Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  After a moment, Unaiko came forward and joined the conversation. “Even if it seems a bit ludicrous to describe our modern condition as the ‘spirit of the Heisei Era,’ the famous spirit of Meiji mentioned in Kokoro really is important, so let’s discuss it a bit more later on,” she said. “First, though, I’d like to ask everyone who believes that the book’s narrator (the never-named ‘I’) didn’t learn anything of value from Sensei’s suicide note to assemble on the right side of the stage. Everybody else: left side, please.

  “All right, now I have a question for the group on the right. Am I correct in thinking that you don’t believe Sensei was an educator in any real sense of the word, even though he basically staked his life on sharing the lessons you dismiss as useless? If that’s the case, why do you think he made a point of writing a long, confessional letter? Was it just an empty act on his part?”

  The person who responded to Unaiko’s question was either Suke or Kaku; it was still too dark for me to tell the two men apart.

  “To me, at least, it doesn’t seem to have been an empty act,” he said. “Sensei felt he was living his life as if he were already dead and perpetually beset by the strange, terrible force he talks about so eloquently. After all those years of living with his guilt, maybe he had reached a point where dying seemed to him to be the most natural course of action.”

  “Point taken,” Unaiko said. “But if—as some of you believe—Sensei wasn’t acting as a teacher, shall we talk about what you think he was trying to accomplish with the letter he left behind for his young friend?”

  At that point, Masao Anai, who had been sitting in the audience, stood up and signaled his desire to speak. I think the gesture might have been a bit of spontaneous ad-libbing on Masao’s part, but I’m not completely sure. Watching this new tactic of dividing the participants into two camps and then revitalizing the discussion by introducing a third line of thought, I got the feeling it was all part of the continuing evolution of the technique they’d used in Tossing the Dead Dogs.

  “I’m probably closer to your fathers’ generation than to yours, and I definitely have a lot more years under my belt than you do,” Masao began. “I’m a playwright and a director, and just as the author Kogito Choko, who originally hails from this part of the country, expresses himself through novels, I use the theater as my vehicle for self-expression. I’m constantly thinking about the phenomenon of expression, day in and day out, so if you don’t mind I’d like to talk a bit about the suicide note written by the Sensei character in Kokoro.

  “As you know from reading the book, Sensei is hoping his death will kindle a new spark of life in the breast of the young man who is reading his posthumous letter. I was very moved when I read this for the first time as a young man, and I asked myself, ‘Do people really say this sort of thing when they’re about to die?’ Obviously, I was identifying with the narrator and projecting my own thoughts and feelings onto him. And I couldn’t help wondering: ‘How would I feel if someone on the threshold of death was kind enough to write down something like this just for me?’

  “But the thing is, as the years have gone by I’ve suffered a sort of sea change, and I’ve noticed that when I reread Kokoro these days I’m not as receptive as I used to be. I find myself asking questions like: ‘Is Sensei giving any thought at all to the effect his words, and his death, will have on this young man who looks up to him and considers him a friend?’ I really don’t think he is; it doesn’t seem to me as if Sensei is ever thinking about anyone except himself. And what’s with the sudden suicide drama, anyway? Until then, Sensei had been quietly living out his years, systematically shutting himself off from society—as we say today, he was holed up like a hermit. By his own admission he was never much of a writer, and this suicide note is his one and only attempt at self-expression. In other words, the only reason he picked up brush and paper was to write his final communiqué.

  “Even so, you have to wonder how he could have believed that reading his suicidal confession would cause a new life to be sparked in the heart of the young. This passage has been read aloud already, but for me, the highlight of the farewell note is I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life.

  “You see, this is how Sensei expresses himself: by basically oversharing with someone who isn’t even part of his inner circle. To be honest, the more I thought about this behavior, the less I liked it. I’m sure some of you must have had the same reaction. Or maybe not?”

  At this point, Masao Anai (who had struck a dramatic pose at the end of his monologue) began to be pelted from all sides with “dead dogs.” As the toys rained down on him Masao picked up the stuffed animals that had bounced off his body and landed at his feet. He made a great show of examining them carefully, one by one. Then, clutching a double armload of dogs, he docilely resumed his seat, bowing to the audience around him as if to acknowledge his defeat.

  Once again, the audience burst into laughter. Masao’s deliberately bombastic tone had captured the students’ attention, and his pretense of having been both intrigued and humbled by the onslaught of “dead dogs,” too, was a skillful way of neutralizing the tension by making them laugh. They were still chuckling when Unaiko, evidently deciding it was time to intervene, strode down to the front of the stage. Projecting the kind of unruffled dignity you’d expect from an experienced teacher, she attempted to calm the antic, exuberant crowd.

  “Let me ask you something, class,” she said. “When you hear people being so critical of the things Sensei wrote, don’t any of you feel like firing back with ‘Yes, but Sensei was on the verge of taking his own life, so maybe it isn’t fair to hold him to normal standards of behavior’? Let’s explore that question together, shall we?”

  While she was speaking, Unaiko gestured to Ricchan and the comic duo Suke & Kaku to step out from the two groups of high school students onstage. (Those three were convincingly dressed as students, but by then it must have been clear to the audience that they were grown-up actors pretending to be teenagers.)

  “A short while ago, one of you suggested that it was a perfectly natural thing for Sensei to have committed suicide at this point in his life,” Unaiko said. “Would you please explain your thinking based on what’s in the suicide note? And then, for balance, we’ll need to ask the person who was expressing the opposing view to elaborate a bit more. You’ll do that for us, won’t you? Then, after we’ve given a fair hearing to both sides of the argument, I’d like to invite everyone to summon all your strength and throw your ‘dead dogs’ at the faction you don’t agree with!”

  In response to Unaiko’s request, Suke began to read aloud from the opened copy of Kokoro he was holding. (Suke’s & Kaku’s faces were helpfully illuminated by the stage lighting now, so I was finally able to tell them apart.)

  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.

  “This is the sort of thing I had in mind,” Suke said. “Sensei felt that after Emperor Meiji died of natural causes and General Nogi committed suicide to follow his master in death, this unusual set of circumstances had created an opportunity for him to end his own life as well. How is that not natural?”

  “Well, okay, but how do you connect the dots between that opportunity and the so-called spirit of Meiji?” inquired Ricchan, still in character as a high school girl. “We know Sensei betrayed his friend, K, so horribly that K couldn’t bear to go on living, and Sensei was haunted by that misdeed for the rest of his life, right? Yet the awareness, however painful, never drove him to commit suicide himself. When he declares, There was nothing I could do, so I decided to go on living as if I were dead, wasn’t he just granting himself a temporary stay of execution? I mean, it seems as if he decided arbitrarily that the reprieve he’d grante
d himself had finally run out, and he made up his mind the time had come for him to die. And because the spirit of Meiji had effectively perished along with the emperor who gave the era its name, you could say Sensei was simply following that spirit into the valley of death, right? But why does the spirit of Meiji suddenly become a factor at this point? If we’re going to talk about naturalness, is it natural for this phrase to crop up at such a late stage in the story? I mean, until now, both before and after Sensei’s betrayal of his friend, Sensei never really talked about the spirit of Meiji, did he? So why in the world does he suddenly drag that concept into the conversation? Wouldn’t it have been more natural if he’d simply declared that he had lost the will to go on living as if he were already dead and had decided to put an end to his lifelong misery? And what is the spirit of Meiji, anyway? Is it somehow related to the strange and terrible force Sensei invokes, or is it that force’s polar opposite, or what?

  “Hang on a minute,” Ricchan said, stopping herself mid-rant. “I’m getting carried away and losing sight of the point I want to make. Okay, here’s what I don’t understand. Are we supposed to believe that all the people who lived through the period of nation building that started with the Meiji Restoration—including Sensei—shared some sort of ideological or spiritual common ground? I see this book as the story of one damaged individual who withdrew from the world because he couldn’t forgive himself for a youthful error in judgment that had unforeseeably tragic consequences. How do you make a connection between one gloomy, introverted person and the bright, shiny ‘spirit of Meiji’ as embodied in all the people who were cheerful, eager, hardworking members of society during that time?”

  “The reason you don’t understand is because you’re a woman!” Kaku screamed, storming to the front of the stage. In baseball terms, this rashly chauvinistic (and completely nonsensical) declaration was the wild pitch that lost the game for Suke & Kaku. Within seconds the two comedians were under siege and the air was filled with a flurry of soft-toy dogs aimed directly at them.

  The female students who were standing nearby naturally allied themselves with their own gender in the face of such blatant sexism, and they immediately got in on the act by scooping up the “dead dogs” that had landed on the stage around them. However, the girls didn’t heave those missives at Suke & Kaku; instead, they used the stuffed animals to pummel the two actors about their heads and faces, like the aggressors in a particularly violent pillow fight.

  An instant later everyone onstage joined the fracas, snatching up the incoming plush toys and slinging them back into the audience with all their might, while continuing to express their opinions in loud voices. It wasn’t long before the scripted play had given way to a festively anarchic fracas. But just as the chaos was reaching its peak the lights were dimmed, transforming the movements of the throng onstage into a sort of shadow play (yet another demonstration of the show’s high production values). At the same time those people’s voices grew gradually fainter, until finally all that could be heard was a passionate, heartfelt whispering, and then the action in the shadow play slowed to a halt as well.

  Since a theater in the round doesn’t have a curtain, the illusion of a curtain coming down was created by plunging the stage into total darkness. When the lights came up again, the female high school students, led by Ricchan, were standing there looking very pleased with themselves, while the male scholars on the other side, captained by Suke & Kaku, were crouching down on the stage so that they appeared to be virtually buried under a massive pile of “dead dogs.” This sight evoked an enthusiastic surge of applause and widespread calls for an encore. Once again the stage went dark, and this time when the lights came on Suke & Kaku stood up and loomed over the scrum with stuffed animals dropping around them—a sight greeted by a mixture of applause, laughter, and catcalls. The alternating blackouts and encores went on and on, and almost as an afterthought, innumerable toy dogs continued to be hurled back and forth.

  All in all it was a truly extraordinary evening, and everyone agreed that the dog-tossing version of Kokoro was a spectacular success!

  Chapter 7

  The Aftermath Continues

  1

  Dear Kogii,

  I’ve already told you about the phenomenal success of Unaiko’s play. When I saw her later, I broached an idea that had come to me during the performance and was gratified to find that she shared my enthusiasm.

  I’m writing to you about this now because my little epiphany has a direct connection to the Forest House, and I’m hoping very much that you will give this plan your blessing. If my introduction seems excessive, it’s probably because I’m a trifle nervous; I’ve never before asked you for such a large favor, and I may never do so again. Nonetheless, I feel as though I’m putting you on the spot, and that really isn’t my style. As you read this letter, please keep in mind that I was fully conscious of what I was doing and felt very awkward about it.

  What originally started me thinking about this in the first place was your decision to abandon the drowning novel. In all honesty, I should say “your decision to do me the favor of abandoning the project.” I won’t pretend I was sorry about that outcome. That’s because when you decided to give up trying to write about our father through the prism of his death, I felt as if I had fulfilled Mother’s final wish, since the possibility you might someday publish that book was something she was very concerned about for a long time. During the ten years since she passed away, I have to confess that I behaved rather duplicitously, although I did have my reasons. The truth is, I knew the materials you needed in order to complete your drowning novel had long since been destroyed, but I needed to hear from your own lips that you had decided to abandon the project based on what you found—or, more precisely, failed to find—in the trunk.

  Anyhow, since the drowning novel has finally been flushed away once and for all (yes, I realize that may not be the most tasteful choice of words), I can finally escape from our mother’s long shadow and start to walk alone, on my own. Even as I was becoming aware of that exhilarating possibility, I realized I’d already started to march in step with Unaiko, so to speak.

  As you know, I was deeply impressed and inspired by her recent performance, and when I announced that from now on I’d like to pour my energy and resources into helping with her creative projects, her response was very quick and totally positive. Unaiko did take some time to discuss the matter with Ricchan, but she got back to me almost immediately, saying they both agreed it was time for a change, and rather than continuing to work for Masao Anai (or some other man), they would rather team up with a woman like me. Then the three of us had a lovely group hug and laughed about feeling as if we had just graduated from—or perhaps to?—an all-girls school. What I’d like to say to you now is that until recently the unresolved issue of Mother’s red leather trunk was always taking up valuable space in my brain, but from here on out I’m going to be single-mindedly devoting myself to the perpetually evolving Tossing the Dead Dogs project. I’m going to live every day with the aim of supporting Unaiko and her creative work in any way I can. As it happens, this decision of mine coincides with an exciting new stage in Unaiko’s career, and I’m delighted to have the chance to commit my time and abilities, such as they are, to helping her realize her unique artistic vision.

  So I guess this is my personal declaration of independence! I know with absolute certainty that I need to free myself from Mother’s influence, and from yours as well, before I can join Unaiko in this adventure. If you were to ask what else I’ve done in my life that felt as challenging as this, I would have to say it was making the movie about a local folk heroine, even though (as you know) Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War was never distributed because of contractual problems. But now that I think about it, on that project, too, I was always toiling in your shadow—and Mother’s, too. I mean, you wrote the screenplay, and of course you were the reason we were able to attract an international movie star like Sakura Ogi Magarshack.


  For our current undertaking, though, I’m absolutely determined not to be dependent on you in any way. So Unaiko and I are thinking that (if you approve) we would like to enter into a formal contractual agreement with you, as the original author of the screenplay, before we do any more work on turning it into a stage play. Realistically, we wouldn’t be able to get our new enterprise off the ground without your cooperation, but once it gets rolling Unaiko and I should be able to bring her innovative ideas to fruition on our own, as an independent partnership.

  Unaiko is considerably younger than I am, but she’s carrying some heavy emotional baggage—things in her past that are far more severe than anything I’ve experienced in my own comparatively sheltered life. I’m talking about seriously dark and damaging violations, the kind you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. As a teenager Unaiko had some truly harrowing experiences, and right now she’s plotting a crucial battle of her own that’s directly connected with a traumatic chapter in her life. I wouldn’t call it a vendetta or a quest for revenge; it’s more like an attempt to obtain a long-overdue measure of justice.

  Our dear friend Ricchan, who is a supercapable manager and administrator in addition to being very creative in her own right, will be accompanying Unaiko and me on our journey. Since the time has come for me to emerge from the shadows, I’m excited to be joining forces with Unaiko as we go forth to fight our battles together: mine rather small, hers potentially epic.