His father nodded several times with apparent satisfaction.
“Radio waves don’t come falling out of the sky for free like rain or snow,” his father said.
With his lips closed Tengo stared at his father’s hands. They were lined up neatly on his knees, right hand on right knee, left hand on left knee, stock still. Small, dark hands, they looked tanned to the core by long years of outdoor work.
“My mother didn’t really die of an illness when I was little, did she?” Tengo asked slowly, speaking phrase by phrase.
His father did not answer. His expression did not change, and his hands did not move. His eyes focused on Tengo as if they were observing something unfamiliar.
“My mother left you. She got rid of you and left me behind. She probably went off with another man. Am I wrong?”
His father nodded. “It is not good to steal radio waves. You can’t get away with it, doing anything you like.”
This man understands my questions perfectly well. He just doesn’t want to answer them directly, Tengo felt.
“Father,” Tengo addressed him. “You may not actually be my father, but I’ll call you that for now because I don’t know what else to call you. To tell you the truth, I’ve never liked you. Maybe I’ve even hated you most of the time. You know that, don’t you? But even supposing you are not my real father and there is no blood connection between us, I no longer have any reason to hate you. I don’t know if I can go so far as to be fond of you, but I think that at least I should be able to understand you better than I do now. I have always wanted to know the truth about who I am and where I came from. That’s all. But no one ever told me. If you will tell me the truth right now, I won’t hate you or dislike you anymore. In fact, I would welcome the opportunity not to have to hate you or dislike you any longer.”
His father went on staring at Tengo with expressionless eyes, saying nothing, but Tengo felt he might be seeing the tiniest gleam of light flashing somewhere deep within those empty swallows’ nests.
“I am nothing,” Tengo said. “You are right. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything. The closest thing I have to a family is you, but you hold on to the secret and won’t even try to tell me anything. Meanwhile, in this seaside town, your memory goes through repeated ups and downs as it steadily deteriorates day by day. Like your memory, the truth about me is being lost. Without the aid of truth, I am nothing, and I can never be anything. You are right about that, too.”
“Knowledge is a precious social asset,” his father said in a monotone, though his voice was somewhat quieter than before, as if someone behind him had reached over and turned down the volume. “It is an asset that must be amassed in abundant stockpiles and utilized with the utmost care. It must be handed down to the next generation in fruitful forms. For that reason, too, NHK needs to have all of your subscription fees and—”
This is a kind of mantra for him, thought Tengo. He has protected himself all these years by reciting such phrases. Tengo felt he had to smash this obstinate amulet of his, to pull the living human being out from behind the surrounding barrier.
He cut his father short. “What kind of person was my mother? Where did she go? What happened to her?”
His father brought his incantation to a sudden halt.
Tengo went on, “I’m tired of living in hatred and resentment. I’m tired of living unable to love anyone. I don’t have a single friend—not one. And, worst of all, I can’t even love myself. Why is that? Why can’t I love myself? It’s because I can’t love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself. No, I’m not blaming you for this. Come to think of it, you may be such a victim. You probably don’t know how to love yourself. Am I wrong about that?”
His father was closed off in silence, lips shut tight. It was impossible to tell from his expression whether he had understood Tengo or not. Tengo also fell silent and settled more deeply into his chair. A breeze blew in through the open window, stirred the sun-bleached curtains and the delicate petals of the potted plant, and slipped through the open door into the corridor. The smell of the sea was stronger than before. The soft sound of pine needles brushing against each other blended with the cries of the cicadas.
His voice softer now, Tengo went on, “A vision often comes to me—the same one, over and over, ever since I can remember. I suspect it’s probably not so much a vision as a memory of something that actually happened. I’m one and a half years old, and my mother is next to me. She and a young man are holding each other. The man is not you. Who he is, I have no idea, but he is definitely not you. I don’t know why, but the scene is permanently burned into me.”
His father said nothing, but his eyes were clearly seeing something else—something not there. The two maintained their silence. Tengo was listening to the suddenly stronger breeze. He did not know what his father was listening to.
“I wonder if I might ask you to read me something,” his father said in formal tones after a long silence. “My sight has deteriorated to the point where I can’t read books anymore. I can’t follow the words on the page for long. That bookcase has some books. Choose any one you like.”
Tengo gave up and left his chair to scan the spines of the volumes in the bookcase. Most of them were historical novels set in ancient times when samurai roamed the land. All the volumes of Sword of Doom were there. Tengo couldn’t bring himself to read his father some musty old book full of archaic language.
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather read a story about a town of cats,” Tengo said. “I brought it to read myself.”
“A story about a town of cats,” his father said, savoring the words. “Please read that to me, if it is not too much trouble.”
Tengo looked at his watch. “It’s no trouble at all. I have plenty of time before my train leaves. It’s an odd story; I don’t know if you’ll like it or not.”
Tengo pulled out his paperback and started reading “Town of Cats.” His father listened to him read the entire story, not changing his position in the chair by the window. Tengo read slowly in a clearly audible voice, taking two or three breaks along the way to catch his breath. He glanced at his father whenever he stopped reading but saw no discernible reaction on his face. Was he enjoying the story or not? He could not tell. When he was through reading the story, his father was sitting perfectly still with his eyes closed. He looked as if he could be sound asleep, but he was not. He was simply deep inside the story, and it took him a while to come back out. Tengo waited patiently for that to happen. The afternoon light had begun to weaken and blend with touches of evening. The ocean breeze continued to shake the pines.
“Does that town of cats have television?” his father asked.
“The story was written in Germany in the 1930s. They didn’t have television yet back then. They did have radio, though.”
“I was in Manchuria, but I didn’t even have a radio. There weren’t any stations. The newspaper often didn’t arrive, and when it did it was two weeks old. There was hardly anything to eat, and we had no women. Sometimes there were wolves roaming around. It was like the edge of the earth out there.”
He fell silent for a while, thinking, probably recalling the hard life he led as a young pioneer in distant Manchuria. But those memories soon clouded over, swallowed up into nothingness. Tengo could read these movements of his father’s mind from the changing expressions on his face.
“Did the cats build the town? Or did people build it a long time ago and the cats came to live there?” his father asked, speaking toward the windowpane as if to himself, though the question seemed to have been directed to Tengo.
“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “But it does seem to have been built by human beings long before.
Maybe the people left for some reason—say, they all died in an epidemic—and the cats came to live there.”
His father nodded. “When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it. Because that’s what everybody does.”
“That’s what everybody does?”
“Exactly.”
“What kind of vacuum are you filling?”
His father scowled. His long eyebrows came down to hide his eyes. Then he said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “Don’t you know?”
“I don’t know,” Tengo said.
His father’s nostrils flared. One eyebrow rose slightly. This was the expression he always used when he was dissatisfied with something. “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”
Tengo narrowed his eyes, trying to read the man’s expression. Never once had his father employed such odd, suggestive language. He always spoke in concrete, practical terms. To say only what was necessary when necessary: that was his unshakable definition of a conversation. But there was no expression on his face to be read.
“I see. So you are filling in some kind of vacuum,” Tengo said. “All right, then, who is going to fill the vacuum that you have left behind?”
“You,” his father declared, raising an index finger and thrusting it straight at Tengo. “Isn’t it obvious? I have been filling in the vacuum that somebody else made, so you will fill in the vacuum that I have made. Like taking turns.”
“The way the cats filled in the town after the people were gone.”
“Right. Lost like the town,” his father said. Then he stared vacantly at his own outstretched index finger as if looking at some mysterious, misplaced object.
“Lost like the town,” Tengo repeated his father’s words.
“The woman who gave birth to you is not anywhere anymore.”
“ ‘Not anywhere.’ ‘Lost like the town.’ Are you saying she’s dead?”
His father made no reply to that.
Tengo sighed. “So, then, who is my father?”
“Just a vacuum. Your mother joined her body with a vacuum and gave birth to you. I filled in that vacuum.”
Having said that much, his father closed his eyes and closed his mouth.
“Joined her body with a vacuum?”
“Yes.”
“And you raised me. Is that what you’re saying?”
After one ceremonious clearing of his throat, his father said, as if trying to explain a simple truth to a slow-witted child, “That is why I said, ‘If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.’ ”
“So you’re telling me that I came out of a vacuum?” Tengo asked.
No answer.
Tengo folded his hands in his lap and looked straight into his father’s face once more. This man is no empty shell, no vacant house. He is a flesh-and-blood human being with a narrow, stubborn soul and shadowed memories, surviving in fits and starts on this patch of land by the sea. He has no choice but to coexist with the vacuum that is slowly spreading inside him. The vacuum and his memories are still at odds, but eventually, regardless of his wishes, the vacuum will completely swallow up whatever memories are left. It is just a matter of time. Could the vacuum that he is confronting now be the same vacuum from which I was born?
Tengo thought he might be hearing the distant rumble of the sea mixed with the early-evening breeze slipping through the pine branches. Though it could have been an illusion.
CHAPTER 9
Aomame
WHAT COMES AS A PAYMENT
FOR HEAVENLY GRACE
When Aomame walked into the adjoining room, Buzzcut followed and swiftly closed the door. The room was totally dark. Thick curtains covered the window, and all lights had been extinguished. A few rays of light seeped in through a gap between the curtains, serving only to emphasize the darkness of everything else.
It took time for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, as in a movie theater or planetarium. The first thing she saw was the display of an electric clock on a low table. Its green figures read 7:20 p.m. When a few more seconds passed, she could tell that there was a large bed against the back wall. The clock was near the head of the bed. This room was somewhat smaller than the spacious adjoining room, but it was still larger than an ordinary hotel room.
On the bed was a deep black object, like a small mountain. Still more time had to go by before Aomame could tell that its irregular outline indicated the presence of a human body. During this interval, the outline remained perfectly unbroken. She could detect no signs of life. There was no breathing to be heard. The only sound was the soft rush of air from the air conditioner near the ceiling. Still, the body was not dead. Buzzcut’s actions were based on the premise that this was a living human being.
This was a very large person, most likely a man. She could not be sure, but the person did not seem to be facing in this direction and did not seem to be under the covers but rather was lying facedown on the made-up bed, like a large animal at the back of a cave, trying not to expend its physical energy while it allows its wounds to heal.
“It is time,” Buzzcut announced in the direction of the shadow. There was a new tension in his voice.
Whether or not the man heard Buzzcut’s voice was unclear. The dark mound on the bed remained perfectly still. Buzzcut stood stiffly by the door, waiting. The room was enveloped in a silence so deep Aomame could hear someone swallow, and then she realized that the sound of swallowing had come from her. Gripping her gym bag in her right hand, Aomame, like Buzzcut, was waiting for something to happen. The clock display changed to 7:21, then 7:22, then 7:23.
Eventually the outline on the bed began to show a slight degree of motion—a faint shudder that soon became a clear movement. The person must have been in a deep sleep or a state resembling sleep. The muscles awoke, the upper body began to rise, and, in time, the consciousness was regained. The shadow sat straight up on the bed, legs folded. It’s definitely a man, thought Aomame.
“It is time,” Buzzcut said again.
Aomame heard the man release a long breath. It was like a heavy sigh slowly rising from the bottom of a deep well. Next came the sound of a large inhalation. It was as wild and unsettling as a gale tearing through a forest. Then the cycle started again, the two utterly different types of sound repeated, separated by a long silence. This made Aomame feel uneasy. She sensed that she had found her way into a region that was completely foreign to her—a deep ocean trench, say, or the surface of an unknown asteroid: the kind of place it might be possible to reach with great effort, but from which return was impossible.
Her eyes refused to adapt fully to the darkness. She could now see to a certain point but no farther. All that her eyes could reach was the man’s dark silhouette. She could not tell which way he was facing or what he was looking at. All she could see was that he was an extremely large man and that his shoulders seemed to rise and fall quietly—but enormously—with each breath. This was not normal breathing. Rather, it was breathing that had a special purpose and function and that was performed with the entire body. She pictured the large movements of his shoulder blades and diaphragm expanding and contracting. No ordinary human being could breathe with such fierce intensity. It was a distinctive method of breathing that could only be mastered through long, intense training.
Buzzcut stood next to her at full attention, back straight, chin in. His breathing was shallow and quick, in contrast to that of the man on the bed. He was trying to minimize his presence as he waited for the intense deep breathing sequence to end: apparently it was an activity the man practiced routinely. Like Buzzcut, Aomame could do nothing but wait for it to end. It was probably a process the man needed to go through to become fully awake.
Finally, the special breathing ended in stages, the way a large machine stops running. The intervals between breaths grew gradually longer, concluding with one long breath that seemed to squeeze everything out.
A deep silence fell over the room once again.
“It is time,” Buzzcut said a third time.
The man’s head moved slowly. He now seemed to be facing Buzzcut.
“You may leave the room,” the man said. His voice was a deep, clear baritone—decisive and unambiguous. His body had apparently attained complete wakefulness.
Buzzcut gave one shallow bow in the darkness and left the room the way he had entered it, with no unnecessary movements. The door closed, leaving Aomame alone in the room with the man.
“I’m sorry it’s so dark,” the man said, most likely to Aomame.
“I don’t mind,” Aomame said.
“We had to make it dark,” the man said softly. “But don’t worry. You will not be hurt.”
Aomame nodded. Then, recalling that she was in darkness, she said aloud, “I see.” Her voice was somewhat harder and higher than normal.
For a time, the man stared at Aomame in the darkness. She felt herself being stared at intensely. His gaze was precise and attentive to detail. He was not so much “looking” at her as “viewing” her. He seemed able to survey every inch of her body. She felt as if he had, in an instant, stripped off every piece of clothing and left her stark naked. But his gaze didn’t stop with the skin; it pierced through to her muscles and organs and uterus. He can see in the dark, she thought. He is viewing far more than the eyes can see.
“Things can be seen better in the darkness,” he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. “But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is. You have to call a stop to it at some point.”
Having said this, he spent another interval observing Aomame. There was nothing sexual in his gaze. He was just viewing her as an object, the way a boat passenger stares at the shape of a passing island. But this was no ordinary passenger. He was trying to see through to everything about the island. With prolonged exposure to such a relentless, piercing gaze, Aomame strongly felt the imperfections of her own fleshly self. This was not how she felt normally. Aside from the size of her breasts, she was, if anything, proud of her body. She trained it daily and kept it beautiful. Her muscles were smooth and taut without the slightest excess flesh. Stared at by this man, however, she could not help but feel that her flesh was a worn-out old bag of meat.
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