Dark Water

by Kōji Suzuki

  Yet this morning, wherever he looked was untidy. Dirty dishes were stacked high in the sink, dirty clothing stuffed in the laundry basket.

  ‘Nanako!’

  Calling his wife’s name, he made his way upstairs and looked into the children’s room. His wife was not there either.

  Hiroyuki had no choice but to prepare his own breakfast from whatever he found in the refrigerator. He then waited for his son to return from school and took him out on a stroll during which he might look for his wife.

  * * *

  As they crossed the park, Hiroyuki tried to remember what had happened the night before. He recalled drinking more than usual since he wouldn’t be working today. But he felt he hadn’t even stayed up that late. Before workdays, Hiroyuki made it a rule to go to bed before nine o’clock; he had to get up very early, at half past two. But he just couldn’t remember what time he’d gone to bed the night before. His wife would have gone to bed at the same time. They always slept next to each other, spreading their futons out on the tatami of a six-mat room. Hiroyuki only had to turn to one side to see his wife’s face as she slept. He did remember seeing his wife’s face last night. She’d been fast asleep, her breathing inaudible, and her face had been lit up in the light of the lamp near her pillow. Hiroyuki had observed his wife’s face as it was illuminated by the weak source of light.

  Suddenly, his head was throbbing with splitting pain. He ran over to the water fountain where he drank and lightly patted his head with his hand. When he tried to think, a black force repelled him. Always hazy, always just out of reach… What had happened the night before? His efforts to remember proved futile.

  Hiroyuki washed his face in the gushing spray of water.

  ‘Let’s try the Fishermen’s Co-op.’

  He turned the water off and turned his drenched face toward his son.

  Katsumi nodded, but he was suffering an attack of anxiety that he couldn’t begin to describe. It was the dread that his mother might never return.

  2

  There was rarely much traffic on the road that ran from east to west by the fishing port. The boats left on the vacant plot of land accented the aura of desolation that pervaded the port on the fishermen’s day off. There were a few stalls selling shellfish, but the place was too far out of the way for the sightseers clamming at low tide.

  The roots of the trees lining the sidewalk were overgrown with grass. Hiroyuki did not hesitate to walk on the road instead. He was conscious that his son was deliberately negotiating each clump of grass so as not to step off the sidewalk.

  ‘The fool,’ Hiroyuki thought to himself.

  The boy’s mother had told him never to step off the sidewalk. The sight of his son unconditionally obeying his mother to the last word galled Hiroyuki to no end.

  A broker’s shop selling marine products stood before the Fishermen’s Cooperative Association. As Hiroyuki looked into the back of the shop, a hefty woman came out, wiping her hands on her apron. He acknowledged her with a nod of his head.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen the wife at all?’

  The tone of his question suggested that he was puzzled by his wife’s absence.

  ‘No… at least not today.’

  Not being on particularly friendly terms with the shopkeeper, he felt little disposed to prolong the conversation. Once she got the bit between her teeth, this fishwife would keep callers all day with her prattle. Hiroyuki beat a hasty retreat into an alley just outside the shop.

  As they wandered here and there along the coast, through the park, and around the Fishermen’s Co-op, Hiroyuki approached countless people with the same question.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen the wife, have you?’

  He would repeat the question whenever he spotted a familiar face. It was unlike Hiroyuki to be the first to speak, to be so spontaneous with his greetings. He was known as an unsociable character. He couldn’t understand why he was behaving in this manner. His behaviour mystified himself. It was as though he were trying to impress upon all of them that he was walking around searching for his wife.

  Hiroyuki’s home was on a corner two blocks down the road from the fishwife’s shop. The house occupied almost the entire plot it was built on. His boat, the Hamakatsu, was moored near the western extremity of the port, making it but a few minutes’ walk from his house. Two years ago, they had enlarged their house. Since that time, they had used the older, original part of the building for storage. Hiroyuki had been born and raised in the part of the house that now housed his fishing tackle. During his entire thirty-three years, he had never lived anywhere else.

  ‘I’m home!’

  He was through the front door and into the house now, but still no one answered. Hiroyuki had expected to see his wife’s all-too-familiar face pop out and greet him, dispelling his misgivings. The silence disillusioned him all too quickly.

  ‘So she’s not back yet.’

  He clicked his tongue and strode across the living room, throwing open one of the sliding screens to the Japanese-style room beyond.

  His daughter Haruna and his father Shozo were sitting on the floor at the low table facing each other. They were both eating jam buns. Although Shozo was only fifty-five years of age, his emaciated form and white hair suggested a man of over eighty.

  Shozo had almost lost his life at sea. That was twenty years ago. He’d taken his boat out of the harbour in calm weather, but the wind had changed suddenly and the boat was being buffeted mercilessly by tail waves generated by southerly winds. His face was hurled against the edge of the boat and he was thrown overboard. Luckily, he was saved, but the accident served to trigger the gradual onset of senile dementia, impairing his perception, memory, and speech. For the past few years, his life had become a monotonous cycle of eating, excreting, and sleeping. It was not clear whether his condition was due to the accident or whether the accident had only served to call forth the symptoms of an innate disposition. Hiroyuki and the other members of his family guessed that it had probably been innate. There were other grounds for suspecting that this was the case. Their daughter Haruna, now approaching her seventh birthday, had begun to show symptoms of aphasia or some similar disorder.

  She’d always been able to learn and interact normally, but for the past three months she hadn’t been able to speak properly and had started making moaning sounds instead. For about a month, she still seemed to have mental images of the things she wanted to say and was simply having a hard time enunciating them. Then one day, she abruptly gave up trying to speak at all. Haruna had always been an odd child and had been experiencing difficulties at school. Since losing her ability to speak, she’d stopped attending school altogether. Whenever they had time on their hands, she and her grandfather would sit together devouring jam buns. All you had to do was give her a jam bun to keep her occupied. The family soon discovered that a great deal of trouble could be avoided by simply stocking up on jam buns and giving her more than she could eat. Hiroyuki was gradually losing the vitality, motivation, whatever else it took to set his family right.

  As he observed his daughter and his father, sitting opposite each other eating jam buns in silence, the sight depressed him anew. How irritating it was not to be able to ask either of them whether his wife had returned while he had been out. Irritation was not the word; he was beginning to feel as if two dark walls were closing in on him from above and below to crush the life out of him.

  One he had given life; the other had given him life. Now he was trapped between the two.

  He closed the sliding panel, unable to watch them any longer. Hiroyuki was partially resigned to suffering some kind of brain impairment himself in the future, but this was one reality he naturally preferred not to contemplate.

  …Just where on earth has she gone?

  Hiroyuki folded his arms on his chest, baffled.

  As five o’clock approached, his irritation was aggravated by hunger. He felt an overpowering resentment at his wife for having left the f
amily to fend for themselves. With no one to take out his rage on, it only grew and grew.

  The one possibility he could think of was that she had suddenly left him. Hiroyuki himself had felt tempted to leave home and desert his family. His emotions rose to an explosive level as he imagined himself saying it: ‘Leave, you bitch, if that’s what you want. But before you do, make sure you kill the kids and the old man.’

  He relived in that instant his own hunger for affection as a child and wiped tears from his face with the back of his hand, which clutched a can of beer.

  He suddenly remembered the bankbook that was kept in the drawer of the kitchen cupboard. Upon locating the bankbook, he flipped through the pages, but found nothing unusual. No large sums of money had been withdrawn lately. If his wife had indeed left him, she had done so on an impulse.

  In that case, she’d just as likely be back as fast as she’d left. She’d succumbed momentarily to temptation, that was all.

  Feeling somewhat better, he decided to go out. He knew a bar called Marie where he could get something to eat.

  ‘Have some of those jam buns,’ he told his son, put on a pair of sandals, and went out.

  * * *

  Hiroyuki made his way along the road by the fishing port toward the park. The gray water in the enclosed harbour was tinged with the crimson of the cloudy dusk sky. There was neither wind nor waves, and the boats moored along the wharf stood motionless side by side. Hiroyuki looked where his own boat was moored.

  Even from where he was standing, he could clearly see the name of his boat, Hamakatsu, on the hull. He halted. It felt like his heart was in his mouth and he didn’t know why. His pulse began to race; the blackest fear welled up from some pinprick in his heart and spread through his body. He swallowed hard. A low-pitched drone seemed to fill his inner ear.

  Hiroyuki had no idea what was causing the attack. He looked towards the harbour. As soon as he spotted his own boat, he felt his chest constrict. No one knew that boat better than he did, he had used it for years. He had spent more time on that boat than at home. What could be bothering him? His forgetfulness had been pronounced of late. He sometimes couldn’t recall events from the day before.

  Maybe there was something he’d left undone at work, something on the boat that needed servicing, some piece of tackle that needed to be put away. He tried to think if there was anything like that he might have forgotten, but his mind remained blank.

  He looked ahead and saw the red neon sign, Marie, on the left. Though desperate for answers, he went inside and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Hi stranger!’ The bar’s madam beamed at him as he walked through the door. He was generous with his money, and the bar valued his patronage.

  The moment Hiroyuki heard the madam’s voice, the anxiety that had been eating away at him simply vanished.

  3

  As always, Hiroyuki woke up a little before three o’clock in the morning. He woke up instinctively and had not needed the prodding of an alarm clock for years now. Of course, there was no precise time laid down to go fishing. He fished for conger eels all alone. The earlier he set out, the earlier he could return. The sooner he got back, the sooner he could start drinking. He sat cross-legged on the futon and gazed into space. The rest of the family was asleep. His wife would have normally been sleeping on the futon next to his, but she was not there. When she was around, she got in the way; when she wasn’t around, there were extra chores for him to do.

  …Where on earth is she?

  He had absolutely no idea how to go about searching for his missing wife. The only thing he could do was to go out fishing as usual and wait for his wife to return. He cursed and slammed his pillow against the tatami matting.

  ‘Someone prepare my breakfast!’

  His yell reverberated through the entire house, but there was no reply. They were all asleep in their own rooms: his son and daughter upstairs, his father in the Japanese-style room behind the living room. Not that any of them gave the impression of being alive at all even when they were awake.

  Hiroyuki did not budge – not because he was averse to making his own breakfast, but because it just didn’t feel right. On this particular morning, he was unable to motivate himself to go fishing. The only justifiable reason for not going out would have been poor weather. He did for a moment find himself wishing he could stay home thanks to some storm.

  He’d rarely wished for bad weather before. In fact, Hiroyuki often went out on rough days when other fishermen took the day off. He was well-known in the Futtsu fishing community for his nerve. That was why the Hamakatsu boasted catches that far surpassed those of other boats. Hiroyuki was not engaged in fishing only for the money; he got a thrill from tracking conger eels as they moved from place to place, using his instincts to net bumper catches. Not only that, he enjoyed boasting to others about his successful hauls. It was as if he had no other way to prove his worth as a human being.

  Hiroyuki heaved himself up. Even in the closed room, he could sense the conditions out in the open air. The weather was nowhere near as bad as to warrant calling off the day’s fishing. Not feeling like it was no justification, but slacking off. And there was one more reason why he could not simply stay home that day. He felt he had to set out to sea, that day more than any other. His feelings were contradictory: he did not feel like going, but he felt he had to go.

  He pulled open the shutters. It was still pitch-dark outside. It was the time of the year when the days were longest. In another hour the eastern skies would drain their darkness.

  Two days earlier, Hiroyuki had netted a very creditable catch. Even his dragnet had caught many fry of conger eel. Another such profitable day awaited him. He tried to spur himself on with such positive thoughts.

  * * *

  He dressed in his usual style: a jacket over a T-shirt, the bottoms of his jogging pants tucked into rubber boots. His clothing that day was different in but one respect. He wore a different hat. He replaced his usual hunting cap with a straw hat given the growing heat of summer. Thus clad and with a sack of frozen sardines slung over his shoulder, he crossed the foot wide plank that linked the wharf with the stern of his boat.

  For conger eel fishing, there was no set time for boats to leave the harbour. Some boats would go out at about the same time as Hiroyuki, while others set off as he returned to the harbour at around two in the afternoon.

  The sputtering of engines starting up began to break the predawn silence of the harbour. Hiroyuki started his generator and joined the others in banishing the silence that had reigned. He then lit up the deck of the Hamakatsu with a searchlight. There was one job that remained to be done before he left. It involved throwing sardines into the tubes used to catch the conger eels. The synthetic resin tubes measured about six inches in diameter and were a little over two feet in length. A couple hundred of these tubes were stacked on the left side of the fore-deck. Hiroyuki began the process of putting a sardine in each tube and stuffing them with a cap fitted with rubber flaps. The eels would be enticed into the tubes by the smell of sardine. The rubber flaps at the mouth of each tube were arranged to trap the catch inside once it entered the tube. The two hundred tubes were attached with rope to a cable that stretched about three miles. This was the most common method of fishing for conger eels, and it involved letting the cable out at a uniform speed and allowing the tubes to sink to the seabed. Then all you had to do was wait, and later lift the tubes. Some of them would be empty, but more often than not a tube would contain more than one eel, sometimes as many as ten.

  Since the rubber flaps prevented the conger eels from escaping, they would squirm around in the dark slippery tube. Hiroyuki was definitely not one for metaphors, but he thought the slippery squirming interior of the tube and the struggling eel resembled nothing so much as sexual intercourse. What pitiful creatures men were to be lured by a scent into a trap from which they could not escape! It was Hiroyuki’s own story, too. He’d fallen into a trap set by a woman, when he
was just twenty-two, that period of life when he was most set on having a good time. Trapped, unable to escape, he had set up home and started a family. The woman had become pregnant with his son Katsumi, and the inevitable obligation, marriage, had followed. He had not married for love. The love he had thought would bloom in time never did. Nothing changed. If he were asked whether he felt any affection for his wife, or children, he would have had to shake his head. It had all transpired beyond his control. Hiroyuki had never once liked another human being.

  By the time he finished loading the tubes, the eastern sky was already light. Hiroyuki sat down on the cover of the ship’s well for a smoke. As he smoked, he gazed at the movement of clouds above Mt Kano. Upon waking he would first look at the dawn sky, then later, before leaving the harbour, check the clouds over the surrounding mountains. Fishermen always turned to the mountains for clues as to how the weather would turn out that day, whether it was likely to be windy or rainy. Any fisherman who did not know how to accurately read the winds and skies in and around the fishing grounds risked losing his life at sea.

  The sky immediately above was more or less clear, although fine cloud cover could be seen in the direction of Mt Kano and Mt Nokogiri. Moreover, the mountains themselves appeared to be capped in lower clouds. The few patches of cloud in the sky right above him were drifting inland, indicating to Hiroyuki that southerly winds were already blowing inshore. It was very likely that these would be full gusts before the morning was out. Hiroyuki’s instincts, honed over many years, told him that things didn’t look good.

  The sky told him that even if he did leave the harbour, he was not likely to get very far out. He would have to check the conditions out at sea and make a speedy retreat back to the harbour if the winds got too strong.