“Thanks. I will,” I said.
“So anyway, how’s the job hunt going?”
“Nothing yet. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been looking very hard. Kumiko’s working, and I’m taking care of the house, and we’re managing for now.”
My uncle seemed to be thinking about something for a few moments. Then he said, “Let me know if it ever gets to the point where you just can’t make it. I might be able to give you a hand.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.” And so our conversation ended.
I thought about calling the old real estate broker and asking him about the background of this house and about the people who had lived here before me, but it seemed ridiculous even to be thinking about such nonsense. I decided to forget it.
The rain kept falling at the same gentle rate into the afternoon, wetting the roofs of the houses, wetting the trees in the yards, wetting the earth. I had toast and soup for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa. I wanted to do some shopping, but the thought of the mark on my face made me hesitate. I was sorry I hadn’t let my beard grow. I still had some vegetables in the refrigerator, and there was canned stuff in the cupboard. I had rice and I had eggs. I could feed myself for another two or three days if I kept my expectations low.
Lying on the sofa, I did no thinking at all. I read a book, I listened to a classical music tape, I stared out at the rain falling in the garden. My cogitative powers seemed to have reached an all-time low, thanks perhaps to that long period of all-too-concentrated thinking in the dark well bottom. If I tried to think seriously about anything, I felt a dull ache in my head, as if it were being squeezed in the jaws of a padded vise. If I tried to recall anything, every muscle and nerve in my body seemed to creak with the effort. I felt I had turned into the tin man from The Wizard of Oz, my joints rusted and in need of oil.
Every now and then I would go to the lavatory and examine the condition of the mark on my face, but it remained unchanged. It neither spread nor shrank. The intensity of its color neither increased nor decreased. At one point, I noticed that I had left some hair unshaved on my upper lip. In my confusion at discovering the mark on my right cheek, I had forgotten to finish shaving. I washed my face again, spread on shaving cream, and took off what was left.
In the course of my occasional trips to the mirror, I thought of what Malta Kano had said on the phone: that I should be careful; that through experience, we come to believe that the image in the mirror is correct. To make certain, I went to the bedroom and looked at my face in the full-length mirror that Kumiko used whenever she got dressed. But the mark was still there. It was not just something in the other mirror.
I felt no physical abnormality aside from the mark. I took my temperature, but it was the same as always. Other than the fact that I felt little hunger, for someone who had not eaten in almost three days, and that I experienced a slight nausea every now and then (which was probably a continuation of what I had felt in the bottom of the well), my body was entirely normal.
The afternoon was a quiet one. The phone never rang. No letters arrived. No one came down the alley. No voices of neighbors disturbed the stillness. No cats crossed the garden, no birds came and called. Now and then a cicada would cry, but not with the usual intensity.
I began to feel some hunger just before seven o’clock, so I fixed myself a dinner of canned food and vegetables. I listened to the evening news on the radio for the first time in ages, but nothing special had been happening in the world. Some teenagers had been killed in an accident on the expressway when the driver of their car had failed in his attempt to pass another car and crashed into a wall. The branch manager and staff of a major bank were under police investigation in connection with an illegal loan they had made. A thirty-six-year-old housewife from Machida had been beaten to death with a hammer by a young man on the street. But these were all events from some other, distant world. The only thing happening in my world was the rain falling in the yard. Soundlessly. Gently.
When the clock showed nine, I moved from the sofa to bed, and after finishing a chapter of the book I had started, I turned out the light and went to sleep.
I awoke with a start in the middle of some kind of dream. I could not recall what had been happening in the dream, but it had obviously been one filled with tension, because my heart was pounding. The room was still pitch dark. For a time after I awoke, I could not remember where I was. A good deal of time had to go by before I realized that I was in my own house, in my own bed. The hands of the alarm clock showed it to be just after two in the morning. My irregular sleeping habits in the well were probably responsible for these unpredictable cycles of sleep and wakefulness. Once my confusion died down, I felt the need to urinate. It was probably the beer I’d drunk. I would have preferred to go back to sleep, but I had no choice in the matter. When I resigned myself to the fact and sat up in bed, my hand brushed against the skin of the person sleeping next to me. This came as no surprise. That was where Kumiko always slept. I was used to having someone sleeping by my side. But then I realized that Kumiko wasn’t with me anymore. She had left the house. Some other person was sleeping next to me.
I held my breath and turned on the light by the bed. It was Creta Kano.
Creta Kano’s Story Continued
•
Creta Kano was stark naked. Facing toward my side of the bed, she lay there asleep, with nothing on, not even a cover, revealing two well-shaped breasts, two small pink nipples, and, below a perfectly flat stomach, a black triangle of pubic hair, looking like a shaded area in a drawing. Her skin was very white, with a newly minted glow. At a loss to explain her presence here, I nevertheless went on staring at her beautiful body. She had her knees closed tightly together and slightly bent, her legs in perfect alignment. Her hair fell forward, covering half her face, which made it impossible for me to see her eyes, but she was obviously in a deep sleep: my turning on the bedside lamp had caused not the slightest tremble, and her breathing was quiet and regular. I myself, though, was now wide awake. I took a thin summer comforter from the closet and spread it over her. Then I turned out the lamp and, still in my pajamas, went to the kitchen to sit at the table for a while.
I recalled my mark. That patch on my cheek was still slightly warm to the touch. It was still there, all right—I had no need to look in the mirror. It wasn’t the kind of little nothing that just disappears by itself overnight. I thought about looking up a nearby dermatologist in the phone book when it got light out, but how could I answer if a doctor asked me what I thought the cause might be? I was in a well for two or three days. No, it had nothing to do with work or anything; I was just there to do a little thinking. I figured the bottom of a well would be a good place for that. No, I didn’t take any food with me. No, it wasn’t on my property; it belonged to another house. A vacant house in the neighborhood. I went in without permission.
I sighed. I could never say these things to anyone, of course.
I set my elbows on the table and, without really intending to, found myself thinking in strangely vivid detail about Creta Kano’s naked body. She was sound asleep in my bed. I thought about the time in my dream when I joined my body with hers as she wore Kumiko’s dress. I still had a clear impression of the touch of her skin, the weight of her flesh. Without a step-by-step investigation of that event, I would not be able to distinguish the point at which the real ended and the unreal took over. The wall separating the two regions had begun to melt. In my memory, at least, the real and the unreal seemed to be residing together with equal weight and vividness. I had joined my body with Creta Kano’s, and at the same time, I had not.
To clear my head of these jumbled sexual images, I had to go to the washbasin and splash my face with cold water. A little while later, I looked in on Creta Kano. She was still sound asleep. She had pushed the cover down to her waist. From where I stood, I could see only her back. It reminded me of my last view of Kumiko’s back. Now that I thought about it, Creta Kano’
s figure was amazingly like Kumiko’s. I had failed to notice the resemblance until now because their hair and their taste in clothes and their makeup were so utterly different. They were the same height and appeared to be about the same weight. They probably wore the same dress size.
I carried my own summer comforter to the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and opened my book. I had been reading a history book from the library. It was all about Japanese management of Manchuria before the war and the battle with the Soviets in Nomonhan. Lieutenant Mamiya’s story had aroused my interest in continental affairs of the period, and I had borrowed several books on the subject. Now, however, less than ten minutes into the finely detailed historical narrative, I was falling asleep. I laid the book on the floor, intending to rest my eyes for a few moments, but I fell into a deep sleep, with the lights still on.
A sound from the kitchen woke me up. When I went to investigate, Creta Kano was there, making breakfast, wearing a white T-shirt and blue shorts, both of which belonged to Kumiko.
“Where are your clothes?” I demanded, standing in the kitchen door.
“Oh, I’m sorry. You were asleep, so I took the liberty of borrowing some of your wife’s clothing. I knew it was terribly forward of me, but I didn’t have a thing to wear,” said Creta Kano, turning just her head to look at me. At some point since I last saw her, she had reverted to her usual sixties style of hair and makeup, lacking only the fake eyelashes.
“No, that’s no problem,” I said. “What I want to know is what happened to your clothes.”
“I lost them,” she said simply.
“Lost them?”
“Yes. I lost them somewhere.”
I stepped into the kitchen and watched, leaning against the table, as Creta Kano made an omelette. With deft movements, she cracked the eggs, added seasoning, and beat the mixture.
“Meaning you came here naked?”
“Yes, that is correct,” said Creta Kano, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I was completely naked. You know that, Mr. Okada. You put the cover on me.”
“Well, true enough,” I mumbled. “But what I’d like to know is, where and how did you lose your clothing, and how did you manage to get here with nothing on?”
“I don’t know that any better than you do,” said Creta Kano, while shaking the frying pan to fold the omelette over on itself.
“You don’t know that any better than I do,” I said.
Creta Kano slipped the omelette onto a plate and garnished it with a few stalks of freshly steamed broccoli. She had also made toast, which she set on the table, along with coffee. I put out the butter and salt and pepper. Then, like a newly married couple, we sat down to breakfast, facing each other.
It was then that I recalled my mark. Creta Kano had shown no surprise when she looked at me, and she asked me nothing about it. I reached up to touch the spot and found it slightly warm, as before.
“Does that hurt, Mr. Okada?”
“No, not at all,” I said.
Creta Kano stared at my face for a time. “It looks like a mark,” she said.
“It looks like a mark to me too,” I said. “I’m wondering whether I should show it to a doctor or not.”
“It strikes me as something that a doctor would not be able to handle.”
“You may be right,” I said. “But I can’t just ignore it.”
Fork in hand, Creta Kano thought for a moment. “If you have shopping or other business, I could do it for you. You can stay inside as long as you like, if you would rather not go out.”
“I’m grateful for the offer, but you must have your own things to do, and I can’t just stay holed up in here forever.”
Creta Kano thought about that for a while too. “Malta Kano would probably know how to deal with this.”
“Would you mind getting in touch with her for me, then?”
“Malta Kano gets in touch with other people, but she does not allow other people to get in touch with her.” Creta Kano bit into a piece of broccoli.
“But you can get in touch with her, I’m sure?”
“Of course. We’re sisters.”
“Well, next time you talk to her, why don’t you ask her about my mark? Or you could ask her to get in touch with me.”
“I am sorry, but that is something I cannot do. I am not allowed to approach my sister on someone else’s behalf. It’s a sort of rule we have.”
Buttering my toast, I let out a sigh. “You mean to say, if I have something I need to talk to Malta Kano about, all I can do is wait for her to get in touch with me?”
“That is exactly what I mean,” said Creta Kano. Then she nodded. “But about that mark. Unless it hurts or itches, I suggest that you forget about it for a while. I never let things like that bother me. And you should not let it bother you, either, Mr. Okada. People just get these things sometimes.”
“I wonder,” I said.
For several minutes after that, we went on eating our breakfast in silence. I hadn’t eaten breakfast with another person for quite a while now, and this one was particularly delicious. Creta Kano seemed pleased when I told her this.
“Anyhow,” I said, “about your clothes …”
“Does it bother you that I put on your wife’s clothing without permission?” she asked, with obvious concern.
“No, not at all. I don’t care what you wear of Kumiko’s. She left them here, after all. What I’m concerned about is how you lost your own clothes.”
“And not just my clothes. My shoes too.”
“So how did it happen?”
“I can’t remember,” said Creta Kano. “All I know is I woke up in your bed with nothing on. I can’t remember what happened before that.”
“You did go down into the well, didn’t you—after I left?”
“That I do remember. And I fell asleep down there. But I can’t remember anything after that.”
“Which means you don’t have any recollection of how you got out of the well?”
“None at all. There is a gap in my memory.” Creta Kano held up both index fingers, about eight inches apart. How much time that was supposed to represent I had no idea.
“I don’t suppose you remember what you did with the rope ladder, either. It’s gone, you know.”
“I don’t know anything about the ladder. I don’t even remember if I climbed it to get out of the well.”
I glared at the coffee cup in my hand for a time. “Do you mind showing me the bottoms of your feet?” I asked.
“No, not at all,” said Creta Kano. She sat down in the chair next to mine and stretched her legs out in my direction so that I could see the soles of her feet. I took her ankles in my hands and examined her soles. They were perfectly clean. Beautifully formed, the soles had not a mark on them—no cuts, no mud, nothing at all.
“No mud, no cuts,” I said.
“I see,” said Creta Kano.
“It was raining all day yesterday. If you lost your shoes somewhere and walked here from there, you should have some mud on your feet. And you must have come in through the garden. But your feet are clean, and there’s no mud anywhere.”
“I see.”
“Which means you didn’t walk here barefoot from anywhere.”
Creta Kano inclined her head slightly to one side as if impressed. “This is all logically consistent,” she said.
“It may be logically consistent, but it’s not getting us anywhere,” I said. “Where did you lose your shoes and clothes, and how did you walk here from there?”
Creta Kano shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said.
•
While she stood at the sink, intently washing the dishes, I stayed at the kitchen table, thinking about these things. Of course, I had no idea, either.
“Do these things happen to you often—that you can’t remember where you’ve been?” I asked.
“This is not the first time that something like this has happened to me, when I can’t recall where I hav
e been or what I was doing. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen to me now and then. I once lost some clothes, too. But this is the first time I lost all my clothes and my shoes and everything.”
Creta Kano turned off the water and wiped the table with a dish towel.
“You know, Creta Kano,” I said, “you haven’t told me your whole story. Last time, you were partway through when you disappeared. Remember? If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear the rest. You told me how the mob got hold of you and made you work as one of their prostitutes, but you didn’t tell me what happened after you met Noboru Wataya and slept with him.”
Creta Kano leaned against the kitchen sink and looked at me. Drops of water on her hands ran down her fingers and fell to the floor. The shape of her nipples showed clearly through the white T-shirt, a vivid reminder to me of the naked body I had seen the night before.
“All right, then. I will tell you everything that happened after that. Right now.”
Creta Kano sat down once again in the seat opposite mine.
“The reason I left that day when I was in the middle of my story, Mr. Okada, is that I was not fully prepared to tell it all. I had started my story precisely because I felt I ought to tell you, as honestly as possible, what really happened to me. But I found I could not go all the way to the end. You must have been shocked when I disappeared so suddenly.”
Creta Kano put her hands on the table and looked straight at me as she spoke.
“Well, yes, I was shocked, though it was not the most shocking thing that’s happened to me lately.”
•
“As I told you before, the very last customer I had as a prostitute of the flesh was Noboru Wataya. The second time I met him, as a client of Malta Kano’s, I recognized him immediately. It would have been impossible for me to forget him. Whether he remembered me or not I cannot be certain. Mr. Wataya is not a person who shows his feelings.
“But let me go back and put things in order. First I will tell you about the time I had Noboru Wataya as a customer. That would be six years ago.