Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of 2025!

BookBrowse Reviews The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe

The Changeling

by Kenzaburo Oe
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 1, 2010, 480 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2011, 480 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


A novel about confronting ghosts of the past, from Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

The Changeling is probably a good book (and glowing reviews in various newspapers and magazines indicate that a number of critics think it is), but it is not for everyone, and it was not for me. The book is pulled along with a compelling plot that frequently startled me with its eerie twists and sharp revelations. The novel primarily concerns Kogito, a well-regarded Japanese writer, his wife, Chikashi, an artist, and Goro, Chikashi's brother and Kogito's childhood friend. The novel opens just after Goro has jumped to his death, and it seems at first that the ensuing action will seek to explain why he has committed suicide, but gradually the mysteries widen and extend backward in time. When Kogito and Goro were just boys and they disappeared for two days, what happened to forever change Goro upon his return?

I didn't actually realize at first that I was reading a suspense novel, but then I started to come across passages like this one, about Kogito's recurring health problems:

"In truth, though, the second, third, and fourth attacks of 'gout' were not due to the usual medical cause (that is, uric-acid accumulation), at all. The real reason was simply too bizarre to share. Every so often, three men would show up to punish him, and their mode of operation was always the same."

A passage like this would jolt me and recharge my interest in the book. But in between such passages, my interest flagged and I had to force myself through dense blocks of text in which a character, usually Kogito, confronts a piece of literature, reading it and applying it to his own life, but also remembering other times he'd read it, and which editions and translations he'd used, and what conversations he'd had about it at several different points in his maturation as a reader, and so on through many dizzying, sedimented layers of his inner thoughts. These passages are meant, in the words of one reviewer, to demonstrate "a conviction that literature has the power to transfigure and redeem reality." But they were often quite chronologically confusing, and they lacked the psychological realism that I have come to expect in contemporary literature.

Kogito's wife, for instance, finds a copy of Maurice Sendak's picture book, Outside Over There, in Kogito's luggage, and after a paragraph discussing the book's editors, when Kogito had previously read it, and how he came to have it in his suitcase, Chikashi finally reads the book and learns the concept of a "changeling." This, she thinks, describes what happened to her brother on that mysterious night in his boyhood. And in prose that couldn't be more leaden and expository, she wonders, "Why did I choose Kogito to be the father of the child I wanted to bring into the world as a means of retrieving the Goro who was taken away?" She has never understood why she married Kogito. "'But now,' Chikashi thought, 'An unexpected solution to that mystery has floated to the surface out of nowhere. When I tried using the Sendak book as a clue, I realized that deep down in my heart this is probably what I'd been feeling all along. Marrying this person, Kogito, was the same as flying out of the window at night in order to retrieve the real Goro.'" I dearly wanted to like the story of three passionately engaged readers making sense of their lives through books, but I simply couldn't connect with the novel in these passages.

Ultimately, I suspect that The Changeling is rather more fun to write about than to read, though I defer to readers more familiar with Oe's body of work and schooled in his formal style of writing for the final analysis.

Reviewed by Amy Reading

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2010, and has been updated for the February 2011 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Changeling, try these:

  • Murder at the 42nd Street Library jacket

    Murder at the 42nd Street Library

    by Con Lehane

    Published 2016

    About This book

    More by this author

    Murder at the 42nd Street Library opens with a murder in a second floor office of the iconic, beaux-arts flagship of the New York Public Library. Ray Ambler, the curator of the library's crime fiction collection, joins forces with NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove in hopes of bringing a murderer to justice.

  • 1Q84 jacket

    1Q84

    by Haruki Murakami

    Published 2013

    About This book

    More by this author

    A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's - 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet.

We have 7 read-alikes for The Changeling, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Kenzaburo Oe
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.
  • Book Jacket
    The Wager
    by David Grann
    From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    From the bestselling author of I Was Anastasia comes a historical mystery inspired by 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard, who investigates a shocking murder.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

Who Said...

Be sincere, be brief, be seated

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

D to T N

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.