Back at his apartment, he found Fuka-Eri sitting at his desk, intently sharpening pencils with a small pocketknife. Tengo always kept ten pencils in his pencil holder, but now there were at least twenty. She had done a beautiful job of sharpening them. Tengo had never seen such beautifully sharpened pencils. Their points were like needles.

“You had a phone call,” she said, checking the sharpness of the current pencil with her finger. “From Chikura.”

“You weren’t supposed to be answering the phone.”

“It was an important call.”

She had probably been able to tell it was important from the ring.

“What was it about?” Tengo asked.

“They didn’t say.”

“But it was from the sanatorium in Chikura, right?”

“They want a call.”

“They want me to call them?”

“Today. Even if it’s late.”

Tengo sighed. “You don’t know the number, I suppose.”

“I do.”

She had memorized the number. Tengo wrote it down. Then he looked at the clock. Eight thirty.

“What time did they call?” he asked.

“A little while ago.”

Tengo went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Resting his hands on the edge of the sink, he closed his eyes and confirmed that his brain was functioning normally. Then he went to the phone and dialed the number. Perhaps his father had died. Or at least it was a life-and-death issue of some sort. They would not have called this late if it were not about something important.

A woman answered the phone. Tengo gave his name and said he was calling in response to an earlier message.

“Mr. Kawana’s son?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Tengo said.

“We met here the other day,” she said.

Tengo pictured the middle-aged nurse with metal-framed glasses. He could not recall her name.

He uttered a few polite words, adding, “I gather you called earlier?”

“Yes, I did. I’ll connect you with the doctor in charge so you can talk to him directly.”

With the receiver pressed against his ear, Tengo waited—and waited—for the doctor to pick up. “Home on the Range” seemed as if it would go on playing forever. Tengo closed his eyes and pictured the sanatorium on the Boso Peninsula shore. The thickly overlapping pine trees, the sea breeze blowing through them, the Pacific Ocean waves breaking endlessly on the beach. The hushed entryway lobby without visitors. The sound of movable beds being wheeled down the corridors. The sun-damaged curtains. The well-pressed white uniforms of the nurses. The thin, flat coffee in the lunchroom.

Finally, the doctor picked up the phone.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I got an emergency call from one of the other sickrooms a few minutes ago.”

“That’s fine,” Tengo said. He tried to recall what his father’s doctor looked like, until it occurred to him that he had never met the man. His brain was still not functioning properly. “So, is something wrong with my father?”

The doctor paused a moment and then said, “Well, it’s not that something in particular happened today, just that his condition has not been good lately. I hate to tell you this, but he is in a coma.”

“You mean, he’s completely unconscious?”

“Exactly.”

Tengo struggled to make his brain work. “Did he come down with something that made him go into a coma?”

“Properly speaking, no,” the doctor said with apparent difficulty.

Tengo waited.

“It’s difficult to explain on the phone, but there is not one particular thing wrong with him. He does not have cancer or pneumonia or any other illness that we can name. Medically speaking, we can’t see any distinguishing symptoms. We don’t know what the cause might be, but in your father’s case, it appears that his natural life-sustaining force is visibly weakening. And since we don’t know the cause, we don’t know what treatment to apply. We are continuing to feed him intravenously, but this is strictly treating the symptoms.”

“Is it all right for me to ask you a very direct question?” Tengo asked.

“Yes, of course,” the doctor said.

“Are you saying that my father is not going to last much longer?”

“That might be a strong possibility if he stays in his current condition.”

“So he’s more or less wasting away of old age?”

The doctor made a vague sound into the phone. Then he said, “Your father is still in his sixties, not yet ready to ‘waste away of old age.’ He is basically healthy. We haven’t found anything wrong with him other than his impaired cognitive abilities. He gets rather good scores on the periodic strength tests we perform. We are not aware of a single problem he might have.”

The doctor stopped talking at that point. Then he went on:

“But … come to think of it … observing him these past few days, there may be some degree of what you call ‘wasting away of old age.’ His physical functions overall have declined, and he seems to be losing the will to live. Normally, these symptoms don’t emerge until the patient passes his mid-eighties. When a person gets that old, we often see him grow tired of living and abandon the effort to maintain life. But I have no idea why that should be happening to a man in his sixties like Mr. Kawana.”

Tengo bit his lip and gave this some thought.

“When did the coma start?” Tengo asked.

“Three days ago,” the doctor said.

“You mean he hasn’t awakened for three days?”

“Not once.”

“And his vital signs are gradually weakening?”

The doctor said, “Not drastically, but as I just said, the level of his life-sustaining force is gradually—but visibly—going down, like a train dropping its speed little by little as it begins to stop.”

“How much time do you think he has left?”

“I can’t say for sure. If his present condition continues as is, he might have another week in the worst case,” the doctor said.

Tengo changed his grip on the receiver and bit his lip again.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Tengo said. “Even if you hadn’t called, I was thinking of going there soon. But I’m glad you called. I’m very grateful to you.”

The doctor seemed relieved to hear this. “Please do come. The sooner you see him the better, I think. He may not be able to talk to you, but I’m sure your father will be glad you’re here.”

“He is completely unconscious, though, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He is not conscious.”

“Do you think he is in pain?”

“For now, no, probably not. That is the one silver lining in all this. He is sound asleep.”

“Thank you very much,” Tengo said.

“You know, Mr. Kawana,” the doctor said, “your father was a very easy patient to take care of. He never gave anyone any trouble.”

“He’s always been like that,” Tengo said. Then, thanking the doctor once again, he ended the call.

Tengo warmed his coffee and drank it at the kitchen table, sitting across from Fuka-Eri.

“You’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Fuka-Eri asked.

Tengo nodded. “Tomorrow morning I have to take the train and go to the cat town again.”

“You’re going to the cat town,” Fuka-Eri asked without expression.

“You will be waiting here,” Tengo asked. Living with Fuka-Eri, he had become used to asking questions without question marks.

“I will be waiting here.”

“I’ll go to the cat town alone,” Tengo said. He took a sip of coffee. Then it suddenly occurred to him to ask her, “Do you want something to drink?”

“White wine if you have some.”

Tengo opened the refrigerator to see if he had any chilled white wine. In back he found a bottle of Chardonnay he had recently bought on sale. The label had a picture of a wild boar. He pulled the cork, poured some into a wineglass, and placed it before Fuka-Eri. After some hesitation, he poured himself a glass as well. He was definitely more in the mood for wine than coffee. It was a bit too chilled, and a bit too sweet, but the alcohol calmed Tengo’s nerves somewhat.