“Lay off, will you? Stop tormenting him like this for your own amusement.”
“He isn’t suffering.”
“What would you know about that? In any case, I object to being used like this.”
Yūko looked up at him mockingly. “What are you saying, after all this time? When you’ve been used from the very beginning. You like it, don’t you?”
In spite of himself, Kōji struck Yūko across the cheek. He left his hand there and, without looking at her, turned to face Ippei.
In that instant, Ippei had an unmistakable smile on his face.
It was exactly the same smile—the embodiment of Ippei’s new character—that Kōji had first seen following his release from prison, and for the first time he felt he understood what it meant. He had been rejected, forced out by that smile.
There was something about Ippei’s smile that reminded him of that serene hourglass that had come and gone amid the billowing steam of the dirty prison bathhouse. Struck with fear, Kōji embraced Yūko. He gazed at her cold, meek face and her closed eyes as she lay in his arms. He kissed those lips, working in vain to rid his mind at once of the image of Ippei’s smile. But this time the kiss had lost completely its exquisite taste.
When he came to, the sky had clouded over. Being unprepared for bad weather, they tidied their things away in silence, helped one another to their feet, and thought about the long and arduous trek home through the rain. Yūko carried the empty picnic hamper on the return journey.
Chapter 4
One particular evening after the end of the rainy season, Kōji found himself drinking alone in the only bar in the village. Lately, he had been coming here often on his own. The worse his estrangement from the villagers became, the more he came deliberately into the middle of the village to drink. And when the young villagers, who had returned in dribs and drabs at the end of the fishing season, heard the rumors about Kōji’s prison record, this only served to heighten their curiosity and their desire to become his drinking companions. Kōji’s crime became the relish for their beer—like a meritorious deed carried out on the field of battle in days gone by.
Even now, when he came down to the village from the Kusakado greenhouse, the sight of the star-filled midsummer night sky never ceased to amaze him. It was altogether different from the sky one saw in the city. Those innumerable stars were like a huge blanket of shiny mildew growing across the heavens.
It was a dark night in the village, with the brightest lights belonging to the last bus stopping at Toi at 8:45 p.m. and the occasional passing truck, their headlights shining mercilessly as they played on the rows of old houses standing alongside the prefectural highway.
The bus was supposed to run once an hour, but sometimes two or three came one after another in succession, or else nothing came along at all for two hours or more. Each time these large vehicles passed by, the rows of houses would vibrate like old chests of drawers, and then, when the bus stopped at the central crossroads and discharged its load of passengers, the local youths—who had been enjoying the cool of the evening on the roadside—teasingly greeted the familiar faces they recognized.
Even at night, there were a couple of fairly well-lit ice shops, with general menus displaying items like watermelons, lemonade, and Chinese noodles. They even had televisions, and the young villagers would congregate there to watch a baseball game or boxing match.
The bar, Storm Petrel, stood alone on the northern fringes of the run of stores, isolated from the others, and gave out all the more a dim light in the dark town. It was a crude hut with blue-painted panel walls; the sign, in English, should have displayed “Storm Petrel,” but the painter had mistaken the spelling and instead it read “Storm Pertel.”
But nobody criticized this oversight, and even the proprietor didn’t mind, so the black lettering, which was now covered in dust from the passing buses, had soon taken on an aged appearance.
Several dozen empty beer bottles were piled up to one side of the entrance. Despite the heat, the windows were closed in by crimson curtains.
Now and then, a popular song played in the background. The twenty-square-yard interior was bathed in a dim red light and looked a little shady. There was no barmaid, so the husband and wife proprietors had to take drinks orders themselves. There were just a few plain tables and chairs scattered about the room.
In one corner, a token stand-up bar had been installed, with an electric fan above it, and there was a tabby cat that, despite having its tail yanked constantly by the younger customers, only ever reacted by wearily changing its sleeping position.
* * *
—
It was early, and the regular customers hadn’t yet gathered. Kōji swapped gossip about Teijirō’s daughter, Kimi, with the owner. Kimi hadn’t stayed with her father at all during her ten-day vacation from the instrument factory in Hamamatsu. She had stayed the first night in a room of her own at the Kusakado greenhouse, and after that she lodged at the Seitōkan—an inn owned by her relatives. Teijirō himself had hardly spoken a word to his daughter, despite her long absence.
It seemed there were some ill feelings between them that nobody had previously been aware of. They had lived together, quite happily on the face of it, for some time after her mother had died.
Then one day Kimi suddenly left home and went to work as a factory girl in Hamamatsu; her father closed up the house and went to live at the Kusakado greenhouse, where a gardener was needed. Since his arrival in the village, Kōji hadn’t heard any stories about Teijirō’s daughter from Teijirō himself.
Not only was Kimi beautiful but she also knew it, and she let everyone else know it, too. The village girls and ordinary locals considered her presence a nuisance.
Before Kimi came home, several girls would come along with the local young men to drink at the Storm Petrel. But once she returned, she became the only female customer in the place.
Before long, this otherwise reputable drinking establishment—which had never before suffered any kind of moral censure—came to be seen as a place of ill repute.
This sudden decline in reputation in a matter of a few days was a remarkable change, and yet Kimi was not the sort of woman to behave flirtatiously.
Matsukichi, a fisherman, and Kiyoshi, a member of the Self-Defense Forces, both Kimi’s childhood friends, quarreled over her. But so far, there was no indication that she had given herself to either of them.
Kimi owned a ukulele. She carried this brand-new item—the manufacture of which she had been partly responsible for—wherever she went. Occasionally, while drinking, she would strum the instrument and sing. From deep within her bosom (which was the largest among all the girls in the village), from the bottom of the ashen gloom that drifted up from the flesh of her breasts, her voice rose up like a bucket in a well, brimming with abundant quantities of water, and those around soon forgot how poor her singing really was.
* * *
—
At around 9:00 p.m., Kimi, Matsukichi, and Kiyoshi came into the bar together with three other youngsters, and with their arrival, the peaceful evening in the Storm Petrel came to an end.
Kiyoshi called over to Kōji, who moved away from the bar and joined them at their table.
As usual, Kimi had her ukulele. The distant breeze from the electric fan blew her stray hairs about as she drank a highball and explained, in a businesslike manner, how the ukulele was manufactured.
First of all, the various parts are laid out in order: the mahogany sound board, the maple sides, and the neck. A groove is introduced into the sound board with a cutter and the circumference of the sound hole is then decorated with celluloid inlay. This was Kimi’s job.
The sides of the gourd-shaped body were formed by boiling the wooden boards and then bending them into shape using an electric press mold.
There were also more intricate stages of the
manufacturing process, such as attaching the linings and plastic bindings, and sanding the edges of the ukulele’s body. But the task that demanded the highest degree of technical skill was attaching the neck to the body, and this was a job undertaken by fastidious craftsmen.
Once the rosewood fret board had been glued on, the instrument was polished with cloth before being sent to be lacquered. After the body assumes its perfectly polished finished form, four nylon strings are attached to complete the instrument—and the ukulele is ready to produce its first sound.
The sober luster of the dark mahogany instrument, which Kimi now held in her hands, appeared like restless agate or a drink-reddened chest in the red lighting. There was a sense of the carefree, like the firm flesh of a precocious girl, in the small gourd-shaped object. Its whole being seemed to have been designed in order to tease and cajole with its easy sound. Further still, stealing a look as far as one could inside the body of the instrument from the sound hole revealed a boundless, sweeping landscape of agitated shadows and shapes and dust-choked nooks and crannies—like the backstage scene in some grand theater. Kōji thought it amusing that Kimi had discovered an instrument so like herself in character.
Such a detailed explanation of the manufacturing process suggested a strange detachment between Kimi and this instrument. While right now the instrument certainly belonged to her, there would forever exist a tantalizing distance between the hands that once helped create it in the wood shaving–filled factory and the instrument itself.
Kōji found it easy to imagine the factory where Kimi worked. The high steel ceilings, the roar of the various machines, scattered deposits of sawdust, the strong, invigorating smell of lacquer…
At any rate, it would not be too dissimilar to the prison paper factory where he had worked for fifty yen a month making a variety of multicolored supplements for sundry children’s magazines.
It was tough when the New Year’s editions were due out. There was the first supplement, and then the second, and by the end of the season there would have been as many as five printings.
How he had adored the colors—like the gaudy plumage of a cockatoo! The supplements were full of paper handbags, paper brooches, floral design paper clocks, self-assembly paper furniture, paper pianos, paper flower baskets, and paper beauty salons—all done out in festival colors and printed on glossy paper.
If the print had shifted a little out of line, the effect produced an even more dazzling blaze of color.
One of the inmates who had children of his own had wept as he made the paper products. But Kōji didn’t have that problem. Yet when he imagined children receiving these toys and the warmth and comfort of their homes, he felt more anguish than when he recalled neon-lit streets of bars.
One time, when he was walking around Numazu following his release from prison, he noticed a pile of beautiful children’s magazines, stuffed full of supplements, heaped up under the protruding summer awning at the entrance to a bookstore. Maybe I made one of those supplements, he reflected as he glanced furtively at them.
He resolved never to have children. He wouldn’t be able to bear watching his child delightedly fingering the paper toys. He felt sure he would be a hard-to-please, disagreeable father. Kōji wanted to distance himself forever from those supplements. To him they used to symbolize those who had colorful, festive lives and who enjoyed the pleasures of a happy home. But then the hands that had made these supplements were the same roughly cracked hands that had committed that crime…
All the while he was listening to Kimi’s explanation, he kept thinking about the secret process for the production of the beautiful “special” children’s supplements. Although Kimi’s hands were not those of a criminal, the dismal nature of working in an instrument factory was not so far removed from his own experience.
And so he felt that, though she may not have been doing so deliberately, she was bragging about it shamelessly. At least that’s how it seemed to him. Working amid the dust, the wood shavings, and the smell of lacquer, Kimi brought one of those beautiful completed products home as a keepsake. Still, Kōji found it hard to believe the way she finally was able to possess every single aspect of the finished ukulele—its perfect smoothness, carefree tunes, the lyricism of “South Island,” and its leisurely melancholy…It was clearly “Kimi’s ukulele,” and it would remain distinct from the other thousands of ukuleles. By rights she herself ought never to have been able to acquire a real ukulele, the perfect instrument, and so it had become her icon.
* * *
—
The cat played around Kōji’s feet. From time to time, it extended the claws of its forepaws slightly and raked playfully at his insteps where they were exposed between the thongs of his geta. Since it was summer, it didn’t come onto the customers’ knees, preferring instead to lie with its stomach on the cool concrete floor. The cat liked Kōji, but Kōji disliked this strange, unaccountable fondness. With the tip of his toe he lightly kicked the cat away. But it soon came back again. At the Kusakado greenhouse, they would sometimes use bonito stock as well as chemical fertilizer. But it didn’t make Kōji reek of fish any more than the fishermen.
Kimi strummed her ukulele and sang a Hawaiian song she had picked up in the women’s dormitory at the Hamamatsu factory.
She was wearing a black, sleeveless beach dress with a sunflower pattern. A shadow was cast vertically into the cleavage of her voluptuous breasts, incongruous against her small stature. On a mere whim, she had clean-shaven one of her armpits, but left some stubble on the other. Her slightly stern face wore a frown, her mouth was like a beautiful half-open sea cucumber, and her dark skin was deeply reddened—maybe from the drink or perhaps from the lighting in the bar.
Kiyoshi was listening intensely to her, his bright, round face nestled in the turned-up collar of his white aloha shirt. Matsukichi, who was wearing a cotton waistband rolled up above his chest, rested his elbow on the tabletop, his chin on his hand.
Kōji sat across the table gazing intently at this stiflingly hot, still scene, as if looking through a picture frame.
He thought about Yūko and suddenly felt choked with emotion. I have repented, I have…He hadn’t realized before now just how much he was in love with her. If he were honest about it, he had to admit that he hadn’t wielded that wrench for her. However, he was sure he was in love now.
The bitter taste of contrition heightened the sweetness of his desire, and his longing for Yūko made its presence known here and there on the most unexpected and delicate of occasions. Kōji now felt constantly afraid of being ambushed by such desires. Yūko’s trifling gestures—the way she would raise her upper arm when she put a hand to her hair; the line of her skirt as she descended, in a stooped manner, the greenhouse steps; the fragrance of her face powder as it began to yield a little to the perspiration beneath…When these gestures suddenly shook him to his very foundations, he felt as though he had been waylaid by his own desires—stabbing him sharply in the back.
But the impossibility of the situation was even more apparent than before. Like living in a house built above a river with the constant clamor of water below, every inch of Kōji’s desire was directly linked to the noise of a culvert flowing through the memory of that dark jail. I have repented, I have…Whenever his desire for something arose, it inevitably revived his crime. Whether or not she was aware of Kōji’s feelings, Yūko had not allowed him to kiss her since the incident during the picnic.
Kōji scratched the bridge of his nose. It itched, unhappily, as if a fly were trying to scurry up his face.
It was clear from Yūko’s expression that some kind of change had occurred inside her since the picnic. During the hot evenings, there were times when she would pant faintly through open lips. She would gaze, absentmindedly, at a fixed point, and sometimes she would address Kōji in an unfriendly manner and make stinging remarks. And what was more, she seemed scarcely
aware of the changes that had occurred within herself.
* * *
—
“Would anyone like this ukulele?” asked Kimi suddenly, the high pitch of her inebriated voice bringing an end to Kōji’s reverie. From around the table, the young men raised their big, rough hands. Kōji, too, extended his arm meekly. The ukulele, now held aloft in Kimi’s grasp, shone in the red light, and looked like the rigid corpse of a waterbird being hoisted aloft by its neck. She toyed with the instrument’s strings with her thumb, and those nearest the pegs gave out a solemn, dry noise.
“No, you don’t! I won’t give it away so easily, you know. This ukulele is my flesh and blood. When I give it to someone, I’m giving myself to them.”
“So whoever gets your ukulele gets to be with you?” asked one of the young men, in an obtuse manner.
“Well, there’s no guarantee of that.”
“Still, I guess if we see a man walking around the village with your ukulele, that means he’s the guy you’re in love with, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Kimi brushed up a stray hair and answered decisively.
“Do you mean it? Will you swear on it?” said Matsukichi, speaking for the first time.
Kiyoshi gnawed at his nails in silence, his eyes glittering.
They were all drunk. They pressed Kimi to make a vow, and the proprietor was brought in to be a witness.
One of the young men scooped up the cat and placed it on the beer-stained table. The cat, with its sparse summer coat, squatted, pinioned by a hand on its back. Its bent body looked like it contained a strong but flexible spring, as if it were waiting for an opportunity to make a swift escape.
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