The Frolic of the Beasts

Chapter 5

Yūko seldom read the newspapers. It was as if she made a point of not doing so. Ippei was unable to read, and yet every morning he would sit for an hour or more holding the newspaper wide-open while moving his head lightly up and down.

Afterward, the newspaper would be passed to Teijirō and Kōji, who were working. There were times when they would get to reading right away with their heads buried in the pages. At others they wouldn’t bother with the morning paper at all, instead preferring to wait for the evening edition to arrive.

That morning, when Kōji came out of the greenhouse, having finished spraying the plants, he noticed Teijirō, sitting on a decorative rock in the shade of a mimosa—a place he had decided would afford him protection from the heat of the day, intently reading a newspaper. The morning sun was already strong and the chirring of cicadas suffused the air.

Kōji came out of the orchid house—where plants such as the Indian Aerides orchid and the African Angraecum orchid grew in temperatures of seventy degrees Fahrenheit or more. As he drew near to where Teijirō was sitting, Kōji used his white teeth—instead of his fingers—to crudely scrape off a small leaf fragment that had stuck to his perspiring arm. As he applied his teeth, he saw close up his own deeply tanned arm.

It was like an insect’s protective camouflage—the same splendid bronze color as the skin of everyone else in this village. Without being conscious of it, Kōji had waited to become adequately suntanned before he felt comfortable enough to frequent places like the Storm Petrel. His skin was no longer the conspicuous pale color it had been when he returned from prison. That sacred whiteness had disappeared from his flesh, and the sun had clothed him entirely in a new, flesh-colored undershirt that allowed him to blend in with the keen-eyed villagers.

He tried tasting the “sleeves” of his “undershirt.” They were salty—exactly the same flavor as Kimi’s body. A bovine, drab saltiness, devoid completely of any compassion or shame.

While Teijirō’s back—clad in an old running shirt—was suntanned and magnificently towering, as he busily read the newspaper, it seemed to have lost its usual strength, and it appeared hollow, like a black cavern. The sparse gray hairs on the nape of his neck formed points of strong white light. Kōji recalled Teijirō one time bending over, just as he was doing now, while he mended a shirt. Looking closely at the small tears in the material of life, Teijirō had worked assiduously at repairing the shirt so that he might hurriedly shut out the long, dark hours of solitude that came spouting up from out of those small holes.

Teijirō hadn’t noticed Kōji as he approached him from behind, and so Kōji ended up reading the title of the article Teijirō was so engrossed in.

The headline read: Aged dry-goods dealer strangles daughter.

Suddenly becoming aware of Kōji, Teijirō instantly transferred his attention to a different headline. Kōji had never seen Teijirō react with such swift sensitivity toward another person before.

“You gave me a start. Creeping up on me unexpectedly,” said Teijirō.

Then, roughly slapping the newspaper with his hand (at which point, a number of rose-pink petals that had fallen from the mimosa fluttered mysteriously on top of the news sheets), he pointed to a relatively small article and said, “Look at that. Seems like the typhoons will be early this year. We should make a start putting up the windbreaks.”

“Yeah. Maybe tomorrow…,” said Kōji, a little haughtily, thrusting his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. This unmindful condescension was a little like flexing his muscles, experimentally, before posing his spiteful, probing question.

“Kimi returns to Hamamatsu today, doesn’t she? She’ll be along soon to say good-bye, I guess.”

“That’s right. She’ll at least stop by to say good-bye, I should think,” agreed Teijirō, vaguely. While there was no visible change in his strong face, it was obvious to Kōji that a crucible of ambivalent emotions boiled, almost audibly, within Teijirō’s inner self.

Kōji recalled a box in which he kept several beetles as a child. Although one couldn’t see through the surface of the thick, sturdy box, what was happening inside, like a gentle wave rolling into the shore, was evident from the bizarre burnt smell leaking from within and from the noise of the black, sluggish beetles locked in combat, their legs scrabbling for a foothold and the clashing of their horns. It was just the same as that…

Kōji had been taken by the sudden urge to thrust the blade of his pocketknife into that box and open up a hole.

He took another pace forward and said, “Kimi has got quite a reputation in the village. In more ways than one… Did you know that?”

“I know,” replied Teijirō.

Answering without the slightest annoyance, Teijirō’s mild tone aroused Kōji’s suspicions.

Teijirō’s head, with its close-cropped, grizzled hair, could well endure even the most direct sunlight. Sitting in the soft shadow of the delicate leaves of the mimosa, he seemed all the more incongruous and appeared to betray the immunity to anguish that Kōji secretly fancied Teijirō possessed.

Even the deep lines on his sun-beaten face—which in the past hadn’t exhibited the slightest hint of anguish—now told of Teijirō’s suffering. Undoubtedly, because they had been in plain sight, they hadn’t drawn attention until now as a sign of that anguish; much like a ship’s waterline—overlooked merely as a decorative stripe until the vessel is in peril.

Teijirō glanced at Kōji, squatting on the ground nearby. Using a twig, Kōji described triangles and squares in the dry earth and then, watching the irritation of several soldier ants as they tried to negotiate the disrupted path, he casually squashed them with the tip of the twig.

A small patch of earth became damp with the fluid from the ants’ bodies. As the ants stopped moving on the ground, cracked by the harsh sunlight, it seemed that the world was experiencing a transformation so subtle that the world itself failed to notice.

With one large, darkly tanned hand, Teijirō tapped Kōji lightly on the shoulder. Kōji turned around and could see from the old man’s face that he was trying to say something—the words leaking out of the corner of his mouth like ripe fruit dropping to the ground.

When he spoke, he did so rapidly and with an extremely humble smile:

“Do you know why Kimi hates me? A little while after her mother died, I raped her. And then she left the house and went to Hamamatsu.”

Aghast, Kōji stared fixedly at the old man’s face. He was ill-equipped to deal with this, and it was clearly unfair that he should have to hear this sudden confession. Then Teijirō moved his left hand slowly around to the back pocket of his shorts.

Besides the countless wrinkles and bulging veins, Teijirō’s yellowish, dark brown hands were a mass of small, old scars picked up from rose thorns, sharp leaves, from dwarf bamboo and cacti and the like. Added to which, they were smeared in a coating of earth and fertilizer so that, buried beneath this layer, the scars gave off a luster all the more dull. His scar-covered hand took from his back pocket an object like a protective amulet, wrapped carefully in a single sheet of plain white calligraphy paper. He opened it under the sunlight as it filtered down through the trees. His practically keratinous fingers made an exaggeratedly dry noise as they touched the paper. From the middle of the wrapping, Teijirō took out a photograph, stuck to a sturdy mount, and showed it to Kōji.

In the sunlight, Kōji didn’t immediately realize what it was a picture of. The white part of the photograph was dazzlingly reflective and filled the middle of the picture, like a bank of clouds. He held it up obliquely to avoid the reflection. It was a photograph of a boy in a student’s uniform and a girl in a sailor uniform performing sexual intercourse. Neither was wearing anything below the waist. Kōji was startled to see that the face of the girl student, who was lying on her back, resembled Kimi’s. However, on closer inspection, it clearly wasn’t her—only the area around her eyebrows bore a resemblance.

Revealing a healthy row of teeth that belied his age, Teijirō moved his eyes over the photograph, with a timid, humble smile. But the manner in which he thrust his face forward seemed impudent and overbearing.

“What do you think?” said Teijirō. “It looks a bit like her, doesn’t it? I came by it one time I went to Tokyo.”

Later, when he met briefly with Kimi to say good-bye, Kōji felt very miserable at the thought of the unsolicited story Teijirō had confided in him earlier.

It was a truly headstrong confession. Kōji didn’t know to what end Teijirō had confessed to him. Perhaps there was no purpose. The raw sense of anguish that had been pent up for so long within the old fisherman had, in all probability, degenerated—like rice wine slowly turning into vinegar—and changed into an unpleasant, derisive sneer. The crime had already been dispelled. Kōji was fearful of the obscurely turbid way Teijirō was trying to live the remainder of his life. Discord, malice, an inability to forgive, whatever the circumstances—all these feelings were confused and mixed up in Teijirō’s own indulgent reminiscences, lust, and indolence. Moreover, Teijirō’s life, just like his face, had been steadfast. Anyone exposed to his derisive sneer would have been transformed into mere vinegar. That was true of Kōji, and Yūko, too, and even Ippei.

Kimi came up to the house empty-handed to say her farewells—having left her luggage at the Seitōkan inn. She said there were only forty minutes until her boat departed, and so she was restless from the moment she arrived. Sweating profusely down her light green dress, she hurriedly drank water from the tap near the entrance to the greenhouse.

Yūko had been preparing the midday meal with the young maid. Try as she might, the maid, who lived out of the house, just couldn’t get the hang of cooking with propane gas. Since coming to this region, Yūko suspected that each of the five successive maids had engaged in propagating spiteful go-slow tactics. The hostility was always carried on the southerly wind, blowing up faintly from the direction of the village. And yet, to her face, they would always greet her in a plain and laid-back manner.

Kimi came around to the kitchen entrance, which faced a stone wall overgrown with ferns, and said, abruptly, “Hello there, ma’am. That smells delicious, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, Kimi, it’s you. I heard you are going home today? Won’t you join us for lunch?”

“It’s all right—thanks. I won’t make the boat if I do.”

Guessing that her open-minded husband would prefer it that way, Yūko had arranged it so that she and Ippei took their meals together with Teijirō. However, before long, Teijirō excused himself from this privilege and so from then on husband and wife developed the custom of sitting alone together at the dining table. Since Kōji had arrived recently, Teijirō had become all the more keen to behave in a manner befitting his status, with the result that Kōji ended up taking his meals with Ippei and Yūko. While Kōji received only a modest salary, he was treated as a guest when it came to food. It would have been a sensitive issue had Kimi joined them for lunch, and it was just as well therefore that she had declined the offer.

From the start, Yūko’s cooking wasn’t to the taste of country folk. She used butter and milk in applying herself to the creation of mock French cuisine, and one would think that she took the utmost care in preparing meals, but she could also be very slapdash with her cooking. Ippei never once complained about it, though.

Kimi talked hurriedly while she loitered in the doorway to the kitchen, and Yūko, who was frying snow peas—which produced a noise like a shower of rain—said without turning around, “Why don’t you go and say hello to my husband. He’s in the living room.”

“Yes, I will,” replied Kimi, causing the floorboards to creak as she came bustling up into the kitchen. As she passed behind Yūko, she asked, “Where’s Kōji?”

“Kōji?” said Yūko, this time looking plainly over her shoulder at Kimi. Directing her reply at the large, slightly sweaty, quivering breasts right in front of her eyes, she said, in a low, stuffy voice, “I’ve just sent him to the temple on an errand with some flowers. Didn’t you meet him on the way up? In any case, he should be back in time for lunch.”

Kōji, who had run back up the hill from the temple, bumped into Kimi by the white rose–festooned archway, just as she was being seen off by Yūko. He had no idea why Yūko had come this far to say good-bye to her. She had probably just been passing by chance. Kōji glanced quickly through the gate, but there was no sign of Teijirō anywhere.

Having run all the way back, Kōji was breathing hard. He looked from one woman to the other without saying anything. In contrast to Kimi’s too-radiant face, Yūko’s somewhat fading beauty, which she found difficult to disguise, gave her a refreshingly elegant appearance.

Having heard Teijirō’s unsolicited story just a little while earlier, it seemed to Kōji that the force that overflowed from Kimi’s slight frame must come from the effort of driving back the dark, filthy water that she was immersed in—just like an infant that, hating its bath, splashes water all around.

He understood now the way Kimi had looked at him after they had slept together, as if she was gauging his appetite for pleasure. She was watching to see whether she had infected him with the germ-like secret of her father’s crime. She must have attempted to share her humiliating memory with many men without letting them know the truth. Her inclination was to revel in the web of deceit she wove around her sexual partners. It was this same inclination that compelled her to take advantage of Kōji, and to persuade Matsukichi to love her without giving him the ukulele.

That night when, pale in the flashing light of the lighthouse, with her eyes closed, Kimi had allowed him to caress her body while listening to the boom of distant waves, she must have been quietly picturing—over and over again—the origin of her burning, rejuvenating humiliation and self-loathing.

“Thanks for everything,” said Kimi, greeting him plainly. “I’m working in the factory again from tomorrow.”

“The typhoons will be here soon. It makes sense to return home around now, I guess,” said Kōji.

As his ragged breathing returned to normal, his whole body broke out in a sweat.

“Quickly now, have a bath. You’re soaked through with sweat. Lunch will be ready soon. I invited Kimi to join us, too, but she says she won’t be in time for her boat,” said Yūko.

For some reason, Kōji hesitated and declined to go straightaway to take his bath.

Perceiving this, Kimi quickly said good-bye and began to walk away. Kōji stole a glance at Yūko to see whether she had noticed this sensitive reaction to his considerate action.

But Yūko only looked on with a vacant expression.

“Good-bye,” said Kimi.

Kimi’s eye suddenly flickered, like a berry bursting; then she gave him a conspicuous wink and squeezed his fingertips firmly together. Standing at his side and gazing at him for a while, she swung his hand gently to and fro.

Yūko put her hand to her hair.

Kōji stared only at Yūko, his heart overflowing with magnanimity. This was the first time he had been able to gaze at her with such composure. With the same vacant expression, Yūko inclined her face slightly and then slowly slid her hand across her hair. It was an uncertain movement, as if she were feeling her way through the midst of a dark and complicated memory. Dancing nervously, Yūko’s fingers looked as though they had regained their old delicate and languid nature. Her fingers drew out a hairpin (in that instant, it caught the sunlight and shone a deep violet), and in an extremely perfunctory manner, she pricked the back of Kimi’s hand.

Kimi let out a shriek and jumped back, laughing loudly from a distance. Stooping forward, she licked around the puncture wound, like an animal, and then she ran down the slope. Even after she had disappeared from view beyond the azalea hedge on the corner, her laughter could be heard intermittently, and Kōji fancied that, at the end of the dry path on that gentle slope, Kimi’s lolling tongue was still flickering like a small apricot-colored flame.

Kōji turned toward Yūko with a fawning expression. Even with the intention of appealing to her better nature, he did so in high spirits, in a calm and carefree manner.

Taking care to ensure that he wasn’t seen to be laughing along with Kimi, his smile became increasingly apparent.

Yūko turned her back on him and began to walk toward the house.

“Hurry up and take a bath. I can’t stand the stink of sweat.”

Glancing at her from the side, he realized that her brow was knitted in a deeply chiseled frown. It seemed it was just his perspiration that was on her mind. Perhaps she hated it.

The Kusakado family home was unnecessarily large. Ippei and Yūko slept in the detached ten-mat annex on the ground floor. In the main building, besides the ten-mat living room and the eight-mat sitting room, there were several small rooms that were not occupied, Teijirō’s room at the back of the house, as well as a spacious kitchen and bathroom.

On the second floor was a twelve-mat guest room that was seldom ever used, and next to that a six-mat room where Kōji stayed. At night, they slept separately in their various rooms.

That evening, the air was still and humid. Unable to sleep, Kōji lay naked facedown on his futon inside a mosquito net, flicking through a lowbrow magazine he had borrowed from the village library.

He had been starved of reading material in prison, and one would have thought that Kōji had a strong intellectual craving, yet since coming here he had lost the appetite to read serious literature. He preferred the thick, lavishly colorful magazines—the kind with their pages curling at the edges, like the petals of a sullied artificial flower—that were stuffed full of scandal, comic strips, action dramas, and period plays.

Reading one section after another, he tried his luck with “This Month’s Star Sign”—squinting at the fine No. 7 type print by the dim light of a reading lamp until his eyes were sore—and painstakingly pawing over the readers’ columns.

Lonely hearts, from all over Japan, jostling for space crammed into several pages of four-column ads in the magazine; solitude masquerading as cheerfulness was laid bare in just a few words.

What a great amount of loneliness. Such a strong desire to be loved. Pairing the lonely hearts up, as if playing cards, Kōji’s well-trained powers of imagination saw the inevitable consequence of such rash exchanges of correspondence.

The couple finally meet, having exchanged countless letters: they discover in one another’s faces the same kind of loneliness, the same kind of neediness… And yet, out of impatience to complete the mental picture they have already created for themselves, the illusion is superimposed on yet another person in a never-ending cycle—the awkward embrace, the morning after—in the shabby hotel, breakfast in the diner, the carrier pigeons that are kept on the roof, the same magazine, placed by the statue of Hotei, the god of fortune, in the alcove, the same readers’ columns, hopes revived again.

Even though it was the middle of the night, it was unbearably hot. Kōji repeatedly wiped away the sweat that ran down the back of his neck. The smell of the new mosquito net that Yūko had bought especially for him pervaded the inside of the netting.

There wasn’t even a slight breeze, and the stiff, light green creases hung indignant, as if the net had just been put up, and wherever the faint light reached, the fresh vermilion of the corner ties shone vibrantly.

It was as if this vaguely distorted mosquito net intimated the form of the world in which Kōji lived.

He had to get some sleep. He turned the light off and, naked, lay spread-eagled. It felt like the sheet was a shadowy image of his own being—absorbing the sweat that seeped from his body.

As he lay there with his eyes closed, an image came to him of the photograph he had been shown that morning, depicting the girl who looked very like Kimi having sex.

He restlessly moved his body about, feeling his senses sharpening like a knife in the midst of the wearily hot darkness. Although the light had been turned off, a moth clung to the mosquito net and scattered its tiny melancholy scales. He saw its agitated shadow through the darkness. The moth struggled for a while, before flying away through the open window.

The hoot of an owl. The transient cry of the cicada woven in with the night. In the stillness of the night, he could even hear the distant sound of the waves.

Kōji was afraid of this thick, gravy-like rural night. The graphic quality of everything that lay in slumber during the day awakening all at once was so much more physical than nights in the city, and the night itself was like a colossal, intense piece of meat saturated with hot blood.

His keen hearing detected the sound of footsteps coming softly up the stairs. His body tensed as he watched through the darkness. Kōji’s six-mat room had a large north-facing window, while the south side gave out onto a wide veranda with a handrail.

In order to draw a breeze through, the rain shutters had all been left open, and from where he lay he could see the vast southern night sky.

The shadowy silhouette that had climbed the stairs stopped and stood still with its back to the starry sky. It was Yūko, wearing a peach-blossom-pink negligee. His heart throbbed violently. He brushed the mosquito net aside and started to step out.

“No, don’t come out. You mustn’t come out,” said Yūko, in a slightly stern voice.

Kōji hesitated and then crouched on top of his bed. Yūko sat sideways on top of the loose south-facing edge of the mosquito net. As a result, that side of the net stretched tightly and the securing cords—already mercilessly strained—quivered dangerously in the two corners of the room where they were attached.

“Come over here. Stay inside, though,” she whispered, her dark face pressed against the net.

The scent of her perfume mingled with the night and came to him as he crawled up to her on his knees. The taut netting traced ever so lightly the curves of Yūko’s body.

Kōji touched his shoulder against her rounded form. She didn’t try to pull back.

“You don’t know why I’m here, do you? You look surprised to see me,” she said, in a cheerful tone, without hesitation. “It’s a petty woman thing, you see. I didn’t like the way you looked at Kimi when she was leaving for home. I stuck my hairpin in her hand, right? I couldn’t stand to look at your face after that. Try as I might, I couldn’t sleep thinking about it. That’s why I came. You were so sure I was jealous, weren’t you?”

Kōji nodded, but he managed to resist the urge to smile the way he had done that afternoon when Kimi was leaving.

“But you would be mistaken. I’m not the sort of woman who would do something like that out of jealousy. I was simply admonishing a conceited and discourteous young lady. When I do that, I don’t use words; I use my hairpin.”

Yūko seemed to hesitate before continuing. But, as if she was afraid that hesitating for too long would place an unnecessary burden on her words, she added, very quickly, “Just like the way you used that wrench.”

Recognizing her defiance, Kōji decided against allowing himself to be drawn into an argument. Were he to rise to the bait and fly into a rage, he knew full well, since the picnic at the waterfall, that a different part of him would also become aroused. Instead, he assumed a meek demeanor and said, “So, basically, you’ve come here to speak ill of me once again.”

While they may have been separated by the mosquito net—their heads were close enough for each to catch the other’s hushed words—their breath drifted around like mist. Yūko’s breath was extremely fragrant. It seemed as though she had deliberately sprayed perfume in her mouth before coming in.

When he considered the time she must have spent on this preparation, her life’s loneliness became clear to him. The hollowness of her life became quickly apparent with each perfumed breath. Yūko being this close made him feel all the more calm.

“Anyway, I’m a different person now. I’ve turned over a new leaf, you see.”

“So have I,” replied Yūko, a little proudly.

“There’s no need at all for you to mend your ways. There was no need in the past either. I assumed responsibility for that crime so that you didn’t have to have any regrets.”

As he had suspected, his declaration angered Yūko. Pulling her shoulder away from him, she narrowed her eyes in a look of displeasure, and each time her words broke off, she cursed under her gasping breath.

“Assumed responsibility, you say? What a perfectly respectable way to put it! I didn’t ask you to do anything. But if that’s what you want to believe, then go ahead. What a conceited, fine, and chivalrous notion. And something else—you’re forever playing the hypocrite.”

After this, her rage having abated, she made a surprising confession in a flat, quiet voice. The tone of this confession had a lasting effect on Kōji.

Yūko’s jealousy was directed not at Kimi, who was of no importance. It was directed, she said, at Kōji’s crime.

The anguish she felt at not having a crime to her name like the one he committed had grown in intensity. Ever since the picnic that day at the waterfall, this thought had rooted itself blackly in her mind—she wanted to compete with Kōji’s crime, to somehow be able to own a crime like his in order to at least stand beside him.

Kōji mocked her at hearing this, asking Yūko if she thought committing a crime would make her a suitable woman for him, and telling her that she could try until she was blue in the face but it would be impossible to compete with him on that score. He hoped that his mockery would change her mind, like someone using harsh words to keep a person from losing consciousness.

In the face of these arguments, Yūko was preoccupied only with her own troubles and failed to notice at all that she had overlooked Kōji’s suffering. If anything, Kōji was pleased about this. In Yūko’s eyes, Kōji had, until now, appeared as someone who had committed and then atoned for his crime, as someone who at heart could be relied upon as a man of substance, a much happier individual than she was, and this, notwithstanding that Kōji himself would have said he had stood idly by watching fearfully as his sense of the crime and the associated remorse diminished with the passing days. Not that he could begin to relate to anyone else this nebulous sense of fear and unease. He felt as one would at watching a rainbow fade and disappear or watching that sacred hourglass in the prison bathhouse degenerate as the steam moves away, the backlighting is extinguished, and the cinnabar granules run out.

“It’s hot, isn’t it? I can’t stand this heat,” said Kōji.

“Yes, it’s hot,” said Yūko meekly.

The tops of her soft, swaying, slightly sweaty breasts were visible in the gloom through the light green material of the mosquito net. Only that part of her was immune to the dark and seemed to offer up its pale proof of purity. Yūko’s lips were devoid of her characteristic heavy lipstick.

“Aren’t there mosquitoes?”

“There aren’t any. Maybe I’m not so tasty,” she said, laughing for the first time and exposing her front teeth slightly.

Then, moving her face close to the netting, she stared intently—like she was examining the violently pulsating temple of this naked youth—as he squatted inside his quivering, light green cage.

Leaning over the mosquito net, she buried her nose in his shoulder and said, “You smell strange.”

“It must offend you.”

Without altering her position, she shook her head slightly.

This was the moment that Kōji had long been waiting for, and extending his arms, he tried to embrace her. Yūko’s rancor disappeared, leaving only gentleness.

Kōji ought to have persevered a little more and slid out from the mosquito net or else adroitly guided Yūko inside. Instead, he took hold of her, mosquito net and all. The coarse cotton chafed roughly against his bare chest; one of the securing cords came away, and Kōji’s body, too, was enveloped in a wave of cotton.

At that moment, he felt the smooth flesh inside Yūko’s peach-blossom-pink negligee slip through his hands. Yūko, having already moved away from the broad veranda, was now standing near the handrail, pulling her displaced negligee back over her shoulder. Panting for breath, she stared at the quiet mosquito net, before transferring her attention to the garden below.

The glass roofs of the five greenhouses twinkled in the moonlight. Signs of dark, squat vegetation could be seen at the bottom of the glass panes, which reflected the faint, bright outline of some evening clouds. They looked like deep, stagnant water tanks with large deposits of algae.

A white figure stood in front of the orchid house.

Sometimes, worried about the temperature regulation, Teijirō got up in the middle of the night. But that happened mainly in the winter. The white clothing was toweling pajamas—not the sort of thing that Teijirō wore.

Still looking toward the second floor, the figure began to walk toward them. The man was lame in his right leg.

“My husband’s in the garden. He’s coming this way. And he was sleeping so soundly, too!” screamed Yūko, no longer concerned about her loud voice as she turned to face the quiet of the mosquito net.

Kōji made no reply.

Seeing Ippei’s approaching form gave Yūko strength. Drawing near the mosquito net, she gazed at Kōji as he lay sprawled on his back. He had his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes closed. She imagined how her sleeping form next to Kōji would have looked to Ippei’s gaze. She felt that, if he appeared, in front of him she would be able to do anything.

The thought that even the things she hadn’t been able to do without Ippei could be realized at this moment liberated her from a long-continued suffering.

From the moment he heard her scream, Kōji perceived a sudden, violent change in Yūko’s heart—that was how well he had come to know her. And then, the sense of remorse, which had begun to fade, revived itself vividly and filled his heart with the docility of an ex-convict. It was a fondly remembered, tender emotion, and Kōji was attached to it.

“You mustn’t. What you’re thinking is wrong,” he said, firmly pinning down the edge of the mosquito net with his body.

Yūko tried even harder to enter the net from a different angle.

This time, half-struck with fear, Kōji lowered his voice and said, imploringly, “Stop it, will you? I beg you. Stop doing that.”

Her pride wounded, Yūko sat outside the mosquito net, with her back toward the north-facing window. She stared at him with an unmistakable look of hatred.

Kōji’s eyes were dry and bloodshot, and in spite of himself, he stared hatefully at Yūko. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Ippei’s footsteps climbed the stairs. Strange footsteps, once heard, instantly recognizable.

Protecting his right arm and leg, his left hand clung to the handrail as he came ponderously up the stairs. It felt like he would never arrive. It seemed to Kōji like the stairs went on forever, ascending higher and higher.

Yūko stood up, and opened the sliding door to the guest room just a crack. Even during the summer, the door was properly closed in order to partition the two rooms; the partitioning wall was covered with things such as Kōji’s desk and a small chest of drawers. Having not been opened for some time, the sliding door creaked and began to warp slightly in its frame, but she slipped adroitly through the gap and went into the twelve-mat guest room, closing the door behind her.

Kōji shut his eyes. He was lying with his head pointing north, and he was afraid of catching sight of Ippei over the edge of the mosquito net as he passed by the veranda.

“Yūko… Yūko,” called Ippei, as he walked along the wide veranda.

“I’m in here.” Her voice came trippingly from the dark, musty-smelling twelve-mat guest room.

With his eyes closed, Kōji followed only their conversation.

As the night wore on it started to get a little blustery outside. The wind, dissipated now as it sifted through the mesh of the net, played lightly on his skin, and all the more made him acutely aware of the oppressive heat.

“Cold,” said Ippei. There was a needlessly assertive tone in his voice as he emphasized the word, almost like a stout, heavy stick tapping around in the darkness.

“Cold? It’s not cold. You mean it’s cool, don’t you?” Yūko was saying.

“Cool… I want… to sleep here.”

“Eh?”

“It’s cool. Here. I want to sleep here… from tomorrow,” said Ippei.

Before they set to work protecting the greenhouses against the approaching typhoon, Kōji and Teijirō spent the whole of the next day busily loading plants into the truck that had arrived, as it did at regular intervals, from Tokyo Horticulture. Tokyo Horticulture had a number of greenhouses around the Izu Peninsula with which it placed direct orders. The president had recommended that Yūko choose the area around Iro Village, since it was conveniently located to join the chain of their direct-order greenhouses that lay in range of the truck route.

In this way, in exchange for being paid by check each month, what was tantamount to a fixed commission by the head office, the greenhouse could do business without the fear of its prices being knocked down at market or the unfavorable competition from the foliage plants supplied direct from Osaka or the roses sold by Tokyo rose growers.

The three-ton truck from Tokyo Horticulture stopped by two or three times a month without fail, and then returned again loaded up with fifty or sixty potted plants each visit. Depending on the season, it would sometimes take as many as a hundred pots. In the summertime, it was mainly foliage plants and orchids. Unable to compete with the produce from areas around Den-en Chofu, the Kusakado greenhouse would ship the cheaper plants, such as gloxinia, to Numazu. These plants were removed from their pots and packed in boxes, and then Kōji took them by handcart to the port.

With great difficulty, the truck climbed sluggishly up the slope as far as the entrance to the Kusakado greenhouse. Yūko was concerned with looking after the drivers, giving them presents of things such as Ippei’s Italian-made ties and English socks, together with a grandiose explanation of their origin.

When it was time for the shipment, Kōji always felt sad at parting with the plants he had cultivated with so much tender care. The cymbidium, with its leaves similar to those of pampas, displayed an elegance as though it had caught some kind of disease-like “beauty,” through the form of its flowers, which float in the air like a sudden vision—a characteristic of orchids, together with its pale purple brushed petals, and lips with purple flecks scattered on a yellow background. To a greater or lesser extent European orchids had that same feel about them. The light red flowers of the dendrobium afforded a glimpse of dark purple in the depths of their tubes, yet they did not attempt to keep their bashfulness in the shade, rather, they seemed to explicitly reveal it. The Hawaiian anthurium was lurid red like synthetic resin with a rough feline tongue projecting from it. A seaweed-like delicate appearance of tiger tail contrasting with the tough nature of its dark green spotted leaves bordered with pale yellow. The large oval leaves of the Decora, an improved variety of rubber plant. The Ananas, with its audacious green bromeliad leaves sporting horizontal black stripes. The lady palm with a profusion of glossy leaves growing from thin hairy stems…

All these had left Kōji’s care and were now lined up on the dirty truck like a group of cold, silent prostitutes taken away by the police. Kōji dreamed of the worlds infiltrated by his dispersed flowers and leaves. He imagined a society of dazzling immensity and grotesque pitch-dark complication where these flowers and leaves hung, as if they were little ribbons secured here and there over its body. The flowers were mere caricatures there. These flowers and leaves would scatter and infiltrate shrewdly, like germs, a variety of entirely useless places in society for the purposes of practical sentimentalism, hypocrisy, peace and order, vanity, death, disease…

After loading the truck, Kōji placed the wrapped gloxinia on the handcart and hurried to the port to make the last shipment of the day. It was getting cloudier, and the wind had started to rise.

He loaded the plants onto the boat and watched it as it departed from the quayside. He noticed that the stern lines of some fishing boats moored nearby were creaking more than usual with a high-pitched whine. The quay where he stood was bright in the sunlight. The sun was shining from the pale blue sky in the west through a cleft in the thick clouds. Far off, some shining clouds drifted tranquilly in the not-so-large clear sky, as if it were a painting enclosed in a frame. The shape of the clouds was like a gabion stuffed with copious amounts of light…

When Kōji got back, Teijirō was in a real fluster. He had heard on the radio news that the typhoon was approaching much more quickly than expected.

Determined to work through the night, they set to the difficult task of sticking long, stout plywood sheets, which they had prepared specially, diagonally across the window frames of the greenhouses, and then further protecting the glass panes by hanging straw matting over the top.

After what had happened the previous night, Yūko avoided Kōji and obdurately did her best not to speak to him. Her attitude repeatedly hampered their busy work. But Kōji worked on diligently without complaint—a little like an unheeded child engrossed completely in the task in front of him. If anything, this state of rejection was necessary in order for him to find some value in his work.

Buffeted by the moisture-laden wind, which intensified as night came on, Kōji found the continuation of his earnest, silent labor agreeable. This work had been “bestowed” on him; it had been the same sort of labor that had delivered the prisoners from resignation to their oppressive fate.

The night wore on. Having progressed more quickly than he had expected, Kōji set about working on the roof of the last greenhouse to finalize their work. Climbing from the top of the ladder onto the roof, he straddled the ridge—taking care not to step on the glass panes—and took hold of the long plywood panels that Teijirō handed to him. To help them with their work, all the fluorescent lights were ablaze in the greenhouses, and the resultant brightness lent the garden an otherworldly appearance.

Thick clouds drifting in the sky jostled with one another. Kōji gazed down between his legs at the shapes of the flowers and plants inside the bright, still greenhouse—undisturbed by the wind outside. He fancied that he had never seen such self-sufficient flowers, quietly breathing in the night air, and unaware of human scrutiny. Furthermore, with their primary colors, this colony of statue-still flowers and leaves, crowded into the uninhabited interior of the greenhouse, created almost a sense of danger.

Cheerfully maintaining his balance in the face of the rain-laden wind—like a sailor perched on top of a ship’s mast—Kōji hammered in one nail after another with a well-practiced hand, before shifting his body slightly and quickly driving a nail into the next sheet. The sound of the hammer rang clear as it pierced the warm wind. Just as he thought it would strike his face, the light rain receded and was now falling onto the top of the mimosa tree. He could feel the solemn, turbulent sky pressing down overhead. The wind gave Kōji’s mind a colossal freedom of emotion, as if in an instant it would carry away into the boundless distance all his words. Mimicking a professional carpenter, he placed several nails between his lips. The indescribably sweet taste of the steel. He felt frighteningly free.

He saw Yūko—who was wearing slacks—come down into the garden from the edge of the veranda of the main building. When he recognized this ill-tempered mistress, his sense of freedom withered in a moment. It was well past her and Ippei’s usual bedtime. She had what looked like a Coca-Cola bottle in each hand. It seemed she had come out to reward them for their hard work. As before, she decided not to speak to Kōji, but as she called out to Teijirō, her loud voice was broken and carried by the wind so that Kōji was able to hear only snatches.

“You’ve worked hard. Why don’t you take a short break? Is there anything I can do to help?”

As she spoke, the scarf, which she had thrown on carelessly, was whipped away from her hair by a sudden gust of wind and blown high in the air, coming to rest on a corner of the glass roof in front of Kōji. As the scarf came away from her head, Yūko looked to Kōji like a beautiful animal, with her flame-like, tangled mass of hair. Holding the bottles in her hands, she had been unable to save her scarf from the wind. Placing the bottles by the entrance to the greenhouse, she raised her hands in the air. One half of her face appeared pale in the light of the greenhouse, and her unsmiling countenance lifted and for the first time turned toward Kōji—as if in prayer.

Kōji reached out and took hold of the scarf. A design of ivy had been hand-painted in gold on the extremely fine black georgette. At once, he spat the nails out and wrapped them in the material to hold the scarf down, and then shouted, “I’m going to throw it. There’s a weight inside, so keep out of the way.”

Yūko observed Kōji’s movements closely and gave an affirmative nod. With a feeling of mild admiration, she watched as Kōji’s youthful form adopted a throwing position against the agitated gray night sky, sitting astride the greenhouse roof with the wind tugging at his clothes. The scarf balled into a small black mass and dropped to the concrete floor in front of the greenhouse.

She drew near and, cautiously reaching out—as if it were an unfamiliar object—touched her hand against the scarf. Then she shook out the nails, stroked her hair, and, this time just to make sure, tied the scarf ends securely under her pale chin. Then she stood up and waved at Kōji on the roof. She smiled at him for the first time since the previous evening. Without applying too much or too little pressure, Kōji used his jeans-clad thighs to brace himself against the sloping glass and his body appeared all the more as if bound to the roof. Yūko’s actions seemed to him a selfish sign of reconciliation.

In the end, the typhoon veered away from West Izu.

Kōji had a patient debate with Teijirō about whether they ought to completely remove the protective sheets they had gone to great lengths to fix in place. Ultimately, they decided to leave half of them in place so that the sunlight would not be impeded. There was no way of knowing when the typhoon might come again.

One afternoon, several days later, Kōji was delivering some flowers to Taisenji temple. Yūko had asked him to take them that morning. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to meet with the priest, who, whenever Kōji came, would always persuade him to stay awhile and serve him tea. Then he would invite him to sit on a cushion at the edge of the veranda overlooking the back garden, where, as always, the honeybees droned. The priest, Kakujin, didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in probing into Kōji’s affairs, and yet, in looking at Kōji’s face he appeared to have detected something from his irritation-fueled put-on cheerfulness and from his red eyes—the unmistakable consequence of too little sleep.

Of course, Kōji didn’t say anything either. He had not come to talk.

The night of the high winds, when he returned to his own room after that moment of reconciliation with Yūko, Kōji had sensed something was different. Without any prior notification, he discovered that the twelve-mat room next to his had been turned into Yūko and Ippei’s bedroom.

As a result of his intense fatigue, Kōji had slept soundly that night. But the following night he couldn’t get to sleep. I’ll get used to it before long, he thought. After all, he had even become accustomed to that dirty bathhouse and the three-minute-interval buzzer.

In any event, it would likely take him a long time to grow used to it, and when he finally did, it was clear that something had definitely come to an end. Kōji was reluctant to suggest to Yūko that his room be moved downstairs, next to Teijirō’s room or someplace like that. The reason was that Yūko hadn’t notified him at all of her own room change (and clearly she was doing as Ippei desired!); added to which, Kōji’s self-respect implored him to protect his small six-mat castle.

Incidentally, this slight rearrangement in the pattern of living in the Kusakado household had, by the following day, suddenly become general knowledge throughout the village. The young maid who lived out of the house had made sure everybody knew about it.

The villagers delighted in the fact that this strange family had at length come to this pass. There was pleasure in guessing how their immoral behavior would turn out. Several mothers with disabled children expected that before long a child more conspicuously ugly and deformed than any in the village would be born to the Kusakado household.

A child that would play tag with its own shadow, weaving in and out of the dozens of oil drums lined up at the harbor, the sides of which were brightly colored in the sunset, who, teased by the young, fit fishermen, with his tongue dripping saliva, would try to help load the cargo onto the ship. Doubtless, such a child would grow up to be like those mothers’ own sons…

The rumors were reported that day to the priest’s wife, as a consequence of which the priest, too, soon got to hear of them. The priest had just returned from holding a Buddhist service for the dead. When he heard about them, he fell silent, took hold of the sleeves of his black vestment, and spread his arms out wide. He recalled a line from “Yun Men Stretching Out His Arms” in the Hekiganroku.

The priest’s affection for Kōji positively overflowed from his affable, small, narrow eyes. It seemed clear to Kōji that he was weighing in his own mind what he was able to impart. Dimpling his ruddy cheeks, and in an extremely circumspect manner, the priest hesitantly began to talk. This was an indication that he was trying to step outside his own small-framed portrait.

“If there is anything I can do, then I will do my best to help. I would even take counsel with you. You seem to have much that is weighing heavily on your mind. If you are worried about something, it is better to get it off your chest. The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot. It easily decays, like a fresh sea urchin.”

While he appreciated the priest’s concern, this sort of excessive decorum about the heart and soul only served to arouse Kōji’s suspicions. The priest talked about the soul hesitantly, in a tone that almost suggested he was discussing Kōji’s crime. In that instant, Kōji fancied he saw through the priest’s clumsy way of interrogation. It was like an inexperienced fisherman trying to extract a lobster from inside a creel.

Had he been a little more experienced in his handling of such situations, the priest ought to have approached Kōji seemingly oblivious to the existence of the soul within and, before Kōji himself had realized what he was doing, skillfully and in no time at all plucked it out by the short hairs. And, if he had succeeded in this, then Kōji, whether willing or not, would no doubt have confided everything.

This bald-headed priest, with his shiny, ruddy complexion and clean-shaven round face… Discussing and asking questions about his soul in that halting manner only succeeded in causing Kōji to shrink back.

Why are you talking about my soul? Can’t you deceive a young guy like me more skillfully? Shouldn’t you be appealing to my manhood, rather than my soul?

Kōji remained silent, and so the priest spoke again. “Yūko-san… she is a fine woman—”

“Yes, she’s a fine woman, all right,” interrupted Kōji quickly. “I owe her a lot. But, sir, you must be the only person in the village who says nice things about her.”

“Well, that’s all right, isn’t it? I will vouch for her.”

“In that case, we’ll all go to heaven then?”

With this rejection, Kōji brought the conversation to an end, and the silence was filled with the drone of the honeybees. If anything, Kōji had been hoping for a strong rebuke from the priest, but that was probably asking for too much. While he had stepped up to the threshold of this young man’s soul, in the end the priest withdrew timidly. Kōji detected in this something akin to the restrained respect society showed toward an ex-convict.

This young man had acquired the privilege of misunderstanding people’s reserve. For him, adopting an ostentatious, gentle attitude appeared to be the real reserve, the only genuine modesty.

In that lightning-like instant, Kōji felt disappointed by the priest. He had failed to comprehend at all the hurricane-like speed with which Kōji had fallen into a state of despair.

So the priest stepped back from Kōji at that moment and pinned his hopes on the near future; someday this young man would open his heart and meekly seek the priest’s instructions. Then surely he would be able to attain the heights that no one else his age was capable of.

Although a harsh westerly sun shone down on the back garden, it disappeared behind the many clouds that scudded across the sky, repeatedly throwing the garden into shadow.

At that moment, Kōji noticed Ippei and Yūko coming slowly down the slope opposite the garden. It was evidently time for Ippei’s walk. Kōji was suddenly seized with the urge to hide from them. If he were to escape into the inner temple and hide in the shadow of one of the pillars draped with fraying gold-threaded banners or perhaps conceal himself in the shadow of the Buddhist image dais, which was enclosed by a railing with its inverted lotus-carved posts—and where it was dark even in the daytime—they would not pursue him that far. He would hide there forever. How nice that would be, he thought.

However, the couple stopped abruptly just at the point where they could look down on the priest’s living quarters. With no alternative, Kōji came down from the edge of the veranda and stood in the garden. But the couple hadn’t stopped because they had seen him; rather, they had bumped into the wife of the postmaster, who was just then on her way up to the Kusakado greenhouse. The postmaster’s wife was a licensed flower-arrangement teacher who taught the young ladies of the village, and as such, she was a special customer of the greenhouse, buying her flowers direct.

Yūko started back up the hill in order to show the postmaster’s wife some flowers. But then, noticing Kōji for the first time standing in the back garden of the temple, she called to him.

“Ah, that’s perfect. Kōji, would you mind accompanying Ippei on his walk today?”

Strangely, although three months had passed since Kōji had first come to these parts, this was the first opportunity he had had of spending any real time alone with Ippei. In fact, it occurred to him that this was the first time since the occasion when Ippei, on a mere whim, had invited Kōji—then still a student—to the bar for a drink.

Kōji couldn’t help subconsciously comparing Ippei, as he was in the bar that night, with the man who now walked beside him. While this invalid seemed to be the sort who would prefer going for a stroll after sundown, in fact he liked to go out with the westerly sun at its strongest, wearing a straw hat. Ippei was afraid of the vast darkness of the countryside at night.

The walk took an exceedingly long time, owing largely to the frequent, lengthy stops that Ippei made in order to rest.

They turned their backs on Yūko and the postmaster’s wife and began to descend the slope. Ippei was placed in Kōji’s care, and an incessant, mellow smile appeared on his face. Amid the dazzling glare of midday, Kōji found it impossible to imagine his sleepless nights. He wondered why, thanks to this invalid with the helpless smile, the nights weighed heavily on him. Why, when the days allowed him so much freedom, did the nights turn so against him? During the nights he couldn’t sleep, Kōji discovered his hearing was sensitive to even the slightest sound, and each time he heard Ippei’s faint snoring or an occasional sigh from Yūko—who also found it difficult to sleep—escape over the top of the sliding door, he felt as though his body was on fire. The twelve-mat room next to his was like one of the greenhouses in the dead of night. Beneath the light of the stars that shone down through the glass roof, the plants continued their subtle chemical action—with little or no movement they dropped leaves, lost petals, and released persistent smells, and some gradually decayed where they stood. The exaggerated rippling noise as Yūko tossed around in her hemp futon. The faint sighs like the flickering of fireflies. The billowing mosquito net… Finally, Yūko had once called Kōji’s name. He had thought his ears were deceiving him, but when he quietly called out Yūko’s name in reply, her voice came to him again, as if searching and hoping for the light of a distant village through the darkness. Just then, Ippei, who had been having a nightmare, cried out in his sleep like an animal and looked as though he would come to, only to settle down again…

They came down to the level ground. The surface of an unharvested paddy field and a cornfield stirred in the wind. As it swept across the green rice paddy, the pliant leaves revealed their white undersides, and each time a cloud passed over, the field appeared desolate. Then the sun would begin to shine again. A white line of parched road stood out in dazzling relief.

Kōji began to think that speaking slowly and clearly in order to make himself understood for Ippei’s benefit was pointless.

Rather than telling him what he thought, the effort required to make Ippei understand through this narrow interaction made a mess of his attempted communication.

There was so much Kōji wanted to say, so much he wanted Ippei to understand, and so much he himself wanted to know. He felt he ought to say candidly exactly what he thought and, suddenly, stepping over the line he had been hesitant to cross, he summoned the courage to speak to Ippei audaciously.

“Say, I just can’t understand the way you behave. Why do you spend your time tormenting Yūko and me with that simpering grin? I’ve been wondering but… You hate me, don’t you? Well? Isn’t that right? Why not come out with it and say it like a man? When things are going conveniently for you, you make out that’s exactly how you intended it, but when things are not going too well, you blame it on your illness and then just deliberately leave things vague and unresolved. Isn’t that true? Hey!”

Kōji prodded Ippei lightly on the shoulder as he walked beside him. Reeling, Ippei eventually steadied himself by leaning on his walking stick; he shook his head slightly and uncertainly, and that stubborn smile spread across his face.

Just talking rapidly this way lifted Kōji’s mood, in addition to which, strangely, he even felt a sort of rough friendship toward his helpless companion.

“You say it’s not true?” he said, continuing. “Good heavens! You understand everything I say, don’t you? What a despicable guy you are. I’ve never met anyone as loathsome as you.”

Ippei shook his head helplessly once again. His rough friendship rejected, Kōji felt deflated. Moreover, he felt that when it came down to it, what he really wanted to say was exceedingly simple and didn’t require a great many words. Everything there was to say had been said without saying a thing, and once it was put into words, it all fell apart so easily. And yet, he dared to continue his rant. Kōji reckoned this would be his only chance to talk to this ash-like man, as one human being to another.

“The truth is, you resent me. You’re angry with me, aren’t you? You don’t even want to look me in the face, and each time you do, all you think is that you can never forgive me. But, when Yūko invited me here, I wanted to see your face. Even though I was afraid of what I might find, for some reason I wanted to see it. I hoped that if I lived my life side by side with you, then I might be able to become a decent person. Do you understand? It’s like making a child regret breaking a toy by forcing him to live with it. You can’t just buy him a new one. So long as I’m with you, I had the feeling I could mend my broken life. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Still maintaining his smile, Ippei moved his eyes restlessly, as if from the fear of being suddenly confronted by something that was difficult to understand.

This man’s soul is beginning to struggle behind a wall that has no exit, thought Kōji. Although he is not cognizant of the goings-on in the world, he can hear sounds outside—he can hear the knock at his door.

Now, Ippei didn’t complain he was tired. If anything, he gave the impression he was trying to get away from Kōji—animatedly thrusting his walking stick and left leg forward and forcing his unwilling right leg to follow as he continued doggedly in his characteristic mechanical gait—striking out along the wide, dusty road that ran past the post office toward the village shrine. On the other side of a small arched stone bridge, surrounded by gigantic camphor trees and ancient cedars, the main building of the shrine stood quietly at the top of just six stone steps. The precincts of the shrine were extremely small, and the calm of the place was disturbed by the noise of mining, coming from a neighboring quarry over to the left. The area produced high-quality pyroxene andesite, which K Stone Merchants dug out and shipped mainly to Chiba Prefecture. Even during the heat of the summer, the noise from the compressor sounded continually, causing a delicate vibration in the air—like the wingbeat of an insect. Having finally walked this far without a break, Ippei sat down on the low stone handrail of the arched bridge, close by the shrine. Shielded by the deep shadows from the trees, from where both the shrine precincts and the quarry could be seen, Ippei liked to watch the stone tumble down as it was hewn from the rock face.

“It’s hot,” said Ippei.

“Yes, it is,” agreed Kōji, applying his handkerchief—which was already dirty from wiping away his own perspiration—to the beads of sweat forming on Ippei’s brow. Compared with the words that Kōji had earnestly spoken up to now, only these words had about them a human quality. Ippei reduced his intercourse with the human world down to this one point, and rejecting everything else, it appeared as if he was trying to control those around him from this narrow perspective.

“I bet you like to dress up like this for the girls in Ginza, don’t you?” continued Kōji, venomously. “I bet they laugh their socks off when they see those baggy khaki trousers, and those slip-ons, not to mention that uncouth open-collared shirt and that straw hat. And the way you sometimes slobber. Who on earth are you trying to impress in this fancy-dress costume? If you asked Yūko, she’d say you wear this getup because you like it, but what hasn’t changed is your resolutely bad fashion sense. You’re playing out the crime. You’ve assumed the shape of it. And I know you’ve done that to make a point to Yūko and me. I’m going to peel off the layers of your disguise. It’s certainly not my fault you are the way you are. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Wa… nt?” said Ippei, dubiously, still smiling.

But Kōji was no longer prepared to listen.

“That’s right. You do this of your own free will. I’ve gradually come to realize it. You intimidate us using false pretenses; then you try to convince us that those false pretenses are indispensable. You’re making a real good job of it. Without you, Yūko and I wouldn’t have come together. And yet, so long as you are here, Yūko and I can never be together. This strange relationship has come about because of your machinations. We can’t even kiss each other without thinking of that incident; memories of the crime taint its taste and turn it to ash. You’re conducting yourself just beautifully. You are waiting to see everyone prostrate themselves before you. It’s what you’ve wanted all along. Well, isn’t it?”

Kōji realized that Ippei wasn’t listening to a thing he said and instead was bent over the stone handrail, staring fixedly at a long-horned beetle that had stopped there for a moment, and because he was motionless—hesitating as if he was about to place his straw hat over it, and the long-horned beetle, too, was stock-still on the surface of the cool stone in the shade of the trees—Ippei looked as though he were waiting for the assistance of some outside force to suddenly shorten the fixed distance between himself and the beetle.

Kōji seized him by the scruff of the neck and gave him a yank. Ippei lost his balance. With his backside barely remaining on the stone handrail, his withered arms and legs seemed to float in the air, and with his head inclined, he watched Kōji’s face intently.

“Hey, pay attention to what I’m saying. Don’t look so serious. Try smiling the way you always do.”

Kōji lightly brushed his left index finger against Ippei’s lower lip. Ippei’s mouth immediately slackened, and as if mirroring Kōji’s own laughing mouth, it took on the shape of his customary smile.

“All right. Now listen to me carefully,” continued Kōji, moving his hand away. “You are content with things the way they are. You even think that it would be your salvation if everyone followed your example and did as you do. You, at any rate, are alive. However crippled you may be, you’re alive, and that’s something. You’re taking a splendid vacation that has turned up at the end of the things you used to do: the flamboyant life you led when you were young; the artistic literary works you wrote, pouring scorn on others; and your uncontrollable preoccupation with the opposite sex. It’s just one long vacation. You’re forever making a show of that empty, splendid vacation, and now you are able to show off openly all of those thoughts you have harbored for so long. I don’t care much for people… Ah… ah. And then you slobber. You just grunt in response to the notions that people hold dear and turn them into something meaningless. Will?… Ah… ah… You turned the desolation of your soul into your prerogative, and you order others to respect that right. Eh? Yes, everyone makes choices and continues to behave as they wish. So, what’s so bad about me? What is it you hate about me? Come on, out with it! Say it! Say it, won’t you! Was it wrong of me to pick up that wrench from the hospital garden? You put it there, having discovered that was where Yūko and I were to secretly meet, didn’t you? Well? Admit it! Tell me what it is I have done wrong!”

Just then, the half-naked quarry workers hurriedly divided into two groups and dodged a large rock fall. The stones kicked up a cloud of dust as they rolled down the cliff—revealing a fresh section of rock that glittered in the sunlight—and reached as far as a clump of tall-stemmed summer grasses before subsiding inelegantly.

The muscular, sweat-soaked backs of the workers were lightly covered in white dust from the stones.

Having witnessed the rock fall, an almost indescribable expression of delight surfaced on Ippei’s face. His eyes brimmed with ecstasy, while his nose seemed to detect the invigorating stench of death; a faint flush came to his suntanned cheeks. In that instant, Ippei’s trademark smile, which revealed his white teeth, appeared quite beautiful to Kōji.

As if to spur himself on, Kōji continued to speak. Ippei’s silence, while Kōji was quiet, disoriented him, and he fancied that Ippei, not grasping at all what he was saying, had afforded him a glimpse of the uncanny abyss within him.

“To tell the truth, thanks to me taking that wrench to your head, your thoughts are now complete; you’ve found a pretext for existing. What does life mean? Life for you is the inability to speak. What is the world to you? The world is your inability to speak. What is history? History is your inability to speak. What about the arts? Love? Politics? Everything and anything is your inability to speak, and so everything is coherent. The things you have been thinking about all along have come to fruition. But that was in the days when I imagined that all that was left intact within you was your intellect, and that, like a clock that has lost its dial, only the mechanism moved with vigor, ‘tick tock’—ticking away time with clockwork precision. But now I realize there is nothing inside you at all. I know it, because I have sniffed it out—like the people of a country who have long been unable to mourn their lost king, his death having been kept a closely guarded secret.

“Our household has begun to revolve around the hollow cavern that lies inside you. If you try to imagine a house that has a deep and empty well with its mouth agape right in the middle of the parlor, that would be about right. An empty hole. A hole so large it would swallow up the world. You safeguard that dearly, and not only that, but you arranged Yūko and me around the periphery in a manner that suits you and took it into your head to create for yourself an entirely new family of the kind that wouldn’t have occurred to anyone else. An ideal, splendid family centered on that empty well.

“When you moved your bedroom next to mine, you were at last close to achieving your objective. Before long, three empty holes or wells had been completed, and you intended to create an intimate, happy family that was the envy of others. Even I felt seduced by it. I almost wanted to lend a hand and make it happen. If I’d wanted to do it, it would have been easy. We could have discarded our troubles, dug ourselves a hole as big as yours, and, right in front of your very eyes, Yūko and I could have had done with it and slept together like a pair of frolicking beasts without a care in the world. We could have writhed around in front of you moaning with pleasure and then, finally, fallen asleep snoring. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. And neither could Yūko. Do you understand? We simply couldn’t do it—afraid as we were of turning into sated beasts and seeing your plan succeed. And what makes it all the more unpleasant is the fact that you are aware of this.

“I’ve gradually come to realize this since the picnic at the waterfall. When I was talking to you just now, I suddenly felt sure of it. Yūko fell victim to your machinations, and while she came dangerously close to helping you realize your plan, after everything even she couldn’t bring herself to do it. You knew that.

“What on earth are you hoping for? While realizing we can’t do it, you still seek to entice us. You corner us, knowing that we have nowhere to go. A common spider is better than you. At least a spider spins its own web and tries to ensnare its prey. You, on the other hand, don’t even spin out your empty existence. You don’t expend any effort at all. The vacuous being that you are wants to be at the sacred center of your empty world.

“What did you expect? Tell me! What do you want?”

Kōji’s line of questioning became increasingly fervent as he found it more and more difficult to tolerate this monologue that Ippei would never comprehend. He once again fell victim to his own irritation in trying to make Ippei understand his questions, as before, and when this happened, his eager voice faltered and took on a mean-sounding tone again.

“What is it you want? Well? What do you really want to do?”

Ippei had been silent for a long while.

Just then, the western sky above the harbor started to glow with the setting sun, and the pebbles on the road cast their long shadows across its surface; as they did so, the first tears Kōji had seen Ippei shed spread thinly over his eyes.

“Home… I want to go… back home.”

Kōji felt betrayed by this childlike supplication and was seized with anger.

“That’s a lie. Tell me the truth. I won’t let you go back until you do.”

Once again Ippei fell into a long silence. Then, still sitting diagonally across the stone handrail, he gazed fixedly at the radiant western sky. Normally uncommonly dark and agitated as he tried to express many differing emotions, his eyes—more animated than in the past but not as vivid as those of a healthy person—were now completely still as they regarded the sunset, his irises openly reflecting the radiant western skies. The tightly congealed clouds were edged with yellow and crimson as a yolk-colored blaze of light streamed across the heavens.

Due to the sun, which had yet to go fully down, the promontory on the opposite side of the inlet appeared unnaturally bright green; the distance across the bay became impossible to gauge, and black protrusions—the ships’ masts and the ice-crushing tower, which were only slightly more prominent than the rows of houses on this side—appeared to directly touch the promontory. The crimson reflection extended unexpectedly far into the distance, like sprinkled droplets of ink, and a section of the clouds directly overhead was also faintly tinged with red. The light from this magnificent sunset, which was at once intense and at the same time strangely calm, converged precisely in Ippei’s unmoving pupils, and that minute melancholy image was not only projected into his eyes but also passed through his pupils and seemed to occupy every recess of his hollow interior.

Thrusting his walking stick into his right hand, he described something like characters in the air with the index finger of his unencumbered left. But the strokes were unduly confused, and try as he might, Kōji was unable to follow the invisible letters being traced in front of him.

“Why don’t you try saying it,” said Kōji, this time with the deliberate consideration of a doctor speaking to his patient.

With a dry, rasping voice that passed through his teeth, and with great concentration, Ippei spoke, expressing himself two ways—as he always did when he was afraid of being misunderstood:

“Death. I want to die.”

As they followed the way home, they saw Yūko coming toward them on the path that went between the green rice paddies. Concerned that they were taking so long to return, she had sent the postmaster’s wife on ahead and come back to meet them. With Yūko’s back to the sun, which had almost gone down, her shadow soon reached their feet as she slowly drew near. The closer she came, the more attractive her heavy lipstick was against her face—the paleness of which was accentuated by the dark blue material of her cotton robe.

“You’re taking your time, aren’t you?”

“We’ve been chatting about all sorts of things,” said Kōji.

“Chatting, you say!”

With the evening sun just then cast obliquely across her face, Yūko suddenly pulled the corners of her mouth back so that even the fine creases on her thin lips were visible and her lipstick shone in the light, and spoke contemptuously, with a note of deliberate surprise in her voice.

“It’s nice and cool in the evening. It sounds like there are a lot of cicadas out lately. Anyhow, since we’re here, do you fancy walking a little farther, toward the harbor? Are you tired?”

Ippei understood Yūko’s question without any real difficulty. His customary smile surfaced below the straw hat as it slowly bobbed from side to side.

“Well, then, let’s take our time. Thanks for your help. It’s my turn now.”

She moved between them and, with Ippei on her right side and Kōji on her left, set off walking. Before long, the path that ran due west cut across the prefectural highway and went straight to the harbor.

“To the family members of the crew of the Tatsumi Maru, please come now and collect your five days’ supply of rice.”

The sound of the fishing cooperative’s loudspeaker echoed around the hillside; accustomed to such announcements, people usually heard but didn’t listen to them. And yet, when one thought how both the end of the fishing season holiday and the departure of the fishing boats were near at hand, it sounded unusually new.

Matsukichi’s boat had already set sail toward Hokkaido. A yellow cloud rose in the distance on the prefectural highway, followed by a dull rumbling noise. Half-enveloped in the dust, the body of a passing bus was barely visible. The glowing sky gradually lost its color, and the sun having already vanished behind the promontory in the distance, the headland stared blackly back at them.

While guiding Ippei, from time to time Yūko’s left hand came into contact with Kōji’s right. Sometimes the contact was soft, and sometimes it was hard and painful. In the end, Yūko’s fingers, groping in the dark, lightly squeezed and then let go of his hand.

Kōji glanced at Yūko’s face, but her head was facing directly to the front, and in profile, her face had a hard edge to it, as if she were curbing her desires. For a moment, there was a tired convulsive strength in Yūko’s fingers as she squeezed and then released her grip.

Kōji started to speak. “You know, I’m always thinking that maybe my life is being lived just for his sake.”

“His? You mean Ippei, right?”

Seeking to evade the issue, Yūko returned the question, but of course Kōji was referring to Ippei.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he continued, in a heavy, faltering voice. He let his head droop, and gazed at their feet slowly extending alternately forward as they fell in line with Ippei’s pace—like some kind of ceremonial procession—on top of the white path that was just starting to go dark. “A lot of things have happened. But, in the end, I feel like I’ve behaved and lived exactly the way he wanted me to. And that will probably carry on this way from now on as well.”

Kōji did his best to sound nonchalant, but Yūko’s intuitive power surprised him.

Her shoulders shuddered slightly. Swiftly turning her keen gaze in his direction, she traced with her eyes the outline of his tense jaw. Without doubt, she immediately saw through the dark, heavy quality given off by his moderate turn of phrase. Kōji recognized in Yūko’s powers of intuition a sign of her love for him, and he felt overjoyed. If that were not the case, then why had they been brought together in an instant by this delicate spider’s thread that was barely visible in the failing light?

Yūko seemed to waver ever so slightly in the face of Kōji’s words, which revealed a quality like a darkly glittering mineral.

However, there must have been a tacit understanding between them for quite some time even before Kōji spoke.

They continued to walk at Ippei’s pace, while Yūko closed her eyes with a sweep of her long eyelashes. When she opened them again, the distant embers of the sunset burned like fire in her eyes. Kōji realized then that she had changed, and she was no longer the desultory and insincere woman she had been. She had been transformed into a vibrant woman brimming with immeasurable energy.

Then she spoke. “Yes, I agree with you. In which case, you’d better come along, Kōji. And so had I. There’s no going back now after all of this.”

When they arrived at the harbor, Ippei, of course, was exhausted, as were they all. The light was failing, and only the crests of the waves in the bay caught the dying light.

The lighthouse shone brightly, and while it was difficult to tell the extent of the fan-shaped band of light that swept across the harbor and promontory opposite, every two seconds the flash of light clearly illuminated both the vessels that lay at anchor and also the oil tanks on the shore opposite.

Leaning against an oil drum, Ippei slid down and collapsed into a sitting position. Yūko squatted next to him, while Kōji stood alone to one side. Fanned by the cool evening breeze, the three gazed without seeing at the scenery on the dark shore in the distance.

“We haven’t been over to the other side yet, have we? Let’s get Teijirō to row us over one of these days in the sculling boat. We should take lots of pictures. The middle of the day would be best, though it may be hot,” said Yūko.