The flow of the river became an elaborate maze, and, just as it traveled deep underground, our reality, too, seemed to proceed inside us, branching out down several paths. Different versions of reality mixed together, different choices became intertwined, out of which a composite reality—or, what we come to understand as reality—took shape.
Of course, this was just my interpretation, my own personal feelings. If I’d been told, “This is the only reality. There are no others,” I might have accepted it. Like the crew of a sinking sailboat clinging to the mast, maybe we are only capable of clinging, desperately, to one reality. Whether we like it or not.
But how much do we know about the secret, dark labyrinth of a river that flows underneath us, below the solid ground we stand on? How many have actually seen it and, having seen it, could make it back to the other side?
On long, dark nights I stare forever at my dark shadow stretching out to the wall. That shadow doesn’t say a word anymore. I talk to him, ask him questions, yet he never responds. My shadow has gone back to the way he was originally—flat, silent. Yet still I talk to him, since I need his wisdom, his encouragement. But he never answers.
What in the world happened to me? Why am I, right now, here? I can’t take it in—including this reality I’m a part of. No matter how you look at it, I shouldn’t be here. I made up my mind, said good-bye to my shadow, and should have been left behind, by myself, in that walled-in town. So why am I back here, in this world? Have I been here the entire time? Did I never leave? Was this all just a long dream?
That said, I do have a shadow now. A shadow attached to my body. Wherever I go, the shadow will accompany me. If I come to a halt, so will my shadow. And I feel relieved, and thankful for that fact—that my shadow and I are literally one flesh. Only people who’ve lost their shadows can understand this feeling. Most likely.
And on nights when I can’t sleep, I go over everything I saw in that walled-in town, all that happened to me, reliving it in vivid detail.
The faint light of the canola oil lamp in the library, how you looked as you carefully crushed the herbs in a little mortar, the click of the hooves of those poor unicorns on the flagstone street, the river willows on the sandbank quietly rustling in the wind—I picture all of it. The Gatekeeper’s horn ringing out morning and night, the sad call of the unseen night birds, the path along the river you and I took every night, the old pavement, the sweet apple dish that melted in my mouth. Ancient dreams I held in my hands so they would warm up. The pure white snow falling on the meadow beside the deep pool. That inscrutable high brick wall that surrounded the town without a gap anywhere. No blade could make a mark on it. And more than everything, a lovely girl, dressed in plain, immaculate clothes. This was the scene that had been promised me. And was the promise kept? Or not kept?
Some power might have separated me into two at some point. I can’t help thinking that at times. Maybe there’s another me, in that town behind a high wall, even now, spending his days quietly. Going every evening to the library, drinking the green herbal tea she makes, sitting behind that thick desk, intently reading old dreams.
I can’t help but think that makes the most sense, that it is the proper conjecture. At a certain point I was given a choice between two alternatives. And the me who’s here now chose to be here. And somewhere is another me who chose to be there. Somewhere—most likely in the town surrounded by a high wall.
In the real world on this side I was on the verge of what’s called middle age. Just a man with nothing special about him, nor a “specialist” anymore with the skills I possessed in that town. My eyes weren’t wounded, and I wasn’t qualified to read old dreams. I was nothing more than a cog in one of the systems that made up a gigantic society. A tiny, replaceable cog. I couldn’t help feeling some regret for that.
After I came back here—and I believe I did come back—for a time I acted like nothing had happened, riding the train every morning to work at the company, giving a simple greeting to my colleagues as usual, attending meetings, voicing the appropriate opinions (none of which made a difference), afterward sitting at my desk in front of a computer doing my work. I sent out directives to branches around the country and received all sorts of requests from them. Occasionally I’d go out from the office for meetings with bookstore managers and publishing supervisors. A certain amount of experience was needed to do the work, though it wasn’t especially difficult. I was just a tiny, fixed cog.
And then one morning I handed my boss a letter of resignation. I couldn’t go on doing this job. I had to remove my body and mind from the track I’d been on—even if I hadn’t found a new track to try.
My boss was surprised by my sudden request. Up until that moment, I’d given no indication that I was unhappy. He thought I’d been recruited by a rival company. I tried to explain as best I could. Not an easy thing to do, but somehow I did end up convincing him. His next gambit was speculating that I must be having some psychological issues—a breakdown or midlife crisis.
“If the work’s wearing you out you should take some time off,” my boss said, calmly trying to convince me. “You have a lot of accrued paid vacation time, so why don’t you go to Bali or somewhere for a couple of weeks, let your hair down, recharge, then come back? And then you can think it over again.”
I had a pretty good relationship with my immediate boss, and I think he kind of liked me. So I felt bad telling him this. But nothing could convince me to stay. This was as clear to me as the first rays of morning sunlight.
I simply felt that this reality wasn’t suited to me. It was the same as saying the air in this place wasn’t right for my lungs. Stay here any longer, and I’d choke. So I wanted to get off this train as quickly as I could, at the next station—that’s all I wanted. It was necessary, what I had to do.
But if I said that to my boss (and to my colleagues, too, I imagine), they wouldn’t understand. The visceral sense that this reality isn’t a reality for me, and the deep sense of estrangement that it produced, wasn’t something I could share with anyone else.
After I quit my job, I still had no particular plan about what to do next. For the time being as much as I could, I thought about nothing, and did nothing, just hanging out, alone, in my apartment. There was nothing else I could do. It felt like a heavy iron ball that had lost all inertia and lay there, discarded on the ground, unmoving. Though that actually wasn’t such a bad feeling.
During that time I slept really well, at least twelve hours a day. When I wasn’t asleep, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to all the sounds filtering in through the window, gazing at the shadows moving along the wall. Trying to read something into them. But of course there wasn’t any kind of message there for me.
I didn’t feel like reading books (which was pretty unusual for me), and I didn’t feel like listening to music, either. I barely had any appetite. I also didn’t want to drink. I talked to no one. I went out to shop for food every once in a while, but the landscape there was something I couldn’t take in. An old man walking a dog, people on ladders trimming trees, children on their way to school—I’d see them, but they didn’t seem like events taking place in the real world. Instead, to me they seemed like scenery neatly put together to fit the situation, a clever flat scene made to look three-dimensional.
The only scenes that felt real to me were the path along the river, the river willows growing on sandbanks, a clock tower with no hands, unicorns in winter trudging along through the falling snow, the eerie gleam of the hatchets the Gatekeeper had neatly honed.
But I had no way to return to that world.
Financially I had no pressing problems. I had some savings (as I said, I’d lived a simple bachelor life for years), and five months’ worth of unemployment insurance. For the past ten years I’d lived in a rented apartment in Tokyo that was convenient for commuting, but I could always move to a cheaper place. Actually, I could move anywhere in Japan. But I couldn’t think of a single place I’d want to go.
I was nothing but an iron ball that had come to a stop on the ground. A heavy, self-contained iron ball, my thoughts tightly locked away inside. Not much to look at, but plenty heavy. Unless someone passed by and tried hard to push me, I wasn’t going anywhere. Or budging an inch.
Many times I asked my shadow, Where should I go now? Predictably, he never replied.