The Changeling (19 page)

“Hey, look over there. I wonder what happened? He’s sitting under a tree!” Akari called out to Chikashi.

Chikashi turned around and walked back toward her son, whose entire face was wreathed in smiles. Her own perpetually tranquil, sorrowful-looking face wore a look of surprise, and Kogito adjusted his own pained expression to convey the message,
Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious
. Chikashi brushed past Akari, who was threading his way unsteadily through the clumps of wild plants, and approached her husband alone. She didn’t seem to notice the apparent recurrence of his gout, and he decided to tell her that he had gone to check out the cesspool and had tripped on the concrete cover and fallen down.

This turned out to be a satisfactory way of dealing with the incident, and that was why it was never reported to the police and didn’t even show up as a minuscule item in the “police blotter” section of the newspapers. As for the subsequent bouts of violence at the hands of the same ruffians, which occurred every few years, Kogito ended up explaining the resulting injuries in much the same way. He even began to feel a silent complicity with the men who shared his secret.

The second attack occurred three years after the first. Once the initial injury had healed and the pain had become manageable, Kogito had become quite sanguine; he even began to think of his surrealistic encounter with the hoodlums as an amusingly bizarre adventure. But when he actually felt the pain again, it was so unimaginably acute that he realized it could only be fully experienced in the moment. Even so, he didn’t feel inclined to file a police report this time, either, because he still felt that the decision he’d made after the first attack was the right one.

The basis for that decision was Kogito’s feeling that this wasn’t a matter that should be resolved through the intervention of the outside world. And that intuition was bound up with the fact that Kogito had felt, from the first, a fleeting sense of nostalgia—even fondness—toward the men who had brutalized him. Clearly, those feelings were evoked by the way they talked. When Kogito analyzed his rush of homesickness, later on, he figured out that it had two elements. One was geographical: that is, the men spoke the same way as the people from the remote area in Shikoku where Kogito had grown up. The other element was a temporal nostalgia that dated back to forty years earlier.

Kogito had been going back to his native province to visit his mother nearly every year, so he knew that the region’s distinctive accent and tempo of speech, and its characteristic tone of voice, were gradually disappearing from the forests where he’d spent his boyhood. However, Kogito had no memory of ever having seen the three men before, and they hadn’t made the slightest attempt to disguise themselves or cover their faces. Even making allowances for the ravages of time—that is, even if he made an effort to picture the faces of the men (all of whom were past their prime) as they might have looked in their youth—Kogito still couldn’t recognize them at all. Nevertheless, the short, rapid-fire phrases they barked at one another during the vicious assaults on Kogito’s left foot were inextricably intertwined with his childhood home, a time and place he still remembered with great fondness.

2

While Kogito was living alone in Berlin, with an overabundance of free time on his hands, his thoughts kept returning to the long-ago past ... He remembered the seventh year after the end of the war, when the seventeen-year-old Kogito was spending every afternoon in the library of the CIE in Matsuyama, studying for his university entrance exams. One day, out of the blue, a man who had been a disciple of Kogito’s dead father suddenly turned up, accompanied by a group of much younger men.

The high-school students were sitting in a reading corner on the east side of the library, perusing collections of questions from sample exams, while Kogito gazed absentmindedly out the window, watching the leaves of the Japanese chinquapin doing their wild dance in the wind. After a time he noticed that the eyes of all the students who were sitting at desks facing the other way were riveted on the entrance behind his back.

Kogito turned around, too. His eyes were bedazzled from staring outside into the bright light, but an image registered dimly on his retina: a group of men, standing motionless outside
on the landing. Kogito could see clearly enough to be disturbed by one of the men’s eyes, which reminded him of the embers that nestled, glowing redly, amid the ashes of the straw fires that could be seen here and there this time of year around the forest valley where he grew up, deep in the mountains. And then Kogito became aware that the eerie, burning eye was staring right at him. The man apparently noticed Kogito’s head movement, because he responded with the slightest of nods, whereupon Kogito gathered up the rough paper that he used for physics calculations and his cheap unfinished-wood pencils (bought at the school-supply stand), and stuffed them into his school briefcase.

He picked up the lovely-smelling, hardcover, English-language edition of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
that had been open beside him—and which was the reason for his earlier absentminded reverie—and went to replace it on the open-access bookshelves on the west side of the library. As he started to walk back toward the group of men, Kogito became aware of a Japanese staff member, who was dressed in black slacks and a white shirt, and appeared to be a nisei (that is, a first-generation American of Japanese ancestry). He was standing on the other side of the glass partition beyond the bookshelves, keeping a wary eye on the intruders—who did look conspicuously out of place.

In the middle of the group of interlopers stood a one-armed man, still staring straight at Kogito. Though he seemed to be listing slightly to one side, the man’s posture was resolute and determined. His open-necked white shirt was tucked into the waistband of his well-worn trousers and held in place by a belt, which created a sunburst of wrinkles. There was no excess flesh
on his deeply sunburned face, and one of his eyes (but only one) was darkly bloodshot. Nonetheless, he seemed to be radiating a strong light in Kogito’s direction. Kogito realized that the initial impression he’d gotten, of embers glowing deep amid the ashes of carbonized straw, was due to this man’s single bloodshot eye.

The one-armed man and his younger companions greeted Kogito silently, with polite nods and bows, as he approached. Together, they descended the stairs from the library. Even when Kogito stopped at the reception desk on the first floor to open his bag for inspection, the one-armed man remained standing next to Kogito, withdrawing just a foot or so, while the younger men kept their distance. During this interlude the young men maintained a defiant attitude that came across as simultaneously pious and uncouth, and when the Japanese staff member in the black pants and white shirt pointed questioningly at the assorted baggage they were carrying, they banded together and refused so aggressively to submit to inspection that he shrank back and didn’t press them further.

When they left the Center the older man fell into step with Kogito, but because he was walking next to the man’s armless side, Kogito came to feel, illusorily, as if his companion’s upper body were leaning on him. The Center was built in a district called Horinouchi, on a site that had once been a military parade ground. From there they walked along the road that led to town, and when they came to the bank of the moat (which surrounded a distant castle, barely visible through the trees), Kogito led the group around to the left, to a place where there were some benches arrayed under a row of cherry trees in full bloom. The men appeared utterly oblivious to the glorious display of cherry blossoms.

In the center of the expanse of flat, grassless ground that surrounded the three benches, there were the messy remains of a bonfire, with dirty, half-burned pieces of wood scattered about. Kogito sat down on a bench facing the moat, and the older man sat down too, leaving a small space between them, with his left side—the one that had an empty sleeve tucked into the belt—next to Kogito, who was still feeling slightly uneasy about the whole encounter. He couldn’t help wondering, idly, what would happen if the man thought he might have to defend himself. Which side would the one-armed man turn toward Kogito?

Facing them on the left side, between the canal and the street where the tramcars ran, was a bank building that had escaped the flames of the Allied air raids, bathed in the pale light of the late-afternoon sun. Abruptly, the hitherto-silent one-armed man began to speak in a spirited, exclamatory way, with the same sweetly nostalgic deep-forest accent that Kogito would hear from the men who attacked him, twenty years later.

“It’s me, Daio! You know, they used to call me Gishi-Gishi! You remember, don’t you, Kogito? I’m sure having me suddenly turn up wanting to talk to you must be a big nuisance,” the man went on, “especially when you’re in the middle of studying for your entrance exams. Still, I’m really happy to see that you brought us right away to a place overlooking the spot where your father went down in a blaze of glory! It’s a great relief to me to know that you haven’t forgotten about that day, or about us!”

Now that Daio had introduced himself, Kogito did remember him as one of the men who used to come to the house for meetings with his father, toward the end of the war. What he actually remembered more clearly than the man himself was
the name, “Daio.” Kogito’s mother and father had singled Daio out from the other followers for special treatment, and the nickname they had bestowed on him, “Gishi-Gishi,” was proof of that. Kogito had heard the explanation from his younger sister: apparently the surname “Daio” was also a proper noun meaning a kind of medicinal rhubarb that grew wild among the ruins of a garden of medicinal plants on the outskirts of the village, and the country folks’ nickname for that plant was “
gishi-gishi
.”

“For the next five days or so, I’m planning to stay at an inn at Dogo Hot Springs,” Daio went on. “I really want to tell you about the ideas I’ve been formulating during the past seven years, so please come visit me there! Of course, I haven’t had direct access to your father’s wisdom, as I used to, but we’ve been working really hard and encouraging each other all along. We’ve planted new fields and rice paddies, and we repaired the training hall and built an annex, too, so the old place in the country is twice as big as it used to be. We have enough space to stage drills with a large number of warriors. We’re totally self-sufficient when it comes to food, and we even make our own
doburoku
—you know, home-brewed sake! I’ve brought some for you to try, along with various local delicacies. Since your father’s blood is flowing through your veins, I’m sure you can’t say that you’ve never tried drinking sake, even once?

“Anyway, at our training camp we still follow the fundamental tenets that were the basis of your father’s philosophy. We don’t bother much with money, and we make a point of having almost no need of it. Of course this trip is an exception, leaving our rural hideout and paying to stay in lodgings provided by this consumeristic society! But that’s just for me; everyone else is bunking at various temples and shrines in the area. The
reason I took a proper room at an inn is so I could have a place to entertain you. These guys will be coming to my room in the evenings, too, because I want to talk to all of you together. I’m sure there must be some jobs for temporary laborers around Matsuyama, so these lucky stiffs will get to work to pay for my room at the inn!”

On the evening of that day, Kogito did, indeed, pay a visit to Daio’s inn at the Dogo Hot Springs resort. Even now, he could still summon up a clear image of himself and the taciturn young men, sitting around that little room listening to Daio’s fervent oratory. The truth is, whenever he remembered that scene, it was always with a painful stab of regret because of the way things turned out.

The dimly lit room was about eight and a half feet by eleven and a third feet, with a thick electric cord leading directly from the ceiling to the blown-glass globe that encased a 40-watt bulb. When Kogito recalled that scene, his memory camera seemed to be looking down from an even higher vantage point than that light fixture, like a cinematographer’s crane shot. The assorted empty plates, dishes, and bowls from Daio’s and Kogito’s dinner were stacked up on a small, low table against the wall. A giant bottle of home-brewed sake, holding nearly four pints, had been placed directly on the tatami-matted floor, surrounded by five cups, and the host and his guests were all sitting on their haunches with their knees almost touching the bottle.

There they were: Kogito (the seventeen-year-old schoolboy), Daio, and his followers. Daio had already consumed a fair amount of
doburoku
all by himself, but Kogito had been drinking coarse, cheap green tea all along, as had the young acolytes. Rather than a feast or a party, the gathering was more like a
seminar, with Daio at the podium. The lecturer alone reeked of sake, and the potent fumes filled the dismal little room.

Daio began his monologue by saying that Choko Sensei—that is, Kogito’s father—had been mistaken in the philosophical theory he espoused during the last stages of the war, and after having lived through that painful experience Daio and his supporters had come up with a new ideology that (they believed) corrected the flaws in the original. Daio held a thin paperback book on his knee—like his audience, he sat on his heels, with his lower legs bent backward under him—and he frequently opened the book to check various points. Kogito couldn’t see the title on the Japanese-paper cover, and he didn’t have the nerve to ask the author’s name.

Later, Kogito ended up spending many hours searching for a copy of that book, starting at an old-book shop in Matsuyama’s busy shopping district. All he had to go on was his memory of some of the phrases Daio had read aloud, when he wasn’t reciting snatches of the Chinese poetry that was quoted in the text. Kogito tried to find that poetry in books written by authors who were involved with right-wing politics, but his quest was fruitless. He realized only much later that he had been wasting his time looking in the wrong places.