by Kenzaburo Oe
When Kogito had finished reading the screenplay and the storyboards that went with it, and was putting everything back into the reddish-amber leather briefcase, Chikashi asked him a question that had evidently been germinating for quite some time.
“When you two were washing up behind the temple, I seem to remember that Goro was very dirty, too. Or is it possible that was just travel dust and sweat? Besides that, the thing that strikes me as strange is that from then on I never saw you and Goro together. Remember, my mother heard that you had gotten into Tokyo University, and she thought that you would have more free time now that your entrance exams were over, and so she asked you to look for some books for us at the used-book stores in Kanda? I wonder ... up until that time, wasn’t your friendship with Goro on a sort of hiatus?”
Chikashi’s surmise was exactly right. But not long after THAT, when she had already moved to Ashiya (the fashionable suburb of Kyoto where their mother was living with her new husband), leaving Goro behind at the “Little Temple” lodgings, alone, Kogito did go again to visit him there just once, late at night.
It was the twenty-eighth of April of that year, the date of Daio’s planned suicide attack on the American army base. For an entire hour, starting at 10:30 PM, Kogito and Goro sat silently in front of the radio, which was tuned to NHK. But there were no breaking stories, no news bulletins, no reports of anything out of the ordinary. After they had waited another hour, just in case, Goro concluded that nothing untoward had taken place after all. Then he suggested that he take a photograph of Kogito, as a memento, with his new Nikon camera—a gift from his equally new stepfather.
During the year Goro had spent giving Kogito French lessons, he had used bits of paper in lieu of a blackboard to write out and explain various texts, and he had a vast store of such scraps, as well as those on which Kogito had scribbled his own tentative translations of the passages in question. Goro got the idea of arranging some of the motley pages around a mirror, then taking a photograph of Kogito’s profile, composed in such a way that his face was framed by sheaves of French translation and reflected in the mirror. By the time he finished, it was close to dawn.
When Kogito suggested that he take Goro’s photo, in turn, Goro refused.
“I’ll pass,” he said. “I think I’m going to make my living with motion pictures, but since you’ll probably end up working with a fountain pen instead of a camera, I’d rather have you immortalize me with words.”
EPILOGUE
Outside Over There
1
While Chikashi was unpacking the large trunk that Kogito had used for his trip to Berlin, she came across two books that struck her as somewhat unusual. Whenever Kogito was in a foreign country—and especially when he was teaching at a university there—he always ended up buying a great many books. Because he didn’t read German, he hadn’t bought as many volumes as usual during his recent stay in Berlin, but even so, he had mailed home more than twenty boxes of books.
Whenever he returned from an overseas sojourn, Kogito’s trunk usually contained notes for manuscripts, assorted suits and shirts, underwear, fountain pens, spare eyeglasses, and so on. As a rule, the only books packed among these quotidian necessities were several indispensable dictionaries. This time, though, Kogito had tucked two slim paperbacks between the suits in his trunk.
One was called Outside Over There. The author was Maurice Sendak, but this book had a very different feeling from the Sendak picture books Chikashi had read in the past. The second stowaway was a privately published, not-for-sale booklet titled Changelings, whose cover was adorned in the familiar Sendak style with minutely detailed portrayals of beguiling monsters. That booklet was the record of a seminar that was held at a research institute on the University of California’s Berkeley campus, and it bore the bylines of three prominent literary scholars and Maurice Sendak himself. Kogito was friendly with one of those academics, who (Chikashi surmised) had probably given her husband the booklet as a commemorative gift when the two men happened to meet again at the Center for Advanced Research in Berlin. As she learned later, that was exactly what had happened.
Still only mildly curious, Chikashi opened the picture book. When she saw the illustration on the opening spread, she felt an uncanny jolt of recognition, and after taking a closer look at the cover she found herself completely captivated. In this state of enchantment, Chikashi read the picture book through to the end, but when she had finished she felt oddly glum and dispirited. After moping about in that state for a while, she had an epiphany: “This girl in the book, this Ida—she’s me!”
As she turned the pages again and again, Chikashi began to realize what it was about the illustrations of the heroine, before the narrative even commenced, that had excited her so profoundly. It was the bare feet sticking out from under the hem of the girl’s long dress—they were the focal point of the entire picture! The only parts of Ida’s body that weren’t covered by a pale sky-colored dress were her head (long hair held back by a matching blue headband), her neck (encircled by white frills), her hands, and those extraordinary feet sticking out beneath her long skirt’s ruffled hem.
For one thing, they were of a size and a sturdiness not usually seen in the feet of a young girl, and the incongruous juxtaposition of the feet of a grown woman with the hem of that childish frock may have made them appear even larger and sturdier than they really were. The supple-looking calf muscles tapered down into the thick ankle bones that supported them, and the Achilles tendons looked particularly tough and strong. The toes were firmly planted on the ground, while the heels, their flesh as pale and elastic as mochi rice cakes, provided a stable foundation for the entire body.
When she tried comparing the feet of the girl, Ida, with those of the other characters in the book, Chikashi discovered that the mother was wearing small, flat-heeled shoes, like ballet slippers, and all that could be seen of her feet was a pale glimpse of her delicately modeled instep. The baby’s feet were just that—typical infant feet—and even the fearsome goblins who snatched Ida’s baby sister and fled through the open window had small, chubby, unformed-looking feet. (A goblin, Chikashi learned when she consulted a dictionary, is “a kind of small elf, in the shape of a miniature person, who derives pleasure from perpetrating cruel mischief on human beings.”)
There was, Chikashi knew, a very clear-cut reason why she couldn’t take her eyes off the preternaturally sturdy feet of the heroine of Outside Over There. She was just about to glance down at her own feet when something made her hesitate. Instead, she went into her bedroom and began rummaging through the piles of books and sketch pads that were stacked against one wall, looking for one thing in particular.
Before the war, there had been a period during which her filmmaker father had become consumed with a passion for still photography, after receiving a Leica as a gift from a German director with whom he’d collaborated on a movie project. When her father died, he had left behind two albums full of positive contact sheets, glued edge to edge on every page. Chikashi dug out the albums and found the snapshot she was looking for.
It showed her as a young girl, caught in the act of clambering up a big oak tree of some sort, possibly a Japanese emperor oak. In spite of the daredevil pose, the young Chikashi’s face had a look of rather precocious maturity. Judging from the size of Goro, who was standing next to the tree, Chikashi deduced that she must have been five or six years old when the picture was taken. That seemed to provide a clue about the age of the girl in the picture book, who wore a similarly grown-up expression. But the important thing was that Chikashi’s own bare feet, clearly visible as she hung upside down from the crotch of the tall tree with legs akimbo, looked exactly like the feet of the girl in the Sendak book.
2
From the very first page, it’s clear that Outside Over There is going to tell the story of what happened while Papa was away at sea. Mama stands on the shore, dressed in a bonnet and a voluminous floor-length gown; it covers her so completely we
can see only her left hand, which is fluttering languidly in the direction of a sailing ship that can be seen heading out to sea from an idyllic cove. Next to her stands Ida, holding a momentarily calm, well-behaved baby. Its distinctive little face is turned in our direction, eyes presciently angled toward the left-hand corner, where the goblins are lurking. Ida’s powerful feet are planted firmly on a large boulder; clearly she, too, has come to see her father off on his voyage.
On the page across from this sweet family tableau, two ominous-looking characters are skulking in the left-hand corner, watching the ship’s departure. Their heads and bodies are completely hidden by large, hooded brown cloaks, and they’re sitting in a small rowboat that has been pulled up to the shore. Next to them, significantly, is a wooden ladder.
In the large illustration that dominates the following spread, Mama (as the text explains) has shed her bonnet and is sitting absentmindedly in the front garden in the shade of a lattice-work arbor with grapevines trailing over it. Later, Chikashi would hear from her husband that at the Berkeley seminar devoted to Sendak’s work, the author himself revealed that the word arbor was forever linked in his mind with an important memory from childhood.
Ida is standing a short distance from where Mama sits ensconced in the arbor. She’s still holding the baby, who is now bawling its eyes out. Ida’s expression conveys a mixture of perplexity and resignation, and it is abundantly clear that she considers herself wholly responsible for the infant’s care. Incidentally, while it is unmistakably a baby, Ida’s sibling is startlingly large. Its head is nearly the same size as Ida’s, and if it could stand up, it would probably be at least half as tall as its much older sister. Meanwhile, the pair of interlopers in their hooded cloaks can be seen cutting through the left-hand corner of the scene, carrying the wooden ladder.
There was something in the very composition of that large double-truck illustration that seemed designed to arouse feelings of uneasiness, but the thing that Chikashi found especially strange was the large, realistically drawn German shepherd who sits in the middle of the scene. In her view, the dog didn’t seem to have any relation to the story. Confused, Chikashi asked Kogito what he thought about this German shepherd, and that was when he first realized that she had more than a casual interest in the work of Maurice Sendak.
Kogito presumably had his own reasons for slipping those two books into his trunk, but he chose to overlook the fact that Chikashi had carried them off to her bedroom and was now monopolizing them. What’s more, he even found some additional books about Sendak among those that had been delivered to the house since his return, and took them down to the living room.
Apparently the Lindbergh kidnapping case had made a deep impression on Sendak’s psyche when he was a child, and, as Kogito explained, this picture book was inspired by those memories. On the first page (where the dedication appears), the baby who’s gazing toward us, as if to introduce itself, has the face of the Lindberghs’ beloved child. The Lindbergh house was equipped with a splendid German shepherd watch-dog, but even though the family was thus protected, their child was still stolen away. “What if some kidnapper decided to snatch a child of impoverished immigrants, like me?” the young Sendak thought. “There’s no way I could escape!” That’s the story the author told at the seminar.
But what bothered Chikashi was a technical detail. Why, she wondered, in such a fancifully illustrated book, was the German shepherd alone drawn in a superrealistic style? She simply couldn’t figure it out. When she asked Kogito about this he went to his study and, returning with a recently published folio book of color and black-and-white photographs, showed her one of Sendak walking his German shepherd. Perhaps, Kogito theorized, the reason the dog looked so much more realistic than the other characters was because the artist had a real-life model close at hand.
There was another aspect of the picture book that had engraved itself on Chikashi’s mind, but she didn’t mention it to Kogito. No question about it, she thought with absolute certainty. The mama in this book is just like my mother!
She was right: Chikashi’s mother really was a person who often wore a vacant, abstracted expression—just like Ida’s mama, sunk in a despondent reverie under the shade of a tree. The text of the picture book didn’t explain why Papa’s departure on a sea voyage had plunged Mama into such a deep abyss of dejection, but the beautiful illustrations made it amply clear that this woman was in seriously low spirits, with no relief in sight.
Ida has no way of knowing the cause of that condition (though an adult reader might be tempted to diagnose post-partum depression), but she seems resigned to the fact that her mother spends a good deal of time in a doleful daze beneath the trees, and that’s just the way it is. Ida has taken over the baby’s care, and even if some difficulty should arise, she wouldn’t dream of turning to her obviously ineffectual mother for assistance. And then, something really does happen.
Back in the house, Ida is trying to mollify the fretful baby by playing her French horn. Before long she is so completely caught up in the music that she becomes oblivious to what’s going on around her. Facing a window that frames a bevy of gigantic, blooming sunflowers, Ida plays her horn with tremendous verve, and the baby, too, seems enraptured by the music. Just then, two interlopers appear; all we can see of them is dark shadows in hooded coats, climbing up a ladder from a window in the background.
The goblins grab the baby, who is so surprised that no sound comes out when it tries to scream, and they spirit it off through the window. In the kidnapped infant’s place they leave a substitute: a grotesque, grayish-white, bug-eyed replica made from ice. Poor Ida, not knowing what has happened, picks up the changeling—for that is the subject of Sendak’s picture book, according to the discussion that took place at the Berkeley seminar—and holds it close. And then she murmurs, “Oh, how I do love you!” As she places her cheek on the floppy yellow cap the baby always wears, Ida is lost in her own reverie, and she doesn’t realize that what she’s holding in her arms is an expressionless little monster made of ice.
The sunflower-filled window through which the goblins made their escape changes into a sort of video screen that shows a scene from a distant place, and we see a sailing vessel pitching and rolling as it tries to navigate a suddenly storm-tossed sea. On this page, the sunflowers peeking in through the window (on whose sill Ida has left her horn) seem to be aggressively encroaching and increasing in both size and number, while their ever more fecund leaves run wild. This scene gave Chikashi an impression so intense that it was close to pain. She wasn’t able to explain in words why the sunflowers seemed to be somehow synergistic with Ida’s emotions, but she felt she understood it well enough from an artistic point of view.
There’s Ida, down on her knees hugging the ice baby, with what might have been a look of remorse or regret on her face, even though she hasn’t yet realized that the baby she is holding is a changeling. That’s what Chikashi was thinking, anyway. Wasn’t that because while she was playing her horn, she became completely free on a soul-deep level? Maybe losing herself in playing the horn was the equivalent, for Ida, of wishing that the baby had never been born or at least that it would go away and leave her in peace.
Chikashi had a visceral memory of having experienced exactly that sort of remorseful regret herself. As a baby and also as a young girl, she’d had a swarthy face, like the dark brown seed of a persimmon. Goro, on the other hand, had been such an angelically beautiful child that even his sister felt proud to be from the same family. But deep down, Chikashi would naturally have been feeling something more complicated than pride in her extraordinary sibling. Even though she didn’t share Goro’s intense interest in psychology, Chikashi knew there were children who wished that the baby who came after them (whether it was a brother or a sister) had never been born—or, once born, would just go away. But Chikashi always felt, strangely, that Goro wasn’t really her younger brother, even though she was born before him. On the contrary, he seemed more like an ol
der brother whose rights she was violating by appearing on the scene. She wasn’t yet three when it really hit Chikashi that in relation to her charismatic younger brother, she was like someone who had tried to seize power from a rival and had totally botched the job.
Ida, though, realized very soon what had happened. The changeling was beginning to drip and melt, and all it did was stare at the floor. According to the narrative, when Ida figured out what the goblins had done she became terribly angry. While the hideous changeling was rapidly melting into a puddle on the floor, its head drooping ever lower, Ida showed her anger by shaking her fist at the window.
Meanwhile (the story continues), beyond that open window we see a stormy sea, and as lightning flashes, the white-sailed tall ship runs aground and its shattered mast slowly sinks beneath the waves. Galvanized by determination, Ida stands with her outsized feet planted firmly on the floor, while the eerily expressive crowd of sunflowers peers through the window like a throng of inquisitive faces. “They stole my sister away to be a nasty goblin’s bride!” Ida cries, and the text on that page ends with “Now Ida in a hurry ...”
Once again, Chikashi was startled. So the baby—which, until then, she had assumed was male—was a girl? But what a cruel and tragic fate, to be forced to marry a nasty goblin!