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other at the breakfast table, Kogito’s mother began to speak in the local Iyo dialect, which tends to feature more exclamatory sentences than standard Japanese. “I’ve been praying for a chance to see you since the beginning of last spring, Kogito!” she began. (It was already fall.) “And now that you’re sitting here, I still half feel as if it’s my fantasy eating breakfast in front of me. It doesn’t help that I can barely hear what you’re saying—of course, I’ve gotten quite deaf, and on top of that you still don’t open your mouth wide enough when you speak, just like when you were a child!
    “But anyway, right now I feel as if this is half reality and half fanciful daydream! Besides, lately, no matter what’s going on, I’m never entirely certain that it’s really happening! When I was wishing that I could see you, it almost seemed as though half of you was already here. At times like that, if I voiced my opinions to you out loud, the other people in the house would just laugh indulgently. However, if you happened to be on televisiontalking about something and I said to the TV set, ‘You’re wrong about that, you know,’ even my great-grandchild would jump in and try to stop me, saying, ‘That’s rude to Uncle Kogito.’ They think it’s amusing when I talk to an invisible person, but isn’t the television itself a kind of fantastical illusion? Just because there’s no machine attached to my private hallucinations, does that make them any less ‘real’ than the images on TV? I mean, what’s the basis for that kind of thinking?
    “Anyway, it seems as if almost everything is already an apparition to me, you know? Everyday life seems like television, and I can’t tell whether somebody is really here with me or not. I’m surrounded by apparitions. One day soon I, too, will stop being real, and I’ll become nothing more than a phantasm myself! But this valley has always been swarming with specters, so I may not even notice when I make the shift over to the Other Side.”
    After Kogito finished his breakfast, his younger sister gave him a ride to Matsuyama Airport so he could catch a plane that left before noon. When his sister called Chikashi in Tokyo to report that Kogito’s departure had gone according to plan, she added, “As Mother was nodding off after breakfast, she said, ‘A little while ago I saw an apparition of Kogito, and we had a nice chat.’”
    When he heard this story later, Kogito felt unexpectedly moved by his mother’s remark. After committing suicide, Goro hadn’t really noticed that he’d left this world and become a spirit on the Other Side, had he? When he thought about it that way, Kogito came to see the fluidity between the two dimensions as a positive thing—especially late at night, after he’d been talking to Goro through the magical medium of Tagame.

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    During Kogito’s Tagame sessions with Goro, he noticed that things got livelier, and he was able to enter more spontaneously into the discussion, when Goro began reminiscing about their early student days in Matsuyama. At times like that, Kogito could ignore the Terrible Thud (his private shorthand for Goro’s baffling suicide). If he didn’t have to worry that the conversation might end up being about the future, he was able to follow the rules he’d set up, to the letter. Conversely, whenever a dialogue concluded with a mention of future plans, the Rules of Tagame could be thrown into disarray.
    On one cassette tape, Goro was trying to reconstruct the details of a conversation that had taken place when he and Kogito were both in their twenties. “Remember when we were talking about how, once upon a time, there used to be some truly great writers? And I was wondering whether really major, transcendent writers like that still exist in the world—and if so, are any of them Japanese? That was the gist of the discussion, and we even made a list of candidates. After a bit I revised thequestion and