by Kōbō Abe
“But you surely don’t expect me to report every single item, particularly those that have no informative value.” Nonchalantly, he called the office girl: “Be so kind as to give our guest a cup of tea.”
The girl silently rose from her seat. The wrinkled skirt, charged with static electricity, clung to the roundness of her buttocks.
“If you didn’t think it was necessary, you should have informed me beforehand, including your reasons.”
“Intolerably uncivil young lady,” he said, ignoring my words, crossing his legs and shifting to the side. “Makes you feel funny. Everywhere I go, as you can see, I’m the villain. It’s funny, if you’re treated like a villain long enough you get used to it, and in the end you get to feel like one.”
“What are you doing here, for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, well. What indeed?”
“You’re here just by accident, of course. Somehow, as you were walking along, you just happened to notice …”
“Chalk one up to you,” he said, smiling cheerfully and snapping his fingers. “No, it’s not a joke. Your suspicions are not unfounded. Actually, the various threads are all tangled up—in a very strange way.”
“If that’s what you think, you’d better explain.”
“If I could, I wanted to pretend I didn’t know, but … Well, when you looked at me in that dreadful way, I couldn’t help myself. I’m prepared to tell you everything—the whole truth. Frankly speaking, I came here for a shakedown.”
“A shakedown?”
“Yes, indeed. Not so, miss?”
The girl took the kettle from the kerosene stove in front of the shelves and poured the hot water into a large earthen teapot, her body rigid. She made no attempt to answer. But her very silence was a more eloquent response than anything she might have said. The brother continued in a calm tone.
“I notified them beforehand so they would have a check ready today. The boss took off and I have no idea where he is. This girl here sticks to her story that she doesn’t know anything about anything. Listen, miss, such an obvious tack won’t do you any good. You hold me up a day and I’ll just increase the interest by that much. Right. You’d better tell the boss just that. I’ve plenty of time, and until further notice I’ll be dropping in every day.”
The girl, admirably expressionless, placed on the table two cheap teacups, which she had filled to overflowing with a weak brew, and returned to her seat in silence. Evidently she had more spirit than one would have thought.
“Cold chick. Don’t get the wrong idea. A blackmailer’s a scoundrel. All right, but the person who’s being blackmailed here is just as bad.”
There was something extraordinary about his casually announcing on our second meeting, without batting an eye, that he was engaged in blackmail. What a nerve. I didn’t have to believe everything, but faced with this amazing situation I felt like a fly in a glue pot. I thought to myself that if I got the opportunity I was certainly going to show up this man for what he was. But I had never dreamt that my hope would materialize in this way. Somehow or other the fellow was an accomplice of my client. A privileged resident in forbidden territory. There was no need to let someone take him by the tail. Was he putting on a show? If that was the case, why? Or, could it be that he just liked to boast of his own wickedness? If so, he knew too little of his adversary.
“I’m sorry, but if things go on like this I can’t continue,” I said, although I realized it was to my disadvantage to become emotional. “In the first place, there seems to be some doubt as to just how serious the application for investigation is.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, there are too many things kept secret. Even I didn’t really expect much from a country fuel supplier’s like this. It’s pretty shabby if it’s a crucial spot.”
“But when a blackmailer and extortionist enters the picture …”
“Yes … and furthermore, if he’s a relative of the missing man …”
With his eyes raised, he brought his lips close to the teacup and noisily sipped his tea. “Just as I thought, you’re pretty clever. But even a monkey can fall out of a tree, as they say. This isn’t monkey business. When it falls right on me it’s too much. Where do you want me to start explaining? What about my purpose, for a starter? Why did I ever scheme up anything like blackmail?”
Suddenly he was interrupted by the blast of a horn. From the breathless wheeze of the engine, it must have been a rather antiquated three-wheeler. Apparently my car was in the way of the loading or unloading. Then came the sound of voices from the outside.—“Sorry, but would you move your car, sir.” When I began to walk in the direction of the door, the brother stood up too and quickly slipped on his suit jacket.—“Well, I’ll be leaving too for this evening.” Wearing his jacket, he instantly became a black wall again. As he passed by, he suddenly reached out and tweaked the girl’s nose. The girl sprang to her feet and the chair jumped with her, but even then she did not even try to cry out. “No, don’t forget to give your boss the message.” Taking up his overcoat from the corner by the screen where he had left it, he hung it over his arm. “I don’t care how many days you take, but the interest goes up proportionately.”
A breeze had sprung up. The sky rippled like a black blanket. I exchanged meaningless civilities with the men at the storehouse and then got in my car. The brother too stood waiting in the most natural way, his hand on the handle of the other door. I turned on the ignition. He had barely got in when I stepped hard on the accelerator, but as luck would have it the cold engine simply sputtered and I was helpless, paralyzed.
“No, you’re quite wrong,” the brother continued nonchalantly. “The main thing is the means, not the end. Why blackmail? I need money too. Right? Just the investigation expenses I pay you come to thirty thousand yen a week. I can’t make do with just what my sister got when she quit her work. Thirty thousand yen a week. Let’s see, that comes to one hundred and twenty thousand a month. I could never make ends meet with an honest job, could I.”
“By the month? Are you planning on continuing the investigation that long?”
“Of course I am. I’ve been at wit’s end for half a year now. I don’t suppose that even you have the self-confidence to think you can clear things up in a week, do you? I can and will get the money. For a year if I need to. It’ll be an endurance test.”
He chuckled, and I was perplexed. Continuing the investigation—the very fact that I might not do so had already put my digestion out of kilter. The white heads and the black heads in the matchbox. The much too obviously happenstance meeting in the parking lot in front of the Camellia coffee house. The even more obvious encounter at M Fuel Supplier’s. The blackmailer’s confession. I could see things better if he remained a strange shadowy character. Though he had come rather into the light, he was still a strange character indeed. I wanted a smoke. Was it to go on forever? The rhythm of the motor was irregular. I pushed in the choke and turned on the heater. Could I have been mistaken? Supposing, on the client’s side, she and her brother were seeking the truth, the facts in a precise sense of the word, and not merely displaying a superficial harmony of views. Well, I would see her again with that in mind. I had to get the boundary lines of the map absolutely clear. But only after first establishing whether—I remember her running the tips of her bloodless fingers along the corner of the table, with the bookcases and the lemon-yellow curtains in the background—whatever she was intently waiting for was indeed one and the same thing the brother was looking for.
Perhaps he had read my thoughts, for he gave a little chuckle and said in a self-deprecatory voice: “I can’t forgive him. I can’t stand his self-centeredness. Even a thug, when he wants out, pays for it. Unless he plays by the rules, how can I forgive him? He said something about my sister’s not being a complete woman. He’s some kind of queer. Let him be, I don’t care, but if he doesn’t follow the rules … One way or another, I’ve got to get him back and make him smart for it. My
sister’s a mess, damn it. Do you understand?”
Unfortunately, I didn’t. I automatically stepped on the brake at an oncoming truck with its lights on high beam. Why should he make him smart? Would finding the husband and bringing him back to her make him smart? I wondered. Didn’t he realize that such thinking would result in hurting her? The road was swallowed up in the cloud of dust left by the truck. They say the thief who pretends he’s been robbed is the cleverest thief.
“Well, no, you are the only one I can rely on. I’ll take the responsibility for the expenses. If it comes to that, I’ll ship off to Vietnam. I’d make roughly two hundred thousand yen on one trip if I could get thirty men to sail with me. You have a little more time now, don’t you?”
“YOU’RE HIGH, I’m afraid,” she said calmly, leaving the chain on the door. She could tell surely by just looking.
“I had something I wanted to ask you. It had to be tonight. Something I’ve got to know for the investigation tomorrow …”
Hesitantly, she removed the chain and, leaving me waiting in the vestibule, dodged away into the room, pushing up with one hand the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck and straightening with the other the collar of the coat she had slipped on over her nightgown. Involuntarily I found myself searching the vestibule floor for a man’s shoes. At the same time I kept my ear tuned toward the other room. What was I suspicious about? I wondered. I was disappointed in myself. Was he or wasn’t he there? A husband pretending to be missing, who in fact was quietly hiding away in his own house.
The idea was fantastic, but it was not altogether unfounded. Who would ever say the first thing this late in the evening, “You’re high, I’m afraid”? She’s the employer. Wouldn’t it be natural for her to expect the latest report right off … the way any employer would?
No, that was not the truth. It was an evasion. One look at my apologetic attitude and she would have realized immediately that she could not expect very much in the way of news. First of all, if it was urgent news, good or bad, there was always the convenient little device of modern civilization called the telephone.
When she returned, she was wearing dark-blue slacks and a tan cardigan of a heavy-knit yarn; her hair was arranged in the usual way, but the freckles under her eyes were unpleasantly conspicuous and made her a completely different person, one with a hard, brittle air. I experienced a mood of warning, as it were. I began to talk falteringly in justification of my visit.
“Actually, I want to talk about the incident of the matchbox last night. I put it down in the report, but from the Camellia coffee house I got, to put it succinctly, exactly nothing. But, I find it a little bothersome, if I remember correctly, that you said something to the effect that the matchbox was found together with some old newspaper, wasn’t it? Do you still have the paper? It would help if you did.”
“I must have it, I suppose, but …”
I restrained her from going off in search of it on the spot. The unpleasant paradox of having my explanation itself be a kind of justification caught in my throat. The first thing I wanted to know was the date line of the newspaper. Was there or wasn’t there a relationship between the matchbox and the paper? Practically speaking, there would seem not to be, I thought. Yet I couldn’t say for sure until I knew what the date was. I was a bit worried. What was the reason that the matchbox was so badly worn? That the vitally important Camellia coffee house had produced nothing at all was most significant. I could pose any number of hypotheses, but they were full of contradictions. Like a broken compass, they pointed now in one directions, now in another. But even broken, a compass was still a compass, wasn’t it? If I could just get some sort of hint, I felt it would point somewhere pretty exactly for me.
“I’ll go and look for it right away,” she said, turning her joined hands at me and nodding in agreement at my words, which seemed to flow endlessly, and after a very slight pause, which I might have overlooked, had I for a moment been inattentive, she added: “Will you come in and wait?”
Again, in the lemon-yellow room, I seated myself in the same chair as the one I had occupied the evening before; I rubbed my hands together briskly. She had apparently just turned the stove off, and a little warmth still lingered along with the smell of kerosene. While there was no reason for it, I somehow had a feeling of indifference. I was indifferent to myself. When I thought about it, I had the impression that a chill had begun the instant I had sat down in the chair. A feeling as if, in sitting, I had pushed something aside—something like the shadow of a mist-shrouded tree, melancholic, unresistant, faint. I thought perhaps it was the husband. For the first time, however briefly, I felt the reality of him. At once he returned to the flat, depthless photograph that had submissively stood aside to let me sit, but in my heart there was a cold feeling of shame, slowly spreading, like a drop of ink suspended in water.
I had grown very suspicious. I would begin by reviewing again the same things I had seen on the preceding evening. First the ashtray on the table. Fortunately, it was clean and dry with no telltale traces that it had been recently used. I filled my lungs with air. There was indeed a faint smell of cosmetics mixed with the odor of kerosene. There was not the slightest smell of cigarette smoke. Beneath the table throw there was only a transparent gloom. Next, my eyes shifted from the curtains to the bookshelf and from there farther along to the telephone. Then a little piece of paper pinned to the corner of the curtain caught my eye and brought me back to the reality of his nonexistence. With my ears cocked for any sound in the next room, I walked softly round the table to investigate. Seven digits had been written on the slip with a ballpoint pen. Small but precise numerals characteristic of a woman. It was a telephone number I remembered seeing … the very one printed on the label of the Camellia matchbox. Yet why was I not surprised at the discovery? Rather than that, the chill within me deepened. Although I tried to reject the possibility that she knew something, hadn’t I foreseen precisely that after all? Apparently she had not been purely a victim all along.
Suddenly I felt defiant and churlish. Well, why not? I said to myself. No one could drive me out of here now. The final trump card of the different matchsticks was mine and, furthermore, either way, my adversaries were a gang of blackmailers. But what terrific cold.—“You really must be drunk, I fear.”—“It’s probably because I’m sobering up.”—“Well then, what do you want here?” Hmm, let me think, what was it then? Until a little while ago I had so much I couldn’t handle it all, but … I stopped my car in the street down there and looked up at the lemon-yellow curtains, hesitating a while—should I get out or shouldn’t I? I smiled to myself as if I were looking into a mirror when I turned off the motor. Stealthily mounting the concrete stairs … The interlaced black and white rectangles of the landing were illuminated like an altar by an all-night light … But, no, I was empty-handed, as much so as if I had been fleeced by some highway robber.
—“You must be drunk, I fear.” That was so wrong. On the contrary, I’d been sitting there about two hours with the heater on and the window wide open, my face exposed to the night air and its icy thorns. Then, the fault was with the saké, not with me. Nobody else but her esteemed and thoughtful confederate had stood me to it. If she wanted to blame it on someone’s evil intent, then blame it on him.
What was that noise? It seemed to come from the vicinity of the kitchen just beyond the curtain. I could not help but hear the faint clinking of glass containers among the muffled noises … that peculiar, fricative sound of air and liquid. I did not realize that beer produced such a forlorn sobbing.
“YOU HAVE nothing against a bottle of beer, I suppose?”
That had not been my reason for coming here especially. What had caused me to drop in at the microbus in the dry river bed was rather hunger. When I thought about it, I realized I had had only a bowl of noodles since morning. It did not mean there was a lack of eating places, for there were apparently some old-fashioned restaurants, of the kind seen but rarely now, near where you
come out on the main street in the third ward. But my appetite was piqued by the possibility of getting somewhat closer to the real character of the self-styled brother in the microbuses.
“In the red-lantern stalls, you’re pretty well known, I hear, aren’t you?”
“You’ve got sharp ears. I expected as much.”
There was not the slightest timidity in his arrogant laugh.
“When I took the examination for entering the company I wasn’t very good. Why was it only in collecting information that I got top marks? You find it strange? We have to be examined. For instance, I took a turn around a department store with the examiner, and then I had to say how many girls were wearing red skirts or what the color was of the shoes the man who was making a purchase at the tie counter had on. But the test on collecting information was a little different. Certain situations were given and I was supposed to answer true or false in each instance: whom one should ask, what should be asked, and how it was to be done. I answered everything with a cross. The examiner questioned me, of course, on why I did that. So I told him. The technique of collecting information is hard, but it’s even harder to stop up your ears.”
The road between the cliff and the embankment of the pear orchard was as black as a tunnel, and I had the illusion of having forgotten to turn on my headlights. I felt the steering wheel wrenched by a sudden gust of wind. The rising ground and the pear orchard ended in a short, abrupt slope. The road formed a T with the bank. At once I could see a cluster of lanterns. But it was quite different from what I had imagined. The various cars were not in a single line, nor were they connected by strings of lights, and there was no music, no commotion as in a fair grounds. Red lanterns dangled saucily in the wind, and on the side of the broad, dry river bed several little buses, their gloomy, pale mouths open, were scattered here and there in a semicircle, irregularly spaced and facing in different directions.