Book Review: The Changeling

How many novels by Nobel Prize winning writers send readers to a children’s picture book as the key to understanding the text? I’m guessing one. That Kenzaburo Oe uses Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There successfully in this manner while exploring the repercussions of his brother-in-law’s suicide only adds to the achievement of the novel.

I have never been a fan of roman à clef, but when I learned that The Changeling focused on Oe’s friendship with one of my favourite contemporary Japanese directors, Juzo Itami, I knew that I would have to make an exception. While Itami is best known in the West for his episodic comedy about food, Tampopo, I was less than enthralled by its series of sketches. It was some of his other films, notably the biting satire A Taxing Woman, and the wryly observed, The Funeral, that helped me appreciate his achievements.

Seeing these movies drove me to seek the hard to find Minbo: Or the Gentle Art of Japanese Persuasion, for its satire of the Japanese organized crime groups known as yakuza. While numerous directors have made a living glamourizing the yakuza lifestyle, few have risked mocking them. Itami showed great courage in making the movie, only to be victimized in a yakuza knife attack within a week of its domestic release. While a reader might benefit from seeing all four aforementioned movies before starting the novel, if you could choose only one, Minbo would be it, because Itami's feud with certain yakuza groups is one important thread running through the novel.

Here's the opening scene of the movie:



The initial part of the novel focuses on Kogito (yes, his name is a play on Descartes' cogito ergo sum), a well established author who is suffering in the aftermath of his brother-in-law Goro's suicide, who seemed to be at the peak of his career as a director. When Kogito receives a box of cassettes that Goro recorded for him, he retreats to his study and engages in conversations of a sort with his late friend, alienating his wife and son in the process. As Kogito alternates between engaging in these dialogues and questioning his own addiction to listening to the "Tagame" tapes over the first 120 pages there is a risk of losing the reader, but it is worth pressing on.

At Kogito's first mention of the yakuza attack on Goro, my antenna went up and I was drawn deeper into the novel. Kogito reveals that when Goro made Minbo, it was not the first time he had angered elements within the yakuza. In fact, Kogito implies that the attack on Goro may have been provoked by a series of incidents when he didn't back down from yakuza in public spaces or by a possible romance between Goro and a woman with connections to the underworld. Reading this section, I was reminded of rumours around the time of Itami's death that his suicide might have been a murder. To the best of my knowledge, no credible evidence has ever emerged on this point, and in the novel all of Kogito's speculations about Goro are centred on why the latter took his own life and not about whether he really did jump off the building. It is an important distinction that depicts Goro not as a victim, but an agent of his own fate.

Having spent a large portion of the novel on Goro, Kogito reveals that he has had his own encounters with thugs willing to use violence on artists they don't like. In Kogito's case, the tormenters are not yakuza, but a small group of ultranationalists from his home province who may have a connection to Kogito's own father. While he is never subjected to anything as extreme as a knife attack, on three separate occasions he has the toes on one foot smashed. The accumulated result of these attacks is to permanently affect his gait.

Considering that Goro and Kogito have both been terrorized while exercising their rights to free speech and artistic expression, it is hard not to reflect upon the courage both men have shown as artists. Who among us would be willing to take the same risks for our art? It is a troubling question the novel effectively raises and makes for an enriched reading experience during the middle part of the book.

Kogito's wife (and Goro's sister), Chikashi, serves as the moral compass of the novel. She is the one who blames Goro's suicide on a traumatic incident that occurred when he and Kogito were seventeen. She feels like something changed in him after that incident that slowly consumed him from the inside. Despite having this feeling, she knows almost nothing about the incident, since she only witnessed the tail end of it after Goro and Kogito returned from semi-confinement in the backwoods of Matsuyama. The incident affected both men so deeply that they individually decided to render it through their chosen artistic mediums, but let decades pass while they tried to make sense of it. Chikashi, aware that Goro died before he could film the story implores her husband "to be brave, and write only the truth, until the very end." Without fear of spoiling anything, I can say that Kogito/Oe goes on to fulfil her wish for the next two hundred pages of the novel.

After Kogito shares as much truth as he can about the incident he persistently refers to as THAT, questions remain. The most obvious one being, why is the novel even called The Changeling? By implication, it seems that Goro is the changeling of the title, but the main part of the novel never addresses the significance of the comparison. Fortunately for the reader, there is an eighty page epilogue that serves to answer many of the questions raised until that point while also compelling the reader to re-read the entire novel in light of the insights shared in the final section.

In the epilogue, the point of view shifts from Kogito to Chikashi. It begins with Chikashi developing her own obsession in counterpoint to Kogito's Tagame obsession as she reads and re-reads Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. The picture book becomes for her a conduit to conduct something akin to a Jungian self-analysis of her relationship with Goro (not to mention their mother). Oe ably retells Sendak's story, but there is still no substitute for having what is ostensibly a children's book in your hands while reading Chikashi's reflections. Briefly, the book tells the story of a girl whose younger sister is kidnapped by goblins, who fool her by leaving an ice sculpture of the baby in the rocker. Although the girl rescues her sister, there's no doubt that her encounter with darkness has altered her worldview.

Among the many similarities Chikashi sees between the book and her own life, two are germane to this review. From the time Goro leaves her until he and Kogito return from their misadventure, she feels as if the unspoiled brother she once knew has disappeared forever and returned almost imperceptibly, yet unalterably changed. What has changed him is his first encounter with the "goblins" of the world, be they the ultranationalists at the training camp they just left, or the yakuza he is going to infuriate time and again for the rest of his life. Just as the world of the girl in the story "is filled with signs that danger lies ahead" (Sendak's own words apparently), so was the darkness at the end of the path always threatening Goro. Perhaps, in the end, it was that pressing darkness that was too much for Goro to bear.

Not that this is the only insight offered into Goro's state of mind before he jumped. It would take a much closer reading than the one I made to blend all the speculations offered throughout the novel. The novel does end on a hopeful note of a sort when Chikashi meets a former lover of Goro and offers her financial support so that she can have a baby fathered by another man who is said to resemble Goro. Both women share the hope that Goro's spirit can re-enter the world in this way. Whether or not this proposed antidote to mortality will satisfy the reader, let it be said that The Changeling is an accomplished novel and a worthwhile read.