Water

Water is not merely a recurring natural element in the novel but a force that links bodily experience, spiritual practice, military history, and political violence. It can be sought as a source of purification and harmony, withheld until thirst becomes a crisis, or treated as a resource whose absence exposes the consequences of failed planning and ruthless power. The motif’s meaning shifts with its circumstances: beneficial water must be reached in person, while water at the wrong place or beyond reach becomes a warning and a threat.

Malta Kano’s water research

Malta Kano describes water as an influence on the body’s elements and recounts how that conviction shaped her life. During three years on Malta, from 1976 to 1979, she lived in a village at the foot of a mountain and climbed for several hours each day to a spring. Its water, despite the island’s generally salty water, was special and, in her account, mystical. It could not be carried elsewhere without losing its power; the drinker had to go to the spring. Documents from the Crusades called it spirit water, and she says that Alien Ginsberg and Keith Richards had also gone there to drink it.

The spring’s inaccessibility is central to Malta’s account of its effects. For one week, she drank only its water and ate no food, describing the restriction as a religious austerity through which she purified her body. The experience helped shape the professional name she adopted after returning to Japan. Her interest is not presented as an ordinary commercial practice: she calls herself a consultant on the body’s elements, researches water believed to benefit them, and does not charge for her work. She says that her activities are supported by family assets managed through an accountant and by modest income from books. Her card carries neither an address nor a telephone number because she is the one who makes contact.

Creta Kano’s account of her sister’s search

Creta Kano’s family history places Malta’s concern with water within a longer search for a way to reconcile unusual powers with bodily life. Malta, five years older than Creta, was known from childhood for predicting deaths and locating lost objects. Their parents ordered her not to speak publicly about matters without a clear factual basis, and she responded by withdrawing from ordinary conversation. In private, however, she confided predictions to Creta, who remembers them as consistently accurate. The pressure to suppress her abilities left Malta isolated and unhappy at home, and she wanted to find a world and a way of life suited to her.

After finishing high school, Malta rejected college, saved money, and left Japan for Hawaii. She lived for two years on Kauai, drawn by reports of springs producing remarkable water and by her belief that human existence was strongly governed by water. At a hippie commune on the island, she felt that drinking its water brought greater harmony between her powers and her physical being. The place eventually ceased to suit her: its residents’ reliance on sex and drugs was not what she sought, and she moved on.

Malta then traveled through Canada, the northern United States, and Europe, sampling water in her search for a perfect source. She found water she considered remarkable but not definitive. When money ran short, she used divination to support herself, helping people find lost belongings and missing persons, though she disliked accepting payment for what she regarded as gifts from heaven. Creta recounts that Malta assisted English police in a missing-child investigation by locating the child’s body and a glove connected to the murderer; the man was arrested and confessed. After close to five years away from Japan, Malta reached the island that became the destination of her search.

Mr. Honda’s warning and the memory of Nomonhan

Water enters Toru Okada and Kumiko Okada’s story in a very different register through Mr. Honda’s warning. He says that there is no flow and advises stillness: do nothing, and be careful of water. He predicts that Toru may later suffer in connection with water, whether because water is missing from where it should be or present where it should not be. When Toru asks what kind of water he means, Mr. Honda cannot specify; the warning rests on water itself, without a more precise explanation.

Mr. Honda connects that warning to his wartime experience at Nomonhan. For three days he had almost no water, while food, bandages, and ammunition were also unavailable. The men could see a river but could not reach it: Soviet tanks, machine-gun positions, and sharpshooters lay between the Japanese troops and the water. Some soldiers went toward the river despite the danger, and none returned. The memory makes water both an essential bodily need and an unreachable resource; Mr. Honda’s practical conclusion is that when one must remain still, one should remain still.

After Toru and Kumiko stop visiting Mr. Honda, Toru recalls that both Mr. Honda and Malta Kano had spoken to him about water. Malta had undertaken austerities in connection with her research; Mr. Honda had warned him to be careful. Toru wonders whether the connection is coincidence, then finds himself thinking of the battlefield, the Soviet positions, and the river beyond them. The river’s sound returns in his imagination, bringing the material history of thirst into the present without resolving Mr. Honda’s prediction.

Water as a military and political resource

Other historical passages broaden the motif from individual thirst to the logistical structures that determine who can live and fight. In Lieutenant Mamiya’s account, he explains that his work along the western border of Manchukuo involved topographical surveys. The maps of the Hulunbuir Steppe and the frontier with Outer Mongolia were crude, while political sensitivity made a unilateral definition of the border risky. Yet military maps required far more than boundary lines: they had to indicate where troops could camp, position artillery, march, find water, and secure enough feed for horses. Water is thus one of the indispensable conditions that a map must make legible if an army is to operate.

The contrast between cartographic planning and actual deprivation is severe. Japan’s imperial army, anticipating possible war with the Soviet Union, established a General Staff research team to assess winter survival equipment. Its work, conducted in part through tests on Sakhalin, addressed clothing and equipment for extreme cold and the army’s vulnerability in a Siberian campaign. The account makes clear that preparation for war depends on the provisions required to keep soldiers alive; the Nomonhan memory, by contrast, shows what happens when supply systems fail even where a river is visible.

In the Siberian mine, the same logic of material provision is turned into a system of exploitation. The mine’s political leadership is judged by production figures, while the deaths of laborers are treated as replaceable costs. Boris Gromov diverts a large share of food, clothing, and medical supplies sent to the camp, stores them, and sells them, while also moving coal through black-market arrangements. He claims the proceeds support secret-police operations, but Lieutenant Mamiya believes that most of the wealth is being converted into Boris’s private fortune and sent abroad or invested in gold. The resources meant to sustain prisoners instead become instruments of enrichment and control.

As Boris’s power consolidates, the camp’s distribution of food becomes an explicit sorting mechanism. He evaluates prisoners’ capacity for work, reduces the rations of those he judges weak, and redirects their food to stronger laborers in pursuit of higher productivity. New prisoners arrive when the workforce declines, despite deaths in transit and in the mine. Water is not singled out in this description, but this account of basic supplies extends the motif’s central concern: survival depends not only on resources but on who controls their allocation. Across Malta’s spring, Mr. Honda’s inaccessible river, military maps, and the mine’s diverted provisions, water belongs to a wider pattern in which bodily life is shaped by access, scarcity, and power.