by Kenzaburo Oe
When the young troupe members heard I was on board with Unaiko’s project, they were gratifyingly happy. What struck me as remarkable was that they (Suke & Kaku, in particular) didn’t want me to simply take the original screenplay and adapt it into a stage play. Using Ricchan’s fieldwork as a jumping-off point, they wanted to see Unaiko’s personal vision brought to life, thus transforming the filmscript into an entirely new play. The rehearsal space had overflowed from the great room into the dining room as well, and that area became the main forum for discussing the project.
My initial participation consisted primarily of recalling details from my own script for the long-ago movie—scenes that hadn’t made the final cut. Ironically, the desire to share those very details with the world had been a large part of my original motivation for agreeing to participate in Sakura’s film.
I threw myself into creating a script to showcase the youthful, inventive style of this new offshoot of the Caveman Group. To that end, I resolved to tear apart all my carefully constructed materials, then reassemble them in a synthesized form that would be more compatible with the dog-tossing dynamic. I also set about removing all my personal materials—index cards, notebooks, and dictionaries—from the long bench in the great room to show my commitment to the project.
I was in the process of carrying those things upstairs when Unaiko, dressed in a professional-looking power suit, walked into the great room. She strode up to where I was standing with my arms full of books and said in a loud, accusatory tone, “What’s the world coming to if young folks can’t even lend a hand to help a senior citizen with the heavy lifting, especially when he’s going to be kindly donating his time to assist us?”
Apparently Masao and the other troupe members hadn’t noticed that I was engaged in removing my personal items, in response to someone’s tactful suggestion that the great room might be more efficiently used for our collaborative efforts if it were a bit tidier. Unaiko briskly took charge of transporting my multivolume set of the facsimile edition of The Golden Bough, pausing only to introduce me to a stranger who had come in a few minutes after she did. The man was dressed in a gray corduroy jacket worn over a high-collared black shirt and he projected a rather different public persona from Masao and the other young troupers, but I got the impression from the way they greeted him that he had already been assimilated into the group.
“This is my significant other,” Unaiko said casually. “He moonlights as a theater critic, but he also has a regular job. He came down to Matsuyama on business, and I went to pick him up at the airport. He has to go back to Tokyo on the evening flight, so I drove him down here hoping he could have a chance to visit with you, however briefly.
“How about it, Mr. Choko? I’ve heard you don’t let many people into your inner sanctum, but since this whole area is pretty much engulfed in chaos, would you be amenable to heading upstairs and having a little chat in your study? My guy here has a particular interest in the spaces where writers do their work. I think it might be partly because I told him about the time Asa gave me a guided tour of the bookshelves at your house in Tokyo.”
The new arrival (whose name I had yet to learn) gathered up the remaining books, while I grabbed the last few index cards and then led the way upstairs. Fortunately, Ricchan had found the time to put my bed in order, even though she’d had to take Akari to the Saya extra early that day.
In the room that doubled as my study and sleeping quarters there were windows facing north and south, and the room was flooded with light. The entire west wall was lined with bookshelves, with a large desk in front. When I was working I usually sat in a reclining chair with my feet propped on the desk chair and a drafting board balanced on my knees. Of course, these days all I was doing up here was reading, more or less aimlessly.
I dragged the reclining chair toward the southern wall and sat down. Gesturing at the desk chair, I said to the guest, “Please have a seat,” and he did. Unaiko, meanwhile, grabbed a footstool I used whenever I needed to reach something on the top shelves of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase and carried it over to complete our little circle.
“Would it be all right if I took a look at the books on that shelf?” the young man asked, pointing. Unaiko started to get up from her perch on the stool, but he put a restraining hand on her shoulder, then strolled to the bookcase. The shelf in question held a collection of my early and midcareer novels, and while the books weren’t all first editions they were from some of the earliest printings of each title. (I actually preferred the textures and colors of the covers of some of the earlier books to those of my more recent publications.)
“I started to read your books a short time before you won that big international literary prize,” the young man said. “This is kind of a funny story, but I happened to see in the newspaper that Kogito Choko had stopped writing fiction, and I somehow misunderstood and thought you had died. Anyway, the ‘obituary’ moved me to go out and buy paperbacks of all your backlist novels and read them for the first time, one by one. Because of that, I’ve never even seen most of these early books in hardcover, but just glancing at the titles brings back some pleasant memories for me.”
“From the beginning, even with the early books, I always chose the designer, and the handwritten calligraphy for the titles was done by Goro Hanawa,” I said. “In addition to being a famous filmmaker he was an exceptional calligrapher, and he was well known for his beautiful book designs.”
“For one of your earlier novels, In Our Time, the bookbinding was done in France, and I really liked the look of the title page, with the blind stamping of calligraphic kanji rendered by your mentor, Professor Musumi. I remember seeing the book on my father’s bookshelf.”
While the newcomer was talking, Unaiko jumped up and quickly pulled an extra copy of that book from the shelf. I used autographing the title page as an excuse to ask his name. “It’s Tatsuo Katsura,” he said, “but everyone calls me Katsura.”
“This makes me so happy!” he said a few moments later as he watched me sign the artistically blind-stamped page. “Back in the day, once I’d finished playing catch-up by reading your earlier works in paperback, whenever you published a new novel—in other words, every few years—I would read it as soon as it came out. I guess you could call me a fan, but because I didn’t start reading your books until I was in my thirties, I never got the feeling the author’s message was aimed directly at me. Putting my own experiences aside, isn’t it a fact that during the past twenty years or so, especially, you haven’t really been making an effort to write books that would appeal to a younger audience? To be honest, I can’t help getting the impression that you don’t really give a damn about being widely read.
“For example, let’s talk about one of your more recent books, The Chilling and Killing of the Beautiful Annabel Lee. It begins with an outdoor scene in which a corpulent old writer (who is obviously meant to be you) and his equally fat, middle-aged son are out walking together. It’s immediately clear, at least to me, that the son (who, we’re told, was born with some cognitive difficulties) is supposed to be Akari. I found it interesting to read about the vagaries of making a film with an international consortium back in the 1970s, even though it was before my time. As a general rule I’m dubious about the idea that certain readers will automatically feel a bond with the author just because they’re from the same generation, or be put off if they aren’t, but both those bits of conventional wisdom are surely true in many cases, and I realize that generational demographics do have an impact on book sales.”
“Well,” Unaiko said, “it’s certainly true there’s a generation or two between me and Sakura, the international movie star who plays a big role in the book, but I still found her character very engaging on a personal level.”
“Point taken,” Katsura said. “I’ll freely admit that with the Annabel Lee book, I was quite captivated by the elderly movie producer who was a classmate of the writer’s at Tokyo University and who introduces him to Sakura. Howeve
r, I couldn’t help thinking it would have been better to give the older characters less prominent roles; in other words, to make them into unobtrusive supporting players and—sorry, I know this will sound like blatant age discrimination, but I have to say it—to let the featured players be the younger versions of those same men and women. In that way, by allowing the character arcs to develop over time while inventing the necessary details, I think the book could be turned into a serious novel.”
“It’s certainly true that the narrator of Annabel Lee is the book’s author himself, barely disguised, and he was familiar with the international movie star because he’d seen her on the screen when she was a young girl, so in that respect it is an ‘I novel,’ absolutely,” Unaiko said. “But even so, you can’t dismiss it out of hand as an unserious piece of work.”
“No, you’re completely right,” Katsura said. “For Mr. Choko, this probably is a ‘serious novel,’ both in terms of structure and literary style. However, the thing is, over the past ten or fifteen years all of Mr. Choko’s long works of fiction have more or less been cut from the same cloth, most notably in terms of the protagonist (who is often the first-person narrator as well). Not to put too fine a point on it, but the author’s alter ego is nearly always the main character in his books. At some point, doesn’t it become overkill? I mean, can these serial slices of thinly veiled memoir really be considered genuine novels? Generally speaking, books like this will never win over the people who want to read a novel that’s actually novelistic: that is, an imaginative work of fiction. So at the risk of seeming rude, I really have to ask: Why do you choose to write about such a solipsistic and narrowly circumscribed world?”
“Everything you say is true,” I said. “I admit that freely. The novel I had been gearing up to write for a very long time—I’ve abandoned it now, but that’s another story—was going to be about my father, who drowned more than six decades ago when he was only fifty years old. I’ve accepted that I will never be able to complete the book, and in the process I have thought about every single one of the points you raised. I’ve often asked myself how I ended up following such a constricted path in my fiction, but I always seem to come back to the sobering realization that if I hadn’t used the quasi-autobiographical approach I wouldn’t have been able to write anything at all. In other words, I’ve had to maintain this narrow focus out of sheer necessity.”
“And yet it’s evident from a quick glance at these bookshelves that you’re a person with wide-ranging interests,” Katsura said. Then, with what appeared to be a conscious effort not to dwell too mercilessly on my flaws as a writer, he guided the conversation in a different direction. “Another thing someone could glean from the contents of these bookshelves is that they belong to a person with a distinctive way of reading,” he went on. “Take T. S. Eliot, for example. You have a great many highly specialized scholarly books, written in English, but you also have a sizable collection of Japanese translations of Eliot’s work. I can also see that for other major poets of the past century, such as Yeats and Auden, you have looked at the work of the people who have translated those poets into Japanese, found the ones whose style you really love, and then collected their published books. It’s easy to see who your favorites are, but really, I don’t think even scholars in the field spend this much money on poetry translations!”
“The truth is, I rely on the advice of one scholar who has been a friend of mine ever since we met at university,” I said. “He went on to become an expert on the work of Coleridge and Eliot, and he tells me which translators are better than others. What I’ve been noticing lately is that when it comes to poems in foreign languages—whether it’s English or French, or, in the case of Dante, Italian—I simply can’t grasp the meaning in the original language anymore. So I’ll memorize the originals and then keep muttering the lines to myself, over and over, in the hope that dogged repetition will somehow help me to ‘get’ them. At the same time, I still seem to hear the Japanese translations (in the case of Eliot, the ones by Fukase and Nishiwaki) ricocheting around my brain and resonating with the original, and by that rather roundabout method I’m finally able to arrive at a solid sense of what the poet is trying to say.”
“Because your private life exists in a place of receptivity, perhaps your novels are conceived in the same place as well?” Katsura asked rhetorically. “Take William Blake, for instance. When you wrote a novel inspired by his poetry, you included the quoted passages in both the original English and your favorite Japanese translation, printed side by side. That seemed like an act of kindness toward Japanese readers, and for me, having those bilingual pairings of Blake’s poems sprinkled throughout gave the book a pleasing visual texture.”
“I agree,” I said. “And for a bilingual reader it can also be interesting to take note of the striking discrepancies between the original and the Japanese translations, which occur more often than you might think.”
“This is a stanza from the latter part of The Waste Land, isn’t it?” Katsura asked, pointing to an index card tacked to one of the bookshelves. “I see that you’ve written the English original first, followed by several Japanese translations, starting with Fukase’s.”
“Ah, that’s just a relic left over from when I was still struggling to write my drowning novel,” I said. “Putting aside the fact that my command of English has never been as strong as it might be, it’s painful for me to realize that even though I’ve been reading the same stanza over and over for half a century, I seem to comprehend it less now than when I began. In my prime, I used to think that I understood those lines, and the loss of insight makes me fear that my intellectual capacities are deteriorating at a rapid rate. Sometimes when I’m lying awake in bed in the middle of the night Fukase’s version will spring to mind, and I’ll try to translate it back into the original English, as a mental exercise. I can never seem to get it right, so I’ll get up and open The Waste Land to check how far off the mark I was. That was how I came to discover that I had been misinterpreting this one particular line for decades!”
Just then, at the precise moment I needed it, Unaiko handed me the relevant index card, which she had presciently unpinned from the bookshelf.
“This stanza is from ‘What the Thunder Said,’ which is the final section of the poem,” I went on. “It’s full of quotations from Dante, Nerval, and Thomas Kyd, among others. The line in question is this: These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Until very recently, I always assumed the narrator was referring to some kind of purely physical ruination. Carried along by the inexorable momentum of my misconception, I somehow imagined that he had been shipwrecked, but had weathered the storm and made it to shore. (There actually is a line about a boat toward the end.) I thought he was expressing his relief at finally being on dry land, safe and sound after having managed to dodge a potentially ruinous disaster. In other words, for the longest time I misperceived ‘shore’ as a metaphorical noun in the sense of landfall, rather than a verb, as in ‘shore up.’
“Recently, though, I’ve arrived at a new interpretation, based on my late-blooming realization that the author is using ‘shore’ in the sense of propping or supporting. I think the narrator is saying that the fragments in The Waste Land are going to help shore him up against the specter of spiritual and mental decay, as evoked in the poem. Of course, there are a lot of other theories floating around, but this one makes sense to me. Anyway, following that line of thought allowed me to resolve the disparities I’d noticed between Eliot’s original and Fukase’s somewhat ambiguous translation, which was good. On the other hand, I’ve realized that as I’m growing older my own mental and physical faculties are perceptibly disintegrating with every passing day—in other words, the type of decline described in Eliot’s poem is really happening to me, and I’m not sure how to go about shoring myself up.”
As I approached the end of this monologue Unaiko began to cry, and a veritable torrent of tears streamed down both sides of her high-bridged nose. Te
ntatively, I put an arm around her shoulders, then shot an expressive glance at Katsura (who was clearly discombobulated by this unexpected development) to indicate that he should probably take her home.
Unaiko was still weeping profusely, but she stood up docilely when Katsura held out his hand, and I watched anxiously from the top of the stairs as he tenderly led her down to the first floor and out the front door.
Chapter 13
The Macbeth Matter
1
Ricchan was the kind of person who didn’t feel the need to draw attention to her own exceptional abilities, but when her facility for giving music lessons (a gift of which I had been completely unaware) came to light, it turned out to be a source of great joy for Akari. After Maki heard the news that Akari had finally started enjoying CDs again (following a long interlude during which he only listened to music on a portable radio, with the volume on his headphones turned up to maximum volume), she sent him a box filled with compact discs. On the chance he might be ready to resume his composing and study of music theory, she threw in some music workbooks (designed for elementary school students and illustrated with cartoon characters and such) along with a number of unfinished compositions Akari had drafted on five-line paper. The latter, in particular, provided a useful starting point for Ricchan’s lessons.
The cardboard box had been sent by courier, and because it was too large for the contents, they had gotten jumbled in transit. While I was putting everything in order, Akari—just back from his daily rehab at the Saya—made a beeline for the table where I was working and began to hover nearby. Taking the hint, I left the dining room to Akari and Ricchan and repaired to my study. When I went downstairs an hour or so later for a drink of water, I found Akari engrossed in one of the music workbooks, wielding pencils in both hands.