“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!