So what about the cat? she asked. I summarized for her my meeting with Malta Kano in the hotel in Shinagawa. I told her about my polka-dot tie: that there had been no sign of it in the wardrobe. That Malta Kano had managed to find me in the crowded tearoom nonetheless. That she had had a unique way of dressing and of speaking, which I described. Kumiko enjoyed hearing about Malta Kano's red vinyl hat, but when I was unable to provide a clear answer regarding the whereabouts of our lost cat, she was deeply disappointed.
Then she doesn't know where the cat is, either? Kumiko demanded. The best she could do was tell you it isn't in our neighborhood any longer?
That's about it, I said. I decided not to mention anything about the obstructed flow of the place we lived in or that this could have some connection to the disappearance of the cat. I knew it would bother Kumiko, and for my own part, I had no desire to increase the number of things we had to worry about. We would have had a real problem if Kumiko insisted on moving because this was a bad place. Given our present economic situation, it would have been impossible for us to move.
That's what she tells me, I said. The cat is not around here anymore. Which means it will never come home? I don't know, I said. She was vague about everything. All she came up with was little hints. She did say shed get in touch with me when she found out more, though. Do you believe her? Who knows? I don't know anything about this kind of stuff. I poured myself some more beer and watched the head settle. Kumiko rested her elbow on the table, chin in hand. She must have told you she wont accept payment or gifts of any kind, she said. Uh-huh. That's certainly a plus, I said. So whats the problem? She wont take our money, she wont steal our souls, she wont snatch the princess away. We've got nothing to lose.
I want you to understand one thing, said Kumiko. That cat is very important to me. Or should I say to us. We found it the week after we got married. Together. You remember?
Of course I do.
It was so tiny, and soaking wet in the pouring rain. I went to meet you at the station with an umbrella. Poor little baby. We saw him on the way home. Somebody had thrown him into a beer crate next to the liquor store. Hes my very first cat. Hes important to me, a kind of symbol. I cant lose him.
Don't worry. I know that.
So where is he? Hes been missing for ten days now. That's why I called my brother. I thought he might know a medium or clairvoyant or something, somebody who could find a missing cat. I know you don't like to ask my brother for anything, but he's followed in my fathers footsteps. He knows a lot about these things.
Ah, yes, the Wataya family tradition, I said as coolly as an evening breeze across an inlet. But whats the connection between Noboru Wataya and this woman?
Kumiko shrugged. I'm sure shes just somebody he happened to meet. He seems to have so many contacts these days.
I'll bet.
He says she possesses amazing powers but that shes pretty strange. Kumiko poked at her macaroni casserole. What was her name again?
Malta Kano, I said. She practiced some kind of religious austerities on Malta. That's it. Malta Kano. What did you think of her? Hard to say. I looked at my hands, resting on the table. At least she wasn't boring. And thats a good thing. I mean, the worlds full of things we cant explain, and somebody's got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn't boring than somebody who is. Right? Like Mr. Honda, for example.
Kumiko laughed out loud at the mention of Mr. Honda. He was a wonderful old man, don't you think? I liked him a lot.
Me too, I said.
For about a year after we were married, Kumiko and I used to visit the home of old Mr. Honda once a month. A practitioner of spirit possession, he was one of the Wataya family's favorite channeler types, but he was terrifically hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aid, he could barely make out what we said to him. We had to shout so loud our voices would rattle the shoji paper. I used to wonder if he could hear what the spirits said to him if he was so hard of hearing. But maybe it worked the other way: the worse your ears, the better you could hear the words of the spirits. He had lost his hearing in the war. A noncommissioned officer with Japans Manchurian garrison, the Kwantung Army, he had suffered burst eardrums when an artillery shell or a hand grenade or something exploded nearby during a battle with a combined Soviet-Outer Mongolian unit at Nomonhan on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchuria.
Our visits to Mr. Honda's place were not prompted by a belief on our part in his spiritual powers. I had never been interested in these things, and Kumiko placed far less trust in such supernatural matters than either her parents or her brother. She did have a touch of superstition, and she could be upset by an ominous prognostication, but she never went out of her way to involve herself in spiritual affairs.
The only reason we went to see Mr. Honda was because her father ordered us to. It was the one condition he set for us to marry. True, it was a rather bizarre condition, but we went along with it to avoid complications. Neither of us had expected an easy time from her family. Her father was a government official. The younger son of a not very well-to-do farm family in Niigata, he had attended prestigious Tokyo University on scholarship, graduated with honors, and become an elite member of the Ministry of Transport. This was all very admirable, as far as I was concerned. But as is so often the case with men who have made it like this, he was arrogant and self-righteous. Accustomed to giving orders, he harbored not the slightest doubt concerning the values of the world to which he belonged. For him, hierarchy was everything. He bowed to superior authority without question, and he trampled those beneath him without hesitation. Neither Kumiko nor I believed that a man like that would accept a poor, twenty- four-year-old nobody like me, without position or pedigree or even decent grades or future promise, as a marriage partner for his daughter. We figured that after her parents turned us down, we'd get married on our own and live without having anything to do with them.
Still, I did the right thing. I formally went to ask Kumiko's parents for her hand in marriage. To say that their reception of me was cool would be an understatement. The doors of all the worlds refrigerators seemed to have been thrown open at once.
That they gave us their permission in the end-with reluctance, but in a near-miraculous turn of events-was thanks entirely to Mr. Honda. He asked them everything they had learned about me, and in the end he declared that if their daughter was going to get married, I was the best possible partner for her; that if she wanted to marry me, they could only invite terrible consequences by opposing the match. Kumiko's parents had absolute faith in Mr. Honda at the time, and so there was nothing they could do but accept me as their daughters husband.
Finally, though, I was always the outsider, the uninvited guest. Kumiko and I would visit their home and have dinner with them twice a month with mechanical regularity. This was a truly loathsome experience, situated at the precise midpoint between a meaningless mortification of the flesh and brutal torture. Throughout the meal, I had the sense that their dining room table was as long as a railway station. They would be eating and talking about something way down at the other end, and I was too far away for them to see. This went on for a year, until Kumiko's father and I had a violent argument, after which we never saw each other again. The relief this gave me bordered on ecstasy. Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.