Afterward, the newspaper would be passed to Teijirō and Kōji, who were working. There were times when they would get to reading right away with their heads buried in the pages. At others they wouldn’t bother with the morning paper at all, instead preferring to wait for the evening edition to arrive.
That morning, when Kōji came out of the greenhouse, having finished spraying the plants, he noticed Teijirō, sitting on a decorative rock in the shade of a mimosa—a place he had decided would afford him protection from the heat of the day, intently reading a newspaper. The morning sun was already strong and the chirring of cicadas suffused the air.
Kōji came out of the orchid house—where plants such as the Indian Aerides orchid and the African Angraecum orchid grew in temperatures of seventy degrees Fahrenheit or more. As he drew near to where Teijirō was sitting, Kōji used his white teeth—instead of his fingers—to crudely scrape off a small leaf fragment that had stuck to his perspiring arm. As he applied his teeth, he saw close up his own deeply tanned arm.
It was like an insect’s protective camouflage—the same splendid bronze color as the skin of everyone else in this village. Without being conscious of it, Kōji had waited to become adequately suntanned before he felt comfortable enough to frequent places like the Storm Petrel. His skin was no longer the conspicuous pale color it had been when he returned from prison. That sacred whiteness had disappeared from his flesh, and the sun had clothed him entirely in a new, flesh-colored undershirt that allowed him to blend in with the keen-eyed villagers.
He tried tasting the “sleeves” of his “undershirt.” They were salty—exactly the same flavor as Kimi’s body. A bovine, drab saltiness, devoid completely of any compassion or shame.
While Teijirō’s back—clad in an old running shirt—was suntanned and magnificently towering, as he busily read the newspaper, it seemed to have lost its usual strength, and it appeared hollow, like a black cavern. The sparse gray hairs on the nape of his neck formed points of strong white light. Kōji recalled Teijirō one time bending over, just as he was doing now, while he mended a shirt. Looking closely at the small tears in the material of life, Teijirō had worked assiduously at repairing the shirt so that he might hurriedly shut out the long, dark hours of solitude that came spouting up from out of those small holes.
Teijirō hadn’t noticed Kōji as he approached him from behind, and so Kōji ended up reading the title of the article Teijirō was so engrossed in.
The headline read: Aged dry-goods dealer strangles daughter.
Suddenly becoming aware of Kōji, Teijirō instantly transferred his attention to a different headline. Kōji had never seen Teijirō react with such swift sensitivity toward another person before.
“You gave me a start. Creeping up on me unexpectedly,” said Teijirō.
Then, roughly slapping the newspaper with his hand (at which point, a number of rose-pink petals that had fallen from the mimosa fluttered mysteriously on top of the news sheets), he pointed to a relatively small article and said, “Look at that. Seems like the typhoons will be early this year. We should make a start putting up the windbreaks.”
“Yeah. Maybe tomorrow…,” said Kōji, a little haughtily, thrusting his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. This unmindful condescension was a little like flexing his muscles, experimentally, before posing his spiteful, probing question.
“Kimi returns to Hamamatsu today, doesn’t she? She’ll be along soon to say good-bye, I guess.”
“That’s right. She’ll at least stop by to say good-bye, I should think,” agreed Teijirō, vaguely. While there was no visible change in his strong face, it was obvious to Kōji that a crucible of ambivalent emotions boiled, almost audibly, within Teijirō’s inner self.
Kōji recalled a box in which he kept several beetles as a child. Although one couldn’t see through the surface of the thick, sturdy box, what was happening inside, like a gentle wave rolling into the shore, was evident from the bizarre burnt smell leaking from within and from the noise of the black, sluggish beetles locked in combat, their legs scrabbling for a foothold and the clashing of their horns. It was just the same as that…
Kōji had been taken by the sudden urge to thrust the blade of his pocketknife into that box and open up a hole.
He took another pace forward and said, “Kimi has got quite a reputation in the village. In more ways than one… Did you know that?”
“I know,” replied Teijirō.
Answering without the slightest annoyance, Teijirō’s mild tone aroused Kōji’s suspicions.
Teijirō’s head, with its close-cropped, grizzled hair, could well endure even the most direct sunlight. Sitting in the soft shadow of the delicate leaves of the mimosa, he seemed all the more incongruous and appeared to betray the immunity to anguish that Kōji secretly fancied Teijirō possessed.
Even the deep lines on his sun-beaten face—which in the past hadn’t exhibited the slightest hint of anguish—now told of Teijirō’s suffering. Undoubtedly, because they had been in plain sight, they hadn’t drawn attention until now as a sign of that anguish; much like a ship’s waterline—overlooked merely as a decorative stripe until the vessel is in peril.
Teijirō glanced at Kōji, squatting on the ground nearby. Using a twig, Kōji described triangles and squares in the dry earth and then, watching the irritation of several soldier ants as they tried to negotiate the disrupted path, he casually squashed them with the tip of the twig.
A small patch of earth became damp with the fluid from the ants’ bodies. As the ants stopped moving on the ground, cracked by the harsh sunlight, it seemed that the world was experiencing a transformation so subtle that the world itself failed to notice.
With one large, darkly tanned hand, Teijirō tapped Kōji lightly on the shoulder. Kōji turned around and could see from the old man’s face that he was trying to say something—the words leaking out of the corner of his mouth like ripe fruit dropping to the ground.
When he spoke, he did so rapidly and with an extremely humble smile:
“Do you know why Kimi hates me? A little while after her mother died, I raped her. And then she left the house and went to Hamamatsu.”
Aghast, Kōji stared fixedly at the old man’s face. He was ill-equipped to deal with this, and it was clearly unfair that he should have to hear this sudden confession. Then Teijirō moved his left hand slowly around to the back pocket of his shorts.
Besides the countless wrinkles and bulging veins, Teijirō’s yellowish, dark brown hands were a mass of small, old scars picked up from rose thorns, sharp leaves, from dwarf bamboo and cacti and the like. Added to which, they were smeared in a coating of earth and fertilizer so that, buried beneath this layer, the scars gave off a luster all the more dull. His scar-covered hand took from his back pocket an object like a protective amulet, wrapped carefully in a single sheet of plain white calligraphy paper. He opened it under the sunlight as it filtered down through the trees. His practically keratinous fingers made an exaggeratedly dry noise as they touched the paper. From the middle of the wrapping, Teijirō took out a photograph, stuck to a sturdy mount, and showed it to Kōji.
In the sunlight, Kōji didn’t immediately realize what it was a picture of. The white part of the photograph was dazzlingly reflective and filled the middle of the picture, like a bank of clouds. He held it up obliquely to avoid the reflection. It was a photograph of a boy in a student’s uniform and a girl in a sailor uniform performing sexual intercourse. Neither was wearing anything below the waist. Kōji was startled to see that the face of the girl student, who was lying on her back, resembled Kimi’s. However, on closer inspection, it clearly wasn’t her—only the area around her eyebrows bore a resemblance.