by Kenzaburo Oe
When he thought back on his previous successes with that procedure, Kogito understood why he was having such a hard time now. It was really quite simple. When the turtle was resting on a cutting board, there was no obstacle on the other side of the cutting board, nor was there anything on the near side to restrict the wrist-to-elbow movement of the arm that was attacking the neck. The hand that was holding the knife could move freely. Plus, Kogito’s sight line was at a diagonal angle to the turtle’s neck, so his aim was true.
This turtle, however, was ensconced in a deep wooden box. When Kogito tried to bring the knife down on its neck, the tip tended to run into the edge of the box, and Kogito’s wrist movement was restricted by the edge of the box on the near side. Moreover, he was looking down at the turtle’s neck from almost directly overhead, so it was difficult to gauge the depth of the box based on his aerial view.
Because he was unable to increase the velocity of the knife on the downward swing, Kogito had to depend on the force of the collision between the heaviness and mass of the knife and the turtle’s neck. Therefore, he changed over to the heavy Chinese knife, in accordance with the basic principle he had learned in a physics classroom, several eons ago: mv2.
When he performed a trial run, the Chinese knife did seem to add to the power of his arm when he brought the blade down on the bottom of the box, and he was able to make substantial grooves in the wood. But when it came to attacking the turtle’s neck, it was even harder to measure space and trajectory with the eye because the knife took up so much room and was so heavy. After repeated failures, Kogito had only managed to lop off the tip of the beast’s little nose (which was already too small in proportion to the gigantic body), so that it looked like a horizontal cross section of a thick stalk of new-mown grass. And all the while, in the face of Kogito’s frenetic onslaught, the turtle kept stubbornly sticking its head out of the shell and making that angry, distressed shu-shu sound.
At last Kogito, totally exhausted from his efforts, flopped down on the floor next to the wooden box, where he could hear the turtle breathing unevenly through its truncated snout. The torrent of knife blows didn’t appear to have had any significant effect, but the thin blood-tinged layer of water that covered the bottom of the box was proof that at least some of those blows had hit their mark. Without bothering to wash his scarlet hands—his long-sleeved jersey shirt, too, was covered with livid splotches of the turtle’s blood—Kogito stood up and left the kitchen, planning to continue his intermission on the sofa in the living room.
To his surprise, he found Chikashi sitting on a chair in the dining room, wearing her pajamas and looking, with her makeup all scrubbed off, like a young girl. She gazed up at him with a fearful expression on her face. “If it’s such a struggle, why don’t you just turn the poor thing loose in the stream?” she asked. “Remember, that’s what you did with the last batch of turtles that Asa sent—you and Akari took them down to the stream and let them go.”
“It’s much too late for that!” Kogito replied, unable to suppress the wild excitement in his voice. “Anyway, what would be the point of throwing an injured creature into that mucky ditch?”
Without further discussion, Chikashi beat a hasty retreat to her bedroom and Kogito lay down on the couch, breathing in ragged gasps. During the past day, since his return from Berlin, he had been focused on unpacking and on returning a backlog of phone calls, and there hadn’t been time to have a real conversation with Chikashi. And now they’d had this disastrous exchange about the fate of the turtle ... Almost from the moment he began this task, Kogito had been plagued by gradually deepening feelings of regret, but he was a strong proponent of the idea that once you’ve started something there’s no turning back. Thus he had no choice but to persevere until he attained his final goal: homemade turtle soup.
Kogito caught a whiff of his own rank body odor; he positively reeked of fishy-smelling turtle blood. Suppose he gave up right now, without achieving his goal, and let the turtle, with its nonfatal injuries and crudely bobbed nose, take up residence in the kitchen? Surely Chikashi would find a way of feeding it, and every time Kogito poked his head into the general vicinity, it would recognize its tormentor and make that menacing shu-shu sound. Would that be a tolerable life, for anyone?
When Kogito returned to work a short while later, he decided to abandon his attempts to sever the turtle’s head with a single vertical blow. To put it in Western-movie terms, instead of confronting his adversary with a pistol, he proceeded to blast away with a shotgun, using the Chinese knife to hack away at the part of the shell that was right next to the turtle’s neck. Before long he had managed to open a large, bloody wound, and when the turtle was no longer able to withdraw into its shell, Kogito finally managed to cut off its head. Then it was just a matter of executing the usual dismemberment procedure, but every time Kogito tried to cut off one of the turtle’s four legs, the now-headless torso (or, more precisely, the legs themselves) seemed to be putting up a powerful and tenacious resistance.
After he had finally managed to remove all four legs, Kogito pulled back the shell. When he touched the short, thick, pudgy, triangular tail, he was startled to see a crooked, bone-hard penis, as large as an adult human’s ring finger, protruding from underneath. When the dirty work was finally done, the bottom of the box was flooded with a pool of blood more than an inch deep. By the time Kogito had finished hosing out the box and wiping up all the blood that had splattered around the kitchen, it was nearly 3 AM.
He took a portion of the huge mass of turtle meat and put it in the refrigerator, to be fried up later. Then he tossed the rest of the meat, along with the soft part of the shell and all the bones, into a giant stew pot. Kogito’s legs felt heavy and numb after the long battle, but he stood stoically next to the boiling pot, periodically skimming off the fatty scum with a ladle. After he had splashed in some sake and added some thinly sliced ginger and salt, he realized that he had made enough soup to feed an army, and he felt rather foolish. He himself had no desire even to taste the soup, and he felt as though he wouldn’t be able to recommend it very enthusiastically to Chikashi and Akari, either.
After a few minutes of lying sleepless and agitated on the army cot in his study (he could smell the nauseatingly fishy aroma of turtle soup all the way up there), Kogito got up again, put on his stinky, blood-soaked clothes, and headed back down to the kitchen. With difficulty, he managed to empty the contents of the immense stew pot into the garbage can. He threw away all the meat that he had stashed in the refrigerator, as well.
It was getting toward daybreak, but the air was still dark and a severe cold snap was in progress. When he lugged the heavy garbage can outside the kitchen door, Kogito had the feeling, in his jet-lagged, sleep-deprived delirium, that some demonic archenemies were sneering derisively down on him from the squalid, stagnant sky, having tricked him into revealing the barbaric violence that lurked in his secret heart. He seemed to hear the sound of the turtle breathing roughly through its nose, and he could almost hear his cosmic nemeses saying: If a turtle king like that doesn’t have a spirit that lives on after death, then you probably don’t have an immortal soul, either.
4
Kogito felt ashamed of himself for having frightened Chikashi (and, possibly, Akari) with his manic marathon of butchery in the kitchen from midnight till dawn on the day he returned home from Berlin. From the following day on, his head felt perpetually feverish due to the sleep deprivation caused by jet lag, and even when he stumbled down to the living room after a short, fitful sleep, he busied himself with sorting through the mail and didn’t talk at all to Chikashi about what had happened during his absence. Of course, they had stayed in close touch by fax while he was away, and he had kept her posted, in detail, about what was going on in Berlin.
As for Akari, he seemed intent on shutting his father out. He listened constantly to his CDs or to his favorite classical-music FM station with the volume turned down low, and generally behaved as if Kogito
were still away from home. Even so, he kept glancing in Kogito’s direction, as if he wanted to show him that he was also listening to the CDs his father had brought back from Berlin as gifts. Kogito didn’t mention this to Chikashi or Akari, but—partly because it seemed like the one small favor he could do for them at this point—he had been resisting the temptation to put the batteries into Tagame, even though the little tape player seemed to be waiting for him, almost sentiently, in his study.
And so the days went by, and the thing that gave Kogito the greatest pleasure as he struggled to overcome his jet lag was going up to his study and gazing at the shelves full of books that had a clear and profound connection with his life so far. In order to escape from the censorious eyes of Chikashi and Akari, who were both giving him the silent treatment, Kogito would sink into the armchair he used for reading and writing and spend hours on end surveying his bookshelves. Without leaving his comfortable chair, he could see a volume of Frida Kahlo’s collected works (interwoven with a critical biography) on one of the highest shelves. While he was thinking about the reproduction of a certain painting in that book, he got the feeling that the image in question was a perfect metaphor for the bond he felt with his books. Indeed, it became a sort of febrile vision, which he could see with perfect clarity.
He pictured himself sitting there in front of his bevy of books, with a red heart beating inside his skull. From one pulsating valve of this cerebral heart, a Medusa-profusion of small blood vessels came snaking out of his head toward the bookshelves. If he looked closely at those blood vessels, one by one, he could see that each of them was connected to a particular volume on the shelf. He felt a deep sense of relief in knowing that he was connected with all those books through the medium of blood vessels, but that sense of reassurance went hand in hand with a sorrowful feeling of loss. Or maybe that whole fantasy was just one of the dreams that played out in Kogito’s overheated head when he fell into one of his brief, intermittent sleeps.
In any case, sometime later, when he was indisputably awake, Kogito was leafing through the aforementioned book of Frida Kahlo’s work, and he noticed that the actual painting was different from the recollection that had given birth to his comforting metaphor of head-as-heart. He had been visualizing a painting in which Kahlo is lying in a Detroit hospital bed after a miscarriage, with arteries stretching from inside her chest—that is, from her heart—to various items arrayed around her bed: an orchid, a pelvic bone, a female abdomen on a pedestal, an enormous fetus, a snail, and an autoclave. But when he actually looked at Henry Ford Hospital, he realized that while the various objects were indeed hovering above the bed, as he had remembered, they weren’t attached to Kahlo’s heart. Rather, it was her hand (resting on the sheet next to her abdomen) that was clutching the bundle of cords leading to that portentous assortment of artifacts. Perhaps because the bed was stained with blood from Kahlo’s gynecological hemorrhaging, Kogito’s mind had somehow made the leap to imagining that Kahlo’s blood vessels were stretching from her heart to the symbolic objects outside her body. Or maybe he had conflated Henry Ford Hospital with the self-portrait Two Fridas, in which the artist is standing in front of a screen aswarm with a scrum of clouds, and the respective hearts of the two magnificent Fridas are clearly joined by a common blood vessel. In Kogito’s mind, the blood vessel outside Kahlo’s body had somehow gotten scrambled with the red cords that were connected to the various articles in the previous painting.
The reason Kogito felt so immensely relieved to be back in his study in Tokyo was because the books he’d had around him in the Berlin apartment that had been his home until recently weren’t what he thought of as real books. Usually when he was abroad (as long as he was working in cities where you could buy books in French and English), he had no trouble adding to his library, and before long the bookcases in his temporary digs would be filled to overflowing. But in Berlin, although he went and checked out the imported-book stores listed in the visitors’ handbook he’d been given at the Center for Advanced Research, he didn’t find the selection of books in French and English particularly appealing. Needless to say, since he didn’t read German, he didn’t buy any books in that language, either. So during the hundred-day quarantine, he never achieved the familiar, soothing illusion of being safely ensconced in a fortress made of books. Now, though, the metaphorical heart that lived inside his skull was once again connected by invisible blood vessels to the books that were among his oldest friends.
Perhaps the feeling of loss—even downfall—that accompanied his sense of relief was due to the constant awareness that he was growing old and irrelevant, and that he would live out the remainder of his days without ever being able to liberate the heart inside his skull from this vast collection of beloved, familiar books, which were an anchor but also, at times, an albatross.
When Kogito had finished sorting through most of the mail, he moved on to organizing the assorted gifts of books and magazines, which he had unwrapped earlier. He read a number of chapters in these books and also read the major essays and roundtable discussions in a variety of general-interest magazines and literary magazines. At some point he discovered that he was having trouble following not only the treatment of the subject matter but also the style of writing and talking about things.
This most recent sojourn abroad had been relatively short, but Kogito had spent it, from beginning to end, as either a teacher or a researcher. What those hundred days had revealed was that he had grown undeniably distant from Japan’s insular world of literature and criticism; that conclusion was impossible to ignore. But, curiously, the sadness he felt about that seemed to have the same root as the sensations of comfort and relief he had been feeling earlier.
Ah, that sense of distance ... He had a notion that while they were all still running on the same track, so to speak, the younger generation had banded together and taken the lead, and he was lagging a full lap behind them. Thus, in order to be able to relax once again among the books in his longtime home in Tokyo, he would give up trying to catch up with the young literati who were so far ahead and would instead concentrate on giving tender nurture to the things that arose spontaneously in him. To be sure, there was a measure of sadness there, too, but it was hard to distinguish it from an agreeably cozy feeling of quiet enjoyment. Kogito felt as though he would be able to live out the days to come, alone and marooned amid the faint glimmer of twilight, as tranquilly as someone already dead.
But one night, as he was lying on the army cot in his study, Kogito’s arm suddenly began to move slowly in the darkness, and even though he changed the angle of that appendage any number of times, it still kept on advancing and retreating. His arm, making no effort to disguise its objective, was reaching out and searching for Tagame, which was ensconced on a nearby shelf among the books. Even while this was happening, Kogito knew very well that Tagame was as he had left it, stripped of its batteries. Moreover, he was conscious of the fact that he had no intention of getting out of bed to search for the batteries and cassette tapes.
And yet the reason he was involuntarily making his arm move like a feeler, as if he were a large insect hunting for a smaller quarry, was because after a hundred days of solitary, silent quarantine, he simply longed to hear Goro’s voice. He wanted, too, to go through the motions of whining and weeping a bit, as a kind of play-acting catharsis. This impulse (most unusual for him) stemmed from a recent epiphany about life and death.
Goro, he wanted to say, if (as I’ve recently concluded) the approach of death really isn’t a matter of very great consequence, then why did you have to pour so much energy—emotional, physical, and spiritual—into throwing yourself off a roof in the prime of life? I know you were upset and stressed out and drunk on brandy, but still!
Along with the emotional mélange of mortal misery mixed with philosophical acceptance, Kogito was simply feeling the urge to indulge in a bit of posthumous pseudo-pleading with Goro, crying quietly all the while. Because his sleep was shallow, the n
ext time he woke up he was still awash in those same disconsolate feelings, but even in the midst of such intense anguish he felt rather proud of himself for not breaking down and putting fresh batteries into Tagame.
5
On one of a blurry series of days like that, Chikashi came and stood in front of the sofa where Kogito was reading a book. She was holding a thin briefcase made of toffee-colored leather (or perhaps it was more of a reddish amber), which he recognized immediately as something Goro used to carry. Kogito had been lying down, but now he sat up and made a space for Chikashi next to him. Once again, he got the feeling that his time in Berlin had been an actual quarantine for a real disease, because he could tell that Chikashi had something she wanted to talk about but had been postponing it out of consideration for the recuperating patient.
“The night you came back from Germany, you didn’t seem like the person I’ve known all these years, and to tell the truth, I was shocked,” Chikashi said. “I imagine that you must have been thinking about a lot of things while you were away, so I put it down to that. Still, there haven’t been any late-night murmurs coming from your study, and even though he doesn’t say anything, Akari seems to be very relieved about that. Umeko told me that she found some of Goro’s writings when she was putting his things in order, and she seemed to think that I ought to take a look at them, so she sent them along. That night when you were all covered with blood after your wrestling match with the turtle, I decided that showing you something like this would be like throwing oil on a bonfire. I was frightened, so I held back.