Читать книгу The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe - Страница 21

Although Akari was singularly uncommunicative when Kogito phoned home from his Berlin apartment, he was perfectly comfortable with putting his thoughts down on paper and sending them to his father by fax. When Chikashi began drawing illustrations for Kogito’s essays, Goro had remarked, “She’s only just begun, but already she has her own style.” Remembering that, Kogito thought: If only he could see Akari’s drawings. For example, next to a picture, drawn with marking pen, that showed Akari and his mother climbing the ramp to a giant jet airplane, Akari wrote, “I think I will go to hear the Berlin Philharmonic. Schwalbe and Yasunaga are very good first violins. I will bring Chikashi to Berlin with me.” However, Chikashi nixed that plan because she was concerned that Akari might have one of his epileptic seizures if they traveled to a northern European city in the dead of winter.

Kogito glued Akari’s faxed drawing to a piece of thick, heavy paper and kept it on the table in his apartment’s kitchen. Akari was good at math, and he had written in the fax number by himself. While Kogito was looking at that number, which was for the machine at the Center for Advanced Research, he noticed something. Akari had not only memorized the long number, including 0014930, the international dialing code for Berlin—that sort of thing was his forte—but also incorporated the number into the picture he drew with markers. That, surely, was because when Goro had been in Berlin for the film festival, he had called unexpectedly and had left that number so Kogito could call him back.

Kogito had forgotten Goro’s callback number in Berlin, and Akari saved the day by quietly reading the number off one of his sheets of five-line music paper, where he had jotted it in the margin. He had been sprawled on the floor nearby, composing music, and had apparently been listening when Kogito repeated the number into the mouthpiece. Kogito and Chikashi had both praised Akari to the skies for this feat, and he clearly hadn’t forgotten. On top of that, he was probably delighted anew by the pleasingly symmetrical fact that the first half of his father’s current fax number was the same as that of the number Goro had left several years earlier.

And then Kogito remembered that a young woman had been at the hotel with Goro on the day in question. After that, all sorts of details came flooding back. Goro had called from Berlin with an unusual request: “You know that story about how you met one of your more, um, enthusiastic fans in Nagasaki? There’s someone I’d like you to share it with. And please tell it in English, just the way you told it to O’Brian, years ago. He helped you to improve it so it would sound more like the Queen’s English, right? So tell it just like that. Chikashi said that the corrections O’Brian wrote down on some index cards and sent to you were very amusing. See if you can dig up those cards, and then call me back. There’s a speakerphone switch on this telephone, so we’ll be able to hear you all over the room.”

When Kogito asked, “And why do you want me to do that, pray tell?” Goro responded cheerfully, “There’s someone here; she’s Japanese, but she was raised overseas, and now she’s acting as my German interpreter. She speaks very good Japanese, as well. But when she told me that she was only able to laugh at a joke or a funny story if she heard it in her first foreign language, English, that really blew me away. I mean, I’d never heard of such a thing. So I figured that she would enjoy that story about your adventures in Nagasaki, and you’ve already put it into English. You even have those cards with O’Brian’s notes about how to improve the wording.”

Abruptly, Goro segued into a treatise about the weather. “They say it’s going to snow today for the first time this year, but in the places where the thin branches of the bare black trees are intricately interlaced, you can already see some light snow beginning to accumulate, weighing down the trees,” he said. “Sometimes the forward-tilting trees will be pressed back by a slight current of air, and in that instant of contrapuntal tension the throngs of trees seem to be perfectly still. I’ve been watching them a lot, and for some reason it’s put me in a very good mood, so I just felt like asking you for an unreasonable favor. Call me when you’re ready—I’ll be waiting!”

Kogito had fond memories of that conversation with Goro, who seemed to be unusually high-spirited and loquacious. He was obviously enjoying the outrageous spontaneity of asking for an elaborate favor over an international phone line, and having a young woman next to him, listening in, must have added to his pleasure.

O’Brian was a famous English—or, more precisely, Irish—actor who had costarred with Goro in Lord Jim, in 1965. When O’Brian happened to come to Japan for a visit, Goro threw a small party for him at the house he shared with his then wife, Katsuko (the only daughter of the owner of a company that imported Western films), and he asked Kogito to come and keep the Englishman company.

While Kogito was chatting with O’Brian, the anecdote the Englishman seemed to find most entertaining was about something that had happened not long before the party, when Kogito was in Nagasaki. He had been invited by the chairman of a left-wing publisher’s labor union to give a lecture to a gathering there, but whether it was publishers, newspapers, or broadcasting stations, the hard-core union organizers had very little use for so-called progressive novelists—at least not for those who didn’t officially belong to the Communist Party or to the extreme-radical minor factions. And on this day, sure enough, that was the sort of treatment that Kogito received: minimal, almost grudging hospitality.

Because of the inconvenient scheduling of nonstop flights, Kogito arrived in the morning, but the “finger-flute” (that is to say, finger-whistling) concert and Kogito’s literary lecture weren’t scheduled until evening. As expected, after being given a dubious-looking box lunch he was peremptorily shuttled off to the union’s lodging house.

Kogito had hardly finished eating the greasy fare when severe cramps and diarrhea set in. He ventured out onto a lively thoroughfare to buy some medicine, but there were no pharmacies to be found. As he was wandering around, he ventured down a narrow alley that looked more like a dimly lit path leading into a mountain vale than a byway in the middle of a city. There he found a small apothecary shop, crammed into a storefront no more than six feet wide.

When Kogito pushed open the old-fashioned glass door and entered the shop, the fortyish woman who was sitting in a cramped space with her back to the medicine-laden shelves turned her round, pale face in his direction. “Oh!” she exclaimed, stifling a shriek of surprise.

Paying no attention to this odd response, Kogito asked for some paregoric, but when he tried to pay for his purchase, the proprietor, who was still seated, gazed up at him, flushed and perspiring. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, in a low voice that was almost a moan. “Sometimes you really do get what you wish for!”

Then, abruptly, she launched into a remarkably spirited account of her life story. She explained that she had attended the pharmaceutical studies department of a university in Kyoto and was a passionate fan of Kogito’s work who owned a hardcover copy of every book he had ever published. She had taken over this family-owned pharmacy after her father’s sudden death. The shop was near a red-light district, and it had stayed in business for many years by specializing in contraceptive devices and remedies for sexually transmitted diseases. After the Anti-Prostitution Law was passed there had been some lean times, and it had looked for a while as if the pharmacy might have to close its doors, but she always clung to the belief that as long as she could hunker down and stay in business, someday she would have a chance to meet Kogito Choko.

Kogito was a little concerned about a disreputable-looking middle-aged man who was loitering outside on the curb next to the gutter with a kimono-clad woman in tow, so he tried to take his leave as quickly as possible, but the female proprietor reached under the counter, took out a carton containing a six-pack of larger-than-usual bottles of some sort of energy drink, plunked it down on the counter, and said, “Please try this—I’ll give you a special VIP discount.”

“Actually, I don’t really drink that sort of health potion,” Kogito responded.

“Oh, no!” the pharmacist protested. “This isn’t your simple, garden-variety health drink. It contains garlic, and Korean ginseng, and even ground-up seahorses. See what’s written on the bottle? DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE! I’ll let you have a six-pack for only two dollars, so why don’t you take a couple of cartons home with you?”

As the woman slapped a second six-pack down on the counter, the shady-looking man who had been hanging around outside barged into the pharmacy with his female consort and shouldered his way to the counter. “If you’re having a sale, I’ll buy some,” he said gruffly. “Two cartons, please!” The timing seemed suspicious, and Kogito couldn’t help wondering whether the man’s appearance might be part of a prearranged charade.

“Coming right up,” said the proprietor. “The special price for one box is thirty dollars, so your total will be sixty dollars. I’m sure you’re familiar with this amazing product. You know their slogan: DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE! Your lucky missus is going to be in seventh heaven! Thank you for your business.”

That’s all there was to the story, but O’Brian showed his marvelous character by not only laughing uproariously but also helping Kogito, afterward, to make his laborious telling of the anecdote much tighter and more forceful. When the Irish actor was on the airplane, heading home to London, he spent a good deal of time reworking the English translation of the advertising slogan (DRINK IT NOW! GET IT UP! DO IT TWICE!). He even gave his notes to a crew member on the flight, which was returning to Narita, with instructions to deliver them to Kogito. O’Brian suggested a way of making the slogan “a bit more lewd,” and Kogito obligingly changed the words to GET IT UP! GET IT ON! SHAG ALL NIGHT!

By the time Kogito had located the card bearing the English-language version of the anecdote it was already midnight in Tokyo, but it was still late afternoon in Berlin. While he was telling the story over the telephone, he couldn’t help noticing the contrast between the youthful freshness of the girl’s laughter—she was clearly excited about the first snow—and the mature rumble of Goro’s satisfied-sounding laughter, as the two merry voices intermingled.

Kogito was pleased to realize that a memory that had seemed to be extinguished was actually very clear, especially since it was a recollection that seemed to be infused with (these were the first words that sprang to mind) a sort of crystalline brightness. In Goro’s twilight years, which had come far too soon, that kind of delight was rather rare.