Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

“In the autumn of last year,” he said, “there were masses of glorious red flowers on the slope below what’s left of the chestnut groves, and it occurred to me that they must be the red spider lilies you’ve written about.”

“Right, that’s where they harvest the bulbs of the red spider lilies — if anyone’s even doing those old-fashioned jobs these days. When those long-stemmed flowers are in full, extravagant bloom, with their delicate stamens and pistils bursting forth from inside the curvaceous outer petals of the bright red flowers, they almost look like fireworks. The entire slope becomes a sea of scarlet, and it’s really something to behold.”

“Oh, I know,” Masao agreed. “I was thinking last fall that if someone with entrepreneurial inclinations came across a field of these flowers they would naturally see the business possibilities and think, Ka-ching! I mean, there’s always a market for cut flowers. And then it occurred to me that when the young soldiers who were here during the war saw this slope in full bloom they might have thought it was on fire, like a great wave of flames blanketing the entire hillside.”

I really didn’t feel like getting into a discussion of the young officers — a subject to which Masao appeared to have given a great deal of thought. When I didn’t respond, he started talking about Unaiko’s throng of admirers.

“Unaiko has tons of fans around here,” he said. “Not only those girls you see on the bridge, but high school girls from the neighboring towns as well. Her master plan is to use the kids as conduits to reach their parents; that’s why she’s making such an effort to cultivate friendly relations with the young students. She’s thinking way beyond the theatrical aspect and is hoping to exploit these relationships for a higher purpose: to advance some of the social issues she cares about.”

I nodded, but I had something else on my mind. “Our swim seems to have taken rather a lot out of me,” I said. “Would you mind bringing the car around to the foot of the bridge? I mean, assuming Unaiko and her friend came down in the car.”

For the first time, Masao seemed to notice that I was in a state of complete exhaustion. However, it turned out Unaiko, too, had come on foot, so I wearily showed Masao an old shortcut back to the Forest House, by way of an iron ladder located a short ways upstream.

4

I turned in unusually early that night and awakened abruptly long before dawn. Even during the last stages of slumber, I was already in the throes of a panic that was distinctly physical as opposed to psychosomatic. Then something bizarre appeared in my darkly dreaming mind: a sort of emblem of entropy, a shapeless shape and formless form whose entire raison d’être seemed to be to disintegrate and crumble into nothingness. The force of the breakdown came as a massive shock to my system, but the part of my brain that should have registered the blow was strangely silent. Still vaguely dream-dazed and half asleep, I switched on the bedside lamp.

A startling sight met my newly opened eyes. A rough-edged, angular black disk, something like a dinged-up flying saucer, appeared to be lodged in the juncture where the bookcase met the sloping ceiling. The disk began to rotate sharply to the right, gaining power and momentum as it moved, and then it suddenly seemed to collapse with a thud. (I knew I was imagining the sound effects, but that didn’t make the sensation any less vivid.)

Instinctively, I closed my eyes. I’ve never experienced anything like this before, but I know what’s happening, I thought. I’m being attacked by a monstrous dizzy spell. When I opened my eyes again, the same thing happened: I saw the whirling-disk apparition, and then it tipped over to the right and dissolved roughly into nothingness.

This time, I kept my eyes open. It dawned on me that the entire time I had been asleep, I’d been seeing the disk (which was, I thought later, half metaphor and half hallucination) on a continuous loop, repeatedly tipping over and shattering into pieces. And now the phantom disk had somehow slipped behind the spines of the books on the shelf, and the books appeared to be falling over as if mowed down by machine-gun fire. With a supreme effort I extended my limp, inert right arm (really, it felt almost boneless) and switched off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness again. Even with the light off, I had a visceral sense that the unstable black disk was incessantly somersaulting around me, but imagining the disintegrative spinning was slightly more bearable than opening my eyes and actually seeming to see it. Clearly, the force that had ambushed me as I lay sleeping (or perhaps the ambush had only begun when I was swimming upstream toward a painful awakening) wasn’t abating at all. On the contrary, it was gathering strength and becoming ever more intense.

Without opening my eyes, I raised my upper body and tried to sit up, but since my torso was every bit as weak and floppy as my wet-noodle arms, the episode made me feel as if my upper body, too, was twirling around, and I immediately toppled over. As my faculties gradually returned, it struck me that this was the most extreme loss of equilibrium I had ever experienced by far. And in the midst of the epiphany — which was only possible because while my body (including my eyes) was overcome by wooziness, my brain was still functioning normally — I found myself thinking that this was surely just the beginning. As the affliction progressed, wouldn’t the next stage be epic, excruciating headaches? Also, with vertigo of this magnitude, wasn’t it likely that I would soon be assailed by violent spasms of nausea? Quickly, before either of those symptoms manifested, there was something I needed to attend to.

I opened my eyes. The disorienting tilt-a-whirl sensation caused me to quickly squeeze them shut again, but I was still able to get my bearings in relation to the contours of the room. Based on that brief reconnaissance I knew my first move should be to slide my body out of the bed and onto the floor, while keeping my eyes closed. However, when I tried to execute that simple maneuver it didn’t go too well.

I eventually managed to turn over onto my stomach, and from there I was finally able to tumble from the bed onto the floor. After lying inert for a moment I made my shaky way into the hall, creeping along on my weakened extremities. The dreaded headache hadn’t yet made its appearance, and as long as I kept my eyes closed I could think quite lucidly. (However, the moment I opened them my consciousness would immediately shatter into a million vertiginous fragments.) Keeping my eyes tightly shut, I slowly made my way down the hall toward the bathroom, crawling blindly along on all fours while I theorized about what might be happening. Something must be going haywire inside my brain, I speculated. Maybe some sort of aneurysm, or a stroke?

A number of my contemporaries had been stricken with this type of disorder out of the blue, and some had simply dropped dead on the spot. As for the ones who went on living, in many cases their mental acuity was adversely affected, and they were never the same again. If that happened to me it would be curtains for my work as a writer, and my life would effectively be over. I didn’t know whether I was about to suffer irreversible brain damage or die outright, but either way I would be finished as a novelist. Therefore, I concluded, I needed to tidy up all the loose ends of my work before the onset of the potentially fatal headache that, I felt certain, was waiting in the wings.

I thought first of my journalism projects. I wanted to have someone discard the entire lot — both the pieces I had just started drafting and the manuscripts that were further along. If I could leave behind a note containing those instructions, surely someone would carry out my wishes (although at the moment, nobody’s name sprang to mind). It occurred to me that in the empty space between the end of the bed and the south-facing window there was an armchair where I liked to sit and work, using a clipboard equipped with a supply of manuscript paper. In my present state there was no way I could have written a coherent last will and testament, or even held a fountain pen, but there were several fat, already sharpened pencils nearby — Lyra-brand colored pencils, made in Germany, in a deep sky blue — and I thought I could grab one of those and scribble something reasonably legible without having to open my eyes.