The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  When he looked back on it now, Kogito realized that he must have been feeling exhilarated at the thought that he was now heading for his childhood home with Goro all to himself—although at the same time he imagined that Peter must probably be storming around the training camp demanding to know where the hell Goro had gone, and he was also a bit worried that Daio and some of his henchmen might jump into the other small truck and give chase. Of course, this was all extreme conjecture; imagining the worst that might happen was a toxic by-product of the assorted exasperation, anxiety, and anger Kogito had experienced this day in his stalled-out relations with Goro, Peter, and Daio. In truth, even as his seventeen-year-old self indulged in those florid fantasies, he didn’t really think there was any serious danger.

  As the little van wove among the overhanging trees that lined the road—trees that seemed to be closing in more aggressively, somehow, than during the daytime—Kogito kept his focus on the surface of the road ahead, unceasingly illuminated by the wobbly headlights as the little truck bounced along. When they finally turned onto the two-lane prefectural road, which was one prong of the three-forked road that ran alongside the tunnel, the mountains were very far away, the valley was infinitely deep, and in the midst of the endless blackness the faint glow of the moon illuminated the slender ribbon of river below.

  By and by Goro spoke, in the awed voice of an adolescent who was feeling thunderstruck by the depths of the darkness the little three-wheeled truck was plunging into. “This really is the ‘mountain fastness,’ isn’t it?” he said dreamily. “I knew there was an expression like that, but till now I never knew what it meant.”

  “We’re going to go a lot deeper into the ‘fastness’ than this,” Kogito replied. “This is a high place and the mountains beyond are pretty far away, so you don’t get a feeling of confinement, but that isn’t the case with my village.” Goro didn’t reply; Kogito had the feeling that he had never before elicited this kind of silence from his friend, and he felt a small frisson of proprietorial pride at his unprecedented “accomplishment.”

  After a while it occurred to Kogito that there was something he ought to explain to Goro before they arrived. Spurred on by a sudden sense of urgency, he simply blurted it out.

  “Listen,” he said, “it’s about my mother. On one side of her head, in the place where an ear should be, she has a fold of skin that looks like the kind of flipper you’d expect to see on a fish, or maybe a reptile, so she always wears a cloth wrapped around her head, like a turban. I thought I should warn you, since it’s late at night and I’m afraid she might come out with her head uncovered and startle you.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be startled,” Goro said with cool indifference, but he was plainly intrigued by what Kogito had just told him.

  “It’s not so much a matter of being startled or not ... rather, if you just react in a natural way I don’t think it will hurt her feelings. When she was still in good health, she even used to make jokes about her condition. But if I don’t tell you the whole story, it’ll be hard to understand.”

  “So tell me the whole story,” Goro said.

  There was a sketch in one of the storyboards Goro drew, years later, that showed the way he visualized Kogito’s mother while he was listening to the tale: as a woman, well past middle age, with a large snail attached to the left side of her face where an ear would normally be.

  Kogito started out by talking about his great-grandfather and how he happened to give Kogito’s mother the unambiguous name “Hiré,” which means a flipper or fin. From the three-forked road at the tunnel exit, it would take the three-wheeled truck another forty minutes to reach Kogito’s house, so there was plenty of time to relate the whole saga, from the beginning.

  That great-grandfather died the winter that Kogito’s mother, his only grandchild on the paternal side, was seven years old; that’s reckoning by the old Japanese system wherein a baby is a year old at birth, so she would have been eight in Western terms. During the uprising that occurred in 1860, the first and only year of the Man’en era—it ended in 1861—Kogito’s mother’s grandfather, as a duty-bound village official, ended up being forced to kill his own younger brother, who was the leader of the revolt.

  He lived an extraordinarily long life, until after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and when his grandchild (Kogito’s mother) was born, the whole village was soon gossiping about her deformed ear, thanks to the garrulous midwife who had delivered the baby. People whispered that the deformity was some sort of curse: divine retribution for her grandfather’s having killed his own brother. But her grandfather didn’t seem at all perturbed, and he even went so far as to christen her, straightforwardly, Hiré. The young girl never forgot the stories she heard while perched on the knee of this larger-than-life old man (even though she was already past the age where that sort of physicality was considered appropriate). With the Western medicine that was developing, it would have been no problem to tidy up the misshapen appendage, but Hiré herself made the choice to leave her ear the way it was at birth.

  Even today, there are a lot of old-fashioned words whose meanings are still passed down in these parts. Hiré is one of those words. In addition to its usual flipper-or-fin connotations, it can also mean talent, personal beauty, and the like. In a famous old book called the Gyokujinsho, there’s a passage that suggests that dull, humdrum, utterly average people often act as if they have some great talent or pretend to be endowed with deep, extraordinary human qualities. As Hiré’s grandfather said, “You’re a girl with brains and charm. If all the men in the cities and villages around here refuse to marry you because they’re uncomfortable with your ear, you’ll have to go as far away as necessary to find a man who can see beyond that superficial flaw.”

  “Maybe your mother just told you that story because she was concerned that your ears are so big,” Goro teased. “But seriously, your great-grandfather sounds like he must have been an unusually cultured old man.”

  “My mother grew up hearing stories from old books like the Gyokujinsho, but she didn’t necessarily remember all the details,” Kogito explained. “So afterward I looked up some words in the dictionary.”

  “You look up a lot of things, don’t you, Encyclopedia Boy?” Goro said good-humoredly. “But just from what I’ve heard so far, there are stories in your family that sound like something Kafka might have written!”

  When the three-wheeled truck came to a stop on the private road that curved along the waterway below Kogito’s house, the young man who had been driving opened his mouth for the first time that evening. “You know that story you just heard? Well, Kogito exaggerated about his mother’s ears,” he said to Goro, in a tone that suggested he had given the matter a great deal of thought.

  Kogito and Goro jumped off the truck and crossed the stone bridge over the aqueduct. The road was lined by a rock wall that eventually merged with a large wooden structure that doubled as gatekeeper’s lodge and passageway through to the estate beyond. (Some of the wood where the building adjoined the wall had rotted out and been replaced with sheets of tin, as a stopgap measure.) A low-wattage electric lightbulb hung in front, barely illuminating the boys’ path.

  Kogito looked back and saw that the young man was still standing next to the three-wheeled truck. “You can go home now, you know!” he called out in the local dialect.

  “I’ll leave as soon as you tell me that your mother is still up and you can get into the house and you’ve no more need of my services, but not before!” was the stubborn reply.

  Relying on the light of the moon, Kogito led Goro up the hill along the cobblestoned road that traced a shallow arc toward the main section of the old house. When they passed the compound’s so-called driveway, which had fallen into disrepair and was no longer used, the horn of the three-wheeled truck honked three times in a practiced rhythm: beep-beep-beep. A moment later, as if in response, a light went on above the large main entrance of the compact one-story bungalow that had been added onto t
he original structure.

  When they finally reached the house and were standing at the entrance, a smaller door next to it opened a crack and a female peeked out. (It took a moment for Kogito to realize that it was his younger sister, Asa, and not his mother.) Asa flung the small door all the way open and thrust out one of her shoulders, which was clad in a yellowish-orange sweater. “Kogito? What are you doing here so late at night?” she grumbled.

  “I’m with a friend,” Kogito replied. “Don’t worry, we’ve already had dinner.”

  After his sister had backed away into the house, Kogito ducked through the small door and beckoned Goro to follow him. Goro watched with obvious curiosity as Kogito’s sister, in her sweater and skirt and hastily slipped-on wooden clogs, stood waiting for them to catch up in the mud-floored room, which was as wide as the big door and continued all the way to the laundry room. Goro seemed to be dazzled by the brightness of that yellowish-orange sweater (it was almost the color of an unripe persimmon), but he managed a semblance of a polite bow, and Kogito’s sister, obviously flustered, lowered her head in return.

  “Do you boys want to go to sleep right away?” she asked. “I’ll go ahead and spread the futons in the back parlor, but you’ll at least pop in and say hello to Mother, won’t you? Chu’s already asleep.”

  His sister looked as if she wanted to say something else, but Kogito ignored her and told Goro to climb up on the verandah that connected the bungalow with the section of the huge, rambling main house that was still in use. The two boys walked along the rough-floored hall, and as they passed through the interior of the house Kogito saw a light burning behind some opaque-paper sliding doors on one side, which told him that his mother was still awake. He showed Goro where the lavatory was, and then they went into his own snug tatami-matted room. His sister had quickly slipped past them and had gone into the spacious room next to Kogito’s—the back parlor, which looked out on the aqueduct—to lay out their bedding.

  Goro sat down in front of Kogito’s small student desk and gazed at the pages from Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of The Collected Works of Rimbaud that Kogito had copied out by hand and tacked up on the facing wall. Kogito was afraid this might turn into an awkward moment. Goro had been teaching him French (though not so frequently now that Kogito had started cramming for his college entrance exams), and the text they’d been using was a copy of the Mercure de France edition of Rimbaud’s Poésies, which Goro had given him. Goro had previously begun to compile a small collection of Rimbaud’s works, including the letters, and at the beginning of his tutoring sessions with Kogito he had said, “From now on, let’s agree not to look at any more translations, okay?”

  The thing was, Kogito had enjoyed reading Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Adieu” long before he transferred to Matsuyama High School and met Goro. Goro had two copies of Poésies, and as soon as he had given Kogito the extra one, Kogito had ascertained that “Adieu” wasn’t included in the contents. So (Kogito was thinking), if Goro had asked him to explain the presence of a forbidden translation on his wall, he would have a perfectly good explanation. But Goro just stared at the end of the first half of what Kogito had written out—“But not one friendly hand! and where can I look for help?”—and then Kogito began to worry that Goro might somehow take that line personally, as an aspersion on their friendship.

  However, Kogito knew that his mother was waiting for the requisite visit from her son, so there was no time to fret about imaginary problems. Gesturing vaguely in the direction of the next room, where his sister could he heard vigorously spreading the futons, Kogito went into the hall on the pretense of checking on her progress, then headed for his mother’s room. (That small subterfuge seemed easier and less embarrassing than telling Goro his real destination.)

  Kogito’s mother was sitting in a narrow space between the near-side sliding door and the Buddhist household altar, in front of which her bedding was spread out on the floor. She was dressed quite formally in a lined kimono, and her head, wrapped in a turban made from the same cloth as the outside layer of the kimono, was drooping so weakly from the nape of her neck that it looked as if she might have nodded off. Kogito remembered how creepy the turbans had always seemed to him as a child, after he’d learned about his mother’s ears.

  Now he sat down, straddling the raised seam between the bedroom’s tatami-matted floor and the hall, and said hello. He left the sliding door open to make it clear that he was just paying his respects, briefly, before returning to join his guest.

  “I meant to stop by yesterday; I’m sorry to be so late,” Kogito said.

  “The friend who’s with you—I assume that’s the famous Goro you’ve been talking so much about lately? Asa said that even though he’s only in high school, he was reeking of sake! I gather you got a ride here in the truck from Daio’s farm, but why did you go there in the first place?”

  “Only because Daio came to see me the other day, after reading in the paper that I was studying at the Army of Occupation’s library. One of the American officers there was interested in Daio’s farm and he said he wanted to visit it, so ...” Kogito had picked up on his mother’s use of the innocuous term “farm” in lieu of “training camp,” and he followed suit by giving the simplest possible explanation, which also happened to be more or less the truth.

  “You shouldn’t blame it on someone else,” his mother retorted. “If you had just said that you were interested in taking a look at Daio’s farm, I wouldn’t have forbidden you to go there! But if Daio had an American army officer as a guest, I imagine he went all out with the sake and food. I’ll bet he was bragging about his Chinese cook, too. Now that I think about it, I feel sorry for Mr. Okawa, having to work there.”

  Kogito didn’t say anything. He knew that rather than questioning him directly, his mother’s style was to ramble along, sharing her own thoughts, and he was waiting to see where that would lead. But his mother made no attempt to pursue the subject of Daio’s “farm,” and after briefly raising her head to look at Kogito she lowered her face again and said, “Well, then, why don’t you and your friend go to sleep now and have a nice long rest. Please ask the young man who was driving the truck to wait for another half hour or so. Tell him we have some rice cakes wrapped in oak leaves, and we’ll take them to him shortly, along with some hot green tea.”

  The last half of this little speech, about the rice cakes, was actually addressed to Kogito’s sister, who had come down the hall and was peering into the room over Kogito’s back. Kogito couldn’t help thinking childishly that if there were extra rice cakes wrapped in oak leaves lying around, he and Goro would happily eat a few. Not wanting his sister to divine his thoughts, he just stood up, wearing a sullen expression, then slipped past her and went back to his own room.

  The sliding doors between that room and the large back parlor had been opened, and on the other side of two futons, which were spread out side by side, Goro was waiting. He had already changed into a cotton sleeping kimono. “About that translation on your wall,” he began, “I know they say the translator inserted his own emotions into it and got some details wrong and so on, but still, it’s really good!”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Kogito replied, making no attempt to suppress the joy in his voice.

  Two years ago, while he was copying out that poem, Kogito had read the first line, “If we are sworn to a search for divine brightness,” and had been struck by the feeling that he didn’t have a friend he could speak of as “we.” Now, he thought, he found that same poem even more moving because he had lately become part of a comradely “we”—and his counterpart was here with him, right now. True, the end of the first section wasn’t entirely optimistic, but that did nothing to dampen his happiness. And then Goro, as if to magnify Kogito’s delight, said, “In that poem, I feel as if he’s talking about our futures. Rimbaud is really something else, isn’t he!”

  Kogito didn’t stop to think about what sort of concrete image Goro might be tryi
ng to conjure up when he said “our futures”; his happiness was simply doubled by that heartwarmingly conspiratorial remark. His feelings were best summed up by a word he had come across in his newly acquired Concise Oxford Dictionary: he was flattered.

  “I only copied out the first half, but if you’d like to read the rest of it, I have the Collected Poems here,” Kogito said, plucking the volume from his bookshelf (it was the edition published by Sogensha) and handing it to Goro. By this time he, too, had changed into a cotton kimono.

  Goro quickly jumped into bed, turned on the floor lamp that Kogito’s sister had placed between their two futons, and began to read Rimbaud’s Collected Poems. As Kogito looked at his friend, comfortably stretched out under the quilt with just his head sticking out at an oblique angle, the sight of Goro’s perfectly cylindrical neck and sculpturesque jawline filled him with a curious sense of pride.

  4

  On that night, after settling down under the quilts, Goro mainly talked about his impressions of Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Adieu.” As Kogito discovered many years later, those same thoughts turned up in the screenplay and storyboards for Goro’s final, unproduced film. It appeared that Goro, who disliked the technique of so-called “art” or “avant-garde” films, had tried to write the scene with his usual cinematic grammar—that is, in the same style he used for his commercial films. But the screenplay contained two different versions of the last scene (both of which, based on Kogito’s impressions as a reader, were given equal weight in the lineup), and in those scenes, Goro used techniques that would have been inappropriate in a standard mainstream movie. As we’ll see later, the fact that both endings seemed to unfold naturally and make perfect contextual sense was typical of Goro’s approach to filmmaking.