Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Wait, that doesn’t make sense. If you had drowned on that day, then the you who was peeping at the school of fish would no longer exist in this dimension at all.”

  “You’re right,” I said dreamily. “I’m the old man who wasn’t able to become one of those fish (however many there may have been) swimming eternally in the bluish-green light of the grotto beyond the crack in the rocks.”

  “Speaking of drowning,” Masao said. “You mentioned that you had never been able to imagine what it was like for your father—who was twenty years younger than you are now, at least—when he set out on the overflowing river, propelled by the powerful current, and was carried far downstream, where his lifeless body ended up rising and falling on the riverbed.”

  “True,” I said. “And I can’t help thinking my father’s drowned body must have been moving exactly like one of those fish.” My eyes were suddenly wet in a way that had nothing to do with swimming in the river.

  Masao paid no attention to my momentary lapse into grief. “Unaiko got mad at me when I told her I was planning to drag your old bones down here,” he remarked, speaking in a rather disrespectful manner. Along with the contrast between my elderly shoulders and his strong brown torso (we were both submerged in the river up to our sternums), his cocky tone seemed like a brutally explicit reminder of the difference in our ages. “She was worried you might catch a cold, or worse, from being in the water for such a long time.”

  Masao turned around and looked downstream, where two concrete bridges—one old, one new—were suspended side by side. Atop the older of the two bridges (long since retired from active duty because it couldn’t handle the increased traffic) two women were wildly windmilling their arms in greeting. I immediately recognized one of them as Unaiko.

  “Shall we head back now?” Masao said.

  He and I let go of the rock we’d been clinging to, and after allowing the current to gently push us into place we commenced swimming, using the usual crawl stroke. Evidently showing off for the women—who continued to wave energetically in our direction and whom he could see every time he raised his head to take a breath—Masao made a visible effort to open up a lead on me. I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it, so I redoubled my own efforts.

  In my childhood, we used to make our way home by riding the vigorous current that rippled out from the deep water next to Myoto Rock and then climbing up the cliff next to the road along the river, but Masao kept heading diagonally toward the shore until the water became so shallow that we had to stop swimming. By the time we both stood up on the sandy gravel of the river bottom, with the water barely covering our knees, we must have swum at least 150 meters. I didn’t think about it until afterward, but I was no longer in shape for serious competitive swimming and the long burst of intense exertion clearly took a toll on my body.

  We made our way onto the riverbank where we had left our things, and as we were drying off with the towels we’d brought, I couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about the prospect of having Unaiko observe my legs, which were quivering with exhaustion. But when I glanced at the bridge after Masao and I had finished throwing on our clothes, I saw that she and her companion had been engulfed in a gaggle of junior high students on their way home from school, and the two older women were focused on dealing with their clamorous admirers. There was no way I was going to climb up to the bridge in my bedraggled state with an audience of teenage girls, so I stood at the mouth of the river with Masao, chatting desultorily.

  “In the autumn of last year,” he said, “there were masses of glorious red flowers on the slope below what’s left of the chestnut groves, and it occurred to me that they must be the red spider lilies you’ve written about.”

  “Right, that’s where they harvest the bulbs of the red spider lilies—if anyone’s even doing those old-fashioned jobs these days. When those long-stemmed flowers are in full, extravagant bloom, with their delicate stamens and pistils bursting forth from inside the curvaceous outer petals of the bright red flowers, they almost look like fireworks. The entire slope becomes a sea of scarlet, and it’s really something to behold.”

  “Oh, I know,” Masao agreed. “I was thinking last fall that if someone with entrepreneurial inclinations came across a field of these flowers they would naturally see the business possibilities and think, Ka-ching! I mean, there’s always a market for cut flowers. And then it occurred to me that when the young soldiers who were here during the war saw this slope in full bloom they might have thought it was on fire, like a great wave of flames blanketing the entire hillside.”

  I really didn’t feel like getting into a discussion of the young officers—a subject to which Masao appeared to have given a great deal of thought. When I didn’t respond, he started talking about Unaiko’s throng of admirers.

  “Unaiko has tons of fans around here,” he said. “Not only those girls you see on the bridge, but high school girls from the neighboring towns as well. Her master plan is to use the kids as conduits to reach their parents; that’s why she’s making such an effort to cultivate friendly relations with the young students. She’s thinking way beyond the theatrical aspect and is hoping to exploit these relationships for a higher purpose: to advance some of the social issues she cares about.”

  I nodded, but I had something else on my mind. “Our swim seems to have taken rather a lot out of me,” I said. “Would you mind bringing the car around to the foot of the bridge? I mean, assuming Unaiko and her friend came down in the car.”

  For the first time, Masao seemed to notice that I was in a state of complete exhaustion. However, it turned out Unaiko, too, had come on foot, so I wearily showed Masao an old shortcut back to the Forest House, by way of an iron ladder located a short ways upstream.

  4

  I turned in unusually early that night and awakened abruptly long before dawn. Even during the last stages of slumber, I was already in the throes of a panic that was distinctly physical as opposed to psychosomatic. Then something bizarre appeared in my darkly dreaming mind: a sort of emblem of entropy, a shapeless shape and formless form whose entire raison d’être seemed to be to disintegrate and crumble into nothingness. The force of the breakdown came as a massive shock to my system, but the part of my brain that should have registered the blow was strangely silent. Still vaguely dream-dazed and half asleep, I switched on the bedside lamp.

  A startling sight met my newly opened eyes. A rough-edged, angular black disk, something like a dinged-up flying saucer, appeared to be lodged in the juncture where the bookcase met the sloping ceiling. The disk began to rotate sharply to the right, gaining power and momentum as it moved, and then it suddenly seemed to collapse with a thud. (I knew I was imagining the sound effects, but that didn’t make the sensation any less vivid.)

  Instinctively, I closed my eyes. I’ve never experienced anything like this before, but I know what’s happening, I thought. I’m being attacked by a monstrous dizzy spell. When I opened my eyes again, the same thing happened: I saw the whirling-disk apparition, and then it tipped over to the right and dissolved roughly into nothingness.

  This time, I kept my eyes open. It dawned on me that the entire time I had been asleep, I’d been seeing the disk (which was, I thought later, half metaphor and half hallucination) on a continuous loop, repeatedly tipping over and shattering into pieces. And now the phantom disk had somehow slipped behind the spines of the books on the shelf, and the books appeared to be falling over as if mowed down by machine-gun fire. With a supreme effort I extended my limp, inert right arm (really, it felt almost boneless) and switched off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness again. Even with the light off, I had a visceral sense that the unstable black disk was incessantly somersaulting around me, but imagining the disintegrative spinning was slightly more bearable than opening my eyes and actually seeming to see it. Clearly, the force that had ambushed me as I lay sleeping (or perhaps the ambush had only begun when I was swimming upstream toward a painful awakening) was
n’t abating at all. On the contrary, it was gathering strength and becoming ever more intense.

  Without opening my eyes, I raised my upper body and tried to sit up, but since my torso was every bit as weak and floppy as my wet-noodle arms, the episode made me feel as if my upper body, too, was twirling around, and I immediately toppled over. As my faculties gradually returned, it struck me that this was the most extreme loss of equilibrium I had ever experienced by far. And in the midst of the epiphany—which was only possible because while my body (including my eyes) was overcome by wooziness, my brain was still functioning normally—I found myself thinking that this was surely just the beginning. As the affliction progressed, wouldn’t the next stage be epic, excruciating headaches? Also, with vertigo of this magnitude, wasn’t it likely that I would soon be assailed by violent spasms of nausea? Quickly, before either of those symptoms manifested, there was something I needed to attend to.

  I opened my eyes. The disorienting tilt-a-whirl sensation caused me to quickly squeeze them shut again, but I was still able to get my bearings in relation to the contours of the room. Based on that brief reconnaissance I knew my first move should be to slide my body out of the bed and onto the floor, while keeping my eyes closed. However, when I tried to execute that simple maneuver it didn’t go too well.

  I eventually managed to turn over onto my stomach, and from there I was finally able to tumble from the bed onto the floor. After lying inert for a moment I made my shaky way into the hall, creeping along on my weakened extremities. The dreaded headache hadn’t yet made its appearance, and as long as I kept my eyes closed I could think quite lucidly. (However, the moment I opened them my consciousness would immediately shatter into a million vertiginous fragments.) Keeping my eyes tightly shut, I slowly made my way down the hall toward the bathroom, crawling blindly along on all fours while I theorized about what might be happening. Something must be going haywire inside my brain, I speculated. Maybe some sort of aneurysm, or a stroke?

  A number of my contemporaries had been stricken with this type of disorder out of the blue, and some had simply dropped dead on the spot. As for the ones who went on living, in many cases their mental acuity was adversely affected, and they were never the same again. If that happened to me it would be curtains for my work as a writer, and my life would effectively be over. I didn’t know whether I was about to suffer irreversible brain damage or die outright, but either way I would be finished as a novelist. Therefore, I concluded, I needed to tidy up all the loose ends of my work before the onset of the potentially fatal headache that, I felt certain, was waiting in the wings.

  I thought first of my journalism projects. I wanted to have someone discard the entire lot—both the pieces I had just started drafting and the manuscripts that were further along. If I could leave behind a note containing those instructions, surely someone would carry out my wishes (although at the moment, nobody’s name sprang to mind). It occurred to me that in the empty space between the end of the bed and the south-facing window there was an armchair where I liked to sit and work, using a clipboard equipped with a supply of manuscript paper. In my present state there was no way I could have written a coherent last will and testament, or even held a fountain pen, but there were several fat, already sharpened pencils nearby—Lyra-brand colored pencils, made in Germany, in a deep sky blue—and I thought I could grab one of those and scribble something reasonably legible without having to open my eyes.

  But what, exactly, was I going to tell my unnamed literary executor to dispose of? I couldn’t think of a thing, and it wasn’t because the seizure had scrambled my brain; on the contrary, I felt as though my mind was functioning with complete clarity. The reason nothing came to mind was that I really didn’t have any work in progress to speak of.

  A complex wave of emotions—a kind of wretched, self-mocking contempt for my current state of being, coupled with a feeling of relief that I wouldn’t be leaving any important assignments uncompleted—washed over me. The existential bottom line seemed to be that the I who was here right now was already as good as dead. And if I was already dead, it was only natural that I wouldn’t experience the slightest fear of dying.

  A moment later, though, I was hit by an avalanche of a different kind of apprehension: the concern that, as my mother had pointed out, I hadn’t done anything to prepare Akari for his own journey to the Other Side. If I had dared to look down at the poetry stone in the back garden I would surely have been plunged into depression by the realization that on the cusp of old age I had neglected my parental duties, my work was in shambles, and my life was essentially devoid of meaning.

  Even so, against my better judgment, I opened my eyes. And before the diabolical disk came crashing down around me again, I imagined myself reading the first lines of the poem carved into the big round stone:

  You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest

  And like the river current, you won’t return home.

  5

  Three days after the terrifying dizzy spell, I was back at home in Seijo. As it happened, there was an excellent physician nearby (he had become a family friend and had helped us countless times), and he was optimistic about my prognosis. After listening carefully to my description of the extreme vertigo I had experienced just before leaving Shikoku, he said it would most likely be a transitory thing, and that cheered me up considerably. The doctor recommended waiting awhile before going to the hospital for a complete examination, and in the meantime I was dutifully taking the medications he’d prescribed.

  I spent a week or so lounging around the house in recovery mode. One morning when I was asleep in my second-floor bedroom I was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs in the living room. I had heard from Chikashi that a side effect of Akari’s continuing depression was that he had stopped answering the phone. Since returning from Shikoku I’d been having trouble falling asleep at night, so I had been getting up after the rest of the family had already finished lunch, but when I glanced at the clock on the wall it showed half past nine. I got out of bed, and as I was making my groggy way down the stairs the phone stopped ringing.

  Akari was perched on the edge of a dining-room chair, leaning backward with both feet propped on a second chair while he stared at the five-line composition paper he was holding on his knees. He was the very picture of a middle-aged man in the throes of deep depression. Even so, he appeared to be engrossed in erasing one section of his composition, and he didn’t look up when I entered the room.

  Just then the phone began to ring again. As I had expected, it was Chikashi calling from the post office. Apparently a special delivery package had arrived very late the previous night, and the postman, assuming we would all be asleep, had thoughtfully decided to leave a note rather than disturb us with the doorbell. The next morning when Chikashi called the local post office, a clerk had read the sender’s name and address to her and had suggested that if the package was important the quickest option would be to pick it up in person. She was at the post office now, waiting in line, but the place was mobbed and the queue was longer than usual.

  Also, Chikashi went on, Akari had an appointment for a routine physical, but she wasn’t feeling well enough to take him to the university hospital herself and hoped I wouldn’t mind going in her stead. By the time I had managed to make myself somewhat presentable (Akari was already dressed and was still working on his composition), Chikashi was back. She handed me my package as she got out of the cab, and then Akari and I piled in and headed for the hospital.

  We made it there barely in time for our eleven o’clock appointment, but as it turned out there was a notice posted near the receptionist’s window saying that the doctor we needed to see was running at least an hour behind schedule. The delay didn’t bother me at all. Chikashi had chosen this particular specialist because he was well known for his expertise in treating patients who had been born with brain damage, and we understood that he would sometimes be called away on unforeseen emerg
encies. When I presented Akari’s patient ID card to the nurse on duty, she told me to go ahead and get his blood work done.

  As I was looking through the file containing our insurance information and other documents, I saw that an appointment for blood tests was scheduled for two days later, so I suspected that the nurse had thoughtfully found a way to make use of the fallow time we were going to spend waiting for the doctor. The blood tests took only a few moments to complete, but they left Akari in a foul mood. He had a phobia about having blood drawn and hadn’t been expecting to undergo that ordeal on this visit.

  After securing a couple of seats in the waiting area, I finally set about opening my exotic-looking package. The sender was a cherished friend, a distinguished American woman whom I had known for decades (I’ll call her Jean S.). The enclosed note explained that she had finally gotten around to sorting through the mementos left behind by a mutual friend of ours, the late university professor, author, and comparative culture scholar Edward W. Said. During the process, Jean wrote, she had come across something she thought I might like to see, so she was sending it along. The item in question was still in its original, stiff paper file folder, and Jean had simply wrapped up the folder and popped it in the mail. The folder contained a trio of custom-bound booklets: the musical scores for three of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, printed on the finest grade of thick cotton paper.

  Jean S. was the person who had first brought Edward W. Said and me together, many years ago. The two of them were old friends, and her posh apartment on a high floor in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan even boasted an “Edward W. Said Room” decorated with motifs inspired by antique Islamic books. By chance, I was in New York City at the time of Said’s discharge from the hospital after a stay there (the first of many) to treat the leukemia that would eventually kill him; Jean threw a party to celebrate, and I was invited. Every year since we had met, Said and Jean had made a custom of telephoning me late at night on New Year’s Eve (which was already New Year’s Day, postmeridian, in Japan) from wherever they happened to be enjoying dinner together along with their respective families.