Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “In that case, do you think it would be a good idea to try shaping our interviews to focus mainly on Kogii?” I asked.

  “Most definitely,” Unaiko said. “And we’re ready to start right now!”

  Intentionally avoiding her bright, eager eyes, I glanced over at my sister. In our younger days, Asa had often run interference for me by deflecting the overtures of this type of strong-willed, extroverted woman, but she didn’t seem to feel any need to do that now, and I trusted her judgment. Unaiko’s energetic body language appeared to say, Come on, let’s do this! and she began to pull an assortment of recording equipment out of a canvas tote bag I had noticed earlier, in passing, and deemed too large to be a woman’s purse.

  To their credit, Unaiko and Anai didn’t rush me into recording mode. Instead, Unaiko carefully laid out the equipment on the dining-room table, piece by piece, while everyone else looked on. This was my first glimpse into the thoughtful, deliberate methodology that would typify my brief collaboration with the Caveman Group. I realized then that I was in capable hands, and any residual reluctance I might have been feeling simply melted away.

  3

  A short while later, with the tape recorder whirring, Masao Anai settled himself in a chair and began to speak. “Even though we hadn’t yet obtained your formal permission, Mr. Choko, we went ahead and started brainstorming the conceptual aspects of this new project,” he said. “Of course, we did talk things over with Asa, and her attitude was ‘I don’t foresee any problem with the plan you’ve described, but be sure to approach my brother with caution.’ There’s a fund designed to assist the directors of small theater groups, and in order to qualify for one of those grants a group needs to have won some type of prize or award. Even though you haven’t seen our performance of the play we based on your book The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, I gather you’ve heard about the gratifying praise that production received?

  “Okay, that concludes the shameless self-congratulation portion of our program. Now let’s move on to the new project. Our original plan was to follow our success with the dramatization of Wipe My Tears Away (as we call it, for short) with a sequel, but as you know better than anyone, in the case of that novel there isn’t one. So I got the idea of searching through your complete canon for a recurrent motif linking all your books together.

  “The leitmotif I found, of course, is Kogii. Now, I find it interesting that in your books the name ‘Kogii’ is assigned to a variety of entities. In the beginning, Kogii was your nickname. Later, you ended up sharing the name with your constant companion: the mysterious—dare I say imaginary?—playmate who supposedly lived at your house and who looked exactly like you. (Your body double, in cinematic terms.)

  “Kogii never left your side until one day he simply took off, moving effortlessly through the air, and returned to the forest. In other words, this mystical being whose corporeal form was visible only to you had the ability to levitate and float off into the sky, so even though he looked like you, his powers surpassed those of any human child.

  “In my formal proposal, I tried to persuade the funding committee to finance this project by explaining how I would portray this entity, who transcends reality, as a tangible flesh-and-blood person. The question was, should I have him appear onstage as a character fully endowed with physical form, or would I simply try to make the audience aware of his presence while he remained invisible? My thought was that in terms of dramatic impact, simpler would be better. I basically lifted all the raw materials for the characterization from your collected works and jotted them down on index cards. By the way, I picked up the index-card technique from reading your essays, back in my university days.

  “At our practice space in Matsuyama, we’ve used your descriptions of Kogii as inspiration for the creation of a doll: a sort of three-dimensional cloth figurine. Unaiko made a prototype by sewing together some pieces of fabric and then stuffing the shell. If the doll ends up being part of the final staging, we’ll place it as high as possible above the stage, in a place where the audience will still be able to see it. We actually did something similar in another play, so we aren’t flying completely blind on this. Anyway, the doll version of Kogii will be looking down at the action and influencing the actors on the stage. Let’s call it the ‘Kogii effect.’

  “The other day I was trying to figure out when Kogii first appeared in your work, and when I remembered that your friend Takamura once mentioned in an interview how much he liked a certain early work of yours, I went through my books and found the story in question.”

  “Ah,” I said. “You’re talking about the one where a young composer imagines that his dead baby is floating in the sky, as big as a kangaroo and dressed in a white cotton nightgown. The apparition’s name is Aghwee.”

  “That’s the one,” Anai said. “The narrator is a student who is working as a part-time personal assistant for the mentally unstable composer, and he thinks the giant creature his employer claims to see in the sky is nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Part of the narrator’s job description is to accompany the hallucinating composer on his rambles around Tokyo, and one day they’re walking down a narrow street when they happen to encounter a dog walker who is being dragged along by a boisterous pack of Doberman pinschers, all straining to escape their leashes. At any rate, the composer is busy trying to communicate with the giant kangaroo-size baby he sees in the sky—it’s the ghost of his brain-damaged child, whom he chose to starve to death shortly after its birth—and the narrator is overcome with panic, fearing he’s about to be engulfed in the scrum of dogs. Feeling utterly helpless, he shuts his eyes and tears begin to trickle down his face. Then someone touches his shoulder.”

  I knew the entire passage by heart. “On my shoulder was a hand gentle as the essence of all gentleness; it felt like Aghwee touching me,” I recited.

  “That’s it!” Masao exclaimed, clapping his hands. “When I reread the story, it occurred to me that what the young narrator perceived as Aghwee’s palm touching his shoulder was, in fact, the hand of Kogii. So I wrote a scene in which Kogii, just like the giant ghostly baby floating in the sky above Tokyo, gazes down from a high place at the novelist below—that is, at Kogito Choko. Hang on a sec, let me read you the ending, where the narrator has been hit in the eye and blinded by a stone thrown by a bunch of inexplicably frightened children.

  “It was then that I sensed a being I knew and missed leave the ground behind me like a kangaroo and soar into the teary blue of a sky that retained its winter brittleness. ‘Good-bye, Aghwee,’ I heard myself whispering in my heart. And then I knew that my hatred of those frightened children had melted away and that time had filed my sky during those ten years with figures that glowed with an ivory-white light, I suppose not all of them purely innocent. When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had been endowed, if for only an instant, with the power to perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of my sky.”

  Masao Anai’s reading of the words I had written so long ago had a powerful impact on me. I felt as though I had just heard, with my own ears, indisputable evidence of his very real talent as a stage director.

  “As I’ve illustrated,” Masao said, “we’ve been talking about making the metaphor of Kogii a focal point. (We can discuss what he represents later on, although it seems fairly obvious.) But there’s another approach, which would be to have Unaiko add her own interpretation to the basic premise. The Caveman Group isn’t rigidly organized by any means, and I think our flexibility might actually end up having a stimulating effect on the work you’re about to undertake as well. The truth is, unlike in the past, university scholars don’t seem to be specializing in the work of Kogito Choko these days, so maybe this collaboration of ours will help to revive your waning popularity, even a little.”

  “Really, Masao?” Asa said sharply. “I mean, I’ve told you that my brother is inclined to be skittish about this type o
f situation, and when you say snarky things you’re running the risk of making him back away from the entire project. Let’s just forge ahead slowly and hope we can all be reciprocally inspired by our creative activities. You were saying that Unaiko might have a different perspective, so how about it, Unaiko? How do you feel about this?”

  Unaiko had been listening intently, looking like a little girl with an old-fashioned ponytail who had grown into a woman without changing much at all, but now she wiped the pensive expression off her face and addressed the group. “I have a very active interest in this project,” she said, “and I think it will be a meaningful collaboration for Masao and for Mr. Choko as well. Actually, there’s something I’d like to ask Mr. Choko privately at some point, if it could be arranged.”

  “You’d better be careful,” Asa warned, but her tone was light. “When you try to get too close to my brother, he tends to run away. Ha ha ha! He really has his work cut out for him, though—he has to wade through all the musty old materials in the red leather trunk. I have my own feelings of ambivalence about the project, so I would be happier if he didn’t rush into it.”

  After making that somewhat inscrutable remark, Asa paused and glanced at her watch. “Okay, then,” she said, turning to me. “It’s almost time for the youngsters to return from their little jaunt. You’re probably going to be relying on them for quite a bit of shuttle service from now on, so why don’t you be a sport and invite them to stay for dinner?”

  4

  The following Monday morning at nine o’clock on the dot, the Caveman Group’s minivan once again rolled up in front of the Forest House bearing Masao Anai, Unaiko, and the two young troupe members who had helped with the poetry stone. Hoping to avoid the morning rush hour, the little party had left Matsuyama at six A.M., and the predawn departure had evidently taken a toll on the two younger men. They greeted me with faces that seemed to say, Sorry, we’re still half-asleep! but just a few minutes later, in a spectacular burst of energy, they were hard at work alongside Asa, converting part of the first floor of the house into a small theater.

  The two young men were clearly no strangers to manual labor, and the task at hand—setting up the Forest House as a communal workplace and rehearsal space—definitely required physical strength. Asa and Unaiko had hatched this plan earlier, and Asa had managed to quell my initial objections by assuring me the changes would only be temporary. The layout of the Forest House (which Asa had already been allowing the Caveman Group to use for rehearsals) was quite well suited to such activities. The previous day, Asa had done the basic cleaning by herself, and now she was supervising her newly arrived workforce.

  The study/bedroom where I worked and slept was on the western end of the second floor, along with a library and one other bedroom. By prior agreement, the entire area had been declared a “no trespassing” zone. As for the ground floor, the northeastern quarter had originally been designed to serve as a parlor or drawing room, but it had never been used. The southern wing included the main entry area where people shed their shoes, a rather cramped foyer, a guest bathroom, and a staircase to the second floor. On the northern side, separated from the narrow foyer by a door, were the dining room and, one step down, the slightly sunken great room. Like the dining room, the large living area featured a massive plate-glass window that looked out on the back garden. Finally, on the west end, there were two guest bedrooms for visiting family members, with a shared bathroom.

  “We’ll have the guys move the furniture from the great room—the table and chairs, the movable bookshelves, the sofa, and the television set—into the parlor,” Unaiko said briskly. “Last year, when it didn’t look as if you would be returning to the Forest House any time soon, we took Asa up on her kind offer and started using the entire first floor as a rehearsal space. If we clear out the great room now, the southernmost portion can be used as a stage. And if we move the big table out of the dining room, the area can be used for audience seating as well.”

  “That sounds fine,” I said. “Back in the days when I used to come to the Forest House every year, if I wasn’t upstairs reading books or doing some work, I could usually be found stretched out on the sofa on the western side of the great room. I’d be grateful if you could leave that one sofa where it is, but feel free to shuffle everything else around however you wish. Asa has probably told you about this already, but I once used this room as a sort of minitheater myself. I invited a group of professional musicians who had recorded a CD of a little composition of Akari’s, and we put on an informal concert. We seated my mother and Asa and a few other guests directly in front of the stage, with the overflow in the dining room. This room has a high ceiling, so the acoustics were quite extraordinary.”

  “We’ll be doing a bunch of different things here, too,” Unaiko told me. “Once we’ve conducted our interviews with you and incorporated the relevant bits into the master script, we’ll be staging some rehearsals. We were also talking about the fact that you’ve never seen the Caveman Group in action, and we were thinking we’d like to put on a compressed version of Wipe My Tears Away, specially for you.”

  With that, Unaiko bounded off to the dining room. She placed both hands on the counter and looked around, then gazed up at the high ceiling with obvious approval.

  “As a rule, the Caveman Group’s public performances take place on a stage that’s on the same level as the audience seating,” she said. “We often use a theater-in-the-round arrangement, so if you imagine a ring of spectators on the other side of the glass, peeking in from the garden, you should be able to get a sense of what would be happening onstage in an actual production.”

  After the two young apprentices had finished emptying the great room of all its movable furnishings, apart from my favorite couch, Unaiko vacuumed the hardwood floor while I busied myself with opening the smaller windows on either side of the big plate-glass window to let in some fresh air. Masao and Asa were standing there shoulder to shoulder, surveying Chikashi’s horticultural handiwork in the back garden. There were innumerable rosebushes, both in pots and in the earth, where they had spread to the point of becoming ground cover; the pomegranate tree, with its luxuriant foliage; the flowering dogwood; and some tall Japanese white birches. (For the past few years Chikashi hadn’t been able to make the trip down here, so Asa had been tending the garden.)

  “These trees look different from the ones in the forest,” Masao said. “Up in Matsuyama you sometimes see flowering dogwoods growing along the road, but they aren’t nearly as tall or as lush as these. Maybe they’re just young, or maybe this is a special spot. But what about these Japanese white birches—isn’t it unusual for them to grow so tall?”

  “The trees Chikashi brought were some she’d originally transplanted from the summer house in Karuizawa to the house in Tokyo, and she’d been tending them there for twenty-odd years,” Asa explained. “She rescued several full-grown trees that had been blown down by the strong winds in those mountains, but the ones she raised here from seedlings are also exceptionally tall for some reason. Chikashi was young and energetic in those days, and she really threw herself into cultivating this garden.”

  “From the sheer number of potted roses, and the way she seems to have been determined to make the trees grow larger than they normally would, I get the feeling Chikashi might share some character traits with her brother, Goro Hanawa,” Masao mused. “A certain tenacity, and an attraction to the unusual …”

  “Goro never showed any particular interest in trees, though,” I said.

  “No, but I see Masao’s point,” Asa said. “I noticed a similarity between Chikashi and Goro in the way she helped Akari with his musical education. There’s no such artistic streak in our family. Actually,” she added, looking at me, “when you met Goro, while you were both going to school in Matsuyama, weren’t you captivated by that aspect of his personality?”

  “Well, Goro was definitely a rare human being,” I said. “For one thing, because he took an interest in
the story of our father’s drowning, he was the first person I ever confided in about the recurrent dream, outside of our immediate family.”

  “Yes,” Masao remarked, “I remember Goro used to say things like ‘Yes, but Choko has Kogii!’ So I guess he thought you were pretty special, too, having your own personal guardian angel and all. Anyhow, the bottom line is that the images of both Kogiis—you and your alter ego—are etched into my mind, and that duality is forming the basis for this project we’re going to be working on together. Speaking of which, we’ve decided on the basic layout of the stage, but what we need to get a handle on now is how to present the interviews we’ll be doing with you. Needless to say, if you’d like to propose any changes to the staging we would be totally receptive. Now, for starters, can we talk a bit about Kogii?”

  Masao Anai’s request seemed perfectly natural, and I had no objection. Just as she had done the previous time, Unaiko placed the recording equipment on the divider between the dining room and the great room, then attached a microphone to my collar. Masao dispatched the muscular young apprentices to the drawing room to retrieve a couple of armchairs, which they quickly placed in the center of the impromptu stage. Watching this smoothly orchestrated transition, I felt as if I was being borne along on a wave of competence: a force of nature that was clearly beyond my control.

  “Please make yourself comfortable,” Masao said to me. “We may use a different approach later on, but for now I’m simply going to stand in front of you and start talking. If I find myself getting tired, I’ll grab a chair and sit down. You’ll already be sitting, of course, but if you want to stretch your legs at any point please feel free to stand up and walk around. Your wireless microphone will work anywhere in the room.