Читать книгу The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe - Страница 11

Kogito and Chikashi arrived at Goro’s house in the seaside town of Yugawara just as the body was being brought home from the police station, but Kogito managed to avoid seeing his dead friend’s face. There was a small private wake, after which Umeko, Goro’s widow (who had starred in many of Goro’s films), planned to stay up all night watching videos of Goro’s movies with anyone who wanted to join her. Kogito explained that he needed to get back to Tokyo to take care of Akari, their son, who had been left at home alone, and it was decided that Chikashi would stay in Yugawara and attend her brother’s cremation the following day.

Glancing toward the coffin, Umeko said, “I could hardly recognize Goro’s face when I saw it at the police station, but now he’s back to looking like his handsome self again. Please take a peek, and pay your respects.”

In response to this, Chikashi said to Kogito, in a quiet but powerful voice, “Actually, I think it would be better if you didn’t look.”

Meeting Umeko’s quizzical eyes, Chikashi returned her sister-in-law’s gaze with a look of absolute conviction and candor, overlaid with sadness. Umeko clearly understood, and she stood up and went into the room with the coffin, alone.

Kogito, meanwhile, was thinking about how distant he had felt from Chikashi while she was staring at Umeko with that strong, defiant expression. There was absolutely no trace, in Chikashi’s utterly direct look, of the genteel social buffers that usually softened her speech and conduct. This is the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it, Chikashi seemed to be trying to tell herself as well, in the midst of her overwhelming grief and sorrow. It’s fine for Umeko to gaze lovingly at the destroyed face of Goro’s corpse and imagine, wishfully, that those dead features have been miraculously restored to their original handsome, animated form. As his sister, I’m doing exactly the same thing. But I think seeing Goro’s face would just be too much for Kogito to bear.

As Chikashi perceptively surmised, the prospect of viewing Goro’s dead body filled Kogito with dread, but when Umeko voiced her request he automatically started to stand up. He couldn’t help thinking that he would never be mature enough to handle something like this, and he was engulfed by feelings of loneliness and isolation. But he was conscious of another motivation for agreeing to view the corpse, as well: he was curious whether there might be a mark stretching along Goro’s cheek that would indicate he had been talking into a Tagame-type headset when he jumped. The impact, Kogito theorized, could have left an imprint that would still be visible now, and he had reason to believe that that scenario wasn’t merely his own wild conjecture.

Taruto, who was the head of Goro’s production company as well as the CEO of his own family-owned company in Shikoku, had taken on the task of transporting Goro’s body to Yugawara, and after the wake he showed the family some things he had found on Goro’s desk at the office. Along with three different versions of a suicide note, written on a personal computer, there was a drawing done in soft pencil on high-quality, watermarked drawing paper.

The picture, which was drawn in a style reminiscent of an illustrated book of fairy tales from some unspecified foreign country, showed a late-middle-aged man floating through a sky populated with innumerable clouds that resembled French dinner rolls. The man’s position reminded Kogito of the way Akari sprawled out on the floor whenever he was composing music, and this added to Kogito’s immediate certainty that the picture was a self-portrait of Goro. Furthermore, the man who was wafting through the air was holding a mobile phone that looked very much like a miniature version of Tagame in his left hand, and talking into it. (Hence, Kogito’s suspicion that there might have been a headset mark on Goro’s dead face.)

The fairy-tale style of the drawing reminded Kogito of something that had happened fifteen years earlier. Goro had written a book of essays having to do with psychoanalysis, which was one of his many interests. In the past he had always designed the covers for his own books, but he was already busy directing movies, so he delegated that task to a young artist. Rather than the contents of the book it was the cover Kogito thought of now, as he looked at Goro’s “floating man” picture.

Soon after the book was published, Goro and Kogito happened to run into each other, and they started talking about the cover design. “This drawing style is clearly emulating that of the popular illustrator whose work is all over the major magazines in America right now,” Kogito remarked. “To be sure, this composition incorporates Japanese people and scenery, but the basic concept and techniques are obviously borrowed. For a young artist beginning his career, is this kind of derivativeness really okay?” Kogito posed this question in what was meant to be a lighthearted, teasing way, but Goro’s reaction was blatantly aggressive.

“If you want to talk about openly copying foreign artists, or being directly influenced by their styles, that’s something you did at the start of your career, too, isn’t it?” he snapped. “But because this is visual art, the derivativeness is much more obvious: what you see is what you get. In your case, you basically cribbed things from literature written in French or English, or else from translations, and redid them in Japanese. But even so, you hewed pretty closely to the original form of the foreign literary style, right?”

“That’s exactly right,” Kogito agreed, but he was taken aback by this rather stark assessment. “When you’re a young writer, you do have something original to say, even at the earliest stages. The trick is figuring out how to protect your original voice while stripping away the veneer of borrowed styles. That’s very difficult and painful to do.”

“And you’ve definitely succeeded in doing that,” Goro conceded. “But in the process, you’ve lost the relatively large readership you used to have when you were younger. You’re aware of that dilemma, no doubt. As time goes on, isn’t it just going to get more and more acute? This young artist has a lot of talent, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to let himself get set in any narrow stylistic ways. On the contrary, I think he’ll probably stretch himself in many different directions.”

At the time, Kogito was bewildered by Goro’s response, which seemed to stem from some sort of festering ill will rather than from simple irritation at Kogito’s offhanded comments. Kogito told himself that Goro probably just felt protective toward the young artist’s book cover, which he obviously liked very much. The style of the paintings Goro was trying to create on his own, toward the end of his life, was clearly a postmodern variation on American primitivism—a term that could also have described that young artist’s work—so it was possible that Goro had taken Kogito’s perceived attack on the young artist as a personal affront.

After a while, it occurred to Kogito that Goro’s last drawing might have been meant as a farewell bequest to Kogito himself: a self-portrait of Goro floating through space, talking to his old friend and brother-in-law via his Tagame headset, in lieu of a mobile phone.

So anyway, that’s it for today—I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.