The Changeling (3 page)

Kogito came to that realization after his train station confrontation with the young cameraman who had inadvertently wounded him—and barely missed putting out his eye. No doubt the TV station was liable for the accident, but the unfortunate cameraman was just one drop of water in the giant wave of disdain, so what would have been the point of taking legal action against him alone?

This is getting a bit ahead of the story, but for about a week after Goro’s suicide, Kogito made a point of watching the
Wide News
program early every morning and again in the evening. Since no one else in his household showed the slightest interest in joining him, he would carry the small TV set into his study and put it at the foot of his bed, then listen to the sound through his Tagame headphones.

Kogito had expected that he might have difficulty understanding the speech of the younger generation—that is, the anchors and reporters on the news shows and the actors (male and female) who had appeared in Goro’s films. But he even found it hard to follow the remarks of the film directors and screenwriters, not to mention the commentators from the arts and from the larger world beyond, who were more or less his own age. And the harder Kogito concentrated on trying to understand what all these talking heads were saying, the more incomprehensible their babble became.

He even began to wonder whether, by surrounding himself with beloved, familiar books and writing so often about
those same books, he had somehow exiled himself to a solitary island with its own peculiar language. As he did his novelist’s work he had assumed that he was somehow connected with other people, but in reality he seemed to have no bond whatsoever with the people living on the continent—the mainland, so to speak—of language. That realization filled him with anxiety and frustration. Nonetheless, he continued to be mesmerized by the televised coverage of Goro’s death, straining his eyes to see the images on the screen with the volume on the headphones cranked up as high as he could bear. After this had gone on for a week, though, he knew that it was time to give it up cold turkey. Kogito lugged the TV set back to the living room, then collapsed onto the sofa in exhaustion.

“I was wondering why you were wasting your time on that garbage,” Chikashi remarked.

The thing is, Kogito thought, his head was still in such a muddle that he couldn’t do much of anything else. Besides, the time wasn’t completely wasted. Why? Because during that week of watching the TV news every morning and noon, in addition to the sensationalistic “specials” that were broadcast every second or third night, Kogito had gradually come to realize that Goro’s suicide was something that couldn’t be explained in the glib words of modern television and that, consequently, the world would never understand why his brilliant, talented friend had decided to jump to his death.

There was another aspect of Goro’s wretched, tragic death that tormented Kogito. During the past ten years or so, Kogito hadn’t seen much of Goro—that is to say, Goro’s tremendous success as a director had stolen the time they might otherwise have spent together—but he knew that Goro had been living
in the world of shallow, incomprehensible blather of the sort he’d heard on all those TV programs. The upshot of that, Kogito thought, was that Goro had started talking into a tape recorder and sending the tapes for Kogito to listen to via Tagame. Perhaps that was because, at the end of his life, Goro needed a language that would express his true self.

Around the time when Kogito stopped watching the relentless TV coverage of Goro’s death, Chikashi began to be tormented every morning by a different kind of blather: the lurid advertisements that were splashed all over the daily newspaper, touting a never-ending stream of articles about Goro in the weekly tabloid magazines. As if hypnotized by the ads, Chikashi would inadvertently end up buying and bringing home those “women’s magazine” scandal sheets, even though reading their ghastly articles just compounded the damage and made her feel even worse. The primary topic of those articles was Goro’s relations with women.

In fact, just before Goro jumped off the building he had printed out a farewell note in which he said that this radical act was the only way to “
deny with his whole body
,” because words evidently didn’t seem sufficient, the gossip-mongering tabloid magazine article about his “relations with women” that was on the verge of hitting newsstands.

Chikashi never talked about it, but Kogito wasn’t convinced by the language of the “suicide note” or by any of the articles about the tragedy. He couldn’t find any words, anywhere, that could provide a satisfactory explanation of the death of Goro, who had always been such an extraordinary presence in Kogito’s life.

Kogito especially disagreed with the articles that tried to blame Goro’s suicide on a minor slump in his filmmaking career.
After winning a major award at a certain film festival in Italy, a Japanese comedian-turned-director, who was heading for America to promote his popular, critically acclaimed film, quipped, “When Goro was looking down from the top of that building, maybe my award gave him a teensy little push from behind.” When Kogito read that soul-chilling, stomach-turning comment, he could only think:
Good God, is that the sort of person Goro was forced to associate with
?

Gradually, though, both Kogito and Chikashi became oblivious to the incessant deluge of TV and tabloid coverage. They left the answering machine switched on all the time, and although their primary aim was to escape the constant ringing of the telephone, after a while they didn’t even bother to check for messages.

And so they muddled slowly along, somehow. Kogito and Chikashi never once spoke about what had happened to Goro, but each knew that the other was obsessing about Goro’s death, and even Akari seemed to sense that his parents thought of little else. Still, they went on paying (or pretending to pay) careful attention to their respective tasks. They lived this way for several months, seldom leaving the house.

Meanwhile, Kogito had developed a new habit—an addiction, really—which he was keeping secret from Chikashi. He had surreptitiously resumed the lively dialogues with Tagame that he had been engaging in, off and on, during the three months preceding Goro’s suicide, with the army cot in his study as the staging ground. Only now he was doing it on a more serious and a more regular basis than before—that is to say, daily. Since Goro’s suicide, Kogito had started making rules about how these midnight conversations with Tagame were to be conducted, and
he was very conscientious about following those arbitrary regulations to the letter.

Rule Number One: Never mention the fact that Goro has gone to the Other Side. This was easier said than done, of course, and at the beginning, whenever Kogito was chatting away with (or at) Tagame, he was unable to erase Goro’s suicide from his mind for even a moment. Before too long, though, new ideas just naturally began to bubble up. For one thing, Kogito was intensely curious about the Other Side, where Goro now resided. In terms of space and time, was it completely different from the world on this side? And when you were there, looking back across the existential divide, would the very fact of your death on this side be nullified, as if you had never died at all?

Before Kogito met Goro at Matsuyama High School, he had been thinking about what certain philosophers had written about the various types of death perception, but there hadn’t been anyone he could talk to about such things. Not long after he and Goro became friends, he broached the subject. In those days—and, now that he thought about it, throughout their long association—their basic style of communication had been infused with jokiness and wordplay, and they tended to aim for humorous effect even when they were discussing profoundly serious matters.

Naturally, it was inevitable that young Kogito would always take a position contrary to those expressed in the rather staid language of the philosophy books he was reading. To wit: “It goes without saying that someone who is living in this world wouldn’t be able to talk knowledgeably about his own death, based on firsthand experience. That’s because the essence of
intelligent consciousness ceases to be at the same moment that one’s actual existence is coming to an end. In other words, for people who are alive and living, death simply doesn’t exist, and by the time they experience it directly they’re already beyond cognitive understanding.” Kogito began by quoting that argument, which he had read somewhere, and then proceeded to outline his own interpretative variation on the theme.

“Let’s say there is such a thing as a human soul, and it’s alive, along with the body it inhabits. In my village, there’s a folk belief that when someone dies—that is, when a person ceases to exist in a physical form—the soul leaves the body and goes up into the air of the valley, spinning around in a spiral movement, like a tornado. (The valley is shaped rather like the inside of a widemouthed jar, and the soul doesn’t venture beyond those confines.) At some point the disembodied spirit reverses its corkscrew trajectory and returns to earth, landing at the base of a tree high up on one of the heavily wooded mountainsides that enclose the valley—not just any old tree, but a specific one that has been selected beforehand by karma, or fate. Then, when the moment is right, the old soul will make its way down to the village and find a home in the body of a newborn baby.”

Goro responded to this bit of folklore with an esoteric reference that showcased his own precociously sophisticated store of knowledge. “According to Dante,” he declared, “the right way for a human being to climb a mountain is by going around to the right, and if you take the left-hand route you could be making a big mistake. When a spirit spirals from your valley up into the forest, which way is it moving: clockwise or counterclockwise?”

Kogito’s grandmother hadn’t shared that logistical detail, so instead of giving a straightforward answer Kogito ventured a wild surmise, half in jest: “I guess that would depend on how people used to think about birth and death. If they thought it was
bad
when the soul left an old body and went to the root of a tree, and
good
when that same soul entered into the body of a newborn baby, then I guess the spiral would be clockwise in the case of rebirth and counterclockwise for death.”

Then he added, “Seriously, though, if the soul is able to detach itself from the body in that way, then the spirit must not be aware that it’s dead. So what dies is just the body, and at the moment when the flesh ceases to be alive the spirit goes its own way. In other words, the spirit goes on living forever, divorced from the body’s finite sense of time and space. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand it myself, so I’m just groping around for an explanation. But I think that just as there’s infinity and also a single instant in time, and just as the entire cosmos can coexist with a single particle, isn’t it possible that when we die we simply move into a different dimension of space and time? If that’s the case, then maybe the soul could continue existing in a fourth-dimensional state of innocent bliss, without ever noticing that there’s such a thing as death.”

And now that giddy, carefree existential conversation they had enjoyed on that day in their youth, having more fun fooling around with the high-flown words than with the actual concepts—now that seemingly abstract scenario had really come to pass. And here was Goro’s spirit, lively as ever, talking to Kogito through Tagame as if he truly hadn’t noticed that his mortal body had already gone up in smoke.

5

Late that night, on the day after Goro took his leap into the next dimension, Kogito finally made it home with the bloodstained handkerchief still pressed against the TV-camera gash between his eyes. He made dinner for Akari, who had been listening to CDs with the answering machine on and the telephone ringer silenced, and then, after washing his injured face (he kept the light in the bathroom turned off, and didn’t even glance at himself in the mirror), Kogito trudged up the stairs to his study.

He took Tagame down from the shelf where he had replaced it in the small hours of the previous night, after being scolded by Chikashi. On the train home, Kogito had had an epiphany about the tape he’d been listening to on Tagame, before last night’s strange farewell—namely, Goro’s reminiscences about the time he explained one of Rimbaud’s poems to Kogito. (It was late that day, around 5 or 6
PM
, when a package containing the final tape recording was delivered to Kogito’s house, though by that time Goro’s body was already in police custody, being held as the unidentified corpse of
someone who has met an unnatural death.) In retrospect, after what had happened, that monologue seemed to be rife with hidden meanings.

“When we were in Mat’chama, how well do you suppose we really understood French poetry? After that you went off to college and majored in French literature, but you mainly read prose, as I recall. And since I never made a formal study of the language, I can’t really judge our abilities,” Goro had said in his usual smooth, flowing voice, with no hint that anything out of the ordinary might be going on in his head. “But I remember that you used to copy the poems out of Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud onto hundreds of little pieces of paper and stick them on the wall at your mother’s house in the mountains. Rimbaud really had a hold on us, didn’t he?”

“That’s true,” Kogito had replied nostalgically, after pressing the
STOP
button on the tape recorder. “In those days, all we did was fantasize about the mystical meanings and how they applied to us. But I think that as time went by we were able to refine our understanding of Rimbaud based on scholarly research, wouldn’t you agree?” Whereupon he pressed the
PLAY
button again. And that was how, the night before, Kogito had managed to have a long, antic “chat” with his already deceased brother-in-law about Arthur Rimbaud, the French prodigy poet.

And now, at last, Kogito became aware of just how dense and thick-skulled he had been: Goro had clearly been using a verse of Rimbaud’s to say his own good-bye. It couldn’t have been more obvious, really. For openers, the poem Goro had been focusing on was “Adieu,” or “Farewell”: the same poem
(as translated by Kobayashi) that Kogito had laboriously copied onto scraps of paper when they were teenagers.