10



Magic Touch
*
Death in the Bathtub
*
Messenger with Keepsakes




We had moved into our present house in the autumn of the second year we were
married. The Koenji apartment we had lived in until then was slated for renovation. We
looked for a cheap, convenient apartment to move into, but finding such a place was not
easy with our budget. When he heard this, my uncle suggested that we move into a house
he owned in Setagaya. He had bought it in his youth and lived there for ten years. He
wanted to tear the old place down and put up something more functional, but
architectural regulations prevented him from building the kind of house he wanted. He
was waiting for a rumored relaxation of the rules to take effect, but if he left the place
vacant in the meantime, he would have to pay the property taxes, and if he rented it to
strangers, there could be trouble when he asked them to vacate. From us, he would take
only a nominal rent to cover the taxes, but in return he wanted us to agree to give up the
place with three months' notice when the time came. We had no problem with that: the
part about the taxes was not entirely clear to us, but we jumped at the chance to live in a
real house, if only for a little while, paying the kind of rent we had been paying to live in
an apartment (and a very cheap apartment at that). The house was pretty far from the
nearest station on the Odakyu Line, but it was in a quiet residential neighborhood, and it
had its own small yard. Even though it didn't belong to us, it gave us the feeling, once we
moved in, that we were now part of a real "household."
My mother's younger brother, this uncle of mine never made any demands on us. He
was kind of a cool guy, I suppose, but there was something almost uncanny about him in
the way he left us alone. Still, he was my favorite relative. He had graduated fro m a
college in Tokyo and gone to work as a radio announcer, but when he got "sick of the
work" after ten years, he quit the station and opened a bar on the Ginza. It was an almost
austere little place, but it became widely known for the authenticity of its cocktails, and
within a few years my uncle was running a string of bars and restaurants. Every one of
his establishments did extremely well: apparently, he had that special spark you need for
business. Once, while I was still in college, I asked him why every place he opened was
such a success. In the very same location where one restaurant had failed on the Ginza, he
might open up the same kind of restaurant and do just fine. Why was that? He held the
palms of both hands out for me to see. "It's my magic touch," he said, without a hint of
humor. And that was all he said.
Maybe he really did have a "magic touch," but he also had a talent for finding capable
people to work for him. He paid them high salaries and treated them well, and they in
turn worked hard for him. "When I know I've got the right guy, I put a wad of bills in his
hand and let him do his thing," he once told me. "You've got to spend your money for the
things that money can buy, not worry about profit or loss. Save your energy for the things
that money can't buy."
He married late in life. Only after he had achieved financial success in his mid-forties
did he settle down. His wife was a divorcee, three or four years his junior, and she
brought her own considerable assets to the mar riage. My uncle never told me how he
happened to meet her, and all I could tell about her was that she was a quiet sort of
woman of good back ground. They had no children. She had apparently had no children
with her first husband, either, which may have been the reason for the divorce. In any
case, though not exactly a rich man, my uncle was in a position in his mid- forties where it

was no longer necessary for him to break his back for money. In addition to the profits
from his restaurants and bars, he had rental income from several houses and condos that
he owned, plus steady dividend income from investments. With its reputation for
respectable businesses and modest lifestyles, the family tended to see my uncle as
something of a black sheep, and he had never shown much inclination for consorting with
relatives. As his only nephew, though, I had always been of some concern to him,
especially after my mother died the year I entered college and I had a falling-out with my
father, who remarried. When I was living the lonely life of a poor college student in
Tokyo, my uncle often treated me to dinner in one or another of his Ginza restaurants.
He and his wife now lived in a condo on a hill in Azabu rather than be bothered with
taking care of a house. He was not given to in dulging in luxuries, but he did have one
hobby, which was the purchase of rare automobiles. He kept a Jaguar and an Alfa Romeo
in the garage, both of them nearly antiques and extremely well cared for, as shiny as
newborn babes.



On the phone with my unc le about something else, I took the opportunity to ask him
what he knew about May Kasahara's family.
"Kasahara, you say?" He took a moment to think. "Never heard of them. I was a
bachelor when I lived there, never had anything to do with the neighbors."
"Actually, it's the house opposite theirs I'm curious about, the vacant house on the
other side of the alley from their backyard," I said. "I guess somebody named Miyawaki
used to live there. Now it's all boarded up."
"Oh, Miyawaki. Sure, I knew him," said my uncle. "He used to own a few
restaurants. Had one on the Ginza too. I met him professionally a few times. His places
were nothing much, tell you the truth, but he had good locations. I thought he was doing
all right. He was a nice guy, but kind of a spoiled -rich- kid type. He had never had to
work hard, or he just never got the hang of it or something, but he never quite grew up.
Somebody got him going on the stock market, took him for everything he had- house,
land, businesses, everything. And the timing couldn't have been worse. He was trying to
open a new place, had his house and land up as collateral. Bang! The whole thing. Had a
couple of daughters, I think, college age."
"The house has been empty ever since, I guess."
"No kidding? I'll bet the title's a mess and his assets have been frozen or something.
You'd better not touch that place, no matter what kind of bargain they're offering you."
"Who? Me?" I laughed. "I could never afford a place like that. But what do you
mean?"
"I looked into that house when I bought mine. There's something wrong with it."
"You mean like ghosts?"
"Maybe not ghosts, but I've never heard anything good about the place," my uncle
said. "Some fairly well- known army guy lived there till the end of the war, Colonel
Somebody- or-other, a real superelite officer. The troops under his command in North
China won all kinds of decorations, but they did some terrible things there-executing five
hundred POWs, forcing tens of thousands of farmers to work for them until half of them
dropped dead, stuff like that. These are the stories that were going around, so I don't

know how much is true. He was called home just before the end of the war, so he was
here for the surrender, and he could see from what was going on that he was likely to be
tried as a war criminal. The guys who had gone crazy in China-the generals, the field
offi cers-were being dragged away by the MPs. Well, he had no intention of being put on
trial. He was not going to be made a spectacle of and hanged in the bargain. He preferred
to take his own life rather than let that hap pen. So one day when he saw a GI stop a jeep
in front of his house, he blew his brains out on the spot. He would have preferred to slit
his stomach open the old - fashioned samurai way, but there was no time for that. His wife
hanged herself in the kitchen to 'accompany' her husband in death."
"Wow."
"Anyhow, it turned out the GI was just an ordinary GI, looking for his girlfriend. He
was lost. He wanted to ask somebody directions. You know how tough it is to find your
way around that place. Deciding it's your time to die- that can't be easy for anybody. "
"No, it can't be."
"The house was vacant for a while after that, until an actress bought it- a movie
actress. You wouldn' t know her name. She was around long before your time, and she
was never very famous. She lived there, say, ten years or so. Just she and her maid. She
was single. A few years after she moved in, she contracted some eye disease. Everything
looked cloudy to her, even close up. But she was an actress, after all; she couldn't work
with glasses on. And contact lenses were a new thing back then. They weren't very good
and almost nobody used them. So before the crew shot a scene, she would always go over
the layout and memorize how many steps she had to take from A to B. She managed one
way or another: they were pretty simple films, those old Shochiku domestic dramas.
Everything was more relaxed in those days. Then one day, after she had checked over the
set and gone back to her dressing room, a young cameraman who didn't know what was
going on moved the props and things just a little bit."
"Uh-oh."
"She missed her footing, fell over, and couldn't walk after that. And her vision started
getting even worse. She was practically blind. It was a shame; she was still young and
pretty. Of course her movie- making days were over. All she could do was stay at home.
And then the maid took all her money and ran off with some guy. This maid was the one
person she knew she could trust, depended on her for everything, and the woman took her
savings, her stocks, everything. Boy, talk about terrible stories! So what do you think she
did?"
"Well, obviously this story can't have a bright, happy ending."
"No, obviously," said my uncle. "She filled the tub, stuck her face in, and drowned
herself. You realize, of course, that to die that way, you have to be pretty damned
determined."
"Nothing bright and happy about that."
"No, nothing bright and happy. Miyawaki bought the property soon afterward. I
mean, it's a nice place; everybody wants it when they see it. The neighborhood is
pleasant, the plot is on high ground and gets good sunlight, the lot is big. But Miyawaki
had heard the dark stories about the people who had lived there, so he had the whole
thing torn down, foundation and all, and put up a new house. He even had Shinto priests
come in to do a purification. But that wasn't enough, I guess. Bad things hap pen to
anybody who lives there. It's just one of those pieces of land. They exist, that's all. I

wouldn't take it if they gave it to me."



After shopping at the supermarket, I organized my ingredients for mak ing dinner. I
then took in the laundry, folded it neatly, and put it away. Back in the kitchen, I made
myself a pot of coffee. This was a nice, quiet day, without calls from anybody. I stretched
out on the sofa and read a book. There was no one to disturb my reading. Every once in a
while, the wind -up bird would creak in the backyard. It was virtually the only sound I
heard all day.
Someone rang the front doorbell at four o'clock. It was the postman. "Registered
mail," he said, and handed me a thick envelope. I took it and put my seal on the receipt.
This was no ordinary envelope. It was made of old - fashioned heavy rice paper, and
someone had gone to the trouble of writing my name and address on it with a brush, in
bold black characters. The sender's name on the back was Tokutaro Mamiya, the address
somewhere in Hiroshima Prefecture. I had absolutely no knowledge of either. J udging
from the brushwork, this Tokutaro Mamiya was a man of advanced age. No one knew
how to write like that anymore.
I sat on the sofa and used a scissors to cut the envelope open. The letter itself, just as
old- fashioned as the envelope, was written on rolled rice paper in a flowing hand by an
obviously cultivated person. Lacking such cultivation myself, I could hardly read it. The
sentence style matched the handwriting in its extreme formality, which only complicated
the process, but with enough time, I managed to decipher the general meaning. It said that
old Mr. Honda, the fortune-teller whom Kumiko and I had gone to see so long ago, had
died of a heart attack two weeks earlier in his Meguro home. Living alone, he had died
without company, but the doctors believed that he had gone quickly and without a great
deal of suffering- perhaps the one bright spot in this sad tale. The maid had found him in
the morning, slumped forward on the low table of his foot warmer. The letter writer,
Tokutaro Mamiya, had been stationed in Manchuria as a first lieutenant and had chanced
to share the dangers of war with Corporal Oishi Honda. Now, in compliance with the
strong wishes of the deceased, and in the absence of surviving relatives, Mamiya had
undertaken the task o f distributing the keepsakes. The deceased had left behind extremely
minute written instructions in this regard. "The de tailed and meticulous will suggests that
Mr. Honda had anticipated his own impending death. It states explicitly that he would be
extremely pleased if you, Mr. Toru Okada, would be so kind as to receive a certain item
as a remembrance of him. I can imagine how very busy you must be, Mr. Okada, but I
can assure you, as an old comrade in arms of the deceased with few years to look forward
to myself, that I could have no greater joy than if you were indeed to be so kind as to
receive this item as a small remembrance of the late Mr. Honda." The letter concluded
with the address at which Mr. Mamiya was presently staying in Tokyo, care of someo ne
else named Mamiya in Hongo 2-chome, Bunkyo Ward. I imagined he must be in the
house of a relative.
I wrote my reply at the kitchen table. I had hoped to keep the postcard short and
simple, but once I had pen in hand, those few concise phrases were not forthcoming. "I
was fortunate enough to have known the late Mr. Honda and benefited from our brief
acquaintance. The news that he is no longer living brings back memories of those times.

Our ages were very different, of course, and our association lasted but a single year, yet-
I always used to feel that there was something about the deceased that moved people
deeply. To be quite honest, I would never have imagined that Mr. Honda would name me
specifically to be the recipient of a keep sake, nor am I certain that I am even qualified to
receive anything from him, but if such was his wish, then I will certainly do so with all
due respect. Please contact me at your earliest convenience."
When I dropped the card into the nearest mailbox, I found myself murmuring old Mr.
Honda's verse: "Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan."



It was close to ten before Kumiko came home from work. She had called before six to
say that she would be late again today, that I should have dinner without her and she
would grab something outside. Fine, I said, and ate a simple meal. Again I stayed home
alone, reading a book. When she came in, Kumiko said she wanted a few sips of beer.
We shared a mid size bottle. She looked tired. Elbows on the kitchen table, she rested her
chin in her hands and said little when I spoke to her. She seemed preoccupied. I told her
that Mr. Honda had died. "Oh, really?" she said, with a sigh. "Oh, well, he was getting on
in years, and he was almost deaf." When I said that he had left a keepsake for me, though,
she was shocked, as if something had suddenly fallen out of the sky.
"For you?!" she exclaimed, her eyebrows twisting into a frown.
"Yeah. Weird, isn't it?"
"He must have liked you."
"How could that be? I never really talked to the guy," I said. "At least I never said
much. And even if I did, he couldn't hear anything. We used to sit and listen to his stories
once a month. And all we ever heard from him was the Battle of Nomonhan: how they
threw Molotov cocktails, and which tank burned, and which tank didn't burn, that kind of
stuff."
"Don't ask me," said Kumiko. "He must have liked something about you. I don't
understand people like that, what's in their minds."
After that, she went silent again. It was a strained silence. I glanced at the calendar on
the wall. Her period was not due yet. I imagined that something unpleasant might have
happened at the office.
"Working too hard?" I asked.
"A little," Kumiko said, a fter taking a sip of beer and staring at what was left in her
glass. There was an almost defiant tone in her voice. "Sorry I was so late, but you know
how it is with magazine work when we get busy. And it's not as if I do this all the time. I
get them to give me less overtime than most. They know I have a husband to go home
to."
I nodded. "I'm not blaming you," I said. "I know you have to work late sometimes. I
was just worried you're letting yourself get tired out."
She took a long shower. I drank my beer and flipped through a weekly magazine that
she had brought home.
I shoved my hand in my pants pocket and found the pay there from my recent little
part -time job. I hadn't even taken the cash from the envelope. Another thing I hadn't
done was tell Kumiko about the job. Not that I had been hiding it from her, but I had let

the opportunity to mention it slip by and there had never been another one. As time
passed, I found it harder to bring up the subject, for some strange reason. All I would
have had to say was, "I met this odd sixteen-year -old girl from down the street and took a
job with her doing a survey for a wig maker. The pay was pretty good too."
And Kumiko could have said, "Oh, really? Isn't that nice," and that might have been
the end of it. Or not. She might have wanted to know more about May Kasahara. She
might have been bothered that I was making friends with a sixteen- year-old girl. Then I
would have had to tell her about May Kasahara and explain in detail where, when, and
how we happened to meet. But I'm not very good at giving people orderly explanations
of things.
I took the money from the envelope and put it in my wallet. The envelope itself I
crumpled and threw in the wastebasket. So this was how secrets got started, I thought to
myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not consciously intended to keep
May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal,
finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flowed down a
certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness,
whatever my original "intention" may have been. The same thing had happened with
Creta Kano. I had told Kumiko that Malta Kano's younger sister had come to the house,
th at her name was Creta, that she dressed in early- sixties style, that she took samples of
our tap water. But I had remained silent on the fact that she had afterward begun to make
startling revelations to me and had vanished without a word before reaching the end.
Creta Kano's story had been too far-out: I could never have re-created the nuances and
conveyed them to Kumiko, and so I had not tried. Or then again, Kumiko might have
been less than pleased that Creta Kano had stayed here long after her business was
through and made all kinds of troubling personal confessions to me. And so that became
another one of my little secrets.
Maybe Kumiko had the same kind of secrets that she was keeping from me. With my
own fund of secrets, I was in no position to blame her if she did, of course. Between the
two of us, I was surely the more secretive. She tended to say what she was thinking. She
was the type of per son who thought things out while speaking. I was not like that.
Uneasy with these ruminations, I walked toward the bathroom. The door was wide
open. I stood in the doorway and looked at Kumiko from behind. She had changed into
solid - blue pajamas and was standing in front of the mirror, drying her hair with a towel.
"About a job for me," I said. "I have been t hinking about it. I've asked friends to be
on the lookout, and I've tried a few places myself. There are jobs out there, so I can work
anytime I decide to work. I can start tomorrow if I make up my mind to it. It's making up
my mind that's hard. I'm just not sure. I'm not sure if it's OK for me to pick a job out of
a hat like that."
"That's why I keep telling you to do what you want," she said, while looking at
herself in the mirror. "You don't have to find a job right away. If you're worried about
the economics of it, you don't have to worry. If it makes you uneasy not to have a job, if
it's a burden to you to have me be the only one working outside the house while you stay
home and take care of the housework, then take some job-any job-for a while. I don' t
care."
"Of course, I'll have to find a job eventually. I know that, you know that. I can't go
on hanging around like this forever. And I will find a job sooner or later. It's just that

right now, I don't know what kind of a job I should take. For a while after I quit, I just
figured I'd take some other law- related job. I do have connections in the field. But now I
can't get myself into that mood. The more time that goes by, the less interest I have in
law. I feel more and more that it's simply not the work for me."
Kumiko looked at me in the mirror. I went on:
"But knowing what I don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what I do want to
do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don't have an image of
the one thing I really want to do. That's my problem now. I can't find the image."
"So, then," she said, putting her towel down and turning to face me, "if you're tired of
law, don't do it anymore. Just forget about the bar exam. Don't get all worked up about
finding a job. If you can't find the image, wait until it forms by itself. What's wrong with
that?"
I nodded. "I just wanted to make sure I had explained to you exactly how I felt."
"Good," she said.
I went to the kitchen and washed my glass. She came in from the bathroom and sat at
the kitchen table.
"Guess who called me this afternoon," she said. "My brother."
"Oh?"
"He's thinking of running for office. In fact, he's just about decided to do it."
"Running for office?!" This came as such a shock to me, I could hardly speak for a
moment. "You mean ... for the Diet?"
"That's right. They're asking him to run for my uncle's seat in Niigata."
"I thought it was all set for your uncle's son to succeed him. He was going to resign
his directorship at Dentsu or something and go back to Niigata."
She started cleaning her ears with a cotton swab. "That was the plan, but my cousin
doesn't want to do it. He's got his family in Tokyo, and he enjoys his work. He's not
ready to give up such an important post with the world's largest advertising firm and
move back to the wilds of Niigata just to become a Diet member. The main opposition is
from his wife. She doesn't want him sacrificing the family to run for office."
The elder brother of Kumiko's father had spent four or five terms in the Lower
House, representing that electoral district in Niigata. While not exactly a heavyweight, he
had compiled a fairly impressive record, rising at one point to a minor cabinet post. Now,
however, advanced age and heart disease would make it impossible for him to enter the
next election, which meant that someone would have to succeed to his constituency. This
uncle had two sons, but the elder had never intended to go into politics, and so the
younger was the obvious choice.
"Now the people in the district are dying to have my brother run. They want
somebody young and smart and energetic. Somebody who can serve for several terms,
with the talent to become a major power in the central government. My brother has the
name recognition, he'll attract the young vote: he's pe rfect. True, he can't schmooze with
the locals, but the support organization is strong, and they'll take care of that. Plus, if he
wants to go on living in Tokyo, that's no problem. All he has to do is show up for the
election."
I had trouble picturing Noboru Wataya as a Diet member. "What do you think of all
this?" I asked.
"He's got nothing to do with me. He can become a Diet member or an astronaut, for

all I care."
"But why did he make a point of coming to you for advice?"
"Don't be ridiculous," she said, with a dry voice. "He wasn't asking my advice. You
know he'd never do that. He was just keeping me in formed. As a member of the family."
"I see," I said. "Still, if he's going to run for the Diet, won't it be a problem that he's
divorced and single?"
"I wonder," said Kumiko. "I don't know anything about politics or elections or
anything. They just don't interest me. But anyway, I'm pretty sure he'll never get married
again. To anybody. He should never have gotten married in the first place. That's not
what he wants out of life. He's after something else, something completely different from
what you or I want. I know that for sure."
"Oh, really?"
Kumiko wrapped two used cotton swabs in a tissue and threw them in the
wastebasket. Then she raised her face and looked straight at me. "I once saw him
masturbating. I opened a door, and there he was."
"So what? Everybody masturbates," I said.
"No, you don't understand," she said. Then she sighed. "It happened maybe two years
after my sister died. He was probably in college, and I was something like a third grader.
My mother had wavered between getting rid of my sister's things and putting them away,
and in the end she decided to keep them, thinking I might wear them when I got older.
She had put them in a carton in a closet. My brother had taken them out and was smelling
them and doing it." I kept silent.
"I was just a little girl then. I didn't know anything about sex. I really didn't know
what he was doing, but I could tell that it was something twisted, something I wasn't
supposed to see, something much deeper than,it appeared on the surface." Kumiko shook
her head.
"Does Noboru Wataya know you saw him?"
"Of course. We looked right into each other's eyes." I nodded.
"And how about your sister's clothes?" I asked. "Did you wear them when you got
bigger?" "No way," she said.
"So you think he was in love with your sister?" "I wonder," said Kumiko. "I'm not
even sure he had a sexual interest in her, but he certainly had something, and I suspect
he's never been able to get away from that something. That's what I mean when I say he
should never have gotten married in the first place."
Kumiko fell silent. For a long time, neither of us said anything. Then she spoke first.
"In that sense, I think he may have some serious psychological problems. Of course, we
all have psychological problems to some extent, but his are a lot worse than whatever you
or I might have. They're a lot deeper and more persistent. And he has no intention of let-
ting these scars or weaknesses or whatever they are be seen by anybody else. Ever. Do
you understand what I'm saying? This election coming up: it worries me."
"Worries you? How's that?"
"I don't know. It just does," she said. "Anyhow, I'm tired. I can't think anymore
today. Let's go to bed."
Brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I studied my face in the mirror. For over two
months now, since quitting my job, I had rarely entered the "outside world." I had been
moving back and forth between the neigh borhood shops, the ward pool, and this house.

Aside from the Ginza and that hotel in Shinagawa, the farthest point I had traveled from
home was the cleaner's by the station. And in all that time, I had hardly seen anyone.
Aside from Kumiko, the only people I could be said to have "seen" in two months were
Malta and Kano and May Kasahara. It was a narrow world, a world that was standing
still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world
that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called
strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to
stop moving. And every time the wind- up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the
world descended more deeply into chaos.
I rinsed my mouth and went on looking at my face for a time.
I can't find the image, I said to myself. I'm thirty, I'm standing still, and I can't find
the image.
When I went from the bathroom to the bedroom, Kumiko was asleep.