“Sure, why not?” I said. “After all, you and your colleagues in the Caveman Group are the first people who have ever been willing to believe Kogii might actually have existed! When I was a child, no one else supported me the way you do. If I happened to mention matter-of-factly that Kogii was ‘right over there, right now,’ all I ever got in return was a giant dose of ridicule and teasing. I mean, some people pretended to believe, but I think they were just having fun at my expense. In the poem etched into the stone out back, when my mother mentions Kogii she appears to be referring to my childhood nickname. However, I believe she’s also talking in a subtle but unmistakable way about Akari. That’s evident, at least to me, from the way she says, You didn’t get Kogii ready…. Going up into the forest is obviously a metaphor for dying, and I’m certain she was chiding me for not having done enough to prepare Akari for death, in case he doesn’t outlive me.
“But when I talked about the recurrent dream, you folks came up with the idea of having Kogii appear early on as a sort of mannequin hovering over the boat as it takes off down the flooded river. I took that as a heartening sign, since it seemed to indicate that you weren’t dismissing Kogii as a phantom or something I hallucinated.”
“I guess it’s just what you might call my director’s habit, but I created a kind of questionnaire about Kogii,” Masao said. “Of course, when we learned that the drowning novel was out of the picture we had to stop working on our dramatization of the story, so these notes don’t have any practical application at this point. Even so, would you mind answering a few questions, just to resolve this gestalt for me?”
Before I’d had a chance to nod my assent, the ever-confident Masao had already opened the jumbo-size notebook balanced on his knees.
2
Masao: Mr. Choko, you’ve mentioned that the existence of your alter ego, Kogii, wasn’t acknowledged by the people around you, but in the course of her research Ricchan has run into a number of people who have said they remember hearing that you had a constant companion who was called ‘Kogii,’ like you, although no one ever actually saw the other child. One of those people was a classmate of yours who has become a leader of the farmers in the region, and another one — also a classmate, unsurprisingly — is a member of the family who owns the medical clinic in town. However, there wasn’t anybody who could say when Kogii first appeared, or how you and he met. It wasn’t her fault, of course, but Ricchan seems to feel that not having been able to interview your mother about a number of things — the uprising, and Kogii, and so on — has left some lamentable gaps in her research.
As I mentioned during our first conversation, we had won a prize and were embarking on the next stage of our group’s artistic evolution when I turned my attention to Kogii. I reread all your essays, hoping to find his first appearance. I mean, surely the initial encounter with a mystical being would be one of the major treasures in a child’s box of memories, right? I thought the evidence I was searching for must be hidden away somewhere in your published work, but I kept striking out. When it came to Kogii’s departure there was an abundance of detailed accounts, yet I couldn’t find a single description of how or when he first arrived on the scene. Ultimately, I concluded that by the time you became conscious of yourself as an entity living in this world, Kogii must already have been by your side.
We know Kogii couldn’t be seen by anyone but you. However, you always behaved as if you had a constant companion who was exactly like you — an identical twin, for all intents and purposes. I heard about it from your sister, Asa. She also told me that Kogii was your one and only playmate, so apparently you didn’t even interact with your only sister very often. She said she would often see you engaged in conversation, chattering at the invisible Kogii and then seeming to strain your ears to hear his reply, and she figured your friend must be telling you secrets about what went on in the realm of the forest. She thought the whole concept of Kogii must somehow have been overlaid with (or even inspired by) the folktales you children had heard from your mother and grandmother: the mythology of the forest that has shaped so many of your novels. You’ve written about a scenario in which kids go into the woods to play hide-and-seek, and both the hiders and the seekers became lost children who are still wandering deep in the forest to this day. Evidently Asa was intrigued by that dark fable, and she pestered your mother to tell her more, but your mom claimed not to know anything about it. Then when Asa suggested you might have invented the story on your own, your mother said that she didn’t think you would be able to make up such a sophisticated tale from scratch, so it was probably something you had heard from your grandmother. Then she went on to say that maybe when you were having all those intense conversations with a companion no one else could see, your pal was telling you stories. But then your mother added that, joking aside, it seemed likely you’d heard the story about the lost children from someone who had intimate knowledge of the forest. So what I’m wondering is, would it be accurate to say that Kogii’s main reason for existing was to keep you informed about whatever might be going on in the forest?
Kogito: Yes, that’s correct.
Masao: Okay, good. So this brings us to the day when Kogii goes off and leaves you behind. You’re standing on the wraparound verandah outside the back parlor of your house by the river. Kogii is beside you, as usual, but then he suddenly leaps onto the balustrade. By the time you realize what’s happening, Kogii has taken off, spreading his arms like wings and floating through the air until he’s just above the midpoint of the river. From there he wafts high up into the forest and vanishes from sight. And that was how you came to lose your beloved doppelgänger.
Kogito: Yes, that’s exactly what happened. There’s really no way around it: Kogii simply went away and left me in the lurch.
Masao: However, Kogii did come down from the forest on one other occasion. It was a full-moon night and you were lying awake, unable to sleep, when you heard what sounded like some sort of signal. When you went out the front door of your house, Kogii was standing there illuminated by the moon. Without saying a word he began walking away, heading up the road into the forest, with you following close behind as the rain began to fall. The next thing you knew, Kogii was nowhere to be seen and you were caught in a torrential downpour.
Now, what strikes me as important about the events of that moonlit night is the fact that even though we have never heard that Kogii came from such-and-such a place, it seems clear that on this evening he came down from the forest. Oh, and there’s another thing: the internal conflicts you had as a child. When Kogii climbed up on the railing and floated across the river, if you’d had the courage to follow him right then — walking through the air to the center of the river, and then spreading your own arms as if they were wings — maybe you would have been able to ascend into the forest, too. But you were a coward, so you missed your big opportunity. Later, while you were brooding in your dark little bedroom, sick at heart and awash in vain regrets, Kogii came down from the forest and gave you another chance. That’s what you were thinking when you went eagerly traipsing after him, isn’t it?
Kogito: That’s exactly right.
Masao: However, after you’d followed Kogii into the forest, he disappeared and you ended up getting stranded by a huge rainstorm. The firemen said that the reason you stayed there overnight was because the forest road had turned into a river. (I can’t help feeling that there was some special significance to their choice of words, given the way your father died.) Anyway, they refused to go and rescue you. You sought shelter in the hollow of a Castanopsis tree, and before long you began to run a high fever. If you had spent another night exposed to the elements, you would almost certainly have died. It seems possible that both times Kogii invited you to follow him, he was acting as an intermediary for the Other Side, trying to lead you to an early grave. I mean, when he took off in the air above the river — if you had tried to emulate his flying motion, like some wingless Icarus, you could easily have hit your head on a rock on the bottom of the river and died.