Akari and I hailed a taxi outside Matsuyama Airport, then sat back in silence as the driver followed the road along the Kame River all the way to the Forest House. Upon our arrival we learned that Unaiko and Ricchan, having completed the preparations for our stay, had returned to Matsuyama, where the theater group had its offices. In their stead a young female member of the drama troupe, whom I had met briefly the last time I was at the Forest House, had prepared our evening meal and was waiting to greet us. Akari and I ate dinner without exchanging a word. After the girl from the Caveman Group had shown Akari around the premises — he had been there before, but it always took some time for him to get acclimated to any change of living situation — she gave us the keys to the house and took off. Akari climbed the stairs to the room she had pointed out as his, which was next to my combination study/bedroom.
I went into the great room on the ground floor, which was clearly in the process of being converted from a rehearsal area back into a living space. After opening my luggage and making a halfhearted stab at unpacking, I poured myself a little nightcap and drank it down. As I climbed the stairs, I couldn’t hear any sounds emanating from Akari’s room. Feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness, I crawled into my bed, which smelled of sunlight. When I got up again a moment later to check whether the night-light in the bathroom was on, I saw that Akari’s pill organizer and a used drinking glass — clear evidence he hadn’t forgotten to take his bedtime medicine — had been left out in plain sight, where I would be sure to notice them.
The next morning I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. When I ran downstairs to answer it (Akari was evidently still asleep), an unmistakably familiar voice on the other end said, “Hello, this is Daio.” Despite Asa’s warning, I was startled. Daio must have picked up on my reaction, because he immediately launched into an apologetic explanation about the circumstances surrounding his spurious “death.”
When the training camp was breaking up, he told me, his mischievous disciples apparently decided that it would be amusing to play an elaborate prank on Kogito Choko, and the resulting jape was somehow connected with a “pre-death wake” they had staged in Daio’s honor before the members of the group went their separate ways.
“I’m already in the neighborhood, down by the river,” Daio went on. “I’ll wander around here for half an hour or so before heading to the Forest House. I’ve been there once before, when Asa invited me to a meeting of the drama group, so I know the way. She gave me a key as well.” “Thank you for calling,” I said. “If you had just appeared at the door with no advance notice, I might have thought I was seeing a ghost. On the other hand, my list of friends and acquaintances includes more and more dead people these days, so it might have seemed perfectly natural …”
“Asa said I should drop by as soon as possible after you arrived,” Daio said. “By the way, I gather you went through quite an ordeal with the turtle my disciples sent you as a joke. For quite some time now, reading has been my only pleasure; I read all your books as soon as they come out, so I know you wrote about that epic struggle in The Changeling. Speaking of turtles, there’s a much easier way to kill them, you know. You just put the creature on the cutting board, belly up, and when it sticks out its neck and starts thrashing around, trying to turn over, bam! You chop off its head, easy as pie. But hey — I guess even an erudite person like you has a few gaps in his knowledge!”
Half an hour later I came downstairs again and found Daio waiting in the great room. On the south side of the spacious room, between some professional lighting equipment and a pair of giant speakers, there were an oblong table and two chairs.
Daio was perched on one of those chairs, and I noticed that my opened trunk had been neatly placed on the floor of the makeshift stage in front of the large plate-glass window overlooking the back garden. I left the luggage strewn around the room when I went to bed, and Daio had apparently tidied it up without being asked. The sofa had been cleared off, too, evidently for Akari and me to use when we came downstairs. I couldn’t help thinking, This must be how it feels to have a butler, or a valet: a luxurious perk I had only read about in British novels.
Daio got up from his chair and gestured for me to take a seat on the couch. Then he shot a glance toward the stairs, clearly hoping to see Akari on his way down. I recalled that in the seemingly solemn letter his prankish training-camp disciples sent me they had used the term “one-legged and one-eyed” (which is often employed, both in period fiction and anime, to describe swordsmen with mythical powers) in reference to their leader. Just as I remembered, Daio was missing an arm, and one of his sleeves was neatly pinned up in the usual way.
“Hello, Kogito. It’s been a while,” he said, openly giving me the once-over. “I can’t help thinking that if your father had lived to enjoy his old age, he would have looked a lot like you do now — aside from your bad posture, of course. Your father always thought you would grow up to be an interesting chap, and you seem to have turned out just as he hoped.”
“Actually, I think the term he used was ‘joker,’ rather than ‘interesting chap,” I said lightly.
“No, but seriously, you really are an interesting guy,” Daio insisted. “And that isn’t the same as being a joker, or a jester, or whatever. As a child you were always searching for obscure characters in your father’s dictionary — you were kind of like an insect collector, only with kanji. I remember one time when your father was happily expounding on the meaning of some word or other and you interrupted, saying, ‘That’s not what it says in the dictionary!’ Then you added, a bit more kindly, that the print was extremely tiny and it was a rather complicated character, so your father had probably just misread it. And when he fished out his magnifying glass and examined the word in question, sure enough: you were right.”
It was actually a rather proud memory for me. At the time my father was only fifty years old, but because of a combination of wartime privations and the remoteness of our mountain village he was malnourished, and he probably had the eyesight of a much older man. As a result he would occasionally misread something, especially when the print was very small. I was obsessed with finding unusual kanji, so I used to spend hours poring over the index of my father’s big dictionary. That’s why I was able to suss out his mistakes on more than one occasion. I even made a point of memorizing potentially problematic characters, and whenever I came across one that I thought my father might be likely to misread at some point, I would be filled with youthful excitement.
Perhaps the most memorable example involved Shinobu Origuchi’s explanatory comments regarding his most famous novel, The Book of the Dead. Those remarks took the form of an essay titled “The Motif of the Mountain-Crossing Buddha,” which was published several years later. The passage in question was a description of how, in olden days, pilgrims used to flock to Shitennoji (the Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings) to watch the sun set over the western gate — a view popularly considered to be a preview of the heavenly paradise known as the Pure Land. Some of the most fervent believers would actually seek to take a shortcut to the Pure Land by drowning themselves in the Inland Sea or whatever body of water happened to be nearby.