Free The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe Page B

the advice my father used to give to up-and-coming actors: When you’re speaking your lines, always pitch your voice a note or two lower than your usual speaking voice .
    “Well, of course, I’m from a different generation, and the moviemaking industry is fifty years farther along than it was in my father’s day, but when you think about the teaching of acting that’s going on today, it’s become so simple that I have a feeling my father would be plunged into despair if he heard about it. The way I see it, if you pour all your efforts into the casting process and put together an absolutely perfect cast, then the movie’s already as good as made! Beyond that, there’s no need for coaching.
    “You hear some people talking about the clique of A-list actresses and so on, right? The truth is that some of those same actresses, even while they are just the latest cute new face,floundering around in a fog, often end up winning the ‘best newcomer’ acting prizes. And that’s what wakes them up to the truth about performing. If the director treats them like serious actresses, they’ll give him more or less what he wants, and before too long, as time goes by, they’ll end up being classified as top-flight, A-list actresses. That’s just the way it is. People may call that kind of skillful acting ‘great,’ but when actresses get put on a pedestal like that they get into a rut, and they just end up giving the same performance over and over. It’s really a staggeringly tedious tautology, you know. An actress who has always played pure, virginal roles gets cast against type and throws herself into a really gritty portrayal of a courtesan in the Heian era or some such. In my father’s day there were people like that ... but that’s nothing more than another rotation of the same tautology. That type of over-the-top performance—you know, the tragic geisha—is meant to make people cry, but I can never watch that sort of thing without laughing.
    “On the other hand, many of the women I’ve actually met up with in everyday life (and these aren’t professional actresses, mind you) have dropped their masks and said to me, at some point, ‘This is who I really am,’ and I’m just blown away by how formidable their acting skills are. You really have to take off your hat to them.
    “And it’s not as if I’ve only run into one or two of these specially talented women in my life so far. In the circles I move in, whether I wanted to or not, I couldn’t help meeting women like that, one after the other. It’s gotten to the point where I think that sort of encounter is the only reason my life has unfolded as it has. All I can say is that it’s been a never-endingparade of trouble, with plenty more where that came from! That seems to be my fate, and I embrace it.”
    This was typical of Goro’s disquisitions; the “harmonica-mouth” saga may have been his main topic on the tape in question, but it was prefaced by this extended free-association ramble. Now that Kogito was in Berlin, far away from Tagame, he was remembering more consciously the way Goro spoke on the tapes, and he realized that quite a few of the recordings had probably been made under the influence of alcohol. When they were younger—in high school, even—he had been with Goro on quite a few occasions when he was drinking. The reason he hadn’t picked up on Goro’s tipsiness when he was listening to the recordings was because now that they were adults living in Tokyo, they each had their own families and their careers had taken them in different directions. So although they occasionally went out for sushi or Chinese food and had a drink or two with their meals, there had been only a couple of times when they met up at some watering hole for the express purpose of drinking the night away. This probably sounds strange, considering that Chikashi was Goro’s only sibling, but although Goro had dropped by once or twice on short notice, in recent years