Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

I had been sent a final version of the screenplay, with certain portions translated into English alongside the Japanese, but I kept that information to myself. Unaiko didn’t pursue the matter any further; she just stood there with her perfect posture, gazing up at the trees. But her face wore an expression of renewed determination, and as I looked at her slim profile I felt certain I hadn’t heard the last about her desire to get her hands on a copy of the script.

3

Ever since the Caveman Group had turned the Forest House into a rural outpost of its headquarters in Matsuyama, one large room on the west end of the ground floor was used by Unaiko and Ricchan as a combination studio and sleeping space. After Akari and I moved in the two women had continued to work and sleep in that room, but their style seemed to be somewhat cramped by our presence. Perhaps that was why they sometimes drove over to Asa’s empty house by the river and spent the night there.

When the troupe members were in rehearsal mode, whether they were running lines or choosing musical cues, I could sense that everyone was being careful not to let any extraneous sounds drift upstairs where they might disturb Akari and me. Sometimes I would even hear the voices of the young actors wafting in on the breeze from the forest road above the house, where they apparently felt they could practice their art with fewer inhibitions.

Daio turned up every other day or so, and it soon became clear that he had taken it upon himself to do most of the yard work and whatever else might be needed in the way of general maintenance. On the evenings when I fixed dinner myself, he would run me down to the supermarket in Honmachi in his vintage Mercedes-Benz sedan to buy the necessary groceries. If I happened to be downstairs in the great room while Akari was out on a music-appreciation outing, Daio would often engage me in conversation, although I could sense he was trying to keep our exchanges relatively short out of consideration for me. Before long, I began paying Daio the going rate for hourly labor around those parts. (Admittedly, it hadn’t occurred to me to do so until Asa made the suggestion in one of her responses to the informal “Forest House reports” Unaiko emailed to her every week.)

Starting with the first trip to Matsuyama, when Daio took Akari to get fitted for a plaster cast, the number of tasks I was able to delegate to Daio seemed to be increasing on a daily basis, which was a great weight off my mind. He even took on the duty of bringing us our own mail from the post office, along with any packages the postman left at Asa’s unoccupied house.

From what I gathered, one of Unaiko’s weekly reports to Asa mentioned her concerns about the fact that I didn’t appear to be living a very dynamic life at the Forest House, to put it mildly. Not long afterward, I received a worried-sounding fax from Asa. Unaiko had apparently written that while she knew I was taking a break from writing after the disastrous demise of the drowning novel, I didn’t even seem to be reading with my usual concentration (at least not when I was downstairs, where she could observe my behavior). Unaiko added that I was evidently in extremely low spirits and basically seemed to be sitting around in a daze, passively watching the hours slip by. In her fax, Asa asked whether the doctor had told me to cut back on my reading in the aftermath of the Big Vertigo. Or, she speculated, maybe I was trying to keep my intellectual endeavors to a minimum, in the hopes of reducing the frequency of those chronic dizzy spells.

I wrote back that shortly before Akari and I moved down here I had pulled a number of books I might want to read off some bookshelves in our house in Tokyo and had left them on the floor, but I hadn’t had time to pack them up and send them to Shikoku. Asa responded by promising that the next time she was able to get away from the hospital she would go to our house in Seijo and complete the task. After a few days, three large cardboard boxes full of books were delivered to the door by courier.

As twofold evidence of my somber, senescent state of mind, not only did I procrastinate unpacking the cartons Asa had sent, but I also overlooked the fact that there was a smaller box from a different sender sitting on top of them. I noticed the extra one only when I finally got around to tackling the stack a day or two later; its brown-paper wrappings so closely resembled those of the others that it had simply blended in. The small, sturdy box had been carefully packed, and the return address was the Caveman Group’s office in Matsuyama.

When I opened the box I found a masterfully crafted picture frame wrapped in brown paper, along with a taped-on card signed by all the members of the Caveman Group. The card read simply, For Mr. Choko: We’re glad you came back to the forest! When I tore away the wrapping I saw a full-length photograph of a voluptuous young woman standing, completely naked, in front of a painted backdrop depicting a large city at night. After I had spent several minutes gazing at the portrait, I suddenly recognized the woman’s resolute, triumphant-looking profile. It was, unmistakably, Unaiko!

In order to get the shot, I mused, the photographer must have been directly in front of the stage, with an assistant crouching down on one side and aiming a handheld light to illuminate the subject at the proper angle. The woman in the photograph was wearing black high heels and she looked as if she might be getting ready to step off the edge of the stage, with the bulk of her weight supported on the left side of her body. Although the muscles were overlaid with a layer of soft fat, the firm solidity of her thighs was clearly apparent, as was the luxuriant thicket of hair covering her gently rounded pubic area. As for her breasts, they were so perfect that they reminded me of the impossibly idealized portrayals of the female form in comic books and graphic novels. Evidently the senders wanted me to feast my eyes on this photograph and I was doing just that, so I was startled when I heard Unaiko’s voice behind me, from the stairs.

“Before the photograph was sent to you, my colleagues in the Caveman Group hung it on the wall of our headquarters for a day,” she said. “It seemed to be common knowledge that you have what they called a ‘pubic-hair fetish,’ so I guess they thought it would be a witty gift. Anyway, this photograph was taken five years ago during a public performance, without my knowledge. I don’t think the motivation behind their sending it to you now was anything more sinister than a desire to tease Old Man Choko a little bit, but I wouldn’t want you to think of me as belonging to a group that would joke around about someone’s, um, private predilections. Backstory aside, though, I gather you’ve taken a liking to the picture?”

“Yes, I like it very much,” I said. After a moment I added, “Since this was a gift to me, I think I’d better keep it in my study, just to be safe.” Akari had been a step or two behind Unaiko when she came down from the second floor, and he had passed by on his way to the restroom. I was hoping he hadn’t seen the framed photograph I was holding, since it was the kind of thing he always found upsetting, but when he stormed into the washroom, slamming the door behind him, I knew he must have caught a glimpse of the photo and formed an impression of the subject matter, if not the subject.

Even before we had fallen into the current deplorable state of affairs, it had been clear that Akari felt particularly ill at ease whenever I was conversing with visitors on topics with the slightest hint of a sexual connotation, even though he probably didn’t understand what was being discussed with any degree of clarity. Unaiko had evidently intuited the reason behind Akari’s door-slamming discomfiture, because she redirected our playful conversation about the photograph into a more serious channel.