“No, I don’t think so,” interrupted the desk editor with a frown. “They might look different at first glance, but they do have one thing in common.”
“What’s that?”
“The fact that he wanted an answer from them. In all the letters, he asked them to reply, or even come to Hokuriku, within the week.”
“That’s true, but—”
“I think what Shinkichi Yoshizawa wanted to convey in the letter was probably just that: please reply, please join me. That’s all. Everything else was just a way to get the addressee’s attention. So for Kiichiro Fujishima he starts off by thanking him effusively for the previous response, and he tells his mate Miyamoto that he is so brave—”
“And Akiko Shimojo that she looks like that actress.”
“Exactly.”
“But why was he so desperate for a reply? Would getting a reply have stopped him from killing himself?”
“This is only conjecture, but I reckon that Shinkichi Yoshizawa made a bet with himself.”
“A bet…?”
“Uh-huh. There’s nothing to suggest suicide in the letters. But he does sound lonesome. It is sometimes said that the worst thing for all the kids brought in from the provinces to work in Tokyo is the sense of isolation. Shinkichi Yoshizawa must also have felt that he was all alone here. And what he must have wanted more than anything else was assurance that he wasn’t alone—so to get that assurance, he wrote to the three people he trusted most. In other words, he made a bet.”
“So you’re saying he lost the bet?”
“Yup. He probably thought that if he received just one reply he would try to make a go of things again.”
“That’s an interesting idea, but…”
“But what?”
“If that’s the case, why didn’t say he was going to kill himself? If he had written that he would kill himself unless he received an answer, the chances of getting a reply would have been higher, wouldn’t they?”
“You’re forgetting about self-respect,” chuckled the desk editor. “A twenty-year-old has a strong sense of pride. That would have been going too far—and getting a reply after threatening them with suicide would hardly count as winning a bet now, would it.”
The desk editor seemed pretty confident of his opinion. Sawaki thought that there might indeed be something in it—and if so, then it followed that had just one person replied or gone to Hokuriku, Shinkichi Yoshizawa would be alive today. If they ran an article with the headline “Youth wagered life on three letters,” they would effectively be denouncing Kiichiro Fujishima, Miyamoto, and Akiko Shimojo. Indeed, thought Sawaki, all three certainly bore some of the responsibility for Shinkichi Yoshizawa’s death although none of them appeared to realize it.
But there were still too many unanswered questions. What was the significance of the toy monkey? What feelings was Toku concealing behind her stony expression?
“I still don’t understand why he killed himself,” shrugged Sawaki.
“Perhaps he just couldn’t handle the tough life in the city,” suggested the desk editor.
“But he’s from Utoro!”
“Utoro?”
“It’s on the north-eastern tip of Hokkaido. I’ve never been there, but looking on the map it’s midway up the Shiretoko Peninsula. It’s a fishing village on the Sea of Okhotsk, and is hemmed in by ice floes during the winter. It hasn’t even got a railway!”
“You’re preaching to me about the geography of Hokkaido?”
“What I’m trying to say is that Shinkichi Yoshizawa was born and raised in a harsh natural environment. Life in Tokyo can’t be that tough, can it? I just don’t get it.”
“If that’s how you feel, then why don’t you accompany Toku Yoshizawa when she goes home?”
“I would like to,” said Sawaki vaguely. “But unless she loosens up, I still won’t have a story. Also, I can’t help thinking the reason for Shinkichi’s suicide has got to be in Tokyo…” he concluded doubtfully.
“I guess you’re right,” said the desk editor, nonchalantly countering his own proposal. He probably had not intended it to be taken seriously in the first place.
The next day, still feeling ambivalent, Sawaki saw Toku off at Ueno Station. Her expression was as hard as ever. As they waited for the train to depart, Sawaki showered her with questions in an attempt to elicit something that he could use for an article, but all he could get out of her was a repeated, “Thank you for all you’ve done.” At this rate he had nothing to gain by going back to Hokkaido with her, he thought.
Just as the train was about to depart, he casually said, “Do come back to Tokyo sometime!”
He had expected a simple “Thank you” by way of answer, but Toku said forcefully, “No, I won’t,” and shook her head. “I never want to set foot here ever again!”
Sawaki felt as though he had been slapped across the face. It was the first time Toku had ever shown any anger, and it was directed at Tokyo, the city that had caused the death of her only son.
“Mrs. Yoshizawa,” he said hastily, but the train started moving and Toku slammed the window shut. She did not look back.
Sawaki stared in astonishment as the train departed. Coming to his senses, he raced to the nearest public telephone, grabbed the receiver and dialed the number for the newspaper.
“Is that the desk editor? I’m getting the next train for Hokkaido.”
Sawaki had often felt he would like to see the ice floes of the Sea of Okhotsk. Now that very scene was there before his eyes. A huge white mass blanketed the port and the coast, and the brief patches of seawater appeared strangely black. Locked in ice, the sea looked as if it had given up any pretence of functioning as a sea and was plunged in a deep sleep.
It was not just the sea that was asleep. The land, too, was under deep snow and the villages appeared immersed in slumber. There was no sign of people.
Due to the snow, the train arrived several hours late in Shari. The last bus to Utoro had long since departed, and so Sawaki had to make do with a horse-drawn sled.
The strong wind along the coastal road prevented the powdery snow from accumulating, making the road icy. It was freezing. The Hokuriku coast had been cold too, but this was on another level altogether. The wind on Sawaki’s face was so cold it hurt. He concentrated all his energy on huddling up his body on the sled and keeping his face hidden. He doubted he would survive even a single day in such a place. Nature here was too cruel. Shivering on the sled, he again felt the same doubt welling up. Why would anyone raised in such a harsh natural environment be defeated by life in Tokyo?
Utoro was an impoverished fishing village, a row of humble shack-like dwellings clinging to the shore. Toku Yoshizawa’s house was one of these.
By the time Sawaki got off the sled, his body was frozen through. The wind blowing in from the sea sent the snow whirling up, while the Shiretoko mountain range loomed behind.
This is not a place for human habitation.
Here there were just mountains and sea, thought Sawaki. And the sea is dead, closed in by ice. The sense of isolation would probably drive him out of his mind.
Toku greeted Sawaki with a look of surprise and took him to sit by the sunken hearth. Sipping the hot tea she made him, he at last began to feel himself again.
Adding some more wood to the fire, Toku said, “I was just about to burn those letters.” The stony expression she had worn in Tokyo was gone without trace.
“You’re not going to put them in Shinkichi’s grave?” asked Sawaki, warming his hands over the flames.
Toku smiled. “That’s what I thought at first, but then I worried he might feel humiliated even in death. That wouldn’t do.”
“I see what you mean,” agreed Sawaki. Indeed, those three letters that had remained unanswered could only be hurtful for the dead youth.
Toku threw the three letters into the flames, one by one. Within seconds they were burned to cinders. Sawaki felt a pang in his chest at the sheer speed at which t
hey had disappeared.
Toku sat for a while in silence stirring the ash with the tongs, then got up and went into the other room, coming back with an old wooden apple crate. Inside were Shinkichi’s diary and books, which she also planned to burn. When he heard the word “diary,” Sawaki asked if he might take a look.
The diary consisted of three close-ruled school notebooks. They were not a continuous record, but rather a series of random jottings with much blank space between. While Sawaki ran his eyes over the pages, Toku ripped up the magazines and books and fed them little by little into the flames. In the intermittent flares of light, Sawaki continued reading.
He did not come across any passages that particularly stood out. Most of it was conventional, and tedious to read. There were the usual pretentious comments typical of teenagers.
In the third notebook there was a poem. No, he was not sure you could call it a poem. It was too clumsy, too full of youthful angst.
I like it here
Summer is short and winter long
Harvests are lean and nature harsh
But I like it here
Why?
Because here nature calls to me
Like in a fairytale world
The murmuring treetops startle me,
The fish from the sea
Play hide-and-seek in the rock pools
And when the snow piles up higher than the roofs
I make a snowman and it beams at me
Then in summer
When I fall asleep on the beach
All the clouds in the sky
All the fishes and birds
Even the wind from the north
All together they envelop me
With their noisy chatter
And so
I like it here
Sawaki skimmed through it not paying much attention, but then something struck him and he hastily turned the page back. Reading it another two or three times, he got the feeling that there was something extraordinarily meaningful in this poem.
Nature in Utoro was cruel. Yet according to this poem, Shinkichi Yoshizawa had not felt lonely here. Here nature was always talking to him, but perhaps in Tokyo the artificial environment had not spoken to him at all?
Could it be that Shinkichi had been consumed by loneliness even while surrounded by people? The city that never spoke to him, as he wrote in his letter to Miyamoto, must have been as claustrophobic as being shut up in a small box. Without nature to talk to him, the only means of escaping the loneliness was to find a mentor, friend, or lover with whom he could converse. That was why he had written those three letters. But just like Tokyo’s artificial environment, they too failed to answer him. That was why…
Sawaki went outside the house without making a sound.
The wind was still raging. Embarrassed at the childishness of what he was doing, he tried listening to the wind. But try as he might, all he could hear was a bleak howl. His hands numb with cold, he made a little snowman. But the snowman was nothing more than a lump of snow and did not talk to him or even smile at him.
There’s no reason why I should be able to hear nature’s voice.
Sawaki shrugged. His ears were attuned to the noise of the city, so why would he be able to hear nature’s voice? Even if nature did talk to him, he had lost the ability to understand it.
Shinkichi Yoshizawa had spent three years in Tokyo, hadn’t he?
The thought suddenly occurred to him. He gazed out over the icebound Sea of Okhotsk as if seeking answers there.
The fact that Shinkichi had not received any replies to the three letters he sent, hoping to alleviate the unbearable loneliness of the city was probably not the only reason he had had committed suicide. Gazing out to sea in Hokuriku, perhaps he realized that he could no longer hear nature’s voice. Such a realization must have exacerbated his despair, and perhaps he had lost even the courage to return home. Or maybe it was just Sawaki’s imagination working overtime. Perhaps he was getting overly sentimental.
Sawaki went back inside the house to find Toku still burning books and magazines. As he took a seat by the hearth, he asked, “Will you burn this diary too?”
Toku replied that that was her intention. After slowly lighting up a cigarette, Sawaki told her, “You should put it in his grave with him. He needs some company, after all.”
Toku looked at him in silence, then smiled and assented, “Okay, let’s do that.”
Sawaki felt relieved. That poem at least should be buried together with him. He knew he was being terribly sentimental. That was a word he detested, but right now he thought that once in a while it was even good to get sentimental without beating yourself up about it. It was a bit like reminiscing on childhood. While he had been outside making the snowman, Sawaki had recalled being a child. Had nature talked to him when he was little? It clearly no longer did now. For Sawaki, nature had lost its definition even in his reminiscences. Just as nature did not feature in his daily reality, it had gone from his memory too. That was probably why he had never been forced to contemplate suicide, or even felt as sad as Shinkichi Yoshizawa had.
Sawaki decided to take up Toku’s offer to stay the night. As he snuggled into the bedding she laid out for him, he asked her, “Is there anything of your son’s that I might have as a keepsake?”
Toku promised to look something out for him.
It did not occur to Sawaki to ask for the diary. The desk editor might want it, but Sawaki felt that it should be buried together with the young man’s spirit. It belonged to someone who had been able to hear nature’s voice. For anyone who had lost that ability, it was nothing more than meaningless words.
The wind blowing in off the sea continued to rattle the roof and the shutters throughout the night.
The next morning, Toku accompanied Sawaki as far as Shari station. The wind was as strong as ever, but it had stopped snowing and the sun had come out. Toku said nothing about the memento as they rode the horse-drawn sled, and Sawaki assumed she had probably been unable to find anything suitable.
Shari station was buried in snow. Just as the day before, nobody was in sight. As he stood on the icy platform with Toku waiting for the train to arrive, Sawaki recalled the toy monkey. He would probably never understand its significance, he thought.
“What happened to that toy monkey?” he asked Toku.
She smiled. “That boy was clutching it right until the end, so I decided to put it in his grave along with the diary.”
“Good idea,” nodded Sawaki, although secretly he would have liked to have had it as a memento. It would not be of any use for his article, though, since he still did not know why the youth had treasured it.
The train arrived. Just as Sawaki was boarding it, Toku rummaged around in her bag and pulled out a small square package.
“Please take this,” she urged Sawaki, passing the cloth-wrapped bundle to him through the window. “When he was little, he used to treasure this. I don’t know whether it’s a good memento or not, though.”
“What is it?”
Toku’s reply was drowned out by the train’s whistle and Sawaki could not catch it.
After her small body had disappeared from sight, Sawaki closed the window and opened up the package on his knees. It contained a weathered old cardboard box, along with a note written in clumsy handwriting.
My husband, who died young, made this for our boy. He was an only child, and it served as a playmate for him when he was little. It’s not much, but please take it.
Sawaki opened up the lid of the box. Inside was a wooden toy monkey. It was clumsily made, clearly fashioned by a novice, but there was a curious charm in its expression.
Sawaki noticed a long string in its back. When he pulled it, the monkey clapped its hands together with a clattering sound, just as that cheap toy had done.
House of Cards
The main street was beginning to stir to the morning, but the dregs of night still hung in the air of the side alley lined with cheap bars
and dubious eateries specializing in offal.
For some time now, bright flashes from the forensics photographer’s camera had ripped through the darkness, illuminating the prone body of a young woman. She was wearing a trashy sequined dress, and her bare feet were shod with plastic slip-on sandals, one of which lay in the gutter beside her—a hostess from one of the bars, by the looks of her.
Taguchi turned her over. “Bring the light closer, will you?” he called out to his junior, Detective Suzuki.
The circle from the flashlight revealed a flat, featureless face twisted in a grimace of pain. Her thick makeup was grotesque, as if she had applied it to look good when she died.
She had been strangled. Taguchi loosened the thin black ribbon wound tightly around her slim neck, and saw that it was a plain black necktie.
She must be around twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, he thought. Or perhaps the bare face under all that makeup might reveal itself to be a little younger than that. In any case, she had been too young to die.
“Boss!” Suzuki held up a sandal showing Taguchi the sole. “There’s a brand name on it,” he said excitedly.
In the flashlight Taguchi made out the words “Turkish Sun.” He had thought she was a bar hostess, but perhaps she worked at a bathhouse. Not that it made much difference, he thought. Either way she had been at work in the entertainment district, and as such it was not hard to imagine why she had been killed—it must have been either for money or for a man.
“I’ll go check it out,” said Suzuki, taking off out of the alley like a bloodhound on the scent. It was the twenty-seven-year-old’s first murder case since his transfer to Shibuya police station and he was overcompensating for nervousness. So young, thought Taguchi, amused. He had also been like that once—and not all that long ago, either, although now his subordinates called him the Old Fox. Even the Old Fox had once been a bloodhound.
Smiling wryly to himself, he took out a cigarette and lit it. The morning light was finally beginning to filter into the alley, and the woman’s cadaver appeared thin and forlorn in the pale light. The murderer would not have needed much strength to kill her, he thought. Averting his eyes, he decided to pay a visit to the nearby police box and hear what the patrolman who discovered the body had to say. As he left the alley, the rear view of his rotund, bandy-legged figure did somehow resemble that of an old fox.
The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories Page 10