Tengo read the story twice. The phrase “the place where he is meant to be lost” attracted his attention. He closed the book and let his eyes wander aimlessly across the drab coastal industrial scene passing by the train window—the flame of an oil refinery, the gigantic gas tanks, the squat but equally gigantic smokestacks shaped like long-range cannons, the line of tractor-trailers and tank trucks moving down the road. It was a scene remote from “Town of Cats,” but it had its own sense of fantasy about it, as though it were the netherworld supporting urban life from below.

Soon afterward Tengo closed his eyes and imagined Kyoko Yasuda closed up in her own “lost place,” where there were no trains or telephones or mail. During the day there was nothing but absolute loneliness, and with night came the cats’ relentless searching, the cycle repeating itself with no apparent end. Apparently, he had drifted off to sleep in his seat—not a long nap, but a deep one. He woke covered in sweat. The train was moving along the southern coastline of the Boso Peninsula in midsummer.

He left the express train in Tateyama, transferred to a local, and went as far as Chikura. Stepping from the train, he caught a whiff of the old familiar smell of the seashore. Everyone on the street was darkly tanned. He took a cab from the station to the sanatorium. At the reception desk, he gave his name and his father’s name.

The middle-aged nurse at the desk asked, “Have you by any chance notified us of your intention to visit today?” There was a hard edge to her voice. A small woman, she wore metal-frame glasses, and her short hair had a touch of gray. The ring on her stubby ring finger might have been bought as part of a matching set with the glasses. Her name tag said “Tamura.”

“No, it just occurred to me to come this morning and I hopped on a train,” Tengo answered honestly.

The nurse gave him a look of mild disgust. Then she said, “Visitors are supposed to notify us before they arrive to see a patient. We have our schedules to keep, and the wishes of the patient must also be taken into account.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“When was your last visit?”

“Two years ago.”

“Two years ago,” Nurse Tamura said as she checked the list of visitors with a ballpoint pen in hand. “You mean to say that you have not made a single visit in two years?”

“That’s right,” Tengo said.

“According to our records, you are Mr. Kawana’s only relative.”

“That is correct.”

She set the list on the desk and glanced at Tengo, but she said nothing. Her eyes were not blaming Tengo, just checking the facts. Apparently, Tengo’s case was not exceptional.

“At the moment, your father is in group rehabilitation. That will end in half an hour. You can see him then.”

“How is he doing?”

“Physically, he’s healthy. He has no special problems. It’s in the other area that he has his ups and downs,” she said, touching her temple with an index finger. “I’ll leave it to you to see what I mean about ups and downs.”

Tengo thanked her and went to pass the time in the lounge by the entrance, sitting on a sofa that smelled like an earlier era and reading more of his book. A breeze passed through now and then, carrying the scent of the sea and the cooling sound of the pine windbreak outside. Cicadas clung to the branches of the trees, screeching their hearts out. Summer was now at its height, but the cicadas seemed to know that it would not last long.

Eventually bespectacled Nurse Tamura came to tell Tengo that he could see his father now that the rehabilitation session was over.

“I’ll show you to his room,” she said. Tengo got up from the sofa and, passing by a large mirror on the wall, realized for the first time what a sloppy outfit he was wearing—a Jeff Beck Japan Tour T-shirt under a faded dungaree shirt with mismatched buttons, chinos with specks of pizza sauce near one knee, long-unwashed khaki-colored sneakers, a baseball cap: no way for a thirty-year-old son to dress on his first hospital visit to his father in two years. Nor did he have anything with him that might serve as a gift on such an occasion. He had a paperback book shoved into one pocket, nothing more. No wonder the nurse had given him that look of disgust.

As they crossed the sanatorium grounds toward the wing in which his father’s room was located, the nurse gave him a general description of the place. There were three wings divided according to the severity of the patient’s illness. Tengo’s father was now housed in the “moderate” wing. People usually started in the “mild” wing, moved to “moderate,” and then to “severe.” As with a door that opens in only one direction, backward movement was not an option. There was nowhere to go beyond the “severe” wing—other than the crematorium. The nurse did not add that remark, of course, but her meaning was clear.

His father was in a double room, but his roommate was out attending some kind of class. The sanatorium offered several rehabilitation classes—ceramics, or gardening, or exercise. Though all were supposedly for “rehabilitation,” they did not aim at “recovery.” Their purpose, rather, was to slow the advance of the disease as much as possible. Or just to kill time. Tengo’s father was seated in a chair by the open window, looking out, hands on his knees. A nearby table held a potted plant. Its flowers had several delicate, yellow petals. The floor was made of some soft material to prevent injury in case of a fall. There were two plain wood-frame beds, two writing desks, and two dressers. Next to each desk was a small bookcase, and the window curtains had yellowed from years of exposure to sunlight.

Tengo did not realize at first that the old man seated by the window was his own father. He had become a size smaller—though “shriveled up” might be more accurate. His hair was shorter and as white as a frost-covered lawn. His cheeks were sunken, which may have been why the hollows of his eyes looked much larger than they had before. Three deep creases marked his forehead. The shape of his head seemed more deformed than it had, probably because his shorter hair made it more obvious. His eyebrows were extremely long and thick, and white hair poked out from both ears. His large, pointed ears were now larger than ever and looked like bat wings. Only the shape of the nose was the same—round and pudgy, in marked contrast to the ears, and it wore a reddish black tinge. His lips drooped at both ends, seemingly ready to drool at any moment. His mouth was slightly open, revealing uneven teeth. Sitting so still at the window, his father reminded Tengo of one of van Gogh’s last self-portraits.

Although Tengo entered the room, the man did nothing but glance momentarily in his direction, after which he continued to stare outside. From a distance, he looked less like a human being than some kind of creature resembling a rat or a squirrel—a creature that might not be terribly clean but that possessed all the cunning it needed. It was, however, without a doubt, Tengo’s father—or, rather, the wreckage of Tengo’s father. The two intervening years had taken much from him physically, the way a merciless tax collector strips a poor family’s house of all its possessions. The father that Tengo remembered was a tough, hardworking man. Introspection and imagination may have been foreign qualities to him, but he had his own moral code and a simple but strong sense of purpose. He was a stoic individual; Tengo never once heard him whine or make excuses for himself. But the man Tengo saw before him now was a mere empty shell, a vacant house deprived of all warmth.

“Mr. Kawana!” the nurse said to Tengo’s father in a crisp, clear tone of voice she must have been trained to use when addressing patients. “Mr. Kawana! Look who’s here! It’s your son!”