the pictures and player bios on them were quite old. Most of the photos were in black and white, and while I could follow a few of the references—"Yoshio Yoshida, the modern-day Mercury," or "the Zatopekesque pitching of Minoru Maruyama"—I was lost when it came to the "diabolic rainbow ball of Tadashi Wakabayashi," or "the incomparable Sho Kageura."
One player had been given special treatment: Yutaka Enatsu. Instead of being filed by position, he had a separate section all to himself. While the other cards were covered in cellophane, Enatsu's were protected by stiff plastic sheaths.
There were numerous Enatsu cards, depicting him in various poses, but this was not the potbellied Enatsu I knew. In these cards he was trim and young and, of course, wearing the uniform of the Hanshin Tigers.
Born May 15, 1948, in Nara Prefecture. Throws left, bats left. h:179cm. w:90kg. Graduated Osaka Gakuin High School, 1967; drafted 1st by Hanshin. Following year, broke Sandy Koufax's record (382) for most strikeouts in a Major League season with 401. Struck out 9 consecutive batters in the 1971 All-Star Game (Nishinomiya), 8 failed to make contact. 1973 season, pitched no-hitter. "The Lofty Lefty." "Super Southpaw."
Enatsu's player profile and statistics appeared on the backs of the cards in tiny print. Here he was, glove on his knee, reading the signals. Or in full windup. Or again, at the end of the pitch, eyes boring into the catcher's mitt. Enatsu on the mound, his fierce stance like a Deva King guarding a temple. And always on his uniform, the perfect number 28.
I returned the cards to the box and pressed the lid down as carefully as I'd taken it off.
Hidden farther back behind the shelves, I found a stack of dusty notebooks. Judging from the discoloration of the paper and ink, they were nearly as old as the baseball cards. Long years of pressure from the tightly packed books had loosened the string holding the thirty or so folders together, and the covers were warped and bent.
I flipped through page after page, but I found no Japanese— just numbers, symbols, and letters of the alphabet. Mysterious geometric forms were followed by equally strange curves and graphs, all the Professor's work. The handwriting was younger and more vigorous, but the ribbonlike fours and the slanted fives were unmistakable.
There is nothing more shameful for a housekeeper than to rummage through her employer's personal property. But the exquisite beauty of the notebooks made me oblivious. The formulas snaked across the pages by some logic of their own, ignoring the lines on the paper; and just when they seemed to resolve into a kind of order, they would divide again into apparently random strands. They were punctuated with arrows and and ∑ and all sorts of other symbols, they covered the paper with dark blotches in some places, and traced faintly like delicate insect tracks in others.
Needless to say, I could not understand any of the mysteries concealed in the notebooks. Yet somehow, I wanted to stay there forever, just staring at the formulas. Was the proof of the Artin conjecture that the Professor had spoken of somewhere here? And certainly there must be some of his work on the beloved prime numbers ... and perhaps the notes for the thesis that had won Prize No. 284 were here as well. In my own way, I could sense all kinds of things from the mysterious numbers and figures—the passion in a pencil smudge, the impatience of a crossed-out mistake, the certitude in a passage underscored with two thick lines. This glimpse into the Professor's world thrilled me deeply.
As I looked more closely, I began to notice scribbles here and there in the margins that even I could read: "Define terms of solution more carefully." "Invalid when only partially stable." "New approach, useless." "Will it be in time?" "14:00 with N, in front of the library."
Though these notes were simply scrawled in the spaces between the calculations, the handwriting here seemed much more purposeful than the scribbled notes attached to the Professor's suit. In these pages, the Professor had walked beyond beaten paths, looking for truth in a place no one knows.
What had happened in front of the library at two o'clock? And who was N? I found myself hoping that the meeting had been a happy one for the professor.
I ran my fingers over the lines of the formula, a long chain of numbers and symbols that flowed from one page to the next. As I