“These men here were asking whether we knew the hidden meaning behind the Saya’s name,” she said, “but then without waiting for an answer they went ahead and told us the term they had in mind. Akari doesn’t like hearing that sort of thing, and that’s why he has his hands over his ears.”
As I explained earlier, the word saya, meaning a sheath for a sword, has long been the local nickname for the spot where a meteor landed in the midst of the forest and left a long, narrow indentation in the ground. However, saya also happens to be a crude colloquialism for the female sex organs — more precisely, the vagina. Daio was a few seconds behind me, and when the two men saw him charging in their direction they finally went on their way, laughing loudly and slapping each other on the back as if they had just shared some grand, uproarious adventure. From time to time they looked over their shoulders at us with faces that were red from an excess of sophomoric mirth.
“Well, those two ran away with their tails between their legs,” Daio said jocularly. “And no wonder, since Kogito was armed with a stone ax. Ha ha.”
“They were so persistent, I really didn’t know what to do,” Ricchan said.
At this, Akari finally removed his hands from his ears. “Don’t worry, Ricchan,” he said in a voice that was filled with emotion. And then he added, to my surprise, “If they come back, Papa will beat them up for us!”
I immediately recognized that phrasing as an echo of one of the more poignant quotes from My Own Words. It had been a very long time since I’d heard my son say anything so positive about me, and my heart swelled with a cautious infusion of hope.
Chapter 11. But Why The Golden Bough?
1
Since the first stirrings of my rapprochement with Akari (which, while still a work in progress, seemed to have taken a definite step in the right direction), our daily life had undergone a transformation. The sound system from Unaiko and Ricchan’s room was moved into the dining room, and Akari would often stretch out diagonally on the floor and listen to music or work on his compositions. Ricchan never took a single day off from their rehab sessions at the Saya, and even though she was busy with the usual plethora of activities, she never dropped the ball where Akari’s well-being was concerned.
I had set up my own base camp on the sofa that had been banished to the southwest corner of the great room to create more space for rehearsals, with my assorted work supplies — books, papers, and index cards — in (and on) a small filing cabinet next to the couch. As I soon realized, our current living arrangement was not so different from the one we’d had at home in Tokyo, except that in this house Akari and I would both retreat to the second floor when a rehearsal began. Ricchan spent a fair amount of time staying on top of bookkeeping and other office tasks on the computer she shared with Unaiko, but after Akari started listening to music in the dining room she would often sit at the dining-room table with her head bent over the production notes from the filming of Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War.
Daio continued to be a regular visitor, and in the spirit of sociability he and I would often join Ricchan at the table. Akari kept the volume on his music fairly low, and it never seemed to have an adverse effect on Ricchan’s concentration. By the same token Daio’s and my speaking voices, which had to be raised slightly to be heard over the music, didn’t seem to be an impediment to Akari’s listening pleasure. Noticing this, I was reminded of something Maki had once observed. When Akari was in listening-to-music mode, she said, his brain seemed to be in a separate realm than when he was speaking or hearing words.
As for my own brain, it was still completely devoid of ideas for a late-work book. I realized in retrospect that I had foolishly put all my creative eggs into the drowning-novel basket and hadn’t bothered to formulate a backup plan. Because I wasn’t working on anything in particular, I didn’t have to cleave to the kind of focused bibliographical list that normally accompanied my novel-writing process, so for once I was free to explore whatever caught my fancy on a given day. My current reading habits were shaped by a conscious continuo of self-restraint born of my fear that the Big Vertigo might pay me another unwelcome visit, so rather than poring over books in my study/bedroom it seemed to make more sense for me to wander downstairs, stretch out on the sofa, and browse through books at a leisurely pace.
It was while I was in this relaxed mode that some reading material I had requested from an editor friend in Tokyo—The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, by James George Frazer — was delivered. My friend had kindly sent all twelve volumes of the Elibron Classics facsimile, published in 2005, of Macmillan’s 1920–1923 edition. Part of the reason I had wanted to get my hands on a complete set was so I could ascertain where the three volumes from the red leather trunk fit into the whole. I was also making frequent reference to the Japanese translations of several volumes of The Golden Bough’s third edition. A certain publisher was in the process of issuing a translation of the entire set, and I had been receiving a complimentary copy of each volume as it came out (there was never any card, but I suspected that the gift had been arranged by a cultural anthropologist friend of mine), so I’d had those sent down here, too.
After my skirmishes with the Big Vertigo, instead of reading with maximum concentration for long stretches of time I fell into the habit of keeping a few books on the desk next to my bed and desultorily flipping through the pages whenever the mood struck me. But now that my conversations with Daio had led me to the Frazer books, my page-turning sessions had taken on a new intensity and focus. I was no longer merely browsing; I was on an active quest.
In keeping with this new resolve, I began to work my way through the three volumes of The Golden Bough I’d found in the red leather trunk, systematically parsing all the underlinings and marginal notes: the visible evidence of my father’s struggle, given his limited proficiency in English, to read these difficult books. (When I was paging through the books for the first time, back in Tokyo, I hadn’t paid any attention to these marks.) I didn’t find anything that would warrant being called marginalia, but there were a number of faint markings in hard-leaded colored pencil (primarily red and blue) — marks I suspected had been made in pencil rather than ink so they could eventually be erased.
Because the books had gotten wet in the river, many of the pages were stuck together and it was difficult to separate them without causing the old, brittle paper to tear or even disintegrate. Nonetheless, I could clearly see that some of the subtitles or subheadings had been lightly circled in colored pencil. At some point I realized the three books must have been a loan (if they had been a gift, the set would surely have been complete), but because my father had died unexpectedly they were never returned. It seemed safe to deduce that the barely legible notations had been made by the books’ original owner, perhaps as a way of letting my father know which segments that person considered especially significant.
If my assumption was correct (and I was confident it was), then the assiduous wielder of those colored pencils must have been the mentor whose name I had heard my father invoke in reverent tones on numerous occasions. Eureka, I thought. That’s it! These books had undoubtedly come from the so-called Kochi Sensei, who lived on the other side of Shikoku’s Sanmyaku mountain range: the same person my father had once gone to visit in search of knowledge, dragging Daio along with him. The pair had walked for many kilometers, following a route to the town of Kochi that followed the river and eventually fed into a road made famous in the mid-1860s by the Kochi-born samurai Ryoma Sakamoto. (As every Japanese schoolchild knows, Sakamoto traversed that roadway when he deserted his feudal clan to embark on a life of idealistic anti-shogunate political activism inspired by the democratic principles of the United States — a life cut short in 1867 when he was murdered by assassins at a lodging house in Kyoto.)