“Kogito had managed to have a long, antic “chat” with his already deceased brother-in-law about Arthur Rimbaud, the French prodigy poet”. Philosophical conversations between writer Kogito and his childhood actor friend Goro are at the heart of "The Changeling"; conversations that cross the divide between the present and past, life and death.

Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe has crafted a novel weighted with memory. Throughout, Kogito tries to figure out why Goro committed suicide, thinking back on past talks with his friend and possible cries for help he never paid attention to. Memories weave in and out of the narrative, so much so that, essentially, the novel takes place in Kogito’s mind. Meandering Oe takes us from a small family apartment in Tokyo to the forests of Shikoku in western Japan (where a strange and unsettling incident happens to the two friends), to Berlin and back again. These movements are triggered by the friends’ interaction through tagame. Hardly one-sided monologues delivered by Goro from “The Other Side”, the two are able to banter and debate. Kogito even decides to accept an invitation to guest lecture at a university in Berlin for three months, at the suggestion of his deceased friend and mentor. He sees this time as an opportunity to break from the strains of his family life and the tagame itself, but Goro’s memory simply follows him, through the introduction of two female characters that may hold clues to the suicide.

At a hefty near-500 pages “The Changeling” requires patience. Its meditative, non-linear style ensures that we mull over the novel’s themes of friendship, family, loss, anxiety and change. It does, though, have some lighter moments – most memorable are the bizarre attacks on Kogito made by a gang of men who routinely remove his left shoe and drop a small cannonball on his foot. Roguish and good-looking Goro brings an element of the erotic to the novel, and in an endearingly funny moment embarrasses Kogito when a smutty tape recording is accidentally broadcast to a bus full of people. These moments lean towards the style of another prolific Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, who relishes strange and mystical plots often revolving around sex and violence. Oe is more conservative in his writing, however, and this book is satisfying in its attention to forming detailed characters and its focus on universal themes. And who is the “changeling” of the title? A shift in narrative perspective in the final chapter allows Chikashi a voice, and it is her thoughts on that subject that give a sensitive and redemptive ending.

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