First, Yoshinobu contacted a sixth-grader who worked on the school newspaper, and once he had painstakingly won him over, he made his proposal: How would you like to write a real newspaper article? About how your friends are reacting to the incident, say, or the relationship between Yasuda and Soejima, or information about this ‘association’ … we’ll publish any article you write for us, as is. The boy agreed on condition of anonymity, but since he just brought in what was clearly a rehash of an old article by another paper, Yoshinobu didn’t bother to inform the boy when he rejected it. A few days later, the boy’s parents called to complain: You’ve been poking around, harassing our child, and now he’s so traumatized he can’t get out of bed! Yoshinobu denied it, of course, but since he couldn’t tell the whole story, he was forced to apologize. The parents demanded that the paper condemn his behavior publicly by publishing an article detailing what he’d done wrong, and when the bureau chief refused, they took their complaint all the way to the Press Corps. The organization promptly called a general meeting to get the truth from Yoshinobu, and when he categorically denied it, it decided to reinstitute its strict ban on contacting or collecting information from children, declaring that in the event the ban was violated, the violator would be expelled from the Corps. And, at least for the time being, the parents backed down too.
But Yoshinobu had yet to learn his lesson, and he sought out a student from a different school—one who attended the same cram school as some of the children who’d been members of the association—and he asked her to gather information for ¥5,000 a day, with an upfront payment of ¥10,000. Two days later, the girl, Minagawa, appeared at the appointed meeting place and handed back his ¥10,000 bill, saying, All the kids at that school, whether they were members or not, knew there was poison in the school lunch that day, and they’re really depressed because even though they all ate the meat sauce udon together, only nine people died. I don’t know how I’m supposed to live out the rest of my life either after this failure. Spurred on by thoughts that set his entire body aflame, he tried to write a column based on Minagawa’s comments, but in the end he gave up; it seemed like lies slipped in no matter how he tried to write it. Shortly thereafter, the Press Corps learned that he’d contacted Minagawa and expelled him. But his bosses at the office couldn’t care less about the Press Corps’s rules— this was a major scoop, so they pressed Yoshinobu to hurry up and turn the information he’d gathered into an article. Yoshinobu, who hadn’t submitted a single manuscript since the incident occurred, couldn’t bear the pressure and finally fabricated a harmless story based on a made-up comment. When the story ran in the newspaper, they let him know quite frankly that they were disappointed in him, but Yoshinobu felt like he’d really accomplished something for the first time since he’d been hired.
After that, Yoshinobu turned into an incompetent reporter unable to get any material on his own, content to just hang around the Tokorozawa police station and the school that had no hope of ever reopening. When his body could no longer withstand the strain, he bought a used Corolla II and slept in it with the AC running full blast whenever he had time to spare. His colleagues stopped asking him to do anything more than write hack articles about things like car accidents and city council announcements, and meetings at the bureau office had become torture for him, so he pretended he had some investigations to do that night and, instead of returning to the office to do galley proofs, drove out and parked his car in the middle of the street and just sat there, dazed.
When he took a vacation about three months later, it was because his mother had collapsed from a stroke. The investigation into the poison incident hadn’t progressed at all: Yasuda had yet to let out a peep, while the other students were so unresponsive they seemed to have lost the power of speech entirely, so it was difficult just to fill the pages day after day, the prefectural edition in particular made up principally of articles seemingly diluted by many times their weight in water. So even though Yoshinobu, feeling useless, couldn’t see how it would make a difference one way or the other, he nonetheless rushed to the hospital in Yokohama right away. His mother was a book-keeper at a small food company, and on her way home from work she’d begun to feel poorly and had stopped by their family physician’s clinic, where she collapsed. She’d talked to Yoshinobu on the cell phone the previous night, grumbling, “This late summer heat is terrible! I feel so sluggish,” but Yoshinobu had been too burnt out himself to care about someone else’s exhaustion, so he’d just made the appropriate “uh-huhs” until he could reach the end of the call. The doctor informed him that she might not make it, so he left his sister there with her that night so he could make the funeral arrangements with his mother’s younger brother.
His mother breathed her last at dawn. Yoshinobu witnessed these last moments. She looked exactly the same, lying there as if still simply sleeping, but the gravitational pull of their relationship, the charged space between them, suddenly disappeared. So this is how it feels when time stops, he thought. He and his mother, the air and the bed, everything existed separately, scattered and unrelated. Each was just another grain of sand. Slowly, time started up again, and the gravitational pull of the relationships between Yoshinobu and the things and people around him was restored, except that between him and his mother, who was gradually turning the color of wax. Yoshinobu thought that he’d like to continue watching her, just like this, till she rotted away into fluids and seeped into the ground.
His mother hadn’t left a will, but Yoshinobu was positive she wanted to be buried. After the wake, during the all-night vigil in the room where her remains were resting, he put the question to his sister as they gazed together out into the garden: Shall we bury her?
I really don’t want to cause trouble for Misaki, she demurred, referring to her boyfriend, who’d promised to live with her once he graduated from technical school. Yoshinobu nodded. Well, at the very least let’s put some dirt from the garden in the casket.
All right, then, his sister agreed, but then she slipped away and left everything to Yoshinobu, saying she lacked the courage to peek inside the casket.
So it was Yoshinobu who opened the casket, removed the coolant, and stripped his mother of her white burial clothes. After that, he took some scented oil in the palm of his hand and spread it over her cold, hard skin. It began to shine, reflecting the light in the room like a mirror, and then he covered her body with layers of garden soil as if tucking her into bed.
Parts of his mother’s ashy white body protruded from the soil like a species of rare mushroom. This soothed him, and he supposed that tomorrow, at the cremation ceremony, everyone would throw in flowers of every color and kind and it would look just like a flowerbed. At the very least, she could rot a little now and mix with the soil before the cremation, which should allow her to rest a bit easier.
Perhaps she’d been embalmed; whatever the case, she didn’t rot, but even so, when the time came to open up the coffin it really took him back to his father’s burial incident, though, as one would expect, it caused a bit of a commotion among the guests. Please, I’ve thought this through, many of you are aware that my mother devoted herself to ecology in her later years, putting her time and energy into creating a garden full of fertile soil for the good of the earth, and—this is something she talked to me about while she was puttering around in the garden—Mother wanted her eternal resting place to be in this very soil, and so I was just thinking I should obey her wishes … Yoshinobu explained himself enough that, despite their bewilderment, everyone was sufficiently satisfied to throw in their flowers. The dirtfilled casket was heavy as a boulder.
The cremation finished, he picked the bones out of the scorched earth and opened the urn to divide some of the ashes into two pill cases, one of which he passed to his sister, burying the remaining ashes, bones, and dirt in the garden. He replaced the ashes in the urn with the ones he made by making a pile of fifty or so beloved travel albums and diaries dating from when his mother and father had
crisscrossed the country, a sheaf of letters they found and left unread, a clipping of one of Yoshinobu’s content-free newspaper articles, and a few eccentric hats his sister had made, then burning it all in the garden. Yoshinobu entrusted his sister with the task of watching over these remains until the forty-ninth night and returned to his apartment in Urawa. But Bimyō likely called Misaki to come stay with her from that night onward. Otherwise, she’d have probably simply fled.
There was one more day left in his vacation. He couldn’t believe he’d have to be at work when morning came again. It seemed a distant memory that he had been a newspaperman at all. Time’s flow seemed about to be diverted from the future and forced to eddy in the stultifying recent past. He’d heard there was some movement to reopen the school, so he figured he’d be reassigned to that beat along with the other reporters from the Tokorozawa bureau. Whenever he wandered around the gray buildings of the school and the surrounding apartments, they seemed somehow ill-dressed, as if wearing high-water hand-me-downs, and he felt as though he wasn’t a reporter on assignment but a man getting lost in his own childhood, on the verge of disappearing into an alley like a villain slipping away after a crime.
Once, as Yoshinobu found himself surrounded all day by teachers as he collected information at the elementary school, he found himself drawn almost against his will to the pool, and he jumped in. Even though the prospects for reopening the school seemed unlikely, the school had filled the pool to the brim with clear water as if to say to the children, this is your place, you’re welcome here whenever you decide to return.
Looking at this pool so unlikely to be used in the near future yet full of water so sparklingly clear it almost hurt to look at it, Yoshinobu was overcome with the absurdity of the whole situation, of pretending to be absorbed in hanging on these teachers’ and administrators’ every word, and he stole away into the pool area, stripped to his underwear, and dove right in. He stayed underwater until he could no longer hold his breath, and then drifted up to the surface to float there, face-up, his body completely relaxed. He closed his eyes to the sun’s dazzling shine and found himself engulfed in the sound of water, a light blue horizon stretching behind his eyelids like an infinite desert. Its surface was neither dune nor grassland nor the surface of the sea, and it undulated unceasingly as the wind played across it. Bobbing on this ultimate surface, Yoshinobu gazed up at a shining, deep blue velvet sky with closed eyes and everything seemed false. The surface may be blue or green, the smell may be sea or grass, but he was sure that whatever the case, it wasn’t real water or real dirt, it was just so much plastic buffeted by a fan. I’m on a set somewhere, surrounded by manufactured oceans, manufactured plains. That’s all nature actually is to me, just a series of sensations recreated in rooms. Even my own self is just a recreation, an illusion. Everything I touch and know to be myself is just the product of a brain that’s no more than just another illusion itself. Not the grand illusion of life’s endless cycle. This self of mine is no everlasting soul able to pass through cycles of reincarnation—it’s the empty shell made and remade with every cycle, an infinite illusion.
Yoshinobu decided to take advantage of this last day he still had a future and drive his silvery blue Corolla II down a little road that wound its way along a stream near the edge of the Higashi Urawa green zone. Sun beat down on his right arm hot enough to fry it, and a CD of Andean music played on the stereo, the cries of the quena and the zampoña sounding less like flutes than birds. From time to time, the songs of the real birds outside would drift in through his open window as if to join in.
His arm was burnt red, so he came to a stop in a shady park at the edge of the woods. The cicadas called out kana-kana-kana, endless as an image reflected in facing mirrors. As if to challenge them, the birds also chirped noisily among themselves. Yoshinobu found himself seduced, and he stepped into the trees even though there was no path.
It was as if he’d stepped into the sound of the flutes he’d just been listening to. As his feet crunched through the thick mat of leaves and into the decaying loam beneath them, a cloud of black and white swallow-sized birds scattered into the sky like black sesame salt. He raised his eyes to watch them and continued walking, only to be hit in the face with the broad fronds of a fern that appeared suddenly before him. He heard the wind shake the trees, the branches rustle as birds landed on them, the squirrels and other little creatures as they skittered across the leafy ground. Suddenly, an old man brushed by Yoshinobu, wearing a reddish-brown wide-brimmed hat and similarly colored short-sleeved jacket. Reflexively, Yoshinobu gave a little bow in his direction. But the wizened old man, with his dark eyes and tearful expression, just continued on his way, his head down and muttering something to himself as he made his way into the forest.
The trees were getting thicker, the ground at his feet deeper in shadow. The cries of the cicadas dripped down and clung to Yoshibnobu like liquefied lard, while the noisome birdcalls scattered in all directions around him as the light bleeding through the leaves of the trees shape-shifted constantly. He had lost his way completely. Thinking that the best way to get out may be to follow the old man who’d just passed him by, he looked around, but the man had disappeared without a trace.
Yoshinobu sat down on nearby rock outcropping. He tried to be careful lest the moss covering it stain his khaki-colored chinos green. Overcome with exhaustion, he closed his eyes. He immediately felt surrounded. As if crowds pressed in on him from all sides. His body trembled.
Yoshinobu opened his eyes again. A hot, wet wind blew down from the sky obscured by the leaves above him, bathing him in its raw, vegetal scent. He imagined that he was sitting in the mouth of an enormous beast made of grass. It should have been cool here in the shade of the trees, but he was sweating. His underwear stuck to his skin, wet enough to wring out. Figuring that the sun might at least help evaporate the moisture, he got up again and started walking.
Eventually, he found a clearing roughly the size of four and a half tatami mats. The bright green of the short grass covering it dazzled him. He felt a drying breeze as well. Yoshinobu stripped down completely, wrung out his clothes and used some branches to hang them in the sun, and then lay down face-up on the ground. The sun squeezed the sweat from his body like a vise, but even though he felt in danger of dehydrating completely, he also felt a deep calm. Once all his sweat was drained, would his flesh begin to melt?
As if in preparation, his consciousness began to melt instead, and Yoshinobu started to drift off to sleep. His genitals, in turn, began to swell, extending up and out. Like an unfurling bean sprout, he thought, laughing to himself. If it sucked his melting flesh into itself and began to extend farther than it was supposed to, up and up until it peeked up above the trees, would it be visible from the city? A long, thin penis, waving in the wind like an enormous asparagus. Yoshinobu suddenly felt surrounded by people again. But his eyes were already too heavy in his sockets and he couldn’t rouse himself to get up. He ended up sleeping there until the sun slid into shadow and his flesh grew solid once more.
Perhaps because he’d overslept in the afternoon, Yoshinobu couldn’t sleep that night, and he felt like he was lugging himself around like a big bag of garbage. He had to return to work the next day, so he decided to look over the newspapers he’d allowed to pile up unread. As always, the main stories focused on the debate over whether to reopen the elementary school and he could probably have read the articles just as well with his eyes closed. And indeed, their authors may well have written them with their eyes closed as well. Yoshinobu had yet to fully learn the “blind touch” possessed by the highest tier of journalists.
But when he began reading the Society section of the Saitama Daily, he came across a series of special reports that opened his eyes at last. The reports told of a community of homeless people living in the forests along the outskirts of the city. Street people wanting to escape contact with others seem to have moved out into hard-to-reach areas like the grassy plains along the
banks of the Arakawa River, the Minuma Wetlands near Higashi Urawa, or the Sayama Hills behind Tokorozawa, building makeshift barracks and tent-cities in increasing numbers. Ironically, these green zones are also places rife with illegal dumping, and it’s from this garbage that the homeless derive the resources to support their lifestyles, reusing some things for themselves and selling others to make a little money, and since they’re helping ameliorate the illegal dumping problem, the city authorities turn a blind eye to the squatting. In places where the homeless “immigrated” comparatively long ago, they’ve established small villages, and though they avoid too much invasion into each others’ business, they nonetheless obey an unspoken code of conduct and a minimal system of mutual aid, thereby equipping them with the means to respond to threats from the outside. The number of foreign workers among them is relatively small, but they nonetheless pop up here and there; the article quoted a man named Abdullah (a pseudonym), who came from Pakistan to earn money to send home until his body gave out and he lost his job, after which he could no longer show his face in his community and he ended up drifting into the forest: “I gave up my home, I gave up Japan, and I immigrated to the Totoro Forest. I threw my passport away.”
Early the next morning, Yoshinobu capped off his all-nighter by filling a thermos with dark, fresh-ground coffee and making a sandwich of hardboiled eggs minced with onions, and then he headed back to the Higashi Urawa green zone.
The morning light fell like lace curtains. Yoshinobu traveled down the little road along the stream, its banks lined with illegally dumped garbage, as if passing through them one by one, and soon he ended up at a small municipal park. Just as he suspected, he found a homeless man starting the day by washing his face in one of the public restrooms. Yoshinobu decided to follow him, though from a safe distance.
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