The Changeling (47 page)

“I know, because I was with him when he made the tape,” Ura said. “I was listening to him and thinking about what an extraordinary education he had given me.”

Ura said this bashfully, with downcast eyes, and as Chikashi looked at the young woman’s face she could see how the borderline-comical irregularities in her features had settled into an unusual but indisputable sort of beauty—a beauty that, at certain angles, did remind her a bit of Goro’s angelic face as a child. They both fell silent, and Chikashi found herself remembering one particularly explicit passage on the cassette tape—though not with any feelings of prurience or indiscretion.

Compared with the sexual landscape of a mature woman, there was something wild and untamed about her topography. It was like a vast, abundant wetland, still not fully formed. Based on my prior experience with the female anatomy, I really couldn’t say definitively, ‘Okay, this is this,’ or ‘Yes, I recognize that.’ I just had fragmented impressions: featurelessly wide
...
opulently wet
...
a healthy sexual appetite somehow managing to coexist with a stubborn attachment to virginity. Yet her outpouring of sexual self-expression (and the way she moved) seemed to have its own natural power, and her responses didn’t feel like mere preliminaries that would normally have led (but didn’t) to sexual intercourse. No, everything we did together felt like the real thing, perfectly whole and complete just the way it was
.

Slowly, Chikashi and Ura resumed their conversation. Mostly, Ura shared stories about Goro. Like the time he told her about a book that shows a series of pictures demonstrating how the faces (and physiognomy) of human beings have evolved, step by step, from the ape stage. When Ura rushed off to an antique-book store to find that book, Goro went along. Later, while looking at snapshots of Ura taken when she was a child—they were mostly taken by her father, which seemed to prove, Goro pointed out, that even if she was an awkward, ungainly girl, she wasn’t unloved at home, and she found that reassuring—anyway, Goro sketched the evolution, by stages, of a funny-faced little girl, showing how he envisioned Ugly Duckling Ura evolving into an ever more beautiful swan. Chronic low self-esteem dies hard, and in spite of Goro’s compliments she couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if he was right and that fairy-tale transformation really was under way.

After a time, certain small fluctuations in Ura’s expression seemed to indicate that something was amiss. It wasn’t a reflection of her changing emotions but rather something more directly physical. Suddenly she stood up and said, “I wonder whether I might use your restroom? I know it’s a rude thing to ask the first time you visit someone’s house, but I’m not feeling well at all.”

Chikashi led the way to the guest bathroom just off the entry hall, then Ura knelt down in front of the toilet, just like that, and began to throw up. Chikashi couldn’t bear to stand there and watch the girl’s broad, muscular shoulders heaving with every spasm, so she quickly stepped back and closed the door.

8

Although she had been expecting something of the sort, Chikashi was still shocked when Ura returned from her emergency visit to the lavatory with all the color drained from her face. Her skin was so pale that she looked as if she were wearing a fencing mask.

“I know this is none of my business,” Chikashi said, “but are you pregnant, by any chance?”

“I’m four months along,” Ura replied frankly, looking as if she might be about to burst into tears.

“So you came back to Japan to have the baby at your parents’ house?”

“No, actually, I came back to have an abortion. The guy told me it would be easy to do in Japan ...”

Once again, Chikashi was shocked. The girl’s use of the slangy, impersonal term “the guy” to describe the father of her unborn child hit her like a punch in the solar plexus, but Ura wore the defiant expression of an awkward little girl who has grown up but not matured.

“That’s no way to talk!” Chikashi scolded.

Ura continued, unfazed. “He said he didn’t want to continue our relationship, but when I told him I was pregnant he offered to take responsibility. I really don’t care for the man at all anymore; to be honest, I think I only got involved with him because he looked like Goro. It wasn’t much of a relationship anyway—it had gotten to the point where whenever we got together all we did was have sex.”

“And are you still planning to have an abortion?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I’m not. While I was on my way back here on a cheap flight, by way of Hamburg, I happened to read an article by your husband in a south German newspaper. It was the Sunday magazine of the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. Anyway, after that, I changed my mind and decided to go ahead and have the baby, somehow.”

“Now that you mention it, he did tell me that he wrote an article while he was in Berlin, and it was translated into German,” Chikashi said. “I believe he wrote it in English, so it would be easier for them to find a translator? If there were a Japanese version, I think he would have shown it to me ...”

Ura reached out and grabbed her big, bulky designer handbag—it was one of those sturdy all-purpose totes they sell at airport duty-free shops, advertised as “Ideal for the Busy Executive.” She pulled out a sheaf of thin newsprint-type paper. “Would you like to read it?” she asked.

“The thing is, I don’t read German ...”

“If I translate, will you listen? It’s a wonderfully strange little story. It’s written in the form of a reply to the question ‘Why do we have to send our children to school?’ It talks about Mr. Choko’s childhood experiences and about Akari’s education at the school for handicapped children, up to graduation.
The first half is especially beguiling. It begins right after the war ended, when Mr. Choko used to go into the forest every day with an illustrated book about botany and study the trees, instead of going to school.”

Ura Shima began to read Kogito’s essay, translating from the German with impressive facility as she went along:

One day in the middle of fall, even though it was pouring rain, I went into the woods as usual. As it continued to rain even harder, torrents of rushing water suddenly appeared here and there in the forest, and the road collapsed. By the time night fell, I was unable to get out of the valley. On top of that, I had fallen ill with a fever, and I spent the next two days more or less comatose in the hollow trunk of a large horse chestnut tree, until I was finally rescued by the local firefighting brigade
.

Even after I returned home, my high fever refused to subside. The doctor who came from a neighboring town to examine me announced that there was no medicine—or any other means of treatment—that could make me better, and took his leave. (I was listening to this dire conversation as if to something in a dream.) Only my mother was unwilling to give up hope, and she continued to do everything she could to nurse me back to health
.

Then, late one night, while I was still weak and feverish, I suddenly awakened from the nightmare world where I’d been living, perpetually engulfed in a hot, fiery wind, and I noticed that my mind had become clear again
.

You no longer see this arrangement very much these days, even in the country, now that Western-style beds have
become so popular, but in keeping with the way it used to be done in Japanese homes, I was lying on a futon spread directly on top of the tatami-matted floor. My mother, who probably hadn’t slept in days, was sitting by my bedside watching over me. In a slow, small voice that sounded strange even to me, I asked:

—Mommy, am I going to die?

—I don’t think you’re going to die. I’m praying that you won’t
.

—But the doctor said, “This child is probably going to die. There’s nothing more we can do.” I heard him. That’s why I think I’m going to die
.

My mother was silent for a moment. Then she said:

—Even if you die, I’ll give birth to you again, so don’t worry
.

—But wouldn’t that child be different from the me who died?

My mother shook her head
.

—No, it would be the same. After I gave birth to you again, I would tell the new you about all the things you’ve seen and heard and all the things you’ve read and all the things you’ve done up till now. And the new you would learn to speak all the words that you know now, so the two children would end up being exactly the same
.

I didn’t really understand what my mother was talking about, but after that conversation I was able to fall asleep with a truly tranquil heart. The next morning, I began to get better. It was a very slow process, and it wasn’t until the beginning of winter that I was finally ready
—
and more than willing
—
to return to school
.

When I was studying in the classroom or playing baseball on the field (baseball had become a popular sport after the war, though most people here believed it was a Japanese invention), before I knew it I would fall into a reverie and be lost in a world of my own. Wasn’t it possible, I mused, that the person who was here right now wasn’t the original me, but was, rather, a new child that my mother had given birth to after the death of her first son, who hadn’t survived that terrible fever? And wasn’t it possible that she had told this new child about everything that the original child had ever seen and heard and read and done, and now I (the new child) felt as though all those memories had been mine from the start? And even now, wasn’t it possible that I was thinking and talking with the vocabulary I had inherited from the child who died, who used to use the very same words?

And all the other children who were in the classroom and on the playing fields
—
wasn’t it possible that they, too, were children who had been born to take the places of the dead children who would never grow to adulthood, and that (like me) they had been told, secondhand, about everything those dead children had ever seen and heard and read and done? The proof of that, I thought, was that all of us were using the same inherited language when we talked
.

And the reason all of us had to go to school was to make those inherited words our very own! Not just Japanese language, but science, math, even physical education; we needed them all in order to inherit the language
—
and by extension, the knowledge, culture, and social traditions
—
of the children who had died. I realized that I couldn’t become a new child to replicate and take the place of the child
I thought had died of fever, just by going deep into the forest and comparing the trees and shrubs I saw before me to the illustrations in my botany book. That’s why we were coming to school like this and studying and playing together every day
...

I imagine that anyone who is reading this might think that the story I’ve just related is very strange indeed. And even while I’ve been recalling something that happened to me a very long time ago, at the beginning of that winter when I was finally over my illness and was able to return to school with quiet joy, I have a feeling, now that I’m an adult, that there are things I used to understand very clearly that now make no sense to me at all. On the other hand, I’ve talked here about a memory that I have never written about before in the hopes that those of you who are children (or “new” children) right now will understand this perfectly well
.

“That’s the gist of it, though I’ve only covered the first third of the essay or so,” Ura said. “Of course, this is my impromptu translation from the German version, which was translated from English, so if it had been written in Mr. Choko’s usual Japanese style I imagine it would probably be very different.”

“I don’t think so at all,” Chikashi protested earnestly. “If he was writing with the intention of having it sound as if he were talking to children, I think Kogito would use exactly that sort of style. The one minor thing I would change in your translation is that my late mother-in-law would probably have been speaking to my husband in the local mountain dialect. But still—why did reading this essay make you decide to have your
baby? The truth is, I think I understand your feelings, but I’d like to hear the explanation directly from you.”

While Ura was reading the pages she’d torn from a magazine, she had been wearing a pair of square, thick-framed, rather mannish-looking reading glasses. Without taking them off, she looked back at Chikashi with a face that was full of intelligence and showed no sign of being on the verge of tears. She appeared to be blushing again, from the depths of her transparent, radiantly alive skin, but this time the stimulus was positive: excitement, rather than embarrassment.

“I was thinking that I could be the kind of mother who gave birth to a new child for the sake of the child who had died, and I could tell that new child about everything the dead child ever saw or read or did, and I could teach him all the words that the dead child used to know.”

“So you’re saying that you’re going to give birth to a child to take the place of Goro ...”

“You’re probably thinking that’s a pretty presumptuous plan, for someone who was still playing with dolls not so long ago.”

“No,” Chikashi responded, straight from the heart. “I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. It’s just that our mother, and Umeko, and I—none of us can give Goro another chance at life. We’re all past that age.”

Ura looked at Chikashi with great intensity, and it was hard to tell whether her eyes held a plea for help or a declaration of defiance. “Earlier this year, you didn’t accompany your husband when he went to Harvard to accept an honorary doctorate,” she said. “I thought at the time that it was because you were in mourning for Goro. And that’s how I knew that you were someone I
could rely on and trust.” So saying, Ura began to sob loudly without making any effort to cover her face, which had already turned bright red.