“Getting back to the fateful day in 1945, apart from those books the trunk mainly contained an assortment of papers and letters, tied in neat bundles. The army officers examined the envelopes and their contents, one by one, and then returned most of them to the trunk. There was an oblong hibachi in the room that was being used for warming sake or heating stewpots, and some of the letters ended up getting tossed onto the coals and going up in flames. As for the rest of the stuff from the trunk — well, your family was in the paper business so there probably would have been an oilcloth, or something of the sort, lying around. But anyhow, the officers wrapped the remaining materials in water-repellent paper and put them back in the trunk, and then they rewrapped the trunk in one of the raincoats we used to wear when we went into the mountains to work. So that was the red leather trunk you came to pick up late that night.”
“You know, it’s strange, but I have no memory of the part of the evening you’ve just described,” I mused. “I don’t remember going to get the trunk late that night at all, although I do recall having a small role in packing it earlier in the day. The thing I do recollect with what feels like absolute certainty is the scene that took place a while later.
“Picture this, if you will. My father has already boarded the little boat. I’m in the water nearby, and I have just handed him the red leather trunk. Looking back toward the shore, I notice one of the ropes that keeps the wooden barrels securely moored — you know, the barrels we used for the spider lily bulbs — is about to be torn loose by the current, so I plow through the chilly water with the muddy waves lapping against my chest, intending to tie a better knot. That’s what happens in the dream, too, so it’s possible my memories may have gradually modified themselves to match the dream. At any rate, the mooring rope for the boat was tied to the same metal ring, which was embedded in a stretch of poured concrete along the shoreline. But isn’t it possible that I’m going back because my father has asked me to untie the mooring line so the boat can cast off? Come to think of it, I realize that must be what happened. It wasn’t about the barrels at all. And then — I don’t know whether I didn’t have time to return to the boat, or maybe I turned around and saw it being catapulted into the middle of the river by the force of the waves, but in any case it was gone. And that’s the story of what happened that night, in a nutshell.”
“Good heavens, Kogito. All these years you’ve been reliving that night over and over in your dreams, torturing yourself with guilt, and while we’re talking you suddenly realize that you didn’t get sidetracked by some trivial issue with a wooden barrel and literally miss the boat? Now, this is pure conjecture, but it seems to me that if your father was ready to take off he wouldn’t have needed to send you back to shore to untie the mooring rope. He could have cut it with the short sword he used for trimming the paperbush bark and so on, which was always hanging from his belt. He set out on the boat trip with no plans to return home, right? So he wouldn’t have needed to use the rope again to tie up the boat, since he would have simply abandoned it when he got to his first destination, downriver. You know, Kogito, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that your father consciously intended to leave you behind, and sending you to cut the mooring rope could have been his way of saving your life!
“And then, of course, Choko Sensei ended up drowning in the river. It was only a few days earlier that you had precociously pointed out that your father was mistaking one complex kanji for a similar-looking one — you know, when he misread the water-related 淼 淼 for the woodsy 森 森? This may be a stretch, but given the way things turned out, doesn’t it strike you that your father’s misreading may actually have been oddly apt and even prescient on a deeper level? What I mean is that in his last moments of existence Sensei wasn’t really being borne along to the end of the river, where it becomes one with the vast and endless sea. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this: I’m talking about the belief around these parts that when people die, their spirits go up into the forest and settle at the base of one particular, foreordained tree. In other words, while your father may have taken his last breath on the water, I think he was really on his way back to the forest!
“Of course, I wasn’t born here, so there’s probably no spirit tree in the forest with my name on it. Even so, when it comes time for me to die, I’d like to believe my soul could go to a place in some cosmic forest and find refuge and salvation there. By the way, Asa mentioned that the poem you collaborated on with your mother wasn’t exactly well received, but I really like it a lot. Of course, Akari was born and raised in Tokyo, but I think that if you’re very careful to make the proper preparations well in advance, when Akari’s time comes his spirit should be able to go up into the forest and find its way to its own designated tree.”
Although Daio wasn’t originally from Shikoku, he had remained in the area after closing the training camp, and he had clearly absorbed a great deal of local lore. He was highly intelligent and often surprisingly articulate, and I imagined that he had probably always had a genuine love of learning. Admittedly, I did question his choice of my father as a role model when there must have been more sensible options available, but that was ancient history. Daio and I had been barefoot while we were talking, to give our feet a break. Now we put our shoes back on, and as we strolled the length and breadth of that grassy meadow my companion shared his fascination with the Saya. There was a local legend (or perhaps it was more of a rumor) that if you dug deep enough it was still possible to unearth prehistoric stone axes made by our distant ancestors. Daio was intrigued by this possibility, and he had apparently spent a fair amount of time poking around in the soil in this general vicinity. On this day, after a brief impromptu dig with a twig he’d found, he proudly brought me a large chunk of dirt-encrusted rock that could conceivably have once been the head of a stone ax.
As we started to head downhill from the Saya we could see Akari and Ricchan finishing their calisthenics beside the river, where the willow trees bursting into fresh new foliage looked like a massive cloud of green smoke. Daio and I were midway down the steep slope when we noticed a couple of men striding toward Akari and Ricchan from the opposite direction.
By this time Akari was half sitting, half reclining on a portable air mattress (a position that showed how much his back pain had abated), with Ricchan next to him. As we watched from afar the two men squatted nearby and began speaking intently to Ricchan and Akari. Suddenly, Akari clapped his hands over his ears. I knew that gesture well; it was his way of expressing disapproval or revulsion when (for example) some giddy comedian on a TV talk show would launch into an off-color joke. Seeing this, I quickened my pace and scrambled down the slope as fast as I could go.
As I approached, the two men (who appeared to be in their forties) stopped talking and shifted their torsos so that they were facing my direction in a tense, watchful-looking stance that I interpreted as “ready to rumble.” When I arrived, panting, Ricchan stood up. Sliding her bare feet into a pair of canvas walking shoes, she explained what was going on.