4

4

 

Hiroyuki turned off the engine of the Hamakatsu. Once all two hundred tubes were thrown into the sea, it was only a question of waiting two hours until the conger eels got caught in the traps. Having cast the line, it was time for a short break, for a meal. Around eight o'clock, he was in the habit of eating a second breakfast.

The shadows of the tankers plying the Uraga Waterway bore down heavily on Hiroyuki's boat. Thanks to a fractional difference in course, there was no risk of collision. Compared to the massive tankers, the six-ton Hamakatsu looked like a mere speck of flotsam. Small as the boat was, there was a fair amount of space in the cabin, making it quite possible to spend the night should the need arise.

As Hiroyuki relaxed and ate his rice ball in the cabin, he began to feel uneasy about the instability of the boat. As he had predicted, the southerly winds had grown stronger and were causing the boat to rock violently. The sky that had appeared clear enough during the morning was now covered entirely with dark threatening clouds speeding across the skylight. It was really the kind of weather that warranted calling off the trip and returning to port. Finding that he had almost no appetite, Hiroyuki left the cabin and threw his half-eaten rice ball into the sea.

His stomach was heaving, but not from nausea. It was a complex conspiracy of tension and fear. To be sure, the way the clouds were moving was disconcerting, but that did not seem to be the source of his anxiety. He couldn't stop thinking about that well. Hiroyuki rested his hand on the cabin door and looked down at the well by his feet. Although he remembered having kicked the cover planks closely together, he could see that the black crack had reappeared. He could hear the sound of water splashing at the bottom of the tank. Though it contained not a single eel, something was surely in there. Whenever the boat pitched violently, whatever it was could be heard thudding against the side.

Hiroyuki steeled himself before thrusting his hand in the gap between the planks. A hideous stench arose from the tank, and Hiroyuki pressed the towel around his neck against his nose. Still determined to look in, he moved the wooden panels further apart.

An angled shaft of light penetrated the darkness of the well to reveal a human foot. The seawater at the bottom of the well was lapping against the sole of a pale foot. Hiroyuki poked his head inside to peer deeper into the well. There were the hips… on up to the back… and pale, pudgy shoulders. And with every rock of the boat, a head thudded again and again against the wall of the tank. The body of a woman floated facedown at the bottom of the well. Though he could not see her face, Hiroyuki knew immediately who it was.

'Nanako…' he called to his wife, 'so this is where you were.'

No sooner had the words left his mouth than it all flashed back in his mind's eye as plain as day. He relived the sensation of his hands gripping her neck. He saw his wife's face desperately gasping for air. He could not make out what she was saying. Yet her torrent of abuse was seared into his brain.

Hiroyuki and his wife had had a violent quarrel the evening before last.

Hiroyuki had come home dead drunk and started to watch television with his mouth hanging half-open. His wife charged into the room and confronted him:

'Just look at you! Just look at that sloppy face of yours!' She brought a hand mirror and thrust it in front of his face. 'Just take a look at yourself!'

Sure enough, the face looking back at him from the mirror was a sorry one. His mouth still hung half-open, even as he looked in the mirror. Not only was he drooling, but the crumbs of a snack he had eaten back at the bar stuck to the corners of his mouth. There it was, his face, ugly and worn-out. It was a face that looked older than his years. He was disgusted with himself. His wife's taunts hit their mark. She was right, and for that reason, he felt infuriated. What right had she to complain when she was receiving upwards of a million yen every month?

 

The mirror flashed for a moment, reflecting the fluorescent light. The flash seemed to urge action.

Slapping the mirror out of her hand, Hiroyuki roared at her, his articulation thick with the effects of drink.

'How dare you!'

Noting the change in the colour of his glaring eyes, she steeled herself and looked away. The sight of her husband gearing up for an episode of violence was terrifying enough. She bit back the rest of her taunts, holding her resentment in check.

Yet, with that 'How dare you?' barely out of his mouth, Hiroyuki slumped down helplessly, his cheek against the surface of the tatami matting, his breath sputtering. Nanako stared at her husband for a while in his slumped, powerless condition. Her gaze betrayed contempt, like she was witnessing the dying moments of some monster. Suddenly, she began spitting out the words she had held back. Inside his head, befuddled as it was with drink, Hiroyuki registered her taunts, rebutting each one silently. He would not engage in a battle of words which he was bound to lose.

He couldn't imagine what the bitch had to complain about. Him, stupid? Look at who was talking, daft bitch! How she went on in that superior whine about having made the top ten of her class! It made him sick. A fisherman didn't need to be an Einstein. He only earned such good wages because he had the strength and instincts of a man. And what was all that about genes? Who was passing on what to whom? Both the kids? So what? Oh, now he saw what the bitch was getting at, it was all his fault that their girl had aphasia. His high-handedness was to blame? How the bitch went on and on with her gibberish!

It wasn't the first time he'd heard it. It was the same old quarrel repeated night after night, the same tired old taunts and complaints every time. Not only would she complain about having to look after her senile father-in-law and aphasic daughter, she would also accuse him of physical abuse and not caring for his family in the least. She claimed that she felt she was locked up in a prison cell. She bitterly lamented how deeply she hated her existence, how she couldn't take it anymore. He had but a single reply to all her complaints: month after month, he never brought home less than a million yen.

She had declared that she intended to leave him. He reacted with derision. Did she have anywhere to go? Who would have her? Had she forgotten how he'd taken her in and fed her? More than anything, how did she think she could make a living? She was incompetent and she'd end up dying in a ditch somewhere.

'I'm leaving' was just another tired old line paraded out again and again until it had completely lost any value it may once have had as a threat. She kept saying she would leave him, but she never even tried. She didn't have parents she could depend on, and she worried about her kids' future and her own job prospects.

But then Nanako said something she had never, ever said before. Exhausted from unleashing her torrent of grievances, she seemed almost to have shrunk. Her strength drained from her shoulders, she muttered as if to herself, 'It'd be awful if he turned out like you.'

This last remark pierced Hiroyuki's heart like a barbed fishing hook. What she meant was clear enough in light of her previous taunts. If she did leave him and desert the children, their motherless son would grow up and turn out like Hiroyuki. That was what Nanako saw as 'awful'.

It had been twenty years now since Hiroyuki's father had almost drowned at sea. Hiroyuki's mother had disappeared around the same time. He'd lost his mother when he was about Katsumi's age. His mother had deserted her family, running off with a younger man… At least, that was the account given him by his father. At the time, however, his father's senility had already been kicking in, making it difficult to gauge how much of what he said was true. For all that, there was no reason to believe that his mother had left for any other reason. As far as Hiroyuki could remember, his mother and father had done nothing but fight. It certainly seemed quite plausible that his mother, unable to endure his father's violence any longer, just left him and disappeared.

Hiroyuki had taken the news of having been abandoned by his mother without displaying any emotion, or so he believed. He could not remember having received much, if any, affection from his mother, and his only value had seemed to lie in deflecting his father's violence from her. As he grew older, however, the fact that his mother deserted him began to turn increasingly into a feeling that he was an unwanted presence in the world. Hiroyuki grew up feeling constantly resentful, and his self-confidence was always so fragile that it could be shattered with a single blow.

Perhaps that was why he'd gone to pieces that evening. Without understanding the cause of the blaze raging in him, Hiroyuki got to his feet, hit his head on a chest of drawers, and tottered across the room, coming down on top of his wife. It was as though flames erupted from every pore of his body. He was never one to waste time on words, but this assault was unlike previous ones, and his wife probably sensed what was coming. She did not attempt to cry out, but simply closed her eyes as if in resignation, and placed her hands on her husband's, which gripped her neck. It almost seemed as though she wanted him to squeeze harder, and Hiroyuki straddled her as she lay there, bringing the full weight of his body on his hands. When he gently removed them, Nanako was dead.

Hiroyuki got to his feet and for some reason switched off the fluorescent light. He turned on the small bedside lamp instead, shining it on his wife's face. She looked to be asleep. She was now released from her prison cell. She even looked content.

He strained his ears. There was not a sound to be heard. His father, his son, and his daughter were all asleep. The silence was so complete that he almost felt he could hear their breathing as they slept.

He already knew how to dispose of his wife's body. He would throw it into the sea. If he sank the body in the sea south of Breakwater No. 2, it would never be found.

He wrapped his wife's body in a fine nylon net and carried her over his shoulder onto his boat. He then dumped the body in the boat's well, there to stay until he could permanently dispose of it. That was all he could do then. The rest could wait until the day after next, when he'd sink the body while out fishing. Persuading himself thus, he put the planks back on the hold and went home.

He drank a glass or two of sake and went to sleep, and something happened in his mind that was very much like throwing his wife's body down a well and putting a lid on it. His brain cells confined the memory of his deed to its deepest recesses and capped it with a lid - one that was destined to be reopened soon enough.