by Toh EnJoe
Of course, James is the smartest guy I ever knew, and Rita was the kind of girl who might have a screw loose, but she was definitely one of a kind, marching to the beat of her own drum.
Wouldn’t I want to be part of that excitement?
Not at all.
Not on your life, is what I’m thinking as I look up at the blue sky and laugh out loud.
02. BOX
ONCE A YEAR, the door at the back of the storehouse is opened.
We call it the storehouse, but really it’s nothing more than a shed. There are no valuables inside. In summer, winter things; in winter, summer things; year-round all kinds of other things are just stuffed randomly inside. The only thing here that identifies this place as a storehouse, and not just a shed, is the quality of the light streaming through the iron lattice over the tiny clerestory windows high on the otherwise expressionless walls. I seldom chose to play in this space, which was too charmless to be called a storehouse. When it was darkness I wanted, I would go to the forest at the Shinto shrine. If it was closeness I wanted, I liked to hide in the closet. I have few memories of playing in the storehouse, which was too jumbled, too bright, and too full of ordinary things.
None of my friends were interested in exploring the storehouse either, and I had no companions looking to escape the eyes of others. In fact, it was in search of such a companion that I eventually left home, and by the time I came back, words like explore and secrets no longer had need of me.
So for me, this storehouse is no more than a way to get through to the space behind it.
In the back of the storehouse, where everyday things are all piled up, wrenched from their context, is the stern visage of a single steel door. Usually, boxes for satsuma oranges or something are stacked in front of it, obstructing it from opening and closing. Once a year, though, the members of the household gather and move the cardboard boxes away from the door. It is the only day that all members of the family are together in one place.
In the back of the storeroom is a space measuring about six tatami mats, in the middle of which is a square box, about one cubic meter. The box has wood inlay, and it seems to be stuffed full of stuff. It is so heavy it takes all the males of the household to move it.
Once a year, that box is tipped around and then returned to the center. That is the sole strange custom of our household. Every household has its own peculiar customs. Usually people don’t realize they’re peculiar, because they’ve grown up with them all their lives, but every household has ways that are unique but not recognized as such because people just don’t talk about them.
But there are limits to human imagination, and I think there must be lots of boxes in the world just like this one, sitting around presenting their ordinary faces.
I don’t know how long this box has been in our family. Come to think of it, I don’t know how long this house has been here. The old records were lost when the nearby temple was burned down in an air raid.
Even so, this house has certainly been here since the Edo period, but nobody knows whether it was Genroku or Kaei. I couldn’t even tell you which of those two periods came first. At any rate, the house has been here a very long time.
If the house itself is this way because of its history, the box is doubly incomprehensible. When people have old things, they generally have boxes to put them in, and often they put labels on the boxes, but what we have here is just a box, a box that cannot be opened.
I have a vague notion that this box has always been here. I’ve never really thought about it.
Once a year, the members of the household get together for a glum conversation about who should tip the box and in what direction.
Now, and this is a frightful thing, there is no record of what direction the box was pushed before.
Once upon a time there certainly was such a record, but no longer. It had been lost so long ago no one even knew when.
After that, through the generations, it is clear that successive heads of the household paid no attention to the trivial issue of considering what direction the box should be toppled in, based on its history to that point, so the situation ended up being pretty haphazard.
I know the box was supposed to be tipped on its side. Or should I perhaps say such is clear without explanation. The box was clearly made as some sort of trick box, and if tipped according to a specific procedure, it would pop open. That is the only possible explanation.
Inlaid boxes like this one are still made in Hakone for the souvenir market. It seems the world will never grow bored of this type of tiresome puzzle mania.
If we ever manage to open the box, what will happen? What might pop out, and what will we do about it? On this point the records of our household are silent. Or perhaps I should say there are no records of our household, and so I have no way of knowing what they might say. Not because the records were destroyed in a fire during wartime, but just for no big reason at all. I think somebody just thought they were in the way and threw them out.
My grandfather was the sort of person who would never agree to do paperwork of any kind, and my father was the kind of person with no interest in family history. No doubt about it, just seeing the way those two lived, it is obvious how our family got to be so irresponsible. Of course, it would be clear to anyone who had a chance to observe me, and the picture isn’t pretty. What it comes down to is, it must have lain around so long it was put out with the trash. One of the women, in one of the previous generations, had gotten rid of it, thinking it was just a faded, soiled scrap of paper with some useless scrawl on it. At least that seems the most likely explanation.
By the time anyone got around to really trying to figure out what might have happened to the records, my grandfather was dying, and my father had already died ahead of him.
These were two men who had never been very curious about family histories, but it is possible to imagine that if anyone ever asked them face-to-face that something might have come of it. Thinking about it now, though, what I might have asked, I can’t think of anything in particular. That is because I myself come from the same lineage of carelessness, and the trait runs strong within me.
All their days, these two men did as they pleased, and it seems this box inspired certain cravings. Until last year, I was not deeply involved in the whole box-tipping thing. All I did was help by tipping the box in whatever direction I was told to tip it. They did not want me to make any decisions about the box. And I myself had no particular interest in the matter, so I simply did as those two said. This year, though, I am the only one left to tip the box, so I have to confront it all on my own.
The box is a cube, about one meter on each side. The craftsman who made it was quite skilled. The wooden pieces are carefully matched, and even now show no sign of warping. On some face of it there must be a way in, a way to open it, a place where the matched woods will slide away from one another and allow the contents to be disgorged. But even that unglued seam is nowhere to be found.
Not that it is impossible to imagine. It could be that some long-ago ancestor had created this box simply to have a laugh at the stupidity of his future descendants.
One can even imagine that the box, with its cryptic, elaborate decoration, is not really a box at all, but just a giant block of wood. In which case, it will never open no matter how you tip it. That could be it. I mean, if I, the mere descendant, am thinking about this, it would not be strange if my ancestor had also thought of it.
Someone might suggest I measure the relative density, like Archimedes, but there is no leeway for a discussion of how one might go about measuring the relative density of household objects. And I could never be convinced to run around naked trumpeting my discovery.
In our family there is an overabundance of the kind of childishness that leads people to do things for the fun of it, like creating an ancient-seeming stone circle in an uninhabited, out-of-the-way place, or tromping crop circles in wheat fields. But by the same token we are also lacking in conviction, so the
se adventures of imagination often end up as solitary pleasures.
Not that I think that if this box were ever to wash up on some craggy shore somebody wouldn’t bring it back, but more likely they would leave it right where they found it, after trying a little exploratory kick, because it is so heavy. Most likely, this box was either made in this house or had been ordered and brought here, but I have little confidence even in supposing that. It almost seems possible that this box has simply been here from the very beginning, and the house was built around it.
The box is big enough to be just a joke. No one outside our household would ever find themselves wondering if it were really a box at all. Arguing via analogy, knowing my own bloodline, and remembering the laziness with which my father and grandfather passed their days, there is no way any preceding ancestor had enough gumption to build this box just as a joke. This much is clear no matter how you look at it.
So then, why must this box be so big? Maybe the builder was worried that if it was too easy to tip over the puzzle would be too easy to solve. When it comes right down to it, though, one person could tip this box on his own, if he were really serious about it. Any simple lever is enough to do the trick. You put your back into it, take a deep breath, and heave. And of course, if you did have help from another member of the family, the weight would not be enough to cause significant harm. Even if one had been remarkably successful in damping enthusiasm up to that point.
Another explanation even more plausible than all those so far: the size of the box itself is a vital clue to the solution of the procedure for how to open it.
You may be familiar with a puzzle known as the Tower of Hanoi. It has three standing rods and a number of disks, of varying sizes, and specific rules for how they may be moved. Only one disk may be moved at a time. A disk may only rest atop another disk larger than itself. That’s it. The object is to move the stack of disks from the leftmost rod to the rightmost rod while observing the rules.
This is a classic puzzle, and the number of moves required for the optimum solutions have all been worked out. If the number of disks = N, the number of moves needed is 2N−1.
If there is one disk, one move is enough. For two disks, three moves are needed, and for three disks, seven. For four disks, fifteen moves are required, roughly double the previous. And if there are sixty-four disks, well, your Tower of Hanoi may as well be buried by a sandstorm, and the process of moving all the disks could outlast the universe.
Also well established is why the process grows in this fashion. It is because if a stack of N disks requires a certain number of moves, then to move a stack of N+1 disks you first have to move the entire stack of N disks and then rebuild it with one more. There is a term, recursion, for processes that entail this kind of repetitive action, and this term can be applied to mechanical repetition that makes hash of things. The process goes round and round, getting bigger each time, and one can get really bored with one’s own little piece of it. There is a group of monks that has been working forever with a stack of sixty-four disks. I wish them the best.
This kind of recursive process may be dreadfully boring to carry out, but it is also frightfully easy to create. All it takes is a little imagination; a program might consist of just a few lines of code. It’s really not very hard to create incredibly complicated wire puzzles. Solving them, however, can be an extremely tedious process, so wire puzzles are not very popular.
The important thing to realize here is that the puzzle is easier to create than to solve. The Tower of Hanoi, for example, would be easy to invent from scratch. Creating the initial situation does not require 264−1 moves; you just have to stack up sixty-four disks. To create a mechanism for measuring time on a universal scale does not require as much time as waiting for the universe to be extinguished.
So, I think the reason why this box is this big must have something to do with this. I think the box is constructed like some random set of Russian nesting dolls, to be opened with a certain set of steps. The number of steps required to open the boxes within the box increases exponentially with each box that is added. Perhaps even to the point where it is not possible within a single human lifetime. It is, however, still a box and has the nature of a box, so just in the process of creating all the nesting box elements, it got to be this size. Seems plausible, don’t you think? If you imagine something and then build it, it may end up being more time and trouble than you think.
Continuing along this line of thought, I arrived at the conclusion that the maker of the box intended that it never be opened. I think my father and my grandfather must also have realized this early on. Oddly enough, it would make sense if the real reason they never seemed to care about the box was because they already understood this strange truth about its structure. That it would never open no matter what they did. If it was never going to open, they didn’t have to try too hard to open it.
Still, it was kind of amusing, once a year, to get together and tip the box around. If it opened, it would be like winning a bet. But twice a year would be one time too many.
And of course, it was well known what would be found in a box of this type. The end of the world, despair, last wishes, stuff like that. Could be a bunch of scraps of paper reading JOB WELL DONE or MOVE ON TO THE NEXT BOX. Nothing particularly interesting or valuable. Not really anything you would want to go to a whole lot of trouble to get the box open for. Even if there were something that would have to be talked about, if not fully understood right away, it would still be okay to just shut it right back in the box. The time to be passed until that time could be used for packing the box back up. If reasonable reasons were written on the colophon, most people would simply accept that. But on the other hand, it was also certainly true there was no sign of anything so fragile it would have to be clearly labeled DO NOT OPEN. How far to trust one’s lineage is a matter of degree. It should be clear that my ancestors had absolutely no faith in their descendants. Thinking, though, about the extraordinary size of this box, it is hard to imagine that the kind of recursiveness had been built in that would allow it to be opened again in just a few short generations. In other words, somebody was making a fool of somebody else.
If all we really wanted to do was open the box and see what was inside, there was an easy way. All we’d have to do is bash it open. Once upon a time, a Rubik’s Cube drove me crazy, and I smashed that checkered cube and put it back together again. I’m sure that at some point, something like that will happen to one of the monks stacking and restacking the Tower of Hanoi. He’ll think all they have to do is take it all apart and start over. I mean, we are talking about the end of the world here, and while that means no one will be able to work—continuing seemingly endless manual labor—any longer, inevitably one would lose touch with the true essence of the task.
What these kinds of puzzles demand, the kind that require an inordinate length of time to solve, is that one obey their rules. To ignore the rules is to destroy the essence of the puzzle itself, but it makes it possible to know what’s inside. So perhaps we should say this box has the power to self-destruct if it determines that the rules have been ignored. But, just as no bomb can be built that cannot be disarmed, there should be a way to escape the power of the box. Physical materials are unconnected to rules created by humans. If human-defined rules have any tangible connection to the physical world, then there must be physical processes that reflect the rules. Of course I have no proof of this; I choose to believe it to make myself feel better. There is no system that cannot be cracked. Not unless we are talking about the impossibility of the very idea of natural phenomena.
So, if you are wondering whether I am contemplating destroying the box, the answer is no. I am simply standing, arms crossed, in front of the box, showing how little real guts I actually have.
There is no reason for there to be this much variety in the human imagination. There are probably other houses where there are boxes just like this one that have been handed down, and there are almost certainly
other people thinking, arms crossed, in front of those boxes just as I am doing now.
One or more of them will surely be able to display the kind of guts that has been passed down in that household and open the box. Or, alternatively, it could be that in those other houses the box has long since been destroyed, and for that reason the only houses that still have boxes left are those housing the people who have no guts. It amuses me for some reason to think that the recent spate of global natural disasters is traceable to someone having opened a box like this one.
What I want to open, though, is not this box.
This box was probably made to be opened, and so in all likelihood can be opened. Somewhere on the other side of the imagination. If it can’t be opened, it can be smashed.
What I want to open is not this box.
What I want to open is the all-enveloping unseeable box, with its worry-free face, the one we call natural phenomena. This too may be made to be opened, and it may also be destructible, and it is a peculiar box. It is difficult even to define its existence, or to say just what it means.
It is believed that that box was created long, long ago, by an old man with a long beard. He is sometimes called the Big Bang. Not the same as the Big Ben who made the clock tower in London.
Somehow, it puts me at ease to think that that was what my distant, distant forebears had wanted to say: Break this box. This box somehow ended up more or less this shape, but its principles are exquisite marvels, and they envelop all that surrounds you. Our task is to pry open that box. I think that is the message our ancestors passed down to us.
I am sure that this simple idea is what is written in the letter that is held inside the box.
“That way, you idiot!”
The box that needs to be opened is not this box, but that box over there in which you are being held. This idea is my rationalization of the lives of idleness that my father and my grandfather led. A salutation with a soupçon of sorrow to the life of idleness I myself am likely to lead.