She obviously thought that “Storehouse” was the geographical name of the piece of high ground on which our house stood. I’d often found a similar misapprehension among the children I used to play with twenty years earlier. Anyway, I felt a sense of relief. If we’d had to go on walking through the forest until dark, the experience would almost certainly have implanted seeds of new trouble in my wife’s mind. And if there were a mist at night, the pitch-black forest would inevitably have plunged her into a panic of some kind or other.
As the bus trundled away leaving us on the road, the faces of the peasant woman and conductress appeared side by side at the rear window, watching us. The boy’s face was not to be seen; presumably he was still slumped pallidly over the armrest. We nodded to them, and the conductress waved happily in response, but the young peasant woman, still giggling to herself, clasped one forefinger in the palm of the other hand in a lewd gesture directed at us. I felt my own face flush with irritation and embarrassment, but to my wife the insult seemed to come as something of a relief. A great part of her mind was obsessed with the need for self-punishment, and the young mother in charge of the child with shaven head and lackluster skin, the child who sat as motionless as our baby, had satisfied a certain part of that need.
Hugging our own bodies through our overcoats in the damp, cold, heavily scented breeze that swept our flanks, we made our way through the rotting leaves covering the red clay of the forest road. Whenever the toes of our shoes kicked up the fallen leaves the bare earth beneath was revealed, a striking vermilion like the belly of a newt. Today, even the red earth seemed to hold a threat it never had in my childhood memories. It was to be expected, now that I’d become such a ratlike, vacillating, suspicious kind of creature, that the forest I had fled and was now seeking to rejoin should look on me with suspicion. So strong were the signs of surveillance that the passage of a group of birds screaming high above the trees was enough to make me feel the red earth rising up to clutch at my legs.
“I wonder why Takashi didn’t tell us on the phone that the bridge had been washed away by the flood.”
“He had quite enough to talk about even without that, didn’t he?” said my wife, rallying to his defense. “It’s hardly surprising it didn’t occur to him to mention the bridge’s state of repair when he had such an odd story to tell.”
Takashi had set off for the valley two weeks earlier than us. He’d gone in the Citroen with his bodyguards and made a long car trip of it. All day long and all through the night he and Hoshi took turns at the wheel, driving swiftly and without a break apart from the one hour on the car ferry to Shikoku. They arrived at the village in the valley two days later. A long-distance telephone call made from the post office was our first news of a peculiar business that had made an immediate impression on him. It concerned a middle-aged farmer’s wife called Jin who acted as caretaker of our house in return for permission to cultivate what little farmland was left to us. She’d come to us as a nursemaid when Takashi was born and had stayed with the family ever since. Even after her marriage, she still lived on in the house with her husband and children.
Parking the Citroen in the open space before the village office in the center of the valley, Takashi and his friends shouldered their belongings and were climbing up the steep, narrow, graveled road to our house when they were met by Jin’s husband and children coming down all out of breath to meet them. Takashi and the others were taken aback by their skinniness, the unhealthy tinge of their skin, and in particular the large fishlike eyes of the children, whose expressions reminded them of refugee children from Central or South America. These same frail children, however, fell on their baggage, wrested it from them, and bore it off up the hill, whereupon Jin’s melancholy-looking spouse tried to explain something to them in a brooding, angry-sounding voice. He was so overcome with shame, however, that all Takashi could gather was that he wanted to explain to them, before they actually met Jin, something extraordinary that had happened to her. Eventually, with every sign of reluctance, he produced from his pocket a cutting, folded in four, from a local newspaper and showed it to Takashi. The piece of newsprint, whose folds were frayed and grubby, bore a photograph so large that it must have badly disrupted the layout of the paper on the day it appeared.
Takashi got a shock when he saw it. The right half of the photograph meticulously took in the skinny members of Jin’s family, tense as a wedding group in their light-colored summer clothes. The left half was taken up by Jin’s enormous, bloated form. Swathed in a cotton print dress, she sat sideways, leaning on her left arm, looking like a pair of bellows. All, including Jin, stared at the camera dolefully, patiently, as though their ears were straining to hear some sound.
Strange Disease Afflicts Countrywoman
Insatiable Appetite—“Beyond Me” Says Spouse
It seems that this prefecture boasts the biggest woman in the country. “Japan’s Fattest Woman” is Mrs. Jin Kanaki, who lives in Okubo village. A forty-five-year-old mother of four children, she is of average height—five feet—but her weight is an astounding 291 pounds. Her bust measures 47 inches, her hips the same, and her arms are 16 inches round. She hasn’t always been so fat; six years ago, at 95 pounds, she was if anything on the skinny side. Her “tragedy” began without warning one day six years ago when she had spasms in her arms and legs and a failure of the blood supply to the brain, with a resulting fainting fit. She recovered consciousness several hours later and has been prey ever since to a pathological, uncontrollable appetite for food. She could no longer keep going, she found, unless she was forever feeding herself something. The slightest delay with a meal would bring shivering, crying fits, and finally stupor.
Nowadays she has meals hourly. She begins the morning by downing a whole pan of boiled vegetables, sweet potatoes, and rice mixed with barley. Next, buckwheat dough or instant noodles every hour until noon. At noon, lunch more or less like breakfast, and buckwheat dough or noodles again every hour until supper. For supper, another panful of boiled vegetables, dried radish and devil’s tongue, with sweet potatoes and barley-rice. This is the daily menu. Thanks to this abnormal appetite, her weight has tripled in six years and she is still getting fatter.
Jin’s husband is the hardest hit. To get enough food to keep her stomach satisfied isn’t child’s play. The great quantities of instant noodles are a particular burden financially. Jin herself earns a little by taking in sewing, but her earnings are a drop in the bucket compared to the awesome demands of her stomach. The village authorities, moved by the family’s plight, are helping with food costs, but ends still won’t meet.
“Somehow I can’t get on with my sewing,” Jin says. “I spend most of the day just sitting. I can’t travel by bus; we have to have a truck whenever I go to the Red Cross hospital. I don’t sleep properly at night and have a lot of dreams.”
Takashi just stared, so Jin’s husband explained that to get more money in the circumstances they’d rented the main building to a teacher from the primary school, but they’d persuaded him to sleep in the teacher’s night room at the school while Takashi and his friends were there. He hoped they would understand. This, in fact, was what had been bothering him most of all.
“Jin herself was sitting in a dark corner of the wooden-floored space at the entrance of the outbuilding,” Takashi said. “She didn’t seem particularly weighed down by her misfortune. She just kept repeating ‘It’s wretched to have got so fat.’ If you’re going to bring a present when you come, a large case of instant noodles would be the best thing.”
My wife mentioned it when she visited her parents before we left, and my father-in-law, who to an unusual degree for his age has retained the flexibility of mind needed to sympathize with such tragicomic mishaps, had half a dozen large cases of instant noodles, just as Takashi had suggested, delivered to us by a firm dealing in them. We sent the provisions for “Japan’s Fattest Woman” on ahead of us.
The road along which we were walking, and the forest
that pressed in on it from either side, stretched ahead indefinitely and monotonously. With the poor sense of perspective of the one-eyed, I had a feeling that we were marking time on a fixed spot.
“The sky looks sort of red to me,” said my wife. “Do you think it’s my eyes? It couldn’t be that things have a reddish look because my eyes are bloodshot, could it, Mitsu?”
I looked up. The deepening shadow over the great trees created an illusion of blinds being drawn from both sides, but the reddish tinge spreading over the narrow gray strip between them was no illusion.
“It’s the sunset. And your eyes aren’t red any more, either.”
“It’s from always being in the city, Mitsu—” she said, “it doesn’t occur to one that that kind of color might only be the sunset. The gray tinged with red is just like a color photo of the brain in some medical dictionary, isn’t it?”
She was still circling aimlessly around the same set of images associated with our painful memory : from the shaven head of the boy on the bus, to our child’s head, and so to the damaged matter within the skull. All signs of intoxication had gone from her eyes; the blood had withdrawn, leaving two dark gray pits. The skin of her face was completely covered with tiny flakes as closely arrayed as the leaves of the forest cedars. An idea hovered about my mind, its approach heralded by a sour taste of fear in my mouth.
A jeep appeared hurtling toward us like an enraged beast, sending dead leaves and earth flying as it came. Its arrival restored my sense of perspective and liberated me from the feeling that time was standing still.
“It’s Taka!”
“What’s happened to the Citroen, then?” I quibbled, reacting against the too obvious pleasure in her voice even as I recognized in the headlong rush of the jeep the authentic mark of Takashi, self-made man of violence.
“Mitsu, it is Taka,” she insisted confidently.
Amidst a flurry of red earth the jeep thrust its hood into a clump of withered grass beside the road, grazing a tree with its fender, came to a halt, shot backward at the same furious speed, then abruptly ceased switching directions and came to rest. My wife had recoiled sharply from the arm I’d put out to protect her from the onrushing jeep, leaving the outstretched arm to subside unwanted. I hoped it hadn’t caught Takashi’s eye as he twisted round in the driver’s seat and stuck his head out of the jeep.
“Hi there, Natsu! Hi, Mitsu!” he hailed us cheerfully. Dressed in an oilskin with a hood hanging down over the shoulders, he looked like a fireman.
“Thanks for coming, Taka.” My wife smiled at him, finally recovering the life she’d lacked ever since awakening in the bus.
“Seems the bridge is down,” I said.
“Right. We managed to get the Citroen over to the valley somehow, but it was too much to drag it back here again just to come and meet you two. So I got the forest ranger to lend me his vehicle. He remembered me, you know, and threw in this oilskin with the jeep.” He spoke with naive pride. “Mitsu—you get in the back. Natsu had better come in front.”
“Thank you, Taka.”
“Hoshi’s taking the baggage,” said Takashi. “If he just carries it on his back over the river where the bridge was, we can use the Citroen on the other side.” He started the jeep up again with a caution utterly different from his driving before meeting up with us.
“How about Jin?” I asked.
“It was a shock when I first saw her. Even now she looks absolutely grotesque to me at times, but her face seems younger and pleasanter now that it’s fat. You might even call her attractive—for a valley woman of over forty, that is.” He laughed. “And in fact, you know, she got pregnant with the youngest kid after she started to get fat, so her husband must find her attractive sexually, even though she weighs about three hundred pounds!”
“Do they seem hard up?”
“Not as much as you might suppose from that newspaper article. I’m sure the reporter, like me, was fooled by that dreadfully gloomy face of her husband’s. They get by all right because the valley folk bring them all kinds of things to eat. I couldn’t figure out, you know, why such a miserly crowd should carry on doing it for six years. So when I met the priest at the temple, the one who was at school with S, I asked him about it. According to him, it’s to do with the fact that the people in the valley are finding it hard to improve their living standards. Just at the right moment, they happened to find this strange creature among them who’d swollen to almost three hundred pounds. So they made her a kind of object of worship : by falling victim to this mysterious and hopeless malady Jin might be acting as the sacrificial lamb who would take upon herself the woes of all the other valley folk. That was the priest’s interpretation, at any rate. Kind of metaphysical, isn’t he ? I expect you get like that after you’ve been looking after all the souls in the valley for a while. You should meet him, Mitsu—he has the best mind here.”
Takashi’s speech made a vivid impression on me. The idea of a lamb expiating the sins of the whole valley had something in it that stimulated a memory reaching down to the roots of my being.
“Remember the madman called Gii, Mitsu?” Takashi went on as I sat silent, delving into my memories.
“Gii the hermit, who used to live in the forest?”
“That’s right. The crazy man who comes down to the valley when it gets dark.”
“I remember. His real name was Giichiro. I knew him well. Some of the valley children only knew him as a legend. Some even thought he was a kind of goblin who slept all day in the forest and roamed the valley only by darkness. But our house,” I explained to my wife, who couldn’t share in our conversation, “stands between the valley and the forest, so we sometimes caught sight of him at dusk, making his way down the graveled road to the valley. He would scuttle down the hill with uncanny agility, like a wild dog. We would watch him go, and by the time he was quite out of sight the whole valley would be covered in darkness. He was extraordinarily accurate in the way he trod the narrow interval between day and night. As I remember him, he always had his head bent mournfully forward and was hurrying away into the shadows.”
“I met him, you know,” said Takashi, ignoring my admiring reminiscences. “I was wondering if we could get hold of something to eat late at night, and took the car out for a spin round the valley. We’d forgotten the shopping, you see. But the supermarket was shut and none of the other shops was open—naturally, since they’re more or less bankrupt at any rate. The one thing I did do was meet Gii.”
“Gii the hermit still alive? Well, that’s news! He must be pretty decrepit, though. I would never have thought a madman who’d been in the forest so many years could live so long.”
“He doesn’t give any particular impression of being old. I couldn’t see well in the dark, but he seemed to be in his fifties—early fifties at that. He’s got extraordinarily small ears. There’s nothing else about him that looks mad, but those ears somehow betray the whole accumulated effect of years of insanity. Our car interested him and he materialized suddenly out of the darkness. When Momoko said hello, he went all serious and introduced himself as ‘Gii the hermit.’ When I told him I was one of the Nedokoro boys, he remembered me, said he’d once talked to me. The pity is, I don’t remember a thing about it.”
“It was me he meant. When S came back from the army, Gii came to the house and stayed to talk with S and me. He wanted to know if the war was really over or not. It was to avoid being caught by the army that he ran off into the forest in the first place—he was the only draft dodger in the village. S told him there was no need to go on hiding, but he never managed to make it back to life in the village. In a town he would probably have been a hero for a while after the war. But it’s just not possible here for a madman who’s been off living in the forest to rejoin the valley community. Even in wartime, of course, everybody admitted that as a madman he had a right to live, so after the war he could carry on as long as he stayed put.” A familiar, long-forgotten mood came welling up inside me, sapp
ing the strength from my limbs.
“So Gii the hermit’s still alive, is he? …” I said. “He must have been through some pretty hard times.”
“And he’s by no means decrepit,” Takashi added. “The superman of the forest!” He laughed. “We left Gii, took a run round the valley, and were on our way back when we saw him go past in the headlights, bounding along like an earnest rabbit. He was fantastically agile. It looked at first as though he was skipping along in a desperate effort to get away from the lights, but if you ask me he wanted to show us how hale and hearty he is. He’s really quite an amiable nut!”
When I was a child, we always had a resident madman somewhere in the valley. Although the place had its full quota of nervous breakdowns or village idiots, there was never more than one person recognized by everybody as a genuine nut. There couldn’t be two legitimate madmen at the same time, nor did the one madman ever leave the valley; it was as though the valley community had a fixed complement of one lunatic, a component of society all the more indispensable for being out of the ordinary. On a number of occasions, I seem to remember, I was aware of a change in these madmen who, like kings, came one at a time. But from some time toward the end of the war, the role of the indispensable solitary had been taken over by Gii.
Once, military police had come from the town to investigate the rumors about him. The village veterans’ association conducted a search in the hills, but I doubt if any of them were serious about it; quite apart from the fallen trees and creeping plants that block the way in the heart of the forest, they would eventually have come to government forest land, which was out of bounds. So Gii quite naturally was never caught. The MPs waited in a booth set up in the space before the village office (which lay just down the hill from our house, so that I watched the whole affair seated on the edge of the long stone wall), and all day long Gii’s mother, almost literally crawling on her knees, wept and wailed before the red and white striped curtains of the booth. The next day, though, after the police had left the valley, she promptly became an ordinary village woman again and went about her work with a smile on her face: