The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  On the next page, the reason for Ida’s haste becomes clear. She was in a hurry to go and fetch her mother’s luminous, yellowish-gold rain cloak, which is evidently endowed with some sort of magical properties. After wrapping herself in the commodious rain cloak and shoving her horn into one large pocket, Ida makes what the text calls a “serious mistake.”

  She goes and jumps—or rather, falls—out of the window backwards! The illustration shows Ida wafting through the air faceup with her legs and arms extended in front of her, as if she were floating on her back in the ocean. And there she goes, bundled up in her mother’s sunflower-yellow rain cloak, flying upside down against the backdrop of a sky that’s just beginning to clear. (The moon is even visible, emerging from behind a charcoal-gray cloud.) In the distance, in the lower part of the scene, we see the goblins in their seaside hideout, along with a red ladder, a small boat, and the kidnapped, none-too-happy baby.

  Kogito explained this scene and the next with obvious relish, analyzing them in terms of myth and folktale: “The secret of life and death isn’t in the bright heavens above; it’s hidden in the subterranean darkness. That’s why it’s a mistake to fly looking up. You have to fly looking down or else you won’t be able to observe the chthonic secrets.”

  Eventually Ida hears her father singing a song. The lyrics explain, helpfully, that she needs to turn around and head in the right direction, instead of flying “backwards in the rain.” After heeding this advice, Ida eventually manages to infiltrate the grottolike den of the shape-shifting goblins. But everyone there has more or less the same face and form as her kidnapped baby sister, so how is she supposed to find the real human child amid this crowd of tiny doppelgängers?

  Putting her heart and soul into it, Ida starts to play her horn. The babies begin to walk toward the water, dancing all the while, but this is no simple, innocuous promenade. Soon, all the goblins begin to feel so unwell that they want desperately to lie down and rest, but they can’t stop moving—not as long as Ida keeps playing “a frenzied jig, a hornpipe that makes sailors wild beneath the ocean moon”! The dancing goblins are obviously suffering, but Ida is fiercely determined. Striding forward with her large, magnificent feet, she goes on relentlessly playing her horn.

  On the next page, the goblin babies have strayed off into the frothing water, presumably to drown, while Ida, having accomplished her goal, stands on the shore looking calm and poised, holding her horn in one hand as she checks for one last time to make sure all the goblins are gone. And then, with a rush of affection, Ida looks down at her little sister, who is sitting in the shell of a giant egg, stretching one chubby hand toward her rescuer.

  Now all they need to do is to find their way home. Carrying the baby, Ida is walking along a forest path that runs beside a creek, while in a little summerhouse on the opposite shore, who should be playing a pianoforte but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, complete with powdered wig! As Chikashi gazes at this scene, she shares Ida’s evident sense of relief, but at the same time an unresolved feeling is tugging at her heart.

  There’s probably nothing particularly strange, in a fantastic story like this, about having Mozart suddenly appear in a red-roofed house on the other side of the river, playing the piano. After all, Chikashi thought, here at home we, too, make Mozart’s music part of our daily lives (just as Maurice Sendak does). But what was the meaning of the ominous-looking tree branches that seemed to be blocking the way as Ida headed for home with the baby in her arms—and what was the significance of the five creepy-looking butterflies that were flitting around?

  Chikashi had a profound sense that this picture book was telling her a number of important things about her own life. She also realized that she needed to go on reading it over and over, concentrating on the details of the illustrations rather than on the text, in order to understand some crucial metaphors that were still unclear to her.

  The more she read and reread this uncanny picture book, the more certain Chikashi felt that she was Ida, and Ida was herself. Chikashi had gone through a great many books since she first learned to read, but until now—and she was past fifty—she had never encountered a literary character with whom she identified so completely. Nevertheless, as she sat staring into space with the book on her lap after reading it for the umpteenth time, Chikashi couldn’t help feeling that she must look very much like Ida’s poor mama, who sat under the arbor for hours on end, lost in melancholy thought.

  3

  Chikashi’s older brother was exceedingly good-looking, lavishly talented, and loved by many people—indeed, even when he was a child, people used to adore him with a sort of awestruck reverence. But from a certain time on, she felt that there was an unknowable part hidden inside of him, and he seemed to have turned into someone subtly different from the person he used to be. Even after that, he was still a brother Chikashi could be proud of, and she could always rely on him for kindness and moral support. But it had occurred to Chikashi more than once that this Goro wasn’t the “real” Goro—and now, thanks to Sendak’s book, she had learned a word that made it possible for her to accurately express for the first time what the other, different Goro was: a changeling.

  After she and Kogito were married, while she was waiting for their first child to be born, Chikashi found herself thinking that this might be a chance to retrieve the real Goro. In place of my own mother, she thought, I will try to give birth (or rebirth) to the beautiful child that was Goro. And then the Goro who disappeared will be brought into the world once again as a new baby. And now, thanks to Sendak’s picture book, she was finally able to express this properly: If only she could have been as brave and heroic as Ida and somehow brought Goro back ...

  Crazy as it sounded, Chikashi thought now that even if she had never put it into those exact words, she had made up her mind to do just that. But, she wondered, what role would Kogito have played in her wild transubstantiation scheme? Chikashi was unable to come up with an answer to that hypothetical question. She felt as if she were gazing at a mysterious landscape that was forever enveloped in fog. Only, of course, that perpetually misty landscape existed only in her mind. And the mystery remained: Why did I choose Kogito to be the father of the child I wanted to bring into the world as a means of retrieving the Goro who was taken away?

  When she thought back on it Chikashi realized that, for her, Kogito had always been a person she could never fully understand. In the beginning, she didn’t perceive him as an independent entity but just as one of Goro’s sidekicks. After she got the sense that Kogito was making an effort to do things that would please Goro, Chikashi started to think of (and treat) Kogito more warmly than any of Goro’s other friends. But then, Chikashi reflected, when I began to talk about getting engaged to Kogito, Goro was violently opposed. Ultimately, I did marry Kogito, but I always felt that I didn’t really understand what led me to make that decision.

  But now, Chikashi thought, an unexpected solution to that mystery has floated to the surface, out of nowhere. When I tried using the Sendak book as a clue, I realized that deep down in my heart this is probably what I’d been feeling all along. Marrying this person, Kogito, was the same as flying out of the window at night in order to retrieve the real Goro. But maybe I made a mistake and jumped out the wrong way: faceup and backwards. The thing is, I had to fly out of the window at night in a hurry. And I couldn’t afford to lose this person, this Kogito, because he was the last person who was with that beautiful Goro, before he was stolen away.

  I remember that when Kogito was still a boy, he and Goro—who was about the same age—went to a place I’ll call “Outside Over There,” a place where something terrible happened, and after surviving that dreadful experience they came straggling back in the middle of the night. When I think about it now, even before that evening, Goro had definitely been changing, little by little. Even so, I think that was the night when Goro passed the point of no return.

  After spending two days in a place I knew nothing about, Goro came home in t
he middle of the night. He must have stood in the front garden of the temple where we were lodging, calling out once or twice in a soft voice. If he hadn’t kept his voice down, I would have been nervously worrying that a light might suddenly go on in the room of the head priest’s eldest daughter, which was in a nearby part of the temple compound. Earlier that night, and all through the night before, I had been straining my ears, listening anxiously for any sign that Goro might have returned. When I slid open the wooden doors of the temple, being careful not to disturb the perfect stillness, the dim lamplight seeping out from behind me fell on two young boys who, even to my girlish eyes, looked extremely pathetic and bedraggled.

  Even as a child, Chikashi was the type who didn’t react emotionally to things, but she still found it difficult to look at that wretched, helpless-looking pair of boys for more than a few seconds. Beyond that, she had no distinct memories of how she felt at that moment, but she did remember how the boys behaved after they straggled in and what she did in response. They seemed to know what they needed to do—get cleaned up—but they were so exhausted that they were moving in slow motion, like zombies. Chikashi was perplexed rather than annoyed by this behavior, and she stood by on the sidelines, ready to be helpful.

  The boys walked around to the back of the lodgings, and she followed the same route inside. She opened the shutters so the light would illuminate the outdoors, then closed the storm shutters that faced the front garden. She understood instinctively that Goro and Kogito were making every effort to avoid having anyone see them with their clothes off. At the base of a crape myrtle tree whose trunk resembled a naked animal, a stone basin had been placed to catch the water coursing down through a length of split bamboo. There was a verandah in front of the washbasin, and that was where Chikashi laid out two sets of Goro’s clothing and two bath towels.

  Big, plush towels were a rarity in those days, but their mother had presciently stocked up on them before commodities became scarce, as a treat for their father, who was recuperating from tuberculosis. Goro had gotten used to luxurious Western-style bath towels, and now he would get very cranky if he didn’t have them instead of the narrow, flimsy Japanese versions, which tended to resemble an insubstantial dish towel or a length of cheesecloth.

  Goro glanced around for just long enough to see what Chikashi was doing, but his friend was looking in the other direction, hanging his head. Chikashi was standing inside the shutters, and while she watched, Goro stripped naked to the waist and began to wash his body. (Although he was unusually tall and robust of build, on this night he looked oddly skinny and shrunken.) In due course his friend, who was standing next to him, followed suit. They were both roughly scrubbing their torsos with odd-shaped pieces of cloth, from their slender shoulders and narrow chests to their bent-over necks and abdomens, which resembled cylinders carved with furrows. The “washrags” they were using, Chikashi seemed to remember, were the boys’ own white tank-style undershirts. Their other clothes lay in a heap on the ground at their feet.

  Standing there together, Goro and Kogito looked like a couple of soot-colored, pointy-headed imps, about four feet tall. That was because they had stuck their heads into the stone washbasin to wet their longish hair, and the water had made it stand up in peaks. Goro nonchalantly shed his trousers, and his friend did the same; Chikashi thought they were probably too tired to feel embarrassed or shy. Her eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and she could make out their small, boyish buttocks, as well as their testicles (which reminded her of a baby’s tightly clenched fist) and their penises, sticking out below their abdomens like misplaced fingers.

  After Goro and his friend had dried themselves off with the bath towels and headed toward the verandah, with chilled-looking faces, to put on the clean, dry clothes Chikashi had left there, she quickly dived back into her futon in the shadow of the Buddhist altar. As she lay there with the quilt pulled over her head, listening to the sound of her own breathing, she could hear the two boys slowly, wearily making their way into the temple, and she was filled with pity once again.

  4

  During the five years before she married Kogito (there was a gap of time between the night she saw the pitiful youths at the temple in Matsuyama and the time when she and Kogito began corresponding after her mother had asked him to look for some books, including copies of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, in the used-book store district of Tokyo), Chikashi respected him as “a person who reads books.” She also thought in some vague way that Kogito would probably end up pursuing a line of work that was appropriate for “a person who reads books.” She seemed to perceive a certain childlike simplicity, and a degree of disengagement from the real world, in Kogito’s extreme bookishness. That was why, as their marriage plans proceeded, she had some remaining hesitation (quite apart from Goro’s vociferous opposition). Yet the essence of the way she felt about Kogito didn’t change after they were married, and even after Goro died, she felt keenly that her husband, as “a person who reads books,” was still the same as he had been when he was young, with all that that implied.

  When Kogito’s mood had been buoyed by reading a new book, he would bring that excitement (and, sometimes, the book itself) to the dinner table and share it with his family. One night, he was talking about some new research into the Gospel according to Mark by a pioneering Japanese biblical scholar whom he held in great esteem. If someone had asked Chikashi whether or not her husband was a completely fair-minded human being when it came to living as a member of society, she would have had to admit to some reservations. However, when he talked about books, even if he disagreed with the content he never tried to oversimplify or second-guess what the author was saying.

  There was an incident in which Professor Musumi (who had been Kogito’s patron and mentor for most of his life and had even been the official go-between for his marriage to Chikashi) took his pupil to task over his critical methodology to such an extent that it was apparently painful even to remember. Kogito never spoke of the incident, but ever after that he had made a special effort to be scrupulously impartial.

  On this night, Kogito began by reading aloud from a new, classically based, collaborative translation of the Bible by a Japanese research society whose leader was the author of the book that had made such an impression on Kogito. In this case, the passage was about how Mary Magdalene, Mary (mother of James), and Salomé tried to go anoint Jesus, after the Crucifixion. Chikashi, who as a rule didn’t make hasty off-the-cuff comments, declared that in this translation, unlike in some earlier, stiffer versions, the women’s behavior came across as so completely natural that she found herself identifying with them.

  “Even if someone important to us was killed and buried in a cave, if we women needed to do something essential like going there to anoint him, we wouldn’t think twice about it,” she said. “I mean, I’m saying that even though I don’t really know what’s involved in anointing a dead body.”

  “I’m not an expert on that sort of thing, either,” her husband said cheerfully.

  “At any rate,” Chikashi went on, “those three women summoned up their courage and set out, and on the way I think they would have been chatting about this and that. However, right after they had that frightening encounter with the supernatural being, the angel, all of them would probably just be walking quickly along, with downcast eyes, staring at the ground in silence, don’t you think? And you know where it says in the Bible, ‘They lifted their eyes and were amazed to see that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance’? That seems like a perfectly normal reaction, as well.”

  “That may be so,” Kogito said, “but I really don’t think these were ordinary women. Although of course you aren’t an ordinary woman, either—maybe that’s why you understand them so well. Now that I think about it, there’s a similar scene in one of my novels when the older brother, Gii, drowns, and his sister, Asa (who’s named after my own sister, of course), single-handedly recovers the corpse and then stands guard
until the police arrive, to make sure the curiosity seekers don’t come too close ...”

  “Being able to rely on women like Asa and me—‘not ordinary women,’ as you put it—must have been convenient for you and Goro, too,” Chikashi remarked.

  Unfazed by that response, which seemed to be tinged with sarcasm, Kogito began to read aloud the next passage, in which the messenger angel is waiting for the women in the tomb. When he had finished, he recapped the author’s questions about what happened when Jesus rose from the dead: “Why were the women so frightened that they didn’t say anything to anyone, in spite of having been ordered by the angels to ‘go, tell his disciples and Peter’—sometimes called Simon Peter—‘that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’ And why did Mark end so abruptly, at that point?”

  Kogito was particularly intrigued by the writers—the authors of the Bible—whose work seemed to parallel his own, and although he didn’t think his own novelist’s opinions had any bearing on the interpretation of the Gospel, he felt, personally, that the original author’s ambiguous way of ending this particular tale was an effective literary technique. However, while they disagreed on that point, he gave the Bible scholar’s treatise high marks for the way (unusual in Japan) that he presented the research, first setting out all the little differences in interpretive methodology and then proceeding to examine, one by one, the pros and cons of various theories and opinions—his own and those of others.

  As Kogito rambled on in that vein Chikashi was only half listening, in a vague, abstracted way, for she was caught up in a daydream of her own. These women, she was thinking, had been followers of Jesus from the early stages of his community-organizing activity, and they themselves had been seriously tested. They were so resolute that when Jesus was nailed to the cross, they stayed there and watched over him from a distance, even after all the male disciples had fled. Surely there was some significance in the fact that these same brave, stalwart women had later been so frightened that they had run away in silence. Was it enough simply to accept that that’s the way the Gospel ends, with the seemingly negative information that the angel’s words had not been relayed to the disciples—just as was written at the end of the Gospel?