by Kenzaburo Oe
4
That Sunday morning, Unaiko drove over to pick Asa up, and then they swung back around to fetch me. I climbed into the passenger seat next to Unaiko and assumed the role of explainer in chief, while Asa added her own questions and comments from the backseat.
“I’ve been thinking about the best way to give you the grand tour,” I told Unaiko. “Asa, remember the time when we were kids, when we went and rambled around some ruins not far from here? They were supposedly the habitat of the Destroyer: the literally larger-than-life character who’s the star of the single most popular legend around these parts … I suppose ‘legend’ could imply a basis in truth, so maybe I should just call him an apocryphal being. In any case, sometime between 250 and 300 years ago, deep in the forest where the feudal clan’s authority held no sway, this charismatic individual supposedly created a completely independent, self-sustaining community of separatists. He’s said to have lived a remarkably long life and somehow, along the way, he was magically transformed into a giant. According to local lore, the Road of the Dead and other large-scale projects were built under his leadership. In any case, one day during our childhood we went to take a look, as a family outing. In the midst of the ruins there was a raised area, like a round platform, covered with vividly verdant grass.”
“I remember!” Asa exclaimed. “It was supposedly the Destroyer’s favorite spot for an afternoon nap!”
“That’s right,” I said. “And according to the story, that was where the spirit of the late Meisuke supposedly appeared and lay down side by side with Meisuke II, his posthumously born little brother. Then the original Meisuke proceeded to instruct his reincarnated self in the art of war, including some strategies for the second insurrection. I’ve always felt as if the story about the meeting between the two Meisukes—one alive, one dead—might really be true.”
“Well, I was quite the tomboy,” Asa said, “so I could freely go places that would have seemed daunting to some of the girlier girls, and I remember visiting the spot with my big brother. (Although, truth be told, I was hanging on to him for dear life.) Actually I suspect the reason my brother took a companion was because he wanted to explore the forest, but he had heard so many stories and legends about the Destroyer that it seemed too scary to venture in alone, even for him.”
“At any rate, I was thinking we could begin our grand tour at that spot today,” I said stiffly.
“Slight change of plans,” Asa said. “I had the same idea of starting out at the Destroyer’s napping spot, but when I talked it over with my son he told me the area has become overgrown and inaccessible in recent years. So instead we’ll start by going down to the road along the Kame River and then following the walking course that winds uphill from Okawara, toward the mountains. The path will take us past the place where Meisuke’s mother was attacked, and we’ll also get to see the site where Meisuke II was stoned to death. We can leave the car down in Okawara. Tamakichi will ride his bike over to fetch it later, and then he’ll pick us up when we start to get tired of walking. So, that’s the plan.”
Unaiko was staring straight ahead, entirely focused on her driving. Her hair, which had been dyed bright gold while she was in Tokyo playing the role of a psychic medium, had reverted to its natural jet-black color, and she wore it pulled back in a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Her body language seemed to radiate seriousness and solemnity.
“It looks as if you’re already getting into character for your role as Meisuke’s mother, Unaiko,” I said. “What’s the story?”
“Yes, I’ve been consciously trying to put on some weight,” Unaiko said, nodding emphatically in a way that emphasized the new fullness of her profile. “I want to be able to project a sense of power when I recite the battle-cry chant. By the way,” she added, “Ricchan was very interested in seeing the actual route Meisuke’s mother followed on the way to the uprising, but she was afraid Akari might be coming down with a cold so she decided to stay behind at the Forest House and keep him company.”
“Ricchan really does take incredibly good care of Akari,” Asa said. “Maki speaks to him on the phone every day, and apparently he talks about Ricchan all the time. When I left for Tokyo I knew you hadn’t even begun to mend your fences with Akari, and I realized after I left that I should have arranged for someone to take care of keeping his face shaved while you were staying down here. During your past visits I’ve always done it myself, whenever the two of you weren’t on the best of terms. But I forgot to put it on my to-do list, and it wasn’t until I’d been tending to Chikashi at the hospital for a week that I started to worry. I asked Maki to check, and she told me that Akari replied, ‘Papa isn’t shaving my whiskers.’ She said she was alarmed to hear it, but even as she was picturing her brother’s face completely covered in stubble (or even a full beard) Akari went on, with his trademark slyness, ‘Ricchan’s shaving me now, and it doesn’t hurt like when Papa does it.’”
“Whenever there’s something new going on, Akari never seems to be able to come right out and talk about it, even if he wants to. So if someone can extract the information from him, indirectly, I think he always feels relieved,” I said.
“Anyhow, Ricchan stepped into a tricky situation and kindly offered her tonsorial services,” Asa said. “I mean, at that point she and Akari had barely spoken two words to each other, and it’s only natural she would have been worried about inadvertently nicking him with the razor. Ricchan’s a very brave soul, though, and it seems to have worked out fine.”
Having spoken her piece on this subject, Asa shifted into explanatory mode. “Let me fill you in on the plan for today,” she said, turning her attention to Unaiko. “First, we’ll drive to Honmachi. Then we’ll get on the highway along the Kame River, crossing the newly widened bypass—you know, the one that forced the removal of the big rock with the poem etched into it, which is now in the back garden of the Forest House. (Of course, the poetry stone wasn’t the only thing displaced as a result of the construction.) Anyhow, that will take us right into Okawara. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from here, so I’d like to use the time to talk to my brother about something having to do with his domestic situation, and I’d be grateful if you would listen, too, Unaiko.
“When Chikashi was discharged from the hospital, before I left Tokyo, we had a little party to celebrate. It was just the three of us: Chikashi, Maki, and me. The timing wasn’t ideal because Maki was dealing with the time of month that’s always the most difficult for her, emotionally—I mean, once she gets past the monthly complications she’s the sweetest person on earth, but that night she was on the warpath against you, Kogii.
“The first thing she said was, ‘When Mama went into the hospital, she was clearly prepared for the possibility that she wouldn’t make a full recovery, and she took the time to talk to me about some important matters. But what about Papa? Is he giving any thought to our future as a family? It was smart of Mama to send Akari and Papa to Shikoku together, because it was definitely a step in the right direction. But even so, now that they’re there, it doesn’t seem as though Papa has made any progress toward considering the problems at hand. Ever since she was diagnosed with cancer, Mama seems to have been giving a lot of thought to her own mortality, but Papa isn’t really thinking seriously about the end of his own life. At least that’s how it looks to me.’”
Asa paused for a moment to let these words sink in, then resumed her monologue. “Anyhow, Maki went on to say, ‘At the beginning of this year, remember when Papa said, “Whoa, I just realized I’m on the cusp of being older than Professor Musumi was when he died!”? And then he seemed to be getting a kick out of saying things like: “Maybe Maki’s depression is something I passed down to her, because I myself was on the cusp of middle age when I first began to suffer from melancholia. When I talked to Musumi Sensei about that, he said, ‘I’ve realized that I didn’t completely understand the work of certain authors—Rabelais, for one—until I read the same books again after I’d reache
d the same age those authors were when they passed away. So, if you can muster up a sufficient degree of interest, I’d like to ask you to read (or reread) all my books when you get to be the age I was when I died.’ And now, here I am, rereading Sensei’s books, one by one.” When I heard what Papa said, it really struck me that he didn’t seem to be giving any thought to how his death would affect Akari, or how Akari would go on living when he was gone.’ Anyhow, that’s what Maki said.
“Chikashi was the first to respond,” Asa continued. “Obviously she would never hug her daughter in front of me, even though I’m family, but she was clearly trying to comfort Maki when she said, ‘No, dear, Papa has actually given quite a bit of thought to the things you mention, and he has even invented a term for the situation with Akari. He calls it ‘the Macbeth matter,’ and the fact that he has given it a name seems to suggest he isn’t trying to avoid the issue entirely.’
“Kogii, I’m only mentioning this now to let you know how seriously Chikashi and Maki are thinking about this. I get the feeling they’re hoping you’ll take the initiative, sooner rather than later, and let them know your thoughts about what will become of Akari when you die. I simply wanted to put a bug in your ear, so to speak.”
Asa lapsed into silence. We had already driven through the residential outskirts of Honmachi, and as I gazed out the window a familiar landmark—the long sandbar on the other side of the embankment—came into view. A few moments later, Unaiko spoke up.
“What do you mean by ‘the Macbeth matter’?” she asked me.
“It’s a reference to the kind of situation implied by the lines where Lady Macbeth says, These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad. That’s all.”
My brief reply was meant to discourage further discussion, and I could sense from Unaiko’s body language that she had gotten the message. Asa gave me an exceptionally eloquent look, but she didn’t say a word. However, Unaiko wasn’t the type to slink quietly away from a conversation, and she managed to change the subject in a positive way.
“On another topic,” she said, “I’ve been watching Ricchan while she’s helping Akari with his music lessons, and it occurred to me that the work she’s doing with him has given her a whole new lease on life. Honestly, I’ve never seen Ricchan like this before. Until now I’ve always relied completely on her, and even though we haven’t always been living in the same place, when the going got tough it always cheered me up to know Ricchan would be coming back before too long—and she always did, eventually. To be perfectly frank, while I’ve admittedly been quite dependent on Ricchan in a practical sense, I always thought working with me was going to turn out to be the most important thing in her life, and I never imagined that anything else could be as exciting and fulfilling for her as our dramatic projects. But lately when I see Ricchan and Akari working on lessons and compositions together, and then when I hear their efforts transformed into music, it’s clear that those endeavors are much more important and rewarding for Ricchan than being my assistant. I’ve gotten a sense that the work she’s doing with Akari has been lifting her to an entirely new level, and I was reminded of that when I heard about what Maki had said.”
“If you don’t mind, Unaiko, I’m going to email Maki and tell her what you said just now,” Asa replied, but (true to her cautiously skeptical character) she managed to infuse her words with a figurative grain of salt. “I’m sure Maki will be happy to hear about this, but I don’t want to lead her to imagine Ricchan might wind up living with Akari sometime in the future—I mean, that kind of wishful thinking could create another ‘Macbeth matter.’ I must admit, I do have a fantasy that after my brother passes away, Ricchan could find a way to continue as Unaiko’s creative partner while also managing to be Akari’s music teacher and Chikashi’s personal assistant, or private secretary. As I said, I realize that scenario may be an impossibly far-fetched pipe dream, but you never know …”
5
“Well, here we are in Okawara!” Asa announced as we rolled into town. “I can guess what’s going through your mind, Kogii: something like Hey, wait a minute, what happened to Okawara? The last person who responded by appreciatively sighing, ‘Ahh, Okawara!’ when I brought her here was Sakura Ogi Magarshack. She knew quite a bit about local history, and she was really moved. Of course, that was before the big real estate companies came in and started building speculative housing developments all over the place.”
“But … I mean, I know Sakura had a rich cinematic imagination, but what exactly did she find so moving about the sight of Okawara?” I asked. “I imagine it was already overrun with unsightly development by then.”
“Oh, Kogii, you’re probably remembering the time Sakura came down here to shoot Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War. Right? No, I’m talking about the day Sakura first laid eyes on Okawara, many years earlier. I’d been contacted by your movie-producer pal, Komori, and I took a paid day off from the Red Cross Hospital—something I’d never done before, even once—and played tour guide for Sakura. It was while you were involved in a hunger strike in Sugibayashi, up in Tokyo, as a show of solidarity with the Korean poet Kim Ji-ha. Komori dropped by the sit-in tent to visit you; Sakura was with him, and he introduced you to her. That should tell you what year it was.”
“Yes, it was 1975: the year Professor Musumi passed away,” I said.
“Anyhow, at the time Sakura was en route back to Washington from Seoul—she had gone there in person to apologize for the production stoppage on a film project that was a joint venture between the US and Korea, or some such. Apparently you mentioned the story of Meisuke’s mother and the uprising. It piqued Sakura’s interest, and she came to take a look around Okawara. As I said, I volunteered my tour-guide services, and that was when Sakura told me about what happened to her while she was in Matsuyama during the Occupation. Later I took her to our house in the village and Mother, who was still going strong at the time, even chanted the battle cry of Meisuke’s mother for the benefit of the glamorous visitor!
“Sakura never forgot that, and some thirty years later she returned with the idea of making the story into a movie, using her own funds for the start-up financing. But Okawara had changed (although not this much!), and her original idea of filming the uprising on location had to be revised. On the plus side, that’s how the first scene of the movie, where Meisuke’s mother’s ghostly spirit is at the Saya chanting her battle cry to incite her followers to march off to war, came into being. Fortunately, the landscape around the Saya hadn’t changed at all in the past hundred years or so.”
“My clearest memory of Okawara is of the time Father and I rode here on our bikes, single file, to see the kite-flying contest,” I said. “You know, the one where everyone has those enormous hand-painted kites? The war was starting to heat up, and Father had heard that the contest was about to be discontinued indefinitely. I haven’t been back to Okawara since then, so of course there would have been some changes in the interim, but even so …”
Asa and I spent the next several minutes lamenting the sad deterioration of the local scenery. (Those changes may have been “only natural,” given the passage of time, but they still came as a rude shock.) Unaiko drove on, listening in silence, and when she finally spoke her words were surprisingly upbeat.
“Actually, I think this is fine,” she said. “The folks who come to see our play will mostly be from around here, and they’ll be aware of the contrast between Okawara today and the way it looked in the old days, when Meisuke’s mother and Meisuke II set up camp. Who knows, those discrepancies may even spark people’s imaginations. We’ll leave it to the audience at the performance to make the connection between the gang of renegade samurai who deliberately trampled the grassy area deep in a grove of trees to clear a place where they could rape Meisuke’s mother, and the OL—you know, Office Lady—who was brutally raped, not long ago, on the concrete floor of one of Okawara’s humongous outdoor parking lots. That way, the viewers will understand wh
at we’re showing them isn’t some long-ago period drama, like you see on TV, but rather the present-day reality faced by many contemporary women. If you look at the signage for the car park, you’ll notice the name of that part of town hasn’t changed since the time of the uprising.”
“I’m glad we brought Unaiko down here, aren’t you?” Asa said, obviously trying to nudge me into echoing her sentiments. “The incident she mentioned, where an OL was attacked in a parking lot, really did happen. It got a lot of newspaper coverage at the time.”
I didn’t reply. A few moments later Asa had Unaiko park the car in that same notorious parking lot, not far from the embankment that sloped down to the river, while she went off to explain to the attendant that a different person would be coming to fetch the car later on.
We set off on foot, climbing the hill on the eastern side of town, and when we reached the top—where there were still a few old-fashioned, tile-roofed houses left over from previous centuries—we all turned around and feasted our eyes on the glittering ribbon of gray-green river below. Then we ambled along the old road, which I remembered from childhood, occasionally pausing to gaze with interest at the rows of stores and houses on the way. Our pace quickened abruptly when Asa noticed a bus approaching along the new embankment-like road above, which ran parallel to the narrower one we were on, and she suggested we hop over from the old road to the new one. When everyone agreed, she told Unaiko to go ahead to the bus stop and ask the driver to wait a few minutes while the senior citizens caught up.
Unaiko ran up to the new road with long, easy strides, while Asa and I followed at a slow trot, huffing and puffing all the way. After we had boarded the bus, Asa began chatting with the driver and he agreed to let us off at the point where the new road, which was presently running parallel to the old one, veered off on its own toward Matsuyama.
