The Changeling is a 2000 novel by Kenzaburō Ōe.[1] It is the first book of a trilogy.[2] A translation into English by Deborah Boliver Boehm,[1] was published in 2010 by Grove Press in the United States[2] and by Atlantic Books in the United Kingdom.[3] Boehm uses American English heavily in her translation.[1]
In the novel, a filmmaker named Goro Hanawa commits suicide, although he had appeared to be happy. His best friend, a novelist named Kogito Choko who is also his brother-in-law, discovers the suicide via one of 40 audiotapes that Goro recorded and sent to him. Chikashi Choko, Goro's sister and Kogito's wife, also learns that Goro has died. Kogito listens to the tapes and, in the words of Scott Espositom reviewing the novel in the Los Angeles Times, "What he finds is a rambling series of discourses on everything from the friendship they've shared since they were teens in the 1950s to Goro's ideas about art and life, their shared admiration for Rimbaud and a few secrets from the past."[2]
Kogito's son, a disabled composer
Scott Esposito wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the book "offers evidence that the Japanese master has regained his footing".[2] Christopher Tayler wrote in The Guardian that, because a Western reader may not have context that a Japanese reader would have, it would be more difficult for him or her to get fulfillment from the novel.[1]