The Changeling (35 page)

Finally, there were
gyoza
(Chinese pot-sticker dumplings, stuffed with pork or shrimp and vegetables), submerged in savory broth and served in a large cauldron. The individual pots were heated on charcoal braziers placed atop fragments of roofing tile. The lamb dish was always warm, too; no sooner had the fat begun to congeal than the platter would be whisked away and a hot, sizzling substitute rushed out in its place.

Kogito was surprised to see that the person who carried the jumbo-sized, black-patinaed Chinese wok, holding the iron-pipe handles in both hands and getting a faceful of hot steam
and garlic fumes—the same man who kept replenishing the supply of
gyoza
in broth, evidently from a big pot that was simmering on a primitive woodstove—was an old friend of his: Okawa.

When Kogito and Daio came downstairs from Choko Sensei’s study, both silent after their ambiguous skirmish, they had circled around to the side of the bathroom that faced the main building. An annex to the hall where the party was being laid out housed a kitchen area, and standing at the back door, evidently taking a break, was a man who accosted Kogito.

He had noticed someone lurking there, but it wasn’t until Daio had passed by, walking ahead, that the man sprang out like a jack-in-the-box. Kogito recognized Okawa immediately. The big man bowed earnestly, bending nearly in half from his great height. Then, while Kogito was trying to remember whether his old friend had always had such a heartrending look of sadness on his face, Okawa began to speak in an impassioned whisper.

“Please don’t be mad at me! I know, I ended up rudely leaving your mother’s house after she was so kind to me! I’m truly sorry, so please, please forgive me!” Just then Daio stopped and looked back over his shoulder with a puzzled expression, and Okawa jumped back through the door of the kitchen like a reverse jack-in-the-box, into that aromatic realm of steam and garlic.

Once the party had started, Okawa made frequent trips from the kitchen to the big hall to whisk away dishes that had gotten cold or to refill the giant platters from a boiling pot, but he didn’t even glance at any of the guests. His face, with its golden skin stretched tight over high cheekbones, was always staring down, with lowered eyes.

Kogito hadn’t seen that face for ages, but he had heard vague rumors that Okawa was at Daio’s training camp. Since the camp had been Kogito’s father’s secret retreat during the wartime years, there was nothing too surprising about that. Okawa was the porter who had carried Choko Sensei’s luggage when Kogito’s father returned from the Chinese mainland, and he had been in Japan ever since. Before Kogito’s house became the favored meeting place not only for soldiers from Kansai and Matsuyama but for other shady-looking strangers, as well, Okawa used to turn up at the house every day to help Kogito’s mother with various household chores.

Kogito had a fond memory of one New Year’s Day during that period, when the family’s close female friends had gathered to share a meal, as was the custom. In the room that was connected to the kitchen by a sunken hearth, Okawa (who was like a member of the family) was sitting by the fire, the whites of his eyes and the surrounding skin tinted a soft, rosy pink from the small amount of sake he had consumed. That gathering included a number of people from other parts of the country who had been evacuated from their homes, so Kogito’s mother said, “Why don’t we each share a legend from our own region?” Kogito’s grandmother, who was still alive at the time, led off, electrifying the atmosphere with her masterful storytelling style.

When it was Okawa’s turn, he recited a traditional Chinese tale about a red dragon that swoops down from the hills. A female teacher who was renting a room on the second floor of the house (where Kogito’s father holed up in his bedroom after he fell ill) started asking Okawa for details about where he was born. And Okawa, just as he had done with Kogito at
the training camp, pleaded to be let off the hook, saying, “Forgive me, but ... please don’t ask me that!”

Now that Kogito thought back on that day, he could see that Goro had rendered some aspects of the party (the room, the people, the food) in considerable detail, but he hadn’t attempted to capture the feeling of being in a surreal scene in some old movie—a feeling that, Kogito realized in retrospect, had been due to the lighting, or lack thereof. A single spotlight shone on the center of the room, but beyond that the cavernous room was shrouded in semidarkness.

If you think about the grammar of Goro’s filmmaking, that seems perfectly appropriate. Goro’s films are known for being filled with fanciful notions and whimsical set pieces, but in truth they are made up entirely of the details of modern life that he had personally experienced or observed. That may have been the reason why a film like
Dandelion
, which was essentially a montage of humorous cinematic sketches, not only succeeded so spectacularly at the box office but also turned out to have exceptionally long-lived popularity, particularly among the European intelligentsia. Kogito had seen evidence of this during his stay in Berlin.

The fact was, even such a consummate observer couldn’t have been expected to retain many impressions of Daio’s party that night. Why? Because Goro, who usually held his liquor quite well, had gotten exceedingly drunk, to the point of seeming strangely feeble (though not quite “falling apart”). Many years later, when Kogito turned off the TV set because he could no longer bear to watch Goro going to pieces on a live chat show, part of the reason may have been that he was reminded of that night, when Goro was so tipsy on guerrilla moonshine that he
even started nodding off while still sitting more or less upright at the feast table. Before long he had toppled over onto his back, where he lay insensate, broadcasting unseemly openmouthed snores.

Kogito, who hadn’t had so much as a drop of home-brewed
doburoku
, went from trying in vain to prop up the childishly weak and wobbly Goro to simply watching over his drunken friend as he lay there on his back, dead to the world. When he looked up from his labors he noticed Peter watching them with great interest from across the table, all but licking his chops. At that, the phrase “Peeping Tom” suddenly popped into Kogito’s mind in connection with the hole in the ceiling of the bathroom. The words filled him with a powerful feeling of disgust, and he called out, in a voice that was almost harsh, “Goro, Goro! Come on, get up. If you can’t sit up, you’d better go sleep it off in the other room.”

Goro was lying on a tatami mat in the dim light not far from the brightly illuminated center of the room, where the party was going on. Kogito thought Goro was fast asleep, but then he opened his eyes and returned Kogito’s gaze with a mocking look. “Goro, why don’t you go in the other room and get some rest?” Kogito urged, feeling the anger surging up once again.

“That’s right, Goro,” Daio chimed in from a few yards away. “There’s a little room just down the hall. You can take a rest in there, and then you can take another hot-spring bath or start drinking again or whatever you like. The evening’s still young. Right, Peter?”

Peter had been watching Kogito’s struggles with a look of amusement, but now he untangled his disproportionately long legs, which had been in the lotus position, and drew them up
so both knees were touching his chest. Wearing an expression that reminded Kogito of an arrogant little boy, he ignored Daio’s question. A drunken flush had spread over Peter’s large face, blending the ruddy portions with the pallid white skin, and there was something childish about the way he moved the compact body that was attached to his oversized head. Indeed, the overall impression he gave was one of almost infantile immaturity. Peter’s haughty, scornful attitude was now directed at the sleeping Goro, in spite of the fact that earlier in the evening he had been making Goro pronounce a whole slew of English words (totally unnecessarily, since they were all speaking Japanese) and singing the praises of Goro’s “un-Japanese” pronunciation.

Kogito felt the anger boiling up inside him, stronger than ever. Roughly shaking Goro by the shoulders, he somehow managed to force his friend to sit up. Whereupon Goro demanded querulously, with the unfocused look of someone who has just regained consciousness, “So where am I supposed to sleep? Don’t you know? You’re the one who woke me up!”

Barely glancing at Kogito, who couldn’t have answered that question in any case, Goro stood up and tottered away with surprising speed, but the hall was darker than the party room, and he stumbled noisily over the threshold. In a panic, Kogito got up and ran after Goro. Behind him the young disciples, who had been decorously silent throughout the meal, holding back on the sake and sitting with their knees folded under them, suddenly burst into raucous laughter.

Goro made his way to the end of the hall, where he went into the lavatory (it was really just a hole-in-the-floor toilet). He had left the sliding wooden door open, so Kogito closed it after him. Kogito was waiting nearby, gazing out into the courtyard
and wondering how to find the room where Goro could lie down for a while, when two men emerged from between the outdoor washbasin and a thicket of the plumy, scarlet-berried shrub known as heavenly bamboo. Kogito was momentarily startled, but when one of the men turned his face toward Kogito, in the faint light from the lavatory window he saw that it was Okawa, looking even sallower than usual.

“You’d better go home to your mother’s house tonight and take your friend with you!” Okawa said urgently, whispering just as he had the first time they’d talked, outside the kitchen. “That’s what you ought to do, Kogito! This fellow here will give you a lift to your village, in a three-wheeled truck!”

Goro, his face noticeably pale even in the darkness, finally emerged from the lavatory, where he had evidently spent the entire time throwing up. Someone had brought Goro’s shirt and trousers and laid them out on the open verandah in front of the washbasin, and his shoes, with Kogito’s next to them, were neatly arranged on a stepping-stone. After he had changed out of the cotton
yukata
, Goro’s intoxication seemed to be wearing off, and there was no need to explain to him what was about to happen.

Following the young man who had set off ahead of them without a word (Okawa had quickly disappeared), they descended the grassy slope, where each leaf of grass seemed to be reflecting the moonlight. Then Kogito, Goro, and their silent savior crossed the suspension bridge and climbed the hill to the empty lot beside the road where their three-wheeled getaway truck was waiting.

3

These are the things Kogito remembered about that journey: the way the moon glittered fiercely on the surface of the river below, which was like the bottom of a deep abyss, as they were crossing the rickety suspension bridge; the way he and Goro perched precariously, not on the luggage platform itself but behind it on two shallow metal-planking seats, anchored with screws, that flanked the driver’s seat; the way the scrawny, sun-blackened neck of the taciturn young driver was thrown closer to them every time he cranked the handlebars sharply to the left or to the right; and the odd shyness Kogito felt about trying to start a conversation with the unusually silent Goro, who was sitting on the other side of the driver, as he watched his newly docile, seemingly sober friend’s profile floating in the moonlight.

When he looked back on it now, Kogito realized that he must have been feeling exhilarated at the thought that he was now heading for his childhood home with Goro all to himself—although at the same time he imagined that Peter must probably
be storming around the training camp demanding to know where the hell Goro had gone, and he was also a bit worried that Daio and some of his henchmen might jump into the other small truck and give chase. Of course, this was all extreme conjecture; imagining the worst that might happen was a toxic by-product of the assorted exasperation, anxiety, and anger Kogito had experienced this day in his stalled-out relations with Goro, Peter, and Daio. In truth, even as his seventeen-year-old self indulged in those florid fantasies, he didn’t really think there was any serious danger.

As the little van wove among the overhanging trees that lined the road—trees that seemed to be closing in more aggressively, somehow, than during the daytime—Kogito kept his focus on the surface of the road ahead, unceasingly illuminated by the wobbly headlights as the little truck bounced along. When they finally turned onto the two-lane prefectural road, which was one prong of the three-forked road that ran alongside the tunnel, the mountains were very far away, the valley was infinitely deep, and in the midst of the endless blackness the faint glow of the moon illuminated the slender ribbon of river below.

By and by Goro spoke, in the awed voice of an adolescent who was feeling thunderstruck by the depths of the darkness the little three-wheeled truck was plunging into. “This really is the ‘mountain fastness,’ isn’t it?” he said dreamily. “I knew there was an expression like that, but till now I never knew what it meant.”

“We’re going to go a lot deeper into the ‘fastness’ than this,” Kogito replied. “This is a high place and the mountains beyond are pretty far away, so you don’t get a feeling of confinement,
but that isn’t the case with my village.” Goro didn’t reply; Kogito had the feeling that he had never before elicited this kind of silence from his friend, and he felt a small frisson of proprietorial pride at his unprecedented “accomplishment.”

After a while it occurred to Kogito that there was something he ought to explain to Goro before they arrived. Spurred on by a sudden sense of urgency, he simply blurted it out.

“Listen,” he said, “it’s about my mother. On one side of her head, in the place where an ear should be, she has a fold of skin that looks like the kind of flipper you’d expect to see on a fish, or maybe a reptile, so she always wears a cloth wrapped around her head, like a turban. I thought I should warn you, since it’s late at night and I’m afraid she might come out with her head uncovered and startle you.”