by Riku Onda
“After that day we got into the habit of talking here sometimes. He liked chatting with me through this glass. He often said he didn’t want to be seen by anybody, that he just wanted to disappear.”
Hisako slowly traces the line of the glass flower with her finger.
“That man used to call me Flower Voice.”
V
They had a strange kind of arrangement.
The man hardly even attempted to look at the girl’s face. Apparently he liked listening to her more than anything. Whenever he saw her in the park he would say hello, then sit down on the other side and talk through the glass. They spoke like this at irregular intervals, once every few months or so.
With the sea breeze and sound of waves washing over them in a forgotten corner of the world, they engaged in halting, guileless conversations.
Both enjoyed these brief, clandestine meetings. The man did not approach when the girl was with someone, so they never knew when they would speak again. Hardly anyone was likely to have seen them together.
They almost never talked about themselves. Didn’t want to know, in fact. They talked about music they had heard. Or science. The movement of stars and the direction that morning glory vines grow in. Or myth and legend, such as the similarities between Greek myths and the chronicles of ancient Japan, the Kojiki. They dwelt in a world of reason and intellect, where facing up to the reality of daily life was not necessary. The formality and beauty of this world of metaphysical concerns was the main substance of their conversations.
Time passed slowly, and their voices mingled with the sound of the sea.
Once it happened that their conversation suddenly stopped and the sound of the sea vanished at the same time, as if a magical hush had been cast over them.
They discussed this moment. A moment when everything disappeared. And the sheer bliss they felt at being the only two left in the world.
The girl let slip the hope that had long been buried in her heart. The moment it left her lips, it bubbled up between them like a mad, blistering torrent. The young man listened intently to that unexpectedly fervent sound.
Abruptly, a giant roar of waves broke the silence. So suddenly and so loud that it gave them both a scare. The noise engulfed them, and they trembled.
And this was probably the moment. The moment when the young girl unintentionally uttered the comment that started it all.
VI
“It was an accident. An unlucky accident,” she mutters blandly. “If you don’t like the word accident, then call it bad luck,” she adds, somewhat more forcefully. Perhaps she notices the lack of conviction in my face. She looks at me fiercely.
“I didn’t know anything. I didn’t do anything.”
Oh, the brazenness in her voice.
“He asked if I had any paper,” she says, folding her fingers affectedly on her lap. “He said he wanted to make a note of anything he thought of. I don’t remember what that was. I happened to have some paper that we used to wrap the cakes we took to the church, but how could I know Kimi also used it as memo paper for writing down telephone messages, and that the address of Father’s friend was on it? I couldn’t have seen what was written on that paper, could I?”
Her tone is coquettish and wheedling. It grates on me, stirring up uneasiness and rubbing my nerves the wrong way.
“You know those paper bags used for dispensing medicine in clinics? At home we always used bags from the clinic as memo paper. With the address and telephone number printed on it. It’s possible I might have given him one.”
She spreads her hands out in a gesture that invites me to challenge her.
“I couldn’t have got hold of the poison, let alone planted it. It’s true, I did know the man was mentally ill. He used to talk to himself a lot, so much so that after a while I couldn’t understand him any more. To be honest, I was a bit scared. I mean, if anything happened I wouldn’t be able to protect myself, would I?”
I sneak another sidelong look at her. The expression in her eyes startles me.
“The last time I saw him was about six months before it happened. How could I know he’d take what I said that way? I never dreamed he would interpret it like that!”
But on her face is an expression of satisfaction, even pride, and her eyes glitter with the reflection from the glowing horizon.
“I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see what was happening. I couldn’t have done it. I was a young, helpless girl. I would never have been able to do something like that.”
The more she denies it, the more clearly I hear another voice: I did it, I knew everything, I made it happen! Her voice rings triumphantly in my head.
“The children at the church were very attached to me. And him. Children loved him. He avoided Kimi and the nuns, but he played with them. Strange, isn’t it, how his own innocence attracted those poor innocent children to him?”
She smiles. No doubt staring at past glory on the horizon.
“It was no wonder those children did as he said. If he told them to make a phone call they would have done it, and if I’d told them to go to the home of a lonely old man and play with fireworks, they would have done. But of course I didn’t do anything, and I have no way of knowing what he might have asked them to do.”
Abruptly she turns to look at me. “Isn’t that right?”
She fixes me with a smile and despite myself I cannot help staring into those eyes. Her smile is so fierce I don’t know if she is angry or on the verge of tears. Is she a killer? Is this the victory declaration of a cold-blooded homicidal maniac? Or is it an unconventional confession? Does she want me to accuse her, or is she trying to win me over, or —
I realize suddenly that a human smile can sometimes look like a tree split in two. Of course, I cannot prove a thing. Even if she has just told me something that only the perpetrator could know, I have no means of proving any of it.
“It was the same for that young man, I’m sure. In the end, everybody went along with you, didn’t they?” My voice is hoarse. “If you said die, he probably would have done as you said.”
VII
One morning the young girl woke early, as usual. And as usual, the house was filled with the sound of voices, music, radio and television. She awoke with a clear head. Then a switch went on, and all the sound immediately flowed into her, helping her to gain a sense of the height of the ceiling.
Inside her room it was extremely close and hot. She was bathed in sweat and felt fatigued, as if she had already been on the move for hours. The low atmospheric pressure and clinging, sticky air signalled the approach of a storm.
Ah, she thought with a familiar weariness, the world still goes on. Weariness and despair were her constant companions, waiting to engulf her every time she awoke.
In addition to the usual noise, however, today the girl was aware of a cheerful note of tension in the air. In a flash, she remembered it was a special day.
A storm would come.
That’s right, she recalled. This day was going to be a very special one for her family. But she was the only one in the house to know that it would be special in a different sense to what everybody else in the family or neighbourhood was expecting.
VIII
“So tell me, what does Eugenia mean?” I ask. My mouth feels parched. “The name everybody wanted to know about. Whose name was it? Who wrote that poem?”
She remains silent for a brief time. Her air of exaltation cools; it feels as if the temperature has suddenly plummeted.
“The detective asked me that too. Many times. But I don’t know. It’s a pretty name, though, isn’t it?”
Her tone is completely different. Now she sounds flat and expressionless. She shoots me a look of piercing contempt that makes me recoil.
“Why do you ask? How could I know? I couldn’t have read anything written on that paper, let alone a poem. No matter how brilliant a poem might be, it meant nothing to me unless somebody read it aloud. Do you know how cruel that is? To be in
a library surrounded by books which are all meaningless unless somebody is with me.”
I sense the beginning of an eruption behind that indignant profile.
“Stop pretending you’re innocent!” My voice goes up sharply. “Don’t you feel guilty in the least?”
My voice trembles and I know I sound foolish, but I cannot hold back any more. In my mind I see his face, looking at me with his troubled smile. The dam bursts and words come pouring out.
“Why did you do it? Why try to kill your family? All those people! Even children! Why in heaven’s name? Didn’t they all love you?”
Finally the accusation comes tumbling out, but it doesn’t seem to make the least dent in her. Her expression remains the same. Imperturbable.
“Tell me! I’m not going to inform on you. I just want to know. I won’t tell anybody. You know as well as anyone I don’t have any evidence, there’s nothing to prove what you did.”
In her stead, the sea answers with a long boom of waves.
IX
Is it a sin to know something? To know that something might happen?
The girl had trouble making herself get out of bed that day. It’s bound to be a sin, said a voice somewhere inside her.
She calmly analysed this. In that case, am I a bad girl? she thought. Am I bad for keeping quiet and saying nothing?
No voice answered this question.
I might have misunderstood, she thought. Or maybe I imagined it. Nothing might happen at all. It might simply be a fun, cheerful day to remember. The world might go on like it always has.
The girl lay on her bed thinking. What if something does happen?
The house rang with the sound of lively voices and patter of slippered feet rushing about. She winced and covered her face with both hands, overwhelmed by unbearable impulses of despair and despondency.
Why is it always like this? Why is there never any peace and quiet in this house?
The world she yearned for and had dreamed of for so long was a far cry from the one she knew, a world filled with vulgar music, scolding and grumbling, flattery and deference, nasty gossip, scheming in the shadows, plotting and manoeuvring behind the scenes, and her mother’s praying voice filled with hypocrisy and damnation.
Apart from her sight, the girl’s senses were acute in the extreme. She heard and felt all sensory input intensely. Everybody knew that, though no one grasped the degree of her sensitivity.
X
In the distance I hear the sound of a truck mounted with megaphones, blaring out advertisements for a pachinko parlour. The sound comes closer, then disappears again.
She flinches. “I hate this,” she says. “Why is the world filled with such horrible noise? Loud, ear-piercing, screeching noise – as if they don’t want anybody to be able to think. People try and paint over the world with noise because they can’t stand the sound of their own voice or anybody else’s.”
She shivers and hugs herself with both arms, a gesture that provokes a strong well of revulsion in me.
“Please, don’t dodge the question,” I plead. “This is my only chance. Tell me, I beg of you, for his sake too. The victims didn’t end that day, you know. The number keeps growing.”
I grab her by the shoulder. Her bony, too skinny shoulder. But as I fear, she cannot accept what I ask.
“Hear that!” she answers in a hollow voice. “Who needs the radio and trumpets when the world is filled with all this music?”
She brusquely brushes my hand from her shoulder, stands up and walks off shakily.
XI
It had been her wish. This had been her wish for so long that she couldn’t remember when it first began. What she wanted was to be alone. To spend time in the house alone. To enjoy her time in peace and quiet. And be able to listen in peace, properly, to real music from around the world.
Storm-driven rain began to fall. The din from the large drops beating against the glass door muffled all other noise. Before long it was even loud enough to drown out the voices of children playing at the back door.
The wind picked up rapidly. A storm is coming. A storm to take away everything. A storm that will bring me everything.
She knew she must be strong to obtain it, for what she would be required to give up in exchange was enormous. But she had to obtain it, at any price, in order to go on living.
She quietly inhaled and settled her breathing, searing in her mind the words she had uttered over and over: I must be stronger and smarter than anybody else. I must be more cunning and wicked than anybody else. To obtain the world I must have the strength to accept everything.
That was the one thing she could do for the young man who was likely to fulfil her wish, and it was her intention to be ready.
Eugenia, my Eugenia. His quiet voice echoed in her head. I journeyed alone all this time.
The young man and the girl had sat on the seat by the sea and composed this poem together through the glass. They had crooned it over and over, dreaming of that day.
She had introduced him as yuu-jin, my friend, to the children from the church. The children who wanted to know his name. They thought it was his name. Yuu-jin, Yuu-jin, they happily called him.
Even now the girl did not know his real name. She didn’t want to know.
She had been in search of another country. A dream country that nobody else knew of. A country just for the two of them, a country of endless quiet, where the world was banished.
The two of them had called that country Eugenia.
XII
All of a sudden the sound of the waves ceases. An uneasy silence falls.
“An angel passed by,” she croons in a low voice.
“Angel? What nonsense is that?”
She gives no answer to my angry question. Her hands move lightly, as if dancing.
“The world disappeared. But it’s strange that it’s still here. So where am I, I wonder?”
She is completely in her own world. I can’t make sense of what she says.
“Did he arrive in our dream country? What about me? Am I there now? If so, my journey is over. Has my journey really ended?”
I follow behind her, this skinny middle-aged woman mumbling to herself as she walks, while I plead, “Please tell me, I beg you,” over and over like a spell.
“Those people were so noisy, you know, all the time. Ever since I was little. They couldn’t keep quiet. Always talking, never happy unless they were making some noise or other. They had no confidence in the value of their own existence.”
She looks at the sea and spreads her arms wide.
“Don’t you agree? Why, when the world is filled with such beautiful music as this.”
Tired summer air hangs over the ocean bathed in the evening sun. The waves turn red. Like a sick cat, a middle-aged woman wanders along the walkway, the scene bathed in red light.
“Oh look, a beautiful flower!” she suddenly stops and happily cries. “It’s the same as the flowers we had at home. Gosh, that does take me back. What was the name of that flower, I wonder?”
She points into the distance. Though I am aware she has turned to look at me I cannot see her clearly, nor the flower she is pointing to, for the tears of vexation that cloud my eyes and the evening sun at her back glaring in my face.
“I can’t see. I can’t see anything,” I sputter, shaking my head. “Nothing at all. Not his face. Not her face.”
Her outline melts into a red sea.
“I can see,” I hear her say from a long way off, in a voice ringing with confidence. “Oh, look at that flower. Why does it make me feel so unbearably sentimental, I wonder?”
14
RED FLOWERS, WHITE FLOWERS
The author
I
The screech of cicadas in shrill chorus reverberates through her head, numbing her brain. Their voices always make her feel dazed, as if she is being bodily wrenched back into a season already past.
The heat here is as oppressive as ever, but the sun has gradually los
t some of its bite.
Cities and people both generate sound in the process of change, she thinks. The same world never exists twice, and in every moment, with every passing second, people live in a different world.
This and other random thoughts flit through her mind as she walks alone without plan or purpose through the city she once lived in as a child. Her body retains an approximate memory of the geography that allows her to meander through the hustle and bustle like a migratory fish returning home. The self who once walked these streets subtly imposes itself on the self who walks here now, with the echo of two sets of footsteps vibrating in her bones.
Her intention is to spend just a few hours here. She is on her way back to Tokyo after visiting her husband in his latest regional posting, and has stopped off in the city on a whim.
Heat haze rises off the asphalt and the air is hot and thick, as if the city is inside a steamer. It always seems to be the last vestige of summer whenever she comes here.
She doesn’t understand herself why she is here. After writing down her memories of this city in her book, it has become part of the past as far as she is concerned.
What shall I do? Perplexed, she looks around, as if the answer might be found somewhere on the streets. Signboards in the city centre robustly asserting their presence have seen better days. All have faded to a similar shade after being exposed to the same sun and rain every day, giving them the appearance of a layer of skin inseparable from the rest of the city.
Just like families, she thinks. Though each person is an individual, people become similar while living under the same roof. Even couples like us come to resemble each other.
She thinks about the husband she has just said goodbye to. How many other couples are like us, she wonders, so alike in their indifference towards other people, including each other, naturally? But since each is equally indifferent to the other, unsurprisingly they have come thus far without discord.
She half-expects their daughter leaving to spell the end of their relationship, but recently she has begun to think that perhaps they can continue as they are. Being able to get along without having to spend a great deal of effort on the other person means that they are in fact perfectly matched as a couple. It would not be easy to find another partner who requires as little maintenance. In the end, we two are probably soulmates, she thinks with a wry smile.