A Wild Sheep Chase (22 page)

“Suginami, Tokyo, … 29 years old, realtor.”

I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped the ink from my fingers.

“Here on business?” asked the clerk.

“Uh, sort of,” I said.

“How many nights?”

“One month,” I said.

“One month?” He gave me a blank-white-sheet-of-drawing-paper look. “You’ll be staying here one whole month?”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, uh, nothing wrong, but well, we like to settle up payment three days at a time.”

I set my satchel on the floor, counted out twenty ten-thousand-yen notes, and laid them on the counter.

“There’s more if that runs out,” I said.

The clerk scooped up the bills with the three fingers of his left hand and counted them with his right. Then he made out a receipt. “Would there be anything special you might care to see in the way of a room?”

“A corner room away from the elevator, if possible.”

The clerk turned around and squinted at the keyboard. After much ado, he chose room 406. The keyboard was almost entirely full. A real success story, the Dolphin Hotel.

There was no such thing as a bellboy, so we carried our bags to the elevator. As she said, no frills. The elevator shook like a large dog with lung disease.

“For an extended stay, there’s nothing like your small, basic hotel.”

“Your small, basic hotel”—not a bad turn of phrase. Like something from the travel pages of a women’s fashion magazine: “After a long trip, your small, basic hotel is just the thing.”

Nonetheless, the first thing I did upon opening the door to our small, basic hotel room was to grab a slipper to smash a cockroach that was creeping along the window frame. Then I picked up two pubic hairs lying by the foot of the bed and disposed of them in the trash. A new experience for me, seeing a cockroach in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, she ran the bath to temperature. And believe me, it was one noisy faucet.

“I tell you, we should’ve stayed in a better hotel,” I opened the bathroom door and yelled in her direction. “We’ve got more than enough money.”

“It’s not a question of money. Our sheep hunt begins here. No argument, it had to be here.”

I stretched out on the bed and smoked a cigarette, switched on the television and ran through all the channels, then turned it off. The only thing decent was the reception. Presently, the bathwater stopped and her clothes came flying out, followed by the sound of the hand shower.

Parting the window curtains, I looked out across the way onto a sordid menagerie of buildings every bit as incomprehensible as our Dolphin Hotel. Each one a dingy ash gray and reeking of piss just by their looks. Although it was already nine o’clock, I could see people in the few lit windows, busily working away. I couldn’t tell what line of work it was, but none of them looked terribly happy. Of course, to their eyes, I probably looked a bit forlorn too.

I drew the curtains shut and returned to the bed, rolled over on the hard-as-asphalt starched sheets, and thought about my ex-wife. I thought about the man she was living with now. I knew almost everything there was to know about him. He’d been my friend, after all, so why shouldn’t I know? Twenty-seven years old. A not very well-known jazz guitarist, but regular enough as not very well-known jazz guitarists go. Not a bad guy. No style, though. One year he’d drift between Kenny Burrell and B.B. King, another year between Larry Coryell and Jim Hall.

Why she’d up and choose him after me, I couldn’t figure. Granted, you can pick out certain characteristics among individuals. Yet the only thing he had over me was that he could play guitar,
and the only thing I had over him was that I could wash dishes. Most guitarists can’t wash dishes. Ruin their fingers and there goes everything.

Then I found myself thinking about sex with her. By default, I tried to calculate the number of times we’d had sex in our four years of married life. An approximate count at best, and admittedly, what would be the point of an approximate count? I should have kept a diary. Or at least made some mark in a notebook. That way I’d have an accurate figure. Accurate figures give things a sense of reality.

My ex-wife kept precise records about sex. Not that she kept a diary per se. She recorded in a notebook exact data about her periods from her first year on and included sex as a supplementary reference. Altogether there were eight of these notebooks, all kept in a locked drawer together with important papers and photographs. These she showed to no one. That she kept records about sex is the full extent of my knowledge. What and how much she wrote, I have no idea. And now that we’re no longer together, I’ll probably never know.

“If I die,” she told me, “burn these notebooks. Douse them in kerosene and let them burn till ash, then bury them. I’d never forgive you if one word remained.”

“But I’m the one who’s been sleeping with you. I pretty much know every inch of your body. What’s there to be ashamed of at this late date?”

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

The woman—save for the month or so prior to our divorce—
was singularly methodical in her thinking. She had an absolutely realistic grasp on her life. Which is to say that no door once closed ever opened again, nor as a rule was any door left wide open.

Now all I know about her is my memories of her. And these memories fade further and further into the distance like displaced cells. Now I have no way of knowing precisely how many times she and I had sex.

We woke the next morning at eight, donned our clothes, headed down in the elevator, and out to a nearby coffee shop for breakfast. No, the Dolphin Hotel had no coffee shop.

“Like I said yesterday, we’ll split up,” I said, passing her a copy of the sheep photo. “I’ll use the mountains in the background as a handle toward searching out the place. You’ll research places where they raise sheep. You know what to do. Any clue, anything, it doesn’t matter how small, is fine. Anything is an improvement over scouring the entire island of Hokkaido totally blind.”

“I’m fine. Leave it up to me.”

“Okay, let’s meet back at the hotel in the evening.”

“Don’t worry so much,” she said, putting on sunglasses. “Finding it’s going to be a piece of cake.”

Of course, it was no piece of cake. Things never happen that way. I went to the Territorial Tourist Agency, did the rounds of various tourist information centers and travel agents, inquired at the Mountaineering Association. In general, I checked all the places
that had anything to do with tourism and mountains. Nobody could recall ever having seen the mountains in the photograph.

“They’re such ordinary-looking mountains too,” they all said. “Besides, the photo shows only a small part of them.”

One whole day on the pavement and that was about as close to progress as I got. That is, the realization that it’d be difficult to identify mountains with nothing to distinguish them and with only a partial view of them.

I stopped into a bookstore and bought
The Mountains of Hokkaido
and a Hokkaido atlas, then went into a café, had two ginger ales, and skimmed through my purchases. As far as mountains were concerned, there was an unbelievable number in Hokkaido, all of them about the same in color and in shape. I tried comparing the mountains in the Rat’s photograph with every mountain in the book; after ten minutes, I was dizzy. It was no comfort to learn that the number of mountains in the book represented but a tiny fraction of all the mountains in Hokkaido. Complicated by the fact that a mountain viewed from one angle gave a wholly different impression than from another angle.

“Mountains are living things,” wrote the author in his preface to the book. “Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder’s frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.”

“Just great,” I said out loud. An impossible task. At the five o’clock bell, I went out to sit on a park bench and eat corn with the pigeons.

Her efforts at information gathering fared better than mine, but ultimately they were futile too. We compared notes of the day’s
trials and tribulations over a modest dinner at a restaurant behind the Dolphin Hotel.

“The Livestock Section of the Territorial Government knew next to nothing,” she said. “They’ve stopped keeping track of sheep. It doesn’t pay to raise sheep. At least not by large-scale ranching or free-range grazing.”

“In a way that makes the search easier.”

“Not really. Ranchers still raise sheep quite actively and even have their own union, which the authorities keep tabs on. With middle-and small-scale sheep raising, however, it’s difficult to keep any accurate count going. Everyone keeps a few sheep pretty much like they do cats and dogs. For what it’s worth, I took down the addresses of the thirty sheep raisers they had listings for, but the papers were four years old and people move around a lot in four years. Japan’s agricultural policies change every three years just like that, you know.”

“Just great,” I sighed into my beer. “Seems like we’ve come to a dead end. There must be more than a hundred similar mountains in Hokkaido, and the state of sheep raising is a total blank.”

“This is the first day. We’ve only just begun.”

“Haven’t those ears of yours gotten the message yet?”

“No message for the time being,” she said, eating her simmered fish and miso soup. “That much I know. I only get despairing messages when I’m confused or feeling some mental pinch. But that’s not the case now.”

“The lifeline only comes when you’re on the verge of drowning?”

“Right. For the moment, I’m satisfied to be going through all this with you, and as long as I’m satisfied, I get no such message. So it’s up to us to find that sheep on our own.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “In a sense, if we don’t find that sheep we’ll be up to our necks in it. In what, I can’t say, but if those guys say they’re going to get us, they’re going to get us. They’re pros. No matter if the Boss dies, the organization will remain and their network extends everywhere in Japan, like the sewers. They’ll have our necks. Dumb as it sounds, that’s the way it is.”

“Sounds like
The Invaders.”

“Ridiculous, I know. But the fact is we’ve gotten ourselves smack in the middle of it, and by ‘ourselves’ I mean you and me. At the start it was only me, but by now you’re in the picture too. Still feel like you’re not on the verge of drowning?”

“Hey, this is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping with strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living.”

“Which is to say,” I interjected, “we’re not drowning so we have no rope.”

“Right. It’s up to us to find that sheep. Neither you nor I have left so much behind, really.”

Maybe not.

We returned to the hotel and had intercourse. I like that word
intercourse
. It poses only a limited range of possibilities.

Our third and fourth days in Sapporo came and went for naught. We’d get up at eight, have breakfast, split up for the day, and when evening came we’d exchange information over supper, return to the hotel, have intercourse, and sleep.

I threw away my old tennis shoes, bought new sneakers, and went around showing the photograph to hundreds of people. She made up a long list of sheep raisers based on sources from the government offices and the library, and started phoning every one of them. The results were nil. Nobody could place the mountain, and
no sheep raiser had any recollection of a sheep with a star on its back. One old man said he remembered seeing that mountain in southern Sakhalin before the war. I wasn’t about to believe that the Rat had gone to Sakhalin. No way can you send a letter special delivery from Sakhalin to Tokyo.

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became opposite east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking the streets like cardboard cutouts. The sun rose from one side of a featureless land, shot up in a cannonball arc across the sky, then set on the other side.

The fifth, then the sixth day passed. October lay heavy on the town. The sun was warm enough but the wind grew brisk, and by late in the day I’d have to put on a thin cotton windbreaker. The streets of Sapporo were wide and depressingly straight. Up until then, I’d had no idea how much walking around in a city of nothing but straight lines can tire you out.

I drank seven cups of coffee a day, took a leak every hour. And slowly lost my appetite.

“Why don’t you put an ad in the papers?” she proposed. “You know, ‘Friends want to get in touch with you’ or something.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said. It didn’t matter if we came up empty-handed; it had to beat doing nothing.