The super tilted his head to one side, puzzled as to why Yoshimi had turned the conversation to the water tank. But when he saw the entry in his own log about the cleaning operations, a look of satisfaction registered on his face.
‘Ah, this? Yes, under normal circumstances, it’s kept carefully locked.’
‘When is the tank opened? Only when it’s cleaned?’
‘Of course, of course.’
Yoshimi put her hands around the cardboard box. ‘Has the tank been cleaned since?’
‘Ehh, we don’t have a maintenance association here, so it’s…’
‘Has it been cleaned?’ she repeated, unable to bottle her impatience.
‘Well, it’s about time they got down it again. It’s been two years.’
‘I see.’
Lifting the box, Yoshimi staggered backwards and reeled out of the office. So unsteady was her gait that it was a wonder she made it back to her apartment without stumbling.
Being careful not to touch the water in the bathtub, she pulled out the plug and watched the water level drop gradually. She no longer felt like taking a bath. Ikuko had plaintively asked again and again why they couldn’t take a bath that day. Her persistence had seemed unending; only a minute ago had she finally fallen asleep. To all appearances, the water looked perfectly clean. Yet Yoshimi couldn’t but picture the particles floating in it.
She opened the kitchen cupboard, took out the bottle of sake she kept there for cooking, and poured herself a glass. Although alcohol did not really agree with her, she felt that she was not likely to get any sleep without it that night.
She made an effort to think about something else. The novel by that writer of violent fiction, the novel she was proofreading at work, would do as well as anything else to occupy her thoughts. What she needed to do was to recall some of those appalling scenes and thereby sever the chain of associations. Yet this just wasn’t possible; the swelling images always converged on one point. The red bag with the Kitty motif that was found on the rooftop, the missing child Mitsuko, the fleeting shadow under the tank, the mysterious stop made by the elevator at the second floor. The evening before, a thin stream of water had linked the bathroom in their apartment with the overhead water tank on the roof. Immersed in the bathwater, Ikuko had been talking openly to Mitsuko as if she were actually there. All this led to a sole conclusion. Yoshimi forced herself to block out this train of thought with a scene from the novel she’d been proofing. In that fictitious world thick with the stench of gore, a punk had been abducted and confined by a rival gang, who were subjecting him to a series of brutal beatings, when purely by coincidence…Yes, that was it: she should think of it as a coincidence. The overhead water tank just happened to be cleaned the very day little Mitsuko disappeared. How absurd to think it could have been anything other than coincidence. Yes, now that she thought about it, every part of it could be explained rationally. In the case of the Kitty bag, neighborhood children had put it on the rooftop in some kind of ritual, out of some childlike fancy, perhaps to signal a UFO. No doubt the children had seen the bag in the garbage dump, retrieved it, then quickly returned it to the rooftop. The elevator had stopped at the second floor quite simply because someone living on that floor had pressed the button with the intent of going down. When the elevator started dithering at the fourth floor, however, he or she had clearly lost patience and decided to walk down the stairway. That was why there hadn’t been anyone waiting when the door opened.
By forcibly disconnecting one event from another, Yoshimi sought to find a logical underpinning for each mangled fragment. Yet no matter how hard she tried to disrupt her train of thought, the severed fragments would instantly link up again, like some serpent growing larger every time it reconnected. She was already aware of the truth, but didn’t want to accept it. The one and only possible conclusion. The inescapable conclusion.
There was no mistaking it, Mitchan was in that overhead tank on the rooftop.
She tried to suppress the thought, only to have the scene unfold in her mind. While the cleaners were away on their lunch break, the little girl had either fallen in the tank or been intentionally thrown in by someone. The decomposing corpse. The Kitty bag she clasped so tightly. The water-filled coffin. She had been drinking that water for the past three months. She had cooked with it, made coffee and chilled summer drinks with it. How many times had they soaked in hot bathwater that teemed with countless putrid cells? How many times had they washed their hands and their faces in it? More than you could tally.
Yoshimi pressed her hands to her mouth. The odor of sake mixed with an eruption of gastric juices. She made a dash for the bathroom, crouched down over the toilet bowl, and vomited. Her eyes were bloodshot. A stinging sensation burned the back of her throat and nose. She flushed the toilet, the water immediately streaming into the bowl before her eyes and swallowing up her vomit in its downward spiral. What remained was to all appearances clear water. The water that trickled down to cleanse the toilet bowl contained skin cells, which had peeled off; it teemed with little pieces of hair, fine, downy hair. Her feeling of nausea did not abate. Yet there remained nothing more to bring up.
As she wiped her mouth with toilet paper, Yoshimi coughed violently again and again from the choking sensation in her throat. She remained in her crouched position, waiting for her breathing to settle. It was then that she heard it. The sound of water dripping one drop at a time into the bathtub beside her. She thought she had turned off the tap tightly. Still, a tiny amount of water seemed to be leaking through. Her knees pressed against the floor, she clasped the toilet bowl with both arms. She frantically swallowed back the saliva, trying to prevent her delusions from becoming reality. Hallucinations! It was obvious. Hallucinations coursed through her very veins. She saw something that looked like the corpse of a little girl floating in the foul water that had collected in the bath. The face was purple and swollen to almost twice its original size. She tried to scream ‘Stop!’ and fell back on the wet floor. A red plastic beaker floated near the breast of the corpse. A green plastic wind-up frog swam across the surface of the water, its front and back legs jerking busily. The frog bumped into the shoulder of the corpse, swam away, and returned to bump into the same shoulder, over and over again, each time gouging a tiny piece of flesh from the corpse with its plastic claws. The bright-red bag with the Kitty motif bobbed up and down, its strap held tight in the grasp of the corpse, the bone of whose clenched hands showed in places.
Apart from jerky gasps, Yoshimi had all but stopped breathing. The stench that assailed her nostrils was not unlike that of rotting kitchen waste. As she tried to avert her eyes from the putrefying corpse whose stench filled the bathroom, she struck her head on the door and collapsed in a heap, her cheek striking the chilly wooden floor of the corridor. She was quickly losing consciousness. A voice from far off that sounded like the chirping of a small bird penetrated the gloomy boundary between consciousness and darkness.
‘Mommy! Mommy!’
Yoshimi’s retina registered the form of Ikuko clad in baggy pajamas.
Her hand on the nape of her mother’s neck, Ikuko’s trembling voice turned to sobs. The tiny hand moved back and forth near Yoshimi’s ear. This was Yoshimi’s only reality, the warmth and tiny proportions of Ikuko’s hand. The tiny body brimming with life was enough to banish her hallucination.
‘Help me up.’
The plea was but a hoarse whisper. Ikuko put her hands under her mother’s arms and heaved with all her might. Once Ikuko had her mother sitting up, Yoshimi put one hand on the edge of the bath and managed to stand up on her own. The jumper skirt she always wore at home was soaked from the waist down. She glanced at the bath and found that countless droplets of water clung precariously to the gleaming cream curves of the bath. The awareness that she had been hallucinating hadn’t been enough to fend off the hallucinations. Amid sobs, Ikuko looked up at her mother and simply murmured ‘Mommy…’ It would take enormous emotional strength to be a good mother to her. Yoshimi felt ashamed of herself for her near collapse. Incited by her daughter’s sobs,