It had been a long time since Kizu had felt so at ease in the midst of people he didn't know and he settled back, giving himself up to the motion of the train.

Even after they left the cities surrounding Tokyo, the hills and valleys were filled with houses, and in the rare patches of greenery, bulldozers were busily scraping away the last vestiges of nature. In America one would never find such uniform scenery like this. Kizu was surprised to see, on the slope of one mountain, a row of twenty identical houses. The scenery was moving by at a faster clip than he remembered. He spied some tall buildings crowded together beside a river in a valley between two steep mountain slopes and sus- pected they were in a region of hot springs, though he wondered whether there really was a hot springs so near to Tokyo. Meanwhile, after passing through a short tunnel they went through the city of Atami. The Bullet train lived up to its name.

Mount Fuji suddenly appeared, like a raised dark-gray plane, and three lines of leftover snow on it flowed by as streaks of dull white. After this, mountains and forests appeared only sporadically between the towns. Kizu had always had a mental image of train travel in Japan as express trains run- ning past rice fields and mountain forests, and all the towns made him feel a bit uncomfortable. He turned to Ikuo beside him and grumbled out a com- plaint.

"One of my colleagues at the institute traveled in Japan and told me the whole country's nothing but cities and suburbs. I told him to try taking a long- distance train. 'You'll see some pastoral scenery, real Japanese hills and fields; once you change to a local line it'll be even more like that,' I insisted. But look at this-it's all houses or roads or construction sites for new subdivisions. And we've been traveling for an hour at least."

"On Hokkaido, though," Ikuo said, "all you'll see from the train is mountains and fields. I'm sure that once we cross the Seto Bridge and start into Shikoku there'll be a lot more natural scenery."

"You mean until then it's all like this? I was looking forward to chat- ting with Dr. Koga while we enjoyed looking out at the mountains or the sea.

Japan's certainly not what I expected."

"Now that you've given up on the scenery," Ikuo said, in a rare joking way, "maybe it's about time to start talking with Dr. Koga? It's a long trip, and I suppose he felt in no hurry to come over."

"Maybe he's holding back on my account. We're all going to be one big happy family from now on, so I suppose it's high time I changed and stopped being so standoffish."

The relaxed feelings the trip had engendered in Kizu brought on this remark, but Ikuo's response was blunt. "You got that right. I think you will have to change," he said. "I'll switch seats with Dr. Koga. The scenery won't be rural for quite some time."

2

Ikuo took Dr. Koga's seat, while the doctor strode over to where Kizu was sitting. Under thick eyebrows a smile much younger than his years sparkled in his deep-set eyes; he sat down and without any real greeting launched into the topic of Kizu's physical condition.

"The doctor you consulted in Tokyo was a year or so behind me in medical school. When things got out of hand during the student movement period he transferred to a university in California. He's a man who knows how to get ahead, I'll give him that. When you look at how efficiently he handles things like getting me to take over your case, you'll see I'm no match for him.

"The place where we'll be living is an hour and a half from the Red Cross Hospital in Matsuyama-provided the traffic's light. Some areas in the Tokyo area are even farther from a decent hospital, so I wouldn't worry if I were you. I will do whatever's necessary."

Kizu didn't expect to hear anything more at this point from the doctor who'd be caring for him. He nodded, relaxed by Dr. Koga's smile.

"We'll be together from now on so there's no need to rush, but I do have some questions I'd like to ask, if that's all right?" Dr. Koga looked ready to stand up and leave if Kizu hesitated.

"Yes, I'd like that," Kizu said. "The reason I haven't come over to talk with you is that I've been looking out the window, waiting impatiently for us to get someplace where there aren't any more buildings or roads. Now that I think about it, though, it's silly to imagine they'd build a bullet train through remote mountains and valleys."

Dr. Koga settled back down in his seat and gazed out the window. He seemed to speak only when he wanted to discuss the business at hand, which Kizu found refeshing.

"Did your doctor explain the symptoms of your disease to you clearly?"

Dr. Koga asked. "Typically, that only happens when an immediate operation is indicated, at which point the patient gets pretty busy, with little time to consider the situation carefully. When you were given the prognosis, though, you didn't have an operation-you didn't have any proper treatment, either.

Instead, you've done what most patients don't get a chance to do-think deeply about your condition. I'd like to ask you, not out of simple curiosity but as a physician: Has this prognosis brought about any psychological change?"

Kizu mentioned what came to mind first. "My sense of time has changed," he said. "Actually, I'd been feeling that change even before this latest diagnosis-which made me realize all over again how I'd been feel- ing that way for some time. This might not be the answer you're looking for, though."

"No, what I wanted to find out was exactly that, whether you'd felt this way before."

"There's one example I can give you," Kizu said. "At the beginning of last week, Okinawa was hit directly by a typhoon, and it affected the weather in Tokyo, making it unusually warm. That afternoon I was resting in bed.

And I felt then that the passage of time perfectly suited me. It wasn't just a fleeting notion but something I'd been feeling the entire morning: a calm sense of satisfaction, I suppose. As if the world's clock and my internal spiritual clock-my soul, if you will-were completely in sync.

"I'm sure I'm not unique in this regard, but when I first became con- scious of time as a child I already felt that the world moved too slowly. Say I was told to wait somewhere for an hour; it seemed so long I couldn't stand it.

And when I thought of living ten, twenty years-one hour piled on top of another-it scared the wits out of me. Then I realized I'd already lived three years, or five years, or whatever it was, and with the inevitability of death I'd already used up a measurable portion of the finite amount of time allotted me, and that frightened me too.

"When I reached my thirties and forties and was teaching in the uni- versity, however, it made me choke up when I felt how fast time raced by, particularly the spring semester. I felt this in chunks of a day or a week, and I could see the free time between teaching that I wanted to use for my own painting eroding right before my eyes.

"Time was either at a standstill or racing by, and either way it didn't fit my own internal clock. Now, though, I've come to feel that Time with a capital T and my individual sense of time are a perfect fit."

Dr. Koga was staring out the window at a line of woods streaming by that was unblemished by buildings or roads, his gaze all the more intent for the knowledge that this scene would soon disappear. And when he spoke his voice was content, not just with what he saw but with what he'd heard. "It's a good feeling, a sense of balance, I suppose," he said.

"I'm just an ordinary person," Kizu went on, "so before long my inner clock will get out of tempo with the world again, going either too fast or too slow, which makes me all the more reluctant to give up this sense of time-in- sync I've been having lately. It's the sensation that I'm less an animal and more like a plant."