The Boy in the Earth Read online

  It may sound strange, but I’ve always enjoyed dropping things. Well, it’s not so much that I enjoy it, but rather that it was something I did, over and over—that seems more accurate. The orphanage that had taken me in as a child was on a low hill, and if I walked a short distance from the back door, there was a cliff about twenty meters high. In front of it was a high green fence that was supposed to keep us away from the cliff. But my young hands were still small, and I dropped all sorts of things off the cliff by reaching through the fence. Bottles, rocks, cans, scraps of metal, sand . . . but what excited me the most was when I dropped lizards or other creatures. Grasping a lizard that had already lost its tail or an unsuspecting frog, I would thrust my arm through the fence and suddenly let go. This living thing would fall, and although it wasn’t dead yet, surely it would be a few seconds later. Watching this happen always evoked anxiety, but for some reason, I found solace in that anxiety. In the midst of my agitated emotions, I felt a clear awakening as nostalgia tinged with sweetness spread within me. When I did this, I would also be thinking about “them”—the ones who had tormented me. This habit was persistent in its cruelty; it was almost as if by what I was doing to those lizards now, I was validating what had been done to me in the past, as if I were exploring the true nature of it. Say someone hit me. The moment that blow was released, it could no longer be taken back. And whether that blow would kill me or whether I would survive cannot be decided by him, nor by me. The relationship between the force of the blow and my resilience cannot be determined by anyone. The lizard would plummet. No matter how much the lizard struggled in the air, the result would be the same. I had already let go of it. All that was left was however much time passed before it crashed to the ground. This was violence—overwhelming violence, without any recourse. And that crippling passivity . . . Leaving me—now the perpetrator—with a thumping chest, anxiety, and regret. But they did not feel that way toward me. Then again, perhaps they had felt a sense of liberation.

  But I think there was actually something else behind this act, beyond my exploration of the nature of violence. Within this broader phenomenon that was driving me, whatever this other force was seemed to pierce the core of my being. It was indistinct, unidentifiable—just like the thing that had been just beyond my grasp when those guys on the bikes were kicking me. This sensation and the validation of the violence itself were intertwined, and something seemed as though it was trying to take shape.

  Realizing I was hungry, I opened the refrigerator, but there was nothing to eat. Judging by the faint whiff of alcohol that lingered in the apartment, I assumed that Sayuko had gone back out again. I wished she were here now, though I wasn’t sure for what purpose. But that was just my ego, since my desire to have her here wasn’t actually about her specifically. It was more of a fleeting impulse; I would be lying to myself if I said there was anything I wanted to talk to her about. People can’t live without a certain amount of self-indulgence—I think I remember one of my teachers in high school saying something like that. But I couldn’t allow myself to drag anybody else into the life of misfortune I expected to lead.

  I took the day off from work again, despite not having anything I needed to get done. This was never a good sign. Driving a cab is not a job where the work makes you forget the time. I should have looked for the kind of job that I could lose myself in, maybe repetitive menial labor like factory work with a quota system. The day would pass before I realized it, I would be tired, I would sleep, then back to work, and before I knew it more time would pass. I wondered how much better I would feel, if I could occupy the hours of my life that way. I didn’t care whether it was boring or interesting work. I think I’d be fine as long as I could just edge toward the prospect of letting go, with the possibility of escaping my depressive tendencies.

  I left the apartment and went to a grungy restaurant where I ate a heaping mess of fried rice off a dirty plate. I drank a beer, and before I knew it, an hour had gone by. During that time, I had been muttering to myself, enough so that the married couple who run the restaurant were now checking me out. Definitely another bad sign. When I left the restaurant, it was so late that there was hardly anyone on the street. Every so often the light from a passing bicycle shone on me before receding into the distance. I heard several car horns—they might have been directed at me. I feel drunk, I thought to myself, even though I knew very well that I wasn’t actually drunk.

  There was a toad smushed on the asphalt, lying on its back with both its arms raised as if in a full-body expression of joy. I walked two or three steps farther, and there was a lightly soiled white glove, its limp index finger pointing to the right. I cocked my head, and took a right turn down a narrow street. A small dog that was tied up started barking at me like mad, as if it were really going to do me harm. If I could melt away into the darkness, I thought to myself, that might make me happy. I didn’t know what happiness was, but I figured I might at least be at ease. I looked up at a ten-story apartment building and considered throwing something off the top of it. My heart skipped a little at this childish idea. I bought a can of coffee from a vending machine and took the stairs up, rather than the elevator. The steady echo of my footsteps made this act into a kind of ritual. The air was cool—maybe the concrete had absorbed the heat. Whenever I reached a landing, the gently blowing breeze seemed to dry my sweat a little more.

  On the landing before the highest floor, the wind felt stronger. From there I looked down, holding the unopened can between my thumb and index finger. At that point, I let go. Immediately, my insides were awhirl with an anxiety that felt like regret. With its contents intact, the can fell with terrific speed. It was unbearable to imagine that the can might feel fear as it plummeted. Perhaps this angst was what linked me—the perpetrator—to the can. I pondered whether this sense of affinity for the can might be a form of affection. In the stillness of the night air, the sound of a dull shattering reverberated. The coffee inside the can spurted out like blood, spattering all around as it rolled, traveling farther than I had expected. I wanted to drop something else. The edge of the concrete wall that protected the landing arced gently toward the exterior. I wondered about this design as I approached it again, noticing how well the curvature fit my body. I rested my belly on it, entrusting my weight to the curve as I leaned my torso out over it. I thought I saw something in the beyond, something other than the ground that seemed so far away. My knees buckled and I felt weak, but in a way, this sensation also seemed comfortable to me. In the midst of falling, would my awareness reach a certain end point? By dropping myself, I would become both the perpetrator and the victim. What would I see on the other side of the fear and anxiety? I felt like I could do what I had to do, if I found out just what that was. In the time before I collided with the ground, at the moment when I knew there was absolutely no turning back, would my body feel the stab of devastating regret? As I fell, would my hands grasp at the air? Would my somersaulting body struggle to stabilize itself, despite that fact that doing so would be of no use? As I anticipated the certainty of the approaching impact, I would resent everything and everyone. I would thrash around, trying to slip away from my existence that was absolutely, inescapably, only moments away from certain death. Experiencing that complete and overwhelming force would bring me closer to my core—and I am convinced that, within that core, my true self would be revealed. But what was it that made me think so? It didn’t matter. The opportunity to actually experience it was right before my eyes. Right now, if I just leaned my body forward, as if I were going to spin around a horizontal bar, I would fall down below. I would fall, tumbling down—out of this life, out of this world . . . Little by little, I tipped my center of gravity forward. Just do it already, I thought as if teasing myself. My heart was pounding, my body dripping with sweat. It wasn’t so bad. This agitation, this anxiety—it felt like my own flesh and blood. Along the edge of the wall, beetles were crawling around, their bodies gleaming green. When I leaned o
ut, I saw that streaks of grime, like brown rust, had formed a branched pattern on the outer wall. A chill seeped from within the concrete, its surface insistently rough to the touch, a sensation I savored. My body was tilting forward. I felt like a seesaw, balancing myself. A cigarette slipped out of my shirt pocket; it fell with such speed that I found it difficult to follow its descent. As if that had been a cue, one after another, the rest of the cigarettes begin to fall, like a mass suicide. They looked like a string of white arrows, enticing me. When my slowly shifting center of gravity had gone beyond a certain point, my body slid forward, irrespective of my own will, and I felt a sudden pull downward. I was caught by an overwhelming force. I put my strength into both arms, and at the same time, my back and legs sprang to life. After flailing around in the air like I was going to burst, I had a slight ringing in my ears and my vision was blurry. I felt a stab of pain like a stitch in my right side. There I was, lying on the landing of the stairs, but I didn’t know what had happened. When I looked at the gentle arc of the wall in front of me, my entire body went weak, and I suppressed my trembling as well as a shriek that I felt welling up inside me. My chest was tight with shortened breath from the shock of what I had just attempted to do. No, my actions had not been unintentional. I very clearly remembered my stream of thoughts as I had been trying to drop myself over the edge. But I didn’t know what it meant. Why had I done such a thing? I knew the reason—I was well aware of it. Perhaps the fact that I lay here now, unscathed, was what went against my own will. I had no strength in my legs, I couldn’t stand up. I reached for a cigarette in order to calm myself down, but there were none left in my shirt pocket. It was difficult to go down the stairs; for the first five flights or so, I could only move in a crouched position. When I set foot on the ground, I felt dizzy from such an overpowering sense of stability and expansiveness, and I had to sit down again. About ten meters away, in a conspicuously vacant parking lot, I found the can I had dropped. Like another version of me, it was horribly crushed and had made a disgusting mess all around it.

  5

  For a few years, until the age of eight, I spent most of my time lying in a narrow room made up of nailed-together storm shutters, on the outermost end of a corner apartment on the first floor of a building. When I look back over my life, unfortunately I don’t have any particularly strong or clear memories from the time I was taken in by this family. Why “they” had decided to take me in was not for me to understand as a small child. Whether they received money periodically or it was an arbitrary decision—to this day, I still don’t know.

  They were distant relatives of mine, a married couple with a newborn of their own, and they were wary of me doing harm to their infant. The door to their rooms was secured from the outside with a simply fashioned lock. I was just a child, I couldn’t help but want someone to take care of me. I doubt it would have mattered to me whether it were by my real parents or someone else. In the beginning, they found my screams when they beat me funny, and they laughed at me. I preferred being hit to being kicked. I could still feel a kind of nearness to whomever was beating me—it was the closest thing I got to intimacy.

  Their baby was beautiful. He had clear eyes and fat lips that were always glossy and red. When the baby would cry or become hysterical, they would strike me. “It stands to reason that we would beat you when the baby is crying!” I couldn’t understand what they meant. But I was very young then, and who was I to question their logic? I thought that was how the world was. I just accepted my place in it.

  One day after the baby learned to stand, he happened to come into my room. Our eyes met, and for a few seconds we just stared at each other. I smiled at how beautiful he was, but the baby’s face turned red and he let out a terrible cry. It might have been the traces of blood caked on my swollen face that he thought were simply terrifying. The baby was beautiful even when he was crying, and his skin was so soft and clean that I hesitated to touch him. That was when I first understood that undeniable differences existed among human beings. I felt the obvious distance that separated me from the baby—our destiny was stamped upon each of us. I could do nothing but stare at him. I knew this difference was beyond my control, that it was something I could not change. The man would raise his fist to strike me. I would clench my teeth and bear up with my whole being as I waited for this predetermined event. My body was ruled by fear. It was my fear that imagined and anticipated the violence, enabling me to exceed my level of tolerance. The fist approached, as surely determined as the crash into the ground that follows a fall. I simply waited for it . . . Violence became easier to commit the more one wielded it. I no longer hoped to escape—what I longed for was a respite. An existence in which, for even just a brief span of time, I would not be attacked, where I could sleep peacefully.

  It was not long before their violence escalated. It wasn’t that they devised an elaborate plan against me; they just put more effort into their actions. The man primarily struck me with his own hands and feet; the woman occasionally also used to an iron or a pipe from the vacuum cleaner. What I found most unbearable was the look of boredom on their faces when they let loose on me. They seemed weary and annoyed as they struck and kicked me; they had no particular hatred or fury, or even curiosity. I didn’t cry at the pain—not because I was tough; it was more like I had forgotten to—but their expressions were what ultimately made me weep.

  What evoked their violence toward me in the first place? I had given some thought to this question. The conclusion my young self arrived at was that they were not me—they were others. If they had considered what it felt like to be me, they wouldn’t treat me this way. I couldn’t help but wonder what any existence outside of myself was like, or what kinds of things others were capable of doing. Each time they kicked me, I began to murmur inside my head, “They’re not me.”

  A burst of violence left a hole in the wall, which was thin to begin with. It was only one day before it was filled in, but through that opening, I managed to steal a glimpse at the television. It was a travel show with a couple of entertainers, a man and a woman. The man acted out some joke and the woman laughed, then the woman made some kind of request and the man happily obliged. I realized that, out there, a whole world existed that had nothing to do with me. Far away, there were people who had nothing to do with me, who were experiencing their own form of happiness. Each time they laughed, I felt angry. There was nowhere for this anger to go. It was a wriggling sensation that accumulated within me like a swirling eddy. A woman in a bathing suit advertised for iced coffee, a man wearing a suit was giving a detailed explanation of the capabilities of a camera. I hated this world that smiled and passed by, without any concern for me—hated it with all my energy, hated it enough that it consumed me. It was around this time that the look in my eyes hardened—my eyes narrowed, the corners turned up ever so slightly—but still to the point where it was noticeable. That angled gaze that was first reflected back in the mirror is still seared in my mind. This was also around the time when I became mute. At first I refused to speak, but before long, when I tried to open my mouth, I would feel suffocated, like it was hard to breathe.

  The violence gradually became less frequent, and in due time I was merely neglected. They had begun to shun me, like an animal who did nothing more than eat and shit. I experienced for the first time the excruciating pain that accompanies severe hunger, along with a raging fever that took over my body, refusing to break. The decline in my physical strength brought on a decline in my consciousness. For the first time I also came to understand that thought itself requires energy.

  One day, there came a turning point. I was seated at their dining table, a plate of curry rice set before me. I was so weakened that I hadn’t been able to stand; I had been dragged like a doll and forced to sit there. “Eat this,” the man said. “Eat this and then you’re going away.”

  Someone else had brought up the idea of taking me in, and the couple had jumped at the chance to be
rid of me. They intended to fatten me up and nurse my wounds in order to conceal their violence and neglect. My mouth was watering, but I was unable to eat. My stomach churned in pain, and I vomited in front of them. They were furious, and they hit me for the first time in a while. Had I been able to eat that plate of food back then, perhaps a different life would have awaited me. Of course, there was also the possibility that an even crueler fate lay in store. But it doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t have been able to eat anything in any case.

  From the time after that, I have only scattered memories. Or, more precisely, I remember, but my memories are not accompanied by images. It seemed as though my body lost its shape and was replaced with a dark haze. My will to live—the basic desires to sleep or drink—emerged vaguely from that haze, only to be extinguished by the pain from each successive blow. I had been transformed into a mass of sensation. During that time, it occurred to me that this might be the true form of a human being. I felt as though the mass I had become was the root of existence.