(1985 – 28th September)
He woke as he usually did. The amber curtains were drawn over the windows facing the courtyard to the east, but the bright morning sun shone right through them into the room. It was quiet outside, but if he listened carefully, he could just make out the faint chirping of the mountain birds, as well as the distant sound of flowing water. He could also hear the heavy rumble of the mill wheels, always revolving by the western side of the house. It was a peaceful morning.
The news last night had reported an approaching typhoon. The forecast said it would start raining in the Chūgoku region on the afternoon of the 28th.
He slowly sat up in the spacious bed. The clock on the wall showed half past eight. The same time he always woke up.
Leaning back against the headboard, he reached for the nightstand with his right hand, picked up his old briar pipe and packed it with tobacco. Soon a mellow scent filled the room, accompanied by cream-coloured smoke.
Three days ago he’d caught a cold and ran a fever, but he’d recovered now. He could savour the scent of tobacco again.
He slowly closed his eyes as he puffed his pipe.
28th September. Ōishi Genzō, Mori Shigehiko, Mitamura Noriyuki and Furukawa Tsunehito. Today was the day the four 30of them would visit him in the afternoon, just as they had done in previous years.
Their annual visit was not a joyous occasion for him, living as he did in this house deep in the mountains, hiding from the outside world. He honestly felt their visit was a great annoyance.
Yet he was also in denial about his feelings. He could easily tell them not to come if he genuinely did not want them to. But his inability to turn them away all these years was perhaps partially due to guilt.
He kept his eyes closed as a low sigh escaped his cracked lips.
Anyway, they’re coming today. It’d all been decided, so nothing could be changed now.
He had no intention of making a detailed analysis of his own contradictory thoughts. The visit plagued him, but he also welcomed it. That was all there was to it.
It was a quarter to nine now. The phone on his nightstand would ring soon, softly signifying the start of another day.
“Good morning, sir.”
The familiar voice on the other end of the line sounded calm. It was the butler, Kuramoto Shōji.
“How are you feeling, sir?”
“Better now, thanks.”
“I can bring your breakfast immediately if you wish.”
“I’ll come down myself.”
He placed his pipe on its stand and started getting dressed. He took his pyjamas off, put on a shirt and trousers, and a dressing gown on top. When he had managed to do all of this, he put the cotton gloves on both his hands. And finally, it was time to put on his face.
His mask. 31
The mask could be considered the symbol of the last twelve years of his life, a symbol of everything that Fujinuma Kiichi was.
Indeed, he had no face. He wore this mask every single day to hide his accursed features. This white mask bearing the features of Fujinuma Kiichi, the master of this house. The rubber clung to his skin. A cold death mask worn by a living man.
It was five to nine.
There was a knock on the door connecting his bedroom to the adjoining sitting room.
“Enter,” he commanded.
A short, plump woman opened the door with the spare key he had given her. She was wearing a pristine white apron.
“Good morning,” said the live-in housekeeper, Negishi Fumie.
“I’ve brought you your medicine. How are you feeling? Oh, you’re dressed already? Will you be wearing a tie today? Oh, dear, smoking the pipe again? It’s not good for your health, you know. I’d appreciate it if you’d listen to my advice for once.”
Fumie was forty-five, four years older than her master, but still energetic and lively. Big eyes adorned her round face, and she always spoke quickly in a high-pitched voice.
The expressionless masked master stared at her as he ignored her chatter and started to get out of bed. Fumie immediately tried to help, but he stopped her.
“I can do this myself,” he said in a hoarse voice. He moved his lean, weak body into the wheelchair.
“Here’s your medicine.”
“I don’t need it any more.”
“Oh, no, that won’t do. Please take it for one more day to be on the safe side. Especially considering we’ll be having visitors. Today will be more taxing for you than usual.” 32
He gave in, took the pills handed over to him and swallowed them together with a glass of water. Fumie looked pleased and nodded as she held the handles of the wheelchair.
“And you’d better not take a bath today yet. Let’s see how that fever fares first.”
He sighed inwardly. He wished she’d let him be, but it was her former profession as a nurse showing through. When it came to his health, she never stopped.
She was an attentive woman who liked to care for others. A previous marriage had failed, but she didn’t seem hurt by the experience. She did everything, from running the house to taking care of him, helping him bathe and cutting his hair, even monitoring his health.
He wouldn’t have liked Fumie to be like Kuramoto, a “robot” who always kept an appropriate distance from his master. But he did wish she’d be a bit less talkative.
“Shall I bring you to the dining room now? Oh, no pipe for you any more, leave that thing here. Let’s go.”
She pushed the wheelchair out of the bedroom.
“The young lady and Masaki are already in the dining room.”
“Yurie too?”
“Yes, it’s good to see her now. She’s much livelier than before. Sir, you know what I think? I think she should get out more often.”
“What?”
The face beneath his mask suddenly froze as he turned around to Fumie. She shuddered and fell silent.
“I-I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” he said bluntly, and faced frontwards again. 33
After breakfast Fujinuma Yurie returned alone to her room up in the tower.
She was a beautiful girl who looked as if she had stepped right out of a painting and didn’t seem to be made of mere flesh and blood. She had clear black eyes, soft pink lips, smooth fair skin and gorgeous black hair. Her features were delicate and refined.
Yurie was nineteen years old, turning twenty the following spring. Normally, a woman her age wouldn’t be called a “girl” any more. But her delicate physique seemed far removed from the ideal of a fully developed woman. Her woeful look, always peering far away into the distance, was heart-wrenching.
A beautiful girl. Yes, that was the only way to describe her.
Dressed in a lemon-coloured blouse, Yurie leaned against the white window frame and stared absent-mindedly at the view outside.
Mountains stretched far into the distance, seeming to overlap each other, while a richly green river snaked through the valleys between them. The peaks of the mountain range pierced the sky and above them dark-grey clouds were slowly gathering.
Soon autumn would take over, changing the colours of the landscape. And then winter would come and the whole world visible from this tower would be painted snow-white. How many such changing seasons had she witnessed from here? Always from this same window, always in this room.
The large circular room was at the top of the tower in the north-west corner of the house. The dining room below had a two-storey high ceiling, so this room was, for all intents and purposes, on the second floor. 34
The walls were a calm pearl-grey colour and a pale fluffy carpet covered the floor. A large chandelier hung from the centre of the dark-brown panelled ceiling. The windows were so small that it was dark inside the room even though it was morning.
Yurie stepped away from the window and sat down on the canopy bed. Opposite her, on the south side of the room, was a dividing wall, with the doors to the staircase on one side and her own bathroom on the other. Behind a third door, brown metal this time, was the lift for the wheelchair-bound master of the house.
Gorgeous pieces of furniture were scattered about the room with lots of space between them—a wardrobe, dressing table, shelf, sofas and even a grand piano. Several oil paintings adorned the remaining wall surface, all of them by Fujinuma Issei in his characteristic fantastical style.
The girl had lived here for ten years. In this house, in this valley, in this tower room.
Ten years ago, Yurie had been nine, still in the third grade. Her mother had passed away soon after giving birth to her only child. Then in October of 1973, when Yurie was seven, her father Shibagaki Kōichirō had passed away at the young age of thirty-one after an illness. With no other relatives, Yurie was all alone.
She could vaguely remember her father’s death. A hospital room with cold, white walls. A bed that smelled of medicine. Her father coughing violently. Blood everywhere, staining the sheets. Adults wearing white uniforms quickly leading her from the room…
The next thing she remembered was crying in someone’s warm embrace. She knew the person’s face. It was “Uncle Fujinuma”, who had often visited their house even before her father fell ill. 35
Not long after, things were arranged so Yurie would be taken in by Fujinuma Kiichi. Knowing he did not have long to live, her father Kōichirō had asked Kiichi for this favour. Fujinuma Kiichi was the only son of the painter Fujinuma Issei, who had been Shibagaki Kōichirō’s mentor.
Very soon after Kiichi had taken in Yurie, he was responsible for a car accident, which caused severe damage to his face and limbs. Kiichi left his birthplace of Kōbe and decided to have this curious house built deep in the mountains. Two years later, in 1975, this was where he had brought Yurie.
Yurie had spent the next ten years here, more or less locked inside the house. This house, this room and the view from the windows were the whole world to her. She’d spent her adolescence without school, without friends, without a television or magazines, without any idea of how other young people her age were living their lives under the same sky.
A delightful melody began to escape from between her lips. She got up from her bed and walked towards the piano.
Her slender fingers fell on the keyboard and she started playing to accompany the tune she was humming.
It was Claude Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin”, a piece taught to her by Masaki Shingo, the friend of Kiichi’s who had come to live in the house six months earlier.
It was a short piece. While she had only barely memorized it, her fingers eventually managed to get to the end. She then walked over to the balcony on the western side of her room.
The air outside was unpleasantly humid. Her hair fluttered in an eerie, warm southern breeze that swept up from the ground. The sound of the water flowing below and the mill wheels turning was louder than usual.
“I’m afraid…” she whispered to herself. 36
It was perhaps the first time that this girl, who’d been imprisoned for ten years, truly experienced fear.
Three gigantic mill wheels, each well over five metres in diameter, turned ceaselessly, making a loud, low rumbling noise as their black blades splashed into the water. Their relentless movement was reminiscent of a steam locomotive.
Fujinuma Kiichi—his own face hidden by the white rubber mask—had gone out to the paved front garden to stare at the face of the house he had chosen as his home. Standing next to him was a skinny man, dressed in brown trousers and a dark-grey shirt. His arms were folded and he looked serious.
“Mr Fujinuma, you know what I think those wheels look like?” He unfolded his arms as he awaited a reaction from Fujinuma Kiichi, who’d been silent the whole time the two were standing there.
“Well, what do they look like?” asked the hoarse voice from beneath the mask.
“They almost look like they are turning against the flow of time, keeping the house and everything in this valley frozen in a never-ending moment.”
“Hm. Always the poet,” the masked man said, looking up at him. But he then sighed at his words. For who was it who had put this “poet” on his current path?
The man’s name was Masaki Shingo, an old friend of Kiichi’s. Both hailed from the city of Kōbe. Masaki was thirty-eight, three years younger. They had first become acquainted during their college years when they joined the same arts club. 37
Kiichi had soon realized that he was not an artistic prodigy like his father Fujinuma Issei. Kiichi had studied economics at a local university, and after graduating used some of his father’s money to get started in real estate, where he’d been successful.
Masaki on the other hand had both the talent and the passion to become an artist, but following his parents’ wishes, he had chosen to pursue the law. However, one day Fujinuma Issei happened to glimpse one of his works and sang its praises. This had changed Masaki’s future. He decided to drop out of university, going against the will of his father, who ran an accountancy firm in his home town. His destiny was to be an artist, and Issei would be his mentor.
“How ironic fate can be,” Kiichi thought to himself. The son of a genius painter becomes a businessman, and the son of an accountant becomes a painter… Back when he’d seen Masaki’s art, his feelings had been quite complicated. He may not have had the talent to be an artist himself, but he could recognize the true value of a painting. Kiichi had prided himself on this, and in his eyes Masaki’s future looked bright indeed. Yurie’s father Shibagaki Kōichirō had also been a disciple of Issei around the same time, but the difference in talent between the two was all too obvious to Kiichi.
Masaki’s brushstrokes showed unrestrained imagination, and he created unique worlds. His work rivalled even that of his mentor Issei. Yet unlike Issei, whose fantastical paintings were born of his imagination, Masaki’s works seemed to be telling the viewer something about reality. In Kiichi’s eyes, Masaki was a poet.
But Masaki’s and Kiichi’s lives had changed forever on that winter day twelve years ago, the day of the accident. 38
Masaki Shingo had disappeared from Kiichi’s life over the last decade, but in April this year, he had suddenly reappeared to ask for Kiichi’s help.
He’d pleaded with Kiichi not to ask any questions. He hadn’t told Kiichi why, but asked if he could stay in the house for a while.
Kiichi understood right away that Masaki had only asked the favour because he had found himself in a difficult situation. Masaki told Kiichi that his parents had already passed away and that he had nowhere else to go now, but it was obvious something fishy was going on. Kiichi even suspected that Masaki might be on the run from the police, but despite that he welcomed Masaki into his home without any hesitation, though he could have easily refused.
“Fumie told me that Yurie has been more cheerful lately,” Kiichi said as he looked up at the tower to his left. “I should thank you for that.”
“Me?” Masaki repeated, slightly startled. Kiichi nodded gently.
“Yurie seems quite fond of you.”
“I guess rediscovering the piano has helped. She started learning when she was five, right?”
“Yes, but only for a short while, until her father passed away,” Kiichi recalled.
“She’s got talent. She’s mastered the fundamentals already. It’s been a pleasure to teach her.”
“And I’m grateful for that. But…”
“Mr Fujinuma, I hope you aren’t…” Masaki said hesitantly.
“What?”
“I hope you aren’t imagining anything…” Masaki touched his thin moustache for a moment, and then chuckled. “Oh, sorry.”
“What’s so funny?” 39
“I hope that as Yurie’s husband, you don’t suspect me of inappropriate behaviour…”
“Of course not.”
Kiichi stared at his old friend from beneath his mask. Masaki was a handsome man with finely chiselled features. He hadn’t changed a bit over the years. No, that wasn’t true. Looking at him now, Kiichi could see that the brilliance he once radiated was gone. The colour of his skin had changed, and the light in his eyes had dimmed.
“There’s absolutely nothing to fret about, I assure you,” Masaki said.
Kiichi remained silent.
“There’s no cause for concern. I simply can’t look at her as a woman. The same way you, her husband, can’t see her as your wife.”
Kiichi could think of no reply. He bit his dry lips in response.
“She’s still a child. And perhaps, she’ll be one for ever,” Masaki said.
“For ever…” Kiichi averted his gaze from his friend. “Yurie has kept barriers around her all this time. Ever since her father died twelve years ago and when we came to live here. For ten years.”
“But, that’s because…” Masaki interrupted, but Kiichi carried on.
“I know. It’s my own fault. It’s because I kept her here, confined to the tower. Fearing her mind would turn to the outside world and that she’d leave me.”
“Do you regret it?” Masaki asked his friend.
“I’d be lying if I said no.”
“I’m not here to pry,” Masaki said as he retrieved a crushed cigarette box from his breast pocket. “But I think I know what’s on your mind.” 40
Kiichi stayed silent again so he went on.
“I suspect that you admire Yurie in the same way you’d look at the paintings by Master Issei. You wanted to keep her locked up here, on display, together with Fujinuma Issei’s beautiful landscapes, right?”
“Yes…” A grunt escaped from Kiichi’s throat. “You really are a poet.”
“I’m no poet,” said Masaki. He shrugged and put a cigarette between his lips. “Even if I used to be one, I stopped twelve years ago.”
Masaki pretended not to mind, but it was painfully clear to Kiichi even now how frustrated Masaki must still feel. The accident happened twelve long years ago, but Kiichi still regretted it.
The rumble of the unrelenting water mill brought him back to that day, to that night, to the blast of destruction. The wheels turning on and on, crashing relentlessly…
Fujinuma Kiichi’s gloved hands moved to cover his ears.
“The sky doesn’t look promising,” Masaki said in an attempt to change the subject. He was looking up. “Seems like it’ll really start to pour in the afternoon, like the forecast said.”
Dark clouds were slowly approaching from beyond the grey stone walls of the tower. A large shadow fell upon the house and its surroundings.