1Q84 (108 page)

“I don’t know yet how long I’ll be staying,” Tengo said, “but I’ll go ahead and pay for three days.” The proprietress of the inn had no objection. The doors shut at eleven, and bringing a woman to his room would be problematic, she explained in a roundabout way. All this sounded fine to him. Once he settled into his room, he phoned the sanatorium. He told the nurse (the same middle-aged nurse he had met before) that he would like to visit his father at three p.m. and asked if that would be convenient. That would be fine, she replied. “Mr. Kawana just sleeps all the time,” she said.

Thus began Tengo’s days at the cat town beside the sea. He would get up early, take a walk along the shore, watch the fishing boats go in and out of the harbor, then return to the inn for breakfast. Breakfast was exactly the same every day—dried horse mackerel and fried eggs, a quartered tomato, seasoned dried seaweed, miso soup with shijimi clams, and rice—but for some reason it tasted wonderful every morning. After breakfast he would sit at a small desk and write. He hadn’t written in some time and found the act of writing with his fountain pen enjoyable. Working in an unfamiliar place, away from your daily routine, was invigorating. The engines of the fishing boats chugged monotonously as they pulled into the harbor. Tengo liked the sound.

The story he was writing began with a world where there were two moons in the sky. A world of Little People and air chrysalises. He had borrowed this world from Fuka-Eri’s
Air Chrysalis
, but by now it was entirely his own. As he wrote, his mind was living in that world. Even when he lay down his pen and stood up from the desk, his mind remained there. There was a special sensation of his body and his mind beginning to separate, and he could no longer distinguish the real world from the fictional. The protagonist of the story who entered the cat town probably experienced the same sensation. Before he knew it, the world’s center of gravity had shifted. And the protagonist would (most likely) be unable to ever board the train to get out of town.

At eleven Tengo had to leave his room so they could clean it. When the time came he stopped writing, went out, walked to the front of the station, and drank coffee in a nearby coffee shop. Occasionally he would have a light sandwich, but usually he ate nothing. He would then pick up the morning paper and check it closely to see if there was any article that might have something to do with him. He found no such article.
Air Chrysalis
had long since disappeared from the bestseller lists. Number one on the list now was a diet book entitled
Eat as Much as You Want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight
. What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell.

After he finished his coffee and was done with the paper, Tengo took the bus to the sanatorium. He usually arrived between one thirty and two. He chatted a bit with the nurse who was always at the front desk. When Tengo began staying in the town and visiting his father every day, the nurses grew kinder to him, and treated him in a friendly way—as warmly as the prodigal son’s family must have welcomed him back home.

One of the younger nurses always gave an embarrassed smile whenever she saw Tengo. She seemed to have a crush on him. She was petite, wore her hair in a ponytail, and had big eyes and red cheeks. She was probably in her early twenties. But ever since the air chrysalis had appeared with the sleeping girl inside, all Tengo could think about was Aomame. All other women were faint shadows in comparison. An image of Aomame was constantly playing at the edges of his mind. Aomame was alive somewhere in this world—he could
feel
it. He knew she must be searching for him, which is why on that evening she chose to find him. She had not forgotten him either.

If what I saw wasn’t an illusion
.

Sometimes he remembered his older girlfriend, and wondered how she was.
She’s irretrievably lost now
, her husband had said on the phone. She can no longer visit your home.
Irretrievably lost
. Even now those words gave Tengo an uncomfortable, uneasy feeling. They had an undeniably ominous ring.

Still, she became less and less of a presence in his mind as time went on. He could recall the afternoons they had spent together only as events in the past, undertaken to fulfill certain goals. Tengo felt guilty about this. But before he had known it, gravity had changed. It had shifted, and it wouldn’t be going back to its original location.

When he arrived at his father’s room, Tengo would sit in the chair next to his bed and briefly greet him. Then he would explain, in chronological order, what he had done since the previous night. He hadn’t done much. He had gone back to town on the bus, had a simple dinner at a restaurant, drunk a beer, returned to the inn, and read. He’d gone to bed at ten. In the morning he would take a walk, eat breakfast, and work on his novel for about two hours. He repeated the same things every day, but even so, Tengo gave the unconscious man a detailed report on all his activities. There was no response from his listener. It was like talking to a wall. A formality he had to go through. Still, sometimes simple repetition has meaning.

Then Tengo would read from the book he had brought along. He didn’t stick to just one book. He would read aloud the book that he himself was reading at the time. If a manual for an electric lawn mower had been his current reading material, that’s what he would have read. Tengo read in a deliberately clear voice, slowly, so that it was easy to understand. That was the one thing he made sure to do.

After wading through the water, customers came into the shop, one after another.

There was a sudden commotion as customers pushed toward them, making it hard to breathe.

Someone cleared his throat, perhaps because a piece of food had gotten stuck; it was a strange voice, more of a snuffling cough, as if it were a dog.

Then he saw that theirs were the faces of animals—dogs or foxes, he wasn’t sure—and the animals all wore clothes, and some of them had long tongues hanging out, licking around the corners of their mouths.

Tengo read to there and looked at his father’s face. “The end,” he said. The story stopped there.

No reaction.

“What do you think?”

As expected, there was no response from his father.

Sometimes he would read what he himself had written that morning. After he had read it, he would rewrite in ballpoint pen the parts he wasn’t satisfied with, and reread the parts he had edited. If he still wasn’t satisfied at the way it sounded, he would rewrite it again, and then read the new version.

“The rewritten version is better,” he said to his father, as if hoping he would agree. His father, predictably, didn’t express an opinion. He didn’t say that it was better, or that the earlier version was better, or that there really wasn’t much of a difference between the two. The lids on his sunken eyes were shut tight, like a sad house with its heavy shutters lowered.

Sometimes Tengo would stand up from his chair and stretch and go to the window and look at the scenery outside. After several overcast days, it was raining. The continual afternoon rain made the pine windbreak dark and heavy. He couldn’t hear the waves at all. There was no wind, just the rain falling straight down from the sky. A flock of black birds flew by in the rain. The hearts of those birds were dark, and wet, too. The inside of the room was also wet. Everything there, pillows, books, desk, was damp. But oblivious to it all—to the weather, the damp, the wind, the sound of the waves—his father continued in an uninterrupted coma. Like a merciful cloak, paralysis enveloped his body. After a short break Tengo went back to reading aloud. In the damp, narrow room, that was all he was able to do.

When he tired of reading aloud, Tengo sat there, gazing at the form of his sleeping father and trying to surmise what kinds of things were going through his brain. Inside—in the inner parts of that stubborn skull, like an old anvil—what sort of consciousness lay hidden there? Or was there nothing left at all? Was it like an abandoned house from which all the possessions and appliances had been moved, leaving no trace of those who had once dwelled there? Even if it was, there should be the occasional memory or scenery etched into the walls and ceilings. Things cultivated over such a long time don’t just vanish into nothingness. As his father lay on this plain bed in the sanatorium by the shore, at the same time he might very well be surrounded by scenes and memories invisible to others, in the still darkness of a back room in his own vacant house.

The young nurse with the red cheeks would come in, smile at Tengo, then take his father’s temperature, check how much remained in the IV drip, and measure the amount of urine he had produced. She would note all the numbers down on a clipboard. Her actions were automatic and brisk, as if prescribed in a training manual. Tengo watched this series of movements and wondered how she must feel to live her life in this sanatorium by the sea, taking care of senile old people whose prognosis was grim. She looked young and healthy. Beneath her starched uniform, her waist and her breasts were compact but ample. Golden down glistened on her smooth neck. The plastic name tag on her chest read
Adachi
.

What could possibly have brought her to this remote place, where oblivion and listless death lay hovering over everything? Tengo could tell she was a skilled and hardworking nurse. She was still young and worked quite efficiently. She could have easily worked in some other field of health care, something more lively and engaging, so why did she choose this sad sort of place to work? Tengo wondered. He wanted to find out the reason and the background. If he did ask her, he knew she would be honest. He could sense that about her. But it would be better not to get involved, Tengo decided—this was, after all, the cat town. Some day he would have to get on the train and go back to the world from which he came.

The nurse finished her tasks, put the clipboard back, and gave Tengo an awkward smile.

“His condition is unchanged. The same as always.”

“So he’s stable,” Tengo said in as cheerful a voice as he could manage. “To put a positive spin on it.”

A half-apologetic smile rose to her lips and she inclined her head just a touch. She glanced at the book on his lap. “Are you reading that to him?”

Tengo nodded. “I doubt he can hear it, though.”

“Still, it’s a good thing to do,” the nurse said.

“Maybe it is, or maybe it isn’t, but I can’t think of anything else I can do.”

“But not everybody else would do that.”

“Most people have busier lives than I do,” Tengo said.

The nurse looked like she was about to say something, but she hesitated. In the end she didn’t say a thing. She looked at his sleeping father, and then at Tengo.

“Take care,” she said.

“Thanks,” Tengo answered.

After Nurse Adachi left, Tengo waited a while, then began reading aloud once more.

In the evening, when his father was wheeled on a gurney to the examination room, Tengo went to the cafeteria, drank some tea, then phoned Fuka-Eri from a pay phone.

“Is everything okay?” Tengo asked her.

“Yes, everything is okay,” she said. “Just like always.”

“Everything’s fine with me, too. Doing the same thing every day.”

“But time is moving forward.”

“That’s right,” Tengo said. “Every day time moves forward one day’s worth.”

And what has gone forward can’t go back to where it came from.

“The crow came back again just a little while ago,” Fuka-Eri said. “A big crow.”

“In the evening that crow always comes up to the window.”

“Doing the same thing every day.”

“That’s right,” Tengo said. “Just like us.”

“But it doesn’t think about time.”

“Crows can’t think about time. Probably only humans have the concept of time.”

“Why,” she asked.

“Humans see time as a straight line. It’s like putting notches on a long straight stick. The notch here is the future, the one on this side is the past, and the present is this point right here. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“But actually time isn’t a straight line. It doesn’t have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn’t have any form. But since we can’t picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.”

“But maybe we are the ones who are wrong.”

Tengo mulled this over. “You mean we may be wrong to see time as a straight line?”

No response.

“That’s a possibility. Maybe we’re wrong and the crow is right. Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it’s shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that’s the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven’t found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it’s probably correct.”

“Experiential model,” Fuka-Eri repeated.

“After taking a lot of samples, you come to view one conjecture as actually correct.”

Fuka-Eri was silent for a time. Tengo had no idea if she had understood him or not.

“Hello?” Tengo said, checking if she was still there.

“How long will you be there,” Fuka-Eri asked, omitting the question mark.

“You mean how long will I be in Chikura?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” Tengo answered honestly. “All I can say right now is that I’ll stay here until certain things make sense. There are some things I don’t understand. I want to stay for a while and see how they develop.”

Fuka-Eri was silent on the other end again. When she was silent it was like she wasn’t there at all.

“Hello?” Tengo said again.

“Don’t miss the train,” Fuka-Eri said.

“I’ll be careful,” Tengo replied, “not to be late for the train. Is everything okay with you?”

“One person came here a while ago.”