The Changeling (37 page)

Goro quickly jumped into bed, turned on the floor lamp that Kogito’s sister had placed between their two futons, and began to read Rimbaud’s
Collected Poems
. As Kogito looked at his friend, comfortably stretched out under the quilt with just his head sticking out at an oblique angle, the sight of Goro’s perfectly cylindrical neck and sculpturesque jawline filled him with a curious sense of pride.

4

On that night, after settling down under the quilts, Goro mainly talked about his impressions of Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Adieu.” As Kogito discovered many years later, those same thoughts turned up in the screenplay and storyboards for Goro’s final, unproduced film. It appeared that Goro, who disliked the technique of so-called “art” or “avant-garde” films, had tried to write the scene with his usual cinematic grammar—that is, in the same style he used for his commercial films. But the screenplay contained two different versions of the last scene (both of which, based on Kogito’s impressions as a reader, were given equal weight in the lineup), and in those scenes, Goro used techniques that would have been inappropriate in a standard mainstream movie. As we’ll see later, the fact that both endings seemed to unfold naturally and make perfect contextual sense was typical of Goro’s approach to filmmaking.

As a novelist, every time Kogito got bogged down in trying to re-create some past occurrence along a linear time sequence (i.e., this happened, then that happened), he would feel the
necessity of changing the focal point of the narrative by jumping around in time and space. Because of that, it was easy for Kogito to understand why, when Goro wrote about that bedtime discussion of Rimbaud, it was in the form of a scene in which he and Kogito were sitting across from each other as adults, recalling that conversation from forty years ago—a scene that never actually took place in real life.

We see present-day Goro talking to present-day Kogito, but we don’t need to get any realistic sense of Kogito’s actual presence or physical form. We should just get a vague impression of a sort of shadowy effigy, almost like a scarecrow, with its back to us. As another option, without even bringing in the actor who’s playing Kogito’s character, it might be effective to have this scene show Goro alone late at night, talking at length into a cassette recorder, making the tapes that he will later send to Kogito. (Incidentally, the part of present-day Goro will probably be played by the director himself.)

GORO (
speaking into Tagame’s microphone
): That night in the old house in the valley in the forest, I said that I had a feeling that Rimbaud was writing about our futures in “Adieu.” You didn’t say anything specific in response, as I recall, but I could tell that you knew exactly what I meant. After I’d said something as naïve as that, if you had cynically brushed it aside I would probably have clammed up for the rest of the evening, nursing my wounded feelings. The translation I have with me now isn’t the one by Hideo Kobayashi, it’s the Chikuma
paperback you recommended, but when I read “Adieu” again in this newer version, I saw that our lives since then are proof positive that what I said was right on target. Indeed, my prediction has come almost heartbreakingly true. Of course, I knew you were especially fond of the opening phrase, and I felt the same way. But already, at that time, I wasn’t envisioning a totally glorious scenario for the future. And that, too, was because I was being guided by what Rimbaud had written. When you think about it, I really was adorably earnest, wasn’t I? Anyway, it went like this:

>>
Autumn. Our boat, risen out of a hanging fog, turns toward poverty’s harbor, the monstrous city, its sky stained with fire and mud
.<<

And then he’s in the city, and he goes on: >>
I can see myself again
... << remember this part? >> ...
my skin corroded by dirt and disease, hair and armpits crawling with worms, and worms still larger crawling in my heart, stretched out among ageless, heartless, unknown figures ... I could easily have died there
...<<

I can pretty much guarantee that this prediction of the future and so on is really and truly accurate, and very specific to boot, at least for me. I can’t claim to be able to predict your future, but if I think about a vision of my own imminent fate, it’s right on the mark. Bingo! Because I figure that sooner or later, I’m probably going to end up taking a fatal dive off of some high place. Of all the available options, that’s the surest way of snuffing it—mainly because even if you change your mind halfway down, there’s no way to stop. If you film the jumper’s descent
and then run the film backward, he’ll seem to be floating in air, but of course there’s no “rewind” or “freeze-frame” in reality. And by the very nature of the act, it’s impossible to have anything like the ambivalent wrist slasher’s hesitation marks when you’re free-falling through space.

And then my body—rather like the man in the Kafka story who turned into a bug and ended up dying quietly under the sofa. (Do you remember when I told you my interpretation that the insect in question was a cockroach? Only in those days we didn’t have a disgusting word like “cockroach,” so we called them “oily bugs.”) Anyway, what if no one found me—you know, like Kafka’s cockroach? I daydream about things like that sometimes when I’m standing on the roof of this office building in the middle of Tokyo, looking down at the alley far below. I mean, suppose my body came crashing down—
ka-thunk
!—amid the mountain of cardboard boxes and other trash that’s always piled up down there, and my corpse wasn’t discovered for days? If I’m going to end up decaying like that, then I really will have died in exactly the way Rimbaud describes, line by line, crawling maggots and all.

Not only that, but when I come to the following phrase, I naturally think about the movies that I’ve made:
I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers
.

As for you, Kogito, there are people who relentlessly ridicule you and your work with all the usual stereotypical put-downs. They say that you’re a fool who turns up
his nose at pop culture and only thinks or cares about old-fashioned belles lettres and so-called “pure art.” But I don’t think that’s the case, at all. And I don’t think there’s any way that someone who has been writing novels for as long as you have could be unaware that all literature and all art (including your own work) is, basically, au fond, kitsch. If you accept that premise, then the astoundingly popular movies that I make have a deliberate halo of kitschiness around them from the very beginning. But even if I blew my own horn like that—
I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama
—you wouldn’t laugh me out of the room, would you? For you, too, as a novelist, surely there must be times when you want to say
I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages
? In your recent novels, there do seem to be some elements of supernatural power emerging here and there. Anyway, for people like us who have been friends since we were schoolboys, isn’t it all right to acknowledge what we’ve accomplished so far? After all, this is a private conversation, just between the two of us.

So anyhow, after that, Rimbaud says:
Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!
And later he adds,
Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that
.

This passage really hits me where I live. Don’t you feel the same way, Kogito? When you think about people who do the kind of work we do—selling the “new flowers” of kitsch and the “new stars” of kitsch by the yard, as it were—we don’t have that much time left, and we need
to come to terms with that fact and ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. How about Takamura? What was he thinking about at the end, I wonder? Did you try asking him about that sort of thing when you visited him after he was hospitalized with terminal cancer? Surely you wouldn’t have told him that his own music was pure art and had no relation whatsoever to kitsch or anything like that, would you? He would have felt disappointed, even betrayed, if you had gotten all deathbed-sentimental and started insisting that his art had nothing kitschy about it.

From the time I first met you, when you were sixteen, I’ve always told you that you should never tell a lie. I’ve said it all along: “You shouldn’t tell lies, not even to entertain people or give them comfort.” I said that again just the other day, remember? But Rimbaud’s line about having lived on lies is absolutely true of me, as well. That’s right, your exalted mentor is a liar. Anyway, there’s something that you and I, together, need to try asking forgiveness for, and then it will be time for us to take our leave.

Needless to say, I’ll be heading out by myself this time. And when you get to be our age, if someone makes up his mind to go on alone, there’s no way to stop him. Other people can’t possibly stop him—I mean, how could they, when the person in question can’t even stop himself? And wasn’t Rimbaud talking about that kind of departure, the end of this first act, when he said: >>
But not one friendly hand! and where can I look for help?
<<

And listen, Kogito, here’s the thing. What I’m able to understand of the poem “Adieu” is really just up to this point; that is to say, I only understand the parts of it that
have some bearing on my own life so far. That’s because I won’t be able to perfectly understand the latter half of the poem until after I say my own farewell—at least that’s the way I feel now.

You’ve seen those sequential photographs, taken with a strobe-style flash that goes off every few seconds? I feel as if I’m already starting to see glimpses of the Other Side, like frozen images illuminated by a brief flash of light. And I feel as if once I actually get there, I’ll truly be able to understand any and all of the lines in the latter half of the poem. For instance, this kind of passage: >>
A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree
!<< If you look at it this way, Rimbaud really does seem to be talking about what happened to us: you know, about
THAT
. It’s as if this one line has somehow been layered over my actual memories, and my own past is just a faint pentimento, or palimpsest.

Kogito was shocked by this portion of the screenplay, wherein Goro seemed to be saying that before too long he was planning to jump to his death from a high place—which is exactly what he had done. Moreover, while he was reading that passage, Kogito had a distinct sensation of déjà vu. That feeling led him directly to the drawing Goro had left behind, showing himself reclining lengthwise in midair holding a Tagame clone—and which, Kogito saw now, could almost have been one of the storyboard drawings that corresponded with various scenes in the screenplay. He felt, suddenly, as if he had heard these same words spoken in Goro’s voice on one of the Tagame
tapes. That realization was so distressing that the blood rushed to his face and he jumped to his feet in agitation.

Of course, the screenplay and storyboards had been delivered to Kogito after Goro’s death, by way of Chikashi. But Kogito couldn’t help thinking, in a state of consternation verging on panic:
If only I had listened sooner to all the Tagame tapes that were in the small trunk
...
if only I had come across the tape that, even if it wasn’t exactly the same as the screenplay, might at least have hinted at Goro’s plan
...
and if only I had talked about it to Chikashi and then asked her to discuss the matter with Umeko, surely the women would have taken Goro to the hospital of a famous doctor they had met when Goro was making a movie about dying in hospitals, and then he would have been safely under the care of a physician who specialized in presenile dementia or depression or whatever was ailing him
...
wouldn’t he
?

When Kogito took out the little duralumin trunk, his memos about the contents of all the cassette tapes that he had already listened to were on the labels, and by using those notations as clues and constantly fast-forwarding, he managed to run through all the tapes again in half a day. He had to perform this task in the living room, which was the only place where the light was bright enough for him to read the small print on the labels, and when Chikashi saw him wearing the forbidden Tagame headphones, she gave him a look that seemed to say, “Oh, no, not again!” Akari, too, was clearly uneasy about seeing his father so immersed in an unusual project involving large numbers of cassette tapes.

In the end, Kogito wasn’t able to find the recording that he’d thought he remembered, albeit in a vague, déjà vu—ish way. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help thinking that the very concept
of Tagame itself was a signal from Goro, a plea for help, and this ended up reviving the feeling he had, right after it happened, that he himself was somehow to blame for Goro’s death.

But on a different level, a phrase from the oft-quoted “Adieu” struck him with new force:
A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!
” And he realized that Goro was on to something when he remarked in his screenplay soliloquy: “If you look at it this way, Rimbaud really does seem to be talking about what happened to us: you know, about
THAT
!”

5

When Goro and Kogito woke up in the big old house in the deep mountain valley, it was already past noon. Kogito’s younger sister came to roust them out of bed, saying, “Mother’s going out to work.” When the two late risers wandered into the big dirt-floored room (the large door was open now, along with the smaller door they had squeezed in through the night before), Kogito’s mother was sitting on the verandah, dressed in her gardening clothes and obviously waiting for them.