His father was closed off in silence, lips shut tight. It was impossible to tell from his expression whether he had understood Tengo or not. Tengo also fell silent and settled more deeply into his chair. A breeze blew in through the open window, stirred the sun-bleached curtains and the delicate petals of the potted plant, and slipped through the open door into the corridor. The smell of the sea was stronger than before. The soft sound of pine needles brushing against each other blended with the cries of the cicadas.

His voice softer now, Tengo went on, “A vision often comes to me—the same one, over and over, ever since I can remember. I suspect it’s probably not so much a vision as a memory of something that actually happened. I’m one and a half years old, and my mother is next to me. She and a young man are holding each other. The man is not you. Who he is, I have no idea, but he is definitely not you. I don’t know why, but the scene is permanently burned into me.”

His father said nothing, but his eyes were clearly seeing something else—something not there. The two maintained their silence. Tengo was listening to the suddenly stronger breeze. He did not know what his father was listening to.

“I wonder if I might ask you to read me something,” his father said in formal tones after a long silence. “My sight has deteriorated to the point where I can’t read books anymore. I can’t follow the words on the page for long. That bookcase has some books. Choose any one you like.”

Tengo gave up and left his chair to scan the spines of the volumes in the bookcase. Most of them were historical novels set in ancient times when samurai roamed the land. All the volumes of Sword of Doom were there. Tengo couldn’t bring himself to read his father some musty old book full of archaic language.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather read a story about a town of cats,” Tengo said. “I brought it to read myself.”

“A story about a town of cats,” his father said, savoring the words. “Please read that to me, if it is not too much trouble.”

Tengo looked at his watch. “It’s no trouble at all. I have plenty of time before my train leaves. It’s an odd story; I don’t know if you’ll like it or not.”

Tengo pulled out his paperback and started reading “Town of Cats.” His father listened to him read the entire story, not changing his position in the chair by the window. Tengo read slowly in a clearly audible voice, taking two or three breaks along the way to catch his breath. He glanced at his father whenever he stopped reading but saw no discernible reaction on his face. Was he enjoying the story or not? He could not tell. When he was through reading the story, his father was sitting perfectly still with his eyes closed. He looked as if he could be sound asleep, but he was not. He was simply deep inside the story, and it took him a while to come back out. Tengo waited patiently for that to happen. The afternoon light had begun to weaken and blend with touches of evening. The ocean breeze continued to shake the pines.

“Does that town of cats have television?” his father asked.

“The story was written in Germany in the 1930s. They didn’t have television yet back then. They did have radio, though.”

“I was in Manchuria, but I didn’t even have a radio. There weren’t any stations. The newspaper often didn’t arrive, and when it did it was two weeks old. There was hardly anything to eat, and we had no women. Sometimes there were wolves roaming around. It was like the edge of the earth out there.”

He fell silent for a while, thinking, probably recalling the hard life he led as a young pioneer in distant Manchuria. But those memories soon clouded over, swallowed up into nothingness. Tengo could read these movements of his father’s mind from the changing expressions on his face.

“Did the cats build the town? Or did people build it a long time ago and the cats came to live there?” his father asked, speaking toward the windowpane as if to himself, though the question seemed to have been directed to Tengo.

“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “But it does seem to have been built by human beings long before. Maybe the people left for some reason—say, they all died in an epidemic—and the cats came to live there.”

His father nodded. “When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it. Because that’s what everybody does.”

“That’s what everybody does?”

“Exactly.”

“What kind of vacuum are you filling?”

His father scowled. His long eyebrows came down to hide his eyes. Then he said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “Don’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” Tengo said.

His father’s nostrils flared. One eyebrow rose slightly. This was the expression he always used when he was dissatisfied with something. “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

Tengo narrowed his eyes, trying to read the man’s expression. Never once had his father employed such odd, suggestive language. He always spoke in concrete, practical terms. To say only what was necessary when necessary: that was his unshakable definition of a conversation. But there was no expression on his face to be read.

“I see. So you are filling in some kind of vacuum,” Tengo said. “All right, then, who is going to fill the vacuum that you have left behind?”

“You,” his father declared, raising an index finger and thrusting it straight at Tengo. “Isn’t it obvious? I have been filling in the vacuum that somebody else made, so you will fill in the vacuum that I have made. Like taking turns.”

“The way the cats filled in the town after the people were gone.”

“Right. Lost like the town,” his father said. Then he stared vacantly at his own outstretched index finger as if looking at some mysterious, misplaced object.

“Lost like the town,” Tengo repeated his father’s words.

“The woman who gave birth to you is not anywhere anymore.”

“ ‘Not anywhere.’ ‘Lost like the town.’ Are you saying she’s dead?”

His father made no reply to that.

Tengo sighed. “So, then, who is my father?”

“Just a vacuum. Your mother joined her body with a vacuum and gave birth to you. I filled in that vacuum.”

Having said that much, his father closed his eyes and closed his mouth.

“Joined her body with a vacuum?”

“Yes.”

“And you raised me. Is that what you’re saying?”

After one ceremonious clearing of his throat, his father said, as if trying to explain a simple truth to a slow-witted child, “That is why I said, ‘If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.’ ”

“So you’re telling me that I came out of a vacuum?” Tengo asked.

No answer.

Tengo folded his hands in his lap and looked straight into his father’s face once more. This man is no empty shell, no vacant house. He is a flesh-and-blood human being with a narrow, stubborn soul and shadowed memories, surviving in fits and starts on this patch of land by the sea. He has no choice but to coexist with the vacuum that is slowly spreading inside him. The vacuum and his memories are still at odds, but eventually, regardless of his wishes, the vacuum will completely swallow up whatever memories are left. It is just a matter of time. Could the vacuum that he is confronting now be the same vacuum from which I was born?

Tengo thought he might be hearing the distant rumble of the sea mixed with the early-evening breeze slipping through the pine branches. Though it could have been an illusion.

CHAPTER 9

Aomame

WHAT COMES AS A PAYMENT

FOR HEAVENLY GRACE