by Kenzaburo Oe
Glancing toward the coffin, Umeko said, “I could hardly recognize Goro’s face when I saw it at the police station, but now he’s back to looking like his handsome self again. Please take a peek, and pay your respects.”
In response to this, Chikashi said to Kogito, in a quiet but powerful voice, “Actually, I think it would be better if you didn’t look.”
Meeting Umeko’s quizzical eyes, Chikashi returned her sister-in-law’s gaze with a look of absolute conviction and candor, overlaid with sadness. Umeko clearly understood, and she stood up and went into the room with the coffin, alone.
Kogito, meanwhile, was thinking about how distant he had felt from Chikashi while she was staring at Umeko with that strong, defiant expression. There was absolutely no trace, in Chikashi’s utterly direct look, of the genteel social buffers that usually softened her speech and conduct. This is the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it, Chikashi seemed to be trying to tell herself as well, in the midst of her overwhelming grief and sorrow. It’s fine for Umeko to gaze lovingly at the destroyed face of Goro’s corpse and imagine, wishfully, that those dead features have been miraculously restored to their original handsome, animated form. As his sister, I’m doing exactly the same thing. But I think seeing Goro’s face would just be too much for Kogito to bear.
As Chikashi perceptively surmised, the prospect of viewing Goro’s dead body filled Kogito with dread, but when Umeko voiced her request he automatically started to stand up. He couldn’t help thinking that he would never be mature enough to handle something like this, and he was engulfed by feelings of loneliness and isolation. But he was conscious of another motivation for agreeing to view the corpse, as well: he was curious whether there might be a mark stretching along Goro’s cheek that would indicate he had been talking into a Tagame-type headset when he jumped. The impact, Kogito theorized, could have left an imprint that would still be visible now, and he had reason to believe that that scenario wasn’t merely his own wild conjecture.
Taruto, who was the head of Goro’s production company as well as the CEO of his own family-owned company in Shikoku, had taken on the task of transporting Goro’s body to Yugawara, and after the wake he showed the family some things he had found on Goro’s desk at the office. Along with three different versions of a suicide note, written on a personal computer, there was a drawing done in soft pencil on high-quality, watermarked drawing paper.
The picture, which was drawn in a style reminiscent of an illustrated book of fairy tales from some unspecified foreign country, showed a late-middle-aged man floating through a sky populated with innumerable clouds that resembled French dinner rolls. The man’s position reminded Kogito of the way Akari sprawled out on the floor whenever he was composing music, and this added to Kogito’s immediate certainty that the picture was a self-portrait of Goro. Furthermore, the man who was wafting through the air was holding a mobile phone that looked very much like a miniature version of Tagame in his left hand, and talking into it. (Hence, Kogito’s suspicion that there might have been a headset mark on Goro’s dead face.)
The fairy-tale style of the drawing reminded Kogito of something that had happened fifteen years earlier. Goro had written a book of essays having to do with psychoanalysis, which was one of his many interests. In the past he had always designed the covers for his own books, but he was already busy directing movies, so he delegated that task to a young artist. Rather than the contents of the book it was the cover Kogito thought of now, as he looked at Goro’s “floating man” picture.
Soon after the book was published, Goro and Kogito happened to run into each other, and they started talking about the cover design. “This drawing style is clearly emulating that of the popular illustrator whose work is all over the major magazines in America right now,” Kogito remarked. “To be sure, this composition incorporates Japanese people and scenery, but the basic concept and techniques are obviously borrowed. For a young artist beginning his career, is this kind of derivativeness really okay?” Kogito posed this question in what was meant to be a lighthearted, teasing way, but Goro’s reaction was blatantly aggressive.
“If you want to talk about openly copying foreign artists, or being directly influenced by their styles, that’s something you did at the start of your career, too, isn’t it?” he snapped. “But because this is visual art, the derivativeness is much more obvious: what you see is what you get. In your case, you basically cribbed things from literature written in French or English, or else from translations, and redid them in Japanese. But even so, you hewed pretty closely to the original form of the foreign literary style, right?”
“That’s exactly right,” Kogito agreed, but he was taken aback by this rather stark assessment. “When you’re a young writer, you do have something original to say, even at the earliest stages. The trick is figuring out how to protect your original voice while stripping away the veneer of borrowed styles. That’s very difficult and painful to do.”
“And you’ve definitely succeeded in doing that,” Goro conceded. “But in the process, you’ve lost the relatively large readership you used to have when you were younger. You’re aware of that dilemma, no doubt. As time goes on, isn’t it just going to get more and more acute? This young artist has a lot of talent, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to let himself get set in any narrow stylistic ways. On the contrary, I think he’ll probably stretch himself in many different directions.”
At the time, Kogito was bewildered by Goro’s response, which seemed to stem from some sort of festering ill will rather than from simple irritation at Kogito’s offhanded comments. Kogito told himself that Goro probably just felt protective toward the young artist’s book cover, which he obviously liked very much. The style of the paintings Goro was trying to create on his own, toward the end of his life, was clearly a postmodern variation on American primitivism—a term that could also have described that young artist’s work—so it was possible that Goro had taken Kogito’s perceived attack on the young artist as a personal affront.
After a while, it occurred to Kogito that Goro’s last drawing might have been meant as a farewell bequest to Kogito himself: a self-portrait of Goro floating through space, talking to his old friend and brother-in-law via his Tagame headset, in lieu of a mobile phone.
So anyway, that’s it for today—I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.
4
Kogito left the house of mourning in Yugawara and headed for the Japan Railways station, planning to board an express train for Tokyo. But the moment he walked into the station he was besieged by an unruly horde of TV reporters and photographers who had obviously been lying in wait, eager to talk to anyone with the slightest connection to the late Goro Hanawa.
Ignoring the shouted questions, Kogito tried to steer clear of the ring of jostling reporters, but then a rapidly revolving TV camera collided with the lower part of the bridge of his nose, barely missing his right eye. The young cameraman looked at Kogito with an insolent half smile; he might just have been covering up his distress and confusion with a façade of arrogance, but Kogito felt that his facial expression was very crass and inappropriate indeed.
After escaping from the mob scene at the train station, Kogito started walking up a long, narrow lane that had been carved out of a hillside of mandarin orange trees and paved with cobblestones. At the top of the slope he found a taxi and climbed in. The driver must have been acquainted with Goro, because he took one look at Kogito and said, “I guess it’s really true what they say about crying tears of blood!” It was only then that Kogito realized that half of his face was covered with blood from the deep cut on his nose.
Even so, he felt that rushing to the nearest emergency room and getting the paperwork to prove that he had been injured, as a way of punishing that arrogant cameraman, would have been an overreaction. Besides, the cameraman was just the inadvertent point man for that seething mass of journalis
ts, with their insatiable collective appetite for tragedy and scandal. In the short time since Goro’s death, Kogito had gotten a very distinct impression from all the media people, whether they were with television networks, newspapers, or weekly tabloid magazines. That is, he had noticed that they all seemed to share a kind of contemptuous scorn for anyone who had committed suicide. At the root of that contempt seemed to be the feeling that Goro—who had for years been lionized, lauded, and treated like royalty by the media—had somehow betrayed them, almost on a personal level, and as a result the fallen idol could never again be restored to his previous kingly status.
The tsunami of scorn that had been heaped on Goro’s dead body was so vast and so powerful that it ultimately extended even to family members such as Kogito, Chikashi, and Umeko, whom the media referred to, coldly, as “parties with ties to Goro.” A female reporter, who had always treated Kogito kindly whenever their paths had crossed at meetings of the book review department of the major newspaper where she worked, left a message on his home answering machine seeking comments for an article she was writing, but even in her innocent voice Kogito could hear an undertone of barely camouflaged contempt for Goro: the “false king” whose torch of power had flickered and gone out once and for all when he decided to jump off a roof.
Kogito came to that realization after his train station confrontation with the young cameraman who had inadvertently wounded him—and barely missed putting out his eye. No doubt the TV station was liable for the accident, but the unfortunate cameraman was just one drop of water in the giant wave of disdain, so what would have been the point of taking legal action against him alone?
This is getting a bit ahead of the story, but for about a week after Goro’s suicide, Kogito made a point of watching the Wide News program early every morning and again in the evening. Since no one else in his household showed the slightest interest in joining him, he would carry the small TV set into his study and put it at the foot of his bed, then listen to the sound through his Tagame headphones.
Kogito had expected that he might have difficulty understanding the speech of the younger generation—that is, the anchors and reporters on the news shows and the actors (male and female) who had appeared in Goro’s films. But he even found it hard to follow the remarks of the film directors and screenwriters, not to mention the commentators from the arts and from the larger world beyond, who were more or less his own age. And the harder Kogito concentrated on trying to understand what all these talking heads were saying, the more incomprehensible their babble became.
He even began to wonder whether, by surrounding himself with beloved, familiar books and writing so often about those same books, he had somehow exiled himself to a solitary island with its own peculiar language. As he did his novelist’s work he had assumed that he was somehow connected with other people, but in reality he seemed to have no bond whatsoever with the people living on the continent—the mainland, so to speak—of language. That realization filled him with anxiety and frustration. Nonetheless, he continued to be mesmerized by the televised coverage of Goro’s death, straining his eyes to see the images on the screen with the volume on the headphones cranked up as high as he could bear. After this had gone on for a week, though, he knew that it was time to give it up cold turkey. Kogito lugged the TV set back to the living room, then collapsed onto the sofa in exhaustion.
“I was wondering why you were wasting your time on that garbage,” Chikashi remarked.
The thing is, Kogito thought, his head was still in such a muddle that he couldn’t do much of anything else. Besides, the time wasn’t completely wasted. Why? Because during that week of watching the TV news every morning and noon, in addition to the sensationalistic “specials” that were broadcast every second or third night, Kogito had gradually come to realize that Goro’s suicide was something that couldn’t be explained in the glib words of modern television and that, consequently, the world would never understand why his brilliant, talented friend had decided to jump to his death.
There was another aspect of Goro’s wretched, tragic death that tormented Kogito. During the past ten years or so, Kogito hadn’t seen much of Goro—that is to say, Goro’s tremendous success as a director had stolen the time they might otherwise have spent together—but he knew that Goro had been living in the world of shallow, incomprehensible blather of the sort he’d heard on all those TV programs. The upshot of that, Kogito thought, was that Goro had started talking into a tape recorder and sending the tapes for Kogito to listen to via Tagame. Perhaps that was because, at the end of his life, Goro needed a language that would express his true self.
Around the time when Kogito stopped watching the relentless TV coverage of Goro’s death, Chikashi began to be tormented every morning by a different kind of blather: the lurid advertisements that were splashed all over the daily newspaper, touting a never-ending stream of articles about Goro in the weekly tabloid magazines. As if hypnotized by the ads, Chikashi would inadvertently end up buying and bringing home those “women’s magazine” scandal sheets, even though reading their ghastly articles just compounded the damage and made her feel even worse. The primary topic of those articles was Goro’s relations with women.
In fact, just before Goro jumped off the building he had printed out a farewell note in which he said that this radical act was the only way to “deny with his whole body,” because words evidently didn’t seem sufficient, the gossip-mongering tabloid magazine article about his “relations with women” that was on the verge of hitting newsstands.
Chikashi never talked about it, but Kogito wasn’t convinced by the language of the “suicide note” or by any of the articles about the tragedy. He couldn’t find any words, anywhere, that could provide a satisfactory explanation of the death of Goro, who had always been such an extraordinary presence in Kogito’s life.
Kogito especially disagreed with the articles that tried to blame Goro’s suicide on a minor slump in his filmmaking career. After winning a major award at a certain film festival in Italy, a Japanese comedian-turned-director, who was heading for America to promote his popular, critically acclaimed film, quipped, “When Goro was looking down from the top of that building, maybe my award gave him a teensy little push from behind.” When Kogito read that soul-chilling, stomach-turning comment, he could only think: Good God, is that the sort of person Goro was forced to associate with?
Gradually, though, both Kogito and Chikashi became oblivious to the incessant deluge of TV and tabloid coverage. They left the answering machine switched on all the time, and although their primary aim was to escape the constant ringing of the telephone, after a while they didn’t even bother to check for messages.
And so they muddled slowly along, somehow. Kogito and Chikashi never once spoke about what had happened to Goro, but each knew that the other was obsessing about Goro’s death, and even Akari seemed to sense that his parents thought of little else. Still, they went on paying (or pretending to pay) careful attention to their respective tasks. They lived this way for several months, seldom leaving the house.
Meanwhile, Kogito had developed a new habit—an addiction, really—which he was keeping secret from Chikashi. He had surreptitiously resumed the lively dialogues with Tagame that he had been engaging in, off and on, during the three months preceding Goro’s suicide, with the army cot in his study as the staging ground. Only now he was doing it on a more serious and a more regular basis than before—that is to say, daily. Since Goro’s suicide, Kogito had started making rules about how these midnight conversations with Tagame were to be conducted, and he was very conscientious about following those arbitrary regulations to the letter.
Rule Number One: Never mention the fact that Goro has gone to the Other Side. This was easier said than done, of course, and at the beginning, whenever Kogito was chatting away with (or at) Tagame, he was unable to erase Goro’s suicide from his mind for even a moment. Before too long, though, new ideas just naturally began to bubble up. For one thin
g, Kogito was intensely curious about the Other Side, where Goro now resided. In terms of space and time, was it completely different from the world on this side? And when you were there, looking back across the existential divide, would the very fact of your death on this side be nullified, as if you had never died at all?
Before Kogito met Goro at Matsuyama High School, he had been thinking about what certain philosophers had written about the various types of death perception, but there hadn’t been anyone he could talk to about such things. Not long after he and Goro became friends, he broached the subject. In those days—and, now that he thought about it, throughout their long association—their basic style of communication had been infused with jokiness and wordplay, and they tended to aim for humorous effect even when they were discussing profoundly serious matters.
Naturally, it was inevitable that young Kogito would always take a position contrary to those expressed in the rather staid language of the philosophy books he was reading. To wit: “It goes without saying that someone who is living in this world wouldn’t be able to talk knowledgeably about his own death, based on firsthand experience. That’s because the essence of intelligent consciousness ceases to be at the same moment that one’s actual existence is coming to an end. In other words, for people who are alive and living, death simply doesn’t exist, and by the time they experience it directly they’re already beyond cognitive understanding.” Kogito began by quoting that argument, which he had read somewhere, and then proceeded to outline his own interpretative variation on the theme.