The Changeling (48 page)

No matter who it was, when Chikashi was with someone who was crying—even watching brave Umeko, who had wept while she was talking into the television cameras after Goro’s death—she couldn’t help feeling ill at ease. In spite of that, Chikashi’s heart was at peace at that moment (even though she didn’t quite understand why her decision not to go on the Harvard trip held so much significance for Ura). She felt sympathetic toward the young woman who was crying her eyes out in front of her, shedding what seemed to be the heartfelt emotional tears of an adult rather than the self-indulgent tears of a child.

To echo something Goro had said in a different context, Chikashi could sense a healthy, natural harmony between the weeping Ura’s outpouring of emotion and her voluntary restraint.
If this person is determined to keep her child and see things through to the end despite the difficulties her pregnancy has caused for her
, Chikashi was thinking,
then if I can help her out somehow, that’s what I’m going to do
.

Ura got her tear ducts under control and regained her composure, and then she began to speak. The story she told to Chikashi, who was listening with total concentration, went like this:

At the beginning, when Ura called her parents from Berlin and told them the situation she was in, both her father and mother were very magnanimous about their daughter’s “indiscretion,” as they called it. They agreed that the only thing to do was to come home to Tokyo and have an abortion, and they
offered to pay for everything. “What’s done is done,” they said, and after Ura had sensibly disposed of the accidental fruit of her indiscretion, she could once again settle down with new resolve and continue the academic journey she’d begun as an undergraduate at Berlin Free University, going on to a master’s-degree course that would enable her to become a professional person. Moreover, after that, they wanted her to press ahead and get her PhD.

“Oh, you’re a student at the Berlin Free University? Did you know that Kogito was teaching there during this past winter semester?”

When Chikashi interrupted the narrative with this question, Ura explained a trifle apologetically, “I was actually taking some prerequisite courses so that I could eventually go on to the Department of Economic Anthropology. The buildings are far apart, too, so I never even saw your husband from a distance. The guy—I’m sorry, the father of my child—was enrolled in the Japanese curriculum, so he registered for Kogito’s lectures. Apparently he thought the classes were going to be in Japanese. But that wasn’t the case, and he said that he found Mr. Choko’s English difficult to understand, so he wasn’t very conscientious about attending. However, he still wanted to get credit for the course, so he went to see Mr. Choko during office hours and asked whether it would be all right to write his report in Japanese. He was complaining afterward that your husband told him Japanese students had to write their reports in something other than Japanese—presumably German or English. We broke up shortly after that, so I don’t know how it turned out ...”

Ura’s parents had met when they were classmates in college, and they both had their hearts set on careers as researchers
or scholars. But because they had married young, they needed to find a way to make a living right away, and somehow they both ended up doing something unrelated to academia. Her father was a top executive in a trading company, and in the eyes of the world he was probably considered a very successful person, but her mother was obsessed with the idea that Ura should become a college professor, as compensation for her parents’ unrealized dreams. That was why they thought Ura should go through the ordeal of an abortion rather than getting married right out of school, as her parents had done—not that marriage was a realistic option in this case.
Look at it this way
, they seemed to be saying.
If you learn a lesson you’ll never forget, then something positive will have come out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into
. Ura was aware that her parents’ apparent magnanimity arose from that kind of calculation.

If you put yourself in their shoes, that may seem like a natural reaction, but when Ura announced that she had decided to keep the baby and take it with her back to Germany, her parents’ attitude underwent a radical change. “There’s no way you could live alone in a foreign country, raising a child, and still outshine your academic peers,” they argued. They wouldn’t even consider her “self-indulgent” idea of giving birth to the baby at home in Tokyo, nor would they approve her backup plan, conceived in desperation, of going back to Germany and delivering the child there. They cut off her allowance and announced that the place where she’d been living, an apartment that was owned by her father, had already been sold to the company he worked for and would henceforward be used as lodgings for their representatives in Berlin. It was clear that her parents’ game plan was to drive Ura into a corner so that she would have no
choice but to terminate the pregnancy as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t even buy her an airline ticket for the trip back to Berlin.

After three hours of intense conversation with Chikashi, Ura started to make noises about going home. Earlier, Chikashi had given Ura the color copy of Goro’s drawing she had requested, but now she impulsively took it back and substituted the original drawing, which she quickly remounted in its frame. Chikashi asked her young visitor to return a week from then, at the same time. Until then, she urged Ura not to give in to her parents’ pressure or threats.

Once Chikashi was alone, before Kogito and Akari came back from the swimming pool, she opened Sendak’s
Outside Over There
and spent a long time looking at the illustration of the scene where Ida sets out to look for her baby sister by flying through the window into the night beyond but makes a tactical error by falling out backwards, like a scuba diver going over the side of a boat. Chikashi knew that in the present situation, she, too, needed to be very careful to conduct herself properly and to make sure she was always flying right side up.

9

The idea that she was Ida, and vice versa, was at the heart of Chikashi’s powerful emotional response to Maurice Sendak’s picture book. While she was rereading the book over and over, to the point where she knew it by heart, Chikashi made an English-Japanese translation for her own private use.

When she showed it to Kogito, he gave it back to her all marked up with a thin red pencil, because he was the sort of person who couldn’t look at the original text of anything without wanting to mark it up and make corrections. Evidently realizing that his wife’s interest in Sendak was not just a passing fancy, he gave Chikashi, for her own library, the pamphlet from the symposium at Berkeley along with a big book called
Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak
, in which he had already pointed out the photograph of Sendak taking a stroll with his German shepherd. Chikashi deduced that it would be all right for her to read those books and annotate them with her own red pencil.

Little by little, as if she were remembering the story of her own life, Chikashi worked her way through the Sendak picture book and the books about his work. As the days went by, she became aware that although her own “tale” and the story of Ida in the picture book converged in a profound way, there were also some clear points of disparity. It wasn’t that the stories strayed apart and by chance ended up turning into a different thing; on the contrary, it was because of the divergences that the significance linking the two seemed to become even deeper.

Kogito had touched on this topic in his book
The Technique of the Novel
, and had revisited it in a revised paperback edition, as well as during a series of programs on educational television. Chikashi was very interested in Kogito’s theory of reiterative divergence: that is, a difference that is developed slowly, rather like the method used to create the illusion of motion in a cartoon or anime, by means of tiny accretional changes from one advancing image to the next. According to Kogito’s analysis, “divergence” takes on a special meaning when the progression of time is layered with the unfolding of the novel’s narrative; in other words, meaning emerges from the progression of slight variations.

Chikashi felt that she was seeing that same principle of reiterative divergence at work in Sendak’s book and in her own life story (which she just kept remembering over and over but never set down in words). Hoping to attain a more complete understanding, Chikashi tried sorting the respective elements into a list of specific topics. In a little sketchbook that she used for watercolors, she wrote down the similarities and differences between the concept of the “changeling,” as Sendak explained
it in his essay for the seminar, and her own thoughts about Goro and Akari as changelings of a sort.

1. The goblins came to steal Ida’s baby sister, and a baby made of ice was left in its place. (But why wasn’t Ida herself taken away? I knew that I didn’t need to think about that, because I myself had never been stolen by goblins, metaphorical or otherwise.) Ida felt completely responsible, and her anguish was profound. She immediately set out to rescue her sister, but she made a blunder right at the start. Wrapped up in her mother’s yellowish-gold rain cloak, she took off into the space beyond the window full of night, but she went out the window backwards and found herself flying faceup. How perfectly the text and the illustration portrayed Ida’s adventures and her predicament!

2. When I gave Kogito the red leather briefcase containing the screenplay and storyboards that Goro left behind, Kogito immediately compared them with his collection of Tagame tapes, then sorted out the various scenes in the order that they were likely to be filmed, and returned them to me. After I had read the screenplay and storyboards once more, I asked Kogito which of the two versions of the last scene he thought Goro would have been likely to film. The reason I didn’t ask Kogito which depiction was true to what really happened that night was because it was clear that he wasn’t present, so I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer that question.

“Since Goro wrote such a meticulously detailed screenplay and drew such complete storyboards, I think he must have been planning to film both versions,” Kogito replied.

I was hoping for a more definitive answer. But instead of pursuing the matter, I asked Kogito what he actually knew for
sure about the events depicted in these scenes, and that was when I realized that my husband, even now, didn’t have the details of everything that had happened to Goro during that time.

Kogito believed that during the week after he introduced Goro to Peter, he was with them in the role of intermediary at all times; in other words, he didn’t think Goro had ever met up with Peter when Kogito wasn’t present as well. But I remembered that a few days before they went missing over that weekend, Goro cut all his classes at the high school, from morning, and took the streetcar to the CIE. He went to Peter’s office, and the American showed him all his movie-related materials—books, magazines, clippings. Peter was exhorting Goro to attend his own alma mater, UCLA, as a foreign student, saying that Goro ought to major in filmmaking and follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a film director. When Goro came home that afternoon, he told me about this rather far-fetched idea with a kind of euphoric enthusiasm that struck me as terribly innocent and naïve. Given the national climate of postwar recovery, very few students had the opportunity to study abroad in those days so it wasn’t likely to happen, but even so I felt exceedingly uneasy about the talk of Goro’s going to UCLA. Wouldn’t that be just the same as if he were abducted and spirited away to America?

The next day, or perhaps it was the day after that, Goro told me that he was going to go for a drive with Peter. I felt the same sense of foreboding and unease, especially when he told me that their destination was the depths of the mountains, where his friend Kogito had been born and raised. Goro was saying lightheartedly, as if it was all a big joke, that in that part
of the country there were still a lot of odd people and curious beliefs.

When Goro left home to go on that “Saturday drive” and didn’t return for two whole days, I was truly frightened, and my imagination ran wild. What if he was being held captive in some hidden fortress in a village deep in the mountains—or what if he had been forced aboard an American warship and carried off to the United States against his will? And then on the third day, close to dawn, when Goro finally returned in that strange, wretched state, with his equally disheveled friend in tow, it didn’t exactly put my heart at ease.

3. What happened at the hidden fortress that last night, after Kogito and Goro left? I wasn’t able to figure that out from the two versions of Goro’s scenario-
cum
-storyboards, and the same doubt appeared to still be lurking in Kogito’s and Goro’s minds, many years later.

After Goro became a film director, and especially when
Dandelion
was such a huge hit in America, he often traveled to the United States, even going so far as to set up a branch office of his production company in Los Angeles. Even if the bloody incident described in the second scenario didn’t really take place, Peter would probably have ended up being sent home for the offense of removing military equipment from the army base, even though the guns in question weren’t operational—that is, assuming he got caught and that he was still alive. After he had been court-martialed and had served his prison term (or whatever his punishment turned out to be) and returned to civilian life, Peter would surely have stayed abreast of what was going on in the world of Japanese cinema, and one day—perhaps at some film festival or awards ceremony—he would
have turned up to greet Goro, who had become an internationally acclaimed director.

Wasn’t Goro dreaming of that sort of happy ending? But behind the façade of that rosy fantasy, Goro must have been horribly tormented, all his life, by the ominous shadow of those nightmarish memories—whether
THAT
had actually concluded with Scenario A or Scenario B. On the other hand, I couldn’t help wondering why Peter’s fate was such a mystery. It would have been a simple matter for Kogito or Goro to stop by the CIE and ask whether Peter had returned safely, but perhaps they couldn’t bring themselves to go back there after all that had transpired that weekend.