“It was strange to find out my parents survived,” Seiji continued. “Over the decades, I dreamt up hundreds of scenarios to allow them this outcome. Almost always, I was the linchpin, the crafty son who’d lead them through the bombs to safety. I rehearsed this again and again, as if repetition could change reality.” He chuckled, a chalky scratch that rustled up a mess of coughs. Masaaki offered his water bottle, but Seiji waved it away. “In the times I didn’t play the hero, it was my parents who’d find me, weeks or months or years later. At no time did I imagine you. But it’s you I found. It was like turning a blind corner I’d spent years forging and finding a figure I didn’t put there. I kept asking myself, which is worse: to never know your parents, or to discover they’d adopted a new child and moved on?”
Masaaki cracked open his water bottle; the warm liquid rolled down the desert of his throat. He too had weighed this question. An orphan who’d never known his parents, he’d nevertheless grown up with a mother and father taken, as it happened, from the very man sitting before him. Objectively, it was nobody’s fault except humanity’s violence, but it was a fragile comfort. The same war might have orphaned them both, but their differences were stark, Seiji’s face and body mottled by incendiaries while Masaaki lived his entire life in comfort, cradled by the very country whose imperial ambitions had subjugated and killed his biological parents. Now Seiji’s appearance only deepened his guilt, amplifying the anxiety he’d lived with since he learned of his adoption: that his life, even his identity, had been borrowed. And not only borrowed, it turned out, but usurped from someone who’d been relegated to society’s fringes to dream up blind corners around which he might find his parents. The irony was that Seiji could’ve found them if he’d looked twenty, maybe even fifteen, years earlier—an easy thought for Masaaki, with his laptop and Internet and the benefits of mainstream life he’d been accorded. Instead, their parents had left Masaaki the house and the family plot, its chamber spacious enough to accept him when his own time came. It had seemed an inevitable conclusion: to rest with this family history had cloven. Now he wasn’t sure he belonged.
“Obviously, I wasn’t surprised they were gone,” Seiji went on. “Still, my disappointment was proportionate to the hope I felt when I first learned they’d survived. To find out so late—would it have been better if I never found out at all?” He chuckled again, a brief sound he confined to his throat this time. “At least I know they were well cared for. It didn’t escape me that my father died the same year that puppet Hirohito died, may His Radiance rest in perpetual remorse. So, I should be grateful. Don’t get me wrong. I am.” He lifted a jug Masaaki hadn’t noticed and poured himself a cup of water. In the half-light the jug trembled and the water sloshed, but Seiji was no longer fussy. “What I’m trying to work out is what we ultimately mean to each other.”
Masaaki watched the cup tip, a pale moon against a craggy summit, and the room filled with the ugly sound of a discordant body slaking itself. Since Seiji’s confinement to this room, Masaaki had insisted that he move in with him—into what was, after all, their parents’ house—but Seiji had refused. Rather than relieved, Masaaki found himself miffed. He and Seiji had no obligations to one another, but hostage to each other, he had come to find Seiji’s presence uncomfortably anchoring. Masaaki had been in his forties when he’d learned of his adoption—a midlife cataclysm that had sent him lurching from a family life in the United States to a solitary one devoted to tracking down information about his biological parents. Nothing had come of it except loss: loss of time; loss of his wife and two daughters; loss of all tether. Was this so different from the vanishing Seiji must have experienced, banished behind a one-way mirror through which he could see the lit world in which he didn’t exist? Masaaki didn’t think so. There was comfort in that.
Across the room, the curtains rippled, bubbles of sunlight spitting their bright coins. It was a cool afternoon, the breeze busily shifting its cargo of sounds and smells—the tinkle of a bicycle, the burnt tang of yakitori gristle—before collapsing in the gathered shade like a sulky smoker. Seiji adjusted his pillow and interlaced his hands. “Months ago, you gave me a book by a famous Argentinian writer. In it, there’s a story about a Chinese spy, working for the German Reich, who must convey the location of a British artillery park before an Irish captain, working for the English police, silences him. The story opens just after the spy discovers the artillery park, and in the gathering shadow of the approaching Irish captain, the spy finds himself paralyzed by the problem of how to relay the information to Germany. I assume you know the story.”
Masaaki not only knew the story but remembered the trouble through which he’d gone to purchase the Japanese translation of the book he’d read in English, itself a translation of the original written in Spanish. In his former life as an academic living in the United States he’d found the book, and especially this story, provocative, with its themes of duty and dislocation, war and empire, loyalty and betrayal, and the unavoidable perversions that twist the actions of the subjugated who are pitted against each other in self-abnegating violence. He’d been curious what Seiji might think. When the book went unmentioned for weeks, Masaaki had presumed it forgotten. Now Seiji was bringing up the very story he’d hoped to discuss, but his tone was bladed. “You mean ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ ” Masaaki said. His own voice, thin and cobwebbed, floated in the dimness and vanished in the shimmer between the curtains.
Seiji nodded, his hands a rock in the still pool of his futon. “To reach Germany, to be heard above the din of war, our spy knows his message must transmit as precisely as a gunshot. He decides to murder a man whose last name is identical to the name of the town where the artillery park is located; his own name, coupled with his victim’s, in a news article would unequivocally reach the German chief. But first, he, a conspicuous Chinese man, must reach his victim, who lives a train ride away in the English countryside.” He paused, sipped his water, then continued.
“Luck favors our spy, and by a hair-raising margin he eludes the Irish captain. And following a set of cryptic but oddly familiar directions given to him by some children milling about the station—take a left at every crossroads—he arrives at his victim’s house: an oddly familiar pavilion spellbound with Chinese music. There, he meets his victim: a tall, elderly Englishman who greets him in Chinese. Their meeting is sublime. While the two men have never met, their roots turn out to be entwined: once a missionary stationed in China, the Englishman is an aspiring sinologist intimately familiar with the works of the spy’s great-grandfather, an illustrious Chinese man of letters with a passion for mazes, especially the garden mazes for which he’d been renowned. Sitting together in the cloister of the sinologist’s pavilion, discussing the great man’s work, the two men discover they’re kindred. Yet the decision to kill hangs over the spy like the noose that awaits him, unavoidably, in his future.”