The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Daio continued his seminar the next evening. This time Goro was in attendance, as well, but he made it clear from the start that he was mainly there for the crab and the home-brewed sake. Picking up where he had left off the previous night, Daio explained that he and his colleagues often found themselves reminiscing about the event that took the life of their beloved leader—Kogito’s father—on the day after the war ended. And the conclusion they had reached was that, contrary to appearances, the young warriors hadn’t really been led into battle by Choko Sensei. That is to say, it looked like a group insurrection, but in truth their leader seemed to have his own self-destructive agenda. Perhaps it was the kamikaze action of a terminally ill man who didn’t have long to live in any case. As Daio put it, reverently, “Sensei’s existence was like a star, sparkling high above our heads. And then that star exploded, all by itself.”

  Choko Sensei’s behavior was in essence a reflection of the theories behind the League of Blood and the 2•26 Incident, whose leaders believed in practicing terrorism for its own sake and assumed that the people who come after will take care of the rest. You’d think such a brilliant man would have been able to move beyond that, but he ended up clinging to those antiquated attitudes and he wasn’t able to take it to the next level.

  That’s what Daio said, adding that Choko Sensei had formerly been a disciple of Kita Ikki and was intimately familiar with the General Rules for Japanese Reconstruction, and had presumably studied a more stable plan for the future, quite apart from the rather naïve and unrealistic optimism of Nissho and his officers, and their ilk.

  “Moreover,” Daio continued, “Sensei must surely have learned the obvious lessons from those earlier, disastrous incidents and come up with his own plan. Yet in spite of that he was moved by the ardent aspirations of his young disciples, and even when he was so desperately ill, he honored us by riding in our wretched, manure-scented chariot, like a Shinto god in a palanquin, even though that pitiful, slipshod plan of action was the best we could come up with.” (This seeming inconsistency—first blaming his mentor, then himself, for the same catastrophe—was typical of Daio’s sake-fueled rhetoric.)

  Goro’s presence was undoubtedly a factor, but more than the specious points of Daio’s somewhat incoherent argument, the thing that made Kogito blush was the grandiloquent phrase “honored us by riding in our wretched chariot,” which seemed to imply that Kogito’s father was some sort of exalted saintly being.

  Ridicule was Kogito’s mother’s natural form of expression, and she had a field day with the events that took place on the day after the war ended. When her husband set out to lead the fatal bank robbery, she jeered at him for having to ride in a makeshift “tank”—a clumsily converted, foul-smelling wooden box that had originally been filled with herring fertilizer from Hokkaido, with rough, round slices of a log for wheels—and she made fun of Kogito, too, for tagging along on the ill-fated mission. “You seemed awfully keyed up about escorting that ragtag band, led by your terminally ill father in his fertilizer box, as if it was some kind of noble undertaking,” she said later, after it was all over.

  When Kogito wrote a novel about the incident, incorporating his mother’s harsh criticisms, it gave him the opportunity to flip his own perspective and reach a completely different conclusion. It was just after the medium-length book was published that the trio of hooligans showed up again. Three years had passed since their first attack, so Kogito’s injuries had healed. At that point, the bones in his foot hadn’t yet morphed into permanent deformity, but then along came the assailants to drop a miniature cannonball on his foot yet again.

  There was no doubt about it. Whoever had sent the posse of thugs was watching every move Kogito made—or, more precisely, monitoring every word he wrote.

  3

  At the time of Daio’s sudden appearance in Matsuyama, Kogito had already started hanging out with Goro on a regular basis. The event that precipitated their friendship was minor, but memorable.

  Kogito had transferred to Matsuyama High School at the beginning of the second year of a three-year high-school program, and one of the elective courses he signed up for was Classical Japanese. At the first meeting of the class, the instructor went around the room asking the students, one at a time, why they had chosen to take this particular course. The teacher was tremendously tall, with a disproportionately tiny head, and his style of dress was rather flamboyant for those subdued postwar times—he even wore a waistcoat, which was quite unusual. His question seemed to imply that it wasn’t a very popular class, although Kogito hadn’t heard anything to that effect before signing up.

  Kogito remembered that from the time he was a child, long before that deadly “insurrection,” his father used to entertain him with excerpts from works of classical Japanese. So when it was his turn to explain why he had chosen this class, Kogito replied, “It’s because I find the minute little details of the way language is used in classical Japanese very interesting.”

  For some reason, this innocuous answer threw the teacher into a tizzy. “How dare you be impertinent with me!” he snapped. “If that’s true, then you’d better give me an example of what you find so interesting!”

  Goro was in the same class, and he later rebuked Kogito with a virtuous expression that seemed to suggest that Goro had momentarily forgotten that he, too, was a student who frequently provoked the ire of his teachers (or maybe it was for that very reason). “Your problem,” Goro said loftily, “is that you don’t look suitably dejected and you keep on talking back. That just makes the enemy even angrier.”

  Goro had a point. Instead of meekly giving in to the teacher’s intimidation, Kogito had recited the lines the way he had learned them—that is, from hearing them repeated two or three times by Choko Sensei, as was his custom, while enjoying his evening drink of sake—and that was what had made the already angry teacher almost apoplectic.

  As an example, Kogito stammered out the story of the eagle who carried off a human infant. When she dropped this hefty morsel into her treetop nest, as food for her own baby, the hungry chick was surprised by the tiny human’s cry. Because of that he didn’t even peck at the human baby, much less eat it alive.

  “What?” the teacher spluttered indignantly. “Which ancient book did you find that foolishness in? How was it phrased in classical Japanese?”

  Kogito was getting a bit fed up with this volatile, aggressive teacher, who had all but grabbed Kogito’s lapels in his fervor to extract an answer, but he replied politely, quoting to the best of his recollection, “That young bird looking up / Surprised and afraid / Didn’t peck at the baby.”

  “Don’t give me that sloppy nonsense,” the teacher fumed. “Just answer my first question: what was the title of the old book you read that story in?”

  Kogito really didn’t know how to answer that question, and he felt distinctly uneasy about the situation he had gotten himself into. The truth was, he had never actually seen those words on the page. He just happened to have memorized them when his cheerful, slightly tipsy father had crooned the lines, as though they were a song.

  His father had offered a commentary, too: “When the eagle’s offspring saw the strange thing that its parent had unceremoniously dumped into the nest, it was surprised and frightened, and the classical Japanese word for ‘looking up’ somehow suggests the quizzical curve of the young bird’s neck. When the original author recited this line over and over, the expression just naturally ripened, you know. Even if they aren’t particularly well educated, people who are good at storytelling always have the characteristic of being able to polish their words and make them better.”

  Kogito was terribly afraid that the relentless teacher might end up saying, “All right, if you aren’t lying, then bring that book to school and prove it.” But Choko Sensei’s entire collection of books had been burned, for reasons Kogito would rather not have to explain. And that book his father had spoken of—he called it A Compendium of Supernatural Parables—did it re
ally exist?

  The female students had started to giggle at Kogito’s unintentionally cheeky replies, and the teacher, wearing an expression of undisguised contempt, moved on to questioning the next student. After that, right up until the end of the school year, the teacher made a point of completely ignoring Kogito. And among his schoolmates, only Goro—who had been kept back a grade for reasons having to do with his transfer from Kyoto—took Kogito aside and said, “Hey, I think your father sounds like a pretty interesting guy.”

  So they became friends, and some months later they ended up going together to Daio’s inn at Dogo Hot Springs to eat dinner, with a heaping side dish of political proselytization. Daio started off by explaining how his group had arrived at their conclusions, but something about his way of speaking gave the impression that his remarks had been delivered many times and had been polished to a high gloss in the process. Indeed, there was something patently artificial about his fluency.

  Kogito’s mother was never swayed by persuasive sweet talk from strangers, much less from her own husband. Kogito felt now as if he had discovered the reason why she gave Daio the nickname “Gishi-Gishi,” which seemed affectionate enough but was also subtly mocking and not entirely respectful. He was too slick, too clownish, too much of a con man for her down-to-earth tastes.

  Kogito’s mother often said that the people who dwelt in the forests of Shikoku could be divided into two types. The first type never told a lie, no matter what. The second type told lies just for fun, even if they didn’t stand to profit from the falsehoods. “Your father was basically a careful, prudent man,” she told Kogito, “but he let himself be played for a fool by people from outside the village who flattered him with lies. I mean, even if it wears a sage’s beard and puts on pompous airs, a papier-mâché daruma doll is still a toy, isn’t it?”

  The climax of the two-day seminar at the inn was Daio’s dramatic recounting of the death of Kogito’s father at the end of the abortive bank robbery. Since Kogito had been present as well and knew exactly what had happened, this was probably more for the benefit of Goro, who had attended only the second meeting, and for Daio’s young colleagues.

  Daio threw himself into an impassioned description of the violent scene that transpired at the bank, telling how when the police began firing their rifles, he had used his own body to try to shield Choko Sensei, who was riding in the “tank” made from a fertilizer box. But then Daio himself was hit in the top of the shoulder by a bullet and collapsed. He was clearly aware that an eyewitness to the event was listening to his retelling of it now and comparing that version with what had really happened, so even though he may have exaggerated a bit, for effect, he didn’t say anything that was blatantly untrue. And if he had, who was to say that wasn’t a simple trick of memory?

  For a while after the war ended, Daio disappeared from village life, but Kogito ran into him from time to time on the roads around the valley or on the banks of the river. It would have been natural to assume that Daio had lost his arm due to injuries sustained in the bank raid, but Kogito had a vague memory of an earlier day, while the war was still going on. They were in his huge stone-and-plaster house, in the dirt-floored room that had been turned into his father’s study, complete with his prized Takara-brand barber’s chair. Daio was taking books off the shelf and tidying up the mail, and at that time, to the best of Kogito’s recollection, he was already missing his left arm. That defect was surely the only reason why the otherwise healthy Daio, who was in his late twenties when the war broke out, wasn’t drafted into the army. The rest of the young men who started coming to visit Kogito’s father when Japan was on the brink of defeat were all soldiers on active duty who had taken a furlough.

  The ill-omened “insurrection” took place the day after the war ended. A group of officers from the regiment stationed in Matsuyama had arrived late the night before and had camped out on the second floor of the farmhouse. The next morning, they loaded Kogito’s father into his wooden cart and lifted that, in turn, onto a flatbed truck. Then, just like in the old stories of farmers’ insurrections, they set off downriver. Destination: Matsuyama.

  That morning, Daio had gathered up the recycled-cloth diapers and various other necessities for his terminally ill leader, wrapped everything in a large square of fabric, and hoisted the bundle onto his shoulders. Early though it was, the officers were already drunk and obnoxious, and they vigorously pushed Daio aside whenever he got in their way. The question was, did he still have his left arm at that time? Kogito thought not, but he wasn’t 100 percent certain.

  After they arrived in front of the regional bank building in Matsuyama, which was on the streetcar route facing the Horinouchi district where the CIE now stands, the conspirators unloaded Kogito’s father from the truck. For a moment he stood there motionless in his wooden “chariot,” looking like a small bronze statue. Then, pushing the wagon ahead of them, the officers charged through the stone-pillared entrance to the bank. Kogito was watching from atop the rear platform of the truck, which was now empty.

  Immediately, there was the sound of gunfire from inside the building, and a group of armed policemen appeared on the road that ran alongside the bank and rushed inside. Kogito was seized with fear; unable to restrain himself, he dashed across the street, almost getting flattened by an approaching streetcar in the process. But he wasn’t able to run very far. The next thing he knew he was slipping and sliding down the bank of the moat, through the lush summer grass ...

  And then—these were the words his mother always used in telling the story—when it was all over, a soaking wet Kogito crawled up the muddy embankment looking exactly like a drowned rat. He stood above the moat, blinking, with his nose, too, twitching like a rat’s, and he gazed over at the bank building where the wooden cart that had carried his father into battle now stood once again in front of the bank, with the murdered man slumped inside it. But could it really be true that Kogito was still in that sodden state when his mother (who had been brought from her home in the car of the village police officers who had gone to notify her) arrived on the scene? It was at least a two-hour ride from their village in the mountain valley to the center of Matsuyama.

  In any case, Kogito returned home the next morning, accompanied by his mother. This memory was indisputably correct, so there was no question but that she had showed up at the site of the uprising, even though she must have arrived there rather late. At that time, in addition to his fatally injured father, there was another member of the group who was shot in the shoulder and seriously wounded. If that person was Daio, why had Kogito and his mother never again spoken about that, even once?

  It wasn’t until after Kogito had graduated from college that he finally came across a book that, he thought, might have been the one Daio had used in his “seminars.” The book was by Maruyama Masao, the political theorist and historian, and it included a number of writings that chronicled the evolution of Japanese nationalism during and after World War II—in particular, the changes in small regional right-wing groups that were under pressure from the occupying army for five or six years. That book (which had just been published at the time of the Dogo Hot Springs soirees) also contained excerpts from the same Chinese-style poem Daio had quoted.

  The author said that there were members of some wartime right-wing groups who felt such despair over the breakdown of their value system when Japan lost the war that they committed suicide, and he even gave the real names of the leaders of those groups. As it happened, two of the names rang a bell for Kogito.

  In the spring of the year he was ten, Kogito was told to put his father’s incoming correspondence—which had suddenly become voluminous—into order. He would study each envelope and painstakingly decipher the name and address (these were usually calligraphed with a bamboo brush and fresh-ground sumi ink), and then enter the names in a logbook. Among those names, he still remembered two that had struck him as odd, each in its own way. Probably pen names, he remembered thinking.

&
nbsp; Other groups simply replaced their Fascist identities with “democratic” window dressing and then continued exactly as before, with their ultranationalistic organizations intact. Still others dispersed and were pursuing nonpolitical social and economic activity on a regional basis; about them, Maruyama wrote: “As a general rule, reflecting the Japanese right wing’s propensity for building a country on the ‘agriculture first’ principle, many of these former political activists joined a movement that advocated reclamation of land and increase in food production.”

  If you figured that during the seven years after Kogito’s father was cruelly killed inside the bank in Matsuyama, Daio had survived by building a training hall in the woods and cultivating new land, then he and the group of which he was the leader must fall into the “agriculture first” category. And then Daio had come looking for Kogito at the CIE library where he was studying for his entrance exams, with the intention of somehow using his late master’s son to advance the dubious goals of his own nascent movement.

  After the incident (not witnessed by Kogito) that Goro got caught up in—never mind that it was part of an intrigue designed to culminate in a symbolic kamikaze mission by Daio and his followers—did Daio decide, for some reason, to abandon that radical plan of action and to apply himself, along with his colleagues, to protecting their farm and training camp?

  When he was attacked with the miniature cannonball, what Kogito wanted most to avoid, deep down, was what would have come afterward. If he had complained to the authorities, he would have had to meet up again at the police station or in court with Daio and his colleagues, who had been pursuing their back-to-the-land venture all these years, conducting all their business (including terrorist attacks on novelists) in that dying deep-forest dialect. The truth was, he didn’t want them to be arrested or punished.