by Ryu Murakami
Almost immediately, Hashi was stopped by a man he knew, a former colleague who was still turning tricks. The man was a deaf-mute, but he expressed his admiration for Hashi’s silk shirt with his hands.
Toxitown had a familiar, comforting smell. The puddles made crazy reflections as they always had, and the streets and houses were the same as ever. It had only been two months since he’d left, so there was really no reason to expect anything to have changed. Still, Hashi almost wished that this world within barbed wire had somehow vanished in the interim. And not just this place; he would be better off without any of the old scenery—the island down south, Kuwayama’s crummy house, the slope where the cannas bloomed in summer, Milk’s doghouse, the beach, the orphanage, the rows of cherry trees, the sandbox, the chapel, everything. But why? It was simple: because he, Hashi, had become a singer.
In point of fact, when he thought about it, he hadn’t exactly “become” a singer; actually, he’d been born wanting to be a singer, and now that he was close, it was just a matter of convincing himself that up till now he had never really existed. All that time before, he’d just been some guy with a forced smile in a badly focused snapshot; or maybe if you looked all the way back, long before he started singing, you’d find a little naked baby, frightened and bawling its head off—a baby in a box, sprinkled with powder and left for dead. That’s what he’d been all along, and it wasn’t until he became a singer that he had been able to get out of the box, out of that coin locker. But now that he was out, he despised his old suffocating self and wanted to erase all traces of him, everywhere he’d been, everything he’d done.
As he walked along, he remembered how Neva’s tongue had felt as it ran down his back, how it probed at his ass, fluttered over his cock and on down to his toes. He could still feel it, rough and pliant yet firm, as if it concealed a nice streak of gristle. It was long and wet, tapering perfectly at the tip. She had swallowed his cum, he remembered; from experience he knew how it must have tasted, how it caught in the throat and refused to be washed away even when you gargled. It stuck to the gums, flavoring your next cup of tea, like a remembrance of fellatios past. Neva said it was the first time she’d ever sucked a cock.
“Hashi,” she had told him when she’d finished, “I’ll give you a piece of important advice. When you’re with a woman, you’ve got to square your shoulders and stick your chest out, not hunch up like you were doing.” Neva had never even hinted that it might be his first time; she had treated him like a man, and it made Hashi feel different. I’m not a faggot any more, he told himself.
Just then, Hashi stopped short, recognizing the man coming toward him along the street. It was his old neighbor, the Quaker.
“It is you!” the old man said. “I saw you from the window, and I thought I knew that face. So. You back to stay?”
“No, just came for a look around the old neighborhood,” said Hashi.
“It’s pretty quiet around here now that you all left. Gets a little scary sometimes and I don’t sleep so good.”
“That so?… Well, I’ve got to be going,” he added.
“Why don’t you stick around a while and have some noodles? I bought them fresh and there’s plenty left.”
“Thanks anyway, but I’ve really got to get home.”
The old man was dressed in faded flannel pajamas and a pair of women’s sandals. He had a slightly sour smell. As he stood hesitating, Hashi had a sense of foreboding; he knew he shouldn’t hang around any longer, but when he turned to retreat down the alley, the old man grabbed his sleeve.
“Look, if you can’t stay to eat, there’s something I want you to do for me,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’ll come back sometime to visit,” Hashi told him, noticing for the first time that he was clutching a cardboard box.
“There’s nobody else I can ask,” he said. “I want you to bury this for me.”
“What is it?”
“You remember the streetwalker lived next door to you? The one with the big belly? Well, she left this behind when she cleared out.”
“Why don’t you just keep it? Nobody would care.”
“You don’t understand. This isn’t something I can keep; it’s a body.”
His premonition had been right. The old man put the box down on the pavement and turned to run, but Hashi managed to catch hold of his pajama top.
“Wait a second. Why do I have to do this?” he demanded. The skin at the back of the Quaker’s neck was so cold and clammy, Hashi released his grip with a shudder. Sinking to his knees, the old man began to cry and shake. Then he reached down and clawed at the damp soil with his fingernails as a stream of incomprehensible insults came from his mouth. The tears welling from his bloodshot eyes collected in the deep, scaly wrinkles that covered his face.
“Monster!” he shouted. “God’s judgment is upon you! The Lord will not suffer your kind to desecrate a body. In the Revelation of St. John it says that the earth will crack and the whole world will be rent asunder and then even those who call the Lord’s name will find it is too late!”
Lights had come on in windows up and down the alley, and somewhere a voice shouted for the old fool to shut up. Hashi retreated into the shadow of an empty oil drum as a man and woman, naked from the waist up, appeared at one window. The Quaker, still crouching on the ground, continued his cryptic tirade in a shrill, whining voice. Looking up at the sky, he began to pray. “Lord, send down Thy judgment upon us miserable sinners,” he begged. A teacup sailed out of a nearby window and shattered at the old man’s feet, and then, from somewhere behind them, a whiskey bottle, better aimed, smacked into the back of his head, breaking into a thousand pieces.
“Fucking asshole! There’s your judgment for you!” a voice shouted. The old man slumped to the ground and lay still as the lights and faces disappeared from the windows. The neighborhood fell silent.
Hashi slowly approached him. The Quaker groaned quietly as Hashi helped him up and walked him back to his room, a narrow space stacked to the ceiling with emergency rations, fuel, medicine, and bottled water. Putting him to bed, Hashi dressed his wound with some mentholatum and then wrapped it in strips of torn towel. When he was done, he went back to the alley to retrieve the box, which looked ordinary enough except that it was taped tightly shut and tied around and around with string. Giving it a shake, Hashi could feel the baby’s stiff body shift inside.
He carried the box to a junkyard where he thought he might find a shovel. There wasn’t one around, so he picked up a flat piece of fender and began scraping a hole in a clear space among the abandoned cars. He dug mindlessly, quickly breaking into a sweat that plastered the silk shirt he was wearing to his skin. Scratching away for as long as he could with the blunt metal, he then took to clawing at the earth with his fingernails. If I don’t go deep enough, dogs will come dig it up, he thought, or hawks will swoop down and tear the hard little body to shreds… He worked on, his arms growing numb and his hips aching. Hashi had never had much stamina when it came to physical labor; he always tired more quickly than anyone he knew. In addition to a stomach and lungs and intestines like everybody else, he decided he must have a special organ in him, a fatigue gland of some sort. But his mind was now on other things; he was digging furiously, scraping with his fingers or whatever bit of wood or metal came to hand. As he dug, he mumbled to himself.
“Nope, I’m never doing any more rain spells. No more hanging mice for me, no way, because if it rains now, the box gets wet and the baby rots…”
When he cut his hand on a piece of broken glass, he finally realized it was daylight. The glass sparkled in the rays of light filtering through gaps in the row of skyscrapers. He felt as though his body had been stretched into a length of fine, shining wire reaching through the spiky fence to the trees and buildings beyond, and from there on to the horizon. But you, my little friend, he thought to himself as he gathered up the box, you will never shine. You, he told the box, are worm food. Putting
it in the hole, he began replacing the earth.
“And I,” he said, “—I funked it, I got away.”
14
Mystery of the Caves at Uwane
The island of Garagi, a volcanic mound 4.6 kilometers square and forty kilometers south of Iwo Jima, was officially returned to Japan by the U.S. government only in 1985, seventeen years after the rest of the islands in the Ogasawara archipelago. For reasons never made clear by the U.S. authorities, during the entire period of this extended occupation the island was closed to its former residents, and even requests made by people wanting to visit family graves were routinely turned down. It is known that the U.S. navy maintained a small intelligence and communications outpost on the island, and it was rumored that the base served as a listening post for spy satellites, but according to well-placed sources with the Self-Defense Forces on Iwo Jima, the Americans operated nothing more than a radar tracking post, part of the navy’s worldwide network. In any case, all traces of the radar equipment had been removed by the time the island was returned to Japan, and the wooden buildings that had apparently housed the installation are now elementary and junior high schools.
Garagi Island: population 184; principal features, pineapple fields and an office of the National Weather Bureau. The population these days is about evenly divided between the descendants of prewar inhabitants and young urbanites seeking refuge from the city, but dreams of further expansion and a booming tourist industry have been stymied by the lack of transportation—the ferry from the main island of Ogasawara stops only twice a week. Still, Garagi is a tropical paradise; lush green hills sloping down to clear blue waters which, on the north shore of the island, enclose a spectacular coral reef. With the destruction in recent years of the coral surrounding the other Ogasawara islands by illegal Southeast Asian fishing boats, the reef at Garagi has become the last remaining example of this undersea wonder in Japanese waters.
It was in 1985, just after the island was returned to Japan, that Wataru Aritsuki quit his job in Tokyo and moved to Garagi to open a diving shop. His original capital consisted of nothing more than a diving instructor’s license and a small savings account, but before long the island’s reputation began attracting enthusiasts from as far away as Australia and Germany, and by the time our story begins, more than a thousand divers had made the roundabout journey to Garagi. At one point, a famous underwater photographer was calling Garagi’s reef the most beautiful in the world. But a darker side to the beauties of these waters has been revealed by Aritsuki himself, who even now, when the entire diving area has been closed off and swimming strictly prohibited, can’t bring himself to leave the island, making a living by working part-time in the pineapple fields. We caught up with him recently for an interview.
“It’s really sad, especially seeing that places like this are so rare nowadays. People don’t have any idea how badly most other coral has been damaged, not only by poachers, but just by having big developments going up on a beach. The old-timers on the island were always complaining about the bad ferry service, but I thought it was great. Put in an airport, throw up hotels, and this place would be Okinawa all over again; but Garagi was a diver’s paradise, a dream of an island. We have table coral out there over eight meters across—nothing like it anywhere else. But now… It’s a shame what’s happened… You want to know about the ‘accidents’? Actually, I’m trying to forget all about it. It was a real shock. I suppose if it had stopped after the first one, you could have called it a fluke, but three times in a row…”
In its heyday, there were thirty-one diving sites on Garagi’s north shore, something for every diver from the complete beginner to the professional. Among them, Uwane Cove was known as the most treacherous. First, before you ever put on a tank, there was the problem of getting to the site; it lies at the bottom of a sheer cliff, with only one very steep and narrow path down. The challenge of carrying air tanks the hundred or so meters to the water restricted it to the young, strong, and healthy. A few meters offshore, an almost vertical shelf falls away to a depth of eighteen meters, but the coral here is still sparse, and you have to swim out along a bare, gently sloping bottom to a depth of about eighty meters where, nearly a kilometer and a half from shore, you come to a great outcrop of rock. Around this rock, dubbed Little Uwane, which actually protrudes above the surface in one spot, flow powerful and unpredictable tidal currents and whirlpools that could suck a diver to the bottom and leave him there forever. But it is also around this rock that the intrepid diver finds—or used to find—some of the world’s most spectacular coral and a rainbow display of tropical fish, all guarded by friendly dolphins.
Uwane quickly became known as the most beautiful and thrilling diving site in Garagi, if not the world, and it was in order to make this spectacular dive a bit safer that Aritsuki and some friends set about charting the currents. Still, only the most experienced were allowed the privilege of diving at Uwane—“experience” meaning, in this case, not only a mastery of diving equipment and techniques but an unquestioning willingness to follow the guide’s instructions.
In September of 1986, the well-known French underwater photographer, J. E. Claudel, spent three months on Garagi and had this to say about Uwane Cove:
“The water is ten times clearer than in the Maldives, the fish a hundred times more numerous than in Tahiti or Rangiroa, and the coral… is breathtaking! I must say, I seriously doubt that even Jacques Cousteau himself, when first beginning to explore the unknown ocean floor shortly after the invention of the aqualung, could have been more thrilled or more satisfied than I was at Uwane.” The photographs Claudel took of this reef more than do justice to his enthusiasm and, sadly enough, have become almost the only record we have at present of this extraordinary spot.
On November 4, 1987, an undersea volcano two hundred kilometers to the south of Garagi erupted, shaking the island with dozens of minor earthquakes and, naturally enough, altering the pattern of the currents that swirl around Little Uwane. It was in the wake of this eruption, while beginning to rechart the tidal patterns, that Aritsuki first discovered a large underwater cave. The entrance, which he speculates may have been opened by the earthquakes, was in the form of a long split in the rock just wide enough for a person to slip through, but, once inside, the passage widened gradually and began to twist about at fantastic angles until you came eventually to a large rock ledge. The ledge, apparently, was a nesting place for shrimp. Aritsuki and his companions ended their initial exploration at this ledge, noting that from that point on the passage split into three separate branches, each of which they considered fairly dangerous to follow. The depth gauges at the ledge read twenty-nine meters, sufficient to require considerable decompression time, and factoring this in with the eight minutes it took to reach the ledge from the surface, with no time for sightseeing, Aritsuki calculated that they had come to the limits of their twelve-liter double tanks. If they were to explore further and perhaps find another exit, they would need better equipment and more help.
It was a few months later, on January 19, 1988, that the first “accident” occurred. It happened during a routine tour of the cave that Aritsuki was conducting for two German women, a Mrs. Franz Mayer and her companion. Leaving a rope trailing behind them to mark the route, they passed through the entrance into the passage lit only by their flashlights. It was somewhere in the part just before the ledge that Aritsuki heard a clinking sound which he immediately recognized as a dolphin. What was odd, however, was that the thing was coming their way at a terrific rate. He knew, of course, that dolphins almost never attack people, and even in the rare case where a pregnant female turns on swimmers, it is more to frighten them than to do any real harm. Thinking that the animal had perhaps been startled by the light, Aritsuki signaled the two women to lie flat on the floor of the passage and then, switching off his flashlight, sank down himself to wait for the dolphin to pass overhead. Soon, he could sense a single animal approaching, then racing by, but almost instantly it must
have turned and begun butting Mrs. Mayer, who was nearest at hand, with its snout. Hearing her scream, Aritsuki turned on his flashlight to find the dolphin savagely attacking both Mrs. Mayer and her friend. The shock of the attack had made Mrs. Mayer lose her regulator.
“I’d never seen a dolphin do anything brutal like that before. I suppose it must have wandered off from its herd and gone a little crazy, but by the time I saw it, it was all covered with cuts and just out of its mind—no other way to describe it. I could see that Mrs. Mayer was going to drown without her regulator so I tried to use myself as a decoy to draw off the dolphin, but by this time things were so stirred up inside the tunnel that you couldn’t see anything. It didn’t look like the dolphin was going to break off the attack, so I did what I could to get the ladies outside, but they’d stopped moving, and in the end it was everything I could do just to get myself out. We were pretty deep, and I knew I would have to decompress, but before I’d even grabbed onto the anchor chain to wait, the dolphin came charging out of that hole after me. I thought I was a goner, but it didn’t turn out like that; just as it spotted me and started to charge, it spit out a cloud of blood, went belly up, and floated to the surface, stone-dead.
“I have a feeling the police and the German insurance company were a bit suspicious of me for a while. They couldn’t believe that a dolphin would attack like that, and I can’t say as I blame them; if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it myself. Yep, that was the first ‘accident.’”
The second occurred on February 2 of the same year, this time without Aritsuki there to witness it. A local fisherman, Tetsuji Owa, and his two sons went shrimping in the cave and all three perished. His wife, Katsue, concerned when they failed to come home, had contacted the fishing co-op, and Aritsuki had been dispatched to find them. This he did: all three bodies were floating on the ceiling above the rock ledge. The autopsies reported the cause of death as acute coronary failure, but all three had been in perfect health prior to the accident and there was no history of heart disease in the Owa family. The ledge where they were found was a space about as wide and high as the average living room, and it was thought that a sudden, violent upcurrent might have thrown them against the ceiling, damaging their tanks. But all this seemed unimportant beside the oddest aspect of the case: one of the sons was found with a hand spear buried in his thigh, and the other had a gaping cut in his shoulder made by a diving knife. The spear, as far as they could tell, belonged to the father, while the knife belonged to the boy who had been speared. Nearly as odd, perhaps, was the fact that all three still had their regulators held firmly in their mouths, sealed there by rigor mortis. So in the end, despite what the autopsies said, it was widely assumed that the three men had died in some sort of violent family feud.