Death by Water

August 3, 2015
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.

October 15, 2015

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015
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 pere 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.

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Starred review from September 15, 2015
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)