by Kōji Suzuki
Today, Hiroyuki was going to fish off the south side of Breakwater No. 2. The debris floating in Tokyo Bay was said to make a round tour of the bay before washing up either on the north beach of Cape Futtsu or at the tip of the Miura Peninsula. Debris floating south of the line between Cape Kannon and Cape Futtsu, however, could flow out into the open sea instead of ever being washed ashore. That day, Hiroyuki wanted to fish in an area south of that line. There was no special reason for this hankering, he simply felt compelled to make his way as far as that patch of ocean.
Some ashes from the cigarette in his mouth fell onto his knee. He brushed them off with his hand and they scattered on the well cover. The cover was painted a dull green, but the paint was peeling off in many places. That was the first time Hiroyuki noticed that he was sitting atop the boat’s well, and suddenly every downy hair on his body stood on end. A chill ran from his buttocks up his spine and a massive shiver rippled across his body.
Its top sticking up at roughly the centre of the boat, the well was about as deep as the height of an average man and measured about six feet by nine. Its central location was ideal for a tank of its kind, for it was here that the boat’s bottom was deepest. The boat’s well was intended to hold the conger eels after a catch. When not in use, however, the well was covered by two planks to prevent accidents. Something unearthly ascended into the air from that covered hold filled with seawater. Even a veteran of the sea like Hiroyuki was affected enough by the eeriness that he jumped to his feet without thinking.
As he stood he caught sight of a black crevice between his legs. The planks had parted slightly. Hiroyuki dealt a light kick to force them back together and closed up the crack. As he did so, his body was shaking.
The wind grew stronger, and the boat rocked with a chopping motion, causing seawater in the well to splash inside the tank. The sound was a little different than usual, as if the water was splashing against something else.
Hiroyuki looked up at the sky again. The clouds were scudding faster. The southerlies were promising to whip up strong. But that wasn’t enough reason to pack up and go home. Before the wind got any stronger, Hiroyuki had to get some work done.
Jumping back onto the wharf, Hiroyuki untied the boat’s mooring rope and carried the loose end back onboard with him. The boat gradually began to move away from the quay under its own inertia.
4
Hiroyuki turned off the engine of the Hamakatsu. Once all two hundred tubes were thrown into the sea, it was only a question of waiting two hours until the conger eels got caught in the traps. Having cast the line, it was time for a short break, for a meal. Around eight o’clock, he was in the habit of eating a second breakfast.
The shadows of the tankers plying the Uraga Waterway bore down heavily on Hiroyuki’s boat. Thanks to a fractional difference in course, there was no risk of collision. Compared to the massive tankers, the six-ton Hamakatsu looked like a mere speck of flotsam. Small as the boat was, there was a fair amount of space in the cabin, making it quite possible to spend the night should the need arise.
As Hiroyuki relaxed and ate his rice ball in the cabin, he began to feel uneasy about the instability of the boat. As he had predicted, the southerly winds had grown stronger and were causing the boat to rock violently. The sky that had appeared clear enough during the morning was now covered entirely with dark threatening clouds speeding across the skylight. It was really the kind of weather that warranted calling off the trip and returning to port. Finding that he had almost no appetite, Hiroyuki left the cabin and threw his half-eaten rice ball into the sea.
His stomach was heaving, but not from nausea. It was a complex conspiracy of tension and fear. To be sure, the way the clouds were moving was disconcerting, but that did not seem to be the source of his anxiety. He couldn’t stop thinking about that well. Hiroyuki rested his hand on the cabin door and looked down at the well by his feet. Although he remembered having kicked the cover planks closely together, he could see that the black crack had reappeared. He could hear the sound of water splashing at the bottom of the tank. Though it contained not a single eel, something was surely in there. Whenever the boat pitched violently, whatever it was could be heard thudding against the side.
Hiroyuki steeled himself before thrusting his hand in the gap between the planks. A hideous stench arose from the tank, and Hiroyuki pressed the towel around his neck against his nose. Still determined to look in, he moved the wooden panels further apart.
An angled shaft of light penetrated the darkness of the well to reveal a human foot. The seawater at the bottom of the well was lapping against the sole of a pale foot. Hiroyuki poked his head inside to peer deeper into the well. There were the hips… on up to the back… and pale, pudgy shoulders. And with every rock of the boat, a head thudded again and again against the wall of the tank. The body of a woman floated facedown at the bottom of the well. Though he could not see her face, Hiroyuki knew immediately who it was.
‘Nanako…’ he called to his wife, ‘so this is where you were.’
No sooner had the words left his mouth than it all flashed back in his mind’s eye as plain as day. He relived the sensation of his hands gripping her neck. He saw his wife’s face desperately gasping for air. He could not make out what she was saying. Yet her torrent of abuse was seared into his brain.
Hiroyuki and his wife had had a violent quarrel the evening before last.
* * *
Hiroyuki had come home dead drunk and started to watch television with his mouth hanging half-open. His wife charged into the room and confronted him:
‘Just look at you! Just look at that sloppy face of yours!’ She brought a hand mirror and thrust it in front of his face. ‘Just take a look at yourself!’
Sure enough, the face looking back at him from the mirror was a sorry one. His mouth still hung half-open, even as he looked in the mirror. Not only was he drooling, but the crumbs of a snack he had eaten back at the bar stuck to the corners of his mouth. There it was, his face, ugly and worn-out. It was a face that looked older than his years. He was disgusted with himself. His wife’s taunts hit their mark. She was right, and for that reason, he felt infuriated. What right had she to complain when she was receiving upwards of a million yen every month?
The mirror flashed for a moment, reflecting the fluorescent light. The flash seemed to urge action.
Slapping the mirror out of her hand, Hiroyuki roared at her, his articulation thick with the effects of drink.
‘How dare you!’
Noting the change in the colour of his glaring eyes, she steeled herself and looked away. The sight of her husband gearing up for an episode of violence was terrifying enough. She bit back the rest of her taunts, holding her resentment in check.
Yet, with that ‘How dare you?’ barely out of his mouth, Hiroyuki slumped down helplessly, his cheek against the surface of the tatami matting, his breath sputtering. Nanako stared at her husband for a while in his slumped, powerless condition. Her gaze betrayed contempt, like she was witnessing the dying moments of some monster. Suddenly, she began spitting out the words she had held back. Inside his head, befuddled as it was with drink, Hiroyuki registered her taunts, rebutting each one silently. He would not engage in a battle of words which he was bound to lose.
He couldn’t imagine what the bitch had to complain about. Him, stupid? Look at who was talking, daft bitch! How she went on in that superior whine about having made the top ten of her class! It made him sick. A fisherman didn’t need to be an Einstein. He only earned such good wages because he had the strength and instincts of a man. And what was all that about genes? Who was passing on what to whom? Both the kids? So what? Oh, now he saw what the bitch was getting at, it was all his fault that their girl had aphasia. His high-handedness was to blame? How the bitch went on and on with her gibberish!
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. It was the same old quarrel repeated night after night, the same tired old taunts and complaints every time. Not onl
y would she complain about having to look after her senile father-in-law and aphasic daughter, she would also accuse him of physical abuse and not caring for his family in the least. She claimed that she felt she was locked up in a prison cell. She bitterly lamented how deeply she hated her existence, how she couldn’t take it anymore. He had but a single reply to all her complaints: month after month, he never brought home less than a million yen.
She had declared that she intended to leave him. He reacted with derision. Did she have anywhere to go? Who would have her? Had she forgotten how he’d taken her in and fed her? More than anything, how did she think she could make a living? She was incompetent and she’d end up dying in a ditch somewhere.
‘I’m leaving’ was just another tired old line paraded out again and again until it had completely lost any value it may once have had as a threat. She kept saying she would leave him, but she never even tried. She didn’t have parents she could depend on, and she worried about her kids’ future and her own job prospects.
But then Nanako said something she had never, ever said before. Exhausted from unleashing her torrent of grievances, she seemed almost to have shrunk. Her strength drained from her shoulders, she muttered as if to herself, ‘It’d be awful if he turned out like you.’
This last remark pierced Hiroyuki’s heart like a barbed fishing hook. What she meant was clear enough in light of her previous taunts. If she did leave him and desert the children, their motherless son would grow up and turn out like Hiroyuki. That was what Nanako saw as ‘awful’.
It had been twenty years now since Hiroyuki’s father had almost drowned at sea. Hiroyuki’s mother had disappeared around the same time. He’d lost his mother when he was about Katsumi’s age. His mother had deserted her family, running off with a younger man… At least, that was the account given him by his father. At the time, however, his father’s senility had already been kicking in, making it difficult to gauge how much of what he said was true. For all that, there was no reason to believe that his mother had left for any other reason. As far as Hiroyuki could remember, his mother and father had done nothing but fight. It certainly seemed quite plausible that his mother, unable to endure his father’s violence any longer, just left him and disappeared.
Hiroyuki had taken the news of having been abandoned by his mother without displaying any emotion, or so he believed. He could not remember having received much, if any, affection from his mother, and his only value had seemed to lie in deflecting his father’s violence from her. As he grew older, however, the fact that his mother deserted him began to turn increasingly into a feeling that he was an unwanted presence in the world. Hiroyuki grew up feeling constantly resentful, and his self-confidence was always so fragile that it could be shattered with a single blow.
Perhaps that was why he’d gone to pieces that evening. Without understanding the cause of the blaze raging in him, Hiroyuki got to his feet, hit his head on a chest of drawers, and tottered across the room, coming down on top of his wife. It was as though flames erupted from every pore of his body. He was never one to waste time on words, but this assault was unlike previous ones, and his wife probably sensed what was coming. She did not attempt to cry out, but simply closed her eyes as if in resignation, and placed her hands on her husband’s, which gripped her neck. It almost seemed as though she wanted him to squeeze harder, and Hiroyuki straddled her as she lay there, bringing the full weight of his body on his hands. When he gently removed them, Nanako was dead.
Hiroyuki got to his feet and for some reason switched off the fluorescent light. He turned on the small bedside lamp instead, shining it on his wife’s face. She looked to be asleep. She was now released from her prison cell. She even looked content.
He strained his ears. There was not a sound to be heard. His father, his son, and his daughter were all asleep. The silence was so complete that he almost felt he could hear their breathing as they slept.
He already knew how to dispose of his wife’s body. He would throw it into the sea. If he sank the body in the sea south of Breakwater No. 2, it would never be found.
He wrapped his wife’s body in a fine nylon net and carried her over his shoulder onto his boat. He then dumped the body in the boat’s well, there to stay until he could permanently dispose of it. That was all he could do then. The rest could wait until the day after next, when he’d sink the body while out fishing. Persuading himself thus, he put the planks back on the hold and went home.
He drank a glass or two of sake and went to sleep, and something happened in his mind that was very much like throwing his wife’s body down a well and putting a lid on it. His brain cells confined the memory of his deed to its deepest recesses and capped it with a lid – one that was destined to be reopened soon enough.
5
…What a thing to have gone and done.
Two planks of wood formed the cover of the well. Hiroyuki removed one and stood it on the deck. He looked up at the sky, then sank down exhausted on the deck. The pit of his stomach began to heave. He deeply regretted what he’d done. Yet, his deed had been exposed to the light of day and there was no more escaping into oblivion.
‘So! Why don’t you get going?’ his wife’s still corpse seemed to provoke him with the reality. It seemed to be suppressing a smirk as it swayed back and forth.
What to do? First, he had to get down into the well with some rope, tie it to his wife’s corpse, and haul her out of the well. He would then attach weights to the body and sink it. Having lain in seawater for a day and a half in the early summer heat, the corpse emitted an unearthly stench. The smell had smouldered in the confined space of the tank, shooting up like a flame through the opening of the removed plank. It occurred to Hiroyuki that leaping into a fire to retrieve a body would have been easier.
Having to get rid of the body was his wife’s punishment for him. Hiroyuki cursed his own deed. But the task could not be avoided.
He tied a towel over his mouth and nose, knotting it firmly behind his head. He tied the end of some rope to the winch, while taking the other end in his hand. He peered into the well, as if he hadn’t done enough of that already, and caught sight of his wife’s blanched foot. The skin was puffed up and had begun to peel.
The boat rocked violently. Hiroyuki put his hands on the edge of the well for support. He had almost fallen in.
The current was getting faster. As he scanned the sea around him, he noticed that there was not a single fishing boat in sight; they must have all scuttled back to harbour.
Everyone agreed that the waves in Tokyo Bay were terrifying. Waves came in two types, rollers and choppers, and the complex indentations of Tokyo Bay’s coastline were perfectly configured to generate choppers. Waves were even now rushing in at random angles and breaking into white spray. If Hiroyuki wasn’t careful, a chopper could smash into the deck from an unexpected angle and flood the boat with water.
Leaving the rope for the time being, Hiroyuki dropped anchor to set the boat against the wind. The boat could capsize if the waves came at its hull.
It was then that it hit him that he hadn’t a second to waste. He was in for serious trouble if he didn’t dump the body and get out of there soon.
A chopper breaking hard by spurred him to action.
With his hands on either side of the well, he lowered himself down to the bottom. Trying to avoid looking at the body as much as possible, he felt around for his wife’s ankles. The best way to do the job seemed to be to bind the legs together with rope and haul it out upside down. Perhaps he could get it over with without having to look at her face.
Every time the boat pitched unexpectedly, Hiroyuki staggered and his wife’s legs would slip from his grasp. He cursed aloud and clamped the end of the rope between his teeth. In that split second, his entire body was jarred by an awful premonition. An uncanny shudder ran through the length and breadth of the boat, and it pitched once like never before and started to list. From that point on, everything unfolded in slow motion. Slowly
, ever so slowly, the opening of the well, which until then had been above him, rolled down to his side, throwing the other plank off with a thud. Soon his only source of daylight, the opening, was completely submerged in the sea and Hiroyuki’s world went pitch dark.
The seawater flooded in at his feet, reached his waist and then his chest in no time, and forced his body up, up.
… She’s capsized.
Before the word ‘capsized’ could come to his mind, his body had grasped the situation and braced for death. He was too panicked even to breathe. In that state, he struggled up to reach air and rammed his head against the bottom of the boat. The water began to stop flowing in, leaving a single head’s breadth of air. Thrusting his face up into that pitch-dark sliver, Hiroyuki coughed violently. He must have swallowed a large amount of seawater.
His heart literally shrank in his chest. He was dead for sure unless he managed to control his panic. His brain raced in a frantic search for some way to save himself… Yes. That was it. He’d fill his lungs to capacity, dive down to find the opening of the well, and swim out.
He tried to remain calm. There was still plenty of air left. There was no need to lose his head. No good would come of a frantic exit. Straying too far from the boat meant certain death.
He suddenly remembered. What happened to that rope he’d been holding just a few moments ago? The other end of the rope had been wound round the winch on the deck. The boat had capsized just as he was trying to bind his wife’s legs with the rope. He would not drift away from the boat as long as he held on to the rope and pulled himself back along it.
No matter how much he groped around in the water for the rope, his fingertips were unable to locate it. It was taking too long. He resigned himself to swimming out without the guidance of the rope. He took several deep breaths to fill his lungs. The more he tried to inhale the air trapped in that cramped, dark space, the more suffocated he felt. His panic was making him hyperventilate. Hiroyuki was no longer sure he could make it, when ten feet was all he needed to dive at most.
