Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [97]
BUT THAT was all fake. It was still twelve minutes until the fourteenth of February. There was still one fourth of the day’s time left until dawn. The preparations seemed too perfect, but there was no call to act like a heady schoolboy on a picnic nor to devise Tashiro’s kind of vicious, irresponsible talk. The contents of my report would not change were I to wait six hours … ten hours. Furthermore, I did not need to fear meeting death within six hours, and tomorrow, if after my search of the Camellia I wanted to visit her place as quickly as possible, there was no better excuse than this report. Whatever the meaning of the un sightly striped curtains, I must be able to pass the barrier openly. In any event the harvest in terms of information would probably fill several lines of my report and I had absolutely no need to feel ashamed. It is self-evident that every night has its morning.
In the little apartment room that I used only as sleeping quarters and where I lived my unaccustomed solitary life, the night was as slow in falling as the day was in rising. I set the hands of my alarm clock at a few minutes before five o’clock, wound it up, and placed it just out of reach on the window ledge; I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the mah-jong players on the second floor and crawled into my cool bed, which because of the whisky I had spilled began to stink more than I did myself. From among the nude photos I had taken from Tashiro, I chose one which, though not characteristic, best showed the woman’s femaleness and placed it side by side with the picture of the husband on the table by the bed. As I sipped my whisky straight from a small bottle I concentrated intensely on the relationship between the two photos. The somewhat elongated face of the man, suggestive of an enthusiastic type, was slightly asymmetrical. The surface of the face seemed rough, perhaps due to the splotches of color and not to the roughness of the skin … evidently a type given to allergies. The right eye was strong and gave a feeling of willfulness, but the left one drooped at the corner, and had a conspicuous sag in the lid, giving a kind of sorrowful, doglike expression. The long, thin nose was bent slightly to the left. The lips joined in an almost straight line, as if drawn by a ruler. The upper lip was thin and nervous, but the lower was heavy and calm. To the left of the mouth were some hairs skipped by the razor. The main impression I had had up to now was of a businessman’s temperament, but tonight—perhaps it was my own fancy—the face had taken on the cast of a visionary. I felt no hostility or resistance, but I could not believe that a real man would materialize and speak to me. The face was one that was best suited to the present pose, as if he had been born as an image on a piece of negative paper. A blurred line of light ran diagonally across the background, perhaps a part of a building gleaming in soft beams of sunlight, or an elevated toll road.
In the other picture, a woman’s hips, naked, flesh-colored, and broad, were set against a background of solid black. Broad they were, but although they filled the whole picture the hips themselves gave the feeling of being rather small-boned. The form made me think of something. Yes, a loquat … a weak-looking, deformed loquat … a cross between a loquat and a pear … a pellucid hemisphere slightly tinged with green below, perhaps because the color of the carpeting on the floor was not a pure black. A cleft underneath ended in the swelling at the tip of the lumbar vertebra. The inside was boldly colored a dark brown and resembled the dampness