The Frolic of the Beasts Read online

  When he buried his face in her magnificent bosom, and felt her flesh—like taut sheepskin—on the tip of his tongue, he unwittingly compared his rapture with that gem of perfect flesh that had been honed by the young inmates day in, day out, in the prison. In contrast to that, this was nothing but a poor imitation. And people call this very thing nature.

  Kimi’s body was briny like a salted fish.

  After they finished, she gazed deeply into Kōji’s eyes as if trying to figure out how much he had enjoyed it; this was one of the things he wanted to tell her to stop doing.

  Even so, Kōji’s needs were sated. It had been a long time since he had experienced his sexual desires receding and leaving behind the flesh, as the waves turn and recede, leaving behind a wet beach.

  Trying hard not to let his eyes reveal his gratitude, he held Kimi fixedly in his gaze, before planting a light kiss the way a man does after sleeping with his lover. For the first time, he thought, I’m all body; just a physical presence—like a dog. He felt as though, for a short while at least, he had escaped from his preordained destiny.

  * * *

  —

  With their clothes tied up above their heads, Kōji and Kimi jumped into the sea below the lighthouse, and swam across the bay at its narrowest point. The tide was coming in and so there was no danger of being swept out to sea.

  They reached the other side swimming between the oil-smelling boats, dressed quickly, and, barefooted, went their separate ways home.

  Several days later, when he came down into the village, Kōji soon heard rumors about the young men. Apparently Kiyoshi was inseparable from Kimi’s ukulele, carrying it around wherever he went. Kiyoshi’s good fortune had become the object of envy of the young men in the village. And yet, no matter how much he was pressed, Kiyoshi just smiled, without revealing anything at all.

  That night, Matsukichi asked Kōji to step outside the bar at the Storm Petrel as he had a confidential matter to discuss. He claimed that the night after they had been to Urayasu, he and Kimi met secretly and, finally, she gave herself to him. There had been a secret pact between Kiyoshi and Matsukichi. Kiyoshi cared only about his reputation. Matsukichi, on the other hand, was more realistic.

  In exchange for keeping the ukulele, Kiyoshi had promised Matsukichi that he wouldn’t lay a hand on Kimi. When Matsukichi confided this secret pact to Kimi, she suddenly began to laugh and then surprisingly easily, not to say cheerfully, agreed to his proposal. Matsukichi thought this proof enough that Kimi had been in love with him right from the start. He repeatedly impressed upon Kōji the need to keep this grave secret. If anything, Kōji was surprised that Matsukichi hadn’t the slightest inkling of his own relationship with Kimi.

  Kōji remembered his geta and Kimi’s sandals that they had left in the forest in Urayasu that night. They had been kicked off carelessly—surely no one would mistake them for footwear discarded at the scene of a suicide. He hoped they would be taken by the incoming tide and carried out to sea as the tide ebbed, and how, if they weren’t, then they would probably rot, half-immersed in water like a scrapped vessel. In the course of time, they would be eaten into completely and transformed into a dwelling place for an infestation of sea lice. They would cease to be geta and sandals. Having once belonged to man, they would instead melt into the great multitude of unearthly, formless material phenomena that exist on earth.

  Chapter 5

  Yūko seldom read the newspapers. It was as if she made a point of not doing so. Ippei was unable to read, and yet every morning he would sit for an hour or more holding the newspaper wide-open while moving his head lightly up and down.

  Afterward, the newspaper would be passed to Teijirō and Kōji, who were working. There were times when they would get to reading right away with their heads buried in the pages. At others they wouldn’t bother with the morning paper at all, instead preferring to wait for the evening edition to arrive.

  That morning, when Kōji came out of the greenhouse, having finished spraying the plants, he noticed Teijirō, sitting on a decorative rock in the shade of a mimosa—a place he had decided would afford him protection from the heat of the day, intently reading a newspaper. The morning sun was already strong and the chirring of cicadas suffused the air.

  Kōji came out of the orchid house—where plants such as the Indian Aerides orchid and the African Angraecum orchid grew in temperatures of seventy degrees Fahrenheit or more. As he drew near to where Teijirō was sitting, Kōji used his white teeth—instead of his fingers—to crudely scrape off a small leaf fragment that had stuck to his perspiring arm. As he applied his teeth, he saw close up his own deeply tanned arm.

  It was like an insect’s protective camouflage—the same splendid bronze color as the skin of everyone else in this village. Without being conscious of it, Kōji had waited to become adequately suntanned before he felt comfortable enough to frequent places like the Storm Petrel. His skin was no longer the conspicuous pale color it had been when he returned from prison. That sacred whiteness had disappeared from his flesh, and the sun had clothed him entirely in a new, flesh-colored undershirt that allowed him to blend in with the keen-eyed villagers.

  He tried tasting the “sleeves” of his “undershirt.” They were salty—exactly the same flavor as Kimi’s body. A bovine, drab saltiness, devoid completely of any compassion or shame.

  While Teijirō’s back—clad in an old running shirt—was suntanned and magnificently towering, as he busily read the newspaper, it seemed to have lost its usual strength, and it appeared hollow, like a black cavern. The sparse gray hairs on the nape of his neck formed points of strong white light. Kōji recalled Teijirō one time bending over, just as he was doing now, while he mended a shirt. Looking closely at the small tears in the material of life, Teijirō had worked assiduously at repairing the shirt so that he might hurriedly shut out the long, dark hours of solitude that came spouting up from out of those small holes.

  Teijirō hadn’t noticed Kōji as he approached him from behind, and so Kōji ended up reading the title of the article Teijirō was so engrossed in.

  The headline read: Aged dry-goods dealer strangles daughter.

  Suddenly becoming aware of Kōji, Teijirō instantly transferred his attention to a different headline. Kōji had never seen Teijirō react with such swift sensitivity toward another person before.

  “You gave me a start. Creeping up on me unexpectedly,” said Teijirō.

  Then, roughly slapping the newspaper with his hand (at which point, a number of rose-pink petals that had fallen from the mimosa fluttered mysteriously on top of the news sheets), he pointed to a relatively small article and said, “Look at that. Seems like the typhoons will be early this year. We should make a start putting up the windbreaks.”

  “Yeah. Maybe tomorrow…,” said Kōji, a little haughtily, thrusting his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. This unmindful condescension was a little like flexing his muscles, experimentally, before posing his spiteful, probing question.

  “Kimi returns to Hamamatsu today, doesn’t she? She’ll be along soon to say good-bye, I guess.”

  “That’s right. She’ll at least stop by to say good-bye, I should think,” agreed Teijirō, vaguely. While there was no visible change in his strong face, it was obvious to Kōji that a crucible of ambivalent emotions boiled, almost audibly, within Teijirō’s inner self.

  Kōji recalled a box in which he kept several beetles as a child. Although one couldn’t see through the surface of the thick, sturdy box, what was happening inside, like a gentle wave rolling into the shore, was evident from the bizarre burnt smell leaking from within and from the noise of the black, sluggish beetles locked in combat, their legs scrabbling for a foothold and the clashing of their horns. It was just the same as that…

  Kōji had been taken by the sudden urge to thrust the blade of his pocketknife into that box and open up a hole
.

  He took another pace forward and said, “Kimi has got quite a reputation in the village. In more ways than one…Did you know that?”

  “I know,” replied Teijirō.

  Answering without the slightest annoyance, Teijirō’s mild tone aroused Kōji’s suspicions.

  Teijirō’s head, with its close-cropped, grizzled hair, could well endure even the most direct sunlight. Sitting in the soft shadow of the delicate leaves of the mimosa, he seemed all the more incongruous and appeared to betray the immunity to anguish that Kōji secretly fancied Teijirō possessed.

  Even the deep lines on his sun-beaten face—which in the past hadn’t exhibited the slightest hint of anguish—now told of Teijirō’s suffering. Undoubtedly, because they had been in plain sight, they hadn’t drawn attention until now as a sign of that anguish; much like a ship’s waterline—overlooked merely as a decorative stripe until the vessel is in peril.

  Teijirō glanced at Kōji, squatting on the ground nearby. Using a twig, Kōji described triangles and squares in the dry earth and then, watching the irritation of several soldier ants as they tried to negotiate the disrupted path, he casually squashed them with the tip of the twig.

  A small patch of earth became damp with the fluid from the ants’ bodies. As the ants stopped moving on the ground, cracked by the harsh sunlight, it seemed that the world was experiencing a transformation so subtle that the world itself failed to notice.

  With one large, darkly tanned hand, Teijirō tapped Kōji lightly on the shoulder. Kōji turned around and could see from the old man’s face that he was trying to say something—the words leaking out of the corner of his mouth like ripe fruit dropping to the ground.

  When he spoke, he did so rapidly and with an extremely humble smile:

  “Do you know why Kimi hates me? A little while after her mother died, I raped her. And then she left the house and went to Hamamatsu.”

  Aghast, Kōji stared fixedly at the old man’s face. He was ill-equipped to deal with this, and it was clearly unfair that he should have to hear this sudden confession. Then Teijirō moved his left hand slowly around to the back pocket of his shorts.

  Besides the countless wrinkles and bulging veins, Teijirō’s yellowish, dark brown hands were a mass of small, old scars picked up from rose thorns, sharp leaves, from dwarf bamboo and cacti and the like. Added to which, they were smeared in a coating of earth and fertilizer so that, buried beneath this layer, the scars gave off a luster all the more dull. His scar-covered hand took from his back pocket an object like a protective amulet, wrapped carefully in a single sheet of plain white calligraphy paper. He opened it under the sunlight as it filtered down through the trees. His practically keratinous fingers made an exaggeratedly dry noise as they touched the paper. From the middle of the wrapping, Teijirō took out a photograph, stuck to a sturdy mount, and showed it to Kōji.

  In the sunlight, Kōji didn’t immediately realize what it was a picture of. The white part of the photograph was dazzlingly reflective and filled the middle of the picture, like a bank of clouds. He held it up obliquely to avoid the reflection. It was a photograph of a boy in a student’s uniform and a girl in a sailor uniform performing sexual intercourse. Neither was wearing anything below the waist. Kōji was startled to see that the face of the girl student, who was lying on her back, resembled Kimi’s. However, on closer inspection, it clearly wasn’t her—only the area around her eyebrows bore a resemblance.

  Revealing a healthy row of teeth that belied his age, Teijirō moved his eyes over the photograph, with a timid, humble smile. But the manner in which he thrust his face forward seemed impudent and overbearing.

  “What do you think?” said Teijirō. “It looks a bit like her, doesn’t it? I came by it one time I went to Tokyo.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, when he met briefly with Kimi to say good-bye, Kōji felt very miserable at the thought of the unsolicited story Teijirō had confided in him earlier.

  It was a truly headstrong confession. Kōji didn’t know to what end Teijirō had confessed to him. Perhaps there was no purpose. The raw sense of anguish that had been pent up for so long within the old fisherman had, in all probability, degenerated—like rice wine slowly turning into vinegar—and changed into an unpleasant, derisive sneer. The crime had already been dispelled. Kōji was fearful of the obscurely turbid way Teijirō was trying to live the remainder of his life. Discord, malice, an inability to forgive, whatever the circumstances—all these feelings were confused and mixed up in Teijirō’s own indulgent reminiscences, lust, and indolence. Moreover, Teijirō’s life, just like his face, had been steadfast. Anyone exposed to his derisive sneer would have been transformed into mere vinegar. That was true of Kōji, and Yūko, too, and even Ippei.

  * * *

  —

  Kimi came up to the house empty-handed to say her farewells—having left her luggage at the Seitōkan inn. She said there were only forty minutes until her boat departed, and so she was restless from the moment she arrived. Sweating profusely down her light green dress, she hurriedly drank water from the tap near the entrance to the greenhouse.

  Yūko had been preparing the midday meal with the young maid. Try as she might, the maid, who lived out of the house, just couldn’t get the hang of cooking with propane gas. Since coming to this region, Yūko suspected that each of the five successive maids had engaged in propagating spiteful go-slow tactics. The hostility was always carried on the southerly wind, blowing up faintly from the direction of the village. And yet, to her face, they would always greet her in a plain and laid-back manner.

  Kimi came around to the kitchen entrance, which faced a stone wall overgrown with ferns, and said, abruptly, “Hello there, ma’am. That smells delicious, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, Kimi, it’s you. I heard you are going home today? Won’t you join us for lunch?”

  “It’s all right—thanks. I won’t make the boat if I do.”

  Guessing that her open-minded husband would prefer it that way, Yūko had arranged it so that she and Ippei took their meals together with Teijirō. However, before long, Teijirō excused himself from this privilege and so from then on husband and wife developed the custom of sitting alone together at the dining table. Since Kōji had arrived recently, Teijirō had become all the more keen to behave in a manner befitting his status, with the result that Kōji ended up taking his meals with Ippei and Yūko. While Kōji received only a modest salary, he was treated as a guest when it came to food. It would have been a sensitive issue had Kimi joined them for lunch, and it was just as well therefore that she had declined the offer.

  From the start, Yūko’s cooking wasn’t to the taste of country folk. She used butter and milk in applying herself to the creation of mock French cuisine, and one would think that she took the utmost care in preparing meals, but she could also be very slapdash with her cooking. Ippei never once complained about it, though.

  Kimi talked hurriedly while she loitered in the doorway to the kitchen, and Yūko, who was frying snow peas—which produced a noise like a shower of rain—said without turning around, “Why don’t you go and say hello to my husband. He’s in the living room.”

  “Yes, I will,” replied Kimi, causing the floorboards to creak as she came bustling up into the kitchen. As she passed behind Yūko, she asked, “Where’s Kōji?”

  “Kōji?” said Yūko, this time looking plainly over her shoulder at Kimi. Directing her reply at the large, slightly sweaty, quivering breasts right in front of her eyes, she said, in a low, stuffy voice, “I’ve just sent him to the temple on an errand with some flowers. Didn’t you meet him on the way up? In any case, he should be back in time for lunch.”

  Kōji, who had run back up the hill from the temple, bumped into Kimi by the white rose–festooned archway, just as she was being seen off by Yūko. He had no idea why Yūko had come this far to say
good-bye to her. She had probably just been passing by chance. Kōji glanced quickly through the gate, but there was no sign of Teijirō anywhere.

  Having run all the way back, Kōji was breathing hard. He looked from one woman to the other without saying anything. In contrast to Kimi’s too-radiant face, Yūko’s somewhat fading beauty, which she found difficult to disguise, gave her a refreshingly elegant appearance.

  Having heard Teijirō’s unsolicited story just a little while earlier, it seemed to Kōji that the force that overflowed from Kimi’s slight frame must come from the effort of driving back the dark, filthy water that she was immersed in—just like an infant that, hating its bath, splashes water all around.

  He understood now the way Kimi had looked at him after they had slept together, as if she was gauging his appetite for pleasure. She was watching to see whether she had infected him with the germ-like secret of her father’s crime. She must have attempted to share her humiliating memory with many men without letting them know the truth. Her inclination was to revel in the web of deceit she wove around her sexual partners. It was this same inclination that compelled her to take advantage of Kōji, and to persuade Matsukichi to love her without giving him the ukulele.

  That night when, pale in the flashing light of the lighthouse, with her eyes closed, Kimi had allowed him to caress her body while listening to the boom of distant waves, she must have been quietly picturing—over and over again—the origin of her burning, rejuvenating humiliation and self-loathing.

  * * *

  —

  “Thanks for everything,” said Kimi, greeting him plainly. “I’m working in the factory again from tomorrow.”

  “The typhoons will be here soon. It makes sense to return home around now, I guess,” said Kōji.