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2. To Find Jito Joo
Int. Note
Something about the poem that had been written on the photograph of Jito Joo was haunting me. I woke several times in the night at the house where I was staying and the image in my mind was always the same — a still lake in a country of still lakes and a bright sun overhead. There was no sound, none at all. There was no possibility of sound. I felt in it the silence that had come over my wife — that very silence which seemed to me then to have ruined my happiness, and which began the long journey that had led me here to Japan to investigate the matter of Oda Sotatsu. I felt in it too his silence.
And so I told myself — this is the heart of it. If this is a mystery, then the thing that is most mysterious is the involvement of Jito Joo. What exactly was her relationship with Sotatsu? Why was she there at the prison? For what reason was she repeatedly admitted, if indeed it was her — all those times?
I told myself, you must find Jito Joo, and if you can, then you must show her that this is a thing you understand, this silence, even if it means saying things aloud to her that you have said to no one. You must draw out from her things she has told no one. Perhaps in it there will be something — a thing that makes sense from these silences, the silence of my wife, the silence of Oda Sotatsu, the stretching on seemingly pointlessly, of life, day after day with no one to call it off.
So, I began to look for Jito Joo wherever she might be found.
Int. Note
First, I looked for her in public records, in phone books, listings of ownership, real estate purchases, deeds, and found nothing. One supposes she could easily have chosen to go by another name. Indeed, she had every reason to want to.
Jiro had no idea where she might be. He felt it was unnecessary to look for her. I hired a private investigator (of a sort) to no avail. I don’t believe the man ever left his office. I began to feel it would never happen.
There is a book that I read once, a book about an Austrian huntsman. Any Trick to Finding. Some year of my childhood, I found the book in the children’s section of the library, where it had been placed, perhaps because the title was silly. I imagine a librarian must have put it there, thinking it was not an adult book. Actually, it was written in a very ornate and mannered English by a British gamekeeper who had known the book’s subject (in his youth). I might be the only one ever to have opened the book (in that library). Certainly I was the last, because I stole it and hid it under my brother’s bed behind a dulcimer and a collection of broken tambourines. Where it is now, I can’t say. I think that house was demolished soon after we left it. In any case, the book was quite marvelous. It tells the man’s story — his childhood in a poor Austrian village, his willingness to be of use, the discovery of his special talent, his rise to a position as head gamekeeper on one then another magnificent and extensive Austrian estate. But what was his special talent? Well — he could find anything, anything at all. Somehow the man, Jurgen Hollar, had invented a system for himself that enabled him to be extraordinarily efficient in several departments of being in which most humans act with extreme looseness of endeavor. Finding things was the principal expression of his gift.