The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  The masterless samurai didn’t look too happy when Goro tossed him the damp, crumpled towel, but he dutifully trudged toward the east entrance to the building to return it. That was when Kogito produced the two extra tickets to the record concert and handed them to Goro, who was smiling broadly at him, obviously exhilarated by his workout. Neither Goro nor his crony, who came running back a moment later, offered a word of thanks.

  Daio had been standing silently by Kogito’s side, but now he gestured for his followers to step back. Stretching his mouth into an ingratiating smile, he addressed Goro in an almost absurdly humble, forelock-tugging manner.

  “You must be Goro!” he began, in his usual overly enthusiastic tone. “Kogito’s pal, the son of the famous film director! After the record concert is over, I’d like to invite you to come to my inn with Kogito. If you stay for the concert, you’ll miss your dinner at your lodgings, won’t you? So come and join us for some simple mountain food—or maybe I should say ‘simple mountain-and-river food’!” Here Daio proffered another affable smile. “Whatever you want to call it, we brought lots of boiled Japanese mitten crab and home-brewed sake with us from the country. We didn’t really have a proper party last night, but maybe if he has a friend along, Kogito here will loosen up a bit. Anyway, please stop by later and have a drink and as much crab as you can eat!”

  Later, at the concert, another curious thing happened. Peter’s seat was next to the giant loudspeaker that was used to broadcast the commentary, but he sent one of the Japanese staff members over to where Goro was sitting with his two friends. The man was carrying a small, custom-bound book, and he showed one bookmarked page to Goro. “This is a book by William Blake,” the man announced in a theatrically hushed tone. “Peter was saying that he thinks you look like this child with the wings.”

  Sitting up very straight, Goro held the proffered book at arm’s length and stared intently at the illustration, but he made no reply. Kogito was peering at the book from the next seat over, so he couldn’t see the winged infant’s face very clearly, but he did notice that the young man who was holding the little seraph above his head looked quite a bit like Peter. While the audience was waiting for the concert to begin, Peter was sitting in a chair made from metal tubing—something not often seen in those days—and his heart-shaped face, with its large, widely spaced eyes, was perpetually turned toward Goro.

  Much later, when Kogito got hold of the Trianon Press edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and looked at the illustration again, he wasn’t able to see any trace of Peter’s features in the face of the beautiful young man who was holding the winged infant aloft. However, when Kogito scrutinized the angelic-looking infant, with its abundant hair swirling above a wide forehead, its well-defined chin, and a nose and mouth that clearly showed both a headstrong nature and a sense of humor, he saw, this time around, an undeniable resemblance to Goro. To put it more precisely, based on old photos and on what he’d heard from Chikashi, he could imagine that the little seraph bore a marked resemblance to Goro as a child, when his unclouded beauty caused him to be loved by everyone he met.

  5

  After the record concert ended, the intelligentsia assembled in a separate room to drink coffee, but the schoolboys were not invited to join them. This seemed perfectly natural, and besides, the truth was that Kogito felt strangely apprehensive about the prospect of encountering Peter again. So Kogito, Goro, and the masterless samurai left the CIE building and walked along the gravel road in the darkness, mingling with the rest of the postconcert crowd. Kogito knew that Goro had decided to take Daio up on his invitation, but he hadn’t yet figured out how to say a tactful good-bye to Goro’s silent sidekick, who was still tagging along with them.

  When they finally got to the stop for the streetcar line that traversed the wide bridge over the moat, Kogito’s problem was solved by a Daio ex machina: the one-armed man suddenly loomed up out of the darkness looking unusually clean and tidy, as if he had just climbed out of the bath. (Kogito deduced that he had paid a visit to Dogo Hot Springs’ famous public bathhouse.) Totally ignoring the third member of their party, Daio hailed Goro and Kogito by name, and the masterless samurai, taking the hint, faded into the night without a word.

  “I wasn’t worried about Kogito, but I thought Goro might hesitate to take us up on the invitation, so I came to meet you,” Daio explained. “Since you’re able to talk about culture and music and that sort of thing, I think you’re plenty grown-up in your heads. Again, I don’t know about Kogito, but I’m sure Goro doesn’t mind taking a sip or two of sake once in a while. As for the food, it may seem barbaric to you city folk, but river crab is more delicious than you might think. The inn says they can only serve as much rice as our ration coupons will buy, but we’ve made up for that in other ways. This feast is our way of saying thanks for all the times that Kogito’s mother treated us to sake and meals, free of charge, at Choko Sensei’s house. If it could be arranged sometime,” Daio added, as if it were a casual afterthought, “I’d like to give that American officer a taste of our countrified cuisine, as well!”

  Once again on this night, all through the meal and the ensuing seminar, Kogito didn’t drink a drop of home-brewed sake. Goro, however, fell immediately into a party mood, and after fearlessly draining his first teacup full of doburoku, he held it out to be refilled from the three-pint-plus bottle. He even remarked that this sake was better than the expensive stuff he had sampled one night in Kyoto, when a female editor who was an admirer of his father’s work had taken them to a high-class drinking spot frequented by poets and writers. As for the crab, Goro applied himself to devouring it with such guileless enthusiasm that for a time he didn’t even acknowledge the questions that were addressed to him.

  The night before, Kogito had noticed a red leather trunk leaning against the wall and had recognized it as something that had once been in his father’s study. After a while Daio cleared away the empty platter that had held the mitten crabs and placed the trunk in the center of the gathering. Using the hand of his one outstretched arm, he unfastened the clasp, which snapped open with a loud click. Then, with his hand still resting on the lid of the trunk, he turned his oily, darkly gleaming face toward Goro and Kogito.

  “We like to call this trunk our portable armory, but there’s something in here that ought to bring back memories for you, Kogito,” he said. While Daio was rummaging single-handedly through the truck, sitting in front of it with his knees in the air, Kogito was so engulfed in embarrassment at the prospect of the shameful secret that was about to be revealed to Goro that he felt as if he were suspended in midair.

  Sure enough, what Daio finally fished out of the trunk—Kogito recognized it right away, with heart-sinking certainty—was the short sword that one of the employees of Kogito’s family, who had been sent to the front during the Russo-Japanese War, had brought back as a souvenir. (Such instruments were commonly known as “burdock swords,” in reference to the vaguely sword-shaped root vegetable.) That dull-colored, rusty old weapon had hung by the ten-year-old Kogito’s side as he marched off to the ill-starred battle at the bank, behind the wooden cart that carried his father, who was clad in his usual bloody diapers. Goro would probably laugh himself sick over that pathetic image, if he knew.

  But the sword wasn’t Daio’s main quarry. What he finally pulled out, after much time and effort (the object in question had obviously gotten tangled up with the other contents of the trunk and had to be dislodged) was a fish spear. Made from rubber, bamboo, and thick wire, and resembling a large, attenuated insect, it was the weapon Kogito had used ages ago when he dove under the water in search of eels.

  Nowadays the banks of the Kame River are surrounded by a concrete wall, but when Kogito was a child, the bamboo grove that grew along the river had created a natural embankment. It was just as Goro said teasingly, many years later, when he presented Kogito with the Tagame system: although not entirely friendless, Kogito was a bit of an outsider who didn’
t play that much with other children. The person who cut a stalk of bamboo and made a rubber speargun for Kogito was the patriarch of a Korean family who had been brought in to do the job of carrying lumber out of the forest. Kogito’s mother took care of feeding the three families of imported workers, and they became quite close. But Kogito ended up being a laughingstock yet again, because the pointed tip of the wire that was inserted into the hollowed-out bamboo as a power source for the rubber hadn’t been properly worn down and polished. Now that Kogito thought about it, it was Daio who had gone to a blacksmith’s shop, some distance from the village, and gotten the metalworker to exchange the original mechanism for a thicker wire attached to a small harpoon with a curved hook on the end.

  Kogito found a pair of old swimming goggles and tried to repair them, but they still let in some water. Undaunted, he put them on and dove under the place where the current was flowing around the rocks. Truth be told, he wasn’t really interested in catching eels; he just wanted to make a token attempt to play at the challenging water games that all the younger children were so good at. Before long, in the long cleft of a rock that separated the rapids from the deeper water, he found a tiny eel, not much larger than a finger, spewing clean water into the murkier river around it. The eel looked back at Kogito with its inky eyes, and he noticed that the pupils seemed to be incongruously far away from the creature’s eyelids.

  After lifting his head out of the water again and again to snatch a breath of air, Kogito finally managed to get the little harpoon on the end of his spear close to the eel’s gills. He unfastened the clasp to release the power. Bull’s-eye! The impaled eel struggled frantically for a few seconds, causing the spear to shake and sway, and then it was suddenly still.

  Kogito raised his body so that he was kneeling in the rushing water, and when he looked down at the dead baby eel hanging from his spear end like a piece of garbage, he didn’t feel like a triumphant hunter at all; he just felt utterly wretched, contrite, and ashamed. That was the bamboo speargun’s first and last adventure on the river, and Kogito had no idea how it had ended up in the ragtag “armory” belonging to Daio’s paramilitary training camp. (He didn’t think about this until many years later, but that same trunk might very well have contained a rusty cannonball or two, left over from some local insurrection.)

  Goro grabbed the speargun and was having a grand time, playfully pulling back the elastic cord and then letting it go with a loud snap, while Daio anxiously cautioned him not to aim it at anyone. After a while, when Daio had already asked him twice to stop fooling around with the speargun, Goro gave it back, acting as if he had been planning to toss it aside in any case. Then, in a voice that was shrill and blurred from all the doburoku he had drunk, he said dismissively, “That really isn’t much of a weapon, is it?”

  Daio’s face turned suddenly serious. “Oh, really?” he said frostily. “Suppose you make a little hole in an entry door or a wooden wall, and the light from inside is leaking out. If somebody comes snooping around, it’s only human nature for them to put their eye up to the illuminated hole to see what’s going on inside, right? And suppose that in the same hole there’s the tip of a spear, narrow enough so it doesn’t block all the light, and suppose all the energy in the rubber band has been stored up and is ready to spring. How about that, huh?”

  “You call that stupid thing a weapon?” Goro scoffed. “What a joke.”

  “Hey, right now we’re just a humble resistance movement, hoping to make life difficult for the occupying army,” Daio said defensively. “If we could get our hands on some more sophisticated weapons, we wouldn’t have to resort to this ‘stupid’ kind of guerrilla fighting, you know!” The leader of the humble resistance movement spoke with naked candor, and by the time he finished, Kogito had put two and two together: Daio, he realized, had been paying court to Goro because he saw him as a possible conduit to augmenting the contents of the rebels’ armory.

  As for Goro, while he never extinguished the dreamy, drunken smile he had worn all evening, he didn’t say anything in response, either, and his body language didn’t offer any clue to his feelings one way or another. Still, it was clear that Daio had figured out exactly what he wanted, and he even went so far as to ask Goro whether he could somehow contrive to become friendlier with that nice Japanese-speaking American officer.

  While this subtle maneuvering was taking place, another showstopping delicacy was served: dumplings made from glutinous rice, pork, and lots of garlic, decoratively wrapped in bamboo leaves. This was a Korean-influenced dish that had been adopted by the people of Kogito’s village during the time when his mother was cooking for the Korean workers and their families. As the boys agreed when they were comparing candid notes on the way home at the end of the evening, it was the single most thrilling dish they had enjoyed during the seven years of privation and turmoil that had followed the end of the war.

  Toward the end of the party, Daio had suddenly launched into a discourse about the origin of Kogito’s unusual given name. Needless to say, the name had been inspired by the famous catchphrase of the Western philosopher Descartes, but there was more to it than that. Kogito’s village had a longstanding business connection with Osaka, which was the closest big city. Many local students commuted to a school there called Kaitokudo, where they studied neo-Confucianism, but the school’s academic tradition also incorporated the classically influenced ideas of Ito Jinsai, the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar.

  “As you may have heard,” Daio said, “the father-in-law of our former teacher, Choko Sensei, was unsuccessful, first with his plan for immigrating to Brazil and then with his dream of creating ‘another village.’ Anyway, when he was a boy, that man—Kogito’s grandfather—studied The Analects of Confucius at Kaitokudo, and then when he was a teenager he learned about ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ in French, from Nakae Chomin, the famous Meiji era prodemocracy philosopher and human-rights activist from Tosa, who studied in France. Of course there’s no co in Japanese orthography, so they had to write it ‘Kogito,’ but that’s just the sort of weird, erudite name you’d expect from the Choko household, don’t you think?”

  Goro laughed uproariously at that, to the point where Kogito started to feel something very close to loathing toward his friend and the buffoonish Daio, who had insisted on telling the embarrassing story.

  Later that night, though, Kogito and Goro patched up their differences, as boys will, and they talked excitedly about everything that had transpired, all the way home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One Hundred Days of Quarantine (II)

  1

  As he embarked on the second half of his stay in Berlin, Kogito couldn’t help feeling that this sojourn, more than any of his other extended trips abroad, had a pleasing sense of stability. When he thought back on his travel experiences, they seemed, in retrospect, surpassingly strange—especially the adventures he’d had when he was young, traveling on a shoestring budget and deliberately setting out for destinations where he didn’t know a soul, places that were far off the beaten track and not designed for the comfort of tourists.

  The reason his life in Berlin felt so settled was because the Berlin Free University and the Institute of Advanced Research had made him feel completely welcome, and despite the fact that he had waited till the last minute to make his decision about coming, every aspect of his stay had been flawlessly arranged in advance. Another element in his “settledness” was the undeniable fact that he seemed to have lost the bountiful vitality that had spurred him to push the experiential envelope as a young traveler, and that realization made him feel quite forlorn.

  It was on a Sunday morning, with the Berlin Film Festival due to begin in the middle of the coming week, that Kogito went to a hotel in Potsdam Square. And there, for the first time on this trip, he had the disturbing feeling (deeply familiar from many other trips abroad) that the ground was shifting under his feet.

  Earlier that morning, he had been standing on the curb in front of
his rococo apartment building, waiting in vain for Iga, an assistant professor of Japanese studies at the university, to pick him up. Finally, thirty minutes past the appointed time of 10 AM, he decided to go back inside. Just as he began climbing the stairs to his apartment, he heard the telephone ringing. He didn’t get there in time to take the call, but a few minutes later the phone rang again.

  When Kogito answered it he heard the rather annoyed-sounding voice of Iga saying that Mrs. Azuma-Böme had been grumbling to him on the phone a moment earlier that Kogito was impossible to get hold of. On the previous day, the woman had evidently proposed a new plan wherein she would first pick up Iga, then Kogito, and that had been agreed on. But when this morning rolled around she informed Iga that she had to deal with a sudden work-related crisis, so she wouldn’t be able to join him and Kogito at the filming of today’s interview, after all.

  Iga said that if he came to pick Kogito up in his car they would both end up being late, so he suggested that they make their separate ways to the hotel by taxi, then share a cab on the way home to avoid the hassle of parking. In spite of the earlier glitches, the revised plan went smoothly, and the two men met in the lobby of the hotel a short time later. Iga immediately went to the festival’s reception desk but found the people there singularly unreceptive because, it seemed, no one had bothered to register him or Kogito. Iga protested, to no avail, and he ended up being passed from one functionary to another in a classic red-tape muddle.

  Kogito had been standing nearby for nearly an hour, watching this scene unfold, when he was approached by a white-maned man whom he had noticed, moments earlier, majestically descending the staircase from the second floor to the lobby. The man appeared to be some years older than Kogito, and he had an air of amiability and intelligence. He said that he had enjoyed the filming they had done in Frankfurt, ten years ago, and wondered whether Kogito had received the video of that event, which had been mailed to Tokyo.