Dark Water

IV – DREAM CRUISE

Masayuki Enoyoshi sat against the mast with his feet stretched out on the bow hatch. In this sloppiest of postures, he seemed to be deliberately facing away from the cockpit. It was not possible to sit on the bow hatch when the main and jib sails were set; anyone sitting there would obstruct the sail whenever the boat changed direction. At that particular moment, however, the small yacht, twenty-five feet long, was motoring out into Tokyo Bay along a sea-lane. Bordered on both sides by landfills, the sea-lane was like a little bay within a larger one. All the yacht’s sails were down. Yachts were prohibited from crossing this patch of sea with their sails set. Any yacht being powered by its sails was likely to obstruct the heavy maritime traffic that plied this part of the bay.

Enoyoshi guessed what the Ushijimas, the couple who owned the boat, were up to. They were going to use this time with the sails down to talk to him. Still inexperienced, Ushijima was far from proficient at using the sails to steer the yacht. It’d been annoying just to watch. Apparently unable to gauge the direction of the wind, Ushijima kept fussing about in the cockpit working the sails in and out with an uncertain look on his face. The way he glanced windward and shook his head, it was obvious the yacht wasn’t sailing how he wanted it to. Enoyoshi had felt more uneasy watching Ushijima’s expression than from the lurching of the boat and had wondered whether they’d make it safely back to the marina.

Yet Ushijima it was who had his hand on the tiller now in the cockpit just behind Enoyoshi. When it came to steering with the nine horsepower outboard motor, the helmsman was finding it easy enough to manoeuvre the yacht. Leaving a trail of white foam in its wake, the yacht silently made its way between the landfill that served as the central breakwater and the pier of the Ariake Ferry. A trip around the tip of Wakasu Marine Park and slightly up the Ara River brought you back to the Dream Island Marina. With renewed confidence in his ability to handle the boat, Ushijima self-consciously placed a foot up on the bench and struck a pose at the tiller. Ushijima’s wife Minako did not appear on deck. She was probably in the cabin down below looking for something to drink. Enoyoshi did not miss her talkative presence. He was only too grateful for the peaceful interlude.

Enoyoshi glanced at his watch. It was a little before six in the evening. This mini-cruise was only intended to provide a superficial sampling of the crannies of Tokyo Bay and was due to return to the Dream Island Marina by evening.

The sun was setting on the western horizon. If this were the open sea, they would have beheld the majestic sight of an evening sun quenching itself on an unobstructed horizon. Here the view was not all that different from what you could get from the pier, but the inexperienced skipper had neither the skill nor the courage to get the boat out into the open sea. A cluster of super-high-rises under construction in the secondary coastal development area rose in the western sky like a clump of bamboo shoots springing from the buried nutrients of the landfill.

A thin evening mist began to envelop the black, steel framed skeletons of the unfinished skyscrapers silhouetted against a crimson background. Although one would not have expected construction to be in progress on a Sunday, thunderous booms could be heard. It was difficult to determine exactly where these sounds were coming from, but each massive reverberation only served to exacerbate Enoyoshi’s feelings of unease. Though he could not pinpoint the source of his anxiety, it was there all the same. The booms echoing up from the seabed to the bottom of the boat reached Enoyoshi’s very guts.

Emerging from the cabin, Minako pointed excitedly in the direction opposite the sunset. ‘Say, look over there!’ she chirped with affected youthful gaiety.

At that moment, the yacht, named MINAKO after the woman, was about to pass the tip of Wakasu Marine Park. The instant the boat shifted course, Disneyland immediately came into view. It was just that time of evening and lights were beginning to come on in the distance. What Minako was urging the men to look at with her Betty Boop squeak was Disneyland and the lights from the hotels that lined the nearby coast. The girlish tone had little childish innocence about it, conveying more of a selfish insistence that the others get involved. Enoyoshi reacted with nothing more than a quick glance and otherwise resolved to ignore her.

But she called over to him, ‘What are you doing musing over there, come get some beer!’

Clasping the mast, Enoyoshi turned to look at her. She stood holding up a can of beer.

Enoyoshi made a noncommittal grunt and wondered what to do. He felt pathetic that he couldn’t just say no. So, should he refuse to have anything to do with her inane chatter by staying put in his sanctuary, or should he get his hands on a beer and pay the price of enduring her ‘sales talk’? There was no denying his thirst, and beer was appealing.

With one hand still on the mast and the other on the boom, he crawled towards the cockpit to take the beer offered by Minako.

‘Thank you. It’s just what I needed.’

He bobbed his head in appreciation, roughly popped the pull tab open, then gulped down the beer. It was chilled and tasted delicious. Detecting contentment on Enoyoshi’s face, Minako ventured, ‘Well? Don’t you think it’s just marvellous?’

The moment he heard her start, the beer seemed to lose some of its savour. How many times had he had to endure this spiel that day? Her tone suggested that she was not so much asking for an opinion as forcing him to accept her own. He made another noncommittal grunt in response.

In an attempt to change the subject, he vainly wracked his brain for another topic. The three of them on the yacht had precious little in common to talk about. This was the third time that Enoyoshi had met Ushijima. As for Minako, he had only met her that morning.

Ushijima, who’d been quiet, chimed in, ‘You can do it. It’s all yours for the taking.’

Enoyoshi didn’t reply. If only they set the sails again. That would shut them up. They wouldn’t have the leisure to harass him if they had to trim the jib sail and main sail. They’d be flailing about in utter confusion. But while they cruised the calm waters of the evening sea using the outboard motor, it was all too easy for Ushijima to stand there beer in hand minding just the tiller.

Enoyoshi had met Ushijima at a high-school reunion in July, two months ago. It hadn’t been a class reunion but rather a grand reunion of all the old boys. Hundreds of them attended the annual event. In the ten years since Enoyoshi graduated he’d never once attended a reunion. That year, he happened to have the weekend free and decided to go for a change. Disappointed not to find as many old classmates as he’d expected, Enoyoshi milled around the room searching for familiar faces. In the process he made small talk with Ushijima and they ended up exchanging business cards. Ushijima had graduated seven years before Enoyoshi and his card said Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. A month later, Ushijima asked Enoyoshi out for a drink and proposed the current outing.

Now that he thought about it, Enoyoshi should have suspected Ushijima’s motives and been altogether more circumspect. In the past, there’d been acquaintances who’d contacted him out of the blue, asking to meet up for old times’ sake, only to approach him then with some dubious scheme. It now seemed only natural that, graduates of the same school or not, the act of inviting a stranger involved an ulterior motive. If they were still fellow students, that would have been one thing. In the adult world, however, any relationship usually revolved around an eye to some sort of gain.

‘First picture whatever it is that you desire, that you want to have.’

Ushijima’s face was close by and the voice came from right behind Enoyoshi’s ears. The dim light of dusk revealed the lines of age etched on Ushijima’s brow. Whenever Ushijima looked down, his thinning hair also became apparent. Enoyoshi felt that the man, who’d initially appeared young for his age, had suddenly gained many years.

‘What is it that you want in life?’

It was clear that the answer Ushijima was seeking was something that required a fortune to buy, like a yacht or a Mercedes. Enoyoshi chose a different sort of thing. He could have picked anything, so long as it couldn’t be bought.

‘Now that you mention it, I suppose I’d like a child.’

Enoyoshi wasn’t married, nor was he even remotely engaged. He was single and had told Ushijima so.

The couple exchanged surprised glances.

‘Are you married?’ asked Minako in wide-eyed puzzlement. As she turned toward her husband, her look turned fierce, conveying annoyance at having been misinformed.

Ushijima, nettled, peered at Enoyoshi. ‘I thought you said you were single?’

‘Sure, I’m single. But I’m living with this girl, and if I could get her in the family way, that’s all it’d take to get her to marry me.’

It was a lie. There was no woman in his life. As pious a lie as it was, he began to loathe himself. His inability to just say no to anyone was pathetic and made him feel like some kid who was never going to grow up. All he could do was be inconsistent in the hope that the others would realize that he wasn’t interested.

His wish wasn’t granted, and Minako began to address the lie. ‘Suppose you did have a child and it led to marriage. You’ll need money. There’ll be the cost of the wedding and you’ll have to find somewhere to live. And your child, of course. Do you realize how much it costs to raise kids?’

The Ushijimas were childless, but this didn’t make them feel any less qualified to lecture Enoyoshi. They insisted that the salary earned from an ordinary company job wasn’t enough to raise a family. Always struggling to make ends meet, he’d never be able to realize his own dreams…

The Ushijimas were trying to get him interested in a pyramid-type sales scheme funded by foreign capital.

Enoyoshi was well aware that the organization in question was not involved in anything illegal. The concept of cutting costs through non-store retailing and handing the margin to the salespeople was not a bad one. The salespeople belonged to different echelons of a pyramidal hierarchy – the higher the level, the greater the performance bonus. The Ushijimas were apparently on the third rung from the bottom and were eager to move up. To do so, they had to recruit salespeople by hook or by crook. Persuading new blood to sell the products manufactured by the company, training the rookies to become great sales reps, was the only way to improve their ranks. A car salesman no doubt familiar with marketing techniques, Enoyoshi would be a great catch for the Ushijimas. In fact, the products manufactured by the company included a car-care line.

Rising in rank meant making more money, enough to buy an apartment in just one year. The Ushijimas claimed they were making double what they made as civil servants from the pyramid scheme. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the yacht. The yacht was an absolutely indispensable tool for their recruitment efforts. Once they were out at sea, they could hammer their victim with their recruitment pitch without worrying about the victim escaping. The yacht also served as proof that the scheme could indeed make your dreams come true. For the Ushijimas, yachting was like holding one of those home parties where the host peddled some product.

‘Imagining it is key. Imagine it long enough and hard enough and it will come true.’

Ushijima argued his case fervently, but Enoyoshi would have none of it. The world that Ushijima was painting held no interest at all for Enoyoshi. He wasn’t indifferent to making money, but he simply wasn’t ready to pursue it at the price of wrecking relationships. He could indeed imagine where it would all lead if he went after ever-increasing sales bonuses. He’d find himself in a sort of religious cult, a clique of similarly minded fanatics with one goal and one ideal, and it would be impossible to break away.

The Ushijimas reacted with clear displeasure and irritation. They spoke disapprovingly of Enoyoshi’s lack of imagination, calling him a fool, even hinting that he was an inferior human being. With their vaunted imagination, they predicted that Enoyoshi would live and die as a pathetic man working all lifelong just to eke out a living, without worthwhile dreams.

Enoyoshi could not even be bothered to argue with them. Of course, spending his entire life as a mere salesman was a distinct possibility. It would have been pointless to tell them that the idea didn’t really upset him. It would have been tedious. All Enoyoshi wanted was to get off the yacht as soon as possible. He’d had enough of not having solid ground beneath him and being aboard someone else’s yacht. He loathed the craven subservience that the unaccustomed setting was inducing in him.

The yacht was moving steadily northward about a hundred yards east of the Wakasu Golf Links, which stretched north to south on a slender tract of land. It was only another mile and a half to the Ara River Bay Bridge, and beyond it was the entrance to the Dream Island Marina. He wouldn’t have to put up with them much longer now. Once off the yacht, he would never have anything to do with them again.

His prayers for haste notwithstanding, the engine of the MINAKO sputtered and came to a stop. So strangely that Ushijima stopped in mid-sentence and gulped. He looked over at the outboard motor.

‘Odd, very odd.’

Enoyoshi glanced unconsciously at his watch. 6:27 p.m., that was when the yacht came to a standstill. A Keio line train was crossing the iron bridge ahead of them, making a distinctive sound. The light from the train windows formed a stream of white in the evening sky above the mouth of the river. Lights were lit in almost every building that lined the bay. The yacht had stopped just as the black surface of the sea began to glimmer with the reflections of these lights.

The area where the yacht had stopped ruled out the possibility of having run aground. They were several hundred yards west of the sandbar known as Sanmaizu that extended due south of the Kasai Coastal Park near the mouth of the former Edo River. Iron poles marked such shallow stretches of water to indicate the hazard. At night the tips of these poles were illuminated. There was little risk of accidentally running aground on sandbars unless there were strong winds or a dense fog. The Dream Island Marina staff had warned them repeatedly about the shallows outside the entrance, and for all his faults as a sailor, Ushijima had been steering the yacht with particular attention to avoiding the shallows.

‘The engine’s stopped, hasn’t it?’ Enoyoshi noted incuriously, making no move to get up from his bench.

With a dubious look, Ushijima unscrewed the cap on the gasoline tank and peered in to check that it wasn’t empty. He gingerly pulled the hand starter. The engine started immediately. The Ushijimas looked relieved, but only for a brief while. As soon as the skipper shifted into forward gear, the engine sputtered and died once more.

Now, instead of trying to restart the engine, Ushijima tilted up the drive unit out of the water.

‘What is this?’ Ushima exclaimed wildly, making Enoyoshi spring up. All three of them looked at the propeller.

In the evening darkness, soaked with seawater, the thing looked almost black. Ushijima reached toward the drive unit and retrieved, from in between the trim tab and the propeller, a child’s blue canvas shoe. It had probably been floating nearby when the laces got tangled in the shaft and the whole shoe ended up being wound in to the propeller.

It was one of those Disney products, with a Mickey Mouse motif. Ushijima turned the shoe upside down to check the size. It was small and probably belonged to a young boy.

Shrugging his shoulders, Ushijima handed the shoe to Enoyoshi and made a face. His attitude suggested that he wanted Enoyoshi to get rid of it one way or another. With all kinds of objects floating in the sea, it wasn’t strange to find a child’s shoe. Yet, Ushijima seemed to find the thing somewhat sinister and seemed even afraid of it. After handing the shoe to Enoyoshi, he used a towel to wipe the palm of his right hand meticulously.

Ushijima prodded with a look, and Enoyoshi was about to throw the shoe back into the sea when he noticed a name on the heel. Kazuhiro, it said in black marker pen.

‘Little Kazuhiro,’ Enoyoshi muttered to himself.

‘Just throw it away, okay?’ Ushijima commanded rather menacingly.

Rather than hurl it away, Enoyoshi set it on the surface like a little boat and gave the heel a gentle shove.

The virtually brand-new left shoe bobbed unsteadily as it floated away. The current in this area was pretty swift, close as it was to the mouth of the River Ara. The shoe floated south and soon melted into the blackness of the sea. Enoyoshi pictured a little boy hopping about on his right foot.

Ushijima lowered the drive unit back into the water and started the engine. They’d removed the shoe that had caused the engine trouble; they ought to be ready to go. Enoyoshi’s watch read 6:35. They’d lost five minutes but it looked like they’d return on schedule at seven.

‘Let’s be off,’ said Ushijima, putting the boat into forward gear. This time the engine didn’t stall and churned steadily.

The feeling they got in the next few moments was hard to describe in words. A gurgling sound could be heard from behind the drive unit and there was a rush of tiny bubbles to the surface. It was clear that the propeller was turning to drive the boat forward. Yet the yacht was not moving. It felt like being in a dream, or rather, a nightmare, where no matter how hard you try to run away from the monster, your feet can’t get traction and only your heart speeds off. All three aboard felt more or less like that. Although the hull and deck of the yacht lay between them and the water below, it was as if their own feet had become entangled in some piece of rope that floated up from the seabed.

Enoyoshi and Ushijima remained absolutely speechless, while Minako nervously kept standing up and sitting down on the bench. She demanded in a strident tone that verged on a scream, ‘What’s up? Why aren’t we moving?’

Ushijima fiddled with the gears and tried putting the engine in reverse. The yacht refused to move in either direction.

‘Could you try leaning over port?’ asked Ushijima.

As requested, Enoyoshi and Minako leaned overboard the left side of the vessel. As it tipped, Ushijima put the engine into forward gear, to no avail. They tried motoring forward with the weight on starboard, then backwards weighted on starboard, and finally backwards weighted on port, but the yacht refused to budge, as though it’d taken root.

Ushijima switched off the engine. Minako started to say something, but he waved her silent.

‘Hold it, will you?’ Saying so, he plunged in thought, probably sifting through his limited experience regarding what to do to get an immobilized yacht moving. Enoyoshi had been longing to return to the marina and be rid of the couple, but given the situation, he had no intention of rushing Ushijima. The man’s expression was not just serious, but grave. Recruiting for a sales scheme must have been the last thing on his mind just then.

‘Right,’ Ushijima said as if to rally himself, and stood up. He announced the next step they needed to take. ‘Let’s take a sounding.’

Ushijima opened a foot locker and pulled out an anchor tied to a piece of rope. He gradually lowered the anchor into the water. When it had sunk a few dozen feet into the water, Ushijima stopped feeding out the rope and was still for about seconds. Then he heaved a big sigh and began pulling the rope back up. There was no problem with the water depth. The yacht hadn’t stopped because its long keel was stuck in some sandbank. They had not run aground, it was certain now.

‘Weird, isn’t it?’ expressed Enoyoshi. There was nothing else to be said about the situation. The unease of having such a precarious footing was something he’d never had to experience on land.

Returning the rope and anchor to the locker, Ushijima banged it shut and sat down on top of it. He clearly wasn’t in any mood to talk. Minako turned on the cabin and navigating lights and opened the hatch. The light from the cabin made the clean white surface of the cockpit gleam as though it was coated in fluorescent paint.

The sense of crisis that Enoyoshi was beginning to feel was probably mild compared to what the Ushijimas must have been going through. After all, Enoyoshi was not crew, just a guest on the yacht, and as such he was not responsible for what was happening. It would have been another matter entirely if they’d been stranded far out at sea with no land in sight. As it was, they were a mere hundred yards or so east of Wakasu Golf Links, whose lights were clearly visible. On the north and the east, too, land was not far away. The shoreline appeared as a belt of light and a murmur of evening activity blended with the puttering of car exhaust.

Meanwhile, the Ushijimas became more morose with every passing minute. Ushijima looked dumbfounded about the yacht having come to a standstill, while Minako, manifestly resenting her husband for his incompetence, snorted and sighed loudly to pressure him to get the thing moving again. The whole situation was a painful slap in the face for Minako, who’d been raving to Enoyoshi about the joys of having a yacht, who’d been trying to entice him to join her in relishing a clearly superior level of life. Well? Don’t you think it’s just marvellous? It was like seeing your pet do something totally stupid when you’ve bragged about its clever tricks and invited people over for a little show.

Quite apart from feeling anxious about his footing, Enoyoshi was getting quite curious as to how Ushijima meant to get them out of the fix.

Clueless though he was, Enoyoshi offered a theory. ‘Maybe some rope got tangled around the keel?’

Ushijima raised his face and nodded rather eagerly. ‘That’s just what I was thinking. It could have caught on a fixed net or something.’

‘Is this where they set nets?’

Ushijima shook his head. ‘Actually, no. This is a shipping lane.’

‘So–’

‘Some clump of rope, from a fixed net or something like that, could’ve drifted over and caught on the keel.’

It was obvious even to Enoyoshi that if that was the problem, the other end of the rope was still embedded securely on the sea floor. Such a coincidence seemed too far-fetched. He had to force back a smile as he envisaged a piece of rope forming a noose and rising up from the seabed to ensnare the keel of the yacht the way a cowboy would lasso a steer.

‘In that case, what are we going to do?’ the yacht’s namesake broke in. Contorting her thick lips, she glared at her husband. Enoyoshi somehow couldn’t get on with that jowly face of hers. Her vanity showed in the contours of her face and her make-up. It was probably she who’d first dabbled in the sales scheme, then sucked in her husband. She probably goaded him on as his sales partner.

‘Get the rope off the keel, I suppose.’

Enoyoshi could imagine with ease what Ushijima had to do now. It was quite simple. Dive down under the yacht, feel for the rope, and get it off the keel. Yet the mere sight of those black waters below was enough to give him the jitters. With the sun now completely set under the horizon, the always dark water of the bay appeared even blacker, reflecting the inky night sky. The very thought of holding his breath and diving into the murky depths was enough to choke him.

The boat was not equipped with a mask or an underwater light, and Ushijima would have to grope around in the dark to get the job done. Even if he had a mask, there would be near zero visibility in the sludgy waters of Tokyo Bay.

But Ushijima stayed silent, unmoving. Pensively biting his lower lip, he shot laden glances at Enoyoshi, who did not wonder why Ushijima wasn’t showing any sign of making a move when what needed to be done was clear. Enoyoshi understood. Ushijima didn’t want to go. He wanted Enoyoshi to go, but instead of asking, he was silently hoping Enoyoshi would offer to go.

…Slim chance.

Enoyoshi had absolutely no intention of obliging him. To communicate this to Ushijima, he got to his feet and turned his back on him gloweringly. He was under no obligation whatsoever to work for the benefit of MINAKO, let alone risk his life.

‘Enoyoshi.’ Just as he was heading toward the cabin, Ushijima called him back.

Enoyoshi turned to see that Ushijima was unbuttoning his shirt. The skipper appeared to have decided that there was nothing to do but handle the job himself. ‘Well, good,’ Enoyoshi remarked inwardly.

Winding a rope around himself several times and tying it in a bowline knot, Ushijima handed the loose end to Enoyoshi.

‘I’m counting on you,’ said Ushijima, giving Enoyoshi a slap on the shoulder.

‘You’re in safe hands,’ Enoyoshi assured him, gripping the rope tightly for his host to see.

Ushijima entered the water feet first and lowered himself up to the shoulders. With his hands on the rim at the stern, he bent and stretched his arms as if chinning himself up on an iron bar, and regulated his breathing. It was still early September, so the water could not be that cold. As he bobbed up and down in the water, Ushijima’s face appeared gray in the light from the cabin. His reluctance to just go ahead and do the job was painfully evident from his expression. Yet, in the next instant, Ushijima thrust himself up out of the water, held his breath, and plunged down under the surface.

A yacht’s keel is a board that protrudes straight down into the water from the center of the hull. The keel of MINAKO was three feet wide and four feet long. Hence, Ushijima’s dive, if it could be called a dive, involved nothing more than a descent of several feet at most. The length of rope that needed to be extended was negligible. Even so, Enoyoshi hurled out a couple of dozen feet out into the sea so that Ushijima would have plenty to spare if he needed it.

Half a minute later, Ushijima plopped his head out of the water. He tried to get a grip on the yacht but failed, and treaded water with just his head above the surface.

‘How’s it look?’

Ushijima shook his head vigorously in response. His face looked even grayer than before. Most probably, on his first dive, all he could do was locate the keel itself.

Ushijima regulated his breathing in preparation for a second attempt. He hadn’t been down there a minute before Enoyoshi felt a bump at his feet, and the hull reverberated in a way that suggested that Ushijima was struggling down there. The sensation from the length of the rope conveyed the same. Ushijima had to be there right underneath, but Enoyoshi felt a pang of anxiety and tried pulling in some rope.

Just then, his hands registered a violent jolt, and the rope pulled taut as if some enormous fish had caught on the other end. As he tried to maintain hold of the rope, Enoyoshi was pulled halfway over the side of the yacht.

‘Please, give me a hand,’ he summoned Minako, who rose from the bench and came over to his side. As a precaution, he had her hold the end of the rope while he pulled with all his might. Enoyoshi’s arms felt Ushijima’s full weight. He had a bad feeling. Maybe there’d been some accident.

Just a few feet from the yacht, Ushijima’s head burst up through the surface. Though he was treading water, he didn’t seem to be gaining any buoyancy. His body was arching back, and he looked like he might go under.

‘Hold on!’

With this shout of encouragement, Enoyoshi pulled even harder on the rope to lift Ushijima up. Ushijima was trying to say something, but no words came from his mouth. Perhaps it was a silent scream of terror. It was dreadful, his expression slackening the next moment as he began to sink, his thinning hair fanning out on the surface of the water like seaweed. Enoyoshi pulled with every ounce of strength he had, for he felt sure that Ushijima was about to drown.

It was impossible to pull him straight up the side of the yacht. Going around to the stern, Enoyoshi grasped Ushijima under the arms and heaved him up toward the cockpit. Ushijima was now bent double with his abdomen against the rim of the stern. When his cheek brushed against the deck, he vomited. From his mouth, in intermittent bursts, came not only the seawater he had swallowed during the dive, but also the remains of the sandwiches and beer he’d had for lunch. His whole body convulsed with each violent retch. His feet were still dragging in the water. Minako yelped and sprang aside; even as she let out screams, she ran to the cabin to get a towel.

Trying to heave himself aboard, Ushijima frantically crawled forward. When he’d pulled his legs out of the water, he rolled over face up, tried to take a breath, and started coughing violently.

Enoyoshi was not sure how to assist someone who had nearly drowned. All he could do was ask over and over again if Ushijima was ‘okay’. Slinging the towel that Minako had given him over his shoulder, he began to rub Ushijima’s back. His head thrust over the side, Ushijima kept retching though nothing was coming out of him except tears and saliva. Still, he would not stop. Urged by violent convulsions, he continued to turn his stomach inside out.

Enoyoshi decided that Ushijima would be better off lying down on the bed in the cabin. Offering Ushijima the support of his shoulder, he started to walk him to the cabin. It became clear after only one or two steps that Ushijima was completely powerless from the knees down. It was not so much that the strength had left his legs, it was as though he’d actually lost his legs from the knees down. After finally managing to get Ushijima on the cabin bed, Enoyoshi covered him with the bath towel, a track-suit jacket, and anything warm he could find. Ushijima’s shaking showed no signs of abating; if anything, it was getting worse by the minute. From time to time, his pale lips uttered a dreadful moan that resembled the howling of a wild beast. The change in Ushijima’s appearance was so dramatic that all Enoyoshi and Minako could do was stand in stupefied silence by the bedside.

At first, Enoyoshi had imagined that Ushijima might have suffered something like the following. In need of fresh air, he tries to make his way straight up to the surface. But, running out of air halfway up, he swallows seawater and panics. Perhaps his lifeline has caught on the keel. At any rate he panics and starts to drown. The terror of groping around in the dark sea was indescribable and the slightest mishap could bring on panic.

But the total look of horror on Ushijima’s face simply defied the imagination. His eyes stared blankly into space, his gaze probably registering nothing at all, and his auditory and olfactory senses didn’t appear to be working either. All his organs of perception were still under the spell of whatever trauma he’d experienced.

Enoyoshi asked Minako whether they had anything stronger than beer. She retrieved half a bottle of red wine and an alumite drinking mug from under the galley.

This might not be strong enough to bring him around,’ said Enoyoshi, sitting Ushijima up and trying to pour some wine into his mouth. At first Ushijima seemed able to swallow only a few drops, but gradually his throat began to move more briskly, and in no time he’d drunk two cups of wine. His eyes began to show some semblance of life. The tremors that had shaken his body were subsiding and his breathing was growing calm.

Enoyoshi decided to start by asking Ushijima whether he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do, that is, remove the rope wrapped around the keel.

‘Mr Ushijima, did you get it done?’

Ushijima shook his head vigorously.

‘So the rope’s still tangled on the keel.’

This time, Ushijima shook his head even more violently than before. He reacted in exactly the same way when Enoyoshi repeated himself. Ushijima shook his head when he was asked if the job was done. He likewise shook his head to deny that any rope remained caught on the keel. If he wasn’t simply delirious, then there was only one rational conclusion. What had brought the yacht to a halt had yet to be removed from the keel – and it wasn’t rope. Something other than rope had caused the yacht to stop. As Enoyoshi thought this through, the boat lurched suddenly, twice. It didn’t feel like a wave, but rather, some force that was working on one point of the boat to attempt to pull it down.

Enoyoshi’s anxiety instantly turned into fear. This may have been his first time on a yacht, but as a boy he’d enjoyed many a thrilling tale about the mysteries of the sea. Even the most orthodox of tales about phantom ships had sent a good chill down his spine. The entire crew of an enormous sailing ship would disappear without a trace, everything just as they had left it. What happened aboard the ship? The stories simply posed the question and never told you why the entire crew simply vanished off the ship. They impressed strongly upon readers that the sea itself was a mystery, that it was a space where the world of the living and the world of the dead were commingled.

Enoyoshi looked around fretfully. Where was the lifeline to land – the radio? Search as he may, he couldn’t spot anything of the sort.

‘Where’s the yacht’s radio?’ Enoyoshi asked Minako. She in turn looked at Ushijima and listlessly rubbed her prostrate husband’s shoulders. She was trying to get her husband to answer.

Enoyoshi repeated the question, and Ushijima’s dull gaze glided sideways.

‘There is no radio?’ rephrased Enoyoshi.

This time Ushijima nodded. So there was no radio set aboard. As near as they were to land, they couldn’t call for help. With a radio, they could contact Dream Island Marine Services and get them to send a tug. A tow from a tugboat with a high-power diesel engine would surely unmoor them. But there was no radio.

His throat dry from the tension, Enoyoshi poured some wine into the mug that Ushijima had used, and downed the whole thing in a gulp. Ushijima was the only man on board with any sailing experience, but the trauma had rendered him useless. Minako just clung to her husband and made no attempt to take the initiative. Enoyoshi, who’d blithely assumed that he was only a guest, felt a terrible weight on his shoulders now.

He kept glancing at his watch, swallowing nervously again and again. It was already eight o’clock. He shuddered to think that they might have to spend the night out at sea. The next day, Monday, he had an important deal to make. He’d had enough. He just wanted to go home to his apartment and lie down on the familiar bed. If only he could…

No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he made his way up to the cockpit and scanned the area to the west. A concrete embankment ran north to south along the perimeter of Wakasu Marine Park, and lined up parallel to the embankment on his side were numerous tetrapods whose boot shaped ends protruded out of the sea.

If he clambered up over the tetrapod blocks, it would be easy to jump onto the embankment. Enoyoshi estimated that it was no more than a hundred yards from the yacht to the tetrapods. Even allowing for error in his reckoning due to darkness, it was a short distance that Enoyoshi could swim comfortably. His heart began to beat fast. Sink or swim. It was worth a try. It was still quite an adventure to swim in Tokyo Bay at night. He felt his short-lived resolve wither as he gazed down at the waters of the nighttime sea.

The cabin hatch opened and Ushijima came crawling up. He was more intent on moving his lips than his body, as if impatient to tell Enoyoshi something. Enoyoshi extended his hand to help him sit on the bench, but Ushijima just lay on the cockpit floor.

‘How do you feel?’

Moving about by himself was certainly a sign that Ushijima was recovering, physically at least. But what he did next was to shudder and croak, ‘This boat isn’t going anywhere.’ His tone made him sound like a stubborn old man.

‘Why not?’

‘I touched, with this hand.’ He held up a palm.

‘Touched what?’

‘The hands.’

…Ushijima’s hand had touched hands?

Enoyoshi began wishing that he’d never asked. There were millions of scary tales about dead spirits pulling at the legs of swimmers, but if Ushijima was trying to tell him some yarn about a hand emerging from the seabed to take hold of their keel, that was too far-fetched even to be a joke.

After a moment of silence, Ushijima opened his mouth again. ‘A child is stronger than you’d think,’ he said.

Enoyoshi couldn’t reply. What was he to say to that? Perhaps the shock had been too great and Ushijima had gone mad. ‘Child?’ There was nothing but to repeat the word.

‘There’s a child clinging to the keel.’

At this, Enoyoshi held his breath. The picture of a child’s drowned body clinging to the keel formed in his mind.

‘You know those hugging dolls they had years ago that you could put on your arm? Reminded me of them, except the face was all bloated like a balloon, you see,’ Ushijima said with some feeling.

Calm down, Enoyoshi reprimanded himself. No good would come of letting into his mind a monster born of another’s imagination. Enoyoshi had to go over the facts carefully. What had caused the creature to form in Ushijima’s mind?

‘Was the child you saw a boy?’

‘Mm-hmm,’ Ushijima replied and nodded. Enoyoshi was on the right track.

‘Six years old or thereabouts?’

Ushijima thought for a while and then nodded. Enoyoshi was convinced now that he’d guessed right. Images don’t usually spring up from nowhere. In this case, without a doubt, the boy’s shoe that had got caught in the propeller provided the grounds, as it were, of Ushijima’s imagination.

Enoyoshi tried to trace the steps in Ushijima’s psychological process in the sequence in which they had occurred. The catalyst to the chain of associations had been the Mickey Mouse shoe, which must have been lingering somewhere in the back of Ushijima’s mind when he attempted the dive. Where had the boy dropped his left shoe? The bridge? The embankment? Or perhaps the boy had drowned and just one of his shoes had come off in the water? If so, the boy’s body would indeed be floating around in the sea somewhere.

Ushijima, who’d dived and started groping around on the bottom of the yacht with both his eyes tightly shut, must have touched something slimy clinging to the keel, maybe seaweed, that conjured up the feel of the skin of a drowned boy. Instantly, an image had flashed in Ushijima’s mind. In the first place, he could never have seen anything in that sludge at night. Ushijima hadn’t seen whatever he’d seen with his eyes. He had seen with his mind’s eye an illusion formed by his famous imagination. A drowned little boy clinging to the keel, his face bloated like a balloon, eyes sunken deep into mushy flesh, the tip of a pale tongue sticking out from his mouth… A drowned boy’s body clinging tightly to the keel like a hugging doll and immobilizing the yacht…

At this point, Enoyoshi felt sure he knew what Ushijima’s answer to his next question would be.

‘The boy you saw, he was missing one of his shoes, right?’ he asked. Ushijima would surely nod. They’d found only the left shoe wedged in the propeller.

Knowing the answer, Enoyoshi studied Ushijima’s reaction. But Ushijima narrowed his eyes, peered up at the sky, and shook his head to say no.

‘He had shoes on both feet?’

This time Ushijima’s reply was direct: The boy had bare feet.’ There was no trace of hesitation or uncertainty in Ushijima’s voice, and that was what baffled Enoyoshi.

In any case, he could not just sit there doing nothing. It occurred to him that they should try to restart the engine once more and get the yacht moving. Finding that the cuff of his shirt got in the way when he tried to tug the hand-starter, he decided to remove his shirt rather than simply roll up the sleeve and began to unbutton. Ushijima lay at Enoyoshi’s feet, his posture unchanged. From under the open hatch, Minako caught sight of Enoyoshi taking off his shirt and called to him with a note of relief in her voice.

‘So you’ve decided to dive at last.’

No doubt she’d misinterpreted Enoyoshi’s removing his shirt. He hadn’t the slightest intention of diving under the yacht, and her remark annoyed him. The way she’d said it, she seemed to assume it was his duty as a man to dive and remove the obstacle. Enoyoshi felt no obligation whatsoever to rescue the yacht for her.

Starting the engine, Enoyoshi tried putting it in forward and reverse alternately, but the yacht remained motionless. It was futile. Irritated by his powerlessness, still resentful of Minako’s gross remark, Enoyoshi was beginning to feel quite angry. He also felt annoyed by how passive he’d been. He ought to show them he could kiss goodbye to their yacht if he wanted. He’d show them he had the freedom.

His withered resolve began to rear its head once more. Come to think of it, there was no other way of getting off the ship. The simplest and most effective thing to do was to swim to shore, telephone Marine Services, and have them dispatch a tugboat.

Enoyoshi took a large plastic sack from an accessory case under the galley and began stuffing his clothes and shoes inside. Making sure there was some air in the bag too, he tightly knotted the opening.

At first, Minako had been staring rudely at him as he removed his clothes, but the bizarreness of his behavior struck her all of a sudden and she began to look worried.

‘Say, just what is it you’re up to over there?’

Enoyoshi tied the sack to his right thigh, sandwiched it between both legs, and stood up on top of the bench.

Minako reached toward him, but sooner than her fingertips could brush against his body, Enoyoshi had plunged into the sea. Instead of swimming straight away, he began to tread water, adjusting the plastic sack between his legs. As he looked towards the yacht, the Ushijimas poked their faces over the side like a couple of puppies peering out of a cardboard box. Minako looked like she was whining but Enoyoshi couldn’t hear her exact words as he bobbed up and down in the sea.

‘You’ll be all right, I’ll call Marine Services for you.’

He tried hollering this, but he wasn’t sure if they’d heard him. Minako still seemed to be wailing. It’d only be an hour’s wait for the tugboat. But until it arrived, they’d have to savor the fact that hell lay just a plank’s breadth under that ‘marvellous’ world of theirs that they so loved to force on others.

Turning round, he began to swim using only his arms, the buoyant plastic sack gripped between his legs. He’d practiced the crawl countless times with a polystyrene board between his legs and could complete twenty lengths that way in a twenty-five-meter pool. Be brave, he told himself. Yet stamina wasn’t the issue. His attention was concentrated on the bottom side of his abdomen and legs. If, at that instant, a slimy thing brushed up against his stomach… His heart quailed at the thought. Why wouldn’t the little boy release his embrace of the keel and come after him? Surely, if Enoyoshi opened his eyes underwater, he would see that little boy’s bloated face right there. The hideous visions kept coming, disrupting his stroke. He was wasting a lot of his strength, and his fatigue grew greater with every stroke and his stomach was heaving into his mouth. As the nausea came, he sensed that his life was in danger. Panic equalled death. The night sky was cloudless and the moon shone brightly as he pressed ahead in the water. Yet the lights of Wakasu Marine Park did not appear any closer. It was maddening how ineffective he was in closing the distance to the embankment.

Enoyoshi forced himself to take a break, ceasing his strokes and turning over to float on his back. Making sure his nose and mouth were clear of the water, he took deliberate breaths to fill his lungs with air. He tried to fend off the nightmarish visions by picturing the yet-unseen naked body of the woman he’d recently started to date. Imagining tangible particulars was the only way to elude the darker fantasies.

Raising his head from the water, he saw that he was now quite a distance from the yacht. A look to the shore confirmed how much closer it was than the yacht. He reckoned that he’d completed two thirds of the distance. The strength returned to his limbs. The shore that he’d thought so far away was actually right there within reach. One last spurt and he’d reach land. Enoyoshi rolled over and began churning the water with vigorous strokes.

It wasn’t until he clambered up the tetrapod blocks in front of the embankment and his body was completely out of the sea that Enoyoshi felt alive again. The lower portion of the tetrapod was submerged in water, but at the top it was dry and the grainy feel of its surface heartened him. Looking out to sea, he saw the MINAKO in exactly the same position, its mast helplessly swaying from side to side.

From below the interlocking tetrapods surged the sound of breaking waves. If he fell through a gap he’d be in some serious trouble. Judging it wise to get over to the embankment on all fours, he crouched, and caught sight of a tiny shoe wedged in a crevice in the intermeshing blocks.

There it was, where he could touch it. In the faint glow of the night-lights, it looked black, probably from being waterlogged. Enoyoshi brought his face closer to it. The tip was wedged tight into the gap and the whole shoe had probably come off the owner for that reason. The wearer must have been playing atop the tetrapods and tripped. The upper canvas bore a Mickey Mouse motif, and a closer look revealed that it was a right shoe. The name written on the heel in black felt pen was legible even in the dim light. Kazuhiro. There could be no mistake. This shoe and the other they’d found on the yacht’s propeller formed a pair.

Enoyoshi looked up. It amazed him how calm he was. Calmly, he observed to himself, With the right shoe here, no wonder the boy’s barefoot.’

Glancing out, he saw the yacht rocking violently on the perfectly placid surface. Enoyoshi thought he glimpsed the figure of a child with bare feet hugging the keel, playing.