The Changeling (34 page)

The area they were driving through wasn’t too far from the mountain-valley village where Kogito had grown up, but there was something alien about the lay of the land and the aspect of the other villages they passed. Of course, Kogito was sensitive to that sort of thing, having been brought up in such an insular
environment. When he used to go on nature walks with his class from the nationalized elementary school, their route often took them upstream along the tributary of the river that ran through his valley and crossed the small mountain. No sooner had the basin below come into view than he would be filled with feelings of awestruck dread, as if he were hopelessly lost in some strange foreign country, even though they were still, technically, within the boundaries of his village. He always half expected a pack of horned demons, brandishing wooden sticks over their heads like swords, to come charging out from the depths of the fields and paddies that were surrounded by quiet groves of trees, and force him to run for his life. Even at seventeen, those childish fears were still vivid in Kogito’s mind.

According to Kogito’s recollections of the trip to Daio’s training camp, right after emerging from the tunnel not far from Kogito’s village, the little caravan turned off the highway that would have led them into the village and went down a slope on the north side of a beautiful stand of trees that seemed to be awash in the fresh green leaves of spring. Continuing along, they descended into a dark, ancient-looking forest of Japanese cypress trees. As they approached the mountain stream, which was churning with whitewater rapids, there were places where the shoulder of the road had caved in. Behind the wheel of the Cadillac, Peter was visibly nervous.

After they had safely navigated that hazard, they emerged onto a road that ran along a big river, which was quite wide but didn’t contain much water. Its high banks were stabilized by the thickets of shrubbery that grew on both sides. The sky, peeking through the steep walls of cedar forest that bordered the road on both sides, was a deep, intense blue.

Next they passed some long, narrow cultivated fields that lay on a level plain between the river and the road, but the land appeared to have been abandoned. The same was true of the fields and storage shacks that could be seen higher up, where patches of farmland had been cleared on the forested side of the mountain. As far as the eye could see, there wasn’t a single private dwelling, or perhaps the houses had been swallowed up by the vegetation when the people who used to live here had gone away for some reason, and now those houses were entombed beneath the tall thickets and wild cascades of ivy that had begun to engulf the old trees, as well, as time went by. That’s what the seventeen-year-old Kogito was daydreaming about as they rode along through the mutable scenery.

The unpaved road began to head uphill again, and as they gained altitude the river vanished into the deep valley below. On the opposite shore, surrounded by cedar trees, a wide slope opened up, and at the top were several roofs that looked as if they might belong to warehouses or granaries. As the road swooped down toward the river from a broad clearing, a rickety-looking bridge suspended from steel cables came into view immediately ahead. On the side of the road that faced a small mountain, there was a three-story building that looked like an abandoned inn. Nearby stood a miniature shrine to the local tutelary god, surrounded by its own little forest of dark-leafed deciduous trees.

Daio and his disciples stopped the truck in the wide clearing and signaled to Peter to park the Cadillac behind them. Then the group trudged down a steep hill, crossed the wobbly suspension bridge, and climbed up a slope that was covered with fresh green grass.

Goro’s storyboards included a sketch of the entire group standing on a road at the top of the slope, between the main building of the training camp and a large outbuilding. In the screenplay, corresponding to that sketch, the following dialogue appeared:

PETER: That tree with a single red flower is a camellia, and the one next to it, with no flowers but lots of buds, is a dogwood. This is so strange—we have the exact same trees in the garden of my house in America.

KOGITO: My mother grows lots of different kinds of flowering trees. I think my father probably brought these from our house in the village.

LEADER: Choko Sensei used these flowering trees as a way to lure the local maidens over here for a visit. It worked out pretty well for us, too!

KOGITO (
ignoring Daio’s little joke
): The one with amber-colored shoots is a pomegranate. And see the one next to it, with the yellow buds? My mother always calls that an ornamental pomegranate. I’ve heard people saying spitefully that our house is the only place that grows that useless kind of pomegranate. I guess they think it’s a waste of space because it isn’t actually edible.

PETER: You certainly know a lot about plants, Kogito!

GORO (
jocularly, but with a critical undertone
): Kogito’s an odd duck, for sure. He remembers everything he’s ever read, whether it’s a dictionary or an illustrated book about
plants. Before long you’re probably planning to turn into an encyclopedia yourself, eh, Kogito?

PETER (
laughing
): An Encyclopedia Boy!

Back in the present day, Kogito remembered something. One day, before they embarked on the Tagame ritual, Goro had telephoned Kogito and said: “Hey, quick question. What was the name of that flowering tree in the forest where you grew up? If you saw it in early spring when the new leaves are coming out you’d know the name right away, but at the moment it escapes me. It isn’t something common like a peach or a plum, though, I’m sure of that.”

Feeling nostalgic for a peaceable time in his village, before he started clashing with his mother, Kogito replied that the tree in question could have been an edible pomegranate or an ornamental pomegranate or possibly a dogwood, since while oak trees did put out showy new leaves in early spring, their flowers were rather plain and unobtrusive. At the time of that phone call, did Goro get the feeling that Kogito was pretending not to remember the conversation that took place at Daio’s training camp? Or did Goro just assume that Kogito was shuffling through his own definitive memories of
THAT
, trying to help Goro out by providing the exact names of the plants he would need to mention in his screenplay?

Reawakened by Goro’s screenplay, Kogito’s memories of that springtime scene came flooding back, and he remembered that the mountain cherries had still been blooming, though only at the higher elevations, where temperatures were cooler than in the valley. Peter was standing with his back against an old
cherry tree, its branches laden with fully unfurled double blossoms, that sheltered the meadow in front of the training hall. Kogito was standing beside him, explaining the surrounding vegetation and appearing, at that moment, to be on more intimate terms with Peter than Goro was ...

Obviously annoyed by this turn of events, Daio gave some orders that were transparently designed to set his plan in motion. Interrupting Kogito’s horticultural discourse, he called out to Peter and Goro. “Wouldn’t you like to wash off the dust from your long road trip?” he asked, pointing at the building behind them—a bathhouse with mineral-rich water piped in from the nearby hot spring. Then, turning to Kogito (who was no less covered with grime from the journey than the other two), he said: “Come on, I’ll show you the room where your father used to spend a lot of his time looking at ... books.”

Peter was enthusiastic about the idea of taking a hot-spring bath, and the young disciples led him and Goro off to the bath-house, where towels and cotton kimonos were already laid out. Meanwhile, Daio hustled Kogito along a path bordered with round stones, which ended at a two-story building that was contiguous with the bathhouse but had its entrance on the opposite side.

There were no spoken lines in the screenplay regarding what happened next, only directorial explanations of the characters’ movements. On the storyboards that were attached to the screenplay with a colored paper clip was a sketch of a scene in which the young American officer and the Japanese schoolboy are naked in the bath.

The bath itself is a small rectangle, set into the ground. Since the Japanese custom is to soap up and rinse off before
getting into the bath, there’s a Japanese-style washing area with a drain in the floor, next to the bathtub. There, Goro and Peter are washing their bodies before taking turns in the steaming tub, which isn’t big enough for two.

After Goro gets out of the bath and returns to the washing area, Peter climbs in and submerges himself in the shallow end of the bath. After a moment, he reaches out from behind and tries to touch Goro’s boyish genitals, which are dangling between his thighs. Goro jumps away, and Peter doesn’t pursue the matter.

In the next scene the young man and the teenaged boy are perched on a couple of low bath stools, washing each other’s backs. Peter’s hand (which has been scrubbing Goro’s back with a thin towel covered with soap bubbles) suddenly stops in midmotion. Laying down the towel, Peter begins to wash Goro’s back all the way down to his loins, massaging the skin with his bare hands, which are covered with foamy lather. Then in one smooth, continuous movement, he tries to stick the palm of one hand in the crevice between Goro’s buttocks. Goro leaps decisively to his feet and, still standing, tosses a bucketful of hot water from the bathtub over his body. Some of the water splashes onto Peter, but he just laughs quietly. Goro heads for the dressing room, and after a moment Peter follows.

That’s exactly how it happened
, Kogito thought as he read the screenplay. He and Daio had been watching from the ceiling cavity above the bathroom, lying on their stomachs in a crawl space about forty inches high atop the sturdy beams of the bathroom’s wooden ceiling, each with an eye pressed to his own private peephole. Kogito was led there via a secret passage, accessed through the bottom half of a built-in closet in the room
on the second floor of the building that was back-to-back with the bathroom.

Earlier, Kogito had been gazing out at the Nepal holly tree directly beneath the window that faced his father’s writing desk, while Daio stood next to the desk paying close attention to a small open area beneath the opulent foliage of the holly tree. When he got the high sign from the acolytes who were down there standing watch, Daio squeezed through the closet into a low-ceilinged space that was above the bathroom, with Kogito close behind. And then Kogito—against his better judgment, and feeling that he was being coerced into doing something improper—ended up peering through the hole Daio pointed out, from which a pale golden light was emanating. And what Kogito saw through that luminous peephole was the exact same bath scene that Goro described in his screenplay.

After watching Goro and Peter leave the bathroom, Kogito heard a noise behind him and turned his head. Daio was scuttling toward him, propelling himself along with his one arm bent at the elbow, as if he were rowing a boat. Then he lay down on his side on the floor and stretched out his now-free arm to touch Kogito’s buttocks. When Kogito pushed the intrusive arm away, Daio toppled over, just like that, and lay faceup on the floor as helpless as an overturned beetle—or cockroach.

Kogito went back into his father’s study, alone, and stood gazing at the rows of volumes that lined the bookshelves. When Daio eventually came crawling out of the spy space, his grimy face dripping with sweat from the humidity, he said, “Your father always used to say, ‘If there’s a naked body to be seen, I don’t care whether it’s male or female.’ He only liked
to look, of course; he never actually did anything. What about you, Kogito? Are you planning to live out your days as your father did, without ever letting anyone find out your true nature? That seems like a really dry, boring approach to life. No, I’m joking, I’m joking!”

2

Kogito was livid. But as a mere high-school student, he didn’t feel confident that he had fully understood the meaning of this strange middle-aged man’s so-called “joke”—and it wasn’t as if Daio had spoken the words with a disagreeable smirk. Since he was there as a guest, Kogito was forced to let the anger fester in his gut.

The next storyboard illustration depicts a training hall of immeasurably vast scale, of the sort often featured in samurai movies; in the films of Goro’s father, for example, this sort of capacious wooden-floored room often shows up as subtle parody of that genre. In the center of the room some tatami mats have been spread out, a small oasis in the immense unfurnished space. Clearly, this is the place where that night’s makeshift party will take place. With no embellishments beyond those few woven-straw mats, the vast, empty hall seems almost surreal.

In a separate sketch, Peter and Goro are seated in the places of honor, with Kogito nearby. Daio sits at the head of a low table, facing the three guests, with his young followers lined
up on either side. A separate sketch shows several extra-large platters, heaped high with Chinese food. This is the only one of Goro’s storyboard sketches that is drawn with bright colors.

As he looked at the illustration, the memories that crowded into Kogito’s head were couched in the simplest sensory terms:
That was the most delicious Chinese food I had ever eaten in my life, and nothing has topped it since
. There was a stupendous amount of food; Goro’s sketch showed only four big platters, but Kogito didn’t remember noticing any shortage of delicious things to eat.

One dish was made up of the red shells, legs, and fat claws of crabs, stir-fried with fresh, juicy vegetables; it was essentially the same concoction Daio had brought to the inn at Dogo Hot Springs, made with mitten crabs from the nearby river. On another platter was fried tofu, or soybean curd. (Homemade tofu, prepared at the training camp and peddled in nearby towns and villages, was the commune’s only means of generating cash revenue.) Then there was the meat from a whole farm-raised lamb, butchered and roasted, then thinly sliced and fried in a hot wok with heaps of garlic and green onions.