What, exactly, was my state of being? There were times when my eyes would pop open in the dark — it could have already been morning, but the curtains were drawn against the light — and I didn’t have the slightest idea who I was, or where. In my ears I would hear a nostalgic, songlike poem repeated over and over, and those lines seemed to offer a clue to my peculiar existential state: 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. Yes, I would think, taking the sequence a step further. Buffeted by the deep-water current, he keeps rising and falling, floating and sinking, seconds away from being dragged into the maelstrom of the whirlpool.
I am I, and yet I’m something more, because I feel that I am he as welclass="underline" in other words, I am my father. My father, who drowned in what I realize now was the prime of his life; my father, who died when he was twenty years younger than I was when the Big Vertigo ambushed me for the first time. That realization would often be followed by another half-conscious epiphany: I loved my father! I would usually wake up again then (more completely this time), awash in dueling emotions: an almost sheepish feeling of relief doing battle with soul-deep despair.
Another new behavior pattern had to do with the way I emerged from sleep. There were times when I would lie awake until the wee hours, assailed by an anxious premonition that another attack was on its way, and I would finally resort to taking the medicine prescribed for such emergencies, which (as a side effect) would cause me to wake up far too early the next morning. However, if I just lay quietly in bed, I often managed to fall into a completely natural sleep, and I would roll out of bed sometime before noon feeling abundantly well rested.
Those prescription meds were potent, so I tried not to take them too often. The side effects weren’t entirely negative, though. When I first resurfaced after a medicated sleep, long before dawn, I would be engulfed in what I thought of as hypermemory: wave upon wave of extraordinarily intense recollections. After I opened my eyes for the second time, usually just before noon, I would jot down some quick notes — rough and rudimentary, like an artist’s initial pencil sketches — about the memories that had washed over me. I couldn’t help wondering whether those remembrances might be connected somehow with the powerful force that ushered in the dizzy spells, and I had an unshakable feeling that the advent of those seizures must have some larger significance. Surely the Big Vertigo’s cataclysmic appearance in my life couldn’t be completely random and devoid of meaning?
I fell prey to another odd notion as welclass="underline" a strong certainty that the serial attacks of vertigo (which were so much more powerful than anything I had ever experienced) must eventually, inevitably, result in permanent damage to my mental faculties. I wasn’t merely terrified by this bleak prospect; I also felt that — especially if my days of mental acuity were numbered — I ought to pay extra-close attention to the surges of remembrance, which were clearly trying to tell me something before it was too late. For the past fifty years, at least, I had started my daily work ritual by making notes on index cards about whatever had emerged during my dreams and the interstitial sessions of hazy, half-waking contemplation. Those jottings would often provide useful clues for my current writing, so I couldn’t very well let the waves of memory slide by unrecorded.
But I had made a firm decision to abandon the drowning novel, and I had also made up my mind that I would never write long-form fiction again. I simply didn’t feel I had another book in me. So why was I still compulsively transcribing those resurgent memories? There’s really no way to explain it except by saying that for me, scribbling on index cards was like a chronic disease, and there didn’t appear to be a cure.
2
During the bouts of hypermemory, I kept remembering the day the war ended.
Many writers of my generation have described the weather as cloudy and overcast, but in the forests of Shikoku it was a perfect blue-sky day. Just before noon, the local children were herded into a line. Then we followed our teachers up the hill behind the national school to the mansion of the village headman (in effect, the mayor), which stood on an elevated bluff overlooking the valley. Because no children were allowed inside, we congregated next to a hedge that surrounded the property. There had been some cloud cover in the early morning, but the sky had gradually cleared; the forest was glittering in the sunlight and the entire area was alive with the sound of cicadas. Even with all the ambient noise, we could still hear what was going on inside the mansion.
First there was a loud commotion among the adult males and then, after the headman had given a little speech to calm them down, the sound of the women’s quiet weeping rose to a wail. A moment later two of the teachers from our school appeared, ducking through the small wicket gate next to the main entrance. They told us the emperor’s broadcast had ended and ordered us to head back to the valley. As we were marching along in formation, with the road hot beneath our bare feet, we were informed by some of the older kids that Japan had lost the war, and then we split up and went our separate ways. When I passed my house I noticed that the tall, slatted-wood storm windows were closed, and I got the sense that my mother was probably doing some kind of handwork in the rear parlor. (After my father died, those windows would remain unopened for many years.) I took the narrow footpath through the fields next to my house and headed toward Myoto Rock.
Down by the river, there was a spot where the women from the hamlet on the north shore did their washing. Above it was a round outcropping of rock with pussy willows growing out of a fissure in the ledge. In the shadow of the boulder, along the riverbank, there was a triangular patch of water that formed a natural wallow. I used to wade along with the current, then throw myself down and settle into the little grotto until I was completely submerged. Using my legs for leverage, I would force my small body into the interior, with the rock jutting out over me like a protective roof.
This secluded part of the river was protected from the current, so there was a permanent accumulation of dissolved clay on the bottom. When I stretched out, my entire body would be enveloped in the soft, smooth, slippery mud. If I was lying flat, my presence couldn’t be detected by the women who were squatting at the water’s edge not far away, washing dishes or doing laundry. Once I had mastered the art of squeezing into that secret grotto without being seen, I would head there alone on a regular basis to luxuriate in the freedom of simply lying in the mud for hour upon blissful hour.
Whenever I was in early-morning remembrance mode the memory of this cozy hiding place would come flooding back, overlaid by a later but uncannily parallel memory that made it even more potent. As an adult, I had read a novel in which a French writer retold the Robinson Crusoe story, with a particular focus on the character of Friday. Crusoe, stranded on a desert island and exhausted by a daily life of endless toil and perpetual danger, had a hideaway not unlike mine where he could revel in submerging his weary body in a grotto of soft, wet clay. Every time I read the scene, I felt completely swept away — not only in my heart but somatically as well, on the deepest level. And now the memory of that book was permanently superimposed over the recollections of my muddy retreat.
When I reached the bank of the river on that day in August 1945, I took off my sweat-soaked clothes and laid them on a rock by the alfresco laundry spot. Wearing nothing but a skimpy Etchu-style loincloth, I immersed myself in the placid water of my hidden grotto. I lay there faceup, letting my body sink until the water started to fill my ears. I stayed that way for a long time, lost in reverie. After a while I stuck one arm out of the water and discovered that the afternoon air had turned chilly. I raised my torso and fixed my gaze on Myoto Rock, which reared above the glimmering flow of the river.