by Kenzaburo Oe
I knew from previous visits that beyond the window, as springtime marched along, you could see the maples, with their wine-colored buds gradually shading into the palest green; the tall, lush-leafed white birches; two kinds of flowering persimmons—one with edible fruit, the other strictly ornamental; and, finally, the late-blooming dogwoods (both red and white). This spring, however, we had kept the curtains perpetually closed on the south-side garden, so we had missed the seasonal parade of loveliness. The realization struck me as a poignant reminder of the stifling, hermetic existence Akari and I had been mired in since arriving here.
Akari returned with the CD, and as the opulent sound of Beethoven filled every atom of the cavernous space, he was clearly transported into some private realm of sublimity. (Both the composition—the Piano Sonata no. 32 in C Minor, op. 111—and the performance, by Friedrich Gulda, were among his particular favorites.) When the recording reached the second movement, which was the section of the piece used in the film, Akari lifted his head from the score and gave Ricchan a meaningful glance as if to say, This is it.
Ricchan was sitting with the screenplay for Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War open on her knees, and she caught Akari’s eye and solemnly bobbed her head, to show she had gotten the message.
4
The next morning, before Akari had emerged from his bedroom and joined us at the breakfast table, Ricchan informed me that she had already called Asa and Unaiko to share the exciting news about the unexpected appearance of the screenplay.
“Asa responded cautiously, as usual. She was happy that I’ve finally gotten a chance to read your version of the story of Meisuke’s mother, but she reminded me that we’d agreed not to pressure you into getting involved with our project on any particular timetable. She also suggested that I ought to take your screenplay with several grains of salt because your interpretation of the saga ‘reeks of male chauvinism,’ as she put it. She said I should tread very carefully going forward.
“Unaiko was really happy to hear that a copy of the screenplay had turned up, and she seems to be eager to forge ahead and express her own concerns through the medium of our upcoming collaboration. As you know, I’ve been asking people from around here to talk about their experiences as extras in the film about Meisuke’s mother, and since I’m passing everything on to Unaiko bit by bit and then taking notes on her comments, I’ve been learning a lot about her method of putting together a dramatic piece. Of course, I hope our wavelengths will eventually become synchronized to the point where I’ll be able to intuit things without even having to ask.
“Regarding the recitative that features so prominently in your screenplay, I asked a number of locals to try to recite it from memory, and I was able to record quite a few different versions. (I gather you can still hear parts of the battle chant—you know, where Meisuke’s mother is rallying her troops before they march off to stage the uprising—at Bon Odori celebrations around these parts.) I’d almost like to say that every person’s rendition was different—both the words and the melody. When I saw the version in the screenplay I said to myself, ‘Ah, this must be written in the slightly old-fashioned style Mr. Choko’s mother and grandmother used when they were reciting this.’ I had to read this part over and over to Unaiko on the phone, but I’m afraid my rendition sounded kind of singsongy. Wait, I’ll show you.” Whereupon Ricchan began to recite, in her trained-musician’s voice:
Women warriors, let us go
Off to face our latest foe.
Into battle we will soar
Strong and brave forevermore.
All together, here we go
We shall vanquish every foe!
“In the screenplay,” Ricchan went on without waiting for me to react, “you used a form of the chant that had apparently been around for a long time, and the chorus section was also in an archaic literary style. I asked Asa whether that was the way you would have heard the recitative from your mother and grandmother when you were a little boy, and she said that, on the contrary, she thought the chant in the screenplay was the result of your applying your novelist’s skills to rewriting it over and over. During the time Unaiko and I have been recording the local women’s memories, in all their disparity, I’ve been entering those accounts into the computer, and it did occur to me that if I kept revising and polishing during the process, we would eventually arrive at a kind of literary style of our own. I was quite excited, but when I mentioned it to Unaiko, she said that since there’s a specific theme she wants to express through this play, she wants to see our play’s language evolve naturally.”
“She’s absolutely right that the theme should shape the literary style,” I said. “It really ought to work that way with any writing project, and I think a distinctive style can be the most compelling part of the whole.”
“When I told Unaiko that Akari had unexpectedly shared his copy of the screenplay, the first thing she wanted to know was how Meisuke’s mother’s remarks were presented,” Ricchan said. “She was wondering about one scene in particular. It takes place just after the second uprising, which was led by the teenage reincarnation of the original Meisuke. His mother (who was, of course, the mother of the first Meisuke as well) and her troops have broken camp in Okawara, and the mother and her eight-year-old son are on the way back to their village when they are surrounded by a group of young hooligans—unemployed former samurai who are filled with freefloating resentment and looking for trouble. These brutes trap young Meisuke II in a hole and stone him to death, and then a bunch of them gang-rape his mother.
“After the ruffians are gone Meisuke’s mother, who is injured and unable to walk, is carried home to the village by her supporters on a stretcher made from an old wooden shutter. The procession stops at a sake brewery, and while the proprietor is making a show of giving them some water to drink, it’s obvious he is consumed with prurient curiosity. So how does Meisuke’s mother respond to his oblique inquiries in the script? When I posed the question to some of the women who participated in the making of the movie, most of them remembered her saying something like ‘If you’re so curious about how it was, kind sir, maybe you should try being raped yourself sometime!’”
I didn’t respond, and Ricchan seemed to cast a mildly critical glance in my direction before she went on speaking. “So anyway, when Unaiko posed that question I had a major epiphany, and I understood for the first time why she was creating this new play and what its theme was going to be as well,” she said. “I made up my mind then that no matter what happened I would do everything I could, without compromise, to help Unaiko find the language to get her message across.”
Once again, I sat there in unresponsive silence, not sure what to make of this cryptic disclosure. After a beat or two I said, “I gather you’re planning to begin by performing this piece at the junior high’s theater in the round. In that case, many of the women you’ve been interviewing will most likely be in attendance, so it’s probably safe to assume they’ll be drawn into the interactive dialogue and the hurling of soft toys that are an integral part of the dog-tossing approach to theater.”
“Absolutely!” Ricchan chirped. “In fact, every time I go out to do these interviews I’ve been promising to invite them all to the premiere when the time comes. I tell everyone I meet that I really hope they’ll come with their arms full of handcrafted ‘dead dogs’ they’ve created themselves at home!”
5
Daio and I were standing side by side in the Saya, up to our ankles in fresh green grass, leaning back against the big meteoric boulder while our conversation meandered aimlessly along.
“This is something I heard from Asa,” Daio said, abruptly switching gears from unfocused small talk, “but I gather you still have a very clear memory of the scene that night when your father set out on the stormy, flooded river.”
“Actually, the account I shared with Asa and Unaiko—the version I was planning to use as the prologue of my drowning novel—is different from the memory of what I
actually saw that night,” I said. “For a very long time, I kept having a recurrent dream that was almost always exactly the same in every detail, and the prologue was based on my dream. At this point I honestly don’t know whether my memories have been retroactively shaped by the endless repetitions of that dream, or whether the dream reflects my actual experience.”
Daio nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if it hadn’t been a dream, your supernatural alter ego wouldn’t have been standing on the boat next to your father,” he said. “I remember hearing that you used to insist there was another child who was an exact duplicate of you living in your house. That was the same Kogii from the dream, right? The story of Kogii was well known around the village, and I heard people mention it more than once after I returned from China. It was one of the things that made me begin to realize what an unusual person you were, from a very young age. As for your dream, I’ve heard about it quite a few times from various sources, but it still knocks me for a loop every time someone mentions offhandedly that Choko Sensei set out on the river with your double standing next to him.
“That’s because I was there, watching, and I have a very clear memory of seeing you! You probably didn’t even notice me, did you? As you’ll recall, the officers and I used to visit your father, and in the old stone storehouse where we talked and ate and slept, there was a big room with a floor that was half dirt and half wooden planks. It was where your father kept his vintage Takara-brand barber’s chair, which everyone understood was for his private use only. That night, I had spread a futon in the interior part of the room and had just settled down to try to get some sleep. Right about then you came in from outside, alone. There was one light burning—a single bulb with an air-raid shade, which illuminated the path to the staircase leading to the second floor. I started to get up because I assumed you had been sent to tell me that your father wanted me to do some task or other, but then I saw that you appeared to have something on your mind. You left your sandals in the entryway and crossed the dirt-floored room to the staircase without ever raising your head, so I just pretended to be asleep. I felt a lot of contempt for myself at that moment, and I remember thinking, What good am I to anyone, anyhow, with only one arm?
“In the big room upstairs there were three young conscripts from the flight-training school along with a couple of young officers who basically made a cottage industry out of ordering me around, and they had all presumably gone to sleep. After a few minutes you came back downstairs, carrying something wrapped in a raincoat. As soon as you went outside again, I got up and tiptoed up the stairs to check whether the officers were awake.
“The thing you were carrying wasn’t very large, but it had sharp corners, so I naturally assumed it must be the red leather trunk. Earlier in the day, sometime around noon, the officers had been worrying that maybe your father wasn’t planning to come over to the outbuilding where we were bunking. They decided that they needed to get their hands on the red leather trunk as a way of finding out whether your father might be plotting some extreme course of action on his own, so they sent me to the main house to fetch it. By early evening the serious partying was well under way, but the only ones who were drinking heavily were the officers and the young navy pilots. The night before there had been a big strategy meeting and, as the officers put it later, they had a breakdown in their talks with your father. He withdrew to the house and didn’t show his face in our quarters the next day, so when I came back with the red leather trunk the officers pulled off the raincoat it was wrapped in and everyone crowded around eagerly to see what was inside. But the thing is, the contents turned out to be a complete disappointment, to the point where the officers were actually laughing and saying rude things like ‘Hey, there’s just a bunch of boring crap in here!’
“I didn’t say anything, but since they were rifling through Sensei’s private property I kept an eye on them the entire time from a corner of the room. One thing I remember clearly was the three heavy books—I wouldn’t have been able to read the titles from a distance, especially since they were written in English, but years later, when I was helping your mother with her annual spring cleaning, I saw those books again. That was when it hit me that they must be the same ones we had carried back from a visit to the Kochi Sensei’s house, when I trekked down there once with your father. And this time, when your mother wasn’t looking, I copied down the title on a scrap of paper. It was The Golden Bough, and there were three big, thick volumes.
“Getting back to the fateful day in 1945, apart from those books the trunk mainly contained an assortment of papers and letters, tied in neat bundles. The army officers examined the envelopes and their contents, one by one, and then returned most of them to the trunk. There was an oblong hibachi in the room that was being used for warming sake or heating stewpots, and some of the letters ended up getting tossed onto the coals and going up in flames. As for the rest of the stuff from the trunk—well, your family was in the paper business so there probably would have been an oilcloth, or something of the sort, lying around. But anyhow, the officers wrapped the remaining materials in water-repellent paper and put them back in the trunk, and then they rewrapped the trunk in one of the raincoats we used to wear when we went into the mountains to work. So that was the red leather trunk you came to pick up late that night.”
“You know, it’s strange, but I have no memory of the part of the evening you’ve just described,” I mused. “I don’t remember going to get the trunk late that night at all, although I do recall having a small role in packing it earlier in the day. The thing I do recollect with what feels like absolute certainty is the scene that took place a while later.
“Picture this, if you will. My father has already boarded the little boat. I’m in the water nearby, and I have just handed him the red leather trunk. Looking back toward the shore, I notice one of the ropes that keeps the wooden barrels securely moored—you know, the barrels we used for the spider lily bulbs—is about to be torn loose by the current, so I plow through the chilly water with the muddy waves lapping against my chest, intending to tie a better knot. That’s what happens in the dream, too, so it’s possible my memories may have gradually modified themselves to match the dream. At any rate, the mooring rope for the boat was tied to the same metal ring, which was embedded in a stretch of poured concrete along the shoreline. But isn’t it possible that I’m going back because my father has asked me to untie the mooring line so the boat can cast off? Come to think of it, I realize that must be what happened. It wasn’t about the barrels at all. And then—I don’t know whether I didn’t have time to return to the boat, or maybe I turned around and saw it being catapulted into the middle of the river by the force of the waves, but in any case it was gone. And that’s the story of what happened that night, in a nutshell.”
“Good heavens, Kogito. All these years you’ve been reliving that night over and over in your dreams, torturing yourself with guilt, and while we’re talking you suddenly realize that you didn’t get sidetracked by some trivial issue with a wooden barrel and literally miss the boat? Now, this is pure conjecture, but it seems to me that if your father was ready to take off he wouldn’t have needed to send you back to shore to untie the mooring rope. He could have cut it with the short sword he used for trimming the paperbush bark and so on, which was always hanging from his belt. He set out on the boat trip with no plans to return home, right? So he wouldn’t have needed to use the rope again to tie up the boat, since he would have simply abandoned it when he got to his first destination, downriver. You know, Kogito, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that your father consciously intended to leave you behind, and sending you to cut the mooring rope could have been his way of saving your life!
“And then, of course, Choko Sensei ended up drowning in the river. It was only a few days earlier that you had precociously pointed out that your father was mistaking one complex kanji for a similar-looking one—you know, when he misread the water-related 淼 淼 for the woodsy 森 森?
This may be a stretch, but given the way things turned out, doesn’t it strike you that your father’s misreading may actually have been oddly apt and even prescient on a deeper level? What I mean is that in his last moments of existence Sensei wasn’t really being borne along to the end of the river, where it becomes one with the vast and endless sea. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this: I’m talking about the belief around these parts that when people die, their spirits go up into the forest and settle at the base of one particular, foreordained tree. In other words, while your father may have taken his last breath on the water, I think he was really on his way back to the forest!
“Of course, I wasn’t born here, so there’s probably no spirit tree in the forest with my name on it. Even so, when it comes time for me to die, I’d like to believe my soul could go to a place in some cosmic forest and find refuge and salvation there. By the way, Asa mentioned that the poem you collaborated on with your mother wasn’t exactly well received, but I really like it a lot. Of course, Akari was born and raised in Tokyo, but I think that if you’re very careful to make the proper preparations well in advance, when Akari’s time comes his spirit should be able to go up into the forest and find its way to its own designated tree.”
Although Daio wasn’t originally from Shikoku, he had remained in the area after closing the training camp, and he had clearly absorbed a great deal of local lore. He was highly intelligent and often surprisingly articulate, and I imagined that he had probably always had a genuine love of learning. Admittedly, I did question his choice of my father as a role model when there must have been more sensible options available, but that was ancient history. Daio and I had been barefoot while we were talking, to give our feet a break. Now we put our shoes back on, and as we strolled the length and breadth of that grassy meadow my companion shared his fascination with the Saya. There was a local legend (or perhaps it was more of a rumor) that if you dug deep enough it was still possible to unearth prehistoric stone axes made by our distant ancestors. Daio was intrigued by this possibility, and he had apparently spent a fair amount of time poking around in the soil in this general vicinity. On this day, after a brief impromptu dig with a twig he’d found, he proudly brought me a large chunk of dirt-encrusted rock that could conceivably have once been the head of a stone ax.
