The Changeling (24 page)

It was on a Sunday morning, with the Berlin Film Festival due to begin in the middle of the coming week, that Kogito went to a hotel in Potsdam Square. And there, for the first time on this trip, he had the disturbing feeling (deeply familiar from many other trips abroad) that the ground was shifting under his feet.

Earlier that morning, he had been standing on the curb in front of his rococo apartment building, waiting in vain for Iga, an assistant professor of Japanese studies at the university, to pick him up. Finally, thirty minutes past the appointed time of 10
AM
, he decided to go back inside. Just as he began climbing the stairs to his apartment, he heard the telephone ringing. He didn’t get there in time to take the call, but a few minutes later the phone rang again.

When Kogito answered it he heard the rather annoyed-sounding voice of Iga saying that Mrs. Azuma-Böme had been grumbling to him on the phone a moment earlier that Kogito was impossible to get hold of. On the previous day, the woman had evidently proposed a new plan wherein she would first pick up Iga, then Kogito, and that had been agreed on. But when this morning rolled around she informed Iga that she had to deal with a sudden work-related crisis, so she wouldn’t be able to join him and Kogito at the filming of today’s interview, after all.

Iga said that if he came to pick Kogito up in his car they would both end up being late, so he suggested that they make their separate ways to the hotel by taxi, then share a cab on the way home to avoid the hassle of parking. In spite of the earlier glitches, the revised plan went smoothly, and the two men met in the lobby of the hotel a short time later. Iga immediately went to the festival’s reception desk but found the people there singularly
unreceptive because, it seemed, no one had bothered to register him or Kogito. Iga protested, to no avail, and he ended up being passed from one functionary to another in a classic red-tape muddle.

Kogito had been standing nearby for nearly an hour, watching this scene unfold, when he was approached by a white-maned man whom he had noticed, moments earlier, majestically descending the staircase from the second floor to the lobby. The man appeared to be some years older than Kogito, and he had an air of amiability and intelligence. He said that he had enjoyed the filming they had done in Frankfurt, ten years ago, and wondered whether Kogito had received the video of that event, which had been mailed to Tokyo.

The man then flung his arm around Kogito’s shoulder as if they were the most intimate of friends and began to hustle him toward the staircase. Kogito was concerned about leaving Iga behind but, unable to resist the natural force that was bearing him away, he allowed himself to be led to the entrance of the festival’s main hall, on the second floor. From that floor on up, everything seemed already to have been taken over by the organizers of the pending film festival.

Kogito’s escort, the friendly older man, wore an official registration badge hanging on a lanyard around his neck, and the person in charge of the entrance pretended not to notice that Kogito lacked a badge of his own. He practiced the same selective myopia on Iga, who had noticed Kogito’s departure and came galloping up the stairs behind them. As the two visitors were following their rescuer along a passageway that led to the main meeting hall, they came to a place where a number of men were standing around in front of a large, half-open door, and
their little procession ground to a momentary halt. Their guide simply threaded his way through this roadblock without greeting or explanation, then ushered Kogito and Iga inside.

They found themselves in a vast, airy room with a ceiling that was twice as high as normal. People were bustling around on the stage at the front of the room, making preparations for filming. Just inside the entrance, there was a chair piled high with four or five overcoats, and a corresponding number of stagehands was busy installing lighting apparatus and punctuating the hall with small viewing screens. The rest of the filming equipment appeared to be already in place. Even at a flashy event like the film festival there was an air of German practicality, so it seemed natural when a sturdily built young woman wearing khaki-colored jeans came up and handed Kogito (who was still standing near the door) a cup of coffee, a small plastic container of milk, and a packet of sugar. But she didn’t say a word, even though Kogito had noticed that most bright young German workers were usually quite fluent in English.

Meanwhile, Iga had been led into the shadow of the main screen by the older man, and they were deep in conversation. As far as Kogito could tell, they were trying to clear up some late-arising point of confusion. Nevertheless, when the older man (who, it emerged, was to be the interviewer-director of the day’s filming) returned from his impromptu conference with Iga, he shepherded Kogito with complete naturalness and ease to a pair of chairs that had been placed in front of the screen and sat him down on the right-hand side. On the left side, Iga, still looking somewhat bewildered, was being fitted with a microphone by the sound engineer. When Kogito had been similarly equipped, the director took a seat beside the camera that faced
them and gave instructions to the crew member standing next to him.

A monitor had been pushed forward to a place where Kogito and Iga could see it, and it suddenly flickered into life. The scene that began to unfold on the screen was so uncannily convincing that Kogito thought for a moment that he was having some sort of Kurosawa-era samurai-film hallucination, complete with Japanese actors.

The terrain is a rather wide, low basin or hollow, with a thick, flourishing forest of Japanese cedar trees closing in on it from either side. On the near flank, a military camp has been set up, and in the midst of a welter of spears and colorful pole-mounted banners stands a group of samurai warriors, encased in ornate medieval-style armor from head to toe. On either side of the foot soldiers are rows of mounted horsemen. Everyone is obviously on high alert, and the tension is palpable.

The camera pulls back, and on this side, some distance from the samurai encampment, a huge throng of half-naked farmers comes into view, seen from behind. There are too many of them to count, and because of the camera’s angle they seem to swarm into the scene, entirely filling the frame. The farmers continue to advance, like a tidal wave. On the other side, the samurai forces surge forward to meet their adversaries. Just as the two hard-charging factions are about to collide, the scene changes to something completely different.

Now we’re looking at a contemporary sports broadcast of a rowdy, exciting rugby match between an English and a German team. In this scene, too, the forces on the near flank are on the offensive, gradually gathering strength as the focus of the battle moves into the opposing territory. The game rages
fiercely as the opponents stage a bold counterattack. Then, climactically, one player on the near wing fields a spectacular pass and starts charging down the right side of the opposing team’s territory. It’s virtually a one-man race, and it looks as if no one can stop him.

The scene changes again, and we’re back on the Japanese battleground. The army of farmers has already taken occupation of the terrain surrounding the cedar grove where the samurai forces have dug in. At the head of the mass of farmers is a rough-hewn box with wooden wheels, and atop this makeshift chariot, like a threadbare Roman centurion, stands a man whose disproportionately large, egg-shaped head is wrapped in layers of dirty, patched cloth. The wooden cart, with its odd-looking passenger, is pushed forward and then swallowed up as the multitude of rebellious farmers surges into battle. Thousands of bamboo spears are hoisted into the air, and the farmers raise a mighty battle cry in unison. And ... fade out.

After the monitor had gone dark, the cameraman began filming. The director of the interview turned toward Kogito and asked a question in German, with a smile that was almost shy, and Iga began to translate the query into Japanese. Then he paused and, without trying to hide his perplexity, asked Kogito a question of his own.

“Of course, it’s up to you to answer the question as you see fit,” Iga said, “but I’m getting the feeling that the subject matter now on the table is very different from what the director originally proposed. How shall we handle this? Rather than answering the question right away, would you like to have them turn off the cameras for a while and then start over after we’ve agreed on some ground rules?”

Kogito had no idea what was going on, but he could see that the camera was still rolling, the sound-recording technicians were looking intently in his direction, and the young woman in khaki-colored jeans was opening a notebook, apparently to chronicle the proceedings. In that highly charged atmosphere, it would have been extremely awkward to ask the director (who was not only kindly-looking but clearly highly intelligent, as well) to call the operation to a temporary halt. Quicker than thought, Kogito rejected that idea. “Just translate the questions,” he told Iga. “I’ll answer them as we go along.”

So the interview recommenced, and the first question was about the film-in-progress that was being made from one of Kogito’s long novels, which had been published in German translation as
Der stumme Schrei
. They had just watched all the completed scenes.

“We would like to hear your reaction to the film so far, as the original author,” the director said in German, as Iga translated. “Also, we would appreciate hearing your comments about the acclaimed Japanese film director Goro Hanawa, who was so generous with his advice and encouragement at the beginning, during the screenplay-conversion stage of the project, while the young filmmakers were persevering in the face of enormous financial difficulties. We know that you had a long-standing friendship with Mr. Hanawa, who so tragically committed suicide, and on top of that, you were his brother-in-law, as well.”

Kogito replied: “The Japanese title of my book,
Rugby Match 1860
, is a metaphor that ties together two events. One is the peasant uprising that occurred in the important year of 1860—a year that also saw the second opening of Japan to the West—and the other is the civilian movement to oppose the
signing of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, a hundred years later in 1960. I see that the filmmakers have made the bold choice to render the metaphors with literal imagery, and I think it would be interesting to continue in the same vein. If it was Goro who proposed to the young German filmmakers that it be done this way, then I can definitely see traces of his trademark humorous yet coruscating satire, and I marvel at the young film-makers’ skill in making that a reality on the screen.

“In case you don’t know the background, the clan authorities, under the feudal system, condemned the leader of the first peasants’ revolt to death by beheading. The peasant activists managed to retrieve the head of their leader, which had been preserved in brine, and after reattaching the pickled head to their leader’s dead body, they went off to mount another attack, this time on the castle town downriver. That trope, like the rugby match, is something that I wrote as a metaphor in the novel, but this film seems to be transforming everything into literal images.

“Anyway, the leader, restored to a semblance of life, is once again riding in the box with wooden wheels, being propelled along the road by his followers. This is a reference to something that really did happen just after Japan lost the war; it’s an incident that is important to me as both a member of my family and, personally, as an individual. I wrote about it in a novel called
His Majesty Himself Will Wipe Away My Tears
, and elsewhere, as well.

“The last thing I would like to point out is that the scenes of the mountain valley depicted in these video excerpts have succeeded brilliantly in capturing the essential atmospherics of the terrain around the area where I grew up. There’s an essay by an architect friend of mine, in which he analyzes the topological
characteristics of my novels. What I saw just now on the screen gave me the feeling that the architect’s superb structural logic had somehow been transformed into visual images. I remember hearing about an extensive field-research trip that Goro went on, accompanied by my wife—as you mentioned earlier, she is Goro’s younger sister—that included a visit to the house where I was born and raised. (This happened about twenty years ago, while I was living and teaching in Mexico City.) This film has made excellent use of that research and brought it vividly to life. In all likelihood, the filmmakers based their production design on the particulars that Goro gave them in his informal lectures, but to transform those details into film in such a vivid way and with such a high degree of integrity—well, I have to say, these young German filmmakers have really earned my respect.”

When Kogito had finished speaking, the interview director, making no attempt to disguise the tension he felt about having a hidden agenda, broached the crucial question.

“May I assume that you, as the author, have a strong desire to see this film project completed?” he ventured. “The team that’s working on it noticed a problem in the contract with the original author—that is, with you. Your agent pointed out the same thing, and then the funding for the project dried up, so production unavoidably ground to a halt for an extended period of time. Is there any chance that you might have the inclination to offer these young artists the assistance that would make it possible to overcome these obstacles?”

After translating the second question up to this point, Iga asked the director a question of his own, this time in English rather than German, so that Kogito would be able to understand
as well: “When you say ‘inclination’ and ‘assistance,’ what exactly are you hoping to obtain?”

“Well, it’s like this,” the director replied. “First, contractually, there’s the option itself; these young artists haven’t officially acquired the film rights to the original novel, and we were wondering whether you might consider letting them have those rights without paying a fee? Second, it has been reported that the estate of Goro Hanawa, the director, may be worth as much as five million deutsche marks—that’s nearly nine million U.S. dollars. If that’s true, could we possibly ask you to try to persuade the bereaved family to invest in this film?”