Death by Water

Prologue. The Joke

1

The year I went off to university in Tokyo, something fateful happened when I returned home to Shikoku for one of the last in a series of traditional Buddhist services for my father. (He had died prematurely, nearly a decade earlier.) For the first time in ages our rambling farmhouse was overflowing with assorted friends and relations, and among the guests was an uncle of mine whose eldest daughter had recently been married to a government official, a graduate of Tokyo University’s prestigious law school.

“So,” this uncle said to me, “you managed to get into that university. Great news, but what’s your major?”

When I replied that I was studying literature, he made no attempt to hide his disappointment.

“In that case,” he said glumly, “you probably can’t expect to find a decent job after you leave school, can you?”

Then my mother, who was usually rather reserved in social situations, came out with a totally unexpected suggestion. Her words threw me into a state of confusion, for until then I had aspired to nothing more ambitious than becoming a French literature scholar.

“Well,” she said, “if he can’t find a regular job, then he’ll most likely become a novelist!” This pronouncement was greeted with stunned silence, but the tension was quickly dispelled by my mother’s next remark. “In fact,” she went on, “there’s more than enough raw material for a novel in the red leather trunk alone!” That made everybody laugh.

All the old families in the region (even if they didn’t have an illustrious history or any success in business to boast about) had their own unique legends and traditions, which were passed down from generation to generation. Time and again anecdotes that struck people as funny or strange would resurface as perennially popular in-jokes, though they would have been meaningless to visitors from the outside world. The red leather trunk was a small part of my clan’s proprietary strange and funny lore.

My mother’s startling words—”Then he’ll most likely become a novelist!”—put down deep, spreading roots inside me, and the fact that my close family members had found that notion so amusing simply added to its power.

During the three years that followed I still didn’t have a clear idea of what my chosen path would be, but I did try my hand at writing some short stories. To my surprise, one of those early efforts was published in Tokyo University’s campus newspaper, and as a result of that success I felt ready to embark on a career as a novelist right out of the gate. In a sense, then, my mother’s offhanded quip ended up steering me toward my destiny.

In the tale I’m about to relate, my mother’s “joke” will make an encore appearance in a way that is more tragic than comical, but we’ll get to that part of the story in due time.

2

For the past several years my wife, Chikashi, has been exchanging occasional greetings with my younger sister, Asa, on my behalf. As a rule, my sister would just leave me an occasional message, so it seemed unusual when she called our house in Tokyo one day and asked specifically to speak to me.

“It’s been ten years since Mother died,” she began, “and in accordance with her will — well, it’s really just an assortment of notes she dictated to me, so I don’t know whether it would even hold up in court — but anyhow, I promised to hand over the red leather trunk to you this year. If we wait till the actual anniversary of her death on December fifth I’ll be busy with other obligations, and when summer rolls around I was thinking that instead of heading to Kita-Karuizawa as usual, you might want to come back to Shikoku and pick up the trunk. You haven’t forgotten about it, have you? I mean, it’s not as if you’re too busy to get away; these days you seem to have all but abandoned your fiction and the only thing you’re doing, as far as I can tell, is eking out one column a month for a newspaper.”

“That’s correct,” I said, ignoring the sisterly gibe. “And of course I haven’t forgotten. Mother was worried that if I got hold of the items she kept in the red leather trunk, I might be able to resume work on the novel about Father’s drowning I’d started writing ages ago. That was her reason for instituting a ten-year moratorium — or was the cooling-off period your idea?”

“No, that was Mother, all the way. Her eyesight was failing and it was difficult for her to write, but her mind was still as sharp as ever. I think she figured you probably wouldn’t outlive her by ten years, since the men in our family aren’t exactly known for their longevity. Anyhow,” Asa went on, “when I mentioned I’ll be extra busy at the end of the year, it’s because I’ve gotten involved in a drama project with some young people — you may have heard that I’ve been in touch with Chikashi regarding their use of a number of your early books. Speaking of which, I’ve been letting the theater troupe use the Forest House — with Chikashi’s permission, of course — and their presence has really breathed new life into the place. Don’t worry; they’re very conscientious about always leaving everything in perfect order. But anyhow, as I was saying, if you’ll be coming down here to take a look at the contents of the red leather trunk, why don’t you plan to stick around for a while?”

Ah, the red leather trunk and the drowning novel (that was how I always thought of it). After my telephone conversation with Asa I felt an exhilarating resurgence of my enthusiasm for novel writing. While the sun was still high in the sky I withdrew to my study, which also doubled as a bedroom. I drew the curtains, then stretched out on the narrow bed to contemplate this intriguing new development.

When I was a young writer I had been mocked and criticized by people who said things like “Because he started writing while he was a college student, this novelist lacks the necessary life experience, and he will probably hit a brick wall before too long. Or maybe he’s planning to be like other writers of his generation and try to earn his stripes with a dramatic change in direction, such as becoming a war correspondent or some such.” Nonetheless, I never wavered. I knew that when the time was ripe I would write a definitive novel about my father. In the meantime, I told myself, I’ll be accumulating the necessary skills.

I imagined sometimes that I would begin to write the tale as “I” and would then just go with the flow of the narrative, bobbing along on the currents of memory. But, I fretted secretly, what if the novelist himself ended up being sucked into the whirlpool in a single gulp when he was finished telling his story?

The fact is, even back in the days when I hadn’t yet read a single serious work of fiction all the way through, I used to see a pivotal scene from the drowning novel in my dreams, night after night. The basis for the recurrent dream was something I actually experienced when I was ten years old. Then, at twenty, I happened upon the phrase “death by water”—in other words, drowning — in a poem by T. S. Eliot that I first read in the original English (the French translation was given alongside as well). And although I hadn’t tried putting my experience down on paper, even as a short story, I felt as if the novel already existed, fully formed, in my head.

So why didn’t I go ahead and start to draft the book? Because I realized clearly that I didn’t possess the literary finesse to pull it off. But even while I was floundering around, not at all certain that I would be able to survive as a young novelist, I remained essentially optimistic. Someday, I vowed, I will write the drowning novel.

There were times when I felt it might have been better to tackle that project sooner rather than later, but I always managed to suppress those urges by telling myself the moment still wasn’t right. I needed to pay my dues by struggling, and suffering, and striving to overcome all the character-building difficulties I would encounter while writing the other books I was meant to produce first, for practice. If I could escape so easily into writing the drowning novel, then what would be the point of the struggle?

3

Nevertheless, I did make a stab at writing the drowning novel, just once, when I was in my midthirties. I had already published The Silent Cry, which seemed to prove that I had attained a certain degree of proficiency, and that accomplishment gave me the confidence to dive in at last.

I dashed off a rough prologue and sent it along with a number of related notes to my sixtysomething mother, who was still living in the forests of Shikoku where I grew up. I enclosed a letter saying that in order to continue working on this book, which would focus on my father, I would like to take a look at his papers and whatever else was stored in the red leather trunk (an exotic piece of luggage that had been in our family since before I was born). However, I didn’t receive a direct reply from my mother, even though she had been saying all along that the raw materials for the novel in question were in the trunk. Nor did she ever return the rough draft of the prologue or any of the other notes I had sent.

Unable to proceed, I had no choice but to abandon the project. However, in the summer of the following year, fueled by unabated anger at my mother, I published The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. The main characters in that novella were grotesquely exaggerated versions of myself and my father, and it also included what some critics perceived as a merciless caricature of my mother (although others lauded the character as a solitary voice of reason).

Not long after, I received a postcard from my sister, Asa, who was still living at home. “Lately Mother has been criticizing you in terms even more scathing than the deliberately spiteful and alienating words you used to describe her at the end of your nasty little book,” she wrote. Asa’s message concluded by announcing that she and our mother had decided to sever all relations with Kogii (my childhood nickname), effective immediately. I was, she said, disowned.

4

Some years before the publication of that novella, my son, Akari, had been born with a defect in his skull, and eventually this ongoing real-life crisis helped to restore my relationship with my mother. Everyone’s shared concern about Akari — who, amazingly, survived and overcame his obstacles — seemed to serve as a kind of intermediary buffer. The lines of communication between Chikashi and the Shikoku contingent were reopened, and we all began the long, slow process of easing back into an amicable family relationship.

However, until the day she died at the age of ninety-five, my mother never said a word about the prologue and notes for my drowning novel, or about the red leather trunk. I did hear that she used to reminisce to my sister, saying things like “When Kogii was a young boy here in the village he wasn’t very well-adjusted, and because I tried to interfere, his character may have ended up being irreparably damaged,” so perhaps she was just determined not to repeat the mistakes she thought she had made in my upbringing. Not only that, but before she passed away she even went to the trouble of planning ten years into the future!

5

Setbacks notwithstanding, I never doubted that I would eventually write the drowning novel. If you were to ask whether there were times when I found myself thinking about the stalled project, I would have to acknowledge that there were. (One example that springs to mind is when I was living alone in a foreign country, while another occurred just after I had learned of the death of someone for whom I felt great respect and affection.) But I was never inspired to jot down any new ideas, much less to pick up where I’d left off.

However, after Asa informed me that it was finally time for me to take possession of the red leather trunk, I suddenly found myself unable to think about anything except resuming work on the drowning novel — an undertaking that had been in limbo for what seemed like an eternity. Even amid those feelings of excited anticipation, though, it struck me that on some level I had been gearing up all along to tackle the project again. I was certain everything I needed was in the red leather trunk Asa was about to hand over to me: the materials my mother had preserved for so many years, along with the rough prologue and assorted scribbles I had mailed to her nearly half a century earlier and hadn’t laid eyes on since. As for the literary skills I would need in order to complete this challenging book, surely I had acquired the necessary tools during my decades of actively practicing the craft. But that encouraging thought was overlaid with a poignant sense that my life as a novelist might soon be approaching its end.

6

At long last I was ready to plunge headfirst into the drowning novel, and in order to do that I needed to pick up the red leather trunk. Then something happened — something very odd and unexpected — that made the idea of a trip to Shikoku seem considerably more appealing.

My house in Tokyo sits on a hill at the far end of the Musashino Plain. If you descend the western slope of the incline, you will see that a large area, originally nothing more than swampland, has been extensively developed around a canal-like waterway. A cycling path was built for the use of the residents of the towering apartment blocks that have gone up one after another, but it is also open to the public.

One day while I was walking on the path with my disabled son, I happened to run into an entirely unexpected individual …. That line was part of the opening scene of a novel I wrote soon after turning seventy. If I were to write again now that I made a new friend while strolling along the same cycling path, people would probably say with pitying smiles, “Oh, look, the poor old thing is plagiarizing himself — again!” But the simple truth is that for an elderly person like me who lives a somewhat reclusive life, there simply aren’t very many locations where chance encounters with the outside world can take place.

It was a morning in early summer. I set out alone for a walk, leaving Akari at home. In recent years my son’s physical decline had advanced to the point where any kind of sustained exertion had become an ordeal for him, and he required increasingly large doses of medicine to keep his epileptic seizures under control.

As I was ambling along I heard the sound of light footsteps behind me, beating out an even rhythm on the pavement, and a moment later someone overtook me and swiftly passed on by. I saw then that it was a diminutive young woman; her long black hair had been lightened to a deep brown hue, and she wore it pulled back in a single ponytail. She was dressed in a beige shirt and matching chinos, and there wasn’t a single wrinkle in the soft, thin, lustrous fabric of her slacks. They fit her like a glove, and the contours of her lower body were plainly visible. Her thighs appeared to be shapely and sturdy without being excessively muscular, and above them the sinewy curves of her small buttocks undulated lithely as she walked. While I was still observing her retreating figure, the girl quickly left me in the dust and vanished from sight.

As I continued at my usual leisurely pace, I spotted the girl up ahead doing stretches or calisthenics in a small landscaped area equipped with benches, iron bars, and other fitness equipment. She would gently extend one leg in front of her, lower her hips, and hold that stance for several seconds. Then she would change legs and repeat. When the girl had overtaken me earlier I’d caught a glimpse of an attractively round face, but seen now in profile as I passed the little plaza she looked more like a lovely, ivory-skinned demoness — in Japanese mythological terms, a hannya. (I once read a theory that Japanese beauties can be divided into two categories: moonfaced, plump-cheeked Otafuku types, named after the bawdy goddess of the underworld, and foxy-looking, angular-featured female demons.)

Meanwhile, the sound of rushing water in the canal had grown louder. This was because the current was stronger along here; also, the framework supporting the steel train bridge — the Odakyu Line passed directly overhead — formed a canopy over the canal and magnified the sound. My eyes were drawn to the surface of the water, where something rather interesting was going on. As I trundled along in a distracted state, staring into the canal, I suddenly collided with a lamppost that had loomed up unnoticed in front of me and I hit my head — hard! (How hard? Well, the resulting hematoma stretched from the right side of my head to the corner of my eye and was still plainly visible four or five days after the accident.)

Just as the world went dark and I was on the verge of toppling over, I was caught from behind in someone’s solid yet supple embrace. Two strong arms encircled me, and the next thing I knew I was perched on what seemed to be a sort of spindle-shaped platform. My perch felt strangely warm and alive, though, and I soon deduced that it was a human thigh. I also became aware that my back was resting against a soft female chest. I somehow managed to struggle to my feet, and clinging to the lamppost I had crashed into a moment earlier, I tried to catch my breath. All the while, I could hear myself groaning out loud.

“Sensei, please sit down on my lap again,” the girl in the chino pants said in a calm, measured tone and obediently, just like that, this vertiginous old man resumed his previous position. Nevertheless, after a few minutes had passed — it was about the same amount of time it took for Akari to recover from a medium-severe seizure — I once again hoisted my body off the girl’s thigh, which had grown noticeably warmer and was now soaked with perspiration.

As I was trying to express my gratitude the girl said politely, “Excuse me for asking, but does this kind of thing happen often?”

“No, not at all.”

“That’s good, because if it were a frequent occurrence it would be cause for worry.”

The girl had the sort of relaxed, easygoing attitude you would expect from someone in her thirties, and she was smiling as she spoke. (I suppose she was a young woman, technically, but she seemed like a girl to me.) Even while I was grimacing with pain, I felt the need to explain the confluence of circumstances that I thought, on brief reflection, had caused my bizarre accident.

“It’s rather dark in this particular spot because the Odakyu Line passes overhead,” I began, “and also this lamppost has a device in the base to turn it on automatically, so the lower part is quite wide while the upper section is oddly attenuated, and I simply didn’t see it. On top of that, my attention was distracted by a sloshing sound in the canal and I was trying to see what was going on. I think the fish have moved to the other shore now — you can still see them splashing around over there — but anyway, four or five splendid-looking male carp were tussling with each other, vying for the favor of one lone female. It must be spawning season for koi. Where I come from you never see such big carp swimming together in a group, and I was momentarily mesmerized by the unusual sight. The next thing I knew, I was about to crash into the pole. In my youth, when my reflexes were sharper, I probably could have made a quick course correction and avoided the collision, but …”

“I see,” said the girl, barely suppressing a giggle. “Thank you for the explanation. I guess that kind of precision and attention to detail must come in handy in your line of work.”

“The most outlandish thing is that the whole time I was trying to piece it all together, I was sitting on the knee of a young woman I’ve never even met! By the way, please excuse me for not being able to stay on my feet,” I added, “but the pain was simply too much to bear. I really can’t thank you enough for your assistance.”

“It’s a good thing the pole didn’t smack you in the temple,” the girl said. “But it looks as though the blood is still spreading under the skin at the edge of your forehead. You should hurry home and put some ice on it right away.”

As I headed toward the bridge over the canal, which was my customary turnaround point, the girl began walking with me, slowing her pace to match mine. That was when it finally dawned on me that this was not some fortuitous chance encounter at all. After the girl had first passed me without a backward glance, she had probably managed to confirm my identity when I passed the small fitness plaza and had followed me from there with the intention of talking to me about something; that’s how she happened to be nearby when I collided with the lamppost. She was planning to use the serendipitous rescue as an excuse for continuing our conversation.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying now. “I should have introduced myself earlier.” Watching my expression, which clearly conveyed, Well, there were extenuating circumstances — I mean, I banged my head on a pole and had to sit on your lap! the girl went on: “I’m from Masao Anai’s group, the Caveman Group, and I’ve heard that Masao has been acquainted with you, at least in passing, for many years. Incidentally, our group was given its name by your late brother-in-law, Goro Hanawa. Anyway, when Masao first started the theater company I gather he wrote you a letter, asking for permission to dramatize your early works, and you kindly agreed. After that, his stage version of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away had a successful run and won an award, which was a huge career boost for our troupe. So we decided to move the Caveman Group’s headquarters to Matsuyama, and now we’re busy with a plan to dramatize more of your work. Your sister, Asa, has been unbelievably helpful, and we’ll be indebted to her forever. I was lucky enough to appear in the production of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, and on the program where it credits ‘Unaiko’? That’s me!”

“In that case,” I said, “I did hear something about this from Asa, by way of my wife.”

“Actually, Sensei, I’ve been thinking for the longest time that I would like to meet you someday, if I ever had the chance. I needed to come to Tokyo this week on other business, so I decided to seize the moment. When I asked Asa how I should handle it, she said rather than setting up a formal appointment — she explained that you always found that sort of thing bothersome and added that your advancing age was a factor as well — anyway, she suggested that I should try to engineer an ‘accidental’ encounter, as if by coincidence. She said you often go walking on a nearby cycling path, and she suggested simply lying in wait and ambushing you, as she put it. (She’s so funny.) She even called your wife to find out what time you were likely to be here. But then the very first time I ventured out here — and I don’t know whether this was good luck, or …” Again, she choked back a little burst of laughter before continuing: “I mean, it was rotten luck for you, but even so, to be honest, it was really very fortunate for me that you happened to bump into the pole.”

My usual exercise course followed a road (paved with a soft, resilient mixture of red and black sand) along the opposite shore, then brought me back to my starting point. The girl followed along, chattering as we walked. There was one rapidly swelling knot between my ear and my eyebrow, and another on my forehead. Both lumps were throbbing and my entire body seemed to be engulfed in a rapidly rising fever, so I assumed the role of passive listener and hardly said a word.

“The truth is,” Unaiko began, “I heard from Asa that you’re planning to go home this summer after a long absence. I gather you’ll be staying in the Forest House, so Asa wanted to give the place a thorough cleaning well in advance. She asked whether the younger members of our troupe — the Caveman Group — might be willing to lend a hand, and of course we happily agreed. But anyway, while we were all working together, we got to hear about the reason for your return. Apparently Asa has been holding on to a certain red leather trunk your mother left in her custody before she passed away, and since this year is the tenth anniversary of your mother’s death, that trunk can now be given to you. Also, Asa said you would most likely pick up where you left off on a book you started many years ago, and that you’d be making use of the stuff in that trunk. She spoke of the book as the ‘drowning novel,’ and I gathered that it begins with an account of what happened one night when the river near your village overflowed its banks.

“Since you’ll be coming home in any case, Asa said she thought you would also do some research for your book around the area — location scouting, as the filmmakers say. She also mentioned that since Masao Anai knows all your work by heart and is in the process of writing a play based on some of your books, he could lend a hand with your research, and vice versa. And she suggested that the other members of our troupe might be able to help out, too, not just with cleaning and other chores but with brain-powered tasks as well. Masao is a different story, of course — he’s supersmart — but I have to wonder whether the rest of us would be very useful with brainwork.” (Even while she was issuing this faux-modest disclaimer, the girl looked as though she had absolute confidence in her own abilities.) “In any case, we were overjoyed at the prospect of getting to work with you and hopefully being able to help. But you’ve probably heard about this already, from Asa?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have spoken with Asa about spending some time in the Forest House, to sort through some things she’s been hanging on to for all these years — a prologue I drafted, and some notes, plus some odds and ends having to do with my father. We did discuss the possibility of ‘location scouting’ for the drowning novel on and around the river. And yes, I have heard her mention the Caveman Group.”

The girl looked thoughtful. “Before I left, Masao kept saying things like ‘Listen, Unaiko, on the chance you manage to meet up with Mr. Choko in Tokyo, make sure you don’t come on too strong. If you do, he may just dig in his heels and refuse to budge.’ Masao knows me pretty well, and I guess he was worried I might mess things up by being overly aggressive. But I was only thinking I’d like to have a chance to tell you in person that all of us in the Caveman Group are wishing and hoping your visit will come to pass.” And then she added in a burst of candor, “Please forgive me for saying this again, but I can’t help feeling what happened at the lamppost was a wonderful stroke of luck, at least for me, because it gave us a chance to talk like this, face-to-face.”

We had come to a halt in front of a horizontal steel pipe that served as a barrier to keep vehicles out, at the juncture where the cycling path intersects a busy city street. This was where I would normally start trudging homeward, up the slope. The bumps beside my ear and on my forehead had continued to swell, and as I was pressing on them gingerly with the fingers of one hand, I ventured another explanation.

“This walking course goes along both banks of the canal, and the two sides are joined by a bridge. Needless to say, depending on the person, it could also be used as a running or jogging course. But if you’re going to have an accidental encounter, the options are limited: you can bump into another person who’s approaching from the front, or you can pass someone, or you can be overtaken from behind. If you had come toward me from the opposite direction and it had been obvious you were targeting me, I would probably have passed by without a word even if you had called out a greeting. On the other hand, when someone creeps up from behind there’s even more of a feeling of pressure, and I wouldn’t have been likely to respond in a friendly way in that case, either. I agree that my collision with the lamppost must have had some deeper significance because I, too, am glad we’ve had this chance to talk. Well then, this is where I take my leave. Please tell Asa to give me a call.”

At that, I started to walk toward the uphill road that led to my house. But instead of taking the social cue and saying good-bye, the girl asked me a question. She seemed suddenly preoccupied, and a subtle change in her facial expression appeared to reflect some interior reverie.

“This is about something completely different,” she said, “but I heard that your old French literature professor at Tokyo University translated an epic novel from the sixteenth century — is that right? And apparently the book contains an episode about a man who uses a crazed bunch of dogs to create some kind of riot in Paris?”

“That’s right,” I said. “The book you’re referring to is The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais. The first volume of what is, indeed, a monumental novel, is called simply Pantagruel. The title character is one of a race of giants, and in one chapter his favorite retainer, Panurge, plays a prank on an aristocratic lady who rejected his attempts to court her. According to the story, Panurge found a female dog in heat and fed her all sorts of delicacies, presumably to enhance her sexual energy. Then he killed the dog and took a certain, um, something out of her insides. He mashed it up, stuffed the resulting pulp into the pocket of his greatcoat, and off he went. He tracked down the snooty Parisian lady and furtively smeared the substance on her dress: on the sleeves, in the folds of the skirt, and so on. Of course, the aroma attracted a huge crowd of male dogs. They all came running and leaped on the lady, and the result was a very unseemly sort of mayhem. I mean, you can imagine what would happen if ‘more than 600,014’ male dogs — the story gives the exact number — were whipped into a frenzy.”

“If the first dog, the one that was killed, was a female, what on earth did the retainer take out of her, um, insides?”

“Well … this is a bit awkward. I mean, it isn’t the sort of word I feel comfortable introducing into a conversation with a young woman I’ve only just met.” I was truly flustered by the question, but at the same time I was also pleasantly reminded of Professor Musumi’s transported expression and exuberant manner of speaking whenever he was illuminating some arcane point for his students. Trying to emulate my late mentor’s happily didactic spirit, I did my best to explain, as delicately as possible, one of the footnotes from my late mentor’s translation of the famous medieval novel.

“It was the uterus of the female dog,” I said. “That organ has been known to scholars since Greek times for its medicinal properties, and I’ve read that medieval sorcerers also used it as an ingredient in magical love potions.”

Without saying another word the girl gave a slight bow, then turned and walked away. I felt curiously refreshed and amused, and I also realized that the request from Unaiko and her colleagues in the Caveman Group had made me much more inclined to act on Asa’s invitation to return to Shikoku, after all these years, and explore the contents of the red leather trunk.

Chapter 1. Enter the Caveman Group

1

Asa picked me up at Matsuyama Airport in her car, and as we drove she shared some local news.

“The young folks from the Caveman Group were delighted to hear you’ll be staying at the Forest House for a while,” she began. “The head of the theater group, Masao Anai, was especially happy and relieved. Apparently when he found out that Unaiko — who, of course, is a very important part of the group — had made an arbitrary decision to go to Tokyo to talk to you directly, he was worried the whole thing might fall apart.

“On another topic, our local officials have been asking what should be done about the commemorative stone that was erected when you won that prize, since in its current location it would interfere with the building of a new road. I discussed the matter with Chikashi, and then relayed her thoughts to the powers that be. As she said, there’s really no need to move the whole thing, and once the stone has been relocated they could go ahead and tear down the pedestal. First, though, we’ll need to salvage the part of the monument that has the words you chose from Mother’s writing, along with your own little poem. While I was planning this it occurred to me that you’ve never even seen the monument in its finished state, so I thought we could go take a look right now — it’s down around Okawara, and we should be there in about an hour or so. Do you want to try to catch a few winks on the way?”

Asa then lapsed into silence and concentrated on piloting the car while I dozed fitfully in the passenger seat. Just as she’d said, it was about an hour later when we stopped the car at a place where the riverbank had been made into a park. Asa mentioned that my mother had planted pomegranates and camellias around the monument but they were gone, having been “tidied up” as part of the construction process. Jutting out of the bare ground was a large round stone that appeared to be a fragment of a meteorite. When I gazed up at the stone — it was a pale, vegetal shade of green, like early-spring onions — I saw that it was inscribed with five spare, calligraphic lines of Japanese characters. Some years earlier I had written those lines with a fountain pen, and the words had been enlarged and then expertly engraved on the stone.

You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest

And like the river current, you won’t return home.

In Tokyo during the dry season

I’m remembering everything backward,

From old age to earliest childhood.

“It reads better than I’d expected, considering all the fuss it provoked,” I said.

“For some reason the beginning — that is, Mother’s two-line poem — just didn’t sit well with people from the start,” Asa said. “They were complaining it wasn’t a proper haiku, yet it wasn’t a tanka, either. That couldn’t be helped, but the professor who was the adviser for the commemorative-stone committee summoned me to Matsuyama and made no secret of his displeasure. ‘What is this supposed to be, anyhow?’ he asked. ‘A parody of a Misora Hibari song?’

“Needless to say, that got my hackles up. So I told him, in no uncertain terms: ‘The line in the Hibari song is like the flowing of water, while this is like the river current. My mother doesn’t plagiarize!’ Then I went on to explain that the people around these parts speak of being ‘taken by the current’ when someone either drowns in the river or else is saved after being carried downstream in a flood. The people borne away by the current — obviously, the drowned, but even those who are rescued from the rushing waters — always seem to end up leaving the village, so the phrase has become a metaphor for going away and not returning, except maybe to visit once in a blue moon. And there’s the implied dig about certain people who go off to Tokyo to study and then stay there, almost as if the river had carried them away, even though they solemnly promised to return to the village someday … well, you know better than anyone that there’s nothing obscure about that. I explained those nuances to the adviser, and when I mentioned that I realized the first line of the poem might be difficult for an outsider to understand, he got all arrogant and defensive (I mean, he’s a university professor, right?) and informed me that he is the author of several scholarly books about the folklore and history of this area. He never did accept my interpretation, but in the end I made sure the stone was carved with the words you sent, exactly as you wrote them.”

Asa took a breath, then continued: “I really have my doubts about whether the professor even understood the first line. I mean, he couldn’t be expected to know that in our house your childhood nickname was Kogii, or that you were sharing your life in those days with a supernatural alter ego who was also called Kogii. Only someone who was intimately familiar with your work would be aware of such details. On the other hand, as you’re well aware, when we talk about sending someone up into the forest it’s usually a metaphor for dying, but it can also refer to holding a memorial service for someone who has passed away. Surely the professor would have discovered that through his research, at least.”

“You don’t know exactly where Father’s body washed up when it was carried downstream from here, do you?” I asked. “You did say that the first memory of your childhood was of the hours just after his body was brought back to our house, but …”

“I remember clearly that you told me to check around the futon where our dead father was laid out, to see if a dead child was lying nearby. Twenty-some years later, when I heard you were having a strange recurrent dream, it sounded like a joke at first, but then I realized it could also be the unbearably sad remembrance of something that really did happen. And I couldn’t help wondering whether, just maybe, the dream might be rooted in the fact that you ran away from the boat that took our father to his watery grave. But anyhow,” Asa continued, “I was walking around and around the dead person, lying on the tatami with a cloth over his face. At one point I stumbled and fell, and when I reached out to brace myself I touched his thick, wet hair with my outstretched hand. I remember that creepy sensation vividly, so I believe you when you say Father drowned after being carried away by the current, even though Mother would never talk about it.”

“Do you remember when I commuted for a year to the new postwar high school near here, before our village was incorporated?” I said. “One day during art period, we went to that shoal to do some plein air sketching. The teacher had set up his easel facing a spot on the edge of the sandbank where there was a thick stand of pussy willows, and he was working on an oil painting. As I was wandering aimlessly about, he called me over and said, ‘I’ve heard this spot has been known for years as the place where Mr. Choko washed ashore. Does that have something to do with your family, by any chance?’

“Of course, we were all in deep denial about the circumstances behind Father’s drowning, but in the outside world, everyone seemed to know about it. I think that probably goes a long way toward explaining how Mother happened to write the words ‘river current’ in the little poem on the stone.”

Walking along under a canopied row of cherry trees so heavily overgrown that hardly any light fell on the road (I’d heard they were already slated for clear-cutting), we returned to the car. As we drove the twenty-plus minutes to our hometown — the picturesque mountain valley deep in a forest, where we both grew up — Asa spoke about some things she had evidently been mulling over for quite a while.

“Listen, Kogii,” she said, “I was very happy when you said you’d be coming to stay for a while in the Forest House. It will be good for you to get some closure with the red leather trunk, after all these years, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking, Yep, my big brother is definitely getting old. One thing I’ve noticed about aging is that it gives rise to a desire to get things settled. And at this stage, it’s only natural to start having thoughts about death.

“Needless to say, I’m aging right along with you, and that’s why I think about these things. But really, isn’t the relevant question what happens between now and then? I mean, even if you’ve resigned yourself to the inevitability of death, you still have to deal with the intervening time until the day arrives. Death is going to find us all, no matter what, but we still have to take active responsibility for what remains of our lives.

“Take the poem our mother wrote — let’s just call it a haiku, shall we? I really think those lines were meant as a message from her to you, to be read when you eventually came home and saw the commemorative stone: You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest / And like the river current, you won’t return home.

“As a kind of counterpoint, in the three lines you contributed you made it clear you won’t be coming back here. You’re up there in Tokyo, pondering various things — you were echoing the quote from Eliot about ‘an old man in a dry month,’ right? And that’s fine, but compared with the two lines Mother wrote your response strikes me as much more blasé, which is exactly what I would have expected from you.

“As for our mother, when she wrote those lines she was still seeing you as Kogii, and she was concerned that you weren’t doing anything to prepare to send Akari up into the forest, since there’s a good chance he won’t live as long as you do. But I think part of your reason for wanting to come back down here for a while is a way of taking the first step toward making the necessary preparations to send Akari (and, eventually, yourself) up into the forest — with every bit of metaphorical subtext the phrase carries in local lore.”

After her long monologue, Asa drove in silence for several miles, and then stopped on the side of the road. “Just walk up this path — it’s really more like a trail for wild animals — and you’ll end up at the Forest House. You haven’t forgotten the shortcut, have you? We’re running late today, so I’m going to let you off here and go straight home. After I’ve had a little rest I’ll come back with some dinner for you. I’ll drop off your luggage then, too.

“Oh, and about Unaiko, the young woman you met in Tokyo? She’ll be dropping by the Forest House tomorrow with Masao Anai, who as I mentioned is the leader of the theater group. (You probably know he was a pupil of Goro Hanawa’s, although ‘disciple’ might be a better word.) Unaiko said that while you’re staying there they would like to talk to you about a number of things — I gather she just hinted at this when you spoke in Tokyo. Tomorrow some of the troupe’s younger members will be stopping by to install the commemorative stone, and after that’s done Masao and Unaiko are hoping to talk to you about your forthcoming collaboration. They’re really looking forward to this, so please be on your best behavior!”

2

Early the next morning Asa, who was always very well organized, dispatched a couple of the younger members of the theater group to pick up the stone. The back garden was planted with flowering dogwood and a maple tree of the variety known as Big Sake Cup, which Chikashi had brought from her garden in Tokyo along with a pomegranate tree she’d been given by her mother-in-law (that is, my mother), and these had grown in a way that was beautifully proportional with the intimate scale of the garden. I agreed with Asa that installing the big stone in front of the trees, facing the house, was a perfect plan.

The members of the Caveman Group arrived in a minivan with the name of their theater troupe emblazoned on the side. (Goro Hanawa had evidently written it out for them, and his calligraphy had been professionally enlarged and painted on their car.) As we stood in the front garden — which had simply been carved out of the overhanging rock and spread with gravel — Asa, who had hitched a ride with the group, introduced me to Masao Anai. I remembered having seen him before; he was a man in his forties, very simply dressed, with the look of someone who had been immersed in the theater world for a long time. Next to him, standing up very straight, wearing casual work clothes and a big smile, was the young woman I had met in Tokyo. Asa knew all about our stranger-than-fiction encounter, but she didn’t mention it. She simply said, “I’d like you to meet Masao Anai and Unaiko.”

After we had exchanged hurried greetings, Masao Anai sent the two apprentices to fetch the poetry stone, wrapped in an old blanket and tied with rope, from the back of the van. Then he led his young helpers to the back garden with their heavy burden, which they carried by balancing it on two sturdy wooden pallets.

Unaiko had remained behind, and as I was thanking her again for coming to my rescue the other day in Tokyo, Asa interrupted. “You know, Chikashi had something to do with Unaiko’s adopted name,” she announced.

Unaiko nodded. “They say the person who first started calling the leader of our troupe ‘the caveman’ was Goro Hanawa,” she said. “And I heard from Asa that your mother once said that her granddaughter, Maki, looked like a child from medieval times — an unaiko—with her unusual unai-style hairdo. (I gather it was a bob with bangs and a little ponytail sprouting on top.) And there I was, wearing my hair in a similar style. So I said, half joking, ‘Well, maybe I should change my name to Unaiko!’ And the younger folks thought it was a great idea, so the name sort of stuck. It was just a bonus that unai echoes our leader’s surname, Anai.”

“I remember hearing that the first time Chikashi brought our children to this valley to meet my mother, our older daughter, Maki, was wearing her hair rather like Unaiko here (though Maki’s version was a bit more girlish), and my mother thought it looked wonderful,” I said.

“Actually, I was standing right there when Chikashi and Mother were having that conversation,” Asa said. “Mother also mentioned an ancient ninth-century song that includes the term unaiko, and she even sang a few lines for us! It was lovely — all about summer rain and the cuckoo’s song and children running around wearing this same kind of retro-medieval hairstyle. Mother seemed very happy as she was singing those words, but of course she was already in high spirits because her grandchildren had come to visit.”

Masao Anai had returned from the garden, so Asa took a minute to fill him in on what he had missed before continuing her story.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “for the duration of their visit, everyone was calling little Maki ‘Unaiko.’ Years later, I told the story to this Unaiko, and the rest is history. Well then,” she added briskly, “shall we take a peek at how the young people are getting along in the garden?”

But by the time we went into the dining room and peered out at the back garden through the big plate-glass window, the giant stone was already in place and the young workers, who were taking a short break, seemed to be anxiously gauging our reaction. I assured Asa that the placement was flawless, and she flashed an “A-OK” sign. As the young men headed around to the front of the house, she went out to meet them. The rest of us sat gazing at the garden, with everyone’s eyes seemingly focused on the poetic inscription carved into the stone.

“Asa explained the significance of ‘the river current,’” Masao Anai said. Seeing his face in profile I could understand why Goro, who was always an extraordinarily perspicacious bestower of pet names and sobriquets, had dubbed him “the caveman.” While it had obviously started out as a clever play on the first element of Anai’s surname (in Japanese, ana can mean “cave,” “hole,” or “cavern”), the nickname was also a reaction to his distinctive physiognomy — especially the way his forehead sloped back from the sharply protuberant ridge of bone above his eyes, giving him an air of wild, primordial ruggedness. That sort of multilayered resonance was typical of Goro’s humor, and evidently “the caveman” had also struck Masao as a good name for his troupe.

“Actually,” Masao went on, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the dramatic significance of the way the notional alter ego, Kogii, runs through your novels as a sort of supernatural leitmotif. Reading this poem, I can’t help thinking that the idea of being sent up into the forest without making preparations seems like a contradiction of the rules of the mythical world you so often evoke in your work. I mean, his childhood playmate, Kogii, was someone who originally came down from the forest and later flew back up into the woods on his own.”

“You’re exactly right,” I said. “But when this poem mentions Kogii, it’s mainly talking about my earliest nickname. My mother uses the childhood name as a sort of verbal spear to ambush my adult self with a serious question about the preparations I’ve made for my own demise and for that of my son, Akari. So the meaning of her section of this poem is, essentially, that the most important thing I need to do in order to prepare for my own death is to get Akari ready for his trip to the forest, which may well precede mine.”

Just then Asa reappeared in the dining room and spoke to Masao Anai. “The young guys are going to take the car and go for a drive around Mount Odami, and they’ll return in three hours or so,” she announced. “Your theater apprentices are really an impressive group, by the way. Not only were they completely willing to do some heavy lifting, but they also had to deal with the constraints of being at a stranger’s house … or at least in a stranger’s garden.”

Masao acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow, then gestured toward his second-in-command. “Unaiko gets all the credit — she’s the one who oversees that aspect of their training,” he said.

After the young men had departed Asa made some fresh coffee and Unaiko served it. As we were sitting around the table, Asa turned to me. “Masao was saying that during your stay here, his main objective — and that of his entire group — is to be of assistance any way they can, but they are also hoping you’ll be willing to help them with the play they’re putting together, based on your work,” she said. “I’ll let him fill you in on the details.”

“Ah, well,” Anai demurred with a humorous shrug. “Asa makes us sound very noble and altruistic, but the truth is our motivations are purely selfish. Seriously, since we were already hard at work on a plan for a play that incorporated elements from your entire oeuvre, when Asa told us you were going to be spending time here it seemed like a gift from the gods. So one day when we were talking to her about the project, we asked whether there was any chance you might be willing to listen to what we’ve come up with so far, and she said, ‘I gather that while he’s down here my brother will try to synthesize all the work he’s done till now, so it shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate his project with yours.’ That arrangement seems to make sense, since we’ll both be creating retrospectives of a sort.

“At some point we’d like to ask you to take a look at the treatment for our play-in-progress, but today I’m just going to talk about the general contours of how we’re trying to approach your work, if I may.

“We’ve been extracting individual scenes from your novels and then converting them into dramatic form, one by one. We’ve barely begun to figure out how to make those vignettes flow as a whole, and since we have this rare opportunity to talk to you in person, we think it would add some depth if we could interview you and incorporate your comments into our play. Once we’ve accumulated a stash of interviews, we’ll find a way to fit them in. In the actual production we’ll dress someone up as you (it’ll be one of the actors from the Caveman Group, who will play other parts as well), and that person will be interviewed as an ongoing part of the drama. As for the other characters who emerge from the stories you share in the interviews, they’ll be portrayed by a rotating cast of actors. That’s the method we’re planning to use to create a multidimensional narrative.

“I have already created and performed a number of dramatic works based on your novels, but it’s my intention to make this current project a kind of summation of everything that’s gone before. With that in mind, I’m planning to turn your doppelgänger into the focal point. You might wonder how we’re going to portray such a singular character visually, but don’t worry — I already have something in mind. Once we start talking, I’m hoping our recorded conversations might be useful for you, too, while you’re working on your own project. (We heard from Asa that you’ll be sorting through your writings and combining them with some new material.) And if we can somehow help you, even just by providing some perspective on your previous work, it would be very satisfying for us.”

When Masao Anai stopped speaking, Asa took the floor and addressed her remarks to me. “I did mention to our friends here that you were planning to try to integrate some of your earlier work with the materials in the trunk and then, I gathered, to combine all those elements in a new book, as a sort of last hurrah,” she explained. “You were saying you’d tried to reread your older works but somehow couldn’t get through them, and an idea occurred to me. What if you tried revisiting your previous novels as a joint endeavor with these folks? Masao and Unaiko have been approaching the same task in a very bold and innovative way.”

I had to admit that I felt intrigued by the prospect of seeing my own books anew through the eyes of Masao Anai and his crew, and it struck me as an excellent way of getting a new perspective on my childhood alter ego, Kogii, who was still (quite literally) haunting my dreams.

“In that case, do you think it would be a good idea to try shaping our interviews to focus mainly on Kogii?” I asked.

“Most definitely,” Unaiko said. “And we’re ready to start right now!”

Intentionally avoiding her bright, eager eyes, I glanced over at my sister. In our younger days, Asa had often run interference for me by deflecting the overtures of this type of strong-willed, extroverted woman, but she didn’t seem to feel any need to do that now, and I trusted her judgment. Unaiko’s energetic body language appeared to say, Come on, let’s do this! and she began to pull an assortment of recording equipment out of a canvas tote bag I had noticed earlier, in passing, and deemed too large to be a woman’s purse.

To their credit, Unaiko and Anai didn’t rush me into recording mode. Instead, Unaiko carefully laid out the equipment on the dining-room table, piece by piece, while everyone else looked on. This was my first glimpse into the thoughtful, deliberate methodology that would typify my brief collaboration with the Caveman Group. I realized then that I was in capable hands, and any residual reluctance I might have been feeling simply melted away.

3

A short while later, with the tape recorder whirring, Masao Anai settled himself in a chair and began to speak. “Even though we hadn’t yet obtained your formal permission, Mr. Choko, we went ahead and started brainstorming the conceptual aspects of this new project,” he said. “Of course, we did talk things over with Asa, and her attitude was ‘I don’t foresee any problem with the plan you’ve described, but be sure to approach my brother with caution.’ There’s a fund designed to assist the directors of small theater groups, and in order to qualify for one of those grants a group needs to have won some type of prize or award. Even though you haven’t seen our performance of the play we based on your book The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, I gather you’ve heard about the gratifying praise that production received?

“Okay, that concludes the shameless self-congratulation portion of our program. Now let’s move on to the new project. Our original plan was to follow our success with the dramatization of Wipe My Tears Away (as we call it, for short) with a sequel, but as you know better than anyone, in the case of that novel there isn’t one. So I got the idea of searching through your complete canon for a recurrent motif linking all your books together.

“The leitmotif I found, of course, is Kogii. Now, I find it interesting that in your books the name ‘Kogii’ is assigned to a variety of entities. In the beginning, Kogii was your nickname. Later, you ended up sharing the name with your constant companion: the mysterious — dare I say imaginary? — playmate who supposedly lived at your house and who looked exactly like you. (Your body double, in cinematic terms.)

“Kogii never left your side until one day he simply took off, moving effortlessly through the air, and returned to the forest. In other words, this mystical being whose corporeal form was visible only to you had the ability to levitate and float off into the sky, so even though he looked like you, his powers surpassed those of any human child.

“In my formal proposal, I tried to persuade the funding committee to finance this project by explaining how I would portray this entity, who transcends reality, as a tangible flesh-and-blood person. The question was, should I have him appear onstage as a character fully endowed with physical form, or would I simply try to make the audience aware of his presence while he remained invisible? My thought was that in terms of dramatic impact, simpler would be better. I basically lifted all the raw materials for the characterization from your collected works and jotted them down on index cards. By the way, I picked up the index-card technique from reading your essays, back in my university days.

“At our practice space in Matsuyama, we’ve used your descriptions of Kogii as inspiration for the creation of a doll: a sort of three-dimensional cloth figurine. Unaiko made a prototype by sewing together some pieces of fabric and then stuffing the shell. If the doll ends up being part of the final staging, we’ll place it as high as possible above the stage, in a place where the audience will still be able to see it. We actually did something similar in another play, so we aren’t flying completely blind on this. Anyway, the doll version of Kogii will be looking down at the action and influencing the actors on the stage. Let’s call it the ‘Kogii effect.’

“The other day I was trying to figure out when Kogii first appeared in your work, and when I remembered that your friend Takamura once mentioned in an interview how much he liked a certain early work of yours, I went through my books and found the story in question.”

“Ah,” I said. “You’re talking about the one where a young composer imagines that his dead baby is floating in the sky, as big as a kangaroo and dressed in a white cotton nightgown. The apparition’s name is Aghwee.”

“That’s the one,” Anai said. “The narrator is a student who is working as a part-time personal assistant for the mentally unstable composer, and he thinks the giant creature his employer claims to see in the sky is nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Part of the narrator’s job description is to accompany the hallucinating composer on his rambles around Tokyo, and one day they’re walking down a narrow street when they happen to encounter a dog walker who is being dragged along by a boisterous pack of Doberman pinschers, all straining to escape their leashes. At any rate, the composer is busy trying to communicate with the giant kangaroo-size baby he sees in the sky — it’s the ghost of his brain-damaged child, whom he chose to starve to death shortly after its birth — and the narrator is overcome with panic, fearing he’s about to be engulfed in the scrum of dogs. Feeling utterly helpless, he shuts his eyes and tears begin to trickle down his face. Then someone touches his shoulder.”

I knew the entire passage by heart. “On my shoulder was a hand gentle as the essence of all gentleness; it felt like Aghwee touching me,” I recited.

“That’s it!” Masao exclaimed, clapping his hands. “When I reread the story, it occurred to me that what the young narrator perceived as Aghwee’s palm touching his shoulder was, in fact, the hand of Kogii. So I wrote a scene in which Kogii, just like the giant ghostly baby floating in the sky above Tokyo, gazes down from a high place at the novelist below — that is, at Kogito Choko. Hang on a sec, let me read you the ending, where the narrator has been hit in the eye and blinded by a stone thrown by a bunch of inexplicably frightened children.

“It was then that I sensed a being I knew and missed leave the ground behind me like a kangaroo and soar into the teary blue of a sky that retained its winter brittleness. ‘Good-bye, Aghwee,’ I heard myself whispering in my heart. And then I knew that my hatred of those frightened children had melted away and that time had filed my sky during those ten years with figures that glowed with an ivory-white light, I suppose not all of them purely innocent. When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had been endowed, if for only an instant, with the power to perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of my sky.”

Masao Anai’s reading of the words I had written so long ago had a powerful impact on me. I felt as though I had just heard, with my own ears, indisputable evidence of his very real talent as a stage director.

“As I’ve illustrated,” Masao said, “we’ve been talking about making the metaphor of Kogii a focal point. (We can discuss what he represents later on, although it seems fairly obvious.) But there’s another approach, which would be to have Unaiko add her own interpretation to the basic premise. The Caveman Group isn’t rigidly organized by any means, and I think our flexibility might actually end up having a stimulating effect on the work you’re about to undertake as well. The truth is, unlike in the past, university scholars don’t seem to be specializing in the work of Kogito Choko these days, so maybe this collaboration of ours will help to revive your waning popularity, even a little.”

“Really, Masao?” Asa said sharply. “I mean, I’ve told you that my brother is inclined to be skittish about this type of situation, and when you say snarky things you’re running the risk of making him back away from the entire project. Let’s just forge ahead slowly and hope we can all be reciprocally inspired by our creative activities. You were saying that Unaiko might have a different perspective, so how about it, Unaiko? How do you feel about this?”

Unaiko had been listening intently, looking like a little girl with an old-fashioned ponytail who had grown into a woman without changing much at all, but now she wiped the pensive expression off her face and addressed the group. “I have a very active interest in this project,” she said, “and I think it will be a meaningful collaboration for Masao and for Mr. Choko as well. Actually, there’s something I’d like to ask Mr. Choko privately at some point, if it could be arranged.”

“You’d better be careful,” Asa warned, but her tone was light. “When you try to get too close to my brother, he tends to run away. Ha ha ha! He really has his work cut out for him, though — he has to wade through all the musty old materials in the red leather trunk. I have my own feelings of ambivalence about the project, so I would be happier if he didn’t rush into it.”

After making that somewhat inscrutable remark, Asa paused and glanced at her watch. “Okay, then,” she said, turning to me. “It’s almost time for the youngsters to return from their little jaunt. You’re probably going to be relying on them for quite a bit of shuttle service from now on, so why don’t you be a sport and invite them to stay for dinner?”

4

The following Monday morning at nine o’clock on the dot, the Caveman Group’s minivan once again rolled up in front of the Forest House bearing Masao Anai, Unaiko, and the two young troupe members who had helped with the poetry stone. Hoping to avoid the morning rush hour, the little party had left Matsuyama at six A.M., and the predawn departure had evidently taken a toll on the two younger men. They greeted me with faces that seemed to say, Sorry, we’re still half-asleep! but just a few minutes later, in a spectacular burst of energy, they were hard at work alongside Asa, converting part of the first floor of the house into a small theater.

The two young men were clearly no strangers to manual labor, and the task at hand — setting up the Forest House as a communal workplace and rehearsal space — definitely required physical strength. Asa and Unaiko had hatched this plan earlier, and Asa had managed to quell my initial objections by assuring me the changes would only be temporary. The layout of the Forest House (which Asa had already been allowing the Caveman Group to use for rehearsals) was quite well suited to such activities. The previous day, Asa had done the basic cleaning by herself, and now she was supervising her newly arrived workforce.

The study/bedroom where I worked and slept was on the western end of the second floor, along with a library and one other bedroom. By prior agreement, the entire area had been declared a “no trespassing” zone. As for the ground floor, the northeastern quarter had originally been designed to serve as a parlor or drawing room, but it had never been used. The southern wing included the main entry area where people shed their shoes, a rather cramped foyer, a guest bathroom, and a staircase to the second floor. On the northern side, separated from the narrow foyer by a door, were the dining room and, one step down, the slightly sunken great room. Like the dining room, the large living area featured a massive plate-glass window that looked out on the back garden. Finally, on the west end, there were two guest bedrooms for visiting family members, with a shared bathroom.

“We’ll have the guys move the furniture from the great room — the table and chairs, the movable bookshelves, the sofa, and the television set — into the parlor,” Unaiko said briskly. “Last year, when it didn’t look as if you would be returning to the Forest House any time soon, we took Asa up on her kind offer and started using the entire first floor as a rehearsal space. If we clear out the great room now, the southernmost portion can be used as a stage. And if we move the big table out of the dining room, the area can be used for audience seating as well.”

“That sounds fine,” I said. “Back in the days when I used to come to the Forest House every year, if I wasn’t upstairs reading books or doing some work, I could usually be found stretched out on the sofa on the western side of the great room. I’d be grateful if you could leave that one sofa where it is, but feel free to shuffle everything else around however you wish. Asa has probably told you about this already, but I once used this room as a sort of minitheater myself. I invited a group of professional musicians who had recorded a CD of a little composition of Akari’s, and we put on an informal concert. We seated my mother and Asa and a few other guests directly in front of the stage, with the overflow in the dining room. This room has a high ceiling, so the acoustics were quite extraordinary.”

“We’ll be doing a bunch of different things here, too,” Unaiko told me. “Once we’ve conducted our interviews with you and incorporated the relevant bits into the master script, we’ll be staging some rehearsals. We were also talking about the fact that you’ve never seen the Caveman Group in action, and we were thinking we’d like to put on a compressed version of Wipe My Tears Away, specially for you.”

With that, Unaiko bounded off to the dining room. She placed both hands on the counter and looked around, then gazed up at the high ceiling with obvious approval.

“As a rule, the Caveman Group’s public performances take place on a stage that’s on the same level as the audience seating,” she said. “We often use a theater-in-the-round arrangement, so if you imagine a ring of spectators on the other side of the glass, peeking in from the garden, you should be able to get a sense of what would be happening onstage in an actual production.”

After the two young apprentices had finished emptying the great room of all its movable furnishings, apart from my favorite couch, Unaiko vacuumed the hardwood floor while I busied myself with opening the smaller windows on either side of the big plate-glass window to let in some fresh air. Masao and Asa were standing there shoulder to shoulder, surveying Chikashi’s horticultural handiwork in the back garden. There were innumerable rosebushes, both in pots and in the earth, where they had spread to the point of becoming ground cover; the pomegranate tree, with its luxuriant foliage; the flowering dogwood; and some tall Japanese white birches. (For the past few years Chikashi hadn’t been able to make the trip down here, so Asa had been tending the garden.)

“These trees look different from the ones in the forest,” Masao said. “Up in Matsuyama you sometimes see flowering dogwoods growing along the road, but they aren’t nearly as tall or as lush as these. Maybe they’re just young, or maybe this is a special spot. But what about these Japanese white birches — isn’t it unusual for them to grow so tall?”

“The trees Chikashi brought were some she’d originally transplanted from the summer house in Karuizawa to the house in Tokyo, and she’d been tending them there for twenty-odd years,” Asa explained. “She rescued several full-grown trees that had been blown down by the strong winds in those mountains, but the ones she raised here from seedlings are also exceptionally tall for some reason. Chikashi was young and energetic in those days, and she really threw herself into cultivating this garden.”

“From the sheer number of potted roses, and the way she seems to have been determined to make the trees grow larger than they normally would, I get the feeling Chikashi might share some character traits with her brother, Goro Hanawa,” Masao mused. “A certain tenacity, and an attraction to the unusual …”

“Goro never showed any particular interest in trees, though,” I said.

“No, but I see Masao’s point,” Asa said. “I noticed a similarity between Chikashi and Goro in the way she helped Akari with his musical education. There’s no such artistic streak in our family. Actually,” she added, looking at me, “when you met Goro, while you were both going to school in Matsuyama, weren’t you captivated by that aspect of his personality?”

“Well, Goro was definitely a rare human being,” I said. “For one thing, because he took an interest in the story of our father’s drowning, he was the first person I ever confided in about the recurrent dream, outside of our immediate family.”

“Yes,” Masao remarked, “I remember Goro used to say things like ‘Yes, but Choko has Kogii!’ So I guess he thought you were pretty special, too, having your own personal guardian angel and all. Anyhow, the bottom line is that the images of both Kogiis — you and your alter ego — are etched into my mind, and that duality is forming the basis for this project we’re going to be working on together. Speaking of which, we’ve decided on the basic layout of the stage, but what we need to get a handle on now is how to present the interviews we’ll be doing with you. Needless to say, if you’d like to propose any changes to the staging we would be totally receptive. Now, for starters, can we talk a bit about Kogii?”

Masao Anai’s request seemed perfectly natural, and I had no objection. Just as she had done the previous time, Unaiko placed the recording equipment on the divider between the dining room and the great room, then attached a microphone to my collar. Masao dispatched the muscular young apprentices to the drawing room to retrieve a couple of armchairs, which they quickly placed in the center of the impromptu stage. Watching this smoothly orchestrated transition, I felt as if I was being borne along on a wave of competence: a force of nature that was clearly beyond my control.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” Masao said to me. “We may use a different approach later on, but for now I’m simply going to stand in front of you and start talking. If I find myself getting tired, I’ll grab a chair and sit down. You’ll already be sitting, of course, but if you want to stretch your legs at any point please feel free to stand up and walk around. Your wireless microphone will work anywhere in the room.

“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 deranged 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 …

I’d forgotten how realistically I had described Kogii in the vignette I dashed off some forty-odd years ago. And when I reviewed the utterly familiar final image, I recognized anew that whenever I had the dream (it was essentially the same scenario every time, though there were small disparities depending upon my state of being on the night in question) Kogii was always present, and I was always watching him as he flashed me a look that I could only describe, vaguely, as a certain ineffable expression.

I considered this in the context of the point Masao had made about the significance of Kogii as an entity who seemed to exist as a regular person, but who also had a decidedly uncanny (or should I just say supernatural?) aspect to his nature. I felt certain Masao would be interested in reading these pages so I asked Asa to make a copy of the rough draft and give it to him, along with the photocopies she was having made of the other materials in the red leather trunk — materials on which I had pinned so many of my artistic hopes.

About a week later Masao, Unaiko, and Asa showed up in the theater troupe’s minivan, driven by a young man whom I hadn’t seen before. Both the driver and his young male colleague in the passenger seat were wearing such flashy clothes that I was momentarily dazzled, until Asa introduced the pair and explained that they were dressed for an important audition. Apparently there was a hall in Uwajima (a seaside town an hour away) that showcased up-and-coming performers in the hopes of attracting audiences from the main island of Honshu, who could now travel there by car via a recently opened bridge. That hall was the destination of the two dapperly turned-out young men. They were part of the Caveman Group, but also performed on their own as a comedy duo called Suke & Kaku — always with an ampersand, they solemnly informed me.

“The work they’re doing is very postmodern,” Asa explained. “Needless to say, their choice of a retro-sounding name was completely intentional. They borrowed their stage names, Suke & Kaku, from a couple of raffish sidekicks in the popular period drama Mito Komon, which has been running on television since these two first opened their eyes as infants.”

“Sometimes fans of Suke & Kaku’s postmodern skits will come to a public performance by the Caveman Group, and they’ll laugh uproariously at all the wrong places,” Masao said wryly. “It can be quite unnerving for everyone concerned — not just the actors, but the rest of the audience as well.”

I soon learned that Masao and his entire crew had read the transcript of the first interview, and they knew exactly what they wanted me to talk about next: my recurrent “Kogii dream.” Once again, Unaiko set up the recording equipment with her trademark swift yet painstaking professionalism.

“Until I reread the fragment recently, I wasn’t seeing much significance in the role Kogii played in the dream,” I began. “But from what you’ve said about your dramatization, it has become clear to me that his presence was a pivotal element. When we look at the phrasing of my mother’s haiku, where she says, And like the river current, you won’t return home, a question arises. After thinking obsessively about this matter for a very long time, endlessly refining those lines in her mind, is it possible all she wanted was to have them read and understood by her only son? I recounted my recurrent dream in the opening section of the prologue to my drowning novel, but Kogii was only mentioned briefly at the end. Now, though, I feel I’d like to delve further into the meaning of what Masao has called the ‘Kogii effect’ through these interviews with you, if only for my own enlightenment.

“At my boyhood home there was a rickety old military rowboat that had been retired from active duty and then delivered to our house by a young army officer, as a gift for my father. We called it, simply, ‘the boat.’ When the craft was launched into the floodwaters (and we’ll never know whether it was an accident) Kogii was at the rear of the boat, standing next to my father with one hand on the tiller. But why do I keep having the dream, even now? Well, when I stopped to think about it I seemed to be remembering Kogii’s presence in my father’s boat as something that actually occurred, in reality. In other words, it isn’t as if I dreamed a total fiction, then conflated the dream with reality, and eventually became convinced that the dream scenario had actually taken place in real life. No, I truly believe the dream was seeded by reality, and not the other way around.

“That night, the plan was for me to shove the boat out into the wide part of the river and then hop on board alongside my father, but I totally botched my life-or-death assignment. Dreams aside, that’s what really happened. It isn’t some compensatory figment of my imagination, cooked up after my father drowned and his body was delivered to our house. But when I tried to talk about the incident later on, my mother turned a deaf ear, just as she’d done years before when I was grumbling about how Kogii had deserted me and returned to the forest.

“When I was drafting the prologue to my drowning novel, as an adult writer, I revisited that night. I was looking for a way to express what a momentous occurrence my father’s drowning was for our family, but in a fit of cowardice I wrote the whole scene as if it were the recollection of a dream. (Though it is true I’ve had the exact same dream, over and over.)

“If you’ll bear with me as I continue with this somewhat convoluted explanation, the event that gave rise to the dream really happened, and all the details I recall are rooted in reality. In the summer of 1945, shortly after our country lost the war, there was an unforgettable night when a storm raged through the forest and the river swelled and roared and overflowed its banks, ultimately rising so high that it engulfed the rocky outcropping above this house. (Incidentally, if you go up there and look down you’ll see that the river today, with its splendidly constructed embankment, bears almost no resemblance to the Kame River as it was then.) Anyway, my father launched his little boat into the tumultuous, storm-tossed river, and then he drowned. That was the first big event and it really did occur, although it was always a taboo subject while I was growing up. The only question in my mind was about my father’s motivation for setting out on such a perilous night.

“As my mother said in one line of her poem, my father was swept away by the river current, never to return home. In a sense, by drowning he became one with the current. Because of the extreme weather, it wasn’t until the following day that my father’s drowned body was retrieved from the riverbank and brought home. So, reading between the first and second lines of the poem, I think what my mother was trying to convey to me was this: ‘You place a lot of emphasis on the fact that your father went out on the river in the midst of a flood, but his body did come back to us eventually, so it’s not as if he was swept away in the extreme sense of never seen again.’ The line also seems to be saying, ‘And what about you, Kogii? Like the river current, you won’t return home, either.’ Of course, that’s a fairly transparent way of chiding me for my selfishness in choosing to live in Tokyo.

“In the first line, too, she’s criticizing me by saying, ‘If you don’t make the necessary preparations for the end of your son’s life, and your own, it would be like sending Akari out onto the river in the terrifying, pitch-dark night with no explanation and letting the current sweep him away.’ And my lines, which continue the poem, are basically responding: ‘Well, since you put it that way, I have to admit it’s true.’

“So my part of the poem is meant to be an honest acknowledgment of the current state of affairs. In Tokyo during the dry season / I’m remembering everything backward / From old age to earliest childhood.”

“But, Mr. Choko,” Masao Anai said, “in your lines, rather than caving in to your mother’s pressure, weren’t you responding to the rather plaintive voice that permeates her poem by saying in return: ‘Hey, maybe I did behave like the river current by going away to Tokyo and not coming back, but before I’m swallowed up in the vortex of the whirlpool I’m going to remember everything that has happened in my life, from my childhood through the present day.’ If you did so, then maybe some kind of reversal of the sad state of affairs set forth in the poem might be possible. Otherwise, why would you have made your part of the poem an undisguised echo of those well-known lines by T. S. Eliot?”

I was all talked out for the moment, so I didn’t reply to Masao Anai’s question. But then Unaiko, without switching off the tape recorder, posed a question of her own: “By the way, what on earth is a ‘spider lily cask’? I’ve never heard that term before.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I guess I’d better give you a complete explanation, since it looks as if we’re going to be talking a lot about Kogii, and the story of my flood dream is an important part of the saga. As a child I wasn’t able to understand my father’s world the way I do now, but he must have told me some of these things, and then later on I was able to put them together.

“My father never talked about where he was born and raised, although I suspect that my mother must have known. He and my mother met and married in Tokyo, and from the time the two of them came back together to set up house in her native village — in other words, for the latter half of his life — he seemed to do very little work. (Or at least that’s how it appeared to me, as a child.) Anyway, because he was his own boss and had an abundance of free time, young army officers from the regiment at Matsuyama would frequently drop by to visit and drink sake on their days off. What sort of radical things were they discussing at those gatherings? Was my father a leader or a follower? Were they planning some sort of symbolic insurrection? I didn’t know for sure, but I was thinking that if I had access to the red leather trunk I would be able to dig up some juicy clues in letters written by the young officers, my father’s correspondence with his own mentor, and so on. That was my hope when I came down here.

“In retrospect, I realize that my father probably wasn’t as idle as I thought he was. For one thing, he believed there would eventually be food shortages in Japan, and he came up with a rather unusual method for dealing with such a situation. As you know, the Kame River snakes through this mountain valley, and in those days the wide slope on the south bank was entirely covered with forests of chestnut trees. (You can still see a few of those trees today.) My grandfather was in the ‘mountain products’ business — that is, he would package chestnuts and persimmons and ship them to Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, and beyond — and at some point he got the idea of encouraging some of the local chestnut-growing households to plant Oriental paperbush plants between rows of chestnut trees.

“The fibrous bark of the paperbush was the basic raw material for paper used in making Japanese currency, so the local harvest from those bushes was sent to the official government printing bureau. First, though, the bushes had to be cut down and the bark stripped off and steamed. After the bark had been dried and separated into bundles, it was temporarily stashed in a warehouse. (Like the paper-bush’s showy flowers, the processed bark was a brilliant white.) The work was done by farmers, as a group effort, and the women and old people would help by soaking the rough bark in the river, then peeling it off in thin layers.

“My father was something of an amateur inventor, and he designed a machine to strip the bark and had a number of those devices made by a firm that manufactured traditional knives. In order to prepare the bark to be transported by truck, my father would compression-mold it into bricks, to meet government standards. He also invented a good-size packing machine, which he even managed to patent. As far as I know my father had never formally studied engineering, but he clearly enjoyed tinkering with machinery and solving practical problems. I seem to have inherited his penchant for inventive puttering around the house—bricolage, as they say in French.

“So how did my father propose to deal with the food shortage he was anticipating? Well, he had observed that every summer the riverside slope I mentioned a moment ago would turn a deep scarlet as the red spider lilies growing wild among the chestnut trees began to bloom. From the autumn of the year before Japan lost the war until the following summer (in other words, until a few months before he drowned), my father became involved in spearheading a public works project — an uncharacteristically social undertaking for a rather private person like him. He began by asking the principal of the local high school whether some students could be assigned to dig up the bulbs of the red spider lilies. He even offered to pay the child laborers a small wage. The high school kids threw themselves into the task with tremendous enthusiasm, and before long the storehouse normally used for chestnuts and persimmons was overflowing with bulbs.

“My father commandeered a portion of my mother’s vegetable garden and built a sort of minifactory in our backyard,” I went on. “He used bamboo pipes to funnel running water from the nearby river, and he built a mechanism to pulverize the bulbs. This type of amateur-engineering challenge was right in his wheelhouse. He put in some wide stone steps leading down to the river, and then he lined up a large number of barrels on a concrete slab he had installed on the riverbank and secured them with ropes. (It’s likely that my father found his pals in the military very useful when it came to getting hold of these materials.)

“The next task was to soak the pulverized spider lily bulbs in water. There was a wide, sandy beach downstream from our house, and that’s where my father placed a row of racks covered with straw mats, to use for drying the pulp. After the processed bulbs were dry, the final step in his master plan was to convert them into an edible form.

“Now, even children knew spider lily bulbs were poisonous, but there was a time, long ago, when the bulbs were turned into a flourlike powder and used as an emergency foodstuff in case of famine. People would grind the bulbs, then neutralize the toxicity by adding some medicinal herbs they’d gathered in the forest. Everyone, including my father, knew about this custom; there were even some old botanical illustrations on display in the local historical archives. My mother and grandmother were both locally renowned amateur herbalists, and they knew the forest couldn’t possibly provide enough of the medicinal herbs needed to detoxify the poisonous bulbs. Luckily, someone had developed a chemical agent that could be substituted for the elusive herbs, and my father obtained a supply from a friend who worked at a university on Kyushu. The idea was that if he could get the bulb-conversion factory up and running, he would be able to provide an ample quantity of high-quality starch.

“My mother and the other folks from the neighborhood who were helping out in the factory weren’t totally convinced the man-made chemical agent would detoxify the bulbs, but nonetheless the work went on. I remember seeing a long row of barrels filled to the brim with pulverized spider lily bulbs at the top of the riverbank. Things seemed to be moving along quite well until the rainy season began.”

“That’s very interesting,” Masao said, but he sounded a trifle impatient. “If we could just get back to the subject at hand, we know the full moon shone through a break in the clouds during a lull in the storm, right around midnight, and that was when your father set off on the flooded river in his little boat and ended up being drowned. Asa has confirmed that timeline as well. But to be honest, I have a feeling the cold, hard truth ends there. Perhaps you really were left behind because you got distracted and didn’t manage to climb aboard in time. But the bit about seeing Kogii standing in the boat, staring back at you? I can’t help thinking that part of the story was a dream and nothing more. Either way, the dream definitely gives the reality a deeper dimension.

“Needless to say, we aren’t trying to make a documentary here,” Masao went on, “so I would like to stage the scene not as a dream sequence but as reality, in accordance with your insistence that the ten-year-old boy really did see his doppelgänger, Kogii, against the backdrop of a giant wall of water. But how can we re-create that tableau onstage? I’m hoping we can figure out the logistics as we proceed with these interviews. I’d like very much to conjure up a scene where the Kogii I’m envisioning — who, as we’ve discussed, is a kind of supernatural being — takes the form of an ordinary child. If we can pull this off, I think it could be fantastic!”

2

This was on a Sunday. The original plan had been to stage a rehearsal, right there at the Forest House, of the condensed version of the troupe’s prize-winning dramatic adaptation of my novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, in order to show me the kind of work it was doing. However, two young actors who were slated to participate had gotten a gig (as they called it) to perform elsewhere in the guise of their sketch-comedy personas, Suke & Kaku. As a result, the rehearsal was rescheduled for the following week. I already had a good feeling about the dynamic of the Caveman Group, based on what I had seen so far of Masao Anai’s strong but fair leadership style (or rather shared leadership, with Unaiko), and this latest development only strengthened my sense that the group was run as a sort of collegial democracy.

And so it was that a week later, on the following Sunday morning, a caravan of assorted vehicles came bumping down the private road and pulled up in front of the Forest House. Within minutes the young actors were hard at work on the preparations for the rehearsal, under the supervision of Masao and Unaiko.

As for me, I had willingly surrendered the first floor to this energetic group (whose members were so focused on their work that they hadn’t even taken the time to greet me one by one) and had retired to my second-floor study. After a while, Masao called to me from the bottom of the stairs. I emerged from my lair to find that Asa, too, had joined the party.

As soon as Asa and I — a command performance audience of two — had seated ourselves with our backs to the partition, Masao strode onto the makeshift stage and began to speak. (The “stage” was furnished with a narrow soldier’s bed his young helpers had carried down from the second floor, along with a chair from the dining room.)

To set the scene for his little audience, Masao led off with a general explanation, but the complex timbre of his voice — simultaneously natural, robust, and precise — seemed to offer a glimpse of his particular brand of theater.

“After having read our copy of the prologue of the drowning novel, Unaiko and I were thinking we would like to open the play with a monologue by the person who is visited by the recurrent dream described in the opening passage,” Masao began. “A small boat is moored in a riverside cove, and our narrator’s father is standing in the bobbing boat and facing away from the audience, with the overflowing river as a dramatic backdrop. In the foreground stands a young boy, immersed in muddy water up to his chest. He, too, is facing away from us. Floating high above the boat is the solitary figure of Kogii, and he’s the only one facing the audience. So that’ll be the tentative staging of the opening scene.

“However, the part of the story where the writer sifts through the contents of the red leather trunk as the entire drowning novel unfolds before us is just a vague concept. Right now we’re in the process of rereading your complete works, Mr. Choko, with the goal of making our allusions as powerful as possible, so today we’ll only be presenting a few scenes from our already completed adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.

“In the first scene, a ten-year-old boy has tagged along with his father (known to everyone as Choko Sensei), who is preparing to charge into battle with a ragtag bunch of army officers — all, we gather, deserters from the regiment in Matsuyama. The ensuing pantomime unfolds at a snail’s pace across the entire stage; the slowness is unavoidable because Choko Sensei is riding in a ‘chariot’ made from a wooden fertilizer box with rough-hewn wheels.

“In actuality, that scene is superimposed over the ongoing narrative of a mentally ill man, reclining on a bed upstage. At the beginning the role is played by Unaiko, but she is almost completely concealed by a jumble of sheets and blankets. Seated beside the bed is a large person in a nurse’s uniform, silently listening to the patient’s story with a skeptical look on her face. The role of the nurse is played (in drag) by Kaku, whom you’ll remember as half of the duo of Suke & Kaku.

“The action taking place downstage portrays the recollections of the patient who is lying in bed reminiscing about the summer of 1945, and the ten-year-old boy is in fact the institutionalized man himself, twenty-some years earlier. Oh, and, Mr. Choko? Once the play begins, if the spirit moves you, please feel free to join in and speak the lines along with the actors. We’ve tried to bring your novel to life passage by passage, with maximum fidelity to the original, so chiming in from time to time should come naturally to the author! Seriously, though, audience participation is completely optional. Okay then, here we go.”

Only a single pane of glass separated the impromptu stage from the summer garden, where the roses — palest lavender, deepest crimson — were blooming in thick, luxuriant clusters. Inside, a quick switch had been made on the stage, and the person lying in bed was now being played by Suke, while Kaku continued to act the part of the large-boned nurse sitting next to the patient’s bed in a metal chair.

Both characters were silent, but the mental patient was evidently remembering his past self as a ten-year-old boy. A hallucinatory vision of the boy, played by Unaiko in a military service cap, entered the foreground of the stage and began to shout in a shrill, piercing voice.

“Mother, Mother, this is terrible — things are really getting out of control! The soldiers have made Father their leader, and they’re gonna stage an insurrection! I knew it, I knew it — it’s just as I thought. They’ve gone off the deep end, and they’ve chosen Father to lead them into battle! We need to check the paper where I wrote down all the people who called Father a spy or a traitor, or said he wanted Japan to lose the war, and then we have to figure out how many names are on that list. It’s such a big job, and we’re gonna be so busy! Oh, Mother, Mother, this is exactly what I was afraid of, and now it’s happening!”

This scene went on and on for a very long time. I seemed to feel my old novel coming back to life inside me, but with an oddly intriguing new twist.

In the next scene, which unfolded across the entire stage, my military-uniform-clad father (who had more or less lost the use of his limbs) was placed in the rough, smelly crate his followers were euphemistically calling a wooden chariot. He was then pushed forward and loaded, crate and all, into a military truck. Simultaneously, the young boy (who had been lurking in the background) emerged from the shadows and spoke — not shrilly and hysterically this time, but in Unaiko’s own naturally calm voice.

“Anyway, in the mountain valley early one morning on a day in August — so early, in fact, that everything was still inky blackness, without even the faintest glimmer of dawn — the soldiers and I loaded Father into a makeshift wooden ‘chariot’ and, moving as slowly as sleepy turtles, we set off on foot, taking turns pushing the wooden cart. At the mouth of the valley we hoisted the cart, with Father inside, onto a military truck that was waiting there, and, coalesced at long last into a brigade of rebels, the group headed for the provincial capital of Matsuyama by way of the switchback road that wound its torturous way through a mountain pass. And while the army truck, being driven recklessly fast, was screaming along the narrow road, the soldiers in the back kept up a raucous chorus, singing disconnected fragments of a foreign song over and over at maximum volume.

“‘What does this song mean, anyway?’ I inquired, and my father (with his eyes still closed and rivulets of sweat running down his deathly pale, porcelain-smooth, eerily unwrinkled face, and his corpulent body bumping against the boards of the wooden cart) gave an explanation. Of course, after all this time, I’m sure I only remember the barest gist of what he told me: ‘It’s German. Tränen means “tears,” and Tod is “death.” They’re singing that the emperor himself, with his own hand, will wipe away my tears. In other words, the song is saying the soldiers are waiting and hoping for the day when His Imperial Majesty, with his own fingertips, will gently wipe away their sorrowful tears.’”

At this point in Anai’s staging of the play, one of Bach’s solo cantatas suddenly burst forth in the background. (I remembered hearing that same thrilling high-volume sound at an avant-garde performance I’d been invited to attend nearly twenty years earlier, in an intimate little theater space.) The recitation continued, struggling to be heard over the rising wave of music, but the narrator’s voice was ultimately swept away on the soaring tide of song.

Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.

Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,

Komm und führe mich nur fort….

And as the chorus swelled I felt something beginning to stir in the deepest recesses of my heart, and I couldn’t stop myself from joining in.

3

After the play had ended, the young apprentices immediately set to work clearing away the stage props. When they left the Forest House it was not quite four o’clock in the afternoon, but the light had already begun to fade from the jar-shaped valley. The young folks had to get back to Matsuyama, where they had a job that involved both performing and working backstage at a concert by a singer-songwriter from Tokyo. Although I myself had never been moved to attend a concert of that sort, I could imagine what an asset the young members of the Caveman Group would be to such an event.

Alone in the Forest House as night descended on the valley, I reflected on what I had just experienced. From the start, the rehearsal had felt rather dark and dreary. The main characters were a decidedly gloomy group: the young boy portrayed by Unaiko in costume, shrieking in a shrill voice (in other words, myself, some sixty-five years earlier); the reclining patient and the nurse at the back of the stage; and finally my father, who was in the last stages of bladder cancer, standing in his wooden “chariot” in a puddle of bloody urine. Not surprisingly, for anyone familiar with the novella, there wasn’t a single bright, cheery, attractive face to be found. The staging followed the book closely, including a scene in which my father — still in his wooden cart — is loaded onto the bed of a truck whose sides were framed with two-by-fours, then filled in with corrugated cardboard. The young boy is jammed in beside his father, while the soldiers line up behind them.

By the end of the impromptu production, there were more than twenty actors onstage: young women and men from the Caveman Group, most of whom I had never laid eyes on. The actors playing the group of soldiers under the renegade officers’ command were outfitted with handmade field caps and toy swords, and when they all joined in the rousing chorus of the German war anthem the stage seemed to explode in pyrotechnic splendor.

Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.

Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,

Komm und führe mich nur fort….

After the chorus had faded away, the ostensibly male patient (played, at that juncture, by Unaiko), who had been lying on his side in the bed and narrating the scene, stood up. The character’s previously nonchalant style of narration suddenly changed radically, and he began to speak in a powerful declamatory voice that dominated the stage.

“I’ll die fighting in the little army my father is leading into this noble insurrection! As I was thinking this, a fighter plane appeared from the direction of the provincial city, coming in low over the pass, and the soldiers began shouting:

“‘Look how recklessly he’s flying. He doesn’t care what happens anymore!’

“‘We’d better get the planes we need fast, before those bastards crash them!’

“‘We need at least ten airplanes, then we can crash them into the Imperial Palace and go out in a kamikaze blaze of glory!’

‘“Our goal is junshi — suicide in the emperor’s name — it’s junshi for us all!’

“‘It’s junshi for us all’—the hot thorns in those words pierced my small heart, then lodged there and continued to burn. Before long I, too, had begun to sing along with the officers and enlisted men in my high, shrill voice.”

After that Unaiko, now playing the role of the young boy, stepped forward to the front of the stage and started to lead the chorus. And as the stirring cantata approached a crescendo even I began to sing along from my seat in the peanut gallery!

“Wow, Kogii — I never expected to hear you singing in such a loud voice, and in German to boot!” Asa exclaimed after the music had died down. “Of course, I don’t know whether your pronunciation is any good. Seriously, though, at least you were able to make your voice blend with those of the actors, and they’ve been practicing the piece for a while. Even after knowing you for all these years, it isn’t something I ever expected to see, or hear! I’ve attended some formal productions by the Caveman Group, and they have always been very well done, but I was never as moved as I am right now.”

Asa had returned from her quick run to the train station, and as she delivered this little speech she was standing next to me, staring out at the deepening darkness enveloping the mountain valley. “Unaiko has told me about the meaning of the words of the cantata you were singing,” she went on, “and while I can’t sympathize with the ideology, that didn’t keep me from being moved by the music, and the voices.”

“Well,” I replied, “in my novella those lines are rendered just as Father explained them to me. Heiland selbst means the savior or rescuer himself, which in this case is the emperor, even though obviously there’s no way the actual ruler would be involved in this scenario. I remember that the young officers who were always drinking sake at our house used to bellow the German anthem every night at the top of their lungs while listening to the RCA Victor Red Seal recording on the phonograph. When I was starting work on that book, I sang the chorus (which I recalled only vaguely) for Goro, and he knew right away which Bach composition it was.

“Afterward he even went out and tracked down a copy of the LP. One day he brought it by and we proceeded to sing the song together, with Goro stopping from time to time to explain the meaning of the German lyrics, and the words gradually came back to me. That’s the background, but when the actors began to sing and I heard the magnificently loud, theatrical sound, I couldn’t help but join the chorus. I must say, singing along with that ultranationalist anthem has left me with a strangely ambivalent aftertaste. But this troupe certainly knows how to put on a play, don’t they?”

“You can say that again,” Asa said. “There I was, watching the rehearsal, with half my mind on other things, when suddenly in the seat next to me my brother began to sing! Sixty-odd years have passed since your voice changed, but it still sounds kind of screechy, and when I heard it fervently raised in song, I thought to myself, Yikes, this feels like something genuine.” (Asa used the unflattering word “screechy” to describe my voice, and that might have been accurate since I had renewed my acquaintance with the song through the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recording Goro found for me. Still, I was tempted to say that I would have preferred to hear my singing voice described as a mellow baritone or even a pleasant countertenor, rather than a prepubescent screech.)

“I felt as though your singing was coming from a deep well of emotion,” Asa continued, evidently unable to stop marveling at my unusual behavior. “It seemed, at that moment, as if the intense emotions of childhood were being rekindled in your heart, so I just sat perfectly still, letting the sound wash over me. Honestly, I’ve never heard you sing with such passion, not even when you were in school. Maybe the song has been hibernating in your memory — or your soul — all this time, and was somehow reawakened when you heard it here today.

“But also, I keep going back to the original book this dramatization is based on. I remember The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away very well, because it caused so much suffering for Mother and me. The ultranationalist uprising described in the novella supposedly takes place on August sixteenth, but in actuality there was never a single guerrilla uprising, anywhere in Japan, involving soldiers who were disgruntled about Japan’s surrender. As a young novelist, you were probably afraid of being raked over the coals by the older generation of critics. They tended to be rigorous about matters of historical verisimilitude, so you found a way around that by portraying the surreal shootout as the delusion of a patient in a mental hospital. The institutionalized patient — who, as a child, was along for the ride — is remembering the voices of the soldiers, singing in the truck as they headed to their doomed insurrection … and that’s when he begins to sing the German song.

“However, if you delve deeply enough into your memories, there’s a real-life incident you experienced long before you ever thought of writing the novella. As you’ve mentioned, during the four or five days before Father’s death, officers from the Matsuyama regiment kept stopping by our house to drink sake, and some of them even slept over in the storehouse next door. At the time, you heard the drunken young officers singing the song, and it would have stuck in your mind. The song itself is a Bach cantata, so of course it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Japanese emperor, but it must have somehow tugged at your heartstrings, don’t you think? And even if you didn’t come right out and say so in the novella, you must have been feeling a visceral connection to the fervor and excitement of the officers.

“I’m pretty sure you came in here today planning to watch the rehearsal with a coolly critical eye, but when the rousing chorus began your face turned bright red and you started to sing along in that high, squeaky voice. While I was watching you in amazement, I couldn’t help thinking, This is so intense it’s almost scary. But as I said earlier, I was feeling deeply moved myself, so the whole thing is rather complicated for me.”

I wasn’t sure what Asa had found so “scary” and “complicated,” and I paused for a moment to ponder her choice of words. We were still sitting there in the gathering dark while outside, Chikashi’s tiny rose garden and the valley beyond it were barely illuminated by the last remains of daylight. The heavily overcast sky, which had been threatening to rain since morning, was almost imperceptibly tinted by traces of a pale, diluted sunset.

After we had shared a contemplative moment, Asa spoke again, and her concerns became clear. “Now, it’s not as if I’m worried that at this late date my famously liberal brother will be criticized for innocently enjoying the sound of an ultranationalist anthem,” she said. “It’s just that you’re about to embark on what (considering your age) may well turn out to be your final project. I realize your main focus will be on exploring the contents of the red leather trunk, with the help of the Caveman Group, but I can’t help wondering what might happen if some echoes of the ultranationalist German song were to show up in the book you ultimately write.

“After the rehearsal Unaiko and I took the young folks to the Japan Rail station in Honmachi, to see them off. Then the two of us — the feisty old lady and Unaiko, the gifted young woman in the prime of life — lingered awhile on the elevated station platform overlooking the picturesque basin of the valley and the mountain range beyond, and we had a very intense conversation. (Incidentally, Unaiko and I have been keeping in touch via email for quite some time, and we agreed to keep the conversation going, like a couple of soul sisters, completely independent of our respective relationships with Masao Anai.)

“As we stood there admiring the view, I confessed to Unaiko that like my brother, who simply couldn’t keep from jumping in and singing along with the chorus of young voices earlier today, I, too, was quite stirred by the German song. And I told her the same thing I’ve been trying to express to you: that the aftermath (to borrow one of your trademark words!) of the Caveman Group’s rehearsal has already begun.

“Maybe this afternoon has made me sentimental, but I just want to say how glad I am to have you back in the place where we grew up. And since I now feel certain you’re mentally prepared to deal with whatever you may find inside, I’m ready to hand over the red leather trunk at last.”

Chapter 3. The Red Leather Trunk

1

Asa had apparently been listening for the sound of my footsteps. When I arrived at her house near the river, she immediately led me down a hallway to a storage closet. Off to the left, the living-room door stood open and through it I caught a glimpse of a familiar low table with a plate of soft, steamed rice-flour dumplings filled with chestnut jam — which I recognized right away as the handiwork of a long-established sweetshop in the nearby town of Honmachi — already laid out for our tea. Stashed in the closet, next to the discs and the boom box Akari had used for playing CDs during his last visit, was my mother’s red leather trunk.

In the eighth year of Showa (that is, 1933), my parents were already married and living in Tokyo, but due to some complications in my father’s situation there had been a delay in their plan to return to our village on Shikoku and look after the family interests. My mother decided to go to Shanghai to visit a childhood friend who was married to a Japanese trading-company employee and had just had a baby, and she ended up staying there for more than a year. Finally my father went to China to fetch her, and when they returned to Japan my mother’s luggage included the red leather trunk. Even then, the trunk wasn’t new; my mother had bought it at a Japanese-run bookstore in Shanghai that sold used goods on the side. There was no way of guessing how old the little suitcase might have been, but after it came into her possession my mother always took meticulous care of it. Over time the leather had begun to crack and peel, but the color was still a deep, rich red. The trunk may have been small, but it was considerably sturdier than the bags you see young women toting around nowadays.

“The lock stopped working ages ago,” Asa explained. “That’s why it’s held together with rope. When Mother died, I took a quick look at the contents and then put the trunk away, and it hasn’t been opened since. During Mother’s lifetime, she used to give it a good airing once a year. The trunk does have a bit of an antique smell, though I don’t find it unpleasant at all. So, here we are at last. Are you ready to take a peek?”

“I think I’d rather take the trunk back to the Forest House,” I replied.

“Suit yourself,” Asa said. “By the way, Father’s papers included a number of letters from a teacher he especially respected, and they were always decorated with calligraphy and watercolor paintings. The notes Father penciled into the margins have faded, but Masao was saying that if we had color copies made they could end up being clearer than the originals for reasons I don’t really understand. So I had him go ahead and do that. When the copies are finished, Unaiko will bring them down from Matsuyama.”

2

At last, indeed, I thought after Asa had dropped me back at the Forest House. I was finally free to open the red leather trunk and explore its contents on my own terms. I carried the suitcase upstairs to my study/bedroom, set it down in front of the south-facing window, and untied the rope. The metal fittings that had once attached the lid to the body of the trunk were long gone, and the top slid off with no resistance whatsoever.

There were some large, bulky-looking objects on the bottom, and when I lifted them up the red trunk lurched forward and slammed into my thigh. The heavy things turned out to be three thick books, each bearing the title The Golden Bough and the publisher’s imprint: Macmillan. When my father was alive, my mother had once remarked that my father’s mentor in Kochi was introducing him to books from all over the world, on all sorts of topics. Maybe that was where these had come from. I remembered suddenly that when I was at university I had bought an Iwanami paperback containing an abridged version of The Golden Bough, in Japanese translation, but I don’t think I ever got around to reading it.

There were no other books in the trunk, so I started off by reading some old journals, an activity that conjured a vivid memory of my mother sitting with her back to me, writing in a small notebook with a metal-nibbed “G pen” she dipped into an inkpot from time to time. On a number of occasions, when there was a temporary lull in the ongoing intrafamilial hostilities and I was on Shikoku for a visit, Asa had secretly borrowed a few of our mother’s journals for me to look at (though only after I promised I would never use anything I found in them as fodder for fiction). Our mother apparently knew what Asa was up to, and her silence was a kind of tacit approval. The trunk now contained fifteen volumes of those journals, but I was certain that was only a fraction of the total.

The friend in Shanghai (whom my mother had stayed with for so long that my father had to bring her back) was someone of particular importance to my family. She had grown up as the only child in a mansion on a hill overlooking the village, and she and my mother had been friends for most of their lives. We called her the Shanghai Auntie. The better part of my mother’s journal entries consisted of detailed transcriptions of the letters the Shanghai Auntie had sent from China, where she was living after her marriage.

Seeing those old journals again reminded me of my mother’s system for keeping me supplied with reading material during the war. Early on I had fallen in love with the children’s fantasy novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and had read it over and over again. My mother used to take some of the thick cotton army socks we received as part of wartime rationing and fashion them into small bags. She would fill the bags with rice and then set out for the nearby cluster of houses, whose occupants were living under perpetual threat of air raids, and she would trade the rice — a precious commodity in those days — for stacks of Iwanami Bunko paperbacks. That was how I came to discover The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a transformative book that became the cornerstone of my personal Great Wall of Literature.

As for Nils, the Swedish classic had been a gift from another childhood friend of my mother’s. They had attended the local elementary school together, but then (unlike my mother, who remained in the village) her friend had gone off to an all-girls high school in Matsuyama and later matriculated at a women’s university in Tokyo. I learned about this for the first time as an adult, from surreptitiously reading my mother’s journals.

When I had originally seen these journals, in my younger days, I had only skimmed the contents, jumping quickly from page to page. Now I was planning to reread them carefully, one by one. After perusing several journals and finding nothing useful, I reached for a newer volume, which was bound in colorfully patterned chiyogami paper. To my disappointment, in this journal, too, my mother seemed to be endlessly fixated on wallowing in the feelings of restless nostalgia triggered by the letters she received from the Shanghai Auntie. The entries didn’t even touch upon the object of my current quest: information about my father’s past, especially the events that transpired in the years leading up to and including 1945. Indeed, it was almost as if my mother had written the journals in such a way as to erase any traces of my father’s presence in her daily life.

I realized that I would need to cast a wider net in my subsequent examinations of the red leather trunk, but since I had stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading my mother’s journals, it was after noon the following day when I embarked upon the second phase of my reconnaissance mission.

Because I had laid out the contents of the red leather trunk in roughly organized categories, the various piles had overflowed from the desk onto the bookshelves and even the floor. My father’s correspondence, which would ultimately be the main focus of my scrutiny, had not yet returned from the copy shop, so naturally my eye was drawn to the fruits of my mother’s secret penchant for journaling. Her private archives included a great many clippings from newspapers and magazines, which had been folded for so many years that they had become brittle and friable. They often disintegrated in my hands when I attempted to smooth out the creases.

I addressed this problem by carefully placing the age-yellowed clippings between random pages of a few of the heavier books from the bottom shelves of the bookcase — for example, the two-volume set of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the older clippings were already in shreds, so I patched those relics together with lavish applications of transparent tape. As I went along I quickly skimmed each clipping, then added it to the appropriate pile. The headlines were eclectic, to say the least: LONDON NAVAL-PREPAREDNESS PACT; THE PRORLEM OF INFRINGEMENT ON THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME HIGH COMMAND; MAJOR SLUMP IN RAW SILK PRODUCTION; DEBT IN RURAL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITIES IS NEARLY $42 BILLION. There were articles about other social issues and current events, such as the Musha Incident in Taiwan (or Formosa, as it was known in those days), and all those clippings seemed to be from the year 1930 or thereabouts.

Five years before I was born, my mother was showing a nascent interest in the affairs of the wider world. Evidently the correspondence that began after her cherished friend (the Shanghai Auntie) went off to live in China had been very instructive for my mother. Her education continued when she traveled alone to Shanghai, to visit that friend, and then remained there for much longer than expected. Indeed, if my father hadn’t gone to China and bodily dragged my mother home when he did, I would never have been born!

One of the news clippings made reference to a historical event I remembered hearing about from my mother as a bedtime story: a bloody uprising by more than eight hundred aboriginal natives of Formosa, who staged a rebellion armed only with bamboo spears, makeshift cudgels, and wooden poles. In retrospect, it struck me as a strangely sanguinary tale to share with a child, but my mother had presented it factually, as something that really happened a long time ago. Perhaps, I realized now, she had been drawing a parallel with the local farmers’ insurrections that were such an important part of our folklore.

Another clipping that caught my eyes was a full-color advertisement for Sapporo beer. The ad, which appeared to have been custom-printed, showed a scantily clad young woman who managed to look both very modern and distinctively Japanese. The image dislodged a recollection from a remote corner of my memory, and I recalled hearing that someone who was a colleague of the founder of the famous beer company was closely connected with the Shanghai Auntie’s family, and as a result my mother had happened to make the influential brewer’s acquaintance when she was young.

There were also a dozen or so clippings of newspaper articles with more photographs than text, either pertaining to the Shanghai Incident of 1932, or else with headlines like CELEBRATION IN MUKDEN OF THE FOUNDING OF MANCHURIA. One photo showed a quiet procession (too sedate to be called a parade) of bizarrely tall Chinese people. Another clipping bore the stark headline: LINDBERGH BABY FOUND DEAD.

I once read an essay by Maurice Sendak in which he recalled a day in his childhood when he went out for a walk with his parents and happened to pass a newsstand where he glimpsed the horrifying photograph of the kidnapped baby’s dead body. (I actually wrote a novel that explored the concept of changelings and was inspired in part by the work of that genius of children’s literature.) At the time, I was seized by what I assumed was nothing more than a false or sympathetic memory of the harrowing photo, but I realized now it must have been a genuine recollection of having seen this newspaper clipping at some point during my own childhood.

While I was attempting to put all the clippings in chronological order, guided by the neat pencil notations at the top that gave the newspaper’s name and the date (most of which preceded my birth), I began to see a path to getting back on track with the newly resurrected drowning novel. The articles appeared to be wildly disparate, but I thought I discerned a pattern in the way they had been selected. That is to say, I suspected my father’s influence must have played a significant role in my mother’s evolving interest in political and international affairs, which seemed to be at odds with her own natural inclinations.

So, I decided, I would try to find the relevant accounts either in the letters to my father, or in the drafts of his replies. I would also need to reread my mother’s journals, paying close attention to how the entries had changed over the years. With those concrete clues in hand, maybe if I just kept digging — and if I could manage to incorporate the long-held ideas I’d expressed in The Silent Cry and had overlaid, in that book, with the area’s popular folklore — perhaps I might be able to chronicle my father’s life and death as it paralleled and reflected this dark period in Japanese history. The thing is, in his own way my father gave a great deal of thought to the history of the age he lived in, but his rigidly ideological views caused him to plan an action so extreme that it would have been laughable if the outcome hadn’t gone beyond mere absurdity to the point of becoming pitiful and, ultimately, fatal.

He set out on the flooded river alone (or with only the other Kogii for company); the boat capsized, and my father was drowned. But surely he didn’t die instantly, and while he was being tossed around underwater by the strong current before drawing his last breath, the drowning man (in a scenario that exactly echoed Eliot’s poem) must have passed again through the various stages, from youth to adulthood, of his relatively short life.

Maybe the rapid series of flashbacks would provide a possible structure for my novel: an organic way to recount my father’s life story, stage by stage. And when he was finally sucked into the whirlpool, the stirring anthem would be ringing in his ears:

Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab.

Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,

Komm und führe mich nur fort….

As I was envisioning the scene I found myself singing along in German — sotto voce and, at least to my ears, not screechily at all.

3

The next day as I was sitting in my study, surrounded by the contents of the red leather trunk, Masao Anai detached himself from the younger members of his troupe (they were hard at work again, moving furniture from place to place) and poked his head through the door.

“I don’t mean to put any pressure on you,” he said puckishly, “but I can’t help wondering whether you’ve found anything interesting so far.”

“Your curiosity is only natural,” I replied in the same playful tone. “I mean, you have a stake in this, too. But I’m afraid I’m still mired in sorting through the materials and trying to put them in order.”

Masao grinned. “The guys and I have been doing hard physical labor since early this morning, while our female counterparts were cooking up some new strategies,” he said. “Speaking of which, Unaiko mentioned that she’s hoping to be able to steal a few minutes of your time later today. She was originally planning to go back up to Matsuyama and take care of some business after dropping off her colleagues, and then come back here. But apparently when she called the stationery shop to check on the pages we’d left to be copied, she ended up getting into a dispute over the unexpectedly high prices they wanted to charge for color, so it looks as if I’ll have to go there myself to straighten out the misunderstanding. I’ll take the young ladies with me, but Unaiko will stay behind.”

A short while later, I went downstairs and found Unaiko waiting for me in the newly rearranged great room. We sat down in a couple of armchairs and then, wasting no time on the usual formulaic pleasantries, she cut right to the chase. “It’s about the rehearsal you were kind enough to watch the other day,” she said. “I’ve been wondering what you thought about it, and Asa said I should ask you directly, so here I am! I gather Asa already spoke to you about some of her concerns?”

“Yes, she did,” I answered. “But it’s not as if she grilled me about my impressions or anything. I mostly just listened to what she had to say.”

“I see,” Unaiko responded with a vigorous nod of her head. Her samurai-child ponytail bobbed up and down. “Actually, Asa seems to think the best approach might be to start by sharing my own thoughts. She was saying that over the years you’ve grown accustomed to having people listen to you while you hold forth at great length, so it can be difficult to get you to stop talking long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.

“But seriously, look at Masao Anai — he’s totally wrapped up in your novels, to the point where he’s in the process of trying to dramatize your entire canon. At the same time, he’s able to view your work with the critical eye of a member of the younger generation. His admiration for your books seems to be tempered by an awareness of their flaws, and I think that’s part of his reason for wanting to convert them into theater, using his own methodology.

“When I speak about Masao’s ‘critical admiration,’ the same ambivalence has characterized my own feelings about you, Mr. Choko, but there’s a degree of divergence there as well. Like the other day I was immersed in the dramatization of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, but on another level I still felt detached and somewhat skeptical. To be honest, during the rehearsals and afterward, too, those conflicted feelings just kept on getting stronger. In the scene where the soldiers are setting out from the mountain valley, heading toward their doomed insurrection, the child is singing along with the grown-ups. After the song ends, the person who’s playing the role of the child in his adult form shrieks the father’s Japanese interpretation of those lyrics like a crazy person — which, of course, he is.

“The emperor will wipe away my tears with his own hand / Come quickly, O death, death that is the sibling of sleep / Come quickly / The emperor himself will wipe away my tears with his own hand.

“To tell you the truth, I really don’t care for that kind of overwrought verbiage. In fact, it really creeps me out. And when we were prepping for our first rehearsals, months ago, I asked Masao a bunch of questions. ‘Shall we perform this with a critical edge? What about the various characters: the young boy with his high, childish voice; the soldiers, singing the boisterous chorus; and the leader, who’s in the throes of terminal cancer and riding in the funky wooden chariot? Should they all project an aura of comical grotesquerie, or should we play it straight?’

“Masao answered my questions with a question of his own: ‘Well, what about when you’re playing the boy’s mother?’ I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, so I asked, ‘Do you mean that I should just put the emphasis on her sarcastically critical words?’

“And then Masao (who tends to be a bit volatile at times) suddenly got angry and went off on a seemingly unrelated tangent. ‘Why do I have to be the messenger boy for Choko’s infatuation with the whole concept of postwar democracy?’ he demanded. He calmed down after a moment, as he always does, and then he went out of his way to help me understand his feelings. He said, ‘For Choko, along with a kind of doctrinaire embracing of the postwar strain of anti-ultranationalism, there’s also a deeper, darker, more nuanced Japanese sensibility. That’s why I’ve taken such an interest in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, and I have a hunch the same duality will show up in the drowning novel as well, once it’s finished.’

“As for me,” Unaiko went on, “when we were performing Wipe My Tears Away for you the other day, I found myself unexpectedly moved. I could tell from Asa’s response that she and I were experiencing similar feelings. If you asked me what I found most affecting I would have to say it was when you suddenly started to sing along with the German song so passionately. It’s not as if I was suddenly swept away by a wave of emperor-worshipping nationalism through the medium of Bach’s cantata. No, I’m coming from a place of fundamental aversion to that type of thinking, so my activities with the Caveman Group are actually an ongoing way of dealing with my antipathy. (You’ll understand this better in a moment, after I tell you my own little story.)

“I was aware that you’ve taken a strong public stand against the resurgence of ultranationalism, especially through your essays and other writings. Even so, for you to undergo such an intense emotional experience as a child, and to revisit it now through the medium of a stage play … that must have had a major impact on you. I know it did on me, because it led me to an interest in you and your work that was different from the feelings I had before — and I think that’s also because Masao’s dramatization of your book has so much raw power.

“As I mentioned earlier, there’s a relevant story I’d like to share with you today, about an experience that made a profound impression on me. It happened at Yasukuni Shrine. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not some big authority on the place. It’s just … when I was seventeen years old my aunt happened to take me along when she went to pray at that famous (and, needless to say, controversial) shrine. That was my first visit and my last. I’ve never gone back there, but that one experience turned out to be a rather momentous event in my life. I’d like to tell you what happened, if you don’t mind.”

I gave an encouraging nod.

“My aunt was married to a man who had spent his entire career as a civil servant in the Ministry of Education,” Unaiko began. “I don’t know whether she was influenced by her husband, or vice versa, but by early middle age they were both right-wing zealots. My aunt’s grandfather was a lieutenant colonel in the navy who died in the war, and that’s probably why she took me with her to Yasukuni Shrine, seventeen years ago. It wasn’t as if she had been invited there for a scheduled ceremony to honor the war dead, though; when we got to the gates we had to stand in a long line with all the other people who had come to pay their respects, or sightsee, or whatever, and we slowly shuffled through the precincts of the shrine like everybody else. After a while we came to the main altar, and my aunt started ringing the bell and clapping her hands to attract the attention of the gods. Then she started praying for the soul of her grandfather, the departed war hero. This ritual went on for an inordinately long time, and I stood next to her, bored out of my teenage mind, staring at the ground. I was startled by the sound of a loud voice, and when I looked up I saw that the area, which had been flooded with people, was rapidly emptying out. Even now, all these years later, the memory of the scene that unfolded before my eyes is totally vivid, as if it had happened this morning.

“The biggest flag I had ever seen was waving wildly right before my eyes; a vast expanse of white cotton with a bloodred rising sun in the center. I recognized it immediately as the Japanese national flag, of course, but it was so abnormally large that I was frightened. The person who was manipulating the gigantic flag, holding the flagpole in front of his body with both hands, was a young man dressed in the black uniform of a student. As he waved it back and forth, the humongous rectangle of white cotton with the bright red sphere in the middle was the only thing I could see. The flag never stopped moving, and I caught a glimpse of a second man behind the flag waver. He was dressed in an old-style military uniform and soldier’s cap (the kind they wear in the desert, with hanging flaps to protect the neck from the sun), and he was brandishing a long sword above his head. Both men seemed to be reciting some sort of vow or pledge, but even though they were slowly chanting the same words, over and over, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying.

“At that moment I suddenly began to throw up all over the place. My aunt pulled something — maybe a handkerchief — out of the folds of her kimono and tried to cover the lower half of my face, but I just went on endlessly spewing vomit in every direction, with tremendous velocity. My aunt took off the short jacket she was wearing over her kimono and draped it around my upper body, which was covered with the partially digested remains of my breakfast. And then (rather coldly, I thought) she frog-marched me toward the exit. The soldiers must have thought that I’d shown extreme irreverence by being sick on sacred ground, even involuntarily, because they followed close behind us with their long swords drawn. My aunt and I ended up running away from our pursuers at full speed, as if our very lives depended on it. And I know I didn’t imagine this melodramatic scene, because my aunt seems to remember it the same way.

“So that’s my story about Yasukuni Shrine. We made it home safely, more or less, and I won’t go into what happened afterward, but for the past seventeen years I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that bizarre and frightening experience.

“After graduating from high school I got an insignificant little job, and then I sort of bounced around from one entry-level position to another. It was a coworker at one of those forgettable jobs who took me to see a stage performance by the Caveman Group, and it came as a total revelation. Is it really possible to live like this? I asked myself. I knew I had to try, so I began to study drama in my spare time while continuing to work at my boring day job.

“But even during that busy and exciting period in my life I kept on thinking about the incident at Yasukuni Shrine, which was still festering in my memory like a psychic cancer. The truth is, Mr. Choko, at the time I wasn’t very familiar with your work. However, Masao was in the ongoing process of creating plays based on your fiction, and as I began to get drawn into the productions myself, I decided it was time to read your novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. And that, more than anything, was my first real encounter with the realm you’ve created in your books.

“I think you have a pretty good idea of what’s transpired since then,” she went on. “As you know, in his late teens Masao was taken under the creative wing of your late brother-in-law, Goro Hanawa. I gather he also met your wife through that connection. According to Masao, Goro Hanawa used to tell him he ought to familiarize himself with your novel Adventures in Everyday Life, because when Goro eventually turned that book into a screenplay, the only actor who could possibly play the part of the picaresque protagonist would be Masao. As you know, the film never got made, but the upshot was that Masao has been constantly reading and rereading your books ever since, while a more typical member of his generation might have dismissed you as an irrelevant fossil from the past. (No offense.) Masao’s immersion in your work ended up bearing fruit in the form of his award-winning production of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, and now he’s busy trying to create a compressed retrospective of your novels in dramatic form. He even moved our theater troupe’s base of operations from Tokyo to Matsuyama, to be closer to the area where so many of your books take place.

“No sooner had we moved down here than Masao started visiting Asa, and he often took me along. Asa was very welcoming, and she totally got what we were doing. She let us hold workshops at the Forest House, and that was when she told us you would be coming to spend some time here. She didn’t have a lot of details, but she did say you’d be sorting through a bunch of materials your mother had left behind, as part of the research for a partially written book that might turn out to be the final chapter of your life as a fiction writer.

“When Asa shared the news, Masao was super excited. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘That must be the long-lost drowning novel!’ Asa hadn’t mentioned the project by name, but Masao seems to have developed a sort of sixth sense when it comes to you and your work.

“As for me, I couldn’t help thinking how great it would be if the author of the original Wipe My Tears Away were living nearby. I had this idea that if I could talk to you and hear your thoughts about Yasukuni Shrine and ultranationalism in general, then maybe I would be able to figure out what significance that whole ideological can of worms has for me. Since I’m the type of person who likes to translate thought into action right away, I decided to plead with you directly to join us down here as soon as possible. That’s how I came to be lying in wait to ambush you the other day in Tokyo. Of course, due to totally unforeseeable circumstances, my ploy was more successful than I could ever have imagined!”

Yes, I thought. Early one morning on the cycling path beside the canal near my house, I suddenly swooned and started to fall backward, only to be caught from behind by an unseen Good Samaritan. A moment later I found myself in a sitting position, with my entire weight supported by one of this invisible stranger’s strong, resilient thighs. I have to confess that I’ve thought more than once about how odd the tableau would have appeared to a passerby who didn’t understand the situation. I didn’t say any of this out loud, though.

“Anyway, for me,” Unaiko continued, “putting aside what Masao said about your being totally supportive of the postwar democratic reforms to the point of being doctrinaire, I was slightly concerned about Masao’s statement that the Japanese people also have a ‘deeper, darker sensibility.’ But then when I saw you getting totally carried away and singing along with the German lyrics of the Bach song during the rehearsal of our play … well, seeing another side of you was like a revelation, and I started to think about you in a whole different light. And that’s why I wanted to share this piece of my past with you today. I’ll be grateful for any illumination you can provide.”

I didn’t feel ready to tackle “that whole ideological can of worms” just then, so I skirted the issue by offering a compliment. “Asa has never been the type to jump into projects with people she barely knows,” I said. “Although on the rare occasions when it does happen, she tends to be rather gung ho. To be perfectly candid, I have to say that I’m intrigued by her decision to team up with you.”

“Masao was saying that Asa had done her part to support your work by staying behind in the village and looking after your mother,” Unaiko said. “Even in our brief acquaintance, I’ve come to share his feeling that Asa is the kind of person who would go the distance for anyone she cares about.”

“That’s very true,” I said. “But Asa seems totally committed to backing you, even though it isn’t exactly clear what direction you’re heading in, and as her brother I’m interested in seeing how everything will turn out.”

“It’s very comforting for me to have Asa here, cheering us on,” Unaiko said. “But the thing is, even I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed. Masao’s the one who mentored me, of course, and I’ll continue to be involved with his theater projects for the foreseeable future at least, so I expect I’ll go on benefiting from Asa’s support and kindness as well.

“However, I have a feeling that at some point my path will deviate from Masao’s, and I’ll strike out on my own. I mean, after all, Masao is the boss of the Caveman Group, and he’s a guy as well, right? I think Asa takes a rather sanguine view of the male dynamic. Oh, that reminds me — the other day she said, ‘Listen, Unaiko, you really shouldn’t expect my brother to do too much, even if the going gets tough. But I want you to know you can always depend on me.’ She added that you tend to help people primarily by lending your skills as a writer. (And, I gathered, as an occasional screenwriter? That sounds exciting!) She told me that I need to respect that invisible line and not ask too much of you.

“I totally understand the need for boundaries,” Unaiko went on, “but there are some other things I still haven’t been able to get a handle on … I mean, I do talk to Asa a lot, and I have a sense of what’s going on with you just from comments she’s made in passing. Even when we first met, Asa used to talk about you all the time. One time she said, ‘My brother may come across as an easygoing sort of person, but on another level he has a tendency to brood over his mistakes. He’s constantly tormented by regrets and misgivings about the past: deeds not done, roads not taken, and so on. He’s been that way for as long as I can remember, going back to childhood. I’m the same way. However, since I’ve gotten involved with the Caveman Group, and especially as my relationship has grown with the female members of the troupe — and with you especially, Unaiko — I’ve begun to feel as if I should be able to overcome that undesirable character trait. I’ve noticed young women nowadays don’t appear to have any regrets about anything, or any awareness of the possibility that their present actions might be sowing the seeds for future regrets. That’s perfectly natural, of course, since they probably haven’t had time to do anything they regret. They seem to feel completely fine about everything: clean and true and pure of heart. Since my eyes have been opened to that approach, I’ve been trying to adjust my own attitude accordingly.’

“I hope you don’t mind my quoting this long monologue, Mr. Choko, but your sister’s words made a huge impression on me. Asa went on to say, ‘If you can live in such a liberated way, all the more reason for someone like me to try to do the same, even at this late date. I’m not getting any younger, and I may not even have time to properly regret the foolish things I’m doing right now, so I’ll just have to follow the lead of my young female role models. Yes, I’ve made up my mind: from now on, my life will be a regret-free zone!’

“And after that, Asa did something truly touching. She made a solemn promise to stick with me artistically, even if it meant ending up on the opposite side from you, her own brother. As you know, Asa doesn’t make a habit of touching the person she’s talking to, so the image of her reaching out and putting her little hand on my shoulder as she spoke those words — just like this — is permanently seared into my memory.”

4

The following day, while I was reshuffling the materials from the red leather trunk that I’d laid out around my study, pausing periodically to speed-read whatever happened to catch my eye, Masao stopped by to drop off the color copies Asa had ordered from the shop in Matsuyama.

“It was terribly kind of you to grant Unaiko a private audience yesterday,” he said with exaggerated formality. “To tell you the truth,” he went on, lapsing back into his normal speech patterns, “I was sweating it a little bit. Originally I thought that if Unaiko had a bee in her bonnet about our dramatization of Wipe My Tears Away—and if she was just going to criticize the play, as she’s done in the past, as an orgy of Yasukuni Shrine-worshipping ultranationalism or whatever — then it would have been a waste of time for her to talk to you about it. That’s what I was thinking in the beginning. But the other day during the rehearsal, we came to the scene where the young officers and the schoolboy are on their way to the ill-fated insurrection and they spontaneously start singing a song about the Heiland—who is on the same exalted level as our emperor — praising him as a savior. To everyone’s amazement, you were so moved that you began to sing along with the chorus, and Unaiko told me afterward that when she saw your reaction it made her curious about what you were feeling in that moment. Oh, and another thing she said, after your meeting, was that since you listened so patiently to her story, the fundamental mistrust she used to feel toward you has disappeared (even though I gather you didn’t exactly answer her questions). Apparently your attentiveness came as a pleasant surprise because Asa had told us that one thing you and Unaiko have in common is that neither of you is very good at listening to what other people have to say!

“Speaking of listening,” Masao continued, “my dramatic method involves incorporating a variety of voices and ways of thinking into every production, and then bringing the collaborative synergy to life onstage. It may seem paradoxical to say this, since I’m supposed to be the director and the man in charge, but Unaiko’s artistic input has been increasingly valuable to our group as we develop our own trademark style.”

“Considering she was in her late twenties when she joined your group, it’s rather remarkable that Unaiko has learned to express her own sensibilities in such a short time,” I said.

“Yes, she’s truly special in that respect. I’m not sure why, but Unaiko has a powerful ability to influence not only her juniors but also women who are older than she is. It’s been only five or six years since Unaiko became a full-fledged member of the Caveman Group, and she has already created her own performance piece, with the help of the younger women in the troupe. It runs for about half an hour, and when they performed it in public it was very well received. The piece is called Tossing the Dead Dogs. You may remember having heard the title at some point?”

“I do indeed,” I said.

“Of course, this was back when our group was still based in the suburbs of Tokyo,” Masao went on. “Our young members used to get up early every morning to do their outdoor exercise routines: walking, running, calisthenics to build core strength, and so on. (I know you’ve made a habit of going for walks, so you’ll understand.) Anyway, this was during the time when the trend of constructing local autonomous townships on the outskirts of Tokyo — what they call ‘bed towns’—was just getting off the ground. At the same time, there was a major boom in dog ownership among the residents of these new suburban communities, and some of the young people from our troupe started to clash with the ladies who were out for a leisurely stroll with their dogs. Our members were trying to get in a serious workout on the training course, but the dog-walking ladies were constantly stopping to gossip right in the middle of the track, blocking traffic for the oncoming runners. Naturally, the athletes were annoyed, and they complained about this basic lack of consideration. They didn’t take their objections any further than that, but Unaiko, who was there both for her own training and as a group leader, observed the behavior of the women and their dogs with great interest. She had a fantasy about how the problem of the lollygagging ladies with their dogs might be resolved with a judicious show of power, and she turned that high-concept idea into a performance piece. Parts of the dialogue were probably based on things our young colleagues had actually said, but Unaiko gets all the credit for deciding to have the play focus on the dog-walking ladies and their over-the-top reactions to the confrontation. Her portrayal of the escalating hostilities between the entitled ladies with their froufrou dogs and the guys from our theater troupe, as the two factions hurled increasingly scurrilous insults back and forth, was nothing less than masterful. Because of the way the stage was arranged, our actors received a lot of vocal encouragement from a cheering section of ringers we’d planted in the audience. As for the group of women onstage, each clutching her own little boutique dog, their next step was to fling plastic bags full of dog poop in the general direction of our contingent. And then, as things continued to heat up, the women began throwing the dogs themselves at their adversaries, and that was the dramatic climax of the piece. Needless to say, both the ‘excrement’ and the ‘dogs’ were stage props: totally fake.

“The title Unaiko gave the piece, Tossing the Dead Dogs, is derived from the climactic ending. That title cracks me up — ha ha ha! I still can’t help laughing every time I hear it.”

At this point, I volunteered a dog-related anecdote of my own. Back in the 1960s, during the time when the popular protests in Europe against the Vietnam War were reaching a crescendo, Günter Grass had published a novel in the form of an on-site report about the youth movement in West Germany. One of the book’s most harrowing sections, which I still remembered vividly, told of a young student called Scherbaum who was threatening to burn his pet dachshund alive in public as a consciousness-raising demonstration against the war.

“If a university student had actually done such a thing in Berlin — I mean, presumably it wouldn’t have been beyond the realm of possibility — it probably would have created a major uproar,” Masao said. “Our group’s production of Tossing the Dead Dogs provoked quite a bit of protest from dog lovers’ groups, too, and as the person in charge of the theater group I was called onto the carpet to defend the piece against the absurd charges that it somehow condoned or even promoted cruelty to dogs. I tried to be circumspect about expressing my personal feelings, but Unaiko and her cohorts weren’t nearly so restrained, and they couldn’t resist the temptation to speak out. Even after I decided to pull the controversial piece and substitute something less incendiary they were there in the theater, lobbying for their right to freedom of expression. They were so mad at me for knuckling under to outside pressure that I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d hurled some ‘feces’ and ‘dead dogs’ at me — I’m sure they must have wanted to! It was a very difficult and stressful time, but fortunately the storm eventually blew over, and we actually ended up receiving some positive publicity as a result.”

“Did it ever reach the point where it looked as if the Caveman Group might have to disband?” I asked.

“Oh, no, it never went that far. The male members of the troupe, in particular, found the whole turn of events immensely amusing, and they seemed to get a kick out of all the excitement and notoriety. As for Unaiko, she’s someone who lives by the maxim ‘Never stop striving.’ It’s just one of the things that make her so unique, and so powerful.”

“My sister, Asa, has some similar traits, and surely that’s part of the reason she and Unaiko have hit it off so well,” I remarked. “I’m quite certain that whatever Unaiko chooses to do from now on, Asa will try to help in any way she can.”

“Unaiko has definitely found a strong ally in Asa,” Masao said, “though I can’t help thinking that at some point the dynamic duo may try to sway you to their alternative vision of this production. They may very well win the battle in the end — nothing’s set in stone. But one thing I’m sure of after talking this over with Unaiko is that I’ve finally found the key to the retrospective dramatization of your novels I’m working on now.

“As I’ve mentioned, my plan is to layer scenes from your books with the interviews in which we’ll be discussing your work. Even with the supernatural figure of Kogii cropping up throughout the piece as a sort of visual continuo, the focus will still be quite vague and scattered. However, Unaiko has a different idea. She thought we might try superimposing the Kogii theme directly over your progress on the novel you’re planning to write about your father.”

“Both approaches sound promising,” I said noncommittally. “Let’s wait and see how things develop, shall we?”

“I hope Unaiko doesn’t inadvertently cross any of your invisible lines — or ‘friendly barriers,’ to use Asa’s term,” Masao said playfully. “I mean, I have to admit that her willfulness and adventurous spirit haven’t caused any major problems for the activities of the Caveman Group — at least not yet. And I’m pleased to report that she hasn’t broached the idea of staging an abbreviated performance of Tossing the Dead Dogs on the hallowed grounds of Yasukuni Shrine! Seriously, though, assuming you’re willing to cooperate, we’re all feeling very optimistic about forging ahead with the dramatization of the drowning novel, with Unaiko leading the way.

“But of course,” Masao concluded, shooting me a significant look, “we’re acutely aware that the whole project hinges on one crucial thing: what you find in the red leather trunk.”

Chapter 4. Joke Accompli

1

The moment Masao Anai handed me the envelopes, I began to feel uneasy. They weren’t nearly as bulging as I would have expected, and they were also suspiciously light. All the pages fit into three large square envelopes: both the color copies and the originals, which consisted mostly of folio-size sheets of handmade Japanese washi paper decorated with watercolor paintings, illustrations, and calligraphic annotations. (Adding such impromptu embellishments to correspondence was a long-standing tradition among cultured people in Japan.) The photocopies were so precise that they had even captured the attractively blurry places where the ink or paint had run, but I was disappointed because I had been hoping more than anything that the envelope would contain some actual letters, but there wasn’t a single one.

I had more than one memory of catching a glimpse of my father in his little study — a cramped, narrow hideaway where he engaged in activities that had nothing to do with running our family business. He would pick up a large piece of paper covered with pictures and inscriptions, then lift it above his forehead with both hands in the manner of someone giving thanks to the gods, and I noticed that he always seemed to treat the missives from his mentor in Kochi with particular reverence.

“I wonder what sort of stuff is written on those pages,” I remember saying to my mother.

“Things that probably couldn’t be understood by the likes of you and me!” was her crisp response, but I thought I heard a distinct undertone of awe. Much later, when I’d all but forgotten about having mentioned the pages, my mother finally offered an explanation.

“There were some Chinese characters on those pages that even your father didn’t recognize, but he was able to find them in volume one of Morohashi Sensei’s kanji dictionary,” she said one day out of the blue, adding that once the renowned lexicographer had finished the other twelve volumes of his magnum opus there probably wouldn’t be a single character or word you couldn’t find in them.

My response was to say, “If every word anyone could think of writing is already listed in the dictionary, then nobody can ever say anything new. Where’s the fun in that?”

“When I told Papa what you said, he laughed,” she informed me later. “And then he joked, ‘Maybe someday our son will write something that can’t be found in any dictionaries!’”

As I understood it, all those artistic-looking letters were written on paper my father had made from paperbush bark the government’s official money-printing bureau had deemed substandard and returned to us. His decision to use the rejected bark struck me as alarmingly subversive, but my mother just said: “Of course, ‘substandard’ isn’t exactly the verdict we were hoping for, but your father turned it into a positive, saying happily, ‘Don’t worry, I think I can still make some good paper out of this!’” I got the sense that my mother had been a bit perplexed by my father’s cheerful reaction.

Every time my father would send a batch of the paper to his guru in Kochi, whom he held in the highest esteem, the Kochi Sensei (as he was known around our house) would turn those pages into works of art by covering them with paintings and calligraphy. He would then mail them back, often accompanied by letters written on the rougher paper, handcrafted from mulberry or pink mullein, which my father shared with his mentor from time to time along with the sheets he had made from rejected paperbush bark.

Sometimes those letters included little postscripts addressed to my mother. Once when I asked her what they said, she replied coolly, “Oh, he was just thanking me for the gifts of dried matsutake and goby and sweetfish.” Her tone seemed to suggest she wasn’t the Kochi Sensei’s biggest fan, for reasons that (I’m speculating in retrospect here) probably had to do with his far-right political views.

I stuck the big envelopes Masao had given me on a bookshelf, still feeling shocked that they hadn’t contained a single copy of the letters my father had received — just copies of the envelopes those letters had arrived in. All my father’s replies were missing as well. His usual routine when he received a letter was to scribble a draft of his response, which he then attached with a rubber band to the envelope containing the relevant correspondent’s missive. (My mother used to praise him for this efficient filing system.) Those drafts had somehow vanished along the way, along with the letters.

Oh well, I thought, making an effort to look on the bright side. I’ll just try to make the best of what I have. I dragged a chair over to the shelves and continued perusing the contents of the envelopes, one photocopied page at a time. As the afternoon light flooding the mountain valley began to fade, I could feel the enthusiasm I’d felt when I first started working, shortly before noon, ebbing away as well. I struggled to remain hopeful and upbeat, but as the sun sank out of sight at the end of the disappointing day my spirits plummeted at an equally rapid rate.

* * *

2

By the time Asa stopped by to deliver my evening meal, the last shreds of optimism had been replaced by full-blown melancholia. One quick glance at my gloomy expression was all it took for my sister to suss out my state of mind, and she observed me closely as I picked up my chopsticks and, without a word, dug into the food she had placed on the table in front of me.

After a while, in a tone of voice that was neutral rather than sympathetic, Asa began to speak. “While Mother still had her eyesight, she used to like to tidy up the clutter in her life from time to time,” she said. “And whenever she embarked on that task, I would watch while she attacked our father’s archived correspondence with a vengeance. It seemed to be a matter of particular concern to her, and I would think, At this rate it won’t be long until all the letters have been destroyed and there’s nothing left but the envelopes …”

“Well, I suppose it was inevitable that Mother’s bouts of intensive housekeeping would have a few casualties,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and honestly, I really don’t feel as though I can complain about the choices she made. I mean, by rights all those things belonged to her, and we knew that she’d gotten appraisals from antiques dealers and used-book stores and had learned they had no value to speak of. It’s just that for the longest time I’ve been wanting to check out the contents of the trunk, and it’s become a bit of an obsession, to tell the truth. I was hoping against hope that if I could examine Father’s correspondence, journals, and so on (assuming such things even existed), those materials might provide some concrete evidence about the things I’ve been speculating about for decades — and might even resolve the lingering questions and ambiguities, once and for all.”

“Really, though,” Asa said, “doesn’t it seem likely that Mother knew you wouldn’t be able to write the book without some kind of spark to jump-start your imagination? At the end, after she had thrown away the letters, maybe the only reason she kept some of the envelopes was because the senders’ names rang a nostalgic bell for her.”

“From what I’ve seen, you’re right; this batch of papers doesn’t contain a single document that could be used to jump-start my imagination, as you put it,” I said. “I’ve already accepted that, reluctantly, and I’m even finding it rather odd that I still haven’t managed to give up daydreaming about Father after all these years. I’ve indulged in conjecture about what might have been going on while Father was alive, up through the events I chronicled in my partial draft of the drowning novel. (The truth is, there have been times when I’ve wondered whether what happened in the middle of that stormy night might just be a figment of my imagination.) As you know, I put some of the wilder scenarios into The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. I think for Mother, choosing to burn the letters was her way of smashing my wishful imaginings to bits, as if she were saying, See? Your ridiculous theories about your father being a hero really don’t have a leg to stand on. And now I’ve finally been forced to give up for the simple reason that I don’t have a single clue or scrap of evidence to support my position. If this had been a court case, it would have been a decisive victory for our mother.”

“Well,” Asa said, “from my point of view the strange thing is that it’s taken you so long to reach this realization. Better late than never, I suppose. The fact is, I’ve completely ignored the red leather trunk during the ten years since Mother’s death because I was dreading the Pandora’s box effect opening the trunk might have on you, and I didn’t want to do anything to cause you pain. However, while Mother was still alive I did have a few chances to read bits and pieces of the papers stored in the trunk. There were times when she would suddenly open the trunk and fish something out, as if she were possessed by some ancient memory, and I was always standing nearby, peeking over her shoulder. That’s how I knew she had started burning the papers to ashes on an old compost heap behind the house. She never told me what she was tossing into the flames, or why, but if I showed the slightest concern she would say something like ‘Oh, this is just some rubbish I don’t need to hang on to anymore.’ I thought it was perfectly reasonable that Mother would continue those periodic purges as she embarked on the second half of her very long life. And it was clear those weren’t spur-of-the-moment decisions by any means; she was obviously determined to tidy up the past, a few chapters at a time.

“In your work to date, you’ve portrayed Father as a grotesquely exaggerated character, almost a cartoon — sometimes ludicrous, sometimes tragic, sometimes a bit heroic — but really, your take on him has been all over the map. In other words, for you, there was no clarity so there could be no absolution or closure, either. I think while Mother may have appeared to be systematically destroying your dreams, she was also trying to be true to her late husband, in her own way. I suspect that she burned a lot of papers after I moved out of her house. Maybe she was upset by the content of Father’s correspondence with some of his more eccentric cohorts, or perhaps she was just trying to protect her dead husband against any more of what she perceived as the defamatory caricaturing in Wipe My Tears Away.

“For me, right now, seeing you laid so low really does make me feel sorry for you, but at the same time it also confirms my belief that Mother did the right thing. The ten years since she passed away should have served as a sort of cooling-off period, and by now you ought to be able to deal with these things in a rational, levelheaded manner. Even if you’re in low spirits, you know what they say about people in our age group: ‘For an older person, there’s a thin line between reasonably copacetic and downright depressed.’ So I’m sure you’ll get over this disappointment before too long.

“When I gave Unaiko and her colleagues the partial manuscript of your drowning novel,” Asa went on, “I kept the index cards that were in the same bundle, and I’ve been reading them. As you probably remember, they contain little sketches or vignettes about incidents you witnessed, such as when the young officers came to our place for a get-together, or when the enlisted men (who were even younger) took you out in the boat and showed you how to operate the tiller. In the notes, you seem to have somehow conflated those memories with a vague recollection of what happened on the night of the massive flood. The section where you describe how Father’s boat gets swept away by the current seems to be written more or less realistically, and it’s entertaining the way those events are layered with your patented flights of fancy about seeing your doppelgänger and so on. But somehow it didn’t ring true, and I couldn’t help thinking how much Mother would have hated that sort of ungrounded narrative.

“Look, as long as we’re being candid, I’ll admit that I thought it was pretty willful of Mother to take such a radical approach to ‘tidying up’ the contents of the red leather trunk. But I honestly don’t believe she did it with malice aforethought, for the express purpose of destroying your plan to someday finish writing the drowning novel. If that had been her intention, she could have just told me to take the trunk and chuck it into the river at high tide, and that would have been the end of the story.

“Listen, I’m about to say something shamelessly sentimental, but I believe Mother really did love you. And as for the drowning novel you were always so preoccupied with, I think she ended up feeling that you should be free to complete it according to your own artistic vision. She wanted you to realize your perception of our father was mistaken, and she thought you should keep that in mind while you were writing the book. For her, those feelings were probably tantamount to love — which would mean she also loved our poor, misguided father as well. His life wasn’t exactly short on folly, but the thing Mother found the most foolish of all was the way he allowed himself to be led down the garden path of political extremism by his so-called mentor. Because of that connection, when the war finally came to an end our father got tangled up in the stupid, futile plot with the officers from Matsuyama. So it’s only natural that Mother would decide the most prudent course of action would be to eliminate the hard evidence pertaining to that particular bit of madness by throwing out any incriminating correspondence. Don’t you agree? It’s also possible that Mother burned those letters, over time, because she felt sorry for Papa for having been such a gullible fool. I mean, there were still lots of empty envelopes, right? When I was doing my summer housecleaning one year, I read one of those letters — just one. It was very friendly and congenial, with the writer teasing our father (whom he addressed as ‘older brother’) about being a member of the ‘elite mountain battalion’ and so on. Even if a plan for some sort of uprising to protest the end of the war really did exist, I suspect Papa might have been the only person who believed in it, and I can’t help feeling as if the only thing the plan produced was his dead body, drowned in the river.

“To Mother’s way of thinking (which seems quite reasonable to me), there was no point in your chronicling the ill-fated scheme in a book, but despite those strong feelings she at least hung on to the envelopes. As for me, I felt honor bound to take care of the red leather trunk and what was left of its contents, in accordance with Mother’s final wishes.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been nursing my own illusions and fantasies about our father for a very long time, and all this information you’re sharing now is news to me.”

“You know, during the three years after you published The Silent Cry you were writing constantly,” Asa said. “You made clean copies of the pages you’d drafted of the drowning novel and sent them to Mother along with the index cards we’ve been talking about. She wrote to me in Kyoto, where I was living at the time, saying basically: Please come home as soon as possible and help me read this stuff. I can’t make head or tail of it on my own!

“So I rushed home on the train that same night. When I wondered out loud why you would send our mother fragments of a book you had barely started writing, she said astutely you probably couldn’t proceed any further without the materials in the red leather trunk, and you must be hoping she would grant you access to the trove. I said to Mother, ‘I think you’d better refuse,’ and she replied that after reading the pages you’d sent, she had reached the same conclusion. Then when I wrote to let you know what we’d decided, you accepted our verdict so meekly I could hardly believe it. You even said that since your hopes of gaining access to the red leather trunk had been dashed, we should go ahead and burn the partial manuscript you had sent. That made Mother really happy, but as for burning your work, she said, ‘I will do no such thing — that would be a terrible waste! I’ll just stick those pages in the red leather trunk. They’ll be the first new additions in twenty years, at least.’ The only other time I can ever remember seeing her so cheerful was when Akari, in spite of his disabilities, managed to compose an amazing piece of music called ‘The Marvels of the Forest,’ and he sent her a recording of it.

“But anyhow, about a year later, you published The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. Mother was too shocked to put together a coherent sentence, but when I relayed her strong objections to the novella your response was to say that anyone who read the book would surely realize it was meant to be a work of fiction — and as I, Asa, should know better than anyone, you had written it without recourse to the materials in the red leather trunk. You followed up with an explanatory letter, admitting you’d turned Papa into a total caricature and pointing out that the book was equally merciless toward the character of the son, who represented you. ‘Self-critical to the point of exaggeration’ was how you put it, as I recall.

“As for the mother’s calm, critical observations, she was clearly being presented as the lone voice of sanity, but that cold comfort didn’t mitigate her extreme loathing for your book. Mother and I both had the distinct feeling that this glib, self-critical writer, who came across as a full-fledged Tokyoite, wasn’t the same person we used to call Kogii. We simply didn’t recognize you anymore. At any rate, that’s how we came to be estranged from you for such a long time. Mother suffered terribly when it happened, and for years afterward as well.”

When I didn’t respond, my younger sister began to cry. Her face was deeply flushed, and I was reminded that our mother used to cry in the same open, red-faced way, making no attempt to hide her vulnerability behind her hand. Asa paused for a long moment, then spoke through her tears.

“Kogii, the part of your drowning novel I returned to you after all this time — forty years! — begins by recounting a recurrent dream of yours, isn’t that right? As you wrote in those pages, the big question seems to be whether your dream is based on something you actually experienced, or whether you first dreamed about the scene you described, then came to believe it had actually happened and, later on, began to dream about it again in a new and different form. And, as you wrote in the early draft, you really weren’t sure where reality or memory ended and dreams began. Ever since I first read your account, after rushing home from Kyoto on the overnight train, I’ve always somehow thought you were only pretending not to know the answer to those questions. I mean, seriously, is there any doubt about what happened that night? I remember vividly how you sent me into the back parlor to see our father after they brought his body home. He was lying on a futon, and I reached out and touched his wet hair. I think the reason you keep saying you’re unsure whether the scene on the river was a dream or reality — and the reason you’ve been so obsessed with wanting to finish your drowning novel — is that you feel you should have been with Father when he rashly set out on the raging river in his little boat and ended up losing his life, and the guilt about what you see as a personal failure has haunted you ever since. As I recall, he had told you to come with him and steer the boat, but you took your own sweet time getting there and Papa, who was never a very patient man, got tired of waiting and took off without you. (Or maybe the boat just got tossed into the waves; we’ll never know for sure.)

“Mother swore me to silence about what I’m about to tell you, but here goes. That night, she walked over to the cornfield and stood on the stone wall looking down on the river, so she saw what happened. And she said to me, on more than one occasion, ‘I’m terribly glad Kogii didn’t go with his father after all.’ I guess she felt it would have been cruel to tell you she was watching, and that was why she never mentioned it to you. She must have realized that knowing there was a witness would have deprived you of your only refuge: pretending to be unable to distinguish between dream and reality.”

“I’m absolutely stunned,” I said. “I had no idea. Mother really thought it was a good thing I blew my assignment and literally missed the boat? The light from the full moon would have been shining through some breaks in the cloud cover, so if she was watching from above she must have witnessed my moment of shame. I mean, Father had put his trust in me — he even took the trouble to teach me how to use the tiller to steer the boat — and then when he needed my help the most I just stood there, totally useless, with the muddy water swirling around my chest, and watched the storm surf carry him away.”

“Anyhow,” Asa said, “Mother said that after Father’s boat was swept away you came slowly dog-paddling back to shore, and her heart was filled with indescribable joy. And now — were you thinking that if you could pick up where you left off with your drowning novel, you would somehow be able to make posthumous amends to our father and restore the good name of the little boy who swam sadly back to shore, feeling like a failure? And were you hoping you might be able to obtain some sort of magical absolution just by sorting through the materials in the red leather trunk?”

Though no longer red, Asa’s face was still contorted by emotion, and the tears continued to course down the deep furrows that ran from her cheeks to her mouth. I just sat there in a daze, feeling utterly annihilated. After some time had passed, my sister once again lifted her eyes and spoke to me. She’d stopped crying, but the expression on her face was markedly somber and subdued. She had evidently been wrestling with a difficult decision, but she now appeared to have made up her mind.

“Since I’ve already betrayed Mother’s trust by telling you something I promised not to share, I may as well go ahead and spill the rest of the beans,” she said. “Three years before she died, Mother recorded her account of what happened on that night when Father went out on the stormy river and lost his life. I have the cassette, and I want you to listen to it. You’re aware, of course, that after Mother’s eyesight began to fail and she wasn’t able to write letters, she started to use the tape recorder — which until then she had only been using to listen to Akari’s musical compositions — to create verbal thank-you notes, and she would send those tapes to people in lieu of letters. In fact, you even lifted her comments about the marvels of the forest from one of those tapes, and quoted them in a novel, as I recall.

“I was the one who oversaw the making of the tapes — who else, right? — but when Mother first said, ‘You know, I think I’d like to talk about that night,’ I didn’t fully understand her motives, and I couldn’t help thinking this material might just end up being something else for you to use in your books. I could tell it was important to her, though, so I did what I could to help. There were a number of Mother’s recordings stored in the red leather trunk, but I recently took that one out and set it aside.

“Okay then, I’m going to head home,” Asa said, getting to her feet. “Unaiko is staying at my house tonight, so I’ll send the tape over with her instead of bringing it myself. She has lots of expertise in using the sound system she set up earlier, but that isn’t the only reason I want her to be here. Given what’s on the tape, I really think it would be better if you weren’t alone when you listened to it.”

3

The minivan pulled into the front garden, and Unaiko stepped out. She was dressed, as usual, in casual work clothes. “I come bearing gifts from Asa,” she announced as she walked into the house and deposited a lumpy bundle, wrapped in a large furoshiki cloth, on the dining table.

The care package contained an unglazed vessel filled with some high-end shochu—fifty-proof distilled liquor some people describe as Japan’s answer to vodka, though I think it has an earthier flavor — that Asa had apparently received as a posthumous bequest from some connoisseur, along with three attractive ceramic sake cups. To this largesse Asa had added several Bizen ware dishes containing an assortment of her culinary creations, tightly covered with plastic wrap. In recent years I had been trying to keep my distance from strong drink, but I seemed to have a primordial muscle memory of how to handle the bottle.

While I was studying the label, Unaiko was busy setting up the playback equipment. “Would you like to listen to the tape while you’re eating dinner?” she asked as she tweaked an assortment of knobs and dials.

I nodded. “Asa was saying she wouldn’t normally have included an alcoholic beverage with the meal, but she had you bring this bottle of shochu because she thought I might need a drink after I’d finished listening to the tape. I’d like to do it while I’m still sober, though,” I said.

While Unaiko stationed herself at the board that controlled sound and lighting, I dragged one of the dining-room chairs to the south end of the great room (which resembled a small theater, with all the equipment). For a moment I let my gaze wander outside to the garden, where a sconce affixed to the wall was casting a pale glow on the Japanese birches.

My mother’s recorded voice, sounding weaker than I remembered, began to emanate from the industrial-size speakers. At first the voice was little more than a whisper, and even after Unaiko adjusted the volume, rewound the tape to the beginning, and started again, it still sounded very faint. After a moment, I realized my mother was addressing her narrative to her two children: Asa and me.

“Papa had made up his mind to set out on the flooded river in his rowboat, so while he was taking a nap that afternoon we added some things we thought he might need — a change of clothes, a towel, and so on — to the items he had already packed in the red leather trunk. These included a bunch of papers and documents, placed on top of a narrow rubber inner tube that had been removed from a bicycle tire. As you know, Papa made a hobby of dismantling and overhauling old, decrepit bicycles, all by himself. Normally, Kogii’s only job was to add a squirt of oil here and there, so he was very excited when Papa told him to take the inner tube out of the tire. (Bicycle pumps were in short supply during the war, so he had to use his mouth to inflate it, like blowing up a balloon.) There used to be a bicycle store on the road beside the river, but at some point it stopped selling bikes and was only doing repairs — and even those were hit or miss because the shop didn’t carry any new parts. Since the bike-repair shop couldn’t do anything much beyond reattaching a loose chain or mending a puncture with gum arabic, once the tube had been removed from a bicycle tire there was no way to get a replacement. So until things started to get back to normal after the war, Kogii would pack old bicycle tires full of straw and ride around like that. We always knew when he was on his way home ‘cause we could hear the rickety sound of his makeshift bike, with its jerry-built gears and straw-filled tires, from miles away!

“Anyhow, after the inner tubes had been removed from the tires and blown up nice and plump, what were they used for? Flotation buoys, of course. In theory, if you blew one up and put it in the red leather trunk, then even if the boat ended up sinking it would have been possible to stay above water by hanging on to the trunk because the inner tube would keep it afloat. If worst came to worst, at least the trunk would eventually find its way to shore. As for the other things your father had packed in the trunk, I didn’t see anything besides a bunch of letters and papers. Some of those letters talked in detail about who had originally suggested the insurrection to your father and his cronies, and told them how they should go about preparing for it. Because the plan was being hatched here in the forest, where no one can ever keep a secret, the conspirators had no choice but to stay in touch by mail. If they had tried using the telephone the village switchboard operator would have been able to eavesdrop on their conversation. That’s why there were so many letters, and your father was trying to take them all with him, every last one. His plan, apparently, was to pack up his correspondence and then ride the rowboat down the flooded river to a spot where the water was wider and the current wasn’t so strong; in other words, someplace where the fields and rice paddies were completely submerged in water from the flooding. He must have figured that if he could get that far, he would be able to scramble onto the shore and ditch the boat, and then he could make his escape by following the train tracks, thus managing to outrun the people who (he thought) were going to be pursuing him. If he had managed to make a clean getaway by following this plan, I have no idea what his next step would have been. The only thing we know for sure is that your father had made up his mind to run away that very night.

“As for why he chose to go by boat, the explanation is obvious. Everyone around here knew him by sight, so he was likely to be spotted by suspicious eyes no matter which road he took out of town. That’s why he decided to ride the river to a place beyond the neighboring town and start his overland journey from there. If the weather had been better his plan might have worked, but the boat snagged on a sandbar downriver and capsized in the high waves, and he drowned. Even so, I can’t help thinking he had been making surprisingly good progress till then!

“The fact that Papa felt the need to fill the red leather trunk with all the papers pertaining to the insurrection seems to indicate that he thought those materials were too important (or too incriminating) to leave behind. It’s as if he felt it would be disastrous for any outsiders to see what he had been plotting, but yet he also put a flotation device in the trunk so the papers would eventually find their way back to us. At least that’s what I believed for many years after he drowned. But why on earth would he set up an outcome in which his folly would be exposed? And wasn’t he worried about having his subversive correspondence fall into the wrong hands? Those are just some of the unknowables that make my head spin, even now. Of course, the trunk was found downstream and taken to the police, quite a while after the war ended. They evidently had bigger fish to fry, and the trunk was returned to us without comment.

“Recently, though, I’ve come to believe there may be a much simpler explanation for the flotation device. Papa obviously wasn’t thinking straight, and maybe he just wanted to make the trunk buoyant so he could use it as a life preserver in case the boat capsized. It’s likely that he didn’t even consider the possibility he might perish, while the trunk survived.

“It does seem as though my husband honestly believed the guerrilla bombing of the Imperial Palace was going to take place. Even though the officers used to come to our house and get drunk and talk big about staging some kind of violent uprising, in the beginning those discussions seemed rather abstract. But they gradually became more focused, and I believe when Papa somehow reached the conclusion that the officers were seriously planning to carry out their radical scheme, he became frightened.

“We know how the story ends: Papa launched his boat on the flooded river and ended up drowning. But did he ever seriously believe he would be able to survive the churned-up current in the wobbly little rowboat? It seems to me, in retrospect, that he was concentrating on the immediate goal of making his escape from the valley, and he didn’t take the time to think about the next step. I think it was shamefully irresponsible, given the haphazardness of his plan, that he would even think about taking his young son along on that wild, doomed flight. And when I watched from above as Kogii came paddling back to shore through the muddy, turbulent water, it truly was one of the happiest moments of my life!

“Anyhow, the one thing we know for sure is that Papa participated in plotting a guerrilla uprising along with a bunch of disgruntled soldiers, and even though it turned out to be nothing more than an idle fantasy, he was afraid he might be forced to go through with it. That’s why he felt the need to flee like a thief in the night in the midst of the biggest storm of the year.

“Kogii always seemed to idolize his father, and if I had given him access to the red leather trunk when he first asked (before I began to weed out the contents), I was afraid it would have broken his heart to learn the truth about his father. Also, of course, I didn’t relish the idea of having our family’s dirty laundry aired in public. I couldn’t explain my reasons without disclosing the secret, and as a result we were estranged for years.

“Kogii’s reaction was to write The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, which was apparently designed to punish and embarrass me. That dreadful novella portrayed Papa’s conduct in a way that made him look ludicrous and pathetic, while I came across as a sarcastic, hypercritical harpy. Even so, it was clear to me that Kogii was still hoping to write his drowning novel someday, to celebrate the father he always thought of as brave and heroic.”

I gave the high sign to Unaiko, who had been standing next to the recording equipment all this time, keeping a watchful eye on me. Then I told her I wanted to listen to the rest of the tape alone, at my leisure, adding by way of explanation that I felt like trying the liquor Asa had sent with the tape. Dexterously, Unaiko rewound the cassette to the beginning, so I would only need to press the play button.

I took the bottle and filled a large sake cup for myself, then pointed at another cup and looked inquiringly at Unaiko, who was in the process of pulling plastic water bottles out of the cloth-wrapped bundle and lining them up on the table. She declined, saying she would be leaving shortly to drive herself home. I quickly drained my cup, then refilled it.

Unaiko must have noticed how distressed I was by the contents of the tape; her body language seemed to suggest that she would be willing to take on the role of sympathetic listener, but I didn’t feel like talking things out with her (or anyone else) at that particular moment. She watched me thoughtfully as I continued to drink alone, in silence, and after a while she spoke.

“The story you’ve been trying to write about your father, who died more than sixty years ago — well, Asa was saying that your mother thought it was meant to be a novel of redemption, and she seems to have been right. I understand now why your mother was so opposed to the project.

“Before you came to the Forest House this summer, Asa kindly offered to let us use it. We did a major cleaning, since the house had been empty for quite a while, and then Masao Anai and I and some of the younger members of the troupe used it as both a training center and a place to stay. It was supposed to be for only a week, but the younger folks had obligations in Matsuyama, so I would often stay down here alone. Asa thought I might be lonely, and she would sometimes come over in the evenings to keep me company.

“I tried never to ask Asa any direct questions, but as the time approached for you to come down here and take possession of the red leather trunk (which, I gathered, had quite a bit of history), I got the distinct feeling that while she was looking forward to your arrival, at the same time she was also quite worried. Masao tends to be very perceptive about such things, and he said that he had a feeling it might turn out there was nothing packed away in the red leather trunk after all — or, at least, nothing that would provide you with the impetus (and the materials) you would need to finish your novel. That was worrying me, too, and one night as I sat here talking with Asa till the wee hours I inadvertently voiced my concerns. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if our worst fears are realized and the materials Mr. Choko is hoping to find aren’t in the trunk, maybe it would be a good idea to let him know as soon as he arrives.’

“I knew I had probably overstepped my boundaries, and I wasn’t surprised that Asa seemed a bit offended at first. When Masao is directing a play, he’ll sometimes say something like ‘You know, I’m deliberately restraining myself from getting angry at you guys,’ in order to keep the younger actors from ‘shrinking’ (that’s the term he uses). And I kind of got the feeling Asa was doing the same: reining in her annoyance. But after a rather tense couple of minutes I kind of sensed that she was saying to herself, Oh well, what the heck, I may as well go ahead and tell Unaiko about all the things I’ve been losing sleep over. She went back to her house beside the river to get her pajamas and other necessities, and after she returned we laid out our bedding side by side on the floor, crawled under the covers, and proceeded to talk the night away.

“The gist of what she told me is that the red leather trunk was recovered by the police a fair distance downstream from where they found your drowned father’s body and was subsequently delivered to your house. The trunk was initially put away unopened, but as the years went by, your mother started to sort through and dispose of the papers, and through that process she gradually came to have a clearer understanding of what her husband had been involved in.

“You probably know all of this already, but I’m going to repeat everything Asa told me, on the chance some of it might be helpful. In the beginning, apparently, your father just seemed to enjoy sharing drinks and conversation with the young officers from the regiment in Matsuyama who showed up one day bearing a letter of introduction from the Kochi Sensei, and soon became regular visitors to your house. Your dad would serve the visitors sake, along with various delicacies, such as sweetfish caught with nets during the months when their bodies have the most oil, then roasted, dried, and put aside to eat when those fish were out of season. I gathered that freshwater crabs and eels, plucked from the river by the village children, were another favorite delicacy. Your father even went so far as to serve meat, or jerky, from secretly slaughtered cows hung up to cure in natural caves in the mountains. You’ve written that the bloody tail of the cow would be delivered, wrapped in newspaper, and your father would then proceed to cook it, but according to your mother’s version of the same story, the guests were simply served the customary cuts of beef. In any case, the officers would dig into those lavish spreads, with their distinctively regional flavors, and your father would mostly sit quietly and listen as the animated conversation — lubricated by large quantities of locally brewed sake your family had somehow managed to obtain — swirled around him. That’s how it was, at first. “Gradually, those discussions began to take on an air of urgency, and the officers started talking about the necessity of doing something radical to change what they perceived as the disastrous course of Japanese history since the Meiji Restoration. From that point on, the local girls who had been working those banquets were no longer allowed in the house, and your mother had to do all the serving herself, unassisted.

“Apparently, according to what your mother told Asa about those get-togethers, at first your father’s role consisted mainly of making sure the sake was kept warm, but the way he listened to the officers’ conversations gradually became more attentive and more intense. Before long, he evidently allowed himself to be drawn into the intrigue, and he began to take an active part in the discussions about the insurgency the young officers were planning.

“And then they learned that a kamikaze aircraft base had recently been established on Kyushu, not too far away, and they got the delusional idea of stealing some of those planes, which were laden with bombs and filled with enough gas for their one-way missions. From then on, when one of the top secret planning sessions was in progress, your mother was only allowed to come into the main house to deliver trays of food. It was around that time, for reasons your mother didn’t understand, that your father got into the habit of burning the midnight oil in his cramped little study while he pored over an assortment of big, heavy books written in English. If those books were somehow significant, doesn’t it seem likely they would have been stashed in the red leather trunk, along with the letters?”

“You’re right,” I replied. “I discovered this only the other day, but the trunk did contain several volumes of Frazer’s classic work The Golden Bough. It was a kind of fad with my father’s generation to read (or at least carry around) the Japanese translation of the abridged version of those books, in the Iwanami paperback edition.”

“Why that particular book, I wonder?” Unaiko asked.

“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” I said, shaking my head.

“So your father drowned, and time passed,” Unaiko went on. “You became a published novelist, and it was when you declared your intention of having your next book focus on your father’s life and death that your mother started to get worried. She refused to give you access to the background materials you needed, and you ultimately decided to put the entire project on ice, even though the first chapter was already written. When you told your mother you wouldn’t be needing the materials from the red leather trunk after all, she was tremendously relieved. But then you wrote The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, and from what Asa told me, its publication changed everything. In that fever dream of a novella you portrayed your father as a grotesque figure riding in a funky wooden chariot who leads his ragtag disciples into Matsuyama to rob a bank in order to get money to finance his little band of insurgents, but ends up being fatally shot by the police. Your mother was appalled by what she saw as your betrayal of your family, and apparently she kept repeating over and over that your book was an affront to the memory of your drowned father, and saying things like ‘Who does Kogii think he is, anyhow — and what makes him think he has a right to publish this kind of garbage?’

“I have to say that Asa’s facial expression as she was telling me all this was something an actress of my generation would find difficult, if not impossible, to emulate. I don’t know whether to call it pain, or anguish, or grief, but it was clearly welling up from a very deep place. And this evening, too, when Asa was looking for the tape I just played for you, I noticed she was wearing the same expression. Oh dear, I’m afraid I’ve said more than I should have, again …”

“Please don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m going to listen to my mother’s tape now, and I’ll make a point of imagining that Asa is sitting here beside me, wearing exactly the facial expression you’ve described. Well then, to top off the evening’s festivities, won’t you join me in a little drink?”

I was trying to be charming and persuasive, but my voice sounded pitiful in my own ears. I poured the shochu (which really was exceptionally good) into the large sake cup sitting on the table in front of Unaiko, but she stood up without even taking a token sip.

“Needless to say, Asa has been concerned about the effect listening to this tape might have on you. Masao’s been worrying, too. Anyway, please don’t overdo it with the booze tonight.” And with that, she vanished into the night.

Once I started drinking I had a bad habit (or perhaps it was a character flaw) of throwing back shot after shot, and as I wandered over to the chair in front of the speakers, I did pause for a moment to quaff the cup I had filled for Unaiko. However, I refrained from replenishing my own, and I left the bottle of liquor on the table.

4

The next morning I woke up early, after a rare night during which I didn’t have even the tiniest sliver of a dream. When I rolled out of bed and headed downstairs to get a drink of water — it was around six o’clock — I saw Masao Anai loitering in the back garden just outside the dining room. He was alone, and his bowed head was haloed by the gilded light streaming through the leaves of the pomegranate tree. There was something tentative and uncertain about the way he was perching atop the large, round poetry stone, as if he wasn’t sure he ought to be there.

I went into the dining room and sat at the table in a position that allowed me to keep a diagonal eye on Masao, who was off to one side. Everything was as I’d left it the night before. I picked up the plastic carafe, poured water into one of the large sake cups (which was still faintly redolent of Japan’s answer to vodka), and emptied it in a single gulp. I repeated the sequence several times until my morning-after thirst was quenched.

Beyond the big picture window, Masao raised his head and appeared to notice that I was up and about. He didn’t make any of the usual gestures of greeting, but a moment later he vanished around the west side of the house. I heard jingling as he unlocked the kitchen door, evidently using a bunch of keys entrusted to the theater group, and let himself in. After settling into the chair across from me, Masao sloshed some water into a cup he’d carried from the kitchen and drank it. Then he poured himself another draught and partially refilled my cup as well, after first hefting the plastic pitcher and thoughtfully calculating how much water remained so we would both get an equal amount.

“If the novel you came here hoping to finish ends up going down the drain, will that also spell doom for the drama project we were hoping to work on in tandem with your own writing and research?” he asked.

“I haven’t really had a chance to think that far ahead,” I said, “but it’s true my plan to stay down here and make a new start on my long-dormant novel, using the materials I’d expected to find in my mother’s trunk, has hit a brick wall.”

“So does that mean your current sojourn will be canceled as well? (I think you mentioned this was probably going to be your last visit, in any case.) To be honest, having your stay at the Forest House cut short would be a very regrettable development from our point of view, but wouldn’t it also be a major blow to the final stage of Kogito Choko’s career? Asa is very concerned about how you’re handling this setback, emotionally. I received a phone call from her early this morning while it was still dark, and she was talking about what a monumental letdown this must have been for you, and saying you’d mentioned that as you’ve grown older you seem to wake up every morning at the crack of dawn with your mind awash in pessimistic thoughts. She was worried about your being alone at a time like this, and — of course, I realize I’m not her brother’s keeper, so to speak, but here I am anyway, barging in on you uninvited at this ungodly hour.”

I didn’t reply. After a moment, I became aware of a kind of subliminal ringing in my ears. In the small forest that bordered the back garden and marked the perimeter of my mother’s property, there were still some ancient stands of broadleaf trees that hadn’t merged with the mixed groves of cedars and Japanese cypresses surrounding them. When I gazed up at the luxuriant foliage of those trees, their green leaves luminous in the early-morning sunshine, the sight was almost transcendentally dazzling.

During the past ten years or so, every time I had come back to the Forest House the uncanny quietude of the forest had always made me aware of the residual clamor in my ears, and I could almost feel myself being reunited with the mystical sound of the forest: that beautifully musical hush. Now, once again, I seemed to hear the living forest’s melodic vibrations amid the radiance of all that grand and glorious greenness. I was suddenly oblivious to the existence of Masao Anai, and I had an illusion that I (in my present guise of feeble, useless old man) was hearing my mother’s line of poetry—You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest—overlaid with the subtle music that seemed to be emanating from the same forest.

While I was in this trancelike state Masao had returned to his seat in the garden, under the pomegranate tree. He had an unusually large notebook open on his lap, but he didn’t appear to be looking at it. (I had seen the same tableau, featuring Unaiko and her own oversize notebook, any number of times.)

I went outside and joined him under the tree. “What’s that you’ve got there? Is it some kind of director’s notebook?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Masao said. “I’ve read quite a few books written by the leaders of the New Drama movement in Japan — you know, adherents of the Stanislavski method — but my notes aren’t nearly so methodical or technique oriented. I jot things down as they occur to me; sometimes I’ll look at my notes later and I won’t even remember when I wrote them, or why. The funny thing is, the tidbits from various sources that I either transcribe or photocopy and paste onto these pages are often more useful than my original ideas. Maybe that’s because all my dramatic creations are basically just eclectic collages of quotations and allusions.”

My eyes were irresistibly drawn to the notebook lying open on Masao’s knees, and while he made no move to show those pages to me, he didn’t try to hide them, either. There were blocks of prose and neat lines of poetry, some written in roman letters, others in Japanese, and everything was annotated with red-ink underlinings and marginal notes in pencil. The pages were intricate and artistic-looking, and I got the feeling I was being allowed to glimpse another side of Masao Anai, the dynamic and innovative director.

“These are some excerpts from the manuscript of the drowning novel that you shared with us,” Masao said. “They don’t have to do with the dream scene, though. I was interested in the quotes from T. S. Eliot, both in the original and in Motohiro Fukase’s translation, which I know you’ve been studying since you were young. What surprised me was that the epigraph for the entire book, at least in the draft we saw, was in French — even though it was a quote from Eliot, who of course wrote in English.

“What I find most interesting are the subtle variations among the three versions: the English, the French, and the Japanese. (Of course, you primarily used Fukase’s version, but you also seem to have incorporated elements of the well-known translation by Junzaburo Nishiwaki.)

“Anyway, what I’m saying is that I make notes about such details as I go along. For example, take the Eliot line He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool. In the Fukase translation, it becomes He passed through the stages of age and youth, while Nishiwaki renders the line considerably more loosely as One after another, he recalled the days of his youth and the days of his dotage.

“The whole time I was reading your manuscript, the Eliot lines kept running through my head: 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. And I couldn’t help wondering how you would have gone about portraying the way your father’s life flashed before his eyes while he was drowning.”

“Oh, you mean in the drowning novel?” I asked absently. Masao’s recitation of the Eliot lines had momentarily transported me back in time.

“Yes, I gather the idea was to reprise the various stages of your father’s life, but I can’t help thinking it would have been difficult for you to pull that off, as a writer who was still quite young and inexperienced.”

“You’ve read the scrap of prose I call the drowning novel, so you know I had drafted the story only to the point where my father sets out in his little boat, heading right into the towering waves, with Kogii — my supernatural alter ego — manning the tiller in place of me. Fast-forward forty years or so, and here I am, or was, trying to pick up where I left off and finish the book. You seem to be asking how I was planning to proceed. Well, you’re right that creating the retrospective scene where my father’s entire past flashes before his eyes would have been a major challenge, but at any age. When I was younger, I lacked the necessary life experience, and now I — the narrator of that passage — have become an old writer myself and I can’t very well be projecting my own history onto my father, who died relatively young.

“At the time, I wanted to try to answer the question: As my father was drowning in the vortex of the raging river, how did he pass the last moments of his life? What was going through his mind just before he died? The other day when I was looking over the index cards I’d included in the packet with the pages I had written, decades ago, I saw that I’d started by composing a straightforward chronicle, including things I had heard from my grandmother and mother when I was a young child: local legends and folklore, bits of our family history, and so on. But how did my father fit into those accounts? Where did he come from, and what was his story before he met my mother? My only clues were a few vague memories of overheard conversations, but as a young writer I had the option of letting my imagination fill in the blanks. But what should I, the writer, have my drowning father remember — and in what sequence? At first I took an oblique approach to the problem, doing things like rereading ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’ Before I embarked on the actual writing, I needed to find a way to incorporate bits of history and folklore into the narrative, one by one, without fretting about realism or verisimilitude. At the same time, I was trying to layer brief vignettes throughout the story.

“I wrestled endlessly with questions of technique. How should I have the drowning man remember his five decades of life, until the night it ended abruptly on a storm-tossed river? Should I begin with miscellaneous occurrences from his late adulthood? Or should I go all the way back to the beginning of my father’s life during the Sino-Japanese War in Manchuria, and use a combination of imagination and hearsay to create episodes from his infancy and youth?

“While I was simultaneously ruminating about such matters and mulling over the stories I’d heard, a few at a time, mostly from my grandmother, it occurred to me that it would be ideal if I could somehow find a way to establish certain biographical details. At one point I used Asa as a go-between to ask my mother how she and my father met, and also about the time, early in their marriage, when she went to China to visit her childhood friend, the Shanghai Auntie. My mother kept extending her stay, so my father finally followed her to China for the sole purpose of bringing her back, and I’ve thought more than once that if he hadn’t made that trip, I would never have been born. Anyway, even at that early date there were already signs that a rift was developing between my mother and me, and as you know the conflict eventually escalated and turned ugly. Now everything seems to have come to naught, so I guess this is the end of the road for the drowning novel. I remember, in those early days, the prospect of someday getting to sift through the contents of the red leather trunk seemed like some wild, impossible dream, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be.”

“I see,” Masao said. He sounded more peeved than sympathetic. “I suppose this is also the end of my current project as well. Oh well — easy come, easy go. After all, until your recent attempt to resurrect this book it had been lying dormant for nearly forty years, right?”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “But when I gave another listen to the tape Unaiko brought over last night, I realized what a fool I had been to think my mother would blithely help me write a novel about something that would have hit so close to home for her. Really, I must have been delusional, or at least absurdly optimistic, to assume she would eventually give her approval and hand over the red leather trunk so I could get back to work. Asa knew the truth all along, but until now I guess she didn’t see any reason to destroy my illusions about our father’s heroism. In the end, I was no match for my mother and sister. When those two females pooled their resources, they were really a force to be reckoned with.”

“That reminds me of something I said to Asa and Unaiko,” Masao said. “This was before you came to stay at the Forest House, and I was only reacting to what I’d heard about the various complications. Anyway, I remember saying, ‘I can’t help wondering whether it was Mr. Choko’s desire to write a revisionist version of history — creating an alternative reality in which his father was some sort of fallen hero — that doomed the project to failure from the start.’

“Of course, it’s water under the bridge now — no pun intended, and I don’t want you to think I’m taking this lightly at all. What I mean is, even though your drowning novel is never going to be finished I still think your younger self’s idea of telling your father’s story through the prism of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Death by Water’ poem is a beautiful thing. For me, it would have been very illuminating to see how you went about transmuting that into prose. Just in terms of methodology — a term you often used when you were in your forties, much to the amusement (or horror) of some of your lit-crit colleagues — I think it could have been quite a tour de force.”

“It’s true that when I was younger a lot of critics used to make fun of me for daring to discuss my writing in terms of methodology — and they were already down on me for my chosen method of transmuting my private life into fiction,” I said. “But the ‘I novel’ method was the reason I was staking my hopes on the red leather trunk, then and now. The year I started college in Tokyo also happened to be the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, and when I came home to attend the traditional Buddhist service my mother jokingly predicted that I might someday become a novelist and write a book based on the materials in the red leather trunk. But now it’s looking as though the joke was on me, in more ways than one.

“Of course, my sister seems to have known that all along. Speaking of Asa, there are still a few drops left in the bottle she sent over last night. How about it, Masao — won’t you join me in a little hair of the dog?”

Chapter 5. The Big Vertigo

1

There was no word from Asa for several days, so we hadn’t yet talked about our mother’s cassette-tape bombshell. Unaiko (who was staying at Asa’s house) had informed me that she would be bringing over my meals while my sister tended to her own affairs, which she had apparently been neglecting since my arrival. As for me, I had definitely made up my mind to decamp from the Forest House. I thought this might be the last time I ever came down here for an extended stay, so I needed to spend a large chunk of time tidying up my own effects and getting ready to vacate the premises.

One day I asked Unaiko to tell Asa I was planning to leave for Tokyo at the beginning of the following week. Upon hearing that news, Asa called to ask whether she could stop by to discuss some practical matters.

“I phoned Chikashi a while ago,” Asa declared with her trademark directness as she strode through the front door of the Forest House not long afterward. “She was perfectly calm, as usual, and she said that when she heard about the failure of your quest to find the materials you needed to complete your drowning novel — which was, of course, your primary purpose in coming to Shikoku — she figured you would probably pack up and return home. I’m only mentioning how cool she sounded because I’d been concerned that your decision to abandon a major literary project might create some cash-flow problems for your family, but Chikashi put my mind at ease by addressing the issue on her own.

“She told me that while the income from both foreign-rights and paperback sales of your books had definitely tapered off, you were continuing to write a series of essays for one of the big newspapers, and whenever you went to deliver lectures at small venues outside of Tokyo there was a magazine that paid to publish your lecture texts after you’d polished them a bit. She said this is how it’s always been for writers of pure, noncommercial literature, especially in the latter phases of their careers. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but you really hit the jackpot when you persuaded Chikashi to become your wife. She truly is a magnificent human being.

“On another topic, I wanted to talk about the tape recording I sent over for you to listen to. Since I already knew what was on Mother’s tape I naturally felt a bit guilty (or at least conflicted) about passing it on to you. That’s why I included some strong liquor to dull the pain. I thought it would be all right, just this once, even though you haven’t been drinking much lately. I was worried about the impact the tape might have on your emotional state, but when I quizzed Masao after he’d seen you the next morning he said you appeared to be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and none the worse for wear. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have given you a bottle, especially after you’ve made such a valiant — and successful — effort to overcome your fondness for the hard stuff. When I walked in today I was afraid I might find the kitchen strewn with empty bottles of the cheap Scotch you can buy everywhere these days, even at our local supermarket here in the boonies, but when I peeked in there just now the only bottle in sight was the one I sent you the other night, so that was a relief.

“Anyhow, for your supper tonight I’ll be sending Unaiko over with some dishes I prepared, along with some more of the shochu from the other night — properly chilled this time. I was thinking it might be nice for you and Unaiko to share the bottle and keep each other company. Since your writing project has fizzled out, I imagine the work you’ve been doing till now with the Caveman Group will probably be a lost cause as well. It’s natural that Unaiko would want to talk to you about various things and also, in terms of improving your mood, I figured hanging out with her would probably be a lot more fun than sitting around with your sister — am I right?”

2

When Unaiko showed up for our farewell dinner, she was wearing a stylish summer outfit: a pale blouse in a floral print and a full, flouncy skirt. During the recent rehearsal, Unaiko’s rather drab, functional attire had made her look more like a stagehand than an actress, but seeing her now in a casual situation, she seemed much more youthful than usual — girlish, even. Asa had prepared several tasty dishes using ham, sausage, and various types of edible wild plants she’d picked herself in the nearby mountains and then stir-fried. Unaiko dug into the meal with gusto and matched me drink for drink as well. Perhaps to reassure me, she mentioned that she had a tendency to become intoxicated rather quickly, so she had sensibly arranged for Masao to drive her home at the end of the evening.

Once again, Unaiko was in a very talkative mood. And while I should theoretically have still been mired in the depression that had been dogging me for several days, I soon found myself cheerfully joining in the conversation.

Unaiko started off with the usual anodyne small talk, but before long she segued into speaking candidly about what was on her mind.

“I imagine you’d prefer not to dwell on things that are over and done with, but there’s one image from your recurrent dream that I just can’t stop thinking about,” she said. “It’s the scene where your father sets out on the river in his small boat and is borne away by the current. In the dream, you can see what your father’s wearing because the moon breaks through the storm clouds and illuminates the scene below, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “The visibility was perfect.”

“And all the times you’ve had the dream, over the years, did the details change at all?”

“Not in any significant way,” I replied. “The dream is nearly identical every single time. It’s almost like watching a video. That may be why I have a persistent feeling the boat-launching scene is something I actually witnessed in reality.”

“Getting back to your father’s clothing,” Unaiko said, “what exactly was he wearing in the dream? (Let’s put the reality aside for a moment, even though I gather there was quite a bit of overlap.) Asa was saying that he was dressed in the type of uniform civilians wore during wartime, but can you tell me what it would have looked like style-wise? When we staged the dramatic adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, we just put his character in the same type of uniform a retired serviceman would have worn.”

“The uniforms for civilians were khaki colored,” I explained. “During the war, everyone was required to wear them. In the dream, my father was dressed in that uniform, complete with a matching military-style hat, and the red leather trunk was by his side.”

“Your mother mentioned on the tape that at first your father was only listening to what his visitors were saying, as an interested observer, but as the conspiratorial plotting gathered steam he ended up being drawn in ever deeper,” Unaiko said. “And the reason he tried to run away on that stormy night was because he was afraid the ill-advised guerrilla action was about to take place. To me, your father’s behavior seems perfectly natural. In your dream, at least, he comes across as a reasonably sane human being, unlike the grotesque, pathetic father figure portrayed in Wipe My Tears Away. Isn’t that correct?”

“That’s exactly right,” I said. “I may have gotten carried away the other day and started singing along with the German song, but that doesn’t change my feeling about the novella I wrote. It was an embarrassingly immature piece of work. In retrospect, I think the only well-written thing in the entire book is the way the mother criticized the foolhardiness of the activities her husband and son were involved in.”

Unaiko, who was evidently already feeling quite tipsy, gazed at me with a face that looked, as always, far younger than her years. “But, Mr. Choko,” she said, “didn’t you want to portray your father in the drowning novel as a man who set out on that flooded river while he was in full possession of his faculties?”

“Yes, I did, absolutely. And while I went on clinging to my childish naive conviction that my father was embarking on a hero’s journey, I also wanted to chronicle his ill-fated boat trip as part of a sequence of events that was supposed to culminate in some kind of paramilitary insurrection. My recurrent dream reflected the idealized perspective of the young boy who believed wholeheartedly that his father was on his way to commit a doomed act of heroism when he drowned. While my father was being tossed around by the current on the river bottom he would have flashed back over his entire life, the way people do when they’re drowning, and that was the story my novel was going to tell.”

Unaiko nodded and took another sip of shochu. “In Wipe My Tears Away the mother is skeptical all along, but the father is portrayed as someone who’s absolutely essential to the radical action the young officers are planning,” she said. “Clearly, the young boy regards his father as a kind of hero.”

“I wrote that book after I’d promised my mother that I would abandon my drowning novel,” I said. “I think my feelings of resentment are clearly evident in the surrealistic novella I ended up writing instead.”

“Even so, for me, the mother is the character who seems the most genuinely human at the conclusion of the story,” Unaiko mused. “She was the only one who dared to disagree when her son kept insisting his father had died a heroic death. Was she meant to come across as the only person who was rational about the whole situation?”

“No, when I wrote the novella I really wasn’t trying to imply that any one person had remained compos mentis while everyone else had completely lost their minds. All the characters in the book — the cancer-ridden father in his fertilizer-box chariot, the young boy wearing a fake military cap, the army officers belting out the German song at the top of their lungs — are supposed to be given equal weight.”

“Well, I know I’m not very sophisticated intellectually,” Unaiko said self-deprecatingly, “but I still can’t help wondering whether there was some underlying significance behind your decision. You came down here intending to work on your drowning novel; we all know how that turned out, but if you had actually managed to finish it, isn’t there a chance the book’s outcome would have been similar to that of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away? No matter how many anecdotes you tell in the voice of the drowned narrator, that talking corpse is always going to be sucked into the whirlpool, right? I mean, for your purposes, there’s no other way for the story to end.

“The other night as you were listening to your mother’s tape, you finally realized that your father ran away because he was terrified about what might happen if he didn’t. And while he was attempting to flee into the storm, his little boat capsized and he drowned. Personally, I’ve been thinking that if you ever do write the drowning novel, instead of having a tragic anticlimax, it might be more interesting to fictionalize the narrative so your father somehow makes it to shore, eluding the dragnet of his police pursuers, and really does manage to carry out some kind of guerrilla action along with his wild-eyed partners in crime.

“Of course, even I know that no such event ever took place in 1945, during the days that followed Japan’s surrender. My thought, plot-wise, was that having an actual dramatic occurrence would be a refreshing change from your usual type of ambiguous, anticlimactic ending. Anyway, everything is moot now, since it looks as though you aren’t going to write the drowning novel after all. And really, isn’t that the ultimate anticlimax, in a way?”

Unaiko had a point, but I didn’t say anything in response. After an expectant moment, she continued: “Asa felt awful when she saw how downhearted you were about not finding the information you needed to complete your book. It was almost as if she thought she owed you an apology for handing over the trunk in the first place, since she already knew how that whole operation was going to turn out. But I guess she realized that it was what it was, as they say, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“I think Asa was simply trying to force her seventysomething brother — who had created a falsely heroic image of his drowned father, and who was still having recurrent dreams about something that happened one night when he was ten years old — to face reality. What I’m trying to say is, I think she was just trying to bring you back to your senses, for your own good.”

Unaiko held her glass up for a refill and I silently obliged. “I helped Asa restore your mother’s tape to a listenable state, so naturally I feel a measure of responsibility as well,” she went on. “From what I’ve heard, your father was far from being an active or essential participant in the insurgency scheme. It sounds to me as though he was nothing more than a country bumpkin who became so alarmed about what his sketchy cohorts were planning that he felt compelled to run away as fast as his little boat would carry him.”

So how did I respond to this crescendo of confrontation from my clearly intoxicated companion? Did I get angry and make a scene, like an ill-behaved old man? No, I was the perfect picture of serenity, sitting there surrounded by the vibrant sounds of the forest while my mood oscillated wildly between an irrepressible urge to laugh and a descent into infinite melancholy. I felt oddly salubrious, and I didn’t even feel the need to refill my own cup.

Toward the end of the evening Masao Anai joined us, and I got the impression that he was accustomed to playing designated driver when Unaiko had been out drinking. The curious thing was that when my outspoken dinner companion finally vanished into the night, leaving me in peace, I was genuinely sorry to see her go.

3

The next day Masao Anai came by to deliver a late breakfast, explaining that Unaiko was still in bed recovering from a hangover. While I was eating, Masao gazed out at the back garden, staring intently at the round stone engraved with the linked poems my mother and I had written. After a moment he started talking, saying Unaiko had asked him, as her emissary, to raise a question she had neglected to broach the night before.

Some time ago, Masao told me, he had run into a college friend who was now teaching Japanese at a local high school, and they had renewed their acquaintance. As a result of subsequent discussions, the Caveman Group initiated a visiting-artist program wherein the theater troupe would choose works of modern literature, turn them into dramatic readings, and then go around giving interactive performances at junior high schools and high schools in the area. They had been working on a new program as part of an integrated learning curriculum for the upcoming school semester, and that was what Unaiko had wanted to discuss with me.

“Each forty-five-minute performance would be divided into two segments, or rounds,” Masao told me. “The first would present the story as a condensed dramatic reading, while the second segment would incorporate the students’ questions. The idea is that a lively debate would inevitably ensue, adding a dramatic aspect of its own.

“We’ve already done a number of presentations based on this model: Miyazawa’s Night of the Milky Way Railway, Tsubota’s Children in the Wind and The Four Seasons of Childhood, Akutagawa’s Kappa, and so on. This year we’ve had a request to do Soseki’s Kokoro, and we’re in the preliminary preparation stage of that project. One of our main actors will handle the role of Sensei, including his conversations and his suicide note, while another will be in charge of the external dialogues and internal monologues voiced by the narrator (whom we know only as ‘I’), and our younger members will be cast in the auxiliary roles. Right now we’re busy converting our condensed version of the book into a script for the dramatic reading, and an aspect of the process has been worrying Unaiko from the start.”

Masao Anai flipped open his vade mecum: the giant notebook he never seemed to be without. He was also carrying a pocket-size Iwanami edition of Soseki’s Collected Works, and he opened that as well.

“Near the end of the novel,” Masao said, “we’ve hit a snag in the section about the death of Emperor Meiji. I’ll read it aloud, if that’s okay.

“Then, at the height of the summer, Emperor Meiji passed away. I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji Era that began with the Emperor had ended with him as well. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the rest of my generation, who had grown up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms. I shared this epiphany with my wife, but she just laughed and refused to take me seriously. Then she said a curious thing, albeit in jest: ‘Well then, maybe you should go ahead and commit junshi, and follow the emperor to the grave.’

“Needless to say, the wife was referring to the fact that General Nogi had chosen to follow the emperor in death by committing suicide himself. As we’ve been mapping out the section featuring Sensei’s long suicide note — which basically relates his life story — Unaiko has been reading the lines, and then I repeat them for emphasis. At some point Unaiko started to fret, and she asked me this question, but I wasn’t able to give her a clear answer. That’s why she was going to request a second opinion from you last night, and now I’ve been tasked with following up. So here’s the question: If it was true that what Soseki calls ‘the spirit of the Meiji Era’ flowed through Emperor Meiji’s entire reign, then would every single person who lived during the era have been imbued with that spirit? This may seem like a rather simplistic question, but we haven’t been able to come up with a satisfactory answer on our own, so we wanted to ask you. For me, and for Unaiko as well, it seems to resonate with the type of transformation you’ve written about in the trilogy that began with The Changeling. Soseki’s character Sensei feels isolated from his era, and he has already decided to go on living as if he were dead. But even someone like that … I mean, could he really have escaped the influence of his own time — in other words, the spirit of Meiji?”

“That’s an excellent question,” I said. “As it happens, when I was young I often used to wonder about the exact same thing, but at the time I wasn’t really able to formulate a proper response. However, when you ask me now, the answer springs to mind with surprising clarity. It may sound paradoxical, but I think it is precisely the people who are trying to live in a way that’s detached from their own eras, and from their contemporaries as well, who end up being most influenced by the spirit of the time they were born into. In my novels, I usually portray characters who exist in very private worlds, but even so, my ultimate goal is to somehow express the spirit of the era I’m writing about. I’m not claiming there’s any special merit in my approach — and, as you’ve so kindly pointed out, my readership has nearly dried up as a result. This may seem like a stretch, but if I should die I can’t help thinking that it would almost be as if I were committing junshi myself: following my own era (and the principles I’ve fought for) into death. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course.”

“So are you thinking of your demise abstractly, as something that will take place in the distant future?” Masao asked lightly. “Or are you ready to predict a specific date, based on some psychic premonition?”

“Is that another of Unaiko’s questions, or did you come up with it just now?” I said, parrying Masao’s facetious inquiry with one of my own.

“Moving right along,” Masao said, changing the subject, “it looks as though you’re nearly finished with your packing, so what do you have planned for today? Asa was telling me that you’d been thinking about scouting locations for your book, before you decided to abandon it. I’ve already done quite a bit of research on the topic, so how would it be if we took a stroll down to the Kame River? The thing is, these days you’re more of a stranger around here than I am, so if you should come face-to-face with any of the local citizens, I think the surprise would probably be mutual! Even so, the other party would most likely know who you are, and if you were to ignore them when they spoke to you it could be kind of awkward. Here’s my plan: when someone calls out to you, I’ll respond to the greeting with the usual pleasantries, and you can just nod in their direction. Shall we stage a quick rehearsal? No? Okay, never mind. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Clearly, Masao Anai had given serious thought to our proposed outing.

“Well then, Mr. Choko,” he continued, “how would you feel about going for a swim around Myoto Rock, where you once came close to drowning as a child after you’d stuck your head in a fissure in the rock to look at a school of dace and weren’t able to pull it out? Before you arrived from Tokyo, Suke & Kaku — you know, our resident comedy duo — said they wanted to check out the site of that famous story, so they went and dived off the rock. When they came back, they reported having seen quite a few of those little silver fish still swimming around!”

Masao and I went our separate ways for a few minutes while we changed into our swim trunks, worn under T-shirts and knee-length shorts. Then we met up again and set off walking down the slope into the river valley. The school term had started early because of a break in the farmers’ busy season, and there were no children to be seen on the road that snaked along beside the river or on the other road between the rows of houses lining the embankment above. No adults rushed to greet us, either. If I were to run into any old acquaintances from the area, they would most likely be in their sixties or seventies, if not older, but down in the valley on that sunny morning it appeared as if all the humans had simply vanished.

Masao and I took a rustic flight of stairs down to the banks of the river. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in the vicinity of Myoto Rock, which was normally the most popular swimming hole in the area. The famous rock was a pyramid-shaped boulder, and the part above the waterline was a good three meters high. There had once been a similarly shaped rock next to it, but some years ago, when building materials were scarce, that half of the “couple” had been dynamited and ground up to make cement for the construction of a now-abandoned bridge. In local lore, the sundered rocks were seen as a metaphor for marital separation, and by felicitous coincidence there were a great many widows living along the river (my own mother included). A deep pool had been created where the remaining rock blocked the flow of the current, and the natural cove was a popular destination. This was the same cove where I had watched the flooded river carry my father and his boat away on the night of the big storm.

Masao and I shed our tops and shorts and waded into the water until it reached our hips, then turned toward the rock. As the current bore us upstream, I gazed at the forest on the opposite bank. The towering trees were taller than I remembered, and the branches appeared to be healthy, mature, and nicely filled out. Overall, the landscape looked much healthier than it had in the years immediately following the end of the war when the forest surrounding the valley was in a sadly weakened state, probably due to neglect. Since then the forest had gradually recovered its vitality, in what struck me as inverse proportion to the mass exodus of young people.

When the water level reached our chests Masao and I began to swim, both using the overhand freestyle stroke known as the Australian crawl. My eyes were protected by the same goggles I had been using for years whenever I swam in the heavily chlorinated public pools in Tokyo. When we reached the big rock we latched on to the submerged part of the monolith, caught our breath, and rested for a while, just as I had done so many times during my childhood.

Masao looked at me with reddened eyes (he wasn’t wearing goggles) and said teasingly: “You’ve written about teaching yourself to swim using instruction books written in French and English, and after seeing your stroke, I totally believe in the veracity of the story.”

“Yes, that method did help me refine my own naturally elegant style,” I replied, echoing his tongue-in-cheek tone.

“On the right side, if you go about a meter along the rock and then look underwater, you’ll see a large crack in the base,” Masao said, serious now. “You remember that, of course. Suke was saying that the crack is wide enough for a child’s head to fit through it quite easily. We know what happened the last time you tried, but how about today? Are you game to give it another go?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I began to creep slowly across the rock face, battling the current all the way. When I had tried to pull off the same maneuver as a child, I seemed to recall losing my grip and being swept away by the overwhelming force of the water crashing against the bifurcated rock. On this day, however, I was able to use a vigorous scissors kick to hold my own, and it occurred to me that I was now confronting the challenges of Nature with grown-up skills — notwithstanding the physical weakening that was a palpable reminder of the passage of years. When I reached the well-remembered spot, I dove underwater and tried to wedge myself between the two slabs of rock. My feet and body slipped through easily enough, but my adult-size head was simply too large. I did, at least, catch a glimpse of the shimmering water in the brightly lit grotto beyond the fissure. Mission unaccomplished, I thought as I allowed the dynamic swirl of the water to buffet my body for a moment. Then I planted my feet firmly on the river bottom, turned around, and returned to where Masao was waiting.

“Hey,” he greeted me, in his overly familiar, slightly sardonic way. “It was a foregone conclusion that your head wasn’t going to fit through the crack in the rock. But if you lower your expectations and just try to peer directly through the crack into the grotto, I can almost guarantee success.”

Focusing my efforts on that more modest goal, I made my way back to the crack in the rock. Peering through my prescription goggles (custom-made to remedy my severe myopia), I saw a nostalgic sight: in the shady grotto illuminated by pale blue-green light, dozens upon dozens of dace were futilely struggling to swim upstream against the current. The glossy black eyes on the sides of those lustrous silvery-blue heads seemed to rotate briefly in my direction, as if the fish were peripherally aware of my presence.

I stayed there, watching, until I ran out of breath. Then I pushed off from the edge of the rock I’d been holding on to, thrust my face above the water, filled my lungs with a deep draught of fresh air, and simply let my body drift, borne along by the kinetic current. After floating passively for a while, I swam back to the spot beside the rock where Masao had stationed himself.

Right away, he began talking. “In the first edition of The Child with the Melancholy Face, you wrote about seeing hundreds of those tiny fish here when you were ten years old,” he said. “You stuck your head through the underwater crack and you saw your child-self, Kogii, reflected in the eyes of the fish. And then as you were trying to get a better look you got your head wedged between the rocks, and if your mother hadn’t come to the rescue you would almost certainly have drowned. The fish you found so fascinating that day probably numbered only in the dozens, as opposed to hundreds. I was talking to some people who used to fish this river in the old days, and they said the dace population around Myoto Rock hasn’t really fluctuated much over the years. What I’m trying to say is you were probably looking at pretty much the same scene today as the one that made such an impression on you more than sixty years ago. There were only a few dozen fish today, right?”

“I didn’t really get a clear sense of how many there were,” I said. “The first time, when I got my head stuck between the rocks and was fading fast, I remember feeling as if I was somehow going to be magically transformed into a dace. And if that had happened, I thought, then I-as-fish would be looking back at the human me.”

“Wait, that doesn’t make sense. If you had drowned on that day, then the you who was peeping at the school of fish would no longer exist in this dimension at all.”

“You’re right,” I said dreamily. “I’m the old man who wasn’t able to become one of those fish (however many there may have been) swimming eternally in the bluish-green light of the grotto beyond the crack in the rocks.”

“Speaking of drowning,” Masao said. “You mentioned that you had never been able to imagine what it was like for your father — who was twenty years younger than you are now, at least — when he set out on the overflowing river, propelled by the powerful current, and was carried far downstream, where his lifeless body ended up rising and falling on the riverbed.”

“True,” I said. “And I can’t help thinking my father’s drowned body must have been moving exactly like one of those fish.” My eyes were suddenly wet in a way that had nothing to do with swimming in the river.

Masao paid no attention to my momentary lapse into grief. “Unaiko got mad at me when I told her I was planning to drag your old bones down here,” he remarked, speaking in a rather disrespectful manner. Along with the contrast between my elderly shoulders and his strong brown torso (we were both submerged in the river up to our sternums), his cocky tone seemed like a brutally explicit reminder of the difference in our ages. “She was worried you might catch a cold, or worse, from being in the water for such a long time.”

Masao turned around and looked downstream, where two concrete bridges — one old, one new — were suspended side by side. Atop the older of the two bridges (long since retired from active duty because it couldn’t handle the increased traffic) two women were wildly windmilling their arms in greeting. I immediately recognized one of them as Unaiko.

“Shall we head back now?” Masao said.

He and I let go of the rock we’d been clinging to, and after allowing the current to gently push us into place we commenced swimming, using the usual crawl stroke. Evidently showing off for the women — who continued to wave energetically in our direction and whom he could see every time he raised his head to take a breath — Masao made a visible effort to open up a lead on me. I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it, so I redoubled my own efforts.

In my childhood, we used to make our way home by riding the vigorous current that rippled out from the deep water next to Myoto Rock and then climbing up the cliff next to the road along the river, but Masao kept heading diagonally toward the shore until the water became so shallow that we had to stop swimming. By the time we both stood up on the sandy gravel of the river bottom, with the water barely covering our knees, we must have swum at least 150 meters. I didn’t think about it until afterward, but I was no longer in shape for serious competitive swimming and the long burst of intense exertion clearly took a toll on my body.

We made our way onto the riverbank where we had left our things, and as we were drying off with the towels we’d brought, I couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about the prospect of having Unaiko observe my legs, which were quivering with exhaustion. But when I glanced at the bridge after Masao and I had finished throwing on our clothes, I saw that she and her companion had been engulfed in a gaggle of junior high students on their way home from school, and the two older women were focused on dealing with their clamorous admirers. There was no way I was going to climb up to the bridge in my bedraggled state with an audience of teenage girls, so I stood at the mouth of the river with Masao, chatting desultorily.

“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.

But what, exactly, was I going to tell my unnamed literary executor to dispose of? I couldn’t think of a thing, and it wasn’t because the seizure had scrambled my brain; on the contrary, I felt as though my mind was functioning with complete clarity. The reason nothing came to mind was that I really didn’t have any work in progress to speak of.

A complex wave of emotions — a kind of wretched, self-mocking contempt for my current state of being, coupled with a feeling of relief that I wouldn’t be leaving any important assignments uncompleted — washed over me. The existential bottom line seemed to be that the I who was here right now was already as good as dead. And if I was already dead, it was only natural that I wouldn’t experience the slightest fear of dying.

A moment later, though, I was hit by an avalanche of a different kind of apprehension: the concern that, as my mother had pointed out, I hadn’t done anything to prepare Akari for his own journey to the Other Side. If I had dared to look down at the poetry stone in the back garden I would surely have been plunged into depression by the realization that on the cusp of old age I had neglected my parental duties, my work was in shambles, and my life was essentially devoid of meaning.

Even so, against my better judgment, I opened my eyes. And before the diabolical disk came crashing down around me again, I imagined myself reading the first lines of the poem carved into the big round stone:

You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest

And like the river current, you won’t return home.

5

Three days after the terrifying dizzy spell, I was back at home in Seijo. As it happened, there was an excellent physician nearby (he had become a family friend and had helped us countless times), and he was optimistic about my prognosis. After listening carefully to my description of the extreme vertigo I had experienced just before leaving Shikoku, he said it would most likely be a transitory thing, and that cheered me up considerably. The doctor recommended waiting awhile before going to the hospital for a complete examination, and in the meantime I was dutifully taking the medications he’d prescribed.

I spent a week or so lounging around the house in recovery mode. One morning when I was asleep in my second-floor bedroom I was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs in the living room. I had heard from Chikashi that a side effect of Akari’s continuing depression was that he had stopped answering the phone. Since returning from Shikoku I’d been having trouble falling asleep at night, so I had been getting up after the rest of the family had already finished lunch, but when I glanced at the clock on the wall it showed half past nine. I got out of bed, and as I was making my groggy way down the stairs the phone stopped ringing.

Akari was perched on the edge of a dining-room chair, leaning backward with both feet propped on a second chair while he stared at the five-line composition paper he was holding on his knees. He was the very picture of a middle-aged man in the throes of deep depression. Even so, he appeared to be engrossed in erasing one section of his composition, and he didn’t look up when I entered the room.

Just then the phone began to ring again. As I had expected, it was Chikashi calling from the post office. Apparently a special delivery package had arrived very late the previous night, and the postman, assuming we would all be asleep, had thoughtfully decided to leave a note rather than disturb us with the doorbell. The next morning when Chikashi called the local post office, a clerk had read the sender’s name and address to her and had suggested that if the package was important the quickest option would be to pick it up in person. She was at the post office now, waiting in line, but the place was mobbed and the queue was longer than usual.

Also, Chikashi went on, Akari had an appointment for a routine physical, but she wasn’t feeling well enough to take him to the university hospital herself and hoped I wouldn’t mind going in her stead. By the time I had managed to make myself somewhat presentable (Akari was already dressed and was still working on his composition), Chikashi was back. She handed me my package as she got out of the cab, and then Akari and I piled in and headed for the hospital.

We made it there barely in time for our eleven o’clock appointment, but as it turned out there was a notice posted near the receptionist’s window saying that the doctor we needed to see was running at least an hour behind schedule. The delay didn’t bother me at all. Chikashi had chosen this particular specialist because he was well known for his expertise in treating patients who had been born with brain damage, and we understood that he would sometimes be called away on unforeseen emergencies. When I presented Akari’s patient ID card to the nurse on duty, she told me to go ahead and get his blood work done.

As I was looking through the file containing our insurance information and other documents, I saw that an appointment for blood tests was scheduled for two days later, so I suspected that the nurse had thoughtfully found a way to make use of the fallow time we were going to spend waiting for the doctor. The blood tests took only a few moments to complete, but they left Akari in a foul mood. He had a phobia about having blood drawn and hadn’t been expecting to undergo that ordeal on this visit.

After securing a couple of seats in the waiting area, I finally set about opening my exotic-looking package. The sender was a cherished friend, a distinguished American woman whom I had known for decades (I’ll call her Jean S.). The enclosed note explained that she had finally gotten around to sorting through the mementos left behind by a mutual friend of ours, the late university professor, author, and comparative culture scholar Edward W. Said. During the process, Jean wrote, she had come across something she thought I might like to see, so she was sending it along. The item in question was still in its original, stiff paper file folder, and Jean had simply wrapped up the folder and popped it in the mail. The folder contained a trio of custom-bound booklets: the musical scores for three of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, printed on the finest grade of thick cotton paper.

Jean S. was the person who had first brought Edward W. Said and me together, many years ago. The two of them were old friends, and her posh apartment on a high floor in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan even boasted an “Edward W. Said Room” decorated with motifs inspired by antique Islamic books. By chance, I was in New York City at the time of Said’s discharge from the hospital after a stay there (the first of many) to treat the leukemia that would eventually kill him; Jean threw a party to celebrate, and I was invited. Every year since we had met, Said and Jean had made a custom of telephoning me late at night on New Year’s Eve (which was already New Year’s Day, postmeridian, in Japan) from wherever they happened to be enjoying dinner together along with their respective families.

Shortly after my brother-in-law, the film director Goro Hanawa, committed suicide, Jean S. happened to be throwing another of her famous parties. Edward W. Said was there, and he entertained the guests by playing the piano — something he did exceedingly well. When Jean shared the news about Goro, Said apparently sat down and wrote a condolence note on the back of the score of the Beethoven piece he had just finished playing. Later, Jean made a clean copy of the draft on plain paper, carefully transcribing Said’s longhand scrawl for added legibility, and faxed it to me in Tokyo (I’ve never made the transition to email). After Said died, Jean told me that if the original note ever turned up again, she would send it to me.

For the first time that day Akari was showing an active interest in what I was doing, and he cast an expert eye on the sheet music as it emerged from the wrappings. “Those are the three sonatas dedicated to Haydn,” he announced. I knew from a long letter Jean S. had sent earlier that Said had been playing the second of those sonatas at her party. Looking through the score, I quickly located his distinctive penciled annotations, and then I stuck the slim booklets back in their folder.

I shepherded Akari to the nearest restroom, which was down on the first floor. Then, in the interest of efficiency, I quickly washed his hands and mine as well. This was another departure from the normal routine — he usually performed such simple functions by himself — and it clearly intensified his already disgruntled mood. On the way back upstairs we stopped in at the hospital gift shop, where I bought a plastic pouch containing two sharpened pencils: HB and B (medium soft and slightly softer, respectively).

When we returned to the seats where we’d left our things, I handed Akari the B pencil (the softer of the two) along with the sheet music for the sonatas. As he held out his hands to receive these unexpected gifts, my son’s formerly downcast face was transmogrified by joy.

Whenever Akari was reading sheet music he would always draw light circles around certain bars or measures with a pencil, exerting barely any force. For reasons unknown to me, he would also write an assortment of glyphlike symbols in the margins. I had already ascertained that the sheet music (which was, in effect, a posthumous bequest from my dear friend Edward W. Said) was printed on exceptionally thick, sturdy paper. My long-range plan was to transcribe any notations Akari might make on those pages onto the ordinary music-store sheet music for the same sonatas, which I knew we had at home. I figured if I wielded the eraser with particular care, no visible marks would remain on the originals.

Akari began reading the sheet music, holding one booklet at arm’s length in front of his chest, and I caught a whiff of the same intoxicating aroma of vintage ink and paper that suffused the innumerable volumes of European special editions in my library. Before long my son was completely immersed in the scores, and I hesitated to disturb him.

In a low voice, I ventured a question: “Is it interesting?”

“Yes, very interesting!”

“I’m glad. Could I take a quick peek at the sheet music for the second sonata?”

“Oh, that part is really interesting!” Akari replied, tapping his finger on the relevant section with an emphatic staccato rhythm.

“My friend Jean mentioned in an earlier letter that Edward Said played the first theme humorously, while the second one sounded sad and mournful,” I said. “At the time, I said to you, ‘Please choose your favorite CD of this piece from your collection.’ Do you remember?”

“Yes! And I put on the Friedrich Gulda recording,” Akari said eagerly. “He played it the same way, too.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It was just the same, and with the volume muted as well. Could you please circle the relevant sections to show me where those passages are? Then when we get home I’ll listen to the CD again, using your annotated score for reference.”

A huge grin spread across Akari’s face, and it occurred to me that this was the first time I had seen my son looking so happy since my return to Tokyo. He turned his attention back to the sheet music, and I felt a sense of relief as I watched him intently following the tempo of the written notes, while the imagined music welled up inside him. Then I remembered that as we were rushing out of the house earlier I had grabbed the first volume of The Golden Bough and brought it along. (I’d been randomly paging through those books since finding them in the red leather trunk.) I fished the book out of my bag and began to read.

Akari, meanwhile, had finished examining the second of the three booklets of sheet music and was now going through it again, starting with the first movement. I was sitting next to my son, of course, and the seat on his other side was occupied by a woman who looked as if she might be a schoolteacher. The sheet music was so large that it protruded into her space; I felt awkward and apologetic about the encroachment, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, she appeared to be intrigued by Akari’s fervent concentration.

By the time we were finally summoned to see the doctor, after waiting for a good three hours, Akari had placed the sheet music on his knees and was staring blankly at it, wearily cradling his head in his hands. It took me longer than expected to fit the booklets back into their envelope, and Akari, who was watching me anxiously out of the corner of his eye, became agitated and marched off to the exam room by himself.

At that point, the woman in the neighboring chair spoke. “Why don’t you just leave those things with me?” she suggested. “It doesn’t look as if my name will be called any time soon.”

After our session with the doctor, Akari and I returned to our seats in the waiting room. The woman handed me the envelope containing the sheet music, and Akari resumed his intensive perusal of the scores. Leaving him there, I ambled over to the cashier’s window and took my place at the end of the line. After I’d settled the bill and was returning to the seating area, I saw Akari handing something to the woman as she got to her feet (she had apparently been called in for her own appointment at last).

Our paths crossed in the middle of the room, and the woman laughingly brandished a fat ballpoint pen in my face. “This is really handy — it has two different colors!” she said. “The ink is easier to see, too, so Akari didn’t need to squint so much.”

It took an epic effort of will to control the borderline-violent feelings welling up inside me. I rushed back to where Akari was sitting with one booklet of sheet music open on his lap. He had drawn a heavy, dark circle around the passage we had discussed earlier, and in the blank space at the top of the page he had written “K. 550” in gigantic, indelible letters!

Akari glanced at me, beaming happily, but when he saw the grim expression on my face his smile was quickly extinguished. He stammered in a weak voice, “I–I don’t like to write with pale, thin letters, so …” The sentence trailed off, unfinished.

“You’re an idiot!” I shouted.

Akari’s face crumpled into a roiling mass of strong emotions. After a brief, frozen moment he raised both arms above his head and began to flap them violently against his ears, like flightless wings. There was only one way to interpret this behavior: clearly, he was trying to injure himself. It had been quite a while since I had seen Akari act out like this, but on the rare occasions when I had scolded him in the past, he had invariably reacted with sullen defiance accompanied by an attempt to punish himself physically, as he was doing now.

While the people around us stared openly — I couldn’t really blame them; at the very least, this behavior wasn’t the sort of thing you expect to see from a large man in his forties — I yanked Akari to his feet. I grabbed the sheet music booklets, which had fallen to the floor, and marched my distraught son downstairs and out of the building.

I couldn’t have imagined then how vast the repercussions of my thoughtless and intemperate speech would be, but I was already thinking, over and over again, YOU’RE the bloody idiot.

6

As we were riding home in the taxi, Akari kept his face turned away from me, and his body language conveyed a single unambiguous message: I reject you completely. He wasn’t rubbing his forehead against the window, as he sometimes did when he was upset; he simply sat and stared at the passing cityscape while keeping his back unnaturally straight.

When Chikashi opened the gate to let us in, Akari practically knocked her over in his headlong rush to get to his room. I put the envelope containing the three scores on the dining table and sat down on the nearest chair. Chikashi, with her finely tuned mother’s intuition, had immediately sensed something unusual about Akari’s behavior, and after sitting with me in silence for a few moments she got up and went into his bedroom.

Being careful not to look at the pages that had been permanently defaced with two different colors of ballpoint ink, I took the three scores out of the envelope and laid them on the table. Then I began to read the tiny words written in pencil on the back cover of the second score. I recognized those scribbles immediately as the words Jean S. had copied over in fountain pen and faxed to me. That fax had been pinned to the wall in front of my desk for the past several years.

What Said had written on the back of the Beethoven score, in English, was his supportive outpouring of sympathy upon learning that my longtime friend and brother-in-law, the film director Goro Hanawa, had committed suicide by jumping off a building in Tokyo. I had translated the note into Japanese and had later quoted it at the memorial service held in Tokyo for Edward W. Said himself after he finally succumbed to leukemia in 2003. (By that time, I had long since committed those eloquent condolences to memory, in both languages.)

I’ve just heard from Jean about the difficulties you’ve been having, and therefore thought I’d write and express my solidarity and affection. You are a very strong man and a sensitive one, so the coping will occur, I am sure.

Chikashi returned to the table. The desecrated sheet music lay spread out in front of me, but I wasn’t looking at it. With her eyes fixed on the three scores, Chikashi began to speak.

“Akari is very concerned about having inadvertently damaged the sheet music for the Beethoven piano sonata,” she said, “but he also told me that you called him an idiot? Nothing like that has ever happened before, not even once, and to be honest I’m in a state of shock. In the past, you’ve always gone to the opposite extreme. Surely you remember the time when you actually came to blows with someone who said those same cruel words to Akari when we were on the train coming home from Kita-Karuizawa, and you ended up being forced to get off the Takasaki? Then when the railway police decided the incident was too serious for them to handle, you were dragged to the municipal police station, and we all went there together. I told Akari that his father would never say such a thing to him, but he won’t listen. He just keeps repeating, ‘Papa said to me, “You’re an idiot.”‘

“Akari knows he did something wrong,” Chikashi continued, “but he seems to want to explain the reason behind his actions. He says he was only writing some notes about Beethoven’s second piano sonata, which I gather you had asked for, in ballpoint pen.”

“It’s true,” I interrupted. “I did call Akari an idiot.” (I was feeling immeasurably sad and sorry, of course, but I still wasn’t able to subdue the anger churning inside me, so I took refuge in self-serving rationalization.) “The thing is, the draft of the condolence message Edward Said wrote at Jean’s house right after Goro died was on the back of the sheet music for the second sonata. So you can see why that particular score is so precious to me.”

After I had shown Chikashi the cover of the booklet in question, I opened it to the defiled page — again, with my eyes averted because it would have been too painful to look at it directly. Chikashi took the opened score and went into Akari’s room. I could hear the conversation: Chikashi asking the same questions over and over in a gentle, restrained voice and then, after a long pause, Akari’s replies, in which he seemed somehow to be resisting his own resistance.

I went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, but soon changed my mind. Instead, I poured a mixture of dark beer and lager (one full bottle of each) into a giant goblet, then drained the entire glass in a single gulp and let out a deep sigh that somehow morphed into a loud belch. As I was about to return to the dining room, I saw Akari coming in through the other door, propelled from behind by Chikashi. Ignoring me completely, he took a CD off the shelf and handed it to his mother.

In the meantime, I had made a hasty U-turn and was in the kitchen refilling my goblet (this time only with regular beer) when I heard the sounds of a piano recording. As I stood there listening to the first strains of Gulda’s performance (he was playing the first movement of the second of the three sonatas Beethoven wrote and dedicated to Haydn in 1795), I was jolted once again by the thought that this was probably the same way Edward Said would have performed this composition.

The music ended, and a few seconds later the air was filled with the sound of Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G Minor, K. 550. I couldn’t tell who was wielding the baton, but the melody was an unmistakable echo of the theme of the passage we had heard a few minutes earlier. I downed my second glass of beer and went into the dining room, where Akari was in the process of carefully replacing the two CDs in their clear plastic cases.

“Akari keeps saying he was trying to use the sheet music he was looking at in the waiting room to show you what these two compositions have in common,” Chikashi said. “So he was shocked when you responded by screaming, ‘You’re an idiot!’”

I glanced reluctantly at the page of sheet music, hideously defaced by two colors of ballpoint pen, which Chikashi had laid out again on the dining-room table. No one spoke for several minutes, but there seemed to be some kind of crucial decision floating in the air. Then Akari, who appeared to have been waiting for me to make some sort of conciliatory gesture, gave up and shambled off to his room. I couldn’t help thinking, not for the first time, that his distinctive gait bore a startling resemblance to the way Goro Hanawa used to walk.

This all happened on a Saturday. A week passed, during which I hardly saw my son at all. I spent most of my time in my upstairs lair — a book-filled study equipped with a narrow bed — while Akari remained sequestered in his room. (This wasn’t a dramatic change from his usual behavior; he always spent a great deal of time in his bedroom, where he could listen to classical music programs on the FM radio next to his bed. When he got bored with the radio, he kept several of his favorite CDs cued up in his personal boom box and he enjoyed letting them play over and over on an endless loop.) In order to avoid running into Akari at breakfast or lunch I would creep downstairs in midmorning and eat a solitary brunch, then trudge back upstairs.

One day during this bleak period Chikashi brought me the mail as usual, along with a cup of coffee. While I was glancing over the letters she tidied up my bed and sat down on the newly smooth covers. Then she began to talk about the extra-large elephant in the room — a topic that hadn’t been touched upon since the tense, emotionally fraught session in the dining room.

“Akari says that when you were at the hospital the other day, you asked him to show you the musical similarities between the Beethoven piano sonata and the Mozart symphony,” she said slowly. “Evidently he was in the process of marking the pertinent passages in pencil when the lady who was sitting next to him lent him a ballpoint pen. Naturally, it’s hard for Akari to understand the subtle distinction whereby it’s perfectly fine to use pencil but switching to pen causes his father to have a major meltdown and call him names in public. Akari just happened to accept the seemingly innocuous loan of a pen. Really, wasn’t that his only mistake? He does seem to understand now that he shouldn’t have defaced the pristine sheet music, even though the damage he did was unintentional. But because of the extreme way you reacted, shouting, ‘You’re an idiot’—which, as you know, is the single most hurtful thing you could possibly say to him — he doesn’t feel inclined to return to the amicable relations the two of you enjoyed before this happened. For your part, you’re apparently unwilling to make the first move toward a peaceful settlement, so things seem to be at an impasse.

“I talked to Maki on the phone this morning, and I have to say that the way she criticized your behavior gave me chills. ‘Papa doesn’t have the courage to make his peace with Akari,’ she said. ‘I mean, he called Akari an idiot, for God’s sake. I’m sure Papa is wallowing in his own private darkness now, wondering if there’s any way to erase the egregious incident from Akari’s memory, weighing various options before ultimately deciding there’s nothing to be done. And that’s why Papa won’t even try to make his peace with Akari; he figures it’s hopeless, and he’s simply given up.’ And then she went on to say that for the past year or so, every time she has come to visit us here in Seijo she’s been noticing a gradual change in Akari, but she thinks you have probably overlooked it. She said, ‘Papa and Akari have been practically inseparable for more than forty years, and it seems to me that Papa’s oppressive (some might even say tyrannical) attitude toward Akari has become more and more set in stone. I know it probably has something to do with Papa’s advancing age; I understand the reasons, and I’m not unsympathetic, but I’m afraid that if this situation continues to fester it could go way beyond the level of terrible insults like “You’re an idiot.” I mean, I think matters could easily escalate to the point of physical violence or permanent estrangement.’

“Maki was quite worked up, and she said some pretty extreme things. ‘I’m afraid Papa could end up like King Lear,’ she told me, ‘wandering lost in the wilderness without even a Fool to accompany him. And if he went on wandering alone until he started to lose his mind, then maybe he would decide to resolve things himself, in the most drastic way, before he did anything that might cause a public scandal. And if he did decide to do away with himself, God knows there’s plenty of deserted wasteland around here where he could do the deed …’

“Maki was very angry about your calling her big brother an idiot,” Chikashi continued, “and I’m sure that’s why she said those things. But putting her concerns aside for now, there are some issues I’ve been worried about myself, and I’d like to discuss them with you. It goes without saying that both you and I are growing older, but have you given any serious thought to the fact that Akari is aging rapidly as well, especially on the physical level? As you know, you added a daily walk to your normal sedentary routine of sitting around the house reading and writing after the doctor said you should take Akari out walking as part of a fitness regimen. It went on for a long time, and then when Akari started having more and more epileptic seizures during your daily walks together, you got into the habit of walking for an hour early in the morning by yourself. You simply gave up taking Akari along. But I think we both understand that the worsening of his epilepsy wasn’t the real reason you gave up walking with Akari. Rather, it was because the degenerative aging process was making it too difficult for him to continue with those outings.

“And then there’s the dental situation. As you know, more than half of Akari’s teeth are already bad. I know the doctor talked to you about the results of the most recent set of blood tests, and while I only skimmed the written report, there seemed to be very few items on the list that weren’t marked ‘Requires Medical Care.’ His sleep apnea hasn’t improved, either, even though we’ve done our best to get his weight down. The reason he takes so many catnaps during the day is to compensate for all the sleep he loses at night.

“Back in the days when Akari was still going to work at the support center for disabled people, the head of the institute showed me a disheartening statistical chart of average life expectancy based on all the people who had ever been enrolled there. You were with me that day, remember? Anyway, he explained that after a certain point children with disabilities begin to age more rapidly than their parents, and when I tried to talk to you about it later, your only reply was silence. Now, though, I realize that what the doctor said is absolutely true, and the problem is we’re aging at a worrisomely rapid rate as well.

“On another topic, I don’t think I fully understood how heartsick you were about having to abandon work on the drowning novel. On reflection, I think this is the first time you not only didn’t finish a book you’d started, but simply stopped writing altogether. (You did take a short break once, early on, but it actually involved this very same book in its earliest incarnation.) Little by little, though, I’m starting to grasp the impact this disappointment has had on you, just from seeing how low your spirits have been since you returned from your fruitless trip to Shikoku. I don’t know when I’ve seen you as miserable as you are now, and it’s also obvious that Akari has been in seriously low spirits. You know how sometimes you’ll be sitting in the living room reading a book while he’s in the dining room studying a musical score? (That is, when you aren’t both holed up in your rooms.) Well, the scenario appears outwardly unchanged, apart from the fact that you aren’t speaking to each other. But for quite a while I’ve felt as if there were two giant mounds of depression permanently camped out in the house, and I couldn’t help worrying about what might happen if those two volatile lumps of unhappiness were to collide. And now what I think has happened is that they finally did crash into each other.

“Since Akari was born, you have never once said anything even remotely like ‘You’re an idiot’ to him. Akari clearly understands the meaning of the heartless phrase you blurted out, and when I think about it I can understand why, as Maki mentioned, you’re unable to summon the courage to patch things up with your son. I know you’re sincerely sorry about hurting Akari, but some combination of the stubbornness of age and a deep-seated personality trait is keeping you from saying the simple words that might restore harmony to our little family.

“This morning I was wide-awake from a very early hour, and I couldn’t stop turning this horrible situation over and over in my mind. Apparently Akari, too, had awakened while it was still dark outside; I had a feeling something wasn’t right, and when I went into his room, thinking he might be having a seizure, I found him crying his eyes out. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but he hasn’t made any attempt to listen to music on his own since the episode at the hospital, even when he’s alone in his room. That hasn’t happened since he was a baby.”

I was truly cornered. And I know this is unspeakably childish, but at that moment I was actively hoping to be ambushed by another attack of vertigo, just to free me from Chikashi’s relentless and entirely justified criticism. But alas, no dizzy spell rode to the rescue and I didn’t have the acting chops to fake one, so I had no choice but to sit quietly while my wife’s quiet censure rained down on me.

Very late that evening, as I was lying on the bed in my study still feeling as though my heart had been put through a meat grinder, I heard the strains of the second of the three sonatas Beethoven wrote and dedicated to Haydn (Op. 2 no. 2 in A Major, to be precise) wafting up through my pillow. Someone was playing the CD downstairs in the living room, with the volume unusually loud. I didn’t move, but when I heard the next piece — Mozart’s Symphony K. 550—being played full blast, I couldn’t control myself any longer, and I went charging down the stairs. Akari was crouched on the floor in front of the stereo.

“It’s after midnight, so why don’t you do this tomorrow instead?” I said mildly. Akari didn’t even glance in my direction, and I was suddenly galvanized by anger. When I went over and squatted beside him in an attempt to get his attention, he responded by boldly turning the volume up even louder. He continued to stare straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge my presence, and I could see the back of his neck flushing a deep crimson. Chikashi emerged from her bedroom and stood in the doorway, shooting me an inquiring look, but after she saw the expression on my face she retreated without speaking.

When the piece had ended, Akari carefully put the compact disc away and stood up. When he met my eyes at last I said flatly, “You know what? You really are an idiot.”

I went upstairs, and after spending a long time staring into the depths of a darkness that wasn’t nearly as black as my mood, I switched on the bedside lamp. For the first time since returning to Tokyo, I groped around on the nearby bookshelf and grabbed the first paperback that came to hand. As I began to read a random page, the rectangle of tiny, tightly packed Japanese characters and the border of white space surrounding the dense block of type suddenly began to blur and whirl before my eyes.

(Incidentally, that reminds me of a gathering I once attended where I got into an animated discussion with an anthropologist, an architect, and several other friends about the fact that in English those borders are called margins, while scribbled comments and annotations in the blank spaces are known as marginalia — although our discussion was primarily focused on the more abstract idea of the intrinsically marginal nature of culture. Another dear friend, the composer Takamura, seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. I assumed he was only half listening to our conversation, so I was surprised when not long afterward he published an exquisite composition titled Marginalia. Now that I think about it, those days when all my brilliant friends were still alive were probably the most creative and stimulating time of my entire life.)

Anyway, as I was saying, my hands and wrists, which were holding the book out in front of me, suddenly collapsed and crashed into the bookshelf while the visible world began to spin so violently that my normally straight line of vision seemed to be tilted at a wildly exaggerated angle, as if I were on some out-of-control carnival ride.

That was the beginning of the second coming of the bouts of extreme dizziness that would become a chronic condition throughout my later years: an alarming series of breakdowns everyone in my family (except Akari) ended up calling “the Big Vertigo.”