Kappa Quartet

by Daryl Qilin Yam

  “We’re outdoors?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’re outdoors. We walk down a flight of stairs, down to the bottom of the slope. Down to the coast. None of the lanterns are on, so there’s no light at all. But you can hear the sea all around us.”

  “And then we enter the water,” I said.

  “We enter the water,” he said.

  “The water is warm.”

  “The water is warm.”

  “You notice the sea is all black in the night.”

  “It’s all black,” said Takao. “And the wind from the sea is cold.”

  “It is?”

  “It is,” said Takao. “I walk to the edge of the bath. I spread open my arms.” He then spread his arms open, his right hand hovering above my head on the grass. “Like this,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You spread your arms open, and I watch you from behind. I’m watching you from behind, Takao.” I then took his hand, used it as a pillow. His fingers were strong and warm against the side of my ear. “And how do you feel, old guy? How do you think you feel?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. I felt his thumb, roving around the edge of my earlobe.

  “It’s a particular kind of loss,” he said. “Something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s there. The more you look into it, the more it stares back at you, leaving you cold on the inside.” He paused. “It feels like a void of some kind, the kind that hurts around the edges—and yet the longer I stand there, the less I can feel it hurting. The fuller I feel I’m becoming.”

  His thumb stopped moving. I smiled to myself, and pressed my hands against my eyes. I asked the old guy if it was true, if he could really feel it happening to him—and he said it was true, he said that he could. As though he were really there, standing at the edge of the world, letting the water fill up the void inside him. He could feel it all, while I felt nothing. I felt nothing whatsoever.

  PART TWO

  5

  LOVER MAN

  DECEMBER 2012

  SUGIMURA

  The intermission was nearly coming to an end, and the boy said he needed to pee. I looked at my friend, seated on his other side. He looked back at me. “C’mon,” my friend said to Goro. “Let’s go.”

  It was the New Year’s Eve concert, held at the Fumon Hall in Tokyo. All my life, I had never stepped foot in a concert hall as big as this one, and now, as the crowd gradually dissipated, I found myself one of the few people remaining, seated in the middle of this great chamber. I noted an old couple seated together, down the row to my left, thumbing through the programme. In the row before mine, a couple of seats down to the right, sat Mr Five. I didn’t know him then, but I would soon enough.

  He was a kappa in what seemed like his fifties, the hole in his head positioned several inches above his left ear. Large boils of various sizes covered his face and his neck, each boil catching the light differently, causing his profile to be cast in an array of splintered shadows. It was such a curious effect I couldn’t help but stare, until Mr Five looked over his shoulder and established eye contact with me. I was too transfixed to look away. Caught in the act, I ended up smiling at him, and he smiled back. The kappa then got up from his seat, walked down to the end of his row, and sat himself in the vacant one next to mine.

  “I am Mr Five,” he said with a short bow. I bowed back.

  “Mr Five?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Mr Five, as opposed to Mr Four, or Mr Six. It is a nickname.” He then said he was here to support a friend; a member of a jazz quintet he had most recently joined. “I am the fifth member of this quintet, and thus: Mr Five.”

  “Interesting…” I told him I was here to support a friend as well.

  “Oh? What does he play?” he asked.

  “The saxophone.”

  Mr Five blinked, and smiled even wider. He seemed taken aback by my answer.

  “Same here,” he said. “My friend plays the sax, while I play the trumpet.”

  I shifted in my seat. “Are you… a member of an orchestra as well?”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head, as though it was a matter of great sensitivity to him. “I find it particularly hard to relate to classical music,” he explained. “It lacks all of the things that make jazz so great: the spontaneity, the cool, the unpredictability. But I must admit I was very moved, halfway through the first set.”

  I began looking through the programme. “You mean, during the Gustav Holst...?”

  “Yes,” said Mr Five. “There it is: the Second Suite in F. Are you fond of classical music yourself?”

  “You could say so,” I said, closing the booklet. “But I prefer jazz as well… I owe this to my friend’s influence.”

  “Was he the one you came with?”

  “Yes… He’s in the toilet now.”

  “I see,” said Mr Five. He paused for a while, looking towards the empty stage. “I hope you do not mind me asking, but was that your son, seated between you and your friend? I could not help but notice earlier, just before the concert started.”

  “Ah, he is,” I said. “My son.”

  Mr Five kept quiet once more. His eyes remained directed towards the stage. There were nothing but chairs and music stands, the conductor’s podium. Mr Five scratched a large boil on his chin, in a thoughtful kind of way. “How strange then,” he said to me, “for a kappa boy to have a human father.”

  I scratched my lip. It wasn’t the first time I had been asked that question. “It’s hard not to notice him… especially when the hole in his head is so big.”

  Mr Five crossed his arms. “I have never seen anything like it before, if you do not mind me saying. It is as though the boy had stepped out of the Edo period. Kappas like him are not meant to exist today, or rather, they just do not anymore.”

  I nodded my head. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Anyway,” said Mr Five, getting up on his feet. “It was nice chatting with you, Mr Sugimura. I will return to my seat.” I then watched the back of his coat as he ambled away, down to the far end of the row, just as the other concertgoers streamed back in. Briefly, I wondered how the man had known my name.

  •

  Goro’s homeroom teacher called me down once, to speak to me privately at the elementary school. It was during the last week of November, about four to five weeks ago. Classes were still ongoing that afternoon, but it was a free period of hers, and so we had a good hour of time entirely to ourselves.

  “Shinichi’s parents just had him transferred,” Goro’s teacher said. We were seated in the art studio, located on the third floor; she sat in a chair two metres away from me, the both of us at one end of a window. It was nearly two in the afternoon, and the room was filled with a clear, cleansing sort of light. “It was only a matter of time. They sent him to another school in a neighbouring city,” she added.

  “Is that so…?” I was dawdling again. “Was he treated badly? Because of what he did to Goro?”

  The teacher tilted her head to the side. She was in her early fifties, possibly even later, but she had a girlish manner about her. She spoke slowly and gently, and had a fairly high voice register. She taught mainly mathematics at the school. Her students knew her as Ms Itsuko.

  “It’s only natural, considering what he did to your child. The kids made sure that Shinichi wouldn’t go unpunished. Shinichi even seemed to welcome it at times,” she said.

  A few seconds of silence passed. Ms Itsuko brushed a piece of lint off her skirt. She then went on.

  “Apparently one of the teachers had asked Shinichi if he was sure he wanted to leave, and he said that he did. Excuse me, Mr Sugimura—but he said he didn’t feel safe.”

  “From his classmates...?”

  She shook her head. “Shinichi said he could feel another person inside him; a person who could take control of his every movement. But of course we’re not here to talk about him, Mr Sugimura. We’re here to talk about your son.”

  “R
ight,” I said. “Of course.”

  Ms Itsuko crossed, and then re-crossed her legs.

  “I’m sure you understand, however, that if we are to talk about your son, we will have to talk about the incident that happened in September.”

  “Of course,” I said. “That goes without saying.”

  She smiled. “I apologise. I don’t know if you remember all the details, Mr Sugimura, but it was right down this hallway, in the boys’ restroom. Shinichi had just come out from one of the stalls, while your child was in the midst of washing his hands. And then something came over Shinichi: a violent impulse he couldn’t contain. He took the back of Goro’s head and smashed it against the mirror.”

  “I remember,” I said to her. “There were…there were three other kids in there as well.”

  “That is right,” said Ms Itsuko. “Three other witnesses to the incident. Two of them were Goro’s classmates. All three of the boys said Goro had done nothing to provoke him. All Goro had done was wash his hands in the sink like he was supposed to.”

  Just then I heard a sudden ping—the sound of a bat hitting a ball outside. From the window, I could see a bunch of kids practicing baseball on the field. A round of applause rose from the stands, as the coach shouted something encouraging.

  “Shinichi said it was the hole at the back of Goro’s head that had agitated him.” The batter began running towards the base. “He said he had never seen a cavity that big before in his life.”

  I nodded. Ms Itsuko turned towards the window as well, just as the batter scored a point.

  “Sorry to ask, but—it’s five inches wide, isn’t it? More or less.”

  I nodded again.

  “And how big was it, when you first adopted him?”

  I tried to remember. It had been four years earlier. “Around three inches, I think…maybe three and a half.”

  “And do you think the hole in Goro’s head will continue to grow, Mr Sugimura?” She tore her gaze away from the field. “I can only assume that would be the case. The boy’s only eight, after all. There’s still a long way to go before puberty.”

  The next pitcher assumed his position on the mound.

  “It’ll stop though,” I said. “Won’t it?”

  Ms Itsuko didn’t seem to know for sure. “My fear is if it gets any bigger it might invite more trouble in the future. I hope you understand,” she said.

  The pitcher swung his arm: the ball flew in a straight, white line. The pitcher couldn’t have been older than twelve.

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  Ms Itsuko smiled once more. I saw it in her reflection on the windowpane. “That’s natural, Mr Sugimura. Fear is the one thing all parents share.”

  It had been around eleven in the morning when I first found Goro, after a three-hour hike in Aokigahara. There was a car, parked at a clearing intended for vehicles coming down Lake Saiko: a banged-up, yellow Toyota Prius with the bumper half-missing. The real reason it caught my eye though was the envelope I saw, pinned beneath the windscreen wiper, and the boy looking out the window from the backseat. He opened his mouth. He was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear him; Wagner was blasting from the car’s speakers—the third act of Tristan und Isolde.

  All this happened four years ago. According to the officials, the boy was an enigma: without any proper identification, they didn’t have a way to access his birth records. The only clue they had was his name—Goro—and the company that had rented the car out to his mother, but that proved to be another dead end: the mother had settled the deposit with cash, and the second-hand dealer, a shady sort of start-up, had neglected to ask for her ID card. A search for the mother’s body through the forest had turned up nothing as well. The only good that came out of the situation was the boy himself, whom the doctors had pronounced a healthy, ordinary kappa. They noted that he had an unusually large hole in the back of his head—it was the size of a baby’s fist, already larger than most adults’—but it was just a physical trait, the doctors had stressed. It had nothing to do with anything else.

  Assured of his well-being, the social workers began to make arrangements for foster care, and suffice it to say, I followed the proceedings with a fairly keen eye. I adopted him. I had failed at being a father once, and that failure had left a void in my life: I saw it every day whenever I came back home (the absence of it, the simple lack) and in many ways Goro felt like a second chance. That, and something told me the boy needed a home.

  Ms Itsuko coughed lightly into her hand. She reached into a pocket and took out a packet of tissues. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Excuse me.”

  I watched as she held onto the tissues in her hand.

  “Goro changed after the incident, didn’t he?” said Ms Itsuko.

  “Hmm.”

  “Everybody noticed,” she said. “Goro used to be such a cheerful kid. He was so eager for everything. So enthusiastic, energetic. And then suddenly, all of that disappeared.”

  I had been notified immediately, after the incident occurred. The school nurse examined Goro and had him sent to the hospital, just to be on the safe side.

  “The doctors said he was fine,” I said.

  “Did they?”

  I nodded. “It was just a bad case of bruising, a slight wave of dizziness… Goro was told to stay at home and rest.”

  Ms Itsuko sighed. “What was he like before? At home, I mean.”

  “He was cheerful… Just like what you said.”

  “And what did he like to do?” she asked.

  “All kinds of things,” I replied. “He liked getting out of the house. During the summer he’d walk around the park and collect insects, put them into boxes… Every night at half past eight, we’d head down to the local bathhouse.”

  “To meet other kappas?”

  I looked at Ms Itsuko. I was surprised. I asked her how she knew, and she smiled again.

  “The bathhouse is my husband’s favourite place in the whole town. That, and the hot spring motel he frequents,” added Ms Itsuko. “My husband is a kappa.”

  I told her it was unheard of, at least in my experience. “How did the two of you meet?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sorry, Mr Sugimura. I don’t remember. It was such a long time ago that I’ve completely forgot.”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t been an easy marriage,” I said. Ms Itsuko held her hands together, and set them on her lap.

  “It’s impossible to conceive a child,” she said. “That’s the part, I think, that I found the hardest to accept. Everything else has worked out just fine.”

  A disquieting change took over my child, the week after the incident. It was like what Ms Itsuko just described: as though he had left a part of himself behind, like dead weight he didn’t need any longer.

  “I saw a lot of my old self in him, in fact.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ms Itsuko. I tried to think of the words.

  “It wasn’t that the divorce made me angry or depressed… It just changed me,” I said. But there was more to it, of course: after the divorce, I felt as though somebody had drawn a complete blank over my life, had left me with no real purpose to carry on from one day to the next. Each day I felt as though I was sitting next to the cliff of a deep chasm: just the constant feeling of falling down, when in reality I was going nowhere at all. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.

  “Goro spaces out for long periods of time,” she said. “In class he’ll either look out of the window, or stare vacantly at the blackboard. That is the worst, I think. You think he’s paying attention to you, but he isn’t.”

  “I heard it made a girl cry,” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Goro told me,” I said. “He came back home after school, said he made a girl cry... why she cried, though, Goro didn’t know. He said he felt sorry for her.”

  Ms Itsuko’s smile had left her face.

  “You said over the phone, Mr Sugimura, that before his episodes at school bega
n, he had his first one at your friend’s apartment?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Could you please tell me what happened?”

  “It was the second week of October… A friend of mine had bought a new set of speakers and wanted me to check them out. He lives alone in a spacious apartment, located in the middle of Kofu city. Bachelor. Typical artsy guy: long, greying hair, clothes entirely in black… I brought the boy along and we went over for dinner,” I said.

  “How did you meet this friend?”

  I tried to remember. “A few years ago I met up with a researcher at the local college, a cartographer who was interested in the local region… She introduced us to one another. She said, ‘I think you and Hajime would make good friends.’ And we did. We’ve been friends ever since.”

  “What kind of guy is he?”

  “He’s caring, easy-going... Our friendship mostly takes place at dinnertime, over at his apartment.” We followed a fairly simple pattern, my friend and I: we would sit back, trade stories with one another, and listen to music. Recently he had taken to vintages as well, so we’d share a bottle amongst ourselves. That evening, he served us aglio olio with grilled prawns, followed by tiramisu from the supermarket. The wine was a smooth white, specially imported from a Spanish vineyard. That night he played ‘Lover Man’ on his new speakers.”

  “Billie Holiday?”

  Again, the feeling of surprise. “No,” I said. “Sarah Vaughan. You know the song, Ms Itsuko?”

  She smiled. “You and I were born in the sixties, Mr Sugimura. It was a great time. Barbra Streisand recorded a version, I think, in Simply Streisand. How was the sound quality?”

  “Flawless,” I said. “You could hear every breath Vaughan takes, every single trill she makes with her voice… It’s as though she has her mouth right beside your ear.”

  Goro had seated himself before the speakers that night, eating the pasta on his own. He’d asked my friend who the singer was, and my friend had told him. The boy turned.