The Changeling (20 page)

It was only natural that Kogito would have assumed that the book Daio relied on so heavily was something that had originated in the right-wing movement. Not only that, but he wondered where Daio had gotten his own copy. After the death of Kogito’s father, in anticipation of a possible visit from members of the occupying army, his disciples had dug a giant hole, built a fire, and burned Choko Sensei’s large collection of books about ultranationalist ideology. Once all the books had been burned
(though in due time Kogito became aware that not all of them had gone up in flames), if Daio had wanted to find prose and poetry that expressed the right-wing philosophy, he would have had no choice but to read books from the other end of the political spectrum—books in which left-wing thinkers and scholars quoted ultranationalist literature in a critical context. And so it was that Kogito discovered, long afterward, that when Daio was chanting those Chinese poems with the traditional sing-song intonation, he was reading from one of those left-wing books of criticism and not from the original text.

The means are unimportant; anything will do.
But if we orchestrate justice, clear and bright,
And if all our thoughts are straight and true,
The emperor’s glory will rise like the sun ...

Daio explained that night that these were the first lines of what was considered at the time an epoch-making historical poem and that at one time, according to one of the defendants on trial for the so-called 2•26 Incident, that quotation was the symbol and the battle cry of their uprising. (The 2•26 Incident was an attempted coup d’état by the radical, ultranationalist Kodaha faction of the Imperial Japanese Army, which transpired between February 26 and 29, 1936. Several leading politicians were killed, and the center of Tokyo was briefly held by the insurgents before the coup was suppressed.) Daio was repudiating the basic ideology expressed in this poem, along with the way of thinking and the course of action—all of which comprised the nucleus of Choko Sensei’s “mistaken” theory. Yet in spite of that disavowal, Daio kept reciting those
lines over and over, in a low voice that was full of genuine emotion.

There were any number of things that Kogito found difficult to understand that night, so what is written about Daio’s treatises in this narrative from here on incorporates Kogito’s adult knowledge, based on extensive reading that illuminated the complex, murky ideology and movements of right-wing zealots and soldiers.

“Choko Sensei, too, was originally opposed to the ‘defeatism’ of the commissioned officers who took part in the 2•26 Incident,” Daio said. “Why ‘defeatism’? Because they themselves had no intention of drawing up an aggressive plan for taking over the government after the uprising. Anyway, Choko Sensei denounced that stance as extreme weakness. In fact, he was very critical of the incident overall, saying that in the end they decided to go down fighting against the Tokyo municipal police force—which, in the long run, was exactly the same as if they hadn’t done anything at all.

“However, the irony is (and you know the whole story, Kogito, since you saw it happen) that Choko Sensei himself launched a so-called insurrection without having a proper plan in place. And as a result, he was shot to death by the police of this little one-horse town. Why did he choose that path to certain doom? We’ve been asking ourselves that question, over and over, for the past seven years, and we’ve finally reached a conclusion that makes sense to us. We think he was trying to write the final chapter, to put an end to the pattern of defeatism that had continued from Inoue Nissho (a radical Nichiren Buddhist priest and founder of the far-right terrorist organization known as the League of Blood, as you surely know) to the officers of
the 2•26 Incident. By so doing, he was trying to make it possible for the people who came after him to move toward a different path. Seriously, Kogito, I really believe that’s what your father had in mind. And when you think about it that way, then the road we’re trying to follow right now is the path that Choko Sensei planned for us all along!”

Daio continued his seminar the next evening. This time Goro was in attendance, as well, but he made it clear from the start that he was mainly there for the crab and the home-brewed sake. Picking up where he had left off the previous night, Daio explained that he and his colleagues often found themselves reminiscing about the event that took the life of their beloved leader—Kogito’s father—on the day after the war ended. And the conclusion they had reached was that, contrary to appearances, the young warriors hadn’t really been led into battle by Choko Sensei. That is to say, it looked like a group insurrection, but in truth their leader seemed to have his own self-destructive agenda. Perhaps it was the kamikaze action of a terminally ill man who didn’t have long to live in any case. As Daio put it, reverently, “Sensei’s existence was like a star, sparkling high above our heads. And then that star exploded, all by itself.”

Choko Sensei’s behavior was in essence a reflection of the theories behind the League of Blood and the 2•26 Incident, whose leaders believed in practicing terrorism for its own sake and assumed that the people who come after will take care of the rest. You’d think such a brilliant man would have been able to move beyond that, but he ended up clinging to those antiquated attitudes and he wasn’t able to take it to the next level.

That’s what Daio said, adding that Choko Sensei had formerly been a disciple of Kita Ikki and was intimately familiar
with the
General Rules for Japanese Reconstruction
, and had presumably studied a more stable plan for the future, quite apart from the rather naïve and unrealistic optimism of Nissho and his officers, and their ilk.

“Moreover,” Daio continued, “Sensei must surely have learned the obvious lessons from those earlier, disastrous incidents and come up with his own plan. Yet in spite of that he was moved by the ardent aspirations of his young disciples, and even when he was so desperately ill, he honored us by riding in our wretched, manure-scented chariot, like a Shinto god in a palanquin, even though that pitiful, slipshod plan of action was the best we could come up with.” (This seeming inconsistency—first blaming his mentor, then himself, for the same catastrophe—was typical of Daio’s sake-fueled rhetoric.)

Goro’s presence was undoubtedly a factor, but more than the specious points of Daio’s somewhat incoherent argument, the thing that made Kogito blush was the grandiloquent phrase “honored us by riding in our wretched chariot,” which seemed to imply that Kogito’s father was some sort of exalted saintly being.

Ridicule was Kogito’s mother’s natural form of expression, and she had a field day with the events that took place on the day after the war ended. When her husband set out to lead the fatal bank robbery, she jeered at him for having to ride in a makeshift “tank”—a clumsily converted, foul-smelling wooden box that had originally been filled with herring fertilizer from Hokkaido, with rough, round slices of a log for wheels—and she made fun of Kogito, too, for tagging along on the ill-fated mission. “You seemed awfully keyed up about escorting that ragtag band, led by your terminally ill father in his fertilizer box,
as if it was some kind of noble undertaking,” she said later, after it was all over.

When Kogito wrote a novel about the incident, incorporating his mother’s harsh criticisms, it gave him the opportunity to flip his own perspective and reach a completely different conclusion. It was just after the medium-length book was published that the trio of hooligans showed up again. Three years had passed since their first attack, so Kogito’s injuries had healed. At that point, the bones in his foot hadn’t yet morphed into permanent deformity, but then along came the assailants to drop a miniature cannonball on his foot yet again.

There was no doubt about it. Whoever had sent the posse of thugs was watching every move Kogito made—or, more precisely, monitoring every word he wrote.

3

At the time of Daio’s sudden appearance in Matsuyama, Kogito had already started hanging out with Goro on a regular basis. The event that precipitated their friendship was minor, but memorable.

Kogito had transferred to Matsuyama High School at the beginning of the second year of a three-year high-school program, and one of the elective courses he signed up for was Classical Japanese. At the first meeting of the class, the instructor went around the room asking the students, one at a time, why they had chosen to take this particular course. The teacher was tremendously tall, with a disproportionately tiny head, and his style of dress was rather flamboyant for those subdued postwar times—he even wore a waistcoat, which was quite unusual. His question seemed to imply that it wasn’t a very popular class, although Kogito hadn’t heard anything to that effect before signing up.

Kogito remembered that from the time he was a child, long before that deadly “insurrection,” his father used to entertain
him with excerpts from works of classical Japanese. So when it was his turn to explain why he had chosen this class, Kogito replied, “It’s because I find the minute little details of the way language is used in classical Japanese very interesting.”

For some reason, this innocuous answer threw the teacher into a tizzy. “How dare you be impertinent with me!” he snapped. “If that’s true, then you’d better give me an example of what you find so interesting!”

Goro was in the same class, and he later rebuked Kogito with a virtuous expression that seemed to suggest that Goro had momentarily forgotten that he, too, was a student who frequently provoked the ire of his teachers (or maybe it was for that very reason). “Your problem,” Goro said loftily, “is that you don’t look suitably dejected and you keep on talking back. That just makes the enemy even angrier.”

Goro had a point. Instead of meekly giving in to the teacher’s intimidation, Kogito had recited the lines the way he had learned them—that is, from hearing them repeated two or three times by Choko Sensei, as was his custom, while enjoying his evening drink of sake—and that was what had made the already angry teacher almost apoplectic.

As an example, Kogito stammered out the story of the eagle who carried off a human infant. When she dropped this hefty morsel into her treetop nest, as food for her own baby, the hungry chick was surprised by the tiny human’s cry. Because of that he didn’t even peck at the human baby, much less eat it alive.

“What?” the teacher spluttered indignantly. “Which ancient book did you find that foolishness in? How was it phrased in classical Japanese?”

Kogito was getting a bit fed up with this volatile, aggressive teacher, who had all but grabbed Kogito’s lapels in his fervor to extract an answer, but he replied politely, quoting to the best of his recollection, “That young bird looking up / Surprised and afraid / Didn’t peck at the baby.”

“Don’t give me that sloppy nonsense,” the teacher fumed. “Just answer my first question: what was the title of the old book you read that story in?”

Kogito really didn’t know how to answer that question, and he felt distinctly uneasy about the situation he had gotten himself into. The truth was, he had never actually seen those words on the page. He just happened to have memorized them when his cheerful, slightly tipsy father had crooned the lines, as though they were a song.

His father had offered a commentary, too: “When the eagle’s offspring saw the strange thing that its parent had unceremoniously dumped into the nest, it was surprised and frightened, and the classical Japanese word for ‘looking up’ somehow suggests the quizzical curve of the young bird’s neck. When the original author recited this line over and over, the expression just naturally ripened, you know. Even if they aren’t particularly well educated, people who are good at storytelling always have the characteristic of being able to polish their words and make them better.”

Kogito was terribly afraid that the relentless teacher might end up saying, “All right, if you aren’t lying, then bring that book to school and prove it.” But Choko Sensei’s entire collection of books had been burned, for reasons Kogito would rather not have to explain. And that book his father had spoken of—he
called it
A Compendium of Supernatural Parables
—did it really exist?

The female students had started to giggle at Kogito’s unintentionally cheeky replies, and the teacher, wearing an expression of undisguised contempt, moved on to questioning the next student. After that, right up until the end of the school year, the teacher made a point of completely ignoring Kogito. And among his schoolmates, only Goro—who had been kept back a grade for reasons having to do with his transfer from Kyoto—took Kogito aside and said, “Hey, I think your father sounds like a pretty interesting guy.”

So they became friends, and some months later they ended up going together to Daio’s inn at Dogo Hot Springs to eat dinner, with a heaping side dish of political proselytization. Daio started off by explaining how his group had arrived at their conclusions, but something about his way of speaking gave the impression that his remarks had been delivered many times and had been polished to a high gloss in the process. Indeed, there was something patently artificial about his fluency.

Kogito’s mother was never swayed by persuasive sweet talk from strangers, much less from her own husband. Kogito felt now as if he had discovered the reason why she gave Daio the nickname “Gishi-Gishi,” which seemed affectionate enough but was also subtly mocking and not entirely respectful. He was too slick, too clownish, too much of a con man for her down-to-earth tastes.

Kogito’s mother often said that the people who dwelt in the forests of Shikoku could be divided into two types. The first type never told a lie, no matter what. The second type told lies
just for fun, even if they didn’t stand to profit from the falsehoods. “Your father was basically a careful, prudent man,” she told Kogito, “but he let himself be played for a fool by people from outside the village who flattered him with lies. I mean, even if it wears a sage’s beard and puts on pompous airs, a papier-mâché
daruma
doll is still a toy, isn’t it?”