The Changeling (38 page)

“Welcome!” she greeted Goro with high good humor, bowing from the waist. “We’re very grateful for everything you’ve done for Kogito.” (That was the customary pleasantry.)

“I’m sorry we made so much noise so late at night,” Goro replied, equally formulaically. Wearing an exquisitely polite smile, he returned the bow with a grace and elegance that Kogito had never before witnessed in someone his own age.

Kogito’s mother went out through the main gate with no further conversation, and as soon as she was out of sight Goro said, in a loud, excited voice, “She was wearing the turban!” At
that moment they heard the horn of the little three-wheeled truck honking three times, just like the night before, and Kogito’s little brother, Chu (who until then had been hiding timidly behind Asa, staring at Goro), turned and ran after their mother. Asa was in the tatami-matted room that was a step up from the dirt-floored entry hall, preparing breakfast for her older brother and his guest beside the sunken hearth that connected that room to the kitchen.

Led by Chu, who had evidently been sent back by his mother, the same taciturn young man from the training camp entered the house and remained standing in the dirt-floored room. He spoke to Goro and Kogito while they were digging into their late breakfast, and Kogito couldn’t help thinking that the young man’s grandparents probably would have behaved in the same deferential, class-conscious manner if they had come to talk to the head of the estate and his family (that is, to Kogito’s grandparents) about some business or other. The young man’s way of speaking, too, was a complicated mixture of reserve and supplication.

“Daio is really worried about how you two are going to get back to Matsuyama!” he said, addressing his remarks to Kogito. “He was saying that since today’s Sunday, that’s no problem, but if you guys miss school tomorrow your mother will surely be angry ... and also, he figured she probably noticed that the friend you brought home was a trifle intoxicated. So that’s why he sent me to pick you up. He was saying that if I take you back to our training camp, you can grab a ride back to Matsuyama with Peter, in that foreign car. Peter went back to his army base for a while, but he said he’d return in the evening. Daio also said that after Kogito’s mother heard about last night, she might have ordered
her son not to go back to the kind of place that serves alcohol to minors, but that your friend, Goro, doesn’t answer to your mother and so she can’t boss him around. And besides, we’re living in a world of democracy now! That’s what he was saying, anyway. It’s none of my business, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the reason Kogito’s mother went out to work in the fields on a Sunday—later than usual, but even so—is because she was angry with Kogito about last night.”

Kogito knew, but didn’t say, that his mother hadn’t gone to work in the fields at all. She had set out for the overgrown remains of a botanical garden, featuring a collection of medicinal plants, that was between the basin of the valley, where they lived, and the other part of the village farther up the hill. According to local folklore, that garden had been created by the founder of the village. Nowadays it was just a plot of land covered with scrubby weeds and shrubs, rather than cultivated herbs and grasses, but Kogito’s mother always managed to find some useful things amid the untamed vegetation. When she went on these horticultural treasure hunts she would sometimes come across a type of wild rhubarb called
daio
—known colloquially around these parts as
gishi-gishi
—and no doubt it had struck her that one of the young men who came to visit her husband during the war was named Daio. Hence (as Daio himself had explained earlier, under the Matsuyama cherry blossoms) the nickname, “Gishi-Gishi.”

While the truck driver was making his pitch to Kogito, Goro sat quietly listening and devouring his breakfast. His body language made it clear that he wanted to go back to the training camp, and he seemed mystified by Kogito’s momentary hesitation.

They arrived at Daio’s training camp in the late afternoon, around 4
PM
. Even now, Kogito still remembered the quizzical expression on Goro’s face after they had crossed the rope suspension bridge and were trudging uphill through the grassy meadow. Kogito, too, was wondering whether the partying had started early. He couldn’t identify any explicit sounds of festivity, but he had the definite impression that there was some sort of commotion taking place in the vicinity of the training hall.

The truck driver had told the boys that Daio was waiting for them in the main building. There was a tall step at the entrance (the structure reminded Kogito of the temple of the Tenrikyo sect of Buddhism that had been built in his village), and as Kogito and Goro entered the building they sensed immediately that their reception was going to be different from the hearty welcome they had received the day before. Indeed, when they first poked their heads into the office, they thought no one was there.

After a moment, they noticed Daio sitting on a couch against the wall, with his legs folded under him and bent to one side. There was a two-quart bottle of home-brewed sake on the floor beside him, and he was in the process of sloshing some into a teacup. Then, with no trace of the cheery expression he had worn at the previous night’s banquet, he fixed them with a look that was so dark and doleful they were almost afraid to approach him. The words he spoke were still affable enough, but his face told a different story.

“Won’t you join me for a drink, Goro?” he called out. “I know you’re a man who can hold his liquor. I already got an angry letter from Kogito’s mother, reading me the riot act for giving alcohol to minors, so I won’t be pouring any for him, that’s for sure.”

“The sun’s still a bit too high for that,” Goro replied, refusing the offer in a sophisticated manner that sounded odd coming from someone so young.

Daio picked up the teacup full of
doburoku
, scooted down to one end of the couch, and set his bare feet on the floor. Goro sat down in the newly opened space, but there was no room for Kogito, so he grabbed a nearby wooden chair, turned it around, and plopped himself down. Daio observed this operation with an expression that was somehow arrogant and disdainful. Then, ignoring Kogito completely, he continued to address himself to Goro alone.

“I’m really happy you came back!” he exclaimed. “This morning, before Peter made a run to the army base—he’ll be back later—I told him that you guys would probably be dropping by again this evening, as well. He’s a sly one, that Peter. He came right out and said that if Goro wasn’t here when he returned with the broken guns, he wouldn’t be fooled again the way he was last night when you two sneaked off without telling anyone. He said that he would just turn around and go home, without even taking the weapons out of the car.

“When the young warriors heard that, they weren’t too happy. They had started drinking toward the end, after you ran off, and the party last night ended up getting a little bit wild and out of control, so maybe they forgot their manners, or maybe it was just their youthful high spirits. They’re kind of hot-blooded, and they don’t always take the time to think things through. Anyway, they said to Peter, ‘You may say that you won’t give us the stuff you bring, but we won’t let you get away with that.’

“And then Peter really showed his true colors. He said, ‘That’s a direct threat, and it would be my right as a soldier of
the occupying army—more than a right: my
duty
—to shoot you to death just for saying that. I’ll be keeping that in mind, and when I come back I won’t just be bringing broken guns. I’ll be bringing one that really works so I can defend myself!’

“But Peter’s a young guy, too, so he really didn’t need to say something like that, am I right? When the warriors heard that, instead of being concerned for their own safety, they were very excited at the prospect of getting their hands on a gun that they could actually use to shoot someone. He probably wouldn’t bring a rifle, so if you have one man with a pistol, all you need is for five men to jump on him with the intention of knocking him down. They could easily restrain him—some of these young guys are demobilized soldiers, with experience in battle. No, Peter really blew it; he said something he never should have said. Even so, when he left he was wearing a very solemn expression. You’d have thought the young warriors would have been intimidated by what Peter said, but they let out a big, loud war whoop that I’m sure was audible even where he was, over by the Cadillac. I hope that when he heard the sudden roar of voices he realized how radically the circumstances had changed, because I think it would be just as well if he didn’t come back ...

“The young warriors held an emergency meeting, and they apparently worked out a strategy in case Peter did come back. If he returned with a working pistol, they were planning to take it from him right away, by force. But Peter’s an officer in the military, so there’s no way he’s going to give up his pistol and bullets without a struggle! If he lost his gun, he would probably be punished in some way, and the Army of Occupation would come and root us out, and then our entire crew would
end up doing hard labor in some Okinawan prison, isn’t that right? For Peter, losing his gun here would be a very different story than if they just found out that he was doing the approximate equivalent of selling broken guns to black-market metal dealers, even if he did do that half in fun, as a sort of reckless game.”

“Was the plan you told us about just a game, too?” Kogito couldn’t stop himself from asking.

Daio’s face returned to the dark, gloomy aspect it had worn before he noticed their arrival. The one-armed man drained the
doburoku
in his teacup and took a deep breath.

“Of course it wouldn’t be just a game for us,” he said, glaring at Kogito with seriously chilly eyes. “Your mother told us not to pass your father’s ideas on to you, as if we were some kind of low-life vermin who would try to corrupt her precious son, but that isn’t our aim at all. In any case, you have no business calling our carefully thought-out plan a game!

“I know I’ve talked about this before, but when this country was ignominiously occupied for the first time in its history, we made up our minds that it wouldn’t do to let the peace treaty take effect without a single show of armed resistance from the Japanese people. But in this well-policed country, it simply isn’t possible to put together a group of armed rebels. If it were possible, don’t you think someone would have done so by now? That’s why we came up with the next best thing: ten of us are going to storm the front gates of the army camp with automatic rifles at the ready—and it won’t matter that they’re broken, because no one will be able to tell just by looking at them. And then we’ll be mowed down by a hail of bullets from the guns of the American soldiers.

“But the story doesn’t end with us dying an honorable
death. After the word gets out that the attack was staged with nonfunctional guns and the men who were shot to death were, essentially, unarmed Japanese—and if the occupying army doesn’t make that information public, the survivors here at the training camp will be handling PR and making sure the truth gets out. Anyway, when that happens, the occupying army’s censorship will have come to an end! And don’t you think that there will be a nationwide outcry of anger and indignation? We believe that outcry will determine the fate of this country after the peace treaty takes effect, because these are the beliefs we’ve acquired so far, and we’re willing to die for them!

“And isn’t this a natural extension of the philosophy of your father, Choko Sensei, who stormed the bank—unarmed, as we will be—and was shot to death in the process? I haven’t been teaching these young men that they should go out and kill people. Rather, I’ve taught them that we should be willing to give up our lives to restore the nationalistic ideology that’s been lost in this country. That’s what I’ve been saying all along! So what’s the point of stealing a single pistol that’s in working order? On top of which, what if you’re properly armed and you end up killing your opponent on the spur of the moment? And what if, among the soldiers of the occupying army, we killed a young pro-Japanese, Japanese-speaking officer like Peter? What effect would that have? Would the peaceable-minded Japan of today be sympathetic if we did something like that?

“But the young warriors end up getting carried away with some reckless, half-baked plan, and they don’t listen to what I tell them! ‘If you steal a pistol and end up killing your opponent in combat, especially before the peace treaty takes effect, that’s the same as annihilating one soldier of the occupying
army’—one idiot actually said that as if it was a good thing, and everybody clapped and cheered. Then there was the smart aleck who said, ‘If the person whose pistol you stole is running away before your eyes, rather than letting him go and bring the Army of Occupation down on us, wouldn’t it make more sense to kill him on the spot?’ And another guy said that if you had one working pistol, you would feel more secure than if you were attacking with a bunch of broken rifles. In the end, the group didn’t seem to understand a word I said. They really do behave like a bunch of brainless bumpkins sometimes.”

After he had finished this tirade, Daio picked up his teacup and splashed another dose of
doburoku
into it, then lifted the cup to his mouth with a trembling hand and drained it dry in a single gulp. The area from his chin to his throat was wet with sake, and after a not entirely successful attempt to wipe it off with the back of his hand, he turned to Goro and began to speak in a tone that seemed to suggest that Goro owed him something or, at the very least, that Goro ought to appreciate Daio’s noble efforts to remove the danger his volatile young followers might pose to Peter. Evidently he expected Goro to be grateful even if that effort turned out to be unsuccessful.

“If only Peter would sense that something weird is brewing and not come back, everything would be fine,” Daio said. “But the thing is, Peter has his heart set on seeing Goro, so I’ll bet he’s behind the wheel of the Cadillac at this very moment, heading back this way ...”