The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  If this hypothetical friend phrased the question in that serious kind of way (and if he was a moody type anyway but was smiling as he asked it) then everything would be fine. In that case Kogito, after pondering the matter for a moment, would probably reply while wearing an opaque, noncommittal expression, since like most people his age he had long since become a master of the poker face and the social smile.

  “That’s true,” he might say, “only with some conditions attached. While I’m listening to his voice on Tagame, Goro’s soul—that is to say, by my definition, a spirit furnished with something that’s invisible yet is extremely close to having physical form, like what they call an etheric double or an astral body—anyway, yes, I do believe that Goro’s soul really exists in that state. It’s different than if I were just playing back a tape recording of his voice. What Goro left in place for me is a very special system. To be sure, his soul has made the transition into a space that’s different from this space that you and I still inhabit. But it just so happens that Tagame is a conduit between this space and that one. That’s how it works.”

  The hypothetical friend is still skeptical. “But when you and Goro aren’t having one of your Tagame talks, what form does he take on the Other Side?” he asks. “Wait, let me rephrase that. When Tagame isn’t connecting you to the Goro beyond Tagame, how does Goro exist in relation to you?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Kogito would be forced to admit, “when we aren’t talking on Tagame, I really can’t think very clearly about Goro.”

  “So the machine you call Tagame acts as an intermediary and makes Goro’s spirit a reality for you. In that case, I guess you can’t reduce it to the more general question of whether a person’s soul exists after death.”

  “That’s right, although the conversations I have with Goro, through Tagame, have also changed the way I think about my own death. As for the deaths of my mentor, Professor Musumi, who did so much for me when I was at university and afterward as well, and my old friend Takamura, the composer, I now believe that there must be a way to communicate with their departed spirits, too, wherever they may be. I don’t happen to have a conduit to Professor Musumi or Takamura, but I like to think that there are people out there who have their own versions of Tagame and are using them to talk to the souls of those two, beyond the grave.”

  While Kogito was carrying on this sort of imaginary conversation, why didn’t he think about the possibility of another Tagame system to keep Goro connected with his sister, Chikashi? (Never mind that Kogito’s posthumous conversations with Goro were the direct cause of the tremendous strain on his own relationship with Chikashi.) Perhaps it was because Kogito was conscious that his Tagame chats with Goro were his own private realm. Besides, Chikashi was a remarkably self-reliant person, independent from Kogito and from Goro, as well; not at all the type, Kogito thought, who would be drawn into that kind of fantasy game. And surely Goro must have been thinking along the same lines.

  One year, Kogito was invited to speak at Kyushu University. While he was in the Green Room waiting for his lecture to begin, he happened to glance at a timetable and discovered that if he skipped the banquet with the other participants and hopped on the next ferryboat to Shikoku, then transferred to a Japan Railways train, he could be back at his childhood home, deep in the forest, before the night was over. He asked the assistant professor who was looking after him to make the travel arrangements, and the tickets were purchased while Kogito was delivering his lecture.

  By the time Kogito made his way to the house where he was born, it was after 11 PM and his mother had already gone to sleep. The next morning, Kogito was up early. When he peered down the covered passageway that led to an adjoining bungalow, he could see the silhouette of his naked mother, illuminated by the reflected river-dazzle that leaked into the dark parlor through the gaps in the wooden rain shutters. Backlit like that, Kogito’s elderly mother looked like a young girl as (with the help of her sister-in-law) she twined the turban she always wore in public around her head. At that moment, his mother didn’t seem to belong entirely to this world; it was as if she had already begun to make the transition over to the Other Side. Her abnormally large ear, which resembled a fish’s dorsal fin, was hanging down from her emaciated profile, almost as if that misshapen appendage itself was absorbed in deep meditation.

  Later, when they were sitting across from each other at the breakfast table, Kogito’s mother began to speak in the local Iyo dialect, which tends to feature more exclamatory sentences than standard Japanese. “I’ve been praying for a chance to see you since the beginning of last spring, Kogito!” she began. (It was already fall.) “And now that you’re sitting here, I still half feel as if it’s my fantasy eating breakfast in front of me. It doesn’t help that I can barely hear what you’re saying—of course, I’ve gotten quite deaf, and on top of that you still don’t open your mouth wide enough when you speak, just like when you were a child!

  “But anyway, right now I feel as if this is half reality and half fanciful daydream! Besides, lately, no matter what’s going on, I’m never entirely certain that it’s really happening! When I was wishing that I could see you, it almost seemed as though half of you was already here. At times like that, if I voiced my opinions to you out loud, the other people in the house would just laugh indulgently. However, if you happened to be on television talking about something and I said to the TV set, ‘You’re wrong about that, you know,’ even my great-grandchild would jump in and try to stop me, saying, ‘That’s rude to Uncle Kogito.’ They think it’s amusing when I talk to an invisible person, but isn’t the television itself a kind of fantastical illusion? Just because there’s no machine attached to my private hallucinations, does that make them any less ‘real’ than the images on TV? I mean, what’s the basis for that kind of thinking?

  “Anyway, it seems as if almost everything is already an apparition to me, you know? Everyday life seems like television, and I can’t tell whether somebody is really here with me or not. I’m surrounded by apparitions. One day soon I, too, will stop being real, and I’ll become nothing more than a phantasm myself! But this valley has always been swarming with specters, so I may not even notice when I make the shift over to the Other Side.”

  After Kogito finished his breakfast, his younger sister gave him a ride to Matsuyama Airport so he could catch a plane that left before noon. When his sister called Chikashi in Tokyo to report that Kogito’s departure had gone according to plan, she added, “As Mother was nodding off after breakfast, she said, ‘A little while ago I saw an apparition of Kogito, and we had a nice chat.’”

  When he heard this story later, Kogito felt unexpectedly moved by his mother’s remark. After committing suicide, Goro hadn’t really noticed that he’d left this world and become a spirit on the Other Side, had he? When he thought about it that way, Kogito came to see the fluidity between the two dimensions as a positive thing—especially late at night, after he’d been talking to Goro through the magical medium of Tagame.

  7

  During Kogito’s Tagame sessions with Goro, he noticed that things got livelier, and he was able to enter more spontaneously into the discussion, when Goro began reminiscing about their early student days in Matsuyama. At times like that, Kogito could ignore the Terrible Thud (his private shorthand for Goro’s baffling suicide). If he didn’t have to worry that the conversation might end up being about the future, he was able to follow the rules he’d set up, to the letter. Conversely, whenever a dialogue concluded with a mention of future plans, the Rules of Tagame could be thrown into disarray.

  On one cassette tape, Goro was trying to reconstruct the details of a conversation that had taken place when he and Kogito were both in their twenties. “Remember when we were talking about how, once upon a time, there used to be some truly great writers? And I was wondering whether really major, transcendent writers like that still exist in the world—and if so, are any of them Japanese? That was the gist of the discussion, and we eve
n made a list of candidates. After a bit I revised the question and changed it to this: I wonder whether, in the near future, we’ll get to see a truly great author who writes in Japanese? You were doubtful, as I recall.”

  Whereupon Kogito pressed the STOP button and said, “I still am.”

  “To be perfectly frank,” Goro went on, “at that point you weren’t thinking of yourself as someone who had the potential to become a truly great writer. I remember you confessed to me, soon after we met, that you had always thought of yourself as an ordinary person who in all likelihood was never going to come up with any extraordinary ideas. But then you told me about how you entered the All-Japan Young Inventors Competition, and that was very entertaining. However, you weren’t the one who broached the subject—I had to coax the story out of you—and you told it in a typically self-deprecating way. And so, in an attempt to force you to talk more about that sort of thing, I set a trap.”

  Kogito pressed the STOP button again and chimed in: “Of course I remember, but I always wondered—what made you do that? You really were tremendously zealous about trying to convince me I wasn’t ordinary.”

  “The first thing I did was to make you realize that Kafka was a truly great writer—a genius,” Goro continued. “I also talked about how Kafka’s fellow writer Max Brod (himself an up-and-coming author in those days, albeit a rather commonplace one) must have felt when he realized that his then-unknown friend was, unquestionably, a genius. The efforts that Brod made after Kafka’s death to bring his late friend’s works the recognition they deserved—that’s another story entirely.

  “Then after you started writing novels, when you fell into your first slump, as they say, I dredged up that subject again. I told you that nowadays (that is, in modern-day Japan), if you can’t become a truly great writer, then writing novels and such is simply a waste of your life. At that point you’d been a successful writer for more than a year, and you had already won the Akutagawa Prize, but it looked to me as if you were settling into an overly cozy and comfortable place in the literary world. That’s when I told you that I thought you ought to take a break from what you’d been doing thus far and start over again, fresh—shake things up a bit. From then on, if you’d laid low for two or three years and hadn’t published any new fiction of your own, the journalists and the literary magazines and the reading public would probably have forgotten all about you. And that, to my way of thinking, is where the process of becoming a truly great writer would begin.

  “In those days, you always had plenty of energy for studying and doing research, and whether you were writing a novel or an essay, you seemed to be able to make clever use of a variety of literary styles if you just put your mind to it. But it was because of that very versatility that you were suffering, don’t you think? You used to say that even though you were still young, as a writer striving for originality you wanted to come up with your own themes and create your own distinctive prose style, and then combine those two elements. You wanted to make the world recognize you as an author who possessed that kind of originality, but you found those tasks daunting, and as you yourself put it, you tended to lose confidence and chicken out.

  “As for me, I came up with an elaborate idea for a literary hoax, which I approached as I would a screenplay, although I never actually wrote it up. The idea was that the protagonist—in this case, a writer—would be someone who had hit upon an original concept at a young age, and he would devote his entire career to delving ever deeper into that particular notion. (For today’s young writers, finding an overarching theme and creating a coherent body of work seems to be the hardest task of all, but with my method you wouldn’t need to be the literary equivalent of a wandering monk, searching for enlightenment or struggling to find your ‘voice.’) Anyway, I subjected you to a long harangue about how this would be the ideal game plan for a versatile type like you, who has the gift of fluent composition and a serious penchant for research as well. Do you remember?”

  Kogito remembered that conversation very well, indeed. After hitting the STOP button, he leaned back and lost himself in leisurely reminiscence.

  Goro’s tongue-in-cheek idea went like this: First, Kogito would invent a fascinating but completely nonexistent writer. Next, he would pretend to pay a visit to the urban hermitage where the aging author supposedly lived as a voluntarily unpublished recluse. (When Goro initially described this fictional personage, Kogito immediately visualized a certain mid-twentieth-century surrealist poet—at that time, already an old man.) After pretending to conduct an interview with the imaginary writer, Kogito would write up their “conversation” as a powerful article for some literary journal.

  The article would probably attract a fair amount of attention. After that, Kogito would introduce some of the nonexistent writer’s “never-published prose” in the form of selected excerpts, all secretly composed by Kogito himself. And then, even though the publicity-shy author was exceedingly reluctant to open up, through sheer tenacity Kogito would manage to eke out some more articles in the form of notes on their subsequent “conversations.” At some point Kogito would gather these fraudulent materials together and publish them in the form of a grandiosely titled book about the “cloistered writer,” which would offer a comprehensive assessment of the phantom’s purported oeuvre.

  The basic story line would be that both before and after the war this impeccably modern writer, who was always ahead of his time, went on writing in his hideaway, following his private vision. Inevitably, after hearing so much about the elusive author from Kogito, both the media and readers in general would become intensely interested in the make-believe writer’s work. Needless to say, for the plan to succeed, Kogito would need to write some exceptionally strong and convincing literary criticism.

  Was such a charade really feasible? Goro laid out a concrete plan that showed how it could be made to happen, but Kogito thought that converting the blithe blueprint into a work of art by stringing words together, one by one, would be the difficult part. After all, how many talented young writers, their heads full of revolutionary ideas, have ended up failing or giving up in frustration? Even so, Goro argued, for a voracious reader like Kogito—someone who had extraordinary powers of recollection and whose mind was perpetually awhirl with curious fancies—it should be a piece of cake to introduce the phantom writer’s work to a wider audience via literary criticism, once Kogito had managed to whip up some samples.

  Moreover, as the plan progressed, Kogito would probably get the urge to try creating some of the hermit author’s fulllength work, as well. All the preliminary work he had done in the process of perpetrating this complex literary masquerade—composing excerpts, transcribing pseudo-interviews, penning literary criticism—would be invaluable when he actually started writing a novel to be published under the phantom’s name, since he would have become intimately familiar with the imaginary master’s prose style and essential themes and would have a clear idea of how to develop them further.

  So the literary hoax would chug along, and when it came time to publish another book of criticism and interpretation, more and more people would probably join the chorus of commenters on the illusory writer’s work. Of course, from the beginning the one who was leading the critical charge would be Kogito, writing under a variety of clever pseudonyms, and in the course of pursuing this plan over a period of twenty years or more, his own reputation as a fiction writer would be entirely erased by the faux-journalistic process. After that there would be nothing to do but to keep cranking out the backlist of the mysterious writer, while vicariously enjoying his invented protégé’s success.

  Kogito Choko, as a writer of his own original books, would eventually cease to exist in the public mind, and all that would remain was the great writer whose “rediscovery” he had orchestrated by easy, leisurely stages. And then after a little more time had passed, when the imaginary master finally “died,” his previously unpublished work would be brought forth posthumously, like water pouring ou
t of a broken dam. And the reclusive writer (whom no one had ever laid eyes on) would be remembered as a truly great artist—maybe even a Japanese Kafka.

  “We really got into the story of that mythical writer, didn’t we, Kogito?” Goro chuckled. “It was just when Borges’s work was being introduced in Japanese translation for the first time, and we were thrilled to find someone else who thought the way we did. And then, before long, you dug up English translations of the writers who were persecuted by Stalin: Bulgakov, Bely, and so on. In a way, I almost felt as if we were growing old along with our great imaginary littérateur!” Then Goro added something that made Kogito feel that his friend had come dangerously close to crossing the line as far as the Rules of Tagame were concerned.

  Rule Number Two: Never, ever speak about plans for the future.

  “This is what I want to say to you, Kogito,” Goro announced. “Right now you’re already older than the phantom writer was when you and he first ‘met.’ From here on, isn’t it time for you to gird your literary loins and try to make one last creative leap, to ensure that you yourself will be remembered as a unique writer, at least? (I won’t go so far as to say ‘great.’) I’m hoping that the words that are pouring out of Tagame right now will somehow prime the pump and get you fired up. In your own past—or rather, in the past we share—surely there’s a rich vein of experience that hasn’t yet been mined?”

  One day during the period when Kogito was indulging in long, intense Tagame dialogues (including the one above) on a nightly basis, Chikashi cornered him and, typically, burst out with a torrent of words that had obviously been germinating in her mind for quite a while.

  “After all this time,” she began, “when I hear you carrying on in your study every evening into the wee hours, complaining to Goro and then seeming to strain your ears for a response, I can’t help wondering whether this isn’t exactly the sort of ‘absurdity’ you dislike so much. I don’t see what good can possibly come of indulging in this sort of charade night after night, and I’m really at my wits’ end. Every time I hear you talking so impassionedly to Goro I can sense that you’re waiting for a reply, and I know it must be terribly painful for you. I sympathize completely, and I truly do feel sorry for you. It’s the same as if by some chance you suddenly died in an accident or something—I think about how puzzled and devastated Akari would be and how sorry I’d feel for him. It isn’t that I think you’re doing these late-night séances as a way of gearing up for your own journey to the Other Side, but still ...