Tengo sat on the stool by the bed once again and began to narrate a summary of his life to date, beginning from the time he left the house and started living in the judo dorm when he entered high school. From that time onward, he and his father had lost nearly all points of contact, creating a situation in which neither had the least concern for what the other was doing. Tengo felt he should probably fill in such a large vacuum as best he could.

Ultimately, however, there was almost nothing for Tengo to tell about his life in high school. He had entered a private high school in Chiba Prefecture that had a strong reputation for its judo program. He could easily have gotten into a better school, but the conditions offered him by that school were the best. They waived his tuition and allowed him to live in the dormitory, providing him with three meals a day. Tengo became a star member of the judo team, studied between practice sessions (he could maintain some of the highest grades in his class without having to study too hard), and he earned extra money during vacations by doing assorted manual labor with his teammates. With so much to do, he found himself pressed for time day after day. There was little to say about his three years of high school other than that it was a busy time for him. It had not been especially enjoyable, nor had he made any close friends. He never liked the school, which had a lot of rules. He did what he had to do in order to get along with his teammates, but they weren’t really on the same wavelength. In all honesty, Tengo never once felt totally committed to judo as a sport. He needed to win in order to support himself, so he devoted a lot of energy to practice in order not to betray others’ expectations. It was less a sport to him than a practical means of survival—a job. He spent the three years of high school wanting to graduate so that he could begin living a more serious life as soon as possible.

Even after entering college, however, he continued with judo, living basically the same life as before. Keeping up his judo meant he could live in the dormitory and thus be spared any difficulty in finding a place to sleep or food to eat (minimal though it was). He also received a scholarship, though it was nowhere nearly enough to get by on. His major was mathematics, of course. He studied fairly hard and earned good grades in college, too. His adviser even urged him to continue into graduate school. As he advanced into the third year and then the fourth year of college, however, his passion for mathematics as an academic discipline rapidly cooled. He still liked mathematics as much as ever, but he had no desire to make a profession of research in the field. It was the same as it had been with judo. It was fine as an amateur endeavor, but he had neither the personality nor the drive to stake his whole life on it, which he well knew.

As his interest in mathematics waned and his college graduation drew near, his reasons for continuing judo evaporated and he had no idea what path he should next pursue. His life seemed to lose its center of gravity—not that he had ever really had one, but up to that point, other people had placed certain demands and expectations upon him, and responding to them had kept him busy. Once those demands and expectations disappeared, however, there was nothing left worth talking about. His life had no purpose. He had no close friends. He was drifting and unable to concentrate his energies on anything.

He had a number of girlfriends during his college years, and a lot of sexual experience. He was not handsome in the usual sense. He was not a particularly sociable person, nor was he especially amusing or witty. He was always hard up for money and wasn’t at all stylish. But just as the smell of certain kinds of plants attracts moths, Tengo was able to attract certain kinds of women—and very strongly, at that.

He discovered this fact around the time he turned twenty (which was just about the time he began losing his enthusiasm for mathematics as an academic discipline). Without doing anything about it himself, he always had women who were interested enough to take the initiative in approaching him. They wanted him to hold them in his big arms—or at least they never resisted him when he did so. He couldn’t understand how this worked at first and reacted with a good deal of confusion, but eventually he got the hang of it and learned how to exploit this ability, after which Tengo was rarely without a woman. He never had a positive feeling of love toward any of them, however. He just went with them and had sex with them. They filled each other’s emptiness. Strange as it may seem, he never once felt a strong emotional attraction to any of the women who had a strong emotional attraction to him.

Tengo recounted these developments to his unconscious father, choosing his words slowly and carefully at first, more smoothly as time went by, and finally with some passion. He even spoke as honestly as he could about sexual matters. There’s no point getting embarrassed about such things now, he told himself. His father lay faceup, unmoving, his deep sleep unbroken, his breathing unchanged.

A nurse came before three o’clock, changed the plastic bag of intravenous fluid, replaced the bag of collected urine with an empty one, and took his father’s temperature. She was a strongly built, full-bosomed woman in her late thirties. The name on her tag read “Omura.” Her hair was pulled into a tight bun on the back of her head, with a ballpoint pen thrust into it.

“Has there been any change in his condition?” she asked Tengo while recording numbers on a clipboard with the ballpoint pen.

“None at all. He’s been fast asleep the whole time,” Tengo said.

“Please push that button if anything happens,” she said, pointing toward the call switch hanging over the head of the bed. Then she shoved the ballpoint pen back into her hair.

“I see.”

Shortly after the nurse went out, there was a quick knock on the door and bespectacled Nurse Tamura poked her head in.

“Would you like to have a bite to eat? You could go to the lunchroom.”

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry yet,” Tengo said.

“How is your father doing?”

Tengo nodded. “I’ve been talking to him the whole time. I can’t tell whether he can hear me or not.”

“It’s good to keep talking to them,” she said. She smiled encouragingly. “Don’t worry, I’m sure he can hear you.”

She closed the door softly. Now it was just Tengo and his father in the little room again.

Tengo went on talking.

He graduated from college and started teaching mathematics at a cram school in the city. No longer was he a math prodigy from whom people expected great things, nor was he a promising member of a judo team. He was a mere cram school instructor. But that very fact made Tengo happy. He could catch his breath at last. For the first time in his life, he was free: he could live his own life as he wanted to without having to worry about anyone else.

Eventually, he started writing fiction. He entered a few of his finished stories in competitions, which led him to become acquainted with a quirky editor named Komatsu. This editor gave him the job of rewriting Air Chrysalis, a story by a seventeen-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri (whose real name was Eriko Fukada). Fuka-Eri had created the story, but she had no talent for writing, so Tengo took on that task. He did such a good job that the piece won a debut writer’s prize from a magazine and then was subsequently published as a book that became a huge bestseller. Because the book was so widely discussed, the selection committee for the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious literary award, kept their distance from it. So while it did not win that particular prize, the book sold so many copies that Komatsu, in his typically brusque way, said, “Who the hell needs that?”