She no longer minded so much that Noriko had taken the Guarnerius. For that tramp-like old woman could hardly have any use for the instrument; all Suwa needed to do, she reasoned, would be to confront her with her guilt and secure the prompt return of the violin by means of a few well-chosen threats.
The next morning, after taking a late breakfast, Suwa made her way upstairs to Noriko’s room and knocked on the door. There was no reply, but she refused to be put off and kept up a steady knocking until at last the door was opened. Noriko Ishiyama had plainly just risen from her bed; her hair was in disarray and a little saliva was dribbling from the corner of her mouth. She stood stunned by the sight of her unexpected visitor, whose relentless glare she could feel penetrating beyond her, seeking out the mountainous pile of old papers and cardboard boxes in her room behind her.
Suwa paused to take in the scene, astonished by the sheer volume of Noriko’s collection, before thrusting the torn cloth in front of Noriko’s eyes.
‘Yours, I think?’
Her look seemed to forestall any possibility of denial, but nonetheless Noriko replied, ‘I’ve no idea. I know nothing about it.’
‘It’s no good pretending innocence! That filthy skirt of yours got caught in the window while you were escaping—look, you can see where it tore!’
Suwa pointed down to a jagged rent in the hem of Noriko’s skirt.
‘That’s an old tear! I didn’t tear it in your room, whatever you say!’
‘What’s the point of lying about it? I know perfectly well that you broke into my room and stole the violin. But so far, I’m the only one who knows, so if you’ll just give it back to me, I’ll forget all about it, and no one else need ever know. But if you don’t, then I’m going to tell everybody that it was you who broke into my room, you who stole the master key. Then you’ll be kicked out of your room for sure!’
Noriko just ignored her. She stood tight-lipped and pale, saying not a word.
‘Come on—say something! You’d better—this whole room of yours is full of stolen goods by the look of it.’
‘How dare you say that? What proof have you got, to come here and speak of stolen goods? You’re a fine one to talk, I must say! What a nerve you’ve got! You stole a famous violin, and then come accusing me of theft! I suppose you think you can treat me like this because I’m on Social Welfare? Well, you’d better think again!’
As Noriko spoke, she got more excited, and her body began to tremble violently as her voice rose to a shout. Suwa began to feel that the tables were being turned; the fortress of her own righteous wrath was being battered by Noriko’s anger.
‘Stop trying to evade the issue!’ she replied. ‘If that’s going to be your attitude, I’ll just have to report you to the police.’
‘Oh really? You just try that and see! They’ll find your fingerprints on the violin, and then what will you say? Now get out, and don’t come back, or I’ll scream so that everyone can hear!’
And with that she slammed the door in Suwa’s face. Suwa seethed with impotent rage, but could do no more than retrace her steps back to her own room, muttering curses as she went. ‘Dirty insect! Filthy caterpillar!’
Once back in her own room, she pondered how best to recover the violin. In her mind’s eye she saw the heaped pile of rubbish in Noriko Ishiyama’s room. Without doubt, her precious Guarnerius lay buried somewhere in the middle of that pile.
She thought of starting a fire. If that mass of old paper caught light, Noriko would have to run for her life. And everyone else would be absorbed in rescuing their most valued possessions and fleeing the building. Under cover of the confusion, she might be able to recover the violin. Even if she didn’t, at least she’d have the pleasure of having punished Noriko. Having got this thought into her mind, Suwa set about working out a means to implement her plan. She thought of a way of setting fire to the newspapers in Noriko’s room.
Many years before, when she was still a mere child, Suwa had lived in the country next to a fruit farmer. She remembered how she used to watch her neighbour kill off the insects on the trees. He used to take a long bamboo pole, and fit some benzine-soaked rags to the tip. Lighting this torch, he would burn off the insects before they could harm his cherry trees. In her rage, she could think of no better way of dealing with ‘that caterpillar’.
And so it came about that a day or so later, at about three-thirty am, Suwa put the necessary materials for fire-raising into a bag and taking up a thin bamboo about a yard long made her way back to Noriko’s room. In the silence of the night, even the slightest sound carried, so that it seemed even more likely to awaken suspicion by trying to muffle her steps. So perversely she took no precautions, other than wearing a pair of straw sandals, to conceal the sounds of her progress. She flushed the toilet on the landing of her floor and, under cover of that sound, made her way up to the floor above.
There was no light to be seen from within Noriko Ishiyama’s room. She pressed her ear to the door, but could hear no sound. Suwa squatted down in the corridor and began to unpack the contents of her paper bag. She took out a small bundle of kindling wood, and some torn scraps of rag, and placed them on the floor. She soaked the rags in benzine and then wound them round the kindling wood so that the final result looked like a lollipop. Taking the bamboo, she pushed against the fanlight above the door, until it opened a few inches. As she had expected, it was not locked from within. She let it close again, and then looked around carefully, holding her breath and listening. There was not a sound to be heard, and nothing untoward apart from the strong smell of the benzine. She struck a match; the sound grated in the silence. Then she applied it to the rags, which flared up, lighting her immediate surroundings and throwing a dim light beyond. She bided her time while the kindling wood caught fire, opening the fanlight once again with the bamboo pole and counting up to ten before she threw the burning torch into Noriko’s room. She let the fanlight close again, and paused to await the results of her action, but could see no glimmer of light from within. She walked slowly back to the toilet on the floor below. The window was set at an angle so that she could see the side of the courtyard overlooked by Noriko’s room. It took her a minute or so to get there, and then with careful deliberation she opened the frosted glass window and looked out. Now she would know if her scheme had worked.
A deep red glow could be seen in Noriko’s window. Suwa had remained icy calm throughout the preparation and execution of her plan, but now for the first time she felt her flesh creep. She rushed out of the toilet and, reaching the landing of the floor above, tried to shout ‘Fire! Fire!’ with all her might, but her vocal chords seemed paralysed.
Just at that moment, she tripped over a small, round black object, and the shock overcame her paralysis. The cat, for such it was, reared up and hissed before escaping. Suwa beat at the nearest door to hand and then, hearing screams from a room down the passage, turned and fled back to her own room as if in a trance. Her teeth chattered, and she had lost control of her senses. She threw herself down and burrowed between her bed-covers without bothering to undress. After a minute or so she heard a siren approaching in the distance. She covered her head with the pillow and remained, trembling, in her bed.
After an hour, the red dawn light filtered into her room through the window. She heard the bustle subside and the last fire engine drive away in the street below, its bell still ringing. But still the building echoed with the coming and going of many feet.
She put on a coat and made her way to the confusion that raged on the floor above.
The corridor outside Noriko Ishiyama’s room was crowded by other residents of the building, many of them from other floors who were already dressed to go to work. A small group was standing outside Noriko’s room, peering in. The floor of the passage was covered with the drenched ashes of burned quilts and clothing. Everywhere there was the stench of scorched cloth and cardboard.
The interior of Noriko’s room was a swamp of burnt rubbish, on top o
f which, here and there, an empty milk bottle floated. The walls and ceiling were coated with small scraps of charred cardboard. Suwa peered over the shoulders of the crowd, dreading what she might see But there was no sign of a burnt corpse, nor was there any trace of a violin case.
‘They took her away in an ambulance,’ said someone knowingly. ‘She slept in the cupboard, you know, so she was very badly burned before they could get her out. The whole room was full of old paper, and it went up like a bonfire. The firemen said that it’s sheer madness to use a pot-bellied stove in such conditions—it’s bound to lead to a fire in the long run.’
It seemed that no one suspected the real cause of the fire. Suwa went back to her room. But it was a long time before she could overcome her dread of a sudden call by the police. She stayed behind locked doors, and gradually her pupils ceased to come.
Noriko Ishiyama’s life was saved, but she spent a long time in hospital. Miss Tamura opined that she would have to spend the rest of her days in an old people’s home.
Suwa Yatabe abandoned all hope of ever seeing the Guarnerius again.
The violin case lay under the pile of ashes in the incinerator, just as Noriko had left it. From time to time, people kindled fires above it, never dreaming that it was there.
PART SIX
Three months before the building was moved
The case of Yoneko Kimura
That morning, as was her unvaried custom, Yoneko Kimura left her room at precisely ten-thirty, holding a letter and fifty yen in cash.
When she had first retired from her post as a teacher of the Japanese language at the Takebayashi Girls’ School, she hadn’t known what to do with the time which suddenly hung so heavily on her hands. After a while, she began to devise ways of occupying herself.
At first, she used to go out at eight-thirty am, just as in the old days of her employment, and stroll to Ikebukuro. Once there, she would visit the cinema at the specially reduced price for the morning show and then wander around one or other of the department stores. This certainly killed time, but after a short while she had to give up this routine for two reasons.
First of all, it cost money—more than she could really afford. She had to pay to go into the cinema, and after window-shopping in the department store she would buy some hot sweet drink or other to restore her energy, or to prevent her throat from drying. (In reality, she was really fond of such drinks, and so these pretexts were rationalisation.)
Then in addition, mixing with the busy crowds brought home to her more than ever her real sense of loneliness. It even seemed better to stay in her little concrete cell of a room, contemplating whatever the future might have in store for her, and for a while she tried that. At least she could give her imagination free rein, and at least it was better than sitting on the department store benches by the urns where green tea was served free, and where she suffered the pangs of looking about her at the other old women of her age who also gathered in such places.
After confining herself to her room for a month, she became listless and lost her appetite, and so took to going out again just for the sake of the exercise. This time, she went in the opposite direction from Ikebukuro. She felt like a convalescent after a long illness, viewing the outside world with a fresh vision. Every few hundred yards along the way there was a red postbox; these became landmarks of her daily voyage, identifying for her the distance she had gone and how far she still had to go. And so it came about that day after day she would, almost subconsciously, take in the presence of the postboxes… until one day a thought suddenly struck her.
After all, postboxes were not just set up along the road as landmarks or as milestones. Why shouldn’t she use them for their proper purpose? Why not write letters to people?
Going back to her room, she opened her closet and got out the old graduation magazines from her former school. They made a heavy pile on her desk.
Her former pupils were almost too numerous to count. She determined to write to each in turn, one per day, starting with the earliest ones and working through them in alphabetical order. It wouldn’t matter if she got no replies.
And in that instant of decision, the purposeless emptiness of her recent existence fell away and she felt a deep sense of satisfaction as she thought of the task which would occupy the hours and days ahead.
Thenceforth, not a day passed but she wrote a letter to one of her former pupils. Generally, she wrote in the evening, spending about four and a half hours on the task. When the letter was complete, she would fold it carefully and put it in the addressed envelope, but she would not stamp it. She would leave it on her desk and go to bed. She got a particular satisfaction from once again employing the skills of her former profession, taking the due care in composition to be expected of a teacher of Japanese.
When she got up the next morning, she never re-read the letter. She would instead open the graduation list and underline the name of her latest addressee in red ink, and number it in sequence. This businesslike procedure gave her the satisfaction and security of routine. Then she would set out on her morning walk. She would stop at the small tobacconist at Otsuka Nakamachi and buy twenty Shinsei cigarettes and a ten-yen stamp. She would then stamp the letter and post it in a different box every day; the box, too, was predetermined according to the order of its position along her route. As for the rest of her day, it was spent in her room, so that her life was structured by the actions of writing and posting her daily letters. Her mind was concentrated, each new day, upon the former pupil to whom she was writing. First she would repeat the name of the girl over and over again until the image of her arose in her mind like a bubble of gas long trapped at the bottom of a swamp. At that instant, she could once more see her correspondent as she had been all those years ago, and remember everything about her clearly in her mind.
For instance, she would recollect how Miss A would freeze to attention, standing to one side, whenever Miss Kimura passed her in the school corridor. Or there was her memory of Miss B, one of her favourite pupils, whom she had caught skylarking with a junior girl on the station platform. The girl had been so embarrassed that she had hidden herself in the Station Master’s office! To her, such memories were full of poignant interest.
This was not, however, necessarily the reaction of the recipients of her letters, now mature women, who were thus abruptly brought face to face with memories of their youthful immaturity. Not all of them found Miss Kimura’s recollections as welcome as she would have wished. These spectres of their past were suddenly produced, as if on film, before their very eyes, and most of the recipients found her letters distasteful or even shocking and did not vouchsafe replies.
A few, however, found the experience of value in helping them reflect on their personalities past and present. All of them had the same points in common; like their former teacher, they were living alone and were suffering from a feeling of spiritual oppression. For all of them, the prospects ahead seemed dark or non-existent, and only the past had any real meaning or comfort. Like her, they led secret lives apart from the real world.
When she had written exactly seven hundred such letters, the lot fell upon one Keiko Kawauchi (b. 1930). Yoneko Kimura had been her class teacher for the two years preceding graduation—and those were the two years immediately following Japan’s wartime defeat, when society was in a turmoil and all the old values were being questioned. Naturally, the former educational system was also being reviewed and revised at the same time.
The older teachers like Yoneko found some of the educational reforms that were being imposed on Japan by the Occupation Forces very hard to stomach. Until the textbooks could be reprinted, they had to go through them inking out passages reflecting militaristic or nationalistic thinking. Also, they had to reduce in number, and sometimes simplify in form, the Chinese characters they had been accustomed to teach in the past. The students soon sensed the uncertainty of their teachers who had for so long reigned inviolate from their raised dais, to whom the new wor
d ‘Liberty’, with its effects overflowing into the classroom, began to assume repulsive connotations. Yoneko made just one attempt to recover her former dignity and state, and that had concerned Keiko Kawauchi. Most of the girls came to school in black cotton stockings. Some of the girls didn’t have them, but most of the girls in the senior classes, the nubile ones, wore their uniform and black cotton stockings even though it was still a time of shortages and drab clothes in Japan. There was just one girl who was different—Keiko, who wore nylon stockings to school. Later on she had her imitators, but she was the first, and such clothes could only be obtained at great price through the black market. Seeing Keiko’s shapely legs glittering in the smooth nylons, Yoneko’s rage boiled up and overflowed. What angered her even more was the unladylike way in which Keiko sat with one thigh crossed over the other, as if to show off her legs and her stockings—such conduct in a young Japanese girl had been unthinkable before the coming of the Occupation Forces. Looking back on the incident, Yoneko now wondered why she had worked herself up so much over a trivial detail, but at that time it had seemed a matter of great moment.
In fact, those nylon stockings were like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and Yoneko’s outburst of wrath merely reflected her deep dissatisfaction with the changes going on around her. Here was a threat, it seemed to her, to the whole structure of Japanese womanliness and morality, and it had to be faced head on. In stern tones, she rebuked the girl in front of the rest of the class, making it quite clear that nylon stockings were forbidden at school.
She had expected Keiko, after such public humiliation, to stay away from school for a day or two. In fact, she had herself begun to regret her over-reaction. But to the contrary, Keiko showed up at school the next day—still wearing nylon stockings. There were several other girls who, like Keiko, came from families which were prospering illicitly or indecently amidst the general ruin of the country, and these were the first to imitate her example. After a short while, all the girls in the class followed suit, until nylon stockings more or less became the fashion with school uniform. Yoneko came to realise that she no longer possessed the power to influence these adolescents of the postwar era, and accepted her defeat for want of any other course of action. The question was raised once at a teachers’ conference, together with the new trend of schoolgirls growing their hair long, a thing formerly forbidden. All the teachers had to accept that their authority was diminished and that there was nothing to be done about such issues.
The Master Key Page 8