Free The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe Page A

exactly where it had left off.
    Hence, it was entirely natural that listening to Tagame should have turned into an indispensable daily routine. Right after Goro’s death, there was a time when Kogito forgot to change the batteries (Tagame was a rather archaic piece of equipment, not designed to be user-friendly, so there was no warning that the batteries were running low), and he was afraid the tape recorder had broken down. After that he had developed a fear of allowing anything to interrupt the conversational system Goro had so painstakingly set up. The thought of how bleak his evenings would be if that happened seemed to hover above Kogito’s head like the shadow of a giant bird.
    In any event, when he first started listening to Goro’s tapes one of the recorded anecdotes that had especially impressed him invoked the bean harmonica. Goro hadn’t set out to tell the harmonica story from the outset; he just segued naturally into it from a discussion about teaching people how to act in films.
    “When you edited that paperback edition of my father’s collected essays, one of your commentaries was on a treatisemy father had published somewhere else, about how to coach actors—remember?” Goro began. “You compared it to Kenji Miyazawa’s Outline of the Essential Art of the Peasant , and as a result you were criticized not only by a group of Miyazawa scholars who believed in the strict ‘textual criticism’ that was flourishing at the time, but also by a group of film critics who had gotten together to make a new study of my father’s written works. They thought your approach was a bit off the wall, as I recall. But although I had reservations about the rather high-flown literary style you chose to use, I did think at the time that there was a visceral, intuitive basis for the parallels you drew.
    “The early days of the film industry in this country were really something else, you know? Any time they wanted to invoke a ‘Japanese-y’ feeling in a scene—which is to say, in pretty much every single scene—the soundtrack would, without fail, be playing some variation on ‘Sakura, Sakura.’ And when they shot a crowd scene, you could sense that beyond the narrow confines of the set, which was crammed full of extras, there wasn’t a soul in sight. That was the sort of thing my father wrote about. And if you want to talk about the origins of the first film actresses, most if not all of them came from that peasant class that Kenji Miyazawa poured so much energy into trying to help. They were probably from the same background as the girls whose parents were so poor that they had no choice but to sell their daughters to the pleasure quarters, or worse. I think my father must have had the same feelings of wanting to do something altruistic for those poor country girls. Both my father and Kenji had the same sort of humanitarian motivations, you know.
    “Once the camera was turned on, the actresses would never smile, and when they spoke their lines they barely openedtheir mouths—those things drove my father crazy. But he always wanted to try to help those camera-shy actresses; that was the feeling he brought to the set. Kenji, of course, tried to introduce the farming class to the magnificence of art and culture, but making that noble ideal a reality was easier said than done. Even Kenji himself probably understood that, ultimately, it was an impossible dream. As for my father, rather than just trying to whitewash those ruddy-complexioned young farmgirls and turn them into pretty, decorative blossoms, I think he was trying to come up with a concrete plan to help them develop their acting skills. As someone who comes from a valley in the middle of a forest, you’re probably able to grasp that better than most people. And the plan that my father came up with way back when, in that acting guide, is something that’s genuinely useful even today. When I myself was first starting out as an actor, I always kept in mind