The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
—Mommy, am I going to die?
—I don’t think you’re going to die. I’m praying that you won’t.
—But the doctor said, “This child is probably going to die. There’s nothing more we can do.” I heard him. That’s why I think I’m going to die.
My mother was silent for a moment. Then she said:
—Even if you die, I’ll give birth to you again, so don’t worry.
—But wouldn’t that child be different from the me who died?
My mother shook her head.
—No, it would be the same. After I gave birth to you again, I would tell the new you about all the things you’ve seen and heard and all the things you’ve read and all the things you’ve done up till now. And the new you would learn to speak all the words that you know now, so the two children would end up being exactly the same.
I didn’t really understand what my mother was talking about, but after that conversation I was able to fall asleep with a truly tranquil heart. The next morning, I began to get better. It was a very slow process, and it wasn’t until the beginning of winter that I was finally ready—and more than willing—to return to school.
When I was studying in the classroom or playing baseball on the field (baseball had become a popular sport after the war, though most people here believed it was a Japanese invention), before I knew it I would fall into a reverie and be lost in a world of my own. Wasn’t it possible, I mused, that the person who was here right now wasn’t the original me, but was, rather, a new child that my mother had given birth to after the death of her first son, who hadn’t survived that terrible fever? And wasn’t it possible that she had told this new child about everything that the original child had ever seen and heard and read and done, and now I (the new child) felt as though all those memories had been mine from the start? And even now, wasn’t it possible that I was thinking and talking with the vocabulary I had inherited from the child who died, who used to use the very same words?
And all the other children who were in the classroom and on the playing fields—wasn’t it possible that they, too, were children who had been born to take the places of the dead children who would never grow to adulthood, and that (like me) they had been told, secondhand, about everything those dead children had ever seen and heard and read and done? The proof of that, I thought, was that all of us were using the same inherited language when we talked.
And the reason all of us had to go to school was to make those inherited words our very own! Not just Japanese language, but science, math, even physical education; we needed them all in order to inherit the language—and by extension, the knowledge, culture, and social traditions—of the children who had died. I realized that I couldn’t become a new child to replicate and take the place of the child I thought had died of fever, just by going deep into the forest and comparing the trees and shrubs I saw before me to the illustrations in my botany book. That’s why we were coming to school like this and studying and playing together every day ...
I imagine that anyone who is reading this might think that the story I’ve just related is very strange indeed. And even while I’ve been recalling something that happened to me a very long time ago, at the beginning of that winter when I was finally over my illness and was able to return to school with quiet joy, I have a feeling, now that I’m an adult, that there are things I used to understand very clearly that now make no sense to me at all. On the other hand, I’ve talked here about a memory that I have never written about before in the hopes that those of you who are children (or “new” children) right now will understand this perfectly well.
“That’s the gist of it, though I’ve only covered the first third of the essay or so,” Ura said. “Of course, this is my impromptu translation from the German version, which was translated from English, so if it had been written in Mr. Choko’s usual Japanese style I imagine it would probably be very different.”
“I don’t think so at all,” Chikashi protested earnestly. “If he was writing with the intention of having it sound as if he were talking to children, I think Kogito would use exactly that sort of style. The one minor thing I would change in your translation is that my late mother-in-law would probably have been speaking to my husband in the local mountain dialect. But still—why did reading this essay make you decide to have your baby? The truth is, I think I understand your feelings, but I’d like to hear the explanation directly from you.”
While Ura was reading the pages she’d torn from a magazine, she had been wearing a pair of square, thick-framed, rather mannish-looking reading glasses. Without taking them off, she looked back at Chikashi with a face that was full of intelligence and showed no sign of being on the verge of tears. She appeared to be blushing again, from the depths of her transparent, radiantly alive skin, but this time the stimulus was positive: excitement, rather than embarrassment.
“I was thinking that I could be the kind of mother who gave birth to a new child for the sake of the child who had died, and I could tell that new child about everything the dead child ever saw or read or did, and I could teach him all the words that the dead child used to know.”
“So you’re saying that you’re going to give birth to a child to take the place of Goro ...”
“You’re probably thinking that’s a pretty presumptuous plan, for someone who was still playing with dolls not so long ago.”
“No,” Chikashi responded, straight from the heart. “I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. It’s just that our mother, and Umeko, and I—none of us can give Goro another chance at life. We’re all past that age.”
Ura looked at Chikashi with great intensity, and it was hard to tell whether her eyes held a plea for help or a declaration of defiance. “Earlier this year, you didn’t accompany your husband when he went to Harvard to accept an honorary doctorate,” she said. “I thought at the time that it was because you were in mourning for Goro. And that’s how I knew that you were someone I could rely on and trust.” So saying, Ura began to sob loudly without making any effort to cover her face, which had already turned bright red.
No matter who it was, when Chikashi was with someone who was crying—even watching brave Umeko, who had wept while she was talking into the television cameras after Goro’s death—she couldn’t help feeling ill at ease. In spite of that, Chikashi’s heart was at peace at that moment (even though she didn’t quite understand why her decision not to go on the Harvard trip held so much significance for Ura). She felt sympathetic toward the young woman who was crying her eyes out in front of her, shedding what seemed to be the heartfelt emotional tears of an adult rather than the self-indulgent tears of a child.
To echo something Goro had said in a different context, Chikashi could sense a healthy, natural harmony between the weeping Ura’s outpouring of emotion and her voluntary restraint. If this person is determined to keep her child and see things through to the end despite the difficulties her pregnancy has caused for her, Chikashi was thinking, then if I can help her out somehow, that’s what I’m going to do.
Ura got her tear ducts under control and regained her composure, and then she began to speak. The story she told to Chikashi, who was listening with total concentration, went like this:
At the beginning, when Ura called her parents from Berlin and told them the situation she was in, both her father and mother were very magnanimous about their daughter’s “indiscretion,” as they called it. They agreed that the only thing to do was to come home to Tokyo and have an abortion, and they offered to pay for everything. “What’s done is done,” they said, and after Ura had sensibly disposed of the accidental fruit of her indiscretion, she could once again settle down with new resolve and continue the academic journey she’d begun as an undergraduate at Berlin Free University, going on to a master’s-degree course that would enable her to become a professional person. Moreover, after that, they wanted her to press ahead and get her PhD.
“Oh, you’re a student at the Berlin Free University? Di
When Chikashi interrupted the narrative with this question, Ura explained a trifle apologetically, “I was actually taking some prerequisite courses so that I could eventually go on to the Department of Economic Anthropology. The buildings are far apart, too, so I never even saw your husband from a distance. The guy—I’m sorry, the father of my child—was enrolled in the Japanese curriculum, so he registered for Kogito’s lectures. Apparently he thought the classes were going to be in Japanese. But that wasn’t the case, and he said that he found Mr. Choko’s English difficult to understand, so he wasn’t very conscientious about attending. However, he still wanted to get credit for the course, so he went to see Mr. Choko during office hours and asked whether it would be all right to write his report in Japanese. He was complaining afterward that your husband told him Japanese students had to write their reports in something other than Japanese—presumably German or English. We broke up shortly after that, so I don’t know how it turned out ...”
Ura’s parents had met when they were classmates in college, and they both had their hearts set on careers as researchers or scholars. But because they had married young, they needed to find a way to make a living right away, and somehow they both ended up doing something unrelated to academia. Her father was a top executive in a trading company, and in the eyes of the world he was probably considered a very successful person, but her mother was obsessed with the idea that Ura should become a college professor, as compensation for her parents’ unrealized dreams. That was why they thought Ura should go through the ordeal of an abortion rather than getting married right out of school, as her parents had done—not that marriage was a realistic option in this case. Look at it this way, they seemed to be saying. If you learn a lesson you’ll never forget, then something positive will have come out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Ura was aware that her parents’ apparent magnanimity arose from that kind of calculation.
If you put yourself in their shoes, that may seem like a natural reaction, but when Ura announced that she had decided to keep the baby and take it with her back to Germany, her parents’ attitude underwent a radical change. “There’s no way you could live alone in a foreign country, raising a child, and still outshine your academic peers,” they argued. They wouldn’t even consider her “self-indulgent” idea of giving birth to the baby at home in Tokyo, nor would they approve her backup plan, conceived in desperation, of going back to Germany and delivering the child there. They cut off her allowance and announced that the place where she’d been living, an apartment that was owned by her father, had already been sold to the company he worked for and would henceforward be used as lodgings for their representatives in Berlin. It was clear that her parents’ game plan was to drive Ura into a corner so that she would have no choice but to terminate the pregnancy as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t even buy her an airline ticket for the trip back to Berlin.
After three hours of intense conversation with Chikashi, Ura started to make noises about going home. Earlier, Chikashi had given Ura the color copy of Goro’s drawing she had requested, but now she impulsively took it back and substituted the original drawing, which she quickly remounted in its frame. Chikashi asked her young visitor to return a week from then, at the same time. Until then, she urged Ura not to give in to her parents’ pressure or threats.
Once Chikashi was alone, before Kogito and Akari came back from the swimming pool, she opened Sendak’s Outside Over There and spent a long time looking at the illustration of the scene where Ida sets out to look for her baby sister by flying through the window into the night beyond but makes a tactical error by falling out backwards, like a scuba diver going over the side of a boat. Chikashi knew that in the present situation, she, too, needed to be very careful to conduct herself properly and to make sure she was always flying right side up.
9
The idea that she was Ida, and vice versa, was at the heart of Chikashi’s powerful emotional response to Maurice Sendak’s picture book. While she was rereading the book over and over, to the point where she knew it by heart, Chikashi made an English-Japanese translation for her own private use.
When she showed it to Kogito, he gave it back to her all marked up with a thin red pencil, because he was the sort of person who couldn’t look at the original text of anything without wanting to mark it up and make corrections. Evidently realizing that his wife’s interest in Sendak was not just a passing fancy, he gave Chikashi, for her own library, the pamphlet from the symposium at Berkeley along with a big book called Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak, in which he had already pointed out the photograph of Sendak taking a stroll with his German shepherd. Chikashi deduced that it would be all right for her to read those books and annotate them with her own red pencil.
Little by little, as if she were remembering the story of her own life, Chikashi worked her way through the Sendak picture book and the books about his work. As the days went by, she became aware that although her own “tale” and the story of Ida in the picture book converged in a profound way, there were also some clear points of disparity. It wasn’t that the stories strayed apart and by chance ended up turning into a different thing; on the contrary, it was because of the divergences that the significance linking the two seemed to become even deeper.
Kogito had touched on this topic in his book The Technique of the Novel, and had revisited it in a revised paperback edition, as well as during a series of programs on educational television. Chikashi was very interested in Kogito’s theory of reiterative divergence: that is, a difference that is developed slowly, rather like the method used to create the illusion of motion in a cartoon or anime, by means of tiny accretional changes from one advancing image to the next. According to Kogito’s analysis, “divergence” takes on a special meaning when the progression of time is layered with the unfolding of the novel’s narrative; in other words, meaning emerges from the progression of slight variations.
Chikashi felt that she was seeing that same principle of reiterative divergence at work in Sendak’s book and in her own life story (which she just kept remembering over and over but never set down in words). Hoping to attain a more complete understanding, Chikashi tried sorting the respective elements into a list of specific topics. In a little sketchbook that she used for watercolors, she wrote down the similarities and differences between the concept of the “changeling,” as Sendak explained it in his essay for the seminar, and her own thoughts about Goro and Akari as changelings of a sort.
1. The goblins came to steal Ida’s baby sister, and a baby made of ice was left in its place. (But why wasn’t Ida herself taken away? I knew that I didn’t need to think about that, because I myself had never been stolen by goblins, metaphorical or otherwise.) Ida felt completely responsible, and her anguish was profound. She immediately set out to rescue her sister, but she made a blunder right at the start. Wrapped up in her mother’s yellowish-gold rain cloak, she took off into the space beyond the window full of night, but she went out the window backwards and found herself flying faceup. How perfectly the text and the illustration portrayed Ida’s adventures and her predicament!
2. When I gave Kogito the red leather briefcase containing the screenplay and storyboards that Goro left behind, Kogito immediately compared them with his collection of Tagame tapes, then sorted out the various scenes in the order that they were likely to be filmed, and returned them to me. After I had read the screenplay and storyboards once more, I asked Kogito which of the two versions of the last scene he thought Goro would have been likely to film. The reason I didn’t ask Kogito which depiction was true to what really happened that night was because it was clear that he wasn’t present, so I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer that question.
“Since Goro wrote such a meticulously detailed screenplay and drew such complete storyboards, I think he must have been planning to film both versions,” Kogito replied.<
I was hoping for a more definitive answer. But instead of pursuing the matter, I asked Kogito what he actually knew for sure about the events depicted in these scenes, and that was when I realized that my husband, even now, didn’t have the details of everything that had happened to Goro during that time.
Kogito believed that during the week after he introduced Goro to Peter, he was with them in the role of intermediary at all times; in other words, he didn’t think Goro had ever met up with Peter when Kogito wasn’t present as well. But I remembered that a few days before they went missing over that weekend, Goro cut all his classes at the high school, from morning, and took the streetcar to the CIE. He went to Peter’s office, and the American showed him all his movie-related materials—books, magazines, clippings. Peter was exhorting Goro to attend his own alma mater, UCLA, as a foreign student, saying that Goro ought to major in filmmaking and follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a film director. When Goro came home that afternoon, he told me about this rather far-fetched idea with a kind of euphoric enthusiasm that struck me as terribly innocent and naïve. Given the national climate of postwar recovery, very few students had the opportunity to study abroad in those days so it wasn’t likely to happen, but even so I felt exceedingly uneasy about the talk of Goro’s going to UCLA. Wouldn’t that be just the same as if he were abducted and spirited away to America?
The next day, or perhaps it was the day after that, Goro told me that he was going to go for a drive with Peter. I felt the same sense of foreboding and unease, especially when he told me that their destination was the depths of the mountains, where his friend Kogito had been born and raised. Goro was saying lightheartedly, as if it was all a big joke, that in that part of the country there were still a lot of odd people and curious beliefs.