The Changeling (2 page)

But when Kogito returned from the United States and saw the new batch of tapes, he was seized by a vague but insistent premonition and immediately popped one of them into Tagame. As Kogito had suspected, the voice that came booming through the headphones belonged to Goro, and it soon became evident that the purpose of the tapes was to tell the story, in no particular chronological order, of the things that happened to Kogito and Goro after they became friends at school in the Shikoku town of Matsuyama—“Mat’chama,” in Goro’s idiosyncratic pronunciation.

Goro’s way of speaking on the tapes wasn’t a monologue, exactly. Rather, it was as if he and Kogito were having an extended conversation on the telephone. Because of this, Kogito soon got into the habit of listening to the tapes before he went to sleep in his study. Lying on his side with the headphones
on, he would listen to the recordings while a host of thoughts floated languidly through his mind.

As new tapes continued to arrive at regular intervals, Kogito would listen to each one, and then—almost as if they were having a real-time conversation—he would punctuate Goro’s recorded remarks from time to time by pressing the
PAUSE
button and giving voice to his own opinions. That practice quickly turned into a routine, and before long, even though Goro couldn’t hear Kogito’s responses, communicating by way of Tagame ended up almost entirely replacing their occasional phone chats.

On the night in question, a few hours before he learned that Goro had plunged to his death from the roof of his production company’s office building in a posh section of Tokyo, Kogito was indulging in his customary bedtime ritual: lying in bed listening to the latest tape, which had been delivered by courier earlier that evening. While Goro rambled eloquently along, Kogito would stop the tape whenever the impulse struck him, and interpolate—not so much his own views, anymore, but rather his natural, spontaneous conversational responses to whatever Goro might be saying. What Kogito remembered about that evening’s session, in retrospect, is that he was suddenly struck with the idea of buying a tape recorder with editing capabilities, which would allow him to cobble together a third tape that incorporated both sides of his lively and occasionally contentious “dialogues” with Goro.

At one point there was a stretch of silence on the tape, and when Goro began talking again his voice sounded very different. It was immediately clear from his blurry diction that he’d had a few drinks during the break and had forgotten to stop the
tape. “So anyway, that’s it for today—I’m going to head over to the Other Side now,” Goro said, quite casually.

After that declaration, there was a sound that Kogito eventually came to think of as the Terrible Thud. It was the sort of dramatic embellishment you would expect from a high-tech filmmaker like Goro, who was known for his skillful use of sound effects and composite recordings. Only later did Kogito realize that the thud was the noise you might hear when a heavy body fell from a high place and crashed onto the unyielding pavement below:
Ka-thunk
.

“But don’t worry,” Goro went on, “I’m not going to stop communicating with you. That’s why I made a special point of setting up this system with Tagame and the tapes. Well, I know it’s probably getting late on
your
side. Good night!” he concluded cheerfully, in a voice that bore no trace of intoxication.

Kogito actually thought, more than once, that maybe that portentous announcement (“I’m going to head over to the Other Side now”) was the last thing Goro said before he jumped, intentionally prerecorded to serve as his final words, and the remarks that followed the thud, made by a totally sober-sounding Goro, were the first dispatch from the Other Side, using the Tagame cassette recorder as a sort of interdimensional mobile phone. If that was true, then if Kogito just went on listening to the tapes using the same system, shouldn’t he be able to hear Goro’s voice from the Other Side? And so he continued his bedtime ritual of chatting with Goro almost every night, via the medium of Tagame, running through the collection of tapes in no particular order—except for the final tape, which he put away in the trunk without bothering to rewind.

3

Kogito and Chikashi arrived at Goro’s house in the seaside town of Yugawara just as the body was being brought home from the police station, but Kogito managed to avoid seeing his dead friend’s face. There was a small private wake, after which Umeko, Goro’s widow (who had starred in many of Goro’s films), planned to stay up all night watching videos of Goro’s movies with anyone who wanted to join her. Kogito explained that he needed to get back to Tokyo to take care of Akari, their son, who had been left at home alone, and it was decided that Chikashi would stay in Yugawara and attend her brother’s cremation the following day.

Glancing toward the coffin, Umeko said, “I could hardly recognize Goro’s face when I saw it at the police station, but now he’s back to looking like his handsome self again. Please take a peek, and pay your respects.”

In response to this, Chikashi said to Kogito, in a quiet but powerful voice, “Actually, I think it would be better if you didn’t look.”

Meeting Umeko’s quizzical eyes, Chikashi returned her sister-in-law’s gaze with a look of absolute conviction and candor, overlaid with sadness. Umeko clearly understood, and she stood up and went into the room with the coffin, alone.

Kogito, meanwhile, was thinking about how distant he had felt from Chikashi while she was staring at Umeko with that strong, defiant expression. There was absolutely no trace, in Chikashi’s utterly direct look, of the genteel social buffers that usually softened her speech and conduct.
This is the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it
, Chikashi seemed to be trying to tell herself as well, in the midst of her overwhelming grief and sorrow.
It’s fine for Umeko to gaze lovingly at the destroyed face of Goro’s corpse and imagine, wishfully, that those dead features have been miraculously restored to their original handsome, animated form. As his sister, I’m doing exactly the same thing. But I think seeing Goro’s face would just be too much for Kogito to bear
.

As Chikashi perceptively surmised, the prospect of viewing Goro’s dead body filled Kogito with dread, but when Umeko voiced her request he automatically started to stand up. He couldn’t help thinking that he would never be mature enough to handle something like this, and he was engulfed by feelings of loneliness and isolation. But he was conscious of another motivation for agreeing to view the corpse, as well: he was curious whether there might be a mark stretching along Goro’s cheek that would indicate he had been talking into a Tagame-type headset when he jumped. The impact, Kogito theorized, could have left an imprint that would still be visible now, and he had reason to believe that that scenario wasn’t merely his own wild conjecture.

Taruto, who was the head of Goro’s production company as well as the CEO of his own family-owned company in Shikoku, had taken on the task of transporting Goro’s body to Yugawara, and after the wake he showed the family some things he had found on Goro’s desk at the office. Along with three different versions of a suicide note, written on a personal computer, there was a drawing done in soft pencil on high-quality, watermarked drawing paper.

The picture, which was drawn in a style reminiscent of an illustrated book of fairy tales from some unspecified foreign country, showed a late-middle-aged man floating through a sky populated with innumerable clouds that resembled French dinner rolls. The man’s position reminded Kogito of the way Akari sprawled out on the floor whenever he was composing music, and this added to Kogito’s immediate certainty that the picture was a self-portrait of Goro. Furthermore, the man who was wafting through the air was holding a mobile phone that looked very much like a miniature version of Tagame in his left hand, and talking into it. (Hence, Kogito’s suspicion that there might have been a headset mark on Goro’s dead face.)

The fairy-tale style of the drawing reminded Kogito of something that had happened fifteen years earlier. Goro had written a book of essays having to do with psychoanalysis, which was one of his many interests. In the past he had always designed the covers for his own books, but he was already busy directing movies, so he delegated that task to a young artist. Rather than the contents of the book it was the cover Kogito thought of now, as he looked at Goro’s “floating man” picture.

Soon after the book was published, Goro and Kogito happened to run into each other, and they started talking about the
cover design. “This drawing style is clearly emulating that of the popular illustrator whose work is all over the major magazines in America right now,” Kogito remarked. “To be sure, this composition incorporates Japanese people and scenery, but the basic concept and techniques are obviously borrowed. For a young artist beginning his career, is this kind of derivativeness really okay?” Kogito posed this question in what was meant to be a lighthearted, teasing way, but Goro’s reaction was blatantly aggressive.

“If you want to talk about openly copying foreign artists, or being directly influenced by their styles, that’s something you did at the start of your career, too, isn’t it?” he snapped. “But because this is visual art, the derivativeness is much more obvious: what you see is what you get. In your case, you basically cribbed things from literature written in French or English, or else from translations, and redid them in Japanese. But even so, you hewed pretty closely to the original form of the foreign literary style, right?”

“That’s exactly right,” Kogito agreed, but he was taken aback by this rather stark assessment. “When you’re a young writer, you do have something original to say, even at the earliest stages. The trick is figuring out how to protect your original voice while stripping away the veneer of borrowed styles. That’s very difficult and painful to do.”

“And you’ve definitely succeeded in doing that,” Goro conceded. “But in the process, you’ve lost the relatively large readership you used to have when you were younger. You’re aware of that dilemma, no doubt. As time goes on, isn’t it just going to get more and more acute? This young artist has a lot of talent, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to let himself get
set in any narrow stylistic ways. On the contrary, I think he’ll probably stretch himself in many different directions.”

At the time, Kogito was bewildered by Goro’s response, which seemed to stem from some sort of festering ill will rather than from simple irritation at Kogito’s offhanded comments. Kogito told himself that Goro probably just felt protective toward the young artist’s book cover, which he obviously liked very much. The style of the paintings Goro was trying to create on his own, toward the end of his life, was clearly a postmodern variation on American primitivism—a term that could also have described that young artist’s work—so it was possible that Goro had taken Kogito’s perceived attack on the young artist as a personal affront.

After a while, it occurred to Kogito that Goro’s last drawing might have been meant as a farewell bequest to Kogito himself: a self-portrait of Goro floating through space, talking to his old friend and brother-in-law via his Tagame headset, in lieu of a mobile phone.

So anyway, that’s it for today
—
I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you
.

4

Kogito left the house of mourning in Yugawara and headed for the Japan Railways station, planning to board an express train for Tokyo. But the moment he walked into the station he was besieged by an unruly horde of TV reporters and photographers who had obviously been lying in wait, eager to talk to anyone with the slightest connection to the late Goro Hanawa.

Ignoring the shouted questions, Kogito tried to steer clear of the ring of jostling reporters, but then a rapidly revolving TV camera collided with the lower part of the bridge of his nose, barely missing his right eye. The young cameraman looked at Kogito with an insolent half smile; he might just have been covering up his distress and confusion with a façade of arrogance, but Kogito felt that his facial expression was very crass and inappropriate indeed.

After escaping from the mob scene at the train station, Kogito started walking up a long, narrow lane that had been carved out of a hillside of mandarin orange trees and paved with cobblestones. At the top of the slope he found a taxi and climbed
in. The driver must have been acquainted with Goro, because he took one look at Kogito and said, “I guess it’s really true what they say about crying tears of blood!” It was only then that Kogito realized that half of his face was covered with blood from the deep cut on his nose.

Even so, he felt that rushing to the nearest emergency room and getting the paperwork to prove that he had been injured, as a way of punishing that arrogant cameraman, would have been an overreaction. Besides, the cameraman was just the inadvertent point man for that seething mass of journalists, with their insatiable collective appetite for tragedy and scandal. In the short time since Goro’s death, Kogito had gotten a very distinct impression from all the media people, whether they were with television networks, newspapers, or weekly tabloid magazines. That is, he had noticed that they all seemed to share a kind of contemptuous scorn for anyone who had committed suicide. At the root of that contempt seemed to be the feeling that Goro—who had for years been lionized, lauded, and treated like royalty by the media—had somehow betrayed them, almost on a personal level, and as a result the fallen idol could never again be restored to his previous kingly status.

The tsunami of scorn that had been heaped on Goro’s dead body was so vast and so powerful that it ultimately extended even to family members such as Kogito, Chikashi, and Umeko, whom the media referred to, coldly, as “parties with ties to Goro.” A female reporter, who had always treated Kogito kindly whenever their paths had crossed at meetings of the book review department of the major newspaper where she worked, left a message on his home answering machine seeking comments for an article she was writing, but even in her innocent
voice Kogito could hear an undertone of barely camouflaged contempt for Goro: the “false king” whose torch of power had flickered and gone out once and for all when he decided to jump off a roof.