“So what’s the point of the quotation?”
“The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let’s leave doubt for tomorrow,” Komatsu said. “That is the point.”
“What does Aristotle have to say about the Holocaust?”
Komatsu’s crescent-moon smile further deepened. “Here, Aristotle is mainly talking about things like art and scholarship and crafts.”
Tengo had far more than a passing acquaintance with Komatsu. He knew the man’s public face, and he had seen his private face as well. Komatsu appeared to be a lone wolf in the literary industry who had always survived by doing as he pleased. Most people were taken in by that image. But if you observed him closely, taking into account the full context of his actions, you could tell that his moves were highly calculated. He was like a player of chess or shogi who could see several moves ahead. It was true that he liked to plot outlandish schemes, but he was also careful to draw a line beyond which he would not stray. He was, if anything, a high-strung man whose more outrageous gestures were mostly for show.
Komatsu was careful to protect himself with various kinds of insurance. For example, he wrote a literary column once a week in the evening edition of a major newspaper. In it, he would shower writers with praise or blame. The blame was always expressed in highly acerbic prose, which was a specialty of his. The column appeared under a made-up name, but everyone in the industry knew who was writing it. No one liked being criticized in the newspaper, of course, so writers tried their best not to ruffle his feathers. When asked by him to write something, they avoided turning him down whenever possible. Otherwise, there was no telling what might be said about them in the column.
Tengo was not fond of Komatsu’s more calculating side, the way he displayed contempt for the literary world while exploiting its system to his best advantage. Komatsu possessed outstanding editorial instincts, and he had been enormously helpful to Tengo. His advice on the writing of fiction was almost always valuable. But Tengo was careful to keep a certain distance between them. He was determined not to draw too close to Komatsu and then have the ladder pulled out from under him for overstepping certain boundaries. In that sense, Tengo, too, was a cautious individual.
“As I said a minute ago, your rewrite of Air Chrysalis is close to perfect. A great job,” Komatsu continued. “There’s just one part—really, just one—that I’d like to have you redo if possible. Not now, of course. It’s fine at the ‘new writer’ level. But after the committee picks it to win the prize and just before the magazine prints it, at that stage I’d like you to fix it.”
“What part?” Tengo asked.
“When the Little People finish making the air chrysalis, there are two moons. The girl looks up to find two moons in the sky. Remember that part?”
“Of course I remember it.”
“In my opinion, you haven’t written enough about the two moons. I’d like you to give it more concrete detail. That’s my only request.”
“It is a little terse, maybe. I just didn’t want to overdo it with detail and destroy the flow of Fuka-Eri’s original.”
Komatsu raised the hand that had a cigarette tucked between the fingers. “Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they’ve seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.”
“I get it,” Tengo said. Komatsu’s request made a lot of sense. “I’ll fill out the part where the two moons appear.”
“Good. Then it will be perfect,” Komatsu said. He crushed out his cigarette.
“I’m always glad to have you praise my work,” Tengo said, “but it’s not so simple for me this time.”
“You have suddenly matured,” Komatsu said slowly, as if pausing for emphasis. “You have matured both as a manipulator of language and as an author. It should be simple enough for you to be glad about that. I’m sure rewriting Air Chrysalis taught you a lot about the writing of fiction. It should be a big help the next time you write your own work.”
“If there is a next time,” Tengo said.
A big grin crossed Komatsu’s face. “Don’t worry. You did your job. Now it’s my turn. You can go back to the bench and take it easy, just watch the game unfold.”
The waitress arrived and poured cold water into their glasses. Tengo drank half of his before realizing that he had absolutely no desire for water. He asked Komatsu, “Was it Aristotle who said the human soul is composed of reason, will, and desire?”
“No, that was Plato. Aristotle and Plato were as different as Mel Tormé and Bing Crosby. In any case, things were a lot simpler in the old days,” Komatsu said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to imagine reason, will, and desire engaged in a fierce debate around a table?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea who would lose that one.”
“What I like about you,” Komatsu said, raising an index finger, “is your sense of humor.”
This is not humor, Tengo thought, but he kept it to himself.
After leaving Komatsu, Tengo walked to Kinokuniya, bought several books, and started reading them over a beer in a nearby bar. This was the sort of moment in which he should have been able to relax most completely.
On this particular night, though, he could not seem to concentrate on his books. The recurring image of his mother floated vaguely before his eyes and would not go away. She had lowered the straps of her white slip from her shoulders, revealing her well-shaped breasts, and was letting a man suck on them. The man was not his father. He was larger and more youthful, and had better features. The infant Tengo was asleep in his crib, eyes closed, his breathing regular. A look of ecstasy suffused his mother’s face while the man sucked on her breasts, a look very much like his older girlfriend’s when she was having an orgasm.
Once, out of curiosity, Tengo had asked his girlfriend to try wearing a white slip for him. “Glad to,” she replied with a smile. “I’ll wear one next time if you’d like that. Do you have any other requests? I’ll do anything you want. Just ask. Don’t be embarrassed.”
“Can you wear a white blouse, too? A very simple one.”
She showed up the following week wearing a white blouse over a white slip. He took her blouse off, lowered the shoulder straps of the slip, and sucked on her breasts. He adopted the same position and angle as the man in his vision, and when he did this he felt a slight dizziness. His mind misted over, and he lost track of the order of things. In his lower body there was a heavy sensation that rapidly swelled, and no sooner was he aware of it than he shuddered with a violent ejaculation.
“Tengo, what’s wrong? Did you come already?” she asked, astounded.
He himself was not sure what had just happened, but then he realized that he had gotten semen on the lower part of her slip.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t planning to do that.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said cheerily. “I can rinse it right off. It’s just the usual stuff. I’m glad it’s not soy sauce or red wine!”
She took the slip off, scrubbed the semen-smeared part at the bathroom sink, and hung it over the shower rod to dry.
“Was that too strong?” she asked with a gentle smile, rubbing Tengo’s belly with the palm of her hand. “You like white slips, huh, Tengo?”
“Not exactly,” Tengo said, but he could not explain to her his real reason for having made the request.
“Just let big sister know any time you’ve got a fantasy you want to play out, honey. I’ll go along with anything. I just love fantasies! Everybody needs some kind of fantasy to go on living, don’t you think? You want me to wear a white slip next time, too?”
Tengo shook his head. “No, thanks, once was enough.”<
br />
Tengo often wondered if the young man sucking on his mother’s breasts in his vision might be his biological father. This was because Tengo in no way resembled the man who was supposed to be his father—the stellar NHK collections agent. Tengo was a tall, strapping man with a broad forehead, narrow nose, and tightly balled ears. His father was short and squat and utterly unimpressive. He had a narrow forehead, flat nose, and pointed ears like a horse’s. Virtually every facial feature of his contrasted with Tengo’s. Where Tengo had a generally relaxed and generous look, his father appeared nervous and tightfisted. Comparing the two of them, people often openly remarked that they did not look like father and son.
Still, it was not their different facial features that made it difficult for Tengo to identify with his father; rather, it was their psychological makeup and tendencies. His father showed no sign at all of what might be called intellectual curiosity. True, his father had not had a decent education. Having been born in poverty, he had not had the opportunity to establish in himself an orderly intellectual system. Tengo felt a degree of pity regarding his father’s circumstances. But still, a basic desire to obtain knowledge at a universal level—which Tengo assumed to be a more or less natural urge in people—was lacking in the man. There was a certain practical wisdom at work in him that enabled him to survive, but Tengo could discover no hint of a willingness in his father to raise himself up, to deepen himself, to view a wider, larger world.
But Tengo’s father never seemed to suffer discomfort from the narrowness and the stagnant air of his cramped little world. Tengo never once saw him pick up a book at home. They never had newspapers (watching the regular NHK news broadcasts was enough, he would say). He had absolutely no interest in music or movies, and he never took a trip. The only thing that seemed to interest him was his assigned collection route. He would make a map of the area, mark it with colored pens, and examine it whenever he had a spare moment, the way a biologist classifies chromosomes.
By contrast, Tengo was regarded as a math prodigy from early childhood. His grades in arithmetic were always outstanding. He could solve high school math problems by the time he was in the third grade. He won high marks in the other sciences as well without any apparent effort. And whenever he had a spare moment, he would devour books. Hugely curious about everything, he would absorb knowledge from a broad range of fields with all the efficiency of a power shovel scooping earth. Whenever he looked at his father, he found it inconceivable that half of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, uneducated man.
My real father must be somewhere else. This was the conclusion that Tengo reached in boyhood. Like the unfortunate children in a Dickens novel, Tengo must have been led by strange circumstances to be raised by this man. Such a possibility was both a nightmare and a great hope. He became obsessed with Dickens after reading Oliver Twist, plowing through every Dickens volume in the library. As he traveled through the world of the stories, he steeped himself in reimagined versions of his own life. The reimaginings (or obsessive fantasies) in his head grew ever longer and more complex. They followed a single pattern, but with infinite variations. In all of them, Tengo would tell himself that this was not the place where he belonged. He had been mistakenly locked in a cage. Someday his real parents, guided by sheer good fortune, would find him. They would rescue him from this cramped and ugly cage and bring him back where he belonged. Then he would have the most beautiful, peaceful, and free Sundays imaginable.
Tengo’s father exulted over the boy’s outstanding schoolwork. He prided himself on Tengo’s excellent grades, and boasted of them to people in the neighborhood. At the same time, however, he showed a certain displeasure regarding Tengo’s brightness and talent. Often when Tengo was at his desk, studying, his father would interrupt him, seemingly on purpose. He would order the boy to do chores or nag Tengo about his supposedly offensive behavior. The content of his father’s nagging was always the same: he was running himself ragged every day, covering huge distances and sometimes enduring people’s curses as a collections agent, while Tengo did nothing but take it easy all the time, living in comfort. “They had me working my tail off around the house when I was your age, and my father and older brother would beat me black and blue for anything at all. They never gave me enough food, and treated me like an animal. I don’t want you thinking you’re so special just because you got a few good grades.” His father would go on like this endlessly.
This man may be envious of me, Tengo began to think after a certain point. He’s jealous—either of me as a person or of the life I’m leading. But does a father really feel jealousy toward his own son? As a child, Tengo did not judge his father, but he could not help feeling a pathetic kind of meanness that emanated from his father’s words and deeds—and this he found almost physically unbearable. Often he felt that this man was not only envious of him, but that he actually hated something in his son. It was not that his father hated Tengo as a person but rather that he hated something inside Tengo, something that he could not forgive.
Mathematics gave Tengo an effective means of retreat. By fleeing into a world of numerical expression, he was able to escape from the troublesome cage of reality. As a little boy, he noticed that he could easily move into a mathematical world with the flick of a switch in his head. He remained free as long as he actively explored that realm of infinite consistency. He walked down the gigantic building’s twisted corridor, opening one numbered door after another. Each time a new spectacle opened up before him, the ugly traces of the real world would dissipate and then simply disappear. The world governed by numerical expression was, for him, a legitimate and always safe hiding place. As long as he stayed in that world, he could forget or ignore the rules and burdens forced upon him by the real world.
Where mathematics was a magnificent imaginary building, the world of story as represented by Dickens was like a deep, magical forest for Tengo. When mathematics stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, the forest spread out beneath his gaze in silence, its dark, sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In the forest there were no maps, no numbered doorways.
In elementary and middle school, Tengo was utterly absorbed by the world of mathematics. Its clarity and absolute freedom enthralled him, and he also needed them to survive. Once he entered adolescence, however, he began to feel increasingly that this might not be enough. There was no problem as long as he was visiting the world of math, but whenever he returned to the real world (as return he must), he found himself in the same miserable cage. Nothing had improved. Rather, his shackles felt even heavier. So then, what good was mathematics? Wasn’t it just a temporary means of escape that made his real-life situation even worse?
As his doubts increased, Tengo began deliberately to put some distance between himself and the world of mathematics, and instead the forest of story began to exert a stronger pull on his heart. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility. Someday he might be able to decipher the spell. That possibility would gently warm his heart from within.
The older he became, the more Tengo was drawn to this kind of narrative suggestion. Mathematics was a great joy for him even
now, as an adult. When he was teaching students at the cram school, the same joy he had felt as a child would come welling up naturally. To share the joy of that conceptual freedom with someone was a wonderful thing. But Tengo was no longer able to lose himself so unreservedly in a world of numerical expression. For he knew that no amount of searching in that world would give him the solution he was really looking for.
When he was in the fifth grade, after much careful thinking, Tengo declared that he wanted to stop making the rounds with his father on Sundays to collect the NHK subscription fees. He told his father that he wanted to use the time for studying and reading books and playing with other kids. Just as his father had his own work, he had things that he had to do. He wanted to live a normal life like everybody else.
Tengo said what he needed to say, concisely and coherently.
His father, of course, blew up. He didn’t give a damn what other families did, he said; it had nothing to do with them. We have our own way of doing things. And don’t you dare talk to me about a “normal life,” Mr. Know-it-all. What do you know about a “normal life”? Tengo did not try to argue with him. He merely stared back in silence, knowing that nothing he said would get through to his father. If that was what Tengo wanted, his father continued, that was what he would get. But if he couldn’t listen to his father, his father couldn’t go on feeding him anymore. Tengo should get the hell out.
Tengo did as he was told. He packed a bag and left home. He had made up his mind. No matter how angry his father got, no matter how much he screamed and shouted, Tengo was not going to be afraid—even if his father raised a hand to him (which he did not do). Now that Tengo had been given permission to leave his cage, he was more relieved than anything else.
But still, there was no way a ten-year-old boy could live on his own. When class was dismissed at the end of the day, he confessed his predicament to his teacher and said he had no place to spend the night. He also explained to her what an emotional burden it had been for him to make the rounds with his father on Sundays collecting NHK subscription fees. The teacher was a single woman in her mid-thirties. She was far from beautiful and she wore thick, ugly glasses, but she was a fair-minded, warmhearted person. A small woman, she was normally quiet and mild-mannered, but she could be surprisingly quick-tempered; once she let her anger out, she became a different person, and no one could stop her. The difference shocked people. Tengo, however, was fond of her, and her temper tantrums never frightened him.
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