OE KENZABURO: 'DEATH BY WATER'

Death by Water is a book by the 74 year old Japanese writer Oe Kenzaburo. Like all his novels it is a meditation on his personal life so, apart from the protatognist Kogii Choko a 74 year old writer, there is Akari, his mentally handicapped son, and a character named Goro based on his brother-in-law, the film director, Itami Juzo. Oe is haunted by Goro's death as he is by his verbal abuse of Akari which has severely damaged his relationship with his son Akari. Most of all he is haunted by the death of his fatther in a boating accident on a river in Shikoku many years before. Kogii has long planned to write about this event which took place during his childhood but his plans were thwarted by his mother who refused to let him see the contents of an old red trunk that contained his father's papers. Ten years after her death, now in his 70s, He is finally allowed access to the trunk only to find that much of is contents have been destroyed over the years. Kogii is not alone in his search for meaning a theatre troop has been given access to the family house in the forest in Shikoku while they dramatise Kogii's writings. His sister Asa encourages Kogii to work together with the treatre troop in the hoe that they can all benefit from their mutual interests. Having discovered that they contents of the red trunk have largely disappeared Kpgii retreats to Tokyo where he verbally abuses Akari. It is his wife Chisakai who sends him back to Shikoku with Akari while she undergoes treatment for cancer.

Oe is a writer who writes from within the canon. As well as references to the great composers in terms of their influence on his son Akari who is a composer there are many references to the world of literature. There are descriptions of his library in Tokyo and the boxes of books he sends down to read in Shikoku. There are references to the books that he read in childhood such as is Hucklebury Finn and the The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. There are many references to the writers that have influenced his own writing such as William Blake in his novel  O Rise up Young Men of the New Age and T.S.Eliot whose poem 'Death by Water' from the Four Quartets is central to this this novel as are his meditations about the character 'sensei' in Natsume Soseki's novel Kokoro. And then there are references to Kogii's friend Edward Said, the literary critic, who once gave Kogii a manuscript of three Beethoven piano sonatas. Kogii's row with Akari starts when Akari is given a pen to use by a stranger to make notes on the score in a hospital waiting room. Kogii calls his mentally handicapped son an "idiot" which he later repeats later at night at home. This is unforgivable and becomes as much a preoccupation in the novel as are the circumstances of his father's death by drowning.

Kogii's failings drive the novel forward. There is the failure to write the 'drowning' novel. There is the failure to repair the damage down to his relationship with Akari. Then there is the failure in his writing to capture an audience. There are multiple references in the novel to poor sales despite his having won the Nobel Prize. The fact that he continues to write and that the theatre troop continue to wrestle with the meaning of his work demonstrates, however, that the work grows on. The failure of Kogii to write his novel becomes the stuff of Oe's own novel. And as the avant garde theatre troop stage performances for students and later a wider audience it can be seen that audiences can be aroused by questions about the past and our interpretations of the past.