The sober luster of the dark mahogany instrument, which Kimi now held in her hands, appeared like restless agate or a drink-reddened chest in the red lighting. There was a sense of the carefree, like the firm flesh of a precocious girl, in the small gourd-shaped object. Its whole being seemed to have been designed in order to tease and cajole with its easy sound. Further still, stealing a look as far as one could inside the body of the instrument from the sound hole revealed a boundless, sweeping landscape of agitated shadows and shapes and dust-choked nooks and crannies—like the backstage scene in some grand theater. Kōji thought it amusing that Kimi had discovered an instrument so like herself in character.
Such a detailed explanation of the manufacturing process suggested a strange detachment between Kimi and this instrument. While right now the instrument certainly belonged to her, there would forever exist a tantalizing distance between the hands that once helped create it in the wood shaving–filled factory and the instrument itself.
Kōji found it easy to imagine the factory where Kimi worked. The high steel ceilings, the roar of the various machines, scattered deposits of sawdust, the strong, invigorating smell of lacquer…
At any rate, it would not be too dissimilar to the prison paper factory where he had worked for fifty yen a month making a variety of multicolored supplements for sundry children’s magazines.
It was tough when the New Year’s editions were due out. There was the first supplement, and then the second, and by the end of the season there would have been as many as five printings.
How he had adored the colors—like the gaudy plumage of a cockatoo! The supplements were full of paper handbags, paper brooches, floral design paper clocks, self-assembly paper furniture, paper pianos, paper flower baskets, and paper beauty salons—all done out in festival colors and printed on glossy paper.
If the print had shifted a little out of line, the effect produced an even more dazzling blaze of color.
One of the inmates who had children of his own had wept as he made the paper products. But Kōji didn’t have that problem. Yet when he imagined children receiving these toys and the warmth and comfort of their homes, he felt more anguish than when he recalled neon-lit streets of bars.
One time, when he was walking around Numazu following his release from prison, he noticed a pile of beautiful children’s magazines, stuffed full of supplements, heaped up under the protruding summer awning at the entrance to a bookstore. Maybe I made one of those supplements, he reflected as he glanced furtively at them.
He resolved never to have children. He wouldn’t be able to bear watching his child delightedly fingering the paper toys. He felt sure he would be a hard-to-please, disagreeable father. Kōji wanted to distance himself forever from those supplements. To him they used to symbolize those who had colorful, festive lives and who enjoyed the pleasures of a happy home. But then the hands that had made these supplements were the same roughly cracked hands that had committed that crime…
All the while he was listening to Kimi’s explanation, he kept thinking about the secret process for the production of the beautiful “special” children’s supplements. Although Kimi’s hands were not those of a criminal, the dismal nature of working in an instrument factory was not so far removed from his own experience.
And so he felt that, though she may not have been doing so deliberately, she was bragging about it shamelessly. At least that’s how it seemed to him. Working amid the dust, the wood shavings, and the smell of lacquer, Kimi brought one of those beautiful completed products home as a keepsake. Still, Kōji found it hard to believe the way she finally was able to possess every single aspect of the finished ukulele—its perfect smoothness, carefree tunes, the lyricism of “South Island,” and its leisurely melancholy… It was clearly “Kimi’s ukulele,” and it would remain distinct from the other thousands of ukuleles. By rights she herself ought never to have been able to acquire a real ukulele, the perfect instrument, and so it had become her icon.
The cat played around Kōji’s feet. From time to time, it extended the claws of its forepaws slightly and raked playfully at his insteps where they were exposed between the thongs of his geta. Since it was summer, it didn’t come onto the customers’ knees, preferring instead to lie with its stomach on the cool concrete floor. The cat liked Kōji, but Kōji disliked this strange, unaccountable fondness. With the tip of his toe he lightly kicked the cat away. But it soon came back again. At the Kusakado greenhouse, they would sometimes use bonito stock as well as chemical fertilizer. But it didn’t make Kōji reek of fish any more than the fishermen.
Kimi strummed her ukulele and sang a Hawaiian song she had picked up in the women’s dormitory at the Hamamatsu factory.
She was wearing a black, sleeveless beach dress with a sunflower pattern. A shadow was cast vertically into the cleavage of her voluptuous breasts, incongruous against her small stature. On a mere whim, she had clean-shaven one of her armpits, but left some stubble on the other. Her slightly stern face wore a frown, her mouth was like a beautiful half-open sea cucumber, and her dark skin was deeply reddened—maybe from the drink or perhaps from the lighting in the bar.
Kiyoshi was listening intensely to her, his bright, round face nestled in the turned-up collar of his white aloha shirt. Matsukichi, who was wearing a cotton waistband rolled up above his chest, rested his elbow on the tabletop, his chin on his hand.
Kōji sat across the table gazing intently at this stiflingly hot, still scene, as if looking through a picture frame.
He thought about Yūko and suddenly felt choked with emotion. I have repented, I have… He hadn’t realized before now just how much he was in love with her. If he were honest about it, he had to admit that he hadn’t wielded that wrench for her. However, he was sure he was in love now.
The bitter taste of contrition heightened the sweetness of his desire, and his longing for Yūko made its presence known here and there on the most unexpected and delicate of occasions. Kōji now felt constantly afraid of being ambushed by such desires. Yūko’s trifling gestures—the way she would raise her upper arm when she put a hand to her hair; the line of her skirt as she descended, in a stooped manner, the greenhouse steps; the fragrance of her face powder as it began to yield a little to the perspiration beneath… When these gestures suddenly shook him to his very foundations, he felt as though he had been waylaid by his own desires—stabbing him sharply in the back.
But the impossibility of the situation was even more apparent than before. Like living in a house built above a river with the constant clamor of water below, every inch of Kōji’s desire was directly linked to the noise of a culvert flowing through the memory of that dark jail. I have repented, I have… Whenever his desire for something arose, it inevitably revived his crime. Whether or not she was aware of Kōji’s feelings, Yūko had not allowed him to kiss her since the incident during the picnic.
Kōji scratched the bridge of his nose. It itched, unhappily, as if a fly were trying to scurry up his face.
It was clear from Yūko’s expression that some kind of change had occurred inside her since the picnic. During the hot evenings, there were times when she would pant faintly through open lips. She would gaze, absentmindedly, at a fixed point, and sometimes she would address Kōji in an unfriendly manner and make stinging remarks. And what was more, she seemed scarcely aware of the changes that had occurred within herself.