I couldn’t remember how this cat had come to make an appearance in my mind but for some time I gave the cat a lot of thought as if the cat were something that was with me, and although I didn’t know what the seven samurai who came to make an appearance in my mind after that had to do with the cat, it was all right if they didn’t have anything to do with the cat.
It had been some time since I’d become so that I could no longer write fictions in which the story developed so that something good or not good happened to the characters, and the characters said or did something good or not good to one another, leading one another to have feelings about one another that were either good or not good, which in turn led them to grow close to or apart from one another, fictions in which characters changed in ways that were good or not good as other things in the fictions changed alongside them, fictions that could perhaps be called conventional for various reasons, but above all it seemed that the fictional characters I presented in such fictions seemed like strangers who had nothing to do with me and ordering them around and talking about them made me feel as if I were meddling in the affairs of people who had nothing to do with me, and I didn’t like meddling in other people’s affairs and I’d reached a point of skepticism where I really was not sure if a fiction writer should create problems and conflicts among fictional characters when the world itself was rife with problems (I hoped that at least in the fictions I wrote nothing bad would happen to anyone, and that the characters wouldn’t undergo changes through certain events or something), but I didn’t know what that had to do with the seven samurai making an appearance in my mind.
The seven samurai who thus came to stay in my mind seemed to have nothing to say like actors in a pantomime, and did not, in fact, say anything but not for reasons they couldn’t speak of, and so they fought without any words as if they didn’t need words and without any expression as if they didn’t need expressions, either, and without either laughing or crying as if they couldn’t even think of laughing or crying. I had to watch the seven samurai who looked somewhat like samurai with their long hair tied back engage in a lame and tedious battle which they didn’t seem to be fighting solely for the sake of fighting—a battle whose cause was unknown and whose justification was unclear, and for which there may or may not have been an alternative—on a romantic and tranquil field covered in white snow, for no apparent reason or perhaps for the reason that the world was much too white, not putting one another to the sword with blood splattering spectacularly on snow but merely pretending to put one another to the sword, as if to say that there were only losers and no winners here.
It wouldn’t have mattered if the seven samurai had been three samurai or nine samurai, and it wouldn’t have mattered either if they were not samurai but instead seven western gunmen, but they kept appearing as seven samurai. The seven samurai began making frequent appearances in my mind and fought one another instead of siding together to fight others, and then when I thought, Just because they are samurai doesn’t mean that they have to do nothing but fight, they still didn’t appear in the next scene and chat with one another and sing while sitting around a bonfire, or lie down on the ground as if suffering from an epidemic, or read a book together written long ago by a samurai on samurai—a book whose existence had only been rumored about—or slap themselves on their own cheeks and discuss ways to hasten the fall of a certain empire; they didn’t appear in the next scene, either, doing nothing, or raising their swords and running toward me as if to get rid of me, but instead they quickly got swept away in a river, as if to show that just because they were samurai didn’t mean that they had to do nothing but fight, and thus they became seven samurai who got swept away in a river, a river in which no baby in a basket or raft carrying a dead person—which could be swept away in a river—or snow-covered mountain or volcano or lake or waterfall or second river—all of which couldn’t be swept away in a river—got swept away, not even when I looked at the river to see if something else came down from upstream, thinking it would be nice if something else got swept away in a lame manner, because the river in which the seven samurai—only seven samurai, and not one samurai or countless samurai filling up the river—flowed in a lame manner as well, and the seven samurai kept fighting a lame fight with one another or getting swept away in a river, and appeared as black- and-white characters as in a black-and-white film, and it seemed that if some background music were to be chosen for the scene in which they fought with one another or got swept away in a river “I Ching,” a piano solo by John Cage would be just right, or music played by broken string quartet instruments to which partial damage had been inflicted, and everything the samurai, who seemed to be saying, We’ll keep fighting useless fights or getting swept away in a river, so you should keep writing useless fiction in which we do or do not make an appearance, did as they fought or got swept away in a river seemed to be fiction, and fiction without any theme or plot at that. The seven samurai seemed to be telling me to write something akin to them fighting one another for no reason or motive, or like them getting swept away in a river, something that was almost nothing about something that was almost nothing.
I thought that perhaps someday I’d write a fiction, perhaps my last fiction, that could be called a dead-end fiction, a large part of which would be about the rough journey of seven samurai who’d come gathering like the wind or clouds from all around the world and literally appeared in the dead-end of a mine in Texas or someplace else, who’d been chosen for reasons unknown but who represented areas all around the world, a journey, again, through which they reached a dead-end. The fiction would end with a sense of futility and with the samurai fighting for no reason (for it’s better for some reasons not to exist), or mining coals or something for no reason (for it’s all right for some reasons not to exist), or driving nails into the wall of a dead-end alley or into one another’s bodies for no reason (for again, it’s better for some reasons not to exist), or taking turns doing the three things above, and from time to time saying incomprehensible things about fighting and coal and nails. The fiction could end with the dead-end as well, which too had feelings and which had been watching everything with patience, knocking itself down not out of disgust or because it could no longer remain a mere spectator but for no reason, burying everyone, and the fiction could end, too, with the seven samurai—who’d wanted to end their lives as samurai but hadn’t been able to—ending their lives after which I wouldn’t have to do such a thing as write fictions anymore.
The seven samurai who fought with one another or got swept away in a river were often with me, and fought with one another or got swept away in a river in a corner of my mind, even when I was taking a walk or chatting with someone, but I didn’t tell anyone about them. And yet when I was taking a walk and saw someone taking a walk with their dog, I thought, I’m taking a walk with seven samurai, but you couldn’t say that that was better than taking a walk with a dog, but when I next saw someone taking a walk with their dog, I wondered, Could you say that that’s better than taking a walk with seven samurai? and in fact, while taking a walk with one of D and N’s dogs (the dog didn’t reveal to me any aspect I hadn’t been able to think of when I thought about dogs, aside from peeing often while on a walk, and so I thought of the dog as a dog without qualities, and the other two dogs belonging to D and N, too, were to me dogs without qualities as they didn’t even have the peculiarity of peeing often while on a walk, which made me think that they were indeed dogs without qualities) in the town of C, I couldn’t make a conclusion either way as to whether it was better to have a dog or seven samurai with you when you were taking a walk. Nonetheless, when I took walks I still made the seven samurai who were with me appear in different settings and fight on Mount Fuji, in western Texas, in the Sahara, on Mount Kilimanjaro, and in battlefields such as Waterloo and Volgograd, and also get swept away in rivers such as the Mississippi, the Nile, and the Volga—but it didn’t seem as if the places were with me as I took my walks.
On
ce, while having a drink in a bar with friends and thinking to myself about the seven samurai, I thought it would be nice if there were a cocktail called Seven Samurai. I didn’t tell the bartender or anyone else about this, but still it would’ve been nice if a cocktail called Seven Samurai were concocted with lime, with snow from Mount Fuji, with mist, and with cherry blossoms, and with sake as the base, although snow from Mount Fuji, mist, and cherry blossoms could have been left out when unavailable, and with anything else that came to mind when you said that Seven Samurai could be added to the cocktail, that although it wouldn’t have been good to draw and add your own blood (or the blood of the person sitting next to you, after asking for permission) just because fresh red blood came to your mind, or to add fake blood, whose ingredients were unknown, although you could have had you wanted to, although it would’ve been better not to do such a thing, but you could have had you made up your mind, for a change, to do something for yourself that wasn’t good. But it wouldn’t have mattered if there was no cocktail called Seven Samurai, and yet it would’ve been all right if there was, as there were cocktails called the Painkiller, the Grenade, the Mudslide, the Moscow Mule, the Kangaroo, and Death in the Afternoon.
I was curious about whether Hemingway, before he committed suicide, drank a cocktail called Death in the Afternoon, which he would have concocted with absinthe and champagne and drank while staying in Paris, in the early 1920s, perhaps because he wanted to drink absinthe straight but couldn’t because it was too strong, and which was also the title of one of his books, but I couldn’t find that out; but, according to my knowledge, it was early morning when he died in his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Perhaps he thought it was already afternoon (perhaps he was drunk after having several Death in the Afternoons) even though it was morning, or perhaps he knew it was morning but he didn’t want to go out of his way to wait until the afternoon to have a Death in the Afternoon and die, or perhaps he thought it wouldn’t make any difference if he waited until the afternoon and died, but he still wondered if he should wait until the afternoon and die after having a Death in the Afternoon, also called by his name, for the very reason that it wouldn’t make a difference anyway, and since you couldn’t die twice, but the afternoon seemed too distant in the future on that particular day when he decided to die; no, every day had always seemed too long for some time, especially the afternoons, and on that day, at least, he didn’t want to face the long afternoon, and so he drank a cocktail he concocted called Death in the Morning, with whatever liquor he had at home—various types of liquor he couldn’t even remember the names of—and then he pointed the muzzle of his most cherished shotgun—with which he’d hunted animals such as deer, elk, and grizzly bears—at himself while thinking, No one will ever find out that I have concocted a new cocktail called Death in the Morning, and then he pulled the trigger as he looked at the black hole of the muzzle and thought that the answer lay in this black hole.
Or perhaps he thought, while regretting not having died sooner when he could have—as he’d suffered greatly from injuries sustained during the First World War, from car accidents, and from two plane accidents in Africa, and also from chronic diseases such as diabetes as well as from very poor vision—that what mattered now was dying and not whether it was morning or afternoon, day or night, or what season it was, but, nevertheless, he thought that he should’ve found out what day it was before he died, and he thought about how long he’d waited for the day, although he wasn’t sure if it would be right to say that it would be right to say that it had been worth waiting for, and he confirmed that it was July 2, 1961, and that he was sixty-one years old, but then he thought, What does it matter when I’m dying?
Many theories surrounded Hemingway’s death, and his wife claimed for several months afterward that his death had occurred as an accident while he was cleaning his gun, although it was generally thought that he woke up early in the morning and quietly left the bedroom so as not to wake his wife, after which he killed himself immediately; but I imagined that he didn’t fall asleep the night before, or that he woke up while it was still in the middle of the night and had a drink, thinking about many people he’d loved or hated, in addition to thinking about many other things; and then he died after all that thinking. And it seemed that people who killed themselves didn’t do so as the first task of the day, as soon as they woke up (there were probably people—as rare as they must’ve been, of course—who made a plan as they went to bed to let the day pass without killing themselves, and then to die the next day as soon as they woke up, and then did as planned) but instead as the last task of the day, like they were going to bed (since suicide, by nature, couldn’t but be the last task of the day), and although Hemingway did of course wake up early in the morning as people said, perhaps he couldn’t think of anything suitable to do besides dying, and he didn’t want to do anything else, and he took his life as the first and final task of the day, thinking there was nothing more to do with his life.
While I was on the subject of Hemingway I thought about reading Death in the Afternoon, a thick nonfiction book he wrote on the ritual and tradition of Spanish bullfighting, but I didn’t. It was possible that the book would make me rethink bullfighting, but it didn’t seem that it would change my opinions on bullfighting. I was amused by the fact that someone had come up with the idea of fighting a bull by making a perfectly normal bull take on an aggressive temper, and then infuriating it by provoking it before a crowd so that it would want to bunt him with its horns, but I had no interest in bullfighting save for that fact. It did seem possible, though, that I would read Death in the Afternoon sometime in the near future.
There were two scenes that always came to my mind when I thought of Hemingway, one that seemed majestic yet sad somehow, and the other comic. The first was the scene in which he walked toward an airplane speeding along for a takeoff on an airfield runway, in an attempt to kill himself a little before he actually died, and perhaps he imagined that the airplane was a bull and that he, who’d been obsessed with bullfighting at one point and who had bipolar disorder, was a bullfighter, and he pictured his life ending in a majestic way through bullfighting.
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River Page 6