Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

While Asa was talking, I got the sense that a number of people had arrived on the scene and were busy doing their jobs just beyond our door: homicide detectives, medical examiners, coroners, and so on. I was certain that my sister was in control of the situation, both now and going forward, and I had absolute confidence in her ability to handle everything in a typically resolute, pragmatic, and dependable manner.

And then, as I was getting ready to follow Asa out into the bustling hallway, I suddenly remembered one of the dreams that had visited me the night before, in intermittent but vivid fragments, during my unnaturally deep sleep. In the dream (or was it a vision?) I had been standing alone on a high promontory amid the trees in the pouring rain, watching Daio from behind as he trudged uphill, ever deeper into the woods. The image of Daio in the forest reminded me of the two kanji—淼 淼 and 森 森—that suggest infinite expanses of water and forest, respectively, and thinking about those pictographs made the dream feel even more luminous and prophetic.

In my dreamy vision, the relentless torrents of rain had saturated the leaves of the trees with such a vast amount of water that the entire forest seemed as deep and as wet as an ocean. For an average man — with the violent wind whipping around his legs as he struggled to make his way through the darkness, slipping and sliding on the rain-soaked earth — remaining upright would have been a matter of life and death. That isn’t hyperbole by any means; everyone knows it’s possible to drown in a cupful of water, and if a hiker lost his footing and tumbled facedown onto the forest floor, which had been transformed by the incessant downpour into a rushing river of mud, it would be very easy to perish. But Daio was an expert at navigating the forest, and as he forged ahead, carefully placing one foot in front of the other, he surely wouldn’t have fallen, even in those treacherous conditions.

The forest directly above the training camp meandered around the border of Honmachi, then merged with the thick woods above the mountain valley that was my once and future home. I could picture Daio walking ever deeper into the woodland as the night sky slowly grew lighter. It would have been close to dawn when he finally reached a remote spot where he didn’t need to worry about being found right away (or, quite possibly, ever) by the police who would surely be tracking him before long with their specially trained dogs.

In my mind’s eye I saw what happened next as clearly as if I had been there in the forest, and the moment felt far too real to be the memory of a dream.

Daio plunged his face into a thick cluster of leaves, which were so heavily laden with rain that they appeared darker than the bark. And just like that, my father’s old disciple embraced his own watery death and drowned standing up.