Читать книгу The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe - Страница 20

As he gradually became used to his days (and especially his nights) of quarantine, Kogito made frequent phone calls to Tokyo, as if to compensate for being deprived of his Tagame sessions with Goro. On the occasions when he phoned the unfailingly helpful assistant professors or the department secretary at the university, the telephone would start to ring in the German way: puu-tz ... silence ... puu-tz ... silence. In contrast, when he placed an international call to Tokyo, he would hear the familiar Japanese ring—although he knew that what was actually echoing through the living room was probably a few bars of Mozart’s chamber music, which Chikashi had installed as a customized ring. And then a quiet, sorrowful voice would answer the phone: “Yes?”

Although they weren’t really able to engage the gears of conversation, Kogito and his son would always imbibe each other’s “vibrations” over the phone line for a couple of wordless minutes. Then Akari would either hand the phone to his mother or else say, “Mama isn’t here,” in that same melancholy tone of voice, and then lapse into silence.

Chikashi, on the other hand, was usually upbeat and voluble on the international phone line. Sometimes she and Kogito even talked about literature—something that rarely happened when they were face-to-face in Tokyo. One day, after winding up a conversation about various practical matters, Chikashi asked a question that she seemed, characteristically, to have been carefully composing in her mind: “When you were still young, during the time when you were mainly reading literature in translations, there were times when you talked so fast that I couldn’t quite catch the pronunciation, even though you were speaking Japanese. Still, the content of your talks was always very interesting and enjoyable. It seemed to sparkle, and you used to use some really quaint, fanciful expressions. Then after you came back from your long stay in Mexico City, you began to read things in their original languages rather than in Japanese translation, and the feeling of the words you used in conversation seemed to change as a result. I sometimes think that your words took on a new depth after that.

“However, I didn’t hear as much of the curious, quixotic strangeness and interesting flavor that I used to notice before when you talked. And wasn’t it the same with the words you were using in your novels? Maybe it was a matter of maturity, but your words just didn’t seem to sparkle like they used to. And somehow, while I was thinking that way, I stopped reading your novels altogether. So I can’t really speak about the novels you’ve written over the past fifteen years or so, but I can’t help wondering whether there might be a connection between the change in your style and the fact that you started reading foreign books in the original languages. I realize that the usual thing you hear from the very same people who read books in the original is that those are much more entertaining than when they’re translated into Japanese, so what I’m saying probably contradicts the conventional wisdom.”

“That may very well be true,” Kogito said. “It was when I was in my late forties that sales of my books started to slow down, and that was right about the time that I cut way back on reading work in Japanese translation. Just as you say, the sparkling appeal of my prose, such as it was, probably did fade a bit. For me, the attraction of reading work in translation—something entirely separate from the pleasure of reading it in the original—is that there’s something incredibly lucid and straightforward about it. I often find myself marveling at translations, being surprised at various things (Oh, is that how they translated this part? Can they really get away with taking such liberties?) and also thinking that I myself could never use Japanese in such a way. Some of the young, prodigiously talented translators, in particular—they show a strength and authority that’s almost uncanny.”

That day’s phone conversation ended on this note, but after an interval of several days Chikashi, who had been putting in order the incoming gifts of books and magazines, called to report on the presentation copies of books that had arrived from various friends during Kogito’s absence and various other matters. Afterward she ventured, “This is picking up where we left off, but some of the prose by young people who are translating new works from French into Japanese is extraordinarily interesting, don’t you think?” she asked.

“Well, yes, I would agree with that,” Kogito responded. “At the other end of the spectrum, leaving aside the groups at the West Coast American universities who have been directly influenced by Foucault, English writing can be a bit of a slog—rather like a local train that stops at every station. In particular, what’s being written by scholars in England ... in fact, I think the reason my style lost its sparkle might have something to do with having read too many Cambridge University Press research monographs about everyone from Blake to Dante.”

Ignoring Kogito’s typically self-mocking digression, Chikashi said, “Anyway, the passage I’m finding interesting right now may not be important at all, but it really struck a chord with me. It’s from a Japanese translation of a French book called René Char in His Poetry, which was written by a French-literature scholar who seems to be quite well known and accomplished in the field. It’s a gigantic book, and I have to admit that I can’t understand the interpretation of Char’s surrealist poems and so on, at all, but anyway, I’ve just faxed you the section I mentioned.”

Chikashi’s fax was a page from that book—a monumental work of biographical literary criticism in which the author makes reference to everyone from Wittgenstein to the Marquis de Sade—underlined here and there with what Kogito recognized, even on the blurry fax paper, as one of the no. 2 pencils Chikashi used to render preliminary sketches for her watercolor paintings.

The rambling section begins with a discussion of René Char’s difficult relationship with his mother, which the critic describes as “more Baudelairean than Oedipal.” A brief digression about Char’s three favorite pursuits (“writing, fighting, and making love”) is followed by a metaphorical passage comparing the poet’s mother to a she-bear. It goes on to say that there comes a time when a man must reject the part of himself that was licked by the mother bear; that is, he must throw away the rules he learned at his mother’s knee.

In the phone call that followed the fax, Chikashi explained the thoughts this passage had awakened in her, and Kogito found himself borne along on the same wave. Chikashi was particularly excited by the nuances of one particular phrase—“the time is ripe to think about throwing away the part that was licked by the mother bear”—in the lines she’d faxed to Kogito in Berlin. “Licked,” of course, referred not only to maternal affection but also to the sterner aspects of child raising. (Indeed, people in medieval Europe used to believe that bear cubs were born as eyeless, formless lumps of flesh and had to be literally licked into shape by their mothers.)

“When I first read this phrase, I thought it said everything there is to say about Goro,” Chikashi declared. “He grew up being constantly ‘licked’ by the mother bear we called Mama. There’s a saying that someone’s being smothered with affection, right? Well, when Goro was a child, from my point of view as his younger sister, he really did appear to be suffocating under the weight of our mother’s affection. Even so, I wasn’t jealous; I thought it was perfectly appropriate for him to receive special treatment and extra care. He was a remarkably beautiful child, and he was so talented at drawing pictures that a publisher in Kyoto once asked him to design the cover for a book. This was during World War Two, but as you know he was even chosen for the special science academy that was created by the government.

“Supplies were tight during wartime, but our mother somehow managed to get her hands on a collection of art supplies that a professional painter would have envied. She also made up a reading list featuring science books aimed at children and got hold of all sorts of unusual things for Goro to read. But she had a severe side as well, and sometimes when Goro didn’t seem to be taking her efforts seriously enough, she could be quite frightening. It’s true; he really did grow up being ‘licked by the bear,’ in every sense of the phrase.

“Remember when Goro got to know some psychologists who specialized in Freud and Lacan? He allowed himself to fall meekly under their influence in a way so unlike him that it struck me, watching from the side, as really strange ... almost creepy. While that was happening, Goro was so completely spellbound that he used to talk about those psychologists really ingenuously, with such total trust and naïveté, and he wrote later in one of his books that they had helped him to finally get free of his mother. For me, though, I never thought he could escape so easily. I know I’m an ignorant person, and I realize it’s a childish kind of skepticism, but I can’t help wondering whether psychology can really be effective on fully formed adults. I mean, look at Goro; he was a sophisticated intellectual who’d been around the block a few times, wasn’t he?

“To be honest, I always thought that at some point the whole psychology thing would turn around and bite him. I’m not saying that he died the way he did as a direct reaction to all that psychiatric mumbo jumbo. But when it comes to the tangled complexities of Goro’s psychological state, I can’t help thinking sometimes that I really would like to see those meddlesome psychologists take some responsibility for what happened in the end.”