This time, I kept my eyes open. It dawned on me that the entire time I had been asleep, I’d been seeing the disk (which was, I thought later, half metaphor and half hallucination) on a continuous loop, repeatedly tipping over and shattering into pieces. And now the phantom disk had somehow slipped behind the spines of the books on the shelf, and the books appeared to be falling over as if mowed down by machine-gun fire. With a supreme effort I extended my limp, inert right arm (really, it felt almost boneless) and switched off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness again. Even with the light off, I had a visceral sense that the unstable black disk was incessantly somersaulting around me, but imagining the disintegrative spinning was slightly more bearable than opening my eyes and actually seeming to see it. Clearly, the force that had ambushed me as I lay sleeping (or perhaps the ambush had only begun when I was swimming upstream toward a painful awakening) wasn’t abating at all. On the contrary, it was gathering strength and becoming ever more intense.
Without opening my eyes, I raised my upper body and tried to sit up, but since my torso was every bit as weak and floppy as my wet-noodle arms, the episode made me feel as if my upper body, too, was twirling around, and I immediately toppled over. As my faculties gradually returned, it struck me that this was the most extreme loss of equilibrium I had ever experienced by far. And in the midst of the epiphany — which was only possible because while my body (including my eyes) was overcome by wooziness, my brain was still functioning normally — I found myself thinking that this was surely just the beginning. As the affliction progressed, wouldn’t the next stage be epic, excruciating headaches? Also, with vertigo of this magnitude, wasn’t it likely that I would soon be assailed by violent spasms of nausea? Quickly, before either of those symptoms manifested, there was something I needed to attend to.
I opened my eyes. The disorienting tilt-a-whirl sensation caused me to quickly squeeze them shut again, but I was still able to get my bearings in relation to the contours of the room. Based on that brief reconnaissance I knew my first move should be to slide my body out of the bed and onto the floor, while keeping my eyes closed. However, when I tried to execute that simple maneuver it didn’t go too well.
I eventually managed to turn over onto my stomach, and from there I was finally able to tumble from the bed onto the floor. After lying inert for a moment I made my shaky way into the hall, creeping along on my weakened extremities. The dreaded headache hadn’t yet made its appearance, and as long as I kept my eyes closed I could think quite lucidly. (However, the moment I opened them my consciousness would immediately shatter into a million vertiginous fragments.) Keeping my eyes tightly shut, I slowly made my way down the hall toward the bathroom, crawling blindly along on all fours while I theorized about what might be happening. Something must be going haywire inside my brain, I speculated. Maybe some sort of aneurysm, or a stroke?
A number of my contemporaries had been stricken with this type of disorder out of the blue, and some had simply dropped dead on the spot. As for the ones who went on living, in many cases their mental acuity was adversely affected, and they were never the same again. If that happened to me it would be curtains for my work as a writer, and my life would effectively be over. I didn’t know whether I was about to suffer irreversible brain damage or die outright, but either way I would be finished as a novelist. Therefore, I concluded, I needed to tidy up all the loose ends of my work before the onset of the potentially fatal headache that, I felt certain, was waiting in the wings.
I thought first of my journalism projects. I wanted to have someone discard the entire lot — both the pieces I had just started drafting and the manuscripts that were further along. If I could leave behind a note containing those instructions, surely someone would carry out my wishes (although at the moment, nobody’s name sprang to mind). It occurred to me that in the empty space between the end of the bed and the south-facing window there was an armchair where I liked to sit and work, using a clipboard equipped with a supply of manuscript paper. In my present state there was no way I could have written a coherent last will and testament, or even held a fountain pen, but there were several fat, already sharpened pencils nearby — Lyra-brand colored pencils, made in Germany, in a deep sky blue — and I thought I could grab one of those and scribble something reasonably legible without having to open my eyes.
But what, exactly, was I going to tell my unnamed literary executor to dispose of? I couldn’t think of a thing, and it wasn’t because the seizure had scrambled my brain; on the contrary, I felt as though my mind was functioning with complete clarity. The reason nothing came to mind was that I really didn’t have any work in progress to speak of.
A complex wave of emotions — a kind of wretched, self-mocking contempt for my current state of being, coupled with a feeling of relief that I wouldn’t be leaving any important assignments uncompleted — washed over me. The existential bottom line seemed to be that the I who was here right now was already as good as dead. And if I was already dead, it was only natural that I wouldn’t experience the slightest fear of dying.
A moment later, though, I was hit by an avalanche of a different kind of apprehension: the concern that, as my mother had pointed out, I hadn’t done anything to prepare Akari for his own journey to the Other Side. If I had dared to look down at the poetry stone in the back garden I would surely have been plunged into depression by the realization that on the cusp of old age I had neglected my parental duties, my work was in shambles, and my life was essentially devoid of meaning.
Even so, against my better judgment, I opened my eyes. And before the diabolical disk came crashing down around me again, I imagined myself reading the first lines of the poem carved into the big round stone:
You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest
And like the river current, you won’t return home.
5
Three days after the terrifying dizzy spell, I was back at home in Seijo. As it happened, there was an excellent physician nearby (he had become a family friend and had helped us countless times), and he was optimistic about my prognosis. After listening carefully to my description of the extreme vertigo I had experienced just before leaving Shikoku, he said it would most likely be a transitory thing, and that cheered me up considerably. The doctor recommended waiting awhile before going to the hospital for a complete examination, and in the meantime I was dutifully taking the medications he’d prescribed.
I spent a week or so lounging around the house in recovery mode. One morning when I was asleep in my second-floor bedroom I was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs in the living room. I had heard from Chikashi that a side effect of Akari’s continuing depression was that he had stopped answering the phone. Since returning from Shikoku I’d been having trouble falling asleep at night, so I had been getting up after the rest of the family had already finished lunch, but when I glanced at the clock on the wall it showed half past nine. I got out of bed, and as I was making my groggy way down the stairs the phone stopped ringing.
Akari was perched on the edge of a dining-room chair, leaning backward with both feet propped on a second chair while he stared at the five-line composition paper he was holding on his knees. He was the very picture of a middle-aged man in the throes of deep depression. Even so, he appeared to be engrossed in erasing one section of his composition, and he didn’t look up when I entered the room.