He and his wife now lived in a condo on a hill in Azabu rather than be bothered with taking care of a house. He was not given to indulging in luxuries, but he did have one hobby, which was the purchase of rare automobiles. He kept a Jaguar and an Alfa Romeo in the garage, both of them nearly antiques and extremely well cared for, as shiny as newborn babes.
On the phone with my uncle about something else, I took the opportunity to ask him what he knew about May Kasahara's family.
Kasahara, you say? He took a moment to think. Never heard of them. I was a bachelor when I lived there, never had anything to do with the neighbors.
Actually, its the house opposite theirs I'm curious about, the vacant house on the other side of the alley from their backyard, I said. I guess somebody named Miyawaki used to live there. Now its all boarded up.
Oh, Miyawaki. Sure, I knew him, said my uncle. He used to own a few restaurants. Had one on the Ginza too. I met him professionally a few times. His places were nothing much, tell you the truth, but he had good locations. I thought he was doing all right. He was a nice guy, but kind of a spoiled-rich-kid type. He had never had to work hard, or he just never got the hang of it or something, but he never quite grew up. Somebody got him going on the stock market, took him for everything he had- house, land, businesses, everything. And the timing couldn't have been worse. He was trying to open a new place, had his house and land up as collateral. Bang! The whole thing. Had a couple of daughters, I think, college age.
The house has been empty ever since, I guess.
No kidding? I'll bet the titles a mess and his assets have been frozen or something. You'd better not touch that place, no matter what kind of bargain they're offering you.
Who? Me? I laughed. I could never afford a place like that. But what do you mean? I looked into that house when I bought mine. Theres something wrong with it. You mean like ghosts? Maybe not ghosts, but I've never heard anything good about the place, my uncle said.
Some fairly well-known army guy lived there till the end of the war, Colonel Somebody-or- other, a real super-elite officer. The troops under his command in North China won all kinds of decorations, but they did some terrible things there-executing five hundred POWs, forcing tens of thousands of farmers to work for them until half of them dropped dead, stuff like that. These are the stories that were going around, so I don't know how much is true. He was called home just before the end of the war, so he was here for the surrender, and he could see from what was going on that he was likely to be tried as a war criminal. The guys who had gone crazy in China-the generals, the field officers-were being dragged away by the MPs. Well, he had no intention of being put on trial. He was not going to be made a spectacle of and hanged in the bargain. He preferred to take his own life rather than let that happen. So one day when he saw a GI stop a jeep in front of his house, he blew his brains out on the spot. He would have preferred to slit his stomach open the old-fashioned samurai way, but there was no time for that. His wife hanged herself in the kitchen to accompany her husband in death.
Wow.
Anyhow, it turned out the GI was just an ordinary GI, looking for his girlfriend. He was lost. He wanted to ask somebody directions. You know how tough it is to find your way around that place. Deciding its your time to die-that cant be easy for anybody.
No, it cant be.
The house was vacant for a while after that, until an actress bought it- a movie actress. You wouldn't know her name. She was around long before your time, and she was never very famous. She lived there, say, ten years or so. Just she and her maid. She was single. A few years after she moved in, she contracted some eye disease. Everything looked cloudy to her, even close up. But she was an actress, after all; she couldn't work with glasses on. And contact lenses were a new thing back then. They weren't very good and almost nobody used them. So before the crew shot a scene, she would always go over the layout and memorize how many steps she had to take from A to B. She managed one way or another: they were pretty simple films, those old Shochiku domestic dramas. Everything was more relaxed in those days. Then one day, after she had checked over the set and gone back to her dressing room, a young cameraman who didn't know what was going on moved the props and things just a little bit.
Uh-oh.
She missed her footing, fell over, and couldn't walk after that. And her vision started getting even worse. She was practically blind. It was a shame; she was still young and pretty. Of course her movie-making days were over. All she could do was stay at home. And then the maid took all her money and ran off with some guy. This maid was the one person she knew she could trust, depended on her for everything, and the woman took her savings, her stocks, everything. Boy, talk about terrible stories! So what do you think she did?
Well, obviously this story cant have a bright, happy ending. No, obviously, said my uncle. She filled the tub, stuck her face in, and drowned herself. You realize, of course, that to die that way, you have to be pretty damned determined.
Nothing bright and happy about that.
No, nothing bright and happy. Miyawaki bought the property soon afterward. I mean, its a nice place; everybody wants it when they see it. The neighborhood is pleasant, the plot is on high ground and gets good sunlight, the lot is big. But Miyawaki had heard the dark stories about the people who had lived there, so he had the whole thing torn down, foundation and all, and put up a new house. He even had Shinto priests come in to do a purification. But that wasn't enough, I guess. Bad things happen to anybody who lives there. Its just one of those pieces of land. They exist, thats all. I wouldn't take it if they gave it to me.
After shopping at the supermarket, I organized my ingredients for making dinner. I then took in the laundry, folded it neatly, and put it away. Back in the kitchen, I made myself a pot of coffee. This was a nice, quiet day, without calls from anybody. I stretched out on the sofa and read a book. There was no one to disturb my reading. Every once in a while, the wind-up bird would creak in the backyard. It was virtually the only sound I heard all day.
Someone rang the front doorbell at four o'clock. It was the postman. Registered mail, he said, and handed me a thick envelope. I took it and put my seal on the receipt.
This was no ordinary envelope. It was made of old-fashioned heavy rice paper, and someone had gone to the trouble of writing my name and address on it with a brush, in bold black characters. The senders name on the back was Tokutaro Mamiya, the address somewhere in Hiroshima Prefecture. I had absolutely no knowledge of either. Judging from the brushwork, this Tokutaro Mamiya was a man of advanced age. No one knew how to write like that anymore.
I sat on the sofa and used a scissors to cut the envelope open. The letter itself, just as old- fashioned as the envelope, was written on rolled rice paper in a flowing hand by an obviously cultivated person. Lacking such cultivation myself, I could hardly read it. The sentence style matched the handwriting in its extreme formality, which only complicated the process, but with enough time, I managed to decipher the general meaning. It said that old Mr. Honda, the fortune-teller whom Kumiko and I had gone to see so long ago, had died of a heart attack two weeks earlier in his Meguro home. Living alone, he had died without company, but the doctors believed that he had gone quickly and without a great deal of suffering- perhaps the one bright spot in this sad tale. The maid had found him in the morning, slumped forward on the low table of his foot warmer. The letter writer, Tokutaro Mamiya, had been stationed in Manchuria as a first lieutenant and had chanced to share the dangers of war with Corporal Oishi Honda. Now, in compliance with the strong wishes of the deceased, and in the absence of surviving relatives, Mamiya had undertaken the task of distributing the keepsakes. The deceased had left behind extremely minute written instructions in this regard. The detailed and meticulous will suggests that Mr. Honda had anticipated his own impending death. It states explicitly that he would be extremely pleased if you, Mr. Toru Okada, would be so kind as to receive a certain item as a remembrance of him. I can imagine how very busy you must be, Mr. Okada, but I can assure you, as an old comrade in arms of the deceased with few years to look forward to myself, that I could have no greater joy than if you were indeed to be so kind as to receive this item as a small remembrance of the late Mr. Honda. The letter concluded with the address at which Mr. Mamiya was presently staying in Tokyo, care of someone else named Mamiya in Hongo 2-chome, Bunkyo Ward. I imagined he must be in the house of a relative.