Michael Hoffman

The Boys' Farm Part I

from The Coat that Covers Him & Other Stories

 

I

When Keiko Noguchi became pregnant three years after little Susumu's murder, her husband Ryunosuke had an idea which he wondered whether to broach, and, if so, how. The idea was to name the baby, if it was a boy, Susumu. True, they had talked in a general way about this second child being a kind of substitute for the one who had been so tragically lost, but actually giving him the same name - was it wise? How would Keiko respond? Perhaps it is a measure of how little Ryunosuke knew his wife, in spite of all their years together and all they had been through, that he simply had no idea; of all the possible responses that played themselves out in his imagination, from violent revulsion to joyful assent, he could dismiss none as foreign to her nature.

Dr. Arai, the therapist, did not actually say so - he never "actually" said anything - but the trace of a frown he permitted himself suggested he thought it a bad idea. Noguchi had phoned him from his office and they met for lunch at the Imperial Hotel. A kind of sympathy had grown up between the two men over the years, and they occasionally met like this, not as counselor and patient but as friends, over lunch or drinks.

"It's taken you both so long to put your lives back together again," he said in his slow, thoughtful, slightly abstracted manner.

Noguchi nodded. An elaboration might have seemed in order, but that was not the doctor's way. In the early days of their association Noguchi's impatience had sometimes got the better of him." Well?" he would prod with ill-concealed snappishness, "what follows from that? What is your opinion? We are here, after all, to hear your professional opinion, aren't we?" But the doctor would regard him imperturbably through sad, slightly watery eyes, as if this very impatience were a symptom of the tragedy he had suffered, pardonable on those grounds but - also on those grounds - not to be indulged. The doctor refused to be hurried. He refused to say more than he felt necessary. As time passed, Noguchi learned to appreciate this quality of Arai's. He noticed the soothing effect it had on Keiko. "Well," he said to himself, "I suppose there are no easy answers. He, being older, understands that. I guess I have some growing up to do."

Noguchi had been known in his milieu as a rising star. His milieu was banking. He had entered it when bankers were the superstars of corporate Japan, and now that the banks had fallen on hard times and were being blamed for the under-performing economy, prominent people had their eyes on him as one of the brilliant young visionaries who could, if anyone could, shake things up and get things moving again.

Then had come the murder of little Susumu. The three of them had gone to the Mitsukoshi Department Store. It was a Sunday afternoon in late winter. They were in the basement buying a French bread, and suddenly Susumu was not there. He had been holding his father's hand - when had he released it? Ryunosuke had never been able to fully reconstruct the scene in his mind. He could see the milling crowds, hear the incessant shouts of the vendors, feel the stuffiness of the overheated air, and recall how eager he was, to the point almost of desperation, to get out of that place, and then suddenly, while Keiko was at the cash paying for the loaf, he became aware that Susumu's hand was not in his. Where had he gone? He was not alarmed, only annoyed - the child was forever straying somewhere; now, hot and tired, they would have to push their way through the crushing throng looking for him, and who knew how long it would take to find him? He had a strange sensation, as of walls closing in on him. "Su-chan's wandered off," he grumbled when Keiko rejoined him with the bread. She too was calm; it had happened often enough before. "You stay here," she said, "in case he comes back. I'll see if I can find him." "No, you stay, I'll go." "Better let me go. Remember that time - " They smiled, recalling how Ryunosuke had once actually failed to recognize the boy in the funny hat he had on.

She was gone a long time. Ryunosuke glanced at his watch; it was after five already; he was expecting an important phone call at six; if they didn't hurry he would miss it. What could be keeping them? Keiko returned, her face white. "Don't panic," said Ryunosuke, in a voice he hoped did not reflect his own rising panic. They went to the information desk and had an announcement made. Then the police were called. Next morning the child's body was found, battered and mutilated, in a dark corner of a parking garage a block from the department store. A week later the culprit was arrested on his way to school. He was a twelve-year-old boy.

***

One of the bank's clients was a publisher, and one evening over drinks he hinted that if Noguchi were to write a book about his experiences his firm would be happy to publish it. The remark, gauche and tactless, was attributable no doubt to tipsy exuberance and had no consequence beyond causing Noguchi to reflect that even if he wanted to, he would never be able to write such a book. How had they survived those three years between Susumu's death and Keiko's discovery that she was pregnant? How had they gone on living? It was not their failure to commit suicide that perplexed him, but the fact that a deliberate act of suicide was necessary, that their lives hadn't simply come to a natural end without their throats having to be cut, or their brains blown out, or their blood poisoned. Pain, at least for him, was the least of it. It was the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. Little four-year-old Susumu, so excited about starting nursery school in April, dead at the hands of a twelve-year-old sexual deviant! For such the murderer turned out to be. Prey to homosexual impulses he himself did not understand, he had molested several small boys before luring Susumu away and torturing him to death in the parking garage. Too young to be tried as a criminal, he was sent by a Family Court judge to an institution of some kind, where he was treated and released after a year and a half, supposedly rehabilitated. He was given a new face and a new identity. Where he and his family were now no one knew. Noguchi imagined him in twenty years' time, a prosperous businessman applying to the bank for a loan and he, Noguchi, not of course knowing who he was, approving the application.

Somehow they had pulled through, testimony to their deep love for one another and to Dr. Arai's skills as a therapist - though bumbling rather than skilful would have been the natural assessment of anyone sizing him up without the benefit of long acquaintance. Noguchi's meteoric rise was stalled, he simply no longer had the drive and ambition to maintain his old pace, but even at half strength he was an asset, and his superiors hoped that, given time, he would yet justify their hopes in him. Keiko, on the other hand, positively threw herself into her work. A marketing consultant before Susumu's birth, she returned to her old firm and resumed her interrupted career. It was possible - not always of course, but a good part of the time - to associate with the Noguchis, either together or separately, and completely forget that they were the victims of one of the most grotesque crimes ever committed in Japan.

***

"Let's name him Susumu."

Keiko had come home from an ultra-sound test with the news that the baby was a boy, and Ryunosuke, his excitement getting the better of him, blurted out his proposal in spite of his resolve, following his conference with Dr. Arai, to proceed slowly and cautiously if at all. His breath caught in his throat. "What have I done? I've ruined everything!" But it was not so. Keiko gasped with joy, threw her arms around him, and said she had been thinking the same thing but had hesitated to mention it, fearing he would think her mad - or worse.

Ryunosuke smiled. "What's worse than mad?"

"Oh, I don't know. Insane. Perverse."

"Is it perverse, do you think?"

"It is, a little."

"Why?"

"Well..."

"Here's the way I look at it. We know nothing, nothing, about what happens to us after death, right? I mean... think about it for a minute: after thousands of years of philosophy and hundreds of years of science we're as much in the dark about that as the first humans out of the trees - or as some of the people I deal with who don't know philosophy from sumo wrestling or Newton from... from who? From George Washington. So. Supposing I say, 'We're bringing Susumu back to life.' Who can contradict me?"

"That's the way I feel about it."

"The mere fact that the same idea came to us separately is significant, don't you think? If we were mad, it's not likely we'd be mad in the same way."

"What then? The higher powers are sending us hints?"

"Supposing I say yes?"

"Who could contradict you?"

"Exactly. I don't know about higher powers... Look. There are certain subjects that, whatever you say about them, you can't help sounding foolish. Human language evolved to deal with sensory experience. We can maybe stretch it a bit beyond that - God, gods, angels, devils, ancestral spirits, what have you. But there are spheres that language simply can't reach."

"What a mystic you've become."

"Have I? I don't know... It's true, though, that having been through what we've been through, you can't help thinking about things in new ways."

"Ryunosuke Noguchi, mystic banker."

"So we're agreed, then, that the baby is Susumu."

"We're agreed."

"What will your mother say?"

"I can't imagine."

***

There was a guilty secret in Noguchi's life. Her name was Michiyo. She was one of the bank's "office ladies" or OLs, as the female clerks were called - a girl in her early twenties with dyed reddish hair and a face altered by plastic surgery to look as if it had sprung from the pages of a teen fashion magazine. Sometimes Noguchi looked at her and saw a cartoon character rather than a human being. How had a man like him, a man of his stature, with a brilliant and beautiful wife besides, got mixed up with a girl like Michiyo? It had started a year after Susumu's murder, when the strain of Keiko's seemingly incurable revulsion to sex was growing intolerable. He understood, of course; he did not blame her; he even looked with disgust upon his own undiminished drives, thinking them rather brutish under the circumstances, but self-reproach did not weaken them, and Michiyo's stupid but oddly irresistible flirtatiousness made it inevitable that sooner or later he would succumb. Having done so, he hated her and himself, and resolved to have nothing further to do with her - a resolution that did not last the week. If with the passage of time she came to regard herself as his mistress, Noguchi could only admit that she had every right to. Still, he made up his mind at last to have done with her once and for all.

A slight hardening of her expression about the corners of her lipsticked mouth persuaded him, as he launched awkwardly into his explanation, that the matter would not be so simple. She was a child only when she wanted to be. Otherwise, she knew how to take care of herself. For all her virginal airs, she had probably been around a good deal. Girls nowadays were experienced far beyond their years. Noguchi had heard of children as young as twelve selling themselves on the street to passing strangers. He himself had been propositioned once or twice. It was done without shame and without the pinch of necessity - unless an apparently universal and overpowering craving for expensive brand name clothing and accessories could be called necessity. As to what Michiyo had been through in that regard Noguchi neither knew nor cared; in any case, here she was confronting him, and though she had not yet spoken a word her expression said plainly enough that she did not intend to be cast aside at his convenience. He broke off. What a fool he had been, what an incredible fool. One word from her to the bank vice-president and his career was ruined; one word to Keiko and his marriage was finished. Supposing I kill her, he thought. He would not have to dirty his own hands with the job. In his profession - in the upper reaches of most professions - one came into contact with all kinds of people, and for less money than it would take to buy her silence (assuming, once paid off, she would keep her end of the bargain, a doubtful assumption at best) he could arrange for her to meet with an accident that would never be traced to him.

"What a coward I am," he thought on the train home. Killing aside, there was only one way out: a full confession to his wife and boss. Of his boss' support he could be fairly confident. Men tend to sympathize with one another in situations like that, even apart from the extenuating circumstances of his son's horrible murder and his highly valued abilities. But what of Keiko? How would she react? Once again, he found himself utterly stymied with regard to the woman who had shared his life for nine years of marriage and four before that of more or less living together. If there was anyone on earth he could claim to know, Keiko was surely that person, and yet... What would she say? What would she do? How would she feel? She might forgive him altogether; she might flounce out of the house and never be seen again; she might say she forgave him but harbor malice in her heart, which may - or then again may not - erupt in the future; she might fling herself at him and claw his eyes out. Was it a failure of his own perceptions that was to blame for his uncertainty, or was Keiko really unfathomable to that degree?

He arrived to find her packing and felt a momentary clutch of alarm, as though his thoughts had somehow communicated themselves to her and she had made up her mind. But no - she was off to Fukuoka on business, she cheerfully informed him; she would leave first thing in the morning and be gone three days. Did she have a lover? How odd. The thought had never occurred to him before, had never so much as crossed his mind. And yet, wasn't it more likely than not, an attractive woman like her? She traveled, met people... Well, well. So here was one more thing he didn't know about her.

"What's on your mind?" she asked, giving him a playful peck on the cheek. "Go have a bath and we'll have dinner. I bought a bottle of wine. It's chilling in the fridge even as we speak."

"Even as we speak, eh? What's the occasion?" he said, forcing himself to fall in with her light-hearted tone.

"The occasion is I want to get drunk. I'm tired of sobriety. I want to float in defiance of the law of gravity."

"Don't they arrest people for that?"

"A good lawyer will get me off."

"You shouldn't drink much, in your condition."

"Just one glass. You'll drink the rest, and I'll get drunk watching you."

He emerged from the bath to find her in tears. "I had a dream last night," she said through sobs. "Susumu came to me and he said, 'Mummy, when I come back will you still love me?' And I said... I said... 'My darling, I will love you more than ever' - but..." She raised a contorted, tear-stained face to him - "I don't think he heard me."

***

II

Susumu was a strange child. Almost from his birth Keiko detected, or thought she did, a certain withdrawn quality about him. She said nothing to Ryunosuke, and, seeing his total unconcern, tried to convince herself it was her imagination, but her fears grew, as the child reached his first birthday without having articulated his first word, that he was autistic, or had Down's syndrome. In her anguish she began to suspect that the morbid circumstances surrounding his birth were coming back to haunt them, that there was more to the first Susumu's murder than the cruel act of a deranged boy, that some sort of curse had been laid on the family. These were horrible thoughts to bear alone, but what was the point of confiding in Ryunosuke? He evidently saw nothing, and perhaps after all there was nothing to see.

Dr. Tamazawa, the gruff but kindly pediatrician at the Nerima Children's Hospital, heard her out in surprise. Absurd, he said, absurd - in that paternally indignant way he had. There was nothing, nothing wrong with the child. On the contrary, the boy was if anything above rather than below average in intelligence. "Down's syndrome? Autism? Nonsense! Just what craziness are we talking ourselves into here? Believe me..." He was so persuasive that Keiko came away reassured.

In his fifteenth month, Susumu suddenly began making up for lost time. How had it happened? Had Keiko missed something? Had her attention been elsewhere? One day, it seemed to her, the boy had no language at all, and the next day he was talking as coherently as a child twice his age. Ryunosuke smiled at her excitement - but really, he said, wasn't she exaggerating? Of course he was a very clever little fellow; what child of theirs could fail to be? Still... His face grew grave as, with a certain uneasiness, he made up his mind to bring up a matter that had been on his mind for some time. "Do you know, Keiko, I think you're a little... hm... a little too wrapped up in the child - wait, hear me out," he said, seeing her about to flare up. "It's not just me; Arai said the same thing - "

"You've been seeing Arai? Talking to Arai about me? Behind my back?"

"Behind your back! You know very well I see Arai every now and then."

"What did he say, exactly?"

Ryunosuke laughed. "When does Arai ever say anything exactly? He hinted, in response to a direct question from me, that it might not be a bad idea if you went back to work."

"I see. I need a distraction, a diversion. 'Too wrapped up in the child,' you say. What do you and Arai think, that I should be like you, hardly aware of his existence?"

"Keiko! That's unfair!"

He was genuinely stung, but she was too roused to give ground. "When is the last time you sat down and played with him? When is the last time you read him a story?"

"Well... the last time... I don't know when the last time was... All right, I admit, I've been busy, maybe not as attentive as I should be, but you..."

"Well? What about me?"

"I don't know, your whole life seems to revolve around him; it's almost... unhealthy."

"I see. And Dr. Arai agrees."

"Dr. Arai - "

"Maybe you're right. Maybe it's time we let the kid fend for himself. He's a year and a half old, after all. Maybe we should just - "

"Keiko, please, please. Nobody said anything about letting him fend for himself. There are daycare centers - excellent ones. And maybe it really is better for a kid to be a little less... you know... fawned on."

***

Nothing changed as a result of that conversation. Keiko made no move to go back to work, and Ryunosuke did not mention the subject again. He continued to fear, however, that the child was growing up spoilt. It was not only Keiko who "fawned" on him. Her mother, Susumu's grandmother, was as bad, if not worse. She loved the boy dearly, extravagantly; she indulged his every whim. Even more than Keiko, she seemed to see the child as his brother resurrected. Mingled with her love was a kind of awed reverence.

Ryunosuke saw the severity he increasingly applied as a necessary corrective. "A child must have some discipline, after all!" That was all very well, but - was it Keiko's imagination? - there seemed as time passed to be a hint of cruelty, almost of sadism, in his "discipline." Not physical cruelty - she had searched the boy's body for evidence of it and found none (but wasn't the fact she felt impelled to search suggestive in itself?) "If you don't behave I'll send you to the Boys' Farm," he would say, not raising his voice but in a tone that left no doubt the Boys' Farm was a place where they knew how to deal with misbehaving children. Susumu never, to Keiko's knowledge, asked what this Boys' Farm was. The mere words cowed him into whimpering submission. Once, when this submission was a little slow in coming, Ryunosuke strode to the telephone and snatched the receiver, muttering, "That does it, I'm calling the Boys' Farm!" Susumu shrieked, sobbed, swore he'd be good. "Don't!" said Keiko, wresting the receiver from Ryunoske, who made a show of surrendering it grudgingly.

There was something else: Ryunosuke's growing coldness towards her. His philandering, of course, was nothing new, it went back years. The first affair she found out about occurred before their marriage, while they were living together in his two-room apartment with the understanding that they would get married "as soon as they got around to it." He broke down in tears when she confronted him and swore it would never happen again. Actually he exaggerated her distress. He was a handsome, vigorous, outgoing man, in a position to meet pretty women; she did not expect "monkish devotion" from him (she put it this way to herself, not to him), and was prepared to be tolerant, the more so as she, if the truth be known, had had one or two little flings of her own.

But those were mere incidents, passing infidelities on his side and on hers, occurring as the opportunity arose and forgotten soon after. Their devotion to each other was too firm to be shaken by them. Or so it had seemed. But Ryunosuke had changed. He seemed bored, restless in her company. He was preoccupied, his thoughts were elsewhere. Had he fallen seriously in love with someone? Under the influence of doubts such as these, she had taken a good look at herself in the mirror, and sure enough, she was aging. Soon she would be forty. He too, of course, but he could still pass for twenty-five. Strange, how little their shared tragedy had marked him.

Susumu at this time was three. One Saturday afternoon, two days before the seventh anniversary of the first Susumu's murder, Keiko went shopping and came home with a memorial candle, the kind that burns for a full day. It was a prelude to a serious talk she meant to have with Ryunosuke. If worse came to worst, she would take the child and leave. She had mentally prepared herself for that outcome. It would be up to him to convince her to stay, if he felt so inclined.

"Where's Susumu?"

"At my mother's. Ryu, listen to me - "

"I quit my job." He was not looking at her.

"You.... what?" She was stunned.

"I don't want to be a banker any more. You go back to work. It's your turn. I'll stay home and take care of Susumu."

***

III

She could have put her foot down, but the ground beneath her seemed to have vanished; in quitting his job and serving out his notice before speaking to her he had effectively burned his boats.

"Have you spoken to Arai about this?"

"Yes."

"And he agrees?"

"Well, you know Arai... Why not speak to him yourself?"

She would, she thought - but there was someone else she wanted to speak to first. Seizing an opportunity when Ryunosuke was out, she said pointblank to Susumu, "From now on daddy's going to stay home and take care of you, while mummy goes out to work." Her eyes were fixed intently on the boy's face, so that not the faintest flicker of emotion would have escaped her. But no, there was nothing. No panic, no fear, not a shadow of unhappiness. He received the news with perfect calm. Well, so he wasn't afraid of his father after all; the supposed violence Ryunosuke inflicted on the boy, psychological if not physical, existed only in her own overheated imagination. So it was she who was crazy, not he. Maybe Ryunosuke had been right all along. She was a talented businesswoman, her considerable abilities were going to seed, her housebound condition had warped her judgment.

"Okay," she said to Ryunosuke a few days later, foregoing a consultation with Arai. "Let's go ahead and see what happens."

Time passed, and her misgivings faded. Ryunosuke proved himself an excellent father. "I'm a father, not a banker," he had said, meaning to reassure her that he knew his own mind. He certainly looked like a man who did, but did that prove anything? As thought madmen didn't behave sanely in pursuit of their insane ends!

***

One day when Susumu was nine years old Ryunosuke received a phone call from the boy's fourth-grade teacher. Would it be convenient for him to drop by the school for a little chat? Certainly, said Ryunosuke - was something wrong? No, said the teacher, not wrong exactly... "I'll be right over." It was four o'clock. Susumu was in his room doing his homework. "Su-chan!"

"What?"

Ryunosuke ran up the stairs to Susumu's room and opened the door. Susumu, seated at his desk, turned in his chair to face his father standing in the doorway. "Listen. I have to go out for a bit. Will you be okay?"

"Sure."

"Okay. I'll be back in an hour."

"Are you going to see Mr. Obara?"

Ryunosuke's surprise showed before he could repress it. "Yes, as a matter of fact. How did you know?"

"I deduced it." It was an expression he had picked up from Sherlock Holmes.

"Has there been any trouble at school?"

"No."

"Well then why..." He broke off. He would find out from the teacher soon enough. "Be a good boy. There are cookies in the pantry if you're hungry. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Is mummy coming home for supper tonight?"

"I think so. If not she'll call."

The school was a ten-minute walk from the house. It was late June, supposedly the height of the rainy season, and yet the sun shone bright in a cloudless sky. How strange the weather was lately, Ryunosuke thought - strange enough at least to baffle the weather forecasters, who seemed not to know what to make of it. It mocked them, raining when they predicted sunshine, shining when they predicted rain. The matter preoccupied him unduly, to the point that the weather report, dismissed in his banking days as unworthy even of cursory attention, was the first thing he turned to as he unfolded the morning newspaper. It was not that he cared one way or the other how the weather turned out, but surely all those PhD meteorologists, analyzing all that data from all those weather satellites, should be achieving rather better results, instead of demonstrably worse ones, than anyone would achieve by simply flipping a coin. Were the scientists incompetent, was the equipment defective? Or had nature entered a new phase, leaving science behind?

Ryunosuke and Mr. Obara, Susumu's teacher, had met once before. One day each May, about a month after the start of the school year, the school invited parents to drop by and watch a lesson in progress. Those attending were almost all mothers, and so Ryunosuke naturally stood out. Mr. Obara was not a young man - his egg-bald head and rotund figure made it impossible to mistake him for one - but he was new to the school, and the parents observed him with the closeness normally reserved for a novice. Ryunosuke, for his part, was singularly impressed with the man's teaching abilities. His somewhat comical appearance not such as to command respect, he all the same, without theatricality, with no apparent effort, engaged the children's attention to such effect that they seemed altogether to forget the parents' presence. The class was social studies, and Mr. Obara began by explaining that, with fewer and fewer children being born and people living to be older and older, soon one Japanese in four would be over sixty-five. A girl's hand shot up. Why, she inquired, were fewer children being born? A good question, said Mr. Obara. Did anyone have any ideas? Ryunosuke tried to suppress a smile as he imagined some squeaky-voiced smartass piping up, "Because people are screwing less." But no, there was nothing like that, and somewhat to his surprise the children seemed aware of the issue and had some notion of the underlying causes: people were marrying late, many women were choosing careers over motherhood, daycare centers were in short supply, and so on. It was a refreshing change from other lessons Ryunosuke had witnessed, where the teacher droned on and the children listened in bored silence.

One thing disturbed him: Susumu took no part in the discussion. He seemed attentive and interested, but he volunteered not a word. This was all the more strange in that this particular topic had come up for discussion at home, and Susumu was at least as knowledgeable about it as anyone else. After the lesson Ryunosuke had introduced himself to Mr. Obara, and mentioned his surprise at Susumu's silence.

"He's a quiet child," said Obara. "Very bright, but very quiet."

"How do you know he's bright then?"

"His writing, his drawing."

"Is his quietness anything to worry about, do you think?"

"Well, let's just watch it before we start worrying about it."

Ryunosuke began to explain something of the family history, but Obara raised a hand to indicate no explanation was necessary. "I know," he said. "I was told. I'm very sorry. While we're on the subject - how much does Susumu know?"

"Nothing."

"I see. Of course he's very young."

"We've been talking about whether we should tell him, and if so how."

"It's very difficult, of course. Still, it might be best if he heard about it from you first."

"'First' meaning...?"

"'Rumor is a pipe blown by surmises, jealousies and conjectures,' as Shakespeare said."

"I see."

Thus had their first interview ended - inconclusively, but on a note of mutual understanding.

"It's good of you to come on such short notice," said Mr. Obara, greeting his visitor with a bow at the classroom door. "It's such a beautiful day for the time of year."

"Have you noticed," Ryunosuke said, "how totally, totally off the weather forecast has been lately?" He felt himself blush. He was here, after all, not to pass the time of day but to discuss some trouble his child was in - possibly serious trouble; serious enough at any rate to warrant a summons. "I was just thinking about it on my way over," he murmured as though by way of apology. But Obara apparently saw nothing inappropriate in Ryunosuke's observation. "I have noticed," he said. "It's quite amazing. As a matter of fact I've been thinking of introducing the topic as a class project - having the kids chart the weather, compare it to the forecasts. And then maybe we can take our results to the weather office and see what they have to say for themselves."

"An excellent idea."

"Please, sit down." Closing the classroom door, Obara waved his guest into a hard green leather armchair that had evidently been brought in and placed across from the teacher's desk specially for the occasion. The late afternoon sunshine pouring in through the windows made the classroom almost unnaturally bright.

"Shall I close the blinds?" said Obara, seeing Ryunosuke squint.

"No, really..."

"Are you sure? Well... here," he said, squeezing his stout frame into his somewhat confining chair, "let me show you something." He bent to open a desk drawer, which momentarily caught on something and required a sharp tug, and withdrew a paper, which he handed to Ryunosuke. It was a drawing, a child's drawing, in crayon, an arc-shaped object in various shades of black. Ryunosuke examined it in puzzled silence.

"Is it Su-chan's?"

"Yes."

"Hm."

"It's very striking, don't you think? Children so young are generally not drawn to black. Older children, yes... thirteen, fourteen. But in a nine-year-old it's unusual. I asked him what it was. Do you know what he answered?"

"No, what did he answer?"

"'Black rainbow.'"

"Black rainbow."

"You know, of course, the artist Teitaro Ichikawa."

"The artist... no, I'm sorry..."

"No? Well, take my word for it, he's a name to reckon with in the art world. He also happens to be my cousin." An impish grin flitted across the teacher's ugly thick lips, followed by a self-deprecating shrug. "I showed him your son's picture. He was astonished."

"You don't say," murmured Ryunosuke.

"Astonished. He couldn't believe it had been done by a nine-year-old. He actually used a word I had never ever heard him utter before, except with reference to himself: 'Genius.'"

"Genius!" Ryunosuke exclaimed.

"Genius."

Ryunosuke examined the picture again. Obara leaned back in his chair, as though to give Ryunosuke all the space he needed for quiet contemplation. The silence lasted some time. It was broken by a slightly foolish laugh from Ryunosuke. "I'm sorry, I... I don't know what to say. You say genius, and yet... I'm no judge, of course..." To him it looked like something anybody could have drawn - even himself, and though he was not by any means lacking in self-respect, he would never dare claim artistic talent for himself. Keiko, perhaps, was another story.

"Well, I thought I should mention it to you, in case you wanted to... you know, cultivate his talent."

"Cultivate... yes," he said. "Yes, certainly, talent should be cultivated..." He stood up. "May I take this home with me? To show my wife?"

"Certainly." The teacher too rose to his feet. "Mr. Noguchi, there is one other matter." He paused. Perhaps it was a trick of his profession - he never spoke more than a few words, Ryunosuke had noticed, without requiring an answer, however perfunctory, from his interlocutor.

"Yes?"

"Please, sit down. I know you're in a hurry..."

"No, not a hurry exactly," Ryunosuke hastened to assure him, resuming his seat as the teacher did likewise. "It's just, Su-chan is alone at home..."

"I understand. I won't keep you long." He picked up a pencil lying on the desk, seemed to regard it with momentary interest, and then lay it down again. "There was a fight in the playground on Monday. Perhaps Susumu mentioned it to you?"

"No..."

"Besides being extremely quiet, extremely intelligent and extremely talented, your boy is also, it seems, extremely strong. From what I hear he did not start the fight. The other boy did. The other boy is considerably bigger. If he thought he could pick on Susumu with impunity, he was soon disabused." Once again his lips shaped themselves into a mischievous grin. Evidently something in the story he was telling gave him pleasure, either his way of telling it or Susumu's unexpected triumph over a bully whose character would only benefit from the sharp lesson he'd been given.

"No, he didn't mention it," said Ryunosuke, no more pertinent remark occurring to him.

"Mr. Noguchi." The teacher leaned forward slightly. "Do you remember what we talked about in May?"

"About... telling him?"

"About having him hear about it from you before rumor starts piping."

"Yes, I remember. Unfortunately..."

"I know how difficult it is. Or maybe I have no right to say 'I know.' Let's say rather, 'I can imagine'. Still - "

"You're right, you're absolutely right."

"It seems the fight started over some unpleasant allusion the other boy made."

"Oh?" Ryunosuke tensed. "What allusion?"

"The report I have is he said something like, 'Su-chan's a ghost, he was murdered and came back to life.' Then the other kids started in, 'A ghost! A ghost! Su-chan's a ghost!'"

"I see. Mr. Obara" - once again he rose - "thank you for... for everything; for this" - he indicated the picture in his hand - "and for... for your advice. I'll talk it over with my wife this evening, and we'll take the matter in hand. You are right, of course. It's high time we did."

"If there's anything I can do..."

"Thank you, thank you."

Out at last in the unseasonal June sunshine, he breathed a deep sigh of relief.

***

IV

The simplicity of Dr. Arai's appearance belied the complexity of his character. His face, though blandly pleasing, was so unremarkable, left so vague an impression, that even people who had known him for many years would have been at a loss if asked to describe him. His one distinguishing feature was a tiny wart in the middle of his forehead, and Keiko had once joked to her husband that if not for it she would not know him if she chanced to meet him outside his office. "It's his third eye," Ryunosuke had quipped in reply.

When he first knew him Ryunosuke had thought of him as "a man of about fifty," and now, nearly twenty years later, he still thought of him that way. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, rather soft from lack of exercise, neither elegant nor slovenly. His thin graying hair did not make him look old, any more than his fresh, unwrinkled face made him look young. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, which in the course of an interview he would take off and put on any number of times, seemingly unconsciously. He said little, and when he did speak it was in a low, murmuring voice that made his words difficult to make out. He cleared his throat frequently.

And yet as a therapist he was remarkably successful. Something about him put people at ease. They would spend fifteen minutes with him and leave feeling better. They didn't know why. Neither did the therapist himself, who did not conceal the fact that his success puzzled him. It even unsettled him. He knew only too well that he did not have the wisdom people attributed to him, and one of these days, he thought, whatever inexplicable power he possessed would desert him, and then his downfall would be abrupt and awful.

Dr. Arai was a bachelor. He lived alone. He had always lived alone. His younger sister, who he loved and who adored him, begged him to move in with her after her husband left her, but he was not to be persuaded. "A man's home is his shell," he liked to say, accompanying the mild witticism, one of his very few, with a timid smile. He could no more conceive of having someone live in the same house with him than he could imagine someone joining him inside his shirt or his trousers.

"Don't you ever get... you know, lonely?" Noguchi had once asked him.

"No."

"Don't you ever" - they had had a few drinks; otherwise he would never have dreamed of putting the question - "don't you ever feel the need for a woman?"

"No. Never. It's a peculiarity of my nature, I suppose."

"Very peculiar indeed."

"Once..."

"Yes? Once?"

"Once I did desire someone..."

"And?"

"She died."

"Oh! I'm sorry."

"I was eight. She was seven."

Without his expression changing in the slightest, Arai's face seemed to close, seemed to say, "Let's not pursue this, if you don't mind." Later, recalling the scene, Noguchi could not be sure how much of it had actually occurred and how much he had imagined.

***

Was the failure Arai had so long dreaded finally upon him? What made it worse was that it concerned Susumu Noguchi, the son of a man he might almost call his friend, and a boy, moreover, whose progress through life he had watched with a more than professional - with an almost paternal - interest.

To him, in the end, had fallen the responsibility of telling Susumu what it seemed he would have to know sooner or later, preferably sooner. Ryunosuke had emerged from his talk with the boy's teacher so overwhelmed by the enormity of it all that, clutching the "Black Rainbow" rolled up in his right hand, he staggered rather than walked home, and then, when Susumu met him at the door with the news that Keiko had called to say she wouldn't be home for dinner after all, his sense of being alone against circumstances that were simply too much for him was such, though only for a moment, that - as he later confessed to Arai - "If at that moment there had been a gun within reach I think I would have grabbed it and blown my brains out."

"What's that?" asked Susumu, pointing to the drawing, and Ryunosuke rallied sufficiently to explain that Mr. Obara had liked his picture very much and thought he had real potential as an artist. "What do you think?" he asked the boy. "Would you like to take drawing lessons?"

"I don't know."

"Well, think about it. Mr. Obara thinks you're really good."

He said nothing about the other matter, but on the pretext of having some work to attend to before supper slipped into his study and, sinking into his chair, dialed Arai's number.

"Keiko's forgotten the kid's existence altogether. I'm all alone with this. I have no idea... no idea... My God..."

"Calm down." It was the only unequivocal advice Arai ever gave, perhaps the only unequivocal advice he had it in him to give; he seemed to feel that calm was the one thing missing from the world, and that all would be well if only it could be restored. Oddly enough, his vacuous exhortation was effective; it actually did seem to calm people down.

"I'm sorry, I'm hysterical," said Ryunosuke with a forced laugh. "I don't know what came over me."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, thank you. I'll tell him tonight."

"If there's anything I can do..."

"What you've done for us already is more than I will ever, ever be able to... to... " There were tears in his eyes. "Goodbye. I'll call you tomorrow."

He did call the next day, but not, as he had planned, to tell the therapist how his talk with Susumu had gone but to confess that he had been unable to broach the subject after all. "I can't, I - I just can't do it!" He realized now, he said, what a colossal mistake it had been to name the child Susumu - "I should have listened to you." How could he possibly explain to the boy an impulse he himself no longer understood? Would Susumu think of himself as some sort of grotesque reincarnation of the tortured and murdered older brother whose existence he (presumably) did not so much as suspect? How would a child of nine assimilate all that? When Keiko came home around midnight, slightly drunk and so pleased with herself over some business triumph she had scored that it was hopeless to try and distract her, he felt a stab of something almost like hatred for her. How could she carry on as if nothing had happened? Did she ever think of the dead child? She never mentioned him. Neither did he, of course, but the child was never, not for a moment, absent from his waking thoughts, and at night, not every night but often, he dreamed of him. And where was the murderer now? He had been twelve at the time; he'd be a man of twenty-five now, "rehabilitated." He imagined himself seeking him out, confronting him, reminding him of his crime in case he'd forgotten it, in case the rehabilitators had rearranged his neurons and synapses to make him forget. Perhaps he had a child of his own... Just the other night Keiko had shaken him awake. "You screamed," she said. His body was soaked in sweat. "What were you dreaming?" "I don't remember." In fact he remembered all too well: in his dream he inflicted the same tortures on the murderer's child that the murderer had inflicted on Susumu.

"What should I say to him, doctor? For God's sake, tell me what to say!"

"Perhaps I should have a word with him..."

Ryunosuke sensed the weariness in the therapist's voice, the reluctance to take upon himself a responsibility that properly belonged to the parents, the contempt - no, contempt was too strong a word, Arai was too familiar with human inadequacy to be seriously contemptuous of it, but mingled with his sympathy was the perception that people tended to resign themselves a little too easily to their own helplessness; of Noguchi in particular, more might have been expected. "No, no, I'll do it, I'm his father..." That, Ryunosuke knew, is what he should have said; it was on the tip of his tongue; but in a surge of emotion he heard himself say instead, "Oh, doctor, would you?"

***

Susumu had always looked on Dr. Arai as a kind of uncle - he had no other. Keiko was an only child; Ryunosuke had a sister, but she lived abroad and maintained no contact at all with her family in Japan. It was unlikely she even knew of the first Susumu's murder. The boy's grandmother, Keiko's mother, was very good to him, but she was his only relative outside the immediate family, and Dr. Arai, occasionally visiting the family and occasionally having them call on him at his apartment, seemed to fill a void in his life - as no doubt Susumu did in Dr. Arai's. As a very small child he would sit on Dr. Arai's lap for hours, playing with the buttons on the doctor's shirt while the grown-ups talked. Often Arai would tell him stories. For such an inarticulate man, he was a surprisingly good storyteller. "Shall I read you a story?" he would say, and the little boy would pipe up, as if on cue, "Don't read me a story, tell me a story!" "What kind of story?" "Oh, about... shopping." "Shopping! And where does this little shopping expedition take place?" "At Lucky." "Lucky, eh? Hm. Well, once upon a time..." And he would weave a most fantastic story, composed of endless little complications, about nothing more extraordinary than a family - "a mummy and a daddy and a little boy" - shopping for groceries at the Lucky supermarket. Sometimes Susumu would demand a story about baseball, or about skiing, or about school - whatever happened to pop into his head. And Dr. Arai was never at a loss, the elaborate twists and turns of his narrative holding his listeners spellbound - "listeners" plural because Keiko and Ryunosuke listened scarcely less eagerly than Susumu - in spite of the doctor's monotonous rumbling voice that seemed hardly capable of holding even an uncritical audience. Even now, too old at age nine for that kind of entertainment, Susumu would laughingly jump up and down like a child half his age and demand a story, and Arai would happily, though unsmilingly, oblige.

***

"Arai's going to tell him," said Ryunosuke to Keiko after Susumu had left for school the next morning.

"Tell him what? Oh! Arai? Why Arai? Why don't we tell him?"

Ryunosuke looked at her. There she stood, gulping down her morning coffee, her mind on her affairs, scarcely aware of his existence. He said nothing.

"I have to go, I have a ten o'clock appointment. We'll talk tonight."

"Maybe we should get a divorce," he mused quietly. It was not that he wanted one; on the contrary, the thought of parting from her filled him with fear, a fear he could not quite account for - or perhaps he could: it would mean parting from the one person on earth who had shared and who understood his almost incommunicable anguish. They never talked about the tragedy that, despite their growing mutual indifference, and in his case something very much like hatred, bound them together. Bereft of her, he would be adrift in a manner that frankly frightened him. His curiosity as to how she would respond, his urge to shock her into taking notice of his state of mind, got the better of his prudence, and he uttered his tentative thought aloud.

"A divorce? Why? Is there someone you want to marry?"

"No."

"Why a divorce, then? I'll tell you what I've been thinking, though. It would really be convenient for me to have a place closer to my office. This ninety-minute commute twice a day wears me down. Supposing I get myself an apartment. That way we can be together as much as we need to for Su-chan's sake, and... well, you know, we can be as free as we want to be for our own sakes. What do you think?"

His heart sank. Why hadn't he kept his mouth shut? Now he had brought this on himself.

"We'll talk about it tonight," she said, stooping to give him a little peck on the cheek. "I'm late."

***

V

Dr. Arai's failure with Susumu, if such it was, was not immediately evident. On the contrary, the interview seemed to go extraordinarily well. The therapist made every effort to blunt the impact of his horrifying revelation while at the same time giving the child sufficient insight into his background to arm him against any rumors that might be circulating among his classmates and any insults he might have to put up with on their account. Susumu listened calmly, apparently eager to show that he was grown up enough to assimilate "the facts of life," however ghastly those facts might be. Combining professional knowledge of his field with personal knowledge of the patient, Arai negotiated the minefield with a skill that never showed itself as such. His manner was much as it always was, that of uncle to nephew, or godfather to godson.

Susumu asked only one question: were there any photographs of the dead child? Arai was prepared for that, and he brought out the album he had taken the precaution of having Ryunosuke lend him. Susumu examined the photographs in silence.

Ryunosuke and Keiko came for him, as arranged, at one o'clock, and the four of them went to McDonald's for lunch. Susumu was his usual self, quiet but not peculiarly so; his burger and fries seemed to absorb him. The grownups too spoke little, the one obvious subject of conversation being off-limits in Susumu's presence unless Susumu raised it himself. Was he deliberately refraining from doing so, out of some childish sense of delicacy? Or was he simply indifferent, having seen worse, perhaps, on TV?

"Can I have a chocolate sundae for dessert?" He glanced uneasily at his mother, who had lately taken a stand against such indulgences. Keiko smiled. "We'll ask the doctor's opinion. Dr. Arai?"

"Well, maybe just this once it won't do any harm."

"What harm does it do?" Susumu asked, and a conversation of sorts was got going about the destruction wrought by high-calorie, low-nutrition junk food.

"I read an article just the other day," said Ryunosuke, "that to protect children too strictly against junk food does more harm than good. It weakens their defenses."

"I agree," said Susumu.

"You agree, you little twit," said Keiko, reaching across the table and rumpling the boy's hair. "You little squirt, what do you know?"

***

If Susumu's new knowledge weighed on him, he showed no sign. He said nothing to his parents about it, and his parents said nothing to him. This serene acceptance, seemingly a triumph of the therapist's art, vaguely unsettled Ryunosuke. What to make of it? One would have expected some sign of disturbance, some change in him. But no, nothing. Ryunosuke kept in touch with Mr. Obara, who reported that Susumu was his usual quiet self in the classroom, saying little but always doing his homework and showing signs of possessing a most remarkable intelligence. The schoolyard fight in which Susumu had triumphed so unexpectedly proved an anomaly; there were no other incidents of the sort, possibly because Susumu's decisive victory over someone so much bigger had established his right to be left alone.

But he was not morbidly solitary by any means. He had friends, both in his immediate home neighborhood and at school, and played the games usual to children his age. He went to their houses, they came to his. He tore up and down the street on his bicycle. He was an active, happy child. Two afternoons a week he took drawing lessons from the great artist Teitaro Ichikawa.

The subject of Keiko moving into her own apartment never came up again. Perhaps she decided it was not necessary after all, or perhaps she had been unable to find one suitable to her needs, whatever they were. Instead she took a new tack with Ryunosuke. "Why don't you go back to work? Su-chan's not a baby any more. There's no reason for you to sit home for the rest of your life - unless," she added with a faintly contemptuous toss of her head, "you want to."

"Hm."

"'Hm' is no answer. I don't mean to seem pushy, but you've gotten rather lazy over the years and I think a push is what you need. If you want me to lay off, just say so and I won't say another word."

"No, you're right. I have gotten lazy, I do need a push. Go back to work eh? Well, it's a thought. But... I don't know, I've been away from all that for so long. Banking, finance. We don't need money, do we? I mean, with you doing so well and all."

"No, we don't need money."

"There's an anomaly here. I'm trying to put my finger on it. Why should a man who doesn't need money go into the money business?"

"Well, do something else, then. You're still young."

"I'm forty-seven. 'Pushing fifty,' I believe it's called."

"Fifty is not old any more."

"Supposing I go back to school."

"Back to school! And do what?"

"Study ancient religion, maybe."

"You're joking."

"You don't approve?"

"What's my approval got to do with it?"

"Well, we're not strangers. You're my wife. And of course you're supporting me. Did you know that when I was a child I dreamed of being an archaeologist in the Holy Land?"

She seemed to regard him with new interest. "No, I didn't know that."

"It's true. I think if I'd gotten a little encouragement... I don't mean to say anyone actively discouraged me..."

"Well, go back to school and study ancient religion, if you want to."

"Su-chan and I could do our homework together."

"It's a lovely tableau."

"You approve, then?"

"Wholeheartedly."

"I'm glad. Just imagine, though... I could do anything. Couldn't I?"

He gazed at her intently, his eyes narrowing behind the spectacles he had recently been compelled to buy and which made him look the least bit unfamiliar to her. She frowned. This newly-acquired habit of his of delivering the most off-hand remark in such a way as to invest it with unfathomable profundity grated on her.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, supposing that instead of ancient religion I decided to study French literature. Would there be any problem in that?"

"Not as far as I'm concerned."

"Or Russian dance, or nuclear physics."

"Ryu, would you be offended if I asked you to get to the point already? I'm exhausted, and first thing tomorrow I have an important meeting."

"I needn't go to university at all. I could go on a trip instead. Couldn't I? You wouldn't mind, would you? You'd put up the money?"

"It's not a question of me 'putting up the money.' As far as I'm concerned my money is your money."

"And there's quite a bit of it, isn't there?"

"The books are open to your inspection at any time."

"Oh, there's no need for that. I just mean, in a general way, we're pretty well off. We can indulge our whims, any whims we might have, without regard for the cost. Do I exaggerate, in saying that?"

"Our resources are not infinite, but yes, within reason we can afford to be pretty indulgent."

"Within reason, and maybe just a bit beyond. No?"

"Ryu, really..."

"You're exhausted. Well... goodnight."

"And here I thought you were leading up to something."

"Nothing, nothing."

"Well in that case, goodnight."

"I don't feel sleepy. I think I'll go for a walk."

***

VI

There was a public junior high school five blocks away from where the Noguchis lived, but its standards were mediocre, and a gifted child like Susumu would wither in its environment. His parents accordingly settled on a school affiliated with the prestigious Keio University. Susumu passed the entrance exam with flying colors. The only problem was that this school was an hour and a half away by train and subway. One possibility was to move, and Ryunosuke, consulting a real estate agent, found what seemed like the perfect house for them, no farther from the new school than their present place was from the old one - and significantly closer to Keiko's office too. It was brand new, built on the model of a New England town house. Brimming with enthusiasm, Ryunosuke took Keiko and Susumu to see it. Keiko was enchanted. She particularly liked the semi-circular staircase, with its sweeping banister, leading to the second floor - it reminded her , she said, of Gone with the Wind. "Gone with the Wind!" laughed Ryunosuke. "That's the deep south. This is New England!" But Keiko was not to be swayed. "It's New England with a deep south staircase," she said with a toss of her head.

From the kitchen window was a view of what would be the back garden, now little more than a sea of mud. Their old house - Ryunosuke was already thinking of their present quarters as "our old house" - had no garden at all, but the one here was remarkably spacious, by Tokyo standards. The garden had captured Ryunosuke's imagination as the staircase had Keiko's. "I'll plant tomatoes and potatoes and Chinese cabbage..."

"It'll do you good to get those soft pink hands of yours dirty," said Keiko.

Everything seemed settled, but then Susumu weighed in: he didn't like it. Both his parents turned on him. "Why?" they cried almost in unison.

He could not tell them.

"Give us a reason," Ryunosuke prodded.

"It's perfect for us," urged Keiko. "It's lovely, it's roomy, it's close to your school, there's a garden to keep your father busy."

"And keeping your father busy is very important," laughed Ryunosuke. "We don't want your father going to seed before his time, do we?"

"Tell us what you don't like about it."

Susumu was sullenly silent.

"Tell us one thing - just one thing."

"It's... it's the boys' farm!"

Keiko and Ryunosuke looked at one another. The boys' farm - once upon a time, when Susumu was practically an infant, Ryunosuke used to threaten to send him there if he did not behave. That was years and years ago. What could suddenly have put it into the boy's head? Was he being disagreeable on purpose?

"I'll tell you what," said Keiko, "let's go home for now, it's getting late, father will fix us a nice dinner, and we'll talk it over calmly, considering the question from every angle. How's that?"

***

Susumu was immovable. He did not like the house, and no recital of its advantages, its beauty and its comforts had any effect on him. He would not explain. Perhaps he couldn't; perhaps his childish vocabulary was simply unequal to expressing his feelings. He did not mention the boys' farm again, and when Ryunosuke, in his gentlest and most engaging voice, asked him why the house should have put that of all things into his head, he sullenly lowered his eyes and said nothing.

"What should we do?" Ryunosuke asked Keiko in bed that night.

"I don't know."

"On the one hand, you don't want to force a kid into a house he hates. On the other hand... if only he had a good reason! Even a bad reason! Any reason! Something!"

"I really like that place, Ryu."

"So do I."

"Maybe he was just having a bad day. Suppose we try again next Sunday."

"Wouldn't it be better to wait a month or so?"

"It'll be gone if we wait too long."

"Hm."

Three days later Keiko was again detained at work, and Ryunosuke and Susumu were alone at dinner.

"Su, listen, about that house..." Was this wise? Would raising the subject only make it worse - whatever "it" was? But it was ridiculous - a boy of twelve is capable of reasoning after all, and can be held to standards of rational behavior. It must be made clear to him that if he has a sound reason for disliking the house his parents have chosen, it would be considered and weighed on its merits. Otherwise...

"We really like that house, Su. It's perfect for us, and best of all, it's within walking distance of your new school. You don't want to spend three hours every day riding trains, do you?"

"I don't mind."

At least he's responding, thought Ryunosuke. "You say that now," he said, "but if you had to do it every day, day in day out, it would get to you, believe me."

"Mummy does it."

"I know, and she hates it! If we lived in the new house, she could be at work in forty-five minutes!"

Susumu picked at his rice with his chopsticks and said nothing.

"Su, listen to me. Human beings are rational animals. That means that, generally speaking, we do what we do, and feel what we feel, for some reason. Admittedly, not always a good reason. Ahem! What I'm trying to say is... if you dislike that house so much, there must be something hateful about it, something mummy and I missed. What is it?"

"I just don't like it."

"You said it reminded you of the boys' farm. What did you mean by that?"

"I don't know. My stomach hurts."

"Come on, Su, you're not a baby anymore, you're a big boy, and an unusually intelligent boy at that. You can express your thoughts and feelings so that people understand them, and you needn't take refuge in imaginary stomach aches! What did you mean when you said it reminded you of the boys' farm?"

"We can move there if you want to."

"What?"

"I like it. It's a nice house. It's not the boys' farm."

"Su-chan..." What was it about this twelve-year-old child that made him feel so hopelessly out of his depth?

"My stomach hurts. I can't eat any more."

***

On Saturday there was a phone call from the real estate agent. Somebody else was interested in the house. Had the Noguchis reached a decision?

"We'd like to have another look at it."

They drove over on Sunday, and went through the rooms one by one. Ryunosuke and Keiko were confirmed in their enthusiasm; if anything they were even more taken with the place than before. Susumu wandered about like one lost in a forest who has given up hope of ever finding his way. Keiko came upon him as he stood listlessly in the middle of the living room.

"It looks vast, doesn't it, without furniture," she said. "Come." She took the boy by the hand. "Let's go up to your room."

They climbed the staircase that so enchanted Keiko. "On the way home we'll stop at the video shop and rent Gone With the Wind and you'll see - the staircase is exactly the same, exactly. It's thirty-five years since I saw that movie - I was just about your age, maybe a little older - and yet there are some things about it I remember as clearly as if I'd seen it yesterday. Here - this will be your room. You're a growing boy, you need a bigger room than the one you've got now. This will give you the space you need. Your desk can go here, your bookcases here, you can set up your easel here... Oh, look! There's daddy in the garden! Look at him - doesn't he look like Moses gazing at the Promised Land? Ryu!" she called from the window. He started violently. He had evidently been lost in thought, and now looked puzzled, as though unable to make out where the voice had come from. "Over here!" Keiko raised the window. "What's the matter with you?"

Coming to himself, Ryunosuke looked up and waved, grinning a little foolishly.

"I was just saying to Su that you look like Moses at the Promised Land!"

He laughed, and somewhat reluctantly turned to go back inside.

He joined them upstairs and, sitting on the floor, they had a family conference.

"Well, Su, what do you say? If you have an objection, let's hear it, but it has to be something a little more concrete than 'I don't like it,' or 'It's like the boys' farm.' I think we're being as fair about this as we can possibly be. Any serious objection you raise will be considered very seriously, I assure you. Right, Keiko?"

"Right."

Susumu looked away. "I have no objection," he said, his tone sullen and resigned.

"But you're not happy?" said Keiko.

Susumu said nothing.

"Tell us why you're not happy."

"I don't know."

Keiko and Ryunosuke looked at one another.

"You'd prefer to stay in the old house?" asked Ryunosuke, turning again to the child.

"I'd prefer - oh, I don't know! Leave me alone!"

"Give me your cell phone," Ryunosuke said to Keiko, holding out his hand for it. His expression had hardened. Enough was enough, it seemed to say. A little doubtfully, Keiko took the phone out of her purse and handed it to him. Ryunosuke dialed a number he seemed to know by heart. It was answered almost immediately. "Mr. Sasaki? This is Noguchi. We've decided. We're taking the house."

***

VII

Despite her initial excitement over the new house, once it furnished and decorated to her rather exacting taste Keiko spent very little time in it. Her professional life absorbed her, as did the social life that accompanied it. Though past fifty - she was two years older than Ryunosuke - her vigor, if not her appearance, was that of a woman twenty years younger. She never so much as hinted of love affairs to Ryunosuke, who for his part asked no questions, but he assumed, without rancor, that her life was full in every respect.

So was his, in quite a different sense. His gardening was a great success. He proved to have quite a green thumb. This was a most unexpected discovery. He had never done anything of the sort before, and, looking back, he could not fathom what it was about the sea of mud the garden had been when they first moved in that inspired him to take up this new pursuit. One thing he was convinced of, foolishly perhaps: it was something in that particular "sea of mud" that affected him; that called to him, he was almost tempted to say. Another proto-garden at another house, though the same in all essential respects, would have left him quite cold. It was not an altogether reasonable conclusion, he knew, but had not Keiko once called him "the mystic banker"? Though no longer a banker, he evidently retained his mystic streak.

He read gardening books and appealed for advice to the proprietor of a seed shop not far from the house, a man in his eighties, still vigorous, who was delighted to find in Ryunosuke proof that his life's passion was not after all doomed to extinction in the commercial concrete jungle. He took Ryunosuke under his wing, adopted him as a kind of son, even paid visits to the house to examine the soil and make recommendations accordingly.

"Easy on the weeding," he counseled. "Weeds are not the enemy. They are friends. For one thing, many of them are edible - dokudani for instance, these here. More important, competing with weeds will make your vegetable crops tough. Tough crops have a wild, gamey taste. You don't want your vegetables tasting like they came off a supermarket shelf, do you?" The expression on his face suggested that, of all the horrors one encountered in the course of a long life, that was the worst.

For nine months of every year they ate garden vegetable salad. Ryunosuke grew tomatoes, potatoes, soy beans, kidney beans, cabbage, spinach, onions, even pumpkins. He planted flowers too: daffodils, tulips, salvia, chrysanthemums.

"I'm thinking of expanding into apples, pears and persimmons," he laughed to Keiko on a rare occasion when she was home for dinner.

"Why not cows and pigs?" said Keiko.

"It's a thought. What do you say, Su? Shall we buy ourselves a cow?"

***

One day in November Susumu said he had a stomach ache and would stay home from school. The next day he was no better, and the day after it was the same. Worried, Ryunosuke suggested they go to the hospital and see a doctor. It was not necessary, said Susumu; he would be all right if he could just be left alone. A little helplessly, Ryunosuke nodded and shuffled out of the boy's room, closing the door behind him.

He proceeded down the corridor to his own room, and closed the door. It was a beautiful room, the room of a man with deep thoughts in his mind and the will to put them into action. An imposing walnut desk took up most of the floor space. The wall on his right was almost hidden by books on bookshelves. On the opposite wall was a hanging scroll, a reproduction of the famous fifteenth-century ink drawing by Bunsei of "The three laughing sages at Hu-ch'i". Many an hour had Ryunosuke spent sitting at his desk and gazing at those three men. His gaze, in stark contrast to their laughter, was solemn, mournful. What were they laughing about? What in the world, or in their thoughts, could inspire such manic, mad laughter? Whatever it was, why had he, Ryunosuke, never seen it, or thought it, or imagined it?

Behind the desk was a large window giving out onto his beloved garden. He went over to it now and, drawing back the thick curtain, looked outside. November - what a gray month. The sky was an indifferent sheet of lead; the drizzle fell with dull persistence.

He let the curtain fall back into place and sat down at his desk. The chair, an executive's chair to match the executive's desk, creaked lightly under his weight. Ten years had passed since he quit his job, giving up an extremely promising career, in order to be a full-time parent to poor Su-chan. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his fists. Something was going on with Susumu, and it was not stomach trouble.

Something - but what? The one goal of his life, since Susumu's birth, the one goal that had swallowed up all his earlier ambitions for success, power, wealth, love, sex, had been to see Susumu grow up normally. The first mistake had been to name him after, thus identifying him with, the murdered child. A mistake, yes, but perhaps a forgivable one - a symptom of the trauma he and Keiko had suffered. Subsequent mistakes were less pardonable. The sacrifice of his career and ambitions, for instance. Not every sacrifice is wise or good just because it is a sacrifice. What kind of example can a man idle for years on end set for the child growing up in his care? Not much of one, and perhaps his, Ryunosuke's, chronic idleness was no small factor in Susumu's deepening listlessness.

Then there was the move to this house. On the one hand, of course, a parent has to lay down the law to his children, has to set standards of reasonable behavior. You don't simply hand the reins over to a twelve-year-old and say, "The family is in your charge, we'll do whatever you want, go wherever you please." No - and yet Susumu had never been a difficult or capricious or demanding child, and in his antipathy for the house, at least potentially, lay something significant that should not have been ignored. There is a time for laying down the law, and a time to hold back and try to discern what is on a child's mind that might be beyond the child's power to express.

He sighed. "If I had my life to live over again..." It was a persistent theme of his solitary musings. What would he do differently? Two milestones stood out: his choice of a career, and his marriage. How little we know ourselves, at twenty, and yet how confident we are that we know everything! Maybe that veil of confidence with which we view the world in the first flush of adulthood is a necessary condition for our survival - we'd fall into hopeless despair otherwise. Maybe evolution had altered our genes to produce it, that confidence. It was under its spell that he had first read, in a philosophy class, Descartes, who said he could doubt everything except his own existence. Ryunosuke, looking into himself as deeply as one can at that age, discerned two certainties in addition to his existence: his aptitude for economics, and his love for Keiko. And look how both had turned out! Was this tragedy, or comedy? Of course he and Keiko had lived through a horror such as few couples experience, such as few couples can even imagine; no doubt it had twisted them, distorting both their individual perceptions and their relationship, in ways they themselves scarcely understood. How much of what he was now was the product of that one blow from out of the dark? Supposing it had not landed on him, that blow. Would he be a banker today? If so, judging by the trajectory he was on at the time, he would by now be a senior bank officer; or perhaps, it was not inconceivable, he would have gone into government, becoming a leading light in the ministry of finance, guiding and shaping government economic policy, no doubt for the better. Idle though he was, his brain was as active and as fertile as ever, and he had firm and detailed notions of what was wrong with the country and how it could be set right.

But no, it probably would not have turned out that way. Sooner or later, perhaps later than was in fact the case, but eventually, he would have grown restless as a banker; there were signs of it even before little Susumu's murder - his growing suspicion, for instance, that the current concentration of all our faculties on business and technology, to the exclusion of all else, was absurd. That was what Keiko was wont to call his "mystic" side. Mystic or not, it seemed defensible even on rational grounds. We grow richer and richer, our technology invests even the poorest and most insignificant among us with powers beyond the dreams of the most potent of the ancient god-kings - and yet nobody who probed the question would dare assert that we are happy. Did that alone not prove his point?

He turned to the three laughing sages, and regarded them in silence for some time. The room was absolutely silent; not a sound reached him from outside; not a passing car, or a chirping bird; nothing. Then, not for the first time, he began to speak to them. He spoke softly and persuasively, in the quietly authoritative tone that in years gone by had carried so much weight at business meetings and marked him as a young man to reckon with. "I'm no prophet," he said, "but what I say is, we're living in a transitional age, the messy birth pangs of a future... a future whose dimmest outline we can't begin to imagine. That's what you're laughing at, isn't it? When I say we can't begin to imagine it, I don't mean we're not clever enough. or imaginative enough, or knowledgeable enough, and that if we had a little more data or a little more intelligence it would be clear. I mean it is unimaginable to us in principle. But why am I lecturing you, as though you don't know this already? Of course you know it. Mankind is headed for a catastrophe, a devastating, devastating catastrophe - it won't wipe us out but it will hurl us onto a new road, a road we've never seen before - no, not a new road, a new dimension. A new dimension. Hm. And this life we're living now... this life... will be swept away in an eyeblink, nothing remaining but shattered artifacts that will make no sense to anyone."