The nurse asked, “Have you by any chance notified us of your intention to visit today?” There was a hard edge to her voice. A small woman, she wore metal-framed glasses, and her short hair had a touch of gray.
“No, it just occurred to me to come this morning and I hopped on a train,” Tengo answered honestly.
The nurse gave him a look of mild disgust. Then she said, “Visitors are supposed to notify us before they arrive to see a patient. We have our schedules to meet, and the wishes of the patient must also be taken into account.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“When was your last visit?”
“Two years ago.”
“Two years ago,” she said as she checked the list of visitors with a ball-point pen in hand. “You mean to say that you have not made a single visit in two years?”
“That’s right,” Tengo said.
“According to our records, you are Mr. Kawana’s only relative.”
“That is correct.”
She glanced at Tengo, but she said nothing. Her eyes were not blaming him, just checking the facts. Apparently, Tengo’s case was not exceptional.
“At the moment, your father is in group rehabilitation. That will end in half an hour. You can see him then.”
“How is he doing?”
“Physically, he’s healthy. It’s in the other area that he has his ups and downs,” she said, tapping her temple with an index finger.
Tengo thanked her and went to wait in the lounge by the entrance, reading more of his book. A breeze passed through now and then, carrying the scent of the sea and the cooling sound of the pine windbreak outside. Cicadas clung to the branches of the trees, screeching their hearts out. Summer was at its height, but the cicadas seemed to know that it would not last long.
Eventually, the bespectacled nurse came to tell Tengo that he could see his father now. “I’ll show you to his room,” she said. Tengo got up from the sofa and, passing by a large mirror on the wall, realized for the first time what a sloppy outfit he was wearing: a Jeff Beck Japan Tour T-shirt under a faded dungaree shirt with mismatched buttons, chinos with specks of pizza sauce near one knee, a baseball cap—no way for a thirty-year-old son to dress on his first hospital visit to his father in two years. Nor did he have anything with him that might serve as a gift on such an occasion. No wonder the nurse had given him that look of disgust.
Tengo’s father was in his room, sitting in a chair by the open window, his hands on his knees. A nearby table held a potted plant with several delicate yellow flowers. The floor was made of some soft material to prevent injury in case of a fall. Tengo did not realize at first that the old man seated by the window was his father. He had shrunk—“shrivelled up” might be more accurate. His hair was shorter and as white as a frost-covered lawn. His cheeks were sunken, which may have been why the hollows of his eyes looked much bigger than they had before. Three deep creases marked his forehead. His eyebrows were extremely long and thick, and his pointed ears were larger than ever; they looked like bat wings. From a distance, he seemed less like a human being than like some kind of creature, a rat or a squirrel—a creature with some cunning. He was, however, Tengo’s father—or, rather, the wreckage of Tengo’s father. The father that Tengo remembered was a tough, hardworking man. Introspection and imagination might have been foreign to him, but he had his own moral code and a strong sense of purpose. The man Tengo saw before him was nothing but an empty shell.
“Mr. Kawana!” the nurse said to Tengo’s father in the crisp, clear tone she must have been trained to use when addressing patients. “Mr. Kawana! Look who’s here! It’s your son, here from Tokyo!”
Tengo’s father turned in his direction. His expressionless eyes made Tengo think of two empty swallow’s nests hanging from the eaves.
“Hello,” Tengo said.
His father said nothing. Instead, he looked straight at Tengo as if he were reading a bulletin written in a foreign language.
“Dinner starts at six-thirty,” the nurse said to Tengo. “Please feel free to stay until then.”
Tengo hesitated for a moment after the nurse left, and then approached his father, sitting down in the chair opposite his—a faded, cloth-covered chair, its wooden parts scarred from long use. His father’s eyes followed his movements.
“How are you?” Tengo asked.
“Fine, thank you,” his father said formally.
Tengo did not know what to say after that. Toying with the third button of his dungaree shirt, he turned his gaze toward the pine trees outside and then back again to his father.
“You have come from Tokyo, is it?” his father asked.
“Yes, from Tokyo.”
“You must have come by express train.”
“That’s right,” Tengo said. “As far as Ta-teyama. Then I transferred to a local for the trip here to Chikura.”
“You’ve come to swim?” his father asked.
“I’m Tengo. Tengo Kawana. Your son.”
The wrinkles in his father’s forehead deepened. “A lot of people tell lies because they don’t want to pay their NHK subscription fee.”
“Father!” Tengo called out to him. He had not spoken the word in a very long time. “I’m Tengo. Your son.”
“I don’t have a son,” his father declared.
“You don’t have a son,” Tengo repeated mechanically.
His father nodded.
“So what am I?” Tengo asked.
“You’re nothing,” his father said with two short shakes of the head.
Tengo caught his breath. He could find no words. Nor did his father have any more to say. Each sat in silence, searching through his own tangled thoughts. Only the cicadas sang without confusion, at top volume.
He may be speaking the truth, Tengo thought. His memory may have been destroyed, but his words are probably true.
“What do you mean?” Tengo asked.
“You are nothing,” his father repeated, his voice devoid of emotion. “You were nothing, you are nothing, and you will be nothing.”
Tengo wanted to get up from his chair, walk to the station, and go back to Tokyo then and there. But he could not stand up. He was like the young man who travelled to the town of cats. He had curiosity. He wanted a clearer answer. There was danger lurking, of course. But if he let this opportunity escape he would have no chance to learn the secret about himself. Tengo arranged and rearranged words in his head until at last he was ready to speak them. This was the question he had wanted to ask since childhood but could never quite manage to get out: “What you’re saying, then, is that you are not my biological father, correct? You are telling me that there is no blood connection between us, is that it?”
“Stealing radio waves is an unlawful act,” his father said, looking into Tengo’s eyes. “It is no different from stealing money or valuables, don’t you think?”
“You’re probably right.” Tengo decided to agree for now.
“Radio waves don’t come falling out of the sky for free like rain or snow,” his father said.
Tengo stared at his father’s hands. They were lined up neatly on his knees. Small, dark hands, they looked tanned to the bone by long years of outdoor work.
“My mother didn’t really die of an illness when I was little, did she?” Tengo asked slowly.
His father did not answer. His expression did not change, and his hands did not move. His eyes focussed on Tengo as if they were observing something unfamiliar.
It seems to us that the resident who was best able to look the building strike squarely in the face was the cat of Mme. Alice Bédat, the opera singer, who lives at 156 West Seventy-fifth Street, and who long ago resolved to live independently of lifts and liftmen. The cat’s name is Bo-Bo, and it has been trained to take its outings in the Bédat back yard when lowered in a basket on the end of a rope. This is the sort of trick Penrod hoped to perfect Duke in. Mme. Bédat has succeeded. Strikes may come and go; Bo-Bo is lowered regularly to the peacef
ul garden, strolls alone there for a brief hour, and returns obediently to the basket (which has meanwhile been hoisted aloft, baited with meat, and lowered again). The whole performance seems to us as improbable as inducing a smooth-haired fox terrier to pull a sled.
| 1936 |
“My mother left you. She left you and me behind. She 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, just doing whatever you want.”
This man understands my questions perfectly well. He just doesn’t want to answer them directly, Tengo thought.
“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 that 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. If you will tell me the truth here and now, I won’t hate you anymore. In fact, I would welcome the opportunity not to have to hate you any longer.”
Tengo’s father went on staring at him with expressionless eyes, but Tengo felt that he might be seeing the tiniest gleam of light somewhere deep within those empty swallow’s 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 have no connection to anything. The closest thing I have to a family is you, but you hold on to the secret. Meanwhile, your memory deteriorates day by day. Along with 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 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 your subscription fees and—”
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 halt, his lips shut tight.
His voice softer now, Tengo went on, “A vision often comes to me—the same one, over and over. I suspect it’s 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.”
“Miss Egan, bring me everything we have on cats.” (illustration credit 9.5)
His father said nothing, but his eyes were clearly seeing something else—something not there.
“I wonder if I might ask you to read me something,” Tengo’s father said in formal tones after a long pause. “My eyesight has deteriorated to the point where I can’t read books anymore. That bookcase has some books. Choose any one you like.”
Tengo got up 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. 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. “It’s in a book that I brought 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.”
“Hey, let’s do lunch.” (illustration credit 9.6)
Tengo pulled out his paperback and started reading slowly, in a clear, 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? He could not tell.
“Does that town of cats have television?” his father asked when Tengo had finished.
“The story was written in Germany in the 1930s. They didn’t have television yet back then. They did have radio, though.”
“Did the cats build the town? Or did people build it before the cats came to live there?” his father asked, speaking as if to himself.
“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “But it does seem to have been built by human beings. Maybe the people left for some reason—say, they all died in an epidemic of some sort—and the cats came to live there.”
His father nodded. “When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it. That’s what everybody does.”
“That’s what everybody does?”
“Exactly.”
“What kind of vacuum are you filling?”
His father scowled. 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. “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.
“I see. So you are filling 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 the vacuum that somebody else made, so you will fill the vacuum that I have made.”
“The way the cats filled the town after the people were gone.”
“Right,” his father said. Then he stared vacantly at his own outstretched index finger as if at some mysterious, misplaced object.
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 that vacuum.”
Having said that much, his father closed his eyes and closed his mouth.
“And you raised me after she left. Is that what you’re saying?”
After a 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.’ ”
Tengo folded his hands in his lap and looked straight into his father’s face. This man is no empty shell, he thought. He is a flesh-and-blood human being with a narrow, stubborn soul, 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. Eventually, that vacuum will swallow up whatever memories are left. It is only a matter of time.
Tengo said goodbye to his father just before 6 P.M. While he waited for the taxi to come, they sat across from each other by the window, saying nothing. Tengo had many more questions he wanted to ask, but he knew that he would get no answers. The sight of his father’s tightly clenched lips told him that. If you couldn’t understand something without an explanation, you couldn’t understand it with an explanation. As his father had said.
When the time for him to leave drew near, Tengo said, “You told me a lot today. It was indirect and often hard to grasp, but it was probably as honest and open as you could make it. I should be grateful for that.”
Still his father said nothing, his eyes fixed on the view like a soldier on guard duty, determined not to miss the signal flare sent up by a savage tribe on a distant hill. Tengo tried looking out along his
father’s line of vision, but all that was out there was the pine grove, tinted by the coming sunset.
“I’m sorry to say it, but there is virtually nothing I can do for you—other than to hope that the process forming a vacuum inside you is a painless one. I’m sure you have suffered a lot. You loved my mother as deeply as you knew how. I do get that sense. But she left, and that must have been hard on you—like living in an empty town. Still, you raised me in that empty town.”
A pack of crows cut across the sky, cawing. Tengo stood up, went over to his father, and put his hand on his shoulder. “Goodbye, Father. I’ll come again soon.”
With his hand on the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see a single tear escaping his father’s eye. It shone a dull silver color under the ceiling’s fluorescent light. The tear crept slowly down his cheek and fell onto his lap. Tengo opened the door and left the room. He took a cab to the station and reboarded the train that had brought him here.
(Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.)
| 2011 |
CAT’S ROBO-CRADLE
* * *
MARGARET ATWOOD
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, there is a warehouse filled with discontinued merchandise, which has been nicknamed the Museum of Failed Products. Inside, one can learn about the line of TV dinners launched by a well-known toothpaste company, with packaging that unwisely echoed the design of the toothpaste. Other candidates for the permanent collection include the Christ Child doll (parents, it seemed, could not quite picture Baby Jesus sharing a dolly tea party with a sock monkey) and the pet-of-the-month scheme that astonished child subscribers with a regular supply of dead rodents and reptiles, sent to them through the mail.
To keep myself humble, I here recall the fact that, back in my market-research days, in 1963, I was skeptical about Pop-Tarts—those breakfast confections made of two layers of flour product glued together like clamshells, with a blob of jam in the clam position. When our testers put them in the toaster, the things exploded, spewing boiling jam over the inside of the toaster. This defect was later rectified, with well-known results.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 18
