by Kenzaburo Oe
Kogito had hardly finished eating the greasy fare when severe cramps and diarrhea set in. He ventured out onto a lively thoroughfare to buy some medicine, but there were no pharmacies to be found. As he was wandering around, he ventured down a narrow alley that looked more like a dimly lit path leading into a mountain vale than a byway in the middle of a city. There he found a small apothecary shop, crammed into a storefront no more than six feet wide.
When Kogito pushed open the old-fashioned glass door and entered the shop, the fortyish woman who was sitting in a cramped space with her back to the medicine-laden shelves turned her round, pale face in his direction. “Oh!” she exclaimed, stifling a shriek of surprise.
Paying no attention to this odd response, Kogito asked for some paregoric, but when he tried to pay for his purchase, the proprietor, who was still seated, gazed up at him, flushed and perspiring. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, in a low voice that was almost a moan. “Sometimes you really do get what you wish for!”
Then, abruptly, she launched into a remarkably spirited account of her life story. She explained that she had attended the pharmaceutical studies department of a university in Kyoto and was a passionate fan of Kogito’s work who owned a hardcover copy of every book he had ever published. She had taken over this family-owned pharmacy after her father’s sudden death. The shop was near a red-light district, and it had stayed in business for many years by specializing in contraceptive devices and remedies for sexually transmitted diseases. After the Anti-Prostitution Law was passed there had been some lean times, and it had looked for a while as if the pharmacy might have to close its doors, but she always clung to the belief that as long as she could hunker down and stay in business, someday she would have a chance to meet Kogito Choko.
Kogito was a little concerned about a disreputable-looking middle-aged man who was loitering outside on the curb next to the gutter with a kimono-clad woman in tow, so he tried to take his leave as quickly as possible, but the female proprietor reached under the counter, took out a carton containing a six-pack of larger-than-usual bottles of some sort of energy drink, plunked it down on the counter, and said, “Please try this—I’ll give you a special VIP discount.”
“Actually, I don’t really drink that sort of health potion,” Kogito responded.
“Oh, no!” the pharmacist protested. “This isn’t your simple, garden-variety health drink. It contains garlic, and Korean ginseng, and even ground-up seahorses. See what’s written on the bottle? DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE! I’ll let you have a six-pack for only two dollars, so why don’t you take a couple of cartons home with you?”
As the woman slapped a second six-pack down on the counter, the shady-looking man who had been hanging around outside barged into the pharmacy with his female consort and shouldered his way to the counter. “If you’re having a sale, I’ll buy some,” he said gruffly. “Two cartons, please!” The timing seemed suspicious, and Kogito couldn’t help wondering whether the man’s appearance might be part of a prearranged charade.
“Coming right up,” said the proprietor. “The special price for one box is thirty dollars, so your total will be sixty dollars. I’m sure you’re familiar with this amazing product. You know their slogan: DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE! Your lucky missus is going to be in seventh heaven! Thank you for your business.”
That’s all there was to the story, but O’Brian showed his marvelous character by not only laughing uproariously but also helping Kogito, afterward, to make his laborious telling of the anecdote much tighter and more forceful. When the Irish actor was on the airplane, heading home to London, he spent a good deal of time reworking the English translation of the advertising slogan (DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE!). He even gave his notes to a crew member on the flight, which was returning to Narita, with instructions to deliver them to Kogito. O’Brian suggested a way of making the slogan “a bit more lewd,” and Kogito obligingly changed the words to GET IT UP! GET IT ON! SHAG ALL NIGHT!
By the time Kogito had located the card bearing the English-language version of the anecdote it was already midnight in Tokyo, but it was still late afternoon in Berlin. While he was telling the story over the telephone, he couldn’t help noticing the contrast between the youthful freshness of the girl’s laughter—she was clearly excited about the first snow—and the mature rumble of Goro’s satisfied-sounding laughter, as the two merry voices intermingled.
Kogito was pleased to realize that a memory that had seemed to be extinguished was actually very clear, especially since it was a recollection that seemed to be infused with (these were the first words that sprang to mind) a sort of crystalline brightness. In Goro’s twilight years, which had come far too soon, that kind of delight was rather rare.
5
While Kogito was living in Berlin, he always had Saturdays and Sundays free. There were no classes, no lunches with his colleagues at the Center for Advanced Research, no academic presentations. Kogito had very little desire to stroll around the noisy, teeming streets, so he usually passed the time by lying on his bed and reading a book, or reminiscing about various things having to do with Goro. While his mind was meandering dreamily through his memories, it sometimes headed off in a distinctly R-rated direction.
One such reminiscence dated back to a time when Goro, who was still married to Katsuko, was frequently going overseas for film roles. Goro was just back from America when he turned up one evening in a taxi to visit Kogito, who had himself only recently returned from a teaching stint at the University of California at Berkeley. Goro rarely took taxis—he preferred to tool around in his sleek, luminous Bentley—and the reason he deliberately used one on this night was because he was planning to drink a large quantity of whiskey in the hopes of routing the depression that was plaguing him.
Throughout the evening, Goro held forth while sipping continuously from a glass filled (and refilled many times over) with Old Parr whiskey, neat, from a bottle Kogito had received from his publisher as a holiday gift. Chikashi kept them company until shortly after 10 PM, then excused herself and went to bed. After that it was just Goro and Kogito, one-on-one. Maybe Goro had been restraining himself while Chikashi was present, but from then on, even though he seemed to be growing increasingly melancholy, he kept up an antic, eloquent stream of anecdotes.
The previous year, Goro had spent six months acting in a Hollywood film that was made with the intention of justifying the western side of the Boxer Rebellion, and he had just returned from attending the movie’s premieres in Los Angeles and New York. He had been given a major role as a military officer attached to the Japanese embassy in Beijing (then known as Peking)—there was even a scene where he cradled the lead actress in his arms and helped her to escape while bullets were ricocheting off the walls and the unpaved road around them. The review in Los Angeles’s leading newspaper singled Goro out for special notice, rhapsodizing about his “glamorous charm” and remarking that he had an unusually charismatic presence for an Asian actor. Kogito happened to read that article, and he clipped it out and sent it to Goro’s then wife, Katsuko.
But when Goro returned home and looked at the Japanese reviews, he discovered that most of them completely ignored his performance. One anonymous weekly-magazine film reviewer focused on a scene in which Katsuko had a walk-on part as a married woman, splendidly dressed in kimono, who attends a Christmas party for the employees of all the foreign embassies in Peking. The review concluded with the snide remark, “This is the reason Goro Hanawa passed his audition,” implying that Katsuko’s family-business connections had been a factor.
As Goro slid ever deeper into drunkenness, Kogito started talking about Yukichi Fukuzawa’s trademark word, enbo, meaning resentment, bitterness, or envy. Kogito quoted liberally from Fukuzawa’s seminal treatise, An Encouragement of Learning, which he had used as a text in a class he’d taught at Berkeley. In Japan, he explained to his increasingly bleary-eyed brother-in-law, there was only one reason why Goro, as a Japanes
e actor who was successful abroad as well, would be slighted or even looked upon with disdain. That reason was pure enbo: bitter, envious resentment.
According to Fukuzawa, virtually every word that’s used to describe people can be a two-sided coin. For example, depending on your tone, frugal can mean admirably thrifty or despicably stingy, while rough and ready could imply either courageousness or bellicosity. The exception, he says, is enbo. No matter how you look at it, enbo is a complete waste of time; there’s no way you can put a positive spin on envy, bitterness, and resentment, or turn those emotions into positive human traits.
To which Goro replied, “When it comes to being tormented by the envy and resentment of others, you’re in the same boat as I am, with that vindictive journalist making a cottage industry of dragging your name through the mud. Just watch—as soon as you win a big international prize for literature, that ‘eminent authority’ will rush to press with a book that totally trashes your entire life and work.” Goro as prophet: that was exactly what did happen, some years later.
“I really don’t worry too much about this kind of stuff,” Goro went on. “But getting back to that article that you went to the trouble of cutting out and sending to Katsuko, where the writer singled me out for special praise? Well, the truth is, I’ve been having some personal problems with that writer. You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with that sort of thing.” Kogito felt disappointed by the way Goro seemed to be changing the subject, as if he wasn’t taking Kogito’s point seriously, so he was gratified to learn from Chikashi, some time later, that Goro had been enthusiastically sprinkling his conversations with his new favorite word: enbo.
It gradually emerged that the film critic who had singled Goro out for such lavish praise in that L.A. newspaper was a fiftyish woman named Amy, who had traveled with Goro’s group for part of the time while he and some of the other actors were on a promotional tour for the movie. After the initial interview, whenever Goro had a little free time she would invite him to join her for dinner at some small restaurant near wherever they happened to be staying, to continue the more detailed interviews she said she needed in order to write a longer article about him.
When Goro returned to San Francisco on the day before he was scheduled to go back to Japan, the film critic took him to a cozy restaurant in Chinatown and did a lengthy follow-up interview. After that, as they were wending their way up the steep, narrow road that led back to the hotel, they stopped for breath and somehow fell into a passionate embrace. Goro made no effort whatsoever to hold his hips away so the reporter wouldn’t be aware of his arousal; on the contrary (he told Kogito) he was insistently pressing his erection against her abdomen the entire time.
Perhaps it was a response to the rather formal English he had been forced to communicate in during the series of interviews, but something definitely awakened his aggressive-male tendencies. Or maybe it was because he had built up a lot of sexual energy during the ten days he’d been traveling around America to promote the film. Anyway, the upshot was that instead of heading back to her own place, Amy accompanied Goro up to his hotel room.
“Before that,” Goro explained to Kogito, “it was obvious that she was very healthy and vital, but she just seemed like a plump, jovial, intellectual sort of woman. Once we got down to doing it, though, she turned out to have an absolutely mind-boggling appetite for sex. I mean, any aperture you could think of—she didn’t seem to care whether it was front or rear. All through that night, until morning, she was constantly touching my body somewhere, and when we weren’t actually having intercourse she would use every trick imaginable to get my penis to stand at attention again. All she wanted to do was to have sex with me, again and again. And when even the famously indefatigable Goro finally reached the point where there was simply nothing left to ejaculate, she would take my cock in the corner of her mouth and then show me exactly what she wanted me to do with my fingers while she worked on me furiously with her tongue. Then when I somehow managed to come again, she would catch my semen on that tongue of hers, like a chameleon. And when the limo came to pick me up the next morning, she hopped in, too, and she kept on playing with my poor, worn-out penis, all the way to the airport. Then just recently, when I found out that I had gotten an acting job that involved going to Spain for three weeks, to shoot on location, she informed me that she had booked a room in the same Spanish hotel. Frankly, I’m terrified by the prospect of twenty more days of carnal excess, and I think I’m speaking for my penis, too, when I say, ‘Enough already!’”
Kogito could feel the amusement breaking through his old friend’s subdued mood, but then Goro lapsed into a dark silence and went back to guzzling whiskey with an undisguisedly sorrowful look in his eyes. Kogito couldn’t resist offering some unsolicited advice; it was an old habit of his, dating back to their days as schoolboys.
“Why don’t you try looking at it this way?” he suggested. “Between your last meeting in America and your departure for Spain there’s what, two or three months or so? In that case, when you finally get together again you’ll be overflowing with pent-up passion—at least for the first three days. And soon after that, you’ll take off for location shooting at special sites around the Spanish countryside, and there will be days when you don’t go back to the hotel at all. And then when you do return to the hotel, after being away for a few days, you’ll probably be thrilled to be reunited with Amy again, and your reunion will have a kind of nostalgic freshness.”
Goro was completely drunk now, and his extreme intoxication was probably part of the reason why his voice suddenly sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. “You may write dark, heavy, gloomy novels,” he said, “but when you say something like that it makes me think that you’re really a fundamentally optimistic person. You don’t really act like it, though. I mean, even though you married someone totally down-to-earth like Chikashi, who isn’t in the least bit needy or demanding, you still choose to spend your nights alone on a monastic cot in your library. Still, I really can’t believe that you’re a completely solitary, pessimistic guy at heart—especially when you start going on about thrilling reunions and ‘nostalgic freshness’!”
As it happened, Goro’s Spanish rendezvous with the American film journalist turned out unexpectedly well; indeed, everything transpired in almost exact accordance with the comforting scenario that Kogito had conjured up out of thin air in an attempt to alleviate Goro’s anxieties. According to the story Goro told Kogito much later, on the day Amy arrived at the hotel that would be the crew’s base of operations, she and Goro ended up having sex twice while the sun was still high in the sky, and again late that night, and then one more time the next morning. Afterward Goro broke out in a cold sweat, thinking that twenty more days of this would be absolute hell, but fortunately the bacchanal was brought to a halt after only four days when the Spanish investors whisked the actors away to Madrid.
And then, just as Goro was wondering why they were all partying in Madrid instead of working on the film, it was announced that the Spanish location shooting had been canceled. In order to placate one of the backers, who had made his fortune by exporting inexpensive Spanish wine, the producers had initially promised to shoot at a typical wine-producing location, but apparently the production side wasn’t serious about this plan, and the majority of the supplies and equipment hadn’t even been shipped.
That was the situation, and it was a mess. As a result, it was decided that the location shooting would move within the week to Flores Island, in Indonesia, and Goro spent the better part of his final two days in Spain engaging in genuinely warm, friendly, heartfelt sexual intercourse with the American journalist. In order to catch her plane, which left long before the film crew’s flight to Indonesia, Amy had to crawl out of bed while it was still dark, so there was no time for a voracious sexual farewell, and this richly experienced woman of the world said good-bye to Goro with the solemn, dignified air of someone who knows how to control her desires ... if she really has to.
Goro’s obvious exhaustion from shooting a movie in the tropics over a long, hot summer could have been a factor as well, but as he shared this tale of adventure, Kogito got the impression that he was lost in contemplation of some sort of hardship or suffering that Kogito couldn’t even begin to imagine. Whatever else might have happened, Kogito thought that Goro’s heroic performance on the day the plump, insatiable American woman arrived in Spain from California, when he managed to perform sexually four times in less than twenty-four hours, was a triumph of perseverance and effort. And as he listened to the story, Kogito felt a resurgence of the childish feelings of respect and esteem for his old friend that had first sprouted when they were in high school.
6
In Russia, before the revolution, there was a craze for building vacation villas in Berlin, and one Russian millionaire spent a small fortune erecting an enormous mansion, complete with Greek-style murals on the façade and cylindrical columns supporting the roof. The exterior still retained its original opulence, but the interior of the building had been remodeled and turned into apartments for the faculty of the Center for Advanced Research. Kogito’s flat was on the third floor, overlooking a lake.
After the Christmas holidays, and after the birth of the new millennium had been celebrated with a noisy all-day eruption of fireworks that continued until midnight on December 31, 1999, the Free University opened its doors again and Kogito resumed his routine of riding the bus to and from work. The entire journey took no more than thirty minutes. From nearby Hagenplatz (where Kogito always went on foot to buy wine and groceries) he boarded the bus that ran down Königstrasse, and when he got to Rathenauplatz he changed to a bus that originated just before the busy boulevard of Kurfürstendamm, better known as Ku’damm. Even on days when the frozen lake was piled high with snow in the morning, the white stuff always stopped falling by midday, and although there were days when the city streets seemed to have been turned into frozen icebahns, traffic always went on running smoothly under perpetually cloudy skies.
