Kafka on the Shore

Chapter 27

It's 2:47 when I notice the girl's here-a little earlier than last night. I glance at the clock by my bed to remember the time. This time I stay up, waiting for her to appear. Other than the occasional blink I don't close my eyes once. I thought I was paying attention, but somehow I miss the actual moment she appears.

She has on her usual light blue dress and is sitting there the same as before, head in hands, silently gazing at the painting of Kafka on the Shore. And I'm gazing at her with bated breath. Painting, girl, and me-we form a still triangle in the room. She never tires of looking at the picture, and likewise I never tire of gazing at her. The triangle is fixed, unwavering. And then something totally unexpected happens.

"Miss Saeki," I hear myself say. I hadn't planned on speaking her name, but the thought welled up in me and spilled out. In a very small voice, but she hears it. And one side of the triangle collapses. Maybe I was secretly hoping it would-I don't know.

She looks in my direction, though not like she's straining to see. Her head's still in her hands as she quietly turns her face. Like something-she's not sure what-has made the air tremble ever so slightly.

I don't know if she can see me, but I want her to. I pray she notices me and knows I exist. "Miss Saeki," I repeat. I can't keep myself from saying her name. Maybe she'll be frightened by my voice and leave the room, never to return. I'd feel terrible if that happened. No-not terrible, that's not what I mean. Devastated is more like it. If she never came back everything would be lost to me forever. All meaning, all direction. Everything. I know this, but I go ahead and risk it anyway, and call her name. Of their own accord, almost automatically, my tongue and lips form her name, over and over.

She's not looking at the painting anymore, she's looking at me. Or at least I'm in her field of vision. From where I sit I can't see her expression. Clouds move outside and the moonlight flickers. It must be windy, but I can't hear it.

"Miss Saeki," I say again, carried away by some urgent, compelling, overwhelming force.

She takes her head out of her hands, holds up her right hand in front of her as if to tell me not to say anything more. But is that what she really wants to say? If only I could go up to her and gaze into her eyes, to see what she's thinking right now, what emotions are running through her. What is she trying to tell me? What is she hinting at? Damn, I wish I knew. But this heavy, just-before-three-a. m. darkness has snatched away all meaning. It's hard to breathe, and I close my eyes. There's a hard lump of air in my chest, like I've swallowed a raincloud whole. When I open my eyes a few seconds later, she's vanished. All that's left is an empty chair. A shadow of a cloud slides across the wall above the desk.

I get out of bed, go over to the window, and look at the night sky. And think about time that can never be regained. I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.

The next day, in the afternoon, a detective stops by the library. I'm lying low in my room and don't know he's there. The detective questions Oshima for about twenty minutes and then leaves. Oshima comes to my room later to fill me in.

"A detective from a local precinct was asking about you," Oshima says, then takes a bottle of Perrier from the fridge, uncaps it, pours the water into a glass, and takes a drink.

"How did he know I was here?"

"You used a cell phone. Your dad's phone."

I check my memory and nod. That night I ended up all bloody in the woods behind that shrine, I called Sakura on the cell phone. "I did, but just once."

"The police checked the calling record and traced you to Takamatsu. Usually police don't get into details, but while we were chatting I got him to explain how they traced the call. When I want to I can turn on the charm. He also let out that they couldn't trace the person you called, so it must've been a prepaid phone. Anyhow, they know you were in Takamatsu, and the local police have been checking all the hotels. They found out that a boy named Kafka Tamura matching your description stayed in a business hotel in town, through a special arrangment with the YMCA, until May 28th. The same day somebody murdered your father."

At least the police didn't find out about Sakura. I'm thankful for that, having bothered her enough already.

"The hotel manager remembered that you'd asked about our library. Remember how he called to see if you were really coming here?"

I nod.

"That's why the police stopped by." Oshima takes a sip of Perrier. "Naturally I lied. I told the detective I hadn't seen you since the 28th. That you'd been coming every day, but not once since."

"You might get into trouble," I say.

"If I didn't lie, you'd be in a whole lot more trouble."

"But I don't want to get you involved."

Oshima narrows his eyes and smiles. "You don't get it, do you? You already have gotten me involved."

"Yeah, I guess so-"

"Let's not argue, okay? What's done is done. Talking about it now won't get us anywhere."

I nod, not saying a word.

"Anyway, the detective left his card and told me to call him right away if you ever showed up again."

"Am I a suspect?"

Oshima slowly shakes his head. "I doubt it. But they do think you might be able to help them out. I've been following all this in the newspaper. The investigation isn't getting anywhere, and the police are getting impatient. No fingerprints, no clues, no witnesses. You're the only lead they have. Which explains why they're trying so hard to track you down. Your dad's famous, too, so the murder's been covered in detail on TV and in magazines. The police aren't about to sit around and twiddle their thumbs."

"But if they find out you lied to them, they won't accept you as a witness anymore-and there goes my alibi. They might think I did it."

Oshima shook his head again. "Japanese police aren't that stupid, Kafka. Lacking in imagination, yes, but they're not incompetent. I'm sure they've already checked all the passenger lists for planes from Tokyo to Shikoku. I don't know if you're aware of this, but they have video cameras set up at all the gates at airports, to photograph all the boarding passengers. By now they know you didn't fly back to Tokyo around the time of the incident. Information in Japan is micromanaged, believe me. So the police don't consider you a suspect. If they did, they wouldn't send some local cop, but detectives from the National Police Agency. If that happened they would've grilled me pretty hard and there's no way I could've outsmarted them. They just want to hear from you whatever information you can provide about the incident."

It makes perfect sense, what he says.

"Anyhow, you'd better keep a low profile for a while," he says. "The police might be staking out the area, keeping an eye out for you. They had photos of you with them. Copies of your official junior high class picture. Can't say it looked much like you, though. You looked really mad in the photo."

That was the only photograph I left behind. I always tried to avoid having my picture taken, but not having this one taken wasn't an option.

"The police said you were a troublemaker at school. There were some violent incidents involving you and your classmates. And you were suspended three times."

"Twice, not three times. And I wasn't suspended, just officially grounded," I explain. I breathe in deeply, then slowly breathe out. "I have times like that, yeah."

"You can't control yourself," Oshima says.

I nod.

"And you hurt other people?"

"I don't mean to. But it's like there's somebody else living inside me. And when I come to, I find out I've hurt somebody."

"Hurt them how much?" Oshima asks.

I sigh. "Nothing major. No broken bones or missing teeth or anything."

Oshima sits down on the bed, crosses his legs, and brushes his hair off his forehead. He's wearing navy blue chinos, a black polo shirt, and white Adidas. "Seems to me you have a lot of issues you've got to deal with."

A lot of issues. I look up. "Don't you have any?"

Oshima holds his hands in the air. "Not all that many. But there is one thing. For me, inside this physical body-this defective container-the most important job is surviving from one day to the next. It could be simple, or very hard. It all depends on how you look at it. Either way, even if things go well, that's not some great achievement. Nobody's going to give me a standing ovation or anything."

I bite my lip for a while, then ask, "Don't you ever think about getting out of that container?"

"You mean leaving my physical body?"

I nod.

"Symbolically? Or for real?"

"Either one."

Oshima flips his hair back with a hand. I can picture the gears going full speed just below the surface of his pale forehead. "Are you thinking you'd like to do that?"

I take a breath. "Oshima, to tell you the unvarnished truth, I don't like the container I'm stuck in. Never have. I hate it, in fact. My face, my hands, my blood, my genes… I hate everything I inherited from my parents. I'd like nothing better than to escape it all, like running away from home."

He gazes into my face and smiles. "You have a nice, muscular body. No matter who you inherited it from, you're quite handsome. Well, maybe a little too unique to be called handsome, exactly. But you're not bad looking. At least I like the way you look. You're smart, you're quick. You've got a nice cock, too. I envy you that. You're going to have tons of girls fall for you, guaranteed. So I can't see what you're dissatisfied with about your container."

I blush.

"Okay, I guess that's all beside the point," Oshima continues. "I'm not crazy about the container I'm in, that's for sure. How could I be-this crummy piece of work? It's pretty inconvenient, I can tell you. Still, inside here, this is what I think: If we reverse the outer shell and the essence-in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell-our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand."

I stare at my hands, thinking about all that blood on them, how sticky they felt. I think about my own essence, my own shell. The essence of me, surrounded by the shell that's me. But these thoughts are driven away by one indelible image: all that blood.

"How about Miss Saeki?" I ask.

"What do you mean?"

"You think she has issues to overcome?"

"You'd better ask her yourself," Oshima says.

At two I take a cup of coffee on a tray up to Miss Saeki's room, where she's sitting at her desk. Like always there's writing paper and a fountain pen on the desk, but the pen is still capped. Both hands resting on the desk, she's staring off into space. Not like she's looking at anything, just gazing at a place that isn't there. She seems tired. The window behind her is open, the early summer breeze rustling the white lace curtain. The scene looks like some beautiful allegorical painting.

"Thank you," she says when I put the coffee cup on her desk.

"You look a little tired."

She nods. "I imagine I look a lot older when I get tired."

"Not at all. You look wonderful, like always."

She smiles. "For someone so young, you certainly know how to flatter a woman."

My face reddens.

Miss Saeki points to a chair. The same chair as yesterday, in exactly the same position. I take a seat.

"I'm used to being tired, but I don't imagine you are."

"I guess not."

"When I was fifteen I wasn't either, of course." She picks up the coffee cup and takes a sip. "Kafka, what can you see outside?"

I look out the window behind her. "I see trees, the sky, and some clouds. Some birds on tree branches."

"Nothing out of the ordinary. Right?"

"That's right."

"But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose so."

"Have you ever thought about that?"

"I have."

A surprised look comes over her. "When?"

"When I'm in love," I tell her.

She smiles faintly, and it continues to hover around her lips. This puts me in mind of how refreshing water looks after someone's sprinkled it in a tiny hollow outside on a summer day.

"Are you in love?" she asks.

"Yes."

"And her face and whole being are special and precious to you, each time you see her?"

"That's right. And I might lose those."

Miss Saeki looks at me for a while, and the smile fades away. "Picture a bird perched on a thin branch," she says. "The branch sways in the wind, and each time this happens the bird's field of vision shifts. You know what I mean?"

I nod.

"When that happens, how do you think the bird adjusts?"

I shake my head. "I don't know."

"It bobs its head up and down, making up for the sway of the branch. Take a good look at birds the next time it's windy. I spend a lot of time looking out that window. Don't you think that kind of life would be tiring? Always shifting your head every time the branch you're on sways?"

"I do."

"Birds are used to it. It comes naturally to them. They don't have to think about it, they just do it. So it's not as tiring as we imagine. But I'm a human being, not a bird, so sometimes it does get tiring."

"You're on a branch somewhere?"

"In a manner of speaking," she says. "And sometimes the wind blows pretty hard." She places the cup back on the saucer and takes the cap off her fountain pen.

This is my signal, so I stand up. "Miss Saeki, there's something I've got to ask you."

"Something personal?"

"Yes. And maybe out of line, too."

"But it's important?"

"For me it is."

She puts the pen back on the desk, and her eyes fill with a kind of neutral glow. "All right. Go ahead."

"Do you have any chidlren?"

She takes in a breath and pauses. The expression on her face slowly retreats somewhere far away, then comes back. Kind of like a parade that disappears down a street, then marches back up the same street toward you again.

"Why do you want to know that?"

"It's personal. It's not just some spur-of-the-moment question."

She lifts up her Mont Blanc like she's testing the thickness and heft of it, then sets it on the desk and looks up. "I'm sorry, but I can't give you a yes or no answer. At least right now. I'm tired, and there's a strong wind blowing."

I nod. "Sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

"It's all right. I'm not blaming you," she says gently. "Thank you for the coffee. You make excellent coffee."

I leave and go back down the stairs to my room. I sit on my bed and try to read, but nothing seems to filter into my head. I feel like I'm gazing at some table of random numbers, just following the words with my eyes. I put my book down, go over to the window, and look at the garden. There are birds on some of the branches, but no wind to speak of. Am I in love with Miss Saeki when she was fifteen? Or with the real, fifty-something Miss Saeki upstairs? I don't know anymore. The boundary line separating the two has started to waver, to fade, and I can't focus. And that confuses me. I close my eyes and try to find some center inside to hold on to.

But you know, she's right. Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.