“Yeah. They all encouraged me—Hidaka and the rest. ‘Hit it! Hit it!’ they said, so I…”
“Was it really a deer?”
“What?”
“The thing you hit. Was it really a deer?”
I didn’t know what he meant. Dad looked confused. He didn’t seem to know what to say. “Were you watching?” he said eventually.
Mitsugu didn’t speak right away. His gaze was still fixed on Dad. Something stirred in his dull eyes, but it couldn’t gather enough force to break free. It stayed where it was, shifting uncertainly.
“Toshiko-bā always says she wants to die,” Mitsugu murmured, forcing each word out painfully. “‘I wanna die, I wanna die!’ she says.”
Again, Dad didn’t seem to know how to respond. Why were they suddenly talking about Toshiko-bā? “Has something happened to her?” Dad said dubiously.
“She’s always sayin’ she wants to die… You sure it wasn’t her on the road, shenshei? Wasn’t she lyin’ in the road like before?” He paused breathlessly between each question. “Was it really a deer you hit, shenshei? Or was it Toshiko-bā?”
“Yamamoto said something about someone lying in the road once, didn’t he?” said Dad, glancing toward me in the kitchen.
When Mr. Yamamoto was the policeman here, someone had come knocking on his door early one morning. It was a young truck driver from Marugi Fisheries. He told Mr. Yamamoto that there was an old woman lying on the road and he couldn’t get his truck around her. He wanted Mr. Yamamoto to do something about it. The truck driver had tried his best to get her to move, but she simply wouldn’t. It was all very strange. If it had been a drunk, then maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so odd, but it was an old woman. There weren’t even any houses nearby. It was such a peculiar situation that the driver couldn’t bring himself to pull her off the road, but no matter what he said to her, she just lay there, stock-still, eyes closed. He’d begun to worry that he might have hit her somehow without realizing. But then, to his relief, he noticed some faint movement in her throat. Seeing that she was alive, he turned his truck around and went to Mr. Yamamoto’s house for help.
Mr. Yamamoto told Dad that the driver had described the old woman’s face as rough and craggy. Mr. Yamamoto went back with the driver, but when they got to where he’d seen her, there was nobody there. No sign of her at all.
“The driver looked stunned,” Mr. Yamamoto said. “As though he’d been tricked by a spirit. ‘I saw her right there,’ he’d said, pointing at the road. Maybe I should have checked if he’d been driving drunk,” he laughed. “Anyway, it’s a strange place.” He tapped Dad on the shoulder. “Be careful you don’t get tricked by any spirits while you’re there.”
Dad was looking at me.
“I wonder if that old woman was Toshiko-bā.”
Of course, I didn’t know.
“Toshiko-bā always says she wants to die,” said Mitsugu Azamui again. “You sure it was a deer you hit, shenshei?”
Toshiko-bā was another big name in the village. The kids, especially, were scared of her.
Mitsugu Azamui’s stare was certainly unnerving—his eyes always looked as though they were about to slip out of their sockets. But his drunkenness matched a familiar stereotype and, in its way, seemed almost comical.
His specialty was passing out at people’s houses, or sometimes on the side of the road. Ken from the Bungo Strait guesthouse once decided to carry him home. He began to regret his kindness when he felt warm liquid running down his back.
“Piss! It was piss! Mitsugu Azamui wet himself on my back! Ugh!”
Ken’s story was met with an explosion of laughter, like a toilet blowing off its lid.
Dad swore he’d never carry Mitsugu home, even if he fell asleep at our house.
“But then he might wet himself here,” Keiji said, looking anxiously up at Dad.
“Hmm…I suppose he might. That wouldn’t be too good, would it?”
Dad and Keiji looked at each other and laughed.
But even when Mitsugu did fall asleep at our house it was never necessary for Dad to carry him home. All he had to do was call Mr. Kawano. It was a small village and Mr. Kawano would arrive within five minutes. Even if Dad didn’t call, Mr. Kawano seemed to have an instinct as to where Mitsugu would be and he’d often simply turn up to collect him just after eleven. Mr. Kawano always looked sad when he arrived. Mitsugu was a struggle to handle—his body would bend this way and that as if it had extra joints. In his drunken state, Mitsugu seemed to forget he was a human being, forget that he could walk on two legs. Fortunately, he lived nearby and Mr. Kawano always managed to get him home.
I feel uncomfortable saying this and perhaps out of respect for Mr. Kawano, I shouldn’t, but to the bystander, Mitsugu Azamui’s drinking wasn’t that terrible. As he tried to drink himself from humanity back into an inorganic state, he never became argumentative or violent. He even had a certain charm. People may have ridiculed or pitied him, they may have shaken their heads and sighed, but they still smiled. But when it came to Toshiko-bā there was nothing whatsoever to smile about.
Almost all the junior high boys fired bottle rockets at her house. It was their obsession, but not even they seemed to know why they did it.
“I did it when I was at junior high, too,” said Mr. Yoshida, as if it were inevitable. “I don’t know why. I suppose because the older boys did. Everyone did it back then, just like now.”
The only boy in the school who didn’t fire rockets at Toshiko-bā’s house was Shiotsuki Toshikazu. He played first base and batted sixth in baseball—but then, there were only forty kids in each grade. All the boys played baseball and all the girls played volleyball.
He was a head and a half taller than the rest of the class and much heavier too. In winter, when there was no baseball, the school entered him in the district sumo tournament, and he won it. He went on to be runner-up at county level and then reached the semifinals of the prefectural tournament, getting his photo in the local papers. Apparently, scouts had come to watch him—not just from a high school with a strong sumo team, but from professional sumo stables as well.
But Toshi’s real love was baseball. His problem was he couldn’t remember the signs, and when he tried to steal a base without the sign he always got out. He was the slowest runner in the class. Once, when having gotten a double, he heard the defenders shouting, “Two out, two out, concentrate!” He joined in, sticking his hand in the air with his thumb and little finger raised, and shouted, “Two out, two out, keep tight!” Both teams burst out laughing, as did the umpire, and the game ground to a halt for a while.
He lived with his father and younger brother. He’d recently lost his granny, Mitsu. She wasn’t his real grandmother, he told me, but she’d always played that role in the family. She’d been given an impressive send-off at the community hall, thanks to the Abes—Hatsue and Hachi-nī. Hatsue had organized the food, there being no mother in the household. The community hall was just across the road from the police office so we could hear the impressive voice of Tahara, the priest, as he chanted sutras.
Tahara was another regular visitor to our house. When he was drunk he always moaned, making everybody uncomfortable. He’d go on and on about how his hair was thinning, even though his job meant he had to shave his head bald anyway. He’d grumble about getting fat because of all the food people gave him when he performed ceremonies for them. He complained about how his new stole ruined his look because it kept sliding off his shoulder. He’d sit in our living room with his seventh whisky on the rocks and whine endlessly about anything to do with his appearance. He obviously cared a lot about it. His eyebrows were always carefully plucked.