Читать книгу The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe - Страница 15

During Kogito’s Tagame sessions with Goro, he noticed that things got livelier, and he was able to enter more spontaneously into the discussion, when Goro began reminiscing about their early student days in Matsuyama. At times like that, Kogito could ignore the Terrible Thud (his private shorthand for Goro’s baffling suicide). If he didn’t have to worry that the conversation might end up being about the future, he was able to follow the rules he’d set up, to the letter. Conversely, whenever a dialogue concluded with a mention of future plans, the Rules of Tagame could be thrown into disarray.

On one cassette tape, Goro was trying to reconstruct the details of a conversation that had taken place when he and Kogito were both in their twenties. “Remember when we were talking about how, once upon a time, there used to be some truly great writers? And I was wondering whether really major, transcendent writers like that still exist in the world—and if so, are any of them Japanese? That was the gist of the discussion, and we even made a list of candidates. After a bit I revised the question and changed it to this: I wonder whether, in the near future, we’ll get to see a truly great author who writes in Japanese? You were doubtful, as I recall.”

Whereupon Kogito pressed the STOP button and said, “I still am.”

“To be perfectly frank,” Goro went on, “at that point you weren’t thinking of yourself as someone who had the potential to become a truly great writer. I remember you confessed to me, soon after we met, that you had always thought of yourself as an ordinary person who in all likelihood was never going to come up with any extraordinary ideas. But then you told me about how you entered the All-Japan Young Inventors Competition, and that was very entertaining. However, you weren’t the one who broached the subject—I had to coax the story out of you—and you told it in a typically self-deprecating way. And so, in an attempt to force you to talk more about that sort of thing, I set a trap.”

Kogito pressed the STOP button again and chimed in: “Of course I remember, but I always wondered—what made you do that? You really were tremendously zealous about trying to convince me I wasn’t ordinary.”

“The first thing I did was to make you realize that Kafka was a truly great writer—a genius,” Goro continued. “I also talked about how Kafka’s fellow writer Max Brod (himself an up-and-coming author in those days, albeit a rather commonplace one) must have felt when he realized that his then-unknown friend was, unquestionably, a genius. The efforts that Brod made after Kafka’s death to bring his late friend’s works the recognition they deserved—that’s another story entirely.

“Then after you started writing novels, when you fell into your first slump, as they say, I dredged up that subject again. I told you that nowadays (that is, in modern-day Japan), if you can’t become a truly great writer, then writing novels and such is simply a waste of your life. At that point you’d been a successful writer for more than a year, and you had already won the Akutagawa Prize, but it looked to me as if you were settling into an overly cozy and comfortable place in the literary world. That’s when I told you that I thought you ought to take a break from what you’d been doing thus far and start over again, fresh—shake things up a bit. From then on, if you’d laid low for two or three years and hadn’t published any new fiction of your own, the journalists and the literary magazines and the reading public would probably have forgotten all about you. And that, to my way of thinking, is where the process of becoming a truly great writer would begin.

“In those days, you always had plenty of energy for studying and doing research, and whether you were writing a novel or an essay, you seemed to be able to make clever use of a variety of literary styles if you just put your mind to it. But it was because of that very versatility that you were suffering, don’t you think? You used to say that even though you were still young, as a writer striving for originality you wanted to come up with your own themes and create your own distinctive prose style, and then combine those two elements. You wanted to make the world recognize you as an author who possessed that kind of originality, but you found those tasks daunting, and as you yourself put it, you tended to lose confidence and chicken out.

“As for me, I came up with an elaborate idea for a literary hoax, which I approached as I would a screenplay, although I never actually wrote it up. The idea was that the protagonist—in this case, a writer—would be someone who had hit upon an original concept at a young age, and he would devote his entire career to delving ever deeper into that particular notion. (For today’s young writers, finding an overarching theme and creating a coherent body of work seems to be the hardest task of all, but with my method you wouldn’t need to be the literary equivalent of a wandering monk, searching for enlightenment or struggling to find your ‘voice.’) Anyway, I subjected you to a long harangue about how this would be the ideal game plan for a versatile type like you, who has the gift of fluent composition and a serious penchant for research as well. Do you remember?”

Kogito remembered that conversation very well, indeed. After hitting the STOP button, he leaned back and lost himself in leisurely reminiscence.

Goro’s tongue-in-cheek idea went like this: First, Kogito would invent a fascinating but completely nonexistent writer. Next, he would pretend to pay a visit to the urban hermitage where the aging author supposedly lived as a voluntarily unpublished recluse. (When Goro initially described this fictional personage, Kogito immediately visualized a certain mid-twentieth-century surrealist poet—at that time, already an old man.) After pretending to conduct an interview with the imaginary writer, Kogito would write up their “conversation” as a powerful article for some literary journal.

The article would probably attract a fair amount of attention. After that, Kogito would introduce some of the nonexistent writer’s “never-published prose” in the form of selected excerpts, all secretly composed by Kogito himself. And then, even though the publicity-shy author was exceedingly reluctant to open up, through sheer tenacity Kogito would manage to eke out some more articles in the form of notes on their subsequent “conversations.” At some point Kogito would gather these fraudulent materials together and publish them in the form of a grandiosely titled book about the “cloistered writer,” which would offer a comprehensive assessment of the phantom’s purported oeuvre.

The basic story line would be that both before and after the war this impeccably modern writer, who was always ahead of his time, went on writing in his hideaway, following his private vision. Inevitably, after hearing so much about the elusive author from Kogito, both the media and readers in general would become intensely interested in the make-believe writer’s work. Needless to say, for the plan to succeed, Kogito would need to write some exceptionally strong and convincing literary criticism.

Was such a charade really feasible? Goro laid out a concrete plan that showed how it could be made to happen, but Kogito thought that converting the blithe blueprint into a work of art by stringing words together, one by one, would be the difficult part. After all, how many talented young writers, their heads full of revolutionary ideas, have ended up failing or giving up in frustration? Even so, Goro argued, for a voracious reader like Kogito—someone who had extraordinary powers of recollection and whose mind was perpetually awhirl with curious fancies—it should be a piece of cake to introduce the phantom writer’s work to a wider audience via literary criticism, once Kogito had managed to whip up some samples.

Moreover, as the plan progressed, Kogito would probably get the urge to try creating some of the hermit author’s fulllength work, as well. All the preliminary work he had done in the process of perpetrating this complex literary masquerade—composing excerpts, transcribing pseudo-interviews, penning literary criticism—would be invaluable when he actually started writing a novel to be published under the phantom’s name, since he would have become intimately familiar with the imaginary master’s prose style and essential themes and would have a clear idea of how to develop them further.

So the literary hoax would chug along, and when it came time to publish another book of criticism and interpretation, more and more people would probably join the chorus of commenters on the illusory writer’s work. Of course, from the beginning the one who was leading the critical charge would be Kogito, writing under a variety of clever pseudonyms, and in the course of pursuing this plan over a period of twenty years or more, his own reputation as a fiction writer would be entirely erased by the faux-journalistic process. After that there would be nothing to do but to keep cranking out the backlist of the mysterious writer, while vicariously enjoying his invented protégé’s success.

Kogito Choko, as a writer of his own original books, would eventually cease to exist in the public mind, and all that would remain was the great writer whose “rediscovery” he had orchestrated by easy, leisurely stages. And then after a little more time had passed, when the imaginary master finally “died,” his previously unpublished work would be brought forth posthumously, like water pouring out of a broken dam. And the reclusive writer (whom no one had ever laid eyes on) would be remembered as a truly great artist—maybe even a Japanese Kafka.

“We really got into the story of that mythical writer, didn’t we, Kogito?” Goro chuckled. “It was just when Borges’s work was being introduced in Japanese translation for the first time, and we were thrilled to find someone else who thought the way we did. And then, before long, you dug up English translations of the writers who were persecuted by Stalin: Bulgakov, Bely, and so on. In a way, I almost felt as if we were growing old along with our great imaginary littérateur!” Then Goro added something that made Kogito feel that his friend had come dangerously close to crossing the line as far as the Rules of Tagame were concerned.

Rule Number Two: Never, ever speak about plans for the future.

“This is what I want to say to you, Kogito,” Goro announced. “Right now you’re already older than the phantom writer was when you and he first ‘met.’ From here on, isn’t it time for you to gird your literary loins and try to make one last creative leap, to ensure that you yourself will be remembered as a unique writer, at least? (I won’t go so far as to say ‘great.’) I’m hoping that the words that are pouring out of Tagame right now will somehow prime the pump and get you fired up. In your own past—or rather, in the past we share—surely there’s a rich vein of experience that hasn’t yet been mined?”

One day during the period when Kogito was indulging in long, intense Tagame dialogues (including the one above) on a nightly basis, Chikashi cornered him and, typically, burst out with a torrent of words that had obviously been germinating in her mind for quite a while.

“After all this time,” she began, “when I hear you carrying on in your study every evening into the wee hours, complaining to Goro and then seeming to strain your ears for a response, I can’t help wondering whether this isn’t exactly the sort of ‘absurdity’ you dislike so much. I don’t see what good can possibly come of indulging in this sort of charade night after night, and I’m really at my wits’ end. Every time I hear you talking so impassionedly to Goro I can sense that you’re waiting for a reply, and I know it must be terribly painful for you. I sympathize completely, and I truly do feel sorry for you. It’s the same as if by some chance you suddenly died in an accident or something—I think about how puzzled and devastated Akari would be and how sorry I’d feel for him. It isn’t that I think you’re doing these late-night séances as a way of gearing up for your own journey to the Other Side, but still ...

“In any case, because your study is right above our bedrooms, it’s really hard on us when your voice comes floating down. It’s a bit like water dripping slowly through a bamboo strainer, and I think it’s probably bothering Akari even more than me. No matter how low you keep your voice, and even when it’s obvious that you’re just listening to Goro’s tapes on your headphones, I don’t think it’s possible for Akari to simply ignore what’s going on. So I’m just wondering whether you might be willing to put an end to your sessions, for us?”

And then while Kogito watched, appalled, Chikashi unexpectedly began to cry. He had no choice but to admit that for these past few months he had been so engrossed in living by the Rules of Tagame that he had forgotten there were rules about living as part of a family, too. On another level, he had been startled by the aside Chikashi had tossed out in the middle of her speech: It isn’t that I think you’re doing these late-night séances as a way of gearing up for your own journey to the Other Side, but still ...