Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  As for me, I had willingly surrendered the first floor to this energetic group (whose members were so focused on their work that they hadn’t even taken the time to greet me one by one) and had retired to my second-floor study. After a while, Masao called to me from the bottom of the stairs. I emerged from my lair to find that Asa, too, had joined the party.

  As soon as Asa and I—a command performance audience of two—had seated ourselves with our backs to the partition, Masao strode onto the makeshift stage and began to speak. (The “stage” was furnished with a narrow soldier’s bed his young helpers had carried down from the second floor, along with a chair from the dining room.)

  To set the scene for his little audience, Masao led off with a general explanation, but the complex timbre of his voice—simultaneously natural, robust, and precise—seemed to offer a glimpse of his particular brand of theater.

  “After having read our copy of the prologue of the drowning novel, Unaiko and I were thinking we would like to open the play with a monologue by the person who is visited by the recurrent dream described in the opening passage,” Masao began. “A small boat is moored in a riverside cove, and our narrator’s father is standing in the bobbing boat and facing away from the audience, with the overflowing river as a dramatic backdrop. In the foreground stands a young boy, immersed in muddy water up to his chest. He, too, is facing away from us. Floating high above the boat is the solitary figure of Kogii, and he’s the only one facing the audience. So that’ll be the tentative staging of the opening scene.

  “However, the part of the story where the writer sifts through the contents of the red leather trunk as the entire drowning novel unfolds before us is just a vague concept. Right now we’re in the process of rereading your complete works, Mr. Choko, with the goal of making our allusions as powerful as possible, so today we’ll only be presenting a few scenes from our already completed adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.

  “In the first scene, a ten-year-old boy has tagged along with his father (known to everyone as Choko Sensei), who is preparing to charge into battle with a ragtag bunch of army officers—all, we gather, deserters from the regiment in Matsuyama. The ensuing pantomime unfolds at a snail’s pace across the entire stage; the slowness is unavoidable because Choko Sensei is riding in a ‘chariot’ made from a wooden fertilizer box with rough-hewn wheels.

  “In actuality, that scene is superimposed over the ongoing narrative of a mentally ill man, reclining on a bed upstage. At the beginning the role is played by Unaiko, but she is almost completely concealed by a jumble of sheets and blankets. Seated beside the bed is a large person in a nurse’s uniform, silently listening to the patient’s story with a skeptical look on her face. The role of the nurse is played (in drag) by Kaku, whom you’ll remember as half of the duo of Suke & Kaku.

  “The action taking place downstage portrays the recollections of the patient who is lying in bed reminiscing about the summer of 1945, and the ten-year-old boy is in fact the institutionalized man himself, twenty-some years earlier. Oh, and, Mr. Choko? Once the play begins, if the spirit moves you, please feel free to join in and speak the lines along with the actors. We’ve tried to bring your novel to life passage by passage, with maximum fidelity to the original, so chiming in from time to time should come naturally to the author! Seriously, though, audience participation is completely optional. Okay then, here we go.”

  Only a single pane of glass separated the impromptu stage from the summer garden, where the roses—palest lavender, deepest crimson—were blooming in thick, luxuriant clusters. Inside, a quick switch had been made on the stage, and the person lying in bed was now being played by Suke, while Kaku continued to act the part of the large-boned nurse sitting next to the patient’s bed in a metal chair.

  Both characters were silent, but the mental patient was evidently remembering his past self as a ten-year-old boy. A hallucinatory vision of the boy, played by Unaiko in a military service cap, entered the foreground of the stage and began to shout in a shrill, piercing voice.

  “Mother, Mother, this is terrible—things are really getting out of control! The soldiers have made Father their leader, and they’re gonna stage an insurrection! I knew it, I knew it—it’s just as I thought. They’ve gone off the deep end, and they’ve chosen Father to lead them into battle! We need to check the paper where I wrote down all the people who called Father a spy or a traitor, or said he wanted Japan to lose the war, and then we have to figure out how many names are on that list. It’s such a big job, and we’re gonna be so busy! Oh, Mother, Mother, this is exactly what I was afraid of, and now it’s happening!”

  This scene went on and on for a very long time. I seemed to feel my old novel coming back to life inside me, but with an oddly intriguing new twist.

  In the next scene, which unfolded across the entire stage, my military-uniform-clad father (who had more or less lost the use of his limbs) was placed in the rough, smelly crate his followers were euphemistically calling a wooden chariot. He was then pushed forward and loaded, crate and all, into a military truck. Simultaneously, the young boy (who had been lurking in the background) emerged from the shadows and spoke—not shrilly and hysterically this time, but in Unaiko’s own naturally calm voice.

  “Anyway, in the mountain valley early one morning on a day in August—so early, in fact, that everything was still inky blackness, without even the faintest glimmer of dawn—the soldiers and I loaded Father into a makeshift wooden ‘chariot’ and, moving as slowly as sleepy turtles, we set off on foot, taking turns pushing the wooden cart. At the mouth of the valley we hoisted the cart, with Father inside, onto a military truck that was waiting there, and, coalesced at long last into a brigade of rebels, the group headed for the provincial capital of Matsuyama by way of the switchback road that wound its torturous way through a mountain pass. And while the army truck, being driven recklessly fast, was screaming along the narrow road, the soldiers in the back kept up a raucous chorus, singing disconnected fragments of a foreign song over and over at maximum volume.

  “‘What does this song mean, anyway?’ I inquired, and my father (with his eyes still closed and rivulets of sweat running down his deathly pale, porcelain-smooth, eerily unwrinkled face, and his corpulent body bumping against the boards of the wooden cart) gave an explanation. Of course, after all this time, I’m sure I only remember the barest gist of what he told me: ‘It’s German. Tränen means “tears,” and Tod is “death.” They’re singing that the emperor himself, with his own hand, will wipe away my tears. In other words, the song is saying the soldiers are waiting and hoping for the day when His Imperial Majesty, with his own fingertips, will gently wipe away their sorrowful tears.’”

  At this point in Anai’s staging of the play, one of Bach’s solo cantatas suddenly burst forth in the background. (I remembered hearing that same thrilling high-volume sound at an avant-garde performance I’d been invited to attend nearly twenty years earlier, in an intimate little theater space.) The recitation continued, struggling to be heard over the rising wave of music, but the narrator’s voice was ultimately swept away on the soaring tide of song.

  Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.

  Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,

  Komm und führe mich nur fort….

  And as the chorus swelled I felt something beginning to stir in the deepest recesses of my heart, and I couldn’t stop myself from joining in.

  3

  After the play had ended, the young apprentices immediately set to work clearing away the stage props. When they left the Forest House it was not quite four o’clock in the afternoon, but the light had already begun to fade from the jar-shaped valley. The young folks had to get back to Matsuyama, where they had a job that involved both performing and working backstage at a concert by a singer-songwriter from Tokyo. Although I myself had never been moved to attend a concert of that sort, I could imagine what an asset the young members of the Caveman Group would be to su
ch an event.

  Alone in the Forest House as night descended on the valley, I reflected on what I had just experienced. From the start, the rehearsal had felt rather dark and dreary. The main characters were a decidedly gloomy group: the young boy portrayed by Unaiko in costume, shrieking in a shrill voice (in other words, myself, some sixty-five years earlier); the reclining patient and the nurse at the back of the stage; and finally my father, who was in the last stages of bladder cancer, standing in his wooden “chariot” in a puddle of bloody urine. Not surprisingly, for anyone familiar with the novella, there wasn’t a single bright, cheery, attractive face to be found. The staging followed the book closely, including a scene in which my father—still in his wooden cart—is loaded onto the bed of a truck whose sides were framed with two-by-fours, then filled in with corrugated cardboard. The young boy is jammed in beside his father, while the soldiers line up behind them.

  By the end of the impromptu production, there were more than twenty actors onstage: young women and men from the Caveman Group, most of whom I had never laid eyes on. The actors playing the group of soldiers under the renegade officers’ command were outfitted with handmade field caps and toy swords, and when they all joined in the rousing chorus of the German war anthem the stage seemed to explode in pyrotechnic splendor.

  Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.

  Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,

  Komm und führe mich nur fort….

  After the chorus had faded away, the ostensibly male patient (played, at that juncture, by Unaiko), who had been lying on his side in the bed and narrating the scene, stood up. The character’s previously nonchalant style of narration suddenly changed radically, and he began to speak in a powerful declamatory voice that dominated the stage.

  “I’ll die fighting in the little army my father is leading into this noble insurrection! As I was thinking this, a fighter plane appeared from the direction of the provincial city, coming in low over the pass, and the soldiers began shouting:

  “‘Look how recklessly he’s flying. He doesn’t care what happens anymore!’

  “‘We’d better get the planes we need fast, before those bastards crash them!’

  “‘We need at least ten airplanes, then we can crash them into the Imperial Palace and go out in a kamikaze blaze of glory!’

  ‘“Our goal is junshi—suicide in the emperor’s name—it’s junshi for us all!’

  “‘It’s junshi for us all’—the hot thorns in those words pierced my small heart, then lodged there and continued to burn. Before long I, too, had begun to sing along with the officers and enlisted men in my high, shrill voice.”

  After that Unaiko, now playing the role of the young boy, stepped forward to the front of the stage and started to lead the chorus. And as the stirring cantata approached a crescendo even I began to sing along from my seat in the peanut gallery!

  “Wow, Kogii—I never expected to hear you singing in such a loud voice, and in German to boot!” Asa exclaimed after the music had died down. “Of course, I don’t know whether your pronunciation is any good. Seriously, though, at least you were able to make your voice blend with those of the actors, and they’ve been practicing the piece for a while. Even after knowing you for all these years, it isn’t something I ever expected to see, or hear! I’ve attended some formal productions by the Caveman Group, and they have always been very well done, but I was never as moved as I am right now.”

  Asa had returned from her quick run to the train station, and as she delivered this little speech she was standing next to me, staring out at the deepening darkness enveloping the mountain valley. “Unaiko has told me about the meaning of the words of the cantata you were singing,” she went on, “and while I can’t sympathize with the ideology, that didn’t keep me from being moved by the music, and the voices.”

  “Well,” I replied, “in my novella those lines are rendered just as Father explained them to me. Heiland selbst means the savior or rescuer himself, which in this case is the emperor, even though obviously there’s no way the actual ruler would be involved in this scenario. I remember that the young officers who were always drinking sake at our house used to bellow the German anthem every night at the top of their lungs while listening to the RCA Victor Red Seal recording on the phonograph. When I was starting work on that book, I sang the chorus (which I recalled only vaguely) for Goro, and he knew right away which Bach composition it was.

  “Afterward he even went out and tracked down a copy of the LP. One day he brought it by and we proceeded to sing the song together, with Goro stopping from time to time to explain the meaning of the German lyrics, and the words gradually came back to me. That’s the background, but when the actors began to sing and I heard the magnificently loud, theatrical sound, I couldn’t help but join the chorus. I must say, singing along with that ultranationalist anthem has left me with a strangely ambivalent aftertaste. But this troupe certainly knows how to put on a play, don’t they?”

  “You can say that again,” Asa said. “There I was, watching the rehearsal, with half my mind on other things, when suddenly in the seat next to me my brother began to sing! Sixty-odd years have passed since your voice changed, but it still sounds kind of screechy, and when I heard it fervently raised in song, I thought to myself, Yikes, this feels like something genuine.” (Asa used the unflattering word “screechy” to describe my voice, and that might have been accurate since I had renewed my acquaintance with the song through the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recording Goro found for me. Still, I was tempted to say that I would have preferred to hear my singing voice described as a mellow baritone or even a pleasant countertenor, rather than a prepubescent screech.)

  “I felt as though your singing was coming from a deep well of emotion,” Asa continued, evidently unable to stop marveling at my unusual behavior. “It seemed, at that moment, as if the intense emotions of childhood were being rekindled in your heart, so I just sat perfectly still, letting the sound wash over me. Honestly, I’ve never heard you sing with such passion, not even when you were in school. Maybe the song has been hibernating in your memory—or your soul—all this time, and was somehow reawakened when you heard it here today.

  “But also, I keep going back to the original book this dramatization is based on. I remember The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away very well, because it caused so much suffering for Mother and me. The ultranationalist uprising described in the novella supposedly takes place on August sixteenth, but in actuality there was never a single guerrilla uprising, anywhere in Japan, involving soldiers who were disgruntled about Japan’s surrender. As a young novelist, you were probably afraid of being raked over the coals by the older generation of critics. They tended to be rigorous about matters of historical verisimilitude, so you found a way around that by portraying the surreal shootout as the delusion of a patient in a mental hospital. The institutionalized patient—who, as a child, was along for the ride—is remembering the voices of the soldiers, singing in the truck as they headed to their doomed insurrection … and that’s when he begins to sing the German song.

  “However, if you delve deeply enough into your memories, there’s a real-life incident you experienced long before you ever thought of writing the novella. As you’ve mentioned, during the four or five days before Father’s death, officers from the Matsuyama regiment kept stopping by our house to drink sake, and some of them even slept over in the storehouse next door. At the time, you heard the drunken young officers singing the song, and it would have stuck in your mind. The song itself is a Bach cantata, so of course it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Japanese emperor, but it must have somehow tugged at your heartstrings, don’t you think? And even if you didn’t come right out and say so in the novella, you must have been feeling a visceral connection to the fervor and excitement of the officers.

  “I’m pretty sure you came in here today planning to watch the rehearsal with a coolly critical eye, but when the rousing chorus began your face
turned bright red and you started to sing along in that high, squeaky voice. While I was watching you in amazement, I couldn’t help thinking, This is so intense it’s almost scary. But as I said earlier, I was feeling deeply moved myself, so the whole thing is rather complicated for me.”

  I wasn’t sure what Asa had found so “scary” and “complicated,” and I paused for a moment to ponder her choice of words. We were still sitting there in the gathering dark while outside, Chikashi’s tiny rose garden and the valley beyond it were barely illuminated by the last remains of daylight. The heavily overcast sky, which had been threatening to rain since morning, was almost imperceptibly tinted by traces of a pale, diluted sunset.

  After we had shared a contemplative moment, Asa spoke again, and her concerns became clear. “Now, it’s not as if I’m worried that at this late date my famously liberal brother will be criticized for innocently enjoying the sound of an ultranationalist anthem,” she said. “It’s just that you’re about to embark on what (considering your age) may well turn out to be your final project. I realize your main focus will be on exploring the contents of the red leather trunk, with the help of the Caveman Group, but I can’t help wondering what might happen if some echoes of the ultranationalist German song were to show up in the book you ultimately write.

  “After the rehearsal Unaiko and I took the young folks to the Japan Rail station in Honmachi, to see them off. Then the two of us—the feisty old lady and Unaiko, the gifted young woman in the prime of life—lingered awhile on the elevated station platform overlooking the picturesque basin of the valley and the mountain range beyond, and we had a very intense conversation. (Incidentally, Unaiko and I have been keeping in touch via email for quite some time, and we agreed to keep the conversation going, like a couple of soul sisters, completely independent of our respective relationships with Masao Anai.)