“Kogito, I know you’ve been having a recurrent dream about what you saw the night of the big flood, when your father took off in his little boat. Asa said you kept insisting that you felt as though you had really seen your father sinking to the bottom of the deep river, and I can’t help thinking the image might have been something you dreamed. Why? Because I was the one who spotted Choko Sensei’s dead body lying on the riverbed in shallow water, and you were nowhere in sight. Asa said you were always saying that Kogii (who was already in the boat) and you were the only ones who saw what happened that night, but she knew for a fact that your mother was standing on top of the promontory, watching the whole scene unfold. And I know there was at least one other witness, because that witness was me.
“After I saw Choko Sensei take off in his little boat, I ran back to tell the army officers. After a great deal of discussion, some of us decided to go out looking for your father as soon as it began to get light. I remember the sky was just beginning to show some faint signs of dawn when we jumped on bicycles and set off down the road along the river. At the top of the sandbar down by Honmachi, we ran into someone who had happened to see a boat flipping over by the light of the moon, so we figured we should start by searching the area along the sandbar. We split up, and as I’ve mentioned before, I was the one who found Choko Sensei’s body lying in some shallow water.
“That’s how it happened, but afterward your mother tried to make sure you never got a chance to talk to anyone who had been involved in pulling your father’s body out of the water; I guess she wanted to protect you from hearing the awful details. You left home when you were fifteen, and from then on you didn’t really hang out much with anyone from here, did you? And even during the five years between your father’s death and your departure for Tokyo, you were kind of a loner. I’ve run into some people who knew you in those days, and they said that whenever they saw you at the new middle school you always seemed to be sitting alone in an empty classroom between classes and at lunchtime, reading a book. Asa was really your only link to this area, and thanks to your mother, you and your sister were estranged for many years. I’m not sure, but I think you may be the only person raised around here who ever uprooted himself so completely — roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and all, as the saying goes.
“But even after everything that’s happened since you moved away, I think at heart you’re still a boy from the forest. I mean, the things you write draw heavily on the stories your mother and grandmother told you growing up, and no matter how much you embellish them with imagination, for me, your books always seem to smell like the truth. That reminds me of something I used to say to your mother during her later years — of course, by then you had long since become a Tokyoite and rarely visited, even though she had finally relented and granted you the freedom to visit whenever you pleased (just as long as you didn’t show up too often).
“Anyhow, I remember one time I said to her, ‘Kogito’s novels are pure fantasy, aren’t they? It’s amazing to me that he can exercise his imagination to such a degree and make things up out of whole cloth. When you come right down to it, I guess it’s a simple matter of talent.’
“And then — maybe it was because she thought I was using some highfalutin-sounding words or something — your mother cut me down to size, snapping, ‘That isn’t fantasy; it’s just imagination.’ Then she went on to say, ‘My husband used to read the books of Kunio Yanagida, and he told me that according to Yanagida there is a clear difference between fantasy and imagination, because imagination has some basis in reality. So what Kogii’s doing is writing mostly about real things, which he augments by using his imagination. He has a very good memory for the tales his grandmother and I used to tell him, and because he used folklore as a sort of launching pad for his imaginings, when we read his early books there wasn’t a single thing to make us think, Gee, this right here is some really far-fetched fantasy.’
“That’s what your mother said to me. Her comments made me angry, and I countered by saying, ‘Yeah, but what about the really crazy book, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, where Choko Sensei is portrayed as a grotesque caricature who has bladder cancer, and he gets loaded into a makeshift wooden chariot and goes off to rob a bank?’ And your mother came back with, ‘Oh, that wasn’t imagination, or fantasy. That was outright delusion!’ Ha ha ha!”
While Daio was delivering this animated monologue, we had been making steady progress up the grassy hill and were now standing at the heart of the Saya: the scabbard-shaped indentation in the meadow.
“Sorry,” Daio continued after he had finished laughing, “I got kind of carried away reminiscing about the fun I used to have talking with your mother. Now that we’ve come to a place where we don’t have to worry about being overheard, we should probably get back to the serious matters we were discussing earlier, don’t you think? Because I keep coming up against a vexing problem, and every time I try to work it out on my own, I seem to end up getting sidetracked or else giving up entirely. If I could only get this matter resolved, there might turn out to be some connection with the recurrent dream that’s been plaguing you for all these years.
“As I mentioned, Asa told me about the dream and I know you’ve even put it down on paper. From my perspective, I don’t believe it should be dismissed as ‘just a dream.’ Now, I’m no expert — this is something I happened to read in a book about dream interpretation, aimed at amateurs like me — but apparently when a child tries to tell its mother something and she refuses to listen, the things the child wanted to express can be turned inward and incorporated into dreams, which eventually merge seamlessly with memories. And then, according to the book, the child can grow up to be someone like you who’s haunted by recurrent dreams. I would never presume to psychoanalyze you, but based on what I’ve heard I can’t help feeling that your genuine memories (even if you don’t actively remember them when you’re awake) have somehow been filtered through those dreams.
“You told this story in one of your newspaper columns, but apparently a cultural anthropologist friend of yours was doing fieldwork somewhere in Indonesia — I believe it was on Flores Island — when he made an interesting discovery in a remote settlement up in the mountains. The people of the tribe had created a giant replica of an airplane from twigs and bits of wood and enshrined it in a clearing in the forest. In your essay you said that when you first heard about this, your heart skipped a beat, and when I read that line I thought, I’ll bet Kogito was remembering a dream he had when he was a child.”
“It’s certainly true I was captivated by a drawing of the primitive replica of a plane I saw in some field notes made by that anthropologist friend of mine — he was an accomplished artist as well, and his sketches would have put a professional to shame — and you’re right in thinking it reminded me uncannily of one of my childhood dreams,” I said. “And now I’m feeling shaken up all over again, because this place you’ve brought me to, the Saya, is the spot where the dream in question took place. In my dream it was above here to the north, beyond the big meteoric boulder, that I came across the tail of a wrecked aircraft. The plane’s body was nearby, facing downward. It wasn’t made of wood, though; it appeared to have been cobbled together from spare machine parts. But really, Daio, your powers of deductive reasoning are quite extraordinary!”