Kappa Quartet

by Daryl Qilin Yam

  I took the metro to Kitchen Town, after we’d confirmed his flight. I went from Jinbocho to Ueno and made my way down to the main street. It was lined with appliance stores, supplying Tokyo’s widest range of kitchenware; it was also a shopping district run entirely by kappas, but I had to set aside that fact for the time being. I entered a store and began browsing through a rack of knives, hung against a wood-panelled wall. The lighting, dimmed inside the store, lent a certain lustre to the hardware.

  “Do you need any help?” a store clerk had asked. I looked at her. She had medium-length hair, tied up in a small bun, which made it impossible to see where the hole in her head was. She could pass off as human any day of the week. I told her I was looking to buy a knife, something light but sturdy.

  “What ingredient will you be using it for?” she asked. “Fish, or meat?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I turned back towards the knives. It was hard to choose, in that particular moment. I went ahead with meat.

  •

  The knife swung by Ahab’s side as we walked. He wanted to talk about the Ito Junji manga again.

  “So the story’s about this one guy, yeah, who travels to the site of the fault.”

  “Sure.”

  “And when the guy’s there, he’s all like, whoa, look at all these man-shaped holes! It’s crazy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Crazy.”

  “So he meets this other girl, who had come down to the fault site to check them out as well. The two of them hit it off.”

  “All right.”

  “They’re talking about the holes and stuff, until they see this other guy, this total stranger, saying that he’s here to find his own hole.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Meaning, this stranger here believes that there is a hole made perfectly for him. And then he shows it to the couple. ‘See?’ the stranger says. ‘It’s in the exact shape of my silhouette. It’s perfectly made for me.’ He then does the craziest thing: he takes off his clothes and steps into the hole. And he gets totally sucked in.”

  “Sucked in?”

  “Like a vacuum cleaner,” Ahab said. He makes a slurping noise. “He just goes right in and disappears. Everybody freaks out.”

  “Understandably.”

  “They’re all like, somebody save him! Somebody get him out! But he’s disappeared, yeah, to god knows where. Nobody can get him out. And then it starts a whole chain of other people stepping into their holes. They find their own specially-shaped hole and disappear for good.”

  “I bet the girl finds her own hole as well.”

  “Oh yeah. She finds it. But the main character is like, don’t go, please. Once you go in you can’t come out. And so she stays with him in his tent, for a couple of days. They make love. But eventually she goes to her hole and steps inside. She does this in the middle of the night, leaves her clothes behind and everything. The main character is devastated.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s crying and everything, going why, why, why? Why did you leave me? And then, all of a sudden, he sees it.”

  “His own man-shaped hole?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Ahab. “He finds it. And there are all these voices telling him to go in, but he resists. Ultimately he’s overcome by madness and despair.”

  “Whatever is empty needs to be filled.”

  “That’s right,” said Ahab. “Whatever is empty needs to be filled.”

  Our pace slowed incredibly, this time. There was barely any room to walk between the trees, let alone for two people. I led at the front while Ahab kept the rear, his knife catching the light and glinting at the blade. It began to feel like rock-climbing, only horizontal: there was hardly any flat ground to find stable footing. Once in a while, the sole of my boot would chip away at a root.

  “What happens when you step inside the hole?” I asked Ahab. “Is that revealed in the manga?”

  “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “A never-ending route, carved out of the exact shape of your own silhouette; you can’t ever turn back and look behind you. All you can do is keep going. Do you know how that feels?”

  I shook my head. “Do you?”

  “No, man,” said Ahab. “Thankfully, no.”

  It was dark when we returned. We were late. Ahab and I were about a hundred metres away from the campsite when I radioed the other pair.

  “We’re going to be late as well,” Nobuo replied. “We thought we saw something that might have belonged to Kawako, so we spent a good amount of time searching the surrounding area. But Mr Sugimura reckons we’re only seven hundred metres away. We shouldn’t be long.”

  “Sure,” I said, radioing back. “We’ll see you there.”

  Just then I felt a hand on my chest: Ahab stopped me.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. His other hand reached for his knife. He unhooked it from his belt. The light of our campfire flickered and danced, just past the trees ahead.

  “The fire’s too weak,” I said. Ahab nodded.

  “The clothes line is still out as well. But I can’t tell where Akiko is.”

  I strained my eyes to see. She was nowhere in sight.

  “Radio her,” Ahab said.

  I held the comm set to my mouth and whispered. “Akiko,” I said. “You there?”

  There was no response. But there was a weird sound, coming from the camp. A strange sort of rustling. According to Sugimura however, strong winds don’t exist in this forest. It’s why the forest is so unnaturally quiet. Nobuo’s voice came from the radio.

  “Why isn’t Akiko responding?” he asked. There was that strange rustling noise again.

  I radioed back. “Ahab and I don’t see her. Hurry, but be careful.”

  “We will,” he said.

  Ahab walked ahead this time. I followed closely behind. The fire was nearly out; whatever was in the pot, however, had burned to a crisp. Ahab took a couple of logs and threw it in to make the fire grow.

  “This is her radio,” I said, pointing it out. It was left behind on one of the chairs. “It explains the noise we’ve been hearing.”

  Ahab nodded. He then turned on the spot, looked over my shoulder.

  “There you are,” he said.

  It was Akiko. She had stepped out from her own tent.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I saw the kappa earlier, before the sun had set. I went into my tent to hide and realised I had left my comm set outside. I’m a fucking idiot.”

  “The kappa came by?” I asked.

  “A female,” she said. “Long hair, brown linen dress. She had on a backpack and wore a pair of sandals, like she was going to school or something.”

  “What did she do?” Ahab asked. Just then we heard Nobuo and Sugimura running towards us.

  “She was desperate for water, I think.” Akiko nodded towards the jerrycans. There was only one left. “She drained that one and dragged away the other two. I saw through the opening of my tent.”

  Akiko said she was all right the next morning. She’d slept perfectly fine. “Sleep’s for the brave,” said Ahab. Nobuo and Sugimura had volunteered to refill the jerrycan before dawn, and came back with a second one in tow. “I always keep an extra one in the boot of my car, just in case,” Sugimura explained. “This should do.”

  We stuck to the usual plan; Akiko didn’t know where the kappa had retreated to, and Ahab didn’t think circling the campsite was worth the effort. If the kappa had remained nearby, it would have attacked us during the night. Nobuo agreed.

  “We’re here to find Kawako, anyway. That’s still our main priority.”

  Breakfast was canned tuna and diced onions, mixed with mayonnaise and ground black pepper. We spread the lot on salted crackers. The five of us huddled around the big bowl with our spoons.

  “How old did the kappa look, by the way? How tall?” Ahab asked.

  “Not young,” Akiko said. “In her thirties or forties, I think. About 1.7 metres high. Slightly taller than I am.”
/>   “Build?”

  “Skinny. Like she’d been in the forest for a long time,” said Akiko.

  “How about the cavity in her head?”

  “Located near the crown. It wasn’t too big or too small; I only caught a glimpse of it.”

  Sugimura got up and walked towards his tent. He wiped his hands on his trousers as he did so. Nobody said anything as he zipped his tent open and stepped inside.

  “It’s me and him today,” Ahab said. “Isn’t that great.” Ahab had been practicing with his knife all morning: he’d throw it towards a nearby tree and watch it pierce the bark. That or he’d move it through the air like a conductor’s baton, with clean vertical and horizontal strokes. Akiko and I made the other pair.

  “It’s day six, isn’t it?” Akiko said. The forest wasn’t as dense today, compared to yesterday’s route. “It’s amazing how you haven’t given up, Mr Shimao.”

  The air smelt like soil: both light and heavy. “It’s my job after all,” I said. She didn’t press the matter any further.

  I had met her for the first time last summer. We were outside a temple in Meguro ward, where Haruhito Daisuke’s funeral was held. Akiko had a cute face, with short bronze hair cropped at the shoulder. I saw her approach the temple gates and called her over. In that instant, I deduced that she was the kind of girl who’d pay heed to a stranger’s words. She’d come over to your side if you told her to. But there was something about her: a hard, tightly coiled fist of a thing she held inside. No matter what you did, you could never take advantage of a girl like that. Her coming over was just deference on her part.

  “Kawako’s father once told me something,” Akiko said. We were a good hour in, and the weather was fine over the forest. We kept at a steady pace.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said that I had a bright soul. A really bright soul.” Akiko seemed to smile at the thought. “Only Kawako and Chiba Mari know about this.”

  “You haven’t told this to anyone else?”

  She nodded.

  “It was during Kawako’s birthday party. About ten years ago, I think. Mr Haruhito and I only ever met that one time,” she said.

  “A bright soul, you say?”

  She nodded again. “Last night I wondered if that was the reason why the kappa came. To take what I had for herself. Afterwards I wondered why she’d left without it.”

  I considered the situation. “Water was more important to her, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps,” said Akiko. “Have you ever seen a dehydrated kappa before?”

  I shook my head.

  “They look like walking skeletons,” she said. “Bony and dry as twigs, all shrivelled up. I was shocked, when I first saw it. I thought it was just another tree, except it seemed to be moving.”

  I looked at her. “You didn’t mention it this morning. You just said it was skinny.”

  Akiko shrugged.

  “It’s got all the water it needs now,” she said.

  For the next minute or so we kept up our pace, making long strides over the hard ground. There was no wind, no stirring, no sound apart from our footsteps. A bird chirped overhead, as though to break the silence.

  “Sounds like glass,” Akiko remarked.

  Two hours later, we stumbled across a cave. There were a number of these, apparently, scattered across the forest. We chanced upon this one, thinking it was a large clearing we had spotted towards the right.

  “Should we check it out?” I asked.

  Akiko looked at the GPS, followed by her compass. Two hundred and forty-one degrees, it said: southwest by west. Anything beyond our right would be tomorrow’s work. “It’s a bit off our course,” she said. “But let’s take a look anyway.”

  The cave was more than twenty metres wide. The ground sloped steeply on the opposite edge of the cave. Where it ran downwards, the light could not reach.

  “Do you feel that?” said Akiko.

  “It’s chilly,” I said.

  She looked around. “There are some trees over there, standing right at the edge.” She pointed. “That one looks like it could fall in at any moment.”

  I looked. The sapling bent and curved, like a thick, wooden vine; its branches reached towards the inner hollow of the cave, as though it were a willow bent over a stream. But this was no stream. Akiko zipped open her backpack.

  “I’m going to have lunch now, if you don’t mind. It’s more or less time.”

  “I’ll have mine as well,” I said.

  Twenty minutes we spent, seated over the top lip of the cave, between the roots of a tall cypress tree. The air moved powerfully here. Lunch was onigiri packed into a Tupperware container. For a long while Akiko did nothing but look towards the cave, that big black hole in the ground. The perimeter of it was so wide and so vast it only seemed to grow: it grew to a point where the forest might as well be pushed back, continually, away from the reach of the cave.

  Akiko ate a lot faster than I did. For a while, she barely even stirred. At that moment I noticed that she had on the same raincoat and wellingtons she wore the day before: they were both red in colour, a fashionable shade of ruby.

  “Akiko.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “The forest is no place for a young woman.”

  She turned and fixed me with her eyes. “I’m tough, Mr Shimao. I have my own reasons for being here.”

  It was half past one when I was done with my food. Akiko got to her feet.

  “Let’s go back,” she said.

  Nobuo kept guard by the fire. The rest of us had called it a night. Akiko sat next to him, keeping her words to herself. Neither of them spoke. Their shadows were cast high and far over our tent.

  “Sugimura barely spoke to me the whole afternoon,” Ahab said. I threw him a look.

  “He’s not here to make friends,” I said to him. “He just owes me a favour. That’s the only reason why he’s here.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ahab said. He smirked. “What did you do for him that was so special?” he said. I told him it was none of his business.

  At a quarter to ten, Nobuo came over and unzipped the front of our tent.

  “I think I saw the kappa. Somewhere over there.” He pointed southeast.

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Not really, to be honest.” Nobuo was drenched in sweat again. “The figure wore something brown, though. Matched what Akiko said yesterday.”

  Ahab was out of the tent in seconds. “Akiko?”

  Akiko looked at him. She was rooted to her chair beside the fire, seemingly out of breath.

  “I’m not lying, Ahab.”

  Ahab and I quickly got flashlights. Nobuo held up an electric lantern. Sugimura and Akiko were to stay behind, and Ahab was to be our leader. “Follow me,” he said. Somewhere behind, Sugimura called out, “Don’t go beyond sight of the flame.” Ahab crooked his jaw.

  “First thing he’s said to me all day,” said Ahab. He waved the knife in his hand. “Come on.”

  The forest was completely dark: the canopy had broken the moonlight, rendering it useless. It just fell, diffuse, like dust over the ground. The only thing our flashlights revealed was just darkness, darkness, more of it—an endless supply of it lying ahead. The trees revealed themselves as white as bones.

  Nobuo nearly tripped over a root. The light from his lantern swung back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

  “I’m going crazy,” he said. I swore.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Shut it,” said Ahab. He looked over his shoulder. “I can still see the campfire. Let’s keep walking.”

  Barely a few seconds passed before I began to sweat. All I saw was tree, bark, root. Tree, tree, tree. All I could hear were my breath, my thoughts. Steps I took with my feet that I kept counting. “Nobuo,” I said to him. “Nobuo.” But he didn’t reply.

  I turned around. The two of them were gone. I didn’t know where I was any longer.

&nb
sp; “Nobuo?” I said again. “Ahab?”

  I swung my torchlight. Nothing. No one. The light was so strong it bounced back into my eyes, blinding me for a second. I was completely alone.

  “Nobuo! Ahab!”

  I swung my torchlight again, and again. And then the beam of light landed on a wood-panelled wall. Mounted on it was a rack of knives, each one the same length but shaped a little different.

  “What is this?” I said. I turned.

  “Do you need any help?” a store clerk asked. It was the same clerk I had spoken to at Kitchen Town: medium-length hair, tied up in a small bun. I swung my flashlight towards her and directed it to her feet. We were in the forest all right. But as I swung my flashlight towards the rack of knives they were still there, each of the blades gleaming lustrous in the night.

  “Sir?” the store clerk asked. I looked at her. The clerk was smiling at me. “Which knife are you interested in, sir?” Her smile then grew wider—it grew until her lips had stretched to her ears. Her eyes had turned to slits. “Are you fish or meat, sir?” she said. “Are you fish or meat?”

  There was a shout. Ahab. I turned.

  “Ahab!” I said.

  He shouted again. And then I saw it: another strobe of light, waving behind a tree. I ran.

  “I’m coming,” I said. I cleared my throat. “I’m coming,” I said again.

  I ran faster. I didn’t look back. My shoe caught on a root, but I quickly stepped over it and kept on running. I never wanted to look back. As I came up right behind them I realised I didn’t have my flashlight.

  “Where is it?” Ahab asked. I told him I had no idea.

  Ahab and Nobuo were standing over something on the ground. I looked. It was the body of a man, its throat freshly slit open. Blood was still trickling from the wound. Nobuo raised the lantern over the corpse: its light was a moving circle, moving, moving, moving. It never stopped moving.

  “Wearing a beige jumper,” Ahab said. He knelt down and turned the body over. He felt through the man’s hair. “Human.” He looked up at Nobuo. “Did you mistake this guy for the kappa?”

  Nobuo looked tired. But his gaze never broke: he kept it fixed on the body.