
When Inspector Watanabe learned that the woman found murdered in her house on Kurumayacho-dori was Professor Kon, a philologist with Osaka University who had achieved international recognition in the narrow field of Armenian literature and had spent her last weeks on Earth working on the translation of a contemporary Armenian novel entitled A Bird of Many Lakes, he observed:
“Well, it’s safe to say her occupation didn’t have her killed”
Whether he was right or wrong depends entirely on the meaning one chooses to give to the word “safe”.
At first glance, A Bird of Many Lakes is a safe book. It narrates the life of a wandering poet in 14th century Armenia who spends his last days searching for the right lake to die by. It is not political. It is not blasphemous. It handles erotic matters with such poetic grace that it passes as perfectly chaste in the circles where chastity matters and imagination is in short supply. It doesn’t point the finger at anyone. It aims to speak to the human soul, in a tone of voice that resonates with its deepest, vibrant core. It is like the breathing of a friend resting their head in your lap. It brings a kindness to its reader’s eyes that lingers there some time after they’ve detached from the page. It is every bit as beautiful and delicate as Emin Panosyan’s previous novels. But on page 147 lies a string of words which, like the moss-covered, unexploded bombs from long-ago battles, only had the appearance of safety:
“He lay in the cool shade of a tall pomegranate tree.”
To Professor Kon, who was intent on offering Japanese readers the most faithful possible translation of A Birds of Many Lakes, this sentence simply made no sense. During her first read of the novel, she underlined the whole sentence and pencilled an interrogation mark next to it. “When I get to this part”, she thought, “I’ll have to call Mr Panosyan to ask him exactly what he had in mind here”. But she never got to making this phone call. In fact, her seemingly senseless murder had no other purpose than to prevent this phone call from happening.
Had it happened, one can safely assume it would have gone something like this:
Professor Kon would have glanced at her wristwatch, as if to calculate whether it was an appropriate hour for calling Yerevan. No actual calculation would have been needed though, since Professor Kon always knew what time it was in Armenia. She would have cleared her throat with a sip of tea before dialling. He would have answered after just one ring.
“Mr Panosyan, it’s Professor Kon. I hope I’m not disturbing you, she would have said in the language she had devoted her entire adult life to study.
— Not at all, Professor, not at all, the ever affable novelist would have answered.
— Are you having your mid-afternoon black tea?
— As a matter of fact I am.
— I’m having my post-dinner green tea.
— I know nothing of Osaka, but I’ve fashioned for myself a mental representation of your home, and the delicate redolence of green tea is one of its most essential components.
— I’m flattered you made a place in your brilliant mind for me to live in.
— I’m afraid it is nothing more than an assemblage of stereotypes. I can only wish I knew Japan as well as you know my country.
— Well, there remain holes in my knowledge, much to my regret, as I often find myself unable to fully comprehend some part or other of your wonderful novel. I am presently struggling to make out the meaning of one of your sentences, and was hoping you’d be willing to help me with it. It goes: “He lay in the cool shade of a tall pomegranate tree”.
A brief pause would have ensued.
— Pardon me, the author would have said, but I fail to see what difficulty you find in this one.
— Well, surely it must be some kind of metaphor?
Panosyan would have chuckled at the notion:
— Absolutely not! Our protagonist just elected to lie under a pomegranate tree to escape the scorching midday sun.
— But there is no such thing as a pomegranate tree.
— Whatever do you mean?
— Pomegranates don’t grow on trees, they are the fruits of a water plant.
— No, they’re not. You have them confused with another fruit.”
She would have given him a thorough description of the fruit she called pomegranate, forcing him to retract his rather insulting allegation.
“Still, you are mistaken, he would have gone on to say. I grew up in the vicinity of a pomegranate farm, and it was undoubtedly an orchard. My village sat uphill from it, and on quiet summer evenings we could hear the wind rustling through its canopy. I called it our sea, because when I sat on that one rock at the end of the cemetery and looked down at it, it resembled a vast sea of silvery green licking the foot of the hill. Of course I had never seen the actual sea, I had only read about it.
— Am I going insane? I also spent the first twelve years of my life up the road from a pomegranate farm, and it was assuredly a cluster of artificial ponds, each of them covered with hundreds of large round floating leaves, similar to that of the lotus or the water lilies.
— Have you ever seen a pomegranate attached to those water plants? Have you ever stood next to one of these ponds and witnessed the actual plucking of a pomegranate?
— I can’t say that I have, but the sight of a truck coming out of the farm with its bed full of pomegranate crates was a very common one. Have you ever seen a pomegranate attached to the branches of your trees?
Panosyan would have taken a moment to think:
— To be honest, no. But I saw the trucks too… and the pomegranate farmer would often sell us some of his fruits at a neighbourly price.
— Mister Panosyan, I implore you, if you’re having a laugh at my expense, to please put an end to it.
— I swear I’m not.
— But couldn’t it be, seeing as you are a delightfully imaginative person, that you managed to convince yourself of a fiction? You’re a poet, a storyteller, you make things up so effortlessly, you’re more at risk of such a forgivable act of self-deceit than me, a scholar who renounced long ago the pleasures and perils of literary creation.
— Were you a scholar in the field of botany, Professor Kon, then I might have considered casting doubt on my own cherished childhood memories on account of you. But since you are not, I feel the most reasonable thing to do is to assume that you are simply mistaken. Perhaps the farm you remember was mainly a lotus farm, albeit one that grew a few pomegranates on the side… I believe the rhizomes of the lotus are consumed as a vegetable in your country?
— Yes, but… Look, before I called you I did a little research. I thought I remembered reading the phrase “pomegranate tree” in an old Japanese poem.
— Ha! There you go! a somewhat annoyed Emin Panosyan would have exclaimed.
— No, but that’s just it: the poem in question is entitled Song of the Drowning Man. It is written from the point of view of a man purposely sinking to the bottom of a pond. The line I only vaguely remembered until I looked it up – it is by no means a famous poem – can be translated as: “Will I find rest here, beneath the pomegranate trees?”. Obviously the drowning man has lost hope of finding peace under the sky, and is attempting to find it under the floating leaves of pomegranate plants. If anything, it confirms that pomegranates do grow in ponds.
— No it does not. Not any more than the line in my own book confirms that they grow on trees. It only tells us that a long dead compatriot of yours held the same peculiar belief you do.”
Panosyan would have been right, of course, to frame the question as a matter of belief, and Professor Kon, being the smart and inquisitive person that she was, would have had no trouble understanding it. She would have done some research, and she would have soon discovered that in every region of the world where pomegranates are produced, the local population holds a different belief about where and how the fruits are grown.
In Mexico, pomegranates are believed to grow on cacti, much like prickly pears. No Mexican has ever seen an actual pomegranate-bearing cactus, but that is only because no Mexican lives in an area where the soil is right. Inhabitants of the northern states are convinced such areas can be found down south, which of course runs counter to the belief held on the matter by their southern countrymen. The only sure thing about these elusive cacti is that nobody has ever heard of them in the USA, where pomegranates are considered a type of squash. Their local moniker of “Mississippi cantaloupes” doesn’t make clear whether they grow in northern Louisiana or in eastern Missouri, but there’s no doubt in any knowledgeable American’s mind that they are the fruit of a trailing vine, just like the beloved pumpkin.
People in Southeast Asia would agree with the Americans that harvesting pomegranates can be tough on your back, since it does involve a lot of bending down, but they would also advise prospective fruit-pickers to cover their forearms with long sleeves, on account of the sharpness of the blade-like leaves of the pomegranate plant, which is best described as a short, thick bush.
In Italy, pomegranate trees are small. In Turkey and the Caucasus, they are tall. In North Africa and in the Arabian Peninsula, they are taller even, surpassing in height the otherwise similar-looking date palms. In Brazil and India, they are mangroves. Most Greeks don’t know where pomegranates come from, but those who do speak of an ancient sisterhood of divers who spend their days swimming in hidden coves and plucking pomegranates from the seabed rocks. In France, all pomegranates are imported, mostly from Sicily, since the climbing vine that allegedly produces them can only take root in soils containing fresh volcanic ash.
When so many different beliefs about the same matter manage to survive for such a long period of time, it tells us two things. Firstly, none of them areis true. Their relation to truth is purely negative, since they all came into existence for the sole purpose of filling the void left by the absence of an accessible truth. They were applied on this particular crevice in our collective knowledge like some sort of putty, and after drying became almost indistinguishable from actual knowledge. Secondly, it tells us that they somehow remained isolated from one another, so as to prevent collisions. That is where the Order of the Red Seeds comes into play.
Up until the invention of telecommunication, the members of this secret order, who call themselves the Knights of the Red Seeds, had a fairly easy job. They watched botanists and agronomists, especially travelling ones, and made sure none of them ever set foot in a pomegranate farm. They mounted accusations of heresy and spread rumours of insanity to destroy the credibility of those who got too close to the truth. Sometimes they had to resort to plain murder, but it was very rare. They were greatly helped in their duty by the fact that nobody really cared about the particular truth they had sworn to protect. But though this fact didn’t change, everything else did, and very quickly. Illiteracy declined. Tourism became a thing. Young men and women from all over the world started mingling in the shared kitchens of youth hostels. Travelling salesmen brought twelve-volume, leather-bound encyclopaedias into the cosy homes of middle class families everywhere from Athens to Zapopan. Game shows multiplied. Pub owners found they could profitably replace darts tournaments with significantly less messy quiz nights. And then of course came the Internet, who quickly made its way into the back pockets of all these literate pub-goers, trivia-lovers, wide-eyed backpackers and bored suburbanites. Anybody curious enough to go on the Internet and compare the Italian and Korean Wikipedia articles for “pomegranate” could instantly get a whiff of the conspiracy. The Order of the Red Seeds was particularly wary of stoners.
It had to adapt to this new world. It recruited members in the best computer science schools, so that it could have people inside all the major Internet companies. It invested in digital mass-spying tools and tried to keep up with the ever evolving art of hacking. For three decades the Knights of the Red Seeds hacked and hacked and hacked. They relentlessly hacked away at the truth-seeking tentacles that kept creeping toward their precious secret. Then at some point someone observed that humankind had entered the post-truth era, which came as a relief to them. Guarding a specific truth from a species that had stopped valuing truth in general would doubtlessly prove easier. Still, they did not let their guard down. And when a certain philologist from Osaka was flagged as an imminent threat, they were ready to take swift action.
Six days after the murder, Inspector Watanabe made an arrest. When presented with the evidence that had led to his apprehension, Endo Tadashi, a thirty-year-old software engineer for a satellite navigation company, quickly confessed to the crime, but Watanabe wasn’t content. He was one of these rare individuals who believe justice cannot be properly served until truth has been paid its due. The way he saw it, his duty was not as much with the good people of Osaka, who needed no more for the restoration of their peace of mind than to see the killer put behind bars, as it was with Professor Kon, who deserved the truth, dead though she might be. The best path to the truth, Watanabe thought, was to figure out why the avowed killer insisted on lying about the murder weapon:
“Look, we know for a fact that you didn’t stab her with a knife you found in her kitchen. Why don’t you tell us what weapon you used?
The two men were alone in the interrogation room, with Watanabe standing and Endo sitting.
— I found the knife lying on the kitchen counter. I’m not saying it was a kitchen knife, just that it was in her kitchen.
— I don’t buy it. Care to know what I think? I think the reason why you don’t want us to get our hands on the weapon is because we’ll find your wife’s prints on it.
— My wife has nothing to do with this!
— Are you sure? She didn’t help you get rid of the murder weapon?
— No!
— I’m starting to think we should investigate her. We haven’t been able to find a connection between you and the victim, but perhaps we’ll find one with your wife… Mister Endo, did you act under your wife’s orders?
— What? No! That is preposterous! I acted alone and for my own reasons.
— What reasons? What reasons could you possibly have had to do this? Answer me, and I’ll forget about your wife.
— You’ll find nothing on my wife. She’s not a part of this.
— A part of what?
— Of the… murder. She didn’t play any part in the murder.
— The murder of Professor Kon, a fifty-six-year-old widow whose only passions were Armenian literature and Baroque music? Who rode her bike every day from the university to her tidy home, where she worked on the translation of a novel by Emin Petrosyan?
— Panosyan, Endo corrected.
Watanabe smiled:
— Yes, pardon me, you’re right. Emin Panosyan. Care to tell me how you know this name?
— He’s a renowned writer, the killer said in a half-convinced voice.
— In Armenia, maybe. And look, I’m not judging, but we didn’t find many books when we searched your apartment.
— I must have read his name in the press. Wasn’t he on the short list for the Nobel or something?
The Inspector sighed. He could have pushed harder on this, but there was another angle he wanted to try, now that Endo was destabilised:
— When you left your home with the weapon you intended to use on Professor Kon, it was 8:15 p.m, correct?
— Yes… Well, yes I left at 8:15, but I didn’t bring any dagger with me.
— A few minutes before that, you received an email.
— So?
— The object of the email was “Are you paying too much for your pet insurance?”
— Junk mail, obviously.
— Yes, obviously. So why did you open it?
— I did? Well if I did, it was an accident.
— Ah, I see. So you opened it by accident, and immediately deleted it?
— Yes.
— No. You deleted it two and a half minutes after opening it. Why is that?
— I don’t recall. My daughter has been saying she wants us to adopt a cat, so maybe…
— Now see, that’s the wrong answer.
— Why?
— Because it’s an obvious lie, Mr Endo. And when someone who has already confessed to a murder takes the trouble to lie to me about little things such as this, it awakens the pointing dog in me – you know, those dogs who freeze whenever they hear a bird moving in the bushes? Anyway, the pointing dog in me is pointing at this email now.
— Just minutes ago it was pointing at my wife.
— No no no, your wife was a tactical move. This is the real deal. I’m going to find who sent that email. I’m going to get answers out of it. Unless you want to give them to me yourself?”
Endo remained silent. Watanabe looked into his eyes and saw fear. He was trying to make out the exact nature of this fear, when the door opened and a middle-aged man in a black suit entered the room. He said his name was Kanamori, and produced a business card stating he was a lawyer. The address printed at the bottom of the card was for a practice in Fukuoka.
“Fukuoka, huh?” Watanabe remarked. “You’ve come a long way.
— I’ve come for my client. And you should have waited for me.
— Mister Kanamori, even your so-called client wasn’t expecting you. I’ll bet he has never heard of you.
Endo opened his mouth as if to talk, but his new counsel intervened:
— Mr Endo, please don’t utter a word. You and I need to speak privately before this interrogation is allowed to continue.”
Watanabe stared one last time at the killer’s face to check if the fear was still there, then calmly walked to the door and exited the room.
Kanamori had silver hair, a serene brow and a pair of unexcitable, slow-blinking eyes. He sat across the table from his client and started the conversation with these words:
“Fruit and heart as one…
To which Endo replied in a hasty whisper:
— Sealed in garnet.
Kanamori took a pen out of his pocket and with it gave a single tap on the table, before asking:
— So, how bad is it?
— Very bad, I’m afraid. I said dagger.
— What do you mean, you said dagger?
— I said I didn’t bring a dagger to the victim’s house.
— I see, so he tricked you into using a specific word that no one had used in your presence before.
— Yes. Now he knows for certain I lied about picking up a knife in the target’s… the victim’s kitchen. And he knows what to look for. What if they find the dagger?
— Using your dagger was a bad idea.
— But… why give us daggers, if we’re not to use them?
— My brother, they don’t give daggers to all of us. My guess is they gave one to you because you seemed really into the whole ninja, shadowy assassins stuff.
— So when you were recruited, you weren’t given a dagger, with a pomegranate-shaped mother-of-pearl inlay in the pommel?
— No. I received a letter from my dead grandfather. But that is not the point. What I want to know is how much of a push this Inspector Watanabe would need to just move on to another mystery and leave this one be.
— Oh, I’m afraid nothing will do. He strikes me as the type who doesn’t let go until he has all the answers. He intends to look into the email. The coded… With the instructions…
— I see.
Kanamori put his pen, which had remained capped during the whole conversation, back in the inside pocket of his jacket:
— From now on you are not to answer any question from the police. If remaining silent proves too difficult, you are allowed to use this one sentence: “I do not recall.” Understood?
— Understood.”
Some thirty-six hours later, Inspector Watanabe was standing on a deserted street corner two blocks away from the Amagasaki train station. He had two handguns on him, one against his chest and the other against his left ankle. Kanamori had told him he was free to bring guns, if it made him feel safer. The black car arrived just in time for its shiny hood to catch the first rays of the rising sun. Kanamori himself was at the wheel. There was no one else in the car.
“You can sit in the front or in the back, the lawyer said in his usual, composed voice. You can point a gun at my head for the whole trip, if it makes you…
— Feel safer, I know. I’ll sit in the front.”
They exchanged very few words during the first part of the drive. On the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the beautiful open view inspired Kanamori to make this remark:
“It’s a powerful thing, isn’t it? – the need for truth. For those of us who feel it, there’s really no way around it. Look at you. A police officer, taking a secret trip with a dubious lawyer to an unknown destination, just so he, and he alone, can know why some random man killed some poor woman.
— How can you be sure I’ll keep the truth to myself?
— Well, for one, you promised.
— So you just… trust me?
— We trust our own.
— I’m not one of you, whoever you are.
— Not yet. But in three hours or so, you will be.”
They quickly drove through Awaji Island, then crossed the Ōnaruto Bridge to Shikoku. Watanabe still wasn’t sure he wasn’t being driven to a shallow grave somewhere in the mountains. Kanamori was hard to read. Most times, he looked like he was just enjoying the road, the swaying treeline, the warm sunlight, the music – ever since they had left Amagasaki the car stereo had been playing old European music, the kind with harpsichords, the kind Professor Kon also liked. Despite what Kanamori thought, Inspector Watanabe was not on an indiscriminate quest for knowledge. He was only interested in the truth insofar as it related to the death of Professor Kon. He thought about her constantly, and felt he owed it to her to discover the answer to the question he had read in her lifeless eyes. That question, he was sure of it, wasn’t “who’s killing me?” – it was “why?”.
Before too long they reached their destination – a pomegranate farm outside the small town of Hidaka. Watanabe looked out the window at the rows of artificial ponds, thinking any one of them would be the perfect place for getting rid of a police officer’s body. He did not think of the Song of the Drowning Man, because he had never read it, but his mind definitely went in an adjacent area: he imagined his body weighted by a concrete block, rotting in the dark waters, forever shielded from the sun by the circular pads of the pomegranate plants. He was about to learn, of course, that there was no such thing.
The car parked outside a small shed. A man who looked every bit like a seasoned pomegranate farmer was waiting by the door, leaning on a pile of empty crates. Kanamori turned off the engine and got out of the car. He told Watanabe that he was welcome to search their host for weapons, or to unholster his own, or both, if it made him feel safer. Watanabe declined the invitation, but remained on his guard. The three men entered the shed, which contained nothing but a naked lightbulb hanging from a steel beam, and a crate containing a dozen pomegranates. Though he could see no chair, Watanabe immediately pictured himself tied to one, with a gag of greasy rags tickling his uvula. That’s when he finally drew his gun and pointed it at Kanamori, who quietly smiled:
“You’re in no danger, I assure you. Look!
— What would you want me to look at? This crate?
— Above the crate.”
Something was indeed beginning to happen above the crate – more precisely, in a spherical pocket of air two feet above the bottom of the crate. Weightless speckles of red were appearing in the centre of the sphere, from which they danced away in pairs, like waltzers at a ball. The air around them was undulating, alternately contracting and dilating. With faint crackling sounds, tiny red thunderbolts ripped through the contained, pomegranate-sized atmosphere, leaving in their wakes thin red dangling fibres. Whenever those fibres made contact with one another, two very brief flashes occurred in rapid succession – the first of intense white light, the second of pure darkness. Watanabe was so fascinated he didn’t even notice both his arms had dropped to his sides. He couldn’t have looked away if his life had depended on it. And so he witnessed in its entirety the birth of a pomegranate.
“That’s your big truth? He later asked Kanamori. That pomegranates just appear out of thin air?
— It is quite a big truth, Kanamori answered, lighting a cigarette.
They were standing by one of the farm’s decoy ponds. Watanabe looked at the fruit he was holding in his hand:
— Yes… Yes it is, but…
— But it feels like a dumb truth to lose your life over?
— Exactly. I mean, why did you have to kill that poor woman?
— Well, we didn’t have time for another method. Had we not acted this way, the whole world would be up in arms, demanding explanations no one can give them.
— You mean nobody knows what… Whatever is at play…
— All we know is that every sixty seconds, in all sixty so-called “pomegranate farms” around the world, exactly one pomegranate appears. In a year, that’s thirty million pomegranates, eaten or juiced by people who regard them as just another fruit.
— Well, you know who might have helped you figure out what they really are?
— No. Many great minds have tried and failed to do so.
— Professor Kon. The woman you had killed. While investigating her murder I read an article of hers where she touched on the topic of the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia. You see, it is believed that before the Sumerians started imprinting symbols on clay tablets, they used clay bullae to carry information. They would enclose variously shaped tokens inside the bulla, and at destination the bulla would be broken, thus revealing the information it contained.
— So your theory…
— I like to think it would have been her theory. But yes, Watanabe said while slowly rotating the pomegranate before his eyes. It is possible that these objects are in fact… speech capsules.”
Kanamori exhaled two sceptical clouds of smoke through his nostrils, and shrugged.
Though he’d promised Kanamori that he would keep the truth to himself, chances are Inspector Watanabe would have shared it with the world eventually, if only to prevent more innocent people from meeting the same fate as Professor Kon. But he never had to resolve this particular dilemma, because it just so happens that a couple of weeks after his trip to Shikoku, in the wreckage of a commercial spaceship drifting at the edge of our galaxy’s bulge, the following exchange took place between the leader of a salvage mission and her communications officer:
“You mean to tell me this wreck never stopped sending speech capsules?
— That is correct, Commander. After the ship suffered total engine failure, its comm system identified the closest inhabited world and started beaming standard speech capsules there, requesting assistance.
— But that was thousands of pohls ago! Why didn’t anybody come before we did? Was there a miscalculation?
— In some way yes, there was. You see, the capsule-generating beams did reach the closest inhabited world, at a distance of 17 light-pohls. But the inhabitants of that particular world could not read the capsules.
— You said they were standard capsules. Standard capsules use universal language.
— Yes Commander. But nothing is truly and fully universal. You’re not without knowing that there remain barbarians out there…
— Barbarians or not, if you speak a language, any language, you should be able, with a little work, to decipher the message contained in a standard capsule.
— Unless you don’t realise it’s a message.
The Commander gave her communications officer a blank stare. She was tired, frustrated, and had seen more mummified sailors floating around the shipwreck than her stomach could bear.
— It has happened before, the communications officer continued. Some barbarian sees a speech capsule, thinks it is food, and eats it. Before you know it, a whole barbarian village is built around the beaming spot, and they eat capsule after capsule, without ever asking themselves what it is exactly that they’re eating.
The Commander felt heavier by the second. She sighed:
— Oh my, what a horrible picture you’re painting… People eating speech! Digesting it, absorbing it passively into their soon-to-be rotting flesh, excreting it in the dirt! To think that they received tens of billions of speech capsules and that every last one of them ended up as… As…
— Well, if it makes you feel any better, Commander, the crew was already dead when the first beam went out.
— You don’t seem to understand, Nintu. Don’t you see what a terrible, terrible waste it all is?
Nintu wasn’t too sure. Perhaps the Commander was indeed, as she had heard other crew members say, too perceptive for her own good.
— Do you want me to kill them, Commander? Nintu asked.
— What?
— The beams, Commander, do you want me to turn them off?
— Yes, Nintu. Please do. Please put an end to this cruel nonsense.”
And with the flip of a switch, Nintu made pomegranates a thing of the past.