Dark Water

by Kōji Suzuki

  Just then, his hands registered a violent jolt, and the rope pulled taut as if some enormous fish had caught on the other end. As he tried to maintain hold of the rope, Enoyoshi was pulled halfway over the side of the yacht.

  ‘Please, give me a hand,’ he summoned Minako, who rose from the bench and came over to his side. As a precaution, he had her hold the end of the rope while he pulled with all his might. Enoyoshi’s arms felt Ushijima’s full weight. He had a bad feeling. Maybe there’d been some accident.

  Just a few feet from the yacht, Ushijima’s head burst up through the surface. Though he was treading water, he didn’t seem to be gaining any buoyancy. His body was arching back, and he looked like he might go under.

  ‘Hold on!’

  With this shout of encouragement, Enoyoshi pulled even harder on the rope to lift Ushijima up. Ushijima was trying to say something, but no words came from his mouth. Perhaps it was a silent scream of terror. It was dreadful, his expression slackening the next moment as he began to sink, his thinning hair fanning out on the surface of the water like seaweed. Enoyoshi pulled with every ounce of strength he had, for he felt sure that Ushijima was about to drown.

  It was impossible to pull him straight up the side of the yacht. Going around to the stern, Enoyoshi grasped Ushijima under the arms and heaved him up toward the cockpit. Ushijima was now bent double with his abdomen against the rim of the stern. When his cheek brushed against the deck, he vomited. From his mouth, in intermittent bursts, came not only the seawater he had swallowed during the dive, but also the remains of the sandwiches and beer he’d had for lunch. His whole body convulsed with each violent retch. His feet were still dragging in the water. Minako yelped and sprang aside; even as she let out screams, she ran to the cabin to get a towel.

  Trying to heave himself aboard, Ushijima frantically crawled forward. When he’d pulled his legs out of the water, he rolled over face up, tried to take a breath, and started coughing violently.

  Enoyoshi was not sure how to assist someone who had nearly drowned. All he could do was ask over and over again if Ushijima was ‘okay’. Slinging the towel that Minako had given him over his shoulder, he began to rub Ushijima’s back. His head thrust over the side, Ushijima kept retching though nothing was coming out of him except tears and saliva. Still, he would not stop. Urged by violent convulsions, he continued to turn his stomach inside out.

  Enoyoshi decided that Ushijima would be better off lying down on the bed in the cabin. Offering Ushijima the support of his shoulder, he started to walk him to the cabin. It became clear after only one or two steps that Ushijima was completely powerless from the knees down. It was not so much that the strength had left his legs, it was as though he’d actually lost his legs from the knees down. After finally managing to get Ushijima on the cabin bed, Enoyoshi covered him with the bath towel, a track-suit jacket, and anything warm he could find. Ushijima’s shaking showed no signs of abating; if anything, it was getting worse by the minute. From time to time, his pale lips uttered a dreadful moan that resembled the howling of a wild beast. The change in Ushijima’s appearance was so dramatic that all Enoyoshi and Minako could do was stand in stupefied silence by the bedside.

  At first, Enoyoshi had imagined that Ushijima might have suffered something like the following. In need of fresh air, he tries to make his way straight up to the surface. But, running out of air halfway up, he swallows seawater and panics. Perhaps his lifeline has caught on the keel. At any rate he panics and starts to drown. The terror of groping around in the dark sea was indescribable and the slightest mishap could bring on panic.

  But the total look of horror on Ushijima’s face simply defied the imagination. His eyes stared blankly into space, his gaze probably registering nothing at all, and his auditory and olfactory senses didn’t appear to be working either. All his organs of perception were still under the spell of whatever trauma he’d experienced.

  Enoyoshi asked Minako whether they had anything stronger than beer. She retrieved half a bottle of red wine and an alumite drinking mug from under the galley.

  This might not be strong enough to bring him around,’ said Enoyoshi, sitting Ushijima up and trying to pour some wine into his mouth. At first Ushijima seemed able to swallow only a few drops, but gradually his throat began to move more briskly, and in no time he’d drunk two cups of wine. His eyes began to show some semblance of life. The tremors that had shaken his body were subsiding and his breathing was growing calm.

  Enoyoshi decided to start by asking Ushijima whether he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do, that is, remove the rope wrapped around the keel.

  ‘Mr Ushijima, did you get it done?’

  Ushijima shook his head vigorously.

  ‘So the rope’s still tangled on the keel.’

  This time, Ushijima shook his head even more violently than before. He reacted in exactly the same way when Enoyoshi repeated himself. Ushijima shook his head when he was asked if the job was done. He likewise shook his head to deny that any rope remained caught on the keel. If he wasn’t simply delirious, then there was only one rational conclusion. What had brought the yacht to a halt had yet to be removed from the keel – and it wasn’t rope. Something other than rope had caused the yacht to stop. As Enoyoshi thought this through, the boat lurched suddenly, twice. It didn’t feel like a wave, but rather, some force that was working on one point of the boat to attempt to pull it down.

  Enoyoshi’s anxiety instantly turned into fear. This may have been his first time on a yacht, but as a boy he’d enjoyed many a thrilling tale about the mysteries of the sea. Even the most orthodox of tales about phantom ships had sent a good chill down his spine. The entire crew of an enormous sailing ship would disappear without a trace, everything just as they had left it. What happened aboard the ship? The stories simply posed the question and never told you why the entire crew simply vanished off the ship. They impressed strongly upon readers that the sea itself was a mystery, that it was a space where the world of the living and the world of the dead were commingled.

  Enoyoshi looked around fretfully. Where was the lifeline to land – the radio? Search as he may, he couldn’t spot anything of the sort.

  ‘Where’s the yacht’s radio?’ Enoyoshi asked Minako. She in turn looked at Ushijima and listlessly rubbed her prostrate husband’s shoulders. She was trying to get her husband to answer.

  Enoyoshi repeated the question, and Ushijima’s dull gaze glided sideways.

  ‘There is no radio?’ rephrased Enoyoshi.

  This time Ushijima nodded. So there was no radio set aboard. As near as they were to land, they couldn’t call for help. With a radio, they could contact Dream Island Marine Services and get them to send a tug. A tow from a tugboat with a high-power diesel engine would surely unmoor them. But there was no radio.

  His throat dry from the tension, Enoyoshi poured some wine into the mug that Ushijima had used, and downed the whole thing in a gulp. Ushijima was the only man on board with any sailing experience, but the trauma had rendered him useless. Minako just clung to her husband and made no attempt to take the initiative. Enoyoshi, who’d blithely assumed that he was only a guest, felt a terrible weight on his shoulders now.

  He kept glancing at his watch, swallowing nervously again and again. It was already eight o’clock. He shuddered to think that they might have to spend the night out at sea. The next day, Monday, he had an important deal to make. He’d had enough. He just wanted to go home to his apartment and lie down on the familiar bed. If only he could…

  No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he made his way up to the cockpit and scanned the area to the west. A concrete embankment ran north to south along the perimeter of Wakasu Marine Park, and lined up parallel to the embankment on his side were numerous tetrapods whose boot shaped ends protruded out of the sea.

  If he clambered up over the tetrapod blocks, it would be easy to jump onto the embankment. Enoyoshi estimated that it was no more than a hundred yards from the
yacht to the tetrapods. Even allowing for error in his reckoning due to darkness, it was a short distance that Enoyoshi could swim comfortably. His heart began to beat fast. Sink or swim. It was worth a try. It was still quite an adventure to swim in Tokyo Bay at night. He felt his short-lived resolve wither as he gazed down at the waters of the nighttime sea.

  The cabin hatch opened and Ushijima came crawling up. He was more intent on moving his lips than his body, as if impatient to tell Enoyoshi something. Enoyoshi extended his hand to help him sit on the bench, but Ushijima just lay on the cockpit floor.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  Moving about by himself was certainly a sign that Ushijima was recovering, physically at least. But what he did next was to shudder and croak, ‘This boat isn’t going anywhere.’ His tone made him sound like a stubborn old man.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I touched, with this hand.’ He held up a palm.

  ‘Touched what?’

  ‘The hands.’

  …Ushijima’s hand had touched hands?

  Enoyoshi began wishing that he’d never asked. There were millions of scary tales about dead spirits pulling at the legs of swimmers, but if Ushijima was trying to tell him some yarn about a hand emerging from the seabed to take hold of their keel, that was too far-fetched even to be a joke.

  After a moment of silence, Ushijima opened his mouth again. ‘A child is stronger than you’d think,’ he said.

  Enoyoshi couldn’t reply. What was he to say to that? Perhaps the shock had been too great and Ushijima had gone mad. ‘Child?’ There was nothing but to repeat the word.

  ‘There’s a child clinging to the keel.’

  At this, Enoyoshi held his breath. The picture of a child’s drowned body clinging to the keel formed in his mind.

  ‘You know those hugging dolls they had years ago that you could put on your arm? Reminded me of them, except the face was all bloated like a balloon, you see,’ Ushijima said with some feeling.

  Calm down, Enoyoshi reprimanded himself. No good would come of letting into his mind a monster born of another’s imagination. Enoyoshi had to go over the facts carefully. What had caused the creature to form in Ushijima’s mind?

  ‘Was the child you saw a boy?’

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ Ushijima replied and nodded. Enoyoshi was on the right track.

  ‘Six years old or thereabouts?’

  Ushijima thought for a while and then nodded. Enoyoshi was convinced now that he’d guessed right. Images don’t usually spring up from nowhere. In this case, without a doubt, the boy’s shoe that had got caught in the propeller provided the grounds, as it were, of Ushijima’s imagination.

  Enoyoshi tried to trace the steps in Ushijima’s psychological process in the sequence in which they had occurred. The catalyst to the chain of associations had been the Mickey Mouse shoe, which must have been lingering somewhere in the back of Ushijima’s mind when he attempted the dive. Where had the boy dropped his left shoe? The bridge? The embankment? Or perhaps the boy had drowned and just one of his shoes had come off in the water? If so, the boy’s body would indeed be floating around in the sea somewhere.

  Ushijima, who’d dived and started groping around on the bottom of the yacht with both his eyes tightly shut, must have touched something slimy clinging to the keel, maybe seaweed, that conjured up the feel of the skin of a drowned boy. Instantly, an image had flashed in Ushijima’s mind. In the first place, he could never have seen anything in that sludge at night. Ushijima hadn’t seen whatever he’d seen with his eyes. He had seen with his mind’s eye an illusion formed by his famous imagination. A drowned little boy clinging to the keel, his face bloated like a balloon, eyes sunken deep into mushy flesh, the tip of a pale tongue sticking out from his mouth… A drowned boy’s body clinging tightly to the keel like a hugging doll and immobilizing the yacht…

  At this point, Enoyoshi felt sure he knew what Ushijima’s answer to his next question would be.

  ‘The boy you saw, he was missing one of his shoes, right?’ he asked. Ushijima would surely nod. They’d found only the left shoe wedged in the propeller.

  Knowing the answer, Enoyoshi studied Ushijima’s reaction. But Ushijima narrowed his eyes, peered up at the sky, and shook his head to say no.

  ‘He had shoes on both feet?’

  This time Ushijima’s reply was direct: The boy had bare feet.’ There was no trace of hesitation or uncertainty in Ushijima’s voice, and that was what baffled Enoyoshi.

  In any case, he could not just sit there doing nothing. It occurred to him that they should try to restart the engine once more and get the yacht moving. Finding that the cuff of his shirt got in the way when he tried to tug the hand-starter, he decided to remove his shirt rather than simply roll up the sleeve and began to unbutton. Ushijima lay at Enoyoshi’s feet, his posture unchanged. From under the open hatch, Minako caught sight of Enoyoshi taking off his shirt and called to him with a note of relief in her voice.

  ‘So you’ve decided to dive at last.’

  No doubt she’d misinterpreted Enoyoshi’s removing his shirt. He hadn’t the slightest intention of diving under the yacht, and her remark annoyed him. The way she’d said it, she seemed to assume it was his duty as a man to dive and remove the obstacle. Enoyoshi felt no obligation whatsoever to rescue the yacht for her.

  Starting the engine, Enoyoshi tried putting it in forward and reverse alternately, but the yacht remained motionless. It was futile. Irritated by his powerlessness, still resentful of Minako’s gross remark, Enoyoshi was beginning to feel quite angry. He also felt annoyed by how passive he’d been. He ought to show them he could kiss goodbye to their yacht if he wanted. He’d show them he had the freedom.

  His withered resolve began to rear its head once more. Come to think of it, there was no other way of getting off the ship. The simplest and most effective thing to do was to swim to shore, telephone Marine Services, and have them dispatch a tugboat.

  Enoyoshi took a large plastic sack from an accessory case under the galley and began stuffing his clothes and shoes inside. Making sure there was some air in the bag too, he tightly knotted the opening.

  At first, Minako had been staring rudely at him as he removed his clothes, but the bizarreness of his behavior struck her all of a sudden and she began to look worried.

  ‘Say, just what is it you’re up to over there?’

  Enoyoshi tied the sack to his right thigh, sandwiched it between both legs, and stood up on top of the bench.

  Minako reached toward him, but sooner than her fingertips could brush against his body, Enoyoshi had plunged into the sea. Instead of swimming straight away, he began to tread water, adjusting the plastic sack between his legs. As he looked towards the yacht, the Ushijimas poked their faces over the side like a couple of puppies peering out of a cardboard box. Minako looked like she was whining but Enoyoshi couldn’t hear her exact words as he bobbed up and down in the sea.

  ‘You’ll be all right, I’ll call Marine Services for you.’

  He tried hollering this, but he wasn’t sure if they’d heard him. Minako still seemed to be wailing. It’d only be an hour’s wait for the tugboat. But until it arrived, they’d have to savor the fact that hell lay just a plank’s breadth under that ‘marvellous’ world of theirs that they so loved to force on others.

  Turning round, he began to swim using only his arms, the buoyant plastic sack gripped between his legs. He’d practiced the crawl countless times with a polystyrene board between his legs and could complete twenty lengths that way in a twenty-five-meter pool. Be brave, he told himself. Yet stamina wasn’t the issue. His attention was concentrated on the bottom side of his abdomen and legs. If, at that instant, a slimy thing brushed up against his stomach… His heart quailed at the thought. Why wouldn’t the little boy release his embrace of the keel and come after him? Surely, if Enoyoshi opened his eyes underwater, he would see that little boy’s bloated face right there. The hideous visions kept coming, disrupting his stroke. He
was wasting a lot of his strength, and his fatigue grew greater with every stroke and his stomach was heaving into his mouth. As the nausea came, he sensed that his life was in danger. Panic equalled death. The night sky was cloudless and the moon shone brightly as he pressed ahead in the water. Yet the lights of Wakasu Marine Park did not appear any closer. It was maddening how ineffective he was in closing the distance to the embankment.

  Enoyoshi forced himself to take a break, ceasing his strokes and turning over to float on his back. Making sure his nose and mouth were clear of the water, he took deliberate breaths to fill his lungs with air. He tried to fend off the nightmarish visions by picturing the yet-unseen naked body of the woman he’d recently started to date. Imagining tangible particulars was the only way to elude the darker fantasies.

  Raising his head from the water, he saw that he was now quite a distance from the yacht. A look to the shore confirmed how much closer it was than the yacht. He reckoned that he’d completed two thirds of the distance. The strength returned to his limbs. The shore that he’d thought so far away was actually right there within reach. One last spurt and he’d reach land. Enoyoshi rolled over and began churning the water with vigorous strokes.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until he clambered up the tetrapod blocks in front of the embankment and his body was completely out of the sea that Enoyoshi felt alive again. The lower portion of the tetrapod was submerged in water, but at the top it was dry and the grainy feel of its surface heartened him. Looking out to sea, he saw the MINAKO in exactly the same position, its mast helplessly swaying from side to side.

  From below the interlocking tetrapods surged the sound of breaking waves. If he fell through a gap he’d be in some serious trouble. Judging it wise to get over to the embankment on all fours, he crouched, and caught sight of a tiny shoe wedged in a crevice in the intermeshing blocks.