by Kenzaburo Oe
“Only … I don’t mean to go on and on about this, but I can’t get it out of my mind. I really think the two of us—you still having the same dream after all these years, and me still obsessed with trying to figure out the truth about that night—are the only people left in the world who can even spare a thought for Choko Sensei anymore!”
At this point, I remembered a question I had been wanting to ask. “Daio, you seem to have very lucid memories about the night of the big flood and the following morning, but what about the red leather trunk I took to my father when he was already on board the boat? Do you know how much time elapsed before that trunk was finally returned to my mother?”
“Oh, the trunk,” Daio said. “Yeah, apparently it floated downstream and finally washed ashore a few kilometers past the spot where the boat capsized. It was retrieved by some fishermen and taken to the police station, and eventually (it could have been weeks, or months) the cops went to your house and returned it to your mother. As for the letters and papers that were inside, those had already been sifted through and censored by the officers. Whether the war had ended in victory or defeat for Japan, there was nothing left in the trunk to raise a warning flag for anyone on any side. No incriminating evidence at all—the officers made sure of that. Of course during that time of crisis, with the Occupation and whatnot, those local policemen certainly didn’t have time to be poring over an English-language edition of The Golden Bough looking for evidence of subversive activities! Until recently the only people who had seen inside the trunk in recent memory were your mother and your sister, as far as I know. And even though the trunk had been more or less sanitized by the officers, I guess those two strong women decided to keep the remaining contents out of your hands to avoid any possible negative repercussions from the drowning novel you wanted to write. In retrospect, maybe they were being overly cautious, but I guess they felt it was important to try to protect the family name from any hint of scandal.”
Daio paused for a moment, then continued. “Choko Sensei was—and still is—the most important teacher I’ve ever had, but to be honest, I hold your mother in even higher esteem. In my personal ranking system, she’s at the very top, above your father. From the time you were a child, I always believed you were no ordinary person. But since we’re ranking things, I’m sure you know your mother always thought Asa was a more balanced human being than you are, in a practical sense, and I think she died happy, knowing that Asa would outlive us all.
“I remember your mother used to say that in the House of Choko, the women never fail to outshine the men. Apparently it’s been true going back to your grandmother’s time. Or if you wanted to go even further, maybe you could include Meisuke’s mother. Your mother always said she might have been a distant relative of yours!”
PART THREE
These Fragments I Have
Shored Against My Ruins
Chapter 12
All About Kogii
1
Very early one morning I heard the sound of something stirring outside, behind the Forest House. After lying awake, listening, for the better part of an hour, I finally got out of bed and ventured downstairs.
Masao Anai was standing in the back garden, gazing intently at the large, round poetry stone, and it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen him during my current sojourn in the forest. Masao raised his head and looked at me calmly, but his expression seemed to bear a tinge of disappointment. (My phrasing may be a trifle disingenuous, since I had been directly responsible for dashing his hopes.) At the same time, I discerned a kind of pellucid freshness in his gaze, as if he might be ready to let bygones be bygones and begin anew. When I caught Masao’s eye, through the window, I got the sense that he was picking up a similarly positive vibration from me.
I glanced at the small clock on the kitchen counter and saw that it was only five A.M. Then I set to work brewing four cups of fresh coffee in the coffeemaker Maki had recently sent down from the house in Tokyo; the amount was based on my expectation of visiting with Masao for the time it took to drink two large cups apiece. Ricchan was asleep in the west wing of the house, while Akari was in his room upstairs, and I knew no one else was likely to be up and about for another couple of hours, at least.
When Masao came inside, I caught a strong whiff of tobacco. He didn’t make any move to light up another cigarette, and I surmised that he had been lingering in front of the poetry stone for the primary purpose of having one last smoke before entering the house. Typically for him, Masao didn’t bother to break the ice with anything resembling the customary “long time no see” greetings. Instead, he resumed our conversation where we had left off, jumping right back into a topic he had evidently been continuing to think about during the intervening months.
“Lately Unaiko and Ricchan have been spending a lot of time here, pouring all their energy into the new project, so I’ve been holding down the fort at our headquarters in Matsuyama by myself,” he began. “I’ve kept busy taking inventory and getting organized, and in the process I reviewed all the works of yours that we’ve converted into stage plays so far.”
“Asa was saying how sorry she was your plan for dramatizing the drowning novel in conjunction with my own work on that book came to naught because of what happened on my part,” I said by way of indirect apology.
“Well, this has turned out to be the end of an era for us, so it’s given me a good chance to reflect and gain some perspective,” Masao said graciously. “Until now, converting Kogito Choko’s fiction into stage plays has been the mainstay of our work, which has caused some theater critics to suggest facetiously that the Caveman Group ought to change its name to something like ‘the People Who Live in the Cave of Kogito Choko.’ You know, the usual sarcasm and cheap plays on words.
“If your drowning novel had been completed, we were planning to find a way of combining it with whatever we had cooked up along the way to create a kind of contrapuntal synergy, to put it in musical terms. Capping off our ‘Choko phase’ with a big finale would have been a great way to thumb our noses at those cynical critics. Unaiko was approaching the project from a different angle, as usual, and some of the younger guys were talking about staging what they called ‘a living wake for Kogito Choko’ and using that as a selling point. I only heard the rough outlines, but I gathered it would have been a sort of retrospective.
“Anyway, as you may recall, the opening scene we had sketched out, before the whole project went to hell in a handbasket, depicted the launching of your father’s little rowboat onto the flooded river. That scene was inspired by your recurrent dream, so if the critics had wanted to make rude remarks about the Caveman Group’s dependence on the works of Kogito Choko … well, they might have had a valid point. It’s all moot now, of course, and today I’m more interested in discussing your uncanny alter ego, Kogii, who was in the boat with your father. As you know, we were going to give the vision physical form by making a Kogii doll and suspending it in the air above the stage, and even now, I still find myself wondering how that might have turned out. That’s actually what moved me to drop by this morning to talk to you.
“This may sound like a simplistic question,” Masao wound up, “but in the final analysis, what exactly was Kogii to you, anyway? Do you by any chance feel like kicking that question around for a while?”
“Sure, why not?” I said. “After all, you and your colleagues in the Caveman Group are the first people who have ever been willing to believe Kogii might actually have existed! When I was a child, no one else supported me the way you do. If I happened to mention matter-of-factly that Kogii was ‘right over there, right now,’ all I ever got in return was a giant dose of ridicule and teasing. I mean, some people pretended to believe, but I think they were just having fun at my expense. In the poem etched into the stone out back, when my mother mentions Kogii she appears to be referring to my childhood nickname. However, I believe she’s also talking in a subtle but unmistakable way about Akari. That’s e
vident, at least to me, from the way she says, You didn’t get Kogii ready…. Going up into the forest is obviously a metaphor for dying, and I’m certain she was chiding me for not having done enough to prepare Akari for death, in case he doesn’t outlive me.
“But when I talked about the recurrent dream, you folks came up with the idea of having Kogii appear early on as a sort of mannequin hovering over the boat as it takes off down the flooded river. I took that as a heartening sign, since it seemed to indicate that you weren’t dismissing Kogii as a phantom or something I hallucinated.”
“I guess it’s just what you might call my director’s habit, but I created a kind of questionnaire about Kogii,” Masao said. “Of course, when we learned that the drowning novel was out of the picture we had to stop working on our dramatization of the story, so these notes don’t have any practical application at this point. Even so, would you mind answering a few questions, just to resolve this gestalt for me?”
Before I’d had a chance to nod my assent, the ever-confident Masao had already opened the jumbo-size notebook balanced on his knees.
2
Masao: Mr. Choko, you’ve mentioned that the existence of your alter ego, Kogii, wasn’t acknowledged by the people around you, but in the course of her research Ricchan has run into a number of people who have said they remember hearing that you had a constant companion who was called ‘Kogii,’ like you, although no one ever actually saw the other child. One of those people was a classmate of yours who has become a leader of the farmers in the region, and another one—also a classmate, unsurprisingly—is a member of the family who owns the medical clinic in town. However, there wasn’t anybody who could say when Kogii first appeared, or how you and he met. It wasn’t her fault, of course, but Ricchan seems to feel that not having been able to interview your mother about a number of things—the uprising, and Kogii, and so on—has left some lamentable gaps in her research.
As I mentioned during our first conversation, we had won a prize and were embarking on the next stage of our group’s artistic evolution when I turned my attention to Kogii. I reread all your essays, hoping to find his first appearance. I mean, surely the initial encounter with a mystical being would be one of the major treasures in a child’s box of memories, right? I thought the evidence I was searching for must be hidden away somewhere in your published work, but I kept striking out. When it came to Kogii’s departure there was an abundance of detailed accounts, yet I couldn’t find a single description of how or when he first arrived on the scene. Ultimately, I concluded that by the time you became conscious of yourself as an entity living in this world, Kogii must already have been by your side.
We know Kogii couldn’t be seen by anyone but you. However, you always behaved as if you had a constant companion who was exactly like you—an identical twin, for all intents and purposes. I heard about it from your sister, Asa. She also told me that Kogii was your one and only playmate, so apparently you didn’t even interact with your only sister very often. She said she would often see you engaged in conversation, chattering at the invisible Kogii and then seeming to strain your ears to hear his reply, and she figured your friend must be telling you secrets about what went on in the realm of the forest. She thought the whole concept of Kogii must somehow have been overlaid with (or even inspired by) the folktales you children had heard from your mother and grandmother: the mythology of the forest that has shaped so many of your novels. You’ve written about a scenario in which kids go into the woods to play hide-and-seek, and both the hiders and the seekers became lost children who are still wandering deep in the forest to this day. Evidently Asa was intrigued by that dark fable, and she pestered your mother to tell her more, but your mom claimed not to know anything about it. Then when Asa suggested you might have invented the story on your own, your mother said that she didn’t think you would be able to make up such a sophisticated tale from scratch, so it was probably something you had heard from your grandmother. Then she went on to say that maybe when you were having all those intense conversations with a companion no one else could see, your pal was telling you stories. But then your mother added that, joking aside, it seemed likely you’d heard the story about the lost children from someone who had intimate knowledge of the forest. So what I’m wondering is, would it be accurate to say that Kogii’s main reason for existing was to keep you informed about whatever might be going on in the forest?
Kogito: Yes, that’s correct.
Masao: Okay, good. So this brings us to the day when Kogii goes off and leaves you behind. You’re standing on the wraparound verandah outside the back parlor of your house by the river. Kogii is beside you, as usual, but then he suddenly leaps onto the balustrade. By the time you realize what’s happening, Kogii has taken off, spreading his arms like wings and floating through the air until he’s just above the midpoint of the river. From there he wafts high up into the forest and vanishes from sight. And that was how you came to lose your beloved doppelgänger.
Kogito: Yes, that’s exactly what happened. There’s really no way around it: Kogii simply went away and left me in the lurch.
Masao: However, Kogii did come down from the forest on one other occasion. It was a full-moon night and you were lying awake, unable to sleep, when you heard what sounded like some sort of signal. When you went out the front door of your house, Kogii was standing there illuminated by the moon. Without saying a word he began walking away, heading up the road into the forest, with you following close behind as the rain began to fall. The next thing you knew, Kogii was nowhere to be seen and you were caught in a torrential downpour.
Now, what strikes me as important about the events of that moonlit night is the fact that even though we have never heard that Kogii came from such-and-such a place, it seems clear that on this evening he came down from the forest. Oh, and there’s another thing: the internal conflicts you had as a child. When Kogii climbed up on the railing and floated across the river, if you’d had the courage to follow him right then—walking through the air to the center of the river, and then spreading your own arms as if they were wings—maybe you would have been able to ascend into the forest, too. But you were a coward, so you missed your big opportunity. Later, while you were brooding in your dark little bedroom, sick at heart and awash in vain regrets, Kogii came down from the forest and gave you another chance. That’s what you were thinking when you went eagerly traipsing after him, isn’t it?
Kogito: That’s exactly right.
Masao: However, after you’d followed Kogii into the forest, he disappeared and you ended up getting stranded by a huge rainstorm. The firemen said that the reason you stayed there overnight was because the forest road had turned into a river. (I can’t help feeling that there was some special significance to their choice of words, given the way your father died.) Anyway, they refused to go and rescue you. You sought shelter in the hollow of a Castanopsis tree, and before long you began to run a high fever. If you had spent another night exposed to the elements, you would almost certainly have died. It seems possible that both times Kogii invited you to follow him, he was acting as an intermediary for the Other Side, trying to lead you to an early grave. I mean, when he took off in the air above the river—if you had tried to emulate his flying motion, like some wingless Icarus, you could easily have hit your head on a rock on the bottom of the river and died.
So on both of those occasions you managed to stay alive, but the second time you lost your best friend, Kogii, forever. While you were recovering from your illness and your condition was still touch and go, you felt very alone and frightened. Your mother felt sorry for you, and that was when she told you the story of Meisuke’s mother, including the reassuring line about how there’s no need to worry, because even if you were to die, she would just give birth to you again. Isn’t that what happened?
Kogito: Yes, that’s the gist of it, except that as I recall my mother spoke those words in the local dialect.
Masao: Anyway, if you had remained in t
hat hollow tree for much longer you would probably have crossed over to the Other Side, with Kogii as your spirit guide, and the two of you could have been together forever. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable that you would have felt some ambivalence or even regret about the way things turned out—that is, about being rescued. In one of the books you wrote for children, I think the scene where you and your mother talk about mortality and rebirth is really a beautiful thing.
Kogito: … [silence]
Masao: And then when you were ten years old, you watched your father take off down the flooded river in his little boat. You weren’t with him, even though that was supposedly the plan when you set out from your house. Instead, next to your father, in the place where you thought you yourself should have been standing, you saw your alter ego, Kogii. And for the past sixty-some years you’ve been dreaming and redreaming the same scene, over and over again. The third time’s the charm, as they say, and isn’t it a fact that even now you’re still thinking, If only I had gone with my father …?
Kogito: Yes, that sounds about right.
Masao: So for me, at least, it seems as if you were hoping to use the drowning novel to rewrite history and reverse the outcome of the scene. I think you were imagining that even if it was only in a book, you might be able to invent a scene in which you and Kogii were working together to help your father. The author of the drowning novel is also the “I” who appears throughout the story, and if you tried to tell me that type of narrative device would be impossible to depict onstage, my response would be, “Well then, I’ll just create a third-person hero and dramatize the scene that way!” There are all sorts of other possibilities, too, but the problem is you’ve abandoned the project. I know you said giving up was your only option after the contents of the red leather trunk turned out to be useless, but I can’t help wondering whether you might simply have lost the courage to even try to create the authentic type of late work E. W. Said talks about in On Late Style, as a final endeavor in the life of an artist. You know: thrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before?
