[Review] The Changeling - Kenzaburo Oe

Title of Book: The Changeling
Author: Kenzaburo Oe
Publisher: Grove Press
Translator: Deborah Boliver Boehm
Publication Year: 2010
Language: English
Format: Hardback
Pages: 468

In The Changeling, Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe takes readers from the forests of southern Japan to the washed-out streets of Berlin as he investigates the impact our real and imagined pasts have on our lives.
Writer Kogito Choko is in his sixties when he rekindles a childhood friendship with his estranged brother-in-law, the renowned filmmaker Goro Hanawa. As part of their correspondence, Goro sends Kogito a trunk of tapes he has recorded of reflections about their friendship. But as Kogito is listening one night, he hears something odd. "I'm going to head over to the Other Side now," Goro says, and then Kogito hears a loud thud. After a moment of silence, Goro's voice continues, "But don't worry, I'm not going to stop communicating with you." Moments later, Kogito's wife rushes in; Goro has jumped to his death from the roof of a building.
With that, Kogito begins a far-ranging search to understand what drove his brother-in-law to suicide. The quest takes him to Berlin, where he confronts ghosts from both his own past, and that of his lifelong, but departed, friend.

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Kogito Choko is a writer who has a special way to communicate with his best friend, Goro Hanawa. Goro would record himself talking and send the tapes to Kogito. However, in one of the recent tapes, Kogito heard Goro saying that he was going to ‘the other side’, followed by a loud thunk sound. He found out that Goro committed suicide by jumping from the roof of his office. In grieving, Kogito then listen to the rest of the tapes while reminiscing the memory of his youth and his relationship with Goro.

The Changeling is divided into several chapters with a prologue and an epilogue. Each chapter consists of several subchapters which supposedly revolve around a particular theme. Sometimes it follows present days Kogito, dealing with Goro’s death and sometimes we’re taken to the flashbacks of Kogito and Goro’s youth. Although mainly the story centers on Kogito, later on it shifted a bit to his wife, Chikashi, who is also Goro’s sister.

To understand Kogito as a character, I feel like I have to learn about the author himself. This is my first time reading his work. I knew nothing about Kenzaburo Oe except that he’s awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. He is a prominent figure in Japanese literature. As I read this book, I realized there are some aspects in this book which parallels Oe’s life. This encourages me to learn more about Oe’s real life. For example, Oe’s wife, Yukari is also the daughter of a film maker (Mansaku Itami) and her brother, Juzo Itami who is a film director, died by falling from a rooftop. I actually realized these parallels for the first time after there are mentions of ‘Kogito’s books’ such as A Quiet Life and one other book that I don’t remember. When I looked up A Quiet Life, it turns out it’s one of Oe’s books which then prompts me to do a little research on Oe’s life. 

The name of the main character in this book, Kogito is said to be inspired from Descartes’s ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ which translated into ‘I think, therefore I am’. I find this interesting because in my opinion this book is some sort of Kogito’s serious thinking on his life and his connection with Goro’s. How their lives intertwined and if there’s any meaning on it. He wonders what drove Goro to do what he did, if something was different in the past would it change the outcome. Some people around him thought that Kogito was the one would end up the way Goro did; which even cause him to look back on his life. There is one significant event in this book which becomes some sort of a mark in his youth. He assumed that this particular event is the reason his relationship with Goro became estranged and shaped their adult lives. 

There’s a lot of mention of a certain political view which I’m not sure if it reflects on Oe’s own political views. Though he doesn’t dive deep down on the topic, it sort of influenced the significant event which I mentioned earlier. Aside of that, there are mentions of several literature that play important roles in this book such as Arthur Rimbaud’s Adieu, Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There, and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. One of them actually explains the title of this book.

All in all, considering I started this book knowing nothing of it, I’m pretty surprised at how much I enjoyed reading it. However, I feel like this is not a book that I can read if I wanted to relax and just chill. The Changeling is slow paced but it kept me thinking the whole time I was reading the book. It could be just me. If you’re okay with it then it’s the book for you.