Death by Water

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Death by Water Page 32

by Kenzaburo Oe


  “Holy cow, Kogito,” he said. “I think the last time I heard you talking so passionately about anything was while you were still in high school, the weekend you brought Goro to the training camp. Please continue your discussion—don’t mind me!”

  “All right,” I replied. “I’m going to get back to Frazer’s book, but I’ll keep in mind that you’re listening too now, Daio. Anyway, I think I’ve figured out the overarching point that the Kochi Sensei was trying to make with all his little notes in the margins. As I told Ricchan, I’ve also realized that while my father was dutifully reading The Golden Bough in order to glean the lessons in political theory his own mentor was trying to impart, he was also reading it on another, more personal level and appreciating the beauty of the prose as a work of literary art. That’s something you’ve mentioned as well, Daio. However, his guru’s notes were clearly focused on posing the question: What should the old king’s followers be doing, in a political sense?

  “If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to read this excerpt from the Frazer book aloud: But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough.”

  After I had finished reading, Akari walked silently past us on his way to the restroom. (He had been lying on the floor for a long time, and getting to his feet obviously caused some lower-back pain.) A moment later we heard a loud noise as the door banged shut behind him.

  “Akari really hates it when they interrupt his music programs with a breaking-news bulletin, especially when it has to do with murder or any other kind of violent crime,” Ricchan said. “I don’t think our discussion about the state-sanctioned killing of kings sat well with him. That’s why he slammed the door.”

  I turned to Daio. “By the way,” I said, “I’ve finally come to understand why my mother and sister were so terrified I might someday finish the drowning novel. I think they were afraid I would tell the world that the Kochi Sensei was using The Golden Bough to convince my father and his cohorts to kill the living god: that is, Emperor Hirohito.”

  When Daio didn’t respond, I went on, “The thing is, Daio, the events of that night—the feverish atmosphere of the meeting at the storehouse, and the way the officers seemed to suddenly be ostracizing my father—struck me as completely mystifying at the time. I still find them baffling, even now. What I’d like to know, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell me, is whether my father and the young officers really understood each other. I mean, suddenly their ties are severed, and my father rushes out alone and drowns. Surely those occurrences must have had some effect on you, as a young man who looked up to my father?”

  The sunlight from the back garden seemed to have turned Daio’s close-cropped white hair into a kind of golden aureole. He stood there for a moment with his head held high, thinking, while I waited for an answer. Evidently something about this tableau rubbed Ricchan the wrong way because she snapped, “Hey, how long do you guys expect Akari to stay barricaded in the restroom in self-defense? I mean, he was down here trying to relax, and then he was forced to put up with your talk about death and murder and drowning, just a few feet away! It’s almost time for one of his favorite FM radio programs, Classics Special, so maybe you two could give him a little space. Please?”

  Then she added in a softer tone, “This afternoon we’ll be going to the Saya again, and you’re both welcome to tag along. If you could just do us the favor of not hanging around too close to where Akari’s listening to his music, you can continue your gruesome discussion at the top of your lungs, if that’s what you want to do!”

  3

  After leaving the van in a large open space (a designated turnaround for forestry trucks), we set out on foot along the pathway, thickly bordered by trees and bushes, that crossed over the mountain stream. Daio led the way, with a thin exercise mat and a blanket draped over his one arm, and the rest of us followed in single file. Ricchan was the very model of a perfect caregiver. Carrying a large Boston bag, she stepped carefully in her canvas walking shoes while her body language seemed to be saying, If Akari should lose his balance and start to fall, I’m ready to jump into the shrubbery and hold him up.

  The path dead-ended at the lower part of the Saya. We stopped there and Daio spread out the exercise mat on a flat, narrow strip of grassland next to the stream. Ricchan, meanwhile, was extracting the components of the portable sound system and an assortment of CDs from the ubiquitous Boston bag. After Akari had taken a seat on the mat and started to remove his shoes, Daio and I took our leave and headed toward the upper reaches of the Saya.

  “I remember the war was still going on when I was given the second floor of the paperbush warehouse down by the river as a place to stay,” Daio said as we climbed the hill, side by side. “I settled in nicely, but I didn’t set foot in the ‘Saya zone’—that is, this area right here—until quite a bit later.”

  “The Saya has had an important place in local history for centuries,” I replied, “but it was never one of the spots local people would share with a visitor from the outside world.”

  “I remember one time I was invited to go fishing with the man I’ve mentioned, whose son-in-law became a doctor,” Daio said. “It was sweetfish season, as I recall. Anyhow, he told me the triangular delta where your father’s body washed ashore is considered a ‘special spot,’ and he said that even after all these years children still won’t go in the water there. When you think about the ancient landmarks in an area like this, each with its own story, it kind of makes sense that a relatively new site could have taken on ‘special’ overtones as well.

  “Kogito, I know you’ve been having a recurrent dream about what you saw the night of the big flood, when your father took off in his little boat. Asa said you kept insisting that you felt as though you had really seen your father sinking to the bottom of the deep river, and I can’t help thinking the image might have been something you dreamed. Why? Because I was the one who spotted Choko Sensei’s dead body lying on the riverbed in shallow water, and you were nowhere in sight. Asa said you were always saying that Kogii (who was already in the boat) and you were the only ones who saw what happened that night, but she knew for a fact that your mother was standing on top of the promontory, watching the whole scene unfold. And I know there was at least one other witness, because that witness was me.

  “After I saw Choko Sensei take off in his little boat, I ran back to tell the army officers. After a great deal of discussion, some of us decided to go out looking for your father as soon as it began to get light. I remember the sky was just beginning to show some faint signs of dawn when we jumped on bicycles and set off down the road along the river. At the top of the sandbar down by Honmachi, we ran into someone who had happened to see a boat flipping over by the light of the moon, so we figured we should start by searching the area along the sandbar. We split up, and as I’ve mentioned before, I was the one who found Choko Sensei’s body lying in some shallow water.

  “That’s how it happened, but afterward your mother tried to make sure you never got a chance to talk to anyone who had been involved in pulling your father’s body out of the water; I guess she wanted to protect you from hearing the awful details. You left home when you were fifteen, and from then on you didn’t really hang out much with anyone from here, did you? And even during the five years between your father’s death
and your departure for Tokyo, you were kind of a loner. I’ve run into some people who knew you in those days, and they said that whenever they saw you at the new middle school you always seemed to be sitting alone in an empty classroom between classes and at lunchtime, reading a book. Asa was really your only link to this area, and thanks to your mother, you and your sister were estranged for many years. I’m not sure, but I think you may be the only person raised around here who ever uprooted himself so completely—roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and all, as the saying goes.

  “But even after everything that’s happened since you moved away, I think at heart you’re still a boy from the forest. I mean, the things you write draw heavily on the stories your mother and grandmother told you growing up, and no matter how much you embellish them with imagination, for me, your books always seem to smell like the truth. That reminds me of something I used to say to your mother during her later years—of course, by then you had long since become a Tokyoite and rarely visited, even though she had finally relented and granted you the freedom to visit whenever you pleased (just as long as you didn’t show up too often).

  “Anyhow, I remember one time I said to her, ‘Kogito’s novels are pure fantasy, aren’t they? It’s amazing to me that he can exercise his imagination to such a degree and make things up out of whole cloth. When you come right down to it, I guess it’s a simple matter of talent.’

  “And then—maybe it was because she thought I was using some highfalutin-sounding words or something—your mother cut me down to size, snapping, ‘That isn’t fantasy; it’s just imagination.’ Then she went on to say, ‘My husband used to read the books of Kunio Yanagida, and he told me that according to Yanagida there is a clear difference between fantasy and imagination, because imagination has some basis in reality. So what Kogii’s doing is writing mostly about real things, which he augments by using his imagination. He has a very good memory for the tales his grandmother and I used to tell him, and because he used folklore as a sort of launching pad for his imaginings, when we read his early books there wasn’t a single thing to make us think, Gee, this right here is some really far-fetched fantasy.’

  “That’s what your mother said to me. Her comments made me angry, and I countered by saying, ‘Yeah, but what about the really crazy book, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, where Choko Sensei is portrayed as a grotesque caricature who has bladder cancer, and he gets loaded into a makeshift wooden chariot and goes off to rob a bank?’ And your mother came back with, ‘Oh, that wasn’t imagination, or fantasy. That was outright delusion!’ Ha ha ha!”

  While Daio was delivering this animated monologue, we had been making steady progress up the grassy hill and were now standing at the heart of the Saya: the scabbard-shaped indentation in the meadow.

  “Sorry,” Daio continued after he had finished laughing, “I got kind of carried away reminiscing about the fun I used to have talking with your mother. Now that we’ve come to a place where we don’t have to worry about being overheard, we should probably get back to the serious matters we were discussing earlier, don’t you think? Because I keep coming up against a vexing problem, and every time I try to work it out on my own, I seem to end up getting sidetracked or else giving up entirely. If I could only get this matter resolved, there might turn out to be some connection with the recurrent dream that’s been plaguing you for all these years.

  “As I mentioned, Asa told me about the dream and I know you’ve even put it down on paper. From my perspective, I don’t believe it should be dismissed as ‘just a dream.’ Now, I’m no expert—this is something I happened to read in a book about dream interpretation, aimed at amateurs like me—but apparently when a child tries to tell its mother something and she refuses to listen, the things the child wanted to express can be turned inward and incorporated into dreams, which eventually merge seamlessly with memories. And then, according to the book, the child can grow up to be someone like you who’s haunted by recurrent dreams. I would never presume to psychoanalyze you, but based on what I’ve heard I can’t help feeling that your genuine memories (even if you don’t actively remember them when you’re awake) have somehow been filtered through those dreams.

  “You told this story in one of your newspaper columns, but apparently a cultural anthropologist friend of yours was doing fieldwork somewhere in Indonesia—I believe it was on Flores Island—when he made an interesting discovery in a remote settlement up in the mountains. The people of the tribe had created a giant replica of an airplane from twigs and bits of wood and enshrined it in a clearing in the forest. In your essay you said that when you first heard about this, your heart skipped a beat, and when I read that line I thought, I’ll bet Kogito was remembering a dream he had when he was a child.”

  “It’s certainly true I was captivated by a drawing of the primitive replica of a plane I saw in some field notes made by that anthropologist friend of mine—he was an accomplished artist as well, and his sketches would have put a professional to shame—and you’re right in thinking it reminded me uncannily of one of my childhood dreams,” I said. “And now I’m feeling shaken up all over again, because this place you’ve brought me to, the Saya, is the spot where the dream in question took place. In my dream it was above here to the north, beyond the big meteoric boulder, that I came across the tail of a wrecked aircraft. The plane’s body was nearby, facing downward. It wasn’t made of wood, though; it appeared to have been cobbled together from spare machine parts. But really, Daio, your powers of deductive reasoning are quite extraordinary!”

  “Really? I don’t know—maybe your mother’s analytical approach to things somehow rubbed off on me! No, but seriously, like she said, imagination (as opposed to pure fantasy) usually has some basis in fact.

  “In this case, during the days before your father’s death there was a series of meetings combined with a nonstop drinking party, and even though you were just a child you must have overheard quite a bit of the discussion. I’m not sure about this, but my guess is that you would have been feeling dismayed and confused by what you heard. On the day before your father took off alone, I remember seeing you lurking in the corridor behind the big tatami-matted room upstairs during one of those meetings with a worried look on your face. And I thought, All this conspiratorial talk must sound pretty scary to a kid, but it wasn’t my place to shoo you away. And then after your father died you must have locked those memories away somewhere deep in your unconscious and then convinced yourself that the things you overheard were just part of a dream. I think the time has come for me to blow the lid off some of those secrets, so I’m going to tell you what actually happened.

  “The plan was to sneak onto the military airfield at Yoshidahama and steal a fully loaded kamikaze plane, then fly east from there. The pilots were supposed to land the stolen plane in the Saya, right here in the middle of the forest, and somehow hide it until it was needed. That risky maneuver was the main point of contention during those meetings you were eavesdropping on.”

  “Yes, I wrote about it in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, only I framed it as the fantastical imaginings of a young man who was in the process of losing his mind,” I said.

  “Hey, I read that little book!” Daio exclaimed. “It was right after your mother summoned me and basically held my feet to the fire, demanding to know whether I’d ever told you about the meeting or whether you, as a ten-year-old child, had been listening through the walls. Again, I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems as if a disturbing memory that had been buried or suppressed for many years found its way to the surface through your dreams—probably helped along by the fact that a novelist’s mind moves in strange and mysterious ways. Anyhow, when your mother showed me the passage in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, I told her in no uncertain terms: ‘I see what you’re getting at, but I don’t see any cause for concern. Your deepest fear seems to be that Kogito understood what was going on in his father’s meetings with the military officers, and that at some
point he might write a much bigger novel than this one and you would all end up in complete disgrace, like the family of Kotoku Sensei after the High Treason Incident, but I’m sure it will never happen. Even for me, and I was quite a bit older, the things I heard at some of those meetings seemed like total gibberish. They made no sense to me, and I’m sure they would have been even more incomprehensible to a child.’

  “As it turned out, I was right. You never did write the big exposé your mother was so afraid of. And since you’ve completely given up on the drowning novel, your practical-minded sister, Asa, can finally breathe a sigh of relief, and I think that’s a very good thing.

  “However, the truth is that I’m still left with a few nagging doubts. We aren’t talking about your conscious mind now but rather the unconscious, right? Either way, I doubt if you really understood the words you were hearing when you eavesdropped on those meetings, but somehow your dreaming mind was able to figure everything out, and the significance of what you’d overheard became clear in your dreams. Doesn’t that seem like a plausible explanation? On some level you knew there was a plan to steal a military plane and hide it at the Saya for future use, to bomb the Imperial Palace. And as you realized in your dream, the radical plan was the reason your father behaved so erratically during his last hours on earth. But the plan never came to fruition, and your unconscious mind invented the next scene.”

  “Even so, the image of a warplane hidden on the grassy area of the Saya had no basis in reality,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’d call it fantasy, or the surreal inventiveness of the dreaming mind …”

  “What do you mean, ‘fantasy’? The image was definitely grounded in fact, or at least in possibility. As I already told you, the issue of ‘borrowing’ the aircraft was a major sticking point in the endless discussions between your father and the military guys who were at your house. At that final meeting, they were talking about how Japan’s defeat in the war appeared to be much more imminent than they had been led to believe, and the discussion got very heated because your father kept insisting they ought to rush ahead with his favorite scheme, which involved a suicide attack on the Imperial Palace from the air. As I’ve mentioned, there were some new faces at the meeting: several young trainee pilots who were attending the Imperial Navy course in the village. They had been brought along by the usual army-officer participants, and they all went up to the Saya to dig out turpentine from the roots of the pine trees—needless to say, turpentine oil has dozens of uses, and like almost everything else it was in short supply during the war. Anyhow, I guess seeing the layout of the Saya gave the young pilots some ideas of their own, because after they returned to the house they were saying the best approach would be to ‘liberate’ a kamikaze plane at the airfield, make sure it was loaded with bombs, and then hide it somewhere around the Saya. You must remember that, at least; it was a major point of discussion.”

 

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