The Lake (15 page)

“It must be lovely when the cherries are in bloom,” I said.

“That’s the most amazing event of the year here,” Mino said.

He wasn’t comfortable enough with me to come right out and invite me to visit then, but his manner made me feel as if he had.

Then we climbed the old stairway to the shrine, where the spring was.

Turning to look back when we reached the top, we were so high that the lake looked like an adorable miniature of itself, ensconced in a ring of greenery. The boats, lined up in a neat row, were like toy boats.

The spring water was cold and tasted slightly salty and hard when I scooped some up and drank it.

There was no one in the shrine; the only sound to be heard in the pure, cleanly swept space was the calling of birds.

It occurred to me that Nakajima and his mother had probably come here for water every day, too. I pictured the two of them then, living their lives, clinging to each other.

They were so hurt and they had lost so much that they no longer knew what was what, but the need they felt for each other was still love. No one could deny that.

Mino spoke. “Perhaps to your eyes, Chihiro, this lake looks like the kind of scenery you’d encounter in a dream—beautiful, ineffable.

“But that’s because you saw it for the first time through Nobu’s eyes.

“We have all kinds of days here, just like anywhere. The lake has all sorts of different faces. And so it’s always fresh. Some days the sky is clear and the water shines so brightly you can’t even look at it, and it lifts your spirit; some days it’s plastered with boats. Sometimes I’ll just sit staring at the snow melting away into nothing on the surface of the lake, and some days when it’s overcast, even the trees in our garden look dingy. It’ll be so hazy that our bicycles look like junk.

“The truth is, time hasn’t really stopped for us. Things are constantly changing, even if the change happens so slowly you don’t notice. I go to that big supermarket in front of the station and wander around looking like a kid, buying packages of curry rice mix with anime characters on them, collecting coupons. I buy things like buckets. Or a toilet brush. Ordinary stuff. And I cart it all home on my bike. You see that …” Mino pointed to a little general store that was visible a short distance from the lake. “That store over there. The man who runs it is part of our neighborhood association, so if we run into each other at the supermarket he gives me a lift in his car. His relatives are in Shizuoka, and in the winter they send him boxes of
mikan
. He brings us a lot, every year.

“But we don’t get any friendlier with him than that.

“The priest at this shrine is a relative of Nobu’s, but whenever we have business with him we just smile back and forth—we never have meals, or go out together. It’s extremely rare for Chii and I to really grow close to someone. People are afraid of us, because we have a different sort of smell. And people scare us, too. But we’re living our lives, just like everyone. We
live
in this place. Our lives may be warped, but we live them all the same. One day to the next.”

“I know,” I said. “And I’m sure that someday Nakajima will realize that, too. That you’re not just a part of his past. He was desperate to see you, even though it hurt him, even though it made him sick just thinking about coming here—but he had to find a way, right? That’s how badly he wanted to see you. And he’ll realize that if he feels that way, it’s okay, he can come. I think he’ll come visit more often now. Now that he’s done it once, he’ll be okay. You’ll see more of Nakajima. All the time, again and again.”

Mino nodded without speaking.

Then he said, “I couldn’t say it well earlier when you showed me the pictures, but … thank you. Thanks for painting us. Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we’re like ghosts, the two of us, even though we’re not supposed to exist, we are alive.”

I had seen Mino and Chii’s mother on TV ages ago. She looked just like them.

She was notorious. People knew her as a terrible mother. She had joined a group that had done horrible things, and she had taken her children with her.

I don’t remember them having a father. They had been born out of wedlock. Maybe their mother didn’t know who the father was. The news was full of all kinds of scandalous reports about her back then. And if Mino and Chii’s mother was presented as an incarnation of evil, Nakajima’s mother was the incarnation of everything good.

Things are never that simple, and I don’t see why it had to be reported that way.

I must have been in elementary school at the time.

If Nakajima had shown me a photograph of his mother instead of that wire rack, I’m sure I would have recognized her immediately. He probably knew that, and so he didn’t.

Nakajima’s mother was always pleading.

“Please return my son to me! I know he’s alive. I’m his mother, I can tell!”

Every chance she had, she would be on TV, in magazines, on the radio, at rallies. She was always there, telling the same story. Telling people about the day her son was kidnapped.

Nakajima was a very bright child—too bright, in fact. He was a little different from other children. And so he would go and spend time at a special school. The school had a summer camp in Izu, and he had been going there, and then one evening he didn’t come back. Until then, his mother explained, again and again, their family had been perfectly happy, and there was nothing at all unusual in their lives, nothing that wasn’t as it should be.

Not long after that, the group began turning up in the news. It wasn’t quite a religion: their goal was to live in accordance with certain principles, and create a new, ideal humanity. Naturally there was a sort of leader, and people gathered to listen to him preach, and then they established a commune deep in the mountains that was very nearly self-sufficient. That’s the kind of group it was.

Reports about this organization circulated so widely that even someone like me, who never watched the news, knew its name, if little else. That’s how notorious it was. After the kidnappings came to light, the group may have disbanded, or maybe it still lives on secretly in some form.

The truth is that in this world, things like that happen all the time. I heard all sorts of wild tales from all kinds of customers at my mom’s club. Many were almost beyond belief; many had to do with what was, in essence, kidnapping.

Of course, on some level I’m hardly one to be held up as a paragon of normalcy. After all, before I turned ten, I started going to my mom’s club and doing some of the stuff a hostess does, so I was raised in a pretty unconventional way. Sure, I was protected by my mom and dad, since their influence kept customers from trying anything funny with me, but if I’d wanted to explore different avenues, my environment would have made anything possible. No matter how high-class you aspire to be, in the entertainment business you’re always trying to create a space where people can unload their irritations and frustrations, and I’m sure I must have been influenced by that in some ways. That shadowy something is here inside me, just a little. The whiff of something purple in the night, the sweet taste of darkness … it’s rubbed off on me, on my body. Things were relatively okay at my mom’s club because her customers weren’t too bad, but even so I know just how slimy people can be, and how people like that are during the daytime. They don’t get slimy at night because they’re drunk, they get slimy because they’re already slimy to begin with.

I remembered hearing people chatting at the club about that incident, and watching reports on the TV there. Only it had gotten all mixed up in my mind with other similar stories, and I couldn’t pick out any episodes in my memory that related specifically to Nakajima.

Nakajima’s mother never, ever gave up. She would go on every TV show and make herself available to every magazine, doing missing-person shows and having psychics look for her son, doing news programs, special features … it’s not an exaggeration to say that there was never a day when you didn’t see her somewhere. She went on putting herself out there on a regular basis, refusing to let people forget.

More than the event itself, she was what made the most powerful impression. She always spoke extremely calmly, only said what she was certain of, hardly ever shed a tear, and always looked straight ahead.

I could tell that until she found her son, nothing she ate would ever taste good, when she slept her dreams would always be nightmares, never light and easy, and no scenery would ever move her—she would just keep staring ahead into the distance, at her absent son. She would go on trying to connect.

Her endurance was astonishing. It was like she was reeling in a tiny, tiny thread, slender as a cobweb, which only occasionally caught the light, and she would never miss it when it did—that’s how focused she was. It was love, and willpower. You could see it in her expression, as if it were painted there. She had this look on her face that told you all she could do was keep gazing at that one point, holding on to her faith, because if she ever so much as wondered if her son might be dead, then he really would die. Her face could have been the model for every mother in this world, or the face of a bodhisattva.

Then, finally, they found Nakajima. All the energy his mother had devoted to the search, distributing flyers all across the country, putting up photographs, going on TV until she was completely worn out—it had paid off.

A boy who had escaped from the group was picked up in a village at the foothills of a mountain. Someone who had seen Nakajima’s mother on TV wondered if maybe this might be her son, and called the police.

It was such major news at the time, I can’t understand why I didn’t remember it, even just a little. I guess I never imagined it could have anything to do with my future.

Wow, that’s awful, how terrible, I wonder what I’d do if it were me?
I must have entertained these thoughts for about a second, and then they vanished. After all, I had a mom and dad, and my life was just beginning. It’s amazing to realize how ignorant I was. And how innocent.

Things keep coming around and around in this world, it’s all crammed violently together, two parts of the same skin. But I didn’t realize that.

I doubt I’ll ever understand how the three of them feel, no matter how long I live.

And ironically, it’s that inability that puts them at ease.

So there’s actually a reason for someone like
me
to exist in this world. Even before I start thinking about stuff like that, whether there is or isn’t a reason, in some place that exists prior to such thoughts, an enormous wheel is spinning, and I’m caught up inescapably in its motion.

I’m its slave, almost. I’m free to think what I like, but it’s all settled in advance.

Ever perceptive, Nakajima knew it as soon as he saw me that evening.

“Ah.”

He must have sensed the turmoil in my heart as I stepped through the door.

Because that’s what he said, the second I took my shoes off and looked up.

And then he tried to act like he didn’t know, going on with his cleaning.

Nakajima was extraordinarily finicky what it came to keeping things neat, and he cleaned the apartment so frequently it made me feel kind of guilty. When I came home, everything would seem weirdly sterile—even the edges of the books were aligned. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d drawn the winning number in this relationship. What’s more, once he had started cleaning, he seemed unable to stop. Maybe that’s what kept him going on this occasion, too. Either way, he went on quietly cleaning.

By then, I no longer felt like I could go on interacting with him the same way.

As long as it had remained a mystery, I could have dealt with it—no matter how enormous a mystery it became. Now that matters had gotten more specific, my imagination began supplying smells and textures.

There’s a huge difference between “Something really, really terrible happened to me once” and “There was a period in my life when I was kidnapped and brainwashed.”

Everything fell into place. The terror that physical contact inspired in him, his fear of seeing his friends from those days, his mother’s seemingly unreasonable concern for him, his ability to cut his mind off from his body when he studied—all the delicious uncertainty was gone now, and in its place was a dank, oppressive weight.

You know
, I told myself,
I’m not sure I can bear to hear the details—what his life there was actually like, why sex became so frightening to him. And maybe I’ll never get over that
.

After a long time, I asked him, “Why did you say ‘Ah’ before?”

He stopped his cleaning, surprisingly, and looked at me.

And after that he was the same old Nakajima I knew and was crazy about, just as pathetic and as cool as always. The curly hair at the back of his neck, his slightly stooped posture, the way he went around the house so quietly—it was him, the same as ever. His palms, too, felt just as dry as they always had.

That set me at ease. We had a history here, together, in this apartment. That history was short, but it had nothing to do with his past.

It was so flimsy, a puff of air would send it flying, but it was real.

“I thought you’d figured something out,” Nakajima said honestly. “Something about my past, I mean.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s happened with lots of people before—I can see it in people’s eyes,” Nakajima said. “And I was always on pins and needles about that, wondering when you’d realize. Of course, part of me wanted you to find out.… Do I disgust you now? Do you want to break up?”

I took Nakajima’s hand in mine and pressed it so hard, so hard against my heart that I was probably about to break his bones.

“Don’t say that,” I said.

I used the sort of tone I might have used with a son.

And like a child Nakajima mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and we went back to our lives.

I cooked dinner, and Nakajima continued cleaning. We worked in silence, like people the night before a move. Like we were starting life over again. Or like we had been doing this for a century already. Setting all kinds of things aside, willing to go back to the first days, if that’s what it took, like Adam and Eve.