“Anyway …,” Kumi said. She turned to Tengo. “Mr. Kawana definitely wanted to be cremated in his NHK uniform. I think we should help him make his wish come true. Don’t you think so?”
Tengo took the bag containing the uniform and went back to the room. Kumi Adachi came with him and made up the bed. There were fresh sheets, with a still-starchy fragrance, a new blanket, a new bed cover, and a new pillow. Once all this was arranged, the bed his father had slept in looked totally transformed. Tengo randomly thought of Kumi’s thick, luxuriant pubic hair.
“Your father was in a coma for so long,” Kumi said as she smoothed out the wrinkles in the sheets, “but I don’t think he was completely unconscious.”
“Why do you say that?” Tengo asked.
“Well, he would sometimes send messages to somebody.”
Tengo was standing at the window gazing outside, but he spun around and looked at Kumi. “Messages?”
“He would tap on the bed frame. His hand would hang down from the bed and he would knock on the frame, like he was sending Morse code. Like this.”
Kumi lightly tapped the wooden bed frame with her fist.
“Don’t you think it sounds like a signal?”
“That’s not a signal.”
“Then what is it?”
“He’s knocking on a door,” Tengo said, his voice dry. “The front door of a house.”
“I guess that makes sense. It does sound like someone knocking on a door.” She narrowed her eyes to slits. “So are you saying that even after he lost consciousness he was still making his rounds to collect fees?”
“Probably,” Tengo said. “Somewhere inside his head.”
“It’s like that story of the dead soldier still clutching his trumpet,” Kumi said, impressed.
There was nothing to say to this, so Tengo stayed silent.
“Your father must have really liked his job. Going around collecting NHK subscription fees.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of liking or disliking it,” Tengo said.
“Then what?”
“It was the one thing he was best at.”
“Hmm. I see,” Kumi said. She pondered this. “But that might very well be the best way to live your life.”
“Maybe so,” Tengo said as he looked out at the pine windbreak. It might really be so.
“What’s the one thing you can do best?”
“I don’t know,” Tengo said, looking straight at her. “I honestly have no idea.”
CHAPTER 22
Ushikawa
THOSE EYES LOOKED RATHER FULL OF PITY
Tengo showed up at the entrance to the apartment building on Sunday evening, at six fifteen. As soon as he stepped outside he halted and gazed around, as if looking for something. First to the right, then the left. Then from left to right. He looked up at the sky, then down at his feet. But nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary, as far as he was concerned.
Ushikawa didn’t follow him then. Tengo was carrying nothing with him. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his unpleated chinos. He had on a high-neck sweater and a well-worn olive-green corduroy jacket, and his hair was unruly. A thick paperback book peeped out of a jacket pocket. Ushikawa figured he must be going out to eat dinner in a nearby restaurant. Fine, he decided, just let him go where he wants.
Tengo had several classes he had to teach on Monday. Ushikawa had found this out by phoning the cram school. Yes, a female office worker had told him, Mr. Kawana will be teaching his regular classes from the beginning of the week. Good. From tomorrow, then, Tengo was finally going back to his normal schedule. Knowing him, he probably wouldn’t be going far this evening. (If Ushikawa had followed him that night, he would have found out that Tengo was on his way to meet with Komatsu at the bar in Yotsuya.)
Just before eight, Ushikawa threw on his pea coat, muffler, and knit hat and, looking around him as he did, hurried out of the building. Tengo had not yet returned at this point. If he was really eating somewhere in the neighborhood, it was taking longer than it should. If Ushikawa was unlucky, he might actually bump into him on his way back. But he was willing to run the risk, since there was something he absolutely had to do, and it had to be done now, at this time of night.
He relied on his memory of the route as he turned several corners, passed a few semi-familiar landmarks, and though he hesitated a few times, unsure of the direction, he eventually arrived at the playground. The strong north wind of the previous day had died down, and it was warm for a December evening, but as expected, the park was deserted. Ushikawa double-checked that there was no one else around, then climbed up the slide. He sat down on top of the slide, leaned back against the railing, and looked up at the sky. The moons were there, almost in the same location as the night before. A bright moon, two-thirds full. Not a single cloud nearby. And beside it, a small green, misshapen moon snuggled close.
So it’s no mistake, then, Ushikawa thought. He exhaled and shook his head. He wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. Two moons, one big, one small, were definitely visible there, above the leafless zelkova tree. The two moons looked like they had stayed put since last night, waiting for him to return to the top of the slide. They knew that he would be back. As if prearranged, the silence around them was suggestive. And the moons wanted Ushikawa to share that silence with them. You can’t tell anybody else about this, they warned. They held an index finger, covered with a light dusting of ash, to their mouths to make sure he didn’t say a thing.
As he sat there, Ushikawa moved his facial muscles this way and that, to make sure there wasn’t something unnatural or unusual about this feeling he was having. He found nothing unnatural about it. For better or for worse, this was his normal face.
Ushikawa always saw himself as a realist, and he actually was. Metaphysical speculation wasn’t his thing. If something really existed, you had to accept it as a reality, whether or not it made sense or was logical. That was his basic way of thinking. Principles and logic didn’t give birth to reality. Reality came first, and the principles and logic followed. So, he decided, he would have to begin by accepting this reality: that there were two moons in the sky.
The rest of it he would think about later. He sat there, trying not to think, completely absorbed in observing the two moons. He tried to get used to the scene. I have to accept these guys as they are, he said to himself. He couldn’t explain why something like this could be possible, but it wasn’t a question he needed to delve into deeply at this point. The question was how to deal with it. That was the real issue. To do so he needed to start by accepting what he was seeing, without questioning the logic of it.
Ushikawa was there for some fifteen minutes. He sat, leaning against the railing of the slide, hardly moving a muscle. Like a diver slowly acclimatizing his body to a change in water pressure, he let himself be bathed in the light from these moons, let it seep into his skin. Ushikawa’s instinct told him this was important.
Finally this small man with a misshapen head stood up, climbed down from the slide, and, completely caught up in indescribable musings, walked back to the apartment building. Things looked a little different from when he came. Maybe it’s the moonlight, he told himself. That moonlight is gradually displacing how things appear. Thanks to this, he took the wrong turn a number of times. Before he walked inside the building he looked up at the third floor to check that Tengo’s lights were still off. Tengo was still out. It didn’t seem likely that he had just gone out to eat someplace nearby. Maybe he was meeting somebody? And maybe that somebody was Aomame. Or Fuka-Eri. Have I let a golden opportunity slip through my fingers? he wondered. But it was too late to worry about it now. It was too risky to tail Tengo every time he went out. Tengo only had to spot him once to bring the whole operation crashing down.
Ushikawa went back to his apartment and removed his coat, muffler, and hat. He opened a tin of corned beef, spread some on a roll, and ate it, standing up in the kitchen. He drank a container of lukewarm canned coffee. Not
hing had any taste. He could feel the texture of the food, but he couldn’t taste anything. Whether this was the fault of the food and drink or his own sense of taste, he couldn’t say. Maybe it could be blamed on those two moons. He heard a faint doorbell ring somewhere. A pause, then it rang again. He didn’t care. It wasn’t his chime ringing, but somebody else’s, far away, on a different floor.
He finished his sandwich, drained the coffee, then leisurely smoked a cigarette to bring his mind back to reality. He reconfirmed what it was he had to do here, and sat down behind the camera at the window. He switched on the electric space heater and warmed his hands in front of the orange light. It was Sunday evening, not yet nine. Traffic into and out of the building was sparse, but Ushikawa was determined to see what time Tengo returned.
A moment later a woman in a black down jacket came out of the entrance, a woman he had never seen before. She had on a gray muffler up to her mouth, dark-framed glasses, and a baseball cap—the perfect getup to hide yourself from prying eyes. She was empty-handed and was walking briskly, taking long strides. Instinctively Ushikawa switched on the camera’s motor drive and snapped three quick shots. He had to find out where she was going, but by the time he had gotten to his feet, the woman had reached the road and vanished into the night. Ushikawa frowned and gave up. At the pace she was walking, by the time he got his shoes on and chased after her, it would be too late to catch up.
He did an instant replay in his mind of what he had just seen. The woman was about five feet six inches tall, and wore narrow blue jeans and white sneakers. All her clothes looked strangely brand-new. He would put her at mid-twenties to about thirty. Her hair was stuffed in her collar, so he couldn’t tell how long it was. The puffy down jacket made it hard to tell what sort of figure she had, but judging from her legs, she must be fairly slim. Her good posture and quick pace indicated she was young and healthy. She must be into sports. All these characteristics fit the Aomame that Ushikawa knew about, though he couldn’t make too many assumptions. Still, she seemed to be very cautious. You could tell how tense her whole body was, like an actress being stalked by paparazzi.
Let’s suppose for the moment, he thought, that this was Aomame.
She came here to see Tengo, but Tengo was out somewhere. The lights in his place were off. She came to see him, but there was no answer when she knocked, so she gave up and left. Maybe she was the one who had been ringing the doorbell. But something about this didn’t make sense. Aomame was being pursued, and should be trying to stay out of sight. Why wouldn’t she have called Tengo ahead of time to make sure he would be at home? That way she wouldn’t unnecessarily expose herself to danger.
Ushikawa mulled this over as he sat in front of the camera, but he couldn’t come up with a working hypothesis that made any sense. The woman’s actions—disguising herself in this non-disguise, leaving the place where she was hiding—didn’t fit what Ushikawa knew about her. She was more cautious and careful than that. The whole thing left him befuddled.
Anyhow, he decided he would go to the photo shop near the station tomorrow and develop the film he had taken. This mystery woman should be in the photos.
He kept watch with his camera until past ten, but after the woman left no one else came in or out of the building. The entrance was silent and deserted, like a stage abandoned after a poorly attended performance. Ushikawa was puzzled about Tengo. As far as he knew, he rarely stayed out this late, and he had classes to teach tomorrow. Maybe he had already come home while Ushikawa was out, and had long since gone to bed?
After ten Ushikawa realized how exhausted he was. He could barely keep his eyes open. This was unusual, since he normally kept late hours. Usually he could stay up as late as he needed. But tonight, sleep was bearing down on him from above, like the stone lid of an ancient coffin.
Maybe I looked at those two moons for too long, he thought, absorbed too much of their light. Their vague afterimage remained in his eyes. Their dark silhouettes numbed the soft part of his brain, like a bee stinging and numbing a caterpillar, then laying eggs on the surface of its body. The bee larvae use the paralyzed caterpillar as a convenient source of food and devour it as soon as they’re born. Ushikawa frowned and shook this ominous image from his mind.
Fine, he decided. I can’t wait here forever for Tengo to get back. When he gets back is entirely up to him, and he’ll just go to sleep as soon as he does. He doesn’t have anywhere else to come back to besides this apartment. Most likely.
Ushikawa listlessly tugged off his trousers and sweater and, stripped to his long-sleeved shirt and long johns, slipped into his sleeping bag. He curled up and soon fell asleep. It was a deep sleep, almost coma-like. As he was falling asleep he thought he heard a knock at the door. But by then his consciousness had shifted over to another world and he couldn’t distinguish one thing from another. When he tried, his body creaked. So he kept his eyes shut, didn’t try to figure out what the sound could mean, and once more sank down into the soft muddy oblivion of sleep.
It was about thirty minutes after Ushikawa fell into this deep sleep that Tengo came back home after meeting Komatsu. He brushed his teeth, hung up his jacket—which reeked of cigarette smoke—changed into pajamas, and went to sleep. Until a phone call came at two a.m. telling him that his father was dead.
When Ushikawa awoke, it was past eight a.m., Monday morning, and Tengo was already on the express train to Tateyama, fast asleep to make up for the hours he had missed. Ushikawa sat behind his camera, waiting to catch Tengo on his way to the cram school, but of course he never made an appearance. At one p.m. Ushikawa gave up. He went to a nearby public phone and called the cram school to see if Tengo was teaching his regular classes today.
“Mr. Kawana had a family emergency, so his classes are canceled for today,” the woman on the phone said. Ushikawa thanked her and hung up.
Family emergency? The only family Tengo had was his father. His father must have died. If that was the case, then Tengo would be leaving Tokyo again. Maybe he had already left while I was sleeping. What was wrong with me? I slept so long I missed him.
At any rate, Tengo is now all alone in the world, thought Ushikawa. A lonely man to begin with, he was now even lonelier. Utterly alone. Before he was even two, his mother had been strangled to death at a hot springs resort in Nagano Prefecture. The man who murdered her was never caught. She had left her husband and, with Tengo in tow, had absconded with a young man. Absconded—a quite old-fashioned term. Nobody uses it anymore, but for a certain kind of action it’s the perfect term. Why the man killed her wasn’t clear. It wasn’t even clear if that man had been the one who murdered her. She had been strangled at night with the belt from her robe, in a room at an inn. The man she had been with was gone. It was hard not to suspect him. When Tengo’s father got the news, he came from Ichikawa and took back his infant son.
Maybe I should have told Tengo about this, Ushikawa thought. He has a right to know. But he told me he didn’t want to hear anything about his mother from the likes of me, so I didn’t say anything. Well, what are you going to do? That’s not my problem, it’s his.
At any rate, whether Tengo is here or not, I have to keep up my surveillance of this place, Ushikawa told himself. Last night was that mysterious woman who looked a lot like Aomame. I have no proof it’s her, but there’s a strong possibility it is. That’s what my misshapen head is telling me. And if that woman is Aomame, she’ll be back to visit Tengo before long. She doesn’t know yet that his father has died. These were Ushikawa’s deductions as he mulled over the situation. Tengo must have gotten the news about his father during the night and set off early this morning. And there must be some reason why the two of them couldn’t get in touch by phone. Which means she would definitely be coming back here. Something was so important to her that she would come here, despite the danger. This time he was going to find out where she was going.
Doing so might also begin to explain why there were two moons. This was a fascinating que
stion that Ushikawa was dying to solve. But really it was of secondary importance. His job was to find out where Aomame was hiding, and hand her over, nice and neat, to the creepy Sakigake duo. Until I do so, whether there are two moons or only one, he decided, I have to be realistic. That has always been my strong point. It’s what defines me.
Ushikawa went to the photo store near the station and handed over five thirty-six-exposure rolls of film. Once the film had been processed and printed, he went to a nearby chain restaurant and looked through them in chronological order while eating a meal of chicken curry. Most were photos of people he was now familiar with. There were three people he was most interested in: Fuka-Eri and Tengo, and last night’s mystery woman.
Fuka-Eri’s eyes made him nervous. Even in the photo she was staring straight into his face. No doubt about it, Ushikawa thought. She knew she was being observed. She probably knew about the hidden camera, too, and that he was taking photos. Her clear eyes saw through everything, and they didn’t like what Ushikawa was up to. That unwavering gaze stabbed mercilessly to the depths of his heart. There was no excuse whatsoever for the activities he was engaged in. At the same time, though, she wasn’t condemning him, or despising him. In a sense, those gorgeous eyes forgave him. No, not forgiveness, Ushikawa decided, rethinking it. Those eyes pitied him. She knew how ugly Ushikawa’s actions were, and she felt compassion for him.
Looking at her eyes, he had felt a sharp stab of pain between his ribs, as if a thick knitting needle had been thrust in. He felt like a twisted, ugly person. So what? he thought. I really am twisted and ugly. The natural, transparent pity that colored her eyes sank deep into his heart. He would have much preferred to be openly accused, reviled, denounced, and convicted. Much better even to be beaten senseless with a baseball bat. That he could stand. But not this.
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