Authors: Kōbō Abe
“Forget it. There isn’t time.” It wouldn’t do to betray weakness. A ship’s captain has to maintain the proper dignity. Rather than announce myself to him as captain, I resolved to carry on resolutely until he addressed me as “Captain” of his own accord.
“We don’t have to go inside and sit down—let’s just get a takeout dinner. We can eat in the car on the way. How about some charcoal-grilled eels and a couple of cans of coffee?”
“If you intend to eat and drive at the same time, it had better be
kamaboko
*
,”
I said firmly, determined to let him know who was in charge.
*
Boiled fish paste
“Okay,
kamaboko
it is.” He ran off through the rain. Having expected more of an argument, I felt somewhat deflated.
Soon he came dashing back, a handkerchief over his head, his face all smiles. Between the thumb and middle finger of his left hand he was carrying something on skewers, and with his little finger he gripped a paper bag. In his right hand he held two paper cups.
“Jumbo franks and coffee. Also, I got four packages of
kamaboko,
five to a package. We can have them now in the car, or save them for later over a beer.”
“Jumbo what?”
“Frankfurters. They’re loaded with mustard, so be sure you don’t get any on your pants. With that color, it could be embarrassing.”
I took a bite—and wondered how I had endured the hunger for so long.
“What’s your name again?” I asked.
“Son of a gun. I guess we never did introduce ourselves. Komono here. Manta Komono. Sorry, I’m all out of name-cards.”
“Unusual name.”
“It comes from a word for a kind of reed, the kind used to make mats. My ancestors were probably roadside beggars who sat on reed mats all day. What’s
your
name?”
“Never mind.”
He tossed the empty frankfurter stick out the window, licked the mustard and ketchup off his fingers, and put the jeep back in gear. “Got something to hide?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just that for the last few years, about the only time I’ve used my name is when I renewed my driver’s license.”
“That’s a good one. But we’re going to be buddies now; I’ve got to call you something.”
Now that he brought it to my attention, I realized it was true: unconsciously I had been avoiding having people call me by my name. There were times when the sound of my name called out unexpectedly had gone through me like an electric shock. Even when I was an assistant in the photography studio, it hadn’t been long before everybody was calling me Mole. That was so vastly preferable to Pig that I would deliberately introduce myself to people that way. And now I’d become a mole in reality.
“… Actually, if I’ve got to call you something, it might as well be ‘Captain.’ ”
His laughter was like the sound of paper being crumpled deep in my ears. I felt the sharp whiff of loneliness. A chance stranger had just volunteered to call me Captain. Perhaps this was all for the best. Brothers end up mutual strangers, they say, and even in marriage, the more distant the relationship the better. As a principle for choosing my crew, the system of random selection fell right in line with the laws of heredity.
“That shortcut you were talking about … you mean crossing the river and then going over the mountain?”
“How did you know? You shouldn’t be able to figure
that
much out from a map like that.”
“A deliveryman develops a sixth sense.” He wiped the top of his head with the handkerchief, then blew his nose into it. “Look at those diesel exhaust fumes. That’s what I hate most about expressways. Somebody really ought to get figures on the incidence of lung cancer among truckdrivers.”
Seen from Kabuto City across the river, Mount Boar was a steep cliff with vertical pleats, somewhat like the
kabuto
of a medieval samurai. In fact, people in the city have always called it Mount Kabuto, using the character for “helmet” to write the mountain’s name. On the other side, it’s known as Mount Boar. Neither name is on the maps, though; nowadays the area is known officially as Skylark Heights.
Heading north, we crossed Kabuto Bridge and came out on Mount Boar. Tangerine orchards stretched along the skirt of the mountain, to our left. At the first bus stop, we turned off the national highway, took a narrow road that cut through an orchard (it looks at first glance like a private road), and headed straight for the top. This was the shortcut. If you don’t know about it, you lose ten or fifteen minutes going out to the railway station and through the underpass, and then skirting back around the foot of the mountain. I’d been counting on this advantage when I’d assured the insect dealer that we could still beat our quarry to the ship.
The road quickly changed to a steep and winding dirt path. Roadside grasses were heavy with rainwater, and the going was slippery. He locked the hubs and went into four-wheel drive. The road finally leveled out near the summit. Here it was less a road than a clearing in a dense woods. The rain had completely stopped, and overhead, ragged clouds flew by like torn shreds of threadbare cloth. Their silhouettes were highlighted by the light of the early moon, or perhaps by lingering rays of the just-set sun.
“What’s that over there? Looks like some sort of monument.”
Now that he said so, it did in a way. On the left of the woods, the crouching black shadow of a rock suggested some structure of no practical use.
“An outcropping of the rock base,” I said. “Apparently a shaft into the original quarry. The land here belongs to whoever owns these orchards, and they must have left it as it was. Everywhere else the land was leveled off.”
“That wouldn’t be the gangway to your ship, would it?”
“You’re way off. You saw the map; it’s farther down the mountain, on the coastal side.”
“I
thought
it was strange. But the tunnels interconnect underground, don’t they?”
“I’ve done some exploring, but this is much farther than I’ve been able to go. As the crow flies, it must be a good three-quarters of a mile or more.”
At the end of the woods was a fence topped with barbed wire. Along the fence was a light steel-frame building that appeared to be some sort of communal facility (actually it was the office of the Broom Brigade, but at this hour no one would be in yet). In front of it, the barbed wire had been cut, and tire marks were visible on the ground. Then we entered an asphalt road, and the scenery underwent an abrupt change. This was Skylark Heights. The slope, curving gently down to the ocean, was covered with roofs of house after house, all shining in the pale coppery light that leaked from between the clouds until the scene seemed more suggestive of an armadillo than a wild boar.
“We’re almost there. Put it back into two-wheel drive and pick up a little speed.”
Until eight years before, Mount Boar had been densely wooded, in better keeping with its name. Quarry motors vied in emitting murderous screeches, while big dump trucks fought for space on the narrow roads, flinging gravel and spraying muddy water as they went. Indeed, there had been an atmosphere of sufficient danger to frighten children away without any need for “Keep Out” signs. Now there were orange-colored streetlights at regular intervals, curbs painted in yellow wavy lines, glass-walled telephone booths, quiet cherry-tree-lined streets used solely by local residents, and row upon row of houses, each with its own modest, fenced-in garden, each running its own air conditioner.
Suddenly the insect dealer broke into a nasal falsetto, singing a children’s tune: “ ‘The gold bug is a rich old bug—’ ” Equally suddenly he broke off into an embarrassed cough. “Sorry—I can’t help it. Before the eupcaccia, I used to sell stag beetles.”
“I heard about it from the shill. They have horns, don’t they?”
“Here’s my old pitch.” He held up his left index finger in the air, and said in a loud voice, full throttle: “Can you see it? Look, right there, the tiny insect on the end of my finger. Stag beetles bring luck, ladies and gentlemen, just as we Japanese have been singing for centuries in that old song. But did you know that ours is not the only country in the world to value the stag beetle so highly? The ancient Egyptians called it the scarab beetle, and worshipped it as a manifestation of the sun god. And as any encyclopedia will tell you, the famous French entomologist Doctor Fabre devoted his life to its study. Buy one today and let it bring
you
luck. The one I have here is especially rare. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the world’s smallest beetle, found only in tropical jungles. Can you make it out? It may be too small to see with the naked eye. They say the magnifying glass was invented just to aid in observing stag beetles. That led in turn to developments in astronomy, so you see you can hardly underestimate their importance.”
“Did they sell?”
“You bet they did—more than the eupcaccias, anyway.” The best customers are mothers with their children in tow. All the kids have to do is give me a sidelong glance, with just a hint of a smile, and the mothers are caught off balance. They always end up loosening their purse strings.”
“You have a smooth delivery.”
“That’s right, smooth as butter.” He stuck out his tongue, wiggled the tip, and said, “Well, that’s a mother for you, isn’t it.”
The downhill road ends by the city hall complex, with its covering of black glass and black imitation marble; from there a four-lane prefectural road carries you due south to the harbor. The area went into a decline after stone hauling came to an end and the bypass opened up, but even so, we encountered a fair amount of traffic as we proceeded—mostly pickup trucks, two or three lined up at every red light. This harbor still has the largest freezing facilities of any fishing harbor in the prefecture.
“The race is as good as over. Whichever way you come, you end up here. I hope we get there before they do.”
“I don’t know. That wasn’t much of a shortcut. All we did was cross one little hill.”
I knew that without being told. Did he have to squash my last fragile hope?
He
was the one who made us lose time at the start.
“The national road swings way around, north of the tracks. If we left at the same time they did, we should have picked up a good fifteen minutes on them.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. Straight on to the sea it is.”
The sensation of being called Captain, now that I could finally taste it, brought nothing like the satisfaction I had so long anticipated. On the contrary, I rather felt he was laughing at me.
“See that row of orange streetlights up ahead? That’s the bypass. Take a left just before you reach there.”
We crossed over a narrow stream, and the asphalt began to buckle and roll. We were on a dilapidated town road whose surface was rough with gravel. Soon the elevated bypass loomed overhead, supported by thick ferroconcrete piers. At first the town road runs parallel with the bypass, but at the second pier it pulls away, swinging around sharply until the two roads cross by the bay. The crescent of land this formed is private property owned by Inototsu, my biological father, who let slide his chance to sell it to the highway department.
The old fishermen’s inn was located on a rocky ledge directly under the present bypass. No trace of it survives, neither grounds nor building nor wharf. All that’s left to show for it is that steep crescent of land sandwiched between the bypass and the town road, hardly big enough for a doghouse. It’s of so little value that not even Inototsu pays it any attention, so I had no difficulty in appropriating it for my own use. At the center of the crescent is the entrance to the quarry—the place where I was taken in and chained twenty years ago, when I was accused of rape. The vein had been exhausted and abandoned even then. A number of artisans were using the site to make stone lanterns, as I recall; they used to sneak me tidbits from their lunches. Just what connection there was between the quarry and the grounds of the inn, I have never understood. Inototsu probably could tell me, but rather than face him, I prefer to remain in the dark.
The town road was made by open-cut excavation in that steep slope which falls away to the rocky shelf in the cove, like a hard-boiled egg sliced at an angle. From the highest point, the center of the curve, the drop is nearly twenty-five feet, and so rough and precipitous that descent is impossible without a rope.
“Hang a right in front of the first concrete pier,” I directed him.
“There’s no road.”
“You’re forgetting this is a jeep.”
Tall weeds covered what was once the entrance to the fishermen’s inn. To get back to the rocky promontory, you have to go under the bypass and skirt the beach.
“They’ll never figure this out,” said the insect dealer.
“Now pull over and cut the engine.” I took a flashlight from the toolbox behind my seat, and stepped outside.
“Your knee seems okay now, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, now that you mention it.”
I had too much on my mind to go on pretending otherwise. I crouched down, peered around, and pricked up my ears. If the shill and his companion had indeed read the map correctly and beaten us here, they would have had to abandon their car in this vicinity. There were no fresh tire tracks. The only sounds that I could make out were the vibrations from cars whizzing by overhead and the whistle of wind on the waves. I detected no whir of an engine trying to pull out of the sand, nor any foreign object interrupting the horizon’s faint glow. We were in time.
“Isn’t that a footprint over there?”
The insect dealer, Komono (it will take me a while to start calling him by his name), leaned out from the driver’s seat and pointed to a section of sand near the pier. I turned my flashlight on it. In a mound of sand between the pier and the ledge were two small indentations that did bear a certain resemblance to footprints. Absorbed in tracing the probable route of the other car, I had somehow overlooked them.
“Probably a dog.”
“Too distinct for that. Or are they?”