Authors: Kōbō Abe
We entered the work hold. It was the same size as the first hold but seemed smaller, as the length and breadth were equal. The ceiling, however, was high, so glancing up, one had an impression of spaciousness. The pillar thrusting upward directly ahead, near the back wall—or in other words along what was an extension of the right wall of this passageway—was exactly twenty-three feet around. The number of pillars, and their girth, were apparently fixed according to ceiling height. Behind the pillar was a tunnel over three feet across and six and a half feet high, easily overlooked because of the old bicycles piled up nearby as camouflage. There were twenty-eight of them, which I planned someday to turn into a foot-powered electric generator. Catty-corner from the pillar—or from where we were, at the far end of the near left-hand wall—gaped the opening of a second passageway. Rusted rails indicated that this had been a main tunnel when the quarry was still in operation. A third opening was near the ceiling, straight ahead on the left, below which a lift—a sort of vertical conveyor belt—was attached. Excavation work customarily proceeds from high to low, so probably in the beginning this was used to transport excavated stone to the surface. When it became apparent that the layer of high-quality rock extended deeper than was anticipated, they must have dug out the main passageway, to raise efficiency.
“What a mountain of rock! Whoever made off with all this must have earned themselves a pile of dough.” As he said this, the insect dealer swung his big head around as if his neck had no vertebrae. “So where do you think our friend went? Where would you look, Captain?”
The lift was over forty feet high—a bit much even for a former Self-Defense Forces member. The secret passage in the shadow of the pillar looked like nothing more than a scrap heap. Our eyes turned as if by agreement to the large tunnel entrance on the left, where the end of the rails could be seen.
“Come on out, will you!” shouted the girl, the echo extending her voice. “You’ve made enough trouble. Just when we were going to eat, too.”
“Remember, he polished off eight of those
kamaboko
sticks all by himself.” The insect dealer lifted his undershirt and began rubbing dirt off the skin on his side.
“Anyway, let’s have a look.” I led the way down the tunnel. Their footsteps behind me rang out with appalling loudness.
“What’s this jiggledy-joggledy thing?” asked the girl, regarding a seesaw-style pump fastened to the wall along the way.
“It’s a pump hooked up to the ventilation system. It’s set up so that two people working it by hand for four hours a day can purify the air of three holds.”
“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?” The insect dealer wiped his finger on his trousers, and laid a hand on the seat of the upper arm of the seesaw. The pump functioned smoothly, operating on the resistance of air inside six-inch-diameter stainless-steel pipes. “Not bad,” he said admiringly. “Pretty darned clever, in fact.”
“Why doesn’t it run on electricity?” the girl cut in with a dissatisfied air.
“When the time comes to use the system, there’ll
be
no electricity,” I told her.
“Don’t waste your time explaining,” said the insect dealer. “You can’t talk logic to a woman.” He raised his right arm, bent at the elbow, and hauled back, aiming for the girl’s rear end. She dodged nimbly aside. Kicking the pedal of one of three wheelless bicycles lined up beside the pump, she said boastfully:
“I know what these are. They look like exercise machines, but really they’re generators. Right?”
“Yes. They’re hooked up to car generators. Of course they function as exercise equipment too; lack of exercise is a perennial problem… .”
“One of these would supply about enough electricity for one twelve-watt bulb, and that’s it,” said the insect dealer, and launched a second attack on her backside. There was the sound of a wet towel falling on the floor. He’d scored a direct hit, in the area of the crease in her buttocks. She emitted a scream that was half wail.
“Eventually I intend to convert all those old bikes in that pile over there. With twenty-eight bikes operating at the same time, charging up the car batteries, there would be enough energy to supply an average day’s needs.”
Pretending I was going to activate one to show them, I drew closer to the woman and laid a hand on her myself, not to be outdone. It was not so much a slap as a caress: that prolonged the contact by a good five times. Using her hand on the handlebars as a fulcrum, she swung herself around to the other side, bent forward, and giggled. On the other side, the insect dealer was waiting, palm outstretched. It was a game of handball, her bottom the ball.
“In that case, you have to have a fairly large crew.” He served.
“Not all
men,
I sincerely hope,” she said, reentering my court.
“Of course not; there’ll be lots and lots of women too… .” Bold now, I took my turn, giving her bottom a good pinch into the bargain.
“That’s enough.” She squatted down, hands covering her posterior. “If the captain and I got on the same seesaw, it would stop moving, wouldn’t it? Please don’t get me wrong… .”
I couldn’t completely fathom what she meant. And yet suddenly my excitement ebbed. She had referred to what bothered me most—the difference in our weights. The insect dealer too seemed to return to himself. Licking the palm of his serving hand with his long tongue, he sighed and glanced up at the ceiling.
“Say,” he said, “isn’t this a terrible waste, all this electricity?”
How like him—a totally practical view. This hold alone had ninety-six fluorescent lights, plus five halogen lights of five hundred watts each. Not only were the ceilings high, but the blue stone walls were dulled by nicks and scratches from the electric saws, reflecting the available light so poorly that in order for the hold to function as a center of operations, extra intensities of illumination were necessary. If an electric bill came, I could never hope to pay it. But it was too soon to show my hand.
There was a sound of water dripping. The girl started up and exclaimed, “What was that?”
Allowing for some variation according to the weather and the time of day, at intervals of once every thirty minutes to three hours a barrage of water drops fell from the ceiling in the first hold onto the row of storage drums. They made a dry, unwatery noise that sounded as if a chair had overturned, or the bottom had burst in a bag of beans. Since it’s impossible to tell what direction the sound is coming from, the imagination swells limitlessly. Without explaining, I turned and headed straight down the second tunnel entrance.
The lights of the operation hold illuminated the rusty rails for another twenty-five feet or so. The lights all shone straight down, so the sheer walls at either side vanished halfway up into darkness, as if stretching all the way to heaven.
“Got some kind of a trap in here too?” asked the insect dealer in an undertone.
“Of course.”
“I’m telling you, he really is very agile.” She too spoke in an undertone.
“This next one is different.” Holding my arms out at shoulder level, I took three steps forward into the dark, guided by the rails, and then slowly I lowered my arms. An alarm bell rang out. The shadow of the insect dealer, which had been following close behind me, suddenly disappeared; he’d tripped on a tie and fallen, crashing into the girl, who let out a scream.
“Quick, turn that damn thing off—it’s bad for my heart.” Seated where he had fallen, the insect dealer covered both ears with his hands.
The left side of the seventh tie from the front. I groped for the switch under the rail, found it, and gave it a flip. The ringing stopped, leaving only a buzz in the ears.
“See what I mean? This one is foolproof.”
“Says who? That’s the same kind of thing they install in banks, right? A burglar alarm using infrared lights. If you look carefully, you can see a red beam in the air, and all you have to do is duck under it.”
“Wouldn’t work. There are three different beams, which get lower as you go. The lowest one is only a foot off the ground. How the hell could anyone duck under
that?”
“Where does this lead to?” The girl was crouched down, with a hand cupped behind one ear. “I hear something.”
“It’s a dead end. It used to connect over to the western side of the mountain, just under where the city hall is now, but there was a cave-in, and it became a blind alley. But there are lots of little rooms along the way. It might make a good place to live.”
“There’s a town on top of this mountain, isn’t there?”
“Yes, a big residential district.”
“I hear noises… .”
“It’s not what you think. Inaudible sounds become audible here, amplified as they bounce off the ceilings and walls: winds of different velocities passing by each other, bugs crawling around, drops of water falling, stone cracking… .”
“I don’t care, I’m not going up there.” The insect dealer looked up at the tunnel at the ceiling edge, brushing stone powder off the seat of his pants. “Granted the guy’s reckless and athletic—but doesn’t it seem funny that these lights came on just twenty or thirty seconds before we came in here? In fact, all we did was check out the trap, so maybe it wasn’t even that long. That contraption would be hard to climb, and it must be a good twenty-five feet high.”
“Forty-two, to be exact.”
“No way.”
“Then where do you think he is? There’s nowhere to hide.” The girl thrust out her chin, tilted her head back like radar, and turned around in a full circle. “What’s that smell? It’s stronger than it was before. And it’s definitely
not
fried squid.”
“I smell it too.” The insect dealer likewise tilted his head back and sniffed the air. “I’ve smelled it somewhere before.”
“It’s the smell of the wind,” I said. “It blows down through that hole in the ceiling.”
“That doesn’t lead to a Chinese restaurant, does it?” she asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I had my own explanation for the odor. But I was not duty-bound to tell them, nor did I think it was at all necessary. “Even fifteen seconds is longer than you think. A woman can do the hundred-yard dash in that length of time.”
The girl started walking straight toward the lift. From around her feet, shadows stretched out in all directions, light and dark, like the spokes of a fan. She put both hands on the bottom of the scaffolding and hung from it, suspending her full weight. “It’s perfectly strong,” she said. “Somebody climb up.”
“Forty-two feet in the air?”
“Well, you had training for a rescue squad, didn’t you?”
“After I left them, I got acrophobia.” The insect dealer spoke glumly, lifting his shirt and scratching his belly. “Captain, how about leveling with us? Is there some reason you don’t want him wandering around in here? Something you don’t want him to find out?”
“No, nothing in particular. It’s just that it turns into a real maze; I haven’t finished surveying it yet. Once I made it all the way to the tangerine grove on the other side of the mountain. I carried a lunch, and it took nearly all day. The inside of the mountain’s full of other, smaller mountains, and valleys, and rivers.”
“Yeah? Any fish?” asked the insect dealer, his forehead wrinkling—a sign of serious interest.
“Not a chance. The only living creatures in there are snakes and beetles and centipedes.”
“Then he won’t make it,” said the girl. “He’s terrified of snakes.” She looked at me and the insect dealer in turn. Was she worried about the shill’s safety after all?
“A bigger problem would be finding the way back,” I said. “I had a heck of a time, believe me. It took me all morning just to get over to the other side, and then coming back I tried to follow the same route and got lost. A compass isn’t worth a damn underground. The going was dangerous and I was hungry, and so tired my knees were knocking. Before I knew it, it was the middle of the night. Frankly, I thought I was done for. You know, like those stories you hear about people who wandered in the wind holes under Mount Fuji and died there without ever finding their way out… .”
“So what happened?”
“So there I was, camping out with nothing but a bar of chocolate and what little water came seeping out of the rocks, no sleeping bag—not even a flashlight, since the batteries had given out. I never felt so forlorn in my whole life. But when the sun came up—”
“How could you tell the sun came up?”
“That’s it, you wouldn’t believe it. I’d retraced my steps back to the other side of the mountain—the north entrance, I call it, or the tangerine grove entrance—and spent the whole night there. When I woke up, the morning light was pouring in.”
“That
is
unbelievable.” The girl’s tone was stinging, but her eyes emanated sympathy. “People’s instincts don’t amount to much, do they?”
“In the dark, your senses are numbed.”
“So,” said the insect dealer, stretching and narrowing his eyes. “You’re saying
he’s
the only one who’ll suffer; you have nothing in particular to lose if he’s in there. Right? Then who cares—let him go. Let it teach him a lesson.”
“You have a point there,” said the girl, falling in easily with his opinion. For some reason, this sudden switchover seemed entirely natural. “It’s just silly to waste time worrying about him. Last December, when we were at a fair near a ski slope, a truck came sliding down a steep hill. It must have been doing at least forty miles an hour. Right then he was crossing the street, and he slipped and fell in the truck’s path. What do you think happened? After the truck rolled on by, he got up and walked away, not a scratch on him. He’s invulnerable.”
“He is, huh?” I said, thinking, Another six months and he’ll be a goner. I started to say the words but caught myself in time. She didn’t react. Didn’t it seem ironic to her that a man with only six months to live should have such great reflexes that he was “invulnerable”? I was the only one who felt abashed. Inwardly I tendered an apology to the shill. Heroes fated to die untimely deaths have an inescapable air of privilege. I began to think it was high time to drop my unwarranted hostility toward the guy and issue him a special complimentary boarding pass.
The insect dealer gave his belly a couple of resounding slaps. “Let’s eat.”
The girl glanced up at the top of the lift. It still seemed to weigh on her. Never mind if it was a stunt worthy of an acrobat—there did remain the small possibility that he had somehow clambered up to the ceiling. I, however, was more concerned about the shadow behind that far right pillar. Before we ate, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t lurking in there.