by Kenzaburo Oe
3
Ever since the occurrence at the Saya, the bond between Akari and Unaiko seemed to have grown noticeably stronger—and, of course, Ricchan was also a member of their cozy little in-group. The activities that Akari had previously been pursuing in either the dining room or the great room, depending on the theater group’s schedule, were now taking place in the downstairs room Unaiko and Ricchan shared: poring over the classical music program guides in the weekly FM radio magazine and elsewhere, listening to music on the radio, playing CDs, and so on. In that room, which also doubled as the young women’s sleeping quarters, Akari could be absolutely certain his father would never come bumbling in; that was part of an unspoken agreement among the residents of the house. Clearly, Akari was making good on his implicitly declared intention to never again share a single note of music with me.
Some of Akari’s medications were on the verge of running out and he happened to be nearby, listening, when I was talking to Maki on the phone one day about the logistics of refilling those prescriptions. The next morning when Maki called back, Akari piped up to say that if someone from the Forest House was going to Tokyo to get his medicine, he would like to ask them to bring down some of his CDs when they returned. As it turned out, shortly after Akari made the request it became necessary for Unaiko and Ricchan to head to Tokyo on business of their own, so no one had to make a special trip to fetch his prescriptions and CDs.
The news about what Unaiko had done in Matsuyama and at the theater in the round had been spreading by way of the national grapevine. Evidently some prominent theater people had taken notice and were offering her the opportunity to apply her talents to the much larger stages of Tokyo. There were some producers and directors (their names were familiar even to me) who were always on the lookout for innovative and ambitious dramatic work, and they had contacted Unaiko to invite her to meet with them. Asa, of course, was already in Tokyo to help Chikashi through her surgery and recuperation, and it went without saying that Unaiko and Ricchan wanted to share this development with her. I knew that Ricchan—the person most familiar with the sad state of my current relationship with Akari—was also hoping to ask Chikashi, in person, for some information regarding Akari’s daily routines. I was resigned to the fact that any such line of inquiry would inevitably make me look bad and would culminate in more criticism of my behavior from my outspoken wife.
4
Dear Kogii,
At the moment, Unaiko is being lionized by her new cronies in the theater world, and she has been spending every day (and night!) running around Tokyo doing all sorts of exciting and constructive things: seeing plays, visiting rehearsals, going to parties, and so on. She’ll be staying here for a while longer but Ricchan will be back at the Forest House very soon, and she should be able to bring you up to speed on all the details of Chikashi’s condition.
The way things are going, it looks as if Unaiko’s trademark dramatic style may end up being incorporated into a major production at a big theater in Tokyo. Ricchan is actively involved, of course, and she has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to help advance Unaiko’s career. For me, having a chance to chat at length with Ricchan during this time has been very fruitful, and she also found time to talk to Maki and Chikashi about managing Akari’s health situation. It’s a great relief to me to know someone so conscientious is looking after you and Akari while you’re down on Shikoku.
On the days when Maki took over for me at the hospital and I went back to your house in Seijo to get some rest, Unaiko and Ricchan would always be there waiting up for me, no matter how late the hour, and the three of us would help ourselves to the contents of your liquor cabinet and talk until the wee hours. I suspect the discussions we had about a certain Kogito Choko may have broken some new ground, and I’ll reconstruct one of the conversations here, just for fun.
Unaiko started things off, holding forth about you and your work in general terms. (I’ll skip over that part, since it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.) After a while Ricchan joined in and then—uncharacteristically for her—she took the lead. In keeping with the basic precepts of the dog-tossing method, there was a tape recorder rolling the entire time, even on an informal occasion like this, so I’m able to give a verbatim account of what was said.
“The truth is,” Ricchan began, “ten years ago I hardly knew anything about Mr. Choko’s work. During the time when I was still bouncing around Tokyo doing various sound-related jobs, I booked a one-off assignment for a performance by an up-and-coming theater group. That night I happened to meet one of the group’s volunteer actresses, who was still working an outside job of her own, and I was captivated by her charisma. Needless to say, I’m talking about Unaiko. Before long we were both invited to join the troupe, and working with the Caveman Group became our full-time jobs. Of course, Masao Anai was the group’s leader. At some point he fixed on the idea of turning Kogito Choko’s novels into stage plays, and that became the guiding principle behind his work. So I ended up being in contact with Mr. Choko’s books on a regular basis, but they never really drew me in, personally. Unaiko felt the same way. By the time we were born, of course, Mr. Choko’s best years as a writer were already behind him. I figure kids like us would probably start exploring Japanese literature on our own (that is, outside of school) when we were eighteen or nineteen, maybe later, and even then we would mostly stick with writers of our own generation, so it would never have occurred to us to read Mr. Choko’s work—at least not voluntarily.
“When I first met Masao and the rest of the group, they were focusing on books by contemporary novelists. They didn’t seem to think Mr. Choko fell into that category, although at the same time they saw something interesting in the slightly retro, nostalgic feeling that infuses so much of his work—what you might call a divergence from the now. Still, it wasn’t until several years later that Unaiko really immersed herself in Mr. Choko’s work. It happened when we were doing the adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, and as we all know, she was exceedingly critical of that book. But now look at her; she’s turned into a full-on Choko freak, even more fanatical than Masao Anai! When I stop to think about it, I realize I’m always a few steps behind Unaiko in everything we do, but at any rate, I’ve finally started reading and appreciating Mr. Choko’s work, too.”
“It was pretty much the same for me, only I was trying to catch up with Masao,” Unaiko acknowledged. “I guess I’m what they call a late adopter.”
Kogii, I was surprised to hear that Unaiko and Ricchan had only recently become acquainted with your work. I told them about an article I’d seen in a theater magazine—you know, “meet the new drama groups” sort of thing—in which a certain critic wrote that while Masao Anai had begun adapting your works into theater pieces early in his career, the group only started having major success with those plays after Unaiko joined the creative team.
Ricchan nodded and said, “I think that’s true, but while Unaiko’s dramatic method may differ from Masao’s style as a director, it’s absolutely consistent within those differences, if that makes sense.”
“It makes perfect sense to me,” Unaiko said with a smile. “Ricchan’s on a roll tonight, so I’ll let her explain how I ended up getting converted.”
“Actually, as I understand it, the thing that transformed Unaiko into a card-carrying Choko devotee wasn’t reading his novels per se,” Ricchan said. “One day she happened to come across something Mr. Choko had written regarding Edward W. Said’s definition of ‘late style,’ and that catalyzed her conversion. She made a photocopy of the page and pinned it above her desk at work, and then she said to me, all excited, ‘This quote from Said is so amazing!’ Said’s basic premise seems to be that when a true artist starts getting on in years, the sort of philosophical mellowness that comes with age can also backfire, and may sometimes even end up having catastrophic consequences.”
“Yes,” Unaiko interrupted excitedly. “Professor Said was riffing on the state
ment by Adorno that in the history of art, ‘late works are the catastrophes,’ and Said added that work created late in life is not always as serene and transcendent as you might expect. It’s been a while since I looked at those quotes, but as I recall Said was talking about Beethoven.”
“To me,” Ricchan went on, “it seems as if it would be beneficial for an aging author to weather that kind of stormy situation alone, and if such adversity ended up being the crucible in which his later work was forged, well, wouldn’t it be a good thing? I mean, isn’t the freedom to charge blindly ahead into the uncharted realm of one’s own late work one of the perks of being old? Even so, I couldn’t help feeling it just wasn’t right, somehow, for a thirtysomething woman like Unaiko to be sitting sit around hoping that an older person would go galloping headlong into catastrophe! But since Mr. Choko has abandoned the drowning novel, and he and Akari are living at the Forest House, it’s making me very happy to see how easy it seems to be for Unaiko to hang out with both of them, and vice versa. And when Akari had his seizure and I saw how flustered Unaiko was, I couldn’t help thinking, Wow, she’s really changed a lot. That is to say, I feel as though she’s become more human and more compassionate than when we first met.”
“When you say something like that it really makes me realize how selfishly I must have behaved toward you, Ricchan,” Unaiko said solemnly, with a self-effacing modesty that was very different from her usual confident, assertive personality.
“No, no, not at all!” Ricchan protested. “I’ve always depended on you for everything, Unaiko, and I have every intention of continuing to do so going forward. I really can’t imagine living any other way.” She was unmistakably sincere but I sensed an undertone of affectionate teasing beneath her words.
Somehow, hearing Unaiko apologize for her past behavior confirmed my sense that joining forces with her, and with Ricchan, for my own late work (so to speak) had been the right decision, without a doubt. At the same time I got the heartening feeling that Unaiko was no longer just the ambitious, talented girl-genius dramatist, but was also—and this was more important to me and, clearly, to Ricchan as well—developing into a more complete and empathetic human being.
As our conversation continued, I posed this question: “Unaiko, this is something I was planning to ask Masao, but I’d like to hear your thoughts, too. Up until now, the Caveman Group has derived a large measure of its inspiration from my brother’s fiction, and while you were waiting for him to finish his own late work, the so-called drowning novel, you were planning to combine the saga of his work on the book with the story about how our father went out one night and drowned in the river. I know you even recorded some interviews with my brother, to use as a resource. What I was wondering is, how were you and Masao proposing to put the Caveman Group’s distinctive theatrical stamp on the novel if it had come to fruition? Or maybe I should ask how you were planning to fit the book into the dog-tossing mold that’s been so successful for you?”
“Well, we were looking at those initial recording sessions as preliminaries, like a dry run,” Unaiko replied. “We were just trying to get a handle on the general parameters of Mr. Choko’s drowning novel so we could start figuring out how to go about dramatizing it. Really, everything was pretty nebulous at that point.
“The idea was that Masao and I would sort of lurk around the Forest House and observe Mr. Choko while he was in the process of writing, and he seemed to be amenable to that. Of course, you of all people were already well aware of the arrangement, Asa. We were also hoping to be able to create a kind of synergy between Masao’s usual style and my own dog-tossing approach. (In both cases, we would have been counting on Mr. Choko’s active participation.) Then we would have tried to combine the two elements into a cohesive dramatic piece. The thing is, for me—and I think the same was true for Masao—the only concrete ideas I had were about the first and last scenes.
“The first scene was going to be something we’d heard about from Mr. Choko: a scenario from the recurrent dream he’s been having for the past sixty years or so. It’s night, and against the backdrop of a flood-swollen river we see your father, illuminated by the moon and looking away from us, sitting in a small rowboat. Meanwhile, a sort of Greek chorus of actors is onstage, chanting the story of a young boy who is struggling to reach the boat with the cold, muddy water lapping against his chest. Suspended high above the stage, the young boy’s supernatural alter ego, Kogii, is gazing down on the action.
“Not surprisingly, the idea for the other scene also came from something Mr. Choko told us. It was going to evoke the last image in the drowning novel, and the idea would have been to have the book’s final words read aloud, verbatim, by me and the other actors onstage. Those words would have suggested the thoughts that were going through the father’s mind just as he was about to drown. Then all the reciters would have been sucked into the whirlpool themselves, while the Kogii doll looked on from above.
“When we talk about it like this, though, it isn’t clear how the book would have been constructed, or how the story would have unfolded scene by scene. To be honest, I get the feeling the only thing floating around in Mr. Choko’s head might have been those T. S. Eliot lines about the Phoenician sailor drowning in the whirlpool.”
Unaiko lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and I found myself remembering the lines she mentioned. I imagine the same thing must be happening to you, Kogii, while you’re reading this fax:
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
5
Dear Kogii,
The day after the late-night conversation I described in my previous fax, Ricchan came to the hospital to say her good-byes to Chikashi, and that allowed me to grab a few winks in a nearby chair. While I was napping Chikashi apparently started talking to Ricchan about your late work, and Ricchan gave me a blow-by-blow account of their conversation after I woke up. I’ll transcribe it here from memory:
Apparently the first thing Chikashi said to Ricchan was this: “Choko went down to the forests of Shikoku to write his drowning novel, but he ended up abandoning it instead. He’s been living the writer’s life for a long time now, but he quit rather easily on what was supposed to be the crowning work of his career. Even if the project is out of the picture for good, Choko will probably live for quite a few more years, so the question is, how can he move ahead with his late work? When my brother, Goro, died in such a horrible way, a lot of his colleagues in the movie business were saying his best work was behind him and his career was probably over anyway, but I believe if he had gone on living he would have produced some new films that were every bit as good as his previous work.
“My husband never seemed to have much to say about Goro’s films, one way or another, but there’s a recording of a seminar Choko gave while he was teaching at the Free University in Berlin. I’ve listened to it so many times that I know it almost by heart, but I’ll just paraphrase the highlights.
“Apparently in Goro’s later years he didn’t tend to take his interviews with Japanese journalists very seriously, but he responded differently when he was talking to the passionate cinema buffs he encountered in his travels overseas. In the seminar, my husband said he had read a number of newspaper articles about Goro in English and French, but since he doesn’t know much German, he asked some of his university students in Berlin to find similar articles in German publications and then put together essay-style reports about them in English. Based on that research, he concluded that Goro would have gone on to make a number of films in the future, if he had lived. I remember that my husband concluded his little speech by saying, ‘So why would Goro have decided to commit suicide in the prime of life? I really have no idea.’
“My husband tends to torment himself and keep his worries bottled up inside,” Chikashi went on, “but lately I know he’s been trying to rebuild his relation
ship with Akari in his own slow, silent way. And even though he’s feeling rather discouraged about his writing these days, I believe my husband is an optimist at heart and I think it’s very likely that he (like Goro, if he had lived) will eventually find his way to the late work he’s meant to do, whatever it might turn out to be. If someone were to theorize that Kogito felt more relief than disappointment about the failure of the drowning novel, well, I would have to disagree.”
Kogii, I hope you’ll take Chikashi’s words, which were spoken not long after she had been through a serious operation, as her way of trying to cheer you on from afar.
I also want to share something else I heard. Ricchan has been a huge help to Maki—in fact, apart from the days when Ricchan needed to go somewhere with Unaiko, she has spent all her time in Tokyo making herself useful around the house in Seijo—and even though she and Maki have low-key, easygoing personalities, they both share the trait of being willing to voice hard truths when they feel the need. They’ve come to trust each other, and that’s probably why Maki felt comfortable saying this to Ricchan:
“My mother realized that sending my father and Akari off to Shikoku together under the current circumstances could create problems for you, but she did it anyway. I think it was because she wasn’t confident she would survive the surgery, and she felt uneasy about having my father and brother around during a time like that. Before she went into the hospital she tidied up a lot of loose ends, and after she was admitted she wouldn’t let either one of them come to visit her. I think sending them to stay on Shikoku was her way of forcing them to find a way to go on living together after she was gone, and she was hoping their time down there would help.