After the Quake

“I am slowly, slowly returning to the mud, Mr. Katagiri. And yet . . . I . . .”

  Frog lost his grasp on words and slipped into a coma. His arms hung down almost to the floor, and his big wide mouth drooped open. Straining to focus his eyes, Katagiri was able to make out deep cuts covering Frog’s entire body. Discolored streaks ran through his skin, and there was a sunken spot on his head where the flesh had been torn away.

  Katagiri stared long and hard at Frog, who sat there now wrapped in the thick cloak of sleep. As soon as I get out of this hospital, he thought, I’ll buy Anna Karenina and “White Nights” and read them both. Then I’ll have a nice long literary discussion about them with Frog.

  Before long, Frog began to twitch all over. Katagiri assumed at first that these were just normal involuntary movements in sleep, but he soon realized his mistake. There was something unnatural about the way Frog’s body went on jerking, like a big doll being shaken by someone from behind. Katagiri held his breath and watched. He wanted to run over to Frog, but his own body remained paralyzed.

  After a while, a big lump formed over Frog’s right eye. The same kind of huge, ugly boil broke out on Frog’s shoulder and side, and then over his whole body. Katagiri could not imagine what was happening to Frog. He stared at the spectacle, barely breathing.

  Then, all of a sudden, one of the boils burst with a loud pop. The skin flew off, and a sticky liquid oozed out, sending a horrible smell across the room. The rest of the boils started popping, one after another, twenty or thirty in all, flinging skin and fluid onto the walls. The sickening, unbearable smell filled the hospital room. Big black holes were left on Frog’s body where the boils had burst, and wriggling, maggotlike worms of all shapes and sizes came crawling out. Puffy white maggots. After them emerged some kind of small centipedelike creatures, whose hundreds of legs made a creepy rustling sound. An endless stream of these things came crawling out of the holes. Frog’s body—or the thing that must once have been Frog’s body—was totally covered with these creatures of the night. His two big eyeballs fell from their sockets onto the floor, where they were devoured by black bugs with strong jaws. Crowds of slimy worms raced each other up the walls to the ceiling, where they covered the fluorescent lights and burrowed into the smoke alarm.

  The floor, too, was covered with worms and bugs. They climbed up the lamp and blocked the light and, of course, they crept onto Katagiri’s bed. Hundreds of them came burrowing under the covers. They crawled up his legs, under his bedgown, between his thighs. The smallest worms and maggots crawled inside his anus and ears and nostrils. Centipedes pried his mouth open and crawled inside one after another. Filled with an intense despair, Katagiri screamed.

  Someone snapped a switch and light filled the room.

  “Mr. Katagiri!” called the nurse. Katagiri opened his eyes to the light. His body was soaked in sweat. The bugs were gone. All they had left behind in him was a horrible slimy sensation.

  “Another bad dream, eh? Poor dear.” With quick, efficient movements the nurse readied an injection and stabbed the needle into his arm.

  He took a long, deep breath and let it out. His heart was expanding and contracting violently.

  “What were you dreaming about?”

  Katagiri was having trouble differentiating dream from reality. “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real,” he told himself aloud.

  “That’s so true,” said the nurse with a smile. “Especially where dreams are concerned.”

  “Frog,” he murmured.

  “Did something happen to Frog?” she asked.

  “He saved Tokyo from being destroyed by an earthquake. All by himself.”

  “That’s nice,” the nurse said, replacing his near-empty intravenous feeding bottle with a new one. “We don’t need any more awful things happening in Tokyo. We have plenty already.”

  “But it cost him his life. He’s gone. I think he went back to the mud. He’ll never come here again.”

  Smiling, the nurse toweled the sweat from his forehead. “You were very fond of Frog, weren’t you, Mr. Katagiri?”

  “Locomotive,” Katagiri mumbled. “More than anybody.” Then he closed his eyes and sank into a restful, dreamless sleep.

  honey pie

  1

  “So Masakichi got his paws full of honey—way more honey than he could eat by himself—and he put it in a bucket, and do-o-o-wn the mountain he went, all the way to the town to sell his honey. Masakichi was the all-time Number One honey bear.”

  “Do bears have buckets?” Sala asked.

  “Masakichi just happened to have one,” Junpei explained. “He found it lying in the road, and he figured it would come in handy sometime.”

  “And it did.”

  “It really did. So Masakichi the Bear went to town and found a spot for himself in the square. He put up a sign: Deeelicious Honey. All Natural. One Cup ¥ 200.”

  “Can bears write?”

  “No, of course not,” Junpei said. “There was a nice old man with a pencil sitting next to him, and he asked him to write it.”

  “Can bears count money?”

  “Absolutely. Masakichi lived with people when he was just a cub, and they taught him how to talk and count money and stuff. Anyway, he was a very talented bear.”

  “Oh, so he was a little different from ordinary bears.”

  “Well, yes, just a little. Masakichi was a kind of special bear. And so the other bears, who weren’t so special, tended to shun him.”

  “Shun him?”

  “Yeah, they’d go like, ‘Hey, what’s with this guy, acting so special?’ and keep away from him. Especially Tonkichi the tough guy. He really hated Masakichi.”

  “Poor Masakichi!”

  “Yeah, really. Meanwhile, Masakichi looked just like a bear, and so the people would say, ‘OK, he knows how to count, and he can talk and all, but when you get right down to it he’s still a bear.’ So Masakichi didn’t really belong to either world—the bear world or the people world.”

  “Poor, poor Masakichi! Didn’t he have any friends?”

  “Not one. Bears don’t go to school, you know, so there’s no place for them to make friends.”

  “I have friends,” Sala said. “In preschool.”

  “Of course you do,” Junpei said.

  “Do you have friends, Jun?” “Uncle Junpei” was too long for her, so Sala just called him “Jun.”

  “Your daddy is my absolute bestest friend from a long, long time ago. And so’s your mommy.”

  “It’s good to have friends.”

  “It is good,” Junpei said. “You’re right about that.”

  Junpei often made up stories for Sala when she went to bed. And whenever she didn’t understand something, she would ask him to explain. Junpei gave a lot of thought to his answers. Sala’s questions were always sharp and interesting, and while he was thinking about them he could also come up with new twists to the story.

  Sayoko brought a glass of warm milk.

  “Junpei is telling me the story of Masakichi the bear,” Sala said. “He’s the all-time Number One honey bear, but he doesn’t have any friends.”

  “Oh really? Is he a big bear?” Sayoko asked.

  Sala gave Junpei an uneasy look. “Is Masakichi big?”

  “Not so big,” he said. “In fact, he’s kind of on the small side. For a bear. He’s just about your size, Sala. And he’s a very sweet-tempered little guy. When he listens to music, he doesn’t listen to rock or punk or that kind of stuff. He likes to listen to Schubert all by himself.”

  Sayoko hummed a little “Trout.”

  “He listens to music?” Sala asked. “Does he have a CD player or something?”

  “He found a boom box lying on the ground one day. He picked it up and brought it home.”

  “How come all this stuff just happens to be lying around in the mountains?” Sala asked with a note of suspicion.

  “Well, it’s a very, very steep mountain, and the hikers get all faint a
nd dizzy, and they throw away tons of stuff they don’t need. Right there by the road, like, ‘Oh man, this pack is so heavy, I feel like I’m gonna die! I don’t need this bucket anymore. I don’t need this boom box anymore.’ Like that. So Masakichi finds everything he needs lying in the road.”

  “Mommy knows just how they feel,” Sayoko said. “Sometimes you want to throw everything away.”

  “Not me,” Sala said.

  “That’s ’cause you’re such a greedy little thing,” Sayoko said.

  “I am not greedy,” Sala protested.

  “No,” Junpei said, finding a gentler way to put it: “You’re just young and full of energy, Sala. Now hurry and drink your milk so I can tell you the rest of the story.”

  “OK,” she said, wrapping her little hands around the glass and drinking the warm milk with great care. Then she asked, “How come Masakichi doesn’t make honey pies and sell them? I think the people in the town would like that better than just plain honey.”

  “An excellent point,” Sayoko said with a smile. “Think of the profit margin!”

  “Ah, yes, creating new markets through value added,” Junpei said. “This girl will be a real entrepreneur someday.”

  It was almost two a.m. by the time Sala went back to bed. Junpei and Sayoko checked to make sure she was asleep, then shared a can of beer at the kitchen table. Sayoko wasn’t much of a drinker, and Junpei had to drive home.

  “Sorry for dragging you out in the middle of the night,” she said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m totally exhausted, and you’re the only one who can calm her down. There was no way I was going to call Takatsuki.”

  Junpei nodded, took a slug of beer, and ate one of the crackers on the plate between them.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m awake till the sun comes up, and the roads are empty this time of night. It’s no big deal.”

  “You were working on a story?”

  Junpei nodded.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Like always. I write ’em. They print ’em. Nobody reads ’em.”

  “I read them. All of them.”

  “Thanks. You’re a nice person,” Junpei said. “But the short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule. Anyhow, let’s talk about Sala. Has she done this before?”

  Sayoko nodded.

  “A lot?”

  “Almost every night. Sometime after midnight she gets these hysterical fits and jumps out of bed. She can’t stop shaking. And I can’t get her to stop crying. I’ve tried everything.”

  “Any idea what’s wrong?”

  Sayoko drank what was left of her beer, and stared at the empty glass.

  “I think she saw too many news reports on the earthquake. It was too much for a four-year-old. She wakes up at around the time of the quake. She says a man woke her up, somebody she doesn’t know. The Earthquake Man. He tries to put her in a little box—way too little for anyone to fit into. She tells him she doesn’t want to get inside, but he starts yanking on her arm—so hard her joints crack—and he tries to stuff her inside. That’s when she screams and wakes up.”

  “The Earthquake Man?”

  “He’s tall and skinny and old. After she’s had the dream, she goes around turning on every light in the house and looks for him: in the closets, in the shoe cabinet in the front hall, under the beds, in all the dresser drawers. I tell her it was just a dream, but she won’t listen to me. And she won’t go to bed until she’s looked everywhere he could possibly hide. That takes at least two hours, by which time I’m wide awake. I’m so sleep-deprived I can hardly stand up, let alone work.”

  Sayoko almost never spilled out her feelings like this.

  “Try not to watch the news,” Junpei said. “Don’t even turn on the TV. The earthquake’s all they’re showing these days.”

  “I almost never watch TV anymore. But it’s too late now. The Earthquake Man just keeps coming. I went to the doctor, but all he did was give me some kind of sleeping pill to humor me.”

  Junpei thought for a while.

  “How about we go to the zoo on Sunday? Sala says she wants to see a real bear.”

  Sayoko narrowed her eyes and looked at him. “Maybe. It just might change her mood. Let’s do it—the four of us. It’s been ages. You call Takatsuki, OK?”

  Junpei was thirty-six, born and bred in the city of Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, a quiet residential area in the Shukugawa district. His father owned a pair of jewelry stores, one in Osaka, one in Kobe. He had a sister six years his junior. After a time at a private high school in Kobe, he entered Waseda University in Tokyo. He had passed the entrance exams in both the business and the literature departments. He chose the literature department without the slightest hesitation and told his parents that he had entered the business department. They would never have paid for him to study literature, and Junpei had no intention of wasting four precious years studying the workings of the economy. All he wanted was to study literature, and then to become a novelist.

  At the university, he made two friends, Takatsuki and Sayoko. Takatsuki came from the mountains of Nagano. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had been the captain of his high-school soccer team. It had taken him two years of studying to pass the entrance exam, so he was a year older than Junpei. Practical and decisive, he had the kind of looks that made people take to him right away, and he naturally assumed a leadership role in any group. But he had trouble reading books; he had entered the literature department because its exam was the only one he could pass. “What the hell,” he said in his positive way. “I’m going to be a newspaper reporter, so I’ll let them teach me how to write.”

  Junpei did not understand why Takatsuki had any interest in befriending him. Junpei was the kind of person who liked to sit alone in his room reading books or listening to music, and he was terrible at sports. Awkward with strangers, he rarely made friends. Still, for whatever reason, Takatsuki seemed to have decided the first time he saw Junpei in class that he was going to make him a friend. He tapped Junpei on the shoulder and said, “Hey, let’s get something to eat.” And by the end of the day they had opened their hearts to each other.

  Takatsuki had Junpei with him when he adopted the same approach with Sayoko. He tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hey, how about the three of us get something to eat?” And so their tight little group was born. Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko did everything together. They shared lecture notes, ate lunch in the campus dining hall, talked about their future over coffee between classes, took part-time jobs at the same place, went to all-night movies and rock concerts and walked all over Tokyo, and drank so much beer they even got sick together. In other words, they behaved like first-year college students the world over.

  Sayoko was a real Tokyo girl. She came from the old part of town where the merchant class had lived for centuries, and her father ran a shop selling the exquisite little accessories that went with traditional Japanese dress. The business had been in the family for several generations, and it attracted an exclusive clientele that included several famous Kabuki actors. Sayoko had two elder brothers. The first had been groomed to inherit the shop, and the second worked in architectural design. She had graduated from an exclusive girls’ prep school, entering the literature department of Waseda with plans to go on to graduate school in English Literature, and ultimately to an academic career. She read a lot, and she and Junpei were constantly exchanging novels and having intense conversations about them.

  Sayoko had beautiful hair and intelligent eyes. She spoke quietly and with simple honesty, but deep down she had great strength. Her expressive mouth bore eloquent testimony to that. She was always casually dressed, without makeup, but she had a unique sense of humor, and her face would crinkle up mischievously whenever she made some funny remark. Junpei found that look of hers beautiful, and he knew that this was the girl he had been searching for. He had never fallen in love until he met Sayoko. He had attended a boys’ high school and had had almost no op
portunity to meet girls.

  But Junpei could never bring himself to express his feelings to Sayoko. He knew that there would be no going back once the words left his mouth, and that she might take herself off somewhere far beyond his reach. At the very least, the perfectly balanced, comfortable relationship of Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko would undergo a shift. So he told himself to leave things as they were for now and watch and wait.

  In the end, Takatsuki was the first to make a move. “I hate to throw this at you all of a sudden,” he told Junpei, “but I’m in love with Sayoko. I hope you don’t mind.”

  This was midway through September. Takatsuki explained that he and Sayoko had become involved, almost by accident, while Junpei was home in Kansai for the summer vacation.

  Junpei fixed his gaze on Takatsuki. It took him a few moments to understand what had happened, but when he did, it sank into him like a lead weight. He no longer had any choice in the matter. “No,” he said, “I don’t mind.”

  “I am so glad to hear that!” Takatsuki said with a huge grin. “You were the only one I was worried about. I mean, the three of us had such a great thing going, it was kind of like I beat you out. But anyway, Junpei, this had to happen sometime. You have to understand that. If not now, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The main thing is that I want the three of us to go on being friends. OK?”

  For the next few days, Junpei felt as if he were trying to walk in deep sand. He skipped classes and work. He lay on the floor of his one-room apartment eating nothing but scraps from the refrigerator and slugging down whiskey whenever the impulse struck him. He thought seriously about quitting the university and going to some distant town where he knew no one and could spend the rest of his years doing manual labor. That would be the best lifestyle for him, he decided.

  The fifth day after he stopped going to classes, Sayoko came to Junpei’s apartment. She was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and white cotton pants, and her hair was pinned back.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “Everybody’s worried that you’re dead in your room. Takatsuki asked me to check up on you. I guess he wasn’t too keen on seeing the corpse himself. He’s not as strong as he looks.”