373
me. But in any case she left you. And me, too, an infant. Maybe you decided to raise
me because you figured she would come back to you if you had me with you. But she
never came back—to you or to me. That must have been hard on you, like living in an
empty town. Still, you raised me in that empty town—as if to fill in the vacuum.”
His father’s expression did not change. Tengo could not tell whether he was
understanding—or even hearing—what he was saying.
“My assumption
may be wrong, and that might be all for the better. For both of us.
But thinking about it that way helps all kinds of things to fit together nicely inside me,
and my doubts are more or less resolved.”
A pack of crows cut across the sky, cawing. Tengo looked at his watch. It was time
for him to leave. He stood up, went over to his father, and put his hand on his
shoulder.
“Good-bye, Father. I’ll come again soon.”
Grasping the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see
a single tear running down from his father’s eye. It shone a dull silver color under the
ceiling’s fluorescent light. To release that tear, his father must have squeezed every
bit of strength from what little emotion he still had left.
The tear crept slowly down
his father’s cheek and fell onto his lap. Tengo opened the door and left the room. He
took the cab to the station and boarded the train that had brought him here.
The Tokyo-bound express train from Tateyama was more crowded and noisy than the
outbound train had been. Most of the passengers were families returning from a stay
at the beach. Looking at them, Tengo thought about being in elementary school. He
had never once experienced such a family outing or trip. During the Bon Festival, or
New Year’s, his father would do nothing but stretch out at home and sleep, looking
like some kind of grubby machine with the electricity switched off.
Taking his seat, he thought he might read the rest of his paperback, until he
realized he had left it in his father’s room. He sighed but then realized on second
thought that this was probably just as well. Anything he
might read now would
probably not register with him. And “Town of Cats” was a story that belonged more
in his father’s room than in Tengo’s possession.
The scenery moved past the window in the opposite order: the dark, deserted strip
of coastline pressed in upon by mountains eventually gave way to the more open
coastal industrial zone. Most of the factories were still operating even though it was
nighttime. A forest of smokestacks towered in the darkness, spitting fire like snakes
sticking out their long tongues. Big trucks’ strong headlights flooded the roadway.
The ocean beyond looked like thick, black mud.
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time he arrived home. His mailbox was empty.
Opening his apartment door, he found the place looking even emptier than usual, the
same vacuum he had left behind that morning. The shirt he had
thrown on the floor,
the switched-off word processor, the swivel chair with the indentation his weight had
left in the seat, the eraser crumbs scattered over his desk. He drank two glasses of
water, undressed, and crawled straight into bed. Sleep came over him immediately—a
deep sleep such as he had not had lately.
374
When he woke up after eight o’clock the next morning, Tengo realized that he was a
brand-new person. Waking up felt good. The muscles of his arms and legs felt free of
all stiffness and ready to deal with any wholesome stimulus. His physical weariness
was gone. He had that feeling he remembered from childhood when he opened a new
textbook at the
beginning of the term, ignorant of its contents but sensing the new
knowledge to come. He went into the bathroom and shaved. Drying his face and
slapping on aftershave lotion, he studied himself in the mirror, confirming that he
was, indeed, a new person.
Yesterday’s events all seemed as if they had happened in a dream, not in reality.
While everything was quite vivid, he noticed touches of unreality around the edges.
He had boarded a train, visited the “Town of Cats,” and come back. Fortunately,
unlike the hero of the story, he had managed to board the train for the return trip. And
his experiences in that town had changed Tengo profoundly.
Of course, nothing at all had changed about the actual situation
in which he found
himself, compelled to walk on dangerous, enigmatic ground. Things had developed in
totally unforeseen ways, and he had no idea what was going to happen to him next.
Still, Tengo had a strong sense that somehow he would be able to overcome the
danger.
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