Kafka on the Shore (17 page)

He listens to the music, humming the melody, then continues.

"That's why I like to listen to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I'm getting at?"

"Sort of...."

"I'm sorry," Oshima says. "I tend to get carried away on the subject."

"But there's all kinds and degrees of imperfection, right?" I say.

"Sure, of course."

"Comparatively speaking, which performance of the D major sonata do you think's the best?"

"That's a tough one." Oshima gives it some thought. He shifts down, swings over to the passing lane, swiftly slips pass a huge refrigerated eighteen-wheeler, shifts up, and steers back into our lane. "Not to frighten you, but a green Miata is one of the hardest vehicles to spot on the highway at night. It has such a low profile, plus the green tends to blend into the darkness. Truck drivers especially can't see it from up in their cabs. It can be a risky business, particularly in tunnels. Sports cars really should be red. Then they'd stand out. That's why most Ferraris are red. But I happen to like green, even if it makes things more dangerous. Green's the color of a forest. Red's the color of blood."

He glances at his watch and goes back to humming along with the music.

"Generally I'd have to say Brendel and Ashkenazy give the best performances, though they don't do anything for me emotionally. Schubert's music challenges and shatters the ways of the world. That's the essence of Romanticism, and Schubert's music is the epitome of the Romantic."

I keep on listening to the sonata.

"What do you think? Kind of boring?" he asks.

"Kind of," I admit.

"You can appreciate Schubert if you train yourself. I was the same way when I first listened to him—it bored me silly. It's only natural for someone your age. In time you'll appreciate it. People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can't distinguish between the two."

"You said you're an unusual person. Do you mean because of the hemophilia?"

"That's part of it," he says, and gives this devilish sort of smile. "There's more to it than that."

Schubert's long "Heavenly" sonata finishes, and we don't listen to any more music.

We fall silent, each of us filling in the silence with our own random thoughts. I gaze vacantly at the passing signs. At a junction we turn south and the road heads into the mountains, one long tunnel after another. Oshima concentrates hard each time he passes another vehicle. We go by a number of slow-moving trucks on the road, and every time there's this whooshing moan of air, like somebody's soul is being yanked out.

Occasionally I look back to make sure my backpack's still tied down okay.

"The place we're headed is deep in the mountains, not the most pleasant dwelling in the world," Oshima says. "I doubt you'll see anybody else while you're there. There's no radio, TV, or phone. Sure you don't mind?"

"I don't," I reply.

"You're used to being alone," Oshima comments.

I nod.

"But solitude comes in different varieties. What's waiting for you might be a little unexpected."

"How so?"

Oshima pushes up the bridge of his glasses. "I can't really say. It might change, depending on you."

We get off the highway and start down a small regional roadway. Along a side road near the exit there's a small town. Oshima stops at a convenience store and buys almost more groceries than we can carry—vegetables and fruit, crackers, milk and mineral water, canned goods, bread, pouch-packed instant food, mostly things that don't require much cooking. I start to take out my wallet, but he shakes his head and pays for it all.

Back in the sports car, we head down the road. I'm holding the bags that wouldn't fit into the trunk. Once we leave the little town everything is dark around us. No houses, and only the occasional car, the road so narrow it's hard for two cars to pass each other.

Oshima flips on the high beams and races ahead, braking, accelerating, shifting from second to third and back. His expression is fixed as he focuses on driving, lips tight, eyes riveted on a point up ahead in the darkness, right hand clutching the top of the wheel, left hand poised for action on the gearshift knob.

A sharp bluff appears on our left side. It looks like there's a mountain stream down below. The curves get sharper, the road more slippery, and a couple of times the rear end of the car spins, but I decide not to worry about it. As far as Oshima is concerned, having an accident here most likely isn't an option.

My watch shows a little before nine. I crack open my window and let the cold air rush in. Everything sounds different here. We're in the mountains, heading in deeper. I breathe a sigh of relief when the road finally cuts away from the bluffs and turns into a forest. Trees magically soar above us. Our headlights lick at the trunks, illuminating one after another. We've left the paved road behind, the tires squirting out pebbles that ricochet against the bottom of the car. The suspension dances up and down over the rough road. There's no moon out, no stars. A fine rain occasionally splashes against the windshield.

"Do you come here a lot?" I ask.

"I used to. Now, with the job and all I can't come so often. My older brother's a surfer and lives on the shore in Kochi. He runs a surf shop there and makes surfboards.

He comes here sometimes. Do you surf?"

"Never tried it," I tell him.

"If you have the chance, you should have my brother teach you. He's very good,"

Oshima says. "If you meet him you'll see he's not at all like me. He's big, tan, kind of quiet, not so sociable, and likes beer. And wouldn't know Schubert from Wagner. But we get along really well."

We continue down the road through thick woods, and finally turn off. Oshima stops the car and, leaving the engine running, climbs out and unlocks a kind of wire fence and pushes it open. We drive inside and proceed down another windy, bumpy road into a clearing where the road ends. Oshima stops the car, sighs heavily, and brushes his hair back with both hands, then kills the engine and sets the parking brake.

The fan still hums, cooling off the overheated engine as steam rises from the hood, but with the engine off a heavy stillness falls over us. I hear a small stream nearby, the faint sound of water. High above us the wind rustles symbolically. I open the door and step outside. Patches of chill hang in the air. I have on a yacht jacket over my T-shirt and zip it up to my neck.

There's a small building in front of us, a log cabin by the look of it, though it's too dark to see much. Just a dark outline floating against the background of the forest. The headlights still on, Oshima slowly approaches the cabin, flashlight in hand, walks up the porch steps, takes out a key, and unlocks the door. He goes inside, strikes a match, and lights a lamp. He then steps out onto the porch, holding the lamp, and announces,

"Welcome to my house." It all looks like a drawing in an old storybook.

I walk up the steps and go inside. Oshima lights a larger lamp suspended from the ceiling. The cabin consists of a single big, boxy room. There's a small bed in the corner, a dining table and two wooden chairs, an old sofa, a hopelessly faded rug—a bunch of old furniture nobody wanted, it looks like, just thrown together. There's a cinder block and board shelf crammed full of books, their covers worn like they've been read a lot.

There's also an old chest for storing clothes. And a simple kitchen with a counter, a small gas stove, and a sink but no running water. Instead, an aluminum pail I guess is for water. A pan and kettle on a shelf, plus a frying pan hanging from the wall. And in the middle of the room there's a black wood-burning stove.

"My brother built this cabin almost all by himself. He took the original rough lumberjack hut and remodeled it completely. He's good with his hands. I was still pretty little then and helped out a bit, making sure I didn't get cut or anything. It's pretty primitive. No electricity. No running water. No toilet. The only modern convenience is the propane gas." Oshima pours some mineral water into the kettle and sets it to boil.

"My grandfather originally owned this mountain. He was a pretty wealthy man in Kochi, with a lot of property. He passed away ten years ago, and my brother and I inherited almost the entire mountain. No other relatives wanted it. It's too far off the beaten track, and not worth much. If you were going to maintain it for harvesting trees, you'd have to hire people and it'd cost too much."

I open the curtain at the window. All I can see is a wall of total darkness.

"When I was just about your age," Oshima says, dipping chamomile tea bags into a pot, "I used to come here a lot and live on my own. Not see anybody else, not talk to anybody. My brother almost forced me to. Usually, with somebody who has a disease like mine, you wouldn't do that—too dangerous for them to be alone in some isolated spot. But my brother didn't mind." He leans back against the counter, waiting for the water to boil. "He wasn't trying to discipline me or anything, it's just what he believed I needed. Looking back on it, I can see it was a good experience, something I did need. I could read a lot, think things over. To tell the truth, after a certain period I hardly went to school. School and I had sort of a mutual hate relationship going. I was different from everybody else. Out of the kindness of their hearts they let me graduate from junior high, but after that I was on my own, basically. Just like you. Did I already tell you all this?"

I shake my head. "Is that why you're being so nice to me?"

"That's part of it," he says, then pauses. "But that's not the whole reason."

Oshima passes me a cup of tea and sips at his own. My nerves are tense after the long drive, and the chamomile is just what I need to calm down.

Oshima glances at his watch. "I'd better be going, so let me explain everything.

There's a nice stream nearby you can use for water. It's spring fed so you can drink it as is. Much better than these bottles of mineral water. There's firewood stacked up in back so use the stove if you get cold. It gets pretty chilly here. I've even used it a few times in August. You can use the stove for simple cooking. If you need any other tools or anything, check the toolshed out back. And feel free to wear any old clothes of my brother's you find in the dresser. He doesn't care if somebody wears his things."

Oshima rests his hands on his hips and gives the cabin a once-over. "It's not some romantic getaway, that's for sure. But for simple living, it'll do. One thing I've got to warn you about—don't go very far into the woods. The forest is really dense, and there's not a good path through it. Always keep the cabin in sight. It's easy to get lost if you go any farther, and it's hard to find your way back. I had a terrible experience there once. I was only a couple hundred yards from here but spent half the day going in circles. You might think Japan's a small country, that there's no chance you could get lost in a forest. But once you get lost in these woods, believe me, you stay lost."

I file that away for future reference.

"And except for an emergency, I wouldn't come down off the mountain. It's too far to any other houses. Just wait here, and I'll be back in a couple of days to pick you up. You have enough food to see you through. By the way, do you have a cell phone?"

"I do," I tell him, pointing at my backpack.

He grins at me. "Keep it in your pack. It won't work here—you're out of range. And of course a radio won't work either. You're cut off from the world. You should be able to get a lot of reading done."

I suddenly think of a very practical question. "If there's no toilet, where should I go to the bathroom?"

Oshima spreads both hands wide. "The forest is all yours. It's up to you."

Nakata visited the vacant lot for several days. One morning it rained heavily, so he spent the day doing simple woodworking in his room, but apart from that he spent his time seated in the weeds waiting for the missing tortoiseshell cat to show up, or the man in the strange hat. But no luck.

At the end of each day Nakata stopped by the home of the people who'd hired him and gave an update on his search—where he'd gone, what sort of information he'd managed to pick up. The cat's owner would pay him twenty dollars, his going rate.

Nobody had ever officially set that fee, word just got around that there was a master cat-finder in the neighborhood and somehow he settled on that daily rate. People would always give him something extra besides the money, too—food, occasionally clothes.

And a bonus of eighty dollars once he actually tracked down the missing cat.

Nakata wasn't constantly being asked to search for missing cats, so the fees he accumulated each month didn't add up to much. The older of his younger brothers paid his utilities out of the inheritance Nakata's parents had left him—which wasn't very much to begin with—and he lived on his meager savings and a municipal monthly subsidy for the elderly handicapped. He managed to get by on the subsidy alone, so he could spend his cat-finding fees as he wished, and for him it seemed like a substantial amount.

Sometimes, though, he couldn't come up with any idea of how to spend it, other than enjoying his favorite grilled eel. Going to the bank or having a savings account at the post office involved filling out forms, so any leftover money he hid beneath the tatami in his room.

Being able to converse with cats was Nakata's little secret. Only he and the cats knew about it. People would think he was crazy if he mentioned it, so he never did.