16



The Simplest Thing
*
Revenge in a Sophisticated Form
*
The Thing in the Guitar Case



The next day I called my uncle and told him I might be moving out of the house sometime
in the next few weeks. I apologized for springing it on him so suddenly but explained that it
was because Kumiko had left me, with just as little warning. There was no point in covering
up anymore. I told him that she had written to say she would not be coming back, and that I
wanted to get away from this place, though exactly for how long I could not be sure. My
summary explanation was followed by a thoughtful silence at my uncle's end of the line. He
seemed to be mulling something over. Then he said, "Mind if I come over there for a visit
sometime soon? I'd kind of like to see with my own eyes what's going on. And I haven't been
to the house for quite a while now."



My uncle came to the house two evenings later. He looked at my mark but had nothing to
say about it. He probably didn't know what to say about it. He just gave it one funny look,
with his eyes narrowed. He had brought me a good bottle of scotch and a package of fish-
paste cakes that he had bought in Odawara. We sat on the veranda, eating the cakes and
drinking the whiskey.
"What a pleasure it is to be sitting on a veranda again," my uncle said, nodding several
times. "Our condo doesn't have one, of course. Sometimes I really miss this place. There's a
special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can't get anywhere else."
For a while, he sat there gazing at the moon, a slim white crescent of a moon that looked
as if someone had just finished sharpening it. That such a thing could actually go on floating
in the sky seemed almost miraculous to me.
Then, in an utterly offhand manner, my uncle asked, "How'd you get that mark?"
"I really don't know," I said, and took a gulp of whiskey. "All of a sudden, it was there.
Maybe a week ago? I wish I could explain it better, but I just don't know how."
"Did you go to the doctor with it?"
I shook my head.
"I don't want to stick my nose in where I'm not wanted, but just let me say this: you really


ought to sit down and think hard about what it is that's most important to you."
I nodded. "I have been thinking about that," I said. "But things are so complicated and
tangled together. I can't seem to separate them out and do one thing at a time. I don't know
how to untangle things."
My uncle smiled. "You know what I think? I think what you ought to do is start by
thinking about the simplest things and go from there. For example, you could stand on a street
corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by there. You're not in any
hurry to decide anything. It may be tough, but sometimes you've got to just stop and take
time. You ought to train yourself to look at things with your own eyes until something comes
clear. And don't be afraid of putting some time into it. Spending plenty of time on something
can be the most sophisticated form of revenge."
"Revenge?! What do you mean, 'revenge'? Revenge against whom?"
"You'll understand soon enough," said my uncle, with a smile.



All told, we sat on the veranda, drinking together, for something over an hour. Then,
announcing that he had stayed too long, my uncle stood up and left. Alone again, I sat on the
veranda, leaning against a pillar and staring out at the garden under the moon. For a time, I
was able to breathe deeply of the air of realism or whatever it was that my uncle left behind,
and to feel, for the first time in a very long time, a sense of genuine relief. Within a few hours,
though, that air began to dissipate, and a kind of cloak of pale sorrow came to envelop me
once again. In the end, I was in my world again, and my uncle was in his.
My uncle had said that I should think about the truly simple things first, but I found it
impossible to distinguish between what was simple and what was difficult. And so the next
morning, after the rush hour had ended, I took the train to Shinjuku. I decided just to stand
there and really look at people's faces. I didn't know if it would do any good, but it was
probably better than doing nothing. If looking at people's faces until you got sick of them was
an example of a simple thing, then it couldn't hurt to give it a try. If it went well, it just might
give me some indication of what constituted the "simple" things for me.
The first day, I spent two full hours sitting on the low brick wall that ran along the edge of
the raised flower bed outside Shinjuku Station, watching the faces of the people who passed
by. But the sheer numbers of people were too great, and they walked too quickly. I couldn't
manage a good look at any one person's face. To make matters worse, some homeless guy
came over to me after I had been there for a while and started haranguing me about
something. A policeman came by several times, glaring at me. So I gave up on the busy area
outside the station and decided to look for a place better suited to the leisurely study of
passersby.
I took the passageway under the tracks to the west side of the station, and after I had spent
some time walking around that neighborhood, I found a small, tiled plaza outside a glass
high-rise. It had a little sculpture and some handsome benches where I could sit and look at
people as much as I liked. The numbers were nowhere near as great as directly outside the
main entrance of the station, and there weren't any homeless guys here with bottles of
whiskey stuck in their pockets. I spent the day there, making do for lunch with some
doughnuts and coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, and going home before the evening rush.
At first the only ones who caught my eye were the men with thinning hair, thanks to the
training I had received doing surveys with May Kasahara for the toupee maker. Before I knew
it, my gaze would lock onto a bald head and I'd have the man classified as A, B, or C. At this
rate, I might just as well have called May Kasahara and volunteered to join her for work
again.
After a few days had gone by, though, I found myself capable of just sitting and watching


people's faces without a thought in my head. Most of the ones who passed by that place were
men and women who worked in offices in the high-rise. The men wore white shirts and
neckties and carried briefcases, the women mostly wore high-heeled shoes. Others I saw
included patrons of the building's restaurants and shops, family groups headed for the
observation deck on the top floor, and a few people who were just passing through the space,
walking from point A to point B. Here most of the people tended not to walk very quickly. I
just let myself watch them all, without any clear purpose. Occasionally there would be people
who attracted my interest for some reason or other, and then I would concentrate on their
faces and follow them with my eyes.
Every day, I would take the train to Shinjuku at ten o'clock, after the rush hour, sit on the
bench in the plaza, and stay there almost motionless until 4:00 p.m., staring at people's faces.
Only after I had actually tried this out did I realize that by training my eyes on one passing
face after another, I was able to make my head completely empty, like pulling the cork from a
bottle. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. I thought nothing, I felt nothing. I often had
the sense that I had become part of the stone bench.
Someone did speak to me once, though-a thin, well-dressed middle-aged woman. She
wore a bright-pink, tight-fitting dress, dark sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames, and a white
hat, and she carried a white mesh handbag. She had nice legs and had on expensive-looking
spotless white leather sandals. Her makeup was thick, but not offensively so. She asked me if
I was in some kind of difficulty. Not at all, I replied. I seem to see you here every day, she
said, and asked what I could be doing. I said I was looking at people's faces. She asked if I
was doing it for some purpose, and I said I was not.
Sitting down beside me, she took a pack of Virginia Slims from her bag and lit up with a
small gold lighter. She offered me one, but I shook my head. Then she took off her sunglasses
and, without a word, stared directly at my face. More precisely, she stared at the mark on my
face. In return, I stared back, into her eyes. But I was unable to read any emotion stirring
there. I saw nothing but two dark pupils that seemed to be functioning as they were meant to.
She had a small, pointed nose. Her lips were thin, and color had been applied to them with
great care. I found it hard to guess her age, but I supposed she was in her mid-forties. She
looked younger than that at first glance, but the lines beside her nose had a special kind of
weariness about them. "Do you have any money?" she asked.
This took me off guard. "Money? What do you mean, do I have any money?"
"I'm just asking: Do you have any money? Are you broke?"
"No. At the moment, I'm not broke," I said.
She drew her lips slightly to one side, as if examining what I had said, and continued to
concentrate all her attention on me. Then she nodded. And then she put her sunglasses on,
dropped her cigarette to the ground, rose gracefully from her seat, and, without a glance in my
direction, slipped away. Amazed, I watched her disappear into the crowd. Maybe she was a
little crazy. But her immaculate grooming made that hard to believe. I stepped on her
discarded cigarette, crushing it out, and then I did a slow scan of my surroundings, which
turned out to be filled with the usual real world. People were moving from one place to
another, each with his or her own purpose. I didn't know who they were, and they didn't
know who I was. I took a deep breath and went back to my task of looking at the faces of
these people, without a thought in my head.
I went on sitting there for eleven days altogether. Every day, I had my coffee and
doughnuts and did nothing but watch the faces of the people passing by. Aside from the
meaningless little conversation with the well-dressed woman who approached me, I spoke
with no one for the whole eleven days. I did nothing special, and nothing special happened to
me. Even after this eleven-day vacuum, however, I was unable to come to any conclusion. I
was still lost in a complex maze, unable to solve the simplest problem.
But then, on the evening of the eleventh day, something very strange occurred. It was a


Sunday, and I had stayed there watching faces until later than usual. The people who came to
Shinjuku on a Sunday were different from the weekday crowd, and there was no rush hour. I
caught sight of a young man with a black guitar case. He was of average height. He wore
glasses with black plastic frames, had hair down to his shoulders, was dressed in blue denim
top and bottom, and trudged along in worn-out sneakers. He walked past me looking straight
ahead, a thoughtful expression in his eyes. When I saw him, something struck me. My heart
gave a thump. I know that guy, I thought. I've seen him somewhere. But it took me a few
seconds to remember who he was-the singer I had seen that night in the snack bar in Sapporo.
No doubt about it: he was the one.
I immediately left my bench and hurried after him. Given his almost leisurely pace, it was
not difficult to catch up with him. I followed ten steps behind, adjusting my pace to his. I
strongly considered the possibility of speaking to him. I would say something like, "You were
singing three years ago in Sapporo, weren't you? I heard you there."
"Oh, really?" he would say. "Thank you very much."
And then what? Should I say, "My wife had an abortion that night. And she left me not
too long ago. She had been sleeping with another man"? I decided just to follow him and see
what happened. Maybe as I walked along I would figure out some good way to handle it.
He was walking away from the station. He passed beyond the string of high-rises, crossed
the Ome Highway, and headed for Yoyogi. He seemed to be deep in thought. Apparently at
home in the area, he never hesitated or looked around. He kept walking at the same pace,
facing straight ahead. I followed after him, thinking about the day that Kumiko had her
abortion. Sapporo in early March. The earth was hard and frozen, and now and then a few
snowflakes would flutter down. I was back in those streets, my lungs full of frozen air. I saw
the white breath coming from people's mouths.
Then it hit me: that was probably when things started to change. Yes, definitely. That had
been a turning point. After that, the flow around me had begun to evidence a change. Now
that I thought about it, that abortion had been an event of great significance for the two of us.
At the time, however, I had not been able to perceive its true importance. I had been all too
distracted by the act of abortion itself, while the genuinely important thing may have been
something else entirely.
I had to do it, she said. I felt it was the right thing to do, the best thing for both of us. But
there's something else, something you don't know about, something I can't put into words just
yet. I'm not hiding anything from you. I just can't be sure whether or not it's something real.
Which is why I can't put it into words yet. Back then, she couldn't be sure that that something
was real. And that something, without a doubt, had been more connected with the pregnancy
than with the abortion. Maybe it had had something to do with the child in her womb. What
could it have been? What had sent her into such confusion? Had she had relations with
another man and refused to give birth to his baby? No, that was out of the question. She
herself had declared that it was out of the question. It had been my child, that was certain. But
still, there had been something she was unable to tell me. And that something was inseparably
connected to her decision to leave me. Everything had started from that.
But what the secret was, what had been concealed there, I had no idea. I was the only one
left alone, the only one in the dark. All I knew for certain was that as long as I failed to solve
the secret of that something, Kumiko would never come back to me. Gradually, I began to
sense a quiet anger growing inside my body, an anger directed toward that something that
remained invisible to me. I stretched my back, drew in a deep breath, and calmed the
pounding of my heart. Even so, the anger, like water, seeped soundlessly into every corner of
my body. It was an anger steeped in sorrow. There was no way for me to smash it against
something, nothing I could do to dispel it.





The man went on walking at the same steady pace. He crossed the Odakyu Line tracks,
passed through a block of shops, through a shrine, through a labyrinth of alleys. I followed
after him, adjusting my distance in each situation so as to keep him from spotting me. And it
was clear that he had not spotted me. He never once looked around. There was definitely
something about this man that made him different from ordinary people. Not only did he
never look back; he never once looked to either side. He was so utterly concentrated: what
could he be thinking about? Or was he, rather, thinking about absolutely nothing?
Before long, the man entered a hushed area of deserted streets lined with two-story wood-
frame houses. The road was narrow and twisted, and the run-down houses were jammed up
against each other on either side. The lack of people here was almost weird. More than half
the houses were vacant. Boards were nailed across the front doors of the vacant houses, and
notices of planned construction were posted outside. Here and there, like missing teeth, were
vacant lots filled with summer weeds and surrounded by chain-link fences. There was
probably a plan to demolish this whole area in the near future and put up some new high-rises.
Pots of morning glories and other flowers crammed the little space outside one of the few
houses that were occupied. A tricycle lay on its side, and a towel and a child's bathing suit
were being dried in the second-story window. Cats lay everywhere-beneath the windows, in
the doorway-watching me with weary eyes. Despite the bright early-evening hour, there was
no sign of people. The geography of this place was lost on me. I couldn't tell north from
south. I guessed that I was in the triangular area between Yoyogi and Sendagaya and
Harajuku, but I could not be sure.
It was, in any case, a forgotten section of the city. It had probably been overlooked
because the roads were so narrow that cars could hardly pass through. The hands of the
developers had not reached this far. Stepping in here, I felt as if time had turned back twenty
or thirty years. I realized that at some point, the constant roar of car engines had been
swallowed up and was gone now. Carrying his guitar case, the man had made his way through
the maze of streets until he came to a wood-frame apartment house. He opened the front door,
went inside, and closed the door behind him. As far as I could see, the door had not been
locked.
I stood there for a time. The hands of my watch showed six-twenty. I leaned against the
chain-link fence of the vacant lot across the street, observing the building. It was a typical
two-floor wood-frame apartment building. The look of the entrance and the layout of the
rooms gave it away. I had lived in a building like this for a time when I was a student. There
had been a shoe cabinet in the entryway, a shared toilet, a little kitchen, and only students or
single working people lived there. This particular building, though, gave no sense of anyone
living there. It was totally devoid of sound or movement. The plastic-veneer door carried no
nameplate. Where it had apparently been removed, there was a long, narrow blank spot. All
the windows of the place were shut tight, with curtains drawn, despite the lingering afternoon
heat.
This apartment house, like its neighbors, was probably scheduled for demolition soon, and
no one lived there any longer. But if that was true, what was the man with the guitar case
doing here? I expected to see a window slide open after he went inside, but still nothing
moved.
I couldn't just go on hanging around forever in this deserted alley. I walked over to the
front door and gave it a push. I had been right: it was not locked, and it opened easily to the
inside. I stood in the doorway a moment, trying to get a sense of the place, but I could hardly
make out anything in the gloomy interior. With the windows all closed, the place was filled
with hot, stale air. The moldy smell here reminded me of the air at the bottom of the well. My
armpits were streaming in the heat. A drop of sweat ran down behind my ear. After a
moment's hesitation, I stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind me. By checking the


name tags (if there were any) on the mailboxes or the shoe cabinet, I intended to see if anyone
was still living here, but before I could do so I realized that someone was there. Someone was
watching me.
Immediately to the right of the entrance stood a tall shoe cabinet or some such thing, and
the someone was standing just beyond it, as if to hide. I held my breath and peered into the
gloomy warmth. The person standing there was the young man with the guitar case. He had
obviously been hiding behind the shoe cabinet from the time he came inside. My heart
pounded at the base of my throat like a hammer smashing a nail. What was he doing there?
Waiting for me?
"Hello there," I forced myself to say. "I was hoping to ask you-"
But the words were barely out of my mouth when something slammed into my shoulder.
Hard. I couldn't tell what was happening. All I felt at the moment was a physical impact of
blinding intensity. I went on standing there, confused. But then, in the next second, I realized
what was going on. With the agility of a monkey, the man had leaped out from behind the
shoe cabinet and hit me with a baseball bat. While I stood there in shock, he raised the bat
again and swung it at me. I tried to dodge, but I was too late. This time the bat hit my left arm.
For a moment, the arm lost all feeling. There was no pain, nothing at all. It was as if the whole
arm had just melted into space.
Before I knew it, though, almost as a reflex action, I was kicking at him. I had never had
formal training in martial arts, but a friend of mine in high school with some ranking in karate
had taught me a few elementary moves. Day after day, he had had me practicing kicks-
nothing fancy: just training to kick as hard and high and straight as possible. This was the
single most useful thing to know in an emergency, he had said. And he had been right.
Entirely taken up with swinging his bat, the man had obviously never anticipated the
possibility that he might be kicked. Just as frantic as he was, I had no idea where my kick was
aimed, nor was it very strong, but the shock of it seemed to take the wind out of him. He
stopped swinging his bat, and as if there had been a break in time at that point, he stared at me
with vacant eyes. Given this opening, I aimed a stronger, more accurate kick at his groin, and
when he curled up with the pain, I wrenched the bat from his hands. Then I kicked him hard
in the ribs. He tried to grab my leg, so I kicked him again. And then again, in the same place.
Then I smashed his thigh with the bat. Emitting a dull scream, he fell on the floor.
At first I kicked and beat him out of sheer terror, so as to prevent myself from being hit.
Once he fell on the floor, though, I found my terror turning to unmistakable anger. The anger
was still there, the quiet anger that had welled up in my body earlier while I was walking
along and thinking about Kumiko. Released now, it flared up uncontrollably into something
close to intense hatred. I smashed the man's thigh again with the bat. He was drooling from
the corner of his mouth. My shoulder and left arm were beginning to throb where he had hit
me. The pain aroused my anger all the more. The man's face was distorted with pain, but he
struggled to raise himself from the floor. I couldn't make my left arm work, so I threw the bat
down and stood over him, smashing his face with my right hand. I punched him again and
again. I punched him until the fingers of my right hand grew numb and then started to hurt. I
was going to beat him until he was unconscious. I grabbed his neck and smashed his head
against the wooden floor. Never in my life had I been involved in a fistfight. I had never hit
another person with all my strength. But now hitting was all I could do, and I couldn't seem to
stop. My mind was telling me to stop: This was enough. Any more would be too much. The
man could no longer get to his feet. But I couldn't stop. There were two of me now, I realized.
I had split in two, but this me had lost the power to stop the other me. An intense chill ran
through my body.
Then I realized the man was smiling. Even as I went on hitting him, the man kept smiling
at me-the more I hit him, the bigger the smile, until finally, with blood streaming from his
nose and lips, and choking on his own spit, the man gave out a high, thin laugh. He must be


crazy, I thought, and I stopped punching him and stood up straight.
I looked around and saw the black guitar case propped against the side of the shoe cabinet.
I left the man where he lay, still laughing, and approached the guitar case. Lowering it to the
floor, I opened the clasps and lifted the cover. There was nothing inside. It was absolutely
empty-no guitar, no candles. The man looked at me, laughing and coughing. I could hardly
breathe. All of a sudden, the hot, steamy air inside this building became unbearable. The smell
of mold, the touch of my own sweat, the smell of blood and saliva, my own sense of anger
and of hatred: all became more than I could bear. I pushed the door open and went outside,
closing the door behind me. As before, there was no sign of anyone in the area. All that
moved was a large brown cat, slowly making its way across the vacant lot, oblivious of me.
I wanted to get out of there before anyone spotted me. I wasn't sure which way I should
go, but I started walking and before long managed to find a bus stop labeled "To Shinjuku
Station." I hoped to calm my breathing and straighten my head out before the next bus came,
but failed to do either. Over and over, I told myself: All I was trying to do was look at peo-
ple's faces! I was just looking at the faces of people passing by on the street, the way my
uncle had said. I was just trying to untangle the simplest complications in my life, that's all.
When I entered the bus, the passengers turned toward me. Each of them gave me the same
shocked look and then averted his eyes. I assumed it was because of the mark on my face.
Some time had to go by before I realized it was because of the splatters on my white shirt of
the man's blood (mostly blood from his nose) and the baseball bat I was still clutching in my
hands.
I ended up bringing the bat all the way home with me and throwing it in the closet.
That night I stayed awake until the sun came up. The places on my shoulder and left arm
where the man had hit me with the bat began to swell and to throb with pain, and my right fist
retained the sensation of punching the man over and over and over again. The hand was still a
fist, I realized, still clutched into a ball and ready to fight. I tried to relax it, but the hand
would not cooperate. And where sleeping was concerned, it was less a matter of being unable
to sleep than of not wanting to sleep. If I went to sleep in my present state, there was no way I
could avoid having terrible dreams. Trying to calm myself, I sat at the kitchen table, taking
straight sips of the whiskey my uncle had left with me and listening to quiet music on the
cassette player. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted someone to talk to me. I set the
telephone on the table and stared at it for hours. Call me, somebody, please, anybody-even the
mysterious phone woman; I didn't care. It could be the most filthy and meaningless talk, the
most disgusting and sinister conversation. That didn't matter. I just wanted someone to talk to
me.
But the telephone never rang. I finished the remaining half-bottle of scotch, and after the
sky grew light, I crawled into bed and went to sleep. Please don't let me dream, please just let
my sleep be a blank space, if only for today.
But of course I did dream. And as I had expected, it was a terrible dream. The man with
the guitar case was in it. I performed the same actions in the dream as I had in reality-
following him, opening the front door of the apartment house, feeling the impact of the bat,
and hitting and hitting and hitting the man. But after that it was different. When I stopped
hitting him and stood up, the man, drooling and laughing wildly as he had in reality, pulled a
knife from his pocket-a small, sharp-looking knife. The blade caught the faint evening glow
that spilled in through the curtains, reflecting a white glimmer reminiscent of bone. But the
man did not use the knife to attack me. Instead, he took all his clothes off and started to peel
his own skin as if it were the skin of an apple. He worked quickly, laughing aloud all the
while. The blood gushed out of him, forming a black, menacing pool on the floor. With his
right hand, he peeled the skin of his left arm, and with his bloody, peeled left hand he peeled
the skin of his right arm. In the end, he became a bright-red lump of flesh, but even then, he
went on laughing from the dark hole of his open mouth, the white eyeballs moving


spasmodically against the raw lump of flesh. Soon, as if in response to his unnaturally loud
laughter, the man's peeled skin began to slither across the floor toward me. I tried to run
away, but my legs would not move. The skin reached my feet and began to crawl upward. It
crept over my own skin, the man's blood-soaked skin clinging to mine as an overlay. The
heavy smell of blood was everywhere. Soon my legs, my body, my face, were entirely
covered by the thin membrane of the man's skin. Then my eyes could no longer see, and the
man's laughter reverberated in the hollow darkness. At that point, I woke up.
Confusion and fear overtook me then. For a while, I even lost hold of my own existence.
My fingers were trembling. But at the same time, I knew that I had reached a conclusion.
I could not-and should not-run away, not to Crete, not to anyplace. I had to get Kumiko
back. With my own hands, I had to pull her back into this world. Because if I didn't, that
would be the end of me. This person, this self that I thought of as "me," would be lost.