Kafka on the Shore (34 page)

"But he had to die in order to become a spirit."

"Yes, that's right," Oshima says. "It would appear that people can't become living spirits out of honor or love or friendship. To do that they have to die. People throw away their lives for honor, love, or friendship, and only then do they turn into spirits. But when you talk about living spirits—well, that's a different story. They always seem to be motivated by evil."

I mull this over.

"But like you said, there might be examples," Oshima continues, "of people becoming living spirits out of positive feelings of love. I just haven't done much research into the matter, I'm afraid. Maybe it happens. Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love."

"Have you ever been in love?" I ask.

He stares at me, taken aback. "What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love."

"That isn't what I mean," I say, blushing.

"I know," he says, and smiles at me gently.

Once Oshima leaves I go back to my room, switch the stereo to 45 rpm, lower the needle, and listen to "Kafka on the Shore," following the lyrics on the jacket.

You sit at the edge of the world,

I am in a crater that's no more.

Words without letters

Standing in the shadow of the door.

The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,

Little fish rain down from the sky.

Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die.

(Refrain)

Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,

Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.

When your heart is closed,

The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,

Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.

The drowning girl's fingers

Search for the entrance stone, and more.

Lifting the hem of her azure dress,

She gazes— at Kafka on the shore.

I listen to the record three times. First of all, I'm wondering how a record with lyrics like this could sell over a million copies. I'm not saying they're totally obscure, just kind of abstract and surreal. Not exactly catchy lyrics. But if you listen to them a few times they begin to sound familiar. One by one the words find a home in my heart.

It's a weird feeling. Images beyond any meaning arise like cutout figures and stand alone, just like when I'm in the middle of a deep dream.

The melody is beautiful, simple but different, too. And Miss Saeki's voice melts into it naturally. Her voice needs more power—she isn't what you'd call a professional singer—but it gently cleanses your mind, like a spring rain washing over stepping stones in a garden. She played the piano and sang, then they added a small string section and an oboe. The recording budget must have kept the arrangement simple, but actually it's this simplicity that gives the song its appeal.

Two unusual chords appear in the refrain. The other chords in the song are nothing special, but these two are different, not the kind you can figure out by listening just a couple of times. At first I felt confused. To exaggerate a little, I felt betrayed, even.

The total unexpectedness of the sounds shook me, unsettled me, like when a cold wind suddenly blows in through a crack. But once the refrain is over, that beautiful melody returns, taking you back to that original world of harmony and intimacy. No more chilly wind here. The piano plays its final note while the strings quietly hold the last chord, the lingering sound of the oboe bringing the song to a close.

Listening to it over and over, I start to get some idea why "Kafka on the Shore" moved so many people. The song's direct and gentle at the same time, the product of a capable yet unselfish heart. There's a kind of miraculous feel to it, this overlap of opposites. A shy nineteen-year-old girl from a provincial town writes lyrics about her boyfriend far away, sits down at the piano and sets it to music, then unhesitantly sings her creation. She didn't write the song for others to hear, but for herself, to warm her own heart, if even a little. And her self-absorption strikes a subtle but powerful chord in her listeners' hearts.

I throw together a simple dinner from things in the fridge, then put "Kafka on the Shore" on the turntable again. Eyes closed, I sit in the chair and try to picture the nineteen-year-old Miss Saeki in the studio, playing the piano and singing. I think about the love she felt as she sang. And how mindless violence severed that love forever.

The record is over, the needle lifts up and returns to its cradle.

Miss Saeki may have written the lyrics to "Kafka on the Shore" in this very room.

The more I listen to the record, the more I'm sure that this Kafka on the shore is the young boy in the painting on the wall. I sit at the desk and, like she did last night, hold my chin in my hands and gaze at the same angle at the painting right in front of me. I'm positive now, this had to be where she wrote it. I see her gazing at the painting, remembering the young boy, writing the poem she then set to music. It had to have been at night, when it was pitch-dark outside.

I stand up, go over to the wall, and examine the painting up close. The young man is looking off in the distance, his eyes full of a mysterious depth. In one corner of the sky there are some sharply outlined clouds, and the largest sort of looks like a crouching Sphinx.

I search my memory. The Sphinx was the enemy Oedipus defeated by solving the riddle, and once the monster knew it had lost, it leaped off a cliff and killed itself.

Thanks to this exploit, Oedipus got to be king of Thebes and ended up marrying his own mother. And the name Kafka. I suspect Miss Saeki used it since in her mind the mysterious solitude of the boy in the picture overlapped with Kafka's fictional world.

That would explain the title: a solitary soul straying by an absurd shore.

Other lines overlap with things that happened to me. The part about "little fish rain from the sky"—isn't that exactly what happened in that shopping area back home, when hundreds of sardines and mackerel rained down? The part about how the shadow "becomes a knife that pierces your dreams"—that could be my father's stabbing. I copy down all the lines of the song in my notebook and study them, underlining parts that particularly interest me. But in the end it's all too suggestive, and I don't know what to make of it.

Words without letters

Standing in the shadow of the door...

The drowning girl's fingers

Search for the entrance stone...

Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die....

What could it mean? Were all these just coincidences? I walk to the window and look out at the garden. Darkness is just settling in on the world. I go over to the reading room, sit on the sofa, and open up Tanizaki's translation of The Tale of Genji. At ten I go to bed, turn off the bedside light, and close my eyes, waiting for the fifteen-year-old Miss Saeki to return to this room.

It was already eight p. m. when their bus from Kobe arrived in front of Tokushima Station.

''Well, Mr. Nakata, here we are. Shikoku."

"What a wonderful bridge. Nakata's never seen such a huge one before."

The two of them alighted from the bus and sat down on a bench at the station to survey their surroundings.

"So—did you have a message from God or something?" Hoshino asked. "Telling you where you're supposed to go now? What you're supposed to do?"

"No. Nakata still has no idea."

"Great..."

Nakata rubbed his head deliberately with his palm for a while, as if pondering weighty matters. "Mr. Hoshino?" he finally said.

"What's up?"

"I'm sorry, but Nakata really needs to go to sleep. I'm so sleepy I feel like I could fall asleep right here."

"Wait a sec—you can't fall asleep here," Hoshino said, flustered. "Tell you what, I'll find a place where you can sack out, okay? Just hang in there for a while."

"All right. Nakata will hang in there and try not to go to sleep."

"Good. Are you hungry?"

"No, just sleepy."

Hoshino quickly located the tourist information counter, found an inexpensive inn that included complimentary breakfast, and called to book a room. It was some distance from the station, so they hailed a cab. As soon as they arrived, Hoshino asked the maid to lay out their futons for them.

Nakata skipped taking a bath and undressed, lay down in bed, and in an instant was peacefully snoring away. "I'll probably sleep for a long time, so don't be alarmed," he said just before he fell asleep.

"Hey, I'm not going to bother you—sleep as much as you want," Hoshino said, but Nakata was already lost to the world.

Hoshino enjoyed a leisurely bath, went out, and strolled around to get the lay of the land, then ducked inside a sushi shop for dinner and a beer. He wasn't much of a drinker, and a medium-size bottle of beer was enough to turn his face bright red and put him in a good mood. After dinner he played pachinko and lost twenty-five dollars in a hour. His Chunichi Dragons baseball cap drew a few stares from passersby, and he decided he must be the only one in Tokushima wearing one.

Back at the inn he found Nakata just as he'd left him, sound asleep. The light was on in the room, but that obviously didn't seem to bother him. What an easygoing old guy, Hoshino concluded. He took off his cap, his aloha shirt, and his jeans, then crawled into bed and turned out the light. But he felt worked up, and the combination of this and his new surroundings kept him from falling asleep. Jeez, he thought, maybe I should've found a hooker and got laid. But as he listened to Nakata's tranquil, regular breathing, he was suddenly embarrassed by the thought, though he wasn't sure why.

Staring at the ceiling in the dark, lying in bed in a cheap inn in a town he'd never been to before next to a strange old guy he knew nothing about, he began to have doubts about himself. By this time of night he should've been driving back to Tokyo, now somewhere around Nagoya. He didn't dislike his job, and there was a girl in Tokyo who always made time for him if he wanted to see her. Still, on an impulse, as soon as he'd unloaded his cargo of furniture in Kobe, he'd called another driver he knew in town and asked him to take his place and drive his rig back to Tokyo. He phoned his company and managed to wrangle three days off, and then it was off to Shikoku with Nakata. All he had along was a small bag with a shaving kit and a change of clothes.

Hoshino originally was intrigued by the resemblance between the old man and his late grandfather, but that impression had faded, and now he was more curious about Nakata himself. The things the old guy talked about, and even how he talked, were definitely strange, but in an interesting way. He had to find out where the old man was going, and what he'd end up doing when he got there.

Hoshino was born into a farming family, the third of five sons. Up until junior high he was well behaved, but after entering a trade school he fell in with a bad crowd and started getting in trouble. The police hauled him in a few times. He was able to graduate but couldn't find a decent job—and trouble with a girl only compounded his difficulties—so he decided to join the Self-Defense Force. Though he was hoping to be a tank driver, he didn't make the cut and spent most of his time driving large transport trucks. After three years in the SDF he got out and found a job with a trucking company, and for the last six years he'd been driving for a living.

This suited him. He'd always loved machines, and when he was perched high up in the cab with his hands on the wheel, it was like he was in his own private little kingdom. The job's long hard hours were tiring, but he knew he couldn't stand a regular company job, commuting to a dingy office every morning only to have a boss watch his every move like a hawk.

He'd always been the feisty type who got into fights. He was skinny and on the short side, not very tough looking, but in his case looks were deceiving. He was deceptively strong, and once he reached the breaking point a crazed look would come over him that sent most opponents scurrying for cover. He'd gotten into a lot of fights, both as a soldier and as a truck driver, but only recently had started to understand that this, win or lose, never accomplished very much. At least, he thought proudly, he'd never had any serious injuries.

During his wild high school days, his grandfather was always the one who'd show up at the local precinct, bowing apologetically to the police, and they'd release Hoshino into his custody. They always stopped at a restaurant on the way home, his grandfather treating him to a delicious meal. He never lectured Hoshino, even then. Not once did his parents come to get him. They were just barely scraping by and didn't have the time or energy to worry about their no-good third son. Hoshino sometimes wondered what would've happened to him if his grandfather hadn't been there to bail him out. The old man, at least, knew he was alive and worried about him.

Despite all this, he'd never once thanked his grandfather for all he'd done. He didn't know what to say, and was also too preoccupied trying to get by. His grandfather died of cancer soon after Hoshino joined the Self-Defense Force. At the end he got senile and didn't even recognize him. Hoshino hadn't been back home once since the old man passed away.

When Hoshino woke up at eight the next morning, Nakata was still fast asleep and looked like he hadn't budged an inch all night. The volume and pace of his breathing, too, was unchanged. Hoshino went downstairs and ate breakfast with the other guests. A pretty bare-bones meal, though there were unlimited seconds on miso soup and rice.

"Will your companion be eating breakfast?" the maid called out.

"He's still out cold. Looks like he won't be needing breakfast. If you don't mind, could you not put away the futon for a while?"

At noon, with Nakata still fast asleep, Hoshino arranged for them to stay one more night. He went out to a soba place and had chicken and egg over rice. Afterward he strolled around for a while and wound up in a coffee shop, where he had a cup and a smoke and flipped through a few of the comic books.