by Kenzaburo Oe
When Kogito hit the PLAY button again, Goro charged aggressively on, as if he had known exactly how Kogito was going to respond. “I think Professor Musumi has stepped into my shoes, and Takamura, as well. I’m sure you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say they aren’t yakuza types like me.”
Feeling a bit disconcerted, Kogito stopped the tape again and thought about the link that connected Professor Musumi, Takamura, and Goro. They were all people he had known for a long time and been very fond of, but even though he had been Professor Musumi’s student at university, there was no way you could call that distinguished scholar of the French Renaissance a tutor, although he had certainly been a mentor. As for the composer Takamura, that was a slightly different dynamic as well.
At the same time, Kogito would have liked to say to Goro: “I know you like to joke about this, but seriously, you aren’t a yakuza type at all. If anything, you’re the anti-yakuza. I mean, gangsters perceive you as such a formidable adversary that a genuine yakuza boss sent a couple of goons to attack you!”
Maybe Goro was just getting a kick out of using the Tagame system, but when Kogito pressed the PLAY button again he noticed that Goro seemed to be in remarkably high spirits as he picked up where he’d left off. Once again, he was so nakedly candid that Kogito was momentarily shocked.
“I think what I was doing in Mat’chama was trying to create a barrier to keep you from killing yourself,” Goro said. “Of course, I’m not sure to what extent I was consciously aware of that, at the time. But when I think back now, that’s the only thing it could have been. That strikes me as very strange, because it’s not as if I was some teenage saint, hanging out with everyone I met in Mat’chama from purely altruistic motives. Although you couldn’t say that I was a totally selfish, self-serving scoundrel, either, by any means! But in your case, especially—from the time you were seventeen or eighteen, there were some things about you that I simply couldn’t grasp. You were really a hard nut to crack, even more than you yourself realized. Maybe it was in spite of your isolated deep-mountain upbringing, or maybe it was precisely because of that, but you were definitely a horse of a different color.
“Still, it wasn’t until we were both in our thirties that I started consciously thinking about you as a potential suicide, and even then, that was only because someone shoved the idea under my nose. That was when you and I were both busy all year round—I had started my own career and you were always reading or writing books—and we only got to hang out once in a blue moon. As you know, there are some bars around Tokyo where certain people in the movie business congregate. (Or, I should say, people who have made a career on the production end of moviemaking.) Anyway, when I used to go to one of those bars I would sometimes run into your friend Takamura, who was there because, as you know, he often composed film scores. This was before he got sick, of course. He would spot me from the entrance and swoop down on my table like a great black bird. And the first thing he always did, after sitting down next to me, was to ask about you.
“‘Have you seen Kogito lately? Is he all right?’ and so on, without even bothering to lower his voice. And it wasn’t the usual sort of small talk about how your work was going or how Akari was getting along. No, he always came right out and said it, without beating around the bush: ‘I’m worried that Kogito might commit suicide one of these days.’ That’s exactly what he said. And he asked me the same questions every time I saw him, so there’s no way it could have been a onetime misunderstanding. And after that I finally understood why I, too, had felt a vague compulsion to watch out for you, back when you were seventeen or eighteen—it was because I was afraid you might kill yourself. That explains everything!
“Okay, I know what you’re thinking: it’s very possible that Takamura would have thought such a thing, but what about Professor Musumi? You probably find it hard to imagine how that distinguished professor could have given me the same idea, right? Of course, there’s no reason for someone like me to see a great scholar like that on a regular basis. I did meet him briefly when you and Chikashi had your small wedding, but I hadn’t seen him at all since then until we happened to have dinner together in Paris. His wife was there that night, as well.”
Kogito pressed the STOP button, took his book of Professor Musumi’s Complete Works off the shelf, and checked the chronological tables in the back. (Later, he had taken that same volume to Berlin with him, with the intention of donating it to the school of comparative literature before he returned to Tokyo.) Then he turned back to Tagame and replied in great excitement: “That must have been at the time of Professor Musumi’s last stay in France! It was the year there was a trash collectors’ strike in Paris. I still have a souvenir that he brought back for me; it’s a miniature-type painting that shows the entire city of Paris, and here and there you can see smoke rising from the piles of burning trash in the streets. It’s sitting on the desk in front of me, here in Seijo.”
Goro continued his anecdote. “My former mother-in-law, who as you know was the vice president of a Japanese company that imports films from abroad, was a huge admirer of Professor Musumi’s, and she had been hoping to persuade the Musumis to be her guests for dinner at a three-star restaurant in Paris. Professor Musumi happened to hear that I was in Paris at that time, and he apparently said, ‘We’ll accept the invitation on the condition that Kogito’s brother-in-law will be there, too.’ I was still quite entangled with my in-laws, and I had heard that my ex-wife was in Tokyo just then, so she wouldn’t be there. But anyway, I agreed, and I set out for the restaurant in a suitably humble frame of mind. I was a few minutes late, and it was obvious that the professor had been waiting eagerly for me to show up. The minute I sat down, the first thing he asked me was, ‘Do you suppose Kogito might be planning to commit suicide?’ My former mother-in-law got a strange look on her face when she heard that, but the professor was totally nonchalant. Then his wife intervened. I have to say that I’ve never seen a woman of that age who was so incredibly beautiful”—here Goro stopped for a moment, as if searching for a word, and Kogito had a feeling that he was remembering his own mother—“and I don’t mean only Japanese women, either. Anyway, Mrs. Musumi said, ‘My husband is always worrying about that sort of thing, to the point of being rude. I have to admit that when I first met Kogito I thought there was something a trifle morbid about him, but now I believe that he’s turned out to be a very well-grounded person.’ After that the vice president—my former mother-in-law—said that she had heard from her daughter that Kogito is kind of a left-winger, politically, but in spite of that he’s very amusing. Then Professor Musumi turned his magnificent face to me, with a stately, dignified expression that seemed to say, ‘I don’t care a fig about that sort of nonsense, do you?’ And that’s what happened, that night in Paris.”
The tape in Tagame kept running after that, but there was only silence. Kogito didn’t feel like asking, “And what did you reply?” Even if they had been having an actual, real-time conversation, Goro would probably have shrugged off the question without a word. Because even though you couldn’t say that Mrs. Musumi’s comment about Kogito’s having been “a trifle morbid” was entirely inaccurate, the indisputable fact was that he had actually managed to keep himself alive for a rather long time.
Kogito didn’t even think of asking, “And what are your thoughts about suicide?” Since Goro had already killed himself by the time Kogito got around to listening to the tape, he felt that to ask a question like that would be a violation of the Rules of Tagame. After an unexplained silence, Goro’s voice once again started emanating from the tape recorder, and in his careless way he said something that could have been seen as an infringement of those same unspoken rules. “I know talking about this sort of topic probably makes you feel tired. Of course, in the realm you live in, and at your age, people are tired most of the time, anyway! Anyway, let’s leave it here for tonight, shall we?”
2
When he jumped off the roof of his office building
, Goro left behind two typed notes that he had written on either a word processor or some more versatile microcomputer, Kogito wasn’t sure which. Or rather, that was the official announcement made by Taruto, the head of Goro’s production company. In actuality, there was also a third note, which was shown only to Kogito and other members of Goro’s inner circle. From then on, Kogito frequently found himself thinking about one particular line in that third, unpublished note: “I feel as if I’m starting to fall apart, on every level.” No matter how much he pondered those words, Kogito couldn’t understand why Goro would talk about himself in those terms.
Goro had been an exceptionally beautiful youth, and even though his hair had started to get a bit thin in both texture and volume by the time he was in his fifties, he was still a fine figure of a man with a charismatic presence. He was also highly proficient in the art of self-presentation and knew how a man at his stage of life should look and carry himself. In the eyes of the world, Goro most certainly didn’t appear to be going to pieces, in any way. Kogito could honestly say that there was only one time when he had ever seen Goro falling apart in public, but he didn’t recall that incident until he was living alone in Berlin with an abundance of leisure time for dredging up old memories.
On one of the major Japanese television networks there is a popular, long-running late-night program called the Wide Show that offers a combination of celebrity chat and cultural news. One night Goro, who was still working as an actor at the time, was one of the guests. Also on the program was a composer who had a wide circle of acquaintances in Parisian society, even though he had spent only a short time studying in Europe. The composer was dressed in a tuxedo that had been custom-made for him in Paris, while Goro was resplendent in a costume of his own design, crafted for him by a Japanese tailor who specialized in occidental garb. It featured a long Mao-collared coat made from lustrous black satin that seemed to have subtle crimson highlights glimmering in its depths, and the two stylishly turned-out men dominated the stage from the moment the program began.
Goro and the composer chatted for a while on camera, both sipping champagne, and before long they were joined by a novelist decked out in his own tux, glass of bubbly already in hand. This author’s novels showcased his distinctive views of European literature and customs (particularly the cult of Epicureanism); he was a lively, vivacious conversationalist, but Kogito was acquainted with the man and knew that under the sparkling surface the novelist’s true personality was actually rather closed off and curmudgeonly. He was, in reality, a difficult man who always seemed to be seething with resentment about the fact that his talents and insights had never received the kind of treatment they warranted—a “life-sized” response, to use one of his favorite expressions—either in the domestic media or in cultural circles abroad. Eventually, wallowing in his perpetual grievances had caused the man to stagnate as an artist.
On the night in question the novelist was clearly irritated, no doubt because he was having a hard time trying to inject his own “flavor” into a conversation that the composer and the actor were monopolizing with an animated dialogue about Europe. A look of perplexity seemed to be spreading over the face of the well-known host of the Wide Show, as well. In an apparent attempt to salvage the mood, a special showing of a short film about Europe was inserted, and after that, Goro (along with the composer and the novelist) reappeared on-screen to join a special live segment featuring a historian and a cultural anthropologist.
But by this time Goro was visibly exhausted, and the alcohol seemed to have suddenly kicked in as well. He launched into a whiny, self-pitying (really, almost feminine) tirade, harping on about how sadly misunderstood and underappreciated he was by the Japanese movie world. As he spoke, his upper body was swaying drunkenly back and forth, and he kept hitting the back of his head on the high-backed chair he was sitting in. At that point Kogito, watching at home, switched off the TV.
Not too long after Goro’s embarrassing performance, Kogito learned that his brother-in-law was going through an exceedingly trying time because he and Katsuko were in the process of getting a divorce. But even so, that appearance on the Wide Show, when Goro allowed the public to see him in such a shaky and mortifying state, was truly a rarity.
More recently, on the night when Goro was attacked by a pair of yakuza—and, as the proverb says, survived by a one-in-a-million miracle—the TV cameras were at the hospital to record his arrival on a stretcher. (He had already been given emergency first aid to patch up his innumerable knife wounds.) At that time, Goro didn’t seem to be falling apart, by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, he appeared, at least on camera, to be in a happy, even euphoric mood.
At the time, Kogito happened to be in America—as one publication reported derisively, “her husband’s absence left Chikashi free to visit her injured brother”—and he saw the filmed coverage of the yakuza incident in Los Angeles, not on some obscure cable station aimed at the Japanese-speaking market but on a major national network’s prime-time early-evening news broadcast. After he returned to Japan, Kogito read an off-the-wall article about the attack, in which one half of a pair of twins—entertainers and pop-culture reviewers who were known for commenting on the news in Japan’s distinctive gay patois—made the ludicrous suggestion that the attack might have somehow been staged as a publicity stunt.
To make sure he hadn’t misunderstood this shocking allegation, Kogito watched the same entertainer when he appeared on a program targeted at a female audience and was overwhelmed by the dreadful aura of desolation that seemed to be oozing from the man’s inner core. It was heartrending to think that Goro had been working in a business populated by such cruel, vicious “elder statesmen,” but Kogito’s feeling of pity was soon supplanted by a hot rush of anger about the words he had heard and read earlier. And yet in that heartless show-biz world, both after the yakuza attack and all the way through the ensuing trial, Goro was always upbeat—triumphant, even—and he never appeared to be losing his grip on things in the least.
Among the cassette recordings that Goro left behind for Kogito to listen to on Tagame, there was one in which Goro praised a book-length essay titled This Fragile Thing Called Man, which Kogito had written when he was young. The gist of the essay was that if we resist the tendency to break—that is, to fall apart—not only will we ourselves remain intact, but we won’t hurt other people, and those who were once broken will become whole again. It was, in essence, an evaluation of the direction Kogito had been pursuing in his own way of living in the world. Kogito listened to the tape over and over again, contrasting it with that final, surprisingly self-critical suicide note, in which Goro said that he felt he was falling apart.
The first time Kogito played that particular tape (plucking it at random from among the thirty or so that were delivered all together) was soon after he had begun the ritual of communicating with Goro via Tagame, but Goro’s words had a liveliness and power that suggested he was speaking only after having given a considerable amount of concentrated thought to the matter. Ostensibly, he was talking about Kogito’s son, Akari, but he approached the subject in a roundabout way.
“When you published This Fragile Thing Called Man, my first thought, almost reflexively, was that I’d like to make a film called The Unbreakable Man, to explore the other extreme,” Goro began. “I told you that directly, and I can still remember how miffed you looked. At some airport—I forget whether it was here or abroad—you happened to see a suitcase with stickers plastered all over it that said FRAGILE, and you came up with the idea of symbolically pasting those stickers on your own back. I gathered that that experience was your source of inspiration for the essay. But I had a problem with your basic premise that ‘breakability,’ or whatever you want to call it, is a very commonplace attribute of human beings. And I even wondered, at first, ‘Is he turning into just another sentimental humanist?’ Because the Kogito I knew originally would never have bought into that sort of cheap, popular palaver.
“Anyway, I was thinking about starting my movie by letting the camera reveal how fragile and easily injured we all are—showing the details of the outside of an actual human body, with all its unsightly scars and imperfections, to the point where the audience says, ‘Enough, already.’ On top of that, I got the idea of having the film tell the story of a protagonist who by some process or another, I’m not sure exactly what, attained a superhuman level of strength and became invulnerable to pain. Sort of a ‘brave Lloyd’ (as in Harold, of course) for our current era of materialism.
“This goes without saying, but from the earliest days of filmmaking the movie genre has offered portrayals of the ‘unbreakable man.’ While they’re watching the invincible hero, viewers forget how fragile they themselves really are; it’s a simple device for engendering catharsis. Of course, there are plenty of breakable people in the supporting roles, getting slashed and killed right and left by the indestructible sword-wielding hero. But they’re nothing more than ciphers or symbols on the screen. For example, as a director, if one supporting character gets killed, you don’t want to place too much emphasis on his suffering or portray it too sympathetically. If you did that, in the blink of an eye the superhero and the supporting player would end up trading roles. On the other hand, when you show the hero twirling his pistol and then stashing it in the holster, you have to imagine the ‘existentially alienated’ supporting player, to put it in your terms, lying nearby, mortally wounded.