To tell you the truth, I have no idea what this long, strange story of mine will mean to you, Mr. Okada. Perhaps it is nothing more than an old mans mutterings. But I wanted to- I had to- tell you my story. As you can see from having read my letter, I have lived my life in total defeat. I have lost. I am lost. I am qualified for nothing. Through the power of the curse, I love no one and am loved by no one. A walking shell, I will simply disappear into darkness.
Having managed at long last, however, to pass my story on to you, Mr. Okada, I will be able to disappear with some small degree of contentment.
May the life you lead be a good one, a life free of regrets.
33 A Dangerous Place
The People Watching Television
The Hollow Man
The door began to open inward. Holding the tray in both hands, the waiter gave a slight bow and went inside. I stayed in the shadows of the vase, waiting for him to come out and wondering what I would do when he did. I could go in as he came out. There was definitely someone inside Room 208. If things continued to develop as they had done before (which was exactly what was happening), the door should be unlocked. On the other hand, I could forget about the room for now and follow the waiter. That way, I could probably find my way to the place where he belonged.
I wavered between the two, but in the end I decided to follow the waiter. There was something dangerous lurking in Room 208, something that could have fatal consequences. I had all too clear a memory of the sharp rapping in the darkness and the violent white gleam of some knife-like thing. I had to be more careful. Let me first see where the waiter would lead me. Then I could come back to the room. But how was I supposed to do that? I thrust my hands in my pockets and found there, along with my wallet and change and handkerchief, a short ballpoint pen. I pulled the pen out and drew a line on my hand to make sure it had ink. I could use this to mark the walls as I followed the waiter. Then I could follow the marks back to the room. It should work.
The door opened and the waiter came out, hands empty. He had left everything inside the room, including the tray. After closing the door, he straightened himself and began whistling The Thieving Magpie as he hurried back along the route he had followed here. I stepped from my place in the shadows of the big vase and followed him. Wherever the corridor forked, I made a small blue X on the cream-colored wall. The waiter never looked back. There was something special about the way he walked. He could have been acting as a model for the World Hotel Waiter Walking-Style Championship. His walk all but proclaimed, This is how a hotel waiter is supposed to walk: head up, jaw thrust out, back straight, arms swinging rhythmically to the tune of The Thieving Magpie, taking long strides down the corridor. He turned many corners, went up and down many short flights of stairs, through stretches where the lighting was brighter or dimmer, past depressions in the walls that produced different kinds of shadows. I maintained a reasonable distance behind him to keep from being noticed, but following him was not particularly difficult. He might disappear for a moment as he turned a corner, but there was never any danger of my losing him, thanks to his vibrant whistling.
Just as a salmon migrating upstream eventually reaches a still pool, the waiter came out of the final corridor into the hotel lobby, the crowded lobby where I had seen Noboru Wataya on television. This time, however, the lobby was hushed, with only a handful of people sitting in front of a large television set, watching an NHK news broadcast. The waiter had stopped whistling as he neared the lobby, so as not to disturb people. Now he cut straight across the lobby floor and disappeared behind a door marked Staff Only.
Pretending to be killing time, I ambled around the lobby, sat on a few different sofas, looked up at the ceiling, checked the thickness of the rug beneath my feet. Then I went to a pay phone and put in a coin. This phone was as dead as the one in the room had been. I picked up a hotel phone and punched in 208, but this phone was also dead.
After that, I went to sit in a chair somewhat apart from where the people were watching television, to observe them unobtrusively. The group consisted of twelve people, nine men and three women, mostly in their thirties and forties, with two possibly in their early fifties. The men all wore suits or sports coats and conservative ties and leather shoes. Aside from some differences in height and weight, none had any distinguishing features. The three women were all in their early thirties, well dressed and carefully made up. They could have been on their way back from a high school reunion, except that they sat separately and gave no evidence of knowing each other. In fact, all the people in the group appeared to be strangers whose attention just happened to be locked on the same television screen. There were no exchanges of opinions or glances or nods.
I sat watching the news for a while from my place somewhat apart from theirs. The stories were of no special interest to me- a governor cutting a tape at the opening ceremony for a new road, a recall of children's crayons that had been discovered to contain a harmful substance, the death of a truck driver who had been hit by a tourist bus in Asahikawa because of icy roads and reduced visibility in a major snowstorm, with injuries to several of the tourists on their way to a hot-spring resort. The announcer read each of the stories in turn in a restrained voice, as though dealing out low-numbered cards. I thought about the television in the home of Mr. Honda, the fortune-teller. His set had always been tuned to NHK too.
These images of the news coming over the air were at the same time very real and very unreal to me. I felt sorry for the thirty-seven-year-old truck driver who had died in the accident. No one wants to die in agony of ruptured internal organs in a blizzard in Asahikawa. But I was not acquainted with the truck driver, and he did not know me. And so my sympathy for him had nothing personal about it. I could feel only a generalized kind of sympathy for a fellow human being who had met with a sudden, violent death. That generalized emotion might be very real for me and at the same time not real at all. I turned my eyes from the television screen and surveyed the big, empty lobby once more. I found nothing there to focus on. There were no hotel staff members present, and the small bar was not yet open. The only thing on the wall was a large oil painting of a mountain.
When I turned back to the television screen, there was a large close-up of a familiar face- Noboru Wataya's face. I sat up straight and turned my attention to the reporters words.
Something had happened to Noboru Wataya, but I had missed the beginning of the story. Soon the photo disappeared and the reporter came on-screen. He wore a tie and an overcoat, and he was standing at the entrance to a large building, with a mike in his hand.
... rushed to Tokyo Womens Medical University Hospital, where he is now in intensive care, but all we know is that he has not regained consciousness since his skull was fractured by an unknown assailant. Hospital authorities have refused to comment on whether or not his wounds are life-threatening. A detailed report on his condition is to be released sometime later. Reporting from the main entrance of Tokyo Womens Medical University...
And the broadcast returned to the studio, where the anchorman began to read a text that had just been handed to him. According to reports just in, Representative Noboru Wataya has sustained severe injuries to the head in what appears to have been an attack on his life. The young assailant burst into his office in Tokyo's Minato Ward at eleven-thirty this morning and, in the presence of the persons with whom Representative Wataya was meeting at the time, delivered several strong blows to the head with a baseball bat, inflicting severe injuries.