Inhabitation

by Teru Miyamoto

  Tetsuyuki had once seen on television a well-known intellectual who claimed that Lamenting the Deviations had given him the wherewithal to go on living. But no matter how he tried, Tetsuyuki was not able to sense any spirit in that man, who seemed somehow enervated and not at all happy. Hadn’t resignation simply replaced a desire to live? What a string of words it was that so enchanted intellectuals! And all concealing poison that ultimately entices one toward death!

  He considered the feelings of nihilism and resignation that he himself harbored and resolved to live. The Kin that inhabited his heart shone bright gold. He wanted to see Yōko. He longed for her body, and wanted to quit this ridiculous farce he had started. He groped his crotch and began to indulge in masturbation, playing with himself for a long time. His masturbatory fantasy did not include Yōko, but rather the nude pink body of Yuriko, which he had never seen.

  The next day, Tetsuyuki was on campus. When he threw a teasing smile at a familiar couple snuggling up to each other on the no longer green lawn under a single duffel coat, he heard Yōko’s voice. He looked about, but she was nowhere to be seen. Unusually, there was a large number of students around then. No doubt many were seniors who had rarely been on campus and were coming up against graduation, so they could not afford to miss more lectures and had begun to show up en masse. He turned toward the main gate, glancing at the closest building, housing the Engineering Department.

  He again heard Yōko’s voice calling his name, and looking at the expression of the couple sitting beneath the duffel coat, a smile spread across his face: Yōko was hiding behind them. He hurriedly extinguished his smile and walked across the lawn to address the lovebirds.

  “Hey, what’re you doing inside that coat? It must be some indecent act.”

  “We’re just holding hands,” the female student responded.

  “Well, that already amounts to having sex.”

  The male student responded with a laugh. “I think the one who’s hiding behind us and sweetly calling out ‘Tetsuyuki!’ is even more indecent.”

  Yōko stood up from behind them and knocked the guy on the head with her textbook. She pressed against Tetsuyuki’s arm, wrapping hers around it.

  The male student gibed, “Hey, you two look as if you already have two or three kids.”

  “A virgin can’t have kids, can she?” The couple burst out laughing at Tetsuyuki’s riposte.

  As they walked off arm in arm, just as expected Yōko asked, “Why didn’t you call last night?”

  Tetsuyuki deliberately looked in another direction. “I didn’t have any ten-yen coins.”

  “You could have gotten change, couldn’t you?”

  “I only had a thousand-yen bill with me. I asked for change at two or three stores, but they all refused.”

  “I stayed up until two o’clock waiting. After all, you’ve never failed to call . . .”

  “Yes, I have. Those several weeks during the summer . . .”

  Yōko released her arm from his and stood still. “Why say something like that?”

  “I wanted to call, and went up and down the shopping arcade. Everyone had an attitude as if to say, ‘If you’ll buy something, I’ll give you change.’ That got under my skin. I was about to buy some gum or something, but gave up on that idea.” As he spoke, Tetsuyuki renewed his resolve to stop this silly charade, and turned toward her to apologize. But Yōko’s eyes were unexpectedly full of indignation.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘those several weeks during the summer’? Why are you bringing that up now?”

  Why did Yōko flare up at the mention of those several weeks? It must be because there was something between her and Ishihama that she refused to admit. That thought made him abandon his resolve. I’ll create several blank weeks, then.

  Without saying a word, he entered the building of the Literature Department and climbed the stairs to the classroom. Yōko, likewise silent, climbed the stairs five or six steps behind him and took a seat far from his, though they always sat together. She was wearing a light blue dress. As the lecture was nearing its end, a slip of paper from her was passed down the row: “Are you hungry?” When he went without eating, his nerves would be on edge, and he had frequently lashed out at her, saying unreasonable and selfish things.

  And here she was extending an olive branch. All he would have to do was smile and nod at her, and this petty skirmish would be over. And he wanted to do so. And yet the fact that she was so much more fixed on those “several weeks during the summer” left him unable to abandon his suspicions.

  Instead of nodding at her with a smile, he stood up and exited the classroom, his face turned away. Expecting her to come running after him, he descended the stairs and passed through the dimly lit hallway to exit the building. As he approached the main gate he kept his ears pricked, but was unable to discern anything like her footsteps.

  He arrived at the hotel, and even as he was changing into his uniform—even as he was carrying luggage and showing guests to rooms—he rehearsed in his mind words he had hurled at Ishihama, and the expression on that man’s face. “Even as I had Yōko in my arms, I gloated as I imagined a guy name Ishihama walking triumphantly toward the hotel. But he was probably gloating in his own mind as he listened to what I said, thinking ‘What a stupid jerk! I’ve already had plenty of fun with Yōko’s body.’” Those imagined words felt very real, as if an actual human voice were assaulting his eardrums. He ended up passing Yuriko several times without so much as glancing at her. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her; he was trying to act indifferent. He had lost the composure to respond to the signals she was sending.

  About an hour before his shift ended, he stepped out of the hotel and called three friends from a pay phone, asking them to answer the roll call for him at tomorrow’s lectures. All three asked why he did not have Yōko do it. He replied that it would be found out if he always had her do it, but that didn’t really amount to a reply, because she always asked those three to answer the roll call for him anyway.

  When Tetsuyuki returned to the front desk of the hotel, a middle-aged guest was grabbing Nakaoka by the lapels and shouting in a loud, angry voice. He was well dressed and wasn’t under the influence of alcohol, but from his language it was obvious that he was a gangster. That guest had arrived just past eight, accompanied by a young woman. It was Tetsuyuki who had shown them to their room, so he knew that the man had made a reservation two weeks previously, and that at check-in he had written the woman’s name as “wife: Mitsuko.” He also knew the man’s address and occupation. And he also knew that all of it was false. Tetsuyuki had gotten so that he could tell at a glance whether or not a couple was actually married. Where he had written his address, what was supposed to have been “Tokyo, Itabashi Ward” contained a mistaken character, and was “Sakabashi Ward” instead. Moreover, no real gallery director when shown to his room would say of the 3,000- or 4,000-yen reproductions hanging on the wall: “These are some very fine pictures you have.”

  In the lobby, a crowd of guests had come to a standstill with stunned looks on their faces, and so the manager rushed up, saying politely that he would like to discuss the matter in the office.

  The man boomed out in an even louder voice, “Seems this hotel has some thieves on its staff, doesn’t it?” He claimed that after finishing his meal at the grill, he returned to his room to find that one of his three pieces of luggage was missing. “The hotel has a master key that opens any room, right?”

  Since Tetsuyuki had begun to work there, this was the third time a gangster had used the same trick to extort money from the hotel. Receiving a meaningful glance from the manager, Tetsuyuki went to the office of the guest room manager on the twelfth floor and, picking up a master key, then stood in front of the door to the man’s room. A woman’s voice answered his knocking.

  “The gentleman who accompanied you said that you are missing a piece of luggage. May we please come in and check?”

  “I don’t have anythin
g on right now. If you’re going to check the room, I want you to do that later when he’s here.”

  Tetsuyuki waited for the plainclothes guard employed by the hotel. He soon came, and, smiling, whispered to Tetsuyuki that he had ascertained that the two of them had gone nowhere but the grill after checking in. “This is an old trick they’re using.” With that, he used the master key to open the door quickly. Panicked, the woman tried to slip into the bathroom, but the guard caught her by the arm.

  “What’re you doing, bursting in on a woman who’s alone? I’ll call the police!”

  “This man is a detective.”

  At Tetsuyuki’s explanation, the woman shot back, “Then show me your identification!”

  “If we don’t find the missing luggage in this room, then I’ll be happy to show it to you.” With that, the guard went into the bathroom and pounded the ceiling with the back of his hand. After pounding a few times, he grabbed the woman by the hair. “That was damned naïve of you to try a trick like that. If you’re going to practice extortion, how about thinking of something more original?”

  In a corner of the bathroom next to an opening for ventilation there was a passage—ordinarily covered by a panel fastened with four screws—large enough for a person to crawl in and make repairs. Using a screwdriver, the guard removed the panel and reached in, pulling out a hidden black leather attaché case. Calling from the telephone next to the bed, Tetsuyuki informed the front desk.

  “Let me tell you for your future reference: for this kind of extortion, you can’t cut corners. Pretend that you’re just going out somewhere, put the piece of luggage in a paper bag or something and go get rid of it, far away. If a guest did that to us, there’d be nothing we could do about it, since we’re in a service business. Of course, it would make us look bad in front of other guests and would hurt our image, but it could be smoothed over with polite words and chump change. The longest anyone’s ever gotten away with cheating us has been six days. Amateurs like you wouldn’t last two days.”

  Snickering, the woman threw herself on the bed and lit a cigarette. The guard had to keep watch over her until the real police arrived. Leaving the door open, Tetsuyuki returned the master key to the guest-room manager and went down to the front desk. The lobby had returned to its usual peaceful state. A newlywed couple, drinking orange juice costing 1,200 yen per glass, was gazing at a small Japanese garden with an artificial stream and waterwheel outside the window.

  “It won’t always be idiots like the ones today. There’s no telling what kind of ingenious trick someone might think of. Take plenty of caution with a guest that seems suspicious,” Tetsuyuki overheard the manager warning the staff at the desk. Appearing to have had his necktie tugged rather forcefully, some long welts had risen on Nakaoka’s slender neck. In an ill-tempered tone of voice, he called for Tetsuyuki.

  “A little while ago, a woman came to see you. Since we were in the middle of all that, we sent her away, but it creates a problem when bellboys meet with their friends at the front desk. If it’s an urgent matter, please have them come to the office through the rear entrance.”

  “Was she wearing a light blue dress?”

  “I didn’t notice what she was wearing, but I think it was light blue.”

  Since the police had arrived, Nakaoka went into the office, rubbing the welts on his neck. Tetsuyuki could picture Yōko’s dejected face as she left the hotel and walked toward the ticket gate of the Hankyū Line. That one line she had written on the scrap of paper came to his mind, words so brimming with love that it made his heart ache: “Are you hungry?”

  He tried to crush his feelings of jealousy. Just as she had said, it would be strange if a young woman were not moved when a handsome man makes a fuss over her, wouldn’t it? Is there something wrong with that? And even if Yōko was in Ishihama’s embrace many times during that void of “several weeks during the summer,” what of it? She’s no saintly woman. “What a petty, base person I am to dredge up what I should have just let go, and to be consumed by this sinister desire for revenge.”

  He glanced at the clock. Nearly forty minutes had passed since the commotion with the gangster. Maybe Yōko would be arriving home about now. That thought made him restless. Dashing out of the hotel, he entered a phone booth. But he had used all his change to call his three friends, and didn’t have a single coin left. Smoothing out a 1,000-yen bill he ran toward a tobacconist’s shop. As he was running, the thought flashed through his mind: She knows me so well, yet she could still let her feelings shift to another man! Even as I was so tormented by that, every day I rode that dirty train back to a room inhabited by a lizard.

  At that thought he stuffed the money back into his pocket and turned around. The tremendous honking of a taxicab resounded in the night street. The extremely irate driver honked incessantly. To Tetsuyuki, it was like a factory’s siren, signaling the end of his work for the day.

  In a bookstore next to the coffee shop where he had agreed to meet Yuriko, Tetsuyuki leafed through the pages of various magazines. He felt it a bother to have to go to a movie with her, and he was uncertain how he should deal with her afterward.

  “I don’t mind if you glance through something, but I can’t do business when people stand here and read entire issues the way you do.” The proprietress of the bookstore was addressing a high school student in another section of the store who was absorbed in a manga book, but her words prompted two or three college students to leave also. Tetsuyuki likewise returned the magazines to the rack and exited. It was already more than a half hour past the time they were to meet.

  He reluctantly pushed open the door of the coffee shop and recognized Yuriko’s bowed profile, which reflected an image of loneliness and helplessness and caused some agitation in his mind. What agitated him even more, however, was the expression of unfeigned joy and relief on her face the moment she looked up at him.

  “I had to cut three classes today, so I’ve been making phone calls to friends to ask them to answer the roll call for me. That’s why I’m late. Sorry . . .”

  “I was thinkin’ you’d be a no-show.” It was the first time Tetsuyuki had hear her speak in her home dialect. Realizing that herself, she covered her mouth and blushed.

  “Why? I’m the one who invited you, so of course I’d show up.”

  Yuriko added some milk to her untouched coffee, which had grown cold, stirring it with a spoon.

  “You don’t add sugar?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because you don’t want to gain weight?”

  “Yeah.” Then Yuriko mentioned that it was her day off, but asked what he had arranged.

  “I’m still just a part-timer, so I can take days off when I want. Tsuruta will get on my case about it later, though.”

  Lowering her voice, Yuriko informed him that Tsuruta would soon be forced to quit. In the basement of the hotel there were five exclusive shops specializing in imported goods. From about a year ago, French handbags and Danish silverware had been disappearing. Of course, the showcases were locked even when the shops were open, and at closing time the glass doors were also locked. And yet goods were disappearing, not in large quantities, but in small amounts and over time, so that the owners were not at first aware.

  But when they checked sales receipts against their inventory, it became apparent that seven or eight items that had not been sold were missing from the showcases. If it were only one shop, the employees there might come under suspicion. But since all five shops had suffered loss, it was obvious that the criminal was among the hotel employees, the conclusion being reached that an outsider would naturally steal a large quantity all at once, not one thing at a time over an extended period. Thus the hotel management checked its employees’ attendance book against the dates when the items seem to have disappeared, and Tsuruta’s name came up as the one on night duty at those times. All this came to light five days ago, and Tsuruta was on night shift tonight.

  “Tonight, from about two a.m
., guards will be hiding out in the basement.”

  “Who told you this?”

  After some hesitation, Yuriko answered. “Nakaoka, at the front desk. He’s an upperclassman from the high school I went to.”

  “That’s not the only reason, is it? He’s in love with an underclassman from his high school, and she’s well aware of it. That inspires me all the more to contend with a rival.” It was a mystery even to Tetsuyuki why such insincere, honeyed words should slip so casually from his lips. He realized what a bind it was putting him in, but he let slip out another phrase as if he were some kind of genius at womanizing. “This is no time for something so idle as watching a movie.”

  A smile so slight one would need to strain one’s eyes to see it was playing on Yuriko’s lips. Tetsuyuki was somewhat surprised to sense that she probably had carnal experience with men, but this also brought a strange feeling of relief. What was the quickest way to make Yuriko—this woman possessing both earthiness and a peculiar seductiveness—yield to him? He stood up, paid for the coffee, and then went out into the subterranean mall. A casual remark Tsuruta had made to him about six months ago came to mind.

  “That idiot Nakaoka! Whenever he’s on night shift, he puts me on the same shift too. Then he has me keep watch on the front desk while he goes to take a nap for two or three hours. And if I refuse, he’ll dump all kinds of grueling work on me.”

  With a start, Tetsuyuki asked Yuriko, “It was a year ago that things began to turn up missing, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that seems about right.”

  “But how far back did they check the attendance book?”

  “Hmm, he didn’t mention that . . .”