A Wild Sheep Chase

The Strange Man’s Strange Tale

The black-suited secretary took his chair and looked at me without saying a word. He didn’t seem to be sizing me up, nor did his eyes betray any disdain, nor was his a pointed stare to bore right through me. Neither cool nor hot, not even in the mid-range. That gaze held no hint of any emotion known to me. The man was simply looking at me. He might have been looking at the wall behind me, but as I was situated in front of it, the end result was that the man was looking at me.

The man picked up the cigarette case from the table, opened the lid and withdrew a plain-cut cigarette, flicked the tip a few times with his fingernail, lit up with the tabletop lighter, and blew out the smoke at an oblique angle. Then he returned the lighter to the table and crossed his legs. His gaze did not waver one blink the whole time.

This was the same man my partner had told me about. He was overdressed, his fingers overly graceful. If not for the sharp curve of his eyelids and the glass-bead chill of his pupils, I would surely have thought him homosexual. Not with those eyes, though. So what did he look like? He didn’t resemble any sort, anything.

If you took a good look at his eyes, they were an arresting color. Dark brown with the faintest touch of blue, the hue of the left eye, moreover, different from the right. Each seemed to focus on a wholly different subject.

His fingers pursued scant movements on his lap. Hauntingly, as if separated from his hand, they moved toward me. Tense, compelling, nerve-racking, beautiful fingers. Slowly reaching across the table to crush out the cigarette not one-third smoked. I watched the ice melt in the glass, clear ice water mixing with the grape juice. An unequally variegated mix.

The room was utterly silent. Now there is the silence you encounter on entering a grand manor. And there is the silence that comes of too few people in too big a space. But this was a different quality of silence altogether. A ponderous, oppressive silence. A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient. A silence pregnant with the presentiment of death. The air faintly musty and ominous.

“Everyone dies,” said the man softly with downcast eyes. He seemed to have an uncanny purchase on the drift of my thoughts. “All of us, whosoever, must die sometime.”

Having said that, the man fell again into a weighty silence. There was only the frantic buzzing of the cicadas outdoors. Bodies scraping out their last dying fury against the ending season.

“Let me be as frank as possible with you,” the man spoke up. His speech had the ring of a direct translation from a formulaic text. His choice of phrase and grammar was correct enough, but there was no feeling in his words.

“Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously. Therefore, should I impart you with no truth at this juncture, that is through no fault of mine. Nor yours.”

How was one to respond to this? He acknowledged my silence and continued to speak.

“You’re probably wondering why I called you all this way here. It was to set the ship in forward motion. You and I shall move it forward. By discussing matters in all honesty, we shall proceed one step at a time closer to the truth.” At that point, he coughed and glanced over at his hand resting on the arm of the sofa. “But enough of these abstractions, let us begin with real concerns. The issue here is the newsletter you produced. I believe you have been told this much.”

“I have.”

The man nodded. Then after a moment’s pause, continued, “I’m sure all this came as quite a surprise to you. Anyone would be unhappy about having the product of his hard labors destroyed. All the more if it’s a vital link in his livelihood. It may mean a very real loss of no mean size. Isn’t that right?”

“That it is,” I said.

“I would like to have you tell me about such real losses.”

“In our line of work, real losses are part of business. It’s not like clients never suddenly reject what’s been produced. But for a small operation like ours, it can be a threat to our existence. So in order to prevent that, we honor the client’s views one hundred percent. In extreme cases, this means checking through an entire bulletin line by line together with the client. That way we avoid all risks. It’s not easy work, but that’s the lot of the lone wolf.”

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” sympathized the man. “Be that as it may, am I to interpret from what you say that your company has incurred a severe financial setback as a result of the cessation of your bulletin?”

“Yes, I guess you could say that. It was already printed and bound, so we have to pay for the paper and printing within the month. There’re also writers’ fees for articles we farmed out. In monetary terms that comes to about five million yen, and we had planned to use it to pay off our debt. We borrowed money to invest in our facilities a year ago.”

“I know,” said the man.

“Then there is the question of our ongoing contract with the client. Our position is very weak, and once there’s been trouble with an advertising agency, clients avoid you. We were under a one-year contract with the life insurance company, and if that’s scrapped because of this, then effectively our company is sunk. We’re small and without connections, but we’ve got a good reputation that’s spread by word of mouth. If one bad word gets out, we’re done for.”

Even after I’d finished, the man stared at me without comment. Then he spoke up. “You speak most honestly. Moreover, what you tell me conforms to our investigations. I commend you on that. What if I had them offer you unconditional payment for those canceled insurance company bulletins and suggest to them that they continue your present contract?”

“There would be nothing more to tell. We’d go back to our boring everyday affairs, left wondering what this was all about.”

“And with a premium on top of that? I have but to write one word on the back of a name card and you would have your work cut out for you for the next ten years. And none of those measly handbills either.”

“A deal, in other words.”

“A friendly transaction. I out of my own goodwill have done your partner the favor of informing him that the P.R. bulletin has ceased publication. And should you show me your goodwill, I would favor you with a further display of goodwill. Do you think you could do that? My favor could prove quite beneficial. Certainly you don’t expect to go on working with a dull-witted alcoholic forever.”

“We’re friends,” I said.

There ensued a brief silence, a pebble sent plunging down a fathomless well. It took thirty seconds for the pebble to hit bottom.

“As you wish,” said the man. “That is your affair. I went over your vita in some detail. You have an interesting history. Now people can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the latter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

The man nodded. I drank half the watered-down grape juice.

“Very well, then, let us proceed to particulars,” said the man. “Particulars about sheep.”

The man changed positions to pull a large black-and-white photograph out of an envelope, setting it on the table before me. The slightest breath of reality seemed to filter into the room.

“This is the photograph you used in your bulletin.”

For a direct blowup of the photograph without using the negative, the image was surprisingly clear. Probably some special technology.

“As far as we know, the photo is one you personally came upon and then used in the bulletin. Is that not so?”

“That is correct.”

“According to our investigations, the photograph was taken within the last six months by a total amateur. The camera, a cheap pocket-size model. It was not you who took the photograph. You have a Nikon SLR and take better pictures. And you haven’t been to Hokkaido in the past five years. Correct?”

“You tell me,” I said.

The man cleared his throat, then fell silent. This was a definitive silence, one you could judge the qualities of other silences by. “Anyway, what we want is a few pieces of information: namely, where and from whom did you receive that photograph, and what was your intention in using such a poor image in that bulletin?”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,” I tossed out the words with a cool that impressed even myself. “Journalists rightfully do not reveal their sources.”

The man stared me in the eyes and stroked his lips with the middle finger of his right hand. Several passes, then he returned his hand to his lap. The silence continued for a while. I couldn’t help thinking what perfect timing it would be if at that instant a cuckoo started to sing. But, of course, no cuckoo was to be heard. Cuckoos don’t sing in the evenings.

“You are a fine one,” said the man. “You know, if I felt like it, I could stop all work from coming your way. That would put an end to your claims of journalism. Supposing, of course, that your miserable pamphlets and handbills qualify as journalism.”

I thought it over. Why is it that cuckoos don’t sing at nightfall?

“What’s more, there are ways to make people like you talk.”

“I suppose there are,” I said, “but they take time and I wouldn’t talk until the last minute. Even if I did talk, I wouldn’t spill everything. You’d have no way of knowing how much is everything. Or am I mistaken?”

Everything was a bluff, but it made sense the way things were going. The uncertainty of the silence that followed showed I had earned myself a few points.

“It is most amusing talking with you,” said the man. “Your dreamer’s scenario is delightfully pathetic. Ah well, let us talk about something else.”

The man pulled a magnifying glass out of his pocket and set it on the table.

“Please examine the photograph as much as you care to.”

I picked up the photo with my left hand and the magnifying glass with my right, and inspected the photo methodically. Some sheep were facing this way, some were facing in other directions, some were absorbed in eating grass. A scene that suggested a dull class reunion. I spot-checked each sheep one by one, looked at the lay of the grass, at the birch wood in the background, the mountains behind that, the wispy clouds in the sky. There was not one thing unusual. I looked up from the photo and magnifying glass.

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“Not at all,” I said.

The man showed no visible sign of disappointment.

“I seem to recall that you majored in biology at university,” the man said. “How much do you know about sheep?”

“Practically nothing. I did mostly useless specialist stuff.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“A cloven-hoofed, herbivorous social animal. Introduced to Japan in the early Meiji era, I believe. Used as a source of wool and meat. That’s about it.”

“Very good,” said the man. “Although I should like to make one small correction: sheep were not introduced to Japan in the early Meiji era, but during the Ansei reign. Prior to that, however, it is as you say: there were no sheep in Japan. True, there is some argument that they were brought over from China during the Heian period, but even if that were the case, they had long since died off in the interim. So up until Meiji, few Japanese had ever seen a sheep or understood what one was. In spite of its relatively popular standing as one of the twelve zodiacal animals of the ancient Chinese calendar, nobody knew with any accuracy what kind of animal it was. That is to say, it might as well have been an imaginary creature on the order of a dragon or phoenix. In fact, pictures of sheep drawn by pre-Meiji Japanese look like wholly fabricated monstrosities. One might say they had about as much knowledge of their subject as H. G. Wells had about Martians.

“Even today, Japanese know precious little about sheep. Which is to say that sheep as an animal have no historical connection with the daily life of the Japanese. Sheep were imported at the state level from America, raised briefly, then promptly ignored. That’s your sheep. After the war, when importation of wool and mutton from Australia and New Zealand was liberalized, the merits of sheep raising in Japan plummeted to zero. A tragic animal, do you not think? Here, then, is the very image of modern Japan.

“But of course I do not mean to lecture you on the vainglory of modern Japan. The points I wish to impress upon you are two: one, that prior to the end of the late feudal period there probably was not one sheep in all of Japan; and two, that once imported, sheep were subjected to rigorous government checks. And what do these two things mean?”

The question wasn’t rhetorical; it was addressed to me. “That every variety of sheep in Japan is fully accounted for,” I stated.

“Precisely. To which I might add that breeding is as much a point with sheep as it is with racehorses, making it a simple matter to trace their genealogy several generations. In other words, here we have a thoroughly regulated animal. Crossbreeding with other strains can be easily checked. There is no smuggling. No one is curious enough to go to all the trouble to import sheep. By way of varieties, there are in Japan the Southdown, Spanish Merino, Cotswold, Chinese, Shropshire, Corriedale, Cheviot, Romanovsky, Ostofresian, Border Leicester, Romney Marsh, Lincoln, Dorset Horn, Suffolk, and that’s about all. With this in mind,” said the man, “I would like to have you take another look at the photograph.”

Once again I took photo and magnifying glass in my hands.

“Be sure to look carefully at the third sheep from the right in the front row.”

I brought the magnifying glass to bear upon the third sheep from the right in the front row. A quick look at the sheep next to it, then back to the third sheep from the right.

“And what can you tell now?” asked the man.

“It’s a different breed, isn’t it?” I said.

“That it is. Aside from that particular sheep, all the others are ordinary Suffolks. Only that one sheep differs. It is far more stocky than the Suffolk, and the fleece is of another color. Nor is the face black. Something about it strikes one as howsoever more powerful. I showed this photograph to a sheep specialist, and he concluded that this sheep did not exist in Japan. Nor probably anywhere else in the world. So what you are looking at now is a sheep that by all rights should not exist.”

I grabbed the magnifying glass and looked once more at the third sheep from the right. On close examination, there, in the middle of its back, appeared to be a light coffee stain of a mark. Hazy and indistinct, it could have been a scratch on the film. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks again. Or maybe somebody actually did spill coffee on that sheep’s back.

“There’s this faint stain on its back.”

“That is no stain,” said the man. “That is a star-shaped birthmark. Compare it with this.”

The man pulled a single-page photocopy out of the envelope and handed it over directly to me. It was a copy of a picture of a sheep. Drawn apparently in heavy pencil, with black finger smudges all over the rest of the page. Infantile, yet there was something about it that commanded your attention. The details were drawn with great care. Moreover, the sheep in the photograph and the sheep in the drawing were without a doubt the same sheep. The star-shaped birthmark was the stain.

“Now look at this,” said the man, taking a lighter from his pocket and handing it to me. It was a specially made, heavy, solid silver Dupont, engraved with the same sheep emblem I’d seen in the limo. Sure enough, the star-shaped birthmark was there on the sheep’s back, plain as day.

My head began to ache.

The Strange Man’s Strange Tale Goes On

“Just a while ago, I made reference to mediocrity,” said the man. “This was by no means a criticism of you. Or to put it more simply, it is because the world itself is so mediocre that you are mediocre as such. Do you not agree?”

“Excuse me?”

“The world is mediocre. About that there is no mistake. Well then, has the world been mediocre since time immemorial? No. In the beginning, the world was chaos, and chaos is not mediocre. The mediocratization began when people separated the means of production from daily life. For when Karl Marx posited the proletariat, he thereby cemented their mediocrity. And precisely because of this, Stalinism forms a direct link with Marxism. I affirm Marx. He was one of those rare geniuses whose memory extended back to primal chaos. And by the same token, I have high regard for Dostoyevsky. Nonetheless, I do not hold with Marxism. It is far too mediocre.”

The man forced back a low sound in the back of his throat.

“I am, right now, speaking with extreme honesty. I mean this as a gesture of gratitude for your previous honesty. Furthermore, I will agree to clarify whatever so-called honest doubts you might have. But know that by the time I am through talking, the options left open to you will have become extremely limited. Please understand this in advance. Quite simply, you are raising the stakes. Are we agreed?”

“What choice have I?” I said.

“Right now, an old man lies dying within this estate,” he began. “The cause is clear. It is a giant blood cyst in his brain. A cyst big enough to distort the very shape of his brain. How much do you know about neurology?”

“Next to nothing.”

“To put it simply then, it is a blood bomb. A blockage of circulation causing an irregular swelling. Like a snake that has swallowed a golf ball. If it explodes, the brain will cease to function. Yet an operation is out of the question. The slightest stimulus might cause it to explode. Realistically speaking, we can only wait and watch him die. He might die in another week, or it might be another month. No one can say.”

The man pursed his lips and let out a slow breath.

“There is nothing odd about him dying. He is an old man, his ailment pinpointed. What is odd is that he has lived this long.”

I hadn’t the foggiest notion what he was trying to say.

“The fact is, there would have been nothing amiss had he died thirty-two years ago,” the man continued. “Or even forty-two years ago. That blood cyst was first discovered by U.S. Army doctors conducting health examinations on Class A war criminals. This was back in the autumn of 1946, before the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The doctor who discovered it was rather alarmed when he saw the X rays. To have such an enormous cyst in one’s brain and still be alive—and more active than the average person at that—challenged all medical common sense. He was transferred from Sugamo to the then-army hospital, St. Luke’s, for special tests.

“The tests went on for a year, though ultimately they learned nothing. Only that his death would come as no surprise to anyone, since the fact that he was alive at all was a total mystery. Still he showed no signs of disability thereafter; he kept on living with singular vitality. All brain activities were, moreover, exceedingly normal. They were at a loss for explanations. A dead end. Here was a man who theoretically should have been dead, yet was alive and walking about.

“Certainly they shed light on a number of specific symptoms. He had three-day headaches that came and went on a forty-day cycle. By his own account, these headaches began in 1936, which they conjectured was around the time his blood cyst first appeared. His headaches were so intolerable that he required painkillers. In short, narcotics. The narcotics eased the pain all right, but they also resulted in hallucinations. Highly compressed hallucinations. Only he himself knows what exactly he experienced, but it seems they were far from pleasant. The U.S. Army still retains the detailed accounts of these hallucinatory experiences. The doctors apparently made meticulous observations. I obtained these by special means and have read them through several times, and in spite of their clinical language they describe a rather grueling series of events. I doubt there are many who could take such regular punishment as those hallucinatory experiences.

“No one has any idea why these hallucinations occurred. Perhaps the cyst gave off some periodic energy and the headaches were the body’s reaction. So that when that reactive buffer was removed, the energy directly stimulated specific parts of the brain, resulting in hallucinations. Of course, this is only one hypothesis, but it is a hypothesis that interested the Americans. Enough that they initiated thorough tests. Top-secret tests by Intelligence. Even now it is not clear why American Intelligence should have jumped into investigations of one man’s blood cyst; however, we can imagine several possibilities.

“As the first possibility, might they not have conducted certain more delicate interrogations under the cover of medical tests? To wit, the securing of spying routes and opium routes on the Chinese mainland. Remember, Chiang Kai-shek’s eventual defeat meant the loss of the Chinese connection for the U.S. But needless to say, these inquiries could not be made public. In fact, after this series of tests, the Boss was released without having to stand trial. It is conceivable that an arrangement was made behind the scenes. An exchange of information for freedom, shall we say.

“The second possibility was to lay bare an interrelationship between his marked eccentricity as the leader of the right wing and the blood cyst. I will go more into this with you later, but it is a more bemusing turn of thought. Though I doubt they ever learned anything. Did they really imagine they could uncover something of that order when the more basic fact of his living remained a mystery? Short of an autopsy, there was no way they would find anything out. Here, then, another dead end.

“The third possibility concerns brainwashing. The idea being that, perhaps, by sending one predetermined set of stimulus waves into the brain they might elicit a particular reaction. They were doing that kind of experimentation in those days. It has come to light that there was, in fact, such a brainwashing research group at the time.

“It is not clear which of these three lines of thought represented the main Intelligence directive. Nor is it clear whether their efforts, shall we call them, bore any fruit. Everything is buried in history. The only ones who know the facts are a handful of the U.S. Army elite at the time and the Boss himself. So far, the Boss has never spoken a word about this to anyone, myself included, and it is doubtful he ever will.”

When he finished talking, the man cleared his throat. I had lost all track of how much time had passed since entering the room.

“In the winter of 1932, the Boss was imprisoned on charges of complicity in a plot to assassinate a key figure. His imprisonment lasted until June 1936. The official prison records and medical register still exist, and he on occasion has touched upon the subject. These glimpses tell us this: that for virtually the entire length of his stay in prison, the Boss suffered from severe insomnia. Or perhaps it was more than simple insomnia. This was insomnia raised to an exceedingly dangerous level. For three days, four days at a time, sometimes close to a week, he would not close his eyes once. In those days, the police forced confessions out of political criminals by depriving them of sleep. So the Boss must have undergone especially punishing interrogations, implicated as he was with the resistance to the Imperial rule and the controlling faction. If the prisoner tried to sleep, they would throw water on him or beat him with bamboo sticks or shine strong lights on him, anything to dash the sleeping patterns to pieces. Most humans break down if such a regimen is kept up for several months. Their sleeping mind is effectively destroyed. They die or they go crazy or they become extreme insomniacs. The Boss went the last route. It was the spring of 1936 before he had completely recovered from his insomnia. That is, around the same time as the blood cyst appeared. What do you make of that?”

“Extreme lack of sleep for some reason disrupted the flow of blood in his brain, thereby creating the cyst, is that it?”

“That would seem the most plausible, commonsense hypothesis. And since a nonprofessional can think that far, you can be sure that it occurred to the U.S. Army doctors as well. Still, that explanation alone is not quite adequate. There is something missing here. I cannot help thinking that the phenomenon of the blood cyst was the secondary manifestation of a more significant factor. Consider, for example, that among the several other people known to have had such blood cysts, not one displayed the same symptoms. Nor, furthermore, does the explanation offer sufficient reason why the Boss went on living.”

Undoubtedly, there was a logic to what the man was saying.

“One more curious fact about the blood cyst. Starting from the spring of 1936, the Boss was proverbially born again, a new man. Up to that point the Boss had been, in a word, a mediocre right-wing activist. Born the third son of a poor farming household in Hokkaido, he left home when he was twelve and went to Korea, but he found no place there either so he returned to his homeland and joined a right-wing group. An angry young man, it seems, who was forever brandishing his samurai sword. Very probably he could barely read. Yet by the summer of 1936, when he was released from prison, he had risen to the top, in every sense of the word, of the right wing. He had charisma, a solid ideology, powers of speech making to command a passionate response, political savvy, decisiveness, and above all the ability to steer society by using the weaknesses of the masses for leverage.”

The man took a breath and cleared his throat again.

“Of course, as a right-wing thinker his theories and conception of the world were rather silly. Still, that scarcely mattered. The real question was how far he could organize his ranks behind them. Look at the way that Hitler took half-baked notions of lebensraum and racial superiority and organized them on the national level. The Boss, however, did not take that path. The path he chose was more covert—a shadow path. Never out in the open, his was to be a presence that manipulated society from behind the scenes. And for that reason, in 1937 he headed over to the Chinese mainland. But even so—well, let us leave it at that. To return to the cyst, what I mean to say is that the period in which the cyst appeared coincided precisely with the period in which he underwent a miraculous self-transformation.”

“In your hypothesis,” I said, “there was no causal relationship between the cyst and the self-transformation; instead the two were governed in parallel by some mysterious overriding factor.”

“You catch on quickly,” said the man. “Precise and to the point.”

“So when does the sheep appear in your story?”

The man removed a second cigarette from the tabletop case and flicked it with his fingernail before putting it to his lips. He did not light it. “Let us take things in order,” he said.

A weighty silence ensued.

“We built a kingdom,” the man began again. “A powerful underground kingdom. We pulled everything into the picture. Politics, finance, mass communications, the bureaucracy, culture, all sorts of things you would never dream of. We even subsumed elements that were hostile to us. From the establishment to the anti-establishment, everything. Very few if any of them even noticed they had been co-opted. In other words, we had ourselves a tremendously sophisticated organization. All of which the Boss built single-handedly after the war. It is as if the Boss commandeered the hull of a giant ship of state. If he pulls out the plug, the ship goes down. Passengers and all, lost at sea, and surely before anyone becomes aware of that fact.”

At that the man lit his cigarette.

“Nonetheless, this organization has its limits. Namely, the king’s death. When the king dies, the kingdom crumbles. The kingdom, you see, was built and maintained on this one man’s genius. Which in my estimation is to say it was built and sustained by that mysterious factor. If the Boss dies, it means the end of everything, inasmuch as our organization was not a bureaucracy, but a perfectly tuned machine with one mind at its apex. Herein is the strength and weakness of our organization. Or rather, was. The death of the Boss will sooner or later bring a splintering of the organization, and like a Valhalla consumed by flames, it will plunge into a sea of mediocrity. There is no one to take over after the Boss. The organization will fall apart—a magnificent palace razed to make way for a public housing complex. A world of uniformity and certainty. Though perhaps you would think it fitting and proper. Fair allotment and all that. But think about it. The whole of Japan, leveled of mountains, coastlines or lakes, sprawling with uniform rows of public housing. Would that be the right thing?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know if the question itself makes sense.”

“An intelligent answer,” said the man, folding his fingers together on his lap. The tips of the fingers tapped out a slow rhythm. “All this talk of public housing is, as you know, merely for the sake of argument. More precisely, our organization can be divided into two elements. The part that moves ahead and the part that drives it ahead. Naturally, there are other parts managing other functions. Still, roughly divided, our organization is made up of these two parts. The other parts hardly amount to anything. The part at the forefront is the Will, and the part that backs up the forefront is the Gains. When people talk about the Boss, they make an issue only out of his Gains. And after the Boss dies, it will be only his Gains that people will clamor for a share of. Nobody wants the Will, because no one understands it. Herein we see the true meaning of what can and cannot be shared. The Will cannot be shared. It is either passed on in toto, or lost in toto.”

The man’s fingers kept drumming out that same slow rhythm on his lap. Other than that, everything about him had remained unchanged from the beginning. Same stare, same cold pupils, same smooth, expressionless face. That face had stayed turned toward me at the exact same angle the whole time.

“What is this Will?” I asked.

“A concept that governs time, governs space, and governs possibility.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Of course. Few can. Only the Boss had a virtually instinctual understanding of it. One might even go so far as to say he negated self-cognition, thereupon realizing in its place something entirely revolutionary. To put it in simple terms for you, his was a revolution of labor incorporating capital and capital incorporating labor.”

“A fantasy.”

“Quite the contrary. It is cognition that is the fantasy.” The man paused. “Granted, everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will the Boss possesses. My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”

All of a sudden the room grew cold, and I had the inexplicable feeling that a nice warm bed had been readied for me there off to one side. Someone was beckoning me under the covers.

An illusion, of course. It was still September. Outside, countless thousands of cicadas were screeching away.

“The expansion of consciousness your generation underwent or at least sought to undergo at the end of the sixties ended in complete and utter failure because it was still rooted in the individual. That is, the attempt to expand consciousness alone, without any quantitative or qualitative change in the individual, was ultimately doomed. This is what I mean by mediocrity. How can I make you understand this? Not that I particularly expect you to understand. I am merely endeavoring to speak honestly.

“About that picture I handed you earlier,” said the man. “It is a copy of a picture from the U.S. Army hospital medical records. It is dated July 27, 1946. The picture was drawn by the Boss himself at the request of the doctors. As one link in the process of documenting his hallucinatory experiences. In fact, according to the medical records, this sheep appeared with remarkably high frequency in the Boss’s hallucinations. To put it in numerical terms, sheep figured in approximately eighty percent of his hallucinations, or in four out of five hallucinations. And not just any sheep. It was this chestnut-colored sheep with the star on its back.

“So it was that the Boss came to use this sheep, that is engraved on the lighter, as his own personal crest from 1936 on. I believe you will have noticed that this sheep is one and the same as the sheep in the medical records. Which is again the same as the one in your photograph. Most curious, do you not think?”

“Mere coincidence,” I tossed out. I had meant to sound cool, but it didn’t quite come off.

“There is more,” the man continued. “The Boss was an avid collector of all available reference materials on sheep, domestic and foreign. Once a week he reviewed at length clippings concerning sheep gleaned from every newspaper and magazine published that week in Japan. I always lent him a hand in this. The Boss was emphatic about his sheep clippings. It was as if he were looking for some one thing. And ever since the Boss took ill, I’ve continued this effort on a personal level. I have actually taken an interest in this pursuit. Who knows what might come to light? That is how you came into the picture. You and your sheep. Any way one looks at it, this is no coincidence.”

I balanced the lighter in my hand. It had an excellent feel to it. Not too heavy, not too light. To think that there was such perfect heft in the world.

“And why do you suppose the Boss was so intent on finding that sheep? Any ideas?”

“None whatsoever,” I said. “It would be quicker to ask the Boss.”

“If I could ask him, I would. The Boss has been in a coma for two weeks now. Very probably he will never regain consciousness. And if the Boss dies, the mystery of the sheep with the star on its back will be buried with him forever. I, for one, am not about to stand by and let that happen. Not for reasons of my own personal loss, but for the greater good of all.”

I cocked open the lid of the lighter, struck the flint to light the flame, then closed the lid.

“I am sure you think that all I am saying is a load of nonsense. And perhaps it is. It might well turn out to be total nonsense. But just consider, this may be the sum total of all that is left to us. The Boss will die. That one Will shall die. Then everything around that Will shall perish. All that shall remain will be what can be counted in numbers. Nothing else will be left. That is why I want to find that sheep.”

He closed his eyes a few seconds for the first time, saying nothing for a moment. Then: “If I might offer my hypothesis—a hypothesis and nothing more, forget I ever said a thing if it does nothing for you—I cannot help but feel that our sheep here formed the basic mold of the Boss’s Will.”

“Sounds like animal crackers,” I said.

The man ignored my comment.

“Very probably the sheep found its way into the Boss. That would have been in 1936. And for the next forty years or so, the sheep remained lodged in the Boss. There inside, it must have found a pasture, a birch forest. Like the one in that photograph. What think you?”

“An extremely interesting hypothesis,” I said.

“It is a special sheep. A v-e-r-y special sheep. I want to find it and for that I will need your help.”

“And what do you plan to do with it once you find it?”

“Nothing at all. There is probably nothing I could do. The scale of things is far too vast for me to do much of anything. My only wish is to see it all out at last with my own eyes. And if that sheep should wish anything, I shall do all in my power to comply. Once the Boss dies, my life will have lost almost all meaning anyway.”

At that he fell silent. I too was silent. Only the cicadas kept at it. They and the trees in the garden rustling their leaves in the near-dusk breeze. The house itself was agonizingly quiet. As if spores of death were drifting about in some unpreventable contagion. I tried to picture the pasture in the Boss’s head. A pasture forlorn and forsaken, the grass withered, the sheep all gone.

“I will ask you one more time: tell me by what route you obtained the photograph,” the man said.

“I cannot say,” I said.

The man heaved a sigh. “I have attempted to talk to you honestly. Therefore I had hoped that you would talk to me honestly as well.”

“I am not in a position to talk. If I were to talk, it might pose problems for the person who provided it.”

“Which is to say,” interposed the man, “that you have some reasonable grounds to believe that some problems might come to this person in connection with the sheep.”

“No grounds whatsoever. I’m playing my hunches. There’s got to be a catch. I’ve felt that the whole time I’ve been talking to you. Like there’s a hook somewhere. Call it sixth sense.”

“And therefore you cannot speak.”

“Correct,” I said. Giving the situation further thought, I went on: “I’m something of an authority on troublemaking. I can claim to be second to none in the ways and means of creating problems for others. I live my life trying my best to avoid things ever coming to that. Which ultimately only creates more problems. It’s all the same. That’s the way things go down. Yet, no matter that I know it’s all the same, it doesn’t change anything. Nothing gets that way from the start. It’s only a pretext.”

“I am not sure I follow you.”

“What I am saying is, mediocrity takes many forms.”

I put a cigarette to my lips, lit it with the lighter in my hand, and took a puff. I felt ever so slightly more at ease.

“You do not have to speak if you do not want to,” said the man. “Instead, I will send you out in search of the sheep. These are our final terms. If within two months from now you succeed in finding the sheep, we are prepared to reward you however you would care to request. But if you should fail to find it, it will be the end of you and your company. Agreed?”

“Do I have any choice?” I asked. “And what if no such sheep with a star on its back ever existed in the first place?”

“It is still the same. For you and for me, there is only whether you find the sheep or not. There are no in-betweens. I am sorry to have to put it this way, but as I have already said, we are taking you up on your proposition. You hold the ball, you had better run for the goal. Even if there turns out not to have been any goal.”

“So that’s how it stands?”

The man took a fat envelope out of his pocket and placed it before me. “Use this for expenses. If you run out, give us a call. There is more where this came from. Any questions?”

“No questions, but one comment.”

“Which is?”

“This all has got to be, patently, the most unbelievable, the most ridiculous story I have ever heard. Somehow coming from your mouth, it has the ring of truth, but I doubt anyone would believe me if I told them what happened today.”

Almost imperceptibly, the man curled his lip. He conceivably could have been smiling. “From tomorrow, you’re on the case. As I said, you have two months from today.”

“It’s a tough job. Two months might not be enough. I mean you’re asking me to seek out one sheep from the entire countryside.”

The man stared me straight in the face and said nothing. Making me feel like an empty pool. A filthy, cracked, empty pool that might never see another year’s use. He looked at me a full thirty seconds without blinking. Then slowly he opened his mouth.

“It is time for you to be going,” he said.

It sure seemed that way.

The Limo and Its Driver, Again

“Will you be returning to your office? Or to somewhere else?” the chauffeur asked. It was the same chauffeur from the trip out, but his manner seemed a bit more personable now. Guess he took to people easily.

I gave my arms and legs a full stretch on the roomy backseat and considered where I should go. I had no intention of returning to the office. Technically I was still on leave, and I wasn’t about to try to explain all this to my partner. I wasn’t about to go straight home either. Right now I needed a good dose of regular people walking on two legs in a regular way in a regular place.

“Shinjuku Station, west exit,” I said.

Traffic was jammed solid in the direction of Shinjuku. Evening rush hour, among other things. Past a certain point the cars seemed practically glued in place, motionless. Every so often a wave would pass through the cars, budging them forward a few inches. I thought about the rotational speed of the earth. How many miles an hour was this road surface whirling through space? I did a quick calculation in my head but couldn’t figure out if it was any faster than the Spinning Teacup at a carnival. There’re many things we don’t really know. It’s an illusion that we know anything at all. If a group of aliens were to stop me and ask, “Say, bud, how many miles an hour does the earth spin at the equator?” I’d be in a fix. Hell, I don’t even know why Wednesday follows Tuesday. I’d be an intergalactic joke.

I’ve read And Quiet Flows the Don and The Brothers Karamazov three times through. I’ve even read Ideologie Germanica once. I can even recite the value of pi to sixteen places. Would I still be a joke? Probably. They’d laugh their alien heads off.

“Would you care to listen to some music, sir?” asked the chauffeur.

“Good idea,” I said.

And at that a Chopin ballade filled the car. I got the feeling I was in a dressing room at a wedding reception.

“Say,” I asked the chauffeur, “you know the value of pi?”

“You mean that 3.14 whatzit?”

“That’s the one. How many decimal places do you know?”

“I know it to thirty-two places,” the driver tossed out. “Beyond that, well …”

“Thirty-two places?”

“There’s a trick to it, but yes. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing really,” I said, crestfallen. “Never mind.”

So we listened to Chopin as the limousine inched forward ten yards. People in cars and buses around us glared at our monster vehicle. None too comfortable, being the object of so much attention, even with the opaque windows.

“Awful traffic,” I said.

“That it is, but sure as dawn follows night, it’s got to let up sometime.”

“Fair enough, but doesn’t it get on your nerves?”

“Certainly. I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.”

“That sounds like a religious interpretation of a traffic jam if there ever was one.”

“I’m a Christian. I don’t go to church, but I’ve always been a Christian.”

“Is that so? Don’t you see any contradiction between being a Christian and being the chauffeur for a major right-wing figure?”

“The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve met God?”

“Certainly. I telephone Him every night.”

“Excuse me?” I stammered. Things were starting to jumble up in my head again. “If everyone called God, wouldn’t the lines be busy all the time? Like directory assistance right around noon.”

“No problem there. God is your simultaneous presence. So even if a million people were to telephone Him at once, He’d be able to speak with everyone simultaneously.”

“I’m no expert, but is that an orthodox interpretation? I mean, theologically speaking.”

“I’m something of a radical. That’s why I don’t go to church.”

“I see,” I said.

The limousine advanced fifty yards. I put a cigarette to my lips and was about to light up when I saw I’d been holding the lighter in my hand the whole time. Without realizing it, I’d walked off with the sheep-engraved silver Dupont. It felt molded to my palm as naturally as if I’d been born with it. The balance and feel couldn’t have been better. After a few seconds’ thought, I decided it was mine. Who’s going to miss a lighter or two? I opened and closed the lid a few times, lit up, and put the lighter in my pocket. By way of compensation, I slipped my Bic disposable into the pocket of the door.

“The Boss gave me it a few years ago,” said the chauffeur out of nowhere.

“Gave you what?”

“God’s telephone number.”

I let out a groan so loud it drowned out everything else. Either I was going crazy or they were all Looney Tunes.

“He told just you, alone, in secret?”

“Yes. Just me, in secret. He’s a fine gentleman. Would you care to get to know Him?”

“If possible,” I said.

“Well, then, it’s Tokyo 9-4-5-…”

“Just a second,” I said, pulling out my notebook and pen. “But do you really think it’s all right, telling me like this?”

“Sure, it’s all right. I don’t go telling just anyone. And you seem like a good person.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “But what should I talk to God about? I’m not Christian or anything.”

“No problem there. All you have to do is to speak honestly about whatever concerns you or troubles you. No matter how trivial you might think it is. God never gets bored and never laughs at you.”

“Thanks. I’ll give him a call.”

“That’s the spirit,” said the chauffeur.

Traffic began to flow smoothly as the Shinjuku skyscrapers came into view. We didn’t speak the rest of the way there.

Summer’s End, Autumn’s Beginning

By the time the limousine reached its destination, a pale indigo dusk had spread over the city. A brisk wind blew between the buildings bearing tidings of summer’s end, rustling the skirts of women on their way home from work.

I went to the top of a high-rise hotel, entered the spacious bar, and ordered a Heineken. It took ten minutes for the beer to come. Meanwhile, I planted an elbow on the armrest of my chair, rested my head on my hand, and shut my eyes. Nothing came to mind. With my eyes closed, I could hear hundreds of elves sweeping out my head with their tiny brooms. They kept sweeping and sweeping. It never occurred to any of them to use a dustpan.

When the beer finally arrived, I downed it in two gulps. Then I ate the whole dish of peanuts that came with it. The sweeping had all but stopped.

I went over to the telephone booth by the register and tried calling my girlfriend, her with the gorgeous ears. But she wasn’t at her place and she wasn’t at mine. She’d probably stepped out to eat. She never ate at home.

Next I tried my ex-wife. I reconsidered and hung up after the second ring. I didn’t have anything to say to her after all, and I didn’t want to come off like a jerk.

After them, there was no one to call. Smack in the middle of a city with a million people out roaming the streets, and no one to talk to. I gave up, pocketed the ten-yen coin, and exited the booth. Then I put in an order with a passing waiter for two more Heinekens.

And so the day came to an end. I could hardly have spent a more pointless day. The last day of summer, and what good had it been? Outside, an early autumn darkness had come over everything. Strings of tiny yellow streetlamps threaded everywhere below. Seen from up here, they looked ready to be trampled on.

The beer came. I polished off the one, then dumped the dish of peanuts into the palm of my hand and proceeded to eat them, bit by bit. Four middle-aged women, finished with swimming lessons at the hotel pool, sat at the next table chatting over colorful tropical cocktails. A waiter stood by, rigidly upright, crooking his neck to yawn. Another waiter explained the menu to a middle-aged American couple. After the peanuts, I moved on to my third Heineken. After it was gone, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

I fished the envelope out of the hip pocket of my Levi’s, tore open the seal, and started to count the stack of ten-thousand-yen notes. It looked more like a deck of cards than a bound packet of new bills. Halfway through, my fingers began to tire. At ninety-six, an elderly waiter came to clear away my empty bottles, asking whether to bring another. I nodded as I continued counting. He seemed totally uninterested in what I was doing.

There were one hundred and fifty bills. I stuck them back into the envelope and shoved it back into my hip pocket just as the new beer came. Again I ate the whole dish of peanuts, and only then did it occur to me that I was hungry. But why was I so hungry? I’d only eaten one slice of fruitcake since morning.

I called the waiter, ordered a cheese and cucumber sandwich. Hold the chips, double the pickles. Might they have nail clippers? Of course, they did. Hotel bars truly have everything you could ever want. One place even had a French-Japanese dictionary when I needed it.

I took my time with this beer, took a long took at the night scenery, took my time trimming my nails over the ashtray. I looked back at the scenery, then I filed my nails. And so on into the night. I’m well on the way to veteran class when it comes to killing time in the city.

A built-in ceiling speaker called my name. At first it didn’t sound like my name. Only a few seconds after the announcement was over did it sink in that I’d heard the special characteristics of my name, and only gradually then did it come to me that my name was my name.

The waiter brought a cordless transceiver-phone over to the table.

“There has been a small change in plans,” said the voice I knew from somewhere. “The Boss’s condition has taken a sudden turn for the worse. There is not much time left, I fear. So we are curtailing your time limit.”

“To how long?”

“One month. We cannot wait any longer. If after one month you have not found that sheep, you are finished. You will have nowhere to go back to.”

One month. I thought it over. But my head was beyond dealing with concepts of time. One month, two months, was there any real difference? And who had any idea, any standard, of how much time it should take to find one sheep in the first place? “How did you know to find me here?” I asked.

“We are on top of most things,” said the man.

“Except the whereabouts of one sheep,” I said.

“Exactly,” said the man. “Anyway, get on it, you waste too much time. You should take good account of where you now stand. You have only yourself to blame for driving yourself into that corner.”

He had a point. I used the first ten-thousand-yen note out of the envelope to pay the check. Down on the ground, people were still walking about on two legs, but the sight no longer gave me much relief.

One in Five Thousand

Returning to my apartment from the hotel bar, I found three pieces of mail together with the evening paper in my mailbox. A balance statement from my bank, an invitation to what promised to be a dud of a party, and a direct-mail flyer from a used-car dealership. The copy read: “BRIGHTEN UP YOUR LIFE—MOVE UP TO A CLASSY CAR.” Thanks, but no thanks. I put all three envelopes together and tore them in half.

I took some juice out of the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table with it. On the table was a note from my girlfriend: “Gone out to eat. Back by 9:30.” The digital clock on the table read 9:30. I watched it flip over to 9:31, then to 9:32.

When I got bored with watching the clock, I got out of my clothes, took a shower, and washed my hair. There were four types of shampoo and three types of hair rinse in the bathroom. Every time she went to the supermarket, she stocked up on something. Step into the bathroom and there was bound to be a new item. I counted four kinds of shaving cream and five tubes of toothpaste. Quite an inventory. Out of the shower, I changed into jogging shorts and a T-shirt. Gone was the grime of one bizarre day. At last I felt refreshed.

At 10:20 she returned with a shopping bag from the supermarket. In the bag were three scrub brushes, one box of paperclips, and a well-chilled six-pack of canned beer. So I had another beer.

“It was about sheep,” I said.

“Didn’t I tell you?” she said.

I took some sausages out of the refrigerator, browned them in a frying pan, and served them up for us to eat. I ate three and she ate two. A cool breeze blew in through the kitchen window.

I told her about what happened at the office, told her about the limo ride, the estate, the steely-eyed secretary, the blood cyst, and the heavyset sheep with the star on its back. I was talking forever. By the time I’d finished talking, it was eleven o’clock.

All that said and done, she didn’t seem taken aback in the least. She’d cleaned her ears the whole time she listened, yawning occasionally.

“So when do you leave?”

“Leave?”

“You have to find the sheep, don’t you?”

I looked up at her, the pull-ring of my second beer still on my finger. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

“But you’ll be in a lot of trouble if you don’t.”

“No special trouble. I was planning on quitting the company anyway. I’ll always be able to find enough work to get by, no matter who interferes. They’re not about to kill me. Really!”

She pulled a new cotton swab out of the box and fingered it awhile. “But it’s actually quite simple. All you have to do is find one sheep, right? It’ll be fun.”

“Nobody’s going to find anything. Hokkaido’s a whole lot bigger than you think. And sheep—there’ve got to be hundreds of thousands of them. How are you going to search out one single sheep? It’s impossible. Even if the sheep’s got a star marked on its back.”

“Make that five thousand sheep.”

“Five thousand?”

“The number of sheep in Hokkaido. In 1947, there were two hundred seventy thousand sheep in Hokkaido, but now there are only five thousand.”

“How is it you know something like that?”

“After you left, I went to the library and checked it out.”

I heaved a sigh. “You know everything, don’t you?”

“Not really. There’s lot more that I don’t know.”

I snorted, then opened the second beer and split it between us.

“In any case, there are only five thousand sheep in Hokkaido. According to government surveys. How about it? Aren’t you even a little relieved?”

“It’s all the same,” I said. “Five thousand sheep, two hundred seventy thousand sheep, it’s not going to make much difference. The problem is still finding one lone sheep in that vast landscape. On top of which, we haven’t a lead to go on.”

“It’s not true we don’t have a lead. First, there’s the photograph, then there’s your friend up there, right? You’re bound to find out something one way or another.”

“Both are awfully vague as leads go. The landscape in the photograph is absolutely too ordinary, and you can’t even read the postmark on the Rat’s letter!”

She drank her beer. I drank my beer.

“Don’t you like sheep?” she asked.

“I like sheep well enough.”

I was starting to get confused again.

“Besides,” I went on, “I’ve already made up my mind. Not to go, I mean.” I meant to convince myself, but the words didn’t come out right.

“How about some coffee?”

“Good idea,” I said.

She cleared away the beer cans and glasses and put the kettle on. Then while waiting for the water to boil, she listened to a cassette in the other room. Johnny Rivers singing “Midnight Special” followed by “Roll Over Beethoven.” Then “Secret Agent Man.” When the kettle whistled, she made the coffee, singing along with “Johnny B. Goode.” The whole while I read the evening paper. A charming domestic scene. If not for the matter of the sheep, I might have been very happy.

As the tape wound on, we drank our coffee and nibbled on a few crackers in silence. I went back to the evening paper. When I finished it, I began reading it again. Here a coup d’état, there a film actor dying, elsewhere a cat who does tricks—nothing much that related to me. It didn’t matter to Johnny Rivers, who kept right on singing. When the tape ended, I folded up the paper and looked over at her.

“I can’t figure it out. You’re probably right that it’s better to do something than nothing. Even if it’s futile in the end, at least we looked for the sheep. On the other hand, I don’t like being ordered and threatened and pushed around.”

“To a greater or lesser extent, everybody’s always being ordered and threatened and pushed around. There may not be anything better we could hope for.”

“Maybe not,” I said, after a moment’s pause.

She said nothing and started to clean her ears again. From time to time, her fleshy earlobes showed through the long strands of hair.

“It’s beautiful right now in Hokkaido. Not many tourists, nice weather. What’s more, the sheep’ll all be out and about. The ideal season.”

“I guess.”

“If,” she began, crunching on the last cracker, “if you wanted to take me along, I’d surely be a help.”

“Why are you so stuck on this sheep hunt?”

“Because I’d like to see that sheep myself.”

“But why should I go breaking my back over this one lousy sheep? And then drag you into this mess on top of it?”

“I don’t mind. Your mess is my mess,” she said, with a cute little smile. “I’ve got this thing about you.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s all you can say?”

I pushed the newspaper over to a corner of the table. The slight breeze coming in through the window wafted my cigarette smoke off somewhere.

“To be honest, there’s something about this whole business that doesn’t sit right with me. There’s a hook somewhere.”

“Like what?”

“Like everything but everything,” I said. “The whole thing’s so damn stupid, yet everything has a painful clarity to it, and the picture all fits together perfectly. Not a good feeling at all.”

She paused a second, picked up a rubber band from the table, and started playing with it.

“But isn’t that friend of yours already up to his neck in trouble? If not, why would he have gone out of his way to send you that photo?”

She had me there. I’d laid all my cards out on the table, and they’d all been trumped. She’d seen straight through me.

“I really think it has to be done. We’ll find that sheep, you’ll see,” she said, grinning.

She finished her ear-cleaning ritual and wrapped up the cotton swabs in a tissue to throw away. Then she picked up a rubber band and tied her hair back behind her ears.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said.

Sunday Afternoon Picnic

I woke up at nine in an empty bed. No note. Only her handkerchief and underwear drying by the washbasin. Probably gone out to eat, I guessed, then to her place.

I got orange juice out of the refrigerator and popped three-day-old bread into the toaster. It tasted like wall plaster.

Through the kitchen window I could see the neighbor’s oleander. Far off, someone was practicing piano. It sounded like tripping down an up escalator. On a telephone pole, three plump pigeons burbled mindlessly away. Something had to be on their mind to be going on like that, maybe the pain from corns on their feet, who knows? From the pigeons’ point of view, probably it was I who looked mindless.

As I stuffed the second piece of toast down my gullet, the pigeons disappeared, leaving only the telephone pole and the oleander.

It was Sunday morning. The newspaper’s weekend section included a color photo of a horse jumping a hedge. Astride the horse, an ill-complexioned rider in a black cap casting a baleful glare at the next page, which featured a lengthy description of what to do and what not to do in orchid cultivation. There were hundreds of varieties of orchids, each with a history of its own. Royalty had been known to die for the sake of orchids. Orchids had an ineffable aura of fatalism. And on the article went. To all things, philosophy and fate.

Now that I’d made up my mind to go off in search of the sheep, I was charged up and raring to go. It was the first time I’d felt like this since I’d crossed the great divide of my twentieth year. I piled the dishes into the sink, gave the cat his breakfast, then dialed the number of the man in the black suit. After six rings he answered.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“Hardly the question. I rise quite early,” he said. “What is it?”

“Which newspaper do you read?”

“Eight papers, national and local. The locals do not arrive until evening, though.”

“And you read them all?”

“It is part of my work,” said the man patiently. “What of it?”

“Do you read the Sunday pages?”

“Of necessity, yes,” he said.

“Did you see the photo of the horse in the weekend section?”

“Yes, I saw the horse photo,” said the man.

“Don’t the horse and rider seem to be thinking of two totally different things?”

Through the receiver, a silence stole into the room. There wasn’t a breath to be heard. It was a silence strong enough to make your ears hurt.

“This is what you called me about?” asked the man.

“No, just small talk. Nothing wrong with a little topic of conversation, is there?”

“We have other topics of conversation. For instance, sheep.” He cleared his throat. “You will have to excuse me, but I am not as free with my time as you. Might you simply get on with your concern as quickly as possible?”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “Simply put, from tomorrow I’m thinking of going off in search of that sheep. I thought it over a lot, but in the end that’s what I decided. Still, I can only see myself doing it at my own pace. When I talk, I will talk as I like. I mean I have the right to make small talk if I want. I don’t like having my every move watched and I don’t like being pushed around by nameless people. There, I’ve said my piece.”

“You obviously do not know where you stand.”

“Nor do you know where you stand. Now listen, I thought it over last night. And it struck me. What have I got to feel threatened about? Next to nothing. I broke up with my wife, I plan to quit my job today, my apartment is rented, and I have no furnishings worth worrying about. By way of holdings, I’ve got maybe two million yen in savings, a used car, and a cat who’s getting on in years. My clothes are all out of fashion, and my records are ancient. I’ve made no name for myself, have no social credibility, no sex appeal, no talent. I’m not so young anymore, and I’m always saying dumb things that I later regret. In a word, to borrow your turn of phrase, I am an utterly mediocre person. What have I got to lose? If you can think of anything, clue me in, why don’t you?”

A brief silence ensued. In that interval, I picked the lint from a shirt button and with a ballpoint pen drew thirteen stars on a memo pad.

“Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose,” began the man. “You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.” Pause. “But I am getting ahead of myself. All this comes later. For the present, let me say that I do not turn an uncomprehending ear toward your speech. I shall take your demands into account. You can do as you like. For one month, is that clear?”

“Clear enough,” I said.

“Well then, cheers,” said the man.

At that, the phone clicked off. It left a bad aftertaste, the click of the receiver. In order to kill that aftertaste, I did thirty push-ups and twenty sit-ups, washed the dishes, then did three days’ worth of laundry. It almost had me feeling good again. A pleasant September Sunday after all. Summer had faded to a distant memory almost beyond recall.

I put on a clean shirt, a pair of Levi’s without a ketchup stain, and a matching pair of socks. I brushed my hair. Even so, I couldn’t bring back the Sunday-morning feeling I used to get when I was seventeen. So what else was new? Guess I’ve put on my share of years.

Next, I took my near-scrap Volkswagen out of the apartment-house parking lot, headed to the supermarket, and bought a dozen cans of cat food, a bag of kitty litter, a travel razor set, and underwear. At the doughnut shop, I sat at the counter and washed down a cinnamon doughnut with some tasteless coffee. The wall directly in front of the counter was mirrored, giving me an unobstructed view of myself. I sat there looking at my face, half-eaten doughnut still in hand. It made me wonder how other people saw me. Not that I had any way of knowing, of course. I finished off the doughnut and left.

There was a travel agency near the train station, where I booked two seats on a flight to Sapporo the following day. Then into the station arcade for a canvas shoulder bag and a rain hat. Each time I peeled another ten-thousand-yen note from the wad of bills in my pocket. The wad showed no sign of going down no matter how many bills I used. Only I showed signs of wear. There’s that kind of money in the world. It aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it, and you hate yourself when it’s gone. And when you hate yourself, you feel like spending money. Except there’s no money left. And no hope.

I sat down on a bench in front of the station and smoked two cigarettes, deciding not to think about the money. The station plaza was filled with families and young couples out for a Sunday morning. Casually taking it all in, I thought of my ex-wife’s parting remark that maybe we ought to have had children. To be sure, at my age it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to have kids, but me a father? Good grief. What kid would want to have anyone like me for a father?

I smoked another cigarette before pushing through the crowd, each arm around a shopping bag, to the supermarket parking lot. While having the car serviced, I popped into a bookstore to buy three paperbacks. There went another two ten-thousand-yen notes. My pockets were stuffed with loose change.

When I got back to the apartment, I dumped all the change into a glass bowl and splashed cold water on my face. It had been forever since I’d gotten up, but when I looked at the clock, it was still before noon.

At three in the afternoon, my girlfriend returned. She was wearing a checkered shirt with mustard-colored slacks and intensely dark sunglasses. She had a large canvas bag like mine slung over her shoulder.

“I came packed and ready to go,” she said, patting the bulging bag. “Will it be a long trip?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

She stretched out on the sofa by the window, stared off at the ceiling with her sunglasses still on, and smoked a clove cigarette. I fetched an ashtray and went over to sit beside her. I stroked her hair. The cat appeared and jumped up on the sofa, putting his chin and forepaws over her ankles. When she’d had enough of her smoke, she transplanted what remained of the cigarette to my lips.

“Happy to be going on a trip?” I asked.

“Uh-huh, very happy. Especially because I’m going with you.”

“You know, if we don’t find that sheep, we won’t have any place to come back to. We might end up traveling the rest of our lives.”

“Like your friend?”

“I guess. In a way, we’re all in the same boat. The only difference is that he’s escaping out of his own choice and I’m being ricocheted about.”

I ground out the cigarette in the ashtray. The cat raised his head and yawned, then resumed his position.

“Finished with your packing?” she asked.

“No, haven’t begun. But I don’t have too much to pack. A couple changes of clothes, soap, towel. You really don’t need that whole bag yourself. If you need anything, you can buy it there. We’ve got more than enough money.”

“I like it this way,” she said, again with that cute little smile of hers. “I don’t feel like I’m traveling unless I’m lugging a huge bag.”

“You’ve got to be kidding….”

A piercing bird call shot in through the open window, a call I’d never heard before. A new season’s new bird.

A beam of afternoon sun landed on her cheek. I lazily watched a white cloud move from one edge of the window to the other. We stayed like that for the longest time.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know how to put it, but I just can’t get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn’t quite hit home. It’s always this way. Only much later on does it ever come together. For the last ten years, it’s been like this.”

“Ten years?”

“There’s been no end to it. That’s all.”

She laughed as she picked up the cat and let it down onto the floor. “Shall we?”

We made love on the sofa. A period piece of a sofa I’d bought at a junk store. Put your face up against it and you get the scent of history. Her supple body blended in with that scent. Gentle and warm like a vague recollection. I brushed her hair aside with my fingers and kissed her ear. The earth trembled. From that point on, time began to flow like a tranquil breeze.

I undid all the buttons of her shirt and cupped her breasts while I appreciated her body.

“Feeling really alive now,” she said.

“You?”

“Mmm, my body, my whole self.”

“I’m right with you,” I said. “Truly alive.”

How amazingly quiet, I thought. Not a sound anywhere around. Everybody but the two of us probably gone off somewhere to celebrate the first Sunday of autumn.

“You know, I really love this,” she whispered.

“Mmm.”

“It seems like we’re having a picnic, it’s so lovely.”

“A picnic?”

“Yeah.”

I wrapped both hands around her back and held her tight. Then I nuzzled my way through her bangs to kiss her ear again.

“It’s been a long ten years for you?” she asked, down low by my ear.

“Long enough,” I said. “A long, long time. Practically endless, not that I’ve managed to get anything over and done with.”

She raised her head a tiny bit from the sofa armrest and smiled. A smile I’d seen somewhere before, but for the life of me I couldn’t place where or on whom. Women with their clothes off have a frightening similarity. Always throws me for a loop.

“Let’s go look for the sheep,” she said, eyes closed. “Once we get to looking for that sheep, things’ll fall into place.”

I looked into her face a while, then I gazed at both her ears. A soft afternoon glow enveloped her body as in an old still life.

Limited but Tenacious Thinking

At six o’clock, she got dressed, brushed her hair, brushed her teeth, and sprayed on her eau de cologne. I sat on the sofa reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The story began: “My colleague Watson is limited in his thinking to rather narrow confines, but possesses the utmost tenacity.” Not a bad lead-in sentence.

“I’ll be late tonight, so don’t wait up for me,” she said.

“Work?”

“Afraid so. I actually should have had today off, but those are the breaks. They pushed it on me because I’m taking off from tomorrow.”

She went out, then after a moment or two the door opened.

“Say, what’re you going to do about the cat while we’re gone?” she asked.

“Oops, completely slipped my mind. But don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

I brought out milk and cheese snacks for the cat. His teeth were so weak, he had a hard time with the cheese.

There wasn’t a thing that looked particularly edible for me in the refrigerator, so I opened up a beer and watched television. Nothing newsworthy on the news either. On Sunday evenings like this, it’s always some zoo scene. I watched the rundown of giraffes and elephants and pandas, then switched off the set and picked up the telephone.

“It’s about my cat,” I told the man.

“Your cat?”

“Yes, I have a cat.”

“So?”

“So unless I can leave the cat with someone, I can’t go anywhere.”

“There are any number of kennels to be had thereabouts.”

“He’s old and frail. A month in a cage would do him in for sure.”

I could hear fingernails drumming on a tabletop. “So?”

“I’d like you to take care of him. You’ve got a huge garden, surely you could take care of one cat.”

“Out of the question. The Boss hates cats, and the garden is there to attract birds. One cat and there go all the birds.”

“The Boss is unconscious, and the cat has no strength to chase down birds.”

“Very well, then. I will send a driver for the cat tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

“I’ll provide the cat food and kitty litter. He only eats this one brand, so if you run out, please buy more of the same.”

“Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell these details to the driver. As I believe I told you before, I am a busy man.”

“I’d like to keep communications to one channel. It makes it clear where the responsibility lies.”

“Responsibility?”

“In other words, say the cat dies while I’m gone, you’d get nothing out of me, even if I did find the sheep.”

“Hmm,” said the man. “Fair enough. You are somewhat off base, but you do quite well for an amateur. I shall write this down, so please speak slowly.”

“Don’t feed him fatty meat. He throws it all up. His teeth are bad, so no hard foods. In the morning, he gets milk and canned cat food, in the evening a handful of dried fish or meat or cheese snacks. Also please change his litter box daily. He doesn’t like it dirty. He often gets diarrhea, but if it doesn’t go away after two days the vet will have some medicine to give him.”

Having gotten that far, I strained to hear the scrawl of a ballpoint pen on the other end of the line.

“He’s starting to get lice in his ears,” I continued, “so once a day you should give his ears a cleaning with a cotton swab and a little olive oil. He dislikes it and fights it, so be careful not to rupture the eardrum. Also, if you’re worried he might claw the furniture, trim his claws once a week. Regular nail clippers are fine. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have fleas, but just in case it might be wise to give him a flea bath every so often. You can get flea shampoo at any pet shop. After his bath, you should dry him off with a towel and give him a good brushing, then last of all a once-over with a hair dryer. Otherwise he’ll catch cold.”

Scribble scribble scribble. “Anything else?”

“That’s about it.”

The man read back the items from his notepad. A memo well taken.

“Is that it?”

“Just fine.”

“Well then,” said the man. And the phone cut off.

It was already dark out. I slipped some change, my cigarettes, and a lighter into my pocket, put on my tennis shoes, and stepped outside. At my neighborhood dive, I drank a beer while listening to the latest Brothers Johnson record. I ate my chicken cutlet while listening to a Bill Withers record. I had some coffee while listening to Maynard Ferguson’s “Star Wars.” After all that, I felt as if I’d hardly eaten anything.

They cleared away my coffee cup and I put three ten-yen coins into the pink public phone and rang up my partner. His eldest son, who was still in grammar school, answered.

“Good day,” I said.

“It’s ‘good evening,’” he corrected. I looked at my watch. Of course, he was right.

After a bit, my partner came to the phone.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Is it all right to talk now? I’m not catching you in the middle of eating?”

“We’re in the middle of eating, but it’s okay. Wasn’t much of a meal, and anyway your story’s got to be more interesting.”

I related snatches of the conversation with the man in the black suit. Then I talked about the huge limo and the dying Boss. I didn’t touch on the sheep. He wouldn’t have believed it, and already this was too long and involved. Which naturally made everything more confusing than ever.

“I can’t begin to follow you,” said my partner.

“This is all confidential, you understand. If it gets out, it could mean a lot of trouble for you. I mean, with your family and all….” I trailed off, picturing his high-class four-bedroom condominium, his wife with high blood pressure, his two cheeky sons. “I mean, that’s how it is.”

“I see.”

“In any case, I have to be going on a trip from tomorrow. A long trip, I expect. One month, two months, three months, I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll never come back to Tokyo.”

“Er … umm.”

“So I want you to take over things at the company. I’m pulling out. I don’t want to cause you any trouble. My work is pretty much done, and for all its being a co-venture, you hold down the important part. I’m only half playing there.”

“But I need you there to take care of all the details.”

“Consolidate your battle line, and go back to how it used to be. Cancel all advertising and editing work. Turn it back into a translation office. Like you were saying the other day yourself. Keep one secretary and get rid of the rest of the part-timers. You don’t need them anymore. Nobody’s going to complain if you give them two months’ severance. As for the office, you can move to a smaller place. The income will go down, sure, but so will the outlay. And minus my take, yours’ll increase, so in actual terms you won’t be hurting. You won’t have to worry about exploiting anyone so much, and taxes will be less of a problem. It’d be ideal for you.”

“No go,” he said, after some silence. “It won’t work, I know it won’t work.”

“It’ll be fine, I tell you. I’ve been through it all with you, so I know, no problem.”

“It went well because we went into it together,” he said. “Nothing I’ve tried to do by myself has ever come off.”

“Now listen. I’m not talking about expanding business. I’m telling you to consolidate. The pre-industrial-revolution translation business we used to do. You and one secretary, plus five or six freelancers you can farm out work to. There’s no reason why you can’t do fine.”

There was a click as the last ten-yen coin dropped into the machine. I fed the phone another three coins.

“I’m not you,” he said. “You can make it on your own. Not me. Things don’t go anywhere unless I have someone to complain to or bounce ideas off of.”

I put my hand over the receiver and sighed. The same old royal runaround. Black goat eats white goat’s letter unread, white goat eats black goat’s letter …

“Hello, hello?” said my partner.

“I’m listening,” I said.

On the other end of the line, I could hear his two kids fighting over which television channel to watch. “Think of your kids,” I said. Not exactly fair, but I didn’t have another card to play. “You can’t afford to be sniveling. If you call it quits, it’s all over for everybody. If you wanted to strike out against the world, you don’t go having children. Straighten up, square away the business, stop drinking.”

He fell silent for a long time. The waitress brought me an ashtray. I gestured with my hand for another beer.

“You’ve got me pinned,” he came back. “I’ll do my best. I have no confidence it’ll go, but …”

I filled my glass with beer and took a sip. “It’ll go fine. Think of six years ago. No money or connections, but everything came through, didn’t it?” I said.

“Like I said, you have no idea how secure I felt because we started the thing together,” said my partner.

“I’ll be calling in again.”

“Umm.”

“Thanks for everything. All this time, it’s been great,” I said.

“Once you’re finished with what you’ve got to do and come back to Tokyo, let’s do some business together again.”

“Sure thing.”

I hung up.

Both he and I knew the probability of my returning to the job. Work together six years and that much you understand.

I took my beer back to the table.

With the job out of the picture, I felt a surge of relief. Slowly but surely I was making things simpler. I’d lost my hometown, lost my teens, lost my wife, in another three months I’d lose my twenties. What’d be left of me when I got to be sixty, I couldn’t imagine. There’s no thinking about these things. There’s no telling even what’s going to happen a month from now.

I headed home and crawled into bed with my Sherlock Holmes. Lights out at eleven and I was fast asleep. I didn’t wake once before morning.

One for the Kipper

At ten in the morning, that ridiculous submarine of an automobile was waiting outside my apartment building. From my third-story window, the limo looked more like an upside-down metal cookie cutter than a submarine. You could make a gigantic cookie that would take three hundred kids two weeks to eat. She and I sat on the windowsill looking down at the car.

The sky was appallingly clear. A sky from a prewar expressionist movie. Utterly cloudless, like a monumental eye with its eyelid cut off. A helicopter flying high off in the distance looked minuscule.

I locked all the windows, switched off the refrigerator, and checked the gas cock. The laundry brought in, bed covered with spread, ashtrays rinsed out, and an absurd number of medicinal items put in proper order by the washbasin. The rent paid two months in advance, the newspaper canceled. I looked back from the doorway into the lifeless apartment. For a moment, I thought about the four years of married life spent there, thought about the kids my wife and I never had.

The elevator door opened, and she called to me. I shut the steel door.

The chauffeur was intently polishing the windshield with a dry cloth as he waited for us. The car, not one single mark anywhere, gleamed in the sun to a burning, unearthly brilliance. The slightest touch of the hand and you’d get burned.

“Good morning,” said the chauffeur. The very same religious chauffeur from two days ago.

“Good morning,” said I.

“Good morning,” said my girlfriend.

She held the cat. I carried the cat food and bag of kitty litter.

“Fabulous weather, isn’t it?” said the chauffeur, looking up at the sky. “It’s—how can I put it?—crystal clear.”

I nodded.

“When it gets this clear, God’s messages must have no trouble getting through at all,” I offered.

“Nothing of the kind,” said the chauffeur with a grin. “There are messages already in all things. In the flowers, in the rocks, in the clouds …”

“And cars?”

“In cars too.”

“But cars are made by factories.” Typical me.

“Whosoever makes it, God’s will is worked into it.”

“As in ear lice?” Her contribution.

“As in the very air,” corrected the chauffeur.

“Well then, I suppose that cars made in Saudi Arabia have Allah in them.”

“They don’t produce cars in Saudi Arabia.”

“Really?” Again me.

“Really.”

“Then what about cars produced in America for export to Saudi Arabia? What god’s in them?” queried my girlfriend.

A difficult question.

“Say now, we have to tell him about the cat,” I launched a lifeboat.

“Cute cat, eh?” said the chauffeur, also relieved.

The cat was anything but cute. Rather, he weighed in at the opposite end of the scale, his fur was scruffy like an old, threadbare carpet, the tip of his tail was bent at a sixty-degree angle, his teeth were yellowed, his right eye oozed pus from a wound three years before so that by now he could hardly see. It was doubtful that he could distinguish between a tennis shoe and a potato. The pads of his feet were shriveled-up corns, his ears were infested with ear lice, and from sheer age he farted at least twenty times a day. He’d been a fine young tom the day my wife found him under a park bench and brought him home, but in the last few years he’d rapidly gone downhill. Like a bowling ball rolling toward the gutter. Also, he didn’t have a name. I had no idea whether not having a name reduced or contributed to the cat’s tragedy.

“Nice kitty-kitty,” said the chauffeur, hand not outstretched. “What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have a name.”

“So what do you call the fella?”

“I don’t call it,” I said. “It’s just there.”

“But he’s not a lump just sitting there. He moves about by his own will, no? Seems mighty strange that something that moves by its own will doesn’t have a name.”

“Herring swim around of their own will, but nobody gives them names.”

“Well, first of all, there’s no emotional bond between herring and people, and besides, they wouldn’t know their name if they heard it.”

“Which is to say that animals that not only move by their own will and share feelings with people but also possess sight and hearing qualify as deserving of names then?”

“There, you got it.” The chauffeur nodded repeatedly, satisfied. “How about it? What say I go ahead and give the little guy a name?”

“Don’t mind in the least. But what name?”

“How about ‘Kipper’? I mean you were treating him like a herring after all.”

“Not bad,” I said.

“You see?” said the chauffeur.

“What do you think?” I asked my girlfriend.

“Not bad,” she said. “It’s like being witness to the creation of heaven and earth.”

“Let there be Kipper,” I said.

“C’mere, Kipper,” said the chauffeur, picking up the cat. The cat got frightened, bit the chauffeur’s thumb, then farted.

The chauffeur took us to the airport. The cat rode quietly up front next to the driver. Farting from to time to time. The driver kept opening the window, so we knew. Meanwhile, I cranked out instructions to the chauffeur about the cat. How to clean his ears, stores that sold litter-box deodorant, the amount of food to give him, things like that.

“Don’t worry,” said the chauffeur. “I’ll take good care of him. I’m his godfather, you know.”

The roads were surprisingly empty. The car raced to the airport like a salmon shooting upstream to spawn.

“Why do boats have names, but not airplanes?” I asked the chauffeur. “Why just Flight 971 or Flight 326, and not the Bell-flower or the Daisy?”

“Probably because there’re more planes than boats. Mass production.”

“I wonder. Lots of boats are mass-produced, and they may outnumber planes.”

“Still…,” said the chauffeur, then nothing for a few seconds. “Realistically speaking, nobody’s going to put names on each and every city bus.”

“I think it’d be wonderful if each city bus had a name,” said my girlfriend.

“But wouldn’t that lead to passengers choosing the buses they want to ride? To go from Shinjuku to Sendagaya, say, they’d ride the Antelope but not the Mule.”

“How about it?” I asked my girlfriend.

“For sure, I’d think twice about riding the Mule,” she said.

“But hey, think about the poor driver of the Mule,” the chauffeur spoke up for drivers everywhere. “The Mule’s driver isn’t to blame.”

“Well put,” said I.

“Maybe,” said she, “but I’d still ride the Antelope.”

“Well there you are,” said the chauffeur. “That’s just how it’d be. Names on ships are familiar from times before mass production. In principle, it amounts to the same thing as naming horses. So that airplanes treated like horses are actually given names too. There’s the Spirit of St. Louis and the Enola Gay. We’re looking at a full-fledged conscious identification.”

“Which is to say that life is the basic concept here.”

“Exactly.”

“And that purpose, as such, is but a secondary element in naming.”

“Exactly. For purpose alone, numbers are enough. Witness the treatment of the Jews at Auschwitz.”

“Fine so far,” I said. “So let’s just say that the basis of naming is this act of conscious identification with living things. Why then do train stations and parks and baseball stadiums have names, if they’re not living?”

“Why? Because it’d be chaos if stations didn’t have names.”

“No, we’re not talking on the purposive level. I’d like you to explain it to me in principle.”

The chauffeur gave this serious thought. He failed to notice that the traffic light had turned green. The camper van behind us honked its horn to the overture to the The Magnificent Seven.

“Because they’re not interchangeable, I suppose. For instance, there’s only one Shinjuku Station and you can’t just replace it with Shibuya Station. This non-interchangeability is to say that they’re not mass-produced. Are we clear on these two points?”

“Sure would be fun to have Shinjuku Station in Ekoda, though,” said my girlfriend.

“If Shinjuku Station were in Ekoda, it would be Ekoda Station,” countered the chauffeur.

“But it’d still have the Odakyu Line attached,” she said.

“Back to the original line of discussion,” I said. “If stations were interchangeable, what would that mean? If, for instance, all national railway stations were mass-produced fold-up type buildings and Shinjuku Station and Tokyo Station were absolutely interchangeable?”

“Simple enough. If it’s in Shinjuku, it’d be Shinjuku Station; if it’s in Tokyo, it’d be Tokyo Station.”

“So what we’re talking about here is not the name of a physical object, but the name of a function. A role. Isn’t that purpose?”

The chauffeur fell silent. Only this time he didn’t stay silent for very long.

“You know what I think?” said the chauffeur. “I think maybe we ought to cast a warmer eye on the subject.”

“Meaning?”

“I mean towns and parks and streets and stations and ball fields and movie theaters all have names, right? They are all given names in compensation for their fixity on the earth.”

A new theory.

“Well,” said I, “suppose I utterly obliterated my consciousness and became totally fixed, would I merit a fancy name?”

The chauffeur glanced at my face in the rearview mirror. A suspicious look, as if I were laying some trap. “Fixed?”

“Say I froze in place, or something. Like Sleeping Beauty.”

“But you already have a name.”

“Right you are,” I said. “I nearly forgot.”

We received our boarding passes at the airport check-in counter and said goodbye to the chauffeur. He would have waited to see us off, but as there was an hour and a half before departure time, he capitulated and left.

“A real character, that one,” she said.

“There’s a place I know with no one but people like that,” I said. “The cows there go around looking for pliers.”

“Sounds like ‘Home on the Pampas.’”

“Maybe so,” I said.

We went into the airport restaurant and had an early lunch. Shrimp au gratin for me, spaghetti for her. I watched the 747s and Tristars take flight and swoop down to earth with a gravity that seemed fated. Meanwhile, she dubiously inspected each strand of spaghetti she ate.

“I thought that they always served meals on planes,” she said, disgruntled.

“Nope,” I said, waiting for the hot lump of gratin in my mouth to cool down, then gulping down some water. No taste but hot. “Meals only on international flights. They give you something to eat on longer domestic routes. Not exactly what you’d call a special treat, though.”

“And movies?”

“No way. C’mon, it’s only an hour to Sapporo.”

“Then they give you nothing.”

“Nothing at all. You sit in your seat, read your book, and arrive at your destination. Same as by bus.”

“But no traffic lights.”

“No traffic lights.”

“Just great,” she said with a sigh. She put down her fork, leaving half the spaghetti untouched.

“The thing is you get there faster. It takes twelve hours if you go by train.”

“And where does the extra time go?”

I also gave up halfway through my meal and ordered two coffees. “Extra time?”

“You said planes save you over ten hours. So where does all that time go?”

“Time doesn’t go anywhere. It only adds up. We can use those ten hours as we like, in Tokyo or in Sapporo. With ten hours we could see four movies, eat two meals, whatever. Right?”

“But what if I don’t want to go to the movies or eat?”

“That’s your problem. It’s no fault of time.”

She bit her lip as we looked out at the squat bodies of the 747s on the tarmac. 747s always remind me of a fat, ugly old lady in the neighborhood where I used to live. Huge sagging breasts, swollen legs, dried-up neckline. The airport, a likely gathering place for the old ladies. Dozens of them, coming and going, one after the other. The pilots and stewardesses, strutting back and forth in the lobby with heads held high, seemed quaintly planar. I couldn’t help thinking how it wasn’t like the DC-7 and Friendship-7 days, but maybe it was.

“Well,” she went on, “does time expand?”

“No, time does not expand,” I answered. I had spoken, but why didn’t it sound like my voice? I coughed and drank my coffee. “Time does not expand.”

“But time is actually increasing, isn’t it? You yourself said that time adds up.”

“That’s only because the time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn’t change. It’s only that you can see more movies.”

“If you wanted to see movies,” she added.

As soon as we arrived in Sapporo, we actually did see a double feature.