Kappa Quartet

by Daryl Qilin Yam

  “Let’s go, kids,” he said.

  The train picked up speed as the three of us settled into a row of seats. The neighbourhood rolled past our windows, all low-lying suburbia and the occasional large building. The scenery looked almost alien, especially at night, as I rarely travelled north on the Tobu Skytree Line. Junpei asked Takao if he had waited long at the station.

  “Not really,” he said. “I had A Love Supreme playing, from the start of the first movement, and the third had just come to an end. That much I know.”

  Junpei asked Takao how many movements there were. Takao said there were four.

  “The first part is ‘Acknowledgement’. The second ‘Resolution’, and the third ‘Pursuance’.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “‘Psalm’,” answered Takao.

  Junpei grew silent. He had a small frown on his forehead. “Were you at the park by the river again?”

  “As usual,” he replied. Takao had chanced upon it a week ago, located on the east side of the Horikiri station; the park was a small section of a larger one that ran down the coast of the Arakawa River. As a kappa in his late thirties, he considered himself more than lucky to be in such proximity to a body of water. He loved the feeling of its sharp breeze, cutting across the top of his head, and he loved the indescribable warmth it gave him, at a time of the year when it was getting cold again. He’d go there whenever he was free, just to spend some time alone.

  The train stopped at Kitasenju station.

  “Did you spend a lot of time there?” Junpei asked. “Or was it just for a while?”

  “Around thirty minutes,” said Takao. “I had to leave because I was hungry.”

  The train moved on. It left the neighbourhood behind, all the lights and the activity of the city centre, as it ran across a bridge spanning the breadth of the Arakawa. The three of us fell silent as we turned around in our seats, and watched for those few seconds as the passage of water stretched before our eyes, dark yet alive in the night.

  “A penny for your thoughts?” asked Takao.

  I looked at him. I mustered a smile.

  “I was just thinking about how long this day has been.”

  He smiled in return. “Did anything in particular happen at the café today?”

  I shook my head. “Not really,” I said. “It was just really busy, even though in reality nothing happened at all. I feel like I’ve been running on a treadmill all day, and my body is still buzzing, even after getting off the machine.”

  Takao laid a hand on my shoulder, and squeezed it. “Remember how enthusiastic you used to be,” he said. “Talking endlessly about the food, or that writer friend of yours.”

  I kept my gaze on the passing view. “It’s just one of those days, Takao. I’m sure you understand.”

  Eventually we arrived at Nishiarai. The three of us stepped outside. Takao told us that the restaurant was located on the west side of the station, somewhere in the vicinity of a hospital and an elementary school. According to his friend, we should be able to find it once we catch sight of both places.

  “Are you saying you don’t have an address, Takao?”

  Takao smiled at Junpei. “That’s right, kiddo.”

  “No way,” he said. He looked really unimpressed. “You’re lying, Takao. Look at this place! It’s just full of houses. There’s no way we can find a restaurant, not here in the dark.”

  “Kiddo,” said Takao. “Calm down, okay? We are not in the dark, you hear me?” He then pointed at a streetlamp. “This is the light,” he said. “Learn how to follow it.”

  Junpei stared at his back as Takao walked onwards ahead of us. He then tugged at my arm. “Hey, hey, older sis. Do something about him.”

  I patted his hand. “Just roll with it,” I whispered to him. “You’ve got me at least.”

  We walked past a house. I could hear the sounds of somebody washing dishes in the sink, the sharp clatter of plates being arranged on a rack. A child calling for its mother. They were sounds of an inner life, a world shut away from prying eyes, and I wondered, for just a moment, if a restaurant of any sort could exist in this neighbourhood at all. And yet there was a small road sign, planted at the corner of an intersection: it pointed the way to Kurihara Elementary School. We followed the arrow on the sign, with only a small, tingling sense of where we were going.

  •

  My mother came to date a man six years her junior in the summer of 2009. I was still a second-year student at university back then, and my mother was a kitchen assistant in an upscale bakery, located in the basement of a department store in Ginza. The man, on the other hand, was a corporate salesman for a multinational corporation, whose headquarters in Japan was based in Tokyo. This man was Junpei’s father.

  According to my mother, Junpei’s father would drop by the bakery every Monday at one thirty, and every Thursday at two thirty, which so happened to coincide with her shifts. Every time he visited the bakery, he would always order a box of egg tarts or strawberry shortcake—goods that he felt he might placate his clients with. It didn’t take long, apparently, for my mother to catch the eye of this particular man. The bakery had an open concept kitchen, the kind with windows through which the customers could observe the bakers hard at work, and my mother, well approaching her fifties, possessed an inexplicable charm and beauty.

  On the day he asked her out for coffee, Junpei’s father informed my mother that although his company was based in Tokyo, his bosses had singled him out to oversee operations in their Sapporo branch. The branch hadn’t been performing very well over the past year or so, and his bosses had decided that a shake-up in the management there was necessary. Although Junpei’s father was excited by the prospect of taking on a more managerial role, he found it a little too lonely: he knew nobody in Hokkaido, having grown up in Tokyo all his life, and he wondered if my mother would like to accompany him there.

  My mother, having never gone on a plane her entire life, was flattered that a younger man like him would ask her for such a favour. She said yes. After three weeks in Hokkaido, my mother came back home a seemingly younger woman, refreshed and rejuvenated by the experience. “I was so happy and in love I almost couldn’t recognise myself,” she said to me. “Everything in Hokkaido looked unreal. It was as though a new life—a life wholly different to the one I’ve always had—awaited me there in Hokkaido. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Not long after their second trip to Hokkaido, my mother announced that she would be getting married to Junpei’s father, and we moved into his house in Adachi city that fall. But it soon became apparent that my stepfather’s job demanded more and more of his time in Hokkaido, and he was far from happy with the idea of leaving his wife alone in the city. And thus, both of our parents would travel up north for months at a time: it was an extended honeymoon of sorts, a long vacation that left me and Junpei to our own devices.

  It helped that us kids were easy-going types, quick to adapt to any situation, although at first I had assumed that Junpei had a rather hard, inflexible personality. Still in his second year at middle school, he was convinced that reading and writing fiction was his life’s calling, and refused to consider doing anything else as a hobby. In time, I realised that it was because Junpei was so set in his ways, so firm he was in his beliefs and in the things he wanted from life, that he had no fear of ever changing no matter what life threw at him. He was like a perfectly smooth stone at the bottom of a river, and for that I envied him greatly.

  Once in a while, I’d receive a call from my mother, telling me how wonderful her life was in Sapporo, going to all sorts of parks and sampling all kinds of cuisine. She even picked up skiing fairly quickly, a sport she had always wanted to try. “It was such a fantasy,” she once said to me, “going down the face of a mountain and then riding back up in a cable car. As though I were in a dream.” During these calls I’d find it hard to break the news that I had dropped out of university, and talked about Junpei’s life instead.

&nb
sp; “He’s now in his final year at middle school, and he’s doing really well,” I said. “He’s become more and more serious about fiction these days, dabbling in a couple of short stories for me to read.” I then told her about an inter-school competition that he’d participated in, just a few weeks ago. One of his submissions had earned him the first prize.

  “Ah, that’s amazing!” my mother said. “Your father and I have been visiting a number of bookstores in the area, trying to find something Junpei has never read before. We think we may have a couple of titles he might enjoy. Does Junpei have a favourite author?”

  The answer was easy. “Chiba Mari,” I told her. “Have you heard of her?”

  “Hmm, I might have. Isn’t she the novelist who did nothing but write the moment she graduated from university? The one who wrote Dining Is West?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “He really respects her. It’s his wish to meet her one day.”

  “That’s nice,” said my mother. She then seemed to pause rather thoughtfully. “Say, Lisa. Do me a favour, all right? I want you to ask Junpei something on my behalf.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I want to know what kind of writer he is. And I’m not talking about the kind of fiction he wants to write—I’m talking about his practice, his habits, his routine. More specifically, I want to ask: does he need music as a stimulant? Or does he need total silence in order to concentrate? That’s what I’ve been wondering lately.”

  Later that evening, I found Junpei in the living room, with his feet under the kotatsu, even though it was the middle of August. In front of him was his laptop, an e-book open across the screen. I asked him if he preferred music or silence whenever he wrote, and he took a while to find an answer to that question.

  “I’m not sure,” he said in reply. “I don’t even think perfect silence is achievable, in any case. But I guess I’ll go with that for now.”

  I got to know Takao two years later, in the summer of 2011. He was a clean-shaven guy, with bags under his eyes and hair that reached down his neck. He had a particularly tall frame, and was built rather burly as well, which made him appear rather impressive from afar. For clothes, Takao didn’t stick to any particular style, but during the cooler months he’d wear a baseball jacket over a plain white tee. Whenever I asked him about the team on his jacket, he’d say that he had no idea. “I’m not a sports guy at all,” he once explained to me. “I just like the material.”

  The first time I heard Takao practice on his saxophone was on a Saturday afternoon, when Junpei and I were both seated in the living room of our house. It was the middle of July. I was casually flipping through the pages of a television guide as Junpei wrestled with a paragraph. It then came as a surprise when the two of us heard that clear, unmistakable sound. It was something I had never heard before, here in Adachi city: the sound of scales and arpeggios, played on a sax.

  Junpei, seated in front of his laptop, stopped writing altogether. “That’s a saxophone, isn’t it?” His gaze was fixed onto the open window, as though he could somehow observe the notes in the air. At the time I had no idea where they might be coming from, or from whom.

  “It is,” I said. “Without a doubt.”

  “Didn’t you play the sax yourself?” he asked, turning around.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A long time ago.” I was part of the concert band, back in high school. “I played the baritone sax for a while, but that got too heavy for me, so I switched to the tenor.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The baritone’s really big, and it’s used to produce the bass. The tenor’s more mid-sized, and is used to provide the harmony. Quite like a supporting role.”

  “And is that a tenor?” Junpei asked, referring to the sound of the sax, coming from outside. We listened as the musician went through his drills. I told him that it was.

  Eventually word got around that the sax player lived in a house just two streets away from ours, according to one of my older neighbours. The guy was a member of a renowned wind orchestra as well. This older neighbour of mine then claimed she had bumped into him two days ago, leaving the supermarket with his instrument case in one hand, a bag of groceries in the other and a hole in the crown of his head, no larger than a five-hundred yen coin. “There’s no mistaking it,” my neighbour said, making a circular gesture over the top of her head. “That man’s a kappa.” She shook her head. “He has a pretty distinct accent as well, so my guess is that he isn’t from Tokyo either.”

  “So you’re saying he’s from somewhere else?”

  She nodded and waved her hand. “Somewhere far away.”

  I met him by chance a few days later, when I went to have dinner with a couple of old friends from high school. It was at a small restaurant within the 1-chome of Yanagihara, famous for its beef bowls, and several of my friends who had moved out of town wanted nothing more than to relive the taste of that beef and onion stir fry. Just before I left, however, I caught sight of a kappa, seated at the corner of the restaurant, an electric hot pot boiling on the table before him. It was a strange sight, especially during the summer—and in a manner of seconds I decided to take a chance, and approached his table. I had nothing to lose, in the final analysis. All I had was a gut feeling: this was the sax player everybody in my neighbourhood had been talking about.

  “Hi there,” I said, seating myself across from him. The hot pot continued to puff and emit steam as it boiled between the two of us. “I noticed you’ve been eating nabe all by yourself.”

  The kappa looked up from his bowl and stared at me.

  “Is that supposed to be bad?” he said, in that strange accent of his. A year and a half ago, I didn’t know enough about his particular accent to know where he might have come from.

  “Just a little,” I said. He sighed.

  “Well, I’m a kappa, if that’s any excuse.” He placed his chopsticks aside. “We tend to be solitary creatures.” He then lowered his head: there was a hole in his scalp, a perfectly smooth, hairless depression where his crown should have been. The hole had been visible enough before, but now I could see it in its entirety. It was indeed no bigger than the size of a five-hundred yen coin.

  “But is it true, though?” I asked. “That kappas prefer to be alone?”

  “You could say that. It’s not entirely false. And it’s not that we can’t form groups or cliques, or operate in teams—we get along with humans just as well as humans get along with one another. Kappas are just bad at forming groups with other kappas. You’ll hardly ever find a group of people solely comprised of them.”

  “But why is that?” I asked.

  Takao shrugged. “We’ve been conditioned, I think. To view our true nature as something we ought to suppress. And so, whenever a kappa comes across another kappa, all the kappa can see is his hidden self, openly reflected in the other person.”

  I crossed my arms over the tabletop. “And do you feel that way as well?”

  Takao made a face, and picked up his chopsticks. “What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Lisa.”

  “I take it that’s your first name, Lisa?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “My name is Takao,” he said in return. “And how old are you?”

  “Twenty, nearing twenty-one.”

  He whistled. “That’s pretty damn young, kid.” He then took hold of a ladle, and scooped out a large serving of food. He poured it into a spare bowl and handed it to me. “You like nabe, Lisa?”

  “Not so much in the summer,” I said. “You don’t think it’s too hot, or humid?”

  He chuckled, and handed me a pair of chopsticks and a wooden spoon. “That’s perfect for a kappa, kiddo.”

  “I see,” I said. I then decided to go on a limb. “Do you play the tenor sax, by any chance?”

  A look of surprise came over his face. “You live near Horikiri station?”

  “Right next to the hospital,” I said. “My brother and I hea
r you practice all the time.”

  He let out a laugh. “And here I was, thinking you were a total stranger.” His accent sounded more distinct than ever. “We come from the same place, you and I.”

  •

  Junpei said we were lost, and I had to agree. The three of us were lost. “What do you mean?” said Takao. “We’re no more lost than when we first stepped foot in this neighbourhood. We’ll find our way eventually.”

  We stopped in front of the main gates to the elementary school, and began to search for signs to the hospital. According to Takao’s friend, finding the restaurant was a matter of finding both places. But neither of us had ever been here before, and in the dark, where the edges of things were least defined, all of the surrounding buildings only seemed to grow in size.

  “Does the restaurant have a name?” I asked. “Maybe Junpei could look it up on his phone.”

  Takao scratched the back of his head, fingering the edge around the hole in his skull. “Perdido,” he answered.

  “What language is that?” Junpei asked.

  “Spanish.”

  “And why would a nabe restaurant have a Spanish name?”

  “I have no idea,” said Takao, shrugging his shoulders. “But it’s also the title of a great jazz number. The composer’s Juan Tizol, a Puerto Rican trombonist. My friend plays jazz as well, so he naturally got drawn to the name.”

  “And your friend didn’t think to give you a more specific address?”

  Takao shook his head. “He tried to, kiddo.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “After he left, he tried to find his way back. He wanted to see if he could obtain an address or a business card of some sort. He’d found it by accident, after all. But it was nearing midnight, and his girlfriend was getting afraid of the dark. Like us, it was their first time in a distant neighbourhood, and so they weren’t familiar with the area at all. That’s why all he had were the school and the hospital as reference points.”