Dark Water

As long as there was a possibility that a kidnapping had been committed with a view to financial gain, the police conducted its investigation with utmost secrecy. But as soon as that possibility was ruled out, they usually launched a public investigation and announced it to the media. That way they could obtain more information faster.

‘So you’re saying that they…’

The super shook his head. ‘They never found her. For nearly a year, the parents never gave up hope that she’d return. In any case, when there was that move to buy up the apartments, it was Mr and Mrs Kawai on the second floor who objected most. They felt that if the apartment block were demolished, their daughter would have no place to return to. But in the end, they probably did give up hope. At any rate, they moved to Yokohama last summer.’

‘They were called Kawai, the family?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Mitchan—that was the little girl’s name—she was a lovely little girl. There are some evil people in the world, and that’s a fact.’

‘Did you say “Mitchan”?’

‘Her name was Mitsuko; we called her Mitchan.’

Mi, Mitchan, Mitsuko…the imaginary playmate that Ikuko was talking to in the bath. It all began to take shape, to fit into place, with that name. That column-like figure that Ikuko had fashioned out of a soaked hand towel and set up in the middle of the washbasin, the figure resembling a road-side jizo statue that Ikuko had chattered to like a friend, the figure that her daughter had called Mitsuko.

Yoshimi felt the blood drain from her face. Placing her hands on her temples, she sought support against the wall, and slowly let out a deep breath.

‘Is anything the matter?’

She tried to deflect the super’s concern by glancing at her watch. There was no time to explain. If they didn’t hurry they’d miss their bus. She gave a slight bow in the direction of the super and quickly left the lobby.

To learn more, she could take advantage of the odd spare moment at work to go through the newspaper archives on microfiche. Even without an exact date, she was sure to find an article concerning the disappearance of a small girl named Mitsuko Kawai without difficulty if she looked meticulously through the newspapers from two years ago. From what the super had said, it seemed clear that Mitsuko hadn’t been found. She had probably either been abducted by some pervert or had fallen into the canal. Either way, the poor girl no doubt lay dead and undiscovered somewhere.

About eight o’clock in the evening that day, Yoshimi had just turned on the hot water for a bath when the telephone rang. She let the water run and hurried into the living room to pick up the phone.

It was from the super’s office. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve gone and sprained my left ankle.’

The super’s remark made no sense to Yoshimi, who was at a loss to reply with anything but an ‘Oh.’ She had no idea why he was calling. It was only after giving an account of how he sustained the injury to his foot that he finally got to the point.

‘There’s a delivery for you.’

She finally caught his drift. The super would often accept her home deliveries because she was seldom home during the day. Usually he brought the deliveries up to her. What he was driving at was that his sprained ankle prevented him from doing so. If the package required urgent attention, he wanted to ask if she’d mind coming down to his office to collect it herself. She knew whom the delivery was from, and it was nothing that couldn’t wait. Still, she thanked the super for his trouble and, before putting the phone down, told him she was coming right away.

Upon reaching the super’s office, she saw that there was a cardboard box on the counter. The super stood with his elbows on the box. As she thought, it was from her friend Hiromi. Hiromi had a daughter who would soon be starting elementary school, and she had kindly taken the trouble to send Ikuko the clothes and shoes that her daughter had outgrown.

She found the box surprisingly heavy and could understand why it had been too much for the super with his sprained ankle.

‘Is your ankle all right?’ She affected concern by drawing her eyebrows together.

‘Nature’s way of telling a foolish old man he’s not as young as he used to be.’ The super laughed as he said this and betrayed signs that he wanted her to ask him how he had sprained his ankle.

However, Yoshimi’s interest lay elsewhere. During the day, she had gone to her firm’s archives to look through all the newspapers dated between July and October of the year before last. She had not succeeded in finding any article that reported Mitsuko’s case. Yoshimi found ‘the year before last’ not precise enough for her liking. She wanted an exact date.

She didn’t really expect the old man to remember, but she tried asking all the same.

‘Just a minute,’ he replied as he checked inside the counter, bending down awkwardly. He brought out a thick battered notebook and thumped it down on the countertop.

The cover bore the words ‘Superintendent’s Log’ in thick black felt pen. Apparently he was in the habit of recording each day’s events in the logbook so he could furnish his employer with some kind of report. The super muttered to himself as he licked his finger and turned the pages.

‘Yes, here we are. Look.’

He turned the notebook upside down and slid it across to her. The page was dated March 17th two years ago. It was now September, so, to be precise, they were not talking about something that happened two years ago, but rather, two and a half years ago. Even the time of day was recorded in the notebook. The authorities had concluded that there was no further justification for handling the disappearance of Mitsuko Kawai of apartment 205 as a case of financially motivated abduction and consequently turned the investigation into an open inquiry, at 11.30 p.m. Yoshimi committed the exact date and time to memory. As she was about to return the notebook to the super, an image of that flesh-colored overhead water tank flashed through her mind, though she didn’t know why. No doubt the image had come through an association with some word or words. What had set it off were the following words, written higher up under the same date heading of March 17th.

Cleaning operations performed on intake tank and overhead tank. Water inspection conducted.

There it was—the overhead tank.

This was the same overhead tank that floated like a giant coffin in the starry night sky. The cleaning operations in question had been performed on the same day Mitsuko Kawai had gone missing. Two cleaners hired by the building management had come and worked inside the water tank.

Yoshimi let out an inaudible scream.

‘The water tank…’ Yoshimi paused to take a breath. ‘Is the lid of the tank usually kept locked?’

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.