Free The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe

know.”
    Afterward, Kogito somehow managed to leave the woman’s card behind on the table where he had been signing his books. The truth is, he was only interested in one of Goro’s female acquaintances in Berlin: the “really nice girl” who had been with him when he painted that watercolor of trees in winter.
    As for the “scandalous” woman who figured in the Tokyo tabloid story that had catalyzed (if not precipitated) Goro’s death, even if she turned out to be the same person who was supposedly getting her revenge for having been treated as a Mädchen für alles , Kogito could not have cared less about that sordid bit of ancient history.

2
    As it turned out, Kogito wasn’t able to free himself from the attentions of the big-haired, heavily scented Japanese woman that easily. The S. Fischer memorial lectureship formally began the following week, with sessions every Monday and Wednesday. Kogito taught from twelve till two, but as he learned from the German assistant professor of comparative literature who came to pick him up at his apartment on the first day of classes, there was a custom called the Academic Fifteen, which required instructors to arrive at their classrooms fifteen minutes late and leave fifteen minutes early. Kogito didn’t want to spend the fifteen extra minutes before his lecture killing time in the classroom, so instead he dropped by the department’s office to say hello. When he peeped into the pigeonhole that had only just been assigned to him, he found a notecard from the woman whose business card he had “accidentally” lost.
Someone—a German university student—kindly let me know that one of my business cards had been “dropped”at the meeting hall the other day. I have never dropped one of my business cards in my life.
On the day in question, I clearly remember handing out only two cards: one to that assistant professor and one to you. I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, so I’m going to assume that you left my card behind inadvertently, due to the sort of absentminded carelessness we associate with professors and authors. In any case, the thing I still want very much to talk to you about has nothing to do with the Mädchen für alles affair that I impulsively mentioned the other day, or anything like that. I actually have a very constructive proposal regarding the future of the German film world.
I have to go to Hannover this afternoon, so I won’t be able to attend your lecture, but I have the telephone number of the Center for Advanced Research, and I’ll be in touch in the next few days. By the way, I’m hoping the lecture will be a huge success. Yours, etc.
    Kogito wouldn’t have gone so far as to call the lecture a huge success, but it was certainly well attended (indeed, only forty copies of the English text of his speech had been made, to be distributed before the talk began, and an additional batch had to be hastily printed), and after he had finished reading the speech in English, the explanatory lecture went off without a hitch.
    Afterward Kogito headed home on the bus he’d been instructed to catch, and as he rode through the city in the deepening dusk, he suddenly remembered the strangely vivid expression “bean harmonica,” a colloquial Japanese nickname for a small pocket harmonica. That memory was directly related to the unusualfacial configuration of the woman who had accosted him, and when Kogito thought about it he realized that he had heard the expression on one of Goro’s Tagame tapes.
    This was while Goro was still alive, during the period when Kogito had started listening to the second batch of tapes—an activity that, in a surprisingly short time, had turned into a nightly ritual. Goro had evidently foreseen that development, because each tape he sent was a seamless continuation of the one before, with no introductory greetings or pleasantries, so that when Kogito pressed the PLAY button Goro’s monologue always picked up