So on both of those occasions you managed to stay alive, but the second time you lost your best friend, Kogii, forever. While you were recovering from your illness and your condition was still touch and go, you felt very alone and frightened. Your mother felt sorry for you, and that was when she told you the story of Meisuke’s mother, including the reassuring line about how there’s no need to worry, because even if you were to die, she would just give birth to you again. Isn’t that what happened?
Kogito: Yes, that’s the gist of it, except that as I recall my mother spoke those words in the local dialect.
Masao: Anyway, if you had remained in that hollow tree for much longer you would probably have crossed over to the Other Side, with Kogii as your spirit guide, and the two of you could have been together forever. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable that you would have felt some ambivalence or even regret about the way things turned out — that is, about being rescued. In one of the books you wrote for children, I think the scene where you and your mother talk about mortality and rebirth is really a beautiful thing.
Kogito: … [silence]
Masao: And then when you were ten years old, you watched your father take off down the flooded river in his little boat. You weren’t with him, even though that was supposedly the plan when you set out from your house. Instead, next to your father, in the place where you thought you yourself should have been standing, you saw your alter ego, Kogii. And for the past sixty-some years you’ve been dreaming and redreaming the same scene, over and over again. The third time’s the charm, as they say, and isn’t it a fact that even now you’re still thinking, If only I had gone with my father …?
Kogito: Yes, that sounds about right.
Masao: So for me, at least, it seems as if you were hoping to use the drowning novel to rewrite history and reverse the outcome of the scene. I think you were imagining that even if it was only in a book, you might be able to invent a scene in which you and Kogii were working together to help your father. The author of the drowning novel is also the “I” who appears throughout the story, and if you tried to tell me that type of narrative device would be impossible to depict onstage, my response would be, “Well then, I’ll just create a third-person hero and dramatize the scene that way!” There are all sorts of other possibilities, too, but the problem is you’ve abandoned the project. I know you said giving up was your only option after the contents of the red leather trunk turned out to be useless, but I can’t help wondering whether you might simply have lost the courage to even try to create the authentic type of late work E. W. Said talks about in On Late Style, as a final endeavor in the life of an artist. You know: thrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before?
Kogito: You may very well be right about that, too.
3
Unaiko’s time in Tokyo as an assistant director — and, unexpectedly, as a lead actress — had finally come to an end. After checking in at the Caveman Group’s headquarters in Matsuyama she hopped in the company van, with Masao Anai at the wheel, and headed down to the Forest House. It was obvious at a glance that Unaiko’s four weeks of working on a play at a major theater in Tokyo had been an emotional roller coaster, and even now that she was back in familiar surroundings she seemed still to be on the wild ride, with its exaggerated highs and lows. The moment she walked through the door the words started tumbling out, and she went on talking nonstop while we were assembling in the great room.
“The play we were doing was inspired by the Heike Monogatari,” Unaiko enthused, naming one of the most famous narratives in classical Japanese literature. “However, it took a very popular approach, focusing on the heroic Kiyomori and also incorporating material from The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu, which came later. As for the role I ended up playing — I kept thinking you might find this interesting and amusing, Mr. Choko — it was, quite literally, weird. In the script, the only description of my part was the single word ‘medium.’ The director told me a character like that appears in volume three of the Heike Monogatari, and he described yorimashi (meaning a medium or channeler) as a sort of spiritual nickname. But because that was the only background he provided, I didn’t have any kind of concrete understanding of the character. The guy who was playing the role of Kiyomori is also quite well known as a highbrow intellectual who frequently pops up on TV as a talking head, so I asked him for advice, but he just said, ‘Why don’t you look it up in the dictionary?’ That seemed rather cold at the time, but it actually turned out to be a helpful suggestion. I called and asked Ricchan to check the big dictionary you keep on the filing cabinet in your study, and she made a copy of the pertinent page and sent it to me.”
Unaiko reached into her handbag for a giant notebook — a virtual duplicate of Masao’s omnipresent vade mecum — and extracted two photocopied sheets from between the pages. One depicted the front cover of my Iwanami Dictionary of Archaic Japanese, while the other was a replica of the page that included a definition of yorimashi.
Unaiko passed the page to me, and I proceeded to read the definition aloud. “Usually when a soothsayer — it could be a mountain ascetic, or an esoteric Buddhist priest — offers a summoning prayer to invoke a certain deity or spirit, that entity will take possession of a medium. The medium is frequently a child with paranormal gifts who has been brought in to serve as the mouthpiece for the divine message or revelation from the god or spirit. That type of channeler is called a yorimashi.”
After I had finished reading, I continued in my own words. “Suppose, for example, that a highborn lady is suffering in childbirth. Based on the assumption that the problem is caused by an evil spirit or spirits, an attempt will be made to pacify it, or them. In order to appease a supernatural spirit, it first has to be summoned and provided with a voice through some sort of medium. In the exorcistic prayer chants mountain ascetics use for that purpose, the person who serves as a mediumistic mouthpiece is called a yorimashi. The young empress Kenreimon, who as you mentioned later became the tragic Lady Daibu, was the daughter of Kiyomori, of the Taira clan. The characters onstage represent some of the most powerful people of the era.”
“That’s totally true,” Unaiko said. “And the angry spirits that possessed me, as the medium, were nothing to sneeze at, either: cosmic heavy hitters, so to speak. As you probably know, there’s a whole slew of different terms for the disembodied entities I was channeling: departed souls, hungry ghosts, angry spirits, or whatever you want to call them.”
“Sometimes the spirit of someone who’s still alive will appear through a medium as well,” I said. “For example, the irate spirit of a priest named Shunkan who eventually died in exile on Kikaigashima — Devil’s Island — after having been banished there by Kiyomori.”