For the first time Onodera was able to grasp something of the total environment that enclosed them—that vast, crushing environment of chill, clear water. Far off to the left, at the very edge of the light, loomed the dark face of the trench wall, merging into the blackness beyond. The twisting yellow-brown mud current was now far below them, but Onodera could make out the faint shadow of the Wadatsumi falling upon it, a tiny metal cylinder suspended in a void.
The Japan Trench. That deepest of trenches, whose broad expanse lay nearly 24,000 feet below the sunlit waves of the vast Pacific. Now in that immense watery void, something was stir ring. That icy, monstrous serpent of blackness that lay within the trench, stretching from one end of it to another—it was beginning to writhe beneath the terrible weight of pressure piled upon it. It was beginning to edge its body forward.
II
Tokyo
1
After he had delivered his report to Yoshimura, his section chief, Onodera was turning to leave when Yoshimura, as though remembering something, called to him: “Onodera . . .” He turned back to see his boss, the report pushed to one side, tapping his lip with the end of a pencil and staring into space, lost in thought.
“What is it, sir?” asked Onodera.
“Ah, yes ... I have it. Onodera, you going home now?”
“Well, ah, I suppose,” he answered vaguely. “The day after tomorrow I was going to start that vacation I missed.”
Yoshimura got to his feet. “I’m leaving,” he said to his secretary. “When the report from construction is approved, send it around to the undersea section.”
Onodera held the door open for him.
“What do you say to a glass of beer?” Yoshimura asked cheer fully. He pressed the elevator button. “Do you know a bar called the Miruto in the West Ginza?”
“Ah, I’ve heard the name,” Onodera replied uneasily.
“There’s a nice little girl there. Young, small. . . . and she’s got this unconventional way about her that’s amusing.”
I wonder what he has in mind, Onodera thought.
They hailed a cab, and, after a short ride through the stifling late-afternoon heat of a Tokyo summer, they arrived at the Miruto. The chief strode through the entrance under full sail across a luxuriant purple rug. He passed between a gently curving beige-colored wall and a narrow metallic pillar to sit down in a comfortable chair beside a potted palm. Onodera caught a glimpse of a small, blue-lit dance floor beyond a large, highly abstract sculpture of a harp. Quiet music flowed through the club.
“Well! You’re early, aren’t you?”
A slim girl in a white sharkskin minidress appeared beside the table.
‘That’s because it’s so hot,” answered Yoshimura brusquely, wiping his neck and chin with the wet towel brought by the waiter. “How’s Tateshina? When did she go back home?”
“Well, she didn’t go. She heard that there was a lot of trouble down there this year.”
“Earthquakes? That was way south of Matsudai, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but there were tremors as far up as around Komoro. Some friends of hers had their car smashed by falling rocks. So she’s splashing around at the beach at Hayama.”
“Gin and tonic,” Yoshimura said to the waiter.
“Give me a gin rickey,” said Onodera.
“This is Onodera from our company . . . Yuri.”
“I’m glad to meet you,” said Yuri. “What sort of work do you do?”
“I’m involved in deep-sea dives.”
“Oh! You’re on a submarine?”
“Not an ordinary submarine,” said Yoshimura. “He goes down more than thirty thousand feet.”
“Oh, how wonderful!”
“Did Mako come yet?” asked the chief as he took hold of his gin and tonic.
“Just before. She’s probably getting herself fixed up now.”
“Call her. I want to hear about Nakagawa’s golf match the other day.”
“I hear it turned out very bad for him. He didn’t say a word about it. If he won, it would have been terrible—he never would have stopped talking about it.”
Onodera looked about him, ill at ease. His glass was covered with condensed moisture. He gripped it tightly and gulped down the light-green liquid.
“Another of the same, sir?” asked the waiter.
Onodera nodded. He was becoming bored with it all. The girl named Yuri left, and a hostess with a brown wig casually took her place. She, too, was beautiful, slim, expensively dressed. Yet both of them, though they were young girls of no more than twenty-three, had faces which bore the insidious marks of fatigue. There was no glow to their skin, and, graceful though their behavior was, there was something crass about them. They earned perhaps three or four times what Onodera did.
He raised his glass again. If he were a little drunk, maybe he might be able to bear up better, he thought. His eyes became heavy, and he began to feel more relaxed. He looked at Yoshimura.
“By the way, sir,” he said, “weren’t you going to talk to me about something?”
“Uhh?” said the chief, blinking as though taken unawares. “Oh, yes . . . that. Well, I thought we could go into it later, but ...”
“Whatever you say, sir.”
“Well . . . I was wondering, Onodera . . . Are you going to get married sometime or what?”
“Ohhh!” cried the hostess, on the verge of hysteria, it seemed. “What a marvelous topic! This fine-looking gentleman is single?”
“All right, now, why don’t you just leave us alone for a bit?” said Yoshimura as though humoring a child.
“Let me hear afterward, okay?” the hostess said as she got up to go.
“Have you got a fiancee or a mistress?” Yoshimura persisted. “Does your family have any ideas for you?”
“No, nothing in particular,” answered Onodera, shaking his head as he chewed some nuts. He was afraid that his facial expression might well be betraying his distaste for the topic.
“I suppose that you know about it, but, anyway, with the next stock issue there’s going to be a big expansion. Now, this is something just between the two of us, but I think that there might be a very important position opening up for you. The recommendation would be coming from me. So, this being the case, I think it would be a good idea, about this time, for you to stabilize yourself in terms of both public and private reliability, you see?”
“It would be a desk job, wouldn’t it?” asked Onodera, sensing as much from his boss’s manner.
“Of course. You can’t be taking that submarine down forever.
You have a good head on you, and I think it’s meant for more important work.”
Onodera said nothing. He felt himself getting drunker but no less discontented.
“How about a meeting so that you can see?” asked the chief, settling back in his seat, and speaking with deliberate cheerfulness.
“A meeting?”
“Yes, what I mean is a miai, with somebody who might be right for you.”
“Oh, I see.”
“If it’s all right, we can make it tonight.”
Onodera’s hand, filled with cashew nuts, stopped halfway to his mouth.
“Tonight?” he said, meeting the chiefs eyes. “Dressed like this?”
“It doesn’t matter. Make it casual, she said. She’s about twenty-six. Very beautiful, but she’s a bit of a bitch. And so I think you might be just what’s called for.”
Onodera was acutely aware that there was nothing casual or haphazard about all this. He knew that the company expected a great deal from him and so took a keen interest in him.
“Who is this young lady?” Onodera asked.
“She comes from a good provincial family, the oldest daughter,” said his boss, altogether nonchalant and still probing. “The family’s rather wealthy, and even though it’s a good provincial family, as I said, they’re very unconventional. The father graduated from a European university, and this young lady, too, studied abroad fo
r two or three years. So whatever you have to say to her, she’ll have a comeback for you, you see?”
Yoshimura shook with loud laughter. And then he raised his hand to a hostess who was coming toward him.
“Hello, there,” he called to her.
She waved in response, a tiny girl, slim and pretty.
“It’s been a long time,” she said to Yoshimura. And then as she sat down next to Onodera, she introduced herself: “I’m Mako. Hello.” Her face was tanned, and when she sat down, she dropped her head abruptly, a mannerism that made Onodera think of a small bird.
“This is Onodera,” said the chief.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, and, with that, she suddenly took hold of his arm, bared by his short-sleeved shirt, and, putting her pert nose to it, she sniffed vigorously. “The smell of the sea. I’ll bet you have a yacht.”
“It’s a submarine,” said Yoshimura.
“Ooh! It’s you, then,” said Mako, her eyes wide. “I’ve heard about you from Mr. Yoshimura, and I begged him to introduce me to you. How happy I am to meet you!”
“Thank you . . .” said Onodera, forcing a smile.
“A drink?” Yoshimura asked Mako. “How about cognac?”
“Too early. A whiskey sour or something.”
The recorded music stopped. The club was somewhat darker now. The lights on the tables throughout the room glowed softly like scattered streetlamps. The spotlights focused on the dance floor grew brighter, and a small band began to play quietly.
“Order what you want,” said the chief, getting up and leaving them.
Once they were alone, the hostess called Mako suddenly be came like a little girl, tensing up and saying nothing. She seemed to be about twenty, perhaps more, perhaps less. She used almost no make-up, and the roundness about her chin made her look like a schoolgirl.
“Would you like to dance?” she asked with an embarrassed smile.
“No,” said Onodera, smiling back. “I don’t dance.”
“Your submarine—is it big?” the girl asked.
“No. For its class it’s big, but it’s not anything like what you’re thinking of. With four men in it, it’s crowded. But it can dive as deep as thirty thousand feet.”
“Thirty thousand feet...” Her eyes wide, the girl’s expression took on a somewhat fearful look. “I have no idea how deep that is, but . . . down that far at the bottom of the ocean, what’s it like?”
Onodera swallowed in surprise. He gazed at a pale-yellow table light for a moment. Then a vague smile formed on his lips, and he said abruptly: “It’s a place where there’s nothing at all.”
Nothing but a ton of water pressure per square inch . . . and in the eerie glow of drifting flares, down there on the floor of the sea trench, a serpent some hundred feet long, its skin rippling convulsively . . .
“Aren’t there any fish?”
“There are some. Deep as it is, icy as it is, terrible as the pressure is, a place with no light whatsoever—there are living things there. There are fish—there are vertebrates, too.”
“Really? But if they live in such a deep, cold place, pitch dark and everything, what pleasure can they possibly get out of life?”
The tone of the girl’s voice startled Onodera. He looked at her face. The girl’s round eyes were brimming with tears.
“I don’t know.” He spoke gently as though trying to comfort a child. “But, at any rate, they really are alive.” Yoshimura had been right about this girl, he thought—she was unconventional.
2
When Onodera awoke from the doze he had fallen into as soon as he had gotten into Yoshimura’s car, his section chief was driving along a road next to a beach. Their destination, Yoshimura had said, was a villa on Sagami Bay. After they had passed through Zushi, he turned off onto a private road that climbed to a heavily wooded height, atop which stood an oddly built structure lit by floodlights, its curved roof thrust into the air like a huge plastic egg.
They got out of the car, and Yoshimura led the way into the house through French windows opening onto the garden. They passed an angular, powerfully built girl in the corridor. She was dressed in bell-bottoms, and she was holding a cigarette in the sinewy fingertips of the same hand that gripped her drink.
“Good to see you,” she said. Her voice was somewhat slurred with alcohol. “They’re all expecting you.”
“Rei?” asked Yoshimura casually.
“She’s here. She’s a bit maudlin tonight.”
They opened a white plastic door at the end of the corridor to enter what was apparently the main room. Its oval floor was spread with carpeting of a subdued, moss-like green, around which curved beige-colored walls. An ivory grand piano stood against the wall. Gathered around a glass palette-shaped table, four or five men and women were sitting in chairs of odd but evidently comfortable design. In another corner of the room there was a bar, behind which stood a girl whose pale face was half covered by her long hair. Holding a cocktail shaker in both hands, she turned to Yoshimura and Onodera as they entered.
“Hello,” she said, her voice listless.
“Well, now,” said Yoshimura, in full control of events, “let me do some introducing. This is Mr. Onodera of our undersea section.”
“Please join us—here,” said a pleasant, light-skinned young man, offering Onodera a chair. He wore an aloha shirt of subdued coloring. “What are you drinking?”
Onodera stood there awkwardly. These people, he was thinking, were sophisticated and refined men and women. He sensed that he would not readily fit in. The names he heard, one by one, as he was introduced were names he had somehow heard before, names that were always striking his eye whenever he glanced through a magazine or book. He began more and more to feel that he had without a doubt gotten himself into an awkward position.
Finally, Yoshimura brought him over to the girl standing by the bar. When he learned that she, Reiko Abe, was the owner of the villa and thus the one whom he was to meet in this informal miai, Onodera did not know quite where to look.
“Want to drink this?” asked Reiko, holding out the cocktail shaker and looking at Onodera with a weary, bored expression. “It’s a martini. Here.” She thrust it under his nose, the handle of a strainer sticking out of it.
Muttering his thanks, Onodera took the heavy cocktail shaker from the girl.
Reiko put her head back slightly and laughed a short, dry laugh. “Here you are a guest for the first time . . . Please forgive me,” she said, her tongue somewhat twisted. “But, you see, we don’t have a single cocktail glass left. I’ve smashed every one.”
“It’s quite all right,” said Onodera, forcing a smile. “Thank you very much.” So saying, he put the cocktail shaker to his lips, strainer and all, and drank the martini. Then, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he handed it back.
“A fine drink.” He turned abruptly and walked back to the table.
“Say, Mr. Onodera . . .” The young man in the aloha shirt, who had offered him a chair before, did so again, cordially bringing him into the conversation. “I’ve heard about you again and again from Mr. Yoshimura. Now, tell me, there’d be no problem about you being able to manage a submarine designed for sight seeing, would there?”
“Well, it depends,” said Onodera.
“What we have in mind is something truly unique—an under sea amusement park,” said another man, who was a well-known economist. “It’s really nothing of consequence, of course, but what we want to incorporate in it are entirely new kinds of entertainment. From available tourism capital, funds should be forthcoming, you see.”
“We’ll even build an underwater concert hall,” said the young man in the aloha shirt, casually spreading a sketch out on the table. He pointed to a young avant-garde composer by the piano. “He’s now experimenting with an underwater sym phony. It’s quite interesting.”
For some time, the sketch in their midst, they carried on an animated discussion of this novel project, and Onodera, despite hims
elf, began to have a good time, helped, of course, by the liquor. At the same time, however, a suspicion began to take form in his mind. He noticed Yoshimura talking earnestly to Reiko, who might or might not have been listening to him as she held her cocktail glass in a limp hand and, from time to time, brushed back a troublesome lock of hair that kept falling over her face. Sometimes she giggled drunkenly and once she threw back her head and gave a loud, dry laugh. Was this cordial discussion about the amusement park part of Yoshimura’s scheme? Onodera wondered. It would have been the shrewd sort of move to be expected from him.
Reiko left Yoshimura and came over to the table, her walk unsteady. She was tall, and though she was slender enough, there was ample evidence that she had the splendid figure of a mature woman.
“I’m going for a swim,” she cried. She stripped off her dress briskly, and the sun-bronzed body so suddenly bared, save for a faded bikini, proved indeed to be surprisingly strong and well formed as she stood with her chest thrust out and her legs apart.
“Not again?” said the youth in the aloha shirt.
“Count me out,” said the economist, stuffing his pipe.
“How about you?” asked Reiko, turning to Onodera. “A swim, Mr. Onoda?”
“I’ll go.” Onodera took off his shirt. “And by the way, my name is Onodera.”
Reiko laughed, wholly unabashed, and led the way out of the room. Onodera followed her, his eyes on her splendid back, which shone as though rubbed with oil. Once out on the terrace, he got rid of his pants. Reiko led the way to a corner of the terrace, where there was a small elevator half hidden by pine branches. His body and Reiko’s touched slightly during the ride down, though he drew back as much as he could. They left the glare from the house behind them, and all at once the night was filled with the sound of waves and of pine branches creaking in the wind. Onodera was acutely aware of Reiko breathing close beside him in the darkness, a sensation that stirred an odd embarrassment in him. There were no stars. The breeze was warm.
Japan Sinks Page 4
