“Tsugumi, you know what I’ve just been doing, don’t you?”
Slowly, without saying a word, Tsugumi nodded.
“You just can’t do stuff like that!” Yōko cried, wiping her face with one of her filthy hands. Then, pouring all the energy she had into her words, which were interrupted even so by her continuing hiccup-sobs, she said, “You simply won’t be able to get along in life if you’re going to do stuff like that!”
I hadn’t the foggiest idea what she was talking about. I went on standing there, looking at the two sisters as they faced off in the dark, not even thinking to switch on the lights. Suddenly Tsugumi lowered her eyes, then reached down and violently snatched up the towel that lay under her pillow—had she gotten this idea from Kyōichi’s story?—and thrust it out toward Yōko.
“. . . I’m sorry.”
It must be something pretty bad if Tsugumi’s apologizing! I thought, catching my breath. Yōko nodded very slightly and accepted the towel. She wiped away her tears as she left the room. I watched Tsugumi dive under the cover of her futon, and then, since there wasn’t really much else I could do, hurried after Yōko, who was heading down the stairs.
“What happened?” I cried. My voice echoed so loudly in the dark hall that I was taken aback. “Are you okay?” I asked, lowering my voice.
“Yes, I’m fine,” replied Yōko, and gave me a smile . . . or, rather, since it was too dark for me to be able to tell whether or not she’d actually smiled, a half-perceptible hint that she had reached me through the dark. “Tell me, what do you think Tsugumi used that dog for?”
“What? But I tied it up under the veranda earlier!”
“You were tricked, Maria.” At this point, Yōko couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Now I know what Tsugumi has been doing all these nights.”
“But wasn’t she trying to track down those guys?” I asked. Then suddenly something occurred to me. Surely Tsugumi could have checked up on that snack bar in the next town by telephone.
“She was digging a hole,” said Yōko.
“Huh?” I cried, raising my voice again.
Yōko motioned for me to follow her into her room.
Now that we were finally in a room with lights, all the things that had just taken place in the dark seemed to spiral away dizzily into the world of dreams. Yōko was totally plastered with mud, but when I suggested that she’d better run and take a bath first she just shook her head and told me to listen. “I’ve had a genuine adventure,” she said. And then she told me the story of the hole.
“It was an amazing hole. Really deep.
“I simply can’t imagine how she managed to dig a hole like that, and what she did with all the dirt. I suppose she must have worked on it every night after we were all asleep, that must be it, and then when morning came she’d place a board over the top and cover it with dirt . . .
“So anyway, I was fast asleep, you know? And then all of a sudden I just woke up, I’m not really sure why, and I was lying there listening in the dark. And then I kind of got this tiny little flicker of a feeling like I’d heard someone groaning. It made me really scared, and I started thinking that maybe I’d just imagined it because of it being night and all, but it was so . . . it sounded like it was coming from the garden, so I went out to see what it was. I’m sure you know the feeling, right? How the sort of thrill of doing things like that sort of lures you on. I opened the gate—it was pitch dark out, and I’d gone out without a flashlight, just groping my way around, but I had this feeling that it wasn’t coming from our house. It was the house around back, where Pooch lives. I started thinking that maybe robbers had broken in and the family was in there tied up or something, except that Pooch had never started barking . . . and since I was thinking about that I decided that first of all I had better go take a look at Pooch, see how he was—that’s why I was opening the gate. So I walked on through, and then the moment I got into the garden—you know how it is in the dark? How you can smell things so clearly? Well, there was this really intense odor of freshly turned soil, much stronger than usual. And so I was standing there with my head cocked slightly to one side, and then I heard the groan . . . It was coming from inside the ground. I could hardly believe that it was true, you know, so I bent down and put my ear to the ground to make sure, and kept listening to it again and again, just to make sure. Gradually my eyes got used to the dark, and so I looked more closely around where Pooch should be—and let me tell you, what I saw gave me a shock. Because Gongorō was there, too. Somehow without even noticing I had stumbled into some place that wasn’t part of reality, that’s really how it seemed . . . except that when I looked more carefully I realized that the color of this dog was subtly different, and for some reason both dogs had these sort of gaglike things in their mouths. I had no idea at all what to do, or what was going on, but to begin with I went and got a flashlight and shone it on the ground. And when I did, I realized that the earth right in front of the doghouse was different from all the rest, so I ran off and rustled up a shovel and dug away like crazy at the ground there. After a while this thick board appeared. I banged on the board with the handle of the shovel, and there was a groan. From then on I worked absolutely desperately. I got down and used every last drop of my strength to drag the board away and then aimed the flashlight down the hole. It was incredibly narrow and deep, and there was this guy at the bottom. Can you imagine how terrifying that was for me? The guy had duct tape over his mouth, and there was blood on his forehead, and his hands were all covered in mud and he was stetching them up toward me. Then it dawned on me that he was one of the guys in the group that had made off with Gongorō, and as soon as I’d gotten that far Tsugumi’s face flew into my mind. I understood then that this was all Tsugumi’s doing. I had a terrible time dragging the guy up out of the hole—I could reach him with my hands, but he kept sliding back down again. That’s how deep the hole was. So as you can see I got totally plastered in mud, but somehow I did manage to get him out, and I peeled the tape away from his mouth. And now that I could really see him I realized that he was just a kid. He looked like he was probably still in high school. And he had this look on his face like he was about to start crying, and we were both so exhausted that we didn’t even speak, we just collapsed onto the ground and sat there. Of course it’s not as if there was anything for us to say. And then I was thinking about Tsugumi. About all the different things that have happened since she was small. And I just started feeling so sad—I stood there in the dark garden, gazing down into that deep hole that Tsugumi had dug, and my tears just wouldn’t stop. And while I was like that, still in a daze, the guy wandered out through the gate, and then I started thinking, Gosh, I have to do something about this hole. For the time being I just put the board back and covered it with dirt . . . then I came inside.”
After she finished telling her story, Yōko headed downstairs to the inn’s large bath, taking a change of clothes. My head was now buzzing with all sorts of different things, and I was still in a daze when I went back to my room. I hesitated for a moment as I passed Tsugumi’s door, struggling to make up my mind whether I ought to go in or not, but in the end I decided not to.
It had occurred to me that she might be feeling so miserable about all this and about everything that she was in there crying herself.
Tsugumi is never careless about anything—she’s always terribly thorough. It made my head whirl just to imagine how tremendously difficult the task she had carried out those nights must have been, and how fatigued she must be.
Night after night, late enough that none of us would notice, Tsugumi had been out there digging that hole. Hauling out the dirt, constantly worrying that someone might discover her, in a garden that belonged to someone else. Digging that hole. And during the same period of time she’d been wandering around the town searching for a dog that looked like Gongorō. Maybe she’d sweet-talked the dog’s owner into letting her borrow it, maybe she’d bought it. Next she told me about the adventure she’d had ear
lier that night, acting as if that was the whole plan—pulling the wool over my eyes had been the work of an instant, it didn’t even require any planning—and had me tie the dog to the veranda so that I wouldn’t start wondering. Because I’m always the most suspicious, and I tend to sense things like this even before they happen. Tsugumi went out into the garden afterward and gagged the two dogs so they wouldn’t bark at the intruder when he arrived, and removed the board that she’d used both to camouflage the hole and to prevent other people from falling down inside, replacing it with a thin sheet of cardboard or something along those lines, and thus transforming it into an actual activated booby trap. The whole plan would probably have gone to pieces if they had come as a gang. Maybe she’d gone to that snack bar at a time when she knew only one member of the group would be there. And no doubt she had been out there watching, waiting for the guy, without even being sure whether or not he would come. He might have been planning to come, but on another night; she really had no idea. But he came, and he was alone. He came to make sure that it was really true, to see whether Gongorō really was still alive, because that last time they’d all been so sure they had killed him. Tsugumi waited for her chance and then snuck up behind him and bashed him over the head with something. While the guy was still reeling she sealed his mouth with duct tape and pushed him down into the hole. Then she put the board back over the opening, covered it with dirt, and returned to her room.
. . . I had no idea whether this sort of thing was actually even possible. But whether it was or not, Tsugumi had done it. And setting aside the fact that Yōko had stumbled onto the truth, everything had gone just as she’d planned. I can’t understand this. Where does this tenacious energy of hers come from? And the cartful precision that gives it shape? And what’s its purpose? What on earth had she been trying to do? I couldn’t understand it at all.
I kept thinking about this as I lay in my futon, unable to sleep. It was near dawn now, and when I looked out the window the eastern sky held such a dim hint of light that it seemed I might just be imagining it. After a while I got up and sat staring out toward the dark ocean. But that ocean—the expanse of water that I knew was out there, that had to be out there—was still sunk in the blue depths of the night, so that it seemed to have dropped utterly out of existence, leaving nothing but an enormous void. Gradually this scene worked its way down into the core of my sleepy head.
Tsugumi has just thrown away her life.
Finally this thought—something that Yōko must have understood a good deal earlier—welled up inside me, accompanied by a burst of shock. Kyōichi and the future meant less to her than this—that’s how badly she’d wanted to carry this through. Tsugumi had tried to kill a person. At the end of all the work, after struggling through labor so intense it passed well beyond the limits of her body’s strength, she seriously believed that the high school kid’s death would be a less weighty matter than the death of a dog she had loved.
Again and again I found myself reliving the peculiar excitement I’d sensed in Tsugumi when we’d gotten together earlier in the evening, as she told me about the adventure she’d just had. Tsugumi never changes at all. Her love for Kyōichi, all the months and years she had spent with the rest of us, the new sequence of days that would begin when her family moved away, and Pooch—none of it changed Tsugumi at all, not deep down inside. She hadn’t changed a bit ever since she was a child. All along she had been living in a universe of thought that was all her own, shared with no one else.
Every time I thought about all this, an image of Tsugumi sitting with a wide smile on her face, holding the dog that looked just like Gongorō in her arms, flickered across the surface of my mind like a burst of warm sunlight. There wasn’t a trace of anything ugly in that scene, and it left me dazzled.
Presence
“My God, use your brain—you think I’d actually try to kill someone?” Tsugumi would sneer. “Hell, I just wanted to put him in kind of a tight spot, you know, give the asshole a little scare, and here you morons are bawling and making a fuss as if it were all real. You two must be the biggest Wusses in the world!” And as she jeered, Yōko and I would see that look she always got in her eyes when she was making fun of you.
We had been expecting that.
But Tsugumi was hospitalized immediately. Her temperature zoomed up, her kidneys stopped functioning properly, the overexertion had left her totally drained of energy . . . as soon as Tsugumi finished her “work,” every possible problem erupted into her body, and all at once. She was pounded flat.
Anyone who carried out a job that strenuous would get sick! I thought, as I watched them load her quietly moaning form into the taxi that would take her to the hospital. I just couldn’t understand what had made her go so far.
—Idiot. Didn’t it occur to you that I have to go home?
Her face was bright red and her eyebrows were pinched tightly together; the pain was written on her unconscious face. For some reason seeing her like that made me ache so hard I even hated her for it.
There were still things I wanted to talk about. We were supposed to take Pooch for one last walk, we were going to say goodbye on the beach . . .
Nothing could be done about any of that now, and yet each little regret hit me with a strange pang of sadness. As Aunt Masako climbed into the taxi she muttered, “You’re such a fool, Tsugumi.” For a moment I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, but when my aunt glanced back at me her eyes were smiling softly, as if to say, What can you do? This is how things are! She had a change of clothes and a towel for Tsugumi clasped in her arms.
I smiled and waved. The taxi sped off through the autumn sun.
Kyōichi came back the day after Tsugumi was hospitalized.
He said he wanted to talk, so we met that night by the ocean.
“Have you been to see Tsugumi yet?” I asked, since I couldn’t think of any other way to begin. The crashing of the waves echoed through the darkness that surrounded us, and as we stood there heavy drops of rain started tumbling down through the strong wind, pounding into us. The lights burning on the boats sailing by in the distance looked blurry.
“Yeah, I saw her. But she looked like she was in a lot of pain, so I couldn’t really stay very long. We didn’t get to talk much,” Kyōichi replied. He had sat down and put his feet up on the breakwater, and now he was staring out across the dark surface of the ocean—I saw his face in profile. His hands remained in his lap, clasped together. They struck me as being unusually big and white. “I take it she was up to something,” he continued. “Not that we would have been able to stop her, of course. That girl is such a total master at playing innocent that she makes you feel bad just for being suspicious of her.”
I laughed, then told him about the hole. About Yōko’s tears.
Kyōichi listened in silence. My voice mingling with the rush of the waves, I painted a perfect picture of Tsugumi. An overwhelmingly clear sense of her presence rose with the wind that streaked through the darkness, fell with the chilly drops of rain that splashed down onto our cheeks. I kept working to change the things she had done into words, and little by little the brilliant light of Tsugumi’s life began to sparkle through the story, flickering up first in one place and then in another, glowing with such ferocious strength that it felt as if she were actually here with us even now. Like the lanterns on the boats that dotted the ocean, revealing its contours, Tsugumi’s life shone.
“What a riot. There’s no one like her!” chuckled Kyōichi after he’d heard the end of the story, struggling to keep from laughing. “I mean really—a hole? What the hell was she thinking?”
“Yeah, you said it.” I laughed along with Kyōichi. The night all this stuff happened I’d felt so unnerved and so sorry for Yōko that I hadn’t really given the matter any thought, but in retrospect the particular method that Tsugumi had chosen—a technique that managed to be both peculiarly straightforward and somehow oddly twisted—seemed so totally characteristic it was funny.
I knew exactly what he meant. The things he was saying seeped down into the center of my now chilly body, making my chest burn.
Tsugumi’s very presence linked us to something huge.
As I stood there in the dark, my feelings strengthened.
“This summer was so much fun,” I said. “It’s strange, it seems like it only lasted an instant, but it also seems to have lasted an unbelievably long time. I’m glad you were here with us. I’m sure Tsugumi’s never had such a good time.”
“She’ll be all right, I feel sure she will,” said Kyōichi.
I nodded firmly in agreement. It felt as if the loud roaring of the wind and the waves was turning the ground at our feet into something ambiguous. I gazed up for a long time at the scattering of bright stars that filled the sky, as if I were trying to count them. “After all, she’s been hospitalized lots of times before,” I said. But my voice was lost in the dark.
Kyōichi was staring out over the sea. He had a look in his eyes so fragile it seemed as if the wind might whittle it away into nothing. He looked sadder and more lonely than ever before.
Tsugumi will no longer be a part of this town. Their young love will have to move into a new configuration . . . all those things that can’t really be put into words must be churning now in Kyōichi’s heart. Just a short while ago, so recently it almost seems as if you could reach out and touch it all, we used to see the two of them and the two dogs walking on this same beach—don’t forget that. Days spent mingling with the landscape of this shore, a perfectly ordinary part of the beach . . . those days were blessed.
Goodbye Tsugumi Page 14
