Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  I’d forgotten how realistically I had described Kogii in the vignette I dashed off some forty-odd years ago. And when I reviewed the utterly familiar final image, I recognized anew that whenever I had the dream (it was essentially the same scenario every time, though there were small disparities depending upon my state of being on the night in question) Kogii was always present, and I was always watching him as he flashed me a look that I could only describe, vaguely, as a certain ineffable expression.

  I considered this in the context of the point Masao had made about the significance of Kogii as an entity who seemed to exist as a regular person, but who also had a decidedly uncanny (or should I just say supernatural?) aspect to his nature. I felt certain Masao would be interested in reading these pages so I asked Asa to make a copy of the rough draft and give it to him, along with the photocopies she was having made of the other materials in the red leather trunk—materials on which I had pinned so many of my artistic hopes.

  About a week later Masao, Unaiko, and Asa showed up in the theater troupe’s minivan, driven by a young man whom I hadn’t seen before. Both the driver and his young male colleague in the passenger seat were wearing such flashy clothes that I was momentarily dazzled, until Asa introduced the pair and explained that they were dressed for an important audition. Apparently there was a hall in Uwajima (a seaside town an hour away) that showcased up-and-coming performers in the hopes of attracting audiences from the main island of Honshu, who could now travel there by car via a recently opened bridge. That hall was the destination of the two dapperly turned-out young men. They were part of the Caveman Group, but also performed on their own as a comedy duo called Suke & Kaku—always with an ampersand, they solemnly informed me.

  “The work they’re doing is very postmodern,” Asa explained. “Needless to say, their choice of a retro-sounding name was completely intentional. They borrowed their stage names, Suke & Kaku, from a couple of raffish sidekicks in the popular period drama Mito Komon, which has been running on television since these two first opened their eyes as infants.”

  “Sometimes fans of Suke & Kaku’s postmodern skits will come to a public performance by the Caveman Group, and they’ll laugh uproariously at all the wrong places,” Masao said wryly. “It can be quite unnerving for everyone concerned—not just the actors, but the rest of the audience as well.”

  I soon learned that Masao and his entire crew had read the transcript of the first interview, and they knew exactly what they wanted me to talk about next: my recurrent “Kogii dream.” Once again, Unaiko set up the recording equipment with her trademark swift yet painstaking professionalism.

  “Until I reread the fragment recently, I wasn’t seeing much significance in the role Kogii played in the dream,” I began. “But from what you’ve said about your dramatization, it has become clear to me that his presence was a pivotal element. When we look at the phrasing of my mother’s haiku, where she says, And like the river current, you won’t return home, a question arises. After thinking obsessively about this matter for a very long time, endlessly refining those lines in her mind, is it possible all she wanted was to have them read and understood by her only son? I recounted my recurrent dream in the opening section of the prologue to my drowning novel, but Kogii was only mentioned briefly at the end. Now, though, I feel I’d like to delve further into the meaning of what Masao has called the ‘Kogii effect’ through these interviews with you, if only for my own enlightenment.

  “At my boyhood home there was a rickety old military rowboat that had been retired from active duty and then delivered to our house by a young army officer, as a gift for my father. We called it, simply, ‘the boat.’ When the craft was launched into the floodwaters (and we’ll never know whether it was an accident) Kogii was at the rear of the boat, standing next to my father with one hand on the tiller. But why do I keep having the dream, even now? Well, when I stopped to think about it I seemed to be remembering Kogii’s presence in my father’s boat as something that actually occurred, in reality. In other words, it isn’t as if I dreamed a total fiction, then conflated the dream with reality, and eventually became convinced that the dream scenario had actually taken place in real life. No, I truly believe the dream was seeded by reality, and not the other way around.

  “That night, the plan was for me to shove the boat out into the wide part of the river and then hop on board alongside my father, but I totally botched my life-or-death assignment. Dreams aside, that’s what really happened. It isn’t some compensatory figment of my imagination, cooked up after my father drowned and his body was delivered to our house. But when I tried to talk about the incident later on, my mother turned a deaf ear, just as she’d done years before when I was grumbling about how Kogii had deserted me and returned to the forest.

  “When I was drafting the prologue to my drowning novel, as an adult writer, I revisited that night. I was looking for a way to express what a momentous occurrence my father’s drowning was for our family, but in a fit of cowardice I wrote the whole scene as if it were the recollection of a dream. (Though it is true I’ve had the exact same dream, over and over.)

  “If you’ll bear with me as I continue with this somewhat convoluted explanation, the event that gave rise to the dream really happened, and all the details I recall are rooted in reality. In the summer of 1945, shortly after our country lost the war, there was an unforgettable night when a storm raged through the forest and the river swelled and roared and overflowed its banks, ultimately rising so high that it engulfed the rocky outcropping above this house. (Incidentally, if you go up there and look down you’ll see that the river today, with its splendidly constructed embankment, bears almost no resemblance to the Kame River as it was then.) Anyway, my father launched his little boat into the tumultuous, storm-tossed river, and then he drowned. That was the first big event and it really did occur, although it was always a taboo subject while I was growing up. The only question in my mind was about my father’s motivation for setting out on such a perilous night.

  “As my mother said in one line of her poem, my father was swept away by the river current, never to return home. In a sense, by drowning he became one with the current. Because of the extreme weather, it wasn’t until the following day that my father’s drowned body was retrieved from the riverbank and brought home. So, reading between the first and second lines of the poem, I think what my mother was trying to convey to me was this: ‘You place a lot of emphasis on the fact that your father went out on the river in the midst of a flood, but his body did come back to us eventually, so it’s not as if he was swept away in the extreme sense of never seen again.’ The line also seems to be saying, ‘And what about you, Kogii? Like the river current, you won’t return home, either.’ Of course, that’s a fairly transparent way of chiding me for my selfishness in choosing to live in Tokyo.

  “In the first line, too, she’s criticizing me by saying, ‘If you don’t make the necessary preparations for the end of your son’s life, and your own, it would be like sending Akari out onto the river in the terrifying, pitch-dark night with no explanation and letting the current sweep him away.’ And my lines, which continue the poem, are basically responding: ‘Well, since you put it that way, I have to admit it’s true.’

  “So my part of the poem is meant to be an honest acknowledgment of the current state of affairs. In Tokyo during the dry season / I’m remembering everything backward / From old age to earliest childhood.”

  “But, Mr. Choko,” Masao Anai said, “in your lines, rather than caving in to your mother’s pressure, weren’t you responding to the rather plaintive voice that permeates her poem by saying in return: ‘Hey, maybe I did behave like the river current by going away to Tokyo and not coming back, but before I’m swallowed up in the vortex of the whirlpool I’m going to remember everything that has happened in my life, from my childhood through the present day.’ If you did so, then maybe some kind of reversal of the sad state of affairs set forth in the poem might be possible
. Otherwise, why would you have made your part of the poem an undisguised echo of those well-known lines by T. S. Eliot?”

  I was all talked out for the moment, so I didn’t reply to Masao Anai’s question. But then Unaiko, without switching off the tape recorder, posed a question of her own: “By the way, what on earth is a ‘spider lily cask’? I’ve never heard that term before.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I guess I’d better give you a complete explanation, since it looks as if we’re going to be talking a lot about Kogii, and the story of my flood dream is an important part of the saga. As a child I wasn’t able to understand my father’s world the way I do now, but he must have told me some of these things, and then later on I was able to put them together.

  “My father never talked about where he was born and raised, although I suspect that my mother must have known. He and my mother met and married in Tokyo, and from the time the two of them came back together to set up house in her native village—in other words, for the latter half of his life—he seemed to do very little work. (Or at least that’s how it appeared to me, as a child.) Anyway, because he was his own boss and had an abundance of free time, young army officers from the regiment at Matsuyama would frequently drop by to visit and drink sake on their days off. What sort of radical things were they discussing at those gatherings? Was my father a leader or a follower? Were they planning some sort of symbolic insurrection? I didn’t know for sure, but I was thinking that if I had access to the red leather trunk I would be able to dig up some juicy clues in letters written by the young officers, my father’s correspondence with his own mentor, and so on. That was my hope when I came down here.

  “In retrospect, I realize that my father probably wasn’t as idle as I thought he was. For one thing, he believed there would eventually be food shortages in Japan, and he came up with a rather unusual method for dealing with such a situation. As you know, the Kame River snakes through this mountain valley, and in those days the wide slope on the south bank was entirely covered with forests of chestnut trees. (You can still see a few of those trees today.) My grandfather was in the ‘mountain products’ business—that is, he would package chestnuts and persimmons and ship them to Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, and beyond—and at some point he got the idea of encouraging some of the local chestnut-growing households to plant Oriental paperbush plants between rows of chestnut trees.

  “The fibrous bark of the paperbush was the basic raw material for paper used in making Japanese currency, so the local harvest from those bushes was sent to the official government printing bureau. First, though, the bushes had to be cut down and the bark stripped off and steamed. After the bark had been dried and separated into bundles, it was temporarily stashed in a warehouse. (Like the paper-bush’s showy flowers, the processed bark was a brilliant white.) The work was done by farmers, as a group effort, and the women and old people would help by soaking the rough bark in the river, then peeling it off in thin layers.

  “My father was something of an amateur inventor, and he designed a machine to strip the bark and had a number of those devices made by a firm that manufactured traditional knives. In order to prepare the bark to be transported by truck, my father would compression-mold it into bricks, to meet government standards. He also invented a good-size packing machine, which he even managed to patent. As far as I know my father had never formally studied engineering, but he clearly enjoyed tinkering with machinery and solving practical problems. I seem to have inherited his penchant for inventive puttering around the house—bricolage, as they say in French.

  “So how did my father propose to deal with the food shortage he was anticipating? Well, he had observed that every summer the riverside slope I mentioned a moment ago would turn a deep scarlet as the red spider lilies growing wild among the chestnut trees began to bloom. From the autumn of the year before Japan lost the war until the following summer (in other words, until a few months before he drowned), my father became involved in spearheading a public works project—an uncharacteristically social undertaking for a rather private person like him. He began by asking the principal of the local high school whether some students could be assigned to dig up the bulbs of the red spider lilies. He even offered to pay the child laborers a small wage. The high school kids threw themselves into the task with tremendous enthusiasm, and before long the storehouse normally used for chestnuts and persimmons was overflowing with bulbs.

  “My father commandeered a portion of my mother’s vegetable garden and built a sort of minifactory in our backyard,” I went on. “He used bamboo pipes to funnel running water from the nearby river, and he built a mechanism to pulverize the bulbs. This type of amateur-engineering challenge was right in his wheelhouse. He put in some wide stone steps leading down to the river, and then he lined up a large number of barrels on a concrete slab he had installed on the riverbank and secured them with ropes. (It’s likely that my father found his pals in the military very useful when it came to getting hold of these materials.)

  “The next task was to soak the pulverized spider lily bulbs in water. There was a wide, sandy beach downstream from our house, and that’s where my father placed a row of racks covered with straw mats, to use for drying the pulp. After the processed bulbs were dry, the final step in his master plan was to convert them into an edible form.

  “Now, even children knew spider lily bulbs were poisonous, but there was a time, long ago, when the bulbs were turned into a flourlike powder and used as an emergency foodstuff in case of famine. People would grind the bulbs, then neutralize the toxicity by adding some medicinal herbs they’d gathered in the forest. Everyone, including my father, knew about this custom; there were even some old botanical illustrations on display in the local historical archives. My mother and grandmother were both locally renowned amateur herbalists, and they knew the forest couldn’t possibly provide enough of the medicinal herbs needed to detoxify the poisonous bulbs. Luckily, someone had developed a chemical agent that could be substituted for the elusive herbs, and my father obtained a supply from a friend who worked at a university on Kyushu. The idea was that if he could get the bulb-conversion factory up and running, he would be able to provide an ample quantity of high-quality starch.

  “My mother and the other folks from the neighborhood who were helping out in the factory weren’t totally convinced the man-made chemical agent would detoxify the bulbs, but nonetheless the work went on. I remember seeing a long row of barrels filled to the brim with pulverized spider lily bulbs at the top of the riverbank. Things seemed to be moving along quite well until the rainy season began.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Masao said, but he sounded a trifle impatient. “If we could just get back to the subject at hand, we know the full moon shone through a break in the clouds during a lull in the storm, right around midnight, and that was when your father set off on the flooded river in his little boat and ended up being drowned. Asa has confirmed that timeline as well. But to be honest, I have a feeling the cold, hard truth ends there. Perhaps you really were left behind because you got distracted and didn’t manage to climb aboard in time. But the bit about seeing Kogii standing in the boat, staring back at you? I can’t help thinking that part of the story was a dream and nothing more. Either way, the dream definitely gives the reality a deeper dimension.

  “Needless to say, we aren’t trying to make a documentary here,” Masao went on, “so I would like to stage the scene not as a dream sequence but as reality, in accordance with your insistence that the ten-year-old boy really did see his doppelgänger, Kogii, against the backdrop of a giant wall of water. But how can we re-create that tableau onstage? I’m hoping we can figure out the logistics as we proceed with these interviews. I’d like very much to conjure up a scene where the Kogii I’m envisioning—who, as we’ve discussed, is a kind of supernatural being—takes the form of an ordinary child. If we can pull this off, I think it could be fantastic!”

  2

  This was on a Sunday. The original plan
had been to stage a rehearsal, right there at the Forest House, of the condensed version of the troupe’s prize-winning dramatic adaptation of my novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, in order to show me the kind of work it was doing. However, two young actors who were slated to participate had gotten a gig (as they called it) to perform elsewhere in the guise of their sketch-comedy personas, Suke & Kaku. As a result, the rehearsal was rescheduled for the following week. I already had a good feeling about the dynamic of the Caveman Group, based on what I had seen so far of Masao Anai’s strong but fair leadership style (or rather shared leadership, with Unaiko), and this latest development only strengthened my sense that the group was run as a sort of collegial democracy.

  And so it was that a week later, on the following Sunday morning, a caravan of assorted vehicles came bumping down the private road and pulled up in front of the Forest House. Within minutes the young actors were hard at work on the preparations for the rehearsal, under the supervision of Masao and Unaiko.