The Changeling (17 page)

While they talked, Kogito and Uncle Chu had been drinking red wine from Italy. By this time, the evening was already slipping away. Suddenly Chikashi, who had presumably long since gone to sleep, appeared in the doorway with a fresh bottle of Italian wine in one hand and, in the other, a strong-smelling cheese covered with an inedible rind of grape seeds—a gift from an American cultural theoretician of Italian ancestry who was an acquaintance of Kogito’s. Whenever Kogito’s brother came up to Tokyo from Shikoku, Chikashi always plied him with the finest food and drink from her domestic stockpile.

Uncle Chu had been talking about Goro in his naturally loud voice, and now he speculatively narrowed his eyes as if he were squinting against a dazzling light, obviously trying to gauge how much of the preceding conversation Chikashi might have overheard.

6

Some time after Kogito read the third suicide note, the one in which Goro said that he felt he was falling apart, he finally asked Chikashi a raw, unusually unguarded question. (Kogito had needed a few days to mull over those baffling words, again and again.)

“You know what Goro said in that note, about feeling as if he was falling apart?” he asked. “Looking at it objectively, I find that really hard to believe. But right after his death, there was some relatively sensible commentary in which someone said that Goro’s sense of himself might have been distorted due to presenile depression or melancholia. Do you remember?”

As she nearly always did, Chikashi took a few moments to reflect before answering Kogito’s question. “I don’t believe Goro chose to die because of some kind of degenerative illness or mental lapse,” she said slowly. “I think it was a completely sane and conscious decision for him. Remember a long time ago, in Matsuyama, very late one night, when you and Goro came back to the ‘Little Temple,’ where he and I were lodging?
I don’t have a very clear memory of you on that night, but Goro definitely seemed to be in a bad way—falling apart, as you say—and I wonder whether you were in the same state.”

While Kogito was in Berlin, engaging in a solitary marathon of reminiscence about Goro, he recalled this reply of Chikashi’s and realized that he hadn’t really picked up on the full import of what she’d said. In particular, when Chikashi unexpectedly alluded to that long-ago incident in Matsuyama, he realized that he had filed those memories away as something important to be dealt with at a later date—which could well have been a defense mechanism to postpone stirring up old ghosts. The way Chikashi answered his question was surprisingly clear and forthright; that should have been the end to it, but he couldn’t resist the urge to rehash a bit of ancient history that had been on his mind.

“If you want to talk about seeing Goro in a state that could be described as falling apart—close to a breakdown, really—the only instance that comes to mind is one time when I saw him on late-night TV. It might have been because the filming of the program had dragged on for such a long time, but while I was watching I noticed that he was getting very drunk, very rapidly. Looking back on all the time he and I have spent drinking together, I’ve never seen him so far gone. It’s not just the fact that Goro wasn’t the type of person who would let other people see him in such a pitiful state, but really, in essence, he simply wasn’t the sort of person who would be falling apart in the first place, don’t you agree? From what I’ve heard, your father was exactly the same. Even during his long recovery from tuberculosis, writers such as Shiga Naoya and Nakano
Shigeharu—who were famously tough themselves—took off their hats to him for refusing to go to pieces.”

“I’m not sure I really understand the meaning of ‘falling apart,’” Chikashi said, after a few moments’ reflection. “Is it primarily a state of mind? Or is it when people looking at you from the outside say that you seem to be falling apart and there’s no way you can deny it?”

Once again, Kogito stammered out a reply. “But don’t they both occur simultaneously? Like when you’re forced to admit that comments from outsiders have hit the nail on the head?”

Then Kogito, having once again decided to postpone thinking about the traumatic incident in Matsuyama until another day, remembered a time when he himself was falling apart in front of Chikashi. To make matters worse, there was nothing he could do to control his shameful disintegration. It happened during the time when they were renting the second floor of a big old house in the same neighborhood as their present home but some hundred yards closer to Seijo Gakuen-mae Station.

Akari had been born in June, and several months had passed since then. It was a wildly windy autumn day, and the dried-up leaves of the Chinese parasol tree were rattling on the branches, making an immoderate racket. Kogito was lying facedown on the bed that had come with the furnished house; his head was twisted into a diagonal position, and he was holding the sheets down over his head with all his strength. The fact was, he truly couldn’t move.

Chikashi stood beside the tall bed, and in a feeble, sorrowful voice that made her sound like a plaintive adolescent girl, she kept saying, over and over, “What’s wrong?” But Kogito
didn’t answer. It wasn’t that he was shirking human contact or being rude; he was simply unable to utter a word. He had always been that way, ever since childhood; if he wasn’t physically able to get out of bed, he wouldn’t be able to speak or respond to questions, either. He really was falling apart, quite literally, as he lay there in a stupor listening to the violent sound of desiccated leaves clattering in the wind-tossed Chinese parasol trees.

Earlier that day they had gone to the hospital and received the final prognosis regarding Akari’s condition. The report stated that their son’s physical problems would gradually improve (though never to the point of perfection), but went on to add that there was no reason to expect that his mental faculties would ever be normal. Chikashi, too, had been sitting there when the doctor shared this news, and Kogito understood keenly how hard it must be for her to sympathize with his present predicament: this unseemly catatonic collapse brought on by sorrow and despair. But much as he wanted to, he was truly unable to move a muscle.

In any case, on the day many years later when Chikashi left the living room and started working on an illustration project at the kitchen table, Kogito, finding himself alone, had started to think about the incident in Matsuyama, which seemed to have made an even stronger impression on Chikashi than the day he fell into a paralytic depression after hearing the doctor’s verdict regarding Akari’s bleak prospects for the future. That incident in Matsuyama was evidently etched in Chikashi’s memory as an experience Kogito and Goro had shared, even though Goro was clearly the focal point of her recollections. Kogito felt as if he’d been backed into a corner and compelled
to revisit that important and disturbing memory, which was usually banished to the deepest recesses of his mind.

Whenever he thought about Goro’s falling apart, those images were always directly connected to Kogito’s consciousness of his own disintegration, so why hadn’t he immediately recalled that incident in Matsuyama? Was it because he had been consciously suppressing that schoolboy memory even while he was thinking obsessively about that one mystifying line in the third suicide note Goro left behind? When that explanation occurred to him, Kogito felt an unpleasant sense of escalating discomfort, as if he were being steadily beaten with a blunt sword.

He lay down on the living room couch, but rather than starting to read a book, as he usually did, he concentrated on trying to avoid attracting Chikashi’s peripheral attention. She, meanwhile, was busy at the kitchen table with her sketchbook open, putting the finishing touches on her most recent drawing. Akari was firmly planted in front of his collection of new CDs, which were kept against the wall on one side of the short flight of steps that led to the kitchen. Kogito didn’t want his son to notice him, either. There was something he needed to ponder undisturbed.

For a long time, it had been Kogito and Chikashi’s habit not to indulge in arguments—matrimonial spats, in common parlance. On Chikashi’s part, she would always offer either some sort of reasonable, carefully thought-out proposal or else an expression of opinion. As for Kogito (the listener, in these cases), he would usually approve the proposal or express sympathy with the opinion, and that would be the end of the discussion. The proposal would be implemented; the opinion
would be accepted. If something was clearly vetoed by Kogito, that, too, would signal the end of the matter. Kogito invariably expressed his vetoes by silence, and even if Chikashi wasn’t satisfied with that outcome, she never pursued the argument beyond that point. If Kogito had a strongly negative reaction to whatever Chikashi had suggested, his silence might last a day or two, or even more.

On one hand, in all the time they had been married Kogito could recall only two or three times when Chikashi had apologized and said that she was mistaken about something. On the other, it was not at all unusual for him to end up tacitly withdrawing his earlier objections, not by saying outright, “Okay, you win,” but by essentially giving up the argument and retreating into his shell. (This was a separate issue from the exhausting of the argument and the subsequent reconciliation.) In any event, that was the way Kogito and Chikashi had managed to muddle through thirty-plus years of living together.

In recent years, though, Kogito had privately noticed a change in Chikashi’s behavior. It had begun just after she started to paint watercolor illustrations to accompany Kogito’s essays about the family’s everyday life with Akari. Chikashi spent several days on each watercolor painting, starting with extended observation of the subject, and she became so absorbed in her work—especially when she reached the stage of adding the finishing touches—that she wouldn’t even look up when Kogito called her name. If he had some urgent business and called out to her several times, she would eventually answer in a terse, abrupt way, like a man. Kogito had never seen that side of Chikashi before, and he eventually realized that her intensity about her creative work was probably a genetic predisposition.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Goro and Chikashi’s father was the man who founded Japan’s tradition of sociosatirical film comedies. During the long period while he was recuperating from tuberculosis, he wrote three volumes of collected essays, which were strong on morality and logic but were also overflowing with witty, open-minded observations. During the time before Japan started producing motion pictures, he had been a painter. Taking all this into account, Kogito had thought at first that it was Goro, the child-prodigy artist and polymath, who had inherited his father’s myriad talents. But before long he began to notice that Goro had actually been more profoundly influenced by his mother.

There was a time when Goro himself, hoping to control these maternally transmitted tendencies, became deeply involved (too deeply, some said) with psychology. At that time, even when he read Goro’s published chronicle of his conversations with scholars of Freud and Lacan (a book that, to put it uncharitably, was a half-baked treatise, rushed into print), Kogito couldn’t help feeling that there was something fishy about the so-called psychology experts who were reverently showcased in Goro’s account. At one point, a young editor of Kogito’s acquaintance had the nerve to say cattily, “Isn’t it possible that you’re just jealous of Goro’s new friends?”

Meanwhile, the manager of a certain pharmaceutical company in the Kansai area came to visit the Choko household and happened to see a watercolor painting that Chikashi had made as a birthday card for Akari. As a result, she was commissioned to do a series of illustrations for some essays of Kogito’s that were being published in a commercial magazine whose primary audience was medical doctors. From then on Chikashi’s artistic style
began to blossom so rapidly that Kogito soon became convinced that it might be Chikashi, not Goro, who had truly inherited their father’s talent for painting.

As for Goro, after the siblings began to lodge in a temple compound in Matsuyama immediately after the war (they nicknamed their digs the “Little Temple”), he accepted the younger but stalwart and dependable Chikashi as another mother, in a way, and depended on her for everything. He didn’t seem to have any expectations that Chikashi would turn out to be an artist but, as has already been mentioned, he did comment favorably that she had always had her own distinctive style from an early age.

With Goro’s own drawings, his first principle was to respect the “real details” of a given subject, and there were times when the balance of the entire composition ended up being destroyed as a result. At the same time, Kogito felt that the two siblings were similar in the way they shied away from the usual academic, textbook ways of making a picture, without ever resorting to the easy clichés of art naïf.

On another day, some time later, Kogito was on his way back to the living room from getting a drink of water in the kitchen when he stopped for a moment to watch Chikashi working on a new watercolor painting at the kitchen table. For inspiration, Chikashi had chosen a photograph from among the many that her father took with his Leica, during a period stretching from before the war until it was about half over. This photograph (and the painting Chikashi was making) showed her as a young girl, hanging upside down from the strong yet supple Y-shaped crotch of a large oak tree—it looked like either a garden-variety evergreen oak or a Japanese emperor oak—with her
older brother standing off to one side. Goro was wearing a flat-collared, khaki-colored school uniform, and his hair was cropped close to his head. As he stood next to the tree watching his sister’s acrobatic antics, he wore a complicated expression that combined good-natured cheerfulness with a certain measure of reserve—an expression often seen on his grown-up face, as well.

“In my experience, whenever I try to write something about the various types of oak trees, I almost always get it wrong,” Kogito remarked in a light, playful way. “Someplace like California is ideal, because you can actually see the different varieties of oaks—not just the distinctions among their trunks and branches and bark, but even the way the lumber is used. I’ve gotten letters that say things like ‘In this country, if you say “oak,” the image that’s evoked in a reader’s mind is likely to be rather vague and indistinct, and then you sometimes write about houses that use oak in the interior finishing, but in fact the wood of the oak tree isn’t used in that way in Japan.’”