The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
“Let’s say there is such a thing as a human soul, and it’s alive, along with the body it inhabits. In my village, there’s a folk belief that when someone dies—that is, when a person ceases to exist in a physical form—the soul leaves the body and goes up into the air of the valley, spinning around in a spiral movement, like a tornado. (The valley is shaped rather like the inside of a widemouthed jar, and the soul doesn’t venture beyond those confines.) At some point the disembodied spirit reverses its corkscrew trajectory and returns to earth, landing at the base of a tree high up on one of the heavily wooded mountainsides that enclose the valley—not just any old tree, but a specific one that has been selected beforehand by karma, or fate. Then, when the moment is right, the old soul will make its way down to the village and find a home in the body of a newborn baby.”
Goro responded to this bit of folklore with an esoteric reference that showcased his own precociously sophisticated store of knowledge. “According to Dante,” he declared, “the right way for a human being to climb a mountain is by going around to the right, and if you take the left-hand route you could be making a big mistake. When a spirit spirals from your valley up into the forest, which way is it moving: clockwise or counterclockwise?”
Kogito’s grandmother hadn’t shared that logistical detail, so instead of giving a straightforward answer Kogito ventured a wild surmise, half in jest: “I guess that would depend on how people used to think about birth and death. If they thought it was bad when the soul left an old body and went to the root of a tree, and good when that same soul entered into the body of a newborn baby, then I guess the spiral would be clockwise in the case of rebirth and counterclockwise for death.”
Then he added, “Seriously, though, if the soul is able to detach itself from the body in that way, then the spirit must not be aware that it’s dead. So what dies is just the body, and at the moment when the flesh ceases to be alive the spirit goes its own way. In other words, the spirit goes on living forever, divorced from the body’s finite sense of time and space. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand it myself, so I’m just groping around for an explanation. But I think that just as there’s infinity and also a single instant in time, and just as the entire cosmos can coexist with a single particle, isn’t it possible that when we die we simply move into a different dimension of space and time? If that’s the case, then maybe the soul could continue existing in a fourth-dimensional state of innocent bliss, without ever noticing that there’s such a thing as death.”
And now that giddy, carefree existential conversation they had enjoyed on that day in their youth, having more fun fooling around with the high-flown words than with the actual concepts—now that seemingly abstract scenario had really come to pass. And here was Goro’s spirit, lively as ever, talking to Kogito through Tagame as if he truly hadn’t noticed that his mortal body had already gone up in smoke.
5
Late that night, on the day after Goro took his leap into the next dimension, Kogito finally made it home with the bloodstained handkerchief still pressed against the TV-camera gash between his eyes. He made dinner for Akari, who had been listening to CDs with the answering machine on and the telephone ringer silenced, and then, after washing his injured face (he kept the light in the bathroom turned off, and didn’t even glance at himself in the mirror), Kogito trudged up the stairs to his study.
He took Tagame down from the shelf where he had replaced it in the small hours of the previous night, after being scolded by Chikashi. On the train home, Kogito had had an epiphany about the tape he’d been listening to on Tagame, before last night’s strange farewell—namely, Goro’s reminiscences about the time he explained one of Rimbaud’s poems to Kogito. (It was late that day, around 5 or 6 PM, when a package containing the final tape recording was delivered to Kogito’s house, though by that time Goro’s body was already in police custody, being held as the unidentified corpse of someone who has met an unnatural death.) In retrospect, after what had happened, that monologue seemed to be rife with hidden meanings.
“When we were in Mat’chama, how well do you suppose we really understood French poetry? After that you went off to college and majored in French literature, but you mainly read prose, as I recall. And since I never made a formal study of the language, I can’t really judge our abilities,” Goro had said in his usual smooth, flowing voice, with no hint that anything out of the ordinary might be going on in his head. “But I remember that you used to copy the poems out of Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud onto hundreds of little pieces of paper and stick them on the wall at your mother’s house in the mountains. Rimbaud really had a hold on us, didn’t he?”
“That’s true,” Kogito had replied nostalgically, after pressing the STOP button on the tape recorder. “In those days, all we did was fantasize about the mystical meanings and how they applied to us. But I think that as time went by we were able to refine our understanding of Rimbaud based on scholarly research, wouldn’t you agree?” Whereupon he pressed the PLAY button again. And that was how, the night before, Kogito had managed to have a long, antic “chat” with his already deceased brother-in-law about Arthur Rimbaud, the French prodigy poet.
And now, at last, Kogito became aware of just how dense and thick-skulled he had been: Goro had clearly been using a verse of Rimbaud’s to say his own good-bye. It couldn’t have been more obvious, really. For openers, the poem Goro had been focusing on was “Adieu,” or “Farewell”: the same poem (as translated by Kobayashi) that Kogito had laboriously copied onto scraps of paper when they were teenagers.
And then Kogito remembered—though he wasn’t clear about whether it had been a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting—that he and Goro had shared a long discussion about the French poet on another occasion. At the time it had been many years since either of them had read any Rimbaud, and Kogito got the impression that Goro, who did most of the talking, was conjuring up the lines of poetry from the dim and distant recesses of his memory.
Inspired by that conversation, Kogito had rounded up and read several new translations of Rimbaud’s poetry. (By that time, almost every French-Japanese translator had published a Rimbaud translation.) Kogito ended up choosing Hitoshi Usami’s recent translation to send to Goro, after checking the Usami version not only against Hideo Kobayashi’s seminal translation but also against the original French text.
Among the pile of cassette tapes that Goro had sent, there was one in which Goro responded to Kogito’s gift of the Usami translation with a long discourse about Rimbaud. After Kogito had listened to that tape again, he went to the section of a bookcase where he kept the French books he had collected during his student days and took down several works, old and new, pertaining to Rimbaud.
On one shelf, a Pléiade edition of Rimbaud’s Collected Works stood next to a Mercure de France edition of Poésies; the latter (a present to Kogito from Goro when they were still in high school) had been Kogito’s first introduction to the French language. For the first time in many years, Kogito opened Poésies. He could still remember how his heart had leapt when Goro handed him that little book with the exotic red letters on the cover. There, in the margins, were the minuscule but clearly legible notations he had made as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, written in hard lead pencil.
The reason some of the notes were in English was because before Goro started teaching him French, the book that Kogito had consulted in the library of Matsuyama’s American-run Center for Cultural Information and Education (CIE for short) was the Oxford French-English dictionary. In addition, the pages bore two different kinds of annotations in Japanese. The notes in the angular katakana syllabary were used to flag what Kogito perceived as the salient points in Goro’s discourses. He used the katakana in imitation of, or homage to, the marginal printed musings in a collection of essays by Goro’s famous film-director father, which Goro had lent him.
Kogito’s own schoolboy thoughts (not shown here) were written in the flowing, cursiv
In a letter to his teacher, as well as in the poem itself, Rimbaud wrote that he was about to turn seventeen: that is to say, an age that’s filled with daydreams and fantasies. But it’s said that the poem in question, “Romance,” was actually written when Rimbaud was fifteen. In other words, when he wrote the line “One isn’t serious at seventeen,” he was misrepresenting his own age.
Even so, this poem is meant to be read by someone who’s exactly the age you are now, Kogito: the same age I was last year, when I read it for the first time. The great thing is that this absolute genius, Arthur Rimbaud, offers equal encouragement to ordinary humans like us, too.
Kogito was surprised that a gifted youth like Goro, who anyone could see was seriously brilliant and abundantly talented, would liken himself—and, with exceptional honesty, Kogito, as well—to ordinary people.
As Kogito was reading “Adieu” in the Pléiade edition, he was once again seized by an urgent thought. Before Goro’s suicide, when he was holding forth about that poem on one of his tapes and quoting certain lines from it, he obviously had the new translation that Kogito had sent open in front of him. Wasn’t Goro assuming that for Kogito, too, the entire poem would immediately be brought to mind by reciting a few lines? Kogito didn’t have a ready answer for that question, then or now.
Even with the new translation that he had urged upon Goro, Kogito didn’t feel the same sort of passionate emotional attachment to Rimbaud’s words as when he was young and used to memorize the poems by writing them out, line by line. Kogito had sensed a similar kind of divergence in their infrequent encounters during recent years. Could that be the reason why Goro had ultimately despaired of Kogito’s dependability and had decided to head off into the realm of the Terrible Thud, alone?
“Autumn already!—But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness, far from those who die as seasons turn.”
Kogito didn’t own a copy of the Usami translation that Goro was quoting from on the Tagame tape, but as he was jotting down a quick transcription he remembered that this opening-paragraph stanza was the same one that had first enthralled him, in Kobayashi’s translation, when he was a seventeen-year-old high-school student. Goro seemed to have had a strong response to those lines, as well. But wasn’t Goro, in choosing to die of his own free will, patterning himself after those who were “sworn to a search for divine brightness”? Wasn’t he, somehow, just mimicking “far from those who die as seasons turn”?
Moreover, in the next stanza, there was the image of a dead body swarming with maggots. How did that make Goro feel, on the threshold of his own death? This poem, which was teeming with what Rimbaud called “dreadful imagining”—why did Goro feel compelled to go on about it at such length on the tape? Kogito couldn’t help wondering about that. It even occurred to him that Goro might have deliberately chosen to hurl those very specific, very horrific words at Kogito and, by extension, at himself.
“Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!” And then, in the next stanza: “Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that. But not one friendly hand! and where can I look for help?”
The topic of lies was a major element in the continuing criticism of Kogito that Goro had recorded on the Tagame tapes. Was Goro giving up on finding “one friendly hand,” too? If that was the case ... Kogito couldn’t stop voicing this question to himself, even though he was fed up with his own endless, obsessive stewing about it. Anyway, if that was the case, as Goro was preparing to ring down the curtain on the final act of a long friendship (albeit one that had clearly grown distant in recent years), why did he give Kogito the Tagame apparatus for the second time and then follow up by sending a slew of long, fervent monologues, recorded on tape for Kogito’s ears only?
As he continued reading the poem, all the way to the final stanza, the passage that filled Kogito with nostalgic yearning was the one he and Goro had been most taken with when they were in high school. It was this line: “And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.” But what sort of meaning could he and Goro, in their extreme youth and inexperience, have been reading into the phrase “cities of glory”? Again, while they certainly found encouragement and inspiration in the concluding line (“and I will be able now to possess the truth within one body and one soul”), what on earth did that have to do with their everyday schoolboy lives on earth? And if Goro happened to be pondering that passage just before he took the final leap into space, what vision of his own future did he see in those words?
In truth, it was always quite a while after the conclusion of each of his Tagame sessions with Goro before Kogito was able to think about the contents of their “discussion” in this sort of lucid, analytical way. Then on the following night, when he once again hit the PLAY button, the quotidian things that had been occupying Kogito’s midday mind would recede into the distance as the strangely live-sounding words poured out of the diminutive speakers, like a real-time, real-space dispatch from the mysterious dimension where Goro now dwelled. Kogito would immediately fall under the spell of Goro’s words, and eagerly pressing the STOP button, he would launch into a spirited reply.
Whatever Goro may have said about his reasons for recording the tapes, the fact was that he used them primarily as a forum for continuous rants about Kogito’s myriad flaws, faults, and shortcomings. When Kogito thought about it later, he realized that it must have been the urgency in his own voice, when he was lying on his army cot trying to defend himself against Goro’s attacks, that had made Chikashi decide it was time to have a candid talk about Kogito’s growing addiction to the Tagame ritual.
6
Of course, Kogito was always the one who started the conversations with Tagame, but sometimes, just before he pressed the PLAY button, he had the uncanny feeling that the chunky little tape recorder was actually psyching itself up for the next round of combat. For some reason this made Kogito think about the way the real tagames—the large, oddly shaped water beetles that lived in the mountain streams of Shikoku—must have amorously bestirred themselves, almost in slow motion, during mating season. All these years later, that image (which may have been pure conjecture) was perfectly sharp and vivid in Kogito’s mind.
Kogito always left the tape cued up at the end of the previous night’s conversation, and whenever Kogito picked Tagame up he always felt as if he were answering an incoming call on the ultimate long-distance mobile phone. And the moment Goro’s voice began to speak, with its distinctive Kyoto/Matsuyama accent, Kogito was repeatedly struck by the fact that whatever the topic might turn out to be, it always seemed to be uncannily relevant to his current situation.
Another odd thing was that when he started talking to Tagame, Kogito was far more enthusiastic than he had been about any other kind of discussion with Goro during the past twenty years or so. There was something engaging about Goro’s relaxed way of talking across the vaporous border that separated the Other Side from the land of the living—despite the fact that his comments often consisted of merciless, searing criticism of Kogito—and even though Kogito was completely aware that Goro was dead, the intensity of their exchanges somehow seemed to overshadow that disturbing fact.
Kogito also felt that he had been forced to take another look at his feelings about his own inevitable death, so naturally there were times when the conversations evoked newly urgent thoughts about what really happens after we die. He could imagine himself, in the not-so-distant future, traveling to the Other Side with an upgraded, afterlife-appropriate version of Tagame and earnestly awaiting a dispatch from this side. When he thought that there might be no answer to his Tagame signals, for all eternity, he felt such a deep sense of loneliness and desolation that his entire being seemed to be disintegrating.
At t
Furthermore, Kogito resolved that during the day, while he was separated from Tagame, he wouldn’t allow his nocturnal conversations with Goro to seep into his daily experiences. And when he was talking about Goro with Chikashi, or with Umeko, or with Taruto, Kogito made every effort not to recall the conversations with Goro that flowed through Tagame.
In this way, Kogito constructed a barrier between the two types of time—real time and Tagame time—and while he was moving around in one zone he wouldn’t permit the other to spill over into it, or vice versa. But whichever zone he happened to be inhabiting, he never denied, at least not to his innermost self, the truth or the reality of what he had experienced in the other realm. From his vantage point on the earthly, conscious side, he firmly believed in the existence of the Other Side, and that belief made the world on this side seem infinitely deeper and richer. Even if his Tagame adventure was nothing but a dream, he still embraced it as a positive experience.
Suppose one of Kogito’s friends had said something like: “Okay, so Goro committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building, and his body, including the brain inside his head, was cremated, but his spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it—anyway, that entity continues to exist somewhere, even now. That’s what you believe, right?”