Authors: Kōbō Abe
“What attitude?”
“It’s like we’re playing parrot… .” She managed a smile the size of a gumdrop. “Oh, I hate it. Really I do.”
“Hate what? You can tell me.”
“Being a woman. It’s a terrible disadvantage.”
“Not always, is it? You don’t seem to be at a disadvantage.”
“I look completely harmless, don’t I?”
“Yes. I can’t imagine you hurting anybody.”
“That’s why I’m so well suited for this line of work. I make people trust me and let down their guard.”
“That’s right, you’re the shill’s partner… . So you’re dangerous, are you?”
“Yes. Twice I’ve swindled men by pretending to want to marry them.”
After a short pause, I said, “But men do that sort of thing too.”
“It’s not the same. When a man does it, he’s a doctor, or the heir of a wealthy landowner, or a company executive, or
something
—he dangles his position or his property in front of his victim’s eyes as bait. But a woman’s only bait is herself. It’s a terrible disadvantage. A man can’t very well say he’s a man for a living, but no one thinks anything about it if a woman says, ‘Oh, I’m just an ordinary woman.’ ”
“Look, I haven’t got a job I can be proud of, either.”
“Why not? You used to be a firefighter, and then a photographer, and now you’re a ship’s captain.”
“Still, I could never carry off a marriage swindle on the strength of any of that. It would be a disaster.”
At last she laughed. “If a policeman asks you your occupation, all you have to do is speak up and tell him. They don’t even
ask
women. A woman is a woman, and that’s that.”
“It’s discriminatory, no doubt about it.” After another pause, I asked, “Shall I make some carrot juice?”
“Never mind that; let’s fix some rice for dinner.”
“I can do it,” I said. “I know my way around a kitchen, you know.”
“Lots of unmarried men say that. Those are the easiest ones to trap into a proposal.”
“But I haven’t had even a whiff of your bait.”
“Is that what you want?”
The conversation had again taken a dangerous turn. I measured out four cups of rice, put it in a pan and left the tap running while I washed it off. No matter how thoroughly I wash it, rice I make always has a peculiar taste. Probably because the rice is old.
“So are women always on the lookout for someone to deceive?”
“Sure. Most women are chronic offenders, aren’t they?”
“Nobody’s ever tried it on me … but that’s all right. It won’t be long now before the apocalypse, when everything’s wiped out and we start all over… .”
“When that happens, are you really sure you’ll be able to survive?”
“Of course. My life began with an apocalypse. My mother was raped by Inototsu, you see, and that’s how I came into the world.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said so much. But I wanted to impress it on her that I, for one, was not the sort of man who could go around brandishing the traditional male prerogatives. I was a mole, someone who might never fall into a marriage trap, but whose prospects for succeeding in any such scheme of his own were nil. Yet I was the captain of this ark, steaming on toward the ultimate apocalypse, with the engine key right in my hand. This very moment, if I so chose, I could push the switch to weigh anchor. What would she say then? Would she call me a swindler? Or would she lift her skirt and hold out her rump for me to slap?
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “our house had sliding shutters, and some birds made a nest in the shutter box outside my window. They were like crows, only smaller, and kind of brown. I don’t like birds. They’re noisy in the morning, and they carry ticks and mites, and if you look closely they have spiteful looks on their faces. I couldn’t sleep in the morning, so it got me mad, and I started to keep one shutter in the box all the time, narrowing the space so that they wouldn’t be able to get in. I forgot all about them until the summer was gone—and then one day I saw it: there in the space between the shutter and the box was the shriveled corpse of a baby bird, with only its head sticking outside. It must have put its head out to be fed until it got so big that it couldn’t get in or out. Isn’t that horrible? And I’ve always thought that that’s what a mother’s love is like.”
I finished washing the rice and put it on to boil.
“About once a year I have a nightmare,” I said. “It’s about rape. The rapist is me, but the victim is me too.”
“That’s fascinating. What sort of a child would be born of such a union, I wonder… . I bet it would be wet and sticky, all tears and saliva and sweat, and nothing else.”
“That doesn’t sound like you. It doesn’t suit you very well, either, that kind of talk.”
“Frankly, I don’t care if it does or not.”
There was an awkward silence. How did we get started on this?
“What if the nuclear bomb went off right now, and you and I were the only survivors? What would become of us, do you think?” I asked.
“We’d end up like that baby bird in the shutter box.”
“Then there must be a mother bird somewhere. But where?”
“How do I know? Anyway, to the baby bird, the mother is nothing but a beak bringing food.”
A mole’s conversation: digging my way in further and further, with only my whiskers to guide me. Or else it was a heart-in-mouth dance on wafer-thin ice. But a
dance,
for all that. I was strangely buoyant. I wanted to grab this chance to come to an agreement with her about our life together here after the apocalypse, so that I could push the dynamite switch anytime.
“But we’re not like the baby bird,” I said. “We’ve got each other, and besides, rice is bubbling in the pot.”
“Anybody who’s leading a rotten life now isn’t going to do any better just because the slate’s wiped clean.”
“Shall I show you my maps? They’re three-D color aerial photos taken by the Land Board. Snapped every ten seconds from a plane, for surveying purposes. Since they’re taken from just the right angle, with three-quarters duplication, if you line them up and look at them with a stereoscope they leap out at you in perfect three D. You can make out all the houses, and people going by, cars, even the condition of the pavement. You’d be amazed. It’s as if you were actually there—TV towers and power cable poles stick right up off the page as if they might poke you in the eye.”
“Three-dimensional maps, eupcaccias … I see you have a definite taste for fakes.”
“Just take my word for it and give it a try. You can complain after that,” I said.
The maps and stereoscope were on the shelf over the toilet, along with my cameras and other valuables. The shelf was fitted with sliding glass doors on rollers, but they were insulated with rubber to protect against humidity, which made them a little tricky to open and close. I removed my shoes. The edge of the toilet was slippery, and besides, I was fond of the feel of stone against the soles of my feet; I usually went around barefoot. The knee I had injured on the department store rooftop still wasn’t completely back to normal, either.
“If you had to choose between a real diamond one hundredth of an inch in diameter, and a glass stone three feet across, which would you take?” she asked.
Might as well let myself in for it, I thought. As long as I’d invited her on a map trip, why not get out my camera too, for the first time in a long while?
“Let’s see. After the apocalypse, it would be the glass stone, of course. I like to work with my hands, and there’s a line I always say to myself while I’m working: ‘People aren’t monkeys, people aren’t monkeys… .’ For some strange reason it makes me happy. Fulfillment doesn’t mean filling your life up with external things, you know, but realizing your own self-sufficiency. People aren’t monkeys, people aren’t monkeys… . The movements of the human fingertips are unbelievably precise.”
She answered, “Once, I forget when, I saw a contest on TV between a chimpanzee and a person, to see which was better at threading needles. Which do you think won?”
“The person, of course. Why …”
“It was the chimp, hands down.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t believe it.”
“He was over twice as fast.”
I lost my balance. My left foot slipped all the way into the toilet and stuck fast, from the toes. That was the leg bearing scars from the time Inototsu had chained me up. Trying to prop myself up, I grabbed the flushing lever without thinking. There was an overwhelming roar as a cylinder of water shot down through the long pipe. Suction clamped on my foot like a powerful vise, so that my leg, acting as a stopper, was dragged down deeper and deeper. The more I struggled, the stronger the attraction became, until the leg was caught all the way to the calf.
The girl sprang up and stood stiff with alarm. “What’s the matter?” she cried.
“How ridiculous! Nothing like this ever happened before.”
Only my toes could still move, ever so slightly. A slimy sensation ran up and down my spine. The pipes were certain to be crawling with germs.
For a while the girl held her breath. She moistened her lower lip as if to laugh, but the frown wrinkles in her forehead were too deep; she was caught between fear and laughter. That wasn’t surprising: even I, though my insides were knotted with panic, felt a certain desire to giggle.
“Well, this is some fix,” I said.
“Can’t you get out?”
“Won’t budge.”
“You’ve got to relax,” she said. “Try a different position.”
“You’re right. Let’s see, I guess I’d better get my weight off that leg.”
In a case like this, getting hysterical only makes matters worse. The essential thing was to stay calm, keep up my courage, take my time, and avoid wasting energy. First, in order to distribute my weight more evenly, I tried shifting my body so that the edge of the toilet came just between my knees. Now it felt as if one foot had on a toilet shoe. My weight was equally distributed, but I knew I couldn’t maintain that position for long. The leg bowed out at the knee. Was there nothing else I could do? Perhaps it would be better to bend my knees ninety degrees as if I were sitting in a chair. But there
was
no chair, no seat at all. I’d have to have someone make me a stool of the proper height. But fitting it to the curve of the toilet would take time and skill. It was beyond the powers of the girl. Perhaps I’d better negotiate with that chimpanzee—the one on TV that was faster at threading needles than a human.
Like someone fingering a puzzle ring, mentally I traced the connections among my joints and muscles. She was still keeping a dubious eye on me, wary perhaps lest I catch her off guard.
“In cases like these, don’t people usually dial the police or the fire station?” she asked.
“Yes—say, if someone gets stuck in an elevator, that sort of thing, they do.”
“Well, when you were working in the fire station, didn’t you get any calls like that?”
“I remember listening in while someone gave advice to someone whose ring wouldn’t come off.”
“What was the advice?”
“Elevate the finger above the heart, and rub it with saliva or soap—just common sense. But I can hardly elevate my leg, and putting soap on it would have the opposite effect.”
“I’ve heard of sawing rings off, too.”
“Yes, they do that sometimes.”
“That machine on the table upstairs—isn’t it an electric saw?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Those are hard to use. Nothing for amateurs to mess with. One slip and it’s goodbye leg.”
“I hope you get loose before you have to go,” she said.
“
You
just went, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, and added, “Don’t worry about me. I can go anywhere.”
I felt a leaden weight around my ankle. My thoughts began to lose coherency. It was as if a ball of string wound too tight had suddenly started to come apart in my hands.
“Would you mind lending me a shoulder? Let’s see if we can’t pull my leg out. The longer it’s in there, the tougher it’s going to be getting it out, once it starts swelling.”
She stood in front of the toilet with her back to me. Without the least hesitation, I put my arms around her shoulders and pressed up close against her, leaning my full weight on her. Her hair smelled like toasted seaweed. If not for my laughable predicament, this dramatic event might well have turned my whole life around. There was still hope, I thought. That foot might pop right out without causing any relative change in our positions. Bending my elbows, I hauled myself up vertically. The only thing to change was
her
position. Her shoulders tilted, she slumped forward, and my knee curved forward too, defying its construction. The pain stopped just short of unbearable. I had achieved nothing. Only the sensation of physical contact with her saved me from blind panic.
“It’s no use,” I said. “The inside of the pipe is a vacuum.”
“How long does it take to get from here to the Broom Brigade headquarters and back?” she asked.
“No more than ten minutes one way.”
“Then if they finished quickly they
could
be on their way back now.”
“It won’t be that easy,” I said. “They’re talking about a human corpse, after all. Man, I sure would like to be out of here before they get back.”
“They might at least call us on the radio. If they stop off somewhere for a drink, they’ll be forever. Glued to their chairs.”
“With a body stashed in the jeep?”
“That’s true; I suppose it would be too risky… .”
She went back to the stairs and seated herself on the second step from the bottom. That short move put her totally beyond my reach. So this was the cozy time alone with her that I had waited for so eagerly. I felt sick.
“When the cork in a wine bottle gets stuck, there’s the devil of a time getting it out, you know,” I said.