Koji Suzuki - Dark Water

The familiar voice of a female television announcer from the living room reminded Yoshimi that it was time to set out.

Ikuko thrust the door open and ran towards the elevator to press the down button before her mother. Once out of the elevator, they could only leave the building by the main front entrance, passing by the super’s office. The red bag was on the counter. Yoshimi and Ikuko caught sight of it simultaneously. The Kitty bag that they’d found on the rooftop the evening before lay on the counter with its zipper closed, and with a notice on top. It read:

Wanted: any information as to owner.

Kamiya, superintendent

Though the super seemed to have acted on her suggestion, Yoshimi somehow thought it very unlikely that the owner would turn up.

Far from bringing a respite from the intense summer heat, the onset of September saw temperatures soar to record levels. During three days of abnormally intense heat, the bright red bag sporting the Kitty character was still visible on the black counter in the super’s office. When Yoshimi saw the bag as she passed by every morning and evening, she found herself the victim of an inexplicable obsession. The bright-red bag seemed to symbolize flames. Then, as if to prove her notion true, the moment the bag was removed from the counter, the sweltering heat of late summer suddenly showed signs of receding. Had the owner turned up to claim the bag? Had the super simply disposed of it of his own accord? It no longer mattered either way. The bag no longer had anything to do with her. Another source of anxiety had arisen to take its place, however. She was suffering from work-related depression. After an interval of six years, she had once again to proofread the new novel of a writer of violent fiction she remembered only too well. Her boss had handed her the proofs as soon as she had arrived for work that morning. The job involved finding errors in the manuscript. To do this, Yoshimi had to read meticulously through the work over and over again. Six years ago, she had been completely unprepared for a manuscript by the same author that ended up traumatizing her. So great was the shock that she’d been pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown. The brutal scenes depicted in the work etched themselves into her consciousness and even tormented her in the form of nightmares. She was on the verge of seeking psychiatric counselling in an attempt to rid herself of the adverse affects of working on the novel. She suffered waves of debilitating nausea on several occasions, lost her appetite, and shed eight pounds. She was also frequently unable to distinguish between illusion and reality.

She complained to the editor in charge of the project, demanding to know why the company handled work from such an author. With a haughty attitude, the editor, a young man still in his mid-twenties, explained that they were in no position to complain. The author’s work sold well and that’s all there was to it.

The remark only reminded Yoshimi once again just how high the barrier was that separated her from other people. She found it incredible that people were prepared to pay good money to read such a disgusting novel. The crowd that swarmed on the other side of the barrier had minds that functioned based on completely different principles than hers. As if that weren’t enough, she was shocked the following year to come across the same book, though one issued in paperback by a different publisher, on her husband’s shelves at home. The moment she set eyes on it, she was overcome with a sensation akin to terror, followed by the image of her husband enjoying gory fantasies aroused by the book. It deepened her resolve to divorce him.

Yoshimi caught sight of the red Kitty bag again the next Saturday morning. This time, she unexpectedly found it in the garbage facility provided for the apartment tenants. She had gone to put out some non-burnable waste and had lifted off the lid of the large polyethylene garbage bin. The red bag had been wedged between two black plastic bags. Although she did momentarily stop and stare at the bag, it was far from difficult to conclude how it had got there. The super had thrown it away in the belief that there was no likelihood of the owner ever turning up. As if nothing had happened, Yoshimi dumped her own sack crammed full of sorted waste on top of the red bag and covered the garbage bin with the lid.

That should have been the end. The bag was to be carted off in a garbage truck with the rest of the incombustible waste destined to form new groundwork for a landfill.

On the first Sunday in September, Yoshimi and Ikuko had gone to buy a few things at the neighbourhood convenience store. They found that fireworks had been significantly discounted now that the summer season was nearly over. In fact, the price was so low that Yoshimi could not reasonably refuse Ikuko’s pleas on grounds that fireworks were too expensive. The disappearance of the remaining fireworks from the store shelves would signal that the lingering embers of summer had finally gone out. Fond as she was of summer, even Yoshimi could not resist the allure of these last goods on the shelf, for there was something poignant about their impending disappearance. So Yoshimi found it perfectly natural when Ikuko said that she wanted to play with fireworks again that evening.

The two of them made their way up to the rooftop at exactly the same time in the evening as they had the week before. The instant she touched the knob to open the door of the penthouse, she was beset with an awful sense of foreboding. She felt an image in red flicker somewhere in her consciousness. As she pushed the door open, she found herself instinctively looking towards the right. Her line of vision locked onto its target in an instant, as if she had known all along that it would be there. An object of livid red highlighted the dark gray of the waterproofed surface of the rooftop. Despite the same poor visibility as the week before, the blazing red sped to the eye through the gloom.

“Oh…” Yoshimi stood with her mouth open and her entire frame rigid. She shrank back without a word, groping wildly with her hands behind her for her daughter. Ikuko, however, ducked in a flash, evading her mother’s arms, and rushed over to the Kitty bag, which was placed exactly where it had been the week before.

“Stop!” Her voice trembled as she called her daughter back.

There was no explaining the dread she felt. Just as her daughter was about to pick the bag up, Yoshimi caught up with her, and swept the bag from her reach. The Kitty character on the side squished out of shape as the bag rolled over several times on the concrete. No question, it was the same one. The bag with the Kitty motif that they had discovered on the rooftop one week ago, the bag that had sat for three full days on the counter in the super’s office before being thrown out unclaimed in the polyethylene garbage bin along with other garbage, that bag was here in front of them now. Undeterred, Ikuko reached out once again to where the bag had rolled. Yoshimi hit her hard.

“I said NO and I mean it!”

Her heart pounded violently in fear. She did not want her daughter to touch it. It was her instinctive loathing of strange objects. Ikuko stared wistfully at the bag and then looked up at her mother’s face. Turning back to the bag, her face puckered and she burst into tears.

So much for fireworks. Yoshimi stroked her daughter’s shoulders with a circular motion to comfort her as they went back into the penthouse and closed the door behind them. Nothing on earth would have induced her to lay a finger on that bag. She didn’t want to bring it back to the super, and she never wanted to come up to the rooftop again.

More than anything else, she wanted to know how such a thing could possibly happen. The bag had been in the polyethylene garbage bin, so how on earth could it have made its way back up to the roof? Her temples ached. “Made its way back” had been an unconscious choice of expression — as if the bag had a life of its own.