by Kenzaburo Oe
“How did you explain the nuances of that phrase, I wonder?”
“Well, my wife was born in Berlin, but she says she never heard that expression used around her house, even once,” Iga said. “Mrs. Azuma-Böme’s present husband is a successful businessman, quite a bit older than she is, so it’s possible that he learned about ‘Mädchen für alles’ while growing up in an old-fashioned household. Anyway, the same mutual friend was saying that when that terrible thing happened to Goro, AzumaBöme’s daughter went around saying that he had been murdered by yakuza. She kept insisting that he’d been killed because he had agreed to do a project for NHK, an investigative documentary that was supposedly going to expose the truth about yakuza control of the waste-incineration industry.” Iga hadn’t really answered Kogito’s questions about the semantics of Mädchen für alles, but he decided not to pursue the matter any further.
The strange thing was that Kogito never heard from Azuma-Böme after that, nor did he ever hear anything further about her daughter, the mysterious girl Friday. The only result of Kogito’s visit to the Berlin Film Festival was the video he left behind, in which he made an outright gift of the film rights to one of his novels to some young German filmmakers without even knowing the name of their group.
2
Kogito’s “quarantine” in Berlin lasted for a hundred days, so it actually ended up being more than twice as long as the forty days mentioned in the dictionary definition, based on the word’s Italian etymology. When he traveled from Tokyo to Berlin, Kogito had almost no ill effects from the time difference, but he knew that the return trip would be a different story. Sure enough, he ended up suffering horrendous jet lag for ten full days.
During that time, Kogito was searching for a way to get a firm grip on reality once again—he had made a conscious point of not putting fresh batteries into Tagame—and he would sometimes lie on the army cot in his study and daydream about telephoning one friend or another. That’s when the stark reality would hit him. Goro’s criticism, on the Tagame tapes, that Kogito didn’t have any intimate younger colleagues was true. Professor Musumi, Takamura, and some more relaxed, easygoing friends as well—practically everyone Kogito might have felt like calling up was dead!
Not only that, but he couldn’t seem to find a book that would soothe his head, which always seemed to be throbbing hotly from jet lag and sleep deprivation. There was a pile of packages at the door of his study, and while he was unwrapping them he would idly browse through the books. He might, for example, be enticed by the style of a Japanese translation of Proust, and that might put him into a mood of leisurely remembrance of all things past. When that happened, Kogito found himself thinking with newfound serenity about his own death as an event that wasn’t too far off. He couldn’t bear to think that he would still be hanging around for another fifteen or twenty long years after this, and rather than Time Regained (the title of the final volume of Proust’s magnum opus), the phrase “Death Regained” popped into his overheated head.
“That’s it!” Kogito exclaimed out loud. “‘Death’ is ‘Time’!” In his deliriously befuddled state, wild thoughts that would probably have been rejected if he were fully awake now struck him as profoundly persuasive epiphanies. He even felt as if his own death was something that had already taken place, some time ago. It seemed as if things that had occurred in the recent past were rapidly receding into the mists of time, and even Goro’s death seemed to have happened a hundred years before, or more. And then he saw himself, too, as someone long dead, dwelling on the Other Side along with Goro, who seemed to have died ages ago. And if Kogito was indeed a shade, then it didn’t seem unnatural for him to be half dozing and nodding off all the time.
When he was “thinking” along these lines, Kogito (who was absolutely certain that his epic jet lag would prevent him from ever falling asleep) was actually sleeping, and what seemed to be conscious, waking thoughts were in fact dreams that were visiting him in his shallow sleep. The next day, like those premonitions that come to us in dreams, thoughts such as “Death is Time,” too, would inevitably fade into obscurity. But before long the harmonic overtones of that thought might end up reverberating in some new dream ... if he was lucky enough to fall asleep.
3
Kogito had convinced himself that his quarantine in Berlin had two main goals: first, to return to the way things were before he embarked on the Tagame dialogues with Goro, and second, to discipline himself until he was sure that he was capable of giving them up for good. Gradually, that plan began to produce results, and at certain times (sitting in his office before he went off to give his lecture was always a time of particular tranquillity) he would find himself almost able to rearrange reality by convincing himself that the communication he and Goro had exchanged after Goro’s defection to the Other Side was nothing more than a self-conscious game.
Yet he never thought it was meaningless just because it was a game. It was only through the form of a game that he could achieve the necessary deepening of consciousness, and it was clear that he had reached that level by way of the Tagame ritual.
Since entering his forties, Kogito had often poked fun at himself as a “late-blooming structuralist,” but he managed to figure out the unique role of a game, in contrast with, say, a ritual, by reexamining some of the arguments that had already begun to be abandoned by the clever, trendsetting cultural anthropologists. Kogito realized that, as if to prove that the Tagame dialogues with Goro were just a game, he had invented any number of rules for that diversion and had followed them scrupulously. Goro, too, had seemed to respond to the conversation as a fellow player who was honoring the rules. (Of course, that could have been because Kogito was careful never to make any moves that might cause Goro to overstep those rules.)
Even so, the communication he exchanged with Goro by means of Tagame had the element of unpredictable dynamism that’s found in any conversation, in varying degrees, and thus it had the effect of stimulating Kogito and pushing him forward toward new perspectives and ways of looking at things that had never occurred to him before. At the same time, Kogito felt confident that, apart from the occasional slip, he and Goro were respecting the rules of the game—in particular, the rule that no matter how impassioned the conversation might get, neither of them would ever again propose that they work on something together in real time, in the real world. (This actually fell under Rule Number Two: Never speak about the future.)
Thus when Kogito was in his apartment in Berlin, continually reviewing the conversations he’d had with Goro, he was still able to make a clear distinction between the messages that had come to him through Tagame (especially the ones that had been recorded close to the date when Goro suddenly and unexpectedly went off to the Other Side) and any discussions they might have had on the telephone, which of course predated Tagame and were not subject to its rules.
“Chikashi was saying that when you turn sixty-four, Akari will be thirty-six,” Goro had said in one of their telephone talks, toward the end. “So if you add up both your ages, that’s a hundred years! According to the mystical beliefs of your pathetic schoolboy days in Mat’chama, by the time you get to be a hundred years old, you should be a genuine, card-carrying Man of Wisdom. And then there’s the hundred years (give or take a few decades) that you yourself have already lived ... I’m not sure how this should be calculated, but if you include the previous fifty years and the fifty years after that, for a total of two hundred years, you could come up with a perfect vision of human life. The way I’m thinking now, if you put together the years that you and Akari have lived individually—that is, sixty-four plus thirty-six—then I figure you’ve already lived for a hundred years. See what I mean?”
“It’s certainly true that Akari and I have collaborated on being alive for close to a hundred years,” Kogito acknowledged, “and I do get the feeling sometimes that I’m a centenarian already. When 1999 rolls around, I expect I’ll feel it even more acutely. Whether the feeling will strike on my
birthday, or on Akari’s, that’s another matter ...”
“Wait a minute,” Goro interrupted. “You two have different birthdays? When I was talking to Chikashi the other day I somehow got the impression that you and Akari were born on the same day. As you know, Chikashi isn’t what you would call arrogant, by any means, but she is a person of strong convictions, and her confident personality sets her apart from the typical modest, self-effacing stereotype of Japanese women. Anyhow, I guess she’s somehow become convinced that she gave birth to you and Akari on the same day—in other words, that both of you are her children! That’s probably because she’s truly a maternal type. When she and I were living in those lodgings in the temple compound in Mat’chama, she gave me more motherly support than I ever got from my real mother.”
At this point Kogito was on the verge of saying glibly, “I know that your mother plays a major role in your personal psychology, whether positive or negative, but what does that have to do with this?” but he swallowed his words. A moment later, he thought of saying: “It must have been kind of uncomfortable for you, having two supermoms on your back!” but he managed to suppress that comment as well.
While Kogito was busy biting his tongue, Goro used the resulting silence to shift the focus to a proposal that had clearly been on his mind before he called. “When you used to talk about becoming a sage, back in Mat’chama, I didn’t want to cross-question you, but what I was imagining vaguely went something like this. You would become a wise old man, so wise that not only would you have a vision of the hundred years you had actually lived and the fifty years before your birth, but you could also see ahead for fifty years to come, for a total of two hundred years. In other words, you would be so wise that you could predict the future, just by studying and thinking about what had gone before. But then, what about me? When you’re a hundred, I’ll be a hundred and one, and even if I’m still alive, I can’t imagine that I’ll still be working. Anyway, there was something disarming about your way of thinking that you were going to live to be a hundred. That was when I first started to think that rather than becoming a scholar, as I had originally predicted, you might end up being a person who did something creative.
“Remember when you wrote Rugby Match 1860 as a magazine serial, and I phoned you from Venice? In those days it was ridiculously expensive to make a long-distance phone call through the hotel switchboard, and I remember my wife wasn’t too happy about the extravagance. At that time I hadn’t yet read your novel, but I was talking to a reporter who was in Venice to cover the film festival, and he had just read the final installment in a magazine and was very excited about it. That was how I came to hear the details of the plot—in spite of the fact that, as you’re always quick to point out, I’m not very good at reducing things to a summarized version, whether it’s a novel or a movie. I have to tell you that it was a huge relief to hear over the international phone line that Rugby Match had nothing to do with your plan for becoming a Man of Wisdom. At that time, even though I was appearing in movies overseas, I wasn’t exactly the toast of the town here in Japan, and I was still just a half-baked actor, struggling to find my path. Naïve as it may sound, I only had one great wish: that I could somehow be a party, through my work, to your plan for living to be a hundred. Actually, I did try to take that idea of yours and turn it into something concrete. I once drew up a plan for a TV series that would have followed the path of modernization since the Meiji era, as my way of trying to make a stab at your vision of the Man of Wisdom. That didn’t pan out, but I’ve continued to think about the idea of showing this country’s last hundred and fifty years in a cinematic way, using your house in the forest as a setting. I’ve also thought of showing that historical time line by starting at some point in the future and going back a hundred and fifty years into the past. Of course, that’s assuming you would collaborate with me on the screenplay. Even if that ultimately proved to be impossible, we could still have the fun of brainstorming together. And now that I’ve been making films for twelve years, I’m conscious that I’ve reached the end of this particular chapter of my career. Then when I heard from Chikashi about your new way of thinking about making it to your hundredth birthday, that reignited the spark and inspired me all over again. Until now I’ve always made light of that, saying that you had plenty of time until you hit a hundred, because when you were younger it really did seem as if you had forever ahead of you. Of course, you’ve been partial to doing magic tricks with numbers ever since our days in Mat’chama, so you got me this time with a bit of mathematical sleight of hand, so to speak. But, really, to think that your age and Akari’s add up to a hundred this year! To be honest, that really knocked me for a loop. I can’t wait to hear what you think about all this.”
“So you mean that’s why you’re calling me now, from Venice?”
“Exactly,” Goro said with such complete candor that Kogito felt as if he, too, had been knocked off his feet. “Up until now,” Goro went on, “it isn’t as if I haven’t wondered why you were so fixated on making it to a hundred or why you even thought about something like becoming a Man of Wisdom in the first place. But I don’t think you’ll live the forty or so years between now and your hundredth birthday in a random, haphazard way. As Chikashi always says, you simply don’t have the gift of being idle for long periods of time.
“I’ve been thinking, too, about your life’s work and the philosophy you’ve constructed, with the goal of reaching your hundredth year on earth, and I think that the day will eventually come when you’ll try to find a way to start to write about THAT while you’re still at an age where you can work. Truth be told, you can’t go on avoiding the necessity of chronicling that experience forever. It’s very much the same for me. And you can’t possibly reach a final conclusion if you push me aside, since you don’t know everything that happened.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you reach a point where you want to tackle THAT, as the crowning accomplishment of your life as a novelist, I won’t let you do it all by yourself.”
4
Kogito’s apartment, in one of Berlin’s poshest residential districts, was as quiet and peaceful a place as you could imagine: a place where no one ever came to call, where he prepared his own meals and washed them down with wine from Spain and Italy. It was while he was getting ready to confront the inexorably approaching Berlin winter, which was a formidable thing in itself—“Das Ding an sich,” in local parlance—that Kogito often found himself remembering that “Man of Wisdom” phone call from Goro, which was one of the last talks they ever had. (This was after his obsession with the Tagame dialogues had begun to recede into the background.)
At other times, as he gazed out at the darkening sky through the overlapping tangles of bare black branches on one of the many winter days when it had been threatening to snow since morning, Kogito was reminded of a conversation he’d had with his composer friend, Takamura, as they looked out a hospital window at a gray Tokyo sky that also held the promise, or the threat, of snow.
On that winter’s day, Kogito had gone to visit Takamura at the hospital in Akasaka and had heard from his friend, firsthand, about the increasingly dire prognosis. Kogito had known since two years earlier that cancerous cells had been found in his friend’s kidneys during an annual physical examination. It wasn’t as if Kogito had been in denial about the lethal implications of that discovery, but he had been clinging all along to the hope that Takamura (this man on whom he had depended since they were young and who could only be described as a genius) would somehow find a way to overcome this crisis.
Takamura showed Kogito a notebook filled with delicate lines that were reminiscent of botanical drawings—the same spidery script the renowned composer used for writing his musical scores. At the top of the page were the heart-wrenching words “Abridged Composition Plan for the Remainder of My Life.” Takamura’s conversation with Kogito on this day seemed to be a way of adding figurative footnotes to the plan set forth in that notebook.
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The patient’s condition was very grave and (as he explained to Kogito) when he considered the dreadful side effects of the anticancer drug therapy and the physical stamina that would be required to endure that treatment, Takamura had realized the necessity of scaling down the work plan he had been following till now. He had asked Kogito to write an opera libretto, and he said now that if the text couldn’t be completed over the next six months or so, he would have to abandon the entire opera project.
“I imagine you’ve probably heard about this already,” Takamura said, “but there’s a libretto that was written by a young American novelist. However, because the idea is to coordinate his work with the nucleus that you’re going to create, if your work can’t be finished in time, I won’t be able to keep the opera on this list. Is there any chance you might be able to finish by spring?”
And Kogito had to answer, with the deepest regret, “No, no chance at all.”
“That’s what I thought, somehow—since we’ve been talking all along, I just got the feeling that was how it would turn out. And I gather that in this case, rather than starting to write something from scratch, it’s more a matter of your needing to dig up things that have been deeply buried for a long time and can’t easily be unearthed.”
Even if Takamura hadn’t been a rather diminutive man, his head would still have been disproportionately large for his body, but his essential power and symmetry were evident in every move he made. He was wearing pajamas made from broad-cloth shirting patterned with tiny polka dots, and his oversized head, which was bald as a result of radiation therapy, was covered with a woolen cap. He held Kogito captive with his deep, motionless eyes until Kogito, unable to bear the intensity of that gaze, had to look away.