The Frolic of the Beasts Read online

  The numbers one to twelve were written on the floor in green paint, in double horizontal columns close to the entrance to the spacious changing room. Twenty-four men lined up by these numbers to wait their turn. Three-minute-interval buzzer…The slosh of water. A moment of quiet, then the sound of smacking flesh as somebody slips and tumbles on the wet floor, followed by a burst of laughter, which quickly subsides. Three-minute-interval buzzer…The men who had been waiting undress together and, having deposited their clothes on a shelf, move forward and line up over the two rows of horizontal numbers in front of the bathhouse entrance. Those numbers were painted yellow.

  Kōji noticed the soles of his bare feet were neatly within the circle of the painted number. The inmates who had been standing in exactly the same spot three minutes earlier were now immersed in the bathtub. Steam, billowing out from the bathhouse, faintly enveloped Kōji’s naked body: the muscles of his lower thorax, sparsely covered with hair, his flat stomach, and, below this, his hanging shame surrounded by a dark tangle of hair. It was a limp, drooping shame and resembled the carcass of a dead rat caught up among flotsam in a stagnant stream. He considered this: I have converged shame from around the world and acquired this slightly dirty bundle, in much the same way as if I might have acquired a single point of light having converged with a lens the sun’s rays.

  He gazed at the ugly backside of the man standing in front of him. The world before his eyes was entirely obscured by ugly, pimple-covered backs and backsides. The door did not open. The soiled flesh door did not open. Three-minute-interval buzzer…The sound of water. Many backs and backsides began to stir, moving as one through the steam, before plunging into the midst of the great, narrow bathtub. Immersed up to their necks in the tepid, foul-smelling, murky water, everybody fastened their gaze on the hourglass on the warden’s table. The three-minute flow of fine cinnabar granules appeared and disappeared amid the billowing steam. Bathing, washing, renewed bathing, exit. A red lamp glowed dimly close to the letters “Bathing.”

  Kōji remembered the hourglass clearly, and he recalled the stench of the water as it had clung tenaciously to his body—and the delicate cascade of cinnabar that flowed beyond the steam. He had been fascinated by the strangely quiet way the granules wholeheartedly flowed through the slender glass neck and unceasingly undermined themselves from within. The close-cropped heads of twenty-four people floating in the middle of the dirty water. Their grave expressions. Immersed in the water with serious, animal-like eyes. That’s exactly how it was. Among all the trivialities of the prison, there existed something with a marvelously pure sanctity. That hourglass was also sacred. The cinnabar granules ran out. The warden pressed the button, and again the cheerless buzzer sounded. The prisoners stood up all at once, and many wet, hairy thighs advanced toward the duckboards. There was no sanctity at all in the sound of the buzzer…

  * * *

  —

  The boat sounded its whistle twice. Kōji walked in the direction of the wheelhouse and gazed through the glass door at a young steersman wearing short rubber boots and jeans. The steersman sounded the whistle again, pulling with one hand on the white knob of a cord hanging from the ceiling while turning the brightly polished brass steering wheel with the other. The boat made a detour and began its entry into the port of Ukusu. To one side lay a narrow, sprawling, gray town. A Shinto shrine gate appeared as a single spot of red on the round mountaintop. In the harbor, an ore factory’s cargo crane extended its arm toward the glaring sea.

  Kōji was telling himself, I have repented. I am a different person now. This thought had likely as not been repeated countless times, always with the same rhythm, and as always it took the form of a resounding incantation. I have repented…In this way, even the freshness of the West Izu coastline became entwined in Kōji’s penance—the crispness of the scenery itself, the verdure of the mountains, and the very clouds that, in Kōji’s eyes, appeared to be quite detached from reality. For it was easy to believe that it ought to be so in the eyes of one who had repented. This notion had, like a single bacterium, nested itself in Kōji’s body one day while he brooded in his cell, surrounded by bars, within the prison walls. And then, in an instant it had reproduced, until his flesh became riddled with remorse, his sweat, too, became the sweat of repentance, even his urine. Even the odor emitted by his youthful body became for Kōji the odor of repentance. It was a cold, gloomy, though in some ways also clear and bright—and yet extremely physical—odor. The odor of stable litter for an animal—repentance.

  The ground above the shore gradually took on a yellow tinge with green pine trees dotted here and there, and this changing scenery signaled that the boat, which had left Ukusu, was now approaching Koganezaki. Kōji descended a flight of steps and went to the stern. A crowd of children had gathered around one of the ship’s crew, who was making a half-hearted attempt to catch fish. He threaded an artificial fly onto a length of fishing gut, to which he then secured some hemp line before casting the lot far out into the sea. In a flash, the fishing gut leapt out through the air, glittering as it went, and then sank beneath the surface of the water.

  Before long a saury was caught. The fish, which resembled a large horse mackerel, was reeled in, its hard belly thrashing against the unyielding water with a metallic ring. The fish having been landed, Kōji no longer felt the urge to watch it as it lay in the man’s hand, and he transferred his attention to the sea.

  Over to the left, the bare reddish-brown cliffs of Koganezaki loomed into sight from around the ship’s prow. The sunlight cascaded down from the heavens directly above the cliff top and appeared like a smooth sheet of gold plate as it covered and illuminated every intricate undulation. The sea at the foot of the cliff was especially blue. The bizarre forms of the sharp rocks jostled with one another as they towered up out of the sea, and the swelling, upward-surging water turned into fine white threads before flowing down again from every crag and corner.

  Kōji watched a seagull. It was a magnificent bird. I have repented, I…and he began his reverie once again. The Ryūgū Maru 20 left Koganezaki behind and, turning in the direction of the next port, Iro, set out intently along the coastal sea lane. The lighthouse at the entrance to Iro harbor gradually came into view on the port side. Fronting the long, narrow bay, the rows of houses and the forested mountains seemed to overlap each other, merging into a single, flat picture. As the boat came farther into the bay, however, the sense of distance between objects and buildings quickly increased; between the ice-crushing tower and the ice plant, between the lookout tower and the house rooftops, and the congealed picture increasingly gained perspective as if it had been thinned with hot water. Even the dazzling surface of the inlet seemed to unfold, and the pale reflection of the concrete quay was no longer simply a line of white refined wax.

  Standing slightly apart from those who had come to welcome the boat, a single figure waited under the eaves of the warehouse, a sky-blue parasol concealing her face. Kōji found it difficult to reconcile the vivid, charming image in front of him with the starved vision he had been desperately clinging to for so long. There was no reason to believe he had been starved of sky blue. But if he had been, it would have been the color of repentance.

  * * *

  —

  Kōji understood perfectly well the significance of the color of the parasol to Yūko’s welcome. She had carried the same one on that summer’s day two years ago. The day of the quarrel in the front garden of the hospital. The unfeeling rendezvous, followed by an evening meal where barely anything was said. Kōji’s subsequent sudden victory and Yūko’s submission. And then the incident that occurred at nine o’clock that evening. But no matter how much he reflected on that day’s events, there had been no indication when Yūko, under her sky-blue parasol, had taken a stroll together with Kōji at noon that the day would end in a night of bloodshed.

  * * *

  —

  The c
olor of that sky-blue parasol on the quay was not the color of starvation; it was without a doubt the color of repentance. As for that other kind of starvation—the deprivation of the flesh—that had been sufficiently satisfied the previous night in Numazu, thanks to the money Yūko had entrusted to the prison governor. Kōji was certain that Yūko had also tacitly wished that the money should be used in this manner. Late last night, he had sent for yet another girl. Sensing what he wanted, they were afraid. He woke up in the morning, sandwiched between the two, having been caressed carefully all over, out of a certain sense of fear. In the relentless morning light that came in through the inn curtain, he reached out his hand to touch the object that had continued to exist for so long as a vivid fixation in his mind’s eye. The girls didn’t notice and slept on uncomplaining. It was poor flesh that had been concealed within, the flower of a crepe myrtle, steeped in alcohol, the erosion of the soul for the moment in flesh form, a thing distant and unrelated to the recollections and notions of the prisoners.

  * * *

  —

  As Kōji clambered up from the barge, Yūko saw before her a young man, more dauntless than she remembered, and while he was slightly leaner than before, he had lost none of his erstwhile vigor. Wearing a summer suit with an open-collared shirt, he waved a hand cheerfully while clutching a small briefcase in the other.

  “You haven’t changed,” Yūko said, greeting Kōji and moving her parasol obliquely to one side. In the shadow it cast, Kōji noticed the dark grape luster of her characteristic thick lipstick.

  “I’d like to talk a little before going on to the house,” said Kōji in a slightly hoarse voice.

  “Yes, I thought it would be nice to talk, but there are no cafes in the village,” Yūko replied, and scanned the vicinity while describing a lazy arc in the air with the basket she held in one hand. Only two or three of the ship’s passengers disembarked and they moved quickly away from the quay, surrounded by those who had come to meet them. The Ryūgū Maru 20 lost no time in turning its prow and heading off toward the bay entrance, water rippling gently in its wake.

  “It’s the opposite direction, but shall we walk toward the bay? There’s a patch of grass and some shady trees where we could talk.”

  As they began to walk, Yūko was seized with anxiety that it had been a mistake to take charge of this forlorn young orphan. Since deciding to care for him, she had not once experienced such a sense of trepidation, which was clearly therefore some sort of presentiment. She had even been censured for her rashness by the prison governor, who said he had never before heard of a case where a member of the victim’s family had become the criminal’s guarantor.

  The governor appeared at first to believe that it was the result of Yūko’s philanthropic sentimentality, and she eventually conceded as much.

  “I believe it is what I ought to do. After all, what he did he did for my sake.”

  The governor had looked hard at her as she stood before him in her flamboyant attire. What incorrigible arrogance. This tendency for a woman to want to draw into herself all the complicated origins of the crime is by no means a rare occurrence. She wishes to become the dramatic, aesthetic personification of the origin of the crime itself.

  This self-conceit that was on the point of drawing the world to its depths ought, so to speak, to be described as the conception of the spirit; there would be no room for man to interfere in such matters. The governor’s dubious gaze clearly betrayed his thoughts: This woman wishes to conceive everything. She has tried to store it all away in her disagreeably warm belly—everything; even the crime and that prolonged period of remorse; the tragedy, and the cities where men gather together, and even the origin of all mankind’s behavior. Everything…

  * * *

  —

  They walked in silence along the bank and gazed at the sea. A thin film of purplish oil lay on the calm surface, and a sundry collection of rubbish—pieces of variously shaped timber, a pair of geta, lightbulbs, food cans, a chipped rice bowl, a corn cob, a single rubber boot, an empty bottle that had once contained cheap whiskey, and, in the middle, the skin of a small watermelon that reflected the flickering color of daybreak in its pale flesh—floated in the water at the very back of the inlet.

  Yūko pointed to a small grassy depression in the hillside close to the dolphin memorial tower. “It’s lunchtime already. Let’s have some sandwiches over there while we talk.”

  Kōji looked up with suspicion in his eyes. A name was on the tip of his tongue, but he found it difficult to speak. Yūko looked at his hesitant mouth as though it belonged to a totally different person. He had become meek. He had forsaken himself, to an almost excessive degree.

  “Ah, do you mean him?” She realized the nature of Kōji’s attempted question and answered genially. “He’s at home today, eating alone. We thought it better that way. Instead of meeting you all of a sudden. Of course, he’s so looking forward to seeing you. He has mellowed as well, you know…like the Buddha himself.”

  Kōji nodded uneasily. They reached the spot Yūko had indicated, and while the view of the bay was beautiful, and the sunlight filtering down through the trees pleasing to the senses, it wasn’t as tranquil as it had appeared from a distance. Below them in a corner of the bay several large sculling boats were being hauled up onto the shore. The huts of the ships’ carpenters were clustered in the same area, and the noise of busy hammers working on newly constructed vessels, and the beelike drone of machine saws, rose up and echoed around the hillside.

  Yūko produced a wrapping cloth from her basket, spread it out on top of a bushy convolvulus plant, and with lithe fingers took out a tea flask and some sandwiches. Her movements were natural and serene, but her fingers had, over the passage of time, become somewhat brown and finely cracked from the sun. As Kōji watched the dreamlike ceremony of Yūko’s gentle, unhesitant movements, it struck him that he had still not grasped entirely the essence of her gentle nature. For Yūko did not display in the slightest the sort of bland, innocuous gentleness born of the fear of offending one with a criminal record, nor was she overawed by the crime itself, as society normally demands. And while it appeared that she was in a vulnerable position, she did not welcome him with a womanly sentiment. Neither was it the same as the intimacy that accompanies complicity in crime, or the overfamiliarity of the kind displayed by a mistress. In Yūko’s case, it was something quite different, for despite the incident, her attitude toward him had not changed in the slightest. In that moment Kōji, too, realized that he ought not to have come here. But it was too late for such regrets.

  Kōji and Yūko were both able to recognize their own reticence as clearly as if watching the quick movements of a shoal of fish inside a tank of water. Yūko wished to show some sympathy toward the anguish Kōji experienced in prison, but she was at a loss to know what to say without sounding insincere. In the same way, Kōji felt bound to apologize for the violent changes he had wrought upon Yūko’s life, while at the same time wanting to know where he stood. But then, what could he say that was appropriate?

  He felt as though he were suffering from some intangible, incurable disease, the condition of which—life in that detestable prison—still lived on vividly in his mind. He continually felt on intimate terms with it. This condition was invisible to Yūko. Invisible, but its unpleasant odor was by no means imperceptible. Before long, Kōji felt obliged to begin talking, as cheerfully as possible, about his experiences in prison, in the same way a patient is fond of explaining an illness.

  “There are no mirrors in prison,” he began. “Of course, there’s no need for things like that. But as it nears the time for you to get out you suddenly become worried about your face. How will it look to people on the outside? In short, a convict who’s coming up for release doesn’t simply want his discharge number, he wants his face back. But like I said, there are no mirrors. What you do is you stand a dustpan against the ou
tside of the windowpane so that your face is reflected in the glass. And so, whenever you see a cell with a dustpan against the window, you know that the guy inside is due for release soon.”

  Yūko couldn’t stand listening to the story, and midway through in a feigned attempt to fix her face she opened the compact she had taken out from her sash. She had glanced at her own face and then thrust the mirror in front of Kōji. “Take a look! You haven’t changed one little bit. There are no shadows anywhere.”

  For Kōji, Yūko’s choice of words was more of a neurotic response than pushing the mirror under his nose. “You haven’t changed one little bit.” They were frightening words.

  The surface of the mirror was dusted over with powder. He pursed his lips and blew. Before he had time to see the tip of his unexpectedly magnified nose, his nostrils were stifled with the scent of the floating powder. He closed his eyes, intoxicated by the stinging sensation it produced.

  The world he had been trying so hard to reach for so long opened up expansively before him. A world of powder. The reality that corresponded to his long-held fantasy sent forth a fragrance of the genuine article. The privilege of dreaming inside one’s prison cell, which he thought had since passed, took on meaning again for the first time since his release. A world of powder, wrapped in silk, the dusky comings and goings of its scent always carrying with them that languid afternoon flavor. And if there were times when it drifted far away in the distance, there were also times when it suddenly appeared before one’s very eyes. While that world flies away in a moment, it leaves its trace on the finger like the minute dusty scales of a butterfly’s wing…