The Changeling (30 page)

There was a letter attached to the package, signed with a name Kogito didn’t recognize. The prose style was that of someone fairly young, but even though the characters were rendered with a fountain pen rather than a brush, it was obvious that the writer had studied calligraphy.

In the dead of winter, someone we have loved and respected for a long time—someone you know, as well—passed away. This turtle was caught by our late teacher on the last of the night-fishing expeditions that he enjoyed so much, using three sweetfish as bait. Our teacher was saying that he wanted to send this turtle to you when you returned from Berlin, and we’ve been keeping it alive in a fish tank. (Your travel schedule was posted on your fan club’s Internet site, so we knew when to send it.) Our teacher had read in the newspaper that you liked to prepare and cook your own turtles, and he was very impressed. Please honor his dying wish, which was for you to cook this turtle by yourself. The truth is, the day we sent you this turtle was also the day we disbanded the training camp where we all learned so much under our teacher’s guidance
.

The letter ended with a spine-chilling sentence in the Iyo dialect Kogito had grown up with:
I don’t think we’ll be bothering you again after this
...

He knew it was purely psychosomatic, but as he read those words Kogito felt a distinct sensation of discomfort, like a cold jolt of electricity, shooting through the second joint of the big toe of his left foot. It stirred him up, somehow, as if a challenge had been issued. Kogito had a pattern of exhibiting stranger-than-usual behavior whenever he returned from abroad in a state of sleep deprivation and in the unpleasant thrall of the time difference—especially on his first night home, when he was still in a state of keyed-up excitement. On this occasion, he was consciously trying to control these impulses, but as
midnight (Japan time) approached he was seized by an irresistible urge to cook the turtle.

The amphibian had arrived in a box that someone had made by cutting lengths of thick plywood and nailing them firmly together. The box was about twenty-four inches long, sixteen inches wide, and eight inches tall, but while some sturdy-looking aquatic plants (the likes of which Kogito had never seen before) were peeking out through the tiny cracks between the boards, the box was soundly constructed and no water was leaking from the bottom. Judging from the weight of the box, it was immediately apparent that this was no ordinary creature.

Kogito finally managed to pry off the tightly nailed lid, and when he pushed aside the thick aquatic plants, whose leaves resembled gecko fingers, he saw the bluish-black shell of the turtle, which was hunkered down on the floor of the box. The creature was at least fourteen inches long and ten inches wide; Kogito had never seen such a large turtle outside of an aquarium, and the word that sprang to mind—rather than the genteel, recreational “cooking”—was “processing,” with its connotations of manual labor and sustained effort. Kogito had an awful premonition that turning this monster of a turtle into soup was not going to be an easy task.

The turtle was wedged into the bottom of the box, unable to stretch out its neck because of the narrowness of the space, but its short, thick, stumpy head was plainly visible. Kogito’s first task was to try to move the box to the corner of the kitchen, but when he tilted the box, the turtle planted its stout legs and began to raise a ruckus, scrabbling loudly at the boards with its claws.

Kogito realized that he needed to warn Chikashi that he was about to charge into combat against a formidable opponent, so it might be better if she didn’t come into the kitchen that night. (She was still awake, reading a book in her bedroom.) After completing that errand—Chikashi had looked a bit bewildered, but he didn’t take the time to explain what was going on—Kogito hurried back to the kitchen and hoisted the heavy box, with the gigantic turtle inside, into the sink. Then he got out the heavy artillery: a large, pointed carving knife and a Chinese knife that had some heft to it. The idea was to use these weapons to subdue the turtle but, from the beginning, things didn’t go as planned.

The wooden box was just slightly too large to fit into the bottom of the stainless-steel sink, and it kept listing uncontrollably to one side while the turtle stood with its head jammed into the suddenly shallow corner of the box. When Kogito tried to return the turtle’s body to a horizontal position, a two-handed maneuver, he couldn’t help marveling at how heavy it felt. The creature’s tough, three-pronged claws—Kogito was reminded that the Latin word for turtle, reflecting this conformation, was
trionyx
—were scraping frantically at the bottom of the box, and Kogito could feel the unexpectedly powerful vibrations in both his hands.

Clearly, this was not an opponent to be taken lightly. Kogito looked at the turtle, which had fallen back onto the bottom board with a loud clunk, and once again he got a sense of its youth. As nearly as he could tell, looking down from above, there wasn’t a single scar on its shell or on the pale yellow border that surrounded it.

As a boy, Kogito had once seen a turtle nearly as big as his head in a shallow pool in the valley, standing very still and
blending in perfectly with the vegetal slime. He had been frustrated because there was no way to catch that prize specimen, but from what he could see by peering down from atop a rock, its body was covered with innumerable scars, and the shell itself looked quite old and worn-out. In terms of surface area, this turtle was several times the size of that one. Its whole body had a young, virile look to it, and the shell had the deep blue-gray luster of polished steel.

Kogito gazed wonderingly at the turtle, his mind overflowing with questions.
How on earth had this turtle managed to live so long, and grow so large, without getting a single injury—indeed, with its body as good as new? Was it because it was secretly living in a deep, tranquil pool in the depths of the forest, where humans never ventured? And then did a flood come along and carry it off to a populated area, where it ended up being enticed one night, against its wiser instincts, by three juicy sweetfish dangling in the water?

Kogito picked up the heavy box in his arms and put it down on a more level surface, between the refrigerator and the back door. When he lifted the far side of the box, the edge of the turtle’s shell slipped down until it reached the corner on the side closest to Kogito. A moment later it began to move forward, scrabbling the three-pronged claws of its forefeet on the board. Not wanting to let this chance slip by, Kogito summoned up all his strength and, in a flash, brought the sharp blade of the carving knife down on the neck of the slow-moving turtle. But the turtle, showing the tough resiliency concealed beneath the soft, loose skin of its neck, swiftly withdrew its head into its shell.

Almost immediately, the stumpy head emerged again and the turtle tried to move forward. On one side of its neck, a
crescent-shaped wound the size of a fingernail paring was filling with jet-black blood. Now the turtle, which had hitherto been silent, began to make the sharp
shu-shu
sound of labored breathing. The animal was unmistakably angry, but it wasn’t being terribly cautious. Indeed, its wounded neck was still stretched out, full-length.

After making a quick visual assessment of the marginal space inside the box in relation to the size of the knife, Kogito attacked the vulnerable, exposed neck again with renewed vigor, but the turtle’s neck seemed to be equipped with a preternatural elasticity that caused the carving knife to bounce harmlessly off. With its head pulled only halfway into the shell, the turtle suddenly rushed forward to the edge of the box and then, digging its claws into one side panel, desperately tried to clamber out. Kogito was still holding the knife in one hand, and he had no choice but to hit the turtle on both sides of its neck with the blade in order to push it back to its original position. As he continued this new line of attack, the knife made deep grooves in the turtle’s neck, but that wasn’t enough to subdue the still-vital head before it retreated into the shell. Now the turtle began snorting loudly before once again poking its head out of the shell, almost as if it were throwing down the gauntlet.

The all-out war between Kogito and the turtle raged on, but for the entire first half, even though Kogito was staging a well-armed, one-sided attack against a defenseless opponent, he still felt as if he was fighting a losing battle.
It’s never been like this before
, he thought. Kogito had killed and cooked any number of turtles that had been sent to him by his brother-in-law (the husband of his younger sister, Asa). On those occasions, the initial step of cutting off the turtle’s head hadn’t been
easy, by any means, but it had never been as difficult as this. He had always used the same method: he held the shell immobile on a large cutting board with one hand, then forced the turtle’s head out of hiding and sliced it off cleanly with a knife.

When he thought back on his previous successes with that procedure, Kogito understood why he was having such a hard time now. It was really quite simple. When the turtle was resting on a cutting board, there was no obstacle on the other side of the cutting board, nor was there anything on the near side to restrict the wrist-to-elbow movement of the arm that was attacking the neck. The hand that was holding the knife could move freely. Plus, Kogito’s sight line was at a diagonal angle to the turtle’s neck, so his aim was true.

This turtle, however, was ensconced in a deep wooden box. When Kogito tried to bring the knife down on its neck, the tip tended to run into the edge of the box, and Kogito’s wrist movement was restricted by the edge of the box on the near side. Moreover, he was looking down at the turtle’s neck from almost directly overhead, so it was difficult to gauge the depth of the box based on his aerial view.

Because he was unable to increase the velocity of the knife on the downward swing, Kogito had to depend on the force of the collision between the heaviness and mass of the knife and the turtle’s neck. Therefore, he changed over to the heavy Chinese knife, in accordance with the basic principle he had learned in a physics classroom, several eons ago: mv
²
.

When he performed a trial run, the Chinese knife did seem to add to the power of his arm when he brought the blade down on the bottom of the box, and he was able to make substantial grooves in the wood. But when it came to attacking the turtle’s
neck, it was even harder to measure space and trajectory with the eye because the knife took up so much room and was so heavy. After repeated failures, Kogito had only managed to lop off the tip of the beast’s little nose (which was already too small in proportion to the gigantic body), so that it looked like a horizontal cross section of a thick stalk of new-mown grass. And all the while, in the face of Kogito’s frenetic onslaught, the turtle kept stubbornly sticking its head out of the shell and making that angry, distressed
shu-shu
sound.

At last Kogito, totally exhausted from his efforts, flopped down on the floor next to the wooden box, where he could hear the turtle breathing unevenly through its truncated snout. The torrent of knife blows didn’t appear to have had any significant effect, but the thin blood-tinged layer of water that covered the bottom of the box was proof that at least some of those blows had hit their mark. Without bothering to wash his scarlet hands—his long-sleeved jersey shirt, too, was covered with livid splotches of the turtle’s blood—Kogito stood up and left the kitchen, planning to continue his intermission on the sofa in the living room.

To his surprise, he found Chikashi sitting on a chair in the dining room, wearing her pajamas and looking, with her makeup all scrubbed off, like a young girl. She gazed up at him with a fearful expression on her face. “If it’s such a struggle, why don’t you just turn the poor thing loose in the stream?” she asked. “Remember, that’s what you did with the last batch of turtles that Asa sent—you and Akari took them down to the stream and let them go.”

“It’s much too late for that!” Kogito replied, unable to suppress the wild excitement in his voice. “Anyway, what would
be the point of throwing an injured creature into that mucky ditch?”

Without further discussion, Chikashi beat a hasty retreat to her bedroom and Kogito lay down on the couch, breathing in ragged gasps. During the past day, since his return from Berlin, he had been focused on unpacking and on returning a backlog of phone calls, and there hadn’t been time to have a real conversation with Chikashi. And now they’d had this disastrous exchange about the fate of the turtle ... Almost from the moment he began this task, Kogito had been plagued by gradually deepening feelings of regret, but he was a strong proponent of the idea that once you’ve started something there’s no turning back. Thus he had no choice but to persevere until he attained his final goal: homemade turtle soup.

Kogito caught a whiff of his own rank body odor; he positively reeked of fishy-smelling turtle blood. Suppose he gave up right now, without achieving his goal, and let the turtle, with its nonfatal injuries and crudely bobbed nose, take up residence in the kitchen? Surely Chikashi would find a way of feeding it, and every time Kogito poked his head into the general vicinity, it would recognize its tormentor and make that menacing
shu-shu
sound. Would that be a tolerable life, for anyone?

When Kogito returned to work a short while later, he decided to abandon his attempts to sever the turtle’s head with a single vertical blow. To put it in Western-movie terms, instead of confronting his adversary with a pistol, he proceeded to blast away with a shotgun, using the Chinese knife to hack away at the part of the shell that was right next to the turtle’s neck. Before long he had managed to open a large, bloody wound, and when the turtle was no longer able to withdraw into its shell,
Kogito finally managed to cut off its head. Then it was just a matter of executing the usual dismemberment procedure, but every time Kogito tried to cut off one of the turtle’s four legs, the now-headless torso (or, more precisely, the legs themselves) seemed to be putting up a powerful and tenacious resistance.