A True Novel

A miracle happened to me two years ago.
It was when I was staying in Palo Alto in northern California, writing my third novel or, more precisely, trying to write it. I lacked confidence and was making slow progress. Then, out of the blue, I was made a gift: a true story, just like a novel. What’s more, I was the gift’s sole recipient. The story was about a man I knew, or rather my family knew, in New York at one time. He was no ordinary man. Leaving Japan with nothing, he arrived in the U.S. and made a fortune there, literally realizing the American dream. His prosperity had become a legend among the old Japanese communities in New York—yet no one knew that he’d had another life, marked in the beginning by the poverty-stricken period that followed the war in Japan. The tale would almost certainly have disappeared, lost in the stream of time, if one young man who happened to hear it in Japan hadn’t tucked it away inside him, crossed the Pacific, and delivered it to me in Palo Alto. Of course, he had no idea what effect this would have on me. As far as he was concerned, he merely traveled there on his own initiative, sought me out of his own accord, then went away when he’d told the story he had to tell, and that was that. Yet I felt as if some invisible power had arranged to send this messenger to me.
He took all night to tell me the story. Outside, the heaviest rainstorm in California for decades raged, trapping us in the house. The angry power of nature must have affected my nerves: when he had finished, I was in shock. I knew that it was only a series of coincidences that led him there, but it was uncanny that I should know someone who had lived such a life, and that his tale should have come to me, just me.