Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

I was finally moved to reply. “Maybe so,” I said. “However, you seem to be forgetting that Daio has said on numerous occasions that he will always consider our father his one and only mentor, until the day he dies.”

Asa continued with her train of thought. “I think the mysterious accident must have taken place right after the photo was taken,” she mused. “You know: And where on earth did you leave your arm? No question about it, something horrible happened to Daio when he was young, and I can’t help wondering whether Father might have been responsible for the accident, or at least involved in some significant way.”

“We’ll probably never know,” I said. “But speaking of luggage, I saw something in the office that reminded me of the first time I ever brought Goro home for a visit, when we were on our way back from this training camp. It was your first encounter with him as well. At the time Daio was in possession of what appeared to be a larger version of Mother’s little red trunk, which I’m guessing Father must have given to him, and I saw the same trunk again tonight, on the couch in the office. The first time I ever laid eyes on that piece of luggage was when Daio turned up unexpectedly in Matsuyama, lurking around the Occupation-run library where Goro and I spent a lot of our free time. After he approached me and invited us to dinner, I remember he made his young disciples carry a big red leather trunk to the inn at Dogo Hot Springs, where he was staying by himself. (His acolytes were bunking at farmhouses and temples to save money.) While we were sitting around Daio’s room at the inn feasting on crab and sweetfish and getting tipsy on sake, he quipped that the trunk was their portable arsenal. Then he proceeded to give us a graphic description of how the rubber spearguns used for fishing in the river could also be converted into weapons for guerrilla warfare. Goro said something disparaging like ‘That doesn’t sound like much of a weapon to me,’ and Daio took offense at that.

“‘Oh yeah?’ he said angrily. ‘Well, suppose you make a little hole in an entry door or a wooden wall, and the light from inside is leaking out. If somebody comes snooping around, they’re naturally going to put their eye up to the hole to see what’s going on, right? And imagine that poised on the other side of the illuminated hole is the tip of a speargun, with the energy in the rubber band stored up and waiting to propel the spear right into the enemy’s eyeball. How about that, eh?’

“Goro just scoffed at him and said, ‘That’s disgusting. And a stupid toy is your idea of a weapon for guerrilla warfare? What a joke.’ Daio got very defensive, and he shot back, ‘Well, if we could get our hands on some fancier weapons, we wouldn’t have to resort to this ‘stupid’ kind of substitute!’”

Asa didn’t say anything, but even in the darkness I could sense from her reaction that she found the eyeball-piercing story every bit as distasteful as Goro had. As a signal that she was all talked out and ready to call it a night, she silently slid a tray across the tatami toward me. When I reached over, I found a glass of water and a dose of my sister’s prescription sleeping powder.

4

I slept more soundly than I had in a very long time. When I awakened the next morning, I was relieved to find that while a light rain was still falling outside, the low-ceilinged room was filled with the fragrant air of the forest and a faint glimmering of morning light. The window overlooking the farmland was still closed, but the wooden rain shutters had been raised. Asa had placed a legless rattan chair — basically a flat cushion with an attached backrest — on the tatami-matted floor, and she was sitting there, watching attentively while she waited for me to wake up.

“Yesterday was such a long, strange day, and I was so exhausted that I’m afraid I made a mistake with the dosage of your sleeping powder,” she said quietly as soon as I opened my eyes. “But I wasn’t worried, since your breathing was perfectly regular the whole time. You were sleeping like a log in the forest, but you must have still been aware of the pistol shots during the night, on some level?”

In fact, I hadn’t been consciously aware of the pistol shots or anything else, but after the events of the previous evening the news that there had been gunfire overnight didn’t surprise me much at all.

“Now that you mention it, I do remember having a vague sense that something was going on, somewhere in the realm between waking and dreaming,” I said after a moment’s reflection. “But it felt very fragmented, even for a dream.”

“Well then, I’m going to tell you what happened, just the way I heard it from Ricchan. Oh, by the way, Akari went to sleep with his headphones on, and thanks to them, he just woke up a little while ago. So you don’t need to worry that he might have heard something upsetting.”

Asa then proceeded to tell me what had happened, including all the details she had managed to collect from various sources while I was still asleep.

The previous night, Akari and Ricchan had made short work of the late supper of convenience-store sandwiches Asa had brought. Then, after Ricchan had installed Akari’s extra-large body (cozily cocooned in a blanket) in one of the room’s two twin beds, she had stretched out on the other bed. The rain was pounding noisily on the roof directly overhead and the wind was rampaging through the forest with a sound like crashing waves, and Ricchan wasn’t able to fall asleep. Akari, though, drifted off immediately and proceeded to sleep soundly through the entire night.

Ricchan remained wide-awake, and after a while she became aware of a man’s voice coming through the eastern wall of the room. The man droned on and on, and Ricchan soon realized that she was listening to Mr. Koga, although she thought his tone sounded considerably calmer than when she had briefly met him in Daio’s office, soon after her arrival. From time to time a woman’s voice, more muted than the man’s, would reply to something Mr. Koga had said. Ricchan knew right away that the woman was Unaiko, trying to keep her voice down out of consideration for Akari. The two people didn’t seem to be quarreling, but Ricchan heard sporadic sounds that seemed to suggest that a physical struggle of some kind was taking place, and she got the sense that the uncle’s behavior was making the transition from playful teasing into something more serious. Nonetheless, Unaiko never raised her voice, either in anger or to call for help. And while it seemed to be unmistakably clear that Mr. Koga was pestering his niece, he and Unaiko continued to carry on a fairly normal-sounding conversation, and once in a while their exchanges would even be punctuated by bursts of shared laughter.

After nearly an hour had passed, Ricchan heard something through the wall that sounded suspiciously like two people tussling on top of a bed. Alarmed, she jumped from her own bed and opened the door a crack. Peeking out, she saw one of Mr. Koga’s thugs standing in front of the door to Unaiko’s room holding a truncheon and staring straight at her. The man brandished his nightstick above his head in a menacing way, but Ricchan couldn’t tell whether he was trying to intimidate her into staying in her room, or if it was just a generically hostile gesture.

She hastily closed the door again and stood behind it, listening. It sounded as though the scuffle had escalated beyond mere horsing around. A moment later she heard Mr. Koga’s voice — much louder and more assertive now — barking an order at some third party. The door to Unaiko’s room opened and then closed. Clinging to a tenuous feeling of hopefulness, Ricchan sat down on her bed. She envisioned a best-case scenario in which the second henchman (whom she hadn’t seen when she peeked out the door) had been attempting to take liberties with Unaiko while the uncle was off somewhere, and now Mr. Koga had returned and given his subordinate the scolding he deserved. Even so, she didn’t feel entirely reassured, so she opened the door again and peered into the corridor. The man who had been standing guard was gone, but the sounds of movement inside the room continued.