第2章

PROLOGUE

The Rules of Tagame

1

Kogito was lying on the narrow army cot in his study, his ears enveloped in giant headphones, listening intently. The voice on the tape had just said, "So anyway, that's it for today-I'm going to head over to the Other Side now," when Kogito heard a loud thud. There was silence for a moment, then Goro's voice continued: "But don't worry, I'm not going to stop communicating with you. That's why I made a special point of setting up this system with Tagame and the tapes. Well, I know it's probably getting late on your side. Good night!"

The recording ended on this rather vague and unsatisfactory note, and Kogito felt a sudden, excruciating sadness that seemed to rip him apart from his ears to the very depths of his eyes. After lying in that shattered state for a while, he put Tagame back on the nearest bookshelf and tried to go to sleep. Thanks in part to the soporific cold medicine he'd taken earlier, he fell into a shallow doze, but then a slight noise wakened him and he saw his wife's face glimmering palely under the fluorescent lights of the study's slanted ceiling.

"Goro committed suicide," she said softly. "I wanted to go out without waking you, but I was worried that Akari would be frightened by the rush of phone calls from the media." That was how Chikashi broke the news about what had happened to her only brother, Goro, who had been Kogito's close friend since high school. For a few moments Kogito just lay there in disbelieving shock-waiting, irrationally, for Tagame to start slowly vibrating, like a mobile phone receiving an incoming call.

"The police have asked Umeko to identify the body, and I'm going to keep her company," Chikashi added, her voice full of barely controlled emotion.

"I'll go along with you till you meet up with Goro's family, and then I'll come back here alone and deal with the telephone," Kogito said, feeling as if he were paralyzed from head to foot. The avalanche of media calls probably wouldn't begin for a few hours, at least.

Chikashi continued to stand silently beneath the fluorescent lights. She watched attentively as Kogito got out of bed and slowly put on the wool shirt and corduroy trousers that were draped over a chair. (It was the dead of winter.) After Kogito had finished pulling a heavy sweater over his head he said, "Well, then," and without thinking he reached out and grabbed Tagame off the bookshelf.

"Wait a minute," said Chikashi, the voice of reason. "What's the point of taking that thing? It's the cassette recorder you use to listen to the tapes Goro sent you, right? That's exactly the sort of absurd behavior that always infuriates you when somebody else does it."

2

Even in his late fifties, Kogito still took the streetcar to the pool, and he had noticed that he was usually the only person on board with an old-fashioned cassette recorder. Once in a while he would see a middle-aged male listening to a tape and moving his lips, from which Kogito deduced that the man must be practicing English conversation. Until recently, the streetcars had been teeming with crowds of youths listening to music on their Walkmans, but now those same kids were all busy chatting on mobile phones or nimbly typing text messages on the tiny keyboards. Kogito actually felt nostalgic for the days when the tinny cacophony of popular music used to leak out of the young people's ubiquitous headphones, even though it had seemed annoying at the time. Nowadays, Kogito concealed his bulky pre-Walkman recorder in the gym bag with his swimming equipment and wore the oversized headphones clamped around his graying head. At times like that, he couldn't help seeing himself as a lonely, isolated symbol of the generation gap, eating modernity's dust.

The old-fashioned cassette recorder had originally been given to Goro, back in the days when he was still working as an actor, as a perk for appearing in a TV commercial for an electronics company. The recording device itself was just a common rectangular parallelepiped, but while the design of the machine was absolutely ordinary, the shape of the large, black, ear-covering headphones bore a curious resemblance to the giant medieval-armored water beetles known as tagame-pronounced "taga-may"-that Kogito used to catch in the mountain streams when he was a boy in the forests of Shikoku. As he told Goro, the first time he tried using the headphones he felt as if, after all this time, he suddenly had a couple of those perpetually useless beetles fastened onto both sides of his head, crushing his skull like a vise.

But Goro said coolly, "That just tells me that you were a kid who couldn't catch anything worthwhile like eels or freshwater trout, so you had to be satisfied with those grotesque bugs. I know it's a little late, but in any case, this is a gift from me to the pitiful little boy you used to be. You can call it Tagame or whatever, and maybe it'll cheer that poor kid up, retroactively."

Goro seemed to think, somehow, that the tape recorder alone wasn't a sufficiently grand gift for Kogito, who was not only an old friend but also his younger sister's husband. That was probably why, along with the cassette recorder, he also gave Kogito a very attractive miniature trunk, made of duralumin-an item that demonstrated Goro's genius for assembling interesting little props, whether to enhance his personal lifestyle or to add atmospheric complexity to one of his films. And in that beguiling minitrunk were twenty-five cassette tapes.

Goro presented Kogito with this quadripartite gift (trunk, tape recorder, headphones, tapes) one evening after they had both attended a sneak preview of one of Goro's films at a large movie theater in downtown Tokyo. Afterward, riding home alone on the train, Kogito stuck one of the cassettes, each of which was identified only by a number stamped on a white label, into Tagame-for he had, in fact, already started to call the machine by the nickname Goro had suggested.

As Kogito was fumbling around, trying to insert the headphone plug into the appropriate jack, he must have inadvertently hit the PLAY button, or perhaps there was a feature that automatically started playback when you inserted a tape. In any case, his fellow passengers in the tightly packed train car looked extremely startled when a loud, brassy-sounding female voice suddenly began to emanate from the vicinity of Kogito's lap. "Aaah!" the woman shrieked through the tiny speaker. "Oh my God! I think my uterus is falling out! Oh, no, I'm gonna come! Oh my God! I'm coming! Aaaaaah!"

As Kogito learned later, that tape was one of twenty similarly sensational recordings made by illegal electronic surveillance. Goro, who had a taste for such things, had been talked into buying the tapes by a colleague at a certain movie studio, and he had been wondering how to dispose of them. Since he seemed to consider loosening Kogito up to be one of his missions in life, Goro mischievously decided to bequeath the collection of "blue tapes" to his bookish brother-in-law.

Earlier in his life, Kogito wouldn't have had the slightest interest in such sordid diversions, but at this particular time he threw himself into listening to the illicit recordings nonstop, over a hundred-day period, with a zeal bordering on mania. As it happened, Kogito was dealing with a rough patch in his life, and he had found himself plunged into an abyss of anxiety and depression. When Goro heard about this from Chikashi, he apparently said, "In that case, maybe he needs a little hair of the dog, so to speak. When you're dealing with humanity in its coarsest, most vulgar form-I'm talking about that scumbag journalist-the best antidote is more of the same." And so it was that when Goro presented Kogito with Tagame, he included a number of clandestinely recorded tapes that showcased the sleazier aspects of human behavior. Kogito heard about Goro's prescription from Chikashi, after the fact, but she remained blissfully ignorant of the contents of the tapes.

Kogito's depression had been brought on by a series of vicious ad hominem attacks on him by the "scumbag journalist" Goro had mentioned, who was the star writer for a major newspaper. Needless to say, the highly personal criticisms of Kogito and his work-attacks that had been going on for more than a decade-were presented as the solemn discharge of the journalist's civic and professional duty.

As long as Kogito was busy reading and working on various writing projects, he didn't think much about his widely published enemy's vendetta against him. But late at night when he suddenly found himself wide awake, or when he was out walking around town on some errand or other, the peculiarly abusive words of his nemesis (who was a talented writer, no question about it) kept running through his head like toxic sludge.

Even though the reporter was known for being meticulous in his newspaper work, when he sat down to compose his poisonpen missives to Kogito he would take dirty-looking, mistake-ridden manuscript pages and smudged faxes of galley proofs, cut them up into small pieces, scribble unpleasant "greetings" on those grubby scraps of recycled paper, and then mail them to Kogito's home address along with copies of the journalist's own books and magazine articles, many of which were obsessively devoted to Kogito-bashing.

In spite of himself, Kogito would immediately commit every word of the loathsome tirades to memory, but whenever it looked as if one of his enemy's vitriolic insults might be about to pollute his brain again, all he had to do to calm himself down-whether he was lying in bed in his study, or out and about in Tokyo-was to don his headphones and listen to the honest voices of "vulgar humanity." As Goro put it, "It's really astonishing the way listening to trashy stuff like that can take your mind off whatever's bothering you."

Fifteen years went by, and one day Kogito was packing for an overseas trip. While he was searching for some of the research materials he needed to take with him, his eyes happened to light on the miniature duralumin trunk tucked away in a corner of his study. Over the years he had turned it into a repository for the libelous books and articles he was constantly receiving from his nemesis, the accursed journalist, but it still held those electronic-eavesdropping tapes as well. What if his plane crashed, and Chikashi happened to listen to those steamy tapes while she was putting his posthumous affairs in order? To avoid that potential catastrophe, he tossed the tapes into the trash and then asked Chikashi to find out whether the little brushed-aluminum trunk was something Goro might like to have returned.

Goro apparently said yes, and so it was that the duralumin trunk found its way back to its original owner. But then, after another two or three years had passed, the same elegant container turned up at Kogito's house again while he was abroad, teaching in Boston. This time it was packed with a batch of thirty or so different cassettes-not lurid audio-surveillance tracks this time, but rather tapes of Goro rambling on about various topics. Goro explained to Chikashi that he would be sending new recordings as soon as he got them finished, with the goal of eventually filling the container to its fifty-tape capacity. When Goro mentioned that the contents were nothing urgent, Chikashi replied jokingly that since Kogito was approaching the age where he could soon begin losing his mental acuity, she might suggest that he save the tapes for his dotage.

But when Kogito returned from the United States and saw the new batch of tapes, he was seized by a vague but insistent premonition and immediately popped one of them into Tagame. As Kogito had suspected, the voice that came booming through the headphones belonged to Goro, and it soon became evident that the purpose of the tapes was to tell the story, in no particular chronological order, of the things that happened to Kogito and Goro after they became friends at school in the Shikoku town of Matsuyama-"Mat'chama," in Goro's idiosyncratic pronunciation.

Goro's way of speaking on the tapes wasn't a monologue, exactly. Rather, it was as if he and Kogito were having an extended conversation on the telephone. Because of this, Kogito soon got into the habit of listening to the tapes before he went to sleep in his study. Lying on his side with the headphones on, he would listen to the recordings while a host of thoughts floated languidly through his mind.

As new tapes continued to arrive at regular intervals, Kogito would listen to each one, and then-almost as if they were having a real-time conversation-he would punctuate Goro's recorded remarks from time to time by pressing the PAUSE button and giving voice to his own opinions. That practice quickly turned into a routine, and before long, even though Goro couldn't hear Kogito's responses, communicating by way of Tagame ended up almost entirely replacing their occasional phone chats.

On the night in question, a few hours before he learned that Goro had plunged to his death from the roof of his production company's office building in a posh section of Tokyo, Kogito was indulging in his customary bedtime ritual: lying in bed listening to the latest tape, which had been delivered by courier earlier that evening. While Goro rambled eloquently along, Kogito would stop the tape whenever the impulse struck him, and interpolate-not so much his own views, anymore, but rather his natural, spontaneous conversational responses to whatever Goro might be saying. What Kogito remembered about that evening's session, in retrospect, is that he was suddenly struck with the idea of buying a tape recorder with editing capabilities, which would allow him to cobble together a third tape that incorporated both sides of his lively and occasionally contentious "dialogues" with Goro.

At one point there was a stretch of silence on the tape, and when Goro began talking again his voice sounded very different. It was immediately clear from his blurry diction that he'd had a few drinks during the break and had forgotten to stop the tape. "So anyway, that's it for today-I'm going to head over to the Other Side now," Goro said, quite casually.

After that declaration, there was a sound that Kogito eventually came to think of as the Terrible Thud. It was the sort of dramatic embellishment you would expect from a high-tech filmmaker like Goro, who was known for his skillful use of sound effects and composite recordings. Only later did Kogito realize that the thud was the noise you might hear when a heavy body fell from a high place and crashed onto the unyielding pavement below: Ka-thunk.

"But don't worry," Goro went on, "I'm not going to stop communicating with you. That's why I made a special point of setting up this system with Tagame and the tapes. Well, I know it's probably getting late on your side. Good night!" he concluded cheerfully, in a voice that bore no trace of intoxication.

Kogito actually thought, more than once, that maybe that portentous announcement ("I'm going to head over to the Other Side now") was the last thing Goro said before he jumped, intentionally prerecorded to serve as his final words, and the remarks that followed the thud, made by a totally sober-sounding Goro, were the first dispatch from the Other Side, using the Tagame cassette recorder as a sort of interdimensional mobile phone. If that was true, then if Kogito just went on listening to the tapes using the same system, shouldn't he be able to hear Goro's voice from the Other Side? And so he continued his bedtime ritual of chatting with Goro almost every night, via the medium of Tagame, running through the collection of tapes in no particular order-except for the final tape, which he put away in the trunk without bothering to rewind.

3

Kogito and Chikashi arrived at Goro's house in the seaside town of Yugawara just as the body was being brought home from the police station, but Kogito managed to avoid seeing his dead friend's face. There was a small private wake, after which Umeko, Goro's widow (who had starred in many of Goro's films), planned to stay up all night watching videos of Goro's movies with anyone who wanted to join her. Kogito explained that he needed to get back to Tokyo to take care of Akari, their son, who had been left at home alone, and it was decided that Chikashi would stay in Yugawara and attend her brother's cremation the following day.

Glancing toward the coffin, Umeko said, "I could hardly recognize Goro's face when I saw it at the police station, but now he's back to looking like his handsome self again. Please take a peek, and pay your respects."

In response to this, Chikashi said to Kogito, in a quiet but powerful voice, "Actually, I think it would be better if you didn't look."

Meeting Umeko's quizzical eyes, Chikashi returned her sister-in-law's gaze with a look of absolute conviction and candor, overlaid with sadness. Umeko clearly understood, and she stood up and went into the room with the coffin, alone.

Kogito, meanwhile, was thinking about how distant he had felt from Chikashi while she was staring at Umeko with that strong, defiant expression. There was absolutely no trace, in Chikashi's utterly direct look, of the genteel social buffers that usually softened her speech and conduct. This is the way it is, and there's nothing we can do about it, Chikashi seemed to be trying to tell herself as well, in the midst of her overwhelming grief and sorrow. It's fine for Umeko to gaze lovingly at the destroyed face of Goro's corpse and imagine, wishfully, that those dead features have been miraculously restored to their original handsome, animated form. As his sister, I'm doing exactly the same thing. But I think seeing Goro's face would just be too much for Kogito to bear.

As Chikashi perceptively surmised, the prospect of viewing Goro's dead body filled Kogito with dread, but when Umeko voiced her request he automatically started to stand up. He couldn't help thinking that he would never be mature enough to handle something like this, and he was engulfed by feelings of loneliness and isolation. But he was conscious of another motivation for agreeing to view the corpse, as well: he was curious whether there might be a mark stretching along Goro's cheek that would indicate he had been talking into a Tagame-type headset when he jumped. The impact, Kogito theorized, could have left an imprint that would still be visible now, and he had reason to believe that that scenario wasn't merely his own wild conjecture.

Taruto, who was the head of Goro's production company as well as the CEO of his own family-owned company in Shikoku, had taken on the task of transporting Goro's body to Yugawara, and after the wake he showed the family some things he had found on Goro's desk at the office. Along with three different versions of a suicide note, written on a personal computer, there was a drawing done in soft pencil on high-quality, watermarked drawing paper.

The picture, which was drawn in a style reminiscent of an illustrated book of fairy tales from some unspecified foreign country, showed a late-middle-aged man floating through a sky populated with innumerable clouds that resembled French dinner rolls. The man's position reminded Kogito of the way Akari sprawled out on the floor whenever he was composing music, and this added to Kogito's immediate certainty that the picture was a self-portrait of Goro. Furthermore, the man who was wafting through the air was holding a mobile phone that looked very much like a miniature version of Tagame in his left hand, and talking into it. (Hence, Kogito's suspicion that there might have been a headset mark on Goro's dead face.)

The fairy-tale style of the drawing reminded Kogito of something that had happened fifteen years earlier. Goro had written a book of essays having to do with psychoanalysis, which was one of his many interests. In the past he had always designed the covers for his own books, but he was already busy directing movies, so he delegated that task to a young artist. Rather than the contents of the book it was the cover Kogito thought of now, as he looked at Goro's "floating man" picture.

Soon after the book was published, Goro and Kogito happened to run into each other, and they started talking about the cover design. "This drawing style is clearly emulating that of the popular illustrator whose work is all over the major magazines in America right now," Kogito remarked. "To be sure, this composition incorporates Japanese people and scenery, but the basic concept and techniques are obviously borrowed. For a young artist beginning his career, is this kind of derivativeness really okay?" Kogito posed this question in what was meant to be a lighthearted, teasing way, but Goro's reaction was blatantly aggressive.

"If you want to talk about openly copying foreign artists, or being directly influenced by their styles, that's something you did at the start of your career, too, isn't it?" he snapped. "But because this is visual art, the derivativeness is much more obvious: what you see is what you get. In your case, you basically cribbed things from literature written in French or English, or else from translations, and redid them in Japanese. But even so, you hewed pretty closely to the original form of the foreign literary style, right?"

"That's exactly right," Kogito agreed, but he was taken aback by this rather stark assessment. "When you're a young writer, you do have something original to say, even at the earliest stages. The trick is figuring out how to protect your original voice while stripping away the veneer of borrowed styles. That's very difficult and painful to do."

"And you've definitely succeeded in doing that," Goro conceded. "But in the process, you've lost the relatively large readership you used to have when you were younger. You're aware of that dilemma, no doubt. As time goes on, isn't it just going to get more and more acute? This young artist has a lot of talent, and it doesn't look as if he's going to let himself get set in any narrow stylistic ways. On the contrary, I think he'll probably stretch himself in many different directions."

At the time, Kogito was bewildered by Goro's response, which seemed to stem from some sort of festering ill will rather than from simple irritation at Kogito's offhanded comments. Kogito told himself that Goro probably just felt protective toward the young artist's book cover, which he obviously liked very much. The style of the paintings Goro was trying to create on his own, toward the end of his life, was clearly a postmodern variation on American primitivism-a term that could also have described that young artist's work-so it was possible that Goro had taken Kogito's perceived attack on the young artist as a personal affront.

After a while, it occurred to Kogito that Goro's last drawing might have been meant as a farewell bequest to Kogito himself: a self-portrait of Goro floating through space, talking to his old friend and brother-in-law via his Tagame headset, in lieu of a mobile phone.

So anyway, that's it for today-I'm going to head over to the Other Side now. But don't worry, I'm not going to stop communicating with you.

4

Kogito left the house of mourning in Yugawara and headed for the Japan Railways station, planning to board an express train for Tokyo. But the moment he walked into the station he was besieged by an unruly horde of TV reporters and photographers who had obviously been lying in wait, eager to talk to anyone with the slightest connection to the late Goro Hanawa.

Ignoring the shouted questions, Kogito tried to steer clear of the ring of jostling reporters, but then a rapidly revolving TV camera collided with the lower part of the bridge of his nose, barely missing his right eye. The young cameraman looked at Kogito with an insolent half smile; he might just have been covering up his distress and confusion with a fa?ade of arrogance, but Kogito felt that his facial expression was very crass and inappropriate indeed.

After escaping from the mob scene at the train station, Kogito started walking up a long, narrow lane that had been carved out of a hillside of mandarin orange trees and paved with cobblestones. At the top of the slope he found a taxi and climbed in. The driver must have been acquainted with Goro, because he took one look at Kogito and said, "I guess it's really true what they say about crying tears of blood!" It was only then that Kogito realized that half of his face was covered with blood from the deep cut on his nose.

Even so, he felt that rushing to the nearest emergency room and getting the paperwork to prove that he had been injured, as a way of punishing that arrogant cameraman, would have been an overreaction. Besides, the cameraman was just the inadvertent point man for that seething mass of journalists, with their insatiable collective appetite for tragedy and scandal. In the short time since Goro's death, Kogito had gotten a very distinct impression from all the media people, whether they were with television networks, newspapers, or weekly tabloid magazines. That is, he had noticed that they all seemed to share a kind of contemptuous scorn for anyone who had committed suicide. At the root of that contempt seemed to be the feeling that Goro-who had for years been lionized, lauded, and treated like royalty by the media-had somehow betrayed them, almost on a personal level, and as a result the fallen idol could never again be restored to his previous kingly status.

The tsunami of scorn that had been heaped on Goro's dead body was so vast and so powerful that it ultimately extended even to family members such as Kogito, Chikashi, and Umeko, whom the media referred to, coldly, as "parties with ties to Goro." A female reporter, who had always treated Kogito kindly whenever their paths had crossed at meetings of the book review department of the major newspaper where she worked, left a message on his home answering machine seeking comments for an article she was writing, but even in her innocent voice Kogito could hear an undertone of barely camouflaged contempt for Goro: the "false king" whose torch of power had flickered and gone out once and for all when he decided to jump off a roof.

Kogito came to that realization after his train station confrontation with the young cameraman who had inadvertently wounded him-and barely missed putting out his eye. No doubt the TV station was liable for the accident, but the unfortunate cameraman was just one drop of water in the giant wave of disdain, so what would have been the point of taking legal action against him alone?

This is getting a bit ahead of the story, but for about a week after Goro's suicide, Kogito made a point of watching the Wide News program early every morning and again in the evening. Since no one else in his household showed the slightest interest in joining him, he would carry the small TV set into his study and put it at the foot of his bed, then listen to the sound through his Tagame headphones.

Kogito had expected that he might have difficulty understanding the speech of the younger generation-that is, the anchors and reporters on the news shows and the actors (male and female) who had appeared in Goro's films. But he even found it hard to follow the remarks of the film directors and screenwriters, not to mention the commentators from the arts and from the larger world beyond, who were more or less his own age. And the harder Kogito concentrated on trying to understand what all these talking heads were saying, the more incomprehensible their babble became.

He even began to wonder whether, by surrounding himself with beloved, familiar books and writing so often about those same books, he had somehow exiled himself to a solitary island with its own peculiar language. As he did his novelist's work he had assumed that he was somehow connected with other people, but in reality he seemed to have no bond whatsoever with the people living on the continent-the mainland, so to speak-of language. That realization filled him with anxiety and frustration. Nonetheless, he continued to be mesmerized by the televised coverage of Goro's death, straining his eyes to see the images on the screen with the volume on the headphones cranked up as high as he could bear. After this had gone on for a week, though, he knew that it was time to give it up cold turkey. Kogito lugged the TV set back to the living room, then collapsed onto the sofa in exhaustion.

"I was wondering why you were wasting your time on that garbage," Chikashi remarked.

The thing is, Kogito thought, his head was still in such a muddle that he couldn't do much of anything else. Besides, the time wasn't completely wasted. Why? Because during that week of watching the TV news every morning and noon, in addition to the sensationalistic "specials" that were broadcast every second or third night, Kogito had gradually come to realize that Goro's suicide was something that couldn't be explained in the glib words of modern television and that, consequently, the world would never understand why his brilliant, talented friend had decided to jump to his death.

There was another aspect of Goro's wretched, tragic death that tormented Kogito. During the past ten years or so, Kogito hadn't seen much of Goro-that is to say, Goro's tremendous success as a director had stolen the time they might otherwise have spent together-but he knew that Goro had been living in the world of shallow, incomprehensible blather of the sort he'd heard on all those TV programs. The upshot of that, Kogito thought, was that Goro had started talking into a tape recorder and sending the tapes for Kogito to listen to via Tagame. Perhaps that was because, at the end of his life, Goro needed a language that would express his true self.

Around the time when Kogito stopped watching the relentless TV coverage of Goro's death, Chikashi began to be tormented every morning by a different kind of blather: the lurid advertisements that were splashed all over the daily newspaper, touting a never-ending stream of articles about Goro in the weekly tabloid magazines. As if hypnotized by the ads, Chikashi would inadvertently end up buying and bringing home those "women's magazine" scandal sheets, even though reading their ghastly articles just compounded the damage and made her feel even worse. The primary topic of those articles was Goro's relations with women.

In fact, just before Goro jumped off the building he had printed out a farewell note in which he said that this radical act was the only way to "deny with his whole body," because words evidently didn't seem sufficient, the gossip-mongering tabloid magazine article about his "relations with women" that was on the verge of hitting newsstands.

Chikashi never talked about it, but Kogito wasn't convinced by the language of the "suicide note" or by any of the articles about the tragedy. He couldn't find any words, anywhere, that could provide a satisfactory explanation of the death of Goro, who had always been such an extraordinary presence in Kogito's life.

Kogito especially disagreed with the articles that tried to blame Goro's suicide on a minor slump in his filmmaking career. After winning a major award at a certain film festival in Italy, a Japanese comedian-turned-director, who was heading for America to promote his popular, critically acclaimed film, quipped, "When Goro was looking down from the top of that building, maybe my award gave him a teensy little push from behind." When Kogito read that soul-chilling, stomach-turning comment, he could only think: Good God, is that the sort of person Goro was forced to associate with?

Gradually, though, both Kogito and Chikashi became oblivious to the incessant deluge of TV and tabloid coverage. They left the answering machine switched on all the time, and although their primary aim was to escape the constant ringing of the telephone, after a while they didn't even bother to check for messages.

And so they muddled slowly along, somehow. Kogito and Chikashi never once spoke about what had happened to Goro, but each knew that the other was obsessing about Goro's death, and even Akari seemed to sense that his parents thought of little else. Still, they went on paying (or pretending to pay) careful attention to their respective tasks. They lived this way for several months, seldom leaving the house.

Meanwhile, Kogito had developed a new habit-an addiction, really-which he was keeping secret from Chikashi. He had surreptitiously resumed the lively dialogues with Tagame that he had been engaging in, off and on, during the three months preceding Goro's suicide, with the army cot in his study as the staging ground. Only now he was doing it on a more serious and a more regular basis than before-that is to say, daily. Since Goro's suicide, Kogito had started making rules about how these midnight conversations with Tagame were to be conducted, and he was very conscientious about following those arbitrary regulations to the letter.

Rule Number One: Never mention the fact that Goro has gone to the Other Side. This was easier said than done, of course, and at the beginning, whenever Kogito was chatting away with (or at) Tagame, he was unable to erase Goro's suicide from his mind for even a moment. Before too long, though, new ideas just naturally began to bubble up. For one thing, Kogito was intensely curious about the Other Side, where Goro now resided. In terms of space and time, was it completely different from the world on this side? And when you were there, looking back across the existential divide, would the very fact of your death on this side be nullified, as if you had never died at all?

Before Kogito met Goro at Matsuyama High School, he had been thinking about what certain philosophers had written about the various types of death perception, but there hadn't been anyone he could talk to about such things. Not long after he and Goro became friends, he broached the subject. In those days-and, now that he thought about it, throughout their long association-their basic style of communication had been infused with jokiness and wordplay, and they tended to aim for humorous effect even when they were discussing profoundly serious matters.

Naturally, it was inevitable that young Kogito would always take a position contrary to those expressed in the rather staid language of the philosophy books he was reading. To wit: "It goes without saying that someone who is living in this world wouldn't be able to talk knowledgeably about his own death, based on firsthand experience. That's because the essence of intelligent consciousness ceases to be at the same moment that one's actual existence is coming to an end. In other words, for people who are alive and living, death simply doesn't exist, and by the time they experience it directly they're already beyond cognitive understanding." Kogito began by quoting that argument, which he had read somewhere, and then proceeded to outline his own interpretative variation on the theme.

"Let's say there is such a thing as a human soul, and it's alive, along with the body it inhabits. In my village, there's a folk belief that when someone dies-that is, when a person ceases to exist in a physical form-the soul leaves the body and goes up into the air of the valley, spinning around in a spiral movement, like a tornado. (The valley is shaped rather like the inside of a widemouthed jar, and the soul doesn't venture beyond those confines.) At some point the disembodied spirit reverses its corkscrew trajectory and returns to earth, landing at the base of a tree high up on one of the heavily wooded mountainsides that enclose the valley-not just any old tree, but a specific one that has been selected beforehand by karma, or fate. Then, when the moment is right, the old soul will make its way down to the village and find a home in the body of a newborn baby."

Goro responded to this bit of folklore with an esoteric reference that showcased his own precociously sophisticated store of knowledge. "According to Dante," he declared, "the right way for a human being to climb a mountain is by going around to the right, and if you take the left-hand route you could be making a big mistake. When a spirit spirals from your valley up into the forest, which way is it moving: clockwise or counterclockwise?"

Kogito's grandmother hadn't shared that logistical detail, so instead of giving a straightforward answer Kogito ventured a wild surmise, half in jest: "I guess that would depend on how people used to think about birth and death. If they thought it was bad when the soul left an old body and went to the root of a tree, and good when that same soul entered into the body of a newborn baby, then I guess the spiral would be clockwise in the case of rebirth and counterclockwise for death."

Then he added, "Seriously, though, if the soul is able to detach itself from the body in that way, then the spirit must not be aware that it's dead. So what dies is just the body, and at the moment when the flesh ceases to be alive the spirit goes its own way. In other words, the spirit goes on living forever, divorced from the body's finite sense of time and space. To tell you the truth, I don't really understand it myself, so I'm just groping around for an explanation. But I think that just as there's infinity and also a single instant in time, and just as the entire cosmos can coexist with a single particle, isn't it possible that when we die we simply move into a different dimension of space and time? If that's the case, then maybe the soul could continue existing in a fourth-dimensional state of innocent bliss, without ever noticing that there's such a thing as death."

And now that giddy, carefree existential conversation they had enjoyed on that day in their youth, having more fun fooling around with the high-flown words than with the actual concepts-now that seemingly abstract scenario had really come to pass. And here was Goro's spirit, lively as ever, talking to Kogito through Tagame as if he truly hadn't noticed that his mortal body had already gone up in smoke.

5

Late that night, on the day after Goro took his leap into the next dimension, Kogito finally made it home with the bloodstained handkerchief still pressed against the TV-camera gash between his eyes. He made dinner for Akari, who had been listening to CDs with the answering machine on and the telephone ringer silenced, and then, after washing his injured face (he kept the light in the bathroom turned off, and didn't even glance at himself in the mirror), Kogito trudged up the stairs to his study.

He took Tagame down from the shelf where he had replaced it in the small hours of the previous night, after being scolded by Chikashi. On the train home, Kogito had had an epiphany about the tape he'd been listening to on Tagame, before last night's strange farewell-namely, Goro's reminiscences about the time he explained one of Rimbaud's poems to Kogito. (It was late that day, around 5 or 6 PM, when a package containing the final tape recording was delivered to Kogito's house, though by that time Goro's body was already in police custody, being held as the unidentified corpse of someone who has met an unnatural death.) In retrospect, after what had happened, that monologue seemed to be rife with hidden meanings.

"When we were in Mat'chama, how well do you suppose we really understood French poetry? After that you went off to college and majored in French literature, but you mainly read prose, as I recall. And since I never made a formal study of the language, I can't really judge our abilities," Goro had said in his usual smooth, flowing voice, with no hint that anything out of the ordinary might be going on in his head. "But I remember that you used to copy the poems out of Hideo Kobayashi's translation of Rimbaud onto hundreds of little pieces of paper and stick them on the wall at your mother's house in the mountains. Rimbaud really had a hold on us, didn't he?"

"That's true," Kogito had replied nostalgically, after pressing the STOP button on the tape recorder. "In those days, all we did was fantasize about the mystical meanings and how they applied to us. But I think that as time went by we were able to refine our understanding of Rimbaud based on scholarly research, wouldn't you agree?" Whereupon he pressed the PLAY button again. And that was how, the night before, Kogito had managed to have a long, antic "chat" with his already deceased brother-in-law about Arthur Rimbaud, the French prodigy poet.

And now, at last, Kogito became aware of just how dense and thick-skulled he had been: Goro had clearly been using a verse of Rimbaud's to say his own good-bye. It couldn't have been more obvious, really. For openers, the poem Goro had been focusing on was "Adieu," or "Farewell": the same poem (as translated by Kobayashi) that Kogito had laboriously copied onto scraps of paper when they were teenagers.

And then Kogito remembered-though he wasn't clear about whether it had been a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting-that he and Goro had shared a long discussion about the French poet on another occasion. At the time it had been many years since either of them had read any Rimbaud, and Kogito got the impression that Goro, who did most of the talking, was conjuring up the lines of poetry from the dim and distant recesses of his memory.

Inspired by that conversation, Kogito had rounded up and read several new translations of Rimbaud's poetry. (By that time, almost every French-Japanese translator had published a Rimbaud translation.) Kogito ended up choosing Hitoshi Usami's recent translation to send to Goro, after checking the Usami version not only against Hideo Kobayashi's seminal translation but also against the original French text.

Among the pile of cassette tapes that Goro had sent, there was one in which Goro responded to Kogito's gift of the Usami translation with a long discourse about Rimbaud. After Kogito had listened to that tape again, he went to the section of a bookcase where he kept the French books he had collected during his student days and took down several works, old and new, pertaining to Rimbaud.

On one shelf, a Pléiade edition of Rimbaud's Collected Works stood next to a Mercure de France edition of Poésies; the latter (a present to Kogito from Goro when they were still in high school) had been Kogito's first introduction to the French language. For the first time in many years, Kogito opened Poésies. He could still remember how his heart had leapt when Goro handed him that little book with the exotic red letters on the cover. There, in the margins, were the minuscule but clearly legible notations he had made as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, written in hard lead pencil.

The reason some of the notes were in English was because before Goro started teaching him French, the book that Kogito had consulted in the library of Matsuyama's American-run Center for Cultural Information and Education (CIE for short) was the Oxford French-English dictionary. In addition, the pages bore two different kinds of annotations in Japanese. The notes in the angular katakana syllabary were used to flag what Kogito perceived as the salient points in Goro's discourses. He used the katakana in imitation of, or homage to, the marginal printed musings in a collection of essays by Goro's famous film-director father, which Goro had lent him.

Kogito's own schoolboy thoughts (not shown here) were written in the flowing, cursive hiragana syllabary, to differentiate them from his notes on Goro's impromptu lectures, which tended to run along these lines:

In a letter to his teacher, as well as in the poem itself, Rimbaud wrote that he was about to turn seventeen: that is to say, an age that's filled with daydreams and fantasies. But it's said that the poem in question, "Romance," was actually written when Rimbaud was fifteen. In other words, when he wrote the line "One isn't serious at seventeen," he was misrepresenting his own age.

Even so, this poem is meant to be read by someone who's exactly the age you are now, Kogito: the same age I was last year, when I read it for the first time. The great thing is that this absolute genius, Arthur Rimbaud, offers equal encouragement to ordinary humans like us, too.

Kogito was surprised that a gifted youth like Goro, who anyone could see was seriously brilliant and abundantly talented, would liken himself-and, with exceptional honesty, Kogito, as well-to ordinary people.

As Kogito was reading "Adieu" in the Pléiade edition, he was once again seized by an urgent thought. Before Goro's suicide, when he was holding forth about that poem on one of his tapes and quoting certain lines from it, he obviously had the new translation that Kogito had sent open in front of him. Wasn't Goro assuming that for Kogito, too, the entire poem would immediately be brought to mind by reciting a few lines? Kogito didn't have a ready answer for that question, then or now.

Even with the new translation that he had urged upon Goro, Kogito didn't feel the same sort of passionate emotional attachment to Rimbaud's words as when he was young and used to memorize the poems by writing them out, line by line. Kogito had sensed a similar kind of divergence in their infrequent encounters during recent years. Could that be the reason why Goro had ultimately despaired of Kogito's dependability and had decided to head off into the realm of the Terrible Thud, alone?

"Autumn already!-But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness, far from those who die as seasons turn."

Kogito didn't own a copy of the Usami translation that Goro was quoting from on the Tagame tape, but as he was jotting down a quick transcription he remembered that this opening-paragraph stanza was the same one that had first enthralled him, in Kobayashi's translation, when he was a seventeen-year-old high-school student. Goro seemed to have had a strong response to those lines, as well. But wasn't Goro, in choosing to die of his own free will, patterning himself after those who were "sworn to a search for divine brightness"? Wasn't he, somehow, just mimicking "far from those who die as seasons turn"?

Moreover, in the next stanza, there was the image of a dead body swarming with maggots. How did that make Goro feel, on the threshold of his own death? This poem, which was teeming with what Rimbaud called "dreadful imagining"-why did Goro feel compelled to go on about it at such length on the tape? Kogito couldn't help wondering about that. It even occurred to him that Goro might have deliberately chosen to hurl those very specific, very horrific words at Kogito and, by extension, at himself.

"Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!" And then, in the next stanza: "Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that's that. But not one friendly hand! and where can I look for help?"

The topic of lies was a major element in the continuing criticism of Kogito that Goro had recorded on the Tagame tapes. Was Goro giving up on finding "one friendly hand," too? If that was the case…Kogito couldn't stop voicing this question to himself, even though he was fed up with his own endless, obsessive stewing about it. Anyway, if that was the case, as Goro was preparing to ring down the curtain on the final act of a long friendship (albeit one that had clearly grown distant in recent years), why did he give Kogito the Tagame apparatus for the second time and then follow up by sending a slew of long, fervent monologues, recorded on tape for Kogito's ears only?

As he continued reading the poem, all the way to the final stanza, the passage that filled Kogito with nostalgic yearning was the one he and Goro had been most taken with when they were in high school. It was this line: "And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory." But what sort of meaning could he and Goro, in their extreme youth and inexperience, have been reading into the phrase "cities of glory"? Again, while they certainly found encouragement and inspiration in the concluding line ("and I will be able now to possess the truth within one body and one soul"), what on earth did that have to do with their everyday schoolboy lives on earth? And if Goro happened to be pondering that passage just before he took the final leap into space, what vision of his own future did he see in those words?

In truth, it was always quite a while after the conclusion of each of his Tagame sessions with Goro before Kogito was able to think about the contents of their "discussion" in this sort of lucid, analytical way. Then on the following night, when he once again hit the PLAY button, the quotidian things that had been occupying Kogito's midday mind would recede into the distance as the strangely live-sounding words poured out of the diminutive speakers, like a real-time, real-space dispatch from the mysterious dimension where Goro now dwelled. Kogito would immediately fall under the spell of Goro's words, and eagerly pressing the STOP button, he would launch into a spirited reply.

Whatever Goro may have said about his reasons for recording the tapes, the fact was that he used them primarily as a forum for continuous rants about Kogito's myriad flaws, faults, and shortcomings. When Kogito thought about it later, he realized that it must have been the urgency in his own voice, when he was lying on his army cot trying to defend himself against Goro's attacks, that had made Chikashi decide it was time to have a candid talk about Kogito's growing addiction to the Tagame ritual.

6

Of course, Kogito was always the one who started the conversations with Tagame, but sometimes, just before he pressed the PLAY button, he had the uncanny feeling that the chunky little tape recorder was actually psyching itself up for the next round of combat. For some reason this made Kogito think about the way the real tagames-the large, oddly shaped water beetles that lived in the mountain streams of Shikoku-must have amorously bestirred themselves, almost in slow motion, during mating season. All these years later, that image (which may have been pure conjecture) was perfectly sharp and vivid in Kogito's mind.

Kogito always left the tape cued up at the end of the previous night's conversation, and whenever Kogito picked Tagame up he always felt as if he were answering an incoming call on the ultimate long-distance mobile phone. And the moment Goro's voice began to speak, with its distinctive Kyoto/Matsuyama accent, Kogito was repeatedly struck by the fact that whatever the topic might turn out to be, it always seemed to be uncannily relevant to his current situation.

Another odd thing was that when he started talking to Tagame, Kogito was far more enthusiastic than he had been about any other kind of discussion with Goro during the past twenty years or so. There was something engaging about Goro's relaxed way of talking across the vaporous border that separated the Other Side from the land of the living-despite the fact that his comments often consisted of merciless, searing criticism of Kogito-and even though Kogito was completely aware that Goro was dead, the intensity of their exchanges somehow seemed to overshadow that disturbing fact.

Kogito also felt that he had been forced to take another look at his feelings about his own inevitable death, so naturally there were times when the conversations evoked newly urgent thoughts about what really happens after we die. He could imagine himself, in the not-so-distant future, traveling to the Other Side with an upgraded, afterlife-appropriate version of Tagame and earnestly awaiting a dispatch from this side. When he thought that there might be no answer to his Tagame signals, for all eternity, he felt such a deep sense of loneliness and desolation that his entire being seemed to be disintegrating.

At the same time, it was only natural for him to feel that the impassioned "conversations" he was carrying on with Tagame, all by himself, were nothing but an escapist diversion, a self-deluding mind game. As a novelist who'd grown partial to the literary theories espoused by Mikhail Bakhtin, Kogito had started to take the concept of "playing games" very seriously after crossing the threshold into middle age. Consequently, he knew very well that even if talking with Goro via Tagame was a mere diversion, as long as he was acting on that fantasy stage there was nothing to do but throw himself into the part with all his heart.

Furthermore, Kogito resolved that during the day, while he was separated from Tagame, he wouldn't allow his nocturnal conversations with Goro to seep into his daily experiences. And when he was talking about Goro with Chikashi, or with Umeko, or with Taruto, Kogito made every effort not to recall the conversations with Goro that flowed through Tagame.

In this way, Kogito constructed a barrier between the two types of time-real time and Tagame time-and while he was moving around in one zone he wouldn't permit the other to spill over into it, or vice versa. But whichever zone he happened to be inhabiting, he never denied, at least not to his innermost self, the truth or the reality of what he had experienced in the other realm. From his vantage point on the earthly, conscious side, he firmly believed in the existence of the Other Side, and that belief made the world on this side seem infinitely deeper and richer. Even if his Tagame adventure was nothing but a dream, he still embraced it as a positive experience.

Suppose one of Kogito's friends had said something like: "Okay, so Goro committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building, and his body, including the brain inside his head, was cremated, but his spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it-anyway, that entity continues to exist somewhere, even now. That's what you believe, right?"

If this hypothetical friend phrased the question in that serious kind of way (and if he was a moody type anyway but was smiling as he asked it) then everything would be fine. In that case Kogito, after pondering the matter for a moment, would probably reply while wearing an opaque, noncommittal expression, since like most people his age he had long since become a master of the poker face and the social smile.

"That's true," he might say, "only with some conditions attached. While I'm listening to his voice on Tagame, Goro's soul-that is to say, by my definition, a spirit furnished with something that's invisible yet is extremely close to having physical form, like what they call an etheric double or an astral body-anyway, yes, I do believe that Goro's soul really exists in that state. It's different than if I were just playing back a tape recording of his voice. What Goro left in place for me is a very special system. To be sure, his soul has made the transition into a space that's different from this space that you and I still inhabit. But it just so happens that Tagame is a conduit between this space and that one. That's how it works."

The hypothetical friend is still skeptical. "But when you and Goro aren't having one of your Tagame talks, what form does he take on the Other Side?" he asks. "Wait, let me rephrase that. When Tagame isn't connecting you to the Goro beyond Tagame, how does Goro exist in relation to you?"

"To tell you the truth," Kogito would be forced to admit, "when we aren't talking on Tagame, I really can't think very clearly about Goro."

"So the machine you call Tagame acts as an intermediary and makes Goro's spirit a reality for you. In that case, I guess you can't reduce it to the more general question of whether a person's soul exists after death."

"That's right, although the conversations I have with Goro, through Tagame, have also changed the way I think about my own death. As for the deaths of my mentor, Professor Musumi, who did so much for me when I was at university and afterward as well, and my old friend Takamura, the composer, I now believe that there must be a way to communicate with their departed spirits, too, wherever they may be. I don't happen to have a conduit to Professor Musumi or Takamura, but I like to think that there are people out there who have their own versions of Tagame and are using them to talk to the souls of those two, beyond the grave."

While Kogito was carrying on this sort of imaginary conversation, why didn't he think about the possibility of another Tagame system to keep Goro connected with his sister, Chikashi? (Never mind that Kogito's posthumous conversations with Goro were the direct cause of the tremendous strain on his own relationship with Chikashi.) Perhaps it was because Kogito was conscious that his Tagame chats with Goro were his own private realm. Besides, Chikashi was a remarkably self-reliant person, independent from Kogito and from Goro, as well; not at all the type, Kogito thought, who would be drawn into that kind of fantasy game. And surely Goro must have been thinking along the same lines.

One year, Kogito was invited to speak at Kyushu University. While he was in the Green Room waiting for his lecture to begin, he happened to glance at a timetable and discovered that if he skipped the banquet with the other participants and hopped on the next ferryboat to Shikoku, then transferred to a Japan Railways train, he could be back at his childhood home, deep in the forest, before the night was over. He asked the assistant professor who was looking after him to make the travel arrangements, and the tickets were purchased while Kogito was delivering his lecture.

By the time Kogito made his way to the house where he was born, it was after 11 PM and his mother had already gone to sleep. The next morning, Kogito was up early. When he peered down the covered passageway that led to an adjoining bungalow, he could see the silhouette of his naked mother, illuminated by the reflected river-dazzle that leaked into the dark parlor through the gaps in the wooden rain shutters. Backlit like that, Kogito's elderly mother looked like a young girl as (with the help of her sister-in-law) she twined the turban she always wore in public around her head. At that moment, his mother didn't seem to belong entirely to this world; it was as if she had already begun to make the transition over to the Other Side. Her abnormally large ear, which resembled a fish's dorsal fin, was hanging down from her emaciated profile, almost as if that misshapen appendage itself was absorbed in deep meditation.

Later, when they were sitting across from each other at the breakfast table, Kogito's mother began to speak in the local Iyo dialect, which tends to feature more exclamatory sentences than standard Japanese. "I've been praying for a chance to see you since the beginning of last spring, Kogito!" she began. (It was already fall.) "And now that you're sitting here, I still half feel as if it's my fantasy eating breakfast in front of me. It doesn't help that I can barely hear what you're saying-of course, I've gotten quite deaf, and on top of that you still don't open your mouth wide enough when you speak, just like when you were a child!

"But anyway, right now I feel as if this is half reality and half fanciful daydream! Besides, lately, no matter what's going on, I'm never entirely certain that it's really happening! When I was wishing that I could see you, it almost seemed as though half of you was already here. At times like that, if I voiced my opinions to you out loud, the other people in the house would just laugh indulgently. However, if you happened to be on television talking about something and I said to the TV set, 'You're wrong about that, you know,' even my great-grandchild would jump in and try to stop me, saying, 'That's rude to Uncle Kogito.' They think it's amusing when I talk to an invisible person, but isn't the television itself a kind of fantastical illusion? Just because there's no machine attached to my private hallucinations, does that make them any less 'real' than the images on TV? I mean, what's the basis for that kind of thinking?

"Anyway, it seems as if almost everything is already an apparition to me, you know? Everyday life seems like television, and I can't tell whether somebody is really here with me or not. I'm surrounded by apparitions. One day soon I, too, will stop being real, and I'll become nothing more than a phantasm myself! But this valley has always been swarming with specters, so I may not even notice when I make the shift over to the Other Side."

After Kogito finished his breakfast, his younger sister gave him a ride to Matsuyama Airport so he could catch a plane that left before noon. When his sister called Chikashi in Tokyo to report that Kogito's departure had gone according to plan, she added, "As Mother was nodding off after breakfast, she said, 'A little while ago I saw an apparition of Kogito, and we had a nice chat.'"

When he heard this story later, Kogito felt unexpectedly moved by his mother's remark. After committing suicide, Goro hadn't really noticed that he'd left this world and become a spirit on the Other Side, had he? When he thought about it that way, Kogito came to see the fluidity between the two dimensions as a positive thing-especially late at night, after he'd been talking to Goro through the magical medium of Tagame.

7

During Kogito's Tagame sessions with Goro, he noticed that things got livelier, and he was able to enter more spontaneously into the discussion, when Goro began reminiscing about their early student days in Matsuyama. At times like that, Kogito could ignore the Terrible Thud (his private shorthand for Goro's baffling suicide). If he didn't have to worry that the conversation might end up being about the future, he was able to follow the rules he'd set up, to the letter. Conversely, whenever a dialogue concluded with a mention of future plans, the Rules of Tagame could be thrown into disarray.

On one cassette tape, Goro was trying to reconstruct the details of a conversation that had taken place when he and Kogito were both in their twenties. "Remember when we were talking about how, once upon a time, there used to be some truly great writers? And I was wondering whether really major, transcendent writers like that still exist in the world-and if so, are any of them Japanese? That was the gist of the discussion, and we even made a list of candidates. After a bit I revised the question and changed it to this: I wonder whether, in the near future, we'll get to see a truly great author who writes in Japanese? You were doubtful, as I recall."

Whereupon Kogito pressed the STOP button and said, "I still am."

"To be perfectly frank," Goro went on, "at that point you weren't thinking of yourself as someone who had the potential to become a truly great writer. I remember you confessed to me, soon after we met, that you had always thought of yourself as an ordinary person who in all likelihood was never going to come up with any extraordinary ideas. But then you told me about how you entered the All-Japan Young Inventors Competition, and that was very entertaining. However, you weren't the one who broached the subject-I had to coax the story out of you-and you told it in a typically self-deprecating way. And so, in an attempt to force you to talk more about that sort of thing, I set a trap."

Kogito pressed the STOP button again and chimed in: "Of course I remember, but I always wondered-what made you do that? You really were tremendously zealous about trying to convince me I wasn't ordinary."

"The first thing I did was to make you realize that Kafka was a truly great writer-a genius," Goro continued. "I also talked about how Kafka's fellow writer Max Brod (himself an up-and-coming author in those days, albeit a rather commonplace one) must have felt when he realized that his then-unknown friend was, unquestionably, a genius. The efforts that Brod made after Kafka's death to bring his late friend's works the recognition they deserved-that's another story entirely.

"Then after you started writing novels, when you fell into your first slump, as they say, I dredged up that subject again. I told you that nowadays (that is, in modern-day Japan), if you can't become a truly great writer, then writing novels and such is simply a waste of your life. At that point you'd been a successful writer for more than a year, and you had already won the Akutagawa Prize, but it looked to me as if you were settling into an overly cozy and comfortable place in the literary world. That's when I told you that I thought you ought to take a break from what you'd been doing thus far and start over again, fresh-shake things up a bit. From then on, if you'd laid low for two or three years and hadn't published any new fiction of your own, the journalists and the literary magazines and the reading public would probably have forgotten all about you. And that, to my way of thinking, is where the process of becoming a truly great writer would begin.

"In those days, you always had plenty of energy for studying and doing research, and whether you were writing a novel or an essay, you seemed to be able to make clever use of a variety of literary styles if you just put your mind to it. But it was because of that very versatility that you were suffering, don't you think? You used to say that even though you were still young, as a writer striving for originality you wanted to come up with your own themes and create your own distinctive prose style, and then combine those two elements. You wanted to make the world recognize you as an author who possessed that kind of originality, but you found those tasks daunting, and as you yourself put it, you tended to lose confidence and chicken out.

"As for me, I came up with an elaborate idea for a literary hoax, which I approached as I would a screenplay, although I never actually wrote it up. The idea was that the protagonist-in this case, a writer-would be someone who had hit upon an original concept at a young age, and he would devote his entire career to delving ever deeper into that particular notion. (For today's young writers, finding an overarching theme and creating a coherent body of work seems to be the hardest task of all, but with my method you wouldn't need to be the literary equivalent of a wandering monk, searching for enlightenment or struggling to find your 'voice.') Anyway, I subjected you to a long harangue about how this would be the ideal game plan for a versatile type like you, who has the gift of fluent composition and a serious penchant for research as well. Do you remember?"

Kogito remembered that conversation very well, indeed. After hitting the STOP button, he leaned back and lost himself in leisurely reminiscence.

Goro's tongue-in-cheek idea went like this: First, Kogito would invent a fascinating but completely nonexistent writer. Next, he would pretend to pay a visit to the urban hermitage where the aging author supposedly lived as a voluntarily unpublished recluse. (When Goro initially described this fictional personage, Kogito immediately visualized a certain mid-twentieth-century surrealist poet-at that time, already an old man.) After pretending to conduct an interview with the imaginary writer, Kogito would write up their "conversation" as a powerful article for some literary journal.

The article would probably attract a fair amount of attention. After that, Kogito would introduce some of the nonexistent writer's "never-published prose" in the form of selected excerpts, all secretly composed by Kogito himself. And then, even though the publicity-shy author was exceedingly reluctant to open up, through sheer tenacity Kogito would manage to eke out some more articles in the form of notes on their subsequent "conversations." At some point Kogito would gather these fraudulent materials together and publish them in the form of a grandiosely titled book about the "cloistered writer," which would offer a comprehensive assessment of the phantom's purported oeuvre.

The basic story line would be that both before and after the war this impeccably modern writer, who was always ahead of his time, went on writing in his hideaway, following his private vision. Inevitably, after hearing so much about the elusive author from Kogito, both the media and readers in general would become intensely interested in the make-believe writer's work. Needless to say, for the plan to succeed, Kogito would need to write some exceptionally strong and convincing literary criticism.

Was such a charade really feasible? Goro laid out a concrete plan that showed how it could be made to happen, but Kogito thought that converting the blithe blueprint into a work of art by stringing words together, one by one, would be the difficult part. After all, how many talented young writers, their heads full of revolutionary ideas, have ended up failing or giving up in frustration? Even so, Goro argued, for a voracious reader like Kogito-someone who had extraordinary powers of recollection and whose mind was perpetually awhirl with curious fancies-it should be a piece of cake to introduce the phantom writer's work to a wider audience via literary criticism, once Kogito had managed to whip up some samples.

Moreover, as the plan progressed, Kogito would probably get the urge to try creating some of the hermit author's fulllength work, as well. All the preliminary work he had done in the process of perpetrating this complex literary masquerade-composing excerpts, transcribing pseudo-interviews, penning literary criticism-would be invaluable when he actually started writing a novel to be published under the phantom's name, since he would have become intimately familiar with the imaginary master's prose style and essential themes and would have a clear idea of how to develop them further.

So the literary hoax would chug along, and when it came time to publish another book of criticism and interpretation, more and more people would probably join the chorus of commenters on the illusory writer's work. Of course, from the beginning the one who was leading the critical charge would be Kogito, writing under a variety of clever pseudonyms, and in the course of pursuing this plan over a period of twenty years or more, his own reputation as a fiction writer would be entirely erased by the faux-journalistic process. After that there would be nothing to do but to keep cranking out the backlist of the mysterious writer, while vicariously enjoying his invented protégé's success.

Kogito Choko, as a writer of his own original books, would eventually cease to exist in the public mind, and all that would remain was the great writer whose "rediscovery" he had orchestrated by easy, leisurely stages. And then after a little more time had passed, when the imaginary master finally "died," his previously unpublished work would be brought forth posthumously, like water pouring out of a broken dam. And the reclusive writer (whom no one had ever laid eyes on) would be remembered as a truly great artist-maybe even a Japanese Kafka.

"We really got into the story of that mythical writer, didn't we, Kogito?" Goro chuckled. "It was just when Borges's work was being introduced in Japanese translation for the first time, and we were thrilled to find someone else who thought the way we did. And then, before long, you dug up English translations of the writers who were persecuted by Stalin: Bulgakov, Bely, and so on. In a way, I almost felt as if we were growing old along with our great imaginary littérateur!" Then Goro added something that made Kogito feel that his friend had come dangerously close to crossing the line as far as the Rules of Tagame were concerned.

Rule Number Two: Never, ever speak about plans for the future.

"This is what I want to say to you, Kogito," Goro announced. "Right now you're already older than the phantom writer was when you and he first 'met.' From here on, isn't it time for you to gird your literary loins and try to make one last creative leap, to ensure that you yourself will be remembered as a unique writer, at least? (I won't go so far as to say 'great.') I'm hoping that the words that are pouring out of Tagame right now will somehow prime the pump and get you fired up. In your own past-or rather, in the past we share-surely there's a rich vein of experience that hasn't yet been mined?"

One day during the period when Kogito was indulging in long, intense Tagame dialogues (including the one above) on a nightly basis, Chikashi cornered him and, typically, burst out with a torrent of words that had obviously been germinating in her mind for quite a while.

"After all this time," she began, "when I hear you carrying on in your study every evening into the wee hours, complaining to Goro and then seeming to strain your ears for a response, I can't help wondering whether this isn't exactly the sort of 'absurdity' you dislike so much. I don't see what good can possibly come of indulging in this sort of charade night after night, and I'm really at my wits' end. Every time I hear you talking so impassionedly to Goro I can sense that you're waiting for a reply, and I know it must be terribly painful for you. I sympathize completely, and I truly do feel sorry for you. It's the same as if by some chance you suddenly died in an accident or something-I think about how puzzled and devastated Akari would be and how sorry I'd feel for him. It isn't that I think you're doing these late-night séances as a way of gearing up for your own journey to the Other Side, but still…

"In any case, because your study is right above our bedrooms, it's really hard on us when your voice comes floating down. It's a bit like water dripping slowly through a bamboo strainer, and I think it's probably bothering Akari even more than me. No matter how low you keep your voice, and even when it's obvious that you're just listening to Goro's tapes on your headphones, I don't think it's possible for Akari to simply ignore what's going on. So I'm just wondering whether you might be willing to put an end to your sessions, for us?"

And then while Kogito watched, appalled, Chikashi unexpectedly began to cry. He had no choice but to admit that for these past few months he had been so engrossed in living by the Rules of Tagame that he had forgotten there were rules about living as part of a family, too. On another level, he had been startled by the aside Chikashi had tossed out in the middle of her speech: It isn't that I think you're doing these late-night séances as a way of gearing up for your own journey to the Other Side, but still…

8

"But I just can't do that!" Kogito wailed. He was alone in his study, lying facedown on his army cot with the sheets pulled tightly over his head, talking to himself. "I know my behavior has been shameful-getting so immersed in Tagame to the point where it's become a kind of crazy obsession. But there's another person involved in this. I can't very well just announce, unilaterally, 'Sorry, pal, it's over.' Think about poor Goro, all alone on the Other Side. How terrible would that be for him?"

Without getting up, Kogito quickly turned over and thrust his head into the darkness next to the bed. Years ago, one of his former college classmates had been admitted to the hospital with leukemia and had thrashed around on the bed so violently that, as the man's wife confided in Kogito, they were afraid he might end up bursting a blood vessel in his head. (And the fact that the doctors had chosen to conceal the true diagnosis from the patient had probably amplified his anxiety.) But maybe that desperate behavior-that sort of secret, private struggle-was just a reflection of the buttoned-up attitude toward life shared by the men of Kogito's generation.

Kogito got up, switched on the light, and pulled the duralumin trunk out from under the bed. He had just remembered something Goro had said on one of the tapes, and now, using his own topical annotations on the labels as a guide, he found the tape in question, popped it into Tagame, and hastily cued up the relevant passage. Then, as if urged on by the slow, whirring vibration of the tape recorder, he gave a decisive nod and pressed the PLAY button.

"Of course, you're always like this," Goro's voice began, ragging on Kogito right out of the gate. "But from what I hear these days, true to form, you've been acting like a mouse trapped in a bag. When you get right down to it, you've brought all your suffering on yourself, and now you're floundering around helplessly. Chikashi's been complaining to me, you know," Goro went on. "She says that same big-shot scumbag journalist has been denouncing you again, in the nastiest, most contemptible way, making a point of saying things like 'Of course I don't read that guy's novels, but I've heard from some young people that he's been putting me in his books, as a villain.' That so-called journalist even published a showy, slanderous book exploiting the fact that you won a major international award. That vendetta has already been dragging on for twenty-five years now-don't you think it's time for you to let it go?

"Lately you've been in pretty low spirits, and you've brought Chikashi and Akari down as well. There's no way you can say that's a good thing. Even without having to cope with a depressed husband, Chikashi is someone who's experienced more than her share of hard times. When the busybodies say that your family appears to have a pretty cushy life, you should just reply that the pleasant things pass soon enough, as if they'd never happened, but the painful experiences tend to linger on for a long, long time.

"The sort of person who's forever reveling in every little delight with an excessive, borderline-abnormal kind of euphoria, and who does nothing but cling to those lovely airbrushed memories-that, in my opinion, is a thoroughly unhappy and unfortunate person. Chikashi has been through far too much suffering already, but in spite of that she has never turned into the sort of weak person who's always longing to return to happier days. Don't you agree?

"Anyway, I've been thinking about your situation, and I was wondering-how would it be if you took a little breather and left town for a while? You've been toiling away at the novelist's life for all these years, and I really think you could use some quarantine time right about now. I think if you just got away from your novels for a while…If you left for good it would be rough on Chikashi and Akari, that's why I say 'for a while.' What I mean is, you need to impose a quarantine on yourself and take a break from the sort of life where you're being confronted by the distressing gutter journalism of this country on a daily basis."

"Give me a minute to check something in the dictionary," Kogito replied. "When you first mentioned this, some time ago, I had a passing familiarity with the word quarantine, so I didn't take the time to look it up and find out exactly what it meant. But the word hasn't taken root in my mind to the point where I would actually use it."

After pressing the PAUSE button, Kogito brought out one of his dictionaries and flipped the pages until he found what he was looking for:

quarantine (kwor-?n-teen) n. 1. A state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere or been exposed to infectious or contagious diseases are placed. v.[with object] to put a person or animal in quarantine. 2. n. The period of this isolation. Origin: mid-seventeenth century, from Italian quarantina, "forty days," from quaranta, "forty."

After he had finished reading the definitions, Kogito turned back to Tagame, making an effort to keep his voice as low as possible while simultaneously striving to pronounce every word with perfect clarity. "Listen, Goro," he said, before pressing the PLAY button again. "I know you're using this word to try to advance a certain agenda, and I understand exactly what you're driving at."

"Of course, it doesn't have to be exactly forty days," responded Goro's recorded voice. "You might have a chance to stay away longer. But what do you think about Berlin as a temporary haven, to put some distance between you and that journalist? (On the bright side, he isn't getting any younger, either!) For me, at least, Berlin is an unforgettable place. If someone asked me what connection that city might have with your self-imposed quarantine, I couldn't say exactly, but…."

"Berlin, eh? Now that you mention it, I did receive an invitation to go there, for considerably longer than forty days!" Kogito exclaimed, hearing the surprise and excitement in his own voice, which had grown suddenly loud as he momentarily forgot about the need to whisper. "I'll check now, but I think the offer's still good."

Whereupon Kogito stopped the tape and went to his study to look for the file in question. S. Fischer Verlag, the publisher who had put out the first German translations of Kogito's early novels, was still doing so, even though sales weren't what they used to be. Every few years-or, more usually, every ten or twelve years-a new translation of one of Kogito's novels would come out in hardcover, but as a rule the subsequent printings would be in paperback. Whenever Kogito gave readings at places such as the Frankfurt Book Fair or cultural associations in Hamburg and Munich, there would be a book signing afterward, where they were always able to sell quite a few of the colorful, beautifully designed paperbacks of his work. And now he had been offered a lectureship at the Berlin Free University to commemorate S. Fischer, the founder of the eponymous publishing house. The course was to begin in the middle of November, so he still had time to accept. The department's offer was generous, and they even said that they would keep the slot open for him through the first half of the term.

By the time he climbed back into bed, Kogito had dug up the most recent fax from a secretary in S. Fischer Verlag's editorial division and learned that he still had three days to let them know whether he wanted to accept the position of guest lecturer at the Free University. To his own amazement, in a matter of a few minutes he had made up his mind to take Goro's rather drastic advice and get out of town for a while.

The tape on which Goro suggested a "quarantine" had been recorded several months earlier, but now his casual suggestion had become a necessity, for a different reason: namely, Kogito's need to pull himself together and get over his addiction to talking to Goro through Tagame. Even after Chikashi's heartfelt complaint earlier that evening, Kogito hadn't been able to leave the tape recorder on the bookshelf for even this one night. And, as it turned out, it was Goro, his Tagame partner, who had dropped the hint that had galvanized him into positive action. Somehow, mixed in with his decision to make a bold move, Kogito felt a resurgence of his old dependence on Goro.

He was just about to ask, "What's going to become of our sessions with Tagame?" But then, without pressing the PLAY button, he answered his own question. Or, to put it more precisely, he consciously crafted a response along the lines of what he thought Goro might have said in real life. That's for you to decide. But when Chikashi criticized your behavior last night, rather than any annoyance or inconvenience to her and Akari, she was probably more concerned about finding a way to free you from your addiction to our Tagame sessions, don't you think?

Nevertheless, right up until the night before he was scheduled to leave for wintry Berlin, Kogito was unable to give up his nightly ritual of talking to Goro by way of Tagame-although he did, at least, make every effort to keep his voice low. The thing was, when he told Chikashi the next day about his decision to go into Tagame-free quarantine in Berlin, she naturally interpreted this action as a direct response to her request: a way for Kogito to take a break from his "séances" with Goro. That being the case, no matter how much he lowered his voice Chikashi was probably still aware that the conversations were continuing, but because the end was in sight her silence on the matter seemed to constitute a sort of tacit approval or at least forbearance.

Then one morning, as Kogito's departure date was rapidly approaching, Chikashi (who had been busying herself every evening with packing and repacking his trunk) said: "Last night I felt like going through Goro's letters, and I came across a watercolor painting that he sent from Berlin. Would you like to see it? It's a landscape, on lovely paper. It's actually drawn with colored pencils, then blurred with a wet brush so it ends up looking like a watercolor. The painting seems to have a really buoyant, happy feeling. On the back is written 'This morning is the only day that's been this clear since I've been here,' and on the front, in the lower corner, is Goro's signature."

Kogito looked at the landscape painting, which was on soft, thick, pale-sepia paper with slightly ragged edges, like a pricey wedding invitation. In classic Goro style, the paper had been roughly torn into a rectangular shape. The centerpiece of the composition was a huge tree, seen from above: stout trunk, barren treetops, and a chaotic tangle of leafless branches with attenuated tips, all minutely detailed in such a way as to delineate the subtleties of light and shade amid the homogeneous hues of gray and brown. The only green came from the perennial creepers that snaked around the tree trunk, while patches of deep blue sky thickly sprinkled with fluffy white clouds could be glimpsed through the lacy jumble of bare, thin branches.

"These leafless white-barked trees in the painting, the ones whose skinny branches are draped in something that looks like the hair of a doll made from woolen yarn? I think they're called European white birches, and in the springtime they put forth leaves that are smaller than the leaves of our Japanese white birches. There were some in front of the window of my office at Berkeley," Kogito remarked.

"Goro must have wanted to paint that sky because it was such a gorgeous color," Chikashi said. "I think this was when he went to Berlin the last time, for the film festival. It had been quite a while since he and Katsuko broke up, so he no longer had the contacts from her film-importing business, and even though his movies were very well known over there, most of the attention was probably going to younger directors, so he seems to have been a bit dejected. I remember he told me on the phone that Berlin was cloudy every day, from morning on, and then it got dark around four PM. He said things like 'Berlin in winter isn't a fit place for a human being.' But that makes it seem even more remarkable that this painting is so bright and full of life. He was probably walking around the city when an unusual set of colored pencils in an art-supply store caught his eye, and he just bought them on the spur of the moment. And then when he was looking out his hotel window at the first clear sky since he'd arrived, he suddenly felt like painting it. He didn't have any proper drawing paper, so he must have used the back cover of the film-festival program or something. The thing is, Goro really wasn't the type of person who would make a sketch of the view from his window while he was alone in his hotel room, was he? Remember when he was working at a commercial-art studio, and whenever he reached the final-design stage on one of his posters, he used to send you a telegram at your student lodgings, because he needed you to be there with him? Anyway, he told me, 'There was someone there with me, watching me paint this picture. It was the person who was working as my interpreter/attendant, so no one was likely to gossip about her being in my hotel room. She was a really nice girl, and it's only because she was there that I was able to make that sketch in an easy, relaxed way.' Goro said that when he finished the picture, it seemed quite possible that the young woman might have asked impulsively whether she could have it. As he put it, 'It would have been hard to refuse a request like that, so I took preemptive action: I told her I was going to send it to my younger sister, whom I'd been neglecting for far too long. I knew the address, of course.' That's the explanation Goro gave me, when I thanked him for the gift. But, you know, Goro never had much confidence in his art, even though he sometimes allowed his drawings to be published as illustrations for his writing, and he simply couldn't bring himself to give his paintings to anyone."

"I wonder what became of those watercolor pencils?" Kogito asked, momentarily awestruck by Chikashi's unusual burst of eloquence. "I don't think I've ever seen such beautiful, subtle colors."

"Goro told me that they were too bulky to pack in his trunk, and the pencil leads would probably have gotten broken in transit, so it just seemed easier to give the set to that girl. Apparently she had taken the university entrance exams, but decided to work in an office for a while before starting classes-I gathered that a lot of young people do that, in Germany. That's how she came to be working as an interpreter/attendant, and the film festival assigned her to help Goro get around the city. At the time, I remember thinking that I would rather have had the colored pencils than the drawing, but now, of course, I'm very glad to have this picture."

Kogito enjoyed doing handicraft projects, and he happily set to work on installing Goro's watercolor painting in a suitable frame.