by Kenzaburo Oe
As we started to head downhill from the Saya we could see Akari and Ricchan finishing their calisthenics beside the river, where the willow trees bursting into fresh new foliage looked like a massive cloud of green smoke. Daio and I were midway down the steep slope when we noticed a couple of men striding toward Akari and Ricchan from the opposite direction.
By this time Akari was half sitting, half reclining on a portable air mattress (a position that showed how much his back pain had abated), with Ricchan next to him. As we watched from afar the two men squatted nearby and began speaking intently to Ricchan and Akari. Suddenly, Akari clapped his hands over his ears. I knew that gesture well; it was his way of expressing disapproval or revulsion when (for example) some giddy comedian on a TV talk show would launch into an off-color joke. Seeing this, I quickened my pace and scrambled down the slope as fast as I could go.
As I approached, the two men (who appeared to be in their forties) stopped talking and shifted their torsos so that they were facing my direction in a tense, watchful-looking stance that I interpreted as “ready to rumble.” When I arrived, panting, Ricchan stood up. Sliding her bare feet into a pair of canvas walking shoes, she explained what was going on.
“These men here were asking whether we knew the hidden meaning behind the Saya’s name,” she said, “but then without waiting for an answer they went ahead and told us the term they had in mind. Akari doesn’t like hearing that sort of thing, and that’s why he has his hands over his ears.”
As I explained earlier, the word saya, meaning a sheath for a sword, has long been the local nickname for the spot where a meteor landed in the midst of the forest and left a long, narrow indentation in the ground. However, saya also happens to be a crude colloquialism for the female sex organs—more precisely, the vagina. Daio was a few seconds behind me, and when the two men saw him charging in their direction they finally went on their way, laughing loudly and slapping each other on the back as if they had just shared some grand, uproarious adventure. From time to time they looked over their shoulders at us with faces that were red from an excess of sophomoric mirth.
“Well, those two ran away with their tails between their legs,” Daio said jocularly. “And no wonder, since Kogito was armed with a stone ax. Ha ha.”
“They were so persistent, I really didn’t know what to do,” Ricchan said.
At this, Akari finally removed his hands from his ears. “Don’t worry, Ricchan,” he said in a voice that was filled with emotion. And then he added, to my surprise, “If they come back, Papa will beat them up for us!”
I immediately recognized that phrasing as an echo of one of the more poignant quotes from My Own Words. It had been a very long time since I’d heard my son say anything so positive about me, and my heart swelled with a cautious infusion of hope.
Chapter 11
But Why The Golden Bough?
1
Since the first stirrings of my rapprochement with Akari (which, while still a work in progress, seemed to have taken a definite step in the right direction), our daily life had undergone a transformation. The sound system from Unaiko and Ricchan’s room was moved into the dining room, and Akari would often stretch out diagonally on the floor and listen to music or work on his compositions. Ricchan never took a single day off from their rehab sessions at the Saya, and even though she was busy with the usual plethora of activities, she never dropped the ball where Akari’s well-being was concerned.
I had set up my own base camp on the sofa that had been banished to the southwest corner of the great room to create more space for rehearsals, with my assorted work supplies—books, papers, and index cards—in (and on) a small filing cabinet next to the couch. As I soon realized, our current living arrangement was not so different from the one we’d had at home in Tokyo, except that in this house Akari and I would both retreat to the second floor when a rehearsal began. Ricchan spent a fair amount of time staying on top of bookkeeping and other office tasks on the computer she shared with Unaiko, but after Akari started listening to music in the dining room she would often sit at the dining-room table with her head bent over the production notes from the filming of Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War.
Daio continued to be a regular visitor, and in the spirit of sociability he and I would often join Ricchan at the table. Akari kept the volume on his music fairly low, and it never seemed to have an adverse effect on Ricchan’s concentration. By the same token Daio’s and my speaking voices, which had to be raised slightly to be heard over the music, didn’t seem to be an impediment to Akari’s listening pleasure. Noticing this, I was reminded of something Maki had once observed. When Akari was in listening-to-music mode, she said, his brain seemed to be in a separate realm than when he was speaking or hearing words.
As for my own brain, it was still completely devoid of ideas for a late-work book. I realized in retrospect that I had foolishly put all my creative eggs into the drowning-novel basket and hadn’t bothered to formulate a backup plan. Because I wasn’t working on anything in particular, I didn’t have to cleave to the kind of focused bibliographical list that normally accompanied my novel-writing process, so for once I was free to explore whatever caught my fancy on a given day. My current reading habits were shaped by a conscious continuo of self-restraint born of my fear that the Big Vertigo might pay me another unwelcome visit, so rather than poring over books in my study/bedroom it seemed to make more sense for me to wander downstairs, stretch out on the sofa, and browse through books at a leisurely pace.
It was while I was in this relaxed mode that some reading material I had requested from an editor friend in Tokyo—The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, by James George Frazer—was delivered. My friend had kindly sent all twelve volumes of the Elibron Classics facsimile, published in 2005, of Macmillan’s 1920–1923 edition. Part of the reason I had wanted to get my hands on a complete set was so I could ascertain where the three volumes from the red leather trunk fit into the whole. I was also making frequent reference to the Japanese translations of several volumes of The Golden Bough’s third edition. A certain publisher was in the process of issuing a translation of the entire set, and I had been receiving a complimentary copy of each volume as it came out (there was never any card, but I suspected that the gift had been arranged by a cultural anthropologist friend of mine), so I’d had those sent down here, too.
After my skirmishes with the Big Vertigo, instead of reading with maximum concentration for long stretches of time I fell into the habit of keeping a few books on the desk next to my bed and desultorily flipping through the pages whenever the mood struck me. But now that my conversations with Daio had led me to the Frazer books, my page-turning sessions had taken on a new intensity and focus. I was no longer merely browsing; I was on an active quest.
In keeping with this new resolve, I began to work my way through the three volumes of The Golden Bough I’d found in the red leather trunk, systematically parsing all the underlinings and marginal notes: the visible evidence of my father’s struggle, given his limited proficiency in English, to read these difficult books. (When I was paging through the books for the first time, back in Tokyo, I hadn’t paid any attention to these marks.) I didn’t find anything that would warrant being called marginalia, but there were a number of faint markings in hard-leaded colored pencil (primarily red and blue)—marks I suspected had been made in pencil rather than ink so they could eventually be erased.
Because the books had gotten wet in the river, many of the pages were stuck together and it was difficult to separate them without causing the old, brittle paper to tear or even disintegrate. Nonetheless, I could clearly see that some of the subtitles or subheadings had been lightly circled in colored pencil. At some point I realized the three books must have been a loan (if they had been a gift, the set would surely have been complete), but because my father had died unexpectedly they were never returned. It seemed safe to deduce that the barely legible notations had been made by the books’
original owner, perhaps as a way of letting my father know which segments that person considered especially significant.
If my assumption was correct (and I was confident it was), then the assiduous wielder of those colored pencils must have been the mentor whose name I had heard my father invoke in reverent tones on numerous occasions. Eureka, I thought. That’s it! These books had undoubtedly come from the so-called Kochi Sensei, who lived on the other side of Shikoku’s Sanmyaku mountain range: the same person my father had once gone to visit in search of knowledge, dragging Daio along with him. The pair had walked for many kilometers, following a route to the town of Kochi that followed the river and eventually fed into a road made famous in the mid-1860s by the Kochi-born samurai Ryoma Sakamoto. (As every Japanese schoolchild knows, Sakamoto traversed that roadway when he deserted his feudal clan to embark on a life of idealistic anti-shogunate political activism inspired by the democratic principles of the United States—a life cut short in 1867 when he was murdered by assassins at a lodging house in Kyoto.)
I began to probe in earnest, exploring the books in sequential order as I thought my father would have done. My goal was to replicate his experience as he attempted to read Frazer’s work in its original form, armed with nothing but a small, dog-eared copy of The Concise English-Japanese Dictionary (which I remembered having seen around the house), after his faithful disciple, Daio, had toted those heavy volumes home following their visit to the Kochi Sensei.
And what about the annotations? I was curious to see whether the Kochi Sensei had confined his explanations to the subheadings, or had commented on the text line by line. To my surprise, after a cursory flip through the pages (pausing only to peruse the headings and passages marked with red and blue pencil), it became clear why the Kochi Sensei had chosen these particular volumes as a means of furthering my father’s education. There was no doubt about it; the Kochi Sensei was using The Golden Bough’s anthropological and folkloric principles as a metaphor for politics!
I was on the third day of skimming the entire Golden Bough when Ricchan ventured into the great room to bring me a cup of coffee. She set the ceramic mug on the filing cabinet near the sofa and said, “I guess whenever you feel like working on this project, you have to make several trips to lug all the books down from the study. That must be good exercise!”
“These are the books I found in the red leather trunk during my previous visit,” I explained. “I’ve been trying to figure out why my father was reading them, and how, and I think I’m close to finding some answers.”
“I’m aware that The Golden Bough has been translated into Japanese, but I’ve never read it,” Ricchan said. “If you’re at a good stopping point, would you mind giving me a crash course? Hang on, I’ll just go grab my own coffee.”
I gathered the relevant materials and laid them out on the L-shaped sofa between the end where I was sitting and the perpendicular segment where Ricchan took a seat when she returned from the kitchen, mug in hand.
“The Golden Bough is a scholarly work about folklore,” I began, “but it also provides practical insight into interpersonal dynamics, particularly as they pertain to the realm of politics. My father was using these books as a means for furthering his own political education, but he seems to have had a penchant for the literary aspects as well, and I’ve been intrigued by the discovery that he apparently enjoyed the text on an artistic level, too. Ricchan, you’ve probably heard Daio referring to my father as ‘Choko Sensei,’ and I’m guessing it might have struck you as odd. ‘Sensei’ is a vestigial title, left over from the time when my father was running an ultranationalistic training camp and Daio was one of his disciples. But recently, as Daio and I have been talking, something rather surprising has emerged. He told me that my father sometimes liked to ramble about political matters, tossing around hard-line terms such as nation-state, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and so on. However, according to Daio, below the blustery ultranationalistic surface my father’s true nature, even at the age of fifty, was still that of a literature-besotted youth.
“When I first started examining The Golden Bough, trying to see it through my father’s eyes, I noticed that in all three volumes someone had circled some of Frazer’s marginal notes, which are rather like summaries of the passages or subsections in question, in colored pencil. Look, here’s one right here. These confident markings appear to have been made by an experienced teacher, but what I didn’t notice at first was that there are also some more tentative notations, evidently added by a reader who hadn’t done much of this sort of thing before—underlining, question marks, exclamation points, and so on. As I continued reading, I realized that this second set of markings must have been made by my father. As Daio said, it’s obvious my father was captivated by the literary—or should I say poetic?—attributes of the book. But it’s equally clear that his mentor was trying to use The Golden Bough as a tool for teaching my father about politics. My father was obediently going along with the plan, but it appears to me as though he was trying to read it from a more artistic perspective as well. This has been a revelation for me; for the first time since I was born, I feel as if I’m seeing my father for who he really was. (At the time he was reading this book, of course, he was nearly twenty-five years younger than I am now.)
“The epigraph of the first volume is a quotation from a poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Here, take a look. I’ve laid out both the English and the Japanese translations, and as you can see the English style is quite archaic.”
From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain….
“I think the translation is reasonably true to the original,” I continued after Ricchan had finished studying both versions of the poem. “I mean, this is one of those epic poems where everything is on the surface, so what you see is what you get. What’s interesting is that Frazer more or less echoes the same content—only in prose, of course—in various parts of his book. His style can be a bit flowery in places, but it’s mostly lucid and straightforward, and sometimes it’s absolutely gorgeous. I think my father managed to grasp that beauty, even through the laborious process of reading the text one word at a time with frequent recourse to The Concise (as we used to affectionately call the little English-Japanese dictionary). Seeing the evidence of his painstaking quest has almost made me feel pity, or at least sympathy, for my father: that fifty-year-old man who was on the cusp of a premature death by drowning.”
2
Next, I moved on to telling Ricchan about the sections that my father himself had circled, with particular emphasis on the concept of the “dying God.”
“The ‘King of the Wood,’ who’s mentioned in an early sentence, is so widely known that you could safely call him a major character in cultural history,” I explained. “In the Alban Hills of Italy, deep in the woods around Lake Nemi—which is basically a volcanic crater filled with water—there is a huge oak tree. A dark-visaged king, sword at his waist, is stationed nearby to protect the sacred tree. (Of course, you could also say that the king is protecting himself.) One after another, vigorous young men come to challenge the king to a sword fight. Once a challenger has vanquished the current monarch, that individual will become the new king. As the term ‘dying God’ suggests, in this mythology gods are not immortal; on the contrary, it is their destiny to die. When a king grows old and feeble, he and his realm will inevitably fall into ruin and be replaced. (Of course, the physical life force has long been associated with fertility cults and crop cycles in many cultures, including our own.)
“So how did the citizens cope with the impending crisis? Well, the people made a conscious effort to prevent the king from dying a natural death—that is, from illness or old age. While the old king still had some energy left, they would send a parade of candidates t
o attempt to kill him, until someone finally succeeded. And with the ascension of a new king the world, too, would experience a rebirth of sorts: a renewal of fertility. That’s the basic premise. Anyone can see that the myth of the Forest King of Nemi is one of the underlying themes of the entire Golden Bough, from beginning to end. The archetypal myth about the new king who kills his aged predecessor, thus engendering a renascence of fertility in the world, was already firmly established in the folkloric canon when Frazer arrived at the party, so to speak. However, Frazer expanded on the theme at great length, and I think the person who loaned my father these books made the marks to indicate that my father ought to jump ahead and read the pages about the way the old king was killed, and the earth regained its power and vitality as a result. It’s clear from the marginal annotations that my father was under the influence of a mentor who was exceedingly intense about the teaching of political science.”
While I was speaking to Ricchan, Daio ambled into the great room and I saw Akari (who was lying on the floor nearby) raise one hand in greeting. Daio had been out in the south-side garden, doing his usual landscaping chores, and he had apparently been listening to our conversation through a partially open sliding glass door.
