“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.