“Rest assured,” said Malta Kano, “I asked to see you today purely about the missing cat. That was the matter about which Mr. Wataya sought my advice. Mrs. Okada had consulted him on the matter, and he in turn consulted me.”
That explained a lot. Malta Kano was some kind of clairvoyant or channeler or something, and they had consulted her on the whereabouts of the cat. The Wataya family was into this kind of stuff—divination and house “physiognomy” and such. That was fine with me: people were free to believe anything they liked. But why did he have to go and rape the younger sister of his spiritual counselor? Why stir up a lot of pointless trouble?
“Is that your area of expertise?” I asked. “Helping people find things?”
She stared at me with those depthless eyes of hers, eyes that looked as if they were staring into the window of a vacant house. Judging from their expression, she had failed to grasp the meaning of my question.
Without answering the question, she said, “You live in a very strange place, don’t you, Mr. Okada?”
“I do?” I said. “Strange in what way?”
Instead of replying, she pushed her nearly untouched glass of tonic water another six or eight inches away from herself. “Cats are very sensitive creatures, you know.”
Another silence descended on the two of us.
“So our place is strange, and cats are sensitive animals,” I said. “OK. But we’ve lived there a long time—the two of us and the cat. Why now, all of a sudden, did it decide to leave us? Why didn’t it leave before now?”
“That I cannot tell you. Perhaps the flow has changed. Perhaps something has obstructed the flow.”
“The flow.”
“I do not know yet whether your cat is still alive, but I can be certain of one thing: it is no longer in the vicinity of your house. You will never find the cat in that neighborhood.”
I lifted my cup and took a sip of my now lukewarm coffee. Beyond the tearoom windows, a misty rain was falling. The sky was closed over with dark, low-hanging clouds. A sad procession of people and umbrellas climbed up and down the footbridge outside.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
I placed my right hand on the table, palm up, assuming she was planning to read my palm. Instead, she stretched her hand out and put her palm against mine. Then she closed her eyes, remaining utterly still, as if silently rebuking a faithless lover. The waitress came and refilled my cup, pretending not to notice what Malta Kano and I were doing. People at nearby tables stole glances in our direction. I kept hoping all the while that there were no acquaintances of mine in the vicinity.
“I want you to picture to yourself one thing you saw before you came here today,” said Malta Kano.
“One thing?” I asked.
“Just one thing.”
I thought of the flowered minidress that I had seen in Kumiko’s clothes storage box. Why that of all things happened to pop into my mind I have no idea. It just did.
We kept our hands together like that for another five minutes—five minutes that felt very long to me, not so much because I was being stared at by people as that the touch of Malta Kano’s hand had something unsettling about it. It was a small hand, neither hot nor cold. It had neither the intimate touch of a lover’s hand nor the functional touch of a doctor’s. It had the same effect on me as her eyes had, turning me into a vacant house. I felt empty: no furniture, no curtains, no rugs. Just an empty container. Eventually, Malta Kano withdrew her hand from mine and took several deep breaths. Then she nodded several times.
“Mr. Okada,” she said, “I believe that you are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur. The disappearance of your cat is only the beginning.”
“Different things,” I said. “Good things or bad things?”
She tilted her head in thought. “Good things and bad things. Bad things that seem good at first, and good things that seem bad at first.”
“To me, that sounds very general,” I said. “Don’t you have any more concrete information?”
“Yes, I suppose what I am saying does sound very general,” said Malta Kano. “But after all, Mr. Okada, when one is speaking of the essence of things, it often happens that one can only speak in generalities. Concrete things certainly do command attention, but they are often little more than trivia. Side trips. The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.”
I nodded silently—without the slightest inkling of what she was talking about.
“Do I have your permission to call you again?” she asked. “Sure,” I said, though in fact I had no wish to be called by anyone. “Sure” was about the only answer I could give.
She snatched her red vinyl hat from the table, took the handbag that had been hidden beneath it, and stood up. Uncertain as to how I should respond to this, I remained seated.
“I do have one small bit of information that I can share with you,” Malta Kano said, looking down at me, after she had put on her red hat. “You will find your polka-dot tie, but not in your house.”
High Towers and Deep Wells
(or, Far from Nomonhan)
•
Back home, I found Kumiko in a good mood. A very good mood. It was almost six o’clock by the time I arrived home after seeing Malta Kano, which meant I had no time to fix a proper dinner. Instead, I prepared a simple meal from what I found in the freezer, and we each had a beer. She talked about work, as she always did when she was in a good mood: whom she had seen at the office, what she had done, which of her colleagues had talent and which did not. That kind of thing.
I listened, making suitable responses. I heard no more than half of what she was saying. Not that I disliked listening to her talk about these things. Contents of the conversation aside, I loved watching her at the dinner table as she talked with enthusiasm about her work. This, I told myself, was “home.” We were doing a proper job of carrying out the responsibilities that we had been assigned to perform at home. She was talking about her work, and I, after having prepared dinner, was listening to her talk. This was very different from the image of home that I had imagined vaguely for myself before marriage. But this was the home I had chosen. I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.
“So what about the cat?” she asked. I summarized for her my meeting with Malta Kano in the hotel in Shinagawa. I told her about my polka-dot tie: that there had been no sign of it in the wardrobe. That Malta Kano had managed to find me in the crowded tearoom nonetheless. That she had had a unique way of dressing and of speaking, which I described. Kumiko enjoyed hearing about Malta Kano’s red vinyl hat, but when I was unable to provide a clear answer regarding the whereabouts of our lost cat, she was deeply disappointed.
“Then she doesn’t know where the cat is, either?” Kumiko demanded. “The best she could do was tell you it isn’t in our neighborhood any longer?”
“That’s about it,” I said. I decided not to mention anything about the “obstructed flow” of the place we lived in or that this could have some connection to the disappearance of the cat. I knew it would bother Kumiko, and for my own part, I had no desire to increase the number of things we had to worry about. We would have had a real problem if Kumiko insisted on moving because this was a “bad place.” Given our present economic situation, it would have been impossible for us to move.
“That’s what she tells me,” I said. “The cat is not around here anymore.”
“Which means it will never come home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She was vague about everything. All she came
up with was little hints. She did say she’d get in touch with me when she found out more, though.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Who knows? I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff.”
I poured myself some more beer and watched the head settle. Kumiko rested her elbow on the table, chin in hand.
“She must have told you she won’t accept payment or gifts of any kind,” she said.
“Uh-huh. That’s certainly a plus,” I said. “So what’s the problem? She won’t take our money, she won’t steal our souls, she won’t snatch the princess away. We’ve got nothing to lose.”
“I want you to understand one thing,” said Kumiko. “That cat is very important to me. Or should I say to us. We found it the week after we got married. Together. You remember?”
“Of course I do.”
“It was so tiny, and soaking wet in the pouring rain. I went to meet you at the station with an umbrella. Poor little baby. We saw him on the way home. Somebody had thrown him into a beer crate next to the liquor store. He’s my very first cat. He’s important to me, a kind of symbol. I can’t lose him.”
“Don’t worry. I know that.”
“So where is he? He’s been missing for ten days now. That’s why I called my brother. I thought he might know a medium or clairvoyant or something, somebody who could find a missing cat. I know you don’t like to ask my brother for anything, but he’s followed in my father’s footsteps. He knows a lot about these things.”
“Ah, yes, the Wataya family tradition,” I said as coolly as an evening breeze across an inlet. “But what’s the connection between Noboru Wataya and this woman?”
Kumiko shrugged. “I’m sure she’s just somebody he happened to meet. He seems to have so many contacts these days.”
“I’ll bet.”
“He says she possesses amazing powers but that she’s pretty strange.” Kumiko poked at her macaroni casserole. “What was her name again?”
“Malta Kano,” I said. “She practiced some kind of religious austerities on Malta.”
“That’s it. Malta Kano. What did you think of her?”
“Hard to say.” I looked at my hands, resting on the table. “At least she wasn’t boring. And that’s a good thing. I mean, the world’s full of things we can’t explain, and somebody’s got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn’t boring than somebody who is. Right? Like Mr. Honda, for example.”
Kumiko laughed out loud at the mention of Mr. Honda. “He was a wonderful old man, don’t you think? I liked him a lot.”
“Me too,” I said.
•
For about a year after we were married, Kumiko and I used to visit the home of old Mr. Honda once a month. A practitioner of spirit possession, he was one of the Wataya family’s favorite channeler types, but he was terrifically hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aid, he could barely make out what we said to him. We had to shout so loud our voices would rattle the shoji paper. I used to wonder if he could hear what the spirits said to him if he was so hard of hearing. But maybe it worked the other way: the worse your ears, the better you could hear the words of the spirits. He had lost his hearing in the war. A noncommissioned officer with Japan’s Manchurian garrison, the Kwantung Army, he had suffered burst eardrums when an artillery shell or a hand grenade or something exploded nearby during a battle with a combined Soviet-Outer Mongolian unit at Nomonhan on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchuria.
Our visits to Mr. Honda’s place were not prompted by a belief on our part in his spiritual powers. I had never been interested in these things, and Kumiko placed far less trust in such supernatural matters than either her parents or her brother. She did have a touch of superstition, and she could be upset by an ominous prognostication, but she never went out of her way to involve herself in spiritual affairs.
The only reason we went to see Mr. Honda was because her father ordered us to. It was the one condition he set for us to marry. True, it was a rather bizarre condition, but we went along with it to avoid complications. Neither of us had expected an easy time from her family. Her father was a government official. The younger son of a not very well-to-do farm family in Niigata, he had attended prestigious Tokyo University on scholarship, graduated with honors, and become an elite member of the Ministry of Transport. This was all very admirable, as far as I was concerned. But as is so often the case with men who have made it like this, he was arrogant and self-righteous. Accustomed to giving orders, he harbored not the slightest doubt concerning the values of the world to which he belonged. For him, hierarchy was everything. He bowed to superior authority without question, and he trampled those beneath him without hesitation. Neither Kumiko nor I believed that a man like that would accept a poor, twenty-four-year-old nobody like me, without position or pedigree or even decent grades or future promise, as a marriage partner for his daughter. We figured that after her parents turned us down, we’d get married on our own and live without having anything to do with them.
Still, I did the right thing. I formally went to ask Kumiko’s parents for her hand in marriage. To say that their reception of me was cool would be an understatement. The doors of all the world’s refrigerators seemed to have been thrown open at once.
That they gave us their permission in the end—with reluctance, but in a near-miraculous turn of events—was thanks entirely to Mr. Honda. He asked them everything they had learned about me, and in the end he declared that if their daughter was going to get married, I was the best possible partner for her; that if she wanted to marry me, they could only invite terrible consequences by opposing the match. Kumiko’s parents had absolute faith in Mr. Honda at the time, and so there was nothing they could do but accept me as their daughter’s husband.
Finally, though, I was always the outsider, the uninvited guest. Kumiko and I would visit their home and have dinner with them twice a month with mechanical regularity. This was a truly loathsome experience, situated at the precise midpoint between a meaningless mortification of the flesh and brutal torture. Throughout the meal, I had the sense that their dining room table was as long as a railway station. They would be eating and talking about something way down at the other end, and I was too far away for them to see. This went on for a year, until Kumiko’s father and I had a violent argument, after which we never saw each other again. The relief this gave me bordered on ecstasy. Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
For a time after our marriage, though, I did exert myself to keep relations between us on a good footing. And without a doubt, the least painful of my exertions were those monthly meetings with Mr. Honda.
All payments to Mr. Honda were made by Kumiko’s father. We merely had to visit Mr. Honda’s home in Meguro once a month with a big bottle of sake, listen to what he had to tell us, and go home. Simple.
We took to Mr. Honda immediately. He was a nice old man, whose face would light up whenever he saw the sake we had brought him. We liked everything about him—except perhaps for the way he left his television on full blast because he was so hard of hearing.
We always went to his house in the morning. Winter and summer, he sat with his legs down in the sunken hearth. In winter he would have a quilt wrapped around his waist to hold in the heat of the charcoal fire. In summer he used neither quilt nor fire. He was apparently a rather famous fortune-teller, but he lived very simply—even ascetically. His house was small, with a tiny entrance hall barely big enough for one person at a time to tie or untie a pair of shoes. The tatami mats on his floors were badly worn, and cracked windowpanes were patched with tape. Across the lane stood an auto repair shop, where there was always someone yelling at the top of his lungs. Mr. Honda wore a kimono styled midway between a sleeping robe and a traditional workman’s jacket. It gave no evidence of having been washed in the recent past. He lived alone and had a woman come in to do the cooking and cleaning. For some reason, though, he never let her launder his robe. Scraggly white whiskers hung on h
is sunken cheeks.
If there was anything in Mr. Honda’s house that could be called impressive, it was the huge color television set. In such a tiny house, its gigantic presence was overwhelming. It was always tuned to the government-supported NHK network. Whether this was because he loved NHK, or he couldn’t be bothered to change the channel, or this was a special set that received only NHK, I had no way of telling, but NHK was all he ever watched.
Instead of a flower arrangement or a calligraphic scroll, the living room’s ceremonial alcove was filled with this huge television set, and Mr. Honda always sat facing it, stirring the divining sticks on the table atop his sunken hearth while NHK continued to blast out cooking shows, bonsai care instructions, news updates, and political discussions.
“Legal work might be the wrong thing for you, sonny,” said Mr. Honda one day, either to me or to someone standing twenty yards behind me.
“It might?”
“Yep, it might. The law presides over things of this world, finally. The world where shadow is shadow and light is light, yin is yin and yang is yang, I’m me and he’s him. ‘I am me and / He is him: / Autumn eve.’ But you don’t belong to that world, sonny. The world you belong to is above that or below that.”
“Which is better?” I asked, out of simple curiosity. “Above or below?”
“It’s not that either one is better,” he said. After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm onto a tissue and studied it closely before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into a wastebasket. “It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. ‘I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self, and there you are.”