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Back home, I found Kumiko in a good mood. A very good mood. It was almost six o’clock by the time I arrived home after seeing Malta Kano, which meant I had no time to fix a proper dinner. Instead, I prepared a simple meal from what I found in the freezer, and we each had a beer. She talked about work, as she always did when she was in a good mood: whom she had seen at the office, what she had done, which of her colleagues had talent and which did not. That kind of thing.
I listened, making suitable responses. I heard no more than half of what she was saying. Not that I disliked listening to her talk about these things. Contents of the conversation aside, I loved watching her at the dinner table as she talked with enthusiasm about her work. This, I told myself, was “home.” We were doing a proper job of carrying out the responsibilities that we had been assigned to perform at home. She was talking about her work, and I, after having prepared dinner, was listening to her talk. This was very different from the image of home that I had imagined vaguely for myself before marriage. But this was the home I had chosen . I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.
“So what about the cat?” she asked. I summarized for her my meeting with Malta Kano in the hotel in Shinagawa. I told her about my polka-dot tie: that there had been no sign of it in the wardrobe. That Malta Kano had managed to find me in the crowded tearoom nonetheless. That she had had a unique way of dressing and of speaking, which I described. Kumiko enjoyed hearing about Malta Kano’s red vinyl hat, but when I was unable to provide a clear answer regarding the whereabouts of our lost cat, she was deeply disappointed.
“Then she doesn’t know where the cat is, either?” Kumiko demanded. “The best she could do was tell you it isn’t in our neighborhood any longer?”
“That’s about it,” I said. I decided not to mention anything about the “obstructed flow” of the place we lived in or that this could have some connection to the disappearance of the cat. I knew it would bother Kumiko, and for my own part, I had no desire to increase the number of things we had to worry about. We would have had a real problem if Kumiko insisted on moving because this was a “bad place.” Given our present economic situation, it would have been impossible for us to move.
“That’s what she tells me,” I said. “The cat is not around here anymore.”
“Which means it will never come home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She was vague about everything. All she came up with was little hints. She did say she’d get in touch with me when she found out more, though.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Who knows? I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff.”
I poured myself some more beer and watched the head settle. Kumiko rested her elbow on the table, chin in hand.
“She must have told you she won’t accept payment or gifts of any kind,” she said.
“Uh-huh. That’s certainly a plus,” I said. “So what’s the problem? She won’t take our money, she won’t steal our souls, she won’t snatch the princess away. We’ve got nothing to lose.”
“I want you to understand one thing,” said Kumiko. “That cat is very important to me. Or should I say to us. We found it the week after we got married. Together. You remember?”
“Of course I do.”
“It was so tiny, and soaking wet in the pouring rain. I went to meet you at the station with an umbrella. Poor little baby. We saw him on the way home. Somebody had thrown him into a beer crate next to the liquor store. He’s my very first cat. He’s important to me, a kind of symbol. I can’t lose him.”
“Don’t worry. I know that.”
“So where is he? He’s been missing for ten days now. That’s why I called my brother. I thought he might know a medium or clairvoyant or something, somebody who could find a missing cat. I know you don’t like to ask my brother for anything, but he’s followed in my father’s footsteps. He knows a lot about these things.”
“Ah, yes, the Wataya family tradition,” I said as coolly as an evening breeze across an inlet. “But what’s the connection between Noboru Wataya and this woman?”
Kumiko shrugged. “I’m sure she’s just somebody he happened to meet. He seems to have so many contacts these days.”
“I’ll bet.”
“He says she possesses amazing powers but that she’s pretty strange.” Kumiko poked at her macaroni casserole. “What was her name again?”
“Malta Kano,” I said. “She practiced some kind of religious austerities on Malta.”
“That’s it. Malta Kano. What did you think of her?”
“Hard to say.” I looked at my hands, resting on the table. “At least she wasn’t boring. And that’s a good thing. I mean, the world’s full of things we can’t explain, and somebody’s got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn’t boring than somebody who is. Right? Like Mr. Honda, for example.”
Kumiko laughed out loud at the mention of Mr. Honda. “He was a wonderful old man, don’t you think? I liked him a lot.”
“Me too,” I said.
•
For about a year after we were married, Kumiko and I used to visit the home of old Mr. Honda once a month. A practitioner of spirit possession, he was one of the Wataya family’s favorite channeler types, but he was terrifically hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aid, he could barely make out what we said to him. We had to shout so loud our voices would rattle the shoji paper. I used to wonder if he could hear what the spirits said to him if he was so hard of hearing. But maybe it worked the other way: the worse your ears, the better you could hear the words of the spirits. He had lost his hearing in the war. A noncommissioned officer with Japan’s Manchurian garrison, the Kwantung Army, he had suffered burst eardrums when an artillery shell or a hand grenade or something exploded nearby during a battle with a combined Soviet-Outer Mongolian unit at Nomonhan on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchuria.
Our visits to Mr. Honda’s place were not prompted by a belief on our part in his spiritual powers. I had never been interested in these things, and Kumiko placed far less trust in such supernatural matters than either her parents or her brother. She did have a touch of superstition, and she could be upset by an ominous prognostication, but she never went out of her way to involve herself in spiritual affairs.
The only reason we went to see Mr. Honda was because her father ordered us to. It was the one condition he set for us to marry. True, it was a rather bizarre condition, but we went along with it to avoid complications. Neither of us had expected an easy time from her family. Her father was a government official. The younger son of a not very well-to-do farm family in Niigata, he had attended prestigious Tokyo University on scholarship, graduated with honors, and become an elite member of the Ministry of Transport. This was all very admirable, as far as I was concerned. But as is so often the case with men who have made it like this, he was arrogant and self-righteous. Accustomed to giving orders, he harbored not the slightest doubt concerning the values of the world to which he belonged. For him, hierarchy was everything. He bowed to superior authority without question, and he trampled those beneath him without hesitation. Neither Kumiko nor I believed that a man like that would accept a poor, twenty-four-year-old nobody like me, without position or pedigree or even decent grades or future promise, as a marriage partner for his daughter. We figured that after her parents turned us down, we’d get married on our own and live without having anything to do with them.
Still, I did the right thing. I formally went to ask Kumiko’s parents for her hand in marriage. To say that their reception of me was cool would be an understatement. The doors of all the world’s refrigerators seemed to have been thrown open at once.
That they gave us their permission in the end—with reluctance, but in a near-miraculous turn of events—was thanks entirely to Mr. Honda. He asked them everything they had learned about me, and in the end he declared that if their daughter was going to get married, I was the best possible partner for her; that if she wanted to marry me, they could only invite terrible consequences by opposing the match. Kumiko’s parents had absolute faith in Mr. Honda at the time, and so there was nothing they could do but accept me as their daughter’s husband.
Finally, though, I was always the outsider, the uninvited guest. Kumiko and I would visit their home and have dinner with them twice a month with mechanical regularity. This was a truly loathsome experience, situated at the precise midpoint between a meaningless mortification of the flesh and brutal torture. Throughout the meal, I had the sense that their dining room table was as long as a railway station. They would be eating and talking about something way down at the other end, and I was too far away for them to see. This went on for a year, until Kumiko’s father and I had a violent argument, after which we never saw each other again. The relief this gave me bordered on ecstasy. Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
For a time after our marriage, though, I did exert myself to keep relations between us on a good footing. And without a doubt, the least painful of my exertions were those monthly meetings with Mr. Honda.
All payments to Mr. Honda were made by Kumiko’s father. We merely had to visit Mr. Honda’s home in Meguro once a month with a big bottle of sake, listen to what he had to tell us, and go home. Simple.
We took to Mr. Honda immediately. He was a nice old man, whose face would light up whenever he saw the sake we had brought him. We liked everything about him—except perhaps for the way he left his television on full blast because he was so hard of hearing.
We always went to his house in the morning. Winter and summer, he sat with his legs down in the sunken hearth. In winter he would have a quilt wrapped around his waist to hold in the heat of the charcoal fire. In summer he used neither quilt nor fire. He was apparently a rather famous fortune-teller, but he lived very simply—even ascetically. His house was small, with a tiny entrance hall barely big enough for one person at a time to tie or untie a pair of shoes. The tatami mats on his floors were badly worn, and cracked windowpanes were patched with tape. Across the lane stood an auto repair shop, where there was always someone yelling at the top of his lungs. Mr. Honda wore a kimono styled midway between a sleeping robe and a traditional workman’s jacket. It gave no evidence of having been washed in the recent past. He lived alone and had a woman come in to do the cooking and cleaning. For some reason, though, he never let her launder his robe. Scraggly white whiskers hung on his sunken cheeks.
If there was anything in Mr. Honda’s house that could be called impressive, it was the huge color television set. In such a tiny house, its gigantic presence was overwhelming. It was always tuned to the government-supported NHK network. Whether this was because he loved NHK, or he couldn’t be bothered to change the channel, or this was a special set that received only NHK, I had no way of telling, but NHK was all he ever watched.
Instead of a flower arrangement or a calligraphic scroll, the living room’s ceremonial alcove was filled with this huge television set, and Mr. Honda always sat facing it, stirring the divining sticks on the table atop his sunken hearth while NHK continued to blast out cooking shows, bonsai care instructions, news updates, and political discussions.
“Legal work might be the wrong thing for you, sonny,” said Mr. Honda one day, either to me or to someone standing twenty yards behind me.
“It might?”
“Yep, it might. The law presides over things of this world, finally. The world where shadow is shadow and light is light, yin is yin and yang is yang, I’m me and he’s him. ‘I am me and / He is him: / Autumn eve.’ But you don’t belong to that world, sonny. The world you belong to is above that or below that.”
“Which is better?” I asked, out of simple curiosity. “Above or below?”
“It’s not that either one is better,” he said. After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm onto a tissue and studied it closely before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into a wastebasket. “It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. ‘I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self, and there you are.”
“Is this one of those times when there’s no flow?” Kumiko asked.
“How’s that?”
“IS THIS ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN THERE’S NO FLOW?” Kumiko shouted.
“No flow now,” Mr. Honda said, nodding to himself. “Now’s the time to stay still. Don’t do anything. Just be careful of water. Sometime in the future, this young fellow could experience real suffering in connection with water. Water that’s missing from where it’s supposed to be. Water that’s present where it’s not supposed to be. In any case, be very, very careful of water.”
Kumiko, beside me, was nodding with the utmost gravity, but I could see she was struggling not to laugh.
“What kind of water?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Honda. “Water.”
On the TV, some university professor was saying that people’s chaotic use of Japanese grammar corresponded precisely to the chaos in their lifestyles. “Properly speaking, of course, we cannot call it chaos. Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for using it, but people won’t necessarily follow them.” It sounded interesting, but Mr. Honda just went on talking about water.
“Tell you the truth, I suffered over water,” he said. “There was no water in Nomonhan. The front line was a mess, and supplies were cut off. No water. No rations. No bandages. No bullets. It was awful. The big boys in the rear were interested in only one thing: occupying territory as fast as possible. Nobody was thinking about supplies. For three days, I had almost no water. If you left a washrag out, it’d be wet with dew in the morning. You could wring out a few drops to drink, but that was it. There was just no other water at all. I wanted to die, it was so bad. Being thirsty like that is the worst thing in the world. I was ready to run out and take a bullet. Men who got shot in the stomach would scream for water. Some of them went crazy with the thirst. It was a living hell. We could see a big river flowing right in front of us, with all the water anybody could ever drink. But we couldn’t get to it. Between us and the river was a line of huge Soviet tanks with flamethrowers. Machine gun emplacements bristled like pincushions. Sharpshooters lined the high ground. They sent up flares at night. All we had was Model 38 infantry rifles and twenty-five bullets each. Still, most of my buddies went to the river. They couldn’t take it. Not one of them made it back. They were all killed. So you see, when you’re supposed to stay still, stay still.”
He pulled out a tissue, blew his nose loudly, and examined the results before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into the wastebasket.
“It can be hard to wait for the flow to start,” he said, “but when you have to wait, you have to wait. In the meantime, assume you’re dead.”
“You mean I should stay dead for now?” I asked.
“How’s that?”
“YOU MEAN I SHOULD STAY DEAD FOR NOW?”
“That’s it, sonny. ‘Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.’ ”
He went on talking about Nomonhan for another hour. We just sat there and listened. We had been ordered to “receive his teaching,” but in a year of monthly visits to his place, he almost never had a “teaching” for us to “receive.” He rarely performed divination. The one thing he talked about was the Nomonhan Incident: how a cannon shell blew off half the skull of the lieutenant next to him, how he leaped on a Soviet tank and burned it with a Molotov cocktail, how they cornered and shot a downed Soviet pilot. All his stories were interesting, even thrilling, but as with anything else, you hear them seven or eight times and they tend to lose some of their luster. Nor did he simply “tell” his stories. He screamed them. He could have been standing on a cliff edge on a windy day, shouting to us across a chasm. It was like watching an old Kurosawa movie from the very front row of a run-down theater. Neither of us could hear much of anything for a while after we left his house.
Still, we—or at least I—enjoyed listening to Mr. Honda’s stories. Most of them were bloody, but coming from the mouth of a dying old man in a dirty old robe, the details of battle lost the ring of reality. They sounded more like fairy tales. Almost half a century earlier, Mr. Honda’s unit had fought a ferocious battle over a barren patch of wilderness on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. Until I heard about it from Mr. Honda, I knew almost nothing about the battle of Nomonhan. And yet it had been a magnificent battle. Almost bare-handed, they had defied the superior Soviet mechanized forces, and they had been crushed. One unit after another had been smashed, annihilated. Some officers had, on their own initiative, ordered their troops to retreat to avoid annihilation; their superiors forced them to commit suicide. Most of the troops captured by the Soviets refused to participate in the postwar exchange of prisoners, because they were afraid of being tried for desertion in the face of the enemy. These men ended up contributing their bones to the Mongolian earth. Sent home with an honorable discharge after he lost his hearing, Mr. Honda became a practitioner of divination.
“It was probably all to the good,” he said. “If my hearing hadn’t been ruined, I probably would have died in the South Pacific. That’s what happened to most of the troops who survived Nomonhan. Nomonhan was a great embarrassment for the Imperial Army, so they sent the survivors where they were most likely to be killed. The commanding officers who made such a mess of Nomonhan went on to have distinguished careers in central command. Some of the bastards even became politicians after the war. But the guys who fought their hearts out for them were almost all snuffed out.”
“Why was Nomonhan such an embarrassment for the army?” I asked. “The troops all fought bravely, and a lot of them died, right? Why did the survivors have to be treated so badly?”
But Mr. Honda seemed not to hear my question. He stirred and rattled his divining sticks. “You’d better be careful of water,” he said.
And so ended the day’s session.
•
After my fight with Kumiko’s father, we stopped going to Mr. Honda’s. It was impossible for me to continue visiting him, knowing it was being paid for by my father-in-law, and we were not in any position to pay him ourselves. We could barely hold our heads above water in those days. Eventually, we forgot about Mr. Honda, just as most busy young people tend to forget about most old people.
•
In bed that night, I went on thinking about Mr. Honda. Both he and Malta Kano had spoken to me about water. Mr. Honda had warned me to be careful. Malta Kano had undergone austerities on the island of Malta in connection with her research on water. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but both of them had been deeply concerned about water. Now it was starting to worry me. I turned my thoughts to images of the battlefield at Nomonhan: the Soviet tanks and machine gun emplacements, and the river flowing beyond them. The unbearable thirst. In the darkness, I could hear the sound of the river.
“Toru,” Kumiko said to me in a tiny voice, “are you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“About the necktie. I just remembered. I took it to the cleaner’s in December. It needed pressing. I guess I just forgot.”
“December? Kumiko, that’s over six months ago!”
“I know. And you know I never do anything like that, forgetting things. It was such a lovely necktie, too.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “I took it to the cleaner’s by the station. Do you think they still have it?”
“I’ll go tomorrow. It’s probably there.”
“What makes you think so? Six months is a long time. Most cleaners will get rid of things that aren’t claimed in three months. They can do that. It’s the law. What makes you think it’s still there?”
“Malta Kano said I’d find it. Somewhere outside the house.”
I could feel her looking at me in the dark.
“You mean you believe in what she says?”
“I’m starting to.”
“Pretty soon you and my brother might start seeing eye-to-eye,” she said, a note of pleasure in her voice.
“We just might,” I said.
I kept thinking about the Nomonhan battlefield after Kumiko fell asleep. The soldiers were all asleep there. The sky overhead was filled with stars, and millions of crickets were chirping. I could hear the river. I fell asleep listening to it flow.