This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you a contemporary ghost story from best-selling author Yasumi Tsuhara. In “Flickers of Light,” our everyman protagonist believes he’s stumbled across a stroke of good fortune when the car of his dreams comes into his possession. But this supposed luck harbours a decidedly unlucky secret. Warned to avoid Kaerimi Tunnel, our protagonist finds himself encountering a chilling memory that may not actually be his own.
In Omiya lives a man dubbed “Count Dracula”—he goes by “Count” among his friends. He makes a living churning out mystery novels. They say he’s well known in his field; you might recognize his name if I were to mention it.
On the other hand, I’m a ne’er-do-well thirty-something man who has never held a regular job, partly because a succession of calamities befell me while I was still in my twenties. Needless to say, my life has nothing whatsoever to do with the publishing industry. Even so, whenever the Count and his hangers-on invite me to unofficial after-parties following movie premieres and award presentations named after somebody famous, I show up just for the fun of it, feeling like a fish out of water. Once I’m there, various hands shove their business cards into mine, dazing me with their illustrious names and titles, while I shove back my card that lists no job title and give them a self-mocking sneer while thinking my life isn’t bad at all.
Speaking of mystery, I met the Count under mysterious circumstances. I almost ran over him. Even though I wasn’t drunk or half asleep behind the wheel, I didn’t see him until it was almost too late. A tall, black-coated figure stood in the flood of crisscrossing headlights as if sprouting out of the road’s surface.
The near miss took place inside a tunnel on the outskirts of Omiya. I was on my way back to Tokyo after removing the sound equipment from an event site. I drove a company-branded Toyota HiAce that belonged to a former college classmate of mine. The president and only full-time employee, he often sent me to this kind of gig.
As I braked hard and skidded to a screeching halt, all the equipment went flying toward the driver’s seat. Even though the Count nimbly stepped aside, I ended up grazing him with the front bumper, pushing him down to the ground. When I jumped out of the car, he was already on his feet.
“Excuse me. I was distracted by music.” He bowed in apology. A lightweight, portable headset collared his neck. I almost felt sick to my stomach as I fretted over the insurmountable amount of red tape that would follow a filed police report on the incident.
“I wasn’t hit. I was just stunned and I stumbled,” he said as if he had read my thoughts.
I secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Even so, I had no heart to leave him there, so I gave him a ride home.
Although I don’t remember how our chat in the car turned to this topic, we ended up getting along well because we discovered that both of us are die-hard tofu aficionados. I, for one, am absolutely crazy about tofu. Whenever I go out to buy tofu, I can’t resist the temptation—I’ll gobble up a whole block on the way home, and then I’ll go to another store to buy another. I don’t hesitate to travel as far as Tohoku and Kansai just to taste tofu that has garnered a great reputation among connoisseurs.
But I digress. One day, I received a call from the Count. “Saruwatari-san,” he said. “It’s darkest under the lamppost, as the old saying goes. I’ve found a great tofu shop here in Omiya.”
We agreed to meet in front of Omiya Station, and I climbed into a Citroën I had recently purchased from a man named Isaka. I met him at a guitar concert the Count and I had attended on his recommendation. Other than being some kind of writer, Isaka has remained a rather shadowy figure. The Count knows him by sight, but he has never talked to him. A few days later, I bumped into Isaka in a department store parking lot. He was accompanied by a woman who appeared to be his wife. She looked like the Japanese counterpart of that actress who disrobes at the drop of a hat—the one who used to be married to the leading man of the Die Hard movies. I had no idea what such a beauty saw in a pale hunchbacked man with drooping glasses. We just exchanged goodbyes as we departed. Since then, I hadn’t heard his name in over a year. Even so, the previous week, Isaka called me out of the blue and offered to sell me his Citroën. He must have remembered me praising his car in the parking lot that day. When I inquired about his price, he quoted me an incredibly cheap amount. I couldn’t hide the excitement in my voice.
That same day, Isaka brought the car over. When I saw the real thing, I knew why he had offered it at such a low price. A major patch job was plainly visible on the hood. Quite a number of people want to get rid of cars that have been in accidents, afraid that the cars will bring them bad luck. Car dealers offer the desperate owners peanuts for their damaged cars on account of these repairs. They start thinking they would rather sell them cheaply to their acquaintances.
After taking the car for a test-spin around the block, I fell in love with it. The following day, I sold off my old Nissan Sunny.
Even though the shortest route to Omiya is through the tunnel where I’d first met the Count, I planned to take a detour around it. I felt anxious about the advice he’d given me over the phone.
“Are you driving a used car, Saruwatari-san?” the Count had asked.
I said yes to the man on the other side of the line, but I didn’t bring up Isaka’s name.
“In that case, you should avoid that tunnel. It’s known for ghost sightings.”
I remained silent, waiting for him to elaborate. I didn’t quite follow what he meant.
“A reporter friend of mine collects firsthand accounts of ghost sightings,” the Count had continued in his usual, soft tone. “According to him, everyone who witnessed a supernatural phenomenon drove a used car. He broke into a cold sweat when he realized what that meant. In other words, he theorizes that the tunnel is merely a mirror that reflects back the grudge hidden in each car. Here’s what I thought while I listened to him: it’s not a matter of grudge, it’s that the past memory of the car flashes back and shows the driver an unfamiliar sight when he goes through the tunnel.”
Cars that remember the past? Only a mystery writer would come up with such an outlandish idea. I was inclined to give more credence to the hypothesis which is about the grudge buried in the car.
“Perhaps the word ‘memory’ isn’t appropriate here,” the Count suggested. “Take old tools, for instance. They are marked with traces of history. This isn’t much different. Precise machines like cars should have even more detailed memories of the past engraved in them. Considering this, it’s not farfetched to speculate that fragments of memory can be transmitted to the driver’s mind under specific circumstances.”
It took me longer than I thought it would to clear the traffic jams around various construction sites all over Tokyo. When I crossed into Saitama, I was already late for our appointment.
“If you’ll allow me to veer off topic, Saruwatari-san—thanks to the advent of computer viruses, the definition of life-form has become increasingly ambiguous,” the Count added. “Personally, I think it’s not necessary to dichotomize between life-forms and non-life-forms. We can place things that consume energy, move, and multiply in the ‘in-between’ area as sub-life-forms. In that sense, it’s reasonable to consider cars . . .”
A succession of lights that appeared to be another jam came into view ahead, prompting me to slow down. I turned on the car’s radio, and on came a voice that warned me about congestion ahead. I entered a side street just off the main road.
“Of course, I don’t know what specific conditions the tunnel meets to cause such a phenomenon, but something caught my attention while I browsed through some local documents. According to an oral tradition, a huge ball of fire fell from the sky and burned down the mountain there. A meteorite, one of a considerable size, must have fallen and covered the area. The whole bedrock there may have been . . .”
After driving around a residential neighborhood, which was a maze of one-way streets, I found myself on a shortcut I had intended to avoid. I was already one hour late, so it was a godsend. The road was empty. I felt silly for having allowed myself to be scared by the Count’s tall tale. Come to think of it, he makes a living scaring the pants off people. I’ve been had, I thought. Even so, I felt spooked when I spotted that tunnel ahead.
“I’ve taken the time and trouble to look this up because I, too, actually experienced it. That said, I don’t drive. I went there out of pure curiosity. Yes—it was the night I first met you, Saruwatari-san. Do you remember I was listening to music? All of a sudden, the cassette player began to play a song that wasn’t supposed to be on the tape. I was so stunned that I wandered into the middle of the road and looked around. Every hair on my body stood on end, because it was a familiar song. It was a song I used to listen to on that cassette player.”
As I entered the tunnel, orange lights kept flickering.
“You said, Saruwatari-san, that I appeared suddenly in the tunnel. But I had been walking in plain sight. Even though I wore a black coat, you should’ve been able to spot me in the middle of the road, because it’s not completely dark inside. The tunnel is actually well lit. Besides, it’s narrow. Maybe you hadn’t noticed me earlier because you were having a flashback of driving through another tunnel in the past. Of course, it wouldn’t have been your memory, but your car’s.”
The street inside the tunnel was slightly curved toward the opposite side. Kaerimi Tunnel. I see—that’s how the tunnel got its name, I thought. Kaerimi might be a reference to its shape. Or maybe it was simply named after the locale. As the Count had said, it wasn’t quite as dark as I remembered, and I felt a chill down my spine. I turned my gaze inside the car to distract myself. The passenger’s seat was much less damaged than the driver’s seat.
Perhaps Isaka hadn’t wanted to have his wife in the car. No—she hadn’t wanted to ride with him. What a beauty, I thought. But her face was already blurred in my mind’s eye. Just then, an impact shot through the car. When I looked up, I saw her face as clear as daylight. Hoisted up on the hood and bathed in her own blood, she glared down at the man in the driver’s seat with a pair of bloodshot eyes.
Translated from the Japanese by Toshiya Kamei
Yasumi Tsuhara has authored numerous books, most recently the best-selling novel Hikky Hikky Shake (2019). In 1997, he made his debut as a horror novelist with Yōto. His 2011 short story collection 11 won the second Twitter Literary Award. In 2014, the manga adaptation of his story “Goshiki no fune” won the Bureau for Cultural Affairs’ Media Arts Festival Grand Prize. His work has been translated into several languages, including Chinese, English, Italian, and Korean.
Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Samovar, and elsewhere.
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