Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “However, the Sensei character commits suicide, leaving behind nothing but a long note of explanation and farewell. The young narrator, in a state of shock, reads the note through to the end—and as we all know, that’s more or less the structure of the entire book. We’re going to begin by reading the part of the suicide note where Sensei is remembering the time when he initially opened up to the young narrator. The reader will be an actor from our theater troupe; he’ll be out here in a moment with the text. This time, his only job will be to read the one passage, but in our actual play a number of other actors will appear in a variety of roles. Some of them will remain onstage, while others will make a brief appearance and then vanish into the wings, but either way, there’s no need to applaud every time a new character appears. All right—here we go!”

  Sensei: Sometimes, you used to look at me with a dissatisfied expression, and you even tried pressuring me to unfurl my past before you, like a picture scroll. That was the first time I really respected you, in my heart of hearts. I was moved by your determination, however audacious or unseemly it might have been, to try to grasp the essence of my being. At the time I was still alive. I didn’t want to die. That is why I refused to grant your request, choosing instead to postpone the revelations until some future date. That time has come, and I am about to cut open my heart and drench your face with my blood. And I will be satisfied if, when my heart stops beating, a new life is lodged in your breast.

  After the actor finishes reading this vivid passage, Unaiko continues with her scripted lecture. “As I said in the beginning, when I first read this passage I was about the same age as you students are now. This will probably sound simplistic, but when the Sensei character agrees to allow the young man to start addressing him by that respectful term, he starts to seem like a sympathetic protagonist, so I thought this novel might be an attempt to teach my generation a thing or two about life.

  “However, that turned out not to be the case at all. While there is a fair amount of direct dialogue between the two main characters, for the most part Sensei doesn’t really teach the young narrator anything. For example, the young man asks, ‘Is there really guilt in loving?’ and Sensei simply replies, ‘Yes, surely.’ He does offer his young friend some practical advice about steps he could take to be sure of receiving his rightful share of the family property when the time comes, but that’s about it. As we learn later, both of these topics—love and inheriting one’s fair share of worldly goods—created significant problems for Sensei and shaped his life.

  “Then when I reached the point of reading the long note Sensei left behind, I realized that this book was probably just written to express the author’s own thoughts through the medium of Sensei’s letter. Sensei lived out his life in self-imposed seclusion, closed off from society, and I felt that he wrote the long suicide note knowing it was his one shot at sharing his story. You may ask, what was the basic message of the note Sensei left behind when he took his own life? As we will see, that note includes the lines I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life. So for Sensei, writing a sort of regretful retrospective was apparently his only means of talking about his own conduct after decades of silence.

  “But what was that conduct exactly? Well, when he was twenty years old, Sensei was swindled out of his inheritance by an unprincipled uncle. After that, he turned into a wary, guarded person who rarely opened up to another human being. When he was at university, Sensei did have one friend (identified only as ‘K’) to whom he had been so close that they had chosen to live in the same lodging house, and when Sensei learned that K was in love with the daughter of their landlady, Sensei went ahead and got engaged to the girl himself, without saying a word to his friend. K was so heartbroken by this betrayal that he committed suicide, and Sensei happened upon the bloody scene not long afterward. I’m going to read an abridged version to you now.”

  Sensei: I stood up and went as far as the doorway. From there, I glanced quickly around his room, which was dimly lit by a single lamp. As soon as I realized what I was seeing, I stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, staring in horror through eyes that seemed to be made of glass. But the initial shock was like a sudden gust of wind, and it only lasted for a moment. “Oh no,” I thought. “This can’t be happening.” It was then that the great, luminous shadow—almost like a black light—that would irrevocably darken my life, forever, spread out before my mind’s eye. My whole body began to tremble.

  As you know, Kogii, I’ll always be the first to acknowledge that Unaiko is enormously talented and endowed with a cutting-edge sensibility, but the truth is she wasn’t generally thought of as an outstanding performer. When I watched her putting on a small production like Tossing the Dead Dogs, it struck me that the way it started out so light and comical, then suddenly morphed into a display of unbridled aggression, was typical of her unique dramatic style.

  However, when Unaiko stood onstage and read the agonized recollections that Sensei forces himself to recount, I saw something amazing. Apart from the stage lights, the theater was lit only by the natural light leaking in through the high windows (they were just open a crack) and the domed skylights in the ceiling. As Unaiko read those powerful lines, I seemed to see a flash of black light slashing across the stage. That’s how moved I was.

  A later section in Kokoro talks about how even after his friend died Sensei went ahead and married the girl they had both been courting, without ever telling her what had driven their friend to suicide. But Sensei never stopped blaming himself, and he was so crippled by guilt that he was never able to venture out into society and work for a living. When Unaiko was reading that section, a short while later, I could have sworn I saw the black light again.

  I even asked Masao about it after the play. I said, “Even though Unaiko is doing the directing this time around, you’re acting in the play and also somehow managing to handle the light board. (And I know that in the scene where the ‘dead dogs’ are being thrown, the lighting plays a very important role because it’s used to ramp up the excitement level.) So I was wondering whether what appeared to be a flash of black light cutting across the stage was an effect you deliberately engineered?” Masao laughed, the way he does, so I knew it must have been my imagination. Anyhow, here’s the excerpt that made me see the black light of despair for the second time:

  Sensei: From then on, a nameless fear would assail me from time to time. At first, it seemed to come over me without warning from the shadows surrounding me, and I would gasp at its unexpectedness. Later, however, when the experience had become more familiar to me, my heart would readily succumb—or perhaps respond—to it; and I would begin to wonder if this fear had not always been in some hidden corner of my heart, ever since I was born.

  Unaiko’s powerful dramatic reading made an indelible impression on me, and I’m now convinced that in addition to all her other talents she is a genuinely gifted actress. Of course, since she was standing on the stage in the guise of a schoolteacher, she had to offer some short explanations as she went along, but I guess the most effective way of showing how Sensei came to terms with his guilt and found a way to continue living was to have him recite a relevant quotation from the book.

  Sensei: Although I had resolved to live as if I were dead, my heart would at times respond to the activity of the outside world, and would almost seem to dance with pent-up energy. But as soon as I tried to break through the cloud that surrounded me, a mysterious and terrifying force would descend upon me from I know not where, and the malign power would grip my heart so tightly that I could not move.

  Unaiko, as Sensei, delivers those lines, then immediately switches back to schoolteacher mode and addresses the high school students. Under these circumstances, she explains, we can see that a life in which Sensei would venture out into society and hold down a normal job probably wouldn’t have been a realistic possibility. So, Unaiko goes on (I’m paraphrasing here), Sensei muddled along, living in quiet seclusion with
his wife and supporting them both on what was left of his inheritance (a lifestyle that, as the vital and adventuresome Meiji Era neared its end, would have struck people as rather unusual). Then, after a chance meeting at the seashore, a young university student inserts himself into Sensei’s low-key, reclusive existence and a bond begins to develop between them. (This explanatory interlude was a truly masterful performance on Unaiko’s part, by the way.) Next Unaiko goes back to the suicide note, which (she explains) shows how Sensei finally reached the conclusion that ending his own life was the only option that made sense anymore.

  Now, I was very familiar with the staging of Tossing the Dead Dogs, but this was my first encounter with one of these literature-based productions, and to tell you the truth I was taken completely by surprise when the air was suddenly filled with “dead dogs” being flung in the general direction of Unaiko’s feet to show the audience members’ disagreement with what she was saying. (They could easily have targeted her torso, but I guess they were just trying to make a symbolic point, not injure their idol!) Unaiko’s only response to the kids who had bombarded her with stuffed animals was to calmly continue the dramatic reading.

  Sensei: You may wonder why I have chosen to take such a radical way out. But you see, the strange and terrible force that gripped my heart whenever I tried to find an escape in life seemed at last only to leave me free to find escape in death. If I wished to move at all, then I could move only towards my own end.

  And then Unaiko read aloud the line she had mentioned a while before, as if she wanted to engrave it onto our hearts.

  Sensei: I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life.

  After a short pause for effect, Unaiko spoke again. “Class, your responses to the questionnaire were excellent,” she announced, to the obvious delight of the authentic students in the audience. “Everything you listed jibes perfectly with the terms the author uses again and again as leitmotifs.”

  She went on to explain that among the repeated words, kokoro, meaning “heart” or “the heart of things,” was used most often (forty-two times), followed by the related term kokoro-mochi (translatable as “feelings, mood, or frame of mind”), which popped up twelve times. Not far behind was kakugo (“readiness, resolution, resignation”) with seven appearances. Unaiko pointed out that while all these concepts played an important role in the story, an external event caused Sensei to decide the time had finally come to end his guilt-ridden life. After this explanation, she resumed the dramatic reading in a voice that vibrated with emotion.

  Sensei: Then, during 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 just go ahead and commit junshi, and follow the emperor to the grave.” I had almost forgotten that there was such a word as junshi, but now I turned to my wife and said: “If I did commit junshi, it would be out of loyalty to the spirit of the Meiji Era.”

  At that point the first half of the play ended and the lights came up for intermission. This letter is already far too long, so I’ll save the rest of the story to share in the next installment.

  6

  Dear Kogii,

  The second act of the play began with the covering of the five domed skylights by means of a clever mechanical device. Those of us in the audience couldn’t see Unaiko standing on the stage, but the dramatic reading recommenced in the darkness and once again Soseki’s term “black light” flashed across my mind.

  Sensei: “Hey!” I called. There was no answer. I called out again, “Hey, K! What’s the matter?” K’s body did not move at all. I stood up and went as far as the doorway. From there, I glanced quickly around his room, which was dimly lit by a single lamp. As soon as I realized what I was seeing, I stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, staring in horror through eyes that seemed to be made of glass. But the initial shock was like a sudden gust of wind, and it only lasted for a moment. “Oh no,” I thought. “This can’t be happening. “ It was then that the great, luminous shadow—almost like a black light—that would irrevocably darken my life, forever, spread out before my mind’s eye. My whole body began to tremble.

  When this reading ended, the stage was illuminated by slanting shafts of directional lighting. Because there were motes of dust visibly rising from the entire stage, the angle of the rays was very conspicuous, and they looked to me like a visual echo of the black light I had imagined earlier. The angular rays illuminated two large antique screens that were being pushed forward from the back. The screens bore livid traces of red, obviously made by a thick brush dipped in crimson paint. While this bit of stagecraft didn’t exactly match Soseki’s description, it was clearly meant to represent the projectile bloodstains Sensei saw when he happened upon the scene of his friend’s suicide.

  An instant later the shafts of light from above were extinguished and a bunch of high school kids (including some young members of the Caveman Group who were impersonating students) rushed down from the audience onto the stage and dragged the screens off into a dark corner. All the young people who performed the task were boys, but they were soon joined by a number of female students. Then Unaiko, still in character as a high school teacher, separated herself from the crowd of students and stood downstage alone. She began to speak, addressing her remarks to the students who were sharing the stage with her.

  “I know I mentioned this earlier, but when I read Kokoro for the first time, I initially thought that it was going to be an educational book. However, I was disappointed to find that there were almost no exchanges between the student (the ‘I’ character) and Sensei that could be described as edifying. However, when I reread the book recently, with a clear agenda in mind, it struck me that it is an educational book after all. In the long letter Sensei leaves behind, he actually asks outright what sort of lessons the young man ought to be learning from Sensei’s experiences. As we’ve already heard, at one point he says: I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life. The logical next step, in educational terms, would seem to be a statement phrased in the future tense, don’t you think? Maybe something along the lines of ‘And this is the way I shall die.’

  “And now I would like to ask all of you, individually, to put yourselves in the place of the young narrator and think accordingly. Speaking from the point of view of that character, do you feel you’ve learned anything useful from reading this letter from Sensei, which was in effect a message from beyond the grave?”

  The students who were standing on the stage proceeded to answer one by one, and I’ll paraphrase some of their replies here from memory. (I got the sense that these lines were derived from the off-the-cuff comments Unaiko had collected from the students during her visiting lectures, but the teenagers spoke the words perfectly, and the lines sounded completely natural.) As you’ll see, the students’ remarks were interspersed with questions and comments from the adults who were onstage with them.

  “I don’t think I learned a single thing.”

  “I think I might have learned something.”

  “Oh? What kind of thing did you learn?”

  “Well, a person I respect decides to end his own life, but before doing so he shares his darkest secrets with me—secrets that have already driven him to kill himself by the time I read his letter. So after the person has made this stunning confession and then killed himself, leaving me behind, there must be something to be learned from what he’s shared with me. As the narrator, I would feel as if this is the first time a life lesson has been so vividly seared into my heart, and I wouldn’t be likely to forget it any time soon.”

  “But what’s the practical meaning of this unforgettable less
on? You shouldn’t betray your friend and drive him to suicide? Really, who doesn’t know that already? It’s just common sense. I think the situation depicted in this novel is personal and unique, rather than universal.”

  “All right, fair point. Let’s say there’s a girl you aren’t particularly interested in, but when your friend ends up falling for her you’re surprised to discover that you’re upset about losing someone you didn’t even realize you wanted. When you confess your newfound interest the girl is very receptive, but your friend is so shattered by this development that he kills himself. Do you think such a thing would happen in real life? I mean, seriously, are you guys really so intense at this age? Let’s suppose that scenario did take place, and the woman in question agreed to marry you. If you never got your act together, don’t you think she would eventually leave you? And before that happened, would you really hatch a plan to express the spirit of the modern age by committing ritual suicide?”

  The high school students—both the fifteen or so who were onstage and the larger group still sitting in the audience—responded to this fusillade of questions by roaring with laughter. Amid the merriment there was only one person who stood by in disgruntled silence, glowering at the young woman who had subjected him to those queries. That glum-looking person wasn’t a student at all, but rather a member of the comedy duo Suke & Kaku (whom you may remember meeting at the Forest House). Beside him on the stage was the other half of the duo, laughing at his partner’s discomfiture. The woman who had been questioning Suke or Kaku—in the dim light, I couldn’t tell who was who—wasn’t a student, either; it was actually Ricchan, the Caveman Group’s music director. (She has been a friend and mentor to Unaiko ever since Unaiko joined the troupe, and now she’s a friend of mine as well. Despite her seniority, she’s a very low-key, unassuming person, the kind you can always count on in a pinch.) Anyhow, Ricchan—in a costume and hairstyle that made her look much younger—was doing such a convincing job of playing the part of a schoolgirl that I couldn’t help myself. I just had to shout, “Ricchan, you look so cute!”