Book Two: Bird as Prophet
July to October 1984
As Concrete as Possible
•
Appetite in Literature
Kumiko never came back that night. I stayed up until midnight, reading, listening to music, and waiting for her, but finally I gave up and went to bed. I fell asleep with the light on. It was six in the morning when I woke. The full light of day shone outside the window. Beyond the thin curtain, birds were chirping. There was no sign of my wife beside me in bed. The white pillow lay there, high and fluffy. As far as I could see, no head had rested on it during the night. Her freshly washed, neatly folded summer pajamas lay atop the night table. I had washed them. I had folded them. I turned off the lamp beside my pillow and took a deep breath, as if to regulate the flow of time.
I did a tour of the house in my pajamas. I went first to the kitchen, then surveyed the living room and looked into Kumiko’s room. I checked the bathroom and, just to make sure, tried the closets. There was no sign of her anywhere. The house seemed more hushed than usual. I felt as if, by moving around, I alone was to blame for disrupting the quiet harmony of the place, and for no good reason.
There was nothing more for me to do. I went to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and lit the gas. When the water boiled, I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table to take a sip. Then I made toast and ate some potato salad from the refrigerator. This was the first time in years that I had eaten breakfast alone. Come to think of it, aside from a single business trip, we had never once missed breakfast together in all the time since our marriage. We had often missed lunch, and sometimes even dinner, but never breakfast. We had a kind of tacit understanding about breakfast: it was almost a ritual for us. No matter how late we might go to bed, we would always get up early enough to fix a proper morning meal and take the time to enjoy it together.
But that morning Kumiko was gone. I drank my coffee and ate my toast alone, in silence. An empty chair was all I had to look at. I looked and ate and thought about the cologne that she had been wearing the morning before. I thought about the man who might have given it to her. I thought about her lying in a bed somewhere with him, their arms wrapped around each other. I saw his hands caressing her naked body. I saw the porcelain of her back as I had seen it in the morning, the smooth skin beneath the rising zipper.
The coffee seemed to have a soapy taste. I couldn’t quite believe it. Shortly after the first sip, I sensed an unpleasant aftertaste. I wondered if my feelings were playing tricks on me, but the second sip had the same taste. I emptied the cup into the sink and poured myself more coffee, in a clean cup. Again the taste of soap. I couldn’t imagine why. I had washed the pot well, and there was nothing wrong with the water. But the taste—or smell—was unmistakable: it could only have been soap—or possibly moisturizing lotion. I threw out all the coffee in the pot and started to boil some more water, but it just wasn’t worth the trouble. I filled a cup with water from the tap and drank that instead. I really didn’t want coffee all that much anyway.
•
I waited until nine-thirty and dialed Kumiko’s office. A woman answered the phone.
“May I please speak to Kumiko Okada?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, but she doesn’t seem to be here yet.”
I thanked her and hung up. Then I started ironing shirts, as I always did when I felt restless. When I ran out of shirts, I tied up old newspapers and magazines, wiped down the sink and cabinet shelves, cleaned the toilet and bathtub. I polished the mirrors and windows with glass cleaner. I unscrewed the ceiling fixtures and washed the frosted glass. I stripped the sheets and threw them in the washing machine, then put on fresh ones.
At eleven o’clock I called the office again. The same girl answered, and again she told me that Kumiko had not come in.
“Was she planning to miss work today?” I asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” she said, without a trace of feeling. She was just reporting the facts.
Something was out of the ordinary if Kumiko had still not reported to work at eleven o’clock. Most publishers’ editorial offices kept irregular hours, but not Kumiko’s company. Producing magazines on health and natural foods, they had to deal with the kind of writers and other professionals—food producers, farmers, doctors—who went to work early in the morning and home in the evening. To accommodate them, Kumiko and her colleagues reported to the company at nine o’clock sharp and left by five, unless there was some special reason to stay later.
Hanging up, I went to the bedroom and looked through her closet. If she had run off, Kumiko should have taken her clothes. I checked the dresses and blouses and skirts that were hanging there. Of course, I didn’t know every piece of clothing she owned—I didn’t know every piece of clothing that I owned—but I often took her things to the cleaner’s and picked them up for her, so I had a pretty good grasp of which items she wore most often and which were most important to her, and as far as I could tell, just about everything was there.
Besides, she had had no opportunity to take a lot of clothes with her. I tried to recall as precisely as possible her departure from the house the day before—the clothes she wore, the bag she carried. All she had had with her was the shoulder bag she always carried to work, stuffed with notebooks and cosmetics and her wallet and pens and a handkerchief and tissues. A change of clothing would never have fit inside.
I looked through her dresser drawers. Accessories, stockings, sunglasses, panties, cotton tops: everything was there, arranged in neat rows. If anything had disappeared, it was impossible for me to tell. Panties and stockings, of course, she could have managed to take in her shoulder bag, but come to think of it, why would she have bothered? Those she could have picked up anywhere.
I went back to the bathroom for another look at her vanity drawers. No sign of change there, either: just a lot of little cosmetics containers and accessories stuffed inside. I opened the bottle of Christian Dior cologne and took another sniff. It smelled the same as before: the fragrance of a white flower, perfect for a summer morning. Again I thought of her ears and her white back.
I went to the living room and stretched out on the sofa. I closed my eyes and listened. Virtually the only sound I could hear was that of the clock ticking off time. There were no car noises or birds chirping. I had no idea what to do now. I decided to call her office again and got as far as lifting the receiver and dialing the first few numbers, but the thought of having to talk to that same girl was too much for me, and I put the receiver back. There was nothing more for me to do. I could only wait. Perhaps it was true that Kumiko was leaving me—for what reason I did not know, but it was at least a possibility. Even if it was true, though, she was not the kind of person who would leave without a word. She would do her best to explain her exact reasons as precisely as possible. Of that I was one hundred percent certain.
Or, then, there might have been an accident. She might have been run down by a car and rushed to the hospital. She could be unconscious at that moment and receiving a transfusion. The thought made my heart pound, but I knew that she was carrying her license and credit cards and address book. The hospital or the police would have contacted me by now.
I went to sit on the veranda and look at the garden, but in fact, I didn’t look at anything. I tried to think, but I couldn’t concentrate my attention on any one thing. All that came to mind, again and again, was Kumiko’s back as I raised the zipper of her dress—her back, and the smell of the cologne behind her ears.
After one o’clock, the phone rang. I stood up from the sofa and lifted the receiver.
“Pardon me, but would this be Mr. Okada’s home?” asked a woman’s voice. It was Malta Kano.
“That’s right,” I said.
“My name is Malta Kano. I am calling about the cat.”
“The cat?” I said with some confusion. I had forgotten all about it. Now, of course, I remembered, but it seemed like something from ages ago.
“The cat that Mrs
. Okada was searching for,” Malta Kano explained.
“Sure, sure,” I said.
Malta Kano fell silent at her end, as if gauging something. My tone of voice might have put her on alert. I cleared my throat and shifted the receiver to my other hand.
After a short pause, Malta Kano said, “I must tell you, Mr. Okada, I believe that the cat will almost certainly never be found. I hate to say this, but the best you can do is resign yourself to the fact. It is gone forever. Barring some major change, the cat will never come back.”
“Some major change?” I asked. But she did not respond.
Malta Kano remained silent for a long time. I waited for her to say something, but try as I might, I could not hear the smallest breath from her end of the line. Just as I was beginning to suspect that the telephone was out of order, she began to speak again.
“It may be terribly rude of me to say this, Mr. Okada, but aside from the cat, isn’t there perhaps something with which I can be of help?”
I could not reply to her immediately. With the receiver in my hand, I leaned back against the wall. It took some time for the words to come.
“Things are still not very clear to me,” I said. “I don’t know anything for sure. I’m trying to work it out in my own mind. But I think my wife has left me.” I explained to her that Kumiko had not come home the night before or reported to work that morning.
She seemed to be mulling this over at her end. “You must be very worried,” she said. “There is nothing I can say at this point, but things should begin to come clear before too long. Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of the tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.”
“Look, Miss Kano, I’m grateful for the trouble you’ve taken with the cat and all, but right now I’m not exactly in the mood for smooth-sounding generalities. I’m feeling lost. Really lost. Something awful is going to happen: I feel it. But I don’t know what to do. I have absolutely no idea what I should do. Is that clear? I don’t even know what I should do after I end this call. What I need right now is facts. Concrete facts. I don’t care how stupid and simple they might be, I’ll take any facts I can get—am I making myself clear? I need something I can see and touch.”
Through the phone I heard the sound of something falling on the floor: something not very heavy—perhaps a single pearl—dropping onto a wooden floor. This was followed by a rubbing sound, as if a piece of tracing paper were being held in someone’s fingertips and given a vigorous yank. These movements seemed to be occurring someplace neither very close to nor far from the telephone, but they were apparently of no interest to Malta Kano.
“I see,” she said in a flat, expressionless voice. “Something concrete.”
“That’s right. As concrete as possible.”
“Wait for a phone call.”
“Waiting for a phone call is all I’ve been doing.”
“You should be getting a call soon from a person whose name begins with O.”
“Does this person know something about Kumiko?”
“That I can’t say. I’m just telling you this because you said you would take any concrete facts you could get. And here is another one: Before very long, a half-moon will last for several days.”
“A half-moon?” I asked. “You mean the moon in the sky?”
“Yes, Mr. Okada, the moon in the sky. In any case, the thing for you to do is wait. Waiting is everything. Goodbye, then. I’ll be talking to you again soon.” And she hung up.
•
I brought our address book from my desk and opened to the Os. There were exactly four listings, written in Kumiko’s neat little hand. The first was my father, Tadao Okada. Then came an old college friend of mine named Onoda, a dentist named Otsuka, and the neighborhood Omura liquor store.
I could forget about the liquor store. It was ten minutes’ walk from the house, and aside from those rare instances when we would order a case of beer to be delivered, we had no special connection with them. The dentist was also irrelevant. I had gone to him for work on a molar two years earlier, but Kumiko had never been there. In fact, she had never been to any dentist since she married me. My friend Onoda I hadn’t seen in years. He had gone to work for a bank after college, was transferred to the Sapporo branch in his second year, and had been living in Hokkaido ever since. Now he was just one of those people I exchanged New Year’s cards with. I couldn’t remember whether he had ever met Kumiko.
That left my father, but it was unthinkable that Kumiko would have some special relationship with him. He had remarried after my mother’s death, and I had not seen him or corresponded with him or spoken with him on the telephone in the years since. Kumiko had never even met the man.
Flipping through the address book, I was reminded how little the two of us had had to do with other people. Aside from a few useful connections with colleagues, we had had almost no relationships outside the house in the six years since our marriage, but instead had lived a withdrawn sort of life, just Kumiko and me.
I decided to make spaghetti for lunch again. Not that I was the least bit hungry. But I couldn’t just go on sitting on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I had to move my body, to begin working toward some goal. I put water in a pot, turned on the gas, and until it boiled I would make tomato sauce while listening to an FM broadcast. The radio was playing an unaccompanied violin sonata by Bach. The performance itself was excellent, but there was something annoying about it. I didn’t know whether this was the fault of the violinist or of my own present state of mind, but I turned off the music and went on cooking in silence. I heated the olive oil, put garlic in the pan, and added minced onions. When these began to brown, I added the tomatoes that I had chopped and strained. It was good to be cutting things and frying things like this. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that I could feel in my hands. I liked the sounds and the smells.
When the water boiled, I put in the salt and a fistful of spaghetti. I set the timer for ten minutes and washed the things in the sink. Even with the finished spaghetti on the plate in front of me, though, I felt no desire to eat. I barely managed to finish off half and threw out the rest. The leftover sauce I put in a container and stored in the refrigerator. Oh, well, the appetite had not been there to begin with.
Long before, I seemed to recall, I had read some kind of story about a man who keeps eating while he waits for something to happen. After thinking long and hard about it, I concluded that it was from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The hero (I had forgotten his name) manages to escape from Italy to Switzerland by boat, and while he’s waiting in this little Swiss town for his wife to give birth, he’s constantly going to the café across the way for something to drink or eat. I could hardly remember anything about the plot. What had stuck in my mind was this one part near the end, in which the hero goes from meal to meal while waiting in a foreign country for his wife to have her baby. The reason I recalled it so clearly, it seemed, was that this part of the book had an intense reality to it. It seemed far more real to me, as literature, for the character’s anxiety to cause this abnormal upsurge in appetite rather than to make him incapable of eating and drinking.
In contrast to A Farewell to Arms, though, I developed no appetite at all as I watched the hands of the clock in this quiet house, waiting for something to happen. And soon the thought crossed my mind that my failure to develop an appetite might be owing to the lack within me of this kind of literary reality. I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true.
•
The phone finally rang, just before two in the afternoon.
“Is this the Okada residence?” asked an unfamiliar male voice. It was a young man’s voice, low and smooth.
“Yes, it is,” I answered, my own voice somewhat tense.
“Block two, number twenty-six?”
>
“That’s right.”
“This is the Omura liquor store calling. Thank you for your continued patronage. I was just about to leave to make my collections, and I wanted to check to see if this was a good time for you.”
“Collections?”
“Yes, sir. I have you down for two cases of beer and a case of juice.”
“Oh. Fine. I’ll be home for a while yet,” I said, bringing our conversation to a close.
After hanging up, I wondered whether that conversation had contained any information regarding Kumiko. But viewed from all possible angles, it had been nothing but a short, practical call from a liquor store about collections. I had ordered beer and juice from them, and they had delivered it, that much was certain. Half an hour later, the fellow came to the door, and I paid for two cases of beer and a case of juice.
The friendly young man smiled as he filled out the receipt.
“By the way, Mr. Okada, did you hear about the accident by the station this morning? About half past nine.”
“Accident?” I asked with a shock. “Who was in an accident?”
“A little girl,” he said. “Got run over by a van backing up. Hurt bad, too, I hear. I got there just after it happened. It’s awful to see something like that first thing in the morning. Little kids scare the heck out of me: you can’t see them in your rearview mirror. You know the cleaner’s by the station? It happened right in front of his place. People park their bikes there, and all these cartons are piled up: you can’t see a thing.”
After he left, I felt I couldn’t stay in the house a minute longer. All of a sudden, the place felt hot and stuffy, dark and cramped. I stepped into my shoes and got out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t even lock the door. I left the windows open and the kitchen light on. I wandered around the neighborhood, sucking on a lemon drop. As I replayed the words of the young liquor store employee in my mind, it slowly dawned on me that I had left some clothes at the cleaner’s by the station. Kumiko’s blouse and skirt. The ticket was in the house, but if I just went and asked for them, the man would probably let me have them.