“Do you think the price will continue to fall?”
The old man gave a sharp nod. “Of course it’s going to fall. To nine hundred thousand per tsubo easy. That’s what they bought it for. They’re really getting worried now. They’d be thrilled if they could break even. I don’t know if they’d go any lower. They might take a loss if they’re hurting for cash. Otherwise, they could afford to wait. I just don’t know what’s going on inside the company. What I do know is that they’re sorry they bought the place. Getting mixed up with that piece of land is not going to do anybody any good.” He tapped his ashes into the ashtray.
“The yard has a well, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Do you know anything about the well?”
“Hmm, it does have a well, doesn’t it,” said Mr. Ichikawa. “A deep well. But I think they filled it in. It was dry, after all. Useless.”
“Do you have any idea when it dried up?”
The old man glared at the ceiling for a while, with his arms folded. “That was a long time ago. I can’t remember, really, but I’m sure I heard it had water sometime before the war. It must have dried up after the war. I don’t know when, exactly. But I know it was dry when the actress moved in. There was a lot of talk then about whether or not to fill in the well. But nobody ever did anything about it. I guess it was too much bother.”
“The well in the Kasahara place across the alley still has plenty of water—good water, I’m told.”
“Maybe so, maybe so. The wells in that area always produced good-tasting water. It’s got something to do with the soil. You know, water veins are delicate things. It’s not unusual to get water in one place and nothing at all right close by. Is there something about that well that interests you?”
“To tell you the truth, I’d like to buy that piece of land.”
The old man raised his eyes and focused them on mine. Then he lifted his teacup and took a silent sip. “You want to buy that piece of land?”
My only reply was a nod.
The old man took another cigarette from his pack and tapped it against the tabletop. But then, instead of lighting it, he held it between his fingers. His tongue flicked across his lips. “Let me say one more time that that’s a place with a lot of problems. No one—and I mean no one—has ever done well there. You do realize that? I don’t care how cheap it gets, that place can never be a good buy. But you want it just the same?”
“Yes, I still want it, knowing what I know. But let me point out one thing: I don’t have enough money on hand to buy the place, no matter how far the price falls below market value. But I intend to raise the money, even if it takes me a while. So I would like to be kept informed of any new developments. Can I count on you to let me know if the price changes or if a buyer shows up?”
For a time, the old man just stared at his unlit cigarette, lost in thought. Then, clearing his throat with a little cough, he said, “Don’t worry, you’ve got time; that place is not going to sell for a while, I guarantee you. It’s not going to move until they’re practically giving it away, and that won’t happen for a while. So take all the time you need to raise the money. If you really want it.”
I told him my phone number. The old man wrote it down in a little sweat-stained black notebook. After returning the notebook to his jacket pocket, he looked me in the eye for a while and then looked at the mark on my cheek.
•
February came to an end, and March was half gone when the freezing cold began to relent somewhat. Warm winds blew up from the south. Buds appeared on the trees, and new birds showed up in the garden. On warm days I began to spend time sitting on the veranda, looking at the garden. One evening I got a call from Mr. Ichikawa. The Miyawaki land-was still unsold, he said, and the price had dropped somewhat.
“I told you it wouldn’t move for a while,” he added, with a touch of pride. “Don’t worry, from now on it’s just going to creep down. Meanwhile, how are you doing? Funds coming together?”
•
I was washing my face at eight o’clock that night when I noticed that my mark was beginning to run a slight fever. When I laid my finger against it, I could feel a touch of warmth that had not been there before. The color, too, seemed more intense than usual, almost purplish. Barely breathing, I stared into the mirror for a long time—long enough for me to begin to see my own face as something other than mine. The mark was trying to tell me something: it wanted something from me. I went on staring at my self beyond the mirror, and that self went on staring back at me from beyond the mirror without a word.
I have to have that well. Whatever happens, I have to have that well.
This was the conclusion I had reached.
Waking from Hibernation
•
One More Name Card
•
The Namelessness of Money
Just wanting the land was not going to make it mine, of course. The amount of money I could realistically raise was close to zero. I still had a little of what my mother had left me, but that would evaporate soon in the course of living. I had no job, nothing I could offer as collateral. And there was no bank in the world that would lend money to someone like me out of sheer kindness. I would have to use magic to produce the money from thin air. And soon.
One morning I walked to the station and bought ten fifty-million-yen lottery tickets, with continuous numbers. Using tacks, I covered a section of the kitchen wall with them and looked at them every day. Sometimes I would spend a whole hour in a chair staring hard at them, as if waiting for a secret code to rise out of them that only I could see. After several days of this, the thought struck me from nowhere: I’m never going to win the lottery.
Before long, I knew this without a doubt. Things were absolutely not going to be solved so easily—by just buying a few lottery tickets and waiting for the results. I would have to get the money through my own efforts. I tore up the lottery tickets and threw them away. Then I stood in front of the washbasin mirror and peered into its depths. There has to be a way, I said to myself in the mirror, but of course there was no reply.
•
Tired of always being shut up in the house with my thoughts, I began to walk around the neighborhood. I continued these aimless walks for three or four days, and when I tired of the neighborhood, I took the train to Shinjuku. The impulse to go downtown came to me when I happened by the station. Sometimes, I thought, it helps to think about things in a different setting. It occurred to me, too, that I hadn’t been on a train for a very long time. Indeed, while putting my money in the ticket machine, I experienced the nervousness one feels when doing something unfamiliar. When had I last been to the streets of the city? Probably not since I followed the man with the guitar case from the Shinjuku west entrance—more than six months earlier.
The sight of the crowds in Shinjuku Station I found overwhelming. The flow of people took my breath away and even made my heart pound to some extent—and this wasn’t even rush hour! I had trouble making my way through the crush of bodies at first. This was not so much a crowd as a raging torrent—the kind of flood that tears whole houses apart and sweeps them away. I had been walking only a few minutes when I felt the need to calm my nerves. I entered a café that faced the avenue and took a seat by one of its large glass windows. Late in the morning, the café was not crowded. I ordered a cup of cocoa and half-consciously watched the people walking by outside.
I was all but unaware of the passage of time. Perhaps fifteen minutes had gone by, perhaps twenty, when I realized that my eyes had been following each polished Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, and Porsche that crept along the jam-packed avenue. In the fresh morning sunlight after a night of rain, these cars sparkled with almost painful intensity, like some kind of symbols. They were absolutely spotless. Those guys have money. Such a thought had never crossed my mind before. I looked at my reflection in the glass and shook my head. This was the first time in my life I had a desperate need for money.
When the lunchtime crowd began to fill the caf
é, I decided to take a walk. I had no particular goal other than to walk through the city I had not seen for so long. I walked from one street to another, my only thought being to avoid bumping into the people coming toward me. I turned right or left or went straight ahead, depending on the changing of the traffic signals or the whim of the moment. Hands in pockets, I concentrated on the physical act of walking—from the avenues with their rows of department stores and display windows, to the back alleys with their garishly decorated porno shops, to the lively streets with movie theaters, through the hushed precincts of a Shinto shrine, and back to the avenues. It was a warm afternoon, and close to half the crowd had left their coats indoors. The occasional breeze felt pleasant for a change. Before I realized it, I found myself standing in familiar surroundings. I looked at the tiles beneath my feet, at the little sculpture that stood there, and at the tall glass building that towered over me. I was standing in the middle of the small plaza outside the high-rise, the very one where I had gone last summer to watch the people passing by, as my uncle had advised me to do. I had kept it up for eleven days then, at the end of which I had followed the weird man with the guitar case into the strange apartment house lobby, where he attacked me with the bat. Aimless walking around Shinjuku had brought me to the same exact place.
As before, I bought myself coffee and a doughnut at Dunkin’ Donuts and took them with me to the plaza bench. I sat and watched the faces of the people passing by, which put me in an increasingly calm and peaceful mood. It felt good for some reason I could not fathom, as though I had found a comfortable niche in a wall where people would not notice me watching them. It had been a very long time since I had had such a good look at people’s faces. And not only people’s faces, I realized. I had hardly looked—really looked—at anything at all over these past six months. I sat up straight on the bench and poised myself to look at things. I looked at the people, I looked at the buildings soaring overhead, I looked at the spring sky where the clouds had parted, I looked at the colorful billboards, I picked up a newspaper lying close by and looked at it. Color seemed gradually to be returning to things as evening approached.
•
The next morning I took the train to Shinjuku again. I sat on the same bench and looked at the faces of the people passing by. Again for lunch I had a doughnut and coffee. I took the train home before the evening rush hour started. I made myself dinner, drank a beer, and listened to music on the radio. The next day I did exactly the same thing. Nothing happened that day, either. I made no discoveries, solved no riddles, answered no questions. But I did have the vague sense that I was, little by little, moving closer to something. I could see this movement, this gradually increasing closeness, whenever I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink. The color of my mark was more vivid than before, warmer than before. My mark is alive, I told myself. Just as I am alive, my mark is alive.
I repeated the routine every day, as I had done the previous summer, boarding the train for the city just after ten, sitting on the bench in the plaza by the high-rise, and looking at the people passing back and forth all day, without a thought in my head. Now and then, the real sounds around me would grow distant and fade away. The only thing I heard at those times was the deep, quiet sound of water flowing. I thought of Malta Kano. She had talked about listening to the sound of water. Water was her main motif. But I could not recall what Malta Kano had said about the sound of water. Nor could I recall her face. All that I could bring back was the red color of her vinyl hat. Why had she always worn that red vinyl hat?
But then sounds gradually returned to me, and once again I returned my gaze to the faces of the people.
•
On the afternoon of the eighth day of my going into town, a woman spoke to me. At that moment, I happened to be looking in another direction, with an empty coffee cup in my hand. “Excuse me,” she said. I turned and raised my eyes to the face of the woman standing in front of me. It was the same middle-aged woman I had encountered here last summer—the only person who had spoken to me during the time I spent in the plaza. It had never occurred to me that we would meet again, but when in fact she spoke to me, it seemed like the natural conclusion of a great flow.
As before, the woman was extremely well dressed, in terms of both the quality of the individual items of clothing she wore and the style with which she had combined them. She wore dark tortoiseshell sunglasses, a smoky blue jacket with padded shoulders, and a red flannel skirt. Her blouse was of silk, and on the collar of her jacket shone a finely sculpted gold brooch. Her red high heels were simple in design, but I could have lived several months on what they must have cost her. My own outfit was a mess, as usual: the baseball jacket I bought the year I entered college, a gray sweatshirt with a stretched-out neck, frayed blue jeans, and formerly white tennis shoes that were now of an indeterminate color.
Despite the contrast, she sat down next to me, crossed her legs, and, without a word, took a box of Virginia Slims from her handbag. She offered me a cigarette as she had last summer, and again I declined. She put one between her lips and lit it, using a long, slender gold lighter the size of an eraser. Then she took off her sunglasses, put them in her jacket pocket, and stared into my eyes as if searching for a coin she had dropped into a shallow pond. I studied her eyes in return. They were strange eyes, of great depth but expressionless.
She narrowed her eyes slightly and said, “So. You’re back.”
I nodded.
I watched the smoke rise from the tip of her narrow cigarette and drift away on the wind. She turned to survey the scene around us, as if to ascertain with her own eyes exactly what it was I had been looking at from the bench. What she saw didn’t seem to interest her, though. She turned her eyes to me again. She stared at my mark for a long time, then at my eyes, my nose, my mouth, and then my mark again. I had the feeling that what she really wanted to do was inspect me like a dog in a show: pry my lips open to check my teeth, look into my ears, and whatever else they do.
“I guess I need some money now,” I said.
She paused a moment. “How much?”
“Eighty million yen should do it.”
She took her eyes from mine and peered up at the sky as if calculating the amount: let’s see, if I take that from there, and move this from here … I studied her makeup all the while—the eye shadow faint, like the shadow of a thought, the curl of the eyelashes subtle, like some kind of symbol.
“That’s not a small amount of money,” she said, with a slight diagonal twist of the lips.
“I’d say it’s enormous.”
Her cigarette was only one-third smoked when she dropped it to the ground and carefully crushed it beneath the sole of her high-heel shoe. Then she took a leather calling card case from her slim handbag and thrust a card into my hand.
“Come to this address at exactly four o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” she said.
The address—an office building in the wealthy Akasaka district—was the only thing on the card. There was no name. I turned it over to check the back, but it was blank. I brought the card to my nose, but it had no fragrance. It was just a normal white paper card.
“No name?” I said.
She smiled for the first time and gently shook her head from side to side. “I believe that what you need is money. Does money have a name?”
I shook my head as she was doing. Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.
She stood up from the bench. “You can come at four o’clock, then?”
“If I do, you’ll put money in my hand?”
“I wonder,” she said, a smile at the corners of her eyes like wind patterns in the sand. She surveyed the surrounding scene one more time, then smoothed her skirt with a perfunctory sweep of the hand.
Taking quick steps, she disappeared into the flow of people. I went on looking at the cigarette she ha
d crushed out, at the lipstick coloring its filter end. The bright red reminded me of Malta Kano’s vinyl hat.
If I had anything in my favor, it was that I had nothing to lose. Probably.
What Happened in the Night
•
The boy heard the hard-edged sound in the middle of the night. He came awake, reached out for the floor lamp, and, once it was on, sat up and looked around the room. The time on the wall clock was just before two. The boy could not imagine what might be happening in the world at a time like this.
Then the sound came again—from outside the window, he was sure. It sounded like someone winding a huge spring. Who could be winding a spring in the middle of the night? No, wait: it was like someone winding a spring, but it was not really a spring. It was the cry of a bird. The boy carried a chair over to the window and climbed up onto it. He pulled the curtains back and opened the window a crack. In the middle of the sky hung a large white moon, the full moon of late autumn, filling the yard below with its light. The trees out there looked very different to the boy at night than they did in the daylight. They had none of their usual friendliness. The evergreen oak looked almost annoyed as it trembled in the occasional puff of wind with an unpleasant creaking sound. The stones in the garden looked whiter and smoother than they ordinarily did, staring up at the sky impassively like the faces of dead people.
The cry of the bird seemed to be coming from the pine tree. The boy leaned out the window and looked up, but from this low angle, the large, heavy branches of the pine hid the bird. He wanted to see what it looked like. He wanted to memorize its color and shape so that tomorrow he could find it in his illustrated encyclopedia. His intense desire to know had brought him fully awake now. Finding birds and fish and other animals in his encyclopedia was his greatest joy. Its big, thick volumes lined one shelf of his room. He had yet to enter elementary school, but he already knew how to read.