“I’ve been thinking about it, too,” Katsura continued, “and I can’t help wondering whether the man my friend saw might have been running some sort of con — that is, a carefully orchestrated and rehearsed situation created for purely mercenary reasons. It isn’t unusual to see such pairs — the crying child and the despondent-looking young mother — out on the streets these days, so isn’t it possible that some sleazy lowlife is putting those duos together and then standing by, watching for an opportunity for blackmail or extortion? Perhaps there’s even a training camp where gangsters teach underprivileged children and their mothers to behave in a manipulative way. If that’s what was going on it would be a truly abominable business enterprise, but I can see how participating in a sidewalk scam could still seem appealing to the poor women and children, compared with the horrific alternatives.
“Taking my uninformed conjecture one step further, please bear with me while I float another scenario. Over a century ago there wasn’t a single car in this country, much less a van. It was a time when the peasants were so poor that they had no choice but to mount an uprising in protest. There were probably quite a few young mothers wandering around with children who had every reason to cry. (They might even have been homeless.) Isn’t it possible that a bunch of those unhappy children and their desperate mothers were brought together in some farmer’s barn, or maybe a shrine or a temple — someplace with enough space to accommodate a large group. This may seem like a stretch, but isn’t it conceivable that they were recruited to act as a kind of miniature advance vanguard, to run interference for the peasant troops in the insurrection led by Meisuke II and his mother? Whatever happened in reality, some version of the crying-child trope seems to have found its way into local folklore. Maybe this is an impossibly rosy scenario, but I’d like to imagine that the crying children and their woebegone mothers might have played an active role in winning the uprising.”
“Hmm,” Ricchan said, addressing Tatsuo Katsura. “That’s an interesting interpretation, and I don’t think it’s impossibly optimistic by any means.”
Katsura smiled, but his next comment seemed to indicate a lingering skepticism. “On the other hand,” he said, “if the story my friend told me is true — you know, about the modern-day crying child, the morose young mother, and the suspicious-looking man — then trying to romanticize their situation really would be impossibly optimistic. I mean, it seems fairly clear why those women and children were rounded up, and where they were going to be taken, and what was going to become of them in the end.”
“What do you mean?” Ricchan asked.
“I think Katsura is lamenting the tragic destinies that might await those mothers and children,” Unaiko declared in the resonant trained-actor’s voice she used onstage. “I mean, we’re all familiar with the loathsome things taking place in Southeast Asia, and here at home as well.”
“That’s right,” Katsura agreed. “I was only trying to say that in the world today, it’s conventional wisdom to assume there are individuals or groups who would round up disadvantaged children and their mothers and then sell them somewhere outside their native country. Child pornography and the prostitution of young girls are undeniable realities, and the Internet is teeming with the most sickeningly exploitative imagery you could imagine.
“As Ricchan said, there are more than a few of those pathetic duos — the crying child and the frowsy, wretched-looking mother — wandering around in Japanese cities these days. It would be nice to think there’s a happy ending waiting for them somewhere down the road, but I’m afraid such a rosily optimistic view would be unrealistic, or delusional. Even so, I won’t give up my vision of a brighter future for those mothers and their children.”
While Tatsuo Katsura was delivering this disquisition, two of the Caveman Group’s featured actors, the inseparable Suke & Kaku, had been sitting quietly on the bare floor in the great room, listening intently. Now they craned their necks above the seated crowd and joined in the conversation.
“We wanted to ask your opinion about a dramaturgical matter, Mr. Choko,” one of them said. “We were looking for an opening-scene motif that could be reprised in the finale, and we thought the crying children might work.
“At the beginning, a single child could appear and begin to ascend toward the rafters, weeping loudly, and later there would be a group of children on the stage. You might wonder how we would go about creating the climbing effect, but by a stroke of luck, it turns out the architect of the circular auditorium, Mr. Ara, also designed a sort of spiral ramp or tiered scaffolding that extends almost all the way up to the ceiling of the theater in the round. Apparently the riser was originally built for a concert of Mr. Takamura’s work. Right now it’s being stored in the gymnasium, so we should be able to use it. As for actors, we could recruit children from around here — the smaller and nimbler the better. Of course we would have to be absolutely certain the corkscrew ramp was safe, but we could get the junior high’s physical education teacher to help us with the logistical details.
“For that version of the opening, rather than using improvisation, we’d like to add a scene in which Unaiko would play a woman who speaks to the dispirited young mother and tries to give her a small ray of hope of the kind Katsura mentioned a while ago. Do you think you could write something along those lines for us, Mr. Choko? The beauty part is that the little girl would be wandering around, wailing at the top of her lungs — you know: Waa, waa! — so you wouldn’t need to write any special dialogue for her at all!”
3
The preparations for the performance proceeded apace, with Unaiko and Ricchan at the center of activity, as usual. While I was busy doing my small part, helping to work out the kinks in the opening scene and finale Suke & Kaku had proposed, I was unexpectedly drawn into a new situation. Asa telephoned me one morning, saying that since the young troupe members were going to be rehearsing at the Forest House during the afternoon, she was hosting a get-together at her house. She wanted me to attend because Unaiko’s aunt (the one who had featured so prominently in the shocking story we’d heard the other day) was going to be there in person.
“I know this probably seems like a bolt from the blue,” Asa said. “It took me by surprise, too, but apparently the aunt says this meeting is an absolute necessity, and Unaiko wants us to be there, too, as witnesses and (I’m guessing) to provide moral support as well. Daio’s the one who arranged it. This is ancient history, but as you may have heard, at one time he was involved in trying to undermine the power of the teachers’ union in this prefecture. Long story short, a number of people who are opposed to Unaiko’s current project move in the same circles, politically speaking, as Daio’s former disciples. I’ve often been forced to listen to them boasting about how they sent you an extra-large live turtle as a prank, and even now the anecdote is gleefully trotted out during elections for the prefectural assembly to liven up campaign speeches. On the other hand, the junior high administrators seem confident they’ll be able to weather the storm of protest and opposition, in large part — ironically — because of my connection with Daio. So he has fingers in both pies, so to speak.