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.”