Kenzaburo Oe’s brother-in-law and friend from youth was filmmaker Juzo Itami, known in the West primarily for his 1985 film Tampopo. In 1997, some time after suffering a knife attack by right-wing gangsters he had satirized in one of his films, Itami ended his life by leaping from a building.
Oe begins The Changeling, as in a number of his novels, from insoluble, deeply personal events – here from his friend’s suicide – and turns it through sets of fictional tests, dialogues, memories and perverse events. And here, as in those other novels, Oe edges his readers toward the sublime through his restrained distortions of reality.
The Changeling begins with Kogito, an aging Oe-like writer, wearing oversized headphones, listening to a cassette-tape recording that his brother-in-law, Goro, has prepared for him. Goro’s voice speaks: “I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. … But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” After slipping into an unpleasant doze, Kogito opens his eyes to find his wife before him, telling him of Goro’s suicide.
The Changeling, by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm, Grove Press, 480 pages, $32.95
The cassette is one of dozens Goro recorded for Kogito, revisiting conversations they had carried on in past years, on Rimbaud, on films that never materialized, on serious faults with Kogito’s novels. Kogito responds to his dead friend by pausing the tapes and talking back to them, thereby creating an impossible dialogue with the Other Side, and one that unwaveringly tries to comprehend Itami’s path to suicide. As this process becomes obsessive, it disturbs Kogito’s wife and son, and he forces himself to break from the dialogue. He takes a writing residency in Berlin – in his words, imposing a “quarantine.”
Oe developed his art, from early in his career, by giving voice to his mentally handicapped son Hikari (who appears as Mori and Eeyore in other of his novels, and here as Ikari), and shortly before receiving the Nobel Prize in 1994, Oe stated he was giving up fiction because his son had developed his own voice as a composer of classical music.
The Changeling summons onto its pages the stock of damage incurred over a lifetime spent speaking against ugly power
Oe did, of course, recommence writing, but no longer for Hikari. His desire to give voice to the voiceless re-emerges here in Itami/Goro’s musings and criticisms from beyond death. They come as necessary counterstatements to scandalous rumours proliferated by tabloids around Itami/Goro’s death: affairs gone wrong, mix-ups with yakuza gangsters, etc.
The latter half of the novel shifts from the present suicide to the distant, life-changing event that Kogito and Goro share in their teens, an event so soul-corrupting and unspeakable it is referred to only as “THAT” (reminding us of Joseph Conrad’s “the horror” or Herman Melville’s white whale), and, unlike other traumatic events in his life, this one Kogito has never attempted to work through in a novel.
Kogito’s memories lead us through fragmented scenes of his and Goro’s burgeoning friendship to their entanglement with a band of militant nationalists, who are also ideological followers of Kogito’s dead father. The youths are coerced into coming to dinner at the isolated training camp, where they come face to face with the group’s plan to make their mark on history. In telling such events, Oe fearlessly cycles personal matters through political consequence and back through art-making, letting loose grotesque criticisms of the self and of ideology in Japan.
Though Oe is known for innovations in syntax in his native language, his sentences as translated into English don’t give us the aesthetic high we often get from writers of his stature (even those in translation). Yet in The Changeling, as in his earlier novels, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! and A Quiet Life, Oe somehow assembles, through relentless inquiry, a formally mesmerizing, polyhedral narrative of enormous power.
By measured steps and backtrackings, he digs into the multitude of reasons one comes to an existential crisis or altogether disengages from life. The Changeling summons onto its pages the stock of damage incurred over a lifetime spent speaking against ugly power, and it ultimately does so in order to eke out ways of persisting.
Malcolm Sutton is writing his PhD dissertation on giants of postmodern fiction.
