Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

My mother’s recorded voice, sounding weaker than I remembered, began to emanate from the industrial-size speakers. At first the voice was little more than a whisper, and even after Unaiko adjusted the volume, rewound the tape to the beginning, and started again, it still sounded very faint. After a moment, I realized my mother was addressing her narrative to her two children: Asa and me.

“Papa had made up his mind to set out on the flooded river in his rowboat, so while he was taking a nap that afternoon we added some things we thought he might need — a change of clothes, a towel, and so on — to the items he had already packed in the red leather trunk. These included a bunch of papers and documents, placed on top of a narrow rubber inner tube that had been removed from a bicycle tire. As you know, Papa made a hobby of dismantling and overhauling old, decrepit bicycles, all by himself. Normally, Kogii’s only job was to add a squirt of oil here and there, so he was very excited when Papa told him to take the inner tube out of the tire. (Bicycle pumps were in short supply during the war, so he had to use his mouth to inflate it, like blowing up a balloon.) There used to be a bicycle store on the road beside the river, but at some point it stopped selling bikes and was only doing repairs — and even those were hit or miss because the shop didn’t carry any new parts. Since the bike-repair shop couldn’t do anything much beyond reattaching a loose chain or mending a puncture with gum arabic, once the tube had been removed from a bicycle tire there was no way to get a replacement. So until things started to get back to normal after the war, Kogii would pack old bicycle tires full of straw and ride around like that. We always knew when he was on his way home ‘cause we could hear the rickety sound of his makeshift bike, with its jerry-built gears and straw-filled tires, from miles away!

“Anyhow, after the inner tubes had been removed from the tires and blown up nice and plump, what were they used for? Flotation buoys, of course. In theory, if you blew one up and put it in the red leather trunk, then even if the boat ended up sinking it would have been possible to stay above water by hanging on to the trunk because the inner tube would keep it afloat. If worst came to worst, at least the trunk would eventually find its way to shore. As for the other things your father had packed in the trunk, I didn’t see anything besides a bunch of letters and papers. Some of those letters talked in detail about who had originally suggested the insurrection to your father and his cronies, and told them how they should go about preparing for it. Because the plan was being hatched here in the forest, where no one can ever keep a secret, the conspirators had no choice but to stay in touch by mail. If they had tried using the telephone the village switchboard operator would have been able to eavesdrop on their conversation. That’s why there were so many letters, and your father was trying to take them all with him, every last one. His plan, apparently, was to pack up his correspondence and then ride the rowboat down the flooded river to a spot where the water was wider and the current wasn’t so strong; in other words, someplace where the fields and rice paddies were completely submerged in water from the flooding. He must have figured that if he could get that far, he would be able to scramble onto the shore and ditch the boat, and then he could make his escape by following the train tracks, thus managing to outrun the people who (he thought) were going to be pursuing him. If he had managed to make a clean getaway by following this plan, I have no idea what his next step would have been. The only thing we know for sure is that your father had made up his mind to run away that very night.

“As for why he chose to go by boat, the explanation is obvious. Everyone around here knew him by sight, so he was likely to be spotted by suspicious eyes no matter which road he took out of town. That’s why he decided to ride the river to a place beyond the neighboring town and start his overland journey from there. If the weather had been better his plan might have worked, but the boat snagged on a sandbar downriver and capsized in the high waves, and he drowned. Even so, I can’t help thinking he had been making surprisingly good progress till then!

“The fact that Papa felt the need to fill the red leather trunk with all the papers pertaining to the insurrection seems to indicate that he thought those materials were too important (or too incriminating) to leave behind. It’s as if he felt it would be disastrous for any outsiders to see what he had been plotting, but yet he also put a flotation device in the trunk so the papers would eventually find their way back to us. At least that’s what I believed for many years after he drowned. But why on earth would he set up an outcome in which his folly would be exposed? And wasn’t he worried about having his subversive correspondence fall into the wrong hands? Those are just some of the unknowables that make my head spin, even now. Of course, the trunk was found downstream and taken to the police, quite a while after the war ended. They evidently had bigger fish to fry, and the trunk was returned to us without comment.

“Recently, though, I’ve come to believe there may be a much simpler explanation for the flotation device. Papa obviously wasn’t thinking straight, and maybe he just wanted to make the trunk buoyant so he could use it as a life preserver in case the boat capsized. It’s likely that he didn’t even consider the possibility he might perish, while the trunk survived.

“It does seem as though my husband honestly believed the guerrilla bombing of the Imperial Palace was going to take place. Even though the officers used to come to our house and get drunk and talk big about staging some kind of violent uprising, in the beginning those discussions seemed rather abstract. But they gradually became more focused, and I believe when Papa somehow reached the conclusion that the officers were seriously planning to carry out their radical scheme, he became frightened.

“We know how the story ends: Papa launched his boat on the flooded river and ended up drowning. But did he ever seriously believe he would be able to survive the churned-up current in the wobbly little rowboat? It seems to me, in retrospect, that he was concentrating on the immediate goal of making his escape from the valley, and he didn’t take the time to think about the next step. I think it was shamefully irresponsible, given the haphazardness of his plan, that he would even think about taking his young son along on that wild, doomed flight. And when I watched from above as Kogii came paddling back to shore through the muddy, turbulent water, it truly was one of the happiest moments of my life!

“Anyhow, the one thing we know for sure is that Papa participated in plotting a guerrilla uprising along with a bunch of disgruntled soldiers, and even though it turned out to be nothing more than an idle fantasy, he was afraid he might be forced to go through with it. That’s why he felt the need to flee like a thief in the night in the midst of the biggest storm of the year.

“Kogii always seemed to idolize his father, and if I had given him access to the red leather trunk when he first asked (before I began to weed out the contents), I was afraid it would have broken his heart to learn the truth about his father. Also, of course, I didn’t relish the idea of having our family’s dirty laundry aired in public. I couldn’t explain my reasons without disclosing the secret, and as a result we were estranged for years.

“Kogii’s reaction was to write The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, which was apparently designed to punish and embarrass me. That dreadful novella portrayed Papa’s conduct in a way that made him look ludicrous and pathetic, while I came across as a sarcastic, hypercritical harpy. Even so, it was clear to me that Kogii was still hoping to write his drowning novel someday, to celebrate the father he always thought of as brave and heroic.”