Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. Leaving the wallow, I swam toward the place where the river waves were crashing violently against the enormous rock, and as I approached the monolithic landmark I gave myself up to the current. It carried me along and deposited me on one side of Myoto Rock. Muscle memory took over then, and I knew exactly how to move. Using my arms and legs, I propelled myself forward, with the swirling current tickling my chest. When I reached my destination, I stuck my head through the underwater fissure in the giant rock. On the other side of the crack, diagonal rays of sunlight slanted down, illuminating the dark blue pool. In that space I could see dozens of silvery dace, brimming with latent power, suspended in the water in quiescent repose.
At this point, as remembrance merges with fantasy, I seem to see the naked body of a large man in the murky depths below the school of dace. There on the river bottom the corpse sways gently, nudged by the current. It’s my father, of course. And I — that is, my retrospectively imagined child-self — am trying to imitate the way the dead body moves.
Back in the present moment, I reached for an index card and my fountain pen. I love my father desperately, I wrote in Japanese. But even in my deeply moved state I felt compelled to add a little orthographic embellishment, so a moment later I spelled out the phonetically Japanized version of the English word “desperately” in the margin: de-su-pe-ree-to-rii.
3
Dear Kogii,
I received a very thoughtful letter from Chikashi. “Thoughtful” really is the only way to describe it, in every sense of the word. Not a single line was wasted on futile optimism or pointless pessimism; she simply gave a straightforward account of your current condition. However, since it’s entirely possible that my interpretation of what she said may have been colored in part by wishful thinking, I’m writing to ask if you would be so kind as to corroborate my conclusions.
1. The Big Vertigo wasn’t some freakish occurrence that happened once while you were visiting down here on Shikoku and never again. There have been three more episodes since you returned to Tokyo.
2. You’ve been taking it easy on order from your family doctor, but you haven’t followed up by going to a university hospital for an MRI and so on. Both your wife and daughter have encouraged you to do so, but you haven’t been receptive to their suggestions. Because the dizzy spell that knocked you for a loop on Shikoku took you completely by surprise, perhaps you’re afraid the results of the examination might be even more of a shock — anyhow, that’s our theory. If the tests show some irreparable abnormality in your brain, you probably wouldn’t be able to do your literary work, and we would all have to accept that you would never be the same.
When Professor Musumi refused to be screened for lung cancer even though he was aware that something was very wrong inside his chest, you took on the task — at his wife’s request — of trying to convince your longtime mentor to submit to treatment. He refused, with fatal consequences, and now it looks as though you’re borrowing the same excuses he gave you virtually verbatim. Chikashi is prepared to respect your choices, and I agree completely. No matter what happens I really feel as if your homecoming trip to our little valley in the mountains made you realize something important about everyone in our family, including yourself. If I’m mistaken, I hope we can laugh it off the way we’ve done with so many of your preconceived notions and misperceptions.
3. Whatever the diagnosis turns out to be, if you would simply take a break and get some rest, then you should be able to get back to your usual regimen of work — within your new limitations, of course — just as Professor Musumi did toward the end. However, if you remain mired in the denial stage and if your prose starts to show any degree of mental decline, it would be a very serious matter. To make sure that doesn’t happen, Chikashi has been thinking about creating a system whereby any manuscripts you produce from here on would be vetted by some of the editors you’ve been working with for years, before publication. And if they find significant problems, then we would have your publishers announce that Mr. Choko will be retiring from writing, effective immediately.
4. At the moment, even though you’re feeling rather low, I gather your life isn’t too different from when you were in good health, and while you’ve stopped work on the drowning novel, you’re still continuing to crank out a newspaper essay every month. I assume that your reading habits are pretty much the same as always, except that you’re being careful not to spend too much time reading books in foreign languages because constantly stopping to look things up in dictionaries can be a strain.
Another reason I’m writing this letter is to figure out the best way for us to stay in touch now that the Big Vertigo is part of the equation. (Needless to say, if an emergency should arise Chikashi would telephone me at home.)
There isn’t much news to report on my end, aside from Masao and Unaiko’s theatrical activities. Ever since you returned to Tokyo they’ve been nice enough to keep me in the loop much more than before, and Unaiko, in particular, seems to have really opened up lately. She’s been confiding in me in a much deeper way, and I have a feeling our talks will raise some matters I’ll need to discuss with you at some point.
However, since Chikashi mentioned that there’s no guarantee you’ll always be able to answer every letter I write, and since you’ve been jotting things down on index cards at a great rate — though not as part of any particular writing project — she kindly offered to make copies of any relevant notes (with your approval, of course) and send them to us down here. Unaiko and I will view those dispatches as your replies to our queries. As you know, I’ve already received the first batch of photocopied notes from Chikashi, and Unaiko and I have been perusing them with great interest — a task Unaiko approached with the same verve and intensity you’ll remember from your own interactions with her. During the process, one thing that jumped out at her was where you confess your feelings of love to the point of desperation (or words to that effect) for our father.
Unaiko said that while you were staying at the Forest House, she shared the story of what happened to her at Yasukuni Shrine. I gather she was hoping to get some reciprocal feedback from you, as a liberal peacenik who also happened to have idolized his right-wing-fanatic father, and who got carried away to the point of singing along with a German military anthem himself. Anyhow, she was apparently left with the sense that you had been less than forthcoming about your own emotions.
Unaiko wants to use the theater to express her feelings about ultranationalism, militarism, gender politics, and so on — feelings that seem to stem from some sort of long-ago personal trauma. I think it was because she feels so strongly about those issues that she took the rather extreme step of criticizing you for declaring your sudden, unexpected surges of love for our poor, misguided father.
That reminds me — the drowning novel may be totally kaput as far as you’re concerned, but the young people who have been hanging out at the Forest House seem to be clinging to some hope that you will tell the story eventually. They seem to be saying, in effect, “Hey, Choko, don’t think we’re going to let you off the hook so easily!”