by Kōbō Abe
“It’s okay.”
He moistened a smear of dry blood on his wrist with his tongue, and wiped it off on his sleeve.
“Now, now—let’s have a look.”
The sound of water spilling began again. It was somewhere close by. He could see no tipped-over bottles or cups in particular. The head nurse stiffened her body and looked up at him, the corners of her eves reddening slightly.
“What’s that?”
“I’m peeing.” She lifted up her skirt over her hips, and there, underneath the crack in her big bottom like a machine-stitched seam, was an enamel bedpan surrounded by sponges. “My bladder’s sphincter muscle doesn’t work. It won’t follow orders.”
“That must be inconvenient, when you have to move around.…”
“You can say that again. Right now on the third floor here they’re doing some kind of interesting experiment. Everybody else went off to look and left me here all by my lonesome … not that I really am lonesome … exactly. I can’t very well diaper myself. I sweat a lot. For heaven’s sake, do you have to keep staring like that?”
Despite what she said, she kept up a nasal tittering and made no move to drop her skirt back down, so he couldn’t help watching as droplets of urine turned to bubbles skating around on the surface.
“Maybe I’ll go have a look at that experiment on the third floor, too.”
“There’s cold beer in the refrigerator.”
The man smiled and declined it with a wave of his hand, then turned and walked out as fast as possible without offending her.
In the center of the waiting room stood the secretary, legs slightly apart. Her weight was distributed evenly on both feet, as though she were waiting to confront the enemy. The light coming from behind put her head in shadow, making the outline of her hair indistinguishable and her round face even rounder-looking. She had one finger stuck through her key ring, and was shaking it in a circle, pointed at her chest. The steel keys shone as they spun around.
(There’s the car. Finally, the horse is here to pick me up.)
NOTEBOOK THREE
I am in an underground room in the old hospital grounds. Last night’s rain is over, and dazzling afternoon sunshine is pouring in through cracks in the ventilator. I just now decided to start writing again, using a cardboard box for a desk. I don’t know how much longer I will be able to keep on with it. When the sun goes down it won’t be worth continuing, and if my pursuers track down this hideout, the game will be up.
With this third volume, the meaning and aim of these notes have undergone a complete change. The other two were ordered by the horse, but this time I have no client. That means I don’t have to hold anything back or feel any constraints; it also means I don’t have to lie to protect myself any more. No matter how I may end up offending the horse, after all, I can’t be any worse off than I am already. This time, for sure, I will make a clean breast of everything. If the other two notebooks were reports, what I am about to write is an indictment. I have no idea yet whom I can possibly get to read it, but in any case I don’t want to sit idly by and let them get away with this.
Just beyond the cardboard box, with the blanket twisted between her thighs, breathing softly in her sleep, is the little girl from room eight. The smell of scalded milk is gone, however, having lost out to the acrid stink of rat urine. Sounds of fireworks and an electric guitar band, advertising the anniversary eve party, scheduled to begin in six hours, echo back and forth through this underground labyrinth, pulsating like weird sighs. I thought I heard sounds of human voices muttering and snickering mixed in with the reverberations, but it could just be that my nerves are starting to go.
Anyway, I will pick up where I left off in notebook two.
Last night, when the horse came as agreed to take him out for a late meal, the man made no attempt to cover his irritation. No sooner had they climbed into the white van than the sky burst open and it began to rain. The front windshield was covered by a sheet of water, and the wipers were useless. The horse bent over the wheel in silence, while the man silently rubbed his temples with his fingertips. He had been writing continuously since that morning, and his nerves were as rusted out as old telephone wires. The horse had been nearly two hours late in coming, and by now his energy pills were starting to wear off.
“Where are we going?’’
“I thought my place, so we could relax.”
A gust of wind blew at smoldering ashes, igniting them into sudden flames. After behaving all along as though he had no private life whatever, here the horse was suddenly inviting the man home with him. The man felt a wave of curiosity, tempered by caution. He gave a huge yawn, tears spilling from his eyes.
It was such a terrible downpour that it’s hard to say exactly where they went or how they got there. They went down a long slope and then back up, but it could have been that they took a long detour and ended up at a different place somewhere on the same elevation that the hospital is on. If so, it was probably the west end. The road along the cluster of wooden infirmaries stops in front of the cartilage surgery building, and of course traffic can go no farther. Beyond lie the foundations of the old demolished hospital building, buried in head-tall weeds and entangled like some ancient ruin in tree branches, with here and there a glimpse of an entryway underground; this hideout is in one of the rooms below ground. Farther on lies a huge, shapeless plot of parched land, as big as three baseball fields combined, on which stands the old target range where the horse works out. Once when I was crossing that vacant lot to take the horse something to eat, I tilted my head in surprise when, off in the distance, across the roof of the target range, I saw a structure like a many-faceted piece of sculpture glittering like a jewel in the morning sun. That grove on the cliff overlooking the sea was certainly an excellent choice for the new residential area.
Standing on a lawn swollen like green gelatin as it sucked light from the overhead street lamps was an apartment building made of glass and ivory-colored tiles, like a work of abstract art. Each floor had a deep veranda, so that the building became progressively narrower toward the top, like a small pyramid. Abandoning the van in an outdoor parking lot, they ran to the entrance, where an automatic door made of glass a centimeter thick slid noiselessly open, revealing a light-blue-gray wall-to-wall carpet so thick they padded across it like cats.
The horse’s apartment was on the top floor.
Opening the door, they stepped immediately into a large sitting room. Beyond the glass window that took up the entire wall facing them spread darkness, etched with scratch-like lines of rain. On either side of the window were odd light fixtures, or more precisely, a pair of life-size acrylic resin sculptures that radiated light from either end.
Both side walls had a door near the entrance that led into an adjoining room; one wall was covered by a glass-doored cabinet, and the other with elaborate stereo equipment and a huge color photograph. The subject of the photo was another horse, a stallion rearing on his hind legs, with his erect organ in full frontal view; for a room decoration it was a little too scrupulous in detail.
By the window was a round table of polished lavender marble, on top of which sat a lacquered tray; over the tray lay a dark blue cloth patterned with white fish. The room’s chairs, wallpaper, and rugs were all done in the same ivory color, with a pattern of tiny blue-green flowers. On paper the decor may sound elegant, but in reality it was rather desolate. The paint on the window frame was cracked and discolored; a flower vase on the ledge wore a shawl of dust around its shoulders; padding stuck out through a rip in the back of one of the chairs. The room seemed to embody the slothful sort of bachelorhood often left behind in the wake of a careening, drunken-driving sort of married life.
The horse gruffly offered him a beer, lifting back the blue cloth. Expensive-looking cakes of raw fish and rice decorated with real bamboo leaves were arranged radially in a circle.
‘‘Well, how are you coming with the investigation?”
The man did
not reply. Before handing over the notebook, he wanted a satisfactory explanation of the footsteps recorded on the beginning of the first cassette. If the horse had not attached some special significance to them, he would not have included that segment on the tape in the first place.
The horse nodded soothingly in short, quick nods.
“There’s lots of time. Never mind that. What’s more important is that the first notebook you gave me yesterday seems to have found its way into your wife’s hands somehow.”
“Then you’ve found her?”
“Not quite. It’s been left to a liaison man.”
“If you know how to contact her, then you must be able to find out where she is! I’ll do it myself if you’ll just introduce me to th£liaison.”
“You can’t rush these things.” The horseradish in his rice cake must have been too strong; he coughed out air from his mouth that he had breathed in through his nose. “You can’t try to force them. Put the other side on its guard, and you’ve lost all advantage.”
“If you would just try, there must be any number of ways of going about it!”
In place of an answer the horse switched subjects, launching into an explanation of the meaning of the opening part of that tape.
“Ah yes,” he began, “it was on the morning of the day I first asked my secretary to make those tapes, which would put it right around the day before yesterday. With the hospital’s founding anniversary just around the corner, a special meeting of the council had been called, and while there I happened to catch some promising news. At the exact moment when your wife was supposedly brought in by ambulance, evidently a theft took place in the outpatient pharmacy. It wasn’t too much of a theft, actually; a glass window facing the courtyard was smashed, and some fever-reducing and sleep-inducing medicines were taken, along with a supply of contraceptive pills valued at about eight hundred thousand yen. That was all. Hardly worth mentioning under ordinary circumstances. Not that thefts are an everyday affair around here, mind you. On the contrary, most people agree that the hospital’s internal crime rate is extremely low. Of course, depending on what you want to call a crime, the rate goes either up or down. By adopting the standard concept, you could even argue that the hospital is a regular hotbed of crime. But when a person finally becomes a patient, all his preconceived ideas are powerfully affected. And as his preconceived ideas undergo alteration, inevitably so does his view of crime. Where there is no victim, you see, of course there can be no aggression.
“The reason that the pill theft was taken up so carefully on that particular day, however, was that those pills were a new morning-after type. Everybody’s been talking about them in connection with a special competition on the program for the anniversary eve party, that’s going to decide which woman has the most and the longest orgasms. Excitement has been running high ever since the first announcement was made; rumor has it that quite a number of patients have secretly equipped themselves with pills in order to enter the contest, and are practicing enthusiastically to be ready.
“Well, as soon as I heard that report, I had a flash of intuition. It couldn’t have been mere chance that the time and place of those two incidents, your wife’s disappearance and the burglary in the pharmacy, coincided so perfectly. If your wife had had some form of contact with the pill thief, then that would explain everything. Because, to be perfectly candid, up until then it didn’t seem to me that her disappearance deserved to be treated as much of an event. The only possible explanation, I felt, was that she had had the help of someone inside the hospital, with whom everything had been arranged beforehand. So either you were lying or else your wife had pulled a fast one on you… . Whichever it was, I couldn’t bring myself to take the whole thing seriously.”
“Then how come you let me have a room of my own, and gave me free access to all the tapes from the security room?”
“I wasn’t the one who wanted to keep you around.”
“Who was, then?”
“My secretary.”
“What for?”
“She doesn’t give up easily, that’s why. When she decides she wants something, she isn’t satisfied until she’s gotten it.”
“Isn’t she a little strange?”
“You just happen to be the type she goes for.”
“One time she kicked me in the leg so hard it started to bleed, and another time she stuck me in the palm of the hand with a needle, and one other time she bit me so hard in the arm I thought she was going to tear a chunk right out.”
“She’s a test-tube baby.”
“So?”
“So she’s completely alone in the world, that’s all.”
“You don’t mean she’s a synthetic human being or anything, do you?”
“Her mother was already dead. She grew from a ripe egg extracted just after the woman died. Her father was one cc of mixed semen borrowed from the semen bank. So she has no familial feelings whatsoever. Her sense of human relationships, shall we call it, is entirely missing.”
“Sounds pretty creepy.”
“For example, the sense of loneliness is one manifestation of the nesting instinct, they say. And skin sensations, it seems, are at the root of all feelings and emotions. While she, you see, has no nest or roots to go back to, at all.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“It isn’t hers, either. Anyway, she probably has a hard time understanding it: why you run around frantically searching for your wife while she has to sit and cool her heels waiting.”
“She’s got a lot of nerve; this has nothing to do with her!”
“Still, it’s probably hard for her to understand.”
The horse drank down the rest of his beer and uncapped a new bottle as he continued talking.
Five years ago, he had taken charge of a certain experiment. More accurately, it had been a plan of his, or rather of his estranged wife’s (the Psycholinguistics Center employee). The experiment was entitled “Sexual Arousal and Inhibition Induced by Symbolic Representation,” and in simple terms its goal had been quantification of the various mechanisms by which sexual acts reduced to symbols (pornography, tapes, etc.) might affect observers or listeners. In addition to ordinary people attracted by the daily remuneration, participants had included a select group of patients chosen by recommendation from each department, all suffering from rare diseases involving sensual dysfunction. I will omit details, since they have little bearing on the matter at hand, but in the end it became clear that vocal stimulation had particularly outstanding evocative powers, unmatched by those of any other kind of symbolic representation. In humans the sense of smell is underdeveloped and the sense of sight overdeveloped, so it was the sense of hearing, on a plane midway between the two, that seemed to function most effectively of all.
She, the secretary, had been one of the specially selected participants. And she alone had reacted in a completely different way from all the others, throwing the experimental results into confusion. Of course, all the participants’ responses varied to some extent, but in the main they followed certain fixed rules, with discrepancies never exceeding the bounds permissible for individual differences. She alone had had no reaction whatever. Worse, she had actually shown negative physiological reactions: when forced to sit and listen, she would develop a neck rash, or visual difficulties.
Actually, the original purpose of the experiment had been to find a treatment for the horse’s stubborn impotence. Since he had no underlying physical problems, some form of outside stimulus was believed responsible. The Psycholinguistics Center was working on his case; the horse was thus in the awkward position of being simultaneously a doctor in his own right and a patient of his estranged wife’s. The name of his disease, it was discovered, was “traumatic interpersonal relations neurosis.” There was some hope that greater anonymity in his interpersonal relations might provide effective treatment. Therefore it was predicted that if properly prescribed, tapes recorded by hidden microphone should have a positive effect, g
iven their high degree of anonymity. Results had been largely as expected.
To have one such glaring exception, though, even granted it was only one out of many, spoiled the otherwise consistent results.
They had decided to try applying direct stimulation to her pleasure center. The response had been normal. She had even had a short but strong orgasm, accompanied by uterine spasms. Like the horse, she evidently suffered from no particular innate disability. It seemed to be another case of “traumatic interpersonal relations neurosis.”
This similarity with the symptoms of the horse drew attention, and little by little the experiment came to focus solely on her. Some suspected that her case was further complicated by experiment hypersensitivity: having been raised in a test tube, she was an object of great curiosity, constantly sought after by people in all the research departments. To ease tension, the experiment was transferred to a room in a fashionable residential section, with a mound of drug-injected chocolates kept in a silver bowl on the table. Seeking a breakthrough, they had even hired an electrical engineer well versed in bugging techniques, in order to assemble data on a variety of sexual acts. By coincidence, he was the father of the long-term patient in room eight of the special-diseases ward in the cartilage surgery department. But, as if to mock all their efforts, not one of the needles on the instruments attached to her had ever shown the slightest motion.
One evening the experiment had dragged on late; she and the engineer had been left alone together, with the cries of an orgasm wafting out of the stereo and into the room. Carried away in perverted excitement, the engineer had raped her.
The night had been hot and sultry, about like tonight, and since she was wearing nothing but thin underwear, the rape was over with easily in just a few minutes. Smeared with blood, she had put up no real resistance, content to watch the engineer’s actions intently without even raising her voice. Ever since, however, she had grown increasingly scornful of all kinds of sexual stimulation, a strong indication that the damage had been emotional as well as physical.
