Yes, as time went by, I began to travel again in order to see things I had a fancy to see. Mind you, they didn’t necessarily exist in reality any more. My travels became a quest for the sources of memories, things that I had ostensibly seen before. Scenes from childhood, for example, or locations with nostalgic associations and the like.
I do believe that’s why I’m here now. It never would have occurred to me otherwise to visit this city, other than for work-related reasons. I’m here in search of nostalgic memories.
I say, the sky is rather low and gloomy, don’t you think? One almost feels as if tears might fall from it at any moment.
And indeed, here comes the rain.
II
Makiko Saiga? I haven’t heard her name in a long while.
She was a year above me at university. We belonged to the same club. Our official name was the Travel Club, but we weren’t a particularly gung-ho group. In reality, it was simply your average social circle and mostly an excuse to play tennis or go skiing under the guise of “travel”. We had a few dozen members and organized trips for the whole group, as well as small group tours. Five or six core members often put together short itineraries with very specific objectives. Tours to see listed cultural assets, or early Showa period buildings – that kind of thing. I enjoyed a ramble, so I often joined them. Makiko Saiga was also in that crowd.
My impressions of her? Well now, she was very mature. Composed, one might say. Which is not to imply she was passive or anything. I had the impression that she simply stood back and observed people. She seemed slightly aloof, which I interpreted as stand-offish in the beginning because she never initiated conversations or conversed in order to keep other people entertained. But once we spoke I realized that she was surprisingly unaffected and straightforward. Another thing about her, which you wouldn’t have expected from her distant manner, was that occasionally she would become so excited she would rattle away like a machine gun. This contrast with her usual manner always astonished me.
Is she in Tokyo?
I see, so she has a daughter. Whom did she marry?
Aha, that means she didn’t marry the fellow she was going out with at university.
Her boyfriend as a student? Well now, I never met him, but the word was that he was at the same university as us. My guess is they were in the same tutor group. I heard she started going out with him in second year and became engaged as soon as she graduated, but that might have just been rumour. You know how rumours can take on a life of their own.
You’re asking why she chose me as her assistant? Good question. Even now I couldn’t tell you the answer.
It wasn’t as if I was indispensable to her. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who could have done the work. Perhaps she simply thought I had the time. My being from Niigata, which isn’t so far away, might have been a factor, but in actual fact I’d never been to K— before then.
All I did mostly was carry equipment, which wasn’t a particularly onerous task. There were also papers and so forth to transport, of course, but by equipment I mean a tape recorder, which was simply a Walkman with a recording function – yes, they were on the market by then. I also assisted with transcribing the tape recordings.
Yes, interview recordings. That was indeed a challenge. I was meant to write down everything verbatim, but it was damned hard to catch it all. Before I got an ear for the local accent – which took some time, I might add – I had great difficulty following older people’s speech in particular. I was often confused. Although I was born and bred in the Hokuriku region, there is an enormous variety of local dialects, and vocabulary and expressions differ significantly over short distances. The older generation also never learned standard Japanese at school, which meant that they tended not to distinguish between dialect and standard language, and that added to the difficulty of my task.
It was hard work, yes indeed, but interesting nonetheless.
At the time, we were discussing a crime that had taken place more than a decade earlier. Hence with the passage of time… er, how do I put this… it had taken on an aspect of legend or myth.
Sorry, that’s probably not the best choice of words – of course it was a terrible crime. The impact on the surviving family and everybody else in the community was immeasurable.
Nevertheless, the interview subjects appeared to have put it behind them over the course of time. It’s my belief that talking about it often had helped them to digest the experience to a certain degree. And in the process of that they had, in my opinion, gradually created their own versions of the story in their memories. Which meant that they had their stories already rehearsed in their minds, and perhaps explains why they were so interesting to listen to.
Yes, it was most fascinating to hear versions of the same event from many different perspectives. Hearing those stories frequently gave me cause to ponder the nature of truth.
Every person spoke in the sincere belief that what they said was the absolute truth, but if one thinks about it, it’s difficult to describe an actual event in words exactly as one sees it. More like impossible, in my opinion. Each person has their own idiosyncratic biases, visual impressions and tricks of memory that shape their perception, and when one also takes into consideration the individual knowledge, education and personality that influence each single viewpoint, one can see how infinite the possibilities are. Hence, when hearing about the same event from a number of people, one starts to notice that all the accounts are, without exception, slightly different.
That’s how I came to believe that it’s impossible to ever really know the truth behind events. Once one accepts this, it follows that everything written in newspapers or textbooks as “history” is actually an amalgam of the greatest common factors from all the information available. Who killed whom may be known, but the parties directly involved were probably not aware of all the facts, nor could they have interpreted a situation at the time and know everything that led up to the event. Only an all-seeing god – if there is such a thing – could ever possibly know the real truth.
I recall being very depressed when I reached this conclusion. You see, I was a law student at the time. It mattered a great deal to me to know what we base our judgements of others on, and it was shocking to realize how presumptuous it was to think that we could know the truth of anything.
I did have memories of the crime. However, I was in primary school when it occurred, so those memories were only to the extent of being aware that something terrible had happened, and that all the grown-ups were talking about it.
After I agreed to help Saiga with her interview research, I did some research of my own in newspapers and so forth from the period, in order to get a handle on the chain of events. However, she told me that it wasn’t necessary as she preferred me to have no preconceptions, therefore I didn’t invest a huge amount of time and effort in preparation. The terms she offered were transport and accommodation plus a daily allowance, so as far as I was concerned it was nothing more than a short trip combined with some casual work.
Saiga worked a couple of casual jobs to fund her research, correcting homework for a correspondence course and serving in a shop that sold bento boxed lunches. She was very impressive in the way she set about executing a plan once she’d decided on it. She even calculated how much time was necessary to allocate to part-time work in order to raise the exact amount she estimated necessary to cover her research costs.