by Kenzaburo Oe
“Yes, she’s truly special in that respect. I’m not sure why, but Unaiko has a powerful ability to influence not only her juniors but also women who are older than she is. It’s been only five or six years since Unaiko became a full-fledged member of the Caveman Group, and she has already created her own performance piece, with the help of the younger women in the troupe. It runs for about half an hour, and when they performed it in public it was very well received. The piece is called Tossing the Dead Dogs. You may remember having heard the title at some point?”
“I do indeed,” I said.
“Of course, this was back when our group was still based in the suburbs of Tokyo,” Masao went on. “Our young members used to get up early every morning to do their outdoor exercise routines: walking, running, calisthenics to build core strength, and so on. (I know you’ve made a habit of going for walks, so you’ll understand.) Anyway, this was during the time when the trend of constructing local autonomous townships on the outskirts of Tokyo—what they call ‘bed towns’—was just getting off the ground. At the same time, there was a major boom in dog ownership among the residents of these new suburban communities, and some of the young people from our troupe started to clash with the ladies who were out for a leisurely stroll with their dogs. Our members were trying to get in a serious workout on the training course, but the dog-walking ladies were constantly stopping to gossip right in the middle of the track, blocking traffic for the oncoming runners. Naturally, the athletes were annoyed, and they complained about this basic lack of consideration. They didn’t take their objections any further than that, but Unaiko, who was there both for her own training and as a group leader, observed the behavior of the women and their dogs with great interest. She had a fantasy about how the problem of the lollygagging ladies with their dogs might be resolved with a judicious show of power, and she turned that high-concept idea into a performance piece. Parts of the dialogue were probably based on things our young colleagues had actually said, but Unaiko gets all the credit for deciding to have the play focus on the dog-walking ladies and their over-the-top reactions to the confrontation. Her portrayal of the escalating hostilities between the entitled ladies with their froufrou dogs and the guys from our theater troupe, as the two factions hurled increasingly scurrilous insults back and forth, was nothing less than masterful. Because of the way the stage was arranged, our actors received a lot of vocal encouragement from a cheering section of ringers we’d planted in the audience. As for the group of women onstage, each clutching her own little boutique dog, their next step was to fling plastic bags full of dog poop in the general direction of our contingent. And then, as things continued to heat up, the women began throwing the dogs themselves at their adversaries, and that was the dramatic climax of the piece. Needless to say, both the ‘excrement’ and the ‘dogs’ were stage props: totally fake.
“The title Unaiko gave the piece, Tossing the Dead Dogs, is derived from the climactic ending. That title cracks me up—ha ha ha! I still can’t help laughing every time I hear it.”
At this point, I volunteered a dog-related anecdote of my own. Back in the 1960s, during the time when the popular protests in Europe against the Vietnam War were reaching a crescendo, Günter Grass had published a novel in the form of an on-site report about the youth movement in West Germany. One of the book’s most harrowing sections, which I still remembered vividly, told of a young student called Scherbaum who was threatening to burn his pet dachshund alive in public as a consciousness-raising demonstration against the war.
“If a university student had actually done such a thing in Berlin—I mean, presumably it wouldn’t have been beyond the realm of possibility—it probably would have created a major uproar,” Masao said. “Our group’s production of Tossing the Dead Dogs provoked quite a bit of protest from dog lovers’ groups, too, and as the person in charge of the theater group I was called onto the carpet to defend the piece against the absurd charges that it somehow condoned or even promoted cruelty to dogs. I tried to be circumspect about expressing my personal feelings, but Unaiko and her cohorts weren’t nearly so restrained, and they couldn’t resist the temptation to speak out. Even after I decided to pull the controversial piece and substitute something less incendiary they were there in the theater, lobbying for their right to freedom of expression. They were so mad at me for knuckling under to outside pressure that I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d hurled some ‘feces’ and ‘dead dogs’ at me—I’m sure they must have wanted to! It was a very difficult and stressful time, but fortunately the storm eventually blew over, and we actually ended up receiving some positive publicity as a result.”
“Did it ever reach the point where it looked as if the Caveman Group might have to disband?” I asked.
“Oh, no, it never went that far. The male members of the troupe, in particular, found the whole turn of events immensely amusing, and they seemed to get a kick out of all the excitement and notoriety. As for Unaiko, she’s someone who lives by the maxim ‘Never stop striving.’ It’s just one of the things that make her so unique, and so powerful.”
“My sister, Asa, has some similar traits, and surely that’s part of the reason she and Unaiko have hit it off so well,” I remarked. “I’m quite certain that whatever Unaiko chooses to do from now on, Asa will try to help in any way she can.”
“Unaiko has definitely found a strong ally in Asa,” Masao said, “though I can’t help thinking that at some point the dynamic duo may try to sway you to their alternative vision of this production. They may very well win the battle in the end—nothing’s set in stone. But one thing I’m sure of after talking this over with Unaiko is that I’ve finally found the key to the retrospective dramatization of your novels I’m working on now.
“As I’ve mentioned, my plan is to layer scenes from your books with the interviews in which we’ll be discussing your work. Even with the supernatural figure of Kogii cropping up throughout the piece as a sort of visual continuo, the focus will still be quite vague and scattered. However, Unaiko has a different idea. She thought we might try superimposing the Kogii theme directly over your progress on the novel you’re planning to write about your father.”
“Both approaches sound promising,” I said noncommittally. “Let’s wait and see how things develop, shall we?”
“I hope Unaiko doesn’t inadvertently cross any of your invisible lines—or ‘friendly barriers,’ to use Asa’s term,” Masao said playfully. “I mean, I have to admit that her willfulness and adventurous spirit haven’t caused any major problems for the activities of the Caveman Group—at least not yet. And I’m pleased to report that she hasn’t broached the idea of staging an abbreviated performance of Tossing the Dead Dogs on the hallowed grounds of Yasukuni Shrine! Seriously, though, assuming you’re willing to cooperate, we’re all feeling very optimistic about forging ahead with the dramatization of the drowning novel, with Unaiko leading the way.
“But of course,” Masao concluded, shooting me a significant look, “we’re acutely aware that the whole project hinges on one crucial thing: what you find in the red leather trunk.”
Chapter 4
Joke Accompli
1
The moment Masao Anai handed me the envelopes, I began to feel uneasy. They weren’t nearly as bulging as I would have expected, and they were also suspiciously light. All the pages fit into three large square envelopes: both the color copies and the originals, which consisted mostly of folio-size sheets of handmade Japanese washi paper decorated with watercolor paintings, illustrations, and calligraphic annotations. (Adding such impromptu embellishments to correspondence was a long-standing tradition among cultured people in Japan.) The photocopies were so precise that they had even captured the attractively blurry places where the ink or paint had run, but I was disappointed because I had been hoping more than anything that the envelope would contain some actual letters, but there wasn’t a single one.
I had more than one memory of catching a glimpse
of my father in his little study—a cramped, narrow hideaway where he engaged in activities that had nothing to do with running our family business. He would pick up a large piece of paper covered with pictures and inscriptions, then lift it above his forehead with both hands in the manner of someone giving thanks to the gods, and I noticed that he always seemed to treat the missives from his mentor in Kochi with particular reverence.
“I wonder what sort of stuff is written on those pages,” I remember saying to my mother.
“Things that probably couldn’t be understood by the likes of you and me!” was her crisp response, but I thought I heard a distinct undertone of awe. Much later, when I’d all but forgotten about having mentioned the pages, my mother finally offered an explanation.
“There were some Chinese characters on those pages that even your father didn’t recognize, but he was able to find them in volume one of Morohashi Sensei’s kanji dictionary,” she said one day out of the blue, adding that once the renowned lexicographer had finished the other twelve volumes of his magnum opus there probably wouldn’t be a single character or word you couldn’t find in them.
My response was to say, “If every word anyone could think of writing is already listed in the dictionary, then nobody can ever say anything new. Where’s the fun in that?”
“When I told Papa what you said, he laughed,” she informed me later. “And then he joked, ‘Maybe someday our son will write something that can’t be found in any dictionaries!’”
As I understood it, all those artistic-looking letters were written on paper my father had made from paperbush bark the government’s official money-printing bureau had deemed substandard and returned to us. His decision to use the rejected bark struck me as alarmingly subversive, but my mother just said: “Of course, ‘substandard’ isn’t exactly the verdict we were hoping for, but your father turned it into a positive, saying happily, ‘Don’t worry, I think I can still make some good paper out of this!’” I got the sense that my mother had been a bit perplexed by my father’s cheerful reaction.
Every time my father would send a batch of the paper to his guru in Kochi, whom he held in the highest esteem, the Kochi Sensei (as he was known around our house) would turn those pages into works of art by covering them with paintings and calligraphy. He would then mail them back, often accompanied by letters written on the rougher paper, handcrafted from mulberry or pink mullein, which my father shared with his mentor from time to time along with the sheets he had made from rejected paperbush bark.
Sometimes those letters included little postscripts addressed to my mother. Once when I asked her what they said, she replied coolly, “Oh, he was just thanking me for the gifts of dried matsutake and goby and sweetfish.” Her tone seemed to suggest she wasn’t the Kochi Sensei’s biggest fan, for reasons that (I’m speculating in retrospect here) probably had to do with his far-right political views.
I stuck the big envelopes Masao had given me on a bookshelf, still feeling shocked that they hadn’t contained a single copy of the letters my father had received—just copies of the envelopes those letters had arrived in. All my father’s replies were missing as well. His usual routine when he received a letter was to scribble a draft of his response, which he then attached with a rubber band to the envelope containing the relevant correspondent’s missive. (My mother used to praise him for this efficient filing system.) Those drafts had somehow vanished along the way, along with the letters.
Oh well, I thought, making an effort to look on the bright side. I’ll just try to make the best of what I have. I dragged a chair over to the shelves and continued perusing the contents of the envelopes, one photocopied page at a time. As the afternoon light flooding the mountain valley began to fade, I could feel the enthusiasm I’d felt when I first started working, shortly before noon, ebbing away as well. I struggled to remain hopeful and upbeat, but as the sun sank out of sight at the end of the disappointing day my spirits plummeted at an equally rapid rate.
* * *
2
By the time Asa stopped by to deliver my evening meal, the last shreds of optimism had been replaced by full-blown melancholia. One quick glance at my gloomy expression was all it took for my sister to suss out my state of mind, and she observed me closely as I picked up my chopsticks and, without a word, dug into the food she had placed on the table in front of me.
After a while, in a tone of voice that was neutral rather than sympathetic, Asa began to speak. “While Mother still had her eyesight, she used to like to tidy up the clutter in her life from time to time,” she said. “And whenever she embarked on that task, I would watch while she attacked our father’s archived correspondence with a vengeance. It seemed to be a matter of particular concern to her, and I would think, At this rate it won’t be long until all the letters have been destroyed and there’s nothing left but the envelopes …”
“Well, I suppose it was inevitable that Mother’s bouts of intensive housekeeping would have a few casualties,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and honestly, I really don’t feel as though I can complain about the choices she made. I mean, by rights all those things belonged to her, and we knew that she’d gotten appraisals from antiques dealers and used-book stores and had learned they had no value to speak of. It’s just that for the longest time I’ve been wanting to check out the contents of the trunk, and it’s become a bit of an obsession, to tell the truth. I was hoping against hope that if I could examine Father’s correspondence, journals, and so on (assuming such things even existed), those materials might provide some concrete evidence about the things I’ve been speculating about for decades—and might even resolve the lingering questions and ambiguities, once and for all.”
“Really, though,” Asa said, “doesn’t it seem likely that Mother knew you wouldn’t be able to write the book without some kind of spark to jump-start your imagination? At the end, after she had thrown away the letters, maybe the only reason she kept some of the envelopes was because the senders’ names rang a nostalgic bell for her.”
“From what I’ve seen, you’re right; this batch of papers doesn’t contain a single document that could be used to jump-start my imagination, as you put it,” I said. “I’ve already accepted that, reluctantly, and I’m even finding it rather odd that I still haven’t managed to give up daydreaming about Father after all these years. I’ve indulged in conjecture about what might have been going on while Father was alive, up through the events I chronicled in my partial draft of the drowning novel. (The truth is, there have been times when I’ve wondered whether what happened in the middle of that stormy night might just be a figment of my imagination.) As you know, I put some of the wilder scenarios into The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. I think for Mother, choosing to burn the letters was her way of smashing my wishful imaginings to bits, as if she were saying, See? Your ridiculous theories about your father being a hero really don’t have a leg to stand on. And now I’ve finally been forced to give up for the simple reason that I don’t have a single clue or scrap of evidence to support my position. If this had been a court case, it would have been a decisive victory for our mother.”
“Well,” Asa said, “from my point of view the strange thing is that it’s taken you so long to reach this realization. Better late than never, I suppose. The fact is, I’ve completely ignored the red leather trunk during the ten years since Mother’s death because I was dreading the Pandora’s box effect opening the trunk might have on you, and I didn’t want to do anything to cause you pain. However, while Mother was still alive I did have a few chances to read bits and pieces of the papers stored in the trunk. There were times when she would suddenly open the trunk and fish something out, as if she were possessed by some ancient memory, and I was always standing nearby, peeking over her shoulder. That’s how I knew she had started burning the papers to ashes on an old compost heap behind the house. She never told me what she was tossing into the flames, or why, but if I show
ed the slightest concern she would say something like ‘Oh, this is just some rubbish I don’t need to hang on to anymore.’ I thought it was perfectly reasonable that Mother would continue those periodic purges as she embarked on the second half of her very long life. And it was clear those weren’t spur-of-the-moment decisions by any means; she was obviously determined to tidy up the past, a few chapters at a time.
“In your work to date, you’ve portrayed Father as a grotesquely exaggerated character, almost a cartoon—sometimes ludicrous, sometimes tragic, sometimes a bit heroic—but really, your take on him has been all over the map. In other words, for you, there was no clarity so there could be no absolution or closure, either. I think while Mother may have appeared to be systematically destroying your dreams, she was also trying to be true to her late husband, in her own way. I suspect that she burned a lot of papers after I moved out of her house. Maybe she was upset by the content of Father’s correspondence with some of his more eccentric cohorts, or perhaps she was just trying to protect her dead husband against any more of what she perceived as the defamatory caricaturing in Wipe My Tears Away.
“For me, right now, seeing you laid so low really does make me feel sorry for you, but at the same time it also confirms my belief that Mother did the right thing. The ten years since she passed away should have served as a sort of cooling-off period, and by now you ought to be able to deal with these things in a rational, levelheaded manner. Even if you’re in low spirits, you know what they say about people in our age group: ‘For an older person, there’s a thin line between reasonably copacetic and downright depressed.’ So I’m sure you’ll get over this disappointment before too long.
“When I gave Unaiko and her colleagues the partial manuscript of your drowning novel,” Asa went on, “I kept the index cards that were in the same bundle, and I’ve been reading them. As you probably remember, they contain little sketches or vignettes about incidents you witnessed, such as when the young officers came to our place for a get-together, or when the enlisted men (who were even younger) took you out in the boat and showed you how to operate the tiller. In the notes, you seem to have somehow conflated those memories with a vague recollection of what happened on the night of the massive flood. The section where you describe how Father’s boat gets swept away by the current seems to be written more or less realistically, and it’s entertaining the way those events are layered with your patented flights of fancy about seeing your doppelgänger and so on. But somehow it didn’t ring true, and I couldn’t help thinking how much Mother would have hated that sort of ungrounded narrative.
