Nagasaki (3 page)

I hung up. Those who had been sitting nearby crowded round me wide-eyed, almost apologetic at having overheard; they hadn’t meant to, shouldn’t have listened, but it was extraordinary. No doubt they were hoping I would furnish them with details to satisfy their curiosity, give them a story to tell over dinner. But they refrained from
asking too many questions, showering me with sympathetic oohs and aahs I could have done without. They were all ogling the kitchen, which I had expanded on screen, and within it the woman standing sideways on, blissfully unaware of our gazes and her sudden celebrity status. And then, having gathered from my garbled commentary that I was in no state to make myself clear, they slunk away shaking their heads slightly, leaving me alone at last.

According to the clock on the computer, I had been off the phone for three minutes. And she was still there. Now that the water had reached the required temperature, she was pouring it into the teapot and steam was rising off it. She had used some of my bancha – the tea I drink in the evening because it doesn’t keep me awake – taking it from the inlaid wooden box I had bought myself in Hakone the previous year. The air was much more bearable than the day before, the cicadas had turned it down a notch, and I was completely bemused by what was going on in my house. Everything appeared calm. A projection of the shared life you might have had, that was
what the police officers were about to arrest, I said to myself. A reflection of your fantasies. So long as she didn’t run off … If she was making herself something to eat, she would be there for some time; long enough, in any case, for them to snare her. There she was, a doe standing in the middle of a clearing, oblivious to the fact the wolf had her in his sights. Time ticked slowly by and I continued to hold my breath. She was done for.

But then the sky cleared and sunlight poured into the kitchen. The woman stopped filling the rice cooker to look up towards the window. How sweet the morning sun felt on her skin! How bountiful it was. The stainless-steel sink glistened in the light. Her face was in three-quarter view and suddenly all I could focus on was the curved, ambered nape of her neck, the elegant throat turned by a potter’s expert hands. And this neck descended sand-coloured towards a covered chest, rounded out with two small dunes. Through the glass, the woman gazed out at the miraculous sun. Eyes half shut, she let this gift from the sky flood her body; her face, which had lost its youth and frankly held little charm, luxuriated in the
rays upon rays which fell upon it, launched eons ago from a star fifty million kilometres away and destined for her alone. What did it matter to her just then to be lacking in youth and charm? She was alone, or so she thought, and caught up in the joy of the moment. With her eyes still part-closed, she smiled. And I told myself she must be taking a deep breath, waving goodbye to untold fears and suffering, letting go. Maybe, just maybe, she was happy.

If she only knew! Oh! Her smile … All of a sudden it hurt to see it. Rap on the computer screen, attract her attention … What had I done? I grabbed the phone. At the first ring, she turned her head as though roused from a pleasant dream. Yet before long, she had returned to her previous pose. Pick up, for goodness’ sake! Quick! I would have to stay on the line until she realised the call was meant for her. I kept on; nothing doing. How was she to know? How could I get my own head around the fact that, having lured her into a trap, I was now trying to get her out before it closed on her? She continued to watch the rice and let her bancha brew in spite of the ringing. Ten, eleven
… Shout at her to get the hell out before they arrive, and don’t come back! Or, to put it more succinctly, they’re coming to get you! Surely she would twig eventually. I glanced at my watch. The second hand was doing its rounds; time had not stood still. The woman was soaking up the rays before the next cloud appeared, and there was me wanting to scream, come on, or you won’t be seeing sunlight again in a hurry!

I hung up bitterly. If you’d rather stand there and wait for the police to arrive, that’s fine by me. You can even pour them tea if you like; get three or four cups out ready; you know exactly where they are. There’s no more I can do. The seconds drained away, the sun vanished behind a cloud. She sorted out her rice and drank a mouthful of tea. Her eyes were wide open now and the smile that had blossomed during the sunny spell had faded. What if I tried again? She made as if to pick up, but then jumped. She stood stock still. The doe had sensed danger. And now she was stepping back, her expression changing. Stepping back, out of the camera’s frame. Did she have time to make a run for it?

As I was to find out later when an inspector called me back, the officers had arrived at my house to find the front door locked. There were no open windows, which surprised them. After forcing the lock, they were even more flummoxed to find nobody inside. In fact the house was sealed. Believing the whole thing to be a hoax, they had been on the verge of turning round and walking out.

‘We wouldn’t have taken a prank like that lightly, Mr Shimura,’ I was told sternly after the event. Still, just to be sure, they had searched every room. ‘It was in the last room, where you keep your tatami mats, that one of our men found her, tucked away inside the oshiire with the futons.’ He hadn’t noticed her to begin with, because she had hoisted herself up to the top part of the closet and was huddled in the dark (he hadn’t opened the doors fully). She was like a terrified animal, couldn’t make the slightest sound. A curled-up little creature, that was all she was. The officer had never seen the like.

Afterwards, the inspector would ask when I intended to come in – the sooner the better – to read and sign the charge sheet. I would not hear him at first, leaving a slight gap before my reply: early this evening, I’ll be as quick as I can.

For a long time after the woman had disappeared from my screen (which must have coincided with the moment they forced the lock), I couldn’t stop staring at the kitchen through this mesmerising box measuring, what, ten by fifteen centimetres? It was over. In the centre of the shot, which the camera was still filming as if nothing had happened, the utensils and appliances on the work surface awaited the return of the intruder – what else could I call her? There was her cup of tea and the Zojirushi rice cooker, a white oblong like an ostrich egg or a spaceship for Lilliputians, which she had left her fingerprints on and, no doubt, a few dead skin cells. And though they were dead, those cells were teeming with atoms whose electrons were in turn twitching, along with their flocks of quarks and protons whose physical properties
have hitherto eluded us but which hold the key to everything, to the universe and life. So if one day I should wish to understand the meaning of what happened in my house, I ought perhaps to collect these fossil cells now and study them.

I had to shake myself out of this daze, which mingled with my sadness – and not just any sadness. The sadness I was a major producer of, and even, as several women had told me as they were leaving me, a significant exporter. Even so I wasn’t going to break down in tears at the sight of my rice cooker and, besides, a colleague had just asked me a delicate question: Well? I could have replied that the police had just entered my home and arrested a woman of a certain age preparing to eat a bowl of plain rice, but I opted for a different turn of phrase, using words like intrusion, trespass, even burglary, carefully avoiding adding that nothing was clear yet and that far from setting my mind at ease, the confusion was only increasing my anxiety.

The room they ‘captured’ her in is the last at the end of the corridor which runs parallel to the patch
of garden between my house and my neighbour’s, consisting of two bushes, two flowerbeds and a stone lantern. The room holds six tatami mats and I hardly ever go in there, keeping it for visiting relatives who generally don’t visit in any case. In the bottom part of the cupboard she had chosen as her hiding place, I store nothing but futons, blankets and pillows. In the top part, nothing at all. The room itself is bare. A bedside lamp made of black wood and white paper watches over the blank space, but this beacon is almost never lit: the last visitors, my sister and her husband, came more than a year ago.

I began to read closely. A woman who had been a complete stranger to me as recently as that morning, a policewoman, had been paid to write
a tiny part of my life story, and had made a very thorough job of it. She had made sense of the garbled account I had given over the phone earlier that day and put it down on paper in a logical order. A minute slice of my life perhaps, but it was one I knew would stay with me until the end. And even though I was a nobody, she had carried out her task brilliantly; I should have liked to congratulate her on it. I was touched. It was spot on. I was taking my time reading over it, mumbling aloud, but I could sense that in spite of her outward politeness she rather wished I would hurry up, so I signed on the dotted line. Afterwards, I asked her a few questions about the intruder.

‘This’ll surprise you, Shimura-san … It really is an odd case … The press are all over it already.’ The press? She nodded and repeated matter-of-factly, ‘The press.’ Then she handed me the transcript of the woman’s interview.

The above-named suspect … admits …

Beyond the voice of the woman who had sneaked into my house, whose words were set out on the page before me, I could hear the far-off wail of ambulance sirens, the rooks shrieking and
the trilling of rush-hour trams. This’ll surprise you, Shimura-san …

My stowaway was fifty-eight, I read, two years older than me. I had thought her a bit younger when she appeared on my screen. As for her surname, it was as common as mine. She had been unemployed for a long time; so long, in fact, that she was no longer entitled to state benefits. She had once lived in a neighbourhood the other side of town, which I can’t have set foot in more than two or three times. With no money coming in, she had had to give up the lease on her apartment. She couldn’t bear her former neighbours to see her homeless and penniless, so she had moved on.

But what did any of this have to do with me? I looked up at the policewoman doubtfully.

‘Carry on to the next page.’

She probably felt I was making a meal of it; it’s true I’m not a big reader, plus I was trying to take in all the details, hoping to find some clue that would make sense of everything. In any case she decided to take over, reading aloud in her high-pitched thirty-something tones. Perhaps she felt the urge to talk down to a weatherman, confronting him
with everything he had failed to forecast in his own life. She began with that well-worn opening ‘one day’, as though telling a fairytale:

‘One day, passing your house as you’re leaving, she notices you don’t lock the door. She stops a little further on, pretending to wait for the tram, but she carries on watching you. It’s early, you look every inch the salaryman on his way to the office. You head down the road and out of sight. It isn’t very warm and it begins to rain. She umms and aahs before making her mind up. She knocks on your door; there’s no reply, so she tells herself it’s OK to open it. In she goes. She hovers in the hallway for a moment, on the alert. All she wants is to have a rest somewhere clean and centrally heated; she has everything she needs here.’

‘But I turned the heating off in March!’

‘Well, this was October. This is last autumn I’m talking about. If you’ll let me finish … From your appearance, the clothes you’re wearing, she guesses you’ll be out at work all day. She sits down on the sofa in the living room to rest. She’ll just put her feet up for a minute and then she’ll be off. She feels her body relaxing. Exhausted, sleep-deprived,
she nods off. She wakes up with a start. Where is she? It comes back to her. She listens out, hears nothing. What? Three hours have gone by! Never mind. She feels much better. It’s midday and she can’t face the thought of leaving already. It’s so nice to be indoors at last, with a roof over her head … A little while longer … Why would she drag herself away? Where would she go? She has no family left; her last remaining links with the world are a handful of ex-colleagues she’s ashamed to get in touch with, given her current circumstances. In the kitchen where you’ll eventually catch her on camera, she makes herself her first cup of tea and opens the fridge.

‘In the top part of the oshiire where she hid when the police arrived, the officers found an unrolled sleeping mat, a blanket, two plastic bottles, a few toiletries and a couple of items of spare clothing. I must tell you, Mr Shimura, though I’m sure you’ve worked it out by now, that this woman had secretly been living with you for almost a year, in this room she realised you never went in. That’s right, nearly a year. Yours was not her only place of residence, mind you. There were two other
addresses where she could sleep unnoticed from time to time. The first was a bungalow belonging to a travelling salesman, a bachelor who was away a lot and would mark the dates of upcoming business trips on his kitchen calendar, which she duly noted. She had also made a nest for herself in the home of a half-deaf old lady, who lived only on the ground floor of her house since she had been widowed. Having had a key cut, she could come and go as she pleased during the evenings and at night, once the old woman was asleep at the back of the house. But, as she admitted to us, it was at your house that she spent the majority of her time. Her other dens were really only back-up options in her eyes.’

Nearly a year. Suddenly I wasn’t hearing anything the policewoman was saying. My head was swimming. I thought back to all those nights I had imagined myself alone, safe from the world. In my own bubble. My den, my burrow, my lair. In my turmoil I began to feel a twinge of anger building, without being quite sure who it was directed at. Everything was becoming so confused
that for perhaps thirty endless seconds all external noises – the words of the policewoman, snatches of conversation among the staff, cicadas, sirens – melded into a single drone, while all I saw in front of me were bees, or rather the hollows of a honeycomb; everything had turned a greyish tone flecked with patches of light; my fingertips and toes were shaking more and more violently; I was painlessly losing control of my extremities. I felt myself gradually drifting away to some unknown place. But then I managed to draw a breath, followed by another deeper one, and little by little my unease abated. The woman speaking to me, whose voice had become oddly distant, now came back into focus. I had returned to reality.

‘She had been living in your house since last autumn. And the reason she passed under the radar for so long was that her survival depended on the art of discretion. Bit by bit, however, she must have begun to feel more confident and let her guard down. As you discovered, she sometimes helped herself to food from the kitchen, thinking it would go unnoticed like everything else.

‘But let me go back to the day of her arrival. She inspects the main living area. She can tell from certain unmistakable signs that you live alone. She glances this way and that before setting off down a corridor that leads to the bathroom; from there, she comes across the place where she will take up residence. That’s how it all starts, she says: she opens the oshiire wide and has a good look inside. Everything in the bottom is so neatly folded. It looks as though nothing has been used for an eternity. This is a spare room, for visitors. She has a kind of epiphany: she is the person the room is for. The sun breaks through the clouds and beats on the window, which she opens a crack; it makes a warm patch on the rush mat. She sits in the shaft of light. It feels good. Bliss? Torpor, in any case, and it’s in this state that time passes and ideas start coming together in her mind until they form just one: stay. A little while. The sunlight falls so sweetly on the tatami mats that she can see herself settling in here. She should just try out the closet overnight. Now she’s having a shower, the first in so long. Feeling clean instantly rejuvenates her. These are her words I’m quoting. She resolves to
spend a night in your home, just long enough to get her strength back. Later on, tucked away in her den, she hears you coming in …’

They handed me back the duplicate key they had found on her. I thanked them with a nod. The locks were going to be changed that evening anyway, and the key would become redundant. Darkness was falling by the time I got home. Across the bay, a string of streetlights and beacons marked the shoreline. Without turning on the light, I stood for a moment in the living room until I found the strength to open the kitchen door. Then I went in. The daylight was fading but it still etched the outlines of the teapot, the half-cup of bancha, the rice cooker and a yogurt. The police had not moved anything. And through the glass cabinet, the camera was watching me. For a second I imagined someone using it to follow my movements and picking up the phone to tell the police I was in his house. I would be caught red-handed in the kitchen and thrown into a cell. Then this man would come home and put away
the things I had moved. And meanwhile, another man who believed himself to be the rightful owner of the house would have his eyes glued to the webcam and would be picking up the phone in turn.

What had actually happened was that the she-goblin who had materialised then reappeared on my screen had been caught in my trap. The objects she had abandoned that morning called to mind a photo taken out of the developing bath too soon. This still life with utensils had something of Herculaneum about it, as if caught out by the suffocating gases, and I shrank from it. By association, it somehow set me thinking about my past. All those days I had no recollection of … Take 10 October 2006, for example. Had I done anything differently or better that day than on, say, 1 March 2003? As a meteorologist, I had a good memory for celestial events, but what did I have to show for myself down here on Earth?

And that wasn’t all. The woman’s presence had somehow opened a tiny window on my consciousness, and through it I was able to see a little more clearly. I understood that the year
she and I had shared, even if she had avoided me and I had known nothing of her, was going to change me, and that already I was no longer quite the same. How exactly, I couldn’t have said. But I knew I wouldn’t escape unscathed. And looking out of the living-room bay window as the city went to sleep, I could see beyond my life, far beyond one single existence. Adjusting its focus, slowly reducing the depth of field, my gaze honed in on the wooden buildings of Dejima – the bell tower and outbuildings of the harbour’s historic artificial island where, for two and a half centuries, the only foreigners to trade with the empire had been confined. Just a handful of sailors and Dutch traders in all those years. And these Europeans had never been allowed to set foot on terra firma, just a few metres away. I must have been inclined towards strange thoughts that evening, because it seemed to me that Nagasaki had for a long time remained a kind of closet right at the far end of the vast apartment that was Japan, with its four adjoining main rooms – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu; and for all of those two hundred and fifty years, the empire had, as it were,
pretended not to notice that a stowaway – that is to say, Europe – had moved into this wardrobe. And yet how many techniques, how many ideas, how much knowledge had been exchanged in both directions by way of this kind of ‘false bottom’? To what extent had Dejima changed the way we saw things, during its centuries-long hibernation? As for me, I feared that the oshiire – the one in my house – and everything it had unleashed upon my feeble existence might unhinge me, leaving me vulnerable to life’s open sea.

I switched on the light in the kitchen and cleaned everything from top to bottom. Then I turned up the volume on the radio, which was playing an old song about those who keep going while all around are dying. If only someone had been watching me from behind the glass cabinet and called to warn me about the pitfalls ahead; I swear I would have picked up without a moment’s thought. But the telephone remained stubbornly silent. The only thing showing up on its Lilliputian screen was a missed call, the time corresponding with my attempt to alert the intruder.

Next I was standing in front of the built-in
cupboard. Two panels both two metres forty high, one sliding behind the other. The shelf was only eighty centimetres from the top. Depth? Not much more than a metre. Wood-panelled interior. A luxury couchette on a stationary train. The police officers hadn’t touched anything. Futon, crumpled sheets, plastic bottles. She must only have taken her toiletries and a couple of items of clothing with her when escorted out. Under the pillow, I found a novel I had scoured the bookcase for the previous week,
Scandal
. On a page with the corner turned down, where her reading must have been interrupted, Shusaku Endo writes: ‘Without warning, the cogs most central to his being had stopped turning. And the reason for it was clear. Ever since the night of …’ Idiot, I said to myself, because it had just crossed my mind to send the book to her in prison to give her the chance to finish it. She must have had a good nose for these things as a matter of fact, since visitors were few and far between. My father was too old to travel. As for my sister and brother-in-law, I had been waiting for them to visit for over a year. I thought back to my stay with them at the beginning of
May; the woman must have taken the opportunity of my absence to really make herself at home. She had probably slept on the tatami mats. Was she alone in her cell tonight? I slid the panel across and backed out of the room because the doorbell had rung: the locksmith.

Later, with the television on low, I sat listening to what was going on in the world. I couldn’t get interested in anything. A documentary channel was telling me all about old people and the robots who would one day make their lives easier. If I heard another word about robots … The number of citizens of the archipelago aged 100 or older had gone from 153 in 1963 to 10,000 thirty-five years later, to 36,200 today, according to a young female journalist who was in no danger herself of joining their ranks until at least 2080. They were taking over. This year, all those celebrating their hundredth birthday were to receive a silver cup from the Prime Minister. And surprise, surprise, the silly woman had to bring Tanabe into it, hauling him in front of the cameras again just because he happened to have reached 113 … and here’s Tanabe who gets up early to read the
paper, and has a glass of milk every morning. He had become our collective baby, whose crib the camera was trained on every day.