The Changeling (25 page)

After first translating that question for Kogito, Iga quickly added a postscript of his own in Japanese. “Speaking as a third-party observer,” he said in a low voice, “I really don’t think this is the sort of thing that you should have to deal with during the filming of an interview. It’s extremely self-serving on their part, in my opinion. What’s more, I can’t help suspecting that the ulterior motive for setting up this so-called interview was so they could push the conversation in this direction, and then if you agreed to their terms they would have proof of it on film. So what do you think—shall we call a halt to this charade right now? On the other hand, to look at the situation in a more positive way, if you want to help them finish a production that’s run aground, and if you’d like to actively offer them support for that purpose—look, I agree that it’s a worthy project, and the part that’s already finished is, as you pointed out, really very fine work. So if that’s what you want, I’ll be happy to translate your response, whatever it may be.”

Kogito chose to proceed with the interview. First, though, he gave his word, in reply to the director’s leading question, that
he would let the young German filmmakers have the rights to his novel for free, provided the rest of the production was consistent with the samples that were already in the can. After having seen the video playback of the scenes, he felt certain that both the screenplay and the staging had Goro’s distinctive fingerprints all over them. Why? Because they corresponded exactly with the ideas and interpretations that Goro had talked about on some of the tapes he made for Tagame, before he went to the Other Side.

Kogito found himself seriously regretting not having brought Tagame with him to Berlin, because he would have liked to compare Goro’s recorded remarks with the film he had just seen. Of course, he had no right whatsoever to speak about the use of Goro’s estate, nor did he have any intention of meddling in the bereaved family’s financial affairs, and he made that perfectly clear to everyone on hand.

After the interview was over, the white-haired director quickly reverted to his original kindly, genteel mien. As he was escorting Kogito and Iga out of the hotel, he said that Kogito’s filmed remarks would provide encouragement and inspiration for the young artists who were trying to rebuild the German film industry—a goal that the country’s chancellor himself had endorsed in a video message he’d sent for the opening of the film festival. The director added that it was especially good that they had filmed Kogito’s gratifyingly specific comments right there in what would be the central venue for the upcoming festival.

On the way home in the taxi, Iga said, as if to confirm the director’s remarks, “The reason Germany’s New Cinema is getting off the ground now is because they have that director leading them. It’s only natural that you would want to come to their
rescue when they’re struggling financially. But do you suppose Goro realized that he would end up becoming so deeply involved with the young German filmmakers? It just seems odd that they went ahead and started work on the film version of your novel without making sure they had the rights sewn up. Or is it possible that they didn’t make their plan clear to Goro, and he unwittingly got dragged into their plan to go ahead and make part of the film and then present it as a fait accompli?”

“Mrs. Azuma-Böme seems to have been helping them out quite a bit, as well, but I wonder whether she was unaware of what was really going on,” Kogito mused. “Or, on the contrary, maybe she knew exactly what was going on, and was trying to make them finish it so it would be, as you say, a fait accompli?”

“Hmm, that’s hard to say. One thing I do know for certain is that she really loves film. I’ve often seen her at showings of the young artists’ experimental work at the Berlin Film Festival and elsewhere. But would she really go so far as to participate in a legally dubious scheme during the production stage? She started out as an actress, you know, and they say that when Goro was being promoted as a ‘new face’ at the beginning of his acting career, she costarred with him as a senior actress. I’ve heard her bragging about that, more than once.”

“She told me that she met Goro again when he came here for the Berlin Film Festival, and they probably realized that they had some sort of history,” Kogito said. “But what about Mrs. Azuma-Böme’s daughter? What’s the connection there?”

“Oh, did you hear the way the mother bad-mouths her own daughter?” Iga laughed. “I think that rather than being opposed to the girl’s involvement with Goro, the mother was just generally critical of her daughter. I know the girl helped Goro out on
one of his trips to Berlin, in a variety of ways. Naturally, there were lots of people who were interested in meeting Goro while he was here, and I heard that some of them were complaining that the girl was monopolizing his time. Apparently the mother felt responsible for her daughter’s behavior, and that was the beginning of the friction between the two of them. After that terrible thing happened to Goro, a horde of tabloid-magazine reporters came here looking for background, and apparently they really got on the wrong side of Mrs. Azuma-Böme. I’ve even heard that her grievances against the reporters might eventually end up in court,” Iga said.

“But why do you think the relationship between the mother and daughter degenerated so radically?”

“Apparently the mother said, ‘Don’t try to be too helpful, because then you’ll be no better than a
Mädchen für alles
, and if you do that he’ll get bored with you right away,’ and I gather that her daughter asked a German friend of hers, who explained about that term’s derogatory meaning. And the girl’s feelings were so deeply hurt that she wasn’t able to forgive her mother for saying such a thing. Anyway, that’s what I heard. The daughter was brought up in Tokyo by her father, Mrs. Azuma-Böme’s ex-husband, but after the mother got married again, to a German, the girl came to live with them in Berlin. That’s why she can barely speak a word of German.”

“You certainly know a lot about this,” Kogito said.

“That’s because I happen to know the German woman who told the girl what that phrase meant; in fact, she actually came to me afterward to make sure she had explained it correctly in English. After she told the girl, she started to worry that she might have gotten it wrong.”

“How did you explain the nuances of that phrase, I wonder?”

“Well, my wife was born in Berlin, but she says she never heard that expression used around her house, even once,” Iga said. “Mrs. Azuma-Böme’s present husband is a successful businessman, quite a bit older than she is, so it’s possible that he learned about ‘
Mädchen für alles
’ while growing up in an old-fashioned household. Anyway, the same mutual friend was saying that when that terrible thing happened to Goro, AzumaBöme’s daughter went around saying that he had been murdered by yakuza. She kept insisting that he’d been killed because he had agreed to do a project for NHK, an investigative documentary that was supposedly going to expose the truth about yakuza control of the waste-incineration industry.” Iga hadn’t really answered Kogito’s questions about the semantics of
Mädchen für alles
, but he decided not to pursue the matter any further.

The strange thing was that Kogito never heard from Azuma-Böme after that, nor did he ever hear anything further about her daughter, the mysterious girl Friday. The only result of Kogito’s visit to the Berlin Film Festival was the video he left behind, in which he made an outright gift of the film rights to one of his novels to some young German filmmakers without even knowing the name of their group.

2

Kogito’s “quarantine” in Berlin lasted for a hundred days, so it actually ended up being more than twice as long as the forty days mentioned in the dictionary definition, based on the word’s Italian etymology. When he traveled from Tokyo to Berlin, Kogito had almost no ill effects from the time difference, but he knew that the return trip would be a different story. Sure enough, he ended up suffering horrendous jet lag for ten full days.

During that time, Kogito was searching for a way to get a firm grip on reality once again—he had made a conscious point of not putting fresh batteries into Tagame—and he would sometimes lie on the army cot in his study and daydream about telephoning one friend or another. That’s when the stark reality would hit him. Goro’s criticism, on the Tagame tapes, that Kogito didn’t have any intimate younger colleagues was true. Professor Musumi, Takamura, and some more relaxed, easygoing friends as well—practically everyone Kogito might have felt like calling up was dead!

Not only that, but he couldn’t seem to find a book that would soothe his head, which always seemed to be throbbing hotly from jet lag and sleep deprivation. There was a pile of packages at the door of his study, and while he was unwrapping them he would idly browse through the books. He might, for example, be enticed by the style of a Japanese translation of Proust, and that might put him into a mood of leisurely remembrance of all things past. When that happened, Kogito found himself thinking with newfound serenity about his own death as an event that wasn’t too far off. He couldn’t bear to think that he would still be hanging around for another fifteen or twenty long years after this, and rather than
Time Regained
(the title of the final volume of Proust’s magnum opus), the phrase “Death Regained” popped into his overheated head.

“That’s it!” Kogito exclaimed out loud. “‘Death’ is ‘Time’!” In his deliriously befuddled state, wild thoughts that would probably have been rejected if he were fully awake now struck him as profoundly persuasive epiphanies. He even felt as if his own death was something that had already taken place, some time ago. It seemed as if things that had occurred in the recent past were rapidly receding into the mists of time, and even Goro’s death seemed to have happened a hundred years before, or more. And then he saw himself, too, as someone long dead, dwelling on the Other Side along with Goro, who seemed to have died ages ago. And if Kogito was indeed a shade, then it didn’t seem unnatural for him to be half dozing and nodding off all the time.

When he was “thinking” along these lines, Kogito (who was absolutely certain that his epic jet lag would prevent him from ever falling asleep) was actually sleeping, and what seemed to
be conscious, waking thoughts were in fact dreams that were visiting him in his shallow sleep. The next day, like those premonitions that come to us in dreams, thoughts such as “Death is Time,” too, would inevitably fade into obscurity. But before long the harmonic overtones of that thought might end up reverberating in some new dream ... if he was lucky enough to fall asleep.

3

Kogito had convinced himself that his quarantine in Berlin had two main goals: first, to return to the way things were before he embarked on the Tagame dialogues with Goro, and second, to discipline himself until he was sure that he was capable of giving them up for good. Gradually, that plan began to produce results, and at certain times (sitting in his office before he went off to give his lecture was always a time of particular tranquillity) he would find himself almost able to rearrange reality by convincing himself that the communication he and Goro had exchanged after Goro’s defection to the Other Side was nothing more than a self-conscious game.

Yet he never thought it was meaningless just because it was a game. It was only through the form of a game that he could achieve the necessary deepening of consciousness, and it was clear that he had reached that level by way of the Tagame ritual.

Since entering his forties, Kogito had often poked fun at himself as a “late-blooming structuralist,” but he managed to figure out the unique role of a game, in contrast with, say, a
ritual, by reexamining some of the arguments that had already begun to be abandoned by the clever, trendsetting cultural anthropologists. Kogito realized that, as if to prove that the Tagame dialogues with Goro were just a game, he had invented any number of rules for that diversion and had followed them scrupulously. Goro, too, had seemed to respond to the conversation as a fellow player who was honoring the rules. (Of course, that could have been because Kogito was careful never to make any moves that might cause Goro to overstep those rules.)

Even so, the communication he exchanged with Goro by means of Tagame had the element of unpredictable dynamism that’s found in any conversation, in varying degrees, and thus it had the effect of stimulating Kogito and pushing him forward toward new perspectives and ways of looking at things that had never occurred to him before. At the same time, Kogito felt confident that, apart from the occasional slip, he and Goro were respecting the rules of the game—in particular, the rule that no matter how impassioned the conversation might get, neither of them would ever again propose that they work on something together in real time, in the real world. (This actually fell under Rule Number Two:
Never speak about the future
.)

Thus when Kogito was in his apartment in Berlin, continually reviewing the conversations he’d had with Goro, he was still able to make a clear distinction between the messages that had come to him through Tagame (especially the ones that had been recorded close to the date when Goro suddenly and unexpectedly went off to the Other Side) and any discussions they might have had on the telephone, which of course predated Tagame and were not subject to its rules.

“Chikashi was saying that when you turn sixty-four, Akari will be thirty-six,” Goro had said in one of their telephone talks, toward the end. “So if you add up both your ages, that’s a hundred years! According to the mystical beliefs of your pathetic schoolboy days in Mat’chama, by the time you get to be a hundred years old, you should be a genuine, card-carrying Man of Wisdom. And then there’s the hundred years (give or take a few decades) that you yourself have already lived ... I’m not sure how this should be calculated, but if you include the previous fifty years and the fifty years after that, for a total of two hundred years, you could come up with a perfect vision of human life. The way I’m thinking now, if you put together the years that you and Akari have lived individually—that is, sixty-four plus thirty-six—then I figure you’ve already lived for a hundred years. See what I mean?”