1Q84 (17 page)

Tengo’s father was repatriated from Manchuria, destitute, when the war ended in 1945. Born the third son of a farming family in the hardscrabble Tohoku region, he joined a homesteaders’ group and crossed over to Manchuria in the 1930s with friends from the same prefecture. None of them had swallowed whole the government’s claims that Manchuria was a paradise where the land was vast and rich, offering an affluent life to all comers. They knew enough to realize that “paradise” was not to be found anywhere. They were simply poor and hungry. The best they could hope for if they stayed at home was a life on the brink of starvation. The times were terrible, and huge numbers of people were unemployed. The cities offered no hope of finding decent work. This left crossing the sea to Manchuria as virtually the only way to survive. As farmers developing new land, they received basic training in the use of firearms in case of emergency, were given some minimal information about farming conditions in Manchuria, were sent off with three cheers from their villages, and then were transported by train from the port of Dalian to a place near the Manchurian-Mongolian border. There they were given some land and farming implements and small arms, and together started cultivating the earth. The soil was poor and rocky, and in winter everything froze. Sometimes stray dogs were all they had to eat. Even so, with government support the first few years, they managed to get by.

Their lives were finally becoming more stable when, in August 1945, the Soviet Union broke its neutrality treaty with Japan and launched a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. Having ended its operations on the European front, the Soviet army had used the Trans-Siberian Railway to shift a huge military force to the Far East in preparation for the border crossing. Tengo’s father had been expecting this to happen, having been secretly informed of the impending situation by a certain official, a man he had become friendly with thanks to a distant connection. The man had told him privately that Japan’s weakened Kwantung Army could never stand up to such an invasion, so he should prepare to flee with the clothes on his back as soon as it happened—the sooner the better. The minute he heard the news that the Soviet army had apparently violated the border, he mounted his horse, galloped to the local train station, and boarded the second-to-last train for Dalian. He was the only one among his farming companions to make it back to Japan before the end of the year.

He went to Tokyo after the war and tried making a living as a black marketeer and as a carpenter’s apprentice, but nothing seemed to work. He could barely keep himself alive. He was working as a liquor store delivery man in the Asakusa entertainment district when he bumped into an acquaintance from his Manchurian days on the street. It was the official who had warned him of the impending Soviet invasion. The man had originally gone over to work for the postal service in Japan’s Manchukuo puppet state, and now that he was back in Japan he had his old job back with the Ministry of Communications. He seemed to like Tengo’s father, both because they came from the same village and because he knew what a hard worker he was. He invited him to share a bite.

When the man learned that Tengo’s father was having a hard time finding a decent job, he asked if he might be interested in working as a subscription fee collector for
NHK
. He offered to recommend him to a friend in that department, and Tengo’s father gladly accepted. He knew almost nothing about
NHK
, but he was willing to try anything that promised a steady income. The man wrote him a letter of recommendation and even served as a guarantor for him, smoothing his way to become an
NHK
subscription fee collector. They gave him training, a uniform, and a quota to fill. People then were just beginning to recover from the shock of defeat and to look for entertainment in their destitute lives. Radio was the most accessible and cheapest form of entertainment; and postwar radio, which offered music, comedy, and sports, was incomparably more popular than its wartime predecessor, with its virtuous exhortations for patriotic self-sacrifice.
NHK
needed huge numbers of people to go from door to door collecting listeners’ fees.

Tengo’s father performed his duties with great enthusiasm. His foremost strengths were his sturdy constitution and his perseverance in the face of adversity. Here was a man who had barely eaten a filling meal since birth. To a person like that, the collection of
NHK
fees was not excruciating work. The most violent curses hurled at him were nothing. Moreover, he felt much satisfaction at belonging to a gigantic organization, even as one of its lowest-ranking members. He worked for one year as a commissioned collector without job security, his only income a percentage of his collections, but his performance and attitude were so outstanding that he was taken directly into the ranks of the full-fledged employees, an almost unheard-of achievement in
NHK
. Part of this had to do with his superior results in an especially difficult collection area, but also effective here was the influence of his guarantor, the Communications Ministry official. Soon he received a set basic salary plus expenses. He was able to move into a corporation-owned apartment and join the health care plan. The difference in treatment was like night and day. It was the greatest stroke of good fortune he had ever encountered in life. In other words, he had finally worked his way up to the lowest spot on the totem pole.

Young Tengo heard this story from his father so many times that he grew sick of it. His father never sang him lullabies, never read storybooks to him at bedtime. Instead, he would tell the boy stories of his actual experiences—over and over, from his childhood in a poor farm family in Tohoku, through the ultimate (and inevitable) happy ending of his good fortune as a fully fledged
NHK
fee collector.

His father was a good storyteller. There was no way for Tengo to ascertain how much was based on fact, but the stories were at least coherent and consistent. They were not exactly pregnant with deep meaning, but the details were lively and his father’s narrative was strongly colored. There were funny stories, touching stories, and violent stories. There were astounding, preposterous stories and stories that Tengo had trouble following no matter how many times he heard them. If a life was to be measured by the color and variety of its episodes, his father’s life could be said to have been rich in its own way, perhaps.

But when they touched on the period after he became a full-fledged
NHK
employee, his father’s stories suddenly lost all color and reality. They lacked detail and wholeness, as if he thought of them as mere sequels not worth telling. He met a woman, married her, and had a child—that is, Tengo. A few months after Tengo was born, his mother fell ill and died. His father raised him alone after that, never remarrying, just working hard for
NHK
. The End.

How he happened to meet Tengo’s mother and marry her, what kind of woman she was, what had caused her death (could it have had something to do with Tengo’s birth?), whether her death had been a relatively easy one or she had suffered greatly—his father told him almost nothing about such matters. If Tengo tried asking, his father would just evade the question and, finally, never answer. Most of the time, such questions put him in a foul mood, and he would clam up. Not a single photo of Tengo’s mother had survived, and not a single wedding photo. “We couldn’t afford a ceremony,” he explained, “and I didn’t have a camera.”

But Tengo fundamentally disbelieved his father’s story. His father was hiding the facts, remaking the story. His mother had not died some months after he was born. In his only memory of her, she was still alive when he was one and a half. And near where he was sleeping, she was in the arms of a man other than his father.

His mother took off her blouse, dropped the straps of her slip, and let a man not his father suck on her breasts. Tengo slept next to them, his breathing audible. But at the same time, Tengo was not asleep. He was watching his mother
.

This was Tengo’s souvenir photograph of his mother. The ten-second scene was burned into his brain with perfect clarity. It was the only concrete information he had about his mother, the one tenuous connection his mind could make with her. They were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo’s brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.

It was a clear, pleasant Sunday morning. There was a chill in the mid-April breeze, though, a reminder of how easily the seasons can turn backward. Over a thin, black crew-neck sweater, Tengo wore a herringbone jacket that he had owned since his college days. He also had on beige chino pants and brown Hush Puppies. The shoes were rather new. This was as close as he could come to dapper attire.

When Tengo reached the front end of the outward-bound Chuo Line platform in Shinjuku Station, Fuka-Eri was already there, sitting alone on a bench, utterly still, staring into space with narrowed eyes. She wore a cotton print dress that had to be meant for midsummer. Over the dress she wore a heavy, grass-green winter cardigan, and on her bare feet she wore faded gray sneakers—a somewhat odd combination for the season. The dress was too thin, the cardigan too thick. On her, though, the outfit did not seem especially out of place. Perhaps she was expressing her own special worldview by this mismatch. It was not entirely out of the question. But probably she had just chosen her clothing at random without much thought.

She was not reading a newspaper, she was not reading a book, she was not listening to a Walkman, she was just sitting still, her big, black eyes staring straight ahead. She could have been staring at something or looking at nothing at all. She could have been thinking about something or not thinking at all. From a distance, she looked like a realistic sculpture made of some special material.

“Did I keep you waiting?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri glanced at him and shook her head a centimeter or two from side to side. Her black eyes had a fresh, silken luster but, as before, no perceptible expression. She looked as though she did not want to speak with anyone for the moment, so Tengo gave up on any attempt to keep up a conversation and sat beside her on the bench, saying nothing.

When the train came, Fuka-Eri stood up, and the two of them boarded together. There were few passengers on the weekend rapid-service train, which went all the way out to the mountains of Takao. Tengo and Fuka-Eri sat next to each other, silently watching the cityscape pass the windows on the other side. Fuka-Eri said nothing, as usual, so Tengo kept silent as well. She tugged the collar of her cardigan closed as if preparing for a wave of bitter cold to come, looking straight ahead with her lips drawn into a perfectly straight line.

Tengo took out a small paperback he had brought along and started to read, but after some hesitation he stopped reading. Returning the book to his pocket, he folded his hands on his knees and stared straight ahead, adopting Fuka-Eri’s pose as if to keep her company. He considered using the time to think, but he couldn’t think of anything to think about. Because he had been concentrating on the rewrite of
Air Chrysalis
, it seemed, his mind refused to form any coherent thoughts. At the core of his brain was a mass of tangled threads.

Tengo watched the scenery streaming past the window and listened to the monotonous sound of the rails. The Chuo Line stretched on and on straight westward, as if following a line drawn on the map with a ruler. In fact, “as if” was probably unnecessary: they must have done just that when they laid it out a hundred years earlier. In this part of the Kanto Plain there was not a single topographical obstruction worth mentioning, which led to the building of a line without a perceivable curve, rise, or fall, and no bridges or tunnels. All they needed back then was a ruler, and all the trains did now was run in a perfectly straight line to the mountains out west.

At some point, Tengo fell asleep. When the swaying of the train woke him, they were slowing down for the stop in Ogikubo Station, no more than ten minutes out of Shinjuku—a short nap. Fuka-Eri was sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead. Tengo had no idea what she was, in fact, looking at. Judging from her air of concentration, she had no intention of getting off the train for some time yet.

“What kind of books do you read?” Tengo asked Fuka-Eri when they had gone another ten minutes and were past Mitaka. He raised the question not only out of sheer boredom but because he had been meaning to ask her about her reading habits.

Fuka-Eri glanced at him and faced forward again. “I don’t read books,” she answered simply.

“At all?”

She gave him a quick nod.

“Are you just not interested in reading books?” he asked.

“It takes time,” she said.

“You don’t read books because it takes time?” he asked, not quite sure he was understanding her properly.

Fuka-Eri kept facing forward and offered no reply. Her posture seemed to convey the message that she had no intention of negating his suggestion.

Generally speaking, of course, it does take some time to read a book. It’s different from watching television, say, or reading manga. The reading of a book is an activity that involves some continuity; it is carried out over a relatively long time frame. But in Fuka-Eri’s statement that “it takes time,” there seemed to be included a nuance somewhat different from such generalities.

“When you say, ‘It takes time,’ do you mean … it takes a
lot
of time?” Tengo asked.

“A
lot
,” Fuka-Eri declared.

“A lot longer than most people?”

Fuka-Eri gave him a sharp nod.

“That must be a problem in school, too. I’m sure you have to read a lot of books for your classes.”