“Ridiculous, I know. But the fact is we’ve gotten ourselves smack in the middle of it, and by ‘ourselves’ I mean you and me. At the start it was only me, but by now you’re in the picture too. Still feel like you’re not on the verge of drowning?”
“Hey, this is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping with strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living.”
“Which is to say,” I interjected, “we’re not drowning so we have no rope.”
“Right. It’s up to us to find that sheep. Neither you nor I have left so much behind, really.”
Maybe not.
We returned to the hotel and had intercourse. I like that word
Our third and fourth days in Sapporo came and went for naught. We’d get up at eight, have breakfast, split up for the day, and when evening came we’d exchange information over supper, return to the hotel, have intercourse, and sleep.
I threw away my old tennis shoes, bought new sneakers, and went around showing the photograph to hundreds of people. She made up a long list of sheep raisers based on sources from the government offices and the library, and started phoning every one of them. The results were nil. Nobody could place the mountain, and no sheep raiser had any recollection of a sheep with a star on its back. One old man said he remembered seeing that mountain in southern Sakhalin before the war. I wasn’t about to believe that the Rat had gone to Sakhalin. No way can you send a letter special delivery from Sakhalin to Tokyo.
Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became opposite east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking the streets like cardboard cutouts. The sun rose from one side of a featureless land, shot up in a cannonball arc across the sky, then set on the other side.
The fifth, then the sixth day passed. October lay heavy on the town. The sun was warm enough but the wind grew brisk, and by late in the day I’d have to put on a thin cotton windbreaker. The streets of Sapporo were wide and depressingly straight. Up until then, I’d had no idea how much walking around in a city of nothing but straight lines can tire you out.
I drank seven cups of coffee a day, took a leak every hour. And slowly lost my appetite.
“Why don’t you put an ad in the papers?” she proposed. “You know, ‘Friends want to get in touch with you’ or something.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said. It didn’t matter if we came up empty-handed; it had to beat doing nothing.
So I placed a three-line notice in the morning editions of four newspapers for the following day.
Attention: Rat
Get in touch. Urgent!
Dolphin Hotel, Room 406
For the next two days, I waited by the phone. The day of the ad there were three calls. One was a call from a local citizen.
“What’s this ‘Rat’?”
“The nickname of a friend,” I answered.
He hung up, satisfied.
Another was a prank call.
“Squeak, squeak,” came a voice from the other end of the line. “Squeak, squeak.”
I hung up. Cities are damn strange places.
The third was from a woman with a reedy voice.
“Everybody always calls me Rat,” she said. A voice in which you could almost hear the telephone lines swaying in the distant breeze.
“Thank you for taking the trouble to call. However, the Rat I’m looking for is a man,” I explained.
“I kind of thought so,” she said. “But in any case, since I’m a Rat too, I thought I might as well give you a call.”
“Really, thank you very much.”
“Not at all. Have you found your friend?”
“Not yet,” I said, “unfortunately.”
“If only it’d been me you were looking for … but no, it wasn’t me.
“That’s the way it goes. Sorry.”
She fell silent. Meanwhile, I scratched my nose with my little finger.
“Really, I just wanted to talk to you,” she came back.
“With me?”
“I don’t quite know how to put it, but I fought the urge ever since I came across your ad in the morning paper. I didn’t mean to bother you …”
“So all that about your being called Rat was a made-up story.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Nobody ever calls me Rat. I don’t even have any friends. That’s why I wanted to call you so badly.”
I heaved a sigh. “Well, uh, thanks anyway.”
“Forgive me. Are you from Hokkaido?”
“I’m from Tokyo,” I said.
“You came all the way from Tokyo to look for your friend?”
“That’s correct.”
“How old is this friend?”
“Just turned thirty.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be thirty in two months.”
“Single?”
“Yes.”
“I’m twenty-two. I suppose things get better as time goes on.”
“Well,” I said, “who knows? Some things get better, some don’t.”
“It’d be nice if we could get together and discuss things over dinner.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve got to stay here and wait for a call.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Sorry about everything.”
“Anyway, thanks for calling.”
I hung up.
Clever, very clever. A call girl, maybe, looking for some business. True, she might really have been just a lonely girl. Either way it was the same. I still had zero leads.
The following day there was only one call, from a mentally disturbed man. “A rat you say? Leave it to me.” He talked for fifteen minutes about fending off rats in a Siberian camp. An interesting tale, but no lead.
While waiting for the telephone to ring, I sat in the half-sprung chair by the window and spent the day watching the work conditions on the third floor office across the street. Stare as I might all day long, I couldn’t figure out what the company did. The company had ten employees, and people were constantly running in and out like in a basketball game. Someone would hand someone papers, someone would stamp these, then another someone would stuff them into an envelope and rush out the door. During the lunch break, a big-breasted secretary poured tea for everyone. In the afternoon, several people had coffee delivered. Which made me want to drink some too, so I asked the desk clerk to take messages while I went out to a coffee shop. I bought two bottles of beer on the way back. When I resumed my seat at the window, there were only four people left in the office. The big- breasted secretary was joking with a junior employee. I drank a beer and watched the office activities, but mainly her.
The more I looked at her breasts, the more unusually large they seemed. She must have been strapped into a brassiere with cables from the Golden Gate Bridge. Several of the junior staff seemed to have designs on her. Their sex drive came across two panes of glass and the street in between. It’s a funny thing sensing someone
