by Kenzaburo Oe
That prompted Kogito to ask Chu about something that was never far from his mind. “I really only ever talked to Goro about his experience with the yakuza attack on the most objective level,” he said. “And even then he was just kidding around, making reference to the young Japanese man who got bitten by a hippo in Africa as an example of feeling totally helpless. As for me, I simply didn’t have the guts to bring up the topic for a serious discussion. I mean, I’ve tried to think realistically about what Goro was going through in his own mind, but I don’t think I’ll ever really understand the most important thing—indeed, I think it’s probably going to end without my ever having managed to comprehend the motive behind his suicide. When I say ‘end,’ I mean that I’m going to die myself before too long, never knowing the answer.”
“So are you saying that you think Goro’s suicide is somehow tied in with the yakuza attack?” Uncle Chu inquired, in a voice that had something dark and cold swirling around in its depths, behind the usual calm stubbornness. Kogito had the odd feeling that he was seeing something in his brother’s facial expression for the first time, but surely that paradoxical tone was natural for a policeman who had spent most of his career in the organized crime division.
Kogito felt as if he was being cross-examined by a professional; that is, by someone very different from the gentle, easygoing Uncle Chu who, as he was greeting Chikashi (whom he hadn’t seen in quite some time), had praised her dignified conduct on the same video footage that Kogito had seen on TV in the United States. But he could sense that Chu already had an answer to his own question firmly in mind, so he just nodded receptively and waited for his brother to continue.
“I’m pretty much convinced that being slashed by those yakuza was the direct cause of Goro’s suicide,” Chu said. “Since the main office of Goro’s production company was in Matsuyama, in the course of my official duties I’ve talked to a police detective there who has researched the background of the case. This is a bit off-topic, but when Goro was gathering material for his yakuza satire, he got to know some of the top brass at the National Police Academy. Later, one of those high-ranking officers was the victim of a terrorist attack by a religious cult, and I heard that while he was recovering in the hospital, Goro sent him a copy of Akari’s CD. After that, Goro proposed to the official that they sit down together, as two people who had both been attacked by terrorists, and have a conversation about their experiences, to be published in Bungei Shunju magazine. However, the official turned Goro down. Personally, I think that was the right thing to do, but ... anyway, I heard that the official wrote a letter to a third party, and apparently he said in the letter that he thought Goro was rather naïve but that he was a man of integrity, courage, and strong moral fiber. He also said that Goro was someone who had clearly made up his mind not to give in to violence. I heard this from a very reliable source, and the man who wrote the letter definitely knew what he was talking about, too. He was an extraordinarily strong man himself, both physically and mentally: someone who had his own violent encounter with terrorism when he was the chief executive of the national police but managed to bounce back. He’s still working, and he now holds a top job in the Foreign Affairs Ministry or someplace like that. The point is, someone of that caliber called Goro ‘a very naïve person’ after the yakuza attack.
“I’ll have to defer to you, as a graduate of Tokyo University, on the finer points of using foreign words, but even I know that ‘naïve’ doesn’t carry the most positive connotations. On the other hand, we have someone who has himself experienced terrorism calling the victim of a separate terrorist act a man of integrity, courage, and strong moral fiber. I think that’s a pretty impressive assessment, and I’ve never forgotten it to this day. Nevertheless, the fact is that same strong, courageous person ended up snapping and committing suicide over a trifling matter. Even so—and I don’t mean to keep flogging the same point over and over—regarding Goro, whatever may have happened in the end, there really isn’t any doubt that he was a brave, intrepid, upright man ... I mean, who better to judge than a career police officer who was himself injured by terrorists? That’s what I believe, anyway.
“The things that my colleague in Matsuyama came up with in his investigation were really just those sort of tabloid-level truths. But he gathered together a pile of flimsy rumors and then somehow managed to solidify that squishy mountain of gossip into something that seems as if it might contain a kernel of truth, although it’s probably the sort of thing a sharp prosecutor could make mincemeat of in no time. I’m talking on the level of gossip now, but if you look at it objectively, on that tabloid level, what you see from any perspective is an already late-middle-aged man who is talented, accomplished, and successful in his career, getting hopelessly entangled with some slightly disreputable woman. At the beginning it’s just supposed to be a lark, but before he knows it he finds himself trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. That sort of thing happens all the time, right? There are men who get involved with the kind of woman who figured in Goro’s tabloid scandal, and even though it’s a dreary quagmire that they got into of their own free will, they make no effort to escape and they end up being resigned to their unhappy fate. Someone who is gifted and accomplished, who has a lot of pride and self-respect and who is also a ‘very naïve person’—that’s exactly the type of man who gets dragged into that sort of situation. But of course this is just the mundane speculation of someone who exists on the level of the weekly tabloids,” Chu said half jokingly, then added in all seriousness: “Please tell Chikashi that for a cop like me who’s been dealing with violent crimes for a long time, this is the easy, conventional interpretation—especially when you have this kind of spiteful woman’s plot and when there’s an unsavory man in the mix, as well (in this case, the woman’s scheming boyfriend). Because in his suicide note, Goro flatly denied any intimate involvement with the woman in question, and you have to respect that!
“So what I’m left with, Kogito, and it’s such a cut-and-dried conclusion that it literally makes me feel sick to my stomach, is that after all is said and done, Goro’s suicide was a direct result of having been slashed by the yakuza. Because if he hadn’t been subjected to violence by the yakuza, surely he wouldn’t have gotten it into his head to perpetrate such a violent act upon himself.”
“I haven’t allowed myself to think about what you’re saying, even in my daydreams, but it all rings completely true,” Kogito said. “You’ve had a lot of direct experience with the terrible specificities of yakuza violence, and the fact that you haven’t even touched on that topic in this conversation just makes me feel more acutely aware of its terrible menace.”
Uncle Chu had been drinking steadily all this time, and that may have been a factor, but now he got a strangely gleeful look in his eyes—a look Kogito remembered from when they were children and which he found, in the grim context of their discussion, distinctly off-putting.
“The thing is, big brother,” Chu said tipsily, “among the huge number of people who have been violently attacked by yakuza, there isn’t anyone who’s died as a result. Everybody has survived, even the ones who have been repeatedly stabbed or slashed or have been shot in the back by snipers—not a single one has died! I mean, the victims have been subjected to the most extreme sort of terrifying, ghastly violence, and they’ve still managed to go on living without losing their sanity. To be perfectly frank, I really think that’s amazing!”
While they talked, Kogito and Uncle Chu had been drinking red wine from Italy. By this time, the evening was already slipping away. Suddenly Chikashi, who had presumably long since gone to sleep, appeared in the doorway with a fresh bottle of Italian wine in one hand and, in the other, a strong-smelling cheese covered with an inedible rind of grape seeds—a gift from an American cultural theoretician of Italian ancestry who was an acquaintance of Kogito’s. Whenever Kogito’s brother came up to Tokyo from Shikoku, Chikashi always plied him with the finest food and drink from her domestic sto
ckpile.
Uncle Chu had been talking about Goro in his naturally loud voice, and now he speculatively narrowed his eyes as if he were squinting against a dazzling light, obviously trying to gauge how much of the preceding conversation Chikashi might have overheard.
6
Some time after Kogito read the third suicide note, the one in which Goro said that he felt he was falling apart, he finally asked Chikashi a raw, unusually unguarded question. (Kogito had needed a few days to mull over those baffling words, again and again.)
“You know what Goro said in that note, about feeling as if he was falling apart?” he asked. “Looking at it objectively, I find that really hard to believe. But right after his death, there was some relatively sensible commentary in which someone said that Goro’s sense of himself might have been distorted due to presenile depression or melancholia. Do you remember?”
As she nearly always did, Chikashi took a few moments to reflect before answering Kogito’s question. “I don’t believe Goro chose to die because of some kind of degenerative illness or mental lapse,” she said slowly. “I think it was a completely sane and conscious decision for him. Remember a long time ago, in Matsuyama, very late one night, when you and Goro came back to the ‘Little Temple,’ where he and I were lodging? I don’t have a very clear memory of you on that night, but Goro definitely seemed to be in a bad way—falling apart, as you say—and I wonder whether you were in the same state.”
While Kogito was in Berlin, engaging in a solitary marathon of reminiscence about Goro, he recalled this reply of Chikashi’s and realized that he hadn’t really picked up on the full import of what she’d said. In particular, when Chikashi unexpectedly alluded to that long-ago incident in Matsuyama, he realized that he had filed those memories away as something important to be dealt with at a later date—which could well have been a defense mechanism to postpone stirring up old ghosts. The way Chikashi answered his question was surprisingly clear and forthright; that should have been the end to it, but he couldn’t resist the urge to rehash a bit of ancient history that had been on his mind.
“If you want to talk about seeing Goro in a state that could be described as falling apart—close to a breakdown, really—the only instance that comes to mind is one time when I saw him on late-night TV. It might have been because the filming of the program had dragged on for such a long time, but while I was watching I noticed that he was getting very drunk, very rapidly. Looking back on all the time he and I have spent drinking together, I’ve never seen him so far gone. It’s not just the fact that Goro wasn’t the type of person who would let other people see him in such a pitiful state, but really, in essence, he simply wasn’t the sort of person who would be falling apart in the first place, don’t you agree? From what I’ve heard, your father was exactly the same. Even during his long recovery from tuberculosis, writers such as Shiga Naoya and Nakano Shigeharu—who were famously tough themselves—took off their hats to him for refusing to go to pieces.”
“I’m not sure I really understand the meaning of ‘falling apart,’” Chikashi said, after a few moments’ reflection. “Is it primarily a state of mind? Or is it when people looking at you from the outside say that you seem to be falling apart and there’s no way you can deny it?”
Once again, Kogito stammered out a reply. “But don’t they both occur simultaneously? Like when you’re forced to admit that comments from outsiders have hit the nail on the head?”
Then Kogito, having once again decided to postpone thinking about the traumatic incident in Matsuyama until another day, remembered a time when he himself was falling apart in front of Chikashi. To make matters worse, there was nothing he could do to control his shameful disintegration. It happened during the time when they were renting the second floor of a big old house in the same neighborhood as their present home but some hundred yards closer to Seijo Gakuen-mae Station.
Akari had been born in June, and several months had passed since then. It was a wildly windy autumn day, and the dried-up leaves of the Chinese parasol tree were rattling on the branches, making an immoderate racket. Kogito was lying facedown on the bed that had come with the furnished house; his head was twisted into a diagonal position, and he was holding the sheets down over his head with all his strength. The fact was, he truly couldn’t move.
Chikashi stood beside the tall bed, and in a feeble, sorrowful voice that made her sound like a plaintive adolescent girl, she kept saying, over and over, “What’s wrong?” But Kogito didn’t answer. It wasn’t that he was shirking human contact or being rude; he was simply unable to utter a word. He had always been that way, ever since childhood; if he wasn’t physically able to get out of bed, he wouldn’t be able to speak or respond to questions, either. He really was falling apart, quite literally, as he lay there in a stupor listening to the violent sound of desiccated leaves clattering in the wind-tossed Chinese parasol trees.
Earlier that day they had gone to the hospital and received the final prognosis regarding Akari’s condition. The report stated that their son’s physical problems would gradually improve (though never to the point of perfection), but went on to add that there was no reason to expect that his mental faculties would ever be normal. Chikashi, too, had been sitting there when the doctor shared this news, and Kogito understood keenly how hard it must be for her to sympathize with his present predicament: this unseemly catatonic collapse brought on by sorrow and despair. But much as he wanted to, he was truly unable to move a muscle.
In any case, on the day many years later when Chikashi left the living room and started working on an illustration project at the kitchen table, Kogito, finding himself alone, had started to think about the incident in Matsuyama, which seemed to have made an even stronger impression on Chikashi than the day he fell into a paralytic depression after hearing the doctor’s verdict regarding Akari’s bleak prospects for the future. That incident in Matsuyama was evidently etched in Chikashi’s memory as an experience Kogito and Goro had shared, even though Goro was clearly the focal point of her recollections. Kogito felt as if he’d been backed into a corner and compelled to revisit that important and disturbing memory, which was usually banished to the deepest recesses of his mind.
Whenever he thought about Goro’s falling apart, those images were always directly connected to Kogito’s consciousness of his own disintegration, so why hadn’t he immediately recalled that incident in Matsuyama? Was it because he had been consciously suppressing that schoolboy memory even while he was thinking obsessively about that one mystifying line in the third suicide note Goro left behind? When that explanation occurred to him, Kogito felt an unpleasant sense of escalating discomfort, as if he were being steadily beaten with a blunt sword.
He lay down on the living room couch, but rather than starting to read a book, as he usually did, he concentrated on trying to avoid attracting Chikashi’s peripheral attention. She, meanwhile, was busy at the kitchen table with her sketchbook open, putting the finishing touches on her most recent drawing. Akari was firmly planted in front of his collection of new CDs, which were kept against the wall on one side of the short flight of steps that led to the kitchen. Kogito didn’t want his son to notice him, either. There was something he needed to ponder undisturbed.
For a long time, it had been Kogito and Chikashi’s habit not to indulge in arguments—matrimonial spats, in common parlance. On Chikashi’s part, she would always offer either some sort of reasonable, carefully thought-out proposal or else an expression of opinion. As for Kogito (the listener, in these cases), he would usually approve the proposal or express sympathy with the opinion, and that would be the end of the discussion. The proposal would be implemented; the opinion would be accepted. If something was clearly vetoed by Kogito, that, too, would signal the end of the matter. Kogito invariably expressed his vetoes by silence, and even if Chikashi wasn’t satisfied with that outcome, she never pursued the argument beyond that point. If Kogito had a strongly negative reaction to whatever Chikashi had
suggested, his silence might last a day or two, or even more.
On one hand, in all the time they had been married Kogito could recall only two or three times when Chikashi had apologized and said that she was mistaken about something. On the other, it was not at all unusual for him to end up tacitly withdrawing his earlier objections, not by saying outright, “Okay, you win,” but by essentially giving up the argument and retreating into his shell. (This was a separate issue from the exhausting of the argument and the subsequent reconciliation.) In any event, that was the way Kogito and Chikashi had managed to muddle through thirty-plus years of living together.
In recent years, though, Kogito had privately noticed a change in Chikashi’s behavior. It had begun just after she started to paint watercolor illustrations to accompany Kogito’s essays about the family’s everyday life with Akari. Chikashi spent several days on each watercolor painting, starting with extended observation of the subject, and she became so absorbed in her work—especially when she reached the stage of adding the finishing touches—that she wouldn’t even look up when Kogito called her name. If he had some urgent business and called out to her several times, she would eventually answer in a terse, abrupt way, like a man. Kogito had never seen that side of Chikashi before, and he eventually realized that her intensity about her creative work was probably a genetic predisposition.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Goro and Chikashi’s father was the man who founded Japan’s tradition of sociosatirical film comedies. During the long period while he was recuperating from tuberculosis, he wrote three volumes of collected essays, which were strong on morality and logic but were also overflowing with witty, open-minded observations. During the time before Japan started producing motion pictures, he had been a painter. Taking all this into account, Kogito had thought at first that it was Goro, the child-prodigy artist and polymath, who had inherited his father’s myriad talents. But before long he began to notice that Goro had actually been more profoundly influenced by his mother.