by Kenzaburo Oe
In any case, after moving his own earthly headquarters to Berlin, Kogito didn’t make any further attempt to contact Goro. There was no word from the Other Side, either, but it wasn’t long after his arrival that Kogito received some unsolicited information about Goro’s time in Berlin.
Due to the unconventional way the campus of the Berlin Free University had come into being, its buildings were scattered around a leafy residential district. In one of those buildings—the assembly hall of the School of Comparative Culture—a meet-and-greet panel discussion took place one night, with Kogito as the primary participant. The audience included students, faculty members, people from the publishing company that was endowing the commemorative chair, and a media contingent. It was also open to local residents who were interested in Kogito’s presence in Berlin.
After the formal meeting was over and most of the crowd had dispersed, Kogito was approached by a stranger who appeared to have some information about Goro’s previous sojourn in Berlin—information that might have some bearing on his subsequent life, and death. When he thought about it, now that he was living alone in this foreign place, with no one to shield him from other people the way Chikashi always did in Tokyo, Kogito wasn’t able to pick and choose among the potential informants who descended upon him. Because of that, he found himself standing before them unprotected and utterly vulnerable.
The hall was rather small, and it was filled to bursting. After a panel discussion that featured an animated exchange of questions and comments, a crowd gathered around Kogito and the assistant professor of Japanese studies who was acting as his interpreter. Kogito remained standing, leaning against the tall table next to him while he signed paperback copies of the German translations of his books.
From one side of the lectern, a Japanese woman approached and stood very close to him. She was enveloped in a cloud of heavy perfume, and her voice had a distinct Kansai accent (that is, typical of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area). “I’d like to talk to you about Goro and the new generation of German filmmakers,” she announced abruptly, and then continued in a pretentious manner, sprinkled with knowing bits of German, evidently in the hopes of forcing Kogito to listen closely to her every word.
“Please don’t worry,” she said, “I have no interest whatsoever in discussing any dreary tabloid scandals. That’s just the revenge of the Mädchen für alles, anyway. In case you aren’t familiar with that expression, it originally meant ‘maid of all work,’ but in the latest editions of German-Japanese dictionaries, it’s now translated, with impeccable political correctness, as ‘factotum’ or ‘a person who will do anything for you.’ In English, they might say ‘girl Friday,’ though in my mind it implies something a bit more, shall we say, personal than that.” Kogito had no idea what the woman was referring to, although he would learn the true meaning of the German expression soon enough, and he was shocked by the barely concealed scorn he heard in her voice. (He hadn’t had a chance to look at her because he was still busy signing books.)
Meanwhile, the next person in line told Kogito, in English, that the book was a Christmas gift for his mother and asked him to write a specific greeting. But as Kogito started to inscribe the title page his mind went completely blank, and when he asked the student to repeat the request he found himself, inexplicably, speaking French. After those little glitches, he finally got the book signed and handed it back to the student. Then, for the first time, he turned and looked directly at the woman who was standing beside him. He was surprised to see that she was considerably older than she sounded; she looked tired, and she seemed to be surrounded by an aura of impenetrable gloom.
“About that Mädchen ... that girl Friday you mentioned. Was she Goro’s interpreter while he was here?” Kogito asked.
“Heavens, no!” the woman exclaimed. “She could barely speak German herself. And she wasn’t what you would call a legitimate assistant, either, if you get my drift. That’s why I used the term ‘girl Friday.’”
The woman appeared to be from the same generation as Kogito, which is to say well into late middle age. Her small face was completely overwhelmed by the unnaturally dark, voluminous mass of deep-black hair that was piled on top of it—hair that seemed to be at odds with her years—and when she closed her mouth there was a conspicuous puffiness around her lips, almost as if she were holding something in her mouth.
Kogito couldn’t think of anything to say to keep the conversational ball rolling, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. Handing him her business card, she said, “It’s great that you have so many fans in Germany, but you seem to be awfully busy today, so I’ll say good-bye for now. As I mentioned earlier, I’d like to have a long talk with you about Germany’s new generation of filmmakers, so please keep that in mind.”
As the woman walked away, Kogito noticed that a television cameraman who had been filming the panel discussion had turned his lens on her retreating back. Petite though she was, she walked with long, bold strides, like a man.
“Are you planning to film this kind of conversation, too?” Kogito asked.
“No,” replied a Japanese producer, sticking his head out from behind the cameraman. “It’s just B-roll footage, to set the scene. By the way, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I was surprised to hear that an expression like ‘Mädchen für alles’—which is what you might call seriously un-PC—is still floating around. Germany’s very strong on feminist issues, you know.”
Afterward, Kogito somehow managed to leave the woman’s card behind on the table where he had been signing his books. The truth is, he was only interested in one of Goro’s female acquaintances in Berlin: the “really nice girl” who had been with him when he painted that watercolor of trees in winter.
As for the “scandalous” woman who figured in the Tokyo tabloid story that had catalyzed (if not precipitated) Goro’s death, even if she turned out to be the same person who was supposedly getting her revenge for having been treated as a Mädchen für alles, Kogito could not have cared less about that sordid bit of ancient history.
2
As it turned out, Kogito wasn’t able to free himself from the attentions of the big-haired, heavily scented Japanese woman that easily. The S. Fischer memorial lectureship formally began the following week, with sessions every Monday and Wednesday. Kogito taught from twelve till two, but as he learned from the German assistant professor of comparative literature who came to pick him up at his apartment on the first day of classes, there was a custom called the Academic Fifteen, which required instructors to arrive at their classrooms fifteen minutes late and leave fifteen minutes early. Kogito didn’t want to spend the fifteen extra minutes before his lecture killing time in the classroom, so instead he dropped by the department’s office to say hello. When he peeped into the pigeonhole that had only just been assigned to him, he found a notecard from the woman whose business card he had “accidentally” lost.
Someone—a German university student—kindly let me know that one of my business cards had been “dropped” at the meeting hall the other day. I have never dropped one of my business cards in my life.
On the day in question, I clearly remember handing out only two cards: one to that assistant professor and one to you. I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, so I’m going to assume that you left my card behind inadvertently, due to the sort of absentminded carelessness we associate with professors and authors. In any case, the thing I still want very much to talk to you about has nothing to do with the Mädchen für alles affair that I impulsively mentioned the other day, or anything like that. I actually have a very constructive proposal regarding the future of the German film world.
I have to go to Hannover this afternoon, so I won’t be able to attend your lecture, but I have the telephone number of the Center for Advanced Research, and I’ll be in touch in the next few days. By the way, I’m hoping the lecture will be a huge success. Yours, etc.
Kogito wouldn’t have gone so far as to call the lecture a huge success,
but it was certainly well attended (indeed, only forty copies of the English text of his speech had been made, to be distributed before the talk began, and an additional batch had to be hastily printed), and after he had finished reading the speech in English, the explanatory lecture went off without a hitch.
Afterward Kogito headed home on the bus he’d been instructed to catch, and as he rode through the city in the deepening dusk, he suddenly remembered the strangely vivid expression “bean harmonica,” a colloquial Japanese nickname for a small pocket harmonica. That memory was directly related to the unusual facial configuration of the woman who had accosted him, and when Kogito thought about it he realized that he had heard the expression on one of Goro’s Tagame tapes.
This was while Goro was still alive, during the period when Kogito had started listening to the second batch of tapes—an activity that, in a surprisingly short time, had turned into a nightly ritual. Goro had evidently foreseen that development, because each tape he sent was a seamless continuation of the one before, with no introductory greetings or pleasantries, so that when Kogito pressed the PLAY button Goro’s monologue always picked up exactly where it had left off.
Hence, it was entirely natural that listening to Tagame should have turned into an indispensable daily routine. Right after Goro’s death, there was a time when Kogito forgot to change the batteries (Tagame was a rather archaic piece of equipment, not designed to be user-friendly, so there was no warning that the batteries were running low), and he was afraid the tape recorder had broken down. After that he had developed a fear of allowing anything to interrupt the conversational system Goro had so painstakingly set up. The thought of how bleak his evenings would be if that happened seemed to hover above Kogito’s head like the shadow of a giant bird.
In any event, when he first started listening to Goro’s tapes one of the recorded anecdotes that had especially impressed him invoked the bean harmonica. Goro hadn’t set out to tell the harmonica story from the outset; he just segued naturally into it from a discussion about teaching people how to act in films.
“When you edited that paperback edition of my father’s collected essays, one of your commentaries was on a treatise my father had published somewhere else, about how to coach actors—remember?” Goro began. “You compared it to Kenji Miyazawa’s Outline of the Essential Art of the Peasant, and as a result you were criticized not only by a group of Miyazawa scholars who believed in the strict ‘textual criticism’ that was flourishing at the time, but also by a group of film critics who had gotten together to make a new study of my father’s written works. They thought your approach was a bit off the wall, as I recall. But although I had reservations about the rather high-flown literary style you chose to use, I did think at the time that there was a visceral, intuitive basis for the parallels you drew.
“The early days of the film industry in this country were really something else, you know? Any time they wanted to invoke a ‘Japanese-y’ feeling in a scene—which is to say, in pretty much every single scene—the soundtrack would, without fail, be playing some variation on ‘Sakura, Sakura.’ And when they shot a crowd scene, you could sense that beyond the narrow confines of the set, which was crammed full of extras, there wasn’t a soul in sight. That was the sort of thing my father wrote about. And if you want to talk about the origins of the first film actresses, most if not all of them came from that peasant class that Kenji Miyazawa poured so much energy into trying to help. They were probably from the same background as the girls whose parents were so poor that they had no choice but to sell their daughters to the pleasure quarters, or worse. I think my father must have had the same feelings of wanting to do something altruistic for those poor country girls. Both my father and Kenji had the same sort of humanitarian motivations, you know.
“Once the camera was turned on, the actresses would never smile, and when they spoke their lines they barely opened their mouths—those things drove my father crazy. But he always wanted to try to help those camera-shy actresses; that was the feeling he brought to the set. Kenji, of course, tried to introduce the farming class to the magnificence of art and culture, but making that noble ideal a reality was easier said than done. Even Kenji himself probably understood that, ultimately, it was an impossible dream. As for my father, rather than just trying to whitewash those ruddy-complexioned young farmgirls and turn them into pretty, decorative blossoms, I think he was trying to come up with a concrete plan to help them develop their acting skills. As someone who comes from a valley in the middle of a forest, you’re probably able to grasp that better than most people. And the plan that my father came up with way back when, in that acting guide, is something that’s genuinely useful even today. When I myself was first starting out as an actor, I always kept in mind the advice my father used to give to up-and-coming actors: When you’re speaking your lines, always pitch your voice a note or two lower than your usual speaking voice.
“Well, of course, I’m from a different generation, and the moviemaking industry is fifty years farther along than it was in my father’s day, but when you think about the teaching of acting that’s going on today, it’s become so simple that I have a feeling my father would be plunged into despair if he heard about it. The way I see it, if you pour all your efforts into the casting process and put together an absolutely perfect cast, then the movie’s already as good as made! Beyond that, there’s no need for coaching.
“You hear some people talking about the clique of A-list actresses and so on, right? The truth is that some of those same actresses, even while they are just the latest cute new face, floundering around in a fog, often end up winning the ‘best newcomer’ acting prizes. And that’s what wakes them up to the truth about performing. If the director treats them like serious actresses, they’ll give him more or less what he wants, and before too long, as time goes by, they’ll end up being classified as top-flight, A-list actresses. That’s just the way it is. People may call that kind of skillful acting ‘great,’ but when actresses get put on a pedestal like that they get into a rut, and they just end up giving the same performance over and over. It’s really a staggeringly tedious tautology, you know. An actress who has always played pure, virginal roles gets cast against type and throws herself into a really gritty portrayal of a courtesan in the Heian era or some such. In my father’s day there were people like that ... but that’s nothing more than another rotation of the same tautology. That type of over-the-top performance—you know, the tragic geisha—is meant to make people cry, but I can never watch that sort of thing without laughing.
“On the other hand, many of the women I’ve actually met up with in everyday life (and these aren’t professional actresses, mind you) have dropped their masks and said to me, at some point, ‘This is who I really am,’ and I’m just blown away by how formidable their acting skills are. You really have to take off your hat to them.
“And it’s not as if I’ve only run into one or two of these specially talented women in my life so far. In the circles I move in, whether I wanted to or not, I couldn’t help meeting women like that, one after the other. It’s gotten to the point where I think that sort of encounter is the only reason my life has unfolded as it has. All I can say is that it’s been a never-ending parade of trouble, with plenty more where that came from! That seems to be my fate, and I embrace it.”
This was typical of Goro’s disquisitions; the “harmonica-mouth” saga may have been his main topic on the tape in question, but it was prefaced by this extended free-association ramble. Now that Kogito was in Berlin, far away from Tagame, he was remembering more consciously the way Goro spoke on the tapes, and he realized that quite a few of the recordings had probably been made under the influence of alcohol. When they were younger—in high school, even—he had been with Goro on quite a few occasions when he was drinking. The reason he hadn’t picked up on Goro’s tipsiness when he was listening to the recordings was because now that they were adults living in Tokyo, they each had their own families
and their careers had taken them in different directions. So although they occasionally went out for sushi or Chinese food and had a drink or two with their meals, there had been only a couple of times when they met up at some watering hole for the express purpose of drinking the night away. This probably sounds strange, considering that Chikashi was Goro’s only sibling, but although Goro had dropped by once or twice on short notice, in recent years there hadn’t been a single time when Kogito and Chikashi invited Goro over to their house and they all stayed up till late at night drinking and talking. The reverse was true, as well: the first time Kogito ever set foot in Goro’s house in Yugawara was the day after he died.
When Kogito heard that Goro had consumed a large quantity of brandy before jumping off the building (Umeko had even placed an open bottle of Hennessy VSOP in front of the coffin), it struck him as strange and disturbing. Kogito himself had for many years made it a habit, if not a ritual, to have a nightcap before going to sleep, but he tried to keep the damage to a minimum by limiting his intake. Still, no matter how hard he tried to reform his lifestyle (especially after he turned fifty), that single tumbler of whiskey before bed remained an immutable rite. Nevertheless, when he was listening to the cassettes that were delivered before Goro went to the Other Side, it never occurred to him that Goro’s extraordinarily high spirits and emotional openness—to a degree that would have been unthinkable if they were in the same room—might be due to the liberating influence of alcohol. Also, it was clear that the distinguishing feature of Goro and Kogito’s relationship, from start to finish, had always been their tutor-pupil dynamic. (Goro, needless to say, played the role of tutor.) Now, of course, that relationship was on hiatus, but when Kogito thought about his Tagame conversations with Goro, he had a feeling they might not yet be at an end.