by Kenzaburo Oe
When Goro left home to go on that “Saturday drive” and didn’t return for two whole days, I was truly frightened, and my imagination ran wild. What if he was being held captive in some hidden fortress in a village deep in the mountains—or what if he had been forced aboard an American warship and carried off to the United States against his will? And then on the third day, close to dawn, when Goro finally returned in that strange, wretched state, with his equally disheveled friend in tow, it didn’t exactly put my heart at ease.
3. What happened at the hidden fortress that last night, after Kogito and Goro left? I wasn’t able to figure that out from the two versions of Goro’s scenario-cum-storyboards, and the same doubt appeared to still be lurking in Kogito’s and Goro’s minds, many years later.
After Goro became a film director, and especially when Dandelion was such a huge hit in America, he often traveled to the United States, even going so far as to set up a branch office of his production company in Los Angeles. Even if the bloody incident described in the second scenario didn’t really take place, Peter would probably have ended up being sent home for the offense of removing military equipment from the army base, even though the guns in question weren’t operational—that is, assuming he got caught and that he was still alive. After he had been court-martialed and had served his prison term (or whatever his punishment turned out to be) and returned to civilian life, Peter would surely have stayed abreast of what was going on in the world of Japanese cinema, and one day—perhaps at some film festival or awards ceremony—he would have turned up to greet Goro, who had become an internationally acclaimed director.
Wasn’t Goro dreaming of that sort of happy ending? But behind the façade of that rosy fantasy, Goro must have been horribly tormented, all his life, by the ominous shadow of those nightmarish memories—whether THAT had actually concluded with Scenario A or Scenario B. On the other hand, I couldn’t help wondering why Peter’s fate was such a mystery. It would have been a simple matter for Kogito or Goro to stop by the CIE and ask whether Peter had returned safely, but perhaps they couldn’t bring themselves to go back there after all that had transpired that weekend.
4. From the way Goro behaved after that two-night absence, I gradually came to feel, ever more strongly, that my brother had changed in some fundamental way. Finally, and completely by accident, I ended up figuring out what it was. When I first saw the title page of Sendak’s Outside Over There, I felt as if that book was speaking directly to me, and as I read it again and again, my eyes were opened to a number of new insights.
That late night when Goro came straggling in close to dawn I was, of course, happy that he had come home safely, but the reason I still felt anxious was because I had a strange sense that the person who had returned to our temple lodgings was a changeling who had somehow been substituted for the real Goro. I was certain that the Goro I knew from then on really was my brother—that was the point where my story deviated from the Sendak book. But even so (to put what I was feeling at that time into Sendak’s words), the Goro who came home that night seemed to carry a subtle redolence of “Outside Over There.” And forever after THAT, wherever Goro was, I always detected a faint whiff of “Outside Over There,” as well.
In Sendak’s picture book, Ida and her baby sister (newly rescued from the goblins) are walking along a forest road. Ahead of them is a tree with a low-hanging branch that looks like a sinister arm, stretched across the path to block their way. In the shadow of the tree, five rather creepy-looking butterflies are flitting about, which does nothing to relieve Ida’s continuing tension. In the discussion at the Berkeley seminar, Sendak himself talked about the darkly prophetic nature of this scene: “It’s showing that Ida’s hard-earned hour of peace and quiet is just a momentary thing. Every part of that picture is filled with signs that danger lies ahead. Her interlude of tranquillity, we gather, is going to be very short-lived.”
“Is that so?” asked one of his colleagues at the seminar in a skeptical tone, whereupon Sendak offered a more detailed explanation.
“Yes, even now the tree looks as if it’s about to reach out and grab her. And the five butterflies dancing around tell us that there are still the same number of goblins in the vicinity.”
When Goro was attacked by the yakuza who were lying in wait when he pulled into his garage in his Bentley, the thing that frightened me more than anything was that I felt he had been stabbed by people who had come from “Outside Over There”—although of course at the time I hadn’t yet heard that phrase. That reminds me: when Kogito had the joint of the big toe of his left foot crushed by some unidentified strangers armed with a rusty miniature cannonball, I went with him to the hospital. And when the incredulous doctor took me aside and asked politely whether my husband was by any chance a pathological liar, didn’t I have an intuition that the violence that crushed Kogito’s foot had originated in “Outside Over There”? That sort of attack happened more than once, and I always had a feeling that he wasn’t sharing all the details.
5. For me, from the very beginning, there was always a part of Kogito that I couldn’t understand. But I think the reason I married him in spite of that—granted, there were other factors as well—was because he was the one human being on earth who went along, as Goro’s traveling companion, when Goro was taken to “Outside Over There.”
When Kogito was still a young man, the Nigerian playwright and 1986 Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka (whom Kogito had met at a conference at the University of Hawai‘i), came to Japan, and I went along to hear the two of them take part in a public panel discussion. I was interested because I had heard from Kogito that Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman, was a story about a guide who is supposed to escort a dead king to the world of the ancestors, in accordance with ancient Yoruba tradition, by ritually willing himself to die on the night of the king’s burial. The thing is, I always had a feeling that Kogito was the guide who led Goro to “Outside Over There.” I always wondered, too, whether Goro’s vociferous opposition to my marriage to Kogito might have been due to the fact that he didn’t want his sister’s life to be intertwined with someone who had a connection with that dark, mysterious realm.
6. When Akari was born, there was a swelling on the back of his head that was like another little head. Maybe it was the result of passing through the birth canal with that thing attached, but his face was strangely narrow and covered with wrinkles. When Goro came to visit me in the maternity ward, I was hurt and indignant when he took one look at his new nephew and said, “Yikes! He looks like a little old woman!” That comment was doubly wounding because I had hoped to give birth to a child who was as beautiful as Goro had been when he was small, and somewhere deep in my unconscious I must have wanted to exchange my flawed child for the lost Goro, in all his purity and innocence.
Knowing that my curiosity had been piqued by the idea of changelings, Kogito went out and bought a number of encyclopedia-type books about spirits of the dead, ghosts, elves, fairies, sprites, and the like. And in all the illustrations in those books, every one of the changelings was a baby with the face of a sly, cunning old trickster.
When the child I gave birth to grew up and, in spite of having to deal with cognitive difficulties and other impediments, began to create musical compositions, I felt that through the medium of music Akari had been able to recapture his own perfectly beautiful self. Sendak explains why he drew Mozart sitting at a pianoforte (and, I imagined, playing The Magic Flute) in a little house across the river that resembled an opera set, as Ida was passing through the frightening forest on her way home. Music always inspires Ida and lifts her spirits—and Sendak has often spoken about his personal affinity for Mozart.
7. When Goro made the film version of Kogito’s novel, A Quiet Life, I was happy to hear the prolonged applause resounding in the darkened theater where we saw the preview, because I felt that by making this movie Goro, too, had regained his original self, in all its purity. But then, almost without stopping to take a
breath, Goro had gone and jumped off the roof of a building. What a terrible, wrongheaded way of leaving this world and going to “Outside Over There”!
Akari mourned the loss of his uncle by writing a composition for cello and piano titled, simply, “Goro.” I believe that by creating that music Akari managed to recover from the feelings of sadness and terror that he himself didn’t fully understand. Goro’s death caused my husband a great deal of pain, and it was also the reason he became addicted to the Tagame tapes. But before too long won’t Kogito, too, reach a point where he will be able to write a completely truthful account of THAT—which is to say, what happened “Outside Over There”? Maybe that process will reveal to him the true meaning of approaching death as a novelist—writing his way to the grave, so to speak.
I know that I have never once said to Kogito, in so many words, “I love you.” That’s just the way I am, and besides, I truly do believe that actions speak louder than words. When I see him with his hoary head pressed against the window glass for hours on end it makes my heart ache, but I would never mope around like that, and I know that no matter how long we go on living together we’re never going to come to resemble each other, the way some couples do. All I can do is watch over him while he does his last work with complete freedom. But what’s going to become of me? How shall I prepare for what lies ahead? What would Ida do, in my place? That’s what Chikashi was thinking. And yet she also knew that asking herself those questions was just a way of summoning up the courage to deal with the answers she had already found.
After their first encounter amid the waning roses, Chikashi met and talked with Ura Shima any number of times, and when Chikashi laid out the plan she’d come up with, Ura was in complete agreement. That is, Chikashi would take the royalty payments she had received for the illustrations she’d drawn for two volumes of essays (mostly revolving around Akari) that Kogito had written, and she would use that small nest egg to cover Ura’s expenses in finding and renting an apartment in Berlin. And when Chikashi bought a ticket for Ura to return to Germany, she also booked a ticket of her own so she could follow later on and help with Ura’s postnatal care.
If Kogito asked about her reasons for doing all this, Chikashi thought she would answer that she didn’t want to let any goblins (whatever deceptive form they might take) get close enough to kidnap Ura’s baby. Moreover, she also intended to say that her thoughts on this matter were perfectly expressed in the concluding lines of Death and the King’s Horseman, which Kogito had spot-translated and then quoted at the public discussion.
In Soyinka’s play, the tragedy swells to a violent crescendo after the king’s horseman has hastily gotten married and impregnated his very young bride, as one last fling for his mortal flesh. He is arrested and finally manages to kill himself in jail, as he is duty-bound to do.
Meanwhile, outside the jail, the women of the marketplace are swaying back and forth and singing a dirge, as the “mother of the marketplace,” Iyaloja, chants these words:
Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn.
THE END