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After ten Ushikawa realized how exhausted he was. He could barely keep his eyes
open. This was unusual, since he normally kept late hours. Usually he could stay up
as late as he needed. But tonight, sleep was bearing down on him from above, like the
stone lid of an ancient coffin.
Maybe I looked at those two moons for too long
, he thought,
absorbed too much of
their light
. Their vague afterimage remained in his eyes. Their dark silhouettes
numbed the soft part of his brain, like a bee stinging and numbing a caterpillar, then
laying eggs on the surface of its body. The bee larvae use the paralyzed caterpillar as
a convenient source of food and devour it as soon as they’re born. Ushikawa frowned
and shook this ominous image from his mind.
Fine
, he decided.
I can’t wait here forever for Tengo to get back. When he gets
back is entirely up to him, and he’ll just go to sleep as soon as he does. He doesn’t
have anywhere else to come back to besides this apartment. Most likely
.
Ushikawa listlessly tugged off his trousers and sweater and, stripped to his long-
sleeved shirt and long johns, slipped into his sleeping bag. He curled up and soon fell
asleep. It was a deep sleep, almost coma-like. As he was falling asleep he thought he
heard a knock at the door. But by then his consciousness had shifted over to another
world and he couldn’t distinguish one thing from another. When he tried, his body
creaked. So he kept his eyes shut, didn’t try to figure out what the sound could mean,
and once more sank down into the soft muddy oblivion of sleep.
It was about thirty minutes after Ushikawa fell into this deep sleep that Tengo
came back home after meeting Komatsu. He brushed his teeth, hung up his jacket—
which reeked of cigarette smoke—changed into pajamas, and went to sleep. Until a
phone call came at two a.m. telling him that his father was dead.
When Ushikawa awoke, it was past eight a.m., Monday morning, and Tengo was
already on the express train to Tateyama, fast asleep to make up for the hours he had
missed. Ushikawa sat behind his camera, waiting to catch Tengo on his way to the
cram school, but of course he never made an appearance. At one p.m. Ushikawa gave
up. He went to a nearby public phone and called the cram school to see if Tengo was
teaching his regular classes today.
“Mr. Kawana had a family emergency, so his classes are canceled for today,” the
woman on the phone said. Ushikawa thanked her and hung up.
Family emergency? The only family Tengo had was his father. His father must
have died. If that was the case, then Tengo would be leaving Tokyo again.
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