by Kenzaburo Oe
“Even so, for me, the mother is the character who seems the most genuinely human at the conclusion of the story,” Unaiko mused. “She was the only one who dared to disagree when her son kept insisting his father had died a heroic death. Was she meant to come across as the only person who was rational about the whole situation?”
“No, when I wrote the novella I really wasn’t trying to imply that any one person had remained compos mentis while everyone else had completely lost their minds. All the characters in the book—the cancer-ridden father in his fertilizer-box chariot, the young boy wearing a fake military cap, the army officers belting out the German song at the top of their lungs—are supposed to be given equal weight.”
“Well, I know I’m not very sophisticated intellectually,” Unaiko said self-deprecatingly, “but I still can’t help wondering whether there was some underlying significance behind your decision. You came down here intending to work on your drowning novel; we all know how that turned out, but if you had actually managed to finish it, isn’t there a chance the book’s outcome would have been similar to that of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away? No matter how many anecdotes you tell in the voice of the drowned narrator, that talking corpse is always going to be sucked into the whirlpool, right? I mean, for your purposes, there’s no other way for the story to end.
“The other night as you were listening to your mother’s tape, you finally realized that your father ran away because he was terrified about what might happen if he didn’t. And while he was attempting to flee into the storm, his little boat capsized and he drowned. Personally, I’ve been thinking that if you ever do write the drowning novel, instead of having a tragic anticlimax, it might be more interesting to fictionalize the narrative so your father somehow makes it to shore, eluding the dragnet of his police pursuers, and really does manage to carry out some kind of guerrilla action along with his wild-eyed partners in crime.
“Of course, even I know that no such event ever took place in 1945, during the days that followed Japan’s surrender. My thought, plot-wise, was that having an actual dramatic occurrence would be a refreshing change from your usual type of ambiguous, anticlimactic ending. Anyway, everything is moot now, since it looks as though you aren’t going to write the drowning novel after all. And really, isn’t that the ultimate anticlimax, in a way?”
Unaiko had a point, but I didn’t say anything in response. After an expectant moment, she continued: “Asa felt awful when she saw how downhearted you were about not finding the information you needed to complete your book. It was almost as if she thought she owed you an apology for handing over the trunk in the first place, since she already knew how that whole operation was going to turn out. But I guess she realized that it was what it was, as they say, and there was nothing she could do about it.
“I think Asa was simply trying to force her seventysomething brother—who had created a falsely heroic image of his drowned father, and who was still having recurrent dreams about something that happened one night when he was ten years old—to face reality. What I’m trying to say is, I think she was just trying to bring you back to your senses, for your own good.”
Unaiko held her glass up for a refill and I silently obliged. “I helped Asa restore your mother’s tape to a listenable state, so naturally I feel a measure of responsibility as well,” she went on. “From what I’ve heard, your father was far from being an active or essential participant in the insurgency scheme. It sounds to me as though he was nothing more than a country bumpkin who became so alarmed about what his sketchy cohorts were planning that he felt compelled to run away as fast as his little boat would carry him.”
So how did I respond to this crescendo of confrontation from my clearly intoxicated companion? Did I get angry and make a scene, like an ill-behaved old man? No, I was the perfect picture of serenity, sitting there surrounded by the vibrant sounds of the forest while my mood oscillated wildly between an irrepressible urge to laugh and a descent into infinite melancholy. I felt oddly salubrious, and I didn’t even feel the need to refill my own cup.
Toward the end of the evening Masao Anai joined us, and I got the impression that he was accustomed to playing designated driver when Unaiko had been out drinking. The curious thing was that when my outspoken dinner companion finally vanished into the night, leaving me in peace, I was genuinely sorry to see her go.
3
The next day Masao Anai came by to deliver a late breakfast, explaining that Unaiko was still in bed recovering from a hangover. While I was eating, Masao gazed out at the back garden, staring intently at the round stone engraved with the linked poems my mother and I had written. After a moment he started talking, saying Unaiko had asked him, as her emissary, to raise a question she had neglected to broach the night before.
Some time ago, Masao told me, he had run into a college friend who was now teaching Japanese at a local high school, and they had renewed their acquaintance. As a result of subsequent discussions, the Caveman Group initiated a visiting-artist program wherein the theater troupe would choose works of modern literature, turn them into dramatic readings, and then go around giving interactive performances at junior high schools and high schools in the area. They had been working on a new program as part of an integrated learning curriculum for the upcoming school semester, and that was what Unaiko had wanted to discuss with me.
“Each forty-five-minute performance would be divided into two segments, or rounds,” Masao told me. “The first would present the story as a condensed dramatic reading, while the second segment would incorporate the students’ questions. The idea is that a lively debate would inevitably ensue, adding a dramatic aspect of its own.
“We’ve already done a number of presentations based on this model: Miyazawa’s Night of the Milky Way Railway, Tsubota’s Children in the Wind and The Four Seasons of Childhood, Akutagawa’s Kappa, and so on. This year we’ve had a request to do Soseki’s Kokoro, and we’re in the preliminary preparation stage of that project. One of our main actors will handle the role of Sensei, including his conversations and his suicide note, while another will be in charge of the external dialogues and internal monologues voiced by the narrator (whom we know only as ‘I’), and our younger members will be cast in the auxiliary roles. Right now we’re busy converting our condensed version of the book into a script for the dramatic reading, and an aspect of the process has been worrying Unaiko from the start.”
Masao Anai flipped open his vade mecum: the giant notebook he never seemed to be without. He was also carrying a pocket-size Iwanami edition of Soseki’s Collected Works, and he opened that as well.
“Near the end of the novel,” Masao said, “we’ve hit a snag in the section about the death of Emperor Meiji. I’ll read it aloud, if that’s okay.
“Then, at the height of the summer, Emperor Meiji passed away. I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji Era that began with the Emperor had ended with him as well. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the rest of my generation, who had grown up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms. I shared this epiphany with my wife, but she just laughed and refused to take me seriously. Then she said a curious thing, albeit in jest: ‘Well then, maybe you should go ahead and commit junshi, and follow the emperor to the grave.’
“Needless to say, the wife was referring to the fact that General Nogi had chosen to follow the emperor in death by committing suicide himself. As we’ve been mapping out the section featuring Sensei’s long suicide note—which basically relates his life story—Unaiko has been reading the lines, and then I repeat them for emphasis. At some point Unaiko started to fret, and she asked me this question, but I wasn’t able to give her a clear answer. That’s why she was going to request a second opinion from you last night, and now I’ve been tasked with following up. So here’s the question: If it was true that what Soseki calls ‘the spirit of the Meiji Era’ flowed through Emperor Meiji’s entire reign, then would every single person who lived during the
era have been imbued with that spirit? This may seem like a rather simplistic question, but we haven’t been able to come up with a satisfactory answer on our own, so we wanted to ask you. For me, and for Unaiko as well, it seems to resonate with the type of transformation you’ve written about in the trilogy that began with The Changeling. Soseki’s character Sensei feels isolated from his era, and he has already decided to go on living as if he were dead. But even someone like that … I mean, could he really have escaped the influence of his own time—in other words, the spirit of Meiji?”
“That’s an excellent question,” I said. “As it happens, when I was young I often used to wonder about the exact same thing, but at the time I wasn’t really able to formulate a proper response. However, when you ask me now, the answer springs to mind with surprising clarity. It may sound paradoxical, but I think it is precisely the people who are trying to live in a way that’s detached from their own eras, and from their contemporaries as well, who end up being most influenced by the spirit of the time they were born into. In my novels, I usually portray characters who exist in very private worlds, but even so, my ultimate goal is to somehow express the spirit of the era I’m writing about. I’m not claiming there’s any special merit in my approach—and, as you’ve so kindly pointed out, my readership has nearly dried up as a result. This may seem like a stretch, but if I should die I can’t help thinking that it would almost be as if I were committing junshi myself: following my own era (and the principles I’ve fought for) into death. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course.”
“So are you thinking of your demise abstractly, as something that will take place in the distant future?” Masao asked lightly. “Or are you ready to predict a specific date, based on some psychic premonition?”
“Is that another of Unaiko’s questions, or did you come up with it just now?” I said, parrying Masao’s facetious inquiry with one of my own.
“Moving right along,” Masao said, changing the subject, “it looks as though you’re nearly finished with your packing, so what do you have planned for today? Asa was telling me that you’d been thinking about scouting locations for your book, before you decided to abandon it. I’ve already done quite a bit of research on the topic, so how would it be if we took a stroll down to the Kame River? The thing is, these days you’re more of a stranger around here than I am, so if you should come face-to-face with any of the local citizens, I think the surprise would probably be mutual! Even so, the other party would most likely know who you are, and if you were to ignore them when they spoke to you it could be kind of awkward. Here’s my plan: when someone calls out to you, I’ll respond to the greeting with the usual pleasantries, and you can just nod in their direction. Shall we stage a quick rehearsal? No? Okay, never mind. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Clearly, Masao Anai had given serious thought to our proposed outing.
“Well then, Mr. Choko,” he continued, “how would you feel about going for a swim around Myoto Rock, where you once came close to drowning as a child after you’d stuck your head in a fissure in the rock to look at a school of dace and weren’t able to pull it out? Before you arrived from Tokyo, Suke & Kaku—you know, our resident comedy duo—said they wanted to check out the site of that famous story, so they went and dived off the rock. When they came back, they reported having seen quite a few of those little silver fish still swimming around!”
Masao and I went our separate ways for a few minutes while we changed into our swim trunks, worn under T-shirts and knee-length shorts. Then we met up again and set off walking down the slope into the river valley. The school term had started early because of a break in the farmers’ busy season, and there were no children to be seen on the road that snaked along beside the river or on the other road between the rows of houses lining the embankment above. No adults rushed to greet us, either. If I were to run into any old acquaintances from the area, they would most likely be in their sixties or seventies, if not older, but down in the valley on that sunny morning it appeared as if all the humans had simply vanished.
Masao and I took a rustic flight of stairs down to the banks of the river. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in the vicinity of Myoto Rock, which was normally the most popular swimming hole in the area. The famous rock was a pyramid-shaped boulder, and the part above the waterline was a good three meters high. There had once been a similarly shaped rock next to it, but some years ago, when building materials were scarce, that half of the “couple” had been dynamited and ground up to make cement for the construction of a now-abandoned bridge. In local lore, the sundered rocks were seen as a metaphor for marital separation, and by felicitous coincidence there were a great many widows living along the river (my own mother included). A deep pool had been created where the remaining rock blocked the flow of the current, and the natural cove was a popular destination. This was the same cove where I had watched the flooded river carry my father and his boat away on the night of the big storm.
Masao and I shed our tops and shorts and waded into the water until it reached our hips, then turned toward the rock. As the current bore us upstream, I gazed at the forest on the opposite bank. The towering trees were taller than I remembered, and the branches appeared to be healthy, mature, and nicely filled out. Overall, the landscape looked much healthier than it had in the years immediately following the end of the war when the forest surrounding the valley was in a sadly weakened state, probably due to neglect. Since then the forest had gradually recovered its vitality, in what struck me as inverse proportion to the mass exodus of young people.
When the water level reached our chests Masao and I began to swim, both using the overhand freestyle stroke known as the Australian crawl. My eyes were protected by the same goggles I had been using for years whenever I swam in the heavily chlorinated public pools in Tokyo. When we reached the big rock we latched on to the submerged part of the monolith, caught our breath, and rested for a while, just as I had done so many times during my childhood.
Masao looked at me with reddened eyes (he wasn’t wearing goggles) and said teasingly: “You’ve written about teaching yourself to swim using instruction books written in French and English, and after seeing your stroke, I totally believe in the veracity of the story.”
“Yes, that method did help me refine my own naturally elegant style,” I replied, echoing his tongue-in-cheek tone.
“On the right side, if you go about a meter along the rock and then look underwater, you’ll see a large crack in the base,” Masao said, serious now. “You remember that, of course. Suke was saying that the crack is wide enough for a child’s head to fit through it quite easily. We know what happened the last time you tried, but how about today? Are you game to give it another go?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I began to creep slowly across the rock face, battling the current all the way. When I had tried to pull off the same maneuver as a child, I seemed to recall losing my grip and being swept away by the overwhelming force of the water crashing against the bifurcated rock. On this day, however, I was able to use a vigorous scissors kick to hold my own, and it occurred to me that I was now confronting the challenges of Nature with grown-up skills—notwithstanding the physical weakening that was a palpable reminder of the passage of years. When I reached the well-remembered spot, I dove underwater and tried to wedge myself between the two slabs of rock. My feet and body slipped through easily enough, but my adult-size head was simply too large. I did, at least, catch a glimpse of the shimmering water in the brightly lit grotto beyond the fissure. Mission unaccomplished, I thought as I allowed the dynamic swirl of the water to buffet my body for a moment. Then I planted my feet firmly on the river bottom, turned around, and returned to where Masao was waiting.
“Hey,” he greeted me, in his overly familiar, slightly sardonic way. “It was a foregone conclusion that your head wasn’t going to fit through the crack in the rock. But if you lower your expectations and just try to peer directly through the crack into the grotto, I can almost guarant
ee success.”
Focusing my efforts on that more modest goal, I made my way back to the crack in the rock. Peering through my prescription goggles (custom-made to remedy my severe myopia), I saw a nostalgic sight: in the shady grotto illuminated by pale blue-green light, dozens upon dozens of dace were futilely struggling to swim upstream against the current. The glossy black eyes on the sides of those lustrous silvery-blue heads seemed to rotate briefly in my direction, as if the fish were peripherally aware of my presence.
I stayed there, watching, until I ran out of breath. Then I pushed off from the edge of the rock I’d been holding on to, thrust my face above the water, filled my lungs with a deep draught of fresh air, and simply let my body drift, borne along by the kinetic current. After floating passively for a while, I swam back to the spot beside the rock where Masao had stationed himself.
Right away, he began talking. “In the first edition of The Child with the Melancholy Face, you wrote about seeing hundreds of those tiny fish here when you were ten years old,” he said. “You stuck your head through the underwater crack and you saw your child-self, Kogii, reflected in the eyes of the fish. And then as you were trying to get a better look you got your head wedged between the rocks, and if your mother hadn’t come to the rescue you would almost certainly have drowned. The fish you found so fascinating that day probably numbered only in the dozens, as opposed to hundreds. I was talking to some people who used to fish this river in the old days, and they said the dace population around Myoto Rock hasn’t really fluctuated much over the years. What I’m trying to say is you were probably looking at pretty much the same scene today as the one that made such an impression on you more than sixty years ago. There were only a few dozen fish today, right?”
“I didn’t really get a clear sense of how many there were,” I said. “The first time, when I got my head stuck between the rocks and was fading fast, I remember feeling as if I was somehow going to be magically transformed into a dace. And if that had happened, I thought, then I-as-fish would be looking back at the human me.”
