That day was hectic. A group of 160 foreign tourists arrived from the airport in sightseeing buses, and the full-time bellboys were marshaled to the task of escorting the mostly middle-aged and older group to their rooms. Tetsuyuki and two other student part-timers were assigned to unload the luggage from the three enormous buses.
Room assignments and preparations had been made in advance, but upon seeing 160 foreign tourists along with other guests standing at the counter waiting to be escorted, Isogai Kōichi, the bellboy captain, impatiently glanced at Tetsuyuki as he loaded the heavy luggage onto a cart.
“It’s amazing that each one of them could carry two or three heavy trunks like this,” one of the student workers remarked, out of breath. And indeed, each of the large trunks was so heavy as to make one wonder what could possibly be in them. Tetsuyuki answered, “Americans must have more muscles than we do.”
He was simply unable to lift them with one hand, and as he was using both hands to heft one, Isogai came by, remarking sharply: “You’ll get nowhere at that leisurely pace. The first thing guests want to do as soon as they get to their rooms is to relax, and you’re keeping them waiting for the change of clothing in their trunks. At the rate you guys are going, it’ll be hours.”
At that, one of the part-timers, Tanaka, who had the habit of always arguing with the full-time bellboys at every opportunity, retorted with a flushed face: “Including everything besides the trunks there are over three hundred pieces of luggage, and only three of us to get them off the buses, check the names on each one, assemble them in the lobby, and then carry them to the rooms. And you’re telling us to do all of that in thirty minutes? That’s impossible.”
Fixing his upturned eyes in an angry glare and taking a few steps toward Tanaka, Isogai said: “If you work efficiently, you can move at twice the speed. You guys just look as if you’re trying to have fun or something.”
“Then you try lifting them with one hand, and I’ll show you that I can work efficiently with both. Come on! Let’s see you lift them with one hand.”
Tetsuyuki tried patting Tanaka on the shoulder to calm him down but he, prone to irascibility, shook off the appeasing hand and grabbed Isogai by the lapels. “There are only three of us part-timers, and you saddle us with backbreaking work like this. How about getting one or two of your henchmen to come help?”
“The front desk is shorthanded and in turmoil. The first order of business is to take care of the guests.” Isogai tried to remove Tanaka’s hands from his lapels.
“In that case, all the bellboys should work at getting the guests settled in, and then all work at carrying luggage, shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?”
Isogai answered in a quavering voice. “The guests will make fun of us if they see hotel employees scuffling with each other at the entrance. Let go of me!” After Tanaka released his grasp, Isogai explained: “Since the flight arrived late, the chartered tour buses were also an hour late getting to the hotel. The drivers are eager to get back to the garage as soon as possible, and are pressing us to unload the luggage.”
“Then at the very least you, as bellboy captain, ought to pitch in and help. The staff at the front desk can manage the bellboys seeing guests to their rooms. Try carrying a couple of these trunks to the lobby!” With that, Tanaka unleashed on Isogai the grievances that had been building inside him for some time. “Today’s not the first time you’ve pushed this kind of thing off onto us part-timers. Should I knock two or three front teeth out of your smart mouth?” Tanaka was on the karate team of a private university in Kyoto. With a slight smile, he cracked his knuckles. Isogai looked at Tetsuyuki as if pleading for help, but immediately returned his gaze to Tanaka.
“Tanaka, you’re fired. Ever since you came here you’ve done nothing but cause trouble with the bellboys. I can’t very well keep someone like you on.”
A threatening gleam flashed in Tanaka’s eyes, and Tetsuyuki hurriedly interposed himself between the two. His attempt to say something was halted by Tanaka’s spiteful laugh directed at the two other part-timers. “Well then, I quit. Sorry, but you two will have to haul all the luggage.” With that parting shot, he headed toward the lobby, but soon wheeled about and returned. “Let Yamaguchi and Takakura know that I’ll be stopping by in a few days to say hello. I have lots to settle with those two.” Yamaguchi and Takakura were full-time bellboys who were always bullying the part-time student workers about one thing or another.
One of the bus drivers hollered from his seat. “Hey, what’re you doing? Hurry up and unload the luggage!”
After Tanaka’s departure, Tetsuyuki had no choice but to board the bus and set about the task of unloading the baggage, more than half of which remained. Isogai disappeared into the lobby, but soon returned and began setting onto a cart the bags the two part-timers had unloaded.
“Only five more. Thank you for waiting.” No sooner had he said this to the cigarette-smoking driver than Tetsuyuki saw Isogai fall over onto the luggage cart. He rushed down off the bus to Isogai’s side.
“What’s wrong?” Isogai’s forehead was perspiring, he was clutching his chest with both hands, his breathing was labored, and his lips had a bluish cast. The other part-timer dashed off to the lobby.
“I’m okay. Is all the luggage off?” he asked in a broken, pained voice. Shimazaki, the head of personnel, came running up, reprimanding Tetsuyuki: “You shouldn’t be making Isogai haul heavy luggage!”
“Yes, sir . . .” Unsure of what it all meant, Tetsuyuki remained standing there until the driver lost his temper and shouted, “Hey, haven’t you finished yet?” At that, Tetsuyuki again boarded the bus and began hauling the trunks one at a time. The last one was especially heavy and, unable to lift it even with both hands, he dragged it down the aisle and finally finished the task of unloading. Even after the tour buses had pulled away from the hotel entrance, Isogai remained sitting on the luggage cart, pressing his hands against his chest. Shimazaki ordered Tetsuyuki to take him to the employees’ nap room.
“You mustn’t make him climb stairs. Use the elevator.”
The nap room, known as the Peacock Room, was off to the side of the hotel’s largest banquet hall on the third floor, at the end of a passageway for employees. In it, triple-decker beds were lined up like shelves in a silkworm nursery to allow as many as thirty employees to nap at any one time. Light snoring could be heard coming from the farthest bed, where someone was apparently asleep. Isogai lay down on a bed and closed his eyes. A bit of redness had returned to his lips, and his breathing no longer seemed so labored.
“Shouldn’t we call a doctor?” Tetsuyuki asked in a hushed voice. Isogai shook his head. “It’s always like this. It’s passed now. If I just rest for a while I’ll be okay.” At length, after some deliberation, he said hesitantly: “I trust that you won’t mention to Nakaoka that I had another bout of chest pains today.”
“Nakaoka?”
“Nakaoka Mineo, the front-desk manager.”
“Oh yes . . . that guy.” Tetsuyuki called to mind the somewhat aloof features of the young manager to whom he had only paid brief respects on his first day on the job, and with whom he had never again exchanged words. Feeling uneasy about Isogai’s use of the word “another,” he asked: “Is this a chronic condition?”
Isogai evaded an answer by changing the topic of conversation. “Is your family in some kind of business?”
“My dad was, but he died about the same time his company went broke. So now my mom works at an eatery in the Kita Shinchi district . . .”
Isogai seemed to have regained strength, so Tetsuyuki started to rise from the edge of the bed where he was seated in order to return to work. Isogai reminded him: “Whatever you do, don’t let Nakaoka know about this.” Tetsuyuki again sat down on the bed and asked: “Why mustn’t he know?”
“He and I are the same age, and were hired here at the same time. But he has a college degree, and I only graduated from high school. At first, both of us were put to work as bellboys, but it wasn’t long before a gap arose in status. Since he can speak English, he was assigned to the front desk and almost immediately made manager. But oddly enough, he has it in for me. At first I thought he was just feeling smug and superior, but that doesn’t seem to be it.”
“Then what leads you to think he feels that way?”
“He makes a big deal of my slightest mistakes, as if he were trying to create an even bigger gap between us.”
The person who had been snoring in the farthest bed, a newly hired cook trainee, suddenly got up and hurried out of the nap room in a panic. The cooks did not have a night shift, so Tetsuyuki concluded that he had probably slipped away from his post and ended up falling asleep. Though it was none of his business to pry into things Isogai didn’t want to talk about, he ended up asking: “You have a bad heart, don’t you?”
As he lay there, Isogai set a finger aside the well-defined ridge of his nose, his eyes darting about. “It’s been bad ever since I was kid. The doctor says I need an operation.”
When introducing him to the job, Isogai had guided him all the way to the twenty-fourth floor. Tetsuyuki had thought it strange that they didn’t just take the emergency stairs when the elevator was slow in coming. So that was it: he was avoiding the stairs. And it became clear why Section Chief Shimazaki insisted that he should not be allowed to lift heavy luggage.
“They told me that since it’s a valve disorder, surgery could fix it . . .”
“Well then, you should just resign yourself to having surgery.”
Isogai turned to Tetsuyuki, smiling, and muttered: “That’s easy for you to say, since it’s not your problem.” It seemed to Tetsuyuki that he was seeing Isogai smile for the first time.
Returning to the lobby, he went to Section Chief Shimazaki in the front office.
“It seems to have subsided.”
Shimazaki raised his angular face from the documents he had been inspecting. “Oh? That’s good.” Then he halted Tetsuyuki, who had turned toward the lobby to return to work.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Having filed away the documents on his desk, Shimazaki headed for the employees’ cafeteria with his restless, somewhat bowlegged gait. Purchasing two cans of cola from the vending machines, he sat down at a table and motioned to Tetsuyuki to take a seat.
“Let’s see, you’ll graduate next year, won’t you?”
“Yes, I plan to.”
“What kind of company are you thinking of applying to for work?”
“I haven’t thought about that yet. I might fail an employment examination . . .”
Though there was no one else in the cafeteria, Shimazaki suddenly lowered his voice and leaned over the table.
“How about full-time work at our hotel?”
“At this hotel . . . ?”
“Being a hotelier doesn’t appeal to you?”
At a loss for an answer, Tetsuyuki sipped the cola that was offered to him.
“These past two months, I’ve been observing your work habits, and have thought that I’d really like to have you work for us after you graduate. These days, so many student part-timers aren’t serious, but you’re well-mannered and a hard worker. Some of our guests have also had praise for you.”
“Oh?” Tetsuyuki could not recall having done anything that would merit praise.
“Next year, we’re planning to hire ten college graduates and twenty high school graduates. How about it? Why not go ahead and make an early decision about employment?”
“Can that be decided before I even take the employment examination?”
A somewhat smug smile arose in the candid features of Shimazaki’s face. “If I recommend you, it’ll be settled in one shot.” Then, as was apparently his habit, he lit his cigarette after resting the filter on his tongue and licking it around once.
“I also saw to it that Isogai was hired here.” Shimazaki explained that he and Isogai were from the same town. “His father was a doctor, an otorhinologist, whose practice was in the Marutamachi area of Kyoto. Our house was in the lane behind that. I knew Isogai when he was just a kid.” Then lowering his voice, Shimazaki added, “Nobody’s had it rougher than that guy.”
“The Isogai Otorhinolaryngology Clinic was flourishing, and everyone assumed that the oldest son, Isogai Kōichi, would one day take his father’s place. However, an unexpected disaster struck the family: leaving for a trip to the northwestern coast with a fellow doctor, his father for some reason fell from the station platform into the path of a special express train that was passing through at full speed.
“But that wasn’t all,” Shimazaki continued in a small voice. Less than a year after his father’s accidental death, his mother also died after being hit by a train. Returning from taking care of some matter with relatives in Katsura, she was waiting at an unmanned railway crossing on the Hankyū Line for an Umeda-bound train from Kawaramachi to pass by. She must have been in a hurry, because after the train had passed she ducked under the crossing gate, which was still down, and started to cross the tracks, unaware of the train rushing in the opposite direction.
“It’s as if they were under some kind of curse, isn’t it?” With that, Shimazaki broke off speaking and took out another cigarette, again licking the filter. “At that time, Isogai was still in his first year of high school, and his sister was in sixth grade at elementary school. He went to live with an uncle, while she was taken in by a different relative. For a long time they continued to live separately, but in February of this year they finally rented an apartment in Toyonaka and are again together. If that accident had not happened, by now Isogai would be a doctor, filling his father’s shoes.”
Glancing at his watch, Shimazaki stood up and, urging Tetsuyuki to give his offer serious thought, hurried back to his office. The smell of food hung heavily in the air of the employees’ cafeteria. Three vending machines stood side by side, and on each table there was a plastic cylinder packed tightly with light brown chopsticks. On a large sign was written: PLEASE RETURN UTENSILS TO THE PROPER PLACE AFTER WASHING THEM THOROUGHLY. Tetsuyuki stared vacantly at the sign, his chin propped on one hand.
He was, to be sure, diligent in his work, but Tetsuyuki was not particularly fond of Isogai and the constantly probing look in his eyes that was a part of his standoffish expression. As he recalled Section Chief Shimazaki’s narrative, he reflected, Strange things do happen in this world. He also thought of Isogai’s need of an operation for his chronic heart condition. But concluding that none of that had anything to do with himself, he left the cafeteria and headed for the lobby.
The foreign guests’ luggage had been placed in a corner of the lobby, to the side of the main entrance. The bellboys had apparently already taken most of the roughly fifty remaining pieces to the rooms of their respective owners. There were five trunks tagged with the name “E. H. Thomas.” Having loaded them onto a cart, Tetsuyuki inquired at the front desk about their owner’s room number.
“Number 2588, on the twelfth floor.” As Tetsuyuki began to walk toward the elevators with the luggage, Nakaoka, his back turned as he checked the cards, called out to him in a sharp tone: “Iryō! You’re supposed to say ‘Yes, sir, I understand.’”
“I’m sorry, that was careless of me.”
Then, finally facing Tetsuyuki, Nakaoka summoned him with an exasperated gesture.
“Yes, what is it?”
“You were goldbricking for a whole hour. Were you in the nap room? Or in the cafeteria?”
“I wasn’t goldbricking. Section Chief Shimazaki had something he wanted to discuss with me, and the two of us went to the cafeteria.”
“What did you discuss?” The shirt on Nakaoka, who was tall and thin, had at least an inch-wide opening between the collar and his slender neck. Tetsuyuki had once heard him complain to coworkers that, if he bought shirts adequately long in the sleeves, they would fit poorly around his neck. Feeling no obligation to respond, Tetsuyuki remained silent. Nakaoka’s long, slender neck oddly appeared to magnify his twitching Adam’s apple. Arranging his disheveled bangs, he asked with a sly smirk: “Isogai had another one of his attacks, didn’t he? And Shimazaki told you to keep it from me, huh?”
“What do you mean by ‘attack’?”
Nakakoa glanced at Tetsuyuki, then turned away with an insouciant air and said, “Get back to work. You’re paid by the hour here, after all.”
Tetsuyuki vaguely remembered hearing rumors about a struggle over succession in the hotel, and he sensed that Nakaoka’s rudeness had something to do with it.
It was a little before midnight when Tetsuyuki returned to his apartment. Turning on the light, he called out the name he had given the lizard: Kin-chan. As usual, Tetsuyuki filled a spoon with water and held it toward Kin, who lapped at it with his narrow tongue. After giving his pet water, he took the lid from a square wooden box on top of the refrigerator and, using tweezers to extract chestnut weevil larvae out of the sawdust, held them in front of Kin’s nose. He released the tension on the tweezers as soon as Kin’s long, agile tongue wrapped itself around the larvae. At first, he could not coordinate the timing of the release, and ended up dropping several on the floor. All of two weeks passed before Kin began eating them directly from him.
“Hey, we’re getting good at this,” Tetsuyuki said after Kin had consumed four larvae. Then, tapping the lizard’s nose with the tweezers, he added: “It’ll be summer before long, and this room will turn into a sauna. But I can’t very well leave the windows open when I’m away.”
Kin curled his tail back and forth and blinked several times. Having cleaned the droppings off the pillar, Tetsuyuki was finally able to stretch out on the tatami and fixed his gaze on the nail piercing the lizard’s back. “You know, it might get so hot in here that you could die by the time I come home, Kin-chan.” He wondered how long he intended to keep this reptile, and thought to himself that if it died, then it died, and that couldn’t be helped.
“Kin-chan, when summer comes, I’m going to pull the nail out.” Even as he spoke the words, he realized that the lizard’s internal organs had probably already knit with the nail, which had thus become part of its body. By pulling the nail out, he would be opening a large wound that had finally healed. Tetsuyuki agonized over what to do.
“Today I did nothing but haul luggage, and only got fifteen hundred yen in tips. Foreign guests have been told that tipping isn’t necessary in Japan, so even after hauling all those heavy trunks, I got nothing but ‘thank you.’ But three newlywed couples did give me five hundred yen each.” Tetsuyuki kept up his monologue directed to the small creature that, deprived of its freedom, remained silent in the phosphorescent glow. “But I have it a lot better than Isogai. I never imagined he had it so bad, poor guy. I just thought he was obnoxious.”
At that moment, there was a knock at the door. Tetsuyuki sat up with a start, his body tense. A feeling of panic gripped him. The knock was repeated, followed by a man’s voice.
“Iryō.” It was a peculiarly gravelly voice, one he could never forget. “It’s Kobori. Open up!”
Kobori entered as soon as the door opened. He was extremely nearsighted, and the long narrow slits of his eyes blinked behind thick, brown-tinted lenses. “I found you! I never thought it’d take this long, but I had no idea where you’d gone. I finally tracked you down.” Kobori sat cross-legged and barked at Tetsuyuki: “Sit!” Kobori kept his red-and-white-striped blazer on until Tetsuyuki took a seat. “Where’s your old lady?”
“She’s living where she works, at a restaurant.”
“Well then, she must have a bit of dough by now. I’m not saying that it all has to be paid back at once. I’ll wait three months. After that, be prepared to fork over 350,000 yen.”
“It’s 323,000 yen, isn’t it?”
“You’ve put me to a lot of unpaid expense and trouble tracking you down.”
“There’s no way I could come up with money like that. Besides, it has nothing to do with me. My dad didn’t leave me a thing, and I am under no obligation to repay his debts.”
“You’ll end up in a condition where you’ll never be able to spout that argument again.”
“I’ll report your threat to the police.”
Instantly, a tremendous blow filled Tetsuyuki’s mind with sparks. Standing up, Kobori again punched Tetsuyuki in the face and kicked him in his side repeatedly after he had fallen over.
“I’ll come again tomorrow. Be prepared to give me a more sensible answer.”
Slinging his blazer over his shoulder, Kobori left. Blood was dripping on the tatami from Tetsuyuki’s nose and from a deep gash inside his upper lip. He staggered upright, but was not able to walk in a straight line. He washed his face in the kitchen sink and, stuffing tissue paper up his bleeding nostrils, used a towel to wipe the blood off the floor and then lay down. His nosebleed appeared to be stanched quickly, but blood from his lip continued to flow endlessly. What if I killed that jerk? That thought crossed his mind as he looked at Kin, nailed to the pillar. When he shows up tomorrow, he’ll get a carving knife stuck in him. Tetsuyuki was shaking with fear and mortification. No matter how hard he tried to calm himself, his trembling only grew stronger.
Sleeping fitfully, Tetsuyuki awoke several times during the night. His nose and upper lip throbbed and he was repeatedly attacked by an anxiety that constricted his chest. Each time he awoke he smoked a cigarette. Once when he dozed off, he dreamed that he had become a lizard, scurrying about through clumps of grass and stone fences. Dying and being reborn, he continually passed through the cycle of life and death as a lizard. Through decades—even through centuries—he continued as a lizard and clearly sensed the long passage of time in his dream. Hiding in the shadow of grass on footpaths between paddies, he would look up to see Yōko, Isogai, and many other people he knew as they passed by, and wondered when his time would finally end.
Then he awoke and glanced at his alarm clock: 3:30. He had not been dozing for longer than forty minutes. Pondering the several centuries he had clearly just spent as a lizard, he lay facedown and lit a cigarette. He was enveloped in a feeling of glowing intoxication. He had no idea why he was so enraptured, but it seemed as if something akin to hope had grown in one corner of his body, which was otherwise bound by tremendous anxiety.
During forty minutes, he had spent centuries going through countless lives as a lizard. What a frightening dream that had been. And still, that strange and frightening dream had put his mind at ease. Savoring the flavor of the smoke, he reflected deeply. The bitterness of the tobacco penetrated the wound behind his upper lip. The dream had been vividly engraved in his mind and had not faded.
He could recall everything: whether the sensation of the blazing sun on his back, or rapturously stretching his limbs out to imbibe from dew-drenched grasses, or the feeling of terror at soaring high into the sky in the beak of a shrike. Dying from hunger and thirst, or being devoured by some unidentified creature, or being clubbed to death by human children, he had died countless times and had been reborn as many times. He had unmistakably passed through a dreadfully long time. And yet all that had happened in only forty minutes. The idea that the lizard that had passed through centuries of recurring life and death, and the person who had awoken and was here smoking a cigarette were the same “self” produced a point of clarity in his hollowed-out spirit.
Tetsuyuki got up and switched on the miniature light. He approached Kin and, leaning against the wall, gazed at the nail. Kin opened his eyes, blinked, moved his face to look at the human, and flicked his long, slender tongue.
“Are you thirsty?” Tetsuyuki spoke to the reptile in a lowered voice. “You didn’t die even after being nailed to a pillar . . . Why didn’t you die, Kin-chan? Why are you alive?”
He stroked Kin’s head gently with his fingertip. The lizard’s skin was rough, lacking any moistness. Filling a cup with water in the kitchen, Tetsuyuki returned and dipped his fingers into the cup, then let the drops from them fall onto Kin’s back.
“Why were you born as a lizard? And why was I born human? There must be some reason for that. What do you think the reason is?”
Tetsuyuki’s tongue licked the wound inside his upper lip. It had stopped bleeding, but a wide, deep gash remained. “There’s no way I’m going to pay anything to a gangster like that, Kin-chan. Even though I ended up in a mess like this, I didn’t die. And I won’t give in. Whether they break my nose, or even kill me, I’ll be damned if I do as that jerk says. I’ll kill him before he kills me!”
Then a slight smile appeared on Tetsuyuki’s face as he corrected himself: “Yeah, but if I did that, my life would be over. No matter that he is only a louse as far as gangsters go, if I killed him everything would be at an end.” Then he told Kin about his dream.
“This was the first time I’ve ever had such a strange dream. For centuries, I had actually become a lizard, just like you, going through life and death over and over.” The moment he spoke these words, it occurred to Tetsuyuki that during those forty minutes of dozing, perhaps he really had gone through all those cycles of birth and death as a lizard. But then he quickly banished the absurd notion from his mind. Such things could not be. It was a dream, after all, and here he was awake and human, talking to Kin, wasn’t he?
Tetsuyuki continued to lean against the wall, staring fixedly at the bluish light reflected on Kin’s skin. As he did so, it became unclear which was dream, which was reality: his self as a human being, or his self as a lizard. It seemed as if both were dreams. Then again, it seemed as if both were real.
“I’ll have to tell Yōko not to come here anymore.” He had no idea when Kobori might show up again, and he couldn’t let her be anywhere nearby.
“Yōko, why do you care for someone like me and even say you want to marry me? I might never be anything more than a grunt salaryman.”
The darkness outside the window was just beginning to yield to the faintest blue. Tetsuyuki left Kin’s side and tumbled into bed, curling up tightly. He slept soundly until nearly noon.
Tetsuyuki remained in bed for a while, reflecting. Then he got up and looked at his face in the mirror. Both his nose and lip were swollen; he could not very well go out among people looking like that. He fixed himself a meal, making some toast and warming some milk. The wound smarted when he ate, and it took him three times longer than usual to get down one slice of toast and a glass of milk.
Then, his face cast downward and his eyes on the ground, he walked the long path to the police box in front of the station. He peered inside and saw a middle-aged policeman sitting at a desk, scribbling notes on a document. Tetsuyuki returned to the shopping arcade, mustered his resolve, and then again went to the police box.
“Excuse me . . .” At Tetsuyuki’s voice, the policeman looked up. “There’s a matter on which I’d be grateful for your advice.”
The policeman’s gaze was fixed for a moment on Tetsuyuki’s swollen nose and lip. He asked, motioning for him to take a seat, “What is it?”
Tetsuyuki summarized the matter from the beginning up to the incident the night before.
“Apart from the issue of the debt, this is a clear case of extortion, and a charge of assault would also apply,” the policeman said as he removed his hat and smoothed his thinning hair with the palms of both hands. “It’s not unusual for collectors to make threats, but they rarely resort to violence. But since he actually assaulted you, you could have this petty gangster Kobori arrested.”
“I’m worried about what would come after that.”
“You mean, you’re afraid of reprisals?”
“That’s right. He’s not working alone.”
“They all capitulate without a fight. As for the debt, that could be solved legally as a civil suit. But since you’ve come to discuss the matter with the police—and especially now that there is the fact of your having been threatened and beaten—we are obliged to take action. Press charges against that gangster.”
Looking at this officer, who somehow had the air of a middle school principal about him, Tetsuyuki hesitantly responded, “I’ll press charges.” He felt the blood drain from his face. The policeman poured some tea for him, but it was hot and made the wound smart, so he took only two or three sips and then vacantly stared at the steam rising from the cup.
Leaving the police box, Tetsuyuki quickly went into a phone booth and dialed the hotel. He told Shimazaki that he had caught a cold and was running a fever, and asked to be excused from work. Then he hung up and returned to his apartment.
Night fell. Around eight o’clock, Tetsuyuki’s heart began to pound violently. He had to keep wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers. He could hear footsteps climbing the metal stairs, and assumed a formal sitting posture in the middle of the room, with both fists clenched. There was a knock on the door, but before he could respond, Kobori had already entered.
“So, have you thought of a good answer?” Kobori’s words hardly entered Tetsuyuki’s ears, which were listening intently for any hint of the arrival of the policeman who was supposed to be keeping watch.
“What’s this? You’re trembling, aren’t you?” As soon as Kobori spoke, the door opened to reveal the familiar middle-aged policeman and a young officer. His mouth partly agape, Kobori glanced back and forth between Tetsuyuki and the policemen. The middle-aged policeman stepped into the room and, patting Kobori on the shoulder, said calmly, “You’re under arrest for extortion and assault.” Then he took out a pair of handcuffs.
“Do you have a warrant?” Kobori was staring at Tetsuyuki, and his face was drained of blood.”
“We do. I can show it to you if you want.” Then, handcuffing Kobori, the policeman smiled at Tetsuyuki. “If something else comes up, please come see us anytime.” The policeman’s voice echoed as they descended the stairs. “You’ll have plenty of other charges against you anyway, and we’ll have you fess up to all of them. It’ll be five or six years before you’ll be back on the streets.”
Tetsuyuki quietly went to the kitchen and opened the window to peer out. Sometime or other, a police car had parked there. He hurriedly closed the window and, leaning against the wall, sank down, pressing his forehead against his knees, and remained motionless for a long time. He wondered how his mother was doing.
They had been in contact by telephone two or three times a week, but over the two months since moving into this apartment, he had not met with her even once. He wanted desperately to see her. Feeling like a child lost in a crowd, he hurriedly put on his shoes and left the apartment. As he walked briskly down the dark path toward the station, he realized that he had not given Kin anything to eat or drink, and ran back.
He opened the box containing the chestnut weevil larvae to find only four of the creatures left among the sawdust. After feeding those to Kin, Tetsuyuki got down on all fours in the kitchen and began looking about. Two young cockroaches ran out from underneath the refrigerator, and so he trapped them with a cup, then, holding the insects with tweezers, thrust them in front of Kin’s nose. Up to now he had only alternated between larvae and grubs, and had never tried feeding him cockroaches. Kin just fixed his beady black eyes on the baby cockroaches squirming in the grasp of the tweezers, but made no move to consume them.
“What’s the matter, Kin-chan? You don’t like roaches?” As if at that urging, Kin’s tongue adroitly wrapped itself around a cockroach. One of the insect’s legs dangled out of Kin’s mouth. It finally disappeared, but it took a very long time for the lump to move from Kin’s throat down to his stomach. Tetsuyuki waited impatiently. Then he administered some water with a spoon.
“Drink up. Who knows? Maybe I won’t be coming back today.” He dampened Kin’s body all over with the water remaining in the spoon, and then left.
There were few people at Suminodō Station, where he waited a good half hour for a train to Katamachi. As soon as he sat down in the nearly empty car, he realized that he had eaten no dinner, and apart from his lunch of milk and a slice of toast he had consumed nothing at all. He had spent all that time so anxiously wondering where the policeman was keeping watch and when Kobori might show up that he had not felt hunger.
From the central entrance of Osaka Station, he went down to an underground arcade and glanced at a clock—11:30. Five or six vagrants had fashioned enclosures out of cardboard and had made beds in them for the night. Hurriedly turning right in the arcade, Tetsuyuki headed toward Sakura Bridge.
No sooner had he started down the main avenue of Kita Shinchi than the restaurant curtain of Yūki came into view. Yūki was a two-story wooden structure sandwiched between large office buildings on either side. It was an unpretentious shop, marked only by an indigo-dyed curtain hanging in front of its latticed door, but it was numbered among the distinguished old establishments of Kita Shinchi, and it had a reputation both for its refined patronage and for its steep prices. It had a regular chef, and at first his mother was put in charge of cleaning up, but it was soon recognized that she was better at flavoring the appetizers and two weeks previously had been put in charge of that.
Tetsuyuki stood in front of a florist’s shop not far from Yūki, waiting for the restaurant’s closing time. A man accompanied by a woman who looked like a bar hostess was purchasing armloads of orchids. Tetsuyuki watched through the window as the man paid, pulling money from a leather wallet bulging with 10,000-yen bills.
As its last group of customers left, the lights inside Yūki went out and a young woman attired in a splash-patterned kimono came out to put away the shop curtain. Tetsuyuki approached her.
“I’m Iryō Kinuko’s son. I’d like to see her for a moment.” The woman affably urged him to enter, loudly calling inside, “Mrs. Iryō, your son is here.”
The light that was on in the kitchen soon spread to the interior of the darkened shop. His mother emerged, her slim body wrapped in an apron, wiping her wet hands with a towel. Tetsuyuki was still standing hesitantly outside.
“The customers have all left. Don’t just stand there. Come on in.” When Tetsuyuki entered, she introduced him to the elderly chef who had poked his face out of the kitchen.
“This is my son. And this is Mr. Ishii, the very best chef in Kita Shinchi.” At her words, a smile came to his lips and he said gruffly, “You’re the only one who calls me the best, auntie.”
“Have you had dinner?” His mother’s face darkened as she looked at him. Then she pulled him by the arm into the brightly lit kitchen. “What happened to you? Your face . . .” She stared at his swollen nose and lip.
“I stumbled and fell down on the apartment stairs.” Tetsuyuki had never before deceived his mother. As soon as she tried to say something, he cut her off. “I haven’t eaten dinner. And I only had a slice of bread for lunch.”
Apparently having overheard him, Chef Ishii chimed in. “We have a bit of sliced squid left, along with some stewed pork and red miso.” With that, he opened a pot, heaped the food on a plate, and set it on the counter. His mother thanked Mr. Ishii as she filled a bowl with rice.
“This is really good, so thank Mr. Ishii and eat up.” Tetsuyuki thanked Mr. Ishii, as well as the young woman who had come into the kitchen, for all they had done for his mother. The latticed door opened and a heavily made-up woman in Japanese attire staggered in, reeking of perfume. “That’s the proprietress,” Tetsuyuki’s mother whispered to him.
“This is my son. He stopped by to discuss something with me, and hadn’t had any dinner, so the chef picked out a few leftovers for him,” she explained in a flustered tone.
“Well, well, you have such a grown-up son.” The proprietress cast a sidelong glance at Tetsuyuki, who said, “Thank you for treating me.” He began to add an expression of thanks for all she had done for his mother, but the proprietress paid no attention to him, and asked the young woman who was putting things away in the kitchen to call a cab for her. Tetsuyuki judged her age to be forty-two or -three.
“Yokota’s gotten so that he drinks too much, and I can’t keep up with him. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re down and out.” As the proprietress talked, Ishii changed out of his apron and responded briefly. “Aside from what you drink with him here, it’s not necessary to accompany him to other clubs, is it?”
“Yes, but he and I go way back together, and he’s trying to hide the fact that his business isn’t going well, and I can’t all of a sudden give him the cold treatment. I had to down three glasses of brandy, and now I’m drunk.”
“That’s because before that you’d already had five rounds of saké.”
Both her cosmetics and her kimono made her look youthful, and her profile still had traces that suggested remarkable beauty in her younger years, but from the front, under strong light, her heavy makeup made her look older. In the middle of her face, which expressed both craftiness and innocence, was a pair of inorganic eyes that seemed like those of an exquisitely crafted doll.
“Eat it up quickly, or it’ll get cold.” Urged by the proprietress, Tetsuyuki slurped the miso and stuffed his mouth with rice. There was no warmth in her words, and it seemed to him that she did not want him eating her shop’s leftovers for free. “How much do I owe you?” His intention was to show consideration, but the proprietress threw him a sharp look and said, “What do you mean? You want to pay? I’m sure our chef didn’t serve it with the intention of being paid.” With that, she got into the cab parked in front of the shop. Ishii and the young woman also went home, leaving only Tetsuyuki and his mother.
“The proprietress seems a bit touchy.”
“Well, she used to be a geisha.” Wiping the countertop, his mother named a major railroad company. “The president of that company set her up in this shop.” She held a pinkie erect as she spoke. “She’s lived in the world of nightclubs and bars since she was a kid. And then she went from being a first-class geisha to being the mistress of a millionaire and got this shop here in Shinchi. She’s getting on in years, but is like a naïve little girl when it comes to how the world works. It was after her patron died that she really got serious about the business. Up till then, all of her customers came here because of connections with her patron.”
“How old is she?”
“The same age as I am.”
“Huh?! Then she’s fifty?” Tetsuyuki found it amusing, thinking that in that case her heavy makeup really did a splendid job of exposing her age.
“She has her endearing qualities, but she’s pretty capricious. But by now I’ve gotten used to dealing with her.”
His mother appeared in better spirits than he had expected. “You’ve grown thin,” she said. “Has something happened?” After finishing her work, she sat down next to him and began questioning.
“No. Just hanging around in my apartment, I suddenly wanted to see you, that’s all.”
“Does Yōko sometimes come to your apartment?”
“Yeah . . . Sometimes she brings groceries.” Under his mother’s gaze, he sensed in her words that she had caught on to everything about them.
“I really like that girl. She’s cheerful and sweet, not a single blemish on her character. I wonder if she’d be willing to marry you.” From a teapot she filled to the brim large teacups, the kind used at sushi restaurants. Cradling her cup in both hands, she looked down, focused on the tea stem floating in the brew. “About two months before your father died, I told him about you and Yōko, and said it seemed as if you had decided to tie the knot.”
“What did Dad say?”
“He laughed, and said that people never get to marry their first love.”
Tetsuyuki beamed at his mother. For the first time in a very long time he felt peace in his heart.
“My first love was cruelly shattered when I was in middle school.” As a teenager, he had fallen for the girl who managed the equipment of the baseball club. He didn’t like baseball, but joined with her as his aim.
“I was put out in right field and made to practice catching fly balls. I got so nervous with her watching me that I caught a ball with my forehead instead of my mitt, and that made her double over laughing. She had become the manager because she had a crush on the pitcher, a guy named Takakura. As soon as I realized that, I quit the club after just three days, and a senior teammate slapped me across the face three times. Whenever I think about it, it seems so idiotic that I end up laughing.”
On the street outside there was the insistent honking of a horn and a sudden surge of people. The noise of the bustle broke the silence of the closed restaurant.
“It’s time for the hostesses to head home.” With that lone comment, his mother fell back into pensive silence, not even sipping the tea she had poured. At length, she said, “What really happened? Tell me, and don’t hide anything.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I really fell down on the apartment stairs and hit my face.”
“You never heard again from that collector?”
“Never. There’s no way he could trace me so far outside Osaka. By the time he finds either of us, I’ll have saved three or four hundred thousand yen.”
“It’s not money that we particularly need to repay, but . . . there’s no doubt that it’s your father’s debt.” She told Tetsuyuki to stay the night in her room on the second floor. After making sure that the door was locked and the gas turned off, she extinguished the light. After climbing a steep staircase next to the enormous refrigerator in the kitchen, they came to a cramped room with a wooden floor, crowded with stacks of cardboard boxes, beside which was a sliding door. Opening the door, she turned on a fluorescent light. It was a six-mat room properly furnished with a tokonoma alcove and filled with her familiar scent.
“It won’t matter if I stay without permission?” Tetsuyuki glanced around the room.
“No, it won’t matter. The proprietress won’t come to the shop until after seven p.m. Mr. Ishii will stop by at about six a.m. with a load of goods from the market, and will leave right after that.”
“Then you have to get up at six?”
“He has a key, so I can stay in bed. If I’m awake, I get up and make him a cup of tea, but he returns home after that and goes to bed. He gets up at four a.m. and goes to the central market by himself to pick out produce for our pantry. Then he comes to work at four p.m., and the restaurant opens at six.” She opened the closet and pulled out futons and quilts, arranging beds for two. Tetsuyuki sat down by a latticed window facing the street.
“This is a nice room.”
“Until two years ago it was used for guests. It even has an alcove for decorations.”
“Why isn’t it used that way now?”
“They said it’s because they were so understaffed that they decided to limit the business to downstairs, but it’s probably because their customer base has dwindled. It’s rare that customers here request a separate room, and so they decided not to use the second floor.”
“Where do you bathe?”
“I take the bus to Jōshō Bridge. There’s an old public bath there.” She sat in front of a small dressing mirror, applying lotion to her face.
“You take the bus, to go to a public bath?”
“It’s only five minutes to Jōshō Bridge.” She changed into a nightgown and got into bed, and so he also undressed, switched off the light, and got into bed in his underwear.
“I hope we can all live together someday soon, you and Yōko, the three of us . . .” she muttered, and yawned. It was not long until her regular breathing evinced slumber. Noting how exhausted she must have been, Tetsuyuki, too, closed his eyes.
There were signs of a steady stream of traffic on the main avenue through Shinchi, and he could hear laughter and voices calling for others among the human noises that had increased. He listened intently to the clamor, his eyes closed tight. He wondered about the meaning of the dream in which he had gone through centuries of cycles of birth and death as a lizard. In a mere forty minutes, he had gone through several hundred years. Though he dismissed it as only a dream, he felt that he had stood on the brink of a chasm opening onto a deep and distant world, and that he had peered down into something very strange. The self that was dreaming and the self of his waking consciousness—how were they different?
He thought of Kin, nailed to a pillar in a small dark apartment way beyond that distant station. Sometime, he would have to pull the nail out and set him free. He wanted to do this in a careful manner that would not kill him or aggravate the wound. Imagining Kin in the back of his mind, Tetsuyuki wanted to repeat the dream of the night before.