The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto Page B

that. He had remarried, too, and they had kids. So I decided I’d live on my own, and then, well, I had enough money so it wasn’t like I had to work like mad to make ends meet or anything, and I’m certainly not a big spender, so all of a sudden I found myself with lots of time on my hands. I thought a lot about what I should do. I wanted something where I wouldn’t have to deal with people too much, and where I could keep my involvement to a minimum, so I’d be able to do my own stuff, and ideally I thought it’d be nice if I could make people’s lives better—that’s the life I wanted. And after looking into various options, I settled on genetic research.”
    “But why would you want to pick something so difficult?” I said. “Did you know someone around you who did the same kind of thing?”
    He paused awkwardly again before he continued. “Well, yeah. When I was away from my parents, the one adult I felt close to had graduated from a department like that with a degree in genetics, and hearing about the topic from him made me think it might be interesting to learn more. And then after my mother died, I was all alone and I was depressed, and since I had nothing else to do I studied constantly. I was totally obsessed. Of course, it was all focused on passing the entrance exams for university. I didn’t want to deal with people, so I didn’t go to cram school or anything, I just did it all myself.”
    He went on to explain his methods in detail, at great length.
    I wanted to ask why he’d been separated from his parents, but I didn’t. I just listened.
    He said he taught himself to concentrate really fiercely, to cut his mind off from his body. He found that it wasn’t all that hard, but he also discovered that it was a dangerous thing to do in the real world.
    The story was as strange as his tone was bland.
    By the time he got into the university he was aiming for, he weighed forty-five pounds less than he had before he started. He had stopped being able to eat at all, and he collapsed on a road somewhere and found himself in the hospital. They had to feed him through an intravenous drip—otherwise he wouldn’t have survived.
    “Sounds like the wrong way to go about becoming a doctor,” I said.
    He laughed like crazy at that. It’s true he’s in the graduate school of medicine at his university, but he said none of the students in his program are training to become doctors. It’s a program for future researchers.
    Once Nakajima started studying he couldn’t stop, and his grades got even better when he figured out how to detach his mind from his body; he got so engrossed in what he was doing that he felt as if he could have forgotten about his body altogether.
    “The only thing was,” he said, “I realized then, in a pretty painful way, that there’s always a lag before the body responds to the orders the mind sends out.”
    “A lag? What do you mean?”
    “It was fairly easy in the beginning, when I’d do this self-hypnosis thing, setting it up so that my body would function at the absolute minimum and all the energy would get routed to my mind instead. That much was no problem, and I guess that made me overconfident. The catch was—I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s like the process accelerated once it got underway, and even if I sent out the order to my body to engage again so that I could get some nutrition and move my limbs and stuff, even when I was really trying, it was like a merry-go-round, the way it can only stop very gradually, by spinning slower and slower. I hadn’t taken that into account, and I had ignored my body too long, and so I stopped the merry-go-round too late. I almost died.”
    “All right,” I said, “I realize that you can do that. But don’t, not anymore, okay? It puts too much of a strain on your body. You end up paying for it later on, right?”
    “That’s why I don’t study like that anymore. I do just enough to keep up.”
    Nakajima