Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

“In the first scene, a ten-year-old boy has tagged along with his father (known to everyone as Choko Sensei), who is preparing to charge into battle with a ragtag bunch of army officers — all, we gather, deserters from the regiment in Matsuyama. The ensuing pantomime unfolds at a snail’s pace across the entire stage; the slowness is unavoidable because Choko Sensei is riding in a ‘chariot’ made from a wooden fertilizer box with rough-hewn wheels.

“In actuality, that scene is superimposed over the ongoing narrative of a mentally ill man, reclining on a bed upstage. At the beginning the role is played by Unaiko, but she is almost completely concealed by a jumble of sheets and blankets. Seated beside the bed is a large person in a nurse’s uniform, silently listening to the patient’s story with a skeptical look on her face. The role of the nurse is played (in drag) by Kaku, whom you’ll remember as half of the duo of Suke & Kaku.

“The action taking place downstage portrays the recollections of the patient who is lying in bed reminiscing about the summer of 1945, and the ten-year-old boy is in fact the institutionalized man himself, twenty-some years earlier. Oh, and, Mr. Choko? Once the play begins, if the spirit moves you, please feel free to join in and speak the lines along with the actors. We’ve tried to bring your novel to life passage by passage, with maximum fidelity to the original, so chiming in from time to time should come naturally to the author! Seriously, though, audience participation is completely optional. Okay then, here we go.”

Only a single pane of glass separated the impromptu stage from the summer garden, where the roses — palest lavender, deepest crimson — were blooming in thick, luxuriant clusters. Inside, a quick switch had been made on the stage, and the person lying in bed was now being played by Suke, while Kaku continued to act the part of the large-boned nurse sitting next to the patient’s bed in a metal chair.

Both characters were silent, but the mental patient was evidently remembering his past self as a ten-year-old boy. A hallucinatory vision of the boy, played by Unaiko in a military service cap, entered the foreground of the stage and began to shout in a shrill, piercing voice.

“Mother, Mother, this is terrible — things are really getting out of control! The soldiers have made Father their leader, and they’re gonna stage an insurrection! I knew it, I knew it — it’s just as I thought. They’ve gone off the deep end, and they’ve chosen Father to lead them into battle! We need to check the paper where I wrote down all the people who called Father a spy or a traitor, or said he wanted Japan to lose the war, and then we have to figure out how many names are on that list. It’s such a big job, and we’re gonna be so busy! Oh, Mother, Mother, this is exactly what I was afraid of, and now it’s happening!”

This scene went on and on for a very long time. I seemed to feel my old novel coming back to life inside me, but with an oddly intriguing new twist.

In the next scene, which unfolded across the entire stage, my military-uniform-clad father (who had more or less lost the use of his limbs) was placed in the rough, smelly crate his followers were euphemistically calling a wooden chariot. He was then pushed forward and loaded, crate and all, into a military truck. Simultaneously, the young boy (who had been lurking in the background) emerged from the shadows and spoke — not shrilly and hysterically this time, but in Unaiko’s own naturally calm voice.

“Anyway, in the mountain valley early one morning on a day in August — so early, in fact, that everything was still inky blackness, without even the faintest glimmer of dawn — the soldiers and I loaded Father into a makeshift wooden ‘chariot’ and, moving as slowly as sleepy turtles, we set off on foot, taking turns pushing the wooden cart. At the mouth of the valley we hoisted the cart, with Father inside, onto a military truck that was waiting there, and, coalesced at long last into a brigade of rebels, the group headed for the provincial capital of Matsuyama by way of the switchback road that wound its torturous way through a mountain pass. And while the army truck, being driven recklessly fast, was screaming along the narrow road, the soldiers in the back kept up a raucous chorus, singing disconnected fragments of a foreign song over and over at maximum volume.

“‘What does this song mean, anyway?’ I inquired, and my father (with his eyes still closed and rivulets of sweat running down his deathly pale, porcelain-smooth, eerily unwrinkled face, and his corpulent body bumping against the boards of the wooden cart) gave an explanation. Of course, after all this time, I’m sure I only remember the barest gist of what he told me: ‘It’s German. Tränen means “tears,” and Tod is “death.” They’re singing that the emperor himself, with his own hand, will wipe away my tears. In other words, the song is saying the soldiers are waiting and hoping for the day when His Imperial Majesty, with his own fingertips, will gently wipe away their sorrowful tears.’”

At this point in Anai’s staging of the play, one of Bach’s solo cantatas suddenly burst forth in the background. (I remembered hearing that same thrilling high-volume sound at an avant-garde performance I’d been invited to attend nearly twenty years earlier, in an intimate little theater space.) The recitation continued, struggling to be heard over the rising wave of music, but the narrator’s voice was ultimately swept away on the soaring tide of song.

Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.

Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,

Komm und führe mich nur fort….

And as the chorus swelled I felt something beginning to stir in the deepest recesses of my heart, and I couldn’t stop myself from joining in.

3

After the play had ended, the young apprentices immediately set to work clearing away the stage props. When they left the Forest House it was not quite four o’clock in the afternoon, but the light had already begun to fade from the jar-shaped valley. The young folks had to get back to Matsuyama, where they had a job that involved both performing and working backstage at a concert by a singer-songwriter from Tokyo. Although I myself had never been moved to attend a concert of that sort, I could imagine what an asset the young members of the Caveman Group would be to such an event.

Alone in the Forest House as night descended on the valley, I reflected on what I had just experienced. From the start, the rehearsal had felt rather dark and dreary. The main characters were a decidedly gloomy group: the young boy portrayed by Unaiko in costume, shrieking in a shrill voice (in other words, myself, some sixty-five years earlier); the reclining patient and the nurse at the back of the stage; and finally my father, who was in the last stages of bladder cancer, standing in his wooden “chariot” in a puddle of bloody urine. Not surprisingly, for anyone familiar with the novella, there wasn’t a single bright, cheery, attractive face to be found. The staging followed the book closely, including a scene in which my father — still in his wooden cart — is loaded onto the bed of a truck whose sides were framed with two-by-fours, then filled in with corrugated cardboard. The young boy is jammed in beside his father, while the soldiers line up behind them.

By the end of the impromptu production, there were more than twenty actors onstage: young women and men from the Caveman Group, most of whom I had never laid eyes on. The actors playing the group of soldiers under the renegade officers’ command were outfitted with handmade field caps and toy swords, and when they all joined in the rousing chorus of the German war anthem the stage seemed to explode in pyrotechnic splendor.