Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Maki was very angry about your calling her big brother an idiot,” Chikashi continued, “and I’m sure that’s why she said those things. But putting her concerns aside for now, there are some issues I’ve been worried about myself, and I’d like to discuss them with you. It goes without saying that both you and I are growing older, but have you given any serious thought to the fact that Akari is aging rapidly as well, especially on the physical level? As you know, you added a daily walk to your normal sedentary routine of sitting around the house reading and writing after the doctor said you should take Akari out walking as part of a fitness regimen. It went on for a long time, and then when Akari started having more and more epileptic seizures during your daily walks together, you got into the habit of walking for an hour early in the morning by yourself. You simply gave up taking Akari along. But I think we both understand that the worsening of his epilepsy wasn’t the real reason you gave up walking with Akari. Rather, it was because the degenerative aging process was making it too difficult for him to continue with those outings.

  “And then there’s the dental situation. As you know, more than half of Akari’s teeth are already bad. I know the doctor talked to you about the results of the most recent set of blood tests, and while I only skimmed the written report, there seemed to be very few items on the list that weren’t marked ‘Requires Medical Care.’ His sleep apnea hasn’t improved, either, even though we’ve done our best to get his weight down. The reason he takes so many catnaps during the day is to compensate for all the sleep he loses at night.

  “Back in the days when Akari was still going to work at the support center for disabled people, the head of the institute showed me a disheartening statistical chart of average life expectancy based on all the people who had ever been enrolled there. You were with me that day, remember? Anyway, he explained that after a certain point children with disabilities begin to age more rapidly than their parents, and when I tried to talk to you about it later, your only reply was silence. Now, though, I realize that what the doctor said is absolutely true, and the problem is we’re aging at a worrisomely rapid rate as well.

  “On another topic, I don’t think I fully understood how heartsick you were about having to abandon work on the drowning novel. On reflection, I think this is the first time you not only didn’t finish a book you’d started, but simply stopped writing altogether. (You did take a short break once, early on, but it actually involved this very same book in its earliest incarnation.) Little by little, though, I’m starting to grasp the impact this disappointment has had on you, just from seeing how low your spirits have been since you returned from your fruitless trip to Shikoku. I don’t know when I’ve seen you as miserable as you are now, and it’s also obvious that Akari has been in seriously low spirits. You know how sometimes you’ll be sitting in the living room reading a book while he’s in the dining room studying a musical score? (That is, when you aren’t both holed up in your rooms.) Well, the scenario appears outwardly unchanged, apart from the fact that you aren’t speaking to each other. But for quite a while I’ve felt as if there were two giant mounds of depression permanently camped out in the house, and I couldn’t help worrying about what might happen if those two volatile lumps of unhappiness were to collide. And now what I think has happened is that they finally did crash into each other.

  “Since Akari was born, you have never once said anything even remotely like ‘You’re an idiot’ to him. Akari clearly understands the meaning of the heartless phrase you blurted out, and when I think about it I can understand why, as Maki mentioned, you’re unable to summon the courage to patch things up with your son. I know you’re sincerely sorry about hurting Akari, but some combination of the stubbornness of age and a deep-seated personality trait is keeping you from saying the simple words that might restore harmony to our little family.

  “This morning I was wide-awake from a very early hour, and I couldn’t stop turning this horrible situation over and over in my mind. Apparently Akari, too, had awakened while it was still dark outside; I had a feeling something wasn’t right, and when I went into his room, thinking he might be having a seizure, I found him crying his eyes out. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but he hasn’t made any attempt to listen to music on his own since the episode at the hospital, even when he’s alone in his room. That hasn’t happened since he was a baby.”

  I was truly cornered. And I know this is unspeakably childish, but at that moment I was actively hoping to be ambushed by another attack of vertigo, just to free me from Chikashi’s relentless and entirely justified criticism. But alas, no dizzy spell rode to the rescue and I didn’t have the acting chops to fake one, so I had no choice but to sit quietly while my wife’s quiet censure rained down on me.

  Very late that evening, as I was lying on the bed in my study still feeling as though my heart had been put through a meat grinder, I heard the strains of the second of the three sonatas Beethoven wrote and dedicated to Haydn (Op. 2 no. 2 in A Major, to be precise) wafting up through my pillow. Someone was playing the CD downstairs in the living room, with the volume unusually loud. I didn’t move, but when I heard the next piece—Mozart’s Symphony K. 550—being played full blast, I couldn’t control myself any longer, and I went charging down the stairs. Akari was crouched on the floor in front of the stereo.

  “It’s after midnight, so why don’t you do this tomorrow instead?” I said mildly. Akari didn’t even glance in my direction, and I was suddenly galvanized by anger. When I went over and squatted beside him in an attempt to get his attention, he responded by boldly turning the volume up even louder. He continued to stare straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge my presence, and I could see the back of his neck flushing a deep crimson. Chikashi emerged from her bedroom and stood in the doorway, shooting me an inquiring look, but after she saw the expression on my face she retreated without speaking.

  When the piece had ended, Akari carefully put the compact disc away and stood up. When he met my eyes at last I said flatly, “You know what? You really are an idiot.”

  I went upstairs, and after spending a long time staring into the depths of a darkness that wasn’t nearly as black as my mood, I switched on the bedside lamp. For the first time since returning to Tokyo, I groped around on the nearby bookshelf and grabbed the first paperback that came to hand. As I began to read a random page, the rectangle of tiny, tightly packed Japanese characters and the border of white space surrounding the dense block of type suddenly began to blur and whirl before my eyes.

  (Incidentally, that reminds me of a gathering I once attended where I got into an animated discussion with an anthropologist, an architect, and several other friends about the fact that in English those borders are called margins, while scribbled comments and annotations in the blank spaces are known as marginalia—although our discussion was primarily focused on the more abstract idea of the intrinsically marginal nature of culture. Another dear friend, the composer Takamura, seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. I assumed he was only half listening to our conversation, so I was surprised when not long afterward he published an exquisite composition titled Marginalia. Now that I think about it, those days when all my brilliant friends were still alive were probably the most creative and stimulating time of my entire life.)

  Anyway, as I was saying, my hands and wrists, which were holding the book out in front of me, suddenly collapsed and crashed into the bookshelf while the visible world began to spin so violently that my normally straight line of vision seemed to be tilted at a wildly exaggerated angle, as if I were on some out-of-control carnival ride.

  That was the beginning of the second coming of the bouts of extreme dizziness that would become a chronic condition throughout my later years: an alarming series of breakdowns everyone in my family (except Akari) ended up calling “the Big Vertigo.”

  PART TWO

  Women Ascendant

  Chapter 6

  Tossing the Dead Dogs

  1

  A
fter the Big Vertigo struck again, I developed some singular new habits. Once a dizzy spell had abated, I would tumble precipitously into a sleep of total, unrelenting darkness. If what followed the initial episode had been the sleep of death, I mused, then I must now be existing in a state beyond life. And yet my consciousness was still functioning, so according to the principle of Cogito, ergo sum, I was still present and alive in reality.

  What, exactly, was my state of being? There were times when my eyes would pop open in the dark—it could have already been morning, but the curtains were drawn against the light—and I didn’t have the slightest idea who I was, or where. In my ears I would hear a nostalgic, songlike poem repeated over and over, and those lines seemed to offer a clue to my peculiar existential state: 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. Yes, I would think, taking the sequence a step further. Buffeted by the deep-water current, he keeps rising and falling, floating and sinking, seconds away from being dragged into the maelstrom of the whirlpool.

  I am I, and yet I’m something more, because I feel that I am he as well: in other words, I am my father. My father, who drowned in what I realize now was the prime of his life; my father, who died when he was twenty years younger than I was when the Big Vertigo ambushed me for the first time. That realization would often be followed by another half-conscious epiphany: I loved my father! I would usually wake up again then (more completely this time), awash in dueling emotions: an almost sheepish feeling of relief doing battle with soul-deep despair.

  Another new behavior pattern had to do with the way I emerged from sleep. There were times when I would lie awake until the wee hours, assailed by an anxious premonition that another attack was on its way, and I would finally resort to taking the medicine prescribed for such emergencies, which (as a side effect) would cause me to wake up far too early the next morning. However, if I just lay quietly in bed, I often managed to fall into a completely natural sleep, and I would roll out of bed sometime before noon feeling abundantly well rested.

  Those prescription meds were potent, so I tried not to take them too often. The side effects weren’t entirely negative, though. When I first resurfaced after a medicated sleep, long before dawn, I would be engulfed in what I thought of as hypermemory: wave upon wave of extraordinarily intense recollections. After I opened my eyes for the second time, usually just before noon, I would jot down some quick notes—rough and rudimentary, like an artist’s initial pencil sketches—about the memories that had washed over me. I couldn’t help wondering whether those remembrances might be connected somehow with the powerful force that ushered in the dizzy spells, and I had an unshakable feeling that the advent of those seizures must have some larger significance. Surely the Big Vertigo’s cataclysmic appearance in my life couldn’t be completely random and devoid of meaning?

  I fell prey to another odd notion as well: a strong certainty that the serial attacks of vertigo (which were so much more powerful than anything I had ever experienced) must eventually, inevitably, result in permanent damage to my mental faculties. I wasn’t merely terrified by this bleak prospect; I also felt that—especially if my days of mental acuity were numbered—I ought to pay extra-close attention to the surges of remembrance, which were clearly trying to tell me something before it was too late. For the past fifty years, at least, I had started my daily work ritual by making notes on index cards about whatever had emerged during my dreams and the interstitial sessions of hazy, half-waking contemplation. Those jottings would often provide useful clues for my current writing, so I couldn’t very well let the waves of memory slide by unrecorded.

  But I had made a firm decision to abandon the drowning novel, and I had also made up my mind that I would never write long-form fiction again. I simply didn’t feel I had another book in me. So why was I still compulsively transcribing those resurgent memories? There’s really no way to explain it except by saying that for me, scribbling on index cards was like a chronic disease, and there didn’t appear to be a cure.

  2

  During the bouts of hypermemory, I kept remembering the day the war ended.

  Many writers of my generation have described the weather as cloudy and overcast, but in the forests of Shikoku it was a perfect blue-sky day. Just before noon, the local children were herded into a line. Then we followed our teachers up the hill behind the national school to the mansion of the village headman (in effect, the mayor), which stood on an elevated bluff overlooking the valley. Because no children were allowed inside, we congregated next to a hedge that surrounded the property. There had been some cloud cover in the early morning, but the sky had gradually cleared; the forest was glittering in the sunlight and the entire area was alive with the sound of cicadas. Even with all the ambient noise, we could still hear what was going on inside the mansion.

  First there was a loud commotion among the adult males and then, after the headman had given a little speech to calm them down, the sound of the women’s quiet weeping rose to a wail. A moment later two of the teachers from our school appeared, ducking through the small wicket gate next to the main entrance. They told us the emperor’s broadcast had ended and ordered us to head back to the valley. As we were marching along in formation, with the road hot beneath our bare feet, we were informed by some of the older kids that Japan had lost the war, and then we split up and went our separate ways. When I passed my house I noticed that the tall, slatted-wood storm windows were closed, and I got the sense that my mother was probably doing some kind of handwork in the rear parlor. (After my father died, those windows would remain unopened for many years.) I took the narrow footpath through the fields next to my house and headed toward Myoto Rock.

  Down by the river, there was a spot where the women from the hamlet on the north shore did their washing. Above it was a round outcropping of rock with pussy willows growing out of a fissure in the ledge. In the shadow of the boulder, along the riverbank, there was a triangular patch of water that formed a natural wallow. I used to wade along with the current, then throw myself down and settle into the little grotto until I was completely submerged. Using my legs for leverage, I would force my small body into the interior, with the rock jutting out over me like a protective roof.

  This secluded part of the river was protected from the current, so there was a permanent accumulation of dissolved clay on the bottom. When I stretched out, my entire body would be enveloped in the soft, smooth, slippery mud. If I was lying flat, my presence couldn’t be detected by the women who were squatting at the water’s edge not far away, washing dishes or doing laundry. Once I had mastered the art of squeezing into that secret grotto without being seen, I would head there alone on a regular basis to luxuriate in the freedom of simply lying in the mud for hour upon blissful hour.

  Whenever I was in early-morning remembrance mode the memory of this cozy hiding place would come flooding back, overlaid by a later but uncannily parallel memory that made it even more potent. As an adult, I had read a novel in which a French writer retold the Robinson Crusoe story, with a particular focus on the character of Friday. Crusoe, stranded on a desert island and exhausted by a daily life of endless toil and perpetual danger, had a hideaway not unlike mine where he could revel in submerging his weary body in a grotto of soft, wet clay. Every time I read the scene, I felt completely swept away—not only in my heart but somatically as well, on the deepest level. And now the memory of that book was permanently superimposed over the recollections of my muddy retreat.

  When I reached the bank of the river on that day in August 1945, I took off my sweat-soaked clothes and laid them on a rock by the alfresco laundry spot. Wearing nothing but a skimpy Etchu-style loincloth, I immersed myself in the placid water of my hidden grotto. I lay there faceup, letting my body sink until the water started to fill my ears. I stayed that way for a long time, lost in reverie. After a while I stuck one arm out of the water and discovered that the afternoon air
had turned chilly. I raised my torso and fixed my gaze on Myoto Rock, which reared above the glimmering flow of the river.

  Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. Leaving the wallow, I swam toward the place where the river waves were crashing violently against the enormous rock, and as I approached the monolithic landmark I gave myself up to the current. It carried me along and deposited me on one side of Myoto Rock. Muscle memory took over then, and I knew exactly how to move. Using my arms and legs, I propelled myself forward, with the swirling current tickling my chest. When I reached my destination, I stuck my head through the underwater fissure in the giant rock. On the other side of the crack, diagonal rays of sunlight slanted down, illuminating the dark blue pool. In that space I could see dozens of silvery dace, brimming with latent power, suspended in the water in quiescent repose.

  At this point, as remembrance merges with fantasy, I seem to see the naked body of a large man in the murky depths below the school of dace. There on the river bottom the corpse sways gently, nudged by the current. It’s my father, of course. And I—that is, my retrospectively imagined child-self—am trying to imitate the way the dead body moves.

  Back in the present moment, I reached for an index card and my fountain pen. I love my father desperately, I wrote in Japanese. But even in my deeply moved state I felt compelled to add a little orthographic embellishment, so a moment later I spelled out the phonetically Japanized version of the English word “desperately” in the margin: de-su-pe-ree-to-rii.