Fracture: A Novel

1

MEMORY PLATES

THE AFTERNOON APPEARS CALM, and yet time is waiting to pounce. Mr. Watanabe rummages in his pockets as though missing items might respond to insistence. Due to what is becoming a habitual carelessness, he has left his transit pass and glasses at home: he can clearly visualize them next to each other on the table, mocking him. He walks irritably toward the machines. While he is carrying out the transaction, he observes a group of young tourists reacting with bewilderment at the tangle of stations. They are making calculations. The numbers emerge from their mouths, rise, and disperse. Clearing his throat, he glances back at the screen. Vaguely hostile, the youngsters look at him. Mr. Watanabe listens to them deliberating in their own language, a melodic, emphatic one that he knows well. He considers the possibility of helping them, as he has so many visitors overwhelmed by the Tokyo subway. But it’s almost a quarter to three, he has a sore back and wants to go home. And, to be honest, he doesn’t sympathize with these young people. He wonders if he’s simply become unaccustomed to the shouting and the gesticulations he once found so liberating. Half listening to their foreign syntax, he pays for his ticket then walks away. He notices the Friday smell, a cocktail of weariness and anticipation. As the escalator descends, he contemplates those platforms that will gradually be filling up. He’s glad he didn’t take a taxi. At this time of day there is still room in the trains. He’s aware that soon the last passengers to arrive will be pushing against the backs of those who arrived ahead of them, and that the attentive subway officials will step forward to cram them in. Until the doors interrupt the flow, like someone clipping the sea. To push one another, Watanabe reflects, is an unusually sincere way of communicating. At that very instant, the escalator steps start to vibrate. The vibration intensifies to a tremor, and the tremor gives way to unmistakable juddering. Mr. Watanabe is engulfed by a feeling that none of what is going on is actually happening to him. His vision blurs. Then he feels the floor cease to be a floor.

The young tourists study the subway map, its multicolored pipework. They are confused by the overlapping trains, the crossword of public and private lines. They try to calculate how many yen each of them will need. At the next machine, an old man clears his throat. The youngest boy among the tourists suggests that the old man could help them instead of staring so much at the girls. Another adds that if he goes on staring like that he could at least pay for their tickets. One of the girls retorts that this boy seems even dumber than usual today. Which, she points out, raising a finger, is saying something. The tourists insert a cascade of coins, while the old Japanese man disappears. Another girl reveals her preference for the coins with a hole in the middle. The youngest boy compares it to the piercing he himself carries on a certain part of his anatomy. Her friend’s hand slaps the back of his head: his hair becomes an asterisk. Their shouts and laughter startle people around them. The tourists become aware of a collective murmur, a strange precision prevailing among the crowd. They try, without much success, to control themselves as they run toward the escalators. They’re astonished that no one bumps into one another, at the way everybody respects the regulations. The more experienced of the group opines that in his country this could be achieved only by threats. What threatens the Japanese? When they feel the first vibrations, the youngsters blame the flexibility of the architecture. Not at all like the stations in their own country. The tremors grow more pronounced. With a mixture of panic and surprise, the tourists can’t decide whether the other passengers are silent because they’re so calm, or because they’re counting how long the tremors last. One of the young women remembers what happened a year ago in her own city, when she counted up to a hundred. And as she feels the ground shake, she begins to experience an increasing sense of déjà vu, as if each jolt were taking place a little deeper inside her head, infusing memories.

Shoes alternate at different levels, improvising musical scores. Feet are Friday’s metronome. As the escalators transport them, the passengers contemplate the platforms that will soon be filling up. Some vaguely notice Mr. Watanabe. One of them studies his clothes, which seem bizarre or somehow out of place. The inertia of the descent takes over, the hum is a mantra. All of a sudden, the hum changes frequency. The looks pull away from their vanishing points. The escalators respond like leaden streamers. Farther below, the temporal dimension splits into two: the trains don’t move, and the passengers start to run. Even the staff appear anxious. They know that anything up to twenty seconds is a tremor, and more than twenty is something serious. Trying to calm himself, one of the guards calls for calm. A language teacher thinks she is witnessing a terrifying tautology: an earthquake is like a train passing close to your feet, yet her train had already arrived. Behind her, the same man who was struck by Watanabe’s clothes is overcome by a sense of incredulous fragility. There’s nothing to hold on to. He reneges on all his certainties. Directly above his head, on the other side of the vaulted roof, a young cyclist tilts over and falls to the asphalt, still pedaling.

The nerves of the pipes run along the roof. The leaks rehearse their future appearance, form layers of time on the architecture. Weight is distributed evenly on the escalator: some passengers go up, others come down. The forces are aligned. Energies cooperate. When the escalator starts to vibrate, and the vibration intensifies to a tremor, and the tremor gives way to unmistakable juddering, each shape fragments into a jumble of lines. Every object is in hiatus. Doubt prowls the platforms. The underground expresses itself in the underground. Like dice changing their numbers, the walls calculate the throw. A black spot amid innumerable spots, Mr. Watanabe raises one of his shoes.

The objects on the ground play their own game. They move one square and wait their turn. The air currents create eddies, microscopic disturbances. A scrap of paper, an unsuccessful origami, is dragged along. That ice cream melting on the platform used to be round. A lighter offers itself to passing bits of fluff. Next to the machines, two earbuds hanker after their ears. They fell out of Mr. Watanabe’s pockets as he went over irritably to purchase his ticket. When the floor ceases to be a floor, the earbuds snake among the footsteps: a stampede in stereo. The lighter bounces, summons its flame. The blob of ice cream lengthens its trail. The scrap of paper relaxes, unfurling a text that no one reads.

The subway’s even light pours over things. Each neon bulb emits its dose of anesthesia. The entire space floats in an electric liquid. Shadows drift amid whistles that guide them like buoys. All at once, Watanabe’s vision blurs. Reality becomes an intermittence, the vibrating blink of an eye splintered into myriad eyes. Then the noise remains. Only the noise. A broken music, captured possibly by the earbuds. Every spoon tapping in unison against its cup. A nutcracker the size of the country. The subterranean protest. And, in the background, the ancestral sound of strings twanging, like a boat caught in a storm.

An earthquake fractures the present, shatters perspective, shifts memory plates.

AS SOON AS WATANABE STICKS HIS HEAD OUT, a torrent of feet engulfs him. He takes a deep breath before emerging. He still has the feeling that the world is swaying slightly, that every object emits the memory of its instability.

Fortunately, everything outside appears more or less in its place. He hadn’t been at all sure of this. The force of the jolts made him fear the worst.

It’s cold for March: the hunched shoulders act as a thermometer. On some corners the traffic is at a standstill; at others it is overflowing. Sirens wail in all directions. Lines are snaking around the few vehicles still running. Anyone would think that, in a matter of minutes, the population had multiplied.

The entire city has reverted to an earlier state, before the new road system existed. Its arteries are narrowing. Its circulation has collapsed. After many years—more than he dare count—Mr. Watanabe feels once more that, rather than protecting him, the crowd is crushing him.

He tries to calm down and assess the situation. Despite his fatigue, he decides to make his own way home. His neighborhood isn’t all that far away. If he keeps up a brisk pace, he should reach Shinjuku before sunset.

People are occupying the space in a new, or rather a very old, way: with the visceral sense of those who can rely only on their bodies. Pedestrians walk down the middle of the avenues, a tiny displacement that to Watanabe seems radical.

These encounters and passing collaborations have an air of shipwreck and rescue. A sudden solidarity disputes distances.

Under normal circumstances, he reflects, isolation offsets overpopulation. And yet that afternoon, several strangers ask how he is, he asks others, and they in turn ask others. Fear is a twisted form of love.

There is still no phone coverage, or at least he can’t make any calls on his device. The emergency has prompted Wi-Fi providers to clear their networks. He sees many people walking and checking their phones: he can read the news on their faces. Envious of their ability to navigate the virtual world at the same time as the public thoroughfares, Mr. Watanabe tries instead to listen to the radio. He pats his pockets. And discovers he has lost his earbuds.

As if the movement of the earth’s plates had disrupted the clocks, the lights in Tokyo are dimming early. The contrast is so startling, he thinks, that each place ought to have one name in daylight and another in darkness. Many stores have closed. People are stocking up on food and batteries. The bigger the city, the greater its dread of the dark.

Mr. Watanabe remembers when, in his youth, they abolished height restrictions on buildings. To own the air became more important than to own the ground. People protested, demanding their right to the sun. And so the Sunlight Act was passed, thanks to which buildings started to be erected at an angle.

The city’s obsession, its nervous system, is prevention. Containment. Isolation. Ditches. Firebreaks. Anti-seismic constructions. An entire urban plan based on future disasters. The result is a dense weight of trust on a surface of fear. With this in mind, Watanabe stops off at a supermarket. He enters with a very specific objective.

When he locates the toilet paper shelf, he discovers there isn’t any. He notices that the people gathering the last rolls are more or less his age. On his way out, he sees that stocks of a second product have been exhausted. Diapers. Senescence and infancy are united by the bathroom.

The advertisements on the facades of buildings have vanished. Today, for the first time since his return, the streets are naked.

It no longer resembles Tokyo. As he raises his eyes, only the sky is shining.

Observing people’s necks craned in surprise, Mr. Watanabe realizes how seldom he looks upward. The city center, he reasons, is designed to protect us from the heavens. And yet, the instinct to orient oneself by means of them has resurfaced: a hole has appeared through which they can be seen. The glow diminishes drop by drop, an ocean seeping out through a grating.

Suddenly, the murmurs change in tone. The rumor spreads through the crowd like a current along a cable. Watanabe tries to speed up. Bad news is something he prefers to assimilate on his own.

Behind him, growing ever louder, ever closer, he hears the word tsunami.

BEFORE FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON, Watanabe arrives at the entrance to a skyscraper in Shinjuku. On the day of its inauguration, it was vaunted as the tallest in Tokyo. From a distance, it looked like a pencil standing out among a bunch of erasers. Another one soon superseded it. We’re addicted to records, he thinks. Or we’re simply addicts.

As he enters the building, his sense of relief evaporates. What if, due to some electrical fault, he is forced to take the stairs? Would his lungs and knees withstand it? What would it be like to sleep in the foyer, to camp out beneath his own home?

Once he sees that the elevators are working, Mr. Watanabe allows himself a lengthy sigh. But, before he presses the button, fresh doubts assail him. What if there’s a power outage while he’s going up? On days such as this, is anyone from the emergency services available? How does the alarm work? Why has he never bothered to learn about these things?

The elevator deposits him peacefully on the twenty-eighth floor. He jumps out. The carpeted corridor is redolent of a muted garden.

Watanabe inserts the key, opens the door to the apartment, walks through the tiny hallway, inserts the key, opens the door, and enters his apartment. This isn’t a repetition. Or rather it is, of the apartment itself: when he bought it, among the other alterations, he had a thick additional wall built. Now he lives in a house within a house. He is bunkered within himself. If something terrible happened, part of the skyscraper could get damaged, or the twenty-eighth floor, even the outer wall. But perhaps not the inner dwelling. His home. The survivor’s.

Clashing with the rest of the decor, an old black-and-white-striped rug covers the floor like a pedestrian crossing. To compensate for his reclusiveness, Mr. Watanabe likes to imagine he is crossing the street when he enters his abode.

He takes off his shoes before going into the living room, quite spacious by Tokyo standards. Although at this point in his life he can afford it, he hasn’t forgotten that when he lived with his aunt and uncle, he couldn’t cross his bedroom with his backpack on. Narrow spaces have never bothered him. His claustrophobia is vertical. That’s why what he most appreciates is the ceiling, approximately three and a half meters high, one surpassing the norm. Watanabe feels that this meter hovering above his head is the space where his ideas and memories float.

From the very moment he steps into the living room, he senses that something isn’t right. As an obsessive, he knows that each space possesses a secret equilibrium, which any imbalance can disturb. Some of the furniture has moved slightly, a confirmation that this earthquake was more powerful than usual. Watanabe advances like a detective investigating the crime committed in his own room.

He instantly notices the disarray among his collection of banjos. Some have slipped off their stands and are lying on the floor. A few strings have come away from their bridges. The necks are pointing every which way, hinting at multiple culprits. The sound boxes sing infinitesimally of their fall.

Mr. Watanabe contemplates this catalog of toppled instruments. He stoops to examine them, then puts them back in place. None appears to have suffered irreparable damage. But then, he corrects himself, to what extent is damage reparable? Wouldn’t it be worth doing something different? Why hide the imperfections in his banjos, why not incorporate them into their restoration? All broken objects, he reflects, have something in common. A crack joins them to their past.

One by one, he caresses the instruments that have survived the toppling. He is convinced that things which have been on the verge of breaking for whatever reason—slipping, falling, smashing, colliding with one another—enter a second life. An amphibious state that makes them meaningful, impossible to touch in the same way as before.

This explains perhaps his growing admiration for the ancient art of kintsugi. When a piece of pottery breaks, the kintsugi craftspeople place powdered gold into each crack to emphasize the spot where the break occurred. Exposed rather than concealed, these fractures and their repair occupy a central place in the history of the object. By accentuating this memory, it is ennobled. Something that has survived damage can be considered more valuable, more beautiful.

Inspecting his library, Watanabe discovers that a few volumes on the uppermost shelves have been dislodged. Is there a pattern to these literary movements? Might they make up a kind of seismic anthology? Might certain authors be more predisposed to being displaced? He pauses to cross-check whether these books correspond in some way to his preferences. The result surprises him.

At the far end of the room, a small detail causes him to shudder. He sees that the doors of the butsudan are ajar. And a couple of objects that evoke his parents and sisters have toppled over on the tiny shrine. He dares not stand them upright immediately, as if to do so would be to contradict their will.

Mr. Watanabe heads for the kitchen. He pours out a glass of wine to calm himself, or at least enrich his lack of calm. When he opens the cupboard, he sees that the cleaning products and cans of food have rolled over and are intermingled. He suspects there’s a hidden meaning to this disarray but can’t think what it is.

He returns to the living room, the glass reddening his hand. He drains it quickly and slumps onto the sofa. He rubs his ankles with difficulty. Then he switches on the television and goes online to immerse himself in the news.

Just at that moment, on the table, he spots his transit pass, intact, hateful: the glimmer of an earlier city where nothing had happened. His missing glasses have slid to the edge. The sun has started to do likewise.

Between his second and third glass, Watanabe learns of the damage caused in the northeast of the country. Particularly in the Tōhoku region, where the army is carrying out rescue operations. If soldiers are involved, he deduces, the casualties must be greater than those reported in the news. This is his fourth glass. His unease spills over the map of the present.

He is astonished to discover the magnitude of the earthquake he has just witnessed: the biggest in the country’s history. Bigger even than the Great Kantō Earthquake, which has always served as the legendary extreme. Today a record has been broken that nobody wanted to break.

Mr. Watanabe reads the long list of places affected, and does so extremely slowly, as if by spelling out their names he could restore them. Sumatra, Valdivia, Alaska. Esmeraldas, Arica, Kamchatka. Lisbon. Mexico City. Japan, Japan, Japan.

Every major earthquake with its epicenter in the sea is invariably followed by something worse. He knows they have been called seaquakes, maremotos, raz de marées, depending on where they struck. Until there were two hundred thousand deaths, and a million evacuees on the Indonesian coast. That was the tsunami, terrifyingly global.

He searches for news in the U.S. media. An alert has just been issued in Hawaii, and a warning on the West Coast. Earthquakes are part of history. Or is history a slice of seismology? Watanabe imagines an underground tremor gradually expanding until it shakes the entire planet.

On the screens of his devices, their reflections distorted on the surface of the empty wine bottle, he sees skyscrapers swaying, their tips almost touching.

He sees cracks in the highways, chewing asphalt like a set of teeth.

He sees turmoil in stores, aisles turned upside down, merchandise falling.

He sees spinning houses, walls losing the perpendicular, rattling lights, a rebellion of shapes, their owners beneath tables.

He sees the absurd strength of the tsunami, its sweep of filthy water, planes floating at Sendai airport, cars washed away like boats, the naturalness of liquid drowning civilization’s warren.

Apparently, a dozen or so nuclear power plants have been shut down. And conflicting reports are coming in about the Daiichi plant in the prefecture of Fukushima. Watanabe learns that at the time the earthquake struck, three of its reactors were in operation. As soon as it was detected, they automatically shut down. When they did so, they stopped generating the electricity for the reactor’s cooling system, which works with boiling water. Under normal circumstances, the external grid would have been activated, but this was damaged by the earthquake. The emergency power generators kicked in. But instantly stopped when the tsunami hit. Simple. Or not.

Watanabe realizes that the information is mimicking the shock waves from the tsunami: estimates of the damage are growing by the minute. To judge by their commentaries, many people regard the official figures with the same mistrust as they did the ceiling during the earthquake.

Soon afterward, a state of emergency is declared in reactors one and two at the Fukushima nuclear plant. People are being evacuated in a limited area around the facility: three kilometers. This distance brings back dreadful memories for Mr. Watanabe. However, the government announces there have been no radiation leaks.

For some reason, his cell phone still has no signal. In his inbox he discovers an email from Carmen, who is writing from Madrid. They haven’t been in touch for a while: that’s what disasters are for. Carmen has seen the news and is concerned. She wants to know if he’s okay, if he needs anything. She tells him she has found a Facebook group called Spaniards in Japan who have experienced the earthquake. She ends by saying: I can’t believe this is happening on March 11.

Watanabe sends a brief reply. He thanks her for her concern and confirms that he is safe and sound. Then he sends a second message, adding that he is delighted to be back in touch, and inquires after her grandchildren. He immediately starts composing a third message, making it clear that of course they had never really lost touch, but that it means a great deal to him to be able to communicate on a day like this, when the people we are closest to, et cetera. He rereads what he has written, deletes it, and closes his email.

How remote foreign disasters seemed in the past. And yet now, thanks to these screens whose technology he knows inside out, we cannot help but witness them. He wonders whether this has enhanced or diminished his sensitivity. Being a permanent spectator creates a filter, a shock absorber. But it also forces him to endlessly witness ubiquitous suffering.

Watanabe switches on his sound system, which is connected to speakers as tall as a man. A man of his modest stature, at any rate. He chooses one of his favorite recordings. A growling trumpet, meditative piano, smoky double bass. He turns the volume down to the lowest setting. He closes his eyes to cut off the optical torrent. Immerses himself in one of the most pleasurable activities he knows: listening to music without the sound. Re-creating it in his mind. This isn’t something that Mr. Watanabe does with just any recording. He is always incredibly meticulous when he chooses what he’s not going to listen to.

The only thing he does hear is the telephone. The landline clamoring from his bedroom. Annoyed at the inconvenience of the call and yet aware of its possible urgency, he struggles up from the sofa. He feels a sharp twinge in his lower back. He runs, more or less. Pants. Picks up. Answers.

The voice isn’t one Watanabe expected, or recognizes. To his surprise, the caller is an Argentinian journalist who says good morning to him and then good evening. Who apologizes. Who has been up all night working. Who hurriedly explains himself. Who says his name is Quintero or Gancedo. No: Pinedo. And who tries to ingratiate himself by mispronouncing a greeting in Japanese.

This last gesture irritates Watanabe. He considers it condescending, a sort of rhetorical souvenir. To make things worse, the journalist offers to speak in English, even though Mr. Watanabe has a perfect grasp of Spanish.

In any event, he has neither the energy nor the patience. Pinedo stutters slightly, which makes him confusing to listen to. Watanabe gathers that he, he would very much like to, to interview him about the, about the earthquake and the tsunami, yes? because he’s planning a catastrophic investigation, or an investigation into who knows what catastrophes, for who knows where.

He finds it strange that this fellow has tracked down his home phone number. He’s infuriated that the man intends to ply him for information. And, above all, why the hell interview him? Wouldn’t he do better with a politician, someone from the embassy, or a fellow journalist?

Watanabe brusquely interrupts Pinedo’s stammering. Addressing him in a Spanish that indignantly stresses unexpected syllables, he suggests the man search elsewhere for his sensationalist material.

Taken aback, Pinedo explains that, that this isn’t, this isn’t at all what it’s about, because, honestly, on the contrary, what he’s writing about, is, in fact is.

Watanabe responds by saying he isn’t interested in making any statements. He hangs up and pulls out the cable to disconnect the telephone.

After the call, he finds it impossible to regain his composure. He walks up and down the old striped rug. He debates whether to return to the news, eat something, or go to bed. As so often when he doesn’t know what to do, he freshens up his flowers.

He removes the fallen leaves. Crumples the petals between his fingertips. Replenishes the water in the slender receptacle, which wasn’t upset by the shocks. Arranges the flowers, so that they overhang as far as possible. Adjusts the willow fronds. He positions them more for the shadows they cast than anything else. He observes the secret hydrography they trace. Once he is satisfied with the result, he discovers fretfully that one of the stems doesn’t reach the water.

A few last temperas stain the glass of the picture window. Reflections splash. Night drenches the skyscrapers. Human shapes move across, are framed, then vanish. Mr. Watanabe wonders if they can see him, if anyone is watching him.

All at once, a banjo string snaps, emitting a shrill note that continues to reverberate.

Watanabe decides to take an ofuro. That’s what he needs. To scrub his nakedness and envelop it in heat. First exposure, then refuge. A bath that softens him and slowly dissolves him.

He disappears into the rectangle. He tries to allow his skin to absorb the water’s compassion, the steam’s abandon. He fixes his gaze on the ceiling. He remains motionless, listening to the silent gurgle baths make.

As soon as he gets out, he eats an apple and takes a sleeping pill.

IT IS ALREADY MORNING and Mr. Watanabe’s body is tossing and turning in his bed. His pale, flaccid limbs twitch like a puppet with its strings snarled.

He hasn’t slept on a tatami for more than fifty years. After he retired and moved back to Tokyo, he forced himself to readjust to the hardness of futons. He soon had to admit that lying down like that, he felt embalmed. All those years on Western beds changed his idea of sleep. After all, when we dream we carry with us all the places where we have slept.

Watanabe uses earplugs in bed, a habit he acquired when his work obliged him to spend a hundred nights a year in hotels. During that period, he discovered that a hundred nights is a lot longer than three and a half months. That they form an independent unit of time, an interval that casts doubt on the notion of home. As he always used to say, when the minibar at the hotel becomes more familiar than your kitchen cupboards, there’s no going back.

That’s why he has kept up his practice of safeguarding his sleep with the slightly rounded foam plugs that penetrate his ear canals until they create the comforting sensation of a vacuum. Watanabe thinks that to sleep without them would foster the belief that he is at home, whereas using them is to accept that he always dreams somewhere else.

It is already morning and his body tosses and turns, flees. Until a nightmare expels him from beneath the sheets. One of those nightmares that has the feel of a premonition.

Watanabe gropes around on the bedside table. As startled as he, his cell phone has just regained its signal. Instantly a deluge of texts, voice mails, and missed calls is unleashed. The device leaps about, convulsing.

Among the calls he finds several from Mariela in Buenos Aires. Also a message, imploring him to pick up the phone if he’s there. He sends her a few reassuring lines and promises to call her soon.

A sudden convention of crickets: the mobile network seems to have been restored throughout the city.

He sits up and turns on the television in the bedroom. It’s made by the same manufacturer as all the other devices in his apartment. The thickness of the screen is next to nothing, as if the weight of its images has stretched it out.

There are updates about the Fukushima nuclear power station and by now they are truly alarming. The radius of evacuations has tripled, extending to ten kilometers. The authorities have admitted that there are a few small leaks. They have ordered the valves in the reactors to be opened, to lower the temperature and reduce the pressure inside. For a second, Mr. Watanabe misconstrues this sentence, the pressure inside, and reads it as directed at him.

On the one hand, the government is appealing to people to remain calm and trust in their security measures. On the other, it announces that the prime minister will be taking an inspection tour of the plant at Fukushima, where, according to the Nuclear Safety Agency, radiation has reached abnormal levels.

Watanabe realizes he isn’t going to get back to sleep. He switches on the lights and the room is inundated with a white glare. He leans his back against the cold wall. He checks the Yomiuri and the Asahi newspapers on his phone and continues in every language he is able to read.

He soon discovers that many of the media outlets are translating one another, mistakes included. In some newspapers there are reports of several explosions. Others speculate that the accident could have international repercussions and that the evacuation zone extends to twenty kilometers, twice what it was only a few hours earlier.

Amazed, he reads that the previous day’s earthquake may have moved the whole country by a couple of meters, and shifted the earth’s axis by ten or fifteen centimeters. Nothing occurs in only one place, he reflects, everything occurs everywhere. He wonders whether the meddling journalist who called him at home knew more than him.

Unable to stop searching, he trawls YouTube for homemade videos of the explosion at the nuclear plant. Filmed at a distance, by unsteady hands, out of focus.

He sees the shape of the smoke. That shape. The bulging mushroom. That mushroom. The head of the cloud swelling, swelling in his head too. Growing like a tumor.

And it is these images, perhaps more than the previous news bulletins, that galvanize his muscles. With surprising agility, Watanabe leaps off his bed.

He walks along the swath of light on the floor. Through the picture window he observes with bewilderment that, although it will soon be spring, it is snowing as dawn breaks. The flakes have an air of retrospective insistence.

Mr. Watanabe recalls the winters he spent in Paris, where he loved to marvel at the buildings beneath the snow. Facing the hyperbole of the Tokyo skyscrapers, he thinks about the collapse of beauty and how easily it can be destroyed. All artistic, technical, monumental achievements, everything that is meant to last, in the end proves absurdly fragile. He remembers his fascination and anguish as he walked for the first time along the Parisian boulevards, which he couldn’t help but imagine bombed out, in ruins, nonexistent. He wandered around its neighborhoods in a kind of trance, visualizing them as they might have been had history shifted by a few centimeters.

These visions were to haunt him for the rest of his life, increasing his awareness of the drastic magnitude of each thing, the simultaneous possibilities of it resisting or imploding. This, he senses, is what could be called emotion.

2

VIOLET AND THE CARPETS

I REMEMBER IT WAS SNOWING when I met him. I don’t remember the date or the exact address, but I haven’t forgotten the snow. Memory is so trite: it retains only the details that make for a good story.

I remember the party. I don’t remember the host. I remember their parents were spending the weekend out of town. I don’t remember where. I remember the sofa we all fought over. I don’t remember the rest of the house. I remember it was late. I don’t remember how much I’d had to drink. I remember that the food quickly disappeared. I don’t remember what he was wearing. I remember being annoyed when I discovered a red wine stain on my new blouse. I don’t remember if I managed to get it out. I remember we looked at each other several times. I don’t remember who spoke first. I remember he had withdrawn to a corner and smiled the whole time. I don’t remember if I thought that was a contradiction. I remember his straight black hair. I don’t remember how I wore mine. I remember he was the only foreigner. I don’t remember who invited him to the party. I remember that at that point in my youth foreign men always seemed more interesting to me. I don’t remember how long this naïveté lasted.

Yoshie had come to study in Paris. He said he loved languages, although he spoke approximately one and a half. He had an almost desperate desire to travel, to visit the most far-flung places possible. Just as I did, I guess. Now that I think about it, our idea of traveling resembled an escape plan. He gave the impression that he was testing out his identity, like someone constantly trying on clothes to see if they fit. When he arrived in the city he had a romanticized idea of the Sorbonne, as does everyone who hasn’t studied there.

To be fair, the atmosphere was starting to become interesting. A lot of us had earnest fantasies of change. That’s to say, ’68 was still a few years off. Those were very different times, it seemed that everything was about to happen. Libération didn’t even exist! What we read, as a kind of alternative bible, was L’Humanité. My friends and I felt so important, so sure of ourselves as we repeated those pro-Soviet slogans.

The point is that I met Yoshie at a student party. Parties nowadays just seem like parties, I never know how to explain this to my grandchildren. In those days, having fun was something of an act of defiance toward authority. A political response. I suspect this was partly a moral justification, because we wanted to make our simple desire to enjoy ourselves seem more worthy. Or maybe we could only do it like that, because we were so repressed we needed lofty excuses for doing what every young person wants to do. But it was also partly a generational truth. Pleasure didn’t come easily, we had to earn it. I think of that whenever I see my granddaughter, Colette, who is so clued in about all the pleasures in life, and yet somehow so conservative. Honestly, I understand less and less what direction we’re headed in.

Someone introduced us, I’ve forgotten who, and we struck up a conversation. We talked and we didn’t talk. We told each other very little and thought we’d understood a lot. That night, I don’t know why, I felt particularly awkward. It wasn’t just how much I’d drunk. It was a different, rather pleasant giddiness.

To begin with, at least, there was nothing remarkable about our conversation. There was, how can I put it, an acceptance that was wordless. Or rather, beneath the words, which in his case were peppered with small, amusing grammatical mistakes. It was as if we had too much to say to each other, and yet there was no need to say anything. He gave the impression of being a shy young man. This of course hopelessly attracted me. Because I, as a rule so haughty with