The Changeling (26 page)

“It’s certainly true that Akari and I have collaborated on being alive for close to a hundred years,” Kogito acknowledged, “and I do get the feeling sometimes that I’m a centenarian already. When 1999 rolls around, I expect I’ll feel it even more acutely. Whether the feeling will strike on my birthday, or on Akari’s, that’s another matter ...”

“Wait a minute,” Goro interrupted. “You two have different birthdays? When I was talking to Chikashi the other day I somehow got the impression that you and Akari were born on the same day. As you know, Chikashi isn’t what you would call arrogant, by any means, but she is a person of strong convictions, and her confident personality sets her apart from the typical modest, self-effacing stereotype of Japanese women. Anyhow, I guess she’s somehow become convinced that she gave birth to you and Akari on the same day—in other words,
that both of you are her children! That’s probably because she’s truly a maternal type. When she and I were living in those lodgings in the temple compound in Mat’chama, she gave me more motherly support than I ever got from my real mother.”

At this point Kogito was on the verge of saying glibly, “I know that your mother plays a major role in your personal psychology, whether positive or negative, but what does that have to do with this?” but he swallowed his words. A moment later, he thought of saying: “It must have been kind of uncomfortable for you, having two supermoms on your back!” but he managed to suppress that comment as well.

While Kogito was busy biting his tongue, Goro used the resulting silence to shift the focus to a proposal that had clearly been on his mind before he called. “When you used to talk about becoming a sage, back in Mat’chama, I didn’t want to cross-question you, but what I was imagining vaguely went something like this. You would become a wise old man, so wise that not only would you have a vision of the hundred years you had actually lived and the fifty years before your birth, but you could also see ahead for fifty years to come, for a total of two hundred years. In other words, you would be so wise that you could predict the future, just by studying and thinking about what had gone before. But then, what about me? When you’re a hundred, I’ll be a hundred and one, and even if I’m still alive, I can’t imagine that I’ll still be working. Anyway, there was something disarming about your way of thinking that you were going to live to be a hundred. That was when I first started to think that rather than becoming a scholar, as I had originally predicted, you might end up being a person who did something creative.

“Remember when you wrote
Rugby Match 1860
as a magazine serial, and I phoned you from Venice? In those days it was ridiculously expensive to make a long-distance phone call through the hotel switchboard, and I remember my wife wasn’t too happy about the extravagance. At that time I hadn’t yet read your novel, but I was talking to a reporter who was in Venice to cover the film festival, and he had just read the final installment in a magazine and was very excited about it. That was how I came to hear the details of the plot—in spite of the fact that, as you’re always quick to point out, I’m not very good at reducing things to a summarized version, whether it’s a novel or a movie. I have to tell you that it was a huge relief to hear over the international phone line that
Rugby Match
had nothing to do with your plan for becoming a Man of Wisdom. At that time, even though I was appearing in movies overseas, I wasn’t exactly the toast of the town here in Japan, and I was still just a half-baked actor, struggling to find my path. Naïve as it may sound, I only had one great wish: that I could somehow be a party, through my work, to your plan for living to be a hundred. Actually, I did try to take that idea of yours and turn it into something concrete. I once drew up a plan for a TV series that would have followed the path of modernization since the Meiji era, as my way of trying to make a stab at your vision of the Man of Wisdom. That didn’t pan out, but I’ve continued to think about the idea of showing this country’s last hundred and fifty years in a cinematic way, using your house in the forest as a setting. I’ve also thought of showing that historical time line by starting at some point in the future and going back a hundred and fifty years into the past. Of course, that’s assuming you would collaborate with me on the screenplay. Even if that ultimately proved to be
impossible, we could still have the fun of brainstorming together. And now that I’ve been making films for twelve years, I’m conscious that I’ve reached the end of this particular chapter of my career. Then when I heard from Chikashi about your new way of thinking about making it to your hundredth birthday, that reignited the spark and inspired me all over again. Until now I’ve always made light of that, saying that you had plenty of time until you hit a hundred, because when you were younger it really did seem as if you had forever ahead of you. Of course, you’ve been partial to doing magic tricks with numbers ever since our days in Mat’chama, so you got me this time with a bit of mathematical sleight of hand, so to speak. But, really, to think that your age and Akari’s add up to a hundred this year! To be honest, that really knocked me for a loop. I can’t wait to hear what you think about all this.”

“So you mean that’s why you’re calling me now, from Venice?”

“Exactly,” Goro said with such complete candor that Kogito felt as if he, too, had been knocked off his feet. “Up until now,” Goro went on, “it isn’t as if I haven’t wondered why you were so fixated on making it to a hundred or why you even thought about something like becoming a Man of Wisdom in the first place. But I don’t think you’ll live the forty or so years between now and your hundredth birthday in a random, haphazard way. As Chikashi always says, you simply don’t have the gift of being idle for long periods of time.

“I’ve been thinking, too, about your life’s work and the philosophy you’ve constructed, with the goal of reaching your hundredth year on earth, and I think that the day will eventually come when you’ll try to find a way to start to write about
THAT
while you’re still at an age where you can work. Truth be told, you can’t go on avoiding the necessity of chronicling that experience forever. It’s very much the same for me. And you can’t possibly reach a final conclusion if you push me aside, since you don’t know everything that happened.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you reach a point where you want to tackle
THAT
, as the crowning accomplishment of your life as a novelist, I won’t let you do it all by yourself.”

4

Kogito’s apartment, in one of Berlin’s poshest residential districts, was as quiet and peaceful a place as you could imagine: a place where no one ever came to call, where he prepared his own meals and washed them down with wine from Spain and Italy. It was while he was getting ready to confront the inexorably approaching Berlin winter, which was a formidable thing in itself—“
Das Ding an sich,”
in local parlance—that Kogito often found himself remembering that “Man of Wisdom” phone call from Goro, which was one of the last talks they ever had. (This was after his obsession with the Tagame dialogues had begun to recede into the background.)

At other times, as he gazed out at the darkening sky through the overlapping tangles of bare black branches on one of the many winter days when it had been threatening to snow since morning, Kogito was reminded of a conversation he’d had with his composer friend, Takamura, as they looked out a hospital window at a gray Tokyo sky that also held the promise, or the threat, of snow.

On that winter’s day, Kogito had gone to visit Takamura at the hospital in Akasaka and had heard from his friend, firsthand, about the increasingly dire prognosis. Kogito had known since two years earlier that cancerous cells had been found in his friend’s kidneys during an annual physical examination. It wasn’t as if Kogito had been in denial about the lethal implications of that discovery, but he had been clinging all along to the hope that Takamura (this man on whom he had depended since they were young and who could only be described as a genius) would somehow find a way to overcome this crisis.

Takamura showed Kogito a notebook filled with delicate lines that were reminiscent of botanical drawings—the same spidery script the renowned composer used for writing his musical scores. At the top of the page were the heart-wrenching words “Abridged Composition Plan for the Remainder of My Life.” Takamura’s conversation with Kogito on this day seemed to be a way of adding figurative footnotes to the plan set forth in that notebook.

The patient’s condition was very grave and (as he explained to Kogito) when he considered the dreadful side effects of the anticancer drug therapy and the physical stamina that would be required to endure that treatment, Takamura had realized the necessity of scaling down the work plan he had been following till now. He had asked Kogito to write an opera libretto, and he said now that if the text couldn’t be completed over the next six months or so, he would have to abandon the entire opera project.

“I imagine you’ve probably heard about this already,” Takamura said, “but there’s a libretto that was written by a young American novelist. However, because the idea is to coordinate
his work with the nucleus that you’re going to create, if your work can’t be finished in time, I won’t be able to keep the opera on this list. Is there any chance you might be able to finish by spring?”

And Kogito had to answer, with the deepest regret, “No, no chance at all.”

“That’s what I thought, somehow—since we’ve been talking all along, I just got the feeling that was how it would turn out. And I gather that in this case, rather than starting to write something from scratch, it’s more a matter of your needing to dig up things that have been deeply buried for a long time and can’t easily be unearthed.”

Even if Takamura hadn’t been a rather diminutive man, his head would still have been disproportionately large for his body, but his essential power and symmetry were evident in every move he made. He was wearing pajamas made from broad-cloth shirting patterned with tiny polka dots, and his oversized head, which was bald as a result of radiation therapy, was covered with a woolen cap. He held Kogito captive with his deep, motionless eyes until Kogito, unable to bear the intensity of that gaze, had to look away.

“I had actually started to give up on this project,” Takamura said, “but then an American reporter came to visit me yesterday, and he told me that he had heard about the idea for an opera from Goro. So I thought, wishfully, that if you had reached the stage of talking to Goro about the opera, maybe it was on the way to being finished, and I began to feel cautiously hopeful again.”

“When I started to think about writing a story about that experience (the one we refer to as ‘
THAT
’), I told Goro right away,”
Kogito explained. “After all, he was there, too. And Goro said, ‘The fact that you’re going to write a libretto about our shared adventure—well, I guess that means it won’t be long until I’ll have to think about making it into a movie.’”

“I imagine the two of you must have talked about that incident quite often over the years,” Takamura ventured.

“No, not really. Of course, it’s something that happened ages ago, when Goro was eighteen and I was a year younger, and several decades have passed since then. Maybe it’s because we’ve never really talked it through, but I don’t think the big picture of the incident is completely clear yet, either for Goro or for me. This may sound as if I’m being evasive and making excuses, but I really don’t feel that I have a firm handle on the story at this point.”

“According to the newspaper reporter, Goro told him about a terrifying memory from his boyhood, but he told it in a
very short
form,” Takamura said. “The reason he put special emphasis on ‘very short’ is because apparently the film that Goro wants to make would be exceptionally
long
. The reporter said he couldn’t tell whether Goro was really serious or not, but I gather he was talking about making a film that would last for ten hours or more. I won’t say it would be impossible to make a film of that length, but the result would have a very different feel from the usual style of Goro’s movies, don’t you think?”

“Actually, there’s a big difference between the films Goro made when he was a student and the commercially successful movies that he’s been making over the past decade or so,” Kogito said. “I remember one of his early student films where two young men were in a room, and one was practicing a meandering,
serpentine piece on the violin, while the other just sat there, listening intently. That went on for thirty minutes.”

For the first time that day, Takamura showed a trace of the devastatingly incisive smile that often used to appear on his face before he was attacked by illness. “What was he practicing?” he asked.

“Bach’s Unaccompanied Partita No. 1,” Kogito replied. “Once in a long while the boy who wasn’t playing the violin would say something to the other one, but he didn’t seem to expect an answer.”

“Now that you mention it, Goro’s ex-wife, Katsuko, was talking about that short film, too,” Takamura said. “She said that when her mother (who subsidized the production costs) asked Goro what sort of thing he was planning to make next, he replied nonchalantly, ‘I’m going to make a film using the same techniques, only ten or fifteen times longer.’ Even after she and Goro broke up, Katsuko was always saying that if he ever decided to give up making movies with one eye on the box office, she would get her mother to shell out the money again and she herself would be the producer. She even said that she wanted to have me write the score, and she was talking like that right up until she collapsed with a stroke.”

“Do you suppose Goro talked to that reporter about his own ideas, or maybe even shared part of the synopsis?” Kogito asked.

Takamura shook his outsized head, which was snugly covered by the extra-large cap. In his eyes and around his mouth, as well, Kogito could discern faint vestiges of the familiar perspicacious smile. “I wanted to ask that question, too, even though I
knew it was probably just a pipe dream that would never come to fruition,” he said. “If Goro was the only person you had talked to in detail about the story for the opera, the next step before that would have to be for Goro to gather everything together in a notebook. I have a fantasy where I steal a peek at those notes, over Goro’s shoulder, and realize it’s the libretto I’ve been hoping for ...”