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By Root 719 0

and constantly moving crowd around him with an unfocused gaze quite as if he were looking at scenery. It was not as though he were watching for some specific person, nor did he look as if he were waiting to be found. From his position and attitude it was not likely that he was some vagabond at a loss for a place to go. Where he was now was an area only for walking, a space where people passed by and vanished, each step taking them closer to their destination. It was, as it were, a nonexistent world of emptiness for people other than photographers, detectives, and pickpockets. His sitting there was an unnatural act, which the more one saw of it the harder it was to understand. But the passers-by appeared to be little concerned with the strange man, perhaps because he was a part of the space there, vanishing among the legs like the tile design of the floor.

It suddenly occurred to me that the man might be dying. Was he not appealing, with difficulty, entrusting to his eyes the agony of his final hour, unable to call for help, his throat constricted by his swollen tongue? But his call was fruitless. The space here was only for walking. No matter how he might appeal, no one would turn and look at something that didn’t exist.

But suddenly he arose as if nothing were wrong and quietly moved off into the crowd of pedestrians.

“By the way, that last picture … that’s too much. Not only is the photography strange, but the girl’s a little funny too, isn’t she?”

The expression “too much” didn’t exactly fit the case. In terms of indecency, I had seen worse. The background was completely black. Against it a girl with knees spread was half squatting, the weight of her body on her left leg. She was bent far over toward the front, and coiled behind her buttocks was her hair, which passed under her crotch. She was grasping it with her right hand, which she had extended around her side. Her position, for all its unnaturalness, was quite unexciting. The picture itself simply made one feel a psychological resistance to the continuing physical discomfort of the model. Only the expanse of flat, white hip, unrelated to the model’s twisted limbs, was as expressionless as the carapace of a crab. Beneath her shell the girl was forced into an almost impossible position. It was an incomprehensible picture. There was no obscenity, no sadistic stimulus, only unnaturalness, only a feeling of strangeness, like flowers arranged with their cut ends up. If I had to find something positive about the picture, it would be the strange cooperation of the model. I could understand it to some extent, I felt, if I interpreted it as showing his power to dominate her, but …

“Tashiro, do you think there’s any hope in following up this model?”

“I really couldn’t say. But this is a side of Mr. Nemuro that wasn’t known, I guess. I felt obliged to tell you about it.”

“But since he went so far as to entrust the safekeeping of such pictures to you, you had his confidence, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Mr. Nemuro was, how shall I put it, on the difficult side when it came to personal relations. He was nice on the outside, but inside he didn’t trust others very much.”

“I think you’re going to have to let me have a look at your room one of these days. Perhaps there’s some other unexpected clue of importance among the things Nemuro entrusted to you, something I would recognize if I saw it but that would appear insignificant to you, if you noticed it at all.”

“Ah. To tell the truth …” His eyes grew smaller behind his glasses; he was flustered. “These pictures weren’t in my room. Look, you remember the rented darkroom I told you about the other day? Mr. Nemuro had a locker there for his own exclusive use.”

“If it’s a locker, it has a key, I suppose.”

“Sure. Lockers do …”

“How did you open it?”

“Well, there’s a master key and … uh … this chum of mine runs the place.”

“You mean you opened it without permission?”

“Actually, I found the newspaper clipping in the locker. Don’t you think it’s quite important? It’s dated the end of July or the beginning of August. Just about the time