Death by Water

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “At the time, my uncle was a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Education—this was before the name was changed to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology; you know, MEXT for short—and he was busy trying to complete some important work before moving up the bureaucratic ladder. My aunt made a point of telling me that this was the most crucial time in his career, and she was emphatic about the fact that I shouldn’t talk about my current situation with anyone, ever. She said that I, in my teenage naïveté, probably wouldn’t understand, but something like this could be turned into a national scandal if the wrong people got wind of it. I must have looked completely bewildered, because my aunt went on in a scolding tone: ‘I mean, just imagine what would happen if this story ever found its way into the mass media. A highly respected man who has made major contributions to Japan’s educational system behaves in an indecent manner toward his teenage niece, eventually going so far as to rape her and make her pregnant? It would be huge news all over the country.’ That was the first time I had ever heard the word ‘rape’ used in connection with myself.

  “We got off the train at Fujisawa Station, and my aunt immediately ducked into a phone booth and called my uncle at work to let him know what she was doing. Then she bundled me into a cab and we went to their house in Kamakura for a quick pit stop, and the same cab took us back to Fujisawa. My aunt checked me into a hospital there, and I was forced to undergo an abortion. I spent the next three days at my aunt and uncle’s house recovering, and then she unceremoniously kicked me out. (During those three days, I never once saw or spoke with my uncle.) Having nowhere else to go, I made my way to my parents’ house in Osaka, feeling like a total wreck in every way: physically, mentally, and emotionally.

  “I probably should have mentioned earlier that my uncle in Kamakura was my father’s older brother, so we were related by blood, not just by marriage. Like you, they grew up on Shikoku. There were three siblings, but my uncle was the only one who went to college. After graduation he went on to Tokyo University Law School, and he became a distinguished government bureaucrat. My father only had a high school education, and he knocked around in the printing business for years until his small shop was chosen as the designated printer for the reams of official documents constantly churned out by the Ministry of Education. My father frequently spoke of the commission as a stroke of luck, but everyone knew his change in fortunes was entirely due to nepotism, so my parents were in no position to make a fuss over the things my uncle had done to me. I heard that they even signed a formal legal document promising never to speak to anyone about what happened to me in Kamakura.

  “As I said, I didn’t see my uncle on the day my aunt dragged me off to get an abortion, or the subsequent days, before I left their house. Since then I haven’t seen either of them even once; I figure that was probably one of the conditions of the paper my parents signed. I lived at home in Osaka for the next two years, and the rape and the abortion were never far from my mind; in fact, I rarely thought about anything else. Since I hadn’t been to college my employment options were limited, and I changed jobs twice during that period. Then I moved up to Tokyo, and it was shortly after my twenty-second birthday when, by the purest happenstance, I found myself at a performance by the Caveman Group. I was hooked on its artistic vision from the start, and after I’d become a regular at the group’s events, Masao Anai invited me to join it. I had also made friends with Ricchan, who was in a similar situation: working part-time jobs while performing various music-related duties for the Caveman Group. In the thirteen years since Ricchan and I became full-time members of the troupe, she has always been my true partner, creatively speaking, although of course Masao Anai has also given me a tremendous amount of support.

  “All the while, as I was learning the ropes of experimental theater, I kept thinking endlessly about what I’d gone through because of my uncle’s misconduct. I was never able to shoehorn those topics into one of our plays but I was always groping around, trying to find my own dramatic style, and on some level I’ve spent the past decade preparing myself for the day when I would be able to express those concerns onstage. I got to know Mr. Choko when we were working on the drowning-novel project, and that was how I came to hear about Sakura Ogi Magarshack’s movie about Meisuke’s mother and the second uprising. It occurred to me that it might be possible to use the story as a starting point for a play that would express my true feelings and, well, you know the rest. The dramatic axis of my play will be the ordeals of Meisuke’s mother, the woman warrior, but I’m envisioning a larger story as well: a narrative that would illuminate Japan’s historical conduct with regard to rape and abortion through this new performance piece.”

  After Unaiko stopped talking, she immediately quickened her pace and pulled ahead. (Until then I had gotten the sense that she was making a conscious effort to walk slowly, so Asa—who had stuck her head between our shoulders to avoid missing a single word—would be able to hear everything Unaiko was saying.) Asa sped up as well, taking over second place in our little parade, and I was left alone to trail behind. At times like this I had a habit of indulging in little dialogues with myself, often on topics I hadn’t given much thought to in the past. Before I knew it, I found myself ruminating out loud and mumbling something like this: “All right—I can see the connection between rape and abortion. I also understand the idea that a country can behave like a rapist toward other countries and even toward its own citizens. And if you view MEXT as a stand-in for the nation of Japan, I can see how that metaphor would have occurred to Unaiko. But where does abortion fit into the scenario?”

  “Well, abortion’s a kind of murder, isn’t it?” Asa said impatiently, glaring at me over her shoulder. “There are two legal ways of committing murder, at least in this country: war and abortion. While she was still a young girl Unaiko was, in effect, raped by the nation of Japan. And then—at least as she sees it—that same country forced her to have an abortion. I mean, really, Kogii. I know you’re just thinking out loud, but I can’t stand by in silence when you say things that are so obtuse and insensitive, especially after Unaiko has opened up about her harrowing experiences.

  “Oh, look,” Asa went on, shifting into a brighter tone, “there’s my son, watching for us from the top of the hill. Yoo-hoo, Tamakichi! Here we are!”

  2

  Every morning from then on, I hunkered down to work on the new play along with the young troupe members who often congregated in the great room, with Unaiko at the epicenter of every meeting. I usually sat at the dining table on the near side of the partition between the two rooms, often with Akari nearby. Ricchan would join us at the table from time to time, and whenever that happened Akari’s behavior would immediately change. That is to say, instead of toiling over his musical compositions while lying belly down on the floor on the dining-room side, which was his default position, he would come to the table and continue his work in a chair placed directly in front of the big sound system. On the table in front of me there would be a hard copy of the most recent draft of the script for what everyone was calling “the Meisuke’s mother play,” which Ricchan regularly updated on the communal computer and then printed out. I spent a good deal of time at the table, but there were also many occasions when I gathered my papers and retreated to my study on the second floor.

  My main task at the time was to create a version of the playscript that would be suitable for publication in a literary magazine. Using my rough draft as a base, the young actors would read the lines aloud to one another and then develop them further by improvising in the proprietary dog-tossing style. In the actual playbill, those embellishments would be credited to Unaiko and Suke & Kaku, but while I was incorporating the bulk of them into the master script I would always check the dialect for accuracy, to make sure the literary style was consistent throughout. I found the entire process refreshing. Until then I had always worked alone, and I felt as though I was receiving a crash course in collaborative creativity.r />
  I also learned some interesting things, including the lore about the so-called crying child (or children) that Ricchan—unusually, for her—had actively decided to include in the playscript. One day she happened to mention having heard about the legend in the course of her field research, and she proceeded to read us the words of one informant, which she had transcribed from one of her tapes: “I heard there was some criticism of Sakura during the filming, because people said that she created the recitative without understanding the meaning of the term ‘crying child.’ As you may know, when Meisuke’s mother went off to battle, some troops sent down to Okawara by the Meiji government tried to break up the uprising by forcing their way through the entry point of the rebels’ front line, which was really no more than a straw hut. However, a number of children threw themselves across the soldiers’ path, weeping at the top of their lungs, and refused to budge. The soldiers couldn’t very well trample a bunch of little children to death, so they were forced to retreat. (No one seemed to know whether the children belonged to the young mothers who were participating in the rebellion, but it would seem to be a reasonable assumption.) Sakura somehow misunderstood the etymology of the term, and her misreading of the kanji led her to a complicated and completely erroneous interpretation. In fact, ‘crying children’ meant just that, with no hidden meaning at all.”

  Ricchan went on to tell our assembled group about a situation in present-day society that uncannily mirrors the local lore about the crying children. She said when she was living in Tokyo, she would occasionally see sad-looking kids with tear-streaked faces in public places. However, after moving to Matsuyama she started to see such children with increasing frequency, and it began to bother her a great deal. The crying children she encountered were never in groups; rather, she would see small girls between the ages of three and five walking alone, bawling their eyes out.

  “The weird thing,” Ricchan concluded, “was that even though the children were so young they were marching down the street at full speed, and their weeping wasn’t like the crying of a normal child at all. Every ‘waa’ they uttered seemed to be suffused with anger bordering on fury, or even a kind of soul-devouring fear. In the midst of this display of raw emotion, from time to time the child would lift her little face—bright red and wet with tears—and glance around. And when I followed her glance, I would sometimes see a slightly older girl with unkempt, bleached-out hair and a grubby-looking face who would quickly scuttle off, paying no attention to the younger child. So rather than a mother and child, the duos I noticed from time to time consisted of a tiny girl walking along, wailing at maximum volume, and another, more elusive girl who was several years older. I thought they might be sisters.”

  In response to Ricchan’s anecdote, several people joined in, saying things such as “Yes, I’ve seen something similar on city streets as well.” One of those voices belonged to Unaiko’s boyfriend, Tatsuo Katsura, who happened to be in town.

  “I heard a similar story from a friend of mine,” Katsura said. “He was making a television documentary in the area. The main difference is that, as he told it, a young mother who appeared to be in the depths of despair was roughly brushing aside a child who was walking beside her, crying like a banshee and trying to cling to the mother’s skirts. I realize this could be a whole other urban myth but I feel as if the two might share a common thread, so please indulge me while I share the version I heard.

  “Actually, this isn’t mere hearsay, because I myself have seen a crying child like the one my friend described, although I just passed by without stopping. As my friend said, anyone who encountered such a scene would naturally be suspicious, thinking it might be a trap or the setup for a scam. But he tends to be curious by nature, so he paused to watch the scene unfold. After a moment, he said, a rather louche-looking man (clearly not a child welfare worker or a police officer in uniform) approached the child and put his arms around her in a comforting gesture. That triggered my friend’s documentary-filmmaker’s instincts, and he hung around to see what the man would do next. By and by the young mother, who had run away as fast as her legs could carry her, leaving her crying child behind, turned around and came back to stand next to the man and the little girl. After a while the child and the mother appeared to have reconciled their differences, although they still weren’t saying anything to each other. The two of them were just standing on the sidewalk, like silent satellites orbiting the man. My friend had to leave then, and that’s the rather anticlimactic way the story ends. He told me that in hindsight he had a feeling there had been a suspicious van parked not too far away, and he said if he ever had a chance, he’d like to go back and follow up on the story. He thought there was probably something unsavory going on involving pornography, or prostitution, or even slave trafficking, but of course that was pure storyteller’s speculation on his part.

  “I’ve been thinking about it, too,” Katsura continued, “and I can’t help wondering whether the man my friend saw might have been running some sort of con—that is, a carefully orchestrated and rehearsed situation created for purely mercenary reasons. It isn’t unusual to see such pairs—the crying child and the despondent-looking young mother—out on the streets these days, so isn’t it possible that some sleazy lowlife is putting those duos together and then standing by, watching for an opportunity for blackmail or extortion? Perhaps there’s even a training camp where gangsters teach underprivileged children and their mothers to behave in a manipulative way. If that’s what was going on it would be a truly abominable business enterprise, but I can see how participating in a sidewalk scam could still seem appealing to the poor women and children, compared with the horrific alternatives.

  “Taking my uninformed conjecture one step further, please bear with me while I float another scenario. Over a century ago there wasn’t a single car in this country, much less a van. It was a time when the peasants were so poor that they had no choice but to mount an uprising in protest. There were probably quite a few young mothers wandering around with children who had every reason to cry. (They might even have been homeless.) Isn’t it possible that a bunch of those unhappy children and their desperate mothers were brought together in some farmer’s barn, or maybe a shrine or a temple—someplace with enough space to accommodate a large group. This may seem like a stretch, but isn’t it conceivable that they were recruited to act as a kind of miniature advance vanguard, to run interference for the peasant troops in the insurrection led by Meisuke II and his mother? Whatever happened in reality, some version of the crying-child trope seems to have found its way into local folklore. Maybe this is an impossibly rosy scenario, but I’d like to imagine that the crying children and their woebegone mothers might have played an active role in winning the uprising.”

  “Hmm,” Ricchan said, addressing Tatsuo Katsura. “That’s an interesting interpretation, and I don’t think it’s impossibly optimistic by any means.”

  Katsura smiled, but his next comment seemed to indicate a lingering skepticism. “On the other hand,” he said, “if the story my friend told me is true—you know, about the modern-day crying child, the morose young mother, and the suspicious-looking man—then trying to romanticize their situation really would be impossibly optimistic. I mean, it seems fairly clear why those women and children were rounded up, and where they were going to be taken, and what was going to become of them in the end.”

  “What do you mean?” Ricchan asked.

  “I think Katsura is lamenting the tragic destinies that might await those mothers and children,” Unaiko declared in the resonant trained-actor’s voice she used onstage. “I mean, we’re all familiar with the loathsome things taking place in Southeast Asia, and here at home as well.”

  “That’s right,” Katsura agreed. “I was only trying to say that in the world today, it’s conventional wisdom to assume there are individuals or groups who would round up disadvantaged children and their mothers and then sell them somewhere outside their native country. Child porn
ography and the prostitution of young girls are undeniable realities, and the Internet is teeming with the most sickeningly exploitative imagery you could imagine.

  “As Ricchan said, there are more than a few of those pathetic duos—the crying child and the frowsy, wretched-looking mother—wandering around in Japanese cities these days. It would be nice to think there’s a happy ending waiting for them somewhere down the road, but I’m afraid such a rosily optimistic view would be unrealistic, or delusional. Even so, I won’t give up my vision of a brighter future for those mothers and their children.”

  While Tatsuo Katsura was delivering this disquisition, two of the Caveman Group’s featured actors, the inseparable Suke & Kaku, had been sitting quietly on the bare floor in the great room, listening intently. Now they craned their necks above the seated crowd and joined in the conversation.

  “We wanted to ask your opinion about a dramaturgical matter, Mr. Choko,” one of them said. “We were looking for an opening-scene motif that could be reprised in the finale, and we thought the crying children might work.

  “At the beginning, a single child could appear and begin to ascend toward the rafters, weeping loudly, and later there would be a group of children on the stage. You might wonder how we would go about creating the climbing effect, but by a stroke of luck, it turns out the architect of the circular auditorium, Mr. Ara, also designed a sort of spiral ramp or tiered scaffolding that extends almost all the way up to the ceiling of the theater in the round. Apparently the riser was originally built for a concert of Mr. Takamura’s work. Right now it’s being stored in the gymnasium, so we should be able to use it. As for actors, we could recruit children from around here—the smaller and nimbler the better. Of course we would have to be absolutely certain the corkscrew ramp was safe, but we could get the junior high’s physical education teacher to help us with the logistical details.