At its best, the Japanese Nobel Laureate’s latest novel dwells on the odd intricacy of a long-running traumatized relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension.

The Changeling By Kenzaburō Ōe. Translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm. Grove Press, 468 pages, $26.00.

Reviewed By Tommy Wallach

I wasn’t feeling entirely qualified to review the newest novel from Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, “The Changeling.” It’s the first of his novels I’ve read, and also intensely autobiographical. Just a few weeks ago, I cited autobiographical interest as the main selling point of Coetzee’s most recent novel, Summertime. In order to avoid missing out on the more intimate aspects of Ōe’s book, I decided to do what any diligent critic would do in such a situation: I looked him up on Wikipedia.

What I found there—a description of an author both intellectual and accessible, so dedicated to his political philosophy that he remains the only person in history to refuse Japan’s Order of Culture—convinced me that I owe it to myself to read more of Ōe’s work.

It also made “The Changeling” come as something of a surprise, because the book had the opposite effect on me. It’s a long, discursive, and ultimately unsatisfying novel which, from the little I know of Ōe’s history, doesn’t do justice to his oeuvre.

The story concerns a fictional stand-in for Ōe, named Kogito after Descartes’ famous epiphanic statement: cogito ergo sum. Kogito is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his brother-in-law, the filmmaker Goro. Goro also has a real-life counterpart, the director Juzo Itami, who killed himself for the same reasons as Goro: a journalist was about to reveal information proving he’d cheated on his wife with a much younger woman.

Goro leaves a number of pre-recorded audiotapes behind him, and “The Changeling” opens with Kogito having odd, obsessive conversations with the Goro on these tapes.

The monologic tapes temporarily obfuscate one of the major weaknesses of Ōe’s writing (and Deborah Boliver Boehm’s translation): his dialogue. I’ve often found something stilted in English translations of Japanese dialogue, but this book takes that awkwardness to a whole new level. Most conversations sound like two people reading to each other from prepared statements:

You’ve had a lot of direct experience with the terrible specificities of yazuka violence, and the fact that you haven’t even touched on that topic in this conversation just makes me feel more acutely aware of its terrible menace.

Aside from the repetition of “terrible,” notice the odd commentary “in this conversation,” the writerly adverb “acutely”, the implausibly formal “terrible menace”. Seldom does the reader feel like human beings with real emotions are actually speaking to each other; they are simply making verbal presentations.

But it isn’t just the dialogue that proves problematic. What possible explanation is there for faux-poetry like “the way the moon glittered fiercely on the surface of the river below, which was like the bottom of a deep abyss…”. How can the glittering surface of a river be anything like the bottom of a deep abyss? Ask translator Boehm, who must take the bulk of the responsibility for these inconsistencies.

Ōe isn’t off the hook either, however. Perhaps for fear of being too obtusely self-involved, he’s constantly forcing his characters to tell each other things they already know, like in this passage where Goro relates to Kogito the story of Kogito’s courtship of Goro’s sister: “You did manage to find a copy of “The House at Pooh Corner,” as I recall, and you sent it to Ashiya. The correspondence that ensued was the beginning of your relationship with Chikashi.” Oh, is that how I met my wife? I’d forgotten!

The story bounces around in time and space, often using Goro’s recorded tapes to evoke moments in their shared history. The book is at its best when it dwells on the odd intricacy of their relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension. As the novel progresses, we discover that Goro and Kogito shared some kind of traumatic event in their past, and it seems inevitable that we will eventually hear about it.

Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Ōe

Unfortunately, we don’t learn about this trauma organically, but through the kind of cheap and embarrassing authorial invasion common to works of genre fiction written by high school English students. For the first 350 pages of the book, Ōe keeps referring to something called “THAT” (the traumatic event), but refuses to describe it. Apparently, no one ever told him that it doesn’t count as dramatic tension when you tell your reader you have a secret, but you won’t reveal it unless he wades through 6 hours of narcissistic rambling.

When we finally learn what the THAT is, Ōe fails utterly in evoking it as any kind of critical juncture. The last part of his novel inhabits the head of Kogito’s (Ōe’s) wife, who finds in Sendak’s picturebook “Outside, Over There” a metaphor for her relationship with her brother.

Apparently, she believes that Goro returned from THAT a changed man, an idea that gives the novel its name. But while these musings may be of some interest to a Japanese audience that has followed the tabloid story of Itami’s suicide, they meant almost nothing to this American.

The one saving grace here is that Ōe at least has a sense of humor about what he’s done in “The Changeling”. At one point, Kogito’s wife takes him to task for his “insufferable propensity for self-reference,” inserting himself into all his novels “under some contrived pseudonym”. But there is a darkness to this self-deprecation. On one of his tapes, Goro tells Kogito what he thinks of their artistic careers in severe terms:

“When you think about people who do the kind of work we do—selling the ‘new flowers’ of kitsch and the ‘new stars’ of kitsch by the yard, as it were—we don’t have that much time left, and we need to come to terms with that fact and ask forgiveness for having lived on lies.”

There is a noble naivete in taking honesty to mean autobiography, but Reality TV is not inherently more genuine than a sitcom, and the digressive relation of experience isn’t enough to float a novel. I have faith that Ōe can do much better than this, but maybe that’s just a bit of credulity on my part. I believe everything I read on Wikipedia.