by Kōji Suzuki
“You’re looking at it from a human standpoint. I’m not. The way I see it, one person dies, one Sadako is born. Add one here, take one there, the total’s still the same. Where’s the problem?”
“That’s totally beyond my comprehension.”
Ryuji brought his sweaty face right up close to Ando’s. “Now’s no time for you to be bitching. You’re on our side now.”
“To do what?”
“You’ll get to intervene in evolution, for one thing. A pretty rare opportunity, if you ask me.”
“Evolution? Is that what you call this?”
All the diversity of human DNA would converge with the single DNA pattern that was Sadako. Was that evolution? It seemed rather a point of weakness to Ando. It’s precisely because of genetic diversity that some plague victims die while others survive. Even if another ice age comes, thought Ando, the Inuit would be able to live through it, and this would be thanks to diversity, in this case of populations within the human species. If this diversity vanished, then the slightest mischance could lead to the downfall of the whole species. If, say, the original Sadako Yamamura had some defect in her immune system, the defect would be present in every subsequent Sadako. A simple cold could come as a mighty blow to a species.
Ando could only hope that happened. The only path left for the human race was to scrape by and wait for the Sadako species to die out.
“Do you know why living things evolve?”
Ando shook his head. He doubted there was anyone who could answer that question with perfect confidence.
But Ryuji’s voice had that confidence as he continued. “Take the eye. I know I don’t have to explain this to an anatomist like yourself, Dr Ando, but the human eye is an amazingly complex mechanism. It’s next to impossible to imagine that a piece of skin evolved into a cornea, a pupil, an eyeball, an optical nerve connecting it to the brain, all in such a way as to make it actually see. It’s hard to believe it all happened by chance. It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape. It wasn’t chance that led sea creatures to first crawl onto the land, or reptiles to learn how to fly. They had the will to do so. Now, try and say this and most experts will just laugh. They’ll call it mystical teleology, an execrable excuse for philosophy.
“Can you imagine what the world is like for a creature that can’t see? To the worms crawling around in the earth, the world is only what touches their bodies there in the darkness. For starfish or sea anemones waving around on the ocean floor, the whole world is the texture of the rock they’re stuck to and the feel of the water as it flows by. Do you think such a creature can even conceptualize seeing? It beggars the imagination. It’s one of those things you can’t contemplate, like the edge of the universe. But somehow, at a certain point in its evolution, life on earth acquired the concept of ‘seeing’. We crawled up onto the land, we flew into the skies, and in the end we grasped culture. A chimp can comprehend a banana. But it’ll never be able to comprehend the concept of culture. It can’t comprehend it, but somehow it gets the will to obtain it. Where that impulse comes from, I have no idea.”
“Oh, so there’s something even you don’t know?” Ando said with all the sarcasm he could muster.
“Pay attention. If the human race goes extinct and Sadako Yamamura’s DNA takes its place, in the end it’s because the human race willed it.”
“Does any species desire its own extinction?”
“Subconsciously, isn’t that what humanity desired? If all DNA were united into one pattern, there would be no more individual difference. Everyone would be the same, with no distinctions in ability, or beauty. There’d be no more attachment to loved ones. And forget about war, there wouldn’t even be any more arguments. We’re talking a world of absolute peace and equality that transcends even life and death. Death would no longer be something to fear, you see. Now, be honest, isn’t that what you humans wanted all along?”
By the end of his speech, Ryuji had brought his mouth even closer and was whispering into Ando’s ear. Ando, meanwhile, simply kept staring at Takanori, who for some time now had been crouched in the same position, packing sand into his empty can.
“Not me,” he replied. His son was special to him, unique. Ando had no desire to see things exactly as other people did. He could say that with confidence.
“Well, whatever,” Ryuji laughed, getting to his feet.
“Are you leaving?”
“It’s about time I took off. What are you going to do now?”
“What can I do? I’ll find a deserted island someplace out of the media’s reach, and raise my son there.”
“That sounds like you. Me, I’m going to watch the end of the human race. Once it’s gone as far as it can go, who knows, maybe a will beyond human wisdom will come raining its wrath down on us. I’d hate to miss that.”
Ryuji started walking away along the embankment.
“Bye, Ryuji. Say hi to Miyashita for me.”
Ryuji stopped again at the sound of Ando’s voice.
“Maybe I ought to teach you one more thing before I go. Why do you think human culture progressed? People can endure almost anything, but there’s one thing they just can’t survive. Man is an animal that can’t stand boredom. And that’s what set the whole thing off. In order to escape boredom, humanity had to progress. I imagine it’ll be pretty boring to be controlled by a single strand of DNA. Think about it in those terms, and it seems like you’d want to have as much individual variation as possible. But hey, what can we do? People just don’t want that variation. Oh, and one last thing—I think you’re going to be pretty bored on that desert island.”
With that and a wave of his hand, Ryuji walked off.
Ando had no definite plans as to where they were going to live. The future was still too uncertain for that. Prospects were such that maybe no plan, no matter how ingenious, would work. He’d just have to drift for a while and let happen what may.
Ando took off his shirt and slacks. He was wearing swim trunks underneath. He ran to his son, took the boy’s hand, and helped him to his feet.
“Let’s go.”
He’d explained to his son a hundred times what they needed to do today and why they needed to do it. They were going to swim out into the ocean just as they had two years ago, and then, when the boy was on the verge of drowning, Ando would take firm hold of his hand. Two years ago their hands had missed. Today they were going to hold on tight.
In the letter she’d left him, Sadako had written that when she was reborn in the exhaust shaft on the roof of that building, she realized it was the exact same situation, physically, as the bottom of the well where she’d died. And only when she had crawled out of the hole on her own did she sense, intuitively, that she’d be able to adapt to the new world. Ando thought his son needed to undergo the same sort of trial. The boy needed to be put in the same situation he’d been in two years ago.
Takanori had an abnormal fear of water, so strong that it was going to make daily life difficult for him if he couldn’t conquer it. As they walked along over the wet sand, Ando could feel Takanori’s hand tighten on his in fear every time seawater lapped at the boy’s ankles.
Now the boy turned to him with trembling lips and said, “Daddy, you promised, right?”
“Yes, I did.”
Ando had already prepared the reward he’d promised the boy for meeting his father’s expectations and overcoming his fear of the water. He was going to let him meet his mother.
“Mommy’s going to be so surprised.”
His wife didn’t know yet that their son had been brought back to life. Ando got excited just thinking about the moment when mother and son would be reunited. He’d have to think of a plausible story. Maybe he could say that the boy hadn’t drowned after all but had been rescued by a fishing boat; that he’d had amnesia, that h
e’d lived with other folks for the last two years. It didn’t matter how ridiculous the story was. The minute she touched Takanori, alive in the flesh, it would become the truth.
Whether or not they’d be able to make it as a married couple again was another question. Ando wanted to try. He gave himself a fifty-fifty chance.
A particularly big wave came along and started to raise the boy’s body off the sand. The boy gave a little shriek and clung tightly to Ando’s waist. Ando held his son tightly to his side and waded out into the sea. He could feel his son’s heartbeat. That rhythm was the only sure thing in a world facing destruction. It proved they were alive.
LOOP
KOJI SUZUKI
Translation
Glynne Walley
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Part One: At the End of the Night
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: The Cancer Ward
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three: Journey to the End of the Earth
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Four: The Space Underground
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Five: Advent
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
PART ONE
At the End of the Night
1
He opened the sliding glass door, and the smell of the sea poured into the room. There was hardly any wind—the humid night air rose straight up from the black water of the bay to envelop his body, fresh from the bath. The resulting immediacy of the ocean was a not-unpleasant feeling for Kaoru.
He made a habit of going out onto the balcony after dinner to observe the movements of the stars and the waxing and waning of the moon. The moon’s expression was constantly, subtly changing for him, and watching it gave him a mystical sort of feeling. Often it would give him ideas.
Gazing up into the night sky was part of his daily routine. He’d slide open the door, feel around in the darkness below until he found his sandals, and step into them. Kaoru liked it up here on the twenty-ninth floor of the apartment tower, on this balcony thrust into the darkness. It was where he felt most at home.
September was mostly gone, but not the heat of summer. The tropical evenings had arrived in June, and while the calendar now said it was autumn, they showed no sign of faltering yet.
He didn’t know when the summers had started getting longer. All he knew was that coming out onto the balcony like this every evening never cooled him off. It just brought him face to face with the heat.
But then the stars rushed right down to him, so close that he felt like he could touch them if he only stretched out his hand, and he forgot the heat.
The residential part of Odaiba, facing Tokyo Bay, boasted an overgrowth of condominium towers, but not many residents. The banks of windows only gave off a limited amount of light, little enough in fact to allow a clear view of the stars.
An occasional fresh breeze took the sea out of the air some, and his hair, just washed and still clinging to the back of his neck, began to dry.
“Kaoru, close the door! You’ll catch cold!” His mother’s voice, from behind the kitchen counter. The movement of the air must have told her that the door was open. She couldn’t see the balcony from where she was, though, so Kaoru doubted she realized that he was outside, fully exposed to the night air.
How could anybody catch cold in this heat, he wondered, exasperated at his mother’s over-protectiveness. Not that it was anything new. He had no doubt that if she knew he was out on the balcony, she’d literally drag him back inside. He shut the door behind him so he couldn’t hear her anymore.
Now he was the sole possessor of this sliver of space jutting into the sky a hundred yards above the ground. He turned around and looked through the glass door into the apartment. He couldn’t see his mother directly. But he could read her presence in the milky band of fluorescent light that shone from the kitchen onto the sofa in the living room. As she stood in front of the sink, cleaning up after the meal, her movements caused slight disturbances in the rays of light.
Kaoru returned his gaze to the darkness and thought the same thoughts he always did. He dreamed of being able to elucidate, somehow, the workings of the world that surrounded and contained him. It wasn’t that he hoped to solve a mystery or two on the cutting edge of a particular field. What he desired was to discover a unifying theory, something to explain all phenomena in the natural world. His father, an information-engineering researcher, had basically the same dream. When they were together, father and son discussed nothing but the natural sciences.
But it wasn’t quite right to call them discussions. Basically, Kaoru, who had just turned ten, shot questions at his father, and his father answered them. Kaoru’s father, Hideyuki, had started out as part of a team working on an artificial life project. Then he’d elected to move his research into a university setting, becoming a professor. Hideyuki never blew off Kaoru’s questions. In fact, he maintained that his son’s bold thinking, unrestrained as it was by common sense, sometimes even gave him hints he could use in his research. Their conversations were always deadly serious.
Whenever Hideyuki managed to get a Sunday afternoon off, he and Kaoru would spend it in heated discussions, the progress of which Machiko, Hideyuki’s wife and Kaoru’s mother, would watch with a satisfied look on her face. Her husband had a tendency to get so involved in what he was saying that he would forget his surroundings; her son, on the other hand, never neglected to be mindful that his mother was probably feeling left out because she was unable to join in the debates. He’d explain the issues they were discussing, breaking them down into bitesize chunks, in an effort to allow her to participate. It was a kind of consideration Hideyuki would never be able to imitate.
She always wore the same look of satisfaction as she watched her son, full of gratitude for his effortless kindness and pride that at age ten he could already discuss the natural sciences at a level so far beyond her own understanding.
Headlights flowed along on Rainbow Bridge far below. Kaoru wondered expectantly if his father’s motorbike was in that belt of light. As always, he couldn’t wait for his father to get home.
It was ten years ago that Hideyuki had gone from mere team member on the artificial life project to university professor; ten years ago that he’d moved from the Tokyo suburbs to this condo in Odaiba. The living environment here—the tall apartment buildings on the water’s edge—suited his family’s tastes. Kaoru never got tired of looking down from on high, and then when night came, he’d pull the stars down close, using them to bolster his imagination concerning the world whose ways he couldn’t yet fully grasp.
A living space high above the ground: the kind of thing to foster a bird’s eye. Kaoru fell to wondering. If birds represented an evolutionary advance from reptiles, it meant that living spaces had gradually progressed skyward. What effect did that have on human evolution? Kaoru realized that it had been a month since he’d set foot on soil.
As he placed his hands o
n the balcony railing, about his own height, and stretched, he felt it. And not for the first time, either. He’d felt it from time to time for as long as he could remember. Only never, oddly enough, had the feeling come over him when he was with his family.
He was used to it by now. So he didn’t turn around, even though he could feel someone watching him from behind. He knew what would be there if he did: the same living room, the dining room beyond it, the kitchen next to it, all unchanged. And in the kitchen, his mother Machiko washing dishes just like always.
Kaoru shook his head to chase away the feeling that he was being watched. And the sensation seemed to take a step back, blending into the darkness and disappearing into the sky.
Once he was sure it was gone, Kaoru turned around and pressed his back against the railing. Everything was just as it had been. His mother’s shadow, flickering in the band of light from the kitchen doorway. Where had they gone, those countless eyes watching him from behind? Kaoru had felt them, unmistakably. Innumerable gazes, fastened on him.
He should have felt those inky stares on his back when he was like this, staring into the apartment, his back to the night. But now those eyes had disappeared, assimilated into the darkness.
Just what was it that was watching him? Kaoru had never thrown this question out at his father. He doubted even his father would be able to give him an answer.
Now he felt a chill, in spite of the heat. He no longer felt like being on the balcony.
Kaoru went back into the living room and peeked into the kitchen at his mother. She’d finished washing the dishes and was now wiping the edge of the sink with a dishcloth. Her back was to him, and she was humming. He stared at her thin, elegant shoulders, willing her to notice his gaze. But she just kept humming, unmoved.
Kaoru came up behind her and spoke.
“Hey, Mom, when’s Dad getting home?”
He hadn’t intended to startle her, but there was no denying that his approach had been a little too silent, and his voice when he spoke a little too loud. Machiko jumped, her arms jerked, and she knocked over a dish that she’d placed at the edge of the sink.
