Free The Ark Sakura by Kōbō Abe

entrance to the fishermen’s inn. To get back to the rocky promontory, you have to go under the bypass and skirt the beach.
    “They’ll never figure this out,” said the insect dealer.
    “Now pull over and cut the engine.” I took a flashlight from the toolbox behind my seat, and stepped outside.
    “Your knee seems okay now, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes, now that you mention it.”
    I had too much on my mind to go on pretending otherwise. I crouched down, peered around, and pricked up my ears. If the shill and his companion had indeed read the map correctly and beaten us here, they would have had to abandon their car in this vicinity. There were no fresh tire tracks. The only sounds that I could make out were the vibrations from cars whizzing by overhead and the whistle of wind on the waves. I detected no whir of an engine trying to pull out of the sand, nor any foreign object interrupting the horizon’s faint glow. We were in time.
    “Isn’t that a footprint over there?”
    The insect dealer, Komono (it will take me a while to start calling him by his name), leaned out from the driver’s seat and pointed to a section of sand near the pier. I turned my flashlight on it. In a mound of sand between the pier and the ledge were two small indentations that did bear a certain resemblance to footprints. Absorbed in tracing the probable route of the other car, I had somehow overlooked them.
    “Probably a dog.”
    “Too distinct for that. Or are they?”
    “Let’s get a move on.” Motioning to him to slide over, I climbed into the driver’s seat, put the gears in four-wheel drive, and started up in second, heading for the sands, gradually picking up speed as we circled around and went up from the beach onto the ledge.
    “Easy! Don’t push your luck.” Clutching the dashboard, he put a cautionary hand on the steering wheel.
    “Leggo—you’ll break a finger!” I yelled.
    Flying to the right, careening to the left, we dashed furiously along. A shadow crossed the headlight beams. I slammed on the brakes and broke into a sweat as a stray dog, one hind leg missing from the knee down, slunk off deliberately into the grass with its head down. A white beard and a sagging back gave the animal a decrepit appearance, but he was a wily old rascal, boss of the seven or eight strays whose territory this was.
    “So it was a dog’s footprints.” The insect dealer stiffened, and added grimly, “Bloodthirsty-looking creature.”
    I turned off the engine. Low growls crawled over the ground, and a panting sound like the chafing of pieces of wood.
    “Hear it?” I said.
    “Are there more of them?”
    “Seven or eight, as far as I can tell. The one you just saw is their leader.”
    “Dogs seldom attack, I’ve heard,” he said hopefully. “They say if they’re not expressly trained to kill, they won’t.”
    “These would. They don’t trust people.”
    “They know you, though, don’t they, Captain?”
    “Well, yes …”
    This time I caught a touch of sycophancy in his use of the word. Still, it was better than being laughed at. I switched the ignition back on, drove straight under the bypass, and pulled up as close as I could to the cliff ahead. Insects attracted by the headlights crashed into the windshield.
    A mountain of garbage and trash reached nearly halfway up the cliff: besides the usual assortment of kitchen refuse, there were nylon stockings wound around a bicycle seat; homemade pickles, complete with pickling crock; a fish head, its mouth the socket for a broken light bulb; an old refrigerator, now a dog coffin; an empty Coke bottle crowned with an old shoe that had melted into gum; and a TV tube stuffed with an insect’s nest that looked exactly like cotton candy.
    “Great—a garbage dump. Just great.”
    “Camouflage,” I explained. “I’ll bet you can’t tell where the entrance is.”
    “I’ll bet I can. Inside the body of that old junk heap on top of the pile.”
    His powers of observation were