I began to probe in earnest, exploring the books in sequential order as I thought my father would have done. My goal was to replicate his experience as he attempted to read Frazer’s work in its original form, armed with nothing but a small, dog-eared copy of The Concise English-Japanese Dictionary (which I remembered having seen around the house), after his faithful disciple, Daio, had toted those heavy volumes home following their visit to the Kochi Sensei.
And what about the annotations? I was curious to see whether the Kochi Sensei had confined his explanations to the subheadings, or had commented on the text line by line. To my surprise, after a cursory flip through the pages (pausing only to peruse the headings and passages marked with red and blue pencil), it became clear why the Kochi Sensei had chosen these particular volumes as a means of furthering my father’s education. There was no doubt about it; the Kochi Sensei was using The Golden Bough’s anthropological and folkloric principles as a metaphor for politics!
I was on the third day of skimming the entire Golden Bough when Ricchan ventured into the great room to bring me a cup of coffee. She set the ceramic mug on the filing cabinet near the sofa and said, “I guess whenever you feel like working on this project, you have to make several trips to lug all the books down from the study. That must be good exercise!”
“These are the books I found in the red leather trunk during my previous visit,” I explained. “I’ve been trying to figure out why my father was reading them, and how, and I think I’m close to finding some answers.”
“I’m aware that The Golden Bough has been translated into Japanese, but I’ve never read it,” Ricchan said. “If you’re at a good stopping point, would you mind giving me a crash course? Hang on, I’ll just go grab my own coffee.”
I gathered the relevant materials and laid them out on the L-shaped sofa between the end where I was sitting and the perpendicular segment where Ricchan took a seat when she returned from the kitchen, mug in hand.
“The Golden Bough is a scholarly work about folklore,” I began, “but it also provides practical insight into interpersonal dynamics, particularly as they pertain to the realm of politics. My father was using these books as a means for furthering his own political education, but he seems to have had a penchant for the literary aspects as well, and I’ve been intrigued by the discovery that he apparently enjoyed the text on an artistic level, too. Ricchan, you’ve probably heard Daio referring to my father as ‘Choko Sensei,’ and I’m guessing it might have struck you as odd. ‘Sensei’ is a vestigial title, left over from the time when my father was running an ultranationalistic training camp and Daio was one of his disciples. But recently, as Daio and I have been talking, something rather surprising has emerged. He told me that my father sometimes liked to ramble about political matters, tossing around hard-line terms such as nation-state, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and so on. However, according to Daio, below the blustery ultranationalistic surface my father’s true nature, even at the age of fifty, was still that of a literature-besotted youth.
“When I first started examining The Golden Bough, trying to see it through my father’s eyes, I noticed that in all three volumes someone had circled some of Frazer’s marginal notes, which are rather like summaries of the passages or subsections in question, in colored pencil. Look, here’s one right here. These confident markings appear to have been made by an experienced teacher, but what I didn’t notice at first was that there are also some more tentative notations, evidently added by a reader who hadn’t done much of this sort of thing before — underlining, question marks, exclamation points, and so on. As I continued reading, I realized that this second set of markings must have been made by my father. As Daio said, it’s obvious my father was captivated by the literary — or should I say poetic? — attributes of the book. But it’s equally clear that his mentor was trying to use The Golden Bough as a tool for teaching my father about politics. My father was obediently going along with the plan, but it appears to me as though he was trying to read it from a more artistic perspective as well. This has been a revelation for me; for the first time since I was born, I feel as if I’m seeing my father for who he really was. (At the time he was reading this book, of course, he was nearly twenty-five years younger than I am now.)
“The epigraph of the first volume is a quotation from a poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Here, take a look. I’ve laid out both the English and the Japanese translations, and as you can see the English style is quite archaic.”
From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain….
“I think the translation is reasonably true to the original,” I continued after Ricchan had finished studying both versions of the poem. “I mean, this is one of those epic poems where everything is on the surface, so what you see is what you get. What’s interesting is that Frazer more or less echoes the same content — only in prose, of course — in various parts of his book. His style can be a bit flowery in places, but it’s mostly lucid and straightforward, and sometimes it’s absolutely gorgeous. I think my father managed to grasp that beauty, even through the laborious process of reading the text one word at a time with frequent recourse to The Concise (as we used to affectionately call the little English-Japanese dictionary). Seeing the evidence of his painstaking quest has almost made me feel pity, or at least sympathy, for my father: that fifty-year-old man who was on the cusp of a premature death by drowning.”
2
Next, I moved on to telling Ricchan about the sections that my father himself had circled, with particular emphasis on the concept of the “dying God.”
“The ‘King of the Wood,’ who’s mentioned in an early sentence, is so widely known that you could safely call him a major character in cultural history,” I explained. “In the Alban Hills of Italy, deep in the woods around Lake Nemi — which is basically a volcanic crater filled with water — there is a huge oak tree. A dark-visaged king, sword at his waist, is stationed nearby to protect the sacred tree. (Of course, you could also say that the king is protecting himself.) One after another, vigorous young men come to challenge the king to a sword fight. Once a challenger has vanquished the current monarch, that individual will become the new king. As the term ‘dying God’ suggests, in this mythology gods are not immortal; on the contrary, it is their destiny to die. When a king grows old and feeble, he and his realm will inevitably fall into ruin and be replaced. (Of course, the physical life force has long been associated with fertility cults and crop cycles in many cultures, including our own.)