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The Tale of the Heike
was a narrative poem
handed down through an oral tradition. Fuka-Eri’s normal style of speaking was
extremely flat, lacking almost all accent and intonation, but when she launched into
the tale, her voice became startlingly strong, rich, and colorful, as if something had
taken possession of her. The magnificent sea battle fought in 1185 on the swirling
currents between Honshu and Kyushu came vividly to life. The Heike side was
doomed to defeat, and Kiyomori’s wife Tokiko, the “Nun of Second Rank,” plunged
into the waves holding her grandson, the child emperor Antoku, in her arms. Her
ladies-in-waiting followed her in death rather than fall into the hands of the rough
eastern warriors. Tomomori, concealing his grief, jokingly urged the ladies to kill
themselves.
You’ll have nothing but a living hell if you go on like this
, he had told
them.
You had best end your lives here and now
.
“Want me to go on,” Fuka-Eri asked.
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“No, that’s fine. Thank you,” Tengo answered, stunned. He understood how those
news reporters, at a loss for words, must have felt. “How did you manage to
memorize such a long passage?”
“Listening to the tape over and over.”
“Listening to the tape over and over, an ordinary person still wouldn’t be able to
memorize it.”
It suddenly dawned on Tengo that precisely to the degree she could not read a
book, the girl’s ability to memorize what she had heard might be extraordinarily well
developed, just as certain children with savant syndrome can absorb and remember
huge amounts of visual information in a split second.
“I want you to read me a book,” Fuka-Eri said.
“What kind of book would you like?”
“Do you have the book you were talking about with the Professor,” Fuka-Eri
asked. “The one with Big Brother.”
“
1984
? I don’t have that one.”
“What kind of story is it.”
Tengo tried to recall the plot. “I read it once a
long
time ago in the school library,
so I don’t remember the details too well. It was published in 1949, when 1984 seemed
like a time far in the future.”
“That’s this year.”
“Yes, by coincidence. At some point the future becomes reality. And then it
quickly becomes the past. In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark
society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator
named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being
rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I’m pretty sure his job is
to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be
thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are
changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true
anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It’s that kind of story.”
“They rewrite history.”
“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of
themselves. It’s a crime.”
Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.
Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our
collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective
memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability
to sustain our true selves.”
“You rewrite stuff.”
Tengo laughed and took a sip of wine. “All I did was touch up your story, for the
sake of expedience. That’s totally different from rewriting history.”
“But that Big Brother book is not here now,” she asked.
“Unfortunately, no. So I can’t read it to you.”
“I don’t mind another book.”
Tengo went to his bookcase and scanned the spines of his books. He had read
many books over the years, but he owned few. He tended to dislike filling his home
with a lot of possessions. When he finished a book, unless it was something quite
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special, he would take it to a used-book store. He bought only books he knew he was
going to read right away, and he would read the ones he cared about very closely,
until they were ingrained in his mind. When he needed other books he would borrow
them from the neighborhood library.
Choosing a book to read to Fuka-Eri took Tengo a long time. He was not used to
reading aloud, and had almost no clue which might be best for that. After a good deal
of indecision, he pulled out Anton Chekhov’s
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