Document Side One: Holograph Will
Holograph Will of Oda Sotatsu. My belongings described below should be given to my family members in the following manner .
BOOKS, perhaps a dozen, on table by window __ to my sister .
my CLOTHING, old pants, new pants, shirts, socks, and others __ burned .
my FURNITURE __ given away .
my KITCHEN contents, pots, knife, etc. _ to my mother .
my RECORDS, RECORD PLAYER, _ to my brother .
my DRAWINGS, JOURNAL __ burned .
my WORM SHOVEL, FISHING POLE, TACKLE __ to my father .
my BICYCLE __ to my brother .
my SCARF __ to my sister .
my BIRD STATUES _ to my mother .
ANYTHING ELSE _ burn or give away .
… my rent was paid when I was taken away, but now hasn’t been since then. I don’t know what that means for anything .
Document Side Two: Letter to Father
[Int. Note . The document has been folded and unfolded many times. It appears that it has even begun to tear along some of the folds. I imagine Jiro has opened it often to read it. When I saw him the next day, the day I was to leave his house, I returned the letters to him, and asked whether he had showed this to their father. He replied that he had not. He had never had the slightest intention of doing so, nor would he. At the time of the publication of this book, Jiro and Sotatsu’s father is dead (d. 2006), so he will never see the letter in this life.]
Father ,
I know why you don’t come to see me. You are right that this is my fault. It is a complicated thing, but also very simple. It is so simple I can see through it like a glass window. When I do that, I see you and the others and you are waiting for something. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t think you know either. Someone writes something because someone thinks it should be written, it should be said. So, I write this, but I don’t know why it should be, just that something should be said, before this is through .
Where the house met the back gate, I used to hide things. You never knew that. Mother, Jiro, no one ever knew it. There is a hollow spot there, and I would put a thing there now and then. This is the kind of feeling I have now. I wanted you to know that I am not worrying anymore. I am not worrying now .
OS
Interview 21 (Watanabe Garo )
[Int. note . Watanabe Garo was extremely reluctant to disclose the details of the execution procedure. I argued with him for a long time, playing on his vanity, his ego, trying to get him to say the exact words he shared with Oda. Finally, only with a cash payment and guaranteed anonymity did he disclose the details.]
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INT.
All right, we’re recording.
GARO
He was sitting there and looking at me and I was standing. I felt pity for him then. It seemed like he was affected, like what Mori said to him had changed him somehow, and I didn’t want him to have to change. He hadn’t been affected by things before. I wanted to let him be who he had been during his time in the prison. It was a good way for him, and I didn’t want this whispering to have altered him. It shouldn’t have happened, and I thought, maybe I could fix it. Maybe I could talk to him and fix it, and things would go back to being the way that they were.
INT.
Was there something you could see in the way he looked, something different?
GARO
I can just say what I said.
INT.
Please.
GARO
I said to him, I said, you don’t know when it’ll be. That much is true. The prisoner can’t ever know the day of his execution. One day it is the day and that’s that. They bring you a snack, some kind of special snack. Something nice. Then they take you out of your cell. They take you to a hall and you notice it is a hall where you haven’t been before. At first maybe you think you are being exercised, or being taken to the infirmary. But, no, it is perfectly clear, this is a different section. It is a hall that is rarely used and it feels that way. You go down the hall and there are little windows and there are no bars, no bars on the windows. Outside you can see a lawn. Then you come to a door. The guard doesn’t have a key. The door just opens. Someone stands behind the door all the time waiting and when someone comes, when the time is right, he opens the door. You go through it. Now you’re in a semi-open space. There is a desk with a guard-sergeant. He has a lamp and a book. He checks your papers against the book. You do not have your papers. In fact, you’ve never seen them. But the guard who came with you has them. A doctor comes out, along with three other guards, ones you have seen before, ones who have dealt with you in the past. You are examined and the doctor and guards sign off. They are making a written statement that you are in fact you, that it is no one else but you standing there at that moment. You sign the document as well, agreeing that you are yourself. When it is done, the sergeant unlocks a door on the far side of the area. He does this once the others have left. It is a procedure. It is all a procedure. They leave; he unlocks the door; you go through. Your two guards have been exchanged for two others. They go in with you, one on each side. You are now in the first of three rooms. The execution suite is composed of three rooms. The first is a chapel. A Buddha statue is on the altar. A priest is waiting. You may have seen him before, on his visits to these very cells. He speaks to you warmly. He might be the only one to meet your eyes. He asks you to sit. There by the altar he reads to you and what he reads you are the last rites. Now you know for sure. Even if you have been pretending that it isn’t so, now it is suddenly clear. Although you have told yourself some irrational story, that on the day of your execution some event of some kind will occur, and that from this event you will know it is the day of your execution, nonetheless, such an event is an invention. The guards do not wear different uniforms. You are not offered a cigarette. You do not go outside to be taken elsewhere in a covered van. Whatever event you have imagined, it is empty and meaningless. You are read the last rites, and that experience is fleeting. So soon it is over. So quickly you are raised onto your two legs. A door in the farther side of the room opens. You go through. The next room is smaller. Someone is waiting there, too. It is the warden. He is dressed very beautifully and appears distinguished, like a general. He waits until you are positioned properly. He waits. When you are standing where you should, he reaches into his pocket. He takes out of his pocket a piece of paper. What is he going to say? Even the guards are restless in this far room. What he reads is this: he is ordering the execution. He uses your name several times, pronouncing it with wonderful care, and it is like you have never heard your name before. You are to be killed by the order of someone or something. He leaves the room and the door locks. Another guard has come in. He has a bag and out of the bag he produces handcuffs. These are placed on your wrists and firmly tightened. Next he produces a blindfold. The guards move around you as if you are delicate. They are performing a series of operations on an object. You are secured. Your arms are secured. Your head is secured. The blindfold is applied to your head and face. Now you can no longer see. The guards guide you now. You go through a door which must have opened soundlessly, the door beyond the warden and the second Buddha statue. You realize you have looked at the last thing you may ever see. If you are wild, if you have become wild, if you become wild, it no longer matters because you have been secured. But most are not wild. Most are led into the room without complaint. Even with animals, covering the eyes produces docility. The bag the guard brought was full of docility and you feel it. The guards have been gentle with you; they are guiding you. You are positioned in the final room, the last room. You feel the space of it around you. The guards touch your shoulders and your head. They lay something over your head, down over the blindfold. They are so gentle with you, like barbers. It is a rope they have laid upon your neck. The rope is laid like a stiff collar on a new dress shirt, and made snug. Everyone is around you, very close. Then, delicately, they remove their hands from you, from off your shoulders, your neck, your arms. They step away. Now it is quiet. You can feel the rope’s upward direction. Occasionally it brushes against the back of your head. Perhaps you can guess where you entered the room. You are doing things like that, guessing with senses that are not operating. A noise comes, a trapdoor has been released and you fall through the floor as if it were not a floor, not the floor of a room such as you have known, but the floor of a room like a gallows. That is the last room, a room like a gallows tree.
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To Find Jito Joo
Int. Note
Something about the poem that had been written on the photograph of Jito Joo was haunting me. I woke several times in the night at the house where I was staying and the image in my mind was always the same — a still lake in a country of still lakes and a bright sun overhead. There was no sound, none at all. There was no possibility of sound. I felt in it the silence that had come over my wife — that very silence which seemed to me then to have ruined my happiness, and which began the long journey that had led me here to Japan to investigate the matter of Oda Sotatsu. I felt in it too his silence.
And so I told myself — this is the heart of it. If this is a mystery, then the thing that is most mysterious is the involvement of Jito Joo. What exactly was her relationship with Sotatsu? Why was she there at the prison? For what reason was she repeatedly admitted, if indeed it was her — all those times?
I told myself, you must find Jito Joo, and if you can, then you must show her that this is a thing you understand, this silence, even if it means saying things aloud to her that you have said to no one. You must draw out from her things she has told no one. Perhaps in it there will be something — a thing that makes sense from these silences, the silence of my wife, the silence of Oda Sotatsu, the stretching on seemingly pointlessly, of life, day after day with no one to call it off.
So, I began to look for Jito Joo wherever she might be found.
Int. Note
First, I looked for her in public records, in phone books, listings of ownership, real estate purchases, deeds, and found nothing. One supposes she could easily have chosen to go by another name. Indeed, she had every reason to want to.
Jiro had no idea where she might be. He felt it was unnecessary to look for her. I hired a private investigator (of a sort) to no avail. I don’t believe the man ever left his office. I began to feel it would never happen.
There is a book that I read once, a book about an Austrian huntsman. Any Trick to Finding . Some year of my childhood, I found the book in the children’s section of the library, where it had been placed, perhaps because the title was silly. I imagine a librarian must have put it there, thinking it was not an adult book. Actually, it was written in a very ornate and mannered English by a British gamekeeper who had known the book’s subject (in his youth). I might be the only one ever to have opened the book (in that library). Certainly I was the last, because I stole it and hid it under my brother’s bed behind a dulcimer and a collection of broken tambourines. Where it is now, I can’t say. I think that house was demolished soon after we left it. In any case, the book was quite marvelous. It tells the man’s story — his childhood in a poor Austrian village, his willingness to be of use, the discovery of his special talent, his rise to a position as head gamekeeper on one then another magnificent and extensive Austrian estate. But what was his special talent? Well — he could find anything, anything at all. Somehow the man, Jurgen Hollar, had invented a system for himself that enabled him to be extraordinarily efficient in several departments of being in which most humans act with extreme looseness of endeavor. Finding things was the principal expression of his gift.
While sitting in the yard at the house of which I have spoken, the house of the butterflies (those that I had been told of, and had believed in before their appearance), the memory of Jurgen Hollar and of Any Trick to Finding came suddenly to me. It had been with great difficulty that I as a boy had read the book, and perhaps it was the doggedness of my approach that had so impressed it on my mind. In any case, there I was, in a Japanese garden, considering the life of a nineteenth-century Austrian huntsman. It was to such thoughts my desperation had led me.
Jurgen Hollar, it may be related — and I give this secret to you now simply out of the general kindness of my heart — could find things because he would not look for them. This is the entire point of his book. He had a very careful method of isolating and categorizing all objects that he would find in a particular area, however large that area might be, however small (however large the object might be, however small). Whether it was a long search or a short one — whether there were many objects or few, still he would follow his credo.
Therefore, imagine this: you are asked to find a spoon. You go into a room and begin on one side of the room. First you behold a sort of long shallow couch full of cushions with a table attached that extends along a wall. That is not a spoon, you say to yourself. Next you cross the wide, sloping, rounded space of the room, walking first down then up, and approach the far side, where, upon a long flat section, you see a sort of kitchen area. There is where spoons are to be found, you think. First you lift one thing then you lift another. Not a spoon, not a spoon you say. But Jurgen, had he been with you, would have looked at each thing in turn, and asked what it was. He would have looked at the couch, emptied it of cushions, and realized that it had a fine spoonlike shape. This may be the spoon I have been looking for. He would have noticed the odd spoon-ness of the very room in which he stood, and might well have identified that as the spoon for which he was looking. He did not permit the previously drawn categories of objects that had been set before him in the world to stop up his eyes and halt his discoveries.
Therefore, when the lord’s son went missing one day, it was Jurgen who found the boy, secreted away, dressed as a girl in a humble village home spinning yarn, actually spinning yarn at a spinning wheel. When a favorite horse was missing, Jurgen found that a particular family, always begging in the marketplace, were mysteriously absent, and not begging for food as they always did. He went to the marketplace and asked himself, what is here and what is not here. He did not say, where is the horse.
And so, as with many lessons, we learn them and forget them and then are forced to learn them again. The time had come for me to regain my composure as a Hollarite, as a fellow who finds things by seeing what is there.
So, after two months of fruitless search, I stopped searching. I would spend my time looking through the transcripts of Oda Sotatsu’s interrogations. I would correspond with his brother, Jiro. I would collect materials and take notes. I would prepare the parts of this very book as best I could.
Also, and perhaps most important, I would wander the area where Jito Joo had last been seen, and I would look at each thing I saw. I would ask myself, what is this that I see.
And so it came to pass after a month of sifting and thinking, I came out of a shop on a street — a street I will tell you where I had often walked! — and there she was. I recognized her from the photographs I had seen. She was on the sidewalk; it was the middle of the afternoon. She was holding a shabby cloth bag and looking at a scrap of paper. That there, I thought, is the addition of twenty years of life to the woman Sotatsu knew, the woman I had seen in photographs. It is what she must look like — it is just what she would look like. Never having seen this older Joo before, I could not look for her, but being prepared to learn what things were by looking at them — suddenly, I found her.
— Joo, I said. Jito Joo?
I explained myself poorly. She was somewhat hostile, at the very least confused and distrustful. However, she also appeared to be a person to whom others seldom spoke. After a little while, I won her trust sufficiently that we went back to her house to speak. In a phrase, she looked quite down on her luck. To whom have you been speaking , she kept asking. To whom?
The House of Jito Joo
[Int. note . This portion is retold from memory, as I did not tape the interaction. You will notice the style of the text differs slightly. That is the reason.]
We passed through several neighborhoods, each poorer than the one before, until we came to an extremely humble street. This one, said Joo, and led me up the steps of a converted building. Her flat was on the top floor, at the back of the house, and looked out onto a small untended patch of ground, and beyond it, a series of other ramshackle buildings running down a long slope.
Her apartment was largely empty. It appeared as if she had just moved in. How long had she lived there? Nineteen years in December.
It was strange, let me tell you, standing there in that apartment with a fifty-year-old Japanese woman I had never met, and no sense at all of what might come of any of it. She looked at me and waited.
Joo, I said, I want to ask you some things. I want to talk to you about Oda Sotatsu. I want to talk about Kakuzo. I want to speak about the poem that was written on a photograph of you. I am looking for this mystery. Not the mystery of why it happened but the mystery of how.
I will tell you nothing about it, said Joo. The person who would speak about it is gone now, gone a long time.
But what if I speak to you? I said. What if I speak about it — about this and about other things. What if I show you it would matter for you to speak. That speaking to me would matter.
She said nothing, but I drew a deep breath and continued.
Her apartment had no kitchen — just a sort of hot plate on a little counter with a sink. She put some water in a pot and set it on the hot plate.
You don’t know me at all, I said, but I have a feeling that you know about something that I know.
And with that, I began.
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