Kafka on the Shore

Chapter 43

With all my baggage gone I can travel light now, forging on deeper into the forest. I focus totally on moving forward. No need to mark any more trees, no need to remember the path back. I don't even look at my surroundings. The scenery's always the same, so what's the point? A canopy of trees towering above thick ferns, vines trailing down, gnarled roots, lumps of decaying leaves, the dry, sloughed-off skins of various bugs. Hard, sticky spiderwebs. And endless branches-a regular tree branch universe. Menacing branches, branches fighting for space, cleverly hidden branches, twisted, crooked branches, contemplative branches, dried-up, dying branches-the same scenery repeated again and again. Though with each repetition the forest grows a bit deeper.

Mouth tightly shut, I continue down what passes for a path. It's running uphill, but not so steeply, at least for now. Not the kind of slope that's going to get me out of breath. Sometimes the path threatens to get lost in a sea of ferns or thorny bushes, but as long as I push on ahead the pseudo-path pops up again. The forest doesn't scare me anymore. It has its own rules and patterns, and once you stop being afraid you're aware of them. Once I grasp these repetitions, I make them a part of me.

I'm empty-handed now. The can of yellow spray paint, the little hatchet-they're history. The daypack's gone as well. No canteen, no food. Not even the compass. One by one I left these behind. Doing this gives a visible message to the forest: I'm not afraid anymore. That's why I chose to be totally defenseless. Minus my hard shell, just flesh and bones, I head for the core of the labyrinth, giving myself up to the void.

The music that had been playing in my head has vanished, leaving behind some faint white noise like a taut white sheet on a huge bed. I touch that sheet, tracing it with my fingertips. The white goes on forever. Sweat beads up under my arms. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of the sky through the treetops. It's covered with an even, unbroken layer of gray clouds, but it doesn't look like it's going to rain. The clouds are still, the whole scene unchanging. Birds in the high branches call out clipped, meaningful greetings to each other. Insects buzz prophetically among the weeds.

I think about my deserted house back in Nogata. Most likely it's all shut up now. Fine by me. Let the bloodstains be. What do I care? I'm never going back there. Even before that bloody incident took place, that house was a place where lots of things had died. Check that-were murdered.

Sometimes from above me, sometimes from below, the forest tries to threaten me. Blowing a chill breath on my neck, stinging like needles with a thousand eyes. Trying anything to drive this intruder away. But I gradually get better at letting these threats pass me by. This forest is basically a part of me, isn't it? This thought takes hold at a certain point. The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self, and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my own heart. The spiderweb stretched taut there is the spiderweb inside me. The birds calling out overhead are birds I've fostered in my mind. These images spring up in my mind and take root.

Like I'm being shoved from behind by some huge heartbeat, I continue on and on through the forest. The path leads to a special place, a light source that spins out the dark, the place where soundless echoes come from. I need to see with my own eyes what's there. I'm carrying an important, sealed, personal letter, a secret message to myself.

A question. Why didn't she love me? Don't I deserve to have my mother love me?

For years that question's been a white-hot flame burning my heart, eating away at my soul. There had to be something fundamentally wrong with me that made my mother not love me. Was there something inherently polluted about me? Was I born just so everyone could turn their faces away from me?

My mother didn't even hold me close when she left. She turned her face away and left home with my sister without saying a word. She disappeared like quiet smoke. And now that face is gone forever.

The birds screech above me again, and I look up at the sky. Nothing there but that flat, expressionless layer of gray clouds. No wind at all. I trudge along. I'm walking by the shores of consciousness. Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out, leave some writing, and just as quickly new waves roll in and erase it. I try to quickly read what's written there, between one wave and the next, but it's hard. Before I can read it the next wave's washed it away. All that's left are puzzling fragments.

My mind wanders back to my house on the day my mother left, taking my sister with her. I'm sitting alone on the porch, staring out at the garden. It's twilight, in early summer, and the trees cast long shadows. I'm alone in the house. I don't know why, but I already knew I was abandoned. I understood even then how this would change my world forever. Nobody told me this-I just knew it. The house is empty, deserted, an abandoned lookout post on some far-off frontier. I'm watching the sun setting in the west, shadows slowly stealing over the world. In a world of time, nothing can go back to the way it was. The shadows' feelers steadily advance, eroding away one point after another along the ground, until my mother's face, there until a moment ago, is swallowed up in this dark, cold realm. That hardened face, turned away from me, is automatically snatched away, deleted from my memory.

Trudging along in the woods, I think of Miss Saeki. Her face, that calm, faint smile, the warmth of her hand. I try imagining her as my mother, leaving me behind when I was four. Without realizing it, I shake my head. The picture is all wrong. Why would Miss Saeki have done that? Why does she have to hurt me, to permanently screw up my life? There had to be a hidden, important reason, something deeper I'm just not getting.

I try to feel what she felt then and get closer to her viewpoint. It isn't easy. I'm the one who was abandoned, after all, she's the one who did the abandoning. But after a while I take leave of myself. My soul sloughs off the stiff clothes of the self and turns into a black crow that sits there on a branch high up in a pine tree in the garden, gazing down at the four-year-old boy on the porch.

I turn into a theorizing black crow.

"It's not that your mother didn't love you," the boy named Crow says from behind me. "She loved you very deeply. The first thing you have to do is believe that. That's your starting point."

"But she abandoned me. She disappeared, leaving me alone where I shouldn't be. I'm finally beginning to understand how much that hurt. How could she do that if she really loved me?"

"That's the reality of it. It did happen," the boy named Crow says. "You were hurt badly, and those scars will be with you forever. I feel sorry for you, I really do. But think of it like this: It's not too late to recover. You're young, you're tough. You're adaptable. You can patch up your wounds, lift up your head, and move on. But for her that's not an option. The only thing she'll ever be is lost. It doesn't matter whether somebody judges this as good or bad-that's not the point. You're the one who has the advantage. You ought to consider that."

I don't respond.

"It all really happened, so you can't undo it," Crow tells me. "She shouldn't have abandoned you then, and you shouldn't have been abandoned. But things in the past are like a plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?"

I nod. You can never put it back together like it was. He's hit the nail on the head.

The boy named Crow continues. "Your mother felt a gut-wrenching kind of fear and anger inside her, okay? Just like you do now. Which is why she had to abandon you."

"Even though she loved me?"

"Even though she loved you, she had to abandon you. You need to understand how she felt then, and learn to accept it. Understand the overpowering fear and anger she experienced, and feel it as your own-so you won't inherit it and repeat it. The main thing is this: You have to forgive her. That's not going to be easy, I know, but you have to do it. That's the only way you can be saved. There's no other way!"

I think about what he's said. The more I think about it, the more confused I get. My head's spinning, and I feel like my skin's being ripped away. "Is Miss Saeki really my mother?" I ask.

"Didn't she tell you that theory is still functional?" the boy named Crow says. "So that's the answer. It's still a functioning hypothesis. That's all I can tell you."

"A working hypothesis until some good counterevidence comes along."

"You got it," Crow says.

"And I have to pursue that hypothesis as far as it'll take me."

"That's it," Crow replies pointedly. "A theory that still doesn't have any good counterevidence is one worth pursuing. And right now, pursuing it's the only choice you have. Even if it means sacrificing yourself, you have to pursue it to the bitter end."

"Sacrifice myself?" That certainly has a strange ring to it. I can't quite grasp it.

There's no reply. Worried, I turn around. The boy named Crow is still there. He's right behind, keeping pace.

"What sort of fear and anger did Miss Saeki have at that time?" I ask him as I turn back around and walk on. "And where did it come from?"

"What kind of fear and anger do you think she had?" the boy named Crow asks in return. "Think about it. You've got to figure it out yourself. That's what your head's for."

So I do just that. I have to understand it, accept it, before it's too late. But I still can't make out that delicate writing left on the shore of my consciousness. There's not enough time between one wave and the next.

"I'm in love with Miss Saeki," I say. The words slip out naturally.

"I know that," the boy named Crow says curtly.

"I've never felt that before," I go on. "And it's more important to me than anything else I've ever experienced."

"Of course it is," Crow says. "That goes without saying. That's why you've come all this way."

"But I still don't get it. You're telling me my mother loved me very much. I want to believe you, but if that's true, I just don't get it. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that?"

I wait for an answer. I keep my mouth shut for a long time, but there's no response, so I spin around. The boy named Crow is gone. From up above I hear the flap of wings.

You're totally confused.

Not long afterward, the two soldiers appear.

They're wearing battle fatigues of the old Imperial army. Short-sleeved summer uniforms, gaiters, and knapsacks. No helmets, just caps with bills, and some kind of black face paint. Both of them are young. One of them's tall and thin, with round, metal-framed glasses. The other one's short, broad-shouldered, and muscular. They're both sitting on a flat rock, neither one looking like he's about to leap into battle. Their Arisaka rifles are on the ground by their feet. The tall soldier seems bored and is chewing on a stem of grass. The two of them look completely natural, like they belong here. Unperturbed, they watch as I approach.

There's a small flat clearing around them, like a landing on a staircase.

"Hey," the tall soldier calls out cheerfully.

"How ya doing?" the brawny one says with the smallest of frowns.

"How are you?" I greet them back. I know I should be amazed to see them, but somehow it doesn't seem weird at all. It's entirely within the realm of possibility.

"We were waiting for you," the tall one says.

"For me?" I ask.

"Sure," he replies. "No one else is coming out here, that's for sure."

"We've been waiting a long time," the brawny one says.

"Not that time's much of a factor here," the tall one adds. "Still, you took longer than I figured."

"You're the two guys who disappeared in this forest a long, long time ago, right?" I ask. "During maneuvers?"

The brawny soldier nods. "That's us."

"They searched everywhere for you," I say.

"Yeah, I know," he says. "I know they were looking for us. I know everything that goes on in this forest. But they're not about to find us, no matter how hard they look."

"Actually, we didn't get lost," the tall one says. "We ran away."

"Not running away so much as just stumbling onto this spot and deciding to stay put," the brawny one adds. "That's different from getting lost."

"Not just anybody can find this place," the tall soldier says. "But we did, and now you have too. It was a stroke of luck-for us, at least."

"If we hadn't found this spot, they would've shipped us overseas," the brawny one explains. "Over there it was kill or be killed. That wasn't for us. I'm a farmer, originally, and my buddy here just graduated from college. Neither one of us wants to kill anybody. And being killed's even worse. Kind of obvious, I'd say."

"How 'bout you?" the tall one asks me. "Would you like to kill anybody, or be killed?"

I shake my head. No, neither one, definitely not.

"Everybody feels like that," the tall one says. "Or the vast majority, at least. But if you say, Hey, I don't want to go off to war, the country's not about to break out in smiles and give you permission to skip out. You can't run away. Japan's a small country, so where are you going to run to? They'll track you down so fast it'll make your head spin. That's why we stayed here. This is the only place we could hide." He shakes his head and goes on. "And we've stayed here ever since. Like you said, from a long, long time ago. Not that time's a major factor here. There's almost no difference at all between now and a long, long time ago."

"No difference at all," the brawny one says, waving something away with his hand.

"You knew I was coming?" I ask.

"Sure thing," the brawny one replies.

"We've been standing guard here for a long time, so we know if somebody's coming," the other one said. "We're like part of the forest."

"This is the entrance," the brawny one says. "And we're guarding it."

"And right now the entrance happens to be open," the tall one explains. "Before long, though, it'll close up. If you want to come in, now's the time. It doesn't open up all that often."

"We'll lead the way," the brawny one says. "The path's hard to follow, so you need someone to guide you in."

"If you don't come in, then go back where you came from," the tall one says. "It's not all that hard to find your way back, so don't worry about it. You'll do fine. Then you'll return to the world you came from, to the life you've been living. The choice is entirely up to you. Nobody's going to force you to do one or the other. But once you're in, it isn't easy to turn back."

"Take me inside," I answer without a moment's hesitation.

"Are you sure?" the brawny one asks.

"Somebody's inside I have to see," I say. "At least I think so…"

Slowly, silently, the two of them get up off the rock and shoulder their rifles. They exchange a glance and walk on ahead of me.

"You must think it's strange we still lug around these heavy lumps of steel," the tall one says, turning around. "They're worthless. Never had any bullets anyway."

"But they're a kind of sign," the brawny one says, not looking back at me. "A sign of what we left behind."

"Symbols are important," the tall one adds. "We happen to have these rifles and soldiers' uniforms, so we play the part of sentries. That's our role. Symbols guide us to the roles we play."

"Do you have anything like that with you?" the brawny one asks. "Something that can be a sign?"

I shake my head. "No, I don't have anything. Just memories."

"Hmm…," the brawny one says. "Memories, huh?"

"That's okay. Doesn't matter," the tall one says. "Memories can be a great symbol too. Course I don't have any idea how well memories will stand up, how long they'll last."

"Something that has a form or a shape is best, if you can manage it," the brawny one says. "It's easier to understand."

"Like a rifle," the tall one says. "By the way, what's your name?"

"Kafka Tamura," I answer.

"Kafka Tamura," they both repeat.

"Weird name," the tall one says.

"You got that right," the brawny one adds.

After this we walk in silence down the path.