After the Quake

by Haruki Murakami

  Plus, there was bound to be a terrible outburst if he were to announce all of a sudden that he was leaving home. He was sure it had never once crossed his mother’s mind that they might someday live apart. He recalled all too vividly her profound heartbreak and distress when he announced at the age of thirteen that he was abandoning the faith. For two solid weeks or more she ate nothing, said nothing, never once took a bath or combed her hair or changed her underwear. She only just managed to attend to her period when it came. Yoshiya had never seen his mother in such a filthy, smelly state. Just imagining its happening again gave him chest pains.

  Yoshiya had no father. From the time he was born there had been only his mother, and she had told him again and again when he was a little boy, “Your father is our Lord” (which is how they referred to their god). “Our Lord must stay high up in Heaven; He can’t live down here with us. But He is always watching over you, Yoshiya, He always has your best interests at heart.”

  Mr. Tabata, who served as little Yoshiya’s special “guide,” would say the same kinds of things to him:

  “It’s true, you do not have a father in this world, and you’re going to meet all sorts of people who say stupid things to you about that. Unfortunately, the eyes of most people are clouded and unable to see the truth, Yoshiya, but Our Lord, your father, is the world itself. You are fortunate to live in the embrace of His love. You must be proud of that and live a life that is good and true.”

  “I know,” responded Yoshiya just after he had entered elementary school. “But God belongs to everybody, doesn’t He? Fathers are different, though. Everybody has a different one. Isn’t that right?”

  “Listen to me, Yoshiya. Someday our Lord, your father, will reveal Himself to you as yours and yours alone. You will meet Him when and where you least expect it. But if you begin to doubt or to abandon your faith, He may be so disappointed that He never shows Himself to you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “And you will keep in mind what I’ve said to you?”

  “I will keep it in mind, Mr. Tabata.”

  But in fact what Mr. Tabata told him did not make much sense to Yoshiya because he could not believe that he was a special “child of God.” He was ordinary, just like the other boys and girls he saw everywhere—or perhaps he was even a little bit less than ordinary. He had nothing that helped him to stand out, and he was always making a mess of things. It was like that all through elementary school. His grades were decent enough, but when it came to sports he was hopeless. He had slow and spindly legs, myopic eyes, and clumsy hands. In baseball, he missed most fly balls that came his way. His teammates would grumble, and the girls in the stands would titter.

  Yoshiya would pray to God, his father, each night before bedtime: “I promise to maintain unwavering faith in You if only You will let me catch outfield flies. That’s all I ask (for now).” If God really was his father, He should be able to do that much for him. But his prayer was never answered. The flies continued to drop from his glove.

  “This means you are testing our Lord, Yoshiya,” said Mr. Tabata sternly. “There is nothing wrong with praying for something, but you must pray for something grander than that. It is wrong to pray for something concrete, with time limits.”

  When Yoshiya turned seventeen, his mother revealed the secret of his birth (more or less). He was old enough to know the truth, she said.

  “I was living in a deep darkness in my teen years. My soul was in chaos as deep as a newly formed ocean of mud. The true light was hidden behind dark clouds. And so I had knowledge of several different men without love. You know what it means to have knowledge, don’t you?”

  Yoshiya said that he did indeed know what it meant. His mother used incredibly old-fashioned language when it came to sexual matters. By that point in his life, he himself had had knowledge of several different girls without love.

  His mother continued her story. “I first became pregnant in the second year of high school. At the time, I had no idea how very much it meant to become pregnant. A friend of mine introduced me to a doctor who gave me an abortion. He was a very kind man, and very young, and after the operation he lectured me on contraception. Abortion was good neither for the body nor the spirit, he said, and I should also be careful about venereal disease, so I should always be sure to use a condom, and he gave me a new box of them.

  “I told him that I had used condoms, so he said, ‘Well, then someone didn’t put them on right. It’s amazing how few people know the right way to use them.’ But I’m not stupid. I was being very careful about contraception. The minute we took our clothes off, I would be sure to put it on the man myself. You can’t trust men with something like that. You know about condoms, right?”

  Yoshiya said that he did know about condoms.

  “So, two months later I got pregnant again. I could hardly believe it: I was being more careful than ever. There was nothing I could do but go back to the same doctor. He took one look at me and said, ‘I told you to be careful. What have you got in that head of yours?’ I couldn’t stop crying. I explained to him how much care I had taken with contraception whenever I had knowledge, but he wouldn’t believe me. ‘This would never have happened if you’d put them on right,’ he said. He was mad.

  “Well, to make a long story short, about six months later, because of a weird sequence of events, I ended up having knowledge of the doctor himself. He was thirty at the time, and still a bachelor. He was kind of boring to talk to, but he was a decent, honest man. His right earlobe was missing. A dog chewed it off when he was a boy. He was just walking along the street one day when a big black dog he had never seen before jumped on him and bit off his earlobe. He used to say he was glad it was just an earlobe. You could live without an earlobe. But a nose would be different. I had to agree with him.

  “Being with him helped me get my old self back. When I was having knowledge of him, I managed not to think disturbing thoughts. I even got to like his little ear. He was so dedicated to his work he would lecture me on the use of the condom while we were in bed—like, when and how to put it on and when and how to take it off. You’d think this would make for foolproof contraception, but I ended up pregnant again.”

  Yoshiya’s mother went to see her doctor lover and told him she seemed to be pregnant. He examined her and confirmed that it was so. But he would not admit to being the father. “I am a professional,” he said. “My contraceptive techniques are beyond reproach. Which means you must have had relations with another man.”

  “This really hurt me. He made me so angry when he said that, I couldn’t stop shaking. Can you see how deeply this would have hurt me?”

  Yoshiya said that he did see.

  “While I was with him, I never had knowledge of another man. Not once. But he just thought of me as some kind of slut. That was the last I saw of him. I didn’t have an abortion, either. I decided to kill myself. And I would have. I would have gotten on a boat to Oshima and thrown myself from the deck if Mr. Tabata hadn’t seen me wandering down the street and spoken to me. I wasn’t the least bit afraid to die. Of course, if I had died then, you would never have been born into this world, Yoshiya. But thanks to Mr. Tabata’s guidance, I have become the saved person you know me as today. At last, I was able to find the true light. And with the help of the other believers, I brought you into this world.”

  To Yoshiya’s mother, Mr. Tabata had had this to say:

  “You took the most rigorous contraceptive measures, and yet you became pregnant. Indeed, you became pregnant three times in a row. Do you imagine that such a thing could happen by chance? I for one do not believe it. Three ‘chance’ occurrences are no longer ‘chance.’ The number three is none other than that which is used by our Lord for revelations. In other words, Miss Osaki, it is our Lord’s wish for you to give birth to a child. The child you are carrying is not just anyone’s child, Miss Osaki: it is the child of our Lord in Heaven; a male child, and I shall give it the name of Yoshiya
, ‘For it is good.’ ”

  And when, as Mr. Tabata predicted, a boy child was born, they named him Yoshiya, and Yoshiya’s mother lived as the servant of God, no longer having knowledge of any man.

  “So,” Yoshiya said, with some hesitation, to his mother, “biologically speaking, my father is that obstetrician that you… had knowledge of.”

  “Not true!” declared his mother with eyes blazing. “His contraceptive methods were absolutely foolproof ! Mr. Tabata was right: your father is our Lord. You came into this world not through carnal knowledge but through an act of our Lord’s will!”

  His mother’s faith was absolute, but Yoshiya was just as certain that his father was the obstetrician. There had been something wrong with the condom. Anything else was out of the question.

  “Does the doctor know that you gave birth to me?”

  “I don’t think so,” his mother said. “I never saw him again, never contacted him in any way. He probably has no idea.”

  The man boarded the Chiyoda Line train to Abiko. Yoshiya followed him into the car. It was after ten-thirty at night, and there were few other passengers on the train. The man took a seat and pulled a magazine from his briefcase. It looked like some sort of professional journal. Yoshiya sat down opposite and pretended to read his newspaper. The man had a slim build and deeply chiseled features with an earnest expression. There was something doctorish about him. His age looked right, and he was missing one earlobe. The right one. It could easily have been bitten off by a dog.

  Yoshiya felt with intuitive certainty that this man had to be his biological father. And yet the man probably had no idea that this son of his even existed. Nor would he be likely to accept the facts if Yoshiya were to reveal them to him there and then. After all, the doctor was a professional whose contraceptive methods were beyond reproach.

  The train passed through the Shin-Ochanomizu, Sendagi, and Machiya subway stops before rising to the surface. The number of passengers decreased at each station. The man never looked away from his magazine or gave any indication he was about to leave his seat. Observing him over the top of his newspaper, Yoshiya recalled fragments of the night before. He had gone out drinking in Roppongi with an old college friend and two girls the friend knew. He remembered going from the bar to a club, but he couldn’t recall whether he had slept with his date. Probably not, he decided. He had been too drunk: knowledge would have been out of the question.

  The paper was filled with the usual earthquake stories. Meanwhile his mother and the other believers were probably staying in the church’s Osaka facility. Each morning they would cram their rucksacks full of supplies, travel as far as they could by commuter train, then walk along the rubble-strewn highway the rest of the way to Kobe, where they would distribute daily provisions to the victims of the quake. She had told him on the phone that her pack weighed as much as thirty-five pounds. Kobe felt light-years away from Yoshiya and the man sitting across from him absorbed in his magazine.

  Until he graduated from elementary school, Yoshiya used to go out with his mother once a week on missionary work. She achieved the best results of anyone in the church. She was so young and lovely and seemingly well bred (in fact, she was well bred) that people always liked her. Plus she had this charming little boy with her. Most people would let down their guard in her presence. They might not be interested in religion, but they were willing to listen to her. She would go from house to house in a simple (but form-fitting) suit distributing pamphlets and calmly extolling the joys of faith.

  “Be sure to come see us if you ever have any pain or difficulties,” she would tell them. “We never push, we only offer,” she would add, her voice warm, eyes shining. “There was a time when my soul was wandering through the deepest darkness until the day I was saved by our teachings. I was carrying this child inside me, and I was about to throw myself and him in the ocean. But I was saved by His hand, the One who is in Heaven, and now my son and I live in the holy light of our Lord.”

  Yoshiya had never found it embarrassing to knock on strangers’ doors with his mother. She was especially sweet to him then, her hand always warm. They had the experience of being turned away so often that it made Yoshiya all the more joyful to receive a rare kind word. And when they managed to win over a new believer for the church it filled him with pride. Maybe now God my father will recognize me as His son, he would think.

  Not long after he went on to middle school, though, Yoshiya abandoned his faith. As he awakened to the existence of his own independent ego, he found it increasingly difficult to accept the strict codes of the sect that clashed with ordinary values. But the most fundamental and decisive cause was the unending coldness of the One who was his father: His dark, heavy, silent heart of stone. Yoshiya’s abandonment of the faith was a source of deep sadness to his mother, but his determination was unshakable.

  The train was almost out of Tokyo and just a station or two from crossing into Chiba Prefecture when the man put his magazine back into his briefcase and stood up, approaching the door. Yoshiya followed him on to the platform. The man flashed a pass to get through the gate, but Yoshiya had to wait in line to pay the extra fare to this distant point. Still, he managed to reach the line for cabs just as the man was stepping into one. He boarded the next cab and pulled a brand-new ten-thousand-yen bill from his wallet.

  “Follow that cab,” he said.

  The driver gave him a suspicious look, then eyed the money.

  “Hey, is this some kind of mob thing?”

  “Don’t worry,” Yoshiya said. “I’m just tailing somebody.”

  The driver took the ten-thousand-yen bill and pulled away from the curb. “OK,” he said, “but I still want my fare. The meter’s running.”

  The two cabs sped down a block of shuttered shops, past a number of dark empty lots, past the lighted windows of a hospital, and through a new development crammed with boxy little houses. The streets all but empty, the tail posed no problems— and provided no thrills. Yoshiya’s driver was clever enough to vary the distance between his cab and the one in front.

  “Guy havin’ an affair or something?”

  “Nah,” Yoshiya said. “Head-hunting. Two companies fighting over one guy.”

  “No kidding? I knew companies were scramblin’ for people these days, but I didn’t realize it was this bad.”

  Now there were hardly any houses along the road, which followed a riverbank and entered an area lined with factories and warehouses. The only things marking this deserted space were new lampposts thrusting up from the earth. Where a high concrete wall stretched along the road, the taxi ahead came to a sudden stop. Alerted by the car’s brake lights, Yoshiya’s driver brought his cab to a halt some hundred yards behind the other vehicle and doused his headlights. The mercury vapor lamps overhead cast their harsh glare on the asphalt roadway. There was nothing to see here but the wall and its dense crown of barbed wire that seemed to defy the rest of the world. Far ahead, the cab door opened and the man with the missing earlobe got out. Yoshiya slipped his driver two thousand-yen bills beyond his initial ten-thousand-yen payment.

  “You’re never gonna get a cab way out here, mister. Want me to wait around?” the driver asked.

  “Never mind,” Yoshiya said and stepped outside.

  The man never looked up after leaving his cab but walked straight ahead alongside the concrete wall at the same slow, steady pace as on the subway platform. He looked like a well-made mechanical doll being drawn ahead by a magnet. Yoshiya raised his coat collar and exhaled an occasional white cloud of breath from the gap between the edges as he followed the man, keeping far enough behind to avoid being spotted. All he could hear was the anonymous slapping of the man’s leather shoes against the pavement. Yoshiya’s rubber-soled loafers were silent.

  There was no sign of human life here. The place looked like an imaginary stage set in a dream. Where the concrete wall ended, there was a scrap yard: a hill of cars surrounded by a chain-link fence. Under the flat light
of a mercury lamp, the pile of withered metal was reduced to a single colorless mass. The man continued walking straight ahead.

  Yoshiya wondered what the point could be of getting out of a cab in such a deserted place. Wasn’t the man heading home? Or maybe he wanted to take a little detour on the way. The February night was too cold for walking, though. A freezing wind would push against Yoshiya’s back every now and then as it sliced down the road.

  Where the scrap yard ended, another long stretch of unfriendly concrete wall began, broken only by the opening to a narrow alley. This seemed like familiar territory to the man: he never hesitated as he turned the corner. The alley was dark. Yoshiya could make out nothing in its depths. He hesitated for a moment, but then stepped in after the man. Having come this far, he was not about to give up.

  High walls pressed in on either side of the straight passageway. There was barely enough room in here for two people to pass each other, and it was as dark as the bottom of the nighttime sea. Yoshiya had only the sound of the man’s shoes to go by. The leather slaps continued on ahead of him at the same unbroken pace. All but clinging to the sound, Yoshiya moved forward through this world devoid of light. And then there was no sound at all.

  Had the man sensed he was being followed? Was he standing still now, holding his breath, straining to see and hear what was behind him? Yoshiya’s heart shrank in the darkness, but he swallowed its loud beating and pressed on. To hell with it, he thought. So what if he screams at me for following him? I’ll just tell him the truth. It could be the quickest way to set the record straight. But then the alley came to a dead end, where it was closed off by a sheet-metal fence. Yoshiya took a few seconds to find the gap, an opening just big enough to let a person through where someone had bent back the metal. He gathered the skirts of his coat around him and squeezed through.

  A big open space spread out on the other side of the fence. It was no empty lot, though, but some kind of playing field. Yoshiya stood there, straining to see anything in the pale moonlight. The man was gone.