When I paid my check, I asked the girl at the register if the man sang here often and whether he usually performed the trick.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “As far as I know, this was his first time here. I never heard of him until today. And nobody told me he did magic tricks. Wasn’t that amazing, though? I wonder how he does it. I bet he’d be a hit on TV.”
“It’s true,” I said. “It looked like he was really burning himself.”
I walked back to the hotel, and the minute I got into bed, sleep came for me as if it had been waiting all this time. As I drifted off, I thought of Kumiko, but she seemed very far away, and after that it was impossible for me to think of anything. Through my mind flashed the face of the man burning his palm. He really seemed to be burning himself, I thought. And then I fell asleep.
The Root of Desire
•
In Room 208
•
Passing Through the Wall
Before dawn, in the bottom of the well, I had a dream. But it was not a dream. It was some kind of something that happened to take the form of a dream.
I was walking alone. The face of Noboru Wataya was being projected on the screen of a large television in the center of a broad lobby. His speech had just begun. He wore a tweed suit, striped shirt, and navy-blue necktie. His hands were folded atop the table before him, and he was talking into the camera. A large map of the world hung on the wall behind him. There must have been over a hundred people in the lobby, and each and every one of them stopped what they were doing to listen to him, with serious expressions on their faces. Noboru Wataya was about to announce something that would determine people’s fate.
I, too, stopped and looked at the television screen. In practiced—but utterly sincere—tones, Noboru Wataya was addressing millions of people he could not see. That unbearable something I always felt when I was face-to-face with him was now hidden in some deep, invisible place. He spoke in his uniquely persuasive style—the carefully timed pauses, the ringing of the voice, the variety of facial expressions, all giving rise to a strangely effective sense of reality. Noboru Wataya seemed to have been growing more polished as an orator with each day that passed. Much as I hated to, I had to grant him that.
“And so you see, my friends,” he was saying, “everything is both complicated and simple. This is the fundamental rule that governs the world. We must never forget it. Things that appear to be complicated—and that, in fact, are complicated—are very simple where motives are concerned. It is just a matter of what we are looking for. Motive is the root of desire, so to speak. The important thing is to seek out the root. Dig beneath the complicated surface of reality. And keep on digging. Then dig even more until you come to the very tip of the root. If you will only do that”—and here he gestured toward the map—“everything will eventually come clear. That is how the world works. The stupid ones can never break free of the apparent complexity. They grope through the darkness, searching for the exit, and die before they are able to comprehend a single thing about the way of the world. They have lost all sense of direction. They might as well be deep in a forest or down in a well. And the reason they have lost all sense of direction is because they do not comprehend the fundamental principles. They have nothing in their heads but garbage and rocks. They understand nothing. Nothing at all. They can’t tell front from back, top from bottom, north from south. Which is why they can never break free of the darkness.”
Noboru Wataya paused at that point to give his words time to sink into the minds of his audience.
“But let’s forget about people like that,” he went on. “If people want to lose all sense of direction, the best thing that you and I can do is let them. We have more important things to do.”
The more I heard, the angrier I became, until my anger was almost choking me. He was pretending to talk to the world at large, but in fact he was talking to me alone. And he must have had some kind of twisted, distorted motive for doing so. But nobody else realized that. Which is precisely why Noboru Wataya was able to exploit the gigantic system of television in order to send me secret messages. In my pockets, I clenched my hands into fists, but there was no way I could vent my anger. And my inability to share this anger with anybody in the lobby aroused in me a profound sense of isolation.
The place was filled with people straining to catch every word that Noboru Wataya spoke. I cut across the lobby and headed straight for a corridor that connected with the guest rooms. The faceless man was standing there. As I approached, he looked at me with that faceless face of his. Then, soundlessly, he moved to block my way.
“This is the wrong time,” he said. “You don’t belong here now.”
But the deep, slashing pain from Noboru Wataya now urged me on. I reached out and pushed the faceless man aside. He wobbled like a shadow and fell away.
“I’m saying this for your sake,” he called from behind me, his every word lodging in my back like a piece of shrapnel. “If you go any farther, you won’t be able to come back. Do you understand?”
I ignored him and moved ahead with rapid steps. I wasn’t afraid of anything now. I had to know. I had lost all sense of direction, but I couldn’t stay like that forever.
I walked down the familiar-looking corridor. I assumed the man with no face would follow and try to stop me, but when I looked back, there was no one coming. The long, winding corridor was lined with identical doors. Each door had a number, but I couldn’t recall the number of the room to which I had been taken the last time. I was sure I had been aware of the number back then, but now my attempts to recall it yielded nothing, and there was no question of my opening every one.
I wandered up and down the corridor until I passed a room-service waiter carrying a tray. On it was a new bottle of Cutty Sark, an ice bucket, and two glasses. I let the waiter go by, then followed after him. Every now and then, the polished tray caught the light of a ceiling fixture with a bright flash. The waiter never looked back. Chin drawn in purposefully, he moved straight ahead, his steps in steady rhythm. Sometimes he would whistle a few lines of music. It was the overture to The Thieving Magpie, the opening where the drums come in. He was good.
The corridor was a long one, but I encountered no one else in it all the while I followed the waiter. Eventually, he stopped in front of a door and gave it three gentle knocks. After a few seconds had passed, someone opened the door and the waiter carried the tray in. I pressed against the wall, hiding behind a large Chinese-style vase, and waited for the waiter to come out. The room number was 208. Of course! Why hadn’t I been able to remember it until now?
The waiter was taking a very long time. I glanced at my watch. At some point, though, the hands had stopped moving. I examined the flowers in the vase and smelled each fragrance. The flowers seemed to have been brought from a garden only moments before, so perfectly fresh were they, retaining every bit of their color and aroma. They probably still hadn’t noticed that they had been severed from their roots. A tiny winged insect had worked its way into the core of a red rose with thick, fleshy petals.
Five minutes or more went by before the waiter came out of the room, empty-handed. With his chin pulled in as before, he went back the same way he had come. As soon as he had disappeared around a corner, I walked over to the door. I held my breath and listened, expecting to hear something. But there was no sound, no sense that anyone was inside. I took a chance and knocked. Three times. Gently. As the waiter had done. But no one answered. I let a few seconds pass and knocked three times again, this time a little more forcefully than before. Still no response.
Next, I tried the knob. It turned, and the door opened soundlessly inward. The room looked pitch dark at first, but some light was managing to find its way in around the thick curtains on the window. With effort, I could just barely make out the window itself and a table and sofa. This was the room in which I had coupled with Creta Kano. It was a suite: the living room here and the bedroom in back. On the table were the dim forms
of the Cutty Sark bottle, the glasses, and the ice bucket. When I opened the door, the stainless-steel ice bucket had caught the light from the corridor and sent back a knife-sharp flash. I entered the darkness and closed the door quietly behind me. The air in the room felt warm, and it carried the heavy scent of flowers. I held my breath and listened, keeping my left hand on the knob so that I could open it at any time. There had to be a person in here, somewhere. Someone had ordered the whiskey, ice, and glasses from room service and had opened the door to let the waiter in.
•
“Don’t turn on the light,” said a woman’s voice. It came from the bedroom. I recognized it immediately. It was the voice of the enigmatic woman who had made those strange calls to me. I let go of the knob and began to feel my way toward the voice. The darkness of the inner room was more nearly opaque than that of the outer room. I stood in the doorway between the two and strained to see into the darkness.
I could hear the sound of bedsheets shifting. A black shadow moved in the darkness. “Leave it dark,” said the woman’s voice.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t turn on the light.”
I kept a firm grip on the doorjamb.
“Did you come here alone?” the woman asked, sounding vaguely tired.
“Of course,” I said. “I figured I’d find you here. You or Creta Kano. I’ve got to know where Kumiko is. I mean, everything started with that first call from you. You opened Pandora’s box. Then it was one weird thing after another, until finally Kumiko disappeared. That’s why I’m here. Alone. I don’t know who you are, but you hold some kind of key. Am I right?”
“Creta Kano?” the woman asked in guarded tones. “Never heard of her. Is she here too?”
“I don’t know where she is. But I’ve met her here more than once.”
Each breath I took brought with it the strong smell of flowers. The air was thick and heavy. Somewhere in this room was a vase full of flowers. Somewhere in this same darkness, they were breathing, swaying. In the darkness filled with their intense fragrance, I began to lose track of my own physicality. I felt as if I had become a tiny insect. Now I was working my way in among the petals of a giant flower. Sticky nectar, pollen, and soft hairs awaited me. They needed my invasion and my presence.
“You know,” I said to the woman, “the very first thing I want to do is find out who you are. You tell me I know you, and I’ve tried as hard as I can to recall you, but without success. Who are you?”
“Who am I?” the woman parroted, but without a hint of mockery. “I’d like a drink. Pour two on the rocks, will you? You will drink with me, I suppose?”
I went back to the living room, opened the new bottle of whiskey, put ice in the glasses, and poured two drinks. In the dark, this took a good deal of time. I carried the drinks into the bedroom. The woman told me to set one on the night table. “And you sit on the chair by the foot of the bed.”
I did as I was told, placing one glass on the night table and sitting in an upholstered armchair some distance away, drink in hand. My eyes had perhaps grown somewhat more used to the darkness. I could see shadows shifting there. The woman seemed to have raised herself on the bed. Then there was the clink of ice as she drank. I, too, took a sip of whiskey.
For a long time, she said nothing. The longer the silence continued, the stronger the smell of flowers seemed to become.
“Do you really want to know who I am?” the woman asked.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, but my voice resounded uneasily in the darkness.
“You came here specifically to learn my name, didn’t you?”
Instead of answering, I cleared my throat, but this also had a strange reverberation.
The woman jiggled the ice in her glass a few times. “You want to know my name,” she said, “but unfortunately, I can’t tell you what it is. I know you very well. You know me very well. But I don’t know me.”
I shook my head in the darkness. “I don’t get it,” I said. “And I’m sick of riddles. I need something concrete that I can get my hands on. Hard facts. Something I can use as a lever to pry the door open. That’s what I want.”
The woman seemed to wring a sigh out of the core of her body. “Toru Okada, I want you to discover my name. But no: you don’t have to discover it. You know it already. All you have to do is remember it. If you can find my name, then I can get out of here. I can even help you find your wife: help you find Kumiko Okada. If you want to find your wife, try hard to discover my name. That is the lever you want. You don’t have time to stay lost. Every day you fail to find it, Kumiko Okada moves that much farther away from you.”
I set my whiskey glass on the floor. “Tell me,” I said, “where is this place? How long have you been here? What do you do here?”
“You have to leave now,” said the woman, as if she had suddenly recalled what she was doing. “If he finds you here, there’ll be trouble. He’s even more dangerous than you think. He might really kill you. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Who is this ‘he’?”
The woman didn’t answer, and I didn’t know what else to say. I felt lost. Nothing stirred in the room. The silence was deep and thick and suffocating. My head felt feverish. The pollen might have been doing it. Mixed with the air, the microscopic grains were penetrating my head and driving my nerves haywire.
“Tell me, Toru Okada,” said the woman, her voice suddenly very different. The quality of her voice could change in an instant. Now it had become one with the room’s thick, heavy air. “Do you ever think you’d like to hold me again? That you’d like to get inside me? That you’d like to kiss me all over? You can do anything you want to me, you know. And I’ll do anything you want … anything … things that your wife … Kumiko Okada … would never do for you. I’ll make you feel so good you’ll never forget it. If you—”
With no warning at all, there was a knock on the door. It had the hard, precise sound of a nail being driven straight in—an ominous sound in the dark.
The woman’s hand came out of the darkness and took me by the arm. “Come this way,” she whispered. “Hurry.” Her voice had lost the dreamy quality now. The knocking started again: two knocks with precisely the same force. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t locked the door.
“Hurry,” she said. “You have to get out of here. This is the only way.”
I moved through the darkness as the woman drew me on. I could hear the doorknob turning slowly. The sound sent chills down my spine. At the very moment the light from the corridor pierced the darkness, we slipped into the wall. It had the consistency of a gigantic mass of cold gelatin; I clamped my mouth shut to prevent its coming inside. The thought struck me: I’m passing through the wall! In order to go from one place to another, I was passing through a wall. And yet, even as it was happening, it seemed like the most natural thing to do.
I felt the woman’s tongue coming into my mouth. Warm and soft, it probed every crevice and it wound around my own tongue. The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs. Down in my loins, I felt a dull need to come. Clamping my eyes closed, I fought it. A moment later, I felt a kind of intense heat on my right cheek. It was an odd sensation. I felt no pain, only the awareness that there was heat there. I couldn’t tell whether the heat was coming from the outside or boiling up inside me. Soon everything was gone: the woman’s tongue, the smell of flowers, the need to come, the heat on my cheek. And I passed through the wall. When I opened my eyes I was on the other side of the wall—at the bottom of a deep well.
The Well and Stars
•
How the Ladder Disappeared
The sky was already bright at something after five in the morning, but even so, I could make out a lot of stars overhead. It was just as Lieutenant Mamiya had told me: from the bottom of a well, you can see stars in the daylight. Into the perfect half-moon slice of sky, faintly glowing stars were packed neatly, like specimens of rare minerals.
Once before,
when camping on a mountaintop with some friends in the fifth or sixth grade, I had seen stars in such numbers that they filled the sky. It almost seemed as if the sky would break under the weight of all those things and come tumbling down. Never had I seen such an amazing skyful of stars. Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted. But in fact, the earth was nothing but a chunk of rock floating in one little corner of the universe: a temporary foothold in the vast emptiness of space. It—and all of us with it—could be blown away tomorrow by a momentary flash of something or a tiny shift in the universe’s energy. Beneath this breathtaking skyful of stars, the uncertainty of my own existence struck me full force (though not in so many words, of course). It was a stunning discovery for a young boy.
Looking up at the dawn stars from the bottom of a well was a special experience very different from looking at the full, starry sky on a mountaintop, as if my mind—my self—my very existence—were firmly bonded through my narrow window to each one of those stars in the sky. I felt a deep sense of intimacy toward them: they were my stars, visible to no one but me, down here in the dark well. I embraced them as my own, and they in turn showered me with a kind of energy and warmth.
As time passed and the sky came increasingly under the sway of the bright morning sun of summer, one star at a time would obliterate itself from my field of view. They did this with the utmost gentleness, and I studied the process of obliteration with wide-open eyes. The summer sun did not, however, erase every star from the sky. A few of the strongest ones remained. No matter how high the sun climbed, they took a stubborn stance and refused to disappear. This made me very happy: aside from the occasional cloud that drifted by, the stars were the only things I could see from down there.