“Obviously, I wasn’t surprised they were gone,” Seiji went on. “Still, my disappointment was proportionate to the hope I felt when I first learned they’d survived. To find out so late—would it have been better if I never found out at all?” He chuckled again, a brief sound he confined to his throat this time. “At least I know they were well cared for. It didn’t escape me that my father died the same year that puppet Hirohito died, may His Radiance rest in perpetual remorse. So, I should be grateful. Don’t get me wrong. I am.” He lifted a jug Masaaki hadn’t noticed and poured himself a cup of water. In the half-light the jug trembled and the water sloshed, but Seiji was no longer fussy. “What I’m trying to work out is what we ultimately mean to each other.”
Masaaki watched the cup tip, a pale moon against a craggy summit, and the room filled with the ugly sound of a discordant body slaking itself. Since Seiji’s confinement to this room, Masaaki had insisted that he move in with him—into what was, after all, their parents’ house—but Seiji had refused. Rather than relieved, Masaaki found himself miffed. He and Seiji had no obligations to one another, but hostage to each other, he had come to find Seiji’s presence uncomfortably anchoring. Masaaki had been in his forties when he’d learned of his adoption—a midlife cataclysm that had sent him lurching from a family life in the United States to a solitary one devoted to tracking down information about his biological parents. Nothing had come of it except loss: loss of time; loss of his wife and two daughters; loss of all tether. Was this so different from the vanishing Seiji must have experienced, banished behind a one-way mirror through which he could see the lit world in which he didn’t exist? Masaaki didn’t think so. There was comfort in that.
Across the room, the curtains rippled, bubbles of sunlight spitting their bright coins. It was a cool afternoon, the breeze busily shifting its cargo of sounds and smells—the tinkle of a bicycle, the burnt tang of yakitori gristle—before collapsing in the gathered shade like a sulky smoker. Seiji adjusted his pillow and interlaced his hands. “Months ago, you gave me a book by a famous Argentinian writer. In it, there’s a story about a Chinese spy, working for the German Reich, who must convey the location of a British artillery park before an Irish captain, working for the English police, silences him. The story opens just after the spy discovers the artillery park, and in the gathering shadow of the approaching Irish captain, the spy finds himself paralyzed by the problem of how to relay the information to Germany. I assume you know the story.”
Masaaki not only knew the story but remembered the trouble through which he’d gone to purchase the Japanese translation of the book he’d read in English, itself a translation of the original written in Spanish. In his former life as an academic living in the United States he’d found the book, and especially this story, provocative, with its themes of duty and dislocation, war and empire, loyalty and betrayal, and the unavoidable perversions that twist the actions of the subjugated who are pitted against each other in self-abnegating violence. He’d been curious what Seiji might think. When the book went unmentioned for weeks, Masaaki had presumed it forgotten. Now Seiji was bringing up the very story he’d hoped to discuss, but his tone was bladed. “You mean ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ ” Masaaki said. His own voice, thin and cobwebbed, floated in the dimness and vanished in the shimmer between the curtains.
Seiji nodded, his hands a rock in the still pool of his futon. “To reach Germany, to be heard above the din of war, our spy knows his message must transmit as precisely as a gunshot. He decides to murder a man whose last name is identical to the name of the town where the artillery park is located; his own name, coupled with his victim’s, in a news article would unequivocally reach the German chief. But first, he, a conspicuous Chinese man, must reach his victim, who lives a train ride away in the English countryside.” He paused, sipped his water, then continued.
“Luck favors our spy, and by a hair-raising margin he eludes the Irish captain. And following a set of cryptic but oddly familiar directions given to him by some children milling about the station—take a left at every crossroads—he arrives at his victim’s house: an oddly familiar pavilion spellbound with Chinese music. There, he meets his victim: a tall, elderly Englishman who greets him in Chinese. Their meeting is sublime. While the two men have never met, their roots turn out to be entwined: once a missionary stationed in China, the Englishman is an aspiring sinologist intimately familiar with the works of the spy’s great-grandfather, an illustrious Chinese man of letters with a passion for mazes, especially the garden mazes for which he’d been renowned. Sitting together in the cloister of the sinologist’s pavilion, discussing the great man’s work, the two men discover they’re kindred. Yet the decision to kill hangs over the spy like the noose that awaits him, unavoidably, in his future.”
Masaaki leaned back, the cool wall reassuringly uncomfortable. The summary was faithful, but he could feel the edges of a new story moving beneath the skin of the familiar narrative, and he dreaded what would emerge. “You make it sound like the story is about limited choices,” Masaaki said. “As though, from the beginning, our spy, arriving at the sinologist’s door, has one choice: whether or not to carry out his murderous intent. It’s as though you’re saying our antihero is trapped, confined to his assigned parameters.”
Seiji tilted his head. “Antihero? I like that.” Behind him, the curtains flapped shut, and his face disappeared into darkness. “What we need to remember is that what binds our spy and his victim is an unreadable novel about the nature of time written by the spy’s illustrious great-grandfather. The reader is never told why the sinologist devoted himself to this novel, a literary disaster by most counts, but it had captivated him, just as it had captivated generations of the spy’s family who wanted it destroyed. It’s this novel that initially stays the spy, who decides to spend his last hour before the arrival of the Irish captain listening to the sinologist’s exegesis.”
Masaaki uncurled his legs, feeling his blood rejoice. The novel was indeed the story’s central mystery. Begun under perplexing circumstances, with the spy’s great-grandfather renouncing his worldly position before retreating into a pavilion to write an infinite novel about time and create an infinite garden of forking paths, the project was terminated a decade later under circumstances equally perplexing: the great-grandfather’s inauspicious death at the hands of a stranger. Chillingly, when the family entered the pavilion, all they found were piles of contradictory drafts and nothing, not even a sketch, of the garden maze. To the spy’s surprise, the sinologist claims to have cracked the mystery.
“The novel, as we said, is unreadable,” Seiji continued. “Characters die in one chapter only to reappear perfectly alive in another. In this novel, time, as our sinologist explains, doesn’t progress; it doesn’t flow linearly in one absolute direction; a decision at a fork in a plot doesn’t ‘logically’ eliminate all other paths not taken. Instead, all paths fork off and continue on, each invisible to the others but existing concurrently, each forking again and again at every crossroad, diverging, converging, crisscrossing, or simply running parallel across a vast, endless labyrinth of time. In some of these times, our spy might exist but not the sinologist; at other times, neither exists; in the times in which they both exist, sometimes they’re friends, other times they barely cross paths; in yet other times they miss each other completely. Then there are times in which they meet as enemies. In the story we’re discussing, the spy and the sinologist are strangers; war brings them together, exposing their roots tangled by the same history that left them exiles: the spy, a dislocated Chinese man working for the German Reich, finds himself a fugitive in imperial England, the empire he has come to sabotage, while the sinologist, technically at home in England, is equally dislocated, living in isolation in a pavilion uncannily reminiscent of the spy’s great-grandfather’s pavilion in China, where he’d retreated to write his infinite novel. Their meeting benefits them both: the sinologist
offers the spy a chance to reconnect with his culture, language, roots, while the spy offers the sinologist the opportunity to present his theory and prove himself an expert, an intellectual heir—a familiar—of the great Chinese man he so admires and identifies with. All futures are possible at all junctures, but despite their sympathies and mutual gratitude, the spy shoots his kindred victim.”
Masaaki uncrossed his legs again. He appreciated Seiji’s attention to the subtext of imperial history he himself found integral to the story, but the implied fatalism troubled him. Why was Seiji insisting on it? He didn’t like the parallel Seiji seemed to be drawing. He rubbed his knees, ashamed of his discomfort in front of the sick man. “Again, I have to question your view of our characters’ choices,” Masaaki said. “It’s true, the spectrum of our options isn’t always perceptible, and clarity is a luxury for this spy trapped in enemy territory, but does it mean he has no choice? The reader is told he has one bullet in his gun. Could a Chinese spy working for the German Reich, to whom he has his worth—the value of the Chinese race—to prove, choose not to fulfill his mission? The pressure is extreme. But the spy is a rational man.”
Seiji loosened the collar of his sweatshirt. On the wall, just to the side of his head, there was a small rectangle, a tattered snapshot tacked up by a pin. In this light, the image was murky, but Masaaki was sure it was the family portrait taken on Seiji’s first day of school. Months ago, when Masaaki had brought it for him, Seiji had been quick to put it away, and Masaaki had feared he’d upset him; now he was relieved to see the photograph displayed. In the window, the curtains were still, the thin press of light like an incandescent thumb.
“You’re right,” Seiji agreed. “Our spy has one bullet, and, logically, he has three possible targets: the sinologist; the Irish captain; himself. A learned man himself, the spy chooses to spend his last hour discussing his great-grandfather’s novel with the sinologist he intends to kill. That he, immersed in a conversation about time and its innumerable forks, remains blind to his own forking options is curious. The Irish captain arrives; the spy has seconds to use his bullet. How differently things could’ve turned out. With a shift of his hand, he might’ve spared the sinologist; Germany might’ve never bombed the artillery park; history might’ve forked differently; and a different future than one of perpetual remorse might’ve been available to the spy. But remember: while all futures are possible, it’s time, embodied by the Irish captain, that our spy feels he can’t escape. Trapped in its stream, racing his impending capture, our spy arrives at the sinologist’s door. Their paths cross, and so do the strands of their entwined past. In that past, the spy’s great-grandfather was murdered by a stranger; in the present, the spy and the sinologist are also strangers.”
The words hung portentiously. “You’re not saying there’s a correlation. That the one murder is related to the other?”
Seiji unlaced his hands. “Why not? Maybe there are patterns we can’t escape.”
“It’s one thing to say history narrows our choices, but it’s another to say there are scenarios that repeat over generations, that we’re scripted to repeat.”
“What makes you so sure there aren’t? Like our spy who misses the story he’s being told, maybe you’re not positioned to know the script we’re enacting.”
In the window, the curtains puffed and, with a thwack, sucked outward; the men startled. Caught in the mouth of the half-lowered window, the curtains strained, a concave sail. Masaaki drew his knees into his arms, passing a hand across his forehead. On and off, he’d been experiencing a dot of pain halfway between his sternum and spine; now his body was coated with a clammy film. In the window, the curtains loosened; their corners flipped; ribbons of light blew back in.
“You’re not serious,” Masaaki said, rubbing the afterimage of the pain. “To say our lives are scripted is like saying we live in a play, that our choices are futile, that the roles we fancy we play in life and in the world are just that: a fantasy. I thought you believed in self-conscious action, the importance of exercising our agency.”
“You shouldn’t assume I’m aligned with the story,” Seiji said. “We’re talking about a piece of fiction.”
Masaaki felt the jab. “You’re right. What I should’ve said is that even if the spy missed the story, he could’ve honored his roots, shifted his loyalties, at least respected his sympathies. I can’t accept that that wouldn’t have changed the outcome. All futures are possible; we happen to be reading the version that forked this way. As for repeating patterns, the spy’s great-grandfather was murdered by a stranger. Here, it’s the great-grandson who murders the sinologist, a stranger.”
Seiji slid his hands over his cup. “All futures are possible. The future in which our spy doesn’t kill the sinologist also exists. But if all futures exist, every future is predetermined. I’m saying that in our version, there was no other way the path could’ve forked. By the time our spy shoots our sinologist, his choices have narrowed to one.” He paused. “Do you remember what prompted you to give me this story?”
Masaaki recalled traipsing all over town, leaving one bookstore for another in search of the book, but the context was gone. He admitted it, uneasily.
Seiji nodded. “I know you read the story many times; I read it many times too, and each time I’ve been plagued with the feeling that I missed something. Like time, words marshaled into a narrative are relentless; they drive on, talking over gaps, bridging contradictions, eloquently covering everything up. But once in a while a moment opens in the narrative, and we can seize our thoughts. Like you, I believe we have options, but only if we know where to look. You remember how the sinologist connects the unreadable novel to the lost garden of forking paths, right?”
Masaaki remembered the detail, crucial to the story. Through the rigorous assertion of reason, the sinologist deduces that, far from being a work of an eccentric or an infirm mind, the novel is itself a maze mirroring the labyrinthine nature of time. “Our sinologist concludes that the Garden of Forking Paths was never a physical structure,” he said. “It was always only a symbolic one, forking across the pages of a novel. The garden and the novel are one and the same.”
Seiji didn’t move. In the window, the curtains flapped, offering flashes of illumination, but he alone occupied the position benefitting from its trajectory. “I’ve been laid up many times, but it always takes getting used to,” he said, finally. “Time lures you places you wouldn’t have gone otherwise. The last few days, I’ve been drawn less to the story’s central parable about forking paths than to its peripheral details. For example, after our spy’s great-grandfather renounces his worldly position, he retreats to what he calls the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude to construct his labyrinthine novel. When he dies, his family discovers that he entrusted his literary estate to a—and I quote—‘Taoist or Buddhist monk,’ and thereafter every descendant of the great-grandfather has cursed the monk for faithfully ensuring the publication of the questionable novel. Tell me something.” He leaned out of the shadow. “Do you believe in curses?”
Masaaki felt his heart turn. “I suppose I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Because there’s something I’m trying to figure out. As you said, in the present, it’s the spy who murders the sinologist, while in the past it’s the great-grandfather who is murdered by a stranger. At first, the inverted symmetry appears to reject any correlation. But what if, in the Great Labyrinth, we cross paths not only at various times but also in various forms? Details click into place. Just as the great-grandfather lived in seclusion in a pavilion amid a garden maze, the sinologist also lives alone in a pavilion reached by turning left at every fork. Just as the great man’s library must have been filled with all manner of textual and other treasures, the sinologist’s library is filled with exquisite artifacts and tomes from West to East, including silk-bound volumes edited by a Chinese emperor that the spy instantly recognizes b
ut knows were never printed. So, who is our sinologist? He’s elderly, tall, with a Westerner’s gray eyes. He’s the definition of a stranger in the context of China.”
“Are you suggesting he killed the great-grandfather? That he’s some sort of an imposter?”
Seiji opened his palms. “We know the sinologist is elderly, but is he old enough to have crossed paths with the great-grandfather? The story offers no clue, nothing about a theft of irreplaceable tomes alongside the murder. What it offers are other clues. For example, the references to ‘Taoism or Buddhism.’ Then the description of our sinologist as looking ‘immortal.’ We also can’t forget the replicated pavilions. Maybe we’re being asked to consider the possibility that the sinologist, in another time, in another form, maybe in the form of an illustrious Chinese man of letters, was murdered by a stranger who’d one day visit him in the form of a Chinese spy.”
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