As our conversation continued, I posed this question: “Unaiko, this is something I was planning to ask Masao, but I’d like to hear your thoughts, too. Up until now, the Caveman Group has derived a large measure of its inspiration from my brother’s fiction, and while you were waiting for him to finish his own late work, the so-called drowning novel, you were planning to combine the saga of his work on the book with the story about how our father went out one night and drowned in the river. I know you even recorded some interviews with my brother, to use as a resource. What I was wondering is, how were you and Masao proposing to put the Caveman Group’s distinctive theatrical stamp on the novel if it had come to fruition? Or maybe I should ask how you were planning to fit the book into the dog-tossing mold that’s been so successful for you?”
“Well, we were looking at those initial recording sessions as preliminaries, like a dry run,” Unaiko replied. “We were just trying to get a handle on the general parameters of Mr. Choko’s drowning novel so we could start figuring out how to go about dramatizing it. Really, everything was pretty nebulous at that point.
“The idea was that Masao and I would sort of lurk around the Forest House and observe Mr. Choko while he was in the process of writing, and he seemed to be amenable to that. Of course, you of all people were already well aware of the arrangement, Asa. We were also hoping to be able to create a kind of synergy between Masao’s usual style and my own dog-tossing approach. (In both cases, we would have been counting on Mr. Choko’s active participation.) Then we would have tried to combine the two elements into a cohesive dramatic piece. The thing is, for me — and I think the same was true for Masao — the only concrete ideas I had were about the first and last scenes.
“The first scene was going to be something we’d heard about from Mr. Choko: a scenario from the recurrent dream he’s been having for the past sixty years or so. It’s night, and against the backdrop of a flood-swollen river we see your father, illuminated by the moon and looking away from us, sitting in a small rowboat. Meanwhile, a sort of Greek chorus of actors is onstage, chanting the story of a young boy who is struggling to reach the boat with the cold, muddy water lapping against his chest. Suspended high above the stage, the young boy’s supernatural alter ego, Kogii, is gazing down on the action.
“Not surprisingly, the idea for the other scene also came from something Mr. Choko told us. It was going to evoke the last image in the drowning novel, and the idea would have been to have the book’s final words read aloud, verbatim, by me and the other actors onstage. Those words would have suggested the thoughts that were going through the father’s mind just as he was about to drown. Then all the reciters would have been sucked into the whirlpool themselves, while the Kogii doll looked on from above.
“When we talk about it like this, though, it isn’t clear how the book would have been constructed, or how the story would have unfolded scene by scene. To be honest, I get the feeling the only thing floating around in Mr. Choko’s head might have been those T. S. Eliot lines about the Phoenician sailor drowning in the whirlpool.”
Unaiko lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and I found myself remembering the lines she mentioned. I imagine the same thing must be happening to you, Kogii, while you’re reading this fax:
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.
5
Dear Kogii,
The day after the late-night conversation I described in my previous fax, Ricchan came to the hospital to say her good-byes to Chikashi, and that allowed me to grab a few winks in a nearby chair. While I was napping Chikashi apparently started talking to Ricchan about your late work, and Ricchan gave me a blow-by-blow account of their conversation after I woke up. I’ll transcribe it here from memory:
Apparently the first thing Chikashi said to Ricchan was this: “Choko went down to the forests of Shikoku to write his drowning novel, but he ended up abandoning it instead. He’s been living the writer’s life for a long time now, but he quit rather easily on what was supposed to be the crowning work of his career. Even if the project is out of the picture for good, Choko will probably live for quite a few more years, so the question is, how can he move ahead with his late work? When my brother, Goro, died in such a horrible way, a lot of his colleagues in the movie business were saying his best work was behind him and his career was probably over anyway, but I believe if he had gone on living he would have produced some new films that were every bit as good as his previous work.
“My husband never seemed to have much to say about Goro’s films, one way or another, but there’s a recording of a seminar Choko gave while he was teaching at the Free University in Berlin. I’ve listened to it so many times that I know it almost by heart, but I’ll just paraphrase the highlights.
“Apparently in Goro’s later years he didn’t tend to take his interviews with Japanese journalists very seriously, but he responded differently when he was talking to the passionate cinema buffs he encountered in his travels overseas. In the seminar, my husband said he had read a number of newspaper articles about Goro in English and French, but since he doesn’t know much German, he asked some of his university students in Berlin to find similar articles in German publications and then put together essay-style reports about them in English. Based on that research, he concluded that Goro would have gone on to make a number of films in the future, if he had lived. I remember that my husband concluded his little speech by saying, ‘So why would Goro have decided to commit suicide in the prime of life? I really have no idea.’
“My husband tends to torment himself and keep his worries bottled up inside,” Chikashi went on, “but lately I know he’s been trying to rebuild his relationship with Akari in his own slow, silent way. And even though he’s feeling rather discouraged about his writing these days, I believe my husband is an optimist at heart and I think it’s very likely that he (like Goro, if he had lived) will eventually find his way to the late work he’s meant to do, whatever it might turn out to be. If someone were to theorize that Kogito felt more relief than disappointment about the failure of the drowning novel, well, I would have to disagree.”
Kogii, I hope you’ll take Chikashi’s words, which were spoken not long after she had been through a serious operation, as her way of trying to cheer you on from afar.
I also want to share something else I heard. Ricchan has been a huge help to Maki — in fact, apart from the days when Ricchan needed to go somewhere with Unaiko, she has spent all her time in Tokyo making herself useful around the house in Seijo — and even though she and Maki have low-key, easygoing personalities, they both share the trait of being willing to voice hard truths when they feel the need. They’ve come to trust each other, and that’s probably why Maki felt comfortable saying this to Ricchan: