by Неизвестный
“Well yes, maybe,” Nakamura replied. “But when I saw her stand up in the boat back there, I just thought ‘Praise be!’ That’s all I thought. But I think really that was a kind of prayer.”
I was about to say what suddenly came into my mind at this, that if I were to pray to anything it would be to the awe-inspiring nature of that woman, that it’s to fearful things that one prays; but at the strange image that this idea conjured up I lost my nerve, and I said nothing.
To the end there was a deep reluctance among the three of us to bring up the subject of that day’s events. When Nakamura and I were alone together, we did speculate on the nature of this woman about whom we had learned absolutely nothing, on her reasons for suicide, and what might have become of her subsequently. But when with Koike we never spoke of the event. Koike had become a man who could no longer look women in the eye.
It was Nakamura and I who together threw ourselves into bringing this woman-shy Koike together with the woman who subsequently became his wife. Watching frustratedly from the sidelines, misgivings filled us as we saw our friend only flee the more as the attraction grew. It had been our early obtuseness there by the seaside that had put Koike in the position of facing the terror of that event alone. While Nakamura and I had gone on to have for the most part unproblematic relationships with women, Koike alone had been unable in any way to shake off the aftereffects of the event, right into his thirties. Our sense of our own responsibility in this weighed on us. Also, we were feeling somewhat threatened by Koike’s lover, the woman who later became his wife. She had become exasperated at how he would dodge aside at the last minute, just when he’d seemed to be reaching for her, and she finally demanded that he introduce her to his best friends so that she could learn more about him and come to terms with things a bit; she got from him the names and workplaces of Nakamura and myself, and one day she telephoned me. Koike had told me firmly that I was to keep out of this, but I could clearly see how attracted he was to her, and when she telephoned me I agreed to go out to meet and talk to her on several occasions. But how could I, who myself couldn’t really understand Koike’s feelings no matter how he tried to explain them, manage to sound convincing to her on the subject? Her pride as a woman had been hurt by Koike, and she was haggard with the impossibility of parting from him. The more I tried to explain, the more irritable she became, and she plied me with questions for all the world as if rebuking me. In the end it was I who was convinced by her, by the fierceness of her love, which eventually sealed my lips.
One night, when she was yet again firing questions at me, I finally spoke of the events by the seaside. She listened then with her eyes fixed on mine. “And ever since, Koike has been the way he is about women,” I finished, with a sense of really providing her for the first time with a worthwhile explanation. But in fact it served only to infuriate her.
“So that’s how you men feel about women, is it?” she demanded, and she shifted sideways to look past me and refused to respond to all my attempts to justify myself. After a while I became aware that everyone around us was taking this to be some kind of lover’s quarrel, so I urged her to come outside.
As we walked together toward the station, I glanced at the tearful face beside me, quite preoccupied and apparently unaware of whom she was with, and the weird thought stole over me that if I suddenly embraced her now things could develop into a three-way relationship with my friend, and then that this could actually make the lovers’ relationship rather more straightforward. It was of course an impossibility. Even without taking Koike into consideration, if I contrived to get myself alone with this woman, who knew how she might attack me for my earlier blunder. After parting from her at the station, I went on to Nakamura’s place and told him the story to date, finishing by saying that as things stood I’d done Koike a bad turn, and that I left the next stage in his hands.
A week later he came to see me, looking glum.
“Look at it how you will, Koike’s in the wrong,” he began, in typical Nakamura style. “He just carries on the whole time about his own feelings, and he’s making no attempt to shake off his fears for the sake of the woman he loves. He just doesn’t deserve to get her, he isn’t qualified as a man.” But there was a certain bewilderment behind his words.
We agreed that we must make every effort to bring the two of them together; it never for a moment occurred to us that this could be construed as uncalled-for meddling.
Luckily, Koike’s married life appeared to go smoothly. Each time we met, Koike seemed more open and relaxed, and his wife’s former raw, nervous quality now became swathed in a plump fleshiness; her skin bloomed and shone. A child was born. Then, with a timing that seemed almost to be putting that marriage’s success to some personal test, Nakamura married, followed by myself.
Five days before Koike died, I called at the hospital. It was another of those days of heavy rain, and the sickroom was imbued with a faintly marshy scent of wet rocks and forest humus. Koike sat me down on a chair by his pillow, and his dark emaciated face looked somehow dazzled as it gazed up at me, while he set about recalling in intricate detail an occasion when the three of us had lost our way in a ravine on one of our climbing trips. This event had occurred more than a year after the event beside the seaside. We had taken a wrong turning on a path that we had been along twice before, and headed confidently up a completely unfamiliar ravine.
As we followed the stream up, the valley sides grew steeper, and we scrambled up a succession of rock ledges we had no recollection of having come across on our previous trips—yet still we resisted the conclusion that we’d come the wrong way, and almost perversely chose to continue. Then, just when we reached a point where it seemed the path along the ridge above might be almost within our grasp, we found our way barred by a fair-sized waterfall. It was only when we’d clawed our way up to a ledge halfway up its side, and gazed at the dismal sight of the rock face above, that we began to think seriously about our position. We had arrived at a place that seemed to be the deep innermost recess of the ravine; within our range of vision there was only the waterfall, its endless stream pouring with a kind of uncanny slowness from somewhere above our heads, the black rocks that hemmed us in on four sides like a bowl, and a sky that was rapidly darkening with clouds. We stood in silence for a long time, gazing up at the rock face. It wouldn’t be impossible to force our way up it as we had forced our way up so far, but at this point we had simply lost the spirit to attempt it. We were not so much searching for a way up as privately taking the inner measure of just how much spirit each of us had lost. Koike alone was impatient. His opinion was that, in the case of a nasty place like this, it was the least dangerous option simply to take a deep breath and climb through it without hesitating and that the longer we stood and contemplated it the more our psychological defenses would crumble; he seemed astonishingly unconcerned with the question of whether it was the right path or not. Astonished though I was, I myself was actually still of two minds as to whether we had mistaken the way. After a little while, Nakamura dealt with the question summarily by saying that whatever the case may be, we should retrace our steps to the first fork in the path. Once it was spoken, this seemed the most reasonable option. We went back down the rock face with ropes and returned to the meeting of the two streams in the same amount of time we had taken to come up, then set up our tents there for the night, as the ravine was rapidly darkening. When we emerged from our tents in the morning, it was clear at a glance that we had gone the wrong way at that point. We had turned up a side stream one back from the point where the path branched, and followed it all the way up the ravine that ended in the sheer cliff etched by its waterfall, without noticing our mistake.
“How could we have been so stupid?” Koike demanded fretfully from his hospital bed, almost as if it had happened just the other day, as if that mistake had led to the gravest of consequences.
“It’s all too common with ravines, to make mistakes that seem ridiculous later.”
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“Yes, but we’d done that walk twice before, hadn’t we? You’d think among the three of us someone would have realized instantly that that dismal little ravine wasn’t the right one.”
He spoke accusingly. Resentment focused his eyes on some distant point in space. Then his right hand emerged trembling from beneath the blankets and took my right wrist in a loose grip. His rough dry palm began stroking my arm repeatedly from wrist to elbow. I swallowed down the disgust that rose in me, and a simultaneous disgust at the sudden consciousness that it produced in me of the greasy sweatiness of my own arm, and replied in a carefully calm voice, “It was because we were tired. We’d walked a long way, remember. When you get tired the brain can’t make judgments anymore, you make them with your body: We’ve walked this far, so this must be the point where we turn off, and so forth. And the tireder you are the sooner . . .”
“You turn up a side path.” There was a strangely ironic smile at the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “But then there’s no option, really. The darkness inside you makes the whole ravine dark, doesn’t it. There’s no point saying it was brighter or darker last time we came here. Because each time is the first time. Still, that feeling of going up a ravine you seem to know, or maybe you don’t after all, that sensation halfway along that you can’t go any farther. . . .”
As he muttered, Koike renewed his grasp on my wrist and drew it under the bedclothes toward his flat chest. My face approached his as he pulled me down, and he gazed into my eyes and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, as though imparting some important secret. “I’ve remembered! That cairn— remember? The one where the streams met, a bit out of the way, little heap of five or six small rocks, just piled up as though someone had come along a moment or so earlier and thrown it together in passing. A sign, but from its position you couldn’t really tell whether it meant ‘go straight ahead’ or ‘turn left here.’ Yes, a treacherous bit of mischief. We’d just come down from the right side of the river; that’s why that cairn seemed to be pointing up to the left. But I’ve remembered now. The moment we went left up that stream I thought, ‘This is odd. This is wrong.’ You thought the same. You did, didn’t you.”
“Yes I suppose I did,” I replied, unable to avoid supplying the answer he was urging on me; and in fact, now that he mentioned it, I did seem to remember that when we first turned off I had a strong impression that this was wrong, but my feet went tramping on in rhythm with theirs without my having the strength to gainsay the other two.
“We were led astray, that’s what it was, just because we didn’t pay enough attention at that point where the paths divided.” There was a certain urgency in his whispering voice. The core of his eyes seemed to blaze up in a wavering flame. “That’s why all we could do was to go on in silence, even when we realized the truth later. That’s what it was. But I saw, up on that rock ledge, I saw it, drawing us on from above, peering down at us over the edge there, a woman’s face. . . .”
“If you saw a woman’s face, why didn’t you tell us! What sort of a friend are you?” I tried to lighten the moment with a feeble joke, but as I spoke I found myself pulling my hand and face away from Koike. My tug made Koike’s face flop upward from the pillow, and he clutched my arm with both hands. A face that seemed to contain equally both laughter and tears, a face that could have belonged to any of the images one sees surrounding the central Buddha in the dark of temple altars; I knew from the experience of my mother’s death that that face had the clear marks of death upon it. A cold confusion of fear gripped me and I rose from the chair. Koike stretched his hands to my chest, gripped my shirt and clung there shaking for a long moment, and a heavy groan thrust itself from deep within him.
“You’re both with me, we’re always there the three of us when we go into the ravine, you were there too weren’t you? You’re always the careful and perceptive one, Nakamura can make decisions. . . .”
Mrs. Koike flew in and separated us, pulling Koike’s hands from my chest and covering me with her back. She shot me a glance, signaling with her eyes as she put a forefinger softly to her temple, then held Koike against her and pressed him down onto the bed with her body.
“I don’t want to die, not all alone, I don’t want to die!” Koike cried out from beneath his wife’s breast. He continued to cry aloud and weep.
His wife put one elbow on the bed, raised herself on her left leg, turning toward me the almost translucent whiteness of the back of her knee, lifted her right leg from the floor and put it on the edge of the bed, and gently pressed her breast to the upturned face of her weeping husband. Then, as she stroked his long tangle of hair with her fingertips, she too began to cry softly.
From within the sound of the rain, a rich sobbing and moaning swelled and died.
“I don’t want to die,” Koike groaned several times more, as if reminding himself, but—strangely—his wife’s sobs seemed to be calming him.
Once his groans had ceased, Mrs. Koike rose from the bed, quietly straightened the hem of her white dress, brushed the hair back from her forehead, turned her somewhat flushed face to me and lowered her eyes, and in a slightly husky voice said, “I do apologize.”
Koike’s eyes were closed, and he was breathing gently with sleep.
After my agitation, my mind became a blank, and I just stood bolt upright against the wall listening to the sound of the rain. But in the grim face of this death, at the moment when being alive seemed as unbearable as dying, my heart had been strangely touched by the two voices I heard. And it was only now, when the first commemorative ceremony of Koike’s death was over, as I lay straining my ears for the sighs and moans of the myriad voices contained within the ravine’s sounds all about me, that I at last understood just how my heart had indeed been touched that day.
HIRANO KEIICHIRŌ
Hirano Keiichirō (b. 1975) was born in Aichi Prefecture and grew up in Kita Kyushu. His first novel, Solar Eclipse (Nisshoku, 1998), set in France on the eve of the Re naissance, was published while Hirano was still a student at Kyoto University and won the Akutagawa Prize in the following year, making him a celebrity overnight and inviting comparisons with Mishima Yukio, who also made a dazzling, youthful debut. Hirano’s second novel, Tale of One Month (Ichigetsu monogatari, 1999), a fable set in the mountains of Yoshino during the Meiji period, was published right after his graduation. In Funeral March (Sōsō, 2002), Hirano turned again to France, writing about Chopin, George Sand, and Eugène Delacroix. His first volume of short stories, including “Clear Water” (Shimizu), was published in 2003, and another collection, Ripples of Dripping Clocks (Shitariochiru tokeitachi no hamon), followed in 2004. Hirano now lives in Kyoto.
CLEAR WATER (SHIMIZU)
Translated by Anthony H. Chambers
Clear water is dripping, far away.
The day was unbearable, the sun scattering incessantly from the morning on.
Wondering at dawn where my slumber had gone (it has stubbornly resisted company for a long time), I gazed through the curtains, marveling at the scene outside as if seeing it for the first time.
I’d been running for days through the same absurd speculations, trying to find a convincing explanation for what was happening to me. Of course, I wasn’t as serene at the beginning as I am now. Serene—yes, I’m serene. Might this be called resignation? Probably. That is, if resignation requires such a feeling of powerlessness.
Once they sprouted in my mind, those fragments of memory flourished with a robust, botanical speed, like ivy shooting out tendrils.
It was the memory of a sun of long ago, a memory of a day when the gigantic sun that covered everything over our heads drew away from us, even as it scattered its light everywhere. A shabby blue spread gradually through the sky. I felt the sadness of parting. In tears, I gazed futilely at the scene, on and on.
. . . Memory. Yes, I said memory. And yet at first I didn’t think of it as such. No—to be more exact, I thought of it as a memory at first, then instantly denied th
at it was:
It must be a fragment of a myth I read someplace and a trace of the arbitrary daydreams it inspired. Or a scene from a movie? Something I envisioned for a novel? Did some stimulus revive a dream that was lost when I awoke? Or simply the dregs of a fantasy I’d amused myself with?
And yet I couldn’t accept any of these explanations. Preceding everything else was the sensation of having remembered and that memory’s feeling of actuality.
Getting out of bed, I sat at the table and looked at a box of cookies as I sipped the remains of last night’s coffee.
Is there such a thing as an indubitable memory? —I was drawn back to this question. If no material traces remain to confirm what has occurred only yesterday—even just now—then there’s endless room for doubt.
For example, here’s a cookie. I am now, without question, gazing at this cookie as it rests in the palm of my hand. I eat it. The image of the cookie on my palm lingers in my memory.
Now, without placing anything on my palm, I try to picture the cookie.
(Watching closely, I clenched my fist, then opened it and pictured the cookie there, then closed my fist again.)
Well? Sure enough, an image of the cookie on my palm lingers in my memory. At this point, how can we demonstrate that only one of the two cookies has truly existed? In my memory, the images of the cookies are the same. Maybe the second cookie is the one that existed. Or maybe there were never any cookies to begin with.—
I drank more cold coffee.