Chapter 6 (February 10, 2010) (3,594 words)

Mitsui was not – and all his teachers would attest to this – academically inclined in any way, and he knew so little about history that “World War II” meant nothing more to him than a prospective title for the latest Star Wars movie. But even he could tell when he was looking at a palace and when he was not, and what he was looking at now was manifestly not a palace.

“A cave,” he said in a meditative way. “An endlessly dark cave into which countless unknowing travelers who wanted to see summer palaces were led by evil tour guides who wanted to sacrifice them by moonlight.”

Ayako thought he had suddenly been seized by a literary afflatus.

“Wow, Mitsui,” she said. “That was really good.”

Miyagi’s spirits sank even lower than he had thought possible.

“You should really consider becoming a writer,” Ayako went on. “You have the stuff in you.”

Mitsui chuckled and feigned modesty.

“Aw, really, Ayako.”

“I mean it.”

He leaned closer to her and whispered into her ear, “Between you and me, I write horror stories in my spare time.”

Ayako gasped and giggled in admiration.

To Miyagi, who didn’t hear what Mitsui had said, the whole thing was no less than a nightmare. Mitsui had leaned so close to Ayako that it almost looked as if he were nuzzling her. Miyagi shook his head. That couldn’t be true. But… Ayako was giggling like she was really enjoying it. How could he explain that? Miyagi decided that the time had come. From his pocket he pulled out a butter knife he had purloined from the hotel and started on a series of vain attempts at cutting his wrists, while all the while keeping his eyes steadily focused on the couple before him, curious to see where things would lead.

“I like that,” she said, loud enough for Miyagi to hear. (He was becoming more fervent with the butter knife.) Her next words were spoken in a whisper that Miyagi could not hear. “Are you willing to show me some of your literary masterpieces?”

Mitsui laughed.

“Sure, why not?”

Mitsui said this out loud, and Miyagi inevitably believed it was his response to a surreptitious request Ayako had made. Miyagi reminded himself that Ayako was still too young to be engaging in something like that, and the thought was able to momentarily assuage his apprehensions. But what Ayako said next knocked the wind out of him.

“I hope your parents won’t mind me coming to your house. I mean… Well…”

Mitsui laughed.

“Are you kidding me? They’ll think of you as a gift from God, sent to set his wayward son straight. And,” he went on, winking, “they’ve always wanted me to bring a girl home with me.”

Ayako giggled.

“Oh, Mitsui, you’re such a pervert.”

The only thing that prevented Miyagi from ending his life heroically was the fact that the above proceedings were interrupted by a sudden realization Mitsui was struck by.

“Oh yeah, right,” he said. “I almost forgot.” He turned to the bus conductor cum tour guide who had been ingratiatingly standing by and listening to their every word all the while. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, waving his hand in the direction of the cave.

The conductor chuckled softly.

“It’s the summer palace.”

Mitsui frowned.

“I’m no fool,” he said. “I know a summer palace when I see one.”

“Pardon me. I should have made my meaning more clear,” said the conductor, speaking in sepulchral tones of all a sudden. “This is only the gateway to the palace.”

Everyone was visibly relieved.

“There, see,” said Coach Takato, relieving his forehead of the furrowed lines of concentration. “These people are paid to be circuitous.” He shook his head and smiled.

While everyone was talking about how they thought for a second that the cave really was the palace, Sendoh had busied himself with examining a bush he came across nearby.

“What are these?” he said, pointing at the red berries growing on them.

“Berries,” said Rukawa simply. It was to him that the question was addressed.

Sendoh waved his hand impatiently.

“Of course they’re berries,” he said. “I mean, what kind of berries?”

Rukawa shrugged and walked away, leaving an exasperated Sendoh to speculate on the nature of the strange plant. He had plucked one of the berries off the tree and was in the process of sniffing it when he serendipitously discovered something weird. Curious, he sniffed again. Same result.

“My nose is blocked.”

“Here’s a handkerchief,” said Haruko out of nowhere, startling Sendoh, and also Sakuragi, who had chosen just that moment to sit precariously poised on top of a rock. The sight of his one true love giving another man her handkerchief was too much for the redhead to bear, and he fell backwards off the rock.

“Thanks,” said Sendoh.

“Anytime,” said Haruko with a smile. She loved helping people. But of course, Rukawa was her only love. She hoped Sendoh wouldn’t misunderstand the gesture. She appreciated the fact that he had feelings for her, but she couldn’t imagine herself agreeing to go out with him.

“Thanks,” said Sendoh after he had finished blowing his nose into the handkerchief, oblivious of what was going on in Haruko’s mind.

Haruko looked at him sympathetically. Sorry Sendoh, she said internally. I just can’t go out with you. I hope you’ll understand.

“Do you want this back?” asked Sendoh.

Haruko shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Just throw it over that rock.”

Sendoh shrugged and threw the used handkerchief over the rock Haruko had pointed at.

Simultaneously something big shot past him like a bullet, crying, “NOOOOOOOO!” and the last thing Sendoh saw before Akagi sailed over the rock and disappeared was Sakuragi attempting to get up behind it.

Thud.

Haruko had her hands clasped over her mouth all through, incredulously staring at the spot where her brother had been mere seconds earlier.

A small crowd (namely everyone present) had gathered around the rock and was standing still with bated breath.

A few moments later, Akagi clambered over the rock, panting and heaving.

“I’m okay,” he said, putting up his hands in order to dispel everyone’s anxiety. “Nothing to worry about. I landed on something soft.”

Sakuragi emerged at that point, looking seriously disgruntled, limping slightly.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me.”

“Soft?” asked Kogure curiously. “If Akagi landed on something soft, then it must have been Sakuragi’s—”

“Drop it,” said Sakuragi peevishly. “Let’s not talk about it.”

“Is everybody okay?” asked Coach Anzai.

“Yeah,” said Sakuragi bitterly, flexing his limbs and doing a few exercises to make sure all his bones were in place. “I’m fine,” he declared.

“Good,” said Coach Taoka dismissively. “Now, where were we again? Oh, yes, the question of whether the sources that the people in charge of making the brochure my dear friend Takato is so obsessed with had were reliable or not.”

A vein throbbed in Coach Takato’s temple.

“There is nothing wrong with the Brochure,” he said. “One of my old friends from college now works at the Department of Tourism, and he says that the people there know their stuff. So if there’s anyone who needs to get their sources checked, it’s you.”

“No need to be so uptight,” said Coach Taoka coolly, as if wanting to create a contrast between his attitude and that of Kainan’s coach. “People make mistakes. Maybe one of your friend’s oh so fantastic coworkers unwittingly allowed a typo to slip into the map, and what was supposed to be ‘Dark, Dark Cave’ was printed as ‘Summer Palace’.”

Coach Takato was exasperated.

“Do you realize that the Department of Tourism can’t afford to make mistakes of that kind?”

“Then it’s lamentable that they have.”

“You’re impossible.”

Sakuragi cleared his throat loudly at this point.

“You two are at it again,” he said.

The coaches in question appeared to have realized it just then, and recomposed themselves hastily, each casting an austere glance at the other and refusing to acknowledge his existence.

Mitsui, meanwhile, after contriving several more paragraphs to the effect that the bus conductor cum tour guide was a conniving criminal who wanted to murder all of them (thoroughly impressing Ayako, much to Miyagi’s dismay), proceeded to pose the unasked question directly to the tour guide.

“Did you bring us to the wrong place on purpose so you could sacrifice us to your loony mountain spirits?” He turned to Ayako, shaking his head amusedly. “These mountain-folk and their primitive beliefs…”

The tour guide looked affronted.

“Such harsh words, master,” he said reprovingly. “I resent it.”

“Ha!” said Mitsui contemptuously. “As if you deserve any better! Oh? Where is the Summer Palace, then, huh?” He put his hand over his brows and mockingly imitated the manner of someone looking around for something in vain. “Where is the Summer Palace?”

The tour guide pointed straight at the cave.

Mitsui laughed derisively.

“Inside the cave? Couldn’t have come up with anything more stupid, could you?”

The tour guide austerely continued to point at the cave.

“Not inside the cave,” he said, his tone conveying the unspoken “you fool”. “You have to go through the cave.”

“You mean it’s actually a tunnel?” asked Fujima with a gasp. He had been listening to their conversation from the sidelines for quite a while.

“Yes,” said the tour guide, pleased at Fujima’s shrewdness. “The Palace is located on the other side of the tunnel. The Emperor who built it was, as they say, a lover of privacy.”

“Excellent,” said Coach Takato with the air of a military commander. “There’s nothing more invigorating than a good hike down a dark tunnel.”

This earned him several groans.

“Come on!” said Coach Takato. “Are you basketball players or a bunch of lazy pumpkins?”

Nobody could tell what Coach Takato really meant when he chose those words, but it was decided that it had something to do with their unwillingness to step inside the tunnel.

Fujima stepped forward and cleared his throat, Hanagata at his side, flashing his glasses austerely upon the audience as he was wont to do whenever he felt indignant.

“You should all be ashamed of yourself for being so indolent,” said Fujima in the way of elucidating Coach Takato’s nebulous remonstrance, and Hanagata added, “Rightly so.”

Akagi, Maki and a few others including Sendoh and Rukawa who prided themselves for being otherwise immediately left the group and joined Fujima.

“Yes,” said Akagi gravely. “You’re so lazy.”

“Or scared,” added Maki with a glance at Jin that went unnoticed. “Yeah, you’re all probably just scared of the dark.” He laughed bitterly. “Scared of the dark? You people?”

Some others, including Mitsui and Kogure, detached themselves from the group and joined Maki.

“Scared of the dark?” said Mitsui in a tone of incredulous mockery. “I’ve been sleeping in the attic since I was five, and you know why? Because there aren’t any windows, and there aren’t any electrical lights up there.”

Kogure was grinning maniacally.

“Oooh the dark! Ha, ha, ha! The dark!!! BOOOOOO!” This was accompanied by all sorts of animated gestures and mocking laughter.

Sendoh, who relied on rationality, ventured to suggest that the others were probably worried that they would fall down and get hurt.

“It’s a flat, paved path all the way,” said the tour guide glumly, as if the path had been paved against his will.

“Oh,” said Sendoh, adding brightly, “Then there’s absolutely no need for you to worry!”

In the end, Sakuragi, Kiyota and Jin were the only ones still unwilling to go.

“Jin,” said Fukuda in his slow, somber way. “You haven’t changed.”

Maki presented a mild diversion by asking curiously, “From what?” He liked keep track of such potentially important things about his team.

“Well,” said Fukuda, the literary glint appearing in his otherwise dull eyes. “Back in middle school” – he paused, glanced at Jin, who seemed to be pleading him not to go any further, and then resumed – “Jin was a scaredy-cat, an emo, and a crybaby among other things.”

“I already know that,” said Maki. “What else?”

“One time, our school took us on a field trip to a marshy forest. Jin looked up at a pine tree, saw a lone pine cone hanging precariously from the end of a branch, and burst into tears. I remember he was saying something about the lamentable fate of the pine cone, and that he wished he could save it. And then it happened – the pine cone fell. And Jin was inconsolable.”

Fukuda’s narrative style had a strangely contrived tone to it – as if he had written it down somewhere a long time ago and memorized it by recounting it innumerable times to all who cared to listen. He didn’t falter, and he used strong adjectives wherever necessary in order to depict the full tragedy of Jin’s tale.

“Go on,” said Maki, clearly enjoying himself.

“Then Jin saw a squirrel on the ground, scurrying unsuspectingly back to its burrow – wherever it was – after a long, hard morning of searching fruitlessly for food.” Nobody asked how Fukuda was so sure of this. “Jin screamed like a girl at the top of his voice, frightening every other squirrel that had been searching fruitlessly for food, as well as all the birds that were taking a nap in their nests in the trees, and the entire class. Thinking Jin saw something unspeakably frightening, the entire class (excluding me, of course) began screaming at the top of their lungs. The teacher was on the verge of passing out – she, too, had been screaming. Then I did the prudent thing and hit Jin with the pine cone that he had seen falling, bringing him back to his senses and calming the class down. The next time I saw Jin, his wrists were covered in bandages. I asked him what had happened, and he answered that he was depressed about what had happened at the field trip, and wanted to punish himself what he had done. He had used a particularly pointy carrot for this. That was the story of Soichiro Jin.”

Fujima couldn’t help himself. He broke into applause.

“That was wonderful!” he said. “Absolutely amazing. You used the right tone of the dispassionate bystander, and your descriptions were vivid.”

Fukuda quoted Shakespeare and said, “I read classics, after all.”

Uozumi looked affronted.

“Fukuda,” he said. “You’ve never said more than a word when we ask you questions. And you start talking nonstop like a bad leak in the plumbing when Maki, here, wants you to open your mouth.”

Jin couldn’t believe his luck. He had braced himself against the humiliation he thought he would inevitably incur once Fukuda had finished telling his story, and now he realized that there was never any real need for it at all. Everyone was too wrapped up in analyzing Fukuda’s literary traits to pay Jin the slightest attention. What luck!

“I seriously can’t believe it Jin,” said Mitsui, feeling disillusioned. “My rival, a girl?” A sharp glance from Ayako made him say, “Oh, scratch that. Girls are much, much tougher than you. So what should I call you, then?” A moment’s silent speculation made him suggest the word “wimp”.

Ayako approved.

“Much better,” she said.

“Jin the wimp,” said Mitsui with a nod. “It has a nice ring to it.”

This inspired poetry in Kogure.

“Jin the wimp,” he said, then paused to let the words sink in. “Jin the wimp. By day he’s a loser, by night he’s a pimp.”

Akagi shook his head and sighed.

“Kogure, there’s something seriously wrong with you,” he said. “I’d say you need to see a psychiatrist. And besides, your little poem didn’t make any sort of sense.”

Kogure was unfazed.

“Of course it did,” he said cheerfully. “Pine cones are female.”

Akagi shook his head again.

“Not all of them,” he said. “There are male pine cones, too: the ones that produce pollen.” He went on to describe at length all he knew about pine cones.

“Oh,” said Kogure. “Okay, then, the female kind. Right?” he said, turning to Jin. “Just making sure you were straight.”

Jin looked green.

Fujima walked up to him and placed an understanding hand on his shoulder.

“The problem with you is that you’re too gauche,” he said. “When we return to Kanagawa, I’ll give you lessons on how to be more confident and less clumsy, more of a man and less of a wo— Sorry, Ayako, I meant crybaby. Anyway, Jin, I can guarantee that when I’m through with you, you’ll look back at your old life and scoff. ‘Is that what I used to be like?’ you’d say to yourself, cringing. ‘What happened to my poor baby?’ your mom might say, but your dad would silence her with a glance and say, ‘Our boy has become a man.’ How would you like that? It’ll be a thousand yen a day, seven days a week, for the greater part of three months. What do you say?”

Jin said nothing.

“Don’t waste your time on him, Fujima,” said Uozumi with a disgusted glance at Jin.

“Stay out of this, Uozumi,” said Fujima coolly. “I’m trying to help him.”

Help was what Jin neither wanted nor needed. But he didn’t have the energy to tell them that. Just listening to Fukuda’s story wore him out completely and made him sick in the gut. Besides, Fukuda had twisted all the facts: Jin hadn’t cried that day just because he had seen a stupid pine cone: he’d cried because he’d seen a dead, decapitated bird dangling upside down from a branch, as if someone had painstakingly removed the head after the bird had died. A sight like that would rend anyone’s heart. And it hadn’t been a squirrel that scared him, but what he had thought was a large snake – the squirrel had just been passing by. And at the precise moment that the pine cone Fukuda had so unscrupulously chucked at him made contact, he had realized that what he had taken to be a snake was actually an old, twisted branch, decaying in the undergrowth. But would anyone believe him if he tried to explain?

Sakuragi wouldn’t stop laughing.

“What a loser!” he said, laughing so hard that his eyes watered. “The genius would never do something as stupid as that! If I’d known we were up against a loser like you during the Qualifying Games, we would have creamed Kainan!”

Maki glared, not at Sakuragi but at Jin.

“Jin,” he said dangerously. “How could you let our magnificent team be humiliated like this? I can’t believe that you were the reason we would have lost the match.”

Jin was past caring at this point. Nevertheless, he made one last attempt at redeeming himself.

“We didn’t lose—”

“Quiet, Jin,” said Takasago, the one who rarely spoke. Upholding Kainan’s dignity was his sole purpose in his high school life. It was on occasions like this that he spoke. His voice had the same tone of authority as Akagi’s had, and one would deemed it pardonable, when one heard him speak, to mistake the two centers for each other, as Sakuragi had done in their game. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Totally,” echoed Muto.

“If I were the captain of the team—”

Maki cut him off.

“I’m the captain of the team,” he said forcefully.

“Yes, but—”

“Takasago, I know that you’ve always wanted to be the captain, but face it: you’re not.”

“I was just saying—”

“Enough is enough!” said Coach Takato in one of his maniacal bursts of anger. “You guys are driving me up the wall with your bickering! Maki and the others, stop picking on Jin. Jin, if you’ve really got problems, you should sort it out with your family psychiatrist – not here, and not now.”

The way he said “family psychiatrist” seemed to insinuate that Jin had a family history of mental illness.

But Jin didn’t make any response to this whatsoever. He had long reconciled himself to the fact that if justice could be found anywhere, it was certainly not here.

He went and joined Miyagi, who had thoughtfully brought with him a spare butter knife, and began going through the familiar motions of wrist cutting.

“Come on now, everyone,” said Coach Takato, taking advantage of the fact that he was still the center of attention before it became too late to be of any consequence. “It’s now or never. We don’t have all day. Do you want to see the palace or not?”

He took the silence he got for an answer as a Yes.

“Good,” he said, and then turned to the tour guide. He made to speak, but Coach Taoka cut him off.

“I’ll speak this time,” he said with the air of one who resented his rival being the center of attention. “Guide,” he said, “lead the way.”

And they began their dangerous journey into the dark cave, their path illuminated by nothing but an exceptionally powerful flashlight, the silence broken only by their incessant bickering and the screeches of annoyance the bats emitted at the invasion of their privacy. Jin and Miyagi brought up the rear. They felt no trepidation of any sort, none of the excitement the others felt. They walked on indifferently, like zombies, without any purpose.

It was only when Ayako screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice reverberating around the cave, that Miyagi showed the first signs of life.

“Ayako…”