Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Kogito: You may very well be right about that, too.

  3

  Unaiko’s time in Tokyo as an assistant director—and, unexpectedly, as a lead actress—had finally come to an end. After checking in at the Caveman Group’s headquarters in Matsuyama she hopped in the company van, with Masao Anai at the wheel, and headed down to the Forest House. It was obvious at a glance that Unaiko’s four weeks of working on a play at a major theater in Tokyo had been an emotional roller coaster, and even now that she was back in familiar surroundings she seemed still to be on the wild ride, with its exaggerated highs and lows. The moment she walked through the door the words started tumbling out, and she went on talking nonstop while we were assembling in the great room.

  “The play we were doing was inspired by the Heike Monogatari,” Unaiko enthused, naming one of the most famous narratives in classical Japanese literature. “However, it took a very popular approach, focusing on the heroic Kiyomori and also incorporating material from The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu, which came later. As for the role I ended up playing—I kept thinking you might find this interesting and amusing, Mr. Choko—it was, quite literally, weird. In the script, the only description of my part was the single word ‘medium.’ The director told me a character like that appears in volume three of the Heike Monogatari, and he described yorimashi (meaning a medium or channeler) as a sort of spiritual nickname. But because that was the only background he provided, I didn’t have any kind of concrete understanding of the character. The guy who was playing the role of Kiyomori is also quite well known as a highbrow intellectual who frequently pops up on TV as a talking head, so I asked him for advice, but he just said, ‘Why don’t you look it up in the dictionary?’ That seemed rather cold at the time, but it actually turned out to be a helpful suggestion. I called and asked Ricchan to check the big dictionary you keep on the filing cabinet in your study, and she made a copy of the pertinent page and sent it to me.”

  Unaiko reached into her handbag for a giant notebook—a virtual duplicate of Masao’s omnipresent vade mecum—and extracted two photocopied sheets from between the pages. One depicted the front cover of my Iwanami Dictionary of Archaic Japanese, while the other was a replica of the page that included a definition of yorimashi.

  Unaiko passed the page to me, and I proceeded to read the definition aloud. “Usually when a soothsayer—it could be a mountain ascetic, or an esoteric Buddhist priest—offers a summoning prayer to invoke a certain deity or spirit, that entity will take possession of a medium. The medium is frequently a child with paranormal gifts who has been brought in to serve as the mouthpiece for the divine message or revelation from the god or spirit. That type of channeler is called a yorimashi.”

  After I had finished reading, I continued in my own words. “Suppose, for example, that a highborn lady is suffering in childbirth. Based on the assumption that the problem is caused by an evil spirit or spirits, an attempt will be made to pacify it, or them. In order to appease a supernatural spirit, it first has to be summoned and provided with a voice through some sort of medium. In the exorcistic prayer chants mountain ascetics use for that purpose, the person who serves as a mediumistic mouthpiece is called a yorimashi. The young empress Kenreimon, who as you mentioned later became the tragic Lady Daibu, was the daughter of Kiyomori, of the Taira clan. The characters onstage represent some of the most powerful people of the era.”

  “That’s totally true,” Unaiko said. “And the angry spirits that possessed me, as the medium, were nothing to sneeze at, either: cosmic heavy hitters, so to speak. As you probably know, there’s a whole slew of different terms for the disembodied entities I was channeling: departed souls, hungry ghosts, angry spirits, or whatever you want to call them.”

  “Sometimes the spirit of someone who’s still alive will appear through a medium as well,” I said. “For example, the irate spirit of a priest named Shunkan who eventually died in exile on Kikaigashima—Devil’s Island—after having been banished there by Kiyomori.”

  “That’s right!” Unaiko agreed. “Anyway, there are tons of spirits floating in the ether, and since we were on a tight budget I had to take on the job of portraying the different specters by myself. The basic concept was to create a classical version of our dog-tossing plays, so I did a fair amount of over-the-top ranting and raving along the way! The author of the play kindly took a liking to the idiosyncratic spin I put on it in rehearsals, and he even went to the trouble of writing a bunch of extra lines to clarify the lineage of the spirits, but it still took some fancy footwork for me to play all those different parts. When the author and director created the role—by which I mean those roles, plural—they were apparently visualizing the medium as a woman, but I managed to persuade them to let me portray the character as a young boy.”

  “I think that was incredibly perceptive of you,” I said. “In one of my more arcane dictionaries, I noticed that the word yorimashi has etymological and mythological connotations of ‘a dead child.’ The kanji in question means ‘dead’ or ‘cadaver,’ and if you write it in its primitive pictographic form, it looks like this,” I explained as I drew a shape that resembled a turkey’s wishbone, or an extremely abstract human form, on the nearest scrap of paper.

  “Oh, that’s adorable!” Unaiko exclaimed. “Actually, when I was brainstorming the role I used a certain someone as my model, and it was—”

  “Kogii!” Masao jumped in, excitedly finishing Unaiko’s sentence for her. “Or rather, the Kogii doll that was hanging over our rehearsal space.”

  “Exactly!” Unaiko exclaimed. “The Kogii doll was my inspiration, so at least the time we spent groping around for a way to dramatize the drowning novel wasn’t entirely in vain.”

  “Since Unaiko’s still pretty amped from her experience on the big stage of Tokyo, this seems like as good a time as any to take a look at her artistic plans from here on out,” Masao said. “By the way,” he went on, “we’re very grateful for your generous financial sponsorship of Unaiko’s first solo flight—venturing out of the nest of the Caveman Group—and, of course, we greatly appreciate Chikashi’s and Asa’s support, too, especially the way they exercised their powers of persuasion on you! The Caveman Group has been on a temporary hiatus ever since our collaboration came to a halt, but I think this unforeseen confluence of circumstances has created a crucial make-or-break opportunity for Unaiko: a chance to try her wings in a big way. You’ve probably heard from Ricchan that they already have a solid plan in place, and it’s looking as if the first offering of Unaiko’s new group will be a stage-play version of the movie Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War—filtered through her trademark ‘dog-tossing’ template, of course. Even while she was madly running around in Tokyo, Unaiko has been thinking about this nonstop, and Ricchan has been doing her part down here by conducting background interviews and so on.

  “When Unaiko asked Asa for advice on how to involve you in the project, Asa said that rather than standing at the crossroads of crisis and opportunity, as the saying goes, you were smack-dab in the middle of a crisis phase, and she thought it would be better not to pester you about anything just yet. She said she would be more than willing to provide guidance for the project, and she added that she would be happy to try to bring you into the fold after she returned. Anyway, Ricchan has been chronicling the progress on this end in a daily journal, and it struck me that it might be a good idea for everyone who is involved in this project—or at least the people who’ll be coming to the Forest House to work on it—to read Ricchan’s notes. I’d especially like for you to take a look at them, Mr. Choko, and I would be grateful if you could do it now, as a favor to all of us.”

  4

  I’ve been given the assignment of keeping a daybook, and I’m writing these entries in full awareness of the fact that they will eventually be read by Mr. Choko, who is old enough to be my father (at least). However, I’m also writing with the intention of making these notes available to any members of our troupe who might fin
d their way into the rehearsal area of the Forest House. Since (unlike a diary) these pages are not for my eyes only, I will inevitably exercise a certain degree of self-censorship, but I would still like to try to write as freely and spontaneously as possible. I’m resigned to the fact that some readers may feel baffled by the inclusion of certain personal matters, and I may very well express some controversial views, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Needless to say, I hope all the readers will feel free to note their complaints or dissenting opinions right in the margins of these pages.

  I’d like to start by talking about Unaiko. While she was working in Tokyo we kept in close touch by telephone, and one day I told her about how, out of the blue, Akari had shown me his copy of the final-draft screenplay for the film about Meisuke’s mother. With her usual focus, Unaiko immediately wanted to know how a certain pivotal scene had been put together. The scene in question shows the injured folk heroine being carried back to the village on an old storm shutter repurposed as a makeshift stretcher, and trying to figure out how to dramatize the final scene onstage has turned out to be a thorny problem. At present we’re trying to juggle the shooting script for the film along with Mr. Choko’s own notes from when he first agreed to get involved with that project and the rough draft he hammered out in the form of a novel before even starting the screenplay. Using those materials as a jumping-off point, I’ve been trying to create a new script in our own dramatic style. I’ve been agonizing over the best way to tell the story, and the pieces are just beginning to fall into place.

  In the movie, as a narrative device to move the action along, the spirit of the late Meisuke’s mother appears and chants in a melodic, singsongy way, while the story of the second uprising unfolds on the screen. However, the movie wasn’t one-dimensional by any means, and it utilized a large variety of techniques and a number of different locations. For instance, in the scenes featuring the spirit or ghost of Meisuke’s mother, the musical base is a revival of the kind of old-style samisen accompaniment we associate with Kabuki. That seems to jibe with the first-person accounts I’ve heard from people who participated in the filming, mostly as extras. Mr. Choko’s grandmother and mother started things off, right after Japan lost the war, by mounting a stage production at the local playhouse. Much later, when Sakura became involved, the play was reenacted on a specially constructed stage at the Saya, and the performance was informally recorded on film, just for reference. The next step was to create a feature film that would be a full-fledged period drama. The basic story, in every version, is about the cruel oppression of the farmers in this area by the local feudal clan. A charismatic young farmer named Meisuke leads the first uprising in response to that tyrannical treatment, and it is a success. After the victory, however, Meisuke is captured by the losing faction and imprisoned in the clan-operated jail, where he becomes desperately ill. In an important scene, Meisuke’s mother (who is still young and attractive) visits her son in jail. As she is leaving, she bids farewell to her ailing son in a deeply affectionate way, speaking the famous lines: “There’s no need to worry—even if you die, I’ll just give birth to you again.”

  The next scene features a reprise of the recitative by Meisuke’s mother’s ghost or spirit, in which she tells us how, a decade and a half after the first uprising, the local farmers once again find themselves in exceedingly dire straits. On that occasion as well, those brave souls aren’t willing to knuckle under without a fight. At this point in the filmscript, the spirit of Meisuke’s mother stands up from the platform where she has been chanting, suddenly transformed back into a real, live person. A moment later she is joined by Meisuke II, the young boy who is widely believed to be the reincarnation of her late son, Meisuke (the hero of the first uprising). There are a number of female farmers surrounding Meisuke’s mother, wailing and shaking their bodies in an apparent display of sympathy. Now they line up along the proscenium, and as they drop to their knees and gaze at their leader, Meisuke’s mother begins the famous battle cry:

  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!

  The women join in, singing along, and they begin to dance as well. Hoisting their primitive armaments—’bamboo spears, pointed sticks, and the like—the village women shuffle around until they’re in a perfectly regimented formation. Then the group goes marching off to battle, led by Meisuke II and his mother.

  The screenplay doesn’t show what happens to Meisuke’s mother and her son following the successful uprising. (According to legend, they were set upon by a gang of masterless samurai who raped Meisuke’s mother after they had thrown her young son into a hole in the ground and stoned him to death.) Instead, in the filmed version, we’re back on the platform at the Saya, and the ghost of Meisuke’s mother is sitting there relating the tale of the victorious uprising. She tells us that the country is in the throes of a major reconstruction, and the adversary who was vanquished in the second uprising wasn’t the despotic clan, but rather some troops sent from Tokyo by the administrator in charge of the area. While the triumphant insurrectionists were raising a flag of victory over their base camp at Okawara, the government administrator committed suicide in shame and the interlopers slunk away with their tails between their legs.

  As the majestic voice of Meisuke’s mother seems to take flight, the camera is borne along with it, pulling up into a crane-shot panorama of the stunning scenery of the Saya and beyond. The entire mountain is ablaze with colorful autumn leaves. We see Meisuke’s mother leading a horse with Meisuke II riding astride, and we watch as they ascend a steep, narrow path into the forest, occasionally emerging from behind the trees and then vanishing once more, but we never see the depraved samurai who are lying in wait to ambush them. After a moment the theme music—one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas—kicks in, and then over the music we hear the voice of a woman wailing “Aah, aah” in agony and anguish. The background music grows ever louder, and then the words “THE END” appear on the screen.

  I gave Unaiko a quick synopsis of this sequence over the phone. Then later, after I’d sent her a copy of the shooting script, she read the whole thing from beginning to end, and this is what she said to me during our next phone convo:

  “When Sakura’s wailing voice suddenly rends the air in the final scene, I found it intensely sad. I also think, without a doubt, that her heartfelt cry represents the misery and suffering of all the women who have been raped on an unbroken continuum from the time of Meisuke’s mother until today. I mean, you have to keep in mind that the film was made to give expression to Sakura’s own traumatic memories of being sexually abused as a young girl. So why do I feel compelled to turn it into another ‘dog-tossing’ play? I think it’s because I identify so strongly with this story on a personal level, and I want to dramatize its terrible, timeless realities openly and honestly, with my own body, rather than merely suggesting the hideous acts of violence by the faraway sound of someone keening offstage.”

  While Unaiko was speaking, I just listened in silence. I felt somehow as if she had abandoned me as a collaborator and was going off by herself to explore some private, uncharted realm. For some reason I thought about how, after the uprising had been won, Meisuke’s mother and her son split off from their female followers and headed into the forest, on their way back to the village. Since the feudal structure had been abolished, a great many young samurai had banded together in gangs of freelance thugs, and they were hiding out between the former castle town and a high mountain pass, lying in wait to cause whatever violent mischief they could. At that moment I felt as disenfranchised as those young outlaws, but Unaiko didn’t seem to notice.

  “Look, I can see that it would have been inappropriate to show a graphic rape as the ending of a movie with this kind of soft, elegiac tone,” she continued. “But even so, the denouement of t
he tragedy, in the original stage version produced here after the war, was the scene where Meisuke’s mother sat onstage and told that dreadful story as a recitative, right? I’m sure you’ve heard about how, after the war ended, Mr. Choko’s mother and grandmother made a nice pile of money by selling their stock of paperbush bark on the black market. (The bark was no longer being used to make paper currency, but it was still in demand for making paper, which was one of many scarce commodities in those postwar days.) Anyway, they used some of their profits to stage a play at the little playhouse in the valley, and apparently every time the battle cry was invoked the audience went nuts and joined in, and the interactive chanting seems to have enabled the postwar women from around here to feel a visceral connection with their ancestors who had taken part in the uprising some eighty years earlier. Of course, this was during a period when all the menfolk were struggling to come to terms with the mortifying fact that Japan had lost the war.

  “In the same spirit, let’s hope it will cheer Mr. Choko up to work with us as we try to dramatize the connection between ourselves, as modern-day women, and the brave women who carried out the uprising,” Unaiko said before we hung up. “I’d love it if we could give one last chance at creative fulfillment to the aging author who’s still tormenting himself after all these years, asleep and awake, because he wasn’t able to save his father from drowning!”

  5

  Clearly, Ricchan’s journal entries had been composed in the conscious knowledge that they would eventually be read by Unaiko and by me. Even so, I found them quite illuminating. One day I took Unaiko aside to talk about this, and she happened to mention that she was trying to respect Asa’s request not to pressure me into becoming involved in a new undertaking until I was ready. By then, though, I didn’t see any way (or, really, any reason) to refuse.