Almost Transparent Blue Read Free Page A

distorted with terror. She made swimming motions, struggling to rise again. Her hair had come undone and waved above her head like seaweed. The trees along the streets, the cars, the people growing larger, her nose and lips twisted by the wind pressure— the scene in my mind was just like the bad dreams that drench you with sweat in midsummer. It was a slow motion film in black and white—the movement of the woman, falling from the building.
    They got up, wiped the sweat from each other, and lit the candle again. I turned away from the brightness. They were talking in voices too low for me to make out. From time to time I was seized with cramp and nausea. The nausea came in waves. Biting my lip, gripping the sheet, I rode it out, and when the nausea stopped at my head and rolled back again, I noticed a pleasure just like sexual release.
    "Okinawa, you, you dirty rat!"
    Reiko's high voice rang out. With it came the sound of breaking glass. One of them fell on the bed and the mattress sank down, tilting my body a little. The other one, it seemed to be Okinawa, spat out the word Shit!, yanked open the door and left. The candle was snuffed out in the wind and I could hear the sound of someone pounding down the iron staircase. In the pitch dark room I heard the soft sound of Reiko's breathing, and then I started to faint as I fought down the nausea. An odor just like the rotten pineapple, I could smell the same sweetish odor from the juices of this mixed-blood girl Reiko. I recalled the face of a certain woman. Long ago, I'd seen her in a movie or a dream, thin, long fingers and toes, slowly letting her slip fall from her shoulders, taking a shower behind a transparent wall, then, water dripping from her pointed chin, she gazed into her own green eyes in a mirror, a foreign woman.

    The man walking ahead of us looked back and stopped, then tossed away a cigarette in the running water of the ditch. Firmly clutching a new duralumin crutch in his left hand, he moved on. Sweat ran down the back of his neck, and from the way he moved, I thought he must have hurt his leg just recently. His right arm seemed heavy and stiff, and there was a long groove in the earth where his foot had dragged.
    The sun was straight overhead. Walking along, Reiko slipped off the jacket draped over her shoulders. Sweat blotched the tight blouse sticking to her body.
    She seemed tired, as if she hadn't slept the night before. In front of a restaurant I said, "Let's have something to eat." She just shook her head without answering.
    "I don't understand that guy Okinawa—I mean, the trains had already stopped running for the night by the time he left."
    "It's O.K., Ryū, I've had enough," Reiko said softly. She pulled a leaf from a poplar tree planted beside the road.
    "Hey, what do they call this thing like a line here, this here, do you know?"
    The torn leaf was dusty.
    "Isn't that a vein?"
    "Yeah, that's it, a vein—me, I was taking biology in junior high, and I made a specimen book of these. I forget what it's called but I put on some kind of chemical, you know, and it just left these all white and dissolved the leaves, just left the veins real pretty."
    The man with the crutch sat down on the bench at the bus stop and looked at the schedule board. "Fussa General Hospital," the bus stop sign read. The big hospital building was on the left, and in its fan-shaped central garden, over ten patients in bathrobes were doing exercises, led by a nurse. They all had thick bandages on their ankles, and they twisted their hips and heads in time with the tweets of a whistle. People coming up to the hospital watched the patients.
    "Hey, I'm coming over to your bar today, I want to tell Moko and Kei about the party. They'll be coming in today?"
    "Sure they'll come, they come every day, so they'll come in today, too. . . . Me, I'd really like to show it to you."
    "What?"
    "That specimen book with all the leaves in it. A lot of people back in Okinawa collect insects,