Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Akari and I hailed a taxi outside Matsuyama Airport, then sat back in silence as the driver followed the road along the Kame River all the way to the Forest House. Upon our arrival we learned that Unaiko and Ricchan, having completed the preparations for our stay, had returned to Matsuyama, where the theater group had its offices. In their stead a young female member of the drama troupe, whom I had met briefly the last time I was at the Forest House, had prepared our evening meal and was waiting to greet us. Akari and I ate dinner without exchanging a word. After the girl from the Caveman Group had shown Akari around the premises—he had been there before, but it always took some time for him to get acclimated to any change of living situation—she gave us the keys to the house and took off. Akari climbed the stairs to the room she had pointed out as his, which was next to my combination study/bedroom.

  I went into the great room on the ground floor, which was clearly in the process of being converted from a rehearsal area back into a living space. After opening my luggage and making a halfhearted stab at unpacking, I poured myself a little nightcap and drank it down. As I climbed the stairs, I couldn’t hear any sounds emanating from Akari’s room. Feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness, I crawled into my bed, which smelled of sunlight. When I got up again a moment later to check whether the night-light in the bathroom was on, I saw that Akari’s pill organizer and a used drinking glass—clear evidence he hadn’t forgotten to take his bedtime medicine—had been left out in plain sight, where I would be sure to notice them.

  The next morning I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. When I ran downstairs to answer it (Akari was evidently still asleep), an unmistakably familiar voice on the other end said, “Hello, this is Daio.” Despite Asa’s warning, I was startled. Daio must have picked up on my reaction, because he immediately launched into an apologetic explanation about the circumstances surrounding his spurious “death.”

  When the training camp was breaking up, he told me, his mischievous disciples apparently decided that it would be amusing to play an elaborate prank on Kogito Choko, and the resulting jape was somehow connected with a “pre-death wake” they had staged in Daio’s honor before the members of the group went their separate ways.

  “I’m already in the neighborhood, down by the river,” Daio went on. “I’ll wander around here for half an hour or so before heading to the Forest House. I’ve been there once before, when Asa invited me to a meeting of the drama group, so I know the way. She gave me a key as well.” “Thank you for calling,” I said. “If you had just appeared at the door with no advance notice, I might have thought I was seeing a ghost. On the other hand, my list of friends and acquaintances includes more and more dead people these days, so it might have seemed perfectly natural …”

  “Asa said I should drop by as soon as possible after you arrived,” Daio said. “By the way, I gather you went through quite an ordeal with the turtle my disciples sent you as a joke. For quite some time now, reading has been my only pleasure; I read all your books as soon as they come out, so I know you wrote about that epic struggle in The Changeling. Speaking of turtles, there’s a much easier way to kill them, you know. You just put the creature on the cutting board, belly up, and when it sticks out its neck and starts thrashing around, trying to turn over, bam! You chop off its head, easy as pie. But hey—I guess even an erudite person like you has a few gaps in his knowledge!”

  Half an hour later I came downstairs again and found Daio waiting in the great room. On the south side of the spacious room, between some professional lighting equipment and a pair of giant speakers, there were an oblong table and two chairs.

  Daio was perched on one of those chairs, and I noticed that my opened trunk had been neatly placed on the floor of the makeshift stage in front of the large plate-glass window overlooking the back garden. I left the luggage strewn around the room when I went to bed, and Daio had apparently tidied it up without being asked. The sofa had been cleared off, too, evidently for Akari and me to use when we came downstairs. I couldn’t help thinking, This must be how it feels to have a butler, or a valet: a luxurious perk I had only read about in British novels.

  Daio got up from his chair and gestured for me to take a seat on the couch. Then he shot a glance toward the stairs, clearly hoping to see Akari on his way down. I recalled that in the seemingly solemn letter his prankish training-camp disciples sent me they had used the term “one-legged and one-eyed” (which is often employed, both in period fiction and anime, to describe swordsmen with mythical powers) in reference to their leader. Just as I remembered, Daio was missing an arm, and one of his sleeves was neatly pinned up in the usual way.

  “Hello, Kogito. It’s been a while,” he said, openly giving me the once-over. “I can’t help thinking that if your father had lived to enjoy his old age, he would have looked a lot like you do now—aside from your bad posture, of course. Your father always thought you would grow up to be an interesting chap, and you seem to have turned out just as he hoped.”

  “Actually, I think the term he used was ‘joker,’ rather than ‘interesting chap,” I said lightly.

  “No, but seriously, you really are an interesting guy,” Daio insisted. “And that isn’t the same as being a joker, or a jester, or whatever. As a child you were always searching for obscure characters in your father’s dictionary—you were kind of like an insect collector, only with kanji. I remember one time when your father was happily expounding on the meaning of some word or other and you interrupted, saying, ‘That’s not what it says in the dictionary!’ Then you added, a bit more kindly, that the print was extremely tiny and it was a rather complicated character, so your father had probably just misread it. And when he fished out his magnifying glass and examined the word in question, sure enough: you were right.”

  It was actually a rather proud memory for me. At the time my father was only fifty years old, but because of a combination of wartime privations and the remoteness of our mountain village he was malnourished, and he probably had the eyesight of a much older man. As a result he would occasionally misread something, especially when the print was very small. I was obsessed with finding unusual kanji, so I used to spend hours poring over the index of my father’s big dictionary. That’s why I was able to suss out his mistakes on more than one occasion. I even made a point of memorizing potentially problematic characters, and whenever I came across one that I thought my father might be likely to misread at some point, I would be filled with youthful excitement.

  Perhaps the most memorable example involved Shinobu Origuchi’s explanatory comments regarding his most famous novel, The Book of the Dead. Those remarks took the form of an essay titled “The Motif of the Mountain-Crossing Buddha,” which was published several years later. The passage in question was a description of how, in olden days, pilgrims used to flock to Shitennoji (the Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings) to watch the sun set over the western gate—a view popularly considered to be a preview of the heavenly paradise known as the Pure Land. Some of the most fervent believers would actually seek to take a shortcut to the Pure Land by drowning themselves in the Inland Sea or whatever body of water happened to be nearby.

  When my father read this passage, he mistook 淼淼(a duplicated-kanji compound meaning “an endless expanse of water,” entirely composed of 水, the character for water) for a similar-looking compound: 森森, which consists of repetitions of 木, the character for “tree,” and is used to describe tall trees growing densely in a forest.

  One day while my father was hard at work at our family business, inspecting the bundles of dried, bleached-out paperbush bark for any untidy scraps that might have adhered to them (he did this by turning the large bundles with a specially designed cargo hook), he started talking to my mother about the Origuchi book he had been reading. She was sitting next to him, busy with her own tasks.

  “‘A dense forest of ocean waves’ is a rather intriguing turn of phrase,” he remarked. “Around here they say when someone passes awa
y, that person’s spirit rises through the air and returns to the forest, isn’t that right? To the people who descend into the depths of the forest from the heights of the sky, the leaves of the trees might appear to resemble waves in the sea. So there really could be a thick forest of waves, figuratively speaking.”

  My father was referring to the local belief that when people from our area die their souls return to the upper tier of the forest above the valley. In our family, the belief was fostered not by my father (who originally came from another part of the country) but by my grandmother and my mother, both of whom used to volunteer at the local shrine. My father tended to be quite taciturn and it was unusual for him to start a conversation in such a way, so it must have made my mother very happy.

  I happened to be standing nearby, and their exchange made me prick up my ears. Because of my obsessive penchant for perusing the index of the kanji dictionary I was familiar with both of the characters in question, and when I ran to check the Origuchi book my hunch that my father had misread the compound was confirmed.

  “The kanji in the quotation is written with the character for water, arranged in a sort of pyramid,” I announced triumphantly when I returned. “The one you mistook for it is constructed in the same way, only with the character for tree. The first one is used to talk about floods and so on, and also to describe a scene where a body of water stretches as far as the eye can see.”

  My father put on the silver-framed reading glasses he always kept nearby and then, wearing an expression so serious that it almost made him look like a different person, he went into his small study in the interior of the house, presumably to double-check what I had said. Later, he apparently shared his pride and amusement over the incident with my mother and also, as I was learning just now, with Daio.

  While I listened to Daio on that morning in early spring, an image floated across my mind: my father, not out on some vast ocean but rather spinning around on the river bottom during the big flood, on the verge of being inexorably drawn into the whirlpool. My father, who at that moment must have been experiencing the sensations of venturing deep into the forest and, simultaneously, being sucked into a watery vortex. My father, who (for all I knew) might even have believed in some paradisiacal world beyond—a realm that could somehow, magically, be reached by drowning.

  “Choko Sensei was studying the ways in which society and the nation as a whole were moving forward,” Daio was saying. “He used to tell us about some of the things he learned from his correspondence with supposedly illustrious people, but when we asked whether those people were recognized experts in the field of politics or economics it always emerged that, in fact, they were not. But you yourself gravitated toward the study of literature, and we’ve all heard the story of how you became interested in the subject because of the books your mother brought home for you when you were a child, during the war.”

  While Daio and I were enjoying a desultory chat, Unaiko (who had driven down from Matsuyama) was busy in the kitchen fixing breakfast for us. When she came into the great room bearing coffee, she was dressed more or less as usual in Chinese-style trousers and a loose shirt that was almost like a jacket. However, I also got a clear sense of something Asa had spoken of in one of her letters: Unaiko did, indeed, project a kind of heightened aura, as if the major success of her theater-in-the-round play had somehow peeled away part of a protective carapace while also giving her self-confidence a visible boost.

  Unaiko needed to consult with me about some practical matters, such as what time Akari should be awakened and when was the latest he could take his morning medicine—Maki had provided a list of all the meds and their dosages—but she conducted even that quotidian exchange in a lively, energized way. Evidently she had already had some preliminary discussions about division of labor with Daio.

  “I’ll go upstairs and get Akari out of bed myself,” I said. “I don’t foresee any particular problems during the morning hours, at least.”

  At this point Unaiko produced a fax from Maki that gave detailed instructions about Akari’s breakfast menus, complete with illustrations in the margins, and began to study it carefully.

  The night before I had checked to make sure Akari was asleep and breathing normally before going to bed myself, but I hadn’t waited until he made his nightly midsleep trip to the bathroom. Before my disastrous outburst in the clinic’s waiting room, I had made a ritual of getting up whenever I heard Akari making his way to the toilet; I would go into his room and tidy the sheets and quilts, then wait for him to return so I could tuck him in again. Since that dark day, though, I hadn’t once performed my familiar middle-of-the-night task—which I had always thought of as something I would be doing forever.

  Now, as I opened the door and entered the room (which was still dark because of the drawn curtains, and redolent of Akari’s body odor), I felt reluctant to turn on the light. After a moment I got a sense that something was stirring in the bed and then, finally, I flipped the switch. Akari was lying stretched out on the bed, wrapped in a cotton quilt and staring at the ceiling.

  “You and I are going to be staying here at the Forest House for a little while,” I said, by way of orientation. “Mama and Maki aren’t here, so can you get dressed by yourself? A friend of Auntie Asa’s named Unaiko is making breakfast for us. If you’ve already used the toilet, let’s go downstairs. You can brush your teeth in the guest washroom there, all right?”

  “I understand,” came the uninflected reply.

  As Akari began to climb out of bed, I noticed that his movements were slower and clumsier than usual, and there seemed to be a hitch in his basic locomotion. I started to offer to help him to his feet, but then I lost my nerve. Instead, I walked over to the window next to the bed and pulled open the drapes. The trees hadn’t yet begun to bud, and the front garden looked barren and deserted. The river shoreline beyond the wooded valley was shrouded in clouds, and the slope above it had a bleak, desolate aspect. I was standing with my back to Akari, but I got the feeling that he was dressing himself with unusual alacrity.

  My son and I descended the staircase in single file, keeping several steps between us. Unaiko was waiting at the bottom, and she led Akari to the washroom. When he didn’t take any notice of the visitor in the great room, Daio withheld his own greeting as well, but I could see him studying the hesitation in Akari’s gait.

  While I was upstairs Daio had apparently been looking at a monochromatic woodblock print on the wall next to the sofa in the great room, which was the only decoration.

  “What’s the story behind this piece of art?” he asked. “This dog looks really ferocious, as if with the proper training it could be taught to kill people.”

  “Ah, you’re wondering about the print?” I said. “Well, I originally brought it down on my previous trip with the intention of hanging it in the space where I thought I would be working on a novel about my father, before and after his death. (That project is now defunct, as you may have heard.) When I went back to Tokyo I simply forgot to take it with me.”

  “Maybe leaving it behind was just another symbol of your decision to give up on your drowning novel,” Daio said. “Asa was saying that it almost seemed as if the project was doomed from the start.”

  Unaiko had returned from escorting Akari to the downstairs restroom and now she, too, was gazing at the woodblock print on the wall. “Maybe I’m being obtuse,” she said, “but I don’t see any great significance in your having forgotten to take this picture back to Tokyo. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that you did make a special point of grabbing this one particular work of art and lugging it all the way down here.”

  I responded with an account of the print’s provenance. “I really don’t think this dog has the sort of evil mojo Daio seems to be ascribing to it,” I said. “On the other hand, I won’t pretend it’s a tranquil and pastoral image, either. As you can see, the date is written in pencil under the author’s signature. This piece was created in 1945, the year my f
ather died, by a printmaker in Mexico, but I didn’t acquire it until the seventies. It’s actually a rather interesting story. At the time, just after the war, the government was oppressing some newspaper companies in Mexico City, and the reporters for those papers staged a major strike. They solicited support from every sphere of culture and the arts, and the printmakers helped raise money by selling work from their private collections. From what I heard, this print was one of them. I bought it at a gallery several decades later, when I was teaching in Mexico City.

  “For those reporters, having their freedom of expression thwarted was exactly the same as if their newspapers had been physically trampled into the ground, and this print could be interpreted as a symbolic depiction of the dilemma they faced. In the foreground, the angrylooking dog that’s facing in our direction, just beginning to bark, is shown in extreme close-up. But is the dog meant to symbolize the newspaper reporters who were resisting the government’s interference, or does it represent the oppressive wielders of authority? I talked about this with some of the cultural movers and shakers who took me to the exhibition where I bought this print, and their opinions were divided between those two interpretations. But the truth is, I just bought this piece, in all innocence, because I liked it. At the end of my term at El Colegio de México (the national graduate school), I received a half year’s pay as a single lump-sum payment, and I used it to buy the print. It’s signed by the artist: Siqueiros.”

  “Oh, you mean the Siqueiros?” Unaiko asked. She looked genuinely surprised and impressed. “I had no idea. I’ve seen photos of his big public murals in art books. The funny thing is, I’ve been thinking all along that whoever created this little print must be quite an exceptional artist. Asa was even saying the other day that we should try to make some stuffed dogs with this same kind of visual impact!”