after the quake

His mother’s faith was absolute, but Yoshiya was just as certain that his father was the obstetrician. There had been something wrong with the condom. Anything else was out of the question.

“Does the doctor know that you gave birth to me?”

“I don’t think so,” his mother said. “I never saw him again, never contacted him in any way. He probably has no idea.”

The man boarded the Chiyoda Line train to Abiko. Yoshiya followed him into the car. It was after ten-thirty at night, and there were few other passengers on the train. The man took a seat and pulled a magazine from his briefcase. It looked like some sort of professional journal. Yoshiya sat down opposite and pretended to read his newspaper. The man had a slim build and deeply chiseled features with an earnest expression. There was something doctorish about him. His age looked right, and he was missing one earlobe. The right one. It could easily have been bitten off by a dog.

Yoshiya felt with intuitive certainty that this man had to be his biological father. And yet the man probably had no idea that this son of his even existed. Nor would he be likely to accept the facts if Yoshiya were to reveal them to him there and then. After all, the doctor was a professional whose contraceptive methods were beyond reproach.

The train passed through the Shin-Ochanomizu, Sendagi, and Machiya subway stops before rising to the surface. The number of passengers decreased at each station. The man never looked away from his magazine or gave any indication he was about to leave his seat. Observing him over the top of his newspaper, Yoshiya recalled fragments of the night before. He had gone out drinking in Roppongi with an old college friend and two girls the friend knew. He remembered going from the bar to a club, but he couldn’t recall whether he had slept with his date. Probably not, he decided. He had been too drunk: knowledge would have been out of the question.

The paper was filled with the usual earthquake stories. Meanwhile his mother and the other believers were probably staying in the church’s Osaka facility. Each morning they would cram their rucksacks full of supplies, travel as far as they could by commuter train, then walk along the rubble-strewn highway the rest of the way to Kobe, where they would distribute daily provisions to the victims of the quake. She had told him on the phone that her pack weighed as much as thirty-five pounds. Kobe felt light-years away from Yoshiya and the man sitting across from him absorbed in his magazine.

Until he graduated from elementary school, Yoshiya used to go out with his mother once a week on missionary work. She achieved the best results of anyone in the church. She was so young and lovely and seemingly well bred (in fact, she was well bred) that people always liked her. Plus she had this charming little boy with her. Most people would let down their guard in her presence. They might not be interested in religion, but they were willing to listen to her. She would go from house to house in a simple (but form-fitting) suit distributing pamphlets and calmly extolling the joys of faith.

“Be sure to come see us if you ever have any pain or difficulties,” she would tell them. “We never push, we only offer,” she would add, her voice warm, eyes shining. “There was a time when my soul was wandering through the deepest darkness until the day I was saved by our teachings. I was carrying this child inside me, and I was about to throw myself and him in the ocean. But I was saved by His hand, the One who is in Heaven, and now my son and I live in the holy light of our Lord.”

Yoshiya had never found it embarrassing to knock on strangers’ doors with his mother. She was especially sweet to him then, her hand always warm. They had the experience of being turned away so often that it made Yoshiya all the more joyful to receive a rare kind word. And when they managed to win over a new believer for the church it filled him with pride. Maybe now God my father will recognize me as His son, he would think.

Not long after he went on to middle school, though, Yoshiya abandoned his faith. As he awakened to the existence of his own independent ego, he found it increasingly difficult to accept the strict codes of the sect that clashed with ordinary values. But the most fundamental and decisive cause was the unending coldness of the One who was his father: His dark, heavy, silent heart of stone. Yoshiya’s abandonment of the faith was a source of deep sadness to his mother, but his determination was unshakable.

The train was almost out of Tokyo and just a station or two from crossing into Chiba Prefecture when the man put his magazine back into his briefcase and stood up, approaching the door. Yoshiya followed him on to the platform. The man flashed a pass to get through the gate, but Yoshiya had to wait in line to pay the extra fare to this distant point. Still, he managed to reach the line for cabs just as the man was stepping into one. He boarded the next cab and pulled a brand-new ten-thousand-yen bill from his wallet.

“Follow that cab,” he said.

The driver gave him a suspicious look, then eyed the money.

“Hey, is this some kind of mob thing?”

“Don’t worry,” Yoshiya said. “I’m just tailing somebody.”

The driver took the ten-thousand-yen bill and pulled away from the curb. “OK,” he said, “but I still want my fare. The meter’s running.”

The two cabs sped down a block of shuttered shops, past a number of dark empty lots, past the lighted windows of a hospital, and through a new development crammed with boxy little houses. The streets all but empty, the tail posed no problems— and provided no thrills. Yoshiya’s driver was clever enough to vary the distance between his cab and the one in front.

“Guy havin’ an affair or something?”

“Nah,” Yoshiya said. “Head-hunting. Two companies fighting over one guy.”

“No kidding? I knew companies were scramblin’ for people these days, but I didn’t realize it was this bad.”

Now there were hardly any houses along the road, which followed a riverbank and entered an area lined with factories and warehouses. The only things marking this deserted space were new lampposts thrusting up from the earth. Where a high concrete wall stretched along the road, the taxi ahead came to a sudden stop. Alerted by the car’s brake lights, Yoshiya’s driver brought his cab to a halt some hundred yards behind the other vehicle and doused his headlights. The mercury vapor lamps overhead cast their harsh glare on the asphalt roadway. There was nothing to see here but the wall and its dense crown of barbed wire that seemed to defy the rest of the world. Far ahead, the cab door opened and the man with the missing earlobe got out. Yoshiya slipped his driver two thousand-yen bills beyond his initial ten-thousand-yen payment.

“You’re never gonna get a cab way out here, mister. Want me to wait around?” the driver asked.

“Never mind,” Yoshiya said and stepped outside.

The man never looked up after leaving his cab but walked straight ahead alongside the concrete wall at the same slow, steady pace as on the subway platform. He looked like a well-made mechanical doll being drawn ahead by a magnet. Yoshiya raised his coat collar and exhaled an occasional white cloud of breath from the gap between the edges as he followed the man, keeping far enough behind to avoid being spotted. All he could hear was the anonymous slapping of the man’s leather shoes against the pavement. Yoshiya’s rubber-soled loafers were silent.

There was no sign of human life here. The place looked like an imaginary stage set in a dream. Where the concrete wall ended, there was a scrap yard: a hill of cars surrounded by a chain-link fence. Under the flat light of a mercury lamp, the pile of withered metal was reduced to a single colorless mass. The man continued walking straight ahead.

Yoshiya wondered what the point could be of getting out of a cab in such a deserted place. Wasn’t the man heading home? Or maybe he wanted to take a little detour on the way. The February night was too cold for walking, though. A freezing wind would push against Yoshiya’s back every now and then as it sliced down the road.

Where the scrap yard ended, another long stretch of unfriendly concrete wall began, broken only by the opening to a narrow alley. This seemed like familiar territory to the man: he never hesitated as he turned the corner. The alley was dark. Yoshiya could make out nothing in its depths. He hesitated for a moment, but then stepped in after the man. Having come this far, he was not about to give up.

High walls pressed in on either side of the straight passageway. There was barely enough room in here for two people to pass each other, and it was as dark as the bottom of the nighttime sea. Yoshiya had only the sound of the man’s shoes to go by. The leather slaps continued on ahead of him at the same unbroken pace. All but clinging to the sound, Yoshiya moved forward through this world devoid of light. And then there was no sound at