“Just a little longer.”
“Yes, just a little longer.”
Yūko cooed like a pigeon and suppressed her laughter, working hard not to ruin her expression for the camera as she said through partially open thin lips, “How marvelous it would be to erect a tomb like this—the three of us lined up together…”
Maybe the two men didn’t catch what she said, for they didn’t reply. Below them on the boat, Teijirō was still carefully getting the camera ready. He fought to resist the boat’s swaying, bracing his legs firmly against the deck, the exertion of which caused the muscles on the old fisherman’s shoulders to bulge and shine in the brilliant sunlight. Despite the quiet, the noise of the water was minutely woven in with the air, and the sound of the shutter didn’t reach the ears of those being photographed.
While Iro is the archetypal fishing village, several fields and rice paddies extend close to the mountains in the east. If one travels awhile past the post office, the row of houses peters out and the road goes straight in the direction of the village shrine, running through the rice fields. Turning right along the way, a single road joins the slope and gradually rises up to the new graveyard, which lies on the mountainside.
A stream flows at the base of the mountain by the graveyard, and from alongside the stream, the graves begin, lying on top of one another, mazelike, reaching halfway up the slope. The farther down the mountainside one goes, the bigger and more magnificent the tombstones. From there the road becomes a narrow path made of pebbles and meanders up the hill, zigzagging its way in front of each row of tombs. The stone wall in front of the tombs has begun to crumble, and stout summer grasses have rooted themselves firmly between the gaps in the collapsed stone. A dragonfly spreads its dry wings and lies still, like a preserved specimen, on the hot stone. A medicine-like smell is in the air, the water in the vases having turned rank. In this region, the inhabitants use not bamboo or stone for vases but sake and beer bottles half buried in the ground, many of which are now filled with the withered branches of the Shikimi tree. If one climbs to this spot before the summer sunset—provided one can tolerate the vast number of striped mosquitoes—the view of Iro Village is superb. Taisenji temple can be clearly seen below, beyond the green rice fields. Farther in the distance, toward the south-facing mountainside, the broken glass windows of the abandoned Kusakado greenhouses twinkle as they catch the light. By the side of the greenhouses, the tiled roof of the now uninhabited Kusakado family house is visible. To the west, a black cargo ship glides past the lighthouse and slips into the port of Iro bay. Maybe it’s a small cargo vessel from Osaka, laden with ore from the mines of Toi, on its way to anchor for a while in Iro harbor. The ship’s mast comes silently past the rooftops, and the surface of the evening sea, faintly brighter than the beacon from the lighthouse, appears only as a narrow band from here.
A television can be heard clearly from a house somewhere in the village. The hail of a loudspeaker, belonging to the fishing cooperative, echoes around the surrounding mountainside: “To all crew members of the Kokura Maru. Assemble here tomorrow after breakfast. We are preparing to sail!”
One can discern the onset of night by the beam of the lighthouse, increasing in brightness hour after hour. The light is failing fast, so that the inscriptions on the gravestones become barely visible. It’s difficult to locate the Kusakado grave, hidden in a corner among many other intricate tombstones. In spite of opposition from the majority of the villagers, the chief priest of Taisenji temple had erected the graves as requested, using the money entrusted to him. Three small new gravestones stand huddled together in a shallow depression in the hillside. To the right is Ippei’s grave. To the left of that, Kōji’s, and in the center lies Yūko’s. That Yūko’s grave appears charming and somewhat brilliant even in the twilight is because only hers is a living monument—a reserved burial plot—with her posthumous Buddhist name painted in bright vermilion. The vermilion is still fresh, and when it grows dark around the cluster of white gravestones, only the inscription is visible, appearing like the thick lipstick she always wore on those thin lips.
Chapter 1
Kōji thought about the sunlight that shone brightly into the connecting corridor that led to the bathhouse, cascading over the windowsill, spreading out like a sheet of white glossy paper. He didn’t know why, but he had humbly, passionately loved the light streaming down through that window. It was divine favor, truly pure—dismembered, like the white body of a slain infant. Leaning against the handrail on the upper deck, he marveled at how the abundant early-summer morning sun that his body now comfortably soaked up was at this very instant, in some remote place, joining with the small, exalted, and fragmented sunlight of his memories. It was difficult to believe that this sunlight and the other were of the same substance.
If he were to trace the diffuse light in front of him, as though reaching hand over hand for a great, sparkling banner, would he eventually touch the tip of a hard, pure tassel of sunlight? And if so, was that pure tassel tip the far, far end of the sunlight? Or was it the distant origin itself of the abundant sunlight right in front of him?
Kōji was traveling aboard the Ryūgū Maru 20, which had departed from Numazu bound for West Izu. The back-to-back benches on the upper deck were sparsely occupied, and the canvas awning sang in the breeze. On the shore, fantastically shaped rocks soared precipitously like a black castle, and high above in the sky, bright cumulus clouds drifted about in disarray. Kōji’s hair was not yet long enough to be disturbed by the persistent wind.
He had regular and firm features, and his somewhat old-fashioned warrior’s face and relatively bony nose made him appear like someone whose emotions were easily controlled. But his face was capable of hiding things. My face is like a well-crafted, carved wooden mask, he thought when he was in good humor.
There wasn’t much pleasure in smoking a cigarette while bearing the brunt of the wind, for it soon deprives the mouth of both the taste and the fragrance of the smoke. But Kōji didn’t remove the cigarette, continuing to draw deeply on the butt until a strange and bitter sensation filled the back of his head. He had no idea how many he’d smoked since leaving Numazu at nine thirty that morning. He couldn’t stand the dazzling pitch and roll of the sea. To his unaccustomed eyes, the vast view of the world around him was nothing more than a vague, widely shining, and remote series of linked objects. He turned his thoughts back once more to the sunlight.
There was nothing more tragic than seeing the miraculous sunlight divided into four by the black window frame. Although Kōji loved the sunlight, having joined the crowd by its side, he had always just quickly passed it by. Ahead was the bathhouse, in front of the entrance to which he and his fellow prisoners had first formed a queue and waited their turn. From inside, a cheerless buzzer sounded at three-minute intervals, accompanied by the vigorous sound of water. Despite the powerful reverberation, the sound of the turbid, heavy water vividly brought to mind a rank liquid the color of dead leaves.
The numbers one to twelve were written on the floor in green paint, in double horizontal columns close to the entrance to the spacious changing room. Twenty-four men lined up by these numbers to wait their turn. Three-minute-interval buzzer… The slosh of water. A moment of quiet, then the sound of smacking flesh as somebody slips and tumbles on the wet floor, followed by a burst of laughter, which quickly subsides. Three-minute-interval buzzer… The men who had been waiting undress together and, having deposited their clothes on a shelf, move forward and line up over the two rows of horizontal numbers in front of the bathhouse entrance. Those numbers were painted yellow.