The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories (9 page)

I was unsure what to do next. I just walked along the corridor to her room, and knocked on the door.

She opened the door.

I went in.

She was wearing a light, see-through negligée. It was as if she was standing naked before me.

“What's the matter?” She smiled gently at me, as if humoring a small child. Mechanically, I raised the rifle and silently aimed it at her breast.

“That's dangerous,” she said. But her face showed no trace of fear. She did not even pale. That was not all. I saw a sinister glee in her eyes, as if she was expecting something. She knew. She knew, and was waiting for it—for the weapon to explode.

Strangely, I felt no anger. I merely felt confused. The worlds of reality and illusion had meshed within me, and I could not distinguish between them.

This is a dream
.

This was the same as last night's dream.

If it was not a dream, surely I would not be able to shoot her. Therefore, it was a dream. It had to be a dream. In last night's dream, I shot her naked body with my hunting rifle. I could still clearly recall that dream. To my seventeen-year-old self, the dream was clearer than reality. If I did not pull the trigger now, it would become hazy like reality. Her image would transform into something elusive and vague. In order to make her mine I had to pull the trigger, just as I had in the dream.

Her naked body would fall slowly to the floor. Her breast would be stained with bright red blood. That vivid redness would remain unchanging for all eternity, because this was a dream.

I pulled the trigger.

The Monkey That Clapped Its Hands

T
oku
Yoshizawa's small body had remained motionless in the viewfinder for some time now. She squatted at the water's edge with her back hunched over, her hands coarsened by farm labor tightly clasped together, gazing out at the dull sheen of the sea. Seeing her silhouetted against the light, Sawaki could not make out her expression, but he guessed she was struggling to contain her tears.

He looked up from the camera at the officer from the local police station next to him.

The middle-aged policeman was clearly bored and itching to get back. It was only to be expected. As far as he was concerned, the case had been wrapped up a week ago—simply a young man's suicide, with nothing else suspicious about it. The fact that he did not come right out and say so was probably because he was more good-natured than his rough appearance suggested.

Sawaki took his cigarettes out of his pocket and offered one to the policeman. Shielding it with his body against the strong sea breeze he finally managed to light it, and then asked the officer, “Would you mind telling me about how the body was found?”

There was nothing much of any note in the policeman's story. A local fisherman had been taking his boat out that morning when he found the body washed up on the beach. That was all. The one point of interest for Sawaki was that the dead man had been clutching a small toy monkey in his hand when he drowned. That toy was now at the police station, along with his other personal effects.

Tossing his cigarette butt into the sea, the policeman turned to Sawaki with his head to one side. “I don't get it. Why would a reporter from Tokyo come all the way here to the Japan Sea for such an insignificant case?”

“Editor's orders,” answered Sawaki simply. Indeed, for the police, this probably was a minor case of no importance. But there was someone who thought otherwise, and that was why Sawaki had come all the way from Tokyo, although he had no intention of telling the policeman that.

The dead youth's name was Shinkichi Yoshizawa. He was from a remote village in Hokkaido, and had come to Tokyo three years earlier having found employment at a laundry in Asakusa through the mass recruitment drive for school leavers from rural areas at that time. He was by all accounts a hard worker, and apparently sent part of his monthly wages back to his mother in Hokkaido. Yet, one day, this twenty-year-old man had suddenly gone off on a trip to the coast of Hokuriku and drowned himself.

What Sawaki had in mind was an investigative piece on the young man's life, to shed light on what might have driven him to suicide. In fact, he had not so much been ordered to do this by his editor as he had persuaded his editor to let him do it. It was partly his reaction against the newspaper's tendency to devote too many column inches to sensational stories like student protests and murders. He also hoped this “obscure” case might possibly illuminate the problematic nature of the mass recruitment program, but he did not yet know whether it would form part of this as a wider issue.

Sawaki once again turned his gaze back to Toku Yoshizawa.

The forty-seven-year-old mother bereaved of her only child was still sitting there gazing out to sea in exactly the same position as before.

Back at the police station, Sawaki took several photos of Toku collecting her son's belongings before picking out the toy monkey from among them.

It was the sort of toy often sold at night stalls for about five hundred yen. It held cymbals in each hand that it clapped together when you wound the screw. It was rusty from having been immersed in seawater, but as Sawaki wound it up there was an abrupt noisy clash of cymbals and the monkey started nodding its head jerkily back and forth. The sound was grotesquely amplified in the silent room, and he hurriedly stopped it with his hands.

“Was your son fond of toys like this?”

Toku briefly shook her dark, tanned face in answer to Sawaki's question. “He wasn't a child any more, and besides, he was always such a good boy, even when he was small.”

At twenty years old, he was already an adult. And no doubt he was a dependable sort, just as she maintained. Yet he had been clutching this toy when he died. When Sawaki released his grip on it, the monkey clashed the cymbals together two or three times more before grinding to a halt.

“I just don't understand,” said Toku, glancing distractedly at the toy monkey. “Why would he go and die, leaving me behind?”

“That's what I would like to know too,” responded Sawaki.

Apart from the toy monkey, there was nothing of note among the dead man's belongings, but mixed in amongst the waterlogged pack of cigarettes and wallet containing less than five thousand yen, a book of matches bearing the name of a hotel caught Sawaki's eye. The Star Lily Inn. The policeman informed him that it was twelve or thirteen minutes' walk away.

“Let's go and check it out,” Sawaki urged Toku, and together they left the police station.

The narrow road to the inn wound along the coast. The wind had picked up and the waves were tipped with white crests. There was nobody in sight, and no fishing boats on the water. To Sawaki, accustomed to the placid Shonan coastline near Tokyo, the early winter Hokuriku sea appeared dark and cheerless. Even if he wanted to die, he would not come here, he thought to himself. Why had young Shinkichi chosen this place to die?

Sawaki turned to Toku, who was lagging behind as usual. “Is this anything like the sea in Hokkaido?”

“What?” Toku glanced at him in surprise, before adding in a small voice, “No. In Utoro the sea is already icebound by now.”

Sawaki had only ever been to Sapporo in Hokkaido, and he could not immediately place Utoro. If it was icebound, though, it must be further north, perhaps on the Sea of Okhotsk. Perhaps the sea where Toku and Shinkichi were from was even darker, even more desolate than here.

The Star Lily Inn was small, but solidly built in the old style with deep eaves to protect it against heavy snowfall. Sawaki blinked in the semi-darkness of the lobby.

The short, middle-aged desk clerk who came out to greet them immediately recalled Shinkichi Yoshizawa with a smile. “He's the one with a toy monkey, right?”

He must have been amused by a twenty-year-old man having a toy like that, thought Sawaki. Or perhaps he had found it ludicrous. Sawaki again wondered why Shinkichi had been carrying such a childish toy around with him as though it were a prized possession.

The clerk brought out the hotel register and showed it to them. Shinkichi Yoshizawa stayed there under his real name for one week. His handwriting was not elegant, but it had an earnest feel, almost excessively so. Toku's nose rubbed against the register as she peered at her son's handwriting, but after a while she raised her face and asked the clerk, “May I please see his room?”

The clerk called a maid to show Toku to the room. Sawaki would have liked to see it too, but he felt he should let Toku go alone and instead questioned the clerk about the last seven days of Shinkichi's life.

“As soon as he arrived, he wrote some letters,” the clerk told him. Letters? Sawaki's eyes gleamed. If those had been suicide notes, they might learn the reason for his death.

“There were three altogether. At his request, I mailed them myself from the post office,” added the clerk.

“Three letters?” It sounded even more likely to Sawaki that they were suicide notes, but it was strange that he had not sent one to his mother, Toku.

“I sent them express delivery. That's what he told me to do.”

“Do you remember the contents of the letters?”

“Contents?” The clerk smiled wryly. “Well, they were in envelopes, you know.”

“So how about the addressees? Can you at least remember whether they were sent to Hokkaido or Tokyo?”

“All three were to Tokyo.”

That meant that none of them had been addressed to his mother.

“What about the names?” asked Sawaki.

The clerk rested his forehead on his hand as he considered this, but he could only recall one of them. His eyes shone as he told Sawaki, “It was the name of one of those experts that's always appearing on TV. He's pretty well known.”

“An expert? You mean a college professor or social commentator, or something?”

“A commentator, that youngish guy who wears black-rimmed glasses. Name's Fuji-something-or-other.”

“Fujishima? Kiichiro Fujishima?”

“Yes, that's the one. I'm sure of it.”

Kiichiro Fujishima was an assistant professor at S University who had been making a name for himself as an up-and-coming commentator. Sawaki had met him once. He was extremely articulate and just the type of commentator popular on TV these days, although he was also criticized for being too much of a celebrity. In any case, he was famous. How come Shinkichi Yoshizawa had known him? Or could it be someone else of the same name? Sawaki could find out by paying Fujishima a visit upon his return to Tokyo.

“And after mailing the letters?” Sawaki pressed.

“He seemed to be waiting for something. Every day he would sit, looking out of the window and often asked about arrival times at the station and airport, and he was always checking to see if any mail had come for him,” the clerk lowered his voice. It would appear that the three letters had not been intended as suicide notes, even if that was how they had ended up. Shinkichi Yoshizawa had spent a week at this inn waiting for the replies. When none came, he killed himself. What had Shinkichi written in those letters? Would he have still killed himself if he had received any replies? Why had the three recipients not replied or come up here to see him?

Toku had not returned. Sawaki suddenly felt uneasy and went upstairs to look for her. As he slid open the door of the tatami room with a sea view where Shinkichi had stayed, he was struck full in the face by the wind. Toku had flung the windows wide open and was sitting there gazing out to sea. Dusk was falling, and the breeze blowing in off the sea had an added chill to it. Frowning, Sawaki walked round to face her and said, “You'll catch cold.”

Toku did not respond. She did not even appear to have heard him. She was not weeping, but she seemed abstracted, expressionless. Sawaki had no idea what she was thinking about.

That night Sawaki took Toku back to Tokyo on the overnight train. The journey took almost ten hours, during which time he snapped numerous photos of her. However, her expression in the viewfinder never changed and in the end he gave up and put the camera away. He would not be able to use photos like that. Instead, he tried asking her various things about her dead son, but the answers that came back were equally flat, certainly not the makings of a good story. The boy was well-behaved, a good kid. After his father died, he had left school as soon as he could, to go out to work. He had really looked after her. He had never quarreled with anyone else. After he came to Tokyo, he sent money home every month without fail. He had just written to her that he would soon be earning enough to bring her to live with him in Tokyo. So why did he go and kill himself? Why—

Why had he killed himself? Of course, Sawaki had no answer to that. He sat quietly trying to picture in his mind the twenty-year-old he had never met. The Shinkichi Yoshizawa he imagined from Toku's account was morally upright, thoroughly unfashionable, and utterly unnewsworthy. He sounded like a pretty dull kind of guy. Was it his deep earnestness that had driven him to suicide? Or had Toku over-idealized her only son, and in reality he had been a very different type of youth? Could he have changed after three years living in Tokyo?

They arrived at Ueno station early the next morning.

Tokyo was far warmer than Hokuriku, and as noisy and bustling as ever. They had breakfast in a café by the station, after which Sawaki told Toku he intended to pay Kiichiro Fujishima a visit. Toku, however, was reluctant to meet such an eminent figure. Sawaki was curious to see how Fujishima would respond to a farmer like her and tried to persuade her to go with him, but the more he tried to convince her, the more she recoiled from the idea. There was no budging her, so for the time being he checked her into an inn by Shinobazu Pond, and went alone.

Kiichiro Fujishima lived in an upmarket condominium near Azabu Roppongi. It was certainly a sign of the times that such a young commentator could be living in a condo and drinking in the bars of Ginza. Sawaki called first to confirm he was home, and when he arrived, Fujishima came out to greet him with a big smile and showed him into the living room decorated with a floral-patterned carpet.

“You'd never believe how busy I am,” he told Sawaki in a slight Kansai accent. “From next month I'll be serializing my opinion pieces, ‘Youth Today: Reality and Myth' in your evening paper. That's going to take up a big chunk of my time.”

“Thanks so much,” Sawaki smiled. Fujishima complained of being busy, but he looked healthy and full of energy, and appeared to be rather enjoying the frenzy of activity. A pretty young girl he introduced as his secretary brought them coffee. Sawaki felt a twinge of envy for this commentator who seemed to be surrounded by a swirl of brilliant color.

Fujishima lit up a slim cigar and then looked at Sawaki. “So, what brings you here today?” The mild scent of the cigar tickled Sawaki's nose. He had been offered one, but instead took out his own pack of Hi-Lites.