The Changeling (4 page)

And then Kogito remembered—though he wasn’t clear about whether it had been a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting—that he and Goro had shared a long discussion about the French poet on another occasion. At the time it had been many years since either of them had read any Rimbaud, and Kogito got the impression that Goro, who did most of the talking, was conjuring up the lines of poetry from the dim and distant recesses of his memory.

Inspired by that conversation, Kogito had rounded up and read several new translations of Rimbaud’s poetry. (By that time, almost every French-Japanese translator had published a Rimbaud translation.) Kogito ended up choosing Hitoshi Usami’s recent translation to send to Goro, after checking the Usami version not only against Hideo Kobayashi’s seminal translation but also against the original French text.

Among the pile of cassette tapes that Goro had sent, there was one in which Goro responded to Kogito’s gift of the Usami translation with a long discourse about Rimbaud. After Kogito had listened to that tape again, he went to the section of a bookcase where he kept the French books he had collected during his student days and took down several works, old and new, pertaining to Rimbaud.

On one shelf, a Pléiade edition of Rimbaud’s
Collected Works
stood next to a Mercure de France edition of
Poésies
; the latter (a present to Kogito from Goro when they were still in high school) had been Kogito’s first introduction to the French language. For the first time in many years, Kogito opened
Poésies
.
He could still remember how his heart had leapt when Goro handed him that little book with the exotic red letters on the cover. There, in the margins, were the minuscule but clearly legible notations he had made as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, written in hard lead pencil.

The reason some of the notes were in English was because before Goro started teaching him French, the book that Kogito had consulted in the library of Matsuyama’s American-run Center for Cultural Information and Education (CIE for short) was the Oxford French-English dictionary. In addition, the pages bore two different kinds of annotations in Japanese. The notes in the angular
katakana
syllabary were used to flag what Kogito perceived as the salient points in Goro’s discourses. He used the
katakana
in imitation of, or homage to, the marginal printed musings in a collection of essays by Goro’s famous film-director father, which Goro had lent him.

Kogito’s own schoolboy thoughts (not shown here) were written in the flowing, cursive
hiragana
syllabary, to differentiate them from his notes on Goro’s impromptu lectures, which tended to run along these lines:

In a letter to his teacher, as well as in the poem itself, Rimbaud wrote that he was about to turn seventeen: that is to say, an age that’s filled with daydreams and fantasies. But it’s said that the poem in question, “Romance,” was actually written when Rimbaud was fifteen. In other words, when he wrote the line “One isn’t serious at seventeen,” he was misrepresenting his own age.

Even so, this poem is meant to be read by someone who’s exactly the age you are now, Kogito: the same age
I was last year, when I read it for the first time. The great thing is that this absolute genius, Arthur Rimbaud, offers equal encouragement to ordinary humans like us, too.

Kogito was surprised that a gifted youth like Goro, who anyone could see was seriously brilliant and abundantly talented, would liken himself—and, with exceptional honesty, Kogito, as well—to ordinary people.

As Kogito was reading “Adieu” in the Pléiade edition, he was once again seized by an urgent thought. Before Goro’s suicide, when he was holding forth about that poem on one of his tapes and quoting certain lines from it, he obviously had the new translation that Kogito had sent open in front of him. Wasn’t Goro assuming that for Kogito, too, the entire poem would immediately be brought to mind by reciting a few lines? Kogito didn’t have a ready answer for that question, then or now.

Even with the new translation that he had urged upon Goro, Kogito didn’t feel the same sort of passionate emotional attachment to Rimbaud’s words as when he was young and used to memorize the poems by writing them out, line by line. Kogito had sensed a similar kind of divergence in their infrequent encounters during recent years. Could that be the reason why Goro had ultimately despaired of Kogito’s dependability and had decided to head off into the realm of the Terrible Thud, alone?

“Autumn already!—But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness, far from those who die as seasons turn.”

Kogito didn’t own a copy of the Usami translation that Goro was quoting from on the Tagame tape, but as he was
jotting down a quick transcription he remembered that this opening-paragraph stanza was the same one that had first enthralled him, in Kobayashi’s translation, when he was a seventeen-year-old high-school student. Goro seemed to have had a strong response to those lines, as well. But wasn’t Goro, in choosing to die of his own free will, patterning himself after those who were “sworn to a search for divine brightness”? Wasn’t he, somehow, just mimicking “far from those who die as seasons turn”?

Moreover, in the next stanza, there was the image of a dead body swarming with maggots. How did that make Goro feel, on the threshold of his own death? This poem, which was teeming with what Rimbaud called “dreadful imagining”—why did Goro feel compelled to go on about it at such length on the tape? Kogito couldn’t help wondering about that. It even occurred to him that Goro might have deliberately chosen to hurl those very specific, very horrific words at Kogito and, by extension, at himself.

“Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!” And then, in the next stanza: “Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that. But not one friendly hand! and where can I look for help?”

The topic of lies was a major element in the continuing criticism of Kogito that Goro had recorded on the Tagame tapes. Was Goro giving up on finding “one friendly hand,” too?
If that was the case
... Kogito couldn’t stop voicing this question to himself, even though he was fed up with his own endless, obsessive stewing about it. Anyway, if that was the case, as Goro was preparing to ring down the curtain on the final act of a long friendship (albeit one that had clearly grown distant
in recent years), why did he give Kogito the Tagame apparatus for the second time and then follow up by sending a slew of long, fervent monologues, recorded on tape for Kogito’s ears only?

As he continued reading the poem, all the way to the final stanza, the passage that filled Kogito with nostalgic yearning was the one he and Goro had been most taken with when they were in high school. It was this line: “And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.” But what sort of meaning could he and Goro, in their extreme youth and inexperience, have been reading into the phrase “cities of glory”? Again, while they certainly found encouragement and inspiration in the concluding line (“and I will be able now to possess the truth within one body and one soul”), what on earth did that have to do with their everyday schoolboy lives on earth? And if Goro happened to be pondering that passage just before he took the final leap into space, what vision of his own future did he see in those words?

In truth, it was always quite a while after the conclusion of each of his Tagame sessions with Goro before Kogito was able to think about the contents of their “discussion” in this sort of lucid, analytical way. Then on the following night, when he once again hit the
PLAY
button, the quotidian things that had been occupying Kogito’s midday mind would recede into the distance as the strangely live-sounding words poured out of the diminutive speakers, like a real-time, real-space dispatch from the mysterious dimension where Goro now dwelled. Kogito would immediately fall under the spell of Goro’s words, and eagerly pressing the
STOP
button, he would launch into a spirited reply.

Whatever Goro may have said about his reasons for recording the tapes, the fact was that he used them primarily as a forum for continuous rants about Kogito’s myriad flaws, faults, and shortcomings. When Kogito thought about it later, he realized that it must have been the urgency in his own voice, when he was lying on his army cot trying to defend himself against Goro’s attacks, that had made Chikashi decide it was time to have a candid talk about Kogito’s growing addiction to the Tagame ritual.

6

Of course, Kogito was always the one who started the conversations with Tagame, but sometimes, just before he pressed the
PLAY
button, he had the uncanny feeling that the chunky little tape recorder was actually psyching itself up for the next round of combat. For some reason this made Kogito think about the way the real
tagame
s—the large, oddly shaped water beetles that lived in the mountain streams of Shikoku—must have amorously bestirred themselves, almost in slow motion, during mating season. All these years later, that image (which may have been pure conjecture) was perfectly sharp and vivid in Kogito’s mind.

Kogito always left the tape cued up at the end of the previous night’s conversation, and whenever Kogito picked Tagame up he always felt as if he were answering an incoming call on the ultimate long-distance mobile phone. And the moment Goro’s voice began to speak, with its distinctive Kyoto/Matsuyama accent, Kogito was repeatedly struck by the fact that whatever the topic might turn out to be, it always seemed to be uncannily relevant to his current situation.

Another odd thing was that when he started talking to Tagame, Kogito was far more enthusiastic than he had been about any other kind of discussion with Goro during the past twenty years or so. There was something engaging about Goro’s relaxed way of talking across the vaporous border that separated the Other Side from the land of the living—despite the fact that his comments often consisted of merciless, searing criticism of Kogito—and even though Kogito was completely aware that Goro was dead, the intensity of their exchanges somehow seemed to overshadow that disturbing fact.

Kogito also felt that he had been forced to take another look at his feelings about his own inevitable death, so naturally there were times when the conversations evoked newly urgent thoughts about what really happens after we die. He could imagine himself, in the not-so-distant future, traveling to the Other Side with an upgraded, afterlife-appropriate version of Tagame and earnestly awaiting a dispatch from this side. When he thought that there might be no answer to his Tagame signals, for all eternity, he felt such a deep sense of loneliness and desolation that his entire being seemed to be disintegrating.

At the same time, it was only natural for him to feel that the impassioned “conversations” he was carrying on with Tagame, all by himself, were nothing but an escapist diversion, a self-deluding mind game. As a novelist who’d grown partial to the literary theories espoused by Mikhail Bakhtin, Kogito had started to take the concept of “playing games” very seriously after crossing the threshold into middle age. Consequently, he knew very well that even if talking with Goro via Tagame was a mere diversion, as long as he was acting on that fantasy stage there was nothing to do but throw himself into the part with all his heart.

Furthermore, Kogito resolved that during the day, while he was separated from Tagame, he wouldn’t allow his nocturnal conversations with Goro to seep into his daily experiences. And when he was talking about Goro with Chikashi, or with Umeko, or with Taruto, Kogito made every effort not to recall the conversations with Goro that flowed through Tagame.

In this way, Kogito constructed a barrier between the two types of time—real time and Tagame time—and while he was moving around in one zone he wouldn’t permit the other to spill over into it, or vice versa. But whichever zone he happened to be inhabiting, he never denied, at least not to his innermost self, the truth or the reality of what he had experienced in the other realm. From his vantage point on the earthly, conscious side, he firmly believed in the existence of the Other Side, and that belief made the world on this side seem infinitely deeper and richer. Even if his Tagame adventure was nothing but a dream, he still embraced it as a positive experience.

Suppose one of Kogito’s friends had said something like: “Okay, so Goro committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building, and his body, including the brain inside his head, was cremated, but his spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it—anyway, that entity continues to exist somewhere, even now. That’s what you believe, right?”

If this hypothetical friend phrased the question in that serious kind of way (and if he was a moody type anyway but was smiling as he asked it) then everything would be fine. In that case Kogito, after pondering the matter for a moment, would probably reply while wearing an opaque, noncommittal expression, since like most people his age he had long since become a master of the poker face and the social smile.

“That’s true,” he might say, “only with some conditions attached. While I’m listening to his voice on Tagame, Goro’s soul—that is to say, by my definition, a spirit furnished with something that’s invisible yet is extremely close to having physical form, like what they call an etheric double or an astral body—anyway, yes, I do believe that Goro’s soul really exists in that state. It’s different than if I were just playing back a tape recording of his voice. What Goro left in place for me is a very special system. To be sure, his soul has made the transition into a space that’s different from this space that you and I still inhabit. But it just so happens that Tagame is a conduit between this space and that one. That’s how it works.”

The hypothetical friend is still skeptical. “But when you and Goro aren’t having one of your Tagame talks, what form does he take on the Other Side?” he asks. “Wait, let me rephrase that. When Tagame isn’t connecting you to the Goro
beyond
Tagame, how does Goro exist in relation to you?”