THE ENGINE STILL RUNNING, Mr. Watanabe stares at a fork in the road. Its choices diverge like a pair of trousers about to split.
He feels the urge to go to Hirodai. He intuits that he should acquaint himself with it; that, in some sense, he is choosing between two directions in his memory.
Ovine clouds drift over the car roof.
He drives on, steering between the cracks. Soon the road begins to climb. The surface remains exactly as it was after the earthquake, when the ground ceased to be a ground and the present broke apart. The car advances with the rhythm of a horse, avoiding the fissures so the wheels won’t get stuck. It is more like a jigsaw puzzle of a path. Watanabe imagines that each piece contains the hint of a movement, a possible detour to somewhere else.
He comes to a halt at the entrance of the village, which is located at the top of a slight hill. According to the GPS, at this very moment he is twenty kilometers from the nuclear power station, on the exact edge of the critical zone. Neither inside nor outside.
He steps out of the car. This time he decides not to look at the dosimeter.
He begins to walk around Hirodai. The fact that this is the closest he has ever set foot to the Fukushima plant makes him feel he’s floating, and his shoes sink less into the ground.
His first impression of the village isn’t the accumulation of things and spaces that comprise it, but the overwhelming sum of its silence. A very specific silence that Watanabe recalls having heard only once before in his life. There are peaceful silences that are a cure for noise, and others that emphasize absence.
And farther away, in the distant background, the sea. The echo of the waves, which his experienced ear instantly associates with the swish of a cassette tape or the crackle of vinyl, just before the music starts.
Since his arrival, Mr. Watanabe’s sense of smell has been sending him disconcerting signals. He has the impression that this place somehow smells like yesterday. As if smells reach his nose with a delay, like when sound and image are out of sync. The only aroma that remains independent of time is that of damp salt.
It’s also hot and getting hotter. The lack of movement in this place seems to have fixed the strips of sunlight. Watanabe undoes another shirt button.
He wonders whether Hirodai is like this at all hours of the day, or if the remaining inhabitants are finishing their lunch. He heads toward the town center. Everything looks as unscathed as it does deserted. Streets without cars. Houses without inhabitants. Shops without customers. Schools without students. This is the without town, he thinks. There’s no destruction: just subtraction. A pure subtraction. A number minus itself.
Everything has the look of a house that’s for sale. Lowered blinds, parched flowerpots. Dried mud on the benches, fountains no longer running. Squares visited only by the cats and dogs that run over to lick his shoes. Buses with seats draped in white fabric, transporting ghosts. Closed temples. Idle offices, bureaucracies that have finally achieved perfection.
Watanabe finally comes across a few people, all of them elderly, moving slowly along and propping themselves against walls. Gazing into infinity, their faces covered with surgical masks.
All children and young people appear to have been evacuated. Only grandparents, great-grandparents, elderly widows and widowers chose to remain. This place, he reflects, has turned into a kind of demographic prophecy. The rehearsal of a future where only the past exists. Chained to a post, a bicycle leans.
All of a sudden, on a street corner, he sees an old man kicking the air. He seems to be carefully following the movements of something Watanabe can’t see, possibly an insect or something stuck to his trouser leg.
Mr. Watanabe approaches gingerly. When they are almost on top of each other, the old man raises his head and asks his name.
Ah, says the old man. I met a Yoshie many years ago. His family was from Toyama. Good people. They loved the sea. He studied things. Strange things. I once saw his photograph in the newspaper because he had died. My name is Sumiteru, a pleasure.
Unable to curb his curiosity, Watanabe asks what the old man had been doing before he walked up to him.
When? replies Sumiteru. Just now? Ah, playing soccer. I always wanted to. When I was young, when our country won the bronze medal, I dreamed of going to the Olympics. Back then no one around here had the slightest interest in soccer. But it’s never too late to play.