The Changeling Read Online Free PDF

Information and Education (CIE for short) was the Oxford French-English dictionary. In addition, the pages bore two different kinds of annotations in Japanese. The notes in the angular katakana syllabary were used to flag what Kogito perceived as the salient points in Goro’s discourses. He used the katakana in imitation of, or homage to, the marginal printed musings in a collection of essays by Goro’s famous film-director father, which Goro had lent him.
    Kogito’s own schoolboy thoughts (not shown here) were written in the flowing, cursive hiragana syllabary, to differentiate them from his notes on Goro’s impromptu lectures, which tended to run along these lines:
In a letter to his teacher, as well as in the poem itself, Rimbaud wrote that he was about to turn seventeen: that is to say, an age that’s filled with daydreams and fantasies. But it’s said that the poem in question, “Romance,” was actually written when Rimbaud was fifteen. In other words, when he wrote the line “One isn’t serious at seventeen,” he was misrepresenting his own age.
Even so, this poem is meant to be read by someone who’s exactly the age you are now, Kogito: the same ageI was last year, when I read it for the first time. The great thing is that this absolute genius, Arthur Rimbaud, offers equal encouragement to ordinary humans like us, too.
    Kogito was surprised that a gifted youth like Goro, who anyone could see was seriously brilliant and abundantly talented, would liken himself—and, with exceptional honesty, Kogito, as well—to ordinary people.
    As Kogito was reading “Adieu” in the Pléiade edition, he was once again seized by an urgent thought. Before Goro’s suicide, when he was holding forth about that poem on one of his tapes and quoting certain lines from it, he obviously had the new translation that Kogito had sent open in front of him. Wasn’t Goro assuming that for Kogito, too, the entire poem would immediately be brought to mind by reciting a few lines? Kogito didn’t have a ready answer for that question, then or now.
    Even with the new translation that he had urged upon Goro, Kogito didn’t feel the same sort of passionate emotional attachment to Rimbaud’s words as when he was young and used to memorize the poems by writing them out, line by line. Kogito had sensed a similar kind of divergence in their infrequent encounters during recent years. Could that be the reason why Goro had ultimately despaired of Kogito’s dependability and had decided to head off into the realm of the Terrible Thud, alone?
    “Autumn already!—But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness, far from those who die as seasons turn.”
    Kogito didn’t own a copy of the Usami translation that Goro was quoting from on the Tagame tape, but as he wasjotting down a quick transcription he remembered that this opening-paragraph stanza was the same one that had first enthralled him, in Kobayashi’s translation, when he was a seventeen-year-old high-school student. Goro seemed to have had a strong response to those lines, as well. But wasn’t Goro, in choosing to die of his own free will, patterning himself after those who were “sworn to a search for divine brightness”? Wasn’t he, somehow, just mimicking “far from those who die as seasons turn”?
    Moreover, in the next stanza, there was the image of a dead body swarming with maggots. How did that make Goro feel, on the threshold of his own death? This poem, which was teeming with what Rimbaud called “dreadful imagining”—why did Goro feel compelled to go on about it at such length on the tape? Kogito couldn’t help wondering about that. It even occurred to him that Goro might have deliberately chosen to hurl those very specific, very horrific words at Kogito and, by extension, at himself.
    “Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!” And then, in the next