Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  3

  Dear Kogii,

  I received a very thoughtful letter from Chikashi. “Thoughtful” really is the only way to describe it, in every sense of the word. Not a single line was wasted on futile optimism or pointless pessimism; she simply gave a straightforward account of your current condition. However, since it’s entirely possible that my interpretation of what she said may have been colored in part by wishful thinking, I’m writing to ask if you would be so kind as to corroborate my conclusions.

  1. The Big Vertigo wasn’t some freakish occurrence that happened once while you were visiting down here on Shikoku and never again. There have been three more episodes since you returned to Tokyo.

  2. You’ve been taking it easy on order from your family doctor, but you haven’t followed up by going to a university hospital for an MRI and so on. Both your wife and daughter have encouraged you to do so, but you haven’t been receptive to their suggestions. Because the dizzy spell that knocked you for a loop on Shikoku took you completely by surprise, perhaps you’re afraid the results of the examination might be even more of a shock—anyhow, that’s our theory. If the tests show some irreparable abnormality in your brain, you probably wouldn’t be able to do your literary work, and we would all have to accept that you would never be the same.

  When Professor Musumi refused to be screened for lung cancer even though he was aware that something was very wrong inside his chest, you took on the task—at his wife’s request—of trying to convince your longtime mentor to submit to treatment. He refused, with fatal consequences, and now it looks as though you’re borrowing the same excuses he gave you virtually verbatim. Chikashi is prepared to respect your choices, and I agree completely. No matter what happens I really feel as if your homecoming trip to our little valley in the mountains made you realize something important about everyone in our family, including yourself. If I’m mistaken, I hope we can laugh it off the way we’ve done with so many of your preconceived notions and misperceptions.

  3. Whatever the diagnosis turns out to be, if you would simply take a break and get some rest, then you should be able to get back to your usual regimen of work—within your new limitations, of course—just as Professor Musumi did toward the end. However, if you remain mired in the denial stage and if your prose starts to show any degree of mental decline, it would be a very serious matter. To make sure that doesn’t happen, Chikashi has been thinking about creating a system whereby any manuscripts you produce from here on would be vetted by some of the editors you’ve been working with for years, before publication. And if they find significant problems, then we would have your publishers announce that Mr. Choko will be retiring from writing, effective immediately.

  4. At the moment, even though you’re feeling rather low, I gather your life isn’t too different from when you were in good health, and while you’ve stopped work on the drowning novel, you’re still continuing to crank out a newspaper essay every month. I assume that your reading habits are pretty much the same as always, except that you’re being careful not to spend too much time reading books in foreign languages because constantly stopping to look things up in dictionaries can be a strain.

  Another reason I’m writing this letter is to figure out the best way for us to stay in touch now that the Big Vertigo is part of the equation. (Needless to say, if an emergency should arise Chikashi would telephone me at home.)

  There isn’t much news to report on my end, aside from Masao and Unaiko’s theatrical activities. Ever since you returned to Tokyo they’ve been nice enough to keep me in the loop much more than before, and Unaiko, in particular, seems to have really opened up lately. She’s been confiding in me in a much deeper way, and I have a feeling our talks will raise some matters I’ll need to discuss with you at some point.

  However, since Chikashi mentioned that there’s no guarantee you’ll always be able to answer every letter I write, and since you’ve been jotting things down on index cards at a great rate—though not as part of any particular writing project—she kindly offered to make copies of any relevant notes (with your approval, of course) and send them to us down here. Unaiko and I will view those dispatches as your replies to our queries. As you know, I’ve already received the first batch of photocopied notes from Chikashi, and Unaiko and I have been perusing them with great interest—a task Unaiko approached with the same verve and intensity you’ll remember from your own interactions with her. During the process, one thing that jumped out at her was where you confess your feelings of love to the point of desperation (or words to that effect) for our father.

  Unaiko said that while you were staying at the Forest House, she shared the story of what happened to her at Yasukuni Shrine. I gather she was hoping to get some reciprocal feedback from you, as a liberal peacenik who also happened to have idolized his right-wing-fanatic father, and who got carried away to the point of singing along with a German military anthem himself. Anyhow, she was apparently left with the sense that you had been less than forthcoming about your own emotions.

  Unaiko wants to use the theater to express her feelings about ultranationalism, militarism, gender politics, and so on—feelings that seem to stem from some sort of long-ago personal trauma. I think it was because she feels so strongly about those issues that she took the rather extreme step of criticizing you for declaring your sudden, unexpected surges of love for our poor, misguided father.

  That reminds me—the drowning novel may be totally kaput as far as you’re concerned, but the young people who have been hanging out at the Forest House seem to be clinging to some hope that you will tell the story eventually. They seem to be saying, in effect, “Hey, Choko, don’t think we’re going to let you off the hook so easily!”

  Now I’d like to give you an update about what Unaiko is working on these days. Out of the entire group, Masao Anai was hit the hardest by your decision to abandon the drowning novel. Unlike me, he tends to take setbacks very much to heart.

  When he first heard that you were coming back to Shikoku to finish writing the book, Masao was running around exclaiming, “At last! At last!” I’ve never seen him so excited, and even Unaiko stopped for a minute to laugh. Of course, we’re all aware that Masao is obsessed with the idea of dramatizing all your novels, so his childlike delight seemed entirely natural—as did his subsequent disappointment when the plan fell through.

  Unaiko, on the other hand, is choosing to put a positive spin on things by focusing on the fact that you’ve finally been liberated from the drowning novel and can now move on. This seems a bit counterintuitive to me, but she seems to think that by being critical of you and your work she will somehow be able to entice you into further collaboration. (Reverse psychology, maybe?) In any event, I gather you’ve already heard about the Caveman Group’s program for teaching drama in secondary schools all over the prefecture, so you know that its current project is an adaptation of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel Kokoro. Unaiko and Masao lost no time in drafting a script, and they’ve already presented it at several schools. The early version was very well received, and the troupe has been inundated with requests and invitations from a number of additional schools.

  But Unaiko isn’t someone who rests on her laurels after a handful of favorable reviews and just repeats the same performance over and over. No, she’s been busy tape-recording the students’ impressions of this special style of teaching and then giving careful consideration to their comments. For the dramatic reading of Kokoro, Unaiko is trying to make the piece evolve organically, one step at a time. And now, with Masao’s help, she’s attempting to distill the result of her preliminary labors into a finished work of art (or, more precisely, into a perpetually evolving work of art). All along, she’s been continually polishing the style and technique that emerged from the dog-tossing piece, and she’s been using the same lapidary process to enliven her drama classes as well. She has gotten the students at various schools to throw a great many symbolic “dogs.” At the moment, she’s busy compili
ng those responses, including a fair number of critical remarks, and synthesizing them into a revised script for the play.

  The plan is for Unaiko and her colleagues to give a major public performance of Kokoro, showcasing their unique interactive approach, at the middle school’s cylinder-shaped auditorium, which will be converted into a theater for the occasion. (That rather daring structure has gotten a lot of criticism because it was very costly to build, and the middle school’s dwindling enrollment didn’t seem to warrant the investment.) They’re thinking that if the building could be given a catchy name like “theater in the round” and turned into an active cultural venue, it might revitalize the village. That’s why everyone is excited about this new idea.

  But what does this have to do with you, up there in Tokyo? Well, I took the liberty of offering to ask whether you’d be willing to help Unaiko create the script for the upcoming play, which is something you could do without actually being here. (As you know, there was some tentative discussion about the possibility of your delivering a related lecture, but it isn’t going to happen, for obvious reasons.) At any rate, I’ll be very grateful if you would do this favor for me—or rather, for us.

  You know, here in this tiny village I’ve been typecast for many years as the younger sister of an illustrious author and activist who has always been a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism. As a result of dealing with that sort of thing on a regular basis, I’ve had no choice but to evolve into a political animal myself!

  4

  I was already familiar with the Tossing the Dead Dogs project, but when I’m asked to commit to something I can’t help wanting to know exactly what is involved. That’s just the way I am. I was aware that the young members of the Caveman Group were working on turning Kokoro into a dramatic reading aimed at students, and I was happy to help, but I still had some questions.

  For one thing, when it came time to actually mount a performance, I couldn’t see how they were going to turn Soseki’s subtle, understated novel into an interactive dramatic free-for-all. In Unaiko’s approach to drama, the spontaneous exchanges that can occur between the audience and the actors onstage become a major aspect of the production.

  Granted, the so-called dead dogs that are her trademark props are just stuffed toys, but how would throwing them back and forth be integrated into a play about friendship, betrayal, existential malaise, and suicide? And in this instance (as opposed to the earlier performance piece, which was literally about dogs), what was the significance of the canine “corpses” supposed to be?

  I tried to imagine various scenarios but I finally gave up and had Chikashi telephone Unaiko, on my behalf, to ask for additional details about how the Caveman Group was planning to pull this off. Unaiko replied (via Chikashi) that the practice script she was currently using was derived from recordings of comments by the students she had met through her dramatic presentations at various schools. Unaiko then proceeded to read some of the raw, unedited lines to Chikashi over the phone, saying she hoped I would share my thoughts about them.

  Chikashi, who appeared to be enjoying her go-between role immensely, wrote those lines down and then showed them to me. She also filled me in on the origin story of the dog-tossing trope, including some details I hadn’t heard before.

  It had begun accidentally, during the Caveman Group’s revival of a play dating back to the New Drama movement that had blossomed in Japan before the war. During the scene in question, a young wife played by Unaiko was sitting on a chair in a Western-style parlor holding a pet dog (represented by a stuffed animal) on her lap. The audience began heckling Unaiko’s character for some reason and, spurred on by the jeers and catcalls, she pretended to strangle the dog—acting up a storm and making the “murder” look very realistic. She tossed the “carcass” into the rowdy audience, whereupon the “dead dog” was immediately heaved back onto the stage.

  Apparently it was a seminal moment in the evolution of Unaiko’s dramatic method, as she realized that while in reality most of the audience members were positively disposed toward her and her colleagues, in the context of the play those same spectators were clearly getting a tremendous kick out of razzing the actors on the stage. (As an aside, Chikashi mentioned having read somewhere about a psychiatric method called drama therapy, in which throwing stuffed animals is used to help patients work through various issues. Unaiko, it seemed, had serendipitously stumbled upon the same cathartic technique.)

  The first, unscripted melee created a great deal of buzz, so in the next performance the bit with the stuffed dog was repeated, only this time with conscious intent. The dramatists added the confrontational give-and-take with the audience to the original script, and a rather staid prewar play was reinvented as Tossing the Dead Dogs. The interactive element turned out to be extremely popular, and it soon became the Caveman Group’s dramatic calling card.

  The technique had grown ever more sophisticated, to the point where the stage directions now called for surreptitiously planting a number of shills or decoys throughout the audience—people whose sole purpose was to raise a choreographed ruckus while pretending to be ordinary members of the crowd. There were also quite a few fans who happily paid their own way and came to the show armed with stuffed animals, so there was no way of knowing how many “dead dogs” might fly back and forth on a given night. Over time, the art form evolved to the point where most (though not all) of the performances tended to end abruptly right at the apex of the dog-flinging pandemonium.

  Unaiko told Chikashi that she was wondering, a bit nervously, what would happen during the upcoming presentation of the Caveman Group’s dramatization of Kokoro. Based on her prior experience, Unaiko sketched out her vision of how the evening might go, with the caveat that since audience participation was always a wild card, there was really no way to predict the outcome. Her innovative stagecraft could turn out to be a brilliant success or an unmitigated disaster; they would just have to wait and see.

  Unaiko explained that the audience would be made up of students from junior high and high schools all over the prefecture, along with teachers and family members, and the event would take place in the circular auditorium, which had been converted for the occasion into a “theater in the round” (technically, a theater in a semicircle). The performance would begin with a straightforward dramatic reading. When that came to an end, the official thespians would congregate at stage left and the stealth participants (who had until then been sitting unobtrusively in the audience) would line up on the opposite side. These imposters would start directing questions and critical comments at the actors; the responses would quickly become heated, and the civil discussion would degenerate into a raucous argument. Up until then, everything would have been scripted in advance and the actors would be reciting lines they had already rehearsed. But when the ringers began quarreling with the actors, the audience members would soon realize that such interaction was not only allowed but encouraged, and would presumably follow suit. Then, if everything went according to plan, the scene would escalate into a near riot, with “dead dogs” being hurled back and forth with wild abandon.

  5

  Dear Kogii,

  I’m happy to report that Unaiko’s play was a complete triumph! (As you know, it was performed at our local theater in the round on the last Saturday in September, as her first dramatic project targeted at an audience of junior high and high school students.) I hope you will share this letter with Chikashi, as I think you’ll both find it very entertaining.

  I must confess that I’m writing partly to coax you, brother dear, into lending your long-distance assistance to Unaiko and me once more as we tackle a new challenge. I’ll save some energy for making that pitch, but first I want to tell you about Unaiko’s theatrical tour de force.

  Picture this: you walk into a round building and see an empty stage in the shape of a half circle, with the other half of the sphere filled with curved tiers of seating. No curtain separates the stage from the spectators, and the aud
ience members look down at a darkened stage that almost appears to be a hole or abyss in the center of the room. It’s still daylight outside, and while several high windows and domed skylights provide a small amount of natural light, inside the theater it’s quite dim.

  Only one thing is visible at first: Unaiko’s slender form, standing motionless at the center of the stage. As the lights come up, we see that she is costumed and made up to look like the very model of a veteran teacher of Japanese language and literature at the high school level. (Incidentally, for the past three years Unaiko has been going around to junior high schools as a visiting instructor of drama, so she’s known and loved by hundreds of students, and the audience is packed with her fans.)

  Unaiko is holding a small hardcover edition of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, in the familiar binding we associate with his collected works. The basic premise of the play is that Unaiko is delivering a lecture to the teenage students who are onstage and in the audience. Needless to say, both the words she addresses to this imaginary class and the way the second half of the play unfolds were shaped (and enriched) by our earlier discussions with you.

  “The first time I read this book, I was just about the same age most of you are now,” she begins. “On that occasion, and subsequent readings as well, I wielded my red and blue pencils freely, underlining certain things and drawing circles around others. (These days I guess you would probably be using highlighters or marking pens, right?) Anyway, I read this book over and over. However, from the very beginning I had doubts and questions, and I’m going to start by talking about them.

  “As preparation for this lecture, I gave you two homework assignments. One was a questionnaire asking you to list some of the words in this novel that strike you as significant. The second assignment was this: I asked all of you to read Kokoro by yourselves, just as I did many years ago. The story starts out as the narrator, a young man we know only as ‘I,’ enters into an unusual friendship with an older man whom he always refers to, respectfully, as Sensei.