Koji Suzuki - Dark Water

Having taken the bag away from her daughter, Yoshimi didn’t know what to dp with it. Through the surface came a lumpy feel of its contents. Yoshimi, something of a hygiene freak, decided without even opening the bag that the best course of action was to go talk to the superintendent about this. She was going to his ground-floor office right away.

The superintendent, Kamiya, was a long-time widower who’d been the building’s live-in super for ten years, ever since he’d retired from a hauling company. Although the job didn’t pay well, the accommodations were free, and it was an ideal arrangement for an old man living on his own.

No sooner had Yoshimi handed him the bag than Mr Kamiya unzipped it and emptied the contents on top of the office counter. A bright-red plastic cup bearing the same Kitty motif as the bag. A plastic wind-up frog whose legs were designed to flap. A little bear with a beach ring. It was clearly a three-in-one bath-time toy kit.

Ikuko cried out and started to reach for the toys, but yanked her hand back when her mother glared at her.

“How very odd,” the superintendent mused. What puzzled him was not that someone had left a bag on the rooftop, but that a toy set that obviously belonged to some child was found on the premises of this building.

“You could display a notice and try to find the owner,” Yoshimi suggested. Perhaps the owner would see the bag and claim it.

“But the only child in the building is little Ikuko — right, Ikuko?” the old man sought the girl’s assent. She was gazing intently at the Kitty bag and red cup from where she stood beside her mother. It was only too obvious from her expression what outcome Ikuko desired. She wanted it: the bag, the toys. Annoyed by her wistful look, Yoshimi grabbed her by the shoulder and forced her to step back from the counter.

“You did mention that a family used to live on the second floor…” ventured Yoshimi.

Kamiya looked up in surprise and said: “Ah, yes.”

“Didn’t you say they had a little girl of five or six?”

“Indeed. Yes. But it’s been two years.”

“Two years? I thought you said they moved out last year.”

The super hunched his back and began to scratch his ankle audibly. “Well, yes. They didn’t move out until last summer.”

Yoshimi remembered being told by the super, when she moved in three months ago, that the family who’d been living on the second floor had moved out of the building the previous year because they’d experienced some misfortune. Yoshimi was guessing that it was they who’d somehow left the bag up on the roof.

Yet, neither the bag nor its plastic contents looked like they’d been exposed to the elements for a whole year up on the roof. The Kitty bag — which was without a speck of dust or grime, as brand-new as if it had just been purchased from the store — refuted the idea that it could’ve been abandoned for so long.

“All right then. I’ll try displaying it on the counter for a while to see if we can find the owner.”

In this way, the super sought to end the conversation.

After all, it was only some cheap bag, and he couldn’t care less if they found the owner or not.

Yoshimi, however, did not move from where she stood in front of the counter. Instead, she fingered her curly chestnut hair, debating whether to come right out with what she had on her mind.

“If the owner doesn’t turn up, Ikuko, then you could have the bag, couldn’t you?” Mr Kamiya offered and smiled at Ikuko.

“No, that wouldn’t be right. If the owner doesn’t turn up, please dispose of the bag.” Yoshimi turned down the offer with a resolute shake of her head. She then left the super’s office, pushing Ikuko from behind as if to get her away from some contagious object.

Yet something troubled Yoshimi as they rode up in the elevator. She had avoided the subject of the so-called tragedy that was supposed to have befallen the family. After all, she did not want to appear the kind of person who entertained herself by talking about other people’s misfortunes. But the question needled her and she longed to know the exact nature of that family’s misfortune.

The next day was a Monday. Yoshimi spent longer than usual combing her hair that morning. From the living room she could hear the theme song of a children’s television program. This melody served as a time signal, indicating on this particular morning that she still had plenty of minutes to spare before setting off for work. She would take Ikuko to the nursery school by nine o’clock, then catch a bus from the school for a twenty-minute ride to her office in Shimbashi. The time and energy required to get to work here was truly nothing compared to what her commuting hassle used to be. It really made the move here worthwhile. Had they stayed in Musashino, she wouldn’t have been able to put Ikuko into nursery school, and certainly couldn’t have worked. She could always find another job, but it was unlikely that she’d ever find anything as good as her present position in the proofreading department of a publishing company. The job not only allowed her to devote herself to the world of the printed word, which was one of her passions, but there was no overtime and little need to associate with other people. On top of this, the pay was quite adequate. Ikuko came into the room with a pink ribbon and asked her mother to tie back her hair with it. The knot she had just tied had come loose and Ikuko’s hair draped down, almost covering her shoulders.

As she touched her daughter’s hair, she found herself surprised at how unmistakably the child had inherited her genes. It was strange that such an obvious fact should not have occurred to her until now. Their two faces looked identical in the three-sided mirror before them: the same chestnut-colored curly hair, the same white skin, and the same freckles under both eyes. One face belonged to a woman in her mid-thirties and the other was that of a little girl turning six.

“Noodles…” She remembered a boy once looking at her in high school and announcing that her hair looked as if someone had dumped a bowl of noodles on top of her head. She hated everything about herself in those days, her natural curls, her face, her freckles, and her skinny body. How many boys told her how passionately they felt about her in high school? It never occurred to her to count. She had no idea what they saw in her, and had to conclude that her criteria as to what constituted beauty were totally at odds with those of others. Everyone remarked on the beauty of her cute little face, freckles and all, and her natural brown hair, a rarity among Japanese. She simply didn’t understand. When the boys caught on to her indifference, they began to make fun of her auburn hair behind her back. There were a lot of girls who knew how to handle things better, saying what they liked without the slightest risk of backbiting. Hiromi, a classmate in junior high school, was a typical example of that type.

With her hair now tied up, Ikuko said a quick “thank you” to her own reflection in the mirror rather than to her mother, and dashed back into the living room to watch television. Yoshimi could detect no trace of her former husband’s physique or manner in Ikuko’s figure. That at least was a blessing. She had never once found anything enjoyable about the physical union of man and woman. Her only word for it was “agonizing”. Yet there is never any shortage of talk about sex in the world. She simply couldn’t understand it. Perhaps some insurmountable barrier separated her from other people. They differed on everything from what constituted beauty and ugliness to definitions of pain and pleasure. The world as she perceived it was largely at odds with the world as others saw it.

When her husband learned of his wife’s unwillingness to accommodate his needs, he would often resort to solitary measures, casually tossing the tissue paper under the sofa. She once got some of the fluid on her fingertips when she’d inadvertently picked up a ball of tissue the following morning. The image of his idiotic expression of bliss came to her mind, leaving no room for the desire to understand. At such times, her entire body would shudder with extreme loathing and scorn.