by Ryu Murakami
“Let’s eat it,” Anemone said before they were even out of the water. “A friend once told me how you cook a turtle. First, we need to light a fire.” They used dried seaweed as kindling, adding broken lengths of driftwood until the embers were smoldering bright red. When the fire was ready, Anemone let the end of a branch burn until it glowed and then, turning the creature on its back, started rubbing it against its belly. As sweat dripped from the end of her nose into the sand, she stood above the turtle applying the hot stick up and down its underside. The turtle paddled its legs in slow motion, its neck craning far out of the shell, as if it meant to leave its burning body behind and run off on its own. A smell like burning wool filled the air as it began to hiss, its cry almost indistinguishable from the sound of the surf being sucked into sand at the water’s edge.
“Sort of cruel, this,” whispered Nakakura. Hayashi nodded, gulping audibly.
“What are you muttering about?” Anemone said loudly, looking up at them. “That’s the law of the jungle: you get caught, you get cooked and eaten.” She added an “assholes” to herself as she went on rubbing, by now having softened the turtle’s belly but not yet killed it. The hissing still came from its leathery mouth as it opened and shut, until finally Anemone flipped it over and told the others to peel the shell away.
“Kiku, come on—if you aren’t quick about it, it’ll cool down and it won’t come off,” she said.
“You do it,” said Kiku, shoving Nakakura forward. But Nakakura looked over at Hayashi.
“Shouldn’t the guy who caught it do it?”
“Sorry, but you can count me out,” said Hayashi. “I’ve never killed anything in my whole life, not even a bug… I mean… except for that old barber I offed during the robbery, but that was the first and last time… so don’t look at me.” Anemone stood glaring from one to the other, but when she turned back to the turtle, she let out a yelp. It was gone, flapping across the sand toward the water, its shell gleaming in the sun. They set out in pursuit, but just as Hayashi reached out to grab it, a wave washed over it. The hiss of sea-water on hot shell startled him, and he drew back his hand as the turtle, in cool relief from pain, paddled slowly out to sea. No one made a move to stop it.
“Look at that motherfucker,” Hayashi murmured. “Just goes to show, even when they’ve got you half roasted, you shouldn’t give up.” The others nodded solemnly.
Later, on the beach, Kiku and Anemone watched an enormous sun sink below the horizon. The coconut and mango trees crowding the shore were dyed deep green by the dazzling orange light, and slowly the incandescent foam on the waves burst, bubble by glowing bubble, as the silhouette of the two lying on the sand darkened. With this subtropical summer sunset, little ice-cold crystals seemed to form just beneath their scorched skin, spreading as the shadows deepened and making them acutely aware of their sunburn.
Anemone stuck her tongue in Kiku’s ear, tasting the salt and feeling the roughness of some sand. Better than wire mesh, she thought.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” she whispered, blowing in his ear. “The Kingdom of the Crocodiles is here, under my tongue: all hot and slippery, like melted ice cream. And the studio walls are snow-white again.”
“What are you talking about?” Kiku laughed, gently peeling a patch of skin from her thigh. The moist new layer underneath glistened in the moonlight and the glow from the phosphorescent tide.
At dawn, the boat left Ogasawara, engines roaring and bow bucking against the waves. Anemone stood on the deck pointing toward the horizon. The Kingdom! she thought. A black speck had appeared: Io Island. As they approached, a crag jutting out of the sea near the island came into view, with smoke trailing from it, and they recognized the vent of an undersea volcano. The rocks were lined with hundreds of cracks from which sulfurous gas leaked into the air, mixing with the morning haze that hung low over the water.
To navigate past the island, they had to slow down and pick their way through a maze of visible reefs. Kiku climbed out on the bow to give directions as they drifted in clouds of smoke belching from the rocks and the sea itself. Large bubbles formed on the still surface, swelling with murky gas into shallow domes which ruptured with a loud pop. Released into the air, the gas combined with water vapor to form layers of color that changed according to the angle of the light: direct light dyed the smoke yellow, shadows were red, and backlighting left it a milky white. The gas hung low, trapping the heat beneath it like an impermeable membrane.
They had slowed to a crawl in order not to run aground. In front of the others, Anemone had tried to ignore the overpowering smell of rotten eggs, but finally she couldn’t stand it any longer and retreated into the cabin, holding her nose and clutching at her chest. The yellow smudge hid the sun, and Kiku was finding it almost impossible to keep his eyes open. He tried using a diving mask, but the sulfur still burned his throat, so he asked Hayashi to bring him a tank and regulator. After that he could breathe. Confined under the cloud, the heat seemed to become palpable and heavy, pressing against their skin like a mound of hot mud.
Suddenly, they heard a sharp knock against the hull and a shudder passed through the deck. Nakakura went pale and cut the engine dead.
“Kiku! What the hell are you doing out there?” he yelled. “If we get stuck here, we’ve had it.” Hayashi was already circling the rail with a boat hook.
“It wasn’t a reef,” said Kiku, mostly for his own benefit. “We were nowhere near a reef.” With the engine stopped, the boat rocked and drifted slowly backward. In the quiet, the sound of the sulfur escaping seemed almost ominous: gases burbling beneath the surface, bubbles popping, the spray falling back into the sea, and the clefts in the rocks hissing out evil-smelling fumes.
“Look!” said Hayashi, pointing off the starboard bow at a large silver fish floating on the surface. It was a barracuda that had probably drifted into the poisonous waters while asleep. The fish was still alive, and its tail fin twitched when they poked the pale, distended belly. A row of jagged teeth peeped out from its jaw.
“Start her up!” Kiku called to Nakakura. “Nothing to worry about; it was just a barracuda.” As the screw began to turn, the boat drifted slightly to the right and the fish was sucked into the propeller. From the deck they could hear the sharp blades grinding the flesh and bones, and they left a trail of bright red chum floating on the yellow surface.
Miruri Atoll, consisting of some forty tiny islands and about two kilometers of offshore territory, was privately owned by a man of Japanese descent who had retired as head of an airline he had founded in the islands of Southeast Asia. On what had been a deserted stretch of land, he installed a small desalination plant and an electric generator powered by the soil from the smallest of the islets—a refined sort of peat that resembled diatomite in color.
Having used more fuel than planned by stopping and starting the engine in the sulfur clouds, and not knowing what lay ahead at Garagi, Kiku decided they would have to make a stop at Miruri, and so, once again, they picked their way through a web of narrow channels between the innumerable keys. The islands, sandwiched as they were between South Io and Garagi, enjoyed a prevailing southerly breeze and heavy rainfall, and as a result were thickly matted with banana and mangrove trees and coconuts. There were no charts for these waters, the atoll being outside any ferry routes, so they were forced to feel their way along. It soon felt as if they were creeping through a tropical swamp, with the horizon obscured by islands of various and fantastic shapes and the surface of the sea covered with slimy algae.
Kiku remembered reading somewhere that the man who owned Miruri had upward of a dozen boats at his disposal, including a hydrofoil, a glass-bottomed job, and even a small submarine. With all that, he reckoned, there was bound to be some extra fuel lying around; the only question was whether they’d be allowed to buy any of it. Anemone, however, wasn’t thinking about fuel, absorbed instead in the sight of all these tree-choked islands that seemed to her the living image of the Kingdom come.
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After they had cleared Io, a Self-Defense Force patrol plane had trailed them for quite a way, hailing them on the radio and demanding to know their destination. When they answered that they were headed for Garagi, the plane asked what they planned to do there, and when they said they were just going to sightsee, they were told to turn back. Garagi, it seemed, had no accommodation for guests at present, and swimming was prohibited on almost all the beaches. It was obviously no place for tourists, and the pilot urged them in the strongest possible terms to choose another destination. Kiku, however, paid no attention, continuing to cruise at full throttle, and eventually the plane abandoned its pursuit. Watching it bank and head for home, Hayashi and Nakakura exchanged a worried look.
Somewhere deep in the maze of waterways that was Miruri Atoll, they spotted a jetty on the beach of a small lagoon. It was a fairly impressive structure made of reinforced concrete, and it was backed by a small wooden shed and a paved road leading into the jungle. As they brought the boat into shore, they could see a canoe that had split in half and been abandoned on the sand. Stuffing a gun into his belt, Nakakura jumped onto the jetty to catch the bowline that Hayashi threw over. Kiku was packing some rice and vitamin pills he hoped to trade for fuel, while Anemone sprayed herself all over with insect repellent, and together they went ashore.
There was no sign of life in the shed, just a lot of old equipment: water skis, tin drums, scuba tanks, tattered fishing nets, and rope. Everything was rusty or rotting, full of holes or coming to pieces. In one corner of the damp floor there was a nest of crabs. While Kiku stood looking at this mess, he realized that the whole place gave off a familiar odor: the smell of wood and metal half crumbling into dry, cracked earth, with just a hint of mildew growing on shaded concrete.
The asphalt sucked at the soles of their shoes as they set off down the road. A hack or two at the undergrowth on either side revealed traces of old mango and pineapple groves. Reaching the top of a small hill, they could look out over the whole island, which proved to be an oval perhaps two or three kilometers around. They also discovered a clearing containing a heliport, a gray hangar, a small generator and fuel refinery, a house with a banana-thatch roof and a terrace, and a volleyball court, but no people. Both the generator and the refinery were silent, the only sounds being the screeching of birds in the jungle and the waves breaking on the shore beyond.
“Nobody’s home,” Anemone murmured, but just then Nakakura, who had been checking out the hangar, called them over.
“Come take a look!” he said, pointing through a broken window. Inside they saw two helicopters covered with dust. “No, up there,” said Nakakura, directing their attention to the ceiling where several thousand bats hung sleeping in the gloom. As they stood looking at them, a hinge creaked loudly behind them and they turned with a start, Nakakura slipping the pistol from his belt. The door of the house had swung open and slammed shut and open again in the wind. A black mountain goat appeared, went clattering across the wooden deck and, after bleating several times, jumped down into the garden to crop the grass.
“Scared the shit out of me,” said Nakakura, shoving the gun back in his belt, but just as he did this, Anemone let out a scream. She was staring at a window, and a face, pressed up against the glass, was staring back. And not just staring—the old man in the window was grinning and waving at them.
Before long, they were being served cups of strong coffee next to an enormous tank of Napoleon fish. The rest of the decor consisted of a few pieces of rattan furniture, a shelf lined with seashells and sharks’ teeth, a stuffed blue marlin, two parrots, and an old phonograph.
“Hot?” the man asked. His guests glanced at one another and shook their heads. A breeze was blowing in from the terrace, and, having escaped the sun, they were in fact feeling cooler. Their host was wearing frayed cut-offs and a white linen shirt. The coffee was not only strong but incredibly sweet. Finally Kiku spoke up.
“We were wondering if you could spare some fuel,” he said. “We’ll pay for it, or we’ve got some rice and vitamins we could trade.” The old man told them there was another jetty on the opposite side of the island, and they could take as much as they liked from a fuel tank there.
“And it’s free of charge,” he added. “Don’t even need to thank me. Where you kids headed, anyway?”
“Garagi,” said Nakakura. The man nodded, stealing a glance at the pistol butt sticking out of Nakakura’s pants, then went over to a glass-topped rattan table and selected a volume from a stack of photo albums. He brought the album to Anemone, pointing out a picture of himself in the pilot seat of a small jet.
“I used to fly all the charters for candidates campaigning for the Malaysian National Assembly,” he said proudly.
“That’s great,” said Anemone, getting up. “Listen, I’m sorry, but we’re in a bit of a hurry. The coffee was fantastic. I love it rich and dark like that. Thanks a lot.” The old man looked a little disappointed, but he shut his album and offered to see them back to the boat.
With the goat trotting along beside them as they walked between rows of trees loaded with ripe and rotting mangoes, the man pointed at Nakakura’s gun.
“Who you planning to shoot with that?” he asked.
“Bad guys,” said Nakakura, aiming his index finger and firing at the sun. The old man laughed.
“You all are the first visitors I’ve had since I started living here alone,” he said. “You’re welcome to stop in on your way back from Garagi,” he added, patting the goat.
“You know what I’ve been wondering,” said Hayashi, speaking up at last, “is how you manage when you get sick.”
“Well, there was one time when I got bit by a moray eel and the wound got infected. My leg swoll up like a balloon and I was fresh out of penicillin, so I figured there was nothing to do but amputate—it was that bad. Trouble was, I couldn’t think how to go about it, but finally I came up with the idea of a guillotine. I had the blade: a big steel thing I use for cutting peat; it just had to be given a good sharp edge. I got a frame assembled, and I rigged it so I could pull the blade up and drop it. I even had enough wood left over to make a pair of crutches and a little coffin for the leg. The toughest part was carving out the track to keep the blade on line; if it was too narrow, I was afraid it wouldn’t drop smooth enough, and if it was too wide, it’d just wobble around and not cut clean. But I got it fixed, and decided to do it on a Sunday. Then it rained, so I put it off a day and checked all my preparations again: bandages, drugs to stop the bleeding, disinfectants, everything. When the day finally came, I tied my thigh right under the blade; it was so black and puffy by then—like a tree trunk almost—and I had so little feeling left in it that I guess I wouldn’t have been too sorry to see it go. It was my right leg, and about the most painful thing was bending the left one out of the way…”
“But you’ve still got your right leg,” Nakakura interrupted.
“Sure do,” said the old man. “The thing was a washout; the blade stopped at the bone. I thought I’d sharpened it good, but it didn’t cut through. You’d be surprised how tough bones are—hard as anything.”
“It must of hurt terribly,” Anemone put in.
“Naw, not so bad. And the good part was that all the pus came spurting out all over the place; except I nearly got it in my eyes and I was scared it’d blind me… I guess for me it wouldn’t have been so bad being lame, but I’d be in pretty deep trouble if I wound up blind.”
“Why’s that?” Anemone asked.
“Well, you see, young lady, I’m a pilot, and while you can probably manage to fly a plane with one leg, there’s no way in creation you can fly when you’re blind.”
A snake with yellow and black stripes cut across the road in front of them. The old pilot rolled up his shorts and showed them the scar. He then asked Nakakura if he could have a go with his gun and, aiming at nothing in particular, fired off into the trees. A flock of birds rose as one body into the air.
“Yo
u come back and see me now,” he said again when they were back on board and preparing to leave. Kiku looked up at him as he stood there on the wharf.
“Do those helicopters still fly?” he asked. The old man nodded.
“Might take an hour or so to get them into shape, but with a little work they’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” The shadow of the birds still circling overhead passed across the weed-choked channel. The goat flicked its tail at a horsefly and bleated as they pulled away.
Garagi Island, which they were finally approaching, was shaped rather like a woman’s shoe.
A squall blew up as they were busy sorting out the diving gear, and soon afterward the engine began making an odd sort of noise. Hayashi, who was at the helm at the time, shut it down, while Kiku and Nakakura went below to see what was wrong. The engine room smelled of burning oil, and they checked the fuel injection pump, the exhaust system, oil pressure, and so on; but in the end they discovered that the problem was some seaweed clogging the intake for the cooling system. The filter screen was torn, and some of the green muck from Miruri must have found its way inside. They would have to clean the whole tube by running seawater through it under pressure.