The Box Man (8 page)

“His concern was excessive. Wizen he was absent from his room even a little longer than usual, he worried lest in the meantime the room might not have disappeared, and he could not go out in peace. Gradually his proclivity to stay at home grew worse. It got to the point where he would shut himself up in his room, unable to take a step outside. In the end he died either from hunger or by hanging. Of course, I hear that no one has as yet identified the corpse?’

When I tried turning the next page the notebook fell apart between my fingers like a soaked biscuit. With it my evidence crumbled away too, and I was still unable to assess the significance of the crushed and empty box corpse.

Now should I bid goodbye to the box? But my underwear and my shirt for some reason were taking a long time to dry. The rain had lifted, but because of the moisture laden, low clouds they were long in drying. Fortunately I felt fine there naked in the box. Perhaps it was because I had carefully cleaned off the dirt, but the various parts of my body felt strangely fresh, and I even experienced an actual longing to embrace myself. But I did not intend to stay like this forever. I hoped the morning calm would end soon.

The dark, wet sky and the black sea fused at eye level. The water was much darker than the sky. A deep black like an elevator falling. A bottomless black that you could still see even if you shut your eyes. I could hear the sea. I could see the inside of my own cranium. A dome shaped tent whose inner struts are exposed. Exactly like the inside of a dirigible. My complete lack of sleep sends my blood pounding. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep at least two or three hours before leaving the box. I tried shutting my eyes even tighter than they were. Waves became visible. Waves in regularly receding, gradually narrowing parallel lines kept rolling ceaselessly toward the open sea. There were a front and back to the successive waves, and the front part glinted slightly. As I leaned forward, trying to see through them, my right and left eyeballs popped out and dropped straight down. And from where they had fallen a wisp of smoke came wafting up. As the eyeballs bounced against each other, they kept rolling between the waves. I felt nauseous. I opened my eyes. Sea and sky stood still, blackly, and everything was as it had been originally. I was miserably small on the hard, wet sand. Apparently I could only wait with my eyes open until I was overcome with sudden sleep.

But even if I can’t catch a nap, I must, under any circumstances, begin the planned course of action when the time comes. After disposing of the box that I have taken off, I shall visit the hospital again at precisely eight o’clock. Since outpatients start coming at ten, I shall anticipate as much extra time as possible before that. However, if I am too early, I will incur their displeasure and that will cause problems. Eight o’clock is a good time, and I won’t disturb them while they are still asleep. I estimate that I can get them to spare me a couple of hours for negotiations, though I can’t go so far as to say that that will be sufficient. It’s possible that I could get them to take the day off from examinations and to make than accept going on with the negotiations. At any rate the negotiations will take plenty of time … but what negotiations… ?

(Let me put this down before I forget. A clincher has just occurred to me that I should like to use when I see her. “I don’t want you to laugh or get angry. I don’t care about others laughing or getting angry, you’re the one who’s important.”)

Now calm down. Let’s go for broke. If I manage without a breakdown in the negotiations, I imagine they’ll come to an agreement, and if they don’t there’s nothing to do but break off the negotiations. Rather than worrying about the negotiations, what is important now is to calculate the procedure necessary to arrange things so that I can be there at eight o’clock. I say arrange things, but there is nothing particularly troublesome. If I tear the box up into three or four pieces and fold them up, it will be ordinary trash. That will take scarcely five minutes at the most. Even if I liquidate my possessions, in any case they are articles of daily use for a life on the move, and they won’t amount to much. For example, this plastic board that I am using now as a pad for my notes. It’s simply a piece of rather thickish board, ordinary, milky white, sixteen by eighteen inches, but it is an absolutely essential item that I cannot do without in my life. First of all, it replaces a table. A stable level surface is necessary at all costs for eating and telling fortunes with cards. It also becomes a chopping board when I cook. It’s a shutter against the rain over the observation window on winter nights when the wind is strong, and on summer evenings when there’s no breeze at all it conveniently takes the place of a fan. It’s a portable bench for sitting on the wet ground, and it becomes a perfect worktable for undoing the cigarette butts that I have collected and for rolling them again.

Of course, as it is, it has taken time and trouble to cull out my personal possessions as much as I have. When I first started living in a box, there was a time when I was quite unable to abandon the common idea of convenience and stored away willy nilly things I didn’t even know how to use, not to mention those articles that seemed as if they might come in handy. My baggage was endlessly increased with various items: a tin can on which were embossed three Technicolor nudes holding a golden apple (surely that would serve some purpose), a precious stone (perhaps an ancient implement), a slot machine ball (it would come in handy for moving heavy things), a Concise English Japanese Dictionary (indispensable sometime, one never knew), a high heel, painted gold (the shape was interesting, and it might be used in place of a hammer), a one hundred and twenty five watt, six ampere house socket (it would be a problem if it wasn’t around when I needed it), a brass doorknob (attached to a string, that could be a dangerous weapon), a soldering iron (surely useful for something), a key ring with five keys (it was not impossible that sometime in the future I would come on a lock one of them would fit), a cast iron nut one and five eighths inches in diameter (suspended from a string, it could be a seismograph and would also be handy as a weight when I dried film). When it got so that I couldn’t move for the cramped quarters and the weight, I was at last vividly aware of the necessity of throwing them all out. What a box man needs is obviously not a seven appliance, all purpose knife but some device that uses a single safety razor blade for any number of purposes. If the article is not used at least three times a day, it should be disposed of with no regrets.

But there’s a limit to throwing things away. It takes work to store articles too, but the effort required to throw them away is still greater. If one does not somehow hold one’s possessions down, one is on tenterhooks lest they be blown away by the wind. For example, could a person who habitually used a small radio-a portable FM with quite good sound-dismiss it as trash just because he wanted to make his burden lighter? I, however, was able to do even that,

Indeed, I would certainly tell her about the radio. If the necessity arose, I should like to tell the fake box man too. Before the negotiations, I would like those two to understand clearly what sort of opponent they are dealing with.

-You’re wondering what I have come for so early in the morning. (I address myself exclusively to her; as for the doctor, let him stay in the corner of the room with the fake box over his head just as he is.) I’m taking a simple stroll. A morning walk. It would be hard to draw the road up the slope from the soy sauce factory, it’s so dispersed, but I like it. What’s the name of that ancient tree with the profusion of small leaves on the way? When the triangular hospital roof here came into view beyond the tree leaves, I became strangely nervous. It’s an atmosphere where strange machinations are going on, with the small, high, painted windows in the cracked mortar wall. Don’t you believe me? Then let me put it this way: there is no particular reason, I came just because I wanted to. You still don’t believe me? Do I look as if I want that much? I was born with this face, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes. But look here, these fifty thousand yen . (saying this, I throw them onto the examination table . . not too hard, but just hard enough). I took them for the time being, but I have not yet decided to accept them. Right now I’m seriously thinking about it. But don’t worry, I disposed of the box as you ordered. So we’re even … no, I’m the one who’s owed something. How about it … how does it feel living in a box? (As I say this, I suddenly look in the window of the fake box, and without giving him time to answer, I immediately again turn toward the girl.) Now I’ll get right to the point: I’d like for you to listen to a story about a radio so you can know what sort of person I am. Yes, a radio. Actually I was terribly addicted to news for a long time. I wonder if you see what I mean. I couldn’t stand it if there weren’t fresh news reports coming in one after the other all the time. Battlefield situations go on changing minute by minute. Moving picture stars and singers keep marrying and divorcing. Rockets go shooting off to Mars, and a fishing boat sends off an
SOS
and blacks out. A pyromaniacal fire chief is apprehended. When a venomous serpent escapes from a load of bananas and an employee of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry commits suicide and a little girl of three is raped, an international conference achieves great success and ends by collapsing, a society is formed to breed sterilized mice, a child is discovered buried in cement at the construction site of a supermarket, the total number of deserters from troops throughout the world sets a new record, the world seems to be boiling over like a teakettle. The globe’s capable of changing shape the minute you take your eyes off it for even a second. I took seven different newspapers; I set up in my room two television sets and three radios; when I went out I never let a portable radio out of my hand, and when I went to sleep I left the earphones plugged in. I got different news reports on different stations at the same time, and there could be special news broadcasts at any moment. Timid animals keep too close a watch around them, and gradually like the giraffe their necks stretch or like the monkey they become incapable of coming down out of the trees. Don’t laugh. For the one afflicted it’s serious. He spends the greater part of the day just reading and listening to news. Angry with the weakness of his own will, still with aching heart, he is unable to separate himself from the radio or television. Of course, I was very much aware that no matter how much I went rooting around for news I wouldn’t necessarily come closer to the truth. I realized that, but I couldn’t stop. Perhaps I needed the news form, which is summarized in cliches, not truth or experience. In short, I was thoroughly addicted to news.

One day, however, I suddenly recovered. A trivial event, served as an antidote, so really trivial that I myself inclined my head in disbelief. It was-where was it indeed?-oh, yes, at one corner of the wide sidewalk between the subway station and the bank. During the day few people pass that way. A middle aged fellow who at first glance seemed to be a white collar worker was walking in the most ordinary way right in front of me. Suddenly all the strength left his legs, and he moved as if to sit down, but fell on his side, and lay motionless. I had the feeling he was playing a game of big bad wolf with a child and had been shot. A young fellow with the air of a student, who was passing by, looked at the fallen man amused. “My God, he’s dead!” he said. I remember that he looked up at me shocked with a wan smile on his lips. I paid no attention, but he reluctantly went to use the telephone at a tobacconist’s two or three stores farther on. Being a professional photographer-well, I was, merely to the extent of getting a job once or twice a month making commercial samples of insert advertisements-I at once set up my camera and tried focusing it from all sorts of angles. In the end I changed my mind and did not take a picture, but that was not because I was especially grieving over the corpse. It was because I realized at once that it would absolutely never become news.

Dying is, of course, a kind of transformation. First of all, the skin suddenly pales. Then the nose thins, and the jaw withers and gets smaller. The half open mouth resembles the edge of a tangerine skin cut open with a knife, and the red artificial teeth of the lower jaw begin to jut out from the opening. Further, even the clothes that are being worn change. What appeared to he of very high quality turns before one’s eyes into cheap goods, showy but worthless. Of course, such things are not news. But it would seem that for the dead man in question whether it’s news or not has nothing to do with him. Supposing one is the tenth victim, that had fallen into the hands of a much wanted, fiendish killer, I don’t suppose he would devise a particularly different way of dying. The dead person has changed himself, but the outside world has changed too, and things cannot change any more than they have. It’s such a great change that no news, however big, can match it.

No sooner had I realized this than my thinking about news suddenly changed completely. How shall I say … ? Slogans won’t do the trick: “You too can stop news watching.” But I think you understand … somehow … why everybody wants news the way they do. Are they preparing for times of emergency by knowing in advance the changes taking place in the world, I wonder? I used to think so. But

that was a big lie. People listen to news only to feel reassured.

Because however great the news of catastrophe they hear, those listening are still perfectly alive. The really big news is the ultimate news announcing the end of the world, I suppose. Of course, everybody wants to hear that. For then one does not need to abandon the world alone. When I think about it, I feel the reason that I was addicted was my eagerness not to miss this ultimate broadcast. But as long as the news goes on, it will never get to the end. Thus news constitutes the announcement that it is still not the end of the world. The following trifling clichés are merely abridgments. Last night the greatest bombings of North Vietnam this year were carried out by B52s, but somehow you are still alive. Gas lines under construction ignited and eight persons received serious and light wounds, but you arc alive and safe. Record rate of rising prices, yet you continue to live. Extinction of marine life in bays by waste products from factories, but somehow you survive everything.