The Changeling (18 page)

“I happen to have a very clear memory of this particular tree,” Chikashi replied, with the abruptness that was a normal part of her artist-at-work persona. But on this day, it wasn’t as if Chikashi was working on a terribly important picture. Rather, there seemed to be something she needed to think through, and painting a picture helped her to concentrate on that task. While Kogito was still standing behind her, peering over her shoulder, Chikashi (without lifting her eyes from her sketchbook) finally gave voice to the matter she had presumably been thinking about all along.

“Do you remember what Uncle Chu said the other day about the conclusion he had reached regarding the reasons behind Goro’s suicide, based on his own experience as a
policeman? When I think about my own experience of living with Goro and with our mother, I have to agree. I don’t think it has anything to do with the sort of tripe they’re publishing in the tabloid magazine that’s put out by the publishing house you’ve been most closely involved with”—and for that very reason, Kogito had terminated the association—“saying that Goro killed himself because he was worn out after having been played for a fool by an ‘evil woman.’ In one of the notes he left behind, Goro wrote that he had never been involved with the woman in question and that he was going to die to prove that fact to his wife, Umeko, and to the media—and for that other woman’s sake, as well. Uncle Chu told me that he believed that, too. However naïve or gullible that way of thinking or of dying may have been (and especially for a man who was past sixty, it really was almost unbelievably naïve), I myself get angry at that kind of terrible innocence or gullibility, but I still want to believe that note. No, what I mean is, I
do
believe it, with all my heart. Whatever anyone may say about ‘evil women’ or ‘good women,’ the fact is that the only woman in Goro’s life who could ever profoundly influence his life was our mother. I really wonder how Goro could have rashly committed suicide knowing that he was abandoning our mother at a time when her Alzheimer’s was progressing at a rapid rate ... Remember Chu was talking about some police official who had the reports from the time when Goro was receiving threats from a crime syndicate, and didn’t that person say that Goro was a man of integrity, courage, and strong moral fiber? But I think Goro died because even a strong, brave person can reach a point where he just feels irreparably crushed by the weight of everything that’s accumulated during the course of his life.

“As for the straw that broke the camel’s back, I really don’t know what it was. But I’m certain it was during that long night when you and Goro came back in a really messed-up state that he first began to change. I’ve never asked you this before, but what really happened that weekend? If you don’t write down whatever you know—without telling any lies or concealing the truth with embellishments—then I’ll never be able to understand what happened. At this point, of course, neither you nor I have very many years left, and it seems to me that just as we want to live the rest of our lives honestly, without resorting to lies, you would want to write that way, too ... for the rest of your days.

“It’s a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: ‘Please cheer up and die!’ Only in your case, I’m asking you to be brave and write only the truth, until the very end.”

And then Chikashi turned her head and gave Kogito an intensely searching look.

CHAPTER THREE
Terrorism and Gout

1

For the past decade and a half, Kogito had been dealing with a foot problem that cropped up periodically: a condition he described to the outside world as “gout.” In fact, he really did have a genuine attack of gout during his late thirties, when his uric-acid level became elevated; he was put on a regimen of medication, and after that the level never rose above 6 or 7 mg/dcl. Nonetheless, every few years Kogito would be forced to venture out into the world walking with a cane and dragging his left leg behind him. When friends and people from the media asked what had happened, he would just quip that he was having a wee bout of gout, and to his perpetual surprise that explanation was readily accepted by everyone he met.

In truth, though, the second, third, and fourth attacks of “gout” were not due to the usual medical cause (that is, uric-acid accumulation), at all. The real reason was simply too bizarre to share. Every so often, three men would show up to punish him, and their mode of operation was always the same. First, they would seize Kogito in some deserted public place
and overcome his resistance (which was only token in any case, since he didn’t want to make matters worse by struggling). Next, they would remove his left shoe and, in their quest for accuracy, his left sock, as well. Then, taking careful aim, they would drop a rusty miniature cannonball onto the second joint of his big toe. It was this “surgical treatment” that triggered the pseudogout.

This had happened a total of three times, and as a result the first and second joints of the big toe of Kogito’s left foot had been crushed to the point of permanent deformity. In time, it got so bad that his mangled foot would no longer fit into ready-made leather shoes. Fortunately, this was during a time of national prosperity, and the gluttonous overindulgence that went with financial solvency had produced a rapid rise in the number of people suffering from gout. So when Kogito reached the point of needing specially fitted shoes, all he had to do was go to the shoemaker’s and explain that the bones of his foot had become abnormal due to gout, and they immediately understood. He fed the same tale to members of his family; only Chikashi knew the true source of Kogito’s affliction, but he didn’t share the complete backstory even with her.

Kogito first heard about the attack on Goro while he was overseas, and even while he was listening to the news reports explaining that it was a yakuza crime, he couldn’t help wondering, as feelings of pent-up anger and impotent frustration coursed through his body, whether his regular tormentors had turned their violent attentions to Goro this time. When he learned that Goro’s attack was a retaliatory act of terrorism by gangsters, he still felt angry, of course, but contradictory though
it may seem, he also felt a deep sense of relief that his first surmise had been mistaken.

So why did Kogito allow himself to be repeatedly assaulted and afflicted with faux gout by a bunch of thugs, without reporting them to the police? Because from the very first attack, Kogito already had a pretty good idea of where the men had come from and what their motivation might be. That was why, after that first encounter, he made up his mind not to make an issue of the incident. At that time, the ruffians’ methods were laughably primitive, and if they hadn’t made a point of inflicting severe pain on his foot he would almost have seen the attack as a sort of warped children’s game. And of course he never dreamed it would happen again.

But the men were a strangely tenacious bunch, and they seemed to have a sincere, simple-hearted confidence in the basic righteousness of what they were doing. At any rate, after a series of three attacks, the structure of Kogito’s left foot ended up being so badly mangled that it was beginning to look as if he might have to give up his one outside interest, swimming, for fear of attracting unwelcome attention from the other people at the pool.

The first time the men turned up, Kogito sensed that they might have had an inkling about his genuine gout and had chosen their weapon accordingly. He also felt certain that the motive for the violent attack was the content of a medium-length book of his that had been published a month or so earlier. It was a novel that took place the summer of the year Japan surrendered to the Allies. Written in the form of an account of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the death of Kogito’s
father as told through the eyes of the son (i.e., Kogito), the narrative derived dramatic tension and contrapuntal balance from the distorted denigration of the boy’s story by his cynical, sharp-tongued mother.

Kogito wrote that book one summer while staying at his mountain cabin in the resort town of North Karuizawa. While he was struggling desperately to get past a particularly difficult patch in the second half of the book, a simple but effective solution occurred to him and he was subsequently able to overcome the obstacles. The idea came to him one day on the narrow road through a grove of trees that he took from his mountain cabin to the shopping area, in front of the now-defunct train station for the So-Kei Line, when he went to buy food. And from then on, forever, every time he passed that spot he remembered his liberating epiphany. He finished the manuscript in a rush of enthusiasm, and it was after that, around the time the initial installment of the story appeared in a magazine, that he had the first attack of gout. He was drinking a fair amount in those days, and that may have been a contributing factor.

Kogito wrote about the background of the story—including his Karuizawa breakthrough and the subsequent attack of gout—in the arts-and-literature column of a major newspaper, and it seemed likely that whoever sent the attackers had read both the book and that column, and had showed them to the hooligans as well.

In the first attack, one of the men grabbed Kogito from behind and pinned back his arms, then gagged him with a flimsy hand towel. The second thug immobilized both of Kogito’s thighs, while the third, after removing only the left shoe and sock, surveyed the aftereffects of Kogito’s genuine gout—a dark,
swollen mass that covered the bones of the foot—with the air of a medical examiner. (There might have been other coconspirators, as well, watching this operation from nearby.) Kogito found himself looking down at his own unsightly feet with a kind of detached disgust, as if they were alien entities that didn’t belong to him at all.

The third man took an iron sphere out of a battered leather Boston bag; it was smaller than the ball used in the shot-put event, and Kogito recognized it as ammunition for the small cannons that had been acquired by the leader of an insurrection in his village, during the early years of the Meiji era. Kogito had heard about the balls from his grandmother, who had somehow ended up with a sizable stockpile. While the third man was holding the grapefruit-sized ball at chest level and taking aim at Kogito’s vulnerable left foot, the second assailant (the one who was keeping the victim’s left leg rigidly in place) solemnly cautioned his cohort about the importance of dropping the ball right on the “sweet spot.” And the dialect he spoke in—an accent redolent of the deep forests of Shikoku—instantly transported Kogito back to his childhood.

Then, suddenly, he realized that the unthinkable was about to happen. Feelings of fear and loathing bubbled up furiously inside him as he watched helplessly, and at the moment of impact he gave a loud scream and passed out. Humans know instinctively that they will lose consciousness when they are subjected to more physical suffering than they can bear—or at least bear in a conscious state—and that knowledge gives them the optimistic certainty that they’ll be able to avoid experiencing the pain by being insensate when it occurs. Kogito had believed in the existence of this automatic shutoff valve since
childhood, but this was the first time he had actually experienced it.

When he came to, he was sitting on the bare ground in the garden of his house in Tokyo, with his back propped against the trunk of a large mountain camellia tree and both legs stretched in front of him. This was before Chikashi started cultivating roses, and she had planted a great many mountain wildflowers, with the result that this section of the garden didn’t look unlike a vacant lot densely overgrown with weeds—although you could still tell that Chikashi’s additions differed from the weedlike plume poppies that Kunio Yanagida (who once lived nearby) mentioned as a feature of the local vegetation of this long-standing residential district.

The bony parts of Kogito’s left foot felt as if they were filled with live embers, and the skin that covered them was so swollen that it resembled the gelatinous covering of pickled pigs’ feet. The throbbing pain seemed to be keeping time with the pulsing of blood to the site of the injury. Remembering that he had been attacked, Kogito took a closer look at his left foot, which was so grotesquely dark and disfigured that he almost laughed out loud.

Kogito tried to cheer himself up by theorizing that the pain in his crushed foot, like the echo that reverberates through a mountain valley, would be more intense at first (that is, now) and then would gradually diminish. With the “normal” gout he’d experienced before, the opposite had occurred: at the first stage all he had felt was a delicate itchiness, but that mild sensation had gradually blossomed into full-blown, excruciating pain. When he compared what he was experiencing now with that earlier agony, it seemed, according to this theory, as if his
present discomfort should continue subsiding second by second until it hit zero.

The back of Kogito’s head was leaning against a fork in the thick trunk of the mountain camellia (a trunk that he had discovered on another occasion was just the right size for him to encircle with his arms), so if he moved his head slightly he could look up at the bell-shaped canopy of luxuriant, low-hanging foliage that surrounded him. The stout branches, which resembled the legs of a baby elephant, were firmly supporting the canopy, and that sight prompted another rush of nostalgia. When he was a child in the forests of Shikoku, he often used to climb into the mountains and gaze dreamily up at the leafy tree umbrellas from underneath. Assuming that the man who had been holding Kogito immobile from behind was the same one who had picked up his body (while he was still unconscious and oblivious to the unbearable pain) and carried him to a place where he could look up at the glossy foliage of the mountain camellia—and since his assailants were speaking the same dialect Kogito grew up with—it could even have been one of his childhood playmates who had left him here.

Presently Kogito saw Chikashi and Akari coming into the garden from the street through a low wicket door that stood open on one side of the main gate. The mere thought of trying to shout loud enough to attract their attention caused the pulsating pain in his foot to flare up again. As he watched, Chikashi headed toward the front door with her head bent down, like someone nursing a great sorrow. But Akari, who was unusually sensitive to the world around him, stopped in midstep, looked around, and spotted his father slumped down on the ground in a completely unexpected place.