“Really? I don’t know — maybe your mother’s analytical approach to things somehow rubbed off on me! No, but seriously, like she said, imagination (as opposed to pure fantasy) usually has some basis in fact.
“In this case, during the days before your father’s death there was a series of meetings combined with a nonstop drinking party, and even though you were just a child you must have overheard quite a bit of the discussion. I’m not sure about this, but my guess is that you would have been feeling dismayed and confused by what you heard. On the day before your father took off alone, I remember seeing you lurking in the corridor behind the big tatami-matted room upstairs during one of those meetings with a worried look on your face. And I thought, All this conspiratorial talk must sound pretty scary to a kid, but it wasn’t my place to shoo you away. And then after your father died you must have locked those memories away somewhere deep in your unconscious and then convinced yourself that the things you overheard were just part of a dream. I think the time has come for me to blow the lid off some of those secrets, so I’m going to tell you what actually happened.
“The plan was to sneak onto the military airfield at Yoshidahama and steal a fully loaded kamikaze plane, then fly east from there. The pilots were supposed to land the stolen plane in the Saya, right here in the middle of the forest, and somehow hide it until it was needed. That risky maneuver was the main point of contention during those meetings you were eavesdropping on.”
“Yes, I wrote about it in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, only I framed it as the fantastical imaginings of a young man who was in the process of losing his mind,” I said.
“Hey, I read that little book!” Daio exclaimed. “It was right after your mother summoned me and basically held my feet to the fire, demanding to know whether I’d ever told you about the meeting or whether you, as a ten-year-old child, had been listening through the walls. Again, I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems as if a disturbing memory that had been buried or suppressed for many years found its way to the surface through your dreams — probably helped along by the fact that a novelist’s mind moves in strange and mysterious ways. Anyhow, when your mother showed me the passage in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, I told her in no uncertain terms: ‘I see what you’re getting at, but I don’t see any cause for concern. Your deepest fear seems to be that Kogito understood what was going on in his father’s meetings with the military officers, and that at some point he might write a much bigger novel than this one and you would all end up in complete disgrace, like the family of Kotoku Sensei after the High Treason Incident, but I’m sure it will never happen. Even for me, and I was quite a bit older, the things I heard at some of those meetings seemed like total gibberish. They made no sense to me, and I’m sure they would have been even more incomprehensible to a child.’
“As it turned out, I was right. You never did write the big exposé your mother was so afraid of. And since you’ve completely given up on the drowning novel, your practical-minded sister, Asa, can finally breathe a sigh of relief, and I think that’s a very good thing.
“However, the truth is that I’m still left with a few nagging doubts. We aren’t talking about your conscious mind now but rather the unconscious, right? Either way, I doubt if you really understood the words you were hearing when you eavesdropped on those meetings, but somehow your dreaming mind was able to figure everything out, and the significance of what you’d overheard became clear in your dreams. Doesn’t that seem like a plausible explanation? On some level you knew there was a plan to steal a military plane and hide it at the Saya for future use, to bomb the Imperial Palace. And as you realized in your dream, the radical plan was the reason your father behaved so erratically during his last hours on earth. But the plan never came to fruition, and your unconscious mind invented the next scene.”
“Even so, the image of a warplane hidden on the grassy area of the Saya had no basis in reality,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’d call it fantasy, or the surreal inventiveness of the dreaming mind …”
“What do you mean, ‘fantasy’? The image was definitely grounded in fact, or at least in possibility. As I already told you, the issue of ‘borrowing’ the aircraft was a major sticking point in the endless discussions between your father and the military guys who were at your house. At that final meeting, they were talking about how Japan’s defeat in the war appeared to be much more imminent than they had been led to believe, and the discussion got very heated because your father kept insisting they ought to rush ahead with his favorite scheme, which involved a suicide attack on the Imperial Palace from the air. As I’ve mentioned, there were some new faces at the meeting: several young trainee pilots who were attending the Imperial Navy course in the village. They had been brought along by the usual army-officer participants, and they all went up to the Saya to dig out turpentine from the roots of the pine trees — needless to say, turpentine oil has dozens of uses, and like almost everything else it was in short supply during the war. Anyhow, I guess seeing the layout of the Saya gave the young pilots some ideas of their own, because after they returned to the house they were saying the best approach would be to ‘liberate’ a kamikaze plane at the airfield, make sure it was loaded with bombs, and then hide it somewhere around the Saya. You must remember that, at least; it was a major point of discussion.”
“Well, it’s not as if everything that went on at those drinking parties and meetings was clearly delineated in my dream, much less in my memory,” I said, shaking my head. “Even today, I’m still puzzled by many of the things I overheard. For example, the lines from The Golden Bough I read aloud a while ago were definitely circled in colored pencil by the Kochi Sensei, but I can’t help wondering why he placed so much emphasis on ‘killing the living God’ as a way of bringing rebirth and prosperity to a country. Did he really think those precepts could be applied directly to postwar realpolitik? I honestly don’t know. I mean, incendiary marginalia aside, there’s no actual proof my father (or his teacher) was reading The Golden Bough pragmatically, with the idea that its ancient mythologies could be translated into action to help steer this country’s imperial system through the postwar morass of chaos and disintegration. I know the others saw you as a kind of loyal retainer whose main job was to warm the sake and keep everyone’s cups filled, but it’s clear you were paying close attention to everything that went on in those meetings. So what I’d like to ask you now, Daio, is whether the group had a definite plan, in the form of a military strategy, to rescue this country from its postwar predicament, and if so, whether my father was the primary author of the plan.”
“Yes, most definitely,” Daio replied without hesitation. “At that point the strategy sessions had become deadly serious, and given the extent of your eavesdropping I’m surprised you even need to ask about your father’s role. He was the one who came up with the idea of bombing the Imperial Palace, but the others took the idea and ran with it, and some of the young military guys started talking about blowing up the big meteoric rock at the Saya to create a landing strip for the plane they were planning to steal. When he heard that, Choko Sensei got very upset and started shouting things like ‘What’s this nonsense about bombing the big rock? Do you really think I’m going to let a bunch of outsiders come in and deface the Saya? That spot isn’t some flash-in-the-pan landmark from the Meiji Era or something. It’s been an important local site since olden times, and you can’t just waltz in and start blowing things up to build a temporary airstrip!’ You must have heard that tirade, right?”