Читать книгу The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe - Страница 14

Of course, Kogito was always the one who started the conversations with Tagame, but sometimes, just before he pressed the PLAY button, he had the uncanny feeling that the chunky little tape recorder was actually psyching itself up for the next round of combat. For some reason this made Kogito think about the way the real tagames—the large, oddly shaped water beetles that lived in the mountain streams of Shikoku—must have amorously bestirred themselves, almost in slow motion, during mating season. All these years later, that image (which may have been pure conjecture) was perfectly sharp and vivid in Kogito’s mind.

Kogito always left the tape cued up at the end of the previous night’s conversation, and whenever Kogito picked Tagame up he always felt as if he were answering an incoming call on the ultimate long-distance mobile phone. And the moment Goro’s voice began to speak, with its distinctive Kyoto/Matsuyama accent, Kogito was repeatedly struck by the fact that whatever the topic might turn out to be, it always seemed to be uncannily relevant to his current situation.

Another odd thing was that when he started talking to Tagame, Kogito was far more enthusiastic than he had been about any other kind of discussion with Goro during the past twenty years or so. There was something engaging about Goro’s relaxed way of talking across the vaporous border that separated the Other Side from the land of the living—despite the fact that his comments often consisted of merciless, searing criticism of Kogito—and even though Kogito was completely aware that Goro was dead, the intensity of their exchanges somehow seemed to overshadow that disturbing fact.

Kogito also felt that he had been forced to take another look at his feelings about his own inevitable death, so naturally there were times when the conversations evoked newly urgent thoughts about what really happens after we die. He could imagine himself, in the not-so-distant future, traveling to the Other Side with an upgraded, afterlife-appropriate version of Tagame and earnestly awaiting a dispatch from this side. When he thought that there might be no answer to his Tagame signals, for all eternity, he felt such a deep sense of loneliness and desolation that his entire being seemed to be disintegrating.

At the same time, it was only natural for him to feel that the impassioned “conversations” he was carrying on with Tagame, all by himself, were nothing but an escapist diversion, a self-deluding mind game. As a novelist who’d grown partial to the literary theories espoused by Mikhail Bakhtin, Kogito had started to take the concept of “playing games” very seriously after crossing the threshold into middle age. Consequently, he knew very well that even if talking with Goro via Tagame was a mere diversion, as long as he was acting on that fantasy stage there was nothing to do but throw himself into the part with all his heart.

Furthermore, Kogito resolved that during the day, while he was separated from Tagame, he wouldn’t allow his nocturnal conversations with Goro to seep into his daily experiences. And when he was talking about Goro with Chikashi, or with Umeko, or with Taruto, Kogito made every effort not to recall the conversations with Goro that flowed through Tagame.

In this way, Kogito constructed a barrier between the two types of time—real time and Tagame time—and while he was moving around in one zone he wouldn’t permit the other to spill over into it, or vice versa. But whichever zone he happened to be inhabiting, he never denied, at least not to his innermost self, the truth or the reality of what he had experienced in the other realm. From his vantage point on the earthly, conscious side, he firmly believed in the existence of the Other Side, and that belief made the world on this side seem infinitely deeper and richer. Even if his Tagame adventure was nothing but a dream, he still embraced it as a positive experience.

Suppose one of Kogito’s friends had said something like: “Okay, so Goro committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building, and his body, including the brain inside his head, was cremated, but his spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it—anyway, that entity continues to exist somewhere, even now. That’s what you believe, right?”

If this hypothetical friend phrased the question in that serious kind of way (and if he was a moody type anyway but was smiling as he asked it) then everything would be fine. In that case Kogito, after pondering the matter for a moment, would probably reply while wearing an opaque, noncommittal expression, since like most people his age he had long since become a master of the poker face and the social smile.

“That’s true,” he might say, “only with some conditions attached. While I’m listening to his voice on Tagame, Goro’s soul—that is to say, by my definition, a spirit furnished with something that’s invisible yet is extremely close to having physical form, like what they call an etheric double or an astral body—anyway, yes, I do believe that Goro’s soul really exists in that state. It’s different than if I were just playing back a tape recording of his voice. What Goro left in place for me is a very special system. To be sure, his soul has made the transition into a space that’s different from this space that you and I still inhabit. But it just so happens that Tagame is a conduit between this space and that one. That’s how it works.”

The hypothetical friend is still skeptical. “But when you and Goro aren’t having one of your Tagame talks, what form does he take on the Other Side?” he asks. “Wait, let me rephrase that. When Tagame isn’t connecting you to the Goro beyond Tagame, how does Goro exist in relation to you?”

“To tell you the truth,” Kogito would be forced to admit, “when we aren’t talking on Tagame, I really can’t think very clearly about Goro.”

“So the machine you call Tagame acts as an intermediary and makes Goro’s spirit a reality for you. In that case, I guess you can’t reduce it to the more general question of whether a person’s soul exists after death.”

“That’s right, although the conversations I have with Goro, through Tagame, have also changed the way I think about my own death. As for the deaths of my mentor, Professor Musumi, who did so much for me when I was at university and afterward as well, and my old friend Takamura, the composer, I now believe that there must be a way to communicate with their departed spirits, too, wherever they may be. I don’t happen to have a conduit to Professor Musumi or Takamura, but I like to think that there are people out there who have their own versions of Tagame and are using them to talk to the souls of those two, beyond the grave.”

While Kogito was carrying on this sort of imaginary conversation, why didn’t he think about the possibility of another Tagame system to keep Goro connected with his sister, Chikashi? (Never mind that Kogito’s posthumous conversations with Goro were the direct cause of the tremendous strain on his own relationship with Chikashi.) Perhaps it was because Kogito was conscious that his Tagame chats with Goro were his own private realm. Besides, Chikashi was a remarkably self-reliant person, independent from Kogito and from Goro, as well; not at all the type, Kogito thought, who would be drawn into that kind of fantasy game. And surely Goro must have been thinking along the same lines.

One year, Kogito was invited to speak at Kyushu University. While he was in the Green Room waiting for his lecture to begin, he happened to glance at a timetable and discovered that if he skipped the banquet with the other participants and hopped on the next ferryboat to Shikoku, then transferred to a Japan Railways train, he could be back at his childhood home, deep in the forest, before the night was over. He asked the assistant professor who was looking after him to make the travel arrangements, and the tickets were purchased while Kogito was delivering his lecture.

By the time Kogito made his way to the house where he was born, it was after 11 PM and his mother had already gone to sleep. The next morning, Kogito was up early. When he peered down the covered passageway that led to an adjoining bungalow, he could see the silhouette of his naked mother, illuminated by the reflected river-dazzle that leaked into the dark parlor through the gaps in the wooden rain shutters. Backlit like that, Kogito’s elderly mother looked like a young girl as (with the help of her sister-in-law) she twined the turban she always wore in public around her head. At that moment, his mother didn’t seem to belong entirely to this world; it was as if she had already begun to make the transition over to the Other Side. Her abnormally large ear, which resembled a fish’s dorsal fin, was hanging down from her emaciated profile, almost as if that misshapen appendage itself was absorbed in deep meditation.

Later, when they were sitting across from each other at the breakfast table, Kogito’s mother began to speak in the local Iyo dialect, which tends to feature more exclamatory sentences than standard Japanese. “I’ve been praying for a chance to see you since the beginning of last spring, Kogito!” she began. (It was already fall.) “And now that you’re sitting here, I still half feel as if it’s my fantasy eating breakfast in front of me. It doesn’t help that I can barely hear what you’re saying—of course, I’ve gotten quite deaf, and on top of that you still don’t open your mouth wide enough when you speak, just like when you were a child!

“But anyway, right now I feel as if this is half reality and half fanciful daydream! Besides, lately, no matter what’s going on, I’m never entirely certain that it’s really happening! When I was wishing that I could see you, it almost seemed as though half of you was already here. At times like that, if I voiced my opinions to you out loud, the other people in the house would just laugh indulgently. However, if you happened to be on television talking about something and I said to the TV set, ‘You’re wrong about that, you know,’ even my great-grandchild would jump in and try to stop me, saying, ‘That’s rude to Uncle Kogito.’ They think it’s amusing when I talk to an invisible person, but isn’t the television itself a kind of fantastical illusion? Just because there’s no machine attached to my private hallucinations, does that make them any less ‘real’ than the images on TV? I mean, what’s the basis for that kind of thinking?

“Anyway, it seems as if almost everything is already an apparition to me, you know? Everyday life seems like television, and I can’t tell whether somebody is really here with me or not. I’m surrounded by apparitions. One day soon I, too, will stop being real, and I’ll become nothing more than a phantasm myself! But this valley has always been swarming with specters, so I may not even notice when I make the shift over to the Other Side.”

After Kogito finished his breakfast, his younger sister gave him a ride to Matsuyama Airport so he could catch a plane that left before noon. When his sister called Chikashi in Tokyo to report that Kogito’s departure had gone according to plan, she added, “As Mother was nodding off after breakfast, she said, ‘A little while ago I saw an apparition of Kogito, and we had a nice chat.’”

When he heard this story later, Kogito felt unexpectedly moved by his mother’s remark. After committing suicide, Goro hadn’t really noticed that he’d left this world and become a spirit on the Other Side, had he? When he thought about it that way, Kogito came to see the fluidity between the two dimensions as a positive thing—especially late at night, after he’d been talking to Goro through the magical medium of Tagame.