I search for the right words. First I look for the boy named Crow, but he's nowhere to be found. I'm left to choose them on my own, and that takes time. But Miss Saeki waits there patiently. Lightning flashes outside, and after a time thunder booms far away.
'I mean I'd change into something I shouldn't.'
Miss Saeki looks at me with great interest. 'As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.'
'But even if that happens, you've got to have a place you can retrace your steps to.'
'A place you can retrace your steps to?'
'A place that's worth coming back to.'
Miss Saeki stares straight at me.
I blush, then summon my courage and look up at her. She has on a navy blue dress with short sleeves. She must have a whole closet of dresses in different shades of blue. Her only accessories are a thin silver necklace and a smallish wristwatch with a black leather band. I look for the fifteen-year-old girl in her and find her right away. She's hidden, asleep, like a 3-D painting in the forest of her heart. But if you look carefully you can spot her. My chest starts pounding again, like somebody's hammering a long nail into the walls surrounding it.
'For a fifteen-year-old, you make a lot of sense.'
I have no idea how to respond to that. So I don't say anything.
'When I was fifteen,' Miss Saeki says with a smile, 'all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.'
'But there's no place like that in this world.'
'Exactly. Which is why I'm living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.' As if hinting at the flow of time, she's silent for a while. 'But you know,' she goes on, 'when I was fifteen, I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I'd run across the entrance that would take me to that other world.'
'Were you lonely when you were fifteen?'
'In a sense, I guess. I wasn't alone, but I was terribly lonely. Because I knew that I would never be happier than I was then. That much I knew for sure. That's why I wanted to go-just as I was-to some place where there was no time.'
'What I want is to grow up faster.'
Miss Saeki pulls back to study my expression. 'You must be much stronger and more independent than I am. At your age I was filled with illusions of escaping reality, but you're standing right up to the real world and confronting it head-on. That's a big difference.'
Strong and independent? I'm neither one. I'm just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not. But I don't say anything.
'You know, you remind me of a fifteen-year-old boy I used to know a long time ago.'
'Did he look like me?' I ask.
'You're taller and more muscular than he was, but there is a resemblance. He didn't enjoy talking with other kids his age-they were on a different wavelength-so he spent most of his time holed up in his room, reading or listening to music. He'd get the same frown lines, too, whenever the topic got difficult. And you love to read as well.'
I nod.
Miss Saeki glances at her watch. 'Thank you for the coffee.'
Taking that as my signal to leave, I stand up and head for the door. Miss Saeki picks up her black fountain pen, slowly twists off the cap, and goes back to her writing. There's another flash of lightning outside, bathing the room for an instant in a weird color. The clap of thunder hits a moment later. This time it's closer than before.
'Kafka,' Miss Saeki says.
I stop at the doorway and turn around.
'I just remembered that I wrote a book on lightning once.'
I don't say anything. A book on lightning?
'I went all over Japan interviewing people who'd survived lightning strikes. It took me a few years. Most of the interviews were pretty interesting. A small publisher put it out, but it barely sold. The book didn't come to any conclusion, and nobody wants to read a book that doesn't have one. For me, though, having no conclusion seemed perfectly fine.'
A tiny hammer in my head is pounding on a drawer somewhere, persistently. I'm trying to remember something, something very important-but I don't know what it is. By this time Miss Saeki's gone back to her writing and I go back to my room.
The rainstorm continues to batter us for another hour. The thunder is so incredibly loud that I'm afraid the windows in the library will shatter. Every time a bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, the stained-glass window on the landing flashes an image like some ancient ghost on the white wall across from it. By two o'clock, the storm lets up, and yellowish light begins to spill out between the clouds like a reconciliation has finally been reached. Water continues to drip down in the gentle sunlight.
When evening rolls around, I start closing up the place for the night. Miss Saeki says good-bye to me and Oshima and heads home. I hear the engine of her Golf and picture her seated at the wheel, turning the key. I tell Oshima I'll finish locking up. Whistling some aria, he goes off to wash up in the restroom, then leaves. I listen as the Mazda Miata roars off, the sound fading off in the distance. Now the library's all mine. It's much quieter than ever before.
I go to my room and study the sheet music for 'Kafka on the Shore.' Like I suspected, most of the chords are simple. The refrain, though, has a couple tricky ones. I go over to the reading room and try playing it on the upright piano. The fingering's really tough, so I practice it over and over, trying to get my hands around it, and somehow wind up getting it to sound right. At first the chords sound all wrong. I'm sure it's a misprint, or that the piano's out of tune. But the longer I listen to how those two chords sound one after the other, the more I'm convinced the whole song hangs on them. These two chords are what keep 'Kafka on the Shore' from degrading into some silly pop song, give it a special depth and substance. But how in the world did Miss Saeki come up with them?
I go back to my room, boil water in the electric kettle, and make some tea. I take out the old records we found in the storage room and put them on the turntable one after another. Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the Beatles' 'White Album,' Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, Stan Getz's Getz/Gilberto-all hit albums from the late sixties. That young boy-with Miss Saeki right beside him-must've done what I was doing, putting the records on the turntable, lowering the needle, listening to the music coming out of these speakers. The music felt like it was taking me and the whole room off to some different time, a world before I was even born. As I enjoy the music, I review the conversation we'd had that afternoon, trying to capture our exact words.
'When I was fifteen, I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I'd run across the entrance that would take me to that other world.'
I can hear her voice right beside me. Inside my head something knocks at a door, a heavy, persistent knock.
An entrance?
I lift the needle off the Stan Getz album, pull out the single of 'Kafka on the Shore,' place it on the turntable, and lower the needle. And listen to her sing.
The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes- at Kafka on the shore.
The girl who comes to this room most likely located that entrance stone. She's in another world, just as she was at fifteen, and at night she comes to visit this room. In her light blue dress, she comes to gaze at Kafka on the shore.
Suddenly, completely out of nowhere, I remember my father talking about how he'd once been struck by
