The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  Katsuo steps up onto the lit verandah. The owl turns to watch him once again. They are connected now, by what it has retrieved.

  Who knows what small detail it sees. The hand that reaches for the door is spattered with blood.

  The bird crouches, hops up onto the wooden foot rail. The piece of severed flesh still in its beak. Takes one last look. Then leans into the abyss and is gone.

  In the crisp morning light, on the bridge, the chattering school children. Half-walking, half-skipping. Holding hands. Unsuspecting.

  One small cry and twenty small heads are at the railing. Looking down. Hushed. Fingers pointing. Quickly sifting doubts. It is a man. His body strangely twisted. The water licking at his cheek. Then they are running.

  Chapter 42

  THE photographs are black and white.

  Why don’t you leave it with me? he had said to Mrs Yamaguchi. The diary. I will have a look at it and get back to you.

  After she had left, Omura sat back in his chair. He had not intended to start reading immediately.

  Why, then, did he open it? And once it was open, why did he glance down and see the name Katsuo floating so prominently within its black morass?

  She had called it a diary. But it wasn’t, not really. It was a mere twenty pages. Stapled together. Handwritten. The writing tightly packed. Twenty pages!

  Twenty pages. Fifteen minutes was all it took. And now, in that time, how the world had changed. A caterpillar turned into a butterfly in less. But this? How monstrous was this? Surely it took longer than that.

  He spoke into the phone.

  When he came out of his office, he had the diary in his hands. He did not look at Mrs Akimoto as he left.

  Now he was standing in the court archives. Between the endless airless shelves. A file lay skewed on the shelf above his head. A box of forensic photographs, ticket stubs, a half-pack of cigarettes, a pearl hairpin, leaned against his chest.

  Two of the photographs, those taken from the bridge, are slightly out of focus. Hideo’s body is in the bottom right-hand corner. His legs face one way, as though he is running on his side, his arms the other. His right hand is in the water.

  Three more photographs, from different angles, show Hideo’s head. One is grotesquely sharp. Omura’s throat constricts. His hand begins to shake. Hideo’s open eyes look down in disbelief at the stain leading to the water’s edge. A discoloured dark wisp still circulates in the water, as if his blood is still flowing. Perhaps his life has not yet fully left him. There may still be hope. A clump of matted hair. Half an earlobe is missing. What’s left is pale, unearthly, incomprehensible. An ant is sampling its still-moist edge. Another is on its way to tell their friends of this good fortune.

  Then there are the X-rays. He holds one up to the light. The primitive shadowed skull always faintly shocking. Two longitudinal fractures. Like the broken hulls of two broken boats. Transparent. Strangely beautiful. He takes his glasses off. Rubs his nose. Squints. An uneven line circumnavigates Hideo’s skull, connecting the two hulls. Tadashi thinks of someone tapping at the side of an egg with a spoon. As fragile as that.

  Another X-ray. This one of Hideo’s neck. One vertebra shattered, dislocated. Marked C2 in blue. Hideo had hit the ground head-first.

  He calls her.

  But I’ve been there, to Akiyama, Mrs Yamaguchi says. The long-distance line crackles. Her voice sounds metallic. To the footbridge. It’s impossible. There are no rocks.

  Can we meet at the inn? he says.

  He takes the bus, as Katsuo would have done. The same bus. To imagine what it would have been like to be him, travelling up the mountain, this hideous thing already in his mind.

  He sits at the front, talks to the driver.

  Did he know Hideo Yamaguchi?

  Yes, he did. Tragic, he says. Why would such a good man kill himself?

  He wheels the bus up around another hairpin bend.

  After a while: You know, I began to think it had something to do with me.

  With you?

  Yes, with me. Three deaths. In less than a year, the driver says. I know, people tell me it’s just coincidence. But three of them, in one year? And all of them passengers on my bus at one time or another.

  Three? Omura says.

  The driver nods.

  It wasn’t just Hideo, you know. His daughter died as well. About eight months after he did. She died in childbirth, trapped in the snow.

  He glances quickly over his shoulder to the road above.

  And before that…Well, before that, I lost my only son.

  The engine changes register. The bus slows. The driver’s powerful arms pull at the wheel. The bus climbs up around another bend.

  The two of them, Mrs Yamaguchi and Omura, are talking on the bridge. They are only centimetres from where Katsuo had stood, although they do not know this. She has begun telling him about her family, her husband, her past. My sister was very stubborn, you see, she is saying. She hated village life. How small it was. How narrow. It’s killing me, she used to say. From our verandah she would look down at our village and say to me: There’s a world out there, Tomoko. Just waiting for me.

  Then, just after she turned fifteen, my sister came home from school one afternoon and announced: I’m leaving. I’m going to Osaka. My mother forbade her to go. But my sister simply dropped her school bag where she was, turned, and walked out the door. Just like that. I remember waiting up with my mother long into the night. Waiting for her to return.

  Don’t worry, my mother said. She’ll be back. She needs her things. Then, when she didn’t return, and it was after midnight, my mother went into her room. Opened her cupboards. And they were almost empty. She had already packed. She must have hidden her bag somewhere, or given it to someone for her to pick up on the way.

  And she stayed away. For good. We rarely heard from her.

  Then, one day, perhaps seven or eight years later, completely unannounced, this young woman arrived on our doorstep saying she was pregnant, that she needed a place to stay. And it was her, my sister.

  A long time later my mother told me that she hadn’t recognised her, not until she spoke.

  Mariko, my mother said. Is it really you?

  She did not tell us where she had been. What she had done. She kept to her room. Looking forward to the birth. Which came about a month later.

  Not long after the child was born, however, Mariko began to change. She…

  But Tadashi Omura has stopped listening. What was this sudden upheaval in his chest? Had Mrs Yamaguchi said Mariko?

  There, she said it again. Mariko.

  …withdrew into herself. She barely looked at the child. She kept saying what a mistake she’d made. That she should have waited.

  She had said Mariko!

  Could it be? Was this Katsuo’s Mariko?

  That she had given up everything. She realised now that she was too young to have a child. A child whom she felt nothing for, whom she did not love.

  Then Omura came back to her, Mrs Yamaguchi. Concentrated. Attended to what she was
saying.

  Early one morning, she was saying, I got up to go to the bathroom. I could hear Sachiko crying. She must have been about six or seven months old. I went into Mariko’s room, but Mariko was not there. She had disappeared again. There was only Sachiko in her crib at the end of the bed. And a note.

  She did not understand what was happening to her, she said. She no longer knew who she was. She felt crushed. She felt as though she was living in a fog. Life had once been so dazzling, she said. So full of promise.

  And then her plea: Why, she said, do I not love this child whom I so longed for? For whom I surrendered everything. I can bear the pain no longer. Please, forgive me.

  I could hear Sachiko crying.

  Omura told Jovert that, in that instant, the dam had burst. He had felt his thoughts cascading back through his life, bouncing from one memory to the next, had felt himself being swept along on this torrent, all the time desperately trying to grasp hold of something that would anchor him, hold him fast. Some memory, some incident, that would fix in his mind what he already knew was true. How old was Sachiko? What had Katsuo said? Sixteen? Seventeen? When had Katsuo bought the house? When had he commenced his legal practice? When exactly had Mariko left?

  He could see the three of them standing on the terrace that first day, looking down over the city to the harbour below as clearly as if it were yesterday. Mariko, holding a glass of wine. Radiant. Full of laughter. Katsuo, his hand on her shoulder, his fingers under the strap of her dress. Where her scar was.

  But what year was that?

  I’m sorry, Mrs Yamaguchi, he said. Did you say Mariko? That your sister’s name was Mariko?

  Yes, she said.

  And did she have a scar high up on her right shoulder? He reached up subconsciously to his own shoulder.

  Yes, she said. She did. It was like a tiny map of Japan.

  And then he thought the impossible thought: Sachiko was Katsuo’s daughter.

  Mariko had gone, Mrs Yamaguchi was saying. She had abandoned Sachiko. So we brought her up as our own.

  He stood there, on the bridge, beside Mrs Yamaguchi, looking down into the darkening river. To the now corpse-less riverbank. Mrs Yamaguchi had been right, he saw now. There were no rocks below.

  Chapter 43

  IT was the saddest call he ever made.

  Two days after his meeting with Mrs Yamaguchi at the inn, and, coincidentally, almost exactly two years after he had run into Katsuo that day in Osaka’s garment district, Omura decided to pay him a visit unannounced. He had spoken to Ishiguro on the phone earlier that day.

  I’m sorry, Tadashi. It’s not my affair, Ishiguro had said. You need to speak to Katsuo.

  He went in the evening. The taxi dropped him at the bottom of the hill. He had expected to have to buzz the house from the gates. But the gates were open. There were weeds growing up through its metal track, and around the base of the buttressed walls. Two rows of thistles—their ghostly, broken-headed spheres still glowing against the setting sun—lined each side of the driveway. Their heads were nodding in the evening breeze, as if to say: At last, you’re here. Go on up, we’ve been waiting for you.

  He walked up the hill through the untrimmed hedgerows. When he emerged onto the gravel forecourt, the house lay in darkness. Katsuo’s once magnificent car sat abandoned some distance from the house, as if it had given up on finding a better place to die. All four tyres were flat. Its once gleaming bodywork was pockmarked with dust.

  The house looked closed up, deserted. He cursed himself for not having asked the cab to wait. It was a long walk back to town.

  He climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. Pushed the button. There were dead leaves crowded into the corners of the portico. Others, still looking for a place to shelter, scurried from one unwelcoming group to another. Cobwebs hung from the light fittings. The house mat was leaning against the wall.

  He pushed the button again.

  They had been there, he and Mariko. On that first day. They had been the anointed ones. They had moved from one light-filled room to another, as if no one in the world existed but them.

  Now the house felt abandoned.

  But then he heard the sound of a key scraping in a lock. The door began to open. An old man appeared in the half-light. He was dressed in a dishevelled bathrobe. He had a soiled scarf tied around his head. The sound of a baby crying came from somewhere deep within the house.

  My name is Tadashi Omura, he said. I am an old friend of Katsuo Ikeda, the owner of the house. I am wondering if he is in?

  The old man did not answer him. Omura thought he might be deaf. He went to repeat his question.

  It’s me, Tadashi, the old man said.

  He barely recognised his voice. The old man looked up at him so that Omura could see his face.

  Katsuo?

  Yes, he said.

  Katsuo leaned inside the door and turned the light on. He reached up, removed his scarf.

  See, he said. It’s me.

  The face Omura saw now was even more shocking than the old man’s. The light from above cast deep shadows into Katsuo’s eyes. His cheeks were hollow. His neck was as deeply ravined as the trunk of an ancient fig. He had not shaved in a long time.

  Katsuo? he repeated.

  Yes, Tadashi, he said again. Won’t you come in.

  They sat opposite each other in the long room. As they had always done. Outside, it was beginning to get dark. Only the first metre or so of the balcony was visible. It could have stretched on forever for all he knew.

  He told Katsuo about Mrs Yamaguchi coming to see him. About the diary. What it contained. He told him that she thought her husband’s death wasn’t suicide. That he had been killed.

  Didn’t Ishiguro call you? Omura asked.

  Ah, old Ishiguro, Katsuo said. What would Ishiguro know?

  Katsuo took a cigarette out of the packet on the table in front of him. He lit it. Inhaled. He blew the smoke out into the air above his head. Omura recognised the ploy. He could see it in the way Katsuo leaned forward, flicking the ash of his cigarette into the small bowl in front of him. Katsuo was waiting, wondering just how much he really knew. What had Katsuo once said to him, of his writing? It’s simple, Tadashi, he had told him in the particularly condescending way he saved for such occasions. All you have to do is ask: What if? What if? What if? And then: How come? He decided not to waste time.

  Etsuko, he said.

  Katsuo nodded, exhaled.

  Very good, Tadashi, he said. He leaned forward again. But what does that prove?

  From a legal point of view, it proves that you were there. Don’t you see that? And if you meant him no harm, why buy a bus ticket in Etsuko’s name?

  From a legal point of view? Katsuo said. My God, Tadashi, has nothing changed?

  Omura ignored the slight. It was just another ploy.

  Why Etsuko? he asked after some time. Weren’t you worried someone might check?

  Some lives are full of risk, Tadashi. What is it people say about tempting fate? Besides, who can remember back then? Ets
uko Kaida? The name is meaningless. Just like the millions of anonymous people who have existed but who have never left a mark on the world. Meaningless. Except perhaps to you. And who else? Professor Todo? I heard he committed suicide. So clearly, not to him. And yes, you’re right. I resurrected Etsuko! Maybe life is just a game, after all. Maybe I wanted to see who was the stronger, me or…

  He hesitated, as if to say: Well, now I know.

  …or fate? Katsuo said.

  Some game, Omura said. You killed a man.

  Yes, he said. I did. I killed a man.

  Katsuo seemed to reflect for a moment on what he had said.

  On the other hand, he went on, I’ve always known that, one way or another, I would never escape myself. That I would always have to pay. I think I just got tired of waiting.

  And what about Hideo?

  What do you mean? He drew on his cigarette. My God, Tadashi, don’t you think Hideo got tired of waiting too? You know, he came to me, wanting to buy Sachiko back. He said to me he could not live with himself. He said he wanted to undo what he had done. But you can’t do that, can you, Tadashi? You can’t undo what you’ve done. Nobody can.

  He flicked the ash from his cigarette into the bowl on the table again, waved the smoke away.

  And how do you know, Tadashi, he went on, how do you know that Hideo was ever going to make it back across the bridge in any case? Back to the twinkling sanctuary of the inn? There was no sanctuary. Not anymore. The empty room was no longer empty. He could no longer keep his thoughts at bay. They were always there, waiting for him.