Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburō Ōe

could squeeze through the barrier by that same tilting of the head to one side. I dived. As if I had tried this before, as if, just two or three days ago, I had tried it in this same water upriver, my dive carried me down to the rock barrier and I worked my head through by turning it and then shifted my position sideways, holding my body horizontal against the upward current. I straightened my head: in front of my nose, in a pristine space brimming with the faint light of the dawn, was a school of carp beyond counting. Unmoving carp, a still life. Of course they appeared still only in relation to the mass of the school; each fish was swimming ceaselessly upstream against the current, which moved even here at the bottom of the pool. Their pale, green flesh was lit from within and embedded with tiny silver points, which also gleamed. And the small, round, watery black eyes of each carp in that school of fish were returning my gaze. I extended my right arm and fired, but the cave was deeper than I thought, and the spear propelled by rotting rubber didn't even carry to the school. I wasn't disappointed; I even felt it was appropriate that the fish had not been disturbed. I would enter this cave smack in the middle of the river in the valley, this egg no matter how you looked at it, just as I was, and go on living here, breathing through gills.
    I have the feeling I did in fact stay underwater for a very long time. I even feel that I'm still there, it's as though my whole life until now were summed up in what I read in the ceaselessly shifting pattern created by the carp as they adjusted their positions. Nevertheless, at a certain moment I moved backward from the direction I had taken through the rocks and suddenly my jaws and head were clamped tight in the narrow passageway. What remains in memory after that is flailing around in terrible fear and choking on the water I had swallowed. Then I remember powerful arms thrusting me forward deep inside the cave, in the direction opposite my struggle to extricate myself, then hauling me out with my legs in a tangle. Blood spreading like smoke from the cut in the back of my head. I had been released from the rocks and the grip of hands, and now the current dragged me, still underwater, toward a shallow rapids. As I write, I stroke the back of my head with the fleshy pad of my left thumb and locate the scar from that gash on the rocks. If I had remained there in the cave I would have no wound in my head, I would have stayed on as I was in the valley, naked as the day I was born like a fiend hid in a cloud, without tasting labor and sorrow, not learning and not forgetting—in the grip of these often repeated and familiar sentiments, I trace the line of the scar with my thumb.…
    The phrase I just quoted as it came to mind, “like a fiend hid in a cloud,” also happens to be Blake. The association is rooted in having recalled while reading Blake later the boldness and bravery of that experience, the feeling I had had of thumbing my nose at the world and everything in it with a grin on my face. The poem is a well-known work titled “Infant Sorrow” (I translate piping loud as “screaming in a high voice” rather than the more conventional “crying with voice raised”):
    My mother groand! my father wept
    Into the dangerous world I leapt:
    Helpless, naked, piping loud;
    Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
    When I read these lines about the birth of a child, they evoked for me the ruinous exuberance of that morning. Churning the light of the river's surface with joy, I had set out for the pool at the Couple in a direction that was exactly opposite that of a newborn baby's cry (as though I had affixed a minus sign to it). Symbolically, I was trying to return to my mother's womb along a road in the opposite direction of birth (by advancing in the direction of the minus sign I had installed). But the groaning occasioned by the pain of birth, related neither to grief nor to joy, is neutral; there