Authors: Kobo Abe
The Ruined Map (20 page)
“I won’t do anything to obstruct business, I promise you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I’m on the trail of the fellow whose photo I showed you.”
“Somebody said the same thing yesterday. Oh, yes … Seems to me he was an acquaintance of yours, wasn’t he. Really, there’s a lot of fellows going in and out of here. A lot of them don’t want their names … or their faces … known. I’ve already had two strokes and I’m a little feebleminded. I’ve got a loose tongue. So I don’t look at faces or try to remember names any more than I have to.”
“If it’s hard for you to talk just tell me where I can inquire … that’ll be fine.”
The old man’s troubled gaze, like a cornered mouse running around trying to find its hole, shifted in a triangle formed by me, the black window of the Camellia, and the burned spot in the blanket over his knees. He gave a short cough, plunged his hands under the blanket and then immediately withdrew them and rubbed them together. Resignedly, he wiped away the secretion from the corners of his eyes with the same finger he had used to wipe the dribble of his nose, and clicking his tongue, said: “Well then, please yourself. Try driving around here about seven in the morning.”
“Sort of accidentally …?”
“Yes, accidentally.”
Same day: 12:06
P.M.
—Visited Mr. Toyama, the man to whom the person under investigation sold the car he had been using until two days before disappearing. Toyama was not at home, but I was told that he was expected for lunch, being under treatment for a stomach disorder. I decided to ask if I might not wait for him a while. Toyama’s house was not number 24, as my client had told me, but 42, and therefore it took me some time and pains to find it. Even so, I was
obliged to wait. The silver lining to my cloud was that at least I reduced the waiting time.
It was a rather squalid corner of development housing. The fence was dilapidated. A ’63 Corona was nosed into the narrow yard. Perhaps that was the car Toyama had purchased from the missing man. It was in excellent condition and the tires almost new. Toyama’s wife is about thirty. Two children, two and four; both girls. In the yard there seemed to be something like a vegetable garden covered with vinyl—the whole complex revealed a thoroughly wholesome family atmosphere. For some time the sun had been shining and the garden was a pool of light. Since the temperature was such as to make me want to take off my coat, I declined the invitation to go in and asked if I might not sit on the verandah.
According to what Toyama’s wife said … (at this juncture there were two short toots of a horn; Toyama himself had apparently returned).
Same day: 12:19
P.M.
—Toyama’s back. Since he seemed busy I took his deposition while he ate. Toyama’s meal consisted of bread and a souplike mush. He complained that he had to build up his strength a lot, that he had to watch out for his stomach, and that driving a taxi was exhausting. But he seemed genuinely concerned about the circumstances of the missing man and was most cooperative in answering my questions.
The following is the dialogue that took place between us:
Q. How did you happen to buy the car from Mr. Nemuro?
A. Through a friend who had bought one previously. It had been highly recommended as being reasonable in price and the repair work was good. In fact, I considered it a good buy.
Q. Didn’t you meet with Mr. Nemuro at the Camellia coffee house?
A (Somewhat surprised expression). Yes, I did. Just about the time I left my job over something quite insignificant and had been doing temporary work and fronting for some time.
Q. What is fronting?
A. Fronting is when you go directly to an office and stand in front of the door to get temporary work. As a general rule, big companies don’t use the fronting system to hire drivers, but they do when they have to lay off a car because a driver’s sick or absent. You can’t ignore the loss. The fronters and odd jobbers are out to make money, so they don’t pay any attention to the law and work a full twenty-four-hour shift. If you go round to two or three places somebody’ll generally hire you.
Q. Does the Camellia have anything to do with fronting?
A (Slightly perplexed). I’m back at my old office and don’t have anything to do with the Camellia any more, but—it’s hard to say—some of the men are grateful to it because they don’t want to do anything against their fellow drivers.
Q. I would just like to get some clue as to what happened to Mr. Nemuro. In short, was the Camellia a private employment agency for temporary drivers?
A. Yes, it was. Besides having good coffee, it opened up early in the morning, so naturally it was a place the drivers hung around. That gave the owner the idea of the employment bit, I suppose.
Q. You said the drivers wanted to make money. About what is the difference in earning power as compared to what a regular man makes?
A. To make up for severance pay, set salary, and health benefits, they used a commission system for temporary work: from forty to forty-two percent of net income. If you work ten days a month you easily make forty to fifty thousand yen. I understand that those who specialize in temporary driving and know how to work tourist attractions, race tracks, and the big holidays make as much as a hundred thousand for three days’ work.
Q. Pretty good work.
A. If you’re young and unmarried and like flashy things, you don’t often have it so good. If you get sick or have your license suspended, well, it’s tough then, but if you can forget about tomorrow the world’s yours.
Q. Were there a lot of fellows like that in and out of the Camellia?
A. No, in Tokyo alone the taxi drivers amount to about eighty thousand. That may be a lot, but out of that number only a few came, say, twenty or thirty men. And furthermore, sixty per cent of the Camellia men were temporary like myself. No matter how easy it is, a man doesn’t live for ease alone, does he? Actually, those who used to work only for the money, though they looked carefree,
gradually became depressed. You get in the habit of wearing first-class uniforms, the best shoes, and imported wrist watches, but in the end you get quarrelsome and irritable. After you’ve been a temporary driver for five years, you even look different. You can tell at a glance.
Q. Did Mr. Nemuro seem to notice the business behind the Camellia?
A. I remember having spoken to him about it.
Q. Are there other places like the Camellia?
A. Very probably there are. A little less than twenty per cent of drivers are temporary men. Just the other day, there was an article in the newspaper saying that some unlicensed agency had been raided.
Q. Are they strictly regulated?
A. They’re in violation of the labor law. They’re treated the same as crooks, and that’s about it.
Q. Was the Camellia linked with some organization too?
A. I don’t know. I didn’t look that closely—and didn’t want to.
Q. Can’t we suppose the possibility that Mr. Nemuro was under some obligation to the Camellia or to some similar agency?
A (Surprised and thoughtfully serious). Well, Mr. Nemuro, if I remember correctly, was a division head in a legitimate business. If he was up to some shenanigans, then I could understand the obligation. Of course, there are all kinds of off-beat types among the drivers: men who used to be school-teachers, fishermen, priests, painters. It’s hard work physically, but it’s different from other work; the
relationship between the men is not troublesome. It’s a good job for someone who finds it congenial always to be his own master … no matter what crowd he may be in. But you can’t have aspirations for the future. All year long you keep running for other people’s purposes, and you get to feel pretty insecure, wondering where in the world you yourself are going to get. They used to have what they called pirate taxis, and they really were pirates. To some people on the outside they were considered regular men of the world sailing from one corner of the earth to the other, but they weren’t at all. Such a queer profession … A street’s a street whether it’s a noisy main street or a quiet back one. And a customer’s a customer, man, woman, rich or poor. The customer’s usually a piece of baggage mouthing trivialities more than another human being. Every day you run around jostling hundreds and thousands of beings, yet you get to long for them as if you were running through some uninhabited desert. Since I’m a fellow that such a life appeals to, no matter how disgusted I get I probably wouldn’t take another job if it was offered. You need that much more determination to plunge into this taxi business. If to start with you drive, say, a small private truck, you can probably get by by just shifting into another category of driver, but in Mr. Nemuro’s case, it would be a little hard unless he had a real reason to do that.
Q. Supposing that he had taken the plunge. What about it, would there be a good way of locating him?
A. That’s a hard question. Reputable firms do a
thorough character check at the time you take the job test, so the company wouldn’t look askance at such an investigation, but if it was some place like the Camellia …
Q. Is it difficult?
A. Between them and the drivers there’s a mutual agreement not to ask for names, to say nothing of one’s past.
Q. Even if I explained the circumstances?
A. If the circumstances are known they protect their men all the more.
Q. Supposing you were still working for the Camellia, even if you were asked to give information would you refuse?
A (After a moment’s thought). Why does the world take it for granted that there’s a right to pursue people? Someone who hasn’t committed any crime. I can’t understand how you can assume, as if it were a matter of course, that there is some right that lets you seize a man who has gone off of his own free will.
Q. By the same reasoning the one left behind might insist that there was no right to go away.
A. Going off is not a right but a question of will.
Q. Maybe pursuit is a matter of will too.
A. Then, I’m neutral. I don’t want to be anyone’s friend or enemy.
“H
OW BLUE
it is!” exclaimed the uniformed schoolboy in an amazed voice as he looked up at the sky. Following his gaze, his companions, taking deep breaths, their mouths open, narrowed their eyes as if abashed.
“Boy! That’s really blue!”
But with the deepening of the blue of the sky, the wind increased, and the boys held down their flapping coat hems with the briefcases they were carrying. With their free hand they grasped the brim of their caps and leaned into the wind, waiting for the railroad barrier gate to rise. Directly to the left of the crossing stood the interurban station. The ticket puncher’s box was higher than the street by only four concrete steps. Right at the top of the stairs was a newsstand, and on a projecting shelf newspapers and weekly magazines covered with a thin sheet of vinyl were set out side by side. A middle-aged woman with a thick turban around her head was struggling with hands, arms, and even her breasts to hold down the fluttering vinyl. The sky sparkled metallically as if dusted with aluminum, and across it clouds like lightly strewn cotton floss scuttled from the northwest toward the southeast. The sun slanted to the right and all the shadows lay perpendicular to the road.
In the sky, the clouds were sailing at full speed; on the
ground the wild rush of irregular pieces of paper caught the eye. It was unbelievable that so many could be scattered over the road. Of course, one never thinks of streets as being clean. But this was the first time I had seen wastepaper upstaging the scenery. Some were white, but most of them were weathered to the color of dead leaves and, having lain in windrows for some time, were covered with dust. Now the papers came dancing over the tracks in the middle of the street. Somehow they did not rise more than two yards from the ground, weaving and frisking between people and cars, again and again repeating their complex movement. They cheated one’s expectation, caught one by surprise, suggesting the swimming of certain kinds of fish. By them one was made aware that air was matter. Just as they seemed to be gliding smoothly over the surface of the ground, they suddenly changed and rose upward, flew horizontally, plastered themselves against the side of some car, then gently slid to the ground and pinned themselves beneath it. But when the car passed, they were no longer in view; unnoticed they had crossed to the other side of the street and were following along, puppylike, after pedestrians.