“You are such a kind person, Tengo,” Nurse Omura said as she changed an IV bag. “There’s no one else I know who comes here to read aloud to an unconscious patient.”

The praise made Tengo uncomfortable. “I just happen to have some vacation days,” he said. “But I won’t be here all that long.”

“No matter how much free time someone might have, they don’t come to a place like this because they want to,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but these are patients who will never recover. As time passes it makes people get more and more depressed.”

“My father asked me to read to him. He said he didn’t mind what I read. This was a long time ago, when he was still conscious. Besides, I don’t have anything else to do, so I might as well come here.”

“What do you read to him?”

“All kinds of things. I just pick whatever book I’m in the midst of reading, and read aloud from wherever I’ve left off.”

“What are you reading right now?”

“Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.”

The nurse shook her head. “Never heard of it.”

“It was written in 1937. Dinesen was from Denmark. She married a Swedish nobleman, moved to Africa just before the First World War, and they ran a plantation there. After she divorced him, she continued to run the plantation on her own. The book is about her experiences at the time.”

The nurse took his father’s temperature, noted it on his chart, then returned the ballpoint pen to her hair and brushed back her bangs. “I wonder if I could hear you read for a bit,” she said.

“I don’t know if you’ll like it,” Tengo said.

She sat down on a stool and crossed her legs. They were sturdy looking, fleshy, but nicely shaped. “Just go ahead and read, if you would.”

Tengo slowly began to read from where he had left off. It was the kind of passage that was best read slowly, like time flowing over the African landscape.

When in Africa in March the long rains begin after four months of hot, dry weather, the richness of growth and the freshness and fragrance everywhere are overwhelming.

But the farmer holds back his heart and dares not trust to the generosity of nature, he listens, dreading to hear a decrease in the roar of the falling rain. The water that the earth is now drinking in must bring the farm, with all the vegetable, animal and human life on it, through four rainless months to come.

It is a lovely sight when the roads of the farm have all been turned into streams of running water, and the farmer wades through the mud with a singing heart, out to the flowering and dripping coffee-fields. But it happens in the middle of the rainy season that in the evening the stars show themselves through the thinning clouds; then he stands outside his house and stares up, as if hanging himself on to the sky to milk down more rain. He cries to the sky: “Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now, and I will not let thee go except thou bless me. Drown me if you like, but kill me not with caprices. No coitus interruptus, heaven, heaven!”

“Coitus interruptus?” the nurse asked, frowning.

“She’s the kind of person who doesn’t mince words.”

“Still, it seems awfully graphic to use when you’re addressing God.”

“I’m with you on that,” Tengo said.

Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognize one another, and the things cry to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: “You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.” That bad time blessed us and went away.

“That’s a wonderful passage,” the nurse said. “I can really picture the scene. Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, you said?”

“That’s right.”

“You have a nice voice, too. It’s deep, and full of emotion. Very nice for reading aloud.”

“Thanks.”

The nurse sat on the stool, closed her eyes for a while, and breathed quietly, as if she were still experiencing the afterglow of the passage. Tengo could see the swell of her chest under her uniform rise and fall as she breathed. As he watched this, Tengo remembered his older girlfriend. Friday afternoons, undressing her, touching her hard nipples. Her deep sighs, her wet vagina. Outside, beyond the closed curtains, a tranquil rain was falling. She was feeling the heft of his balls in her hand. But these memories didn’t arouse him. The scenery and emotions were distant and vague, as though seen through a thin film.

Some time later the nurse opened her eyes and looked at Tengo. Her eyes seemed to read his thoughts. But she was not accusing him. A faint smile rose to her lips as she stood up and looked down at him.

“I have to be going.” She patted her hair to check that the ballpoint pen was there, spun around, and left the room.

Every evening he called Fuka-Eri. Nothing really happened today, she would tell him. The phone had rung a few times, but she followed instructions and didn’t answer. “I’m glad,” Tengo told her. “Just let it ring.”

When Tengo called her he would let it ring three times, hang up, then immediately dial again, but she didn’t always follow this arrangement. Most of the time she picked up on the first set of rings.

“We have to follow our plan,” Tengo cautioned her each time this happened.

“I know who it is. There is no need to worry,” Fuka-Eri said.

“You know it’s me calling?”

“I don’t answer the other phone calls.”

I guess that’s possible, Tengo thought. He himself could sense when a call was coming in from Komatsu. The way it rang was sort of nervous and fidgety, like someone tapping their fingers persistently on a desktop. But this was, after all, just a feeling. It wasn’t as if he knew who was on the phone.

Fuka-Eri’s days were just as monotonous as Tengo’s. She never set foot outside the apartment. There was no TV, and she didn’t read any books. She hardly ate anything, so at this point there was no need to go out shopping.

“Since I’m not moving much there’s not much need to eat,” Fuka-Eri said.

“What are you doing by yourself every day?”

“Thinking.”

“About what?”

She didn’t answer the question. “There’s a crow that comes, too.”

“The crow comes once every day.”

“It comes many times, not just once,” she said.

“Is it the same crow?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody else comes?”

“The N-H-K person came again.”

“Is it the same NHK person as before?”

“He says, Mr. Kawana, you’re a thief, in a loud voice.”

“You mean he yells that right outside my door?”

“So everyone else can hear him.”

Tengo pondered this for a moment. “Don’t worry about that. It has nothing to do with you, and it’s not going to cause any harm.”

“He said he knows you are hiding in here.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” Tengo said. “He can’t tell that. He’s just saying it to intimidate me. NHK people do that sometimes.”

Tengo had witnessed his father do exactly the same thing any number of times. A Sunday afternoon, his father’s voice, filled with malice, ringing out down the hallway of a public housing project. Threatening and ridiculing the resident. Tengo lightly pressed the tips of his fingers against his temple. The memory brought with it a heavy load of other baggage.