The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
In the twenty-fifth year since Kogito had been continuously writing novels (a career he had embarked upon during his early twenties), he had become aware of the advent of a major turning point. That revelation wasn’t catalyzed by looking toward the future; rather, it was an insight that had gradually been illuminated by examining the past.
At that time, if Kogito had folded the page of his life-to-date in half, it would have been divided almost equally between the years before and after he’d become a novelist. In Kogito’s twenty-plus years as a novelist—excluding the first few years during which he hadn’t been consciously thinking about “how to write”—he had always perceived the two major questions of “how to write” and “what to write” as a pair of intertwined vines, and writing his novels had been a matter of somehow finding a way to unravel those tangled vines.
Before long, his consciousness of “writing” became hideously hypertrophied, and it began to interfere with his ability to begin a new writing project. As he was struggling to find a way out of this predicament, looking for some way to go on writing, Kogito came up with a desperate contrivance. He wouldn’t be able to get a solid sense of “how to write” until he actually began. Therefore, he had to start writing immediately, cranking out a very rough draft the minute he had even a vague idea of the direction he wanted to go in. If he didn’t do that, he would never be able to embark on writing another novel at all.
If, as a next step, he examined what he had already drafted, one section at a time, that would help him to establish “how to write.” When he focused on what he had already written, line by line, the search for “what to write” would no longer be like casting a net over the surface of dark water. By following this simple formula Kogito was able to begin to write novels once again, and that was the crucial turning point.
When he was asked by Takamura to write the novel that would serve as raw material for an opera, Kogito made a decision. This time, he would start out by making sure that he had a clear idea of “how to write.” Why? Because this time “what to write” was clearly determined from the outset. He knew he was going to try to write about something that had actually happened to him when he was seventeen.
In his life since then, there had been very few days when he didn’t think about THAT, if only in passing. In particular, around the time when he graduated from college and married Goro’s younger sister, the only time he wasn’t remembering THAT was when he was concentrating on something else, and even then it was an underlying current in all his thoughts. Somehow, though, Kogito had managed to make it this far without ever putting THAT in a novel.
That had been a conscious decision. Moreover, the idea was always rattling around in Kogito’s head that at some point, after having gotten all his ducks in a row, he would write about the incident honestly and straightforwardly, with full frontal candor. He realized that he probably wouldn’t be able to end his life as a novelist without ever having written about THAT. Indeed, when he thought about it that way, he could almost convince himself that he had become a novelist for the primary purpose of writing about the occurrences of that profoundly disturbing “lost weekend.”
Goro’s provocative comment—“The reason I became a film director is so that, someday, I could make a long, drawn-out film about that occurrence, in its entirety”—had aroused a powerful sympathetic response in Kogito. And then when Takamura asked Kogito to write up the saga so he could use it as material for his opera, Kogito had finally been inspired to begin. If not now, he asked himself, when? At that point, Kogito even phoned Goro; they got together for the first time in a long while and Kogito announced his resolution. Goro wasn’t the type to rush recklessly into a project, but when he said that he, too, was ready to start working on a film about THAT, Kogito believed that he had truly made a commitment, on the spot, to doing just that.
And now, more than a year later, Kogito had a fresh epiphany: he realized that the first batch of thirty tapes that Goro had recorded for Tagame had been delivered shortly after Takamura died. While waiting for Kogito to write the novel that would become the libretto for Takamura’s opera, Goro had already begun to do the preliminary work for his movie, as if he felt there might not be enough time remaining for him to approach the task in a leisurely way.
Maybe Goro even felt as though he needed to take Takamura’s place, and he had used Tagame as a vehicle for doing his inherited duty of encouraging Kogito to get on with his writing, just as Takamura had done until the end. But now Goro, too, had gone over to the Other Side. While Kogito was living in Berlin, after having gone cold turkey on his Tagame addiction, he finally grasped the full extent of his lonely isolation: all his closest friends were gone.
During the last week of his solitary quarantine in Berlin, Kogito finished up his lectures at the Free University and finding himself with some time to spare, he went to the concert house in the former East Berlin to hear Verdi’s Quattro Pezzi Sacri. When the orchestra played there wasn’t the slightest bit of wasted reverberation or distortion of musical details, even at the maximum level of sound—that is, with all the instruments in action. The imposing building that housed the concert hall was utilitarian as well as gorgeous, and it was the perfect vessel for that magnificent saturation of sound.
And when the chorus sang at maximum intensity, it revealed the glory of the human voice, far surpassing any sound an orchestra could create, and the structure of the music, which seemed to reflect the totality of the universe, reached its fullest fruition in that superb space. But it wasn’t all serious and cosmic; there were passages that evoked a lighter kind of sublimity, arranged so sweetly and prettily that it occurred to Kogito that if the children of the gods had musical toys, they might sound like this. That’s the sort of thing he was thinking, utterly transported by his passion for the music, and he found himself wishing he could write sentences that were as powerful and transporting as the words that were now being sung, but needless to say he thought that was surely beyond his natural capacity.
Of course, since Takamura was already dead there would be no chance of atonement for the unwritten libretto, but Kogito realized that he needed, on the deepest level, to face up to the fact that both Takamura and Goro were gone. Maybe if he did that before his own death (which couldn’t be that far away), he would be able to confront the task of writing about THAT head-on, with no tricks or excuses. And if he did that (he fantasized as the music soared around him), maybe he would somehow be able to conjure up the sort of words that a person can produce only once in a lifetime and write something truly great.
Of course, he was drunk on the music of Verdi ...
CHAPTER FIVE
Trial by Turtle
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While he was flying from Berlin to Frankfurt, and then from there to Narita Airport in Tokyo, the problem Kogito kept pondering was this: When he was back once again at the house in Seijo Gakuen, and the time came to climb into his army cot and go to sleep, what would he do about Tagame, which had been left on its own for the past hundred days? In retrospect, he realized that his decision to leave Tagame behind in Tokyo had been an impulse born of desperation, but the separation had been unquestionably effective. Whether or not he would be able to continue to leave Tagame stashed on its side on a shelf near his bed once he was back in the same room was an entirely different matter.
Wasn’t it possible that the reason Kogito had been able to survive for a hundred days without Tagame was because he always knew that the minute he got back to Tokyo he would be able to resume his conversations with Goro right away? On this day, too, when he boarded a small jet at Berlin’s Tegel Airport and again as he transferred to a colossal jumbo jet at Frankfurt International Airport, his heart swelled with emotion at the thought of being reunited with his midnight companion. His innocent enthusiasm was almost childlike, and as if to prove that self-diagnosis he even bought a six-pack of batteries that happened to catch his eye at one of the airport kiosks, on the transparent pretext of needing to disp
Furthermore, he had managed to cook up a perfectly plausible rationalization for resuming his sessions with Tagame. Of course, he missed Goro and longed to be in touch with him again, but beyond that he felt a strong need to respond to Goro’s recorded criticism of him on the tapes. When Goro was still on this side, their relationship had consisted largely of a freewheeling exchange of criticism. But wouldn’t it be a conscious dereliction of duty to choose not to listen to the outspoken advice that Goro had left behind—counsel for Kogito as he was now, and as he would be?
From the time Kogito’s first short story was published in the college newspaper, Goro had never praised his friend’s work without also expressing some reservations. This pattern continued, without variation, right up until Goro went over to the Other Side. As for Kogito, he made a point of seeing all of Goro’s movies when they were first released, and while he appreciated that there was no other director in Japan who could create such films, when Goro appeared on TV to promote his latest project and offered simple explanations of the cinematic grammar of his films, Kogito felt that with each new work the explanations (and, by implication, the films themselves) were becoming more popular and more conventional. He mentioned that concern directly to Goro, and it wasn’t long before Goro simply stopped asking for Kogito’s reactions to his current work.
Around that time, Kogito found himself thinking more than once that the dynamic of their reciprocal relationship, at least from his perspective, was something like this: Goro’s films were incomparably interesting and enjoyable—nothing else that was being produced in Japan at the time even came close—but Kogito couldn’t help wondering whether Goro shouldn’t be making his own personal, idiosyncratic films instead of the crowd-pleasing entertainments he was turning out. Goro’s view, meanwhile, was that Kogito just kept perpetuating the same tiresome flaws in his novels, over and over, and this gave rise to Goro’s persistent dissatisfaction with Kogito’s work. As always, Goro was much more straightforward than Kogito. This was certainly true of the things he said on the Tagame tapes.
“Right now, who do you think is reading your novels? True, from the time you were an up-and-coming author until you reached a certain age, you’ve never had an enormous readership, but for someone who writes pure literature you were always in your own special category, as a writer. These days, by doing your usual thing, you’re still managing to sell just enough books to make a decent living. Isn’t that about right? Maybe it’s because you’re able to get along this way, but you seem singularly unconcerned about what sort of reader is choosing your books today or who might buy them in the future. You don’t seem to be making any efforts to acquire new readers, either. I’ll tell you right now, nobody could get away with taking such a laid-back approach with a movie. Take me, for instance; I’m not attached to a big movie studio—though these days most of those companies are awash in a sea of red ink, too—and if a filmmaker (even me!) puts out two flops in a row, it will be next to impossible to get funding for the next project. Chikashi and I were talking about this, and she told me that you said, ‘Oh, that probably wouldn’t happen to Goro,’ but when it comes to this sort of thing you’re totally out of touch with the times. What I’m making here isn’t Tora-san, you know,” Goro went on, making wry reference to an immensely popular series of formulaic, feel-good films about a hapless, sweet-natured vagabond. “The audience is continually changing, and figuring out how to attract new viewers is a truly urgent problem. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to sell out. I only pick a subject or a theme that interests me, and I will only film it in my own distinctive style; those are my basic, nonnegotiable requirements, and I refuse to compromise on either one.
“As for you, Kogito—when I think about it, it’s rather surprising, but in all these years that you’ve been churning out novels, there isn’t a shred of evidence that you’ve ever thought about the potential reader when you were choosing either the subject or the way of writing. After you finish the first draft, you rack up endless strings of ten-hour days, rewriting the original within an inch of its life, so it’s no wonder your sentences end up being diabolically difficult to read. Of course, the writing is being refined and polished as you go along, but at some point it becomes like an artificial piece of music, with no trace of natural breath. And then there’s the trademark impenetrable-prose style that you’re so pleased with, whether you want to call it alienation, or dissimilation, or whatever. If readers are being bombarded with radically unfamiliar images and esoteric allusions and convoluted sentences on every page, most of them aren’t going to end up wanting to buy another book by the author in question, unless they’re total masochists. This is a bit of your personal argot as well, but what you call travailler—meaning toiling and agonizing over a work of art—is something the writer does, not something the reader should be forced to do. And on top of that, there’s your insufferable propensity for self-reference! Now, I won’t go so far as to echo one criticism that you often receive, which is that if someone hasn’t read all your previous books they won’t be able to understand your new work because of your habit of incessantly referring to what you’ve written before. That’s just the way you are, but at least you write the allusive sections in such a way that they can be understood without prior knowledge of your oeuvre. You’re very conscientious about that.
“Even so, you never let the reader forget that the writer who’s composing this new work, and who also wrote all the books that came before, is this person called Kogito Choko. Why do you always have to make such a big fuss about yourself and insert yourself into the story under some contrived pseudonym? I mean, at the very most you’re just another novelist, aren’t you?
“In one of your books, when the main character was in elementary school he wrote a composition in which he said that all the things his younger brother had experienced in life were carried in that brother’s pocket, so to speak. You found a sentence in Latin that expressed that metaphorical conceit, and you had the other brother repeat it ad nauseam, remember?”
Kogito remembered. It was a quotation from Cicero that he had come across in a book by an Italian writer: Omnia mea mecum porto—literally, “I carry all my things with me,” but usually translated as “My wisdom is my greatest treasure.”
“Getting back to my main point,” Goro went on, “what you need to understand is that when the book you’re working on right now is published, and potential readers wander into a bookstore hoping to find an interesting-looking novel, most of those readers aren’t going to be specifically searching for the latest offering from Kogito Choko. Assuming there are any people out there who have read all your books and are sitting around eagerly counting the days till the next one comes out, they’re probably pretty few and far between. That’s what you don’t seem to grasp. Or even if you understand it intellectually, you can’t seem to escape from your ancient habits. Maybe it’s just too late to teach an old dog new tricks!”
As he sat in business class on the jumbo jet, heading back to Tokyo from Berlin, Kogito was reminded of a time when Chikashi told him about a conversation she’d had with Goro, in which Goro (a rarity for him) had actually praised one of Kogito’s novels. The book in question was the paradoxically titled Looking Ahead to Years Gone By, which told the story of Goro’s opposition to their marriage—and which, incidentally, was the book that catalyzed Chikashi’s decision to stop reading her husband’s novels.
“Goro was saying that he thought the end of that novel was really beautiful, especially the scene where two sisters pull the drowned body of their brother, Gii, up onto an island and are waiting for the police to come,” Chikashi said. “And on the periphery of that solemn yet oddly pleasant scene, a young woman who looks like me is playfully gathering wild grasses with Akari, who’s still a small child. Goro said that if he shot that scene very carefully, he thought he could create an image that would express the deep meaning of the tableau. He was say
The night he heard this, Kogito stretched out on his army cot with a copy of Looking Ahead to Years Gone By and reread the passage in question.
Listen, Brother Gii: I’m going to write you a great many letters about what happened in the past, as if we were still experiencing those moments together, over and over again. Starting now, I will keep on writing to you from this transient world in which you’re no longer present, until the end of my own time on earth. And that, I think, will be my task from now on.
Even after Kogito was back in Tokyo, that would hardly be the time to vow to give up his Tagame dialogues with Goro forever. For me, now, he mused, isn’t Goro already like another Brother Gii, as we exchange these messages about the much-missed past? Kogito struggled unsuccessfully to stifle the sigh that rose in his throat, and an instant later a flight attendant who had been hovering watchfully in the shadows materialized next to his seat.
“Excuse me, sir, is something the matter? That is, I mean—is everything all right?”
The subtle rephrasing gave a fleeting glimpse into the flight attendant’s private, interior self in a way that Kogito found very appealing, but she immediately reverted to the protocol set forth in her professional manual.
“How about a drink?” she said brightly. “That’ll cheer you up!”
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