The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe Page A

the sort of weak person who’s always longing to return to happier days. Don’t you agree?
    “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about your situation, and I was wondering—how would it be if you took a little breather and left town for a while? You’ve been toiling away at the novelist’s life for all these years, and I really think you could use some quarantine time right about now. I think if you just got away from your novels for a while ... If you left for good it would be rough on Chikashi and Akari, that’s why I say ‘for a while.’ What I mean is, you need to impose a quarantine on yourself and take a break from the sort of life where you’re being confronted by the distressing gutter journalism of this country on a daily basis.”
    “Give me a minute to check something in the dictionary,” Kogito replied. “When you first mentioned this, some time ago, I had a passing familiarity with the word quarantine , so I didn’t take the time to look it up and find out exactly what it meant. But the word hasn’t taken root in my mind to the point where I would actually use it.”
    After pressing the PAUSE button, Kogito brought out one of his dictionaries and flipped the pages until he found what he was looking for:
quarantine (kwor-ãn-teen) n . 1. A state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere or been exposed to infectious or contagious diseases are placed. v .[with object] to put a person or animal in quarantine. 2. n . The period of this isolation. Origin: mid-seventeenth century, from Italian quarantin a, “forty days,” from quaranta , “forty.”
    After he had finished reading the definitions, Kogito turned back to Tagame, making an effort to keep his voice as low as possible while simultaneously striving to pronounce every word with perfect clarity. “Listen, Goro,” he said, before pressing the PLAY button again. “I know you’re using this word to try to advance a certain agenda, and I understand exactly what you’re driving at.”
    “Of course, it doesn’t have to be exactly forty days,” responded Goro’s recorded voice. “You might have a chance to stay away longer. But what do you think about Berlin as a temporary haven, to put some distance between you and that journalist? (On the bright side, he isn’t getting any younger, either!) For me, at least, Berlin is an unforgettable place. If someone asked me what connection that city might have with your self-imposed quarantine, I couldn’t say exactly, but....”
    “Berlin, eh? Now that you mention it, I did receive an invitation to go there, for considerably longer than forty days!” Kogito exclaimed, hearing the surprise and excitement in his own voice, which had grown suddenly loud as he momentarily forgot about the need to whisper. “I’ll check now, but I think the offer’s still good.”
    Whereupon Kogito stopped the tape and went to his study to look for the file in question. S. Fischer Verlag, the publisherwho had put out the first German translations of Kogito’s early novels, was still doing so, even though sales weren’t what they used to be. Every few years—or, more usually, every ten or twelve years—a new translation of one of Kogito’s novels would come out in hardcover, but as a rule the subsequent printings would be in paperback. Whenever Kogito gave readings at places such as the Frankfurt Book Fair or cultural associations in Hamburg and Munich, there would be a book signing afterward, where they were always able to sell quite a few of the colorful, beautifully designed paperbacks of his work. And now he had been offered a lectureship at the Berlin Free University to commemorate S. Fischer, the founder of the eponymous publishing house. The course was to begin in the middle of November, so he still had time to accept. The department’s offer was generous, and they even said that they would keep the slot open for him through the first half of the term.
    By the