Natsume Sōseki — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

I had gone to the archive, as I go most Thursdays, for no reason that would survive translation into any language a sensible man might use to justify his hours. The rain that morning had the particular indecision of Tokyo rain in the tenth month—falling, then reconsidering, then falling again as though embarrassed by its own commitment—and I remember thinking that this was as good a metaphor as any for my scholarship of the last decade: a great deal of falling, very little wetting of the ground.

The archive keeper, a man named Sekiguchi whom I had known since we were both young enough to believe our opinions mattered to someone, met me at the door with the expression of a man who has been waiting to tell you something disagreeable and is pleased, in a professional sort of way, that you have finally arrived to receive it.

"The Ōkubo clock has started again," he said.

"Started," I repeated, in the manner of a man repeating a foreign word to see if it sounds less foreign the second time.

"Running backwards. Since Tuesday."

I should explain, for the reader who has not had the peculiar misfortune of my acquaintance, that the Ōkubo clock is a mechanism of some antiquity housed in the eastern annex, built—so the catalogue card insists, though catalogue cards insist a great many things—by a clockmaker of the old Tenpō era who apparently distrusted the forward march of hours enough to build a machine that occasionally, and without any warning that modern science has been able to detect, reverses itself. For thirty years it had sat dead as a shrine bell with no rope. Now, Sekiguchi informed me with the flat satisfaction of a man delivering bad news he has not yet decided is bad, it ticked. Backwards. Audibly.

"And you called me," I said, "because—"

"Because you are the only man I know who would find this interesting rather than alarming."

Here is where I ought to report that I felt some scholarly thrill, the pulse-quickening of discovery that populates the memoirs of men more disciplined than I. Instead I felt cold, and faintly put upon, and I said so.

"It is only interesting," I told him, "in the sense that a drunk man walking backwards down a street is interesting. One watches to see if he falls. One does not conclude that walking backwards is the superior method of locomotion."

Sekiguchi did not laugh, which I count against him, though in fairness laughter had not been my object.

We went in together to look at it—the mechanism sat under glass in a room that also housed, with what I have always considered a failure of curatorial imagination, three broken abacuses, a lacquer box whose provenance no one has established in my lifetime, and the diary of a minor domain official who recorded, with heroic tedium, the weather for eleven consecutive years and nothing else. The clock's hands moved with a small, deliberate insolence, counter to every clock I had ever trusted, ticking off seconds that had, by any reasonable accounting, already been spent.

It was while standing there, watching those hands retreat into a past they had no business revisiting, that I thought—absurdly, I grant you, but a man's mind at fifty does not always consult him before it wanders—of my nephew's telephone device, the one on which he had, some months before, shown me with the pride of a boy displaying a new insect a sort of ledger of unmarried women, each attached to a photograph, a list of preferences, a percentage figure indicating compatibility, as though the human heart were a sum that could be checked by an abacus more sophisticated than the broken ones gathering dust three feet from where I stood.

"You tell it what you want," he had said, "and it tells you who wants it too."

"And if it is wrong?"

"It is rarely wrong. It has data."

I had said nothing further at the time, being a guest in his home and disinclined to lecture a young man on a machine I did not understand in service of a conclusion I could not have defended. But standing before the Ōkubo clock, watching its hands walk obediently backward through hours already exhausted, I understood at last what had troubled me in my nephew's device: it was not that it moved forward too confidently. It was that it pretended time could be organized at all—filed, cross-referenced, made to answer to percentage and preference—when the truth, as any clockmaker of the old school might have told you over a cup of somewhat bitter tea, is that time is exactly as unreliable as this ruined mechanism suggests, and no more honest for pretending otherwise.

"Well," said Sekiguchi, when I had said some version of this aloud, though considerably less well-organized, "what do you propose we do with it?"

"Do?" I said. "I propose we watch it fail. That is, after all, the only reliable feature of any mechanism, old or new."

He wrote something in his ledger—I did not ask what—and outside the rain resumed its indecision, and the clock went on counting backward toward some origin it would never quite reach, and I found myself, not for the first time, envying its confidence in the wrong direction.

It was into this arithmetic of reversal that, three days later, the rogue arrived—though "rogue" is my word and not one he would have accepted, being a man who described himself, on the card he pressed into my hand before I had properly seen his face, as a "Consultant in Temporal Antiquities, Overseas Clientele Welcomed." His name was Kanai. He had the particular brightness of eye that I have learned, over fifty years of disappointing acquaintances, to associate with men who have found a way to monetize other people's grief, and he had heard—Tokyo being a village dressed as a city—that the Ōkubo clock had begun to run backwards, and he wished, he said, to be of assistance.

"Assistance," I repeated, in the same foreign-word manner I had used on Sekiguchi, though this time the word sounded no better for the repeating.

"There are collectors," Kanai said, settling into a chair he had not been offered, "who would pay handsomely for a mechanism with this sort of story attached. Not the clock itself—forgive me, I don't mean disrespect to the institution—but the narrative. A clock that refuses the forward direction of time. You understand the market for such things is considerable, especially abroad. I could have a listing prepared within the week. Photographs. A short essay on provenance—I gather you might write it, given your position here. We would want to establish urgency, of course. Scarcity. These things sell on scarcity."

I confess that for one uncharitable moment I pictured Kanai's proposed essay sharing shelf space with my life's other unpublished labors, and I found the comparison did not flatter either document.

"You want," I said slowly, "to attach a compatibility percentage to a clock."

He blinked, not understanding, which was itself a kind of answer.

"Never mind," I said. "Tell me, Kanai-san, what happens to the narrative once the clock stops running backwards. As it must. Mechanisms of this age are not known for their constancy in any direction."

"Then the piece appreciates further," he said, without hesitation, the way a man answers a question he has anticipated and rehearsed. "A clock that ran backwards and then simply stopped—there is poetry in that too. Poetry sells."

Sekiguchi, standing by the glass case with the particular stillness of a man deciding whether a joke has been made at his expense, said nothing at all, which I took to be his most eloquent contribution to the conversation.

I did not, in the end, write Kanai's essay. I told him the mechanism was the property of the ward and not of sentiment, which was a lie of convenience, since sentiment was the only thing anyone in that room actually owned. He left his card a second time, as though the first had been insufficiently persuasive, and I have it still, in a drawer with three other cards from men who wished to purchase, at various points in my life: a set of my late father's inkstones, the rights to a minor essay on Bashō I had published and forgotten, and—this the most recent, and the most instructive—a subscription to a service that promised to locate, "through advanced compatibility algorithms," a wife suited to a man of my temperament and income, as though temperament could be tabulated like the weather in that domain official's diary, eleven years of rain recorded and nothing learned from any of it.

The clock, for what it is worth, stopped on the following Monday, mid-tick, its hands arrested at twenty minutes past an hour that meant nothing to anyone living. Sekiguchi found it so and did not call me until Thursday, my appointed day, as though the news could wait for its proper vessel the way a letter waits for the post.

"It's stopped," he said.

"Then it has achieved," I said, "the only honest condition available to any clock, forward or backward-running: silence."

He wrote this down too, in his ledger, which I have come to understand functions for him much as my own irregular pages function for me—a place where observations go to be filed under a heading of Not Yet Understood, awaiting a reader neither of us expects to arrive.

I did not ask what would happen to the mechanism now—whether it would be catalogued as a curiosity, sold despite my objection to Kanai's version of the same fate, or simply shut back into its case among the abacuses and the lacquer box, to gather the particular dust that gathers on things a museum has decided are dead. I found I did not want to know. There is a mercy, I have come to think, in mechanisms that stop rather than mechanisms that are stopped, in griefs that close themselves rather than being closed by the hand of a well-meaning clerk with a ledger and a schedule.

My nephew called that evening, cheerful in the manner of the young, to tell me his device had produced, at last, a woman of eighty-one percent compatibility, and did I not think that remarkable.

"Remarkable," I agreed, watching the rain resume outside my own glass doors, indecisive as ever, falling and reconsidering and falling again, keeping no time that any mechanism, old or new, could be trusted to record.