I went on sitting there for eleven days altogether. Every day, I had my coffee and doughnuts and did nothing but watch the faces of the people passing by. Aside from the meaningless little conversation with the well-dressed woman who approached me, I spoke with no one for the whole eleven days. I did nothing special, and nothing special happened to me. Even after this eleven-day vacuum, however, I was unable to come to any conclusion. I was still lost in a complex maze, unable to solve the simplest problem.
But then, on the evening of the eleventh day, something very strange occurred. It was a Sunday, and I had stayed there watching faces until later than usual. The people who came to Shinjuku on a Sunday were different from the weekday crowd, and there was no rush hour. I caught sight of a young man with a black guitar case. He was of average height. He wore glasses with black plastic frames, had hair down to his shoulders, was dressed in blue denim top and bottom, and trudged along in worn-out sneakers. He walked past me looking straight ahead, a thoughtful expression in his eyes. When I saw him, something struck me. My heart gave a thump. I know that guy, I thought. I’ve seen him somewhere. But it took me a few seconds to remember who he was—the singer I had seen that night in the snack bar in Sapporo. No doubt about it: he was the one.
I immediately left my bench and hurried after him. Given his almost leisurely pace, it was not difficult to catch up with him. I followed ten steps behind, adjusting my pace to his. I strongly considered the possibility of speaking to him. I would say something like, “You were singing three years ago in Sapporo, weren’t you? I heard you there.” “Oh, really?” he would say. “Thank you very much.” And then what? Should I say, “My wife had an abortion that night. And she left me not too long ago. She had been sleeping with another man”? I decided just to follow him and see what happened. Maybe as I walked along I would figure out some good way to handle it.
He was walking away from the station. He passed beyond the string of high-rises, crossed the Ome Highway, and headed for Yoyogi. He seemed to be deep in thought. Apparently at home in the area, he never hesitated or looked around. He kept walking at the same pace, facing straight ahead. I followed after him, thinking about the day that Kumiko had her abortion. Sapporo in early March. The earth was hard and frozen, and now and then a few snowflakes would flutter down. I was back in those streets, my lungs full of frozen air. I saw the white breath coming from people’s mouths.
Then it hit me: that was probably when things started to change. Yes, definitely. That had been a turning point. After that, the flow around me had begun to evidence a change. Now that I thought about it, that abortion had been an event of great significance for the two of us. At the time, however, I had not been able to perceive its true importance. I had been all too distracted by the act of abortion itself, while the genuinely important thing may have been something else entirely.
I had to do it, she said. I felt it was the right thing to do, the best thing for both of us. But there’s something else, something you don’t know about, something I can’t put into words just yet. I’m not hiding anything from you. I just can’t be sure whether or not it’s something real. Which is why I can’t put it into words yet.
Back then, she couldn’t be sure that that something was real. And that something, without a doubt, had been more connected with the pregnancy than with the abortion. Maybe it had had something to do with the child in her womb. What could it have been? What had sent her into such confusion? Had she had relations with another man and refused to give birth to his baby? No, that was out of the question. She herself had declared that it was out of the question. It had been my child, that was certain. But still, there had been something she was unable to tell me. And that something was inseparably connected to her decision to leave me. Everything had started from that.
But what the secret was, what had been concealed there, I had no idea. I was the only one left alone, the only one in the dark. All I knew for certain was that as long as I failed to solve the secret of that something, Kumiko would never come back to me. Gradually, I began to sense a quiet anger growing inside my body, an anger directed toward that something that remained invisible to me. I stretched my back, drew in a deep breath, and calmed the pounding of my heart. Even so, the anger, like water, seeped soundlessly into every corner of my body. It was an anger steeped in sorrow. There was no way for me to smash it against something, nothing I could do to dispel it.
•
The man went on walking at the same steady pace. He crossed the Odakyu Line tracks, passed through a block of shops, through a shrine, through a labyrinth of alleys. I followed after him, adjusting my distance in each situation so as to keep him from spotting me. And it was clear that he had not spotted me. He never once looked around. There was definitely something about this man that made him different from ordinary people. Not only did he never look back; he never once looked to either side. He was so utterly concentrated: what could he be thinking about? Or was he, rather, thinking about absolutely nothing?
Before long, the man entered a hushed area of deserted streets lined with two-story wood-frame houses. The road was narrow and twisted, and the run-down houses were jammed up against each other on either side. The lack of people here was almost weird. More than half the houses were vacant. Boards were nailed across the front doors of the vacant houses, and notices of planned construction were posted outside. Here and there, like missing teeth, were vacant lots filled with summer weeds and surrounded by chain-link fences. There was probably a plan to demolish this whole area in the near future and put up some new high-rises. Pots of morning glories and other flowers crammed the little space outside one of the few houses that were occupied. A tricycle lay on its side, and a towel and a child’s bathing suit were being dried in the second-story window. Cats lay everywhere—beneath the windows, in the doorway—watching me with weary eyes. Despite the bright early-evening hour, there was no sign of people. The geography of this place was lost on me. I couldn’t tell north from south. I guessed that I was in the triangular area between Yoyogi and Sendagaya and Harajuku, but I could not be sure.
It was, in any case, a forgotten section of the city. It had probably been overlooked because the roads were so narrow that cars could hardly pass through. The hands of the developers had not reached this far. Stepping in here, I felt as if time had turned back twenty or thirty years. I realized that at some point, the constant roar of car engines had been swallowed up and was gone now. Carrying his guitar case, the man had made his way through the maze of streets until he came to a wood-frame apartment house. He opened the front door, went inside, and closed the door behind him. As far as I could see, the door had not been locked.
I stood there for a time. The hands of my watch showed six-twenty. I leaned against the chain-link fence of the vacant lot across the street, observing the building. It was a typical two-floor wood-frame apartment building. The look of the entrance and the layout of the rooms gave it away. I had lived in a building like this for a time when I was a student. There had been a shoe cabinet in the entryway, a shared toilet, a little kitchen, and only students or single working people lived there. This particular building, though, gave no sense of anyone living there. It was totally devoid of sound or movement. The plastic-veneer door carried no nameplate. Where it had apparently been removed, there was a long, narrow blank spot. All the windows of the place were shut tight, with curtains drawn, despite the lingering afternoon heat.
This apartment house, like its neighbors, was probably scheduled for demolition soon, and no one lived there any longer. But if that was true, what was the man with the guitar case doing here? I expected to see a window slide open after he went inside, but still nothing moved.
I couldn’t just go on hanging around forever in this deserted alley. I walked over to the front door and gave it a push. I had been right: it was not locked, and it opened easily to the inside. I stood in the doorway a moment, trying to get a sense of the place, but I could hardly make out anything in
the gloomy interior. With the windows all closed, the place was filled with hot, stale air. The moldy smell here reminded me of the air at the bottom of the well. My armpits were streaming in the heat. A drop of sweat ran down behind my ear. After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind me. By checking the name tags (if there were any) on the mailboxes or the shoe cabinet, I intended to see if anyone was still living here, but before I could do so I realized that someone was there. Someone was watching me.
Immediately to the right of the entrance stood a tall shoe cabinet or some such thing, and the someone was standing just beyond it, as if to hide. I held my breath and peered into the gloomy warmth. The person standing there was the young man with the guitar case. He had obviously been hiding behind the shoe cabinet from the time he came inside. My heart pounded at the base of my throat like a hammer smashing a nail. What was he doing there? Waiting for me? “Hello there,” I forced myself to say. “I was hoping to ask you—”
But the words were barely out of my mouth when something slammed into my shoulder. Hard. I couldn’t tell what was happening. All I felt at the moment was a physical impact of blinding intensity. I went on standing there, confused. But then, in the next second, I realized what was going on. With the agility of a monkey, the man had leaped out from behind the shoe cabinet and hit me with a baseball bat. While I stood there in shock, he raised the bat again and swung it at me. I tried to dodge, but I was too late. This time the bat hit my left arm. For a moment, the arm lost all feeling. There was no pain, nothing at all. It was as if the whole arm had just melted into space.
Before I knew it, though, almost as a reflex action, I was kicking at him. I had never had formal training in martial arts, but a friend of mine in high school with some ranking in karate had taught me a few elementary moves. Day after day, he had had me practicing kicks—nothing fancy: just training to kick as hard and high and straight as possible. This was the single most useful thing to know in an emergency, he had said. And he had been right. Entirely taken up with swinging his bat, the man had obviously never anticipated the possibility that he might be kicked. Just as frantic as he was, I had no idea where my kick was aimed, nor was it very strong, but the shock of it seemed to take the wind out of him. He stopped swinging his bat, and as if there had been a break in time at that point, he stared at me with vacant eyes. Given this opening, I aimed a stronger, more accurate kick at his groin, and when he curled up with the pain, I wrenched the bat from his hands. Then I kicked him hard in the ribs. He tried to grab my leg, so I kicked him again. And then again, in the same place. Then I smashed his thigh with the bat. Emitting a dull scream, he fell on the floor.
At first I kicked and beat him out of sheer terror, so as to prevent myself from being hit. Once he fell on the floor, though, I found my terror turning to unmistakable anger. The anger was still there, the quiet anger that had welled up in my body earlier while I was walking along and thinking about Kumiko. Released now, it flared up uncontrollably into something close to intense hatred. I smashed the man’s thigh again with the bat. He was drooling from the corner of his mouth. My shoulder and left arm were beginning to throb where he had hit me. The pain aroused my anger all the more. The man’s face was distorted with pain, but he struggled to raise himself from the floor. I couldn’t make my left arm work, so I threw the bat down and stood over him, smashing his face with my right hand. I punched him again and again. I punched him until the fingers of my right hand grew numb and then started to hurt. I was going to beat him until he was unconscious. I grabbed his neck and smashed his head against the wooden floor. Never in my life had I been involved in a fistfight. I had never hit another person with all my strength. But now hitting was all I could do, and I couldn’t seem to stop. My mind was telling me to stop: This was enough. Any more would be too much. The man could no longer get to his feet. But I couldn’t stop. There were two of me now, I realized. I had split in two, but this me had lost the power to stop the other me. An intense chill ran through my body.
Then I realized the man was smiling. Even as I went on hitting him, the man kept smiling at me—the more I hit him, the bigger the smile, until finally, with blood streaming from his nose and lips, and choking on his own spit, the man gave out a high, thin laugh. He must be crazy, I thought, and I stopped punching him and stood up straight.
I looked around and saw the black guitar case propped against the side of the shoe cabinet. I left the man where he lay, still laughing, and approached the guitar case. Lowering it to the floor, I opened the clasps and lifted the cover. There was nothing inside. It was absolutely empty—no guitar, no candles. The man looked at me, laughing and coughing. I could hardly breathe. All of a sudden, the hot, steamy air inside this building became unbearable. The smell of mold, the touch of my own sweat, the smell of blood and saliva, my own sense of anger and of hatred: all became more than I could bear. I pushed the door open and went outside, closing the door behind me. As before, there was no sign of anyone in the area. All that moved was a large brown cat, slowly making its way across the vacant lot, oblivious of me.
I wanted to get out of there before anyone spotted me. I wasn’t sure which way I should go, but I started walking and before long managed to find a bus stop labeled “To Shinjuku Station.” I hoped to calm my breathing and straighten my head out before the next bus came, but failed to do either. Over and over, I told myself: All I was trying to do was look at people’s faces! I was just looking at the faces of people passing by on the street, the way my uncle had said. I was just trying to untangle the simplest complications in my life, that’s all. When I entered the bus, the passengers turned toward me. Each of them gave me the same shocked look and then averted his eyes. I assumed it was because of the mark on my face. Some time had to go by before I realized it was because of the splatters on my white shirt of the man’s blood (mostly blood from his nose) and the baseball bat I was still clutching in my hands.
I ended up bringing the bat all the way home with me and throwing it in the closet.
That night I stayed awake until the sun came up. The places on my shoulder and left arm where the man had hit me with the bat began to swell and to throb with pain, and my right fist retained the sensation of punching the man over and over and over again. The hand was still a fist, I realized, still clutched into a ball and ready to fight. I tried to relax it, but the hand would not cooperate. And where sleeping was concerned, it was less a matter of being unable to sleep than of not wanting to sleep. If I went to sleep in my present state, there was no way I could avoid having terrible dreams. Trying to calm myself, I sat at the kitchen table, taking straight sips of the whiskey my uncle had left with me and listening to quiet music on the cassette player. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted someone to talk to me. I set the telephone on the table and stared at it for hours. Call me, somebody, please, anybody—even the mysterious phone woman; I didn’t care. It could be the most filthy and meaningless talk, the most disgusting and sinister conversation. That didn’t matter. I just wanted someone to talk to me.
But the telephone never rang. I finished the remaining half-bottle of scotch, and after the sky grew light, I crawled into bed and went to sleep. Please don’t let me dream, please just let my sleep be a blank space, if only for today.
But of course I did dream. And as I had expected, it was a terrible dream. The man with the guitar case was in it. I performed the same actions in the dream as I had in reality—following him, opening the front door of the apartment house, feeling the impact of the bat, and hitting and hitting and hitting the man. But after that it was different. When I stopped hitting him and stood up, the man, drooling and laughing wildly as he had in reality, pulled a knife from his pocket—a small, sharp-looking knife. The blade caught the faint evening glow that spilled in through the curtains, reflecting a white glimmer reminiscent of bone. But the man did not use the knife to attack me. Instead, he took all his clothes off and started to peel his own skin as if it we
re the skin of an apple. He worked quickly, laughing aloud all the while. The blood gushed out of him, forming a black, menacing pool on the floor. With his right hand, he peeled the skin of his left arm, and with his bloody, peeled left hand he peeled the skin of his right arm. In the end, he became a bright-red lump of flesh, but even then, he went on laughing from the dark hole of his open mouth, the white eyeballs moving spasmodically against the raw lump of flesh. Soon, as if in response to his unnaturally loud laughter, the man’s peeled skin began to slither across the floor toward me. I tried to run away, but my legs would not move. The skin reached my feet and began to crawl upward. It crept over my own skin, the man’s blood-soaked skin clinging to mine as an overlay. The heavy smell of blood was everywhere. Soon my legs, my body, my face, were entirely covered by the thin membrane of the man’s skin. Then my eyes could no longer see, and the man’s laughter reverberated in the hollow darkness. At that point, I woke up.
Confusion and fear overtook me then. For a while, I even lost hold of my own existence. My fingers were trembling. But at the same time, I knew that I had reached a conclusion.
I could not—and should not—run away, not to Crete, not to anyplace. I had to get Kumiko back. With my own hands, I had to pull her back into this world. Because if I didn’t, that would be the end of me. This person, this self that I thought of as “me,” would be lost.