Tài năng thường bộc lộ trong những hoàn cảnh khó khăn và ngủ yên trong hoàn cảnh thuận lợi.
Horace
ePub
A4Chapter 1
1
“There’s no such thing as perfect writing. Just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
A writer I happened to meet when I was in college told me this. It was a long time before I finally understood what those words meant, but just
knowing them was a kind of comfort that put me at ease. There’s no such thing as a perfect writing style. However, in spite of that, the thought of
actually writing something always filled me with a sense of hopelessness, because the things I was able to write about were fairly limited. For
example, if Iwere to write about elephants, I’d have had no idea what words to use. That’s what it was like.
I struggled on with this dilemma for eight years. Eight years—that’s a long time.
Of course, there’s a limit to how much you can try to learn about things, but it’s not as painful as being old. At least, that’s what they say.
From the time I turned twenty, I strived to live my life this way. Thanks to this, I took painful blows from others, I was deceived, misunderstood, and I
also had many strange adventures. Lots of people came around to tell me their stories, and their words flew over my head as if crossing a bridge,
and they never came back. During that time, I’d keep my mouth shut, not telling anybody anything. And that’s how I came to the end of my twenties.
Now, I think I’ll tell a story.
Of course, there’s not a single solution to the problem, and once the story’s over, things will probably still be just as they were. In the end, writing a
story isn’t a means of self-therapy, it’s nothing more than a meager attempt at self-therapy.
But, telling a story honestly is extremely difficult. As much as I try to be honest, the words I’m looking for always seem to sink into dark depths.
I’m not trying to make excuses. At least what I’m writing here is the best I can do. There’s nothing else to say. Still, here’s what I’m thinking: way
before you’re good at it, maybe years or decades before you’re good at it, you can save yourself, I think. And when you do, the elephant back on the
plains will be able to tell his story with words more beautiful than your own.
* * *
I learned a lot about writing from Derek Hartfield. Almost everything, I should say. Unfortunately, Derek Hartfield himself was the embodiment of a
‘simple’ writer. If you read his work, you’ll understand what I mean. His writing was hard to read, his plots were haphazard, and his themes were
childish. However, in spite of all that, among the few extraordinary writers who brandished their writing as a weapon, he was unique. Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, the other writers of his time, even compared to them, the militancy of his writing has never wavered, in my opinion. Unfortunately, even at
the very end, Hartfield could never get a clear grasp of the shape of his own enemy. When it was all said and done, it was a very simple affair
indeed.
Eight years and two months, that was how long his own simple battle lasted, and then he died. In June of 1938, on a sunny Sunday morning,
clutching a portrait of Hitler with his right hand and an open umbrella in his left, he jumped off the roof of the Empire State Building. The singular
manner of his life, nor that of his death, ever became a subject of great intrigue.
I had the good fortune to receive a copy of Hartfield’s already out-of-print first novel during the summer vacation of my third year of middle school,
while I was laid up with a skin disease that had taken over my crotch. The uncle who’d given me that book came down with bowel cancer three
years later, had his body cut into ribbons from head to toe, and with plastic tubes jammed into his bodily entrances and exits, died upon their painful
removal. The last time I saw him, his shriveled up, reddish-brown features had contracted severely, his body resembling that of a sly monkey.
* * *
In all, I had three uncles, but one of them died in a suburb of Shanghai. Two days after the war ended, he stepped on one of the land mines he’d
buried himself. The third uncle, the sole survivor, became a magician and went around touring all of Japan’s hot springs.
* * *
On the subject of good writing, Hartfield said something that went like this:
“The writer who writes literature, that is to say the writer who ensconces himself in his work, always checks his distance. The important thing isn’t
what he perceives, it’s the ruler he uses.” -If it Feels Good, What’s the Problem?, 1936
I stared at the ruler I held timidly in my hand the year Kennedy died, and from then it was fifteen years later. In those fifteen years I’d found that I’d
really given up a lot. Like an airplane with an engine on the fritz, expelling luggage, seats, then finally the sorry stewardesses, in those fifteen years I
discarded every possible thing, but I’d gained almost nothing in the way of wisdom.
As a result of that, and I don’t know if I’m right about this or not, I’ve lost all my convictions. Even if it makes things easier, my worst fear is that when I
get old and I’m facing death I’ll wonder what the hell I’ve got to show for any of it. After I’m cremated, I doubt even a single bone will remain.
“People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream,” went a favorite saying of my late
grandmother.
The night she died, the very first thing I did was to reach my arms out and softly close her eyes. As I did this, the dream she’d held for seventy-nine
years ended the way a summer shower stops falling on pavement, and after that there was nothing left.
* * *
I’ll write about writing once more. This is the last thing I have to say about it.
For me, writing is a terribly painful process. Sometimes I spend a month unable to write a single line, other times, after writing for three straight days
and nights Irealize everything I’ve written is all wrong.
Nevertheless, in spite of all that, writing is also a fun process. Compared to the difficulties of living, with writing it’s a lot easier to find meaning.
Maybe it was in my teens when this fact finally hit me, and Iwas surprised enough to be dumbfounded for a week. If I could lighten up just a little, the
world would move according to my whims, the value of everything would change, the flow of time would be altered…that’s how I felt.
The problem with that, as I realized, would come much later. I drew a line in the middle of a piece of notebook paper, filling up the left side with
things I’d gained, and in the right side listing things I’d lost. The things I’d lost, trampled to pieces, things I’d given up on long before, things I’d
sacrificed, things I’d betrayed…in the end I just wasn’t able to cross these out and cut my losses.
The things we try our hardest not to lose, we really just put create deep abysses in the spaces between them. No matter how long your ruler is, it’s
an immeasurable depth. The most I can do in writing it down is merely to make a list. Not even with short stories or literature, not even through the
arts. Just a notebook with a line drawn down the middle of its first page. There might be some kind of a small lesson in this.
If you’re looking for fine art or literature, you might want to read some stuff written by the Greeks. Because to create true fine art, slaves are a
necessity. That’s how the ancient Greeks felt, with slaves working the fields, cooking their meals, rowing their ships, all the while their citizens, under
the Mediterranean Sun, indulged in poetry writing and grappled with mathematics. That was their idea of fine art.
Those people digging around in the refrigerator at 3am, those are the only people I can write for. And that, is me.
2
This story begins on August 8th, 1970, and lasts for eighteen days, meaning it finishes on August 26th of that same year.
3
“All those rich fuckers can just go to hell!”
The Rat had his hands on the counter, looking depressed as he shouted this to me.
Or maybe he was shouting at the coffee grinder behind me. The Rat and I were sitting next to each other at the bar, and he had no reason to shout
at me like that. But, at any rate, when he was finished yelling, he drank his seemingly delicious beer wearing an expression of contentment.
Naturally, nobody in the vicinity paid any attention to his shouting. The small bar was overflowing with customers, and each and every one of them
were shouting at each other the same way. It was like being on a sinking ship.
“Parasites,” he said, shaking his head in what looked like revulsion. “Those guys can’t do shit. I look at those guys acting all rich, and it just pisses
me off.”
With my lips on the thin rim of my beer glass, I nodded in silence.
On that note, the rat shut his mouth and gazed at his hands on the counter, turning them over and gazing at them intently, again and again, as if
they’d been in a bonfire. I gave up and looked up at the ceiling. He inspected each of his fingers in turn, and we couldn’t start our next conversation.
It was always like this.
Over the course of that summer, like men obsessed, we drank enough beer to fill a 25-meter swimming pool and our peanut shells would have
carpeted the floor of J’s Bar at a depth of five centimeters. If we hadn’t done so, the tedium of the summer would have been unbearable.
On the counter of J’s Bar was a picture smeared by tobacco-stained fingers, and at those times when Iwas bored out of my mind, I never grew tired
of staring at that picture for hours on end. Its pattern made it look like it was made to be one of those inkblot pictures they used in Rorschach tests,
and to me it looked like two green monkeys pitching tennis balls that had fallen out of the sky.
When I said as much to J, he stared at it for a minute and nonchalantly said yes it did, when I put it that way.
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“The monkey on the left is you, the monkey on the right is me. I toss out bottles of beer, and you toss me the money to pay for them.”
I drank my beer in admiration.
“They piss me off.”
After the Rat finished gazing at all his fingers, he said it again.
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Rat badmouthing the rich, and again, he really did hate them. The Rat’s own family was fairly rich, but when I
pointed that out to the Rat, he’d say, ‘It’s not my fault.’At times (usually when I’d had too much to drink) I’d say, ‘It is your fault,’ and afterwards I’d feel
pretty bad about it. Because he did have a point.
“Why do you think I hate rich people?”
Said the Rat one night, continuing his argument. It was the first time our conversation had advanced this far.
I shrugged my shoulders as if to say I didn’t know.
“I’ll just come right out and say it, rich people have no imagination. They can’t even scratch their own asses without a ruler and a flashlight.”
‘Coming right out and saying it’ was how the Rat often prefaced his statements.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. They can’t think about anything important. They only pretend like they’re thinking about things…why do you think that is?”
“No idea.”
“They don’t need to. Sure you need a little brainpower to get rich, but to stay rich you don’t need any at all. The way satellites in space don’t need
gasoline. It’s okay just to keep going round and round in the same place. But that’s not me, and that’s not you. We have to keep thinking if we want
to survive. From the weather tomorrow to the stopper in the bathtub. Don’t you think?”
“Maybe that’s just how it is.”
Having said his piece, the Rat took a tissue out of his pocket and blew his nose loudly. I honestly had no way of knowing if he’d really said all he
wanted to say.
“Still, in the end, we all die just the same,” I said, testing him out.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah. Everybody’s gotta die sometime. But until then we’ve still got fifty-some odd years to go, and a lot to think about while we’re
living those fifty years, and I’ll just come right out and say it: that’s even more tiring than living five thousand years thinking about nothing. Don’t you
think so?”
That’s how it went.
* * *
I’d first met the Rat three years before, in the spring. It was the year we both entered college, and the two of us were completely smashed. Why in
the hell we were, at sometime after four in the morning, stuck in the Rat’s black Fiat 600, I almost can’t remember. We probably had some mutual
friend. Anyway, we were sloppy drunk, and as an added bonus the speedometer was pointing at eighty kilometers-an-hour. Thanks to all that, we
broke through the park’s immaculately-trimmed hedges, flattened a thicket of azaleas, and without thinking, not only smashed the car into a stone
pillar, but came away without a single injury, which I can’t call anything but a stroke of luck.
Awakened by the shock, I kicked away the broken door and climbed out. The hood of the car was knocked ten meters away, coming to rest in front
of the monkey cage, and the front end of the car bore the giant imprint of a stone pillar. The monkeys seemed to be terribly upset at being jarred
awake by the noise.
The Rat, with his hands still on the steering wheel, was leaning forward, not because he was hurt, but because he was vomiting onto the dashboard
the pizza he’d eaten just an hour before. I clambered up onto the roof of the car and peered through the sunroof onto the driver’s seat.
“You okay?”
“Mm, but Imight’ve drank too much. You know, with the throwing up and all.”
“Can you get out?”
“Pull me up.”
The Rat cut the engine, took his pack of cigarettes from the dashboard and put it in his pocket, then slowly seized my hand and climbed up onto the
roof of the car. Sitting side-by-side on the roof of the Fiat, we looked up at the dawning sky, silently smoking who knows how many cigarettes. For
some reason, Iwas reminded of a tank movie starring Richard Burton. I have no idea what the Rat was thinking about.
“Hey, we’re pretty lucky,” said the Rat five minutes later. “Check it out, not a scratch on us. Can you believe it?”
I nodded. “The car’s busted, though.”
“Don’t worry about that. I can always buy another car, but luck I cannot buy.”
I stared at the Rat, shocked. “What are you, rich or somethin’?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, that’s great.”
To this, the Rat said nothing, just shaking his head a few times as if unsatisfied. “Still, anyway, we’re lucky.”
“Yep.”
The Rat crushed out his cigarette under the heel of his tennis shoe, throwing the butt towards the monkey cage.
“Say, how about the two of us become a team?
Together, we could do just about anything.”
“What should we do first?”
“Let’s drink beer.”
We went to a nearby vending machine and bought a half-dozen beers, then we walked to the beach. We layed ourselves down on the beach, and
when we were finished drinking our beer, we gazed out at the ocean. It was incredibly good weather.
“You can call me ‘Rat,’” he said.
“How’d you get a name like that?”
“I forget. It was a really long time ago. Back then I used to hate being called that, but now I don’t care. For some reason I’ve gotten used to it.”
After we tossed our empty beer cans into the ocean, we leaned against the embankment, putting our duffel coats under our heads as pillows and
sleeping for an hour. When Iwoke up, my body was pulsing with some kind of mysterious energy. It was a really strange feeling.
“I feel like I could run a hundred kilometers,” I told the Rat.
“Me too,” he said.
However, in reality, what we ended up doing was paying off the damage to the park in installments to the municipality over three years.
* * *
The Rat never read books. He never ran his eyes across anything more than the sports pages or his junk mail.
Sometimes, when I’d be killing time by reading a book, he’d peek at me curiously like a fly looking at a flyswatter.
“Why do you read books?”
“Why do you drink beer?”
After eating a mixed mouthful of pickled horse mackerel and vegetable salad, without making eye contact, I asked him again. He thought it over for
a long time, but it took him five minutes to open his mouth.
“The good thing about beer is that it all comes out as piss. Like a double play with one out to go, there’s nothing left over.”
Having said that, he watched as I continued to eat.
“Why are you always reading books?”
After washing down my last mouthful of horse mackerel with beer and cleaning my plate, I grabbed the copy of L’Education sentimentale I’d been
reading and started flipping through the pages.
“Because Flaubert’s already dead.”
“You don’t read books by living people?”
“Living authors don’t have any merit.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dead authors, as a rule, seem more trusting than live ones.”
I said this as I was watching the rebroadcast of Route 66 on the portable television in the middle of the counter. The Rat thought about my answer
for a minute.
“Hey, how about living authors? Aren’t they usually trusting?”
“How should I put this…I haven’t really thought about it like that. When they’re chased into a corner, they might become that way. Probably less
trusting.”
J came over and set two cold beers in front of us.
“And if they can’t trust?”
“They fall asleep clutching their pillows.”
The Rat shook his head, looking upset.
“It’s strange, I’ll give you that. Me, I have no idea.”
So said the Rat.
I poured the Rat’s beer into his glass, and with his bottle half-empty he sat there thinking.
“Before this, the last time I’d read a book was last summer,” said the Rat, “I don’t remember who wrote it or what it was about. I forget why I even
read it. Anyway, it was written by some woman. The protagonist was this thirty year-old fashion designer girl, and somehow she starts to believe
she’s come down with some incurable disease.”
“What kind of disease?”
“I forget. Cancer or something. Is there something more terminal than that? Anyway, she goes to this beach resort and masturbates the whole time.
In the bath, in the forest, on her bed, in the ocean, really, all kinds of places.”
“In the ocean?”
“Yeah…can you believe it? Why write a story about that? There’s so much else you could write about.”
“Beats me.”
“Sorry for bringing it up, that’s just how the story went. Made me wanna throw up.”
I nodded.
“If it were me, I’d write a completely different story.”
“For example?”
The Rat ran his finger along the edge of its beer glass as he thought it over.
“How about this? The ship I’m on sinks in the middle of the Pacific.
“I grab a life preserver and look at the stars, floating all alone in the night sea. It’s a quiet, beautiful night. From nearby, clinging to another life
preserver like mine, a young girl comes swimming over.”
“Is she cute?”
“Oh yeah.”
I took a swig of beer and nodded.
“It’s a little ridiculous.”
“Hey, listen. So we’re still floating in the ocean together, chatting. Our pasts, our futures, our hobbies, how many girls I’ve slept with, talking about TV
shows, what we dreamed about the night before, stuff like that. Then we drink beer together.”
“Hold on a sec, where the hell did you get beer?”
The Rat considered this for a moment.
“It’s floating there. It’s beer in cans, floating over from the ship’s mess hall. Together with the canned sardines. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
“During that time, the sun comes up. ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asks, then adds, ‘I’m going to swim to where I think an island should be.’
“‘But it doesn’t look like there’s any islands. What’s more, if we just float here drinking beer, an airplane will definitely come to rescue us,’ I say. But
she goes off swimming by herself.”
The Rat pauses to catch his breath and drink beer.
“For two days and two nights, the girl struggles to make her way to some island. I stay there, drunk for two days, and I’m rescued by an airplane.
Some years later, at some bar on the Yamanote, we happen to meet again.”
“And then the two of you drink beer together once again?”
“Sad, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I said.
6
The Rat’s stories always follow two rules: first, there are no sex scenes, and second, not one person dies. Even if you don’t acknowledge it, people
die, and guys sleep with girls. That’s just how it is.
* * *
“Do you think I’m wrong?” she asked.
The Rat took a sip of beer and shook his head deliberately. “I’ll just come right out and say it, everybody’s wrong.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Hm,” the Rat grunted and licked his upper lip. He made no effort to respond.
“I thought my arms were going to fall off with how hard I swam to get to that island. It hurt so much I thought I was going to die. Over and over I kept
thinking about it. If I’m wrong, then you must be right. I struggled so hard, so why were you able to just float on the ocean’s surface ding nothing?”
When she said this, she laughed a little, looking depressed with her eyes crinkling at the corners. The Rat bashfully dug around randomly in his
pocket. For the last three years he’d wanted so much to smoke a cigarette.
“You’d rather I died?”
“Heh, a little.”
“Really? Only a little?”
“I forget.”
The two of them were silent for a moment. The Rat felt compelled to say something.
“Well, some people are just born unlucky.”
“Who said that?”
“John F. Kennedy.”
7
When Iwas little, Iwas a terribly quiet child. My parents were worried, so they took me to the house of a psychiatrist they knew.
The psychiatrist’s house was on a plateau overlooking the sea, and while I sat on the waiting room sofa, a well-built middle-aged woman brought
me orange juice and two donuts. I ate half a donut, carefully, as if trying not to spill sugar on my knees, and I drank the entire glass of orange juice.
“Do you want some more to drink?” the psychiatrist asked me, and I shook my head. We sat facing each other, just the two of us.
From the wall in front of me, a portrait of Mozart glared at me reproachfully, like a timid cat.
“Once upon a time, there was a kind-hearted goat.”
It was a spectacular way to start a story. I closed my eyes and imagined a kind-hearted goat.
“This goat always had a heavy gold watch hanging around his neck, and he always walked around panting heavily. What’s more, this watch was not
only heavy, but it was also broken. One time, his friend the rabbit comes along and says, ‘Hey goat, why are you always lugging around that broken
watch? It looks so heavy, don’t you think it’s useless?’
‘It really is heavy,’ said the goat. ‘But, you know, I’ve gotten used to it. Even though it’s heavy, even though it’s broken.’
The psychiatrist paused and took a sip of his own orange juice, then looked at me, grinning. I said nothing, waiting for him to continue his story.
“So one day, it’s the goat’s birthday, and the rabbit brings a small box with a pretty ribbon as a present. It was a shiny, glittering, very light, and yet
stillworking new watch. The goat was incredibly happy and hung it around his neck, then went around showing it to everyone.”
The story suddenly ended there.
“You’re the sheep, I’m the rabbit, and the watch is your soul.”
Feeling tricked, all I could do was nod. Once a week, on Sunday afternoon, I rode a train and then a bus to the psychiatrist’s house, eating coffee
rolls and apple pies and pancakes and croissants topped with honey while receiving my treatment. It took an entire year, but thanks to all those
sweets, I got stuck going to the dentist. With civilization comes communication, he said. Whatever can’t be expressed might as well not exist. Nil,
nothing. Suppose you’re hungry. You say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and even that short phrase will suffice. I’ll give you a cookie. You can eat it. (Iwas now holding
a cookie.) If you say nothing, there’s no cookie. (The psychiatrist then hid the plate of cookies under the table with a sadistic look on his face.)
Nothing. You get it? You don’t want to talk. But you’re hungry. Without making words, you can’t express your hunger. Here’s a gesture game. Come
watch this. I grabbed my stomach like it was hurting. The psychiatrist laughed. I had indigestion.
Indigestion…
After that, the next thing we did was ‘free talking’.
“Tell me about cats. Say whatever pops into your head.”
I pretended to think about it, then shook my head back and forth.
“Anything you can think of.”
“They’re animals with four legs.”
“So are elephants.”
“Cats are much smaller.”
“What else?”
“They live in the house, and they can kill mice if they want.”
“What do they eat?”
“Fish.”
“How about sausage?”
“Sausage, too.”
That’s how it went.
What the psychiatrist said was true. With civilization comes communication. Expression and communication are essential; without these, civilization
ends. *Click*…OFF.
The spring when I turned 14, an unbelievable thing happened: as if a dam had burst, I suddenly began talking. I don’t really remember what I talked
about, but it was like I was making up for lost time, talking non-stop for three months, and when I stopped talking in the middle of July, I came down
with a 105
degree fever and missed school for three days. After the fever, Iwasn’t completely silent, nor was I a chatterbox; I became a normal teenager.
8
I woke up at six in the morning, probably because I was thirsty. Waking up in someone else’s house, I always feel like I’m in someone else’s body
with someone else’s soul stuffed inside. Eventually collecting myself, I rose from the narrow bed, and from the sink next to the door, like a camel, I
drank glass after glass of water before returning to bed. From the open window, I could see just a tiny sliver of the ocean. The sunlight glimmered
above the tiny waves, and I gazed upon the who-knowshow-many rusty freighters going nowhere in particular. It looked like it was going to be a hot
day. All the nearby houses were sleeping quietly, and every once in a while the squeaking of the trains on the rails could be heard, and I thought I
detected a faint trace of a radio playing the melody for morning calisthenics.
Still naked, I was leaning against the bed and, after lighting a cigarette, I let my eyes wander over to the girl sleeping next to me. From the
southward-facing window, rays of sunlight illuminated the full spread of her body. She was sleeping with her bedsheets pushed down to below her
knees. Occasionally, she would struggle when taking a breath, and her wellshaped breasts would jiggle up and down. Her body was well tanned,
but over time, the dark color had begun to change, and with the clear tanlines of her swimsuit leaving those areas looking strangely white, she
looked like her flesh was decaying.
Ten whole minutes after finishing my cigarette, I made an attempt to remember the girl’s name, but it was useless. First off, I couldn’t even
remember if I’d known her name to begin with. I gave up, yawned, then went back to gazing at her body. She was a little younger than twenty, and
she was a little on the slim side. I spread out my fingers and measured her from head to toe. She was eight handspans long, with a remainder of a
thumb. Somewhere in the
neighborhood of 158 centimeters, I’d say.
Under her right breast was a birthmark the size of a nickel, and on her abdomen a thin happy trail of pubic hair had sprung up like weeds along a
river. As an added bonus, she only had four fingers on her left hand.
From then, it was still three whole hours before she woke up. After that, it took her five minutes to become fully cognizant. During that time, I hunched
my shoulders together and looked out towards the east, at the thick clouds changing shape over the horizon of the ocean.
A short time later, when I looked back, she had the covers pulled up to her neck. She was struggling with the whiskey vapors rising from the pit of
her stomach, staring at me without any expression.
“Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember?”
She shook her head just once. I lit a cigarette and tried to offer one to her, but she ignored me.
“Explain.”
“Where should I start?”
“At the beginning.”
For starters, I had no idea where the hell to begin, and what’s more, I didn’t have any idea how to tell the story so that she’d understand. I wasn’t
sure whether it would go over well or not. After thinking about it for ten seconds or so, I started to speak.
“It was hot, but it was a nice day. I swam all afternoon, then went home and, after an afternoon nap, I had dinner. Now it’s after 8pm. Then I got in my
car so I could go somewhere and go for a walk. I parked my car on the road near the shore and listened to the radio while I looked at the ocean, like
I always do.
“After thirty minutes of this, I all of a sudden got to feeling like talking to people. Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but
when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean. I’m weird like that. So then I decided to go to J’s Bar. I wanted to drink beer, and I
usually can meet up with my friend there. But my friend wasn’t there. So I decided to drink by myself. In just one hour I drank three beers.”
I paused for a moment to ash my cigarette into the ashtray.
“By the way, have you ever read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?”
She didn’t answer, wrapped in her sheet she looked like a mermaid who washed up onto a beach as she glared up at the ceiling. Undeterred, I
went back to my story.
“What I mean is that I’m always reminded of that play whenever I’m drinking by myself. Like a little switch that goes off and lets me relax or
something. But in reality, it didn’t go so well. I didn’t even hear the click.After awhile, I got sick of waiting and called up his apartment. Iwas going to
invite him to come out and have a drink with me. However, some girl answered his phone. It made me really uneasy. He’s just not the type to let that
happen. Even if he’d had fifty girls in his room and was dead drunk, he’d still answer his own phone. You know what Imean?
“I pretended I had the wrong number, apologized, and hung up. After that call, I started to feel bad. Of course, what I did was ridiculous. Still, that’s
just how I am. I finished my beer and called J over so I could pay the check, thinking about going home and listening to the baseball scores on the
news. J told me to go and wash my face. You could drink a case of beer, and he’d still that that washing your face would make you okay to drive.
There was nothing I could say to that, so I headed to the washroom to wash my face. To tell you the truth, I didn’t really plan to wash my face. Just to
pretend to. Because the drain in the sink there is usually clogged up. So I didn’t really want to go in there. But last night, strangely, there wasn’t any
water filling up the sink. Instead, it was you, all balled up on the floor.”
She sighed and shut her eyes.
“And?”
“I sat you up and carried you out of the bathroom, then took you around to all the customers in the bar and asked them if they knew you. But nobody
knew you. Then, J and I treated your wound.”
“My wound?”
“When you passed out, you must’ve hit your head on a corner or something. It wasn’t a major injury or anything.”
She nodded and drew her hand from under her sheet, then lightly touched her fingertip to her forehead.
“So then I consulted with J. What we should do about you. In the end, we decided that I should take you home. I emptied your bag and found a key
holder and a postcard addressed to you. I paid your tab with the money in your wallet, and following the address on the postcard, brought you here,
opened the door with the key, and laid you out on your bed. That’s it. I put the receipt from the bar in your wallet.”
“Why’d you stay?”
“Hm?”
“Why didn’t you just buzz off after bringing me home?”
“I had a buddy who died from alcohol poisoning. After gulping down whiskey and saying goodbye and leaving, he went home feeling well enough,
brushed his teeth, put on his pajamas and went to bed. When the morning came, he was cold and dead. It was a spectacular funeral.”
“So you were going to nurse me all night?”
“Really, Iwas planning to go home at 4am. But I fell asleep. I thought about leaving when Iwoke up. But I gave up on that.”
“Why?”
“At the very least, I thought I should explain to you what happened.”
“You did all this out of the goodness of your heart?”
Feeling the venom laced in her words, I shrugged my shoulders and let them pass over me. Then I looked at the clouds.
“Did I…did I talk about anything?”
“A little.”
“What did I say?”
“This and that. But I forget. Nothing too terribly important.”
She closed her eyes and a grunt escaped the depths of her throat.
“And the postcard?”
“I put it back in your bag.”
“Did you read it?”
“No way!”
“Why not?”
“There was no reason to.”
I said this in a bored way. Something about her tone was irritating me. Even more than that, she stirred up some kind of familiar sentiment within
me. Something old, from a long time ago. If before this hellish encounter we’d have met under different circumstances, we’d probably have had a
slightly better time together. That’s how I felt. However, in reality, what those ‘better circumstances’ might have been, Ireally couldn’t remember.
“What time is it?” she asked.
Breathing a little sigh of relief, I stood up, looked at my digital watch on the desk, put some water in a glass, and came back to bed.
“It’s nine.”
She nodded weakly, then got up, leaned on the wall and drank all the water in one gulp.
“Did Ireally drink all that much?”
“Absolutely. If it were me, I’d be dead.”
“I feel like I’m dying.”
She took her cigarettes out from under her pillow and lit one, sighing as she exhaled the smoke, then suddenly pitched the match out the window
towards the harbor.
“Hand me something to wear.”
“Like what?”
With her cigarette still in her mouth, she closed her eyes yet again. “Anything. I ask you to get me something, don’t ask questions, just do it.”
Facing the bed was a large wardrobe. I opened its door feeling a little confused, but finally chose a sleeveless blue dress and handed it to her. Not
bothering to put on underwear, she slipped it completely over her head and pulled it down, zipping up the back all by herself and sighing once again
when she finished.
“I have to go.”
“Where?”
“To work.”
She spit those words out, stumbling out of bed. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I looked on, uninterested, as she washed her face and brushed her
hair.
The room was tidy, but even with things being neatly arranged, there was an air of something like resignation, and it was weighing heavily on my
spirits.
Her room was just six mats in size, and after taking into account the cheap furniture it was stuffed with, there was barely enough space left over for
one person to lie down. She was standing in this space brushing the knots out of her hair.
“What kind of work?”
“That’s none of your business.”
And that’s how it was.
For the time it takes to smoke an entire cigarette, I kept quiet. With her back to me, she was pushing her bangs, which hung down to below her
eyes, into position with her fingertip.
“What time is it?” she asked once more.
“It’s been ten minutes.”
“Time to go. You’d better hurry up and get dressed and go home,” she said while spraying perfume under her armpits, “you do have a home, don’t
you?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, pulling my t-shirt over my head. Still sitting on the edge of her bed, Iwent back to gazing out the window.
“Where is your work?”
“Close to the harbor. Why?”
“I’ll drive you. You won’t be so late.”
Clutching the handle of her brush, she looked at me as if she were about to burst out in tears. This’ll be fun if she cries, I thought to myself. But she
didn’t cry.
“Hey, just remember this: I drank too much, and Iwas drunk. So if anything bad happened, it’s my own fault.”
Saying that, she tapped the handle of the brush in her palm a few times in an almost entirely businesslike manner. I was silent while I waited for her
to continue.
“Don’t you think?”
“Sure.”
“Still, a guy who sleeps with a girl who’s passed out…that’s low.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
She was quiet, looking like she was trying to keep her emotions in check.
“Hmm, well then, why was I naked?”
“You took your own clothes off.”
“Yeah right.”
She tossed her brush onto her bed, then carefully stuffed her shoulder bag with her wallet, lipstick, aspirin, and the like.
“Hey, can you prove that you really didn’t do anything?”
“You can check for yourself.”
She definitely seemed to be genuinely pissed off.
“I swear.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You have to believe me,” I said. I started to feel bad after I said it.
She gave up on any further attempt at discussion and kicked me out of her room, locking her own door behind her.
Without exchanging so much as a word, we walked down the avenue running along the river until we came to the parking lot.
While Iwiped the dust off the the windshield with a piece of tissue paper,
and after walking a slow, suspicious lap around the car, she fixed her gaze upon a picture of a cow’s face drawn on in white paint. The cow had a
huge nose ring, and one white rose in its mouth, smiling. It was a really vulgar smile.
“Did you paint this?”
“Nah, the last owner did.”
“Why’d he paint a cow of all things?”
“Who knows?” I said.
She walked back and stared at the cow again, looking as if she regretted saying too much to me, then kept her mouth shut as she got into the car. It
was incredibly hot inside the car, and all the way to the harbor she didn’t say a word, wiping off her dripping sweat with a towel while she chainsmoked. After lighting a cigarette, she’d take three puffs and stare at the lipstick on the filter as if inspecting it, then snuff it out in the car’s ashtray
and light another.
“Hey, about last night, all the other stuff aside, what the hell did I say?”
“This and that.”
“Well, just tell me one thing I said. C’mon.”
“You were talking about Kennedy.”
“Kennedy?”
“John F. Kennedy.”
She shook her head and sighed.
“I don’t remember a thing.”
When I dropped her off, without a word she tucked a thousand-yen note in behind my rearview mirror.
