‘Oh, maybe the door to the annex is still open?’ said Ryūichi testily, his face flush from too many drinks. ‘Hey, Kazuto. It’s making a ruckus. Go and close it.’
Kazuto’s angry frown was visible to all. Ten cans of Heineken were lined up on the rattan table.
‘It’s not noisy at all. Can’t you just let the door bang all it wants?’
Kazuto, grumbling, stood up and went over to the nearest corridor window, where he made a pretence of looking at the annex building. But that was all he did, and he sat down again immediately.
‘It’s probably the door of the storage room of the annex that’s banging. But there’s nothing inside anyway, so who cares whether the rain gets inside or the door gets blown away?’
‘Lazy as always.’ That was all Ryūichi had to say. The door, however, was not busy constantly, but would only bang once in a while, as if it would forget its job and then suddenly remember to go to work again. The occasional loud bang, just as you’d started to forget about it, was even harder on the ears, but nobody felt like dragging their heavy, alcohol-filled bodies outside in the rain. ‘Shall I go?’ I asked, but Ryūichi firmly said no.
‘You don’t need to go. If my son won’t go, then that’s it. We’ll just leave the door banging tonight. It’s dangerous to go out in the night. Who knows what the sea is also blowing this way?’
‘But if it’s me, it doesn’t matter if it’s dangerous or not, eh?’ Kazuto mumbled softly, but by now he’d become rather inarticulate.
It was only eleven, but three people had already drunk themselves to sleep. Sonobe, Junji and Egami were all lying comfortably stretched out in chairs here and there, and would occasionally sit up and take another sip of their drink, or stagger to the toilet. Ryūichi and Kazuto were also moments away from going down. I wasn’t able to keep up with the drinking pace of the others, so I was only slightly drunk. Next to me, Toshiyuki Inukai was still busy mixing beer with the Scotch. He must have a high tolerance, because he was still sober. ‘Is it really okay? Your wife went back to your room earlier. Shouldn’t you join her?’ I asked. He hiccupped once loudly. His eyes looked unfocused now. He was starting to feel the alcohol.
‘She, she doesn’t sleep well while travelling…She takes sleeping pills to fall asleep. She won’t… miss me… hic.’
Hirakawa had started off drinking with gusto, but that was all show and he had been the first to get drunk. Already at ten we’d had to drag him to Sonobe’s room. Like us, the doctor had a twin room.
Kango Makihara didn’t look like the type who would recklessly drink, and he sipped his whisky-and-water at his own pace. Shortly after ten, he’d announced he was going to bed and had gone upstairs. I’d seen Sumako follow him with a determined look on her face, but she hadn’t come back down. Had her plea for money been answered, or refused? Or were they still negotiating? No, maybe she’d missed her chance and gone to her own bedroom. Thus did I meddle in their affairs in my own mind.
‘Aliiiiice, still among the living?’
Maria yelled to me from across the hall. I waved back to her silently. Maria and Reiko were having a chat, while sipping from their light whisky-and-water and playing with the jigsaw puzzle.
‘Oh, you’re still sober. Never knew you could drink that much,’ said Maria, teasingly. I smiled wryly, mumbling the words she’d used earlier: ‘I can’t take much.’
‘Maria, let’s go up to sleep,’ said Reiko, as she suppressed a yawn. ‘I’m feeling drunk, too. I might not able to make breakfast tomorrow morning.’
‘It’s okay, Reiko. Look at everyone now. Their hangovers will keep them away from the dining room until noon.’
Reiko agreed and laughed.
The two of them split up and went around waking up all the unconscious men. When Sonobe woke up, he smiled weakly, said ‘I’m so sorry,’ and staggered upstairs. One taken care of. The others, however, remained lying around, with no intention of moving.
‘Oh, that’s why I hate drunks,’ complained Maria, even though her own breath also reeked of alcohol. Reiko, too, looked displeased.
‘Reiko, just leave us,’ Ryūichi mumbled. ‘We won’t catch a cold in this weather, so it’s okay. When they wake up they’ll go crawling back to their nests on their own. You’re tired, so go to sleep now. You too, Maria.’
Reiko was still hesitant.
‘Reiko, I’ll stay here as well. Just think of us men as standing by in the hall in case the typhoon does come. You two can go to sleep,’ I said.
‘Reiko, let’s do that,’ said Maria, pulling on Reiko’s elbow. ‘Let’s go, let’s go to sleep. Ah, if only there was someone here who could drink like a real man. Oh, my beloved Philip Marlowe.’
She’s drunk. And aren’t there plenty of drunken detectives in hard-boiled detective stories, I wanted to say to Egami. But he was still sound asleep, even though he was almost falling out of his chair.
The door of the annex storage room banged again, twice. It was probably that noise that had woken Kazuto, who was slowly nodding.
‘Morning, Reiko and Maria.’ His tenor voice rang through the hall. ‘I drank too much. Kind of embarrassing you seeing me like that.’
What was he talking about?
‘Go to bed now, Kazuto,’ said Reiko.
‘Ah, I’ll sleep in your room then. Take me with you.’
You fool!
‘Oh yeah, Kazuto’s room is in the annex.’ Maria, too, sounded shocked by his suggestion. ‘So sleep here, then. Good night. Reiko, can I sleep in your room tonight? I can just sleep on your couch with a cushion. I’m so afraid of the typhoon.’
Oh brother.
‘Okay, you come and sleep with me. Just for tonight I’ll give you the bed.’
‘No, I’m the one intruding. I can’t go chasing you out of your own bed as well.’
That’s all fine, but Reiko, please take that drunk with you immediately.
Reiko took Maria by the hand and the two of them disappeared down the corridor in the back. I could hear Maria humming Over the Rainbow all the way until the bedroom door opened and closed.
The hall turned silent again and I let out a sigh of relief. The howling of the wind outside and the drumming of the raindrops on the windows only heightened the silence. Besides me, there were only five men, drunk and not moving an inch, like a bunch of broken mannequin dolls. Why was I at a place like this?
‘There’s a storm outside.’
I played with those words on the tip of my tongue.
The night had only just started.
6
‘Hey, Alice.’ A voice was speaking close to my ear. ‘You’ll catch cold.’
Someone gently shook my shoulder. I rubbed my heavy eyelids and looked up to see Egami standing in front of me. It seemed I’d dozed off. What was this about catching a cold? Coming from someone who’d been sleeping like a log until just now.
‘I said the same when I tried to wake you up. What’s the time?’
Egami looked at his watch before answering: ‘Just before two.’ The third quarter of the Hour of the Ox in the traditional time-system. The time when ghosts are at their most active.
I looked around to see how the others were doing. Kazuto and Junji were still asleep. Ryūichi Arima and Toshiyuki Inukai had left.
‘Mr. Egami, didn’t you wake up just now?’
‘Yes. I don’t remember a thing after eleven. And when I woke up, there were just the four of us in the hall. Guess the others made it back to their rooms on their own.’
‘So they left us here. On second thoughts, they probably tried to wake us, but to no avail.’
My head felt heavy. I massaged my eyebrows and stood up. A glass of water suddenly appeared in front of my eyes.
‘Drink it,’ said Egami and I thanked him as I grasped it. Egami, too, drank a glass of water with ice cubes. If we could go to the sauna right now, we could get the alcohol out of our systems.
‘The rain’s not that bad, but the wind is raging,’ sa
id Egami as he walked to the window, glass in hand. The rustling of the trees had become louder, and the wind that came howling from beyond the sea sounded as if it was lamenting or suffering in pain. It even reminded me of a voice from beyond this world. And then the storage room door banged again.
‘Haaaooo.’ Egami yawned once and closed the curtains. ‘Drinks were flowing rather freely. As if we were all drinking for the sake of getting drunk.’
‘It was the doc who got us going.’ I poured a second glass of water for myself. ‘He’d already started drinking in the afternoon. By the time we joined him, he was already pretty drunk, pouring for everyone else, babbling about nothing and gobbling snacks, saying dinner hadn’t been enough. One moment he was yelling “Keiō University is king of the athletic field,” the next he was reciting the Rubaiyat. And somehow he managed to drag us along too.’
People only set out on this eternal Road
And none return to explain the way.
Do not leave anything at this tavern
Once you leave you will never return.
Egami leaned against the wall while he, too, recited the Rubaiyat in a low voice, as if it were an incantation.
Oh Saki, those who went down this path,
Are already resting in the triumphant land.
Have some wine and heed my words
What those people said was simply wind.
The ice cubes in Egami’s glass were clinking.
‘…Who wrote those lines?’
‘Omar Khayyám. An eleventh-century Persian poet. It’s well-known that the British writer Saki took his name from that four-line verse.’ Egami smiled wryly. ‘This poem and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde are enough to drive anyone to drink. Haha.’
It wasn’t likely that Egami had memorised the poem from Sonobe’s dodgy and barely articulate recitation. It was more likely Rubaiyat was one of his favourite books. He emptied his glass and let out a sigh.
‘Shall we go to bed, too? Let’s wake these two up.’
He gently shook Junji awake and I did the same with Kazuto. They regained their senses, gulped down the glasses of water we poured for them, and then sighed.
‘We sure had a lot,’ said Kazuto as he blinked his eyes, blinded by the light in the hall. Junji was mumbling something.
‘That quack! Drinking like that.’
You’re a fine one to talk.
‘And the typhoon? Not here yet?’ asked Kazuto.
‘There’s a gale outside now, but it isn’t the typhoon. Probably still on its way here,’ I said, to which he replied: ‘Don’t worry. Even if it did hit the island, what could happen? It’s not as if we have a mountain on the verge of collapsing behind the house or a river about to overflow. If you’re into surfing, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Fantastic waves out there.’
‘Do you surf?’
With a sullen expression, he replied in the negative. Oh, that was right, Maria mentioned he couldn’t swim and would simply sink. Seems as though I’d hurt his feelings.
‘Let’s go to bed.’
Junji raised his heavy body. He staggered a little, but did manage to walk on his own. With a ‘Good night’ he walked to the staircase and with his hand firmly gripping the rail, he slowly went step by step upstairs.
‘What do you think of him?’ Kazuto asked, after the sound of Junji’s slippers had disappeared. ‘Junji Makihara. What do you think of him? He always seems so comical to me.’
What a rude expression. I was just thinking about what he meant by that when Kazuto himself, still under the influence, started to explain:
‘You know, he’s the only one who doesn’t fit in our company. He only speaks to his wife and he looks as if he has no idea what he’s doing on a small island like this. So, don’t come. I guess Sumako dragged him along. His dear little wife. But—.’
Kazuto paused for a second, then decided to say it anyway.
‘But that’s the whole comedy. Sure, Junji is everything to Sumako now, but she was all lovey-dovey with the man before him as well. And who was that? Our artist fiend, maestro Hirakawa.’
Maria had mentioned this yesterday, but she’d skipped over it quickly.
‘I thought they were acting suspiciously that summer four years ago. She stuck to him from morning to night, claiming he would be the one to solve the moai puzzle. The following year, she became his model. Must be great to be an artist, it gives you an excuse to be all alone with a girl in a little room. Oh, did you ever hear this one? An artist is busy in his atelier. Not with painting, but with seducing his model. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door. What did the artist say to his model? “Oh no, it’s my wife. Quick, take off your clothes.” Hahaha. Funny, get it?’
It probably was. But his delivery was so awful I couldn’t laugh.
‘But there was definitely something going on during that summer four years ago. The old men didn’t notice a thing though. Not my uncle, not my father, not even the doctor had a clue. Probably only a mother would notice. Perhaps they hadn’t expected something like that to happen between her and Mr. Hirakawa. Maria and I knew right away, though.
‘I think that after returning to Tōkyō, the two of them still saw a great deal of each other for several months. But then the affair cooled off and, as a bystander, I was quite relieved. Now she’ll probably agree to a marriage meeting set up by my uncle, I thought, but then along came Junji.
‘They’re not kids anymore, so if they are really in love, my uncle has nothing to say about it, whatever his feelings may be. Junji could simply take Sumako away somewhere. But the fact remains that Junji did marry into my uncle’s family, who think very little of him—and the feeling’s mutual....’
The pathetic drunkard talked about his shallow ideas concerning the affair. It’s easy to say they should have eloped when you’re not involved at all. Her father was probably very important to Sumako, and Junji probably wanted to protect his bar even if it meant he had to stay within Kango’s reach. Who are you to talk like a bigshot in the first place?
‘And so he bickers with his father-in-law on the one hand, while his wife tries to calm him on the other. Now he’s here on the island and the man he’s sharing a drink with is his wife’s former lover.’
Junji had been drinking in silence on his own, and the first person to pour him a drink and try to have a talk with him had been Hirakawa. Kazuto was probably referring to this when he called it all comical.
Someone came down the staircase. There was a noise of slippers hitting the floor.
‘Oh, Mr. Makihara, what’s the matter?’ asked Egami, who was sitting facing the staircase. Kazuto and I both turned round and there stood the topic of our discussion, who’d only just gone upstairs: Junji Makihara.
‘No, err, it’s a bit odd,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I tried to enter my room…but it appears to be locked from the inside.’
‘Locked? Oh, the latch?’ said Kazuto. Our room had a door latch as well. It was a simple model where a bar dropped into a receiving catch, just like the ones you often read about in old mystery novels.
‘Yeah, the latch. I guess that Sumako locked the door and fell asleep, even though I was still drinking down here.’
‘That’s odd,’ said Egami. ‘Would she really accidentally lock out her own husband? Does she have a habit of locking the door when she goes to sleep?’
‘No. That’s why I’m a bit annoyed she decided to do it this time.’
‘Did you knock on the door and call out to her?’
‘Yeah. I couldn’t make too much noise in the middle of the night, so I held back a bit. But she should’ve noticed it and woken up.’
‘Does she take sleeping pills before she goes to bed like Mrs. Inukai?’
‘She’s never taken anything like that.’
‘Then it’s really odd.’
Egami had a concerned expression on his face. It was indeed strange for her to lock her husband out, go to sleep and not wake up when he called for her. And Sumako h
adn’t been drunk; she’d hardly touched any alcohol.
‘I’m worried. Let’s go upstairs.’
Egami stood up and Kazuto and I followed his example. With our heads heavy, we climbed the dimly-lit staircase in single file.
The hallway on the first floor was also in darkness. Yesterday, starlight had shone brightly through the six hallway windows facing east, but tonight the windows were like a line of mirrors reflecting the darkness. Across from the six windows stood six doors. The Makiharas’ room was the second one from the staircase.
Junji stood before the door and knocked three times with a tightly clenched fist.
‘Sumako. Hey, Sumako.’
He turned to look at us, as if to show that she really wasn’t answering. At this point, I felt a slight unease. He grabbed the door knob and pushed hard, but the door wouldn’t budge.
Junji knocked louder and called out to his wife five or six times. There was no reaction from inside the room. The noise of the wind outside was all we could hear.
‘Definitely strange.’ Kazuto pushed up his bangs of hair with his slim fingers. ‘Let’s open the door. It’s just a latch, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. Maybe we can just stick a thin strip of wood through the gap between the door and the frame and push the bar up.’
‘That’s easier said than done,’ growled Junji. ‘The latch is actually pretty stiff. It’s a bit rusty and you need to apply quite a bit of power to lock or unlock it, or else it won’t budge. That’s why we stopped using it.’
‘Well, that makes matters more difficult, but let’s try anyway. Where can we find a thin, sturdy strip?’
I had an idea, so I asked them to wait and went back to our room. I found my half-read Patricia McGerr paperback and ran back to the door where Junji and the others were waiting.
‘A metal bookmark? That should do the trick.’
Kazuto took the bookmark and inserted it in the space between the door and the frame. It was a very thin metal strip, but even so, it barely fit inside the gap. Once it was in, Kazuto moved it slowly up until it touched the bottom of the latch bar. He tried to raise it by applying an upward movement, but it didn’t move as he’d hoped. ‘It won’t go up,’ he said quietly and tried again with more force, whereupon the bookmark broke in two.
The Moai Island Puzzle Page 9