To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (18 page)

Presently it came. Keitaro thought that he could avoid being suspicious if he deliberately got on after they did, so he lagged behind the others. The woman stepped up onto the motorman's platform, almost treading on her long coat trailing behind her. But, unexpectedly, the man, contrary to Keitaro's thought that he would immediately follow her, showed no sign of doing so. He remained stationary, his hands in his cloak pockets.

Only at that moment did Keitaro realize that the man had escorted her only to see her off. Actually, Keitaro was more interested in the woman. If the two had to separate, he wished of course to abandon the man and stand by her to know her destination. It was, however, only about the conduct of the man in the black fedora, not the woman, that he had been entrusted to report on by Taguchi, so he restrained himself from leaping onto the streetcar platform.

From the motorman's platform she gave a little salute with her eyes and disappeared within the car. As it was a winter night, all the windows were closed. She did not take the trouble to open one and lean out. Nonetheless, the man remained motionless, waiting for the car to start. It began to move, electric power carrying the lighted windows southward as if it had recognized that there was no further occasion for an exchange of goodbyes between the two. The man took the cigar from his mouth and threw it to the ground. Then turning around, he went back to the concourse that forked into three streets, this time heading left and stopping by the foreign goods shop. The streetcar stop there was fresh in Keitaro's memory, the place where the stranger had run up against him, causing him to drop the bamboo walking stick.

Keitaro stealthily followed his man. As he looked at various items in which he had little interest—neckties in the new fashion, top hats, blankets with fancy stripes—he thought that this furtiveness was taking the fun out of spying. He was not ready to say he was tired of the work, but now that the woman was gone, he suddenly began to feel to a much greater degree the constraints imposed on him, although they ought to have been the same as before. Since he had been asked to observe the man in the black fedora for only two hours after his alighting from the Ogawamachi stop, he had already done his duty, so he would sooner return to his boardinghouse and go to bed.

The streetcar that the man seemed to be waiting for came. He laid his long hand on the iron rod at the entrance and lifted his body adroitly onto the car, which had not yet come to a complete stop. Keitaro, who had been hesitating until then, suddenly thought he hadn't a moment to lose. He jumped up into the car. It was not that crowded, so there was enough room for the passengers to see each other's faces. As soon as Keitaro entered the car, he attracted the attention of several who were already seated, among them the man in the black fedora. In the man's eyes Keitaro saw a surprised recognition, but nothing of the suspicion of being spied on. Relieved, he chose a seat on the same side.

He wondered where the streetcar would take him and, looking toward the front of the car, saw "For Edogawa" written in black characters. Each time the car came to a halt, he stole a furtive glance at the man, prepared if the other should transfer to do the same. The man was looking mostly either straight before him or down on his lap, his hands all the while in his pockets. His demeanor seemed to be that of a person lost in musing over something without actually thinking about anything in particular. But as the streetcar was nearing Kudanshita, he began glancing out the window, often craning his long neck, as if trying to ascertain something. Keitaro too was drawn into peering through the window into the obscurity outside. Presently, above the noise of the running vehicle, his ears caught the sound of raindrops striking the windowpanes. He looked at the bamboo cane he was carrying, wishing it were an umbrella instead.

Ever since they had been in the restaurant, Keitaro had taken notice of the man's personality and also of the look in his eyes, which seemed to indicate that he had no doubts about the world around him. The result was that Keitaro suddenly thought it much more sensible, even though it was late now, to speak frankly to the man and to report to Taguchi only those facts which the man himself admitted, rather than trying to gather material under such restricted conditions. With this thought in mind, Keitaro began to devise the best means of introducing himself.

Meanwhile, the streetcar came to the end of the line. The rain seemed to be getting heavier and heavier, for when the car halted, the sound of a downpour suddenly attacked Keitaro's eardrums. The man in the fedora muttered to himself, "What a bother," and lifted the collar of his cloak and rolled up his trouser cuffs. Keitaro used his walking stick for support as he rose from his seat.

As soon as the man got off into the rain, he caught one of the rickshaws coming up for hire. Keitaro hired another at once. "Where to, sir?" his rickshawman asked as he lifted the shafts. Keitaro ordered him to follow the rickshaw ahead of them. The man shouted and began running desperately.

When the rickshawman had run the straight road to a point below the police box on Yarai Slope, he again asked which way Keitaro wanted to go. The other rickshaw was nowhere to be seen. Keitaro raised himself from under the rickshaw hood, but not a trace of the other was in sight. He was at a loss about where to direct the rickshaw in the driving rain, his walking stick held firmly against the rickshaw floor.

  The Report

When Keitaro opened his eyes, he thought it odd to find himself in the six-mat room to which he was so accustomed. All the events of the previous day seemed real. Yet they also seemed like an incoherent dream. To describe it more exactly, they seemed like a "real dream." They were also accompanied by the memory that he had acted on the streets in a state of intoxication or rather— this was the feeling that was strongest in him—that the world itself had been overflowing with an aura of intoxication. The streetcars and their stops were filled with it. The jewelry store, the tanner's shop, and the signalman with his red and green flags were imbued with the same atmosphere. The second floor of the restaurant with its light blue paint and the gentleman with the mole between his eyebrows and the fair-complexioned woman who had taken seats there, all were wrapped in it. The unnamed place in their talk and the coral the man had promised the woman, these too were endowed with a kind of ecstasy. And what was saturated most with this feeling and what had played the greatest part was the walking stick. And that moment in which he had been perplexed about which direction to take—the bamboo stick in his hand against the floor of the rickshaw, the rain beating against the rickshaw hood—that moment had been a scene just before the fall of the curtain in which this ecstatic feeling had reached its zenith and he himself had seemed like a person possessed.

At that moment, when he had looked around at the wet street faintly illuminated by shop lights, at the small police box that at the top of the slope seemed smaller in the rain, and at the clump of trees to the left silhouetted dark and dim, he had wondered if this were to be the result of his day's efforts. He remembered that he had been able to do nothing except order the rickshawman to turn the shafts around and head toward Hongo, the direction least likely to be taken by the other rickshaw.

Now in bed looking up at the ceiling, Keitaro made the previous day's world rotate again and again before his eyes. His head and eyes were still affected by this hung-over feeling as the pictures in his mind emerged one after another like thread spun by a silkworm, but finally the drifting images bothered him so much that he could hardly endure them any longer. Yet they continued to spin of their own accord. He began to entertain the suspicion that sane as he was, he might actually be possessed by something. Thus he could not help recalling the walking stick.

The man and woman were as clear to him as if he were gazing at a picture of them. Their clothing and their way of walking, to say nothing of their faces—everything was reflected in clear images in the mirror of his memory. Yet he had the feeling that the two of them were actually in some faraway land from which they were reaching the pupils of his eyes with vivid colors and distant shapes as though they were right nearby. Somewhere in his mind Keitaro had the feeling that this strange influence came from the cane itself. When he had passed through the hall of his boardinghouse last night after paying the exorbitant rickshaw fare, he had unconcernedly carried the cane up to his own room and then, with a serious look on his face as if he had concluded that the stick was not to be kept where anyone could see it, had flung it behind the wicker trunk in the interior of his closet before he went to bed.

But this morning the snakehead did not seem to have all that much significance. It seemed even less so when the practical problem occurred to him that he had to meet Taguchi soon and report the results of his espionage. He was definitely conscious of his having been intoxicated by a kind of atmosphere for one single day from noon to evening, but when it came now to the question to putting the results of his activities into a consistent, orderly report to be made use of in a concrete way by an ordinary mortal, he hardly knew whether the task he had undertaken was a success or a failure. Consequently, it was not clear whether he was actually indebted to the cane or not. Still in bed, he again traced the course of the previous day's events. He seemed to feel indebted to the cane, and he also thought he wasn't indebted to it in the least.

At any rate, he resolved that the first thing he had to do was to get rid of the devilish aftereffects. Flinging aside the covers, he sprang up and went down to the washroom, where he doused his head with icy water. He felt he had shaken yesterday's dream from the roots of his hair; in fact, he felt as if he had returned to the world of ordinary men. His spirits soaring, he bounded back up to the third floor. Flinging open the window in his room, he stood erect facing east, and while bathed from head to foot in the rays of the sun high above the woods at Ueno, he inhaled a series of deep breaths. After thus spurring his mind on to normal activity, he lit a cigarette and turned over his thoughts, endeavoring to be as practical as he could in arranging the items of the affair in proper order for his report to Taguchi.

When Keitaro boiled down the previous night's business to its essentials, it seemed to him that he had not come away with any substantial item likely to be of use to Taguchi, so he felt he had but a slim hope of success. But he sensed a certain urgency, as if the other party were expecting an account that very day, so he telephoned Taguchi's house and asked if it would be all right to go there immediately. After being kept waiting a considerably long time, the same houseboy returned with the answer that he could come over. Without a moment's delay, Keitaro left for Uchisaiwaicho.

Two rickshaws were waiting in front of Taguchi's gate, and at the entrance to the house there was a pair each of shoes and wooden clogs. The room Keitaro was shown into this time was, unlike that of his last visit, Japanese style. It was a drawing room of about ten mats, its wide alcove containing a pair of large hanging scrolls. He was served tea in a deep cup by the houseboy, who also brought in a small brazier hollowed out of paulownia and who offered a soft cushion as well. No woman appeared in the room.

Keitaro sat formally rigid in the middle of the large room as he waited uneasily for the approach of the master's footsteps. Evidently, Taguchi's business consultation was not yet finished; it seemed to Keitaro that he was being made to wait an eternity. Having nothing to do, he imagined the value of the aged brownish scrolls, passed his hand around the edge of the small brazier, and placing both hands properly on the lap of his
hakama,
tried to look ceremonious even though no one else was there. Everything around him was neatly arranged; he could not easily make himself feel at home due to the novelty of being in such a room. Finally, he thought of taking down what looked like a picture album from a shelf in the alcove, but its beautiful glittering cover seemed to declare that it was not an embellishment to be touched, so he dared not put forth his hand.

After a little less than an hour, the man who had tried Keitaro's patience finally came out from the Western-style drawing room.

"Sorry about the delay. My caller simply wouldn't leave."

Keitaro gave a short greeting which seemed appropriate enough for Taguchi's apology; in addition, he made a polite bow. He was about to speak immediately on the events of the preceding day, but at just that moment he was again puzzled about what item would be most convenient to report first and how to say it, so he let his chance of broaching the subject slip. Moreover, Taguchi, while conveying from the first through his voice and manner an air of apparent busyness, was not at all hasty in asking about the results of the detective work, as if somewhere in his mind he kept a storehouse of leisure. Although he spoke with apparent interest, he merely went on and on about such things as whether or not the temperature had reached the freezing point in Hongo, whether the wind blew forcefully against the third floor of the boardinghouse, and whether or not the place had its own phone. Keitaro proceeded with answers just satisfying the inquiries, but while this apparently meaningless talk was carried on, he was vaguely aware that it was to his behavior that Taguchi seemed to be paying secret attention. But why Taguchi should be regarding him so scrupulously was utterly beyond his comprehension.

"Well, how did you fare yesterday?" Taguchi asked abruptly. "Did it go well?"

From the first Keitaro had expected to be questioned in this way, but since an honest reply such as "I'm not at all certain" would only be half-hearted and therefore impolite to Taguchi, he said after faltering a bit, "Yes, I finally detected the person you informed me about."

"Did he have a mole in the middle of his forehead?"

Keitaro replied he had recognized a small protuberance, a black spot in that area.

"Was his clothing as I told you? A salt-and-pepper overcoat and a black fedora?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Then there's no doubt about it. He got off at Ogawamachi between four and five, right?"

"Perhaps a little later than that."

"About how many minutes?"

"I don't know, but it seemed considerably past five."

"Considerably past? If so, you needn't have waited for him. Since I deliberately stated that the time would be between four and five, wasn't it as much your obligation to be gone after five? Why didn't you go home right then and let me have the information just as it was?"

Keitaro had never dreamed that this man who had been speaking with such quiet good humor up to then would suddenly be giving him a harsh reprimand.

Until this moment the figure before Keitaro's eyes had been that of an easy-mannered, lower-town master, but when he suddenly overwhelmed him with a severity reminiscent of that which a thoroughly disciplined soldier would receive, his mind was thrown off balance. Had they been good friends, Keitaro might have said in return, "I did it for you," but those words would have served absolutely no purpose in this instance.

"It was simply for my own convenience that I remained standing there even after the time was up."

No sooner had Keitaro answered with these words than Taguchi's stern manner changed. "That was quite convenient for me too," he said with good humor, adding, "but what was this convenience of yours?"

Keitaro hesitated.

"Well, you needn't tell me. It's your own concern. If you don't want to talk about it, I can do without it."