What happened down there? What did it mean? Even now, more than forty years later, I cannot answer those questions with any certainty. Which is why what I am about to say is strictly a hypothesis, a tentative explanation that I have fashioned for myself without the benefit of any logical basis. I do believe, however, that this hypothesis of mine is, for now, the closest that anyone can come to the truth of what it was that I experienced.
Outer Mongolian troops had thrown me into a deep, dark well in the middle of the steppe, my leg and shoulder were broken, I had neither food nor water: I was simply waiting to die. Before that, I had seen a man skinned alive. Under these special circumstances, I believe, my consciousness had attained such a viscid state of concentration that when the intense beam of light shone down for those few seconds, I was able to descend directly into a place that might be called the very core of my own consciousness. In any case, I saw the shape of something there. Just imagine: Everything around me is bathed in light. I am in the very center of a flood of light. My eyes can see nothing. I am simply enveloped in light. But something begins to appear there. In the midst of my momentary blindness, something is trying to take shape. Some thing. Some thing that possesses life. Like the shadow in a solar eclipse, it begins to emerge, black, in the light. But I can never quite make out its form. It is trying to come to me, trying to confer upon me something very much like heavenly grace. I wait for it, trembling. But then, either because it has changed its mind or because there is not enough time, it never comes to me. The moment before it takes full shape, it dissolves and melts once again into the light. Then the light itself fades. The time for the light to shine down into the well has ended.
This happened two days in a row. Exactly the same thing. Something began to take shape in the overflowing light, then faded before it could reach a state of fullness. Down in the well, I was suffering with hunger and thirst—suffering terribly. But finally, this was not of major importance. What I suffered with most down there in the well was the torture of being unable to attain a clear view of that something in the light: the hunger of being unable to see what I needed to see, the thirst of being unable to know what I needed to know. Had I been able to see it clearly, I would not have minded dying right then and there. I truly felt that way. I would have sacrificed anything for a full view of its form.
Finally, though, the form was snatched away from me forever. The grace came to an end before it could be given to me. And as I said earlier, the life I led after emerging from that hole in the ground was nothing but a hollow, empty shell. Which is why, when the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria just before the end of the war, I volunteered to be sent to the front. In the Siberian labor camp, too, I purposely strove to have myself placed in the most difficult circumstances. No matter what I did, however, I could not die. Just as Corporal Honda had predicted that night, I was fated to return to Japan and live an amazingly long life. I remember how happy that news made me when I first heard it. But it turned out to be, if anything, a curse. It was not that I would not die: I could not die. Corporal Honda had been right about that too: I would have been better off not knowing.
When the revelation and the grace were lost, my life was lost. Those living things that had once been there inside me, that had been for that reason of some value, were dead now. Not one thing was left. They had all been burned to ashes in that fierce light. The heat emitted by that revelation or grace had seared away the very core of the life that made me the person I was. Surely I had lacked the strength to resist that heat. And so I feel no fear of death. If anything, my physical death would be, for me, a form of salvation. It would liberate me forever from this hopeless prison, this pain of being me.
Again I have burdened you with an overlong tale. I beg your forgiveness. But what I want to convey to you, Mr. Okada, is this: I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment—perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
In any case, I am grateful for the chance to have met you, Mr. Okada, and to have told you my story. Whether it will ever be of any use to you, I cannot be certain. But by telling it to you, I feel that I have attained a kind of salvation. Frail and tenuous though it may be, to me any kind of salvation is a treasure. Nor can I but sense the presence of the subtle threads of fate to think that Mr. Honda was the one who guided me to it. Please remember, Mr. Okada, that there is someone here sending his best wishes to you for a happy life in the years to come.
I read through the letter one more time, with care, and returned it to its envelope.
Lieutenant Mamiya’s letter moved my heart in strange ways, but to my mind it brought only vague and distant images. Lieutenant Mamiya was a man I could trust and accept, and I could also accept as fact those things that he declared to be facts. But the very concept of fact or truth had little power to persuade me just then. What most moved me in his letter was the sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenant’s words: the frustration of never quite being able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction.
I went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then I wandered around the house. In the bedroom, I sat on the bed and looked at Kumiko’s dresses lined up in the closet. And I thought, What has been the point of my life until now? I saw what Noboru Wataya had been talking about. My first reaction to his words had been anger, but I had to admit that he was right. “You have been married to my sister for six years,” he had said, “and what have you done in all that time? Nothing, right? All you’ve accomplished in six long years is to quit your job and ruin Kumiko’s life. Now you’re out of work and you have no plans for the future. There’s nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks.” I had no choice but to admit the accuracy of his remarks. Objectively speaking, I had done nothing meaningful in these six years, and what I had in my head was indeed something very like garbage and rocks. I was a zero. Just as he had said.
But was it true that I had ruined Kumiko’s life?
For a long time, I looked at her dresses and blouses and skirts in the closet. They were the shadows Kumiko had left behind. Bereft of their owner, these shadows could only hang where they were, limp. I went to the bathroom and took out the bottle of Christian Dior cologne that someone had given to Kumiko. I opened it and smelled it. It was the fragrance I had smelled behind Kumiko’s ears the morning she had left the house. I slowly poured the entire contents into the sink. As the liquid flowed down the drain, a strong smell of flowers (the exact name of which I tried but failed to recall) hung over the sink, stirring up memories with brutal intensity. In the midst of this intense aroma, I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I decided to go to May Kasahara’s.
•
As always, I stood in the alley at the back of the Miyawaki house, waiting for May Kasahara to appear, but this time it didn’t work. I leaned against the fence, sucked on a lemon drop, looked at the bird sculpture, and thought about Lieutenant Mamiya’s letter. Soon, however, it began to grow dark. After waiting close to half an hour, I gave up. May Kasahara was probably out somewhere.
I made my way back down the alley to the rear of my house and scaled the wall. Inside, I found the place filled with the hushed, pale darkness of a summer evening. And Creta Kano was there. For one hallucinatory moment, I felt I was dreaming. But no, this was the continuation of reality. A subtle trace of the cologne I had spilled still floated in the air. Creta Kano was sitting on the sofa, her hands on her knees. I drew closer
to her, but as if time itself had stopped inside her, she made not the slightest movement. I turned on the light and sat in the chair facing her.
“The door was unlocked,” she said at last. “I let myself in.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I usually leave the door unlocked when I go out.”
She wore a lacy white blouse, flouncy mauve skirt, and large earrings. On her left wrist she wore a large pair of matching bracelets. The sight of them sent a shock through me. They were virtually identical to the bracelets I had seen her wearing in my dream. Her hair and makeup were both done in the style she always used. Hair spray held the hair perfectly in place as usual, as if she had just arrived from the beauty parlor.
“There is not much time,” she said. “I have to return home right away. But I wanted to be sure I had a chance to talk with you, Mr. Okada. You saw my sister and Mr. Wataya today, I believe.”
“Sure did. Not that it was the most fun little gathering.”
“Isn’t there something you would like to ask me in connection with that?” she asked.
All kinds of people were coming to me with all kinds of questions.
“I’d like to know more about Noboru Wataya,” I said. “I can’t help thinking that I have to know more about him.”
She nodded. “I would like to know more about Mr. Wataya myself. I believe that my sister has already told you that he defiled me once, a very long time ago. I don’t have time to go into that today, but I will, on some future occasion. In any case, it was something done to me against my will. It had originally been arranged for me to have relations with him. Which is why it was not rape in the ordinary sense of the word. But he did defile me, and that changed me as a person in many important ways. In the end, I was able to recover from the experience. Indeed, it enabled me (with the help of Malta Kano, of course) to bring myself to a whole new, higher level. Whatever the end results may have been, the fact remains that Noboru Wataya violated and defiled me at that time against my will. What he did to me was wrong—and dangerous. The potential was there for me to have been lost forever. Do you see what I mean?”
I did not see what she meant.
“Of course, I had relations with you too, Mr. Okada, but it was something done in the correct way, with a correct purpose. I was in no way defiled by that.”
I looked directly at her for several seconds, as if staring at a wall with colored blotches. “You had relations with me?”
“Yes,” she said. “The first time I only used my mouth, but the second time we had relations. In the same room both times. You remember, of course? We had so little time on the first occasion, we had to hurry. There was more time to spare on the second occasion.”
It was impossible for me to reply to her.
“I was wearing your wife’s dress the second time. The blue one. And bracelets like these on my left arm. Isn’t that true?” She held her left wrist, with the pair of bracelets, out toward me.
I nodded.
Creta Kano then said, “Of course, we did not have relations in reality. When you ejaculated, it was not into me, physically, but in your own consciousness. Do you see? It was a fabricated consciousness. Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations with each other.”
“What’s the point of doing something like that?”
“To know,” she said. “To know more—and more deeply.”
I released a sigh. This was crazy. But she had been describing the scene of my dream with incredible accuracy. Running my finger around my mouth, I stared at the two bracelets on her left wrist.
“Maybe I’m not very smart,” I said, my voice dry, “but I really can’t claim to have understood everything you’ve been telling me.”
“In your second dream, when I was in the midst of having relations with you, another woman took my place. Isn’t that true? I have no idea who she was. But that event was probably meant to suggest something to you, Mr. Okada. This is what I wanted to convey to you.”
I said nothing in return.
“You should have no sense of guilt about having had relations with me,” said Creta Kano. “You see, Mr. Okada, I am a prostitute. I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind. Things pass through me.”
At this point, Creta Kano left her seat and went down on her knees beside me, clutching my hand in both of hers. She had soft, warm, very small hands. “Please hold me, Mr. Okada. Right here and now.”
We stood, and I put my arms around her. I honestly had no idea whether I should be doing this. But holding Creta Kano just then, just there, did not seem to be a mistake. I could not have explained it, but that was how I felt. I wrapped my arms around her slender body as if I were taking my first lesson in ballroom dancing. She was a small woman. The top of her head came just past the bottom of my chin. Her breasts pressed against my stomach. She held her cheek against my chest. And although she made no sound the whole time, she was crying. I could feel the warmth of her tears through my T-shirt. I looked down, to see her perfectly set hair trembling. I felt I was having a well-made dream. But it was not a dream.
After we had stayed in that position without moving for a very long time, she pulled away from me as if she had suddenly remembered something. Maintaining a distance, she looked at me.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Okada,” she said. “I will be going home now.” She had supposedly just been crying with some intensity, but her makeup had hardly been disturbed. The sense of reality was now strangely absent.
“Are you going to be coming into my dreams again sometime?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, with a gentle shake of the head. “Not even I can tell you that. But please have faith in me. Whatever might happen, please don’t be afraid of me or feel you must be on your guard where I am concerned. Will you promise me that, Mr. Okada?”
I answered with a nod.
Soon afterward, Creta Kano went home.
The darkness of night was thicker than ever. The front of my T-shirt was soaking wet. I stayed up until dawn, unable to sleep. I didn’t feel sleepy, for one thing, and in fact, I was afraid to sleep. I had the feeling that if I were to go to sleep, I would be enveloped in a flow of shifting sand that would carry me off to another world, from which I would never be able to return. I stayed on the sofa until morning, drinking brandy and thinking about Creta Kano’s story. Even after the night had ended, the presence of Creta Kano and the fragrance of Christian Dior eau de cologne lingered in the house like captive shadows.
Views of Distant Towns
•
Eternal Half – Moon
•
Ladder in Place
The telephone rang at almost the exact moment I was falling asleep. I tried to ignore it, but as if it could read my mind, it kept up its stubborn ringing: ten times, twenty times—it was never going to stop. Finally, I opened one eye and looked at the clock. Just after six in the morning. Beyond the window shone the full light of day. The call might be from Kumiko. I got out of bed, went to the living room, and picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” I said, but the caller said nothing. Somebody was obviously there, but the person did not try to speak. I, too, kept silent. Concentrating on the earpiece, I could just make out the sound of breathing.
“Who is it?” I asked, but the silence continued at the other end.
“If this is the person who’s always calling, do me a favor and make it a little later,” I said. “No sex talk before breakfast, please.”
“The person who’s always calling?” blurted out the voice of May Kasahara. “Who do you talk about sex with?”
“Nobody,” I said.
“The woman you were holding in your arms last night? Do you talk about sex with her on the telephone?”
“No, she’s not the one.”
“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, just how many women do you have hanging around you—aside from your wife?”
“That would be a very long story,” I
said. “Anyhow, it’s six in the morning and I haven’t had much sleep. So you came to my house last night, huh?”
“And I saw you with her—holding each other.”
“That didn’t mean a thing,” I said. “How can I put it? It was a kind of little ceremony.”
“You don’t have to make excuses to me,” said May Kasahara. “I’m not your wife. It’s none of my business, but let me just say this: You’ve got a problem.”
“You may be right,” I said.
“You’re having a tough time now, I know that. But I can’t help thinking it’s something you brought on yourself. You’ve got some really basic problem, and it attracts trouble like a magnet. Any woman with any sense would get the hell away from you.”
“You may be right,” I said again.
May Kasahara maintained a brief silence on her end of the line. Then she cleared her throat once and said, “You came to the alley last night, didn’t you? Standing for a long time at the back of my house, like some amateur burglar … Don’t worry, I saw you there.”
“So why didn’t you come out?”
“A girl doesn’t always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty—like, if the guy’s gonna wait, let him really wait.”
I grunted.
“But I still felt bad,” she went on. “So I dragged myself all the way to your house later—like an idiot.”
“And I was holding the woman.”
“Yeah, but isn’t she kinda cuckoo? Nobody dresses like that anymore. And that makeup of hers! She’s, like, in a time warp or something. She should go get her head examined.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “she’s not cuckoo. Different people have different tastes.”
“Well, sure. People can have any taste they want. But ordinary people don’t go that far just for taste. She’s like—what?—right out of an old magazine: everything about her, from head to foot.”