In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Thomas Carlyle
ePub
A4Chapter 4
3
0Once upon a time, everybody was preoccupied with being cool.
When I finished high school, I resolved to say only half of what I was really thinking. I don’t know why, but that was the plan. Over the course of a few
years, I was able to stick to this. Then one day I discovered that I was no longer the kind of person who could just say half of what he was really
feeling.
I don’t know what that had to do with being cool. However, if you could call an old refrigerator in desperate need of defrosting cool, that was me. In
that vein, I was caught in the ebb and flow of time, and when my consciousness begged for sleep, I kickstarted it with beer and cigarettes to keep
on writing like this. I took lots of hot showers, shaved twice a day, and listened to old records ad infinitum. Right now, behind me, those oldfashioned Peter, Paul, and Mary are singing:
“Don’t think twice, it’s alright.”
31
The following day, I invited the Rat to the pool at the hotel on the mountainside. Summer was almost over, traffic was rough, and there were only ten
other guests at the pool. Of them, half were swimming and the other half were contentedly-sunbathing Americans staying there.
The hotel was a remodeled nobleman’s estate spanned by a splendid lawn, the pool and the main wing partitioned by a hedge rising up a slightly
inclining hill, with a clear view of the ocean, the town, and the harbor below.
After racing the Rat back and forth down the length of the twenty-five meter pool, we sat in the deck chairs and drank cola. I caught my breath and
then in the time it took to take one hit of my cigarette, the Rat was all alone, his gaze fixed absently on an American girl swimming beautifully.
In the brilliant sky, a few jet trails could be seen, stuck to the sky as if frozen there.
“I feel like lots more planes used to fly by when Iwas a kid,” said the Rat as he looked up.
“They were mostly US Air Force planes, though. Twin-fuselage propeller planes. You’ve seen ‘em?”
“Like the P-38?”
“Nah, transport planes. Much bigger than P-38s. They’d be flying really low, and you could see the emblems painted on the side…also I saw a DC6, a DC-7, and a Sabrejet.”
“Those are really old.”
“Yep, back from the Eisenhower days. The cruisers would enter the bay, and the town would be full of sailors. You ever seen an MP?”
“Yeah.”
“Times change,” he sighed. “Not that I particularly like sailors or anything…”
I nodded.
“The Sabres were really great planes. They were only used to drop napalm. You ever see an airplane drop napalm?”
“Just in war movies.”
“People really think up a lot of things. And napalm is one of them. After ten years, you’d even start to miss the napalm, I bet.”
I laughed and lit my second cigarette. “You really like airplanes, don’t you?”
“I thought Iwanted to be a pilot, back in those days. But my eyes were bad, so I gave it up.”
“Yeah?”
“I like the sky. You can look at it forever and never get tired of it, and when you don’t want to look at it anymore, you stop.”
The Rat was silent for five minutes, then suddenly spoke.
“Sometimes, there’s nothing I can do, I just can’t stand it any longer. ‘Cause I’m rich.”
“I can’t pretend to know how you feel,” I said resignedly, “but it’s okay to run away. If you really feel that way.”
“Probably…I think that would be the best thing to do. Go to some town I don’t know, start all over again. Wouldn’t be too bad.”
“You won’t go back to college?”
“I’m done. There’s no way I can go back.”
From behind his sunglasses, the Rat’s eyes followed the girl who was still swimming.
“Why’d you quit?”
“I don’t know, ‘cause Iwas bored? Still, in my own way, I tried my best. More than even I could believe. I thought about other people just as much as
myself, and thanks to that I got punched by a policeman. But, when the time comes, everybody goes back to their own routine. I just had nowhere to
go back to. Like a game of musical chairs.”
“So what are you going to do?”
He wiped his legs with a towel as he thought this over.
“I’m thinking of writing novels. What do you think?”
“Of course I think it’s a great idea.”
He nodded.
“What kind of novels?”
“Good ones. By my standards, anyway. Me, I don’t think I have talent or anything. At least, I think that my writing has got to be the result of some
epiphany or it won’t have any meaning. Don’t you think?”
“I agree.”
“I’ve got to write for myself…or maybe for the cicadas.”
“Cicadas?”
“Yep.”
The Rat fiddled around for a moment with the Kennedy half-dollar hung around his neck as a pendant.
“Some years back, me and this girl went to Nara. It was a terribly hot summer afternoon, and we’d been walking on these mountain trails for three
whole hours. During that time, to give you an idea, we had for company: the shrieking of wild birds shooting out of the trees, these monster cicadas
buzzing across the paths between the rice fields, and the like. ‘Cause it was hot as hell, you know.
“After walking for a bit, we sat on a hillside covered thick with summer grass, and there was a nice breeze blowing the sweat off our bodies. There
was a deep moat stretching out below the hill, and on the other side was this mound, covered with trees, looking like an island. It was a burial
mound. For some Emperor from a long time ago. You ever seen one?”
I nodded.
“Looking at that, I started thinking, ‘why did they make such a huge tomb for him?’ Of course, every grave has meaning. Like they say, everybody
dies sometime. They teach you that.
“Still, this was just too big. Bigness, sometimes it changes the very essence of something into something else entirely. Speaking practically, it was
like this didn’t even look like a tomb. A mountain. The surface of the moat was covered with frogs and water plants, and the whole edge of it was
covered with cobwebs.
“I stared at it in silence, the wind from the water clearing my ears. What I felt at that time, I really can’t even put into words. No, wait, it wasn’t really a
feeling. It was its own completely-packaged sensation. In other words, the cicadas and frogs and spiders, they were all one thing flowing into
space.”
Saying this, the Rat drank the last sip of his already-flat cola.
“When I’m writing, I’m reminded of that summer afternoon and that overgrown burial mound. Then I think this: the cicadas and frogs and spiders, the
summer grass and the wind, if I could write for them, it would be a wonderful thing.”
Finishing his story, the Rat folded both his arms behind his head and stared quietly up at the sky.
“So…have you tried writing anything?”
“Nope, I can’t write a single line. I can’t write anything.”
“Really?”
“‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’”
“What?”
“‘But if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’”
So said the Rat.
When the evening sun started to dim, we left the pool and went into the hotel’s small bar, which was filled with Mantovani’s Italian mood music, and
drank cold beer. Through the large windows, we could clearly make out the lights of the harbor.
“What happened with the girl?” I’d made up my mind to ask.
The Rat wiped the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand, then gazed at the ceiling as if suddenly remembering something.
“I’ll come right out and say it, Iwasn’t going to say anything to you about that. Because it was stupid.”
“But you tried once, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. But I thought it over all night and gave up on the idea. There are some things in the world you just can’t do anything about.”
“For example?”
“Cavities, for example. One day your tooth just starts hurting. Someone comforting you isn’t going to make it stop hurting. When that happens, you
just start to get mad at yourself. Then you start to get really pissed off at the people who aren’t pissed off. Know what Imean?”
“Kind of,” I said, “still, think about this. Everyone’s built the same. It’s like we’re all riding together on a broken airplane. Of course there are lucky
people, there are also unlucky people. There’re tough people, and weak people, rich people, and poor people. However, not a single person’s
broken the mold with his toughness. We’re all the same. Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried
they’ll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll want to get stronger. Even if you’re just pretending.
Don’t you think?
There aren’t any real strong people anywhere. Only people who can put on a good show of being strong.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
I nodded.
“You really believe all that?”
“Yeah.”
The Rat was silent for a moment, fixing his gaze on his beer glass.
“You sure you’re not bullshitting me?” the Rat said earnestly.
After I drove the Rat back to his house, I dropped by J’s Bar.
“You talk to him?”
“I did.”
“That’s good.”
Saying that, J set a plate of French fries in front of me.
32
In spite of Derek Hartfield’s large volume of work, when it came to the subjects of life, dreams, love, and the like, he was an extremely rare writer.
Comparatively serious (‘serious’ meaning stories without appearances by spacemen and monsters) was his 1937 semi-autobiographical book
Halfway ‘Round the Rainbow, in which, through all the irony, jokes, insults, and paradoxes, he revealed just a little bit of his true feelings.
“My most sacred books are in this room, and by that I mean the stack of alphabetized phonebooks on which I swear to tell the whole truth and
nothing but. The truth is this: life is empty. However, help is available. If you know that from the outset, it’s almost as if life’s not really meaningless at
all. We’ve really worked tirelessly to build it all up, and then tried with all our might to wear it down, and now it’s empty. No matter how hard you work,
or how hard your try to bring it down, none of that’ll be written here. ‘Cause it’s a real pain in the ass. For those of you who really want to know, you
can read about it in Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe. It’s all there, written out for you.”
The reason Hartfield was so terribly enamored with Jean-Christophe is, quite simply, because it diligently outlined the life of one person from birth
until death and, moreover, it was a terribly long novel. In his opinion, a novel could present information even better than graphs, chronologies, and
the like, and he thought the accuracy was comparable as well.
He was always critical of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
‘Of course, I have no problem with the length of it,’
he noted. ‘It’s that it lacks a clear conceptualization of outer space, and the author has given the reader a mishmash of impressions.’ The phrase
‘conceptualization of space,’ the way he uses it, usually meant ‘sterility.’
The novel he liked the most was A Dog of Flanders.
‘Hey, you. Can you believe a dog died just for a picture?’
During an interview, a newspaper reporter once asked Hartfield this:
“Your book’s protagonist, Waldo, has died twice on Mars, and once on Venus. Isn’t this some kind of contradiction?”
Hartfield’s reply was this:
“Do you know how time flows in the void of space?”
“No,” he responded, “but nobody knows that.”
“If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?”
* * *
Out of all of Hartfield’s works, one story, The Wells of Mars stands out, almost suggesting a hint of Ray Bradbury’s future appearance on the writing
scene. It was a long time ago when Iread it, and I forget most of the details, so I’m only going to give you the most important points.
This story is about the countless bottomless wells dug into the surface of Mars and the young man who climbed down into one. These wells were
dug by the Martians tens of thousands of years ago, and that’s well-known, but the strange thing is that all of them, and I mean all of them, were dug
so they wouldn’t strike water. So the question of why the hell they bothered to dig them is something nobody knew. As for the Martians themselves,
aside from these wells, there wasn’t a trace of them left. Their written language, their dwellings, their plates and bowls, metallic infrastructure, their
graves, their rockets, their vending machines, even their shells, there was absolutely nothing left. Just those wells. And the Earthlings had a hell of a
time deciding whether or not you could even call that civilization, but those wells were definitely really well made, and all those tens of thousands of
years later there wasn’t even so much as a single brick of a ruin.
To be sure, a few adventurers and explorers went down into those wells. They descended with their ropes in hand, but due to the depth of the wells
and length of the caves, they had to turn back for the surface, and of those without ropes, not a single soul ever returned.
One day, there was this young guy wandering around in outer space, and he went into one of the wells. He was sick of the utter hugeness of space,
and he wanted to die alone, without anybody around. As he descended, the well started to feel like a more and more relaxing and pleasant place,
and this uncanny, familiar power started to envelop his body. After going down an entire kilometer, he found a real cave and climbed into it, and he
continued to walk along, following its winding paths along intently. He had no idea how long he was walking along. This is because his watch
stopped. It could have been two hours, but it just as easily could have been two days. It was like he couldn’t feel hunger or exhaustion, and the
previously-mentioned strange power continuing to encase his body just as before. And then, all of a sudden, he felt sunlight. Turns out the cave was
connected to a different well. He clambered up out of the well, and once again he was above ground. He sat on the edge of the well and stared at
wasteland ahead of him free of any obstacles, and then he gazed at the sun. Something about it was different. The smell of the wind, the sun…the
sun was in the middle of the sky, an orange twilight sun that had become an enormous orange blob.
“In 250,000 years, the sun is going to explode.
*Click*…OFF. 250,000 years. Not such a long time,”
the wind whispered to him.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m just the wind. If you want to call me that, or call me a Martian, that’s okay, too. I’m not an evil echo. But then, words don’t
mean anything to me.”
“But, you’re speaking.”
“Me? You’re the one talking. I’m just giving your spirit a little hint, a little prodding.”
“What the hell happened to the sun?”
“It’s old. It’s dying. Me, you, there’s nothing either of us can do.”
“How’d it happen so quickly…?”
“Not quickly at all. In the time it took you to get out of that well, fifteen hundred million years have passed. As your people say, time flies. That well
you came from was built along a distortion in spacetime. To put it another way, we wander around through time. From the birth of the universe ‘til its
death. And so we never live, and we never die. We’re the wind.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Ask away.”
“What have you learned?”
The atmosphere shook a little, and the wind laughed. And then, the stillness of eternity once again covered the surface of Mars. The young man
pulled a revolver out of his pocket, put the muzzle to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
33
The phone rang.
“I’m back,” she said.
“Let’s meet up.”
“Are you free now?”
“Of course.”
“Pick me up in front of the YWCA at five.”
“What do you do at the YWCA?”
“French lessons.”
“French?”
“Oui.”
After I hung up the phone, I took a shower and drank a beer. When I finished it, the evening rain started in like a waterfall.
When I made it to the YWCA the rain had almost completely lifted, but the girls coming out of the gate looked distrustfully up at the sky as they
opened and closed their umbrellas. I parked on the side of the road facing the gate, cut the engine, and lit a cigarette. Soaked by the rain, the
gateposts looked like two tombstones in a wasteland. Next to the dirty, gloomy YWCA building were newer buildings, but they were just cheap
rentals, and stuck to the rooftop was a giant billboard showing a refrigerator. A thirty year-old seemingly telling the word that she was, indeed,
anemic, was slouching, but still looking as if she were having a good time opening the refrigerator door, and thanks to her, I could take a peek at
the contents inside.
In the freezer, there were ice cubes, a liter of vanilla ice cream, and a package of frozen shrimp. On the second shelf was a carton of eggs, some
butter, camembert cheese, and boneless ham. The third shelf held packs of fish and chicken, and in the plastic case at the very bottom were
tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus and grapefruit. In the door, there were large bottles of cola and beer, three of each, and a carton of milk.
While I waited for her, leaning on the steering wheel, I thought about the order in which I would eat the food in the refrigerator, but, at any rate, one
liter was way too much ice cream, and the lack of salad dressing for the lettuce was lethal.
It was a little after five when she came through the gate. She was wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt and a miniskirt with white stripes. She had her
hair up, and she was wearing glasses. In just one week, she had aged almost three years. It was probably due to the hair and the glasses.
“What a downpour,” she said as she got into the passenger seat, nervously fixing the hem of her skirt.
“You get wet?”
“A little.”
From the backseat, I pulled out a beach towel I’d had there from my trip to the pool and I handed it to her. She used it to wipe the sweat off her face,
then patted her hair with it a few times before she gave it back.
“When it started pouring, Iwas having coffee near here. It was like a flood.”
“Still, it really cooled things off.”
“Yeah.”
She nodded, then put her arm out the window to check the temperature outside. Between us, I sensed a different vibe than the last time we’d met,
something in the atmosphere was a little off.
“Did you have fun on your trip?” I asked.
“I didn’t really go on a trip. I lied to you about that.”
“Why’d you lie to me?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
34
Sometimes I tell lies.
The last time I told a lie was last year. Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society,
you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence.
However, if we were constantly talking year-round, and telling only the truth, truth would probably lose some of its value.
* * *
Last autumn, my girlfriend and Iwere naked, having climbed into bed together. And then we got really hungry.
“Don’t you have anything to eat?” I asked her.
“I’ll go and check.”
She rose from the bed, naked, opened the refrigerator and took out some old bread she’d found, made some simple sandwiches with lettuce and
sausage, then brought them back to bed with some instant coffee. Being October, it was a really cold night, and when she crawled back into bed
her body was completely chilled, like canned salmon.
“There wasn’t any mustard.”
“Mmm…delicious.”
Wrapped up in blankets in her futon, we munched on sandwiches as we watched an old movie on television.
It was The Bridge on the River Kwai.
In the end, when the bridge was bombed, she groaned for a little while.
“Why’d you go through all that just to build a bridge?” she said with her finger pointed to the dumbfounded, petrified Alec Guinness.
“So they could keep their pride.”
“Hmph,” she said with her mouth stuffed full of bread, as she thought for a moment on the subject of human pride. It was always this way, but I had no
idea what the hell was going on inside her head.
“Hey, do you love me?”
“Sure.”
“You wanna get married?”
“Now? Right away?”
“Sometime…someday.”
“Of course I’d like to marry you.”
“But until I asked you about it, you’ve never breathed a word about it.”
“I forgot to tell you.”
“Hmm…how many kids do you want?”
“Three.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Two girls and a boy.”
She washed down the bread in her mouth with some coffee and then fixed her eyes upon my face.
“LIAR!”
She said.
However, she was mistaken. I only lied once. 35
We went into a small restaurant near the harbor, finished a simple meal, and ordered a Bloody Mary and a bourbon.
“You wanna know the truth?” she asked.
“Last year, I dissected a cow.”
“Yeah?”
“When Iripped open its stomach, there was only a handful of grass inside. I put that grass in a plastic bag and took it home,
then set it on top of my desk. When I’m feeling bad about something, I stare at that lump of grass and think about this: why do cows take this
unappetizing, miserable-looking food and reverently eat it, chewing their cud?”
She laughed a little, pursing her lips, then gazed at my face.
“I understand. Iwon’t say a word.”
I nodded.
“There’s something Iwant to ask you. Can I?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why do people die?”
“Because we’re evolving. One individual can’t withstand all the energy of evolution, so we go through the alternation of generations. Of course, that’s
just one theory.”
“Even now, we’re evolving?”
“Little by little.”
“What’s the point of evolving?”
“There are many opinions about that. One thing that’s for sure is that the universe itself is evolving. Putting aside the question of whether or not it’s
some kind of trend or willful intervention, the universe is evolving, and in the end, we’re merely a small part of that.” I pushed away my glass of
whiskey and lit a cigarette.
“Where that energy comes from, nobody knows.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Spinning the ice around in her glass with her fingertip, she stared at the white tablecloth.
“Hey, after I die, a hundred years later, nobody’ll remember I even existed.”
“Looks that way.”
Leaving the restaurant, in the midst of a strangely vivid twilight, we walked slowly along the quiet lane of warehouses. Walking together, I could
sense the smell of her hair conditioner. The wind, shaking the leaves of the willow trees, made me think just a little bit about the end of the summer.
After walking for a while, she grabbed my hand with her five-fingered hand.
“When are you going back to Tokyo?”
“Next week. I’ve got a test.”
She was silent.
“I’ll be back in the winter. It’s just until around Christmas. My birthday’s on December 24th.”
She nodded, but she seemed to be thinking about something else.
“You’re a Capricorn?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Me too. January 10th.”
“Feels like an unlucky star to be born under. Same as Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah,” saying that, she grabbed my hand again.
“I’m feeling like I’ll get lonely once you’re gone.”
“We’ll definitely see each other again.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
One by one, the warehouses were really starting to look old, a deep greenish, smooth moss clinging there in the spaces between the bricks. There
were sturdylooking iron bars set into the high, dark windows, on each heavily-rusted door hung the nameplate bearing the name of the trading
company. The distinct smell of the ocean could be felt throughout the vicinity, interrupted by the row of warehouses, and then ended like a row of
willow trees, or a pulled-out tooth. We crossed the overgrown harbor railroad tracks, sat on the steps of a warehouse storing concrete waterbreakers that had fallen into disuse, and stared out at the ocean.
There were lights on at the dock in front of the shipbuilding company, next to that a Greek freighter unloading cargo with its waterline rising, floating
there like it was abandoned. The white paint of the deck was red with rust, the sides of it encrusted with shells and resembling an injured person’s
scabs. For a really long time, we stared in silence at the ocean and the sky and the ships. The evening wind crossed the ocean, and while it shook
the grass, the darkness slowly replaced the faint night, and a few stars started to twinkle above the dock.
After the long silence, she made left hand into a fist, and nervously tapped her right palm over and over. She kept tapping it until her palm was red,
and then she stared at as if she were disappointed.
“I hate everybody,” she spat out.
“You hate me too?”
“Sorry ‘bout that,” she said, blushing, and then as if pulling herself together, she set her hands back atop her knees.
“You’re not such a bad person.”
“That’s it?”
As if smiling slightly, she nodded, and making a series of small, shaking movements, lit a cigarette. The smoke flew on the ocean breeze, slipped
through the sides of her hair, and then disappeared into the darkness.
“Keeping myself all alone, I could hear lots of people coming along and talking to me…people I know, people I don’t know, my father, my mother, my
high school teachers, lots of people.”
I nodded.
“Usually, they say nothing but terrible things.
‘Fuck off,’ and other filthy things…”
“Like?”
“I don’t wanna say.”
She took just two drags of her cigarette before stamping it out under her leather sandal, then gently rubbed her eye with her fingertip.
“Do you think I’m sick?”
“Hard to say,” I said, inflecting it the way I’d say ‘I don’t know,’ and shook my head.
“If you’re worried, you should go see a doctor.”
“I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”
She lit her second cigarette, then tried to laugh but couldn’t quite pull it off.
“You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this.”
I grasped her hand. Her hand was forever shaking slightly, her fingers and the spaces between oozing cold sweat.
“Ireally didn’t want to lie to you.”
“I know.”
We once again descended into silence, and as we listened to the small waves crashing against the breakers, we didn’t speak. It was a long time,
longer than I can remember.
When I finally regained my senses, she was crying. Iran my finger along her tear-soaked cheek and then put my arms around her shoulders.
It’d been a long time since I’d felt the scent of summer. The smell of the ocean, the distant steam whistle, feeling the skin of a girl’s hand, the lemon
scent of her conditioner, the evening wind, faint hopes, summer dreams…
However, like a piece of tracing paper slipping away, everything had, little by little, become irreparably different than it had been in the past. 36
It took us a half hour to walk back to her apartment.
It was a pleasant-feeling night, and after she finished crying, she was frighteningly cheerful. On the way home, we popped into a few stores and
shopped intently for things we didn’t really need. Things like strawberry-scented toothpaste and gaudy beach towels, some kind of puzzle made in
Denmark, six ballpoint pens, clutching these things we walked uphill, occasionally pausing to look back towards the harbor.
“Hey, your car’s still parked over there, yeah?”
“I’ll go back and get it later.”
“Would you mind waiting until tomorrow?”
“I don’t mind.”
And then we took our time walking the rest of the way.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
She was looking at the pavement on the street below as she said this.
I nodded.
“But you won’t be able to shine your dad’s shoes…”
“He should shine them himself once in a while.”
“Think he’ll do it, himself?”
“Yeah, he’s a man of integrity.”
It was a quiet night.
She turned over slowly in her sleep, pushing her nose against my right shoulder.
“I’m cold.”
“You’re cold? It’s eighty-six degrees!”
“I don’t know, but I’m cold.”
I grabbed the blanket that had been kicked down past our feet and pulled it up to our necks and then held her. Her body was rattling a little as she
shook ever so slightly.
“Are you feeling well?”
She shook her head a little.
“I’m scared.”
“Of?”
“Everything. You’re not scared?”
“Not particularly.”
She was silent. It was a silence as if she were taking my answer by its hand to confirm its existence.
“You want to have sex with me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t today.”
Still embracing her, I nodded, saying nothing.
“I just had the operation.”
“A baby?”
“Yes.”
She lessened the pressure with which she was moving her hand around on my back, using her fingers to make small circles behind my shoulders
over and over again.
“It’s strange, I don’t remember a thing.”
“Yeah?”
“The man. I’ve completely forgotten him. I can’t even remember his face.”
I patted her hair with my palm.
“I felt like I could really fall for him. For just a short instant…you ever fall in love with someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you remember her face?”
I tried to imagine the faces of the three girls from before, but it was strange, I couldn’t bring even one of them clearly into mind.
“Nope,” I said.
“Strange. Why do you think that is?”
“Probably because that would be too easy.”
With the side of her face pressed to my chest, she nodded silently a few times.
“You know, if you really want to do it, we can probably do something else…”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
She once again increased the pressure behind the hand she was moving around on my back. I could feel her breasts on the center of my stomach. I
really wanted to drink a beer.
“Starting quite a few years back, I’ve failed at lots of things.”
“How many years, do you think?”
“Twelve, thirteen…the year my father got sick. I don’t remember a single thing before that. Just a bunch of bad stuff. There’s always an unlucky wind
blowing above my head.”
“The winds can change direction.”
“You really think so?”
“It’s gotta happen sometime.”
She was quiet for a moment. In the midst of the dryness of that desert-like silence, she took a second to soak up my words, leaving only bitterness
in her mouth.
“I’ve tried many times to believe that, but it’s never worked out. I’ve tried to get close to people, tried to be more patient, but…”
Without saying another word, we put our arms around each other. She put her head on my chest, her lips nestled lightly on my nipple and was still
for a lone time, as if asleep.
For a long time, a really long time, she was silent. Half-dozing, I gazed up at the dark ceiling.
“Mom…” she murmured softly, as if in a dream. She was sleeping.
37
Hey, how’s it going? This is Radio NEB’s Pop Music Requests. Saturday night has come around once again. For the next two hours, we’ve got lots
of great music for you to listen to. By the way, summer is drawing to a close. How was it? Did you have a good summer?
Today, before I start playing records, I’d like to tell you about this letter Ireceived. I’d like to read it for you. Here’s the letter:
How are you?
I enjoy listening to your program every week. Time goes by quickly; this fall will mark my third year of living in this hospital.
Time really does go by before you know it. Of course, gazing at a little bit of the scenery from the window of my air-conditioned hospital room, the
change of the seasons holds little meaning for me, but still, when one season ends, another comes calling, and that really does make my heart
dance.
I’m seventeen now, for these last three years I’ve been unable to read a book, unable to watch television, unable to walk…no, I’m unable to rise from
bed, and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t even shift the positions in my sleep. My sister, visiting me, is the one kind enough to write this letter for
me. She stopped going to college so she could look after me. Of course, I’m incredibly grateful to her. What I’ve learned during my three years of
lying in this hospital bed is that even from whatever miserable experience you might have, there is something to be learned, and it’s because of this
that I can find the will to keep on living.
My illness appears to be related to nerve damage in my spinal cord. It’s a terribly debilitating disease, but there is, of course, a chance of recovery.
It might only be three percent…but my doctor (a wonderful person) gave me an example illustrating the rate of recovery from my illness. The way he
explained it, the odds are longer than a pitcher throwing a no-hit, no-run game against the Giants, but not quite as unlikely as a complete shutout.
Sometimes, when I think I’m never going to recover, I get really scared. So scared Iwant to scream out.
I feel like I’m going to spend my whole life like this, like a stone, lying on my back staring at the ceiling, unable to read a book, unable to walk in the
wind, unable to be loved by anyone, growing old here for decades and decades, and then die here quietly, I think of this and I just can’t stand it and I
get so sad. When Iwake up at 3am in the middle of the night, I feel like I can hear the bones in my spine dissolving. In reality, that’s probably what’s
happening. I won’t say any more about that unpleasant business. So, like my sister coming here every day, hundreds of times over, to encourage
me, I’m going to try to only think positive thoughts.And I’ll be able to fall sound asleep at night. Because the worst thoughts usually strike in the dead
of night. From my hospital window, I can see the harbor. Every morning, I get out of bed and walk to the harbor and take deep breaths of the ocean
air…at least, I imagine that I do. If I could do this just once, just one time, I think I could understand what the world is all about. I believe that. And if I
could comprehend just that little bit, I think I’d even be able to endure spending the rest of my life in this bed. Goodbye. Take care.
The letter is unsigned.
It was yesterday, a little after 3pm, when Ireceived this letter. Iwas sitting in the break room, reading it as I drank coffee, and when my work finished
in the evening, I walked down to the harbor, looking up towards the mountains. If you can see the harbor from your hospital room, I expect I can see
your hospital room from the harbor. I could see quite a few lights when I looked at the mountains. Of course, I have no idea which of the lights was
your hospital room. One thing I saw was the lights of a rundownlooking house, and I could also see the lights of a big mansion. There were hotels,
schools, also company buildings. Really just many different kinds of people living their various lives, I thought. It was the first time I’d really thought
about it like that. Thinking that, I burst out in tears. It was the first time I’d cried in a really long time. But hey, it’s okay, I wasn’t crying because I felt
sorry for you. What Iwant to say is this. I’m only going to say it once, so listen up: I love all of you.
Ten years from now, this show and the records I played, and me, if you still remember all this, remember what I told you just now.
I’ll play the song she requested. Elvis Presley’s Good Luck Charm.
After this song, we’ve got one hour and fifty minutes left, and we’ll go back to the same old lowbrow comedy routine we always do. Thank you for
listening.
38
The evening of my return to Tokyo, with my suitcase in hand, I peeked my head into J’s Bar. It wasn’t open yet, but J let me in and gave me a beer.
“I’m taking the bus back tonight.”
Facing the potatoes for the French fries, he nodded a few times.
“I’ll be sad to see you go. Our monkey business is finished,” he said as he pointed to the picture on the counter. “The Rat is sad, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Tokyo seems like a lot of fun.”
“Anyplace is the same as any other.”
“Perhaps. Since the Tokyo Olympics, I haven’t left this town even once.”
“You like this town that much?”
“You put it best: any place is as good as any other.”
“Yeah.”
“Still, after a few years go by, I’d like to go back to China one time. I’ve never been there even once…I think about it when I go down to the harbor
and look at the ships.”
“My uncle died in China.”
“Yeah…lots of people died there. Still, we’re all brothers.”
J treated me to a few beers, and as a bonus he threw some French fries into a plastic bag and gave them to me to take.
“Thank you.”
“No big deal. Just something I felt like doing…hey, you kids grow up so fast. First time Imet you, you were still in high school.”
I laughed and nodded and said goodbye.
“Take care,” J said.
On the bar’s calendar, the aphorism written under August 26th was:
“What you give freely to others, you will always receive in turn.”
I bought a ticket for the night bus, went to the pickup spot and sat on a bench, gazing at the lights of the town. As the night grew later, the lights
started to go out, leaving only the streetlights and neon signs. The sea breeze blew over the faint sound of a steam whistle.
There were two station workers, one on each side of the bus door, taking tickets and checking seat numbers. When I handed over my ticket, he
said,
“Number twenty-one China.”
“China?”
“Yeah, seat 21-C, it’s a kind of phonetic alphabet. A is America, B for Brazil, C for China, D for Denmark. You’ll be upset if you hear me wrong and
end up in the wrong seat.”
Saying that, he pointed to his partner, who was in charge of consulting the seating chart. I nodded and boarded the bus, sat in seat 21-C, and ate
my stillwarm French fries. Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That’s the way we live our lives.
39
This is where my story ends, but of course there’s an epilogue.
I’m twenty-nine, the Rat is thirty. Kind of an uninteresting age.At the time of the highway expansion, J’s Bar was remodeled and became a nice little
place. Going in there, you can see J every day, same as ever, facing his bucket of potatoes, and you can hear the regulars complaining about how
much better things used to be as they keep on drinking their beers.
I got married, and I’m now living in Tokyo. Whenever a new Sam Peckinpah movie comes out, my wife and I go to the movie theatre, stop at Hibiya
Park on the way back and drink two beers each, scattering our popcorn for the pigeons. Out of Peckinpah’s movies, my favorite is Bring Me the
Head ofAlfredo Garcia, and she says she likes Convoy the best. Of non-Peckinpah movies, I like Ashes and Diamonds, and she likes Mother Joan
of the Angels. Live together long enough, and I guess your interests start to coincide.
Am I happy? If you asked me this, I’d have to say,
‘Yeah, I guess.’ Because dreams are, after all, just that: dreams.
The Rat is still writing his novels. He sends me copies of them every year for Christmas. Last year’s was about a cook in a psychiatric hospital’s
cafeteria, the one from the year before that was about a comedy band based on The Brothers Karamazov. Same as ever, his novels have no sex
scenes, and none of the characters die.
The first page is always a piece of Japanese writing paper bearing this message:
“Happy birthday,
and a
White Christmas.”
Because my birthday is December 24th. The girl with only four fingers on her left hand, I never saw her again. When I went back to the town that
winter, she’d quit the record store and vacated her apartment. Then, in a flood of people and in the flow of time, she vanished without a trace. When
I go back to the town in the summer, I always walk down the street we walked together, sit on the stone stairs in front of the warehouse and gaze out
at the sea. When I think Iwant to cry, the tears won’t come. That’s just how it is.
That California Girls record, it’s still on my record shelf. When summer comes around I pull it out and listen to it over and over. Then I think of
California and drink beer.
Next to the record shelf is my desk, and above my desk hangs the dried-out, nearly mummified remains of the clump of grass. The grass I pulled out
of that cow’s stomach.
The picture of the dead girl from the French lit department, it got lost when Imoved.
The Beach Boys put out their first new record in a long time.
Iwish they all could be California Iwish they all could be California girls…
