The Lake (16 page)

Nakajima’s past would always be there, so the foundation could crumble at any moment. That’s what happens, I realized, when people destroy other people.

We had finished eating when Nakajima spoke.

“Can we go see your mural?”

“If you want to. But I don’t know—it’s night. Wouldn’t it be better to go in the daytime, when you can see better?”

“I’ll go during the day, too, of course. I just thought we could go now, take a walk. I’m assuming it’s finished, right?”

I figured we could go to see it whenever, so I hadn’t actually told him it was done.

“All right, let’s go,” I said. “It’s still early enough that the guard will let us in if I tell him I forgot something. He knows me by now. There’s a street light near the wall, so I doubt it will be too dark to see anyway, but just in case we can take that giant flashlight.”

The scents of spring hung over the dark street; the stars seemed hazy.

As we walked, Nakajima started talking.

“I was going to a summer camp run by this school I was going to, and somehow I got lost, I ended up deep in the mountains, wandering along the highway, and these people picked me up in their car, and that was it, I’d been kidnapped. This was long before cell phones, of course.”

The story had begun.

The words kept coming, like water overflowing, refusing to stop.

He’s like a broken machine
, I thought.

Walking on, talking on, his arms folded over his chest.

All I could do was nod.

“Can you imagine what it’s like to be kidnapped? Did it ever occur to you that you’d have to learn to
like
your kidnappers? Because that’s the only way you can survive.

“Do you understand what that means?

“First, they erased my memory. With hypnotism and drugs. And they made me believe that the place we were in wasn’t in Japan.

“I was a smart kid, so I knew how to resist the hypnotism. I had a vague memory of this technique I’d read about in a book, and I figured I’d try whatever I could, and somehow I managed to make it work.

“What you had to do was practice a kind of autosuggestion, you make yourself remember a given person whenever you see a particular object, and since I was in Izu I knew the ocean had to be somewhere nearby, so I hypnotized myself into remembering my mother whenever I saw the ocean or if I found myself standing on the shore. After that I just let them do what they wanted with me. It was scary, but in the end it worked.

“Several months later, when we went down to the beach one very cold night for meditation practice, I remembered my mom. It took a few days after that for me to recall that we were in Japan, and to think I might have been kidnapped. There were a number of families in the group, parents and children both, like Mino and Chii and their mother, and I had gotten so used to it being that way that I almost took it for granted. Their mother wasn’t living in the same room as them—the group had some ideological reason for that—but they put us together, and we all slept in a row. Holding hands, like the three strokes of the character for ‘river.’

“During the daytime, teachers in different fields would come and lead discussions and study groups and stuff. For kids and adults both.

“At first after I remembered I got so confused I thought I was going crazy, but I waited a few days without letting on about anything, and little by little I started analyzing the situation I was in. I came up with a hypothesis about what must have happened, the thing that seemed closest to the truth, and in the end I made up my mind to escape.

“It wouldn’t have been a surprise if I’d gone crazy then.

“I had to go wild inside myself, fighting to keep my sanity.

“People try instinctively to take the easy route, right? We shy away from pain.

“So I didn’t want to believe that the people I was living with then, day after day, were bad, and my mind would drift off on its own, trying to think that the things I had remembered were fake, that
they
were the lie. I hated the thought of leaving Mino and Chii, there was no ambiguity in that, and it frightened me to think of what might happen to them if I escaped and the police came. At times like that, your thoughts are inevitably drawn to the worst-case scenario.

“Is this really a foreign country? No, it has to be Japan. But I was born here, I grew up in this place. No, that’s not true. I was kidnapped. Kidnapping is bad—I’ve got to do something. But they’re all such good people, how could I accuse them of something like that? How long have I been here? Has it been a really long time? I wonder if Mom is still alive …
I was bewildered.
Is this woman I keep remembering my mom? No, I know she isn’t, she’s just a vision I created because I want a mom so badly …
Everything got tangled up like that, the thoughts kept hounding me. I don’t say that lightly: my mind was really being torn to pieces, stripped of everything inside it, and I started getting very unstable.

“So finally I got up the courage to talk with Mino and Chii.

“And this is what Mino said, late at night, in a whisper:

“ ‘I think you’re probably right, Nobu. I’ve been living here with everyone ever since I was a baby, so I don’t really know about certain things, but I think you were probably stolen. I mean, it’s odd that your mom isn’t here. And this
is
Japan. That’s for sure. Even though everyone says it isn’t.’

“He had no idea how it might affect him and his sister, but still he told me his opinion. In a sense, he was risking his life, and I can’t ever be grateful enough to him for that, as long as I live. Even though it is so hard for me to go and see them.

“The reason Chii is bedridden, and the reason I get so exhausted sometimes—it’s not just a matter of emotional trauma. All the drugs they gave us destroyed our livers. Mino has gotten a lot better, but I don’t think he’s completely recovered, either.

“Not long after the group disbanded, Mino and Chii’s mother died of liver cancer.

“The house they live in now was originally used as a kind of combined storage and meeting room for the shrine, and that’s why my mother and I were able to live there a while, and when Mino and Chii’s mother died we decided to invite them to live there, without paying any rent or anything. We wanted them to feel free to stay there forever. After all, part of me still isn’t sure whether what I did was really best for them. Maybe they would have been better off if I hadn’t informed on the group when I escaped, and they could have just stayed there like that for the rest of their lives. Sometimes I wonder. So I wanted to find a way to help them out with their new lives, and to protect them from society. My mom felt exactly the same way.”

Nakajima’s arms remained tightly folded across his chest. I knew the street we were walking on very well, and yet it seemed somehow to be detached from the earth, subtly distorted.

Plodding on with even steps, I listened.

“The group hadn’t been living in that place all along—evidently they were moving around from place to place, all over Japan, looking for somewhere to settle. So all kinds of people were coming and going all the time. It wasn’t at all unusual to suddenly see some face you didn’t recognize, or for someone who had been there to disappear, so it wasn’t hard for me to escape.

“The thought that scared me the most was that maybe I’d keep going and going, but maybe I’d never arrive anywhere, and if I finally came to a populated area I’d find that it really was a foreign country, and I wouldn’t be able to communicate, and it would turn out that all those memories I’d had really were just an illusion. I didn’t have a passport, so I would have no way of getting back to the ‘home’ I was thinking of anyway. So I’d just have to go back to the same place and live there again. Without any hope. What if
that
turned out to be the truth? These thoughts plagued me endlessly. That was the worst, it really was.

“I started thinking that if that were the case, I’d rather just be dead.

“If this little dream I’d cherished turned out not to be there for me to hold on to anymore, I mean. Because it wasn’t just my mother I was dreaming of. It was the background against which I came into this world, the scent of freedom that wafted through my life, supported by all the hopes and the love my parents had for me, because back then, when I was still a kid, things like that were everything to me.

“My head was spinning, and the world before me looked so dark, I was ready to lie down right there on the spot and die.

“But I had Mino. His words, etched deep in my mind, were my reality then.

“I could count on Mino. I’m sure I would have despaired even more if he hadn’t told me we were in Japan, probably in a place called Shimoda, even though no one ever said so.

“He had been growing suspicious for some time as a result of information he got from his mysterious sister. He was secretly afraid that the adults might learn about her strange powers, and then their mother would end up in an even stronger position in the group, and they would have to stay even longer than they might otherwise. He tried his best to hide the things she said from them, but it was really hard. So I had no choice but to save them. I don’t know if they would agree that what I did deserves to be called ‘saving,’ though. After all, both their parents were part of the group—at least I’m pretty sure their father was, too. I’m sure their wounds, the despair they felt, must have been a lot deeper than mine.

“I think what Mino did for me, his noble sacrifice, destroyed any sense of stability he’d had. And Chii’s, too. And even if that stability was built on a lie, at the time it was still something they could rely on. After that, everything changed. And yet he wanted that change, although maybe he wanted it for us, in order to save me and Chii—and that act of love, more than anything, is the reason he can keep smiling the way he does, even now.

“I trudged through the forest, thinking only of Mino’s words, and of my mother.

“I get the sense that most people assume that when someone who’s been brainwashed comes out of it there’s a feeling of relief, that it’s like waking up, but it isn’t like that. You feel sort of dull, nothing is clear—it makes you miserable. That’s the truth. I felt like there was nothing good waiting for me. I would actually keep feeling that way for a long time. Right then, though, making my way along that dark mountain road, I wasn’t worried about that, I was just fighting for my life. Trying to keep from getting torn to pieces inside, trying to hold myself together.

“Eventually I saw lights, and my heart started thumping, my head hurt so badly it felt like it was about to split, and all the scary stories I had ever heard weighed down on me until I could hardly bear it anymore. But I kept walking. I stepped, almost collapsed, into the light. I didn’t know what it was, but there was a fence around the space, and I had the sensation of something beautiful watching me, so I stumbled over in that direction, and there was a stable with five horses lined up in their stalls, looking out at me.

“For some reason the horses didn’t get nervous or start acting up when they saw me; they simply stood there watching me, perfectly still. Their black eyes and their lustrous coats made me feel completely calm. I stretched out a hand and touched one of them. I wasn’t afraid he would bite me. I just wanted to touch him, because he was so lovely. His skin felt warm, and then I caught a whiff of animal smell, and I loved the hard feel of his coat, stiff like grass—my eyes filled with tears. The horse just kept looking at me, it didn’t seem to be thinking anything, his eyes were like two lakes, so gorgeous, drawing me in.

“I’ll be grateful to that horse for the rest of my life.

“That horse, with its wild, natural eyes, brought me back, made me all right.

“I pulled myself together again, got a grip.… The place I was in, it was a small riding club. I went and knocked on the clubhouse door. People who had come in from riding and the couple who owned the club were inside chatting over coffee, and they were pretty taken aback when they saw me, but the wife seemed to deduce immediately from how I looked that something was very wrong. She told me to come inside and sat me down at the back of the room and made me some coffee. The coffee smelled good, but even better than that was her smell—she smelled like a mother. The kind of bodily, nice scent of a mother who never lets her children out of her sight, who always thinks first of her kids—I smelled it. And it brought back such memories, it was so warm and familiar, that I cried and cried and couldn’t stop.

“ ‘You’re Japanese, right? So this is Japan, after all? Please, call the police. I don’t even know my own name right now, honest. I was kidnapped.’

“I kept repeating those words, crying all the while.

“And then one of the riders said he recognized me, he had seen my mother on TV, and so right away the woman’s husband called the police.

“ ‘You can tell us the details later’, the woman said, and gave me more coffee and some curry rice. There was lots of meat in it, and I realized how much I had missed that, too. When I was with that group, we weren’t allowed to eat any meat at all.

“And it came back to me that this is what a mother is, this is the kind of being she is—it doesn’t matter what the situation is, if someone’s cold she warms him, and if he’s hungry she wants to feed him. I remembered that with such intensity, so vividly. It was okay for me to remember now, I realized, and I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t cry anymore. It took time for my heart to unclench itself.”

We arrived at the center. Nakajima stopped talking while I chatted with the guard.

Then, as we walked through the small gate, I asked my first question.

“And you and your mom went to live in that house by the lake after you got back?”

Nakajima nodded. After that, he started speaking again, but less rapidly.

“I was almost ten at the time, but after I returned my mother and I slept in the same futon every night, with her hugging me tight. And for about three months, every morning when we woke up she would look at my face and burst out sobbing. I remember the suffocating feeling I got, even when my eyes were closed—the sense that someone is staring at you, at your face. I knew if I opened my eyes I’d see her, her face swollen from crying, so I just lay there, pretending to be asleep. It felt so oppressive, I’m sure it was even worse than what you feel being with me now, dealing with the things you don’t know about me. It was so over the top that my father got fed up and left her. That’s how bad it was.” Nakajima smiled. “I worried that she might go crazy, and so I asked if she could join me for counseling, even though it was really only meant for me, and we did go together, for a long time. Even then, with her in that condition, she did whatever was necessary to protect me when the media came to do a story on us, and she told me we were going to make up for the time I’d lost—sometimes we’d go places, amusement parks and so on, and my father would come along, too.