by Yoko Ogawa
“He jumped! Lower a lifeboat.” Footsteps running across the deck. A clamor of voices. “Get a life preserver!”
The young man tried to touch the scarf, but I brushed his hand away and crouched down on the deck.
“Mari! You must have been terrified! But you’re safe now. I nearly died when they told me you’d been kidnapped. And look what he’s done to you. You’re not hurt anywhere? What a monster! But I’m glad you’re all right. That’s the most important thing. And thank you, Officer. You’ll be taking her to the hospital? In an ambulance?” Mother rambled on, her voice slipping around and around me, tighter and tighter, but it was the sound of the translator sinking into the sea that echoed in my ears.
His body surfaced three days later. The police diving team found it, swollen and half naked. The head had ballooned to twice its normal size, and the face was almost unrecognizable.
I learned he’d had a criminal record. More than four years ago, he had attacked the owner of a clock shop in a dispute about some purchase. He had beaten the man with one of his clocks. Now, his fingerprint record from that old arrest had made it possible to identify his body when it washed ashore.
I spent only one night in the hospital. The doctors examined every inch of me, checking each little bruise and scrape and recording it on my chart. They discovered that my head was covered with countless tiny cuts that must have been from the blades of the scissors. They stung when I rubbed against the pillow.
The police inquiry was careful but discreet. It was conducted by a female detective, who was sometimes accompanied by a psychiatrist or a counselor. But I simply told them that I had no memory of anything that had happened. They assumed this was the result of the shock, and they concluded that, since the suspect was dead, there was little point in pursuing an inquiry that could have little benefit for the victim and was likely to prolong her suffering.
There had been a tremendous uproar at the Iris when I didn’t return on the night of the storm, and my absence had been reported to the police. At first they’d assumed I had been carried away by a wave or drowned in a flash flood. But in the morning, the waiter from the coffee stand on the boat said that he’d seen me with a suspicious-looking man. I learned the details from the maid. She talked breathlessly, unable to contain her curiosity but realizing she had to appear sympathetic at the same time.
But none of it meant anything to me. The translator was dead. That was my only reality.
I didn’t return to my duties behind the front desk, preferring to avoid the eyes of the guests. It took more than ten months for my hair to grow back. But even when it did, Mother no longer insisted on putting it up for me. Eventually, the camellia oil dried in the bottle.
No one came to claim the translator’s body, and it was cremated and placed in the public grave. The nephew was never seen in town again.
I did ask the police to look for the translation of the novel about Marie, but they were never able to locate it. All they found were endless rolls of film filled with pictures of me.
Since 1988, Yoko Ogawa has written more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Harvill Secker published The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, in 2007 and her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor in 2009.