by Kōbō Abe
(The recording breaks off again here. The tape counter reads 582. I’m sure the reason the horse kept trying to get me to finish the second tape, even calling up to see how I was doing and using supper as bait, was that he was after these few hours that went unrecorded. Naturally, I mean to tell everything. Surely she wouldn’t be angry at me for that now.) “The mikes don’t work inside the elevator. If you have anything to say, say it now. We have this place to ourselves now but there isn’t much time, so say it fast. Isn’t there anything you want me to do? If not, then let me tell you something. I was raped by the chief.”
She spoke so rapidly that when she had finished it was still only the ninth floor. He had no idea how to answer her. Perhaps the word “rape” isn’t all that shocking in print, but heard spoken by someone directly involved, it was like gunpowder exploding in his ears.
His impression of her changed instantly. Gone without a trace were her haughty airs as the doctors’ ally. Even her smooth, taut skin, that had seemed to him the mark of a fearless aggressor, now seemed to brand her as a victim. She kept her mouth tightly closed.
They stepped out into the employees’ lobby. Except for the prevailing style of white coats and sandals and the smell of medicine, it was crowded enough to suggest the underground walkway of an office building at quitting time. Not surprisingly, considering she was the assistant director’s private secretary, a number of people greeted her familiarly. Some glanced back and forth meaningfully at the two of them.
A pair of shaven-headed fellows in sweat pants came weaving through the crowd, ran up to her and stopped, bowing at sharp angles, then looked at her hopefully. With a practiced air she sent them casually on their way. Her self-assurance suggested that she must after all be on the doctors’ side. Could he have heard mistakenly before, about the rape? Or was even rape treated differently here in the hospital from the way it was in ordinary society?
A barbershop, a notions counter, a travel bureau, a florist’s shop, a coffee shop with chairs set out as far as the passageway, a speedy printing office, an electronic listening device store, a photo shop, a coin laundry, and then, as though glimpsed through a wide-angle lens, a steam-hazed dining hall.
In a far corner of the dining hall was an outsize television. Steel pipes had been assembled to a height of two meters off the floor, over which the table for the TV receiver jutted out sharply like a visor. Seating space in the blind spot underneath was particularly crowded. Granted there wasn’t much on the tube worth watching around six o’clock, but still, why was such a noisy place so popular? For the very reason, it seemed, that it was so noisy: that made it a blind spot for hidden microphones, too.
Come to think of it, it did seem that everyone was snuggled unnaturally close together, as though whispering in each other’s ears. A few couples were obviously engaged in romantic tete-a-tetes, but the majority seemed to be business partners huddled in confidential talks. As they walked between tables, a flurry rose wherever she went. Some couples even rose casually and left. The supervisor is never popular.
They sat down at the corner of a table for four, so close together that their knees almost touched; they had to sit that close just to be able to hear themselves talk. When the waiter came for their order she drew an A in the air with her finger, and then pantomimed pouring beer into a glass. There were five combination lunches on the menu, from A to E; today’s A lunch was Chinese-style fried pork and vegetables, with corn soup. On television, a robot monster’s scream marked the end of the children’s program, and amber-colored lights flickered on the faces of surrounding diners as a commercial for an electronic mosquito-repellent device began.
“I was raped.”
She whispered the words into the man’s ear, then quickly faced forward again, tapping with her right forefinger on the white plastic tabletop. He knew he was being pressed for a response, but couldn’t imagine what sort of answer she wanted. Was she trying to lodge a complaint with him against the chief, was she expressing solidarity with him as a fellow victim, or was she just seeking to arouse his sympathy?
Knowing that he was off target, he decided to give as noncommittal an answer as possible.
“When?”
She lowered her head and squirmed. He must have blown too hard in her ear. This time she blew back equally hard in his.
“Is it true about your wife being kidnapped in an ambulance?”
“If it weren’t true, I wouldn’t hang around this place so long, cutting work, would I?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?”
No matter how short their remarks, each one necessitated a shift from mouth to ear, then back from ear to mouth again; in the process everything they said took on a terribly suggestive sound.
“If you were a private eye, you’d have gone about looking for her quite differently, I bet.”
“I’ve done everything a private eye could do. I’ve shadowed people, snooped around….”
“How many years have you been married?”
“Going on five.”
“You still haven’t done a survey of her general schedule, have you? Her circle of friends before you were married, her present associates. They say you can find all sorts of clues in address books, calendar notations, and dog-eared pages in the phone listings. You should check around with people in the neighborhood, too. Did she have any set day in the week for going out; if so, what hours was she gone and how was she dressed and made up . .. ?”
“You don’t realize—it’s funny for me to be the one to say this, but in the first place, I—”
“I know, you’re a good-looking guy.”
“That’s not what I was going …”
The beer came. With her kneecap pressing against his like a hard gumball as she urged him to share a toast, he could hardly refuse. He glanced around. People’s gazes flew off reluctantly in all directions, like flies chased away. The beer he gulped down disappeared before ever hitting his stomach.
“What’s your wife like?”
There was an unmistakable invitation in the pressure on his knee. To ignore it would hurt her feelings, and at this stage it would not be wise to earn her enmity. But if he took her up on it, his own position in searching for his wife would lose all credibility. He didn’t know what to do.
“I have some pictures of her at home … when she was in college she was in a district preliminary tryout for the Miss Tokyo contest, so I’ve even got some big color pictures of her in a bathing suit and stuff.”
“You mean she’s proud of her figure, and she’s the flashy type. Right?”
“That’s not so.”
“How come, I wonder.”
“How come what?”
“I wonder if being married to a man makes him protective like that.”
He stole a careful look at her expression. There was no trace of the sarcasm often accompanying that sort of remark, which struck him as all the more reason to stay on guard. While he searched for an answer, she went right on talking, oblivious.
“There’s something I think you ought to know.” She stared into his eyes, slurping down the rest of her beer through pursed lips as if using an invisible straw. “Nobody really gives a hoot about you and your problems at all.”
That was more than likely so. But it made him feel no better to be told so straight out like that. An unpleasant, clammy sensation oozed from his pores, as though he were a sponge being trampled underfoot. His hopes cracked and peeled off like a thin layer of ice on a frozen orange.
“But people from outside hardly ever get to go in there, do they, that room where you listen to the tapes? . ..”
“Just because something is hard to come by doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useful, does it?”
It was a suggestive warning. What was she after? Was this harassment, a frame-up, or just good will? But good will, like things that are hard to come by, wasn’t necessarily useful. He was all too accustomed to demonstrations of good will fro
m strangers by now.
Two A lunches were brought on aluminum trays. Instead of answering, he quickly took a mouthful of soup and discovered that he was so hungry he could scarcely taste it. For a while they busied themselves chewing. Finally, when the pile of fried pork and vegetables had been reduced to little more than broth, she glanced at her watch, then impulsively stuck out her wrist toward him, laughing with her eyes. A red scar three centimeters long ran parallel to her watchband.
The man’s imagination spun. This must have some connection with that rape incident she had already mentioned twice now. Was she trying to arouse his sympathy by hinting at a past suicide attempt? His first impression had been that she and the chief of security worked in close harmony, but it could be that they didn’t get along as well as they seemed to. Perhaps they were playing a dangerous game, one victim and the other aggressor. She had gone out of her way to show him an opportunity to press his advantage; it was up to him to make good on it.
She was first to take the next move.
“Do I seem unhappy to you, or happy?”
“You don’t seem especially unhappy.”
“Why not?”
Apparently he had said the wrong thing. If he had said that she seemed unhappy, that would have been a tacit admission that each of them had something to offer the other.
“It’s just the impression I had, that’s all. …”
She gave a slight smile, curling her upper lip, then abruptly shoved back her chair and stood up.
“Want to stop by my room on the way back?”
Half rising, he hedged.
“Would there be some advantage in that?”
A sharp pain shot through his anklebone. She had kicked him with the toe of her sandal. The skin was broken, and it was bleeding.
“Do you have to always just think about yourself like that? It’s disgusting.”
“Can I help it?”
She started walking ahead without looking back. He patted his ankle with the paper napkin he had used to wipe his mouth, then followed after her, weaving through the narrow spaces between tables and trying to let the pain of his injury drown his rising anger. She was like a spoiled baby monkey. What in hell gave her the right to act that way?
By the wall just outside the dining hall a crowd of twenty or so had gathered. That same shaven-headed twosome in sweat pants was in the act of beating up a middle-aged man in a doctor’s white lab coat. They seemed to be the same pair as before, and yet they could just as easily have been different. The victim was seated on the floor, the front of his coat open, the buttons torn off. Blood streaming from his nose formed a spreading network across his undershirt, which was plastered against the flabby bulges of subcutaneous fat in his belly. One shaven-headed fellow, with a puffy face like a steamed bun, snatched off the victim’s glasses and crushed them underfoot. His accomplice, who had one staring glass eye, kept jabbing his knee into the victim’s nose, which had already been transformed into a ripe purple grape. Yet nobody made any move to intervene. Perhaps some special circumstances dictated against interfering.
The steamed bun saw the secretary; putting his hands up behind his ears, he flapped them like elephant ears. The glass eye smiled, showing even white teeth. She spoke to neither one in particular.
“Say the multiplication table.”
The steamed bun pursed his lips proudly and popped his cheek with one finger, making a noise like tapping on the mouth of a bottle. He began to recite in a singsong.
“Two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is eight, two times five is ten, two times six is twelve ..
The onlookers averted their eyes and stood stiffly and awkwardly. Everyone wore a cross, sulky look. It was not clear if their displeasure was aimed at the woman, at the two men, or at the victim himself. Meanwhile the glass eye kept his one good eye glued suspiciously on the man, who felt as ill at ease as if he were being forced to crap in public.
Without waiting for the recitation of the multiplication table to end, she began to walk away. The man followed behind her somewhat reluctantly. They left by a different route than they* had come by. Gradually the lighting fixtures grew fewer and farther between, and the stores and coffee shops gave way to closed doors that looked like offices or storerooms. Every time they rounded another corner of the mazelike underground passage, the number of people diminished visibly, until finally they came to the foot of a narrow, deserted stairway. She turned around suddenly and spoke.
“What do you want?”
He felt he had fallen into a trap.
“I thought you were showing me the way, so I.. .”
“The way where?”
“I’d get lost by myself.”
She tilted her head and smiled. He had no alternative but to continue following. They came out in the open air, and turning, he saw the main building of the hospital soaring up into deep violet clouds in the evening sky. Piled up in the dingy lamplight were hundreds of bicycles, wheels and handlebars intertwined. She pulled one out seemingly at random and started riding. The man ran alongside her. Now the jump shoes could show their stuff. As long as he wasn’t up against a professional racer, he could hold his own against a bicycle for a good kilometer with no trouble. She looked back, saw him following closely behind as though in a dream, and increased her speed still more. The hem of her uniform fluttered in the wind, and her bare legs, fully revealed, stroked through the darkness.
They moved along a weed-grown path between row’ after row’ of wooden two-story buildings. These must be the wards for long-term patients that he had seen on the way to the assistant directors office, after the emergency doctor’s accident. Stalks of gladioli mowed down by the bicycle wheels pointed downhill, their flowers the color of dried blood. She slammed on the brakes, and the man barely managed to avoid a collision. A three-story ferroconcrete building stood blocking the way ahead. It was a rather old-fashioned building, with vines covering its blue-gray walls, and red bricks framing its windows. This must once have been part of the main hospital buildings. Hanging there now’ was a wooden sign, smudged with ink, identifying it as SPECIAL WARD - CARTILAGE SURGERY.
The man was secretly relieved that it was not the woman’s room. For the time being, then, he was on suspended sentence.
(7:43. The darkness outside my window rolled back and cracks between the clouds shone brightly, followed three seconds later by thunder and the spattering of large drops of rain. The horse should be here pretty soon. The tape counter still reads 582. I know he isn’t going to like that. Rain is blowing in the window’, and a foul green stench has begun to fill the room. Please, let this insanity end soon!)
He crossed a narrow driveway and pushed open the heavy front door with his shoulder, coming into a spacious hallway like a waiting room. The odor of disinfectant stung his nostrils, and the hum of ventilating fans crawled along the floor. He sensed the presence of people, but saw no one. Panting hard, the secretary opened the collar of her uniform and fanned herself. The man, also panting, wiped the sweat from his throat.
She turned, facing the elevator next to the front stairs as she spoke.
“Wait here. I’ll talk to the assistant director and get a key to the room for you.”
“Room? What room?”
She looked back sharply, stretched out both her arms, the fists tightly clenched, and stamped the floor impatiently with her sandal.
“I won’t do anything to hurt you, so just do as you’re told. You can save a whole lot of time by staying here at the hospital instead of always going back and forth between here and your house, right?”
She could say what she liked, but he still intended to go home. The reason there had been no answer on the phone before might very well be because his wife had been out running around in search of him. Besides, for all he knew, he might come upon some unexpected clue in the back of a bureau drawer. But there was no point in arguing about it with her. It was only common sense for someone lost to keep from acting bl
indly, and save strength for when the fog lifts. Silently he watched her disappear inside the elevator, and then seated himself on a narrow wooden bench covered with black vinyl. He was tired to the bone. The job of discriminating among those six sound tracks, all simultaneously bombarding him with random noises, had been far more grueling than he had realized.
Drowsiness fell on him like the dropping of a curtain. Just before drifting off to sleep, he thought he heard a voice like a slender whisper calling to him from somewhere upstairs. He dreamed. In his dream he washed his hands with a wormy bar of soap that was full of holes, and then his hands were full of holes, too. He rolled off the bench and woke up.
His awakening was so sudden that he had no clear sense of the passing of time. It could have been only a moment or two, or it could have been hours. Filled with a senseless fear that the secretary had gone off and left him, he leaped to his feet. He was also impatient to go back to the security room and wrestle with those tapes again. He must have hit his left elbow when he fell off the bench; his arm was numb from there to his little finger.
Beside the elevator, a hallway stretched back into the building. Only a blue emergency light was dimly shining. The lights were out behind the doors on both sides of the corridor. He tiptoed up the stairs and came to a smoking area with a framed color photograph of two mating horses hung on the wall. Compared with the painting in the assistant director’s office, here the sexual organs were larger, and the overall impression was more scientific. Straight ahead, at chest height, were oblong glass doors; beyond them every corner was so brightly lit that there were no shadows, but he saw no sign of human beings. Papers, stainless-steel and glass instruments, rubber tubes and medicine bottles, and all manner of painful-looking equipment lay scattered across a desktop; immediately he recognized it as a nurses’ station.
On the right were double wooden doors, and beyond them a corridor whose wooden floor was stained with oil. The wainscoting was painted in dark red horizontal stripes; where it ended was a door, from under which light was leaking out. He tried knocking but there was no answer. Mentally preparing a suitable excuse, he opened the door a crack. A young girl was lying in bed in a large room.