by Kenzaburo Oe
But suppose the angel had asked the women to spread the word that Jesus had risen, and suppose that Jesus hadn’t happened to meet up with the disciples in Galilee, after the Resurrection. If that had been due to the women’s failure to relay the angel’s message, and if their fearful silence had been recorded in the Gospel, they would probably have been blamed for eons to come. But all’s well that ends well, and didn’t Jesus rise up and appear in front of his disciples, restored to life, even though the women never relayed the angel’s message?
Continuing along those lines, Chikashi thought: On that dark night when my brother hadn’t come home for two days, I was waiting for him, and I was afraid. And after my brother and his friend finally came back, when I saw how pathetic they looked I trembled violently and almost ended up passing out, just like those biblical women. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid ...
I never told anyone about that night, either, because I was filled with fear. That’s all there was to it. But what does it mean that the terror I felt, as I lay awake in the total darkness just before daybreak, is still resonating inside me? Even if there is some special significance, it doesn’t help my dead brother or my living husband or me as I am now. But still, I can’t help wondering—if the events of that dark night had never happened, would things have ended up as they did?
Chikashi imagined the scene that had taken place two thousand years before, when the terrified women ran away and hid in their homes without telling anyone what had happened, at the same time that the resurrected Jesus was trying to meet with his disciples in Galilee. While the women were keeping their frightened silence, the disciples—who, as related in the Gospel according to Luke, had heard what had befallen the women—were walking toward the village of Emmaus, and their hearts had been “set ablaze” by the story they heard from the mysterious stranger who appeared along the way. Not realizing that their new companion was actually Jesus, they listened to his words, and “their hearts burned within them.” When Chikashi thought about the disciples and the women who were frightened into silence, she found a certain measure of comfort in the realization that she felt a common bond with those scared, silent women.
And then Chikashi thought once again about the picture book Kogito had brought back from Berlin and how it had shaken her to the core. Ida’s mother, who did nothing but mope around, appeared to be a weak, helpless female, but Sendak drew her as if she were one of those biblical women in the Gospel according to Mark, frightened into silence. The first time she read Outside Over There, Chikashi had felt an overwhelming rush of fond recognition and sympathy for that sad-faced mother under the trees ...
For myself, Chikashi thought, I can pinpoint the precise time when I had the feeling of silently fleeing from an unbearably frightening experience. It was when I gave birth to an abnormal baby. Somewhere beyond my two naked, elevated legs, I heard the nurse who had just caught the newborn baby exclaim, “Oh, my God!” And ever after that, in the darkest depths of my heart, that nurse’s voice has been echoing endlessly. I’ve even gone so far as to think that her horrified exclamation might have been the same scream I stifled in my own throat when I saw Goro and his friend standing outside the temple at midnight in such a terrible state.
And when I regained consciousness after having passed out from shock, that day in the maternity ward, for a moment I couldn’t tell whether I was waking up in a private room in a hospital in Tokyo or in that dark, cold temple in Matsuyama.
5
There was a long stretch of time during which Goro never came to the house in Seijo Gakuen for the express purpose of seeing Kogito. He did, however, drop by the Choko household occasionally—for example, when he was filming at a former major movie soundstage in nearby Tamagawa that had been turned into a rental facility since the slump in the filmmaking business.
One of the things about Kogito that Chikashi had come to find interesting was that although he didn’t like to have outsiders handle the books in his personal library, he made an exception for Goro and no one else. Not only did he allow Goro free access to his precious books, but he didn’t even make a fuss when Goro ran off with a book that Kogito hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. But once Goro had taken a volume home with him, it was his custom to read that book intensively until he had fully understood it, so Kogito knew better than to hold his breath waiting for a given book to be safely returned.
On the day in question, a book had arrived in a hard-paper case that Chikashi found very attractive. It was an English translation of the revised edition of The Man Without Qualities, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil, and Kogito explained that the difference between this edition and earlier compilations was that this time the editors had tried a different way of organizing the unfinished portions of the manuscript. He also said that when he read the original translation, it was the less-polished early notes, memos, and scribblings that he had found inspiring, rather than the more advanced drafts. He had even gotten the idea of writing a novel of his own made up entirely of that sort of ephemera.
Goro didn’t have time to read novels in English, so after checking out the cover design, which featured an interesting variation on the usual treatment of an author photo, his eyes wandered to the window and he began gazing dreamily out at the flowering dogwood, which was showing the first flush of fall colors, and the deep red petals of the autumn-blooming rosebush. Chikashi remembered now that the rosebush in question had the rather overblown name of “William Shakespeare,” and she remembered, too, that Goro’s hair had still been jet-black. Although Umeko had once whispered to her that some of that youthful darkness came from dye ...
After a while, Goro said to Kogito, “When you were first reading An Ordinary Man, it was right around the time that Akari was born, wasn’t it? I remember your saying, ‘If I used this collage-like style of writing, I would probably be able to write about things that I haven’t tackled before.’ But you never did it.”
Chikashi didn’t detect any trace of sarcasm in Goro’s voice, but Kogito, apparently feeling that he was being chided, shot back, “All right, I’ll try giving a careful reading to the notes-and-memos section of this edition one more time, and I’ll try to figure out what made me think that would be a workable format. After all, it’s been twenty years since I first read this book, and I’ve been learning my craft as a novelist all that time, so maybe now I’ll be able to do what I only talked about then.”
In response, Goro did something that struck Chikashi as unusual for him: he made an effort to smooth Kogito’s ruffled feathers by being deliberately conciliatory. “I truly hope that you’ll be able to take that expressive style and make it your own,” he said. “Because in the long run, I think we share a common artistic goal, and that approach might actually work well for both of us ...”
At this point Chikashi impulsively jumped into the conversation, unable to tolerate what she saw as Goro’s capitulation—throwing the match, in sumo terms. At least, that’s how she analyzed it later. “But when you talk about your own artistic expression, Goro, don’t you mean in films?”
“No, no. It’s not that simple,” Goro responded cryptically, still staring out at the garden, where the fall-blooming roses were slowly trembling on their singularly long stems.
Much later (this was after Goro had died), when Chikashi’s uncanny attraction to the Maurice Sendak picture book Kogito had brought back from Berlin became a catalyst for rethinking some of the things that were always lurking in the recesses of her mind, Kogito broached a subject that must have been directly connected to the conversation they’d had with Goro on that autumn evening, while the William Shakespeare roses were blooming in the garden. By then Chikashi had already asked Kogito to write about what happened on that fateful night, when he and Goro were teenagers.
“Haven’t you, too, found a style to express the things that you’ve been thinking about forever?” Kogito asked. “Of course, in a totally different genre than the ways of expressing ourselves t
hat Goro and I found. But I really think that Goro would be ... I mean, would have been delighted if you wrote a picture book.”
Chikashi didn’t reply. She had been aware since earliest childhood of the difference in temperament and talents between her dazzling older brother and herself; there had even been times when she became convinced that there wasn’t a single point of similarity. Many friends of the family had pointed out that she and Goro shared an aptitude for drawing pictures, but to Chikashi herself, the pictures she drew and the pictures Goro drew were radically different entities. She had been rather surprised when, toward the end of his life, Goro began to praise the style of her drawings, but she still couldn’t imagine that she would ever be able to create a picture book about the sort of thing that was important to Goro and Kogito.
This is a bit of a detour, but one of the things Chikashi had discovered since getting married was that her husband was the type of person who couldn’t remain silent if someone asked him a question. She and Goro, on the other hand, always felt that it was more natural to remain silent than to argue a point with a torrent of words; this was one of the few traits they shared. In the course of a typical day, Chikashi would frequently let any number of her husband’s questions go unanswered.
From the outset—that is, from the time they first began going out until after they’d been married for quite a while—there were numerous occasions when Chikashi didn’t really understand what her husband was talking about. And when Kogito was chatting with Goro, she noticed that her brother often responded to her husband’s questions with silence. There were times when Kogito appeared to be nettled by this behavior of Goro’s (though not every single time it happened, by any means), but Chikashi decided that there was no point in letting it bother her, since there was nothing she could do.
After Chikashi came across Outside Over There (a book that had awakened and inspired her in a powerful, all-encompassing way because it felt so eerily close to her own life), she began to think about what had happened to Goro and Kogito during that lost weekend more deeply than ever before. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that she might be able to turn those thoughts into a picture book and then show it to Kogito. And wouldn’t Goro have been likely to say the same thing regarding that unmade, extralong film he had started to work on, without mentioning it to Kogito?
Yes, Chikashi thought ruefully, Goro and I did have something in common, after all, unusual as that might seem. We both gave Kogito the silent treatment on a regular basis—and we both kept our little secrets from him, as well.
6
It was the middle of the night when Chikashi got the call from Umeko, telling her that Goro had leapt to his death from the roof of a building. The actual incident had taken place earlier that evening, and now that the body had finally been identified, Umeko needed to report to the police station right away. After hanging up the telephone, Chikashi immediately went into Kogito’s sleeping room—that is, his library, where he had installed an army cot. This was only the second time during their marriage that Chikashi had gone into Kogito’s sleeping room with the explicit intention of waking him up. The first time, it had already been morning, albeit extremely early, when Chikashi rushed into the library to announce to her sleeping husband: “President Kennedy has been assassinated!”
On that November morning, Chikashi had heard the breaking news about the Kennedy assassination as soon as she got out of bed, and she was very upset. How was it possible that a man who had everything—good looks, superior character, phenomenal talents, the love of an admiring public—could be wiped out in one fatal moment by some scruffy-looking lowlife? She saw, with sudden clarity, the ubiquity of that dark, world-destroying power, and she felt as if there was some sort of parallel with what had happened to Goro as a youth. (She could almost hear Goro saying, with a grim little smile, “Oh, now you’re comparing me to Kennedy?”)
And when Chikashi first came across that picture book by Maurice Sendak, she felt as if everything written in there was something she already knew. People said that the kidnapping of the Lindberghs’ beloved child was Sendak’s inspiration for Outside Over There, and wasn’t the Kennedy assassination, too, a similarly tragic showdown between the forces of darkness and light? It was on the morning when she learned Kennedy had been shot, Chikashi thought, that the essential core of everything she now believed had first begun to crystallize.
The previous night, her husband, as was his habit in those days, had read until late while nursing a half cup of whiskey and then had gone to sleep. When she woke him up with the news of the assassination, he poked his bleak-looking head out from under the blanket and listened to the details with an increasingly desolate expression on his face. Then, without saying a word, he dived back under the blanket and pulled it up over his head. Chikashi had actually been expecting him to say something like: “Oh, right, that type always ends up getting the worst of it.”
Of course, this was all surmise on top of speculation, but if Kogito had said something like that back in 1963, then when Chikashi went to tell him that her brother had taken a fatal plunge off the roof of a building, suppose she had made some reference to what he had said (but didn’t) when he heard the news of Kennedy’s death? If she had put that into words, her husband probably would have replied with something similar to what he might have said (but didn’t) that time about Kennedy, something like “I always thought Goro was the kind of person who would end up this way.” (A tendency to indulge in convoluted conjecture was one trait, at least, that Chikashi and Kogito shared.)
A week or so after the day Kogito gave his dinner-table dissertation on the newly published research into the Gospel according to Mark, Chikashi happened to see her husband looking alarmingly somber—the polar opposite of the cheerful, upbeat person who had held forth about the adventures of Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, and Salomé. He was staring out the sitting-room window into the garden with his head, which no longer had a single section unthreaded with white hair, pressed against the glass.
After observing his unusual posture from behind, Chikashi went back to her own room without saying a word. But when she reemerged nearly an hour later, Kogito was still in the same position. It didn’t seem like the way a man who was well on his way to old age would behave, as a rule. Chikashi felt a wave of pity, thinking that now that Kogito was getting on in years he must be reflecting on the details of his life and regretting all the mistakes he had made. But there was no way for anyone to stick a finger into his salt-and-pepper-colored head (in Kogito’s case, now mostly salt) and erase all the painful memories.
But wasn’t that exactly what Goro had tried to do for himself? If Goro, like everyone else on the planet, was running a continual-loop mental slide show of regrettable scenes from his life, how difficult that must have been for him—especially since he was known for his extraordinary ability to remember the details of things he’d experienced (a facility he used in his films, to marvelous effect). Goro had often remarked on Kogito’s phenomenal memory, but Kogito was the type of person who remembers words, while Goro had a remarkable capacity for recalling and reconstructing visual scenes. But if a human being decided to obliterate all those intricately detailed memories by violent, self-destructive means, that was rather easily done ...
Chikashi sat down behind Kogito, who had been standing by the window in the same unnatural pose for nearly two hours. It seemed almost cruel to even look at him in that state. Kogito had never been a sportsman type, but he had always been active, and if he wasn’t reading or writing it was unusual to see him sitting still for very long. How, she wondered, had he suddenly fallen into this vegetative state? Then she noticed that Akari was standing next to her.
After determining that this peculiar behavior was not restricted to his father but had apparently spread, like a virus, to his mother as well, Akari addressed his words to both parents, subtly swiveling his head back and forth between them. “People!” he exclaimed. “What on earth is going on?”
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br /> Just as Chikashi hadn’t been able to do anything to prevent Goro from destroying himself, now—even compared with Akari’s small gesture—she was unable to do anything to prevent the same sort of behavior in Kogito, and she felt deeply, profoundly sad. (Ida had at least been able to “straighten up and fly right” after hearing Papa’s song.)
Toward the end of that strange day, after Akari had trundled off to his bedroom, Chikashi sat down on the sofa next to the armchair where Kogito was working with his back to the garden. He was writing away, with a drawing board—black hardboard bordered with persimmon-colored wood—balanced on his knee. It was the only thing he had brought back from Berlin for himself, apart from books. After a while he lifted his stubbly, unshaven face (for some reason, ever since his whiskers had turned noticeably white, they had started to grow much more rapidly) and looked at Chikashi with a quizzical expression. At times like this Kogito would usually launch into an account of what he had read that day, as if he had been waiting for the opportunity, and the fact that he didn’t do so on this day seemed to confirm the severity of his depression.
“I wanted to ask you about earlier today,” Chikashi ventured. “Until now I don’t think there’s ever been a time when you just stood and stared into the garden, has there?”