by Kōbō Abe
“Now this is going too far.” Looking grim, the insect dealer removed his glasses, slumped forward, and rubbed the area between his brows. “We have an agreement with the captain here. You can’t get away with this.”
Not to be outdone, the shill pressed his elbows tightly against his sides, crouched over, and lowered his head. Except for their tense breathing, it was as if each had withdrawn inside his own shell, ignoring the other. Wild animals feign the same indifference as they sharpen their claws, waiting for a chance to pounce.
“You’re going to have to throw me out, you know.”
“I know.”
“Pretty sure of yourself.”
The insect dealer folded his glasses and dropped them in his pocket. The shill stuck the fingers of his right hand in his pants pocket. Did he have a concealed knife? They stood twelve feet apart, with the corner of the table between them.
The girl stepped on my foot and whispered, “Do you suppose it’s still raining outside?”
In that taut atmosphere, her whisper stood out like a piece of dirt in the eye. The men’s excitement ended abruptly. The insect dealer put a fist to his mouth and coughed, while the shill went on clicking his tongue.
“The walls are thick and there are no windows, so for both weather and time we have to rely on instruments.” I switched on the monitor sitting on the middle shelf of the bookcase between the couch and the locker. Electric signals from the outdoor sensor were translated by computer into symbols that flashed on the screen. “Looks like the rain is over. Wind velocity is thirteen point eight feet per hour, coming out of the southwest.”
“You’re really something, Captain.” The shill’s gaze swept me boldly up and down.
“Humidity index is eighty-two. Air pressure’s still low and falling.”
“That’s why my head feels so heavy,” the girl said, sweeping the hair off her forehead. “Anyone else want a cup of coffee?”
“Not a bad idea. Take the bad taste out of our mouths.” The insect dealer relaxed a bit.
“Everything you do, Komono, is so phony it leaves a bad taste in the mouth,” said the shill. To the girl he said, “To celebrate your recovery, miss, how about fixing us all a cup of coffee?” His motive was transparent: by having her help out, he meant to settle the issue of whether they stayed or went, by means of a fait accompli. “Captain, would you mind showing her where the coffee and everything is?”
“Never mind, I’ll get it myself,” I said.
The girl glanced at the shill to ascertain what he wanted her to do. He urged her on with brisk waves of his hand, as if chasing a fly.
“Let me do it,” she said, her voice suddenly animated as if in amends for malingering. “I make a mean cup of coffee.”
“Yes, but it’s an electric coffeemaker, so it comes out the same no matter who does it,” I said. I too had an ulterior motive: this was it, my chance to be alone with her. “Why don’t you help me wash up some cups instead? All that sort of thing I do downstairs, by the toilet. Cooking and laundry too. I don’t use the toilet water, you understand—there’s a sink built into the wall, with its own faucet. The coffee-maker only makes three cups. We’ll just have to brew it a little stronger, and then add hot water.”
She smoothed her skirt and led the way, motioning for me to follow.
“I don’t like violence.” The insect dealer stood aside, taking a kamaboko stick from a pouch on his belt and offering it to me as I went by. “Want one? In the confusion, I forgot all about them. Coffee on an empty stomach is bad for the system, you know. Upsets the nerves, and it can make you constipated too.”
I took four and dashed after the girl, dragging the leg that was still partially numb. Three steps down, we entered the shadow of a pillar, out of sight of the bridge. The shill’s voice sounded.
“What a crazy machine. What the heck is this for, sharpening rats’ teeth?”
“It’s a small precision machine tool,” replied the insect dealer, his mouth stuffed with kamaboko. “You know, I’ve always wanted to play with one of these.”
9
BACK TO THE POT
“Really, the more you look at this toilet, the stranger it is… .” The girl spoke in a nasal whisper that sounded almost deliberately provocative.
I had to agree with her about the toilet, all right. Squatting over it, you were totally unprotected, longing desperately for a cover behind, or just for some way to tell front from back. In a place as vast as this old quarry, the anus developed rejection symptoms even with a wall behind you. When I first started living here, constipation was my bane. I tried all kinds of laxatives, to no avail. After a week my ears were ringing; by the tenth day my vision was clouding over.
I tried enemas, but that only made it worse: they gave me the urge to go, and that’s all. My sphincter remained stubbornly corked. To feel an intense urge to evacuate—a violent one, I should say, as in intestinal catarrh—and to be incapable of doing anything about it is an excruciating form of suffering that must be experienced to be believed.
At the hospital they brushed it off lightly: “If you feel like moving your bowels, that only proves you have a light case, so don’t rush yourself. Just keep sitting on the toilet.” They needn’t have told me that; the moment I got off I would feel the summons of nature, and tear straight back again. For two whole days I sat there leafing through the Family Medical Book, convinced that death was imminent.
The Family Medical Book was written for laymen, as the title suggests, but in the end it provided the solution. At least it gave better advice than the doctors. Mention constipation and generally they’ll ascribe it to one of two causes: desiccation and hardening of the stool, or poor muscle tone. Intestinal malfunction, in short. But in the Family Medical Book, as an example of intestinal hyperfunction the authors mention difficulty in evacuation due to a spastic rectum—a type of constipation not even listed in the constipation section. I felt a flash of light.
Despite my large bulk, I am of surprisingly nervous temperament, and two or three times a year (when I must meet with someone unpleasant, such as my biological father, Inototsu, or when I’m called to traffic court for a violation), I come down with diarrhea. When the symptoms worsen I am attacked by severe pain, as if my bowels were being twisted and wrung. If this constipation had resulted from an especially acute case of diarrhea, I reasoned, then it might pay to try my regular medicine. (In fact, it’s a drug to relieve menstrual cramps, but I find it wonderfully effective for an irritable colon.) The results were dramatic: in minutes, an enormous movement erupted, leaving only a delightful sense of hollowness. Thinking he might be interested, I did mention this to the doctor, but his only reaction was a look of faint annoyance.
That time of suffering did, however, enable me to grow accustomed to the vastness of the quarry. Besides losing my fear of constipation, I became able to straddle the toilet forward, backward, or sideways, from any angle. I even became relaxed enough to contemplate other uses for the thing. More and more frequently, I used it for garbage disposal. Soon I was using the sink and counter to prepare food. Waiting for the contents of a pan to heat, I could seat myself on the toilet in comfort. Even while eating my meals and drinking my coffee, I had no need to go elsewhere. I could do my aerial-photography traveling, or go over the results of the day’s surveying, right while drinking coffee on the pot. And so the toilet came gradually to occupy a central place in my life. Metaphorically speaking, I was beginning to change into a eupcaccia.
The galley was a hollow in the wall, about a meter off the floor; inside, it had been polished to a blue, enamel-like finish that deserved to be set off by a loving cup, if I’d had such a thing. Once, on the ceiling there, I found some bumps that had been puttied over. Prying with a knife, I uncovered a lead pipe whose end was capped. When I unscrewed the cap, water came gushing out. I installed a faucet, electric wiring and a socket. Then I added a small refrigerator and a fluorescent light, a large electric stove, a kitchen cabinet, and a
foldout counter. When I wasn’t using it, I kept the area hidden behind accordion curtains. Finally I added a high enclosed shelf you reached by standing on the toilet; rubber sealing made it airtight. Up there is where I keep my camera equipment and travel necessities (i.e., the aerial photos), surveying equipment and so on, protected by drying agents. My safety precautions are airtight too: I set it up so that if you touch the door handle without first flicking a hidden switch, an electric shock will burn your fingers, and tear gas will go off in your face. The spot right next to the camera equipment would be a good place to keep the eupcaccias.
I opened the curtain, which made the lights go on. “How pretty!” she exclaimed. “It’s like marble.”
“Actually it’s something called hydrous shale; as long as it stays moist, it has a nice shine. It’s probably an underwater stone. The only trouble with it is that when it dries out, it gets covered with fine powder. After four or five years, buildings decorated with it look as if they’ve been dusted with confectioner’s sugar. In fact, that probably explains why the quarry closed down.”
“Hmm,” she said. “It certainly lacks a woman’s touch.” She looked at five days’ worth of dirty dishes piled in the sink and laughed.
“Of course it does. What else did you expect?”
“Want me to wash these up for you?”
“That’s all right, I always do it once a week, without fail.” I stuck one of the kamaboko from the insect dealer in my mouth, and gave another to her. “They’re not chilled, but we just bought them a little while ago, so I’m sure they’re all right.”
“Thank you.” Like thin rubber, the girl’s lips expanded and contracted, following the shape of the kamaboko. “These are high in protein and low in fat, so they’re very good for you,” she said.
“Oh, I’m incorrigible. I’ve given up.” Talking openly about my weaknesses, I figured, would make me come across as a frank and likable type. “But this is mostly monosodium glutamate held together with starch. Glutamic acid soda is sodium chloride, so it could be bad for your blood pressure.”
“Can you hear something? Like dogs barking?” the girl said.
“You can hear anything here if you try hard enough,” I answered. “This place is so full of tunnels and caves, it’s like being in the middle of a gigantic trumpet.”
“It’s like one of those foreign movies on TV. There’s always a house—a big stone building with an iron fence, right?—and a big yard and a watchdog. If this were a movie, the story would just be getting under way. All we need is some music.”
“You’re different,” I told her.
“How?”
“I mean different in a nice way. Interesting.”
“Don’t tease me. He’s forever groaning about me—says I have holes in my head.”
“He’s disgusting.”
“Maybe that’s why he is the way he is—because he knows people don’t like him.”
“What do you mean, ‘the way he is’?”
“How many cups’ worth of grounds shall I put in?”
“Five, if you like it strong.” Perhaps because of the peculiar nature of where we were, sandwiched between the kitchen sink and the toilet, I began to feel an excitement attended by visual stricture, like that of a child playing in closets. “I’ll tell you what I don’t like about him. It’s his attitude toward you—he’s so damned overbearing.”
“I know, but he’s sick, so what can I do?”
“Sick? What’s the matter with him?”
“Cancer.”
Mentally I reviewed my impressions of the shill, as if starting again at page one of a book I’d read partway. “What kind of cancer?”
“Bone marrow. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s evidently a kind of leukemia. Don’t tell anyone, okay? He doesn’t even know about it yet himself.”
“Is it serious?”
“Isn’t cancer always? They give him six months to live.”
“Tell me the truth. What’s your relationship to him?”
“It’s hard to say exactly.”
“Why does he call you ‘young lady’? Isn’t that a bit formal?”
“Probably he does it to excite people’s imaginations.”
“More fishing?”
“I don’t know; maybe.”
“But the only ones to be told the truth about a cancer patient’s condition are the next of kin. Isn’t that so?” I felt a rising irritation that was totally at odds with the thrill of being alone with her like two children snuggled in a closet.
Instead of answering, she looked up and waved. The shill and the insect dealer were standing side by side, elbows on the bridge parapet, munching on kamaboko and looking down at us.
“You want your coffee up there?” she asked.
“Nah, we’ll come on down.” The insect dealer placed his hands on the small of his back and stretched. “Less trouble that way, and easier to clean up.”
“No, let’s have it up here.” Waving both hands, the shill disappeared in the recesses of the bridge, then rounded the pillar and came down the stairs. “But first I’ve got to use the john.”
“You can’t—me first!” the girl exclaimed, thrusting at him a tray piled with four clean cups, no two alike. “I’ll bring the coffee up as soon as the water boils.”
What could we say? Wordlessly the shill took the tray and withdrew, and I followed. Together we laid the cups out near one corner of the table. The insect dealer called down to her over the parapet:
“Got anything to eat down there?”
Her voice came echoing back, colored by the reverberation. “Hey! No peeking.” I detected a note of playfulness that I found distasteful. A half-smile lingering on the corner of his mouth, the insect dealer turned away with visible regret.
“Let’s eat, Captain,” he said. “I can’t talk on an empty stomach.”
I was hungry too. The problem as I saw it was to decide what kind of meal we should have; it might well have a profound impact on our future relationships. Broadly speaking, there were three possibilities: the four of us could share a simple meal of instant noodles; we could sit down to a slightly more substantial meal, in a spirit of welcome to the new crew (in that case, we would need more booze); or I could take them all to the food storehouse, where they could each pick out what they wanted, at their own expense. In that case, everybody would be on their own. Personally, I favored the last option, but seeing that living quarters had not yet been formally assigned, it might set some unfortunate precedents. An enjoyable welcome party might serve as an effective social lubricant for all the various relationships among us. If there was some guarantee I could talk to the girl without worrying constantly about the shill, I certainly had no objection to opening a bottle or two of sake. Right now, in order to settle my mind, I needed time for another cup of coffee.
“Is this where you sleep, Captain?” asked the shill, tapping an armrest of the chaise longue.
“Yes—why?”
“What about us? Where do we sack out?”
“For now, anyplace. I have sleeping bags for everybody.”
“Well, in that case, you’ll have to excuse me for a while. Sorry,” said the shill.
With people switching back and forth all the time this way, how could I formulate any plan? I decided to stop worrying about the dinner menu.
“Nothing to be sorry about. Do as you please,” I said.
“I can’t help it,” the shill said, explaining, “I can’t get to sleep without my own pillow. Always carry it with me on trips.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it isn’t.” The insect dealer was stuck to the edge of the chaise longue like a half-dried squid. “It doesn’t have to be a particularly soft one, or anything. But there are people with attachments to a certain pillow. It must be the smell of their own hair oils, absorbed into the pillow.”
“Pillows pick up smells, all right, that’s for sure,” agreed the shill. “Ever stay in a cheap hotel s
omewhere in the sticks? It’s enough to make you gag.”
“Of all the senses, they say the sense of smell is the most primitive,” said the insect dealer.
“Other people’s smells may be unbearable, but your own never are,” said the shill. “Everyone has a certain affection for their own body odors.”
“That’s true,” said the insect dealer. “Ever see somebody scratch his dandruff, and then sniff the dirt under his nails?”
“Please, would you both just be quiet?” I was fed up. I certainly had never expected life with a crew to be so bothersome. “I went a long time without hearing any human voices here,” I went on. “Now it’s a strain on my nerves.”
Would the old quiet never return? This arrangement was scarcely worth the trouble. Did any of them have the slightest idea of the enormous price I was paying?
We heard a sudden gush of water. The girl had begun to urinate. I hadn’t expected the noise to carry so well. It took little effort to imagine the precise amount and pressure of liquid released. It sounded as close as a cricket would have sounded, chirping under the chaise longue. Too late, I regretted having asked them to be silent. All three of us pulled at our ears, sucked air through our molars, and pretended not to hear. The sound continued unendingly, until I could no longer endure it.
“Anytime people begin living together, there have got to be some rules.” My words serving as a substitute for ear-plugs, I jabbered on at a speed even I found offensive to the ear. “And rules aren’t rules unless they’re kept. And in order for them to be kept, they must be based on the premise of a shared set of fundamental values. What I mean to say is that only people who fully appreciate the utility value of this old quarry can comprehend its true worth. I’m not being overly fussy, I can assure you.”
