•
I did not go back there for the next five days. For some reason, I seemed to have lost any desire to go down into the well. I would be losing the well itself before long. The longest I could afford to keep the Residence going without clients was two months, so I ought to be using the well as much as possible while it was still mine. I felt stifled. All of a sudden, the place seemed wrong and unnatural.
I walked around aimlessly without going to the Residence. In the afternoons I would go to the Shinjuku west exit plaza and sit on my usual bench, killing time doing nothing in particular, but Nutmeg never appeared before me there. I went to her Akasaka office once, rang the bell by the elevator and stared into the closed circuit camera, but no reply ever came. I was ready to give up. Nutmeg and Cinnamon had obviously decided to cut all ties with me. This strange mother and son had deserted the sinking ship for someplace safer. The intensity of the sorrow this aroused in me took me by surprise. I felt as if I had been betrayed in the end by my own family.
Malta Kano’s Tail
•
Boris the Manskinner
In my dream (though I didn’t know it was a dream), I was seated across the table from Malta Kano, drinking tea. The rectangular room was too long and wide to see from end to end, and arranged in it in perfectly straight lines were five hundred or more square tables. We sat at one of the tables in the middle, the only people there. Across the ceiling, as high as that of a Buddhist temple, stretched countless heavy beams, from all points of which there hung, like potted plants, objects that appeared to be toupees. A closer look showed me that they were actual human scalps. I could tell from the black blood on their undersides. They were newly taken scalps that had been hung from the beams to dry. I was afraid that the still-fresh blood might drip into our tea. Blood was dripping all around us like raindrops, the sound reverberating in the cavernous room. Only the scalps hanging above our table seemed to have dried enough so that there was no sign of blood dripping down from them.
The tea was boiling hot. Placed beside the teaspoons in each of our saucers were three lurid green lumps of sugar. Malta Kano dropped two of the lumps into her tea and stirred, but they would not melt. A dog appeared from nowhere and sat down beside our table. Its face was that of Ushikawa. It was a big dog, with a chunky black body, but from the neck up it was Ushikawa, only the shaggy black fur that covered the body also grew on the face and head. “Well, well, if it isn’t Mr. Okada,” said the dog-shaped Ushikawa. “And will you look at this: a full head of hair. It grew there the second I turned into a dog. Amazing. I’ve got much bigger balls now than I used to have, and my stomach doesn’t hurt anymore. And look: No glasses! No clothes! I’m so happy! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. If only I had become a dog a long time ago! How about you, Mr. Okada? Why don’t you give it a try?”
Malta Kano picked up her one remaining green sugar lump and hurled it at the dog. The lump thudded into Ushikawa’s forehead and drew ink-black blood that ran down Ushikawa’s face. This seemed to cause Ushikawa no pain. Still smiling, without a word, he raised his tail and strode away. It was true: his testicles were grotesquely huge.
Malta Kano was wearing a trench coat. The lapels were closed tightly across the front, but from the subtle fragrance of a woman’s naked flesh I could tell she was wearing nothing underneath. She had her red vinyl hat on, of course. I lifted my cup and took a sip of tea, but it had no taste. It was hot, nothing more.
“I am so glad you could come,” said Malta Kano, sounding genuinely relieved. Hearing it for the first time in quite a while, I thought her voice seemed somewhat brighter than it had before. “I was calling you for days, but you always seemed to be out. I was beginning to worry that something might have happened to you. Thank goodness you are all right. What a relief it was to hear your voice! In any case, I must apologize for having been out of touch so long. I can’t go into detail on everything that has occurred in my life in the meantime, especially on the phone like this, so I will just summarize the important points. The main thing is that I have been traveling all this time. I came back a week ago. Mr. Okada? Mr. Okada? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you,” I said, suddenly realizing that I was holding a phone to my ear. Malta Kano, on her side of the table, was also holding a receiver. Her voice sounded as if it were coming through a bad connection on an international call.
“I was away from Japan the whole time, on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. All of a sudden one day, the thought crossed my mind, ‘Oh, yes! I must return to Malta and bring myself near its water. The time for that has come!’ This happened just after I last talked to you, Mr. Okada. Do you remember that conversation? I was looking for Creta at the time. In any case, I really did not mean to be away from Japan so long. I was planning on two weeks or so. Which is why I did not contact you. I told hardly anyone I was going, just boarded the plane with little more than the clothes I was wearing. Once I arrived, however, I found myself unable to leave. Have you ever been to Malta, Mr. Okada?”
I said that I had not. I remembered having had virtually the same conversation with this same person some years before.
“Mr. Okada? Mr. Okada?”
“Yes, I’m still here,” I said.
It seemed to me there was something I had to tell Malta Kano, but I could not remember what it was. It finally came back to me after I cocked my head and thought about it for a while. I switched hands on the receiver and said, “Oh, yes, there’s something I’ve been meaning to call you about for a long time. The cat came back.”
After four or five seconds of silence, Malta Kano said, “The cat came back?”
“Yes. Cat hunting was more or less what brought us together originally, so I thought I’d better let you know.”
“When did the cat come back?”
“Early this spring. It’s been with me ever since.”
“Is there anything different about its appearance? Anything that has changed since before it disappeared?”
Changed?
“Come to think of it, I kind of had the feeling that the shape of the tail was a little different,” I said. “When I petted the cat the day it came back, it seemed to me the tail used to have more of a bend in it. I could be wrong, though. I mean, it was gone close to a year.”
“You are sure it is the same cat?”
“Absolutely sure. I had that cat for a very long time. I’d know if it was the same one or not.”
“I see,” said Malta Kano. “To tell you the truth, though, I am sorry, but I have the cat’s real tail right here.”
Malta Kano put the receiver down on the table, then she stood and stripped off her coat. As I had suspected, she was wearing nothing underneath. The size of her breasts and the shape of her pubic hair were much the same as Creta Kano’s. She did not remove her red vinyl hat. She turned and showed her back to me. There, to be sure, attached above her buttocks, was a cat’s tail. Proportioned to her body, it was much larger than the original, but its shape was the same as Mackerel’s tail. It had the same sharp bend at the tip, but this one was far more convincingly real than Mackerel’s.
“Please take a close look,” said Malta Kano. “This is the actual tail of the cat that disappeared. The one the cat has now is an imitation. It may look the same, but if you examine it closely, you will find that it is different.”
I reached out to touch her tail, but she whipped it away from my hand. Then, still naked, she jumped up onto one of the tables. Into my extended palm fell a drop of blood from the ceiling. It was the same intense red as Malta Kano’s vinyl hat.
“Creta Kano’s baby’s name is Corsica, Mr. Okada,” said Malta Kano from atop her table, her tail twitching sharply.
“Corsica?”
“ ‘No man is an island.’ That Corsica,” piped up the black dog, Ushikawa, from somewhere.
Creta Kano’s baby?
I woke up, soaked in sweat.
•
It had been a very
long time since I last had a dream so long and vivid and unified. And strange. My heart went on pounding audibly for a while after I woke up. I took a hot shower and changed into fresh pajamas. The time was something after one in the morning, but I no longer felt sleepy. To calm myself, I took an old bottle of brandy from the back of the kitchen cabinet, poured a glass, and drank it down.
Then I went to the bedroom to look for Mackerel. The cat was curled up under the quilt, sound asleep. I peeled back the quilt and took the cat’s tail in my hand to study its shape. I ran my fingers over it, trying to recall the exact angle of the bent tip, when the cat gave an annoyed stretch and went back to sleep. I could no longer say for sure that this was the same exact tail the cat had had when it was called Noboru Wataya. Somehow, the tail on Malta Kano’s bottom seemed far more like the real Noboru Wataya cat’s tail. I could still vividly recall its shape and color in the dream.
Creta Kano’s baby’s name is Corsica, Malta Kano had said in my dream.
•
I did not stray far from the house the next day. In the morning, I stocked up on food at the supermarket by the station and made myself lunch. I fed the cat some large fresh sardines. In the afternoon, I took a long-delayed swim in the ward pool. Not many people were there. They were probably busy with New Year’s preparations. The ceiling speakers were playing Christmas music. I had swum a leisurely thousand meters, when I got a cramp in my instep and decided to quit. The wall over the pool had a large Christmas ornament.
At home, I was surprised to find a letter in the mailbox—a thick one. I knew who had sent it without having to look at the return address. The only person who wrote to me in such a fine hand with an old-fashioned writing brush was Lieutenant Mamiya.
His letter opened with profuse apologies for his having allowed so much time to go by since his last letter. He expressed himself with such extreme politeness that I almost felt I was the one who ought to apologize.
I have been wanting to tell you another part of my story and have thought for months about writing to you, but many things have come up to prevent me from sitting at my desk and taking pen in hand. Now, almost before I realized it, the year has nearly run its course. I am growing old, however, and could die at any moment. I can’t postpone the task indefinitely. This letter might be a long one—not too long for you, I hope, Mr. Okada.
When I delivered Mr. Honda’s memento to you last summer, I told you a long story about my time in Mongolia, but in fact there is even more to tell—a “sequel,” as it were. There were several reasons for my not having included this part when I told you my story last year. First of all, it would have made the tale too long if I had related it in its entirety. You may recall that I had some pressing business, and there simply wasn’t time for me to tell you everything. Perhaps more important, I was still not emotionally prepared then to tell the rest of my story to anyone, to relate it fully and honestly.
After I left you, however, I realized that I should not have allowed practical matters to stand in the way. I should have told you everything to the very end without concealment.
I took a machine gun bullet during the fierce battle of August 13, 1945, on the outskirts of Hailar, and as I lay on the ground I lost my left hand under the treads of a Soviet T34 tank. They transferred me, unconscious, to the Soviet military hospital in Chita, where the surgeons managed to save my life. As I mentioned before, I had been attached to the Military Survey Corps of the Kwantung Army General Staff in Hsin-ching, which had been slated to withdraw to the rear as soon as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Determined to die, however, I had had myself transferred to the Hailar unit, near the border, where I offered myself up as a human bullet, attacking a Soviet tank with a land mine in my arms. As Mr. Honda had prophesied on the banks of the Khalkha River, though, I was not able to die so easily. I lost only my hand, not my life. All the men under my command, I believe, were killed, however. We may have been acting under orders, but it was a stupid, suicidal attack. Our little portable mines couldn’t have done a thing to a huge T34.
The only reason the Soviet Army took such good care of me was that, as I lay delirious, I said something in Russian. Or so they told me afterward. I had studied basic Russian, as I have mentioned to you, and my post in the Hsin-ching General Staff Office gave me so much spare time, I used it to polish what I knew. I worked hard, so that by the time the war was winding down, I could carry on a fluent conversation in Russian. Many White Russians lived in Hsin-ching, and I knew a few Russian waitresses, so I was never at a loss for people to practice on. My Russian seems to have slipped out quite naturally while I was unconscious.
The Soviet Army was planning from the outset to send to Siberia any Japanese prisoners of war they took in occupying Manchuria, to use them as forced laborers as they had done with German soldiers after the fighting ended in Europe. The Soviets may have been on the winning side, but their economy was in a critical state after the long war, and the shortage of workers was a problem everywhere. Securing an adult male work force in the form of prisoners of war was one of their top priorities. For this, they would need interpreters, and the number of these was severely limited. When they saw that I seemed to be able to speak Russian, they shipped me to the hospital in Chita instead of letting me die. If I hadn’t babbled something in Russian, I would have been left out there to die on the banks of the Hailar, and that would have been that. I would have been buried in an unmarked grave. Fate is such a mysterious thing!
After that, I was subjected to a grueling investigation and given several months of ideological training before being sent to a Siberian coal mine to serve as an interpreter. I will omit the details of that period, but let me say this about my ideological training. As a student before the war, I had read several banned Marxist books, taking care to hide them from the police, and I was not entirely unsympathetic to the communist line, but I had seen too much to swallow it whole. Thanks to my work with intelligence, I knew very well the bloody history of oppression in Mongolia carried out by Stalin and his puppet dictators. Ever since the Revolution, they had sent tens of thousands of Lamaist priests and landowners and other forces of opposition to concentration camps, where they were cruelly liquidated. And the same kind of thing had happened in the Soviet Union itself. Even if I could have believed in the communist ideology, I could no longer believe in the people or the system that was responsible for putting that ideology and those principles into practice. I felt the same way about what we Japanese had done in Manchuria. I’m sure you can’t imagine the number of Chinese laborers killed in the course of constructing the secret base at Hailar—killed purposely so as to shut them up, to protect the secrecy of the base’s construction plans.
Besides, I had witnessed that hellish skinning carried out by the Russian officer and his Mongolian subordinates. I had been thrown into a Mongolian well, and in that strange, intense light I had lost any passion for living. How could someone like me believe in ideology and politics?
As an interpreter, I worked as a liaison between Japanese prisoners of war in the mine and their Soviet captors. I don’t know what it was like in the other Siberian concentration camps, but in the mine where I worked, streams of people were dying every day. Not that there was any dearth of causes: malnutrition, overwork, cave-ins, floods, unsanitary conditions that gave rise to epidemics, winter cold of unbelievable harshness, violent guards, the brutal suppression of the mildest resistance. There were cases, too, of lynchings of Japanese by their fellow Japanese. What people felt for each other under such circumstances was hatred and doubt and fear and despair.
Whenever the number of deaths increased to the point where the labor force was declining, they would bring in whole trainloads of new prisoners of war. The men would be dressed in rags, emaciated, and a good quarter of them would die within the first few weeks, unable to withstand the harsh conditions in the mine. The dead would be thrown into abandoned mine shafts. There was no way to dig graves for them all. The earth was frozen
solid there year round. Shovels couldn’t dent it. So the abandoned mine shafts were perfect for disposing of the dead. They were deep and dark, and because of the cold, there was no smell. Now and then, we would put a layer of coal over the bodies. When a shaft filled up, they would cap it with dirt and rocks, then move on to the next shaft.
The dead were not the only ones thrown into the shafts. Sometimes living men would be thrown in to teach the rest of us a lesson. Any Japanese soldier who showed signs of resistance would be taken out by Soviet guards and beaten to a pulp, his arms and legs broken before they dropped him to the bottom of the pit. To this day, I can still hear their pitiful screams. It was a literal living hell.
The mine was run as a major strategic facility by politburo members dispatched from Party Central and policed by the army with maximum security. The top man was said to be from Stalin’s own hometown, a cold, hard party functionary still young and full of ambition. His only concern was to raise production figures. The consumption of laborers was a matter of indifference to him. As long as the production figures went up, Party Central would recognize his mine as exemplary and reward him with an expanded labor force. No matter how many workers died, they would always be replaced. To keep the figures rising, he would authorize the digging of veins that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been considered too dangerous to work. Naturally, the number of accidents continued to rise as well, but he didn’t care about that.
The director was not the only coldhearted individual running the mine. Most of the guards inside the mine were former convicts, uneducated men of shocking cruelty and vindictiveness. They displayed no sign of sympathy or affection, as if, living out here on the edge of the earth, they had been transformed over the years by the frigid Siberian air into some kind of subhuman creatures. They had committed crimes and been sent to Siberian prisons, but now that they had served out their long sentences, they no longer had homes or families to go back to. They had taken local wives, made children with them, and settled into the Siberian soil.