Death by Water

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016

Kenzaburo Oe, Deborah Boliver Boehm

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780857895486
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857895479
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE An astonishing interweaving of myth, fantasy, history and autobiography, Kenzaburo Oe's Death by Water is the shimmering masterpiece of a Nobel Prize-winning author. For the first time in his long life, Nobel-laureate Kogito Choko is suffering from writer's block. The book that he wishes to write would examine the turbulent relationship he had with his father, and the guilt he feels about being absent the night his father drowned in a storm-swollen river; but how to write about a man he never really knew? When his estranged sister unexpectedly calls, she offers Choko a remedy - she has in her possession an old and mysterious red trunk, the contents of which promise to unlock the many secrets of the man who disappeared from their lives decades before.

PART ONE

The Drowning Novel

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,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Part One: The Drowning Novel
• Part Two: Women Ascendant
• Part Three: These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins
• Copyright