Finally, though, the form was snatched away from me forever. The grace came to an end before it could be given to me. And as I said earlier, the life I led after emerging from that hole in the ground was nothing but a hollow, empty shell. Which is why, when the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria just before the end of the war, I volunteered to be sent to the front. In the Siberian labor camp, too, I purposely strove to have myself placed in the most difficult circumstances. No matter what I did, however, I could not die. Just as Corporal Honda had predicted that night, I was fated to return to Japan and live an amazingly long life. I remember how happy that news made me when I first heard it. But it turned out to be, if any- thing, a curse. It was not that I would not die: I could not die. Corporal Honda had been right about that too: I would have been better off not knowing.
When the revelation and the grace were lost, my life was lost. Those living things that had once been there inside me, that had been for that reason of some value, were dead now. Not one thing was left. They had all been burned to ashes in that fierce light. The heat emitted by that revelation or grace had seared away the very core of the life that made me the person I was. Surely I had lacked the strength to resist that heat. And so I feel no fear of death. If anything, my physical death would be, for me, a form of salvation. It would liberate me forever from this hopeless prison, this pain of being me.
Again I have burdened you with an overlong tale. I beg your forgiveness. But what I want to convey to you, Mr. Okada, is this: I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment-perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of ones life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
In any case, I am grateful for the chance to have met you, Mr. Okada, and to have told you my story. Whether it will ever be of any use to you, I cannot be certain. But by telling it to you, I feel that I have attained a kind of salvation. Frail and tenuous though it may be, to me any kind of salvation is a treasure. Nor can I but sense the presence of the subtle threads of fate to think that Mr. Honda was the one who guided me to it. Please remember, Mr. Okada, that there is someone here sending his best wishes to you for a happy life in the years to come.
I read through the letter one more time, with care, and returned it to its envelope. Lieutenant Mamiya's letter moved my heart in strange ways, but to my mind it brought only vague and distant images. Lieutenant Mamiya was a man I could trust and accept, and I could also accept as fact those things that he declared to be facts. But the very concept of fact or truth had little power to persuade me just then. What most moved me in his letter was the sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenants words: the frustration of never quite being able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction.
I went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then I wandered around the house. In the bedroom, I sat on the bed and looked at Kumiko's dresses lined up in the closet. And I thought, What has been the point of my life until now? I saw what Noboru Wataya had been talking about. My first reaction to his words had been anger, but I had to admit that he was right. You have been married to my sister for six years, he had said, and what have you done in all that time? Nothing, right? All you've accomplished in six long years is to quit your job and ruin Kumiko's life. Now you're out of work and you have no plans for the future. Theres nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks. I had no choice but to admit the accuracy of his remarks. Objectively speaking, I had done nothing meaningful in these six years, and what I had in my head was indeed something very like garbage and rocks. I was a zero. Just as he had said.
But was it true that I had ruined Kumiko's life?
For a long time, I looked at her dresses and blouses and skirts in the closet. They were the shadows Kumiko had left behind. Bereft of their owner, these shadows could only hang where they were, limp. I went to the bathroom and took out the bottle of Christian Dior cologne that someone had given to Kumiko. I opened it and smelled it. It was the fragrance I had smelled behind Kumiko's ears the morning she had left the house. I slowly poured the entire contents into the sink. As the liquid flowed down the drain, a strong smell of flowers (the exact name of which I tried but failed to recall) hung over the sink, stirring up memories with brutal intensity. In the midst of this intense aroma, I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I decided to go to May Kasahara's.
As always, I stood in the alley at the back of the Miyawaki house, waiting for May Kasahara to appear, but this time it didn't work. I leaned against the fence, sucked on a lemon drop, looked at the bird sculpture, and thought about Lieutenant Mamiya's letter. Soon, however, it began to grow dark. After waiting close to half an hour, I gave up. May Kasahara was probably out somewhere.
I made my way back down the alley to the rear of my house and scaled the wall. Inside, I found the place filled with the hushed, pale darkness of a summer evening. And Creta Kano was there. For one hallucinatory moment, I felt I was dreaming. But no, this was the continuation of reality. A subtle trace of the cologne I had spilled still floated in the air. Creta Kano was sitting on the sofa, her hands on her knees. I drew closer to her, but as if time itself had stopped inside her, she made not the slightest movement. I turned on the light and sat in the chair facing her. The door was unlocked, she said at last. I let myself in.
That's all right, I said. I usually leave the door unlocked when I go out. She wore a lacy white blouse, flouncy mauve skirt, and large earrings. On her left wrist she wore a large pair of matching bracelets. The sight of them sent a shock through me. They were virtually identical to the bracelets I had seen her wearing in my dream. Her hair and makeup were both done in the style she always used. Hair spray held the hair perfectly in place as usual, as if she had just arrived from the beauty parlor.
There is not much time, she said. I have to return home right away. But I wanted to be sure I had a chance to talk with you, Mr. Okada. You saw my sister and Mr. Wataya today, I believe.
Sure did. Not that it was the most fun little gathering.
Isn't there something you would like to ask me in connection with that? she asked. All kinds of people were coming to me with all kinds of questions. Id like to know more about Noboru -Wataya, I said. I cant help thinking that I have to know more about him. She nodded. I would like to know more about Mr. Wataya myself. I believe that my sister has already told you that he defiled me once, a very long time ago. I don't have time to go into that today, but I will, on some future occasion. In any case, it was something done to me against my will. It had originally been arranged for me to have relations with him. Which is why it was not rape in the ordinary sense of the word. But he did defile me, and that changed me as a person in many important ways. In the end, I was able to recover from the experience. Indeed, it enabled me (with the help of Malta Kano, of course) to bring myself to a whole new, higher level. Whatever the end results may have been, the fact remains that Noboru Wataya violated and defiled me at that time against my will. What he did to me was wrong-and dangerous. The potential was there for me to have been lost forever. Do you see what I mean? I did not see what she meant.