After Unaiko stopped talking, she immediately quickened her pace and pulled ahead. (Until then I had gotten the sense that she was making a conscious effort to walk slowly, so Asa — who had stuck her head between our shoulders to avoid missing a single word — would be able to hear everything Unaiko was saying.) Asa sped up as well, taking over second place in our little parade, and I was left alone to trail behind. At times like this I had a habit of indulging in little dialogues with myself, often on topics I hadn’t given much thought to in the past. Before I knew it, I found myself ruminating out loud and mumbling something like this: “All right — I can see the connection between rape and abortion. I also understand the idea that a country can behave like a rapist toward other countries and even toward its own citizens. And if you view MEXT as a stand-in for the nation of Japan, I can see how that metaphor would have occurred to Unaiko. But where does abortion fit into the scenario?”
“Well, abortion’s a kind of murder, isn’t it?” Asa said impatiently, glaring at me over her shoulder. “There are two legal ways of committing murder, at least in this country: war and abortion. While she was still a young girl Unaiko was, in effect, raped by the nation of Japan. And then — at least as she sees it — that same country forced her to have an abortion. I mean, really, Kogii. I know you’re just thinking out loud, but I can’t stand by in silence when you say things that are so obtuse and insensitive, especially after Unaiko has opened up about her harrowing experiences.
“Oh, look,” Asa went on, shifting into a brighter tone, “there’s my son, watching for us from the top of the hill. Yoo-hoo, Tamakichi! Here we are!”
2
Every morning from then on, I hunkered down to work on the new play along with the young troupe members who often congregated in the great room, with Unaiko at the epicenter of every meeting. I usually sat at the dining table on the near side of the partition between the two rooms, often with Akari nearby. Ricchan would join us at the table from time to time, and whenever that happened Akari’s behavior would immediately change. That is to say, instead of toiling over his musical compositions while lying belly down on the floor on the dining-room side, which was his default position, he would come to the table and continue his work in a chair placed directly in front of the big sound system. On the table in front of me there would be a hard copy of the most recent draft of the script for what everyone was calling “the Meisuke’s mother play,” which Ricchan regularly updated on the communal computer and then printed out. I spent a good deal of time at the table, but there were also many occasions when I gathered my papers and retreated to my study on the second floor.
My main task at the time was to create a version of the playscript that would be suitable for publication in a literary magazine. Using my rough draft as a base, the young actors would read the lines aloud to one another and then develop them further by improvising in the proprietary dog-tossing style. In the actual playbill, those embellishments would be credited to Unaiko and Suke & Kaku, but while I was incorporating the bulk of them into the master script I would always check the dialect for accuracy, to make sure the literary style was consistent throughout. I found the entire process refreshing. Until then I had always worked alone, and I felt as though I was receiving a crash course in collaborative creativity.
I also learned some interesting things, including the lore about the so-called crying child (or children) that Ricchan — unusually, for her — had actively decided to include in the playscript. One day she happened to mention having heard about the legend in the course of her field research, and she proceeded to read us the words of one informant, which she had transcribed from one of her tapes: “I heard there was some criticism of Sakura during the filming, because people said that she created the recitative without understanding the meaning of the term ‘crying child.’ As you may know, when Meisuke’s mother went off to battle, some troops sent down to Okawara by the Meiji government tried to break up the uprising by forcing their way through the entry point of the rebels’ front line, which was really no more than a straw hut. However, a number of children threw themselves across the soldiers’ path, weeping at the top of their lungs, and refused to budge. The soldiers couldn’t very well trample a bunch of little children to death, so they were forced to retreat. (No one seemed to know whether the children belonged to the young mothers who were participating in the rebellion, but it would seem to be a reasonable assumption.) Sakura somehow misunderstood the etymology of the term, and her misreading of the kanji led her to a complicated and completely erroneous interpretation. In fact, ‘crying children’ meant just that, with no hidden meaning at all.”
Ricchan went on to tell our assembled group about a situation in present-day society that uncannily mirrors the local lore about the crying children. She said when she was living in Tokyo, she would occasionally see sad-looking kids with tear-streaked faces in public places. However, after moving to Matsuyama she started to see such children with increasing frequency, and it began to bother her a great deal. The crying children she encountered were never in groups; rather, she would see small girls between the ages of three and five walking alone, bawling their eyes out.
“The weird thing,” Ricchan concluded, “was that even though the children were so young they were marching down the street at full speed, and their weeping wasn’t like the crying of a normal child at all. Every ‘waa’ they uttered seemed to be suffused with anger bordering on fury, or even a kind of soul-devouring fear. In the midst of this display of raw emotion, from time to time the child would lift her little face — bright red and wet with tears — and glance around. And when I followed her glance, I would sometimes see a slightly older girl with unkempt, bleached-out hair and a grubby-looking face who would quickly scuttle off, paying no attention to the younger child. So rather than a mother and child, the duos I noticed from time to time consisted of a tiny girl walking along, wailing at maximum volume, and another, more elusive girl who was several years older. I thought they might be sisters.”
In response to Ricchan’s anecdote, several people joined in, saying things such as “Yes, I’ve seen something similar on city streets as well.” One of those voices belonged to Unaiko’s boyfriend, Tatsuo Katsura, who happened to be in town.
“I heard a similar story from a friend of mine,” Katsura said. “He was making a television documentary in the area. The main difference is that, as he told it, a young mother who appeared to be in the depths of despair was roughly brushing aside a child who was walking beside her, crying like a banshee and trying to cling to the mother’s skirts. I realize this could be a whole other urban myth but I feel as if the two might share a common thread, so please indulge me while I share the version I heard.
“Actually, this isn’t mere hearsay, because I myself have seen a crying child like the one my friend described, although I just passed by without stopping. As my friend said, anyone who encountered such a scene would naturally be suspicious, thinking it might be a trap or the setup for a scam. But he tends to be curious by nature, so he paused to watch the scene unfold. After a moment, he said, a rather louche-looking man (clearly not a child welfare worker or a police officer in uniform) approached the child and put his arms around her in a comforting gesture. That triggered my friend’s documentary-filmmaker’s instincts, and he hung around to see what the man would do next. By and by the young mother, who had run away as fast as her legs could carry her, leaving her crying child behind, turned around and came back to stand next to the man and the little girl. After a while the child and the mother appeared to have reconciled their differences, although they still weren’t saying anything to each other. The two of them were just standing on the sidewalk, like silent satellites orbiting the man. My friend had to leave then, and that’s the rather anticlimactic way the story ends. He told me that in hindsight he had a feeling there had been a suspicious van parked not too far away, and he said if he ever had a chance, he’d like to go back and follow up on the story. He thought there was probably something unsavory going on involving pornography, or prostitution, or even slave trafficking, but of course that was pure storyteller’s speculation on his part.