Maki Kashimada: Touring the Land of the Dead: Two Novellas

It wasn’t that the gears were broken and in total disarray—rather, they looked to be frozen at the point just before collapse, faded into monochrome, and fitted into a sheet of paper. At the moment when, if just one more second were to elapse, the teeth would fail to mesh together, and the whole mechanism would shatter before one’s eyes.

She spent a long time looking at that sketch, staring at it as if it had nothing at all to do with her family.

In the end, she looked at all the works. She experienced each of them in turn.

They left the wheelchair in the place marked by the exit. Taichi seemed disappointed to part with it.

This journey had only been for herself, Natsuko thought, feeling beholden to her husband.

“Do you want to go anywhere else?” she asked.

“How about the beach?” Taichi suggested.

They followed the footpath that ran along the shoreline, the wind blowing around them. Natsuko could smell the salty air wafting up from the sea.

Taichi, out of nowhere, said: “I’m taking a test for an electric wheelchair tomorrow. So I wanted to get used to sitting in one.”

“Oh, really?”

Natsuko helped him down to the beach. He stabbed at the sand with his cane, confirming his footing as he ambled forward.

Some children ran up from behind, overtaking them. Taichi came to a stop, and watched the children run past. “How cute,” he murmured to himself, before turning to Natsuko. “I’ll be able to get one with a nickel battery. It’s got awesome horsepower. That’s what they’re going to let me use. I can get it for a ten percent copayment with the welfare office. Pretty lucky, huh?”

A stray dog approached them. Taichi crouched down, trying to pat it on the head, but he was unable to bend over properly, and so instead flashed it a broad smile. The dog turned around and ran ahead along the beach.

“I can’t keep up with kids, or dogs, can I? It’ll be different when I get the wheelchair.”

“What should I do? Do you want me to go with you?” Natsuko asked, feeling more devoted than ever.

“You don’t have to do anything, Natchan. With the wheelchair, I’ll carry your stuff,” he said, leaning against her.

The waves brushed at their feet. Thinking that Taichi would get wet, Natsuko pushed him lightly up the slope, but he fell down. She offered him her hand, but he couldn’t stand up.

“With the wheelchair, we’ll be able to go overseas. Anywhere we want, right?” In his excitement, Taichi spread his hands wide as if to emphasize the word anywhere .

The waves broke over him the moment he finished speaking. Natsuko sat beside him. She wasn’t worried about getting wet. She wanted to hear the sound of the waves a little longer.

They watched the sea in silence. It was the usual silence that fell over them.

The sea was constantly changing shape, like something whose true form could never be truly grasped.

She began to think about the things that she had long considered incomprehensible. About why Taichi never asked her why her family treated him so poorly, about why his neurological disease had befallen him. What did he think about that long series of unreasonableness and contradiction? But now, at the end of their trip, she finally felt as if she understood. He didn’t think about them at all. Taking off one’s clothes on a warm day, putting up an umbrella on a rainy one—that was the extent of his thoughts. Like someone reflecting on the changing seasons, and saying: Ah, it’s warming up. Like someone who after being exposed to violence of every kind decided simply to take a brief rest. That was how he lived. Anyone else would no doubt have been fed up with it all, with the unfairness of everything. But Taichi wasn’t like that. Of course, unfairness still existed in his world—but he just swallowed it down whole. No matter how bad it was, no matter how poisonous.

But what about herself? Natsuko wondered. How should she deal with her life, with that life ? She wasn’t her husband. What could she do?

The waves surged forward. A sense of dread came over her, that they would keep rushing toward her forever. Because she couldn’t make out their true form.

The seascape began to blur. She felt tears welling in her eyes. “When I was little,” she began, “I always thought the sea was so scary. Why, I wonder…?”

Taichi said nothing.

She turned around, only to see her husband spread out like a star, sound asleep with his stomach peeking out from the bottom of his shirt.

His belly looking up at the sky, his thighs opened out to the sea, his breathing, like the waves, keeping to the same slow, gentle rhythm.

She pulled his shirt down to cover his navel.

As she stared at his sleeping face, Natsuko began to reflect on how she had used the words unreasonable and contradiction to describe that life . I don’t get it, that way of thinking, she thought she heard Taichi say.

She remembered something that he had said to her once: I’ve known the sea since I was a kid. The tide is always rising and falling.

No doubt he had never feared it. Natsuko was afraid of things changing. She was terrified of it, in the same way that she was terrified of violence. And the sea was no different. But Taichi seemed to have no such fear. He had always been like that. To him, no doubt, the whole world was made up of a constant tide of rising and falling.

He was a special person, Natsuko thought as she watched him lying there on the sand. A special person—someone she had never seen before, someone she had just seen for the first time in her life. But it was a strange kind of specialness. Even sitting beside that special person, she felt no sense of envy. But then, on the other hand, she felt no sense of superiority at being the wife of such a special person either. She just knew that she had picked up something very important. It was something that she had been given to look after for a while, something that, when the time came, she would have to give back.

To Natsuko, this man, fast asleep with his belly exposed to the water, seemed also to be asleep to the wide, open sea of unreasonableness that comprised the world.

Without seizing on the identity of her feelings, her sense of not properly belonging in her family, Natsuko, in her constant state of anxiety, had made a truly spur-of-the-moment decision to bring this stranger into her life. Her family’s illness would infect him too, and consume him from within, she thought. He would be a hapless victim, but it was her fate to find a necessary sacrifice, so there was no way of helping it. He would ultimately end up being absorbed by her family, by that life . That was what she had believed.

When she looked back on it all, it was a strange, miraculous turn of events. A thorny ivy of arrogance and waste, built up over three generations, had entwined itself around her, trying to rob her of her very soul. And it had been swept away in an instant thanks to one average man’s cerebral attack. She wondered whether he really was so pitiful. If not for those seizures, he would have been destined to have everything he ever had be torn away from him by her family. He had managed to avoid that fate in a way that no one could have foreseen. Indeed, the attacks had begun with exquisite timing, without even the slightest margin of error. Quite as if they had been lying dormant in wait from the very beginning. Natsuko had found no means of her own to escape from her family. And Taichi—he was a simple, good-natured person, the kind of person who, even feeling ill at ease around his wife’s family, even knowing that they were exploiting him, would give them every last ounce of what he had. This was the kind of couple that the cerebral attacks had fallen on. It was an attack on their very lives.