The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  At the time of the first attack, when Kogito caught an echo of the provincial dialect he had grown up with in the speech of the three ruffians—a dialect that was all but lost to the new generation—his intuition told him that the men must be preserving the old accent by living continuously in an insular group. So it was only natural that hearing that accent would trigger images of Daio in his subconscious.

  Getting back to the second time Kogito was attacked: it was right after he had written a novella called His Majesty Himself Will Wipe Away My Tears. As has already been mentioned, that work contained an account of his father’s doomed insurrection at the bank in Matsuyama, the day after the war ended. Goro had at one time planned to turn the novella into a film.

  While he was writing the book, Kogito kept remembering that eventful ten-day interval when he was seventeen, starting with his reunion with Daio and concluding with the traumatic events at the training camp. He often thought about the ideas Daio had shared on the second night of the “seminar,” which Goro had attended, as well. However, Kogito didn’t write a single word about Daio’s myriad plans, theories, and rationalizations in the novel.

  It is undeniably true that, while listening to all of Daio’s pontifications, the seventeen-year-old Kogito had serious doubts about many aspects of the man’s presentation of self. But even taking into account those questions and hesitations, Kogito could still have found a way to bring Daio into the story if he had wanted to. The underlying psychological reason for Kogito’s not having written about Daio was probably because he was afraid of creating trouble for his mother, who still lived near the training camp. If you had asked Kogito for an explanation at the time, he wouldn’t have been able to express it in so many words, but surely some sort of protective self-censorship was at work. That was probably part of the reason he didn’t report the attacks on his foot to the police, as well.

  4

  When Daio came looking for Kogito at the CIE library, it seems likely that he was still at the stage of feeling his way toward a plan of action, with nothing very specific in mind. But how had Daio found out that the surviving child of his fallen leader had transferred to high school in Matsuyama and was making frequent use of the library that had been created by the occupying army? He happened to read a small article in the local newspaper about some special recognition Kogito had received from the Americans, and that’s what gave him the idea that he might be able to establish contact with the United States armed forces through Kogito. He probably came to Matsuyama, in the beginning, with just that sort of vague, inchoate desire, and nothing more.

  When Daio lured Kogito away from the library and they sat talking on the edge of the canal, under the riotously blooming cherry blossoms—not that Daio and his cohorts showed the slightest interest in that wondrous sight—a brief silence ensued after the preliminary small talk related earlier. At that point, as if exhibiting an important clue, Daio produced a clipping from the local newspaper. When Kogito made no response, Daio seemed disappointed, but then the expression around his eyes suddenly brightened. Turning his sunburned peasant face to his companions, he said grandly, like an oracle sharing a divine revelation: “See, this is just what you’d expect from the son of Choko Sensei—he’s not the kind of person who gets all excited about this sort of thing.”

  The article in question had been published ten days or so earlier, in the soft-news section of the morning paper that was headquartered in a building west of the moat embankment where Kogito and his companions were now sitting. According to the article, at the end of the previous school term, one Japanese high-school student had been awarded a commendation from the Bureau of American Cultural Information and Education. While commuting to the Matsuyama CIE library to study for his college entrance exams, the story explained, this second-year student also managed to finish reading an entire book in English.

  The American woman who was head of the department happened to hear from some of her Japanese employees that this high-school student was reading a certain English-language book with exceptional comprehension. The book was volume 1 of a two-volume edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. This book wasn’t really aimed at children in the first place, and the dialogue, which contained a great deal of African-American dialect from the southern United States, was particularly difficult. However, when the officials tested him on certain pages chosen at random, the young boy fluently translated the indicated pages into Japanese, thus (according to the article) earning the admiration of the Japanese-speaking American officers who were supervising the project.

  Kogito had unwittingly prepared for this challenge by reading over and over, one line at a time, the Iwanami paperback books of the Japanese translation of Huckleberry Finn (which his mother had obtained during the last days of the war in exchange for rice), to the point where you could say he knew them by heart. Soon after transferring to Matsuyama, Kogito began to read the splendid English-language volume that he found in the open-access stacks of the CIE’s library, applying the Japanese translation of Huckleberry Finn that he had all but memorized. Whether or not he brought any extraordinary facility with English to bear on the project is debatable, but the fact is that he spent an entire year in careful reading. Apparently, some of the staff noticed him toiling away and were impressed. The upshot was that the article appeared, relating the whole story in detail, and that was what brought Daio and his followers to the Matsuyama CIE.

  When Kogito showed no inclination to discuss this topic, Daio launched into a long, tedious monologue about how, in accordance with Choko Sensei’s dying wishes, he had taken over the management of the training camp. They had cultivated new land in the surrounding area and had enlarged the buildings, but because the original training camp had been created by their leader, Choko Sensei, after inheriting the property all they did was finish the construction in accordance with their late leader’s vision of a rough-hewn hideaway.

  As Kogito listened to this account, he remembered that long before the end of the war—and before a stream of total strangers, including many young soldiers in uniform, started showing up at the family’s rustic, rambling dwelling—there had been some periods when his father would disappear from the mountain valley for days at a time. His mother never told Kogito where his father had gone, and she didn’t appear to take any particular notice of her husband’s absences. When people came to the house on business, hoping to meet with Kogito’s father, they would be sent away without any clear explanation of his whereabouts. Kogito remembered the baffled looks on the faces of those visitors, but around that same time, he heard a story in the village that seemed to have some bearing on where his father had gone.

  It was the oft-repeated tale of “another village,” which had taken on the patina of folklore. First (the story went) Kogito’s grandfather had come up with the idea of immigrating to Brazil and persuaded a number of villagers to join him. When the growing international trend toward anti-Japanese sentiment turned that stratagem into an impossible dream, Kogito’s grandfather and his followers decided, as an alternative, to create “another village” not far away.

  It so happened that a plan was in progress to extend the railroad to the next town. The village they were living in was going to be cut off from the route, so his grandfather bought up a large quantity of land around a deserted village where some therapeutic hot-spring spas had been operating until around the middle of the Meiji era. People said that because Kogito’s greatgrandfather had given meritorious service (including fratricide) in the suppression of a local insurrection, the prefectural governor made a secret agreement with Kogito’s grandfather, promising that the new train line would include a station close to the new settlement, which everyone called simply “another village.” However, the prospective settlers’ hopes were dashed when the actual train route (and a new prefectural road as well) ended up being farther away from “another village” than the original blueprint had specified, and the dreams of creating a new village c
ame to naught. As a result of the serial failures of his grand schemes—first the abortive group immigration to Brazil, then the abandonment of “another village”—Kogito’s grandfather lost both his wealth and his popularity, and he ended up being remembered around those parts not as a hero but as the punch line of a rather sad joke.

  When Kogito began attending a nationalized wartime elementary school, he used to ride into Matsuyama from his village, and every time the bus reached a place just before the tunnel where a wide panorama opened up, he always thought about his grandfather’s vision of “another village” and what might have been. Wasn’t it possible that the training camp Daio kept talking about, which had originally belonged to Kogito’s father, had been built on the land originally intended for “another village,” at the site of the deserted hot-spring village? And as for Choko Sensei’s ill-fated “insurrection” on the day after the war ended—wasn’t it possible that there was something more to that story than what Kogito had believed as a young boy?

  In other words, maybe the preposterous military operation his father and his followers had claimed to envision—robbing a bank to get the necessary funds, then somehow sending a bombing mission from the Yoshidahama Naval Air Base to Ouchiyama in order to spoil the imperial proclamation of the end of the war, because they couldn’t deal with the prospect of quiet surrender—maybe that was just them, talking big. Kogito now felt that it was more likely that they (including his father) had wanted to rob the bank to get funds to fix up the retreat in the depths of the forest, so they could go into hiding and bide their time. Indeed, Daio and his followers had built a training camp in that location and had been leading a self-sufficient life there ever since.

  In any case, as we know, by the time the conversation by the moat was at an end Kogito had agreed to visit Daio’s inn that night. That might have been, in part, because he was intrigued by the concept of self-sufficient living off the grid of civilization.

  So off Kogito went to the inn, that first night, and as he was getting ready to take his leave, Daio said that since the next day was Saturday and classes ended at noon, he’d like to talk to him again sometime in the afternoon. Kogito saw no reason to refuse. The only complication was that there was a record concert scheduled to begin at 5 PM at the Matsuyama CIE. Originally, Kogito’s only concern regarding the special event had been the inconvenience. The reading corner where the high-school students were cramming for their exams would be closed at 4 PM, the desks and chairs tidied up, and the partition that separated it from the meeting room cleared away. That would disrupt Kogito’s usual Saturday schedule, which was to study at the library until 5:30, then walk home to his lodgings along the big street where the streetcars ran, and continue studying in his room after dinner.

  However, this record concert was to feature chamber music by Mozart and Beethoven, in performances recorded on LPs belonging to the Americans who ran the center; this was a departure from the usual CIE concerts, which tended to be heavy on works by Copland, Gershwin, and Grofé. When Kogito talked to Goro after seeing the program announcement on the bulletin board in the library, Goro—who had often declared that he didn’t give a toss for the usual concerts of pieces by modern American composers; “movie music,” he called it, noting that unfortunately there were no movies attached—said he would like to go. There was a limit to how many people could be admitted to the CIE record concerts, which were popular with the townspeople, and even the students who practically lived at the CIE library couldn’t get in without a ticket. It wasn’t easy to get hold of one, either; reservations were required, and a casual would-be attendee had no hope of dropping by and scooping up a ticket on the night in question.

  Kogito knew this, and the reason he had mentioned the chamber-music program to Goro in the first place was because he had been given three tickets to the concert in question as a bonus gift along with his main prize, a copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, in an official ceremony before the newspaper article about him was printed.

  Kogito’s several conversations with Daio (in the afternoon and evening of the first day, and again the following day) had been rather disjointed and desultory in nature. When four o’clock rolled around on that Saturday afternoon, Kogito stole a glance at his old Omega watch (the only thing he had inherited from his father) and explained that he had an appointment with a friend—namely, Goro. After saying his good-byes, Kogito left the inn, and Daio and his colleagues tagged along, presumably just to see him off at the tram stop. But when Kogito boarded the streetcar, they climbed on, too. Noticing Kogito’s perplexity, Daio declared in a perfectly calm, matter-of-fact voice, “These guys want to do some sightseeing around Matsuyama, and they’d like to see how our friend Kogito lives. To tell the truth, so would I!”

  So that was how Kogito happened to have Daio and his young followers in tow when he approached the entrance to the CIE. On the east side of the building, where some large trees had been cleared away to reveal a fine view of the verdant Horinouchi district, they saw a group of men engaged in a shoot-around in an empty lot where a basketball net had been installed. And there, in the midst of the action, was Goro! Scrambling for the ball, dribbling, trying to get a shot off: Goro stood out from the rest of the players with his height, his splendid physique, and his shirtless, suntanned torso. He was brimming with youthful vigor, yet there was something cool and laid-back about him, too.

  As they were watching, Kogito noticed that every time the ball ended up in Goro’s hands, the people around him seemed to be working as a team to protect his shot. The other players on the makeshift court were all Japanese employees of the CIE. Watching from the sidelines was a young American man dressed in a linen ice-cream suit (his name, Kogito knew, was Peter), along with an older student who was never far from Goro’s side. That student was what is colloquially known as a ronin or masterless samurai; that is, he had failed his college entrance exams on the first try and was waiting to take them again. Recently, when Kogito had received the award for reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in English, Peter was the Japanese-speaking American officer who came from the military base to attend the ceremony.

  Kogito wasn’t particularly surprised to find Peter there, but he was amazed to see that the Japanese staff members (who tended to be unfriendly toward the local residents who used the facilities, sometimes to the point of outright discrimination) had included Goro in their basketball-practice group. Goro hardly ever came to the Center, yet he already appeared to be part of the in-group. To make matters worse, Kogito had an embarrassing memory of something that had happened to him in this little “sports corner,” as it was euphemistically called.

  In the fall of the previous year, while Kogito was still getting used to the routine of studying for his entrance exams at the CIE library, he became obsessed with the fact that ever since he’d moved from his village to the provincial city, his skin had been getting very little direct exposure to the sun, and he felt certain that that wasn’t good for his health. So one day Kogito trotted down to the primitive sports corner, shed his shirt, and started doing bare-chested calisthenics. Seconds later, a Japanese staff member sneaked up on him, stealthy as a ninja—actually running on tiptoe to conceal the sound of his footsteps—and scolded him severely. Kogito had the feeling that someone was watching this spectacle from a window on the second floor, and sure enough, when he looked up he saw an American officer, no taller than the average Japanese, looking down on the mortifying scene. Now that he thought about it, that American was Peter.

  Meanwhile, back in the present, several groups of the local intelligentsia and their female companions had already gathered by the front entrance and in the driveway to wait for the record concert to begin. In spite of this growing audience, the Japanese staff members were still allowing Goro to go on playing basketball, naked from the waist up. Clearly, Kogito thought ruefully, there was a double standard at work.

  The basketball shoot-around continued for a while after Kogito and
his companions had stopped at courtside to watch. Then the Japanese staff members discussed the situation in loud, exhibitionistic English (of course) and decided to call a halt to the game. They returned the ball to Peter; someone else was apparently in charge of the physical-education facilities, but perhaps today’s use of the court had been arranged through Peter. In any case, he took the leather ball, which was a truly precious commodity in those days, and dashed toward the east-side entrance of the building. Goro alone lingered at the base of the pole from which the net was suspended, obviously reluctant to leave.

  As Peter was about to go into the building, he looked back and saw Goro moping around under the basket. Shouting something in English (Kogito had no idea what it meant), Peter threw a Hail Mary–type pass toward the court. Goro leapt into the air, caught the ball, did a balletic half turn, dribbled for three or four steps, and took his shot. The ball clanged off the backboard and dropped into the hoop. Goro caught the ball as it fell through the knotted-string net, dribbled briskly down the court until he was in three-point range, then turned and let fly a perfect shot: nothing but net. Then, holding the ball at his side, he headed toward where Peter was waiting.

  After taking the ball, Peter pointed at the shiny film of sweat on Goro’s chest and shoulders, and appeared to be saying something. Not long after that, as Goro was sauntering back toward the court, a thick towel was thrown from the second-floor window by someone who looked unmistakably like an American soldier. Nonchalantly catching the towel in midair, Goro began wiping the perspiration off his upper body.

  When Goro finally made his way to where Kogito and his companions were standing, he didn’t show any surprise at seeing them there. His buddy, the masterless samurai, handed Goro a long-sleeved jersey shirt, and Goro put it on over his bare skin. Kogito had heard the story behind that shirt: it was part of an ice-hockey uniform and had been a gift from a college-student friend of Goro’s when he was living Kyoto.