The Shut Ins

by Katherine Brabon

  ‘I pretended that I knew snow and mountains,’ she said, laughing, ‘instead of bamboo and mosquitoes and humid air. It was the time. It really was the time. Nobody wanted contaminated babies in a country recovering from war.’

  The woman pushed deep into Sadako’s shoulder muscles and all breath left her; her chest gave an involuntary sigh.

  ‘We all have something inside us, like a cold stone we carry around alone. I can relieve some of the tension for my customers, but I can never get the cold stone out of a body, no matter what I do. It’s like a pearl closed up in its shell, buried down on the dark ocean floor. The women who dive for them must make sure they start coming back up to this side at just the right time, so they don’t run out of air.’

  When they parted, Sadako thanked the woman. Her muscles did feel relieved, some tension was gone. But Sadako felt that what the woman said was true. Inside her there was a cold stone, perhaps impossible to remove.

  Could she cut herself off from Tokyo and live a quiet life here? Her rent was paid month to month, her apartment full of other young women who came and went at short notice, arriving as if fleeing, leaving overnight as if escaping. Here, she woke each morning to the sound and smell of Keiko cooking breakfast, the voices of her father and Toru getting ready for work. When everyone left she would get up, clean the breakfast dishes, perhaps clean the bathroom or mop the floor. She would go to the onsen where Keiko worked and sit in one of the baths, calmed by the process of undressing, washing her body, ridding it of the sweat of the night, stripping away the listless fog in her mind, even if for a moment.

  She noticed that she was drawn to Toru, felt some affinity with him, a young person in this old person’s town. It was a physical longing tied up with the heat, their bodies’ sweat, something primal, a body wakened and opened, the summer. He took her on other walks, to Manyo Park and the footbaths, and they returned again to the waterfall. He said he would show her the cave one day too, although that was a longer walk.

  When the midsummer rains fell heavy and the wide skies darkened, the green of the trees deepened and the walls of the house became dull, the rooms smaller, but even then Sadako felt a sense of safety, of something protecting her in the cramped but comfortable house. Had she ever felt this, even as a girl? Her father was still his quiet self, but she sensed that he was what could be called a happy man, in the simple way of someone who does not expect much from their life. Sadako couldn’t decide if it was a sad thing, or just something very real.

  One morning, when Toru had the day off work, they decided to finally go to the cave. The sky was low and a few isolated drops splashed their skin as they walked. Sadako’s head felt heavy; the humidity was intense.

  After an hour of walking they reached an empty car park. On the other side of the car park was a tall, dark tunnel.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a road passing through to the other side of the hills. Our path runs alongside it.’

  The tunnel looked endless, a stone half-moon mouth gaping, choking on the road running through.

  ‘Drink some water,’ said Toru. ‘You look pale.’

  A gravel path turned steadily upwards through a tall forest. As they set off, figures emerged ahead, stone statues and lanterns bordering the path. Reddish dead pine needles coated the forest floor.

  ‘It’s getting darker,’ said Sadako, looking up.

  ‘It’s just the trees,’ said Toru. ‘They’re really old.’

  In truth, this kind of quiet unnerved Sadako, the way the quiet allowed her to be closer to her thoughts, without the city noise and crowds, her phone and conversations; there was no buffer between Sadako and her thoughts. It was an awful, empty quiet.

  She looked down at a statue, a short plump Buddha in stone. The face and body were dotted with pale lichen, the eyes turned white. It chilled her inside.

  They kept walking upwards, past more statues and lanterns, the air mossy and warm. Soon the path was crowded with stone lanterns, as though they were competing for the more sacred space up near the cave. Some had lantern roofs, others were only heavy posts. Sadako could not decide if the statues were hostile or welcoming—or maybe they were nothing; after all, they were just great lumps of stone.

  Her head was still heavy with the humidity, as if she wore a helmet carved from a stone grey sky.

  Sadako felt the cave before she saw it. Cool air travelled down over them. A smell, grainy, ancient and cool, like wet stones and dirt. In the mouth of the cave, stretching into darkness, Sadako saw uneven rows of stone statues, white and mossy, small ghosts. She must have gasped, because she heard the sound of a woman’s breath echo in the heights of the cave. She didn’t know who these statues represented, or what they meant.

  Toru took her hand; his palm was rough and warm. They walked among the statues.

  ‘My skin,’ said Sadako. ‘It feels so cold now.’ Her skin was clammy, and she felt ligh-theaded from the walk. They were like pilgrims, she thought, who had finally made it to the shrine.

  They went further into the cave and sat down beside each other on a cool rock. It was very dark, the entrance to the cave a bright, jagged mouth below them. Sadako thought of the entrance she had seen from outside the cave, the inner dark; they were now inside it.

  ‘We’re on the other side now,’ Toru said. ‘It’s a different place in here.’ He lay down on his back, arms behind his head, looking up at the dark rock ceiling.

  ‘Do you remember what my father said?’ Sadako lay down next to Toru on the cold floor. ‘My grandfather was supposed to be a kamikaze. An aborted suicide. That’s what he called it.’

  ‘Every family has stories,’ said Toru. ‘People in this town seem to have left a completely different life behind before coming here. Some are free of that other life, some are haunted by it. You could say it’s a town for people recovering from their former lives.’ He laughed when he said it.

  Sadako felt Toru’s hand on her stomach, light pressure on her t-shirt. She put her hand over his. She liked how the skin was warm. Sadako felt him kiss her neck and she turned towards him, her eyes closed, her head finally cool. She bent one knee and let her hip open outwards. Toru pressed his fingers onto the lips of her vagina, began to move them rhythmically. Sadako tried to breathe and relax, but she felt cold in her chest, and she was completely dry down where his fingers touched. She felt Toru’s hand pull away hesitantly, after what must have been a long time touching her. She struggled to feel anything but raw, hot and uncomfortable between her legs. Sadako turned away and pressed her forehead into her arm, her face close to the wet stone floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s like it’s too real.’

  Toru looked confused but he shrugged and gave a small smile, lightly touched her shoulder.

  The cold stone. She could feel it now. Was it only because the woman had mentioned it, or was the stone growing inside her, getting heavier, getting colder? Sadako remembered how she felt disconnected from her body when she was young, after her first sex at sixteen with a man, older, at a stranger’s apartment. She hadn’t wanted it, had gone along with it, and why? Would it have been dangerous to say no? That time was stuck inside her, the fact that she did it but didn’t want to. It had happened on a night spent alone in the city; she had run from her mother’s misery, hung around a gaming parlour. She had seen this man before. His company offered a temporary escape from home. She had done it and continued with her young life. Without saying any words to make it real, to validate it, the thing that happened to Sadako had fallen through her like sediment and settled somewhere deep down inside her.

  And now, when every encounter was paid for, she did not feel anything. Even the outside dates, the guys who said they liked her, and not just as a hostess, even with them she did not feel real. With J it had been terribly strange, reality laced with unreality; she had swelled with what felt like the truth of their encounter, been swept up in it for one pretend moment.

  Sadako’s
phone rang, a violent shrill in the darkness. It was J, calling from Nagoya. His voice broke into the cave, her quiet.

  ‘My wife—she didn’t come home three nights ago,’ he said.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘She’s not answering her phone, the dial tone is dead. Some wife I’ve got!’

  Sadako sat up.

  ‘Did you argue? She might have wanted some space. She might be at her parents’ house, or a friend’s.’

  ‘She’s not with her parents,’ said J. ‘And she doesn’t have any friends, except some guy from her high school, some otaku freak.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ said Sadako.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked J. ‘Your boss said you were away for the week.’

  ‘I’m visiting my father, he’s been sick.’

  ‘I wish you would come back,’ he said. His voice might have been angry. He muttered, Some wife! once more, before hanging up.

  Sadako lay down and closed her eyes again. She heard Toru’s footsteps move away from her. Sadako imagined J’s wife in some distant place. Perhaps she had run off; perhaps J’s suspicions about her drifting further away from him, emotionally and now physically, were true. But she was a woman Sadako would never know, just like all the other wives of the men she drank with.

  It was so quiet in this town, this cave, Sadako wasn’t sure if she loved or hated the silence. Perhaps she could come to love it. Eventually she opened her eyes. The cave was colder now, her body clammy with old sweat. She could see nothing as she looked at the dark stone ceiling. She sat up. Toru stood close to the mouth of the cave, looking out. Outside it was almost as dark as the deep interior of the cave, the barrier between the two blurred by the flooding sky.

  ‘It’s raining,’ he said.

  Note no. 3

  In Nagasaki, the humid air was a heavy weight on my chest, eyelids, every surface of my body. Sweat pooled on my skin. I didn’t want to walk. I ate noodles in Chinatown and then went to a bar, drank umeshu plum wine, sweet liquified summer night. I wore a white, sleeveless dress. I met Pedro—or Pe-de-ro, as he pronounced it slowly for me. Pedro was a Catholic Japanese, he explained partly in English, partly through his computer’s translator. His wife was a Catholic, she was dead now, but he had converted and taken a new name. I tried to say that there must be lots of Catholics around here, but he didn’t quite understand.

  Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in the 1540s, setting down from their boats off the green, hilly coast of Nagasaki, bringing with them something new to believe. Within fifty years the religion was repressed, and in another forty it was banned: worshippers were hunted, tortured and killed. Suspected Christians were presented with images of Jesus and Mary, fumie, and ordered to raise their foot and stamp on them. If they refused to do this, they were condemned. The new religion was thought to threaten national unity.

  On arriving in Nagasaki, I had reached the physical limit of my travels in Japan; I would now turn around and make my way back through the island of Kyushu and eventually return to Tokyo. I continued to write to M’s friend, who increasingly felt like a friend of my own, though I had never met him. In fact, I did not even know what he looked like. Though I tried to find him, he had no presence online—no social media, no public references on websites anywhere, and he appeared in no photographs in any of M’s online accounts. But then again, M did say it had been a long time since she had seen this friend.

  In the mornings, I woke unable to tell if I had slept much at all, my body coated in sweat. The room was full of other women, who had all stayed up late, rummaging in their bags and whispering to each other, but who now slept thick and deep, hair plastered across their silent faces.

  My body began to ache more each day, my shoulders stiff and somehow cold despite the heat. I looked online and found an onsen in a hotel on the small island of Iojima. To get there, I would take a bus over a road bridge that extended off the coast of Nagasaki.

  The bus went through places that felt strangely deserted and commercialised at the same time: a shipping company; a port; a series of snaking roads that passed few or no buildings. The hotel appeared suddenly, close to the water. I felt that I was very far from anything I knew. My room in the hostel in Nagasaki now seemed, at least, like a familiar place to which to return. I paid my entrance fee to two quiet women who smiled and soundlessly directed me to the baths. The baths were mostly empty, except for a couple of older Japanese women, who watched me and smiled greetings from across the hot water. After, I went to the hotel restaurant in a cavernous room with high ceilings. There was a buffet of dishes and large jugs of water and soft drinks. I sat alone at a long table in this room full of families, and then waited in the sun for a bus back to Nagasaki.

  In my hostel room, which I had returned to as if home, I wrote: I used the cypress wood bath, which was so hot, and then the stone bath, which was cooler. Stood outside for a while but the sun’s heat was too strong; I loved to stand there naked, staring out at the sea and the mountains. I could not believe the relief of floating in hot water on a raging humid day, or that the atomic bomb melted the city in this same kind of heat.

  One of the Catholic structures built in Nagasaki was Urakami Cathedral. It was obliterated by the atomic bombing, except for its facade. In Hiroshima, where I was just days earlier, the enormous Dome has been left just as it was after the 8.15 a.m. bombing. It looks the same for us as it did for the survivors. The rest of the city has new arcades and narrow 1960s streets. I saw a group of school students taking an excursion to see the Dome. They wore identical red hats so that the individual could be recognised as part of the group. The top of the shattered Dome looked like a birdcage. In Nagasaki, bombed three days after Hiroshima, they rebuilt Urakami Cathedral entirely, absorbing the old facade into the new walls, so you wouldn’t know how broken it had been. I cannot decide if it is better or worse to leave the wound exposed.

  In the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum I read fragments of a report of the US Target Committee, which determined where in Japan to drop an atomic bomb. Kyoto, as the cultural capital of ancient Japan, was considered because of the anticipated psychological impact of any attack, but in the end Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for their size and geography, which would magnify the effects of the blast. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage, notes the report of the Target Committee.

  At the entrance to the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims stands an enormous sculpted basin, twenty-nine metres in diameter, designed in memory of the great number of people who craved water after experiencing the atomic bombing. Visitors are urged to walk all the way around it (proceeding counter-clockwise) in order to calm your mind before entering the Hall. At night the basin is illuminated by seventy thousand lights, representing the number of lives lost and now glowing from the other side. Any groups wishing to hold flower-laying ceremonies in the Hall should contact our staff.

  When I first met him in the bar near my hostel, the Catholic man Pedro was dressed in pink slacks, a striped blue shirt, red-and-white leather shoes, suspenders and a Panama hat. He carried a fan that he pulled out when he arrived at the bar. I went again the next night, after my visit to the hot springs, and Pedro was there too, in a dark navy robe of high quality that made him look timeless. He had a wry, gentle smile. It was nice to be recognised after weeks alone.

  I returned to the same bar each night I was in Nagasaki. Pedro was always there, before six o’clock in the evening when the sun was still fixed hot in the sky. The bartenders, a Japanese woman and a man from Cameroon, were friendly. I chatted to three young Korean men who eyed Pedro admiringly. They came to Japan often, the young men said. It wasn’t far, an easy holiday. It was my final night in the city and, swept up, heady in the sense that we knew each other, that we had staked some small claim on this place as our own, we all—Pedro, the Korean men, the bartenders and me—drank a shot
of liquor at once and together we posed for a photo. I sent the photo in a message back home. My partner wrote: You look happy, and I wondered at all the disconnections possible within a person. I looked again at the photo, struck by how happy I did appear, by Pedro’s wizened smile.

  I saw a rare evening message from M’s friend. Usually I looked for his words in the morning. For once, I did not feel a need for them. The place where I went to speak with him—a constructed world, a little dream-like, insular and intimate—was too far from where I was then. I was in a real moment, tired from real things, from the onsen water, the hot streets, rather than thoughts, and I wanted to stay in it, to do nothing more with my day than fall asleep.

  Before seven o’clock in the morning I carried my heavy bag to the tram stop and on to Nagasaki Station. I bought a dark strong coffee with large chunks of ice. I would travel back to Tokyo via Okayama Prefecture and stay in Kurashiki, a smaller town, for a few days. I changed trains at Hakata. Inside the bullet train it was cool; the sense of absolute order through the carriages calmed me. In the cities, even the most crowded subway carriages have a subdued peace about them, the stations a flood of ordered crowds. People had said this to me: the order in Japan, the calmness, the polite and placid nature of the people. You will see it, they said. I saw it, and I wondered what was on the other side of their faces.

  In 1995 members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo released poisonous sarin gas into the Tokyo subway at rush hour. The novelist Haruki Murakami interviewed cult members as well as victims of the attack. A young man and member of the cult told Murakami he was sick of not feeling anything in the life he lived in Japan, of not having the sense of experiencing a real moment, as he called it. He reported that he longed for violence, the kind of violence that would break open the constraints of society and shock people into feeling something.