Read an Excerpt
"Why don't you try some water instead?" I urged her. "There's a
spring here that the valley folk say gives the best water in the whole
forest. That's if it hasn't dried up."
It hadn't dried up. At the foot of the slope on the forest side of the
road, an unexpected outflow of water formed a pool about as big as the
circle of a man's arms. The water--too copious, almost, to have sprung from
such small beginnings--made a channel that ran down to the valley. Beside
the pool stood a number of outdoor hearths, some new, some old, the clay and
stones charred black and hideous inside. In my childhood, my friends and I
had built just such a hearth by the spring, and cooked rice and made soup
there. In a twice-yearly ritual, each of us chose the group he would camp
out with, thereby determining the division of forces among the children of
the valley. The outing lasted only two days each spring and autumn, but the
influence of the groups thus formed by the children remained valid
throughout the year. Nothing was so humiliating as to be expelled from the
group one had joined.
As I bent down over the spring to drink from it directly, I had a sudden
sense of certainty: certainty that everything--the small round pebbles,
grayish blue and vermilion and white, lying at the bottom of water whose
brightness seemed still to harbor the midday light; the fine sand that
swirled upward, clouding it ever so slightly; and the faint shiver that ran
over the surface of the water--was just as I'd seen it twenty years before;
a certainty, born of longing yet to myself, at least, utterly convincing,
that the water now welling up so ceaselessly was exactly the same water that
had welled up and flowed away in those days. And the same certainty
developed directly into a feeling that the "I" bending down there now was
not the child who had once bent his bare knees there, that there was no
continuity, no consistency between the two "I's," that the "I" now bending
down there was a remote stranger. The present "I" had lost all true
identity. Nothing, either within me or without, offered any hope of
recovery.
I could hear the transparent ripples on the pool tinkling, accusing me of
being no better than a rat. I shut my eyes and sucked up the cold water. My
gums shrank, leaving a taste of blood on my tongue. As I stood up, my wife
bent down in obedient imitation, as though I was an authority on how to
drink from the spring. In fact, I was as complete a stranger to the spring
by now as she, who had just come through the forest for the first time. I
shuddered. The bitter cold penetrated my consciousness again. Shivering, my
wife stood up too and tried to smile to show that the water had tasted good;
but her teeth as her purple lips shrank back merely seemed to be bared in
anger. Shoulder to shoulder, silent and shuddering with cold, we returned to
the jeep. Takashi averted his eyes as though he'd seen something too pitiful
to look on.
