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happened.

    —Other than this boy, Nakata, none of the other children showed any symptoms later on?
    As far as any outward signs at least, no, they displayed no unusual symptoms. No one complained of pain or discomfort. As soon as we got back to the school I brought the children into the nurse's room one by one and examined them—took their temperature, listened to their heart with a stethoscope, checked their vision. Whatever I was able to do at the time I did. I had them solve some simple arithmetic problems, stand on one foot with their eyes closed, things like that. Physically they were fine. They didn't seem tired and had healthy appetites. They'd missed lunch so they all said they were hungry. We gave them rice balls to eat, and they gobbled them up.
    A few days later I stopped by the school to observe how the children were doing.
    I called a few of them into the nurse's room and questioned them. Again, though, everything seemed fine. No traces remained, physically or emotionally, from their strange experience. They couldn't even remember that it had happened. Their lives were completely back to normal, unaffected by the incident. They attended class as usual, sang songs, played outside during recess, everything normal kids did. Their homeroom teacher, however, was a different story: she still seemed in shock.
    But that one boy, Nakata, didn't regain consciousness, so the following day he was taken to the university hospital in Kofu. After that he was transferred to a military hospital, and never came back to our town again. I never heard what became of him.
    This incident never made the newspapers. My guess is the authorities decided it would only cause unrest, so they banned any mention of it. You have to remember that during the war the military tried to squelch whatever they saw as groundless rumors.

    The war wasn't going well, with the military retreating on the southern front, suicide attacks one after the other, air raids on cities getting worse all the time. The military was especially afraid of any antiwar or pacifist sentiment cropping up among the populace.
    A few days after the incident the police came calling and warned us that under no circumstances were we to talk about what we'd seen.
    The whole thing was an odd, unpleasant affair. Even to this day it's like a weight pressing down on me.

Chapter 5
    I'm asleep when our bus drives across the huge new bridge over the Inland Sea. I'd seen the bridge only on maps and had been looking forward to seeing it for real. Somebody gently taps me on the shoulder and I wake up.
    "Hey, we're here," the girl says.
    I stretch, rub my eyes with the back of my hand, and look out the window. Sure enough, the bus is just pulling into what looks like the square in front of a station. Fresh morning sunlight lights up the scene. Almost blinding, but gentle somehow, the light is different from what I was used to in Tokyo. I glance at my watch .6:32.
    "Gosh, what a long trip," she says tiredly. "I thought my lower back was going to give out. And my neck's killing me. You aren't going to catch me on an all-night bus again. I'm taking the plane from now on, even if it's more expensive. Turbulence, hijackings—I don't care. Give me a plane any day."
    I lower her suitcase and my backpack from the overhead rack. "What's your name?" I ask.
    "My name?"
    "Yeah."
    "Sakura," she says. "What about you?"
    "Kafka Tamura," I reply.
    "Kafka Tamura," she muses. "Weird name. Easy to remember, though."
    I nod. Becoming a different person might be hard, but taking on a different name is a cinch.
    She gets off the bus, sets her suitcase on the ground, and plunks herself down on top, then pulls a notebook from a pocket in her small backpack, scribbles down something, rips the page out, and hands it to me. A phone number, by the looks of it.
    "My cell phone number," she says with a wry expression. "I'm staying at my friend's place for a while, but if you ever feel like seeing somebody, give me a