Book Review: Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe 

In his most recent work to be translated into English—Changeling—Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe writes about the suicide of his lifelong friend, the internationally acclaimed screenwriter and director Juzo Itami. Itami—whose most famous film in the West is the hilarious and insightful “noodle western” Tampopo—purportedly leapt to his death from the roof of a Tokyo office building in 1997 (although some reports accuse the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, of murdering him).

The narrative centers on a washed up, depressed writer named Kogito who is trying to comprehend the suicide of his childhood friend, Goro. As is common in Oe’s work, the protagonist, in this case Kogito, is a pseudo-autobiographical representation of the author. The character Goro (a name Oe seems to have borrowed from the hero of Tampopo), represents Itami.

The story kicks off when Kogito receives a trunk full of cassette tapes from Goro. The tapes contain recorded monologues in which Goro expresses his innermost thoughts and feelings. After Goro leaps off a high-rise, listening to the tapes on a walkman becomes Kogito’s nightly ritual through which he tries to make sense of his friend’s suicide. Kogito begins to have conversations with Goro’s taped voice, engaging in dialog with his walkman. Like a low-tech version of mind-altering technology in a Phillip K. Dick story, the walkman begins to blur the lines between reality and illusion as this man-machine dialog grows ever more obsessive, and Kogito begins to believe he is talking to Goro in the afterlife.

The narrative spirals steadily from memory, to tape-recorded dialogue, to fragments of movie script, to numerous literary allusions and a fairly coherent storyline slowly emerges. However this style of telling eventually becomes repetitive as we return to similar moments in Kogito’s life again and again. By the end of the novel, for example, we have grown tired of Goro’s repeated criticism of Kogito’s novels, which are phrased in much the same way throughout.

The first half of the novel moves ponderously through a highly cerebral world in which details of setting and bodily actions remain vague and poorly realized. The name Kogito intentionally alludes to Rene Descartes’ famous philosophical catchphrase “cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am” and the almost disembodied manner of telling is reminiscent of the cognizing introspection of the narrator in Descartes’’ Meditations on First Philosophy.

In the second half of the novel Oe conjures a better-realized world of action and location. Kogito’s struggle to behead a giant turtle in his kitchen is quite memorable and the climactic scene referred to enigmatically throughout as “THAT” is also vivid, clearly paying homage to the late director Juzo Itami by attempting to simulate his cinematic style in novel form.

Oe is notorious in Japan for producing ambiguous and obscure novels written in complex, others might say cryptic, syntax. The translator Deborah Boliver Boehm has done an excellent job of making this novel easier to follow in English by adding quotation marks and useful phrases like “X said” to indicate who is speaking, elements Oe himself does not do the Japanese reader a favor of including. She also adds descriptive passages, which reduce the reader’s feeling of alienation, especially in the disorienting and thinly explained introduction.

However, this generous clarification leads the translation into trouble. The translator (or perhaps the editor) was reluctant to include footnotes, and yet the text demands explanation of Japanese customs and phrases that are unfamiliar to most readers of English. The end-result is explanatory passages squeezed incongruously in brackets within paragraphs. The translator ought to have chosen either the footnote route or, better yet, done the nitty-gritty work of integrating these details into the story.

In addition, creative translations of many descriptive details diverge inexplicably from the original. For example, the phrase “濃い雲の影” (koi-kumo-no-kage) (Jp P65), has been translated as “shadow of a giant bird” (Eng P69) but a word for word translation would be “shadow of a dense cloud”.

Literary translation is an interpretive art form not a set of rigidly defined rules and procedures. Translators can and should change images if essential to giving a text new life within the cultural context of the target language. But few English readers will find “dense cloud” difficult to grasp, offensive or even awkward, and the image of a “giant bird” adds nothing in the context (birds do not play any symbolic role in the novel). There are many examples like this of disloyalty to the original text without any discernible semantic gains. One suspects that the Nobel-prize winner carefully chose his imagery for a reason.

Problems of translation aside, this novel expects a heavy burden of prior reading. It constantly refers to events in Oe’s novels, which cannot be fully grasped without reading them. Since these novels are pseudo-autobiographical, study of the author’s life and historical milieu is also recommended (not to mention the wide array of allusions to be tracked down and studied).

Rather than being the first novel in a trilogy, one feels that Changeling might be better labeled as the 20^th installment in a series made up of Oe’s lifework. This makes the book well-suited for Japanese literature specialists, or perhaps only the die-hard Oe fans among them, who enjoy brow-knitting intellectual scrutiny and pedantic nitpicking over the profound immediacy of art. Laypeople should look elsewhere in contemporary Japan to writers like Haruki Murakami, and Banana Yoshimoto whose accessible literature enchants the full sensory and emotive range of our humanity.

Originally published in the Pacific Rim Review of Books