Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami Page B

Nights I tackle the complete works of Natsume Soseki—there're still a couple of his novels I haven't read yet. At five I exit the library. So most of the day I'm in the gym or the library. As long as I'm in one of those two, nobody seems to worry about me. Chances are pretty slim a kid skipping school would hang out in either one. I eat dinner at the diner in front of the station. I try to eat as many vegetables as I can, and occasionally buy fruit from a stand and peel it using the knife I took from my father's desk. I buy cucumbers and celery, wash them in the sink at the hotel, and eat them with mayonnaise. Sometimes I pick up a container of milk from the mini-mart and have a bowl of cereal.
    Back in my room I jot down what I did that day in my diary, listen to Radiohead on my Walkman, read a little, and then it's lights out at eleven. Sometimes I masturbate before going to sleep. I think about the girl at the front desk, putting any thoughts of her potentially being my sister out of my head, for the time being. I hardly watch any TV or read any newspapers.
    But on the evening of the eighth day—as had to happen sooner or later—this simple, centripetal life is blown to bits.

Chapter 8
    U.S. ARMY INTELLIGENCE SECTION (MIS) REPORT
    Dated: May 12, 1946
    Title: Report on the Rice Bowl Hill Incident, 1944
    Document Number: PTYX-722-8936745-42216-WWN
    The following is a taped interview with Doctor Shigenori Tsukayama (52), professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, Tokyo Imperial University, which took place over a three-hour span at the GHQ of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Documentation related to the interview can be accessed using application number PTYX-722-SQ-267 to 291. [Note: Documents 271 and 278 are missing.]
    Impressions of the interviewer, Lt. Robert O'Connor: Professor Tsukayama was quite calm and relaxed throughout the interview, as one might expect of an expert of his caliber. He is one of the leading psychiatrists in Japan and has published a number of outstanding books on the subject. Unlike most Japanese, he avoids vague statements, drawing a sharp distinction between facts and conjecture. Before the war he was an exchange scholar at Stanford, and is quite fluent in English. He is surely well liked and respected by many.
    We were ordered by the military to immediately undertake an examination of the children in question. It was the middle of November 1944. It was quite unusual for us to receive requests or orders from the military. The military, of course, had its own extensive medical branch, and being a self-contained entity that put a high priority on secrecy, they usually preferred to handle matters internally. Apart from the rare times when they needed the special knowledge and techniques that only outside researchers or physicians had, they seldom appealed to civilian doctors or researchers.
    Thus when they broached this we immediately surmised that something extraordinary had occurred. Frankly, I didn't like to work under military directions. In most cases their goals were strictly utilitarian, with no interest in pursuing truth in an academic sense, only arriving at conclusions that accorded with their preconceptions.
    They weren't the type of people swayed by logic. But it was wartime and we couldn't very well say no. We had to keep quiet and do exactly as we were told.
    We'd been continuing our research despite the American air raids. Most of our undergrads and grad students, though, had been drafted. Students in psychiatry weren't exempt for the draft, unfortunately. When the order came from the military we dropped everything and took a train to [name deleted] in Yamanashi Prefecture. There were three of us—myself and a colleague from the Psychiatry Department, as well as a research physician from the Department of Neurosurgery with whom we'd been conducting research.
    As soon as we got there they warned us that what they were about to reveal was a