The Ruined Map (11 page)

Same day: 4:28
P.M.
—Right turn at the second bus stop after the gas station. I stopped the car at the first ward post office and inquired at the corner tobacconist’s. Mr. M’s house was the one to the right of the post office, visible diagonally in front of me. Long fence
of building blocks. Garden with many trees. Ordinary residential house in a shopping neighborhood. Beside the gate, you can see a simple garage consisting of only a roof.

                 L
EAVING MY
car in front of the tobacconist’s, I decided first to take a look at the post office. A set of painted folding doors with brass handles was flanked by a small flower bed, where nothing was planted now, and a pillar letterbox. The floor was concrete; to the right was a small bench and to the left a public telephone booth. Between the two front windows, side by side, was written: Money Orders, Postal Savings, Postal Life Insurance. Dirty cotton curtains were hung over the windows and there was a sign in the shape of an obelisk: Closed Today. Only the window inscribed Stamps—Parcels—Telephone was open. An oldish man, doubtless the chief, who was cleaning or repairing the rubber stamps, looked up at me. There was the pungent odor of a kerosene stove functioning inefficiently. A ten-ton truck sped by, making the earth vibrate; it suddenly slowed down (perhaps because my car was in the way) and changed gears. As I casually requested ten five-yen stamps, I asked if it were true that at Mr. M’s place they had bought a car. I was posing as a salesman … an old trick in a case like this.

“A car?” The man slowly shifted his gaze from me to the next window place hidden behind the curtain. “Never heard that …”

“There’s no reason for him to have bought a car,” answered the muffled voice of a middle-aged woman unexpectedly from behind the curtain. As in most small post offices, a married couple was in charge here. “A man who goes around boasting about the number of alarm clocks he has is certainly not going to keep silent about buying a car, is he?”

“Oh. I’m relieved to hear it. Because a rather plausible rumor has come to my attention according to which Mr. M is driving around in a red car.”

“Impossible. The car next door is light blue,” said the man.

“Ordinary light blue. He’s really not a bad fellow, you know,” added the wife.

“Be that as it may, what about you yourselves? If you had a car you could enjoy life twice as much, that’s for sure. It’s a lot more advantageous than life insurance.”

“At our stage in life we’re too old to start driving. That’ll be fifty yen.”

I drew out a hundred-yen note and asked for small change. “But Mr. M’s business is apparently thriving, isn’t it?”

“Apparently it is. He used to be only a charcoal dealer,” the wife retorted dryly.

“With the increase in houses, he’s changed from a black-charcoal seller to a propane dealer who takes a bath every day. It’s the times,” the clerk declared, drawing up his thin upper lip, as he pushed toward me the stack of five ten-yen pieces.

A propane dealer! In spite of me, my heart thumped. So could the fuel shop opposite M’s house be his? Could it be that the small three-wheeled trucks driving back and forth
with their tanks of gas, raising clouds of dust and rattling like tin horses, were in fact part of M’s business? If M was not merely a councilman but the head of a fuel concern, the plot was much better. There was no longer the slightest mystery about the missing man’s behavior that morning. Dainen Enterprises were tied up with M.

“But it’s so unfair,” said the man’s wife in a cheerful tone, quite at odds with the substance of her remark. “I wonder just how long it’s going to go on.” I turned and looked over my shoulder through the glass in the door. Under the deep zinc eaves peculiar to fuel stores, two young men were unloading tanks, which they placed side by side at the edge of the road and then carried into the storehouse. Its interior was already dark, and I could not see in very well. Evening came more quickly than elsewhere to this valley town screened to the east and west by hills. Uttering a persistent series of little coughs, the wife got up. Then the lights in the post office were turned on. I lit a cigarette, and the few seconds of silence acted, as I thought they would, as a primer to their gossiping tongues.

“Here now. See how the housing project in the second ward is getting finished. They’ve already promised publicly to lay city gas in the town. The place is developing all the time … a real suburb. It’s expanding—and the propane dealers’ purses are expanding right along with it. But sooner or later city gas is going to come in, and when it does they’ve had it. Shops’ll spread, telephones’ll increase, shop clerks’ll be at a premium. Already there are ten three-wheeled trucks, if you include those belonging to the branch stores.”

“Nine.”

“Anyway, they’ve had it. The balloon’ll burst.”

“For a while he came to ask us to sign petitions against
city gas. He said propane gas was sanitary, that you couldn’t commit suicide with it.”

“Stupid! At our age who’s going to commit suicide with gas? Whatever method you choose, convenience is the main thing. These days, who’s going to sympathize with the grievances of a charcoal dealer?”

                 F
IRST WARD
, F—— City. Former F—— Village’s main street, which begins at the post office. A straight road on a gentle incline about four hundred yards long, ending at the stone steps leading up to the town hall. Mixed among the tile-roofed stores, the farmhouses stood out conspicuously with their lattice doors and high-pitched roofs—apparently the farmers had raised silkworms. In the spacious yards were small passenger cars, bought by the sale of mulberry fields. The same as everywhere else, the electrical appliance shops were unreasonably brilliant. There were even barrel makers, whose shops seemed on the verge of collapse. Generally the shops seemed affluent, still keeping some touch of the old days. However, the paucity of street lights suggested the fate of the old town, which was being left behind and forgotten. Although on the ridge of the low hill to the west the light was still bright enough so that one could distinguish each branch of the trees, the valley town
was already completely in the shadow of night. I noted a deep ditch to the right as I slowly drove the car over the pocked asphalt road, which had long lain unrepaired.

An old, gnarled cypress just before the town hall had encroached over a third of the road and towered above me, at what was apparently the entrance to a shrine. There was quite a bit of free space, and a good many cars were parked there. A light-blue or a slightly dirty blue one? Among six, four were various shades of blue and thus provided no clue. The windows of the town hall, except for a part of the second floor, were still bright, probably people working overtime on accounts. I turned the car around and went slowly back over the way I had just come.

I was not well acquainted with the organization of a fuel supplier. But along with the spread of the residential areas toward the suburbs, the charcoal dealers were also extending their business in propane gas, and the more the population increased, the more they prospered. But just as inevitably as the great reptiles ultimately had to give way to the mammals, they too would be taken over by city gas. They were born of the city’s growth and of that growth they would die—a paradoxical business. An appealing fate, where at their moment of greatest affluence they were sentenced to death. Uneasy moneymakers, sumptuously wined and dined, their tables were their gallows. Surely they must have deep anxieties.

Yet, no matter how they might suffer, they knew from the beginning what the results of the game would be. What alternative was there to city gas? What room for maneuver was left them? They were caught in the coils of events, and the disparity in strength was too great. What was the husband’s goal in trying to send Tashiro on the mission that
morning? It would seem that he had not been forced to disappear. Perhaps I should believe the story of the sales manager when he insisted that there was no crime involved. Perhaps Tashiro’s parting taunt, that one way or another my coming here would be fruitless, was not untrue. The most a wholesaler like Dainen Enterprises could do for a cornered retailer was to help him along to an easy death, or perhaps to order the tombstone for him.

I stopped the car a little before the fuel supplier’s.

Other than the outdoor floodlights suspended from the edge of the eaves and projecting inward, I could see no change in the scene. As before, the two men were tossing down the tanks and carrying them into the storehouse. One was a slim fellow about twenty, who looked as if he had stomach trouble. The other was a man about thirty, who had a weather-beaten, craggy look; a towel encircled his thick neck. He worked sluggishly, as if he had no liking for it, and he could hardly be blamed, since there were so many tanks.

“The boss here yet?”

“Boss?” the younger man shot back, with an expression as if he were not used to hearing the word. He looked up at me suspiciously, his hands resting on a tank. In color and shape the tank was the image of a bomb, and in the middle of one end there was a white trademark in the shape of a leaf.

Perhaps the expression I had used went against his grain. Although originally a charcoal dealer, M was now a ward councilman; maybe I should have called him the “proprietor.” But my qualms were apparently groundless, for with a slight motion of his chin he indicated the house beyond the road.

“He doesn’t come to the store very often and he’s not back home yet … the car’s not there.”

“I’ve just come from Dainen Enterprises.”

It wasn’t really an untruth. My starting point had been our office, but before that I had indeed passed by Dainen Enterprises. If I were questioned later I would get out of it by saying that the fellow had jumped to a hasty conclusion.

The youth set down the tank, straightened up, and looked at the older man, who had just come back from inside the storehouse. There seemed to be some reaction. But just what was not obvious—the name Dainen Enterprises was apparently already familiar to them. The suspicious relationship between Dainen Enterprises and M, before the husband’s disappearance, had resolved itself into a completely ordinary one after it; and thus my hopes of stumbling on a trace of the husband here had become more and more improbable.

But I did expect something, and I was not particularly disheartened at what I heard. If I could, I should have enjoyed getting in smaller doses the information I toiled to acquire. Being deceived and checkmated, being made to go miles out of my way and take all kinds of pains—I wanted at least to use this information to make my report plausible. My trip that had lasted a full two and a half hours had become just as obvious an act as casting a line in a pond.

Moreover, at the time when the possibilities were collapsing one after the other, the vexatious quiverings of huge, flesh-colored moth larvae nestling in my breast were growing in intensity, as if they were on the point of bursting forth from the cocoon and flying away. As soon as they were liberated, these gory moths would make a dash straight for that lemon-yellow window. The shadow of a man standing in their way as they passed with a rush through the glass and the curtains—the black-walled back of the self-styled brother, of course—aiming for the heart, they would sink their fangs
into it. Hold on! Moths don’t have fangs. So let them stop at the dentist’s on the way and get themselves fitted with special custom-made teeth. Right. I would have to go right to the dentist’s myself. When I put the tip of my tongue in the hole left by my molar, more and more I got the metallic taste of blood.

“When you say the Dainen, you mean the main office?”

Sucking up air into his nose, the younger man exhaled strongly on the tips of his oil-stained fingers peeping out from the torn work gloves. I wondered if he had swallowed the mucous he had inhaled. He inclined his head toward me as I nodded.

“Funny … his going out before noon. He said he was going to drop in at the Dainen main office.”

“Who knows?” said the older man, tucking the ends of the towel round his neck into the collar of his overalls. He spoke in a thick dialect that was difficult to understand. “He’s always got one excuse or another for going out. He can do it in his position … just drop out of sight like that.”