A deep silence followed for some moments.

Aomame finally managed to speak. “I know I keep saying the same thing, but I can’t help thinking that the techniques at my disposal can do almost nothing for your problem—especially if it is something that has come to you as a payment for heavenly grace.”

Leader sat up straight and looked at Aomame with those small, deep-set, glacier-like eyes. Then he opened his long, thin lips.

“No, I think you can do something for me—something that only you can do.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am right, I know it,” the man said. “I know a lot of things. If you are willing, I would like to have you start now. Do what you always do.”

“I’ll try,” Aomame said, her voice tense and hollow. What I always do, Aomame thought.

CHAPTER 10

Tengo

YOU HAVE DECLINED OUR OFFER

Tengo said good-bye to his father just before six p.m. While he waited for the taxi to come, the two of them sat across from each other by the window, saying nothing. Tengo indulged in his own unhurried thoughts while his father stared hard at the view outside the window, frowning. The sun had dropped down, and the sky’s pale blue was slowly deepening.

He had many more questions he wanted to ask, but he knew that there would be no answers coming back. The sight of his father’s tightly clenched lips told him that. His father had obviously decided to say nothing more, so Tengo decided not to ask any more. If you couldn’t understand something without an explanation, you couldn’t understand it with an explanation. As his father had said.

When the time for him to leave drew near, Tengo said, “You told me a lot today. It was indirect and often hard to grasp, but it was probably as honest and open as you could make it.”

Tengo looked at his father, but there was no change of expression.

“I still have some things I’d like to ask you, but I know they would only cause you pain. All I can do is guess the rest from what you’ve told me. You are probably not my father by blood. That is what I assume. I don’t know the details, but I have to think that in general. If I’m wrong, please tell me so.”

His father made no reply.

Tengo continued, “If my assumption is correct, that makes it easier for me. Not because I hate you, but—as I said before—because I no longer need to hate you. You seem to have raised me as your son even though we had no blood ties. I should be grateful for that. Unfortunately, we were never very good at being father and son, but that’s another problem.”

Still his father said nothing, his eyes fixed on the outdoor scene like a soldier on guard duty, determined not to miss the next signal flare sent up by the savage tribe on the distant hill. Tengo tried looking out along his father’s line of vision, but found nothing resembling a flare. The only things out there were the pine trees tinted with the coming sunset.

“I’m sorry to say it, but there is virtually nothing I can do for you—other than to hope that the process forming a vacuum inside you is a painless one. I’m sure you have suffered a lot. You must have loved my mother as deeply as you knew how. I do get that sense. But she went off somewhere. I don’t know whether the man she went with was my biological father or not, and you apparently have no intention of telling me. But in any case she left you. And me, too, an infant. Maybe you decided to raise me because you figured she would come back to you if you had me with you. But she never came back—to you or to me. That must have been hard on you, like living in an empty town. Still, you raised me in that empty town—as if to fill in the vacuum.”

His father’s expression did not change. Tengo could not tell whether he was understanding—or even hearing—what he was saying.

“My assumption may be wrong, and that might be all for the better. For both of us. But thinking about it that way helps all kinds of things to fit together nicely inside me, and my doubts are more or less resolved.”

A pack of crows cut across the sky, cawing. Tengo looked at his watch. It was time for him to leave. He stood up, went over to his father, and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Good-bye, Father. I’ll come again soon.”

Grasping the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see a single tear running down from his father’s eye. It shone a dull silver color under the ceiling’s fluorescent light. To release that tear, his father must have squeezed every bit of strength from what little emotion he still had left. The tear crept slowly down his father’s cheek and fell onto his lap. Tengo opened the door and left the room. He took the cab to the station and boarded the train that had brought him here.

The Tokyo-bound express train from Tateyama was more crowded and noisy than the outbound train had been. Most of the passengers were families returning from a stay at the beach. Looking at them, Tengo thought about being in elementary school. He had never once experienced such a family outing or trip. During the Bon Festival, or New Year’s, his father would do nothing but stretch out at home and sleep, looking like some kind of grubby machine with the electricity switched off.

Taking his seat, he thought he might read the rest of his paperback, until he realized he had left it in his father’s room. He sighed but then realized on second thought that this was probably just as well. Anything he might read now would probably not register with him. And “Town of Cats” was a story that belonged more in his father’s room than in Tengo’s possession.

The scenery moved past the window in the opposite order: the dark, deserted strip of coastline pressed in upon by mountains eventually gave way to the more open coastal industrial zone. Most of the factories were still operating even though it was nighttime. A forest of smokestacks towered in the darkness, spitting fire like snakes sticking out their long tongues. Big trucks’ strong headlights flooded the roadway. The ocean beyond looked like thick, black mud.

It was nearly ten o’clock by the time he arrived home. His mailbox was empty. Opening his apartment door, he found the place looking even emptier than usual, the same vacuum he had left behind that morning. The shirt he had thrown on the floor, the switched-off word processor, the swivel chair with the indentation his weight had left in the seat, the eraser crumbs scattered over his desk. He drank two glasses of water, undressed, and crawled straight into bed. Sleep came over him immediately—a deep sleep such as he had not had lately.

When he woke up after eight o’clock the next morning, Tengo realized that he was a brand-new person. Waking up felt good. The muscles of his arms and legs felt free of all stiffness and ready to deal with any wholesome stimulus. His physical weariness was gone. He had that feeling he remembered from childhood when he opened a new textbook at the beginning of the term, ignorant of its contents but sensing the new knowledge to come. He went into the bathroom and shaved. Drying his face and slapping on aftershave lotion, he studied himself in the mirror, confirming that he was, indeed, a new person.

Yesterday’s events all seemed as if they had happened in a dream, not in reality. While everything was quite vivid, he noticed touches of unreality around the edges. He had boarded a train, visited the “Town of Cats,” and come back. Fortunately, unlike the hero of the story, he had managed to board the train for the return trip. And his experiences in that town had changed Tengo profoundly.

Of course, nothing at all had changed about the actual situation in which he found himself, compelled to walk on dangerous, enigmatic ground. Things had developed in totally unforeseen ways, and he had no idea what was going to happen to him next. Still, Tengo had a strong sense that somehow he would be able to overcome the danger.