Carrying a single bag, the young man is traveling alone at his whim with no particular destination in mind. He goes by train and gets off at any stop that arouses his interest. He takes a room, sees the sights, and stays as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he boards another train. He spends every vacation this way.
One day he sees a lovely river from the train window. Gentle green hills line the meandering stream, and below them lies a quiet-looking, pretty little town with an old stone bridge over the river. The scene attracts him. Tasty river fish should be available in a place like this. The train stops at the station, and the young man steps down with his bag. No one else gets off there. As soon as he alights, the train departs.
No workers man the station, which must see very little activity. The young man crosses the stone bridge and walks into the town. It is utterly still, with no one to be seen. All the shops are shuttered, the town hall deserted. No one occupies the desk at the town’s only hotel. He rings the bell, but no one comes out. The place seems totally uninhabited. Perhaps all the people are off napping somewhere. But it is only ten thirty in the morning, way too early for that. Perhaps something caused all the people to abandon the town. In any case, the next train will not come until the following morning, so he has no choice but to spend the night here. He wanders around the town to kill time.
In fact, however, this is a town of cats. When the sun starts to go down, many cats cross the bridge into town—cats of all different kinds and colors. They are much larger than ordinary cats, but they are still cats. The young man is shocked to see this spectacle. He rushes into the bell tower in the center of town and climbs to the top to hide. The cats go about their business raising the shop shutters or seating themselves at their town hall desks to start their day’s work. Soon, still more cats come, crossing the bridge into town like the others. They enter the shops to buy things or go to the town hall to handle administrative matters or have a meal at the hotel restaurant or drink beer at the tavern and sing lively cat songs. One plays a concertina and others dance to the music. Because cats can see in the dark, they need almost no lights, but that particular night the glow of the full moon floods the town, enabling the young man to see every detail from his perch in the bell tower. When dawn approaches, the cats close up shop, finish their work or official business, and swarm back across the bridge to where they came from.
By the time the sun comes up, the cats are gone, and the town is deserted again. The young man climbs down, picks one of the hotel beds for himself, and goes to sleep. When he gets hungry, he eats the bread and cooked fish left in the hotel kitchen. When darkness approaches, he hides in the top of the bell tower again and observes the cats’ activities until dawn. Trains stop at the station before noon and before evening. If he took the morning train he could continue his journey, and if he took the afternoon train he could go back where he came from. No passengers alight at the station, and no one boards here, either. Still, the trains stop at the station for exactly one minute as scheduled and pull out again. He could take one of the trains and leave the creepy cat town behind. But he doesn’t. Being young, he has a lively curiosity and boundless ambition and is ready for adventure. He wants to see more of the strange spectacle of the cat town. If possible, he wants to find out when and how it became a town of cats, how the town is organized, and what the cats are doing there. He is probably the only human being who has ever seen this strange sight.
On the night of the third day, a hubbub breaks out in the square below the bell tower. “Hey, do you smell something human?” one of the cats says. “Now that you mention it, I thought there was a funny smell the past few days,” another chimes in, twitching his nose. “Me too,” says yet another cat. “That’s weird. There shouldn’t be any humans here,” someone adds. “No, of course not. There’s no way a human could get into this town of cats.” “Still, that smell of theirs is definitely here.”
The cats form into groups and search the town from top to bottom like vigilante bands. Cats have an excellent sense of smell when they want to use it, so it takes them very little time to discover that the bell tower is the source of the smell. The young man hears their soft paws padding their way up the stairs. That’s it, they’ve got me! he thinks. His smell seems to have aroused the cats to anger. They have big, sharp claws and white fangs. Humans are not supposed to set foot in this town. He has no idea what terrible fate awaits him if he is discovered, but he is sure they will never let him leave the town alive now that he has learned their secret.
Three cats climb to the top of the bell tower and sniff the air. “Strange,” one cat says, twitching his whiskers. “I smell a human, but there’s no one here.”
“It is strange,” says a second cat. “But there is definitely no one here. Let’s look somewhere else.”
“I don’t get it, though.”
The three cats cock their heads, puzzled, then retreat down the stairs. The young man hears their footsteps going down and fading into the dark of night. He breathes a sigh of relief, but he doesn’t get it, either. He was literally nose-to-nose with the cats in this small space. There was no way they could have missed him. But for some reason they did not see him. He brings his hand to his eyes and can see it perfectly well. It hasn’t turned transparent. Strange. In any case, though, when morning comes, he knows he should go to the station and take the train away from this town. Staying here would be too dangerous. His luck can’t last forever.
The next day, however, the morning train does not stop at the station. He watches it pass by without slowing down. The afternoon train does the same. He can even see the engineer seated at the controls. The passengers’ faces, too, are visible through the windows. But the train shows no sign of stopping. It is as though people cannot see the young man waiting for a train—or even see the station itself. Once the afternoon train disappears down the track, the place grows quieter than ever. The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. He knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is a place not of this world that has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to bring him back to his original world.
Tengo read the story twice. The phrase “the place where he is meant to be lost” attracted his attention. He closed the book and let his eyes wander aimlessly across the drab coastal industrial scene passing by the train window—the flame of an oil refinery, the gigantic gas tanks, the squat but equally gigantic smokestacks shaped like long-range cannons, the line of tractor-trailers and tank trucks moving down the road. It was a scene remote from “Town of Cats,” but it had its own sense of fantasy about it, as though it were the netherworld supporting urban life from below.
Soon afterward Tengo closed his eyes and imagined Kyoko Yasuda closed up in her own “lost place,” where there were no trains or telephones or mail. During the day there was nothing but absolute loneliness, and with night came the cats’ relentless searching, the cycle repeating itself with no apparent end. Apparently, he had drifted off to sleep in his seat—not a long nap, but a deep one. He woke covered in sweat. The train was moving along the southern coastline of the Boso Peninsula in midsummer.
He left the express train in Tateyama, transferred to a local, and went as far as Chikura. Stepping from the train, he caught a whiff of the old familiar smell of the seashore. Everyone on the street was darkly tanned. He took a cab from the station to the sanatorium. At the reception desk, he gave his name and his father’s name.
The middle-aged nurse at the desk asked, “Have you by any chance notified us of your intention to visit today?” There was a hard edge to her voice. A small woman, she wore metal-frame glasses, and her short hair had a touch of gray. The ring on her stubby ring finger might have been bought as part of a matching set with the glasses. Her name tag said “Tamura.”
“No, it just occurred to me to come this morning and I hopped on a tr
ain,” Tengo answered honestly.
The nurse gave him a look of mild disgust. Then she said, “Visitors are supposed to notify us before they arrive to see a patient. We have our schedules to keep, and the wishes of the patient must also be taken into account.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“When was your last visit?”
“Two years ago.”
“Two years ago,” Nurse Tamura said as she checked the list of visitors with a ballpoint pen in hand. “You mean to say that you have not made a single visit in two years?”
“That’s right,” Tengo said.
“According to our records, you are Mr. Kawana’s only relative.”
“That is correct.”
She set the list on the desk and glanced at Tengo, but she said nothing. Her eyes were not blaming Tengo, just checking the facts. Apparently, Tengo’s case was not exceptional.
“At the moment, your father is in group rehabilitation. That will end in half an hour. You can see him then.”
“How is he doing?”
“Physically, he’s healthy. He has no special problems. It’s in the other area that he has his ups and downs,” she said, touching her temple with an index finger. “I’ll leave it to you to see what I mean about ups and downs.”
Tengo thanked her and went to pass the time in the lounge by the entrance, sitting on a sofa that smelled like an earlier era and reading more of his book. A breeze passed through now and then, carrying the scent of the sea and the cooling sound of the pine windbreak outside. Cicadas clung to the branches of the trees, screeching their hearts out. Summer was now at its height, but the cicadas seemed to know that it would not last long.
Eventually bespectacled Nurse Tamura came to tell Tengo that he could see his father now that the rehabilitation session was over.
“I’ll show you to his room,” she said. Tengo got up from the sofa and, passing by a large mirror on the wall, realized for the first time what a sloppy outfit he was wearing—a Jeff Beck Japan Tour T-shirt under a faded dungaree shirt with mismatched buttons, chinos with specks of pizza sauce near one knee, long-unwashed khaki-colored sneakers, a baseball cap: no way for a thirty-year-old son to dress on his first hospital visit to his father in two years. Nor did he have anything with him that might serve as a gift on such an occasion. He had a paperback book shoved into one pocket, nothing more. No wonder the nurse had given him that look of disgust.
As they crossed the sanatorium grounds toward the wing in which his father’s room was located, the nurse gave him a general description of the place. There were three wings divided according to the severity of the patient’s illness. Tengo’s father was now housed in the “moderate” wing. People usually started in the “mild” wing, moved to “moderate,” and then to “severe.” As with a door that opens in only one direction, backward movement was not an option. There was nowhere to go beyond the “severe” wing—other than the crematorium. The nurse did not add that remark, of course, but her meaning was clear.
His father was in a double room, but his roommate was out attending some kind of class. The sanatorium offered several rehabilitation classes—ceramics, or gardening, or exercise. Though all were supposedly for “rehabilitation,” they did not aim at “recovery.” Their purpose, rather, was to slow the advance of the disease as much as possible. Or just to kill time. Tengo’s father was seated in a chair by the open window, looking out, hands on his knees. A nearby table held a potted plant. Its flowers had several delicate, yellow petals. The floor was made of some soft material to prevent injury in case of a fall. There were two plain wood-frame beds, two writing desks, and two dressers. Next to each desk was a small bookcase, and the window curtains had yellowed from years of exposure to sunlight.
Tengo did not realize at first that the old man seated by the window was his own father. He had become a size smaller—though “shriveled up” might be more accurate. His hair was shorter and as white as a frost-covered lawn. His cheeks were sunken, which may have been why the hollows of his eyes looked much larger than they had before. Three deep creases marked his forehead. The shape of his head seemed more deformed than it had, probably because his shorter hair made it more obvious. His eyebrows were extremely long and thick, and white hair poked out from both ears. His large, pointed ears were now larger than ever and looked like bat wings. Only the shape of the nose was the same—round and pudgy, in marked contrast to the ears, and it wore a reddish black tinge. His lips drooped at both ends, seemingly ready to drool at any moment. His mouth was slightly open, revealing uneven teeth. Sitting so still at the window, his father reminded Tengo of one of van Gogh’s last self-portraits.
Although Tengo entered the room, the man did nothing but glance momentarily in his direction, after which he continued to stare outside. From a distance, he looked less like a human being than some kind of creature resembling a rat or a squirrel—a creature that might not be terribly clean but that possessed all the cunning it needed. It was, however, without a doubt, Tengo’s father—or, rather, the wreckage of Tengo’s father. The two intervening years had taken much from him physically, the way a merciless tax collector strips a poor family’s house of all its possessions. The father that Tengo remembered was a tough, hardworking man. Introspection and imagination may have been foreign qualities to him, but he had his own moral code and a simple but strong sense of purpose. He was a stoic individual; Tengo never once heard him whine or make excuses for himself. But the man Tengo saw before him now was a mere empty shell, a vacant house deprived of all warmth.
“Mr. Kawana!” the nurse said to Tengo’s father in a crisp, clear tone of voice she must have been trained to use when addressing patients. “Mr. Kawana! Look who’s here! It’s your son!”
His father turned once more in Tengo’s direction. His expressionless eyes made Tengo think of two empty swallows’ nests hanging from the eaves.
“Hello,” Tengo said.
“Mr. Kawana, your son is here from Tokyo!” the nurse said.
His father said nothing. Instead, he looked straight at Tengo as if he were reading a bulletin written in a foreign language.
“Dinner starts at six thirty,” the nurse said to Tengo. “Please feel free to stay until then.”
Tengo hesitated for a moment after the nurse was gone, and then approached his father, sitting down in the chair that faced his—a faded, cloth-covered chair, its wooden parts scarred from long use. His father’s eyes followed his movements.
“How are you?” Tengo asked.
“Fine, thank you,” his father said formally.
Tengo did not know what to say after that. Toying with the third button of his dungaree shirt, he turned his gaze toward the pine trees outside and then back again to his father.
“You have come from Tokyo, is it?” his father asked, apparently unable to remember Tengo.
“Yes, from Tokyo.”
“You must have come by express train.”
“That’s right,” Tengo said. “As far as Tateyama. There I transferred to a local for the trip here to Chikura.”
“You’ve come to swim?” his father asked.
“I’m Tengo. Tengo Kawana. Your son.”
“Where do you live in Tokyo?” his father asked.
“In Koenji. Suginami Ward.”
The three wrinkles across his father’s forehead deepened. “A lot of people tell lies because they don’t want to pay their NHK subscription fee.”
“Father!” Tengo called out to him. This was the first time he had spoken the word in a very long time. “I’m Tengo. Your son.”
“I don’t have a son,” his father declared.
“You don’t have a son,” Tengo repeated mechanically.
His father nodded.
“So, what am I?” Tengo asked.
“You’re nothing,” his father said with two short shakes of the head.
Tengo caught his breath. He could find no words. Nor did his father have any more to say. Each sat i
n silence, searching through his tangled thoughts. Only the cicadas sang without confusion, screeching at top volume.
He may be speaking the truth, Tengo felt. His memory may have been destroyed, and his mind might be sunk in mud, but the words on his lips are probably true. Tengo understood this intuitively.
“What are you talking about?” Tengo asked.
“You are nothing,” his father repeated the words, his voice devoid of emotion. “You were nothing, you are nothing, and you will be nothing.”
That’s enough, Tengo thought.
He wanted to get up out of his chair, walk to the station, and go back to Tokyo. He had heard what he needed to hear. But he could not stand up. He was like the young man who traveled to the town of cats. He had curiosity. He wanted to know what lay behind those words. He wanted a clearer answer. There was danger lurking there, of course. But if he let this opportunity escape, he would lose any chance to learn the secret about himself forever. It would sink into total chaos.
Tengo arranged and rearranged words in his head until, at last, he was ready to speak them. This was the question he had come close to asking since childhood but could never quite manage to utter.
“What you’re saying, then, is that you are not my biological father, correct? You are telling me that there is no blood connection between us, is that it?”
His father looked at him without speaking. It was impossible to tell from his expression whether he had understood the meaning of Tengo’s question.
“Stealing radio waves is an unlawful act,” his father said, looking into Tengo’s eyes. “It is no different from stealing money or valuables, don’t you think?”
“You’re probably right,” Tengo decided to agree for now.