by Kōji Suzuki
The super hunched his back and began to scratch his ankle audibly. ‘Well, yes. They didn’t move out until last summer.’
Yoshimi remembered being told by the super, when she moved in three months ago, that the family who’d been living on the second floor had moved out of the building the previous year because they’d experienced some misfortune. Yoshimi was guessing that it was they who’d somehow left the bag up on the roof.
Yet, neither the bag nor its plastic contents looked like they’d been exposed to the elements for a whole year up on the roof. The Kitty bag – which was without a speck of dust or grime, as brand-new as if it had just been purchased from the store – refuted the idea that it could’ve been abandoned for so long.
‘All right then. I’ll try displaying it on the counter for a while to see if we can find the owner.’
In this way, the super sought to end the conversation.
After all, it was only some cheap bag, and he couldn’t care less if they found the owner or not.
Yoshimi, however, did not move from where she stood in front of the counter. Instead, she fingered her curly chestnut hair, debating whether to come right out with what she had on her mind.
‘If the owner doesn’t turn up, Ikuko, then you could have the bag, couldn’t you?’ Mr Kamiya offered and smiled at Ikuko.
‘No, that wouldn’t be right. If the owner doesn’t turn up, please dispose of the bag.’ Yoshimi turned down the offer with a resolute shake of her head. She then left the super’s office, pushing Ikuko from behind as if to get her away from some contagious object.
Yet something troubled Yoshimi as they rode up in the elevator. She had avoided the subject of the so-called tragedy that was supposed to have befallen the family. After all, she did not want to appear the kind of person who entertained herself by talking about other people’s misfortunes. But the question needled her and she longed to know the exact nature of that family’s misfortune.
The next day was a Monday. Yoshimi spent longer than usual combing her hair that morning. From the living room she could hear the theme song of a children’s television program. This melody served as a time signal, indicating on this particular morning that she still had plenty of minutes to spare before setting off for work. She would take Ikuko to the nursery school by nine o’clock, then catch a bus from the school for a twenty-minute ride to her office in Shimbashi. The time and energy required to get to work here was truly nothing compared to what her commuting hassle used to be. It really made the move here worthwhile. Had they stayed in Musashino, she wouldn’t have been able to put Ikuko into nursery school, and certainly couldn’t have worked. She could always find another job, but it was unlikely that she’d ever find anything as good as her present position in the proofreading department of a publishing company. The job not only allowed her to devote herself to the world of the printed word, which was one of her passions, but there was no overtime and little need to associate with other people. On top of this, the pay was quite adequate. Ikuko came into the room with a pink ribbon and asked her mother to tie back her hair with it. The knot she had just tied had come loose and Ikuko’s hair draped down, almost covering her shoulders.
As she touched her daughter’s hair, she found herself surprised at how unmistakably the child had inherited her genes. It was strange that such an obvious fact should not have occurred to her until now. Their two faces looked identical in the three-sided mirror before them: the same chestnut-colored curly hair, the same white skin, and the same freckles under both eyes. One face belonged to a woman in her mid-thirties and the other was that of a little girl turning six.
‘Noodles…’ She remembered a boy once looking at her in high school and announcing that her hair looked as if someone had dumped a bowl of noodles on top of her head. She hated everything about herself in those days, her natural curls, her face, her freckles, and her skinny body. How many boys told her how passionately they felt about her in high school? It never occurred to her to count. She had no idea what they saw in her, and had to conclude that her criteria as to what constituted beauty were totally at odds with those of others. Everyone remarked on the beauty of her cute little face, freckles and all, and her natural brown hair, a rarity among Japanese. She simply didn’t understand. When the boys caught on to her indifference, they began to make fun of her auburn hair behind her back. There were a lot of girls who knew how to handle things better, saying what they liked without the slightest risk of backbiting. Hiromi, a classmate in junior high school, was a typical example of that type.
With her hair now tied up, Ikuko said a quick ‘thank you’ to her own reflection in the mirror rather than to her mother, and dashed back into the living room to watch television. Yoshimi could detect no trace of her former husband’s physique or manner in Ikuko’s figure. That at least was a blessing. She had never once found anything enjoyable about the physical union of man and woman. Her only word for it was ‘agonizing’. Yet there is never any shortage of talk about sex in the world. She simply couldn’t understand it. Perhaps some insurmountable barrier separated her from other people. They differed on everything from what constituted beauty and ugliness to definitions of pain and pleasure. The world as she perceived it was largely at odds with the world as others saw it.
When her husband learned of his wife’s unwillingness to accommodate his needs, he would often resort to solitary measures, casually tossing the tissue paper under the sofa. She once got some of the fluid on her fingertips when she’d inadvertently picked up a ball of tissue the following morning. The image of his idiotic expression of bliss came to her mind, leaving no room for the desire to understand. At such times, her entire body would shudder with extreme loathing and scorn.
The familiar voice of a female television announcer from the living room reminded Yoshimi that it was time to set out.
Ikuko thrust the door open and ran towards the elevator to press the down button before her mother. Once out of the elevator, they could only leave the building by the main front entrance, passing by the super’s office. The red bag was on the counter. Yoshimi and Ikuko caught sight of it simultaneously. The Kitty bag that they’d found on the rooftop the evening before lay on the counter with its zipper closed, and with a notice on top. It read:
Wanted: any information as to owner.
Kamiya, superintendent
Though the super seemed to have acted on her suggestion, Yoshimi somehow thought it very unlikely that the owner would turn up.
* * *
Far from bringing a respite from the intense summer heat, the onset of September saw temperatures soar to record levels. During three days of abnormally intense heat, the bright red bag sporting the Kitty character was still visible on the black counter in the super’s office. When Yoshimi saw the bag as she passed by every morning and evening, she found herself the victim of an inexplicable obsession. The bright-red bag seemed to symbolize flames. Then, as if to prove her notion true, the moment the bag was removed from the counter, the sweltering heat of late summer suddenly showed signs of receding. Had the owner turned up to claim the bag? Had the super simply disposed of it of his own accord? It no longer mattered either way. The bag no longer had anything to do with her. Another source of anxiety had arisen to take its place, however. She was suffering from work-related depression. After an interval of six years, she had once again to proofread the new novel of a writer of violent fiction she remembered only too well. Her boss had handed her the proofs as soon as she had arrived for work that morning. The job involved finding errors in the manuscript. To do this, Yoshimi had to read meticulously through the work over and over again. Six years ago, she had been completely unprepared for a manuscript by the same author that ended up traumatizing her. So great was the shock that she’d been pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown. The brutal scenes depicted in the work etched themselves into her consciousness and even tormented her in the form of nightmares. She was on the verge of seeking psychiatric counselling in an att
empt to rid herself of the adverse affects of working on the novel. She suffered waves of debilitating nausea on several occasions, lost her appetite, and shed eight pounds. She was also frequently unable to distinguish between illusion and reality.
She complained to the editor in charge of the project, demanding to know why the company handled work from such an author. With a haughty attitude, the editor, a young man still in his mid-twenties, explained that they were in no position to complain. The author’s work sold well and that’s all there was to it.
The remark only reminded Yoshimi once again just how high the barrier was that separated her from other people. She found it incredible that people were prepared to pay good money to read such a disgusting novel. The crowd that swarmed on the other side of the barrier had minds that functioned based on completely different principles than hers. As if that weren’t enough, she was shocked the following year to come across the same book, though one issued in paperback by a different publisher, on her husband’s shelves at home. The moment she set eyes on it, she was overcome with a sensation akin to terror, followed by the image of her husband enjoying gory fantasies aroused by the book. It deepened her resolve to divorce him.
* * *
Yoshimi caught sight of the red Kitty bag again the next Saturday morning. This time, she unexpectedly found it in the garbage facility provided for the apartment tenants. She had gone to put out some non-burnable waste and had lifted off the lid of the large polyethylene garbage bin. The red bag had been wedged between two black plastic bags. Although she did momentarily stop and stare at the bag, it was far from difficult to conclude how it had got there. The super had thrown it away in the belief that there was no likelihood of the owner ever turning up. As if nothing had happened, Yoshimi dumped her own sack crammed full of sorted waste on top of the red bag and covered the garbage bin with the lid.
That should have been the end. The bag was to be carted off in a garbage truck with the rest of the incombustible waste destined to form new groundwork for a landfill.
* * *
On the first Sunday in September, Yoshimi and Ikuko had gone to buy a few things at the neighbourhood convenience store. They found that fireworks had been significantly discounted now that the summer season was nearly over. In fact, the price was so low that Yoshimi could not reasonably refuse Ikuko’s pleas on grounds that fireworks were too expensive. The disappearance of the remaining fireworks from the store shelves would signal that the lingering embers of summer had finally gone out. Fond as she was of summer, even Yoshimi could not resist the allure of these last goods on the shelf, for there was something poignant about their impending disappearance. So Yoshimi found it perfectly natural when Ikuko said that she wanted to play with fireworks again that evening.
The two of them made their way up to the rooftop at exactly the same time in the evening as they had the week before. The instant she touched the knob to open the door of the penthouse, she was beset with an awful sense of foreboding. She felt an image in red flicker somewhere in her consciousness. As she pushed the door open, she found herself instinctively looking towards the right. Her line of vision locked onto its target in an instant, as if she had known all along that it would be there. An object of livid red highlighted the dark gray of the waterproofed surface of the rooftop. Despite the same poor visibility as the week before, the blazing red sped to the eye through the gloom.
‘Oh…’ Yoshimi stood with her mouth open and her entire frame rigid. She shrank back without a word, groping wildly with her hands behind her for her daughter. Ikuko, however, ducked in a flash, evading her mother’s arms, and rushed over to the Kitty bag, which was placed exactly where it had been the week before.
‘Stop!’ Her voice trembled as she called her daughter back.
There was no explaining the dread she felt. Just as her daughter was about to pick the bag up, Yoshimi caught up with her, and swept the bag from her reach. The Kitty character on the side squished out of shape as the bag rolled over several times on the concrete. No question, it was the same one. The bag with the Kitty motif that they had discovered on the rooftop one week ago, the bag that had sat for three full days on the counter in the super’s office before being thrown out unclaimed in the polyethylene garbage bin along with other garbage, that bag was here in front of them now. Undeterred, Ikuko reached out once again to where the bag had rolled. Yoshimi hit her hard.
‘I said NO and I mean it!’
Her heart pounded violently in fear. She did not want her daughter to touch it. It was her instinctive loathing of strange objects. Ikuko stared wistfully at the bag and then looked up at her mother’s face. Turning back to the bag, her face puckered and she burst into tears.
So much for fireworks. Yoshimi stroked her daughter’s shoulders with a circular motion to comfort her as they went back into the penthouse and closed the door behind them. Nothing on earth would have induced her to lay a finger on that bag. She didn’t want to bring it back to the super, and she never wanted to come up to the rooftop again.
More than anything else, she wanted to know how such a thing could possibly happen. The bag had been in the polyethylene garbage bin, so how on earth could it have made its way back up to the roof? Her temples ached. ‘Made its way back’ had been an unconscious choice of expression – as if the bag had a life of its own.
As soon as they returned to the apartment, Yoshimi tried to put the chain on the door, but found that she had no control over her hands. Her legs also trembled. As she tried to remove her sandals, one flew awry and knocked down a pair of Ikuko’s boots. Ikuko’s expression was reproachful as she set the sandals and boots straight; her face clearly betrayed a hankering for that Kitty bag.
* * *
Yoshimi emerged from the bath first and began drying herself with a bath towel. She could hear her daughter’s muffled voice coming from inside the bathroom. Her daughter would not leave the tub until she had put away the toys she played with in the water. She had also been brought up to always remove the plug after a bath.
With a bath towel wrapped around her chest, Yoshimi took a carton of milk from the refrigerator in the dining area and poured herself a glass. She made it a rule to drink a glass of milk before going to bed. It kept her bowels regular. Ikuko still showed no signs of getting out of the bath when Yoshimi had finished drinking her glass of milk. She bent down near the door and was about to tell Ikuko to get out of the bath when she heard her daughter talking to herself. She could only catch snatches.
That’s ‘cos I’m playing all by myself… but… bear… no fair… It isn’t yours… mi…’
The ‘Mi…’ caught Yoshimi’s attention as probably being the name of Ikuko’s friend. But, as far as Yoshimi knew, none of Ikuko’s friends at the nursery school or in the neighbourhood where they used to live in Musashino had names beginning with ‘Mi’. Who on earth was Ikuko having her imaginary conversation with, then? Ikuko did have a classmate called Mikihiko, but she always called him by his surname instead.
Yoshimi opened the bathroom door. The ‘unit’ bathroom was one of those comprising a bath and western-style toilet. A plastic washbasin floated on the water in the cream-colored bathtub. In the centre of this basin was a small drenched towel that rose up in the form of a column. It somehow resembled a wayside jizo statue, but one with its head tilted to one side. Having soaked the towel and wrung it into this shape, Ikuko now seemed to be talking to the towel as if it were a playmate. A trickle of water dripped from the tap into the bath, linking the opening of the tap and the surface of the bathwater with a slender column. As the little washbasin floating in the bath came into contact with this column of water, it tilted a little and started spinning.
‘Ikuko, what are you doing in there? Come out at once.’
Immersed in the bathwater, Ikuko had her back to the door when she answered her mother.
‘My friend loves taking a bath all by herself. She never, ever gets out.’
Yoshimi asked herself aga
in who on earth her ‘friend’ might be.
‘Never mind. Just get out,’ she told her daughter.
Ikuko put the washbasin in the sink and stood up with a swoosh. Yoshimi wrapped Ikuko in a bath towel and held her. Despite having been immersed in the tub for so long, Ikuko’s shoulders were strangely cold to the touch.
Ikuko fell asleep on her futon, with the picture book she had been reading open in front of her. Yoshimi debated whether to stay up for a while and read, but finally decided to turn the light off and go to sleep. She fell asleep as soon as she pulled the light summer sheet over her chest.
She had been asleep for about two hours when her consciousness began to edge its way back up from slumber to wakefulness; her casually extended hand could no longer detect that familiar warm presence at her side. Yoshimi’s body rolled frantically to and fro. Sliding her hand along her side, she could feel nothing. She was wide awake in an instant. Half sitting up, she groped the surface of the futon where Ikuko had been sleeping, and began calling her daughter’s name. The tiny nightlight at the foot of the futon was enough to reveal the emptiness of the small room: Ikuko wasn’t there.
‘Ikuko! Ikuko!’ Yoshimi tried shouting louder.
This kind of thing had never happened before. Ikuko was a deep sleeper. Once she had snuggled down to sleep, she always slept soundly through to the next morning without ever waking up during the night. She would rarely get up to go to the toilet.
After checking the living room and dining area, Yoshimi was about to check the toilet, but the bathroom light was out so Ikuko obviously wasn’t there. Just then, she heard the sound of tiny footsteps in the passage outside.
Yoshimi dashed to the door, where she noticed that the door chain was not fastened. Did she forget to fasten the chain when they returned from the rooftop, or did Ikuko unchain the door?
Unconcerned about being clad in nothing more than her negligee, she rushed out into the corridor outside. She could hear the sound of the elevator moving. The elevator hall was halfway down the corridor. She stood there and watched the floor numbers light up in succession. The fifth-floor lamp went out and the sixth-floor lamp came on. Then the sixth-floor lamp went out, the seventh-floor lamp blinked on, and it stopped. The elevator had gone to the top floor, where no one lived. Someone had just gotten off on the seventh floor. In that instant she suspected that that someone was Ikuko. That suspicion was being confirmed in her mind. Ikuko could not bear the thought of the red Kitty bag being left out there on the apartment rooftop, Yoshimi concluded. She must have been desperate for that bag. At the same time, though, Ikuko knew better than to believe that her mother would allow her to pick up something that someone else had thrown away. That’s why she had waited until her mother was asleep before heading for the apartment rooftop. Although Yoshimi doubted that Ikuko had the courage to overcome her fear of the dark, she pressed the elevator button to call the cage back down from the seventh floor. The elevator stirred, made its way down to the fourth floor, and flung its doors open. Yoshimi pulled the sides of her negligee close together over her chest as she entered the elevator. She pushed the button for the seventh floor, only to feel the elevator plunge softly downward, contrary to her expectations. Yoshimi took several steps away from the door, until her back was against the wall of the elevator. She brought her clenched elbows together to cover her chest more closely.