Nagasaki (4 page)

I imagined myself at a venerable age, fifty years from now. Buried deep in the mines of Brazil or the Congo lay the elements – coltan, cassiterite and other peculiar metals – that would one day be used to make my robot. This automaton would watch over the endless autumn of my days, speak to me, take down my will and hear my last breath. Someday, as it had been programmed to do, it would place a hand on my shoulder and gently whisper my name; it would pass this same hand over my eyes and mouth, dial the emergency services and set the funeral arrangements in motion. I turned off the television, plunging the house into darkness as I listened out for the sounds of the last trams, distant traffic, the on-off drone of the cicadas, the harmonious sound of the wind blowing through the bamboo, and then drops of rain as heavy as time.

While trying to get to sleep facing one way then the other, I couldn’t shake off a persistent thought. That woman, at any point during the hundreds of nights she had spent living close to me, could have got up and stabbed me as I slept. I knew nothing about her past or her inclinations, the reasons that might have led to her putting down roots here, soiling my sheets, drying herself with my towels, crapping in my toilet, and I was furious with her. I had been completely at her mercy, and wondered if it had ever occurred to her that she could bump me off, easy as that, just because, and get away with it? I was reminded of a story by Edogawa Rampo about a man secretly living inside a sofa. Did it end with a murder? I couldn’t remember and, besides, I had been living in an Edogawa novella of my own for several months and I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. The fact she had not battered me to death probably meant she had been looking for somewhere quiet, lived in and well maintained so that she could be spared too many anxieties in the senseless situation she found herself in, until a time when, perhaps, things might become clearer. She was therefore
neither Madam Death nor Madam Fear. More like Madam Ordinary.

It was time I got to sleep and, lying on my back with my legs bent, I felt myself drifting off when my thoughts were hijacked again, scuppering my efforts. What if there was another woman hiding somewhere in the house? In the darkness, the absurdity of this idea made me smile, yet I began to imagine that every cupboard contained the ghost of a lost love, as though the woman caught red-handed in my house was the reflection of someone I had fallen for many years before – as a teenager, say – so long ago that I hadn’t recognised her. I resolved to take one of my sleeping tablets. A mock sleep, as heavy and grey as a bloated cloud, got the better of my thoughts. It was a sleep disturbed by tortuous dreams, like a rough sea crossing at night with lightning flashing all around.

I put down the copy of the
Nagasaki Shimbun,
which I never buy. The colleagues who had shown me the article had been kind and respectful. After a pause, they shook their heads as if to say, ‘Well, well, the things that happen.’ It’s fine, I would have liked to say before I skim-read the report: something happened in my life and it’s over, case closed. In reality, nothing was closed and the case was only just getting started, but I didn’t want to give anything anyway. I answered their questions, playing my double role of victim and fleeting celebrity. In return, they teased me to try to cheer me up.

‘You sly dog! Funny way of kicking your wife out, Shimura, offloading it onto the police!’

I smiled at the person who said this, but not too much, so as not to encourage him.

We got back to work. A typhoon had incubated far away over the China Seas, and there was a good chance it would soon be heading our way. Through force of habit, I clicked to bring my
kitchen up on screen. High in the trees outside, the kites were going
kiii, kiii, kiii.
I have never really got used to their cry, any more than the way they fly. How were you to know if those
kiii, kiii
calls were hostile and meant they were about to dive-bomb you, or were merely lookout calls?

All day long my colleagues carried on gently poking fun at me until eventually I gave in and agreed to go out with them after work.

‘Seeing as you’re single now …’

‘A few beers will do you good, Shimura.’

Once the night shift had taken over, I left with the others. Their usual haunt was a tiny establishment near the shopping arcades at Hamanomachi. Five seats at the bar, that was it, and they must have known that because there were five of us. I had never joined them there before in spite of their best efforts.

‘Here we are at last!’ the leader of our little group burst out, raising his glass to me with a smile that narrowed his eyes. Was he ever going to stop smiling and looking at me like that? The need to contain a burp eventually cut short his bliss.

We drank. I drink very little when I’m on my own, and since I’m on my own every day of the year …

‘Aah,’ they sighed one by one. ‘You’re right of course, Shimura. If only we had your courage …’

‘What courage?’

‘The courage to chuck our wives out!’

And we went on drinking, having lost all sense of time, in this place called Torys Bar, in conditions more cramped than a cattle truck. Two fans spluttered opposite each other, slowly turning 180 degrees in one direction and then the other as though disapprovingly shaking their heads at the amount of beer we were consuming or how much noise we were making – it could have been either. The colleagues who had dragged me to this dive were young, much younger than I, who am no longer young at all. They exchanged banter with a woman they introduced as the owner, a smiling, wrinkled lady by the name of Machiko with a scarf tied oddly around her head, giving her a pair of rabbit ears. It wasn’t Machiko’s fault, but her presence was making things worse. How could the others have guessed what a miserable
drunk I was? Every gulp took me further away from them, while their laughter was becoming so deafeningly loud that it sometimes drowned out the music entirely.

Yukio, the most talkative member of the group, began telling a true story he had heard on the radio: on the morning of 6 August 1945, a businessman had woken up in a hotel room in Hiroshima, having arrived the previous day. The blast which devastated the city a few minutes later miraculously spared him, but he was left in a state of shock. He managed to make his way home, to Nagasaki; but two days after his return, on 9 August, the force of the second bomb threw him across his bedroom. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the fellow’s still going strong today, at the age of 93. And to top it off he has just been awarded substantial damages, having been the only known survivor of two atomic bombs in the space of three days.

The story met with guffaws of laughter. As for me, I found myself thinking the poor sod could use his payout to buy a multifunctional robot to look after him in his final years. Or months, as the case may be.

I went on smiling for a long time after the conclusion of the tale of the man and the two bombs (as was expected of me) and then I got up, blaming my age: can’t hold my alcohol like you youngsters, it’s back to work bright and early in the morning! Drawing back the
noren
curtain, I slipped out with my sadness. The Torys Bar sign carried on blinking orangey-red behind me and the last tune I heard coming from the place, a refrain familiar to all of my generation, was still going round in my head when I reached my front door. The last thing I felt like doing was going straight to bed. I could have wandered down by the river where there are a number of bars of varying repute, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I didn’t have the heart for anything; it had stopped.

Dismantling the camera was child’s play. Deciding what to do with it afterwards, less so. Get rid of it? I could just as easily put it away in the bottom of a drawer; it wouldn’t do anyone any further harm. When I had it in my hand, I found myself squeezing it tightly as if trying to crush it. Someone was behind bars thanks to this contraption! Realising I was trying to put the
blame on an inanimate object, I gradually turned on myself, shouting out loud and not pulling my punches: What the hell do you want with that now? Going to put out more bait in the middle of the table and wait for another mouse to walk into the trap? Want to film the moment of capture, do you? Play it back afterwards? Do you think your kitchen’s a casting room? How many lost souls do you want paraded in front of you until the right one comes along, your fairytale princess? You never managed to find her in the outside world the way everyone else does, but you think she’s going to turn up here? Come on, get real, you’ve never even managed to hold down a relationship …

Of course you feel better after vomiting. In what you throw up are the words that form in your brain but you never express. Rubbish along with heavy beer. I thought a shower would calm me down afterwards and I’d be overcome with tiredness. I was wrong. I lay down and waited, but it wouldn’t come. Sleep? No, the ability to forget. Not that poor woman, who meant nothing to me, but my own entire existence, whose barren aridity had suddenly been revealed for all to see.
No ambition had grown from it in years, no hope either. I cursed that woman. It was because of her that the fog had lifted.

After two hours mulling over the same disappointments, I got out of bed again. I committed a crime that night: I started smoking again. Standing in the living room, with the window open to let the air in. Before long, I had had enough. I threw away the ash, angry with myself at having gone back to the filthy habit, and then I left the room. Back in the corridor, as unthinkingly as I had turned to cigarettes, I turned to the spare room.

I wanted to know what it was like. What you could hear from in there. What she might have heard of me. With some difficulty, I heaved myself up onto the top shelf. Had she once been an acrobat? A dancer? She was certainly agile. I stretched out there, in the place she had spent so many nights. My body barely fitted, my head and toes touching either end of the airless tomb. Yet I stayed there a while. These were appallingly cramped quarters, like those capsule hotel rooms, or a space capsule. How had she done it for so
many nights? I lay for a long time listening to the sounds of my house and trying desperately, yes, desperately to sniff out the scent trail she might have left behind; I wanted the mattress to be steeped in the smell of her. To have taken her shape.

Outside, the past has begun to yellow. Humankind is becoming dry and brittle. When I say the past, what I mean is the time of her arrest back at the height of summer, and the evening I found myself home alone again – on my own as if a lover had dumped me. That was three months ago; it already seems so distant. I think I did my best to forget about it, and I must say the arrival of autumn has gone a long way towards making that happen. For this autumn has seeped into the soul. It has poured into us. Brought silence where there was none. At times, those walking past the dockyards do not hear the usual hammering. Gone are the echoes, clashes and cries. In the harbour, the cranes are barely loading or unloading. Elsewhere in the city where major works were in progress,
the bulldozers are frozen. These dinosaurs of the industrial age have been struck down with a mysterious malady. They have spoken of it again and again on the TV, they call it the Crisis and the cure has yet to be found. The banks have stopped lending money. Some of them have no money left themselves. Where did it go? No one knows for sure, which worries everyone. An air of lethargy reigns. In the sandpit where children played at capitalism, the rules of the game have gone missing.

‘Damn it, what have you done with them? You had them a minute ago!’

‘What! It was you who had them just now …’

Because the system is ailing, we are all becoming wobbly and helpless, like little children. Rumours escape from the prevailing silence like plaster crumbling from a wall. They contain words like ‘restructure’ and ‘consultation exercise’. Even here in the weather department there’s talk of cutbacks, as if there were less going on with the climate, or they could close the seas, which would be fair enough really since some of them are empty. In the space of three months, this crisis
has almost made me forget that a woman bit the dust well before the rest of us and, having been homeless, is now in ‘sheltered accommodation’ care of the municipal prison. But now her trial is about to begin. I got my court summons yesterday. Tonight, it’s not the rain that’s stopping me sleeping but something else entirely – perhaps the fear of having to meet the eyes of my stowaway. Or perhaps her absence has made my life feel more incomplete than ever.

I have never liked successful people.

Not for being successful per se, but because they become defined by their success and are nothing but one big blinkered ego. Unfettered egos spell the end for all of us.

The Crisis is making everyone feel a little more alone. What do people mean when they harp on about what ‘we’ are going through? There is no ‘we’. Instead of huddling together round a fire, all the individual ‘me’s are slinking off alone, eyeing one another with suspicion. Everyone thinks he’s doing better than the next man, and that too probably spells the end for all of us.

Trial or no trial, crisis or no crisis, I haven’t
managed to forget the stowaway. I know that according to Article 130 she is facing three years inside and a 500,000-yen fine, a fortune for a woman who probably doesn’t have 10,000 to her name. Should I feel bad, and if so, about what exactly? I keep on asking myself this question, though no one else is putting it to me. My mother, when she was alive, accused me of being too sentimental. Justice must be done, she would say now, as indeed it will, but for the last few nights, yes, I’ve had terrible trouble sleeping.