Remote Control
Page 39
"Such as?"
"Do you think he really did it or not?"
Kondo closed his eyes and sat for a moment. "Definitely," he said at last.
Shota Kamata pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building. He looked over at his son, sleeping in the seat next to him. The boy would be starting elementary school next year and he sometimes marveled at how much he had grown, but as he watched him sleeping, he realized he was still a baby. He called to him softly and touched his face, but the boy's eyes didn't open. He would be heavy to carry inside.
They were returning after a year and a half, and Shota was worried about the condition of the apartment. It had been such a windfall, he had been unable to resist, but had it really been wise to sublet to a stranger for all these months? Before she had left him, his wife had told him he was too impulsive—though before they were married she used to say she loved him for being so spontaneous.
Loosening his seatbelt, he reached for the newspaper he had thrown in the back. He would read while he waited for his son to wake up. It would be cold until he got the heat running in the apartment, so the kid might as well sleep here.
THREE MONTHS LATER
An article about the assassination caught his eye. It mentioned that a body had been found in Sendai harbor a few days after Masaharu Aoyagi disappeared. The police said it was Aoyagi's, but the article insisted there was no credible evidence to support this claim. Somebody in the know had pointed out that no DNA testing had been done, and concluded that the authorities had fabricated the story in an effort to close the books on the case. The whole thing seemed fishy to Shota—the bungled investigation and the over-the-top journalism. How could you know what was true when you were dealing with something that big? He stared for a moment at the photograph of Aoyagi. Handsome sucker, he thought. Probably had it coming.
Then there was a knock on the window next to him. The man peering in had sleepy eyes and a weak jaw. It was difficult to tell how old he was, but Shota could see there was something odd about him. Warily, he lowered the window. A blast of cold air came in.
“Can I help you?" he said.
“Sorry to bother you," said the man. He smiled, revealing a mouth full of crooked teeth. “I recognized the red convertible."
“I'm afraid you're mistaken," said Shota. “We've been out of town for months."
“Driving around the country?" the man asked. It wasn't really a question.
“How did you know that?"
“On the money you made subletting your a|)artment?"
Shota was feeling more and more uncomfortable. “Who are you? Who told you all that?" he said, opening the door and getting out. The man was slighter than he had imagined, younger perhaps, and there was something hard about his face. He wasn't ugly exactly, but his appearance was rough and a bit unsavory. “What do you want?" Shota said.
“Don't get me wrong. I'm just haj)|)y to see you back. You see, 1 thought you were dead. You live here, don't you?" The man pointetl at the buikling. “1 spent a little time in your |)lace a while ago."
“T bought we were dead? What makes you think you can go around s
“Sorry, I'm just glad you're okay," he heard the strange man say, but when he k)oked back he was gone.
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As Eijiro Iwasaki unlocked the door and stepped into his apartment, he felt something heavy in the air. His daughter's shoes were missing; she must have gone out to play with her friends. Probably to make a snow fort in the park.
He checked the clock. A little past four. It was his day off and he had been out wandering around town.
"It's freezing out there," he announced as he made his way from the entrance hall into the living room. He could hear his wife chopping something in the kitchen, but there was no answer. From long years of experience, he knew this was not a good sign. She was mad about something. But what?
It wasn't the first time he had gone out on his day off. So what had he done today? Left the seat up on the toilet? Left his clothes all over the bedroom? He ran the possibilities over in his head, but there was no way of knowing. Muttering something that sounded vaguely apologetic, he sat down and turned on the TV.
Before long his wife emerged from the kitchen and went to straighten the magazines on the coffee table. From the way she avoided making eye contact, he could tell she was angry. He had a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"You had an odd visitor," she said at last, making no attempt to hide her temper.
"Odd how?"
"1 left the chain on, but as soon as I opened the door, he told me you'd been playing around with a girl from a club." When she finally turned toward him, he could see the anger and suspicion in her eyes. But he had no idea what this was all about. "I was scared, and started to close the door, but just before 1 did he bowed and told me to tell you how grateful he was."
"Aoyagi," he murmured, feeling goose bumps rise on his arms.
"No, 1 would have recognized him," she said. "This one looked a bit grim, with droopy eyes. Besides, Aoyagi's dead, isn't he?"
No longer listening to his wife, Iwasaki planted his hands on the floor behind him, looked up at the ceiling, and took a deep breath. "So that's it," he said.
"What is?"
T38
THREE MONTHS LRTER
"So that's it," he said again more quietly. "He got away."
"Are you listening to me? What did he mean about the girl?" Iwasaki got up. He needed a beer. "Are you cheating on me?" his wife said, pummeling him on the shoulder.
Ignoring her, he said, "That guy rocksV
Heiichi Aoyagi was seated at a low table, watching TV and eating clementines. He stared at the screen as he pulled off the peel, glancing from time to time at the snow in the garden outside the window.
"We should get a dog," he had said to his wife, Akiyo, about an hour earlier. Her response had been noncommittal. "The yard's just going to waste."
"I suppose so," she said.
Three months had passed since the period when their son, Masaharu, had been on TV day and night. When they'd announced that his body had been found in Sendai harbor, Heiichi had insisted it wasn't Masaharu. But as he saw the forlorn look on his wife's face now, he realized that she assumed his sudden desire for a dog was in some way an admission that he had hnally accepted that their boy was dead.
The phone calls from the media had nearly stopped, though the occasional reporter would get in touch even now to ask for an interview. T he police, on the other hand, were still camped out across the street. It occurred to Heiichi that the continued surveillance meant they couldn't confirm that Masaharu was dead. So every time he caught sight of a detective outside, his annoyance was tempered by a sense of relief.
As he bit into the clementine, the juice sjilashed across the table. 1 le wi[ied it with the side of his hand and called to his wife in the kitchen: "Do we ha'e any more of these?" T here was no answer, and it worried him. Akiyo had col-lajised a month earlier with abdominal pain, probably brought on by stress. 1 hen, too, he had called her and had no answer, and when lu*'d gone to find her she was doubled over in the kitchen, "f.verything okay?" he calk'il .igiiin, getting Lij) from the table. But at that moment his wile .i|)|)(.*ari*d through tlu' door leading to the front entrance. "T here you are," he said.
"1 just went to get the imnl."
REMOTE CONTROL
"Well, don't scare me like that." Padding out to the kitchen, he grabbed a clementine in each hand and went back to sit at the table.
Akiyo was kneeling next to him, sorting through a stack of letters. "There's no return address on this," she said, holding up an envelope.
"More hate mail, 1 suppose. Kind of makes you mad that everybody seems to want you dead," he laughed. "But 1 guess 1 should thank them. I'm getting pretty thick-skinned."
"Getting?" Akiyo murmured.
"You're pretty tough yourself these days," he said
. He had always thought of her as sensitive, but she had held up remarkably well under the pressure of the last few months. There had been moments when she'd been upset, but underneath he had recognized a quiet strength.
"Knots in my stomach is more like it," she said. She started to tear open the envelope but then stopped and got out a pair of scissors. "At least I've learned enough to know you have to check these. You can never be sure they haven't slipped in something funny, like a razorblade," she said, carefully cutting along the flap.
Heiichi dug his thumb into the rind of the clementine and tore away the peel. He was just about to say how sweet they were in winter when his wife burst out laughing. "What?" he said, turning to look at her. She was holding out the letter, her face beaming but threatening at any minute to dissolve in tears. He took it gingerly.
The thin rice paper felt strange to the touch. The brush-written characters were large and crude. "Perverts Must Die" it read.
Heiichi stared at the paper, his mouth gaping open. "C^h!" he muttered, but that was all.
At that moment the doorbell rang. Since Akiyo was sobbing, he went to answer it himself and found a familiar detective standing outside. "Could I have a look at the mail that just arrived?" he said. They came every day to ask. Part of the investigation.
Heiichi handed over everything, just as he always did, and the officer went through the letters one by one, with the same embarrassed look he always had. When he came to the brush-written one, he studied it for a moment. "Still getting these threats?" he said, a note of sympathy in his voice.
"Pain in the ass," Heiichi said, scratching his head with apparent indifference.
THREE MONTHS LRTER
He had been away from Sendai for two and a half months. After the surgery, he had recuperated at the doctor's private clinic for a couple of weeks and then taken the bus to Niigata. Nights in cheap hotels and Internet cafes, days searching for work. Not that there was much to be had, and what he found was backbreaking and poorly paid. Still, beggars can't be choosers, and for the most part he was just happy to be able to move freely through a city again instead of sneaking around everywhere.
He was back now in Sendai because he wanted to pay his respects at Mori-ta's grave. He hadn't learned for certain what had happened after the explosion until he got to Niigata. Up to that point he had tried to avoid looking at the news online or in the weeklies, but finally he'd caught sight of a headline on the magazine rack at a convenience store—'The Secret Life of Aoyagi's Closest Friend"—and he had stopped to read the article. It confirmed that Morita had died in the car after Aoyagi had run off, then gave a gossipy account of his debts and the problems with his family.
Morita dead and him still here. Lots of people had been harmed in all this, including the double, whose body was found in the harbor. He'd been unable to help any of them, and now here he was, still alive, with someone else's face.
After the Kennedy assassination, too, any number of people had died, presumably to make sure they never talked. Oswald, of course, but others as well. And it was the same now. He took no pleasure in having escaped with his life. On the contrary, he felt guilty, and a profound sense of impotence.
Almost before he finished reading the article, standing there in the store, he decided to visit .Morita's grave.
The cemetery was on a hilltop an hour's walk from downtown and had a fine view of the surrounding area. Morita was about halfway up the slope. ".Morita family" had been carved into an upright slab ot black stone. Aoyagi thought ot asking the stone whether it could hear the "voice ol the forest," but at just that moment a breeze blew through the leiixes oveiheiid. He checked to make sure there was no one else around, then yelled Morita's name one last time. T here would be no more smart .inswers.
REMOTE CONTROL
He made his way back to Sendai Station and went into a shopping center nearby. It was brand new, perhaps no more than a month old, and surprisingly empty. On the top floor was a restaurant where he had lunch. As he looked down at the patches of snow still melting here and there in the city, he searched for the site of the explosion. What had happened to him? To everyone? He had run for his life through the landscape spread out before him, barely keeping his panic at bay, and in the end he had been willing to lose his own face to put an end to it.
The prime minister was dead. He had become a different man. And the man who looked like him had been found floating in the harbor. But what had really changed?
He left the restaurant and walked out into the lobby just as an elevator was arriving. The car was empty, but he froze for a moment as he caught sight of his reflection in the window at the back. He wasn't sure he would ever get used to this new self.
He had asked the doctor to give him a face that would allow him to blend in. Something plain that would be unlikely to attract attention.
"Understood. But Tm leaving you with your old fingerprints, so you should paint the tips with this when you're out and about." He had given him a bottle of clear liquid that looked like nail polish.
The elevator stopped at the fifth floor and a couple got on with their little girl. Aoyagi nearly let out a shout when he recognized the woman, then stared straight ahead at the buttons. The family moved to the back of the car and peered out the window at the city. "Where are we going now?" asked the girl. She was waving what seemed to be an ink stamp, the sort of thing children press on notes or cards.
"You shouldn't play with that here," Haruko Higuchi said, trying to take the toy from her.
"No!" the girl objected. She turned to her father for support, but he just laughed.
Of course, none of them recognized the man standing by the door. Why should they? Why should Haruko, even after all the time they had spent together?
A number of people had helped him escape, he knew, and Haruko was almost certainly among them. "Thank you," he whispered to himself. When
THREE MONTHS LfiTER
the elevator came to a stop at the ground floor, he moved to one side and pressed the button to hold the door, signaling for them to get off first.
They moved past him, the little girl, her father, and finally Haruko. At the last moment, he realized he was pressing the button with his thumb and tried to switch to his index finger. There was no way of knowing whether she had noticed. If he was going to live life as someone else, he would have to get rid of the old Aoyagi habits.
.After they had walked away, he got off the elevator and went in the opposite direction. But he had gone only a few steps when he heard a soft voice behind him. "Mister?" He turned to find the girl; her parents were nowhere in sight.
"Yes?" he said, looking down at her.
"Mommy said 1 should give you this." She took his hand, hanging limp at his side, and pressed the stamp she had been playing with into the skin on the back. Too startled to react, Aoyagi stood looking down at her as she turned. "Bye," she said, and ran off into the crowd. He looked down at his hand. There, in the center of a pretty flower, was a single word: "Excellent!"
People pushed past him as he stood there, lost in thought. Then he glanced once again after the girl and held his hand up to his lips to blow it dry.
Remote Control
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English translation © Stephen Snyder 2010
Printed in Japan
ISBN 978-4-7700-3108-2
THE RIUTHOR ' '
Kotaro Is aka was born in Chiba Prefecture in ^ 1971 and graduated from Tohoku University, School.oT taw: Formerly
a systems engineer, he debuted as a writer with Rudubon's Prayer, a mystery whose murder victim is a talking scarecrow. His novels and short-story collections have been nominated for the Naoki Prize—Japan's most prestigious award for popular fiction—and many have been made into movies, including Remote Control, which was released in POlO under the book's original title. Golden Slumber. This is his first novel to be translated into English. - -
THE TRflNSLRTOR
Stephen Snyder is the acclaimed translator of Natsuo Kirino's Out, Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies, and Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper ond the Professor, and Hotel Iris. He teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College in Vermont.
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Printtd in Japan