1



No doubt there are numerous ways to tell twin sisters apart, but I only knew of one. Not only were they alike in every respect, right down to their expressions, voices, and hair styles, but they didn’t even have the slightest distinguishing beauty mark or blemish. I was at a total loss. They were perfect copies. Their reactions to any given stimulus were identical; the things they ate and drank, the songs they sang, the hours they slept, even their periods–everything was the same.

The whole situation was beyond me; my imagination couldn’t cope with what it must be like to be a twin. I mean, I’m sure that if I had a twin brother, and we were alike in every detail, I’d be really mixed up. Because I’m mixed up enough as it is.

Still, all things being equal, the two girls went about their affairs with the utmost equanimity. As a matter of fact, the girls were shocked when they found out I couldn’t tell them apart. They were understandably furious.

“Why, we’re completely different!”

“Total opposites!”

Which shut me up. So I just shrugged.



I can’t even begin to guess how much time has gone by since they moved into my apartment. The only thing I know for certain is that ever since they’d begun living with me, my internal clock has been running perceptibly behind. It occurs to me that this must be how organisms that multiply by cell-division experience time.



* * *



A friend of mine and I leased a condominium on the slope from Shibuya to Nampeidai and opened a small translation service. My friend’s father put up the funds, which is not to say that it took any astounding sum of money–just the deposit on the place, and the money for three steel desks, some ten dictionaries, a telephone, and a half-dozen bottles of bourbon. We thought up a suitable name, and with the rest of the money had it engraved on a metal sign and hung it out front, then put an ad in the newspaper. After that we waited for customers. The two of us, with our four feet propped up on the desks, drinking whiskey. It was the spring of ‘72.

After a few months, we felt we’d struck a real gold mine. An amazing amount of business found its way to our humble office. And with our earnings we bought an air conditioner, a refrigerator, and a home bar set.

“We’ve made it, we’re a success!” my friend exclaimed.

It made me all warm inside. Because it was the first time in my life that I had heard such encouraging words.

We even got a rebate from a printer contact my friend had, whom we’d let handle all the translations that needed printing. I’d gotten a university that taught foreign languages to pool some of their better students, and farmed out to them any unmanageable volume of work for rough translation. We hired an office girl to take care of the accounts, odd chores, and messages. A bright, attentive girl fresh out of business school, with long legs and no particular shortcomings, save that (in dull moments) she would hum “Penny Lane” up to twenty times a day. “We sure did right by getting her,” my friend pronounced. So we paid her one hundred fifty percent of the normal company salary, gave her a five-month bonus, and granted ten days’ leave in the summer and winter. So each of us had every reason to be happy, and we got along famously.

The office consisted of a dining room-kitchenette plus two additional rooms; the odd thing was that the dining-kitchen was in between the other two rooms. We drew straws, with the result that I got the room in the back and my friend got the room nearest the entry. The girl sat in the dining-kitchen doing the books, fixing drinks-on-the-rocks, and assembling roach traps, all to the tune of “Penny Lane.”

I purchased a pair of file cabinets as necessary expenditures, and placed one on either side of my desk; the one on the left I piled with incoming material to be translated, the one on the right with outgoing finished translations.

And what a mixed bag of materials and clients it was. Everything from Scientific American articles on the durability of ball bearings under pressure to the 1972 All-American Cocktail Book, from William Styron essays to safety razor blurbs. Everything had a tag-affixed deadline–such and such a date–and was stacked on the left until, in due course, it was transferred to the right. Whenever I finished a translation, I’d down two fingers’ of whiskey.

One of the great points about our level of translation was that there was no extra thinking involved. You’d have a coin in your left hand, slap your right hand down on your left, slide away your left hand, and the coin would remain on your right palm.

That’s about all there was to it.

I’d check into the office at ten and leave at four. On Saturdays, the three of us would hit a nearby discotheque, and dance to some Santana clone between sips of J&B.

The income wasn’t bad. Once the office rent, incidental expenses, the girl’s salary, the part-time help’s pay, and tax percentage were squared away, we’d divvy up the remaining earnings into ten shares, one share going to the company savings, five shares to my friend, and four to me. Our method was primitive–we’d lay out ten equal piles of cash on the table–but it was a lot of fun. It always reminded me of that poker game between Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson in The Cincinnati Kid.

The five-four split was pretty fair, I thought. After all, it was he who had been saddled with the actual management of the company, and he who would put up and shut up whenever I drank a bit too much whiskey. On top of which, he was struggling along with a sick wife, a three-year-old son, and a Volkswagen that was in constant need of repair. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was forever having some new problem or other.

“What about me? I’ve got twin girls I’m supporting,” I blurted out one day. Not that it counted for much, of course–he still took his five shares and I my four.

So that’s how I passed the prime of my mid-twenties. Like so many tranquil afternoons spent basking in the sun.

“No matter who wrote it,” boasted the catchphrase on our three-color offset brochure, “there’s nothing we can’t make intelligible.” Every half-year or so, when business fell into a periodic lull, out of sheer boredom the three of us would go stand in front of Shibuya Station and hand out brochures.



How much time went by like that? There I was, trudging on and on through unending silence. When I finished work and went home, I’d drink the twin’s delicious coffee, and read the Critique of Pure Reason for the umpteenth time.

Every once in a while, things that happened just the day before would seem as far off as the year before, or things from the previous year might come to me like only yesterday. When things got really out of hand, the next year would come to me like yesterday. Either that, or I’d be translating a Kenneth Tynan article on Polanski from the September 1971 issue of Esquire, the whole time thinking about ball bearings.

For months, for years, I was sitting there all by myself in the depths of a fathomless pool. In warm water, soft, filtered light, and silence. Silence...



* * *



There was only one way I could tell the twins apart, and that was by their sweatshirts. Faded navy blue sweatshirts with white numerals emblazoned across the chest. One read “208,” the other “209.” The 2s were over the right nipple, and the 8 or 9 over the left nipple. The Os were sandwiched smack in the middle.

The very first day, I asked the twins what the numbers meant. They told me they didn’t mean anything.

“They look like manufacturer’s serial numbers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked one of them.

“Well, it makes it look as if there were a whole batch of people just like you, and you were number 208 and number 209.”

“The ideas you get!” scoffed 209.

“Only been two of us every since we were born,” said 208. “We were given the shirts.”

“Where?” I was incredulous.

“At a supermarket opening. They were giving them away to the first customers.”

“I was the two-hundred-and-ninth customer,” said 209.

“And I was the two-hundred-and-eighth,” said 208.

“The two of us bought three boxes of tissues.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll call you 208. And you, we’ll call 209. That way I can distinguish between you,” pointing to each in turn.

“No good,” said one of them.

“Why’s that?”

Without so much as a word, they both stripped off their sweatshirts, exchanged them, and pulled them down over their heads.

“I’m 208,” said 209.

“And I’m 209,” said 208.

I let out a sigh.



Even so, when I was desperate to distinguish the two of them, I had no recourse but to rely on the numbers. I just couldn’t come up with any other way to tell them apart.

The twins hardly had any other clothes besides those sweatshirts. It almost seemed as if they’d stepped out for a walk, happened into someone’s apartment, and simply decided to stay. Which really wasn’t so far from the truth. At the start of each week I’d always give them a little money so they could buy whatever they needed, but other than meals, in fact, they never spent money on anything but an occasional box of coffee-cream cookies.

“Doesn’t it bother you, not having clothes?” I asked.

“Not in the least,” replied 208.

“Why should we be so interested in clothes?” said 209.

Once a week, with tender loving care, the two of them would wash their sweatshirts in the bath. I’d be in bed perusing my Critique of Pure Reason only to look up and see the two of them, naked on the bathroom tiles, washing their sweatshirts in tandem. At times like that, I’d get this really far-away feeling. I don’t know why. Ever since the summer before, when I’d lost a tooth-cap under the diving board at the pool, these would come over me from time to time.

Often when I came home from work, I’d encounter the numbers 208 and 209 swaying in the window’s southern exposure. Times like that, it was enough to bring tears to my eyes.



* * *



Just why did you choose to descend on my apartment, how long do you both intend to stay, and above all, who do you girls think you are? Your age? Background? Somehow I never saw fit to ask.

And you two, for your part, never volunteered a word.



Our days were spent, the three of us, drinking coffee, walking the golf course looking for lost balls, joking around in bed. Going through the newspapers was the highlight of each day, when I’d spend one solid hour explaining what was going on in the news. The two of them were frightfully ignorant about things. They didn’t know Burma from Australia. It took three days to get them to accept that Vietnam was divided in two, and that the two halves were at war. It took another four days to explain why Nixon was bombing Hanoi.

“And which side do you support?” asked 208.

“Which side?”

“You know, North or South?” pressed 209.

“Hmm, it’s hard to say.”

“What do you mean?” returned 208.

“I mean, it’s not like I was living in Vietnam.”

Neither of them would accept that explanation.

Hell, I couldn’t even accept it.

“They’re fighting because they think different, right?” 208 pursued the question.

“You could say that.”

“So there’s two opposite ways of thinking, am I correct?” 208 continued.

“Yes, but… there’s got to be a million opposing schools of thought in the world. No, probably even more than that.”

“So hardly anybody’s friends with anybody?” puzzled 209.

“I guess not,” said I. “Almost no one’s friends with anyone else.”

Dostoyevsky had prophesied it; I lived it out.

That was my lifestyle in the 1970s.



2



The autumn of 1973, it seemed, deep down, held something spiteful. It was painfully clear to the Rat, plain as a pebble in his shoe.

Even after that year’s all-too-brief summer had vanished, as if sucked up into thin air along with early September uncertainties, some small reminder of summer lingered on in the Rat’s heart.

There he was, still in his old T-shirt, cut-offs, beach sandals. Back again to J’s Bar, where he’d sit at the bar facing J, downing overchilled beers. He’d begun smoking again after five years, and every fifteen minutes or so he’d glance at his wristwatch.

The Rat could almost see the passage of time cleaving away-slice-at intervals somewhere down the line. Why it had to be like that, the Rat could never understand. He couldn’t find the severed end. And so he wandered through the dimming autumn twilight holding the limp cord. He cut across grassy knolls, crossed rivers, forced open any number of doors–but the limp cord didn’t lead him anywhere. Like a fly that winter has robbed of wings, like an estuary confronted by the open sea, the Rat was powerless, alone. An ill wind had blown in from somewhere, and to the Rat it felt as if his protective blanket of air had been sent sailing clear around to the other side of the globe.

No sooner had one season slipped out the door than the next came in by another door. A person might scramble to the closing door and call out, Hey, wait a minute, there’s one last thing I forgot to tell you. But nobody would be there any more. The door shuts tight. Already another season is in the room, sitting in a chair, striking a match to light a cigarette. Anything you forgot to mention, the stranger says, you might as well go ahead and tell me, and if it works out, I’ll get the message through.

Nah, it’s okay, you say, it was nothing really. And all around, the sound of the wind. Nothing, really. A season’s died, that’s all.



* * *



Every year it was the same: came that chill time of autumn-going-on-winter, this university-dropout-rich-kid and that lonesome Chinese bartender would be huddled together, just like an elderly couple.

Autumn always hit hard. Those few friends who had been in town for the summer holidays would not even wait for September to roll around before they’d bid brief farewells and be off again to their distant haunts. Ever so subtly the colors changed, as if the summer light had crossed over some unseen divide, and the Rat would note that aura-like brilliance fading away around him. Soon the last breath of the warm dream has seeped away like a stream vanishing into the autumn sands, leaving no trace.

Even for J, autumn was by no means a happy season. From the middle of September on, the number of customers would noticeably dwindle. It was a yearly thing, but that autumn’s decline was something to see. Neither J nor the Rat knew what to make of it. At closing time, there’d still be half a bucket of potatoes for fries left peeled and waiting.

“It’ll start jumping, just you wait,” the Rat consoled J. “You’ll be so busy you’ll curse your luck.”

“Think so, eh?” J voiced dubiously as he plopped down on a barstool he’d commandeered behind the counter and began scraping away with an ice pick at the butter that had dropped on the toaster.

Nobody knew what to expect from there on in.

So the Rat went on thumbing through the pages of his book, while J, between polishing the liquor bottles, would take puffs on the filterless cigarette protruding from his stubby fingers.



* * *



For the Rat, some three years before, the passage of time had begun little by little to lose its evenness. In the spring he quit the university.

Of course, the Rat had any number of reasons for dropping out. The wiring to those reasons had gotten impossibly tangled up, and when things heated up past a critical point, the fuse blew with a bang. Some stayed with him, some were blown clear away, some things bit the dust.

He never explained to anyone why he quit school. It would have taken him five hours to put the pieces in place. And if he told one person, then everyone else would want to hear. Pretty soon he’d be in a real fix, and have to explain it to the whole world. The very prospect was enough to plunge the Rat into a state of depression.

“They didn’t like the way I mowed the grass in the courtyard,” he’d say whenever further explanation became unavoidable. One coed actually went so far as to go check out the courtyard lawn. “You didn’t do such a bad job,” she told him when she came back. “Maybe some bits of paper here and there, but...” “A matter of taste,” was all the Rat said.

Or when he was in a fairly good mood, he might say, “We just couldn’t get along, the university and me,” and leave it at that.

But that’s three whole years ago now.

Everything passed unbelievably quickly. Until at some point, the entire palette of built-up emotions lost all its color, fading to the meaninglessness of old dreams.



***



The Rat left home the year he entered university and moved into a penthouse apartment his father had once used as a study. His parents didn’t oppose the move. After all, they’d bought the place figuring to hand it over to their son by and by. Plus they had no real objection to him struggling along on his own for a while.

Nevertheless, no one would have ever said he was struggling, no matter how they looked at it. A melon just doesn’t look like a rutabaga. The place, you see, was a truly spacious two-room, living-dining-kitchen layout, complete with air-conditioning, telephone, a 17-inch color TV, bath-and-shower unit, an underground parking space set up with a Triumph, and to top it off, the ideal veranda for sunbathing in style. From his top-floor southeast corner window, he could gaze down on a magnificent view of the city and sea. Open the side windows and the rich scent of trees and the sound of birds chirping wafted in.

The Rat spent leisurely afternoons in the comfort of a rattan chaise longue. Lazily closing his eyes, he’d feel the gentle current of time flow through his body like a stream of water. Hours, days, weeks, the Rat spent like that.

Occasionally, though, tiny ripples of emotion would be set off, as if to remind him. At times like that, the Rat simply closed his eyes, sealed off his mind, and sat tight until the ripples subsided. By then it would already be getting a little dark, toward early evening. The ripples gone, that same hushed tranquillity would come over him again, as if nothing had happened.



3



Except for newspaper salesmen, no one ever knocked at my door. So if there was a knock, I never opened the door, never even acknowledged them.

But that Sunday morning the caller kept right on knocking, thirty-five times. Eventually I gave in, dragged myself out of bed with eyes still half-closed, stumbled to the door, and opened it a crack. Standing in the hall was a fortyish man in a gray work outfit, helmet tucked in the hollow of his arm like you’d cuddle a puppy.

“I’m from the telephone company,” the man said. “I’ve come to change the switch-panel.”

I nodded. The guy had a permanent five-o’clock shadow, the sort of face you could shave and shave and never get clean-shaven. His whole face was beard, right up to his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but more than that, I felt just plain sleepy. I’d been up until four in the morning playing backgammon with the twins.

“Could you possibly come back in the afternoon?”

“No, I’m afraid it’s got to be now.”

“How come?”

The man searched through his pants pocket, and brought out a black notebook. “I’ve got a set number of jobs to do in a single day. As soon as I’m through here, it’s off to another area, see?”

I glanced at the addresses in the book, and even though it was upside down I could see that, as he’d said, mine was the only apartment left in the area.

“Just what kind of repair work is it?”

“Real simple. Take out the switch-panel, cut the wires, hook up a new panel, that’s it. Be done in ten minutes.”

I thought about it a moment, then shook my head.

“There’s nothing wrong with the present one,” I said.

“The present one’s the old type.”

“Doesn’t bother me any.”

“Now, listen,” he began, then reconsidered. “That’s not the point. That’d only make problems for everyone.”

“How?”

“Look, all the switch-panels are linked by a big computer back at the main office. But your switch panel, it sends out different signals from everybody else’s, so it fouls up the whole works. Got it?”

“Got it. It’s a matter of matching up hardware to software.”

“Now that we’ve got that straight, how about letting me in?”

At which point I decided I might as well open the door and let him in.

Then it occurred to me to ask,“But what makes you so sure the switch-panel’s inside my apartment? Shouldn’t it be in the superintendent’s room or some place like that?”

“Ordinarily, yes,” said the man, scanning the walls of the kitchen for any sign of the switch-panel. “You see, most people seem to find switch-panels a real nuisance. They’re nothing you’d generally have much use for. They just get in the way.”

I nodded. The man got up on the kitchen stool in his socks and checked around the ceiling. Nothing there.

“A regular treasure hunt. Switch-panels get stashed away in the most unbelievable places. It’s a crime. And then what do people do? They turn around and fill their apartments with mammoth pianos and dolls in glass cases and what have you. It just doesn’t make sense.”

I sympathized. The man gave up on the kitchen, and proceeded to stalk through the other room, craning his head into this corner and that, and before I knew it he was opening the door to the next room.

“For instance, take the switch-panel in the last condo I visited. Let me tell you, that was a case! Where do you think they’d shoved the thing? I mean, even I–”

The man’s words trailed off into a slight gasp. There in the corner of the room, in that enormous bed, the twins’ heads were poking out from under the covers where they lay on either side of the depression I’d left. Dumbstruck, the repairman just stood there with his mouth open for fifteen seconds. For that matter, the twins weren’t exactly bubbling with conversation either. I figured it was up to me to break the ice.

“Uh, this gentleman does telephone repairs.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the one on the right.

“Much obliged,” said the one on the left.

“Well, yes ... likewise, I’m sure,” the repairmen said.

“He’s come to change the switch-panel.”

“The switch-panel?”

“The what?”

“The device that connects our telephone circuits.”

Which meant even less to them, so I handed over the rest of the explaining to the repairman.

“Um... it’s like this. A whole bunch of telephone lines come together here, okay? Say here’s a mother dog and down here are all her puppies. See, you understand, right?”

“?”

“Not a bit.”

“Well, uh... so the mother dog looks after her puppies, but if the mother dog dies, then the puppies die, too. That’s where I come in, and sort of exchange a new mother when it looks like the mother’s going to die.”

“That’s great!”

“Wow!”

Even I was impressed.

“And so that’s why I’m here today. Sorry to have to disturb you.”

“Oh, don’t mind us.”

“No, really, I’d like to watch!”

The man wiped his brow in relief with a towel, and gave the room the once-over.

“Well, now, to find that old switch-panel…”

“No need to make a search,” said the right.

“It’s in the back of the bedding closet. Just pry up the boards.”

I was floored. “Hey, how is it you know stuff like that? I didn’t even know that.”

“The switch-panel?”

“Common knowledge!”

“That does it,” said the repairman.



* * *



Sure enough, the job was over in ten minutes. Meanwhile the twins shared some whispered secret, giggling away, foreheads huddled together. Thanks to which the man bungled the wiring repeatedly. When the work was completed, the twins wormed into their sweatshirts and jeans under the covers, made their way to the kitchen, and made coffee for everyone.

I offered the repairman a leftover Danish, which he accepted with great pleasure, and ate with his coffee.

“Really appreciate it. Haven’t eaten a thing today.”

“Aren’t you married?” queried 208.

“Oh sure, but my wife never feels like getting up Sunday mornings.”

“That’s terrible,” said 209.

“Well, look at me. You know, I don’t work on Sundays because I like to.”

“How about a hard-boiled egg?” I suggested by way of consolation.

“Oh, no, no, no... that’d be too much to ask.”

“No trouble at all,” I said. “I was going to make enough for us all anyway.”

“Well, in that case, medium hard-set, if it’s, uh, at all…”



The man resumed talking as he peeled his hard-boiled egg. “I’ve been doing the rounds of people’s homes for twenty-one years now, but this was a first.”

“What was?” I asked.

“I mean, uh... a guy who’s sleeping with twin girls. Bet that must take some doing, eh?”

“Not especially,” I said, sipping my second cup of coffee.

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s really something,” said 208.

“An animal,” said 209.

“That does it,” said the man.



* * *



I really think that did do it for him. He was so flustered he left behind the old switch-panel. Either that or it was a thank-you gift in return for breakfast. Whatever, the twins spent the rest of day playing with the switch-panel. One would play the mother dog, the other a puppy, chattering some nonsense back and forth incessantly.

I left the two of them to their own devices, while I spent the afternoon finishing up some translation work I’d brought home with me. All the part-time student help was busy with exams and there was no one to do the rough translations, so I had a whole stack of work. It wasn’t going badly until after three o’clock or so, when my pace began to drop off as if my batteries were running down. By four, they’d given up the ghost. I couldn’t make headway with a single line.

So I just quit. I planted my elbows on the glass desk top, and blew smoke up at the ceiling. The smoke drifted lazily through the tranquil afternoon light like some ectoplasmic form. A small calendar I’d gotten at the bank lay on the desk under the glass top. September 1973 . . . it was more like a dream… 1973; who’d have thought such a year would really exist? And for some reason, there was nothing particularly wrong with thinking it didn’t.

“What’s wrong?” 208 came over to ask.

“You look tired. How about some coffee?”

The two of them nodded in consensus, then headed back to the kitchen, one to grind the coffee beans, the other to boil water and heat the cups. Then we all plopped down in a row on the floor by the window, and drank the fresh coffee.

“Not going well?” asked 209.

“It doesn’t seem to be,” said I.

“It’s run down.”

“What has?”

“Your switch-panel.”

“The mother dog.”

I heaved a sigh from the bottom of my gut. “You really think so?”

The two of them nodded in unison.

“On its last legs.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

They just shook their heads.

“Don’t know.”

I took a silent puff at my cigarette. “What say we go for a walk on the golf course? Today’s Sunday, so there ought to be a lot of lost balls.”

After an hour’s worth of backgammon, we climbed over the chainlink fence, and in the twilight strolled on the deserted golf course. I whistled Mildred Bailey’s “It’s So Peaceful in the Country” twice, and the twins complimented me on the tune. As nice as this was, we didn’t find a single ball. There are days like that. Probably all the players in Tokyo with low handicaps had gotten together. Either that, or they’d begun raising specially trained beagles as golf ball retrievers. We gave up and returned to the apartment.



4



The beacon stood at the end of a long jetty that reached out at an angle from the shore. Barely ten feet tall, the beacon wasn’t particularly big. Fishing boats had used its light until the water became so polluted that there weren’t any more fish to be had offshore. Not that there had ever been any harbor to speak of. The fishermen had merely set up winches and makeshift wooden frames along the beach as guide-rails for hoisting the boats up onto the shore by rope. Near the beach lived maybe three fishing families, and every day they’d lay out the morning’s catch of small fry in wooden boxes to dry in the sun behind the sheltering seawall.

The fisher-folk were eventually driven out because 1) the fish had already gone; 2) local residents had become quite vocal about fishermen not belonging in a residential community; and 3) the shanties they’d built unlawfully occupied public property. That all took place in 1962. Who knows where they went? The three shanties were summarily leveled, while the rotting fishing boats, for lack of any other use or place to dump them, were hauled up amidst a seaside grove of trees and children would play there.

Once these fishing boats were out of the picture, only an occasional yacht would sail close to shore, or perhaps a freighter might weigh emergency anchor in dense fog or during a typhoon warning, but very few vessels ever availed themselves of the beacon any more. And even if they did, there was only an outside chance it would really make much difference.

Weathered to a dark patina, the beacon was molded in a bell-shape. Or else it was a brooding man, seen from behind. When the sun went down, and touches of blue filtered into the fading afterglow, an orange lamp would light up in the knob of the bell and slowly begin to revolve. The beacon always pinpointed the onset of nightfall exactly. Against the most gorgeous sunsets or in dim drizzling mist, the beacon was ever true to its appointed moment: that precise instant in the alchemy of light and dark when darkness tipped the scales.

So many times in childhood had the Rat headed out to the beach at dusk just to catch that moment. Toward late afternoon, as the waves died down he’d walk along the jetty out to the beacon, counting the weatherworn paving stones as he went. Beneath the surface of the unbelievably crystalline water he could see schools of the slender fish of early autumn. As if in search of something, they’d trace looping arcs beside the jetty, before shooting off into deeper waters.

When he finally reached the beacon, he’d sit down on the end of the jetty and slowly gaze out over the water. Thin cloud trails brushed across a sky of perfect blue as far as the eye could see. A boundless deep blue, so deep it set the boy’s legs trembling. It was as if he were shaking with fear. The scent of the sea, the tinge of the wind, everything was amazingly vivid. He’d take his time drinking in the vista, letting it slowly but surely spread through him, then just as slowly he’d turn to look behind him. Now it was his own world he observed, set off utterly in the distance by this depth of sea. Back there, the white-sand beach and seawall, the green pine woods tamped down to a low-lying expanse, and behind that the blue-gray hills ascending skyward.

Off in the distance to the left was a gigantic harbor. He could just make out the massive cranes, floating docks, boxlike warehouses, freighters, and high-rise buildings. To the right, curving inland along the shoreline, was a quiet residential area and yacht harbor, and a block of old sake storehouses; then beyond that, the industrial sector lay with its rows of spherical tanks and tall smokestacks, their white smoke drifting lazily across the sky. Further still, for all the ten-year-old Rat knew, you dropped off the edge of the world.

Throughout his childhood from spring to early autumn, the Rat made these little excursions out to the beacon. On days when the breakers were high, his feet would get all wet from the spray, the wind moaning overhead as he padded along, slipping time and again on the mossy stones. He knew that path out to the beacon better than anything. And while he sat there on the end of the jetty, he’d let the sound of the waves fill his ears, watch the clouds and schools of tiny sweetfish, take pebbles he’d pocketed on the way and throw them out into the deep.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting “out there” was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.



A woman he knew lived near the jetty. Whenever the Rat passed the spot, he recalled that aimless feeling of childhood, the scent of those twilights. He stopped his car on the shore road, and cut through the sparse tract of pines that had been planted on the beach to hold back the sand. The dry sand rasped beneath his feet.

They’d built apartment houses where the fishermen’s shacks had been. The canna grass in front of the apartments had, by the looks of it, had the life tramped out of it. Her apartment was on the second floor where, on windy days, a fine spray of sand would pepper the windowpanes. She had a pretty little apartment with southern exposure, but for some reason a brooding air hung over the place.

It’s the sea, she said. It’s too close. The tides, the wind, the roar of the waves, that fishy smell. Everything.

There’s no fishy smell, the Rat said.

There is, she snapped, bringing the blinds crashing down with a pull of the cord. If you lived here, you’d know.

Sand struck the window.