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Summary
Summary
Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." In Death by Water , his recurring protagonist and literary alter-ego returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase fabled to hold documents revealing the details of his father's death during WWII: details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel.
Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father's fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he's haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Kogito is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father's demise.
Diving into the turbulent depths of legacy and mortality, Death by Water is an exquisite examination of resurfacing national and personal trauma, and the ways that storytelling can mend political, social, and familial rifts.
Author Notes
Kenzaburo Oe was a Nobel literature laureate. In 1994 he became the second Japanese author to be awarded this Nobel Prize for literature. Oe, the third of seven children, was born January 31, 1935, in a village on Japan¿s southern island of Shikoku. At the University of Tokyo, he studied French literature and began writing plays.
He died on March 3, 2023 of old age.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Layered and reflexive, Nobel winner Oe's (The Changeling) novel concerns itself with an elderly writer, Kogito Choko, whose inability to write "the drowning novel," a fictional account of his father's death by drowning, threatens both his health and his plans to provide for his family after his death. As a child, Choko-then called Kogii-witnessed his father's ill-fated boat trip in the Shikoku forest region of his childhood. When he revisits the forests and delves into the area's history and folklore at his sister Asa's invitation, he discovers not only other witnesses to his father's voyage-including a nationalist former disciple of his dad's-but that "the materials in the red leather trunk" required for his research were destroyed by his mother long ago. Bereft, Choko finds himself cooperating with an experimental theater troupe, who wish to adapt his body of work for the stage using the visionary Unaiko's "throwing the dead dogs" method, whereupon meta-narrative discussion and the throwing of stuffed dogs occur on stage. Choko's disappointment over the uselessness of the red leather trunk's contents drives him to lash out at his adult, intellectually disabled composer son, Akari, and when his wife, Chikashi, undergoes treatment for a serious illness, she's most concerned about this unprecedented rift between father and son. Told in echoing and overlapping accounts of conversations, telephone calls, and stage performances, Oe's deceptively tranquil idiom scans the violent history of postwar Japan and its present-day manifestations, in the end finding redemption. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Oe's literary alter ego guides the reader through a dense forest of stories and competing recollections Near the beginning of this novel, which has been translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm, there is an image of the built environment imitating nature, as a steel train bridge forms a "canopy" over a canal. Soon, however, the urban is replaced by the rural, and the narrator is "walking along under a canopied row of cherry trees so heavily overgrown that hardly any light fell on the road". Forests and floods rise up. This is a novel about a drowning in a river a long time ago, and about overwhelming waves of memory in old age. It is also explicitly about the late style of a Nobel-winning writer. The narrator is Oe's literary alter ego Kogito Choko, who is to Oe as Nathan Zuckerman is to Philip Roth. Choko is an internationally famous writer in his 70s, who is determined to write a novel about the day his father died near the end of the second world war. Choko senior had been plotting something with rightwing militarist friends at a training camp, and then one night set off in a small boat during a flood, and drowned. A red leather trunk filled with documents was recovered, and guarded fiercely by Choko's mother while she was alive; now at last he can look into it. He returns to the rural Shikoku of his childhood, where he and his sister Asa have a "Forest House". There, however, they are invaded by a theatre troupe called the Caveman Group, led by one Masao Anai, who are putting on plays based on Choko's work. They specialise in interactive performances where audience members throw stuffed dogs at the actors; their female star is a young woman called Unaiko, whose traumatic past will be unveiled in the book's climactic performance. Meanwhile Choko is beginning to suffer attacks of vertigo, and has a terrible falling out with his disabled composer son, Akari. Then one of his father's old disciples, Daio, turns up, and hints that he may reveal the truth about what they were all up to more than half a century ago. This all proceeds in a meandering, looping, and often stifling fashion. Even once one has accepted the occupational hazard, in reading Japanese books in translation, of American slanginess ("down here in the boonies"; "Holy cow, Kogito"), it challenges the reader's patience. Characters give long speeches to one another about Choko's work. ("I was aware that you've taken a strong public stand against the resurgence of ultranationalism, especially through your essays and writings," Unaiko tells Choko, perhaps unnecessarily.) Choko keeps wondering what he is going to write and how ("But what should I, the writer, have my drowning father remember -- and in what sequence?"), and so does everyone else. Meanwhile, Asa writes long, detailed letters to Choko about the Caveman Group's theatrical productions (with suspiciously exact recall of dialogue), and pages of reported speech are nested inside more reported speech, so that crucial scenes come third- or fourth-hand. Some mild suspense is introduced when a character promises to talk about something at greater length, but a bit later. On page 289, the narrator confesses: "As for my own brain, it was still completely devoid of ideas." One hopes this is all deliberate, and, at length, so it turns out: Oe wants the reader to get lost, too, in a forest of stories and competing memories. (He playfully signals the other characters' impatience with the kind of novel they are trapped in: they are often rude to Choko about his own work, and he defends it as the only kind he can manage.) And through this rebarbative foliage appear some memorable visions: the young Choko watching his father set off in the boat accompanied by Choko's own "supernatural alter ego"; a vision of glittering fish spied in an underwater grotto; a disturbing kitchen battle with a giant turtle. At length what seemed oppressively solipsistic widens out, almost imperceptibly, into a book that is also about politics, war and the place of women in modern Japanese society. Death By Water is an art-haunted book, with much discussion of TS Eliot (the novel is named after section four of The Waste Land), Beethoven, and Edward Said, and a brilliant reading of JG Fraser's The Golden Bough as potential incitement to a military coup. The recurrent themes of water and forest (symbolising perhaps a place where one may get eternally lost, or simply death), linked in an anecdote about Choko's father confusing two similar kanji (logographic characters), build until very late on, when an epic storm breaks. The reader has long since been lulled into accepting the pensive, discursive ambience of the text, but now a plot erupts, and ramifies in an extraordinarily vivid sequence of scenes. The ending is quite some coup. * To order Death By Water for [pound]16 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10. - Steven Poole.
Kirkus Review
Pensive novel, at once autobiographical and philosophical, by Nobel Prize-winner Oe (The Changeling, 2010, etc.). It's a scenario that conjures up the director of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, perhaps the only person who could film it: Oe, now 80 years old, returns to his hometown in the person of alter ego Kogito Choko and looks deep into a past that might have been. In real life, Oe's father died in World War II; here, Choko's father has died during the war years in a drowning incident on a Japanese river, and now Choko, having endured decades of writer's block on the matter, is circling back to his youth to excavate the contents of a mysterious red leather trunk, "a small part of my clan's proprietary strange and funny lore," in the hope of reclaiming his literary birthright. What's in the trunk? And why did his father die? Was it really an accident? Mystery abounds, especially when it develops that Choko pre was working to help alleviate wartime famine by detoxifying lilies. That's a matter of some complexity, and Oe lingers over the details without any apparent rush to get back to the main story; indeed, he takes a leisurely pace throughout, having set aside the fraught intensity of Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness and other early works. Complicating Choko's quest in the nearly idyllic countryside of his youth is the presence of an avant-garde theatrical collective, whose members are trying to stage Choko's ouevre and now puzzle over the story as it develops: "the part of the story where the writer sifts through the contents of the red leather trunk as the entire drowning novel unfolds before us is just a vague concept." Indeed, and part of the reader's task is to accommodate Oe's vagueness and misdirection to arrive at a crafty ending, embracing twists and turns and plot points that are, among other things, "radical and potentially scandalous." Like, say, a "pubic-hair fetish." In other words, it's vintage Oe: provocative, doubtful without being cynical, elegant without being precious. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's taken six years for this big novel by Japanese Nobel laureate Oe (The Changeling, 2010) to reach Anglophone readers, but that wait has been for something immensely worthwhile, the story of another novel's demise for lack of documentation and the revival of a frustrated earlier work by the same author, a movie, as an agitprop drama. The author of failed novel, movie, drama, and this book alike is Oe's alter ego, Kogito Choko, whose family members and friends correspond to Oe's. Death by Water is as novelistic as autobiographical, not recollection or reportage but art. The abortive novel is about Choko's father's traumatizing demise in the waning months of WWII, the play about the tragic aftermath of a successful uprising by women and children against the oppressive Meiji government in Choko's ancestral homeland. As the novel comes to naught and the play takes shape, Choko is afflicted by vertigo, has a horrific falling-out with his mentally disabled son, forms deep friendships with two women in the theater group developing the play, and reencounters an old family friend who dispels the mysteries of his father's death. This novel, teeming with crises and disclosures, proceeds almost exclusively via conversation made up of intricate, literarily and dramaturgically knowledgeable, politically progressive, long speeches. And it is enchanting.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN HIS 1994 Nobel acceptance speech, Kenzaburo Oe described Japan as being "split between two opposite poles of ambiguity" - the traditional and the modern, emperor worship and democracy, aggression and suffering. This polarization, he said, has informed every aspect of his life as a writer "like a deep scar." His job is to use his art to help heal the wound. Oe won the Akutagawa Prize, one of his country's most prestigious awards, in 1958 at the tender age of 23, and he has towered over the Japanese literary landscape ever since. His fiction and his life can be difficult to distinguish: He writes, again and again, of his rural childhood, his brain-damaged son, the disillusionment of postwar Japan. "Death by Water," published in Japanese in 2009 and newly translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm, revisits these themes and variations in a minor, valedictory key. We begin on familiar ground, with the elderly and venerated writer Kogito Choko, the doppelgänger protagonist Oe has used in several previous novels. For years, Choko has wondered about the contents of a red leather trunk that belonged to his father - books and papers that may shed light on his mysterious drowning just after the war. Choko's mother stipulated that he could have the trunk 10 years after her death, and that moment has arrived. Choko is galvanized - writing "the drowning novel" has been a cathartic goal of his for decades - but even as he prepares to return from Tokyo to his hometown in distant Shikoku he feels "a poignant sense that my life as a novelist might soon be approaching its end." This straightforward tale-within-a-tale soon twists and slows. The trunk yields little. Choko suffers crippling attacks of vertigo. He takes out his creative crisis on his disabled son in acts of breathtaking emotional cruelty, driving a wedge between them. His mortality looms. He keeps to his room. "I'm afraid Papa could end up like King Lear," his exasperated daughter says, "wandering lost in the wilderness without even a Fool to accompany him." Inspiration appears in the form of the Caveman Group, an avant-garde theater collective with an Oe/Choko fetish, which has devoted itself to dramatizing his work. (As Choko's previous titles are identical to Oe's, confusion is forgivable.) The fearless activism of the troupe's youthful leaders is a tonic for Choko's torpor, and their gratifying passion for his oeuvre doesn't hurt, either. Re-energized, Choko resumes his investigations into the past, confronting the paradox of himself as a "liberal peacenik who also happened to have idolized his right-wing-fanatic father." The ambiguity of postwar Japan is compounded by the ambiguity of memory, as Choko's sister, wife and friends, old and new, add their voices to what he thinks he knows. The narrative is a series of expositional soliloquies; characters don't converse so much as lecture one another at great length, and nearly always on the subject of Choko. The title of Chapter 14, "Everything That Happens Is Fodder for Drama," seems especially apt, though what happens is only occasionally dramatic. Events unfold in an oddly detached monotone, even when the action involves such bizarre details as the bloody butchering of a turtle or a "dog tossing" approach to theater in which the audience is invited to throw stuffed animals at the actors onstage. Descriptive language is at a minimum, and what there is feels opaque. When a director's voice is described as "natural, robust and precise," it doesn't become any easier to hear him. "Death by Water" is not a transporting novel. The thing is, Oe knows it. "I can't help getting the impression that you don't really give a damn about being widely read," an admirer tells Choko. "Why do you choose to write about such a solipsistic and narrowly circumscribed world?" And that's the reaction of a fan. As another character points out, most younger readers consider Choko "an irrelevant fossil from the past." Critics are thus neatly neutralized. So why read Oe at all? Because he's an eloquent spokesman for a generation that can remember, vividly and viscerally, all sides of Japan's ambiguities - a generation that's beginning to exit the stage. "I am the last author who practices the old, very heavy or sincere way of writing," Oe has said. The combination of this seriousness with a fearsome, graphic candor - trained on himself most of all - makes him formidable, whether he's describing the challenges of being a parent or the sins of history. Oe is known for his deep study of other writers, from Eliot, Yeats and Blake to his friend and contemporary Edward Said. Said's last work, "On Late Style," is a particular influence here, and more than one of Oe's characters has read it. "Late works are the catastrophes," one of them remarks excitedly. Will Choko - or Oe - have the courage to write one last "thrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before"? True Oe devotees may find this thrill in "Death by Water," but thrilling or not, it remains a thoughtful reprise of a lifetime of literary endeavor. It's like the story of the emperor's new clothes, only with the man in question gazing calmly at his audience and declaring yes, it's true, he's completely naked and he wouldn't have it any other way. You have to admire his serene and total conviction, even if you flinch from the view. JANICE P. NIMURA is the author of "Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back."
Library Journal Review
Kogito Choko, an aging writer of international renown, is still grappling with the drowning death of his ultranationalist father during World War II. His controlling sister Asa possesses a red leather trunk that Choko believes holds the key to their father's death and the nucleus of his own final novel. When the contents of the trunk prove disappointing, Choko abandons his book, succumbing to a depression exacerbated by his wife's illness and an emotional split from his adult son, who suffers from learning disabilities. After a contrived meeting with the actress Unaiko, Choko partners with her avant-garde theatrical troupe, examining his earlier oeuvre, a political mind-set shaped by war, a career plagued by censorship yet resulting in a Nobel Prize, and the tragedy of a son who was born with severe limitations but is able to compose glorious music. Oe is known for obscuring the lines between reality and fiction, but here that practice feels self-indulgent. The didactic, hectoring style detracts from a narrative that should be thoughtfully introspective. Could it be that the graceful prose one would expect from a Nobel laureate has been lost in translation? verdict Originally published in Japan in 2009, this is the fifth in a series that began with The Changeling. The subject matter, familiar to Oe's followers, may not satisfy general fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.