Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (34 page)

I walked down a dark street along a canal. Soon I was reminded of my adoptive parents' home in the suburbs. The two of them were surely waiting there each day for my return. My children probably were, too. But I dreaded the power that would naturally bind me if I went home to them. Upon the choppy waters of the canal a barge was moored at the embankment, a dim glow seeping from within. Even in a place like this, no doubt, families were living, men and women hating each other in order to love each other…. But, calling forth my own combative spirit once again, and feeling the whiskey, I went back to my hotel room.

I sat at the desk again, reading more
Mérimée
letters, and again I found them giving me the strength to go on living. When I learned, however, that the author had become a Protestant
⁴⁰
at the end of his life, I felt as if I were seeing the face behind the mask for the first time. He, too, was one of us: those who walk through the darkness. Through the darkness? Now
A Dark Night's Passing
began to frighten me. To forget my melancholy, I started to read
Conversations with Anatole France
, but this modern Pan, too, was another man who bore a cross…

An hour had gone by when a bellboy poked his head in to deliver a packet of letters. One was from a Leipzig publisher asking me to write an essay on the theme of “The Modern
Japanese Woman.” Why
me
of all people on a subject like that? The letter, in English, carried a handwritten P.S.: “We would be most pleased if your portrait of the Japanese woman were done like a Japanese ink painting, entirely in black and white.” This reminded me of the Black and White whiskey I had drunk earlier, and I ripped the letter to shreds. I opened another envelope at random and ran my eyes over the yellow letter paper that emerged from it. This one was from a young man I had never met. The words “your story, ‘Hell Screen'” could hardly fail to disturb me. The third letter I opened was from my nephew. At last I could turn to family matters with a momentary sense of relief. But even this letter delivered a blow at the end:

“I will be sending you a second-edition copy of
Red Lights
.”
⁴¹

Red lights! I fled from the room, convinced that I was being mocked. The corridor was empty. Leaning one hand against the wall, I made my way to the lobby. There I took a seat and decided that I would at least give myself the pleasure of a smoke. The cigarette pack for some inexplicable reason carried the brand name “Airship.” (I had been smoking nothing but “Star” since settling into this hotel.) Once again man-made wings presented themselves to my eyes. I called over a bellboy and ordered two packs of Star. If what he said was true, Star was the one brand they had sold out of.

“We
do
have Airship, though, Sir.”

I shook my head and surveyed the broad lobby. Across from me four or five foreigners were chatting around a table. One of them—a woman in a red dress—seemed to be glancing at me from time to time while speaking to her companions in low tones.

“Mrs. Townshead….” Some invisible something whispered to me. I had of course never heard of anyone named “Mrs. Townshead.” Even supposing it
was
the name of the woman over there—

I stood up and, fearing I might suddenly go mad, decided to return to my room.

Once there, I considered telephoning a mental hospital, but I knew that, for me, to enter such a place would be tantamount
to dying. After much indecision, I started reading
Crime and Punishment
to dispel my fear. The page to which I opened by chance, however, turned out to be from
The Brothers Karamazov
. Had I picked up the wrong book? I looked at the cover.
Crime and Punishment
—the book was
Crime and Punishment
, that was certain. The bindery had accidentally included pages from the wrong book. That I had, in turn, accidentally opened the book to those misbound pages: I sensed the agency of the finger of destiny and felt compelled to read that passage. Before I had read a single page, however, my entire body began to tremble. It was the scene in which the devil torments Ivan. Ivan, and Strindberg, and Maupassant—and, here in this room: me…

Sleep was the only thing that could save me. But all my narcotics were gone. I could hardly stand the thought of being kept awake in torment, but I generated enough desperate courage to have coffee brought to the room and started writing with frantic intensity. Two pages, five pages, seven pages, ten pages: the manuscript went on growing before my eyes. I was filling the world of this story with supernatural beasts, one of which was becoming my own self-portrait.
⁴²
Fatigue, however, began to cloud my brain. I finally left the desk and lay down on the bed. I slept for what must have been forty or fifty minutes. But when I became aware of someone whispering these words in my ear, I came suddenly awake and stood up:

“Le diable est mort.”

Beyond the window and its volcanic stone frame, the night was beginning to give way to a chilly-looking morning. I stood against the door and surveyed the empty room. Clouded in patches by the outside air, the glass of the window on the other side of the room seemed to display a tiny landscape: a yellow-tinged pinewood, and beyond it, the sea. I approached the window with some trepidation, only to discover that the elements that made up the landscape were simply the garden's withered grass and pond. The illusion had had its effect on me, though, for it called forth an emotion close to homesickness.

Stuffing my books and the manuscript into the bag on the desk, I made a decision: as soon as it turned nine o'clock, I
would call a certain magazine publisher and, one way or another, arrange for some money. Then I would go home.

Home at last, I spent the next three days in relative peace, thanks to my wife and child and to the power of narcotics. My second-floor study gave me a glimpse of the sea beyond the pinewoods. I spent only the mornings at my desk, listening to pigeons as I wrote. Aside from the pigeons and crows, we also had sparrows landing now and then on the veranda. This was another source of pleasure for me. Pen in hand, I would think of the phrase from the Chinese classics whenever I heard the birds: “The Sparrow of Joy
⁴³
enters the hall.”

One cloudy warmish afternoon I went to a variety store to buy some ink. The only kind on the shelf was sepia, the one color I have always been uncomfortable with. I gave up and left the store for a solitary stroll down the nearly empty street. A foreigner came swaggering in my direction, a man around forty who appeared to be near-sighted. This was the neighborhood Swede who suffered from persecution delusion and whose name was actually Strindberg. I had a physical reaction to him as he passed by.

This street was no more than three blocks long, but in the time it took me to cover that distance, the same dog passed by me four separate times.
⁴⁴
Half its face was black. As I turned into a side street I recalled the Black and White whiskey, and it occurred to me that “Strindberg” had just been wearing a
black and white necktie. I could not believe this had been a coincidence, and if it was
not
a coincidence—

I came to a momentary stop on the street, feeling as if my mind were still walking on alone. Next to the road, behind a wire fence, lay a glass bowl that someone had tossed away. It had a slight rainbow-like shimmer, and around its bottom was embossed a design that seemed to be of wings. Just then several sparrows flew down toward it from the branches of a pine tree. No sooner had they reached the bowl than they soared again upward as if making their escape together…

I went to the house of my wife's family and sat in a cane chair on the veranda by the garden. In a wire mesh enclosure in a corner of the garden, several white leghorns were quietly moving around. At my feet lay a black dog. Even as I struggled to solve unanswerable riddles, I went on chatting calmly (outwardly, at least) with my wife's mother and younger brother.

“Quiet here, isn't it?”

“Certainly quieter than Tokyo!”

“You mean, disturbing things happen even in a place like this?”

“We
are
in the real world here, after all.”

My mother-in-law said this with a smile, but she was right: even this place of refuge from the heat was part of the real world. I knew all too well what sins and tragedies had occurred here in the space of one short year. The doctor bent on murdering his patients by slow poisoning, the old woman who set fire to the home of her adopted son and his wife, the lawyer who tried to snatch his younger sister's assets: for me, seeing the homes of such people was always like seeing hell in human life itself.

“You have a crazy person living in the neighborhood, don't you?”

“Oh, you mean little H? He's not crazy. He just turned out to be an idiot,” she said.

“I'm sure he's got ‘schizophrenia.' The sight of him always gives me an eerie feeling. The other day—I don't know—I saw him bowing to the Horsehead Kannon.”
⁴⁵

“Gives you an eerie feeling? Come on, you've got to be tougher than that.”

“He's tougher than
I
am,” my wife's younger brother
⁴⁶
interjected in his usually hesitant manner, sitting up in his futon in the room opened to the veranda. He wore several days' growth of beard.

“Even tough guys have tender spots,” I said.

“Oh dear, that's too bad,” my mother-in-law said. I had to smile at this, which brought a smile from my brother-in-law as well. He gazed off at the pinewoods far beyond the fence and spoke in dreamy tones. (Still recovering from an illness, this young man often looked to me like pure spirit free of flesh.)

To me he said, “You can be strangely detached from all things human one minute and the next thing I know you have these incredibly intense human desires, and…”

“Well sure, I can be good and the next thing you know I'm bad.”

“No, it's not so much good and bad as that you've got these opposites in you that are…”

“You mean, like a grownup with a child inside?”

“No, not that, either. I don't know, I can't put it very well, but…. maybe it's like the two poles of electricity. Sort of like having the two opposites in one.”

What startled us both at this point was the violent roar of an airplane. I looked up to see a plane all but touching the pine trees above us as it soared upward. It was an unusual model, its single set of wings painted yellow. The chickens and the family dog, also startled by the sound, scattered in all directions. The dog howled as it crawled under the veranda with its tail between its legs.

“That plane might crash,” I said.

“No, it'll be fine. By the way, have you ever heard of airplane disease?”

Instead of speaking, I answered with a shake of my head as I lit a cigarette.

“I've heard that people who fly airplanes are always breathing the air up high, so after a while they can't stand breathing the air down here…”

After leaving my mother-in-law's house, I walked through the utterly still pinewoods, feeling ever more depressed. Why
had that airplane flown directly over me instead of someone else? Why did the hotel have only Airship cigarettes? Struggling with painful questions like these, I chose a deserted road to walk down.

Beyond the low sand dunes, the sea was a cloudy stretch of gray. A swing set without swings jutted upward on a dune. It looked like a gallows to me. There were even a few crows perched on the topmost pole. They all looked at me but gave no sign of flying off. Far from it: the middle crow lifted its big beak heavenward and cawed exactly four times.

Following a sandy bank with withered grass, I turned down a path where there were many summer homes. Among more tall pines on the right side there should have been the white presence of a two-story wood-frame Western-style house. (A good friend of mine liked to call it “The House Where Springtime Lives.”) Instead there was only a bathtub perched on a concrete slab.
Fire
, I thought at once, and I tried not to look as I walked by. Just then I saw a man on a bicycle coming straight at me. He wore a dark brown cap, and he was hunched over the handlebars, his eyes fixed strangely straight ahead. For a moment I thought I recognized the face of my sister's dead husband, and I turned into a side path before he could reach me. But in the very center of this new path lay the rotting corpse of a mole, belly upward.

Something was out to get me. The thought increased my anxiety with every step I took. Then, one at a time, translucent gears began to block my field of vision. Afraid that my final moments were nearing, I yet managed to walk on with head erect. The number of gears increased, and they began to spin ever faster. At the same time the interwoven branches of the pines on the right began to look as if I were seeing them through finely cut glass. I felt my heartbeat rising and kept trying to make myself stand still at the side of the road, but someone seemed to be pushing me from behind: stopping was out of the question…

Thirty minutes later I was on my back on the floor in my upstairs room, eyes shut tight, struggling with the pain of a violent headache. Behind my closed eyelids I began to see a
single wing with silver feathers overlapping like fish scales. The image was projected on my retinas with perfect clarity. I opened my eyes, and shut them again once I had confirmed that no such image existed on the ceiling. Again the silver wing shone in the darkness. I remembered that the radiator cap of the taxi I had just taken had had wings on it.

Just then someone clattered up the stairs and clattered right down again. When I realized the “someone” was my wife, the shock of it roused me from the floor and I immediately went down and stuck my head into the gloomy family room at the bottom of the stairs. My wife had flung herself face down on the matted floor, trying to catch her breath, shoulders heaving.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing, I'm fine,” she said. With a great effort she raised her face from the mat and forced herself to smile as she went on to explain, “It wasn't any one thing. I just had this feeling that you were going to die, Papa, and—”

This was the most terrifying experience of my life.