by Kōji Suzuki
Takanori had thought it best not to call his father in advance and tell him the reason for his visit. Knowing his father, if he’d known why Takanori was coming, he would have made up some elaborate, convincing explanation beforehand and created a smokescreen to conceal the truth.
There was no way to extract it from him without taking him by surprise.
Mitsuo kept looking down because he didn’t want Takanori to see how agitated he was.
Surely Mitsuo was deeply regretful that he hadn’t dealt with this problem sooner. He hadn’t even considered that his son would decide to marry so soon, without consulting his parents at all. If he’d known, there might have been some other way to handle this matter. Or perhaps he hadn’t known that the matter of Takanori’s death had remained in the family register as a past record. It was hard to believe that Mitsuo, always so prudent and prepared for everything, had forgotten about that. He’d simply been too busy to check the content in the family register.
When exactly twenty seconds had passed, Mitsuo raised his face.
“By the way, why did you need to get the family register?” he asked.
He tried to pretend to be calm, but his eyes were wandering. In the first place, it was not an answer to the question Takanori had asked: How are you going to explain the fact that I was dead for two years?
“Because I’m getting married, dad.”
“Oh, married, eh? When I got married, I was the same age as you are now. So, whom do you want to marry?”
“Akane Maruyama.”
As her name permeated his mind, many memories came flooding back. Seeing his father’s expression become a bit more cheerful, Takanori assumed that he had a good impression of Akane.
“Oh, that girl. She was the one who truly proved how valuable Fureai was for society.”
Since Akane Maruyama had entered the foster home Fureai at the same time that it was founded, Mitsuo had known about her since she was little.
“I agree,” Takanori said.
“She was a nice girl. I admit it. But why have you chosen her as your marriage partner?”
“Because we’re alike.”
“Alike? I don’t understand what you mean. Isn’t it more accurate to say you and she are complete opposites?”
She had been all alone in the world, while Takanori had been showered with affection by his wealthy parents growing up. Mitsuo was merely talking about how different their childhood environments had been.
“I know what you’re saying, dad. Because I thought so, too. I asked myself why I feel we’re the same even though we’re from completely different backgrounds.” Then Takanori cast his eyes down at the family register, as if the answer to that question might lie there.
Mitsuo defied Takanori’s inducement and fixed his gaze straight ahead, brushing off the family register as if he were getting rid of something detestable.
“I don’t see why you had to barge into my office like this. I mean, why don’t you visit us at home more often? Your mom wants to see you.”
“I’ll go there soon, with Akane.”
Takanori had a reason for coming to his father’s office instead of the house—he didn’t want to involve his mother in this. He couldn’t ask his father to explain the entry about his death in the family register in her presence. That would be all right if his parents had gotten on the same page beforehand, but if Mitsuo had told a nonsense story to her, Takanori would be stirring up a hornet’s nest. Only Takanori needed the truth to be revealed, and the merciful thing was to let his mother go on believing the fake story.
“It was an unfortunate accident,” Mitsuo said.
With that preliminary remark out of the way, he began to describe what had happened.
“Every person has different types of memories. Memories of scenery or sounds, of smells or tastes…They’re obtained by the five senses that human beings possess. The story I’m about to tell you started with my sense of touch. My hands still remember the feeling. For two years, I’d been pained by the memory of being touched by soft skin, and the feeling had soaked into my hands…
“I don’t even remember how many times I was tortured by nightmares…Every time I had a bad dream where I was sinking under the sea and being buffeted by the waves, I’d wake up in a cold sweat and put a hand to my chest to calm my heart. There was always this feeling of small hands trying to grab my shin at the end of my nightmare. Their soft fingers would slip away from my skin and disappear down into the bottom of the sea. How it frustrated me that I couldn’t grab those hands, even though I felt like I could reach them if only I stretched my arms farther…
“Those small hands were yours.
“It was about twenty-five years ago, in the early summer. You were still two or three, I think. The three of us went to the beach for a swim, in Toi, West Izu. It was before the beach opened, so there weren’t so many people there, and it was almost like our own private beach.
“You and I were on our chests on long inflatables, and we were paddling out to the open sea. Every time the waves came, you sounded like you were having so much fun. I heard your mother’s voice from behind, telling us to ‘Come back,’ but I ignored it and paddled further and further. I just wanted to see you having fun some more.
“Just as your mother’s voice became hysterical, this big white wave appeared in front of us. It turned our plastic floats upside down, and we got thrown out into the sea.
“I didn’t realize until my head went under that it was so deep that even an adult’s legs couldn’t reach bottom, and I nearly panicked. I stuck my head above the surface and looked around for you as I kicked below the water to stay afloat, but you were nowhere to be found. I saw your mother running toward me from the shore, splashing through the water. She was half-crazed, coming out into the sea with her clothes still on.
“That’s when I felt your hands clinging on to my leg. It was only a brief moment that you touched my leg. I took a deep breath and dove into the dark sea to search for you, but I couldn’t find you. I knew you were somewhere near me, but I couldn’t reach you.
“When I looked closer toward the shore, I saw your mother flailing, her arms raised. The way her screams were mixed with this dull gurgling, I knew she was drowning.
“As you know, your mother’s a poor swimmer. She’s helpless in the water if she can’t stand up, but she was possessed by the desire to save you. She was panicking and starting to go under.
“I was ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea,’ as they say. I grabbed the inflatable floating nearby, lifted your mother’s body on top of it, and went back over to the spot where you’d disappeared. The slightest loss of time made such a difference. I swam around the area, holding my breath and going down so many times, but I was never able to get ahold of you again.
“All I had left of you was some of your hair caught in my wedding ring on my left hand. But you were gone.
“The Coast Guard searched for days, but even after they were done, we paid out of our own pocket and kept looking for you. We were never able to find you, though.
“Afterwards, your mother and I started hurling abuse at each other, vile stuff. She’d sob and tell me to ‘give me back my baby,’ and I’d shout back that her reckless behavior cost us the chance to save you. The two of us were one step away from divorcing.
“Those two years, we kept on struggling in the depths of that blackness. It makes me shudder every time I recall those years…”
Getting choked up, Mitsuo turned his face to the side, and his expression softened somewhat.
“But then a miracle happened. It was exactly two years after you drowned. In a small fishing village north of Toi called Odoi, there was this elderly couple—a retired fisherman and his wife—who quietly passed away one after the other, without anyone at their side. When a distant relative came to visit and searched the house, a young boy was found in the back shed.
“The old fishing couple never had any children, so naturally they couldn’t have
had any grandkids. The boy showed symptoms of memory loss, and no one had any idea who he was, where he came from, or how he ended up there.
“He was properly dressed, and well-fed, so it was clear that he’d been raised with care by the old couple.
“It didn’t take all that long to realize that the boy was you.
“It was a miracle. Your mother was beside herself with joy, and I thanked God for our unexpected good luck. I used it as an opportunity to quit my job at K University’s Faculty of Medicine and took over at the hospital run by your mother’s family, developing it into something much larger and venturing into charitable work.
“A precious treasure, once lost, had been returned to us. It was only natural that I’d want to give something back to society…”
Takanori remained silent and calm as he listened to his father speak so earnestly.
At the time, his father had belonged to the forensic medicine department in the Faculty of Medicine at K University. He’d likely had many opportunities to take part in autopsies and must have formed deep connections with the police. Surely he had managed to pull a few strings and to offer some money to get others to cooperate with him—all to concoct a coherent story so that he could put the register back the way it was before.
Yet the story that his son had been raised by an old fisherman and his wife went beyond belief. As it went, a childless couple had gone out in their boat to fish and picked up this young boy, who’d slipped through the search dragnet and floated his way to them, and after reviving the boy, they’d raised him discreetly and no one had ever noticed.
Just like Momotaro.
When Takanori recalled the tale of Momotaro—the “peach boy” whom an old couple found floating down a river inside a giant fruit—he nearly burst out laughing, forgetting that it was his own story, too.
As he tried to stifle his laughter, his father went on talking. Making heavy use of medical terms, Mitsuo described how the after-effects of having nearly drowned had erased Takanori’s memory of the two years spent living in Odoi. Apparently, similar examples had been reported overseas.
There was a period after Takanori entered elementary school when his body was remarkably small. Mentally, too, he fell behind the other students and had trouble keeping up in class. As he grew he got better, and once in middle school, he closed the gap with his fellow students academically. By the time he started high school, he was of above-average height and could boast the highest grades of anyone in his year.
This wasn’t a matter of memory loss. To him, it made more sense in every way to suppose that the two-year period when he was two and three had been excised from his life.
Listening to his father spin his yarn, Takanori didn’t feel especially angry.
As Mitsuo talked frantically, his eyes seeming to plead for forgiveness, Takanori found his inclination to scoff at him subside.
It was immodest of his father to make up some ridiculous fairy tale about a matter of life and death, but mocking someone who was trying to work things out somehow, who was struggling to live with himself, seemed even worse.
For two years, his father and mother had believed their beloved son was dead. That belief was an unmistakable fact. As he imagined their desperation and sorrow, Takanori’s heart was filled with gratitude.
Forgive me, his father seemed to be saying. Right now, this foolish excuse is all I can give you.
Witnessing this appeal made Takanori realize how loved he’d been by his father.
The immediate prospect of marrying Akane and becoming a father only intensified his appreciation.
Wiping his eyes with his hand, he stepped away from the table and sat down on the sofa.
“I understand, dad. Now I know how it all happened. I have a vague recollection of it, too. I can dimly remember that sometime before I entered preschool, we went swimming in the ocean with nobody around.”
Even when Takanori said this, Mitsuo kept his guard up. Perhaps he couldn’t help wondering what it was that his son remembered.
“Oh? Right, the three of us did go out a lot together.”
“No, what I remember is a time that you and I went out, just us two.”
“Hmm, that’s odd. Your mother was usually with us.”
Until hearing his father’s story, Takanori hadn’t known that the beach in Toi was where he’d drowned. Previously, a vision of a tranquil seaside area would sometimes pop up in his head. Some of his memories were accompanied by a fear of getting pulled down to the dark depths of the sea, and so it seemed that the part about him drowning was true.
However, he had an even more vivid memory. The timeframe was incoherent, and the scenes came to him in fragments, and whenever he tried to remember, he had to labor to put together all the little pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
“No, mom wasn’t there. There was another man there, instead.”
His mother was absent from the beach scenery, with a strange man in her place.
“A man,” Mitsuo echoed…
Bored of playing with the sand under the blazing sun, young Takanori was about to return to his father, who was sitting on the embankment and watching him.
A man was walking toward Mitsuo on top of the embankment, which stretched straight along the shoreline.
Although this man appeared to be a stranger, he began talking to Takanori’s father. Despite his young age, Takanori could tell that they were talking about some serious matter. Although the stranger was grinning, his father reacted with an angry look.
Takanori felt so thirsty that he walked over to his father and mumbled, “I’m thirsty, dad,” while studying the stranger’s face.
His father held out a bottle of oolong tea that he’d been drinking. Takanori took it and was about to drink, but there wasn’t much left. Seeing this, the man muttered something unintelligible before asking, “Want another?” in a tone that was overly familiar, coming from a stranger.
Takanori declined the offer, instead finishing off the last drops of the tea his father had given him.
While he didn’t know why he remembered this, the scene had left a major impression on him…
“Dad, who was that man?”
A tiny spasm ran across Mitsuo’s face. He always looked that way just before getting sullen.
“There’s no such man…Well, anyway, he’s gone now, so don’t worry about it. Just forget about him.”
Mitsuo wore the same angry expression he’d shown back then, when Takanori was a boy.
4
Thank goodness it’s early summer, Akane thought as she took in the view outside the window. Though it was after 7 p.m., it was still light out. If it were closer to winter, the scenery alongside the train line would long since have been covered in darkness.
Takanori had told her to come home quickly, and she had tried to do just that, but she’d had to attend a meeting of the drama club in the role of assistant moderator and ended up leaving quite late. They’d been unable to decide the program for the school festival to be held in the fall, and every time someone suggested a potential play to perform, the group discussed the option in detail. Then the club president Miho Iizawa proposed that she write an original work, and the meeting devolved into bickering.
Iizawa had the highest grades in her class and was a precocious girl all around, so it wasn’t as though she lacked the literary talent. Yet the dramas she’d written previously were rather awful and even traumatic for the other club members, and the fact that she was oblivious to it exacerbated the problem.
The ensemble that she’d written last year about the behind-the-scenes doings of the club members—except for the care taken to assign the performers equal roles—had met with severe criticism. Every emotional peak had been expressed in shouts and roars, and the whole play was full of the sort of overacting that only the Takarazuka Revue could pull off, so neither the actors themselves nor the audience were able to get emotionally involved. It was arguably a work meant to satisfy the club president herself,
and although the members had all had their fill of her, she hadn’t taken the hint, offering to write another drama for them to perform. Even Akane had sighed as the assistant moderator.
Finally wrapping up the meeting and leaving school only ten minutes ago, she jumped on the inbound Keihin Express train.
Since the question of what to do for the school festival had been put on hold, inevitably, they would soon be rehashing the same agenda item.
While she fretted over how to go about placating young Iizawa, the train slid in to Aomono-Yokocho station. With no train on the opposite track, Akane could see the outbound platform as she leaned against the doors.
Just before they came to a full stop, her gaze was drawn to a lone man around the center of the platform. He was using his cell phone and started walking. Almost bumping into another passenger, he raised his hand with the device up high and spun on his tiptoes like a dancer. At that moment, his face slowly turned to reveal itself, dominating her field of vision.
That might be the guy I saw that time.
A light bulb went off in her head. It wasn’t only his face but also his sharp style that stood out, with his white jacket coordinated with a summer necktie. He resembled the strange man she’d seen near Takanori’s condo. That time, the man had been standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the street so she couldn’t make out his facial features, but the gestures of his hands as he used his cell phone and the way he looked around as he talked were a dead match.
This time, all that stood between them was one side of the tracks, meaning they were considerably closer than before.
The man, his back turned to Akane and using his cell phone, didn’t seem to notice that she was right behind him and separated only by the glass of the train doors.
At such times, Akane’s cognitive faculties sped up. In her mind, she rapidly lined up all the pieces of info that she’d received from Takanori as if she were a professional card dealer.