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

doesn't panic on the way down, there is no writhing or swallowing lungfuls of water. Since in the course of this series of actions he has advanced two or three feet, repeating the series will carry him, very slowly to be sure, from one end of the pool to the other. It appears he may even be thinking secretly that this is his way of swimming in the pool.
    I called out to him constantly, “Dig your hands into the water” or “Try pushing forward with your feet,” and each time he responded in the same amiable way, “ That's an excellent idea! ”
    But the minute he lowered his head to the water he began to move like a swimmer in a dream or an image in a slow-motion film and showed no sign of improving. Sometimes I put my goggles on and swam alongside to coach him along: underwater, his movements were calm, so very calm that I could see his deep-set, oval eyes wide open in an expression of quiet wonder and could see each bubble from his nose and mouth as it rose glintingly toward the surface. I found myself wondering whether this might not be the manner in which nature intended a person to behave underwater.
    Though I took my son with me to the pool twice a week and sometimes more, there was no indication that his swimming style was changing. Since the swimmer himself appeared to be having a good time, there was nothing wrong with that; but on days when the pool was crowded, we had a problem. The club had two pools for competitive swimming and three deeper pools for diving and scuba training, but Eeyore could use only the twenty-five-meter main pool when a lane had been reserved for “leisure swimming.” When the main pool was occupied by swimmers from the swimming school or those practicing in the training lanes, the only other place available for him to swim was the twenty-meter pool reserved for club members.
    But since mid-autumn, there had been times when the doors in the glass partition around the Members Pool had all been locked. It had been reserved, in other words, by a special group. Since they were never there for more than two hours, I would let Eeyore swim in a training lane in the twenty-five-meter pool when one happened to be open, or, failing that, we would wait for the group in the Members Pool to finish. Once Eeyore had put on his bathing suit and gone downstairs to the pools, there was no point in even mentioning that swimming might not be possible that day. On the other hand, if it came to waiting, my son would sit on the bench at poolside for as long as necessary without saying a word.

    The group that had chartered the Members Pool was unique to the club, and had its own unique pattern of activity. It consisted of fifteen young men in their late twenties. I can be definite about their number because we could hear them counting off before and after practice on the other side of the glass partition. For reasons I shall explain, the counting was in Spanish— uno, dos, tres, cuatro —and always ended with quince.
    The young men were of course Japanese, and everything about them, from their bodies to the expressions on their faces to their most trivial movements, made it appear that they were being trained in the manner of our former military. Their roll call in Spanish was unmistakably military in style. Some time ago, I spent several months in Mexico City; and I remember waking on a Sunday or holiday morning to children outside the apartment shouting back and forth in a Spanish round with vowels that was so familiar it took me back in a flash to the Shikoku village of my boyhood and churned my dreams as I awakened—the Spanish of this roll call had nothing in common with the language of my youth; there was a growling coarseness to it that was the sound of a Japanese soldier.
    There were other things about these young men that smacked of the military: their short crew cuts, the khaki bathing suits like short pants they wore when they came downstairs to the pool—when I ran into them as they were