The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “You call it a watercolor,” Chikashi responded, “but it’s actually a picture that was drawn with colored pencils, then liquefied with a wet paintbrush, isn’t that right? A picture of trees in winter, in Berlin?”

  “That’s right, Goro was in Ku’damm—that’s Berlin’s equivalent of the Ginza, more or less—anyway, he was walking around in Ku’damm and that colored-pencil set caught his eye. He said that it would be good for making sketches when he was out scouting locations, and so he ran in and bought it.”

  Chikashi could picture her brother, the quintessential sophisticated shopper, caught up in that spontaneous, high-spirited moment. “That painting is in my room right now,” she said. “I’ll be glad to take it to the local stationery store and make a color copy.”

  “Oh, thank you so much. When would it be convenient for me to come pick it up?”

  “Either the end of this week or the beginning of next—anytime around then would be fine. On Wednesdays I go to visit our mother at the hospital, but I’ll be back in the late afternoon.”

  “Well, then, if you’re really sure it’s all right, I’d like to stop by the day after tomorrow—Saturday—at around two o’clock. If you could spare the time to talk to me for an hour or so, that would really make me happy. But if a visit would interfere with your husband’s work, I don’t need to go beyond the front door.”

  “On Saturday afternoon he’ll be at the pool with our son, so there’s no need to worry.”

  As soon as Chikashi had hung up the phone, she went to her bedroom to get the painting. The technique was as she had described it to Ura Shima; she hadn’t tried it herself, but she thought it might be more difficult than it looked. Just before Kogito went to Berlin, the conversation had turned to Goro, and they had looked at this picture together. She took the painting out of the frame that Kogito had put it in, that night, and then she looked again at the writing in the lower right-hand corner, next to the date. It wasn’t entirely legible because the colored-pencil letters had blurred when they were accidentally painted over with a wet brush, but she could tell that it wasn’t Goro’s signature. Rather, it read: “With Urashima Taro, on Wallotstrasse.”

  If a Japanese person who would be known in her native country as Shima Ura (Shima being her surname) was working as an interpreter/attendant in Berlin, it would be customary to introduce herself the Western way, last name last, as Ura Shima. From that, it would be a short leap for Goro to give her the nickname “Urashima Taro,” after the old man in the famous folktale—the approximate Japanese analogue of Rip Van Winkle, transplanted to the bottom of the sea. Goro had always enjoyed that sort of wordplay, from the time he was very young.

  Chikashi stuck the watercolor between the pages of one of her own sketchbooks, and then, intending to combine the color-copying errand with shopping for the evening meal, she pedaled her bicycle toward the shopping area in front of the station in a state of ebullient excitement. Now that she thought about it, she seemed to remember having heard from Goro that Ura Shima had been given the name “Ura,” written with archaic kanji, as a Japanese equivalent of the German name “Ulla.” (There is, of course, no l in Japanese.)

  The following Saturday, Ura Shima arrived a few moments after the time she and Chikashi had agreed upon. While she was waiting—after having sent Kogito and Akari off to the Nakano pool—Chikashi busied herself with tidying up the pots of rosebushes in the garden, most of which had already finished blooming. It was the rainy season, but during this rare interval of clear weather the weak sunlight was shining through the thin clouds. Counting the bushes in the ground and the potted plants, Chikashi was raising as many as 120 varieties of English roses in the narrow garden. While she was moving the pots of tall, lush-leafed rosebushes, it occurred to her that after Goro had suddenly vanished from her life she had thrown herself into caring for the rapidly multiplying potted roses as a temporary substitute for some more serious passion (such as making art) that she longed for but, at that time, hadn’t yet found.

  Before long, she noticed a sedate-looking green car being adroitly maneuvered into a parking place on the other side of a tall, dense hedge where flowering dogwood grew in profusion and the dark green leaves of camellia bushes glowed with a deep luster. Chikashi hurried down the narrow path to the gate. A tall, well-built young woman wearing a dress of soft, cream-colored fabric (Goro’s trademark taste, Chikashi thought) was approaching the gate with a poised, graceful gait. Her hair, which appeared to be a dark chestnut color, was bound in a knot at the nape of her neck, and she was looking down at the path.

  “Oh, you came by car?” Chikashi called out. “If I’d known I could have faxed you a map, instead of telling you how to walk here from the station. Did you have a hard time finding it?”

  “No, it was easy. I’m Ura Shima,” the young woman said, lifting her head and fixing her large eyes on Chikashi. Ura Shima was nearly four inches taller than Chikashi. Of course, if she had been wearing pumps instead of casual canvas sneakers, the difference would have been even more noticeable. About the time Chikashi had first started going out with Kogito, while Goro was still in good spirits (that is, before he decided to oppose their marriage), he had teased, “Since you two are about the same height, I guess Chikashi won’t be able to wear high heels any more!” The fact was, Goro had always been attracted to tall women.

  Looking around at the pots of bloomed-out rosebushes that were piled high, one on top of another, in the narrow space, Ura sheepishly held out a large, bulky bouquet wrapped in sturdy brown paper.

  “These roses were sent to my house as a gift, and I wanted to share them,” she said. “But since you’re growing them yourself, I guess it’s a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle!”

  Chikashi accepted the bouquet. “As you can see, most of my flowers have finished blooming, so these will be lovely,” she called over her shoulder as she went to get a vase for the deep-pink roses, which were charmingly striped in a darker pink, like peppermint candy. She thought they were called ‘Vick’s Caprice.’

  When Chikashi returned to the living room, she found Ura staring at a framed drawing that hung on the wall. It was the work of an artist, a family friend who had also been Chikashi and Goro’s art teacher when they were in high school; they had posed for this portrait when they were children, and Kogito had bought it some time ago from the artist, who was now an established painter. Ura seemed transfixed by the image of Goro, who was wearing a beret and cupping his cheek in the palm of one large hand.

  “You and Goro look a lot alike, don’t you?” Ura said, turning her gaze back to Chikashi. Her eyes, like her dress and her height, were exactly to Goro’s taste: so widely placed on either side of the well-defined bridge of her nose that they seemed to walk an aesthetic tightrope between beauty and caricature.

  “That wasn’t really true when we were children,” Chikashi replied. “But Goro always used to say that when we got to a certain, more advanced age, we would end up resembling each other the way old couples do.”

  Ura didn’t reply, so Chikashi added, “I made the color copy of Goro’s watercolor—it’s there on the table, so please take a look. I’ll be back in a jiffy with some tea.”

  That was how Ura and Chikashi began their conversation. Then they moved on to Goro’s watercolor painting: What were those leafless trees in the foreground? It would be hard to tell during winter, but now that they’re covered with green leaves it should be possible to identify them. And that building in the painting, the one that’s visible on the opposite shore of the lake through the gaps between the bare-branched trees? You probably can’t see it from that window anymore, now that the trees have leafed out. That was the kind of small talk they made.

  After a while Ura sat up straighter on the couch, with an air of determination. Then, plainly nervous, she embarked on a different conversational tack with Chikashi, who was feeling rather tense herself.

  “When I was assigned to work with Goro, it was the winter of the year I tur
ned eighteen. I had met the requirements for admission to the University of Hamburg, but first I wanted to get some experience in the wider world for a year or two. Then, right after I started working part-time for the Japan-Germany Center in Berlin, I had the incredible good fortune to be chosen to be the assistant to Goro, who was there for the film festival. ‘Interpreter/attendant’ was the job title, though I don’t know whether I was much use as an interpreter ... For me, the time I spent with Goro was the first time I’d ever felt the joy of being a fresh, desirable young woman instead of just an awkward, clumsy, ill-favored girl with big feet.”

  “I think it was a very happy time for Goro, as well,” Chikashi said. “You were there with him while he was painting this picture, weren’t you? I can tell that he was enjoying himself, and I think that must be why—even though it portrays a bleak, wintry landscape—this painting ended up having such a bright feeling to it.”

  Ura flushed deeply all the way up to the firm skin under her eyes, as if her cheeks were being heated from inside. “‘An awkward, clumsy, ill-favored girl with big feet’: that was what my parents always used to say about me, until it got to be a sort of mantra. I guess it was their way of trying to motivate me to make the most of my academic strengths. But thanks to all their negative reinforcement, I was pretty much resigned to a future devoid of romance. And then Goro came along, and he told me that my face and figure were still sorting themselves out and assured me that one of these days I would suddenly become so startlingly beautiful that people who had known me before would laugh out loud in disbelief. He explained that the fable of the Ugly Duckling probably came from observing late-blooming girls like me, rather than being rooted in psychology. He even said that my transformation had already begun and that he thought I was really beautiful already.” As she said this, Ura once again blushed all the way up to her eyes.

  “Goro talked to me about that,” Chikashi said. She didn’t feel as if she was telling a lie, but even so, she felt the need to backtrack: “Well, he didn’t actually talk to me directly, only through a cassette tape, but he said other things about you, too—like that if you were a feminist, you might say that even looking at women in ‘Ugly Duckling’ terms was the very essence of sexist discrimination. He was actually talking very seriously, for him.”

  “I know, because I was with him when he made the tape,” Ura said. “I was listening to him and thinking about what an extraordinary education he had given me.”

  Ura said this bashfully, with downcast eyes, and as Chikashi looked at the young woman’s face she could see how the borderline-comical irregularities in her features had settled into an unusual but indisputable sort of beauty—a beauty that, at certain angles, did remind her a bit of Goro’s angelic face as a child. They both fell silent, and Chikashi found herself remembering one particularly explicit passage on the cassette tape—though not with any feelings of prurience or indiscretion.

  Compared with the sexual landscape of a mature woman, there was something wild and untamed about her topography. It was like a vast, abundant wetland, still not fully formed. Based on my prior experience with the female anatomy, I really couldn’t say definitively, ‘Okay, this is this,’ or ‘Yes, I recognize that.’ I just had fragmented impressions: featurelessly wide ... opulently wet ... a healthy sexual appetite somehow managing to coexist with a stubborn attachment to virginity. Yet her outpouring of sexual self-expression (and the way she moved) seemed to have its own natural power, and her responses didn’t feel like mere preliminaries that would normally have led (but didn’t) to sexual intercourse. No, everything we did together felt like the real thing, perfectly whole and complete just the way it was.

  Slowly, Chikashi and Ura resumed their conversation. Mostly, Ura shared stories about Goro. Like the time he told her about a book that shows a series of pictures demonstrating how the faces (and physiognomy) of human beings have evolved, step by step, from the ape stage. When Ura rushed off to an antique-book store to find that book, Goro went along. Later, while looking at snapshots of Ura taken when she was a child—they were mostly taken by her father, which seemed to prove, Goro pointed out, that even if she was an awkward, ungainly girl, she wasn’t unloved at home, and she found that reassuring—anyway, Goro sketched the evolution, by stages, of a funny-faced little girl, showing how he envisioned Ugly Duckling Ura evolving into an ever more beautiful swan. Chronic low self-esteem dies hard, and in spite of Goro’s compliments she couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if he was right and that fairy-tale transformation really was under way.

  After a time, certain small fluctuations in Ura’s expression seemed to indicate that something was amiss. It wasn’t a reflection of her changing emotions but rather something more directly physical. Suddenly she stood up and said, “I wonder whether I might use your restroom? I know it’s a rude thing to ask the first time you visit someone’s house, but I’m not feeling well at all.”

  Chikashi led the way to the guest bathroom just off the entry hall, then Ura knelt down in front of the toilet, just like that, and began to throw up. Chikashi couldn’t bear to stand there and watch the girl’s broad, muscular shoulders heaving with every spasm, so she quickly stepped back and closed the door.

  8

  Although she had been expecting something of the sort, Chikashi was still shocked when Ura returned from her emergency visit to the lavatory with all the color drained from her face. Her skin was so pale that she looked as if she were wearing a fencing mask.

  “I know this is none of my business,” Chikashi said, “but are you pregnant, by any chance?”

  “I’m four months along,” Ura replied frankly, looking as if she might be about to burst into tears.

  “So you came back to Japan to have the baby at your parents’ house?”

  “No, actually, I came back to have an abortion. The guy told me it would be easy to do in Japan ...”

  Once again, Chikashi was shocked. The girl’s use of the slangy, impersonal term “the guy” to describe the father of her unborn child hit her like a punch in the solar plexus, but Ura wore the defiant expression of an awkward little girl who has grown up but not matured.

  “That’s no way to talk!” Chikashi scolded.

  Ura continued, unfazed. “He said he didn’t want to continue our relationship, but when I told him I was pregnant he offered to take responsibility. I really don’t care for the man at all anymore; to be honest, I think I only got involved with him because he looked like Goro. It wasn’t much of a relationship anyway—it had gotten to the point where whenever we got together all we did was have sex.”

  “And are you still planning to have an abortion?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not. While I was on my way back here on a cheap flight, by way of Hamburg, I happened to read an article by your husband in a south German newspaper. It was the Sunday magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Anyway, after that, I changed my mind and decided to go ahead and have the baby, somehow.”

  “Now that you mention it, he did tell me that he wrote an article while he was in Berlin, and it was translated into German,” Chikashi said. “I believe he wrote it in English, so it would be easier for them to find a translator? If there were a Japanese version, I think he would have shown it to me ...”

  Ura reached out and grabbed her big, bulky designer handbag—it was one of those sturdy all-purpose totes they sell at airport duty-free shops, advertised as “Ideal for the Busy Executive.” She pulled out a sheaf of thin newsprint-type paper. “Would you like to read it?” she asked.

  “The thing is, I don’t read German ...”

  “If I translate, will you listen? It’s a wonderfully strange little story. It’s written in the form of a reply to the question ‘Why do we have to send our children to school?’ It talks about Mr. Choko’s childhood experiences and about Akari’s education at the school for handicapped children, up to graduation. The first half is especially beguiling. It begins right after the war ended, when Mr
. Choko used to go into the forest every day with an illustrated book about botany and study the trees, instead of going to school.”

  Ura Shima began to read Kogito’s essay, translating from the German with impressive facility as she went along:

  One day in the middle of fall, even though it was pouring rain, I went into the woods as usual. As it continued to rain even harder, torrents of rushing water suddenly appeared here and there in the forest, and the road collapsed. By the time night fell, I was unable to get out of the valley. On top of that, I had fallen ill with a fever, and I spent the next two days more or less comatose in the hollow trunk of a large horse chestnut tree, until I was finally rescued by the local firefighting brigade.

  Even after I returned home, my high fever refused to subside. The doctor who came from a neighboring town to examine me announced that there was no medicine—or any other means of treatment—that could make me better, and took his leave. (I was listening to this dire conversation as if to something in a dream.) Only my mother was unwilling to give up hope, and she continued to do everything she could to nurse me back to health.

  Then, late one night, while I was still weak and feverish, I suddenly awakened from the nightmare world where I’d been living, perpetually engulfed in a hot, fiery wind, and I noticed that my mind had become clear again.

  You no longer see this arrangement very much these days, even in the country, now that Western-style beds have become so popular, but in keeping with the way it used to be done in Japanese homes, I was lying on a futon spread directly on top of the tatami-matted floor. My mother, who probably hadn’t slept in days, was sitting by my bedside watching over me. In a slow, small voice that sounded strange even to me, I asked: