The Changeling (12 page)

“You will?” The woman looked surprised. “That’s great. Thank you very much. So the plan is, we’ll stop by your apartment on the day in question and take you directly to the meeting place. It’s a famous hotel, right on Potsdam Square, where they’ll be holding the Berlin Film Festival starting next week. Come to think of it, Goro showed his films in that festival from time to time, didn’t he? That really takes me back. Anyway, your interview will take place in the main hall—as I mentioned just now, the director who will be handling it is very distinguished, so the powers that be are allowing him to use the large hall for filming.

“Unfortunately, the delegation of Japanese movie people won’t yet have arrived in Berlin. If our appointment were a few days later, I would have been able to introduce you to some very famous celebrities. That’s really a shame—although on second
thought perhaps it’s just as well, since I’ve heard that you’ve been keeping your distance from everyone in the film industry for some time because of your relationship with Goro.”

The bus stop was just a square pillar with a sign that read H. On the other side, down the hill, was another, much larger park; Kogito had never been there, but he knew that it was the location of the university’s medical school and the renowned Max Planck Institute. As he stood there being buffeted by the icy wind, he had long since given up trying to hold his own against this insistent woman (whose name, according to her business card, was Mrs. Mitsu Azuma-Böme). All he could do was listen in silence to her relentless chatter, which made him think, ruefully, about the old saying: “No matter how bad your aim, if you fire off enough bullets you’re bound to hit something eventually.”

Contrary to this Azuma-Böme woman’s supposition, Kogito had no recollection of ever having heard anything about a plan for a German director to make a film based on one of Goro’s original screenplays. He thought it likely that Goro, who was somewhat weak-willed (or, more charitably, softhearted) and hated to say no to anyone, might simply have been unable to summon the energy to resist this woman’s blandishments.

The likelihood increased if you considered the possibility (again, this was wild surmise) that Goro might have had some kind of involvement with the woman’s daughter and that relationship had become complicated and problematic. What Kogito did remember hearing spoken of as a certainty, while Goro was still alive, was a plan to take the American profits from Goro’s most recent hit movie, bank those funds in Los Angeles, and then embark on a new film project there, using local actors and crew.

If that was the case, given that Germany had always warmly embraced Goro’s films, with box-office numbers second only to those they racked up in America, it was entirely possible that Goro had thought about setting up a similar project with a German cast and crew.

On top of that—this was something that happened three years earlier, immediately after Goro’s last sojourn in Berlin—Kogito remembered hearing that there were some young German film students who wanted to take the movie Goro had made from one of Kogito’s novels (
Der stumme Schrei
, in German), dismantle it, and reassemble it as an experimental film. At that time, Goro had also asked Kogito whether he would need to be paid for the right to use the film or whether he might be inclined to let the young scholars use it for free.

This conversation took place on an evening when Goro, Chikashi, and Kogito, along with their assorted offspring, went on a rare group outing to have dinner in Roppongi. On that night, Kogito wasn’t able to do anything more than listen to Goro’s proposition and promise to think about it later. That was because Chikashi openly criticized the plan, pointing out that it was uncommonly inconsiderate of them not only to ask Kogito, the novelist, to allow his work to be used without any payment for the film rights, but also to give carte blanche for the work of art to be freely taken apart and rearranged. After Chikashi’s tongue-lashing, Goro retreated into a timid, cowed silence, but Kogito remembered having the distinct feeling that Goro hadn’t come up with that idea on his own.

Under the cloudy Berlin skies, with dusk darkening into evening—it wasn’t long past 4
PM
, but it already felt like night to Kogito—the tall double-decker bus finally hove into sight,
pitching and rolling like a ship at sea. Kogito started to say his polite good-byes to the woman but she winced, and the expression on her small face, enveloped in that cloud of unnaturally black hair, suggested that he had done something terribly rude.

“Don’t worry,” she said coldly. “I’m not planning to follow you all the way to your apartment. This same bus goes to Potsdam Square. Didn’t you know that? Were you afraid that
I
was going to start acting like some crazy
Mädchen für alles
or something? How would you have dealt with that?”

Huffily, Mrs. Azuma-Böme clambered quickly onto the bus and began to ascend the steep, twisting staircase to the second deck. Kogito somehow ended up following her, and they sat down side by side on the right side of the front row. He found it difficult to say anything to the woman, for fear that her present fierce silence might revert at any moment to the equally intense loquacity she had displayed at the bus stop, so he just stared out the window at the grocery stores and other shops that were just beginning to buzz with early-evening activity.

The bus approached Rathenauplatz, and at the point where Kogito could look out over the lively bustle of Ku’damm from his high second-floor seat, he bowed to Mrs. Azuma-Böme and started to descend the stairs alone. She returned his bow with an authoritative nod, bobbing the mass of hair whose inky blackness looked so incongruous on someone her age, and two perfectly straight parallel lines appeared where her lips should have been. Once again, Kogito had the illusion that the woman was holding a small harmonica in her mouth.

As he waited to cross a wide boulevard, heading toward the bus stop where he would transfer to his final conveyance, Kogito looked up at the already black sky, then lowered his eyes
to monitor the color progression of the stoplight. That’s when it hit him.

“Aha!” he said out loud, more like a sigh than an exclamation, as he put two and two together. (Soliloquizing to himself in public was a habit that always seemed to be resurrected whenever he was living abroad.) But wait—did the “scandal girl” whose photograph had been splashed across the cover of the tabloid magazine really resemble the woman with the harmonica mouth? Everyone said that photo was a deliberate setup staged by the girl and her unsavory boyfriend, who worked for the tabloid publisher, but in any case that was definitely Goro sitting next to her, looking uncommonly depressed.

If, indeed, the girl in the picture (the purported
M. für alles
) had the same harmonica mouth as her mother—two straight, parallel lines—and if Goro had nicknamed her “Bean Harmonica” ...
Well
, Kogito thought,
my powers of observation regarding women never could hold a candle to Goro’s gifts in that area
. Yet Goro’s extraordinary perceptiveness had almost never prompted him to avoid (much less run away from) trouble with women.

And that, too, was classic Goro.

CHAPTER TWO
This Fragile Thing
Called Man

1

Kogito taught at the Free University twice a week, and on the other weekdays he went there to eat lunch with his colleagues. But he spent the majority of his time in Berlin by himself, and one of the things he thought about in his solitude was how many times his conversations with Goro had turned, over the years, to the subject of suicide. That topic cropped up frequently in the Tagame talks, as well. Of course, ever since Goro jumped to his death Kogito hadn’t had the slightest desire to talk about suicide—indeed, avoiding that subject was one of the cardinal Rules of Tagame. On the other hand, Goro himself had freely discussed that very topic on the tapes.

“From the first time I met you in Mat’chama, I felt that I was destined to play a certain role in your life,” Goro said on one recording. “There’s no way of saying whether I played that role effectively or not; maybe the ‘problem’ was all in my mind, and I was just wrestling with myself—doing one-man sumo, as the saying goes. In any case, when our circumstances changed and we weren’t seeing each other as often as before, there were
people who came along and assumed that role in my stead. Still, it might not have been entirely my imagination that you needed looking out for. I mean, the people who took over that role from me weren’t freewheeling yakuza-hipster types like me.” (The self-deprecation was typical Goro, and so was the hyperbole.) “You’ll probably deny this right off the bat, if only because you have a deep-seated tendency to be contrarian, but the truth is you’ve really been a very blessed human being. Now that you’re within hailing distance of your sixties, isn’t it about time to get rid of the
basso ostinato
in your way of living? You know what I mean: the bass notes of your relentless self-mockery.”

When Goro started talking about his predestined role in Kogito’s life, Kogito always wondered whether Goro was really trying to say that he had been Kogito’s tutor and mentor and, apparently, his guardian angel, too. But then he realized that a thought like that was exactly the sort of naïve oversimplification that
deserved
to be subjected to self-ridicule. At that point, he pressed the
STOP
button and asked, “Now that you and I hardly ever see each other anymore, who do you think has taken your place?”

When Kogito hit the
PLAY
button again, Goro charged aggressively on, as if he had known exactly how Kogito was going to respond. “I think Professor Musumi has stepped into my shoes, and Takamura, as well. I’m sure you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say they aren’t yakuza types like me.”

Feeling a bit disconcerted, Kogito stopped the tape again and thought about the link that connected Professor Musumi, Takamura, and Goro. They were all people he had known for a long time and been very fond of, but even though he had been Professor Musumi’s student at university, there was no way you
could call that distinguished scholar of the French Renaissance a tutor, although he had certainly been a mentor. As for the composer Takamura, that was a slightly different dynamic as well.

At the same time, Kogito would have liked to say to Goro: “I know you like to joke about this, but seriously, you aren’t a yakuza type at all. If anything, you’re the anti-yakuza. I mean, gangsters perceive you as such a formidable adversary that a genuine yakuza boss sent a couple of goons to attack you!”

Maybe Goro was just getting a kick out of using the Tagame system, but when Kogito pressed the
PLAY
button again he noticed that Goro seemed to be in remarkably high spirits as he picked up where he’d left off. Once again, he was so nakedly candid that Kogito was momentarily shocked.

“I think what I was doing in Mat’chama was trying to create a barrier to keep you from killing yourself,” Goro said. “Of course, I’m not sure to what extent I was consciously aware of that, at the time. But when I think back now, that’s the only thing it could have been. That strikes me as very strange, because it’s not as if I was some teenage saint, hanging out with everyone I met in Mat’chama from purely altruistic motives. Although you couldn’t say that I was a totally selfish, self-serving scoundrel, either, by any means! But in your case, especially—from the time you were seventeen or eighteen, there were some things about you that I simply couldn’t grasp. You were really a hard nut to crack, even more than you yourself realized. Maybe it was in spite of your isolated deep-mountain upbringing, or maybe it was precisely
because
of that, but you were definitely a horse of a different color.

“Still, it wasn’t until we were both in our thirties that I started consciously thinking about you as a potential suicide,
and even then, that was only because someone shoved the idea under my nose. That was when you and I were both busy all year round—I had started my own career and you were always reading or writing books—and we only got to hang out once in a blue moon. As you know, there are some bars around Tokyo where certain people in the movie business congregate. (Or, I should say, people who have made a career on the production end of moviemaking.) Anyway, when I used to go to one of those bars I would sometimes run into your friend Takamura, who was there because, as you know, he often composed film scores. This was before he got sick, of course. He would spot me from the entrance and swoop down on my table like a great black bird. And the first thing he always did, after sitting down next to me, was to ask about you.

“‘Have you seen Kogito lately? Is he all right?’ and so on, without even bothering to lower his voice. And it wasn’t the usual sort of small talk about how your work was going or how Akari was getting along. No, he always came right out and said it, without beating around the bush: ‘I’m worried that Kogito might commit suicide one of these days.’ That’s exactly what he said. And he asked me the same questions every time I saw him, so there’s no way it could have been a onetime misunderstanding. And after that I finally understood why I, too, had felt a vague compulsion to watch out for you, back when you were seventeen or eighteen—it was because I was afraid you might kill yourself. That explains everything!

“Okay, I know what you’re thinking: it’s very possible that Takamura would have thought such a thing, but what about Professor Musumi? You probably find it hard to imagine how that distinguished professor could have given me the same idea,
right? Of course, there’s no reason for someone like me to see a great scholar like that on a regular basis. I did meet him briefly when you and Chikashi had your small wedding, but I hadn’t seen him at all since then until we happened to have dinner together in Paris. His wife was there that night, as well.”

Kogito pressed the
STOP
button, took his book of Professor Musumi’s
Complete Works
off the shelf, and checked the chronological tables in the back. (Later, he had taken that same volume to Berlin with him, with the intention of donating it to the school of comparative literature before he returned to Tokyo.) Then he turned back to Tagame and replied in great excitement: “That must have been at the time of Professor Musumi’s last stay in France! It was the year there was a trash collectors’ strike in Paris. I still have a souvenir that he brought back for me; it’s a miniature-type painting that shows the entire city of Paris, and here and there you can see smoke rising from the piles of burning trash in the streets. It’s sitting on the desk in front of me, here in Seijo.”