The Changeling (21 page)

The climax of the two-day seminar at the inn was Daio’s dramatic recounting of the death of Kogito’s father at the end of the abortive bank robbery. Since Kogito had been present as well and knew exactly what had happened, this was probably more for the benefit of Goro, who had attended only the second meeting, and for Daio’s young colleagues.

Daio threw himself into an impassioned description of the violent scene that transpired at the bank, telling how when the police began firing their rifles, he had used his own body to try to shield Choko Sensei, who was riding in the “tank” made from a fertilizer box. But then Daio himself was hit in the top of the shoulder by a bullet and collapsed. He was clearly aware that an eyewitness to the event was listening to his retelling of it now and comparing that version with what had really happened, so even though he may have exaggerated a bit, for effect, he didn’t say anything that was blatantly untrue. And if he had, who was to say that wasn’t a simple trick of memory?

For a while after the war ended, Daio disappeared from village life, but Kogito ran into him from time to time on the roads around the valley or on the banks of the river. It would have been natural to assume that Daio had lost his arm due to injuries sustained in the bank raid, but Kogito had a vague memory of an earlier day, while the war was still going on. They were in his huge stone-and-plaster house, in the dirt-floored
room that had been turned into his father’s study, complete with his prized Takara-brand barber’s chair. Daio was taking books off the shelf and tidying up the mail, and at that time, to the best of Kogito’s recollection, he was already missing his left arm. That defect was surely the only reason why the otherwise healthy Daio, who was in his late twenties when the war broke out, wasn’t drafted into the army. The rest of the young men who started coming to visit Kogito’s father when Japan was on the brink of defeat were all soldiers on active duty who had taken a furlough.

The ill-omened “insurrection” took place the day after the war ended. A group of officers from the regiment stationed in Matsuyama had arrived late the night before and had camped out on the second floor of the farmhouse. The next morning, they loaded Kogito’s father into his wooden cart and lifted that, in turn, onto a flatbed truck. Then, just like in the old stories of farmers’ insurrections, they set off downriver. Destination: Matsuyama.

That morning, Daio had gathered up the recycled-cloth diapers and various other necessities for his terminally ill leader, wrapped everything in a large square of fabric, and hoisted the bundle onto his shoulders. Early though it was, the officers were already drunk and obnoxious, and they vigorously pushed Daio aside whenever he got in their way. The question was, did he still have his left arm at that time? Kogito thought not, but he wasn’t 100 percent certain.

After they arrived in front of the regional bank building in Matsuyama, which was on the streetcar route facing the Horinouchi district where the CIE now stands, the conspirators unloaded Kogito’s father from the truck. For a moment
he stood there motionless in his wooden “chariot,” looking like a small bronze statue. Then, pushing the wagon ahead of them, the officers charged through the stone-pillared entrance to the bank. Kogito was watching from atop the rear platform of the truck, which was now empty.

Immediately, there was the sound of gunfire from inside the building, and a group of armed policemen appeared on the road that ran alongside the bank and rushed inside. Kogito was seized with fear; unable to restrain himself, he dashed across the street, almost getting flattened by an approaching streetcar in the process. But he wasn’t able to run very far. The next thing he knew he was slipping and sliding down the bank of the moat, through the lush summer grass ...

And then—these were the words his mother always used in telling the story—when it was all over, a soaking wet Kogito crawled up the muddy embankment looking exactly like a drowned rat. He stood above the moat, blinking, with his nose, too, twitching like a rat’s, and he gazed over at the bank building where the wooden cart that had carried his father into battle now stood once again in front of the bank, with the murdered man slumped inside it. But could it really be true that Kogito was still in that sodden state when his mother (who had been brought from her home in the car of the village police officers who had gone to notify her) arrived on the scene? It was at least a two-hour ride from their village in the mountain valley to the center of Matsuyama.

In any case, Kogito returned home the next morning, accompanied by his mother. This memory was indisputably correct, so there was no question but that she had showed up at
the site of the uprising, even though she must have arrived there rather late. At that time, in addition to his fatally injured father, there was another member of the group who was shot in the shoulder and seriously wounded. If that person was Daio, why had Kogito and his mother never again spoken about that, even once?

It wasn’t until after Kogito had graduated from college that he finally came across a book that, he thought, might have been the one Daio had used in his “seminars.” The book was by Maruyama Masao, the political theorist and historian, and it included a number of writings that chronicled the evolution of Japanese nationalism during and after World War II—in particular, the changes in small regional right-wing groups that were under pressure from the occupying army for five or six years. That book (which had just been published at the time of the Dogo Hot Springs soirees) also contained excerpts from the same Chinese-style poem Daio had quoted.

The author said that there were members of some wartime right-wing groups who felt such despair over the breakdown of their value system when Japan lost the war that they committed suicide, and he even gave the real names of the leaders of those groups. As it happened, two of the names rang a bell for Kogito.

In the spring of the year he was ten, Kogito was told to put his father’s incoming correspondence—which had suddenly become voluminous—into order. He would study each envelope and painstakingly decipher the name and address (these were usually calligraphed with a bamboo brush and fresh-ground
sumi
ink), and then enter the names in a logbook. Among those
names, he still remembered two that had struck him as odd, each in its own way. Probably pen names, he remembered thinking.

Other groups simply replaced their Fascist identities with “democratic” window dressing and then continued exactly as before, with their ultranationalistic organizations intact. Still others dispersed and were pursuing nonpolitical social and economic activity on a regional basis; about them, Maruyama wrote: “As a general rule, reflecting the Japanese right wing’s propensity for building a country on the ‘agriculture first’ principle, many of these former political activists joined a movement that advocated reclamation of land and increase in food production.”

If you figured that during the seven years after Kogito’s father was cruelly killed inside the bank in Matsuyama, Daio had survived by building a training hall in the woods and cultivating new land, then he and the group of which he was the leader must fall into the “agriculture first” category. And then Daio had come looking for Kogito at the CIE library where he was studying for his entrance exams, with the intention of somehow using his late master’s son to advance the dubious goals of his own nascent movement.

After the incident (not witnessed by Kogito) that Goro got caught up in—never mind that it was part of an intrigue designed to culminate in a symbolic kamikaze mission by Daio and his followers—did Daio decide, for some reason, to abandon that radical plan of action and to apply himself, along with his colleagues, to protecting their farm and training camp?

When he was attacked with the miniature cannonball, what Kogito wanted most to avoid, deep down, was what would have come afterward. If he had complained to the authorities,
he would have had to meet up again at the police station or in court with Daio and his colleagues, who had been pursuing their back-to-the-land venture all these years, conducting all their business (including terrorist attacks on novelists) in that dying deep-forest dialect. The truth was, he didn’t want them to be arrested or punished.

At the time of the first attack, when Kogito caught an echo of the provincial dialect he had grown up with in the speech of the three ruffians—a dialect that was all but lost to the new generation—his intuition told him that the men must be preserving the old accent by living continuously in an insular group. So it was only natural that hearing that accent would trigger images of Daio in his subconscious.

Getting back to the second time Kogito was attacked: it was right after he had written a novella called
His Majesty Himself Will Wipe Away My Tears
. As has already been mentioned, that work contained an account of his father’s doomed insurrection at the bank in Matsuyama, the day after the war ended. Goro had at one time planned to turn the novella into a film.

While he was writing the book, Kogito kept remembering that eventful ten-day interval when he was seventeen, starting with his reunion with Daio and concluding with the traumatic events at the training camp. He often thought about the ideas Daio had shared on the second night of the “seminar,” which Goro had attended, as well. However, Kogito didn’t write a single word about Daio’s myriad plans, theories, and rationalizations in the novel.

It is undeniably true that, while listening to all of Daio’s pontifications, the seventeen-year-old Kogito had serious doubts about many aspects of the man’s presentation of self. But even
taking into account those questions and hesitations, Kogito could still have found a way to bring Daio into the story if he had wanted to. The underlying psychological reason for Kogito’s not having written about Daio was probably because he was afraid of creating trouble for his mother, who still lived near the training camp. If you had asked Kogito for an explanation at the time, he wouldn’t have been able to express it in so many words, but surely some sort of protective self-censorship was at work. That was probably part of the reason he didn’t report the attacks on his foot to the police, as well.

4

When Daio came looking for Kogito at the CIE library, it seems likely that he was still at the stage of feeling his way toward a plan of action, with nothing very specific in mind. But how had Daio found out that the surviving child of his fallen leader had transferred to high school in Matsuyama and was making frequent use of the library that had been created by the occupying army? He happened to read a small article in the local newspaper about some special recognition Kogito had received from the Americans, and that’s what gave him the idea that he might be able to establish contact with the United States armed forces through Kogito. He probably came to Matsuyama, in the beginning, with just that sort of vague, inchoate desire, and nothing more.

When Daio lured Kogito away from the library and they sat talking on the edge of the canal, under the riotously blooming cherry blossoms—not that Daio and his cohorts showed the slightest interest in that wondrous sight—a brief silence ensued after the preliminary small talk related earlier. At that point, as
if exhibiting an important clue, Daio produced a clipping from the local newspaper. When Kogito made no response, Daio seemed disappointed, but then the expression around his eyes suddenly brightened. Turning his sunburned peasant face to his companions, he said grandly, like an oracle sharing a divine revelation: “See, this is just what you’d expect from the son of Choko Sensei—he’s not the kind of person who gets all excited about this sort of thing.”

The article in question had been published ten days or so earlier, in the soft-news section of the morning paper that was headquartered in a building west of the moat embankment where Kogito and his companions were now sitting. According to the article, at the end of the previous school term, one Japanese high-school student had been awarded a commendation from the Bureau of American Cultural Information and Education. While commuting to the Matsuyama CIE library to study for his college entrance exams, the story explained, this second-year student also managed to finish reading an entire book in English.

The American woman who was head of the department happened to hear from some of her Japanese employees that this high-school student was reading a certain English-language book with exceptional comprehension. The book was volume 1 of a two-volume edition of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, by Mark Twain. This book wasn’t really aimed at children in the first place, and the dialogue, which contained a great deal of African-American dialect from the southern United States, was particularly difficult. However, when the officials tested him on certain pages chosen at random, the young boy fluently translated the indicated pages into Japanese, thus (according
to the article) earning the admiration of the Japanese-speaking American officers who were supervising the project.

Kogito had unwittingly prepared for this challenge by reading over and over, one line at a time, the Iwanami paperback books of the Japanese translation of
Huckleberry Finn
(which his mother had obtained during the last days of the war in exchange for rice), to the point where you could say he knew them by heart. Soon after transferring to Matsuyama, Kogito began to read the splendid English-language volume that he found in the open-access stacks of the CIE’s library, applying the Japanese translation of
Huckleberry Finn
that he had all but memorized. Whether or not he brought any extraordinary facility with English to bear on the project is debatable, but the fact is that he spent an entire year in careful reading. Apparently, some of the staff noticed him toiling away and were impressed. The upshot was that the article appeared, relating the whole story in detail, and that was what brought Daio and his followers to the Matsuyama CIE.

When Kogito showed no inclination to discuss this topic, Daio launched into a long, tedious monologue about how, in accordance with Choko Sensei’s dying wishes, he had taken over the management of the training camp. They had cultivated new land in the surrounding area and had enlarged the buildings, but because the original training camp had been created by their leader, Choko Sensei, after inheriting the property all they did was finish the construction in accordance with their late leader’s vision of a rough-hewn hideaway.