by Kenzaburo Oe
“As we stood there admiring the view, I confessed to Unaiko that like my brother, who simply couldn’t keep from jumping in and singing along with the chorus of young voices earlier today, I, too, was quite stirred by the German song. And I told her the same thing I’ve been trying to express to you: that the aftermath (to borrow one of your trademark words!) of the Caveman Group’s rehearsal has already begun.
“Maybe this afternoon has made me sentimental, but I just want to say how glad I am to have you back in the place where we grew up. And since I now feel certain you’re mentally prepared to deal with whatever you may find inside, I’m ready to hand over the red leather trunk at last.”
Chapter 3
The Red Leather Trunk
1
Asa had apparently been listening for the sound of my footsteps. When I arrived at her house near the river, she immediately led me down a hallway to a storage closet. Off to the left, the living-room door stood open and through it I caught a glimpse of a familiar low table with a plate of soft, steamed rice-flour dumplings filled with chestnut jam—which I recognized right away as the handiwork of a long-established sweetshop in the nearby town of Honmachi—already laid out for our tea. Stashed in the closet, next to the discs and the boom box Akari had used for playing CDs during his last visit, was my mother’s red leather trunk.
In the eighth year of Showa (that is, 1933), my parents were already married and living in Tokyo, but due to some complications in my father’s situation there had been a delay in their plan to return to our village on Shikoku and look after the family interests. My mother decided to go to Shanghai to visit a childhood friend who was married to a Japanese trading-company employee and had just had a baby, and she ended up staying there for more than a year. Finally my father went to China to fetch her, and when they returned to Japan my mother’s luggage included the red leather trunk. Even then, the trunk wasn’t new; my mother had bought it at a Japanese-run bookstore in Shanghai that sold used goods on the side. There was no way of guessing how old the little suitcase might have been, but after it came into her possession my mother always took meticulous care of it. Over time the leather had begun to crack and peel, but the color was still a deep, rich red. The trunk may have been small, but it was considerably sturdier than the bags you see young women toting around nowadays.
“The lock stopped working ages ago,” Asa explained. “That’s why it’s held together with rope. When Mother died, I took a quick look at the contents and then put the trunk away, and it hasn’t been opened since. During Mother’s lifetime, she used to give it a good airing once a year. The trunk does have a bit of an antique smell, though I don’t find it unpleasant at all. So, here we are at last. Are you ready to take a peek?”
“I think I’d rather take the trunk back to the Forest House,” I replied.
“Suit yourself,” Asa said. “By the way, Father’s papers included a number of letters from a teacher he especially respected, and they were always decorated with calligraphy and watercolor paintings. The notes Father penciled into the margins have faded, but Masao was saying that if we had color copies made they could end up being clearer than the originals for reasons I don’t really understand. So I had him go ahead and do that. When the copies are finished, Unaiko will bring them down from Matsuyama.”
2
At last, indeed, I thought after Asa had dropped me back at the Forest House. I was finally free to open the red leather trunk and explore its contents on my own terms. I carried the suitcase upstairs to my study/bedroom, set it down in front of the south-facing window, and untied the rope. The metal fittings that had once attached the lid to the body of the trunk were long gone, and the top slid off with no resistance whatsoever.
There were some large, bulky-looking objects on the bottom, and when I lifted them up the red trunk lurched forward and slammed into my thigh. The heavy things turned out to be three thick books, each bearing the title The Golden Bough and the publisher’s imprint: Macmillan. When my father was alive, my mother had once remarked that my father’s mentor in Kochi was introducing him to books from all over the world, on all sorts of topics. Maybe that was where these had come from. I remembered suddenly that when I was at university I had bought an Iwanami paperback containing an abridged version of The Golden Bough, in Japanese translation, but I don’t think I ever got around to reading it.
There were no other books in the trunk, so I started off by reading some old journals, an activity that conjured a vivid memory of my mother sitting with her back to me, writing in a small notebook with a metal-nibbed “G pen” she dipped into an inkpot from time to time. On a number of occasions, when there was a temporary lull in the ongoing intrafamilial hostilities and I was on Shikoku for a visit, Asa had secretly borrowed a few of our mother’s journals for me to look at (though only after I promised I would never use anything I found in them as fodder for fiction). Our mother apparently knew what Asa was up to, and her silence was a kind of tacit approval. The trunk now contained fifteen volumes of those journals, but I was certain that was only a fraction of the total.
The friend in Shanghai (whom my mother had stayed with for so long that my father had to bring her back) was someone of particular importance to my family. She had grown up as the only child in a mansion on a hill overlooking the village, and she and my mother had been friends for most of their lives. We called her the Shanghai Auntie. The better part of my mother’s journal entries consisted of detailed transcriptions of the letters the Shanghai Auntie had sent from China, where she was living after her marriage.
Seeing those old journals again reminded me of my mother’s system for keeping me supplied with reading material during the war. Early on I had fallen in love with the children’s fantasy novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and had read it over and over again. My mother used to take some of the thick cotton army socks we received as part of wartime rationing and fashion them into small bags. She would fill the bags with rice and then set out for the nearby cluster of houses, whose occupants were living under perpetual threat of air raids, and she would trade the rice—a precious commodity in those days—for stacks of Iwanami Bunko paperbacks. That was how I came to discover The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a transformative book that became the cornerstone of my personal Great Wall of Literature.
As for Nils, the Swedish classic had been a gift from another childhood friend of my mother’s. They had attended the local elementary school together, but then (unlike my mother, who remained in the village) her friend had gone off to an all-girls high school in Matsuyama and later matriculated at a women’s university in Tokyo. I learned about this for the first time as an adult, from surreptitiously reading my mother’s journals.
When I had originally seen these journals, in my younger days, I had only skimmed the contents, jumping quickly from page to page. Now I was planning to reread them carefully, one by one. After perusing several journals and finding nothing useful, I reached for a newer volume, which was bound in colorfully patterned chiyogami paper. To my disappointment, in this journal, too, my mother seemed to be endlessly fixated on wallowing in the feelings of restless nostalgia triggered by the letters she received from the Shanghai Auntie. The entries didn’t even touch upon the object of my current quest: information about my father’s past, especially the events that transpired in the years leading up to and including 1945. Indeed, it was almost as if my mother had written the journals in such a way as to erase any traces of my father’s presence in her daily life.
I realized that I would need to cast a wider net in my subsequent examinations of the red leather trunk, but since I had stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading my mother’s journals, it was after noon the following day when I embarked upon the second phase of my reconnaissance mission.
Because I had laid out the contents of the red leather trunk in roughly organized categories, the various piles had overflowed from the desk onto the bookshelves and even the floor. My father’s corres
pondence, which would ultimately be the main focus of my scrutiny, had not yet returned from the copy shop, so naturally my eye was drawn to the fruits of my mother’s secret penchant for journaling. Her private archives included a great many clippings from newspapers and magazines, which had been folded for so many years that they had become brittle and friable. They often disintegrated in my hands when I attempted to smooth out the creases.
I addressed this problem by carefully placing the age-yellowed clippings between random pages of a few of the heavier books from the bottom shelves of the bookcase—for example, the two-volume set of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the older clippings were already in shreds, so I patched those relics together with lavish applications of transparent tape. As I went along I quickly skimmed each clipping, then added it to the appropriate pile. The headlines were eclectic, to say the least: LONDON NAVAL-PREPAREDNESS PACT; THE PRORLEM OF INFRINGEMENT ON THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME HIGH COMMAND; MAJOR SLUMP IN RAW SILK PRODUCTION; DEBT IN RURAL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITIES IS NEARLY $42 BILLION. There were articles about other social issues and current events, such as the Musha Incident in Taiwan (or Formosa, as it was known in those days), and all those clippings seemed to be from the year 1930 or thereabouts.
Five years before I was born, my mother was showing a nascent interest in the affairs of the wider world. Evidently the correspondence that began after her cherished friend (the Shanghai Auntie) went off to live in China had been very instructive for my mother. Her education continued when she traveled alone to Shanghai, to visit that friend, and then remained there for much longer than expected. Indeed, if my father hadn’t gone to China and bodily dragged my mother home when he did, I would never have been born!
One of the news clippings made reference to a historical event I remembered hearing about from my mother as a bedtime story: a bloody uprising by more than eight hundred aboriginal natives of Formosa, who staged a rebellion armed only with bamboo spears, makeshift cudgels, and wooden poles. In retrospect, it struck me as a strangely sanguinary tale to share with a child, but my mother had presented it factually, as something that really happened a long time ago. Perhaps, I realized now, she had been drawing a parallel with the local farmers’ insurrections that were such an important part of our folklore.
Another clipping that caught my eyes was a full-color advertisement for Sapporo beer. The ad, which appeared to have been custom-printed, showed a scantily clad young woman who managed to look both very modern and distinctively Japanese. The image dislodged a recollection from a remote corner of my memory, and I recalled hearing that someone who was a colleague of the founder of the famous beer company was closely connected with the Shanghai Auntie’s family, and as a result my mother had happened to make the influential brewer’s acquaintance when she was young.
There were also a dozen or so clippings of newspaper articles with more photographs than text, either pertaining to the Shanghai Incident of 1932, or else with headlines like CELEBRATION IN MUKDEN OF THE FOUNDING OF MANCHURIA. One photo showed a quiet procession (too sedate to be called a parade) of bizarrely tall Chinese people. Another clipping bore the stark headline: LINDBERGH BABY FOUND DEAD.
I once read an essay by Maurice Sendak in which he recalled a day in his childhood when he went out for a walk with his parents and happened to pass a newsstand where he glimpsed the horrifying photograph of the kidnapped baby’s dead body. (I actually wrote a novel that explored the concept of changelings and was inspired in part by the work of that genius of children’s literature.) At the time, I was seized by what I assumed was nothing more than a false or sympathetic memory of the harrowing photo, but I realized now it must have been a genuine recollection of having seen this newspaper clipping at some point during my own childhood.
While I was attempting to put all the clippings in chronological order, guided by the neat pencil notations at the top that gave the newspaper’s name and the date (most of which preceded my birth), I began to see a path to getting back on track with the newly resurrected drowning novel. The articles appeared to be wildly disparate, but I thought I discerned a pattern in the way they had been selected. That is to say, I suspected my father’s influence must have played a significant role in my mother’s evolving interest in political and international affairs, which seemed to be at odds with her own natural inclinations.
So, I decided, I would try to find the relevant accounts either in the letters to my father, or in the drafts of his replies. I would also need to reread my mother’s journals, paying close attention to how the entries had changed over the years. With those concrete clues in hand, maybe if I just kept digging—and if I could manage to incorporate the long-held ideas I’d expressed in The Silent Cry and had overlaid, in that book, with the area’s popular folklore—perhaps I might be able to chronicle my father’s life and death as it paralleled and reflected this dark period in Japanese history. The thing is, in his own way my father gave a great deal of thought to the history of the age he lived in, but his rigidly ideological views caused him to plan an action so extreme that it would have been laughable if the outcome hadn’t gone beyond mere absurdity to the point of becoming pitiful and, ultimately, fatal.
He set out on the flooded river alone (or with only the other Kogii for company); the boat capsized, and my father was drowned. But surely he didn’t die instantly, and while he was being tossed around underwater by the strong current before drawing his last breath, the drowning man (in a scenario that exactly echoed Eliot’s poem) must have passed again through the various stages, from youth to adulthood, of his relatively short life.
Maybe the rapid series of flashbacks would provide a possible structure for my novel: an organic way to recount my father’s life story, stage by stage. And when he was finally sucked into the whirlpool, the stirring anthem would be ringing in his ears:
Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.
Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,
Komm und führe mich nur fort….
As I was envisioning the scene I found myself singing along in German—sotto voce and, at least to my ears, not screechily at all.
3
The next day as I was sitting in my study, surrounded by the contents of the red leather trunk, Masao Anai detached himself from the younger members of his troupe (they were hard at work again, moving furniture from place to place) and poked his head through the door.
“I don’t mean to put any pressure on you,” he said puckishly, “but I can’t help wondering whether you’ve found anything interesting so far.”
“Your curiosity is only natural,” I replied in the same playful tone. “I mean, you have a stake in this, too. But I’m afraid I’m still mired in sorting through the materials and trying to put them in order.”
Masao grinned. “The guys and I have been doing hard physical labor since early this morning, while our female counterparts were cooking up some new strategies,” he said. “Speaking of which, Unaiko mentioned that she’s hoping to be able to steal a few minutes of your time later today. She was originally planning to go back up to Matsuyama and take care of some business after dropping off her colleagues, and then come back here. But apparently when she called the stationery shop to check on the pages we’d left to be copied, she ended up getting into a dispute over the unexpectedly high prices they wanted to charge for color, so it looks as if I’ll have to go there myself to straighten out the misunderstanding. I’ll take the young ladies with me, but Unaiko will stay behind.”
A short while later, I went downstairs and found Unaiko waiting for me in the newly rearranged great room. We sat down in a couple of armchairs and then, wasting no time on the usual formulaic pleasantries, she cut right to the chase. “It’s about the rehearsal you were kind enough to watch the other day,” she said. “I’ve been wondering what you thought about it, and Asa said I should ask you directly, so here I am! I gather Asa already spoke to you about some of her concerns?”
“Yes, she did,�
� I answered. “But it’s not as if she grilled me about my impressions or anything. I mostly just listened to what she had to say.”
“I see,” Unaiko responded with a vigorous nod of her head. Her samurai-child ponytail bobbed up and down. “Actually, Asa seems to think the best approach might be to start by sharing my own thoughts. She was saying that over the years you’ve grown accustomed to having people listen to you while you hold forth at great length, so it can be difficult to get you to stop talking long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.
“But seriously, look at Masao Anai—he’s totally wrapped up in your novels, to the point where he’s in the process of trying to dramatize your entire canon. At the same time, he’s able to view your work with the critical eye of a member of the younger generation. His admiration for your books seems to be tempered by an awareness of their flaws, and I think that’s part of his reason for wanting to convert them into theater, using his own methodology.
“When I speak about Masao’s ‘critical admiration,’ the same ambivalence has characterized my own feelings about you, Mr. Choko, but there’s a degree of divergence there as well. Like the other day I was immersed in the dramatization of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, but on another level I still felt detached and somewhat skeptical. To be honest, during the rehearsals and afterward, too, those conflicted feelings just kept on getting stronger. In the scene where the soldiers are setting out from the mountain valley, heading toward their doomed insurrection, the child is singing along with the grown-ups. After the song ends, the person who’s playing the role of the child in his adult form shrieks the father’s Japanese interpretation of those lyrics like a crazy person—which, of course, he is.
