The Changeling (10 page)

While Kogito was chatting with O’Brian, the anecdote the Englishman seemed to find most entertaining was about something that had happened not long before the party, when Kogito was in Nagasaki. He had been invited by the chairman of a left-wing publisher’s labor union to give a lecture to a gathering there, but whether it was publishers, newspapers, or broadcasting stations, the hard-core union organizers had very little use for so-called progressive novelists—at least not for those who didn’t officially belong to the Communist Party or to the extreme-radical minor factions. And on this day, sure enough, that was the sort of treatment that Kogito received: minimal, almost grudging hospitality.

Because of the inconvenient scheduling of nonstop flights, Kogito arrived in the morning, but the “finger-flute” (that is to say, finger-whistling) concert and Kogito’s literary lecture weren’t scheduled until evening. As expected, after being given a dubious-looking box lunch he was peremptorily shuttled off to the union’s lodging house.

Kogito had hardly finished eating the greasy fare when severe cramps and diarrhea set in. He ventured out onto a lively
thoroughfare to buy some medicine, but there were no pharmacies to be found. As he was wandering around, he ventured down a narrow alley that looked more like a dimly lit path leading into a mountain vale than a byway in the middle of a city. There he found a small apothecary shop, crammed into a storefront no more than six feet wide.

When Kogito pushed open the old-fashioned glass door and entered the shop, the fortyish woman who was sitting in a cramped space with her back to the medicine-laden shelves turned her round, pale face in his direction. “Oh!” she exclaimed, stifling a shriek of surprise.

Paying no attention to this odd response, Kogito asked for some paregoric, but when he tried to pay for his purchase, the proprietor, who was still seated, gazed up at him, flushed and perspiring. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, in a low voice that was almost a moan. “Sometimes you really do get what you wish for!”

Then, abruptly, she launched into a remarkably spirited account of her life story. She explained that she had attended the pharmaceutical studies department of a university in Kyoto and was a passionate fan of Kogito’s work who owned a hardcover copy of every book he had ever published. She had taken over this family-owned pharmacy after her father’s sudden death. The shop was near a red-light district, and it had stayed in business for many years by specializing in contraceptive devices and remedies for sexually transmitted diseases. After the Anti-Prostitution Law was passed there had been some lean times, and it had looked for a while as if the pharmacy might have to close its doors, but she always clung to the belief that as long as she could hunker down and stay in business, someday she would have a chance to meet Kogito Choko.

Kogito was a little concerned about a disreputable-looking middle-aged man who was loitering outside on the curb next to the gutter with a kimono-clad woman in tow, so he tried to take his leave as quickly as possible, but the female proprietor reached under the counter, took out a carton containing a six-pack of larger-than-usual bottles of some sort of energy drink, plunked it down on the counter, and said, “Please try this—I’ll give you a special VIP discount.”

“Actually, I don’t really drink that sort of health potion,” Kogito responded.

“Oh, no!” the pharmacist protested. “This isn’t your simple, garden-variety health drink. It contains garlic, and Korean ginseng, and even ground-up seahorses. See what’s written on the bottle?
DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE!
I’ll let you have a six-pack for only two dollars, so why don’t you take a couple of cartons home with you?”

As the woman slapped a second six-pack down on the counter, the shady-looking man who had been hanging around outside barged into the pharmacy with his female consort and shouldered his way to the counter. “If you’re having a sale, I’ll buy some,” he said gruffly. “Two cartons, please!” The timing seemed suspicious, and Kogito couldn’t help wondering whether the man’s appearance might be part of a prearranged charade.

“Coming right up,” said the proprietor. “The special price for one box is thirty dollars, so your total will be sixty dollars. I’m sure you’re familiar with this amazing product. You know their slogan:
DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE!
Your lucky missus is going to be in seventh heaven! Thank you for your business.”

That’s all there was to the story, but O’Brian showed his marvelous character by not only laughing uproariously but also helping Kogito, afterward, to make his laborious telling of the anecdote much tighter and more forceful. When the Irish actor was on the airplane, heading home to London, he spent a good deal of time reworking the English translation of the advertising slogan (
DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE!
). He even gave his notes to a crew member on the flight, which was returning to Narita, with instructions to deliver them to Kogito. O’Brian suggested a way of making the slogan “a bit more lewd,” and Kogito obligingly changed the words to
GET IT UP! GET IT ON! SHAG ALL NIGHT!

By the time Kogito had located the card bearing the English-language version of the anecdote it was already midnight in Tokyo, but it was still late afternoon in Berlin. While he was telling the story over the telephone, he couldn’t help noticing the contrast between the youthful freshness of the girl’s laughter—she was clearly excited about the first snow—and the mature rumble of Goro’s satisfied-sounding laughter, as the two merry voices intermingled.

Kogito was pleased to realize that a memory that had seemed to be extinguished was actually very clear, especially since it was a recollection that seemed to be infused with (these were the first words that sprang to mind) a sort of crystalline brightness. In Goro’s twilight years, which had come far too soon, that kind of delight was rather rare.

5

While Kogito was living in Berlin, he always had Saturdays and Sundays free. There were no classes, no lunches with his colleagues at the Center for Advanced Research, no academic presentations. Kogito had very little desire to stroll around the noisy, teeming streets, so he usually passed the time by lying on his bed and reading a book, or reminiscing about various things having to do with Goro. While his mind was meandering dreamily through his memories, it sometimes headed off in a distinctly R-rated direction.

One such reminiscence dated back to a time when Goro, who was still married to Katsuko, was frequently going overseas for film roles. Goro was just back from America when he turned up one evening in a taxi to visit Kogito, who had himself only recently returned from a teaching stint at the University of California at Berkeley. Goro rarely took taxis—he preferred to tool around in his sleek, luminous Bentley—and the reason he deliberately used one on this night was because he was planning to drink a large quantity of
whiskey in the hopes of routing the depression that was plaguing him.

Throughout the evening, Goro held forth while sipping continuously from a glass filled (and refilled many times over) with Old Parr whiskey, neat, from a bottle Kogito had received from his publisher as a holiday gift. Chikashi kept them company until shortly after 10
PM
, then excused herself and went to bed. After that it was just Goro and Kogito, one-on-one. Maybe Goro had been restraining himself while Chikashi was present, but from then on, even though he seemed to be growing increasingly melancholy, he kept up an antic, eloquent stream of anecdotes.

The previous year, Goro had spent six months acting in a Hollywood film that was made with the intention of justifying the western side of the Boxer Rebellion, and he had just returned from attending the movie’s premieres in Los Angeles and New York. He had been given a major role as a military officer attached to the Japanese embassy in Beijing (then known as Peking)—there was even a scene where he cradled the lead actress in his arms and helped her to escape while bullets were ricocheting off the walls and the unpaved road around them. The review in Los Angeles’s leading newspaper singled Goro out for special notice, rhapsodizing about his “glamorous charm” and remarking that he had an unusually charismatic presence for an Asian actor. Kogito happened to read that article, and he clipped it out and sent it to Goro’s then wife, Katsuko.

But when Goro returned home and looked at the Japanese reviews, he discovered that most of them completely ignored his performance. One anonymous weekly-magazine film reviewer focused on a scene in which Katsuko had a walk-on part
as a married woman, splendidly dressed in kimono, who attends a Christmas party for the employees of all the foreign embassies in Peking. The review concluded with the snide remark, “This is the reason Goro Hanawa passed his audition,” implying that Katsuko’s family-business connections had been a factor.

As Goro slid ever deeper into drunkenness, Kogito started talking about Yukichi Fukuzawa’s trademark word,
enbo
, meaning resentment, bitterness, or envy. Kogito quoted liberally from Fukuzawa’s seminal treatise,
An Encouragement of Learning
, which he had used as a text in a class he’d taught at Berkeley. In Japan, he explained to his increasingly bleary-eyed brother-in-law, there was only one reason why Goro, as a Japanese actor who was successful abroad as well, would be slighted or even looked upon with disdain. That reason was pure
enbo:
bitter, envious resentment.

According to Fukuzawa, virtually every word that’s used to describe people can be a two-sided coin. For example, depending on your tone,
frugal
can mean admirably thrifty or despicably stingy, while
rough and ready
could imply either courageousness or bellicosity. The exception, he says, is
enbo
. No matter how you look at it,
enbo
is a complete waste of time; there’s no way you can put a positive spin on envy, bitterness, and resentment, or turn those emotions into positive human traits.

To which Goro replied, “When it comes to being tormented by the envy and resentment of others, you’re in the same boat as I am, with that vindictive journalist making a cottage industry of dragging your name through the mud. Just watch—as soon as you win a big international prize for literature, that ‘eminent authority’ will rush to press with a book that totally
trashes your entire life and work.” Goro as prophet: that was exactly what did happen, some years later.

“I really don’t worry too much about this kind of stuff,” Goro went on. “But getting back to that article that you went to the trouble of cutting out and sending to Katsuko, where the writer singled me out for special praise? Well, the truth is, I’ve been having some personal problems with that writer. You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with that sort of thing.” Kogito felt disappointed by the way Goro seemed to be changing the subject, as if he wasn’t taking Kogito’s point seriously, so he was gratified to learn from Chikashi, some time later, that Goro had been enthusiastically sprinkling his conversations with his new favorite word:
enbo
.

It gradually emerged that the film critic who had singled Goro out for such lavish praise in that L.A. newspaper was a fiftyish woman named Amy, who had traveled with Goro’s group for part of the time while he and some of the other actors were on a promotional tour for the movie. After the initial interview, whenever Goro had a little free time she would invite him to join her for dinner at some small restaurant near wherever they happened to be staying, to continue the more detailed interviews she said she needed in order to write a longer article about him.

When Goro returned to San Francisco on the day before he was scheduled to go back to Japan, the film critic took him to a cozy restaurant in Chinatown and did a lengthy follow-up interview. After that, as they were wending their way up the steep, narrow road that led back to the hotel, they stopped for breath and somehow fell into a passionate embrace. Goro made no effort whatsoever to hold his hips away so the reporter
wouldn’t be aware of his arousal; on the contrary (he told Kogito) he was insistently pressing his erection against her abdomen the entire time.

Perhaps it was a response to the rather formal English he had been forced to communicate in during the series of interviews, but something definitely awakened his aggressive-male tendencies. Or maybe it was because he had built up a lot of sexual energy during the ten days he’d been traveling around America to promote the film. Anyway, the upshot was that instead of heading back to her own place, Amy accompanied Goro up to his hotel room.

“Before that,” Goro explained to Kogito, “it was obvious that she was very healthy and vital, but she just seemed like a plump, jovial, intellectual sort of woman. Once we got down to doing it, though, she turned out to have an absolutely mind-boggling appetite for sex. I mean, any aperture you could think of—she didn’t seem to care whether it was front or rear. All through that night, until morning, she was constantly touching my body somewhere, and when we weren’t actually having intercourse she would use every trick imaginable to get my penis to stand at attention again. All she wanted to do was to have sex with me, again and again. And when even the famously indefatigable Goro finally reached the point where there was simply nothing left to ejaculate, she would take my cock in the corner of her mouth and then show me exactly what she wanted me to do with my fingers while she worked on me furiously with her tongue. Then when I somehow managed to come again, she would catch my semen on that tongue of hers, like a chameleon. And when the limo came to pick me up the next morning, she hopped in, too, and she kept on playing with my poor,
worn-out penis, all the way to the airport. Then just recently, when I found out that I had gotten an acting job that involved going to Spain for three weeks, to shoot on location, she informed me that she had booked a room in the same Spanish hotel. Frankly, I’m terrified by the prospect of twenty more days of carnal excess, and I think I’m speaking for my penis, too, when I say, ‘Enough already!’”