The road had widened at Shiiba, but thereafter narrowed. Nagoyan was constantly honking the horn, and when I asked why, he said there were “Sound Horn” signs before every curve. I realized that until that moment, I hadn’t given any thought to the signs or their meaning. Observing them now as we drove, I saw that each had rusted to dark reddish brown. There was barely room for two-way traffic, and the battered pavement was split down the middle, with a straight line of slender grass growing in the crack.
“That’s the median strip,” Nagoyan remarked, and when I expressed credulous surprise, he admitted he was joking. Flowing down onto one side of the road was the dark forest, with a natural mixture of soil; on the other side was a cliff of protruding boulders. Stones the size of melons scattered about spoke to the truth of a sign warning of rockslides. As it would have been quite an impossible task for me, Nagoyan was doing all the driving. We stopped the car at a scenic spot and looked out at the endless chain of mountains; in the distance, appearing as small as the edge of a fingernail, the village of Shiiba reflected the light. There was no other sign of human endeavor.
“How far does this road go?” We had been on it for hours since Nagoyan first posed the question.
“Do ye s’pose it might be a forestry road?”
Nagoyan snapped back with an air of authority, “It’s National Route 265, and it’s the pits! It ought to be called ‘abomi-national’!
“It’s a good thing there are no oncoming cars,” he continued. “Where in the world would we have to back up to in order to let them by? All we need is to meet a truck, and we’ll be finished. What can we do?”
Yet for all his complaining there was no improvement, and the local place name indicated below the road signs we passed remained unchanged: Omata. There’s no one living here, I thought. We continued our meandering way, climbing the slopes and descending again into ravines.
With all the twists and turns, I became carsick.
“Stop – anywhere’ll do!” I exclaimed.
“Wait until the road widens a bit,” Nagoyan replied. He pulled over to the left alongside a stream, where there was a straight stretch. I leaned the seat partway back and remained motionless, waiting to recover. There was not the slightest breeze. I thought that if there was a reoccurrence of my auditory hallucination at that moment, that would really be the end. Nagoyan put on his backpack and headed down into the streambed.
When at last I felt better, I went to join him. He had stepped into clear, blue water and was standing unsteadily, washing the underwear into which he had pissed, along with various other items. He had carefully tied his rope to trees along the bank to serve as a clothesline. Having spread body shampoo on his T-shirt, he was diligently scrubbing, then rinsing.
I laughed as I saw him take a step forward, slip, and fall into the stream, but now as he tried to stand up again, he slipped again. Letting out a scream, he fell into the deeper water.
“Hana-cha—!”
With his head bobbing up and down in the current, he called out, “I…can’t…swim!”
Up he spluttered again, struggling to get a hand out of the water, and in that frantic effort sank once more and disappeared.
Nagoyan had been swept away in the current.
I raced back to the car, got in, and started the engine. I had to rescue him. Nagoyan was going to drown! Thinking only of heading him off, I pushed the accelerator to the floorboard and tore off faster than I had ever driven before.
The stream followed the road, descending into a deep gorge. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that would allow me to climb down to rescue him… He couldn’t bloody swim! How could that be? Unbelievable! He had no business coming to Kyushu if he couldn’t! It was summer, and with Itoshima and Hirado just waiting for him, he hadn’t bothered to learn…! How stupid could he get?
Now driving alone for the first time ever, I felt every hair standing on end from the tension, even as I felt a mixture of anger and concern. I could not have been underway for more than a few minutes, but the distance I had gone seemed immense. As I went, I could see through the shadow of the trees that the stream had widened. There was a shoal, blending sand and small pebbles, and there the current appeared to slow. Spotting a fisherman’s path leading down to the stream, I slammed on the brakes, causing the engine to stall, and yanked up the side brake. If I were to let him slip by, that it would be it. There was no time to lose.
I ran down over the gravel to a simple bridge, consisting of nothing more than planks some five centimeters thick, held together by wire. I wobbled across partway, then jumped down onto what appeared to be a soft, sandy spot. I waded in and stood with my arms spread, the water nearly reaching my underwear, until Nagoyan, having given in to the stream, his eyes rolled back, came floating down. Having taken one of his hands, I put another of my own hands on his shoulder and pulled as hard as I could. “Ouch!” he screamed and tried to stand up on his own, only to slip on the mossy stones of the river bottom.
Wet as rats, we stumbled over the pebbles, trying to catch our breath. But when my heart palpitations had eased, I realized that we had no idea what to do now. My jeans clung heavily, and the parts that the sun was warming gave me an unpleasant feeling.
“Ahhh, I swallowed water!”
“Ye bloody fool!”
“The river took my T-shirt!”
“The hell wit’ yer T-shirt!”
“Well, we’re not in the ocean, so I knew that eventually I’d be
all right.”
Saying that, Nagoyan suddenly coughed and, turning downstream, went off to vomit. It seemed he couldn’t directly thank me for having saved him. I felt mildly disgusted. If he had said one word of the sort, I might have been able to tell him how glad I was that he hadn’t drowned and to feel some sense of relief. Of course, if he had indeed wound up dead, I wouldn’t have known what to do.
In the car, I changed out of my wet clothes, and then we went off again to do our laundry. The current wasn’t swift, but this time I didn’t let my eye off Nagoyan. I still felt embarrassed to have my panties and bras on display, but it couldn’t be helped. For his part, Nagoyan made no bones about hanging up the pants he’d pissed in on a line he again hung between the trees. Only our shoes refused to dry.
We were unusually quiet, waiting until our clothes were half dry. Casually tossing them into the broiling-hot back of the car, we set off again along the wretched road.
We had been driving for quite a while, when we saw the center line reappear for the first time in many an hour. We both let out a shout. Nagoyan immediately put the engine into fourth gear. Connected to the foot of the bridge leading to Tashirobae Dam was a small parking area. It had neither a restroom nor vending machines. There was a pavilion, where a written explanation of the dam was provided. The reservoir was half empty, with a yellowish soil laid bare; it was a truly atrocious sight. Being from subtropical Kyushu, I may be particularly squeamish about any hint of drought.
A blue sign told us that there was a branching prefectural highway that would take us from Aya along the dam to Miyazaki.
“Have you been there?”
“No, never.”
“Let’s go there to get the air conditioner repaired.”
Yet, when following the dam, we turned left at the fork into a narrow road, we encountered an absurdly large electric bulletin board, telling us in thick red letters: CLOSED TO ALL TRAFFIC DUE TO DISASTER REPAIRS. TO REOPEN DECEMBER.
“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Nagoyan, having consulted the map. “There’s supposed to be quite a similar road, Prefectural Route 62.” Steering back and forth several times, he made a U-turn and took us back to the national highway.
“Even if we have no luck with Route 62,” he remarked laughingly, “we can drive straight to Kobayashi.” He exuded great confidence, sure of smooth sailing, but we hadn’t gone fifteen minutes before we encountered another sign, this one concerning Route 265: CLOSED TO ALL TRAFFIC DUE TO ROAD SHOULDER COLLAPSE.
“What is this supposed to mean??” Nagoya exclaimed. For a long time he was silent.
“I’d guess it’s been rainin’ a lot.”
I couldn’t understand how, with the low level in the reservoir, the road could be closed. Had all the water leaked out?
“We can’t use Route 62 either. What’s all this about ‘national roads’?”
“Gettin’ all steamed up won’t do ye any good.”
“Am I steamed up? Now I don’t think there’s much good about Nagoya, but at least it’s got a really fine infrastructure. They got started on road planning right after the war. There’s a hundred-meter-wide avenue. And even that is overshadowed by the four- and five-lane highways around the Sakae district and Nagoya Station. At least all of that is first-rate.”
All this blather wasn’t of any use. For the first time in quite a while I was aware of my empty stomach, of acute, penetrating, pressing hunger pangs. There were only two choices before us: to take the road to Taragi in Kumamoto Prefecture or to go back over the same bad road on which we had just come.
“How ’bout goin’ through Ebino t’ Kagoshima?”
“After all of this,” snapped Nagoyan, grinding his teeth, “we’re going to Miyazaki no matter what.”
“There’re hot springs in Kirishima, ye know.”
“The first thing is the air conditioning,” persisted Nagoyan. “And as we’ve already decided on Miyazaki, that’s where we’re going.”
“Ye think ye can go do that now?”
Dusk had already fallen, and the day was quite gone. Even the evening cicadas had stopped chirping.
“Can’t be done, I suppose,” replied Nagoyan in a discouraged tone, turning on the overhead light and looking at the map.
“No, we can’t do anymore today,” I agreed. “Ye’re no doubt tired from th’ mountain roads.” I added that it would be good if I were able to handle the passes.
“What are you saying?” came the scornful retort. “You haven’t even got a license.”
The only reasonable thing to do was to go back to the parking lot, with its pavilion, near the Tashirobae Dam. That meant sleeping in the car again. When my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, I got out without a word and went quickly into the tall grass. Checking behind me, I lowered my jeans and underwear and peed, the hard weeds jabbing at my buttocks.
“I’m hungry,” exclaimed Nagoyan.
In the unlit pavilion we sat across from each other, our flashlight between us. There was nothing in our picnic cooler but water. Along the way we had traveled there had been not a single field where we might have stolen some vegetables.
“I’d love to have some meat. We’ve had nothing but vegetables and fish. We’re not old codgers.”
“I’d settle fer anythin’.”
“I suppose you’d like to be eating your instant dumplings about now…”
“I’d murder some Hyuga chicken.”
“Ah, yes! When it comes to meat, I like chicken best.”
“Kentucky Fried’s awright too, but I don’t suppose we’ll find any ’round here.”
“There’s nothing like ‘The Restaurant of Many Orders’ around here. Say, how many cars passed us today, do you suppose? Maybe not one, the whole day.”
Completely missing in Nagoyan’s account of “the whole day” was the half day he’d squandered by falling into the stream.
“How I’d jus’ love some salted mackerel. That ’n hot rice, salted cod’s roe, and miso soup.”
“Stop it. I’m hungry. No more talk about food. We still have water.”
As for that water, it could go bad in the heat at any time. And I had no desire to drink what was in the muddy reservoir.
“We’ve got only water and medicine. I feel like a hydrophyte.”
At least here in the middle of nowhere we should have been able to feast our eyes on a clear, starry firmament, but unluckily enough, the sky was clouded faintly white. The sweet sound of the croaking frogs was one I had never heard before.
“Pitch black, well, innit now!” I remarked. At this Nagoyan bolted up as though he had just awakened.
“Let’s set off some sparklers!”
I remembered that in Takamori, Nagoyan had, on the spur of the moment, bought a package of fireworks and put them in the trunk. Even the small ones, the kind that in the city only small children enjoy, were enchantingly beautiful, emitting dazzling sparks. As the cigarette lighter became too hot to handle, we would use the embers of one device to ignite the next. In the end, there were so many left that I lit three of them all simultaneously in an attempt to form a large fireball. Nagoyan scolded me for wastefulness.
I squatted and gazed at them, wondering what tomorrow would bring.
I dunno. What’ll ’appen? I dunno. What’ll ’appen?
When the last of fireworks had faded, the sense of loneliness they had fleetingly dulled came rushing back.
“It’s all my fault.”
I had been trying to get to sleep without hearing those weird voices, when I heard Nagoyan calling out in the darkness.
“I should have stopped you. I thoughtlessly took the car and needlessly prevented your return… And where are we now in this absurd place? I even let you drive without a license. We’ll be in a terrible pickle if we get caught… Your parents must hate me enough to kill me. When I get back, I’ll be charged with kidnapping. It’ll be called a case of abduction… Will I be able to get my job back? I suppose not… In the end, I’ll be called in by the police after all…”
The longer I kept silent, the more Nagoyan went on grumbling, grumbling, grumbling. Even without any of that, I was covered in sticky sweat, and the more Nagoyan went on, the more humid it became. I raised my seat and said, “T’isn’t so bad as ye think. Drink yer Depas.”
“I’ve already taken it.”
His voice sounded shrill in my ears. I daubed Sea Breeze on the nape of my neck and on my arms and furiously waved my fan, unable otherwise to endure the muggy heat of the night.
“If you think you can solve all your problems with drugs, you’re dead wrong. That’s your biggest mistake.”
“But if I don’t take me meds, I’ll never git well.”
“You’ve been taking it all along, but it doesn’t seem to have done you much good, has it?”
“I’ll git well someday, I will. It’s only that Tetropin that I really hate.”
“Listen. You’re forever talking about running away, running away, but in fact we’re doing just the opposite. Aren’t we simply letting ourselves be herded in? Why didn’t we head toward Honshu? Wait a minute. We were supposed to get on the expressway at Dazaifu… And this is how it’s turned out. So look. It’s like this. Running away doesn’t make things any better.”
“In that prison we woulda gone totally off our rockers. We’re better off as we are.”
“So that’s why I’m asking – are we to just keep on going? What’re you going to do when you run out of medicine?” Nagoyan asked shrilly.
“We’re not really running away, though, are we? There’s no road fer it!”
I thought he was on the verge of tears.
“An’ aren’t ye the one who’s been runnin’ away from Nagoya?”
My voice was lower than usual. The strange thing was that the more Nagoyan raged, the calmer I became. I didn’t itch, and I didn’t hear “Twenty…”
“Mind your own business! I wasn’t running away from Nagoya. I dumped Nagoya.”
“Even if ye did, ye can ne’er quite git away. ’Tis the same thing as bein’ on Planet Earth: there’s no escape.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied weepily.
“Ye can take a flyin’ leap into space to git away, but gravity will still pull ye back. An’ people who try to do that are jus’ plain daft. But then I’m one of ’em an’ so are ye.”
I was hardly thinking as I spoke, sputtering incoherently, a player piano hammering the keys. My tone was calm, but I was talking gibberish, and I knew it.
“Do you suppose it’s like being a mullet?”
In my mind I saw those huge fish leaping out of the mouth of the Hiikawa and splashing back in again. Anyone who’s done a bellyflop would think that hitting the surface like that must be painful, but the mullet are a thick-skinned, insensitive lot and may not feel it. Or perhaps they can’t help jumping, even if it hurts. Without asking one of them, I wouldn’t know.
“Aye,” I replied, “like a mullet…” For a long time he said nothing.
“…We’re low on gasoline. Wonder how much longer we can go. If we wind up with an empty tank here in the mountains, we’ll really be stuck… I wonder if any bears will come prowling around… If we’re this hungry, I can imagine that they are… Oh, if only we could get the air conditioner fixed…”
Nagoyan had started his grumbling again. I closed my eyes. Then finally, as though he had completed his quotidian quota of chatter, he fell silent, and so the day was now truly at an end. I quickly fell into a pitch-black sleep.