Kafka on the Shore

Chapter 25

I fall asleep for a short time, wake up, fall asleep again, wake up, over and over. I don't want to miss the moment she appears. But I do miss it-I look up and she's already seated at the desk, just like last night. The clock next to my bed shows a little past three. I'm positive I closed the curtains before going to bed, but again they're wide open. But there's no moon tonight-that's the only difference. There's a heavy cloud cover, and it might be drizzling outside. The room's much darker than last night, with only distant lamps in the garden casting a faint light between the trees. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust.

The girl is seated at the desk, head in her hands, gazing at the painting. She's wearing the same clothes as last night. Even if I squint and look hard, this time it's too dark to make out her face. Strangely enough, though, her body and silhouette stand out, floating there clearly in the darkness. The girl is Miss Saeki when she was young-I have absolutely no doubt about it.

She looks deep in thought. Or in the midst of a long, deep dream. Check that-maybe she herself is Miss Saeki's long, deep dream. At any rate, I try to breathe very quietly so as not to disturb the balance of this scene before me. I don't move an inch, just glance occasionally at the clock to check the time. Time passes slowly, regularly.

Out of the blue my heart starts beating hard, a dry sound like somebody's knocking at the door. The sound echoes through the silent, dead-of-night room, and startles me so much that I nearly leap right out of bed.

The girl's black silhouette moves ever so slightly. She looks up and listens in the dark. She's heard it-the sound of my heart. She tilts her head just a fraction, for all the world like an animal in the woods focusing on an unexpected, unknown sound. Then she turns to face me in bed. But I don't register in her eyes, I can tell. I'm not in her dream. She and I are in two separate worlds, divided by an invisible boundary.

Just as quickly as it came on, my pounding heart settles back down to normal. And so does my breathing. I'm back to being invisible, and she's no longer listening. Her gaze falls back on Kafka on the Shore. Head in hands like before, her heart is drawn once more toward the boy in that summer scene.

She's there for about twenty minutes, then vanishes. Just like last night, she stands up, barefoot, noiselessly glides toward the door, and, without opening it, disappears outside. I sit still for a while, then finally get up. Keeping the light off, I go over in the darkness and sit down on the seat she just occupied. I rest both hands on the desk and absorb the afterglow of her presence. I close my eyes, scooping up her shivering heart, letting it seep inside mine. I keep my eyes closed.

There's one thing, I discover, the girl and I have in common. We're both in love with someone who's no longer of this world.

A short time later I fall into a restless sleep. My body needs rest, but my mind won't allow it. I swing like a pendulum, back and forth between the two. Later, though-I'm not even sure if it's light out or not-birds begin making a racket in the garden, and their voices pull me completely awake.

I tug on jeans and pull a long-sleeved shirt over my T-shirt and go outside. It's after five o'clock and nobody else is up. I walk out of the old-looking town, through the pine forest set up as a windbreak, past the seawall and out onto the beach. There's barely a breeze against my skin. The sky's covered with a layer of gray clouds, but it doesn't look like it's going to rain anytime soon. It's a quiet, still morning. Like a layer of soundproofing, the clouds absorb every sound the earth sends up.

I walk for a while on a path that parallels the sea, picturing the boy in the painting walking the same path, canvas chair in hand, sitting on the shore. I'm not sure, though, what scene along this shore the painting depicts. The painting only shows the beach, the horizon, sky, and clouds. And an island. But there are a number of islands along the shore, and I can't exactly recall what the one in the painting looked like. I sit down on the sand, face the sea, and make a kind of picture frame with my hands. I imagine the boy sitting there. A single white seagull flits aimlessly across the windless sky. Small waves break against the shore at regular intervals, leaving behind a gentle curve and tiny bubbles on the sand.

All of a sudden I realize-I'm jealous of the boy in the painting.

"You're jealous of the boy in the painting," the boy called Crow whispers in my ear.

You're jealous of that pitiful, twenty-year-old boy mistaken for someone else and pointlessly murdered-what is it, thirty years ago? So insanely jealous it hurts. This is the first time you've ever been jealous in your life. Now you finally understand what it feels like. It's like a brush fire torching your heart.

You've never ever in your life envied anybody else, or ever wanted to be someone else-but right now you do. You want more than anything to be that boy. Even knowing that at age twenty he was going to be smashed over the head with an iron pipe and beaten to death, you'd still trade places with him. You'd do it, to be able to love Miss Saeki for those five years. And to have her love you with all her heart. To hold her as much as you want, to make love to her over and over. To let your fingers run over every single part of her body, and let her do the same to you. And after you die, your love will become a story etched forever in her heart. Every single night she'll love you in her memory.

Yup, you're in a strange position, all right. You're in love with a girl who is no more, jealous of a boy who's gone forever. Even so, this emotion you're feeling is more real, and more intensely painful, than anything you've ever felt before. And there's no way out. No possibility of finding an exit. You've wandered into a labyrinth of time, and the biggest problem of all is that you have no desire at all to get out. Am I right?

Oshima comes in a little later than yesterday. Before he does I vacuum the first and second floors, wipe down all the desks and chairs, open the windows and clean them, wash out the restroom, throw out the garbage, pour fresh water in the vases. Then I turn on all the lights and switch on the catalog computers. All that's left is to open the front gate.

Oshima checks my work and gives a satisfied nod. "You learn pretty quick, and don't fool around, do you?"

I boil some water and make him some coffee. Like yesterday, I have a cup of Earl Grey. It's started raining outside, pretty heavily. You can hear thunder off in the distance. It's not yet noon, but it's like evening it's so dark.

"Oshima, I have something I'd like you to do for me."

"What's that?"

"Can you get hold of the sheet music for 'Kafka on the Shore' somewhere?"

Oshima thinks it over. "As long as it's on a music publisher's website, I imagine you could download it for a fee. I'll check it out and let you know."

"Thanks."

He sits down on a corner of the counter, puts the tiniest lump of sugar into his coffee cup, then carefully stirs it with a spoon. "So you like the song?"

"Yeah, a lot."

"I'm fond of it myself. It's a lovely tune, quite unique. Simple yet deep. It tells you a lot about the person who composed it."

"The lyrics, though, are pretty symbolic," I venture.

"From time immemorial, symbolism and poetry have been inseparable. Like a pirate and his rum."

"Do you think Miss Saeki knew what all the lyrics mean?"

Oshima looks up, listening to the thunder as if calculating how far away it is. He turns to me and shakes his head. "Not necessarily. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose."

"So you're saying Miss Saeki maybe found those words in some other space-like in dreams?"

"Most great poetry is like that. If the words can't create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem."

"But plenty of poems only pretend to do that."

"Right. It's a kind of trick, and as long as you know that it isn't hard. As long as you use some symbolic-sounding words, the whole thing looks like a poem of sorts."

"In 'Kafka on the Shore' I feel something urgent and serious."

"Me too," Oshima says. "The words aren't just something on the surface. But the words and melody are so inseparable in my mind, I can't look at the lyrics as pure poetry and decide how persuasive they are by themselves." He shakes his head slightly. "At any rate, she was definitely blessed with a natural talent, and had a real sense for music. She was also practical enough to grab an opportunity when it came along. If that terrible incident hadn't taken her out of circulation, I'm sure she would've developed her talent even further. In any number of ways it's a real shame…"

"So where did all that talent go?"

Oshima looks at me. "You're asking where Miss Saeki's talent went after her boyfriend died?"

I nod. "If talent's a kind of natural energy, doesn't it have to find an outlet?"

"I don't know," he replies. "Nobody can predict where talent's headed. Sometimes it simply vanishes. Other times it sinks down under the earth like an underground stream and flows off who knows where."

"Maybe Miss Saeki focused her talents somewhere else, other than music," I venture.

"Somewhere else?" Oshima, obviously interested, narrows his brow. "What do you mean?"

I'm at a loss for words. "I don't know… I just feel maybe that's what happened. Maybe into something intangible."

"Intangible?"

"Something other people can't see, something you pursue for yourself. An inner process."

Oshima brushes his hair off his forehead, locks of it spilling between his slender fingers. "That's an interesting idea. For all we know, after Miss Saeki came back to town maybe she used her talents somewhere out of sight-as you said, for something intangible. But you have to remember she disappeared for about twenty-five years, so unless you ask her yourself there's no way of knowing for sure."

I hesitate, then decide to just go ahead. "Can I ask you something really stupid?"

"Really stupid?"

I blush. "Totally off the wall."

"No problem. I don't necessarily mind stupid, off-the-wall things."

"I can't believe I'm actually saying this to somebody."

Oshima tilts his head ever so slightly, waiting for me to go on.

"Is it possible that Miss Saeki… is my mother?"

Oshima leans back against the counter, taking time to search for the right words. The clock on the wall ticks away as I wait.

Finally he speaks up. "So what you're saying is that when she was twenty, Miss Saeki left Takamatsu in despair and was living alone someplace when she happened to meet your father, Koichi Tamura, and they got married. They were blessed with you and then, four years later, something happened and she ran away, leaving you behind. After this there's a mysterious blank, but then she shows up back in Shikoku. Do I have that right?"

"Yeah."

"It's not impossible. What I mean is, at this point I don't have any evidence to refute your hypothesis. So much of her life is a total mystery. Rumor has it she lived in Tokyo. Plus she's about the same age as your father. When she came back to Takamatsu, though, she was alone. How old did you say your sister is?"

"Twenty-one."

"The same age as me," Oshima says. "I'm not your sister-that much I know for certain. I've got parents, and my brother-all related by blood. A family way too good for me." He folds his arms and looks me at for a while. "I've got a question for you. Have you ever looked at your family register? That would give your mother's name and age."

"Of course I have."

"So what did it say?"

"There wasn't any name," I say.

He looks surprised. "No name? How can that be?"

"There wasn't any. No kidding. I have no idea why. As far as the family register's concerned, I don't have a mother. Or an older sister. There's just my father's name and mine on the register. Legally, I'm a bastard. An illegitimate child."

"But you actually had a mother and a sister at one time."

I nod. "I did, until I was four. The four of us lived together. It's not just my imagination. I remember it very clearly. The two of them left soon after I turned four." I pull out my wallet and show Oshima the photo of me and my sister playing at the shore. He gazes at it for a moment, smiles, and hands it back.

"'Kafka on the Shore,'" he says.

I nod and put the photograph back in my wallet. The wind swirls outside, pounding rain against the window. The ceiling light casts a shadow of me and Oshima on the floor, where we look like we're having an ominous talk in some alternate world.

"You don't remember your mother's face?" Oshima asks. "You lived together till you were four, so you should have some memory of what she looked like."

I shake my head. "I just can't recall, not at all. I don't know why, but the part of my memory where her face should be is dark, painted over, blank."

Oshima ponders this for a while. "Tell me more about why you think Miss Saeki might be your mother."

"That's enough," I say. "Let's just forget it. I'm making too much of it."

"It's all right-go ahead and say what's on your mind," he says. "Then the two of us can decide if you're making too much of it or not."

Oshima's shadow on the floor moves in time with his movements, though it's slightly more exaggerated.

"There are an amazing amount of coincidences between me and Miss Saeki," I say. "They're like pieces of a puzzle that fit together. I understood this when I listened to 'Kafka on the Shore.' First off is the fact that I was drawn to this library, like fate reeling me in. A straight line from Nakano to Takamatsu. Very strange, when you think about it."

"Like the plot of a Greek tragedy," Oshima comments.

"Plus," I add, "I'm in love with her."

"With Miss Saeki?"

"Yeah, probably."

"Probably?" Oshima repeats, frowning. "Do you mean it's probably Miss Saeki you're in love with? Or that you're probably in love with her?"

I turn red. "I can't really explain it," I reply. "It's complicated and there's a lot of stuff I still don't get."

"But you're probably in love, probably with Miss Saeki?"

"Right," I say. "Very much."

"Probably, but also very much."

I nod.

"At the same time it's possible she's your mother?"

Another of my patented nods.

"For a fifteen-year-old who doesn't even shave yet, you're sure carrying a lot of baggage around." Oshima takes a sip of his coffee and carefully places the cup back on its saucer. "I'm not saying that's wrong. Just that everything has a critical point."

I don't say anything.

Oshima touches his temples and is lost in thought for a time. He crosses his slim fingers together in front of his chest. "I'll try to find that sheet music as soon as I can. I can finish up here, so why don't you go back to your room."

At lunchtime I take over from Oshima at the front counter. There are fewer visitors than usual, probably due to the steady rain. When he comes back from his break, he hands me a large envelope with a computer printout of the sheet music for "Kafka on the Shore."

"Convenient world we live in," he says.

"Thanks," I tell him.

"If you don't mind, why don't you take a cup of coffee upstairs. No cream or sugar. You make really good coffee."

I make a fresh cup and take it on a tray to the second floor. As always, the door to Miss Saeki's room is open and she's at her desk, writing. When I put the cup of coffee on her desk, she looks up at me and smiles, then puts the cap back on her fountain pen and rests it on top of the paper.

"So, are you getting used to things around here?"

"Bit by bit," I answer.

"Are you free now?"

"Yes, I am," I tell her.

"Why don't you sit down, then." Miss Saeki points to the wooden chair beside her desk. "Let's talk for a while."

It's starting to thunder again. Still far away, but gradually getting closer. I do what she says and take a seat.

"How old are you again? Sixteen?"

"Fifteen. I just turned fifteen," I respond.

"You ran away from home, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did."

"Was there some reason you had to do that?"

I shake my head. What should I say?

Miss Saeki picks up the cup and takes a sip while she waits for my answer.

"I felt like if I stayed there I'd be damaged beyond repair," I say.

"Damaged?" Miss Saeki says, narrowing her eyes.

"Yes," I say.

After a pause she says, "It sounds strange for a boy your age to use a word like damaged, though I must say I'm intrigued. What exactly do you mean by damaged?"

I search for the right words. First I look for the boy named Crow, but he's nowhere to be found. I'm left to choose them on my own, and that takes time. But Miss Saeki waits there patiently. Lightning flashes outside, and after a time thunder booms far away.

"I mean I'd change into something I shouldn't."

Miss Saeki looks at me with great interest. "As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later."

"But even if that happens, you've got to have a place you can retrace your steps to."

"A place you can retrace your steps to?"

"A place that's worth coming back to."

Miss Saeki stares straight at me.

I blush, then summon my courage and look up at her. She has on a navy blue dress with short sleeves. She must have a whole closet of dresses in different shades of blue. Her only accessories are a thin silver necklace and a smallish wristwatch with a black leather band. I look for the fifteen-year-old girl in her and find her right away. She's hidden, asleep, like a 3-D painting in the forest of her heart. But if you look carefully you can spot her. My chest starts pounding again, like somebody's hammering a long nail into the walls surrounding it.

"For a fifteen-year-old, you make a lot of sense."

I have no idea how to respond to that. So I don't say anything.

"When I was fifteen," Miss Saeki says with a smile, "all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time."

"But there's no place like that in this world."

"Exactly. Which is why I'm living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break." As if hinting at the flow of time, she's silent for a while. "But you know," she goes on, "when I was fifteen, I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I'd run across the entrance that would take me to that other world."

"Were you lonely when you were fifteen?"

"In a sense, I guess. I wasn't alone, but I was terribly lonely. Because I knew that I would never be happier than I was then. That much I knew for sure. That's why I wanted to go-just as I was-to some place where there was no time."

"What I want is to grow up faster."

Miss Saeki pulls back to study my expression. "You must be much stronger and more independent than I am. At your age I was filled with illusions of escaping reality, but you're standing right up to the real world and confronting it head-on. That's a big difference."

Strong and independent? I'm neither one. I'm just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not. But I don't say anything.

"You know, you remind me of a fifteen-year-old boy I used to know a long time ago."

"Did he look like me?" I ask.

"You're taller and more muscular than he was, but there is a resemblance. He didn't enjoy talking with other kids his age-they were on a different wavelength-so he spent most of his time holed up in his room, reading or listening to music. He'd get the same frown lines, too, whenever the topic got difficult. And you love to read as well."

I nod.

Miss Saeki glances at her watch. "Thank you for the coffee."

Taking that as my signal to leave, I stand up and head for the door. Miss Saeki picks up her black fountain pen, slowly twists off the cap, and goes back to her writing. There's another flash of lightning outside, bathing the room for an instant in a weird color. The clap of thunder hits a moment later. This time it's closer than before.

"Kafka," Miss Saeki says.

I stop at the doorway and turn around.

"I just remembered that I wrote a book on lightning once."

I don't say anything. A book on lightning?

"I went all over Japan interviewing people who'd survived lightning strikes. It took me a few years. Most of the interviews were pretty interesting. A small publisher put it out, but it barely sold. The book didn't come to any conclusion, and nobody wants to read a book that doesn't have one. For me, though, having no conclusion seemed perfectly fine."

A tiny hammer in my head is pounding on a drawer somewhere, persistently. I'm trying to remember something, something very important-but I don't know what it is. By this time Miss Saeki's gone back to her writing and I go back to my room.

The rainstorm continues to batter us for another hour. The thunder is so incredibly loud that I'm afraid the windows in the library will shatter. Every time a bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, the stained-glass window on the landing flashes an image like some ancient ghost on the white wall across from it. By two o'clock, the storm lets up, and yellowish light begins to spill out between the clouds like a reconciliation has finally been reached. Water continues to drip down in the gentle sunlight.

When evening rolls around, I start closing up the place for the night. Miss Saeki says good-bye to me and Oshima and heads home. I hear the engine of her Golf and picture her seated at the wheel, turning the key. I tell Oshima I'll finish locking up. Whistling some aria, he goes off to wash up in the restroom, then leaves. I listen as the Mazda Miata roars off, the sound fading off in the distance. Now the library's all mine. It's much quieter than ever before.

I go to my room and study the sheet music for "Kafka on the Shore." Like I suspected, most of the chords are simple. The refrain, though, has a couple tricky ones. I go over to the reading room and try playing it on the upright piano. The fingering's really tough, so I practice it over and over, trying to get my hands around it, and somehow wind up getting it to sound right. At first the chords sound all wrong. I'm sure it's a misprint, or that the piano's out of tune. But the longer I listen to how those two chords sound one after the other, the more I'm convinced the whole song hangs on them. These two chords are what keep "Kafka on the Shore" from degrading into some silly pop song, give it a special depth and substance. But how in the world did Miss Saeki come up with them?

I go back to my room, boil water in the electric kettle, and make some tea. I take out the old records we found in the storage room and put them on the turntable one after another. Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the Beatles' "White Album," Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, Stan Getz's Getz/Gilberto-all hit albums from the late sixties. That young boy-with Miss Saeki right beside him-must've done what I was doing, putting the records on the turntable, lowering the needle, listening to the music coming out of these speakers. The music felt like it was taking me and the whole room off to some different time, a world before I was even born. As I enjoy the music, I review the conversation we'd had that afternoon, trying to capture our exact words.

"When I was fifteen, I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I'd run across the entrance that would take me to that other world."

I can hear her voice right beside me. Inside my head something knocks at a door, a heavy, persistent knock.

An entrance?

I lift the needle off the Stan Getz album, pull out the single of "Kafka on the Shore," place it on the turntable, and lower the needle. And listen to her sing.

The drowning girl's fingers

Search for the entrance stone, and more.

Lifting the hem of her azure dress,

She gazes- at Kafka on the shore.

The girl who comes to this room most likely located that entrance stone. She's in another world, just as she was at fifteen, and at night she comes to visit this room. In her light blue dress, she comes to gaze at Kafka on the shore.

Suddenly, completely out of nowhere, I remember my father talking about how he'd once been struck by lightning. He didn't tell me himself-I'd read about it in an interview in a magazine. When he was a student in art college, he had a part-time job as a caddy at a golf course. One day he was following his golfer around the course when the sky suddenly changed color and a huge thunderstorm crashed down on them. They took refuge under a tree when it was hit by a bolt of lightning. This huge tree was split right in two. The golfer he was caddying for was killed, but my father, sensing something, leaped away from the tree in time. He got some light burns, his hair was singed, and the shock of the lightning threw him against a rock. He struck his head and lost consciousness, but survived the ordeal with only a small scar on his forehead. That's what I was trying to remember this afternoon, standing there in Miss Saeki's doorway listening to the roar of the thunder. It was after he recovered from his injuries that my father got serious about his career as a sculptor.

As Miss Saeki went around interviewing people for her book, maybe she met my father. It's entirely possible. There can't be that many people around who've been struck by lightning and lived, can there?

I breathe very quietly, waiting for the dawn. A cloud parts, and moonlight shines down on the trees in the garden. There are just too many coincidences. Everything seems to be speeding up, rushing toward one destination.