At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapidservice train. The car was empty.
He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was
entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating
down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station,
the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave
some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks
as if it’s going to be a hot day. I could go to the seashore.” He raised his head and studied the
platform guide.
At that point, he realized what he had been doing all along.
He tried shaking his head a few times, but the idea that had struck him would not go away. He
had probably made up his mind unconsciously the moment he boarded the Chuo Line train in
Koenji. He heaved a sigh, stood up from the bench, and asked a station employee for the fastest
connection to Chikura. The man flipped through the pages of a thick volume of train schedules.
He should take the 11:30 special express train to Tateyama, the man said, and transfer there to a
local; he would arrive at Chikura shortly after two o’clock. Tengo bought a TokyoChikura
roundtrip ticket. Then he went to a restaurant in the station and ordered rice and curry and a
salad.
Going to see his father was a depressing prospect. He had never much liked the man, and his
father had no special love for him, either. He had retired four years earlier and, soon afterward,
entered a sanatorium in Chikura that specialized in patients with cognitive disorders. Tengo had
visited him there no more than twice—the first time just after he had entered the facility, when a
procedural problem required Tengo, as the only relative, to be there. The second visit had also
involved an administrative matter. Two times: that was it.
The sanatorium stood on a large plot of land by the coast. It was an odd combination of elegant
old wooden buildings and new threestory reinforcedconcrete buildings. The air was fresh,
however, and, aside from the roar of the surf, it was always quiet. An imposing pine grove
formed a windbreak along the edge of the garden. And the medical facilities were excellent.
With his health insurance, retirement bonus, savings, and pension, Tengo’s father could probably
spend the rest of his life there quite comfortably. He might not leave behind any sizable
inheritance, but at least he would be taken care of, for which Tengo was tremendously grateful.
Tengo had no intention of taking anything from him or giving anything to him. They were two
separate human beings who had come from—and were heading toward—entirely different
places. By chance, they had spent some years of life together—that was all. It was a shame that it
had come to that, but there was absolutely nothing that Tengo could do about it.
Tengo paid his check and went to the platform to wait for the Tateyama train. His only fellow
passengers were happylooking families heading out for a few days at the beach.
Most people think of Sunday as a day of rest. Throughout his childhood, however, Tengo had
never once viewed Sunday as a day to enjoy. For him, Sunday was like a misshapen moon that
showed only its dark side. When the weekend came, his whole body began to feel sluggish and
achy, and his appetite would disappear. He had even prayed for Sunday not to come, though his
prayers were never answered.
When Tengo was a boy, his father was a collector of subscription fees for NHK—Japan’s quasi
governmental radio and television network—and, every Sunday, he would take Tengo with him
as he went door to door soliciting payment. Tengo had started going on these rounds before he
entered kindergarten and continued through fifth grade without a single weekend off. He had no
idea whether other NHK fee collectors worked on Sundays, but, for as long as he could
remember, his father always had. If anything, his father worked with even more enthusiasm than
usual, because on Sundays he could catch the people who were usually out during the week.
Tengo’s father had several reasons for taking him along on his rounds. One reason was that he
could not leave the boy at home alone. On weekdays and Saturdays, Tengo could go to school or
to day care, but these institutions were closed on Sundays. Another reason, Tengo’s father said,
was that it was important for a father to show his son what kind of work he did. A child should
learn early on what activity was supporting him, and he should appreciate the importance of
labor. Tengo’s father had been sent out to work in the fields on his father’s farm, on Sunday like
any other day, from the time he was old enough to understand anything. He had even been kept
out of school during the busiest seasons. To him, such a life was a given.
Tengo’s father’s third and final reason was a more calculating one, which was why it had left the
deepest scars on his son’s heart. Tengo’s father was well aware that having a small child with
him made his job easier. Even people who were determined not to pay often ended up forking
over the money when a little boy was staring up at them, which was why Tengo’s father saved
his most difficult routes for Sunday. Tengo sensed from the beginning that this was the role he
was expected to play, and he absolutely hated it. But he also felt that he had to perform it as
cleverly as he could in order to please his father. If he pleased his father, he would be treated
kindly that day. He might as well have been a trained monkey.
Tengo’s one consolation was that his father’s beat was fairly far from home. They lived in a
suburban residential district outside the city of Ichikawa, and his father’s rounds were in the
center of the city. At least he was able to avoid doing collections at the homes of his classmates.
Occasionally, though, while walking in the downtown shopping area, he would spot a classmate
on the street. When this happened, he ducked behind his father to keep from being noticed.
On Monday mornings, his school friends would talk excitedly about where they had gone and
what they had done the day before. They went to amusement parks and zoos and baseball games.
In the summer, they went swimming, in the winter skiing. But Tengo had nothing to talk about.
From morning to evening on Sundays, he and his father rang the doorbells of strangers’ houses,
bowed their heads, and took money from whoever came to the door. If people didn’t want to pay,
his father would threaten or cajole them. If they tried to talk their way out of paying, his father
would raise his voice. Sometimes he would curse at them like stray dogs. Such experiences were
not the sort of thing that Tengo could share with friends. He could nothelp feeling like a kind of
alien in the society of middleclass children of whitecollar workers. He lived a different kind of
life in a different world. Luckily, his grades were outstanding, as was his athletic ability. So even
though he was an alien he was never an outcast. In most circumstances, he was treated with
respect. But whenever the other boys invited him to go somewhere or to visit their homes on a
Sunday he had to turn them down. Soon, they stopped asking.
Born the third son of a farming family in the hardscrabble Tohoku region, Tengo’s father had left
home as soon as he could, joining a homesteaders’ group and crossing over to Manchuria in the
nineteenthirties. He had not believed the government’s claims that Manchuria was a paradise
where the land was vast and rich. He knew enough to realize that “paradise” was not to be found
anywhere. He was simply poor and hungry. The best he could hope for if he stayed at home was
a life on the brink of starvation. In Manchuria, he and the other homesteaders were given some
farming implements and small arms, and together they started cultivating the land. The soil was
poor and rocky, and in winter everything froze. Sometimes stray dogs were all they had to eat.
Even so, with government support for the first few years they managed to get by. Their lives
were finally becoming more stable when, in August, 1945, the Soviet Union launched a full
scale invasion of Manchuria. Tengo’s father had been expecting this to happen, having been
secretly informed of the impending situation by a certain official, a man he had become friendly
with. The minute he heard the news that the Soviets had violated the border, he mounted his
horse, galloped to the local train station, and boarded the secondtolast train for Dalien. He was
the only one among his farming companions to make it back to Japan before the end of the year.
After the war, Tengo’s father went to Tokyo and tried to make a living as a black marketeer and
as a carpenter’s apprentice, but he could barely keep himself alive. He was working as a liquor
store deliveryman in Asakusa when he bumped into his old friend the official he had known in
Manchuria. When the man learned that Tengo’s father was having a hard time finding a decent
job, he offered to recommend him to a friend in the subscription department of NHK, and
Tengo’s father gladly accepted. He knew almost nothing about NHK, but he was willing to try
anything that promised a steady income.
At NHK, Tengo’s father carried out his duties with great gusto. His foremost strength was his
perseverance in the face of adversity. To someone who had barely eaten a filling meal since
birth, collecting NHK fees was not excruciating work. The most hostile curses hurled at him
were nothing. Moreover, he felt satisfaction at belonging to an important organization, even as
one of its lowestranking members. His performance and attitude were so outstanding that, after
a year as a commissioned collector, he was taken directly into the ranks of the fullfledged
employees, an almost unheardof achievement at NHK. Soon, he was able to move into a
corporationowned apartment and join the company’s healthcare plan. It was the greatest stroke
of good fortune he had ever had in his life.
Young Tengo’s father never sang him lullabies, never read books to him at bedtime. Instead, he
told the boy stories of his actual experiences. He was a good storyteller. His accounts of his
childhood and youth were not exactly pregnant with meaning, but the details were lively. There
were funny stories, moving stories, and violent stories. If a life can be measured by the color and
variety of its episodes, Tengo’s father’s life had been rich in its own way, perhaps. But when his
stories touched on the period after he became an NHK employee they suddenly lost all vitality.
He had met a woman, married her, and had a child—Tengo. A few months after Tengo was born,
his mother had fallen ill and died. His father had raised him alone after that, while working hard
for NHK. The End. How he happened to meet Tengo’s mother and marry her, what kind of
woman she was, what had caused her death, whether her death had been an easy one or she had
suffered greatly—Tengo’s father told him almost nothing about such matters. If he tried asking,
his father just evaded the questions. Most of the time, such questions put him in a foul mood. Not
a single photograph of Tengo’s mother had survived.
Tengo fundamentally disbelieved his father’s story. He knew that his mother hadn’t died a few
months after he was born. In his only memory of her, he was a year and a half old and she was
standing by his crib in the arms of a man other than his father. His mother took off her blouse,
dropped the straps of her slip, and let the man who was not his father suck on her breasts. Tengo
slept beside them, his breathing audible. But, at the same time, he was not asleep. He was
watching his mother.
This was Tengo’s photograph of his mother. The tensecond scene was burned into his brain with
perfect clarity. It was the only concrete information he had about her, the one tenuous connection
his mind could make with her. He and she were linked by this hypothetical umbilical cord. His
father, however, had no idea that this vivid scene existed in Tengo’s memory, or that, like a cow
in a meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of it to chew on, a cud from which he
obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his
own secrets.
As an adult, Tengo often wondered if the young man sucking on his mother’s breasts in his
vision was his biological father. This was because Tengo in no way resembled his father, the
stellar NHK collections agent. Tengo was a tall, strapping man with a broad forehead, a narrow
nose, and tightly balled ears. His father was short and squat and utterly unimpressive. He had a
small forehead, a flat nose, and pointed ears like a horse’s. Where Tengo had a relaxed and
generous look, his father appeared nervous and tightfisted. Comparing the two of them, people
often openly remarked on their dissimilarity.
Still, it was not their physical features that made it difficult for Tengo to identify with his father
but their psychological makeup. His father showed no sign at all of what might be called
intellectual curiosity. True, having been born in poverty he had not had a decent education.
Tengo felt a degree of pity for his father’s circumstances. But a basic desire to obtain knowledge
—which Tengo assumed to be a more or less natural urge in people—was lacking in the man. He
had a certain practical wisdom that enabled him to survive, but Tengo could discern no hint of a
willingness in his father to deepen himself, to view a wider, larger world. Tengo’s father never
seemed to suffer discomfort fromthe stagnant air of his cramped little life. Tengo never once
saw him pick up a book. He had no interest in music or movies, and he never took a trip. The
only thing that seemed to interest him was his collection route. He would make a map of the
area, mark it with colored pens, and examine it whenever he had a spare moment, the way a
biologist might study chromosomes.
Tengo, by contrast, was curious about everything. He absorbed knowledge from a broad range of
fields with the efficiency of a power shovel scooping earth. He had been regarded as a math
prodigy from early childhood, and he could solve highschool math problems by the time he was
in third grade. Math was, for young Tengo, an effective means of retreat from his life with his
father. In the mathematical world, he would walk down a long corridor, opening one numbered
door after another. Each time a new spectacle unfolded before him, the ugly traces of the real
world would simply disappear. As long as he was actively exploring that realm of infinite
consistency, he was free.
While math was like a magnificent imaginary building for Tengo, literature was a vast magical
forest. Math stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, but stories spread out before him,
their sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In this forest there were no maps, no doorways.
As Tengo got older, the forest of story began to exert an even stronger pull on his heart than the
world of math. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape—as soon as he closed
the book, he had to come back to the real world. But at some point he noticed that returning to
reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of
math. Why was that? After much thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear things
might become in the forest of story, there was never a clearcut solution, as there was in math.
The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form.
Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the
narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece
of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical
purpose, but it contained a possibility.
The one possible solution that Tengo was able to decipher from his readings was this one: My
real father must be somewhere else. Like an unfortunate child in a Dickens novel,
Tengo had perhaps been led by strange circumstances to be raised by this impostor. Such a
possibility was both a nightmare and a great hope. After reading “Oliver Twist,” Tengo plowed
through every Dickens volume in the library. As he travelled through Dickens’s stories, he
steeped himself in reimagined versions of his own life. These fantasies grew ever longer and
more complex. They followed a single pattern, but with infinite variations. In all of them, Tengo
would tell himself that his father’s home was not where he belonged. He had been mistakenly
locked in this cage, and someday his real parents would find him and rescue him. Then he would
have the most beautiful, peaceful, and free Sundays imaginable.
Tengo’s father prided himself on his son’s excellent grades, and boasted of them to people in the
neighborhood. At the same time, however, he showed a certain displeasure with Tengo’s
brightness and talent. Often when Tengo was at his desk, studying, his father would interrupt
him, ordering the boy to do chores or nagging him about his supposedly offensive behavior. The
content of his father’s nagging was always the same: here he was, running himself ragged every
day, covering huge distances and enduring people’s curses, while Tengo did nothing but take it
easy all the time, living in comfort. “They had me working my tail off when I was your age, and
my father and older brothers would beat me black and blue for anything at all. They never gave
me enough food. They treated me like an animal. I don’t want you thinking you’re so special just
because you got a few good grades.”
This man is envious of me, Tengo began to think at a certain point. He’s jealous, either of me as
a person or of the life I’m leading. But would a father really feel jealousy toward his son? Tengo
did not judge his father, but he could not help sensing a pathetic kind of meanness emanating
from his words and deeds. It was not that Tengo’s father hated him as a person but, rather, that
he hated something inside Tengo, something that he could not forgive.
When the train left Tokyo Station, Tengo took out the paperback that he had brought along. It
was an anthology of short stories on the theme of travel and it included a tale called “Town of
Cats,” a fantastical piece by a German writer with whom Tengo was not familiar. According to
the book’s foreword, the story had been written in the period between the two World Wars.
In the story, a young man is travelling alone with no particular destination in mind. He rides the
train and gets off at any stop that arouses his interest. He takes a room, sees the sights, and stays
for as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he boards another train. He spends every
vacation this way.
One day, he sees a lovely river from the train window. Gentle green hills line the meandering
stream, and below them lies a pretty little town with an old stone bridge. The train stops at the
town’s station, and the young man steps down with his bag. No one else gets off, and, as soon as
he alights, the train departs.
No workers man the station, which must see very little activity. The young man crosses the
bridge and walks into the town. All the shops are shuttered, the town hall deserted. No one
occupies the desk at the town’s only hotel. The place seems totally uninhabited. Perhaps all the
people are off napping somewhere. But it is only tenthirty in the morning, far too early for that.
Perhaps something has caused all the people to abandon the town. In any case, the next train will
not come until the following morning, so he has no choice but to spend the night here. He
wanders around the town to kill time.
In fact, this is a town of cats. When the sun starts to go down, many cats come trooping across
the bridge—cats of all different kinds and colors. They are much larger than ordinary cats, but
they are still cats. The young man is shocked by this sight. He rushes into the bell tower in the
center of town and climbs to the top to hide. The cats go about their business, raising the shop
shutters or seating themselves at their desks to start their day’s work. Soon, more cats come,
crossing the bridge into town like the others. They enter the shops to buy things or go to the town
hall to handle administrative matters or eat a meal at the hotel restaurant or drink beer at the
tavern and sing lively cat songs. Because cats can see in the dark, they need almost no lights, but
that particular night the glow of the full moon floods the town, enabling the young man to see
every detail from his perch in the bell tower. When dawn approaches, the cats finish their work,
close up the shops, and swarm back across the bridge.
By the time the sun comes up, the cats are gone, and the town is deserted again. The young man
climbs down, picks one of the hotel beds for himself, and goes to sleep. When he gets hungry, he
eats some bread and fish that have been left in the hotel kitchen. When darkness approaches, he
hides in the bell tower again and observes the cats’ activities until dawn. Trains stop at the
station before noon and in the late afternoon. No passengers alight, and no one boards, either.
Still, the trains stop at the station for exactly one minute, then pull out again. He could take one
of these trains and leave the creepy cat town behind. But he doesn’t. Being young, he has a lively
curiosity and is ready for adventure. He wants to see more of this strange spectacle. If possible,
he wants to find out when and how this place became a town of cats.
On his third night, a hubbub breaks out in the square below the bell tower. “Hey, do you smell
something human?” one of the cats says. “Now that you mention it, I thought there was a
funny smell the past few days,” another chimes in, twitching his nose. “Me, too,” yet another cat
says. “That’s weird. There shouldn’t be any humans here,” someone adds. “No, of course not.
There’s no way a human could get into this town of cats.” “But that smell is definitely here.”
The cats form groups and begin to search the town like bands of vigilantes. It takes them very
little time to discover that the bell tower is the source of the smell. The young man hears their
soft paws padding up the stairs. That’s it, they’ve got me! he thinks. His smell seems to have
roused the cats to anger. Humans are not supposed to set foot in this town. The cats have big,
sharp claws and white fangs. He has no idea what terrible fate awaits him if he is discovered, but
he is sure that they will not let him leave the town alive.
Three cats climb to the top of the bell tower and sniff the air. “Strange,” one cat says, twitching
his whiskers, “I smell a human, but there’s no one here.”
“It is strange,” a second cat says. “But there really isn’t anyone here. Let’s go and look
somewhere else.”
The cats cock their heads, puzzled, then retreat down the stairs. The young man hears their
footsteps fading into the dark of night. He breathes a sigh of relief, but he doesn’t understand
what just happened. There was no way they could have missed him. But for some reason they
didn’t see him. In any case, he decides that when morning comes he will go to the station and
take the train out of this town. His luck can’t last forever.
The next morning, however, the train does not stop at the station. He watches it pass by without
slowing down. The afternoon train does the same. He can see the engineer seated at the controls.
But the train shows no sign of stopping. It is as though no one can see the young man waiting for
a train—or even see the station itself. Once the afternoon train disappears down the track, the
place grows quieter than ever. The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. The young
man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place
where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him.
And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world
he came from.
Tengo read the story twice. The phrase “the place where he is meant to be lost” attracted his
attention. He closed the book and let his eyes wander across the drab industrial scene passing by
the train window. Soon afterward, he drifted off to sleep—not a long nap but a deep one. He
woke covered in sweat. The train was moving along the southern coastline of the Boso Peninsula
in midsummer.
One morning when he was in fifth grade, after much careful thinking, Tengo declared that he
