“You are such a kind person, Tengo,” Nurse Omura said as she changed an IV bag. “There’s no one else I know who comes here to read aloud to an unconscious patient.”
The praise made Tengo uncomfortable. “I just happen to have some vacation days,” he said. “But I won’t be here all that long.”
“No matter how much free time someone might have, they don’t come to a place like this because they want to,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but these are patients who will never recover. As time passes it makes people get more and more depressed.”
“My father asked me to read to him. He said he didn’t mind what I read. This was a long time ago, when he was still conscious. Besides, I don’t have anything else to do, so I might as well come here.”
“What do you read to him?”
“All kinds of things. I just pick whatever book I’m in the midst of reading, and read aloud from wherever I’ve left off.”
“What are you reading right now?”
“Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.”
The nurse shook her head. “Never heard of it.”
“It was written in 1937. Dinesen was from Denmark. She married a Swedish nobleman, moved to Africa just before the First World War, and they ran a plantation there. After she divorced him, she continued to run the plantation on her own. The book is about her experiences at the time.”
The nurse took his father’s temperature, noted it on his chart, then returned the ballpoint pen to her hair and brushed back her bangs. “I wonder if I could hear you read for a bit,” she said.
“I don’t know if you’ll like it,” Tengo said.
She sat down on a stool and crossed her legs. They were sturdy looking, fleshy, but nicely shaped. “Just go ahead and read, if you would.”
Tengo slowly began to read from where he had left off. It was the kind of passage that was best read slowly, like time flowing over the African landscape.
When in Africa in March the long rains begin after four months of hot, dry weather, the richness of growth and the freshness and fragrance everywhere are overwhelming.
But the farmer holds back his heart and dares not trust to the generosity of nature, he listens, dreading to hear a decrease in the roar of the falling rain. The water that the earth is now drinking in must bring the farm, with all the vegetable, animal and human life on it, through four rainless months to come.
It is a lovely sight when the roads of the farm have all been turned into streams of running water, and the farmer wades through the mud with a singing heart, out to the flowering and dripping coffee-fields. But it happens in the middle of the rainy season that in the evening the stars show themselves through the thinning clouds; then he stands outside his house and stares up, as if hanging himself on to the sky to milk down more rain. He cries to the sky: “Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now, and I will not let thee go except thou bless me. Drown me if you like, but kill me not with caprices. No coitus interruptus, heaven, heaven!”
“Coitus interruptus?” the nurse asked, frowning.
“She’s the kind of person who doesn’t mince words.”
“Still, it seems awfully graphic to use when you’re addressing God.”
“I’m with you on that,” Tengo said.
Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognize one another, and the things cry to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: “You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.” That bad time blessed us and went away.
“That’s a wonderful passage,” the nurse said. “I can really picture the scene. Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“You have a nice voice, too. It’s deep, and full of emotion. Very nice for reading aloud.”
“Thanks.”
The nurse sat on the stool, closed her eyes for a while, and breathed quietly, as if she were still experiencing the afterglow of the passage. Tengo could see the swell of her chest under her uniform rise and fall as she breathed. As he watched this, Tengo remembered his older girlfriend. Friday afternoons, undressing her, touching her hard nipples. Her deep sighs, her wet vagina. Outside, beyond the closed curtains, a tranquil rain was falling. She was feeling the heft of his balls in her hand. But these memories didn’t arouse him. The scenery and emotions were distant and vague, as though seen through a thin film.
Some time later the nurse opened her eyes and looked at Tengo. Her eyes seemed to read his thoughts. But she was not accusing him. A faint smile rose to her lips as she stood up and looked down at him.
“I have to be going.” She patted her hair to check that the ballpoint pen was there, spun around, and left the room.
Every evening he called Fuka-Eri. Nothing really happened today, she would tell him. The phone had rung a few times, but she followed instructions and didn’t answer. “I’m glad,” Tengo told her. “Just let it ring.”
When Tengo called her he would let it ring three times, hang up, then immediately dial again, but she didn’t always follow this arrangement. Most of the time she picked up on the first set of rings.
“We have to follow our plan,” Tengo cautioned her each time this happened.
“I know who it is. There is no need to worry,” Fuka-Eri said.
“You know it’s me calling?”
“I don’t answer the other phone calls.”
I guess that’s possible, Tengo thought. He himself could sense when a call was coming in from Komatsu. The way it rang was sort of nervous and fidgety, like someone tapping their fingers persistently on a desktop. But this was, after all, just a feeling. It wasn’t as if he knew who was on the phone.
Fuka-Eri’s days were just as monotonous as Tengo’s. She never set foot outside the apartment. There was no TV, and she didn’t read any books. She hardly ate anything, so at this point there was no need to go out shopping.
“Since I’m not moving much there’s not much need to eat,” Fuka-Eri said.
“What are you doing by yourself every day?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
She didn’t answer the question. “There’s a crow that comes, too.”
“The crow comes once every day.”
“It comes many times, not just once,” she said.
“Is it the same crow?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody else comes?”
“The N-H-K person came again.”
“Is it the same NHK person as before?”
“He says, Mr. Kawana, you’re a thief, in a loud voice.”
“You mean he yells that right outside my door?”
“So everyone else can hear him.”
Tengo pondered this for a moment. “Don’t worry about that. It has nothing to do with you, and it’s not going to cause any harm.”
“He said he knows you are hiding in here.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” Tengo said. “He can’t tell that. He’s just saying it to intimidate me. NHK people do that sometimes.”
Tengo had witnessed his father do exactly the same thing any number of times. A Sunday afternoon, his father’s voice, filled with malice, ringing out down the hallway of a public housing project. Threatening and ridiculing the resident. Tengo lightly pressed
the tips of his fingers against his temple. The memory brought with it a heavy load of other baggage.
As if sensing something from his silence, Fuka-Eri asked, “Are you okay.”
“I’m fine. Just ignore the NHK person, okay?”
“The crow said the same thing.”
“Glad to hear it,” Tengo said.
Ever since he saw two moons in the sky, and an air chrysalis materializing on his father’s bed in the sanatorium, nothing surprised Tengo very much. Fuka-Eri and the crow exchanging opinions by the windowsill wasn’t hurting anybody.
“I think I’ll be here a little longer. I can’t go back to Tokyo yet. Is that all right?”
“You should be there as long as you want to be.”
And then she hung up. Their conversation vanished in an instant, as if someone had taken a nicely sharpened hatchet to the phone line and chopped it in two.
Afterward Tengo called the publishing company where Komatsu worked. He wasn’t in. He had put in a brief appearance around one p.m. but then had left, and the person on the phone had no idea where he was or if he was coming back. This wasn’t that unusual for Komatsu. Tengo left the number for the sanatorium, saying that was where he could be found during the day, and asked that Komatsu call back. If he had left the inn’s number and Komatsu ended up calling in the middle of the night, that would be a problem.
The last time he had heard from Komatsu had been near the end of September, just a short talk on the phone. Since then Komatsu hadn’t been in touch, and neither had Tengo. For a three-week period starting at the end of August, Komatsu had disappeared. He had called the publisher with some vague excuse, claiming he was ill and needed time off to rest, but hadn’t called afterward, as if he were a missing person. Tengo was concerned, but not overly worried. Komatsu had always done his own thing. Tengo was sure that he would show up before long and saunter back into the office.
Such self-centered behavior was usually forbidden in a corporate environment. But in Komatsu’s case, one of his colleagues always smoothed things over so he didn’t get in trouble. Komatsu wasn’t the most popular man, but somehow there always seemed to be a willing person on hand, ready to clean up whatever mess he left behind. The publishing house, for its part, was willing, to a certain extent, to look the other way. Komatsu was self-centered, uncooperative, and insolent, but when it came to his job, he was capable. He had handled, on his own, the bestseller Air Chrysalis. So they weren’t about to fire him.
As Tengo had predicted, one day Komatsu simply returned, without explaining why he was away or apologizing for his absence, and came back to work. Tengo heard the news from another editor he worked with who happened to mention it.
“So how is Mr. Komatsu feeling?” Tengo asked the editor.
“He seems fine,” the man replied. “Though he seems less talkative than before.”
“Less talkative?” Tengo asked, a bit surprised.
“How should I put it—he’s less sociable than before.”
“Was he really quite sick?”
“How should I know?” the editor said, apathetically. “He says he’s fine, so I have to go with that. Now that he’s back we’ve been able to take care of the work that has been piling up. While he was away there were all sorts of things to do with Air Chrysalis that were a real pain, things I had to take care of in his absence.”
“Speaking of Air Chrysalis, are there any developments in the case of the missing author, Fuka-Eri?”
“No, no updates. No progress at all, and not any idea where the author is. Everybody is at their wits’ end.”
“I’ve been reading the newspapers but haven’t seen a single mention of it recently.”
“The media has mostly backed off the story, or maybe they’re deliberately distancing themselves from it. And the police don’t appear to be actively pursuing the case. Mr. Komatsu will know the details, so he would be the one to ask. But as I said, he has gotten a bit less talkative. Actually he’s not himself at all. He used to be brimming with confidence, but he has toned that down, and has gotten more introspective, I guess you would say, just sitting there half the time. He’s more difficult to get along with, too. Sometimes it seems like he has totally forgotten that there are other people around, like he is all by himself inside a hole.”
“Introspective,” Tengo said.
“You’ll know what I mean when you talk with him.”
Tengo had thanked him and hung up.
A few days later, in the evening, Tengo called Komatsu. He was in the office. Just like the editor had told him, the way Komatsu spoke had changed. Usually the words slipped out smoothly without a pause, but now there was awkwardness about him, as if he were preoccupied. Something must be bothering him, Tengo thought. At any rate, this was no longer the cool Komatsu he knew.
“Are you completely well now?” Tengo asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you took a long break from work because you weren’t feeling well, right?”
“That’s right,” Komatsu said, as if he had just recalled the fact. A short silence followed. “I’m fine now. I’ll tell you all about it sometime, before long. I can’t really explain it at this point.”
Sometime, before long. Tengo mulled over the words. There was something odd about the sound of Komatsu’s voice. The sense of distance that you would normally expect was missing, and his words were flat, without any depth.
Tengo found an appropriate point in the conversation to say good-bye, and hung up. He decided not to bring up Air Chrysalis or Fuka-Eri. Something in Komatsu’s tone indicated he was trying to avoid these topics. Had Komatsu ever had trouble discussing anything before?
This phone call, at the end of September, was the last time he had spoken to Komatsu. More than two months had passed since then. Komatsu usually loved to have long talks on the phone. Tengo was, as it were, the wall against which Komatsu hit a tennis ball. Maybe he was going through a period when he just didn’t want to talk to anyone, Tengo surmised. Everybody has times like that, even somebody like Komatsu. And Tengo, for his part, didn’t have anything pressing he had to discuss with him. Air Chrysalis had stopped selling and had practically vanished from the public eye, and Tengo knew exactly where the missing Fuka-Eri happened to be. If Komatsu had something he needed to discuss, then he would surely call. No calls simply meant he didn’t have anything to talk about.
But Tengo was thinking that it was getting about time to call him. I’ll tell you all about it sometime, before long. Komatsu’s words had stuck with him, oddly enough, and he couldn’t shake them.
Tengo called his friend who was subbing for him at the cram school, to see how things were going.
“Everything’s fine,” his friend replied. “How is your father doing?”
“He has been in a coma the whole time,” Tengo explained. “He’s breathing, and his temperature and blood pressure are low but stable. But he’s unconscious. I don’t think he’s in any pain. It’s like he has gone over completely to the dream world.”
“Not such a bad way to go,” his friend said, without much emotion. What he was trying to say was This might sound a little insensitive, but depending on how you look at it, that’s not such a bad way to die. But he had left out such prefatory remarks. If you study for a few years in a mathematics department, you get used to that kind of abbreviated conversation.
“Have you looked at the moon recently?” Tengo suddenly asked. This friend was probably the only person he knew who wouldn’t find it suspicious to be asked, out of the blue, about the moon.
His friend gave it some thought. “Now that you mention it, I don’t recall looking at the moon recently. What’s going on with the moon?”
“When you have a chance, would you look at it for me? And tell me what you think.”
“What I think? From what standpoint?”
“Any standpoint at all. I would just like to hear what you think when you see the moon.”
A short pause.
“It might be hard to find the right way to express what I think about it.”
“No, don’t worry about expression. What’s important are the most obvious characteristics.”
“You want me to look at the moon and tell you what I think are the most obvious characteristics?”
“That’s right,” Tengo replied. “If nothing strikes you, then that’s fine.”
“It’s overcast today, so I don’t think you can see the moon, but when it clears up I’ll take a look. If I remember.”
Tengo thanked him and hung up. If he remembers. This was one of the problems with math department graduates. When it came to areas they weren’t interested in, their memory was surprisingly short-lived.
When visiting hours were over and Tengo was leaving the sanatorium he said good-bye to Nurse Tamura, the nurse at the reception desk. “Thank you. Good night,” he said.
“How many more days will you be here?” she asked, pressing the bridge of her glasses on her nose. She seemed to have finished her shift, because she had changed from her uniform into a pleated dark purple skirt, a white blouse, and a gray cardigan.