by Kōji Suzuki
There was—just one way. He couldn’t allow his wife and his daughter to remain unprotected. Eriko was no longer struggling alone and unassisted.
In his thirty-one years of life, Yoshiaki had never experienced such righteous rage. If he could just snap this bastard’s neck, he wouldn’t need to worry anymore. If he left him alone, his family would have to live in fear indeterminately.
Yoshiaki stuck his hand in his pocket and switched off the tape recorder. Slowly, he turned back around. “I couldn’t quite hear you … Care to repeat that?”
His demeanor had undergone a shocking change. Hikuma’s cigarette slipped from his mouth again.
12
When Eriko opened the blinds, the autumnal sun filtered into the room. Yoshiaki covered his forehead with his hand and moaned, but it was far more refreshing to be woken by natural light than the electronic sounds of an alarm clock.
“C’mon, up and at ’em. You promised.” Eriko was looking much younger than usual in her sweatshirt and jeans, and her movements were brisk.
“What time is it?” Yoshiaki asked.
“It’s nine o’clock. You’ve slept enough, haven’t you?”
“Nine …”
He had slept for more than ten hours, almost twice as long as usual.
Yoshiaki hadn’t forgotten about the promise he made to Eriko the night before. He’d gone into the office to catch up on some work though it was a Saturday. As soon as he’d returned, Eriko had asked him to take her out somewhere the next day. “All right. Let’s go to Kamakura,” he’d replied before falling asleep. Lured by the clear autumn skies, he did feel like visiting a number of temples in Kamakura he hadn’t seen in a while.
Still in his pajamas, he walked towards the bathroom. He glanced towards the entrance and noticed a daypack by the door. Surprisingly enough, his wife was already prepared—just how early had she risen? While sighing at her meticulousness, he found it endearing that Eriko would be so excited over a day trip to Kamakura. Being housebound for long thanks to childrearing apparently put you on cloud nine over a mere hike. Baby Aya was now six months old, and there wasn’t anywhere they couldn’t go so long as they had a stroller or sling. From now on there would be more opportunities for family trips.
Yoshiaki himself required just ten minutes to get ready as all he needed to do was shave and wash his face; he always ended up being the one trying to get Eriko out the door. Today was no different. While she was still hustling about looking for wetnaps for the baby, Yoshiaki already had his shoes on in the foyer. “Come on, let’s get going,” he hollered time and again.
Carrying the baby in the elevator hall he asked, “Newspaper?”
Eriko shook her head. “I haven’t yet.”
The papers weren’t delivered to each individual apartment but were left in the communal mailbox in the lobby. Each tenant had to pick them up themselves, but Eriko hadn’t gotten theirs yet this morning. Wanting to read it in the train, he retrieved theirs as they passed through the lobby and stuffed it into the daypack.
Transferring at Yokohama station from the Toyoko Line to the Yokosuka Line, they were able to sit as a family in box seating facing each other. Yoshiaki took out the morning edition dated October 16th and started reading it from the local news section as usual. Eriko chattered incessantly at him, but he was too busy scanning the headlines and answered vaguely. He wasn’t searching for any article in particular. That Sunday morning edition featured a color photo of Mt. Bandai’s foliage turning autumnal and the report of a famous politician’s death. Neither item interested Yoshiaki. Instead, his eyes were drawn to the lower left corner of the local news section. He saw a curiously attention-grabbing name and address in the small print.
The headline stated that there had been a fire in Haneda, Ota Ward.
… Last night after 8:00 p.m. a fire broke out on the second floor of the Okada Lodgings apartment building in Haneda, Ota Ward …
Yoshiaki held his breath and brought the paper closer to his face.
… The burned corpse of Yuji Hikuma, age 29, a resident, was found among the ruins … The fire may have come from the victim’s apartment on the second floor, but the cause is still undetermined …
Yoshiaki took a deep breath.
How the fire started?
It was obvious. Though it had been three and a half months ago, the scorch marks all over the carpet were still clearly burned into the back of his eyelids. That room had brimmed with a certain something that augured such a fate. After getting hammered, Hikuma had probably fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand, and by the time he realized, there was no escaping the flames and he’d burned to death …
Three and a half months ago …
Yoshiaki, infuriated by Hikuma’s threat that he’d throw Aya out the window, turned around with murder in his eyes. Hikuma’s cigarette fell out of his mouth. Before he could grab it, Yoshiaki snatched it up and grabbed Hikuma by the scruff of his neck.
“Go on. Try saying that one more time,” Yoshiaki growled, but on Hikuma’s face his smirk stayed plastered over an expression that was neither fear nor resignation. Yoshiaki’s hand moved of its own volition. Instead of punching him, Yoshiaki pressed the cigarette’s cherry into Hikuma’s slackened cheek. Crying out like a child, the guy writhed. Yoshiaki bore down onto him, pinning him in place, and ground the cigarette into his face. The smell of burning flesh felt repugnant for a moment, but letting go wasn’t an option. Yoshiaki had to make him understand, tangibly, that he was deadly serious. The paper of the cigarette broke and the leaves crumbled away until only the filter remained, but he didn’t let up. Then, leaning in close enough to bite off Hikuma’s earlobe, he drove his point home repeatedly: “If you ever call us again or loiter anywhere near our home, I’ll smash every single bone in your body.”
Hikuma started to moan and sob, his tears dripping onto the floor. He looked just like a baby when he cried. The strength in Yoshiaki’s arms dissipated.
“Shit! Shi-Shit!”
Hikuma continued to weep, hand to his cheek. Yoshiaki had never seen a man cry with such unashamed abandon. His murderous urge to strangle Hikuma faded away like a dream. Thoughts of getting arrested for murder and his wife being left with the baby and the mortgage flitted through his mind, but more than anything it was Hikuma’s moans that sapped his desire for violence.
Yoshiaki stood up and looked down at Hikuma, who kept on crying curled up in the fetal position, clawing at air. Sometimes he would pound his own knees with his fists, but rather than lash out at Yoshiaki, anger and protestations directed at something deeper seemed to be bubbling up in him. He scraped his legs against the carpet and contorted his face, sloppy from tears and drool. Gradually, he started to grumble. Since his speech was lazy to begin with the words were unintelligible, but it was clear he wasn’t addressing Yoshiaki. Hikuma’s face was turned elsewhere, and he griped endlessly, cursing and unleashing his wrath at whomever it was who hovered beyond the darkness. Yoshiaki thought Hikuma had lost his mind.
Three and a half months had passed since that indelible scene, and during that time there were no more prank calls, and Hikuma certainly hadn’t been seen loitering around their neighborhood. Eriko had ceased to be afraid of the phone ringing. Yoshiaki was learning of Hikuma’s demise just when the caller’s shadow had finally retreated from the daily lives of the Fukazawas.
The Yokosuka train was about to roll into Higashi Totsuka station. Yoshiaki glanced out with his newspaper still open in front of him. As small groups of people waiting on the platform passed slowly by the window, he wondered, at this late point in time, what kind of life Hikuma had really led. Did his mother dote on him? What was his relationship like with his father? Did his parents have a healthy marriage? Did he have any siblings? What were his dreams when he moved to Tokyo from the provinces? What work had he done before delivering film? Had he ever loved a woman? How many times in his life had he truly felt that life was wonderful? It was impossible to know now.
>
The newspaper spread out in front of his face grew two bumps in the center. His daughter, sitting on her mother’s lap, was kicking at it. Daddy, Daddy … It was like a voiceless call, and he shifted the paper to the side to see her face.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Eriko squinted her nearsighted eyes and hunched over, peering into his face.
“Oh, nothing.” Yoshiaki wiped at his eyes in a fluster and put the newspaper on the overhead rack.
“Some sad article?”
“No, not really …”
He had no intention of telling Eriko about the death. Yoshiaki wanted her to be able to put this behind her without any mention of it.
His hands now empty, Yoshiaki took his daughter on his lap and spoke to her in baby talk, but tears continued to spill from his eyes. He didn’t know why he was crying. Certainly, Hikuma’s death had brought him a measure of relief. Although his threats to Hikuma had effectively halted the prank calls for the last three and a half months, the guy’s shadow had always lurked in the back of his mind. With Hikuma dead, Yoshiaki was free at last. That loathsome voice would never come back to haunt them. What was odd was that Yoshiaki could forgive Hikuma while still detesting him. It wasn’t pity or a sense of superiority over their respective circumstances. Perhaps it was his daughter’s innocent smile, but somehow all of humanity including Hikuma and himself seemed endearing to Yoshiaki.
Looking around the interior of the carriage he saw a good number of families, probably out to enjoy the clear, autumnal Sunday. Happiness didn’t take a more hackneyed form than this. A family’s respite rested on understanding that somewhere out there people like Hikuma haunted the shadows waiting for an opportune moment. The thought briefly crossed Yoshiaki’s mind as the train rocked into motion.
Embrace
Rieko turned off the shower, thinking she heard the phone ringing, and listened intently. She opened the bathroom door and poked her head through the narrow crack but heard nothing from the direction of the living room where the phone was. Must have been my imagination. The steam from the shower that filled the small space handily amplified any sound that reached her ears.
Her daughter, who had turned one in January, was crawling along the styrofoam mat on the bathroom floor and making squeaky, obnoxious noises. Rieko removed Kiko’s hearing aid before baths and before bed. Kiko, born with impaired hearing, couldn’t register any external sounds without such a device. Even when water gushed out of the faucet, Kiko’s mind was wrapped in silence.
Rieko finished rinsing out her own hair and wrapped her head with a towel. Still half-damp herself, she meticulously dried off her daughter’s body. Whenever Rieko bathed or dried her daughter, she made it a habit to place a hand behind the neck even though Kiko was at a stage where she could support her own head. The baby was maintaining a healthy weight. Rieko couldn’t help but think her neck was fragile.
The gas-powered space heater burning bright red made the living room feel overly warm to her post-shower skin. As she had to bathe both herself and her daughter, it tended to take a long time, and even during this, the coldest season of the year, she was sweating by the time she came out of the bathroom.
While she dressed her daughter in pajamas, Rieko glanced at the clock. The needles were lining up to nine. As Rieko knelt naked on the floor with both hands on the floor, Kiko kicked up a foot and struck one of her breasts. Just then the phone rang. It was 9:00 on the dot, as promised.
As anticipated, it was Fujimura. He must have been calling from a payphone along a road somewhere. She could hear the muffled sound of cars whizzing by and splashing up rainwater in the background. Rieko’s new house on the outskirts of the city of Shimizu was a new building with aluminum sashes and shutters protecting the windows, preventing outside noise from seeping in, so she would often be oblivious to precipitation. She could now sense the frigid sounds of the end of February through the phone. The noises that night were dripping wet. The receiver was acting like a hearing aid, amplifying all sorts of sounds.
“Can you guess where I am now?”
Whenever someone asked such a question, it meant they were somewhere the listener would never imagine.
“I guess it’s someplace rainy.”
Tokyo, where Fujimura lived, and Shimizu were close to a hundred miles apart. Perhaps it was coming down hard in both cities, but Rieko sensed rain outside her own shutters. She was convinced that Fujimura must be near her house.
At the unexpected answer, Fujimura made a choked noise, at a loss for how to respond. He seemed to fear that he wasn’t welcome.
“So you must be nearby?” Rieko added hurriedly.
“Oh, you can tell?”
“Sure can.”
“And you’re not surprised?”
“I thought you were drunk and it was some joke …”
Fujimura fell silent. He was apparently waiting for Rieko’s invitation.
“So what are your plans for the rest of the evening?” she asked, somewhat appalled.
“Well, I dunno …” Fujimura said, then laughed as if to conceal his discomfort.
“Would you like to come over to my humble abode?” Rieko noticed that one of Kiko’s pajama buttons was undone. She tucked the receiver between her ear and shoulder and dexterously fixed it.
“I would appreciate that,” Fujimura replied, sounding genuinely relieved. “I was wondering what I’d do if you didn’t let me in after coming all this way from Tokyo.”
Did you really drive all the way out here just to see me?
Rieko doubted his words. Common sense argued against such a thing. Fujimura, who worked in sales and traveled often, probably had come just a little out of his way in order to see her.
“Liar. You just dropped by because you’re on a business trip and you came just a little out of your way to see me,” Rieko said out loud to taunt him.
“Oh, stop. It’s Saturday. I’m off work,” Fujimura insisted desperately. I raced along the Tomei Expressway in the rain just to see you, that’s the only reason, I swear.
“What were you planning to do if I wasn’t home?”
“I took a gamble on that point.”
The intensity of the male sex drive always astonished Rieko. At the same time, she was stunned by Fujimura’s cavalier attitude given the length of the round-trip journey. Yet she thought it a little unfair that he waited to call until he was nearby. She was flattered that he’d come all this way, and thinking of the distance he’d driven she wasn’t ready to flatly refuse him and send him home. Despite a good chance that he’d end up wasting his time, he’d spared no effort at the hint of an opportunity. As a woman, it was something Rieko could hardly even imagine doing. The only thing she unreservedly put all her energy into these days was her daughter.
Rieko and Fujimura had met five nights ago through work.
As the owner of a boutique on main street in Shimizu, Rieko had a business meeting with a major apparel manufacturer. Fujimura was the manufacturer’s sales rep. During a pause in their discussions, Fujimura had asked her out for a drink. He apparently concluded from the casual chatter woven through their otherwise business-focused exchanges that Rieko could hold her liquor. He invited her with an air of confidence.
Fujimura was tall and slim with a slender but fearless face, which suited Rieko’s tastes. She had doubted that he’d be able to return to Tokyo that night if he went out drinking in Shimizu. Nevertheless, she’d vaguely replied, “I guess …” with a coy tilt of her head and gone to ring her mother. If she couldn’t watch Kiko, Rieko couldn’t possibly spend a night out. Her mother agreed to babysit on the condition that Kiko would be asleep by the time she got there.
Rieko was upbeat over the prospect of her first night out in a while. Her impatience must have seeped across her skin; Kiko, who always slept beside her, took a long time to doze off. It was nearly ten by the time she met up with Fujimura at the tiny bar. It was no longer possible for him to make the last bullet train back to Tokyo. As Fujimura
waded deeper into intoxication, his ulterior motive began to surface. Around when alcohol started to dissolve reason he offered, “I booked a hotel room for the night. Why don’t we continue drinking there?”
Rieko wasn’t interested. She realized that she had probably led him on and tried to let him down easily. Emboldened by her inebriation, she ended up speaking in a blunt manner that only served to incite male curiosity.
“No way. I’ve got small tits and a chubby tummy. I can’t possibly get naked in front of a man.”
Fujimura laughed. He was amused that an invitation for a drink in a hotel room had been rejected on the basis of physical flaws.
“You don’t look that way to me at all.” His eyes, as he took in Rieko’s figure, filled with irrepressible desire. Having one’s mind read by others is discomfiting for a man or woman, but even Fujimura was aware of how comically obvious he was, gazing at her body after making such a remark. Still, he didn’t bother to look away. In fact, he believed a woman had to have some confidence in her appearance to be self-deprecating. He suspected just the opposite of what she said. At thirty-two, she was just starting to bloom with a ripe loveliness.
Of course, the real reason Rieko didn’t want to sleep with Fujimura lay elsewhere. She didn’t have the heart to abandon her deaf daughter for the sake of soaking in pleasure. Her divorce had just been finalized at the beginning of that month, and including the time she was separated from her husband, she hadn’t been locked in an embrace with a man for almost a year. Some of her friends advised her to have fun once in a while simply to shake things up, but she couldn’t seem to take the first step. Pent-up sexual frustration, she knew, wouldn’t help with her childrearing, but she hadn’t wanted to be intimate with a man for a while.