by Yoko Ogawa
I nodded.
“I know it’s asking a lot, but we wonder whether you could keep these works your mother gave us. Until we’re able to meet again.”
As he finished, his daughter reached into the bag at her feet and, almost as if they had rehearsed the moment before showing up on my doorstep, pulled out five small sculptures and lined them up on the table.
“Your mother made this tapir for us as a wedding present. This one she gave us when our daughter was born, and the other three we received the day before she went away with the Memory Police.”
My mother had loved to sculpt tapirs, even though she had never seen one in real life. The present to their daughter was a doll with large eyes, carved in oak. I had one just like it. But the other three were different. They were abstract, puzzle-like objects made of both wood and bits of metal. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, they were rough to the touch, neither sanded nor varnished. It almost seemed they could be combined to form a single object, and yet the three were distinct and bore no resemblance to one another.
“I had no idea she left these with you before she went away,” I said.
“And we had no idea that they would come back to you. But I had the feeling at the time that she must have intended something of the sort. In those last days, she worked down here almost constantly, perhaps wondering when she would be able to sculpt again. When she gave them to us, she said she didn’t see any point in just leaving them in the studio.”
“And now we’d like to leave them here with you,” said Mrs. Inui as she folded the handkerchief.
“And I’m grateful that you’ve taken such good care of them all this time. I’d be happy to look after them.”
“Thank you,” said the professor, smiling with relief. “At least they won’t get their hands on these.”
* * *
. . .
I understood they needed to hurry, to be gone before dawn, but I wanted to do what I could for them.
I went up to the kitchen, heated some milk, and poured it into mugs. Then I carried them back down to the cellar and we made as if to drink a toast, though we were careful to avoid even the sound of clinking cups. From time to time, one of us would look up as if about to say something, but no words came and we sipped in silence.
The bulb in the lone lamp was covered in dust, and the pale light made the scene in the cellar look like a watercolor. My mother’s discarded possessions lay quietly in the shadows—a half-finished stone carving, yellowed sketchbooks, a dry whetstone, a broken camera, a set of pastels, twenty-four colors in all. The smallest movement made the chairs creak on the floor. The sky outside the window was pitch-black, with no sign of a moon.
The little boy, perhaps finding it odd that no one was speaking, peered into our faces one by one. There was a white ring around his mouth. “This is delicious,” he said.
“It is,” someone murmured, and we nodded at one another. I couldn’t imagine the sort of life that might be waiting for them, but at least now, right at this moment, they had good, warm milk to drink.
“Where will you be?” I asked, voicing the question that most concerned me. “Perhaps I could help in some way, bring you things you need or let you know what’s going on outside.” The Inuis glanced at one another and then their eyes fell back toward their mugs. After a moment, the professor spoke up.
“It’s terribly kind of you to be concerned, but I think it would be best not to tell you anything about the safe house. It’s not that we’re worried you might let something slip—if that were the case, we would never have brought the sculptures here in the first place. But we can’t allow ourselves to cause you any more trouble than we already have. The more deeply you become involved, the more danger you’ll be in. You can’t be forced to reveal what you don’t know, but if you do know something, there’s no telling what they might do to get it out of you. So I beg of you, please don’t ask about the safe house.”
“I understand. I’ll leave it at that. I may not know where you are, but I’ll be praying for your safety. Before you go, is there anything else I can do?” I clutched my empty mug and looked at them.
“Could I trouble you for a nail clipper?” Mrs. Inui murmured. “His fingernails have gotten so long.” She took the boy’s hand in hers.
“Of course,” I said, searching for a clipper in the back of a drawer. When I had found it, I helped the boy remove his gloves. “Hold still now. We’ll be done in one second.” His fingers were slender and smooth, and spotless, without a single freckle or mole. I crouched down in front of him and gently took hold of his hand. As our eyes met, he gave me a bashful smile. His legs, dangling from the chair, swayed back and forth.
I carefully clipped his nails, starting from the little finger of his left hand. The nails were soft and transparent, and came away with the least effort, fluttering to the floor like flower petals. We listened to the quiet clicking of the clippers, their echoes sealing this moment in the depth of the night.
When I finished, the sky-blue gloves were waiting on the table.
And that is how the Inui family vanished.
I climbed the staircase, so narrow I wondered how I’d get past should I meet someone coming down. It was no more than rough boards cobbled together, with no carpet or handrail.
When I find myself here, I always feel as though I’m in a lighthouse. Only once or twice, in my childhood, have I had occasion to visit one, but I have a feeling the smell and the echo of footsteps were quite similar. The dull sound of shoes on board after board, the odor of machine oil.
The lighthouse of my childhood had long ago ceased to give off light, and no adult ventured to visit it. The spit of land on which it stood was overgrown with sharp reeds, and walking to it meant risking scratches on your legs.
I went with an older cousin who licked my cuts one by one.
Next to the staircase was a small room that had once served as a place for the lighthouse keeper to rest. Two chairs and a folding table were left in the room, and, neatly arranged on the table, were a teapot, a sugar bowl, napkins, two teacups, forks, and a cake plate.
Everything was so perfect—the spacing of the dishes, the direction of the cup handles, the shine on the forks—that I felt a shiver of fear, even as I found myself wondering what sort of delicious cake must have been served on such beautiful plates.
The lighthouse keeper had been gone for many years and the light atop the tower was cold and covered with dust, but here in this room it felt as though someone had been taking tea just a few minutes ago. I felt I’d see steam rising from the cups if I stood staring long enough.
Our hearts still racing despite our quick detour into the room, we began to climb the lighthouse steps. I went ahead and my cousin followed. The light was dim and the staircase constantly curved away above, so there was no way to tell how much progress we were making.
I would have been about seven or eight years old, dressed in a pink lace skirt my mother had made for me. It was by then much too short, even when I pulled on the lace, and I remember being terribly worried that my cousin, coming up behind me on the stairs, would be able to see my underwear.
But why were we there in the first place? I can’t recall, no matter how hard I try.
Just as I was beginning to feel out of breath, the sound of waves suddenly grew louder and the smell of oil grew stronger—though at the time I was not sure what I was smelling. At first, I thought it might be something poisonous that was floating up through the tower. I pressed my hand over my mouth and held my breath, but that only made matters worse, and soon I was quite dizzy.
There was a sound from below, and it occurred to me that the people who had been eating cake in the little room were climbing the stairs after us. Having skewered the last morsel with a sparkling fork, the lighthouse keeper had let it dissolve on his tongue and was now following me up the tower, cr
umbs of sponge cake still clinging to his lips.
I wanted to look back at my cousin, hoping he would reassure me, but I was frozen by the fear that I would find the lighthouse keeper instead. In the end, I stopped and crouched down on the stairs, equally unable to face what I might find at the top.
I don’t know how long I cowered there. At some point the lighthouse had fallen quiet, above and below, and I could no longer hear the waves.
I listened, but there was no sound. Just an oppressive silence. Working up my courage, I turned at last to look behind me.
But I saw neither my cousin nor the lighthouse keeper…
Still, it’s strange that this staircase invariably brings to mind that lighthouse. I come here to meet my lover, so you might imagine I would fly up the stairs, nearly tripping with excitement, but for some reason I climb slowly, listening carefully to each step.
I am in the clock tower of a church. The bell rings twice a day, at eleven o’clock in the morning and again at five in the afternoon. The tools for regulating the clock are kept in a small room at the bottom of the tower—exactly the same size as the room at the base of the lighthouse. The clockworks themselves are in a space at the top of the bell tower, but I have never tried climbing up to see them. My lover waits for me in a room halfway up, where they teach typing.
After a certain point in my ascent, the sound of typewriters comes to me, some being pecked hesitantly, others click-clacking away at great speed. I suppose the class has both beginners and more advanced students who will soon be graduating.
Is he standing near one of the beginners, watching carefully as her trembling fingers tap at the keys? When she makes a mistake, does he gently move her finger to the correct spot—as he used to do for me?…
* * *
. . .
Having written this phrase, I set down my pencil. My new novel wasn’t going very well. I seemed to be writing in circles, going backward, or running into dead ends, with no idea what should come next. Still, I often encountered this sort of writer’s block, and I no longer took much notice of it.
“How are you doing?” R asked each time we met.
“All right,” I answered, unsure whether he was asking about my novel or about me personally. But it was always the novel.
“You can’t write with your head. I want you to write with your hand,” he said. It was rare for him to make a pronouncement like this, so I found myself simply nodding in silence. Then I stretched my hand toward him, fingers extended.
“That’s right. That’s where the story should come from,” he said, but he looked away, as though he had seen into the most vulnerable part of my body.
At any rate, I was ready to give up for today and go to bed. My fingers were tired and stiff. I put my pencil and eraser in my pen box, straightened the manuscript pages, and secured them with a glass paperweight.
In bed, I found myself thinking about the Inui family. Since that night, I had passed the faculty housing at the university any number of times, but from the outside nothing seemed to have changed. The students were sprawled out on the lawn; the elderly man who occupied the guardhouse at the gate was idly reading a book on bonsai trees.
Futons were hung out to air on the balconies of the faculty apartments near the back entrance to the campus. I located the E block and counted the windows from one end to find apartment 619, where the Inuis had lived. The balcony had been cleaned off and was completely empty.
Then I stopped by the dermatology unit waiting room at the university hospital, but the square on the duty chart for Wednesdays, when Professor Inui had done his consultations, was now filled in with the name of an assistant. Nurses were circulating among the rooms with medicine or bandages or charts. Patients were rolling up sleeves or opening shirts to reveal their afflicted skin. No one wondered where the professor had gone or lamented his absence.
The entire Inui family had simply vanished, as though they had melted into thin air.
But I thought about them, wondering whether they were able to eat dinner at a proper table, with all the dishes and glasses they needed, whether they slept in comfortable beds. I had failed to ask them at the time what they had done with their cat. I should have offered to take him, along with the sculptures. Still, if Mizore had been found hanging about my house, I might have come under suspicion. No doubt the Memory Police could have identified him.
No matter how much I tried to sleep, worries seemed to form like so many bubbles, but unlike bubbles they floated about forever in my head, refusing to pop. Could the Inuis really trust their network of support? The professor had not told me much about it. And the most important thing was for the children to stay healthy. Had the little boy’s fingernails grown out inside those sky-blue gloves?
* * *
. . .
When I opened my eyes the next morning, something else had disappeared.
It had grown colder and there was frost on the garden. Everything in the house—my slippers, the faucet, the heater, the rolls in the bread box—was chilled. At some point, the wind that had blown in the night had fallen still.
I set the pan holding leftover stew on the stove and around it I arranged the rolls, wrapped in aluminum foil. When the water in the kettle boiled, I made tea, which I drank sweetened with honey. I wanted only warm things this morning.
To avoid having to wash dishes, I ate the stew directly from the pan on the stove. Alerted by the odor of toasting bread, I opened the foil and drizzled honey on the rolls.
While I was chewing, I tried to figure out what had disappeared this time. I was certain at least that it wasn’t stew or buttered rolls or tea or honey. They all had the same flavor they’d had yesterday.
It’s always sad when a food disappears. In the past, the trucks at the market were overflowing with all sorts of things, but now the selection is meager at best. When I was a child, I was fond of a salad with lots of green beans. It had potatoes and boiled eggs and tomatoes, all dressed with mayonnaise and sprinkled with parsley. Mother would ask the man at the market whether he had fresh beans. “Fresh ones, so crisp they break with a snap!” she’d say.
It’s been a long while since we stopped eating such a salad, and I can no longer recall how green beans looked or tasted.
When the stew was gone, I put the empty pan in the sink and turned off the stove. Then I drank a second cup of tea, this time with nothing to sweeten it. My fingers were already sticky with honey.
Despite the cold, the river did not seem to be frozen—or at least I thought I could hear the faint sound of flowing water, and above it the sound of footsteps, adults and children together, running toward the alley in back, and the dog next door barking. The unsettled sounds, I knew from experience, of a morning when something had disappeared.
After I’d finished the warm rolls, I followed the sound of the footsteps and opened the window on the north side of the house. There they stood, all in a group: the former hatmaker, the unfriendly couple from next door, the dog with brown spots, and some schoolchildren with their backpacks. They were staring at the river in silence.
Just yesterday, it had been an utterly unremarkable stream where, at most, you might spot the back of a carp from time to time. But now it was far too strange and beautiful to call it simply a river.
I leaned out over the windowsill, blinking again and again. The surface of the river was covered with tiny fragments of…something…in an indescribable array of hues—reds, pinks, and whites—so thick that not a space was visible between them. Viewed from above, they appeared to be soft, as they collided and merged with one another, flowing along at a pace that seemed more leisurely than the usual current of the river.
I hurried down to the basement and went out to the washing area where I had greeted the Inui family. From there I would be right above the water.
The bricks paving the area were cold and ro
ugh, with clover growing between the cracks, and right below me was the miraculous stream. I knelt down and plunged my hands in to scoop up the water. When I held them in front of me, my palms were covered in rose petals.
“Strange, isn’t it?” the former hatmaker called from the other bank.
“Strange, indeed,” I answered, and there were nods all around. The children took off running along the river, their backpacks rattling behind them.
“Get straight to school!” the former hatmaker called after them.
None of the petals were withered or brown. On the contrary, perhaps because the water was so cold, they seemed fresher and fuller than ever, and their fragrance, mixed with the morning mist from the river, was overpoweringly strong.
Petals covered the surface as far as the eye could see. My hands had cleared a patch of water for a brief moment, but petals soon came flooding in again to fill it, and then they flowed on, almost as if someone had hypnotized each one of them and was drawing them toward the sea.
I wiped my palms together, brushing the petals that had stuck to them back into the stream. Petals with frilled edges, pale ones, vivid ones, petals with the calyx still attached. They all clung for a moment to the bricks of the wash landing, but in no time at all they were caught up in the stream again and melted into the mass.
* * *
. . .
I washed my face and rubbed on a little cream. Deciding against spending the time to apply my makeup, I threw on a coat and went out. My plan was to follow the river upstream to the rose garden on the slope of the hill.
A crowd had gathered on the banks, gawking at this beautiful sight, and the Memory Police, too, were out in force, more so than usual. They stood as always, weapons on their hips, faces devoid of expression.
