The Future Is Japanese (20 page)

As the sound dissolves her, I know she won’t return. Her ghost form dissipates, leaving behind only bleached, white bones.

My Sayomi.

I curl myself around her skeleton. It’s no longer as cold as ice, only as cold as death.

I sleep there, on the floor, with what’s left of her, just as the suicide watch sleeps beside the bodies they bring back. For one night at least, someone must stay to console the newly dead. To ease their loneliness as best we can before morning.

When we have to go on.

People complain, but nobody goes out there. It’s just like wondering where to go. Or asking whether to go anywhere, and if so, where to. Like pointing down the tracks, which seem to go on forever, and asking, that way? Or pointing back over one’s shoulder, and saying, that way. Or stretching out your arms and asking, which way?

Our very small village is situated somewhere in a vast plain that seems to go on forever. The tracks run straight, right up against it. They come from over there and disappear off in the other direction. There isn’t even a proper train stop. Children run after the trains and wave at the trainman who heaves off supplies. The supplies hit the ground hard and roll and roll, and the stuff inside is often strewn around.

“So, don’t you think, it’s just like where should we go, isn’t it?” Leo says, perched on the rooftop, picking up the apple I had just tossed aside. The earth is a sphere, and if you look at it from far away, it’s just like a point. You can’t move around on a point. So there’s no point in going anywhere. That is Leo’s bizarre logic.

“If you really want to go somewhere, you have to believe in the Flat Earth Theory,” Leo goes on. It is just like Leo. The plain goes on without limit, and no matter how far away you get to look back at it, it is still a plane. If space is like that, it doesn’t matter where you think about going, it’s all the same.

I climb to the top of the ladder and sit a little ways away from Leo. Leo is lying on the slate roof. Leo sets the apple aside and drinks lemonade from a bottle. The night sky spreads overhead like an overturned sugar bowl, as far as the eye can see, with the moon looking down on us like a big eyeball. The old man says this night sky is like the terrain of old. The old night sky used to be like the terrain is now. No doubt, looking at it like this, it feels like your body is floating up toward the night sky and somehow falling toward it at the same time.

I reach out for the hand-crank radio. Noise is mixed in with the audio. It is the language of some foreign country, like music, but random mutterings, flowing smoothly, then pausing abruptly, then flowing again. It is said to be a radio broadcast from the moon, and the radio waves are certainly coming from the moon, but no one can understand what is being said.

This is what we do every night, look at the celestial bodies like this. All the light in the sky is starlight, and the earth too is a celestial body, so it is natural. If all things floating in space are celestial bodies, then we too ourselves are celestial bodies.

On the giant moon floating overhead, a pupil is visible, black and sucking in all the light. The strands of light make a pattern like a retina across the surface of the moon. It is said to be a vast city, but no one really knows for sure. People say all kinds of things about it: that rabbits live there, that crabs built it, that nine million grandmothers live there. I like to think it was built by our ancestors, but the history of our village is silent about the city on the face of the moon. I cannot imagine our descendants traveling to the moon. Likewise, I cannot believe our ancestors went there either.

Sitting here silently looking at the moon like this, sometimes I think it gives a big wink. I think it is trying to tell us something. I think it is looking back at us.

A big-screen sky full of stars. Few of the constellations are familiar to us. The ancient constellations are becoming lost, intermingled with the countless stars that are newly appearing. It is getting hard to point out particular stars. If you point at a star and say, “That one!” no one can tell which one you mean. No one can sit in the orbit of another. Even as we’re sitting there saying “that one” and “which one?” we forget most of the names of the stars and constellations, and there are just too many newcomers for us to give them all new names.

We give names willy-nilly to arrays of stars, but they are just names, capricious. The constellation Lion covers half the sky, roaring. Whether it is the same as the ancient constellation known as Leo is anybody’s guess.

Of the few that are certainly still the same, the ones that everyone knows, even today the constellation Orion looks to the right, his belt of three stars slopes up to the right, twinkling, and from it hangs his club.

“Anytime now Orion should be turning,” Leo predicted, and so for several nights in a row we came out to look up at the night sky.

“What do you mean, ‘turning’?” After years of experience listening to Leo, I have learned that when Leo starts saying things I don’t understand, I should ask the meaning of the words Leo uses.

Leo makes a stern face and answers seriously. “It means he will turn from looking right to looking left. Or of course the other way around.”

“Huh?” I say blankly, and start packing the radio, apple, cookies, cold-weather gear, and lemonade bottles in the backpack. Whatever the logic, once Leo decides something, there is no shaking that hypothesis.

Now Leo stands up and points straight at the night sky, yelling merrily, “Look, look!” Rocking a lemonade-addled head, Leo is doing a dangerous dance on the rooftop.

“He’s looking left!”

Orion floats expressionlessly in the night sky.

“Looks the same to me,” I say matter-of-factly. Just saying what I see. Orion is still looking to the right, in a muscular pose.

“The stars seem to be moving more quickly than usual.”

“No way,” Leo says, snapping fingers sharply, in effect telling me to pipe down.

Brushing off the pants’ seat, knitting brows, and then slowly relaxing them again. Leo stares intently at Orion and says, “Orion has no front or back!”

A name meaning “lion” seems entirely fitting for someone shaking fists and standing all hairs on end because the constellation Orion will not look straight in this direction.

This village is very close to the end of the earth.

That is the conclusion both Leo and the old man on the other side of the tracks have reached. More precisely, they have concluded this village is one-fifth of the way from the end of the earth. Probably that means it is about one-fifth of the way from the end along the tracks that run from the center of the earth to the end.

The old man is someone who was driven out of town because he once drunkenly espoused subtraction in the town bar. As is written in the holy textbook, our creator the watchmaker made this world using natural numbers and addition alone. But from this performance we can conclude that math was not his best subject. That is why this world is rife with errors, and these mistakes do not cancel one another out, they simply get added together, giving birth to even bigger mistakes.

Now, if this were just change back from a bill we were talking about, there might still have been room to rethink things, but the old man was on a tear and started going on about dividing one fraction by another.

Division of fractions was the forbidden knowledge that destroyed the ancient world.

Subtraction and multiplication are the work of man. If the old man had quit there he might still have been okay, but as the overzealous people began to practice division of fractions, the end result was a giant tower of mathematics, and the ancient world was irreparably ruptured. As the word
fraction
suggests, the world itself had been fractured. Of course, I have no idea to what extent this fable reflects reality.

It was the decision of the village council that the possessor of such heretical ideas must never again cross back to this side of the tracks, and since that time the old man has remained on the other side, sleeping in a shack that is little more than a pit dug out of a garbage heap. He is somehow a distant relative of mine, and to Leo he is a friend, or a teacher, or something.

“What I mean to say is …” was the old man’s pretentious pet phrase. “Let’s assume you happen to be alongside the tracks, waiting for the next train, with a stupid look on your face.” His eyes clouded by alcohol, he gazes at my face as if to say, “Got it?”

“Which direction will the next train be going in?” the old man asks.

I answer that the probability of a train heading left would be the same as a train heading right. But the old man, his breath reeking of alcohol, belches, “I thought so too. But I was wrong.”

Leo is in the habit of gathering up liquor bottles thrown from the train and giving them to the old man in lieu of tuition. One day as Leo was doing this, the thought came: once Leo finally reached the tracks and was waiting for the next train to come, there were far more trains heading for the end of the earth than in the other direction.

“Now it seems so obvious!” Leo and the old man had tried many times to explain this to me, but they had never succeeded. But thanks to this, although I still did not understand at all, I had at least memorized the explanation.

“One line of track crosses before us. Many trains are positioned in various places along this track, and they travel at random in one direction or the other. If a larger number of trains are positioned to our left, there is a high probability the next train we see will be heading to the right,” is how I put it to them, and Leo and the old man both nod.

“So why is it that from this, you know where this village is located?” I ask them every time, and every time they look perplexed.

“What do you mean, ‘why?’ It’s just as you just explained. A middle school student would understand,” says Leo—who would be about the age of a middle-schooler by the old way of reckoning—with a deeply quizzical look. And I, who should also be a middle-schooler, continue to recite from memory sentences I only halfway understand.

“In other words, as one approaches the tracks at random, if one knows the probability that a train will be heading to the right or the left, one can deduce one’s own position along the line.”

“Is that it?” I ask, and Leo and the old man nod solemnly.

They are unable to comprehend how someone might be able to recite the explanation in this way and still not grasp the underlying concepts. I am simply parroting by rote, and I end up thinking I really am no better than a parrot.

“It’s called the Elevator Paradox,” the old man says, shrugging his shoulders, using his usual locution. The two of them devised on their own this method of deducing the location of the village, but the old man later found the same ideas recorded in ancient texts. At some point in the past, someone named Elevator had stumbled upon this idea and had attached his own name to the principle. Of course, the old man could not be sure that Elevator was a person’s name. There was also a theory it was the name of the mathematical tower that towered toward the heavens and incurred the wrath of the watchmaker. Or perhaps its patron.

“Probably everything is like that.”

The things people are capable of imagining were all imagined long ago. All has already been written. That is what the old man told me, with a wan smile. “But this time is so fantastic,” says Leo beside him, nodding eagerly.

“The forecast for the lunar eclipse has arrived,” the old man says.

“Oh, I want to see that,” I respond, without enthusiasm.

Through a gap in the roof of the scooped-out shed, the round moon looks down upon us.