She said nothing but quietly placed her glass on the night table. I went on: “And your sister, I’m sure, didn’t die from food poisoning. No, it was more unusual than that. The one responsible for her death was Noboru Wataya, and you know that for a fact. Your sister probably said something to you about it before she died, gave you some kind of warning. Noboru Wataya probably had some special power, and he knew how to find people who were especially responsive to that power and to draw something out of them. He must have used that power in a particularly violent way on Creta Kano. She was able, one way or another, to recover, but your sister was not. She lived in the same house, after all: she had nowhere to run to. She couldn’t stand it anymore and chose to die. Your parents have always kept her suicide a secret. Isn’t that true?”
There was no reply. The woman kept quiet in an attempt to obliterate her presence in the darkness.
I went on: “How he managed to do it and what the occasion was I have no idea, but at some point Noboru Wataya increased his violent power geometrically. Through television and the other media, he gained the ability to train his magnified power on society at large. Now he is trying to bring out something that the great mass of people keep hidden in the darkness of their unconscious. He wants to use it for his own political advantage. It’s a tremendously dangerous thing, this thing he is trying to draw out: it’s fatally smeared with violence and blood, and it’s directly connected to the darkest depths of history, because its final effect is to destroy and obliterate people on a massive scale.”
She sighed in the darkness. “I wonder if I could bother you to pour me another whiskey?” she asked softly.
I walked over to the night table and picked up her empty glass. I could do that much in the dark without difficulty. I went into the other room and poured a new whiskey on the rocks with the aid of the flashlight.
“What you just said was strictly a product of your own imagination, right?” she asked.
“That’s right. I’ve strung a few separate ideas together,” I said. “There’s no way I can prove any of this. I don’t have any basis for claiming that what I have said is true.”
“But still, I’d like to hear the rest—if there is more to tell.”
I went back into the inner room and put the glass on the night table. Then I switched off the flashlight and returned to my chair. There I concentrated my attention on telling the rest of my story.
“You didn’t know exactly what had happened to your sister, only that she had given you some kind of warning before she died. You were too small at the time to understand what it was about. But you did understand, in a vague sort of way. You knew that Noboru Wataya had somehow defiled and injured your sister. And you sensed the presence in your blood of some kind of dark secret, something from which you could not remain aloof. And so, in that house, you were always alone, always tense, struggling by yourself to live with your dormant, undefinable anxiety, like one of those jellyfish we saw in the aquarium.
“After you graduated from college—and after all the trouble with your family—you married me and left the Wataya house. Our life was serene, and with each day that went by, you were able, bit by bit, to forget your dark anxiety. You went out into society, a new person, as you continued gradually to recover. For a while, it looked as though everything was going to work out for you. But unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. At some point you noticed that you were being drawn, unconsciously, toward that dark force that you thought you had left behind. And when you realized what was happening, you became confused. You didn’t know what to do. Which is why you went to talk to Noboru Wataya, hoping to learn the truth. And you sought out Malta Kano, hoping that she could give you help. It was only to me that you could not open up.
“I would guess that all this started after you became pregnant. That, I’m sure, was the turning point. Which is probably why I received my first warning from the guitar player in Sapporo the night you had the abortion. Getting pregnant may have stimulated and awakened the dormant something inside you. And that was exactly what Noboru Wataya had been waiting for. That may be the only way he is capable of sexually committing to a woman. That is why he was so determined to drag you back from my side to his, once that tendency began to surface in you. He had to have you. Noboru Wataya needed you to play the role your sister had once played for him.”
When I finished speaking, a deep silence came to fill in the emptiness. I had given voice to everything that my imagination had taught me about Kumiko. Parts of it had come from vague thoughts I had had until then, and the rest had taken shape in my mind while I spoke in the darkness. Perhaps the power of darkness had filled in the blank spots in my imagination. Or perhaps this woman’s presence had helped. In either case, there was no solid basis for what I had imagined.
“A very, very interesting story,” said the woman. Again her voice had become the one with the girlish lisp. The speed with which her voice changed seemed to be increasing. “Well, well, well. So I left you to go into hiding with my defiled body. It’s like Waterloo Bridge in the mist, Auld Lang Syne, Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh—”
“I’m going to take you out of here,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.”
“And how are you going to do that?” the woman asked. “How are you going to take me out of here, Mr. Okada?”
“The way they do in the fairy tales,” I said. “By breaking the spell.”
“Oh, I see,” said the voice. “But wait a minute, Mr. Okada. You seem to think that I am Kumiko. You want to take me home as Kumiko. But what if I’m not Kumiko? What will you do then? You may be preparing to take home someone else entirely. Are you absolutely sure of what you’re doing? Shouldn’t you think it over one more time?”
I made a fist around the flashlight in my pocket. This couldn’t possibly be anyone but Kumiko, I thought. But I couldn’t prove it. It was finally nothing but a hypothesis. Sweat oozed from the hand in my pocket.
“I’m going to take you home,” I said again, my voice dry. “That’s what I came here to do.”
I heard movement in the sheets. She was changing her position in the bed.
“Can you say that for sure? Without a doubt?” she asked, pressing me for confirmation.
“Yes, I can say it for sure. I’m going to take you home.”
“And you have no second thoughts?”
“No, none. My mind is made up,” I said.
She followed this with a long silence, as if checking on the truth of something. Then, to mark the end of this stage in our conversation, she let out a long breath.
“I’m going to give you a present,” she said. “It’s not much of a present, but it may come in handy. Don’t turn on the light now, but reach over here—very, very slowly—over to the night table.”
I left my chair, and gauging the depth of the emptiness, I stretched my right hand out in the dark. I could feel the air’s sharp thorns against my fingertips. And then I touched the thing. When I realized what it was, the air seemed to lodge in the back of my throat. The “present” was a baseball bat.
I took hold of the grip and held the bat out straight. It was almost certainly the bat I had taken from the young man with the guitar case. The grip and the weight were right. This had to be it. But as I felt it over more carefully, I found that there was something, some kind of debris, stuck to it just above the brand. It felt like a human hair. I took it between my fingertips. Judging from the thickness and hardness, it had to be a real human hair. Several such hairs were stuck to the bat, with what seemed to be congealed blood. Someone had used this bat to smash someone else—probably Noboru Wataya—in the head. It took an effort for me to expel the air caught in my throat.
“That is your bat, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said, struggling to keep calm. My voice had begun to take on a somewhat diffe
rent tone in the deep darkness, as if someone lurking down here were speaking in my place. I cleared my throat, and after checking to be sure that the one speaking was the real me, I continued: “But somebody seems to have used this to beat someone.”
The woman kept her mouth sealed. Sitting down, I lowered the bat and held it between my legs. “I’m sure you know what’s going on,” I said. “Somebody used this bat to crush Noboru Wataya’s skull. The news I saw on TV was true. Noboru Wataya is in the hospital in critical condition. He might die.”
“He’s not going to die,” said Kumiko’s voice, without emotion. She might have been reporting a historical fact from a book. “He may not regain consciousness, though. He may just continue to wander through darkness, but what kind of darkness that would be, no one knows.”
I felt for the glass at my feet and picked it up. I poured its contents into my mouth and, without thinking, swallowed. The tasteless liquid passed through my throat and down my gullet. I felt a chill for no reason, then an unpleasant sensation as if something far away were moving slowly in my direction through a long darkness. As I had known it would, my heart started beating faster.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “Just tell me this if you can: where are we?”
“You’ve been here before, and you found the way in here—alive and unharmed. You should know where this is. And anyhow, it doesn’t matter anymore. The important thing—”
Just then there was a knock on the door—a hard, dry sound, like someone driving a nail into the wall, two loud raps followed by two more. It was the same knock I had heard before. The woman gasped.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” she said, in a voice that was unmistakably Kumiko’s. “If you go now, you can still pass through the wall.”
I had no idea if what I was thinking was right or wrong, but I knew that as long as I was down here, I had to defeat this thing. This was the war that I would have to fight.
“I’m not running away this time,” I said to Kumiko. “I’m going to take you home.”
I set my glass on the floor, put my wool hat on, and took the bat from between my knees. Then I started slowly for the door.
Just a Real Knife
•
The Thing That Had Been Prophesied
Lighting my way along the floor and keeping my steps soundless, I moved toward the door. The bat was in my right hand. I was still walking when the knocks came again: two knocks, then two more. Harder this time, and more violent. I pressed myself against the side wall where I would be hidden by the door when it opened. There I waited, keeping my breath in check.
When the sound of the knocks faded, deep silence descended on everything again, as if nothing had happened. I could feel the presence of someone on the other side of the door, though. This someone was standing there the way I was, keeping his breath in check and listening, trying to hear the sound of breathing or the beating of a heart, or to read the movement of a thought. I tried to keep my breath from agitating the surrounding air. I am not here, I told myself. I am not here. I am not anywhere.
The key turned in the lock. He made each movement with the utmost caution, stretching out the time it took to perform any one act so that the sounds involved would become isolated from each other, their meaning lost. The doorknob turned, and this was followed by the almost imperceptible sound of hinges rotating. The contractions of my heart began to speed up. I tried to quell the disturbance this caused, but without success.
Someone came into the room, sending ripples through the air. I made a conscious effort to sharpen each of my five senses and caught the faint smell of a foreign body—a strange mixture of thick clothing, suppressed breathing, and overwrought nerves steeped in silence. Did he have the knife in his hand? I had to assume that he did. I remembered its vivid white gleam. Holding my breath, obliterating my presence, I tightened my grip on the bat.
Once inside, the someone closed the door and locked it from within. Then he stood there, back to the door, waiting and watching. My hands on the bat were drenched with sweat. I would have liked to wipe my palms on my pants, but the slightest extra movement could have had fatal results. I brought to mind the sculpture that had stood in the garden of the abandoned Miyawaki house. In order to obliterate my presence here, I made myself one with that image of a bird. There, in the sun-drenched summer garden, I was the sculpture of a bird, frozen in space, glaring at the sky.
The someone had brought his own flashlight. He switched it on, and its straight, narrow beam cut through the darkness. The light was not strong. It came from the same kind of penlight I was carrying. I waited for the beam to pass me as he walked into the room, but he made no effort to move. The light began to pick out items in the room, one after another—the flowers in the vase, the silver tray lying on the table (giving off its sensual gleam again), the sofa, the floor lamp.… It swung past my nose and came to rest on the floor a few inches beyond the tips of my shoes, licking every corner of the room like the tongue of a snake. I waited for what felt like an eternity. Fear and tension drilled into my consciousness with intense pain.
No thinking. You are not allowed to think, I told myself. You are not allowed to use your imagination. Lieutenant Mamiya had said that in his letter. Imagining things here can be fatal.
Finally, the flashlight beam began to move forward slowly, very slowly. The man seemed to be heading for the inner room. I tightened my grip on the bat. It was then I noticed that the sweat of my hands had dried. If anything, my hands were now too dry.
The man took one slow step forward, then stopped. Then one more step. He seemed to be checking his footing. He was closer to me than ever now. I took a breath and held it. Two more steps, and he would be where I wanted him. Two more steps, and I would be able to put an end to this walking nightmare. But then, without warning, the light disappeared. Total darkness had swallowed everything again. He had turned off his flashlight. I tried to make my mind work quickly in the dark, but it would not work at all. An unfamiliar chill ran through me. He had realized that I was there.
Move, I told myself. Don’t just stand there. I tried to dodge to the left, but my legs would not move. My feet were stuck to the floor, like the feet of the bird sculpture. I bent forward and barely managed to incline my stiffened upper body to the left. Just then, something slammed into my right shoulder, and something hard and cold as frozen rain stabbed me to the bone.
The impact seemed to revive me, and the paralysis went out of my legs. I sprang to the left and crouched in the darkness, feeling for my opponent. The blood was pounding through my body, every muscle and cell straining for oxygen. My right shoulder was going numb, but I had no pain. The pain would come later. I stayed absolutely still, and he did too. We faced each other in the darkness, holding our breaths. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear.
Again, without warning, the knife came. It slashed past my face like an attacking bee, the sharp point just catching my right cheek where the mark was. I could feel the skin tearing. No, he could not see me, either. If he could, he would have finished me off long before. I swung the bat in the darkness, aiming in the direction from which the knife had come, but it just swished through the air, striking nothing. The swing had been a good one, though, and the crisp sound helped me to loosen up somewhat. We were still an even match. The knife had cut me twice, but not badly. Neither of us could see the other. And though he had a knife, I had my bat.
Again, in our mutual blindness, breathing held in check, we felt each other out, waiting for some hint of movement. I could feel blood dripping down my face, but I was strangely free of fear. It’s just a knife, I said to myself. It’s just a cut. I waited. I waited for the knife to come my way again. I could wait forever. I drew my breath in and expelled it without a sound. Come on! I said to him in my mind. Move! I’m waiting for you to move. Stab me if you want to. I’m not afraid.
Again the knife came. It slashed the collar of my sweater. I could feel the point moving past my throat, bu
t it never touched my skin. I twisted and jumped to the side, and almost too impatient to straighten up, I swung the bat through space. It caught him somewhere around the collarbone. Not enough to bring him down or break any bones, but I knew I had hurt him. I could feel him recoil from the blow, and I heard a loud gasp. I took a short backswing and went for him again—in the same direction at a slightly higher angle, where I had heard the breath drawn in.
It was a perfect swing. I caught him somewhere high on the neck. There was a sickening sound of cracking bone. A third swing hit home—the skull—and sent him flying. He let out a weird sound and slumped to the floor. He lay there making little gasps, but those soon stopped. I closed my eyes and, without thinking, aimed one final swing in the direction of the sound. I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice. I had to finish him off: not out of hatred or even out of fear, but as something I simply had to do. I heard something crack open in the darkness like a piece of fruit. Like a watermelon. I stood still, gripping the bat, holding it out in front of me. Then I realized I was trembling. All over. And there was no way I could stop it. I took one step back and pulled the flashlight from my pocket.
“Don’t!” cried a voice in the darkness. “Don’t look at it!” Kumiko’s voice was calling to me from the inner room, trying to stop me from looking. But I had to look. I had to see it. I had to know what it was, this thing in the center of the darkness that I had just beaten to a pulp. Part of my mind understood what Kumiko was forbidding me to do. She was right: I shouldn’t look at it. But I had the flashlight in my hand now, and that hand was moving on its own.
“Please, I’m begging you to stop!” she screamed. “Don’t look at it if you want to take me home again!”