The Changeling (43 page)

Even as a child, Chikashi was the type who didn’t react emotionally to things, but she still found it difficult to look at that
wretched, helpless-looking pair of boys for more than a few seconds. Beyond that, she had no distinct memories of how she felt at that moment, but she did remember how the boys behaved after they straggled in and what she did in response. They seemed to know what they needed to do—get cleaned up—but they were so exhausted that they were moving in slow motion, like zombies. Chikashi was perplexed rather than annoyed by this behavior, and she stood by on the sidelines, ready to be helpful.

The boys walked around to the back of the lodgings, and she followed the same route inside. She opened the shutters so the light would illuminate the outdoors, then closed the storm shutters that faced the front garden. She understood instinctively that Goro and Kogito were making every effort to avoid having anyone see them with their clothes off. At the base of a crape myrtle tree whose trunk resembled a naked animal, a stone basin had been placed to catch the water coursing down through a length of split bamboo. There was a verandah in front of the washbasin, and that was where Chikashi laid out two sets of Goro’s clothing and two bath towels.

Big, plush towels were a rarity in those days, but their mother had presciently stocked up on them before commodities became scarce, as a treat for their father, who was recuperating from tuberculosis. Goro had gotten used to luxurious Western-style bath towels, and now he would get very cranky if he didn’t have them instead of the narrow, flimsy Japanese versions, which tended to resemble an insubstantial dish towel or a length of cheesecloth.

Goro glanced around for just long enough to see what Chikashi was doing, but his friend was looking in the other direction, hanging his head. Chikashi was standing inside the
shutters, and while she watched, Goro stripped naked to the waist and began to wash his body. (Although he was unusually tall and robust of build, on this night he looked oddly skinny and shrunken.) In due course his friend, who was standing next to him, followed suit. They were both roughly scrubbing their torsos with odd-shaped pieces of cloth, from their slender shoulders and narrow chests to their bent-over necks and abdomens, which resembled cylinders carved with furrows. The “washrags” they were using, Chikashi seemed to remember, were the boys’ own white tank-style undershirts. Their other clothes lay in a heap on the ground at their feet.

Standing there together, Goro and Kogito looked like a couple of soot-colored, pointy-headed imps, about four feet tall. That was because they had stuck their heads into the stone washbasin to wet their longish hair, and the water had made it stand up in peaks. Goro nonchalantly shed his trousers, and his friend did the same; Chikashi thought they were probably too tired to feel embarrassed or shy. Her eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and she could make out their small, boyish buttocks, as well as their testicles (which reminded her of a baby’s tightly clenched fist) and their penises, sticking out below their abdomens like misplaced fingers.

After Goro and his friend had dried themselves off with the bath towels and headed toward the verandah, with chilled-looking faces, to put on the clean, dry clothes Chikashi had left there, she quickly dived back into her futon in the shadow of the Buddhist altar. As she lay there with the quilt pulled over her head, listening to the sound of her own breathing, she could hear the two boys slowly, wearily making their way into the temple, and she was filled with pity once again.

4

During the five years before she married Kogito (there was a gap of time between the night she saw the pitiful youths at the temple in Matsuyama and the time when she and Kogito began corresponding after her mother had asked him to look for some books, including copies of
Winnie-the-Pooh
and
The House at Pooh Corner
, in the used-book store district of Tokyo), Chikashi respected him as “a person who reads books.” She also thought in some vague way that Kogito would probably end up pursuing a line of work that was appropriate for “a person who reads books.” She seemed to perceive a certain childlike simplicity, and a degree of disengagement from the real world, in Kogito’s extreme bookishness. That was why, as their marriage plans proceeded, she had some remaining hesitation (quite apart from Goro’s vociferous opposition). Yet the essence of the way she felt about Kogito didn’t change after they were married, and even after Goro died, she felt keenly that her husband, as “a person who reads books,” was still the same as he had been when he was young, with all that that implied.

When Kogito’s mood had been buoyed by reading a new book, he would bring that excitement (and, sometimes, the book itself) to the dinner table and share it with his family. One night, he was talking about some new research into the Gospel according to Mark by a pioneering Japanese biblical scholar whom he held in great esteem. If someone had asked Chikashi whether or not her husband was a completely fair-minded human being when it came to living as a member of society, she would have had to admit to some reservations. However, when he talked about books, even if he disagreed with the content he never tried to oversimplify or second-guess what the author was saying.

There was an incident in which Professor Musumi (who had been Kogito’s patron and mentor for most of his life and had even been the official go-between for his marriage to Chikashi) took his pupil to task over his critical methodology to such an extent that it was apparently painful even to remember. Kogito never spoke of the incident, but ever after that he had made a special effort to be scrupulously impartial.

On this night, Kogito began by reading aloud from a new, classically based, collaborative translation of the Bible by a Japanese research society whose leader was the author of the book that had made such an impression on Kogito. In this case, the passage was about how Mary Magdalene, Mary (mother of James), and Salomé tried to go anoint Jesus, after the Crucifixion. Chikashi, who as a rule didn’t make hasty off-the-cuff comments, declared that in this translation, unlike in some earlier, stiffer versions, the women’s behavior came across as so completely natural that she found herself identifying with them.

“Even if someone important to us was killed and buried in a cave, if we women needed to do something essential like
going there to anoint him, we wouldn’t think twice about it,” she said. “I mean, I’m saying that even though I don’t really know what’s involved in anointing a dead body.”

“I’m not an expert on that sort of thing, either,” her husband said cheerfully.

“At any rate,” Chikashi went on, “those three women summoned up their courage and set out, and on the way I think they would have been chatting about this and that. However, right after they had that frightening encounter with the supernatural being, the angel, all of them would probably just be walking quickly along, with downcast eyes, staring at the ground in silence, don’t you think? And you know where it says in the Bible, ‘They lifted their eyes and were amazed to see that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance’? That seems like a perfectly normal reaction, as well.”

“That may be so,” Kogito said, “but I really don’t think these were ordinary women. Although of course you aren’t an ordinary woman, either—maybe that’s why you understand them so well. Now that I think about it, there’s a similar scene in one of my novels when the older brother, Gii, drowns, and his sister, Asa (who’s named after my own sister, of course), single-handedly recovers the corpse and then stands guard until the police arrive, to make sure the curiosity seekers don’t come too close ...”

“Being able to rely on women like Asa and me—‘not ordinary women,’ as you put it—must have been convenient for you and Goro, too,” Chikashi remarked.

Unfazed by that response, which seemed to be tinged with sarcasm, Kogito began to read aloud the next passage, in which the messenger angel is waiting for the women in the tomb.
When he had finished, he recapped the author’s questions about what happened when Jesus rose from the dead: “Why were the women so frightened that they didn’t say anything to anyone, in spite of having been ordered by the angels to ‘go, tell his disciples and Peter’—sometimes called Simon Peter—‘that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’ And why did Mark end so abruptly, at that point?”

Kogito was particularly intrigued by the writers—the authors of the Bible—whose work seemed to parallel his own, and although he didn’t think his own novelist’s opinions had any bearing on the interpretation of the Gospel, he felt, personally, that the original author’s ambiguous way of ending this particular tale was an effective literary technique. However, while they disagreed on that point, he gave the Bible scholar’s treatise high marks for the way (unusual in Japan) that he presented the research, first setting out all the little differences in interpretive methodology and then proceeding to examine, one by one, the pros and cons of various theories and opinions—his own and those of others.

As Kogito rambled on in that vein Chikashi was only half listening, in a vague, abstracted way, for she was caught up in a daydream of her own. These women, she was thinking, had been followers of Jesus from the early stages of his community-organizing activity, and they themselves had been seriously tested. They were so resolute that when Jesus was nailed to the cross, they stayed there and watched over him from a distance, even after all the male disciples had fled. Surely there was some significance in the fact that these same brave, stalwart women had later been so frightened that they had run away in silence.
Was it enough simply to accept that that’s the way the Gospel ends, with the seemingly negative information that the angel’s words had not been relayed to the disciples—just as was written at the end of the Gospel?

But suppose the angel had asked the women to spread the word that Jesus had risen, and suppose that Jesus hadn’t happened to meet up with the disciples in Galilee, after the Resurrection. If that had been due to the women’s failure to relay the angel’s message, and if their fearful silence had been recorded in the Gospel, they would probably have been blamed for eons to come. But all’s well that ends well, and didn’t Jesus rise up and appear in front of his disciples, restored to life, even though the women never relayed the angel’s message?

Continuing along those lines, Chikashi thought:
On that dark night when my brother hadn’t come home for two days, I was waiting for him, and I was afraid. And after my brother and his friend finally came back, when I saw how pathetic they looked I trembled violently and almost ended up passing out, just like those biblical women. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid
...

I never told anyone about that night, either, because I was filled with fear. That’s all there was to it. But what does it mean that the terror I felt, as I lay awake in the total darkness just before daybreak, is still resonating inside me? Even if there is some special significance, it doesn’t help my dead brother or my living husband or me as I am now. But still, I can’t help wondering—if the events of that dark night had never happened, would things have ended up as they did?

Chikashi imagined the scene that had taken place two thousand years before, when the terrified women ran away and
hid in their homes without telling anyone what had happened, at the same time that the resurrected Jesus was trying to meet with his disciples in Galilee. While the women were keeping their frightened silence, the disciples—who, as related in the Gospel according to Luke, had heard what had befallen the women—were walking toward the village of Emmaus, and their hearts had been “set ablaze” by the story they heard from the mysterious stranger who appeared along the way. Not realizing that their new companion was actually Jesus, they listened to his words, and “their hearts burned within them.” When Chikashi thought about the disciples and the women who were frightened into silence, she found a certain measure of comfort in the realization that she felt a common bond with those scared, silent women.

And then Chikashi thought once again about the picture book Kogito had brought back from Berlin and how it had shaken her to the core. Ida’s mother, who did nothing but mope around, appeared to be a weak, helpless female, but Sendak drew her as if she were one of those biblical women in the Gospel according to Mark, frightened into silence. The first time she read
Outside Over There
, Chikashi had felt an overwhelming rush of fond recognition and sympathy for that sad-faced mother under the trees ...

For myself
, Chikashi thought,
I can pinpoint the precise time when I had the feeling of silently fleeing from an unbearably frightening experience. It was when I gave birth to an abnormal baby. Somewhere beyond my two naked, elevated legs, I heard the nurse who had just caught the newborn baby exclaim, “Oh, my God!” And ever after that, in the darkest depths of my heart, that nurse’s voice has been echoing endlessly. I’ve even gone so far as to think that her horrified exclamation might have been the same scream I stifled in my own throat when I saw Goro and his friend standing outside the temple at midnight in such a terrible state
.

And when I regained consciousness after having passed out from shock, that day in the maternity ward, for a moment I couldn’t tell whether I was waking up in a private room in a hospital in Tokyo or in that dark, cold temple in Matsuyama
.

5

There was a long stretch of time during which Goro never came to the house in Seijo Gakuen for the express purpose of seeing Kogito. He did, however, drop by the Choko household occasionally—for example, when he was filming at a former major movie soundstage in nearby Tamagawa that had been turned into a rental facility since the slump in the filmmaking business.

One of the things about Kogito that Chikashi had come to find interesting was that although he didn’t like to have outsiders handle the books in his personal library, he made an exception for Goro and no one else. Not only did he allow Goro free access to his precious books, but he didn’t even make a fuss when Goro ran off with a book that Kogito hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. But once Goro had taken a volume home with him, it was his custom to read that book intensively until he had fully understood it, so Kogito knew better than to hold his breath waiting for a given book to be safely returned.