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believe that Goro’s soul really exists in that state. It’s different than if I were just playing back a tape recording of his voice. What Goro left in place for me is a very special system. To be sure, his soul has made the transition into a space that’s different from this space that you and I still inhabit. But it just so happens that Tagame is a conduit between this space and that one. That’s how it works.”
    The hypothetical friend is still skeptical. “But when you and Goro aren’t having one of your Tagame talks, what form does he take on the Other Side?” he asks. “Wait, let me rephrase that. When Tagame isn’t connecting you to the Goro beyond Tagame, how does Goro exist in relation to you?”
    “To tell you the truth,” Kogito would be forced to admit, “when we aren’t talking on Tagame, I really can’t think very clearly about Goro.”
    “So the machine you call Tagame acts as an intermediary and makes Goro’s spirit a reality for you. In that case, I guess you can’t reduce it to the more general question of whether a person’s soul exists after death.”
    “That’s right, although the conversations I have with Goro, through Tagame, have also changed the way I think about my own death. As for the deaths of my mentor, Professor Musumi, who did so much for me when I was at university and afterward as well, and my old friend Takamura, the composer, I now believe that there must be a way to communicate with theirdeparted spirits, too, wherever they may be. I don’t happen to have a conduit to Professor Musumi or Takamura, but I like to think that there are people out there who have their own versions of Tagame and are using them to talk to the souls of those two, beyond the grave.”
    While Kogito was carrying on this sort of imaginary conversation, why didn’t he think about the possibility of another Tagame system to keep Goro connected with his sister, Chikashi? (Never mind that Kogito’s posthumous conversations with Goro were the direct cause of the tremendous strain on his own relationship with Chikashi.) Perhaps it was because Kogito was conscious that his Tagame chats with Goro were his own private realm. Besides, Chikashi was a remarkably self-reliant person, independent from Kogito and from Goro, as well; not at all the type, Kogito thought, who would be drawn into that kind of fantasy game. And surely Goro must have been thinking along the same lines.
    One year, Kogito was invited to speak at Kyushu University. While he was in the Green Room waiting for his lecture to begin, he happened to glance at a timetable and discovered that if he skipped the banquet with the other participants and hopped on the next ferryboat to Shikoku, then transferred to a Japan Railways train, he could be back at his childhood home, deep in the forest, before the night was over. He asked the assistant professor who was looking after him to make the travel arrangements, and the tickets were purchased while Kogito was delivering his lecture.
    By the time Kogito made his way to the house where he was born, it was after 11 PM and his mother had already gone to sleep. The next morning, Kogito was up early. When hepeered down the covered passageway that led to an adjoining bungalow, he could see the silhouette of his naked mother, illuminated by the reflected river-dazzle that leaked into the dark parlor through the gaps in the wooden rain shutters. Backlit like that, Kogito’s elderly mother looked like a young girl as (with the help of her sister-in-law) she twined the turban she always wore in public around her head. At that moment, his mother didn’t seem to belong entirely to this world; it was as if she had already begun to make the transition over to the Other Side. Her abnormally large ear, which resembled a fish’s dorsal fin, was hanging down from her emaciated profile, almost as if that misshapen appendage itself was absorbed in deep meditation.
    Later, when they were sitting across from each