A Quiet Life (28 page)

Mrs. Shigeto did not become emotional toward the young man who had inflicted injuries on her husband. She said, instead, that it wasn't right, in her opinion, to call Mr. Arai a criminal solely on psychological grounds. From what she had gleaned from reading the newspapers, the cruiser incident of five years ago had been an unfortunate accident, and the police had come to the same conclusion. When his wife said “solely on psychological grounds,” Mr. Shigeto fidgeted and moved his body, thrusting his bulging torso forward. He was using these movements to assert that he possessed both material and physical evidence, when once again—“Uhh!”—he let out a groan.

All the while I was being informed of what had happened in the parking lot, Eeyore kept playing his “Ribs” for Mr. Shigeto's injured body. Mr. Shigeto, who must have felt sorry for Eeyore, gingerly raised himself from the sofa, like an old man, and started for the music room. With the closing of the door behind him, he seemed, with the sound of the piano, to have quietly receded into the distance. And immediately, I faintly heard him begin his private lesson.

I read the copies of the newspaper articles Mrs. Shigeto had obtained through an acquaintance of hers at a news agency.
The incident had involved not so much Mr. Arai, but more a fifty-year-old high school teacher named Kurokawa and a thirty-five-year-old female travel agent named Suzaki. Mr. Arai merely happened to join the Izu-Oshirna cruise on which the other two had gone. Mr. Kurokawa and Miss Suzaki had disappeared during the night, and later both bodies were picked up by a fishing boat. It came to light that Mr. Kurokawa had drowned but Miss Suzaki had been thrown into the sea after being strangled. Mr. Arai testified that he had been sleeping in the cabin below, it having been his night off duty, and had learned that his cruising companions were missing only around dawn when the shifts were changed. …

Magazine articles emphasized that. Miss Suzaki had taken out an enormous amount of insurance with Mr. Arai as the beneficiary. Mr. Kurokawa, Miss Suzaki, and Mr. Arai had met at the athletic club, and had become so intimate they went to far-off places together, cruising, skiing, and whatnot. Shortly before the incident, Miss Suzaki and Mr. Arai had secretly become engaged. Miss Suzaki, much older than Mr. Arai, and very well paid, had been the guardian of a student who was still in college, and the buying of an insurance policy had been her idea, she being very familiar with the business from the nature of her work. From the very start, however, Mr. Kurokawa and Miss Suzaki had had a physical relationship, which Mr. Arai had known about. Other people saw, on top of this relationship, a special affinity at work among the three. The cruise was supposed to give Miss Suzaki an opportunity to discuss breaking off her relationship with Mr. Kurokawa, but he pressed her to continue it, and in the course of the argument he had strangled her and committed suicide. … The widow Mrs. Kurokawa lodged a protest with the police, who had ruled the incident a murder-suicide. This protest,
and the discovery of the existence of the policy, had scandalized the case.

“As far as Mr. Arai's inner thoughts are concerned, K-chan's novel doesn't deviate from his notes. After all, that's how Mr. Arai asked him to write it. In the scene where the woman gets murdered in the dark of night, K-chan changed the concrete details, such as from the cruiser at sea to a children's park beside a loop highway. It's depicted in the grotesque realism that's so typical of K-chan. … I don't think you need to read that far, Ma-chan.

“K-chan contrived a setting that couldn't exist in reality—probably because he was being careful to avoid pulling the reader's attention back to the actual incident—wherein he has a young man kill a woman because of what transpires sexually. But then he has a man in his fifties, totally drunk, assault the woman again, and step into the role of murderer. As a result, the man commits suicide. This is the story K-chan wrote. The scene he invented, in which he has the man hang himself in a dovecote on a nearby rooftop, is one you would find only in the movies. K-chan imparts meaning to the man's motives by writing: He sacrificed his own life in such a manner as to destroy his ego and his own body in disgrace, so as to rescue a young man in dire circumstances from which there was no turning back. …’ He also has this drunk-turned-hero reveal his peculiar resolve this way: ‘All right. Then I, and who else but I, shall let him taste of grace—this youth ensnared in remorse enormous and without exit. I shall assume God's role so that the murder, which he committed, will be effaced for him.’

“Though it may be stretching it a bit, doesn't this seem a peculiar contraposition of Christ's crucifixion? Perhaps K-chan himself has a strange desire to act out this man's sacrifice. But in real life—which is exactly what his dilemma appears to be
about—instead of him sacrificing anything, there's a tendency for him to have others perform sacrifices for him. Even the roughing up that Mr. Shigeto incurred stems from what. K-chan requested of him. And he's victimizing you, too, by having you look after Eeyore, while he himself has taken emergency shelter in California with Oyu-san nursing him. …”

“I don t think I'm being victimized,” I said.

“You don't? Well, you've always been a personification of conviction, Ma-chan!” Mrs. Shigeto ruefully said, tolerating the forceful way I had answered her. “I don't think it will do you harm to read at least this part of the novel, because it quite honestly reveals his feelings at the time—before this current ‘pinch’ of his—when he diligently swam as treatment for his ailing mind. …”

Before Eeyore's lesson was over, I had not only finished reading the part of Father's novel that Mrs. Shigeto had marked in red, but thinking that I ought to preserve it in the pages of “Diary as Home,” I also copied it down on one of the Céline cards I always carry with me, though as I wrote, I had a feeling that I didn't understand it well enough.

After the lesson at Mr. Shigeto's place, I thought: that Eeyore and I would make the transfer to the Odakyu Line at Shinjuku Station and go straight home. But Eeyore hurriedly went through the National Railway gate on his own, and headed toward the platform for the Chuo Line's rapid-service trains.

“Oh, wait! Let's not go to the pool today. Mr. Shigeto didn't come with us, you know?”

“Because that gentleman is having a terrible time with his rib injury. I think I shall swim!”

So firm was Eeyore's reply that I had no choice but to go to the club with him. But then in my heart, I guess I had thought
little of it. I figured that because Mr. Arai had roughed up Mr. Shigeto so badly as to cause such serious injuries and had done it all in the parking lot, some club member must have witnessed the brawl. And though the victim hadn't reported it to the police—I thought that this kind of attitude must be typical of a strange man in his fifties, the kind of person who would sacrifice himself to do something for a young man who's gone astray—the information must have gotten around. Mr. Arai couldn't possibly disregard this and come out for his everyday practice, could he? Besides, he had once before been involved in an incident the weekly magazines had scandalized. So I would take Mr. Arai's place and, while standing in the same lane, only because I worry about his epileptic fits, watch Eeyore do his laps with his newly acquired skills.

Eeyore and I opened the glass door to the members-only pool, and walked down the aisle that led to the tiered poolside. But in the open space where we usually do our warm-up exercises was Mr. Arai, with his white teeth and pink gums showing through his typically slightly parted, girlish lips, vigorously flailing his arms and motioning to Eeyore. Taking big strides, in his new pair of red-and-green swimming trunks of the most unconventional design, he walked over to Eeyore, held him by the arm as he would a friend, and fetched him away, making only a neutral bow to me.

I was left alone with warm-up exercises to do. But without Mr. Shigeto, there were no examples to follow in moving my arms and legs. At a loss, I noticed Mrs. Ueki on the other side of the pool slowly doing some preparation exercises, so I went over to her side. Weighing more than when in the water, Mrs. Ueki was all the more laboriously moving her body. Yet she greeted me with a nod that, though despondent, was friendly. After the exercises. Mrs. Ueki and I entered the pool. The only others swimming were Mr. Arai and Eeyore, two lanes across from us.
Mesmerized by the mesh-patterned shadows that the lane markers were casting on the bottom of the quiet water, I recalled, in fragments, Father's words, which Mrs. Shigeto had read to me:
this youth ensnared in remorse enormous and without exit. … which he committed … be effaced
. … Could it be that Eeyore and Mr. Arai, enthusiastically exchanging words each time they swam, were struggling together to wipe away what had been done in the parking lot, with a huge invisible eraser they kept afloat on the water?

Before long, however, I recalled with sudden fright the scar on Mr. Shigeto's back, and the decision he had made after the operation on his esophagus, most likely for cancer. I couldn't help but shudder again at the thought of the cruel Mr. Arai smiting and kicking a man of such mind and body as Mr. Shigeto, kicking him repeatedly, and aiming the kicks at his ribs in order to break them.

My small round head became unfocused and hot, as though it were being pulled apart from both sides, but I continued with my flutter kicks, feigning bravado, repeating in my heart,
Hell, no! Hell, no!
as if it were an incantation, yet no longer knowing why I was saying this. I saw out of the corner of my eye that Mr. Arai and Eeyore were leaving the pool, so I went over to the faucets used for washing the eyes and gargling, while maintaining a little distance from them. By the time I had settled in the drying room, my body was tired, as if I had swum two or three times longer than the usual thirty minutes, and my head was exhausted to the core.

In the drying room, as usual Mr. Arai's behavior was the opposite of the lively movements and expressions he exhibits at the pool. He had entrenched himself in his armor of muscles, and was sitting there motionless with his head down, not even sweating. Mr. Shigeto's absence had given Eeyore, too, a reason to sit there solemnly with his eyes cast down. But perhaps
I appeared even lonelier, as I looked down at my plain thighs, which resembled white sticks. As the regulars trickled in, the atmosphere of the room gradually changed into something quite different from the usually more lively one. The jovial and gentle Mr. Mochizuki, whose facial features and body are those of an artisan, sat in silence that day with a deep, pensive look, glaring, as it were, at the sauna device in the middle of the room, with beads of perspiration forming around his reddened nose. Even the mustached, feminine-sounding beauty parlor proprietor was wearing an irascible expression on his face; he looked like a young prosecutor in a colored-woodblock print from the late nineteenth century I had seen in a course on contemporary literature. Mrs. Ueki, who had finished her training somewhat later than us, had climbed to the upper tier of the drying room, with her thighs rubbing together and her shoulders rounded like a cat's, to endeavor to heighten the perspiration effect at its ever-so-slightly higher elevation; and only she seemed to have adopted the attitude that she could not be discriminatory toward Mr. Arai, which is not to say that she was a friendly woman. …

All the other regulars were critical of Mr. Arai, and each appeared, in their own way, to be demonstrating a warning to me for still incorrigibly associating with him. Pressured by the stiff-mannered attitudes of Mr. Mochizuki and the others, I was nonetheless starting to react to it all with a
Hell, no! Hell, no!
—though Eeyore would say, “Ma-chan, you're impossible.” No doubt Mr. Arai's act of violence had been horrendous. Even so, aren't there times when the mind becomes
distressed
to the point that a person explosively resorts to violence? Instead of bawling, for not having people understand your suffering? Though the cruiser incident that had killed Mr. Kurokawa had involved Mr. Arai, the man who had beaten up her husband, Mrs. Shigeto told me that, ever since the incident Mr. Arai had
been living with the widowed wife, a middle-school teacher, and she said that perhaps this was his way of atoning as best he could. …

After a while, though, it appeared that Mr. Arai, to my surprise, was whispering something in my brother's ear, something apparently interesting to Eeyore, who was sitting solemnly beside him with his head sunk into his fat, round shoulders. Mr. Arai then came over to the corner in which I was sitting, one corner away from where he had been. He aligned his thighs, which resembled unboned ham, right in front of me. And as heat waves of silent rebuke gushed toward me from the regulars, including an especially strong glare from Mr. Mochizuki, whose protests I had ignored, Mr. Arai fixed his apricot-shaped eyes on me and said, “Let's design Eeyore's new training plan at my condo, where we won't be bothered by rubbernecks. Eeyore thinks it's a good idea. Mr. Shigeto”—it sounded like he said Mist
a
Shigeto—“is trying his best to cut me off from Eeyore, which I don't mind. But in all fairness, myself, I don't think Eeyore should let the progress he's made go to waste. And if he's to practice on his own, myself, I have this
Textbook of Swimming
I can lend you. You can read it with Eeyore and follow it in conducting his swimming regimen. So if you would come …”