by Kenzaburo Oe
As Goro was riffing about coaching actors, he invoked the woman he’d nicknamed “Bean Harmonica.” She was, he maintained, a classic illustration of his theory that even with all the acting training he himself had received over the years, he couldn’t hold a candle to the normal, everyday behavior of someone who was naturally endowed with remarkable histrionic gifts.
“There was one woman, especially,” he recalled. (He never did mention the woman’s name.) “She always tried to conceal it by wearing her hair down over her face, but if you were to lift up her bangs with both hands, you’d see that she had something not often seen among Japanese women: a majestically high forehead. She had very expressive, deep-set eyes, and the space between her splendid nose and her upper lip was very small. It’s hard to describe, but the overall effect was indescribably attractive. However, in a matter of seconds that lovely, smiling face could be transformed into a mask of resentment, bitterness, and discontent. Or else she would start wheedling, trying to talk me into something with tears welling up in her eyes.
“And then, suddenly, she would just clam up. At times like that it looked as if she was holding one of those toylike miniature harmonicas in her charming, oversized mouth, with her lips closed over it so that her mouth was stretched into a rectangle. And with her complicated facial expressions playing around that harmonica mouth—there’s no actress, no matter how accomplished, who could ever portray such a roller-coaster range of emotions on screen. I can’t even imagine it. The thing is, that acting ability was hereditary: the gift of the mother, passed on to her daughter!”
Now, in Berlin, as he ruminated about what Goro had said on that tape, Kogito gradually began to discern a thread of logic running through the chaos and confusion. He had initially been reminded, vaguely, of the phrase “bean harmonica” by the facial expression of the woman who accosted him after the panel discussion, and that was what had inspired him to try to recall its context. Goro’s powers of observation and description were prodigious, as evidenced by the nicknames he bestowed on various people. If the friend he called “Bean Harmonica” was the same person as Goro’s “nice young girl,” then wasn’t it within the realm of possibility that the big-haired woman might be her mother? If that was true, then Kogito had seen the parental version of the pouty, stormy-faced expression Goro had described. Given that peculiar facial structure, and assuming it was shared by a biologically related mother and daughter, it wasn’t difficult to visualize the daughter’s face based on that of the mother.
But if (Kogito’s flight of conjecture continued) Goro’s “nice young girl in Berlin,” his interpreter/assistant, really was the aggressive woman’s daughter, why would a mother betray her own offspring by saying such disloyal and harshly critical things to a stranger? That question added a new riddle to Kogito’s list of unsolved mysteries.
3
As he gradually became used to his days (and especially his nights) of quarantine, Kogito made frequent phone calls to Tokyo, as if to compensate for being deprived of his Tagame sessions with Goro. On the occasions when he phoned the unfailingly helpful assistant professors or the department secretary at the university, the telephone would start to ring in the German way: puu-tz ... silence ... puu-tz ... silence. In contrast, when he placed an international call to Tokyo, he would hear the familiar Japanese ring—although he knew that what was actually echoing through the living room was probably a few bars of Mozart’s chamber music, which Chikashi had installed as a customized ring. And then a quiet, sorrowful voice would answer the phone: “Yes?”
Although they weren’t really able to engage the gears of conversation, Kogito and his son would always imbibe each other’s “vibrations” over the phone line for a couple of wordless minutes. Then Akari would either hand the phone to his mother or else say, “Mama isn’t here,” in that same melancholy tone of voice, and then lapse into silence.
Chikashi, on the other hand, was usually upbeat and voluble on the international phone line. Sometimes she and Kogito even talked about literature—something that rarely happened when they were face-to-face in Tokyo. One day, after winding up a conversation about various practical matters, Chikashi asked a question that she seemed, characteristically, to have been carefully composing in her mind: “When you were still young, during the time when you were mainly reading literature in translations, there were times when you talked so fast that I couldn’t quite catch the pronunciation, even though you were speaking Japanese. Still, the content of your talks was always very interesting and enjoyable. It seemed to sparkle, and you used to use some really quaint, fanciful expressions. Then after you came back from your long stay in Mexico City, you began to read things in their original languages rather than in Japanese translation, and the feeling of the words you used in conversation seemed to change as a result. I sometimes think that your words took on a new depth after that.
“However, I didn’t hear as much of the curious, quixotic strangeness and interesting flavor that I used to notice before when you talked. And wasn’t it the same with the words you were using in your novels? Maybe it was a matter of maturity, but your words just didn’t seem to sparkle like they used to. And somehow, while I was thinking that way, I stopped reading your novels altogether. So I can’t really speak about the novels you’ve written over the past fifteen years or so, but I can’t help wondering whether there might be a connection between the change in your style and the fact that you started reading foreign books in the original languages. I realize that the usual thing you hear from the very same people who read books in the original is that those are much more entertaining than when they’re translated into Japanese, so what I’m saying probably contradicts the conventional wisdom.”
“That may very well be true,” Kogito said. “It was when I was in my late forties that sales of my books started to slow down, and that was right about the time that I cut way back on reading work in Japanese translation. Just as you say, the sparkling appeal of my prose, such as it was, probably did fade a bit. For me, the attraction of reading work in translation—something entirely separate from the pleasure of reading it in the original—is that there’s something incredibly lucid and straightforward about it. I often find myself marveling at translations, being surprised at various things (Oh, is that how they translated this part? Can they really get away with taking such liberties?) and also thinking that I myself could never use Japanese in such a way. Some of the young, prodigiously talented translators, in particular—they show a strength and authority that’s almost uncanny.”
That day’s phone conversation ended on this note, but after an interval of several days Chikashi, who had been putting in order the incoming gifts of books and magazines, called to report on the presentation copies of books that had arrived from various friends during Kogito’s absence and various other matters. Afterward she ventured, “This is picking up where we left off, but some of the prose by young people who are translating new works from French into Japanese is extraordinarily interesting, don’t you think?” she asked.
“Well, yes, I would agree with that,” Kogito responded. “At the other end of the spectrum, leaving aside the groups at the West Coast American universities who have been directly influenced by Foucault, English writing can be a bit of a slog—rather like a local train that stops at every station. In particular, what’s being written by scholars in England ... in fact, I think the reason my style lost its sparkle might have something to do with having read too many Cambridge University Press research monographs about everyone from Blake to Dante.”
Ignoring Kogito’s typically self-mocking digression, Chikashi said, “Anyway, the passage I’m finding interesting right now may not be important at all, but it really struck a chord with me. It’s from a Japanese translation of a French book called René Char in His Poetry, which was written by a French-literature scholar who seems to be quite well known and accomplished in the field. It’s a gigantic book, and I have to admit that I can’t understand the interpre
tation of Char’s surrealist poems and so on, at all, but anyway, I’ve just faxed you the section I mentioned.”
Chikashi’s fax was a page from that book—a monumental work of biographical literary criticism in which the author makes reference to everyone from Wittgenstein to the Marquis de Sade—underlined here and there with what Kogito recognized, even on the blurry fax paper, as one of the no. 2 pencils Chikashi used to render preliminary sketches for her watercolor paintings.
The rambling section begins with a discussion of René Char’s difficult relationship with his mother, which the critic describes as “more Baudelairean than Oedipal.” A brief digression about Char’s three favorite pursuits (“writing, fighting, and making love”) is followed by a metaphorical passage comparing the poet’s mother to a she-bear. It goes on to say that there comes a time when a man must reject the part of himself that was licked by the mother bear; that is, he must throw away the rules he learned at his mother’s knee.
In the phone call that followed the fax, Chikashi explained the thoughts this passage had awakened in her, and Kogito found himself borne along on the same wave. Chikashi was particularly excited by the nuances of one particular phrase—“the time is ripe to think about throwing away the part that was licked by the mother bear”—in the lines she’d faxed to Kogito in Berlin. “Licked,” of course, referred not only to maternal affection but also to the sterner aspects of child raising. (Indeed, people in medieval Europe used to believe that bear cubs were born as eyeless, formless lumps of flesh and had to be literally licked into shape by their mothers.)
“When I first read this phrase, I thought it said everything there is to say about Goro,” Chikashi declared. “He grew up being constantly ‘licked’ by the mother bear we called Mama. There’s a saying that someone’s being smothered with affection, right? Well, when Goro was a child, from my point of view as his younger sister, he really did appear to be suffocating under the weight of our mother’s affection. Even so, I wasn’t jealous; I thought it was perfectly appropriate for him to receive special treatment and extra care. He was a remarkably beautiful child, and he was so talented at drawing pictures that a publisher in Kyoto once asked him to design the cover for a book. This was during World War Two, but as you know he was even chosen for the special science academy that was created by the government.
“Supplies were tight during wartime, but our mother somehow managed to get her hands on a collection of art supplies that a professional painter would have envied. She also made up a reading list featuring science books aimed at children and got hold of all sorts of unusual things for Goro to read. But she had a severe side as well, and sometimes when Goro didn’t seem to be taking her efforts seriously enough, she could be quite frightening. It’s true; he really did grow up being ‘licked by the bear,’ in every sense of the phrase.
“Remember when Goro got to know some psychologists who specialized in Freud and Lacan? He allowed himself to fall meekly under their influence in a way so unlike him that it struck me, watching from the side, as really strange ... almost creepy. While that was happening, Goro was so completely spellbound that he used to talk about those psychologists really ingenuously, with such total trust and naïveté, and he wrote later in one of his books that they had helped him to finally get free of his mother. For me, though, I never thought he could escape so easily. I know I’m an ignorant person, and I realize it’s a childish kind of skepticism, but I can’t help wondering whether psychology can really be effective on fully formed adults. I mean, look at Goro; he was a sophisticated intellectual who’d been around the block a few times, wasn’t he?
“To be honest, I always thought that at some point the whole psychology thing would turn around and bite him. I’m not saying that he died the way he did as a direct reaction to all that psychiatric mumbo jumbo. But when it comes to the tangled complexities of Goro’s psychological state, I can’t help thinking sometimes that I really would like to see those meddlesome psychologists take some responsibility for what happened in the end.”
4
Although Akari was singularly uncommunicative when Kogito phoned home from his Berlin apartment, he was perfectly comfortable with putting his thoughts down on paper and sending them to his father by fax. When Chikashi began drawing illustrations for Kogito’s essays, Goro had remarked, “She’s only just begun, but already she has her own style.” Remembering that, Kogito thought: If only he could see Akari’s drawings. For example, next to a picture, drawn with marking pen, that showed Akari and his mother climbing the ramp to a giant jet airplane, Akari wrote, “I think I will go to hear the Berlin Philharmonic. Schwalbe and Yasunaga are very good first violins. I will bring Chikashi to Berlin with me.” However, Chikashi nixed that plan because she was concerned that Akari might have one of his epileptic seizures if they traveled to a northern European city in the dead of winter.
Kogito glued Akari’s faxed drawing to a piece of thick, heavy paper and kept it on the table in his apartment’s kitchen. Akari was good at math, and he had written in the fax number by himself. While Kogito was looking at that number, which was for the machine at the Center for Advanced Research, he noticed something. Akari had not only memorized the long number, including 0014930, the international dialing code for Berlin—that sort of thing was his forte—but also incorporated the number into the picture he drew with markers. That, surely, was because when Goro had been in Berlin for the film festival, he had called unexpectedly and had left that number so Kogito could call him back.
Kogito had forgotten Goro’s callback number in Berlin, and Akari saved the day by quietly reading the number off one of his sheets of five-line music paper, where he had jotted it in the margin. He had been sprawled on the floor nearby, composing music, and had apparently been listening when Kogito repeated the number into the mouthpiece. Kogito and Chikashi had both praised Akari to the skies for this feat, and he clearly hadn’t forgotten. On top of that, he was probably delighted anew by the pleasingly symmetrical fact that the first half of his father’s current fax number was the same as that of the number Goro had left several years earlier.
And then Kogito remembered that a young woman had been at the hotel with Goro on the day in question. After that, all sorts of details came flooding back. Goro had called from Berlin with an unusual request: “You know that story about how you met one of your more, um, enthusiastic fans in Nagasaki? There’s someone I’d like you to share it with. And please tell it in English, just the way you told it to O’Brian, years ago. He helped you to improve it so it would sound more like the Queen’s English, right? So tell it just like that. Chikashi said that the corrections O’Brian wrote down on some index cards and sent to you were very amusing. See if you can dig up those cards, and then call me back. There’s a speakerphone switch on this telephone, so we’ll be able to hear you all over the room.”
When Kogito asked, “And why do you want me to do that, pray tell?” Goro responded cheerfully, “There’s someone here; she’s Japanese, but she was raised overseas, and now she’s acting as my German interpreter. She speaks very good Japanese, as well. But when she told me that she was only able to laugh at a joke or a funny story if she heard it in her first foreign language, English, that really blew me away. I mean, I’d never heard of such a thing. So I figured that she would enjoy that story about your adventures in Nagasaki, and you’ve already put it into English. You even have those cards with O’Brian’s notes about how to improve the wording.”
Abruptly, Goro segued into a treatise about the weather. “They say it’s going to snow today for the first time this year, but in the places where the thin branches of the bare black trees are intricately interlaced, you can already see some light snow beginning to accumulate, weighing down the trees,” he said. “Sometimes the forward-tilting trees will be pressed back by a slight current of air, and in that instant of contrapuntal tension the throngs of trees seem to be perfectly still. I’ve been watching them a lot, and for some reason it’s p
ut me in a very good mood, so I just felt like asking you for an unreasonable favor. Call me when you’re ready—I’ll be waiting!”
Kogito had fond memories of that conversation with Goro, who seemed to be unusually high-spirited and loquacious. He was obviously enjoying the outrageous spontaneity of asking for an elaborate favor over an international phone line, and having a young woman next to him, listening in, must have added to his pleasure.
O’Brian was a famous English—or, more precisely, Irish—actor who had costarred with Goro in Lord Jim, in 1965. When O’Brian happened to come to Japan for a visit, Goro threw a small party for him at the house he shared with his then wife, Katsuko (the only daughter of the owner of a company that imported Western films), and he asked Kogito to come and keep the Englishman company.
While Kogito was chatting with O’Brian, the anecdote the Englishman seemed to find most entertaining was about something that had happened not long before the party, when Kogito was in Nagasaki. He had been invited by the chairman of a left-wing publisher’s labor union to give a lecture to a gathering there, but whether it was publishers, newspapers, or broadcasting stations, the hard-core union organizers had very little use for so-called progressive novelists—at least not for those who didn’t officially belong to the Communist Party or to the extreme-radical minor factions. And on this day, sure enough, that was the sort of treatment that Kogito received: minimal, almost grudging hospitality.
Because of the inconvenient scheduling of nonstop flights, Kogito arrived in the morning, but the “finger-flute” (that is to say, finger-whistling) concert and Kogito’s literary lecture weren’t scheduled until evening. As expected, after being given a dubious-looking box lunch he was peremptorily shuttled off to the union’s lodging house.