Manazuru

by Hiromi Kawakami

  “You’re too wrapped up in your daughter,” the woman tells me.

  Be quiet! I shout, in my mind. The woman laughs. Then she moves away, disappears into the ocean. The surface of the sea sparkles all the more brilliantly, all the way to the horizon. The next stop will be Manazuru, Manazuru, the announcement says.

  NO SOONER HAD I arrived at the hotel, hung up my clothes, and tossed my body down on the bed than a wave of tiredness came over me. Thinking that I should turn down the air conditioner, I drifted smoothly off to sleep.

  When I come to, it is evening, and the sky is on fire. I must have slept for more than two hours, but my body refuses to wake. I go out onto the veranda and listen to the roaring of the waves. It is a wild sound. The wind, too, is strong. I turn on the television, and the newscaster keeps repeating the word “typhoon.”

  I wash my face, redo my lipstick, get ready to go out. I haven’t dined alone for a while. Alone, I walk the roads Momo and I walked together last time. The wind teases with my hair. I feel forsaken.

  Over time, I have come to feel forsaken. I didn’t used to feel this way. I was fine. On my own, with another person, with many people, I was fine, always. Not now. I can’t get used to it. My body can’t get used to it. Being alone, being three, as soon as I feel I have finally grown accustomed to the atmosphere of a given moment, someone steps away, or joins the group, and the air changes; it takes time for me to get used to the change.

  I sit on the beach and peruse Rei’s diary. Boats return from the offing. Where could they have gone, on such a windy day? “Lost a little weight.” From time to time, this appears.

  Was he gradually losing weight, in those days? I don’t remember that at all. I do remember the bathroom scale. The small apartment where Rei and Momo and I lived, the three of us, I would vacuum twice a day, it was so small it wasn’t a problem. Momo constantly tracked in sand and mud.

  The scale had an orange rim, it was padded with cork. A couple, Rei’s friends, gave it to us for our wedding. Rei despised it.

  “Why?” He grimaced when I asked.

  “C’mon, a scale? It’s so cultured, so hoity-toity.”

  You’re an odd one, I laughed, and he said, Look, don’t laugh at me. Look, don’t laugh at me. How I warmed to those words. Innocently, carefree, I warmed. Back then, ages ago.

  I think the word: sickness. Was Rei sick? He fell ill, felt his death approaching, disappeared? No, I thought, sometimes, it’s too cruel. At other times, I wished it were true.

  Either way, it is pitiful to be left behind. True, but who deserves more pity, the one who leaves, or the ones who are left behind? the woman asks. I don’t even want to think about it. I reply coldly. The woman vanishes quickly into the sea. The instant before she sank from view, slipping under the waves, her feet gleamed, white.

  I ROSE LATE the next morning. The previous night, I had eaten a light dinner and gone to sleep by ten. I felt as if I could sleep forever. Just like Momo.

  Thinking I might hear the sounds of the festival, I stepped out onto the balcony, but there was only the pounding of the waves. The hotel stood a good way in from the road, so I didn’t hear any cars, either. I had coffee for breakfast, nothing else, and rode the bus to the port.

  Where does the festival take place? I asked a middle-aged clerk in front of a liquor shop. The port was crowded, more than when I’d been there last, but it hardly looked like a festival.

  “Oh, at this hour they’ve probably still got the omikoshi moveable shrine up on the mountain, out in front of the shrine itself,” she drawled.

  I looked for the woman, but she wasn’t around. Completely useless, I muttered to myself, and immediately she appeared.

  “You come if I call you, I see,” I said.

  “Pure coincidence,” the woman answered without smiling.

  The festival is just beginning, I guess, I said, and she nodded. We turned our backs on the port, entered an alleyway. Soon the ground began to slope upward. On this peninsula, only the area around the shore remains at sea level; beyond that the land slants sharply, rising abruptly to higher ground. The interior of the peninsula is covered, not with mountains, perhaps, but with big hills.

  I am out of breath. The woman is fine. She drifts along, following.

  “Where are we going?” the woman asks.

  “Nowhere. I’m just walking,” I reply, and her face clouds over. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was remembering.”

  My field of vision dims. A cloud has pushed forward, blocking the sun. Looking at the sky, I see flashes of light in the gaps of the cloud. Soon the cloud passes, it is brilliant again.

  “Do you want to go to the cape?” the woman asked. But before I could tell her yes, or no, she was gone.

  I looked up again, and was dizzied by the fullness of the light. For a time, I couldn’t see.

  Rei, I CALLED. To see how it felt.

  It was hard to call him by his name, right to his face, but frequently, when he wasn’t there, I would say it to myself.

  Rei.

  Sometimes, too, I would say it to his profile as he lay sleeping. Sometimes I would call out to him during the day, when he was at work, not at home, as I nursed Momo.

  The truth is, I have a faint memory of that hour, 21:00.

  Three days before he disappeared, having put Momo to bed, I was reading the newspaper at the table. Rei had left it there in the morning when he was done. Slowly I turned the pages, the corners of which, already touched by his hands, lacked the sharpness they had when the paper was delivered. The TV guide, the society section, local news, sports, I read them all, and then I got to the family section.

  “HELL.” Is what it said. Printed as a headline. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  I don’t remember the content of the article. The instant I saw that word, I heard myself calling to him. Rei.

  In one corner of the quiet living room lay a few blocks, round and square, that Momo had been playing with that evening. The blocks were red, looked like things growing from the floor, and though I knew they meant nothing, they seemed to me like an ill omen.

  Rei. I called again. Glancing at the clock, I saw that it was nine, and while every other time I had called him my voice, aimed into emptiness, simply vanished into emptiness, that evening I seemed to hear a voice reply.

  Kei.

  I heard Rei’s voice, weakly, from the living-room ceiling.

  Gripped by a sense of foreboding, I folded the newspaper, making a rough, papery rustling. Rei’s voice fizzled, and, soon after, the lingering memory of my own voice, too.

  Climbing into an alley in Manazuru, I call out, as on that evening. Rei.

  Sweat from my face bleeds into my eye. I hear the cry of a kite. I’m hungry. I feel my body, and I am relieved. Down an even narrower alley, I find a Chinese restaurant. I rattle the door open on its track. My eyes are unused to the darkness inside. Groping, I pull out a chair, sit.

  “WHAT DID YOU have?” the woman asked.

  “Wonton soup.”

  “I envy you.”

  I walked more after lunch. From alley to alley, from the heights to the low-lying area, my legs ached. Eventually, I got on a bus bound for the tip of the cape. The first time, when I walked, alone, winter had only just ended.

  “Get off,” the woman urged.

  This isn’t the last stop, and I’m tired, I told her, and she glared. All right, fine, I said, pressing the button. I stepped down from the bus, and a protected forest spread around me. The growth was thick, hardly any light filtered through the leaves to the road.

  You know, says the woman.

  You know, somewhere in this great wood, there was a woman who died.

  As soon as the woman began speaking, the sky darkened. A deep, gruff rumble came from the distance.

  “Thunder?”

  “There’s a typhoon coming,” the woman answered.

  I followed the woman as though I were being led along on a rope. A footpath snaked throug
h the great woods, as the woman called the protected forest. As we meandered left and right, I lost track of our direction. Intermittently, gruffly, the thunder continued to boom. The dead woman was strung up in a pine tree. Again the thunder booms. The pine fell down, much later, in a typhoon. The woman tells me, her voice low. The kite no longer cries. Because the wind has shifted, the woman says.

  The footpath began to slant downward. The slope steepened, dropping sharply toward the shore. From time to time, I catch sight of waves exploding on the rocks.

  “And she was such a good girl,” the woman murmurs.

  “A good girl?”

  “The woman in the tree.”

  “That’s a sickening story, I don’t want to hear it,” I say, hoping it might help, but it does no good to ask the things that come and follow anything, they won’t listen.

  “Who’d have thought, to be strung up. Wisteria vines around her feet.”

  The time between thunderclaps was shortening. Lightning shimmered. The woman held out her hand. Several times, my feet catching in the wet earth, I had almost fallen down. It was cool when I took hold of it. I felt as if I were starting to blur, from the fingertips.

  LOOK, SHE PUSHES me. I gaze down at a tidal pool, an enclosure protected by large boulders. The surface of the water is still, even though the waves on the other side, just beyond, are rough.

  Isn’t it dangerous to be here, if there’s a typhoon? I said to the woman, but she didn’t listen. The hand linked with mine refuses to let me go. Her grip isn’t strong, but I can’t loosen it. I’ve started to blur, I’m numb all the way to my upper arm.

  Look carefully, the woman says.

  There are tiny fish in the tidal pool, swimming in circles, frantically. Look at them, they’re insane, even though they’re better off in the shadow of these boulders when the waves are so rough. The woman mutters, laughs. I shudder at how thin, how empty of feeling, her laugh is.

  She was spirited away. The girl who was strung up. She was a good girl, really, a darling. She would go early in the morning into the hills to gather firewood, and in the afternoon she would collect clams and seaweed on the shore. At night, she swept, spun. She toiled without resting, and then one day she heard a voice in the woods. Tomorrow, it said, you mustn’t go to the hills or the shore.

  “But she went anyway?” I asked, and the woman nodded.

  She went. And after that day, she was never seen alive again. They searched and searched, and then a fisherman, rowing out to the offing, found her on the ocean.

  On the ocean. I didn’t get her meaning, so I asked.

  “On top of it, not in the water?”

  That’s right, on the ocean. Reflected there. That same girl. Hair standing on end. She wore nothing but a red robe, an undergarment, wrapped around her waist. Her feet were bound with wisteria vines. Looking up, the fisherman saw her dangling upside-down from a pine branch that jutted out over the water. Her throat and feet were perfectly white.

  Thunder rumbles. The lightning is fierce. Waves surge, carrying away the sand. Is that girl you? I ask the woman. No. The woman replies. Is that the truth? I ask again. I don’t know, I’ve forgotten, the woman replies. Thunder crashes. The waves, higher now, can’t be held back by the boulders. We’ll be swept away, we should move to higher ground, the woman says, gently. I have heard a terrible story, I think, letting the woman lead me. That wonton soup sure was good, I say, intentionally inappropriately, just to see. I’ve never had wonton soup, the woman says enviously. Lightning and thunder arrive at the same time. There is a tearing sound. With stunning force, the rain begins to fall.

  THE RAIN BEAT across the land, omnipresent, yet it felt as if it were directed only at me.

  I ran hard, it didn’t matter, the rain kept coming. My thin shirt, drenched, clung to my skin.

  “You don’t get wet,” I said, and the woman cocked her head.

  “I wish I could.”

  Easy for her to say, strolling on ahead of me, comfortably dry. Even as countless drops of water spill from my head, run down my cheeks, flow from my eyelashes. My white, knee-length skirt is soaked; it has turned a darker shade.

  The woman scampers up the stairs on the next hill, opposite the path we descended. I get short of breath following her. Sweat runnels, joining the raindrops.

  Arriving at the top, we came to a white building. I remembered seeing it before, when I came by myself. Under all that rain, the building looked abandoned.

  “Go on, go inside,” the woman said, pointing.

  Pushing the glass door open, I was enveloped in warm, close air. My body, assailed by the rain, had grown cold. There were two people sitting dully at the long line of tables; perhaps it was a slow time, between meals. Still, the couple’s presence instantly purged the desolate feeling I had carried within me, outside.

  Plastic models of the lunch offerings were set out just inside the door. Fried horse mackerel, or sashimi. The waiter walked over, dragging his feet, I asked him for a cup of coffee. You have to buy a ticket from the vending machine, he said.

  The woman hadn’t followed me inside. The coffee was unexpectedly hot, and my tongue felt scalded. Looking out through the wall of glass that ran from ceiling to floor, I saw pines bending in the wind. The floor was wet from the drops that fell from every part of my body. A small puddle had formed.

  I bent down to peer into it and saw, deep down, the woman’s face, blurrily reflected.

  I NOTICE, SUDDENLY, that there is no sound at all.

  Gripping my half-drunk cup of coffee in one hand, I have been gazing down at the woman’s face, reflected in the puddle. The size of a bean at first, it grew to walnut size, then finally assumed the size of an actual human face.

  The rain still falls. The wind blows. But there is no sound. The voices of the couple sitting at the other table, which I could hear a moment ago, are no longer audible.

  From the puddle at my feet, like a geyser bubbling over, the woman gushes forth.

  “I’m all wet, aren’t I?” the woman asks. She remained dry the whole time we traipsed through the driving rain, and yet now she is sopping. “I’ve become closer to you, I guess,” the woman says with a lovely smile.

  Is that why I can no longer hear anything? It isn’t only sounds, either, things that were in motion just seconds before have stopped moving. The waiter, the two customers, are frozen, like clay figures.

  “The power,” the woman said, and immediately the fluorescent bulb over my head began to flicker. Brilliant flashes zigzagged past the window, and suddenly all the lights went out.

  “Lightning has struck,” the woman explained. In the absence of sound, I had no way of knowing whether it was true or not. All right, come on, the woman beckoned.

  Must I follow you, I asked, testing my voice, but it didn’t emerge as sound. I realized that when I talked with the woman, it wasn’t my real voice; it happened within my body.

  Soon the fluorescent bulbs sputtered on, and all at once sound surged into my ears. Mixed in amidst a crush of noise like static from a radio not tuned to any station, but several times more dense, I heard a voice I recognized.

  That’s Rei, I thought. The sound stopped right away. Only the woman’s form was visible, perfectly clear.

  Will it be okay, getting back?

  Yes, don’t worry.

  Did the woman ask, or was I the one who posed the question, did the woman answer me, or was I the one who answered her, unable to say, the two of us, indistinguishably intermingled, set out. Lightning bridged the vast distance from sky to ocean, describing a sharp, beautiful line.

  Don’t worry.

  Once again, one or the other of us spoke, and I looked up at the wild sky.

  It was a long way here.

  So I had thought, but perhaps it wasn’t such a long walk, after all.

  We plodded step by step along the cement walkway that rimmed the beach, as large waves washed over it. If I hadn’t been with the woman, I would have been swept away
in seconds, dragged to the bottom of the sea.

  “It doesn’t end, does it, the rain, the wind,” I said, and the woman dimly smiled.

  See, the woman pointed back. Even as I turned, the white building was slowly collapsing. For a moment it seemed to have swelled, and then a second later it shriveled, contracting into itself. The building crumbled like a film in slow motion. Not from the roof: the foundation was the first to go. The upper half held its form, the whole roof subsided vertically. Partway down the roof, too, strained and bent, and the next instant everything was massed upon the ground. Dust rose, but the violence of the rain erased it; it too was soon settled.

  “The people inside—” I began, and the woman held a long finger to her lips.

  “Quiet, keep watching.”

  As I looked on, obeying, the mound of rubble vanished. Just like that.

  “It’s gone,” I said, and the woman nodded lightly.

  “Let’s go, onward.” The woman twined her fingers in mine. Billows washed over my feet. Some swelled as high as my waist, my shoulders. I was almost gone, but she held me.

  “Are we going to meet Rei?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” The woman is brusque.

  We march on and on, tracing the peninsula. Walking, I think of the grumpy waiter and the bored-looking couple I saw in the white building. I wonder if they’ve all passed on, and the woman shakes her head.

  “We’re the ones who have passed on.” Her tone is flat.

  “Momo,” I call to the shattering waves. I had forgotten Momo. But I remembered. When I think of her, I feel as though I might be able to make it back. Back where the white building is. Where the woman is not.

  The woman tightens her grasp. She blurs into me. An even larger wave comes, and I fade.

  I WOKE SHORTLY, and once again felt the rain and wind blowing, everywhere.