The next day, Yellow Submarine Boy never showed up. Which was more than unusual.
“He doesn’t seem to have come today,” I said to Mrs. Soeda, who was seated at the counter. I gave the reading room a once-over.
“I don’t think he has,” she said. “There are days like that. He might not be feeling well.”
“Does that happen sometimes?”
“Periodically. It’s not like a chronic condition, but sometimes he doesn’t feel well, feels weak and can’t get out of bed. His mother thinks it’s some kind of nervous condition. If he stays in bed for three or four days, just resting, he recovers, she said, and there’s no need to have a doctor look at him.”
“In bed for three or four days, just resting.”
“That’s right. Like recharging a drained battery,” Mrs. Soeda said.
Something like recharging indeed might be involved here, I thought. His abilities (which surpassed most human intellect) might get overactive and exceed his physical capacity. Like when a fuse automatically blows in a circuit board when it detects excess demand for electricity. Then he needs to take it easy, cool down from being overheated from overwork, and let his body recover naturally. Considering the timing, perhaps creating the map of that town—work that required extra energy—had caused his system to shut down.
Mrs. Soeda went on. “As you know, the boy has extraordinary feelings and abilities, but he’s still at the age where he’s growing and might not yet have the physical capability, or emotional defenses, to fully support the use of those abilities. I get terribly worried about him sometimes.”
“He needs someone to take care of him, to guide him.”
“Exactly. He needs someone to teach him how to control those unique abilities himself.”
“Which can’t be easy.”
“Yes, it’s very difficult. First they would have to understand each other. But the way I see it, his mother dotes on him too much, and his father is too involved with work to take care of his son. Up till now, Mr. Koyasu kept a close eye on him and took care of him in the library. Perhaps seeing him as a substitute for the son he lost. But sadly Mr. Koyasu passed away and no one is around who should watch over him.”
“He hardly ever talks with anyone, yet he does seem to talk with you often.”
“True, he does, because I’ve known him since he was little. Still, our conversations are pretty minimalist, limited to practical matters. I wouldn’t say our mutual understanding is such that I can care for him mentally, or help him with any emotional issues.”
“Do his family members talk with him?”
“He speaks a little to his mother, but only when it’s absolutely necessary. And he never talks to his father. The only time he speaks to people he doesn’t know is when he asks them their date of birth. It’s only then that he’s not timid and will speak to anyone. Looks them right in the eye and speaks clearly. But other than that he never talks to anyone. And if they talk to him, he doesn’t respond.”
I asked, “I understand that Mr. Koyasu personally took on the boy’s care, but did the boy and Mr. Koyasu—when Mr. Koyasu was alive, I mean—go beyond the superficial when they talked?”
Mrs. Soeda narrowed her eyes and tilted her head slightly. “That I don’t know. They always went to the head librarian’s office, or that subterranean room, shut the door, and spent a long time together there, just the two of them. So I have no idea what they talked about, or whether they had more confidential talks.”
“But he was pretty attached to Mr. Koyasu.”
“I don’t know if attached is the right word. But spending hours together, just the two of them in a room, implies a certain level of trust. That was quite unusual for the boy.”
There was one thing I had to know. Yet I wasn’t confident that this was the time or place (in midmorning sunlight shining on the bright library counter) to broach the question straight on. But I decided to plunge ahead, and ask it as simply as I could.
“Mrs. Soeda, do you think the two of them met even after Mr. Koyasu passed away?”
Mrs. Soeda looked right at me for a few seconds, her expression serious. Her thin nose quivered a fraction. Then she said, each word carefully punctuated, “What you’re asking is whether after Mr. Koyasu’s death did M** continue to meet him—with his ghost, his soul that took on form—and communicate with him. Do I have that right?”
I nodded.
“Well, I guess that is possible,” Mrs. Soeda said after giving it some thought. “Very possible, in fact.”
For four days after that, Yellow Submarine Boy didn’t show up at the library. Without him, the reading room seemed unsettled. Or maybe it was me who was unsettled. I spent most of those four days holed up in the square subterranean room, lost in random, dreamy thoughts as I gazed at the map the boy had drawn.
The map summoned up amazingly vivid memories of scene after scene I’d seen myself in the world over there. Like a visual hallucination machine, the map activated my memory, unearthing details in a precise, three-dimensional way. The tangible feel of the air I breathed, the faint fragrance in the air—it all came back. As if it were all there, right before my eyes.
The map was simply drawn, yet it seemed to contain some sort of power. For four days, alone in my room, with the map before me, I wandered in that world that isn’t here, caught up so deeply in that visual hallucination machine (type of thing) I gradually couldn’t tell which world I belonged to. Like some eighteenth-century aesthetic poet addicted to opium in search of a pure illusion. Though what I held in my hand was merely a rough map, drawn in ballpoint pen on a thin sheet of A4 paper.
So why had Yellow Submarine Boy drawn this map, and had it delivered to me? What was the point? Maybe, though, there was no goal. Maybe it was an act performed purely for the sake of the act (just as he asked people their birth dates and then told them what day of the week they were born on).
If Mr. Koyasu and the boy were somehow communicating, and working together, was Mr. Koyasu involved in the creation of the map? Was it partly his intention that the map be delivered to me? If so, then why? What did he intend by it?
Lots of questions, but no clear-cut answers. The meaning of it all totally eluded me. Many mysterious doors before me, but no key that fit. What I could somehow understand (or faintly perceive) was that there was an extraordinary, special power at work. This was not just a map of the place I had stayed in for a time in the past, but also served as a rough sketch of the shape of the world to come. As I gazed at it, it felt like something had been entrusted to me, personally.
I used the library copy machine to make a copy of the map and penciled in several corrections I noticed. The library, for instance, was shown as too close to the town square, the river was depicted as too gently meandering just before the pool, the area where the unicorns lived was a little bigger…those sorts of things. Seven corrections in all. These were all minor differences, nothing to do with the overall structure of the town. No need, really, to make these corrections (and how accurate was my memory, anyway?), but I surmised that the boy would value accuracy of detail. Also at play was the general principle that every act of expression required critique, and my need to make contact with the boy in some form or another. If the ball’s served to me, I need to hit it back. That’s the rule.
I put the copy of the map with my corrections in an envelope, sealed it, and handed it to Mrs. Soeda. I didn’t go so far as to add a letter. Inside the envelope was a single sheet with the map—the same as when the boy had sent it to me.
“If the boy shows up, I’d like you to give this to him.”
Mrs. Soeda took the envelope and looked at it for a moment, inspecting it. Nothing was written on either the front or the back. “Any additional message from you?”
“There’s nothing you need to add,” I said. “Just tell him it’s from me and hand it to him, that’ll be fine.”
“Alright. I’ll do that. I think he’s probably recovered by now and should be coming here before long. If previous times are any indication.”
Two days later, Mrs. Soeda showed up at my room.
“M** came this morning, so I gave him the envelope you left with me,” she said. “He took it without a word and put it in his backpack.”
“He didn’t open it?”
“No, he put it in without opening it. And after that I didn’t see him take it out of his backpack. He sat at his usual seat, intently reading as always.”
“Thank you,” I said. “By the way, what is he reading now?”
“A collection of letters by Dmitri Shostakovich,” Mrs. Soeda replied without missing a beat.
“Sounds interesting.”
Mrs. Soeda didn’t give an opinion. Instead, she frowned a fraction. She was a woman whose expressions and gestures spoke louder than words.