The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe Page B

time he climbed back into bed, Kogito had dug up the most recent fax from a secretary in S. Fischer Verlag’s editorial division and learned that he still had three days to let them know whether he wanted to accept the position of guest lecturer at the Free University. To his own amazement, in a matter of a few minutes he had made up his mind to take Goro’s rather drastic advice and get out of town for a while.
    The tape on which Goro suggested a “quarantine” had been recorded several months earlier, but now his casual suggestion had become a necessity, for a different reason: namely, Kogito’s need to pull himself together and get over his addiction to talking to Goro through Tagame. Even after Chikashi’s heartfelt complaint earlier that evening, Kogito hadn’t been able to leave the tape recorder on the bookshelf for even this onenight. And, as it turned out, it was Goro, his Tagame partner, who had dropped the hint that had galvanized him into positive action. Somehow, mixed in with his decision to make a bold move, Kogito felt a resurgence of his old dependence on Goro.
    He was just about to ask, “What’s going to become of our sessions with Tagame?” But then, without pressing the PLAY button, he answered his own question. Or, to put it more precisely, he consciously crafted a response along the lines of what he thought Goro might have said in real life. That’s for you to decide. But when Chikashi criticized your behavior last night, rather than any annoyance or inconvenience to her and Akari, she was probably more concerned about finding a way to free you from your addiction to our Tagame sessions, don’t you think?
    Nevertheless, right up until the night before he was scheduled to leave for wintry Berlin, Kogito was unable to give up his nightly ritual of talking to Goro by way of Tagame—although he did, at least, make every effort to keep his voice low. The thing was, when he told Chikashi the next day about his decision to go into Tagame-free quarantine in Berlin, she naturally interpreted this action as a direct response to her request: a way for Kogito to take a break from his “séances” with Goro. That being the case, no matter how much he lowered his voice Chikashi was probably still aware that the conversations were continuing, but because the end was in sight her silence on the matter seemed to constitute a sort of tacit approval or at least forbearance.
    Then one morning, as Kogito’s departure date was rapidly approaching, Chikashi (who had been busying herself every evening with packing and repacking his trunk) said: “Last night I felt like going through Goro’s letters, and I came across awatercolor painting that he sent from Berlin. Would you like to see it? It’s a landscape, on lovely paper. It’s actually drawn with colored pencils, then blurred with a wet brush so it ends up looking like a watercolor. The painting seems to have a really buoyant, happy feeling. On the back is written ‘This morning is the only day that’s been this clear since I’ve been here,’ and on the front, in the lower corner, is Goro’s signature.”
    Kogito looked at the landscape painting, which was on soft, thick, pale-sepia paper with slightly ragged edges, like a pricey wedding invitation. In classic Goro style, the paper had been roughly torn into a rectangular shape. The centerpiece of the composition was a huge tree, seen from above: stout trunk, barren treetops, and a chaotic tangle of leafless branches with attenuated tips, all minutely detailed in such a way as to delineate the subtleties of light and shade amid the homogeneous hues of gray and brown. The only green came from the perennial creepers that snaked around the tree trunk, while patches of deep blue sky thickly sprinkled with fluffy white clouds could be glimpsed through the lacy jumble of bare, thin branches.
    “These leafless white-barked trees in the painting, the ones whose skinny branches are draped in something that