Kappa Quartet

by Daryl Qilin Yam

  APRIL 2013

  MR SHIMAO

  Ahab had a hole in his heart as a kid; it had long healed since then, but he believes he’s the way he is because of it.

  “You’ve ever read this manga by Ito Junji?” he said. He had gone behind a tree to take a piss, about a few metres away. “It’s about this fault in the ground, yeah?” A pause. “It rises from the ground after an earthquake, this huge slab of rock, and all across it are tons of man-shaped holes. You’ve ever read anything like that?”

  “Who is it again?” I asked. Ahab’s Singaporean, so his Japanese always sounded strange. “Plot sounds familiar,” I said.

  “Ito Junji,” he said again. “You know him?”

  I shook my head. “Never heard of him.” Ahab came walking back.

  “Isn’t it your job to read all kinds of stuff?”

  “My business is with novels, not manga,” I said. I looked at Sugimura, seated on the other side of the fire. He was boiling instant noodles with a metal saucepan. “You know it?” I asked him, and he shook his head.

  “Oh, well,” said Ahab. “You guys should read him. He’s amazing.”

  “Noted,” I said. I looked at Sugimura once more, his face as impassive as ever. He cracked an egg over his noodles. Sugimura was here to guide us, not befriend us, and he made sure he stuck to his role the entire time. He never really approved of killing, after all.

  •

  Sugimura has a kappa for a son. He’s forty-eight, divorced; the ex-wife got the twins. He adopted the kappa three years later. The first thing I noticed about him was how dark and tanned his skin was, as though he had spent every waking hour under the sun. The skin on his face and arms looked almost leathery in his camping gear, all buckles and straps and khaki. There was a pale band of skin around his ring finger.

  “My boy is a kappa,” he repeated himself to me. “I don’t like this at all…”

  This was about a week ago, when I was in search of a person who could guide us through the forest. Sugimura and I were seated in a café in Kofu city. The only food it served was chicken pie.

  “I wouldn’t need you if this wasn’t a matter of urgency,” I said to him. “But it is. You said so yourself. A kappa has been spotted in the forest, and unfortunately it’s looking for prey. We need to be able to avoid it before it catches up to us or Kawako, and nobody knows the forest better than you do.”

  He didn’t look pleased. “And if it does catch up to us? What will your guy do?”

  I didn’t answer. Sugimura shook his head.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why would the kappa go to Aokigahara, of all places? Wouldn’t Lake Saiko be more, how do I put it…”

  “Fitting?”

  Sugimura rubbed the side of his head. “This isn’t the first time either,” he added.

  I knew what he was referring to. My contact had told me all about the boy’s mother, and the yellow Toyota Prius she’d left him behind in.

  “I don’t know,” I said to him. “Kappas haven’t made ponds or lakes their homes for a very long time. They’ve adapted to the human way. Maybe that’s why. And maybe that’s why people assume they’re not dangerous anymore.”

  Sugimura said nothing for a while. He moved in his seat.

  “Some people say it’s easier to steal a shirikodama… if its owner is willing to dispose of it.” He paused. “Do you think there might be any truth to that claim?”

  I shrugged. I asked him, “How many bodies have you found? Across all the times you’ve hiked in the forest.”

  He said sixteen.

  •

  Nobuo and Akiko came back with the water, three jerrycans loaded. “These should last us for another while,” Nobuo said. They were drenched in sweat.

  “Was it tough?” Ahab asked.

  Nobuo made a face. “Well, I’m definitely not a guy with a lot of endurance,” he said. “Akiko?”

  Akiko made her way back to the tent. “I’m going to lie down for a while,” she said. “Tell me when we have to get going again.”

  “Okay,” Nobuo said. “I’ll let you know.”

  We had set up camp about eight kilometres away from the nearest path: Nobuo and Akiko in one tent, Ahab and me in another. Sugimura had a tent all to himself. We were as close to the centre of the forest as we could get.

  “So we’re covering the west this time?”

  I nodded. “Most of the eastern side’s been accounted for. Right, Sugimura?”

  He was slurping up his noodles. He nodded back.

  “We’ll take turns as usual,” I said. “We’ll go out in two pairs and rotate our partners. One person stays at the campsite.”

  “The west is a lot bigger, yeah?” Ahab asked.

  “We could find ourselves searching for up to a week,” I said. “Hopefully we’ll take half that time.”

  “Because of supplies?”

  “That’s one of the reasons,” I said.

  Nobuo opened up one of the trunks, and took out a custard bun. He sat beside Sugimura and ripped open the plastic with his teeth.

  “How much longer till we set out?” he asked.

  “Thirty minutes?” Ahab said. He looked towards me. The guy had one foot constantly tapping the ground, wearing away the moss beneath his boot. “That’s good, yeah?”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  Thirty minutes later, Nobuo woke Akiko up. “It’s time,” he said to her, through the opening in their tent. Akiko got out and put on her boots.

  “I never slept,” she said. “I just lay there.”

  Nobuo and I set off at a hundred and eighty degrees on the compass, Ahab and Akiko at a hundred and ninety: the seventeenth and eighteenth cardinal points, respectively. The aim was to keep going in a straight line for four hours and then head back in the exact same direction. We’d do this for every cardinal point on the compass.

  It was Sugimura’s turn to keep watch over the campsite. “Remember,” he said, wiping his saucepan clean. “Avoid stepping on the roots, if you can… They’re pretty weak, the trees in this forest.”

  Nobuo and I began our route. Neither of us spoke for about thirty minutes.

  “I’m going a little mad, truth be told.” Nobuo was sweating badly. “All the trees look the same to me.”

  We were moving at a steady pace, stepping over mounds and roots that snaked across the forest floor. The soil was rock solid beneath our feet, cushioned somewhat by the green moss. All around, the trees stood tall and narrow, a sight that repeated itself as though we were in a hall of mirrors. It was enough to make anybody’s head light.

  “You’ve ever been camping?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  “I was born and raised in Tokyo.”

  “Didn’t you ever climb Mount Takao?”

  “Well, a few times, when I was a kid,” Nobuo said. “But that was it. You went up to see the summit and visit the temple. I hardly know anyone who went beyond Takao and camped in the mountains.”

  We kept on walking.

  “It’s dizzying, isn’t it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Nobuo. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “To be honest, I really enjoyed going back to the visitor centre and getting our water filled. It was so great to see another face.”

  I nodded. “We really shouldn’t take more than a few days,” I said to him. “If Kawako brought any supplies with her, they would have run out by then. There would be no point in staying in this forest.”

  Nobuo stiffened. He said he understood.

  “I’m not having second thoughts, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  I nodded again. There were a number of tree roots, sprawled across the soil. We avoided stepping on them like we were told.

  “How did you know my uncle again?”

  “Business,” I said.

  “What kind of business?”

  “He didn’t want a
book published, if that’s what you’re asking. I am more than just a literary agent.” A pause. “He wanted to track somebody down. He needed to, from time to time.”

  “So that’s really your specialty?” asked Nobuo. “Tracking people down? Finding people?”

  “I do my best,” I said.

  We kept at it, the walking. Once, we stopped to inspect a boot, a wallet, a baseball bat. A length of rope, looped over a tree branch. Nobuo sighed.

  “We did a story about this place,” he said to me. “Back at the newspaper. One of my colleagues even had photos of a body.”

  “That must have been bad,” I said.

  Nobuo tugged on the rope. The branch made a cracking noise. Nobuo stopped.

  “There’s a shared photo archive that all the reporters can access,” he said. “It caused quite a stir in the office, but it didn’t really affect me so much.”

  “You used to work the local crime beat, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “All the bodies I saw were the bodies of strangers. Six months into the job, and I found I could actually tolerate the smell of a crime scene without even trying.”

  There was another pause; I didn’t know what to say.

  “Have you ever failed to find a person, Mr Shimao?” He turned towards me. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  I looked at him. We resumed walking. We left the branch with the rope behind.

  “Of course,” I told him. “But: whenever I fail to find someone, I end up finding somebody else. So I can’t really call it a failure, per se.”

  Nobuo didn’t say anything, for about a minute or two.

  “Everywhere I turn, I see Kawako, standing behind a tree,” he said to me. Do you see her dead or alive, I wanted to ask, but I kept the question to myself. We still had plenty of forest to cover.

  We made it back to the campsite, as the sun began to set. Ahab and Akiko had returned long before we did, and their search too had yielded nothing. Sugimura was busy preparing a bigger fire. We handed our radios back to him.

  “Tell me if you guys need the generator tonight,” he said. “Dinner’s in the pot over there.” He then turned back to the flame.

  We had dinner. Nobody felt like making conversation that night, so we returned to our tents. Sugimura remained outside. Ahab and I got changed and kept our eyes on his shadow, his figure hunched and exaggerated over the fabric.

  “I know how he feels about me,” Ahab said, pulling on his jumper.

  I unzipped my sleeping bag and slid myself in. I switched on my flashlight and took out Chiba Mari’s final draft. We were a month away from printing; I had a red pen in one hand and a highlighter in another. I told Ahab it wasn’t personal.

  •

  Ahab was the first to wake the next morning. “Come on,” he said. “It’s you and me today, yeah?”

  It was Akiko’s turn today to stay behind.

  “Remember to radio us immediately if you see something suspicious,” Sugimura said to her.

  “I will,” she said. She was setting up a laundry line, to air some of our clothes. It was a fairly big pile. For some reason she had on a raincoat and a pair of wellingtons. “Take care when you’re out there, Nobuo.”

  Nobuo turned. He and Sugimura were already more than ten paces away.

  “See you,” he said to her.

  Nobuo and Sugimura took the nineteenth cardinal point that day, while Ahab and I did the twentieth. Before we set off, I caught Ahab looking at Akiko.

  “What?” he said, smiling. “Let’s go.”

  We went. I looked over my shoulder, just before we lost sight of the campsite. Akiko was standing absolutely still; she had a pair of jeans in her hands. She was watching our backs.

  “Did something happen between you and Akiko?”

  “What,” said Ahab. “You mean, yesterday?”

  I nodded. It was chilly, that morning. We stepped over a fallen tree.

  “We just talked,” he said.

  “About?”

  We walked—nothing but green, for miles and miles. With Ahab you had to double your pace, lengthen your stride; the man was long-legged and toned, and built like a panther. Sometimes I forget he used to have a heart condition.

  “Akiko told me about stuff. About her relationship with Kawako.”

  I kept quiet. He went on.

  “Akiko told me she has a fantastic memory. Remembers all kinds of details. Lately though, she’s been starting to forget.”

  I frowned. “Forget?”

  Ahab stepped over a root. “They met way back in university, yeah? Akiko and Kawako.”

  “That’s right.”

  “According to Akiko, Kawako was different back then.” He stepped over another root. “Completely different. I mean, she’s always been the same person, technically speaking—but right now there’s a large gap between the Kawako of the present and the Kawako of the past. It was as though she’d lost something along the way, except it wasn’t just one thing. It was many things. That’s how Akiko put it.”

  We kept on moving. We sidestepped a tree, followed by another. The forest was getting dense.

  “And?” I said to him. “So what about Akiko’s memory?”

  He hopped over a mound of dirt.

  “Akiko can’t remember,” he said. “Why she’d loved that Kawako in the first place. And she kept saying this one thing about herself.”

  The thicket of trees grew denser. “What was that?” I asked. He shrugged.

  “That she was a monster,” he said.

  •

  Ahab kept a large knife with him, wherever he went. He owned a parang in Singapore, a Malay machete, but obviously he couldn’t bring it to Japan. I had to get him one of those absurdly long knives chefs use all the time, in a store I found in Kitchen Town. Ahab said that was good enough.

  I got the call on the third of April. It was from Nobuo. It had been more than a month since Haruhito Kawako’s twenty-ninth birthday, when she had refused to celebrate the occasion with any of her relatives. In fact, she hadn’t seen a single one of them since her father’s funeral. Only her flatmate, Akiko, had any access to her. Nobuo met up with Akiko one day and asked if he could check in on his cousin, let him into their apartment. Akiko said it wouldn’t be a problem.

  “It’s not like Kawako’s a shut-in,” Akiko had said to Nobuo. “She goes to work and comes back home. Sometimes we go out, have a drink, watch a movie together. I actually don’t know why she refuses to see any of you guys.”

  Out of instinct, Nobuo asked Akiko if she had ever returned to Akishima city, after she’d made the move to Nakameguro. Had she ever gone back to see her family? Akiko blinked. She then gave him a smile.

  “You caught me,” she said to Nobuo. “We’re awfully alike, aren’t we.”

  On the day Akiko had agreed to bring Nobuo to their apartment, Kawako was nowhere to be seen. It was the thirty-first of March. A Sunday. Both of them had assumed that she’d simply gone out for the day, and waited for her to return. She did not come back.

  “Kawako didn’t report to work the next day either,” Nobuo said over the phone. “Naturally we got a bit worried. We checked for any clues we could find, from her room to her toilet and the kitchen. We concluded that she probably packed a bag and left. As to where she went, nobody knows.”

  “I’m assuming she didn’t leave a note,” I said.

  “She didn’t, no. It’s like she just vanished.”

  I paused at what he had just said.

  “People do that sometimes,” I replied. “One moment they’re there, and in the next they’re not.”

  “But Kawako’s been doing nothing but running away,” he said to me. “She ran away from me. She ran away from my family. She’s been taking herself out of our lives and now she finally did it to Akiko as well. I can’t let this go on any longer.”

  He then made it clear that I owed him a favour, after what I had asked him to do for Chiba Mari. And so I was l
eft with no choice.

  The next day, I sent out a couple of my usual feelers, and found that she’d taken herself to Yamanashi prefecture—to the forest northwest of Mount Fuji: Aokigahara. But another feeler in Kofu city had informed me that there was a kappa in there, hunting for humans to prey on. Tourists had been told to stay in groups, and to never venture away from the paths. Once you did, there was no guarantee of ever returning.

  I called Ahab, the day after I’d gathered all my information on the situation. “If we want this woman to survive, I’ll have to assemble a search party as fast as possible,” I said to him. “You know how it goes.”

  “No cops?”

  “No cops,” I said. “So you can do whatever you have to.”

  “Heh heh. But we’re not killing this woman, yeah? So what do you need me for?” he asked.

  “The kappa,” I said. “It could either attack Kawako, or it could very well attack us.”

  “While we’re out searching for her in the forest.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right,” said Ahab. “I get it.” He then paused for a few seconds. “I can fly out first thing tonight.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Truth is—something similar is happening in Singapore. Something just as bad, possibly worse. A colleague and I are doing our best against this guy, so I could use the experience, I think.”

  “But ‘this guy’,” I said. “Is he a kappa?”

  “No,” said Ahab. “But he’s after the same thing: a shirikodama. As far as I know he’s already attacked one guy, who died on a plane soon after—who knows if he’s gotten to other people?”

  “Right,” I said. I felt a memory stirring. “I know of a man. He died on a plane as well. Nobody really knows why.”

  I heard Ahab sigh.

  “Our trail has gone cold for a while now. He’s gone into hiding, and he’s doing it well. We could certainly do with a man of your abilities, but we’d like to avoid getting other people involved.” A pause. “If I’m flying to Japan, Mr Shimao—I’ll need a knife.”

  “A knife?”

  “Yeah,” said Ahab. “A good, long knife. Get me one and we’ll do just fine.”