“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.