Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  I guess this next bit is what movie people call the backstory, but at any rate I think the idea for the giant favor I’m leading up to first began germinating when you mentioned that there will come a time, perhaps quite soon, when you’ll no longer be able to return to the forest, and you asked me to give some thought to how we ought to handle the business aspect of the equation. I started thinking now might be the perfect time to make some changes, so I went down to the town hall and had a chat with one of the clerks.

  When we built the Forest House, Mother’s idea was that the land should be in my name, while the house would belong to you. Since Unaiko is planning to strike out on her own and establish her own theater group based on the “tossing the dead dogs” model, I’ve been thinking about what a boon it would be for her to have the use of the Forest House on a more permanent basis. I’m not proposing that you should deed the house over to me—I suspect I’ll eventually need to move somewhere less remote myself. Nor am I suggesting that the property be passed down to my son.

  What I’m saying is that I would be very grateful if you would formally bequeath the Forest House to Unaiko. (Naturally I would do the same with my claim to the land it sits on.) In addition, I’d like to ask you to continue paying the property taxes and to subsidize the conversion of the downstairs into a proper rehearsal space—a project that, as you know, is already under way. I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you please consider doing these things, perhaps as a way of compensating me for having looked after the Forest House all these years? Of course, if you should ever want to come to see any of Unaiko’s new productions, or if you ever feel like taking an active part in those projects (and, to be honest, we’re going to be counting on your assistance on the artistic side), or if you simply decide to pay us a visit, you will always be more than welcome to set up camp on the second floor for as long as you like.

  As for the timing of this new chapter of Unaiko’s career, something has happened that makes her going solo necessary, and maybe even inevitable. After the success of her recent show—the dog-tossing play built around some of the concepts set forth in Kokoro—she started getting even more flak than usual from the right-wing factions around these parts. At this stage the criticism is still only verbal, but if it should escalate into actual interference she’ll have no choice but to fight back. Because the leader of the Caveman Group, Masao Anai, tries to be apolitical in both his private life and his art, Unaiko needs to make it clear to the public that she is leaving the group and going her own way. Since Unaiko will almost certainly need to borrow some start-up capital from the bank, the question of what she has in the way of assets or property—things that could serve as collateral for a loan—will be crucial. That’s why I’m asking you to give careful consideration to my request, at your very earliest convenience.

  2

  Dear Kogii,

  I’m absolutely thrilled that you agreed to my big request! How can I ever thank you enough? Since my previous letter ended up being a shameless plea for assistance, I’d like to try to make up for that by telling you about what’s been going on, theater-wise, since the beginning of the year, following last fall’s boffo performance at the theater in the round.

  After the resounding success of the Kokoro play, Unaiko immediately got to work on a revised version targeted at a more adult audience. She staged the play at a small venue in Matsuyama where avant-garde theater groups from Tokyo appear from time to time, and it was another smash hit. I was particularly impressed by the way Unaiko took some of the critiques of the earlier version of the play, which was tailored to appeal to students, and cleverly found a way to incorporate those responses into her revised script.

  Until now, I’ve mostly been sending you brief descriptions and on-the-scene reports, but I’d like to give you a broader sense of what’s taking place in the theater during one of Unaiko’s plays. (Although I think it would be difficult for an accomplished journalist, much less an amateur like me, to write an account that does justice to the entire panorama; I mean, there are so many different things going on at the same time while the performance unfolds.) I would also like to try to evoke the distinctive atmosphere of freshness, openness, and unpredictability Unaiko brings to all her productions.

  As I’ve mentioned before, lively, unscripted arguments and discussions often erupt spontaneously among the actors onstage and the animated interplay spills over into the audience as well, drawing the spectators into the action. Meanwhile, Unaiko is making a continuous effort to monitor everything that’s going on. (It’s truly phenomenal the way she’s able to focus on several conversations simultaneously; I can’t help being reminded of Prince Shotoku, with his legendary facility for listening to individual requests or complaints from ten citizens at once!) At any rate, she’ll usually beckon two or three interesting-looking participants from the audience to join her at the front of the stage. Then some of the established performers from the troupe will take the new arrivals under their wings and offer vocal support for whatever opinions the newcomers might be expressing.

  Of course, this sort of interactive approach—’blurring the usually clear demarcation between performers and audience—is at the heart of Unaiko’s theatrical modus operandi. However, she runs a tight ship, and when a side discussion that seemed to be heading in an interesting direction begins to lose steam, the people in that group will soon find themselves the targets of a dismissive hail of stuffed animals.

  On opening night at the cozy little theater in Matsuyama, one of the first audience members to be invited onstage by Unaiko was an acquaintance of mine, a high school teacher from Honcho. (He also came to see the initial Kokoro performance last fall.) The teacher started by pointing out that at the beginning of the play an actor was speaking as Sensei himself, in the first person. However, when it came time to quote from Sensei’s suicide note, the monologue was voiced in the third person. The teacher’s complaint was that because the Sensei character didn’t actively participate in the discussion, it simply wasn’t as effective or entertaining as when that pivotal character was speaking as himself.

  My acquaintance was immediately heckled by people saying things like “Wasn’t that as it should be, since Sensei had already committed suicide?” He didn’t back down, though. “So what if Sensei had already killed himself?” he retorted. “Why couldn’t he be sent onstage as someone who’s dead, like the ghost in Hamlet? I mean, it’s a play, right?” He even offered a concrete suggestion: “I noticed a wheelchair out in the lobby,” he said. “Couldn’t you seat an actor representing Sensei in the wheelchair, with his head and face covered by a cloth to let us know he was supposed to be dead? Then when someone asked him a question, he could reply in his own voice! That would be some gripping theater. Personally, I’d like to call the deceased Sensei back to this dimension from wherever he is now and ask him some tough questions, and based on conversations I’ve had here tonight I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way.” I’m not quoting verbatim, of course, but that’s the gist of what the teacher said.

  And voilà—no sooner said than done! Seriously, I was amazed. It took Unaiko only a few minutes to implement the teacher’s suggestions, and in the interlude I could feel the audience’s growing excitement about this bit of improvised stagecraft. While we watched, the wheelchair was carried onstage, and after Suke & Kaku had thrown a white cloth over Unaiko’s head they seated her in the chair and pushed it into the center of the stage. From then on the high school teacher—whose request had set this impromptu scenario in motion—had no choice but to address his questions to the “corpse.”

  “Sensei,” he said, “I’d like to ask about your final letter, or suicide note, which I’ve read many times along with my students. The thing is, when it comes to making statements about this nation of ours in a public high school in the twenty-first century, an educator has to be extremely circumspect. About six months ago, when this same play was staged in our little town for an audience that included both studen
ts and regular citizens—and I’d appreciate it if you would make a point of remembering that I used the word ‘citizens’ rather than ‘townspeople’—anyhow, while a number of students and citizens did participate in the performance, I decided to keep my comments to myself. Today, before I say anything, I’d like to emphasize the fact that I’m here on my own, as a theatergoer. I am not speaking as I would in the classroom.

  “In case you might wonder to whom the disclaimer is addressed, the answer is: to the members of the school board in the town where I teach. They have made a special trip up here to Matsuyama this evening just to see this play. Because the previous performance at our local junior high gave rise to some very public controversy, I imagine the board members wanted to see for themselves what all the fuss was about. Take a good look at these people; I think you’ll agree that they aren’t the sort who would normally come to an experimental performance in a small theater like this.

  “I’d like to begin by talking about what happened when this play was performed in the town where we live. The original plan was to combine the play with a lecture by Kogito Choko, the novelist who was one of the first students to enter the new postwar junior high in our village. However, because Mr. Choko was sidelined with an attack of vertigo—which was completely understandable, since whenever we try to read his convoluted sentences I think we all start to feel a bit dizzy, too [laughter]—anyhow, the planning committee decided to go ahead and present the play as a stand-alone event.

  “From the perspective of the school board that outcome may actually have been preferable, politically speaking. Why? Because as a writer, Kogito Choko has shown a deep emotional attachment to the archaic version of the Fundamental Law of Education. Back in the prewar era there were students who were unable to advance to the next educational level because of family finances, and that’s why a new junior high was built in the village. Mr. Choko was one of the students who benefited. The school was created according to the postwar principles embodied in the New Constitution and the revised—some might say watered-down—version of the Fundamental Law of Education. At the time laws were being modified left and right, and Mr. Choko suggested that everyone ought to make the original Fundamental Law of Education into pamphlets, to carry around in our breast pockets. He even had a bunch of those booklets printed at his own expense, but apparently they didn’t sell too well—you know, not like novels. Or maybe I should say they sold about as well as Mr. Choko’s own novels. [Laughter.] I was one of the people who actually purchased some of those booklets, so if you don’t mind I’d like to read an excerpt from the one I just happen to have in my pocket.”

  At this point, the teacher began to read aloud, but the passage he’d chosen ventured so deeply into the intricacies of educational politics that the audience around me started to fidget in obvious boredom and impatience. He must have sensed this because he stopped reading and said, a bit sheepishly, “Anyhow, the bottom line is that we have to tread carefully whenever we talk about the topic of education. Why, tonight alone three people have already thrown ‘dead dogs’ at me, so I’ll move on to my main point before I get hit again.

  “It has to do with the note Sensei left behind, in which he wrote: 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.’”

  After he finished reading, the teacher addressed the shrouded figure in the wheelchair. “Sensei, when you said that to your wife she laughed at you and didn’t seem to take you seriously at all. She even teased you, saying, ‘Maybe you should just go ahead and commit junshi.’ On this point, I have to say I really—I don’t mean to give you a hard time about this, but it just struck me as extremely odd. And that’s why I would like to go back in time and ask for some clarification. You talk about how strongly you and your contemporaries were influenced by the spirit of the Meiji Era, but is that true? Your friend was driven to commit suicide as a direct result of your betrayal, yet that betrayal sprang from your own character and the choices you made, so you couldn’t really blame your behavior on the sensibilities of the Meiji Era, could you? And as a result of your youthful error, isn’t it true that you ended up more or less dropping out of society for personal reasons and then living for many years as if you were already dead, as you put it? In any case, I don’t believe your private motivations were shaped by the spirit of the era—although I wouldn’t presume to say you were entirely removed from the influence of the society and the era you were living in, either.

  “No, I think what moved you to behave as you did was your own secret heart. You speak repeatedly of a strange and terrible force. But didn’t the force originate in your soul, or in your gut, rather than somewhere external? Even so, your conviction that the spirit of Meiji was alive in your psyche doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all; I just don’t believe it was the primary motivation for anything you did.

  “Then there’s the matter of your long-suffering wife. She may appear to be a rather unworldly and submissive person, but the fact is she’s still a full-fledged member of the sibylline tribe known as womankind. Think about her life for a moment: spending every day and night with a man who doesn’t go to work and stays cooped up at home, a man who is immobilized by a mysterious force he can’t talk about, even to his spouse. When a man like that blurts out something grandiose and melodramatic about killing himself, wouldn’t his wife simply laugh it off? I think she would. And when she says, ‘Well then, maybe you should just go ahead and commit junshi’—I mean, isn’t it possible she wasn’t joking at all? Maybe she was just fed up.”

  Kogii, at this point, without thinking, I spontaneously stood up and started clapping. And I wasn’t the only one—at least a third of the spectators in the theater applauded too, and some even jumped up and waved their arms in the air. That was the kind of passionate response the teacher’s speech evoked.

  However, in the very back of the theater (it was completely sold out for once) there were three or four men dressed in trench coats. They started swinging “dead dogs” in circles above their heads with an ominous whistling sound, evidently as a way of declaring their objections to what the high school teacher had said. (I don’t know; maybe they felt throwing the dogs right away would somehow diminish the impact of their protest?) I won’t say those men were members of the school board, but they were most likely from the same camp, ideologically speaking. I can say with certainty that they were people who had heard about what happened at the junior high school last fall and had come to see for themselves. To save time, I’ll compress their remarks and bundle the speakers into one, under the generic name “Citizen.”

  “Are you questioning Sensei’s feeling that the Meiji Era began and ended with Emperor Meiji? I mean, Sensei stated clearly that he and his contemporaries were profoundly influenced by the essence of Meiji, didn’t he? So it rings true that he really did commit junshi out of solidarity with the spirit of his age. Are you trying to disparage this noble death?”

  And with that, the citizens hurled their “dead dogs” in the direction of the high school teacher. However, most of the people in the audience (including a great many young people) apparently sided with the teacher’s point of view, because they responded by sending a hailstorm of stuffed animals in the direction of the citizens—an attack that had both numbers and energy on its side. In the midst of the jubilant chaos, Unaiko, who had been sitting motionless in the wheelchair, still in character as the late Sensei, suddenly leaped to her feet. She tore off the white cloth covering her head, revealing a corpselike face made up to appear, quite literally, deathly pale. A hush fell over
the small theater as Unaiko began to speak, displaying her superb talent for recitation. Using the same voice she had employed when she was pretending to be Sensei, she started to talk about the character in the third person.

  “I’ve been playing the role of Sensei, but I still don’t understand what’s in the ‘secret heart’ of this character whose costume I’m wearing right now. I’m not sure whether he even understood himself. For me, this quote says it all.”

  Sensei: I read in the newspaper the words General Nogi had written before killing himself. I learned that ever since the Seinan War, when he lost his banner to the enemy, he had been wanting to redeem his honor through death. I found myself automatically counting the years that the general had lived, always with death at the back of his mind. The Seinan War, as you know, took place in the tenth year of Meiji, so he must have spent thirty-five years waiting for the proper time to die. I asked myself: “When did he suffer greater agony—during those thirty-five years, or at the moment when the sword entered his bowels?”

  It was two or three days later that I decided at last to commit suicide. Perhaps you will not understand clearly why I am about to die, any more than I can fully understand why General Nogi killed himself. You and I belong to different eras, and so we think differently. There is nothing we can do to bridge the gap between us. Of course, it might be more accurate to say that we are different simply because we are two separate human beings. At any rate, I have done my best in the above narrative to make you understand the strange person that is myself.

  After delivering this long quote, Unaiko addressed the crowd directly, in her own words. “Look, I think for Sensei … as this quote says, he was perpetually obsessed with the question of the human heart—of the individual, by the individual, for the individual—and after having done his best to make his young friend understand this, he took his own life. But how can it be seen as a sacrifice on the altar of the spirit of Meiji? I keep going back to the idea that Sensei ultimately committed suicide as a kind of belated atonement, which is to say he did it for himself. If you agree, please feel free to throw as many ‘dead dogs’ as you like at those citizens in the audience who take a different view. Go ahead, everybody—knock yourselves out!”