The Changeling Read Online Free PDF Page A

delivered to Kogito’s house, though by that time Goro’s body was already in police custody, being held as the unidentified corpse ofsomeone who has met an unnatural death.) In retrospect, after what had happened, that monologue seemed to be rife with hidden meanings.
    “When we were in Mat’chama, how well do you suppose we really understood French poetry? After that you went off to college and majored in French literature, but you mainly read prose, as I recall. And since I never made a formal study of the language, I can’t really judge our abilities,” Goro had said in his usual smooth, flowing voice, with no hint that anything out of the ordinary might be going on in his head. “But I remember that you used to copy the poems out of Hideo Kobayashi’s translation of Rimbaud onto hundreds of little pieces of paper and stick them on the wall at your mother’s house in the mountains. Rimbaud really had a hold on us, didn’t he?”
    “That’s true,” Kogito had replied nostalgically, after pressing the STOP button on the tape recorder. “In those days, all we did was fantasize about the mystical meanings and how they applied to us. But I think that as time went by we were able to refine our understanding of Rimbaud based on scholarly research, wouldn’t you agree?” Whereupon he pressed the PLAY button again. And that was how, the night before, Kogito had managed to have a long, antic “chat” with his already deceased brother-in-law about Arthur Rimbaud, the French prodigy poet.
    And now, at last, Kogito became aware of just how dense and thick-skulled he had been: Goro had clearly been using a verse of Rimbaud’s to say his own good-bye. It couldn’t have been more obvious, really. For openers, the poem Goro had been focusing on was “Adieu,” or “Farewell”: the same poem(as translated by Kobayashi) that Kogito had laboriously copied onto scraps of paper when they were teenagers.
    And then Kogito remembered—though he wasn’t clear about whether it had been a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting—that he and Goro had shared a long discussion about the French poet on another occasion. At the time it had been many years since either of them had read any Rimbaud, and Kogito got the impression that Goro, who did most of the talking, was conjuring up the lines of poetry from the dim and distant recesses of his memory.
    Inspired by that conversation, Kogito had rounded up and read several new translations of Rimbaud’s poetry. (By that time, almost every French-Japanese translator had published a Rimbaud translation.) Kogito ended up choosing Hitoshi Usami’s recent translation to send to Goro, after checking the Usami version not only against Hideo Kobayashi’s seminal translation but also against the original French text.
    Among the pile of cassette tapes that Goro had sent, there was one in which Goro responded to Kogito’s gift of the Usami translation with a long discourse about Rimbaud. After Kogito had listened to that tape again, he went to the section of a bookcase where he kept the French books he had collected during his student days and took down several works, old and new, pertaining to Rimbaud.
    On one shelf, a Pléiade edition of Rimbaud’s Collected Works stood next to a Mercure de France edition of Poésies ; the latter (a present to Kogito from Goro when they were still in high school) had been Kogito’s first introduction to the French language. For the first time in many years, Kogito opened Poésies .He could still remember how his heart had leapt when Goro handed him that little book with the exotic red letters on the cover. There, in the margins, were the minuscule but clearly legible notations he had made as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, written in hard lead pencil.
    The reason some of the notes were in English was because before Goro started teaching him French, the book that Kogito had consulted in the library of Matsuyama’s American-run Center for Cultural