1Q84 (147 page)

I’m nothing
, Tengo repeated.

Suddenly he realized that his young mother in the photo from long ago reminded him of his older girlfriend. Kyoko Yasuda was her name. In order to calm his mind, he pressed his fingers hard against the middle of his forehead. He took the photo out again and stared at it. A small nose, plump lips, a somewhat pointed chin. Her hairstyle was so different he hadn’t noticed at first, but her features did somewhat resemble Kyoko’s. But what could that possibly mean?

And why did his father think to give this photo to Tengo after his death? While he was alive he had never provided Tengo with a single piece of information about his mother. He had even hidden the existence of this family photo. One thing Tengo did know was that his father never intended to explain the situation to him. Not while he was alive, and not even now after his death.
Look, here’s a photo
, his father must be saying.
I’ll just hand it to you. It’s up to you to
figure it out.

Tengo lay faceup on the bare mattress and stared at the ceiling. It was a painted white plywood ceiling, flat with no wood grain or knots, just several straight joints where the boards came together—the same scene his father’s sunken eyes must have viewed during the last few months of life. Or maybe those eyes didn’t see anything. At any rate his gaze had been directed there, at the ceiling, whether he had been seeing it or not.

Tengo closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself slowly moving toward death. But for a thirty-year-old in good health, death was something far off, beyond the imagination. Instead, breathing softly, he watched the twilight shadows as they moved across the wall. He tried to not think about anything. Not thinking about anything was not too hard for Tengo. He was too tired to keep any one particular thought in his head. He wanted to catch some sleep if he could, but he was overtired, and sleep wouldn’t come.

Just before six p.m. Nurse Omura came and told him dinner was ready in the cafeteria. Tengo had no appetite, but the tall, busty nurse wouldn’t leave him alone. You need to get something, even a little bit, into your stomach, she told him. This was close to a direct order. When it came to telling people how to maintain their health, she was a pro. And Tengo wasn’t the type—especially when the other person was an older woman—who could resist.

They took the stairs down to the cafeteria and found Kumi Adachi waiting for them. Nurse Tamura was nowhere to be seen. Tengo ate dinner at the same table as Kumi and Nurse Omura. Tengo had a salad, cooked vegetables, and miso soup with asari clams and scallions, washed down with hot
hojicha
tea.

“When is the cremation?” Kumi asked him.

“Tomorrow afternoon at one,” Tengo said. “When that’s done, I’ll probably go straight back to Tokyo. I have to go back to work.”

“Will anyone else be at the cremation besides you, Tengo?”

“No, no one else. Just me.”

“Do you mind if I join you?” Kumi asked.

“At my father’s cremation?” Tengo asked, surprised.

“Yes. Actually I was pretty fond of him.”

Tengo involuntarily put his chopsticks down and looked at her. Was she really talking about his father? “What did you like about him?” he asked her.

“He was very conscientious, never said more than he needed to,” she said. “In that sense he was like my father, who passed away.”

“Huh,” Tengo said.

“My father was a fisherman. He died before he reached fifty.”

“Did he die at sea?”

“No, he died of lung cancer. He smoked too much. I don’t know why, but fishermen are all heavy smokers. It’s like smoke is rising out of their whole body.”

Tengo thought about this. “It might have been better if my father had been a fisherman too.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I’m not really sure,” Tengo replied. “The thought just occurred to me—that it would have been better for him than being an
NHK
fee collector.”

“If your father had been a fisherman, would it have been easier for you to accept him?”

“It would have made many things simpler, I suppose.”

Tengo pictured himself as a child, early in the morning on a day when he didn’t have school, heading off on a fishing boat with his father. The stiff Pacific wind, the salt spray hitting his face. The monotonous drone of the diesel engine. The stuffy smell of the fishing nets. Hard, dangerous work. One mistake and you could lose your life. But compared with being dragged all over Ichikawa to collect subscription fees, it would have to be a more natural, fulfilling life.

“But collecting
NHK
fees couldn’t have been easy work, could it?” Nurse Omura said as she ate her soy-flavored fish.

“Probably not,” Tengo said. At least he knew it wasn’t the kind of job he could handle.

“Your father was really good at his job, wasn’t he?” Kumi asked.

“I think he was, yes,” Tengo said.

“He showed me his award certificates,” Kumi said.

“Ah! Darn,” Nurse Omura said, suddenly putting down her chopsticks. “I totally forgot. Darn it! How could I forget something so important? Could you wait here for a minute? I have something I have to give you, and it has to be today.”

Nurse Omura wiped her mouth with a napkin, stood up, and hurried out of the cafeteria, her meal half eaten.

“I wonder what’s so important?” Kumi said, tilting her head.

Tengo had no idea.

As he waited for Nurse Omura’s return, he dutifully worked his way through his salad. There weren’t many others eating dinner in the cafeteria. At one table there were three old men, none of them speaking. At another table a man in a white coat, with a sprinkling of gray hair, sat alone, reading the evening paper as he ate, a solemn look on his face.

Nurse Omura finally trotted back. She was holding a department-store shopping bag. She took out some neatly folded clothes.

“I got this from Mr. Kawana about a year or so ago, while he was still conscious,” the large nurse said. “He said when he was put in the casket he would like to be dressed in this. So I sent it to the cleaners and had them store it in mothballs.”

There was no mistaking the
NHK
fee collector’s uniform. The matching trousers had been nicely ironed. The smell of mothballs hit Tengo. For a while he was speechless.

“Mr. Kawana told me he would like to be cremated wearing this uniform,” Nurse Omura said. She refolded the uniform neatly and put it back in the shopping bag. “So I’m giving it to you now. Tomorrow, give this to the funeral home people and make sure they dress him in it.”

“Isn’t it a problem to have him wear this? The uniform was just on loan to him, and when he retired it should have been returned to
NHK
,” Tengo said, weakly.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Kumi said. “If we don’t say anything, who’s going to know?
NHK
isn’t going to be in a tight spot over a set of old clothes.”

Nurse Omura agreed. “Mr. Kawana walked all over the place, from morning to night, for over thirty years for
NHK
. I’m sure it wasn’t always pleasant. Who cares about one uniform? It’s not like you’re using it to do something bad or anything.”

“You’re right. I still have my school uniform from high school,” Kumi said.

“An
NHK
collector’s uniform and a high school uniform aren’t exactly the same thing,” Tengo interjected, but no one took up the point.

“Come to think of it, I have my old school uniform in the closet somewhere too,” Nurse Omura said.

“Are you telling me you put it on sometimes for your husband? Along with white bobby socks?” Kumi said teasingly.

“Hmm—now that’s a thought,” Nurse Omura said, her chin in her hands on the table, her expression serious. “Probably get him all hot and bothered.”

“Anyway …,” Kumi said. She turned to Tengo. “Mr. Kawana definitely wanted to be cremated in his
NHK
uniform. I think we should help him make his wish come true. Don’t you think so?”

Tengo took the bag containing the uniform and went back to the room. Kumi Adachi came with him and made up the bed. There were fresh sheets, with a still-starchy fragrance, a new blanket, a new bed cover, and a new pillow. Once all this was arranged, the bed his father had slept in looked totally transformed. Tengo randomly thought of Kumi’s thick, luxuriant pubic hair.

“Your father was in a coma for so long,” Kumi said as she smoothed out the wrinkles in the sheets, “but I don’t think he was completely unconscious.”

“Why do you say that?” Tengo asked.

“Well, he would sometimes send messages to somebody.”

Tengo was standing at the window gazing outside, but he spun around and looked at Kumi. “Messages?”

“He would tap on the bed frame. His hand would hang down from the bed and he would knock on the frame, like he was sending Morse code. Like this.”

Kumi lightly tapped the wooden bed frame with her fist.

“Don’t you think it sounds like a signal?”

“That’s not a signal.”

“Then what is it?”

“He’s knocking on a door,” Tengo said, his voice dry. “The front door of a house.”

“I guess that makes sense. It does sound like someone knocking on a door.” She narrowed her eyes to slits. “So are you saying that even after he lost consciousness he was still making his rounds to collect fees?”

“Probably,” Tengo said. “Somewhere inside his head.”

“It’s like that story of the dead soldier still clutching his trumpet,” Kumi said, impressed.

There was nothing to say to this, so Tengo stayed silent.

“Your father must have really liked his job. Going around collecting
NHK
subscription fees.”

“I don’t think it’s a question of liking or disliking it,” Tengo said.

“Then what?”

“It was the one thing he was best at.”

“Hmm. I see,” Kumi said. She pondered this. “But that might very well be the best way to live your life.”

“Maybe so,” Tengo said as he looked out at the pine windbreak. It might really be so.

“What’s the one thing you can do best?”

“I don’t know,” Tengo said, looking straight at her. “I honestly have no idea.”

Tengo showed up at the entrance to the apartment building on Sunday evening, at six fifteen. As soon as he stepped outside he halted and gazed around, as if looking for something. First to the right, then the left. Then from left to right. He looked up at the sky, then down at his feet. But nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary, as far as he was concerned.

Ushikawa didn’t follow him then. Tengo was carrying nothing with him. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his unpleated chinos. He had on a high-neck sweater and a well-worn olive-green corduroy jacket, and his hair was unruly. A thick paperback book peeped out of a jacket pocket. Ushikawa figured he must be going out to eat dinner in a nearby restaurant.
Fine
, he decided,
just let him go where he wants
.

Tengo had several classes he had to teach on Monday. Ushikawa had found this out by phoning the cram school. Yes, a female office worker had told him, Mr. Kawana will be teaching his regular classes from the beginning of the week. Good. From tomorrow, then, Tengo was finally going back to his normal schedule. Knowing him, he probably wouldn’t be going far this evening. (If Ushikawa had followed him that night, he would have found out that Tengo was on his way to meet with Komatsu at the bar in Yotsuya.)

Just before eight, Ushikawa threw on his pea coat, muffler, and knit hat and, looking around him as he did, hurried out of the building. Tengo had not yet returned at this point. If he was really eating somewhere in the neighborhood, it was taking longer than it should. If Ushikawa was unlucky, he might actually bump into him on his way back. But he was willing to run the risk, since there was something he absolutely had to do, and it had to be done now, at this time of night.

He relied on his memory of the route as he turned several corners, passed a few semi-familiar landmarks, and though he hesitated a few times, unsure of the direction, he eventually arrived at the playground. The strong north wind of the previous day had died down, and it was warm for a December evening, but as expected, the park was deserted. Ushikawa double-checked that there was no one else around, then climbed up the slide. He sat down on top of the slide, leaned back against the railing, and looked up at the sky. The moons were there, almost in the same location as the night before. A bright moon, two-thirds full. Not a single cloud nearby. And beside it, a small green, misshapen moon snuggled close.

So it’s no mistake, then
, Ushikawa thought. He exhaled and shook his head. He wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. Two moons, one big, one small, were definitely visible there, above the leafless zelkova tree. The two moons looked like they had stayed put since last night, waiting for him to return to the top of the slide. They knew that he would be back. As if prearranged, the silence around them was suggestive. And the moons wanted Ushikawa to share that silence with them.
You can’t tell anybody else about this
, they warned. They held an index finger, covered with a light dusting of ash, to their mouths to make sure he didn’t say a thing.

As he sat there, Ushikawa moved his facial muscles this way and that, to make sure there wasn’t something unnatural or unusual about this feeling he was having. He found nothing unnatural about it. For better or for worse, this was his normal face.

Ushikawa always saw himself as a realist, and he actually was. Metaphysical speculation wasn’t his thing. If something really existed, you had to accept it as a reality, whether or not it made sense or was logical. That was his basic way of thinking. Principles and logic didn’t give birth to reality. Reality came first, and the principles and logic followed. So, he decided, he would have to begin by accepting this reality: that there were two moons in the sky.