“I’m going to go and visit someone in T Hospital at three,” said Yūko, adding that Kōji should wait for her in the front garden of the hospital at three thirty.
T Hospital was a large, modern building located not very far from Ippei’s residence. It stood roughly halfway up a south-facing slope in the middle of a residential area forming a valley, and a gentle, wide sloping driveway looped its way around the hospital to the front entrance. This newly built five-story hospital had an airy appearance, incorporating the piloti style of architecture, with glass-faced walls, white-tiled pillars, and blue-tiled window frames. There was a lawn on the south-facing slope of the front garden, as well as hemp palms, Himalayan cedars, and a variety of shrubbery. Two or three benches had been set out, although nothing in particular had been provided to block out the intense sunlight of the summer afternoon.
With one side of his face exposed to the westerly sun, Kōji stared fixedly in the direction of the main entrance and felt as though the light were eating into his face like a red crab, leaving its imprint on his cheek. It was three forty-five, and there was still no sign of Yūko. A pair of kites was flying above the hospital. Cheerless fluorescent lamps shone from within the large, bright windows. One window was closed in by a set of glossy venetian blinds. Another displayed the shining silver of medical instruments. And by the windowsill a kettle was visible, and a red plastic toy.
Sweat dripped down the collar of Kōji’s suit as he waited. He suddenly felt that what Yūko had told him about visiting someone in the hospital was a lie. Perhaps she’d come here in connection with her own condition. What if by some chance that corruption that had taken such a firm hold of Ippei had also rooted itself inside Yūko and inflamed her soul like a summer sunset?
A sky-blue parasol unfurled near the entrance. Like someone emerging into a heavy downpour, no sooner had Yūko stepped out from behind the large glass doors than she had opened her sun shade. She’s trying to hide her face, thought Kōji, gloomily.
It was approximately thirty yards between the entrance and the bench, the two locations being intersected by a wide vehicle turnaround. He lacked the courage to fix his eyes on her slowly approaching form and averted his gaze toward the ground. Something by his feet caught his attention. It was a black wrench. It had doubtless been forgotten and left by somebody while they were repairing their car on the driveway.
Much later while in prison, Kōji repeatedly reflected on the discovery he made at that moment. That wrench was not merely something that had been dropped there; rather it was the manifestation of a material phenomenon making its sudden entry into this world. To all appearances, the wrench, which lay on its side half-buried in the overgrown lawn exactly on the border with the concrete driveway, looked all the more natural in its present position—as though it ought to be there. However, this was merely a splendid deception, for it was undoubtedly some other indescribable substance that had provisionally assumed the form of a wrench. Some form of substance that originally ought not to have been here at all; a substance that, having been excluded from this world’s order, at times suddenly manifests itself in order to upset the very foundations of that order—the purest of pure substances. It was that substance that must have taken the shape of the wrench.
We normally consider “will” to be something intangible. Take, for instance, a swallow that skims past the eaves, the strange shapes of bright clouds, the sharp ridgeline of a tiled roof, lipstick, a lost button, a single glove, a pencil, or the hard fastener of a flexible curtain. We don’t normally refer to such objects by the term “will.” However, if we assume that not our will, but the will of “something” exists, then it would come as no surprise to find that “something” manifesting itself as some form of material phenomenon. While consciously working to upset our even, everyday sense of order, it becomes stronger, more unifying, waiting for the moment when it can integrate us into its own inevitably full and jostling system, and while it normally scrutinizes us from some invisible form, at the most critical moment it takes on shape and manifests itself as a tangible material object. Where do they come from? Kōji often conjectured, while brooding in his cell, that such objects probably came from the stars.
That was but a moment. He gazed intently at the black luster of the wrench. The moment was imbued with a quite inexplicable enchantment; time stood still and almost burst with the fascination of the wrench. Time was like a basket piled up with fruit. Thanks to that dirty, black, key-shaped piece of iron, a cool, mellow, charming fascination overflowed from the basket in a mere instant. Without hesitation Kōji picked it up and put it in the inside pocket of his summer jacket. It burned like fire and penetrated his shirt, pleasantly warming the flesh of his chest. Before long, the sky-blue parasol came closely into view, its stretched silk canopy raised aloft, and Yūko smiled wryly with thickly painted lips.
“Sorry to have kept you. I should think you were hot, weren’t you? I should have let you borrow this.”
She held her parasol against the back of the bench and blocked out the westerly sun. At that moment, Kōji had no reason at all to believe that Yūko had witnessed his strange behavior just now.
Kōji vividly recollected what they had discussed at length under the hot sunlight. To begin with, Yūko related how the condition of the patient she had just visited had improved considerably more than she had expected. Kōji listened without believing a word of it. Then, totally out of the blue, she said that she thought she had aged, a notion that Kōji enthusiastically denied.
“But when I look at my husband’s face I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” said Yūko, as always, gradually broaching the topic of conversation Kōji most disliked. Whenever she began talking about Ippei, she appeared to Kōji like a woman who was rapidly sinking in a swamp right in front of him. Before he even had time to reach out his hand, she had slipped between the open lotus flowers, feet, thighs, stomach, and then chest, instantly drowned in the mire, until even her thickly adorned thin lips disappeared, still wearing that smile, and afterward, all that remained on the surface of the swamp was a faint ripple of water.
Yūko told the story, which, incidentally, Kōji had already heard from time to time, of how much fun Ippei had been in his twenties; how he had been the personification of youth itself. That was evident in the long, enraptured commentary “The Vilification of Youth” that appeared in his biography of Li He, and at the time he wrote it, Ippei undoubtedly looked upon his own adolescence in the same light as the celestial man in that brilliant poem of the same name:
The respect in which Kōji differed from Ippei could be simply expressed in the verse: “He went through life without so much as reading a word.”
There was no reason why Yūko should have recited this poem while sitting on the bench drenched in the summer sun. She had previously lent the book to Kōji, and she had in particular drawn his attention to this piece, which he read in the austere surroundings of his lodgings; he realized that the disagreeable line quoted by Ippei during their first conversation in the bar that night was the closing verse of the poem. The young Ippei had certainly not wanted for anything. But now everything he possessed had begun to emit the stench of decay. There was no reason to believe that Yūko had not detected this foul odor, but likely as not she had come to love its fragrance. Ever since Ippei had convinced himself that only good fortune was destined to come his way, the manner in which he lived his dreadfully affected and artificial lifestyle had become markedly conspicuous.