Death by Water Page 5

  “The way you’re sitting, facing straight ahead—please imagine that you’re looking out at the big round stone we moved into the back garden the other day. The poem carved into the stone begins with two lines that we’ve agreed to call a haiku, strict rules of poetry aside. Let’s start with the first line: You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest. We know this ‘Kogii’ is different from the ‘Kogii’ character who appears in some of your novels, but …”

  “Since my mother wrote this line, we have to look at the meanings she was ascribing to this particular ‘Kogii,’” I said. “The things I’m going to tell you have already been addressed in my books, but when my mother wrote these lines during the last year of her life, she was also using ‘Kogii’ to mean her grandson, Akari, who was born with an abnormal growth on his head.

  “My mother was concerned because she felt that I hadn’t made sufficient preparations for dealing with the prospect of Akari’s eventual death. Naturally, her approaching death was very much on her mind as well. And, of course, she had to be aware that the death of her own son (that is, me), who had been called ‘Kogii’ as a child, couldn’t be too far off, either. So I think she mentioned Kogii in this poem as an oblique way of voicing her fear that I might not be preparing properly for my own inevitable demise—an event euphemistically known around these parts as ‘going up into the forest.’ In essence, my mother was conflating two ideas and using them to level a double-barreled criticism at me. She was saying that Akari needs a guide to show him the proper way to go up into the forest, and the responsibility for that should be mine and mine alone. However, she clearly implies that I can’t even seem to get my own affairs in order, and (in her opinion) I’m dillydallying around in a state of obliviousness, with my end-of-life preparations in limbo. This may seem like a lot to read into a short line but trust me, it’s all there.

  “The second and last line of my mother’s portion of the poem is And like the river current, you won’t return. Inspired by my mother’s haiku—and electrified by the feeling that her words were right on the mark—I wrote my own lines: In Tokyo during the dry season / I’m remembering everything backward, / From old age to earliest childhood.

  “Before we move on, there’s just one more thing. I’d like to talk about the nickname ‘Kogii’ (although I think you may know about this already, through my novels), which has special significance for me.

  “First, obviously, Kogii is derived from my real name: Kogito. When I was a child, my family used to call me ‘Kogii’ for short. Although no one else could see him, I had a constant companion who was an exact replica of me: same age, same face, same body. We were as alike as two peas in a pod, as the saying goes. I called this doppelgänger by my nickname, Kogii, and we lived together in perfect harmony—right up until the midsummer day when he took off and wafted up into the forest, leaving me behind. I complained bitterly to my mother, but she just ignored me. Undaunted, I regaled her again and again with every detail of exactly how Kogii made his exit from our house and how abandoned I felt. Asa, among others, has speculated that Kogii’s distressing departure (and my endless retelling of it) might have been an underlying cause for my choice of fiction writing as a career.

  “Anyway, on that fateful day Kogii was standing on the veranda outside the back parlor, which looked out toward the river. He was wearing an unlined summer kimono of splash-patterned kasuri cloth. The long sleeves were draped over the balustrade, and he was staring at the grove of Japanese chestnut trees on the opposite shore. (I still have a vivid memory of that moment, in the form of an imaginary photograph; I’m standing right next to Kogii but I look a bit out of focus, as if someone had moved the camera.)

  “And then he climbed up on the railing. I thought he was being playful, because he often used to invent little games. He spread both arms and stood very still, taking a moment to center himself and get his balance. Then he stepped out into space—first with one leg, then the other—and a moment later he flapped his arms and simply wafted away through the air. He cut across Mother’s cornfield, passed the stone wall, and floated to a place right above the middle of the river. Then, once again, he spread his arms in their wide kimono sleeves straight out to both sides, and like some great wingless bird he took off on the wind and vanished from my sight. (At that point I was still standing indoors, with the low-hanging eaves partially obstructing my view.) When I stepped onto the veranda and peered up at the sky, I saw Kogii rising ever higher into the forest, twirling upward through the air with a corkscrew motion.

  “And just like that, he was gone. From then on I whined incessantly to my mother, telling her how my perfect playmate had abruptly vanished from my life, but she refused to even talk about the other Kogii, as if (it seemed to me) she was unwilling to acknowledge that there had ever been another boy living in her house—a boy who really was as similar to her own son as (I’ll say it again) two peas in a pod.

  “So life went on, and one day something extraordinary befell me. Several months had passed since Kogii’s ascent into the heights of the forest; I remember that the slope on the far side of the river was already crimson with fall foliage. It was a full-moon night, and I seemed to sense something unusual happening beyond the windows. I went out onto the road in front of our house to investigate and there, with his back to me, stood Kogii. Without saying a word, he began to walk away—keeping his feet on the ground this time. He took the narrow, hilly road that wound between the village office and the Shinto shrine, striding along the moonlit path at a rapid pace. I thought I was only a few steps behind him, but the next thing I knew I had ended up deep in the forest, alone. Kogii was nowhere to be seen. For reasons I can’t explain, I climbed into the hollow of a giant horse chestnut tree, crouched inside, and spent the night huddled there, either asleep or unconscious. When dawn finally broke, I peeked out into the forest and saw the rain pouring down, drenching the dark red leaves of the trees.

  “I must have lost consciousness again. When I regained my senses I was running a fever so high that my entire body seemed to be on fire, and some village firemen were in the act of scooping me out of my hideout in the dry, decaying bowels of the ancient tree. The rescue team wrapped me in a waterproof cloak and carried me away through the rain-scented forest, back to my home in the valley.

  “Those heroic firemen deserved all kinds of credit, but as the days went by and my fever abated, I gradually came to realize that my life had been saved by my mother’s intuition. I’m not sure when she realized I was missing, but even in the first hours of frantic worry she had crossed over to join me in the realm of imagination, and had figured out that I must have gone into the forest in search of my dearly missed companion.

  “In the wee hours of that full-moon night, after I ran out of the house and didn’t come back, the rain began to fall and the turbid river thundering through the bottom of the valley turned a murky green, darker than the bamboo grass that grew on the riverbanks. The river was rising, and everyone jumped to the conclusion that the missing child must have fallen in and been carried away on the flood tide. Which brings us back to the lines that are carved into the round stone: And like the river current, you won’t return home.

  “Now you might think, given the weather conditions and her own experience, that when my mother realized her child was missing and rushed to the fire station, she would have said something like ‘Please start your search for my son by looking downriver.’ That seems logical, doesn’t it? But no—my mother took the opposite tack. She asked the firemen to search for me up in the forest, and even though the torrential rain had flooded the road to the forest, turning it into a muddy river, she insisted that they make their way there, paddling along as if they were in a boat. I’m guessing there must have been a lull in the downpour, and the firemen, who had reluctantly agreed to search the forest, found a small person huddled in the hollow of a giant tree, running a high temperature and clearly very ill. The delirious child tried to fight them off, like some derange
d wild boar, but they managed to pick him up and get him safely home. (Incidentally, that particular tree was well known to everyone in the area, and everyone revered it as a sort of naturally created Shinto shrine.)

  “It’s really rather uncanny, don’t you think? I mean, why was my mother so certain I would go up into the forest rather than heading downriver? (It was probably more of a gut feeling on her part, but her instincts still struck me as remarkable.) Some of the adults in our village had a habit of saying cruel, unpleasant things to the local children, and for a long time after my dramatic rescue they used to taunt me with remarks like “Hey, sonny boy, you were so obsessed with finding your imaginary friend that you got lost in the forest and caused a lot of trouble for the firemen. Shame on you!”

  5

  After the first official recording session ended, Masao Anai was in a supremely buoyant mood.

  “Today was only supposed to be a run-through to test our system, but we ended up getting a full-fledged interview!” he said. “Of course, you’re about to tackle the major task of sorting through the materials in the red leather trunk, but if you could see your way clear to hanging out with us from time to time, just like this, before too long we should be able to create a bundle of interviews that can become a vital part of the play. And while you’re working on your own project, perhaps these sessions will provide you with some useful notes, as we say in the theater biz. I think that would be an excellent path, for all of us. We’ll come back next week, and in the meantime Unaiko will type up a transcript of today’s session. The first thing on the agenda next time will be to have you take a look at those pages.

  “I know sometimes, when you give a lecture, you’ll polish your notes later on and publish them in a magazine. I usually make a point of reading those articles. But when it comes to our group’s approach to making art, smoothing things out too much wouldn’t be as enjoyable for the audience, since everything we do is aimed at creating drama. We aren’t asking you to remove the irrelevancies and divergences, but we would like you to elaborate a bit more, keeping in mind that we’ll be trying to transform your narrative into a physical form onstage.”

  Unaiko picked up where Anai had left off, speaking in a manner noticeably calmer and more composed than that of her exuberant colleague. “Mr. Choko,” she began, “I wanted to talk to you about something I noticed toward the end of the interview. At one point you seemed to be in a bit of a quandary about how to proceed with your story; it seemed as if there were two possible directions, and you were trying to decide which one to choose.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what was going on,” I acknowledged. “You really are exceptionally observant, Unaiko.”

  “Not really—I’ve just gotten into the habit of listening very carefully to what people are saying while I’m recording them,” Unaiko said modestly.

  “You must have noticed that as I was talking, my eyes were fixed on the round stone beyond the big window. I was asking myself, ‘Should I start by making a connection between the first line of the poem, about Kogii, and the line about the river current? Or should I take the second fork in this road and go in an entirely different direction?’ Obviously, I ended up choosing number one,” I said.

  “I’d like to hear more about the other option you mentioned,” Masao said. “Is that something you’ve already written about in your novels?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s related to the quote you read from one of my books the other day. I was wondering how my mother knew—or intuited—that the firemen ought to look for me in the hollow tree, and as I was trying to express my thoughts I remembered one of the more captivating tidbits of local folklore my mother used to share. She often talked about the ‘marvelous forest,’ and she said that while there were various ways of seeing the story, she had her own perspective. Her version appears virtually verbatim in my novel M/T and the Story of the Marvels of the Forest.”

  “Hang on a sec, I’ve got it right here.” Masao Anai quickly paged through his large notebook, found the relevant quote, and began to read my mother’s words in a theatrical voice.

  “We think now that our individuality is terribly important, but back in the time when we were in the marvelous forest, even though we were individual entities, we were all part of a greater whole. We were perfectly contented with our existences, perpetually awash in feelings of infinite nostalgia. However, at some point, we had to leave the mystical forest and venture into the outside world to be born as human beings. The way I see it, because each and every one of us possesses an individual life, or soul, no sooner do we leave the forest than we are scattered to the four winds. That’s my theory, for what it’s worth! But as we go about living our own lives, don’t we always feel a lingering sense of wistful nostalgia for the earlier time when we were all together, happily unborn yet alive amid the marvels of the forest?”

  Unaiko had evidently talked about the marvels of the forest with Anai, and when he had finished reading my mother’s quotation, she added her own comments.

  “The obvious assumption would be that the missing child had somehow fallen into the surging river,” she said. “But the child had a special sense of direction—not to mention a deep affinity with the forest—and those two things led him to head up (you could even say ‘head home’) into the marvelous forest. But before he could return to the universal forest-womb for good, his mother led the firemen to the large hollow tree near the entrance to the forest, and he was brought back to the world of the living. If that’s what we’re talking about, it makes perfect sense.”

  Masao nodded his enthusiastic agreement, and I got a sense of how completely he relied on Unaiko’s artistic instincts. “Yes,” he said. “If it unfolds that way, the story of Kogii will be an absolutely perfect motif for our play.”

  My sentiments exactly, I thought.

  Chapter 2

  The Rehearsal

  1

  I was originally thinking that the next step, after I’d settled into my digs in the mountain valley, would be to get my mother’s red leather trunk from Asa. However, Asa had mentioned in the presence of the Caveman Group that she would be happier if I took my time investigating the trunk’s contents. So the only things she gave me, for starters, were the rough draft of the prologue to my unfinished drowning novel and the auxiliary materials I’d sent to my mother and sister some forty years earlier when they were still living together in our family home. As she was handing over the tote bag containing those papers, Asa said there were some things in the red leather trunk she wanted to have copied, to remember our mother by, before I took that fabled piece of luggage to Tokyo once and for all.

  When I peeked into the tote bag there seemed to be far fewer papers than I remembered. Aside from a number of preliminary jottings—esquisses, in French—the only remotely novel-like materials were twenty manuscript pages (at most), each with space for four hundred Japanese characters, and a clean copy of the opening lines of a prologue or introduction. I had sent those pages to my mother along with a polite request for access to any resources that might help me develop my embryonic book; I was especially interested in my father’s correspondence: both letters he had received and the rough drafts of his replies. In the bag I received from Asa there was also a bundle of letters I had sent from Tokyo over the years, which had evidently been stored in the red leather trunk.

  Among those missives was a letter addressed to Asa in which I expressed my anger that not only had my mother ignored the rough draft of my drowning novel, she had also failed to respond to my inquiry regarding my father’s correspondence and other research materials.

  I’ve given up hope on this [I wrote], so you may as well burn the manuscript. If our mother is going to willfully deny me access to the materials I need, I’ll just have to take a different approach. I will abandon reality and simply write the book as a work of wild imagination, presented as the unhinged ramblings of a young man who is an inmate at a mental institution. And the father in the story will
die not by drowning but from a gunshot wound. Because this story will appear to be so far from the truth, Mother won’t be able to prevent its publication by claiming I used my father as a model for the central character. However, the essence of what I say about the father (and his ideologies) will, in fact, be true.

  I went ahead and wrote that novella in lieu of the drowning novel I really wanted to write, and it was published in a literary magazine as The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. My mother and sister were horrified and very, very angry, and the upshot was that I ended up being “disowned” (the quaint term we settled on to describe our reciprocal estrangement) and barred from returning home for a number of years.

  Anyway, in the rough draft of the prologue to the drowning novel I wrote about something that had happened in 1945—an incident that, at the time, I had been dreaming about on a regular basis.

  There is a place where, under normal conditions, the flow of the river is diverted around a protruding rock and the killifish congregate in the shallows. On this night, the flooding has turned the usually quiescent pool into a deep-water cove. That’s where the rowboat is moored, bobbing about on the high, choppy waves. My father is already on board the little boat, and I am standing at the base of a stone wall, facing in his direction. I take a step forward into the dark water and am shocked by how deep it is; I’m instantaneously submerged in the chilly water, almost up to my neck. To make matters worse, the skin of my chest is being pricked, rather painfully, by some aggressive flotsam: either the spines of grass berries, or some bird lice that have latched onto my skin. There’s no time to scrape off these unwelcome passengers, so I charge through the rushing water, chest first. The flood tide roars in my ears, loud as thunder.

  It’s the middle of the night, and the rain has stopped falling. The full moon shines through a fissure in the clouds, illuminating my father, who is standing in the stern of the boat dressed in his civilian wartime uniform with his ramrod-straight back to me and his head hanging down at a precipitous angle. Beyond him the moonlight is reflecting off the mountainous wall of water as it surges downriver. In the plan I’ve been visualizing for a while now, I would paddle along through the murky water until I reached the boat and joined my father on board. But as I’m struggling to get to the boat, I find myself distracted by something that seems to need fixing, and I go back to tighten a storm-loosened rope that is looped around the big rock and tied to one of the wooden spider lily casks. Just as I finish securing the cask I see that the boat has been tossed into the raging current, and my father has apparently lost his footing and fallen down. Then I notice Kogii standing next to where I last saw my father, looking at me with a certain ineffable expression on his otherworldly face. It’s starting to feel as though the churning water might wash me away, too, and I’m clinging for dear life to the spider lily cask …