Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  My eyes were irresistibly drawn to the notebook lying open on Masao’s knees, and while he made no move to show those pages to me, he didn’t try to hide them, either. There were blocks of prose and neat lines of poetry, some written in roman letters, others in Japanese, and everything was annotated with red-ink underlinings and marginal notes in pencil. The pages were intricate and artistic-looking, and I got the feeling I was being allowed to glimpse another side of Masao Anai, the dynamic and innovative director.

  “These are some excerpts from the manuscript of the drowning novel that you shared with us,” Masao said. “They don’t have to do with the dream scene, though. I was interested in the quotes from T. S. Eliot, both in the original and in Motohiro Fukase’s translation, which I know you’ve been studying since you were young. What surprised me was that the epigraph for the entire book, at least in the draft we saw, was in French—even though it was a quote from Eliot, who of course wrote in English.

  “What I find most interesting are the subtle variations among the three versions: the English, the French, and the Japanese. (Of course, you primarily used Fukase’s version, but you also seem to have incorporated elements of the well-known translation by Junzaburo Nishiwaki.)

  “Anyway, what I’m saying is that I make notes about such details as I go along. For example, take the Eliot line He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool. In the Fukase translation, it becomes He passed through the stages of age and youth, while Nishiwaki renders the line considerably more loosely as One after another, he recalled the days of his youth and the days of his dotage.

  “The whole time I was reading your manuscript, the Eliot lines kept running through my head: A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool. And I couldn’t help wondering how you would have gone about portraying the way your father’s life flashed before his eyes while he was drowning.”

  “Oh, you mean in the drowning novel?” I asked absently. Masao’s recitation of the Eliot lines had momentarily transported me back in time.

  “Yes, I gather the idea was to reprise the various stages of your father’s life, but I can’t help thinking it would have been difficult for you to pull that off, as a writer who was still quite young and inexperienced.”

  “You’ve read the scrap of prose I call the drowning novel, so you know I had drafted the story only to the point where my father sets out in his little boat, heading right into the towering waves, with Kogii—my supernatural alter ego—manning the tiller in place of me. Fast-forward forty years or so, and here I am, or was, trying to pick up where I left off and finish the book. You seem to be asking how I was planning to proceed. Well, you’re right that creating the retrospective scene where my father’s entire past flashes before his eyes would have been a major challenge, but at any age. When I was younger, I lacked the necessary life experience, and now I—the narrator of that passage—have become an old writer myself and I can’t very well be projecting my own history onto my father, who died relatively young.

  “At the time, I wanted to try to answer the question: As my father was drowning in the vortex of the raging river, how did he pass the last moments of his life? What was going through his mind just before he died? The other day when I was looking over the index cards I’d included in the packet with the pages I had written, decades ago, I saw that I’d started by composing a straightforward chronicle, including things I had heard from my grandmother and mother when I was a young child: local legends and folklore, bits of our family history, and so on. But how did my father fit into those accounts? Where did he come from, and what was his story before he met my mother? My only clues were a few vague memories of overheard conversations, but as a young writer I had the option of letting my imagination fill in the blanks. But what should I, the writer, have my drowning father remember—and in what sequence? At first I took an oblique approach to the problem, doing things like rereading ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’ Before I embarked on the actual writing, I needed to find a way to incorporate bits of history and folklore into the narrative, one by one, without fretting about realism or verisimilitude. At the same time, I was trying to layer brief vignettes throughout the story.

  “I wrestled endlessly with questions of technique. How should I have the drowning man remember his five decades of life, until the night it ended abruptly on a storm-tossed river? Should I begin with miscellaneous occurrences from his late adulthood? Or should I go all the way back to the beginning of my father’s life during the Sino-Japanese War in Manchuria, and use a combination of imagination and hearsay to create episodes from his infancy and youth?

  “While I was simultaneously ruminating about such matters and mulling over the stories I’d heard, a few at a time, mostly from my grandmother, it occurred to me that it would be ideal if I could somehow find a way to establish certain biographical details. At one point I used Asa as a go-between to ask my mother how she and my father met, and also about the time, early in their marriage, when she went to China to visit her childhood friend, the Shanghai Auntie. My mother kept extending her stay, so my father finally followed her to China for the sole purpose of bringing her back, and I’ve thought more than once that if he hadn’t made that trip, I would never have been born. Anyway, even at that early date there were already signs that a rift was developing between my mother and me, and as you know the conflict eventually escalated and turned ugly. Now everything seems to have come to naught, so I guess this is the end of the road for the drowning novel. I remember, in those early days, the prospect of someday getting to sift through the contents of the red leather trunk seemed like some wild, impossible dream, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be.”

  “I see,” Masao said. He sounded more peeved than sympathetic. “I suppose this is also the end of my current project as well. Oh well—easy come, easy go. After all, until your recent attempt to resurrect this book it had been lying dormant for nearly forty years, right?”

  “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “But when I gave another listen to the tape Unaiko brought over last night, I realized what a fool I had been to think my mother would blithely help me write a novel about something that would have hit so close to home for her. Really, I must have been delusional, or at least absurdly optimistic, to assume she would eventually give her approval and hand over the red leather trunk so I could get back to work. Asa knew the truth all along, but until now I guess she didn’t see any reason to destroy my illusions about our father’s heroism. In the end, I was no match for my mother and sister. When those two females pooled their resources, they were really a force to be reckoned with.”

  “That reminds me of something I said to Asa and Unaiko,” Masao said. “This was before you came to stay at the Forest House, and I was only reacting to what I’d heard about the various complications. Anyway, I remember saying, ‘I can’t help wondering whether it was Mr. Choko’s desire to write a revisionist version of history—creating an alternative reality in which his father was some sort of fallen hero—that doomed the project to failure from the start.’

  “Of course, it’s water under the bridge now—no pun intended, and I don’t want you to think I’m taking this lightly at all. What I mean is, even though your drowning novel is never going to be finished I still think your younger self’s idea of telling your father’s story through the prism of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Death by Water’ poem is a beautiful thing. For me, it would have been very illuminating to see how you went about transmuting that into prose. Just in terms of methodology—a term you often used when you were in your forties, much to the amusement (or horror) of some of your lit-crit colleagues—I think it could have been quite a tour de force.”

  “It’s true that when I was younger a lot of critics used to make fun of me for daring to discuss my writing in terms of methodology—and they were already down on me for my chosen method of transmuting my private life into fiction,” I s
aid. “But the ‘I novel’ method was the reason I was staking my hopes on the red leather trunk, then and now. The year I started college in Tokyo also happened to be the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, and when I came home to attend the traditional Buddhist service my mother jokingly predicted that I might someday become a novelist and write a book based on the materials in the red leather trunk. But now it’s looking as though the joke was on me, in more ways than one.

  “Of course, my sister seems to have known that all along. Speaking of Asa, there are still a few drops left in the bottle she sent over last night. How about it, Masao—won’t you join me in a little hair of the dog?”

  Chapter 5

  The Big Vertigo

  1

  There was no word from Asa for several days, so we hadn’t yet talked about our mother’s cassette-tape bombshell. Unaiko (who was staying at Asa’s house) had informed me that she would be bringing over my meals while my sister tended to her own affairs, which she had apparently been neglecting since my arrival. As for me, I had definitely made up my mind to decamp from the Forest House. I thought this might be the last time I ever came down here for an extended stay, so I needed to spend a large chunk of time tidying up my own effects and getting ready to vacate the premises.

  One day I asked Unaiko to tell Asa I was planning to leave for Tokyo at the beginning of the following week. Upon hearing that news, Asa called to ask whether she could stop by to discuss some practical matters.

  “I phoned Chikashi a while ago,” Asa declared with her trademark directness as she strode through the front door of the Forest House not long afterward. “She was perfectly calm, as usual, and she said that when she heard about the failure of your quest to find the materials you needed to complete your drowning novel—which was, of course, your primary purpose in coming to Shikoku—she figured you would probably pack up and return home. I’m only mentioning how cool she sounded because I’d been concerned that your decision to abandon a major literary project might create some cash-flow problems for your family, but Chikashi put my mind at ease by addressing the issue on her own.

  “She told me that while the income from both foreign-rights and paperback sales of your books had definitely tapered off, you were continuing to write a series of essays for one of the big newspapers, and whenever you went to deliver lectures at small venues outside of Tokyo there was a magazine that paid to publish your lecture texts after you’d polished them a bit. She said this is how it’s always been for writers of pure, noncommercial literature, especially in the latter phases of their careers. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but you really hit the jackpot when you persuaded Chikashi to become your wife. She truly is a magnificent human being.

  “On another topic, I wanted to talk about the tape recording I sent over for you to listen to. Since I already knew what was on Mother’s tape I naturally felt a bit guilty (or at least conflicted) about passing it on to you. That’s why I included some strong liquor to dull the pain. I thought it would be all right, just this once, even though you haven’t been drinking much lately. I was worried about the impact the tape might have on your emotional state, but when I quizzed Masao after he’d seen you the next morning he said you appeared to be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and none the worse for wear. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have given you a bottle, especially after you’ve made such a valiant—and successful—effort to overcome your fondness for the hard stuff. When I walked in today I was afraid I might find the kitchen strewn with empty bottles of the cheap Scotch you can buy everywhere these days, even at our local supermarket here in the boonies, but when I peeked in there just now the only bottle in sight was the one I sent you the other night, so that was a relief.

  “Anyhow, for your supper tonight I’ll be sending Unaiko over with some dishes I prepared, along with some more of the shochu from the other night—properly chilled this time. I was thinking it might be nice for you and Unaiko to share the bottle and keep each other company. Since your writing project has fizzled out, I imagine the work you’ve been doing till now with the Caveman Group will probably be a lost cause as well. It’s natural that Unaiko would want to talk to you about various things and also, in terms of improving your mood, I figured hanging out with her would probably be a lot more fun than sitting around with your sister—am I right?”

  2

  When Unaiko showed up for our farewell dinner, she was wearing a stylish summer outfit: a pale blouse in a floral print and a full, flouncy skirt. During the recent rehearsal, Unaiko’s rather drab, functional attire had made her look more like a stagehand than an actress, but seeing her now in a casual situation, she seemed much more youthful than usual—girlish, even. Asa had prepared several tasty dishes using ham, sausage, and various types of edible wild plants she’d picked herself in the nearby mountains and then stir-fried. Unaiko dug into the meal with gusto and matched me drink for drink as well. Perhaps to reassure me, she mentioned that she had a tendency to become intoxicated rather quickly, so she had sensibly arranged for Masao to drive her home at the end of the evening.

  Once again, Unaiko was in a very talkative mood. And while I should theoretically have still been mired in the depression that had been dogging me for several days, I soon found myself cheerfully joining in the conversation.

  Unaiko started off with the usual anodyne small talk, but before long she segued into speaking candidly about what was on her mind.

  “I imagine you’d prefer not to dwell on things that are over and done with, but there’s one image from your recurrent dream that I just can’t stop thinking about,” she said. “It’s the scene where your father sets out on the river in his small boat and is borne away by the current. In the dream, you can see what your father’s wearing because the moon breaks through the storm clouds and illuminates the scene below, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The visibility was perfect.”

  “And all the times you’ve had the dream, over the years, did the details change at all?”

  “Not in any significant way,” I replied. “The dream is nearly identical every single time. It’s almost like watching a video. That may be why I have a persistent feeling the boat-launching scene is something I actually witnessed in reality.”

  “Getting back to your father’s clothing,” Unaiko said, “what exactly was he wearing in the dream? (Let’s put the reality aside for a moment, even though I gather there was quite a bit of overlap.) Asa was saying that he was dressed in the type of uniform civilians wore during wartime, but can you tell me what it would have looked like style-wise? When we staged the dramatic adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, we just put his character in the same type of uniform a retired serviceman would have worn.”

  “The uniforms for civilians were khaki colored,” I explained. “During the war, everyone was required to wear them. In the dream, my father was dressed in that uniform, complete with a matching military-style hat, and the red leather trunk was by his side.”

  “Your mother mentioned on the tape that at first your father was only listening to what his visitors were saying, as an interested observer, but as the conspiratorial plotting gathered steam he ended up being drawn in ever deeper,” Unaiko said. “And the reason he tried to run away on that stormy night was because he was afraid the ill-advised guerrilla action was about to take place. To me, your father’s behavior seems perfectly natural. In your dream, at least, he comes across as a reasonably sane human being, unlike the grotesque, pathetic father figure portrayed in Wipe My Tears Away. Isn’t that correct?”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said. “I may have gotten carried away the other day and started singing along with the German song, but that doesn’t change my feeling about the novella I wrote. It was an embarrassingly immature piece of work. In retrospect, I think the only well-written thing in the entire book is the way the mother criticized the foolhardiness of the activities her husband and son were involved in.”


  Unaiko, who was evidently already feeling quite tipsy, gazed at me with a face that looked, as always, far younger than her years. “But, Mr. Choko,” she said, “didn’t you want to portray your father in the drowning novel as a man who set out on that flooded river while he was in full possession of his faculties?”

  “Yes, I did, absolutely. And while I went on clinging to my childish naive conviction that my father was embarking on a hero’s journey, I also wanted to chronicle his ill-fated boat trip as part of a sequence of events that was supposed to culminate in some kind of paramilitary insurrection. My recurrent dream reflected the idealized perspective of the young boy who believed wholeheartedly that his father was on his way to commit a doomed act of heroism when he drowned. While my father was being tossed around by the current on the river bottom he would have flashed back over his entire life, the way people do when they’re drowning, and that was the story my novel was going to tell.”

  Unaiko nodded and took another sip of shochu. “In Wipe My Tears Away the mother is skeptical all along, but the father is portrayed as someone who’s absolutely essential to the radical action the young officers are planning,” she said. “Clearly, the young boy regards his father as a kind of hero.”

  “I wrote that book after I’d promised my mother that I would abandon my drowning novel,” I said. “I think my feelings of resentment are clearly evident in the surrealistic novella I ended up writing instead.”