Kenzaburo Oe - Death by Water

5

Daio and I were standing side by side in the Saya, up to our ankles in fresh green grass, leaning back against the big meteoric boulder while our conversation meandered aimlessly along.

“This is something I heard from Asa,” Daio said, abruptly switching gears from unfocused small talk, “but I gather you still have a very clear memory of the scene that night when your father set out on the stormy, flooded river.”

“Actually, the account I shared with Asa and Unaiko — the version I was planning to use as the prologue of my drowning novel — is different from the memory of what I actually saw that night,” I said. “For a very long time, I kept having a recurrent dream that was almost always exactly the same in every detail, and the prologue was based on my dream. At this point I honestly don’t know whether my memories have been retroactively shaped by the endless repetitions of that dream, or whether the dream reflects my actual experience.”

Daio nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if it hadn’t been a dream, your supernatural alter ego wouldn’t have been standing on the boat next to your father,” he said. “I remember hearing that you used to insist there was another child who was an exact duplicate of you living in your house. That was the same Kogii from the dream, right? The story of Kogii was well known around the village, and I heard people mention it more than once after I returned from China. It was one of the things that made me begin to realize what an unusual person you were, from a very young age. As for your dream, I’ve heard about it quite a few times from various sources, but it still knocks me for a loop every time someone mentions offhandedly that Choko Sensei set out on the river with your double standing next to him.

“That’s because I was there, watching, and I have a very clear memory of seeing you! You probably didn’t even notice me, did you? As you’ll recall, the officers and I used to visit your father, and in the old stone storehouse where we talked and ate and slept, there was a big room with a floor that was half dirt and half wooden planks. It was where your father kept his vintage Takara-brand barber’s chair, which everyone understood was for his private use only. That night, I had spread a futon in the interior part of the room and had just settled down to try to get some sleep. Right about then you came in from outside, alone. There was one light burning — a single bulb with an air-raid shade, which illuminated the path to the staircase leading to the second floor. I started to get up because I assumed you had been sent to tell me that your father wanted me to do some task or other, but then I saw that you appeared to have something on your mind. You left your sandals in the entryway and crossed the dirt-floored room to the staircase without ever raising your head, so I just pretended to be asleep. I felt a lot of contempt for myself at that moment, and I remember thinking, What good am I to anyone, anyhow, with only one arm?

“In the big room upstairs there were three young conscripts from the flight-training school along with a couple of young officers who basically made a cottage industry out of ordering me around, and they had all presumably gone to sleep. After a few minutes you came back downstairs, carrying something wrapped in a raincoat. As soon as you went outside again, I got up and tiptoed up the stairs to check whether the officers were awake.

“The thing you were carrying wasn’t very large, but it had sharp corners, so I naturally assumed it must be the red leather trunk. Earlier in the day, sometime around noon, the officers had been worrying that maybe your father wasn’t planning to come over to the outbuilding where we were bunking. They decided that they needed to get their hands on the red leather trunk as a way of finding out whether your father might be plotting some extreme course of action on his own, so they sent me to the main house to fetch it. By early evening the serious partying was well under way, but the only ones who were drinking heavily were the officers and the young navy pilots. The night before there had been a big strategy meeting and, as the officers put it later, they had a breakdown in their talks with your father. He withdrew to the house and didn’t show his face in our quarters the next day, so when I came back with the red leather trunk the officers pulled off the raincoat it was wrapped in and everyone crowded around eagerly to see what was inside. But the thing is, the contents turned out to be a complete disappointment, to the point where the officers were actually laughing and saying rude things like ‘Hey, there’s just a bunch of boring crap in here!’

“I didn’t say anything, but since they were rifling through Sensei’s private property I kept an eye on them the entire time from a corner of the room. One thing I remember clearly was the three heavy books — I wouldn’t have been able to read the titles from a distance, especially since they were written in English, but years later, when I was helping your mother with her annual spring cleaning, I saw those books again. That was when it hit me that they must be the same ones we had carried back from a visit to the Kochi Sensei’s house, when I trekked down there once with your father. And this time, when your mother wasn’t looking, I copied down the title on a scrap of paper. It was The Golden Bough, and there were three big, thick volumes.

“Getting back to the fateful day in 1945, apart from those books the trunk mainly contained an assortment of papers and letters, tied in neat bundles. The army officers examined the envelopes and their contents, one by one, and then returned most of them to the trunk. There was an oblong hibachi in the room that was being used for warming sake or heating stewpots, and some of the letters ended up getting tossed onto the coals and going up in flames. As for the rest of the stuff from the trunk — well, your family was in the paper business so there probably would have been an oilcloth, or something of the sort, lying around. But anyhow, the officers wrapped the remaining materials in water-repellent paper and put them back in the trunk, and then they rewrapped the trunk in one of the raincoats we used to wear when we went into the mountains to work. So that was the red leather trunk you came to pick up late that night.”

“You know, it’s strange, but I have no memory of the part of the evening you’ve just described,” I mused. “I don’t remember going to get the trunk late that night at all, although I do recall having a small role in packing it earlier in the day. The thing I do recollect with what feels like absolute certainty is the scene that took place a while later.

“Picture this, if you will. My father has already boarded the little boat. I’m in the water nearby, and I have just handed him the red leather trunk. Looking back toward the shore, I notice one of the ropes that keeps the wooden barrels securely moored — you know, the barrels we used for the spider lily bulbs — is about to be torn loose by the current, so I plow through the chilly water with the muddy waves lapping against my chest, intending to tie a better knot. That’s what happens in the dream, too, so it’s possible my memories may have gradually modified themselves to match the dream. At any rate, the mooring rope for the boat was tied to the same metal ring, which was embedded in a stretch of poured concrete along the shoreline. But isn’t it possible that I’m going back because my father has asked me to untie the mooring line so the boat can cast off? Come to think of it, I realize that must be what happened. It wasn’t about the barrels at all. And then — I don’t know whether I didn’t have time to return to the boat, or maybe I turned around and saw it being catapulted into the middle of the river by the force of the waves, but in any case it was gone. And that’s the story of what happened that night, in a nutshell.”