Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

“When we talk about it like this, though, it isn’t clear how the book would have been constructed, or how the story would have unfolded scene by scene. To be honest, I get the feeling the only thing floating around in Mr. Choko’s head might have been those T. S. Eliot lines about the Phoenician sailor drowning in the whirlpool.”

Unaiko lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and I found myself remembering the lines she mentioned. I imagine the same thing must be happening to you, Kogii, while you’re reading this fax :

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

5

Dear Kogii,

The day after the late-night conversation I described in my previous fax, Ricchan came to the hospital to say her good-byes to Chikashi, and that allowed me to grab a few winks in a nearby chair. While I was napping Chikashi apparently started talking to Ricchan about your late work, and Ricchan gave me a blow-by-blow account of their conversation after I woke up. I’ll transcribe it here from memory:

Apparently the first thing Chikashi said to Ricchan was this: “Choko went down to the forests of Shikoku to write his drowning novel, but he ended up abandoning it instead. He’s been living the writer’s life for a long time now, but he quit rather easily on what was supposed to be the crowning work of his career. Even if the project is out of the picture for good, Choko will probably live for quite a few more years, so the question is, how can he move ahead with his late work? When my brother, Goro, died in such a horrible way, a lot of his colleagues in the movie business were saying his best work was behind him and his career was probably over anyway, but I believe if he had gone on living he would have produced some new films that were every bit as good as his previous work.

“My husband never seemed to have much to say about Goro’s films, one way or another, but there’s a recording of a seminar Choko gave while he was teaching at the Free University in Berlin. I’ve listened to it so many times that I know it almost by heart, but I’ll just paraphrase the highlights.

“Apparently in Goro’s later years he didn’t tend to take his interviews with Japanese journalists very seriously, but he responded differently when he was talking to the passionate cinema buffs he encountered in his travels overseas. In the seminar, my husband said he had read a number of newspaper articles about Goro in English and French, but since he doesn’t know much German, he asked some of his university students in Berlin to find similar articles in German publications and then put together essay-style reports about them in English. Based on that research, he concluded that Goro would have gone on to make a number of films in the future, if he had lived. I remember that my husband concluded his little speech by saying, ‘So why would Goro have decided to commit suicide in the prime of life? I really have no idea.’

“My husband tends to torment himself and keep his worries bottled up inside,” Chikashi went on, “but lately I know he’s been trying to rebuild his relationship with Akari in his own slow, silent way. And even though he’s feeling rather discouraged about his writing these days, I believe my husband is an optimist at heart and I think it’s very likely that he (like Goro, if he had lived) will eventually find his way to the late work he’s meant to do, whatever it might turn out to be. If someone were to theorize that Kogito felt more relief than disappointment about the failure of the drowning novel, well, I would have to disagree.”

Kogii, I hope you’ll take Chikashi’s words, which were spoken not long after she had been through a serious operation, as her way of trying to cheer you on from afar.

I also want to share something else I heard. Ricchan has been a huge help to Maki — in fact, apart from the days when Ricchan needed to go somewhere with Unaiko, she has spent all her time in Tokyo making herself useful around the house in Seijo — and even though she and Maki have low-key, easygoing personalities, they both share the trait of being willing to voice hard truths when they feel the need. They’ve come to trust each other, and that’s probably why Maki felt comfortable saying this to Ricchan:

“My mother realized that sending my father and Akari off to Shikoku together under the current circumstances could create problems for you, but she did it anyway. I think it was because she wasn’t confident she would survive the surgery, and she felt uneasy about having my father and brother around during a time like that. Before she went into the hospital she tidied up a lot of loose ends, and after she was admitted she wouldn’t let either one of them come to visit her. I think sending them to stay on Shikoku was her way of forcing them to find a way to go on living together after she was gone, and she was hoping their time down there would help.

“When I went to the airport to see my father and Akari off to Shikoku — and also to meet my aunt Asa, who had just flown in — I got the sense that Akari knew what was going on with our mother and was aware of what the worst-case outcome could be. He seemed so lost and depressed that I impulsively blurted out, ‘Mama is going to come home from the hospital around the beginning of May,’ even though I knew as I was saying those words that they could undermine my mother’s intentions.

“Akari’s response was typical of his peculiar sense of humor — in fact, it was a playful variation on one of his quotes from the little book I put together. He said, ‘Oh, is that so? Mama’s coming home at the beginning of May? Well, even if she comes home then, right now she’s dead. Mama is really dead!’”

Kogii, I can’t help thinking about one of the terms you’re so fond of: “rebirth.” Isn’t that the essence of what Akari is talking about here and in My Own Words as well?

1

When Unaiko was offered a four-week job as guest director at a large theater — a far cry from the small-scale venues where she had been mounting her own productions — she naturally jumped at the opportunity. There was nothing more for Ricchan to do, so she left Tokyo as soon as she had finished attending to some personal business of her own.

Ricchan’s first task after returning to the Forest House had been to rearrange the room she shared with Unaiko to create a designated space for Akari. He immediately settled into his downstairs pied-à-terre and busied himself with organizing the CDs Ricchan had brought back from Tokyo for him. After spending half a day lining up the discs according to his own method of classification he began listening to one track from each CD, starting with a Piazzolla piece for guitar, until he’d worked his way through the entire stack.

Meanwhile, Ricchan came upstairs to clean my study/bedroom. While she worked, she told me about her farewell conversation with Chikashi at the hospital, although of course (as Ricchan knew) Asa had already given me a partial recap. While she was bundling some sheets, pillowcases, and pajamas to be laundered, Ricchan caught sight of the photograph of Unaiko’s heroic onstage pose, which I had tucked away on the bookshelf with my big dictionaries, and she quietly moved it to a more conspicuous place. Then she mentioned having noticed that Chikashi had only one photo of her late brother, Goro, on display in her hospital room — and even that was just a book cover rather than a framed photo.