The Story Archive

The Changeling

Kenzaburō Ōe · 2000 CE · Novel · Japanese · Contemporary

After his brother-in-law, a film director, jumps to his death, the novelist Kogito Choko plays the cassette tapes his friend recorded for him and tries to understand the suicide and the boyhood they shared. The book moves between the tapes, memory and Kogito's own working life, and mourns a friendship while weighing what a writer owes the dead. Ōe's first novel after the Nobel Prize, it returns to the autobiographical mode of his earlier work.

Open The Changeling in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Attributes

Genre
Psychological
Theme
Memory & TimeDeath & MortalityGuilt & ConscienceIdentity & SelfArt & CreationLoss of Innocence
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanGhost
Form
Nonlinear / FracturedFrame Narrative
Symbol / motif
MusicThe Letter
Conflict
vs Self
Mode / tone
ElegiacModernist
Culture / tradition
Japanese

Closest analogues