“She’s absolutely right that the theme should shape the literary style,” I said. “It really ought to work that way with any writing project, and I think a distinctive style can be the most compelling part of the whole.”
“When I told Unaiko that Akari had unexpectedly shared his copy of the screenplay, the first thing she wanted to know was how Meisuke’s mother’s remarks were presented,” Ricchan said. “She was wondering about one scene in particular. It takes place just after the second uprising, which was led by the teenage reincarnation of the original Meisuke. His mother (who was, of course, the mother of the first Meisuke as well) and her troops have broken camp in Okawara, and the mother and her eight-year-old son are on the way back to their village when they are surrounded by a group of young hooligans — unemployed former samurai who are filled with freefloating resentment and looking for trouble. These brutes trap young Meisuke II in a hole and stone him to death, and then a bunch of them gang-rape his mother.
“After the ruffians are gone Meisuke’s mother, who is injured and unable to walk, is carried home to the village by her supporters on a stretcher made from an old wooden shutter. The procession stops at a sake brewery, and while the proprietor is making a show of giving them some water to drink, it’s obvious he is consumed with prurient curiosity. So how does Meisuke’s mother respond to his oblique inquiries in the script? When I posed the question to some of the women who participated in the making of the movie, most of them remembered her saying something like ‘If you’re so curious about how it was, kind sir, maybe you should try being raped yourself sometime!’”
I didn’t respond, and Ricchan seemed to cast a mildly critical glance in my direction before she went on speaking. “So anyway, when Unaiko posed that question I had a major epiphany, and I understood for the first time why she was creating this new play and what its theme was going to be as well,” she said. “I made up my mind then that no matter what happened I would do everything I could, without compromise, to help Unaiko find the language to get her message across.”
Once again, I sat there in unresponsive silence, not sure what to make of this cryptic disclosure. After a beat or two I said, “I gather you’re planning to begin by performing this piece at the junior high’s theater in the round. In that case, many of the women you’ve been interviewing will most likely be in attendance, so it’s probably safe to assume they’ll be drawn into the interactive dialogue and the hurling of soft toys that are an integral part of the dog-tossing approach to theater.”
“Absolutely!” Ricchan chirped. “In fact, every time I go out to do these interviews I’ve been promising to invite them all to the premiere when the time comes. I tell everyone I meet that I really hope they’ll come with their arms full of handcrafted ‘dead dogs’ they’ve created themselves at home!”
5
Daio and I were standing side by side in the Saya, up to our ankles in fresh green grass, leaning back against the big meteoric boulder while our conversation meandered aimlessly along.
“This is something I heard from Asa,” Daio said, abruptly switching gears from unfocused small talk, “but I gather you still have a very clear memory of the scene that night when your father set out on the stormy, flooded river.”
“Actually, the account I shared with Asa and Unaiko — the version I was planning to use as the prologue of my drowning novel — is different from the memory of what I actually saw that night,” I said. “For a very long time, I kept having a recurrent dream that was almost always exactly the same in every detail, and the prologue was based on my dream. At this point I honestly don’t know whether my memories have been retroactively shaped by the endless repetitions of that dream, or whether the dream reflects my actual experience.”
Daio nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if it hadn’t been a dream, your supernatural alter ego wouldn’t have been standing on the boat next to your father,” he said. “I remember hearing that you used to insist there was another child who was an exact duplicate of you living in your house. That was the same Kogii from the dream, right? The story of Kogii was well known around the village, and I heard people mention it more than once after I returned from China. It was one of the things that made me begin to realize what an unusual person you were, from a very young age. As for your dream, I’ve heard about it quite a few times from various sources, but it still knocks me for a loop every time someone mentions offhandedly that Choko Sensei set out on the river with your double standing next to him.
“That’s because I was there, watching, and I have a very clear memory of seeing you! You probably didn’t even notice me, did you? As you’ll recall, the officers and I used to visit your father, and in the old stone storehouse where we talked and ate and slept, there was a big room with a floor that was half dirt and half wooden planks. It was where your father kept his vintage Takara-brand barber’s chair, which everyone understood was for his private use only. That night, I had spread a futon in the interior part of the room and had just settled down to try to get some sleep. Right about then you came in from outside, alone. There was one light burning — a single bulb with an air-raid shade, which illuminated the path to the staircase leading to the second floor. I started to get up because I assumed you had been sent to tell me that your father wanted me to do some task or other, but then I saw that you appeared to have something on your mind. You left your sandals in the entryway and crossed the dirt-floored room to the staircase without ever raising your head, so I just pretended to be asleep. I felt a lot of contempt for myself at that moment, and I remember thinking, What good am I to anyone, anyhow, with only one arm?
“In the big room upstairs there were three young conscripts from the flight-training school along with a couple of young officers who basically made a cottage industry out of ordering me around, and they had all presumably gone to sleep. After a few minutes you came back downstairs, carrying something wrapped in a raincoat. As soon as you went outside again, I got up and tiptoed up the stairs to check whether the officers were awake.
“The thing you were carrying wasn’t very large, but it had sharp corners, so I naturally assumed it must be the red leather trunk. Earlier in the day, sometime around noon, the officers had been worrying that maybe your father wasn’t planning to come over to the outbuilding where we were bunking. They decided that they needed to get their hands on the red leather trunk as a way of finding out whether your father might be plotting some extreme course of action on his own, so they sent me to the main house to fetch it. By early evening the serious partying was well under way, but the only ones who were drinking heavily were the officers and the young navy pilots. The night before there had been a big strategy meeting and, as the officers put it later, they had a breakdown in their talks with your father. He withdrew to the house and didn’t show his face in our quarters the next day, so when I came back with the red leather trunk the officers pulled off the raincoat it was wrapped in and everyone crowded around eagerly to see what was inside. But the thing is, the contents turned out to be a complete disappointment, to the point where the officers were actually laughing and saying rude things like ‘Hey, there’s just a bunch of boring crap in here!’
“I didn’t say anything, but since they were rifling through Sensei’s private property I kept an eye on them the entire time from a corner of the room. One thing I remember clearly was the three heavy books — I wouldn’t have been able to read the titles from a distance, especially since they were written in English, but years later, when I was helping your mother with her annual spring cleaning, I saw those books again. That was when it hit me that they must be the same ones we had carried back from a visit to the Kochi Sensei’s house, when I trekked down there once with your father. And this time, when your mother wasn’t looking, I copied down the title on a scrap of paper. It was The Golden Bough, and there were three big, thick volumes.