by Kōbō Abe
“‘Those people’? Then you do know something you’re not letting on.”
“Oh, they’re nothing to worry about. The Broom Brigade, they’re called—an old people’s club.”
“The broom what?” The insect dealer, who’d been sitting stiffly, stuck out his paw. His glasses slipped askew. His right eye was watering.
“The Broom Brigade. They do volunteer work, sweeping and cleaning, as a public service. Their average age is seventy-five.”
“And they live somewhere in this quarry?”
“No, they probably just use it for their garbage dump. In any case, they’re over two miles from here. You remember, don’t you, Komono?” I said, using his name for the first time. With some trepidation at this change in our relationship, I went on, “On the shortcut, that slight outcropping of rock—”
“That’s it! It was the smell of garbage,” interrupted the girl, her mind still on the same track.
“But why would a cleaning brigade come spying around here?” The shill too had a one-track mind. “And whoever was doing the running wasn’t any seventy-five years old, either.”
“It might have been someone from the supervisory squad. I gather they use younger people for supervisors.”
“Is it a large battalion?”
“Thirty-five to forty men. They work only late at night, so hardly anybody’s ever seen them. They go around in a straight line, swinging their brooms in time to martial songs.”
“Sounds creepy.”
“As far as I know, nobody’s ever complained about the noise. They sing in hushed voices, so the sound must get mixed in with the sighing of the wind and the swish of their brooms.”
Layer upon layer of heavy, relaxed inebriation settled over everyone but the girl.
13
THE BROOM BRIGADE WAS
WRITTEN UP IN THE PAPER
The Broom Brigade’s been written up in the local paper; everybody from this area knows about them. It all began with a movement to collect empty beverage cans, organized by a few elderly citizens. They attracted a growing following, and the movement began earning a name for itself as a way of getting old people reinvolved in society and giving them new purpose in life. Gradually it became more structured, with uniforms and a badge showing two crossed bamboo brooms. Clad in dark blue uniforms like combat suits, the oldsters parade around in the middle of the night, when ordinary people are in bed, and sweep the streets till dawn. They work in the wee hours because generally old people are early risers anyway, and because they don’t want to get in people’s way. Imagine them marching abreast in a single row, softly intoning an old war song and swinging their brooms in rhythm, casting a shadow under the streetlights like some monster centipede creeping through the night.
There definitely is something creepy about them. The matter of the martial air was debated in the city council, but the issue was laid to rest when one councillor declared that the words, beginning “Here we bide, hundreds of miles from home …” expressed the universal grief of soldiers everywhere, and that to lump this with the “Man-of-war March” was a piece of left-wing radical hokum. The brigade members’ practice of soliciting donations in areas they had swept, moreover, won acceptance with the reasonable argument that it’s only wholesome good neighborliness to give a helping hand to senior citizens seeking to build their own retirement home. As a matter of fact, the city of Kitahama is exceptionally clean. You can walk the streets barefoot without dirtying your feet. Not only that: the city has become a leader in cutting the use of synthetic detergents. How could the authorities fail to be pleased?
“What a disgusting bunch of old men,” snorted the insect dealer. “Must be something wrong with them. Doesn’t sound normal to me.” He slipped down from his perch on the parapet, came over by the table, and rested his cheek in one hand. In the depths of his glasses his gaze flickered. “Basically,” he went on, “nobody who enjoys cleaning up can be worth much. I hate it, myself. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’—you can take that motto and stuff it.”
“Besides,” said the shill, “there’s something disturbing about the whole thing. We don’t know beans about them, and here they’ve been staring up our asses.” As he spoke, he pulled the bowstring on the crossbow and fixed an arrow in place. “What I can’t figure out is where in hell did that spy disappear to? It was like a subway platform out there, steep cliffs on right and left, up to the edge of the water. The only way to escape would be to dive in.”
“Then he must have swum across,” said the insect dealer, sinking to a sitting position on the floor. I did not at all like where he was: from there he could peer though the table legs at the girl, sitting cross-legged on the chaise longue, and see right between her legs.
“Impossible.” The shill too seemed to take notice of the situation. All of a sudden he took aim with the crossbow and put his finger on the trigger. “The other side of the river was a sheer wall, straight up to the ceiling.”
“Put that thing down,” said the insect dealer. Instinctively he snatched up the Uzi that was leaning against the parapet, cocked it, and rose to a crouch. “Save it for when you’re sober.”
A thin smile on his lips, the shill ignored this and pulled the trigger. The arrow missed its target for the second time, skimming by the beer can and ricocheting with a dry scrape somewhere off in the distance.
“Look who’s talking,” he said mockingly to the insect dealer. “Aren’t you a little old to be playing with toys? Or is a gun freak like you happy to get his hands on anything?”
The insect dealer lowered his gun without comment. But he made no move to go back under the table. The girl started to speak, then clamped her mouth shut.
Flicking the bowstring, the shill added, “Captain, what do you say? Shall we head back to that river for a look?”
“Too late now,” I said. “Better wait till the sun comes up.”
“Underground, what difference does it make?” he protested. “There’s no day or night in a cave, is there?” He slurped up the rest of his noodles and started in on his fourth beer. “My mental faculties are sharpest when I’m drinking, believe it or not. Although noodles and sardines make a hell of a combination.”
“No need to go searching them out, you know,” said the insect dealer, picking up the last sardine by its tail and curling his tongue around it. “If they have something on their minds, they’ll be back.”
“No,” said the shill, “we’ve got to take the initiative. Don’t forget, that place where they’re dumping their garbage is right next door. Who do they think they are, anyway, cleaning up the streets at our expense?”
“And it’s not just ordinary garbage.” The girl clung tenaciously to her theme. “That smell is from some harmful substance, I’m positive. You know they say you can make a lot of money cleaning up industrial wastes.”
“That’s right,” agreed the shill. “Whoever heard of building an old people’s home out of the proceeds from street sweeping? It would never be enough.” The two of them seemed to be growing in rapport. “Some ticket for survival,” he wound up sardonically. “Now it turns out we’re being slowly poisoned by toxic fumes!”
A snail covered with wire netting full of gaping holes, imagining itself shielded by a giant shell of some superstrong alloy: how soft-headed can you get! There was a pop in the vicinity of my lower eyelids like that of a tiny balloon. My vision clouded, as tears sprang to my eyes. I remembered having had the same experience when Inototsu locked me up in this quarry, chained like a dog. I read somewhere that there are three kinds of tear glands, each used with a different degree of frequency. These tears probably came from a gland I rarely used; that would explain the popping noise, as if the tear ducts were clogged from lack of use.
“I’ll bet you it was a spy who came to see if the captain was dead yet or not,” said the girl. “Right about now they must be in a tizzy as they find out that (a) the captain is still alive, and (b) he’s got three new people
in with him.” She stared in sudden surprise at my face. “What’s the matter—are you crying?”
“Of course not.” Ashamed to wipe them away, I let the tears trickle down the wings of my nose.
“The captain has no reason to cry,” said the insect dealer, eyes tightly shut, leaning on the table with his elbows planted far apart.
“They could be tears of mortification,” said the shill with emphasis, spraying a mist of saliva. “A ship’s captain can’t very well sit back and watch while his air supply is slowly poisoned, after all.”
“I told you before—I’m going to close off that passageway just as soon as I can get to it.”
“No, you’ve got to act now. Look, that guy came poking his nose in here only a little while ago. What’s the Broom Brigade anyway? Just a bunch of decrepit old street cleaners. Let’s go have it out with them!”
“Or we could simply assert our territorial rights, much as it might inconvenience them,” said the insect dealer, crawling up on the table like a wounded sea slug. “They look on it as a garbage dump, but we can put the space to far more significant use. Remember, Japan is a very small country, suffering from acute space deficiency, getting worse all the time… .”
“What are you going to do, plant a flag?” The girl kept staring curiously at my tears.
“Why not?” said the shill. “That or something else.” He spoke with great assurance, driving his words home. “The thing to do is to see that they give us service at a special rate, or pay us for the space they’re using. Somehow we’ve got to draw a firm line.”
Despite small individual differences, overall it appeared that everybody but me was in favor of some form of association with the Broom Brigade. I had a sense of double defeat: first the spy and then, as if that weren’t humiliation enough, the fact that it was the shill, not me, who discovered him. The Broom Brigade, for its part, having had its spy exposed, would surely be devising some swift countermeasure. If a confrontation was inevitable, what better time than now, when I was flanked by two self-appointed bodyguards?
I decided to let the girl score a few points. “I give up—you’re right,” I said, addressing her. “They’ve been scattering around a chromic waste fluid. Highly poisonous. You know,” I added, “ninja used to have keen noses too. Even in the dark they could distinguish people and objects by scent, like dogs.” (This comparison was perhaps a touch inept.) “They say the whole body of ninja lore comes down to perfecting the sense of smell. Why, you’re probably qualified to be a ninja right now.”
As it happened, my association with the Broom Brigade was a good deal more intimate than any of them suspected. Our first contact dated from just about a year ago. As the girl had divined, we were engaged in the illegal disposal of industrial waste (although the instigator was not them, but me). Once a week they furnished five polyethylene containers full of a heavily chromic waste fluid, fifty-eight times the permitted level of concentration. It was a pretty awful job, and the pay was accordingly high. To dispose of one container was worth 80,000 yen. That’s 400,000 yen a week; 1,600,000 yen a month. More money than I could ever hope to lay hands on again.
Of course it wasn’t as if I’d drawn up a contract directly with the Broom Brigade. There was a middleman. Every Tuesday just before daybreak, he came by with the goods, hauling five containers along the town road in a pickup truck. The rest was up to me. First, using a pulley, I lowered them to the roof of the abandoned car I used for camouflage (a Subaru 360); then I shoved them in through the back-seat window, where the pane was missing, and loaded them aboard ship in a handcart. It’s fairly hard labor, but when you want to raise money in a hurry, you can’t pick and choose. Besides, I didn’t want anybody finding out about my toilet.
Before setting up in this business, I did the necessary groundwork. I couldn’t rest easy without having some idea of where things flushed down that toilet would end up. Common sense said it was somewhere out at sea. But where? The complex topography of the sea bottom made it impossible to predict. Since I knew I would be handling illegal wastes, it was imperative to investigate the matter thoroughly beforehand: if toxic substances and corpses of small animals started popping up along the shoreline, people would inevitably ask questions.
One windless day, choosing an hour when there was little current, I flushed twenty ounces of red food coloring down the toilet. I then kept a steady watch from atop the pedestrian bridge on Skylark Heights, which commands an excellent view, but saw no telltale red stain anywhere on the surface of the water. Nor at any time since then have I even heard rumors of dead fish floating nearby. The underground water vein from the toilet must empty very far out at sea. Or perhaps an especially swift current sweeps the outlet clean. As long as no one raises any fuss, there’s no problem. The work goes along smoothly. In any case, the world is coming to an end soon, so what difference does it make?
Then, early this month, things suddenly changed. One day shortly after the rainy season was declared officially over, I was waiting in my jeep for a red light to change at the corner by the Plum Blossom Sushi Shop, when next to me there pulled up a black van like a paddy wagon or one of those paramilitary soundtrucks used by the neo-fascist right wing. On its side was an emblem of two crossed brooms, and on the corner of one bumper, a flag bearing the same emblem fluttered in the breeze. So this is the famous Broom Brigade patrol car, I thought, having heard about it from our middleman. I gazed at it not with any strong sense of identification but with genuine (quite neutral) interest; we were, after all, business partners. Then my eyes met those of the man sitting next to the driver. A big fellow, whose head brushed against the car ceiling, he was staring intently into my jeep. The shock was like sticking your hand into the chill vapor of dry ice, expecting hot steam. Large sunglasses and a goatee had altered his appearance, but there was no mistaking that green hunting cap. It was my biological father, Inototsu.
I had not seen him in five years. Just to find him in apparent good health was bad enough (a more fitting fate being pauperism or softening of the brain), but of all things, here he was seated in the patrol car of my best customer, the Broom Brigade, as snug as a yolk in its egg. Barely six feet away, the facings on the left sleeve of his dark blue uniform were plainly legible: thee gold inverted V’s. Gold for the rank of general, three for the highest grade within his rank. That made him their chief, or marshal, or supreme commander. Of course I couldn’t have known—but still, I had picked one hell of a business partner. My head throbbed as if I’d come down with Raynaud’s disease,* and after the light turned green I had trouble putting the car in gear.
* A circulatory disorder affecting habitual chain-saw users.
The reaction from his side was swift: the following week, orders for work were abruptly terminated. Naturally, my first suspicions rested with the intermediary, Sengoku. Unless he had said something, I figured, not even Inototsu was crafty enough to connect me with the consignments of hexavalent chromium. Probably, carried away by some desire to boast of his own evildoing (since bullying his family was part of the sadism he secreted like poison), Inototsu had told his followers about meeting me in front of the sushi shop; Sengoku, who happened to be present, then boasted that he knew me as the final recipient of the illegal wastes. For Inototsu to order an immediate halt to all deliveries would be the logical next step. His goal would be to starve me out, cutting off my supplies and attempting to recover my territory. As the one who had chained me to the toilet, he was no doubt well aware of its power.
Not surprisingly, Sengoku firmly denied my allegations. For his services, he pointed out, I regularly paid him twenty percent of the intake, which made him no less a victim of the work stoppage than me. That too made sense. No matter how attractive the Broom Brigade’s terms, he could do nothing without first finding another safe place for disposal of the chromium waste. Still vaguely suspicious, I resolved to leave the negotiations up to him, and meanwhile to prepare for a long siege.
“And now that I th
ink of it,” I concluded, “it was just about then that I first began detecting the presence on board ship of what I took to be a rat.”
“You know, if it were me, I wouldn’t trust that Sengoku person an inch.” Tracing endless small circles on the armrest of the chaise longue, the girl recrossed her legs. She had sweet, unpretentious kneecaps.
“I agree,” said the shill, licking flecks of saliva from the corners of his mouth. “Who knows—that guy who gave me the slip before might have been Sengoku himself.”
“You have nothing but supposition to base that on.”
“Here goes,” said the insect dealer, carefully lighting a cigarette. “My last one for today.”
“Actually I don’t trust Sengoku one hundred percent myself,” I added. “The name means ‘a thousand koku of rice,’ and it has a great air of nobility about it (and for all I know, his ancestors were aristocrats), but when you come down to it, he’s nothing but the son of a confectioner who gave his creditors the slip and set up a little confectionery just off the town road.”
He’s three or four years younger than me. The store—you know the kind of place—has a lattice front backed by glass instead of paper, with a faded sign; he lives there with his mother, who’s involved in some religious sect or other, and often goes out. They sell things like cheap sweets and snack breads, milk and fried donuts made from unsold leftovers from other stores. The one exception is their homemade sweet-potato cakes. Made from real sweet potatoes with plenty of butter, they would be any baker’s pride; they fill the store with a wonderful fragrance, and were even marketed wholesale to coffee shops and restaurants near the station, with great success. Sengoku’s father was formerly a baker in a confectionery factory, specializing in sweet-potato cakes. I’m fond of them, and they’re easy to pop in your mouth, so I got in the habit of dropping by every morning to buy them fresh-baked. Besides, if you time it right, you can get all the way there and back without encountering anyone.