“Kevin?” said Madam Lim.
The figure cocked its head to the side. It blinked once, twice, at the woman’s steady approach. Its gills flapped, revealing a layer of soft, pink flesh.
“I can call Ahab,” said Ms Neo.
I pointed towards the door. “Take her and go.”
“What?”
“Leave,” I said. “Now.” I kept my eyes fixed on Mr Lim as I heard Ms Neo grab Madam Lim, and force her out of the room. And then the door slammed shut.
I took a moment to assess my surroundings. It was a nothing sort of room, and here I was, confronted with the creature Mr Lim had become. I suddenly became aware of how alone I was in this world, and how that loneliness had been a result of the things I had done to myself. And now here I was, after years of work and neglect. Here was my devil.
The figure twitched again. I thought of many things at that moment. I thought of Madam Lim, outside with Ms Neo. I thought of Kawako. I thought of her mother—my late wife. For a second, I allowed myself to question everything I knew, everything I had believed in: maybe there really wasn’t a bead inside any of us, worthy of taking in the first place. Perhaps all this was mere superstition. I wouldn’t know what I’d see, anyway, if somebody had taken that bead and broken it. I held on to this particular thought as the figure on the chair stopped moving—and then leapt forward.
3
THE WOMAN ACROSS THE RIVER
JULY 2012
CHIBA MARI
I
The café was warm and bright, as it had been throughout the rainy season.
This was a place I had frequented several times over the past week; three times, in fact, and each time with a different person. The first time I came, I was drawn, quite rightly, by the dark blue awning that hung from the eaves of the storefront, the name of the café printed on it in large, white characters. Here the river was narrower: a large and deep canal. A muddy odour rose from its waters.
There was a great sense of calm to the place, even when it was at its busiest. Frames of pressed flowers and dried twigs decorated the beige-coloured walls, as leafy potted ferns hung unassumingly from the ceiling. And I grew to admire the café’s assortment of cakes and baked goods, neatly displayed in a glass case. Bags of coffee beans and tea leaves for sale were artfully arranged to the side.
Only a handful of people were in the café today, scattered across the dozen tables or so. It was a small space, made intimate by the friendliness of its staff. An old couple sat in a corner while a high school student occupied another, plugged into his music player as he read a book. A man with dreadlocks leant back against his chair as he read the paper. There was no music in this café, no soundtrack: only the sound of cups laid down on their saucers, as well as the surprising hiss of the steamer, located behind the cash register. The flap of the newspaper, as the man with dreadlocks flipped a page. Once in a while I could hear a murmuring or two, coming from the kitchen, as members of the staff passed messages to one another. The old couple raised their voices for a brief moment, complaining about taxes.
I took a seat beside the storefront window, with a view of the cherry trees and the dark green bushes, planted beside the railings that ran along the river. Outside, a gentle rain poured over this seemingly remote part of the city. I looked at my watch and noted the hour.
One forty-seven, I said to myself.
I still had time.
•
This whole thing was my agent’s idea. The plan was to seat myself at the designated table beside the storefront window, and wait for a person to arrive at an appointed time. The person would then come and sit opposite me, and proceed to tell me a tale. Whether the tale was true or not was none of my concern: all I had to do, my agent said to me, was listen.
This unique arrangement had been brought about by rather unfortunate circumstances. I have been a novelist for nearly fifteen years now, and a recent winner of one of Japan’s top literary prizes. Needless to say, it’s not just my livelihood that depends on my ability to write: a core team of editors and publishers have worked tirelessly to support me, to whom I feel bound by obligation to do my part. Lately, however, I’ve developed an issue with my writing: for the past year or so, I found myself unable to produce a single sentence worthy of a new novel.
It wasn’t self-doubt, nor was it fatigue—I just found myself completely devoid of inspiration. I was like a well with no water left to draw, and after a year of struggling, I couldn’t shy away from the problem any longer. My agent, Mr Shimao, naturally became concerned, and thus came up with this rather unusual plan. I asked him point-blank over the phone if he had ever done this for his other writers before, and he said that he had. “You’re not the only client of mine who has run into a bad case of writer’s block,” he said. “This thing happens to everyone. But not everybody will admit to it.”
I then asked if he was sure his plan would work. “You seem pretty confident about it,” I said.
“I am confident, yes. It always seems to do the trick. I guess it’s got something to do with the people, or maybe it’s got to do with the café. Either way, it works.”
“And these people,” I said. “How do you find them, exactly?”
“I just do,” he replied. “I am more than just a literary agent, Ms Chiba.”
I asked him what else he did then, if not merely being an agent. He said he was also a specialist.
“I see,” I said, taking note of the term. “And I’m supposed to get inspiration from the stories these people will tell me?”
“That is the plan, yes. But like I said—how exactly you’ll gain inspiration is something neither one of us will ever know.”
I remained doubtful. “But what if I don’t like what I hear?”
“Just drop me a message,” my agent said. “I’ll arrange for another person to come by.”
I was nervous, the first time I went to the café. I sat at the designated table and waited for my person to arrive. It was a teenager, I discovered to my surprise: she was dressed in her high school uniform as she walked into the café, established eye contact with me, and sat on the opposite side of my table. She began her tale with a dream she had one week ago—a dream that had haunted her since.
“I dreamt I was in class, busy making arrangements of some sort. Our teacher told us that we could leave whenever we were ready, although I wasn’t sure what it was that we had to be ready for. And then I learnt that there was a game of survival, apparently, happening right outside our classroom. A life-or-death kind of situation. The moment we were done getting ready, we were to step outside and participate in this game, after which the winner would be the last one remaining.”
“That sounds scary,” I said.
She remained rather still. “Armed with this new piece of information, I realised then why we were all so busy, packing our bags and checking all of our items. None of us wanted to step outside of the classroom and be killed, just because we were unprepared. Suddenly, however, the lights in our classroom went off.”
“They did?”
She nodded. “Everybody screamed. We screamed twice. The first scream was timed at precisely three seconds: we screamed out of fear, it was so dark. Nobody knew why the lights had gone off. The second time we screamed, however, was out of realisation. This one lasted four seconds.”
I asked her what all of her classmates had “realised”. She looked down at the table.
“We realised that the game had already begun—that whatever our teacher had told us was a lie. The game waited for no one; it wasn’t going to start when we stepped outside. The game was going to happen right in the middle of our classroom. Next thing I knew, I felt a hand grab my wrist and a voice whisper in my ear: This I can do.”
“‘This I can do’?” I repeated. The girl in her high school uniform nodded her head once more.
“Even now I still wonder what that was supposed to mean,” she said.
After the girl left the café I called my agent,
and told him that she wasn’t the right fit for me. There was a brief pause over the phone. “I see,” he said. “It’s disappointing news, but I’m not going to ask why. I’ll fix you up with somebody else.”
•
A grating sound came from a corner of the café: the old couple had risen from their chairs. They moved, slowly, towards the cash register. They paid for their food and the service.
“It was lovely as usual,” the couple said, to the staff manning the counter, who thanked them and wished to see them again. A waiter then retrieved their umbrella from the stands, and opened it for the couple just before they left. A bell, hanging by the entrance, jingled as the door swung open.
The man with the dreadlocks raised his hand. “Could I have water, please?” he said quietly. The high school student, still reading his book, bobbed his head to an unknown beat.
A waitress approached me.
“Excuse me,” she said. She seemed embarrassed. “Are you Chiba Mari, by any chance?”
She had a very pleasant smile, I noticed. The tag on her front said Lisa. I told her that I was.
“Ah!” said the waitress, holding her hands together. “You have been here so often the past week, I kept wondering if it was really you or not. My younger brother is a big fan of yours.”
“Oh, thank you,” I said. “Please tell your brother I am grateful for his support.”
The waitress nodded and asked if there was anything I’d like to order. “I’ve noticed that you prefer tea instead of coffee. Would you like to try a pot of our barley tea?”
“That would be nice,” I said. “And maybe a pot of chrysanthemum tea as well. I’m currently expecting a friend, you see, who should be here any time soon.”
“Most certainly,” the waitress said, and bowed. “I’ll come back with your order in just a moment.”
Lisa walked back to the counter. Just then, a lady in her late forties entered the café: she was impeccably attired, dressed in a white blouse and a pair of knee-length culottes, dyed blood orange. She held a small collapsible umbrella in one hand and an expensive-looking handbag in the other. Her hair, tied into a tight ponytail, fell down her back in a single, straight line.
“Hello,” she said in English. “One iced Americano, please. To go.”
The staff looked confused. “To go?” they repeated among themselves. Eventually they figured it out, and handed the lady her takeaway cup of iced coffee. The lady then thanked them and walked out of the café: she sat on the bench outside, beneath the shelter of the eaves and the blue awning. She sat with her back pressed against the glass of the window, the only thing that separated her from my table. I checked my watch once more.
“I still have time,” I told myself; it was five minutes to two.
She came in ten minutes later, around five past the hour. This young woman was my fourth this week, after I had informed my agent that I was losing faith in his plan. “Don’t worry,” Mr Shimao had told me over lunch one day. “You will like the next one.”
The young woman’s name was Kurosawa Akiko. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and a set of full but delicate lips. Her face was long and cut like a European’s, complemented further by earnest, deep-set eyes and a row of small, nicely arranged teeth. She was attractive, most certainly, but in a chiselled sort of way. I wondered, briefly, if a person such as her could tell me a story worth hearing. Akiko introduced herself as a salarywoman in her late twenties, and a fairly new resident of the area. The lady, seated outside, appeared to be blocking Akiko’s view of her own apartment; apparently she lived right across the river.
“If you look over her shoulder,” said Akiko, “you can more or less find it.”
I asked if she lived alone, or if she lived with her family.
“I live with my best friend now. Kawako. I’ve known her since my first year at university. I moved in after her father passed away.”
I leant back in my chair. Lisa, the waitress, came back with our pots of tea.
“I saw the summer come once,” Akiko said, pouring out the chrysanthemum tea. “I won’t ever forget it. It was the fourth of June, a rather dry and sunny day, during which one could hear the first cries of the cicadas. I remember reading the weather report that afternoon: nothing but rain for the rest of the week. It was such a pity, I thought—that we’d only get one real day of sunshine.”
She set her pot down.
“The wake for Kawako’s father was to be held that day, at a small temple nearby. His name was Haruhito Daisuke. Apparently he caught something fatal while he was on a business trip to Singapore last month. Kawako, of course, urged her father to return as quickly as possible. Just forty minutes before the plane was due to land, however, he was found dead in his seat.”
I poured some tea for myself. “What killed him, exactly?” I asked. Akiko raised her cup to her lips, and took a quick sip.
“It was organ failure, according to the coroner’s report. It began in the colon, before spreading to the rest of his organs: his kidneys, the liver, the heart. It was a lot like cancer in its later stages, spreading upwards like a poison. As to what brought this condition about, the coroner had not a clue.”
I set my pot down. “That’s really hard to believe,” I said. “To have no clue whatsoever? Over something so deadly?”
Akiko almost seemed to laugh. “I posed the same question to Kawako, and all she said to me was, ‘It was a little strange, I guess, from the way you put it.’” She shook her head. “I told her it didn’t make sense—nothing did. ‘Doesn’t everything happen for a reason?’ I said to her.”
“And what did she say to that?” I asked.
“She said to me, ‘Perhaps. I like to think so too.’”
A lot of things came together for Akiko that day, on the fourth of June. More than a hundred or so people had attended the wake, even though it was meant to be a relatively simple affair. There were friends of Mr Haruhito’s, his extended family, and even his former clients. The whole lot of them came in a steady stream, crowding the main chamber of the temple.
“There was a large azalea tree, planted in the middle of the courtyard,” Akiko told me. After taking note of the wide shadow it had cast, she elected to sit out of the main chamber’s proceedings and stand beneath the shade of the tree, where she could be on her own for a while. It was not long, however, until she saw a man step out of the chamber. He joined her at the tree.
“It was Nobuo, I realised: an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in six years.” Akiko shook her head. “‘It’s been a long time,’ he said to me, and I could not believe it. I said to him, ‘It has, hasn’t it?’”
“When was the last you had seen him?”
“It would have to be our graduation ceremony, at the end of our fourth year at Waseda. We promised to keep in touch afterwards, although that never happened in the end. We were too swept up in our new jobs to make any sort of effort. The most I ever saw of him since was his name in the paper, where he wrote articles that covered the local crime beat. And then there he was, standing beside me in a black suit and a skinny tie, at a wake for his uncle.”
“His uncle?”
Akiko nodded. “Nobuo is Kawako’s cousin,” she explained. “The second child of Haruhito Daisuke’s older sister.”
I drank from my cup of tea. “And I’m assuming Kawako went to Waseda as well?”
She nodded once more. “The three of us—Kawako, Nobuo and myself—all studied at Waseda at the same time. Each of us had different majors, but we were all freshmen at the same university, and had formed a trio of sorts. But our trio eventually fell apart, just before the start of our second year, so that the next time I saw him was during our graduation, when we were bound to part again.” She smiled. “All this happened a long time ago.”
“I see,” I said. I was aware, in a sense, that we were deviating somewhat from the present narrative, and I wanted to refocus her attention. “So you and Nobuo were standing beneath the tree, yes?”
&nb
sp; “Yes,” said Akiko. “Beneath the tree, in the courtyard.”
“Was it awkward, starting a conversation with him? Or did the both of you talk as if you were old friends?”
Akiko shook her head. “It was the former situation, unfortunately. After a brief exchange we lapsed into a long, uncomfortable silence. I remember feeling the heat at the time, prickling at the edges of my scalp.” She scratched at her hairline. “The afternoon was so still and windless, I could hear the final strains of the monk’s sutra. His voice was distant, like the tolling of a bell.”
I ran the sentence over in my brain. “That’s a very poetic thing to say,” I remarked.
Akiko looked at me. For such a cute and harmless-looking girl, her eyes almost seemed to harden at the compliment. She thanked me, regardless, and continued with her story.
“Kawako appeared, of course, dressed in a simple black dress and black leather pumps. She hadn’t tied her hair up that day, so it fell down her back, all the way down to her bum. It was all curly and wild, the way it had always been.
“She found me and Nobuo, standing beneath the azalea tree. She came up to us and said that it’d been a long time. Kawako couldn’t recall when the three of us had last stood together like that, and neither could I, to be honest. I don’t think Nobuo could either.”
“And then?”
“And then Kawako began to tell us about a dream she’d had the night before,” Akiko replied. “I asked her what kind of dream it was, and she said that she had been in the air, watching a swimming pool from above, like a bird coasting on the wind. In the middle of this pool was a young man, floating on his back, completely naked.”
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