Sir, allow me now to call your attention to the fact that I am once again addressing you directly. I will now move my testimony forward.
A torrential rain has begun, and it’s unlikely that anyone will come looking for me while it lasts. The roads will be impassable for a few more days after it abates, as you can imagine. But by then I’ll be ready to come to you instead; I’ll turn myself in. So for now there’s plenty of time to enjoy telling my story. Truth be told? I don’t care whether you’re interested in what I’m about to say, but what else is there to do in this lodge if I can’t leave? All I can do is play with the only other person here with me now, in one form or another: you. So let the game begin. Do you remember my saying that there were details about my life you could understand only if I doled the information out morsel by morsel? What I meant is that if I were to tell you all the particulars of what had impacted me the most in one fell narrative swoop, or more specifically the single greatest incident after the bomb at Hiroshima, you wouldn’t fully appreciate it. No doubt you would grasp it as information. That’s not hard to do. But what I’m trying to do is drench you in the details. I want you to soak up every drop of my happiness, sir. That’s why now, in this savage rain, I’m beginning my game, a game of riddles, and here’s your first clue:
Rain.
Drop after drop it’s been saturating you throughout this story, without your ever noticing. Do you feel capable right now of gathering all the little written droplets together to tell me which is the particularly significant event that I wish to highlight now? I suspect not. So let me just crack the window a sliver, enough for the water to christen the text lightly as I plow on. Let’s see if maybe, just maybe, you’ll figure out what all the fuss is about. If you puzzle it out before I have to reveal it, you’ll have won the game, in which case let me congratulate you beforehand.
Remember my friend S’s sex toy store, where I got my crime weapon? Let me tell you it thrived, which allowed her to buy the space next door to set up a library accessible through a small door, so the murmuring of clients wouldn’t disturb the readers’ need for silence. At first I thought it was strange how much effort she put into gathering such a large number of books and buying a space that was elegant and comfortable, with wooden tables and individual lamps for each reader, because I didn’t see the logical connection between the store and the library or couldn’t justify the need for a reading space so close to a sex shop, seemingly an unusual juxtaposition. Yet whenever I went from the shop to the library or back, I never felt a gap between the two, only a soft transition to and fro, and soon I discovered a simple explanation precisely through reading. Our genitalia are not our bodies’ most erogenous zone, and neither is our skin; it’s our brain. That’s why I’d always gotten so aroused by reading books that had nothing ostensibly erotic about them. It was the primeval sexual organ that got so excited, activated by the challenge of thought, which at the same time activated my desire. I bet you still have no idea where I want to take you with all of this? And I say, “I want to take you,” because I wouldn’t mind if you won the game—it would make you a worthy rival. So let’s see now, another clue, one little drop after another of rain:
The brain, the most erotic organ in the body.
If you’ve accepted my challenge to play, it’s because you’re interested, and so in a way it could be said that you are interested in me, as the other player. Arousing another’s curiosity is not an easy task. I presume it means you attribute a certain amount of intelligence to me. Thank you. This is precisely the case. I am an intelligent woman. So the question is, are you suitably intelligent to read between my lines? If so, this acumen will allow you to reach a climax before I have to explain. Just as in S’s library, I’m the book that attracts your attention, but also the book that foresees my ending.
I spent many hours in the library. There were days when you could say I was content, but invariably I was lonely. A while had passed since Jim’s death, and with his death, the abandonment of the outer search for Yoro (not the inner one, which I always carried with me). What I just wrote between parentheses could serve as another clue, expressed in this way: I carried Yoro inside of me. But let me continue—this last bit might get clearer toward the end of my story. I felt as though my love for Jim, the love we shared, belonged to another life. I felt disconnected from those past times. And yet, though my life was in many ways a new life, I still bore the same emptiness as before. I felt the gravity of eight months’ worth of gestation, while still feeling the absence. My belly showed as full as it was deserted. Read this quote, which I’m copying from one of my notebooks, a quote Okakura attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, probably paraphrasing slightly:
“A room is valuable not because of the walls or the ceiling, but for the emptiness that the walls and ceiling enclose. The utility of a pitcher of water is in the emptiness that can contain the water, not in the shape of the pitcher or the material of which it’s made. The emptiness is able to do this because it contains everything.”
I would think of myself as a pitcher at times, whose hollowness was meaningless, a pitcher without water, a pitcher full of water, but water that would never break before I went into labor, that didn’t keep my clay moist. There was no water for someone who thought that with me they might quench their thirst.
Third clue:
Emptiness can do everything, because it contains everything.
Under those circumstances, reading helped relieve my aloneness, but not just any kind of reading. I read mostly testimonies of people like me who had put into writing their reflections on absolute forms of isolation. Knowing that other people had gone through similar things made me feel I had companions, even if they were dead. As I write this, I realize that it might seem a little gloomy to feel that the dead are still with us, but the mere act of reading how other people have gone through situations like mine before brought them back to life for me, before me. I felt these others place a fraternal hand on my shoulder as I read what they wrote years or even centuries ago. Did you know that in some countries they are already studying the best way to warn the citizens of the future, people from other worlds millions of years ahead of us in time, about how truly hazardous the stockpiles of nuclear waste are? Language will have morphed completely by then, so how can we possibly take preventive measures against the dangers of nuclear waste for people who will be born or come to Earth for a visit thousands of generations hence? Fortunately life on Earth is still so young that as it stands today, we can understand almost all of what has been carried forward in written testimony. So how could I help but feel as though someone dead for only a few centuries shares my same era on Earth? If someone happens to read me a thousand years in the future, they’ll still understand me. You see? Two thousand years hence they’ll still appreciate this story, and yet it’s pretty clear they wouldn’t judge me the same way you are judging me now. Your law is worth nothing over time. Nothing. I’m not even going to trot out that hoary comparison with grains of sand. Your law isn’t worth a grain of sand. My words are so much grander than your law. Anyone’s words will outlast the law by thousands of years. Even the words of people who don’t know how to read, illiterates, will last longer than your current laws. Language is what I think gives cohesion to a single generation, a family.