Once again, Unaiko was in a very talkative mood. And while I should theoretically have still been mired in the depression that had been dogging me for several days, I soon found myself cheerfully joining in the conversation.
Unaiko started off with the usual anodyne small talk, but before long she segued into speaking candidly about what was on her mind.
“I imagine you’d prefer not to dwell on things that are over and done with, but there’s one image from your recurrent dream that I just can’t stop thinking about,” she said. “It’s the scene where your father sets out on the river in his small boat and is borne away by the current. In the dream, you can see what your father’s wearing because the moon breaks through the storm clouds and illuminates the scene below, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “The visibility was perfect.”
“And all the times you’ve had the dream, over the years, did the details change at all?”
“Not in any significant way,” I replied. “The dream is nearly identical every single time. It’s almost like watching a video. That may be why I have a persistent feeling the boat-launching scene is something I actually witnessed in reality.”
“Getting back to your father’s clothing,” Unaiko said, “what exactly was he wearing in the dream? (Let’s put the reality aside for a moment, even though I gather there was quite a bit of overlap.) Asa was saying that he was dressed in the type of uniform civilians wore during wartime, but can you tell me what it would have looked like style-wise? When we staged the dramatic adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, we just put his character in the same type of uniform a retired serviceman would have worn.”
“The uniforms for civilians were khaki colored,” I explained. “During the war, everyone was required to wear them. In the dream, my father was dressed in that uniform, complete with a matching military-style hat, and the red leather trunk was by his side.”
“Your mother mentioned on the tape that at first your father was only listening to what his visitors were saying, as an interested observer, but as the conspiratorial plotting gathered steam he ended up being drawn in ever deeper,” Unaiko said. “And the reason he tried to run away on that stormy night was because he was afraid the ill-advised guerrilla action was about to take place. To me, your father’s behavior seems perfectly natural. In your dream, at least, he comes across as a reasonably sane human being, unlike the grotesque, pathetic father figure portrayed in Wipe My Tears Away. Isn’t that correct?”
“That’s exactly right,” I said. “I may have gotten carried away the other day and started singing along with the German song, but that doesn’t change my feeling about the novella I wrote. It was an embarrassingly immature piece of work. In retrospect, I think the only well-written thing in the entire book is the way the mother criticized the foolhardiness of the activities her husband and son were involved in.”
Unaiko, who was evidently already feeling quite tipsy, gazed at me with a face that looked, as always, far younger than her years. “But, Mr. Choko,” she said, “didn’t you want to portray your father in the drowning novel as a man who set out on that flooded river while he was in full possession of his faculties?”
“Yes, I did, absolutely. And while I went on clinging to my childish naive conviction that my father was embarking on a hero’s journey, I also wanted to chronicle his ill-fated boat trip as part of a sequence of events that was supposed to culminate in some kind of paramilitary insurrection. My recurrent dream reflected the idealized perspective of the young boy who believed wholeheartedly that his father was on his way to commit a doomed act of heroism when he drowned. While my father was being tossed around by the current on the river bottom he would have flashed back over his entire life, the way people do when they’re drowning, and that was the story my novel was going to tell.”
Unaiko nodded and took another sip of shochu. “In Wipe My Tears Away the mother is skeptical all along, but the father is portrayed as someone who’s absolutely essential to the radical action the young officers are planning,” she said. “Clearly, the young boy regards his father as a kind of hero.”
“I wrote that book after I’d promised my mother that I would abandon my drowning novel,” I said. “I think my feelings of resentment are clearly evident in the surrealistic novella I ended up writing instead.”
“Even so, for me, the mother is the character who seems the most genuinely human at the conclusion of the story,” Unaiko mused. “She was the only one who dared to disagree when her son kept insisting his father had died a heroic death. Was she meant to come across as the only person who was rational about the whole situation?”
“No, when I wrote the novella I really wasn’t trying to imply that any one person had remained compos mentis while everyone else had completely lost their minds. All the characters in the book — the cancer-ridden father in his fertilizer-box chariot, the young boy wearing a fake military cap, the army officers belting out the German song at the top of their lungs — are supposed to be given equal weight.”
“Well, I know I’m not very sophisticated intellectually,” Unaiko said self-deprecatingly, “but I still can’t help wondering whether there was some underlying significance behind your decision. You came down here intending to work on your drowning novel; we all know how that turned out, but if you had actually managed to finish it, isn’t there a chance the book’s outcome would have been similar to that of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away? No matter how many anecdotes you tell in the voice of the drowned narrator, that talking corpse is always going to be sucked into the whirlpool, right? I mean, for your purposes, there’s no other way for the story to end.
“The other night as you were listening to your mother’s tape, you finally realized that your father ran away because he was terrified about what might happen if he didn’t. And while he was attempting to flee into the storm, his little boat capsized and he drowned. Personally, I’ve been thinking that if you ever do write the drowning novel, instead of having a tragic anticlimax, it might be more interesting to fictionalize the narrative so your father somehow makes it to shore, eluding the dragnet of his police pursuers, and really does manage to carry out some kind of guerrilla action along with his wild-eyed partners in crime.
“Of course, even I know that no such event ever took place in 1945, during the days that followed Japan’s surrender. My thought, plot-wise, was that having an actual dramatic occurrence would be a refreshing change from your usual type of ambiguous, anticlimactic ending. Anyway, everything is moot now, since it looks as though you aren’t going to write the drowning novel after all. And really, isn’t that the ultimate anticlimax, in a way?”
Unaiko had a point, but I didn’t say anything in response. After an expectant moment, she continued: “Asa felt awful when she saw how downhearted you were about not finding the information you needed to complete your book. It was almost as if she thought she owed you an apology for handing over the trunk in the first place, since she already knew how that whole operation was going to turn out. But I guess she realized that it was what it was, as they say, and there was nothing she could do about it.