Читать книгу The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe - Страница 13

Late that night, on the day after Goro took his leap into the next dimension, Kogito finally made it home with the bloodstained handkerchief still pressed against the TV-camera gash between his eyes. He made dinner for Akari, who had been listening to CDs with the answering machine on and the telephone ringer silenced, and then, after washing his injured face (he kept the light in the bathroom turned off, and didn’t even glance at himself in the mirror), Kogito trudged up the stairs to his study.

He took Tagame down from the shelf where he had replaced it in the small hours of the previous night, after being scolded by Chikashi. On the train home, Kogito had had an epiphany about the tape he’d been listening to on Tagame, before last night’s strange farewell—namely, Goro’s reminiscences about the time he explained one of Rimbaud’s poems to Kogito. (It was late that day, around 5 or 6 PM, when a package containing the final tape recording was delivered to Kogito’s house, though by that time Goro’s body was already in police custody, being held as the unidentified corpse of someone who has met an unnatural death.) In retrospect, after what had happened, that monologue seemed to be rife with hidden meanings.

“When we were in Mat’chama, how well do you suppose we really understood French poetry? After that you went off to college and majored in French literature, but you mainly read prose, as I recall. And since I never made a formal study of the language, I can’t really judge our abilities,” Goro had said in his usual smooth, flowing voice, with no hint that anything out of the ordinary might be going on in his head. “But I remember that you used to copy the poems out of Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud onto hundreds of little pieces of paper and stick them on the wall at your mother’s house in the mountains. Rimbaud really had a hold on us, didn’t he?”

“That’s true,” Kogito had replied nostalgically, after pressing the STOP button on the tape recorder. “In those days, all we did was fantasize about the mystical meanings and how they applied to us. But I think that as time went by we were able to refine our understanding of Rimbaud based on scholarly research, wouldn’t you agree?” Whereupon he pressed the PLAY button again. And that was how, the night before, Kogito had managed to have a long, antic “chat” with his already deceased brother-in-law about Arthur Rimbaud, the French prodigy poet.

And now, at last, Kogito became aware of just how dense and thick-skulled he had been: Goro had clearly been using a verse of Rimbaud’s to say his own good-bye. It couldn’t have been more obvious, really. For openers, the poem Goro had been focusing on was “Adieu,” or “Farewell”: the same poem (as translated by Kobayashi) that Kogito had laboriously copied onto scraps of paper when they were teenagers.

And then Kogito remembered—though he wasn’t clear about whether it had been a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting—that he and Goro had shared a long discussion about the French poet on another occasion. At the time it had been many years since either of them had read any Rimbaud, and Kogito got the impression that Goro, who did most of the talking, was conjuring up the lines of poetry from the dim and distant recesses of his memory.

Inspired by that conversation, Kogito had rounded up and read several new translations of Rimbaud’s poetry. (By that time, almost every French-Japanese translator had published a Rimbaud translation.) Kogito ended up choosing Hitoshi Usami’s recent translation to send to Goro, after checking the Usami version not only against Hideo Kobayashi’s seminal translation but also against the original French text.

Among the pile of cassette tapes that Goro had sent, there was one in which Goro responded to Kogito’s gift of the Usami translation with a long discourse about Rimbaud. After Kogito had listened to that tape again, he went to the section of a bookcase where he kept the French books he had collected during his student days and took down several works, old and new, pertaining to Rimbaud.

On one shelf, a Pléiade edition of Rimbaud’s Collected Works stood next to a Mercure de France edition of Poésies; the latter (a present to Kogito from Goro when they were still in high school) had been Kogito’s first introduction to the French language. For the first time in many years, Kogito opened Poésies. He could still remember how his heart had leapt when Goro handed him that little book with the exotic red letters on the cover. There, in the margins, were the minuscule but clearly legible notations he had made as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, written in hard lead pencil.

The reason some of the notes were in English was because before Goro started teaching him French, the book that Kogito had consulted in the library of Matsuyama’s American-run Center for Cultural Information and Education (CIE for short) was the Oxford French-English dictionary. In addition, the pages bore two different kinds of annotations in Japanese. The notes in the angular katakana syllabary were used to flag what Kogito perceived as the salient points in Goro’s discourses. He used the katakana in imitation of, or homage to, the marginal printed musings in a collection of essays by Goro’s famous film-director father, which Goro had lent him.

Kogito’s own schoolboy thoughts (not shown here) were written in the flowing, cursive hiragana syllabary, to differentiate them from his notes on Goro’s impromptu lectures, which tended to run along these lines:

In a letter to his teacher, as well as in the poem itself, Rimbaud wrote that he was about to turn seventeen: that is to say, an age that’s filled with daydreams and fantasies. But it’s said that the poem in question, “Romance,” was actually written when Rimbaud was fifteen. In other words, when he wrote the line “One isn’t serious at seventeen,” he was misrepresenting his own age.

Even so, this poem is meant to be read by someone who’s exactly the age you are now, Kogito: the same age I was last year, when I read it for the first time. The great thing is that this absolute genius, Arthur Rimbaud, offers equal encouragement to ordinary humans like us, too.

Kogito was surprised that a gifted youth like Goro, who anyone could see was seriously brilliant and abundantly talented, would liken himself—and, with exceptional honesty, Kogito, as well—to ordinary people.

As Kogito was reading “Adieu” in the Pléiade edition, he was once again seized by an urgent thought. Before Goro’s suicide, when he was holding forth about that poem on one of his tapes and quoting certain lines from it, he obviously had the new translation that Kogito had sent open in front of him. Wasn’t Goro assuming that for Kogito, too, the entire poem would immediately be brought to mind by reciting a few lines? Kogito didn’t have a ready answer for that question, then or now.

Even with the new translation that he had urged upon Goro, Kogito didn’t feel the same sort of passionate emotional attachment to Rimbaud’s words as when he was young and used to memorize the poems by writing them out, line by line. Kogito had sensed a similar kind of divergence in their infrequent encounters during recent years. Could that be the reason why Goro had ultimately despaired of Kogito’s dependability and had decided to head off into the realm of the Terrible Thud, alone?

“Autumn already!—But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness, far from those who die as seasons turn.”

Kogito didn’t own a copy of the Usami translation that Goro was quoting from on the Tagame tape, but as he was jotting down a quick transcription he remembered that this opening-paragraph stanza was the same one that had first enthralled him, in Kobayashi’s translation, when he was a seventeen-year-old high-school student. Goro seemed to have had a strong response to those lines, as well. But wasn’t Goro, in choosing to die of his own free will, patterning himself after those who were “sworn to a search for divine brightness”? Wasn’t he, somehow, just mimicking “far from those who die as seasons turn”?

Moreover, in the next stanza, there was the image of a dead body swarming with maggots. How did that make Goro feel, on the threshold of his own death? This poem, which was teeming with what Rimbaud called “dreadful imagining”—why did Goro feel compelled to go on about it at such length on the tape? Kogito couldn’t help wondering about that. It even occurred to him that Goro might have deliberately chosen to hurl those very specific, very horrific words at Kogito and, by extension, at himself.

“Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!” And then, in the next stanza: “Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that. But not one friendly hand! and where can I look for help?”

The topic of lies was a major element in the continuing criticism of Kogito that Goro had recorded on the Tagame tapes. Was Goro giving up on finding “one friendly hand,” too? If that was the case ... Kogito couldn’t stop voicing this question to himself, even though he was fed up with his own endless, obsessive stewing about it. Anyway, if that was the case, as Goro was preparing to ring down the curtain on the final act of a long friendship (albeit one that had clearly grown distant in recent years), why did he give Kogito the Tagame apparatus for the second time and then follow up by sending a slew of long, fervent monologues, recorded on tape for Kogito’s ears only?

As he continued reading the poem, all the way to the final stanza, the passage that filled Kogito with nostalgic yearning was the one he and Goro had been most taken with when they were in high school. It was this line: “And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.” But what sort of meaning could he and Goro, in their extreme youth and inexperience, have been reading into the phrase “cities of glory”? Again, while they certainly found encouragement and inspiration in the concluding line (“and I will be able now to possess the truth within one body and one soul”), what on earth did that have to do with their everyday schoolboy lives on earth? And if Goro happened to be pondering that passage just before he took the final leap into space, what vision of his own future did he see in those words?

In truth, it was always quite a while after the conclusion of each of his Tagame sessions with Goro before Kogito was able to think about the contents of their “discussion” in this sort of lucid, analytical way. Then on the following night, when he once again hit the PLAY button, the quotidian things that had been occupying Kogito’s midday mind would recede into the distance as the strangely live-sounding words poured out of the diminutive speakers, like a real-time, real-space dispatch from the mysterious dimension where Goro now dwelled. Kogito would immediately fall under the spell of Goro’s words, and eagerly pressing the STOP button, he would launch into a spirited reply.

Whatever Goro may have said about his reasons for recording the tapes, the fact was that he used them primarily as a forum for continuous rants about Kogito’s myriad flaws, faults, and shortcomings. When Kogito thought about it later, he realized that it must have been the urgency in his own voice, when he was lying on his army cot trying to defend himself against Goro’s attacks, that had made Chikashi decide it was time to have a candid talk about Kogito’s growing addiction to the Tagame ritual.