“I think Asa was simply trying to force her seventysomething brother — who had created a falsely heroic image of his drowned father, and who was still having recurrent dreams about something that happened one night when he was ten years old — to face reality. What I’m trying to say is, I think she was just trying to bring you back to your senses, for your own good.”
Unaiko held her glass up for a refill and I silently obliged. “I helped Asa restore your mother’s tape to a listenable state, so naturally I feel a measure of responsibility as well,” she went on. “From what I’ve heard, your father was far from being an active or essential participant in the insurgency scheme. It sounds to me as though he was nothing more than a country bumpkin who became so alarmed about what his sketchy cohorts were planning that he felt compelled to run away as fast as his little boat would carry him.”
So how did I respond to this crescendo of confrontation from my clearly intoxicated companion? Did I get angry and make a scene, like an ill-behaved old man? No, I was the perfect picture of serenity, sitting there surrounded by the vibrant sounds of the forest while my mood oscillated wildly between an irrepressible urge to laugh and a descent into infinite melancholy. I felt oddly salubrious, and I didn’t even feel the need to refill my own cup.
Toward the end of the evening Masao Anai joined us, and I got the impression that he was accustomed to playing designated driver when Unaiko had been out drinking. The curious thing was that when my outspoken dinner companion finally vanished into the night, leaving me in peace, I was genuinely sorry to see her go.
3
The next day Masao Anai came by to deliver a late breakfast, explaining that Unaiko was still in bed recovering from a hangover. While I was eating, Masao gazed out at the back garden, staring intently at the round stone engraved with the linked poems my mother and I had written. After a moment he started talking, saying Unaiko had asked him, as her emissary, to raise a question she had neglected to broach the night before.
Some time ago, Masao told me, he had run into a college friend who was now teaching Japanese at a local high school, and they had renewed their acquaintance. As a result of subsequent discussions, the Caveman Group initiated a visiting-artist program wherein the theater troupe would choose works of modern literature, turn them into dramatic readings, and then go around giving interactive performances at junior high schools and high schools in the area. They had been working on a new program as part of an integrated learning curriculum for the upcoming school semester, and that was what Unaiko had wanted to discuss with me.
“Each forty-five-minute performance would be divided into two segments, or rounds,” Masao told me. “The first would present the story as a condensed dramatic reading, while the second segment would incorporate the students’ questions. The idea is that a lively debate would inevitably ensue, adding a dramatic aspect of its own.
“We’ve already done a number of presentations based on this modeclass="underline" Miyazawa’s Night of the Milky Way Railway, Tsubota’s Children in the Wind and The Four Seasons of Childhood, Akutagawa’s Kappa, and so on. This year we’ve had a request to do Soseki’s Kokoro, and we’re in the preliminary preparation stage of that project. One of our main actors will handle the role of Sensei, including his conversations and his suicide note, while another will be in charge of the external dialogues and internal monologues voiced by the narrator (whom we know only as ‘I’), and our younger members will be cast in the auxiliary roles. Right now we’re busy converting our condensed version of the book into a script for the dramatic reading, and an aspect of the process has been worrying Unaiko from the start.”
Masao Anai flipped open his vade mecum: the giant notebook he never seemed to be without. He was also carrying a pocket-size Iwanami edition of Soseki’s Collected Works, and he opened that as well.
“Near the end of the novel,” Masao said, “we’ve hit a snag in the section about the death of Emperor Meiji. I’ll read it aloud, if that’s okay.
“Then, at the height of the summer, Emperor Meiji passed away. I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji Era that began with the Emperor had ended with him as well. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the rest of my generation, who had grown up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms. I shared this epiphany with my wife, but she just laughed and refused to take me seriously. Then she said a curious thing, albeit in jest: ‘Well then, maybe you should go ahead and commit junshi, and follow the emperor to the grave.’
“Needless to say, the wife was referring to the fact that General Nogi had chosen to follow the emperor in death by committing suicide himself. As we’ve been mapping out the section featuring Sensei’s long suicide note — which basically relates his life story — Unaiko has been reading the lines, and then I repeat them for emphasis. At some point Unaiko started to fret, and she asked me this question, but I wasn’t able to give her a clear answer. That’s why she was going to request a second opinion from you last night, and now I’ve been tasked with following up. So here’s the question: If it was true that what Soseki calls ‘the spirit of the Meiji Era’ flowed through Emperor Meiji’s entire reign, then would every single person who lived during the era have been imbued with that spirit? This may seem like a rather simplistic question, but we haven’t been able to come up with a satisfactory answer on our own, so we wanted to ask you. For me, and for Unaiko as well, it seems to resonate with the type of transformation you’ve written about in the trilogy that began with The Changeling. Soseki’s character Sensei feels isolated from his era, and he has already decided to go on living as if he were dead. But even someone like that … I mean, could he really have escaped the influence of his own time — in other words, the spirit of Meiji?”
“That’s an excellent question,” I said. “As it happens, when I was young I often used to wonder about the exact same thing, but at the time I wasn’t really able to formulate a proper response. However, when you ask me now, the answer springs to mind with surprising clarity. It may sound paradoxical, but I think it is precisely the people who are trying to live in a way that’s detached from their own eras, and from their contemporaries as well, who end up being most influenced by the spirit of the time they were born into. In my novels, I usually portray characters who exist in very private worlds, but even so, my ultimate goal is to somehow express the spirit of the era I’m writing about. I’m not claiming there’s any special merit in my approach — and, as you’ve so kindly pointed out, my readership has nearly dried up as a result. This may seem like a stretch, but if I should die I can’t help thinking that it would almost be as if I were committing junshi myself: following my own era (and the principles I’ve fought for) into death. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course.”
“So are you thinking of your demise abstractly, as something that will take place in the distant future?” Masao asked lightly. “Or are you ready to predict a specific date, based on some psychic premonition?”
“Is that another of Unaiko’s questions, or did you come up with it just now?” I said, parrying Masao’s facetious inquiry with one of my own.