The Narrow Road to the Deep North(91)

And at the moment he resolved to take his destiny into his own hands and die honourably, Nakamura heard some muffled shouts from above. He found his whole being filled with an insatiable curiosity as to what those shouts were, as though doing something, anything, was better than contemplating his wretched fate.

He crawled out of the hollow, stood up in the rain and slowly turned his head, listening intently. Then he heard a woman hissing. The sound came from somewhere above, in a pile of rubble that formed the left-hand side of the Rashomon.

As quietly as was possible on rubble, Nakamura crept up the large mound of loose masonry and broken buildings that formed the left wing of the archway, hand gripping his crowbar tightly. He came upon a small hole in the rubble, the size of a fist. Looking through it he saw into the remains of a bombed-out room, lit from an opening where the top half of the far wall ought to have been. Nakamura could see that the room had perhaps once been a neat and pleasant place, but now the chrysanthemum wallpaper was only just visible through a thick smear of dust and soot, and it seemed to Nakamura that it had been turned into a sort of animal den. The remnants of a rotting tatami mat and some cushions formed a bed, and by it was a three-legged table, propped up with broken bricks, on top of which sat a dirty mirror.

The woman’s hissing began again, very close now, and by twisting his body in the direction of the woman’s voice, Nakamura was able to see into a far corner of the room. There stood a pan pan girl and a young boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, holding a long kitchen knife. Below them lay the uniformed body of an American serviceman whose throat had been so recently cut that it was still weakly spurting blood. The pan pan girl was remonstrating with the boy, asking why he had killed the American, but she was not sad, only angry.

Hidden from their view, Nakamura quickly took all this in, but what caught his eye was not this drama—about which he couldn’t have cared less—but what sat on the makeshift dressing table: two gyoza dumplings and a bar of American chocolate.





2



NAKAMURA CAREFULLY AND quietly crawled down from his peephole and crept over the top of the Rashomon and around to the opening in the wall. As he slowly raised his head over a loose sheet of roofing iron, the pan pan girl was rifling through the dead man’s pockets. When she rolled the American’s body over onto its side, it gave a low murmur. She jumped back up, but, realising it was just air being forced out of his lungs, she went back to searching his clothes. From a back pocket she pulled a roll of American dollars.

But it was the gyoza dumplings that Nakamura was focused on. He was remembering how they ate them all the time when he had served in Manchukuo and thought nothing of it. He felt his mouth filling with saliva at the memory of them then, and the possibility of them now.

Unable to think of anything other than how much he wanted those gyoza dumplings, Nakamura braced himself and threw himself through the hole. He rolled into the room and jumped to his feet, brandishing the crowbar. For a moment all stared at each other over the body of the dead American—the pan pan girl in an expensive floral print shirt, wide slacks and glossy black geta sandals holding the wad of American dollars, the boy with the knife, and Nakamura with his crowbar.

With a roar the boy leapt at Nakamura with his knife, and Nakamura, feeling some heightened sense of himself that was at once terror and calm experience, dropped to a slight squat to balance better, and swung the crowbar as if it were a sword. It passed through the air in a wide upward arc that ended with the soft, sloppy sound of it hitting the boy’s head. That sound—of a hammer burying itself in a watermelon—seemed to Nakamura to stay in the air for a long, long time. And in that same odd eternity that was also only an instant, all the boy’s violent forward momentum ended. There seemed to Nakamura to be a strange break in time before the boy dropped noiselessly to the floor.

Both Nakamura and the pan pan girl said nothing. Though the boy’s body spasmed violently, they knew he was dead. As blood began to appear, the spasms slowed, then stopped, and Nakamura noticed lice swarming in seeming sudden panic around the boy’s filthy long hair. He became acutely conscious of the chill odour of damp dust that filled the room.

The pan pan girl began to whimper. Nakamura took two steps over to the three-legged table and stuffed both gyoza dumplings into his wet mouth. As he gobbled them down, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on her. A new idea came to him.

Using the crowbar to talk, he pointed at the wad of dollars in her hand. With a shaking hand she passed it to him. He pocketed the cash, and then with the tip of his outstretched crowbar lifted the edge of her floral print shirt. Slowly, she raised her eyes from the crowbar to his eyes, and then she bowed and took a step backwards. She began to strip.