1Q84 (101 page)

Here was the man who had raised Tengo as his own son, listing him as such in the family register despite the absence of blood ties, and raising him until he was old enough to fend for himself.
I owe him that much. I have some obligation to tell him how I have lived my life thus far, as well as some of the thoughts I have had in the course of living that life
, Tengo thought.
No, it’s not so much an obligation as a courtesy. It doesn’t matter if the things I am saying reach his ears or whether telling him serves any purpose
.

Tengo sat on the stool by the bed once again and began to narrate a summary of his life to date, beginning from the time he left the house and started living in the judo dorm when he entered high school. From that time onward, he and his father had lost nearly all points of contact, creating a situation in which neither had the least concern for what the other was doing. Tengo felt he should probably fill in such a large vacuum as best he could.

Ultimately, however, there was almost nothing for Tengo to tell about his life in high school. He had entered a private high school in Chiba Prefecture that had a strong reputation for its judo program. He could easily have gotten into a better school, but the conditions offered him by that school were the best. They waived his tuition and allowed him to live in the dormitory, providing him with three meals a day. Tengo became a star member of the judo team, studied between practice sessions (he could maintain some of the highest grades in his class without having to study too hard), and he earned extra money during vacations by doing assorted manual labor with his teammates. With so much to do, he found himself pressed for time day after day. There was little to say about his three years of high school other than that it was a busy time for him. It had not been especially enjoyable, nor had he made any close friends. He never liked the school, which had a lot of rules. He did what he had to do in order to get along with his teammates, but they weren’t really on the same wavelength. In all honesty, Tengo never once felt totally committed to judo as a sport. He needed to win in order to support himself, so he devoted a lot of energy to practice in order not to betray others’ expectations. It was less a sport to him than a practical means of survival—a job. He spent the three years of high school wanting to graduate so that he could begin living a more serious life as soon as possible.

Even after entering college, however, he continued with judo, living basically the same life as before. Keeping up his judo meant he could live in the dormitory and thus be spared any difficulty in finding a place to sleep or food to eat (minimal though it was). He also received a scholarship, though it was nowhere nearly enough to get by on. His major was mathematics, of course. He studied fairly hard and earned good grades in college, too. His adviser even urged him to continue into graduate school. As he advanced into the third year and then the fourth year of college, however, his passion for mathematics as an academic discipline rapidly cooled. He still liked mathematics as much as ever, but he had no desire to make a profession of research in the field. It was the same as it had been with judo. It was fine as an amateur endeavor, but he had neither the personality nor the drive to stake his whole life on it, which he well knew.

As his interest in mathematics waned and his college graduation drew near, his reasons for continuing judo evaporated and he had no idea what path he should next pursue. His life seemed to lose its center of gravity—not that he had ever really had one, but up to that point, other people had placed certain demands and expectations upon him, and responding to them had kept him busy. Once those demands and expectations disappeared, however, there was nothing left worth talking about. His life had no purpose. He had no close friends. He was drifting and unable to concentrate his energies on anything.

He had a number of girlfriends during his college years, and a lot of sexual experience. He was not handsome in the usual sense. He was not a particularly sociable person, nor was he especially amusing or witty. He was always hard up for money and wasn’t at all stylish. But just as the smell of certain kinds of plants attracts moths, Tengo was able to attract certain kinds of women—and very strongly, at that.

He discovered this fact around the time he turned twenty (which was just about the time he began losing his enthusiasm for mathematics as an academic discipline). Without doing anything about it himself, he always had women who were interested enough to take the initiative in approaching him. They wanted him to hold them in his big arms—or at least they never resisted him when he did so. He couldn’t understand how this worked at first and reacted with a good deal of confusion, but eventually he got the hang of it and learned how to exploit this ability, after which Tengo was rarely without a woman. He never had a positive feeling of love toward any of them, however. He just went with them and had sex with them. They filled each other’s emptiness. Strange as it may seem, he never once felt a strong emotional attraction to any of the women who had a strong emotional attraction to him.

Tengo recounted these developments to his unconscious father, choosing his words slowly and carefully at first, more smoothly as time went by, and finally with some passion. He even spoke as honestly as he could about sexual matters.
There’s no point getting embarrassed about such things now
, he told himself. His father lay faceup, unmoving, his deep sleep unbroken, his breathing unchanged.

A nurse came before three o’clock, changed the plastic bag of intravenous fluid, replaced the bag of collected urine with an empty one, and took his father’s temperature. She was a strongly built, full-bosomed woman in her late thirties. The name on her tag read “Omura.” Her hair was pulled into a tight bun on the back of her head, with a ballpoint pen thrust into it.

“Has there been any change in his condition?” she asked Tengo while recording numbers on a clipboard with the ballpoint pen.

“None at all. He’s been fast asleep the whole time,” Tengo said.

“Please push that button if anything happens,” she said, pointing toward the call switch hanging over the head of the bed. Then she shoved the ballpoint pen back into her hair.

“I see.”

Shortly after the nurse went out, there was a quick knock on the door and bespectacled Nurse Tamura poked her head in.

“Would you like to have a bite to eat? You could go to the lunchroom.”

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry yet,” Tengo said.

“How is your father doing?”

Tengo nodded. “I’ve been talking to him the whole time. I can’t tell whether he can hear me or not.”

“It’s good to keep talking to them,” she said. She smiled encouragingly. “Don’t worry, I’m sure he can hear you.”

She closed the door softly. Now it was just Tengo and his father in the little room again.

Tengo went on talking.

He graduated from college and started teaching mathematics at a cram school in the city. No longer was he a math prodigy from whom people expected great things, nor was he a promising member of a judo team. He was a mere cram school instructor. But that very fact made Tengo happy. He could catch his breath at last. For the first time in his life, he was free: he could live his own life as he wanted to without having to worry about anyone else.

Eventually, he started writing fiction. He entered a few of his finished stories in competitions, which led him to become acquainted with a quirky editor named Komatsu. This editor gave him the job of rewriting
Air Chrysalis
, a story by a seventeen-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri (whose real name was Eriko Fukada). Fuka-Eri had created the story, but she had no talent for writing, so Tengo took on that task. He did such a good job that the piece won a debut writer’s prize from a magazine and then was subsequently published as a book that became a huge bestseller. Because the book was so widely discussed, the selection committee for the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious literary award, kept their distance from it. So while it did not win that particular prize, the book sold so many copies that Komatsu, in his typically brusque way, said, “Who the hell needs
that
?”

Tengo had no confidence that his story was reaching his father’s ears, and even if it was, he had no way of telling whether or not his father was understanding it. He felt his words had no impact and he could see no response. Even if his words were getting through, Tengo had no way of knowing if his father was even interested. Maybe the old man just found them annoying. Maybe he was thinking, “Who gives a damn about other people’s life stories? Just let me sleep!” All Tengo could do, though, was continue to say whatever came to his mind. He couldn’t think of anything better to do while crammed into this little room with his father.

His father never made the slightest movement. His eyes were closed tightly at the bottom of those two deep, dark hollows. He might as well have been waiting for winter to come and the hollows to fill up with snow.

“I can’t say that things are going all that well for the moment, but if possible I’d like to make my living by writing—not just rewriting somebody else’s work but writing what I want to write, the way I want to write it. Writing—and especially fiction writing—is well suited to my personality, I think. It’s good to have something you want to do, and now I finally have it. Nothing of mine has ever been published with my name on it, but that ought to happen soon enough. I’m really not a bad writer, if I do say so myself. At least one editor gives me some credit for my talent. I’m not worried on that front.”

And I seem to have the qualities needed to be a Receiver
, Tengo thought of adding.
So much so that I have been drawn into the fictional world that I myself have written
. But this was no place to start talking about such complicated matters. That was a whole different story. He decided to change the subject.

“A more pressing problem for me is that I have never been able to love anyone seriously. I have never felt unconditional love for anyone since the day I was born, never felt that I could give myself completely to that one person. Never once.”

Even as he said this, Tengo found himself wondering if this miserable-looking old man before him had ever experienced loving someone with his whole heart. Perhaps he had seriously loved Tengo’s mother, which may have been why he was willing to raise Tengo as his own child, even though he knew they had no blood tie. If so, that meant he had lived a far more spiritually fulfilling life than Tengo.

“The one possible exception is a girl I remember very well. We were in the same class in the third and fourth grades in Ichikawa. Yes, I’m talking about something that happened a good twenty years ago. I was very strongly drawn to her. I’ve thought about her all this time, and even now I still think about her a lot. But I never really talked to her. She changed schools, and I never saw her again. But something happened recently that made me want to find her. I finally realized that I need her, that I want to see her and talk to her about all kinds of things. But I haven’t been able to track her down. I suppose I should have started looking for her a lot sooner. It might have been much easier then.”

Tengo fell silent, waiting for the things he had talked about so far to sink into his father’s mind—or, rather, to sink into his own mind. Then he started speaking again.

“Yes, I was too much of a coward where these things were concerned. The same reason kept me from investigating my own family register. If I wanted to find out whether my mother really died or not, I could have looked it up easily. All I had to do was go to the city hall and look up the record. In fact, I thought about doing it any number of times. I even walked as far as the city hall. But I couldn’t make myself request the documents. I was afraid to see the truth before my eyes. I was afraid to expose it with my own hands. And so I waited for it to happen by itself, naturally.”

Tengo released a sigh.

“Oh well, all that aside, I should have started looking for the girl a lot sooner. I took a huge detour. I couldn’t get myself going. I just—how should I put this?—I’m a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.”

Tengo got up from the stool, went to the window, and looked out at the pine woods. The wind had died. He couldn’t hear the roar of the ocean. A large cat was crossing the garden. Judging from its sagging middle, it was probably pregnant. It lay down at the base of a tree, spread its legs, and started licking its belly.

Leaning against the windowsill, Tengo continued to speak to his father.

“But anyhow, lately it has begun to seem as if my life has finally started to change. I feel that way. To tell you the truth, I hated you for a long time. From the time I was little, I used to think that I didn’t belong in such a miserable little place, that I was someone who deserved to be in more comfortable circumstances. I felt it was unfair for you to treat me as you did. My classmates all seemed to be living happy, satisfying lives. Kids whose gifts and talents were far inferior to mine were having much more fun than I was every day. I used to seriously wish that you were not my father. I imagined that this had to be some mistake; you couldn’t possibly be my real father; there couldn’t possibly be any blood relationship.”

Tengo looked out of the window again at the cat. It was still absorbed in licking its swollen belly, unaware that it was being watched. Tengo kept his gaze on the cat as he continued talking.

“I don’t feel that way anymore. Now I think that I was in the right circumstances for me and had the right father. I really mean it. To tell you the truth, I was a useless human being, a person of no value. In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself. I can see that now. I was a math prodigy when I was little, that’s for sure. Even I know I had a real talent. Everybody kept their eye on me and made a big deal over me. But ultimately, it was a talent that had no hope of developing into anything meaningful. It was
just there
. I was always a big boy and good at judo, and I always did well in the prefectural tournaments. But when I went out into the wider world, there were lots of guys who were stronger than I was. I was never chosen to represent my university in the national tournaments. This was a great shock to me, and for a while I no longer knew who I was. But that was only natural, because in fact I was nobody.”