Death and the Flower Read online

  “How so?”

  “Er, nothing …” he demurred with a vague laugh, but I had a pretty good idea as to his meaning.

  You look strong enough. You’ll be fine. You’ll manage to wrench Masahiro away from Fujishima.

  No one had ever told me I was gentle. I was always described as looking tough or intimidating, and I’d been in countless childish fights. I’ve only had one fight where I put my life on the line, though. Every time I think about it, I can’t help but rotate my right shoulder. I can still feel the injuries I sustained that day.

  As soon as I graduated from college, I got a job at a small publishing company where I worked in both editorial and sales. One day, apropos of nothing, I started thinking about the dream I’d had when I was a boy of becoming a ship’s captain. It grew inexorably until I could no longer tolerate living on land. Day after day, visions of the ocean washed against my brain with the ebb and flow of the tides and refused to fade. I was sure that if I neglected the urge it would haunt me for the rest of my life. I worked up the guts to quit my job and used connections to gain passage on a tuna fishing boat whose home port was Muroto Bay. At that point I had already proposed to my wife, so I asked her to wait for just one year. I figured after a satisfying year on the seas I’d never dream about becoming a sailor again. My purpose was not to fulfill my dream but to be freed from it. But my wife-to-be, as she was left behind, interpreted my sudden behavior in two ways and spent the year in a state of worry faced with a pair of alternatives. Should she trust my word and wait for a year, or had I in fact just politely dumped her? She must have tried to recall my speech and conduct countless times to guess my true intentions. The more she thought about it, however, the more violently she swung between both extremes, and her panic eventually wrecked her nerves. I was entirely responsible. That’s why when my wife got pregnant and grew hypersensitive, hinting at a possible relapse, I had no choice but to devote myself completely to her and our baby, at least for a little while.

  Just four months into the sea journey that caused my wife’s neurasthenia, I got into a fight that nearly cost me my life. Things like reason and logic have no place on a tuna fishing boat. As a first-timer there were many things I didn’t know, and the fishermen merely blamed me for my ignorance. If I screwed up even a small part of the operational protocol, a fist accompanied by a shout flew straight for me. The sullen whirlpool created by men cut off from the rest of the world was something utterly unique. After working day after day under the watchful eye of the Grim Reaper, it was understandable that they’d lose their temper over small issues. But one day I jumped clear over the line.

  If a shark was caught, it was the newbie’s job to gut it. Naturally it fell to me to do the dissection, as it was called. I thought I was working efficiently, but I heard someone holler, “Hurry up, asshole!” I jerked up in time to see a foot-long buoy flying towards me. I ducked at the last second and turned around to see the buoy tumble across the deck. People often use the term “snap.” When that buoy rolled and bounced off the gunwale, I actually heard an internal fuse blow in my neural circuitry. If that buoy had hit me right in the head it could have been fatal. At this rate, I constantly risked getting murdered. I had to break out of the situation … and chose my target. The boatswain that threw the buoy was solidly built, could easily lift a 200-lb tuna, and was rumored the strongest man on the boat. Roaring like a beast, I charged him.

  He looked stunned for a moment by my sudden defiance but soon threw down his tools and rose to the challenge with an “All right!” Other men halted their work and thronged around us. We grappled and punched each other for several minutes under their watchful eyes. I was engrossed. I remember how I felt a strong urge to kill him. If the chief fisherman hadn’t been there, I imagine we’d have fought until one of us was dead. When he waded in to part us, I couldn’t even stand up. My right collarbone was damaged, my left middle finger was broken, and I’d lost three upper front teeth. The boatswain hadn’t fared much better in the physical damage department. Yet my recompense was substantial. After that brawl, the fishermen’s attitudes toward me did an about-face. None of them tried to pick on me again. In fact, they were much more respectful towards me, and my life on the boat improved dramatically. Why hadn’t I tried that earlier? The memory still fills me with regret.

  Perhaps smelling that savage blood, most people I meet for the first time are intimidated by me. I’ve been vaguely aware of this for some time. Even so, Masahiro’s brother’s words made me see myself in third person.

  A little after nine, I stood in the foyer and asked Mrs. Kawaguchi, “What should we do next week?” I knew already that I’d be blown off again even if I showed up on time, and I was starting to get fed up over being paid fifty thousand yen per month when I wasn’t teaching. I didn’t mind quitting right then. My income would take a temporary hit, but I’d find another student soon enough. I couldn’t get involved in another family’s troubles.

  “Please come again next week. I will do whatever it takes to have him here.”

  Her pleading eyes clung to me. I was her last ray of hope. The golf bag—a totemic substitute for the man of the house—placed next to the shoe rack just inside the front door intimated this mother’s powerlessness. I felt some compassion for this family with the absentee father.

  “Let’s see what happens for just another week,” I said, promising to return, and took my leave.

  3

  I stood in front of a pane of smoked glass on which the word “Étranger” was painted and peered inside the well-lit interior of the coffee shop, but there was no trace of the boys. When I moved to the side, I triggered the automatic door, and smoky air billowed out and assaulted my nostrils. I could sense frustration and youthful irritability in that smoke, which probably hadn’t been inhaled. The place could seat maybe a dozen people but was devoid of customers. Fujishima, Masahiro, and company seemed to have gone elsewhere, leaving just their smoke behind. A sense of relief came over me. I got on my bike and headed home to where my wife and child waited.

  I was speeding along Nakahara Street towards the Tama River. Just as I passed Ring Road No. 8 I noticed headlights moving oddly in my rear-view mirror. A car, behind me at an angle, was tailing me closely. The road was pretty empty, so the way the car was maintaining its distance was unnatural. It could only be following me. It was a gunmetal gray old-model Celica with a dropped suspension.

  I slowed to allow it to pass me, but the Celica slowed down as well to maintain the distance. I could see the metalwork of the Maruko Bridge over Tama River looming before me. The two lanes per direction shrank to one on the bridge. In order to go straight onto it, I had to merge right. The Tama’s water level was low, and in the damp, humid summer night, I could see on its surface the lights of the residences in Shin-Maruko where my wife and baby waited. I might still make it back in time to bathe my daughter.

  As soon as I had that thought, I felt wind pressure from the side. The Celica that had been tailing me had sped up and was now next to me on my right. I turned to face forward again. The metal guardrail of Maruko Bridge was fast approaching. I quickly downshifted twice and sped up to try and pass the Celica and get into the right lane. The engine revved with a high-pitched noise and my body jerked backwards from the sudden acceleration. An ordinary car couldn’t possibly match the two-stroke race replica’s acceleration rate. But this Celica’s engine was apparently modified, and the car stayed right next to me the whole time not falling behind an inch. The distinct sound of the enhanced engine echoed eerily.

  For a split second, I couldn’t make a decision. Blocked as I was by the Celica, I couldn’t switch to the right lane, and if I continued on, I would strike the guardrail of the bridge. Was that what they wanted? There was no time to hesitate. I slammed on my brakes. I knew as soon as the dropped Celica blocked my route that it’d be dangerous to get into some kind of match. But apparently blocking me from merging wasn’t all; the Celica swerved towards me from the righ
t after I hit the brakes.

  “The hell are you doing?!” I yelled from inside my helmet.

  A mere bump from the Celica’s passenger side door to the bike’s right handle made me lose balance. Realizing I couldn’t avoid a fall, I purposely pulled the bike down and tumbled rear-first onto the pavement. The lights flickering in the distance disappeared for a second, and I felt a wash of nostalgia for the touch of my daughter’s milky-scented skin. Death was very much on my mind. As my back and knees struck the asphalt, I rolled several times, and I could see my bike sliding across the street, spraying sparks. The friction from the asphalt drew a trail of them in the humid summer air and the gas tank seemed ready to ignite at any moment. More than the sounds or anything else, that vivid image etched itself into my mind. The tip of the clutch lever broke off and the abrasion from the pavement sharpened it into a blade. The bike slammed into the guardrail tire-first and rebounded with great momentum, right towards me. They say if you fall off your bike at thirty miles per hour you end up rolling for several dozen yards. Of course you wouldn’t be able to change direction while you rolled. I mentally braced myself. The remnants of the bike would crash into me, ensnare me, the honed clutch lever would pierce my body …

  Just then, I felt like I was being hugged by something smooth and resilient. I had no idea what was happening. I thought maybe I’d heard a rubber band snap as well. The next instant, my field of vision was swallowed up, and in the darkness I went still.

  I must have passed out for just a few seconds. The cold feel of the pavement on my cheek gradually revived me. My hearing returned at the same time and I could hear a tire spinning idly right beside my ear. The faint sound of the river flowing past seemed to rise skyward only to come down like rain. Lying prone on my back, I slowly raised my head to check my abdomen. I tried moving my limbs. When I tried too hard, pain coursed through me. In the distance I saw the dark Celica that almost killed me stopped near the bridge entrance. A rear passenger window opened and a small youth leaned out to check the damage. I could tell it was Masahiro without even bothering to squint. The Celica abruptly took off in the direction of Kawasaki.

  A passing car stopped and its driver leaned his head out the window. “Are you okay? Need an ambulance?”

  I stood up and hopped lightly from foot to foot to double-check for any injuries. Still wearing my helmet, I shook my head and tried to call back, “I’m fine,” but found I had no voice. The driver gave me a dubious look, gently honked his horn once, and sped away.

  I noticed that disposable diapers were scattered all over the road. A sound like a rubber band snapping, the soft, pliant sensation … Here lay their source. Before the bike collided with me, the bungee cord I’d used to lash my freight had snapped, tossing the diapers between the motorcycle and myself. As though to prove this, the clutch lever had skewered a number of torn plastic bags containing several diapers each.

  I started gathering the scattered diapers and returning them to their plastic bags. I knew they were beyond usable at this point but didn’t want to leave them like litter on the street.

  I righted the bike, pushed it across, and leaned it against the guardrail. The left side that had scraped along the pavement had suffered the most damage, the fairing warped beyond recognition. The tailpipes were ruined, and looking head-on I could see the front suspension was twisted. I couldn’t tell if it was oil or gasoline, but a black, glossy liquid from the bike dotted the pavement like so much blood. As time ticked by, I grew increasingly agitated. I found myself imagining that the liquid splattering the asphalt was not oil but my own blood.

  I headed home, pulling the badly mangled bike over Maruko Bridge. It wasn’t an easy task to haul a bike with a twisted suspension on badly bruised legs. In order to get it to move straight forward, I had to force down the handles as if I were laying her down. Just ten yards was an arduous journey. I was drenched in sweat from head to toe before I’d even crossed the bridge.

  I parked the bike on the side of the road some distance away from my apartment and walked the rest of the way home. I stopped for a minute at the outside stairwell of the apartment building, held my breath, and listened. Somewhere in the sultry, windless August night I thought I heard a baby crying. When I held still and strained my ears but heard nothing more, I decided it was just my imagination and felt a wave of relief. It seemed I had made it back in time for night feeding. It was just past eleven. My wife and baby were probably in a heap, asleep.

  Ours was an old two-story apartment building with identical two-room floor plans and four apartments per floor. We just barely afforded it with our combined incomes. Even if you tried to ascend quietly, the rusty metal staircase swayed and creaked. The right-hand corner apartment on the first floor was the only one that still had lights on, the TV set faintly audible. Everybody else seemed to be asleep. There were no lights from our next-door neighbor with the rarely seen husband, but I could hear the sound of water trickling. Household wastewater seeped like so many dregs from the shabby apartment where a tired mother and her children lived a very cramped lifestyle.

  The kitchen was immediately by the foyer, and in the back were two tatami-mat rooms, one 75 square feet, the other about 100 square feet.

  The tiny light was on in the smaller of the two rooms that functioned as our bedroom, and a hint of the steam from my wife and daughter’s bath still hovered in the air. My discomfiture gradually ballooned in the lingering humidity. I flung off my jacket and t-shirt and pulled off my jeans, which had torn at the knees, and threw them at the floor. I sat cross-legged on my discarded jeans and checked myself over for injuries. I noticed blood trickling from below my knee. Looking at the wound carefully under the light, I could see that several small specks of rock had eaten into my skin. Using a pair of tweezers I tore open the skin to dig out the specks and disinfected the wounds with hydrogen peroxide. Aside from that, my left elbow was bruised and oozing blood. There was no damage to the elbow section of the jacket; only my skin had torn. Considering the condition of the bike, it was almost unbelievable that I’d walked away with such light injuries. If the diapers hadn’t been there to cushion me from the impact, things would doubtlessly have turned out much differently.

  As I wiped the sweat from my body with a cold towel I measured out a cup of water and brought it to a boil. I added the proper quantity of powered milk to a bottle then poured in the boiled water. After the powder completely dissolved, I put the bottle inside a basin filled with cold water to cool it down to an appropriate temperature. I wiped off the wet bottle with a cloth and checked that it was just above body temperature by wrapping both hands around it and holding it against my cheek. I’d made my baby cry several times because the milk was too hot, but now I was so used to the process that I no longer had to drop the milk on my tongue to make sure it was right.

  Leaving the sliding screen between the rooms open, I sat on the threshold and drew the baby to me. I took the utmost caution to avoid making any noise and put my daughter, breathing peacefully in her sleep, on my lap. I gently touched the nipple on the bottle to her tiny lips. Instinctively, she latched on with her eyes still closed. I could see the milk in the bottle decreasing rapidly from her powerful suction. It was as if vitality itself were passing from my hands to my daughter and accumulating in the depths of her body. Under the weak fluorescent light I stared at the dwindling milk. When my wife was diagnosed with mastitis and could no longer produce any milk, she was pitifully depressed, but if it hadn’t been for that, nursing my daughter would have remained a job well out of my reach.

  When the bottle was empty, I lay down in the narrow space between my wife and daughter and stared at the dark ceiling for a while. I was still agitated and didn’t get the sense I’d fall asleep anytime soon. I turned to my side and looked at my daughter’s sleeping face. Perhaps sensing my presence, she stretched out her tiny hand to touch my cheek. Her hand wandered across my face until she found my left earlobe, which she grabbed and squeezed tight. As s
he did so, her expression relaxed, and her breathing resumed the rhythm of deep sleep. Unable to roll over with her hand clutching my earlobe, I felt tears well up in my eyes like it was the most natural thing. Thanks to her touch I got a powerful sense of my own value and presence. That tiny hand had very nearly lost what it relied on. My body trembled.

  The one thing I could do for my family was put myself on the line for them. Yet, a capricious show of spite had nearly snuffed out my life. Imagining my family’s future without me pained my heart. The scene of the accident came flooding back. I had never before felt such appreciation for my own life, nor had I ever been as mindful of death. At the same time, I felt sharp anger roiling up for the would-be murderer at that Celica’s wheel. I didn’t know who it was, but I knew Masahiro had been in the backseat. Why block me from switching lanes and run me off the road? Was it just some game?

  My daughter stretched out her other hand, stuck it between my head and my pillow, and grabbed my right ear. With both of my earlobes squeezed and my face pinioned in place, I cursed at the dark figure of the driver and clenched my fists tight.

  Perhaps sensing my tension, my daughter’s hands squeezed my earlobes even harder. She must have been dreaming about food. She made munching movements with her mouth and drool dripped down her face. I relaxed my fists, wiped off the drool with my finger, and touched it to my tongue. It had a slightly milky flavor.

  4

  The next day, after a light workout at the gym, I took the afternoon off to visit the Kawaguchi residence. I made the unannounced visit in the hopes that I might catch Masahiro at home since it was summer vacation, but unfortunately he wasn’t there.

  “Oh my, did he have a lesson scheduled today?” Mrs. Kawaguchi inquired, perplexed.