Mariye came to visit from time to time (she hid it from her aunt, using her secret passageway). We put our heads together to try to figure out what our experiences had in common, comparing the timelines right down to the smallest detail.
At first, I worried that Shoko would suspect that Mariye’s four-day disappearance and my three-day “long-distance trip” were somehow related, but the idea seems never to have entered her head. Nor did the police direct their attention to that coincidence. They were ignorant of the passageway, so they dismissed my home as just another house on the next ridge over. Since I did not number among the Akikawas’ “neighbors,” they never came to interview me. Nor did it appear that Shoko had told them I was painting Mariye’s portrait. She probably didn’t see it as relevant. Had the police put Mariye’s absence and my trip together, I could have been placed in a delicate situation.
* * *
—
I never completed my portrait of Mariye Akikawa. It was almost done, but I feared where finishing it might lead. Menshiki, for one, would move heaven and earth to put his hands on it. That much was clear, no matter what he might say to the contrary. I had no intention, however, of letting him install the painting in his private “sanctuary.” That could be dangerous. So in the end I left it unfinished. Mariye, however, loved the painting (“It shows how I think these days,” was how she put it), and wanted to keep it near her if possible. So I readily gave it to her in its unfinished state (along with the three sketches I had promised earlier).
“I think it’s cool,” Mariye said. “It’s a work in progress, and I’m a work in progress too, now and forever.”
“None of us are ever finished. Everyone is always a work in progress.”
“How about Mr. Menshiki?” Mariye asked. “He looks very finished to me.”
“I think he’s a work in progress too,” I said.
Menshiki was far from being a completed human being. From what I could tell, anyway. That is why, night after night, under cloak of darkness, he reached out to Mariye Akikawa across the valley on his high-powered binoculars. He couldn’t help himself. That secret allowed him to maintain some sort of personal equilibrium. It was for him the equivalent of the long balancing pole that tightrope walkers carry.
Of course, Mariye was aware that Menshiki was peeking into her house. But she never revealed it to anyone (apart from me). She never told her aunt. What possessed him to do something like that? It mystified her. Yet for some reason she didn’t feel like pursuing it any further. All she did was keep her curtain closed. The sun-bleached orange curtain stayed tightly shut at all times. She also made sure that the light in her room was off when she changed for bed at night. Elsewhere in the house, however, his voyeurism didn’t bother her. Sometimes she even thought she enjoyed it. Perhaps she found some meaning in the fact that she alone knew what was going on.
According to Mariye, Shoko and Menshiki were still seeing each other. Her aunt would jump in the car and drive off to his house once or twice a week. Their relationship appeared to be sexual (Mariye hinted at this in a very roundabout way). Her young aunt never said where she was going, but Mariye knew. When she came back, her complexion was rosier than usual. In any case—whatever the nature of that peculiar void within Menshiki—Mariye was powerless to interfere in their affair. She could only let them continue on as they were. All she wished was not to be drawn into whatever was going on between the two of them. That she be allowed to stand at a safe distance, outside the whirlpool of their relationship.
I doubted that she could pull that off. Without realizing it, she would be sucked in sooner or later, to a greater or lesser degree. From the periphery, unavoidably toward the center. Menshiki was wooing Shoko Akikawa, but always with Mariye in mind. Whether he had planned it all from the start or not, he couldn’t help himself—that’s the kind of man he was. And, like it or not, I had brought them together. He had met Shoko in this house. That’s what he had wanted. And when Menshiki wanted something, the guy knew how to put his hands on it.
Mariye wasn’t sure what Menshiki would do with that closetful of shoes and size 5 dresses. She guessed he would keep them—whether they were stored in that closet or in another place. However his relationship with Shoko Akikawa turned out, he wouldn’t be able to discard them, or burn them. That was because the wardrobe had become a part of his psyche. The clothes would be forever enshrined within his spiritual sanctuary.
I decided to quit teaching my painting class near Odawara Station. “I’m sorry, but I need to focus on my art,” was how I put it to the director. He took it in stride. “It’s a shame,” he said. “Everyone says you’re a wonderful teacher.” His words didn’t sound altogether false, either. I thanked him, and promised to stick it out till year’s end. By then, he had located a good replacement, a retired high school art instructor in her mid-sixties. She struck me as a very nice woman, with eyes that resembled those of an elephant.
* * *
—
Menshiki called from time to time. No practical matter was ever involved—we just chatted. Each time he would ask if there had been any change in the pit behind the shrine, and each time I would tell him no, there hadn’t. That was the honest truth. The blue plastic sheet was still stretched across the opening. I went to check sometimes when I was out for a walk, but never saw any sign that it had been tampered with. The stones holding it down hadn’t been moved either. There were no more strange or suspicious events connected to the pit. I never heard the bell in the middle of the night, nor did the Commendatore (or anything else) emerge from it. It was just a big hole sitting quietly in the middle of the woods. The clump of tall pampas grass flattened by the backhoe was growing back, concealing the area around the pit once again.
As far as Menshiki knew, I had been in the pit the whole time I was missing. True, he couldn’t explain how I had gotten inside. Yet he had found me there—that was an indisputable fact. As a result, he never connected Mariye’s disappearance and mine. He could only see the overlap of the two events as some kind of strange coincidence.
Discreetly, I probed to see if he had an inkling that someone had been hiding in his house for four days. But he had seen no telltale signs. He was wholly in the dark. In which case, whoever had been standing outside the closet in the forbidden chamber was most likely not him. But then who had it been?
Although Menshiki called, he no longer came by for visits. Perhaps he no longer needed to hang out now that Shoko was in his grasp. Or maybe he had lost interest in me. Or both. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other (though there were times I missed the sound of his Jaguar V8 purring up the slope).
Nevertheless, the occasional phone calls (always before eight in the evening) suggested that Menshiki felt we should stay connected in some way. Perhaps the fact that he had revealed to me that he might be Mariye’s biological father weighed on his mind to some extent. I don’t think he worried that I would blurt it out—to either Mariye or Shoko Akikawa—somewhere down the line. He was sure I would guard his secret. He could read me well enough to know that, like he could read all people. Yet it was so foreign to Menshiki to have bared his heart to anyone, whoever they might be. He had an iron will, but maybe even he found it exhausting to keep secrets to himself all the time. He must have really needed me on his side when he made his confession. And I had struck him as relatively harmless.