The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Then for the past week or so, you’ve been at the opposite end of the spectrum—almost too quiet and kind of depressed, and I ended up realizing that if this was something Goro wanted you to read, it really wasn’t my place to withhold it. These pages are in the form of a screenplay, but they look like some sort of reminiscence or memoir. I don’t know whether he was seriously planning to make this into a movie or not.”

  Kogito felt an overpowering attraction to the briefcase that was balanced on Chikashi’s knees, but the reply he gave was somewhat anticlimactic. “During the ten-plus years that Goro was making movies, he wrote a ton of screenplays that never got produced, though I doubt if they would all fit into that briefcase,” he said. “But when he was making a film, he had the habit of publishing the written materials at the same time the movie was released, sort of like a simulcast.”

  “He left behind lots of other notebooks besides these, you know,” Chikashi said. “Umeko wanted to keep the ones where he made notes about her acting scenes, for sentimental reasons, and Taruto is taking care of all the preparatory documentation for the two court cases. There are also a bunch of memos with material for a TV documentary Goro was planning, and I gather those are going to be donated to a new museum celebrating both Goro’s work and the films our father made, as well. As soon as the formalities have been completed to release the money from the American box-office profits, work on the museum should begin in earnest. As you know, producing Goro’s movies was just a sideline for Taruto, and his main company has already prepared the site for the museum in Matsuyama. They’ve purchased the land behind it, as well, as a buffer zone. Anyway, when Umeko finally reached the point where Goro’s office was more or less in order, she brought this over and asked me to give it to you. She said that she thought it must have been something of special importance to Goro.

  “Before you left for Berlin, I ... well, Akari felt the same way, but in any case, you kindly implemented the change we requested, and now I gather that you’ve pulled yourself together to the point where you’re ready to start writing about what happened to you and Goro in Matsuyama. If you’re truly serious about chronicling that incident, the screenplay and storyboards that Goro left behind in his favorite briefcase should be helpful. The whole thing isn’t in any particular sequence, and all the details haven’t been worked out, either, but I still think you might find it useful.”

  Kogito was a bit nonplussed to hear that Chikashi had such a clear vision of the novel he was supposed to begin working on next. As a way of temporarily nudging the conversation in another direction, he asked: “When Goro was getting ready to make a film, did he ever storyboard the finished parts when the screenplay was still at the stage where there was nothing but bits and pieces?”

  “That doesn’t seem like Goro, does it?” Chikashi replied. “I had the same feeling, so I asked Umeko about it. She said that when it came to filmmaking, Goro was a pro through and through, and he wouldn’t begin storyboarding until the cast had been completely decided and the production had reached the point of starting principal photography. It could be that Goro wanted to make this movie, but he thought it was impossible given the current circumstances, so maybe he put together this sort of detailed treatment as a substitute for actually making the movie. That’s what I was thinking, anyway. It’s also possible that he had already decided to take his life when he made those tapes and sent them to you, and perhaps he made the screenplay and the storyboards in the same spirit—as a way of recording his own memories to share with you.” So saying, Chikashi stood up and placed the briefcase in front of Kogito with such a formal gesture that he might have been a guest in his own house.

  That night after dinner, Chikashi and Akari went off to their separate rooms after they had finished watching a classical-music program on NHK television. Kogito remained alone in the living room, gazing at the briefcase lying on the steel-framed, glass-topped table that stood in front of the sofa. Even though his mind was totally focused on the briefcase, he couldn’t quite bring himself to reach out and touch it.

  Since Chikashi had made such a point of asking him to look at the contents—speaking in an uncharacteristically stiff way, like a stranger—Kogito knew that he had to open the briefcase tonight and at least take a cursory glance at what was inside. If he had trundled off to bed without doing at least that much, he knew Chikashi would be very annoyed to discover the briefcase lying on the table the next morning, untouched. She had been supersensitive ever since the overwrought coverage of her brother’s suicide in the weekly tabloids, and even now, if Kogito made even the most innocent, harmless little comment about Goro, Chikashi would act as if he had personally attacked her and wounded her self-esteem.

  Kogito’s feeling of trepidation about reading whatever the briefcase might hold was growing stronger by the minute. He had already gone over every detail of THAT—the traumatic experience he and Goro had shared—in his head so many times that he had lost count. There were parts of that chain of events that he didn’t have a firm grasp of, and he had never had the courage to ask Goro about them directly. But what if the missing bits were in here, graphically told, and with storyboard illustrations to boot? Wasn’t it possible that they might include some accusations or a denunciation of Kogito’s behavior on that day? And the other night, when it looked as if he might lose control and start pleading with Goro through Tagame—maybe he’d been in the throes of some sort of inchoate premonition that Goro was about to accuse him of something and had wanted to issue a preemptive apology or explanation in self-defense.

  Slowly, Kogito got up from the sofa and picked up the briefcase. While he had been staring at it, mesmerized and magnetized, he had realized that as a thing in itself it really was exceptionally attractive in both color and form. When he opened the front flap, which was the same width as the body of the briefcase, he spied a piece of paper with the texture of parchment pasted on the underside. And then he saw that Goro had written something, copied out from one of his books of French literature (with the italicized portions conscientiously replicated), and the memories came rushing back. Straining his eyes to read the words, Kogito was so deeply moved by what he saw that he let out an involuntary “Ah!”

  Je ne t’envoie pas d’histoires, quoique j’en aie déjà trois, ça coûte tant! Enfin voilà! Au revoir, tu verras ça, which one translation renders as: “I am not sending you any stories, although I already have three. It costs too much! That’s all for now! Goodbye to you. You’ll see it [the book] later.”

  Those lines were from a letter from Rimbaud to Ernest Delahaye, circa May 1873; Kogito remembered that they had read it together when Goro was giving him informal lessons in French poetry in Matsuyama. Even for a student of Goro’s linguistic gifts, to say nothing of a complete beginner like Kogito, the italicized portion had been especially difficult. At the time, Kogito had consulted the postscript that followed this passage, and he contended that Rimbaud was simply saying that because the price of stamps had risen, he wouldn’t send the three stories he had already written for a projected book. But Goro disagreed, translating the lines more abstractly as “Reading this is going to cost you a lot in the end, you know.” In a more recent translation, which Kogito had on hand, the passage went like this: “I am not sending you any stories, although I already have three. It costs too much! That’s all for now! Farewell, and you’ll see it later on.”

  Kogito sat very still for a while, with the briefcase resting on his knees. Then, as if he were attempting some sort of precision handiwork that would go awry if he didn’t take the time to do it in the proper order, he slowly took the contents out of the briefcase and placed them on the table. There was a jumble of papers of various sorts; the pile included pages torn from sketchbooks, a loose-leaf notebook with the cardboard cover still attached, and a goodly quantity of small pieces of the motley sort of paper, in miscellaneous colors, sizes, shapes, and textures, that Goro had delighted in since childhood—all held together by rubber bands. T
hen there were programs from film premieres and concerts, which had wide margins with plenty of space for scribbling. Perhaps because they had been crammed tightly into a thin briefcase, when Kogito emptied the papers out into a mountainous heap the faint, nostalgic aroma of Goro’s distinctive imported cigarettes wafted up to his nose.

  On this night, Kogito simply extracted the papers from the briefcase and left it at that. He didn’t have the energy to start sorting through them, or reading. But when he saw the storyboards, which were drawn on paper that had been divided into four or six frames, the highly visual sketches had a charm that was so quintessentially Goro-esque that his hand involuntarily reached out for them. Even without reading the screenplay that was attached to the sketches with beautifully colored paper clips (though in terms of Goro’s intent, it could have been the other way around: he might have thought he was attaching the sketches to the screenplay, as decorative incidentals) he could see that its narrative was endowed with a uniquely engaging visual texture that seduced his skimming eye.

  Kogito left the huge pile of papers next to the briefcase, thinking that when Chikashi came downstairs, his good intentions would be immediately evident: he had decided to answer Goro’s call to action, and leaving the papers out showed, implicitly, that he knew what had to be done and was ready, at long last, to do it. Still, now that he found himself face-to-face with Goro’s posthumous manuscript, he felt like an inexperienced, intimidated greenhorn, and he had major butterflies in his stomach at the mere thought of how he was going to deal with it. As he so often did these days, he felt as if he were somehow suspended in limbo, and he was bedeviled by a nagging worry that (compared with the ultraworldly Goro) he hadn’t yet accumulated a sufficiently rich store of life experiences to tackle this challenge. Surely that quote from Rimbaud’s letter—the secret code that had struck such a resonant chord for both of them—had been written down as a warning from Goro as he passed the baton of his unfinished work to Kogito. Realizing Goro’s intent, Kogito was seized once again by a complicated sort of stage fright, and part of him wanted very much to chicken out.

  6

  The following day Kogito started reading Goro’s screenplay and storyboards, and despite his initial qualms he soon became totally engrossed. Technically speaking, even from the point of view of a novelist, he found Goro’s cinematic approach to telling the story uncommonly interesting and exciting. He even had the feeling that he was discovering a whole new side of Goro’s character—not just as a director but as a human being. This may sound like a contradiction, but at the same time he also had keen flashes of realization that Goro was always exactly this kind of person, from the first day they met. Kogito knew that even when Goro opposed his marriage to Chikashi, that was absolutely predictable behavior, and because he knew that extreme reaction was just part of Goro’s nature, Kogito never had any feelings of being hurt, betrayed, or disillusioned.

  Even during the twelve years while Goro was racking up spectacular successes in the film industry, one after another, Kogito never revised his essential perception of his old friend. Rather, he recognized that the potential for such exceptional accomplishments was there all along, in the facets of Goro’s character he had observed during their schoolboy days. Whenever Kogito happened to meet up with people he and Goro had known in high school, he was always surprised when they would say, with an unmistakable undertone of jealousy, “Who knew Goro had that kind of talent?”

  Kogito knew. Indeed, from the time the eighteen-year-old Goro transferred to Matsuyama High School and they became friends, Kogito believed that his new friend was so talented that he would end up eclipsing even his famous father. (At that point, Kogito had only read Goro’s father’s essays—he hadn’t yet seen any of the elder Hanawa’s satirical samurai films—but that didn’t stop him from making expansive predictions.) Just on the basis of what he had already seen of Goro’s artistic gifts, Kogito expected him to expand his creative dominion far beyond the sphere of moviemaking.

  As Kogito read his way through Goro’s screenplay and storyboards, he was impressed anew by the extraordinary scope of Goro’s natural talents, but he also marveled at the artistic and directorial skills that Goro had acquired, and polished by daily practice, during his short but fully realized career as a maker of films. Take, for example, the character in Goro’s screenplay, called Leader, who was obviously modeled after Daio. No matter which sketch Kogito looked at, he could see no physical resemblance to the Daio he remembered in the way that personage was portrayed in the storyboards. Those sketches did, however, remind Kogito vividly of a comedian who had played the role of a small-business owner in Goro’s enormously successful comedy about tax evasion—a character who, memorably, began to weep copious crocodile tears when he was about to be busted for evading his taxes.

  Nonetheless, in the screenplay excerpt that was attached to the storyboard in question with a colored paper clip, the stage directions for that scene offered a portrait of Daio as Goro had observed him during the two-week series of events known forever after as THAT—a portrait that was rendered with dazzling accuracy, in a way that matched Kogito’s recollections exactly.

  The Leader is a bitter-faced man with a stubborn look around his mouth and eyes. Whatever he tackles, he will stick with it to the end. Confident in his own dogma, he strives to fulfill his single-minded goals. Never giving up, never vacillating, he’ll try again and again, and then he’ll rally his forces and try one more time. But it’s hard to tell whether the Leader is really serious about pursuing those goals or whether he’s just joking around. Isn’t it possible that from the beginning he never really intended to carry out his radical, far-fetched plan? Nonetheless, he’s the kind of guy who, when confronted with an unscalable wall, shouts, “Charge!” and runs into it head-on, with his foolish, faithful disciples close behind.

  The Leader has worked out an idea based on a refinement of Choko Sensei’s reactionary nationalistic ideology, and this is the motivation for his actions. His theories seem to make sense when you first hear them, yet while the logic behind his motivations seems sincere and serious-minded enough, there’s also a sense that everything he says might be nothing more than a frivolous cock-and-bull story or a bad joke. He comes across as complex and conflicted: part volatile buffoon, part serious guerrilla. You get the feeling that somewhere along the way he might say, “Sorry, folks, just kidding!” and abandon the entire plan (or fantasy). But if that ludicrous-sounding plan ever did become a reality, it could turn out to be a terrible, bloody, irrevocable thing ... And if that happened, and people on both sides lost their lives, what sort of expression would the Leader wear as he faced up to what he’d done? (That is, assuming he survived the surreal skirmish with the American military forces.) The dodgy, dangerous jester’s face that he showed to the world before his plan came to fruition would be supplanted, after the event, by a mask of tragedy. Or else it could be the other way around. (That will probably be a key point to consider, directorially.) The following scene is a true representation of Daio’s plan of action, as told to Kogito and Goro.

  LEADER: The peace treaty has already been signed and sealed, and it’ll go into effect this April twenty-eighth [1952] at 10:30 PM. So what does that mean? It means that during the entire period of Allied occupation there hasn’t been a single incident of armed resistance by Japanese directed at American camps, and time is running out for us to take a stand. There is one famous photograph that will endure forever as a symbol of the entire period of military occupation since Japan lost the war, and as a foreshadowing of the future relationship between America and Japan. It was taken on September twenty-seventh, 1945, at the American embassy. The emperor of Japan stands perfectly erect, wearing Western-style civilian clothes (formal black suit, white shirt, narrow tie); beside him is Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur, dressed in his casual-duty uniform of khaki-colored shirt and trousers, no necktie, both hands on his hips. That photograph’s subliminal message is stamped on the collective psyche
of the Japanese people, as strong and clear as the maker’s mark on a samurai sword: The emperor will never again be restored to godly status.

  Kogito, too, had a lucid memory of Daio giving this erudite burst of political analysis in the midst of a party. Just as Goro suggested in the character sketch of the Leader in his screenplay, the real-life Daio’s behavior was a mixture of seriousness and frivolity. You could never let down your guard around him, and whenever he spoke, no sooner had the words left his mouth than the listener would begin to doubt their sincerity or veracity. This unsettling ambiguity was in evidence as the tipsy Daio irreverently imitated the pose in the photograph, showing them exactly how the emperor was standing and what sort of expression was on his face. Kogito’s amusement was mixed with abhorrence, but Goro just laughed uproariously. Of course, he, too, was already drunk on doburoku and feeling no pain.

  Naturally Daio, as the heir to Choko Sensei’s ideological mantle, couldn’t be expected to stand by quietly while this ignominious situation—the Occupation—came to an end. During the three weeks that remained before the peace treaty took effect, Daio and his cohorts started gearing up for their armed attack on the American military base, perhaps hoping to rewrite the last page of the history of the occupied era, with what they saw as its shameful theme of passivity and defeatism. What they needed was to get close to the American camp without being stopped by the Japanese police, so they organized an attack party from among the most outstanding disciples, who would be disguised as innocuous members of the local populace. But the soldiers who were stationed at the main gate of the American army base would immediately fight back, and in order to ensure that a violent street fight would break out the minute the attackers showed up, Daio and his ragtag band would charge the gate, brandishing their authentic-looking weapons. To make the MPs perceive them as seriously armed, it would be ideal if Daio’s group could attack with the same kind of armaments that the American soldiers were carrying. So what they needed, the screenplay showed, was to get their hands on ten rifles from the military base’s armory for the ten members of the attack party to use.