The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “In any case, because your study is right above our bedrooms, it’s really hard on us when your voice comes floating down. It’s a bit like water dripping slowly through a bamboo strainer, and I think it’s probably bothering Akari even more than me. No matter how low you keep your voice, and even when it’s obvious that you’re just listening to Goro’s tapes on your headphones, I don’t think it’s possible for Akari to simply ignore what’s going on. So I’m just wondering whether you might be willing to put an end to your sessions, for us?”

  And then while Kogito watched, appalled, Chikashi unexpectedly began to cry. He had no choice but to admit that for these past few months he had been so engrossed in living by the Rules of Tagame that he had forgotten there were rules about living as part of a family, too. On another level, he had been startled by the aside Chikashi had tossed out in the middle of her speech: 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 ...

  8

  “But I just can’t do that!” Kogito wailed. He was alone in his study, lying facedown on his army cot with the sheets pulled tightly over his head, talking to himself. “I know my behavior has been shameful—getting so immersed in Tagame to the point where it’s become a kind of crazy obsession. But there’s another person involved in this. I can’t very well just announce, unilaterally, ‘Sorry, pal, it’s over.’ Think about poor Goro, all alone on the Other Side. How terrible would that be for him?”

  Without getting up, Kogito quickly turned over and thrust his head into the darkness next to the bed. Years ago, one of his former college classmates had been admitted to the hospital with leukemia and had thrashed around on the bed so violently that, as the man’s wife confided in Kogito, they were afraid he might end up bursting a blood vessel in his head. (And the fact that the doctors had chosen to conceal the true diagnosis from the patient had probably amplified his anxiety.) But maybe that desperate behavior—that sort of secret, private struggle—was just a reflection of the buttoned-up attitude toward life shared by the men of Kogito’s generation.

  Kogito got up, switched on the light, and pulled the duralumin trunk out from under the bed. He had just remembered something Goro had said on one of the tapes, and now, using his own topical annotations on the labels as a guide, he found the tape in question, popped it into Tagame, and hastily cued up the relevant passage. Then, as if urged on by the slow, whirring vibration of the tape recorder, he gave a decisive nod and pressed the PLAY button.

  “Of course, you’re always like this,” Goro’s voice began, ragging on Kogito right out of the gate. “But from what I hear these days, true to form, you’ve been acting like a mouse trapped in a bag. When you get right down to it, you’ve brought all your suffering on yourself, and now you’re floundering around helplessly. Chikashi’s been complaining to me, you know,” Goro went on. “She says that same big-shot scumbag journalist has been denouncing you again, in the nastiest, most contemptible way, making a point of saying things like ‘Of course I don’t read that guy’s novels, but I’ve heard from some young people that he’s been putting me in his books, as a villain.’ That so-called journalist even published a showy, slanderous book exploiting the fact that you won a major international award. That vendetta has already been dragging on for twenty-five years now—don’t you think it’s time for you to let it go?

  “Lately you’ve been in pretty low spirits, and you’ve brought Chikashi and Akari down as well. There’s no way you can say that’s a good thing. Even without having to cope with a depressed husband, Chikashi is someone who’s experienced more than her share of hard times. When the busybodies say that your family appears to have a pretty cushy life, you should just reply that the pleasant things pass soon enough, as if they’d never happened, but the painful experiences tend to linger on for a long, long time.

  “The sort of person who’s forever reveling in every little delight with an excessive, borderline-abnormal kind of euphoria, and who does nothing but cling to those lovely airbrushed memories—that, in my opinion, is a thoroughly unhappy and unfortunate person. Chikashi has been through far too much suffering already, but in spite of that she has never turned into the sort of weak person who’s always longing to return to happier days. Don’t you agree?

  “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about your situation, and I was wondering—how would it be if you took a little breather and left town for a while? You’ve been toiling away at the novelist’s life for all these years, and I really think you could use some quarantine time right about now. I think if you just got away from your novels for a while ... If you left for good it would be rough on Chikashi and Akari, that’s why I say ‘for a while.’ What I mean is, you need to impose a quarantine on yourself and take a break from the sort of life where you’re being confronted by the distressing gutter journalism of this country on a daily basis.”

  “Give me a minute to check something in the dictionary,” Kogito replied. “When you first mentioned this, some time ago, I had a passing familiarity with the word quarantine, so I didn’t take the time to look it up and find out exactly what it meant. But the word hasn’t taken root in my mind to the point where I would actually use it.”

  After pressing the PAUSE button, Kogito brought out one of his dictionaries and flipped the pages until he found what he was looking for:

  quarantine (kwor-ãn-teen) n. 1. A state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere or been exposed to infectious or contagious diseases are placed. v.[with object] to put a person or animal in quarantine. 2. n. The period of this isolation. Origin: mid-seventeenth century, from Italian quarantina, “forty days,” from quaranta, “forty.”

  After he had finished reading the definitions, Kogito turned back to Tagame, making an effort to keep his voice as low as possible while simultaneously striving to pronounce every word with perfect clarity. “Listen, Goro,” he said, before pressing the PLAY button again. “I know you’re using this word to try to advance a certain agenda, and I understand exactly what you’re driving at.”

  “Of course, it doesn’t have to be exactly forty days,” responded Goro’s recorded voice. “You might have a chance to stay away longer. But what do you think about Berlin as a temporary haven, to put some distance between you and that journalist? (On the bright side, he isn’t getting any younger, either!) For me, at least, Berlin is an unforgettable place. If someone asked me what connection that city might have with your self-imposed quarantine, I couldn’t say exactly, but....”

  “Berlin, eh? Now that you mention it, I did receive an invitation to go there, for considerably longer than forty days!” Kogito exclaimed, hearing the surprise and excitement in his own voice, which had grown suddenly loud as he momentarily forgot about the need to whisper. “I’ll check now, but I think the offer’s still good.”

  Whereupon Kogito stopped the tape and went to his study to look for the file in question. S. Fischer Verlag, the publisher who had put out the first German translations of Kogito’s early novels, was still doing so, even though sales weren’t what they used to be. Every few years—or, more usually, every ten or twelve years—a new translation of one of Kogito’s novels would come out in hardcover, but as a rule the subsequent printings would be in paperback. Whenever Kogito gave readings at places such as the Frankfurt Book Fair or cultural associations in Hamburg and Munich, there would be a book signing afterward, where they were always able to sell quite a few of the colorful, beautifully designed paperbacks of his work. And now he had been offered a lectureship at the Berlin Free University to commemorate S. Fischer, the founder of the eponymous publishing house. The course was to begin in the middle of November, so he still had time to accept. The department’s offer was generous, and they even said that they would keep the slot open for him through the first half of the term.

  By the time he climbed back into bed, Kogito had dug up the most recent fax from a secretar
y in S. Fischer Verlag’s editorial division and learned that he still had three days to let them know whether he wanted to accept the position of guest lecturer at the Free University. To his own amazement, in a matter of a few minutes he had made up his mind to take Goro’s rather drastic advice and get out of town for a while.

  The tape on which Goro suggested a “quarantine” had been recorded several months earlier, but now his casual suggestion had become a necessity, for a different reason: namely, Kogito’s need to pull himself together and get over his addiction to talking to Goro through Tagame. Even after Chikashi’s heartfelt complaint earlier that evening, Kogito hadn’t been able to leave the tape recorder on the bookshelf for even this one night. And, as it turned out, it was Goro, his Tagame partner, who had dropped the hint that had galvanized him into positive action. Somehow, mixed in with his decision to make a bold move, Kogito felt a resurgence of his old dependence on Goro.

  He was just about to ask, “What’s going to become of our sessions with Tagame?” But then, without pressing the PLAY button, he answered his own question. Or, to put it more precisely, he consciously crafted a response along the lines of what he thought Goro might have said in real life. That’s for you to decide. But when Chikashi criticized your behavior last night, rather than any annoyance or inconvenience to her and Akari, she was probably more concerned about finding a way to free you from your addiction to our Tagame sessions, don’t you think?

  Nevertheless, right up until the night before he was scheduled to leave for wintry Berlin, Kogito was unable to give up his nightly ritual of talking to Goro by way of Tagame—although he did, at least, make every effort to keep his voice low. The thing was, when he told Chikashi the next day about his decision to go into Tagame-free quarantine in Berlin, she naturally interpreted this action as a direct response to her request: a way for Kogito to take a break from his “séances” with Goro. That being the case, no matter how much he lowered his voice Chikashi was probably still aware that the conversations were continuing, but because the end was in sight her silence on the matter seemed to constitute a sort of tacit approval or at least forbearance.

  Then one morning, as Kogito’s departure date was rapidly approaching, Chikashi (who had been busying herself every evening with packing and repacking his trunk) said: “Last night I felt like going through Goro’s letters, and I came across a watercolor painting that he sent from Berlin. Would you like to see it? It’s a landscape, on lovely paper. It’s actually drawn with colored pencils, then blurred with a wet brush so it ends up looking like a watercolor. The painting seems to have a really buoyant, happy feeling. On the back is written ‘This morning is the only day that’s been this clear since I’ve been here,’ and on the front, in the lower corner, is Goro’s signature.”

  Kogito looked at the landscape painting, which was on soft, thick, pale-sepia paper with slightly ragged edges, like a pricey wedding invitation. In classic Goro style, the paper had been roughly torn into a rectangular shape. The centerpiece of the composition was a huge tree, seen from above: stout trunk, barren treetops, and a chaotic tangle of leafless branches with attenuated tips, all minutely detailed in such a way as to delineate the subtleties of light and shade amid the homogeneous hues of gray and brown. The only green came from the perennial creepers that snaked around the tree trunk, while patches of deep blue sky thickly sprinkled with fluffy white clouds could be glimpsed through the lacy jumble of bare, thin branches.

  “These leafless white-barked trees in the painting, the ones whose skinny branches are draped in something that looks like the hair of a doll made from woolen yarn? I think they’re called European white birches, and in the springtime they put forth leaves that are smaller than the leaves of our Japanese white birches. There were some in front of the window of my office at Berkeley,” Kogito remarked.

  “Goro must have wanted to paint that sky because it was such a gorgeous color,” Chikashi said. “I think this was when he went to Berlin the last time, for the film festival. It had been quite a while since he and Katsuko broke up, so he no longer had the contacts from her film-importing business, and even though his movies were very well known over there, most of the attention was probably going to younger directors, so he seems to have been a bit dejected. I remember he told me on the phone that Berlin was cloudy every day, from morning on, and then it got dark around four PM. He said things like ‘Berlin in winter isn’t a fit place for a human being.’ But that makes it seem even more remarkable that this painting is so bright and full of life. He was probably walking around the city when an unusual set of colored pencils in an art-supply store caught his eye, and he just bought them on the spur of the moment. And then when he was looking out his hotel window at the first clear sky since he’d arrived, he suddenly felt like painting it. He didn’t have any proper drawing paper, so he must have used the back cover of the film-festival program or something. The thing is, Goro really wasn’t the type of person who would make a sketch of the view from his window while he was alone in his hotel room, was he? Remember when he was working at a commercial-art studio, and whenever he reached the final-design stage on one of his posters, he used to send you a telegram at your student lodgings, because he needed you to be there with him? Anyway, he told me, ‘There was someone there with me, watching me paint this picture. It was the person who was working as my interpreter/attendant, so no one was likely to gossip about her being in my hotel room. She was a really nice girl, and it’s only because she was there that I was able to make that sketch in an easy, relaxed way.’ Goro said that when he finished the picture, it seemed quite possible that the young woman might have asked impulsively whether she could have it. As he put it, ‘It would have been hard to refuse a request like that, so I took preemptive action: I told her I was going to send it to my younger sister, whom I’d been neglecting for far too long. I knew the address, of course.’ That’s the explanation Goro gave me, when I thanked him for the gift. But, you know, Goro never had much confidence in his art, even though he sometimes allowed his drawings to be published as illustrations for his writing, and he simply couldn’t bring himself to give his paintings to anyone.”

  “I wonder what became of those watercolor pencils?” Kogito asked, momentarily awestruck by Chikashi’s unusual burst of eloquence. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beautiful, subtle colors.”

  “Goro told me that they were too bulky to pack in his trunk, and the pencil leads would probably have gotten broken in transit, so it just seemed easier to give the set to that girl. Apparently she had taken the university entrance exams, but decided to work in an office for a while before starting classes—I gathered that a lot of young people do that, in Germany. That’s how she came to be working as an interpreter/attendant, and the film festival assigned her to help Goro get around the city. At the time, I remember thinking that I would rather have had the colored pencils than the drawing, but now, of course, I’m very glad to have this picture.”

  Kogito enjoyed doing handicraft projects, and he happily set to work on installing Goro’s watercolor painting in a suitable frame.

  CHAPTER ONE

  One Hundred Days

  of Quarantine (I)

  1

  As he began his solitary sojourn in Berlin, Kogito wondered whether it would be even slightly easier to distance himself from Goro—or rather, from Goro’s spirit—there than in Tokyo. Kogito knew himself well enough to realize that this was a delicate question.

  True, he had left Tagame and the small duralumin trunk stashed in his study at home. But if he started to feel a desperate need to have these things with him, all he had to do was call Chikashi, and she could send them by international mail. (They were already packed in a vinyl box, wrapped in strong paper, and addressed to his lodgings in Berlin, just in case.) The arrival of the sea-mail boxes bearing the books he had shipped from Tokyo to Berlin before his departure had been delayed for some reason, so Kogito was using that emergency process to obtain the German
dictionaries and other books that he needed right away. When he stopped to think about it, though, the very act of using Tagame as a means of contacting Goro on the Other Side was nothing more than an arbitrary rule of the game he and Goro had set up. If Goro felt an urgent desire to get in touch with Kogito from his new dimension, surely he would find a more direct method.

  As soon as Kogito had boarded his All-Japan Airlines/Lufthansa flight from Narita to Frankfurt, he put on the headphones that were provided. He jabbed repeatedly at the various switches and buttons on the side of his seat, hoping to find some clue or conduit that would lead him to a new message from Goro. But there was nothing, not even a whisper, and Kogito figured that was probably the way Goro wanted it.

  After all, it was Goro who had broached the idea of going into quarantine in order to rescue Kogito from his unhealthy addiction (though Goro was talking about Kogito’s obsession with the “scumbag journalist,” not about Tagame). But it was Kogito himself, already feeling cornered by Chikashi’s request for a moratorium, who had seized on that suggestion and made it a reality by accepting the invitation to live and work in Germany for three months. Surely a brief period of separation at this point wouldn’t matter to Goro, who had moved on to eternity.