Читать книгу Echo on the Bay - Masatsugu Ono - Страница 5

Dad had a lot of things bothering him when he was stationed on the coast.

There was the abandoned boat floating in the bay. There was the body that Mitsugu Azamui said was on the beach, but which nobody had ever found. There were the boys who kept shooting bottle rockets at old Toshiko-bā’s house. And then there was me, in love with Mr. Yoshida, my social studies teacher.

“Looks like we’ll be able to get a new car!” Dad said, seeing how fed up Mom looked when he told her about the move.

Mom was worried about my private high school entrance exams. In the city, I’d been going to a well-known cram school in the evenings and was due to join the advanced group when I got to second year. Down on the coast there was no such thing as a cram school.

Dad wasn’t exactly against me going to a private high school, but he took no interest in the idea.

“A public school will be fine,” he said. “They’re all the same in the end. Look at me. I never went near a private school, but I’m looking after you all well enough!”

Dad often said that kind of thing, ignoring the fact that he’d always failed his promotion exams and was set to spend his whole career on the bottom rung. His self-confidence unsettled Mom and made her set all the more importance on my exams.

Dad had been in a good mood ever since he’d been told about the transfer. His head was full of this new car idea. In fact, upgrading was standard behavior among his colleagues. Whenever any of them was reposted a long way off they always used their relocation allowances to buy a better car. Mr. Yamamoto, whom Dad was replacing, had come back to the city with a Nissan Cima.

“Yamamoto’s got GPS!” Dad exclaimed. “What’s the use of GPS in a place like that? There’s only one road. Not a single traffic light.”

“The work’s easy,” Mr. Yamamoto told Dad. “Nothing to worry about.”

It was the day before we were set to leave and there was stuff all over the floor.

“Nothing serious happens,” he said. “You won’t get any burglaries. You may have to grab up a high school kid now and then for stealing dried squid, but that’s about it. Nobody even bothers to lock up at night or when they go out. I sometimes went inside people’s houses to turn off their lights when there was nobody there. I suppose I could have been arrested for unlawful entry! But the people there don’t get worked up about a thing like that,” he laughed, pulling a piece of packing tape off his sock. “The only problem is it’s so small. You see the same people all the time and you get too close to them. You’ll have somebody drinking at your house every single night.”

It was just as Mr. Yamamoto said. Almost every day when I got home from volleyball, I’d find Mitsugu Azamui in the living room, drinking. He’d be sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite Dad. His thin body was always bent so far forward that it looked like he was drinking directly from the tabletop. From time to time he’d look up at Dad, as if suddenly remembering that someone was with him. His eyes were cloudy and yellow. My eight-year-old brother, Keiji, was scared of him and wouldn’t come into the living room. He’d peer in from the kitchen looking miserable. “I wanna watch TV!” he’d snivel to Mom.

Mitsugu Azamui was one of the village celebrities. He drank all day every day and had sold his house to pay for it. His wife and children had left him long ago. Now he was living in public housing on the far side of the creek that ran past the police house. The reason he didn’t have to work was that he got disability payments for hand-arm vibration syndrome. He’d been a construction worker when he was younger, moving from one tunnel site to the next.

He’d come over to our house, drink, and talk about a body that had washed up on the beach. Nobody but him had ever seen it.

“Ain’t no use believin’ a drunk like him,” the villagers warned Dad.

His hands were always shaking. You couldn’t be sure whether it was vibration syndrome or alcohol that did it. Each of his fingers shook like the needle of a broken compass, one that sent the traveler around in a circle and back to his starting point. People who’d gone to see the traveler off grew weary of his constant returns. And this particular traveler was no hero. He’d endured no real defeats, exhausted by an endless struggle against barriers (the enemy without) and hesitation (the enemy within). No, he was just a tottering drunk with a limitless thirst for alcohol. The local people had grown tired of Mitsugu Azamui long ago because of the way he came to their houses and drank their liquor without paying a penny for it. That’s why he was now drinking at an outsider’s house, Dad’s house.

He never looked happy when he was drinking. I watched him from the far end of the room. The drunker he got, the more rigid and expressionless his face became. It lost its connection with time—an ageless profile, like a face stamped on a coin, unearthed among the remnants of a minor kingdom that no longer existed. The king had been deposed and the country gone to ruin, but the faces on the coins knew nothing of that. Gradually, the features of the faces faded, their outlines were lost, and they disappeared one by one into a smooth oblivion.

Mitsugu Azamui seemed an odd name. I asked Mr. Yoshida if he knew why people called him that. Mr. Yoshida, besides being the social studies teacher, also taught physical education and was our volleyball coach. He was twenty-four and had been brought up in the village. He told me they’d always used the name when he was a boy, just as they did now.

Apparently, it had originated a long time ago. After the war, soldiers from the occupation forces came to the village. Somebody told the children that Americans had tails, so the children chased after them, trying to see. “Typical!” laughed the local men. “Only women and children could be interested in them hairy bastards!” But their smiles disappeared when they realized just how interested the women really were. The incidence of domestic quarrels suddenly shot up.

One day, the children sneaked up to the inn where the soldiers were staying and tried to peak into the bathroom. Of course, the soldiers didn’t like that and one of them got out of the water, walked straight over to the door, and flung it open. The children scattered as fast as they could, but one little boy didn’t get away. He was so surprised he just fell on his butt. As he sat there almost in tears, with “America-san” looking down at him, he remembered some English phrases that he’d been taught:

“Sank you, sank you. My name is Mitsugu Azamui.”

The American burst out laughing. The little boy watched as the waves of laughter made America-san’s tail jolt and swing above his head.

“It were a tail, a tail!” he shouted when his friends came back. “A real long tail! And it had balls!”

After that the boy, whose name was really Azamui Mitsugu, was always called Mitsugu Azamui, in the English order, as though his given name were his surname.

About a year after we moved to the village, there was an election for the district assembly. Normally, the only sounds we heard were those of the wind over the bay and vehicles on the prefectural road that had been carved into the mountain to the west. But even here things got noisy during a campaign. Wherever you went, it was like listening to an overused cassette tape being played backward at maximum volume.

There were three candidates from the village, and to make matters worse, two of them were brothers-in-law. The resulting mayhem led to Dad getting a huge dent in his new car. Mom was mad at him about that, and Dad was miserable.

The battle between the brothers-in-law was the main focus of the campaign. Nobody paid much attention to the third candidate, which was hardly surprising since he ran in every election and always lost. He was like a drop of ink that falls from a calligraphy brush when you’re writing large characters—a little spot on the paper that nobody even notices.

The candidate, Kawano Itaru, didn’t seem to care what people thought of him. It was hard to tell if he wanted to be elected at all. He had no election vehicle to go around in, and no microphone either.

“It’s grassroots,” was how he described his campaign.

Kawano Itaru was a retired junior high school teacher. He’d never been a principal or held any other senior position; he’d just been an ordinary teacher throughout his career. Even in his retirement everyone always called him “Mr. Kawano,” as though he were still a teacher.

There were certain things about Mr. Kawano’s physical appearance that you couldn’t help noticing. He had no nails on the fingers of his left hand; the joints of the third and fourth fingers didn’t bend—the fingers stuck straight out, always facing the same direction, like two like-minded siblings. His left ear was missing—he never tried to conceal this, always keeping his white hair in a neat close crop that reminded me of a sports field on the morning after snow. People gestured at his ear when he kept putting himself forward as a candidate. “He can’t hear the people’s voice!” they laughed.

Mr. Kawano said it was his communism that had prevented him being promoted at school. Nobody knew if this was true.

In his campaign speeches he always emphasized the importance of education. Then he said that children must be told not to avoid Toshiko-bā, and to stop firing bottle rockets at her house. “That’s the most important thing for the village,” he said, “because children are the future.” Was there a connection between that and communism? Nobody in the village knew enough about “communism” to be able to judge. But anyway, every one of his speeches ended with the issue of Toshiko-bā.

Mom once asked Dad about Mr. Kawano’s political views.

“Well,” he said. “Basically, not to, um, fire, you know, bottle rockets at Toshiko-bā’s house.”

Really, that’s what everybody thought—that Mr. Kawano’s platform was to stop fireworks being aimed at Toshiko-bā’s house. You’d have to be pretty eccentric to vote for a candidate like that. And very few people did. The number of votes he got never came close to the number of hits that Toshiko-bā’s house took over the course of the campaign. If he’d ever gotten that number, he’d have won easily.

The battling brothers-in-law were Todaka Yoshikazu, head of a major fishery and chairman of the local fishing co-operative, and Abe Hachiro, head of a construction company. Everyone called them Yoshi-nī (big brother Yoshi) and Hachi-nī (big brother Hachi). Hachi-nī was married to Yoshi-nī’s sister, Hatsue.

Yoshi-nī had been on the district assembly for twelve years and was a prominent figure throughout the region. His company’s dried horse-mackerel had been the most successful item in a campaign to promote regional products. It had even reached the food courts of department stores in Tokyo and Osaka. It was now the company’s most profitable product, outstripping their farmed yellowtail.

The Marugi Fisheries processing plant was halfway along the promontory on the eastern side of the village. It was similar in size to the elementary school, which stood at the base of the promontory. I’ve been to the plant—Mr. Yoshida took me in his car. There were no houses beyond the school, so the paved road was just for the plant. It was better than the one that ran through the village—wide enough for the large refrigerated trucks that were always coming and going.

In front of the plant there’s a wide open space paved with concrete. Gutted sardines and mackerel glint in the sunshine. Mr. Yoshida drives past the fish into the shade of the building. He parks the car beside a small forklift, next to a huge pile of empty wooden crates. I worry that they might topple over. When I get out of the car there’s a dry smell, like manure. Flies buzz around my head, their abdomens and wings bright in the sunshine—rough, black beads of light.

On Sundays there’s nobody at the plant. All I can hear is the hum of a huge refrigeration unit—a sound like numbness itself. My mind goes blank as I listen. Inside the building is an office, with a very large, black-leather sofa for visitors. That’s our favorite place. As I squeeze the edge of the sofa, I open my eyes and look up at the wall. There are two photos hanging near the top. I see them upside down. They’re jolting back and forth. One is of the imperial family. The other is of Yoshi-nī shaking hands with the prefectural governor. Like the governor, Yoshi-nī’s thinning hair is slicked back over his scalp. He’s fat and smiling, his chin drawn down against his neck. I feel slightly nauseous looking at him, so I close my eyes again. There are flies on my sweaty thighs and calves. They keep lifting off and resettling, sipping at the perspiration.

It was thanks to Yoshi-nī that Mr. Yoshida got through the teacher selection process. Mr. Yoshida’s mother was Yoshi-nī’s cousin.

“My university was a second-rate private place in Tokyo,” Mr. Yoshida said, turning over the ignition. “I’d never have landed a teaching job right away without his help.” The engine snarled—a deep, heavy growl that sent leaves and dust swirling through the air. “He had a word with a member of the prefectural assembly. He told me that as long as I got through the first written test, I’d be okay.”

Mr. Yoshida’s car was also thanks to Yoshi-nī. His mother had asked for a loan on her son’s behalf and Yoshi-nī had agreed just like that. There’s no way Mr. Yoshida, fresh out of college, could have bought a Nissan Skyline GTR otherwise. After we left the plant, he’d always drive me up to the little beach at the tip of the promontory.

Until that year, the only person from the village on the local assembly had been Yoshi-nī. But then Hachi-nī suddenly decided to run too. Hachi-nī had always supported Yoshi-nī before, but nobody seemed surprised by his change of heart. They’d been classmates through elementary and junior high schools, and had been friends, but deep down there’d always been a rivalry.

“Giant Baba and Antonio Hinoki,” said Hidaka, comparing them to characters in the world of Japanese wrestling. Hidaka didn’t say much, but the general consensus was that when he did, he was worth listening to. He, Iwaya, Hashimoto, and Someya were all in the police office together, drinking.

“Nah,” said Someya flatly. “More like Butcher and Singh.” Someya talked a lot, but people didn’t often think much of what he said. This time, though, he seemed to have hit the mark.

The fat-faced Yoshi-nī was Abdullah the Butcher. Unlike the Butcher he did have a few strands of hair, though. Whenever these fell across his forehead, he’d look up, cross-eyed, and contort his mouth to blow them away.

Like Tiger Jeet Singh, Hachi-nī had a mustache, and his face was sallow and sharp. Singh often brought a saber into the ring with him, and Hachi-nī—whose hobby was collecting western weaponry—often stood in his garden gazing up at a saber held over his head.

The people of the village couldn’t tell on the surface whether Yoshi-nī and Hachi-nī got along or not. But they were certainly reminiscent of the famous tag team.

But Yoshi-nī and his sister, Hatsue—Hachi-nī’s wife—didn’t get along at all. So, everybody saw the election as a kind of family feud.

Hatsue, who was the deputy chair of the local women’s association, came by our house one evening. She stood at the back door, moaning about her brother. Mom looked a bit uncomfortable—it was no business of hers. “He stashes away loads of money for himself, and he bought a car for his cousin’s son, but he won’t lend us nothing at all. He knows construction’s going through a rough patch, and that things’re hard for us, but he’s so greedy! And he’s always got this grudge ’bout something that happened years ago. Can’t hardly believe he’s my brother!”

I could hear her angry voice from the kitchen.

Mom didn’t know what to do. She just kept nodding and saying, “Oh dear!” Keiji was hanging around her, whining as he did every evening.

“It’s not fair! Mitsugu Azamui will be here soon and I won’t be able to watch TV. He’s coming, right? He always does. It’s not fair!”

His defeated, fretful voice was all but drowned out by the campaign cars as they drove around the village blaring out their messages. They kept at it all day every day, right up until 8 p.m., when they had to stop.

Votes were being bought in the village, but that wasn’t the real problem. Nearly every candidate in the district was doing that. The only one who didn’t was Mr. Kawano. The villagers said it wasn’t so much a question of him not buying them, but of not being able to buy them. They looked at him as though he were from some primitive tribe that had no concept of money. “I’m following communist ideals,” was what Mr. Kawano had to say on the subject.

Though he was neither a teacher nor a doctor, the villagers always called my dad “sensei,” or rather, “shenshei” in the local pronunciation. When the summer Bon festival came around, and at the end of the year too, he was showered with gifts—so many they didn’t fit in the living room.

“It won’t look too good, but there’s nowhere else for them to go,” he said, taking the gifts into the police office, which was attached to the house.

Of course, it wasn’t just things that arrived. More frequent than the gifts were the endless visits by the people who gave them. I don’t know what issues they came to discuss, but once they were inside, they did exactly the same as Mitsugu Azamui—they drank. But unlike Mitsugu, they didn’t simply sit silently drinking only what they were offered. When the bottle was nearly empty, they calmly got up and went through to the police office to get another.

“Shenshei,” they’d say, “that bottle of White Wave I gave you—it’s next door, isn’t it?” And they’d go get it and then keep on drinking.

“It’s like I’m keeping their bottles for them,” said Dad, clutching his stomach in drunken laughter.

Of course, it wasn’t all like that. Sometimes fishermen came around with something from their catch, or women brought potatoes and radishes from their fields. Hatsue sometimes came with dishes the women’s association had made on a cooking day, and people often brought Dad a portion of the special food that had been prepared for a family wake or memorial service.

“Always nice to have a bit of free grub!” Dad said.

Mom glared.

“What a thing to say in front of the children!” she exclaimed.

Being the only policeman in the area, Dad always got a special invitation to school field days, and on such occasions, he would sit with the members of the district assembly. The assemblymen were, for the most part, the chairmen or directors of fishing or farming cooperatives, or heads of local construction companies.

They liked to be seen. When there was a meeting with just office staff present, they often excused themselves, citing business commitments. But they never missed an opportunity to parade in front of the public. There was only one hotel in the area with a wedding venue—the Hayasu. Every time there was a wedding, they’d be there, in VIP seating. At the district baseball tournament, there they’d be again, in the row that afforded the clearest view of the game. The same went for judo and kendo tournaments. Had there been a soccer tournament, they’d have expected the same treatment then. But sadly, with only one club in the district, there was no tournament. The absence of this priority-seating opportunity led to passionate exchanges in the assembly chamber about the importance of promoting soccer. When it came to funerals, they couldn’t very well have special seating, so instead there was always a row of floral wreaths from the assemblymen, all the same size.

It was very awkward for a little village like ours to have multiple candidates in the election. It led to the opposing sides getting embroiled in a battle of accusations.

Someya was a Hachi-nī supporter. He came to the police office one day to tell Dad that Yoshi-nī was buying votes for 5,000 yen each. Hashimoto, a Yoshi-nī supporter, arrived almost at the same time.

“What’re you doing here lookin’ so fed up?” said Someya.

“Yoshi-nī asked me to come,” replied Hashimoto.

“You mean you come to report Hachi-nī for breakin’ the rules?”

“Yeah.”

“I was sent by Hachi-nī,” said Someya wearily.

Hashimoto nodded sympathetically.

“It’s a pain, ain’t it? I don’t like makin’ accusations!” he said.

“Want me to do it for you?” asked Someya.

“Would you?” said Hashimoto, suddenly cheering up. “But you’re on his side…”

“It don’t matter,” said Someya. “But you can give me that!”

“This?” said Hashimoto holding up the large bottle of Kubota sake in his hand. “Yoshi-nī asked me to give it to shenshei.”

“He’s got style, Yoshi-nī, no question!” said Someya. “Why don’t the two of us go in together and share it with shenshei?” he said, downing an imaginary cup.

“I wish they’d kept quiet about the vote-buying and just given me the drink,” said Dad after Someya and Hashimoto had gone home. His face flushed, he tipped the Kubota bottle over his glass and shook it. Nothing came out.

“Selling your vote is against the law,” I told Keiji. “Mr. Yoshida told us in our social studies class.” Keiji was trying to make the most of his TV time, nervous that Mitsugu Azamui would come over soon. But the program had just reached a commercial break, so he looked up.

Dad sighed. “Mr. Yoshida, huh? Again… Well, he’s right. But everyone does it around here, so there’s no point in making a fuss. What good is there in trying to get each other into trouble?”

“But selling your vote is a crime,” I said.

“Yeah, a crime!” said Keiji, coming over next to me. “A crime!”

“Everyone does it,” said Dad, going into the kitchen. “I must have a word with Mr. Yoshida…”

“Everyone?” I said. “Mitsugu Azamui doesn’t.”

At the mention of Mitsugu Azamui, Keiji looked up uneasily.

“Well, he’s hardly likely to go and vote, is he?” said Dad, coming back from the kitchen with two cans of beer. “But I suppose if someone offered him money, he’d take it anyway to spend on booze,” he laughed as he pulled the ring on one of the cans. Beer fizzed out.

Perhaps Dad was right. I couldn’t imagine Mitsugu casting a vote. The only picture that came to my mind was him drunkenly sipping shochu.

“If he accepted the money, I’d have to arrest him, along with everyone else in the village.” Dad raised his voice and lifted his arms as though about to grab me: “Mitsugu Azamui, you are under arrest on suspicion of corruption and drunkenness!”

I froze. He veered away and brought his hands down on Keiji instead.

“Agh!” Keiji shouted and dashed into the kitchen.

“Hey!” Mom shouted. “Don’t mess around like that! He’ll have an asthma attack!”

The war between the two electoral camps continued. Even Yoshi-nī and Hachi-nī themselves rang Dad up to demand arrests. In the end, Dad could no longer just smile placidly and hope things would calm down. It was getting difficult to keep both sides happy, and he was constantly being accused of bias.

“It’s such a pain,” he said to Mom. “There were no elections at all while Yamamoto was here. My timing’s always bad.”

“Can’t be helped,” she said. Then, with a serious expression on her face she looked up from her magazine. “Do you think I’ve gained weight? It’s all this food we keep being given! I’ll have to exercise more, but there isn’t even a pool here.”

“There’s the ocean just over there,” said Dad. “But I suppose it’s not that good for swimming, with all the fish feed floating around.”

“Perhaps I’ll start going to volleyball with Miki,” Mom said with a smile. “Mr. Yoshida’s very handsome. Miki, will you ask him if I can come along?”

“That’s not funny!” said Dad. “You hear all the time about policemen’s wives having affairs with local men. It wasn’t while he was stationed here, but you know about Yamamoto’s divorce. I don’t want that happening to us.”

“Well, what about you?” Mom replied with a sharp look. “How do I know you’re not doing anything stupid?”

“Me? You’ve got to be kidding! There’s all this stuff with the election and the kids shooting rockets at Toshiko-bā’s house. It’s wearing me out!”

To calm the feuding factions down, Dad thought up a compromise. Each side would choose two people to be arrested. Dad would arrest them under the Public Offices Election Law and put them in jail overnight. Both sides had said that arresting just one person wouldn’t be enough—they were after a whole sweep. But the district had no jail, which meant that anybody he arrested would have to be taken to the town on the other side of the hills. If there were a lot of them, Dad would have to use a minibus, but there only were two vehicles like that in the village—one belonging to Marugi Fisheries, for taking staff to and from the plant, and the other to Abe Construction, for transporting workers to building sites. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t very well borrow either.

So he decided to use his new Toyota Crown. The official patrol car had been another possibility, and, in the end, he regretted not using it, but he’d thought it would be overdoing things to use a patrol car in what was, after all, really just a mock arrest. Besides, if he was in his own car, he’d be able to go play pachinko afterward without attracting attention. So it seemed a good opportunity to take the new Toyota for a drive. He could only fit four people in the car besides himself, so that was why he settled on two detainees from each side. Mom told us that they were to be Iwaya and Hashimoto from Yoshi-nī’s side and Hidaka and Someya from Hachi-nī’s.

All four of them had been diagnosed with silicosis. Like Mitsugu Azamui and his hand-arm vibration syndrome, their diagnoses brought them a monthly government benefit, which meant they didn’t have to work. Except for playing pachinko and chatting, none of them had anything in particular to do all day. In fact, they were perfectly happy to be arrested—they saw it as another way of supporting their candidates.

“It’ll be good to see where the pigs put people,” said Hidaka. “I know plenty about where people put pigs.” His younger son had graduated from the prefecture’s agricultural university and was now a pig farmer on the outskirts of the village.

Iwaya had two sons working as truck drivers at Marugi Fisheries, and Hashimoto’s wife worked in the office. Before developing silicosis, Hidaka had for years been a manager at Abe Construction. Someya had originally been a fish-farmer. Everyone knew how his business had gone bankrupt before new techniques brought a boom to fish farming in the village. The story was a local legend. He blamed the fishing cooperative for refusing him financing, and of course the chairman of the cooperative, then as now, was Yoshi-nī. But in fact, most people believed—and maybe deep down Someya did too—that Yoshi-nī had actually saved him from much bigger losses. Someya had been like an unsteady surfer, unable to mount a big slow wave curving gently into the bay. If he’d had financing to expand his business, his failure would have been on a truly disastrous scale.

Though their various circumstances meant they had different allegiances in the election, the four men got along well. They certainly enjoyed being as rude as possible about each other, and used the foulest language, even when children were around. But it was only a bit of theater. After all, they’d all been born in the same small village and had known each other their whole lives. They weren’t suddenly going to start hating each other. Their friendship couldn’t be switched off like a TV. But family relationships were more difficult. When things turned sour there was no way back. You could see that from Yoshi-nī and his sister, Hatsue. The four men all agreed on that uncomfortable fact.

They arrived very early in the morning. I was leaving for volleyball practice just before 7:30 when I heard voices. They were standing outside the house, chatting.

“Dad!” I shouted. “They’re here!”

Dad appeared through the front door in a hurriedly pulled-on pair of track pants, his hair sticking up at the back of his head.

“You’re very early, gentlemen,” he said, easing down the ski-jump tufts of hair.

“Shenshei,” said Iwaya, “we thought that if we’re goin’ to town maybe we could um…” He gestured—a turn of his right wrist.

“Huh?” Dad said, imitating the move. He was still sleepy.

“Pachinko, shenshei,” said Someya. “Why don’t we play some pachinko?”

“Ah! Pachinko!” Dad said happily. “Sounds good!”

Then Mom appeared.

“How about some tea?” she asked.

“Great!” they all said. “Thank you!” and trooped into the police office.

“If only we’d waited until we got to town to go to the pachinko place there,” said Dad.

They’d gone to the pachinko parlor on the highway this side of the pass. Iwaya and Hidaka had both won 30,000 yen there the previous day and they swore it paid out better than the one in town. Someya agreed, without giving the matter much thought. It had just been remodeled after a change of ownership. “Places like that always give better odds,” he’d said.

“I should have known we’d be taken for a ride,” Dad groaned.

“People who forget the past repeat the past,” said Mom coldly. “You shouldn’t have gone at all.”

Dad sat in red-faced silence.

When they’d come out of the pachinko place the sun was already down. The western fringes of the hills were turning from indigo to black.

“We should at least have left before dark,” said Dad with a heavy sigh.

Keiji was keen to hear all about it. He’d often said he wanted to see the animals that came out along the road up in the hills at night. Mom had said we couldn’t have pets because of Keiji’s asthma—which was maybe why he was so interested in animals. He was always watching nature programs on TV or looking at books about animals.

“There are no lights on the road up there,” said Dad. “It was pitch black.”

“Must have been scary,” said Keiji.

“Not really—there were five of us in the car—we were enjoying ourselves.”

“But wasn’t that part of the problem?”

“Yes,” said Dad, glancing at Mom. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“And when you came out of the tunnel…”

“Yes. It was just after the tunnel. I saw a kind of flash in front of us.”

“Their eyes?”

“Yes. There were deer on the road.”

“I wish I could have seen them. I’ve never seen any in real life, never seen a monkey, never seen a boar. How many deer were there?”

“Three, I think. One of them was small.”

“Did the big ones have antlers?”

“No.”

“So, they were does, then. One of them must have been the little one’s mother.” Keiji was proud of his knowledge. “And that’s when it happened?”

“Yeah. It was stupid. The other guys in the car all shouted when they saw the deer. ‘Hit one, shenshei! Deer! Hit one!’”

“Mr. Hashimoto said he’d hit one before, right?”

“Yeah, I think so. He hit it, kept the meat, and ate it. But just then—in the car—we’d been talking about a boar.”

Keiji looked astonished.

“Somebody hit a boar? Who?”

“Didn’t I tell you? It was Ken, the guy who runs the Bungo Strait guesthouse—you know him, he sometimes brings us fish. He saw a boar on the road one day and thought to himself, ‘A bit of stew would be good,’ and drove straight at it. The car hit it hard, and the boar flew up into the air and landed in a heap on the road. But it wasn’t dead. It was only pretending. It lay there, waiting for Ken to get out of the car and walk over. Then it jumped up, ran straight at him, knocked him over, and pinned him to the ground. The boar’s front trotters were on his chest and he couldn’t move. It was so heavy he could hardly breathe. The boar was snorting angrily through its nostrils and Ken thought he was going to be eaten, but he was saved at the last moment. Just as he’d given up all hope, a car came by. When the boar saw the car, it calmly walked off toward the hills. As it was leaving the road, it turned around, looked Ken straight in the eye, and gave a scornful smile. Then it disappeared. When Ken got back to the car, he saw there was a terrible dent in the front. And he was covered in fleas from the boar. He was scratching himself for days!”

“Boars aren’t carnivores, Dad,” Keiji corrected him with a momentary frown. “And I wonder if they really smile.” His eyes were now sparkling with curiosity.

“Well…” said Dad, with a shrug. “But anyway, they coaxed me into it with their shouting: ‘Hit it! Hit it!’ I shouldn’t have listened. I suppose I must have been thinking: It’s not a boar; it’s a deer. It won’t cause any damage… And there were no other vehicles around. ‘Hit it! Hit it!’ they kept shouting and before I knew what I was doing I had the accelerator flat to the floor. Then there was a terrible noise and I slammed on the break. As soon as we stopped, everyone jumped out of the car and there was something lying on the road.

“But it wasn’t dead, was it?”

“No. When we got close it hopped up and ran off.”

“After being hit by a car…amazing!”

It was the second time Keiji had heard the story, but he looked just as surprised as he had the first time.

“Yeah,” said Dad. “Then we went back to the car. It was in a hell of a state. The bumper was bent, the left headlight was broken, and there was a dent in the hood. The other four were laughing their heads off. ‘The deer was tougher than the car,’ they said. Well, all I could do was laugh along with them, though really there was nothing to laugh about.” He smiled sadly.

“Nothing at all,” said Mom sternly from the kitchen.

“Deer must be really strong!” said Keiji, trying not to snicker.

But they’re not. At least, they’re no match for a car.

As usual, Mitsugu Azamui was already drunk when he arrived at the house that day. What was different this time was that Dad was pretty drunk too. He and Mom had been arguing a lot about the car, and of course he always came off worst, so his confidence was at a low ebb. Mom was away for the night, on a trip to the Dogo Onsen hot spring, organized by the women’s association.

The trip had been proposed by Hatsue, the deputy chair. The election had gone very well as far as Hatsue was concerned. Her husband, Hachi-nī, was now a member of the district assembly, and although her brother, Yoshi-nī, had retained his seat, his ranking had fallen. Until then he had always gotten the most votes of any candidate in the whole district, but Hachi-nī had successfully eaten into his support in the village. Hachi-nī’s own share of the vote was not huge—the second lowest of the successful candidates—but he’d gotten his seat. Mr. Kawano had done better than expected this time around, attracting the most votes of any of the defeated candidates. But, of course, defeat was still defeat.

Hatsue was delighted by her husband’s success.

“We couldn’t have done it without shenshei and you,” she told Mom, urging her to come on the trip. Hatsue (or rather Abe Construction) paid for Mom’s expenses, as well as those of several other women who had contributed to the Hachi-nī cause.

Because Mom was away, I had to serve drinks for Dad and Mitsugu Azamui. Well, I didn’t have to, exactly, but Dad was very down because of the car and it seemed like a nice thing to do. We had the curry that Mom had left us, and then I quietly took him a glass. It seemed to cheer him up.

“Would you like some fries?” I said.

“Sure!” he said, nodding happily.

I’d bought some frozen fries that afternoon and I put them in the microwave. Keiji stood next to me, drooling.

“Aren’t they ready yet?” he demanded impatiently, peering through the glass.

It wasn’t long before the microwave went ping, but at that very same moment we heard a voice from the veranda.

“Evening!”

It was Mitsugu Azamui. Keiji’s face fell.

“Save some for me!” he said, almost in tears. “I’ll be in my room. Bring me some up there!”

Dad was drinking more quickly than usual. He and Mitsugu were in the living room as always, and I was watching from the kitchen. It wasn’t that easy to tell who was who. Dad was slouching forward just like Mitsugu. It looked as if only the table was keeping him from sinking away altogether. Mitsugu Azamui was even thinner than he had been on his previous visit. His drooping head looked oddly large on his small body. His face, tarnished by sun and alcohol, was almost the same color as his dull, close-shaved hair. His eyes looked like wounds gouged into his flat face. They oozed a yellow discharge. His whole head was like a rotten fruit that might at any moment topple onto the table.

“You had some bad luck, shenshei,” said Mitsugu, staring straight at Dad. His voice was strangely harsh and dry, as though the alcohol had burned his throat. Normally Mitsugu would have to make an effort to lift his eyes when looking at Dad, as though turning heavy stones. But today Dad’s face was so low that Mitsugu didn’t have to move a muscle.

“Damaged your new car?”

“Yeah. I’m ashamed of myself,” groaned Dad. “It’s a real headache. I’d only just bought it.”

“Were you really tryin’ to kill a deer?” asked Mitsugu. He was still staring straight at Dad. Once fixed on something, his dull, cloudy eyes didn’t shift easily. It was these eyes that frightened Keiji the most.

“Yeah. They all encouraged me—Hidaka and the rest. ‘Hit it! Hit it!’ they said, so I…”

“Was it really a deer?”

“What?”

“The thing you hit. Was it really a deer?”

I didn’t know what he meant. Dad looked confused. He didn’t seem to know what to say. “Were you watching?” he said eventually.

Mitsugu didn’t speak right away. His gaze was still fixed on Dad. Something stirred in his dull eyes, but it couldn’t gather enough force to break free. It stayed where it was, shifting uncertainly.

“Toshiko-bā always says she wants to die,” Mitsugu murmured, forcing each word out painfully. “‘I wanna die, I wanna die!’ she says.”

Again, Dad didn’t seem to know how to respond. Why were they suddenly talking about Toshiko-bā? “Has something happened to her?” Dad said dubiously.

“She’s always sayin’ she wants to die… You sure it wasn’t her on the road, shenshei? Wasn’t she lyin’ in the road like before?” He paused breathlessly between each question. “Was it really a deer you hit, shenshei? Or was it Toshiko-bā?”

“Yamamoto said something about someone lying in the road once, didn’t he?” said Dad, glancing toward me in the kitchen.

When Mr. Yamamoto was the policeman here, someone had come knocking on his door early one morning. It was a young truck driver from Marugi Fisheries. He told Mr. Yamamoto that there was an old woman lying on the road and he couldn’t get his truck around her. He wanted Mr. Yamamoto to do something about it. The truck driver had tried his best to get her to move, but she simply wouldn’t. It was all very strange. If it had been a drunk, then maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so odd, but it was an old woman. There weren’t even any houses nearby. It was such a peculiar situation that the driver couldn’t bring himself to pull her off the road, but no matter what he said to her, she just lay there, stock-still, eyes closed. He’d begun to worry that he might have hit her somehow without realizing. But then, to his relief, he noticed some faint movement in her throat. Seeing that she was alive, he turned his truck around and went to Mr. Yamamoto’s house for help.

Mr. Yamamoto told Dad that the driver had described the old woman’s face as rough and craggy. Mr. Yamamoto went back with the driver, but when they got to where he’d seen her, there was nobody there. No sign of her at all.

“The driver looked stunned,” Mr. Yamamoto said. “As though he’d been tricked by a spirit. ‘I saw her right there,’ he’d said, pointing at the road. Maybe I should have checked if he’d been driving drunk,” he laughed. “Anyway, it’s a strange place.” He tapped Dad on the shoulder. “Be careful you don’t get tricked by any spirits while you’re there.”

Dad was looking at me.

“I wonder if that old woman was Toshiko-bā.”

Of course, I didn’t know.

“Toshiko-bā always says she wants to die,” said Mitsugu Azamui again. “You sure it was a deer you hit, shenshei?”

Toshiko-bā was another big name in the village. The kids, especially, were scared of her.

Mitsugu Azamui’s stare was certainly unnerving—his eyes always looked as though they were about to slip out of their sockets. But his drunkenness matched a familiar stereotype and, in its way, seemed almost comical.

His specialty was passing out at people’s houses, or sometimes on the side of the road. Ken from the Bungo Strait guesthouse once decided to carry him home. He began to regret his kindness when he felt warm liquid running down his back.

“Piss! It was piss! Mitsugu Azamui wet himself on my back! Ugh!”

Ken’s story was met with an explosion of laughter, like a toilet blowing off its lid.

Dad swore he’d never carry Mitsugu home, even if he fell asleep at our house.

“But then he might wet himself here,” Keiji said, looking anxiously up at Dad.

“Hmm…I suppose he might. That wouldn’t be too good, would it?”

Dad and Keiji looked at each other and laughed.

But even when Mitsugu did fall asleep at our house it was never necessary for Dad to carry him home. All he had to do was call Mr. Kawano. It was a small village and Mr. Kawano would arrive within five minutes. Even if Dad didn’t call, Mr. Kawano seemed to have an instinct as to where Mitsugu would be and he’d often simply turn up to collect him just after eleven. Mr. Kawano always looked sad when he arrived. Mitsugu was a struggle to handle—his body would bend this way and that as if it had extra joints. In his drunken state, Mitsugu seemed to forget he was a human being, forget that he could walk on two legs. Fortunately, he lived nearby and Mr. Kawano always managed to get him home.

I feel uncomfortable saying this and perhaps out of respect for Mr. Kawano, I shouldn’t, but to the bystander, Mitsugu Azamui’s drinking wasn’t that terrible. As he tried to drink himself from humanity back into an inorganic state, he never became argumentative or violent. He even had a certain charm. People may have ridiculed or pitied him, they may have shaken their heads and sighed, but they still smiled. But when it came to Toshiko-bā there was nothing whatsoever to smile about.

Almost all the junior high boys fired bottle rockets at her house. It was their obsession, but not even they seemed to know why they did it.

“I did it when I was at junior high, too,” said Mr. Yoshida, as if it were inevitable. “I don’t know why. I suppose because the older boys did. Everyone did it back then, just like now.”

The only boy in the school who didn’t fire rockets at Toshiko-bā’s house was Shiotsuki Toshikazu. He played first base and batted sixth in baseball—but then, there were only forty kids in each grade. All the boys played baseball and all the girls played volleyball.

He was a head and a half taller than the rest of the class and much heavier too. In winter, when there was no baseball, the school entered him in the district sumo tournament, and he won it. He went on to be runner-up at county level and then reached the semifinals of the prefectural tournament, getting his photo in the local papers. Apparently, scouts had come to watch him—not just from a high school with a strong sumo team, but from professional sumo stables as well.

But Toshi’s real love was baseball. His problem was he couldn’t remember the signs, and when he tried to steal a base without the sign he always got out. He was the slowest runner in the class. Once, when having gotten a double, he heard the defenders shouting, “Two out, two out, concentrate!” He joined in, sticking his hand in the air with his thumb and little finger raised, and shouted, “Two out, two out, keep tight!” Both teams burst out laughing, as did the umpire, and the game ground to a halt for a while.

He lived with his father and younger brother. He’d recently lost his granny, Mitsu. She wasn’t his real grandmother, he told me, but she’d always played that role in the family. She’d been given an impressive send-off at the community hall, thanks to the Abes—Hatsue and Hachi-nī. Hatsue had organized the food, there being no mother in the household. The community hall was just across the road from the police office so we could hear the impressive voice of Tahara, the priest, as he chanted sutras.

Tahara was another regular visitor to our house. When he was drunk he always moaned, making everybody uncomfortable. He’d go on and on about how his hair was thinning, even though his job meant he had to shave his head bald anyway. He’d grumble about getting fat because of all the food people gave him when he performed ceremonies for them. He complained about how his new stole ruined his look because it kept sliding off his shoulder. He’d sit in our living room with his seventh whisky on the rocks and whine endlessly about anything to do with his appearance. He obviously cared a lot about it. His eyebrows were always carefully plucked. Apparently, he’d bought some special Italian tweezers at Sony Plaza in Osaka after a trip to his sect’s head temple in Kyoto. Mom looked at herself in her hand mirror when she heard about that.

“I’m so jealous,” she said to Dad, who was sprawling on the floor. “Those are exactly what I want! Any chance of you getting sent on a trip to Osaka?”

“Why would an Oita policeman be sent to Osaka?” said Dad, bemused. “They have nothing in common but the character O!”

Toward evening the villagers would come outside to enjoy the cool air on the main road by the bay. The onshore wind blew wearily toward them, while the bay, holding tight to the smell of the sea, waited patiently for night. The police house was at the junction of the main street and a small side road, so people often stopped in front of our garden to chat with each other. The men who’d guided Dad’s car toward disaster—Hashimoto, Hidaka, Someya, and Iwaya, along with Iwaya’s dog, Shiro—gathered frequently and often talked for a very long time.

Dad had begun to call them the Silica Four, a name he’d picked up from Mr. Kawano. Mr. Kawano had no sympathy for them at all, regarding them as living lazy lives at tax-payers’ expense. At the same time, they were all former students of his, so he seemed to feel some responsibility for how they’d turned out. Whenever he saw them, he’d stop his bicycle, walk over, and say something like:

“Is this what my teaching’s done?”

Then he’d stand, gazing at them mournfully, shaking his head for a full three minutes. The four of them would exchange embarrassed glances, laughing with exaggerated cheeriness. Even Shiro would seem embarrassed, looking up at Mr. Kawano, his tail between his legs, his front paws over his nose.

But Mr. Kawano’s greatest sadness was Mitsugu Azamui. Mr. Kawano had raised him. Nobody in the village seemed to know about Mitsugu’s birth, but they all knew that, as a young couple, Mr. Kawano and his wife had taken him in. And the child they’d nurtured with all their care had ended up an alcoholic, living off benefits for what may or may not have been a genuine case of hand-arm vibration syndrome. In a sense, Mitsugu Azamui was, in human form, the antithesis of the capitalist society that Mr. Kawano hated—the end point of his criticism of that whole social system. But I don’t think this made him happy in the least. When he looked at Mitsugu Azamui, Mr. Kawano’s eyes were filled with pain.

Mrs. Kawano—Kimie—had died some years before. People said she’d worried about Mitsugu until the very end. But Mitsugu, himself abandoned by his wife and children, had long since abandoned his adoptive parents. He never once visited Kimie in the hospital.

But Mr. Kawano had never abandoned Mitsugu. Whether he lay drunk at the side of the road or at our house, it was Mr. Kawano who carried him home. Mr. Kawano always looked so sad as he was doing it.

But whenever any of the Silica Four saw Mr. Kawano carrying Mitsugu, they felt relieved.

“At least we ain’t as bad as Mitsugu!” they’d say. “Dunno how shenshei copes!”

Tahara the priest had been in the same grade as the Silica Four at school and even now he was still a target of their mockery.

“That priest’s a wuss, ain’t he,” said Iwaya one time when he ran into the other three on his way back from a walk with Shiro.

“Lucky you’ve got Shiro to protect you.” They all laughed.

“He always was a bit of a girl,” said Someya, adjusting his false teeth.

“But he sounds like a man all right when he’s chanting his sutras,” said Hashimoto with genuine enthusiasm. “Kaaa-ttsu!”

Hashimoto’s sudden shout in imitation of the priest boomed across the bay. Shiro barked in approval, wagging his tail happily. The Silica Four laughed, as though they were being tickled by Shiro’s fluffy tail.