Dark Water

1

There is an observation platform shaped like a five-needle pine at the tip of Cape Futtsu. A climb to the top reveals a panoramic view that encompasses Yokosuka and Cape Kannon. Hiroyuki Inagaki had brought his son with him to the observation platform for the first time in a while.

The tide was visibly rapid between Breakwater No. 1 and Breakwater No. 2. A sandbar extended like an arc from the promontory in front, falling only a little short of Breakwater No. 1. Shortly after the war, you could cross over as far as Breakwater No. 1 in a jeep at low tide, but these days that was no longer possible. A mere row of dots, the sandbar was now barely visible above the water, making the crossing extremely difficult even on foot. As a child, Hiroyuki had heard how someone had tried to walk across only to become stranded when the tide shifted. The unfortunate man was said to have been washed away by the current, and his body was never recovered.

It was a windy Saturday afternoon in early summer. For some time now, Hiroyuki had been staring intently at the rapid current between the two breakwaters. From their position on the observation platform, the ships looked as small as peas on the water. Indeed, that very stretch of sea was where he worked. Hiroyuki was a fisherman. He fished for Futtsu conger eels between the breakwaters for twenty-five days a month.

He’d inherited the job from his father fifteen years ago. During that time, the face of Tokyo Bay had changed dramatically. The sandbar that stretched out to sea now pointed much further to the north than before. Landfills had been created and the seabed dredged to widen the sea-lanes. These changes wrought by man had disrupted the balanced rhythm of the tides, resulting in sand being washed away and the sandbar being eroded at its south end.

For all the changes that had taken place, however, Hiroyuki did not feel particularly concerned. As long as his catch brought in the monthly target of no less than one million yen, he could not have cared less how much the face of Tokyo Bay changed. He wanted to slap down that million yen on the table in front of his wife every month. As long as he did that, she had no reason to complain.

‘Okay, let’s be off.’

Hiroyuki playfully pushed his son’s head down. Katsumi was a very quiet and withdrawn child. He made no response and continued to gaze wistfully toward the Miura Peninsula. But the moment he saw his father going down the stairs, he chased after him in a hurry.

There was a man selling roasted corn on the cob in a stall at the bottom of the stairway.

‘Want some?’

Not waiting for his son to answer, Hiroyuki bought a cob from the vendor whom he seemed to know.

‘Have you seen the wife round here?’ he asked as he took his change.

The vendor only laughed and shook his head.

Hiroyuki handed his son the corn and beckoned with his soy sauce stained hand to follow after him:

‘Come.’

Katsumi didn’t really want the corn, but knew that refusing something offered by his father would invite his wrath. His father might even strike him. Katsumi took the corn without a word and spied his father’s expression to gauge his mood. He began to nibble at the cob and tagged along behind his father. His mother had strictly forbidden him to eat snacks between meals. His father, however, would buy Katsumi sweets and candy, not out of carelessness but in wilful defiance of his wife’s wishes. Every time this happened, Katsumi felt himself to be in an impossible position. He would earn a tongue-lashing from his mother if he ignored her but would get his ears boxed if he refused what his father offered. The worse part of it was that his father always bought him things he didn’t want.

Katsumi dawdled several yards behind his father as they walked along the beach on the north side of the cape. The cape jutted out into the sea and divided the waves into the raging and the calm. Rough waves broke on the southern shore, while gentler waves washed the northern side of the cape. The calmer shore was host to hordes of four wheel drive vehicles from Tokyo. The drivers and passengers of these cars that lined the shore had come to spend an enjoyable Saturday afternoon by the sea. Young people sped about on jet-skis in the water, while on the beach families barbecued fish, the adults drinking beer. Every corner of the beach teemed with summer fun and resounded with happy peals of laughter.

Hiroyuki stopped walking and looked around. His son now lagged more than thirty feet behind him. The boy shambled unsteadily this way and that, eating the piece of corn with a plain expression of disgust. As he watched, Hiroyuki was overwhelmed by a surge of irritation.

Unaware of his father’s annoyance, Katsumi was watching a jet-ski speeding over the water and spraying a shower of seawater in its wake. Yet this was no look of envy; Katsumi was terrified of water. He would always find some excuse not to take part in school swimming lessons. He was also averse to taking baths. This was no doubt the reason why he could hardly swim, even though he was already eleven years old. As far as his father was concerned, the inability to swim was tantamount to betrayal in the son of a fisherman.

Hiroyuki bellowed out his son’s name. The roaring engines of the jet-skis drowned out his voice, however, as the riders sped around in circles. Still looking out to the sea, Katsumi dawdled along the beach, kicking up sand. Hiroyuki shouted his name again and started walking toward his son. As a shadow loomed over him, Katsumi became aware of his father’s presence. He flinched instinctively. He thought he was in for a beating.

‘Give it here!’ roared his father.

He took the corn from his son and finished it off.

‘Now that’s the way to eat corn. Got that, lad?’

He tossed the corncob away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Hiroyuki was startled by a shriek from down by his side. Katsumi was holding his stomach and groaning in pain. At first, Hiroyuki couldn’t tell what was the matter.

‘We’re sorry!’

The apology came from a father and his son as they came running up. They had their hands stuffed into baseball gloves.

Hiroyuki looked down and saw a ball at his son’s feet. The boy and his father had been playing catch in front of the nearby pine grove and the ball must have been overthrown, hitting Katsumi in the ribs.

The two approached Hiroyuki and Katsumi, both bowing apologetically. ‘Sorry! Are you all right?’

‘Can’t you be more damned careful?’ yelled Hiroyuki, throwing the ball back in their direction.

Katsumi was still squatting down on the sand. Hiroyuki took his hand, pulled him to his feet, and started examining the side of his chest where the ball had struck. He found nothing much wrong, just a faint red bruise under his T-shirt.

‘It’s nothing at all. You’ll be okay.’ Patting his son reassuringly on the ribs, Hiroyuki pronounced a clean bill of health.

Katsumi began to walk, but his pace was even slower than before. He still held his side, his face distorted in an exaggerated look of misery. He shortly began to drag his feet, his tongue dangling from a half-open mouth, and he let out deep sighs. This served to irritate Hiroyuki badly enough that he felt the need to take his anger out on someone or something.

The boy and his father whose ball had struck Katsumi had returned to the area by the pine grove to resume their game of catch. Both wore matching polo shirts of a well-known brand, and both reeked of the city from head to toe. The little boy was about Katsumi’s age and extraordinarily agile for a kid from the city.

Picking them as the target to vent his anger on, he strode over to where they were playing and called to them in a thick, menacing voice.

‘Say, you two over there!’

They stopped playing catch and turned to face Hiroyuki with anxious expressions that only fuelled the flames of his resentment. The timid, nervous look in their eyes strengthened his resolve to vent his spleen on them to his heart’s content.

He stopped within a few paces of them and growled, ‘I want your name and address.’

‘Huh?’ The father looked at once puzzled and contemptuous.

‘My boy says it hurts so much he can’t walk. What you gonna do if he’s broken a rib or something?’ Hiroyuki held out his left arm and pointed behind him to where his son was; only his son wasn’t there.

Katsumi had pretended it had hurt more than it did, to get a little sympathy from his father. Yet when he realized that he had only incited his father’s wrath, his throat parched with fear. On this particular occasion, his father’s anger just happened not to be directed at him. Nonetheless, Katsumi was terrified. As his father walked away, his back radiated malevolence. Left to run its natural course, it could well develop into violence. Katsumi wanted to avoid such a scene at all costs. What terrified him more than calling his father’s wrath upon himself was seeing him beat up others. It was particularly horrifying when the victim was his mother. At such times he could hardly breathe.

It was not until he felt Katsumi tugging his hand that Hiroyuki realized that his son was standing by his right side.

‘Dad,’ the boy appealed in a trembling voice. He had apparently been calling for some time now, but his father had been too wound up to notice.

Hiroyuki saw that his excuse for a fight was being snatched from under his nose. ‘What,’ he said, forcefully shaking off his son’s hand.

‘I’m all right. I’m fine…’

Katsumi tugged at his father’s hand again, trying to get him to step back. He was telling his father to let things be and just go home, to stop taking his anger out on other people.

‘You’re fine? Then what was that face back there?’

Hiroyuki’s anger had found a different target. Their gloved hands now dangling at their side, the boy and the father who’d been playing catch remained motionless, waiting to see which way things would go. The muzzle of Hiroyuki’s anger was now directed at someone else. Their anxious looks revealed that they still saw this as no reason to feel relieved.

I’m sorry, Dad,’ Katsumi apologized to his father, his face creasing up, on the verge of tears.

‘Fool, don’t apologize so easy!’ Hiroyuki’s hand rose.

The moment his father’s eyes changed colour rarely escaped Katsumi. Immediately before an eruption of anger, his father’s eyes would go from black to white, with the black part suddenly rolling up. Katsumi instinctively squeezed his eyes shut and covered his head with his hands.

When hitting his son failed to assuage his anger, Hiroyuki started kicking him around on the sand.

His tear-sodden face thick with sand, the boy kept on apologizing, I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry.’ Where had his son learned to beg for mercy in such a craven, pathetic, snivelling way? It was enough to drive Hiroyuki insane with anger.

The eruption did not last long. Hiroyuki suddenly reined in his hands and reached out to pull the boy up to his feet. It wasn’t that he was concerned that others were looking at them. It was simply that a passing storm had convulsed his frame and blown itself out in an instant. Once the storm had passed, he didn’t even remember what had caused his anger in the first place. It had been a ludicrous sequence: baseball hits son in ribs, son exhibits a painful expression, father sets out to get even with the culprits who threw the ball, son suddenly claims there’s nothing wrong, hence father gives son something real to cry about. Hiroyuki was at a loss to describe the absurdity of it in words. He slowly shook his bowed head and muttered to himself.

…I’m beginning to be like pop.

His son sobbing convulsively before him reminded him of himself at that age. He had been exactly the same. As the one wielding angry fists now, he’d become the spitting image of his father. Realizing this made him no more capable of altering what he had become. Knowing where the violence in his veins originated didn’t help him resist the impulse. The mass of emotion just surged up to shake him.

He lifted his gaze to discover that the father and son who had been playing catch were gone. The city types that filled the beach always had the fanciest equipment. The ball and gloves had certainly been nothing more than just another fancy possession. Having lost their interest in playing catch, they must have returned to their car to find other fancy things to play with.

He lightly cuffed his son’s head as they made their way along the beach towards the park. Though they had more time to spare than they knew what to do with, he felt strangely tense, almost afraid.

‘Stupid bitch!’ he said out loud.

His wife’s absence was at the root of his uncontrollable vexation. Every aspect of the scenery struck him as detestable. Normally so pleasant, the sound of the waves now jarred his nerves.

‘Where can that stupid bitch be?’

Most Futtsu fishermen did not work on Saturdays because the market was closed on Sundays. It was their only day off. He had awoken that morning on his day off to find his wife gone.

It being his day off, he got up several hours later than usual. It was shortly before nine o’clock when the parching thirst of a hangover disrupted his sleep. He rolled over and shouted for water. No matter how many times he shouted, there was no reply.

He got out of bed, and as he made his way to the kitchen, he noticed that the house was somehow different than usual. Normally, at this time, his wife would be sitting on the sofa in the living room watching television after having finished her morning household chores. His breakfast would have been there on the table, the dishes and pots all washed and stacked to dry near the sink, the laundry done and the house cleaned. That’s how it was every Saturday morning.

Yet this morning, wherever he looked was untidy. Dirty dishes were stacked high in the sink, dirty clothing stuffed in the laundry basket.

‘Nanako!’

Calling his wife’s name, he made his way upstairs and looked into the children’s room. His wife was not there either.

Hiroyuki had no choice but to prepare his own breakfast from whatever he found in the refrigerator. He then waited for his son to return from school and took him out on a stroll during which he might look for his wife.

As they crossed the park, Hiroyuki tried to remember what had happened the night before. He recalled drinking more than usual since he wouldn’t be working today. But he felt he hadn’t even stayed up that late. Before workdays, Hiroyuki made it a rule to go to bed before nine o’clock; he had to get up very early, at half past two. But he just couldn’t remember what time he’d gone to bed the night before. His wife would have gone to bed at the same time. They always slept next to each other, spreading their futons out on the tatami of a six-mat room. Hiroyuki only had to turn to one side to see his wife’s face as she slept. He did remember seeing his wife’s face last night. She’d been fast asleep, her breathing inaudible, and her face had been lit up in the light of the lamp near her pillow. Hiroyuki had observed his wife’s face as it was illuminated by the weak source of light.

Suddenly, his head was throbbing with splitting pain. He ran over to the water fountain where he drank and lightly patted his head with his hand. When he tried to think, a black force repelled him. Always hazy, always just out of reach… What had happened the night before? His efforts to remember proved futile.

Hiroyuki washed his face in the gushing spray of water.

‘Let’s try the Fishermen’s Co-op.’

He turned the water off and turned his drenched face toward his son.

Katsumi nodded, but he was suffering an attack of anxiety that he couldn’t begin to describe. It was the dread that his mother might never return.

2

There was rarely much traffic on the road that ran from east to west by the fishing port. The boats left on the vacant plot of land accented the aura of desolation that pervaded the port on the fishermen’s day off. There were a few stalls selling shellfish, but the place was too far out of the way for the sightseers clamming at low tide.

The roots of the trees lining the sidewalk were overgrown with grass. Hiroyuki did not hesitate to walk on the road instead. He was conscious that his son was deliberately negotiating each clump of grass so as not to step off the sidewalk.

‘The fool,’ Hiroyuki thought to himself.

The boy’s mother had told him never to step off the sidewalk. The sight of his son unconditionally obeying his mother to the last word galled Hiroyuki to no end.

A broker’s shop selling marine products stood before the Fishermen’s Cooperative Association. As Hiroyuki looked into the back of the shop, a hefty woman came out, wiping her hands on her apron. He acknowledged her with a nod of his head.

‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen the wife at all?’

The tone of his question suggested that he was puzzled by his wife’s absence.

‘No… at least not today.’

Not being on particularly friendly terms with the shopkeeper, he felt little disposed to prolong the conversation. Once she got the bit between her teeth, this fishwife would keep callers all day with her prattle. Hiroyuki beat a hasty retreat into an alley just outside the shop.

As they wandered here and there along the coast, through the park, and around the Fishermen’s Co-op, Hiroyuki approached countless people with the same question.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen the wife, have you?’

He would repeat the question whenever he spotted a familiar face. It was unlike Hiroyuki to be the first to speak, to be so spontaneous with his greetings. He was known as an unsociable character. He couldn’t understand why he was behaving in this manner. His behaviour mystified himself. It was as though he were trying to impress upon all of them that he was walking around searching for his wife.

Hiroyuki’s home was on a corner two blocks down the road from the fishwife’s shop. The house occupied almost the entire plot it was built on. His boat, the Hamakatsu, was moored near the western extremity of the port, making it but a few minutes’ walk from his house. Two years ago, they had enlarged their house. Since that time, they had used the older, original part of the building for storage. Hiroyuki had been born and raised in the part of the house that now housed his fishing tackle. During his entire thirty-three years, he had never lived anywhere else.

‘I’m home!’

He was through the front door and into the house now, but still no one answered. Hiroyuki had expected to see his wife’s all-too-familiar face pop out and greet him, dispelling his misgivings. The silence disillusioned him all too quickly.

‘So she’s not back yet.’

He clicked his tongue and strode across the living room, throwing open one of the sliding screens to the Japanese-style room beyond.

His daughter Haruna and his father Shozo were sitting on the floor at the low table facing each other. They were both eating jam buns. Although Shozo was only fifty-five years of age, his emaciated form and white hair suggested a man of over eighty.

Shozo had almost lost his life at sea. That was twenty years ago. He’d taken his boat out of the harbour in calm weather, but the wind had changed suddenly and the boat was being buffeted mercilessly by tail waves generated by southerly winds. His face was hurled against the edge of the boat and he was thrown overboard. Luckily, he was saved, but the accident served to trigger the gradual onset of senile dementia, impairing his perception, memory, and speech. For the past few years, his life had become a monotonous cycle of eating, excreting, and sleeping. It was not clear whether his condition was due to the accident or whether the accident had only served to call forth the symptoms of an innate disposition. Hiroyuki and the other members of his family guessed that it had probably been innate. There were other grounds for suspecting that this was the case. Their daughter Haruna, now approaching her seventh birthday, had begun to show symptoms of aphasia or some similar disorder.

She’d always been able to learn and interact normally, but for the past three months she hadn’t been able to speak properly and had started making moaning sounds instead. For about a month, she still seemed to have mental images of the things she wanted to say and was simply having a hard time enunciating them. Then one day, she abruptly gave up trying to speak at all. Haruna had always been an odd child and had been experiencing difficulties at school. Since losing her ability to speak, she’d stopped attending school altogether. Whenever they had time on their hands, she and her grandfather would sit together devouring jam buns. All you had to do was give her a jam bun to keep her occupied. The family soon discovered that a great deal of trouble could be avoided by simply stocking up on jam buns and giving her more than she could eat. Hiroyuki was gradually losing the vitality, motivation, whatever else it took to set his family right.

As he observed his daughter and his father, sitting opposite each other eating jam buns in silence, the sight depressed him anew. How irritating it was not to be able to ask either of them whether his wife had returned while he had been out. Irritation was not the word; he was beginning to feel as if two dark walls were closing in on him from above and below to crush the life out of him.

One he had given life; the other had given him life. Now he was trapped between the two.

He closed the sliding panel, unable to watch them any longer. Hiroyuki was partially resigned to suffering some kind of brain impairment himself in the future, but this was one reality he naturally preferred not to contemplate.

…Just where on earth has she gone?

Hiroyuki folded his arms on his chest, baffled.

As five o’clock approached, his irritation was aggravated by hunger. He felt an overpowering resentment at his wife for having left the family to fend for themselves. With no one to take out his rage on, it only grew and grew.

The one possibility he could think of was that she had suddenly left him. Hiroyuki himself had felt tempted to leave home and desert his family. His emotions rose to an explosive level as he imagined himself saying it: ‘Leave, you bitch, if that’s what you want. But before you do, make sure you kill the kids and the old man.’

He relived in that instant his own hunger for affection as a child and wiped tears from his face with the back of his hand, which clutched a can of beer.

He suddenly remembered the bankbook that was kept in the drawer of the kitchen cupboard. Upon locating the bankbook, he flipped through the pages, but found nothing unusual. No large sums of money had been withdrawn lately. If his wife had indeed left him, she had done so on an impulse.

In that case, she’d just as likely be back as fast as she’d left. She’d succumbed momentarily to temptation, that was all.

Feeling somewhat better, he decided to go out. He knew a bar called Marie where he could get something to eat.

‘Have some of those jam buns,’ he told his son, put on a pair of sandals, and went out.

Hiroyuki made his way along the road by the fishing port toward the park. The gray water in the enclosed harbour was tinged with the crimson of the cloudy dusk sky. There was neither wind nor waves, and the boats moored along the wharf stood motionless side by side. Hiroyuki looked where his own boat was moored.

Even from where he was standing, he could clearly see the name of his boat, Hamakatsu, on the hull. He halted. It felt like his heart was in his mouth and he didn’t know why. His pulse began to race; the blackest fear welled up from some pinprick in his heart and spread through his body. He swallowed hard. A low-pitched drone seemed to fill his inner ear.

Hiroyuki had no idea what was causing the attack. He looked towards the harbour. As soon as he spotted his own boat, he felt his chest constrict. No one knew that boat better than he did, he had used it for years. He had spent more time on that boat than at home. What could be bothering him? His forgetfulness had been pronounced of late. He sometimes couldn’t recall events from the day before.

Maybe there was something he’d left undone at work, something on the boat that needed servicing, some piece of tackle that needed to be put away. He tried to think if there was anything like that he might have forgotten, but his mind remained blank.

He looked ahead and saw the red neon sign, Marie, on the left. Though desperate for answers, he went inside and closed the door behind him.

‘Hi stranger!’ The bar’s madam beamed at him as he walked through the door. He was generous with his money, and the bar valued his patronage.

The moment Hiroyuki heard the madam’s voice, the anxiety that had been eating away at him simply vanished.

3

As always, Hiroyuki woke up a little before three o’clock in the morning. He woke up instinctively and had not needed the prodding of an alarm clock for years now. Of course, there was no precise time laid down to go fishing. He fished for conger eels all alone. The earlier he set out, the earlier he could return. The sooner he got back, the sooner he could start drinking. He sat cross-legged on the futon and gazed into space. The rest of the family was asleep. His wife would have normally been sleeping on the futon next to his, but she was not there. When she was around, she got in the way; when she wasn’t around, there were extra chores for him to do.

…Where on earth is she?

He had absolutely no idea how to go about searching for his missing wife. The only thing he could do was to go out fishing as usual and wait for his wife to return. He cursed and slammed his pillow against the tatami matting.

‘Someone prepare my breakfast!’

His yell reverberated through the entire house, but there was no reply. They were all asleep in their own rooms: his son and daughter upstairs, his father in the Japanese-style room behind the living room. Not that any of them gave the impression of being alive at all even when they were awake.

Hiroyuki did not budge – not because he was averse to making his own breakfast, but because it just didn’t feel right. On this particular morning, he was unable to motivate himself to go fishing. The only justifiable reason for not going out would have been poor weather. He did for a moment find himself wishing he could stay home thanks to some storm.

He’d rarely wished for bad weather before. In fact, Hiroyuki often went out on rough days when other fishermen took the day off. He was well-known in the Futtsu fishing community for his nerve. That was why the Hamakatsu boasted catches that far surpassed those of other boats. Hiroyuki was not engaged in fishing only for the money; he got a thrill from tracking conger eels as they moved from place to place, using his instincts to net bumper catches. Not only that, he enjoyed boasting to others about his successful hauls. It was as if he had no other way to prove his worth as a human being.

Hiroyuki heaved himself up. Even in the closed room, he could sense the conditions out in the open air. The weather was nowhere near as bad as to warrant calling off the day’s fishing. Not feeling like it was no justification, but slacking off. And there was one more reason why he could not simply stay home that day. He felt he had to set out to sea, that day more than any other. His feelings were contradictory: he did not feel like going, but he felt he had to go.

He pulled open the shutters. It was still pitch-dark outside. It was the time of the year when the days were longest. In another hour the eastern skies would drain their darkness.

Two days earlier, Hiroyuki had netted a very creditable catch. Even his dragnet had caught many fry of conger eel. Another such profitable day awaited him. He tried to spur himself on with such positive thoughts.

He dressed in his usual style: a jacket over a T-shirt, the bottoms of his jogging pants tucked into rubber boots. His clothing that day was different in but one respect. He wore a different hat. He replaced his usual hunting cap with a straw hat given the growing heat of summer. Thus clad and with a sack of frozen sardines slung over his shoulder, he crossed the foot wide plank that linked the wharf with the stern of his boat.

For conger eel fishing, there was no set time for boats to leave the harbour. Some boats would go out at about the same time as Hiroyuki, while others set off as he returned to the harbour at around two in the afternoon.

The sputtering of engines starting up began to break the predawn silence of the harbour. Hiroyuki started his generator and joined the others in banishing the silence that had reigned. He then lit up the deck of the Hamakatsu with a searchlight. There was one job that remained to be done before he left. It involved throwing sardines into the tubes used to catch the conger eels. The synthetic resin tubes measured about six inches in diameter and were a little over two feet in length. A couple hundred of these tubes were stacked on the left side of the fore-deck. Hiroyuki began the process of putting a sardine in each tube and stuffing them with a cap fitted with rubber flaps. The eels would be enticed into the tubes by the smell of sardine. The rubber flaps at the mouth of each tube were arranged to trap the catch inside once it entered the tube. The two hundred tubes were attached with rope to a cable that stretched about three miles. This was the most common method of fishing for conger eels, and it involved letting the cable out at a uniform speed and allowing the tubes to sink to the seabed. Then all you had to do was wait, and later lift the tubes. Some of them would be empty, but more often than not a tube would contain more than one eel, sometimes as many as ten.

Since the rubber flaps prevented the conger eels from escaping, they would squirm around in the dark slippery tube. Hiroyuki was definitely not one for metaphors, but he thought the slippery squirming interior of the tube and the struggling eel resembled nothing so much as sexual intercourse. What pitiful creatures men were to be lured by a scent into a trap from which they could not escape! It was Hiroyuki’s own story, too. He’d fallen into a trap set by a woman, when he was just twenty-two, that period of life when he was most set on having a good time. Trapped, unable to escape, he had set up home and started a family. The woman had become pregnant with his son Katsumi, and the inevitable obligation, marriage, had followed. He had not married for love. The love he had thought would bloom in time never did. Nothing changed. If he were asked whether he felt any affection for his wife, or children, he would have had to shake his head. It had all transpired beyond his control. Hiroyuki had never once liked another human being.

By the time he finished loading the tubes, the eastern sky was already light. Hiroyuki sat down on the cover of the ship’s well for a smoke. As he smoked, he gazed at the movement of clouds above Mt Kano. Upon waking he would first look at the dawn sky, then later, before leaving the harbour, check the clouds over the surrounding mountains. Fishermen always turned to the mountains for clues as to how the weather would turn out that day, whether it was likely to be windy or rainy. Any fisherman who did not know how to accurately read the winds and skies in and around the fishing grounds risked losing his life at sea.

The sky immediately above was more or less clear, although fine cloud cover could be seen in the direction of Mt Kano and Mt Nokogiri. Moreover, the mountains themselves appeared to be capped in lower clouds. The few patches of cloud in the sky right above him were drifting inland, indicating to Hiroyuki that southerly winds were already blowing inshore. It was very likely that these would be full gusts before the morning was out. Hiroyuki’s instincts, honed over many years, told him that things didn’t look good.

The sky told him that even if he did leave the harbour, he was not likely to get very far out. He would have to check the conditions out at sea and make a speedy retreat back to the harbour if the winds got too strong.

Today, Hiroyuki was going to fish off the south side of Breakwater No. 2. The debris floating in Tokyo Bay was said to make a round tour of the bay before washing up either on the north beach of Cape Futtsu or at the tip of the Miura Peninsula. Debris floating south of the line between Cape Kannon and Cape Futtsu, however, could flow out into the open sea instead of ever being washed ashore. That day, Hiroyuki wanted to fish in an area south of that line. There was no special reason for this hankering, he simply felt compelled to make his way as far as that patch of ocean.

Some ashes from the cigarette in his mouth fell onto his knee. He brushed them off with his hand and they scattered on the well cover. The cover was painted a dull green, but the paint was peeling off in many places. That was the first time Hiroyuki noticed that he was sitting atop the boat’s well, and suddenly every downy hair on his body stood on end. A chill ran from his buttocks up his spine and a massive shiver rippled across his body.

Its top sticking up at roughly the centre of the boat, the well was about as deep as the height of an average man and measured about six feet by nine. Its central location was ideal for a tank of its kind, for it was here that the boat’s bottom was deepest. The boat’s well was intended to hold the conger eels after a catch. When not in use, however, the well was covered by two planks to prevent accidents. Something unearthly ascended into the air from that covered hold filled with seawater. Even a veteran of the sea like Hiroyuki was affected enough by the eeriness that he jumped to his feet without thinking.

As he stood he caught sight of a black crevice between his legs. The planks had parted slightly. Hiroyuki dealt a light kick to force them back together and closed up the crack. As he did so, his body was shaking.

The wind grew stronger, and the boat rocked with a chopping motion, causing seawater in the well to splash inside the tank. The sound was a little different than usual, as if the water was splashing against something else.

Hiroyuki looked up at the sky again. The clouds were scudding faster. The southerlies were promising to whip up strong. But that wasn’t enough reason to pack up and go home. Before the wind got any stronger, Hiroyuki had to get some work done.

Jumping back onto the wharf, Hiroyuki untied the boat’s mooring rope and carried the loose end back onboard with him. The boat gradually began to move away from the quay under its own inertia.

4

Hiroyuki turned off the engine of the Hamakatsu. Once all two hundred tubes were thrown into the sea, it was only a question of waiting two hours until the conger eels got caught in the traps. Having cast the line, it was time for a short break, for a meal. Around eight o’clock, he was in the habit of eating a second breakfast.

The shadows of the tankers plying the Uraga Waterway bore down heavily on Hiroyuki’s boat. Thanks to a fractional difference in course, there was no risk of collision. Compared to the massive tankers, the six-ton Hamakatsu looked like a mere speck of flotsam. Small as the boat was, there was a fair amount of space in the cabin, making it quite possible to spend the night should the need arise.

As Hiroyuki relaxed and ate his rice ball in the cabin, he began to feel uneasy about the instability of the boat. As he had predicted, the southerly winds had grown stronger and were causing the boat to rock violently. The sky that had appeared clear enough during the morning was now covered entirely with dark threatening clouds speeding across the skylight. It was really the kind of weather that warranted calling off the trip and returning to port. Finding that he had almost no appetite, Hiroyuki left the cabin and threw his half-eaten rice ball into the sea.

His stomach was heaving, but not from nausea. It was a complex conspiracy of tension and fear. To be sure, the way the clouds were moving was disconcerting, but that did not seem to be the source of his anxiety. He couldn’t stop thinking about that well. Hiroyuki rested his hand on the cabin door and looked down at the well by his feet. Although he remembered having kicked the cover planks closely together, he could see that the black crack had reappeared. He could hear the sound of water splashing at the bottom of the tank. Though it contained not a single eel, something was surely in there. Whenever the boat pitched violently, whatever it was could be heard thudding against the side.

Hiroyuki steeled himself before thrusting his hand in the gap between the planks. A hideous stench arose from the tank, and Hiroyuki pressed the towel around his neck against his nose. Still determined to look in, he moved the wooden panels further apart.

An angled shaft of light penetrated the darkness of the well to reveal a human foot. The seawater at the bottom of the well was lapping against the sole of a pale foot. Hiroyuki poked his head inside to peer deeper into the well. There were the hips… on up to the back… and pale, pudgy shoulders. And with every rock of the boat, a head thudded again and again against the wall of the tank. The body of a woman floated facedown at the bottom of the well. Though he could not see her face, Hiroyuki knew immediately who it was.

‘Nanako…’ he called to his wife, ‘so this is where you were.’

No sooner had the words left his mouth than it all flashed back in his mind’s eye as plain as day. He relived the sensation of his hands gripping her neck. He saw his wife’s face desperately gasping for air. He could not make out what she was saying. Yet her torrent of abuse was seared into his brain.

Hiroyuki and his wife had had a violent quarrel the evening before last.

Hiroyuki had come home dead drunk and started to watch television with his mouth hanging half-open. His wife charged into the room and confronted him:

‘Just look at you! Just look at that sloppy face of yours!’ She brought a hand mirror and thrust it in front of his face. ‘Just take a look at yourself!’

Sure enough, the face looking back at him from the mirror was a sorry one. His mouth still hung half-open, even as he looked in the mirror. Not only was he drooling, but the crumbs of a snack he had eaten back at the bar stuck to the corners of his mouth. There it was, his face, ugly and worn-out. It was a face that looked older than his years. He was disgusted with himself. His wife’s taunts hit their mark. She was right, and for that reason, he felt infuriated. What right had she to complain when she was receiving upwards of a million yen every month?

The mirror flashed for a moment, reflecting the fluorescent light. The flash seemed to urge action.

Slapping the mirror out of her hand, Hiroyuki roared at her, his articulation thick with the effects of drink.

‘How dare you!’

Noting the change in the colour of his glaring eyes, she steeled herself and looked away. The sight of her husband gearing up for an episode of violence was terrifying enough. She bit back the rest of her taunts, holding her resentment in check.

Yet, with that ‘How dare you?’ barely out of his mouth, Hiroyuki slumped down helplessly, his cheek against the surface of the tatami matting, his breath sputtering. Nanako stared at her husband for a while in his slumped, powerless condition. Her gaze betrayed contempt, like she was witnessing the dying moments of some monster. Suddenly, she began spitting out the words she had held back. Inside his head, befuddled as it was with drink, Hiroyuki registered her taunts, rebutting each one silently. He would not engage in a battle of words which he was bound to lose.

He couldn’t imagine what the bitch had to complain about. Him, stupid? Look at who was talking, daft bitch! How she went on in that superior whine about having made the top ten of her class! It made him sick. A fisherman didn’t need to be an Einstein. He only earned such good wages because he had the strength and instincts of a man. And what was all that about genes? Who was passing on what to whom? Both the kids? So what? Oh, now he saw what the bitch was getting at, it was all his fault that their girl had aphasia. His high-handedness was to blame? How the bitch went on and on with her gibberish!

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. It was the same old quarrel repeated night after night, the same tired old taunts and complaints every time. Not only would she complain about having to look after her senile father-in-law and aphasic daughter, she would also accuse him of physical abuse and not caring for his family in the least. She claimed that she felt she was locked up in a prison cell. She bitterly lamented how deeply she hated her existence, how she couldn’t take it anymore. He had but a single reply to all her complaints: month after month, he never brought home less than a million yen.

She had declared that she intended to leave him. He reacted with derision. Did she have anywhere to go? Who would have her? Had she forgotten how he’d taken her in and fed her? More than anything, how did she think she could make a living? She was incompetent and she’d end up dying in a ditch somewhere.

‘I’m leaving’ was just another tired old line paraded out again and again until it had completely lost any value it may once have had as a threat. She kept saying she would leave him, but she never even tried. She didn’t have parents she could depend on, and she worried about her kids’ future and her own job prospects.

But then Nanako said something she had never, ever said before. Exhausted from unleashing her torrent of grievances, she seemed almost to have shrunk. Her strength drained from her shoulders, she muttered as if to herself, ‘It’d be awful if he turned out like you.’

This last remark pierced Hiroyuki’s heart like a barbed fishing hook. What she meant was clear enough in light of her previous taunts. If she did leave him and desert the children, their motherless son would grow up and turn out like Hiroyuki. That was what Nanako saw as ‘awful’.

It had been twenty years now since Hiroyuki’s father had almost drowned at sea. Hiroyuki’s mother had disappeared around the same time. He’d lost his mother when he was about Katsumi’s age. His mother had deserted her family, running off with a younger man… At least, that was the account given him by his father. At the time, however, his father’s senility had already been kicking in, making it difficult to gauge how much of what he said was true. For all that, there was no reason to believe that his mother had left for any other reason. As far as Hiroyuki could remember, his mother and father had done nothing but fight. It certainly seemed quite plausible that his mother, unable to endure his father’s violence any longer, just left him and disappeared.

Hiroyuki had taken the news of having been abandoned by his mother without displaying any emotion, or so he believed. He could not remember having received much, if any, affection from his mother, and his only value had seemed to lie in deflecting his father’s violence from her. As he grew older, however, the fact that his mother deserted him began to turn increasingly into a feeling that he was an unwanted presence in the world. Hiroyuki grew up feeling constantly resentful, and his self-confidence was always so fragile that it could be shattered with a single blow.

Perhaps that was why he’d gone to pieces that evening. Without understanding the cause of the blaze raging in him, Hiroyuki got to his feet, hit his head on a chest of drawers, and tottered across the room, coming down on top of his wife. It was as though flames erupted from every pore of his body. He was never one to waste time on words, but this assault was unlike previous ones, and his wife probably sensed what was coming. She did not attempt to cry out, but simply closed her eyes as if in resignation, and placed her hands on her husband’s, which gripped her neck. It almost seemed as though she wanted him to squeeze harder, and Hiroyuki straddled her as she lay there, bringing the full weight of his body on his hands. When he gently removed them, Nanako was dead.

Hiroyuki got to his feet and for some reason switched off the fluorescent light. He turned on the small bedside lamp instead, shining it on his wife’s face. She looked to be asleep. She was now released from her prison cell. She even looked content.

He strained his ears. There was not a sound to be heard. His father, his son, and his daughter were all asleep. The silence was so complete that he almost felt he could hear their breathing as they slept.

He already knew how to dispose of his wife’s body. He would throw it into the sea. If he sank the body in the sea south of Breakwater No. 2, it would never be found.

He wrapped his wife’s body in a fine nylon net and carried her over his shoulder onto his boat. He then dumped the body in the boat’s well, there to stay until he could permanently dispose of it. That was all he could do then. The rest could wait until the day after next, when he’d sink the body while out fishing. Persuading himself thus, he put the planks back on the hold and went home.

He drank a glass or two of sake and went to sleep, and something happened in his mind that was very much like throwing his wife’s body down a well and putting a lid on it. His brain cells confined the memory of his deed to its deepest recesses and capped it with a lid – one that was destined to be reopened soon enough.

5

…What a thing to have gone and done.

Two planks of wood formed the cover of the well. Hiroyuki removed one and stood it on the deck. He looked up at the sky, then sank down exhausted on the deck. The pit of his stomach began to heave. He deeply regretted what he’d done. Yet, his deed had been exposed to the light of day and there was no more escaping into oblivion.

‘So! Why don’t you get going?’ his wife’s still corpse seemed to provoke him with the reality. It seemed to be suppressing a smirk as it swayed back and forth.

What to do? First, he had to get down into the well with some rope, tie it to his wife’s corpse, and haul her out of the well. He would then attach weights to the body and sink it. Having lain in seawater for a day and a half in the early summer heat, the corpse emitted an unearthly stench. The smell had smouldered in the confined space of the tank, shooting up like a flame through the opening of the removed plank. It occurred to Hiroyuki that leaping into a fire to retrieve a body would have been easier.

Having to get rid of the body was his wife’s punishment for him. Hiroyuki cursed his own deed. But the task could not be avoided.

He tied a towel over his mouth and nose, knotting it firmly behind his head. He tied the end of some rope to the winch, while taking the other end in his hand. He peered into the well, as if he hadn’t done enough of that already, and caught sight of his wife’s blanched foot. The skin was puffed up and had begun to peel.

The boat rocked violently. Hiroyuki put his hands on the edge of the well for support. He had almost fallen in.

The current was getting faster. As he scanned the sea around him, he noticed that there was not a single fishing boat in sight; they must have all scuttled back to harbour.

Everyone agreed that the waves in Tokyo Bay were terrifying. Waves came in two types, rollers and choppers, and the complex indentations of Tokyo Bay’s coastline were perfectly configured to generate choppers. Waves were even now rushing in at random angles and breaking into white spray. If Hiroyuki wasn’t careful, a chopper could smash into the deck from an unexpected angle and flood the boat with water.

Leaving the rope for the time being, Hiroyuki dropped anchor to set the boat against the wind. The boat could capsize if the waves came at its hull.

It was then that it hit him that he hadn’t a second to waste. He was in for serious trouble if he didn’t dump the body and get out of there soon.

A chopper breaking hard by spurred him to action.

With his hands on either side of the well, he lowered himself down to the bottom. Trying to avoid looking at the body as much as possible, he felt around for his wife’s ankles. The best way to do the job seemed to be to bind the legs together with rope and haul it out upside down. Perhaps he could get it over with without having to look at her face.

Every time the boat pitched unexpectedly, Hiroyuki staggered and his wife’s legs would slip from his grasp. He cursed aloud and clamped the end of the rope between his teeth. In that split second, his entire body was jarred by an awful premonition. An uncanny shudder ran through the length and breadth of the boat, and it pitched once like never before and started to list. From that point on, everything unfolded in slow motion. Slowly, ever so slowly, the opening of the well, which until then had been above him, rolled down to his side, throwing the other plank off with a thud. Soon his only source of daylight, the opening, was completely submerged in the sea and Hiroyuki’s world went pitch dark.

The seawater flooded in at his feet, reached his waist and then his chest in no time, and forced his body up, up.

… She’s capsized.

Before the word ‘capsized’ could come to his mind, his body had grasped the situation and braced for death. He was too panicked even to breathe. In that state, he struggled up to reach air and rammed his head against the bottom of the boat. The water began to stop flowing in, leaving a single head’s breadth of air. Thrusting his face up into that pitch-dark sliver, Hiroyuki coughed violently. He must have swallowed a large amount of seawater.

His heart literally shrank in his chest. He was dead for sure unless he managed to control his panic. His brain raced in a frantic search for some way to save himself… Yes. That was it. He’d fill his lungs to capacity, dive down to find the opening of the well, and swim out.

He tried to remain calm. There was still plenty of air left. There was no need to lose his head. No good would come of a frantic exit. Straying too far from the boat meant certain death.

He suddenly remembered. What happened to that rope he’d been holding just a few moments ago? The other end of the rope had been wound round the winch on the deck. The boat had capsized just as he was trying to bind his wife’s legs with the rope. He would not drift away from the boat as long as he held on to the rope and pulled himself back along it.

No matter how much he groped around in the water for the rope, his fingertips were unable to locate it. It was taking too long. He resigned himself to swimming out without the guidance of the rope. He took several deep breaths to fill his lungs. The more he tried to inhale the air trapped in that cramped, dark space, the more suffocated he felt. His panic was making him hyperventilate. Hiroyuki was no longer sure he could make it, when ten feet was all he needed to dive at most.

With all his remaining strength, he forced his head under the water and lunged downwards. In an instant, he saw a three-foot-square opening cut out in the darkness beneath him. A faint light filtered through from below. The opening of the well was right in front of him.

‘Nothing to it,’ he thought as he placed his hands on the edge of the opening and thrust his head through. He thrust out his chest, and then his waist, and right when his body formed a V shape, Hiroyuki felt something pull at his foot. Though the upper part of his body was now outside the well, his legs refused to follow. He was fast losing what breath he had. He gathered his remaining strength and tried to yank his foot free. To no avail. There was no choice but to go back. Any more hesitation, and he’d die like that in a V shape.

As much as he hated to, he pulled back the upper half of his body and came up where he had been before. His head emerged from the water with such force that he bumped it hard on the floor of the boat. A bolt of searing pain shot through him. The sliver of air had shrunk in size; the boat was slowly sinking. Now, to get any air at all, Hiroyuki had to bend his head and thrust just his nose and mouth out of the water.

He bent his leg and groped around with his hand to find out what had caught. A moment before, he could have sworn that his foot was tangled up in rope. Yet, now, his hand detected nothing there at all. Maybe something had decided to hold his foot…

But this was no time for speculation. Filling his lungs with what little air remained at the top, he lunged down headfirst once more.

No sooner had he thrust his head downward than a spectral human form drifted toward the hazy opening. Its hair fanned out around the head. As though to block the exit, his wife’s corpse had wandered out from the side, and it danced like a dark shadow in the faint light from-below.

The sight made Hiroyuki gulp seawater. Terrified by his wife’s movement, which seemed wilful, he used up all the air in his lungs.

…Exit’s blocked.

There was nothing to do but surface again.

This time, he had almost to lick the bottom of the boat to get any air. He let out a silent scream. The smell of fuel, which must have leaked from the engine, assailed his nostrils.

It was all up with him, all over.

He pissed himself, and started crying. Above, the boat floor. Below, the sea. The only exit was occupied by his wife. Hiroyuki had no space left to live.

He was like a conger eel caught in a trap. His wife’s corpse was the rubber flap at the opening of the eel tube. With arms and legs akimbo, she clung with grim tenacity to the opening to prevent his passage.

Hiroyuki didn’t have the strength left to laugh at the irony. A man who’d trapped countless conger eels in dark tubes was now snared himself and waiting for death.

With the pounding of the waves, the roar should have been a lot more thunderous, but it was strangely calm all around. Death was approaching with a steady tread. There was no escaping it.

As he thought of his imminent death, a notion popped into his mind. Twenty years ago, around when his mother disappeared, Hiroyuki’s father had narrowly escaped death. Hiroyuki had never doubted his father’s story. But now, with death staring him in the face, he understood the truth. Just as Hiroyuki had done, his father had killed his wife and used his fishing as an alibi for disposing the body out at sea. His father’s mental troubles had nothing to do with having hit his head. His terrible deed had slowly driven him mad.

The same blood ran in his veins, and the past was repeating itself. Even if Hiroyuki were to return home alive and somehow manage to bring up his son single-handedly, Katsumi would no doubt end up doing exactly the same thing. Where to sever the awful chain?

In death. All he had to do was die. With the death of both his parents, his son would grow up in a new environment. The thought made it a little easier for Hiroyuki. Perhaps he could meet death with composure.

Then he heard two sounds coming from above, with a brief interval between them. There it was again, two sounds. It was not the waves striking the boat; it sounded more artificial.

At first he listened vacantly. But when he fathomed the meaning of the sound that was penetrating his brain, he became alert and thrust his face upwards. There was still a little air left. A few more knocks came from the exterior of the keel.

His body reacted reflexively, his right hand clenching into a fist and banging against the bottom. As if in response, two sounds from above. And now Hiroyuki, thumping the bottom twice. From above, another answer of two knocks.

He was saved!

Just when he’d given up hope of ever getting out alive, he was given a second chance. Hiroyuki had witnessed a similar scene a few years ago. A rescue boat from the Maritime Safety Agency was rushing to the aid of a fishing vessel that had capsized as a result of poor handling. Hiroyuki, who’d been fishing, interrupted his work to pull alongside and watch. The rescue squad used the same procedure to check if anyone had been trapped in the cabin. They straddled the keel of the overturned boat and knocked on its bottom, reassuring any survivors that help was on the way; they would send down their divers if anyone responded. The divers took an extra regulator down with them to insert in the mouth of the survivor. Other fishing boats had also gathered around to watch the operation, and when the trapped fisherman emerged safely from the sinking boat, there was some wild cheering.

The sounds he now heard raining down from above were to let him know that the Maritime Safety Agency had come to his rescue. Hiroyuki had lost all sense of time. He wondered how long ago the boat had capsized. It was just conceivable that a patrol boat had discovered him by chance.

Hiroyuki roared with joy at his good fortune. He had been granted a new lease on life; he’d be able to breathe real air once more.

He thrust his face under the water and looked down. He expected to see his wife blocking the opening, but she wasn’t there. She had vanished. Perhaps a wave had caught her and washed her out of the well. She was probably sinking deep just then. Hiroyuki tried hard to believe that this was the case. Without his wife’s body, no criminal charge could be proved against him.

Just when everything had looked so desperate, his fortune had suddenly changed for the better. Almost as soon as his wife’s body had disappeared, effectively disposing of itself, the rescue team had found him. Hiroyuki could not wait for the divers to come get him.

Suddenly, his body was hugged by powerful arms. They were here!

He could hear no voices, but he felt the reassuring words in his stomach: ‘You’re all right now.’

Hiroyuki felt for the diver’s arm and clung to him. The diver put his arm around Hiroyuki’s shoulder and inserted a regulator snugly into his mouth. Holding the mouthpiece tightly between his teeth, he drew in air. It had the aroma of a highland plateau; never had air tasted so sweet. Determined to never let go of it, he bit deeper into the mouthpiece, sucking in the air over and over again.

He was ecstatic. Once back in the land of the living, he would be able to love them all, his son, his daughter, even his senile father. The shell that encased him was cracking and breaking off like the lie it had always been. He was sorry not everything could be the same again. He was going to beg for his wife’s forgiveness. He had no idea how to apologize to the dead. His desire to do so, however, was genuine.

Hiroyuki had taken it for granted that the diver would escort him in a downward dive. But he felt himself suddenly floating up instead. In an instant, he was gazing at the keel of the Hamakatsu, which was now barely afloat.

Resembling nothing more permanent than a leaf on the water, the boat looked as if it would go under at any moment. The patrol boat made its way towards them. People jostled about on the deck; they all seemed to be shouting things, but Hiroyuki couldn’t hear their voices.

He could see all around him, all of the sea and the sky. Bursting through the clouds, shafts of light poured down onto the crests of waves as they broke and spewed their foam. Catching the light, the spray scintillated like jewels hurled in every direction. This was the sea he had known from childhood. Cape Futtsu stretched straight toward him. The wind and waves were strong. Never had he seen the sea so sublime, it shimmered. A sense of relief enveloped him, and his body felt lighter and lighter.

A phrase he’d never once uttered in his life came to him now: All clear!

He spoke the words and they felt good. He spoke them once more.

The patrol ship retrieved the two bodies simultaneously. It was obvious that one was that of a woman who’d been dead for two or three days. The other was that of a man who’d just breathed his last. What this meant would be understood in due course.

What they would never understand, however, was why the man had died with the woman’s cadaver locked in his embrace. He certainly didn’t look like he’d clutched at a straw in panic-stricken desperation. Far from anguished, the man’s expression was serene. Something else that troubled the rescue team was that the woman’s right thumb was plunged down to its base in the man’s mouth. How on earth could the dead woman insert her thumb into the man’s mouth? Nonetheless, that was how it looked to those who saw the corpses.

The man must have bitten down hard on the thumb, for his jaws refused to unclamp even after the recovered bodies had been laid on the deck of the patrol boat. When they pried his mouth open and removed the thumb, they found that it’d nearly come off. They tried giving the man artificial respiration to see if he could be revived. It was useless. He showed no signs of returning to life. He was dead. They could have saved him if they’d reached him just a few minutes earlier.

The man’s serene expression, however, soothed the rescuers’ feelings. It wasn’t easy to bite down so fiercely and at the same time wear such a serene expression. But this man had accomplished the contradiction.