The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Passing the Turing Test

Kenzaburō Ōe reveals the frantic chaos below the swan-like public composure of Japanese society. In The Changeling, his target is the intense culture of the cosmopolitan Japanese intellectual - political, commercial, sometimes sordid and bizarre, and not infrequently violent. If the title means anything, it probably refers to Japan itself in its intellectual transformation since the mid-nineteenth century..

The rambling fictional memoir uses the conceit of a conversation with the protagonist’s (Kogito = Cogito?) recently dead brother-in-law via a set of cassette tapes he had made over years of separation, possibly estrangement. While listening, Kogito simply pauses the tape and responds as if the man were speaking. Like Proust’s madeleine, the tapes provoke buried memories in Kogito, mostly about the duties of an artist and their unpleasant consequences.

The somewhat self-conscious literary allusions range from Rimbaud to Maurice Sendak to the Gospel of Mark as Kogito’s reminiscences bounce from his home in the forests of Shikoku, to Berlin, Chicago and Brazil. Strange anecdotes, like the unaccountable arrival of a large turtle in the post and its gruesome slaughter, to the antics of a post-war right wing suicide cult, are strewn about randomly. Some of the references to contemporary events - like the assassination of JFK - are well-known, but many are specific to Japan and therefore probably unintelligible to non-Japanese.

I get the impression that Ōe is conducting a sort of inverse Turing Test with himself. Instead of interrogating a machine to determine if it conforms to intuitive standards of human responsiveness, Kogito allows himself to be interrogated by the the machine in order to discover what he is. The poem ‘Adieu’ by Rimbaud is a running theme throughout. At one point the brother-in-law reflects on this poem, perhaps stating the point of the book: “Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller! And later he adds, Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that.”

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