Perhaps it was not so very unnatural for fish to be washed up on the shoreline; perhaps he was somehow exaggerating the mystery of it. Still, when he looked at the ripples that covered the lake’s surface, as tight and quick as if an electrical current had been rendered visible as liquid, he could not help wondering if there were some malicious predator in there, or if, indeed, there were any life at all. The latter thought appalled him indefinably. These were, like the nonsense with the cigarette, childish ideas, mere self-indulgence, really. He indulged this unwontedly gloomy fascination further by looking for ripples that might be those of fish. He thought he saw something like the wake of a fin, but could not be sure. Eventually he felt that there was no answer to his fake questions, that the mystery was an empty one, and he turned away, strode past the row of boats lying on their sides, and back to the waiting car. Komakichi started up the engine again, with the smoothness of supreme leisure, and twisting the wheel drastically, resumed their interrupted journey to the coast.
When they returned by the same road that evening, Stephen once again asked if Komakichi could stop by the lake. The pleasant exhaustion of swimming was on him. His body still tingled a little, and the tips of his hair were a little damp. Something in this trance-like drowsiness turned to desire as he dreamily recognised the surroundings of the lake. The crunch of the car door was softened by the night. Komakichi left the headlights on, and Stephen crossed the slanted yellow beams, down the little dirt road that led to the shore.
There was a deep, gorgeous blue in the sky which seemed to make the black of trees and mountain as rich as sapphire. Some of this blue even hovered over the slurping, sloshing, washing body of black that was the lake. The constellations seemed to be churning in the sky, falling in on each other in a slow, continuous collapse, like the lights of a fair seen from a distance, the turning of the big wheel, a dizzy convergence. Watching the collapsing sky, Stephen staggered, losing for a moment all sense of vertical and horizontal. Then he jumped upright again as if falling back into his body from a dream. He saw the faint cobalt of the stars on the carcasses of fish. For a weird instant he felt that the odour of the fish was rising up like a haze to be one with the dizziness of the sky.
There is a certain serious but pleasant feeling to be gained from the dim, yet clinical whiteness of strip lights when all outside is dark. Stephen noted this upon their return to the Sugimori residence that evening. Perhaps the subliminal buzz and flicker of the lights simply harmonised with his tiredness. Or perhaps it held pleasant associations for him. He felt too much reduced to a vague and clumsy sensual object to analyse anything at all. The best he could do consciously was to know how pleasing he found it to see Mr Sugimori at his desk with books before him and books neatly lining the shelves behind. It was the perfect mixture of relaxation and industry, cosiness and sobriety.
Komakichi excused himself almost immediately, retiring straight to his room, either to sleep or to study. Since Komakichi was now approaching the end of his degree, he could no longer spend the amount of time with Stephen as he had when they were first acquainted. When he had some brief leisure, he might drive Stephen here and there, but there always remained the sense that he was ‘fitting it in’, or taking Stephen to places that were on his way to somewhere else anyway. Even when they were together, conversation, too, seemed restricted, as if there was not room for anything other than functional exchanges. Still, Stephen felt some friendliness in the mere fact of receiving these businesslike favours. By some strange process he was now on better terms with Komakichi’s father than Komakichi himself. He had been invited on the pretext of his friendship with Komakichi, but now that he was here he was enjoying that strange Japanese magnanimity which meant the attachment he had formed with Komakichi was now passed on to the rest of the family, as if it all made no difference exactly who he had come to see. And since Mrs Sugimori was visiting her sick mother, there was no one else in the family to take Komakichi’s place as host except for Mr Sugimori.
So it was Mr Sugimori who now put down his books, turned in his chair, removed his glasses, and offered Stephen something to drink. Stephen settled on green tea, and drank with the mug cupped in both hands. Mr Sugimori asked him about the day’s diving. Stephen responded conventionally that he had enjoyed himself and expressed his thanks to Mr Sugimori for introducing him to a friend with a boat who shared his interest. His thoughts, however, were on something else, and, despite somewhere an instinct that told him the subject was a dubious or eccentric one, he found himself unwontedly voicing his mental enquiries.
‘We stopped at a nearby lake,’ he said. ‘I realised I have never dived in a lake before, and the idea sort of took hold of me that freshwater diving might be very different. The thing is, there were dead fish on the shore, and I thought perhaps it might be polluted. You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?’
‘Which lake is it?’
Stephen strained and finally managed to recall the name Komakichi had given him.
‘It’s really not something I know much about, but if it was industrial pollution you were thinking of, there are no factories or chemical plants in the area.’
‘Strange,’ said Stephen, musingly.
‘Not so very strange, surely. A dead fish is not so peculiar a sight.’
‘Perhaps not, at least, not by the sea, where there is more chance it might get washed up by the tide. But this is a lake. Surely it’s not natural for that many fish to die all at once?’
‘Why not? I’m not an expert on aquatic life, but it doesn’t seem so implausible to me.’
Stephen grew a little impatient and excited.
‘I’m not an expert either. That’s what’s so tantalising. When it comes to it we have very little ability to judge what is natural and what isn’t. It takes something like this to remind you of your sad ignorance.’
‘It is not so remarkable. If you want to dive in a lake, I’m sure there are others in the area whose purity is less in doubt.’
‘To be honest I’m interested in this particular lake.’
At these words Mr Sugimori paused, swallowed thoughtfully and spoke again in a matter of fact tone.
‘There is something I know about the lake. It has a bad reputation. People don’t talk about it much, and yet somehow its reputation is well known. Well, it’s not first-hand knowledge, but there are a number of suicides connected with the lake. I’m sure at least of those facts.
‘The lake has had a bad name for a very long time, something to do with the shrine at the edge, perhaps. I’m sure that’s all superstition, but the suicides are real. Occasionally people from outside the area who don’t know the lake’s reputation will visit and take a swim in the lake. All those that are known of killed themselves soon after. I could not even speculate on the reasons, but those are the facts. I should think it would be better to be safe and keep away from the lake, just in case.’
Was this why Stephen had instinctively felt it was a bad idea to mention the lake? Had he too somehow absorbed the fact of its evil reputation just by seeing it, and had that uneasiness when his mouth ran away with him been because he was afraid to associate himself with the lake lest he meet with disapproval, even ostracism? Mr Sugimori had not stressed the risk of swimming in the lake, repeated his warning or extracted a promise from Stephen not to swim there. Instead his words were full of the firm confidence that a single stating of the facts would be sufficient to make his point. And so it was. Stephen now felt he was in a position where it was very difficult to express any further interest in the lake. And yet his interest was only stronger for this.
‘You don’t know anything else about those suicides, do you? Motive, for instance?’
‘I know very little. Cases have been covered in the papers though. I dare say there is a fair amount of material on the lake at the local library. If you want my opinion, though, it’s a matter best left alone. After the initial inquiries following each death it seems that no one has been willing to inve
stigate further. I expect there are good reasons for this, even if those involved don’t know themselves what they are.’
‘Forgive me, but surely that is superstition.’
‘Not at all. Saying you don’t understand something is very different to being superstitious.’
The Venetian blind formed a dusty rib cage of shadow. The sun suffered behind the slats, and dust floated off them as if dislodged by the sun’s slow impact. So the shadows around the wall and bookshelves were intense with the sun’s far presence as Stephen sat at the reading table, his hand pressed into his forehead and his fingers furrowing the front of his hair. Can someone be poisoned by the weather or the atmosphere like they can by food? he wondered to himself.
Whether it had been all Mr Sugimori’s talk about the unexplained being different to superstition, or something else, Stephen did not know. Whatever it was, something had changed Stephen’s interest in the lake from a passive and vague wondering to a deliberate and systematic quest for knowledge. Whereas before it had merely been the lapping mass of water that fascinated him, now he was almost forgetful of the lake itself and taken up in incident and circumstance. For the first time in his life he was investigating something purely voluntarily, testing the potential of his own initiative and that storehouse of public information, the library. It was only the day after the conversation.
Perhaps it was all this reading that had brought it on, or the nasty humidity, but Stephen had developed a shocking headache. He almost never had headaches, and this one was as unexpected as a black cloud in the middle of a blue sky. Surely it could not be eye-strain? Stephen had always had perfect, untroubled vision, vision that was so pristine it was virtually a primal faculty, fresh as dew-fall in Eden. It had even come to symbolise for him the passive and exaggerated good luck that had blessed his frame and seemed to slap along beside him in the echoes and shadows of his stride, a luck he was often tempted to christen normality. He could not imagine what it was like to have his vision, which in many ways amounted to the world itself, impaired or blurred even slightly.
Truly he felt baptised with holy water, born to the miracle of the ordinary.
This was so, wasn’t it? And yet all this was not completely unqualified. For Stephen had spent his whole life floating on the surface, in the realm of the physical. The practice of sport gave him a peculiar sensation of lightness, as if he was constantly living with a prickly new haircut. He had proved himself academically, but his chosen subjects had been maths, physics and those fields of study bathed in the summery light of logic. Sometimes, sitting at a window, studying, he would fairly feel the sunlight dazzle through him.
It was not that Stephen was a shallow person. Indeed, that he possessed fine apparatus for a spiritual life he himself sensed with a layman’s subtle but inarticulate intuition. He was happy for a spiritual dimension to exist in life, but saw no reason to meddle with it. In fact, he considered it a measure of his true depth that he had been aware of his spiritual side and had the foresight to let it take care of itself, just as his biological functions did.
So the course he had taken in life was in many ways a monkish one. He kept his body and mind pleasantly uncluttered, and they remained buoyant and full of light. As long as he was empty how could he sink into life’s heavy dross? That dross would actually keep him afloat. He kept his mind in order, the way he might repair a puncture. Yet, for all this buoyancy he was often aware of himself as a shell, and aware, too, of vague watery shadows not so far beneath the surface of existence, visible to him through his transparent shell.
He tried to ignore his headache and concentrated on jotting down all the essential elements of what he had discovered in connection with the lake. In fact, it did not amount to a great deal more than what Mr Sugimori had already told him. Yes, there had been suicides. The articles he had found dated from 1956, but even the first article alluded, with a tantalising lack of emphasis, to the lake being a place sullied by a gloomy history of rumours and incidents. Accompanying this particular article, there was even a photograph of the suicide victim, one Toraiwa Taiji, standing bare-chested by the margin of the lake. It was a grainy, black and white photograph, and somehow Stephen associated its smudgy greys, its Rorschach-like patterns, with the dim understatement and the omission of the article itself. That healthy body, still beaded with little drops of water perhaps—it was hard to distinguish—stood in a sunshine now rendered a kind of heavy, dark tedium by the chemical process of its recording; and a half smile hovered on the young man’s face, now set forever as if by nervousness. These signs of outward normality seemed to conspire with the flat tone of the article to obscure the very heart of the incident. In its place was a cave of vague shadow, such as that one sees when one closes one’s eyes, the static snow and white noise of the mind. It was for this very reason, perhaps, that the blurred ripples of the lake behind the figure became uncanny to Stephen, like the cryptic, unfocused shots of UFOs or the inconclusive photographs of the Loch Ness monster.
There was another photograph of Toraiwa Taiji. In this one he was fully clothed in a dark student’s uniform. He was not showing even a flicker of a smile here; it could easily have been a passport photograph. His slight acne, his badly cut and badly combed hair, all seemed omens. They were the stigmata of a cursed drabness and anonymity that made the student’s macabre end a foregone conclusion. Indeed, that was one thing that had particularly impressed Stephen—the method of suicide. Taiji was apparently a very good swimmer, one who might find it difficult to drown, especially in the still waters of a lake. This must have been why he tied a metal weight to his ankle when he went down to the water. Apparently there had been a witness, an unfortunate sightseer had been forced to watch the whole incident helplessly through binoculars from a nearby mountainside. The body, it seems, was never recovered. Stephen’s wonder at the meaning of this method of suicide was multiplied when he found that a significant number of all cases had chosen the same basic method—drowning in the lake.
However, this was where he began to become annoyed with the articles, for they were decidedly thin on details. He understood how the verdict of suicide was reached in the case of Taiji, but, while some other cases were referred to merely as drownings, there were one or two that were given the name suicide without any substantiation. Was it just that the lake was associated with suicide? But that was very lazy journalism. And then, too, the articles were very reticent on the matter of the investigative steps taken by the authorities. For instance, in one article, the whole assumption of one young girl’s suicide rested on the discovery of her clothes at the side of the lake. No body or attempts to recover the body were mentioned.
There were a few cases where the victim had left a note, which did form conclusive evidence that there was a kernel of truth to the whole suicide theory. However, the letters were either so tight-lipped that they communicated nothing other than the intention to commit suicide, written seemingly as a sort of reluctant duty, or they were simply incoherent. It was hard to discern a single motive, common or otherwise. There were two notes a little longer than the others, and it was interesting to compare them. They were full of such phrases as ‘the stagnant womb of death’, and ‘the stars that eat the decaying carcass of the sky’.
However, of any sign of purpose or sense to these notes, there was none. Looking for sense in them, Stephen felt, was like trying to look for life in the lake. It remained an opaque, shapeless and stationary mass. The notes could have been describing themselves, stagnant wombs, breeding nothing but the maggots of words.
Perhaps most disturbing of all was a case of two friends who had gone swimming together and had both killed themselves days afterwards, one with an overdose of pills and alcohol, the other with mains electricity. Stephen wondered what, if anything, had passed between the friends in a few days between their swimming in the lake and their respective self-murders. If it had been a pact, would it not have been more natural for them to commit the final act together? Of course
, Stephen was not an expert on these matters, but this kind of double suicide, separate in location and method, but almost single in time, and likely one in cause, seemed to have a frenetic, hurried violence to it quite unlike any other suicide he had heard of.
This formed the general burden of those articles he had managed to isolate and extricate from the rank and neglected garden of tedious text that was local history. Apart from the newspaper articles, however, there were a few books that treated of an entirely different phase of the lake’s identity. These were books dealing with mythology and religious sects throughout Japan’s history. The relevant information in them was concerned with the shrine Mr Sugimori had mentioned, and the cult for whom it formed a centre of worship. Stephen had discovered in the pages of one book that the cult was known as Mamushi, and had used the name to try and find information in other books. In most of the books he tried, the name did not even make the index. Where it did it was often still only the name that was mentioned, and that in passing, or else the bare fact of the existence of such a cult. But the lack of detail concerning this cult was so profound and complete that Stephen almost wondered if it was some sort of trick of his fancy that it existed at all. Or maybe it was, instead, a trick in the shared imagination of folklorists, a name one of them thought they had heard somewhere, a dreamlike conviction that arose from doubt and absence and spread like a phantom disease. Just as the paper behind the printed name was a white blank, so the very existence behind the concept concentrated in the word seemed utterly empty.
Morbid Tales Page 13