But who can possibly save all the people of the world? Tengo thought. You could bring all the gods of the world into one place, and still they couldn’t abolish nuclear weapons or eradicate terrorism. They couldn’t end the drought in Africa or bring John Lennon back to life. Far from it—the gods would just break into factions and start fighting among themselves, and the world would probably become even more chaotic than it is now. Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about, to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin.
Tengo read about half of the Air Chrysalis reviews that Komatsu had sent before stuffing them back into the envelope. He could pretty well imagine what the rest were like. As a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people. It had fascinated Tengo and Komatsu and Professor Ebisuno and an amazing number of readers. What more did it have to do?
The phone rang just after nine o’clock Tuesday night. Tengo was listening to music and reading a book. This was his favorite time of day, reading to his heart’s content before going to sleep. When he tired of reading, he would fall asleep.
This was the first time he had heard the phone ring in quite a while, and there was something ominous about it. This was not Komatsu calling. The phone had a different ring when it was from Komatsu. Tengo hesitated, wondering whether he should pick it up at all. He let it ring five times. Then he lifted the needle from the record groove and picked up the receiver. It might be his girlfriend.
“Mr. Kawana?” a man said. It was the voice of a middle-aged man, soft and deep. Tengo did not recognize it.
“Yes,” Tengo said cautiously.
“I’m sorry to call so late at night. My name is Yasuda,” the man said in a neutral voice, neither friendly nor hostile, neither impersonal nor intimate.
Yasuda? The name was ordinary enough, but he couldn’t think of any Yasudas he knew.
“I’m calling to give you a message,” the man said. He then inserted a slight pause, rather like putting a bookmark in between the pages of a book. “My wife will not be able to visit your home anymore, I believe. That is all I wanted to tell you.”
Yasuda! That was his girlfriend’s name. Kyoko Yasuda. She never had occasion to speak her name in Tengo’s presence, which accounted for the lag in recognition. This man on the phone was Kyoko’s husband. Tengo felt as if something were stuck in his throat.
“Have I managed to make myself clear?” the man asked, his voice entirely free of emotion—or none that Tengo could hear. He spoke with a slight accent, possibly from Hiroshima or Kyushu. Tengo could not be sure.
“Not be able to visit,” Tengo echoed the words.
“Yes, she will no longer be able to visit.”
Tengo mustered up the courage to ask, “Has something happened to her?”
Silence. Tengo’s question hung in space, unanswered. Then the man said, “So what I’m telling you, Mr. Kawana, is that you will probably never see my wife again. I just wanted to let you know that.”
The man knew that Tengo had been sleeping with his wife. Once a week. For a year. Tengo could tell that he knew. But the man’s voice was strangely lacking in either anger or resentment. It contained something else—not so much a personal emotion as an objective scene: an abandoned, overgrown garden, or a dry riverbed after a major flood—a scene like that.
“I’m not sure what you are trying to—”
“Then let’s just leave it at that,” the man said, before Tengo could finish. A trace of fatigue was discernible in his voice. “One thing should be perfectly clear. My wife is irretrievably lost. She can no longer visit your home in any form. That is what I am saying.”
“Irretrievably lost,” Tengo repeated.
“I did not want to make this call, Mr. Kawana. But I couldn’t sleep at night if I just let it go and said nothing. Do you think I like having this conversation?”
No sounds of any kind came from the other end when the man stopped talking. He seemed to be phoning from an incredibly quiet place. Either that or the emotion inside him was acting like a vacuum, absorbing all sound waves in the vicinity.
Tengo felt he ought to ask the man a question or two. Otherwise, it seemed, this whole thing would end as a collection of inscrutable hints. He mustn’t let the conversation die! But this man had no intention of informing Tengo of any situational details. What kind of question could he ask when the other person had no intention of revealing the actual state of affairs? What kind of words should he give voice to when facing a vacuum? Tengo was still struggling to discover any words that might work when, without warning, the connection was cut. The man had set down the receiver without saying anything and left Tengo’s presence. Probably forever.
Tengo kept the dead receiver pressed to his ear for a time. If anyone else was listening in to the call, he might be able to grasp that person’s presence. He held his breath and listened, but there were no telltale sounds. All he could hear was the beating of his own heart. The more he listened, the more he felt like a thief who has crept into a stranger’s house at night, hidden in the shadows, holding his breath, and waiting for the family to fall asleep.
He boiled some water in a kettle and made green tea to calm his nerves. Cradling the handleless cup in his hands, he sat at the kitchen table and mentally reviewed the telephone call.
“My wife is irretrievably lost. She can no longer visit your home in any form. That is what I am saying.” In any form: that phrase disturbed Tengo the most. It suggested something dark, damp, and slimy.
What this man named Yasuda wanted to convey to Tengo, it seemed, was the message that even if his wife wanted to visit Tengo’s apartment again, it was literally impossible for her to carry out that wish. Impossible in what way? In what context? And what did it mean to say that she was “irretrievably lost”? An image formed in his mind of Kyoko Yasuda with serious injuries from an accident or having come down with an incurable disease or her face horribly disfigured by violence. She was confined to a wheelchair or had lost a limb or was wrapped head to toe in bandages, unable to move. Or then again she was being held in an underground room, fastened like a dog on a thick chain. All of these possibilities, however, seemed far-fetched.
Kyoko Yasuda (as Tengo was now calling her in his mind) had hardly ever spoken of her husband. Tengo had learned nothing about him from her—his profession, his age, his looks, his personality, where they had met, when they had married, whether he was skinny or fat, tall or short, or whether or not they got along well. All Tengo knew was that she was not particularly hard-pressed economically (she appeared to be quite comfortable, in fact), and that she seemed dissatisfied with either the frequency or the quality of the sex she had with her husband, though even these were entirely matters of conjecture on his part. She and Tengo spent their afternoons in bed talking of many things, but never once had the subject of her husband come up, nor had Tengo wanted to know about him. He preferred to remain ignorant of the man whose wife he was stealing. It seemed only proper. Now that this new situation had developed, however, he was sorry that he had never asked her about her husband (she would almost certainly have responded frankly if he had asked). Was her husband jealous? Possessive? Did he have violent tendencies?
He tried to put himself in the man’s place. How would he feel if the situation were reversed? Say, he has a wife, two small children, and a tranquil home life, but he discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man once a week—a man ten years her junior, and the affair has been going on for over a year. What would he think if he found himself in such a situation? What emotions would rule his heart? Violent anger? Deep disappointment? Vague sadness? Scornful indifference? A sense of having lost touch with reality? Or an indistinguishable blend of several emotions?
No amount of thinking enabled Tengo to hit upon exactly how he would feel. What came to mind through all his hypothesizing was the image of his mother in a white slip giving her breasts to a young man he did not know. Destiny seem
s to have come full circle, Tengo thought. The enigmatic young man was perhaps Tengo himself, the woman in his arms Kyoko Yasuda. The composition was exactly the same; only the individuals had changed. Does this mean that my life has been nothing but a process through which I am giving concrete form to the dormant image inside me? And how much responsibility do I bear for her having become irretrievably lost?
Tengo could not get back to sleep again. He kept hearing the voice of the man who called himself Yasuda. The hints that he had left behind weighed heavily on Tengo, and the words he had spoken bore a strange reality. Tengo thought about Kyoko Yasuda. He pictured her face and body in minute detail. He had last seen her on Friday, two weeks prior. As always, they had spent a lot of time having sex. After the phone call from her husband, though, it seemed like something that had happened in the distant past, like an episode out of history.
On his shelf remained several LP records that she had brought from home to listen to in bed with him, all jazz records from long, long ago—Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday (this one, too, had Barney Bigard as a sideman), some 1940s Duke Ellington. She had listened to them—and handled them—with great care. The jackets had faded somewhat with the years, but the records themselves looked brand-new. Tengo picked up one jacket after another. Gazing at them, he felt with growing certainty that he might never see her again.
Tengo was not, strictly speaking, in love with Kyoko Yasuda. He had never felt that he wanted to spend his life with her or that saying good-bye to her could be painful. She had never made him feel that deep trembling of the heart. But he had grown accustomed to having this older girlfriend as part of his life, and naturally, he had grown fond of her. He looked forward to welcoming her to his apartment once a week and joining his naked flesh with hers. Their relationship was an unusual one for Tengo. He had never been able to feel very close to many women. In fact, most women—whether he was in a sexual relationship with them or not—made Tengo feel uncomfortable. And in order to curb that discomfort, Tengo had to fence off a certain territory inside himself. In other words, he had to keep certain rooms in his heart locked tight. With Kyoko Yasuda, however, such complex operations were unnecessary. First of all, she seemed to grasp exactly what Tengo wanted and what he did not want. And so Tengo counted himself lucky that they had happened to find each other.
Now, however, something had happened, and she was irretrievably lost. For some unknowable reason, she could never visit here in any form. And, according to her husband, it was better for Tengo to know nothing about either the reason or its consequence.
. . .
Still unable to sleep, Tengo was sitting on the floor, listening to the Duke Ellington record at low volume, when the phone rang again. The hands of the wall clock were pointing to 10:12. Tengo could think of no one other than Komatsu who might call at a time like this, but the ring didn’t sound like Komatsu’s, which was always more high-strung and impatient. It might be Yasuda again; perhaps he had forgotten to tell Tengo something else. Tengo did not want to answer. Experience had taught him that phone calls at this time of night were never very pleasant. Thinking of his current situation, however, he had no choice but to answer it.
“That is Mr. Kawana, isn’t it?” said a man. It was not Komatsu. Nor was it Yasuda. The voice belonged unmistakably to Ushikawa, speaking as if he had a mouthful of water—or some other elusive liquid. His strange face and flat, misshapen head came to Tengo’s mind automatically.
“Uh, sorry for calling so late. It’s Ushikawa. I know I burst in on you the other day and took much of your valuable time. Today, too, I wish I could have called earlier, but some urgent business came up, and the next thing I knew it was already this late. Believe me, I know you’re a real early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, Mr. Kawana, and that’s a very admirable thing. Staying up until all hours, frittering away your time, doesn’t do anyone any good. The best thing is to go to bed as soon as possible after it gets dark and wake with the sun in the morning. But, I don’t know, call it intuition, it just popped into my mind that you might still be up tonight, Mr. Kawana, so even though I knew it was not the most polite thing to do, I decided to give you a call. Have I caught you at a bad time?”
Tengo did not like what Ushikawa was saying, and he did not like it that Ushikawa knew his home phone number. Intuition had nothing to do with it: he had called because he knew perfectly well that Tengo was up, unable to sleep. Maybe he knew that Tengo’s lights were on. Could someone be watching this apartment? He could almost picture one of Ushikawa’s “eager” and “capable” “researchers” observing Tengo’s apartment from somewhere with a pair of high-powered binoculars.
“I am up tonight, in fact,” Tengo said. “That ‘intuition’ of yours is correct. Maybe I drank too much strong green tea.”
“That is too bad, Mr. Kawana. Wakeful nights often give people useless thoughts. How about it, then, do you mind talking with me a while?”
“As long as it’s not about something that makes it harder for me to sleep.”
Ushikawa burst out laughing. At his end of the line—someplace in this world—his misshapen head shook in its own misshapen way. “Very funny, Mr. Kawana. Of course, what I have to say may not be as comforting as a lullaby, but the subject itself is not so deadly serious as to keep you awake at night, I assure you. It’s a simple question of yes or no. The business about the, uh, grant. It’s an attractive proposition, don’t you think? Have you thought it over? We have to have your final answer now.”
“I believe I declined the grant quite clearly the last time we talked. I appreciate the offer, but I have everything I need at the moment. I’m not hard-pressed financially, and if possible I’d like to keep my life going along at its present pace.”
“Meaning, you don’t want to be beholden to anyone.”
“In a word, yes.”
“I suppose that is very admirable of you, Mr. Kawana,” Ushikawa said with a sound like a light clearing of the throat. “You want to make it on your own. You want to have as little as possible to do with organizations. I understand how you feel, but I’m concerned about you, Mr. Kawana. Look at the world we live in. Anything could happen at any time. So we all need some kind of insurance, something to lean on, a shelter from the wind. I hate to say this, Mr. Kawana, but at the moment you have, uh, exactly nothing that you can lean on. Not one of the people around you can be counted on, it seems to me: all of them would most likely desert you in a pinch. Am I right? You know what they say—‘Better safe than sorry.’ It’s important to insure yourself for when the pinch does come, don’t you think? And I’m not just talking about money. Money, ultimately, is just a kind of symbol of something else.”
“I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at,” Tengo said. That intuitive sense of distaste he experienced when first meeting Ushikawa was creeping up on him again.
“No, of course not. You’re still young and healthy. Maybe that’s why you don’t understand what I am saying. Let me give you an example. Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful—as painful as actually being cut with a knife. You will be turning thirty soon, Mr. Kawana, which means that, from now on, you will gradually enter that twilight portion of life—you will be getting older. You are probably beginning to grasp that painful sense that you are losing something, are you not?”
Tengo wondered if this man could be dropping hints about Kyoko Yasuda. Perhaps he knew that they had been meeting
here once a week, and that recently something had caused her to leave him.
“You seem to know a great deal about my private life,” Tengo said.
“No, not at all,” Ushikawa insisted. “I’m just talking about life in general. Really. I know very little about your private life.”
Tengo remained silent.
“Please, Mr. Kawana,” Ushikawa said with a sigh, “be so good as to accept our grant. Frankly speaking, you are in a rather precarious position. We can back you up in a pinch. We can throw you a life preserver. If things go on like this, you might find yourself in an inextricable situation.”
“An inextricable situation,” Tengo said.
“Exactly.”
“Can you tell me specifically what kind of ‘situation’ you mean?”
Ushikawa paused momentarily. Then he said, “Believe me, Mr. Kawana, there are things it is better not to know. Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep. Green tea is no match for these things. They might take restful sleep away from you forever. What I, uh, want to say to you is this. Think about it this way: it’s as if you opened a special spigot and let a special something out before you knew what was happening, and it’s having an effect on the people around you—a rather less-than-desirable effect.”
“Do the Little People have anything to do with this?”
It was a shot in the dark, but it shut Ushikawa up for a while. His was a heavy silence, like a black stone sunk to the bottom of a deep body of water.
“I want to know the truth, Mr. Ushikawa. Let’s stop throwing riddles at each other and talk more concretely. What has happened to her?”
“ ‘Her’? I don’t know what you mean.”
Tengo sighed. This was too delicate a matter to discuss on the phone.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kawana, but I’m just a messenger sent by my client. For now, my job is to speak of fundamental matters as indirectly as possible,” Ushikawa said circumspectly. “I’m sorry if I seem to be deliberately tantalizing you, but I’m only allowed to talk about this in the vaguest terms. And, to tell you the truth, my own knowledge of the matter is quite limited. In any case, though, I really don’t know anything about ‘her,’ whoever she might be. You’ll have to be a little more specific.”
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