by Kōji Suzuki
Hashiba had been leaning against the wall, but as he finished his story, he straightened up and placed one hand on the wall just next to Saeko’s head.
“Do you know what I think it was? For two-and-a-half years, I completely believed the story about the grandfather in the shed. Based on the information my friend had given me, I’d developed a complete mental picture of the old man. He didn’t exist, and of course I never saw him. But that made him all the more real to me. My imagination gave birth to and fed this being, fleshing him out, filling in the image of his terrifying face.
“And then when I went after the ball, in a panic, I actually came face to face with this figment of my imagination. It was a bit of a hallucination, I suppose. No wonder the phantom old man looked exactly the way I’d imagined him.
“Now, suppose things had gone differently. Suppose I had never learned the truth. My friend would have gone away to his junior high school in Tokyo. The grandfather would no longer have a reason to exist, and my friend would have tried to expunge him. ‘One day, my grandfather up and took off,’ he would have told us. ‘Nobody knows what happened to him.’
“Then we would have investigated the shed and found nobody there. As far as we were concerned, his grandfather would now be a missing person. The person who had lived in the hut all that time had disappeared. It would never have occurred to us that he hadn’t existed in the first place.
“Since we’ve been investigating these missing persons cases, every now and then, I wonder: did the Fujimura family really live in that house in Takato to begin with? I know it sounds crazy. But maybe we won’t be able to solve this mystery unless we question the assumptions we take for granted.”
Saeko was reminded of the debate between Einstein and Bohr.
“So the Moon exists when we’re observing it and doesn’t when we aren’t?”
With that extreme formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Einstein had denied the possibility that things only existed if there was someone there to observe them. On a quantum level, it sometimes appeared that the mind of the observer influenced the state of the object. It was the interplay that mattered; Saeko herself had considered the possibility that the world was built through its interaction with a cognizing subject.
“I wonder if the ability to cause a wave function to collapse merely by observing it is an ability unique to human beings,” she pondered aloud.
“A wave function?” Hashiba echoed. He didn’t seem to be familiar with the term.
“It’s the role of psi in Shroedinger’s equation. A quantum wave is just an elusive probability until the moment we observe it, at which point it collapses and makes its whereabouts known.”
A slightly distant look came into Hashiba’s eyes.
Oh, great. Now I’ve done it, Saeko realized immediately.
“What are you, some kind of physics whiz?” he asked.
“I’m no whiz. But I guess I was more familiar with physics growing up than most kids,” Saeko replied.
“I don’t understand relativity or quantum dynamics, but that’s never been a problem for me,” Hashiba noted. Saeko picked up on a note of irony and resentment in his tone.
Most people acted surprised when they learned that Saeko had a strong grasp of physics. Growing up in an environment where math and physics were discussed every day, Saeko didn’t realize how unique her education had been until she started to encounter men who acted stunned and alienated by her knowledge.
Rather than trying to explain her background to Hashiba, Saeko figured the quickest thing would be to show him her father’s study. She rapped on the door with her knuckles.
“For now, allow me to show you the old shed at my house,” she suggested, turning the key in the lock and pushing open the door.
How long had it been since she’d last entered this room? Four years, five? Saeko no longer remembered exactly when she’d sealed it off. Was it when she and her husband had married? Or when they’d first started living together? In any case, at this point, the room had been locked for longer than her marriage had lasted.
As the door opened, a green eddy of scents flooded their nostrils. Saeko could identify her father’s smell in the mix. He wasn’t a phantom. He had definitely existed. And this room had been his sanctuary.
6Floor-to-ceiling bookcases took up two-thirds of the room. The aluminum shelves stood in five rows, extending from the wall near the door all the way to the windows. They were packed tightly with double rows of books, and their comb-like formation made even the vast room feel claustrophobic. The entire place was packed with a suffocating quantity of books.
The morning sun poured in through the green plastic slats of the blinds hung over the windows, giving the interior a dark green tinge.
Hashiba stepped inside. “Was your father an author?”
“Well, not exactly …” Saeko weaved through the bookshelves to the windows, raised the blinds, and opened the sashes. Immediately, cold air and sunlight streamed in. As the air in the room changed, the stopped hands on the clock of time once again began to move.
The opposite end of the L-shaped room was her father’s workspace, and his desk wasn’t visible from the door. At the very far end was a sofa bed he’d used for naps. At any moment, Saeko felt as if her father’s leather chair might creak and spin towards them, his legs appearing around the edge of the wall.
Whenever Saeko entered the room, her father leaned way back in his chair to peer towards the entrance. When he spotted Saeko, he would spin his chair around and rise to his feet. No matter how absorbed he was in his work, he always welcomed his daughter’s presence. With that in mind, Saeko was careful not to come knocking without a good reason. She didn’t want to interrupt her father’s work unless it was absolutely necessary.
Leaving Saeko to her memories, Hashiba walked up and down the length of the room several times, trying to get a sense of its former occupant.
“What did your father do?” he asked again.
Hashiba’s voice sounded far away. Whenever Saeko spoke to someone about her father, her voice didn’t feel like her own. It was like the ringing you heard in your ears when you yawned—as if there were a shutter door closing off her inner ear and opening up a narrow passageway into a different space. If her father were dead, she would probably have felt differently. But the possibility that he might still be alive somewhere made her feel the need to maintain this narrow passage to wherever he was.
When she talked to Hashiba about her father, Saeko felt as though someone else were doing the talking. When she thought about it, nobody knew who her father truly was. Saeko’s image of him was the polar opposite of the way his employees saw him. From her point of view, her father was a gentle, loving, pleasant person. But as far as his subordinates were concerned, he was a barbarian, quick to fly into a rage over the smallest mistake. Both were accurate descriptions of different sides of his character. Saeko could only explain her father to Hashiba as she had known him.
Saeko’s father, Shinichiro Kuriyama, had been a rare phenomenon in that he had possessed the attributes of both scholar and businessman, characteristics often considered to be in opposition. Rather than systematically mastering a specific field, he’d taken an interest in everything under the sun, from mathematics, physics, philosophy and astronomy to evolution, biology, sociology, religion, astrology, history, archaeology, and psychology. Well versed in all of these fields, he was probably best characterized as a natural historian.
As an undergraduate he’d majored in mathematics but had switched to philosophy in graduate school. On a scholarship awarded by a newspaper publisher, he had studied abroad in Europe. That was where he’d encountered the book that would change his life.
The summer Shinichiro was twenty-four years old, he came across it by chance in the Oxford book store in the U.K. It was called The Plumed Serpent.
As it happened, Shinichiro wound up purchasing the book quite by accident. Based on the title, Shinichiro had taken it to
be the novel by D. H. Lawrence and brought the book up to the register without even leafing through it. It wasn’t until he’d returned to his boarding house that he realized his mistake; he’d purchased a different book by the same title. The author’s name was printed in tiny letters beneath the title: O. H. Wolles—a not entirely dissimilar name. According to the author bio, Wolles was a professor of archaeology at the University of London. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge, Shinichiro wasn’t familiar with the professor’s work. But when he delved into the book, he found himself completely captivated. It dealt with mysteries of ancient history, a topic that fascinated him and captured his imagination. Far from a bestseller, however, the book was barely known even in the U.K.
I want to translate this book into Japanese, Shinichiro realized. He wasn’t confident the book would sell well in Japan. Nonetheless, he felt that somehow, translating the book into Japanese was his mission.
After completing his two-year course of study overseas, Shinichiro returned to Japan and approached all of the major publishers with his translated manuscript. During his time abroad, he had met directly with the author and received permission to publish the translation. All he had to do now was find a publisher who wanted to print it. He tried cold calls and he tried using connections, but the response was always lukewarm. It was unclear whether the editors had actually even read the manuscript, as they all responded noncommittally that they didn’t see much of a market for it. On the other hand, they never turned it down outright. The general implication of their attitude was that they weren’t interested in publishing the book but also didn’t want another publisher to put it out and wind up with a bestseller.
If only they would give him a clear yes or no, Shinichiro would have been able to consider his next move. But when they simply kept him on hold for months on end, he felt that his time was simply being wasted. Frustrated, he made up his mind to drop out of graduate school, launch his own publishing house, and put out the book himself.
He borrowed money from his mother to launch the business and recruited a young editor who had been fascinated by the manuscript but whose boss had forced him to reject it. Soon Shinichiro had established an incorporated company and set about acquiring a publisher’s code.
The following year, just as Shinichiro, deeply in debt, was poised to publish his translation, the gods bestowed upon him a completely unforeseen blessing. Back in the U.K., scientific evidence for a theory proposed by Wolles’ had emerged, and the news spread quickly around the world.
Ruins of an ancient civilization had been unearthed at a particular location in South America, precisely where Wolles had predicted them to be in The Plumed Serpent. His hypothesis had been right on the mark.
In the nineteenth century, the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had theorized that the epics of Homer were based on historical fact. He had postulated that the legendary ancient city of Troy had been located in Hissarlik, in northern Turkey, resulting in the excavation of a treasure trove of relics from the early Bronze Age. Now, the media descended on Wolles, heralding him as a modern-day Schliemann, lauding his achievement. The book wherein he had penned his theories—The Plumed Serpent—soon began to fly off the shelves in Europe.
When Shinichiro’s translation hit the bookshelves in Japan, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The press were all over him. Suddenly Shinichiro was the man of the hour, the twenty-six-year-old grad-school dropout with the astonishing foresight to discover a brilliant treatise, translate it, and publish it himself. His impressive initiative was widely supported and admired by the younger generation.
Bolstered by all of the free publicity, sales of the book drove reprint after reprint. Before long, the book had sold over a million copies. Meanwhile, Shinichiro developed a personal friendship with Wolles beyond that of author and translator, and Wolles granted him the exclusive right to publish all of his works. Wolles explained his devotion to Shinichiro thus: “Even with little prospect that the book would sell, he recognized its value and invested his energies in its translation. Intuition of that caliber is rare.”
With a staff of just three people, the publishing house was off to a strong start from the beginning. They quickly released Wolles’ next book, then followed up with the rapid release of a succession of nonfiction works dedicated to mysteries of the natural world. Each book achieved bestseller status, and the company grew rapidly with the help of Shinichiro’s stellar managerial skills.
The company’s profit margin was high given that the president himself performed the translations. Soon Shinichiro had paid off his debts, and the company never again saw a drop of red ink. To that end, Shinichiro personally took on Herculean feats. He slept only two or three hours per night, managing his company during the day and holing up in his office at night to fashion new manuscripts. Everyone around him was astounded by the superhuman amount of work he accomplished.
Meanwhile, in his private life, Shinichiro got married, had a daughter, and lost his wife, all in the same year.
When he married his college sweetheart three years after establishing the company, she was already pregnant. During childbirth, however, an accident claimed the young bride’s life, and Saeko lost her mother the day she was born.
The singular tragedy rocked Shinichiro’s success-filled world. Overcome by grief, for several months he was unable to muster the will to put down a single word. Meanwhile, he found himself utterly smitten by the baby daughter who had come into the world just as his wife had left it. As a single parent, with the help of various babysitters, he managed to bring her up healthy and strong. Saeko’s existence gave him new vitality and sparked an interest in developing educational materials, a field he had never before even considered.
From around the time Saeko began elementary school, Shinichiro explained the principles of natural and social science to her in easy-to-understand terms. Whenever he could, he took her with him on his information-gathering trips, visiting historical relics, temples, and famous sites around the world and teaching her everything he could. Whether or not she understood was not the crucial point. Teaching Saeko became Shinichiro’s greatest pleasure. His company indeed began to publish educational materials for young learners.
By its tenth year, Shinichiro supervised more than fifty employees and had realized his dream of acquiring a dedicated building for his business. He had translated seventeen volumes and penned six original texts of his own.
Thanks to his books and translations, Shinichiro’s personal income had grown to a tremendous level, and he now ranked among the richest men in his business.
The year Shinichiro vanished was his company’s twentieth year in operation. At that point, it employed 150 people and boasted sales of 50 billion yen per year. It had grown into a well-established mid-sized publishing house.
But, the board of executives included, every last employee was well aware that Shinichiro Kuriyama was the person that made the company what it was. When they lost their powerhouse president, the board made a decision to shut the business down before its operations went downhill and they wound up in the red. They put the company’s accounts in order, and the employees all found posts at other publishing houses.
A trusted lawyer managed Shinchiro’s personal assets. The accounts were held at a trust bank, and even Saeko wasn’t sure of their total worth. She certainly had no need to work, but she didn’t write to pay the bills. It satisfied her curiosity and gave her a reason to live and a way to fill her days with something meaningful. There was nothing she loved more than finding a topic that fascinated her, learning it, and expressing it in her own words.
7As he listened to Saeko’s account, Hashiba realized he had a vague memory of Shinichiro Kuriyama’s name and face. “I remember now. I had no idea he was your father! I think I was in my second year of high school, near the end of summer vacation. For days on end, the talk shows went on and on about the mysterious disappearance of the golden boy of the publishing world! That wa
s your father, huh? I didn’t realize.” Hashiba spoke excitedly, punching one fist into the opposite palm.
Then suddenly, he seemed to remember where he was and quickly assumed a more somber expression. Shinichiro’s disappearance was a tragic event in Saeko’s life. The fact that her father was famous and that Hashiba had heard of him was no reason for levity.
Hashiba turned his gaze to the bookshelves. Immediately, he noticed a book that Shinichiro Kuriyama had authored. He pulled it off the shelf and read the title: The Landscape of Evolution. It was, in fact, a volume he’d read long ago. As he thumbed through the pages and skimmed the table of contents, Hashiba began to remember its content.
Since the dawn of life on earth, organisms had gone through many landmark events. Bacteria and other prokaryotes had given rise to the more complex and advanced eukaryotes. Photosynthesis had developed, increasing the oxygen content in the atmosphere. Life on earth had experienced an explosion of diversification during the Cambrian Period. The first land animals had emerged from the sea. The dinosaurs had gone extinct. All of it led up to the rise of modern humankind, with our capacity for language and sophisticated cognitive abilities.
Shinichiro highlighted these landmark events of the evolutionary process, describing the prehistoric world so vividly that it almost seemed as if he had traveled through time and witnessed it with his own eyes. The sales copy for the book characterized it as “a scientific primer for young people.”
“I read this when I was in high school,” Hashiba said, his gaze nostalgic.
“He had me read it too, of course. Probably around the same time,” Saeko replied. She couldn’t help feeling somehow pleased that Hashiba had been a fan of her father’s work.
“Wow, it’s so great that you got to read books by your own father. Wait, don’t tell me you were the very first reader?”