The Ruined Map

by Kōbō Abe

  I jabbed him roughly in the neighborhood of his fifth rib with my index and middle fingers locked together. Tashiro gave a little grunt, twisting his body as the upper half fell forward. He sprang up on one leg, barely avoiding falling over, and, facing the closing door, shouted hoarsely: “I followed him! I followed him! I did!”

  I LEFT the car at the top of the slope on the plateau where the housing development was situated. Besides the money I had spent for coffee with Tashiro, there was the unintentionally large tip I had given the taxi driver because I was drunk and the unexpected expense at the bar of the nude studio. What could I claim as justifiable expenses? I wondered. A claim had to fit with the contents of my report. Of course, I could not say that there was nothing worthwhile at all to report on. Even killing time has some value. I thought that I should get a really first-rate eraser for the purpose of erasing the equivocal and useless lines which for over two hours had connected me with a potential pseudo-runaway.

  But it was close to impossible to put together in an objective report that would be meaningful to others such vague results. Writing that a liar confessed he had lied was the same as writing nothing at all. Even in thinking it over the only thing that stood out clearly was the naked white thigh beneath the counter, only the feeling in the palm of my hand that seemed to adhere to it. As for the dissected parts of the girl, supposing I could fit them into the jigsaw picture without going any further than I had, then it would seem I could only seek the remaining parts behind the lemon-yellow curtains. Like some insect lured to a light trap, I again walked the street of the housing development in the direction of her window. I didn’t even particularly wonder at the fact that I had no reason, none worth the name, at least …

  No, that was not quite true. My car, abandoned there near the steps that led up to her place, just beyond the second street light from here (I had left it on the pretext of being drunk and now I was even more so) became flimsier and flimsier as a reason. I walked over the trampled path in the dead grass, shortening the distance between me and the lemon-yellow window. At length, some thirty-two normal paces from the corner of Building 3, I raised my head, and the line of street lights, glass eyes that no longer knew how to blink, stood in a row like charms, summoning a festival procession that would never come; the faint rectangular light that burned in the window had long since given up such things as festivals. I was struck on the side of my face by a wind like a wet mop, and as I stood there motionless I raised the collar of my coat. It was about here that the missing husband was said to have last been observed.

  Supposing he were standing here now and not I … supposing he had come stealthily, concealed under the cover of darkness, looking up at the house he had abandoned, what would he be thinking? I tried as best I could to put myself in his position, but it would not work. I didn’t know why, but the silhouette of the driver of the taxi I had just taken forced itself before my eyes. That slimy, malicious runt, from whose entire body rose an animal stench, breathing dissatisfaction instead of air, circulating in his veins venom instead of blood. Such a man would not stand around here. He would have no time to compare stealthily his own fate with the lemon-yellow window. But it didn’t mean that all drivers were always like that. For instance, there were also family men like Toyama, who had bought the car. Of course, the husband had to be himself. He couldn’t let himself be replaced with someone else. The husband … he had tried to run from the filing cabinets of life, turning his back squarely on whatever hopes he had for festivals. Had he not wanted to set out for some eternal festival that could never be realized?

  One day, unexpectedly, he had come upon a poster pasted on some wall or telephone pole … a broadside telling of a great festival, inconspicuous with its faded colors, and blanched by the wind and the rain. The time and place were blank, but that only served to stimulate his hopes. Without looking behind, he set out in search of the festival that was announced … he went toward an eternal festival, one that would end only with death, one that was different from the pseudo-fêtes each night that only the darkness and neon lights could cover up. If darkness were indispensable for the festival ceremonies, it would be a world of perpetual night. He joined the unending, circling waltz, unrelated to the pieces of paper dancing in the wind, the sadness and fatigue that come after a festival.

  Now he is standing here, balancing the weight of unfulfilled dreams with what he has lost. What will he do? I search and fumble for him … but in vain. This blackness I am seeking is after all merely my own self … my own map, revealed by my brain. I am the one standing here, not he. Properly speaking, the place where I should be standing is not here but in front of the board fence around the construction site from which the window of my wife’s room is visible. I stand trembling, seeking the window of a stranger who has only the accidental relationship with me of being my client. Perhaps the husband is standing under some unexpected window too, one that does not even appear on his own map. Is he sleeping now in that place, that place nobody else can ever reach? Or is he awake, is he laughing or crying … is he angry or bored … does he despair or is he in good spirits … is he helplessly drunk, does his tooth ache, is he frightened, is he fuming like a burning pot, is he all upset or is he relieved, has he lost his way, is he falling down with a crash, is he concentrating on counting out his pocket money, is he addicted to memories, is he gathering together his appointments for tomorrow, is he alone with his nightmares, is he tearing out his hair with remorse, or with faint breath does he keep forcing the blood from a deep wound?

  But I was the one standing here now. There was no mistake, I was the one. I thought I was following the husband’s map, but I was following my own; I wanted to follow in his steps and I followed my own. Suddenly I was frozen still. But it was not only because of the cold … nor was it the fault of the liquor alone, nor of my shame. My perplexity gave way to uneasiness, and that changed to fear. My gaze traveled along the corner of Building 3, running up and down; looking back, I counted the buildings from the end. Again, a second time, a third time I counted. My eyes continued like a madman’s up and down, down and up along the corner of the same building. It wasn’t there! The lemon-yellow window was gone! Curtains of white and brown vertical stripes, completely different, were hanging in the place where the lemon-yellow window should have been. What in the name of God had happened? If I wanted to know I had only to advance thirty-two paces, go up the stairs, and ring the bell at the left of the door on the second floor. But I could not. Since the curtains had changed so radically, the person who would come to greet me would doubtless have turned from lemon to zebra. Was not this striped curtain a flag indicating the husband’s return? There was one possibility in a thousand that, having seen the article in the evening edition, he had returned half out of dislike for the brother … that his one chance in a thousand had materialized. What a boring conclusion … a splendid disappointment. A very easy map to understand. A dialogue indistinguishable from talking to oneself. All right. Everything was perfectly resolved—not a thing was left in doubt. I could completely withdraw from the case with no unpleasant thoughts, although I should never be able to brag of my success.

  Yet, there was not a single reason to be unhappy. Subconsciously, I may have wanted the case to go on forever, but the source of funds had been severed by the brother’s death, and no matter how much savings she might have there was no reason for her to let and almost hopeless investigation go on any further. In the three and a half days left till the term of our contract expired, no matter how active I might be, it would not amount to much. There was no reason to be disappointed. Musing that I had just wanted my briefcase from the car, that I had made a detour for it, I withdrew with a heavy heart by the same path I had come. A dark path … too dark. Just one more time I turned to look at the altogether inappropriate, unsightly striped pattern and then went down the slope in the direction of the subway station. I passed a middle-aged couple going in the opposite direction, their necks sunk into their co
at collars against the cold, their shoulders hunched timorously; between them a schoolboy dressed in a uniform was volubly discussing something or other. A number of small pieces of paper, each striving to be first, were being sucked into the entrance to the subway, scooped out by the brilliant illumination. For dinner I made do with curried rice with an egg and stew at a cheap restaurant just before the entrance. Although it was dead winter a huge green bottlefly, slipping and sliding, was buzzing as it tried to crawl up the shade over the electric light; it kept circling aroung but there was no need to worry: flies know the seasons better than humans, and their wisdom is great.

  REPORT

  14 February: 6:30 A.M.—I went on a secret reconnoitering expedition on the basis of the tip that from half past six to seven in the morning the Camellia coffee house engaged in unlicensed placement of temporary taxi drivers. If this unlicensed placement was a fact, then the Camellia matchbox that the missing man had left, with its black and white matchsticks and the way it was scratched, would be profoundly significant. I suppose I shall have to look again into the ad for recruiting drivers that appeared in the sports paper. The Camellia owner’s ad for private drivers could naturally be considered a ploy to fool people, and it is quite possible that it was a special private code understandable only to temporary drivers. (F.Y.I. a couple of examples: they could be giving notice of reopening after a raid by the size or arrangement of the letters; or they could be suggesting a change in the contact place; or it was not at all impossible that there was some special meaning over and above the words.) And so it doesn’t necessarily follow that I will be able to find traces here of the missing man at once. Since drivers in the metropolitan area alone number roughly 80,000 and out of them 15,000, or about twenty percent, are migratory, similar unlicensed employment agencies can be supposed to exist in quite large numbers. However, there’s doubtless nothing to stop me considering it a reliable fact that the Camellia constitutes a meaningful clue. The above are the reasons I went on secret reconnaissance of the Camellia. Fortunately the driver Toyama is a good-natured fellow and since he has a satisfactory history as an employee of the Camellia for the time being, and though I do not have a proper letter of introduction, his name will be very helpful to me in getting information.

  BUT THAT was all fake. It was still twelve minutes until the fourteenth of February. There was still one fourth of the day’s time left until dawn. The preparations seemed too perfect, but there was no call to act like a heady schoolboy on a picnic nor to devise Tashiro’s kind of vicious, irresponsible talk. The contents of my report would not change were I to wait six hours … ten hours. Furthermore, I did not need to fear meeting death within six hours, and tomorrow, if after my search of the Camellia I wanted to visit her place as quickly as possible, there was no better excuse than this report. Whatever the meaning of the un sightly striped curtains, I must be able to pass the barrier openly. In any event the harvest in terms of information would probably fill several lines of my report and I had absolutely no need to feel ashamed. It is self-evident that every night has its morning.

  In the little apartment room that I used only as sleeping quarters and where I lived my unaccustomed solitary life, the night was as slow in falling as the day was in rising. I set the hands of my alarm clock at a few minutes before five o’clock, wound it up, and placed it just out of reach on the window ledge; I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the mah-jong players on the second floor and crawled into my cool bed, which because of the whisky I had spilled began to stink more than I did myself. From among the nude photos I had taken from Tashiro, I chose one which, though not characteristic, best showed the woman’s femaleness and placed it side by side with the picture of the husband on the table by the bed. As I sipped my whisky straight from a small bottle I concentrated intensely on the relationship between the two photos. The somewhat elongated face of the man, suggestive of an enthusiastic type, was slightly asymmetrical. The surface of the face seemed rough, perhaps due to the splotches of color and not to the roughness of the skin … evidently a type given to allergies. The right eye was strong and gave a feeling of willfulness, but the left one drooped at the corner, and had a conspicuous sag in the lid, giving a kind of sorrowful, doglike expression. The long, thin nose was bent slightly to the left. The lips joined in an almost straight line, as if drawn by a ruler. The upper lip was thin and nervous, but the lower was heavy and calm. To the left of the mouth were some hairs skipped by the razor. The main impression I had had up to now was of a businessman’s temperament, but tonight—perhaps it was my own fancy—the face had taken on the cast of a visionary. I felt no hostility or resistance, but I could not believe that a real man would materialize and speak to me. The face was one that was best suited to the present pose, as if he had been born as an image on a piece of negative paper. A blurred line of light ran diagonally across the background, perhaps a part of a building gleaming in soft beams of sunlight, or an elevated toll road.

  In the other picture, a woman’s hips, naked, flesh-colored, and broad, were set against a background of solid black. Broad they were, but although they filled the whole picture the hips themselves gave the feeling of being rather small-boned. The form made me think of something. Yes, a loquat … a weak-looking, deformed loquat … a cross between a loquat and a pear … a pellucid hemisphere slightly tinged with green below, perhaps because the color of the carpeting on the floor was not a pure black. A cleft underneath ended in the swelling at the tip of the lumbar vertebra. The inside was boldly colored a dark brown and resembled the dampness of mucous membranes. The upper half was an opaque white faintly tinged with a soft pink. The opacity was perhaps due to the downy hair and maybe the white too was a diffused reflection caused by the down. Because the subject was bent far over toward the front, from my viewpoint only the planes of the protuberances of the spinal column, in rows like clusters of old tombs buried in the sand, were the color of scorched flour, polished in texture. The color disturbed me strangely.

  Downy hair like expensive velvet, so soft and fine as to be almost invisible. The fine-textured skin of a young boy with a touch of brown. Of course, even though one might have the highest technical competence, color film was incapable of reproducing exactly the actual tones. At this point I had no intention of rejecting Tashiro’s confession, but if I was again suspicious of a lie based on another lie, it was not at all imposible that the first lie had become true. Moreover, it was true that she herself recognized that her husband was crazy about color photography. The possibility that this nude picture had actually been taken by the husband could really not be ruled out. Since I was suspicious of the way Tashiro had got excited and took back what he had said before, there was probably some question as to how he had come by the photos, When I thought about it—I do not know whether such analysis is possible—on the husband’s face creases characteristic of a peeping Tom seemed to have been etched. The inhabitant of an upside-down world, who could not believe in the existence of something until he had all alone completely absorbed the object into himself.

  Thus, I still had reservations. In the first place, I wondered whether Tashiro had the know-how to use a wide-angle lens. Furthermore, there was the album—The Meaning of Memories. In it she had been composedly aware of being photographed and had even put on a performance: the picture of her, dressed in her peignoir, through which the contours of her body were visible. (Was it out of disinterest or absentmindedness, was she fully aware of what she was doing, or was it out of natural coquetry that she had calmly permitted herself to be exposed to my eyes as she did?) Yes, it was quite possible. The model in this picture was his wife, my client herself.

  I had grown stiff. Leaving only the picture of the woman, I put the husband’s photo aside. Although I would have to be up early in the morning tomorrow, I had without being aware of it finished off a small bottle of whisky. The radio continued ceaselessly playing American folk songs. Under the blankets my body at last had gotten warm, and less and l
ess was I able to take my eyes from the loquat. In my fancies she had almost become a young girl. The crevice in the loquat was glistening and moist, like the membrane between the toes of a frog. Certainly a very short, crimson dress would suit her well. She overlapped and was inextricably involved—precisely like the Picasso reproduction in her room—with my impression of the eccentric girl who helped in my wife’s shop. I was an acrobat indefatigably repeating my dangerous act, almost falling, on an absolutely safe rope stretched over level ground. How would it be if I took her with me to my wife’s shop to order a dress? Actually, I seemed to recall her saying she wanted to find a job. If I could get them to take her at my wife’s place, the membrane between the frog’s toes would be even more beautiful—like purple rubber. What was broken? What was left? Again the usual face appeared in the veneer ceiling printed with the straight-grain cypress wood … a laughing moon … why was the dream I had a couple of times every year, where I was pursued by a laughing full moon, so frightening? It was still a puzzle I could not understand no matter how I racked my brains.

  4:56 A.M. Thinly, like emery paper, the ringing of the alarm clock impinged on my senses. My mouth was dry, and a thick phlegm stuck in my throat, making it impossible to smoke. Rather than a hangover, I seemed still to have last night’s inebriation; no matter how much cold water I dashed over my face, my eyes felt as hot as after a number of headstands, and no matter how I blew my nose it simply would not stop running.

  However, I had already entered my arrangements for today in the report. I could only act as if they were accomplished. The smallish room with almost no furniture gave me the feeling of being embarrassingly large. Perhaps it was due to the cold. Turning on the gas, I placed my two hands on the kettle to gather up its warmth. I would set out immediately after I had had a cup of strong coffee. If I left the apartment at 5:30, I would get to the housing development on the hill by 6:10. If I got my car back and made a couple of passes in front of the Camellia to check the lay of the land and then went in, it would be about 6:30, just as I had written in the report.