There was rarely much traffic on the road that ran from east to west by the fishing port. The boats left on the vacant plot of land accented the aura of desolation that pervaded the port on the fishermen's day off. There were a few stalls selling shellfish, but the place was too far out of the way for the sightseers clamming at low tide.
The roots of the trees lining the sidewalk were overgrown with grass. Hiroyuki did not hesitate to walk on the road instead. He was conscious that his son was deliberately negotiating each clump of grass so as not to step off the sidewalk.
'The fool,' Hiroyuki thought to himself.
The boy's mother had told him never to step off the sidewalk. The sight of his son unconditionally obeying his mother to the last word galled Hiroyuki to no end.
A broker's shop selling marine products stood before the Fishermen's Cooperative Association. As Hiroyuki looked into the back of the shop, a hefty woman came out, wiping her hands on her apron. He acknowledged her with a nod of his head.
'Don't suppose you've seen the wife at all?'
The tone of his question suggested that he was puzzled by his wife's absence.
'No… at least not today.'
Not being on particularly friendly terms with the shopkeeper, he felt little disposed to prolong the conversation. Once she got the bit between her teeth, this fishwife would keep callers all day with her prattle. Hiroyuki beat a hasty retreat into an alley just outside the shop.
As they wandered here and there along the coast, through the park, and around the Fishermen's Co-op, Hiroyuki approached countless people with the same question.
'I don't suppose you've seen the wife, have you?'
He would repeat the question whenever he spotted a familiar face. It was unlike Hiroyuki to be the first to speak, to be so spontaneous with his greetings. He was known as an unsociable character. He couldn't understand why he was behaving in this manner. His behaviour mystified himself. It was as though he were trying to impress upon all of them that he was walking around searching for his wife.
Hiroyuki's home was on a corner two blocks down the road from the fishwife's shop. The house occupied almost the entire plot it was built on. His boat, the Hamakatsu, was moored near the western extremity of the port, making it but a few minutes' walk from his house. Two years ago, they had enlarged their house. Since that time, they had used the older, original part of the building for storage. Hiroyuki had been born and raised in the part of the house that now housed his fishing tackle. During his entire thirty-three years, he had never lived anywhere else.
'I'm home!'
He was through the front door and into the house now, but still no one answered. Hiroyuki had expected to see his wife's all-too-familiar face pop out and greet him, dispelling his misgivings. The silence disillusioned him all too quickly.
'So she's not back yet.'
He clicked his tongue and strode across the living room, throwing open one of the sliding screens to the Japanese-style room beyond.
His daughter Haruna and his father Shozo were sitting on the floor at the low table facing each other. They were both eating jam buns. Although Shozo was only fifty-five years of age, his emaciated form and white hair suggested a man of over eighty.
Shozo had almost lost his life at sea. That was twenty years ago. He'd taken his boat out of the harbour in calm weather, but the wind had changed suddenly and the boat was being buffeted mercilessly by tail waves generated by southerly winds. His face was hurled against the edge of the boat and he was thrown overboard. Luckily, he was saved, but the accident served to trigger the gradual onset of senile dementia, impairing his perception, memory, and speech. For the past few years, his life had become a monotonous cycle of eating, excreting, and sleeping. It was not clear whether his condition was due to the accident or whether the accident had only served to call forth the symptoms of an innate disposition. Hiroyuki and the other members of his family guessed that it had probably been innate. There were other grounds for suspecting that this was the case. Their daughter Haruna, now approaching her seventh birthday, had begun to show symptoms of aphasia or some similar disorder.
She'd always been able to learn and interact normally, but for the past three months she hadn't been able to speak properly and had started making moaning sounds instead. For about a month, she still seemed to have mental images of the things she wanted to say and was simply having a hard time enunciating them. Then one day, she abruptly gave up trying to speak at all. Haruna had always been an odd child and had been experiencing difficulties at school. Since losing her ability to speak, she'd stopped attending school altogether. Whenever they had time on their hands, she and her grandfather would sit together devouring jam buns. All you had to do was give her a jam bun to keep her occupied. The family soon discovered that a great deal of trouble could be avoided by simply stocking up on jam buns and giving her more than she could eat. Hiroyuki was gradually losing the vitality, motivation, whatever else it took to set his family right.
As he observed his daughter and his father, sitting opposite each other eating jam buns in silence, the sight depressed him anew. How irritating it was not to be able to ask either of them whether his wife had returned while he had been out. Irritation was not the word; he was beginning to feel as if two dark walls were closing in on him from above and below to crush the life out of him.
One he had given life; the other had given him life. Now he was trapped between the two.
He closed the sliding panel, unable to watch them any longer. Hiroyuki was partially resigned to suffering some kind of brain impairment himself in the future, but this was one reality he naturally preferred not to contemplate.
… Just where on earth has she gone?
Hiroyuki folded his arms on his chest, baffled.
As five o'clock approached, his irritation was aggravated by hunger. He felt an overpowering resentment at his wife for having left the family to fend for themselves. With no one to take out his rage on, it only grew and grew.
The one possibility he could think of was that she had suddenly left him. Hiroyuki himself had felt tempted to leave home and desert his family. His emotions rose to an explosive level as he imagined himself saying it: 'Leave, you bitch, if that's what you want. But before you do, make sure you kill the kids and the old man.'
He relived in that instant his own hunger for affection as a child and wiped tears from his face with the back of his hand, which clutched a can of beer.
He suddenly remembered the bankbook that was kept in the drawer of the kitchen cupboard. Upon locating the bankbook, he flipped through the pages, but found nothing unusual. No large sums of money had been withdrawn lately. If his wife had indeed left him, she had done so on an impulse.
In that case, she'd just as likely be back as fast as she'd left. She'd succumbed momentarily to temptation, that was all.
Feeling somewhat better, he decided to go out. He knew a bar called Marie where he could get something to eat.
'Have some of those jam buns,' he told his son, put on a pair of sandals, and went out.
Hiroyuki made his way along the road by the fishing port toward the park. The gray water in the enclosed harbour was tinged with the crimson of the cloudy dusk sky. There was neither wind nor waves, and the boats moored along the wharf stood motionless side by side. Hiroyuki looked where his own boat was moored.
Even from where he was standing, he could clearly see the name of his boat, Hamakatsu, on the hull. He halted. It felt like his heart was in his mouth and he didn't know why. His pulse began to race; the blackest fear welled up from some pinprick in his heart and spread through his body. He swallowed hard. A low-pitched drone seemed to fill his inner ear.
Hiroyuki had no idea what was causing the attack. He looked towards the harbour. As soon as he spotted his own boat, he felt his chest constrict. No one knew that boat better than he did, he had used it for years. He had spent more time on that boat than at home. What could be bothering him? His forgetfulness had been pronounced of late. He sometimes couldn't recall events from the day before.
Maybe there was something he'd left undone at work, something on the boat that needed servicing, some piece of tackle that needed to be put away. He tried to think if there was anything like that he might have forgotten, but his mind remained blank.
He looked ahead and saw the red neon sign, Marie, on the left. Though desperate for answers, he went inside and closed the door behind him.
'Hi stranger!' The bar's madam beamed at him as he walked through the door. He was generous with his money, and the bar valued his patronage.
The moment Hiroyuki heard the madam's voice, the anxiety that had been eating away at him simply vanished.