Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [16]
“Actually, maybe it was deliberate …” Suddenly he lowered his voice and bent his head, kicking the car tire with the tip of his shoe. “On that score, my views are somewhat different from my sister’s. Because she’s a girl. She can’t stand being thrown out like an old rag. Maybe she wants some other reason. She’s a girl. If she could, she’d accept an absolutely unexplainable fairy story. But how will you be able to prove something unexplainable? It’s a big order. I know how she feels.”
“There’s such a thing as amnesia, you know.”
The man gave the tire another kick and, as if making some estimate, walked slowly along the side of the car toward the board fence of the parking lot. “Yes, I realized that. I even consulted a doctor. According to him …”
“Let’s go back to the Camellia over there and have a cup of coffee or something.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean ‘Why’? Because it’s getting pretty chilly.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he replied, slipping through the space between the car and the fence, and then even more slowly approaching me. “Sorry. I seem to be excitable. Do you have anything left to do over there?”
“No. It was a complete miss.”
“You know, the doctor claimed there were two types of amnesia,” he said, thrusting his joined hands at me suddenly, pawing at my chest as if he were kneading an invisible piece of clay. “One is where you only forget about the past; present events—how shall I say …?”
“You don’t lose your discernment.”
Perhaps it was imagination, but I sensed his strong bad breath and stepped back involuntarily, whereupon my companion bent forward slightly and peered into the car.
“Right … discernment … and then he said there was another kind … where even discernment is lost. In the end you get to be a moron, batty. With the first kind you change completely into another person and apparently can live in a different world, but you usually get back your memory in about two or three months. The problem is the kind where you really go insane. But then you’re soon picked up by the police. Right? And they check the list of missing persons and you’re identified in no time. Besides, Nemuro’s not like us; he always carries his driver’s license and what not.”
“If that’s so, you for one accept the explanation that his disappearance was deliberate, don’t you?”
“I haven’t made up my mind. He’s not a child, and it’s a little childish to leave the way he did with no reason.”
“If the disappearance was scrupulously prepared, then I suppose he left no clues. However, so far as I can judge from what your sister told me last evening, that’s still uncertain. Undoubtedly, the address book is in your possession, isn’t it?”
I had intended to take him by surprise, but he showed no sign of perturbation.
“Oh, if that’s the type of thing you’re after, there are other things: the diary and the calling cards from his desk at the office.” Innocently he looked up at the sky, and on either side of his Adam’s apple his well-developed muscles tensed like the neck of a barbecued bird. “But more than half a year’s gone by since he disappeared. I haven’t been just an idle spectator for all that time. I looked into every one of them. I suppose you think I’m a bungler … anyway, I spent a lot of time and money. Of course, I’ll show you what I’ve got any time you need it. But to tell the truth, I don’t want you to waste time on such things. I say that because my own investigation was a big flop. I’d like you to start from the beginning.”
“With only a matchbox and a photograph to go on, it’s like trying to find a house that has no number.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” He slowly took off his gloves and firmly rubbed the corner of his right eye with his middle finger—perhaps a piece of dust. “I realized very well that the coffee house was a wild goose chase. But the matchbox is interesting. While I was imagining the scene of your investigating the place, it suddenly occurred to me. My brother-in-law’s real objective was not the coffee