by Kōbō Abe
“How can you say such a terrible thing with a straight face? I was only trying to say that one can pose all kinds of hypotheses. But I understood your brother’s tastes, and you did show me the album.”
“It’s curious, I felt that myself. And I talked about it with my brother. He was disgusted. He abhorred women and evidently he disliked children too.”
“You’re an amazing woman. I didn’t mean anything so far out as that by what I said. I meant something a lot simpler … a conventional ménage à trois or something like that. He might have pretended to be a brother so you could hide the relationship. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean, ‘pretended to be a brother’?”
“Frankly speaking, it was an equivocal situation.”
“I wish you had said that to my brother.”
“Of course, I’m not suspicious any more.” I quickly leafed through the album, trying not to look at her expression. I showed her the page with the picture of the brother and the car. “Look at this picture. It’s written here that you were the one who took it. Your husband has crawled underneath. Your brother’s standing to the side, looking rather absently at what your husband is doing. No, he is pretending to look, smiling like some accomplice in the direction of the person who’s taking the shot—that is, toward you. Naturally your husband can’t see his expression.”
“I wonder if he wasn’t beginning to be suspicious.”
“No. This is a record. It has been left specifically as such. That’s precisely the sense of The Meaning of Memories. Both the one who’s taking the picture and the one who’s having his picture taken must be very much aware of that. If the two of you had had anything to be ashamed of, you would have consciously avoided such a scene.”
“You’re a clever fellow, I knew it.” Suddenly her voice became animated, and she laughed as she filled up my glass, which for some time had been empty. I did not demur. There were only about two inches of beer left in the bottle. “I like this kind of talk. I want more of it.”
“What do you mean, ‘this kind of talk’?”
“Talk that reverses itself, where top becomes bottom, as you’re listening to it. Maybe I can do it too with one subject: my brother. Shall I try?”
“I’ve just about a quarter of an hour.”
“Some years ago my brother had a real lover. I mean a girl, of course … someone he had met in a student movement, he said. That was winter. He seemed terribly happy on through the spring. But one day in the summer the girl said he smelled like cat piddle and couldn’t he have some operation or treatment.”
“I suppose it was an underarm odor.”
“Anyway, my brother meekly began going to the hospital. But when the treatments were half over he decided to have nothing more to do with her. Instead his old dislike of women came back. I began to be more and more important to him. I was the only woman in the world who, for him, was not a woman. We loved each other … really. It was funny we didn’t have a child. But then my husband came on the scene. And I became a real woman.”
“Well then, they must have vied with each other.”
“On the contrary, they didn’t. Right away my brother got along perfectly with my husband. It was much better than if I had made friends with other women.”
“But he could have wanted exclusive possession of you, couldn’t he?”
“Well, he did have exclusive possession … of a boy.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I really liked everything about my brother.”
“Can’t you talk about your husband that way?”
“But my husband didn’t have such a double life.”
“Yet he was the one to run away.”
“Yes, and that’s why it’s so horrible.”
Terror flashed in her eyes, a pathetic fright like frost-covered wires moaning in the wind.
“You’re frightened because you’re thinking of your husband who’s not here. Try instead to imagine him being somewhere. You may suffer but your fear will go away.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Even if you imagined he was living with some other woman?”
“If I don’t understand why he isn’t here, it’s the same thing.”
“I wonder if the news about your brother is in this eve ning’s paper. If it is, your husband may see it and get in touch with you quite normally.”
“Do you mean that my brother was the motive behind my husband’s disappearance?”
“That’s a silly idea, forget it. Anyway, it’s not good to have made up your mind to something. I myself was obsessed until just a while ago with the idea that the matchbox I had in my possession was material evidence definitely unfavorable to you. It contained both black and white sticks. Someone who valued the matchbox but who rarely frequented the shop had, in the course of events, replenished the matches. If he had gone to the shop regularly he could have got new matches any time. Now, what kind of situation can you assume? One, it was a man who went out but rarely. Two, he was someone interested in the telephone number printed on the label. Three, he was a man who needed a secret telephone contact.”
“Can’t you jot a telephone number down in a notebook?”
“If anything happened, an address book would be checked first thing, but no one’s going to pay any attention to a matchbox from a coffee house. But that album a little while ago quite removed any basis for suspicion. I was relieved. It was a real dilemma for me. The matchbox was a very troublesome item because we investigators can’t go around suspecting clients. A good example of having made up my mind in advance. Shouldn’t you try being more tolerant toward the relationship between your husband and your brother?”
“You’re the one who’s prejudiced against my brother.”
“Well, let’s drop your brother then. It’s time for me to be going. It’ll take me about ten minutes to S—– station by subway.”
She dropped her eyes and nervously bit twice at her thumbnail.
“SAY, THIS article was in the newspaper last year.” Young Tashiro peered through thick glasses as he presented me with a tattered newspaper clipping, barely waiting until I had sat down.
“I must say, your map was pretty hard to follow.”
“It says there were over eighty thousand missing persons. I was amazed. Mr. Nemuro’s case wasn’t particularly exceptional.”
“Were you the one who decided on this place?”
“Yes. The view’s rather interesting, don’t you think? You can see both the people going up and the ones going down the stairs when you look over there. You have the feeling of viewing the world absolutely privately, unnoticed by anyone, as if from some nonexistent hole in space. I really like this spot. It’s interesting, people walking around without even knowing they’re being watched.”
“Be that as it may, your map is wrong. I missed the corner four times. I’m nearly twenty minutes late.”
“It’s all right. It’s not so much the map … the underground passages are hard to follow.”
“It’s not all right.” I ordered coffee from a white-jacketed waiter who came to take the order. “With a map like this, it’s conceivable Mr. Nemuro might not have been able to get here.”
“You’re exaggerating. I waited exactly one hour and ten minutes. It may be complicated, but it’s not impossible. And he knew the name of the shop perfectly.”
“Was there about this much of a crowd that morning?”
“The morning rush hour’s not like this. You can’t see the floor for the people.”
“But there’s a considerable crowd now.”
I was seized by the hallucination that I had retrogressed three or four hours in time when I thought of the calm of her room. One had no idea of the direction governing these walking people, where they came from, where they were going. Perhaps it was because, with the tiled floors and the tiled pillars, all the lines of the passageways and stairs converged here, and anyone could follow the line of his choice.
>
“The people around now are most interesting … each one has his own way of walking … his own expression.”
“Well, let’s take a look at the pictures, shall we?”
“Do you think it’s all right? Here, I mean? They’re pretty hot.”
“We’re not going to pass them around, after all.”
“No, I suppose not, but …”
He passed a square envelope over to me with an air of secrecy. Opening it, I found a paper wrapping held by a rubber band. Inside that, six card-sized photos lay in a pile between two slightly larger pieces of cardboard.
“They’re all color shots,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning toward me. “See there, the poses are different. They’re a lot hotter than the professional ones in magazines. The model might not be so good though. The legs seem too small for the body … sort of like an insect’s, aren’t they. But you certainly get the idea. You can just see a bit of hair there at the buttocks. Hair’s absolutely out for the magazines, they say.”
“Every picture’s taken from the back. Did you pick out only this kind?”
“I guess it was Mr. Nemuro’s taste. For some reason they’re all back views.”
“The model seems to be the same in them all.”
“Boy! That hair’s something. Looks like a horse’s tail.”
Indeed, the pictures had no narrative quality, that indirect suggestiveness of a professional’s work, and no penetrating analysis of the subject. As a whole they seemed flat—perhaps it had to do with the lighting or the shooting technique. And then the model always filled the picture to the same extent and the surrounding space was not made the most of. It was pointless to criticize such things, for the husband’s interest was doubtless more in the subject than in the composition. Nevertheless, there was some purpose to the six photos, a will to find something. It was not just some naked girl who had been snapped, but a model. Then, every photo was from the back, and though the various poses were different the chief point of interest was the back down to the hips, the buttocks to the thighs. The face, of course, never appeared. The back of the head with the hair falling down was half out of the picture, the face being completely hidden by the back as she squatted over. Tashiro’s criticism that the legs were short for the body and that they were like an insect’s was not, on close inspection, because of the model, but, I felt, a conscious distortion produced by the lens. Take, for example, the one that Tashiro said was like a horse’s tail. The buttocks were turned toward the camera in a posture as if for an enema, and the white backs of the two heels occupying the two corners of the photo were magnified in the greatest detail as if there alone a magnifying glass had been applied. The focus was not quite perfect, but even the pores could be seen. The single hand that was grasping the flesh of one buttock was so heavy-boned and ill-matching that it gave the illusion of being someone else’s—from the perspective, a man’s. It quickly narrowed and faded into nothing as one’s gaze followed it from wrist to elbow. Surely the effect of a wide-angle lens. Once he had decided on the purpose of the picture, being technically minded as he was, then this kind of effect would be relatively simple. But the purpose was the problem. I could interpret the picture as a desire to dissect the woman right out of existence. If it had been the brother’s work, I could have understood; but as it was the husband’s, I was at a loss. My client, at least, was not one to inspire such vengefulness. She was rather an enigmatic type, the opposite of physical, and a man would get pretty irritated in his effort to understand her. What in heaven’s name ever made the husband so enthusiastic about such work?
“What did you say the model’s name was?”
“Saeko. She says she’s twenty-one, but I’d make it twenty-five or six.” Pushing up his glasses, he spoke sharply: “Watch out! The waiter’s coming.”
I turned the stack of photos face down and raised my eyes. Directly across the open space outside, in the shadow of a pillar, a middle-aged man was squatting on his heels, absentmindedly looking around him. The hem of his overcoat touched the tile floor and was folded back: judging from the folds, the material did not seem cheap. The briefcase put down at his side suggested that he was a very ordinary office worker. The coffee was placed on our glass-covered table and the bill slipped under the cream pitcher. The man in the shadow of the pillar followed the randomly and constantly moving crowd around him with an unfocused gaze quite as if he were looking at scenery. It was not as though he were watching for some specific person, nor did he look as if he were waiting to be found. From his position and attitude it was not likely that he was some vagabond at a loss for a place to go. Where he was now was an area only for walking, a space where people passed by and vanished, each step taking them closer to their destination. It was, as it were, a nonexistent world of emptiness for people other than photographers, detectives, and pickpockets. His sitting there was an unnatural act, which the more one saw of it the harder it was to understand. But the passers-by appeared to be little concerned with the strange man, perhaps because he was a part of the space there, vanishing among the legs like the tile design of the floor.
It suddenly occurred to me that the man might be dying. Was he not appealing, with difficulty, entrusting to his eyes the agony of his final hour, unable to call for help, his throat constricted by his swollen tongue? But his call was fruitless. The space here was only for walking. No matter how he might appeal, no one would turn and look at something that didn’t exist.
But suddenly he arose as if nothing were wrong and quietly moved off into the crowd of pedestrians.
“By the way, that last picture … that’s too much. Not only is the photography strange, but the girl’s a little funny too, isn’t she?”
The expression “too much” didn’t exactly fit the case. In terms of indecency, I had seen worse. The background was completely black. Against it a girl with knees spread was half squatting, the weight of her body on her left leg. She was bent far over toward the front, and coiled behind her buttocks was her hair, which passed under her crotch. She was grasping it with her right hand, which she had extended around her side. Her position, for all its unnaturalness, was quite unexciting. The picture itself simply made one feel a psychological resistance to the continuing physical discomfort of the model. Only the expanse of flat, white hip, unrelated to the model’s twisted limbs, was as expressionless as the carapace of a crab. Beneath her shell the girl was forced into an almost impossible position. It was an incomprehensible picture. There was no obscenity, no sadistic stimulus, only unnaturalness, only a feeling of strangeness, like flowers arranged with their cut ends up. If I had to find something positive about the picture, it would be the strange cooperation of the model. I could understand it to some extent, I felt, if I interpreted it as showing his power to dominate her, but …
“Tashiro, do you think there’s any hope in following up this model?”
“I really couldn’t say. But this is a side of Mr. Nemuro that wasn’t known, I guess. I felt obliged to tell you about it.”
“But since he went so far as to entrust the safekeeping of such pictures to you, you had his confidence, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Mr. Nemuro was, how shall I put it, on the difficult side when it came to personal relations. He was nice on the outside, but inside he didn’t trust others very much.”
“I think you’re going to have to let me have a look at your room one of these days. Perhaps there’s some other unexpected clue of importance among the things Nemuro entrusted to you, something I would recognize if I saw it but that would appear insignificant to you, if you noticed it at all.”
“Ah. To tell the truth …” His eyes grew smaller behind his glasses; he was flustered. “These pictures weren’t in my room. Look, you remember the rented darkroom I told you about the other day? Mr. Nemuro had a locker there for his own exclusive use.”
“If it’s a locker, it has a key, I suppose.”
“Sure. Lockers do …”
“How did you
open it?”
“Well, there’s a master key and … uh … this chum of mine runs the place.”
“You mean you opened it without permission?”
“Actually, I found the newspaper clipping in the locker. Don’t you think it’s quite important? It’s dated the end of July or the beginning of August. Just about the time Mr. Nemuro disappeared. Maybe he was put up to it by reading the article. It probably occurred to him that with eighty thousand missing persons, another to swell the ranks wouldn’t make much difference.”
“One way or another, you did open it without permission, didn’t you?”
“But it was for Mr. Nemuro’s own good. When someone’s on the verge of committing suicide, I don’t think it constitutes a crime to break down the door to get in.”
“I’m not blaming you particularly. I’m just asking for the facts.”
“What for?”
“Why didn’t you tell me from the first that the shop in F—Town was a fuel supplier? Don’t tell me you didn’t know. You haven’t been frank with me. Is there anything else you’ve been hiding?”
A blush spread over his face. Defiantly he stuck out his lips. His breathing was heavy. “You really do say things that destroy a person’s good intentions. I showed you those pictures of my own accord … without any thought of reward. If I hadn’t said anything you would never have known about them. What a fool I was to tell you.”
“It’s strange of you to say that. Weren’t you particularly trusted by Mr. Nemuro? Isn’t it natural for you to cooperate spontaneously with me?”
“I don’t think it can be put that simply,” he said sulkily, biting his lip. “You’d like to put it that way because it’s your business, but … there’s more to life than just pursuing. Sometimes it’s more important to shield.”
“But Mr. Nemuro’s disappearance doesn’t necessarily depend only on his own will. Perhaps he’s been killed, or maybe he’s being held by force somewhere.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Does that mean you’re shielding him?”