Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Look, as long as we’re being candid, I’ll admit that I thought it was pretty willful of Mother to take such a radical approach to ‘tidying up’ the contents of the red leather trunk. But I honestly don’t believe she did it with malice aforethought, for the express purpose of destroying your plan to someday finish writing the drowning novel. If that had been her intention, she could have just told me to take the trunk and chuck it into the river at high tide, and that would have been the end of the story.

  “Listen, I’m about to say something shamelessly sentimental, but I believe Mother really did love you. And as for the drowning novel you were always so preoccupied with, I think she ended up feeling that you should be free to complete it according to your own artistic vision. She wanted you to realize your perception of our father was mistaken, and she thought you should keep that in mind while you were writing the book. For her, those feelings were probably tantamount to love—which would mean she also loved our poor, misguided father as well. His life wasn’t exactly short on folly, but the thing Mother found the most foolish of all was the way he allowed himself to be led down the garden path of political extremism by his so-called mentor. Because of that connection, when the war finally came to an end our father got tangled up in the stupid, futile plot with the officers from Matsuyama. So it’s only natural that Mother would decide the most prudent course of action would be to eliminate the hard evidence pertaining to that particular bit of madness by throwing out any incriminating correspondence. Don’t you agree? It’s also possible that Mother burned those letters, over time, because she felt sorry for Papa for having been such a gullible fool. I mean, there were still lots of empty envelopes, right? When I was doing my summer housecleaning one year, I read one of those letters—just one. It was very friendly and congenial, with the writer teasing our father (whom he addressed as ‘older brother’) about being a member of the ‘elite mountain battalion’ and so on. Even if a plan for some sort of uprising to protest the end of the war really did exist, I suspect Papa might have been the only person who believed in it, and I can’t help feeling as if the only thing the plan produced was his dead body, drowned in the river.

  “To Mother’s way of thinking (which seems quite reasonable to me), there was no point in your chronicling the ill-fated scheme in a book, but despite those strong feelings she at least hung on to the envelopes. As for me, I felt honor bound to take care of the red leather trunk and what was left of its contents, in accordance with Mother’s final wishes.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been nursing my own illusions and fantasies about our father for a very long time, and all this information you’re sharing now is news to me.”

  “You know, during the three years after you published The Silent Cry you were writing constantly,” Asa said. “You made clean copies of the pages you’d drafted of the drowning novel and sent them to Mother along with the index cards we’ve been talking about. She wrote to me in Kyoto, where I was living at the time, saying basically: Please come home as soon as possible and help me read this stuff. I can’t make head or tail of it on my own!

  “So I rushed home on the train that same night. When I wondered out loud why you would send our mother fragments of a book you had barely started writing, she said astutely you probably couldn’t proceed any further without the materials in the red leather trunk, and you must be hoping she would grant you access to the trove. I said to Mother, ‘I think you’d better refuse,’ and she replied that after reading the pages you’d sent, she had reached the same conclusion. Then when I wrote to let you know what we’d decided, you accepted our verdict so meekly I could hardly believe it. You even said that since your hopes of gaining access to the red leather trunk had been dashed, we should go ahead and burn the partial manuscript you had sent. That made Mother really happy, but as for burning your work, she said, ‘I will do no such thing—that would be a terrible waste! I’ll just stick those pages in the red leather trunk. They’ll be the first new additions in twenty years, at least.’ The only other time I can ever remember seeing her so cheerful was when Akari, in spite of his disabilities, managed to compose an amazing piece of music called ‘The Marvels of the Forest,’ and he sent her a recording of it.

  “But anyhow, about a year later, you published The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. Mother was too shocked to put together a coherent sentence, but when I relayed her strong objections to the novella your response was to say that anyone who read the book would surely realize it was meant to be a work of fiction—and as I, Asa, should know better than anyone, you had written it without recourse to the materials in the red leather trunk. You followed up with an explanatory letter, admitting you’d turned Papa into a total caricature and pointing out that the book was equally merciless toward the character of the son, who represented you. ‘Self-critical to the point of exaggeration’ was how you put it, as I recall.

  “As for the mother’s calm, critical observations, she was clearly being presented as the lone voice of sanity, but that cold comfort didn’t mitigate her extreme loathing for your book. Mother and I both had the distinct feeling that this glib, self-critical writer, who came across as a full-fledged Tokyoite, wasn’t the same person we used to call Kogii. We simply didn’t recognize you anymore. At any rate, that’s how we came to be estranged from you for such a long time. Mother suffered terribly when it happened, and for years afterward as well.”

  When I didn’t respond, my younger sister began to cry. Her face was deeply flushed, and I was reminded that our mother used to cry in the same open, red-faced way, making no attempt to hide her vulnerability behind her hand. Asa paused for a long moment, then spoke through her tears.

  “Kogii, the part of your drowning novel I returned to you after all this time—forty years!—begins by recounting a recurrent dream of yours, isn’t that right? As you wrote in those pages, the big question seems to be whether your dream is based on something you actually experienced, or whether you first dreamed about the scene you described, then came to believe it had actually happened and, later on, began to dream about it again in a new and different form. And, as you wrote in the early draft, you really weren’t sure where reality or memory ended and dreams began. Ever since I first read your account, after rushing home from Kyoto on the overnight train, I’ve always somehow thought you were only pretending not to know the answer to those questions. I mean, seriously, is there any doubt about what happened that night? I remember vividly how you sent me into the back parlor to see our father after they brought his body home. He was lying on a futon, and I reached out and touched his wet hair. I think the reason you keep saying you’re unsure whether the scene on the river was a dream or reality—and the reason you’ve been so obsessed with wanting to finish your drowning novel—is that you feel you should have been with Father when he rashly set out on the raging river in his little boat and ended up losing his life, and the guilt about what you see as a personal failure has haunted you ever since. As I recall, he had told you to come with him and steer the boat, but you took your own sweet time getting there and Papa, who was never a very patient man, got tired of waiting and took off without you. (Or maybe the boat just got tossed into the waves; we’ll never know for sure.)

  “Mother swore me to silence about what I’m about to tell you, but here goes. That night, she walked over to the cornfield and stood on the stone wall looking down on the river, so she saw what happened. And she said to me, on more than one occasion, ‘I’m terribly glad Kogii didn’t go with his father after all.’ I guess she felt it would have been cruel to tell you she was watching, and that was why she never mentioned it to you. She must have realized that knowing there was a witness would have deprived you of your only refuge: pretending to be unable to distinguish between dream and reality.”

  “I’m absolutely stunned,” I said. “I had no idea. Mother really thought it was a good thing I blew my assignment and literally missed the boat? The light from the full moon would have
been shining through some breaks in the cloud cover, so if she was watching from above she must have witnessed my moment of shame. I mean, Father had put his trust in me—he even took the trouble to teach me how to use the tiller to steer the boat—and then when he needed my help the most I just stood there, totally useless, with the muddy water swirling around my chest, and watched the storm surf carry him away.”

  “Anyhow,” Asa said, “Mother said that after Father’s boat was swept away you came slowly dog-paddling back to shore, and her heart was filled with indescribable joy. And now—were you thinking that if you could pick up where you left off with your drowning novel, you would somehow be able to make posthumous amends to our father and restore the good name of the little boy who swam sadly back to shore, feeling like a failure? And were you hoping you might be able to obtain some sort of magical absolution just by sorting through the materials in the red leather trunk?”

  Though no longer red, Asa’s face was still contorted by emotion, and the tears continued to course down the deep furrows that ran from her cheeks to her mouth. I just sat there in a daze, feeling utterly annihilated. After some time had passed, my sister once again lifted her eyes and spoke to me. She’d stopped crying, but the expression on her face was markedly somber and subdued. She had evidently been wrestling with a difficult decision, but she now appeared to have made up her mind.

  “Since I’ve already betrayed Mother’s trust by telling you something I promised not to share, I may as well go ahead and spill the rest of the beans,” she said. “Three years before she died, Mother recorded her account of what happened on that night when Father went out on the stormy river and lost his life. I have the cassette, and I want you to listen to it. You’re aware, of course, that after Mother’s eyesight began to fail and she wasn’t able to write letters, she started to use the tape recorder—which until then she had only been using to listen to Akari’s musical compositions—to create verbal thank-you notes, and she would send those tapes to people in lieu of letters. In fact, you even lifted her comments about the marvels of the forest from one of those tapes, and quoted them in a novel, as I recall.

  “I was the one who oversaw the making of the tapes—who else, right?—but when Mother first said, ‘You know, I think I’d like to talk about that night,’ I didn’t fully understand her motives, and I couldn’t help thinking this material might just end up being something else for you to use in your books. I could tell it was important to her, though, so I did what I could to help. There were a number of Mother’s recordings stored in the red leather trunk, but I recently took that one out and set it aside.

  “Okay then, I’m going to head home,” Asa said, getting to her feet. “Unaiko is staying at my house tonight, so I’ll send the tape over with her instead of bringing it myself. She has lots of expertise in using the sound system she set up earlier, but that isn’t the only reason I want her to be here. Given what’s on the tape, I really think it would be better if you weren’t alone when you listened to it.”

  3

  The minivan pulled into the front garden, and Unaiko stepped out. She was dressed, as usual, in casual work clothes. “I come bearing gifts from Asa,” she announced as she walked into the house and deposited a lumpy bundle, wrapped in a large furoshiki cloth, on the dining table.

  The care package contained an unglazed vessel filled with some high-end shochu—fifty-proof distilled liquor some people describe as Japan’s answer to vodka, though I think it has an earthier flavor—that Asa had apparently received as a posthumous bequest from some connoisseur, along with three attractive ceramic sake cups. To this largesse Asa had added several Bizen ware dishes containing an assortment of her culinary creations, tightly covered with plastic wrap. In recent years I had been trying to keep my distance from strong drink, but I seemed to have a primordial muscle memory of how to handle the bottle.

  While I was studying the label, Unaiko was busy setting up the playback equipment. “Would you like to listen to the tape while you’re eating dinner?” she asked as she tweaked an assortment of knobs and dials.

  I nodded. “Asa was saying she wouldn’t normally have included an alcoholic beverage with the meal, but she had you bring this bottle of shochu because she thought I might need a drink after I’d finished listening to the tape. I’d like to do it while I’m still sober, though,” I said.

  While Unaiko stationed herself at the board that controlled sound and lighting, I dragged one of the dining-room chairs to the south end of the great room (which resembled a small theater, with all the equipment). For a moment I let my gaze wander outside to the garden, where a sconce affixed to the wall was casting a pale glow on the Japanese birches.

  My mother’s recorded voice, sounding weaker than I remembered, began to emanate from the industrial-size speakers. At first the voice was little more than a whisper, and even after Unaiko adjusted the volume, rewound the tape to the beginning, and started again, it still sounded very faint. After a moment, I realized my mother was addressing her narrative to her two children: Asa and me.

  “Papa had made up his mind to set out on the flooded river in his rowboat, so while he was taking a nap that afternoon we added some things we thought he might need—a change of clothes, a towel, and so on—to the items he had already packed in the red leather trunk. These included a bunch of papers and documents, placed on top of a narrow rubber inner tube that had been removed from a bicycle tire. As you know, Papa made a hobby of dismantling and overhauling old, decrepit bicycles, all by himself. Normally, Kogii’s only job was to add a squirt of oil here and there, so he was very excited when Papa told him to take the inner tube out of the tire. (Bicycle pumps were in short supply during the war, so he had to use his mouth to inflate it, like blowing up a balloon.) There used to be a bicycle store on the road beside the river, but at some point it stopped selling bikes and was only doing repairs—and even those were hit or miss because the shop didn’t carry any new parts. Since the bike-repair shop couldn’t do anything much beyond reattaching a loose chain or mending a puncture with gum arabic, once the tube had been removed from a bicycle tire there was no way to get a replacement. So until things started to get back to normal after the war, Kogii would pack old bicycle tires full of straw and ride around like that. We always knew when he was on his way home ‘cause we could hear the rickety sound of his makeshift bike, with its jerry-built gears and straw-filled tires, from miles away!

  “Anyhow, after the inner tubes had been removed from the tires and blown up nice and plump, what were they used for? Flotation buoys, of course. In theory, if you blew one up and put it in the red leather trunk, then even if the boat ended up sinking it would have been possible to stay above water by hanging on to the trunk because the inner tube would keep it afloat. If worst came to worst, at least the trunk would eventually find its way to shore. As for the other things your father had packed in the trunk, I didn’t see anything besides a bunch of letters and papers. Some of those letters talked in detail about who had originally suggested the insurrection to your father and his cronies, and told them how they should go about preparing for it. Because the plan was being hatched here in the forest, where no one can ever keep a secret, the conspirators had no choice but to stay in touch by mail. If they had tried using the telephone the village switchboard operator would have been able to eavesdrop on their conversation. That’s why there were so many letters, and your father was trying to take them all with him, every last one. His plan, apparently, was to pack up his correspondence and then ride the rowboat down the flooded river to a spot where the water was wider and the current wasn’t so strong; in other words, someplace where the fields and rice paddies were completely submerged in water from the flooding. He must have figured that if he could get that far, he would be able to scramble onto the shore and ditch the boat, and then he could make his escape by following the train tracks, thus managing to outrun the people who (he thought) were going to be pursuing him. If he had managed to make a clean g
etaway by following this plan, I have no idea what his next step would have been. The only thing we know for sure is that your father had made up his mind to run away that very night.

  “As for why he chose to go by boat, the explanation is obvious. Everyone around here knew him by sight, so he was likely to be spotted by suspicious eyes no matter which road he took out of town. That’s why he decided to ride the river to a place beyond the neighboring town and start his overland journey from there. If the weather had been better his plan might have worked, but the boat snagged on a sandbar downriver and capsized in the high waves, and he drowned. Even so, I can’t help thinking he had been making surprisingly good progress till then!

  “The fact that Papa felt the need to fill the red leather trunk with all the papers pertaining to the insurrection seems to indicate that he thought those materials were too important (or too incriminating) to leave behind. It’s as if he felt it would be disastrous for any outsiders to see what he had been plotting, but yet he also put a flotation device in the trunk so the papers would eventually find their way back to us. At least that’s what I believed for many years after he drowned. But why on earth would he set up an outcome in which his folly would be exposed? And wasn’t he worried about having his subversive correspondence fall into the wrong hands? Those are just some of the unknowables that make my head spin, even now. Of course, the trunk was found downstream and taken to the police, quite a while after the war ended. They evidently had bigger fish to fry, and the trunk was returned to us without comment.