Stories

Haruki Murakami

From the collections The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow, Sleeping Girl, and After the Quake, found on #bookz, May 2009.

A Window

translated by Kiki

Dear—

As winter daily softens her grip I can sense spring in the warmth of the sunlight.　Thank you again for yesterday’s interesting letter.

I enjoyed the part of your essay about spicing your hamburger steaks with nutmeg. It seemed real to me. I can clearly hear the “chop-chop” of your kitchen knife as it attacks the leeks. I can feel the warmth of your kitchen. I can smell it too.

Reading your letter really made me hungry for a hamburger steak. So I went directly to a restaurant to have one. At this restaurant they had eight different kinds of hamburger steaks. Believe it or not! A Texas style and a California style, a Hawaiian flavor, and a Japanese style. The Texas steak was just big, nothing else. That was all there was to it. The Hawaiian steak came garnished with a slice of pineapple. I don’t remember what the California style was. The Japanese steak was served with grated radish. This restaurant struck me as rather trendy. All of the waitresses were really cute, and they were also wearing short skirts.

However I didn’t go to that restaurant to check out its interior or to stare at the waitresses. No, I went there to taste their basic hamburger steak. That’s what I told the waitress. But she apologized and said that they didn’t have just a plain steak. Of course I can’t blame the waitress. After all she didn’t decide the menu. But she also wasn’t wearing such a short skirt that somebody could drop his silverware to look up at her panties. So I ordered a Hawaiian style hamburger steak. While I was eating it the waitress suggested that I just remove the pineapple. The world is such a strange place. All I really wanted was just a simple, ordinary hamburger steak.　By the way how do you make your hamburger steaks? After reading your letter, someday I really want to try one of your steaks.

I liked what you wrote about the automatic ticket machine, and I thought it showed some improvement.　The point of view was interesting. But I couldn’t really see the scenery or the situation. Maybe you are trying too hard. After all you can’t change the world with a sentence.

Considering all of your writing I’d give it about a 70. And I do think it is improving. Don’t rush it, be patient. Good luck. I’m looking forward to your next letter.　By the way, it looks like spring is just around the corner, doesn’t it?

P.S. Thanks for that box of assorted cookies. They were really good. However since personal fraternization outside of our letters is prohibited, please be more careful in the future and don’t send me any more packages. Thank you nonetheless.

P.S.S. In your letter before last I thought you explained your husband’s nervous problem very well.

And that was my job for a year when I was 22. I signed a contract with a small company called “Pen Society.” I don’t know why it was called that. I got 2000 yen for each letter I wrote, and soon I was writing more than 30 letters every month. “You too will write letters that will echo in the bottom of your friend’s heart”—that was our company’s motto.” After paying a monthly fee and a sign-up fee, the clients write four letters every month. The “Pen Master”?that is what we were called?proceeds to edit the letters, offering feedback, guidance, and impressions.

Female “Pen Masters” write to men, and male “Pen Masters” write to women. All of my clients were older than me. About 15 were between the ages of 40 to 53, but most of my clients were between 25 and 35. I had a rough first month of writing letters. Why did all of my clients write better than me? Because they were used to writing letters. Up to that point in my life I really hadn’t taken letter writing seriously.

However my reputation grew. My clients told me this. After three months my writing power had nearly improved to a “leadership” role. It felt strange to get credit for helping these women. They trusted me and my guidance.　 At that time I didn’t really understand, but later I realized that these women were all lonely. It didn’t matter who wrote to them. Nor did it matter what they wrote in their letters.　Maybe we all need to be needed. Maybe we all need to be forgiven. Maybe we all need somebody to share such feelings with.

Anyway that’s how I spent the winter and spring when I was 21 going on 22. Surrounded by this harem of letters like a sea lion with a bad leg.

I answered many different kinds of letters. I answered boring letters. I answered pleasing letters and sad letters. I worked there for only one year but it felt like three. When I gave my notice my clients expressed their regrets. To be honest I had become tired of the job. It didn’t have any point. But I had my own misgivings about quitting. I realized that I might never have a second chance to meet so many honest people.

Speaking of hamburger steaks, I finally did eat one cooked by that woman (from my first letter). She was 32, married but no kids. Her husband worked for the fifth most famous commercial firm in the world. When I wrote to tell her that I’d be quitting at the end of the month, she invited me to her apartment for lunch. She promised to make me a basic hamburger steak. Even though such contact was against the company’s fraternization policy I accepted readily.　I just couldn’t suppress my curiosity. Her apartment was near the Otachu train line. It was a neat, tidy, apartment, quite appropriate for a couple with no children. The furniture and the interior, even her sweater, they weren’t so expensive but they looked nice. She looked younger than I expected. She was surprised at how young I looked. Company policy also prohibited us from disclosing our ages.

Even though at first we were caught off guard, soon we loosened up and relaxed. It felt like we were two people who had become friends after just missing the same train and waiting together for the next one. We ate our steak and drank our coffee. The atmosphere was good. You could see the train from her 3^rd story window. That day the weather was great. A lot of futons were being aired out on verandas. You could hear the whap-whap-whap of housewives beating them with bamboo brooms. The sound seemed to be coming from the bottom of a dry well, yet you couldn’t really tell how far away it was. The hamburger steak tasted great. It was spiced just right, and it was really juicy too. It was also covered with the just the right amount of gravy. After our coffee while listening to Burt Bacharach we started to tell our life stories. I didn’t really have any life to talk about, so she did most of the talking. She told me that when she was a student she wanted to be a writer. She was a fan of the books of Franciose Sagan. Her story “Do you like Brahms?” was one of her favorites. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Sagan. She’s ok. People say she’s boring but I don’t really agree.

“But I can’t write anything,” she complained.

“It’s never too late to start,” I suggested.

“But you are the one who told me that I can’t write very well,” she said smiling.

I blushed. I used to blush often when I was 22.

“But I think there’s a lot of truth in your writing.” She didn’t say anything, but a wisp of a smile slipped across her face. “Your letter made me want to try one of your hamburger steaks.”

“You were probably just hungry,” she said, smiling.

Maybe so I thought.

A train passed under the window, with its dry clack-clack sound.

I suddenly realized that it was 5:00. I had to go. I apologized to her and started to leave. “Your husband will be home soon, so I suppose you have to start dinner.”

“He always comes home very late,” she said, resting her head in her hands. “He generally doesn’t get home until after midnight.”

“He sounds busy.”

“I guess so.” She hesitated for a moment. “As I mentioned in my letters we don’t get along that well.” I didn’t have an answer for that.

“But that’s ok,” she said softly. I thought it was ok too. “Thanks again for writing me all those letters. I really enjoyed them.”

“Me too,” I said. “And thank you for the hamburger steak.”

Ten years later whenever I take the Otakyu line close to her apartment I think of her hamburger steak. I don’t remember which window is hers. But I wonder if she’s still alone, in that apartment, listening to Burt Bacharach.

Do you think I should have slept with her?

That is the point of this story. I don’t know either.

As the years go by there are more and more things that I don’t understand.

Barn Burning

This story is translated by Philip Gabriel and published in the November 2, 1992 issue of The New Yorker.

I met her at a friend’s wedding reception here in Tokyo, and we got to know each other. Three years ago. There was nearly a dozen years’ age difference between us, she being twenty and I thirty-one. Not that it mattered much. I had a lot else on my mind then, and didn’t have time to worry about things like age. And she didn’t care about the difference at all. I was married, too, but that didn’t bother her either. For her, your age or marital status or income were like your shoe size, how high or low your voice is, the shape of your fingernails-in other words, not the kind of thing you can do anything about. Come to think of it, I guess she’s tight.

She was studying with that guy—I can’t remember his name—the famous mime, and working as an advertising model to make ends meet. But she usually found it too much trouble to go out on the assignments her agent got her, so her income didn’t amount to much. What it didn’t cover, her boyfriends made up. Of course, I don’t know for sure. But things she said seemed to hint at that kind of arrangement.

I’m not saying that she slept with men for money. Maybe there were times when something close to that took place. But that’s not the point. Something else was at work in her relations with men. There was a simplicity about her that attracted a certain type of man. He would look at that unabashed simplicity and want to put it together with his own complicated, bottled-up feelings. I can’t explain it well, but I think that’s what was going on. You could say that she lived on her simplicity.

Naturally, you couldn’t expect things to work that way all the time. That would turn the whole structure of the universe upside down. It could only happen under certain conditions, in a certain time and place. The way it did with the Tangerine Peeling. Let me tell you about this Tangerine Peeling. As I mentioned, when I first met her she told me she was studying mime. “Is that so?” I said. Didn’t surprise me too much. Young women these days are all studying something or other. But she didn’t seem the type who’d be serious about perfecting a skill.

Then she showed me the Tangerine Peeling. As the name says, it involves peeling a tangerine. On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea-actually there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d finished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (we were just charting at the bar, and, almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very strange feeling. A long time ago, when Adolf Eichmann was on trial in an Israeli court, someone said that a fitting punishment for him would be locking him in an airtight room and slowly pumping all the air out. I don’t know how he actually died .... The story just sort of popped into my head.

‘You’re pretty talented,” I told her.

“This? It’s easy. Has nothing to do with talent. What you do isn’t make yourself believe that there are tangerines there. You forget that the tangerines are not there. That’s all.”

“Sounds like Zen.”

I could see we were going to get along.

We didn’t go out all that often. About once a month, twice at most. I’d call her up and ask her where she’d like to go. We’d have something to eat, have a few drinks in a bar. And talk up a storm. I’d listen to her talk, she’d listen to me. We had hardly anything in common to talk about, but that didn’t matter. I guess you’d say we were friends. Naturally, I paid for everything, all the food and drink. A few times she called me up, usually when she’d run out of money and was hungry. On those occasions she ate like you wouldn’t believe.

I was completely relaxed when I was with her. I could erase everything from my mind—all the work I didn’t want to do, the jumble of senseless ideas people carry around in their heads. She had that effect on me. She didn’t talk about anything in particular. Often I would just keep nodding my head, not really picking up the gist of her words. But listening to her made me feel relaxed, as if I were gazing at drifting clouds far off in the distance.

I talked about all sorts of things, too. I told her, as honestly as I could, my thoughts on everything, from personal dilemmas to the state of the world. You name it. Maybe she was doing the same thing I did—just nodding her head as she listened to me, without any of it sinking in. But I didn’t care. What I was looking for was a certain feeling. A feeling that had nothing to do with sympathy—or understanding.

In the spring of the year after we met, her father had died of heart disease, and she inherited a little money from him. At least that’s what she told me. She said she wanted to use the money to go to North Africa. I don’t know why she picked North Africa, but I went ahead and introduced her to a girl I knew who worked at the Algerian Embassy in Tokyo. So off she went to Algeria. As things turned out, I went to see her off at the airport. She carried just one beat-up old bag with a few changes of clothes stuffed inside. Going through the luggage check, she looked more like she was going home to North Africa than taking a trip there.

“Are you going to come back to Japan?” I asked her, jokingly.

“Of course I am,” she replied.

Three months later she was back, seven pounds lighter and tanned a deep brown. And with a new boyfriend. It seemed the two of them met at a restaurant in Algiers. Since there weren’t many Japanese there, they grew dose and soon became lovers. As far as I knew, he was the first steady boyfriend she’d ever had.

He was in his late twenties, tall, impeccably dressed, and well-spoken. His face was somewhat expressionless, but he was handsome enough, and came across as a pleasant sort of guy. His hands were large, with long fingers.

I knew that much about him because I went to pick her up at the airport. A telegram had come all of a sudden from Beirut with just the date and flight number. When the plane arrived (four hours late, because of bad weather—I sat in the airport coffee shop and read through three magazines) the two of them appeared at the gate arm in arm, for all the world like some nice young married couple. She introduced me to him, and we shook hands. He had the firm handshake of a person who’d lived abroad a long time. She said she was dying for a bowl of tempura and rice, so we went to a restaurant, and she had some while he and I had a couple of draught beers.

“I’m in the import-export business,” he told me, But he didn’t say anything more about it. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about his job, or maybe he thought I’d find it boring, I really don’t know. I didn’t’ have much interest in hearing about trade, so I didn’t ask any questions. Having nothing much to talk about, we talked about how dangerous Beirut had become, and about the water system inTunis. He seemed to be upon everything from North Africa to the Middle East.

When she’d finished her tempura, she gave a deep yawn and said she was sleepy. She looked like she was going to conk out right on the spot; she had the habit of nodding off at the most unexpected times. He said he’d take her home by cab. I told them the train would be fluster for me. I had no idea why I’d gone to all the trouble of coming out to the airport.

I’m glad I could get to know you,” he said, somewhat apologetically.

“Same here,” I replied.

I saw him again several times after that. Whenever I ran into her, there he’d be, right beside her. And if I had a date with her he’d drive her to wherever we were supposed to meet. He drove a silver sports car, German. I know next to nothing about cars, so I can’t really describe it well, but it looked like it belonged in a black-and-white Fellin film.

“He must be pretty well off, don’t you think?” I asked her once.

“Yeah,”.. she answered without much interest. “Guess so.”

“I wonder if you can make that much in foreign trade.”

“Foreign trade?”

‘That’s what he told me. Said he was in foreign trade.”

“Well, I guess he must be. But I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to be working anywhere. He

meets a lot of people and makes a lot of phone calls, but he doesn’t seem to be too wrapped up in it.” Just like Gatsby, I thought. A young man who’s a riddle: you have no idea what he does, really,

but he never seems to be hurting for money.

She called me one Sunday afternoon in October. My wife had left in the morning to visit relatives and I was alone. It was a beautiful, dear Sunday, and I was gazing at the camphor tree in the garden, eating an apple. I must have eaten seven apples that day. This happens from time to time—I get a pathological craving for apples.

“We were just in the neighborhood and wondered if we could drop by to see you,” she said.

“We?” I asked.

“Him and me,” she said.

“Sure, come on,” I said.

“O.K—we’ll be over in half an hour,” she said. And hung up.

I lay vacantly on the couch for a while, then got up and showered and shaved. Drying off, I cleaned my ears. I couldn’t decide whether I should straighten up the house, and in the end decided not to. There wasn’t enough time to do a thorough job of it, and if it can’t be done right, I thought, better not bother with it at all. The room was littered with books, magazines, letters, records, pencils, and sweaters, but it didn’t look that messy. I’d just finished a job and was feeling lazy. I sat down on the sofa and, gazing at the camphor tree, had myself another apple.

A little after two, I heard a car pull up to the house. When I opened the door, I saw the silver sports car at the curb. She stuck her face out the window and waved. I showed them where to park, out m back.

“Well, here we are!” she said with a smile. She wore a light shirt that showed the outline of her nipples through it, and an olive-green miniskirt.

He had on a navy-blue blazer. Somehow he seemed different, probably because of his two-day growth of beard. You’d think the whiskers would make him look scruffy; instead they gave him a certain presence. Getting out of the car, he took off his sunglasses and stuck them in his pocket.

“I’m really sorry to drop in like this all of a sudden on your day off,” he said.

“No problem,” I said. “It’s like every day’s a day off for me. And I was just ready for some company.”

“We brought a meal,” she said, and she hauled a large white paper sack from the rear seat of the car.

“A meal?”

“Nothing special. We just thought that since we dropped in on you on a Sunday we’d better bring something to eat,” he said.

“Great All I’ve had today is apples.”

We went inside and laid the food out on the table. Quite a spread: roast-beef sandwiches, salad, smoked salmon, and blueberry ice cream—and plenty of everything. While she arranged it all on plates, I got some white wine out of the refrigerator and uncorked it. It looked like we were having ourselves a little party.

“Let’s eat. I’m starved,” she said, famished as usual.

We munched our sandwiches, ate our salad, and helped ourselves to the smoked salmon. When we’d polished off the wine, we drank some canned beer from the fudge. One thing you can always count on at my place is a fridge full of beer.

His color didn’t change at all, no matter how much he drank. I am a pretty good beer drinker myself She had a couple of cans with us, and in less than an hour the table was lined with empties. She selected a couple of records from the shelf and set them on the player. The first tune was Miles Davis doing “Airegin.”

“You don’t see too many of these automatic changers these days,” he said.

I explained how I was a fan of automatic changers, and how I’d had a tough time coming up with a Garrard in good shape. Nodding from time to time, he listened politely.

We talked about audio equipment for a while, and he fell quiet. Then he said, “I’ve got some grass, if you’d care for a smoke.”

I wasn’t sure how to react. I’d just given up smoking cigarettes a month before; it was touch and go whether I could shake the habit for good, and I had no idea what effect smoking marijuana would have on me. But I decided to give it a try. He took out the dark-colored leaves in a foil wrapper from the bottom of the paper sack, rolled the grass into a sheet of cigarette paper, and licked the glued edge. He lit up with his lighter and took a few drags to make sure the joint was going before passing it over to me. The grass was terrific. We sat there silently for a while, each taking a toke and then handing it along. Miles Davis was over, and a collection of Strauss waltzes began to play. Not your usual programming, I thought. But not bad.

After we finished the first joint, she said she was sleepy. She hadn’t gotten enough rest the night before, apparently, and the three beers and the grass knocked her out I showed her upstairs and put her to bed. She asked to borrow a T-shirt. I gave her one, she stripped down to her panties, pulled on the shirt; and lay down on the bed. “Are you cold?” I asked, but she was already snoring away. Shaking my head, I went back downstairs.

In the living room her boyfriend was rolling a second joint. He was something. Given a choice, I’d rather have snuggled up nest to her in bed and taken a good nap, but that was out. I smoked the second joint with him, the Strauss waltzes still going. For some reason I remembered a play we’d done back in grade school. I was the owner of a glove shop. A baby fox comes in looking for gloves, but he doesn’t have enough money to buy them.

“You can’t buy gloves with that,” I say. The villain.

“But Mama is so cold. Her paws are all chapped. Please!” the baby fox begs.

“Sorry, but it’s not enough. Save up your money and come back later. If you do—”

“—sometimes I bum down barns,” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said. I was drifting off, and I must have heard him wrong.

“Sometimes I burn down barns,” he said again.

I looked at him. He was tracing the design on his lighter with the tip of his fingernail. He sucked the marijuana smoke deep into his lung, held it there for ten seconds, then slowly let it out. The smoke swirled up like ectoplasm from his mouth. He passed me the joint

“Pretty good stuff;” I said.

He nodded. “I brought it back from India. The best they had. You smoke this and all kinds of memories rush out at you. Light, smells, things like that. The quality of your memory”—he paused in a leisurely way, and, as if searching for the right words, lightly snapped his fingers a couple of times—“is like something you’ve never experienced before. Don’t you think so?”

I do, I told him. I was lost in memories of the commotion on the grade-school stage, of the smell of paint on the cardboard scenery.

“I’d like to hear about the barns,” I said.

He gazed at me. His face, as usual, was expressionless.

“You don’t mind me telling you about it?” he asked.

“Go right ahead,” I replied.

“It’s very simple, really. You pour gasoline around, throw on a lighted match and whoosh! it’s all

over. Takes less than fifteen minutes to burn to the ground. Of course, I’m not talking about large barns. More like sheds, really.”

“So ...” I said, and I stopped. I couldn’t figure out how to go on. “So why do you burn down barns?”

“Is it strange?”

“I’m not sure. You burn barns, and I don’t. Obviously there’s a difference between the two. Rather than say which is strange and which isn’t, what I’d like to pin down is how they’re different. But you’re the one who brought up this barn burning in the first place, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “Right you are. Oh, by the way—do you have any Ravi Shankar records?”

“I don’t,” I told him.

He sat there blankly for a lime. His mind seemed all twisted around, like putty. Or maybe it was

my mind that was all twisted around. “I burn roughly one barn every two months,” he said. And snapped his fingers again. ‘That

seems about the tight pace. For me, that is.” I nodded vaguely. The right pace? “So, are these your own barns you burn?’ I asked. He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about “Why would I burn down my

own barns? What makes you think I own so many barns?”

“So, what you’re telling me,” I said,” is you burn other people’s barns, correct?”

“That’s tight,” he said. “Of course that’s right. Other people’s barns. So it’s illegal. Just like you

and me sitting here smoking grass—definitely against the law. I was silent, resting my elbows on the arms of the chair. “I burn other people’s barns without their permission. Of course, I always choose one that won’t

turn into a four-alarm blaze. I don’t want to start a fire—just burn down barns.” I nodded, and snuffed out the stub of the joint. “But if you’re caught you’ll be in trouble. It’s arson, after all. You blow it and you could wind up in jail.”

“I won’t get caught,” he said casually. “I pour on the gasoline, strike a match, and take off. Then I have a good time watching it all from a distance with binoculars. I won’t get caught. The police aren’t going to comb the streets over a lousy little barn burning down.”

He was probably right, I thought. And no one would ever think that a well-dressed young man driving an expensive foreign car would be running around torching barns.

“Does she know about it?” I asked, pointing upstairs.

“She doesn’t know a thing. Actually, I’ve never told another soul. It’s not the kind of topic you can bring up with just anybody.”

“Then why me?”

He spread the fingers of his left hand straight out and rubbed his cheek. The whiskers made a scratchy, dry sound, like a bug crawling over a taut sheet of paper. “You’re a writer, so I thought you must be interested in patterns of human behavior. Writers are supposed to appreciate something for what it is, before they hand down a judgment or whatever. If ‘appreciate’ isn’t the right word, maybe you can say they can accept things for what they are. That’s why I told you. Besides, I wanted to talk about it with someone.”

I nodded. But in what way was I supposed to accept this as it was? Frankly, I had no idea.

He laughed. “The way I’m explaining it might be a little weird, I guess.” He spread both hands in front of him and clapped them together. “The world’s full of barns, that are, like, waiting for me to burn them down. A barn all by itself beside the ocean, a barn in the middle of a rice paddy ... Anyhow, all kinds of barns. Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll burn them dear to the ground. So it looks like there was never any barn there to begin with. No one gets choked up over it. It just ... disappears. Whoosh!”

“But you’re the one who judges that they’re expendable, right?”

“I don’t judge anything. The barns are waiting to be burned. I just accept that. I merely accept what’s there. It’s like the rain. The rain falls. The river swells up. Something gets carried away in the flow. Is the rain making a judgment? It’s not like I’m out to commit an immoral act. I have my own code of morality. A sense of morality is important; people can’t live without it. I think of it like this: morality is the delicate balance that’s involved in parallel existence.

“Parallel existence? What do you mean?”

“In other words, I’m right here, but I’m over there, too. I’m in Tokyo, and at the same time I’m in Tunis. I can blame people and forgive them, all at once. There’s a balance involved, and without it I don’t think we’d be able to live. It’s like a clasp—if it came undone we’d fill to pieces. But because it’s there we can experience this kind of parallel existence.

“And burning down barns is consistent with your code of morality?”

“Not exactly. It’s more an act that sustains that morality. But enough of this morality talk. That’s not the point I’m getting at. What I’m trying to say is that the world is filled with these barns. You’ve got your barns, I’ve got mine. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. rye been almost everywhere in the world, done everything you could possibly imagine. Even stared death in the face a couple of times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to brag or anything. But why don’t we change the subject? I’m usually not this talkative—the grass makes me run off at the mouth.”

We sat there, silent and still for a while, waiting, it seemed, for the glow to wear off. I had no clue what I should say next. I felt as if I were looking through a train window watching a weird landscape flash in and out of view. My body was relaxed, yet I couldn’t grasp the details of the scenes passing by. But I could grasp, quite distinctly, the presence of my own body. And with it a trace of parallel existence: here’s me, over here thinking. And here’s another me, watching the first me thinking. Time ticked by in polyrhythmic precision.

“Care for another beer?” I asked after a while.

Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”

I brought out tour cans from the kitchen, along with some Camembert cheese. We had two beers

each and ate the cheese. “When was the last time you burned down a barn?” I asked him. “Let me see.” He ligh4 gripped his empty beer can and thought for a while. “This summer, the

end of August.”

“And when are you going to burn down your next one?”

“I don’t know. I’m not going by some schedule, circling dates on the calendar and holding off till

then. I burn a barn when I get the urge to.”

“But when you want to burn one, there isn’t always the kind you’re looking for just waiting for

you, is there?”

“Of course not,” he said quietly. “So I make sure I’ve got a good one picked out in advance.”

“You lay in a supply, in other words.”

“That’s right.”

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

“Sure.”

“Have you, already decided on your next barn?” Frown lines formed between his eyes. And he breathed in a rush of air through his nose. “Yes.

I’ve already found it” I didn’t say anything, just sipped at what was left of my beer.

“It’s a wonderful barn. It’s a long time since I’ve seen one so well worth burning. Actually, I came over here today to check it out”

“You mean it’s around here?”

“Very close by,” he said. So ended our discussion of barns.

He woke up his girlfriend at five, and apologized again for having dropped in on me out of the blue. Even though he’d drunk a huge amount of beer, he was cold sober. He drove the car out from behind the house. It had one small nick, near the headlight.

“I”ll keep an eye out for those barns,” I said in farewell.

“Right,” he said. “Anyhow, remember it’s right nearby?’

“What do you mean, ‘barns’?” she asked.

“Just something between us men,” he replied.

“I see,” she said.

And they disappeared.

I returned to the living room and plopped down on the sofa. The tabletop was covered with all

kinds of garbage. I picked up my duffel coat from where it lay on the floor, covered myself with it, and fell sound asleep. When I woke up, the room was pitch-dark. Seven o’clock.

A bluish pall and the pungent smell of the marijuana lay over the room. The darkness was strangely uneven. Still sacked out on the sofa, I tried to conjure up more memories of the school play, but I couldn’t get a clear picture in my head. Did the baby fox ever get the gloves?

I got up from the sofa, opened the windows for some fresh air, made coffee in the kitchen, and drank it.

The next day, I went to the bookstore and bought a map of the part of town where I live. One of those black-and-white maps on a scale of one to twenty thousand, showing even the smallest lanes and alleys. Map in hand, I walked the neighborhood, marking with a pencil the location of every barn. Over three days, I explored an area two and a half miles in each direction. My home was on the outskirts of town, with quite a few farms still around, so there were lots of barns. I counted sixteen.

The barn he planned to burn must be one of those. The way he’d said that it was right nearby made me sure it wasn’t beyond the area I’d covered.

Next, I made a careful check of each of the sixteen barns. First, 1 eliminated the ones too close to people’s houses or to those plastic-covered greenhouses farmers use. Next, I crossed off the ones that had farm tools and pesticides inside—that is, ones that looked as though someone was using them every day. I was sure he wouldn’t want to burn one of those.

That left five barns. Five barns that could be burned. The kind that could burn down in fifteen minutes, and would burn clear to the ground—and wouldn’t be any loss. But I couldn’t decide which of the five he’d pick. It was a question of personal preference. I was dying to find Out which one it would be.

I spread out the map and erased all but five of the “X”s I’d made. Then I got out my T-square, French curve, and divider, and I mapped out the shortest route that would pass all five barns and take me back home. The route curved along the river and over some hills, so the project: took longer than I thought it would. The course ended up being four and one-third miles, no matter how many times I measured it.

At six the next morning I put on my jogging outfit and running shoes and ran the length of the course I’d mapped out. Since I usually do three and a half miles every morning, adding an extra mile didn’t bother me too much. The scenery wasn’t bad, and though there were two railroad crossings along the way, they didn’t really slow me down.

The course circled the athletic grounds of the college near my house, then ran along the river and nearly two miles up a deserted dirt road. The first barn was halfway up the road. Then the course cut through a wood and up a slight slope. Another barn. A little way off, there was a stable for a racetrack The horses might kick up a little ruckus if they saw a fire, but that’s all; they wouldn’t get hurt or anything.

The third and fourth barns looked alike, like two ugly old twins. They were only two hundred or so yards apart. Both of them were dilapidated and filthy. If you were going to burn down one of them, you might as well burn the pair.

The last barn stood beside a railroad crossing, at about the three-and-a-half-mile mark It was clearly abandoned. It faced the road and had a tin Pepsi-Cola sign nailed to it. The building itself—I’m not sure you could even call it a building anymore—had mostly collapsed. It fit his description—a building just waiting for someone to commit it to the flames.

I stopped in front of the last barn, took a few deep breaths, then crossed the railroad tracks and headed home. The run took thirty-one minutes and thirty seconds. I took a shower and had breakfast. Then I lay on the sofa, listening to a record and, when that was finished, started work.

I ran the same course every morning for a month. But none of the barns burned down.

Sometimes the thought hit me that maybe he was trying to get me to burn down a barn. As if he’d filled my head with the image of a barn burning and were steadily pumping it up more and more, like putting air in a bicycle tire. There were even times when I thought that, as long as I was waiting for him to do it, I might as well go ahead and strike a match and burn one down. It’s just a beat-up old barn, right?

But that’s going too far. After all, it’s not me who burns barns, it’s him. No matter how much the image of burning barns might swell up in my head, I’m just not the barn-burning type.

Maybe he decided on some other barn somewhere. Or was too busy to find the time to burn one. I didn’t hear from her at all.

December came, and with it the end of fill, and the morning air turned piercingly cold. No change in the barns, just white frost covering their roofs. In frozen woods, winter birds noisily flapped their wings. The world moved on as always.

The next time I saw him was that December, a few days before Christmas. Wherever you went, Christmas carols were playing. I was busy walking around town buying presents for all sorts of people. Over near Nogizaki, I spotted his car in the parking lot of a coffee shop. There was no mistaking that silver sports car, with its Shinagawa plates and the small scratch next to the left headlight. The car didn’t look as bright and shiny as it used to. The silver seemed faded, but that may have just been my imagination. I have a tendency to rework my memories to suit me. Without thinking, I went inside.

The interior of the shop was dark, with a strong aroma of coffee. People’s voices were muted, and baroque music played softly in the background. I spotted him right away. Seated by the window, he was drinking cafe au lait. The shop was hot enough to fog up your glasses, but he hadn’t removed his cashmere coat. Or his muffler.

I was a little flustered, but I just said hello. I didn’t tell him I’d seen his car parked out front; I happened to come into the shop and happened to run into him.

“Mind if I sit down?” I asked.

“Not at all. Please go ahead,” he said.

We chatted for a while. But 6ur conversation went nowhere. We didn’t have much to say to each other, and his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Even so, he didn’t appear to mind my sharing his table. He told me about the harbor in Tunisia. And about the shrimp they catch there. It wasn’t that he felt obliged to talk; he just wanted to tell me about the shrimp. But the story ran out halfway through, like a trickle of water being sucked up by sand.

He raised his hand, called a waiter over, and ordered a second cup of cafe au lait.

“By the way, whatever happened to that barn?” I ventured to ask him.

A trace of a smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Ah-you still remember, I see,” he said. He

took his handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his mouth, and put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I burned it, of course. Burned it right down. Just like I said I would.”

“Near my house?”

“Yes. Right nearby.”

“When?”

“A while back, ten days after we dropped by your house.”

I told him about marking the locations of the barns on a map and running past them once a day. “So I couldn’t have missed it,” I said.

“You’re quite meticulous, aren’t you?” he said brightly. “Meticulous and logical. But you must have overlooked it. That happens sometimes. A thing’s too dose and you miss it.”

“Well, I don’t get it.”

He straightened his tie and glanced at his watch. ‘~lt’s too close,” he said. “But I have to be going. Why don’t we have a nice long talk about it next time? You’ll have to excuse me, but someone’s waiting for me.”

There was no reason to keep him any longer. He stood up and put his cigarettes and lighter in his pocket.

“Oh, by the way, have you seen her since that day?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t. Have you?”

“No. I can’t get hold of her. She isn’t in her apartment, I can’t get through by phone, and she hasn’t been going to her mime class for a long time.”

“I imagine she just took off for somewhere. She’s done that a number of times.”

He stood there, hands stuck in his pockets, and stared at the tabletop. “With no money, for a month and a half? She’s not the kind who can make it on her own, you know.”

He snapped his fingers inside his pocket a couple of times.

She doesn’t have a cent,” he continued. “Or any real friends, either. Her address book is crammed, but those are just names. There’s not a single person she can depend on. You’re the only one

she trusted. I’m not saying that to be polite. You were someone special to her. Even made me a bit jealous. And I’m not the kind of person who’s ever jealous? He gave a slight sigh and looked at his watch again. “I’ve really got to be going. Let’s get together again sometime.”

I nodded. But the right words wouldn’t come out It was always that way. Whenever I was with him the words just wouldn’t flow.

I tried calling her a couple of times after that; until the phone company shut off her phone. I was a little worried, so I went to her apartment. Her door was locked. A sheaf of junk mail was stuffed in her mailbox. I couldn’t locate the building supervisor, so I couldn’t even find out if she still lived there. I tore a page from my appointment book, wrote a note saying, “Get in touch with me, my name, and dropped it in her mailbox.

Not a word.

The next time I visited her apartment, there was someone else’s nameplate on the door. 1 knocked, but no one answered. Just like the last time, the super was nowhere to be found.

So I gave up. ‘That was almost a year ago. She just disappeared.

I still run past the five barns every morning. No barn in my neighborhood has burned down. And I haven’t heard about any barn burning. December’s come again, and the winter birds fly overhead. And I keep on getting older.

Lederhosen

Translated by Alfread Birnbaum

“Mother dumped my father,” a friend of my wife’s was saying one day, “all because of a pair of shorts.”

I’ve got to ask. “A pair of shorts?”

“I know it sounds strange,” she says, “because it is a strange story.”

A large woman, her height and build are almost the same as mine. She tutors electric organ, but most of her free time she divides between swimming and skiing and tennis, so she’s trim and always tanned. You might call her a sports fanatic. One days off, she puts in a morning run before heading to the local pool to do laps; then at two or three in the afternoon it’s tennis, followed by aerobics. Now, I like my sports, but I’m nowhere near her league.

I don’t mean to suggest she’s aggressive or obsessive about things. Quite the contrary, she’s really rather retiring; she’d never dream of putting emotional pressure on anyone. Only she’s driven; her body—and very likely the spirit attached to that body—craves vigorous activity, relentless as a comet.

Which may have something to do with why she’s unmarried. Oh, she’s had affairs—the woman may be a little on the large side, but she is beautiful—she’s been proposed to, even agreed to take the plunge. But inevitably, whenever it’s gotten to the wedding stage, some problem has come up and everything falls through.

Like my wife says, “She’s just unlucky.”

“Well, I guess,” I sympathize.

I’m not in total agreement with the wife on this. True, luck may rule over parts of a person’s life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there’s a will—much less a will strong enough to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers—there’s a way to overcome most any trouble. No, her heart was never set on marrying, is how I see it. Marriage just doesn’t fall within the sweep of her comet, at least not entirely.

And so she keeps on tutoring electric organ, devoting every free moment to sports, falling regularly in and out of unlucky love.

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and she’s come two hours earlier than expected, while my wife is still out shopping.

“Forgive me,” she apologizes. “I took a rain check on today’s tennis, which left me two hours to spare. I’d have been bored out of my mind being alone at home, so I just thought ... Am I interrupting anything?”

Not at all, I say. I didn’t feel quite in the mood to work and was just sitting around, cat on my lap, watching a video. I show her in, go to the kitchen, and make coffee. Two cups, for watching the last twenty minutes of Jaws. Of course, we’ve both seen the movie before—probably more than once?so neither of us is particularly riveted to the tube. But we’re watching it anyway because it’s there in front of our eyes.

It’s THE END. The credits roll up. No sign of the wife. So we chat a bit. Sharks, seaside, swimming .... Still no wife. We go on talking. Now, I suppose I like the woman well enough, but after an hour of this our lack of things in common becomes obvious. The fact is, she’s my wife’s friend, not mine.

I’m already thinking about popping in the next video when she suddenly brings up the story of her parents’ divorce. I can’t fathom the connection—at least to my mind, there’s no link between swimming and her folks splitting up—but I uess a reason is where you find it.

“They weren’t really shorts”, she says. “They were lederhosen.”

“You mean those hiking pants the Germans wear? The ones with the shoulder straps?”

“You got it. Father wanted a pair of lederhosen as a souvenir gift. Well, Father’s pretty tall for his generation. He might even look good in them, which could be why he wanted them. But can you picture a Japanese man wearing lederhosen? I guess it takes all kinds.”

I’m still not any closer to the story. I have to ask: What were the circumstances behind her father’s request—and of whom?—for these souvenir lederhosen?

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m always telling things out of order. Stop me if things don’t make sense,” she says.

Okay, I say.

“Mother’s sister was living in Germany and she invited Mother for a visit. Something she’d always been meaning to do. Of course, Mother can’t speak German, she’d never even been abroad, but having been an English teacher for so long she had that overseas bee in her bonnet. It’d been ages since she’d seen my aunt. So Mother approached Father—how about taking ten days off and going to Germany, the two of us? Father’s work wouldn’t allow it, and Mother ended up going alone.”

“That’s when your father asked for the lederhosen, I take it?

“Right,” she says. “Mother asked what he wanted her to bring back, and Father said lederhosen.”

“Okay so far.”

Her parents were reasonably close. They didn’t argue until all hours of the night; her father didn’t storm out of the house and not come home for days on end. At least not then, though apparently there had been rows more than once over him and other women.

“Not a bad man, a hard worker, but kind of a skirt-chaser,” she tosses off matter-of-factly. No relations of hers, the way she’s talking. For a second I almost think her father is deceased. But no, I’m told, he’s alive and well.

“Father was already up there in years, and by then those troubles were all behind them. They seemed to be getting along just fine.”

Things, however, didn’t go without incident. Her mother extended the ten days in Germany to nearly a month and half, with hardly a word back to Tokyo, and when she finally did return to Japan, she stayed with another sister of hers in Osaka. She never did come back home.

Neither she—the daughter—nor her father could understand what was going on. Until then, when there’d been marital difficulties, her mother had always been the patient one—so ploddingly patient in fact that she sometimes wondered if the woman had no imagination; family always came first and mother was selflessly devoted to her daughter. So when her mother didn’t come around, didn’t even make the effort to call, it was beyond their comprehension. They made phone calls to the aunt’s house in Osaka, repeatedly, but they could hardly get her to come to the phone, much less admit what her intentions were.

In mid-September, two months after returning to Japan, her mother made her intentions known One day, out of the blue, she called home and told her husband, “You will be receiving the necessary papers for divorce. Please sign, seal, and send them back to me.” Would she care to explain, her husband asked, what was the reason? “I’ve lost all love for you—in any way, shape, or form.” Oh? said her father. Was there no room for discussion? Sorry, none, absolutely none.

“All this came as a big shock,” she tells me. “But it wasn’t just the divorce. I’d imagined my parents splitting up many times, so I was already prepared for it psychologically. If the two of them had just plain divorced without all that funny business, I wouldn’t have gotten so upset. The problem wasn’t Mother dumping Father; Mother was dumping me too. That’s what hurt.”

I nod.

“Up until that point, I’d always taken Mother’s side and Mother would always stand by me. And yet there was Mother throwing me out with Father, like so much garbage, and not a word of explanation. It hit me so hard, I wasn’t able to forgive Mother for the longest time. I wrote her who knows how many letters asking her to set things straight, but she never answered my questions, never even said she wanted to see me.”

It wasn’t until three years later that she actually saw her mother. At a family funeral, of all places. By then, the daughter was living on her own—she’d moved out in he sophomore year of college, when her parents divorced—and now she had graduated and was tutoring electric organ. Meanwhile, her mother was teaching English at a prep school.

Her mother confessed that she hadn’t been able to talk to her own daughter because she hadn’t known what to say. “I myself couldn’t tell where things were going,” Mother said, “but it all started over that pair of shorts.”

“Shorts?” She’d been as started as I was. She’d never wanted to speak to her mother again, but curiosity got the better of her. In their mourning dress, mother and daughter went into a nearby coffee shop and ordered iced tea. She had to hear this—pardon the expression—short story.

The shop that sold the lederhosen was in a small town an hour away by train from Hamburg. Her mother’s sister looked it up for her.

“All the Germans I know say if you’re going to buy lederhosen, this is the place. The craftsmanship is good, and the prices aren’t so expensive, said her sister.

So Mother boarded a train to buy her husband his souvenir lederhosen. In her train compartment sat a middle-aged German couple, who conversed with her in halting English. “I go now to buy lederhosen for souvenir,” Mother said. “Vat shop you go to?” the couple asked. Mother named the name of the shop, and the middleaged German couple chimed in together, “Zat is ze place, jah. It is ze best.” Hearing this, Mother felt very confident.

It was a delightful early-summer afternoon and a quaint old-fashioned town. Cobblestone streets led in all directions, and cats were everywhere. Mother stepped into a cafe for a bite of kasekuchen and coffee.

She was on her last sip of coffee and playing with the shop cat when the owner came over to ask what brought her to their little town. She said lederhosen, whereupon the owner pulled out a pad of paper and drew a map to the shop.

“Thank you very much,” Mother said.

How wonderful it was to travel by oneself, she thought as she walked along the cobblestones. In fact, this was the first time in her fifty-five years that she had traveled alone. During the whole trip, she had not once been lonely or afraid or bored. Every scene that met her eyes was fresh and new; everyone she met was friendly. Each experience called forth emotions that had been slumbering in her, untouched and unused. What she had held near and dear until then—husband and home and daughter—was on the other side of the earth. She felt no need to trouble herself over them.

She found the lederhosen shop without problem. It was a tiny old guild shop. It didn’t have a big sign for tourists, but inside she could see scores of lederhosen. She opened the door and walked in.

Two old men worked in the shop. They spoke in a whisper as they took down measurements and scribbled them into a notebook. Behind a curtain divider was a larger work space; the monotone of sewing machines could be heard.

“Darf ich Ihnen helfen, Madame?” the larger of the two old men addressed Mother.

“I want to buy lederhosen,” she responded in English.

“For Madame?” he asked back.

“No, I buy for my husband in Japan.”

“Ach so,” said the old man, “your husband. Zen he is not here viss you?”

“No, I say already, he is in Japan,” she replied.

“Ziss make problem.” The old man chose his words with care. “Ve do not make article for customer who not exist.”

“My husband exist,” Mother said with confidence.

“Jah, jah, your husband exist, of course, of course,” the old man responded hastily. “Excuse my not good English. Vat I vant say, if your husband not exist here, ve cannot sell ze lederhosen.”

“Why?” Mother asked, perplexed.

“Is store policy. Is unser Prinzip. Ve must see ze lederhosen how it fit customer, ve alter very nice, only zen ve sell. Over one hundred years ve are in business, ve build reputation on ziss policy.”

“But I spend half day to come from Hamburg to buy your lederhosen.”

“Very sorry, Madame,” said the old man, looking very sorry indeed. “Ve make no exception. Ziss vorld is very uncertain vorld. Trust is difficult sink to earn but easy sink to lose.”

Mother sighed and stood in the doorway. She strained her brain for some way to break the impasse. The larger old man explained the situation to the smaller man, who nodded sadly, jah, jah. Despite their great difference in size, the two old men wore identical expressions.

“Well, perhaps, can we do as this?” Mother proposed. “I find man just like my husband and bring him here. That man puts on lederhosen, you alter very nice, you sell lederhosen to me.”

The first old man looked her in the face, aghast.

“But, Madame, zat is against rule. Is not same man who tries ze lederhosen on, your husband. And ve know ziss. Ve cannot do ziss.”

“Pretend you do not know. You sell lederhosen to that man and that man sell lederhosen to me. That way, there is no shame to your policy. Please, I beg you. I may never come back to Germany. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.”

“Hmph,” the old man pouted. He thought for a few seconds, then turned to the other old man spoke a stream in German. They spoke back and forth several times. Then finally, the large man turned back to Mother and said, “Very well, Madame. As exception—very exception, you please understand—ve vill knownossink of ziss matter. Not so many come from Yapan to buy lederhosen. Please find man very like your husband. My brother he says ziss.”

“Thank you,” she said. Then she managed to thank the other brother in German, “Das ist so nett vor Ihnen.” She—the daughter who’s telling me this story—folds her hands on the table and sighs. I drink the last of my coffee, long since cold. The rain keeps coming down. Still no sign of the wife. Who’d ever have thought the conversation would take this turn?

“So then?” I interject, eager to hear the conclusion. “Did your mother end up finding someone with the same build as your father?”

“Yes,” she says, utterly without expression. “Mother sat on a bench looking for someone who matched Father’s size. And along came a man who fit the part. Without asking his permission—it seems the man couldn’t speak a word of English—she dragged him to the lederhosen shop.”

“The hands-on approach,” I joke.

“I don’t know. At home Mother was always a normal sensible-shoes woman,” she says with another sigh. “The shopkeepers explained the situation to the man, and the man gladly consented to stand in for Father. He puts the lederhosen on, and they’re pulling here and tucking there, the three of them chortling away in German. In thirty minutes the job was done, during which time Mother made up her mind to divorce Father.”

“Wait,” I say, “I don’t get it. Did something happen during those thirty minutes?”

“Nothing at all. Only those three German men ha-ha-ing like bellows.”

“But what made your mother do it?”

“That’s something even Mother herself didn’t understand after all this time. It made her defensive and confused. All she knew was, looking at that man in the lederhosen, she felt an unbearable disgust rising in her. Directed toward Father. And she could not hold it back. Mother’s lederhosen man, apart from the color of his skin, was exactly like Father, the shape of the legs, the belly, the thinning hair. The way he was so happy trying on those new lederhosen, all prancy and cocky like a little boy. As Mother stood there looking at this man, so many things she’d been uncertain about slowly shifted together into something very clear. That’s when she realized she hated Father.”

My wife gets home from shopping, and the two of them commence their woman talk, but I’m still thinking about the lederhosen.

“So, you don’t hate your mother anymore?” I ask when my wife leaves the room.

“No, not really. We’re not close at all, but I don’t hold anything against her.”

“Because she told you about the lederhosen?”

“I think so. After she explained things to me, I couldn’t go on hating her. I can’t say why it makes any difference, I certainly don’t know how to explain it, but it may have something to do with us being women.”

“Still, if you leave the lederhosen out of it, supposing it was just the story of a woman taking a trip and finding herself, would you have been able to forgive her?”

“Of course not,” she says without hesitation. “The whole point is the lederhosen, right?”

A proxy pair of lederhosen, I’m thinking, that her father never even received.

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either—must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl—one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers—or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.

“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.

“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”

“Not really.”

“Your favorite type, then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her—the shape of her eyes or

the size of her breasts.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah. Strange.”

“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”

“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”

She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell

her about myself, and—what I’d really like to do—explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.

After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a

hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little

conversation?”

Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.

“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”

No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”

No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.

We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.

I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.

Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”

“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves—just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.

They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.

Sleep

translated by Jay Rubin

This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep.

I’m not talking about insomnia. I know what insomnia is. I had something like it in college—“something like it” because I’m not sure that what I had then was exactly the same as what people refer to as insomnia. I suppose a doctor could have told me. But I didn’t see a doctor. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Not that I had any reason to think so. Call it woman’s intuition—I just felt they couldn’t help me. So I didn’t see a doctor, and I didn’t say anything to my parents or friends, because I knew that that was exactly what they would tell me to do.

Back then, my “something like insomnia” went on for a month. I never really got to sleep that entire time. I’d go to bed at night and say to myself, “All right now, time for some sleep.” That was, all it took to wake me up. It was instantaneous-like a conditioned reflex. The harder I worked at sleeping, the wider awake I became. I tried alcohol, I tried sleeping pills, but they had absolutely no effect.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But this wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while my mind was wide-awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wafl, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake.

This incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or tenure. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep.

It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

And then, when night came, the intense wakefulness would return. I was powerless to resist it. I was locked in its core by an enormous force. All I could do was stay awake until morning, eyes wide open in the dark. I couldn’t even think. As I lay there, listening to the clock tick off the seconds, I did nothing but stare at the darkness as it slowly deepened and slowly diminished.

And then one day it ended, without warning, without any external cause. I started to lose consciousness at the breakfast table. I stood up without saying anything. I may have knocked something off the table. I think someone spoke to me. But I can’t be sure. I staggered to my room, crawled into bed in my clothes, and fell fast asleep. I stayed that way for twenty-seven hours. My mother became alarmed and tried to shake me out of it. She actually slapped my cheek .. But I went on sleeping for twenty-seven hours without a break. And when I finally did awaken, I was my old self again. Probably.

I have no idea why I became an insomniac then nor why the condition suddenly cured itself. It was like a thick, black cloud brought from somewhere by the wind, a cloud crammed full of ominous things I have no knowledge of. No one knows where such a thing comes from or where it goes. I can only be sure that it did descend on me for a time, and then departed.

In any case, what I have now is nothing like that insomnia, nothing at all. I just can’t sleep. Not for one second. Aside from that simple fact, I’m perfectly normal. I don’t feel sleepy, and my mind is as clear as ever. Clearer, if anything. Physically, too, I’m normal: my appetite is fine; I’m not fatigued. In terms of everyday reality, there’s nothing g with me. I just can’t sleep.

Neither my husband nor my son has noticed that I’m not sleeping. And I haven’t mentioned it to them. I don’t want to be told to see a doctor. I know it wouldn’t do any good. I just know. Like before. This is myself.

So they don’t suspect a thing. On the surface, our life flows on unchanged. Peaceful. Routine. After I see my husband and son off in the morning. I take my ca, and go marketing. My husband is a dentist. His office is a ten-minute drive from our condo. He and a dental-school friend own it as partners. That way they can afford to hire a technician and a receptionist. One partner can take the other’s overflow. Both of them are good, so for an office that has been in operation for only five year., and that opened without any special connections, the place is doing very well. Almost too well. “I didn’t want to work so hard,” says my husband. “But I can’t complain.”

And I always say, “Really, you can’t.” It’s true. We had to get an enormous bank loan to open the place. A dental office requires a huge investment in equipment. And the competition is fierce. Patients don’t start pouring in the minute you open your doors. Lots of dental clinics have failed for lack of patients.

Back then, we were young and poor and we had a brand-new baby. No one could guarantee that we would survive in such a tough world. But we have survived, one way or another. Five years. No. we really can’t complain. We’ve still got almost two-thirds of our debt left to pay, though.

“I know why you’ve got so many patients,” I always say to him. “It’s because you’re such a good-looking guy.

This is our little joke. He’s not good-looking at all. Actually, he’s kind of strange-looking. Even now I sometimes wonder why I married such a strange-looking man. I had other boyfriends who were far mote handsome.

What makes his face so strange? I can’t really say. It’s not a handsome face, but it’s not ugly, either. Nor is it the kind that people would say has “character.” Honestly, “strange’” about all that fits. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it has no distinguishing features. Still, there must be some element that makes his face have no distinguishing features, and if I could grasp whatever that is, I might be able to understand the strangeness of the whole. I once tried to draw his picture, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I sat there holding the pencil over the paper and couldn’t make a mark. I was flabbergasted. How can you live with a man so long and not be able to bring his face to mind? I knew how to recognize him, of course. I would even get mental images of him now and then. But when it came to drawing his picture, I realized that I didn’t remember anything about his face. What could I do? It was like running into an invisible wall. The one thing I could remember was that his face looked strange.

The memory of that often makes me nervous.

Still, he’s one of those men everybody likes. That’s a big plus in his business, obviously, but I think he would have been a success at just about anything. People feel secure talking to him. I had never met anyone like that before. All my women friends like him. And I’m fond of him, of course. I think I even love him. But, strictly speaking, I don’t actually like him.

Anyhow, he smiles in this natural, innocent way, just like a child. Not many grownup men can do that. And I guess you’d expect a dentist to have nice teeth, which he does.

“It’s not my fault I’m so good-looking,” he always answers when we enjoy our little joke. We’re the only ones who understand what it means. It’s a recognition of reality—the fact that we have managed in one my or another to survive—and it’s an important ritual for us.

He drives his Sentra out of the condo parking garage every morning at eight-fifteen. Our son is in the seat next to him. The elementary school is on the way to the office. “Be careful,” I say. “Don’t worry” he answers. Always the same little dialogue. I can’t help myself. I have to say it. “Be careful.” And my husband has to answer, “Don’t worry.” He starts the engine, puts a Haydn or Mozart tape into the car stereo, and hums along with the music. My two “men” always wave to me on the way out. Their hands move in exactly the same way. It’s almost uncanny. They lean their heads at exactly the same angle and turn their palms toward me, moving them slightly from side to aside in exactly the same way, as if they’d been trained by a choreographer.

I have my own car, a used Honda Civic. A girlfriend sold it to me two years ago for next to nothing. One bumper is smashed in, and the body style is old-fashioned, with rust spots showing up. The odometer has over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it. Sometimes—once or twice a month—the car is almost impossible to start. The engine simply won’t catch. Still, it’s not bad enough to have the thing fixed. If you baby it and let it rest for ten minutes or so, the engine will start up with a nice, solid vroom. Oh, well, everything-everybody-gets out of whack once or twice a month. That’s life. My husband calls my car “your donkey.” I don’t care. It’s mine.

I drive my Civic to the supermarket. After marketing I clean the house and do the laundry. Then I fix lunch. I make a point of performing my morning chores with brisk, efficient movements. If possible, I like to finish my dinner preparations in the morning, too. Then the afternoon is all mine.

My husband comes home for lunch. He doesn’t like to eat out. He says the restaurants are too crowded, the food is no good, and the smell of tobacco smoke gets into his clothes. He prefers eating at home, even with the extra travel time involved. Still, I don’t make anything fancy for lunch. I warm up leftovers in the microwave or boil a pot of noodles. So the actual time involved is minimal. And, of course, it’s more fun to eat with my husband than all alone with no one to talk to.

Before, when the clinic was just getting started, there would often be no patient in the first afternoon slot, so the two of us would go to bed after lunch. Those were the loveliest times with him. Everything was hushed, and the soft afternoon sunshine would filter into the room. We were a lot younger then, and happier.

We ‘re still happy, of course. I really do think so. No domestic troubles cast shadows on our home. I love him and trust him. And I’m sure he feels the same about me. But little by little, as the months and years go by, your life changes. That’s just how it is. There s nothing you can do about it. Now all the afternoon slots are taken. When we finish eating, my husband brushes his teeth, hurries out to his car, and goes back to the office. He’s got all those sick teeth waiting for him. But that’s all right. We both know you can t have everything your own way.

After my husband goes back to the office, I take a bathing suit and towel and drive to the neighborhood athletic club. I swim for half an hour. I swim hard. I’m not that crazy about the swimming itself: I just want to keep the flab off. I’ve always liked my own figure. Actually, I’ve never liked my face. It’s not bad, but I’ve never felt I liked it. My body is another matter. I like to stand naked in front of the mirror. I like to study the soft outlines

I see there, the balanced vitality. I’m not sure what it is, but I get the feeling that something inside there is very important to me. Whatever it is, I don’t want to lose it.

I’m thirty. When you reach thirty, you realize it’s not the end of the world. I’m not especially happy about getting older, but it does make some things easier. It’s a question of attitude. One thing I know for sure, though: if a thirty-year-old woman loves her body and is serious about keeping it looking the way it should, she has to put in a certain amount of effort. I learned that from my mother. She used to be a slim, lovely woman, but not anymore. I don’t want the same thing to happen to me.

After I’ve had my swim, I use the rest of my afternoon in various ways. Sometimes I’ll wander over to the station plaza and window-shop. Sometimes I’ll go home, curl up on the sofa and read a book or listen to an FM station or just rest. Eventually my son comes home from school. I help him change into his playclothes, and give him a snack. When he’s through eating, he goes out to play with his friends. He’s too young to go to an afternoon cram school, and we aren’t making him take piano lessons or anything.

“Let him play,” says my husband. “Let him grow up naturally.” When my son leaves the house, I have the same little dialogue with him as I do with my husband. “Be careful,” I say, and he answers, “Don’t worry.”

As evening approaches, I begin preparing dinner. My son is always back by six. He watches cartoons on TV. If no emergency patients show up, my husband is home before seven. He doesn’t drink a drop and he’s not fond of pointless socializing. He almost always comes straight home from work.

The three of us talk during dinner, mostly about what we’ve done that day. My son always has the most to say. Everything that happens in his life is fresh and full of mystery. He talks, and we offer our comments. After dinner, he does what he likes—watches television or reads or plays some kind of game with my husband. When he has homework, he shuts himself up in his room and does it. He goes to bed at eight-thirty. I tuck him in and stroke his hair and say good night to him and turn off the light.

Then it’s husband and wife together. He sits on the sofa, reading the newspaper and talking to me now and then about his patients or something in the paper. Then he listens to Haydn or Mozart. I don’t mind listening to music, but I can never seem to tell the difference between those two composers. They sound the same to me. When I say that to my husband, he tells me it doesn’t matter. “It’s all beautiful. That’s what counts.”

“Just like you,” I say.

“Just like me,” he answers with a big smile. He seems genuinely pleased.

So that’s my life—or my life before I stopped sleeping—each day pretty much a repetition of the one before. I used to keep a simple diary, but if I forgot for two or three days, I’d lose track of what happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I’d sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was—very simply—amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. As the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I ever had a chance to turn and look at them.

Whenever I felt like that, I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror—just look at it for fifteen minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I’d stare at my face purely as a physical object, and gradually it would disconnect from the rest of me, becoming just some thing that happened to exist at the same time as myself. And a realization would come to me: This is happening here and now. It’s got nothing to do with footprints. Reality and I exist simultaneously at this present moment. That’s the most important thing.

But now I can’t sleep anymore. When I stopped sleeping, I stopped keeping a diary.

I remember with perfect clarity that first night I lost the ability to sleep. I was having a repulsive dream—a dark, slimy dream. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember how it felt ominous and terrifying. I woke at the climatic moment—came fully awake with a start, as if something had dragged me back at the last moment from a fatal turning point. Had I remained immersed in the dream for another second, I would have been lost forever. My breath came in painful gasps for a time after I awoke. My arms and legs felt paralyzed. I lay there immobilized, listening to my own labored breathing, as if I were stretched out full length on the Boor of a huge cavern.

“It was a dream,” I told myself, and I waited for my breathing to calm down. Lying stiff on my back, I felt my heart working violently, my lungs hurrying the blood to it with big, slow, bellowslike contractions. I began to wonder what time it could be. I wanted to look at the clock by my pillow, but I couldn’t turn my head far enough. Just then I seemed to catch a glimpse of something at the foot of the bed, something like a vague, black shadow. I caught my breath. My heart, my lungs, everything inside me seemed to freeze in that instant. I strained to see the black shadow.

The moment I tried to focus on it, the shadow began to assume a definite shape, as if it had been waiting for me to notice it. Its outline became distinct, and began to be filled with substance, and then with details. It was a gaunt old man wearing a skintight black shirt. His hair was gray and short, his cheeks sunken. He stood at my feet, perfectly still. He said nothing, but his piercing eyes stared at me. They were huge eyes, and I could see the red network of veins in them. The old man’s face wore no expression at all. It told me nothing. It was like an opening in the darkness.

This was no longer the dream, I knew. From that, I had already awakened. And not just by drifting awake but by having my eyes ripped open. No, this was no dream. This was reality. And in reality an old man I had never seen before was standing at the foot of my bed. I had to do something—turn on the light, wake my husband, scream. I tried to move. I fought to make my limbs work, but it did no good. I couldn’t move a finger. When it became clear to me that I would never be able to move, I was filled with a hopeless terror, a primal fear such as I had never experienced before, like a chill that rises silently from the bottomless well of memory. I tried to scream, but I was incapable of producing a sound, or even moving my tongue. All I could do was look at the old man.

Now I saw that he was holding something—a tall, narrow, rounded thing that shone white. As I stared at this object, wondering what it could be, it began to take on a definite shape, just as the shadow had earlier. It was a pitcher, an old-fashioned porcelain pitcher. Alter some time, the man raised the pitcher and began pouring water from it onto my feet. I could not feel the water. I could see it and hear it splashing down on my feet, but I couldn’t Feel a thing.

The old man went on and on pouring water over my feet. Strange—no matter how much he poured, the pitcher never ran dry. I began to worry that my feet would eventually rot and melt away. Yes, of course they would rot. What else could they do with so much water pouring over them? When it occurred to me that my feet were going to rot and melt away, I couldn’t take it any longer.

I closed my eyes and let out a scream so loud it took every ounce of strength I had. But it never left my body. It reverberated soundlessly inside, tearing through me, shutting down my heart. Everything inside my head turned white for a moment as the scream penetrated my every cell. Something inside me died. Something melted away, leaving only a shuddering vacuum. An explosive flash incinerated everything my existence depended on.

When I opened my eyes, the old man was gone. The pitcher was gone. The bedspread was dry, and there was no indication that anything near my feet had been wet. My body, though, was soaked with sweat, a horrifying volume of sweat, more sweat than I ever imagined a human being could produce. And yet, undeniably, it was sweat that had come f mm me.

I moved one finger. Then another, and another, and the rest Next, I bent my arms and then my legs. I rotated my feet and bent my knees. Nothing moved quite as it should have, but at least it did move. After carefully checking to see that all my body parts were working. I eased myself into a sitting position. In the dim light filtering in from the sweet lamp, I scanned the entire room from corner to corner. The old man was definitely not there.

The clock by my pillow said twelve-thirty. I had been sleeping for only an hour and a half. My husband was sound asleep in his bed. Even his breathing was inaudible. He always sleeps like that, as if all mental activity in him had been obliterated. Almost nothing can wake him.

I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I threw my sweat-soaked nightgown into the washing machine and took a shower. After putting on a fresh pair of pajamas, I went to the living room, switched on the floor lamp beside the sofa, and sat there drinking a full glass of brandy. I almost never drink. Not that I have a physical incompatibility with alcohol, as my husband does. In fact, I used to drink quite a lot, but after marrying him I simply stopped. Sometimes when I had trouble sleeping I would take a sip of brandy but that night I felt I wanted a whole glass to quiet my overwrought nerves.

The only alcohol in the house was a bottle of Remy Martin we kept in the sideboard. It had been a gift. I don’t even remember who gave it to us, it was so long ago. The bottle wore a thin layer of dust. We had no real brandy glasses, so I just poured it into a regular tumbler and sipped it slowly.

I must have been in a trance, I thought. I had never experienced such a thing, but I had heard about trances from a college friend who had been through one. Everything was incredibly clear, she had said. You can’t believe it’s a dream. “I didn’t believe it was a dream when it was happening, and now I still don’t believe it was a dream.” Which is exactly how I felt. Of course it had to be a dream-a kind of dream that doesn’t feel like a dream.

Though the terror was leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop. It was in my skin, like the circular ripples on water after an earthquake. I could see the slight quivering. The scream had done it. Tint scream that had never found a voice was still locked up in my body, making it tremble.

I closed my eyes and swallowed another mouthful of brandy. The warmth spread from my throat to my stomach. The sensation felt tremendously real.

With a start, I thought of my son. Again my heart began pounding. I hurried from the sofa to his room. He was sound asleep, one hand across his mouth, the other thrust out to the side, looking just as secure and peaceful in sleep as my husband. I straightened his blanket. Whatever it was that had so violently shattered my sleep, it had attacked only me. Neither of them had felt a thing.

I returned to the living room and wandered about there. I was not the least bit sleepy.

I considered drinking another glass of brandy. In fact, I wanted to drink even more alcohol than that. I wanted to warm my body more, to calm my nerves down more, and to feel that strong, penetrating bouquet in my mouth again. After some hesitation, I decided against it. I didn’t want to start the new day drunk. I put the brandy back in the sideboard, brought the glass to the kitchen sink, and washed it. I found some strawberries in the refrigerator and ate them.

I realized that the trembling in my skin was almost gone.

What was that old man in black? I asked myself. I had never seen him before in my life. That black clothing of his was so strange, like a tight-fitting sweatsuit, and yet, at the same time, old-fashioned. I had never seen anything like it. And those eyes—bloodshot, and never blinking. Who was he? Why did he pour water on my feet? Why did he have to do such a thing?

I had only questions, no answers.

The time my friend went into a trance, she was spending the night at her fiancé’s house. As she lay in bed asleep, an angry-looking man in his early fifties approached and ordered her out of the house. While that was happening, she couldn’t move a muscle. And, like me, she became soaked with sweat. She was certain it must be the ghost of her fiancé’s father, who was telling her to get Out of his house. But when she asked to see a photograph of the father the next day, it wined out to be an entirely different man. “I must have been feeling tense,” she concluded. “That’s what caused it.”

But I’m not tense. And this is my own house. There shouldn’t be anything here to threaten me. Why did I have to go into a trance?

I shook my head. Stop thinking, I told myself. It won’t do any good. I had a realistic dream, nothing more. I’ve probably been building up some kind of fatigue. The tennis I played the day before yesterday must have done it. I met a friend at the club after my swim and she invited me to play tennis and I overdid it a little, that’s all. Sure—my arms and legs felt tired and heavy for a while afterward.

When I finished my strawberries, I stretched out on the sofa and tried closing my eyes.

I wasn’t sleepy at all. “Oh, great,” I thought. “1 really don’t feel like sleeping.”

I thought I’d read a hook until I got tired again. I went to the bedroom and picked a novel from the bookcase. My husband didn’t even twitch when I turned on the light to hunt for it. I chose “Anna Karenina.” I was in the mood for a long Russian novel, and I had only read “Anna Karenina” once, long ago, probably in high school. I remembered just a few things about it the first line, “All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and the heroine’s throwing herself under a train at the end. And that early on there was a hint of the final suicide. Wasn’t there a scene at a racetrack? Or was that in another novel?

Whatever. I went back to the sofa and opened the book. How many years had it been since I sat down and relaxed like this with a book? True, I often spent half an hour or an hour of my private time in the afternoon with a book open. But you couldn’t really call that reading. I’d always find myself thinking about other things—my son, or shopping, or the freezer’s needing to be fixed, or my having to find something to wear to a relative’s wedding, or the stomach operation my father had last month. That kind of stuff would drift into my mind, and then it would grow, and take off in a million different directions. After a while I’d notice that the only thing that had gone by was the time, and I had hardly turned any pages.

Without noticing it, I had become accustomed in this way to a life without books. How strange, now that I think of it. Reading had been the center of my life when I was young. I had read every book in the grade-school library, and almost my entire allowance would go for books. I’d even scrimp on lunches to buy books I wanted to read. And this went on into junior high and high school. Nobody read as much as I did. I was the middle one of five children, and both my parents worked, so nobody paid much attention to me. I could read alone as much as I liked. I’d always enter the essay contests on books so I could win a gift certificate for more books. And I usually won. In college I majored in English literature and got good grades. My graduation thesis on Katherine Mansfield won top honors, and my thesis adviser urged me to apply to graduate school. I wanted to go out into the world, though, and I knew that I was no scholar. I just enjoyed reading books. And, even if I had wanted to go on studying, my family didn’t have the financial wherewithal to send me to graduate school. We weren’t poor by any means, but there were two sisters coming along after me, so once I graduated from college I simply had to begin supporting myself.

When had I really read a book last? And what had it been? I couldn’t recall anything. Why did a person’s life have to change so completely? Where had the old me gone, the one who used to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days—and that almost abnormally intense passion—meant to me?

That night, I found myself capable of reading “Anna Karenina” with unbroken concentration. I went on turning pages without another thought in mind. In one sitting, I read as far as the scene where Anna and Vronsky first see each other in the Moscow train station. At that point, I stuck my bookmark in and poured myself another glass of brandy.

Though it hadn’t occurred to me before, I couldn’t help thinking what an odd novel this was. You don’t see the heroine, Anna, until Chapter 18. I wondered if it didn’t seem unusual to readers in Tolstoy’s day. What did they do when the book went on and on with a detailed description of the life of a minor character named Oblonsky—just sit there, waiting for the beautiful heroine to appear? Maybe that was it. Maybe people in those days had lots of time to kill—at least the part of society that read novels.

Then I noticed how late it was. Three in the morning! And still I wasn’t sleepy.

What should I do? I don’t feel sleepy at all, I thought. I could just keep on reading. I’d love to find out what happens in the story. But I have to sleep.

I remembered my ordeal with insomnia and how I had gone through each day back then, wrapped in a cloud. No, never again. I was still a student in those days. It was still possible for me to get away with something like that. But not now, I thought. Now I’m a wife. A mother. I have responsibilities. I have to make my husband’s lunches and take care of my son.

But even if I get into bed now, I know I won’t be able to sleep a wink.

I shook my head.

Let’s face it, I’m just not sleepy, I told myself. And I want to read the rest of the book.

I sighed and stole a glance at the big volume lying on the table. And that was that. I plunged into “Anna Karenina” and kept reading until the sun came up. Anna and Vronsky stared at each other at the ball and fell into their doomed love. Anna went to pieces when Vronsky’s horse fell at the racetrack (so there was a racetrack scene, after all!) and confessed her infidelity to her husband. I was there with Vronsky when he spurred his horse over the obstacles. I heard the crowd cheering him on. And I was there in the stands watching his horse go down. When the window brightened with the morning light, I laid the book down and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. My mind was filled with scenes from the novel and with a tremendous hunger, obliterating any other thought. I cut two slices of bread, spread them with butter and mustard, and had a cheese sandwich. My hunger pangs were almost unbearable. It was rare for me to feel that hungry. I had trouble breathing, I was so hungry. One sandwich did hardly anything for me, so I made another one and had another cup of coffee with it.

To my husband I said nothing about either my trance or my night without sleep. Not that I was hiding them from him. It just seemed to me that there was no point in telling him. What good would it have done? And besides, I had simply missed a night’s sleep. That much happens to everyone now and then.

I made my husband his usual cup of coffee and gave my son a glass of warm milk. My husband ate toast and my son a bowl of cornflakes. My husband skimmed the morning paper and my son hummed a new song he had learned in school. The two of them got into the Sentra and left. “Be careful,” I said to my husband. “Don’t worry,” he answered. The two of them waved. A typical morning.

After they were gone, I sat on the sofa and thought about how to spend the rest of the day. What should I do? What did I have to do? I went to the kitchen to inspect the contents of the refrigerator. I could get by without shopping. We had bread, milk, and eggs, and there was meat in the freezer. Plenty of vegetables, too. Everything I’d need through tomorrow’s lunch.

I had business at the bank, but it was nothing I absolutely had to take care of immediately. Letting it go a day longer wouldn’t hurt.

I went back to the sofa and started reading the rest of “Anna Karenina.” Until that reading, I hadn’t realized how little I remembered of what goes on in the book. I recognized virtually nothing—the characters, the scenes, nothing. I might as well have been reading a whole new hook How strange. I must have been deeply moved at the time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my noticing, the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away and vanished.

What, then, of the enormous fund of time I had consumed back then reading books? What had all that meant?

I stopped reading and thought about that for a while. None of it made sense to me, though, and soon I even lost track of what I was thinking about. I caught myself staring at the tree that stood outside the window. I shook my head and went back to the book.

Just after the middle of Volume III, I found a few crumbling flakes of chocolate stuck between the pages. I must have been eating chocolate as I read the novel when I was in high school. I used to like to eat and read. Come to think of it, I hadn’t touched chocolate since my marriage. My husband doesn’t like me to eat sweets, and we almost never give them to our son. We don’t usually keep that kind of thing around the house.

As I looked at the whitened flakes of chocolate from over a decade ago, I felt a tremendous urge to have the real thing. I wanted to eat chocolate while reading “Anna Karenina,” the way I did back then. I couldn’t hear to be denied it for another moment. Every cell in my body seemed to be panting with this hunger for chocolate.

I slipped a cardigan over my shoulder and took the elevator down. I walked straight to the neighborhood candy shop and bought two of the sweetest-looking milk-chocolate bars they had. A. soon as I left the shop, I tore one open, and started eating it while walking home. The luscious taste of milk chocolate spread through my mouth. I could feel the sweetness being absorbed directly into every part of my body. I continued eating in the elevator, steeping myself in the wonderful aroma that filled the tiny space.

Heading straight for the sofa, I started reading “Anna Karenina” and eating my chocolate. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. I felt no physical fatigue, either. I could have gone on reading forever. When I finished the first chocolate bar, I opened the second and ate half of that. About two-thirds of the way through Volume III, I looked at my watch. Eleven-forty.

Eleven-forty!

My husband would be home soon. I closed the book and hurried to the kitchen. I put water in a pot and turned on the gas. Then I minced some scallions and took out a handful of buckwheat noodles for boiling. While the water was heating, I soaked some dried seaweed, cut it up, and topped it with a vinegar dressing. I took a block of tofu from the refrigerator and cut it into cubes. Finally, I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth to get rid of the chocolate smell.

At almost the exact moment the water came to a boil, my husband walked in. He had finished work a little earlier than usual, he said.

Together, we ate the buckwheat noodles. My husband talked about a new piece of dental equipment he was considering bringing into the office, a machine that would remove plaque from patients’ teeth far more thoroughly than anything he had used before, and in less time. Like all such equipment, it was quite expensive, but it would pay for itself soon enough, since these days more and more patients were coming in just for a cleaning.

“What do you think?’ he asked me.

I didn’t want to think about plaque on people’s teeth, and I especially didn’t want to hear or think about it while I was eating. My mind was filled with hazy images of Vronsky falling off his horse. But of course I couldn’t tell my husband that. He was deadly serious about the equipment. I asked him the price and pretended to think about it. “Why not buy it if you need it?” I said. “The money will work out one way or another. You wouldn’t be spending it for fun, after all.”

“That’s true,” he said. “I wouldn’t be spending it for fun.” Then he continued eating his noodles in silence.

Perched on a branch of the tree outside the window, a pair of large birds were chirping. I watched them half consciously. I wasn’t sleepy. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Why not?

While I cleared the table, my husband sat on the sofa reading the paper. “Anna Karenina” lay there beside him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He had no interest in whether I read books.

After I finished washing the dishes, my husband said, “I’ve got a nice surprise today. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My first afternoon patient has cancelled. I don’t have to be back in the office until one-thirty.” He smiled.

I couldn’t figure out why this was supposed to be such a nice surprise. I wonder why I couldn’t.

It was only after my husband stood up and drew me toward the bedroom that I realized what he had in mind. I wasn’t in the mood for it at all. I didn’t understand why I should have sex then. All I wanted was to get back to my book. I wanted to stretch out alone on the sofa and munch on chocolate while I turned the pages of “Anna Karenina.” All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his characters so skillfully. He described them with such wonderful precision. But that very precision somehow denied them a kind of salvation. And this finally—

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips to my temple.

“I’m sorry, I’ve had a kind of headache all day. What awful timing.”

I had often had some truly terrible headaches, so he accepted my explanation without a murmur.

“You’d better lie down and get some rest,” he said. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“It’s really not that bad,” I said.

He relaxed on the sofa until one o’clock, listening to music and reading the paper. And he talked about dental equipment again. You bought the latest high-tech staff and it was obsolete in two or three years ... So then you had to keep replacing everything ... The only ones who made any money were the equipment manufacturers—that kind of talk. I offered a few clucks, but I was hardly listening.

After my husband went back to the office, I folded the paper and pounded the sofa cushions until they were puffed up again. Then I leaned on the windowsill, surveying the room. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why wasn’t I sleepy? In the old days I had done all-nighters any number of times, but I had never stayed awake this long. Ordinarily, I would have been sound asleep after so many hours, or, if not asleep, impossibly tired. But I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. My mind was perfectly clear.

I went into the kitchen and warmed up some coffee. I thought, Now what should I do? Of course I wanted to read the rest of “Anna Karenina,” but I also wanted to go to the pool for my swim. After a good deal of agonizing, I decided to go swimming. I don’t know how to explain this, but I wanted to purge my body of something by exercising it to the limit. Purge it—of what? I spent some time wondering about that. Purge it of what?

I didn’t know.

But this thing, whatever it was, this mistlike something, hung there inside my body like a certain kind of potential. I wanted to give it a name, but the word refused to come to mind. I’m terrible at finding the right word, for things. I’m sure Tolstoy would have been able to come up with exactly the right word.

Anyhow, I put my swimsuit in my bag and, as always, drove my Civic to the athletic club. There were only two other people in the pool—a young man and a middle-aged woman—and I didn’t know either of them. A bored-looking lifeguard was on duty.

I changed into my bathing suit, put on my goggles, and swam my usual thirty minutes. But thirty minutes wasn’t enough. I swam another fifteen minutes, ending with a crawl for two full lengths at maximum speed. I was out of breath, but I still felt nothing but energy welling up inside my body. The others were staring at me when I left the pool.

It was still a little before three o’clock, so I drove to the bank and finished my business there. I considered doing some shopping at the supermarket, but I decided instead to head straight for home. There, I picked up “Anna Karenina” where I had left off, eating what was left of the chocolate. When my son came home at four o’clock, I gave him a glass of juice, and some fruit gelatin that I had made. Then I started on dinner. I defrosted some meat from the freezer and cut up some vegetables in preparation for stir-frying. I made miso soup and cooked the rice. All of these tasks I took care of with tremendous mechanical efficiency.

I went back to “Anna Karenina.

I was not tired.

At ten o’clock I got into my bed, pretending that I would be sleeping there near my husband. He fell asleep right away, practically the moment the light went out, as if there were some cord connecting the lamp with his brain.

Amazing. People like that are rare. There are far more people who have trouble falling asleep. My father was one of those. He’d always complain about how shallow his sleep was. Not only did he find it hard to get to sleep, but the slightest sound or movement would wake him up for the rest of the night.

Not my husband, though. Once he was asleep nothing could wake him until morning. We were still newly-weds when it struck me how odd this was. I even experimented to see what it would take to wake him. I sprinkled water on his face and tickled his nose with a brush and that kind of thing. I never once got him to wake up. If I kept at it, I could get him to groan once, but that was all. And he never dreamed. At least he never remembered what his dreams were about. Needless to say, he never Went into nay paralytic trances. He slept. He slept like a turtle buried in mud.

Amazing. But it helped with what quickly became my nightly routine.

After ten minutes of lying near him, I would get out of bed. I would go to the living room, turn on the floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy. Then I would sit on the sofa and read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and letting the smooth liquid glide over my tongue. Whenever I felt like it, would eat a cookie or a piece of chocolate that I had hidden in the sideboard. After a while, morning would come. When that happened, I would close my book and make myself a cup of coffee. Then I would make a sandwich and eat it.

My days became just a. regulated.

I would hurry through my housework and spend the rest of the morning reading. Just before noon, I would put my book down and fix my husband’s lunch. When he left, before one. I’d drive to the club and have my swim. I would swim for a full hour. Once I stopped sleeping, thirty minutes was never enough. While I was in the water I concentrated my entire mind on swimming. I thought about nothing but how to move my body most effectively, and I inhaled and exhaled with perfect regularity. If I met someone I knew, I hardly said a word—just the basic civilities. I refused all invitations. “Sorry,” I’d say. “I’m going straight home today. There’s something I have to do.” I didn’t want to get involved with anybody. I didn’t want to have to waste time on endless gossiping. When I was through swimming as hard as I could, all I wanted was to hurry home and read.

I went through the motions—shopping, cooking, playing with my son, having sex with my husband. It was easy once I got the hang of it. All I had to do was break the connection between my mind and my body. While my body went about its business, my mind floated in its own inner space. I ran the house without a thought in my head, feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband.

After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.

Of course there were variations now and then. My mother-in-law had dinner with us. On Sunday, the three of us went to the zoo. My son had a terrible case of diarrhea.

But none of these events had any effect on my being. They swept past me like a silent breeze. I chatted with my mother-in-law, made dinner for four, took a picture in front of the bear cage, put a hot-water bottle on my son’s stomach, and gave him his medicine.

No one noticed that I had changed—that I had given up sleeping entirely, that I was spending all my time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years—and hundreds of miles—from reality. No matter how mechanically I worked, no matter how little love or emotion I invested in my handling of reality, my husband and my son and my mother-in-law went on relating to me as they always had. If anything, they seemed more at ease with me than before.

And so a week went by.

Once my constant wakefulness entered its second week, though, it started to worry me. It was simply not normal. People are supposed to sleep. All people sleep. Once, some years ago, I had read about a form of torture in which the victim is prevented from sleeping. Something the Nazis did, I think. They’d lock the person in a tiny room, fasten his eyelids open, and keep shining lights in his face and making loud noises without a break. Eventually, the person would go mad and die.

I couldn’t recall how long the article said it took for the madness to set in, but it couldn’t have been much more than three days or four. In my case, a whole week had gone by. This was simply too much. Still, my health was not suffering. Far from it. I had more energy than ever.

One day, after showering, I stood naked in front of the mirror. I was amazed to discover that my body appeared to be almost bursting with vitality. I studied every inch of myself, head to toe, but I could find not the slightest hint of excess flesh, not one wrinkle. I no longer had the body of a young girl, of course, but my skin had far more glow, far more tautness than it had before. I took a pinch of flesh near my waist, and found it almost hard, with a wonderful elasticity.

It dawned on me that I was prettier than I had realized. I looked so much younger than before that it was almost shocking. I could probably pass for twenty-four. My skin was smooth. My eyes were bright, lips moist. The shadowed area beneath my protruding cheekbones (the one feature I really hated about myself) was no longer noticeable—at all. I sat down and looked at my face in the mirror for a good thirty minutes. I studied it from all angles, objectively. No, I had not been mistaken: I was really pretty.

What was happening to me?

I thought about seeing a doctor.

I had a doctor who had been taking care of me since I was a child and to whom I felt close, but the more I thought about how he might react to my story the less inclined I felt to tell it to him. Would he take me at my word? He’d probably think I was crazy if I said I hadn’t slept in a week. Or he might dismiss it as a kind of neurotic insomnia. But if he did believe I was telling the truth he might send me to some big research hospital for testing.

And then what would happen?

I’d be locked up and sent from one lab to another to be experimented on. They’d do EEGs and EKGs and urinalyses and blood tests and psychological screening and who knows what else.

I couldn’t take that. I just wanted to stay by myself and quietly read my book I wanted to have my hour of swimming every day. I wanted my freedom: that’s what I wanted more than anything. I didn’t want to go to any hospitals. And, even if they did get me into a hospital, what would they find? They’d do a mountain of tests and formulate a mountain of hypotheses, and that would be the end of it. I didn’t want to be locked up in a place like that.

One afternoon I went to the library and read some hooks on sleep. The few books I could find didn’t tell me much. In fact, they all had only one thing to say: that sleep is rest. Like turning off a car engine. If you keep a motor running constantly, sooner or later it will break down. A running engine must produce heat, and the accumulated heat fatigues the machinery itself. Which is why you have to let the engine rest. Cool down. Turning off the engine-that, finally, is what sleep is. In a human being, sleep provides rest for both the flesh and the spirit When a person lies down and rests her muscles, she simultaneously closes her eyes and cuts off the thought processes. And excess thoughts release an electrical discharge in the form of dreams.

One book did have a fascinating point to make. The author maintained that human beings, by their very nature, are incapable of escaping from certain fixed idiosyncratic drives both in their thought processes and in their physical movements. People unconsciously fashion their own action—and thought-drives, which under normal circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in the prison cells of their own drives. What modulates these drives and keeps them in check—so the organism doesn’t wear down as the heel of a shoe does, at a particular angle, as the author puts it—is nothing other than sleep. Sleep therapeutically counteracts the tendency. In sleep, people naturally relax muscles that have been consistently used in only one direction; sleep both calms and provides a discharge for thought circuits that have likewise been used in only one direction. This is how people are cooled down. Sleeping is an act that has been programmed, with Karmic inevitability, into the human system, and no one can diverge from it. If a person were to diverge from it, the person’s very “ground of being” would be threatened.

“Drives?” I asked myself.

The only “drive” of mine that I could think of was housework—those chores I perform day after day like an unfeeling machine. Cooking and shopping and laundry and mothering: what were they if not “drives”? I could do them with my eyes closed. Push the buttons. Pull the levers. Pretty soon, reality just flows off and away. The same physical movements over and over. Drives. They were consuming me, wearing—me down on one side like the heel of a shoe. I needed sleep every day to adjust them and cool me down.

Was that it?

I read the passage once more, with intense concentration. And I nodded. Yes, almost certainly, that was it.

So, then, what was this life of mine? I was being consumed by my drives and then sleeping to repair the damage. My life was nothing but a repetition of this cycle. It was going nowhere.

Sitting at the library table, I shook my head.

I’m through with sleep! So what if I go mad? So what if I lose my “ground of being”? I will not be consumed by my “drives.” If sleep is nothing more than a periodic repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don’t want it anymore. I don’t need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I’m keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don’t want to be “repaired.” I will not sleep.

I left the library filled with a new determination.

Now my inability to sleep ceased to frighten me. What was there to be afraid of? Think of the advantages! Now the hours from ten at night to six in the morning belonged to me alone. Until now, a third of every day had been used up by sleep. But no more. No more. Now it was mine, just mine, nobody else’s, all mine. I could use this time in any way I liked. No one would get in my way. No one would make demands on me. Yes, that was it. I had expanded my life. I had increased it by a third.

You are probably going to tell me that this is biologically abnormal. And you may be right. And maybe someday in the future I’ll have to pay back the debt I’m building up by continuing to do this biologically abnormal thing. Maybe life will try to collect on the expanded part—this “advance” it is paying me now. This is a groundless hypothesis, but there is no ground for negating it, and it feels right to me somehow. Which means that in the end the balance sheet of borrowed time will even out.

Honestly, though, I didn’t give a damn, even if I had to die young. The best thing to do with a hypothesis is to Let it run any course it pleases. Now, at least, I was expanding my life, and it was wonderful. My hands weren’t empty anymore. Here I was—alive, and I could feel it. It was real. I wasn’t being consumed any longer. Or at least there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed, and that was what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. A life without that feeling might go on forever, but it would have no meaning at all. I saw that with absolute clarity now.

After checking to see that my husband was asleep I would go sit on the living-room sofa, drink brandy by myself, and open my book. I read “Anna Karenina” three times. Each time, I made new discoveries. This enormous novel was full of revelations and riddles. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader. The old me had been able to understand only the tiniest fragment of it, but the gaze of this new me could penetrate to the core with perfect understanding. I knew exactly what the great Tolstoy wanted to say, what he wanted the reader to get from his book; I could see how his message had organically crystallized as a novel, and what in that novel had surpassed the author himself.

No matter how hard I concentrated, I never tired. After reading “Anna Karenina” as many times as I could, I read Dostoyevski. I could read book after book with utter concentration and never tire. I could understand the most difficult passages without effort. And I responded with deep emotion.

I felt that I had always been meant to be like this. By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

Eventually, my bottle of brandy ran out. I had drunk almost all of it by myself. I went to the gourmet department of a big store for another bottle of Remy Martin. As long as I was there, I figured, I might as well buy a bottle of red wine, too. And a fine crystal brandy glass. And chocolate and cookies.

Sometimes while reading I would become overexcited. When that happened, I would put my book down and exercise—do calisthenics or just walk around the room. Depending on my mood, I might go out for a nighttime drive. I’d change clothes, get into my Civic, and drive aimlessly around the neighborhood. Sometimes I’d drop into an all-night fast-food place for a cup of coffee, but it was such a bother to have to deal with other people that I’d usually stay in the car. I’d stop in some safe-looking spot and just let my mind wander. Or I’d go all the way to the harbor and watch the boats.

One time, though, I was questioned by a policeman. It was two-thirty in the morning, and I was parked under a street lamp near the pier, listening to the car stereo and watching the lights of the ships passing by. He knocked on my window. I lowered the glass. He was young and handsome, and very polite. I explained to him that I couldn’t sleep. He asked for my license and studied it for a while. “There was a murder here last month,” he said. “Three young men attacked a couple, killed the man, and raped the woman.” I remembered having read about the incident. I nodded. “If you don’t have any business here, Ma’am, you’d better not hang around here at night.” I thanked him and said I would leave. He gave my license back. I drove away.

That was the only time anyone talked to me. Usually I would drift through the streets at night for an hour or more and no one would bother me. Then I would park in our underground garage. Right next to my husband’s white Sentra; he was upstairs sleeping soundly in the darkness. I’d listen to the crackle of the hot engine cooling down, and when the sound died I’d go upstairs.

The first thing I would do when I got inside was check to make sure my husband was asleep. And he always was. Then I’d check my son, who was always sound asleep, too. They didn’t know a thing. They believed that the world was as it always had been, unchanging. But they were wrong. It was changing in ways they could never guess. Changing a lot. Changing fast. It would never be the same again.

One time I stood and stared at my sleeping husband’s face. I had heard a thump in the bedroom and rushed in. The alarm clock was on the floor. He had probably knocked it down in his sleep. But he was sleeping as soundly as ever, completely unaware of what he had done. What would it take to wake this man? I picked up the clock and put it back on the night table. Then I folded my arms and stared at my husband. How long had it been—years?—since the last time I had studied his face as he slept?

I had done it a lot when we were first married. That was all it took to relax me and put me in a peaceful mood. “I’ll be safe as long as he goes on sleeping peaceful1y like this,” I’d tell myself. Which is why I spent a lot of time watching him in his sleep.

But, somewhere along the way, I had given up the habit. When had that been? I tried to remember. It had probably happened back when my mother-in-law and I were sort of quarreling over what name to give my son. She was big on some religious-cult kind of thing, and had asked her priest to “bestow” a name on the baby. I don’t remember exactly the name she was given. but I had no intention of letting some priest ‘bestow” a name on my child. We had some pretty violent arguments at the time, but my husband couldn’t say a thing to either of us. He stood by and tried to calm us.

After that I lost the feeling that my husband was my protector. The one thing I thought I wanted from him he had failed to give me. All he had managed to do was make me furious. This all happened a long time ago, of course. My mother-in-law and I have long since made up. I gave my son the name I wanted to give bin,. My husband and I made up right away, too.

I’m pretty sure that was the end, though, of my watching hint m his sleep.

So there I stood, looking at him sleeping .. soundly as always. One bare foot stuck out from under the covers at a strange angle—so strange that the foot could have belonged to someone else. It was a big, chunky foot. My husband’s mouth hung open, the lower lip drooping. Every once in a while, his nostrils would twitch. There was a mole under his eye that bothered me. It was so big and vulgar-looking. There was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed, the lids slack, covers made of faded human flesh. He looked like an absolute fool. This was what they mean by “dead to the world.” How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly face! It’s just too gruesome, I thought. He couldn’t have been like this in the old days. I’m sure he must have had a better Face when we were first married, one that was taut and alert. Even sound asleep, he couldn’t have been such a blob.

I tried to r ember what his sleeping face had looked like back then, but I couldn’t do it, though I tried hard enough. All I could be sure of was that he couldn’t have had such a terrible face. Or was I just deceiving myself? Maybe he had always looked like this in his sleep and I had been indulging in some kind of emotional projection. I’m sure that’s what my mother would say. That sort of thinking was a specialty of hen. “All that lovey-dovey stuff lasts two years—three years tops,” she always used to insist. “You were a new bride,” I’m sure she would tell me now. “Of course your little hubby looked like a darling in his sleep.”

I’m sure she would say something like that, but I’m just as sure that she’d be wrong. He had grown ugly over the years. The firmness had gone out of his face. That’s what growing old is all about. He was old now, and tired. Worn out. He’d get even uglier in the years ahead, that much was certain. And I had no choice but to go along with it, put up with it, resign myself to it.

I let out a sigh as I stood there watching him. It was a deep sigh, a noisy one as sighs go, but of course he didn’t move a muscle. The loudest sigh in the world would never wake him up.

I left the bedroom and went back to the living room. I poured myself a brandy and started reading. But something wouldn’t let me concentrate. I put the book down and went to my son’s room. Opening the door. I stared at his face in the light spilling in from the hallway. He was sleeping just as soundly as my husband was. As he always did. I watched him in hi. sleep, looked at his smooth, nearly featureless face. It was very different from my husband’s: it was still a child’s face, after all. The skin still glowed; it still had nothing vulgar about it.

And yet something about my son’s face annoyed me. I had never felt anything like this about him before. What could be making me feel this way? I stood there, looking, with my arms folded. Yes, of course I loved my son, loved him tremendously. But still, undeniably, that something was bothering me, getting on my nerves.

I shook my head.

I closed my eyes and kept them shut. Then I opened them and looked at my son’s face again. And then it hit me. What bothered me about my son’s sleeping face was that it looked exactly like my husband’s. And exactly like my mother-in-law’s. Stubborn. Self-satisfied. It was in their blood—a kind of arrogance I hated in my husband’s family. True, my husband is good to me. He’s sweet and gentle and he’s careful to take my feelings into account He’s never fooled around with other women, and he works hard. He’s serious, and he’s kind to everybody. My friends all tell me how lucky I am to have him. And I can’t fault him, either. Which is exactly what galls me sometimes. His very absence of faults makes for a strange rigidity that excludes imagination. That’s what grates On me so.

And that was exactly the kind of expression my son had on his face as he slept.

I shook my head again. This little boy is a stranger to me, finally. Even after he grows up, he’ll never be able to understand me, just as my husband can hardly understand what I feel now.

I love my son, no question. But I sensed that someday I would no longer be able to love this boy with the same intensity. Not a very maternal thought. Most mothers never have thoughts like that. But as I stood there looking at him asleep, I knew with absolute certainty that one day I would come to despise him.

The thought made me terribly sad. I closed his door and turned out the hail light I went to the living-room sofa, sat down, and opened my book. After reading a few pages. I closed it again. I looked at the clock. A little before three.

I wondered how many days it had been since I stopped sleeping. The sleeplessness started the Tuesday before last. Which made this the seventeenth day. Not one wink of sleep in seventeen days. Seventeen days and seventeen nights. Along, long time. I couldn’t even recall what sleep was like.

I closed my eyes and tried to recall the sensation of sleeping, but all that existed for me inside was a wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness: what it called to mind was death.

Was I about to die?

And if I died now, what would my life have amounted to?

There was no way I could answer that.

All right, then, what death?

Until now I had conceived of sleep as a kind of model for death. I had imagined death as an extension of sleep. A far deeper sleep than ordinary sleep. A sleep devoid of all consciousness. Eternal rest. A total blackout.

But now I wondered if I had been wrong. Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike sleep, something that belonged to a different category altogether—like the deep, endless, wakeful darkness I was seeing now.

No, that would be too terrible. If the state of death was not to be a rest for us, then what was going to redeem this imperfect life of ours, so fraught with exhaustion? Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever truly seen it? No one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what death is like. They can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe death is a kind of rest, but reasoning can’t tell us that. The only way to find out what death is is to die. Death can be anything at all.

An intense terror overwhelmed me at the thought A stiffening chill ran down my spine. My eyes were still shut tight. I had lost the power to open them. I stared at the thick darkness that stood planted in front of me, a darkness as deep and hopeless as the universe itself. I was all alone. My mind was in deep concentration, and expanding. If I had wanted to, I could have seen into the uttermost depths of the universe. But I decided not to look. It was too soon for that.

If death was like this, if to die meant being eternally awake and staring into the darkness like this, what should I do?

At last, I managed to open my eyes. I gulped down the brandy that was left in my glass.

I’m taking off my pajamas and putting on jeans, T-shirt, and a windbreaker. I tie my hair back in a tight ponytail, tuck it under the windbreaker, and put on a baseball cap of my husband’s. In the mirror I look like a boy. Good. I put on sneakers and go down to the garage.

I slip in behind the steering wheel, turn the key, and listen m the engine hum. It sounds normal. Hands on the wheel, I rake a few deep breaths. Then I shift into gear and drive out of the building. The car is running better than usual. It seems to be gliding across a sheet of ice. I ease it into higher gear, move out of the neighborhood, and enter the highway to Yokohama.

It’s only three in the morning, but the number of cars on the road is by no means small. Huge semis roll past, shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don’t sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency.

What a waste. I could work day and night. I don’t have m sleep.

This is biologically unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They just infer it inductively. I’m beyond that. A priori. An evolutionary leap. A woman who never sleeps. An expansion of consciousness.

I have to smile. A priori. An evolutionary leap.

Listening to the car radio, I drive to the harbor. I want classical music, but I can’t find a station that broadcasts it at night. Stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth. I give up searching and listen to those. They make me feel I’m in a far-off place, far away from Mozart and Haydn.

I pull into one of the white-outlined spaces in the big parking lot at the waterfront park and cut my engine. This is the brightest area of the lot, under a lamp, and wide open all around. Only one other car is parked here—an old, white two-door coupé of the kind that young people like to drive. Probably a couple in there now, making love—no money for a hotel room. To avoid trouble, I pull my hat low, trying not to look like a woman. I check to see that my doors are locked.

Half consciously, I let my eyes wander through the surrounding darkness, when all of a sudden I remember a drive I took with my boyfriend the year I was a college freshman. We parked and got into some heavy petting. He couldn’t stop, he said, and he begged me to let him put it in. But I refused. Hands on the steering wheel, listening to the music, I try to bring back the scene, but I can’t recall his face. It all seems to have happened such an incredibly long time ago.

All the memories I have from the time before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with accelerating speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really mine. This is how people change. But nobody realizes it. Nobody notices. Only I know what happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t believe me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no idea what I’m feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive world view.

I am changing, though. Really changing.

How long have I been sifting here? Hands on the wheel. Eyes closed. Staring into the sleepless darkness.

Suddenly I’m aware of a human presence, and I come to myself again. There’s somebody out there. I open my eyes and look around; Someone outside the car. Trying to open the door. But the doors are locked. Dark shadows on either side of the car, one at each door. Can’t see their faces. Can’t make out their clothing. Just two dark shadows, standing there.

Sandwiched between them, my Civic feels tiny—like a little pastry box. It’s being rocked from side to side. A fist is pounding on the right-hand window. I know it’s not a policeman. A policeman would never pound on the glass like this and would never shake my car. I hold my breath. What should I do? I can’t think straight. My underarms are soaked. I’ve got to get out of here. The key. Turn the key. I reach out for it and turn it to the right. The starter grinds.

The engine doesn’t catch. My hand is shaking. I close my eyes and turn the key again. No good. A sound like fingernails clawing a giant wall. The motor turns and turns. The men—the dark shadows—keep shaking my car. The swings get bigger and bigger. They’re going to tip me over!

There’s something wrong. Just calm down and think, then everything will be O.K. Think. Just think. Slowly. Carefully. Something is wrong.

Something is wrong.

But what? I can’t tell. My mind is crammed full of thick darkness. It’s not taking me anywhere. My hands are shaking. I try pulling out the key and putting it back in again. But my shaking hand can’t find the hole. I try again and drop the key. I curl over and try to pick it up. But I can’t get hold of it. The car is rocking back and forth. My forehead slams against the steering wheel.

I’ll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over.

The Elephant Vanishes

translated by Jay Rubin

When the elephant disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper. My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at six-thirteen. I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. I’m one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order, so it took me a while to get to the article about the vanishing elephant. The front page was filled with stories on S.D.I. and the trade friction with America, after which I plowed through the national news, international politics, economics, letters to the editor, book reviews, real-estate ads, sports reports, and finally the regional news.

The elephant article was the lead story in the regional section. The unusually large headline caught my eye: “ELEPHANT MISSING IN TOKYO SUBURB,” and, beneath that, in type one size smaller, “CITIZENS’ FEARS MOUNT. SOME CALL FOR PROBE.” There was a photo of policemen inspecting the empty elephant house. Without the elephant, something about the place seemed wrong. It looked bigger than it needed to be, blank and empty like some huge, dehydrated beast from which the innards had been plucked.

Brushing away my toast crumbs, I studied every line of the article. The elephant’s absence had first been noticed at two o’clock on the afternoon of May 18th—the day before—when men from the school-lunch company delivered their usual truckload of food (the elephant mostly ate leftovers from the lunches of children in the local elementary school). On the ground, still locked, lay the steel shackle that had been fastened to the elephant’s hind leg, as though the elephant had slipped out of it. Nor was the elephant the only one missing. Also gone was its keeper, the man who had been in charge of the elephant’s care and feeding from the start.

According to the article, the elephant and keeper had last been seen sometime after five o’clock the previous day (May 17th) by a few pupils from the elementary school, who were visiting the elephant house, making crayon sketches. These pupils must have been the last to see the elephant, said the paper, since the keeper always closed the gate to the elephant enclosure when the six-o’clock siren blew.

There had been nothing unusual about either the elephant or its keeper at the time, according to the unanimous testimony of the pupils. The elephant had been standing where it always stood, in the middle of the enclosure, occasionally wagging its trunk from side to side or squinting its wrinkly eyes. It was such an awfully old elephant that its every move seemed a tremendous effort—so much so that people seeing it for the first time feared it might collapse at any moment and draw its final breath.

The elephant’s age had led to its adoption by our town a year earlier. When financial problems caused the little private zoo on the edge of town to close its doors, a wildlife dealer found places for the other animals in zoos throughout the country, But all the zoos had plenty of elephants, apparently, and not one of them was willing to take in a feeble old thing that looked as if it might die of a heart attack at any moment. And so, after its companions were gone, the elephant stayed alone in the decaying zoo for nearly four months with nothing to do—not that it had had anything to do before.

This caused a lot of difficulty, both for the zoo and for the town. The zoo had sold its land to a developer, who was planning to put up a high-rise condo building, and the town had already issued him a permit The longer the elephant problem remained unresolved, the more interest the developer had to pay for nothing. Still, simply killing the thing would have been out of the question. If it had been a spider monkey or a bat, they might have been able to get away with it, but the killing of an elephant would have been too hard to cover up, and if it ever came out afterward the repercussions would have been tremendous. And so the various parties had met to deliberate on the matter, and they formulated an agreement on the disposition of the old elephant:

(1) The town would take ownership of the elephant at no cost.

(2) The developer would, without compensation, provide land for housing the elephant.

(3) The zoo’s former owners would be responsible for paying the keeper’s wages.

I had had my own private interest in the elephant problem from the very outset, and I kept a scrapbook with every clipping I could find an is I had even gone to hear the town council’s debates on the matter, which is why I am able m give such a full and accurate account of the course of events. And whole my account may prove somewhat lengthy, I have chosen m sec it down here in case the handling of the elephant problem should bear directly upon the elephant’s disappearance.

When the mayor finished negotiating the agreement—with its provision that the town would take charge of the elephant—a movement opposing the measure boiled up from within the ranks of the opposition party (whose very existence I had never imagined until then). “Why must the town take ownership of the elephant?” they demanded of the mayor, and they raised the following pointy (sorry for all these liars, but I use them to make things easier to understand):

(1) The elephant problem was a question for private enterprise—the zoo and the developer; there was no reason for the town to become involved.

(2) Care and feeding costs would be too high.

(3) What did the mayor intend to do about the security problem?

(4) What merit would there be in the town’s having its own elephant?

“The town has any number of responsibilities it should be taking care of before it gets into the business of keeping an elephant—sewer repair, the purchase of a new fire engine, etc,” the opposition group declared, and while they did not say it in so many words, they hinted at the possibility of some secret deal between the mayor and the developer.

In response, the mayor had this to say:

(1) If the town permitted the construction of high-rise condos, its tax revenues would increase so dramatically that the cost of keeping an elephant would be insignificant by comparison; thus it made sense for the town on the care of this elephant.

(2) The elephant so old that it neither ace nor was likely to pose a danger to anyone.

(3) When the elephant died, the town would take full possession of the land donated by the developer.

(4) The elephant could become the town’s symbol.

The long debate reached the conclusion that the town would take charge of the elephant after all. As an old, well-established residential suburb, the town boasted a relatively affluent citizenry, and its financial footing was sound. The adoption of a homeless elephant was a move that people could look upon favorably. People like old elephants better than sewers and fire engines.

I myself was all in favor of having the town care for the elephant. True, I was getting sick of high-rise condos, but I liked the idea of my town’s owning an elephant.

A wooded area was cleared, and the elementary school’s aging gym was moved there as an elephant house. The man who had served as the elephant’s keeper for many years would come to live in the house with the elephant. The children’s lunch scraps would serve as the elephant’s feed. Finally, the elephant itself was carted in a trailer to its new home, there to live pot its remaining years.

I joined the crowd at the elephant-house dedication ceremonies. Standing before the elephant, the mayor delivered a speech (on the town’ s development and the enrichment of in cultural facilities); one elementary-school pupil, representing the student body, stood up to read a composition (“Please live a long and healthy life, Mr. Elephant”); there was a sketch contest (sketching the elephant thereafter became an integral component of the pupils’ artistic education); and each of two young women in swaying dresses (neither of whom was especially good-looking) fed the elephant a bunch of bananas. The elephant endured these virtually meaningless (for the elephant, entirely meaningless) formalities with hardly a twitch, and it chomped on the bananas with a vacant score. When it finished eating the bananas, everyone applauded

On in right rear leg, the elephant wore a solid, heavy-looking sled cuff from which there stretched a thick chain perhaps thirty feet long, and this in turn was securely fastened to a concrete slab. Anyone could see what a sturdy anchor held the beast in place: the elephant mold have snuggled with all ha might for a hundred years and never broken the thing.

I couldn’t tell if the elephant was bothered by in shackle. On the surface, at least, it seemed all but unconscious of the enormous chunk of metal wrapped wound in leg. It kept its blank gage fixed on some indeterminate point in space, its ears and the few white hairs on its body waving gently in the breeze.

The elephant’s keeper was a small, bony old man. It was hard to guess his age; he could have been in his early sixties or late seventies. He was one of those people whose appearance is no longer influenced by their age after they pass a certain point in life. His skin had the came darkly ruddy, sunburned look both summer and winter, his hair was stiff and short, his eyes were small. His face had no distinguishing characteristics, but his almost perfectly circular ears stuck out on either side with disturbing prominence.

He was not an unfriendly man. If someone spoke to him he would reply, and he expressed himself clearly. If he wanted to he mold he almost charming—though you always knew he was somewhat ill at ease. Generally, he remained a reticent, lonely-looking old man. He seemed to like the children who visited the elephant house, and he worked at being nice to them, but the children never really warmed to him.

The only one who did that was the elephant. The keeper lived in a small prefab room attached to the elephant house, and all day long he stayed with the elephant, attending its needs. They had been together for more than ten years, and you could sense their closeness in every gesture and look. Whenever the elephant was standing there blankly and the keeper wanted it to move, all he had to do was stand next to the elephant, tap it on a front leg, and whisper something in its ear. Then, swaying in huge bulk, the elephant would go exactly where the keeper had indicated, take up in new position, and continue staring at a point in space.

On weekends, I would drop by the elephant house and study these operations, but I could never figure out the principle on which the keeper-elephant communication was based. Maybe the elephant understood a few simple words (it had certainly been living long enough), or perhaps it received in information through variation in the taps on in leg. Or possibly it had some special power resembling mental telepathy and mold read the keeper’s mind. I once asked the keeper how he gave his orders to the elephant, but the old man just smiled and aid, “We’ve been together a long time:’

And so a year went by. Then, without warning, the elephant vanished. One day it was there, and the next it had ceased to be.

I poured myself a second cup of coffee and read the story again from beginning to end. Actually, it was a pretty strange article—the kind that might excite Sherlock Holmes. “Look at this, Watson,” he’d say, tapping his pipe. “A very interesting article. Very interesting indeed.”

What gave the article its air of strangeness was the obvious confusion and bewilderment of the reporter. And this confusion and bewilderment clearly came from the absurdity of the situation itself. You could see how the reporter had struggled to find clever ways around the absurdity in order to write a “normal” article. But the struggle had only driven his confusion and bewilderment to a hopeless extreme.

For example, the article used such expressions as “the elephant escaped,” but if you looked at the entire piece it became obvious that the elephant had in no way “escaped.” It had vanished into thin air. The reporter revealed his own conflicted state of mind by saying tint a few “details” remained “unclear,” but this was not a phenomenon that could be disposed of by using such ordinary terminology as “details” or “unclear,” I felt.

First, there was the problem of the steel cuff that had been fastened to the elephant’s leg. This had been found still locked. The most reasonable explanation for this would be that the keeper had unlocked the ring, removed it from the elephant’s leg, locked the ring again, and run off with the elephant—a hypothesis to which the paper clung with desperate tenacity despite the fact that the keeper had no key! Only two keys existed, and they, for security’s sake, were kept in locked safes, one in police headquarters and the other in the firehouse, both beyond the reach of the keeper—or of anyone else who might attempt to steal them. And even if someone had succeeded in stealing a key, there was no need whatever for that person to make a point of returning the key after using it. Yet the following morning both keys were found in their respective safes at the police and fire stations. Which brings us to the conclusion that the elephant pulled its leg out of that solid steel ring without the aid of a key—an absolute impossibility unless someone had sawed the foot off.

The second problem was the route of escape. The elephant house and grounds were surrounded by a massive fence nearly ten feet high. The question of security had been hotly debated in the town council, and the town had settled upon a system that might be considered somewhat excessive for keeping one old elephant. Heavy iron bars had been anchored in a thick concrete foundation (the cost of the fence was borne by the real-estate company), and there was only a single entrance, which was found locked from the inside. There was no way the elephant could have escaped from this fortresslike enclosure.

The third problem was elephant tracks. Directly behind the elephant enclosure was a steep hill, which the animal could not possibly have climbed, so even if we suppose that the elephant somehow managed to pull its leg out of the steel ring and leap over the ten-foot-high fence, it would still have had to escape down the path to the front of the enclosure, and there was not a single mark anywhere in the soft earth of that path that could be seen as an elephant’s footprint.

Riddled as it was with such perplexities and labored circumlocutions, the newspaper article as a whole left but one possible conclusion: the elephant had not escaped. It had vanished.

Needless to say, however, neither the newspaper nor the police nor the mayor was willing to admit—openly, at least—that the elephant had vanished. The police were continuing to investigate, their spokesman saying only that the elephant either “was taken or was allowed to escape in a clever, deliberately calculated move. Because of the difficulty involved in hiding an elephant, it is only a matter of time till we solve the case.” To this optimistic assessment he added that they were planning to search the woods in the area with the aid of local hunters’ clubs and sharpshooters from the national Self-Defense Force.

The mayor had held a news conference, in which he apologized for the inadequacy of the town’s police resources. At the same time, he declared, “Our elephant-security system is in no way inferior to similar facilities in any zoo in the country. Indeed, it is far stronger and far more fail-safe than the standard cage.” He also observed, “This is a dangerous and senseless anti-social act of the most malicious kind, and we cannot allow it to go unpunished.”

As they had the year before, the opposition-party members of the town council made accusations. “We intend to look into the political responsibility of the mayor; he has colluded with private enterprise in order to sell the townspeople a bill of goods on the solution of the elephant problem.”

One “worried-looking” mother, thirty-seven, was interviewed by the paper. “Now I’m afraid to let my children out to play,” she said.

The coverage included a detailed summary of the steps leading to the town’s decision to adopt the elephant, an aerial sketch of the elephant house and grounds, and brief histories of both the elephant and the keeper who had vanished with it. The man, Noboru Watanabe, sixty-three, was from Tateyama, in Chiba Prefecture. He had worked for many years as a keeper in the mammalian section of the zoo, and “had the complete trust of the zoo authorities, both for his abundant knowledge of these animals and for his warm, sincere personality.” The elephant had been sent from East Africa twenty-two years earlier, but little was known about its exact age or its “personality.” The report concluded with a request from the police for citizens of the town to come forward with any information they might have regarding the elephant.

I thought about this request for a while as I drank my second cup of coffee, but I decided not to call the police—both because I preferred not to come into contact with them if I could help it and because I felt the police would not believe what I had to tell them. What good would it do to talk to people like that, who would not even consider the possibility that the elephant had simply vanished?

I took my scrapbook down from the shelf, cut out the elephant article, and pasted it in. Then I washed the dishes and left for the office.

I watched the search on the seven-o’clock news. There were hunters carrying large-bore rifles loaded with tranquillizer darts, Self-Defense Force troops, policemen, and firemen combing every square inch of the woods and hills in the immediate area as helicopters hovered overhead. Of course, we’re talking about the kind of “woods” and “hill” you find in the suburbs outside Tokyo, so they didn’t have an enormous area to cover. With that many people involved, a day should have been more than enough to do the job. And they weren’t searching for some tiny homicidal maniac: they were after a huge African elephant. There was a limit to the number of places a thing like that could hide. But still they had not managed to find it. The chief of police appeared on the screen, saying, “We intend to continue the search.” And the anchorman concluded the report, “Who released the elephant, and how? Where have they hidden it? What was their motive? Everything remains shrouded in mystery.”

The search went on for several days, but the authorities were unable to discover a single clue to the elephant’s whereabouts. I studied the newspaper reports, clipped them all, and pasted them in my scrapbook—including editorial cartoons on the subject. The album filled up quickly, and I had to buy another. Despite their enormous volume, the clippings contained not one fact of the kind that I was looking for. The reports were either pointless or off the mark: “ELEPHANT STILL MISSING,”

“GLOOM THICK IN SEARCH HQ,”

“MOB BEHIND DISAPPEARANCE?’ And even articles like this became noticeably scarcer after a week had gone by, until there was virtually nothing. A few of the weekly magazines carried sensational stories—one even hired a psychic—but they had nothing to substantiate their wild headlines. It seemed that people were beginning to shove the elephant case into the large category of “unsolvable mysteries.” The disappearance of one old elephant and one old elephant keeper would have no impact on the course of society. The earth would continue its monotonous rotations, politicians would continue issuing unreliable proclamations, people would continue yawning on their way to the office, children would continue studying for their college-entrance exams. Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever. And so a number of unremarkable months went by, like a tired army marching past a window.

Whenever I had a spare moment, I would visit the house where the elephant no longer lived. A thick chain had been wrapped round and round the bars of the yard’s iron gate, to keep people out. Peering inside, I could see that the elephant-house door had also been chained and locked, as though the police were tying to make up for having failed to find the elephant by multiplying the layers of security on the now empty elephant house. The area was deserted, the previous crowds having been replaced by a flock of pigeons resting on the roof. No one took care of the grounds any longer, and thick, green summer grass had sprung up there as if it had been waiting for this opportunity. The chain coiled around the door of the elephant house reminded me of a huge snake set to guard a ruined palace in a thick forest. A few short months without its elephant had given the place an air of doom and desolation that hung there like a huge, oppressive rain cloud.

I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.

We noticed each other at the party my company threw to launch its new advertising campaign. I work for the P.R. section of a major manufacturer of electrical appliances. and at the time I was in charge of publicity for a coordinated line of kitchen equipment, which was scheduled to go on the market in time for the autumn wedding and winter-bonus seasons. My job was to negotiate with several women’s magazines for tie-in articles—not the kind of work that takes a great deal of intelligence, but I had to see to it that the articles they wrote didn’t smack of advertising. When magazines gave us publicity, we rewarded them by placing ads in their pages. They scratched our backs, we scratched theirs.

As an editor of a magazine for young housewives, she had come to the party for material for one of these “articles.” I happened to be in charge of showing her around, pointing out the features of the colorful refrigerators and coffeemakers and microwave ovens and juicers that a famous Italian designer had done for us.

“The most important point is unity,” I explained. “Even the most beautifully designed item dies if it is out of balance with its surroundings. Unity of design, unity of color, unity of function: this is what today’s kit-chin needs above all else. Research tells us that a housewife spends the largest part of her day in the kit-chin. The kit-chin is her workplace, her study, her living room. Which is why she does all she can to make the kit-chin a pleasant place to be. It has nothing to do with size. Whether it’s large or small, one fundamental principle governs every successful kit-chin, and that principle is unity. This is the concept underlying the design of our new series. Look at this cooktop, for example ....

She nodded and scribbled things in a small notebook, but it was obvious that she had little interest in the material, nor did I have any personal stake in our new cooktop. Both of us were doing our jobs.

“You know a lot about kitchens,” she said when I was finished. She used the Japanese word, without picking up on “kit-chin.”

“That’s what I do for a living,” I answered with a professional smile. “Aside from that, though, I do like to cook. Nothing fancy, but I cook for myself every day.”

“Still, I wonder if unity is all that necessary for a kitchen.”

“We say ‘kit-chin,’” I advised her. “No big deal, but the company wants us to use the English.”

“Oh. Sorry. But still, I wonder. Is unity so important for a kit-chin? What do you think?”

“My personal opinion? That doesn’t come out until I take my necktie off,” I said with a grin. “But today I’ll make an exception. A kitchen probably does need a few things more than it needs unity. But those other elements are things you can’t sell. And in this pragmatic world of ours, things you can’t sell don’t count for much.”

“Is the world such a pragmatic place?”

I took out a cigarette and lit it with my lighter.

“I don’t know—the word just popped out,” I said. “But it explains a lot. It makes work easier, too. You can play games with it, make up neat expressions: ‘essentially pragmatic,’ or ‘pragmatic in essence.’ If you look at things that way, you avoid all kinds of complicated problems.”

‘What an interesting view?’

“Not really. It’s what everybody thinks. Oh, by the way, we’ve got some pretty good champagne. Care to have some?”

“Thanks. I’d love to.”

As we chatted over champagne, we realized we had several mutual acquaintances. Since our part of the business world was not a very big pond, if you tossed in a few pebbles one or two were bound to hit a mutual acquaintance. In addition, she and my kid sister happened to have graduated from the same university. With markers like this to follow, our conversation went along smoothly.

She was unmarried, and so was I. She was twenty-six, and I was thirty-one. She wore contact lenses, and I wore glasses. She praised my necktie, and I praised her jacket. We compared rents and complained about our jobs and salaries. In other words, we were beginning to like each other. She was an attractive woman, and not at all pushy. I stood there talking with her for a hill twenty minutes, unable to discover a single reason not to think well of her.

As the party was breaking up, I invited her to join me in the hotel’s cocktail lounge, where we settled in to continue our conversation. A soundless rain went on falling outside the lounge’s panoramic window, the lights of the city sending blurry messages through the mist. A damp hush held sway over the nearly empty cocktail lounge. She ordered a frozen Daiquiri and I had a Scotch-on-the-rocks.

Sipping our drinks, we carried on the kind of conversation that a man and woman have in a bar when they have just met and are beginning to like each other. We talked about our college days, our tastes in music, sports, our daily routines.

Then I told her about the elephant. Exactly how this happened, I can’t recall. Maybe we were talking about something having to do with animals, and that was the connection. Or maybe, unconsciously, I had been looking for someone—a good listener—to whom I could present my own, unique view on the elephant’s disappearance. Or, then again, it might have been the liquor that got me talking.

In any case, the second the words left my mouth, I knew that I had brought up one of the least suitable topics I could have found for this occasion. No, I should never have mentioned the elephant. The topic was—what?—too complete, too closed.

I tried to hurry on to something else, but, as luck would have it, she was more interested than most in the case of the vanishing elephant, and once I admitted that I had seen the elephant many times she showered me with questions—what kind of elephant was it, how did I think it had escaped, what did it eat, wasn’t it a danger to the community, and so forth.

I told her nothing more than what everybody knew from the news, but she seemed to sense constraint in my tone of voice. I had never been good at telling lies.

As if she had not noticed anything strange about my behavior, she sipped her second Daiquiri and asked, “Weren’t you shocked when the elephant disappeared? It’s not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted.”

“No, probably not,” I said. I took a pretzel from the mound in the glass dish on our table, snapped it in two, and ate half. The waiter replaced our ashtray with an empty one.

She looked at me expectantly. I took out another cigarette and lit it I had quit smoking three years earlier but had begun again when the elephant disappeared.

“Why ‘probably not’? You mean you could have predicted it?’

“No, of course I couldn’t have predicted it,” I said with a smile. “For an elephant to disappear all of a sudden one day—there’s no precedent, no need, for such a thing to happen. It doesn’t make any logical sense.”

“But still, your answer was very strange. When I said, ‘It’s not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted,’ you said, ‘No, probably not.’ Most people would have said, ‘You’re right’ or ‘Yeah, it’s weird, or something. See what I mean?”

I sent a vague nod in her direction and raised my hand to call the waiter. A kind of tentative silence took hold as I waited for him to bring me my next Scotch.

“I’m finding this a little hard to grasp,” she said softly. “You were carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with me until a couple of minutes ago—at least until the subject of the elephant came up. Then something funny happened. I can’t understand you anymore. Something’s wrong. Is it the elephant? Or are my ears playing tricks on me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your ears,’ I said.

“So then it’s you. The problem’s with you.

I stuck my finger in my glass and stirred the ice. I like the sound of ice in a whiskey glass.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘problem,’ exactly. It’s not that big a deal. I’m not hiding anything. I’m just not sure I can talk about it very well, so I’m trying not to say anything at all. But you’re right—it’s very strange.”

“What do you mean?’

It was no use: I’d have to tell her the story. I took one gulp of whiskey and started.

“The thing is, I was probably the last one to see the elephant before it disappeared. I saw it after seven o’clock on the evening of May 17th, and they noticed it was gone on the afternoon of the eighteenth. Nobody saw it in between, because they lock the elephant house at six.”

“I don’t get it. If they closed the house at six, how did you see it after seven?’

“There’s a kind of cliff behind the elephant house. A steep hill on private property, with no real roads. There’s one spot, on the back of the hill, where you can see into the elephant house. I’m probably the only one who knows about it.”

I had found the spot purely by chance. Strolling through the area one Sunday afternoon, I had lost my way and come out at the top of the cliff. I found a little flat open patch, just big enough for a person to stretch out in, and when I looked down through the bushes there was the elephant-house roof. Below the edge of the roof was a fairly large vent opening, and through it I had a clear view of the inside of the elephant house.

I made it a habit after that to visit the place every now and then to look at the elephant when it was inside the house. If anyone had asked me why I bothered doing such a thing I wouldn’t have had a decent answer. I simply enjoyed watching the elephant during its private time. There was nothing more to it than that. I couldn’t see the elephant when the house was dark inside, of course, but in the early hours of the evening the keeper would have the lights on the whole time he was taking care of the elephant, which enabled me to study the scene in detail.

What struck me immediately when I saw the elephant and keeper alone together was the obvious liking they had for each other—something they never displayed when they were out before the public. Their affection was evident in every gesture. It almost seemed as if they stored away their emotions during the day, taking care not to let anyone notice them, and took them out at night when they could be alone. Which is not to say that they did anything different when they were themselves inside. The elephant just stood there, as blank as ever, and the keeper would perform those tasks one would normally expect him to do as a keeper: scrubbing down the elephant with a deck broom, picking up the elephant’s enormous droppings, cleaning up after the elephant ate. But there was no way to mistake the special warmth, the sense of trust between them. While the keeper swept the floor, the elephant would wave its trunk and pat the keeper’s back. I liked to watch the elephant doing that.

“Have you always been fond of elephants?’ she asked. “I mean, not just that particular elephant?’

“Hmm ... come to think of it, I do like elephants,” I said. “There’s something about them that excites me. I guess I’ve always liked them. I wonder why.”

“And that day, too, after the sun went down, I suppose you were up on the hill by yourself, looking at the elephant. May—what day was it!”

“The seventeenth. May 17th at 7 P.M. The days were already very long by then, and the sky had a reddish glow, but the lights were on in the elephant house.”

“And was there anything unusual about the elephant or the keeper?’

“Well, there was and then wasn’t. I can’t say exactly. It’s not as if they were standing right in front of me. I’m probably not the most reliable witness.”

“What did happen, exactly?’

I took a swallow of my now somewhat watery Scotch. The rain outside the windows was still coming down, no stronger or weaker than before, a static element in a landscape that would never change.

“Nothing happened, really. The elephant and the keeper were doing what they always did—cleaning, eating, playing around with each other in that friendly way of theirs. It wasn’t what they did that was different. It’s the way they looked. Something about the balance between them.”

“The balance?”

“In size. Of their bodies. The elephant’s and the keeper’s. The balance seemed to have changed somewhat. I had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk.”

She kept her gaze fixed on her Daiquiri glass for a time. I could see that the ice had melted and the water was working its way through the cocktail like a tiny ocean current.

“Meaning that the elephant had gotten smaller?”

“Or the keeper had gotten bigger. Or both simultaneously.”

“And you didn’t tell this to the police?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have believed me. And if I had told them I was watching the elephant from the cliff at a time like that I’d have ended up as their Number One suspect.”

“Still, are you certain that the balance between them had changed?”

“Probably. I can only say ‘probably.’ I don’t have any proof, and, as I keep saying, I was looking at them through the air vent. But I had looked at them like that I don’t know how many times before, so it’s hard for me to believe that I could make a mistake about something as basic as the relation of their sizes.”

In fact, I had wondered at the time whether my eyes were playing tricks on me. I had tried closing and opening them and shaking my head, but the elephant’s size remained the same. It definitely looked as if it had shrunk—so much so that at first I thought the town might have got hold of a new, smaller elephant. But I hadn’t heard anything to that effect, and I would never have missed any news reports about elephants. If this was not a new elephant, the only possible conclusion was that the old elephant had, for one reason or another, shrunk. As I watched, it became obvious to me that this smaller elephant had all the same gestures as the old one. It would stamp happily on the ground with its right foot while it was being washed, and with its now somewhat narrower trunk it would pat the keeper on the back.

It was a mysterious sight. Looking through the vent, I had the feeling that a different, chilling kind of time was flowing through the elephant house—but nowhere else. And it seemed to me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving themselves over to this new order that was trying to envelop them—or that had already partially succeeded in enveloping them.

Altogether, I was probably watching the scene in the elephant house for less than half an hour. The lights went out at seven-thirty—much earlier than usual—and, from that point on, everything was wrapped in darkness. I waited in my spot, hoping that the lights would go on again, but they never did. That was the last I saw of the elephant.

“So, then, you believe that the elephant kept shrinking until it was small enough to escape through the bars, or else that it simply dissolved into nothingness. Is that it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “All I’m trying to do is recall what I saw with my own eyes, as accurately as possible. I’m hardly thinking about what happened after that. The visual image I have is so strong that, to be honest, it’s practically impossible for me to go beyond it.”

That was all I could say about the elephant’s disappearance. And, just as I had feared, the story of the elephant was too particular, too complete in itself to work as a topic of conversation between a young man and woman who had just met. A silence descended upon us after I had finished my tale. What subject could either of us bring up after a story about an elephant that had vanished—a story that offered virtually no openings for further discussion? She ran her finger around the edge of her cocktail glass, and I sat there reading and rereading the words stamped on my coaster. I never should have told her about the elephant. It was not the kind of story you could tell freely to anyone.

“When I was a little girl, our cat disappeared,” she offered after a long silence. “But still, for a cat to disappear and for an elephant to disappear—those are two different stories.”

“Yeah, really. There’s no comparison. Think of the size difference.”

Thirty minutes later, we were saying goodbye outside the hotel. She suddenly remembered that she had left her umbrella in the cocktail lounge, so I went up in the elevator and brought it down to her. It was a brick-red umbrella with a large handle.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Good night,” I said.

That was the last time I saw her. We talked once on the phone after that, about some details in her tie-in article. While we spoke, I thought seriously about inviting her out for dinner, but I ended up not doing it. It just didn’t seem to matter one way or the other.

I felt like this a lot after my experience with the vanishing elephant. I would begin to think I wanted to do something, but then I would become incapable of distinguishing between the probable results of doing it and of not doing it. I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way. It’s probably something in me.

The papers print almost nothing about the elephant anymore. People seem to have forgotten that their town once owned an elephant. The grass that took over the elephant enclosure has withered now, and the area has the feel of winter.

The Kangaroo Communiqué

translated by J. Philip Gabriel

Hi, how are you?

This morning 1 went to a zoo in the neighborhood to see the kangaroos. It’s not a very big zoo, but somehow they’ve managed to gather together most every kind of animal—Everything from gorillas to elephants. But if what you’re after’s a llama or an anteater, then you’d better not go there. There aren’t any llamas or anteaters. No impalas or hyenas either. Not even a leopard.

Instead, they’ve got four kangaroos.

One is a baby, born just two months ago. And there’s one male and two females. I have no idea what kind of family organization they have.

Every time I look at a kangaroo I always find it strange to think of what it’d be like to be one of them. What are they jumping all around a silly place like Australia for? And why are they killed by such an awkward sort of stick as a boomerang?

I really don’t know.

But, well—it doesn’t really matter. It’s no big deal.

At any rate, while I was watching the kangaroos I found myself wanting to send you a letter.

You might think this a little weird. “Why did you want to send me a letter after watching kangaroos? What do kangaroos have to do with me?” you’ll ask. But please don’t worry about that. It doesn’t matter. Kangaroos are kangaroos and you are you.

What I mean is this.

There are 36 subtle steps between the kangaroos and you, and when I followed them one by one in the correct order, I arrived at where you are. That’s all there is to it. Even if I tried to explain all of these steps to you one at a time, I don’t think you’d understand and besides I don’t even remember them.

’Cause there’re 36 of them!

If the order of any one of them had gotten messed up, I wouldn’t have been sending you this letter. Instead I might have all of a sudden decided to jump on the back of a sperm whale in the Arctic Ocean. Or I might have set fire to the neighborhood tobacco shop.

Guided by this stack of 36 coincidences, though, here I am sending you a letter.

It’s all very strange.

O.K., let me begin by introducing myself.

I’m 26, and work in the merchandise control section of a department store. This is—as I think you can easily imagine—a terribly boring job. First, we check the merchandise purchased by the stock department to see if there’re any defects. We do this to make sure no cozy relationship builds up between that department and the wholesalers, but it’s all done kind of half-heartedly. We sit around shooting the breeze, pulling at shoe buckles, or taking bites out of cakes, just things like that. This is what they mean by merchandise control.

And one more job, actually our main one, is to answer complaints we get from customers about our merchandise. For instance, two pairs of new stockings both got runs in them, or a wind-up toy bear fell off a table and won’t work anymore, or a bathrobe shrank by a quarter in the washing machine. Those type of complaints.

Well, you might not be aware of it, but the number of these complaints is depressingly large. There’re so many that four employees, running around all day, can’t keep up with them. Some complaints seem justified, and some are outrageous. And some are hard to place in either group.

For convenience’s sake we divide them into three ranks, A, B, and C. In the middle of the room are three large boxes labelled A, B, and C, and we throw the letters into them. We call it the ‘Three-Step Critique of Reason.” Of course this is an in-joke at the office. Please don’t let it bother you.

Anyway, the three ranks are as follows:

A. Reasonable complaints. Cases in which our company must take responsibility. We take a gift box of sweets to the customer’s house, and exchange the merchandise for something appropriate.

B. Cases in which our company is not to blame, either morally, legally, or according to standard business practice. In order not to damage the stores reputation, and to avoid any unnecessary trouble, however, we take the appropriate action.

C. Cases in which it is clearly the customer at fault. We explain the situation and request that they withdraw their complaint.

Now, concerning your complaint we received the other day, after careful examination, we ye arrived at the conclusion that it’s the type that should be ranked C. The reason why is—all right? Please listen carefully—

1. The record that you bought 2. especially after a week has passed 3. without a receipt, cannot be exchanged. No matter where you went in the world you couldn’t exchange it. Do you understand what I’m saying?

This ends my official explanation.

Your complaint has been rejected.

However, if one distances oneself from the official position-something I’m always doing-my personal reaction to your complaint-that you mistakenly bought Brahms instead of Mahler-is one of sincere sympathy. This isn’t a lie. And that is precisely why instead of a perfunctory office memo, I’m sending you this kind of, in a certain sense, intimate message.

To tell you the truth, all week I’ve tried over and over to write you a letter.

I’m very sorry, but according to standard business practices, we can’t exchange your record. But something in your letter touched me, and personally, blab blab blab .... That kind of letter. But I never could write it well. It’s not that I’m poor at writing, it’s just that when I decided to write, the words wouldn’t come. The words that did come were not to the point. It’s a strange thing.

So I decided not to reply. If I’m going to send you an incomplete letter, it’d be better not to send anything. Don’t you think so? I do. An imperfect message is like a mixed-up train schedule.

But this morning, in front of the kangaroo’s fence, I experienced the accumulation of 36 coincidences and had a revelation. What this was, in other words, was an enormous incompleteness.

What, you might ask, is an enormous incompleteness?-and well you might ask. An enormous incompleteness, well, to put it simply, might be something like someone in effect ending up forgiving someone else. I forgive the kangaroos, the kangaroos forgive you, and you forgive me-this kind of thing, for example.

Hmmm.

This kind of cycle, however, is not permanent; someday the kangaroo might not want to forgive you. But don’t get angry at the kangaroo just because of this. It’s not the kangaroo’s fault or your own. And it’s not my fault. The kangaroo, too, has very complicated reasons for this. Who could ever criticize a kangaroo?

To grab hold of the instant is all we are able to do. To grab hold of the instant and take a souvenir photograph. In the front row from the left, you, the kangaroo, and me.

I gave up trying to write it down. No matter what I did it wouldn’t come out right. For instance, if I write the word “coincidence,” what you feel from the shape of this written word might be completely different-or even the opposite-of what I feel from the same shape. I think this is very unfair. I’ve stripped to my undershorts, but you’ve only undone three buttons of your blouse. It’s really unfair.

So I bought a cassette tape, and decided to record the letter to you directly.

(Whistling. Eight bars of “The Colonel Bogey March.”)

How’s that? Can you hear me?

I don’t know how you’ll feel when you receive this letter-I mean tape. I can’t even imagine. Maybe you’ll feel very uneasy about it. Because-because in response to a letter of complaint from a customer the head of merchandise control records his reply on a cassette-and it’s a personal message-and sends it, a highly irregular, and depending on your viewpoint, really stupid thing to do. If it does make you uneasy, and you send this tape back to my boss, it’d put me in a terribly delicate position at the office.

If you’d like to do so, please go ahead.

If that happened, I wouldn’t be angry or hate you. You see, we’re on a 1000/0 equal footing. That is, I have the right to send you a letter, and you have the right to put my means of making a living in jeopardy.

That’s right, isn’t it.

We are equal. Please just remember that.

Oh, right, I forgot to tell you something. I’ve named this letter the “Kangaroo Communique.”

Everything needs a name.

Let’s say you’re keeping a diary. Instead of writing something long like “Today an answer to my complaint came from the chief of merchandise control at the department store,” you can just write “Today the ‘Kangaroo Communique’ came.” And it’s a wonderful name, don’t you think? From far across the broad plain, a kangaroo with mail in its pouch comes hopping your way.

Rap rap rap. (The sound of a table being hit.)

This is a knock.

Knock knock knock ... do you see?

If you don’t want to open the door, you don’t have to. Either way is all right. If you don’t want to listen anymore, please stop the tape and throw it in the garbage can. I just want to sit outside your door and talk by myself for a little while, that’s all. I have no idea whether you’re listening to me or not. If I have no idea, then it doesn’t really matter whether you listen or not, does it? Ha ha ha.

OK—anyhow let’s do it.

Incompleteness, though, is quite troublesome. I didn’t think talking in front of a mike like this without any script or plan would be so hard. I feel just like I was standing in the middle of a desert sprinkling water around with a cup. There’s nothing to see and no response.

So I’ve started talking toward the needle on the VU meter. You know what a VU meter is, don’t you? It’s that thing with the needle that shakes and oscillates according to the volume. I don’t know what the V and the U stand for. But even so, they are the only presences that show a response to my speech.

Well ...

By the way, they have a simple set of values.

In other words, V and U.

This V and U are like, well, a comedy team. If not V, then U, if not U, then V. What a wonderful world. It makes no difference to them what I talk about. All they’re interested in is how much my voice makes the air tremble. That’s all. For them, because the air is trembling, I exist.

Isn’t that great?

When I look at them, I feel like saying anything, just to keep on talking.

Sigh ...

That reminds me. The other day I saw a really sad movie. It was about a comedian that no one laughed at, no matter how many jokes he told.

You understand? Not a single person laughed.

Talking in front of this mike like I am now, I suddenly If remembered that movie.

It’s a strange thing.

The same lines spoken by one person are screamingly funny, but spoken by someone else are not funny at all. Strange, isn’t it? I thought about it, and felt that maybe the difference is somehow inborn. I mean, you know, the tips of their semi-circular canals are curved a little more than other people, something like that.

Sometimes I think about how happy I’d be to have that ability. Things I always find funny that have me rolling on the floor, once I tell them to others are not a bit interesting and are surprisingly boring. I feel like I’ve become the Sandman of Egypt. And first of all ...

Do you know about the Sandman of Egypt?

You see, uh ... the Sandman of Egypt was born the prince of Egypt. A long time ago, the age when there were the pyramids and the sphinx and all. But since he had such an ugly face-a really terribly ugly face-the king shunned him and abandoned him deep in the jungle. And what happened next was he was raised by wolves or apes. Not so unusual. And then for some reason he becomes the Sandman. Whatever the Sandman touches changes into sand. Breezes change to sandstorms, brooks become streams of sand, and plains turn into deserts. That’s the story of the Sandman. Heard of it? You haven’t, right? That’s because I made it up. Ha ha ha.

Anyhow, talking to you this way makes me feel like this become the Sandman. Everything I touch turns to sand, sand, sand, sand, sand, sand.

... Somehow I’ve talked too much about myself But if you think about it, it can’t be helped. ’Cause I don’t know anything about you. All I know about you is your name and address, that’s it. I have no idea how old you are, how much you make a year, what shape your nose is, whether you’re fat or thin, married or not. But those are not important. It might even be better that I don’t know. I want to handle everything simply, as simply as possible, in a word, metaphysically.

What I mean is, I have your letter here.

That’s enough for me.

Just like a zoologist who can calculate from droppings he’s collected in the jungle an elephant’s diet, behavioral patterns, weight, and sex life, based on one letter I can feel the existence of a person—you. Of course facial features, brand of perfume, etc., those kind of useless things are left out. Existence-itself.

Your letter was really quite captivating. The style, handwriting, punctuation, paragraphing, rhetoric-everything was flawless. Not outstanding. Just flawless.

Every month I read over 500 letters, but honestly this is the first time I’ve ever read one so moving. I snuck your letter home, and read it over and over. Then I analyzed it thoroughly. Since it was a short letter, this wasn’t much trouble.

I found out a lot through analyzing it. First of all, the overwhelming number of commas. For every period there were 6.36 commas. A lot, don’t you think? That’s not all. The way the commas were used really went against all rules.

Please don’t think I’m making fun of your writing. Because I am simply moved.

Moved.

Not just by the punctuation. All the elements of your letter—even the single ink stain—aroused and shook me.

Why?

Because, in the final analysis, in those sentences you are nowhere to be found. Of course there’s a story. A girl—or a woman—bought the wrong record. Though she had the feeling that the wrong pieces were on it, it was a week before she realized she’d bought the wrong record. The sales clerk wouldn’t exchange it for her. So she wrote a letter of complaint. This is the story.

I had to read your letter three times before I understood that story. Because your letter was completely different from the other letters sent to us. To put it plainly, there’s not even a complaint in your letter. No emotion either. The only thing that is present is—the story.

To tell you the truth, I was a little worried. I couldn’t figure out if your letter was meant to be a complaint, a confession, a declaration, or whether it was the establishment of a kind of thesis. Your letter made me think of a news photograph of a massacre. No caption, no article, just a photograph. A photograph taken in some nameless country beside some unknown road, of corpses strewn about.

I can’t even figure out what it is you want. Your letter is like the jumbled complexity of a makeshift ant hill, giving no clue as to where to begin. A marvelous thing.

Bang bang bang ... a massacre.

That’s right, let’s simplify things further. Make them very very simple.

What I mean is, your letter uplifts me sexually.

That’s what I mean.

I’d like to talk about sex.

Knock knock knock.

A knock.

If you aren’t interested, please stop the tape. I’ll talk to the VU meter by myself. Blab blab blab.

OK?

The front legs are short and have five toes, while the remarkably large hind legs have four. Just the fourth toe is fully developed. The second and third toes are quite small and are fused.

... This is a description of a kangaroo’s feet. Ha ha ha.

Well then, about sex.

Ever since I took your letter home, all I’ve been thinking about is sleeping with you. In bed with you beside me, when I wake up in the morning you’re still there. When I wake up you’re already up and I can hear the sound of a dress being zipped. But Il ... hey, do you know there’s nothing that breaks as easily as the zipper on a dress?... I keep my eyes closed and pretend to be asleep. I can’t see you. And you walk across the room and disappear into the bathroom. Then finally I open my eyes. I eat and go to work.

The night is pitch black-I’ve put up special blinds on the window to make it that way-and of course I can’t see your face. I don’t know your age or weight, or anything. So I can’t touch your body with my hand.

But, well ... that’s all right.

To tell the truth, it’s all right whether I have sex with you or not.

... No, it isn’t.

Let me think for a minute.

OK—this is what I mean. I want to sleep with you. But it’s OK if we don’t. What I mean is I want to be in as fair a position as possible. I don’t want to force people to do anything or have them force me. It’s enough to feel your presence beside me, to have your punctuation marks running around and around me.

Do you understand me?

What I mean is this.

Sometimes it’s very trying for me to think about the individual. A soon as I do my body feels like it’s about to be broken into pieces.

Take, for instance, when I’m riding on a train. There’re several dozen people riding on the train. In principle these are merely “passengers.”

“Passengers” carried from Aoyama

Itchome to Akasaka Mitsuke. But sometimes I get to feeling very uneasy about the presence of each passenger. What could this person be, what could that person be, why is he riding on the Ginza Line? And then it’s too much. Once I start to feel uneasy there’s no end to it. That office worker’s starting to go bald on both sides of his forehead, isn’t he ... the hair on that girl’s shins is a little thick, wonder if she shaves once a week ... why is that young guy sitting over there wearing that tie whose color clashes?... like that. And finally my body starts trembling all over and I want to leap from the train. The other day—you’ll probably laugh—I was on the verge of pushing the emergency brake button beside the door.

But just because I’ve told you this, don’t get the idea that I am particularly sensitive or nervous. I am not overly sensitive or nervous. I’m a very ordinary, everyday office worker, the kind you see everyday, who works in the merchandise control section of a department store. And I like the subways.

And it’s not that I have any sexual problems either. I have a girlfriend, and since about a year ago we’ve been sleeping together twice a week, an arrangement we re both pretty satisfied with. But I’ve been trying very hard not to think too deeply about her. I don’t feel like marrying, either. If we got married, I’m sure I’d start to think deeply about her, and I have absolutely no confidence we’d be able to get along once that started. That’s the way it is, isn’t it? If you worry about the way the teeth of the girl you’re living with are aligned, or the shape of her nails, it won’t work out.

Please let me talk a little more about myself.

This time without any knocks.

If you’ve listened this far, please listen all the way to the end.

Just a moment. I’m going to have a cigarette.

(Rustle rustle)

... Up till now I’ve hardly ever said a thing about myself to anyone. ’Cause there’s nothing much to talk about. Even if I did, probably no one would be interested.

So why am 1 talking to you this way?

It’s because, like I said before, right now I am aiming at an enormous incompleteness.

What was it that touched off this huge incompleteness?

Your letter and four kangaroos.

Kangaroos.

Kangaroos are fascinating animals, and I never get tired of looking at them, no matter how many hours I watch. What are they thinking about? They jump meaninglessly round their enclosure all day, and occasionally dig holes in the ground. And what do they do with these holes they’ve dug? Nothing. They just dig holes. Ha ha ha.

A kangaroo gives birth to just one baby at a time. So a female kangaroo gets pregnant as soon as she’s given birth. If it weren’t that way they couldn’t maintain their numbers. A female kangaroo, then, spends nearly her whole life in pregnancy and raising young. If she isn’t pregnant, she’s raising them, if not raising them, then pregnant. So you can say that kangaroos exist to make kangaroos continue to exist. Without the existence of kangaroos, they wouldn’t continue to exist, and without the goal of continuing the existence of kangaroos, kangaroos themselves wouldn’t exist.

It’s a strange thing, isn’t it.

I’m sorry the order of what I’ve said has gotten all mixed up.

I’ll talk about myself.

Actually, I’m extremely frustrated by having to be myself. Not by my looks or ability or position. Just by my being myself. I feel it’s extremely unfair.

Now please don’t get the idea from this that I am a very frustrated person. I’ve never once complained about my job or salary. Sure, my job is pointless, but so arc most jobs. And money’s not a big problem.

Let me be more precise.

I want to be in two places at once. This is my one and only desire. Besides this I have no other desires.

But this separate entity known as me gets in the way of this desire. Don’t you think this is a very unhappy fact? This desire of mine is a modest one, I think. It’s not that I want to be the leader of the world or an artistic genius. Or to fly through the air. I just want to exist in two places at once. Not three or four, you understand, just two. While listening to an orchestra in a concert hall, I want to roller-skate. While being the head of a department store’s merchandise control, I want to also be a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. While sleeping with my girlfriend, I want to be sleeping with you. While being an individual, I also want to be a universal.

Let me have another cigarette.

Sigh ...

I’m a little tired.

I’m not used to this, talking so honestly about myself.

One thing I want to affirm: I don’t have any sexual desire towards you, a woman. As I said before, I am very angry at the fact that I can only be myself. Being a single individual makes me terribly unhappy. I can’t stand odd numbers. So I don’t want to sleep with you as you the individual.

How wonderful it’d be if you could be split in two, and I could be split in two, and those four people could share a bed. Don’t you agree?

Please don’t send a reply. If you want to send me a letter, send a letter or complaint in care of the company. If you don’t have any complaint to make, think of something.

Well, that’s all.

I just played the tape back up to this point. To tell you the truth, I’m not satisfied with it at all. I feel like the guy in charge of feeding animals at the aquarium who lets a sea lion die by mistake. I worried quite a lot about whether this tape’s something I should send to you or not.

Even now that I’ve decided to send it, I’m still worried.

At any rate, I’ve been aspiring to incompleteness, so I guess I should go along with it without any qualms. What supports it all are you and the four kangaroos.

Well, that’s all.

The Second Bakery Attack

Did you ever try to share something that impresses you very much with someone who impresses you very much, only to receive an impressive lack of appreciation?

It’s like taking landscape pictures from your vacation, and then showing them around. Just don’t bother.

This happened to me with Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a very talented, absorbing, inspiring writer who wrote the best short story I have ever read, “Sleep.” He also wrote the following story (which is shorter than “Sleep” and thus more transcription-friendly), which I numbed my little fingers typing out one day at work, risking my job, eyesight and circulation for the sake of e-mailing it to three ingrates whose puzzled, lackluster reactions made them unworthy of my suffering. (I mean, I was also really bored and, in retrospect, potentially a bit touched that day; but that’s beside the point.)

I guess we must choose our cultural battles carefully.

But if at least one person is searching for some electronic Murakami and is gratified by this page, my labor will not have been in vain.

I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I hadn’t been planning to bring it up—I had forgotten all about it—but it wasn’t one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either.

What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before two o’clock in the morning. We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty, and gone to sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger pangs.

Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.

I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design school. I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine—why can’t I remember the exact year we married?—and she was two years and eight months younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds.

We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. On the other hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kitchen, ending up across the table from each other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs?

We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked inside, the contents never changed. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions in the butter, but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite.

“Would madame care for some French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?”

I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. “Let’s get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant,” I said. “There must be one on the highway.”

She rejected that suggestion. “We can’t. You’re not supposed to go out to eat after midnight.” She was old-fashioned in that way.

I breathed once and said, “I guess not.”

Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe that’s what happens with newlyweds, I don’t know. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.

A special kind of hunger. And what might that be?

I can present it here in the form of a cinematic image.

One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water, I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water’s surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance.

This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my “I guess not.” Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyze with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation. Which is why—the almost grotesque intensity of my hunger notwithstanding—I all but automatically agreed with her thesis (or declaration).

We did the only thing we could do: opened the beer. It was a lot better than eating those onions. She didn’t like beer much, so we divided the cans, two for her, four for me. While I was drinking the first one, she searched the kitchen shelves like a squirrel in November. Eventually, she turned up a package that had four butter cookies in the bottom. They were leftovers, soft and soggy, but we each ate two, savoring every crumb.

It was no use. Upon this hunger of ours, as vast and boundless as the Sinai Peninsula, the butter cookies and beer left not a trace.

Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish’s gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turned the pages of yesterday’s paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs on the tabletop.

“I’ve never been this hungry in my whole life,” she said. “I wonder if it has anything to do with being married.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe not.”

While she hunted for more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had opened somewhere behind my solar plexus—a hermetically sealed cavern that had neither entrance nor exit. Something about this weird sense of absence—this sense of the existential reality of nonexistence—resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the very top of a high steeple. This connection between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me.

Which is when it occurred to me that I had once before had this same kind of experience. My stomach had been just as empty then ... When?... Oh, sure, that was—

“The time of the bakery attack,” I heard myself saying.

“The bakery attack? What are you talking about?”

And so it started.

“I once attacked a bakery. Long time ago. Not a big bakery. Not famous. The bread was nothing special. Not bad, either. One of those ordinary little neighborhood bakeries right in the middle of a block of shops. Some old guy ran it who did everything himself. Baked in the morning, and when he sold out, he closed up for the day.”

“If you were going to attack a bakery, why that one?”

“Well, there was no point in attacking a big bakery. All we wanted was bread, not money. We were attackers, not robbers.”

“We? Who’s we?”

“My best friend back then. Ten years ago. We were so broke we couldn’t buy toothpaste. Never had enough food. We did some pretty awful things to get our hands on food. The bakery attack was one.”

“I don’t get it.” She looked hard at me. Her eyes could have been searching for a faded star in the morning sky. “Why didn’t you get a job? You could have worked after school. That would have been easier than attacking bakeries.”

“We didn’t want to work. We were absolutely clear on that.”

“Well, you’re working now, aren’t you?”

I nodded and sucked some more beer. Then I rubbed my eyes. A kind of beery mud had oozed into my brain and was struggling with hunger pangs.

“Times change. People change,” I said. “Let’s go back to bed. We’ve got to get up early.”

“I’m not sleepy. I want you to tell me about the bakery attack.”

“There’s nothing to tell. No action. No excitement.”

“Was it a success?”

I gave up on sleep and ripped open another beer. Once she gets interested in a story, she has to hear it all the way through. That’s just the way she is.

“Well, it was kind of a success. And kind of not. We got what we wanted. But as a holdup, it didn’t work. The baker gave us the bread before we could take it from him.”

“Free?”

“Not exactly, no. That’s the hard part.” I shook my head. “The baker was a classical-music freak, and when we got there, he was listening to an album of Wagner overtures. So he made us a deal. If we would listen to the record all the way through, we could take as much bread as we liked. I talked it over with my buddy and we figured, Okay. It wouldn’t be work in the purest sense of the word, and it wouldn’t hurt anybody. So we put our knives back in our bag, pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened to the overtures to Tannhauser and The Flying Dutchman.”

“And after that, you got your bread?”

“Right. Most of what he had in the shop. Stuffed it in our bag and took it home. Kept us fed for maybe four or five days.” I took another sip. Like soundless waves from an undersea earthquake, my sleepiness gave my boat a long, slow rocking.

“Of course, we accomplished our mission. We got the bread. But you couldn’t say we had committed a crime. It was more of an exchange. We listened to Wagner with him, and in return, we got our bread. Legally speaking, it was more like a commercial transaction.”

“But listening to Wagner is not work,” she said.

“Oh, no, absolutely not. If the baker had insisted that we wash his dishes or clean his windows or something, we would have turned him down. But he didn’t. All he wanted from us was to listen to his Wagner LP from beginning to end. Nobody could have anticipated that. I mean—Wagner? It was like the baker put a curse on us. Now that I think of it, we should have refused. We should have threatened him with our knives and taken the damn bread. Then there wouldn’t have been any problem.”

“You had a problem?”

I rubbed my eyes again.

“Sort of. Nothing you could put your finger on. But things started to change after that. It was kind of a turning point. Like, I went back to the university, and I graduated, and I started working for the firm and studying the bar exam, and I met you and got married. I never did anything like that again. No more bakery attacks.”

“That’s it?”

“Yup, that’s all there was to it.” I drank the last of the beer. Now all six cans were gone. Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.

Of course, it wasn’t true that nothing had happened as a result of the bakery attack. There were plenty of things that you could have easily put your finger on, but I didn’t want to talk about them with her.

“So, this friend of yours, what’s he doing now?”

“I have no idea. Something happened, some nothing kind of thing, and we stopped hanging around together. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

For awhile, she didn’t speak. She probably sensed that I wasn’t telling her the whole story. But she wasn’t ready to press me on it.

“Still,” she said, “that’s why you two broke up, isn’t it? The bakery attack was the direct cause.”

“Maybe so. I guess it was more intense than either of us realized. We talked about the relationship of bread to Wagner for days after that. We kept asking ourselves if we had made the right choice. We couldn’t decide. Of course, if you look at it sensibly, we did make the right choice. Nobody got hurt. Everybody got what he wanted. The baker—I still can’t figure out why he did what he did—but anyway, he succeeded with his Wagner propaganda. And we succeeded in stuffing our faces with bread.

“But even so, we had this feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. And somehow, this mistake has just stayed there, unresolved, casting a dark shadow on our lives. That’s why I used the word ‘curse.’ It’s true. It was like a curse.”

“Do you think you still have it?”

I took the six pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of a bracelet.

“Who knows? I don’t know. I bet the world is full of curses. It’s hard to tell which curse makes any one thing go wrong.”

“That’s not true.” She looked right at me. “You can tell, if you think about it. And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it’ll stick with you like a toothache. It’ll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too.”

“You?”

“Well, I’m your best friend now, aren’t I? Why do you think we’re both so hungry? I never, ever, once in my life felt a hunger like this until I married you. Don’t you think it’s abnormal? Your curse is working on me, too.”

I nodded. Then I broke up the ring of pull-tabs and put them back in the ashtray. I didn’t know if she was right, but I did feel she was onto something.

The feeling of starvation was back, stronger than ever, and it was giving me a deep headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to the core of my head by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds of complicated machinery.

I took another look at my undersea volcano. The water was clearer than before—much clearer. Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely nothing to support it. I could see every little pebble on the bottom. All I had to do was reach out and touch them.

“We’ve only been living together for two weeks,” she said, “but all this time I’ve been feeling some kind of weird presence.” She looked directly into my eyes and brought her hands together on the tabletop, her fingers interlocking. “Of course, I didn’t know it was a curse until now. This explains everything. You’re under a curse.”

“What kind of presence?”

“Like there’s this heavy, dusty curtain that hasn’t been washed for years, hanging down from the ceiling.”

“Maybe it’s not a curse. Maybe it’s just me,” I said, and smiled.

She did not smile.

“No, it’s not you,” she said.

“Okay, supposed you’re right. Suppose it is a curse. What can I do about it?”

“Attack another bakery. Right away. Now. It’s the only way.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now. While you’re still hungry. You have to finish what you left unfinished.”

“But it’s the middle of the night. Would a bakery be open now?”

“We’ll find one. Tokyo’s a big city. There must be at least one all-night bakery.”

We got into my old Corolla and started drifting around the streets of Tokyo at 2:30 a.m., looking for a bakery. There we were, me clutching the steering wheel, she in the navigator’s seat, the two of us scanning the street like hungry eagles in search of prey. Stretched out on the backseat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the pocket of my wife’s windbreaker. We had two black ski masks in the glove compartment. Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. Married life is weird, I felt.

Impeccably equipped, we were nevertheless unable to find an all-night bakery. I drove through the empty streets, from Yoyogi to Shinjuku, on to Yosuya and Akasaka, Aoyama, Hiroo, Roppongi, Daikanyama, and Shibuya. Late-night Tokyo had all kinds of people and shops, but no bakeries.

Twice we encountered patrol cars. One was huddled at the side of the road, trying to look inconspicuous. The other slowly overtook us and crept past, finally moving off into the distance. Both times I grew damp under the arms, but my wife’s concentration never faltered. She was looking for that bakery. Every time she shifted the angle of her body, the shotgun shells in her pocket rustled like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow.

“Let’s forget it,” I said. “There aren’t any bakeries open at this time of night. You’ve got to plan for this kind of thing or else—”

“Stop the car!”

I slammed on the brakes.

“This is the place,” she said.

The shops along the street had their shutters rolled down, forming dark, silent walls on either side. A barbershop sign hung in the dark like a twisted, chilling glass eye. There was a bright McDonald’s hamburger sign some two hundred yards ahead, but nothing else.

“I don’t see any bakery,” I said.

Without a word, she opened the glove compartment and pulled out a roll of cloth-backed tape. Holding this, she stepped out of the car. I got out on my side. Kneeling at the front end, she tore off a length of tape and covered the numbers on the license plate. Then she went around to the back and did the same. There was a practiced efficiency to her movements. I stood on the curb staring at her.

“We’re going to take that McDonald’s,” she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what we would have for dinner.

“McDonald’s is not a bakery,” I pointed out to her.

“It’s like a bakery,” she said. “Sometimes you have to compromise. Let’s go.”

I drove to the McDonald’s and parked in the lot. She handed me the blanket-wrapped shotgun.

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life,” I protested.

“You don’t have to fire it. Just hold it. Okay? Do as I say. We walk right in, and as soon as they say, ‘Welcome to McDonald’s,’ we slip on our masks. Got that?”

“Sure, but—”

“Then you shove the gun in their faces and make all the workers and customers get together. Fast. I’ll do the rest.”

“But—”

“How many hamburgers do you think we’ll need? Thirty?”

“I guess so.” With a sigh, I took the shotgun and rolled back the blanket a little. The thing was as heavy as a sandbag and as black as a dark night.

“Do we really have to do this?” I asked, half to her and half to myself.

“Of course we do.”

Wearing a McDonald’s hat, the girl behind the counter flashed me a McDonald’s smile and said, “Welcome to McDonald’s.” I hadn’t thought that girls would work at McDonald’s late at night, so the sight of her confused me for a second. But only for a second. I caught myself and pulled on the mask. Confronted with this suddenly masked duo, the girl gaped at us.

Obviously, the McDonald’s hospitality manual said nothing about how do deal with a situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that comes after “Welcome to McDonald’s,” but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the words wouldn’t come out. Even so, like a crescent moon in the dawn sky, the hint of a professional smile lingered at the edges of her lips.

As quickly as I could manage, I unwrapped the shotgun and aimed it in the direction of the tables, but the only customers there were a young couple—students, probably—and they were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned on the table like an avant-garde sculpture. They slept the sleep of the dead. They didn’t look likely to obstruct our operation, so I swung my shotgun back toward the counter.

All together, there were three McDonald’s workers. The girl at the counter, the manager—a guy with a pale, egg-shaped face, probably in his late twenties—and a student type in the kitchen—a thin shadow of a guy with nothing on his face that you could read as an expression. They stood together behind the register, staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an Incan well. No one screamed, and no one made a threatening move. The gun was so heavy I had to rest the barrel on top of the cash register, my finger on the trigger.

“I’ll give you the money,” said the manager, his voice hoarse. “They collected it at eleven, so we don’t have too much, but you can have everything. We’re insured.”

“Lower the front shutter and turn off the sign,” said my wife.

“Wait a minute,” said the manager. “I can’t do that. I’ll be held responsible if I close up without permission.”

My wife repeated her order, slowly. He seemed torn.

“You’d better do what she says,” I warned him.

He looked at the muzzle of the gun atop the register, then at my wife, and then back at the gun. He finally resigned himself to the inevitable. He turned off the sign and hit a switch on an electrical panel that lowered the shutter. I kept my eye on him, worried that he might hit a burglar alarm, but apparently McDonald’s don’t have burglar alarms. Maybe it had never occurred to anybody to attack one.

The front shutter made a huge racket when it closed, like an empty bucket being smashed with a baseball bat, but the couple sleeping at their table was still out cold. Talk about a sound sleep: I hadn’t seen anything like that in years.

“Thirty Big Macs. For takeout,” said my wife.

“Let me just give you the money,” pleaded the manager. “I’ll give you more than you need. You can go buy food somewhere else. This is going to mess up my accounts and—”

“You’d better do what she says,” I said again.

The three of them went into the kitchen area together and started making the thirty Big Macs. The student grilled the burgers, the manager put them in buns, and the girl wrapped them up. Nobody said a word.

I leaned against a big refrigerator, aiming the gun toward the griddle. The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest corners, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, clinging to its pink walls.

A pile of white-wrapped burgers was growing nearby. I wanted to grab and tear into them, but I could not be certain that such an act would be consistent with our objective. I had to wait. In the hot kitchen area, I started sweating under my ski mask.

The McDonald’s people sneaked glances at the muzzle of the shotgun. I scratched my ears with the little finger of my left hand. My ears always get itchy when I’m nervous. Jabbing my finger into an ear through the wool, I was making the gun barrel wobble up and down, which seemed to bother them. It couldn’t have gone off accidentally, because I had the safety on, but they didn’t know that and I wasn’t about to tell them.

My wife counted the finished hamburgers and put them into two small shopping bags, fifteen burgers to a bag.

“Why do you have to do this?” the girl asked me. “Why don’t you just take the money and buy something you like? What’s the good of eating thirty Big Macs?”

I shook my head.

My wife explained, “We’re sorry, really. But there weren’t any bakeries open. If there had been, we would have attacked a bakery.”

That seemed to satisfy them. At least they didn’t ask any more questions. Then my wife ordered two large Cokes from the girl and paid for them.

“We’re stealing bread, nothing else,” she said. The girl responded with a complicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt.

My wife then pulled a ball of twine from her pocket—she came equipped—and tied the three to a post as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord hurt, or if anyone wanted to go to the toilet, but no one said a word. I wrapped the gun in the blanket, she picked up the shopping bags, and out we went. The customers at the table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?

We drove for a half hour, found an empty parking lot by a building, and pulled in. There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Macs in the back seat. Our hunger—that hunger that had felt as if it could go on forever—vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building’s filthy walls purple and made a giant SONY BETA ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed Forces radio was playing cowboy music. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.

“Still was it really necessary for us. to do this?” I asked.

“Of course it was!” With one deep sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft and as light as a kitten.

Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone. The water’s calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves—like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze—lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else.

I stretched out in the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.

A Fine Day for Kangarooing

Translated by Christopher Allison

Inside the fence, there were four kangaroos: one male, two females, and one baby that had just been born.

In front of the fence, there was no one but her and I. It wasn’t the most popular zoo around under any circumstances, but to make matters worse, it was Monday morning. Animals outnumbered visitors by a fair margin.

Our objective was, of course, the kangaroo baby. It didn’t occur to us that we should look at anything else.

We had read in the local section of the newspaper that a kangaroo baby had been born about a month before. So, for one month we had continued to await a morning suitable for going to see the new kangaroo. One morning, it rained. The next morning, naturally, it continued to rain. Then, the next day after that, the ground was too muddy, and for a couple more days an annoying wind was blowing. Then, she had a painful cavity, and I had pressing business at the ward office.

A month had passed in such fashion.

Somehow, I had lost an entire month. When I tried to think of what had happened to it, I couldn’t remember a thing. I felt like I’d done a lot of things, but I also felt like I’d done nothing at all. Until the guy had come around collecting for the newspaper at the end of the month, I didn’t realize that a whole month had gone by.

But at last a good kangaroo-viewing morning arrived. We got up at six, opened the curtains, and confirmed in an instant that it was a fine day for kangarooing. We washed our faces, finished breakfast, fed the cat, did a little laundry and, putting on our sun visors, we went out.

“Hey, I wonder if the kangaroo baby is still alive,” she asked me while we were on the train.

“Yeah, I think so. If it had died, there would have been a newspaper story or something.”

“I bet it’s sick and they took it to a hospital somewhere.”

“That would have been in the newspaper, too.”

“Maybe it’s afflicted with neurosis.”

“The baby?”

“Of course not. The mother. They probably have her locked up inside some dark room with her baby.”

I’m always quite impressed by the range of possibilities that occurs to girls.

“I just have this feeling that if I let this chance escape, I won’t be able to see a baby kangaroo ever again.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, what about you? Have you ever seen a kangaroo baby before?”

“No.”

“Up to now, did you ever believe that you would see one?”

“I don’t know. It had never really occurred to me.”

“That’s why I’m worried.”

“But wait a minute,” I protested. “While everything you知e said is true, I’ve never seen a giraffe being born either, or a whale swimming in the ocean. Why is it that now only the baby kangaroo is a problem?”

“Because it’s a baby kangaroo,” she said.

I gave up, and glanced through the newspaper. I have yet to win a single discussion with a girl.

The kangaroo baby was, of course, still alive. He (or she) had grown much bigger than in the pictures in the newspaper, and was hopping around energetically in the kangaroo enclosure. He wasn’t so much a baby anymore as a small kangaroo. This fact seemed to disappoint her a little.

“It’s like it’s not a baby anymore.”

“It still looks like a baby,” I reassured her.

“We should have come sooner.”

I went to a small shop and bought chocolate ice cream, and when I came back she was still leaning on the fence staring at the kangaroo.

“It’s not a baby anymore,” she repeated.

“Really?” I said, handing her an ice cream cone.

“If it was a baby, it would be in it’s mother’s pouch.”

Nodding in acquiescence, I licked my ice cream.

“But it’s not.”

We spent a moment trying to discern which was the mother kangaroo. The father kangaroo we identified immediately. He was by far the biggest and quietest kangaroo there. He had a talent for staring at the green leaves in the feed box with an expression like a washed-up composer. The other two were females and had almost the same build, were almost the same color, had almost the same expression. Which one was the mother was no laughing matter.

“So, one of them is the mother, and one of them is not,” I said.

“Right.”

“That being the case, which one is not the mother?”

I don’t know, she said.

At any rate, the child of that inhospitable kangaroo was running all over the place, senselessly digging holes in the ground here and there with it’s front legs. He/she seemed to have a life that knew no boredom. He ran around and around his father, gnawed on a little roughage, dug holes in the ground, reproved the two female kangaroos, lay down on the ground, and then got up again and ran around some more.

“Why do kangaroos hop so quickly,” she asked.

“To escape from their enemies.”

“Enemies? What kind of enemies?”

“Humans,” I said. “Humans kill kangaroos with boomerangs and eat their meat.”

“Why do baby kangaroos get in their mothers・pouches?”

“So they can run away together. Babies can’t run that fast.”

“It’s for protection?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Everybody protects their young.”

“How long are they protected for?”

I should have gotten all my information concerning kangaroos from an animal picture book. Then I would have known everything from the start.

“Probably somewhere around one or two months.”

“OK, so that one’s still only one month old,” she said, pointing at the baby kangaroo. “It must still get in its mother’s pouch.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably so.”

“Wow. Wouldn’t it be great to get in that pouch?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I bet it would be just like returning to the womb.”

“I wonder.”

“Of course it is.”

The sun had gotten really hot. You could hear the cheers of the kids playing in the nearby pool. Billowy clouds floated in the summer sky.

“You want something to eat?” I asked her.

“A hotdog,” she said. “And a Coke.”

The hotdog vendor was a young college-age girl, and she had brought a boom box along with her inside the wagon. I listened to songs by Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel while I waited for our hotdogs to cook.

When I returned to the kangaroo pen, she said “Look!” pointing at one of the female kangaroos.

“Look, it got in her pouch.”

Sure enough, the baby was tucked away in its mother’s pouch. The stomach pouch was pretty swollen, and just its little pointy ears and the tip of its tail poked out from the top.

“I wonder if he’s heavy.”

“Kangaroos are strong.”

“Really?”

“Which is why they’ve been able to survive this long.”

The mother kangaroo, standing in that blistering sunlight didn’t have a single drop of sweat on her. She reminded me of a mother going to pick up the groceries at a supermarket on Aoyama-dori, and then stopping by the coffee shop for a quick break.

“Because they look after their young?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder if he’s sleeping.”

“Maybe.”

We ate our hotdogs, drank our Cokes, and hung out in front of the kangaroo cage. When it came time to leave, the father kangaroo was still searching around in the feed box for a lost note. The mother kangaroo and the baby rested their bodies together as one, and that mysterious other female kangaroo hopped around in the center of the cage as if she was testing the condition of her tail.

It was the hottest day we had had in a long time. “Hey, you wanna go drink beer?” she said.

“Great,” I said.

A Poor-Aunt Story

Translated by Jay Rubin.

Issue of 2001-12-03

It started on a perfectly beautiful Sunday afternoon in July—the very first Sunday afternoon in July. Two or three chunks of cloud, white and tiny in a distant corner of the sky, were like punctuation marks placed with exceptional care. Unobstructed, the light of the sun poured down on the world. In this kingdom of July, even a crumpled silver sphere of a chocolate wrapper discarded on the lawn gave off a proud sparkle, like a crystal at the bottom of a lake. If you stared at the scene for long enough, you could see that the sunlight was enfolding yet another kind of light, like one Chinese box inside another. The inner light seemed to be made up of countless grains of pollen—grains that hung in the sky, almost motionless, until finally they drifted down to the surface of the earth.

I had gone for a stroll with a friend, and on the way home we stopped in the plaza outside the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. Sitting by the pond, we gazed across the water at two bronze unicorns on the opposite shore. A breeze was stirring the leaves of the oak trees and raising tiny ripples on the pond’s surface. Time seemed to move like the breeze: starting and stopping, stopping and starting. Soda cans shone through the clear water, like the sunken ruins of a lost city. Before us passed a softball team in uniform, a boy on a bicycle, an old man walking his dog, a young foreigner in jogging shorts. We caught snatches of music from a large portable radio on the grass: a sugary song about love soon to be lost. I thought I recognized the tune, but could not be certain. It may have just sounded like one I knew. I could feel my bare arms silently soaking up the sunlight. Summer was here.

Why a poor aunt, of all things, should have taken hold of my heart on a Sunday afternoon like this I have no idea. There was no poor aunt to be seen in the vicinity, nothing to make me imagine the existence of one. But a poor aunt came to me, nonetheless, and then she was gone. If only for a hundredth of a second, she had been inside me. And when she moved on she left a strange, human-shaped emptiness behind. It felt as if someone had raced past a window and disappeared—I ran to the window and stuck my head out, but no one was there.

A poor aunt?

I tried the words out on my companion. “I’d like to write something about a poor aunt,” I said.

“A poor aunt?” She seemed a bit surprised. “Why a poor aunt?”

I didn’t know why. For some reason, the things that grabbed me were always things I didn’t understand. I said nothing for a time, just ran my finger along the edge of that human-shaped

emptiness inside me.

“I wonder if anybody would want to read a story like that,” my companion said.

“True,” I said. “It might not be what you’d call a good read.”

“Then why write about such a thing?”

“I can’t put it into words very well,” I said. “In order to explain why I want to write a story about a

poor aunt, I’d have to write the story. But once the story was finished there wouldn’t be any need to

explain the reason for writing the story—or would there?”

She smiled and lit a crumpled cigarette she’d taken from her pocket. Her cigarettes were always

crumpled, sometimes so badly they wouldn’t light. This one lit.

“Do you have any poor aunts among your relatives?” she asked.

“Not a one,” I said.

“Well, I do. Exactly one. The genuine article. I even lived with her for a few years.”

I watched her eyes. They were as calm as ever.

“But I don’t want to write about her,” she added. “I don’t want to write a single word about that aunt

of mine.”

The portable radio started playing a different tune, much like the first, but this one I didn’t recognize

at all.

“You don’t have a single poor aunt in your family, but still you want to write a poor-aunt story.

Meanwhile, I have a real, live poor aunt, but I don’t want to write about her.”

I nodded. “I wonder why that is.”

She tipped her head a little and said nothing. With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to

trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were running through her fingers and down to the ruined city beneath the water.

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “there are some things I’d like to say about my poor aunt. But it’s impossible for me to come up with the right words. I just can’t do it, because I know a real poor aunt.” She bit her lip. “It’s hard—a lot harder than you seem to realize.”

I looked up at the bronze unicorns again, their front hooves thrust out as if in angry protest at the flow of time for leaving them behind. She wiped her fingers on the hem of her shirt. “You’re going to try to write about a poor aunt,” she said. “You’re going to take on this task. I wonder whether you are capable of it just now. You don’t even have a real poor aunt.”

I released a long, deep sigh. “Sorry,” she said.

“That’s O.K.,” I replied. “You’re probably right.”

And she was.

Huh. Like lines from a song.

Chances are you don’t have a poor aunt among your relatives, either. In which case we have something in common. But you must at least have seen a poor aunt at someone’s wedding. Just as every bookshelf has a book no one has read and every closet has a shirt that has never been worn, every wedding reception has a poor aunt.

No one bothers to introduce her. No one talks to her. No one asks her to give a speech. She just sits at the table, like an empty milk bottle. With sad little slurps she consumes her consommé. She eats her salad with her fish fork, and she’s the only one who doesn’t have a spoon when the ice cream comes.

Her picture is there, all right, whenever they pull out the wedding album, but her image is as cheering as a drowned corpse.

“Honey, who’s this woman here, in the second row, with glasses?”

“Never mind, that’s nobody,” the young husband says. “Just a poor aunt of mine.”

No name. Just a poor aunt.

All names fade away, of course. There are those whose names fade the minute they die. There are those who go out like an old television set, leaving snow flickering across the screen, until suddenly one day it burns out completely. And then there are those whose names fade even before they die—the poor aunts. I myself fall into this poor-aunt state of namelessness now and then. In the bustle of a train station or airport terminal, my destination, my name, my address are suddenly no longer there in my brain. But this never lasts long: five or ten seconds at the most.

And sometimes this happens: “For the life of me, I can’t remember your name,” someone says.

“Never mind. Don’t let it bother you. It’s not much of a name, anyway.”

Over and over, he points to his mouth. “It’s right here, on the tip of my tongue, I swear.”

I feel as if I’ve been buried in the earth with half of my left foot sticking out. People trip over it and start to apologize. “I swear, it’s right here, on the tip of my tongue.”

Where do the lost names go? The probability of their surviving in this maze of a city must be extremely low. Still, there may be some that do survive and find their way to the town of lost names, where they build a quiet little community. A tiny town, with a sign at the entrance that reads “No Admittance Except on Business.” Those who dare to enter without business receive an

Perhaps that was why a tiny punishment had been prepared for me. A poor aunt—a little

one—was stuck to my back.

It was the middle of August when I first realized that she was there. Nothing in particular happened

to alert me to her presence. I simply felt it one day: I had a poor aunt on my back. It was not an

unpleasant sensation. She wasn’t especially heavy. She didn’t puff bad breath across my shoulder.

She was just stuck there, on my back, like a shadow. People had to look hard even to see that she

was there. True, the cats I shared my apartment with gave her suspicious looks for the first few

days, but as soon as they understood that she had no designs on their territory they got used to her.

She made some of my friends nervous. We’d be sitting at a table with drinks and she’d peek over

my shoulder.

“She gives me the creeps,” one friend said.

“Don’t let her bother you. She minds her own business. She’s harmless enough.”

“I know, I know. But I don’t know—she’s depressing.”

“So try not to look.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Then a sigh. “Where’d you have to go to get something like that on your back?”

“It’s not that I went anywhere. I just kept thinking about some things. That’s all.”

He nodded and sighed again. “I think I get it. It’s your personality. You’ve always been like this.”

“Uh-huh.”

We downed several whiskeys over the next hour without much enthusiasm.

“Tell me,” I said. “What’s so depressing about her?”

Judging by the impressions of a number of people (since I myself was unable to see her), what I had on my back was not a poor aunt with a single, fixed form: she seemed to change shape according to the person who was observing her, as though she were made of ether.

For one friend, she was a dog of his, an Akita, who had died the previous fall from cancer of the esophagus.

“She was on her last legs, anyway, I guess. Fifteen years old. But what an awful way to die, poor thing.”

“Cancer of the esophagus?”

“Yeah. It’s really painful. All she did was cry—though she had pretty much lost her voice by then. I wanted to put her to sleep, but my mother wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“Who the hell knows? We kept the dog alive for two months on a feeding tube. Out in the shed.

God, what a stench.”

He was silent for a while.

“She wasn’t much of a dog. Scared of her own shadow. Barked at everybody who came by. A

really useless animal. Noisy, covered with scabs.”

I nodded.

“She’d have been better off born a cicada. Could have screamed her head off and nobody would

have given a damn. No cancer of the esophagus, either.”

But there she was, up on my back still, a dog with a plastic tube sticking out of her.

For a real-estate agent I knew, my poor aunt was his old elementary-school teacher.

“Must have been 1950, the first year of the Korean War,” he said, using a thick towel to wipe the sweat from his face. “I had her two years in a row. It’s like old times seeing her again. Not that I missed her, exactly. I’d forgotten she even existed.”

The way he offered me a cup of ice-cold barley tea, he seemed to think I must be some kind of relative of his old elementary-school teacher.

“She was a sad case, come to think of it. Husband got drafted the year they were married. He was on a transport ship, and boom! Must have been ‘43. She stayed on teaching school after that. Got bad burns in the air raids of ‘44. Left side of her face, down to her arm.” He drew an arc from his cheek to his left arm. Then he drained his cup of tea and wiped his face again. “Poor thing. She must have been pretty before that happened. Changed her personality, too. She’d be near eighty if she’s still alive.”

At the same time, my friends began to drop away from me, the way teeth fall out of a comb. “He’s not a bad guy,” they would say, “but I don’t want to have to look at my depressing old mother”—or the dog that died of esophageal cancer, or the teacher with her burn scars—“whenever I see him.”

I was beginning to feel like a dentist’s chair—not hated but avoided by everyone. If I bumped into friends on the street, they’d find some reason to get away as soon as possible. “I don’t know,” one girl confessed with difficulty—and honesty. “It’s hard to be around you these days. I wouldn’t mind so much if you had an umbrella stand on your back or something.”

An umbrella stand.

While friends avoided me, the media couldn’t get enough of me. Reporters would show up every couple of days, take photos of me and the aunt, complain when her image didn’t come out clearly, and shower me with pointless questions. I kept hoping that if I coöperated with them they’d lead me to a new discovery or explanation with regard to the poor aunt, but instead they just exhausted me.

Once, I appeared on a morning show. They dragged me out of bed at six o’clock, drove me to the TV studio, and filled me full of terrible coffee. Incomprehensible people ran around me doing incomprehensible things. I thought about leaving, but before I could bring myself to do it they said it was my turn. When the cameras weren’t on, the show’s host was a grumpy, arrogant bastard who did nothing but attack the people around him, but the second the camera’s red light lit he was all smiles and intelligence: your regulation middle-aged nice guy.

“And now it’s time for our daily feature, ‘Look What Else Is Out There,’” he announced to the camera. “Today’s guest is Mr. ______, who suddenly found he had a poor aunt on his back. Not many people have this particular problem, and what I’d like to do today is ask our guest how it happened to him, and what kind of difficulties he’s had to face.” Turning to me, he continued, “Do you find having a poor aunt on your back in any way inconvenient?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t exactly call it inconvenient. She’s not heavy, and I don’t have to feed her.”

“No lower-back pain?”

“No, none at all.”

“When did you find her stuck there?”

I briefly summarized my afternoon by the pond with the bronze unicorns, but he seemed unable to grasp my point.

“In other words,” he said, clearing his throat, “she was lurking in the pond near where you were sitting, and she possessed your back. Is that it?”

No, I said, shaking my head, that was not it.

How had I let myself in for this? All they wanted was jokes or horror stories.

“The poor aunt is not a ghost,” I tried to explain. “She doesn’t ‘lurk’ anywhere, and she doesn’t ‘possess’ anybody. The poor aunt is just words,” I said. “Just words.”

No one said anything. I would have to be more specific.

“A word is like an electrode connected to the mind. If you keep sending the same stimulus through it, there is bound to be some kind of response, some effect. Each individual’s response will be different, of course, and in my case the response is something like a sense of independent existence. What I have stuck to my back, really, is the phrase ‘poor aunt’—those words, without meaning, without form. If I had to give it a label, I’d call it a conceptual sign or something like that.”

The host looked confused. “You say it has no meaning or form,” he observed, “but we can clearly see ... something ... some real image there on your back. And it gives rise to some sort of meaning in each of us.”

I shrugged. “Of course,” I said. “That’s what signs do.”

“So,” the host’s young female assistant interjected, in the hope of easing the atmosphere, “you could just erase this image or this being, or whatever it is, if you wanted to.”

“No, I can’t,” I said. “Once something has come into being, it continues to exist independent of my will. It’s like a memory—a memory you wish you could forget but you can’t. It’s just like that.”

She went on, seemingly unconvinced: “This process you mentioned of turning a word into a conceptual sign, is that something even I could do?”

“I can’t say how well it would work, but in principle, at least, you could,” I answered.

Now the host got into the act. “Say if I were to keep repeating the word ‘conceptual’ over and over every day, the image of ‘conceptual’ might appear on my back, is that it?”

“In principle, at least, that could happen,” I repeated mechanically. The strong lights and stale air of the studio were beginning to give me a headache.

“What would a ‘conceptual’ look like?” the host ventured, drawing laughter from some of the other guests.

I said I didn’t know. It was not something I wanted to think about. My hands were full already with just one poor aunt. None of them really gave a damn about any of this. All they were concerned about was keeping the patter alive until the next commercial.

The whole world is a farce. From the glare of a TV studio to the gloom of a hermit’s cabin in the woods, it all comes down to the same thing. Walking through this clownish world with the poor aunt on my back, I was the biggest clown of all. Maybe the girl had been right: I’d have been better off with an umbrella stand. I could have painted it a new color twice a month and taken it to parties.

“All riiight! Your umbrella stand is pink this week!” someone might say.

“Sure,” I’d answer. “Next week I’m going for British racing green.”

Perhaps there were girls out there who were eager to get into bed with a guy wearing a pink umbrella stand on his back. Unfortunately, though, what I had on my back was not an umbrella stand but a poor aunt. As time passed, people’s interest in me and in the poor aunt on my back

“I saw you on TV,” my friend said. We were sitting by the pond again. I hadn’t seen her for three months. It was now early autumn. The time had shot by. We had never gone so long without seeing each other.

“You looked a little tired.”

“I was.”

“You weren’t yourself.”

I nodded. It was true: I hadn’t been myself.

She kept folding and unfolding a sweatshirt on her knees.

“So you finally succeeded in getting your own poor aunt.”

“Yes.”

She smiled, caressing the soft sweatshirt on her knees as if it were a cat.

“Do you understand her better now?”

“A little,” I said. “I think.”

“And has it helped you to write something?”

“Nope.” I gave my head a little shake. “Not a thing. The urge to write just isn’t there. Maybe I’ll

never be able to do it.”

She was silent for a while.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said finally. “Ask me some questions. I’ll try to help out a little.”

“As the poor-aunt authority?”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled. “Fire away. I feel like answering poor-aunt questions right now, and I may

never want to again.”

I didn’t know where to start.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I wonder what kind of person becomes a poor aunt. Are they born that way? Or does it take special poor-aunt conditions? Is there some kind of bug that turns people into poor

aunts?”

She nodded several times as if to say that these were very good questions.

“Both,” she said. “They’re the same thing.”

“The same thing?”

“Uh-huh. Well, look. A poor aunt might have had a poor-aunt childhood. Or she might not. It really

doesn’t matter. There are millions of reasons floating around the world for millions of results.

Millions of reasons to live, and millions of reasons to die. Millions of reasons for giving reasons.

Reasons like that are easy to come by. But what you’re looking for is not one of those, is it?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess not.”

“She exists. That’s all. Your poor aunt is there. You have to recognize that fact and accept it. She

exists. And that’s what a poor aunt is. Her existence is her reason. Just like us. We exist here and

now, without any particular reason or cause.”

We sat by the pond for a long time, neither of us moving or speaking. The clear autumn sunlight

cast shadows on her face.

“Well,” she said, “aren’t you going to ask me what I see on your back?”

“What do you see on my back?”

“Nothing at all,” she said with a smile. “I see only you.”

Time, of course, topples everyone, but the thrashing that most of us receive is frightfully gentle. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten. In a poor aunt, however, we can actually witness the tyranny of time. It has squeezed the poor aunt like an orange, until there’s not a single drop of juice left. What draws me to the poor aunt is that completeness of hers, that utter perfection.

She is like a corpse sealed inside a glacier—a magnificent glacier with ice like steel. Only ten thousand years of sunshine could melt such a glacier. But no poor aunt can live for ten thousand years, and so she will have to live with her perfection, die with her perfection, and be buried with

It was late in autumn when the poor aunt left my back. Recalling some work I had to complete before the winter, I boarded a suburban train with my poor aunt on my back. Like any suburban train in the afternoon, it was practically empty. This was my first trip out of the city for quite some time, and I enjoyed watching the scenery go by. The air was crisp and clear, the hills almost unnaturally green, and here and there along the tracks there were trees with bright-red berries.

Sitting across the aisle from me on the return trip were a skinny woman in her mid-thirties and her two children. The older child, a girl in a navy-blue serge dress and a gray felt hat with a red ribbon—a kindergarten uniform—sat on her mother’s left. On the mother’s right sat a boy who was perhaps three years old. Nothing about the mother or her children was particularly noteworthy. Their faces, their clothing were ordinary in the extreme. The mother held a large package. She looked tired, but then most mothers look tired. I had hardly noticed them boarding the train.

Not long afterward, however, sounds from the little girl began to reach me across the aisle. There was an edge to her voice, an urgency that suggested pleading.

Then I heard the mother say, “I told you to keep still on the train!” She had a magazine spread open on top of her bundle and seemed reluctant to tear her eyes from it.

“But, Mama, look at what he’s doing to my hat,” the little girl said.

“Just shut up!”

The girl made as if to speak, but then she swallowed her words. The little boy was holding the hat that she’d been wearing earlier, and he kept pawing it and pulling on it. The girl reached out and tried to grab it back, but he twisted himself away, determined to keep it out of her grasp.

“He’s going to ruin my hat,” the girl said, on the verge of tears.

The mother glanced up from her magazine with a look of annoyance and went through the motions of reaching for the hat, but the boy clamped both his hands on the brim and refused to give it up. “Let him play with it for a while,” she said to the girl. “He’ll get bored soon enough.” The girl did not look convinced, but she didn’t try to argue. She pursed her lips and glared at the hat in her brother’s hands. Encouraged by his mother’s indifference, the boy started yanking at the red ribbon. He clearly knew that this would drive his sister crazy—and it had that effect on me as well. I was ready to stomp across the aisle and snatch the thing out of his hands.

The girl stared at her brother in silence, but you could see that she had a plan. Then, all of a sudden, she got to her feet and slapped him hard on the cheek. In the stunned moment that followed, she grabbed the hat and returned to her seat. She did this with such speed and dispatch that it took the interval of one deep breath before the mother and brother realized what had happened. As the brother let out a wail, the mother smacked the girl’s bare knee. She then turned to comfort the boy, but he kept on wailing.

“But, Mama, he was ruining my hat,” the little girl said.

“Don’t talk to me,” the mother said. “You don’t belong to me anymore.”

The girl looked down, staring at her hat.

“Get away from me,” the mother said. “Go over there.” She pointed at the empty seat next to me.

The girl looked away, trying to ignore her mother’s outstretched finger, but it continued pointing to my left, as if it were frozen in midair.

“Go on,” the mother insisted. “You’re not part of this family anymore.”

Resigned to her fate, the girl stood up with her hat and schoolbag, trudged across the aisle, and sat down next to me, her head bowed. Hat on her lap, she tried to smooth its brim with her little fingers. It’s his fault, she was clearly thinking. He was going to tear the ribbon off my hat. Her cheeks were streaked with tears.

It was almost evening now. Dull yellow light filtered down from the train ceiling like dust from the wings of a doleful moth. It hovered there to be silently inhaled through the passengers’ mouths and noses. I closed my book. Resting my hands on my knees, I stared at my upturned palms for a long time. When had I last studied my hands like this? In the smoky light, they seemed grimy, even dirty—not like my hands at all. The sight of them filled me with sadness: these were hands that would never make anyone happy, that would never save anyone. I wanted to place a reassuring hand on the shoulder of the little girl sobbing next to me, to tell her that she had been right, that she had done a great job, taking the hat that way. But of course I didn’t touch her or speak to her. It would only have confused and frightened her more. And, besides, those hands of mine were so dirty.

By the time I left the train, a cold winter wind was blowing. Soon the sweater season would be

over, and the time for thick winter coats would be upon us. I thought about coats for a while, trying

to decide whether or not to buy myself a new one. I was already down the stairs and out the gate

before I became aware that the poor aunt had vanished from my back.

I had no idea when it had happened. Just as she had come, she had gone. She had gone back to

wherever it was that she had existed before, and I was my original self again.

But what was my original self? I couldn’t be sure anymore. I couldn’t help feeling that this was

another me, another self that strongly resembled my original self. So now what was I to do? I had

lost all sense of direction. I shoved my hand in my pocket and fed every piece of change I found

there into a pay phone. Eight rings. Nine. And then she answered.

“I was sleeping,” she said with a yawn.

“At six o’clock in the evening?”

“I was up all last night working. Just finished two hours ago.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. “This may sound strange, but I called just to make sure

you’re still alive. That’s all. Really.”

I could feel her smiling into the phone.

“Thanks. That was nice of you,” she said. “Don’t worry, though. I’m still alive. And I’m working

my tail off to stay alive. Which is why I’m dead tired. O.K.? Are you relieved?”

“I’m relieved.”

“You know,” she said, as if she were about to share a secret with me, “life is pretty damn hard.”

“I know,” I said. And she was right. “How would you like to have dinner with me?”

In the silence at her end, I could sense her biting her lip and touching her little finger to her

eyebrow.

“Not right now,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. “We’ll talk later. You have to let me sleep

now. Everything will be fine if I can just sleep a little. I’ll call you when I wake up. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” I said. “Good night.”

“You, too. Good night.”

She hesitated a moment. “Was it some kind of emergency—what you wanted to talk about?”

“No, no emergency,” I said. “We can talk about it later.”

It was true—we had plenty of time. Ten thousand, twenty thousand years. I could wait.

“Good night,” she said again, and she hung up. For a while, I looked at the receiver in my hand, then I placed it in its cradle. The moment I let go of it, I felt an incredible hunger. I’d go insane if I didn’t get something to eat. I’d eat anything. Anything at all. If someone offered me something to put in my mouth, I’d crawl to him on all fours. I might even suck his fingers clean. Yes, I would, I would suck your fingers clean. And then I’d sleep like a weathered crosstie. The meanest kick wouldn’t wake me. For ten thousand years I’d be sound asleep.

I leaned against the pay phone, emptied my mind out, and closed my eyes. Then I heard footsteps, thousands of footsteps. They washed over me like a wave. They kept walking, on and on, tramping in time. Where was the poor aunt now? I wondered. Where had she gone back to? And where had I come back to?

If, ten thousand years from now, a society came into being that was peopled exclusively by poor aunts—with a town hall run by poor aunts who had been elected by poor aunts, streetcars for poor aunts driven by poor aunts, novels for poor aunts written by poor aunts—would they open the gates for me?

Then again they might not need any of those things—the town hall or the streetcars or the novels. They might prefer instead to live quietly in giant vinegar bottles of their own making. From the air you’d be able to see tens—hundreds—of thousands of vinegar bottles lined up, covering the earth. It would be a sight so beautiful it would take your breath away.

Yes, that’s it. And if, by any chance, that world had room to admit a single poem, I would gladly be the one to write it: the first poet laureate of the world of poor aunts. I would sing in praise of the glow of the sun on the green bottles, of the broad sea of grass below.

But this is looking far ahead, to the year 12001, and ten thousand years is too long for me to wait. I have many winters to survive before then.

A Shinagawa Monkey

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Issue of 2006-02-13

She sometimes had trouble remembering her own name. Usually this happened when someone unexpectedly asked what it was. She’d be at a boutique, getting the sleeves of a dress altered, and the saleswoman would say, “Your name, Ma’am?,” and her mind would go blank. The only way she could remember it was to pull out her driver’s license, which was bound to seem weird to the person she was talking to. Even if she was on the phone when it happened, the awkward silence as she rummaged through her purse inevitably made the person at the other end wonder what was going on.

She could remember everything else. She never forgot the names of the people around her. Her address, phone number, birthday, and passport number were no problem at all. She could rattle off her friends’ phone numbers, and the numbers of important clients. And when she was the one who brought up her name she never had any trouble remembering it. As long as she knew in advance what to expect, her memory was fine. But when she was in a hurry or unprepared, it was as if a circuit had been broken. The more she struggled, the clearer it became that she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember what she was called.

Her married name was Mizuki Ando; her maiden name was Ozawa. Neither name was unique or particularly dramatic, though that still didn’t explain how they could, in the course of her busy schedule, vanish from her memory. She had been Mizuki Ando for three years, since she married a man named Takashi Ando. At first she hadn’t been able to get used to her new name. The way it looked and sounded just didn’t seem right to her. But, gradually, after she had repeated it and signed it a number of times, she began to feel more comfortable with it. Compared with other possibilities—Mizuki Mizuki, for instance, or Mizuki Miki (she’d actually dated a guy named Miki for a while)—Mizuki Ando wasn’t bad.

She’d been married for a couple of years when the name started to slip away from her. At first it happened only once a month or so, but over time it became more frequent. Now she was forgetting her name at least once a week. If she had her purse with her she was fine. If she ever lost her purse, though, she’d be lost, too. She wouldn’t entirely disappear, of course—she still remembered her address and phone number. This wasn’t like those cases of total amnesia in the movies. Still, the fact remained that forgetting her name was upsetting. A life without a name, she felt, was like a dream you never wake up from.

Mizuki went to a jewelry store, bought a thin, simple bracelet, and had her name engraved on it: “Mizuki (Ozawa) Ando.” She felt like a cat or a dog, but still she was careful to wear the bracelet every time she left home. If she forgot her name, all she had to do was glance down at her wrist. No more yanking out her license, no more strange looks from other people.

She didn’t tell her husband about her problem. She knew he’d only decide that it meant she was unhappy with their marriage. He was overly logical about everything. He didn’t mean any harm by it; that was just the way he was—always theorizing. He was also quite a talker, and he didn’t easily back down once he had started on a topic. So she kept the whole thing to herself. Still, she thought, what her husband said—or would have said if he’d known about the problem—was off the mark. She wasn’t dissatisfied with their marriage. Aside from her husband’s sometimes excessive rationality, she had no complaints about him at all.

Mizuki and her husband had recently taken out a mortgage and bought a condo in a new building in Shinagawa. Her husband, who was now thirty, worked in a lab in a pharmaceutical company. Mizuki was twenty-six and worked at a Honda dealership, answering the phone, getting coffee for customers, making copies, filing, and updating the customer database. Mizuki’s uncle, an executive at Honda, had got her the position after she graduated from a women’s junior college in Tokyo. It wasn’t the most thrilling job she could imagine, but she did have some responsibility, and over all it wasn’t so bad. Whenever the salesmen were out she took over, and she always did a decent job of answering the customers’ questions. She had watched the salesmen at work, and quickly grasped the necessary technical information. She’d memorized the mileage ratings of all the models in the showroom and could convince anyone, for instance, that the Odyssey handled less like a minivan than like an ordinary sedan. Mizuki was a good conversationalist, and she had a winning smile that always put customers at ease. She also knew how to subtly change tacks, based on her reading of each customer’s personality. Unfortunately, however, she didn’t have the authority to give discounts, to negotiate trade-ins, or to throw in free options, so, even if she had the customer ready to sign on the dotted line, in the end she had to turn things over to one of the salesmen, who would get the commission. The only reward she could expect was a free dinner now and then from a salesman sharing his windfall.

Occasionally it crossed her mind that the dealership would sell more cars if it would let her do sales. But the idea didn’t occur to anyone else. That’s the way a company operates: the sales division is one thing, the clerical staff another, and, except in very rare cases, those boundaries are unbreachable. But it didn’t really matter; she wasn’t ambitious and she wasn’t looking for a career. She much preferred putting in her eight hours, nine to five, taking the vacation time she had coming, and enjoying her time off.

At work, Mizuki continued to use her maiden name. She knew that in order to change it she’d have to change all the data relating to her in the computer system. It was too much trouble and she kept putting it off. She was listed as married for tax purposes, but her name was unchanged. She knew that this wasn’t the right way to do it, but nobody at the dealership said anything about it. So Mizuki Ozawa was still the name on her business cards and on her time card. Her husband knew that she was still going by her maiden name at work (he called her there occasionally), but he didn’t seem to have a problem with it. He understood that it was simply a matter of convenience. As long as he saw the logic of what she was doing, he didn’t complain. In that sense, he was pretty easygoing.

Mizuki began to worry that forgetting her name might be a symptom of some awful disease, perhaps an early sign of Alzheimer’s. The world was full of unexpected, fatal diseases. She had

only recently discovered that myasthenia and Huntington’s disease existed. There had to be countless other diseases she’d never heard of. And with most of these illnesses the early symptoms were quite minor. Minor but unusual symptoms such as—forgetting your own name?

She went to a large hospital and explained her situation. But the young doctor in charge—who was so pale and exhausted he looked more like a patient than like a physician—didn’t take her seriously. “Do you forget anything besides your name?” he asked. “No,” she said. “Right now it’s just my name.”

“Hmm. This sounds more like a psychiatric case,” he said, his voice devoid of interest or sympathy. “If you start to forget anything else, please check back with us. We can run some tests then.” We’ve got our hands full with people who are much more seriously ill than you, he seemed to be implying.

One day in the newsletter for the local ward, Mizuki came across an article announcing that the ward office would be opening a counselling center. It was a tiny article, something she would normally have overlooked. The center would be open twice a month and would be staffed by a professional counsellor offering private sessions at a greatly reduced rate. Any resident of Shinagawa Ward who was over eighteen was welcome to make use of the service, the article said, and everything would be held in the strictest confidence. Mizuki had her doubts about whether a ward-sponsored counselling center would do her any good, but she decided to give it a try. The dealership was busy on the weekends, but getting a day off during the week wasn’t difficult, and she was able to adjust to fit the schedule of the counselling center, which was an unrealistic one for ordinary working people. One thirty-minute session cost two thousand yen, which was not an excessive amount for her to pay.

When she arrived at the counselling center, Mizuki found that she was the only client. “This program was started rather suddenly,” the receptionist explained. “Most people don’t know about it yet. Once people find out, I’m sure we’ll get busier.”

The counsellor, whose name was Tetsuko Sakaki, was a pleasant, heavyset woman in her late forties. Her short hair was dyed a light brown, her broad face wreathed in an amiable smile. She wore a pale summer suit, a shiny silk blouse, a necklace of artificial pearls, and low heels. She looked less like a counsellor than like a friendly neighborhood housewife.

“My husband works in the ward office here, you see,” she said, by way of introduction. “He’s the section chief of the Public Works Department. That’s how we were able to get support from the ward and open this center. Actually, you’re our first client, and we’re very happy to have you. I don’t have any other appointments today, so let’s just take our time and have a good heart-to-heart talk.” The woman spoke at a measured pace; everything about her was slow and deliberate.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” Mizuki said. Privately, though, she wondered whether this sort of person would be of any help to her.

“You can rest assured that I have a degree in counselling and lots of experience,” the woman added, as if she’d read Mizuki’s mind.

Mrs. Sakaki was seated behind a plain metal office desk. Mizuki sat on a small, ancient sofa that looked as if it had just been dragged out of storage. The springs were about to go, and the musty smell made her nose twitch.

She leaned back and began to explain what had been happening. Mrs. Sakaki nodded along. She

didn’t ask questions or show any surprise. She just listened carefully to Mizuki’s story, and, except for the occasional frown, as if she were considering something, her face remained unchanged; her faint smile, like a spring moon at dusk, never wavered.

“It was a wonderful idea to put your name on a bracelet,” she commented after Mizuki finished.

“I like the way you dealt with it. The first goal is to come up with a practical solution, to minimize the inconvenience. Much better to deal with the issue in a realistic way than to brood over it. I can see that you’re quite clever. And it’s a lovely bracelet. It looks good on you.”

“Do you think that forgetting one’s name might be connected with a more serious disease?” Mizuki asked. “Are there cases of this?”

“I don’t believe that there are any diseases that have that sort of defined early symptom,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “I am a little concerned, though, that the symptoms have got worse over the past year. I suppose it’s possible that this could lead to other symptoms, or that your memory loss could spread to other areas. So let’s take it one step at a time and determine where it all started.”

Mrs. Sakaki began by asking several basic questions about Mizuki’s life. “How long have you been married?”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“How is your health?” She went on to ask her about her childhood, about her family, her schooling. Things she enjoyed, things she didn’t. Things she was good at, things she wasn’t. Mizuki tried to answer each question as honestly and as quickly as she could.

Mizuki had grown up in a quite ordinary family. Her father worked for a large insurance company, and though her parents weren’t affluent by any means, she never remembered them hurting for money. Her father was a serious person; her mother was on the delicate side and a bit of a nag. Her older sister was always at the top of her class, though Mizuki felt she was a little shallow and sneaky. Still, Mizuki had no special problems with her family. She’d never had any major fights with them. Mizuki herself had been the sort of child who didn’t stand out. She never got sick. She didn’t have any hang-ups about her looks, though nobody ever told her she was pretty, either. She saw herself as fairly intelligent, and she was always closer to the top of the class than to the bottom, but she didn’t excel in any particular area. She’d had some good friends in school, but most of them had married and moved to other cities, and now they rarely kept in touch.

She didn’t have anything bad to say about her marriage. In the beginning, she and her husband had made the usual mistakes that young newlyweds make, but over time they’d cobbled together a decent life. Her husband wasn’t perfect, but he had many good qualities: he was kind, responsible, clean, he’d eat anything, and he never complained. He seemed to get along well with both his coworkers and his bosses.

As she responded to all these questions, Mizuki was struck by what an uninspired life she’d led. Nothing even remotely dramatic had ever touched her. If her life were a movie, it would be one of those low-budget nature documentaries guaranteed to put you to sleep. Washed-out landscapes stretching endlessly to the horizon. No changes of scene, no closeups, nothing ominous, nothing suggestive. Mizuki knew that it was a counsellor’s job to listen to her clients, but she started to feel sorry for the woman who was having to listen to such a tedious life story. If it were me and I had to listen to endless accounts of stale lives like mine, Mizuki thought, at some point I’d keel over from sheer boredom.

Tetsuko Sakaki, though, listened intently to Mizuki, taking a few concise notes. When she spoke, her voice revealed no hint of boredom, just warmth and a genuine concern. Mizuki found herself strangely calmed. No one has ever listened to me so patiently, she realized. When their meeting ended, after just over an hour, Mizuki felt as if a burden had been lifted from her.

“Mrs. Ando, can you come at the same time next Wednesday?” Mrs. Sakaki asked, smiling broadly.

“Yes, I can,” Mizuki replied. “You don’t mind if I do?”

“Of course not. As long as you’re interested. It can take many sessions of counselling before you see any progress. This isn’t like one of those radio call-in shows where the host just tells you to hang in there. Let’s take our time and do a good job.”

“I wonder if there’s any event you can recall that had to do with names?” Mrs. Sakaki asked during the second session. “Your name, somebody else’s name, the name of a pet, the name of a place you’ve visited, a nickname, perhaps? If you have any memory at all concerning a name, I’d like you to tell me about it. It could be something trivial, so long as it has to do with a name. Try to remember.”

Mizuki thought for a few minutes.

“I don’t think I have any particular memory about a name,” she said finally. “At least nothing’s coming to me right now. Oh, wait ... I do have a memory about a nametag.”

“A nametag. Very good.”

“But it wasn’t my nametag,” Mizuki said. “It was somebody else’s.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “Tell me about it.”

“As I mentioned last week, I went to a private girls’ school for both junior and senior high,” Mizuki began. “I was from Nagoya and the school was in Yokohama, so I lived in the school dorm and went home on the weekends. I’d take the Shinkansen train home every Friday night and be back at school Sunday night. It was only two hours to Nagoya, so I didn’t feel particularly lonely.”

Mrs. Sakaki nodded. “But weren’t there a lot of good private schools in Nagoya? Why did you have to go all the way to Yokohama?”

“My mother went to this school and she wanted one of her daughters to go there, too. And I thought it might be nice to live away from my parents. The school was a missionary school, but it was fairly liberal. I made some good friends there. All of them were like me—girls from other places whose mothers had attended the school. I was there for six years and I generally enjoyed it. The food was pretty bad, though.”

Mrs. Sakaki smiled. “You said you have an older sister?”

“That’s right. She’s two years older than me.”

“Why didn’t she go to that school?”

“She’s more of a homebody, and she had some problems with her health. So she went to a local school and lived at home. I’ve always been a lot more independent than her. When I graduated from elementary school and my parents asked me if I’d go to the school in Yokohama, I said O.K. The idea of riding the Shinkansen every weekend was kind of exciting, too.

“For most of my time there I had a roommate, but when I got to be a senior I was given my own room. I was also appointed the student representative for my dorm. Every student in the dorm had a nametag, which hung on a board at the entrance to the building. The front of the nametag had your name in black, the back in red. Whenever you went out, you had to turn the nametag over, then you’d turn it over again when you came back. So if a girl’s name was in black, that meant that she was in the dorm; if it was red, you knew that she had gone out. If you were staying away overnight, or you were going to be on leave for a while, you had to take your nametag off the board. It was a convenient system. Students took turns manning the front desk and when a phone call came in it was very easy to tell a student’s whereabouts just by glancing at the board.

“Anyway, this happened in October. Before dinner one night, I was in my room, doing my homework, when a junior named Yuko Matsunaka came to see me. She was by far the prettiest girl in the dorm—she had light skin, long hair, and beautiful, doll-like features. Her parents ran a well-known inn in Kanazawa and were quite well off. She wasn’t in my class, so I’m not sure, but I heard that her grades were very good. In other words, she stood out. A lot of the younger students worshipped her. But Yuko was friendly and she wasn’t stuck up at all. She was a quiet girl who didn’t show her feelings much. I couldn’t always tell what she was thinking. The younger girls may have looked up to her, but I don’t think she had any close friends.”

When Mizuki opened the door to her dorm room, Yuko Matsunaka was standing there, dressed in a tight turtleneck sweater and jeans. “Do you have a minute to talk to me?” Yuko asked. “Sure,” Mizuki said, surprised. “I’m not doing anything special right now.” Although she knew Yuko, Mizuki had never had a private conversation with her, and it had never occurred to her that Yuko might ask her advice about anything personal. Mizuki motioned for her to sit down while she made some tea with the hot water in her thermos.

“Mizuki, have you ever felt jealous?” Yuko said all of a sudden.

Mizuki was surprised by the question, but she gave it some serious thought. “No, I guess I never have,” she replied.

“Not even once?”

Mizuki shook her head. “At least, when you ask me out of the blue like that I can’t remember anything. What kind of jealousy do you mean?”

“Like you love someone but he loves someone else. Like there’s something you want very badly but someone else just grabs it. Or there’s something you can’t quite do, but someone else is able to do it with no effort .... That sort of thing.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way,” Mizuki said. “Have you?”

“A lot.”

Mizuki didn’t know what to say. How could a girl like this want anything more in life? She was beautiful, rich, good at school, and popular. Her parents doted on her. Mizuki had heard rumors that she was dating a handsome college student. So who on earth could she be jealous of?

“Like when, for instance?” Mizuki asked.

“I’d rather not say,” Yuko said, choosing her words carefully. “Listing all the details is pointless. But I’ve been wanting to ask you that for a while—whether you’ve ever felt jealous.”

Mizuki had no idea what Yuko wanted from her, but she decided to answer as honestly as she could. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that sort of feeling,” she repeated. “I don’t know why, and maybe it’s a little strange if you think about it. I mean, it’s not like I have tons of confidence or get everything I want. Actually, there are lots of things I should feel frustrated about, but, for whatever reason, that hasn’t made me feel jealous of other people. I wonder why.”

Yuko Matsunaka smiled faintly. “I don’t think jealousy has much to do with objective conditions—like if you’re fortunate you’re not jealous but if life hasn’t blessed you you are. Jealousy doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a tumor growing inside you that gets bigger and bigger, beyond all reason. Even if you know it’s there, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Mizuki listened without interrupting. Yuko hardly ever had so much to say at one time.

“It’s hard to explain what jealousy is to someone who’s never felt it,” Yuko went on. “One thing I do know is it’s not easy to live with. It’s like carrying around your own small hell, day after day. You should be really thankful you’ve never felt this way.”

Yuko stopped speaking and gave Mizuki what might pass for a smile. She really is lovely, Mizuki thought. How would it feel to be like her—so beautiful you turn heads wherever you go? Is it something you can be proud of? Or is it more of a burden? Despite these thoughts, Mizuki never once felt jealous of Yuko.

“I’m going home now,” Yuko said, staring at her hands in her lap. “One of my relatives died and I have to go to the funeral. I already got permission from the dorm master. I should be back by Monday morning, but while I’m gone I was wondering if you would take care of my nametag.”

She extracted her nametag from her pocket and handed it to Mizuki.

“I don’t mind holding on to it for you,” Mizuki said. “But why go to the trouble of giving it to me? Couldn’t you just stick it in a desk drawer?”

Yuko held Mizuki’s gaze. “I just want you to hold on to it for me this time,” she said. “Something’s bothering me, and I don’t want to keep it in my room.”

“O.K.,” Mizuki said.

“I don’t want a monkey running off with it while I’m gone,” Yuko said.

“I doubt that there are any monkeys here,” Mizuki said brightly. It wasn’t like Yuko to make jokes. And then Yuko left the room, leaving behind the nametag, an untouched cup of tea, and a strange empty space where she had been.

“On Monday Yuko didn’t come back to the dorm,” Mizuki told Mrs. Sakaki. “The teacher in charge of her class was worried, so he phoned her parents. It turned out that she’d never gone home. No one in her family had passed away, and there had been no funeral for her to attend. She’d lied about the whole thing. They found her body almost a week later. I heard about it when I came back from Nagoya the following Sunday. She had slit her wrists in the woods somewhere. No one knew why she’d done it. She didn’t leave a note. Her roommate said that she’d seemed the same as always, not especially troubled by anything. Yuko had just killed herself without saying a word to anyone.”

“But wasn’t this Miss Matsunaka trying to tell you something?” Mrs. Sakaki asked. “When she came to your room and left her nametag with you. And talked about jealousy.”

“It’s true that she talked about jealousy with me. I didn’t make much of it at the time, though later I realized that she must have wanted to tell someone about it before she died.”

“Did you tell anyone that she’d come to see you?”

“No, I never did.”

“Why not?”

Mizuki tilted her head and gave it some thought. “If I’d told people about it, it would only have caused more confusion. I don’t think anyone would have understood.”

“You mean that jealousy might have been the reason for her suicide?”

“Right. As I said, who in the world would a girl like Yuko be jealous of? Everybody was so upset at the time. I decided that the best thing was just to keep it to myself. You can imagine the atmosphere in a girls’ dorm—talking about it would have been like lighting a match in a room filled with gas.”

“What happened to the nametag?”

“I still have it. It’s in a box at the back of my closet. Along with my own nametag.”

“Why did you keep it?”

“Things were in such an uproar at school at the time that I missed my chance to return it. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to just casually turn it in. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, either. Besides, I started to think that maybe Yuko had wanted me to keep that nametag. Why she picked me, I have no idea.”

“Perhaps Yuko was interested in you for some reason. Maybe there was something in you that she was drawn to.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Mizuki said.

Mrs. Sakaki was silent, gazing for a while at Mizuki as if trying to make sure of something. “All that aside, you honestly never have felt jealous? Not even once in your life?”

Mizuki didn’t reply right away. Finally, she said, “I don’t think I have. Of course there are people who are more fortunate than I am. But that doesn’t mean that I’ve ever felt jealous of them. I

figure everybody’s life is different.”

“And since everybody’s different there’s no way to compare?”

“I suppose so.”

“An interesting point of view,” Mrs. Sakaki said, her hands folded together on top of her desk, her relaxed voice betraying amusement. “So that means that you can’t comprehend what jealousy is?”

“I think I understand what might cause it. But it’s true that I don’t know what it actually feels like. How overpowering it is, how long it lasts, how much you suffer because of it.”

When Mizuki got home, she went to her closet and pulled out the old cardboard box in which she kept Yuko’s nametag, along with her own. All sorts of memorabilia from Mizuki’s life were stuffed in the box—letters, diaries, photo albums, report cards. She kept meaning to get rid of all these things, but she never had time to sort through them, so she dragged the box along with her every time she moved. But no matter how hard she looked she couldn’t find the envelope in which she kept the nametags. She was bewildered. She had looked in the box when she first moved into the condo and she distinctly remembered having seen the envelope. She hadn’t opened the box since then. So the envelope had to be there. Where else could it have gone?

Mizuki had kept her counselling sessions a secret from her husband. She hadn’t intended to, but explaining the whole situation just came to seem like more trouble than it was worth. And, besides, the fact that Mizuki was forgetting her name and going once a week to a ward-sponsored counsellor wasn’t bothering him in any way.

Mizuki also kept the loss of the two nametags a secret. She decided that it shouldn’t make any difference to her counselling if Mrs. Sakaki didn’t know.

Two months passed. Every Wednesday, Mizuki made her way to the ward office for her appointment. The number of clients there had increased, so Mrs. Sakaki had had to scale back their one-hour sessions to thirty minutes. This didn’t matter, though, since they had learned by now how to make the best use of their time together. Sometimes Mizuki wished that they could talk longer, but, given the low fees, she couldn’t complain.

“This is our ninth session together,” Mrs. Sakaki said, five minutes before the end of one appointment. “You aren’t forgetting your name less often, but it hasn’t got worse, has it?”

“No, it hasn’t,” Mizuki said.

“That’s wonderful,” Mrs. Sakaki said. She put her black-barrelled ballpoint pen back in her pocket and tightly clasped her hands on the desktop. She paused for a moment. “Perhaps—just perhaps—when you come next week we will make great progress concerning the issue we’ve been discussing.”

“You mean my forgetting my name?”

“Exactly. If things go as planned, I should be able to determine a definite cause and even show it to you.”

“The reason I’m forgetting my name?”

“Precisely.”

Mizuki couldn’t quite grasp what Mrs. Sakaki was getting at. “When you say a definite cause ... you mean it’s something visible?’

“Of course it’s visible,” Mrs. Sakaki said, rubbing her hands together in satisfaction. “I can’t go into details until next week. At this point, I’m still not sure whether it will work out or not. I’m just hoping that it will.”

Mizuki nodded.

“At any rate, what I’m trying to say is that we’ve gone up and down with this but things are finally heading toward a solution. You know what they say about life being three steps forward and two steps back? So don’t worry. Just trust me, and I’ll see you next week. And don’t forget to make an appointment on your way out.”

Mrs. Sakaki punctuated this with a wink.

The following week, when Mizuki entered the counselling office Mrs. Sakaki greeted her with the biggest smile Mizuki had ever seen on her.

“I’ve discovered the reason you’ve been forgetting your name,” she announced proudly. “And I’ve found a solution.”

“So I won’t be forgetting my name anymore?” Mizuki asked.

“Correct. You won’t forget your name anymore. The problem has been solved.”

Mrs. Sakaki took something out of a black handbag beside her and laid it on the desk. “I believe these are yours.”

Mizuki got up from the sofa and walked over to the desk. On the desk were two nametags. “Mizuki Ozawa” was written on one of them, “Yuko Matsunaka” on the other. Mizuki turned pale. She went back to the sofa and sank down, speechless for a time. She pressed both palms against her mouth as if to prevent the words from spilling out.

“It’s no wonder you’re surprised,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “But there’s nothing to be frightened of.”

“How did you ... “ Mizuki said.

“How did I happen to find your high-school nametags?”

Mizuki nodded.

“I recovered them for you,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “Those nametags were stolen from you and that’s why you had trouble remembering your name.”

“But who would ... “

“Who would break into your house and steal these two nametags, and for what possible purpose?” Mrs. Sakaki said. “Rather than having me respond to that, I think it’s best if you ask the

individual responsible directly.”

“The person who did it is here?” Mizuki asked in astonishment.

“Of course. We captured him and took back the nametags. That is, I didn’t nab him myself. My husband and one of his men did it. Remember I told you that my husband is the section chief of the Public Works Department?”

Mizuki nodded without thinking.

“So what do you say we go meet the culprit? Then you can give him a piece of your mind face to

face.

Mizuki followed Mrs. Sakaki out of the counselling office, down the hallway, and into the elevator. They rode down to the basement and walked along a long deserted corridor to a door at the very end.

Inside was a tall, thin man in his fifties and a larger man in his mid-twenties, both dressed in light-khaki work clothes. The older man had a nametag on his chest that said “Sakaki”; the younger man had one that said “Sakurada.” Sakurada was holding a black nightstick.

“Mrs. Ando, I presume?” Mr. Sakaki asked. “I am Yoshio Sakaki, Tetsuko’s husband. And this is Mr. Sakurada, who works with me.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mizuki said.

“Is he giving you any trouble?” Mrs. Sakaki asked her husband.

“No, I think he’s sort of resigned himself to the situation,” Mr. Sakaki said. “Sakurada here has been keeping an eye on him all morning, and apparently he’s been behaving himself. So let’s proceed.”

There was another door at the rear of the room. Mr. Sakurada opened it and switched on the light. He looked quickly around the room, then turned to the others. “Looks O.K.,” he said. “Come on

in.

They entered a small storage room of some kind; it held only one chair, on which a monkey was sitting. He was large for a monkey—smaller than an adult human, but bigger than, say, an elementary-school student. His hair was a shade longer than is usual for monkeys and was woven with gray. It was hard to tell his age, but he was definitely not young. The monkey’s arms and legs were tightly tied to the wooden chair, and his long tail drooped on the floor. As Mizuki entered, the monkey shot her a glance, then stared back down at the ground.

“A monkey?” Mizuki asked in surprise.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Sakaki replied. “A monkey stole the nametags from your apartment, right around the time that you began forgetting your name.”

I don’t want a monkey running off with it, Yuko had said. So it wasn’t a joke after all, Mizuki realized. A chill shot up her spine.

“I’m very sorry,” the monkey said, his voice low but spirited, with an almost musical quality to it.

“He can talk!” Mizuki exclaimed, dumbfounded.

“Yes, I can,” the monkey replied, his expression unchanged. “There’s one other thing I need to apologize to you for. When I broke into your place, I wasn’t planning to take anything besides the nametags, but I was so hungry I ended up grabbing two bananas that were on the table. They just looked too good to pass up.”

“The nerve of this guy,” Mr. Sakurada said, slapping the black nightstick against his palm a couple of times. “Who knows what else he swiped? Want me to grill him a little to find out?”

“Take it easy,” Mr. Sakaki told him. “He confessed about the bananas voluntarily, and, besides, he doesn’t strike me as such a brutal sort. Let’s not do anything drastic until we hear the facts. If they find out that we mistreated an animal at the ward office we could be in deep trouble.”

“Why did you steal the nametags?” Mizuki asked the monkey.

“It’s what I do,” the monkey answered. “I’m a monkey who takes people’s names. It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I fix on a name, I can’t help myself. Not just any name, mind you. I’ll see a name that attracts me, and then I have to have it. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t control myself.”

“Were you trying to break into our dorm and steal Yuko’s nametag?”

“Yes, I was. I was head over heels in love with Miss Matsunaka. I’ve never been so attracted to somebody in my life. But when I wasn’t able to make her mine I decided that, no matter what, I had to at least have her name. If I could possess her name, then I’d be satisfied. But before I could carry out my plan she passed away.”

“Did you have anything to do with her suicide?”

“No, I didn’t,” the monkey said, shaking his head emphatically. “I had nothing to do with that. She was just overwhelmed by an inner darkness.”

“But how did you know, after all these years, that Yuko’s nametag was at my house?”

“It took me a long time to trace it. When Miss Matsunaka died, I tried to get her nametag from the bulletin board, but it was already gone. Nobody had any idea where. I worked my butt off trying to track it down, but no matter what I did I couldn’t locate it. It didn’t occur to me at the time that Miss Matsunaka would have left her nametag with you, since you weren’t particularly close.”

“True,” Mizuki said.

“But one day I had a flash of inspiration that maybe—just maybe—she’d given it to you. This was in the spring of last year. It took me a long time to track you down—to find out that you’d got married, that your name was now Mizuki Ando, that you were living in a condo in Shinagawa. Being a monkey slows down an investigation like that, as you might imagine. At any rate, that’s how I came to steal it.”

“But why did you steal my nametag, too? Why not just Yuko’s? I suffered a lot because of what you did!”

“I’m very, very sorry,” the monkey said, hanging his head in shame. “When I see a name I like, I end up snatching it. This is kind of embarrassing, but your name really moved my poor little

heart. As I said before, it’s an illness. I’m overcome by urges I can’t control. I know it’s wrong, but I do it anyway. I deeply apologize for all the problems I caused you.”

“This monkey was hiding in the sewers in Shinagawa,” Mrs. Sakaki interjected. “So I asked my husband to have some of his younger colleagues catch him.”

“Young Sakurada here did most of the work,” Mr. Sakaki said.

“Public Works has to sit up and take notice when a character like this is hiding out in our sewers,” Sakurada said proudly. “The monkey apparently had a hideout underneath Takanawa that he used as a base for foraging operations all over Tokyo.”

“There’s no place for us to live in the city,” the monkey said. “There are so few trees, so few shady places in the daytime. If we go aboveground, people gang up on us and try to catch us. Children throw things at us or shoot us with BB guns. Dogs chase after us. TV crews pop up and shine bright spotlights on us. So we have to hide underground.”

“But how on earth did you know that this monkey was hiding in the sewer?” Mizuki asked Mrs. Sakaki.

“As we’ve talked over the past two months, many things have gradually become clear to me,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “It was like a fog lifting. I realized that there had to be something that was stealing names, and that whatever it was it had to be hiding underground. That sort of limited the possibilities—it was either in the subway or in the sewers. So I told my husband that I thought there was some creature, not a human, living in the sewers and asked him to look into it. And, sure enough, he came up with this monkey.”

Mizuki was at a loss for words for a while. “But ... how did just listening to me make you understand that?” she asked, finally.

“Maybe it’s not my place, as her husband, to say this,” Mr. Sakaki said with a serious look, “but my wife is a special person, with unusual powers. Many times during our twenty-two years of marriage I’ve witnessed strange events. That’s why I worked so hard to help her open the counselling center here in the ward office. I knew that as long as she had a place where she could put her powers to good use, the residents of Shinagawa would benefit.”

“What are you going to do with the monkey?” Mizuki asked.

“Can’t let him live,” Sakurada said casually. “No matter what he says, once they acquire a bad habit like this they’re up to their old tricks again before long—you can count on it.”

“Hold on now,” Mr. Sakaki said. “No matter what reasons we might have, if some animal-rights group found out about us killing a monkey, it would lodge a complaint and you can bet there’d be hell to pay. You remember when we killed all those crows, the big stink about that? I’d like to avoid a repeat of that.”

“I beg you, please don’t kill me,” the monkey said, bowing his head deeply. “What I’ve done is wrong. I understand that. I’ve caused a lot of trouble. I’m not trying to argue with you, but some good also comes from my actions.”

“What possible good could come from stealing people’s names?” Mr. Sakaki asked sharply.

“I do steal people’s names, no doubt about that. But, in doing so, I’m also able to remove some of the negative elements that stick to those names. I don’t mean to brag, but if I’d been able to steal Yuko Matsunaka’s nametag back then, she might very well not have taken her life.”

“Why do you say that?” Mizuki asked.

“Along with her name, I might have been able to take away some of the darkness that was inside her,” the monkey said.

“That’s too convenient,” Sakurada said. “I don’t buy it. The monkey’s life is on the line—of course he’s going to try to justify his actions.”

“Maybe not,” Mrs. Sakaki said, her arms folded. “He might have a point.” She turned to the monkey. “When you steal names you take on both the good and the bad?”

“Yes, that’s right,” the monkey said. “I have no choice. I take on the whole package, as it were.”

“Well—what sort of bad things came with my name?” Mizuki asked the monkey. “I’d rather not say,” the monkey said.

“Please tell me,” Mizuki insisted. She paused. “If you answer my question, I’ll forgive you. And I’ll ask all those present to forgive you.”

“Do you mean it?”

“If this monkey tells me the truth, will you forgive him?” Mizuki asked Mr. Sakaki. “He’s not evil by nature. He has already suffered, so let’s hear what he has to say and then you can take him to Mt. Takao or somewhere like that and release him. I don’t think he’ll bother anyone again. What do you think?”

“I have no objection, as long as it’s all right with you,” Mr. Sakaki said. He turned to the monkey. “How about it? You swear if we release you in the mountains you won’t come back to the Tokyo city limits?”

“Yes, sir. I swear I won’t come back,” the monkey promised meekly. “I will never cause any trouble for you again. I’m not young anymore, and this will be a fresh start for me in life.”

“All right, then, why don’t you tell me what evil things have stuck to my name?” Mizuki said, staring right into the monkey’s small red eyes.

“If I tell you it might hurt you.”

“I don’t care. Go ahead.”

For a time the monkey thought about this, deep frown lines in his forehead. “I think it’s better for you not to hear this,” he said.

“I told you it’s all right. I really want to know.”

“O.K.,” the monkey said. “Then I’ll tell you. Your mother doesn’t love you. She has never loved you, not even for a minute, since you were born. I don’t know why, but it’s true. Your older sister doesn’t like you, either. Your mother sent you to school in Yokohama because she wanted to get

rid of you. She wanted to drive you as far away as possible. Your father isn’t a bad person, but he isn’t what you’d call a forceful personality, and he couldn’t stand up for you. For these reasons, ever since you were small you’ve never got enough love. I think you’ve had an inkling of this, but you’ve intentionally turned your eyes away from it. You’ve shut this painful reality up in a small dark place deep in your heart and closed the lid. You’ve tried to suppress any negative feelings. This defensive stance has become part of who you are. Because of all this, you yourself have never been able to deeply, unconditionally love anybody else.”

Mizuki was silent.

“Your married life seems happy and problem-free. And perhaps it is. But you don’t truly love your husband. Am I right? Even if you were to have a child, it would be the same.”

Mizuki didn’t say anything. She sank down to the floor and closed her eyes. She felt as though her whole body were about to come apart. Her skin, her organs, her bones were crumbling. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing.

“That’s a terrible thing for a monkey to say,” Sakurada said, shaking his head. “Chief, I can’t stand it anymore. Let’s beat the hell out of him!”

“Hold on,” Mizuki said. “What the monkey’s saying is true. I’ve known it for a long time, but I’ve always closed my eyes to it, blocked my ears. He’s telling the truth, so please forgive him. Just take him to the mountains and let him go.”

Mrs. Sakaki gently rested a hand on Mizuki’s shoulder. “Are you sure you’re O.K. with that?”

“I don’t mind, so long as I get my name back. From now on I’m going to live with what’s out there. That’s my name, and that’s my life.”

As Mizuki was saying goodbye to the monkey, she handed him Yuko Matsunaka’s nametag.

“You should have this, not me,” she said. “Take good care of her name. And don’t steal anybody else’s.”

“I’ll take very good care of it. And I’m never going to steal again, I promise,” the monkey said, with a serious look on his face.

“Do you know why Yuko left this nametag with me before she died? Why would she pick me?”

“I don’t know why,” the monkey said. “But, because she did, you and I were able to meet. A twist of fate, I suppose.”

“You must be right,” Mizuki said.

“Did what I told you hurt you?”

“It did,” Mizuki said. “It hurt a lot.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you.”

“It’s all right. Deep down, I knew it already. It’s something I had to confront someday.”

“I’m relieved to hear that,” the monkey said.

“Goodbye,” Mizuki said. “I don’t imagine we’ll meet again.”

“Take care,” the monkey said. “And thank you for saving my poor life.”

“You’d better not show your face around Shinagawa anymore,” Sakurada warned, slapping his palm with the nightstick. “We’re giving you a break this time since the Chief says so, but if I ever catch you here again you aren’t going to get out alive.”

“Well, so what should we do about next week?” Mrs. Sakaki asked after she and Mizuki returned to the counselling center. “Do you still have things you’d like to discuss with me?” Mizuki shook her head. “No. Thanks to you, I think my problem is solved. I’m so grateful for

everything you’ve done for me.”

“You don’t need to talk over the things the monkey told you?”

“No, I should be able to handle those myself. I’ll have to think them over on my own for a while.” Mrs. Sakaki nodded. “If you put your mind to it,” she said, “I know it will make you stronger.” The two women shook hands and said goodbye.

When she got home, Mizuki took her nametag and her bracelet and put them in a plain brown envelope. She placed the envelope inside the cardboard box in her closet. She finally had her name back and could resume a normal life. Things might work out. Then again, they might not. But at least she had her name now, a name that was hers, and hers alone. +

Airplane

Translated by Jay Rubin

Issue of 2002-07-01

That afternoon she asked him, “Is that an old habit, the way you talk to yourself?” She raised her eyes from the table and put the question to him as if the thought had just struck her, but it had obviously not just struck her. She must have been thinking about it for a while. Her voice had that hard but slightly husky edge it always took on at times like this. She had held the words back and rolled them around on her tongue again and again before she let them out of her mouth.

The two were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. Aside from the occasional commuter train running on a nearby track, the neighborhood was quiet—almost too quiet at times. Tracks without trains passing over them have a mysterious silence all their own. The vinyl tile of the kitchen floor gave his bare feet a pleasant chill. He had pulled his socks off and stuffed them into his pants pocket. The weather was a bit too warm for an April afternoon. She had rolled up the sleeves of her pale checked shirt as far as the elbows, and her slim white fmgers toyed with the handle of her coffee spoon. He stared at the moving fmgertips, and the workings of his mind went strangely flat. She seemed to have lifted the edge of the world, and now she was loosening its threads little by little—perfunctorily, apathetically, as if she had to do it no matter how long it might take.

He watched and said nothing. He said nothing because he did not know what to say. The few sips of coffee left in his cup were cold now, and muddy-looking.

He had just turned twenty, and she was seven years older, married, and the mother of one. For him, she might as well have been the far side of the moon.

Her husband worked for a travel agency that specialized in trips abroad, and so he was away from home nearly half of every month, in places like London or Rome or Singapore. He obviously liked opera. Thick three—and four-record albums lined the shelves, arranged by composer—Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, Richard Strauss. The long rows looked less like a record collection than a symbol of a world view: calm, immovable. He looked at the husband’s records whenever he was at a loss for words or for something to do; he would let his eyes wander over the album spines—from right to left, from left to right—and read the titles aloud in his mind: “La Bohême,”

“Tosca,”

“Turandot,”

“Norma,”

“Fidelio” ... He had never once listened to music like that, had never had the chance to hear it. Not one person among his family, friends, or acquaintances was an opera fan. He knew that a music called opera existed, and that certain people liked to listen to it, but the husband’s

records were his first actual glimpse of such a world.

She herself was not particularly fond of opera. “I don’t hate it,” she said. “It’s just too long.”

Next to the record shelves stood a very impressive stereo set. Its big, foreign-made tube amp hunched down heavily, waiting for orders like a well-trained crustacean. There was no way to prevent it from standing out among the room’s other, more modest furnishings. It had a truly exceptional presence. One’s eyes could not help fixing on it. But he had never once heard it producing sound. She had no idea where to find the power switch, and he never thought to touch the thing.

“There’s nothing wrong at home,” she told him—any number of times. “My husband is good to me, I love my daughter, I think I’m happy.” She sounded calm, even serene, as she said this, without a hint that she was making excuses for her life. She spoke of her marriage with complete objectivity, as though discussing traffic regulations or the International Date Line. “I think I’m happy, there’s nothing wrong.”

So why the hell is she sleeping with me? he wondered. He gave it lots of thought but couldn’t come up with an answer. What did it even mean for there to be “something wrong” with a marriage? He sometimes thought of asking her directly, but he didn’t know how to start. How should he say it? “If you’re so happy, why the hell are you sleeping with me?” Should he just come out with it like that? He was sure it would make her cry.

She cried enough as it was. She would cry for a long, long time, making tiny sounds. He almost never knew why she was crying. But, once she started, she wouldn’t stop. Try to comfort her though he might, she would not stop until a certain amount of time had gone by. In fact, he didn’t have to do anything at all—once that time had gone by her crying would come to an end. Why were people so different from one another? he wondered. He had been with any number of women, all of whom cried, or got angry, but each in her own special way. They had points of similarity, but those were far outnumbered by their differences. It seemed to have nothing to do with age. This was his first experience with an older woman, but the difference in age didn’t bother him as much as he had expected it to. Far more meaningful than age differences, he felt, were the different tendencies that each individual possessed. He couldn’t help thinking that this was an important key for unlocking the riddle of life.

After she finished crying, usually, the two of them would make love. Only then would she be the one to initiate it. Otherwise, he had to be the one. Sometimes she would refuse him, without a word, shaking her head. Then her eyes would look like white moons floating at the edge of a dawn sky—flat, suggestive moons that shimmered at the single cry of a bird at dawn. Whenever he saw her eyes looking like that, he knew there was nothing more he could say to her. He felt neither anger nor displeasure. “That’s how it goes,” he thought. Sometimes he even felt relieved. They would sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, chatting quietly. They spoke in fragments most of the time. Neither was a great talker, and they had little in common to talk about. He could never remember what it was that they had been saying, just that it had been in little pieces. And all the while one commuter train after another would go past the window.

Their lovemaking was hushed and tranquil. It had nothing that could properly be called the joys of the flesh. Of course, it would be false to say that they knew none of the pleasure that obtains when a man and a woman join their bodies, but mixed with this were far too many other thoughts and elements and styles. It was different from any sex he had experienced before. It made him think of a small room—a nice, neat room that was a comfortable place to be. It had strings of many colors hanging from the ceiling, strings of different shapes and lengths, and each string, in its own way, sent a thrill of enticement through him. He wanted to pull one, and the strings wanted to be pulled. But he didn’t know which one to pull. He felt that he might choose a string and have a magnificent spectacle open up before his eyes, but that, just as easily, everything could be ruined. And so he hesitated, and while he did, another day would end.

The strangeness of this situation was almost too much for him. He believed that he had lived his life with his own sense of values. But when he was in this room, hearing the trains go by and holding the silent older woman in his arms, he couldn’t help feeling confused. Again and again he would ask himself, “Am I in love with her?” But he could never reach an answer with complete conviction.

When their lovemaking ended, she would glance at the clock. Lying in his arms, she would turn her face slightly and look at the black clock radio by the head of the bed. In those days, clock radios didn’t have lighted digital displays but little numbered panels that flipped over with a tiny click. When she looked at the clock, a train would pass the window. It was like a conditioned reflex: she would look, a train would go by.

She was checking the clock to make sure it was not time for her four-yearold daughter to be coming home from kindergarten. He had happened to catch a glimpse of the girl exactly once, and she seemed like a sweet child. That was the only impression she left him with. He had never seen the opera-loving husband who worked for a travel bureau. Fortunately.

It was an afternoon in May when she first asked him about his talking to himself. She had cried

that day—again. And then they had made love—again. He couldn’t recall what had made her cry. He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone’s arms. Maybe she can’t cry alone, and that’s why she needs me.

That day she locked the door, closed the curtains, and brought the telephone next to the bed. Then they joined their bodies. Gently, quietly, as always. The doorbell rang, but she ignored it. It seemed not to startle her at all. She shook her head as if to say, “Never mind, it’s nothing.” The bell rang several more times, but soon whoever it was gave up and went away. Nothing, just as she had said. Maybe a salesman. But how could she know? A train rumbled by now and then. A piano sounded in the distance. He vaguely recognized the melody. He had heard it once, long ago, in music class, but he couldn’t recall it exactly. A vegetable seller’s truck clattered by out front. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and he came—with the utmost gentleness.

He went to the bathroom for a shower. When he came back, drying himself with a bath towel, he found her lying face down in bed with her eyes closed. He sat down next to her and, as always,

caressed her back as he let his eyes wander over the titles of the opera records.

Soon, she left the bed, got properly dressed, and went to the kitchen to make coffee. It was a short time later that she asked him, “Is that an old habit, talking to yourself like that?”

“Like what?” She had taken him off guard. “You mean, while we’re ... ?”

“No, no. Not then. Just anytime. Like when you’re taking a shower, or when I’m in the kitchen and you’re by yourself, reading the newspaper, that kind of thing.”

“I had no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve never noticed. I talk to myself?”

“You do. Really,” she said, toying with his lighter.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he said, the discomfort of it affecting his voice. He put a cigarette in his mouth, took the lighter from her hand, and used it to light up. He had started smoking Seven Stars a short time earlier. It was her husband’s brand. He had always smoked Hope regulars. Not that she had asked him to switch to her husband’s brand; he had thought of taking the precaution himself. It would just make things easier, he’d decided. Like on the TV melodramas.

“I used to talk to myself a lot, too,” she said. “When I was little.”

“Oh, really?”

“But my mother made me stop. ‘A young lady does not talk to herself,’ she used to say. And whenever I did it she got so angry! She’d lock me in a closet—which, for me, was about the worst place I could imagine    dark and moldy-smelling. Sometimes she’d smack me in the knees with a

ruler. But it worked. And it didn’t take very long. I stopped talking to myself completely. Not a

word. II

He couldn’t think of anything to say to this, and so he said nothing. She bit her lip.

“Even now,” she said, “if I feel I’m about to say something I just swallow my words. It’s like a reflex. But what’s so bad about talking to yourself? It’s natural. It’s just words coming out of your mouth. If my mother were still alive, I think I’d ask her, ‘What’s so bad about talking to yourself?’”

“She’s dead?”

“Uh-huh. But I wish I’d gotten it straight. I wish I’d asked her, ‘Why did you do that to me?’”

She was playing with her coffee spoon. She glanced at the clock on the wall. The moment she did that, a train went by outside.

She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”

Both of them thought about wells for a little while.

“What do I talk about when I talk to myself?” he asked. “For example.”

“Hmm,” she said, slowly shaking her head a few times, almost as if she were discreetly testing the

range of movement of her neck. “Well, there’s airplanes ... “

“Airplanes?”

“Uh-huh. You know. They fly through the sky.”

He laughed. “Why would I talk to myself about airplanes, of all things?”

She laughed, too. And then, using her index fingers, she measured the length of an imaginary object in the air. This was a habit of hers. One that he had picked up.

“You pronounce your words so clearly, too. Are you sure you don’t remember talking to yourself?”

“I don’t remember a thing.”

She picked up the ballpoint pen lying on the table, and played with it for a few seconds, but then she looked at the clock again. It had done its job: in the five minutes since her last look, it had advanced five minutes’ worth.

“You talk to yourself as if you were reciting poetry.”

A hint of red came into her face as she said this. He found this odd: why should my talking to myself make her turn red?

He tried out the words in rhythm: “I talk to myself / Almost as if / I were reciting / Po-e-try.”

She picked up the pen again. It was a yellow plastic ballpoint pen with a logo marking the tenth anniversary of a certain bank branch.

He pointed at the pen and said, “Next time you hear me talking to myself, take down what I say, will you?”

She stared straight into his eyes. “You really want to know?” He nodded.

She took a piece of notepaper and started writing something on it. She wrote slowly, but she kept the pen moving, never once resting or getting stuck for a word. Chin in hand, he looked at her long eyelashes the whole time. She would blink once every few seconds, at irregular intervals. The longer he looked at them—these lashes which, until a few moments ago, had been wet with tears—the less he understood: what did his sleeping with her really mean? A sense of loss overtook him, as if one part of a complex system had been stretched and stretched until it became terribly simple. I might never be able to go anywhere else again. When this thought came to him, the horror of it was almost more than he could bear. His being, his very self, was going to melt away. Yes, it was true: he was as young as newly formed mud, and he talked to himself as if reciting poetry.

She stopped writing and thrust the paper toward him across the table. He reached out and took it from her.

In the kitchen, the afterimage of some great thing was holding its breath. He often felt the presence of this image when he was with her: the afterimage of a thing he had lost. But what had he lost?

“I know it all by heart,” she said. “This is what you were saying.” He read the words aloud:

Airplane

Airplane flying

I, on the airplane The airplane Flying

But still, though it flew

The airplane’s The sky?

“All of this?!” He was stunned.

“Uh-huh, the whole thing,” she said.

“Incredible! I can’t believe I said all this to myself and don’t remember any of it.” She flashed a tiny smile. “You did, though, just like that.”

He let out a sigh. “This is too weird. I’ve never once thought about airplanes. I have absolutely no memory of this. Why, all of a sudden, would an airplane come popping out?”

“I don’t know, but that is exactly what you were saying, before, in the shower. You may not have been thinking about airplanes, but somewhere deep in a forest, far away, your heart was thinking about them.”

“Who knows? Maybe somewhere deep in a forest I was making an airplane.”

With a small thunk, she set the ballpoint pen on the table, then raised her eyes and stared at him.

They remained silent for some time. The coffee in their cups clouded up and grew cold. The Earth turned on its axis while the moon’s gravity imperceptibly shifted the tides. Time moved on in silence, and trains passed over the rails.

He and she were thinking about the very same thing: an airplane. The airplane that his heart was making deep in the forest. How big it was, and its shape, and the color of its paint, and where it was going, and who would board it.

She cried again soon after that. This was the very first time that she cried twice in the same day. It was also the last. It was a special thing for her. He reached across the table and touched her hair. There was something tremendously real about the way it felt—hard and smooth, and far away. +

Birthday Girl

Harper’s Magazine, July, 2003

She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked on Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. The other part-time girl had agreed to switch shifts with her as a matter of course: being screamed at by an angry chef while lugging pumpkin gnocchi and seafood fritto to customers’ tables was not a normal way to spend one’s twentieth birthday. But the other girl had aggravated a cold and gone to bed with unstoppable diarrhea and a fever of 104, so she ended up working after all on short notice.

She found herself trying to comfort the sick girl, who had called to apologize. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I wasn’t going to do anything special anyway, even if it is my twentieth birthday.”

And in fact she was not all that disappointed. One reason was the terrible argument she had had a few days earlier with the boyfriend who was supposed to be with her that night. They had been going together since high school, and the argument had started from nothing much. But it had taken an unexpected turn for the worse until it became a long and bitter shouting match—one bad enough, she was pretty sure, to have snapped their long-standing ties once and for all. Something inside her had turned rock-hard and died. He had not called her since the blowup, and she was not about to call him.

Her workplace was one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the tony Roppongi district of Tokyo. It had been in business since the late sixties, and, although its cuisine was hardly leading edge, its high reputation was fully justified. It had many repeat customers, and they were never disappointed. The dining room had a calm, relaxed atmosphere without a hint of pushiness. Rather than a young crowd, the restaurant drew an older clientele that included some famous stage people and writers.

The two full-time waiters worked six days a week. She and the other part-time waitress were students who took turns working three clays each. In addition there was one floor manager and, at the register, a skinny middle-aged woman who supposedly had been there since the restaurant opened—literally sitting in the one place, it seemed, like some gloomy old character from Little Dorrit. She had exactly two functions: to accept payment from the guests and to answer the phone. She spoke only when necessary and always wore the same black dress. There was something cold and hard about her: if you set her afloat on the nighttime sea, she could probably sink any boat that happened to ram her.

The floor manager was perhaps in his late forties. Tall and broad-shouldered, his build suggested that he had been a sportsman in his youth, but excess flesh was now beginning to accumulate on his belly and chin. His short, stiff hair was thinning at the crown, and a special aging-bachelor smell clung to him—like newsprint that had been stored for a while in a drawer with cough drops. She had a bachelor uncle who smelled like that.

The manager always wore a black suit, white shirt, and bow tie—not a snap-on bow tie but the real thing, tied by hand. It was a point of pride for him that he could tie it perfectly without looking in the mirror. His job consisted in checking the arrival and departure of guests, keeping the reservation situation in mind, knowing the names of regular customers, greeting them with a smile, lending a respectful ear to any

customers’ complaints, giving expert advice on wines, and overseeing the work of the waiters and waitresses. He performed his duties adroitly day after day. It was also his special task to deliver dinner to the room of the restaurant’s owner.

“The owner had his own room on the sixth floor of the same building where the restaurant was,” she said. “An apartment or office or something.”

Somehow she and I had gotten onto the subject of our twentieth birthdays—what sort of day it had been for each of us. Most people remember the day they turned twenty. Hers had happened more than ten years earlier.

“He never, ever showed his face in the restaurant, though. The only one who saw him was the manager. It was strictly his job to deliver the owner’s dinner to him. None of the other employees knew what he looked like.”

“So, basically, the owner was getting home delivery from his own restaurant.”

“Right,” she said. “Every night at eight the manager had to bring dinner to the owner’s room. It was the restaurant’s busiest time, so having the manager disappear just then was always a problem for us, but there was no way around it because that was the way it had always been done. They’d load the dinner onto one of those carts that hotels use for room service, the manager would push it onto the elevator wearing a respectful look on his face, and fifteen minutes later he’d come back empty-handed. Then, an hour later, he’d go up again and bring down the cart with empty plates and glasses. Like clockwork, every day. I thought it was really weird the first time I saw it happen. It was like some kind of religious ritual, you know? After a while I got used to it, though, and never gave it another thought.”

The owner always had chicken. The recipe and the vegetable sides were a little different every day, but the main dish was always chicken. A young chef once told her that he had tried sending up the same exact roast chicken every day for a week just to see what would happen, but there was never any complaint. Of course, a chef wants to try different ways of preparing things, and each new chef would challenge himself with every technique for chicken that he could think of. They’d make elegant sauces, they’d try chickens from different suppliers, but none of their efforts had any effect: they might just as well have been throwing pebbles into an empty cave. Every one of them gave up and sent the owner some really standard chicken dish every day. That’s all that was ever asked of them.

Work started out as usual on her twentieth birthday, November 17. It had been raining on and off since the afternoon, and pouring since early evening. At five o’clock the manager gathered the employees together to explain the day’s specials. Servers were required to memorize them word for word and not use crib sheets: veal Milanese, pasta topped with sardines and cabbage, chestnut mousse. Sometimes the manager would take the part of a customer and test them with questions. Then came the employees’ meal: waiters in this restaurant were not going to have growling stomachs as they stood there taking customers’ orders!

The restaurant opened its doors at six o’clock, but guests were slow to arrive because of the downpour, and several reservations were simply canceled. Women didn’t want their dresses ruined by the rain. The manager walked around tight-lipped, and the waiters killed time polishing the salt and pepper shakers or chatting with the chef about cooking. She surveyed the dining room with its single couple at a table and listened to the harpsichord music flowing discreetly from ceiling speakers. A deep smell of late-autumn rain worked its way into the restaurant.

It was after seven-thirty when the manager started feeling sick. He stumbled over to a chair and sat there for a while pressing his stomach, as if he had suddenly been shot. A greasy sweat clung to his forehead. “I think I’d better go to the hospital,” he muttered. For him to have medical problems was a most unusual occurrence: he had never missed a day since he started working in this restaurant more than ten years earlier. It was another point of pride for him that he had never been out with illness or injury, but his painful grimace made it clear that he was in very bad shape.

She stepped outside with an umbrella and hailed a cab. One of the waiters held the manager steady and climbed into the car with him to take him to a nearby hospital. Before ducking into the cab, the manager said to her hoarsely, “I want you to take a dinner up to room 604 at eight o’clock. All you have to do is ring the bell, say, ‘Your dinner is here,’ and leave it.”

“That’s room 604, right?” she said.

“At eight o’clock,” he repeated. “On the dot.” He grimaced again, climbed in, and the taxi took him away.

The rain showed no signs of letting up after the manager was gone, and customers arrived at long intervals. No more than one or two tables were occupied at a time, so if the manager and one waiter had to be absent, this was a good time for it to happen. Things could get so busy that it was not unusual for even the full staff to have trouble coping.

When the owner’s meal was ready at eight o’clock, she pushed the room-service cart onto the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor. It was the standard meal for him: a half bottle of red wine with the cork loosened, a thermal pot of coffee, a chicken entree with steamed vegetables, dinner rolls, and butter. The heavy aroma of cooked chicken quickly filled the little elevator. It mingled with the smell of rain. Water droplets dotted the floor of the elevator, suggesting that someone with a wet umbrella had recently been aboard.

She pushed the cart down the corridor, bringing it to a stop in front of the door marked “604.” She double-checked her memory: 604. That was it. She cleared her throat and pressed the button by the door.

There was no answer. She stood in place for a good twenty seconds. Just as she was thinking of pressing the bell again, the door opened inward and a skinny old man appeared. He was shorter than she was, by some four or five inches. He had on a dark suit and a necktie. Against his white shirt, the tie stood out distinctly with its brownish-yellow coloring like withered leaves. He made a very clean impression, his clothes perfectly pressed, his white hair smoothed down: he looked as though he were about to go out for the night to some sort of gathering. The deep wrinkles that creased his brow made her think of deep ravines in an aerial photograph.

“Your dinner, sir,” she said in a husky voice, then quietly cleared her throat again. Her voice grew husky whenever she was tense.

“Dinner?”

“Yes, sir. The manager suddenly took sick. I had to take his place today. Your meal, sir.”

“Oh, I see,” the old man said, almost as if talking to himself, his hand still perched on the doorknob. “Took sick, eh? You don’t say.”

“His stomach started to hurt him all of a sudden. He went to the hospital. He thinks he might have appendicitis.”

“Oh, that’s not good,” the old man said, running his fingers along the wrinkles of his forehead. “Not good at all.”

She cleared her throat again. “Shall I bring your meal in, sir?” she asked.

“Ah yes, of course,” the old man said. “Yes, of course, if you wish. That’s fine with me.” If I wish? she thought. What a strange way to put it. What am I supposed to wish?

The old man opened the door the rest of the way, and she wheeled the cart inside. The floor was covered in short gray carpeting with no area for removing shoes. The first room was a large study, as though the apartment were more a workplace than a residence. The window looked out on Tokyo Tower nearby, its steel skeleton outlined in lights. A large desk stood by the window, and beside the desk was a compact sofa and love seat. The old man pointed to the plastic laminate coffee table in front of the sofa. She arranged his meal on the table: white napkin and silverware, coffeepot and cup, wine and wineglass, bread and butter, and the plate of chicken and vegetables.

“If you would be kind enough to set the dishes in the hall as usual, sir, I’ll come to get them in an hour.”

Her words seemed to snap him out of an appreciative contemplation of his dinner. “Oh, yes, of course. I’ll put them in the hall. On the cart. In an hour. If you wish.”

Yes, she replied inwardly, for the moment that is exactly what I wish. “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said after a moment’s consideration. He was wearing black shoes that had been polished to a high sheen. They were small and chic. He’s a stylish dresser, she thought. And he stands very straight for his age.

“Well, then, sir, I’ll be getting back to work.”

“No, wait just a moment,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Do you think it might be possible for you to give me five minutes of your time, miss? I have something I’d like to say to you.”

He was so polite in his request that it made her blush. “I ... think it should be all right,” she said. “I mean, if it’s really just five minutes.” He was her employer, after all. He was paying her by the hour. It was not a question of her giving or his taking her time. And this old man did not look like a person who would do anything bad to her.

“By the way, how old are you?” the old man asked, standing by the table with arms folded and looking directly into her eyes.

“I’m twenty now,” she said.

“Twenty now,” he repeated, narrowing his eyes as if peering through some kind of crack. “Twenty now. As of when?”

“Well, I just turned twenty,” she said. After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “Today is my birthday, sir.”

“I see,” he said, rubbing his chin as if this explained a great deal. “Today, is it? Today is your twentieth birthday?”

She nodded silently.

“Your life in this world began exactly twenty years ago today.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, “that is true.”

“I see, I see,” he said. “That’s wonderful. Well, then, happy birthday.”

“Thank you very much,” she said, and then it dawned on her that this was the very first time all day that anyone had wished her a happy birthday. Of course, if her parents had called from Oita, she might find a message from them on her answering machine when she got home after work.

“Well, well, this is certainly a cause for celebration,” he said. “How about a little toast? We can drink this red wine.”

“Thank you, sir, but I couldn’t. I’m working now.”

“Oh, what’s the harm in a little sip? No one’s going to blame you if I say it’s all right. Just a token drink for celebration.”

The old man slipped the cork from the bottle and dribbled a little wine into his glass for her. Then he took an ordinary drinking glass from a glass-doored cabinet and poured some wine for himself.

“Happy birthday,” he said. “May you live a rich and fruitful life, and may there be nothing to cast dark shadows on it.”

They clinked glasses.

May there be nothing to cast dark shadows on it: she silently repeated his remark to herself. Why had he chosen such unusual words for her birthday wish?

“Your twentieth birthday comes only once in a lifetime, miss. It’s an irreplaceable day.”

“Yes, sir, I know,” she said, taking one cautious sip of wine.

“And here, on your special day, you have taken the trouble to deliver my dinner to me like a kindhearted fairy.”

“Just doing my job, sir.”

“But still,” the old man said with a few quick shakes of the head. “But still, lovely young miss.”

The old man sat down in the leather chair by his desk and motioned her to the sofa. She lowered herself gingerly onto the edge of the sofa, with the wineglass in her hand. Knees aligned, she tugged at her skirt, clearing her throat again. She saw raindrops tracing lines down the windowpane. The room was strangely quiet.

“Today just happens to be your twentieth birthday, and on top of that you have brought me this wonderful warm meal,” the old man said, as if reconfirming the situation. Then he set his glass on the

desktop with a little thump. “This has to be some kind of special convergence, don’t you think?” Not quite convinced, she managed a nod.

“Which is why,” he said, touching the knot of his withered-leaf-colored necktie, “I feel it is important for me to give you a birthday present. A special birthday calls for a special commemorative gift.”

Flustered, she shook her head and said, “No, please, sir, don’t give it a second thought. All I did was bring your meal the way they ordered me to.”

The old man raised both hands, palms toward her. “No, miss, don’t you give it a second thought. The kind of ‘present’ I have in mind is not something tangible, not something with a price tag. To put it simply”—he placed his hands on the desk and took one long, slow breath—“what I would like to do for a lovely young fairy such as you is to grant a wish you might have, to make your wish come true. Anything. Anything at all that you wish for—assuming that you do have such a wish.”

“A wish?” she asked, her throat dry.

“Something you would like to have happen, miss. If you have a wish—one wish, I’ll make it come true. That is the kind of birthday present I can give you. But you had better think about it very carefully, because I can give you only one.” He raised one finger into the air. “Just one. You can’t change your mind afterward and take it back.”

She was at a loss for words. One wish? Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the windowpane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears.

“I have to wish for something, and it will be granted?”

Instead of answering her question, the old man—hands still side-by-side on the desk—just smiled. He did it in the most natural and amiable way.

“Do you have a wish, miss—or not?” he asked gently.

“This really did happen,” she said, looking straight at me. “I’m not making it up.”

“Of course not,” I said. She was not the sort of person to invent some goofy story out of thin air. “So ... did you make a wish?”

She went on looking at me for a while, then released a tiny sigh. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I wasn’t taking him 100 percent seriously myself. I mean, at twenty you’re not exactly living in a fairy-tale world anymore. If this was his idea of a joke, though, I had to hand it to him for coming up with it on the spot. He was a dapper old fellow with a twinkle in his eye, so I decided to play along with him. It was my twentieth birthday, after all: I figured I ought to have something not so ordinary happen to me that day. It wasn’t a question of believing or not believing.”

I nodded without saying anything.

“You can understand how I felt, I’m sure. My twentieth birthday was coming to an end with nothing special happening, nobody wishing me a happy birthday, and all I’m doing is carrying tortellini with anchovy sauce to people’s tables.”

I nodded again. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand.”

“So I made a wish.”

The old man kept his gaze fixed on her, saying nothing, hands still on the desk. Also on the desk were several thick folders that might have been account books, plus writing implements, a calendar, and a lamp with a green shade. Lying among them, his small hands looked like another set of desktop furnishings. The rain continued to beat against the glass, the lights of Tokyo Tower filtering through the shattered drops.

The wrinkles on the old man’s forehead deepened slightly. “That is your wish?”

“Yes,” she said. “That is my wish.”

“A bit unusual for a girl your age,” he said. “I was expecting something different.”

“If it’s no good, I’ll wish for something else,” she said, clearing her throat. “I don’t mind. I’ll think of something else.”

“No no,” the old man said, raising his hands and waving them like flags. “There’s nothing wrong with it, not at all. It’s just a little surprising, miss. Don’t you have something else? Like, say, you want to be prettier, or smarter, or rich? You’re okay with not wishing for something like that—something an ordinary girl would ask for?”

She took some moments to search for the right words. The old man just waited, saying nothing, his hands at rest together on the desk again.

“Of course I’d like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can’t imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don’t really know what life is all about. I don’t know how it works.”

“I see,” the old man said, intertwining his fingers and separating them again. “I see.”

“So, is my wish okay?”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course. It’s no trouble at all for me.”

The old man suddenly fixed his eyes on a spot in the air. The wrinkles of his forehead deepened: they might have been the wrinkles of his brain itself as it concentrated on his thoughts. He seemed to be staring at something—perhaps all-but-invisible bits of down—floating in the air. He opened his arms wide, lifted himself slightly from his chair, and whipped his palms together with a dry smack. Settling in the chair again, he slowly ran his fingertips along the wrinkles of his brow as if to soften them, and then turned to her with a gentle smile.

“That did it,” he said. “Your wish has been granted.”

“Already?”

“Yes, it was no trouble at all. Your wish has been granted, lovely miss. Happy birthday. You may go back to work now. Don’t worry, I’ll put the cart in the hall.”

She took the elevator down to the restaurant. Empty-handed now, she felt almost disturbingly light, as

though she were walking on some kind of mysterious fluff.

“Are you okay? You look spaced out,” the younger waiter said to her.

She gave him an ambiguous smile and shook her head. “Oh, really? No, I’m fine.”

“Tell me about the owner. What’s he like?”

“I dunno, I didn’t get a very good look at him,” she said, cutting the conversation short.

An hour later she went to bring the cart down. It was out in the hall, utensils in place. She lifted the lid to find the chicken and vegetables gone. The wine bottle and coffee carafe were empty. The door to room 604 stood there closed and expressionless. She stared at it for a time, feeling as though it might open at any moment, but it did not open. She brought the cart down on the elevator and wheeled it in to the dishwasher. The chef looked at the plate, empty as always, and nodded blankly.

“I never saw the owner again,” she said. “Not once. The manager turned out to have had just an ordinary stomachache and went back to delivering the owner’s meal again himself the next day. I quit the job after New Year’s, and I’ve never been back to the place. I don’t know, I just felt it was better not to go near there, kind of like a premonition.”

She toyed with a paper coaster, thinking her own thoughts. “Sometimes I get the feeling that everything that happened to me on my twentieth birthday was some kind of illusion. It’s as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened. But I know for sure that they did happen. I can still bring back vivid images of every piece of furniture and every knickknack in room 604. What happened to me in there really happened, and it had an important meaning for me too.”

The two of us kept silent for a time, drinking our drinks and thinking our separate thoughts. “Do you mind if I ask you one thing?” I asked. “Or, more precisely, two things.”

“Go right ahead,” she said. “I imagine you’re going to ask me what I wished for that time. That’s the first thing you’ll want to know.”

“But it looks as though you don’t want to talk about that.”

“Does it?”

I nodded.

She put the coaster down and narrowed her eyes as though staring at something off in the distance. “You’re not supposed to tell anybody what you wished for, you know.”

“I’m not going to try to drag it out of you,” I said. “I would like to know whether or not it came true, though. And also—whatever the wish itself might have been—whether or not you later came to regret what it was you chose to wish for. Were you ever sorry you didn’t wish for something else?”

“The answer to the first question is yes and also no. I still have a lot of living left to do, probably. I haven’t seen how things are going to work out to the end.”

“So it was a wish that takes time to come true?”

“You could say that. Time is going to play an important role.”

“Like in cooking certain dishes?”

She nodded.

I thought about that for a moment, but the only thing that came to mind was the image of a gigantic pie cooking slowly in an oven at low heat.

“And the answer to my second question?”

“What was that again?”

“Whether you ever regretted having chosen what you wished for.”

A few moments of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desiccated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, giving me a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

“I’m married now,” she said. “To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”

“Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.

“Even if the Audi’s bumper has two dents?”

“Hey, bumpers are made for denting.”

“That could be a great bumper sticker,” she said. “‘Bumpers are for denting.” I looked at her mouth when she said that.

“What I’m trying to tell you is this,” she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”

“There’s another good bumper sticker,” I said. “‘No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.”

She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.

She rested her elbow on the bar and looked at me. “Tell me,” she said. “What would you have wished for if you had been in my position?”

“On the night of my twentieth birthday, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

I took some time to think about that, but I couldn’t come up with a single wish.

“I can’t think of anything,” I confessed. “I’m too far away now from my twentieth birthday.”

“You really can’t think of anything?”

I nodded.

“Not one thing?”

“Not one thing.”

She looked into my eyes again—straight in—and said, “That’s because you’ve already made your wish.”

Haruki Murakami is the author, most recently, of the story collection After The Quake. He lives outside of Tokyo.

Copyright 2003 Harper’s Magazine Foundation

Blind Willow, Sleeping Girl

Translated by Philip Gabriel

When I closed my eyes, the scent of the wind wafted toward me. A May wind, swelling up like a piece of fruit, with a rough outer skin, slimy flesh, dozens of seeds. The flesh split open in midair, spraying seeds like gentle buckshot into the bare skin of my arms, leaving behind a faint trace of pain.

“What time is it?” my cousin asked me. About eight inches shorter than me, he had to look up when he talked. I glanced at my watch. “Ten-twenty.”

“Does that watch tell good time?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

My cousin grabbed my wrist to look at the watch. His slim, smooth fingers were surprisingly strong. “Did it cost a lot?”

“No, it’s pretty cheap,” I said, glancing again at the timetable.

No response.

My cousin had a confused look on his face. The white teeth between his open lips looked like bones that had regressed. “It’s pretty cheap,” I said, looking right at him, carefully repeating the words. “It’s pretty cheap, but it keeps good time.” My cousin nodded silently.

My cousin can’t hear well out of his right ear. Soon after he went into elementary school he was hit by a baseball and his hearing was screwed up. Not that he can’t function normally. He goes to a regular school, leads an entirely normal life. In his classroom, he always sits in the front row, on the right, so he can keep his left ear toward his teacher. And his grades aren’t so bad. The thing is, though, he goes through periods when he can hear sounds pretty well, and periods when he

can’t. It’s cyclical, like the tides. And sometimes, maybe twice a year, he can barely hear anything out of either ear. It’s like the silence in his right ear deepens to the point where it crushes any sound on the left side. When that happens, ordinary life goes out the window and he has to take some time off from school. The doctors are basically stumped. They’ve never seen a case like it, so there’s nothing they can do.

“Just because a watch is expensive doesn’t mean it’s accurate,” my cousin said, as if trying to convince himself. “I used to have a pretty expensive watch, but it was always off. I got it when I started junior high, but I lost it a year later. After that I’ve gone without a watch. They wouldn’t buy me a new one.”

“Must be tough to get along without one,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“Isn’t it hard to get along without a watch?” I repeated, looking right at him.

“No, it isn’t,” he replied, shaking his head. “It’s not like I’m living off in the mountains or something. If I want to know the time I just ask somebody.”

“True enough,” I said.

We were silent again for a while.

I knew I should say something more, try to be kind to him, try to make him relax a little until we arrived at the hospital. But it had been five years since I saw him last. In the meanwhile he’d grown from nine to fourteen, and I’d gone from twenty to twenty-five. And that span of time had created a translucent barrier between us that was hard to traverse. Even when I had to say something, the right words just wouldn’t come out. And every time I hesitated, every time I swallowed back something I was about to say, my cousin looked up at me with a slightly confused look on his face. His left ear tilted ever so slightly toward me.

“What time is it now?” he asked me.

“Ten twenty-nine,” I replied.

It was ten thirty-two when the bus finally rolled into view.

The bus that came was a new type, not like the one I used to take to high school. The windshield in front of the driver was much bigger, the whole vehicle like some huge bomber minus the wings. And the bus was more crowded than I had imagined. Nobody was standing in the aisles, but we couldn’t sit together. We weren’t going very far, so we stood next to the rear door in back. Why the bus should be so crowded at this time of day was a mystery. The bus route started from a private railway station, continued up into a residential area in the hills, then circled back to the station, and there weren’t any tourist spots along the way. A few schools along the route made the buses crowded when kids were going to school, but at this time of day the bus should have been empty.

My cousin and I held on to the straps and the poles. The bus was brand-new, straight from the factory, the metal surfaces

so shiny you could see your face reflected in them. The nap of the seats was all fluffy, and even the tiniest of screws had that proud, expectant feeling that only brand-new machinery possesses.

The new bus, and the way it was more crowded than expected, threw me off. Maybe the bus route had changed since I last rode it. I looked carefully around the bus and glanced outside. But it was the same old view of a quiet residential district I remembered.

“This is the right bus, isn’t it?” my cousin asked worriedly. Ever since we got aboard I must have had a perplexed look on my face.

“Not to worry,” I said, half trying to assure myself. “There’s only one bus route that goes by here, so this has got to be it.”

“Did you used to take this bus when you went to high school?” my cousin asked.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Did you like school?”

“Not particularly,” I said. “But I could see my friends there, and it wasn’t such a long ride.”

My cousin thought about what I said.

“Do you still see them?”

“No, not for a long time,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

“Why not? Why don’t you see them?”

“’Cause we live so far away from each other.” That wasn’t the reason, but I couldn’t think of any other way to explain it. Right beside me sat a group of old people. Must have been close to fifteen of them. They were the reason the bus was so crowded, I suddenly realized. They were all suntanned, even the backs of their necks dark. And every single one of them was skinny. Most of the men had on thick mountain-climbing types of shirts; the women, simple, unadorned blouses. All of them had small rucksacks in their laps, the kind you’d use for short hikes into the mountains. It was amazing how much they looked alike. Like a drawer full of samples of something, all lined up neatly by category. The strange thing, though, was that there wasn’t any mountain-climbing route along this bus line. So where in the world could they have been going? I thought about this as I stood there, clinging to the strap, but no plausible explanation came to mind.

I wonder if it’s going to hurt this time-the treatment,” my cousin asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t hear any of the details.”

“Have you ever been to an ear doctor?” I shook my head. I hadn’t been to an ear doctor once in my life.

“Has it hurt before?” I asked.

“Not really,” my cousin said glumly. “It wasn’t totally painless, of course; sometimes there was a little pain. But nothing

terrible.”

“Maybe this time it’ll be the same. Your mom said they’re not going to do anything much different from usual.”

“But if they do the same as always, how’s that going to help?”

“You never know. Sometimes the unexpected happens.”

“You mean like pulling out a cork?” my cousin said. I glanced at him, but I didn’t detect any sarcasm.

“It’ll feel different having a new doctor treat you, and sometimes just a slight change in procedure might make all the

difference. I wouldn’t give up so easily.”

“I’m not giving up,” my cousin said.

“But you are kind of fed up with it?”“I guess,” he said, and sighed. “The fear is the worst thing. The pain I imagine is

worse than the actual pain. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

A lot of things had happened that spring. A situation developed at work and I ended up quitting my job at a little ad company in Tokyo where I’d been working for two years. Around the same time I broke up with the girlfriend I’d been going out with since college. A month after that my grandmother died of intestinal cancer, and for the first time in five years I came back to this town, small suitcase in hand. My old room was just as I’d left it. The books I’d read were still on the shelf, my bed was there, my desk, and all the old records I used to listen to. But everything in the room had dried up, had long ago lost its color and smell. Time alone had stood still.

I’d planned to go back to Tokyo a couple of days after my grandmother’s funeral to run down some leads for a new job. I was planning to move to a new apartment too, for a change of scenery. As the days passed, though, it seemed like too much trouble to get off my butt and get going. To put a finer point on it, even if I’d wanted to get up and moving, I couldn’t. I spent my time holed up in my old room, listening to those old records, rereading old books, occasionally doing a little weeding in the garden. I didn’t meet anybody, and the only people I talked to were members of my family. One day my aunt dropped by and asked me to take my cousin to a new hospital. She should take him herself, she said, but something had come up that day so she couldn’t. The hospital was near the high school I used to go to, so I knew where it was, and I had nothing else going on, so I couldn’t very well refuse. My aunt handed me an envelope with some cash in it for us to use as lunch money.

This switch to a new hospital came about because the treatment he’d been getting at his old hospital hadn’t done a thing to help. In fact he was having more problems than ever. When my aunt complained to the doctor in charge, he suggested

that the problem had more to do with the boy’s home environment than anything medical, and the two of them went at it. Not that anybody really expected that changing hospitals would lead to a quick improvement in his hearing. Nobody said as much, but they’d pretty much given up hope that his hearing would get any better.

My cousin lived nearby, but I was just over a decade older than him and we were never what you’d call close. When the relatives would get together I might take him someplace or play with him, but that was the extent of it.

Still, before long everyone started to look at my cousin and me as a pair, thinking that he was attached to me and that he was my favorite. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. Now, though, seeing the way he tilted his head, his left ear aimed at me, I found it strangely touching.

Like the sound of rain heard long ago, his awkwardness struck a chord in me. And I began to catch a glimpse of why our relatives wanted to bring us together.

The bus had passed by seven or eight bus stops when my cousin looked up at me again anxiously.

“Is it much farther?”

“Yeah, we still have a ways. It’s a big hospital, so we won’t miss it.”

I casually watched as the wind from the open window gently rustled the brims of the old people’s hats and the scarves around their necks. Who were these people? And where could they possibly be headed?

“Hey, are you going to work in my father’s company?” my cousin asked. I looked at him in surprise. His father, my uncle, ran a large printing company in Kobe. I’d never given the idea a thought, and nobody ever dropped a hint. “Nobody’s said anything about that,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

My cousin blushed. “I just thought you might be,” he said. “But why don’t you? You wouldn’t have to leave. And everybody’d be happy.”

The taped message announced the next stop, but no one pushed the button to get off. Nobody was waiting to get on at the bus stop either.

“But there’s stuff I have to do, so I have to go back to Tokyo,” I said. My cousin nodded silently.

There wasn’t a single thing I had to do. But I couldn’t very well stay here.

The number of houses thinned out as the bus climbed the mountain slope.

Thick branches began to throw a heavy shadow across the road. We passed by some foreign-looking houses, painted, with low walls in front. The cold breeze felt good. Each time the bus rounded a curve the sea down below popped into view, then disappeared. Until the bus pulled up at the hospital my cousin and I just stood there, watching the scenery go by. “The examination will take some time and I can handle it alone,” my cousin said, “so why don’t you go and wait for me somewhere?” After a quick hello to the doctor in charge, I exited the exam room and went to the cafeteria. I’d barely had a bite for breakfast and was starving, but nothing on the menu whetted my appetite. I made do with a cup of coffee.

It was a weekday morning and one little family and I had the place to ourselves. The father was mid-forties, wearing a navy-blue, striped pair of pajamas and plastic slippers. The mother and little twin girls had come to pay a visit. The twins had on identical white dresses and were bent over the table, serious looks on their faces, drinking glasses of orange juice. The father’s injury, or illness, didn’t seem too serious, and both parents and kids looked bored.

Outside the window was a lawn. A sprinkler ticked as it rotated, misting the grass with a silvery spray. A pair of shrill, long-tailed birds cut right above the sprinkler and disappeared from sight. Past the lawn there were a few deserted tennis courts, the nets gone. Beyond the tennis courts was a line of zelkovas, and between their branches you could see the ocean. The early summer sun glinted here and there off the small waves. The breeze rustled the new leaves of the zelkova, ever so slightly bending the spray from the sprinkler.

I felt like I’d seen this scene, many years before. A broad expanse of lawn, twin girls slurping up orange juice, long-tailed birds flying off who knows where, netless tennis courts, and the sea beyond ... But it was an illusion. It was vivid enough, an intense sense of reality, but an illusion nonetheless. I’d never been to this hospital before in my life.

I stretched my legs out on the seat opposite, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. In the darkness I could see a lump of white. Silently it expanded, then contracted, like some microbe under a microscope. Changing form, spreading out, breaking up, reforming.

It was eight years ago when I went to that other hospital. A small hospital next to the sea. All you could see out the window were some oleanders. It was an old hospital, and smelled of rain. My friend’s girlfriend had her chest operated on there, and the two of us went to see how she was doing. The summer of our junior year in high school. It wasn’t much of an operation, really, just done to correct the position of one of her ribs that curved inward a bit. Not an emergency procedure, just the type of thing that would eventually have to be done, so she figured why not take care of it now. The operation itself was over quickly, but they wanted her to take her time recuperating, so she stayed in the hospital for ten days. My friend and I rode there together on a 125cc Yamaha motorcycle. He drove on the way there, me on the way back. He’d asked me to come. “No way I’m going to a hospital by myself,” he’d said.

My friend stopped at a candy store near the station and bought a box of chocolates. I held on to his belt with one hand, the other hand clutching tightly the box of chocolates. It was a hot day and our shirts kept getting soaked, then drying in the wind. As my friend drove he sang some nothing song in an awful voice. I can still remember the smell of his sweat. Not too long after that he died.

His girlfriend had on blue pajamas and a thin gown sort of thing down to her knees. The three of us sat at a table in the cafeteria, smoked Short Hope cigarettes, drank Cokes, and ate ice cream. She was starving and ate two sugar-coated doughnuts and drank cocoa with tons of cream in it. Still that didn’t seem enough for her.

“By the time you get out of the hospital you’re going to be a regular blimp,” my friend said, somewhat disgustedly. “It’s okay-I’m recovering,” she replied, wiping the tips of her fingers, covered with oil from the doughnuts.

As they talked I gazed out the window at the oleanders. They were huge, almost like a woods unto themselves. I could hear the sound of waves too. The railing next to the window was completely rusted from the constant breeze. An antique—looking ceiling fan nudged the hot, sticky air around the room. The cafeteria had the smell of a hospital. Even the food and the drinks had that hospital odor to them. The girlfriend’s pajamas had two breast pockets, in one of which was a small gold-colored pen. Whenever she leaned forward I could see her small, white breastspeep out of the V-necked collar.

The memories ground to a halt right there. I tried to remember what had happened after that. I drank a Coke, gazed at the oleander, snuck a look at her breasts-and then what? I shifted in the plastic chair and, resting my head in my hands, tried to dig down further in the layer of memory. Like gouging out a cork with the tip of a thin-bladed knife.

I looked off to one side and tried to visualize the doctors splitting open the flesh on her chest, sticking their rubber-gloved hands inside to straighten out her crooked rib. But it all seemed too surreal, like some sort of allegory. That’s right-after that we talked about sex. At least my friend did. But what did he say? Something about me, no doubt. How I’d tried, unsuccessfully, to make it with some girl. Not much of anything, but the way he told it, blowing everything out of proportion, made his girlfriend burst out laughing. Made me laugh as well. The guy really knew how to tell a story.

“Please don’t make me laugh,” she said, a bit painfully. “When I laugh my chest hurts.”

“Where does it hurt?” my friend asked.

She pressed a spot on her pajamas above her heart, just to the right of her left breast. He made some joke about that, and again she laughed.

I looked at my watch. It was eleven forty-five but my cousin still wasn’t back. It was getting close to lunchtime and the cafeteria was starting to get more crowded. All sorts of sounds and voices mixed together like smoke enveloping the room. I returned once more to the realm of memory. And that small gold pen she had in her breast pocket .... Now I remember-she used that pen to write something on a paper napkin.

She was drawing a picture. The napkin was too soft and the tip of her pen kept getting stuck. Still, she managed to draw

a hill. And a small house on top of the hill. A girl was asleep in the house. The house was surrounded by a stand of blind willows. It was the blind willows that had put her to sleep.

“What the heck’s a blind willow?” my friend asked.

“There is a kind of tree like that.”

“Well I never heard of it.”

“That’s ’cause I’m the one who created it,” she said, smiling. “Blind willows have a lot of pollen, and tiny flies covered with the stuff crawl inside her ear and put the girl to sleep.”

She took a new napkin and drew a picture of the blind willow. The blind willow turned out to be a tree the size of an azalea. The tree was in bloom, the flowers surrounded by dark green leaves like a bunch of lizard tails gathered together. The blind willow didn’t resemble a willow at all.

“You got a cigarette?” my friend asked me. I tossed a sweaty pack of Hopes and some matches across the table.

“A blind willow looks small on the outside, but it’s got incredibly deep roots,” she explained. “Actually, after a certain point it stops growing up and pushes further and further down into the ground. Like the darkness nourishes it.”

“And the flies carry that pollen to her ear, burrow inside, and put her to sleep,” my friend added, struggling to light his cigarette with the damp matches. “But what happens to the flies?”

“They stay inside the girl and eat her flesh-naturally,” his girlfriend said.

“Gobble it up,” my friend said.

I remembered now how that summer she’d written a long poem about the blind willow and explained it all to us. That was the only homework assignment she did that summer. She made up a story based on a dream she’d had one night, and as she lay in bed for a week she wrote this long poem. My friend said he wanted to read it, but she was still polishing it, so she turned him down; instead, she drew those pictures and summarized the plot.

A young man climbed up the hill to rescue the girl the blind-willow pollen had put to sleep.

“That’s got to be me,” my friend put in.

She shook her head. “No, it isn’t you. “You sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said, a fairly serious look on her face. “I don’t know why I know that. But I do. You’re not angry, are you?”

“You bet I am,” my friend frowned, half joking.

Pushing his way through the thick blind willows, the young man slowly made his way up the hill. He was the first one ever to climb the hill once the blind willows took over. Hat pulled down over his eyes, brushing away with one hand the

swarms of flies buzzing around him, the young man kept on climbing. To see the sleeping girl. To wake her from her long, deep sleep.

“But by the time he reached the top of the hill the girl’s body had basically been eaten up already by the flies, right?” my friend said.

“In a sense,” his girlfriend replied. “In a sense being eaten by flies makes it a sad story, doesn’t it,” my friend said. “Yes, I guess so,” she said after giving it some thought. “What do you think?” she asked me.

“Sounds like a sad story to me,” I replied.

It was twelve-twenty when my cousin came back. He was carrying a small bag of medicine and had a sort of unfocused look on his face. After he appeared at the entrance to the cafeteria it took some time for him to spot me and come on over. He walked awkwardly, as if he couldn’t keep his balance. He sat down across from me and, like he’d been too busy to remember to breathe, took a huge breath.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“Mmm,” he said. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

“Are you hungry’?” I asked. He nodded silently.

“You want to eat here? Or do you want to take the bus into town and eat there?”

He looked uncertainly around the room. “Here’s fine,” he said. I bought lunch tickets and ordered the set lunches for both of us. Until the food was brought over to us my cousin gazed silently out the window at the same scenery I’d been looking at-the sea, the row of zelkovas, the sprinkler.

At the table beside us a nicely decked-out middle-aged couple were eating sandwiches and talking about a friend of theirs who had lung cancer. How he’d quit smoking five years ago but it was too late, how he’d vomit blood when he woke up in the morning. The wife asked the questions, the husband gave the answers. In a certain sense, the husband explained, you can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.

Our lunches consisted of Salisbury steaks and fried white fish. Plus salads and rolls. We sat there, across from each other, silently eating. The whole time we were eating the couple next to us went on and on about how cancer starts. Why the cancer rate’s gone up,why there isn’t any medicine that can combat it.

“Everywhere you go it’s the same,” my cousin said in a flat tone, gazing at his hands. “The same old questions, the same tests.”

We were sitting on the bench in front of the hospital, waiting for the bus. Every once in a while the breeze would rustle the green leaves above us.

“Sometimes you can’t hear anything at all?” I asked him.

“That’s right,” my cousin answered. “I can’t hear a thing.”

“What does that feel like?”

He tilted his head to one side and thought about it. “All of a sudden you can’t hear anything. But it takes quite some time before you realize what’s happened. By then you can’t hear a thing. It’s like you’re at the bottom of the sea wearing earplugs. That continues for a while. All that time you can’t hear a thing, but it’s not just your ears. Not being able to hear anything is just a part of it.”

“Is it annoying?”

He shook his head, a short, definite shake. “I don’t know why, but it doesn’t bother me that much. It is inconvenient, though. Not being able to hear anything.”

I tried to picture it. But the image wouldn’t come.

“Did you ever see John Ford’s movie Fort Apache?” my cousin asked.

“A long time ago,” I said.

“It was on TV a while ago. It’s really a good movie.”

“Um,” I affirmed.

“In the beginning there’s this new colonel who’s come to a fort out west. A veteran captain comes out to meet him when he arrives, the captain played by John Wayne. The colonel doesn’t know much about what things are like out west. And there’s an Indian uprising all around the fort.”

My cousin took a neatly folded white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth.

“Once he arrives at the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, ‘I did see a few Indians on the way over here.’ And John Wayne, this cool look on his face, replies, ‘Don’t worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there aren’t any there.’ I don’t remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?”

I couldn’t recall any lines like that from Fort Apache. It struck me as a bit too abstruse for a John Ford movie. But it had been some time since I’d seen the film.

“I think it means that what can be seen by anybody isn’t all that important ... I guess.”

My cousin frowned. “I don’t really understand it either, but every time somebody sympathizes with me about my ears that line comes to me. ‘If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there aren’t any there.”‘

I laughed.

“Is that strange?” my cousin asked. “Yep,” I said. And he laughed. It’d been a long time since I’d seen him laugh.

After a while my cousin said, like he was unburdening himself, “Would you look inside my ears for me?”

“Look inside your ears?” I asked, a little surprised.

“Just what you can see from the outside.”

“Okay, but why do you want me to do that?”

“I don’t know,” my cousin blushed. “I just want you to see what they look like.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

My cousin sat facing away from me, tilting his right ear toward me. His ear was really nicely shaped. On the small side, but the earlobe was all puffy, like a freshly baked madeleine. I’d never looked at anybody’s ear so intently before. Once you start observing it closely, the human ear-its structure-is a pretty mysterious thing. With all these outrageous twists and turns to it, bumps and depressions. Maybe evolution determined this weird shape was the optimum way to collect sounds, or to protect what’s inside. Surrounded by this asymmetrical wall, the hole of the ear gapes open like the entrance to a dark, secret cave.

I pictured my friend’s girlfriend, microscopic flies nesting in her ear. Sweet pollen stuck to their six tiny legs, they burrow into the warm darkness inside her, chewing on the soft, light pink flesh within, sucking up all the juices, laying tiny eggs inside her brain. But you can’t see them, or even hear the sound of their wings.

“That’s enough,” my cousin said. He spun around to sit facing forward, shifting around on the bench. “So, did you see anything unusual?”

“Nothing different as far as I could see, from the outside at least.”

“Anything’s okay-even a feeling

you got or something.”

“Your ear looks normal to me.” My cousin looked disappointed. Maybe I had said the wrong thing.

“Did the treatment hurt?” I asked. “No, it didn’t. Same as always. They just rummaged around in the same old spot. Makes me feel they’re about to wear it out. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like my own ear anymore.”

“There’s the number 28,” my cousin said after a while, turning to me. “That’s our bus, isn’t it?”

I’d been lost in thought. I looked up when he said this and saw the bus slowing down as it went round the curve coming up the slope. This wasn’t the kind of brand-new bus we’d ridden over on but one of those older buses I remembered. A sign with the number 28 was hanging from the front. I tried to stand up from the bench, but I couldn’t. Like I was caught up in the middle of a powerful current, my limbs didn’t respond.

I’d been thinking of the box of chocolates we’d taken when we went to that hospital on that long ago summer afternoon. The girl had happily opened the lid to the box only to discover that the dozen little chocolates had completely melted, sticking to the paper between each piece and to the lid itself. On the way to the hospital my friend and I had stopped the motorcycle by the seaside, and lay around on the beach just talking and hanging out. The whole while we’d let that box of chocolates lie out in the hot August sun. Our carelessness, our self-centeredness, had wrecked those chocolates, made one fine mess of them all. We should have sensed what was happening. One of us-it didn’t matter who-should have said something meaningful. But on that afternoon, we didn’t sense anything, just exchanged a couple of dumb jokes and said goodbye. And left that hill still overgrown with blind willows.

My cousin grabbed my right arm in a tight grip.

“Are you all right?” he asked me. That brought me back to reality, and I stood up from the bench. This time I had no trouble standing. Once more I could feel on my skin the sweet May breeze blowing by. For a few seconds I stood there in a strange, dim place. Where the things I could see didn’t exist. Where the invisible did. Finally, though, the real number 28 bus stopped in front of me, its real door opening. I clambered aboard, heading off to some other place. I rested my hand on my cousin’s shoulder. “I’m all right,” I told him.

Chance Traveler

Translated by Philip Gabriel.

The “I” here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of this story. Mostly this is a third-person narrative, but here at the beginning the narrator does make an appearance. Just like in an old-fashioned play where the narrator stands before the curtain, delivers a prologue, then bows out. I appreciate your patience, and promise I won’t keep you long.

The reason I’ve turned up here is I thought it best to relate directly several so-called strange events that have happened to me. Actually, events of this kind happen quite often. Some of them are significant, and have affected my life in one way or another. Others are insignifant incidents that have no impact at all. At least I think so.

Whenever I bring up these incidents, say, in a group discussion, I never get much of a reaction. Most people just make some noncommittal comment, and it never goes anywhere. It never jump-starts the conversation, never spurs someone else to bring up something similar that’s happened to him. The topic I bring up is like so much water flowing down the wrong channel and being sucked up in a nameless stretch of sand. No one says anything for a while, then invariably someone changes the subject.

At first I thought I was telling the story wrong, so one time I tried writing it down as an essay. I figured if I did that maybe people would take it more seriously. But no one seemed to believe what I’d written. “you’ve made it all up, right?” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. Since I’m a novelist people assume that anything I say or write must have a touch of make-believe. Granted, my fiction contains more than its share of invention, but when I’m not writing fiction I don’t go out of my way to make up meaningless stories.

As a kind of preface to a tale, then, I’d like to briefly relate some strange experiences I’ve had. I’ll stick to the trifling, insignificant ones. If I started in on the life-changing experiences, I’d use up most of my allocated space.

*

From 1993 to 1995 I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a sort of writer-in-residence at a college, and was working on a novel entitled The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In Harvard Square there was a jazz club called the Regattabar Jazz Club where they had lots of live performances. It was a comfortable, relaxed, cozy place. Famous jazz musicians played there, and the cover charge was reasonable.

One evening the pianist Tommy Flanagan appeared with his trio. My wife had something else to do so I went by myself. Tommy Flanagan is one of my favorite jazz pianists. He usually appears as an accompanist; his performances are invariably warm and deep, and marvelously steady. His solos are fantastic. Full of anticipation, then, I sat down at a table near the stage and enjoyed a glass of California Merlot. To tell the truth, though, his performance was a bit of a letdown. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Or else it was still too early for him to get in the swing of things. His performance wasn’t bad, it was just missing that extra element that sends us flying to another world. It lacked that special magical glow, I guess you could say. Tommy Flanagan’s better than this, I thought as I listened—just wait till he gets up to speed.

But time didn’t improve things. As their set was drawing to a close, I started to get almost panicky, hoping that it wouldn’t end like this. I wanted something to remember his performance by. If things ended like this, all I’d take home would be lukewarm memories. Or maybe no memories at all. And I may never have a chance to see Tommy Flanagan play live again. (In fact I never did.) Suddenly a thought struck me: what if I were given a change to request two songs by him right now—which ones would I choose? I mulled it over for a while before picking “Barbados” and “Star-Crossed Lovers.”

The first piece is by Charlie Parker, the second a Duke Ellington tune. I add this for people who aren’t into jazz, but neither one is very popular, or performed much. You might occasionally hear “Barbados,” though it’s one of hte less flashy numbers Charlie Parker wrote, and I bet most people have never heard “Star-Crossed Lovers” even once. My point being, these weren’t typical choices.

I had my reasons, of course, for choosing these unlikely pieces for my fantasy requests—namely that Tommy Flanagan had made memorable recordings of both. “Barbados” appeared on the 1957 album Dial JJ 5 where he was a pianist with the J. J. Johnson Quintet, while he recorded “Star-Crossed Lovers” on the 1968 album Encounter! with Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims. Over his long career Tommy Flanagan has played and recorded countless pieces as a sideman in various groups, but it was the crisp, smart solos, short though they were, in these two particular pieces that I’ve always loved. That’s why I was thinking if only he would play those two numbers right now it’d be perfect. I was watching him closely, picturing him coming over to my table and asking, “Hey, I’ve had my eye on you. Do you have any requests? Why don’t you give me the titles of two numbers you’d like me to play?” Knowing all the time, of course, that the chances of that happening were nil.

And then, without a word, and without so much as a glance in my direction, Tommy Flanagan launched into the last two numbers of his set—the very ones I’d been thinking of. He started off with the ballad “Star-Crossed Lovers,” then went into an up-tempo version of “Barbados.” I sat there, wineglass in hand, speechless. Jazz fans will understand that the chance of his picking these two pieces from the millions of jazz numbers out there was astronomical. And also—and this is the main point here—his performances of both numbers were amazing.

*

The second incident took place around the same time, and also had to do with jazz. I was in a used-record store near the Berklee School of Music one afternoon, checking out the records. Rummaging around in old shelves of LPs is one of the few things that makes life worth living, as far as I’m concerned. On that particular day I’d located a used copy of Pepper Adam’s recording for Riverside called 10 to 4 at the 5 Spot. It was a live recording of the Pepper Adams Quintet, with Donald Byrd on trumpet, recorded in New York at the Five Spot jazz club. “10 to 4,” of course, meant ten minutes till four o’clock, meaning that they played such a hot set they went on till dawn. This copy of the album was a first pressing, in mint condition, and was going for only seven or eight dollars. I owned the Japanese version of the record and had listened to it so much it was all scratched. Finding an original recording in this good shop and at this price seemed, to exaggerate a little, like a minor miracle. I was overjoyed as I bought the record, and just as I was exiting the shop a young man passed me and asked, “Hey, do you have the time?” I glanced at my watch and automatically answered, “Yeah, it’s ten to four.”

After I said this I noticed the coincidence and gulped. What in the world is going on? I wondered. Was the god of jazz hovering in the sky above Boston, giving me a wink and a smile and saying, “Yo, you dig it?”

*

Neither one of these incidents was anything special. It wasn’t like my life turned in a new direction. I was simply struck by the strange coincidences—that things like this do actually happen.

Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not the sort of person who’s into occult phenomena. Fortune-telling doesn’t do a thing for me. Instead of going to the trouble of having a fortune-teller read my palm, I think I’m better off trying to rack my brain for a solution to whatever problem I have. Not that I have a brilliant mind or anything, just that this seems a quicker way to find a solution. I’m not into paranormal powers either. Transmigration, the soul, premonitions, telepathy, the end times—I’ll pass. I’m not saying I don’t believe in any of these. No problem with me if they really do exist. I’m just personally not interested. Still, a significant number of strange, out-of-left-field kinds of things have colored my otherwise humdrum life.

The story I’m about to tell is one a friend of mine told me. I happened to tell him once about my own two episodes, and afterward he sat there for a time with a serious look on his face and finally said, “You know, something like that happened to me, too. Something that coincidence led me to. It wasn’t something totally weird, but I can’t really explain it. At any rate, a series of coincidences took me somewhere I never expected to be.”

I’ve changed some of the facts to protect people’s identities, but other than that the story is just as he related it.

*

My friend works as a piano tuner. He lives in the western part of Tokyo, near the Tama River. He’s forty-one, and gay. He doesn’t especially hide the fact that he’s gay. He has a boyfriend three years younger than he is. The boyfriend works in real estate and because of his job isn’t able to come out, so they live apart. My friend might be a lowly piano tuner but he graduated from the piano department of a music college and is an impressive pianist himself. HIs forte is modern French composers—Debussy, Ravel, and Erik Satie and he plays them with a deep expressiveness. But Francis Poulenc is his favorite.

“Poulenc was gay,” he explained to me one day. “And he made no attempt to hide it. Which was a pretty hard thing to do in those days. He said this once: ‘If you took away my being homosexual my music would never have come about.’ I know exactly what he means. He had to be as true to his homosexuality as he was to his music. That’s music, and that’s life.”

I’ve always liked Poulenc’s music too. When my friend comes over to tune my old piano I sometimes have him run through a few short Poulenc pieces when he’s finished. The “French Suite,” the “Pastoral,” and so on.

He “discovered” he was gay after entering music college. Before then he never once considered the possibility. He was handsome, well brought up, had a calm demeanor, and was popular with the girls in his high school. He never had a steady girlfriend, but he did go out on dates. He loved walking with a girl, gazing at her hairdo close-up, the fragrance of her neck, holding her delicate hand in his. But he never experienced sex. After several dates with a girl he’d start to sense that she was hoping he’d take the initiative and do something, but he never was able to take the next step. He never felt anything inside him driving him to do so. Without exception the other guys around him wrestled with their own sexual demons, some of them struggling with them, others plunging ahead and giving in, but he never felt the same kind of urges. Maybe I’m just a late bloomer, he figured. Or maybe I just haven’t met the right girl yet.

In college he went out with a girl in the same year in the percussion department. They enjoyed talking, and whenever they were together they felt close. Not long after they met they had sex in her room. She was the one who led him on. They’d had a few drinks. The sex went off smoothly, though it wasn’t as thrilling and satisfying as everybody said. In fact he found the act rough, grotesque even. And the faint odor the girl gave off when she got sexually aroused turned him off. He much preferred just talking with her, playing music together, sharing a meal. As time passed, having sex with her became a burden.

Still, he just thought he was indifferent to sex. But on day ... No, I think I’ll skip this part. It’ll take too long, and really isn’t connected to the story I want to tell. Let’s just say that something took place and he discovered that he was, unmistakably, gay. He didn’t want to make up some excuse so he came right out and told her. Within a week the news had spread to all his friends. He lost a few of them, and things grew difficult between him and his parents, but in the final analysis it was good it all came out. He wasn’t the type who could have hid who he really was.

What hurt the most, though, was how this affected his relationship with the person he was closest to in his family, his sister, who was two years older. When her fiancé’s family heard about his coming out it looked like the marriage might be canceled, and though they were able to persuade the man’s parents and finally get married, the whole thing nearly gave his sister a nervous breakdown, and she got incensed at her brother. Why did you have to pick this time in my life to make waves? she yelled at him. Her brother naturally defended himself, but after this they grew apart, and he even passed on attending her wedding.

He mostly enjoyed his life as a gay man living alone. Other than those who had a physical revulsion to gays, most people liked him—he was, after all, always well dressed, kind, and courteous, with a nice sense of humor and a winning smile. He was good at his job, so had a large list of clients and a steady income. Several famous pianists insisted on having him tune their instruments. He purchased a two-bedroom apartment near a university and had nearly paid off the mortgage. He owned an expensive stereo system, was a skilled organic chef, and kept himself in shape by working out five days a week at a gym. After going out with a number of men, he met his present partner and had been enjoying a settled sexual relationship with him for nearly a decade.

On Tuesdays he’d cross over the Tama River in his green, stick-shift Hondo convertible sports car and go to an outlet mall in Kanagawa Prefecture. The mall had all the typical big-box stores—the Gap, Toys R Us, the Body Shop. On weekends the place was packed and you could barely find a parking spot, but on weekday mornings the mall was nearly deserted. He’d head to a large bookstore at the mall, buy a book that caught his eye, then spend a pleasant few hours sipping coffee and reading in a café. That was the way he spent his Tuesdays.

“The mall’s hideous,” he told me, “but that café is the exception—a very comfortable little place. I just happened to run across it. They don’t play any music, it’s all nonsmoking, and the chairs are perfect for reading. Not too hard, not too soft. And there’s never anybody there. I don’t imagine on a Tuesday morning you’d find many people heading for a café. Even if they were, they’d probably go to the nearby Starbucks.

So Tuesday mornings find him in that café, lost in a book, from just past ten till one. At one he heads to a nearby restaurant, has a lunch of tuna salad and Perrier, then goes to the gym to work out. That’s a typical Tuesday.

*

On that particular Tuesday morning he was reading, as usual, in the nearly empty café. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. He’d read it many years ago, and when he spied it on a bookshelf decided to try it again. He had a clear memory of it as an interesting read, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember the plot. Dickens had always been one of his favorite writers. Reading Dickens made the world fade away. From the first page he found himself completely absorbed by the story.

After an hour’s concentrated reading, though, he felt tired. He closed his book, put it on top of his table, signaled the waitress for a refill, and went to the restroom outside the café. When he returned to his seat, a woman at the next table, who was also reading, spoke to him.

“I’m sorry, but do you mind if I ask you a question?” she said.

A somewhat ambiguous smile came to him as he returned her gaze. She was about the same age as he was. “Of course,” he replied.

“I know it’s forward of me to speak like this, but there’s something I’ve been wondering about,” she said, blushing slightly.

“It’s fine. I’m in no hurry, go right ahead.”

“By any chance is that book you’re reading by Dickens?”

“It is,” he said, picking up the book and showing it to her. “Bleak House.”

“I thought so,” she said, clearly relieved. “I glanced at the cover and thought it might be that book.”

“Are you a fan of Bleak House, too?”

“I am. What I mean is, I’ve been reading the same book. Right next to you, just by coincidence.” She took the plain paper wrapping off the book, the kind bookstores put on if you like, and showed him the cover.

It was definitely a surprising coincidence. Imagine—on a weekday morning, in a deserted café in a deserted shopping mall two people happen to be sitting right next to each other, reading the same exact book. And this wasn’t some worldwide best seller but Charles Dickens. And not even one of his better-known works. This strange and startling chance meeting took both of them by surprise, but it also helped them overcome the awkwardness of a first encounter.

The woman lived in anew housing development not far from the mall. She’d purchased Bleak House five days ago at the very same bookstore, and when she first sat down at this café to order a cup of tea and opened the book she found she couldn’t stop reading. before she knew it two hours had passed. She hadn’t been so absorbed in reading since she was in college.

She ws petite and, although not overweight, was starting to put on a bit of extra flesh in all the typical places. She had a large bust and an attractive face. Her clothes were tasteful, and looked a little on the expensive side. The two of them chatted for a while. The woman was in a book club and their book of the month happened to be Bleak House. One of the women in the club was a great fan of Dickens and had suggested that novel as their next reading. The woman in the café had two children (two girls, a third grader and a first grader) and normally found it hard to find any time to read. Though sometimes she was able to get out of the house like this and carve out some time. Most of the people she dealt with every day were the mothers of her children’s classmates, and their topics of conversation were limited tot TV dramas and gossip about their children’s teachers, so she had joined a local book club. Her husband used to be quite a reader himself, though now work kept him so busy that he was lucky to have time to glance through a few business books now and then.

He told her a little about himself. That he worked as a piano tuner, lived across the Tama River, and was single. He liked this little café so much he drove all the way here once a week just to sit and read. He didn’t mention being gay. He didn’t intentionally hide it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you tell just anybody.

They had lunch together in a restaurant in the mall. The woman was a very open, honest sort of person. Once she relaxed she laughed a lot—a natural, quiet laugh. Without her putting it into words, he could well imagine the kind of life she’d led till then. She was a pampered daughter of a well-to-do family in Setagaya, attended a decent college, where she got good grades and was popular (more with other girls than with boys, perhaps), married a man three years older than her who was pulling in a good salary, and had two daughters. The girls were attending private school. Her twelve years of marriage hadn’t exactly been all roses, but she had no particular complaints. The two of them had a light lunch and talked about books they’d read recently, music they liked. They talked for about an hour.

“I enjoyed this,” the woman said after they’d finished, and she blushed. “I don’t have anybody I can really talk to.”

“I enjoyed it, too,” he said. And that was the truth.

*

The next Tuesday, as he sat in the café reading, she showed up again. They greeted each other with a smile and sat at separate tables, both silently delving into their copies of Bleak House. Just before noon she came over to his table and spoke to him, and like the week before they went off to have lunch. I know a cozy little French place nearby, she said, and I was wondering if you’d like to go. There aren’t any decent restaurants in the mall. Sounds good, he agreed, let’s go. They drove to the restaurant in her blue, automatic Peugeot 306, and had watercress salad and grilled sea bass, a glass of white wine. And discussed Dickens’s novel as they ate.

After lunch, as they were driving back to the mall, she stopped the car in a park and took his hand in hers. She wanted to someplace nice and quiet with him, she said. He was a little surprised at how fast things had developed.

“I’ve never done this kind of thing after I got married. Not even once,” she explained. “But you’re all I’ve thought about this past week. I promise I won’t make any demands, or cause you any trouble. Of course if you don’t find me attractive ...”

He gently squeezed her hand, and quietly explained things. I f I were an ordinary guy, he said, I’m sure I’d be happy to go with you to someplace nice and quiet. You’re an attractive woman and I know spending time like that with you would b wonderful. But the thing is, I’m gay. So I can’t manage sex with women. Some gay men are able to, but not me. I hope you’ll understand. I can be your friend, but not your lover, I’m afraid. It took quite a while for her to truly comprehend what he was trying to convey (he was the first homosexual she’d ever met), and after she finally grasped it, she began to cry. Pressing her face against the piano tuner’s shoulder, she cried for a long time. It must have been a shock for her. The poor woman, he though, then he put his arms around her and caressed her hair.

“Forgive me,” she finally said. “I made you talk about something you didn’t want to talk about.”

“That’s all right. I’m not trying to hide who I am. I guess I should have picked up on where we were headed so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding. I’m afraid I’m the one who made you feel bad.”

His long slim fingers gently stroked her hair for a long time, and that gradually had a calming effect. There was s single mole, he noticed, on her right earlobe. The mole called up a childhood memory. His older sister had a mole about the same size, in the same spot. When he was little, he used to playfully rub his sister’s mole when she was asleep, trying to rub it off. His sister would wake up, angry.

“I’ve been excited every day since I met you,” she said. “I haven’t felt this way in a long time. It was great—I felt like a teenager again. So I don’t mind. I went to the beauty salon, went on a quick diet, bought some Italian lingerie ...”

“Sounds like I made you waste your money,” he laughed.

“But I think I needed that right now.”

“Needed what?”

“I had to do something to express what I’m feeling.”

“By buying sexy Italian lingerie?”

She blushed to her ears. “It wasn’t sexy. Not at all. Just very beautiful.”

He beamed and looked in her eyes. He indicated he’d just been joking and that broke the tension. She smiled back, and for a time they gazed deep into each other’s eyes.

He took out his handkerchief and wiped away her tears. She sat up and redid her makeup, checking herself in the sun visor mirror.

“The day after tomorrow I have to go to a hospital in town to get a second examination for breast cancer.” She’d just pulled into the parking lot at the mall and had set the parking brake. “They found a suspicious shadow on my annual X-ray and told me to come in so they can run some more tests. If it really turns out to be cancer I might have to have an operation right away. Maybe that’s why I acted the way i did today. What I mean is ...”

She didn’t say anything for a while, and then shook her head vigorously.

“I don’t understand it myself.”

The piano tuner measured her silence for a time. Listening carefully, as if to pick up a faint sound within.

“Almost every Tuesday morning I’ll be here,” he said. “Right here, reading. There’s not much I can do to help, but I’m here if you need somebody to talk to. If you don’t mind talking to somebody like me, that is.”

“I haven’t told anybody about this. Not even my husband.”

He rested his hand on top of hers, on top of the parking brake.

“I’m scared,” she said. “Sometimes so scared I can’t think.”

A blue minivan pulled into the space beside them, an unhappy middle-aged couple emerging. They were arguing about something pointless. Once they had gone, silence returned. Her eyes were closed.

“I’m in no position to hand down any advice,” he said, “but there’s a rule I always follow when I don’t know what to do.”

“A rule?”

“If you have to chose between something that has form and something that doesn’t, go for the one without form. That’s my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works out. Even if it’s hard going at the time.”

“You made up that rule yourself?”

“I did,” he replied, looking at the Peugeot’s odometer. “From my own experience.”

“If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn’t, choose the one without form,” she repeated.

“That’s right.”

She considered this. “But if I had to do that right now I don’t know if I could tell the difference. Between what has form and what doesn’t.”

“Maybe not, but somewhere down the line I’m sure you’ll have to make that kind of choice.”

“How do you know that?”

He nodded quietly. “An experienced gay guy like me has all kinds of special powers.”

She laughed. “Thank you.”

A long silence followed. But it wasn’t as thick and stifling as before.

“Goodbye,” the woman said. “I really want to thank you. I’m happy I could meet you, and talk. I feel a little more able to face up to things now.”

He smiled and shook her hand. “Take care of yourself.”

He stood there, watching as her blue Peugeot drove away. He gave a final wave toward her rearview mirror, and then slowly walked back toward where his Honda was parked.

*

The next Tuesday it was raining and the woman didn’t show up at the café. He silently read until one and then left.

On this day the piano tuner decided not to go to the gym. He just didn’t feel like exercising. Instead he went straight home without stopping for lunch and lay there on his couch, listening to Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin ballads. Eyes closed, he could picture the woman’s face, the touch of her hair. The shape of the mole on her earlobe came back clearly to him. After a while her face and the Peugeot faded from his mind, but that mole remained. Whether he kept his eyes opened or closed, that small black dot remained, like a forgotten period.

Around two thirty in the afternoon he decided to phone his sister. It had been a long time since they’d spoken. How long, he wondered. Ten years? They were that estranged from each other. One reason was that back when her engagement got messed up, the two of them had gotten worked up and said some things they shouldn’t have. Another reason was that he didn’t like her husband. He was arrogant and crude, and treated the piano tuner’s sexual orientation like it was a contagious disease. Unless he absolutely had to, the piano tuner didn’t want to come within a hundred yards of the guy.

He hesitated several times before picking up the phone, but finally punched in the number. The phone rang over ten times and he was about to give up—with a certain sense of relief, actually—when his sister picked up. Her familiar voice. When she realized it was him, there was a deep silence for a moment on the other end of the line.

“Why are you calling me?” she said, in a flat tone.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just thought I’d better call you. I was worried about you.”

Silence once more. A long silence. Maybe she’s still mad at me, he thought.

“There’s no particular reason I called. I just wanted to check that everything’s okay.”

“Hold on a second,” his sister said. He could tell that she had been weeping. “I’m sorry, but could you give me a moment?”

Silence continued for a long time. He kept the receiver held to his ear the whole time. He couldn’t hear anything, or sense anything. “Are you busy now?” she finally asked.

“No, I’m free,” he replied.

“Can I come over to see you?”

“Of course. I’ll pick you up at the station.”

An hour later he picked up his sister at the train station and took her back to his apartment. It had been ten years since they’d seen each other, and they had to admit that they’d each aged. They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves. His sister was still slim and stylish, and looked five years younger than her real age. Still, her hollow cheeks had a severity to them he’d never seen before, and her impressive dark eyes had lost their usual luster. He himself looked younger than his years, too, though it was hard to hide the fact that his hair was thinning out. In the car they hesitantly talked about typical things: work, her children, news about mutual friends, the state of their parents’ health.

Inside his apartment he went into the kitchen to boil some water.

“Are you still playing piano?” she asked as she eyed the upright piano in his living room.

“Just for my own amusement. And only simple pieces. I can’t get my hands around the harder ones anymore.”

*

His sister opened the lid of the piano and rested her fingers on the yellowed, well-used keys. “I was sure you were going to be a famous concert pianist one day.”

“The music world is where child prodigies go to die,” he said as he ground some coffee beans. “Having to give up the idea of being a professional pianist was a major disappointment. It was like everything I’d done up till then was a complete waste. I just wanted to disappear. But it turned out my ears are superior to my hands. There are a lot of people more talented than me, but nobody has as good an ear. I realized that not long after I started college. And that being a first-class piano tuner was a lot better than being a second rate pianist.

He took out a container of cream from the refrigerator and poured it into a ceramic pitcher.

“It’s funny, but after I switched to a major in piano tuning I began to enjoy playing the piano much more. Ever since I was little I’d practiced piano like crazy. It was fun to see myself improve, but I never once enjoyed playing. Playing piano was just a way of solving certain problems. Trying to avoid fingering mistakes or letting my fingers get all tangled up—all just to impress other people. It wasn’t until I gave up the idea of becoming a pianist that I finally understood how enjoyable playing the piano can be. And how wonderful music really is. It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders, a weight I never realized I as lugging around until I got rid of it.”

“You never told me about this.”

“I didn’t?”

His sister shook her head.

“It was the same when I realized I’m gay,” he went on. “Issues I could never understand were suddenly resolved. Life was much easier after that, like the clouds had parted and I could finally see. When I gave up being a pianist and came out as a homosexual, I’m sure it upset a lot of people. But I want you to understand that that’s the only way I could get back to who I really am. The real me.”

He placed a coffee cup down in front of his sister, then took his own mug and sat down next to her on the sofa.

“I probably should have made more of an effort to understand you better,” his sister said. “But before you took those steps you should have explained things to us. Told us what was on your mind, let us in on what you were thinking and—”

“I didn’t want to explain things,” he said, cutting her off. “I wanted people to understand me, without having to put it into words. You, especially.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Back then I just couldn’t consider others’ feelings. I couldn’t afford to think about that.”

His voice shook a little as he recalled that time of his life. He felt like bursting gout crying but somehow held himself in check and went on.

“My life completely changed back then, in a short space of time. It was all I could do to hang on and not get thrown off. I was so scared, so very frightened. At the time I couldn’t explain things to anybody. I felt like I was about to slip off the face of the earth. I just wanted you to understand me. And hold me. Without any logic or explanations. But nobody ever—”

His sister covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook as she silently wept. He gently laid a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he replied. He poured some cream into his coffee, stirred it, and took a slow sip, trying to calm himself. “No need to cry about it. It was my fault, too.”

“Tell me,” she said, raising her face to look straight at him, “why today of all days did you call me?”

“Today?”

“You haven’t called for ten years, and I just wanted to know why you picked—today?”

“Something happened,” he said, “and it made me think of you. I just wondered how you’re doing. I wanted to hear your voice. That’s all.”

“No one told you anything?”

There was something different about your voice, and he tensed up. “No, I haven’t heard anything from anybody. Did something happen?”

His sister was silent for a while, gathering her feelings. He waited patiently for her to explain.

“I’m going into the hospital tomorrow,” she said.

“The hospital?”

“I’m having an operation for breast cancer tomorrow. They’re going to remove my right breast. The whole thing. Nobody knows, though, if that will stop the cancer from spreading. They won’t know till they’ve taken it off.”

He couldn’t say a thing for a while, his hand still on her shoulder, he gazed around meaninglessly from one object to another in the room. The clock, an ornament, the calendar, the remote control for the stereo. Familiar objects in a familiar room, but he somehow couldn’t grasp the distance that separated one object from the other.

“For the longest time I wondered whether I should get in touch with you,” his sister said. “I ended up thinking I shouldn’t, so I never said anything. But I wanted to see you so much. I thought we should have at least one good talk. There were things I had to apologize for. But ... I didn’t want to see you like this. DO you know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” her brother said.

“If we were going to meet, I wanted it to be under happier circumstances, where I could be more optimistic about things. So I decided not to get in touch with you. Right when I’d made up my mind, though, you called me—”

Wordlessly, he put both arms around her and drew her close. He could feel her breasts pressing against his chest. His sister rested her face on his shoulder and cried. Brother and sister stayed that way for a long while.

Finally she spoke up. “You said something happened and you thought of me. What was it? If you don’t mind telling me.”

“I don’t know how to put it. It’s hard to explain. It was just something that happened. A series of coincidences. Once coincidence after another and then I—”

He shook his head. The sense of distance was still off. Several light-years separated the ornament from the remote control.

“I just can’t explain it,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “But I’m glad it happened. Very glad.”

He touched her right earlobe and lightly rubbed the mole. And then, like sending a wordless whisper into some very special place, he leaned forward and kissed it.

*

“My sister’s right breast was removed in the operation, but fortunately the cancer hadn’t spread and she was able to get by with mild chemotherapy. Her hair didn’t even fall out. She’s completely fine now. I went almost every day to see her in the hospital. It must be awful for a woman to lose a breast that way. After she went home, I started to visit them pretty often. I’ve grown close to my nephew and niece. I’ve even been teaching my niece piano. Not to brag or anything, but there’s a lot of promise there. And my brother-in-law’s not as bad as I thought, now that I’ve gotten to know him. Sure, he’s still full of himself and a bit crude, but he works hard and he’s good to my sister. And he’s finally gotten it through his head that being gay isn’t a contagious disease I’m going to give his children. A small but significant step.”

He laughed. “Getting back together with my sister, I feel like I’ve moved on in life. Like I can live the way I’m supposed to now, more than ever before ... It was something I had to face up to. I think deep down I was always hoping my sister and I would make up, and be bale to hug each other one more time.”

“But something had to happen before you could?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said, and nodded several times. “That’s the key. And you know, this thought crossed my mind at the time: maybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don’t catch out attention and we just let them go by. It’s like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can’t see a thing. But if we’re really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface. Then we’re able to make it out clearly, decipher what it means. And seeing it before us we’re surprised and wonder at how strange things like this can happen. even though there’s nothing strange about it. I just can’t help thinking that. What do you think? Is this forcing things?”

I thought about what he’d said. You know, you may be right, I managed to reply. But I wasn’t at all sure that things could be neatly wrapped up like that.

“I’d rather believe in something simpler, like in a god of jazz,” I said.

He laughed. “I like that. It’d be nice if there was a god of gays, too.”

*

I have no idea whatever happened to that petite woman he met in the bookstore café. I haven’t had my piano tuned for over half a year, and haven’t had a chance to talk with him. But I imagine on Tuesdays he’s still driving across the Tama River and going to that café. Who knows—maybe he ran into her again. But I haven’t heard anything, which means that this where the story ends.

I don’t care if it’s the god of jazz, the god of gays, or some other type of god, but I hope that, somewhere, unobtrusively, as if it were all a coincidence, someone up there is watching over that woman. I hope this from the bottom of my heart. A very simple hope.

Dabchick

Translated by Jay Rubin

When I reached the bottom of a narrow concrete stairway, I found myself in a corridor that stretched on forever straight ahead?a long corridor with ceilings so high the passageway felt more like a dried-up drainage canal than a corridor. Lacking decoration of any kind, it was an authentic corridor that was all corridor and nothing but corridor. The lighting was feeble and uneven, as if the light itself had finally reached its destination after a series of terrible mishaps. It had to pass through a layer of thick black dust that caked the fluorescent tubes installed at irregular intervals along the ceiling. And of those tubes, one in three was burnt out. I could hardly see my hand before my eyes. The place was silent. The only sound in the gloomy hallway was the flat slapping of my tennis shoes against the concrete floor.

I kept walking: two hundred yards, three hundred yards, maybe half a mile, not thinking, just walking, no time, no distance, no sense that I was moving forward in any way. But I must have been. All of a sudden I was standing in a T-shaped intersection.

A T-shaped intersection?

I fished a crumpled postcard from my jacket pocket and let my eyes wander over its message: “Walk straight down the corridor. Where it intersects at right angles with another corridor, you will find a door.” I searched the wall in front of me, but there was no sign of a door, no sign there had ever been a door, no indication there would ever be a door installed in this wall. It was a plain, simple concrete wall with no distinguishing features other than those shared by other concrete walls. No metaphysical doors, no symbolic doors, no metaphorical doors, no nothing. I ran my palm over long stretches of the wall, but it was just a wall, smooth and blank.

There must be some mistake, I was sure.

Leaning against the wall, I smoked a cigarette. Now what? Was I to forge onward or go back?

Not that the answer was ever seriously in doubt. I had no choice. I had to go on. I was sick of being poor. Sick of monthly payments, of alimony, of my cramped apartment, of the cockroaches in the tub, of the rush-hour subway, sick of everything. Now, at last, I had found a decent job. The work would be easy, the pay astoundingly good. Bonuses twice a year. Long summer vacations. I wasn’t about to give up now?just because I was having trouble finding one lousy door. If I couldn’t find the door here, I would simply go on until I did find it.

I pulled a ten-yen coin from my pocket and flipped it. Heads. I took the corridor to the right.

The passageway turned twice to the right, once to the left, down ten steps, and turned right again. The air here made me think of coffee jello: it was chilly and strangely thick. I thought about the prospect of a salary, about the refreshing cool of an air-conditioned office. Having a job was a wonderful thing. I quickened my steps and went on down the corridor.

At last there was a door ahead. From this distance, it looked like a ragged, old postage stamp, but the closer I came the more it took on the look of a door?until there could no longer be any doubt.

I cleared my throat and, after a light knock on the door, I took a step back and waited for a response. Fifteen seconds went by. Nothing. Again I knocked, this time a little harder, then stepped back to wait. Again, nothing.

All around me, the air was gradually congealing.

Urged on by my own apprehension, I was taking a step forward to knock for a third time when the door opened soundlessly, naturally, as if a breeze had sprung up to swing it on its hinges, though to be sure, nature had nothing to do with it. The click of a switch came first, and then a man appeared before me.

He was in his middle twenties and perhaps two inches shorter than I. Water dripped from his freshly washed hair, and the only clothing on his body was a maroon bathrobe. His legs were abnormally white, and his feet as tiny as a child’s. His features were as blank as a handwriting practice pad, but his mouth wore a faintly apologetic smile. He was probably not a bad man.

“Sorry. You caught me in the bath,” he said, drying his hair with a towel.

“The bath?” I glanced at my watch in reflex.

“It’s a rule. We have to bathe after lunch.”

“I see.”

“May I ask the nature of your business?”

I drew the postcard from my jacket pocket and handed it to the man. He took it in his fingertips so as to avoid wetting it and read it over several times.

“I guess I’m five minutes late,” I said. “Sorry.”

He nodded and returned the card to me. “Hmmm. You’ll be starting to work here, then?”

“That’s right.”

“Funny, I haven’t heard about any new hires. I’ll have to announce you to my superior. That’s my job, you know. All I do is answer the door and announce people to my superior.”

“Well, good. Would you please announce me?”

“Of course. If you’ll just tell me the password.”

“The password?”

“You didn’t know there was a password?”

I shook my head. “No one told me about a password.”

“Then I can’t help you. My superior is very strict about that. I am not to let in anyone who does not know the password.”

This was all news to me. I pulled the postcard from my pocket again and studied it to no avail. It said nothing about a password.

“They probably forgot to write it,” I said. “The directions for getting here were a little off, too. If you’ll just announce me to your superior, I’m sure everything will be fine. I’ve been hired to start work here today. I’m sure your superior knows all about it. If you’ll just announce my arrival ....”

“That’s what I need the password for,” he said and began groping for a cigarette only to find that his bathrobe had no pockets. I gave him one of my cigarettes and lit it for him with my lighter.

“Thanks, that’s very nice of you,” he said. “Now, are you sure you can’t recall anything that might have been a password?”

I could only shake my head.

“I don’t like this picky business any better than you do, but my superior must have his reasons. See what I mean? I don’t know what kind of person he is. I’ve never met him. But you know how people like that are?they get these brainstorms. Please don’t take it personally.”

“No, of course not.”

“The guy before me announced someone he felt sorry for because the person claimed he ‘just forgot’ the password. He was fired on the spot. And you of all people know how hard it is to find work these days.”

I nodded. “How about it, then?” I said. “Can you give me a hint? Just a little one.”

Leaning against the door, the man exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Sorry. It’s against the rules.”

“Oh, come on. What harm can a little hint do?”

“Yeah, but if it ever got out, I’d be in deep trouble.”

“I won’t tell a soul. You won’t tell a soul. How’ll they ever know?” This was a deadly serious business for me. I wasn’t about to give up.

After some indecision, the man bent close to my ear and whispered, “Are you ready for this? All right, now, it’s a simple word and it has something to do with water. It fits in your hand, but you can’t eat it.”

Now it was my turn to mull things over.

“What’s the first letter?”

“D,” he said.

“Driftwood,” I ventured.

“Wrong,” he said. “Two more.”

“Two more what?”

“Two more tries. If you miss those, you’ve had it. I’m sorry, but I’m risking a lot here, breaking the rules like this. I can’t just let you keep on guessing.”

“Look, I really appreciate you giving me a chance like this, but how about a few more hints? Like how many letters in the word.”

He frowned. “Next you’re gonna ask me to tell you the whole damned thing.”

“No, I would never do that. Never. Just tell me how many letters there are in the word.”

“OK. Eight,” he said with a sigh. “My father always told me: Give somebody a hand and he’ll take an arm.”

“I’m sorry. Really.”

“Anyhow, it’s eight letters.”

“Something to do with water, it fits in your hand but you can’t eat it.”

“That’s right.”

“It starts with a D and it has eight letters.”

“Right.”

I concentrated on the riddle. “Dabchick,” I said finally.

“Nope. Anyway, you can eat a dabchick.”

“You sure?”

“Probably. It might not taste good,” he added with less than total conviction. “And it wouldn’t fit in your hand.”

“Have you ever seen a dabchick?”

“Nope,” he said. “I don’t know anything about birds. Especially water birds. I grew up in the middle of Tokyo. I can tell you all the stations in the Yamanote Line in order, but I’ve never seen a dabchick.”

Neither had I, of course. I didn’t even know I knew the word until I heard myself saying it. But “dabchick” was the only eight-letter word I could think of that fit the clues.

“It’s got to be ‘dabchick,’” I insisted. “The little, palm-sized dabchicks taste so bad you couldn’t get a dog to eat one.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you think; ‘dabchick’ is not the password. You can argue all you want, but you’ve got the wrong word.”

“But it fits all the clues?connected with water, fits in your hand, you can’t eat it, eight letters. It’s perfect.”

“There’s just one thing wrong.”

“What’s that?”

“‘Dabchick’ is not the password.”

“Well, then, what is?”

He had to catch himself. “I can’t tell you.”

“Because it doesn’t exist,” I declared in the coldest tone I could manage. “There is no other eight-letter word for a thing connected with water that fits in your hand but you can’t eat it.”

“But there is,” he pleaded, close to tears.

“Is not.”

“Is.”

“You can’t prove it. And ‘dabchick’ meets all the criteria.”

“I know, but still, there might be a dog somewhere that likes to eat palm-sized dabchicks.”

“All right, if you’re so smart, tell me where you can find a dog like that. What kind of dog? I want concrete evidence.”

He moaned and rolled his eyes.

I went on: “I know everything there is to know about dogs, but I have never?ever?seen a dog that likes to eat palm-sized dabchicks.”

“Do they taste that bad?” he whimpered.

“Awful. Just awful. Yech!”

“Have you ever tasted one?”

“Never. Do you expect me to put something so gross in my mouth?”

“Well, no, I guess not.”

“In any case, I want you to announce me to your superior,” I demanded. “‘Dabchick.’”

“I give up,” he said, wiping his hair once again with his towel. “I’ll give it a try. But I’m pretty sure it won’t do you any good.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”

“But tell me,” he said. “Are there really such things as palm-sized dabchicks?”

“Yes. Without a doubt. They exist somewhere,” I said, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell how the word had popped into my head.

THE PALM-SIZED DABCHICK wiped his glasses with a velvet square and let out another sigh. His lower right molar throbbed with pain. Another trip to the dentist? he thought. I can’t take it anymore. The world is such a drag: dentists, tax returns, car payments, broken-down air conditioners .... He let his head settle back against the leather-covered armchair, closed his eyes, and thought about death. Death as silent as the ocean bottom, as sweet as a rose in May. The dabchick had been thinking about death a lot these days. In his mind, he saw himself enjoying his eternal rest.

“Here lies the palm-sized dabchick,” said the words engraved on the tombstone.

Just then his intercom buzzed.

He aimed one angry shout at the device: “What!”

“Someone to see you, sir,” came the voice of the doorman. “Says he’s supposed to start work here today. He knows the password.”

The palm-sized dabchick scowled and looked at his watch.

“Fifteen minutes late.”

Hanalei Bay

The Guardian, Saturday 15 April 2006

Sachi lost her 19-year-old son to a big shark that attacked him when he was surfing in Hanalei Bay. Properly speaking, it was not the shark that killed him. Alone, far from shore when the animal ripped his right leg off, he panicked and drowned. Drowning, therefore, was the official cause of death. The shark all but tore his surfboard in half as well. Sharks are not fond of human flesh. Most often their first bite disappoints them and they swim away. Which is why there are many cases in which the person loses a leg or an arm but survives as long as he doesn’t panic. Sachi’s son, though, suffered some sort of cardiac arrest, swallowed massive amounts of ocean water, and drowned.

When notice came from the Japanese consulate in Honolulu, Sachi sank to the floor in shock. Her head emptied out, and she found it impossible to think. All she could do was sit there staring at a spot on the wall. How long this went on, she had no idea. But eventually she regained her senses enough to look up the number of an airline and make a reservation for a flight to Hawaii. The consulate staff person had urged her to come as soon as possible in order to identify the victim. There was still some chance it might not be her son.

Because of the holiday season, all seats were booked on that day’s flight and the next day’s as well. Every airline she called told her the same thing, but when she explained her situation, the United reservationist said, “Just get to the airport as soon as you can. We’ll find you a seat.” She packed a few things in a small bag and went out to Narita Airport, where the woman in charge handed her a business-class ticket. “This is all we have today, but we’ll charge you only economy fare,” she said. “This must be terrible for you. Try to bear up.” Sachi thanked her for being so helpful.

When she arrived at Honolulu Airport, Sachi realised she had been so upset that she had forgotten to inform the Japanese consulate of her arrival time. A member of the consulate staff was supposed to be accompanying her to Kauai. She decided to continue on to Kauai alone rather than deal with the complications of making belated arrangements. She assumed that things would work out once she got there. It was still before noon when her second flight arrived at Lihue Airport in Kauai. She rented a car at the Avis counter and went straight to the police station nearby. There, she told them she had just come from Tokyo after having received word that her son had been killed by a shark in Hanalei Bay. A greying police officer with glasses took her to the morgue, which was like a cold-storage warehouse, and showed her the body of her son with one leg torn off. Everything from just above the right knee was gone, and a ghastly white bone protruded from the stump. This was her son—there could no longer be any doubt. His face carried no hint of an expression; he looked as he always did when sound asleep. She could hardly believe he was dead. Someone must have arranged his features like this. He looked as though, if you gave his shoulder a hard shake, he would wake up complaining the way he always did in the morning.

In another room, Sachi signed a document certifying that the body was that of her son. The policeman asked her what she planned to do with the boy. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do people normally do?” They most often cremate it and take the ashes home, he told her. She could also transport the body to Japan, but this required some difficult arrangements and would be far more expensive. Another possibility would be to bury her son on Kauai.

“Please cremate him,” she said. “I’ll take the ashes with me to Tokyo.” Her son was dead, after all. There was no hope of bringing him back to life. What difference did it make whether he was ashes or bones or a corpse? She signed the document authorising cremation and was told the fee.

“I only have American Express,” she said. “That will be fine,” the officer said. Here I am, paying the cost of having my son cremated with an American Express card, Sachi thought. It felt unreal to her, as unreal as her son’s having been killed by a shark. The cremation would take place the next morning, the policeman told her.

“Your English is very good,” the officer said as he put the documents in order. He was a Japanese-American by the name of Sakata.

“I lived in the States for a while when I was young,” Sachi said.

“No wonder,” the officer said. Then he gave Sachi her son’s belongings: clothes, passport, return ticket, wallet, Walkman, magazines, sunglasses, shaving kit. They all fitted into a small Boston bag. Sachi had to sign a receipt listing these meagre possessions.

“Do you have any other children?” the officer asked.

“No, he was my only child,” Sachi replied.

“Your husband couldn’t make the trip?”

“My husband died a long time ago.”

The policeman released a deep sigh. “I’m sorry to hear that. Please let us know if there is anything we can do for you.”

“I’d appreciate it if you could tell me how to get to the place where my son died. And where he was staying. I suppose there’ll be a hotel bill to pay. And I need to get in touch with the Japanese consulate in Honolulu. Could I use your phone?”

He brought her a map and used a felt-tip marker to indicate where her son had been surfing and the hotel where he had been staying. She slept that night in a little hotel in Lihue which the policeman recommended.

As Sachi was leaving the police station, the middle-aged Officer Sakata said to her, “I have a personal favour to ask of you. Nature takes a human life every now and then here on Kauai. You see how beautiful it is on this island, but sometimes, too, it can be wild and deadly. We live here with that potential. I’m very sorry about your son. I really feel for you. But I hope you won’t let this make you hate our island. This may sound self-serving to you after everything you’ve been through, but I really mean it. From the heart.”

Sachi nodded to him.

“You know, ma’am, my brother died in the war in 1944. In Belgium, near the German border. He was a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up entirely of Japanese-American volunteers. They were there to rescue a Texas battalion surrounded by the Nazis when they took a direct hit and he was killed. There was nothing left but his dog tags and a few chunks of flesh scattered in the snow. My mother loved him so much, they tell me she was like a different person after that. I was just a little kid, so I only knew my mother after the change. It’s painful to think about.”

Officer Sakata shook his head and went on:

“Whatever the ‘noble causes’ involved, people die in war from the anger and hatred on both sides. But Nature doesn’t have ‘sides’. I know this is a painful experience for you, but try to think of it like this: your son returned to the cycle of Nature; it had nothing to do with any ‘causes’ or anger or hatred.”

Sachi had the cremation performed the next day and took the ashes with her in a small aluminium urn when she drove to Hanalei Bay on the north shore of the island. The trip from the Lihue police station took just over an hour. Virtually all the trees on the island had been deformed by a giant storm that struck a few years earlier. Sachi noticed the remains of several wooden houses with their roofs blown off. Even some of the mountains showed signs of having been reshaped by the storm. Nature could be harsh in this environment.

She continued on through the sleepy little town of Hanalei to the surfing area where her son had been attacked by the shark. Stopping in a nearby car park, she went to sit on the beach and watched a few surfers—maybe five in all—riding the waves. They would float far offshore, hanging on to their surfboards, until a powerful wave came through. Then they would catch the wave, push off and mount their boards, riding almost to the shore. As the force of the waves gave out, they would lose their balance and fall in. Then they would retrieve their boards and slip under the incoming waves as they paddled back out to the open sea, where the whole process would start all over again. Sachi could hardly understand them. Weren’t they afraid of sharks? Or had they not heard that her son had been killed by a shark in this very place a few days earlier?

Sachi went on sitting there, vacantly watching this scene for a good hour. Her mind could not fasten on to any single thing. The weighty past had simply vanished, and the future lay somewhere in the distant gloom. Neither tense had any connection with her now. She sat in the continually shifting present, her eyes mechanically tracing the monotonously repeating scene of waves and surfers. At one point the thought dawned on her: What I now need most of all is time

Then Sachi went to the hotel where her son had been staying, a shabby little place with an unkempt garden. Two shirtless, long-haired white men sat there in canvas deckchairs, drinking beer. Several empty green Rolling Rock bottles lay among the weeds at their feet. One of the men was blond, the other had black hair. Otherwise, they had the same kind of faces and builds and sported the same kind of florid tattoos on both arms. There was a hint of marijuana in the air, mixed with a whiff of dog shit. As she approached, the two men eyed her suspiciously.

“My son was staying here,” she said. “He was killed by a shark three days ago.”

The men looked at each other. “You mean Takashi?”

“Yes,” Sachi said. “Takashi.”

“He was a cool dude,” the blond man said. “It’s too bad.”

The black-haired man explained in flaccid tones, “That morning, there was, uh, lots of turtles in the bay. The sharks come in lookin’ for the turtles. But, y’know, those guys usually leave the surfers alone. We get along with ’em fine. But, I don’t know, I guess there’s all kinds of sharks ...”

Sachi said she had come to pay Takashi’s hotel bill. She assumed there was an outstanding balance on his room.

The blond man frowned and waved his bottle in the air. “No, lady, you don’t get it. Surfers are the only ones who stay in this hotel, and they ain’t got no money. You gotta pay in advance to stay here. We don’t have no ‘outstanding balances’.”

Then the black-haired man said, “Say, lady, you want to take Takashi’s surfboard with you? Damn shark ripped it in two, kinda shredded it. It’s an old Dick Brewer. The cops didn’t take it. I think it’s, uh, somewhere over there ...”

Sachi shook her head. She did not want to see the board.

“It’s really too bad,” the blond man said again as if that was the only expression he could think of.

“He was a cool dude,” the black-haired fellow said. “Really OK. Damn good surfer, too. Come to think of it, he was with us the night before, drinkin’ tequila. Yeah.”

Sachi ended up staying in Hanalei for a week. She rented the most decent-looking cottage she could find and cooked her own simple meals. One way or another, she had to get her old self back again before returning to Japan. She bought a vinyl chair, sunglasses, a hat and sunscreen, and sat on the beach every day, watching the surfers. It rained a few times each day—violently, as if someone were tipping a huge bowl of water out of the sky. Autumn weather on the north shore of Kauai was unstable. When a downpour started, she would sit in her car, watching the rain. And when the rain let up, she would go out to sit on the beach again, watching the sea.

Sachi started visiting Hanalei at this season every year. She would arrive a few days before the anniversary of her son’s death and stay three weeks, watching the surfers from a vinyl chair on the beach. That was all she would do each day, every day. It went on like this for 10 years. She would stay in the same cottage and eat in the same restaurant, reading a book. As her trips became an established pattern, she found a few people with whom she could speak about personal matters. Many residents of the small town knew her by sight. She became known as the Japanese mother whose son was killed by a shark nearby.

One day, on the way back from Lihue Airport, where she had gone to exchange a too-big rental car, Sachi spotted two young Japanese hitch-hikers in the town of Kapaa. They were standing outside the Ono Family Restaurant with big sports-equipment bags hanging from their shoulders, facing traffic with their thumbs stuck out but looking far from confident. One was tall and lanky, the other short and stocky. Both had shoulder-length hair dyed a rusty red and wore faded T-shirts, baggy shorts and sandals. Sachi passed them, but soon changed her mind and turned round.

Opening her window, she asked them in Japanese, “How far are you going?”

“Hey, you can speak Japanese!” the tall one said.

“Well, of course, I am Japanese. How far are you going?”

“A place called Hanalei,” the tall one said.

“Want a lift? I’m on the way back there myself.”

“Great! Just what we were hoping for!” the stocky one said.

They put their bags in the boot and started to climb into the back seat of Sachi’s Neon.

“Wait just a minute there,” she said. “I’m not going to have you both in the back. This is not a taxi, after all. One of you sit in front. It’s plain good manners.”

They decided the tall one would sit in front, and timidly he got in next to Sachi, wrenching his long legs into the available space. “What kind of car is this?” he asked.

“It’s a Dodge Neon. A Chrysler car,” Sachi answered.

“Hmm, so America has these cramped little cars, too, huh? My sister’s Corolla maybe has more room than this.”

“Well, it’s not as if all Americans ride around in big Cadillacs.”

“Yeah, but this is really little.”

“You can get out right here if you don’t like it,” Sachi said.

“Whoa, I didn’t mean it that way!” he said. “I was just rather surprised how small this is, that’s all. I thought all American cars were on the big side.”

“So anyway, what’re you going to Hanalei for?” Sachi asked as she drove along.

“Well, surfing, for one thing.”

“Where’re your boards?”

“We’ll get ’em there,” the stocky boy said.

“Yeah, it’s a pain to lug ’em all the way from Japan. And we heard you could get used ones cheap there,” the tall one added.

“How about you, ma’am? Are you here on holiday, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Alone?”

“Alone,” Sachi said lightly.

“I don’t suppose you’re one of them legendary surfers?”

“Don’t be crazy!” Sachi said. “Anyway, have you got a place to stay in Hanalei?”

“Nah, we reckoned it’d work out once we got there,” the tall one said.

“Right, we reckoned we can always sleep on the beach if we have to,” the stocky one said. “Besides, we haven’t got much money.”

Sachi shook her head. “It gets cold at night on the north shore this time of year—cold enough for a sweater indoors. Sleep outside and you’ll make yourselves ill.”

“It’s not always summer in Hawaii?” the tall one asked.

“Hawaii’s right up there in the northern hemisphere, you know. It’s got four seasons. The summers are hot, and winters can be cold.”

“So we’d better get a roof over our heads,” the stocky boy said.

“Say, ma’am, do you think you could help us find a place?” the tall one asked. “Our English is, like, non-existent.”

“Right,” said the stocky boy. “We heard you can use Japanese anywhere in Hawaii, but so far it hasn’t done anything for us at all.”

“Of course not!” Sachi said, exasperated. “The only place you can get by with Japanese is Oahu, and just one part of Waikiki at that. They get all these Japanese tourists wanting Louis Vuitton bags and Chanel No 5, so they hire sales people who can speak Japanese. The same with the Hyatt and the Sheraton. But outside the hotel, English is the only thing that works. I mean, it’s America, after all. You came all the way to Kauai without knowing that?”

“I had no idea. My mum said everybody in Hawaii speaks Japanese.”

Sachi groaned.

“Anyhow, we can stay at the cheapest hotel there is,” the stocky boy said. “As I said, we ain’t got any money.”

“Newcomers do not want to stay at the cheapest hotel in Hanalei,” Sachi cautioned them. “It can be dangerous.”

“Why’s that?” asked the tall boy.

“Drugs, mainly,” Sachi answered. “Some of those surfers are bad guys. Marijuana might be OK, but watch out for ice.”

“‘Ice’? What’s that?”

“Never heard of it,” said the tall boy.

“You two don’t know anything, do you? You’d make perfect pigeons for those guys. Ice is a hard drug, and it’s everywhere in Hawaii. I don’t know exactly, but it’s some kind of crystallised upper. It’s cheap, and easy to use, and it makes you feel good, but once you get hooked on it you might as well be dead.”

“Scary,” said the tall one.

“You mean it’s OK to do marijuana?” asked the stocky one.

“I don’t know if it’s OK, but at least it won’t kill you. Not like tobacco. It might mess your brain up a little, but you guys wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Hey, that’s harsh!” said the stocky boy.

The tall one asked Sachi, “Are you one of those boomer types?”

“You mean ...”

“Right, a member of the baby-boom generation.”

“I’m not a ‘member’ of any generation. I’m just me. Don’t start lumping me in with any groups, please.”

“That’s it! You are a boomer!” said the stocky boy. “You get so serious about everything right away. Just like my mum.”

“And don’t lump me together with your precious ‘mum’, either,” Sachi said. “Anyhow, for your own good, you’d better stay in a decent place in Hanalei. Things happen ... even murder sometimes.”

“Not exactly the peaceful paradise it’s cracked up to be,” the stocky boy said.

“No,” Sachi agreed. “The age of Elvis is long gone.”

“I’m not sure what that’s all about,” said the tall boy, “but I know Elvis Costello is an old guy already.” Sachi drove without talking for a while after that.

Sachi spoke to the manager of her cottage, who found the boys a room. Her introduction got them a reduced weekly rate, but still it was more than they had budgeted for.

“No way,” the tall one said. “We haven’t got that much money.”

“Right, next to nothin’,” the stocky one said.

“You must have something for emergencies,” Sachi insisted.

The tall boy scratched his earlobe and said, “Well, I do have a Diners Club family card, but my dad said absolutely not to use it except for a real, honest-to-goodness emergency. He’s afraid once I start I won’t stop. If I use it for anything but an emergency, I’ll get it in the neck when I get back to Japan.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sachi said. “This is an emergency. If you want to stay alive, get that card out right now. The last thing you want is for the police to throw you in jail and have some big Hawaiian make you his girlfriend for the night. Of course, if you like that kind of thing that’s another story, but it hurts.”

The tall boy dug the card out of his wallet and handed it to the manager. Sachi asked for the name of a store where they could buy cheap used surfboards. The manager told her, adding, “And when you leave, they’ll buy them back from you.” The boys left their packs in the room and hurried off to the store.

Sachi was sitting on the beach, looking at the ocean as usual the next morning, when the two young Japanese boys appeared and started surfing. Their surfing skills were solid, in contrast to their helplessness on land. They would spot a strong wave, mount it nimbly and guide their boards towards shore with grace and sure control. They kept this up for hours without a break. They looked truly alive when they were riding the waves: their eyes shone, they were full of confidence. There was no sign of yesterday’s timidity. Back home, they probably spent their days on the water, never studying—just like her dead son.

Sachi had begun playing the piano in high school—a late start for a pianist. She had never touched the instrument before. She started fooling around with the one in the music room after classes, and before long she had taught herself to play well. It turned out she had perfect pitch, and an ear that was far above ordinary. She could hear a melody once and turn it into patterns on the keyboard. She could find the right chords for the melody. Without being taught by anyone, she learned how to move her fingers smoothly. She obviously had a natural, inborn gift for the piano.

The young music teacher heard her playing one day, liked what he heard and helped her correct some basic fingering errors. “You can play it that way, but you can speed it up if you do it like this,” he said, and demonstrated for her. She got it immediately. A great jazz fan, this teacher instructed her in the mysteries of jazz theory after school: chord formation and progression, use of the pedal, the concept of improvisation. She greedily absorbed everything. He lent her records: Red Garland, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly. She would listen to them over and over until she could copy them flawlessly. Once she got the hang of it, such imitation became easy for her. She could reproduce the music’s sound and flow directly through her fingers without transcribing anything. “You’ve got real talent,” the teacher said to her. “If you work hard, you can be a pro.”

But Sachi didn’t believe him. All she could do was produce accurate imitations, not music of her own. When urged to ad lib, she didn’t know what to play. She would start out improvising and end up copying someone else’s original solo. Reading music was another of her stumbling blocks. With the detailed notation of a score in front of her, she found it hard to breathe. It was far easier for her to transfer what she heard directly to the keyboard. No, she thought: there was no way she could become a pro.

She decided instead to study cookery after high school. Not that she had a special interest in the subject, but her father owned a restaurant, and since there was nothing else she particularly wanted to do, she thought she would carry on the business after him. She went to Chicago to attend a professional cookery school. Chicago was not a city known for its sophisticated cuisine, but the family had relatives there who agreed to sponsor her.

A classmate at the cookery school introduced her to a small piano bar downtown, and soon she was playing there. At first she thought of it as part-time work to earn some spending money. Barely managing to scrape by on what little her parents sent her from home, she was glad for the extra cash. The owner of the bar loved the way she could play any tune at all. Once she heard a song, she would never forget it, and even with a song she had never heard before, if someone hummed it for her, she could play it on the spot. She was no beauty, but she had attractive features, and her being there started bringing more and more people to the bar. The tips they left her also began to mount up. Eventually she stopped going to her classes. Sitting in front of the piano was so much easier—and so much more fun—than dressing a bloody chunk of pork, grating a rock-hard cheese, or washing the scum from a heavy frying pan.

And so, when her son became a virtual high school dropout to spend all his time surfing, Sachi resigned herself to it. I did the same kind of thing when I was young. I can’t blame him. It’s probably in the blood.

She played in the bar for a year and a half. Her English improved, she put away a fair amount of money, and she got herself a boyfriend—a handsome African-American aspiring actor. (Sachi would later spot him in a supporting role in Die Hard 2.) One day, however, an immigration officer with a badge on his chest appeared at the bar. She had apparently made too big a splash. The officer asked for her passport and arrested her on the spot for working illegally. A few days later she found herself on a jumbo jet bound for Narita—with a ticket she had to pay for from her savings. So ended Sachi’s life in America.

Back in Tokyo, Sachi thought about the possibilities open to her for the rest of her life, but playing the piano was the only way she could think of to make a go of it. Her opportunities were limited by her handicap with written music, but there were places where her talent for playing by ear was appreciated—hotel lounges, nightclubs and piano bars. She could play in any style demanded by the atmosphere of the place, the types of customer or the requests that came in. She might have been a genuine “musical chameleon”, but she never had trouble making a living.

She married at the age of 24, and two years later gave birth to a son. The man was a jazz guitarist one year younger than Sachi. His income was virtually non-existent. He was addicted to drugs, and he fooled around with women. He stayed out much of the time, and when he did come home, he was often violent. Everyone opposed the marriage, and afterwards everyone urged Sachi to divorce him. Unpolished though he was, Sachi’s husband possessed an original talent, and in the jazz world he was gaining attention as an up-and-coming star. This was probably what attracted Sachi to him in the first place. But the marriage lasted only five years. He had a heart attack one night in another woman’s room, and died stark naked as they were rushing him to the hospital. It was probably a drug overdose.

Soon after her husband died, Sachi opened her own small piano bar in the fashionable Roppongi neighbourhood. She had some savings, and she collected on an insurance policy she had secretly taken out on her husband’s life. She also managed to get a bank loan. It helped that a regular customer at the bar where Sachi had been playing was a branch manager. She installed a second-hand grand piano in the place, and built a counter that followed the shape of the instrument. To run the business, she paid a high salary to a capable bartender-manager she had decided to hire away from another bar. She played every night, taking requests from customers and accompanying them when they sang. A fishbowl sat on the piano for tips. Musicians appearing at jazz clubs in the neighbourhood would drop in now and then to play a quick tune or two. The bar soon had its regular customers, and business was better than Sachi had hoped for. She was able to repay her loan on schedule. Quite fed up with married life as she had known it, she did not remarry, but she had men friends every now and then. Most of them were married, which made it all the easier for her. As time went by, her son grew up, became a surfer and announced that he was going to go to Hanalei in Kauai. She didn’t like the idea, but she tired of arguing with him and reluctantly paid his fare. Long verbal battles were not her. And so it was that, while he was waiting for a good wave to come in, her son was attacked by a shark that entered the bay in pursuit of turtles, and ended his short life of 19 years.

Sachi worked harder than ever once her son was dead. She played and played and played that first year, almost without let-up. And when autumn was coming to an end, she took a three-week break, bought a business-class ticket on United Airlines and went to Kauai. Another pianist took her place while she was gone.

Sachi sometimes played in Hanalei, too. One restaurant had a baby grand that was played on weekends by a string bean of a pianist in his mid-50s. He would perform mostly harmless little tunes such as “Bali Hai” and “Blue Hawaii”. He was nothing special as a pianist, but his warm personality came through in his playing. Sachi got friendly with him and sat in for him now and then. She did it for fun, so of course the restaurant didn’t pay her anything, but the owner would treat her to wine and a plate of pasta. It just felt good to get her hands on the keys: it opened her up. This was not a question of talent or whether the activity was of any use. Sachi imagined that her son must have felt the same way when he was riding the waves.

In all honesty, however, Sachi had never really liked her son. Of course she loved him—he was the most important person in the world to her—but as an individual human being, she had had trouble liking him, which was a realisation that it took her a very long time to reach. She probably would have had nothing to do with him had they not been of the same blood. He was self-centered, could never concentrate on anything, could never bring anything to fruition. She could never talk to him seriously about anything; he would immediately make up some phoney excuse to avoid any such discussion. He hardly ever studied, which meant his exam results were miserable. The only thing he ever lent some effort to was surfing, and there was no telling how long he would have kept that up. A sweet-faced boy, he never had a shortage of girlfriends, but after he had had what fun he could out of a girl, he would cast her off like an old toy. Maybe I’m the one who spoiled him, Sachi thought. Maybe I gave him too much spending money. Maybe I should have been stricter with him. But she had no concrete idea what she could have done so as to be stricter with him. Work had kept her too busy, and she knew nothing about boys—their psyches or their bodies.

Sachi was playing at the restaurant one evening when the two young surfers came in for a meal. It was the sixth day since they had arrived in Hanalei. They were thoroughly tanned, and they seemed to have a sturdier look about them now as well.

“Hey, you play the piano!” the stocky one exclaimed.

“And you’re good, too—a real pro,” chimed in the tall one.

“I do it for fun,” she said.

“Know any songs by the B’z?”

“No J-pop for me, thanks!” Sachi said. “But wait a minute, I thought you guys were broke. Can you afford to eat in a place like this?”

“Sure, I got my Diners Card!” the tall one announced.

“Yes, for emergencies ...”

“Oh, I’m not worried. My old man was right, though. Use it once and it becomes a habit.”

“True, so now you can take it easy,” Sachi said.

“We were thinking we ought to buy you dinner,” the stocky boy said.

“To thank you. You helped us a lot. And we’re goin’ home the day after tomorrow.”

“Right,” said the tall one. “How about now? We can order wine, too. Our treat!”

“I’ve already had my dinner,” Sachi said, lifting her glass of red wine. “And this was on the house. I’ll accept your thanks, though. I appreciate the thought.”

Just then a large white man approached their table and stood near Sachi with a glass of whisky in his hand. He was around 40 and wore his hair short. His arms were like slender telephone poles, and one bore a large dragon tattoo above the letters “USMC”. Judging from its fading colours, the tattoo had been applied some years before.

“Hey, little lady, I like your piano playing,” he said.

Sachi glanced up at him and said, “Thanks.”

“You Japanese?”

“Sure am.”

“I was in Japan once. A long time ago. Stationed two years in Iwakuni. A long time ago.”

“Well, what do you know? I was in Chicago once for two years. A long time ago. That makes us even.”

The man thought about this for a moment, seemed to decide that she was joking, and smiled.

“Play something for me. Something upbeat. You know Bobby Darin’s ‘Beyond the Sea’? I wanna sing it.”

“I don’t work here, you know,” she said. “And right now I’m having a conversation with these two boys. See that skinny gentleman with the thinning hair sitting at the piano? He’s the pianist here. Maybe you ought to give your request to him. And don’t forget to leave him a tip.”

The man shook his head. “That fruitcake can’t play anything but wishy-washy queer stuff. I wanna hear you play—something snappy. There’s 10 bucks in it for you.”

“I wouldn’t do it for 500.”

“So that’s the way it is, huh?” the man said.

“Yes, that’s the way it is,” Sachi said.

“Tell me something, then, will you? Why aren’t you Japanese willing to fight to protect your own country? Why do we have to drag our asses to Iwakuni to keep you guys safe?”

“And because of that I’m supposed to shut up and play?”

“You got it,” the man said. He glanced across the table at the two boys. “And lookit you two—a coupla Jap surf bums. Come all the way to Hawaii—for what? In Iraq, we—”

“Let me ask you a question,” Sachi interjected. “Something I’ve been wondering about ever since you came over here.”

“Sure. Ask away.”

Twisting her neck, Sachi looked straight up at the man. “I’ve been wondering this whole time,” she said, “how somebody gets to be like you. Were you born that way, or did something terrible happen to make you the way you are? Which do you think it is?”

The man gave this a moment’s thought and then slammed his whisky glass down on the table. “Look, lady—”

The owner of the restaurant heard the man’s raised voice and hurried over. He was a small man, but he took the ex-marine’s thick arm and led him away. They were friends apparently, and the ex-marine offered no resistance other than a parting shot or two.

The owner came back shortly afterwards and apologised to Sachi.

“He’s usually not a bad guy, but liquor changes him. Don’t worry, I’ll set him straight. Meanwhile, let me buy you something. Forget this ever happened.”

“That’s alright,” Sachi said. “I’m used to this kind of thing.”

The stocky boy asked Sachi, “What was that guy saying?”

“Right, I couldn’t catch a thing,” the tall boy added, “except ‘Jap’.”

“It’s just as well,” Sachi said. “Never mind. Have you boys had a good time here in Hanalei? Surfing your brains out, I suppose.”

“Faaantastic!” said the stocky boy.

“Just super,” said the tall one. “It changed my life. No kiddin’.”

“That’s wonderful,” Sachi said. “Get all the fun you can out of life while you’re still able. They’ll serve you the bill soon enough.”

“No problem,” said the tall boy. “I’ve got my card.”

“That’s the way,” Sachi said, shaking her head. “Nice and easy.”

Then the stocky boy said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, if you don’t mind.”

“About what?”

“I was just wondering if you had ever seen the one-legged Japanese surfer.”

“One-legged Japanese surfer?” Sachi looked straight at him with narrowed eyes. “No, I never have.”

“We saw him twice. He was on the beach, staring at us. He had a red Dick Brewer surfboard, and his leg was gone from here down.” The stocky boy drew a line with his finger a few inches above his knee. “As if it was chopped off. He was gone when we came out of the water. Just disappeared. We wanted to talk to him, so we tried hard to find him, but he wasn’t anywhere. I reckon he must have been about our age.”

“Which leg was gone? The right one or the left one?” Sachi asked.

The stocky boy thought for a moment and said, “I’m pretty sure it was the right one. Right?”

“Yes, definitely. The right one,” the tall boy said.

“Hmm,” Sachi said and moistened her mouth with a sip of wine. She could hear the sharp, hard beating of her heart. “You’re sure he was Japanese? Not Japanese-American?”

“No way,” the tall boy said. “You can tell the difference right away. No, this guy was a surfer from Japan. Like us.”

Sachi bit hard into her lower lip, and stared at them for some moments. Then, her voice dry, she said, “Strange, though. This is such a small town, you couldn’t miss seeing somebody like that even if you wanted to: a one-legged Japanese surfer.”

“Right,” said the stocky boy. “I know it’s strange. A guy like that’d stick out like a sore thumb. But he was there, I’m sure of it. We both saw him.”

The tall boy looked at Sachi and said, “You’re always sitting there on the beach, right? He was standing there on one leg, a little way away from where you always sit. And he was looking right at us, sort of as if leaning against a tree trunk. He was under that clump of iron trees on the other side of the picnic tables.”

Sachi took a silent swallow of her wine.

The stocky boy went on: “I wonder how he can stand on his surfboard with one leg? It’s tough enough with two.”

Every day after that, from morning to evening, Sachi walked back and forth the full length of Hanalei’s long beach, but there was never any sign of the one-legged surfer. She asked the local surfers, “Have you seen a one-legged Japanese surfer?” but they all gave her strange looks and shook their heads. A one-legged Japanese surfer? Never seen such a thing. If I had, I’d be sure to remember. He’d stand out. But how can anybody surf with one leg?

The night before she went back to Japan, Sachi finished packing and got into bed. The cries of the geckos mingled with the sound of the surf. Before long, she realised that her pillow was damp: she was crying. Why can’t I see him? she wondered. Why did he appear to those two surfers—who were nothing to him—and not to me? It was so unfair! She summoned up the image of her son’s corpse in the morgue. If only it were possible, she would shake his shoulder until he woke up, and she would shout at him—Tell me why! How could you do such a thing?

Sachi buried her face in her damp pillow for a long time, muffling her sobs. Am I simply not qualified to see him? she asked herself, but she did not know the answer to her own question. All she knew for sure was that, whatever else she might do, she had to accept this island. As that gentle-spoken Japanese-American police officer had suggested to her, she had to accept the things on this island as they were. As they were: fair or unfair, qualified or unqualified, it didn’t matter. Sachi woke up the next morning as a healthy middle-aged woman. She loaded her suitcase into the back seat of her Dodge and left Hanalei Bay.

She had been back in Japan for some eight months when she bumped into the stocky boy in Tokyo. Taking refuge from the rain, she was drinking a cup of coffee in a Starbucks near the Roppongi subway station. He was sitting at a nearby table. He was nattily dressed, in a well-pressed Ralph Lauren shirt and new chinos, and he was with a petite, pleasant-featured girl.

“What a coincidence!” he exclaimed as he approached her table with a big smile.

“How’ve you been?” she asked. “Look how short your hair is!”

“Well, I’m just about to graduate from college,” he said.

“I don’t believe it! You?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve got at least that much under control,” he said, slipping into the chair across from her.

“Have you given up surfing?”

“I do some on weekends once in a while, but not much longer: it’s hiring season now.”

“How about Beanpole?”

“Oh, he’s got it easy. No job-hunting worries for him. His father’s got a big Western pastry shop in Akasaka, says they’ll buy him a BMW if he takes over the business. He’s so lucky!”

Sachi glanced outside. The passing summer shower had turned the streets black. Traffic was at a standstill, and an impatient taxi driver was honking his horn.

“Is she your girlfriend?” Sachi asked.

“Uh-huh ... I guess. I’m workin’ on it,” he said, scratching his head.

“She’s cute. Too cute for you. Probably not giving you what you want.”

His eyes went up to the ceiling. “Whoa! I see you still say exactly what you think. You’re right, though. Got any good advice for me? To make things happen, I mean ...”

“There are only three ways to get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she’s wearing; and three, treat her to really good food. Easy, eh? If you do all that and still don’t get the results you want, better give up.”

“Sounds good: simple and practical. Mind if I write it down in my notebook?”

“Of course not. But you mean to say you can’t remember that much?”

“No, I’m like a chicken: three steps, and my mind’s a blank. So I write everything down. I heard Einstein used to do that.”

“Oh, sure, Einstein.”

“I don’t mind being forgetful,” he said. “It’s actually forgetting stuff that I don’t like.”

“Do as you please,” Sachi said.

Stocky pulled out his notebook and wrote down what she had said.

“You always give me good advice. Thanks again.”

“I hope it works.”

“I’ll give it my best shot,” he said, and stood up to go back to his own table. After a moment’s thought, he held out his hand. “You, too,” he said.

“Give it your best shot.”

Sachi took his hand. “I’m glad the sharks didn’t eat you in Hanalei Bay,” she said.

“You mean, there are sharks there? Seriously?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Seriously.”

Sachi sits at the keyboard every night, moving her fingers almost automatically, and thinking of nothing else. Only the sounds of the piano pass through her mind—in one door and out of the other. When she is not playing, she thinks about the three weeks she spends in Hanalei at the end of autumn. She thinks about the sound of the incoming waves and the sighing of the iron trees. The clouds carried along by the trade winds, the albatrosses sailing across the sky, their huge wings spread wide. And she thinks about what surely must await her there. That is all there is for her to think about now. Hanalei Bay.

Hunting Knife

Issue of 2003-11-17

Two rafts were anchored offshore like twin islands. They were the perfect distance to swim to from the beach—exactly fifty strokes out to one of them, then thirty strokes from one to the other. About fourteen feet square, each raft had a metal ladder, and a carpet of artificial grass covering its surface. The water, ten or twelve feet deep at this point, was so transparent you could follow the chains attached to the rafts all the way down to the concrete anchors at the bottom. The swimming area was enclosed by a coral reef, and there were hardly any waves, so the rafts barely bobbed in the water. They seemed resigned to being anchored in that spot with the intense sun beating down on them day after day.

I liked to stand out there and look back at the shore, at the long white beach, the red lifeguard tower, the green row of palm trees—it was a gorgeous scene, maybe a little too picture-postcard perfect. Off to the right, the beach ended in a line of dark craggy rocks that led to the hotel cottages where my wife and I were staying. It was the end of June, still early in the tourist season, and there weren’t many people at the hotel or on the beach.

There was an American military base nearby, and the rafts lay right in the flight path of the helicopters returning to it. The planes would appear offshore, bisect the space between the rafts, then zoom over the palm trees and disappear. They flew so low you could almost make out the expressions on the faces of the pilots. Still, except for those helicopters swooping overhead, the beach was a sleepy, quiet place—the perfect spot to be left alone on vacation.

Each cottage was a white two-story building divided into four units, two on the first floor, two on the second. Our room was on the first floor, with an ocean view. Right outside our window was a stand of white plumeria, and beyond that a garden with a neatly trimmed lawn. Morning and night, the sprinklers made a drowsy clatter on the grass. Past the garden was a swimming pool and a row of tall palm trees, whose huge fronds waved gently in the trade winds.

A mother and her son, Americans, were staying in the unit next door to my wife and me. They seemed to have settled in long before we arrived. The mother was about sixty, the son close to our age, twenty-eight or twenty-nine. They resembled each other more than any mother and son I’d ever seen—both with identical long, narrow faces, broad foreheads, tightly set lips. The mother was tall, her posture erect, her movements alert and brisk. The son seemed tall, too, but you couldn’t really say for sure, as he was confined to a wheelchair. Invariably, his mother was behind him, pushing the chair.

They were incredibly quiet, their room like a museum. They never had the TV on, though twice I

heard music coming from their place—a Mozart clarinet quintet the first time, the second time some orchestral music I didn’t recognize. Richard Strauss was my guess. Other than that, no sound at all. They didn’t use the air-conditioner—they left their front door open instead, so that the cool sea breeze could blow in. But, even with the door open, I never heard them talking. Any conversation they had—they had to talk sometime—must have been more or less an exchange of whispers. This seemed to rub off on my wife and me, and whenever we were in our room we found ourselves speaking in low voices.

We often ran across the mother and son in the restaurant, or in the lobby, or on one of the walkways through the garden. The hotel was a small, cozy place, so I guess we were bound to cross paths, whether we wanted to or not. We’d nod to one another as we passed. The mother and son had different ways of nodding hello. The mother would give a strong, affirmative nod; the son barely tilted his head. The impression that these two variant nods gave off, though, was pretty much the same: both greetings began and ended there; nothing lay beyond. We never tried to speak to them. My wife and I had more than enough to talk about between ourselves—whether we should move to a new apartment when we got home, what we should do about our jobs, whether or not to have kids. This was the last summer of our twenties.

After breakfast, the mother and son always sat in the lobby and read the newspapers—each methodically proceeding from one page to the next, top to bottom, as if they were locked in a fierce contest to see who could take longer to read the whole thing. Some days it wasn’t newspapers but massive hardcover books. They seemed less like a mother and son than an old married couple who had long ago grown bored with each other.

At around ten every morning, my wife and I would take a cooler down to the beach. We’d cover

ourselves with sunblock, then sprawl out on our mats on the sand. I’d listen to the Stones or Marvin Gaye on a Walkman, while my wife plowed through a paperback of “Gone with the Wind.” She claimed that she’d learned a lot about life from that book. I’d never read it, so I had no idea what she meant. Every day, the sun would pop up inland, trace a slow path between the rafts—in the opposite direction from the helicopters—then sink leisurely beneath the horizon.

At two every afternoon, the mother and son would appear at the beach. The mother always wore a plain light-colored dress and a broad-brimmed white straw hat. The son never wore a hat; he had on sunglasses instead, with a Hawaiian shirt and cotton pants. They’d sit in the shade below the palm trees, the breeze rustling around them, and stare off at the ocean, not really doing anything. The mother sat in a folding beach chair, but the son never got out of his wheelchair. Every now and then, they’d shift slightly in order to stay in the shade. The mother had a silver thermos with her, and occasionally she poured herself a drink in a paper cup or munched on a cracker.

Some days they’d leave after half an hour; other days they stayed as long as three. When I went swimming, I could feel them watching me. It was quite a long way from the rafts to the line of palm trees, so I may have been imagining it. Or perhaps I was just being oversensitive, but whenever I clambered up onto one of the rafts I got the distinct feeling that their eyes were trained in my

direction. Sometimes the silver thermos would glint like a knife in the sunlight.

One listless day followed another, with nothing to distinguish one from the next. You could have

changed the order and no one would have noticed. The sun rose in the east, set in the west, the olive-green helicopters zoomed in low, and I downed gallons of beer and swam to my heart’s content.

On the afternoon of our last full day at the hotel, I went out for one final swim. My wife was taking a nap, so I left for the beach alone. It was a Saturday, and there were more people there than usual. Tanned young soldiers with buzz cuts and tattooed arms were playing volleyball. Kids were splashing around at the edge of the water, building sandcastles and shrieking in delight at each big wave. But there was almost no one in the water; the rafts were deserted. The sky was cloudless, the sun high overhead, the sand hot. It was after two, but the mother and son still hadn’t made their appearance.

I walked out until the water came up to my chest, then did the crawl, heading for the raft on the left. Slowly, testing the resistance of the water with my palms, I swam on, counting the strokes. The water was chilly, and it felt good on my suntanned skin. Swimming in such clear water, I could see my own shadow on the sandy bottom, as if I were a bird gliding through the sky. After I had counted forty strokes, I looked up and, sure enough, there was the raft right ahead of me. Exactly ten strokes later, my left hand touched its side. I floated there for a minute, catching my breath, then grabbed hold of the ladder and scrambled aboard.

I was surprised to find someone else already there—an overweight blond woman. I hadn’t seen anyone on the raft when I set out from the beach, so she must have got there while I was swimming toward it. The woman was wearing a tiny bikini—one of those fluttery red things, like the banners that Japanese farmers fly in their fields to warn that they’ve just sprayed chemicals—and she was lying face down. She was so obese that the swimsuit looked even smaller than it was. She seemed to have arrived recently—her skin was still pale, without a trace of a tan.

She glanced up for a second and then closed her eyes again. I sat down at the opposite end of the raft, dangled my legs in the water, and looked off at the shore. The mother and son still weren’t under their palm trees. They were nowhere else, either. There was no way I could have missed them: the metal wheelchair, glistening in the sunlight, was a dead giveaway. I felt let down. Without them, a piece of the picture was missing. Perhaps they had checked out of the hotel and gone back to where they came from—wherever that was. But when I’d seen them earlier, in the hotel restaurant, I hadn’t got the impression that they were preparing to leave. They had taken their time eating the daily special and had quietly drunk a cup of coffee afterward—the same routine as always.

I lay face down like the blond woman and tanned myself for ten minutes or so, listening to the tiny waves slap against the side of the raft. The drops of water in my ear warmed in the intense sun.

“Boy, it’s hot,” the woman said from the other end of the raft. She had a high-pitched, saccharine

kind of voice.

“It sure is,” I replied.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“I don’t have a watch, but it must be around two-thirty. Two-forty, maybe?”

“Really?” she said, and let out something close to a sigh, as if that might not have been the time she was hoping for. Perhaps she just didn’t care one way or another about the time.

She sat up. Sweat was beaded on her like flies on food. The rolls of fat started just below her ears and sloped gently down to her shoulders, then in one continuous series down her chubby arms. Even her wrists and ankles seemed to disappear into those fleshy folds. I couldn’t help thinking of the Michelin Man. As heavy as she was, though, the woman didn’t strike me as unhealthy. She wasn’t bad-looking, either. She simply had too much meat on her bones. I guessed that she was in her late thirties.

“You must have been here awhile, you’re so tanned,” she said. “Nine days.”

“What an amazing tan,” she said. Instead of responding, I cleared my throat. The water in my ears gurgled as I coughed.

“I’m staying at the military hotel,” she said.

I knew the place. It was just down the road from the beach.

“My brother’s a Navy officer, and he invited me to come. The Navy’s not so bad, you know? The pay’s O.K. They’ve got everything you want, right there on the base, plus perks like this resort. It was different when I was in college. That was during the Vietnam War. Having a career military person in your family then was kind of an embarrassment. You had to slink around. But the world’s really changed since then.”

I nodded vaguely.

“My ex used to be in the Navy, too,” she went on. “A fighter pilot. He had a tour of duty in Vietnam for two years, then he became a pilot for United. I was a stewardess for United then, and that’s how we met. I’m trying to remember what year we got married ....

Nineteen-seventy-something. Anyhow, about six years ago. It happens all the time.”

“What does?”

“You know—airline crews work crazy hours, so they tend to date each other. The working hours and life style are totally off the wall. Anyhow, we get married, I quit my job, and then he takes up with another stewardess and winds up marrying her. That happens all the time, too.”

I tried changing the subject. “Where do you live now?”

“Los Angeles,” she said. “You ever been there?”

“No,” I said.

“I was born there. Then my father was transferred to Salt Lake City. Have you been there?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she said, shaking her head. She palmed the sweat from her face.

It was strange to think that she’d been a stewardess. I’d seen plenty of brawny stewardesses who could have been wrestlers. I’d seen some with beefy arms and downy upper lips. But I’d never seen one as big as her. Maybe United didn’t care how heavy its stewardesses were. Or maybe she hadn’t been this fat when she had that job.

I scanned the beach. No sign yet of the mother and son. The soldiers were still tossing around a volleyball. The lifeguard up on his tower was staring intently at something with his oversized binoculars. Two military helicopters appeared offshore and, like messengers in a Greek tragedy delivering inauspicious news, they thundered solemnly overhead and disappeared inland. Silently, we watched the green machines vanish into the distance.

“I bet from up there we look like we’re having a great time,” the woman said. “Sunning ourselves out here on this raft, not a care in the world.”

“You may be right.”

“Most things look beautiful when you’re way up high,” she said. She rolled over onto her stomach again and closed her eyes.

Time passed in silence. Sensing that it was the right moment to leave, I stood up and told her that I had to be getting back. I dived into the water and swam off. Halfway there, I stopped, treading water, and turned back toward the raft. She was watching me and waved. I gave a slight wave back. From far away, she looked like a dolphin. All she needed was a pair of flippers and she could leap back into the sea.

In my room, I took a nap, then as evening came on we went down to the restaurant as always and ate dinner. The mother and son weren’t there. And when we walked back to our room from the restaurant their door was closed. Light filtered out through the small frosted-glass pane in the door, but I couldn’t tell if the room was still occupied.

“I wonder if they’ve already checked out,” I said to my wife. “They weren’t at the beach or at dinner.”

“Everyone checks out eventually,” my wife said. “You can’t live like this forever.”

“I guess so,” I agreed, but I wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t picture that mother and son anywhere but right there.

We started packing. Once we’d filled our suitcases and stowed them at the foot of the bed, the room suddenly seemed cold and alien. Our vacation was coming to an end.

Iwoke up and glanced at my watch, on the table next to the bed. It was one-twenty. My heart was beating furiously. I slid off the bed and down onto the carpet, sat cross-legged, and took some deep breaths. Then I held my breath, relaxed my shoulders, sat up straight, and tried to focus. A couple of repetitions of this and I was fmally calm. I must have swum too much, I decided, or got too much sun. I stood and looked around the room. At the foot of the bed, our two suitcases crouched like stealthy animals. That’s right, I remembered—tomorrow we won’t be here anymore.

In the pale moonlight shining through the window, my wife was fast asleep. I couldn’t hear her breathing at all, and it was almost as if she were dead. Sometimes she sleeps that way. When we first got married, it kind of scared me; every now and then, I thought maybe she really was dead. But it was just that silent, bottomless sleep. I stripped off my sweaty pajamas and changed into a clean shirt and pair of shorts. Shoving a miniature bottle of Wild Turkey that was on the table into my pocket, I opened the door quietly and went outside. The night air was chilly and it carried with it the damp odor of all the surrounding plants. The moon was full, bathing the world in a strange hue that you never see in the daytime. It was like looking through a special color filter, one that made some things more colorful than they really are and left others as drab and drained as a corpse.

I wasn’t sleepy at all. It was as if sleep had never existed, my mind was so totally clear and focussed. Silence reigned. No wind, no insects, no night birds calling out. Only the far-off sound of waves, and I had to listen carefully to hear even them.

I made one slow circuit of the cottage, then cut across the grass. In the moonlight, the lawn, which was circular, looked like an iced-over pond. I stepped softly, trying not to crack the ice. Beyond the lawn was a narrow set of stone steps, and at the top a bar decorated in a tropical theme. Every evening, just before dinner, I had a vodka-tonic at this bar. This late at night, of course, the place was closed, the bar shuttered, and the parasols at each table all neatly folded up like slumbering pterodactyls.

The young man in the wheelchair was there, resting an elbow on one of the tables, gazing out at the water. From a distance, his metal wheelchair in the moonlight looked like some precision instrument made especially for the deepest, darkest hours of the night.

I had never seen him alone before. In my mind, he and his mother were always a single unit—him in his chair, his mother pushing it. It felt odd—rude, even—to see him like this. He was wearing an orange Hawaiian shirt I’d seen before and white cotton pants. He was just sitting without moving, staring at the ocean.

I stood for a while, wondering whether I should signal to him that I was there. But, before I could decide what to do, he sensed my presence and turned around. When he saw me, he gave his usual minimalist nod.

“Good evening,” I said.

“Good evening,” he answered in a small voice. This was the first time I’d heard him speak. His voice sounded a little sleepy but otherwise perfectly normal. Not too high, not too low.

“A midnight stroll?” he asked. “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

He looked me over from top to bottom, and a faint smile came to his lips. “Same here,” he said. “Have a seat, if you’d like.”

I hesitated for a moment, then walked over to his table. I pulled out one of the plastic chairs and sat down opposite him. I turned to look in the same direction that he was looking. At the end of the beach were the jagged rocks, like muffins sliced in half, with waves slapping at them at regular intervals. Neat, graceful little waves—as if they’d been measured off with a ruler. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to look at.

“I didn’t see you at the beach today,” I said.

“I was resting in my room all day,” the young man replied. “My mother wasn’t feeling well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s not a physical thing. More of an emotional, nervous condition.” He rubbed his cheek with the middle fmger of his right hand. Despite the late hour, his cheeks were as smooth as porcelain, not a trace of stubble. “She’s O.K. now. She’s sound asleep. It’s different from my legs—one good night’s sleep and she’s better. Not completely cured or anything, but at least she’s her usual self again. Come morning, she’ll be fine.”

He was silent for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. I uncrossed my legs under the table and wondered if this was the right moment to leave. It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in a conversation to say goodbye. But I missed my chance; just as I was about to tell him I had to go, he spoke up.

“There are all kinds of nervous disorders. Even if they have the same cause, there are a million different symptoms. It’s like an earthquake—the underlying energy is the same, but, depending on where it happens, the results are different. In one case, an island sinks; in another, a brand-new island is formed.”

He yawned. A long, formal kind of yawn. Elegant, almost. “Excuse me,” he said. He looked exhausted, his eyes were blurry, as if he might fall asleep at any second. I glanced at my watch and realized that I wasn’t wearing one—just a band of white skin on my wrist where my watch had been.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I might look sleepy but I’m not. Four hours a night is enough for me, and I usually get that just before dawn. So at this time of night I’m mostly here, just hanging out.”

He picked up the Cinzano ashtray on the table, gazed at it for a while as if it were some rare find, then put it back.

“Whenever my mother has her nervous condition, the left side of her face gets frozen. She can’t move her eye or her mouth. If you look at that side of her face, it looks like a cracked vase. It’s

weird, but it’s not fatal or anything. One night’s sleep and she’s good to go.”

I had no idea how to respond, so I just gave a noncommittal nod. A cracked vase?

“Don’t tell my mother I told you about this, O.K.? She hates it if anybody talks about her condition.”

“Sure,” I said. “Besides, we’re leaving tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll have a chance to talk with her.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, as if he really meant it.

“It is, but I’ve got to get back to work, so what can I do?” I said.

“Where are you from?”

“Tokyo.”

“Tokyo,” he repeated. He narrowed his eyes again and stared out at the ocean, as if he’d be able, if he stared hard enough, to see the lights of Tokyo out beyond the horizon.

“Are you going to be here much longer?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” he said, tracing the handgrip on his wheelchair with his fmgers. “Another month, maybe two. It all depends. My sister’s huband owns stock in this hotel, so we can stay here for next to nothing. My father runs a big tile company in Cleveland, and my brother-in-law’s basically taken it over. I don’t like the guy very much, but I guess you can’t choose your family, can you? I don’t know, maybe he’s not as terrible as I make out. Unhealthy people like me tend to be a little narrow-minded.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and slowly, delicately, blew his nose, then repocketed the handkerchief. “Anyhow, he owns stock in a lot of companies. A lot of investment property, too. A shrewd guy, just like my father. So we’re all—my family, I mean—divided into two types of people: the healthy ones and the sick ones. The functional and the dysfunctional. The healthy ones are busy making tile, increasing their wealth, and evading taxes—don’t tell anybody I said that, O.K.?—and they take care of the sick ones. It’s a neat division of labor.”

He stopped speaking and took a deep breath. He tapped his fingernails against the tabletop for a while. I was silent, waiting for him to go on.

“They decide everything for us. Tell us to stay a month here, a month there. We’re like the rain, my mother and I. We rain here, and the next thing you know we’re raining somewhere else.”

The waves lapped at the rocks, leaving white foam behind; by the time the foam vanished, new waves had appeared. I watched this process vacantly. The moonlight cast irregular shadows among the rocks.

“Of course, since it’s a division of labor,” he went on, “my mother and I have our roles to play, too. It’s a two-way street. It’s hard to describe, but I think we complement their excesses by doing nothing. That’s our raison d’être. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, sort of,” I replied. “But I’m not entirely sure I do.”

He laughed quietly. “A family’s a strange thing,” he said. “A family has to exist as its own premise, or else the system won’t function. In that sense, my useless legs are a kind of banner that my family rallies around. My dead legs are the pivot around which things revolve.”

He was tapping the tabletop again. Not in initation—merely moving his fmgers and quietly contemplating things in his own time zone.

“One of the main characteristics of this system is that lack gravitates toward greater lack, excess toward greater excess. When Debussy was getting nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: ‘I spent my days pursuing the nothingness—Tien—it creates.’My job is to create that void, that rien.”

He sank back into an insomniac silence, his mind wandering to some distant region. Perhaps to the void inside him. Eventually, his attention returned to the here and now, the point he came back to a few degrees out of alignment with where he’d departed from. I tried rubbing my own cheek. The scratch of stubble told me that, yes, time was still moving. I took the miniature bottle of whiskey from my pocket and stood it on the table.

“Care for a drink? I don’t have a glass, I’m afraid.”

He shook his head. “Thanks, but I don’t drink. I’m not sure how I’d react if I did, so I don’t. But I don’t mind other people drinking—be my guest.”

I tipped the bottle back and let the whiskey slide slowly down my throat. I closed my eyes, savoring the warmth. He watched this process from across the table.

“This might be a strange question,” he said, “but do you know anything about knives?”

“Knives?”

“Knives. You know, like hunting knives.”

I’d used knives when camping, I told him, but I didn’t know much about them. That seemed to disappoint him. But not for long.

“Never mind,” he said. “I just happen to have a knife I wanted you to take a look at. I bought it about a month ago from a catalogue. But I don’t know the first thing about knives. I don’t know if it’s any good or if I wasted my money. So I wanted to have somebody else take a look and tell me what they think. If you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind,” I told him.

Gingerly, he withdrew a five-inch-long, beautifully curved object from his pocket and placed it on the table.

“Don’t worry. I’m not planning to hurt anybody with it, or hurt myself. It’s just that one day I felt like I had to own a sharp knife. I can’t remember why. I was just dying to get a knife, that’s all. So I looked through some catalogues and ordered one. Nobody knows that I’m always carrying this knife around with me—not even my mother. You’re the only person who knows.”

“And I’m leaving for Tokyo tomorrow.”

“That’s right,” he said, and smiled. He picked up the knife and let it rest in his palm for a moment, testing its weight as if it held some great significance. Then he passed it to me across the table. The knife did have a strange heft—it was as if I were holding a living creature with a will of its own. Wood inlay was set into the brass handle, and the metal was cool, even though it had been in his pocket all this time.

“Go ahead and open the blade.”

I pushed a depression on the upper part of the hilt and flipped out the heavy blade. Fully extended, it was about three inches long. With the blade out, the knife felt even heavier. It wasn’t just the weight that struck me; it was the way the knife fit perfectly in my palm. I tried swinging it around a couple of times, up and down, side to side, and with that perfect balance I never had to grip harder to keep it from slipping. The steel blade, with its sharply etched blood groove, carved out a crisp arc as I slashed with it.

“Like I said, I don’t know much about knives,” I told him, “but this is one great knife. It’s got such a great feel to it.”

“But isn’t it kind of small for a hunting knife?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it depends on what you use it for.”

“True enough,” he said, and nodded a few times as if to convince himself.

I folded the blade into the handle and handed it back to him. The young man opened it up again and deftly twirled the knife once in his hand. Then, as if he were sighting down a rifle, he shut one eye and aimed the knife directly at the full moon. Moonlight reflected off the blade and for an instant flashed on the side of his face.

“I wonder if you could do me a favor,” he said. “Could you cut something with it?”

“Cut something? Like what?”

“Anything. Whatever’s around. I just want you to cut something. I’m stuck in this chair, so there isn’t much I can reach. I’d really like it if you’d cut something up for me.”

I couldn’t think of any reason to refuse, so I picked up the knife and took a couple of stabs at the trunk of a nearby palm tree. I sliced down diagonally, lopping off the bark. Then I picked up one of those Styrofoam kickboards lying near the pool and sliced it in half lengthwise. The knife was even sharper than I’d imagined.

“This knife’s fantastic,” I said.

“It’s handcrafted,” the young man said. “And pretty expensive, too.”

I aimed the knife at the moon as he’d done, and stared hard at it. In the light, it looked like the stem of some ferocious plant just breaking through the surface of the soil. Something that connected nothingness and excess.

“Cut some more things,” he urged.

I slashed out at everything I could lay my hands on. At coconuts that had fallen on the ground, the massive leaves of a tropical plant, the menu posted at the entrance to the bar. I even hacked away at pieces of driftwood on the beach. When I ran out of things to cut, I started moving slowly, deliberately, as if I were doing Tai Chi, silently slicing the knife through the night air. Nothing stood in my way. The night was deep, and time was pliable. The light of the full moon only added to that depth, that pliancy.

As I stabbed the air, I suddenly thought of the fat woman, the ex-United Airlines stewardess. I could see her pale, bloated flesh hovering in the air around me, formless, like mist. Everything was there inside that mist. The rafts, the sea, the sky, the helicopters, the pilots. I tried slashing them in two, but the perspective was off, and it all stayed just out of reach of the tip of my blade. Was it all an illusion? Or was I the illusion? Maybe it didn’t matter. Come tomorrow, I wouldn’t be here anymore.

“Sometimes I have this dream,” the young man in the wheelchair said. His voice had a strange echo to it, as if it were rising up from the bottom of a cavernous hole. “There’s a sharp knife stabbed into the soft part of my head, where the memories are. It’s stuck deep down inside. It doesn’t hurt or weigh me down—it’s just stuck there. And I’m standing off to one side, looking at this like it’s happening to someone else. I want someone to pull the knife out, but no one knows that it’s stuck inside my head. I think about yanking it out myself, but I can’t reach my hands inside my head. It’s the strangest thing. I can stab myself, but I can’t reach the knife to pull it out. And then everything starts to disappear. I start to fade away, too. And only the knife is left. Only the knife is always there—to the very end. Like the bone of some prehistoric animal on the beach. That’s the kind of dream I have,” he said. +

Man-Eating-Cats

Ttranslated by Philip Gabriel

I bought a newspaper at the harbor and came across an article about an old woman who had been eaten by cats. She was seventy years old and lived alone in a small suburb of Athens—a quiet sort of life, just her and her three cats in a small one-room apartment. One day, she suddenly keeled over face down on the sofa—a heart attack, most likely. Nobody knew how long it had taken for her to die after she collapsed. The old woman didn’t have any relatives or friends who visited her regularly, and it was a week before her body was discovered. The windows and door were closed, and the cats were trapped. There wasn’t any food in the apartment. Granted, there was probably something in the fridge, but cats haven’t evolved to the point where they can open refrigerators. On the verge of starvation, they were forced to devour their owner’s flesh.

I read this article to Izumi, who was sitting across from me. On sunny days, we’d walk to the harbor, buy a copy of the Athens English-language newspaper, and order coffee at the cafe next door to the tax office, and I’d summarize in Japanese anything interesting I might come across. That was the extent of our daily schedule on the island. If something in a particular caught our interest, we’d bat around opinions for a while, Izumi’s English was pretty fluent, and she could easily have read the articles herself. But I never once saw her pick up a paper.

“I like to have someone to read to me,” she explained. “It’s been my dream ever since.

I was a child—to sit in a sunny place, gave at the sky or the sea, and have someone read aloud to me. I don’t care what they read—a newspaper, a textbook, a novel. It doesn’t matter. But no one’s ever read to me before. So I suppose that means you’re making up for all those lost opportunities. Besides, I love your voice.”

We had the sky and the sea there, all right. And I enjoyed reading aloud. When I lived in Japan, I used to read picture books aloud to my son. Reading aloud is different from just sentences with your eyes. Something quite unexpected wells up in your mind, a kind of indefinable resonance that I find impossible to resist.

Taking the occasional sip of bitter coffee, I slowly read the article to Izumi. I’d read a few lines to myself, mull over how to put them into Japanese, then translate aloud. A few bees popped up from somewhere to lick the jam that a previous customer spilled on the table. They spent a moment lapping it up, then, as if suddenly remembering something, flew into the air with a ceremonious buzz, circled the table a couple of times, and then—again as if something had jogged their memory—settled once more on the tabletop. After I had finished reading the whole article, Izumi sat there, unmoving, elbow resting on the table. She put the tips of the fmgers of her right hand against those of her left to form a tent. I rested the paper on my lap and gazed at her slim hands. She looked at me through the spaces between her fingers.

“Then what happened?” she asked.

“That’s it” I replied, and folded up the paper. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the flecks of coffee grounds off my lips. “At least, that’s all it says.”

“But what happened to The cats?”

I stuffed the handkerchief back in my pocket. “I have no idea. It doesn’t say.”

Izumi pursed her lips to one side, her own little habit. Whenever she was about to give an opinion ? which always took the form of a mini-declaration ? she pursed her lips like that, as if she were yanking a bed sheet to smooth out a stray wrinkle. When I first met her, I found this habit quite charming.

“Newspapers are all the same, no matter where you go,” she fmally announced. “They never tell you what you really want to know.”

She took a Salem out of its box, put it in her mouth, and struck a match. Every day, she smoked one pack of Salem—no more, no less. She’d open a new pack in the morning x and smoke it up by the end of the day. I didn’t smoke. My wife had made me quit, five years earlier, when she was pregnant.

“What I really want to know.” Izumi began, the smoke from her cigarette silently curling up into the air, “is what happened to the cats afterward. Did the authorities kill them because they’d eaten human fresh? Or did they say, ‘Yon guys have had a tough time of it,’ give them a pat on the head, and send them on their way? What do you think?”

I gazed at the bees hovering over the table and thought about it. For a fleeting instant; the restless little bees licking up the jam and the three cats devouring the old woman’s flesh became one in my mind. A distant seagulls shrill squawk overlapped the buzzing of the bees, and for a second or two my consciousness strayed on the border between reality and the unreal. Where was I? Whet was I doing here? I couldn’t get a purchase on the situation. I took a deep breath, gazed up at the sky, and turned to Izumi.

“I have no idea.”

“Think about it. If you were that town’s mayor or chief of police, what would you do with those cats?”

“How about putting them in an institution to reform them?” I said. “Turn them into vegetarians.”

Izumi didn’t laugh. She took a drag on her cigarette and ever slowly let out a stream of smoke. “That story reminds me of a lecture I heard just after I started at my Catholic junior high school. Did I tell you I went to a very strict Catholic school? Just after the entrance ceremony, one of the head nuns had us all assemble in an auditorium, and then she went up to the podium and gave a talk about Catholic doctrine. She told us a lot of things, but what I remember most ? actually, the only thing I remember ? is this story about being shipwrecked on a desert island with a cat.”

“Sound interesting,” I said.

“‘You’re in a shipwreck,’ she told us. ‘The only ones who make it to the lifeboat are you and a cat. You

land on some nameless desert island, and there’s nothing there to eat. All yon have is enough water and dry biscuit to sustain one person for about ten days.’ She said, ‘Al 1 right, everyone, I’d like you to imagine yourselves in this situation. Close your eyes and try to picture it. You alone on the desert island, just you and the cat. You have almost no food at all. Do you understand? You’re hungry, thirsty, and eventually you’ll die. What should you do? Should you share your meagre store of food with the cat? No you should not. That would be a mistake. You are all precious beings, chosen by God, and the cat is not. That’s why you should eat all the food yourself.’ The nun gave us this deadly serious look. I was a bit shocked. What could possibly be the point of telling a story like that to kids who’d just started at the school? I thought, Whoa, what kind of place have I got myself into?”

Izumi and I were living in an efficiency apartment on a small Greek island. It was off-season, and the island wasn’t exactly a tourist spot, so the rent was cheap. Neither of us had heard of thy island before we got there. It lay near the border of Turkey, and on clear day you could just make out the green Turkish mountains. On windy days, the local joked, you could smell the shish kebab. All joking aside, our island was closer to the Turkish shore than to the next closest Greek island, and there—looming right before our eyes—was Asia Minor.

In the town square, there was a statue of a hero of Greek independence. He had led an insurrection on the Greek mainland and planned an uprising against the Turks, who controlled the island then. But the Turk captured him put him to death. They set up a sharpened stake in the square beside the harbor, stripped the hapless hero naked, and lowered him onto it. The weight of his body drove the stake through his anus and then the rest of his body until it finally came out of his mouth ? an incredibly slow, excruciating way to die. The statue was erected on the spot where this was supposed to have happened. When it was first built, it must have been impressive, but now, what with the sea wind, dust, and seagull droppings, von could barely make out the mans features. The locals hardly gave the shabby statue a passing glance, and for his part the hero looked as though he’d turned his back on the people, the island, the world.

When Izumi and I sat at our outdoor cafe, drinking coffee or beer, aimlessly gazing at the boat in the harbor and at the far-off Turkish hills, we were sitting at the edge of Europe. The wind was the wind at the edge of the world. An inescapable retro color filled the place. It made me feel as if I were being quietly swal lowed up by an alien reality, something foreign and just out of reach, vague yet strangely gentle. And the shadow of that substance colored the faces, the eyes, the skin of the people gathered in the harbor.

At times, I couldn’t grasp the fact that I was part of this scene. No matter how much I took in the scenery around me, no matter how much I breathed in the air, there was no organic connection between me and all this.

Two months before, I had been living with my wife and our four-year-old son in a three-bedroom apartment in Unoki, in Tokyo. Not a spacious place, just your basic, functional apartment. My wife and I had our own bedroom, so did our son, and the remaining room served as my study. The apartment was quiet, with a nice view. On weekend, the three of us would take walk along the banks of the Tama

River. In spring, the cherry trees by the river would blossom, and I’d put my son on the back of my bike, and we’d go off to watch the Tokyo Giants Triple A team in spring training.

I worked at a medium-sized design company that specialized in book and magazine layouts. Calling me a “designer” makes it sound more than it was, since the work was fairly cut-and-dried. Nothing flamboyant or imaginative. Most of the time, our schedule was a bit too hectic, and several times a month I had to pull an all-nighter at the office. Some of the work bored me to tears. Still, I didn’t mind the job, and the company was a relaxed place. Because I had seniority, I was able to pick and choose my assignment and say pretty much whatever wanted to. My boss was O.K., and I got along with my co-workers. And the salary wasn’t half bad. So if nothing had happened, I probably would have stayed with the company for the foreseeable future. And my life, like the Moldau River—or, more precisely, the nameless water that makes up the Moldau River—would have continued to flow, ever so swiftly; into the sea.

But then I met Izumi.

Izumi was ten years younger than I was. We met at a business meeting. Something clicked between us the first time we laid eyes on each other. Not the kind of thing that happens all that often. We met a couple of times after that, to go over the details of our joint project. I’d go to her offices or she’d drop by mine. Our meetings were always short, other people were involved, and it was basically all business. When our project was finished, though, a terrible loneliness swept over me; as if something absolutely vital had been forcibly snatched from my grasp. I hadn’t felt like that in years. And I think she felt the same way.

A week later, she phoned my office about some minor matter and we chatted for a bit. I told a joke, and she laughed. “Want to go out for a drink?” I asked. We went to a small bar and had a few drinks. I can’t recall exactly what we talked about, but we found a million topics and could have talked forever. With a laserlike clarity, I could grasp everything she wanted to say. And things I couldn’t explain well to

anyone else came across to her with an exactness that took me by surprise. We were both married, with no major complaints about our married lives. We loved our spouses and respected them. Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle ? running across someone to wham you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been a mistake to label this “love”. It was more like total empathy.

We started going out regularly for drinks. Her husband’s job kept him out late, so she was free to come and go as she pleased. When got together, though, the time just flew by. We’d look at our watches and discover that we could barely make the last train. It was always hard for me to say goodbye. There was so much more we wanted to tell each other.

Neither one of us lured the other to bed, but we did start sleeping together. We’d both been faithful to our spouses up to that point, but somehow we didn’t feel guilty, for the simple reason that we had to do it. Undressing her, caressing her skin, holding her close, slipping inside her, coming—it was all just a natural extension of our conversations. So natural that our lovemaking was not a source of heartrending

physical pleasure; it was just a calm, pleasant act, stripped of all pretense. Best of all were our quiet talks in bed after sex. I’d hold her naked body close, and she’d curl up in my arms, and we’d whisper secrets in our own private language.

We met whenever we could. Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, we were absolutely convinced that our relationship could go on forever, or married lives on one side of the equation, our own relationship on the other, with no problems arising. We were convinced that our affair would never come to light. Sure we had sex, but how was that hurting anyone? On night when I slept with Izumi, I’d get home late and have to make up some lie to tell my wife, and I did feel a pang of conscience, but it never seemed be an actual betrayal. Izumi and I had a strictly compartmentalized yet totally intimate relationship.

And if nothing had happened, maybe we would have continued like that forever, sipping our vodka-and-tonics, slipping between the sheets whenever we could. Or maybe we would have got tired of lying to our spouses and decided to let the affair die a natural death so that we could return to comfortable little life styles. Either way, I don’t think things would have turned out badly. I can’t prove it; I just have that feeling. But a twist of fate—inevitable, in retrospect—intervenedd, and Izumi’s husband got wind of our affair. After grilling her, he barged into my home, totally out of control. As luck would have it, my wife was alone at the time, and the whole thing turned ugly. When I got home, she demanded that I explain what going on. Izumi had already admitted everything, so I couldn’t very well make up some story. I told my wife exactly what happened. “It’s not like I’m in love,” I explained. “It’s a special relationship, but completely different from what I have with von. Like night and day. You haven’t detecte4 anything going on, right? That proves it’s not the kind of affair you’re imagining.”

But my wife refused to listen. It was a shock, and she froze and literally wouldn’t speak another word to me. The next day, she packed all her things in the car and drove to her parents’ place, in Chigasaiki, taking our son with her. I called a couple of times, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. Her father came on instead. “I don’t want to hear any of your lame excuse,” he warned, “and there’s no way I’m going to let my daughter go back to a bastard like you.” He’d been dead set against our marriage from the start, and his tone of voice said he’d finally been proved right.

At a complete loss, I took a few days off and just lay forlornly alone in bd. Izumi phoned me. She was alone, too. Her husband had left her, as well, but not before slapping her around a bit. He had taken a pair of scissors to every stitch of clothing she owned. From her overcoat to her underwear, it all lay in tatters. She had no idea where he had gone. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. Everything is ruined, and it’ll never be the same again. He’s never coming back.” She sobbed over the phone. She and her husband had been high–school sweethearts. I wanted to comfort her, but what could I possibly say?

“Let’s go somewhere and have a drink,” she finally suggested. We went to Shibuya and drank until drawn at an allnight bar. Vodka gimlet for me, Daiquiris for her. I lost track of how much we drank. For the first time since we’d met, we didn’t have much to say. At down, we worked off the liquor by walking over to Harajuku, where we had coffee and breakfast at a Denny’s. That’s when she brought up the idea of going to Greece.

“Greece” I asked,

“We can’t very well stay in Japan,” she said, looking deep into my eyes.

I turned the idea around in my mind. Greece? My vodka-soaked brain couldn’t follow the logic.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Greece,” she said. “It’s been my dream. I wanted to go on my honeymoon, but we didn’t have enough money. So let’s go ? the two of us. And just live there, you know, with no worries about anything. Staying in Japan’s just going to depress us, and nothing good will come of it.”

I didn’t have any particular interest in Greece, but I had to agree with her. We calculated how much money we had between us. She had two and a half million yen in savings, while I could come up with about one and a half million. Four million yen altogether—about forty thousand dollars.

“Forty thousand dollars should last a few years in the Geek countryside,” Izumi said. Discount plane tickets would set us back around four thousand. That leaves thirty-six. Figure a thousand a month, and that’s enough for three years. Two and a half, to be on the safe side. What do you say? Let’s go. We’ll let things sort themselves out later on.”

I looked around. The early-morning Denny’s was crowded with young couples. We were the only couple over thirty. And surely the only couple discussing taking all our money and fleeing to Greece after a disastrous affair. What a mess, I thought. I gazed at the palm of my hand for the longest time. Was this really what my life had come to?

“All right,” I said finally. “Let’s do it.”

At work next day, I handed in my letter of resignation. My boss had heard rumors and decided that it was best to put me on extended leave for the time being. My colleagues were startled to hear that 1 wanted to quit, but no one tried very hard to talk me out of it. Quitting a job is not so difficult, after all, I discovered. Once you make up your mind to get rid of something, there’s very little you can’t discard. No ? not very little. Once you put your mind to it, there’s nothing you can’t get rid of. And once you start tossing things out, you fmd yourself wanting to get rid of everything. It’s as if you’d gambled away almost all your money and decided, What the hell, I’ll bet what’s left. Too much trouble to cling to the rest.

I packed everything I thought and need into one medium-sized blue Samsonite suitcase. Izumi took about the same amount of baggage.

As we were flying over Egypt, I was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear that someone else had taken my bag by mistake. There had to be tens of thousands of identical blue Samsonite bags in the world. Maybe I’d get to Greece, open up the suitcase, and find it stuffed with some else’s possessions. A severe anxiety attack swept over me. If the suitcase got lost, there would be nothing left to link me to my own life ? just Izumi. I suddenly felt as if I had vanished. It was the weirdest sensation. The person sitting on that plane was no longer me. My brain had mistakenly attached itself to some convenient packaging that looked like me. My mind was in utter chaos. I had to go back to Japan and get back inside my real body.

But here was in a jet, flying over Egypt, and there was no turning back. This flesh I was temporarily occupying felt as if it were made out of plaster. If I scratched myself, pieces would flake off. I began to shiver uncontrollably, and I couldn’t stop. I knew that if these shakes continued much longer the body I was in would crack apart and turn to dust. The plane was air-conditioned, but I broke out in a sweat. My shirt stuck to my skin. An awful smell arose from me. All the while, Izumi held my hand tightly and gave me the occasional hug. She didn’t say a word, but she knew how I was feeling. The shake went on for a good half hour; I wanted to die—to stick the barrel of a revolver in my ear and pull the trigger, so that my mind and my flesh would turn to dust.

After the shakes subsided, though, I suddenly felt lighter. I relaxed my tense shoo 1 der and gave myself up to the flow of time. I fell into a deep sleep, and when I opened my eye, there below me lay the azure waters of the Aegean.

The biggest problem facing us on the island was an almost total lack of things to do. We didn’t work, we had no friends. The island had no movie theatres or tennis courts or books to read. We’d left Japan so abruptly that I had completely forgotten to bring books. I read two novels I’d picked up at the airport, a copy of Aeschylus’ tragedies that

Izumi had brought along. I read them all twice. To cater to tourists, the kiosk at the harbor stocked a few English paperbacks, but nothing caught my eye. Reading was my passion, and I’d always imagined that if I had free time I’d wallow in books, but, ironically, here I was—with all the time in the world and nothing to read.

Izumi started studying Greek. She’d brought along a Greek-language text, and made a chart of verb conjugations that she carried around, reciting verbs aloud like a spell. She got to the point where she was able to talk to the shopkeepers in her broken Greek, and to the waiters when we stepped by the cafe, so we managed to make a few acquaintances. Not to be outdone, I dusted off my French. I figured it would come in handy someday, but on this seedy little island I never ran across a soul who spoke French. In town, we were able to get by with English. Some of the old people knew Italian or German. French, though, was useless.

With nothing much to do, we walked everywhere. We tried fishing in the harbor but didn’t catch a thing. Lack of fish wasn’t the problem; it was water was too clear. Fish could see all the way from the hook up to the face of the person trying to catch the. You’d have to be a pretty dumb fish to get caught that way. I bought sketchbook and a set of watercolors at a local shop and tramped around the island sketching the scenery and the people. Izumi would sit beside me, looking at my paintings, memorizing her Greek conjugations. Local people often came to watch me sketch. To kill time, I’d draw their portrait, which seemed to be a big hit. If I gave them the picture, they’d often treat us to a beer. Once, a fisherman gave us a whole octopus.

“You could make a living doing portraits, Izumi said. “You’re good, and you could male a nice little business out of it. Play up the fact that you’re a Japanese artist. Can’t be many of them around here.”

I laughed, but her expression was serious. I pictured myself trekking around the Greek isles, picking up

spare change drawing portraits, enjoying the occasional free beer. Not such a bad idea, I concluded.

“And I’ll be a tour coordinator for Japanese tourists,” Izumi continued. “There should be more of them as time goes by, and that will help make ends meet. Of course, that means I’ll have to get serious about learning Greek.”

“Do you really think we can spend two and a half years doing nothing?” I asked.

“As long as we don’t get robbed or sick or something. Barring the unforeseen, we should be able to get by. Still, it’s always good to prepare for the unexpected.”

Until then, I’d almost never been to a doctor, I told her.

Izumi stared straight at me, pursed her lips, and moved them to one side.

“Say I got pregnant;” she began. “What would you do? You protect yourself the best you can, but people make mistakes. If that happened, our money would run out pretty quick”

If it comes to that, we should probably go back to Japan.” I said.

“You don’t get it. do you?” she said quietly “We can never go back to Japan.”

Izumi continued her study of Greek, I my sketching. This was the most peaceful time in my whole life. We ate simply and carefully sipped the cheapest wines. Every day, we’d climb a nearby hill. There was a small village on top, and from there we could see other islands far away. With all the fresh air and exercise, I was soon in good shape. After the sun set on the island, you couldn’t hear a sound. And in that silence Izumi and I would quietly make love and talk about all kinds of things. No more worrying about making the last train, or coming up with lies tell our spouses. It was wonderful beyond belief. Autumn deepened bit by bit, and early winter came on. The wind picked up, and there were witecaps in the sea.

It was around this time that we read the story about the man—eating cat. In the same paper, there was a report about the Japanese emperor’s condition worsening, but we’d bought it only to cheek on exchange rates. The yen was continuing to gain against the drachma. This was vital for us; the stronger the yen, the more money we had.

“Speaking of cats,” I said. a few days after we’d read the article, “when I was a child I had a cat who disappeared in the strangest way.”

Izumi seemed to want to hear more. She lifted her face from her conjugation chart and looked at me “How so?”

“I was in second, maybe third grade. We lived in a company house that had a big garden. There was this ancient pine tree in the garden, so tall you could barely see the top of it. One day, I was sitting on the back porch reading a book, while our tortoiseshell car was playing in the garden. The cat was leaping about by itself, the way cats do sometimes. It was all worked up something, completely oblivious of the

fact that I was watching it. The longer I watched, the more frightened I became. The cat seemed possessed, jumping around, its fur standing on end. It was as if it was something that I.

couldn’t. Finally, it started racing around and around the pine tree, just like the tiger in ‘Little Black Sambo.’ Then it screeched to an abrupt halt and scrambled up the tree to the highest branches. I could just make out its little face way up in the topmost branches. The cat was still excited and tense. It was hiding in the branches, staring out at something. I called its name, but it acted like it didn’t hear me.”

“What was the cat’s name?” Izumi asked.

“I forget,” I told her. “Gradually, evening came on, and it grew darker. I was worried and waited for a long time for the cat to climb down. Finally, it got pitch dark And we never saw the cat again.”

“That’s not so unusual,” Izumi said. “Cats often disappear like that. Especially when they’re in heat. They get overexcited and then can’t remember how to get home. The cat must have come down from the pine tree and gone off somewhere when you weren’t watching.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But I was still a kid then, and I was positive that the cat had decided to live up in the tree. There had to be some reason that it couldn’t come down. Every day, I’d sit on the porch and look up at the pine tree, hoping to see the cat peeking out between the branches.”

Izumi seemed to have lost interest. She lit her second Salem, then raised her head and looked at me. “Do you think about your child sometime?” She asked.

I had no idea how to respond. “Sometimes I do,” I said honestly. “But not all the time. Occasionally something will remind me.”

“Don’t you want to see him?”

“Sometime I do,” I said. But that was a lie, I just thought that that was the way I was supposed to feel. Whenever I was living with my son, I thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Whenever I got home late, I’d always go to my son’s room first, to see his sleeping face. Sometimes I was seized by a desire to squeeze him so hard he might break. Now everything about him—his face, his voice, his actions—existed in a distant land. All I could recall with any clarity was the smell of his soap. I liked to take baths with him and scrub him. He had sensitive skin, so my wife always kept a special bar of soap just for him. All I could recall about my own son was the smell of that soap.

“If you want to go back to Japan, don’t let me stop you,” lzumi said, “Don’t worry about me. I’d manage somehow.”

I nodded. But I knew that it wasn’t going to happen.

“I wonder if your child will think of you that way when he’s grown up,” Izumi said. “Like you were a cat who disappeared up a pine tree.”

I laughed. “Maybe so,” I said.

Izumi crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray and sighed. “Let’s go home and make love, all right?” she

said.

“It’s still morning”, I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Not a thing,” I said.

Later, when I woke up in the middle of the night, Izumi wasn’t there. I looked at my watch next to the bed. Twelve-thirty; I fumbled for the lamp, switched it on, and gazed around the room. Everything was as quiet as if someone had stolen in while I slept and sprinkled silent dust all around. Two bent Sal em butts were in the ashtray, a balled-up empty cigarette pack beside them. I got out of bed and looked out at the living room. Izumi wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. I opened the door and looked out at the front yard. Just a pair of vinyl lounge chairs, bathed in the brilliant moonlight. “Izumi,” I called out in a small voice. Nothing. I called out again, this time more loudly. My heart pounded. Was this my voice? It sounded too loud, unnatural. Still no reply. A faint breeze from the sea rustled the tips of the pampas grass. I shut the door; went back to the kitchen, and poured myself half a glass of wine, to calm down.

Radiant moonlight poured in the kitchen window, throwing weird shadow, the walls and floor. The whole thing looked like the symbolic set of some avant-garde play. I suddenly remembered; the night the cat had disappeared up the pine tree had been exactly like this one, a full moon with not a wisp of cloud. After dinner that night, I’d gone to the porch again to look for the cat. As the night had deepened, the moonlight had brightened. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off the pine tree. From time to time I was sure that I could make out the cat’s eyes, sparkling between the branches. But it was just an illusion.

I tugged on a thick sweater and a pair of jeans, snatched up the coins on the table, put them in my pocket, and went outside. Izumi must have had trouble sleeping and gone out for a walk. That had to be it. The wind had completely died down All I could hear was the sound of my tennis shoes crunching along the gravel, like in an exaggerated movie soundtrack. Izumi must have gone to the harbor, I decided. There was only one road to the harbor, so I couldn’t miss her. The lights in the house along the road were all off, the moonlight dyeing the ground silver. It looked like the bottom of the sea.

About halfway to the harbor, I heard the faint sound of music and came to a halt. At first I thought it was a hallucination ? like when the air pressure changes and you hear a ringing in your ears. But, listening carefully, I was able to make out a melody. I held my breath and listened as hard as I could. No doubt about it, it was music. Somebody playing an instrument. Live, unamplified music. But what kind of instrument was it? The mandolinlike instrument that Anthony Quinn danced to in “Zorba the Greek”? A bouzouki? But who would be playing a bouzouki in the middle of the night? And where?

The music seemed to be coming from the village at the top of the hill we climbed every day for exercise. I stood at the crossroads, wondering what to do, which direction to take. Izumi must have heard the same music at this very spot. And I had a distinct feeling that if she had she would have headed toward

I took the plunge and turned right at the crossroads, heading up the slope I knew so well. There were no trees lining the path, just knee-high thorny bushes away in the shadows of the cliffs. The farther I walked the louder and more distinct the music grew. I could make out the melody more clearly; too. There was a festive flashiness to it. I imagined some sort of banquet being held in the village on top of the hill. Then I remembered that earlier that day, at the harbor, we had seen a lively wedding procession. This must be the wedding banquet, going on into the night.

Just then—without warning—I disappeared.

Maybe it was the moonlight, or that midnight music. With each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into a quicksand where my identity vanished; it was the same emotion I’d had on the plane, flying over Egypt. This wasn’t me walking in the moonlight. It wasn’t me but a stand-in, fashioned out of plaster. I rubbed my hand against my face. But it wasn’t my face. And it wasn’t my hand. My heart pounded in

my chest, sending the blood coursing through my body at a crazy speed. This body was a plaster puppet, a voodoo doll into which some sorcerer had breathed a fleeting life. The glow of real life was missing. My makeshift, phony muscles were just going through the motions. I was a puppet, to be some sacrifice.

So where is the real me? I wondered.

Suddenly, Izumi’s voice came out of nowhere. The real you has been eaten by the cats. While you’ve been standing here, those hungry cats have devoured you—eaten you all up. All that’s left is bones.

I looked around. It was an illusion, of course. All I could see was the rockstrewn ground, the low bushes, and their tiny shadow. The voice had been n my head.

Stop thinking such dark thoughts, I told myself. As if trying to avoid a huge wave, I clung to a rock at the bottom of the sea and held my breath. The wave would surely pass by. You’re just tired, I told myself, and overwrought. Grab on ‘to what’s real. It doesn’t matter what ? just grab something real. I reached into my pocket for the coins. They grew sweaty in my hand.

I tried hard to think of something else. My sunny apartment back in Unoki. The record collection I’d left behind. My nice little jazz collection. My specialty was white jazz pianist of the fifties and sixties. Lennie Tristano, Al Haig, Claude Williamson, Lou Levy, Russ Freeman ... Most of the albums were out of print, and it had taken a lot of time and money to collect them. I had diligently made the rounds of record shops, making trades with other collectors, slowly building up my archives. Most of the performances weren’t what you’d call “first-rate.” But I loved the unique, intimate atmosphere those musty old records conveyed. The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up of only the first-rate, right? Every detail of those record jackets came back to me ? the weight and heft of the albums in my hands.

But now they were all gone forever. And I’d obliterated them myself. Never again in this lifetime would

I hear those records.

I remembered the smell of tobacco when I kissed Izumi. The feel of her lips and tongue. I closed my eyes. I wanted her beside me. I wanted her to hold my hand, as sec had when we flew over Egypt, and never let go.

The wave finally passed over me and away; and with it the music.

Had they stopped playing? Certainly that was a possibility. After all, it was nearly one o’clock. Or maybe there had never been any music to begin with. That, too, was entirely possible. I no longer trusted my hearing. I closed my eyes again and sank down into my consciousness ? dropped a thin, weighted line down into that darkness. Bu I couldn’t hear a thing. Not even an echo.

I looked at my watch. And realized I wasn’t wearing one. Sighing, I stuck both hands in my pockets. I didn’t really care about the time. I looked up at the sky. The moon was a cold rock, its skin eaten away by the violence of the years. The shadows on its surface were like a cancer extending its awful feelers. The moonlight plays tricks with people’s minds. And makes cats disappear. Maybe it had made Izumi disappear. Maybe it’ had all been carefully choreographed, beginning with that one night long ago.

I stretched, bent my arms, my fingers. Should I continue, or go back the way I came? Where had Izumi gone? Without her, how was I supposed to go on living, all by myself on this backwater island? She was the only thing that held together the fragile, provisional me

I continued to climb uphill. I’d come this far and might as well reach the top. Had there really been music there? I had to see for myself, even if only the faintest of clues remained. In five minutes, I had reached the summit. To the south, the hill sloped down to the sea, the harbor, and the sleeping town. A scattering of street lights lit the coast road. The other side of the mountain was wrapped in darkness. There was no indication whatsoever that a lively festival had taken place here only a short while before.

I returned to the cottage and downed a glass of brandy. I tried to go to sleep, bit I couldn’t. Until the eastern sky grew light, I was held in the grip of the moon. Then, suddenly, I pictured those cats, starving to death in a 1 ocked apartment. I—the real me—was dead, and they were alive, eating my flesh, biting into my heart, sucking My blood, devouring my penis. Far away, I could hear they lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth’s witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.

Mirror

Translated by Christopher Allison

Ok, so I’ve been listening to everybody’s stories from the beginning, and it seems to me that there are a couple of basic patterns for this kind of thing. The first one is, here is the world of the living, over there is the world of the dead, and it’s a story about crossing between the two. Like ghosts, and that type of thing. And then there’s the type where phenomena or abilities exist that surpass everyday three-dimensional experience. E.S.P., premonitions, and the like. If you were to divide them broadly, I think you could separate them into those two groups.

And if you take what I said even further, I think you’d find that everybody only has experiences of one type or the other. What I mean is, someone who sees ghosts may see ghosts again and again, but he never has premonitions, and someone who has ESP may have premonitions all the time but will never see a ghost. I have no idea why this is, but for whatever reason it seems to happen this way. Or at least I think so.

And of course there are some people who don’t fit into either group. Me, for example. I’ve been alive for 30-some years, and I’ve never once seen a ghost. Nor have I ever had a vision or a premonition or anything. There was even a time when I was riding an elevator with two of my friends and they both saw a ghost but I didn’t see a thing. They saw this woman wearing a grey suit standing next to me, but there wasn’t actually any woman in the elevator. Just the three of us. I’m totally serious. And these two friends weren’t the type to put one over on me. Sure, that was a totally creepy experience, but all the same it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve never seen a ghost.

But one time, just one time, I think I felt fear in the depths of my soul. It was more than ten years ago now, but I’ve never told anyone about it. Even talking about it scared me. I had this feeling like, if I talked about it, the same kind of thing might happen again. So I have kept silent all these years. But tonight, listening to everybody tell their scary stories one by one, as the host, I can’t very well close up the place without saying anything at the end. So I’ve decided to talk.

No, please, you don’t have to clap. It’s really not that big a deal.

Like I said before, I’ve never seen a ghost and I don’t have any special powers. You may not think that my story is as scary as I do, and perhaps you’ll think, like, so what? And if that’s the case, that’s fine. But anyway, this is my story.

I left high school at the end of the sixties, during the period of civil turmoil when it seemed like whole system was breaking down. For my part, I was swept up in that wave as well, refusing to go on to college, and spending several years wandering around Japan doing manual labor. I thought that was the right way to lead a life. Yeah, I sure did a lot of different stuff. And some of it was dangerous. I was young and foolish. But when I think about it now, it was a fun lifestyle. If I had my life to live over again, I’d probably do the same thing. I’m that kind of person.

In the fall of my second year of wandering, I spent about two months as a night watchman at a middle school. This middle school in a small town in Niigata Prefecture. I had spent the summer doing really tough work, so I wanted to relax a little bit. And being a night watchman sounded kind of fun. I could sleep all day in the janitor’s room, and at night I only had to walk around and check all of the buildings twice. Apart from that, I could listen to records in the music room or read books in the library or shoot baskets alone in the gym or whatever. Being all alone at night in a middle school wasn’t too bad. No, it wasn’t bad at all. When you’re 18 or 19, you don’t know anything to be afraid of.

Since none of you have probably ever spent any time as a night watchman at a middle school, I’ll give you a quick run down of the procedure. I had to make rounds once at 9:00 and again at 3:00. That was fixed. The schoolhouse was a relatively new three storey concrete structure, with 18 or 20 classrooms. It wasn’t that big a school. Then there was the music room, the laboratory, the home-ec room, the art room, and also the staff room and the principal’s office. Apart from the main building, there was also the cafeteria and the pool and the gym and the auditorium. That was pretty much the extent of what I had to cover.

There were about twenty checkpoints that I had to mark off one by one on a form with a ballpoint pen as I made my rounds. Staff Room—check, Laboratory—check, like that. Of course I could have just kept sleeping in the janitor’s room and written check, check, check on the paper. But I’m not quite that lazy. Which is to say that it didn’t take much time, and anyway if someone had broken in they could have attacked me in my sleep.

So at 9:00 and 3:00, I’d take up a large flashlight and a kendo sword and make my rounds of the school. Flashlight in my left hand, kendo sword in my right. When I was a high school student I had practiced kendo, so I felt pretty confident in my ability to defend myself. If a novice had attacked me with a samurai sword, I wouldn’t have been particularly scared. But that was then. If it happened to me now, I’d run away pronto.

It was a windy October night. It wasn’t very cold. To tell you the truth, it felt kind of humid. When night fell, the mosquitoes became unbearable, and I remember lighting a couple of insect coils. The wind was howling all night. It sounded like the gate to the pool was being destroyed as it banged around in the wind. I thought to myself that I should fix it, but it was dark so I left it. It kept banging all night long.

When I made the rounds at 9:00, nothing was happening. I marked all twenty checkpoints ‘OK.’ The doors were firmly locked and everything was in its proper place. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I went back to the janitor’s room, set the clock to wake me up at 3:00, and fell sound asleep.

When the alarm bell went off at 3:00, I awoke with the strangest feeling. I can’t really describe it, but it was a very strange sensation. To make it plain, I didn’t want to get up. I felt like my body was resisting my will to wake up. I usually get up right away, so it was peculiar. But with difficulty I eventually got up to make my rounds. The pool gate was still banging around the same as earlier. But I had the feeling that the sound was somehow different than before. It was probably just my imagination, but I felt uncomfortable in my skin. This sucks, I thought to myself. I don’t want to make the rounds. But of course I pulled myself together and went out. If I faked it even once, I’d be doing it all the time. I took up my flashlight and my kendo sword and left the janitor’s room.

It was a miserable night. The wind was getting stronger and stronger, and the air was growing increasingly damp. My skin crawled and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. First, I checked on the gym and the auditorium and the pool. All three were OK. The pool gate kept banging open and shut like a lunatic bobbing and shaking his head senselessly. It was totally irregular: yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, no ... like that. I know that’s a really odd way to put it, but at the time that’s what it felt like.

Nothing seemed to be amiss in the main school building. Same as ever. I hurriedly made my rounds and marked off all the checkpoints on the form ‘OK.’ There didn’t seem to be anything wrong, after all. It was with some relief that I decided to return to the janitor’s room. The last checkpoint was the boiler room, next to the cafeteria, on the far east side of the school. Unfortunately, the janitor’s room was on the far west side of the school. As a result, I had to walk the whole length of the first floor corridor on my way back to the janitor’s room. Naturally, it was pitch black. When the moon was out, a little light penetrated into the hallway, but if not, you couldn’t see a thing. I’d make my way back shining the flashlight right in front of me. Since there was a typhoon close by that night, naturally the moon wasn’t out. Every once in a while there would be a flash of lightning, and then darkness once again.

That night I walked more quickly than normal down the hallway. The rubber soles of my basketball shoes made a slapping sound against the linoleum. The hallway was covered in green linoleum. I can see it even now.

About halfway down the length of the hallway was the entranceway of the school, and when I passed it I suddenly had this feeling like ‘What the ...?!?.’ It was like I could make out a figure in the darkness. Just out of the corner of my eye. I fixed my grip on the sword, and turned in that direction. In a heartbeat, I trained the beam of my flashlight there. It was a spot on the wall next to the shoe rack.

And there I was. That is to say—it was a mirror. There was nothing there except my own image reflecting back at me. The mirror must have just been installed, and hadn’t been there the day before. That’s why it had caught me off guard. I felt immensely relieved and totally stupid all at once. You dumbshit, I thought to myself. Still standing in front of the mirror, I set the flashlight down, fished a cigarette out of my pocket, and lit it. I had a smoke staring at myself in the mirror. A tiny bit of light from a street lamp came in through the window, and that light reached the mirror. The clanging sound of the pool gate could be heard coming from behind me.

After I’d taken about three drags off my cigarette, I abruptly noticed something strange. The image in the mirror wasn’t me. The outward appearance was me. There was no mistaking that. But it was absolutely not me. I knew it instinctively. No, wait, that’s not right. Of course it was me. But it was a me outside of me. It was me in a form that shouldn’t have been me.

I’m not saying this very well.

But at that time, the only thing I understood for certain was that the person staring back at me hated me from the very depths of his soul. It was a hatred like a dark iceberg, a hatred that no one could cure. That was the only thing I could understand. I stood there for a moment dumbfounded, unable to move. The cigarette dropped from between my fingers to the floor. We stared at each other identically. My body wouldn’t move, as if it had been bound there.

Eventually, the other guy moved his hand. The fingers of his left hand slowly touched his cheek and then, little by little, wandered across his face. I realized I was doing the same thing. It was as if I was the image in the mirror. What I mean is, he seemed to be in control of me.

Then, summoning all my strength, I screamed as loud as I could. I yelled, like, ‘Garhhh!’ With that, the bonds loosened a little bit. I hurled the kendo sword with all my might in the direction of the mirror. I heard the sound of the mirror shattering. I took off running back to my room without looking back, locked the door, and climbed into bed. The sound of the pool gate continued until morning.

Yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, no ... and on and on.

I guess you probably know how the story ends: of course, there was never any mirror there. Nothing of the sort. No mirror had ever been installed in the entranceway next to the shoe rack.

All of which is to say, it wasn’t a ghost that I saw. All I saw was myself. I’ve never been able to forget the fear that I felt that night.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that there’s not a single mirror in this house. I don’t even use a mirror for shaving, although it takes a lot longer that way. It’s a true story.

(Translated by Christopher Allison)

New York Mining Disaster

Translated by Philip Gabriel

They blew out their lamps to save on air, and darkness surrounded them. No one spoke. All they could hear in the dark was the sound of water dripping from the ceiling every five seconds.

“O.K, everybody, try not to breathe so much. We don’t have enough air left,” an old miner said. He held his voice to a whisper, but even so the wooden beams on the ceiling of the tunnel creaked faintly. In the dark, the miners huddled together, straining to hear one sound. The sound of pickaxes. The sound of life.

They waited for hours. Reality began to melt away in the darkness. Everything began to feel as if it were happening a long time ago, in a world far away. Or was it happening in the future, in a different far-off world?

Outside, people were digging a hole, trying to reach them. It was like a scene from a movie.

A friend of mine has a habit of going to the zoo whenever there’s a typhoon. He’s been doing this for ten years. At a time when most people are closing their storm shutters or running our to stock up on mineral water or checking to see if their radios and flashlights are working, my friend wraps himself in an army-surplus poncho from the Vietnam War, stuffs a couple of cans of beer into his pockets, and sets off. He lives about a fifteen-minute walk away.

If he’s unlucky, the zoo is closed, “owing to inclement weather,” and its gates are locked. When this happens, my friend sits down on the stone statue of a squirrel next to the entrance, drinks his lukewarm beer, and then heads back home.

But when he makes it there in time he pays the entrance fee, lights a soggy cigarette, and surveys the animals, one by one. Most of them have retreated their shelters. Some stare blankly at the rain. Others are more animated, jumping around in the gale-force winds.

Some are frightened by the sudden drop in barometric pressure; others turn vicious.

My friend makes a point of drinking his first beer in front of the Bengal tiger cage. (Bengal tigers always react the most violently to storms.) He drinks his second one outside the gorilla cage. Most of the time the gorillas aren’t the least bit disturbed by the typhoon. They stare at him calmly as he sits like a mermaid on the concrete floor sipping his beer, and you’d swear they actually felt sorry for him.

“It’s like being in an elevator when it breaks down and you’re trapped inside with strangers,” my friend tells me.

Typhoons aside, my friend’s no different from anyone else. He works for an export company, managing foreign investments. It’s not one of the better firms, but it does well enough. He lives alone in a neat little apartment and gets a new girlfriend every six months. Why he insists on having a new one every six months (and it’s always exactly six months) I’ll never understand. The girls all look the same, as if they were perfect clones of one another. I can’t tell them apart.

My friend owns a nice used car, the collected works of Balzac, and a black suit, a black tie, and black shoes that are perfect for attending funerals. Every time someone dies, I call him and ask if I can borrow them, even though the suit and the shoes are one size too big for me.

“Sorry to bother you again,” I said the last time I called. “Another funeral’s come up.

“Help yourself. You must be in a hurry,” he answered. “Why don’t you come over right away?” When I arrived, the suit and tie were laid out on the table, neatly pressed, the shoes were polished, and the fridge was full of cold imported beer. That’s the kind of guy he is.

“The other day I saw a cat at the zoo,” he said, opening a beer.

“A cat?”

“Yeah, two weeks ago. I was in Hokkaido on business and dropped by a zoo near my hotel. There was a cat asleep in a cage with a sign that said ‘Cat.’”

“What kind of cat?”

“Just an ordinary one. Brown stripes, short tail. And unbelievably fat. It just plopped down on its side and lay there.”

“Maybe cats aren’t so common in Hokkaido.”

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked, astonished. “There must be cats in Hokkaido. They can’t be that unusual.”

“Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?” I said.

“They’re animals, too, right?”

“Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody’s going to pay money to see them,” he said. “Just look around you-they’re everywhere. Same thing with people.”

When we’d finished off a six-pack, I put the suit and tie and shoebox into a large paper bag.

“Sorry to keep doing this to you,” I said. “I know I should buy my own suit, but somehow I never get around to it. I feel like if I buy funeral clothes I’m saying it’s O.K. if somebody dies.”

“It’s no problem,” he said. “I’m not using them anyway. It’s better to have someone use them than to have them hanging in the closet, right?”

It was true that in the three years since he’d had the suit made he’d hardly worn it.

“It’s weird, but since I got the suit nor a single person I know has died,” he explained. “That’s the way it goes.”

“Yes, that’s the way it goes,” he said.

For me, on the other hand, it was the Year of Funerals. Friends and former friends died one after another, like ears of corn withering in a drought. I was twenty-eight. My friends were all about the same age—twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Not the right age to die.

A poet dies at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty-four. But after that you assume that everything is going to be all right. You’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six-lane highway-whether you want to be or not. You get your hair cut; you shave every morning. You aren’t a poet anymore, or a revolutionary or a rock star. You don’t pass out drunk in phone booths or blast the Doors at four in the morning. Instead, you buy life insurance from your friend’s company, drink in hotel bars, and keep your dental bills for medical deductions. That’s normal at twenty-eight.

But that was exactly when the unexpected massacre started in our lives. It was like a surprise attack on a lazy spring day—as if someone, on top of a metaphysical hill, holding a metaphysical machine gun, had sprayed us with bullets. One minute we were changing our clothes, and the next minute they didn’t fit anymore: the sleeves were inside out, and we had one leg in one pair of pants and the other in a different pair. It was a mess.

But death is just that. A rabbit is a rabbit whether it springs out of a hat or a wheat field. A hot oven is a

hot oven, and the black smoke rising from a chimney is what it is—black smoke rising from a chimney. The first person to straddle the divide between reality and unreality (or unreality and reality) was a friend from college who taught English at a junior-high school. He’d been married for three years, and his wife had gone back to her parents’ house in Shikoku to have their baby.

One unusually warm Sunday afternoon in January, he went to a department store and bought two cans of shaving cream and a German-made knife that was big enough to lop off an elephant’s ear. He went home and ran a bath. He got some ice from the refrigerator, downed a bottle of Scotch, climbed into the tub, and slit his wrists. His mother found his body two days later. The police came and took a lot of photographs. Blood had dyed the bath the color of tomato juice. The police ruled it a suicide. After all, the doors had been locked, and, of course, the deceased had bought the knife himself. But why did he buy two cans of shaving cream that he didn’t plan to use? No one knew.

Maybe it hadn’t hit him when he was at the department store that in a couple of hours he’d be dead. Or maybe he was afraid that the cashier would guess that he was going to kill himself.

He didn’t leave a will or a note. On the kitchen table there was only a glass, the empty whiskey bottle and ice bowl, and the two cans of shaving cream. While he was waiting for the bath to fill, knocking back glass after glass of Haig-on-the-rocks, he must have stared at those cans and thought something along the lines of I’ll never have to shave again.

A man’s death at twenty-eight is as sad as the winter rain.

During the next twelve months, four more people died.

One died in March in an incident at an oil field in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, and two died in June—a heart attack and a traffic accident. From July to November there was peace, but then in December another friend died, also in a car crash.

Unlike my first friend, who’d killed himself, these friends never had time to realize that they were dying. For them it was like climbing up a staircase they’d climbed a million times before and suddenly finding a step missing.

“Would you make up the bed for me?” the friend who died of a heart attack had asked his wife. He was a furniture designer. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. He’d woken up at nine, worked for a while in his room, and then said he felt sleepy. He went to the kitchen, made some coffee, and drank it. But the coffee didn’t help. “I think I’ll take a nap,” he said. “I hear a buzzing sound in the back of my head.” Those were his last words. He curled up in bed, went to sleep, and never woke up again. The friend who died in December was the youngest, and the only woman. She was twenty-four, like a revolutionary or a rock star. One cold rainy evening just before Christmas, she was flattened in the tragic yet quite ordinary space between a beer-delivery truck and a concrete telephone pole.

A few days after the last funeral, I went to my friend’s apartment to return the suit, which I’d picked up from the dry cleaner’s, and to give him a bottle of whiskey to thank him.

“Much obliged. You’ve helped me out once again,” I said.

As usual, his fridge was full of cold beer, and his comfortable sofa reflected a faint ray of sunlight. On the coffee table there was a clean ashtray and a pot of Christmas poinsettias.

He accepted the suit, in its plastic covering, his movements leisurely—like those of a bear just coming our of hibernation—and quietly put it away.

“I hope the suit doesn’t smell like a funeral,” I said.

“Clothes aren’t important. The real problem is what’s inside them.”

“Um,” I said.

“One funeral after another for you this year,” he said, stretching out on the sofa and pouring beer into a glass. “How many all together?”

“Five,” I said, spreading out the fmgers of my left hand. “But I think that’s got to be it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Enough people have died.”

“It’s like the curse of the Pyramids or something,” he said. “I remember reading that somewhere. The curse continues until enough people have died. Or else a red star appears in the sky and the moon’s shadow covers the sun.

After we finished a six-pack, we started on the whiskey. The winter sunlight sloped gently into the room.

“You look a little glum these days,” he said.

“Really?” I said.

“You must be thinking about things too much in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’ve stopped thinking about things at night.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“When I get depressed, I start to clean. Even if it’s two or three in the morning. I wash the dishes, wipe off the stove, mop the floor, bleach the dish towels, organize my desk drawers, iron every shirt in sight,” he said, stirring his drink with his finger. “I do that till I’m exhausted, then I have a drink and go to sleep. In the morning I get up and by the time I’m putting on my socks I can’t even remember what it was I was thinking about.”

I looked around again. As always, the room was clean and orderly.

“People think of all kinds of things at three in the morning. We all do. That’s why we each have to figure out our own way of fighting it off’

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Even animals think things over at 3 A.M.,” he said, as if he were remembering something. “Have you ever gone to a zoo at 3 A.M.?”

“No,” I answered vaguely. “No, of course not.”

“I’ve only done it once. A friend of mine works at a zoo, and I asked him to let me in when he had the night shift. You’re not supposed to, really.” He shook his glass. “It was a strange experience. I can’t explain it, but I felt as if the ground had silently split open and something was crawling up out of it. And then there was this invisible thing on a rampage in the dark. It was as if the cold night air had coagulated. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it, and the animals felt it, too. It made me think about the fact that the ground we walk on goes all the way to the earth’s core, and I suddenly realized that the core has sucked up an incredible amount of time.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, I never want to go again—to the zoo in the middle of the night, I mean.”

“You prefer a typhoon?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take a typhoon any day.”

The phone rang and he went to his bedroom to take the call. It was his girlfriend clone, with an endless clone phone call. I wanted to tell him I was going to call it a day, but he was on the phone forever. I gave up waiting and switched on the TV. It was a twenty-seven-inch color set with a remote control, the kind you barely have to touch to change the channel. The TV had six speakers and great sound. I’d

never seen such a wonderful TV.

I made two complete rounds of the channels before settling on a news program. A border clash, a fire, exchange rates going up and down, a new limit on car imports, an outdoor winter swim meet, a family suicide. All these bits of news seemed somehow connected, like people in a high-school-graduation photo.

“Any interesting news?” my friend asked as he came back into the room.

“Not really,” I said.

“Do you watch a lot of TV?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have a TV.”

“There’s at least one good thing about TV,” he said after a while. “You can shut it off whenever you like. And nobody complains.”

He pushed the “Off” button on the remote control. Immediately, the screen went blank. The room was still. Outside the window, lights in other buildings were starting to come on.

We sat there for five minutes, drinking whiskey, with nothing to talk about. The telephone rang again, but he pretended not to hear it. Just as the phone stopped ringing, he hit the “On” button, as if he’d suddenly remembered something. The picture returned instantly, and a commentator standing in front of a graph gestured with a pointer as he explained changes in the price of oil.

“See? He didn’t even notice that we’d switched him off for five minutes.”

“True enough,” I said.

“Why is that?”

It was too much trouble to think it through, so I shook my head.

“When you switch it off, one side ceases to exist. It’s us or him. You just hit the switch and there’s a communications blackout. It’s easy.”

“That’s one way of thinking of it,” I said.

“There are millions of ways of thinking. In India they grow coconut trees. In Argentina it rains political prisoners from helicopters.” He switched the TV off again. “I don’t want to say anything about other people,” he said, “but consider the fact that there are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.”

I nodded silently. I felt that I knew what he was getting at. At the same time, I felt that I had no idea what he meant. I was tired and a bit confused. I sat there, fmgering one of the poinsettia’s green leaves. “I’ve got some champagne,” he said earnestly. “I brought it back from a business trip to France a while ago. I don’t know much about champagne, but this is supposed to be great. Would you like some? Champagne might be just the thing after a string of funerals.”

He brought out the chilled champagne bottle and two clean glasses and set them quietly on the table, then smiled slyly. “Champagne’s completely useless, you know,” he said. “The only good part is the moment you pop the cork.”

“I can’t argue with you there,” I said.

We popped the cork, and talked for a while about zoo in Paris and the animals that live there. The champagne was excellent.

There was a party at the end of the year, an annual New Year’s Eve party at a bar in Roppongi, which had been rented for the occasion. A piano trio played, and there was a lot of good food and drink. When I ran across someone I knew, I’d chat for a while. My job required that I put in an appearance every year. Parties aren’t my thing, but this one was easy to take. I had nothing else to do on New Year’s Eve

and could just stand by myself in a corner, relax, have a drink, and enjoy the music. No obnoxious people, no need to be introduced to strangers and listen to them rant for half an hour about how a vegetarian diet cures cancer.

But that evening someone introduced me to a woman. After the usual small talk, I tried to retreat to my corner again. But the woman followed me back to my seat, whiskey glass in hand.

“I asked to be introduced to you,” she said amiably.

She wasn’t the type to turn heads, though she was certainly attractive. She was wearing an expensive green silk dress. I guessed that she was about thirty-two. She could easily have made herself look younger, but she didn’t seem to think it was worth the trouble. Three rings graced her fingers, and a faint smile played on her lips.

“You look exactly like someone I know,” she said. “Your facial features, your back, the way you talk, the over-all mood—it’s an amazing likeness. I’ve been watching you ever since you came in. “If he’s that much like me, I’d like to meet the guy,” I said. I had no idea what else to say. “You would?”

“I’d want to see what it feels like to meet someone who’s exactly like me.”

Her smile deepened for an instant, then softened. “But it’s impossible,” she said. “He died five years ago. When he was about the same age you are now.

“Is that right?” I said.

“I killed him.”

The trio was just fmishing its second set, and there was a smattering of halfhearted applause. “Do you like music?” she asked me.

“I do if it’s nice music in a nice world,” I said.

“In a nice world there is no nice music,” she said, as if she were telling some vital secret. “In a nice world the air doesn’t vibrate.”

“I see,” I said, not knowing how to respond.

“Have you seen the movie where Warren Beatty plays the piano in a night club?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Elizabeth Taylor is one of the customers at the club, and she’s really poor and miserable.”

“Hmm.”

“So Warren Beatty asks Elizabeth Taylor if she has any requests.”

“And does she?”

“I forget. It’s a really old movie.” Her rings sparkled as she drank her whiskey. “I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It’s like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I’ll finish it.”

She put a cigarette between her lips. I struck a match and lit it for her.

“Let’s see,” she said. “We were talking about the person who looked like you.”

“How did you kill him?”

“I threw him into a beehive.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

Instead of sighing, I took a sip of whiskey. The ice had melted and it barely tasted like whiskey anymore.

“Of course, legally I’m not a murderer,” she said. “Or morally, either.”

“Neither legally nor morally a murderer.” I didn’t want to, but I reviewed the points she’d made. “But

you did kill someone?”

“Right.” She nodded happily “Someone who looked just like you.”

Across the room a man let out a loud laugh. And the people around him laughed, too. Glasses clinked. It sounded very far away but extremely clear. I don’t know why, but my heart was pounding, as if it were expanding or moving up and down. I felt as if I were walking on earth that was floating on water.

“It took less than five seconds,” she said. “To kill him.”

We were silent for a while. She was taking her time, savoring the silence.

“Do you ever think about freedom?” she asked. “Sometimes,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Can you draw a daisy?”

“I think so. Is this a personality test?”

“Almost.” She laughed.

“Well, did I pass?”

“Yes” she answered. “You’ll be fine. Nothing to worry about. Intuition tells me you’ll live a good long life.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The band began playing ‘Auld Lang Syne.”

“Eleven-fifty-five,” she said, glancing at the gold watch on her pendant. “I really like ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ How about you?”

“I prefer ‘Home on the Range.’ All those deer and antelope.”

She smiled again. “You must like animals.”

“I do,” I said. And I thought of my friend who likes zoos and of his funeral suit.

“I enjoyed talking to you. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

Ice Man

Translated  by Richard L. Peterson.

Issue of 2003-02-10 Posted 2003-12-12

I married an ice man. I first met him in a hotel at a ski resort, which is probably the perfect place to meet an ice man. The hotel lobby was crowded with animated young people, but the ice man was sitting by himself on a chair in the corner farthest from the fireplace, quietly reading a book. Although it was nearly noon, the clear, chilly light of an early-winter morning seemed to linger around him.

“Look, that’s an ice man,” my friend whispered.

At the time, though, I had absolutely no idea what an ice man was. My friend didn’t, either. “He must be made of ice. That’s why they call him an ice man.” She said this to me with a serious expression, as if she were talking about a ghost or someone with a contagious disease.

The ice man was tall, and he seemed to be young, but his stubby, wirelike hair had patches of white in it, like pockets of unmelted snow. His cheekbones stood out sharply, like frozen stone, and his fingers were rimed with a white frost that looked as if it would never melt. Otherwise, though, the ice man seemed like an ordinary man. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but you could see that he might be very attractive, depending on how you looked at him. In any case, something about him pierced me to the heart, and I felt this, more than anywhere, in his eyes. His gaze was as silent and transparent as the splinters of light that pass through icicles on a winter morning. It was like the single glint of life in an artificial body.

I stood there for a while and watched the ice man from a distance. He didn’t look up. He just sat without moving, reading his book as though there were no one else around him.

The next morning, the ice man was in the same place again, reading a book in exactly the same way. When I went to the dining room for lunch, and when I came back from skiing with my friends that evening, he was still there, directing the same gaze onto the pages of the same book. The same thing happened the day after that. Even when the sun sank low, and the hour grew late, he sat in his chair, as quiet as the winter scene outside the window.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, I made up some excuse not to go out on the slopes. I stayed in the hotel by myself and loitered for a while in the lobby, which was as empty as a ghost town. The air there was warm and moist, and the room had a strangely dejected smell—the smell of snow that had been tracked in on the soles of people’s shoes and was now melting in front of the fireplace. I

looked out the windows, rustled through the pages of a newspaper or two, and then went over to the ice man, gathered my nerve, and spoke.

I tend to be shy with strangers and, unless I have a very good reason, I don’t usually talk to people I don’t know. But I felt compelled to talk to the ice man no matter what. It was my last night at the hotel, and if I let this chance go by I feared I would never get to talk with an ice man again.

“Don’t you ski?” I asked him, as casually as I could.

He turned his face toward me slowly, as if he’d heard a noise in the distance, and he stared at me with those eyes. Then he calmly shook his head. “I don’t ski,” he said. “I just like to sit here and read and look at the snow.” His words formed white clouds above him, like comic-strip captions. I could actually see the words in the air, until he rubbed them away with a frost-rimed finger.

I had no idea what to say next. I just blushed and stood there. The ice man looked into my eyes and seemed to smile slightly.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked. “You’re interested in me, aren’t you? You want to know what an ice man is.” Then he laughed. “Relax, there’s nothing to worry about. You won’t catch a cold just by talking to me.”

We sat side by side on a sofa in the corner of the lobby and watched the snowflakes dance outside the window. I ordered a hot cocoa and drank it, but the ice man didn’t drink anything. He didn’t seem to be any better at conversation than I was. Not only that, but we didn’t seem to have anything in common to talk about. At first, we talked about the weather. Then we talked about the hotel. “Are you here by yourself?” I asked the ice man. “Yes,” he answered. He asked me if I liked skiing. “Not very much,” I said. “I only came because my friends insisted. I actually rarely ski at all.”

There were so many things I wanted to know. Was his body really made of ice? What did he eat? Where did he live in the summer? Did he have a family? Things like that. But the ice man didn’t talk about himself, and I held back from asking personal questions.

Instead, the ice man talked about me. I know it’s hard to believe, but he somehow knew all about me. He knew about the members of my family; he knew my age, my likes and dislikes, the state of my health, the school I was attending, and the friends I was seeing. He even knew things that had happened to me so far in the past that I had long since forgotten them.

“I don’t understand,” I said, flustered. I felt as if I were naked in front of a stranger. “How do you know so much about me? Can you read people’s minds?”

“No, I can’t read minds or anything like that. I just know,” the ice man said. “I just know. It’s as if I were looking deep into ice, and, when I look at you like this, things about you become clearly visible to me.”

I asked him, “Can you see my future?”

“I can’t see the future,” he said slowly. “I can’t take any interest in the future at all. More precisely, I have no conception of a future. That’s because ice has no future. All it has is the past enclosed within it. Ice is able to preserve things that way—very cleanly and distinctly and as vividly as

though they were still alive. That’s the essence of ice.”

“That’s nice,” I said and smiled. “I’m relieved to hear that. After all, I don’t really want to know what my future is.”

We met again a number of times once we were back in the city. Eventually, we started dating. We

didn’t go to movies, though, or to coffee shops. We didn’t even go to restaurants. The ice man rarely ate anything to speak of. Instead, we always sat on a bench in the park and talked about things—anything except the ice man himself.

“Why is that?” I asked him once. “Why don’t you talk about yourself? I want to know more about you. Where were you born? What are your parents like? How did you happen to become an ice man?”

The ice man looked at me for a while, and then he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said quietly and clearly, exhaling a puff of white words into the air. “I know the past of everything else. But I myself have no past. I don’t know where I was born, or what my parents looked like. I don’t even know if I had parents. I have no idea how old I am. I don’t know if I have an age at all.”

The ice man was as lonely as an iceberg in the dark night.

Ifell seriously in love with this ice man. The ice man loved me just as I was—in the present,

without any future. In turn, I loved the ice man just as he was—in the present, without any past. We even started to talk about getting married.

I had just turned twenty, and the ice man was the first person I had really loved. At the time, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it meant to love an ice man. But even if I’d fallen in love with a normal man I doubt I’d have had a clearer idea of what love meant.

My mother and my older sister were strongly opposed to my marrying the ice man. “You’re too young to get married,” they said. “Besides, you don’t know a thing about his background. You don’t even know where he was born or when. How could we possibly tell our relatives that you’re marrying someone like that? Plus, this is an ice man we’re talking about, and what are you going to do if he suddenly melts away? You don’t seem to understand that marriage requires a real commitment.”

Their worries were unfounded, though. After all, an ice man isn’t really made of ice. He isn’t going to melt, no matter how warm it gets. He’s called an ice man because his body is as cold as ice, but what he’s made of is different from ice, and it’s not the kind of cold that takes away other people’s heat.

So we got married. Nobody blessed the wedding, and no friends or relatives were happy for us. We didn’t hold a ceremony, and, when it came to having my name entered in his family register, well, the ice man didn’t even have one. We just decided, the two of us, that we were married. We bought a

little cake and ate it together, and that was our modest wedding.

We rented a tiny apartment, and the ice man made a living by working at a cold-storage meat facility. He could take any amount of cold, and he never felt tired, no matter how hard he worked. So the ice man’s employer liked him very much, and paid him a better salary than the other employees. The two of us lived a happy life together, without bothering or being bothered by anyone.

When the ice man made love to me, I saw in my mind a piece of ice that I was sure existed somewhere in quiet solitude. I thought that the ice man probably knew where that piece of ice was. It was frozen hard, so hard that I thought nothing could be harder. It was the biggest piece of ice in the world. It was somewhere very far away, and the ice man was passing on the memories of that ice to me and to the world. At first, I felt confused when the ice man made love to me. But, after a while, I got used to it. I even started to love having sex with the ice man. In the night, we silently shared that enormous piece of ice, in which hundreds of millions of years—all the pasts of the world—were stored.

There were no problems to speak of in our married life. We loved each other deeply, and nothing came between us. We wanted to have a child, but that didn’t seem to be possible. It may have been that human genes and ice-man genes didn’t combine easily. In any case, it was partly because we didn’t have children that I found myself with time on my hands. I would finish up all the housework in the morning, and then have nothing to do. I didn’t have any friends to talk to or go out with, and I didn’t have much to do with the people in our neighborhood, either. My mother and sister were still angry with me for marrying the ice man and showed no sign of ever wanting to see me again. And although, as the months passed, the people around us started talking to him from time to time, deep in their hearts they still hadn’t accepted the ice man or me, who had married him. We were different from them, and no amount of time could bridge the gap between us.

So, while the ice man was working, I stayed at home by myself, reading books and listening to music. I tend to prefer staying at home, anyway, and I don’t especially mind being alone. But I was still young, and doing the same thing day after day eventually began to bother me. It wasn’t the boredom that hurt. It was the repetition.

That was why I said to my husband one day, “How would it be if the two of us went away on a trip somewhere, just for a change?”

“A trip?” the ice man said. He narrowed his eyes and stared at me. “What on earth would we take a trip for? Aren’t you happy being here with me?”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I am happy. But I’m bored. I feel like travelling somewhere far away and seeing things that I’ve never seen before. I want to see what it’s like to breathe new air. Do you understand? Besides, we haven’t even had our honeymoon yet. We have some savings, and you have plenty of vacation days coming to you. Isn’t it about time that we got away somewhere and took it easy for a while?”

The ice man heaved a deep frozen sigh. It crystallized in midair with a ringing sound. He laced his

long fmgers together on his knees. “Well, if you really want to go on a trip so badly, I don’t have anything against it. I’ll go anywhere if it’ll make you happy. But do you know where you want to go?”

“How about visiting the South Pole?” I said. I chose the South Pole because I was sure that the ice man would be interested in going somewhere cold. And, to be honest, I had always wanted to travel there. I wanted to wear a fur coat with a hood, and I wanted to see the aurora australis and a flock of penguins.

When I said this, my husband looked straight into my eyes, without blinking, and I felt as if a pointed icicle were piercing all the way through to the back of my head. He was silent for a while, and finally he said, in a glinting voice, “All right, if that’s what you want, then let’s go to the South Pole. You’re really sure that this is what you want?”

I wasn’t able to answer right away. The ice man’s stare had been on me so long that the inside of my head felt numb. Then I nodded.

As time passed, though, I came to regret ever having brought up the idea of going to the South Pole. I don’t know why, but it seemed that as soon as I spoke the words “South Pole” to my husband something changed inside him. His eyes became sharper, his breath came out whiter, and his fingers were frostier. He hardly talked to me anymore, and he stopped eating entirely. All of this made me feel very insecure.

Five days before we were supposed to leave, I got up my nerve and said, “Let’s forget about going to the South Pole. When I think about it now, I realize that it’s going to be terribly cold there, and it might not be good for our health. I’m starting to think that it might be better for us to go someplace more ordinary. How about Europe? Let’s go have a real vacation in Spain. We can drink wine, eat paella, and see a bullfight or something.”

But my husband paid no attention to what I was saying. He stared off into space for a few minutes. Then he declared, “No, I don’t particularly want to go to Spain. Spain is too hot for me. It’s too dusty, and the food is too spicy. Besides, I’ve already bought tickets for the South Pole. And we’ve got a fur coat and fur-lined boots for you. We can’t let all that go to waste. Now that we’ve come this far, we can’t not go.”

The truth is that I was scared. I had a premonition that if we went to the South Pole something would happen to us that we might not be able to undo. I was having this bad dream over and over again. It was always the same. I’d be out taking a walk and I’d fall into a deep crevasse that had opened up in the ground. Nobody would fmd me, and I’d freeze down there. Shut up inside the ice, I’d stare up at the sky. I’d be conscious, but I wouldn’t be able to move, not even a finger. I’d realize that moment by moment I was becoming the past. As people looked at me, at what I’d become, they were looking at the past. I was a scene moving backward, away from them.

Then I’d wake up and find the ice man sleeping beside me. He always slept without breathing, like a dead man.

But I loved the ice man. I cried, and my tears dripped onto his cheek and he woke up and held me in his arms. “I had a bad dream,” I told him.

“It was only a dream,” he said. “Dreams come from the past, not the future. You aren’t bound by them. The dreams are bound by you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced.

Icouldn’t find a good reason to cancel the trip, so in the end my husband and I boarded a plane for the South Pole. The stewardesses were all taciturn. I wanted to look at the view out the window, but the clouds were so thick that I couldn’t see anything. After a while, the window was covered with a layer of ice. My husband sat silently reading a book. I felt none of the excitement of heading off on a vacation. I was just going through the motions and doing things that had already been decided on.

When we went down the stairs and stepped off onto the ground of the South Pole, I felt my husband’s body lurch. It lasted less than a blink of an eye, just half a second, and his expression didn’t change at all, but I saw it happen. Something inside the ice man had been secretly, violently shaken. He stopped and looked at the sky, then at his hands. He heaved a huge breath. Then he looked at me and grinned. He said, “Is this the place you wanted to visit?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

The South Pole was lonely beyond anything I had expected. Almost no one lived there. There was just one small, featureless town, and in that town there was one hotel, which was, of course, also small and featureless. The South Pole was not a tourist destination. There wasn’t a single penguin. And you couldn’t see the aurora australis. There were no trees, flowers, rivers, or ponds. Everywhere I went, there was only ice. Everywhere, as far as I could see, the wasteland of ice stretched on and on.

My husband, though, walked enthusiastically from place to place as if he couldn’t get enough of it. He learned the local language quickly, and spoke with the townspeople in a voice that had the hard rumble of an avalanche. He conversed with them for hours with a serious expression on his face, but I had no way of knowing what they were talking about. I felt as though my husband had betrayed me and left me to care for myself.

There, in that wordless world surrounded by thick ice, I eventually lost all my strength. Bit by bit, bit by bit. In the end, I didn’t even have the energy to feel irritated anymore. It was as though I had lost the compass of my emotions somewhere. I had lost track of where I was heading, I had lost track of time, and I had lost all sense of my own self. I don’t know when this started or when it ended, but when I regained consciousness I was in a world of ice, an eternal winter drained of all color, closed in alone.

Even after most of my sensation had gone, I still knew this much. My husband at the South Pole was not the same man as before. He looked out for me just as he had always done, and he spoke to me kindly. I could tell that he truly meant the things he said to me. But I also knew that he was no

longer the ice man I had met in the hotel at the ski resort.

There was no way I could bring this to anybody’s attention, though. Everyone at the South Pole liked him, and, anyway, they couldn’t understand a word I said. Puffing out their white breath, they would tell jokes and argue and sing songs in their own language while I sat by myself in our room, looking out at a gray sky that was unlikely to clear for months to come. The airplane that had brought us there had long since gone, and after a while the runway was covered with a hard layer of ice, just like my heart.

“Winter has come,” my husband said. “It’s going to be a very long winter, and there will be no more planes, or ships, either. Everything has frozen over. It looks as though we’ll have to stay here until next spring.”

About three months after we arrived at the South Pole, I realized that I was pregnant. The child that I gave birth to would be a little ice man—I knew this. My womb had frozen over, and my amniotic fluid was slush. I could feel its chill inside me. My child would be just like his father, with eyes like icicles and frost-rimed fingers. And our new family would never again set foot outside the South Pole. The eternal past, heavy beyond all comprehension, had us in its grasp. We would never shake it off.

Now there’s almost no heart left in me. My warmth has gone very far away. Sometimes I forget that warmth ever existed. In this place, I am lonelier than anyone else in the world. When I cry, the ice man kisses my cheek, and my tears turn to ice. He takes those frozen teardrops in his hand and puts them on his tongue. “See how I love you,” he says. He is telling the truth. But a wind sweeping in from nowhere blows his white words back and back into the past.

The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day

Translated by Jay Rubin

I

Junpei was sixteen years old when his father made the following pronouncement. True, they were father and son; the same blood flowed in their veins. But they were not so close that they could open their hearts to each other, and it was extremely rare for Junpei’s father to offer him views of life that might (perhaps) be called philosophical. And so that day’s exchange remained with him as a vivid memory long after he had forgotten what prompted it.

‘Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three that have real meaning for him. No more, no fewer,’ his father said—or, rather, declared. He spoke coolly but with utter certainty, as he might have in nothing that the earth takes a year to revolve around the sun. Junpei listened in silence, partly because his father’s declaration was so unexpected; he could think of nothing, on the spur of the moment, to say.

‘You will probably become involved with many women in the future,’ his father continued,’but you will be wasting your time if a woman is the wrong one for you. I want you to remember that.’

Later, several questions formed in Junpei’s young mind: Has my father already met his three women? Is my mother one of them? And if so, what happened with the other two? But he was not able to ask his father these questions. As noted before, the two were not on such close terms that they could talk to each other heart to heart.

Junpei left the house at eighteen when he went to university in Tokyo, and he became involved with several women, one of whom had ‘real meaning’ for him. He knew this with absolute certainty at the time, and he is just as certain of it now. Before he could express his feelings in concrete form, however (by nature, it took him longer than most people to put things into concrete form), she married his best friend, and since then she has become a mother. For the time being, therefor, she had to be eliminated from the list of possibilities that life had to offer Junpei. He had to harden his hert and sweep her from his mind, as a result of which the number of women remaining who could have ‘real meaning’ in his life—if he was going to take his father’s theory broadly—was reduced to two.

Whenever Junpei met a new woman after that, he would ask himself, Is this a woman who has real meaning for me? and the question would call forth a dilemma. For even as he continued to hope (as who does not?) that he would meet someone who had ‘real meaning’ for him, he was afraid of playing his few remaining cards too early. Having failed to join with the very first important Other he encountered, Junpei lost confidence in his ability—the exceedingly important ability—to give outward expression to love at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner. I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away. Whenever this thought crossed his mind—which was often—his heart would sink down to a place devoid of light and warmth.

And so, after he had been with a new woman for some months, if he should begin to notice something about her character or behavior, however trivial, that displeased him or touched a nerve, somewhere in a recess of his heart he would feel a twinge of relief. As a result, it became a life pattern for him to maintain pale, indecisive relationships with one woman after another. He would stay with a woman as if taking stock of the situation until, at some point, the relationship would dissolve of its own accord. The break-ups never entailed any discord or shouting matches because he never became involved with women who seemed as if they might be difficult to get rid of. Before he knew it, he had developed a kind of nose for convenient partners.

Junpei himself was unsure whether this power stemmed from his own innate character or had been formed by his environment. If the latter, it could well have been the fruit of his father’s curse. Around the time he graduated from college, he had a violent argument with his father and cut off all contact with him, but his father’s ‘three-women theory’, its basis never fully explained, became a kind of obsession that clung tenaciously to his life. At one time he even half jokingly considered moving on to homosexuality: maybe then he could free himself from this stupid countdown. For better or worse, though, women were the only objects of Junpei’s sexual interest.

II

The next woman Junpei met was, he soon discovered, older than he was. Thirty-six. Junpei was thirty-one. An acquaintance of his was opening a little French restaurant on a street leading out of central Tokyo, and Junpei was invited to the party. He wore a Perry Ellis shirt of deep blue silk with matching summer sports jacket. He had planned to meet a close friend at the party, but the friend cancelled at the last minute, which left Junpei with time to kill. He nursed a large glass of Bordeaux alone at the bar. When he was ready to leave and beginning to scan the crowd to say goodbye to the owner, a tall woman approached him with some kind of purple cocktail in her hand. Junpei’s first thought on seeing her was, Here is a woman with excellent posture.

‘Somebody over there told me you’re a writer. Is that true?’ she asked, resting an elbow on the bar.

‘I suppose so, in a way,’ Junpei answered.

‘A writer in a way.’

Junpei nodded.

‘How many books have you published?’

’Two volumes of short stories, and one book I translated. None of them sold much.’

She gave him a quick head-to-toe inspection and smiled with apparent satisfaction.

‘Well, anyhow, you’re the first real writer I’ve met.’

‘It might be a little disappointing,’ Junpei said. ‘Writers don’t have any talents to offer. A pianist could play you a tune. A painter could draw you a sketch. A magician could perform a trick or two. There’s not much a writer can do.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe I can just enjoy your artistic aura or something.’

‘Artistic aura?’ Junpei said.

‘A special radiance, something you don’t find in ordinary people?’

‘I see my face in the mirror every morning when I’m shaving, but I’ve never noticed anything like that.’

She smiled warmly and asked, ‘What type of stories do you write?’

‘People ask me that a lot, but it’s hard to talk about my stories as “types”. They don’t fit into any particular genre.’

She ran a finger around the lip of her cocktail glass. ‘I suppose that means you write literary fiction?’

‘I suppose it does. But you say that the way you might say “chain letters”.’

She smiled again. ‘Could I have heard your name?’

‘Do you read the literary magazines?’

She shook her head, a small, sharp shake.

‘Then you probably haven’t. I’m not that well known.’

‘Ever been nominated for the Akutagawa Prize?’

’Twice in five years.’

‘But you didn’t win?’

Junpei smiled, but said nothing. Without asking his permission, she sat on the bar stool next to his and sipped what was left of her cocktail.

‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ she said. ‘Those prizes are just an industry gimmick.’

‘I’d be more convinced if I could hear that from somebody who’s actually won a prize.’

She told him her name: Kirie.

‘How unusual,’ he said. ‘Sounds like “Kyrie” from a mass.’

Junpei thought she might be an inch or more taller than he was. She wore her hair short, had a deep tan and her head was beautifully shaped. She wore a pale green linen jacket and a knee-length flared skirt. The sleeves of the jacket were rolled up to the elbow. Under the jacket she had on a simple cotton blouse with a small turquoise brooch on the collar. The swell of her breasts was neither large nor small. She dressed with style, and while there was nothing affected about it, her entire outfit reflected strongly individualistic principles. Her lips were full, and they would mark the ends of her sentences by spreading or pursing. This gave everything about her a strange liveliness and freshness. Three paralled creases would form across her broad forehead whenever she stopped to think about something, and when she finished thinking, they would disappear.

Junpei noticed himself being attracted to her. Some indefinable but persistent something about her was exciting him, pumping adrenalin to his heart, which began sending out secret signals in the form of tiny sounds. Suddenly aware that his throat was dry, Junpei ordered a Perrier from a passing waiter, and as always he began to ask himself, Is she someone with real meaning for me? Is she one of the remaining two? Or will she be my second failure? Should I let her go, or take a chance?

‘Did you always want to be a writer?’ Kirie asked.

‘Hmm, let’s just say I could never think of anything else I wanted to be.’

‘So, your dream came true.’

‘I wonder. I wanted to be a superior writer.’ Junpei spread his hands about a foot apart. ‘There’s a pretty big distance between the two, I think.’

‘Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.’ Then she asked, ‘How old are you?’

This was when they told each other their ages. Being older didn’t seem to bother her in the least. It didn’t bother Junpei. He preferred mature women to young girls. In most cases, it was easier to break up with an older woman.

‘What kind of work do you do?’ he asked.

Her lips formed a perfectly straight line, and her expression became earnest for the first time.

‘What kind of work do you think I do?’

Junpei jogged his glass, swirling the red wine inside it exactly once. ‘Can I have a hint?’

‘No hints. Is it so hard to tell? Observation and judgements are your business.’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘What a writer is suppsed to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgements to the last possible moment.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Alright, then, observe and observe and observe again, and then use your imagination. That wouldn’t clash with your professional ethics, would it?’

Junpei raised his eyes and studied Kirie’s face with new concentration, hoping to find a secret sign there. She looked straight into his eyes, and he looked straight into hers.

After a short pause, he said, ‘Alright, this is what I imagine, based on nothing much: you’re a professional of some sort. Not just anyone can do your job. It requires some kind of special expertise.’

‘Bull’s-eye! You’re right: not just anyone can do what I do. But try to narrow it down a little.

‘Something to do with music?’

‘No.’

‘Fashion design?’

‘No.’

‘Tennis?’

‘No,’ she said.

Junpei shook his head. ‘Well, you’ve got a deep tan, you’re solidly built, your arms have a good bit of muscle. Maybe you do a lot of outdoor sports. I do’t think you’re an outdoor labourer. You don’t have that vibe.’

Kirie lifted her sleeves, rested her bare arms on the counter, and turned them over, inspecting them. ‘You seem to be getting there.’

‘But I still can’t give you the right answer.’

‘It’s important to keep a few little secrets,’ Kirie said. ‘I don’t want to deprive you of your professional pleasure—observing and imagining ... I will give you one hint, though. It’s the same for me as for you.’

‘How the same?’

‘I mean, my profession is exactly what I always wanted to do, ever since I was a little girl. Like you. Getting to where I am, though, was not an easy trip.’

‘Good,’ Junpei said. ‘That’s important. Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.’

‘An act of love,’ Kirie said. The words seemed to have made an impression on her. ‘That’s a wonderful metaphor.’

‘Meanwhile, do you think I might have heard your name somewhere?’ Junpei asked.

‘Probably not,’ she answered, shaking her head. ‘I’m not that well known.’

‘Oh, well, everybody has to start somewhere.’

‘Exactly,’ Kirie said with a smile. Then she turned serious, ‘My case is different from yours in one way. I’m expected to attain perfection right from the start. No mistakes allowed. Perfection or nothing. No in between. No second chances.’

‘I suppose that’s another hint.’

‘Probably.’

A waiter circulating with a tray of champagne approached them. She took two glasses from him and handed one to Junpei.

‘Cheers,’ she said.

‘To our respective areas of expertise,’ Junpei said.

They clinked glasses with a light, secretive sounds.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘are you married?’

Junpei shook his head.

‘Neither am I,’ Kirie said.

III

She spent that night in Junpei’s room. They drank wine—a gift from the restaurant—had sex and went to sleep. When Junpei woke at ten o’clock the next morning, she was gone, leaving only an indentation like a missing memory in the pillow next to his, and a note: ‘I have to go to work. Get in touch with me if you like.’ She had added her mobile-phone number.

He called her, and they had dinner at a restaurant the following Saturday. They drank a little wine, had sex in Junpei’s room and went to sleep. Again the next morning, she was gone. It was Sunday, but she left another simple note: ‘I have to work, am disappearing.’ Junpei still had no idea what kind of work Kirie did, but it certainly started early in the morning. And—no occasion at least—she worked on Sundays.

The two were never at a loss for things to talk about. She had a sharp mind and was knowledgeable on a broad range of topics. She enjoyed reading, but generally favoured books other than fiction—biography, history, psychology and popular science—and she retained an amazing amount of information. One time, Junpei was astounded at her detailed knowledge of the history of prefabricated housing.

‘Prefabricated housing? Your work must have something to do with construction or architecture.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I just tend to be attracted to highly practical topics. That’s all.’

She did, however, read the two story collections that Junpei had published, and found them ‘wonderful—far more enjoyable than I had imagined. To tell you the truth, I was worried. What would I do if I read your work and didn’t like it? What could I say? But there was nothing to worry about. I enjoyed them thoroughly.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Junpei, relieved. He had had the same worry when, at her request, he gave her the books.

‘I’m not just saying this to make you feel good,’ Kirie said, ‘but you’ve got something special—that special something it takes to become an outstanding writer. Your stories have a quiet mood, but several of them are quite lively, and the style is beautiful, but mainly your writing is so balanced. For me, that is always the most important thing—in music, in fiction, in painting. Whenever I encounter a work or a performance that lacks that balance—which is to say, whenever I encounter a poor, unfinished work—it makes me sick. Like motion sickness. That’s probably why I don’t go to concerts and hardly read any fiction.’

‘Because you don’t want to encounter unbalanced things?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And in order to avoid that risk, you don’t read novels and you don’t go to concerts?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Sounds a little over the top to me.’

‘I’m a Libra. I just can’t stand it when things are out of balance. No, it’s not so much that I can’t stand it as—’

She closed her mouth in search of the right words, but she wasn’t able to find them, releasing instead a few tentative sighs. ‘Oh, well, never mind,’ she went on. ‘I just wanted to say that I believe some day you are going to write full-length novels. And when you do that, you will become a more important writer. It may take a while, but that’s what I feel.’

‘No, I’m a born short-story writer,’ Junpei said drily. ‘I’m not suited to writing novels.’

‘Even so,’ she said.

Junpei offered nothing more on the subject. He remained quiet and listened to the breeze from the air conditioner. In fact, he had tried several times to write novels, but always got bogged down part of the way through. He simply could not maintain the concentration it took to write a story over a long period of time. He would start out convinced that he was going to write something special. The style would be lively, and his future seemed assured. The story would flow almost by itself. But the further he went with it, the more its energy and brilliance would fade—gradually at first, but undeniably, until, lke an engine losing speed and coming to a halt, it would peter out altogether.

The two of them were in bed. It was autumn. They were naked after long, warm lovemaking. Kirie’s shoulder pressed against Junpei, whose arms were around her. Two glasses of white wine stood on the bedside table.

‘Junpei?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You’re in love with another woman, aren’t you? Somebody you can’t forget?’

‘It’s true,’ Junpei admitted. ‘You can tell?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Women are very sensitive to such things.’

‘Not all women, I’m sure.’

‘I don’t mean all women.’

‘No, of course not,’ Junpei said.

‘But you can’t see her?’

‘There are problems.’

‘And no possibility those “problems” could be solved?’

‘None,’ Junpei said with a quick shake of the head.

‘They go pretty deep, eh?’

‘I don’t know how deep they are, but they’re there.’

Kirie drank a little wine. ‘I don’t have anybody like that,’ she said almost under her breath. ‘I like you a lot, Junpei. You really move me. When we’re together like this, I feel tremendously happy and calm. But that doesn’t mean I want to have a serious relationship with you. How does that make you feel? Relieved?’

Junpei ran his fingers through her hair. Instead of answering her question, he asked one of his own. ‘Why is that?’

‘Why don’t I want to be with you?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘A little.’

‘I can’t have a serious everyday relationship with anybody. Not just you: anybody,’ she said. ‘I want to concentrate completely on what I’m doing now. If I were living with somebody—if I had a deep emotional involvement with somebody—I might not be able to do that. So I want to keep things the way they are.’

Junpei thought about that for a moment. ‘You mean you don’t want to be distracted?’

‘That’s right.’

‘If you were distracted, you could lose your balance, and that might prove to be an obstacle to your career.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And so to avoid any risk of that, you don’t want to live with anybody.’

She nodded. ‘Not as long as I’m involved in my current profession.’

‘But you won’t tell me what that is.’

‘Guess.’

‘You’re a burglar.’

‘No,’ Kirie answered with a grave expression that quickly gave way to amusement. ‘What a sexy guess! But a burglar doesn’t go to work early in the morning.’

‘You’re a hit man.’

‘Hit person,’ she corrected him. ‘But no. Why are you coming up with these awful ideas?’

‘So, what you do is perfectly legal?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Spy?’

‘No. OK, let’s stop for today. I’d rather talk about your work. Tell me about what you’re writing now. You are writing something now?’

‘Yes, a short story.’

‘What kind of story?’

‘I haven’t finished it yet. I’m taking a break.’

‘So tell me what happens up to the break.’

IV

Junpei fell silent. He had a policy of not talking to anyone about works in progress. That could junx the story. If he put it into words and those words left his mouth, some important something would evaporate like morning dew. Delicate shades of meaning would be flattened into a shallow backdrops. Secrets would no longer be secrets. But here in bed, running his fingers through Kirie’s short hair, Junpei felt that it might be alright to tell her. After all, he had been experiencing a block. He hadn’t been able to move forward with the story for some days now.

‘It’s in the third person, and the protagonist is a woman,’ he began. ‘She’s in her early thirties, a skilled junior doctor who works at a big hospital. She’s single, but she’s having an affair with a surgeon at the same hospital. He’s in his late forties and has a wife and children.’

Kirie took a moment to imagine the heroine. ‘Is she attractive?’

‘I think so. Quite attractive,’ Junpei said. ‘But not as attractive as you.’

Kirie smiled and kissed Junpei on the neck. ‘That’s the right answer,’ she said.

‘I make it a point to give right answers when necessary.’

‘Especially in bed, I suppose.’

‘Especially in bed,’ he replied. ‘So anyway, she has a holiday and goes off on a trip by herself. The season is autumn: the same as this. She’s staying at a little hot-spring resort in the mountains and she goes for a walk by a stream in the hills. She’s a birdwatcher, and she especially enjoys seeing kingfishers. She steps down into the dry stream-bed and notices an odd stone. It’s black with a tinge of red, it’s smooth and it has a familiar shape. She realises right away tht it’s shaped like a kidney. I mean, she’s a doctor, after all. Everything about it is just like a real kidney—the size, the coloration, the thickness.’

‘So she picks it up and takes it home.’

‘Right,’ Junpei said. ‘She brings it to her office at the hospital and uses it as a paperweight. It’s just the right size and weight.’

‘And it’s the perfect shape for a hospital.’

‘Exactly,’ Junpei said. ‘But a few days later, she notices something strange.’

Kirie waited silently for him to continue with his story. Junpei paused as if deliberately teasing his listener, but in fact this was not deliberate at all. He had not yet written the rest of the story. This was the point at which it had come to a stop. Standing at this unmarked crossroads, he surveyed his surroundings and worked his brain as hard as he could. Then he thought of how the story should go.

‘Every morning, she finds the stone in a different place. She leaves it on her desk when she goes home at night. She’s a very methodical person, so she always leaves it in exactly the same spot, but in the morning she finds it on the seat of her swivel chair, or next to the vase, or on the floor. Her first thought is that she must be wrong about where she left it. Then she begins to wonder if her memory is playing tricks on her. The door is locked, and no one else should be able to get in. Of course the nightwatchman has a key, but he has been working at the hospital for years, and he would never take it upon himself to go into anyone’s office. Besides, what would be the point of his barging into her office every night just to move from one position to another a stone she’s using as a paperweight? Nothing else in her office has changed, nothing is missing and nothing has been tampered with. The position of the stone is the only thing that changes. She’s totally stumped. What do you think is going on? Why do you think the stone moves during the night?’

‘The idney-shaped stone has its own reasons for doing what it does,’ Kirie said with simple assurance.

‘What kind of reasons can a kidney-shaped stone have?’

‘It wants to shake her up. Little by little. Over a long period of time.’

‘Alright, then, why does it want to shake her up?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. Then with a giggle she added. ‘Maybe it just wants to rock her world.’

‘That’s the worst pun I’ve ever heard,’ Junpei groaned.

‘Well, you’re the writer. Aren’t you the one who decides? I’m just a listener.’

Junpei scowled. He felt a slight throbbing behind his temples from having concentrated so hard. Maybe he had drunk too much wine. ‘The ideas aren’t coming together,’ he said. ‘My plots don’t move unless I’m actually sitting at my desk and moving my hands, making sentences. Do you mind waiting a bit? Talking about it like this, I’m beginning to feel as if the rest of the story is going to work itself out.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Kirie said. She reached over for her glass and took a sip of wine. ‘I can’t wait. But the story is really getting interesting. I want to know what happens with the kidney-shaped stone.’

She turned towards him and pressed her shapely breasts against his side. Then quickly, as if sharing a secret, she said, ‘You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does.’ Junpei was falling asleep and could not answer. In the night air, her sentences lost their shape as grammatical constructions and blended with the faint aroma of the wine before reaching the hidden recesses of his consciousness. ‘For example, the wind has its reasons. We just don’t notice as we go about our lives. But then, at some point, we are made to notice. The wind envelops you with a certain purpose in mind, and it rocks you. The wind knows everything that’s inside you. And not just the wind. Everything, including a stone. They all know us very well. From top to bottom. It only occurs to us at certain times. And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.’

V

For the next five days, Junpei hardly left the house; he stayed at his desk, writing the rest of the story of the kidney-shaped stone. As Kirie predicted, the stone continues quietly to shake the lady doctor—little by little, over time, but decisively. She is engaged in hurried coupling with her lover one evening in an anonymous hotel room when she stealthily reaches around to his back and feels for the shape of a kidney. She knows that her kidney-shaped stone is lurking in there. The kidney is a secret informer that she herself has buried in her lover’s body. Beneath her fingers, it squirms like an insect, sending her kidney-type message. She converses with the kidney, exchanging intelligence. She can feel its sliminess against the palm of her hand.

The lady doctor grows gradually more used to the heavy, kidney-shaped stone that shifts position every night. She comes to accept it as natural. She is no longer surprised when she finds that it has moved during the night. When she arrives at the hospital each morning, she finds the stone somewhere in her office, picks it up and returns it to her desk. This has simply become part of her normal routine. As long as she remains in the room, the stone does not more. It stays quietly in one place, like a cat napping in the sun. It awakes and begins to move only after she has left and locked the door.

Whenever she has a spare moment, she reaches out and caresses the stone’s smooth, dark surface. After a while, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to take her eyes off the stone, as if she has been hypnotised. Gradually she loses interest in anything else. She can no longer read books. She stops going to the gym. She maintains just enough of her powers of concentration to see patients, but she carries on all other thought through sheer force of habit and improvisation. She loses interest in talking to her colleagues. She becomes indifferent to her own grooming. She loses her appetite. Even the embrace of her lover becomes a source of annoyance. When there is no one else around, she speaks to the stone in a low voice, and she listens to the wordless words the stone speaks to her, the way lonely people converse with a dog or a cat. The dark, kidney-shaped stone now controls the greater part of her life.

Surely the stone is not an object that has come to her from without: Junpei becomes aware of this as his story progresses. The main point is something inside herself. That something inside herself is activating the dark kidney-shaped stone and urging her to take some kind of concrete action. It keeps sending her signals for that purpose—signals in the form of the stone’s nightly moves.

While he writes, Junpei thinks about Kirie. He senses that she (or something inside her) is propelling the story; it was never his intention to write something so divorced from reality. What Junpei had vaguely imagined beforehand was a more tranquil, psychological storyline. In that storyline, stones did not take it upon themselves to move around.

Junpei imagined that the lady doctor would cut her emotional ties to her married surgeon. She might even come to hate him. This was probably what she was seeking all along, unconsciously.

Once the rest of the story had become visible to him, writing it out was relatively easy. Listening repeatedly to songs of Mahler at low volume, Junpei sat at his computer and wrote the conclusion at what was, for him, top speed. The doctor makes her decision to part with her surgeon lover. ‘I can’t see you any more,’ she tells him. ‘Can’t we at least talk this over?’ he asks. ‘No,’ she tells him firmly, ‘that is out of the question.’ On her next free day she boards a Tokyo harbour ferry, and from the deck she throws the kidney-shaped stone into the sea. The stone sinks down to the bottom of the deep, dark ocean towards the core of the earth. She resolves to start her life over. Having cast away the stone, she feels a new sense of lightness.

The next day, however, when she goes to the hospital, the stone is on her desk, waiting for her. It sits exactly where it is supposed to be, as dark and kidney-shaped as ever.

As soon as he finished writing the story, Junpei telephoned Kirie. She would probably want to read the finished work, which she, in a sense, had inspired him to write. His call, however, did not go through. ‘Your call cannot be completed as dialled,’ said a recorded voice. ‘Please check the number and try again.’ Junpei tried it again—and again. But the result was always the same. She was probably having some kind of technical problem with her phone, he thought.

Junpei stuck close to home, waiting for word from Kirie, but nothing ever came. A month went by. One month became two, and two became three. The season changed to winter, and a new year began. His story came out in the February issue of a liteerary magazine. A newspaper advertisement for the magazine listed Junpei’s name and the title, ‘The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day’. Kirie might see the advertisement, buy the magazine, read the story and call him to share her impressions—or so he hoped. But all that reached him were new layers of silence.

The pain Junpei felt when Kirie vanished from his life was far more intense than he had anticipated. She left behind a void that truly shook him. In the course of a day he would think to himself any number of times, ‘If only she were here!’ He missed her smile, he missed the words shaped by her lips, he missed the touch of her skin as they held each other close. He delivered no comfort from his favourite music or from the arrival of new books by authors that he liked. Everything felt distant, divorced from him. Kirie may have been woman number two, Junpei thought.

VI

Junpei’s next encounter with Kirie occurred after noon one day in early spring—though you couldn’t really call it an ‘encounter’. He heard her voice.

He was a in a taxi stuck in traffic. The young driver was listening to an FM broadcast. Kirie’s voice emerged from the radio. Junpei was not sure as first that he was hearing Kirie. He simply thought the voice was similar to hers. The more he listened, though, the more it sounded like Kirie, her manner of speaking—the same smooth intonation, the same relaxed style, the special way she had of pausing now and then.

Junpei asked the driver to turn up the volume.

‘By all means,’ the driver said.

It was an interview being held at the broadcast studio. The female announcer was asking her a question: ‘—and so you liked high places from the time you were a little girl?’

‘That is true,’ answered Kirie—or a woman with exactly the same voice. ‘Ever since I can remember, I liked going up high. The higher I went, the more peaceful I felt. I was always nagging my parents to take me to tall buildings. I was a very strange little creature,’ the voice said with a laugh.

‘Which is how you got started in your present line of work, I suppose.’

‘First I worked as an analyst at a securities firm. But I knew right away it wasn’t right for me. I left the company after three years, and the first thing I did was get a job cleaning the windows of tall buildings. What I really wanted to be was a steeplejack, but that’s such a macho world, they don’t let women in very easily. So for the time being, I took part-time work as a window cleaner.’

‘From securities analyst to window cleaner—that’s quite a change!’

‘To tell you the truth, cleaning windows was much less stressful for me: if anything falls, it’s just you, not stock prices.’ Again the laugh.

‘Now, by “window cleaner” you mean one of those people who gets lowered down the side of a building on a platform.’

‘Yes. Of course, they give you a lifeline, but some spots you can’t reach without taking the lifeline off. That didn’t bother me at all. No matter how high we went, I was never frightened. Which made me a very valuable worker.’

‘I suppose you like to mountain climbing?’

‘I have almost no interest in mountains. I’ve tried climbing a few times, but it does nothing for me. I can’t get excited climbing mountains, no matter how high I go. The only things that interest me are man-made multi-storey structures that rise straight up from the ground. Don’t ask me why.’

‘So now you run a window-cleaning company that specialises in high-rise buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan area.’

‘Correct,’ she said. ‘I saved up and started my own little company about six years ago. Of course I go out with my crews, but basically I’m an owner now. I don’t have to take orders from anybody, and I can make up my own rules: it’s very handy.’

‘Meaning, you can take the lifeline off whenever you like?’

‘In a word.’ (Laughter)

‘You really don’t like to put one on, do you?’

‘It’s true. It makes me feel I’m not myself. It’s as if I’m wearing a stiff corset.’ (Laughter)

‘You really do like high places, don’t you?’

‘I do. I feel it’s my calling to be up high. I can’t imagine doing any other kind of work. Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.’

‘It’s time for a song now,’ said the announcer. ‘James Taylor’s “Up on the Roof”. We’ll talk more about tightrope walking after this.’

While the music played, Junpei leaned over the front seat and asked the driver, ‘What does this woman do?’

‘She says she puts up ropes between high-rise buildings and walks across them,’ the driver explained. ‘With a long pole in her hands for balance. She’s some kind of performer. I get scared just riding in a glassed-in lift. I guess she gets her kicks that way. She’s got to be a little weird. She’s probably not all that young, either.’

‘It’s her profession?’ Junpei asked. He noticed that his voice was dry and the weight had gone out of it. It sounded like someone else’s voice coming through a hole in the taxi’s ceiling.

‘Yeah. I guess she gets a bunch of sponsors together and puts on a performance. She just did one at some famous cathedral in Germany. She says she wants to do it on higher buildings but can’t get permission. ’Cause if you go that high a safety net won’t help. She wants to keep adding to her record, and challenging herself with buildings that are a little higher every time. Of course, she can’t make a living that way, so—well, you heard her say she’s got this window-cleaning company. She wouldn’t work for a circus even if she could do tightrope walking that way. The only thing she’s interested in are high-rise buildings. Weird lady.’

VII

‘The most wonderful thing about it is, when you’re up there you change yourself as a human being,’ Kirie declared to the interviewer. ‘You change yourself, or rather, you have to change yourself or you can’t survive. When I come out to a high place, it’s just me and the wind. Nothing else. The wind envelops me, rocks me. It understands who I am. At the same time, I understand the wind. We accept each other and we decide to go on living together. Just me and the wind: there’s no room for anybody else. It’s that moment that I love. No, I’m afraid. Once I set foot on to that high place and enter completely into that state of concentration, all fear vanishes. We are there, inside our own warm void. It’s that moment that I love more than anything.’

Kirie spoke with cool assurance. Junpei could not tell whether the interviewer understood her. When the interview ended, Junpei stopped the taxi and got out, walking the rest of the way to his destination. Now and then he would look up at a tall building and at the clouds flowing past. No one could come between her and the wind, he realised, and he felt a violent rush of jealousy. But jealousy of what? The wind? Who could possibly be jealous of the wind?

Junpei waited several months after that for Kirie to contact him. He wanted to see her and talk to her about lots of things, including the kidney-shaped stone. But the call never came, and his calls to her could never be ‘completed as dialled’. When summer came, he gave up what little hope he had left. She obviously had no intention of seeing him again. And so the relationship ended calmly, without discord or shouting matches—exactly the way he had ended relationships with so many other women. At some point the calls stop coming, and everything ends quietly, naturally.

Should I add her to the countdown? Was she one of my three women with real meaning? Junpei agonised over the question for sometime without reaching a conclusion. I’ll wait another six months, he thought. Then I’ll decide.

During that six months, he wrote with great concentration and produced a large number of short stories. As he sat at his desk polishing the style, he would think, Kirie is probably in some high place with the wind right now. Here I am, alone at my desk, writing stories, while she’s all alone somewhere, up higher than anyone else—without a lifeline. Once she enters that state of concentration, all fear is gone: ‘Just me and the wind.’ Junpei would often recall those words of hers and realise that he had come to feel something special for Kirie, something that he had never felt for another woman. It was a deep emotion, with clear outlines and real weight in the hands. Junpei was still unsure what to call this emotion. It was, at least, a feeling that could not be exchanged for anything else. Even if he never saw Kirie again, this feeling would stay with him for ever. Somewhere in his body—perhaps in the marrow of his bones—he would continue to feel her absence.

As the year came to an end, Junpei made up his mind. He would count her as number two. She was one of the women who had ‘real meaning’ for him. Failure number two. Only one left. But he was no longer afraid. Numbers aren’t the important thing. The countdown has no meaning. Now he knew: What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. And it always has to be the first time and the last.

VIII

One morning, the doctor notices that the dark kidney-shaped stone has disappeared from her desk. And she knows: It will not be coming back.

The Seventh Man

Translated by Christopher Allison

“It was a September afternoon during my tenth year when that wave nearly brought me to my end,” the Seventh Man began in a quiet voice.

He was the last person to speak that night. The hour hand on the clock had already past ten. The sound of the wind blowing to the west outside in the black darkness could be heard by everyone sitting there together in a circle in the room. Leaves rustled in the garden, the panes of the window rattled slightly, and the wind rose up in a shrill whistle before blowing away into the night.

“That was a special type of wave, a colossus, the like of which I’ve never again seen,” the man continued.

“That wave only missed finishing me off by hair’s breadth. But instead it drank up the most essential part of me, and transported it to another world. It took such a long time before I was finally completely recovered. So much precious time.”

The Seventh Man looked to be in his mid-fifties. Tall and gaunt, he had a profusion of whiskers around his mouth, and there was a small but deep wound by his right eye, that appeared to have been made by a knife stroke. His hair was short, and had bristly touches of white here and there. His face seemed to bear the expression of a man who suddenly doesn’t know quite what to say, except that he seemed to have worn this expression consistently for a long time, and there was something quite familiar about it. He wore a cheerless blue shirt under a grey tweed jacket. He occasionally took the collar of his shirt into his hand. No one knew his name. There was probably nobody who knew anything about him.

The Seventh Man coughed quietly. All other words dropped away into silence. Without saying anything, everyone waited for him to go on.

“In my case, it was a wave. Of course, I can’t say anything about how it is with other people. But in my case it just happened to be a wave. I had no advance warning. Suddenly it was just there in front of me one day: that fatal force presenting itself in the shape of an enormous wave.

“I grew up in S Prefecture, in this town by the sea. It was such a nowhere town that even if I told you the name, it probably wouldn’t make an impression on you. My father was engaged as a medical practitioner there, and at first I had a relatively untroubled childhood. I had one very close friend for as long as I could remember. His name was K. He lived in the house next door to ours, and was a year behind me in school. We walked to school together everyday, and when we returned home in the afternoon the two of us always played together. We might as well have been brothers. Though we were friends for a very long time, never once did any kind of trouble arise between us. I actually had a real brother, but because he was six years older than me we didn’t have much in common, and to speak frankly, there wasn’t much love lost between us. It was because of this that I felt more fraternal love for my friend than I did for my real brother.

“K was pale and slight, and had the delicate features of a girl. He also had a speech impediment, and couldn’t talk well. When strangers met him for the first time, I imagine they got the impression that he was retarded. And since he wasn’t very strong, I frequently found myself acting as his protector both at school and after school when we were playing. Anybody can see right away that I’m a pretty big guy, and fairly athletic. The thing that I liked most about being with K was his kindness and the beauty of his soul. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his mind, but his impediment led him to have academic problems, and going to class was troublesome for him. He was exceptionally gifted at drawing pictures, though, and whenever he took up a pencil or his paints, he created such exquisite pictures exuding such vitality that even his teacher was blown away. He frequently won prizes in competitions and received commendations. If he had grown up unpreturbed, I think that he probably would have made a name for himself as an artist. He was particularly fond of painting landscapes, and went to the shore incessantly to draw the sea. I spent countless days sitting next to him, watching his nimble hand guide the pencil over the paper. The way he could bring such life-like shapes and colors out of the pure white of the paper in an instant impressed me deeply, and was truly amazing. When I think about it now, it was really nothing short of genius.

“One year in September, the region where I lived was beset by a fierce typhoon. According to the report on the radio, this was going to be the biggest typhoon the area had seen in ten years. School was quickly dismissed, and all the shops in town were closed and shuttered tight. My father and brother got out the tool box and began putting up storm doors around the house, while my mother busied herself in the kitchen preparing onigiri as emergency rations. Bottles and canteens were filled with water, and we all packed backpacks with necessaries, in case we had to be evacuated somewhere quickly. To the adults, who had to face the hardship of typhoons nearly every year, it was just a noisome and dangerous fact of life, but to us children, removed as we were from the hard reality of the situation, it was nothing less than a great and exciting event of considerable moment.

“The color of the sky began to change dramatically just after noon. There seemed to be an unnatural hue mixed into it. The wind rose to a howl, making a strange dry, crackling sound like beaten sand, and I went out onto the veranda to watch the sky until the rain began to beat fiercely against the side of the house. In the darkness of the house sealed off by storm shutters, the family gathered in one room and listened to the news reports on the radio. The volume of the rain wasn’t that great, but there was a lot of danger from strong winds, and many houses had had their roofs blown off, and numerous ships had been overturned. Heavy objects flying through the air had killed or injured several people. The announcer repeated his warning not to go outdoors under any circumstances. Occasionally, the strong winds would cause a creaking sound in the house, as if some giant hand were shaking it. Once in a while, we would hear a great wham as some heavy object crashed into the storm shutters. Father said that they were probably roofing tiles from a house somewhere. We had a lunch of the onigiri my mother had made, along with some fried eggs, and listened to the news on the radio, waiting for the typhoon to leave us and go somewhere else.

“But the typhoon wouldn’t leave. According to the news, from the time the typhoon had reached the eastern part of S Prefecture it had lost speed, and was now moving to the northeast no faster than a person walking briskly. The wind didn’t slacken at all, and made a brutal sound as if it was trying to rip up the very surface of the earth and blow it away.

“That fierce wind probably lasted about an hour from the time it first began to blow. But then I noticed that it had grown very quiet. You couldn’t hear a single sound; not even the crow of distant birds. Father opened one of the rain shutters a little and peered out from the crack to see what was happening. The wind had died down and the rain was slackening. The thick grey clouds were slowly rolling away. Here and there, patches of blue sky appeared between breaks in the clouds. The trees in the garden were dripping with rain water and droplets hung off the tips of the braches.

“‘We’re in the eye of the typhoon right now,’ my father told me. ‘For a little while, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, we’ll get a short break from the storm. Then it will pick up again, as fierce as before.’

“I asked father if it was ok for me to go outside. It’s ok to take a walk around, father told me, as long as you don’t go far.

“‘But as soon as the wind begins to pick up even a little bit, hurry back home right away.’ I went outside and looked around. I couldn’t believe that just a few minutes before everything was being buffeted by fierce winds. I looked up at the sky. I had the impression that the typhoon’s huge eye floated up there above us, glaring down malevolently. But of course that was just my childish imagination. We were merely in the midst of a temporary lull at the center of an air pressure vortex.

“While the adults walked around the outside of the house checking for damage, I decided to wander down to the sea shore. A lot of limbs from trees in the neighborhood had been ripped off by the wind and dropped on the roadway. Some of them were fat pine branches so big that an adult couldn’t possibly lift them alone. Shattered roof tiles were scattered all over the ground. A rock had hit a car windshield, and caused a large crack. There was even a doghouse that had been blown onto the road from somewhere. The sight looked like a giant hand had reached down from the sky and calmly wiped across the surface of the earth. K spotted me as I was walking along the road, and came out of his house. Where are you going?, K asked. When I replied that I was going down to take a look at the sea, K fell in behind me without saying a word. There was a small white dog that lived at K’s house, and this dog trailed the both of us as well. ‘We have to go home right away when the wind picks up even a little bit,’ I told K, and he nodded silently in reply.

“The sea was no more than a 200 meter walk from my house. There was a breakwater there that was about as tall as I was at the time, and climbing a short set of stairs, we arrived at the seashore. We came to the shore nearly every day to play, and we knew this stretch of beach like the backs of our hands. But in the eye of the typhoon, things seemed different from normal. The color of the sky, the color of the sea, the crashing of the waves, the smell of salt, the breadth of the scene, everything about that stretch of sea coast had changed. We sat on top of the breakwater for a moment and just stared out at the sea wordlessly. Even though we were in the middle of a typhoon, the waves were dreadfully still. When the waves struck, they retreated farther than normal. The white sand beach was getting wider as we watched. Even at ebb tide, the water didn’t recede so far. It was like a large room after all the furniture has been moved out, when it looks unbearably empty. Assorted pieces of flotsam washed up into a line on shore, almost as usual.

“I got down off the sea wall, and keeping my eye on the sky as I walked along the newly expanded beach, I looked more closely at the junk that had been deposited there. Plastic toys and sandals and chunks of wood that seemed to have once been pieces of furniture and loose clothing and rare bottles and boxes made of wood with foreign writing on them and other things of unknown character were scattered as far as the eye could see. Most likely, the great waves of the typhoon had transported it all here from some far away place. Whenever we noticed anything particularly unique, we would pick it up and examine it closely. K’s dog stood beside the two of us wagging his tail and sniffing each thing we picked up.

“We were there for at most 5 minutes or so. Suddenly, however, I noticed that the waves had made their way up the beach. Without any sound, without any indication at all, the silvery tongue of the sea had silently crept to our very feet. There was no way that I could have anticipated this. Having been raised close to the ocean, I knew well the terrors of which it was capable. I knew that it could on occasion produce brutality of a scale impossible to predict. We thus moved away from the place where the waves were lapping, exercising all due caution, to a place that seemed safe to me. But before I knew it, the waves had reached up to within a 8 inches of where I was standing, and then soundlessly receded again. And then finally they didn’t return. There was nothing particularly menacing about these waves. They were quietly and discreetly washing the beach. But there was something secretive and terribly ominous in them, like the serpentine feel of reptile hide, that immediately sent chills up my spine. It was fear without any obvious cause. But it was fear real and true nonetheless. I realized intuitively that it was something alive. There could be no mistake. Those waves were alive. The waves would grab hold of me, and toy with me according to their whim. And as I fantasized about that giant carnivore honing in on me and devouring me with his sharp teeth, the wind lurked somewhere out there in the fields. We’ve got to get out of here, I thought to myself.

“I turned to K and said to him ‘Hey, let’s go.’ He was standing about ten yards away with his back to me, and looking at something as if it were his reflection. I had spoken in a plenty loud enough voice, but it was as if K didn’t even hear me. Or maybe he was so absorbed in what he had discovered that my voice didn’t reach his ears. As if in a dream, the outside world was forgotten. Or perhaps my voice wasn’t as loud as I thought. I remember clearly that it didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded entirely like somebody else’s voice.

Then I heard a groan. It seemed loud enough to shake the earth. No, but before the groan another sound could be heard. It was the strange sound of a lot of water gushing through a hole. After this gushing sound had continued for a while, there came an almost insensible groaning sound, like the rumble of distant thunder. But still K didn’t look up. He just stood there distractedly staring at something at his feet. All of his senses were concentrated on it. K probably couldn’t even hear that groaning sound. I don’t know how he could not have heard that tremendous sound, like the very earth trembling. Maybe it was a sound that I alone could hear. It may sound strange, but I wonder whether that sound was made only to reach my ears. That is to say, the dog which stood at his side didn’t seem to notice the sound either. And dogs do have especially acute hearing, after all.

“I had to go over there and get him and drag him away, I thought to myself. There was no other way about it. I knew that the wave was coming, and K did not. My feet, though, which knew what was about to happen, turned away from my willin exactly the opposite direction. I ran away to the breakwater alone. I guess it was the overwhelming fear that made me do it. It robbed me of my voice, but it got my feet moving well enough. I fled stumbling across the soft sand beach and, arriving there, turned to shout at K.

“‘Watch out! There’s a wave coming!’ I yelled in a loud voice. Then I noticed that the rumbling sound had stopped. K finally noticed my shouting and raised his head. But it was too late. At that very moment, a great wave rose up, like a viper preparing to strike, and pounded the coast. I had never seen anything like it in my entire life. It was taller than a three-story building. It hardly made any noise at all (or, at least, my memory of it contains no sound. It came soundlessly in my memory), and rose so high as to block out the sky behind K. He looked at me for a moment with an expression of incomprehension. But then he seemed to realize something and turned around. He was trying to get away. But there was no escape. In the next instant, the wave swallowed him up. It was like a collision with an unfeeling locomotive running at full speed.

“The rumbling sound rose and the wave broke, smashing down violently on the beach and, like an explosion, threw off fragments which came flying through the air to attack me at the breakwater. But secreted as I was behind the seawall, it passed by me. The tendrils of spray that managed to surmount it only soaked my clothes. Then I climbed up on top of the breakwater quickly and looked down the shoreline. The wave was rolling back out to sea at full speed, raising its savage shout all the while. It looked as if as someone had stretched a giant wool carpet at the extreme edge of the land. I looked as hard as I could, but there was no trace of K anywhere. In the space of a breath, the wave had passed so far out to sea that it seemed as if the ocean were drying out and the seafloor would be exposed. I cowered alone on the seawall.

“The silence returned. It was a hopeless silence as if the world had been violently stripped of every sound. With K still swallowed up inside, the wave passed far away. I couldn’t begin to guess what I ought to do next. I thought that maybe I should go down to the beach. Maybe, by some chance, K had been buried in the sand somewhere nearby ... But then I changed my mind and didn’t move from atop the breakwater. I had learned from experience that these big waves could come two or three times together.

“I can’t remember now how much time passed. I think it probably wasn’t very long. 10 or 20 seconds, something like that, anyway. At any rate, after that impenetrable interval, the wave returned again to pound the shore, just as I had anticipated. That rumbling sound shook the earth violently just as before, the noise ceased, and at last the wave raised its head like a viper. All exactly like before. It blocked out the sky, and hemmed me in in front like a mortal cliff face. But this time there was nowhere to run to. As if bewitched, I stood there petrified on top of the breakwater, watching my impending demise. I had this feeling that, K having already been abducted, there was no use in trying to escape. Or then again, maybe in the face of that overwhelming fear, I could do nothing but cower. I don’t clearly remember now which way it was.

“The second wave was every bit as big as the first. No, it was even bigger. The shape distorted slowly at first, like a brick rampart collapsing, as the wave toppled down from above. It was far too big, and didn’t look like a real wave. It looked like something completely different that had the shape of a wave. Something come from some distant world in the shape of a wave, but altogether different. I steeled my resolve and waited for the instant when darkness would seize me. I didn’t even close my eyes. I remember hearing the sound of my own pulse. When the wave was immediately before me, however, it stopped and floated in the air, as if it had suddenly lost power. It only lasted for a second, but in that moment the wave hung there, midway through breaking, and stopped. And in the foam at the crest of the wave, in the middle of that vicious, transparent tongue, I clearly recognized the shape of K.

“Perhaps not all of you can believe such a thing. That’s probably inevitable. To speak frankly, even I still can’t comprehend how something like this could happen. Of course there is no explanation. But it wasn’t a vision and it wasn’t an illusion. That’s exactly how it happened without the slightest fabrication. As if enclosed in a transparent capsule, K floated on his side in the crest of that wave. And that wasn’t all. K was laughing at me. There, right before my eyes, so close I could reach out and touch him, I could make out my best friend’s face, who only moments before had been swallowed by the wave. There was no mistake. He started laughing at me. And it was no ordinary laugh either. His grin literally stretched from ear to ear. Then his look grew cold and dire, and he fixed his gaze on me. He stretched out his right hand in my direction. As if he wanted to take my hand and drag me into that world. His hand was unable to grasp me, however. Then K opened his mouth even wider and laughed once again.

“I guess I lost consciousness after that. The next thing I knew, I was on a bed in my father’s hospital. When I opened my eyes, a nurse went to call my father and he came running in right away. He took my hand and measured my pulse, looked in my pupils, and put a hand to my forehead to check my temperature. I tried to move my hand, but it was impossible for me to lift it. I had a fever like my whole body was on fire, and I was dazed and couldn’t hold a thought. It seems that I’d had a high fever for quite a while. You slept for three days straight, my father said. A neighbor who had been watching the whole time from some distance away picked me up after he saw me fall and carried me home. K was carried of by the wave and we still don’t know where he is, my father said. I knew there was something I wanted to tell my father. There was something I had to tell my father. But my tongue was swollen and numb. I couldn’t get any words out. It felt like some completely different type of creature had taken up residence in my mouth. Father asked me my name. I tried to remember my name, but before it came to mind I lost consciousness again and plunged back into the darkness.

“In the end, I was in bed for a week, hooked up to an I.V. I threw up many times and had nightmares. The whole time, Father was deeply concerned that the severe shock and the high fever might cause permanent brain damage. My situation was so grave that it wouldn’t have been unusual if that had happened. But my body slowly recovered somehow. Over the course of many weeks I gradually returned to my former life. I ate the usual foods, and I went back to school. But of course not everything was back to the way it was.

“K’s corpse was never recovered. The dog that the wave had swallowed up with him wasn’t ever seen again either. Usually, people who drown off that part of the coast get carried by the tide to this small inlet to the east, and after a few days wash up on the beach, but what became of K’s body was never known. Maybe the overwhelming size of the waves during that typhoon carried him so far out to sea that his body never made it back to shore. He probably sank to the bottom of the ocean somewhere and became food for fish. The search for K’s body continued for quite a long time with the assistance of the local fishermen, but at some point tapered off and eventually stopped. Since the all-important corpse was missing, in the end no funeral was held. From then on, K’s parents were half-mad with grief, spending every day wandering aimlessly up and down the beach, or else shut up in their house chanting sutras.

“And despite the fact that they took the blow so hard, K’s parents never once blamed me for having brought him to the beach in the middle of the typhoon. They knew well that until then I loved him as my own brother and valued him tremedously. My parents also seemed to avoid touching on the incident in my presence. But I knew it. If I think about it a little, I know I could have saved K. I’m pretty sure I could have gone to the place where he was standing and brought him safely to some place where the wave that carried him off wouldn’t have been able to reach him. It would have been close, but when I go over my memory of it and the amount of time I had, I think I could have made it. But, as I said previously, I was overcome with blinding fear, and abandoned K to save myself. Since K’s parents didn’t blame me, and everybody else avoided talking about the incident as if it were cancerous, I suffered abundantly. For a long time, I was unable to recover from that psychological shock. I didn’t go to school, I didn’t eat much, I just lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling.

“No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forget the sight of K reclining in the foam of the crest of that wave, with a merry grin on his face. Nor could I drive from my mind the individual fingers of his hand, each reaching out to me invitingly. When I went to sleep, that face, those eyes would appear in my dreams as well, as if he were waiting impatiently for me. In these dreams, K would leap out from his capsule in the foam, grab me by the wrist, and pull me into the wave.

“And I also had this other kind of dream. In it, I was swimming in the ocean. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, and I swim across the flat water far out to sea. The sun beats down on my back, and the water wraps around my body luxuriantly. But then something in the water grabs my right foot. I feel an ice-cold grip around my ankle. It is very strong and I can’t shake it off. And just like that I’m pulled down into the deep. I see K’s face there. Just like that time, he’s looking dead at me, his face nearly split by that immense grin. I try to scream, but no sound comes out. I just gulp water in. My lungs fill up with water.

“I wake up in the dark, screaming, covered in sweat, and breathless.

“At the end of that year, I begged my parents to let me leave town immediately and move away somewhere else. I couldn’t continue to live by that beach where K had been carried off by the wave, and I was having nightmares nearly every night, as you know. Some place fairly far removed from here. If I couldn’t, I’d probably end up going mad. When he heard my request, my father made arrangements for me to relocate. In January, I moved to Nagano Prefecture and started going to a public elementary school there. My father’s family home was nearby, and I was allowed to stay there. I advanced to junior high and then to high school in that same place. When vacations came, I didn’t ever go back home. Every once in a while, my parents would come up for a visit.

“And to this very day, I still live in Nagano. I graduated from a technical college in Nagano City, found a job with a precision machinery company, and that brings us up to the present. I have had the life and career of a completely ordinary person. As you can see, there is nothing particularly different about me. I’m not a very social person, but I enjoy mountaineering, and I have a number of close friends through that. As soon as I moved away from that town, the nightmares decreased in frequency, almost to how it was before. But they didn’t depart from my life completely either. They would come back to me periodically, like a bill collector knocking at the door. Just as soon as I would start to forget, there they would be. The dreams were always exactly the same, down to the minutest detail. Whenever that happened, I’d wake up screaming. My sheets would be drenched with sweat.

“That’s probably why I never married. I didn’t want to be continually waking up whoever was sleeping next to me at two or three o’clock in the morning with my yelling. There have been a number of women thus far that I’ve been quite fond of. But I’ve never spent the night with any of them. The fear is suffused into the very marrow of my bones, and is not something that it is possible to share with anyone.

“At this point, I’m over 40 years old and I’d never been back to my hometown, nor had I gotten near that stretch of coastline. It’s not just that stretch of shore either, but the sea itself that I could not bear to be near. I was afraid that if I actually went to the sea there, the things that happened in my dreams would come to pass in reality. At one time, I loved swimming more than anything, but since then I hadn’t even been able to swim in a pool. I couldn’t get near a deep river or the tide. I avoided riding in ships. I had never been overseas on a plane either. I couldn’t scrub from my mind the image of me drowning in some unknown place. Like K’s cold hand in my dreams, I couldn’t shake loose that dark presentiment from my consciousness.

“In the spring of last year, I revisited the site of K’s abduction for the first time.

“Father had died the previous year, and my brother had sold the family home in order to divide up the proceeds. As he’d been putting the storage room in order, he came across a cardboard box full of my childhood things, and had sent it to me. Most of the stuff was worthless junk, but deep inside, a bundle of pictures that K had painted for me caught my eye. I think K’s parents had given them to me as a rememberence of him. The fear was so strong it took my breath away. I had the feeling that K’s spirit was revivified before my eyes in those pictures. I wrapped them back up in their flimsy wrapping and, intending to destroy them right away, put them back in the box. For whatever reason, though, I was unable to through away K’s paintings. Several days later, completely at the end of my rope, I ripped the paper off K’s watercolors, and boldly took them in hand.

“They were nearly all landscapes, familiar ocean and beaches and forests and store fronts, all done in K’s distinctive shades. They were unfaded to a peculiar degree, and marks that had been there when I had seen the pictures years before still appeared as though they were fresh. As soon as I took the pictures in my hand, before I had even had a chance to really look at them, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of longing and remorse. Those pictures were far more skillfully executed and artistically superior than I had even remembered them being. I could feel acutely the presence of K’s deep spirit in those pictures as if it were my own. I was able to understand fully how K saw the world around him. As I gazed at those pictures, the things that I did with K and the places that we went together came rushing vividly back to me, one by one. Yes, that’s it: it was as if they were my own personalperceptions. I could see the world distinctly and unclouded, exactly as it had been then, the two of us side by side.

“Everyday when I returned home from work, I would take one of those pictures in my hand and stare at it. I could look at them endlessly. They contained the beautiful scenery of my youth that I had long before forced out of my mind. When I looked at K’s pictures, I had the feeling that they permeated quietly into the center of my body.

“Then, after about a week had passed, I was taken aback by a new thought. Hadn’t I, perhaps, been completely mistaken in my thinking? As K was lying in the foam of that wave, did he really hate and resent me, or was he not, perhaps, trying to transport me to somewhere else? That weird smile on his face—might it have just looked like a smile? Was he not already unconscious by then? Or could he not have just wanted to give me one last final, affectionate smile before we parted forever? Could the color of violent hatred that I saw in his face have been nothing more than the projection of my own deep fear?... As I examined those ancient watercolors of K’s, my thoughts in this direction became stronger and stronger. No matter how I looked at them, nothing but K’s unblemished, pacific spirit emerged from the pictures.

“For a long time after that, I just sat there. I was compledtely unable to stand up. The day passed and dusky darkness slowly enveloped the room. Finally, a deeply silent night came on. The seemingly unending night continued on until the counterbalance of the darkness could no longer sustain its weight, and then gradually day broke. New sunlight dyed the sky a pale rose, and the birds woke up and began their crowing.

“I realized then that I had to go back to that town. And right away.

“I packed a suitcase with the bare essentials, called the office to tell them that something urgent had come up, and took a train in the direction of my hometown ..

“The town was not at all the quiet seaside town of my memory. Out of the rapid growth period of the 1960’s had emerged a manufacturing city, and this had wrought a great transformation on the scenery. The area around the station, where once only a few souvenir shops stood, was now crowded with merchants, and the only movie theater in town had become a supermarket. Even my own house was no more. It had been demolished some months before and now was nothing more than naked tilled earth. All the trees in the garden had been cut down, and weeds sprouted here and there from the black earth. Needless to say, the house that K had once lived in had vanished too. The land had been paved over for monthly parking, and cars and vans were lined up side by side. None of this really made me nostalgic at all, though. It had been so long since this town had been my own.

I walked to the shore and climbed the stairs to the top of the seawall. Facing the breakwater just as always, impeded by no one, the sea spread out wide. It was a huge ocean. Far away I could see the unbroken line of the horizon. The view from the beach was exactly as it had been long before. The beach stretched out like before, the waves lapped the shore like before, and people walked along the surf like before. The weak light of early evening enveloped the area and, as if the sun was considering something carefully, sunk slowly into the west. I sat down on the beach there, set my bag down next to me, and silently watched the sunset. It was a truly soothing and peaceful sight. The sight gave no clue that this was the same place where a great typhoon had once blown in, where a wave had swallowed up my best friend. There was probably hardly anyone left who even remembered that it had happened, forty years before. I began to wonder whether it was just some private phantom that I had conjured up entirely in my head.

“Suddenly I noticed that the deep darkness within me had been extinguished. Just as suddenly as it had come on it was gone without a trace. I slowly got up from the beach. I walked to the edge of the surf and without rolling up my pants waded out into it. Waves lapped at my feet, still covered by shoes. The waves hit the shore just as they had when I was a child, and as if making a peace offering, washed over my feet, dampening my shoes and my clothes. Waves approached internittently and then retreated. Passersby stared at the peculiar sight of me, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. After such a long time, I had finally made it back here.

“I looked up at the sky. Small grey clouds, like finely chopped cotton, floated by. There being hardly any wind, the clouds seemed to stay stopped in one place. I can’t really explain it, but I had the feeling that those clouds floated there for me alone. My thoughts turned to the time when I was a boy that I had gone out looking for the great eye of the typhoon, and how at that time I had looked up to the sky in just the same way. The huge axle of time gave a mighty screech within me. The past and present crashed together, like my old desiccated house being demolished, and mixed together in one vortex of time. All ambient sound ceased, and the light wavered. I lost my balance and toppled into the approaching wave. My heart made a loud noise in my throat, as sensation in my hands and feet disipated. I lay prone like that, where I had fallen, for a long time. I was unable to stand up. But I wasn’t at all afraid either. There was nothing to be afraid of. All of that was past.

“Since then I haven’t had a single bad dream. I haven’t once woken up screaming in the middle of the night. I wish I could start my life over from the beginning now and live it right. But no, I guess it’s too late for that. From here on out, I probably don’t have that much time left. But in spite of having lost so much time, I’m so grateful that I was redeemed before the end, and managed to recover. That’s right. The possibility was there for me to end my life without receiving redemption, screaming into the fearful void.”

The Seventh Man fell silent for a moment, and looked around him at the people seated there. Nobody said a word. There wasn’t a sound in the room except for the faint whisper of breathing. Nobody so much as twitched. The wind had died down completely, and no sounds could be heard outside either. As if searching for a word, the man started once again to fidget with the collar of shirt.

“The way I see it, the true fear for us as human being is not terror as such,” the man said after a little while. Terror certainly exists there .... It manifests itself in various forms, and from time to time overwhelms our very existence as human beings. But the most fearful thing of all is to turn your back on that fear, to close your eyes to it. By doing that, we end up alienating the very most essential part of our make-up. In my case—it was a wave.”

Tony Takitani

Issue of 2002-04-15

Tony Takitani’s real name was really that: Tony Takitani.

Because of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I. But Tony Takitani’s mother and father were both

one-hundred-per-cent genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those days, Shanghai was just a day’s boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo—or anywhere else in Japan—that he would hate to lose. He left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai’s elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was twenty-one years old.

And so he took it easy through the upheaval of the war—from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs. He played his trombone in Shanghai night clubs as the struggles took place somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest inclination to influence—or even to reflect upon—history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with kindness and good feeling, which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and a talented musician, he stood out wherever he went like a crow on a snowy day. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis had made him a Shanghai sensation.

Shozaburo was also blessed—though he did not realize it—with a talent for making “useful” friends. He was on good terms with high-ranking Army officers, millionaires, and various influential types who were reaping gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never exited a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani and they just “clicked.” And they took

special care of him whenever problems came up.

But talent can sometimes work against you. When the war ended, Shozaburo’s connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, others who had been imprisoned for similar reasons were taken out of their cells and executed without a trial. Guards would just appear, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. Shozaburo assumed that he would die in prison. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They would put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I’ve lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought. I’ve slept with tons of women. I’ve eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There isn’t so much in life that I’m sorry I missed. Besides, I’m not in any position to complain about being killed. It’s just the way it goes. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese have died in this war, and many of them in far more terrible ways.

As he waited, Shozaburo watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on his cell’s filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the women he had slept with. In the end, though, he turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time, the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo stood on the deck of the boat, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance he thought, Life: I’ll never understand it.

Emaciated, with no possessions to speak of, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring

of 1946, nine months after the war had ended. He discovered that his parents’ house had burned down in the great Tokyo air raid of March, 1945, and they were dead. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo was now alone in the world. This was not a great shock to him, however; nor did it make him feel particularly sad. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he was convinced that everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was in his thirties, and beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had suddenly aged several years at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.

One way or another, Shozaburo had managed to survive, and he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.

Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American Army major, an Italian-American from New Jersey who played a mean clarinet himself. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the records he wanted, straight from the United States, and Shozaburo would go to the major’s quarters and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were difficult to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, Shozaburo thought, not a bad time to be alive.

In 1947, he married a distant cousin on his mother’s side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. Before long they ended up living together—probably because she had become pregnant. At least, that was the way that Tony Takitani heard it from his father. His mother was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not very healthy. She gave birth to Tony the year after she was married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, quickly and quietly. She had experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.

Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what death was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole, as a fait accompli. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disklike thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn’t say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more about what had happened. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby that he had left in the hospital.

The major took Shozaburo under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together at the base nearly every day. “You’ve got to get ahold of yourself,” the major would tell Shozaburo. “The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right.” The words meant nothing to Shozaburo, who merely nodded in silence. “Hey, I know,” the major added suddenly one day. “Why don’t you let me be the boy’s godfather? I’ll give him a name.” Oh, Shozaburo thought, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.

The major suggested his own first name—Tony. Tony was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major’s mind. When Shozaburo got home, he wrote the name Tony Takitani on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall. He stared at it for the next several days. Tony Takitani. Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last awhile, he thought, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.

For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was not much fun. The other kids at

school called him a “half-breed,” and whenever he told people his name they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming face to face with a child called Tony Takitani was all it took to reopen old wounds.

Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any close friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. His father was always travelling with the band, and when Tony was little a housekeeper had come to take care of him during the day. But by the time he was in his last years at elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. This seemed preferable to having someone fussing over him all the time.

Shozaburo Takitani never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he didn’t bring any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as different from each other as one might imagine. But, being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.

Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours every day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate, and highly detailed drawings of bicycles, radios, engines, and the like. If he drew a plant, he would capture every vein in every leaf. It was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually won first prize in school art contests.

So it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to art school to a career as an illustrator. There was never any need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were agonizing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And, because it was a time when most young people were acting out against the establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art-school professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony himself could not see what was so great about their work, with its ideological content. To him it looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.

Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. “They look realer than the real thing,” everyone said. His sketches were more detailed than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator everybody had to have. And he took on everything—from the covers of automobile magazines to advertising illustrations. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He bought a big house in Setagaya, an affluent Tokyo suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.

By this point in his life, Tony had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them, for a short time. But he had never considered marriage, had never seen a need for it. Cooking, cleaning, and laundry he could manage for himself, and when his work interfered with those things he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He lacked his father’s special charm, and he had no real friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. But he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others, and just about everybody who knew him liked him. He saw his father no more than once every two or three years, on some matter of business. When the

business was over, neither man had much to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani’s life went by, quietly and calmly.

Then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. She worked part time for a publishing company, and she came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a demure girl with a gentle smile. Her features were pleasant enough but, objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani’s heart a violent punch. The moment he first saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could say what it was about her that had struck him with such force.

The next thing that caught his attention was her clothes. He generally took no particular interest in what people wore, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed that it made a deep impression on him; indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed elegantly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Utterly different. She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy.

After she left, he sat at his desk, (-land, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.

The next day, he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though they were fifteen years apart in age, they found they had much in common, almost strangely so. They agreed on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. She was a little nervous at first, but she gradually relaxed, until she was laughing and talking freely.

“You really know how to dress,” Tony said when they parted.

“I like clothes,” she answered, with a bashful smile. “Most of my money goes on clothing.”

They went on a few dates after that. They didn’t go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours—about their pasts, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking. It was as if they were filling up each other’s emptiness.

The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been seeing since high school. The relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, she admitted, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things whenever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere near as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but, still, that didn’t mean that she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And, besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that age gap might mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.

Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn’t work. He

drank, alone. Suddenly, his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thick, cold walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn’t want to marry me, I might just kill myself.

He went to see her and told her exactly how he felt. How lonely his life had been until then. How much he had lost over the years. How she had made him realize all that.

She was an intelligent young woman. She had come to like this Tony Takitani. She had thought well of him from the start, and each meeting had only made her like him more. Whether she could call this “love” she didn’t know. But she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married.

By marrying her, Tony Takitani brought the lonely period of his life to an end. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was look for her. When he found her sleeping next to him, he felt relief. When she wasn’t there, he felt anxious and searched the house for her. There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. The question haunted him: What would he do? Sometimes this fear would make him break out in a cold sweat. As he became used to his new life, though, and the possibility of his wife’s suddenly disappearing seemed to lessen, the anxiety gradually eased. In the end, he settled down and wrapped himself in his new and peaceful happiness.

One day, she said that she wanted to hear what kind of music her father-in-law was making. “Do you think he would mind if we went to hear him?” she asked.

“Probably not,” Tony said.

They went to a Ginza night club where Shozaburo Takitani was performing. This was the first time that Tony Takitani had gone to hear his father play since childhood. Shozaburo was playing exactly the same music he had played in the old days, the same songs that Tony had heard so often on records when he was a boy. Shozaburo’s style was smooth, elegant, sweet. It was not art, but it was music made by the skillful hand of a professional, and it could put a crowd in a good mood.

Soon, however, something began to constrict Tony Takitani’s breathing, as though he were a narrow pipe that was filling quietly, but inexorably, with sludge, and he found it difficult to remain seated. He couldn’t help feeling that the music he was hearing now was just slightly different from the music he remembered his father playing. He had heard it years ago, of course, and he had been listening with a child’s ears, after all, but the difference, it seemed to him, was terribly important. It was infmitesimal but crucial. He wanted to go up onto the stage, take his father by the arm, and ask, “What is it, Father? What has changed?” But he did nothing of the sort. He would never have been able to explain what was in his mind. Instead, he stayed at his table until the end of his father’s set, drinking much more than he usually did. When it was over, he and his wife applauded and went home.

The couple’s married life was free of shadows. They never fought, and they spent many happy hours together, taking walks, going to movies, travelling. Tony Takitani’s work continued as successfully as ever, and, for someone so young, his wife was remarkably capable at running their home. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. A strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought that she had suddenly taken ill. He had noticed it before their marriage, but it wasn’t until their honeymoon that it began to seem serious. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels around Europe. In Milan and Paris, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Fen-e. Mesmerized, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.

Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house, and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvellous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody’s perfect, he told himself.

When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.

He took the plunge one night after dinner. “I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes,” he said. “It’s not a question of money. I’m not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?”

His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, “You’re right, of course. I don’t need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can’t help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can’t stop myself.” She promised to try to hold back. “If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long.”

And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself

in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn’t stand it.

She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favorite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. “Certainly, Madam,” she was told. She was one of the store’s best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colors, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail. She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.

A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.

Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife’s clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.

Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favorable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size. From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife’s, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.

Tony Takitani told the woman, “The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies—that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I’ve recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I’m pretty sure, it will finally

come home to me that she is dead.”

Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request—so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife’s having died. And she understood the part about the wife’s having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife’s clothes. Normally, she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye. But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn’t look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.

“I think I understand,” she said. “And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size.”

“Of course,” Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.

Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I’m sorry.” She dried her tears with a handkerchief.

“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to have you start at the office tomorrow,” Tony said in a businesslike manner. “Pick out a week’s worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you.”

The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days’ worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.

“Take a coat, too,” Tony Takitani said. “You don’t want to be cold.”

She chose a warm-looking gray cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.

When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife’s closet, shut the door, and let

his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.

These dresses had once clung to his wife’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again, like a lukewarm broth. It’s all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it’s over.

He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologizing.

“But how can that be?” the woman asked, stunned.

“I’m sorry, but the situation has changed,” he said. “You can have the clothes and shoes you took home, and the suitcase, too. I just want you to forget that this ever happened, and please don’t tell anyone about it.”

The woman could make nothing of this, and the more she pressed for answers the more pointless it seemed.

“I see,” she said finally, and hung up.

For a few minutes, she felt angry at Tony Takitani. But soon she came to feel that things had

probably worked out for the best. The whole business had been peculiar from the beginning. She was sorry to have lost the job but she figured she would manage somehow or other.

She unpacked the dresses she had brought home from Tony Takitani’s house, smoothed them out, and hung them in her wardrobe. The shoes she put into the shoe cabinet by her front door. Compared with these new arrivals, her own clothes and shoes looked horrendously shabby. She felt as if they were a completely different type of matter, fashioned of materials from another dimension. She took off the blouse and skirt she had worn to the interview, hung them up, and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the floor, drinking a cold beer. Recalling the room full of clothes she had seen at Tony Takitani’s house, she heaved a sigh. So many beautiful dresses, she thought. And that “closet”: it was bigger than my whole apartment. Imagine the time and money that

must have gone into buying all those clothes! And now the woman who did it is dead. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many beautiful dresses behind.

The woman’s friends were well aware that she was poor, so they were amazed to see her wearing a new dress every time they got together—each one a sophisticated, expensive brand.

“Where did you ever get a dress like that?” they would ask her.

“I promised not to tell,” she would say, shaking her head. “Besides, even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

In the end, Tony Takitani had another used-clothing dealer take away everything that his wife had left behind. The dealer gave Tony less than a twentieth of what he had paid for the clothes, but that didn’t matter to him. He would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where he would never see them again.

Once in a while, Tony would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mind go blank. He would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife’s shadows. But, as the months went by, he lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it was gone. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished fell back, as if retreating from the province of his mind. Like a mist in the breeze, his memories changed shape, and with each change they grew fainter. Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.

Sometimes he could barely recall his wife’s face. What he did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that his wife had left behind. He recalled her unremarkable face and her worn-out patent-leather shoes. Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman’s name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.

Two years after Tony Takitani’s wife died, his father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo Takitani suffered little, and his time in the hospital was short. He died almost as if falling asleep. In that sense, he lived a charmed life to the end. Aside from a little cash and some stock certificates, Shozaburo left nothing that could be called property. There was only his instrument, and a gigantic collection of old jazz records. Tony Takitani left the records in the boxes supplied by the moving company and stacked them up on the floor of the empty room. Because they smelled of mold, he had to open the windows in the room at regular intervals to air it out. Otherwise, he never set foot in the place.

A year went by this way, but having the boxes of records in the house began to bother him more and more. Often, the mere thought of them sitting in there made him feel that he was suffocating. Sometimes, too, he would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep. His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.

Tony Takitani called a record dealer and had him make an offer for the collection. Because it contained many valuable disks that were long out of print, he received a remarkably high payment—enough to buy a small car. To him, however, the money meant nothing.

Once the records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.

Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.

All God’s Children Can Dance

Harper’s Magazine Oct, 2001

Yoshiya woke with the worst possible hangover. He could barely manage to open one eye; the left lid wouldn’t budge. His head felt as if it had been stuffed with decaying teeth during the night. A foul sludge was oozing from his rotting gums and eating away at his brain from the inside. If he ignored it, he wouldn’t have a brain left. Which would be all right. Just a little more sleep: that’s all he wanted. But he knew it was out of the question. He felt too awful to sleep.

He glanced up at the clock by his pillow, but it had vanished. Why wasn’t the clock where it belonged? No glasses either. He must have tossed them somewhere. It had happened before.

He managed to raise the upper half of his body, but this jumbled his mind, and his face plunged back into the pillow. A truck came through the neighborhood selling clothes-drying poles. They’d take your old ones and exchange them for new ones, said the

loudspeaker, and the price was the same as twenty years ago. The monotonous, stretched-out voice belonged to a middle-aged man. It made him feel seasick, but he couldn’t barf.

The best cure for a bad hangover was to watch a morning talk show, according to one friend. The shrill witch-hunter voices of the showbiz correspondents would bring up every last bit left in your stomach from the night before.

But Yoshiya didn’t have the strength to drag himself to the TV. Just breathing was hard enough. Random but persistent streams of clear light and white smoke swirled together inside his eyes, which gave him a strangely flat view of the world. Was this what it felt like to die? If so, fine. But once was enough. Please, God, he thought, never do this to me again.

“God” brought to mind his mother. He started to call out to her for a glass of water, but realized he was home alone. She and the other believers had left for Kansai three days earlier. It takes all kinds to make a world, and his mother was a volunteer servant of God. He

still couldn’t open his left eye. Who the hell could he have been drinking so much with? No way to remember. Just trying turned the core of his brain to stone. Never mind now; he’d think about it later.

It couldn’t be noon yet. But still, Yoshiya figured, judging from the glare of what seeped past the curtains, it had to be after eleven. Some degree of lateness on the part of a young staff member was never a big deal to his employer, a publishing company. He had always evened things out by working late. But showing up after noon had earned him some sharp remarks from the boss. Those he could overlook, but he wanted to avoid causing any problems for the believer who had recommended him for the job.

By the time he left the house, it was almost one o’clock. Any other day he would have made up an excuse and taken off from work, but he had one document on disk that he had to format and print out today, and it was not a job that anyone else could do.

He left the condo in Asagaya that he rented with his mother, took the elevated Chuo Line to Yotsuya, transferred to the Marunouchi Line subway, took that as far as Kasumigaseki, transferred again, this time to the Hibiya Line subway, and got off at Kamiya-cho, the station closest to the small foreign-travel-guide publishing company where he worked. He climbed up and down the long flights of stairs at each station on wobbly legs.

He saw the man with the missing earlobe as he was transferring back the other way underground at Kasumigaseki around ten o’clock that night. Hair half-gray, the man was somewhere in his mid-fifties: tall, no glasses, tweed overcoat somewhat

old-fashioned, briefcase in right hand. He walked with the slow pace of someone deep in thought, heading from the Hibiya Line platform toward the the Chiyoda Line. Without hesitation, Yoshiya fell in after him. That’s when he noticed that his throat was as dry as a piece of old leather.

Yoshiya s mother was forty-three, but she didn’t look more than thirty-five. She had clean, classic good looks, a great figure that she preserved with a simple diet and vigorous workouts morning and evening, and dewy skin. Only eighteen years older than Yoshiya, she was often taken for his elder sister.

She had never had much in the way of maternal instincts, or perhaps she was just eccentric. Even after Yoshiya had entered middle school and begun to take an interest in things sexual, she would think nothing of walking around the house wearing skimpy underwear—or nothing at all. They slept in separate bedrooms, to be sure, but whenever she felt lonely at night, she would crawl under his covers with almost nothing on. As if hugging a dog or cat, she would sleep with an arm thrown over Yoshiya, who knew she meant nothing by it, but still it made him nervous. He would have to twist himself into incredible positions to keep his mother unaware of his erection.

Terrified of stumbling into a fatal relationship with his own mother,

Yoshiya embarked on a frantic search for an easy lay. As long as one failed to materialize, he would take care to masturbate at regular intervals. He even went so far as to patronize a porno shop while he was still in high school, using the money he made from part-time jobs.

He should have left his mother’s house and begun living on his own, Yoshiya knew, and he had wrestled with the question at critical points: when he entered college and again when he took a job. But here he was, twenty-five years old and still unable to tear himself away. One reason for this, he felt, was that there was no telling what his mother might do if he were to leave her alone. He had devoted vast amounts of energy over the years to preventing her from carrying out the wild, self-destructive (but good-hearted) schemes she was always coming up with.

Plus, there was bound to be a terrible outburst if he were to announce all of a sudden that he was leaving home. He was sure it had never once crossed his mother’s mind that they might someday live apart. He recalled all too vividly the profound heartbreak and distress that she had experienced when he announced at the age of thirteen that he was abandoning the faith. For two solid weeks or more, she ate nothing, she said nothing, she never once took a bath or combed her hair or changed her underwear. She hardly even managed to attend to her period when it came. Yoshiya had never seen his mother in such a filthy, smelly state. Just imagining the possibility of its happening again gave him chest pains.

Yoshiya had no father. From the time of his birth, there had been only his mother, and she had told him again and again, from the time he was a little boy, “Your father is Our Lord” (which is how they referred to their god). “Our Lord must stay high up in Heaven; He can’t live down here with us. But He is always watching over you, Yoshiya; He always has your best interests at heart.”

Mr. Tabata, who served as little Yoshiya’s special “Guide,” would say the same kinds of things to him:

“It’s true, you do not have a father in this world, and you’re going to meet all sorts of people who say stupid things to you about that. Unfortunately, the eyes of most people are clouded and unable to see the truth, Yoshiya, but Our Lord, your father, is the world itself. You are fortunate to live in the embrace of His love. You must be proud of that and live a life that is good and true.”

“I know,” responded Yoshiya just after he had entered elementary school. “But God belongs to everybody, doesn’t He? Fathers are different, though. Everybody has a different one. Isn’t that right?”

“Listen to me, Yoshiya. Someday Our Lord, your father, will reveal Himself to you as yours and yours alone. You will meet Him when and where you least expect it. But if you begin to doubt or to abandon your faith, He may be so disappointed that He never shows Himself to you. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“And you will keep in mind what I’ve said to you?”

“I will keep it in mind, Mr. Tabata.”

But in fact what Mr. Tabata was telling him did not make much sense to Yoshiya because he could not believe that he was a special “child of God.” He knew that he was average, just like the other boys and girls he saw everywhere—or rather, that he was just a little bit less than average. He had nothing that made him stand out, and he was always making a mess of things. It stayed that way for him through elementary school. His grades were decent enough, but when it came to sports he was hopeless. He had slow and spindly legs, myopic eyes, and clumsy hands. In baseball he missed most fly balls that came his way. His teammates would grumble, and the girls in the stands would titter.

Yoshiya would pray to God, his father, each night before bedtime: “I promise to maintain unwavering faith in You if only You will let me catch outfield flies. That’s all I ask (for now).” If God really was his father, He should be able to do that much for him. But his prayer was never answered. The flies continued to drop from his glove.

“This means you are testing Our Lord, Yoshiya,” said Mr. Tabata sternly. “There is nothing wrong with praying for something, but you must pray for something grander than that. It is wrong to pray for something concrete, with time limits.”

When Yoshiya turned seventeen, his mother revealed the secret of his birth (more or less). He was old enough to know the truth, she said.

“I was living in a profound darkness in my teen years. My soul was in chaos as deep as a newly formed ocean of mud. The true light was hidden behind dark clouds. And so I had knowledge of several different men without love. You know what it means to have knowledge, don’t you?”

Yoshiya said that he did indeed know what it meant. His mother used incredibly old-fashioned language when it came to sexual matters. By that point in his life, he himself had had knowledge of several different girls without love.

His mother continued her story. “I first became pregnant in the second year of high school. At the time, I had no idea how very much it meant to become pregnant. A friend of mine introduced me to a doctor who gave me an abortion. He was a very kind man, and very young, and after the operation he lectured me on

contraception. Abortion was good neither for the body nor the spirit, he said, and I should also be concerned about venereal disease, so I should always be sure to use a condom, and he gave me a new box of them.

“I told him that I had used condoms, so he said, ‘Well, then, someone didn’t put them on right. It’s amazing how few people know the right way to use them.’ But I’m not stupid. I was being very careful about contraception. The minute we took our clothes off, I would be sure to put it on the man myself. You can’t trust men with something like that. You know about condoms, I hope?”

Yoshiya said that he did know about condoms.

“So, two months later I got pregnant again. I could hardly believe it: I was being more careful than ever. There was nothing I could do but go back to the same doctor. He took one look at me and said, ‘I told you to be careful. What have you got in that head of yours?’ I couldn’t stop crying. I explained to him how much care I had taken with contraception whenever I had knowledge, but he wouldn’t believe me. ‘This would never have happened if you put them on right,’ he said. He was mad.

“Well, to make a long story short, about six months later, because of a weird series of circumstances, I ended up having knowledge of the doctor himself. He was thirty at the time, and still a bachelor. He was kind of boring to talk to, but he was a nice man. His right earlobe was missing. A dog chewed it off when he was a boy. He was just walking along the street one day when a big black dog he had never seen before jumped up on him and bit his earlobe off. He used to say he was glad it was just an earlobe. You could live without an earlobe. But a nose would be different. I had to agree with him.

“Being with him helped me get my old self back. When I was having knowledge of him, I managed not to think disturbing thoughts. I even got to like his half-size ear. He was such a serious man, he would lecture me on the use of the condom while we were in bed—like when and how to put it on and when and how to take it off. You’d think this would make for fool-proof contraception, but I ended up pregnant again.”

Yoshiya’s mother went to see her doctor-lover and told him she seemed to be pregnant. He examined her and confirmed that it was so. But he would not admit to being the father. He was a professional, he said; his contraceptive techniques were beyond reproach. Which meant that she must have had relations with another man.

“This really hurt me. He made me so angry when he said that, I couldn’t stop shaking. Can you see how deeply this would have hurt me?”

Yoshiya said that he did see.

“While I was with him, I never had knowledge of another man. Not once. But he just thought of me as some kind of young slut. That was the last I saw of him. I didn’t have an abortion either. I decided to kill myself. And I would have. I would have gotten on a boat to

Oshima and thrown myself from the deck if Mr. Tabata hadn’t seen me wandering down the street and spoken to me. I wasn’t the least bit afraid to die. Of course, if I had died then, you would never have been born into this world, Yoshiya. But thanks to Mr. Tabata’s guidance, I have become the saved person you know me as today. At last, I was able to find the true light. And with the help of the other believers, I brought you into this world.”

To Yoshiya’s mother, Mr. Tabard had had this to say:

“You took the most rigorous contraceptive measures, and yet you became pregnant. Indeed, you became pregnant three times in a row. Do you imagine that such a thing could happen by chance? I, for one, do not believe it. Three ‘ chance’ occurrences are no longer ‘ chance.’ The figure three is none other than that which is used by Our Lord for revelations. In other words, Miss Osaki, it is Our Lord’s wish for you to give birth to a child. The child you are carrying is not just anyone’s child, Miss Osaki: it is the child of Our Lord in Heaven, a male child, and I shall give it the name of Yoshiya, ‘For it is Good.”

And when, as Mr. Tabata predicted, a boy child was born, they named him Yoshiya, and Yoshiya’s mother lived as the servant of God, no longer having knowledge of any man.

“So then,” Yoshiya said, with some hesitation, to his mother, “biologically speaking, my father is that obstetrician that you ... had knowledge of.”

“Not true!” declared his mother with burning eyes. “His

contraceptive methods were absolutely foolproof! Mr. Tabata was right: your father is Our Lord. You came into this world not through carnal knowledge but through an act of Our Lord’s will!”

His mother seemed to have unshakable faith in the truth of this, but Yoshiya was just as certain that his father was the obstetrician. There had been something wrong with the condom. Anything else was out of the question.

“Does the doctor know that you gave birth to me?”

“I don’t think so,” said his mother. “I never saw him again, never contacted him in any way. He probably has no idea.”

The man boarded the Chiyoda Line train to Abiko. Yoshiya followed him into the car. It was after 10:30 at night, and there were few other passengers on the train. The man took a seat and pulled an open magazine from his briefcase. It looked like some sort of professional journal. Yoshiya sat down across from him and pretended to read the newspaper he was carrying. The man had a slim build and a deeply chiseled face with an earnest expression. There was something doctorish about him. His age looked right, and he was missing one earlobe—the right earlobe. It could easily have been bitten off by a dog.

Yoshiya felt with intuitive certainty that this man had to be his biological father. And yet the man probably had no idea that this son of his even existed. Nor would he be likely to accept the facts if Yoshiya were to reveal them to him here and now. After all, the doctor was a professional whose contraceptive methods were beyond reproach.

The train passed through the Shin-Ochanomizu, Sendagi, and Machiya subway stops before rising to the surface. The number of passengers decreased at each station. The man never looked up from his magazine or gave any indication of readiness to leave his seat. Observing him between feigned glances at his newspaper, Yoshiya brought back fragments of what he had done the night before. He had gone out to drink in Roppongi with an old college friend and two girls that the friend knew. He remembered going from the bar to a disco, but he couldn’t recall whether or not he had had sex with his date. Probably not, he decided. He had been too drunk: such knowledge would have been out of the question.

The human-interest page of the paper was filled with the usual earthquake stories. His mother and the other believers had probably been staying in the church’s Osaka facility. Each morning they would cram their rucksacks full of supplies, go as far as they could by commuter train, and walk along the rubble-strewn highway the rest of the way to Kobe, where they would distribute daily necessities to victims of the quake. She had told him by phone that her pack weighed as much as thirty-five pounds. That place felt light-years away from Yoshiya himself and from the man sitting across from him absorbed in his magazine.

Until he graduated from elementary school, Yoshiya used to go out with his mother once a week on missionary work. She got the best results of anyone in the church. She was so young and lovely and seemingly well-bred (in fact, she was well-bred) that people always liked her. Plus she had this little boy with her. Most people would let down their guard in her presence. They might not be interested in religion, but they were willing to listen to her. She would go from house to house in a simple (but form-fitting) suit, distributing pamphlets and calmly extolling the joys of faith.

“Be sure to come see us if you ever have any pain or difficulties,” she would tell them. “We never push, we only offer,” she would declare, voice warm, eyes burning. “In my own case, my soul was wandering through the deepest darkness until the day I was saved by our teachings. I was carrying this child at the time, and I was on the brink of throwing myself and him in the ocean. But I was saved by His hand, the One who is in Heaven, and now my son and I live in the holy light of Our Lord.”

Yoshiya had never found it painful to knock on strange doors with his mother. She was especially sweet to him at those times, her hand always warm. They had the experience of being rebuffed often enough that it made him all the more joyful to receive a kind word. And when they managed to win a new believer for the church, it filled him with pride. “Maybe now God my father will recognize me

as his son,” he would think.

Not long after he went on to middle school, though, Yoshiya abandoned his faith. As he awakened to the existence of his own independent ego, he found it increasingly difficult to accept those stern codes of the sect that clashed with normal values. This was one major reason for his loss of belief. But the most fundamental and decisive cause was the unending coldness of the One who was his father: His dark, heavy, silent heart of stone. Her son’s abandonment of the faith was a source of deep sadness to Yoshiya’s mother, but his determination was unshakable.

The train was almost out of Tokyo and just a station or two from crossing into Chiba Prefecture when the man put his magazine back into his briefcase, stood up, and approached the door. Yoshiya followed him off the train. The man flashed a pass to get through the gate, but Yoshiya had to wait in line to pay the extra fare to this distant point. Still, he managed to reach the line for cabs just as the man was stepping into one. He climbed into the next cab and pulled a brand-new 10,000-yen bill from his wallet.

“Can you follow that cab for me?” he asked.

The driver gave Yoshiya a suspicious look. Then he eyed the bill. “Hey, man, is this some kind of mob thing?”

“Not at all. Don’t worry,” Yoshiya said. “I’m just tailing somebody.”

The driver took the 10,000-yen bill and pulled away from the curb. “Okay,” he said, “but I still want my fare. The meter’s running.”

The two cabs sped down a block of shuttered shops, past a number of dark empty lots, past a hospital with lighted windows, and through a new development lined with tiny houses. The streets all but empty, the tail posed no problems—and provided no thrills. Yoshiya’s driver was clever enough to vary the distance between his cab and the one in front.

“Guy having an affair or something?”

“Nah,” said Yoshiya. “Head-hunting. Two companies fighting over one guy.”

“No kidding? I knew companies were scrambling for people these days, but I didn’t realize it was this bad.”

Now there were hardly any houses along the road, which followed a riverbank and entered an area lined with factories and warehouses. The only things marking this deserted space were new light poles thrusting up from the earth. Where a high concrete wall stretched along the road, the taxi carrying the man came to a sudden stop. Alerted by the car’s brake lights, Yoshiya’s driver brought his cab to a halt some hundred yards behind the other vehicle and doused his headlights. The mercury-vapor lamps overhead cast their harsh, silent light on the asphalt roadway. The road and the wall: there was

nothing else here to see. Far ahead, the cab door opened and the man with no earlobe got out. Yoshiya slipped his driver two 1,000-yen bills beyond his initial 10,000-yen payment.

“You’re never gonna get a cab way out here, mister. Want me to wait a little while?” the driver asked.

“Never mind,” said Yoshiya and stepped outside.

The man never glanced up after leaving his cab but walked straight ahead beside the concrete wall with the same slow, steady pace he had used on the subway platform. He looked like a well-made mechanical doll being drawn ahead by a magnet. Yoshiya raised his coat collar and released an occasional white cloud of breath from the gap between the edges as he followed the man from far enough behind to keep from being spotted. All he could hear was the anonymous slapping of the man’s leather shoes against the pavement. Yoshiya’s rubber-soled loafers were silent.

There was no hint of human life here. The scene looked like something from a fantastic dream. Where the concrete wall ended there was an automobile scrap yard. A chain-link fence surrounded a hill of cars that had been reduced to a single colorless mass by long exposure to the rain and the flat mercury light. The man continued walking straight ahead.

What was the point of getting out of a cab in such a deserted place? Yoshiya wondered. Wasn’t the man heading home? Or maybe he wanted to take a little detour on the way. The February night was too cold for walking, though. A freezing wind would push against Yoshiya’s back every now and then as it sliced down the road.

Where the scrap yard ended, another long stretch of unfriendly concrete wall began, broken only by the opening to a narrow alley. This seemed like familiar territory to the man: he never hesitated as he turned the corner. The alley was dark. Yoshiya could make out nothing in its depths. He hesitated for a moment, but he stepped in after the man. Having come this far, it made no sense to give up.

High walls pressed in on either side of the straight passageway. There was barely enough room in here for two people to pass each other, and it was as dark as the bottom of the sea, as if light never made its way to this separate world. Yoshiya had only the sound of the man’s shoes to go by. The leather slaps continued ahead of him at the same unbroken pace. And then they stopped.

Could the man have sensed that he was being followed? Was he standing still now, holding his breath, straining to see and hear what was behind him? Yoshiya’s heart shrank in the darkness, but he swallowed its loud beating and pressed on. “To hell with it,” he thought. “So what if he screams at me for following him? I’ll just tell him the truth. It could be the quickest way to set the record straight.” But then the alley gave out. It was a dead end, closed off by a sheet-metal fence. Yoshiya took a few seconds to find the hole, an opening where someone had bent the metal back just enough to

let a person through. He gathered the skirts of his coat around him and squeezed through.

A big, open space spread out on the other side of the fence. It was no empty lot but some kind of playing field. Yoshiya stood there, straining to see in the pale moonlight. There was no sign of the man.

It was a baseball field, and Yoshiya was standing somewhere way out in center field amid a stretch of trampled-down weeds. Bare ground showed through like a scar in the place where the center fielder usually stood. Over the distant home plate, the backstop soared like a set of black wings. The pitcher’s mound lay closer to hand, a slight swelling of the earth. The high metal fence ringed the entire outfield. A breeze swept across the field, carrying with it an empty potato-chip bag.

Yoshiya plunged his hands into his coat pockets and held his breath, waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened. He surveyed right field, then left field, then the pitcher’s mound and the ground beneath his feet before looking up at the sky. Several chunks of cloud hung there, the their hard edges a strange A whiff of dog shit mixed with of the grass. The man was gone. He had

disappeared without a trace. If Mr. Tabata had been here, he would have said, “So you see, Yoshiya, Our Lord reveals himself to us in the most unexpected forms.”

But Mr. Tabata had died three years earlier, of urethral cancer. His final months of suffering had been excruciating to see. Had he never once in all that time tested God? Had he never once prayed to God for some small relief from his terrible pain? Mr. Tabata had observed those harsh commandments with such rigor and lived in such intimate contact with God that he, of all people, was qualified to make such prayers (concrete and limited in time though they might be). And besides, thought Yoshiya, if it was all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?

Yoshiya felt a faint throbbing in his temples, but he could not tell if this was the remains of his hangover or something else at work. With a grimace, he pulled his hands from his pockets and began taking long, slow strides toward home plate. Only seconds earlier, the one thing on his mind had been the breath-stopping pursuit of a man who might well be his father, and that had carried him to this strange place. Now that the man had disappeared, however, the importance of the acts that had brought him this far turned suddenly unclear inside him.

What was I hoping to gain from this? Yoshiya asked himself as he strode ahead. Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now? Was I hoping to be woven into some new plot, to be given some new and better-defined role to play? No, he thought, that’s not it. What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I’m sure I’ll never see it again.

Yoshiya’s spirit now lingered in the stillness and clarity of a particular point in time and space. So what if the man was his actual father, or God, or some unrelated individual who just happened to have lost his right earlobe? It no longer made any difference to him, and this in itself had been a manifestation, a sacrament. Was it something to celebrate?

He climbed the pitcher’s mound and, standing atop its worn rubber, stretched himself to his full height. He intertwined his fingers, thrust his arms aloft, and, sucking in a lungful of cold night air, looked up once more at the moon. It was huge. Simple plank bleachers ran the length of the first—and third-base lines. They were empty, of course: it was the middle of a February night. Three levels of straight plank seats stood there in long, chilly rows. Windowless, gloomy buildings—some kind of warehouses, probably—huddled together beyond the backstop. No light. No sound.

Standing on the mound, Yoshiya swung his arms up, over, and down in large circles. He moved his feet in time with this, ahead and to the side. As he went on with these dancelike motions, his body began to warm and to recover the full senses of a living organism. Before long he realized that his headache was all but gone.

The girlfriend he had had throughout his college years called Yoshiya “Super-Frog,” because he looked like a giant frog when he danced. She loved to dance and would always drag him out to discos. “Look at you!” she used to say. “I love the way you flap those long arms

and legs of yours! You’re like a frog in the rain!”

This hurt the first time he heard it, but once he had been with her long enough, Yoshiya himself began to enjoy dancing. As he let himself go and moved his body in time to the music, he came to have a deep sense that the natural rhythm inside him was pulsing in perfect unison with the basic rhythm of the world. The ebb and flow of the tide, the dancing of the wind across the plains, the course of the stars through the heavens: he felt certain that these things were by no means occurring in places unrelated to him.

She had never seen a penis as huge as his, his girlfriend used to say, taking hold of it. Didn’t it get in the way when he danced? No, he would tell her: it never got in the way. True, it had always been on the big side, from the time he was a boy. He could not recall it ever having been of any great advantage to him, though. In fact, several girls had refused to have sex with him because it was too big. In aesthetic terms, it just looked slow and clumsy and stupid. Which is why he had always done his best to keep it hidden. “Your big wee-wee is a sign,” his mother used to tell him with absolute conviction. “It shows that you’re the child of God.” And so he believed it, too. But then one day the craziness of it hit him. All he had ever prayed for was the ability to catch outfield flies, in answer to which God had bestowed upon him a bigger penis than anybody else’s. What kind of world allowed such idiotic bargains?

Yoshiya took off his glasses and slipped them into their case. With his eyes closed, and feeling the white light of the moon on his skin, he began to dance all by himself. He drew his breath deep into his lungs and exhaled just as deeply. Unable to think of a song to match his feelings, he danced in time with the stirring of the grass and the flowing of the clouds. Before long he began to feel that someone’s eyes were fixed on him. He sensed a strange tingling in his skin. So what? he thought. Let them look if they want to. All God’s children can dance.

He trod the earth and swirled his arms, each graceful movement calling forth the next in smooth, unbroken links, his body tracing diagrammatic patterns and impromptu variations, with invisible rhythms behind and between rhythms. At each crucial point in his dance, he could survey the complex intertwining of these elements. Animals lurked in the forest like trompe l’oeil figures, some of them horrific beasts he had never seen before. He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course: the forest was inside him, and it made him who he was. The beasts were ones that he himself possessed.

How long he went on dancing, Yoshiya could not tell. But it was long enough to start him perspiring under the arms. And then it struck him what it was that lay far down in the earth upon which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of

the earth. He ceased his dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

Yoshiya thought of his mother far away in the ruined city. What would happen, he wondered, if he could stay his present self and yet turn time backward so as to meet his mother in her youth when her soul was in its deepest state of darkness? No doubt they would plunge as one into the muck of bedlam and devour each other in acts for which they would be dealt the harshest punishment. “And what of it? ‘Punishment?’ I was due for punishment long ago. The city should have crumbled to bits all around me long ago.”

His girlfriend had asked him to marry her when they graduated from college. “I want to be married to you, Super-Frog. I want to live with you and have your child—a boy, with a big thing just like yours.”

“I can’t marry you,” Yoshiya had said to her. “I know I should have told you this, but I’m the son of God. I can’t marry anybody.”

“Is this true?”

“It is true. I’m sorry.”

Yoshiya knelt down and scooped up a handful of sand, which he allowed to slip back to earth between his fingers. He did this again and again. The chilly, uneven touch of the earth reminded him of the last time he had held Mr. Tabata’s emaciated hand.

“I won’t be alive much longer, Yoshiya,” said Mr. Tabata in a voice that had grown hoarse. Yoshiya began to protest, but Mr. Tabata stopped him with a gentle shake of the head.

“Never mind that,” he said. “This life is nothing but a short, painful dream. Thanks to His guidance, I have made it this far. Before I die, though, there is one thing I have to tell you. It shames me to say it, but I have no choice. I have had lustful thoughts toward your mother any number of times. As you well know, I have a family that I love with all my heart. And your mother is a pure-hearted person. But still, I have had violent cravings for her flesh—cravings that I have never been able to suppress. I want to beg your forgiveness for that.”

“There is no need for you to beg anyone’s forgiveness, Mr. Tabata. You are not the only one who has had lustful thoughts. Even I, her son, have been pursued by terrible obsessions.” Yoshiya wanted to open himself up this way, but he knew that all it would do would be to upset Mr. Tabata even more. Yoshiya grasped Mr. Tabata’s hand and held it for a long time, hoping that the thoughts in his breast would communicate themselves from his hand to Mr. Tabata’s. Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and, whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another. The next day, Mr. Tabata drew his last breath.

Kneeling on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya gave himself up to the flow of time. Somewhere in the distance he heard the faint wail of a siren. A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grass’s song before it died.

“Oh, God,” said Yoshiya aloud.

Haruki Murakami’s work has been translated into sixteen languages. His most recent novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, was published in May 2001. A collection of stories, entitled After the Quake, will be published next summer. He lives outside Tokyo.

Copyright 2001 Harper’s Magazine Foundation

Honey Pie

Translated by Jay Rubin.

September 7, 2001

 “ o Masakichi got his paws full of honey—way more honey than he could eat by himself—and he put it in a pail, and do-o-own the mountain he went, all the way to the town, to sell his honey. Masakichi was the all-time No. 1 honey

bear.”

“Do bears have pails?” Sala asked.

“Masakichi just happened to have one,” Junpei explained. “He found it lying by the road, and he figured it would come in handy sometime.”

“And it did.”

“It really did. So Masakichi went to the town and found a spot for himself in the square. He put up a sign: ‘Deeelicious Honey. All Natural. One Cup ¥200.’”

“Can bears count money?”

“Absolutely. Masakichi lived with people when he was just a cub, and they taught him how to talk and how to count money. Masakichi was a very special bear. And so the other bears, who weren’t so special, tended to shun him.”

“Shun him?”

“Yeah, they’d go, like, ‘Hey, what’s with this guy, acting so special?’ and keep away from him. Especially Tonkichi, the tough guy. He really hated Masakichi.”

“Poor Masakichi!”

“Yeah, really. Meanwhile, the people would say, ‘O.K., he knows how to count, and he can talk and all, but when you get right down to it he’s just a bear.’ So Masakichi didn’t really belong to either world—the bear world or the people world.”

“Didn’t he have any friends?”

“Not a single friend. Bears don’t go to school, you know, so there’s no place for them to make friends.”

“Do you have friends, Jun?”

“Uncle Junpei” was too long for her, so Sala just called him Jun. “Your daddy is my absolute bestest friend from a long, long time ago. And so’s your mommy.”

“That’s good, to have friends.”

“It is good,” Junpei said. “You’re right about that”

Junpei often made up stories for Sala before she went to bed. And whenever she didn’t understand something she would ask him to explain. Junpei gave a lot of thought to his answers. Sala’s questions were often sharp and interesting, and while he was thinking about them he could also come up with new twists to the story he was telling.

Sayoko brought a glass of warm milk.

“Junpei is telling me the story of Masakichi the bear,” Sala said. “He’s the all-time No. 1 honey bear, but he doesn’t have any friends.”

“Oh, really? Is he a big bear?” Sayoko asked.

Sala turned to Junpei with an uneasy stare. “Is Masakichi big?”

“Not so big,” Junpei said. “In fact, he’s kind of on the small side. For a bear. He’s just about your size, Sala. And he’s a very sweet-tempered little guy. When he listens to music, he doesn’t listen to rock or punk or that kind of stuff. He likes to listen to Schubert, all by himself.”

“He listens to music?” Sala asked. “Does he have a CD player or something?”

“He found a boom box lying on the ground one day. He picked it up and brought it home.”

“How come all this stuff just happens to be lying around in the mountains?” Sala asked with a note of suspicion.

“Well, it’s a very, very steep mountain, and the hikers get all faint and dizzy, and they throw away tons of stuff they don’t need. Right there by the road, like, ‘Oh, man, this pack is so heavy, I feel like I’m gonna die! I don’t need this pail anymore. I don’t need this boom box anymore.’”

“I know just how they feel,” Sayoko said. “Sometimes you want to throw everything away.”

“Not me,” Sala said.

“That’s because you’re young and full of energy, Sala,” Junpei said. “Hurry and drink your milk so I can tell you the rest of the story.”

“O.K.,” she said, wrapping her hands around the glass and drinking the warm milk with great care. Then she asked, “How come Masakichi doesn’t make honey pies and sell them? I think the people in the town would like that better than just plain honey.”

“An excellent point,” Sayoko said with a smile. “His profits would be much greater that way.”

“Plowing up new markets through value added,” Junpei said. “This girl will be a real entrepreneur someday.”

It was almost 2 A.M. by the time Sala went back to bed. Junpei and Sayoko waited for her to fall asleep, then went to split a can of beer at the kitchen table. Sayoko wasn’t much of a drinker, and Junpei had to drive home.

“Sorry for dragging you out in the middle of the night,” Sayoko said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m totally exhausted, and you’re the only one who can calm her down. There was no way I was going to call Takatsuki.”

Junpei nodded and took a swig of beer. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m awake till the sun comes up, and the roads are empty at this time of night. It’s no big deal.”

“You were working on a story?”

Junpei nodded.

“How’s it going?”

“Like always. I write ’em. They print ’em. Nobody reads ’em.”

“I read them. All of them.”

“Thanks. You’re a nice person,” Junpei said. “But the short story is on its way out. Like the slide rule. Let’s talk about Sala. Has she done this before?”

Sayoko nodded. “A lot?”

“Almost every night. Sometime after midnight, she gets these hysterical fits and jumps out of bed. And I can’t get her to stop crying. I’ve tried everything.”

“Any idea what’s wrong?”

Sayoko drank what was left of her beer and stared at the empty glass.

“I think she saw too many news reports on the earthquake. It was too much for a four-year-old. She wakes up at around the time of the quake. She says a man woke her up, somebody she doesn’t know. The Earthquake Man. He tries to put her in a little box—too little for anyone to fit into. She tells him she doesn’t want to get inside, and he starts pushing her—so hard her joints crack—and he tries to stuff her inside. That’s when she screams and wakes up.”

“The Earthquake Man?”

“He’s tall and skinny and old. After she’s had the dream, she goes around turning on every light in the house and looking for him: in the closets, in the shoe cupboard in the front hall, under the beds, in all the dresser drawers. I tell her it was just a dream, but she won’t listen to me. And she won’t go to bed until she’s looked everywhere he could possibly hide. That takes at least an hour, by which time I’m wide awake. I’m so sleep-deprived I can hardly stand up, let alone work.”

Sayoko almost never spilled out her feelings like this.

“Try not to watch the news,” Junpei said. “The earthquake’s all they’re showing these days.”

“I almost never watch TV anymore. But it’s too late now. The Earthquake Man keeps coming.” Junpei thought for a while.

“What do you say we go to the zoo on Sunday? Sala says she wants to see a real bear.”

Sayoko narrowed her eyes and looked at him. “Not bad. It just might change her mood. Let’s do it—the four of us. It’s been ages. You call Takatsuki, O.K.?”

Junpei was thirty-six, born and bred in the city of Kobe, where his father owned a pair of jewelry stores. He had a sister

six years his junior. After a year at a private cram school, he had enrolled at Waseda University, in Tokyo. He had passed the entrance exams in both the business and the literature departments. He chose the literature department without the slightest hesitation and told his parents that he had entered the business department. They would never have paid for him to study literature, and Junpei had no intention of wasting four precious years studying the workings of the economy. All he wanted was to study literature, and then to become a writer.

At the university, Junpei made two friends, Takatsuki and Sayoko. Takatsuki came from the mountains of Nagano. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had been the captain of his high-school soccer team. It had taken him two years of studying to pass the entrance exam, so he was a year older than Junpei. Practical and decisive, he had the kind of looks that made people take to him right away, and he naturally assumed a leadership role in any group. But he had trouble reading books; he had entered the literature department because its exam was the only one he could pass. “What the hell,” he said, in his positive way. “I’m going to be a newspaper reporter, so I’ll let them teach me how to write.”

Junpei did not understand why Takatsuki had any interest in befriending him. Junpei was the kind of person who liked to sit alone in his room reading books or listening to music, and he was terrible at sports. Awkward with strangers, he rarely made friends. Still, for whatever reason, Takatsuki seemed to have decided the first time he saw Junpei in class that he was going to make him a friend. He tapped Junpei on the shoulder and said, “Hey, let’s get something to eat.” And by the end of the day they had opened their hearts to each other.

Takatsuki used the same approach with Sayoko. Junpei was with Takatsuki when he tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hey, what do you say the three of us go get something to eat?” And so their tight little group was born. Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko did everything together. They shared lecture notes, ate lunch in the campus dining hall, talked about their future over coffee, took parttime jobs at the same place, went to latenight movies and rock concerts, walked all over Tokyo, and drank so much beer that they even got sick together. In other words, they behaved like first-year college students the world over.

Sayoko was a real Tokyo girl. She came from the old part of town, where the merchant class had lived for centuries, and her father ran a shop selling the exquisite little accessories that go with traditional Japanese dress. The business had been in the family for several generations, and it attracted an exclusive clientele that included several famous Kabuki actors. Sayoko had plans to go on to graduate school in English literature, and ultimately to an academic career. She read a lot, and she and Junpei were constantly exchanging novels and having intense conversations about them. Sayoko had beautiful hair and intelligent eyes. She expressed herself quietly and with simple honesty, but deep down she had great strength. She was always casually dressed, without makeup, but she had a unique sense of humor, and her face would crinkle up mischievously whenever she made some funny remark. Junpei found that look of hers incredible. He had never fallen in love until he met Sayoko. He had attended a boys’ high school and had had almost no opportunities to meet girls.

But Junpei couldn’t bring himself to express his feelings to Sayoko. He knew that there would be no going back once the words were spoken, and that Sayoko might take herself off somewhere far beyond his reach. At the very least, the perfectly balanced, comfortable relationship between Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko would undergo a shift. So Junpei told himself to leave things as they were for now and watch and wait.

In the end, Takatsuki was the first to make a move. “I hate to throw this at you out of the blue, but I’m in love with Sayoko,” he told Junpei. “I hope you don’t mind.” This was midway through September of their second year. Takatsuki explained that he and Sayoko had become involved, almost by accident, while Junpei was at home for the summer vacation.

Junpei fixed his gaze on Takatsuki. It took him a few moments to understand what had happened, but when he did it sank into him like a lead weight. He no longer had any choice in the matter. “No,” he said, “I don’t mind.”

“I am so glad to hear that!” Takatsuki said with a huge smile. “You were the only one I was worried about. I mean, the three of us had such a great thing going, it was kind of like I beat you out. But, anyway, Junpei, this had to happen

sometime. If not now, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The main thing is that I want the three of us to go on being friends. O.K.?”

Junpei spent the next several days in a fog. He skipped classes and work. He lay on the floor of his one-room apartment, eating nothing but the scraps in the refrigerator and slugging down whiskey whenever the impulse struck him. He thought about quitting university and going to some distant town where he knew no one and could spend the rest of his years doing manual labor. That would be the best life style for him, he decided.

On the fifth day of this, Sayoko came to Junpei’s apartment. She was wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt and white cotton pants, and her hair was pinned back.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “Everybody’s worried that you’re dead in your room. Takatsuki asked me to check up on you. I guess he wasn’t too keen on seeing the corpse himself.”

Junpei said he had been feeling sick.

“Yeah,” she said, “you’ve lost some weight, I think.” She stared at him. “Want me to make you something to eat?” Junpei shook his head. He didn’t feel like eating, he said.

Sayoko opened the refrigerator and looked inside with a grimace. It held only two cans of beer, an old cucumber, and some baking soda. Sayoko sat down next to Junpei. “I don’t know how to ask this, Junpei, but are you feeling bad about Takatsuki and me?”

Junpei said that he was not. And it was no lie. He was not feeling bad or angry. If, in fact, he was angry, it was at himself. For Takatsuki and Sayoko to become lovers was the most natural thing in the world. Takatsuki had all the qualifications. Junpei had none. It was that simple.

“Go halves on a beer?” Sayoko asked. “Sure.”

She took a can of beer from the refrigerator and divided the contents between two glasses, handing one to Junpei. They drank in silence, separately.

“It’s kind of embarrassing to put this into words,” she said, “but I want to stay friends with you, Junpei. Not just for now, but even after we get older. A lot older. I love Takatsuki, but I need you, too, in a whole different way. Does that make me selfish?”

Junpei was not sure how to answer that, but he shook his head.

Sayoko said, “To understand something and to put that something into a form that you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, living would be a lot simpler.”

Junpei looked at Sayoko in profile. He had no idea what she was trying to say. Why does my brain always work so slowly? he wondered. He looked up, and for a long time his half-focussed eyes traced the shape of a stain on the ceiling. How would the situation have developed if he had confessed his love to Sayoko before Takatsuki had confessed his? To this Junpei could find no answer. All he knew for sure was that such a thing would never have happened.

He heard the sound of tears falling on the tatami, an oddly magnified sound. For a moment, he wondered if he was crying without being aware of it. But then he realized that Sayoko was the one who was crying. She had hung her head between her knees, and now, though she made no sound, her shoulders were trembling.

Almost unconsciously, he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. Then he drew her gently toward him. She did not resist. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to hers. She closed her eyes and let her lips part. Junpei caught the scent of tears and drew breath from her mouth. He felt the softness of her breasts against him. Inside, he felt some kind of switching of places. He even heard the sound it made—like joints creaking. But that was all. As if regaining consciousness, Sayoko moved her face back and down, pushing Junpei away.

“No,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “We can’t do this. It’s wrong.”

Junpei apologized. Sayoko said nothing. They remained that way, in silence, for a long time. The sound of a radio came in through the open window. It was a popular song. Junpei was sure that he would remember it till the day he died. But, in fact, try as he might after that, he was never able to recall the title or the melody.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Sayoko said. “It’s not your fault”

“I think I’m confused,” Junpei said honestly.

Sayoko reached out and laid her hand on Junpei’s. “Come back to school, O.K.? Tomorrow? I’ve never had a friend like you before. You give me so much. I hope you realize that.”

“So much, but not enough,” he said.

“That’s not true,” she said. “That is so not true.”

Junpei went to his classes the next day, and the tight-knit threesome of Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko continued through graduation. Junpei’s short-lived desire to disappear disappeared itself. By holding her in his arms that day in his apartment and pressing his lips to hers, Junpei had calmed something inside himself. At least he no longer felt confused. The decision had been made, even if he had not been the one to make it.

Sayoko sometimes introduced Junpei to a classmate of hers, and they would double-date. He saw a lot of one of the girls, and it was with her that he had sex for the first time, just before his twentieth birthday. But his heart was always somewhere else. He was respectful, kind, and tender to her, but never passionate or devoted. She eventually went elsewhere in search of true warmth. The same pattern repeated itself any number of times.

When he graduated, Junpei’s parents discovered that he had been majoring in literature, not economics, and things turned ugly. His father wanted him to take over the family business, but Junpei had no intention of doing that. He wanted to stay in Tokyo and keep writing fiction. There was no room for compromise on either side, and a violent argument ensued. Words were spoken that should not have been. Junpei never saw his parents again, and he was convinced that it had to be that way. Unlike his sister, who always managed to compromise and get along with their parents, Junpei had done nothing but clash with them from the time he was a child.

Junpei took a series of part-time jobs that helped him to scrape by as he continued to write fiction. Whenever he finished a story, he showed it to Sayoko and got her honest opinion, then revised it according to her suggestions. Until she pronounced a piece good, he would rewrite it again and again, carefully and patiently. He had no other mentor, and he belonged to no writers’ group.

When he was twenty-four, a story of his won an award from a literary magazine, and over the next five years Junpei was nominated for the coveted Akutagawa Prize four times, but he never actually won it. He remained the eternally promising candidate. A typical opinion from a judge on the prize committee would say, “For such a young author, this is writing of very high quality, with remarkable examples of both plot and psychological analysis. But the author has a tendency to let sentiment take over from time to time, and the work lacks both freshness and novelistic sweep.”

Takatsuki would laugh when he read such opinions. “These guys are out of their minds. What the hell is ‘novelistic sweep’? Real people don’t use words like that ‘Today’s sukiyaki was lacking in beefistic sweep.’ Ever hear anybody say anything like that?”

Junpei published two volumes of short stories before he turned thirty: “Horse in the Rain” and “Grapes.”

“Horse in the Rain” sold ten thousand copies, “Grapes” twelve thousand. These were not bad figures for short-story collections, according to his editor. The reviews were generally favorable, but none gave his work passionate support. Most of Junpei’s stories were about young people in situations of unrequited love. His style was lyrical, the plots rather old-fashioned. Readers of his generation were looking for a more inventive style and grittier plots. This was the age of video games and rap music, after all. Junpei’s editor urged him to try a novel. If he never wrote anything but short stories, he would just keep dealing with the same material over and over again. Writing a novel could open up whole new worlds for a writer. As a practical matter, too, novels attracted far more attention than stories. Writing only short stories was a hard way to make a living.

But Junpei was a born short-story writer. He would shut himself in his room, let everything else go to hell, and turn out a first draft in three days of concentrated effort. After four more days of polishing, he would give the manuscript to Sayoko and his editor to read. Basically, though, the battle was won or lost in that first week. That was when everything that mattered in the story came together. His personality was suited to this way of working: total concentration of effort over a few short days. Junpei felt only exhaustion when he thought about writing a novel. How could he possibly maintain his concentration for months at a time? That kind of pacing eluded him.

Given his austere bachelor’s life style, Junpei did not need much money. Once he had made what he needed for a given period, he would stop accepting work. He had only one silent cat to feed. His girlfriends were always the undemanding type, and when he grew bored with them he would come up with some pretext for ending the relationship. Sometimes, maybe once a month, he would wake at an odd time in the night with a feeling that was close to panic. I’m not going anywhere, he would tell himself. I can struggle all I want, but I’m never going to go anywhere. Then he would either force himself to go to his desk and write, or drink until he could no longer stay awake.

Takatsuki had landed the job he’d always wanted—reporting for a top newspaper. Since he never studied, his grades at the university were nothing to brag about, but the impression he made at interviews was overwhelmingly positive, and he had basically been hired on the spot. Sayoko had entered graduate school, as planned. They married six months

after graduation, the ceremony as cheerful and busy as Takatsuki himself. They honeymooned in France, and bought a two-room condo a short commute from downtown. Junpei would come over for dinner a couple of times a week, and the newlyweds always welcomed him warmly. It was almost as if they were more comfortable with Junpei around than when they were alone together.

Takatsuki enjoyed his work at the newspaper. He was assigned first to the city desk, which kept him running from one scene of tragedy to the next “I can see a corpse now and not feel a thing,” he said. Bodies dismembered by trains, charred in fires, discolored with age, the bloated cadavers of drowning victims, gunshot victims with their brains splattered. “Whatever distinguished one lump of flesh from another when they were alive, it’s all the same once they’re dead,” he said. “Just used-up shells.”

Takatsuki was sometimes too busy to make it home before morning. Then Sayoko would call Junpei. She knew that he was often up all night.

“Are you working? Can you talk?”

“Sure,” he would say. “I’m not doing anything special.”

They’d discuss the books they had read, or things that had come up in their daily lives. Then they’d talk about the old days, when they were still free and spontaneous. Conversations like that would inevitably bring back memories of the time that Junpei had held Sayoko in his arms: the smooth touch of her lips, the softness of her breasts against him, the transparent early-autumn sunlight streaming onto the tatami floor of his apartment—these were never far from his thoughts.

Just after she turned thirty, Sayoko became pregnant. She was a graduate assistant at the time, but she took a break

from her job to give birth to a baby girl. The three of them came up with all kinds of names for the baby, but decided in the end on one of Junpei’s suggestions—Sala. “I love the sound of it,” Sayoko told him. There were no complications with the birth, and that night Junpei and Takatsuki found themselves together without Sayoko for the first time in a long while. Junpei had brought over a bottle of single malt to celebrate, and they emptied it together at the kitchen table.

“Why does time shoot by like this?” Takatsuki asked with a depth of feeling that was rare for him. “It seems like only yesterday I was a freshman, and then I met you, and then I met Sayoko, and the next thing I know I’m a father. It’s weird, like I’m watching a movie in fast-forward. You probably wouldn’t understand, Junpei. You’re still living the way you did in college. It’s like you never stopped being a student, you lucky bastard.”

“Not so lucky,” Junpei said, but he knew how Takatsuki felt. Sayoko was a mother now. This was as big a shock for Junpei as it was for Takatsuki. The gears of life had moved ahead a notch with a loud ker-chunk, and Junpei knew that they would never turn back again. The one thing that he was not yet sure of was how he was supposed to feel about it.

“I couldn’t tell you this before,” Takatsuki said, “but I’m pretty sure Sayoko was more attracted to you than she was to me.” He was drunk, but there was a more serious gleam in his eye than usual.

“That’s crazy,” Junpei said with a smile.

“Like hell it is. I know what I’m talking about. You know how to put words on a page, but you don’t know shit about a woman’s feelings. A drowned corpse does better than you. You had no idea how she felt about you, and I figured, what the hell, I was in love with her, and I had to have her. I still think she’s the greatest woman in the world. I still think it was my right to have her.”

“Nobody’s saying it wasn’t,” Junpei said.

Takatsuki nodded. “But you still don’t get it. Not really. When it comes to anything halfway important, you’re so damn stupid. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a different thing.”

“Anyhow, now there are four of us,” Takatsuki said with a sigh. “Four of us. Four. Is that O.K.?”

Junpei learned just before Sala’s second birthday that Takatsuki and Sayoko were on the verge of breaking up. Sayoko

seemed apologetic when she broke the news to him. Takatsuki had had a lover since the time of Sayoko’s pregnancy, and he hardly ever came home anymore, she explained.

Junpei couldn’t seem to grasp what he was hearing, no matter how many details Sayoko was able to give him. Why would Takatsuki have wanted another woman? He had declared Sayoko to be the greatest woman in the world the night that Sala was born, and he had meant it. Besides, he was crazy about Sala. “I mean, I’m over at your house all the time,

eating dinner with you guys, right? But I never sensed a thing. You were happiness itself—the perfect family.”

“It’s true,” Sayoko said. “We weren’t lying to you or putting on an act. But quite separately from that he got himself a girlfriend, and we can never go back to what we had. So we decided to split up. Don’t let it bother you too much. I’m sure things will work out better now, in a lot of different ways.”

Sayoko and Takatsuki were divorced some months later. They reached an agreement without the slightest problem: no recriminations, no disputed claims. Takatsuki went to live with his girlfriend; he came to visit Sala once a week, and they all agreed that Junpei would try to be present at those times. “It would make things easier for both of us,” Sayoko told Junpei. He felt as if he had suddenly grown much older, though he had only just turned thirty-three.

Whenever they got together, Takatsuki was his usual talkative self, and Sayoko’s behavior was perfectly natural, as though nothing had happened. If anything, she seemed even more natural than before, in Junpei’s eyes. Sala had no idea that her parents were divorced. And Junpei played his assigned role perfectly. The three joked around as always and talked about the old days.

“Hey, Junpei, tell me,” Takatsuki said, one January night when the two of them were walking home, their breath white in the chill air. “Do you have somebody you’re planning to marry?”

“Not at the moment,” Junpei said.

“No girlfriend?”

“Nope.”

“What do you say you and Sayoko get together?”

Junpei squinted at Takatsuki as if at some too bright object. “Why?” he asked.

“What do you mean, ‘why’? It’s so obvious! If nothing else, you’re the only man I’d want to be a father to Sala.”

“Is that the only reason you think I should marry Sayoko?”

Takatsuki sighed and draped his thick arm around Junpei’s shoulders.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like the idea of marrying Sayoko? Or is it the thought of stepping in after me?”

“That doesn’t bother me. I just wonder if you can make this like some kind of deal. It’s a question of decency.”

“This is no deal,” Takatsuki said. “And it’s got nothing to do with decency. You love Sayoko, right? You love Sala, too, don’t you? That’s the most important thing. I know you’ve got your own hangups. Fine. I grant you that. But to me it looks like you’re trying to pull off your shorts without taking off your pants.”

Junpei said nothing, and Takatsuki went into an unusually long silence. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked down the road to the station, heaving white breath into the night.

“In any case,” Junpei said, “you’re an absolute idiot.”

“I have to give you credit,” Takatsuki said. “You’re right on the mark. I don’t deny it. I’m ruining my own life. But I’m telling you, Junpei, I couldn’t help it. There was no way I could put a stop to it. I don’t know any better than you do why it had to happen. It just happened. And, if not here and now, something like it would have happened sooner or later.”

Junpei felt as if he had heard the same speech before. “Do you remember what you said to me the night that Sala was born? That Sayoko was the greatest woman in the world, that you could never find anyone to take her place.”

“And it’s still true. Nothing has changed where that’s concerned. But that very fact can sometimes make things go bad.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Junpei said.

“And you never will,” Takatsuki said with a shake of the head. He always had the last word.

Two years went by. Sayoko never went back to teaching. Junpei got an editor friend of his to send her a story to

translate, and she carried the job off with a certain flair. The editor was impressed enough to give her a substantial new piece the following month. The pay was not very good, but it added to what Takatsuki was sending and helped Sayoko and Sala to live comfortably.

They all went on meeting at least once a week, as they always had. Whenever urgent business kept Takatsuki away, Sayoko, Junpei, and Sala would eat together. The table was quiet without Takatsuki, and the conversation turned to

oddly mundane matters. A stranger would have assumed that the three of them were just a typical family.

Junpei went on writing a steady stream of stories, bringing out his fourth collection, “Silent Moon,” when he was thirty-five. It received one of the prizes reserved for established writers, and the title story was made into a movie. Junpei also produced a volume of music criticism, wrote a book on ornamental gardening, and translated a collection of John Updike’s short stories. All were well received. Securing his position as a writer little by little, he had developed a steady readership and a stable income.

He continued to think seriously about asking Sayoko to marry him. On more than one occasion, he kept himself awake all night thinking about it, and for a time he was unable to work. But still he could not make up his mind. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that his relationship with Sayoko had been consistently choreographed by others. His position was always passive. Takatsuki was the one who had picked the two of them out of his class and created the threesome. Then he had taken Sayoko, married her, made a child with her, and divorced her. And now Takatsuki was the one who was urging Junpei to marry her. Junpei loved Sayoko, of course. About that there was no question. And now was the perfect time for him to be united with her. She probably wouldn’t turn him down. But Junpei couldn’t help thinking that things were just a bit too easy. What was there left for him to decide? And so he went on wondering. And not deciding. And then the earthquake came.

Junpei was in Barcelona at the time, doing a story for an airline magazine. He returned to his hotel in the evening to

find the TV news filled with images of collapsed buildings and black clouds of smoke. It looked like the aftermath of an air raid. Because the announcer was speaking in Spanish, it took Junpei a while to realize what city he was looking at. “You’re from Kobe, aren’t you?” his photographer asked.

But Junpei did not try to call his parents. The rift was too deep, and had gone on too long for there to be any hope of reconciliation. Junpei flew back to Tokyo and resumed his normal life there. He never turned on the television, and hardly looked at a newspaper. Whenever the subject of the earthquake came up, he would clamp his mouth shut. It was an echo from a past that he had buried long ago. He hadn’t set foot on those streets since his graduation, but still the catastrophe laid bare wounds that were hidden somewhere deep inside him. It seemed to change certain aspects of his life—quietly, but completely. Junpei felt an entirely new sense of isolation. I have no roots, he thought. I’m not connected to anything.

Early on the Sunday morning that they had all planned to take Sala to the zoo to see the bears, Takatsuki called to say that he had to fly to Okinawa. He had managed at last to pry the promise of a one-on-one interview out of the governor. “Sorry, but you’ll have to go to the zoo without me. I don’t suppose Mr. Bear will be too upset if I don’t make it.”

So Junpei and Sayoko took Sala to the Ueno Zoo. Junpei held Sala in his arms and showed her the bears. She pointed to the biggest, blackest bear and asked, “Is that one Masakichi?”

“No, no, that’s not Masakichi,” Junpei said. “Masakichi is smaller than that, and he’s smarter-looking, too. That’s the tough guy, Tonkichi.”

“Tonkichi!” Sala yelled again and again, but the bear paid no attention. Then she looked at Junpei and said, “Tell me a story about Tonkichi.”

“That’s a hard one,” Junpei said. “There aren’t that many interesting stories about Tonkichi. He’s just an ordinary bear. He can’t talk or count money like Masakichi.”

“But I bet you can tell me something good about him. One thing.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Junpei said. “There’s at least one good thing to tell about even the most ordinary bear. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Well, Tonchiki—”

“Tonkichi!” Sala corrected him with a touch of impatience.

“Ah, yes, sorry. Well, Tonkichi had one thing he could do really well, and that was catching salmon. He’d go to the river and crouch down behind a boulder and snap!—he would grab himself a salmon. You have to be really fast to do something like that. Tonkichi was not the brightest bear on the mountain, but he sure could catch more salmon than any of the other bears. More than he could ever hope to eat. But he couldn’t go to town to sell his extra salmon, because he didn’t know how to talk.”

“That’s easy,” Sala said. “All he had to do was trade his extra salmon for Masakichi’s extra honey.”

“You’re right,” Junpei said. “And that’s what Tonkichi decided to do. So Tonkichi and Masakichi started trading salmon for honey, and before long they got to know each other really well. Tonkichi realized that Masakichi was not such a stuck-up bear after all, and Masakichi realized that Tonkichi was not just a tough guy. Before they knew it, they were best friends. Tonkichi worked hard at catching salmon, and Masakichi worked hard at collecting honey. But then one day, like a bolt from the blue, the salmon disappeared from the river.”

“A bolt from the blue?”

“Like a flash of lightning from a clear blue sky,” Sayoko explained. “All of a sudden, without warning.”

“All of a sudden the salmon disappeared?” Sala asked, with a sombre expression. “But why?”

“Well, all the salmon in the world got together and decided they weren’t going to swim up that river anymore, because a bear named Tonkichi was there, and he was so good at catching salmon. Tonkichi never caught another decent salmon after that. The best he could do was catch an occasional skinny salmon and eat it, but the worst-tasting thing you could ever want to eat is a skinny salmon.”

“Poor Tonkichi!” Sala said.

“And that’s how Tonkichi ended up being sent to the zoo?” Sayoko asked.

“Well, that’s a long, long story,” Junpei said, clearing his throat. “But, basically, yes, that’s what happened.”

“Didn’t Masakichi help Tonkichi?” Sala asked.

“He tried. They were best friends, after all. That’s what friends are for. Masakichi shared his honey with Tonkichi—for free! But Tonkichi said, ‘I can’t let you do that. It’d be like taking advantage of you.’ Masakichi said, ‘You don’t have to be such a stranger with me, Tonkichi. If I were in your position, you’d do the same thing for me, I’m sure. You would, wouldn’t you?’”

“Sure he would,” Sala said.

“But things didn’t stay that way between them for long,” Sayoko interjected.

“Things didn’t stay that way between them for long,” Junpei said. “Tonkichi told Masakichi, ‘We’re supposed to be friends. It’s not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that’s not real friendship. I’m leaving this mountain now, Masakichi, and I’ll try my luck somewhere else. And if you and I meet up again somewhere, we will still be best friends.’ So they shook hands and parted. But after Tonkichi came down from the mountain, he didn’t know enough to be careful in the outside world, so a hunter caught him in a trap. That was the end of Tonkichi’s freedom. They sent him to the zoo.”

“Couldn’t you have come up with a better ending? Like, everybody lives happily ever after?” Sayoko asked Junpei later.

“I haven’t thought of one yet”

The three of them had dinner together, as usual, in Sayoko’s apartment. Sayoko boiled a pot of spaghetti and

defrosted some tomato sauce while Junpei made a salad of green beans and onions. They opened a bottle of red wine and poured Sala a glass of orange juice. When they had finished eating, and cleaning the kitchen, Junpei read to Sala from a picture book, but when bedtime came she resisted.

“Please, Mama, do the bra trick,” she begged.

Sayoko blushed. “Not now,” she said. “We have a guest.”

“No, we don’t,” Sala said. “Junpei’s not a guest.”

“What’s this all about?” Junpei asked.

“It’s just a silly game,” Sayoko said.

“Mama takes her bra off under her clothes, puts it on the table, and puts it back on again. She has to keep one hand on the table. And we time her. She’s great!”

“Sala!” Sayoko growled, shaking her head. “It’s just a little game we play at home. It’s not meant for anybody else.”

“Sounds like fun to me,” Junpei said.

“Please, Mama, show Junpei! Just once. If you do it, I’ll go to bed right away.”

“Oh, what’s the use,” Sayoko muttered. She took off her digital watch and handed it to Sala. “Now, you’re not going to give me any more trouble about going to bed, right? O.K., get ready to time me when I count to three.”

Sayoko was wearing a baggy black crewneck sweater. She put both hands on the table and counted, “One ... two ... three!” Like a turtle’s head retracting into its shell, her right hand disappeared up her sleeve, and then there was a light

back-scratching kind of movement. Out came the right hand again, and the left hand went up its sleeve. Sayoko turned her head just a bit, and the left hand came out holding a white bra—a small one, with no wires. Without the slightest wasted motion, the hand and bra went back up the sleeve, and the hand came out again. Then the right hand pulled in, poked around at the back, and came out again. The end. Sayoko rested her right hand on her left on the table.

“Twenty-five seconds,” Sala said. “That’s great, Mama, a new record! Your best time so far was thirty-six seconds.” Junpei applauded. “Wonderful! Like magic.”

Sala clapped her hands, too. Sayoko stood up and announced, “All right, show time is over. To bed, young lady. You promised.”

Sala kissed Junpei on the cheek and went to bed.

Sayoko stayed with her until her breathing was deep and steady, then joined Junpei on the sofa. “I have a confession to make,” she said. “I cheated.”

“Cheated?”

“I didn’t put the bra back on. I just pretended. I slipped it out from under my sweater and dropped it on the floor.” Junpei laughed. “What a terrible mother!”

“I wanted to make a new record,” she said, narrowing her eyes with a smile. He hadn’t seen her smile in that simple, mischievous way for a long time. Time wobbled on its axis inside Junpei, like curtains stirring in a breeze. He reached for Sayoko’s shoulder, and her hand took his. They came together on the sofa in a strong embrace. With complete naturalness, they wrapped their arms around each other and kissed. It was as if nothing had changed since the time they were nineteen.

“We should have been like this to begin with,” Sayoko whispered after they had moved from the sofa to her bed. “But you didn’t get it. You just didn’t get it. Not till the salmon disappeared from the river.”

They took their clothes off and held each other gently. Their hands groped clumsily, as if they were both having sex for the first time. They took their time, until they knew they were ready, and then at last Junpei entered Sayoko and she drew him in.

None of this seemed real to Junpei. In the half-light, he felt as if he were crossing a deserted bridge that went on and on forever. He moved, and she moved with him. Again and again, he wanted to come, but he held himself back, fearing that, once it happened, the dream would end and everything would vanish.

Then, behind him, he heard a slight creaking sound. The bedroom door was easing open. The light from the hallway took the shape of the door and fell on the rumpled bedclothes. Junpei raised himself and turned to see Sala standing against the light. Sayoko held her breath and moved her hips away, pulling Junpei out. Gathering the sheet to her breasts, she used one hand to straighten the hair on her forehead.

Sala was not crying or screaming. Her right hand gripping the doorknob, she just stood there, looking at the two of them but seeing nothing. Her eyes were focussed on emptiness.

Sayoko called her name.

“The man said to come here,” Sala said in a flat voice, like someone who has just been ripped out of a dream. “The man?” Sayoko asked.

“The Earthquake Man. He came and woke me up. He told me to tell you. He said he has the box ready for everybody. He said he’s waiting with the lid open. He said I should tell you that, and you would understand.”

Sala slept in Sayoko’s bed that night. Junpei stretched out on the living-room sofa with a blanket, but he could not sleep. The TV faced the sofa, and for a very long time he stared at the dead screen. Junpei knew that they were inside there. They were waiting with the box open. Junpei felt a chill run up his spine, and, no matter how long he waited, it did not go away.

He gave up trying to sleep and went to the kitchen. He made himself some coffee and sat at the kitchen table to drink it, but he felt something bunched up under one foot. It was Sayoko’s bra, still lying there. He picked it up and hung it on the back of a chair. It was a simple, white piece of underwear, devoid of decoration. It hung on the kitchen chair in the predawn darkness like some anonymous witness who had wandered in from a time long past.

Junpei thought about his early days in college. He could still hear Takatsuki the first time they met, saying, “Hey, let’s get something to eat,” in that warm way of his, and he could see Takatsuki’s friendly smile that seemed to say, “Relax. The world is just going to keep getting better and better.” Where did we eat that time, Junpei wondered, and what did

we have? He couldn’t remember, though he was sure it was nothing special.

“Why did you choose me to go to lunch with?” Junpei had asked him that day. Takatsuki tapped his own temple with complete confidence. “I have a talent for picking the right friends at the right times in the right places.”

And Takatsuki had not been wrong, Junpei thought, setting his coffee mug on the kitchen table. He did have an intuitive knack for picking the right friends. But that was not enough. Finding one person to love over the long haul of life was quite a different matter from finding friends. Junpei closed his eyes and thought about the stretch of time he had passed through. He did not want to think of it as something he had merely used up without any purpose.

As soon as Sayoko woke in the morning, he would ask her to marry him, Junpei decided. He was sure now. He couldn’t waste another minute. Taking care not to make a sound, he opened the bedroom door and looked at Sayoko and Sala sleeping bundled in a comforter. Sala lay with her back to Sayoko, whose arm was draped on Sala’s shoulder. Junpei touched Sayoko’s hair where it fell across the pillow, and caressed Sala’s small, pink cheek with the tip of his finger. Neither of them stirred. He eased himself down to the carpeted floor by the bed, his back against the wall, to watch over them in their sleep.

Eyes fixed on the hands of the clock, Junpei thought about the rest of the story for Sala. He had to find a way to end the tale of Masakichi and Tonkichi. There had to be a way to save Tonkichi from the zoo. Junpei retraced the story from the beginning. Before long, an idea began to sprout in his head, and, little by little, it took shape.

Tonkichi had the same thought as Sala: he would use the honey that Masakichi had collected to bake honey pies. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had a real talent for making crisp, delicious honey pies. Masakichi took the honey pies to town and sold them to the people there. The people loved Tonkichi’s honey pies and bought them by the dozen. So Tonkichi and Masakichi never had to separate again: they lived happily ever after in the mountains.

Sala would be sure to love the new ending. And so would Sayoko. I want to write stories that are different from the ones I’ve written so far, Junpei thought. I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so that they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone—not anyone—try to put them into that crazy box, not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar. +

Landscape with Flatiron

Translated by Jay Rubin

Junko was watching television when the phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Keisuke sat in the corner of the room wearing headphones, eyes half-closed, head swinging back and forth as his long fmgers flew over the strings of his electric guitar. He was practicing a fast passage and obviously had no idea the phone was ringing. Junko picked up the receiver.

“Did I wake you?” Miyake asked in his familiar muffled Osaka accent. “Nah,” Junko said. “We’re still up.”

“I’m at the beach. You should see all this driftwood! We can make a big one this time. Can you come down?”

“Sure,” Junko said. “Let me change clothes. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She slipped on a pair of tights and then her jeans. On top she wore a turtleneck sweater, and she stuffed a pack of cigarettes into the pocket of her woolen coat. Purse, matches, key ring. She nudged Keisuke in the back with her foot. He tore off his headphones.

“I’m going for a bonfire on the beach,” she said.

“Miyake again?” Keisuke asked with a scowl. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s February, you know. Twelve o’clock at night! You’re going to go make a bonfire now?”

“That’s okay, you don’t have to come. I’ll go by myself” Keisuke sighed. “Nah, I’ll come. Give me a minute to change.”

He turned off his amp, and over his pajamas he put on pants, a sweater, and a down jacket, which he zipped up to his chin. Junko wrapped a scarf around her neck and put on a knitted

hat.

“You guys are crazy,” Keisuke said as they took the path down to the beach. “What’s so great about bonfires?”

The night was cold, but there was no wind at all. Words left their mouths to hang frozen in midair.

“What’s so great about Pearl Jam?” Junko said. “Just a lot of noise.”

“Pearl Jam has ten million fans all over the world,” Keisuke said.

“Well, bonfires have had fans all over the world for fifty thousand years,” Junko said.

“You’ve got something there,” Keisuke said.

“People will be lighting fires long after Pearl Jam is gone.”

“You’ve got something there, too.” Keisuke pulled his right hand out of his pocket and put his arm around Junko’s shoulders. “The trouble is, I don’t have a damn thing to do with anything fifty thousand years ago—or fifty thousand years from now, either. Nothing. Zip. What’s important is now. Who knows when the world is going end? Who can think about the future? The only thing that matters is whether I can get my stomach full right now and get it up right now. Right?”

They climbed the steps to the top of the breakwater. Miyake was down in his usual spot on the beach, collecting driftwood of all shapes and sizes and making a neat pile. One huge log must have taken a major effort to drag to the spot.

The light of the moon transformed the shoreline into a sharpened sword blade. The winter waves were strangely hushed as they washed over the sand. Miyake was the only one on the beach.

“Pretty good, huh?” he said with a puff of white breath.

“Incredible!” Junko said.

“This happens every once in a while. You know, we had that stormy day with the big waves. Lately, I can tell from the sound, like, ‘Today some great firewood’s going to wash up.’”

“Okay, okay, we know how good you are,” Keisuke said, rubbing his hands together. “Now let’s get warm. It’s so damn cold, it’s enough to shrivel your balls.”

“Hey, take it easy. There’s a right way to do this. First you’ve got to plan it. And when you’ve got it all arranged so it’ll work without a hitch, you light it slow-like. You can’t rush it. ‘The patient beggar earns his keep.’”

“Yeah,” Keisuke said. “Like the patient hooker earns her keep.”

Miyake shook his head. “You’re too young to be making such crummy jokes all the time,” he said.

Miyake had done a skillful job of interlacing the bigger logs and smaller scraps until his pile had come to resemble some kind of avant-garde sculpture. Stepping back a few paces, he would examine in detail the form he had constructed, adjust some of the pieces, then circle around to the other side for another look, repeating the process several times. As always. All he had to do was look at the way the pieces of wood were combined to begin having mental images of the subtlest movement of the rising flames, the way a sculptor can imagine the pose of a figure hidden in a lump of stone.

Miyake took his time, but once he had everything arranged to his satisfaction, he nodded as if to say to himself, That’s it: perfect. Next, he bunched up sheets of newspaper that he had brought along, slipped them through the gaps at the bottom of the pile, and lit them with a plastic cigarette lighter. Junko took her cigarettes from her pocket, put one in her mouth, and struck a match. Narrowing her eyes, she stared at Miyake’s hunched back and balding head. This was it: the one heart-stopping moment of the whole procedure. Would the fire catch? Would it erupt in giant flames?

The three stared in silence at the mountain of driftwood. The sheets of newspaper flared up, rose swaying in flames for a moment, then shriveled and went out. After that there was nothing. It didn’t work, thought Junko. The wood must have been wetter than it looked.

She was on the verge of losing hope when a plume of white smoke shot up from the pile. With no wind to disperse it, the smoke became an unbroken thread rising straight toward the sky. The pile must have caught fire somewhere, but still there was no sign of flames.

No one said a word. Even the talkative Keisuke kept his mouth shut tight, hands shoved in coat pockets. Miyake hunkered down on the sand. Junko folded her arms across her chest, cigarette in hand. She would puff on it occasionally, as if suddenly recalling that it was there.

As usual, Junko thought about Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” It was the story of a man traveling alone through the snowy Alaskan interior and his attempts to light a fire. He would freeze to death unless he could make it catch. The sun was going down. Junko hadn’t read much fiction, but that one short story she had read again and again, ever since her teacher had assigned it as an essay topic during the summer vacation of her first year in high school. The scene of the story would always come vividly to mind as she read. She could feel the man’s

fear and hope and despair as if they were her own; she could sense the very pounding of his heart as he hovered on the brink of death. Most important of all, though, was the fact that the man was fundamentally longing for death. She knew that for sure. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she knew it from the start. Death was really what he wanted. He knew that it

was the right ending for him. And yet he had to go on fighting with all his might. He had to fight against an overwhelming adversary in order to survive. What most shook Junko was this deep-rooted contradiction.

The teacher ridiculed her view. “Death is really what he wanted? That’s a new one for me! And strange! Quite ‘original,’ I’d have to say.” He read her conclusion aloud before the class, and everybody laughed.

But Junko knew. All of them were wrong. Otherwise, how could the ending of the story be so quiet and beautiful?

“Uh, Mr. Miyake,” Keisuke ventured, “don’t you think the fire has gone out?”

“Don’t worry, it’s caught. It’s just getting ready to flare up. See how it’s smoking? You know what they say: ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’”

“Well, you know what else they say: ‘Where there’s blood, there’s a hard-on.’”

“Is that all you ever talk about?”

“No, but how can you be so sure it hasn’t gone out?”

“I just know. It’s going to flare up.”

“How did you come to master such an art, Mr. Miyake?”

“I wouldn’t call it an ‘art.’ I learned it when I was a Boy Scout. When you’re a Scout, like it or not, you learn everything there is to know about building a fire.”

“I see,” said Keisuke. “A Boy Scout, huh?”

“That’s not the whole story, of course. I have a kind of talent, too. I don’t mean to brag, but when it comes to making a bonfire I have a special talent that most folks just don’t have.”

“It must give you a lot of pleasure, but I don’t suppose this talent of yours makes you lots of money.”

“True. None at all,” Miyake said with a smile.

As he had predicted, a few small flames began to flicker at the center of the pile, accompanied by a faint crackling sound. Junko let out a long-held breath. Now there was nothing to worry about. They would have their bonfire. Facing the newborn flames, the three began to stretch out their hands. For the next few minutes there was nothing more to be done but to watch in silence as, little by little, the flames gained in strength. Those people of fifty thousand years ago must have felt like this when they held their hands out to the flames, thought Junko.

“I understand you’re from Kobe, Mr. Miyake,” Keisuke said in a cheery voice, as if the thought had suddenly popped into his head. “Did you have relatives or something in the Kansai earthquake last month?”

“I’m not sure,” said Miyake. “I don’t have any ties with Kobe anymore. Not for years.”

“Years? Well, you sure haven’t lost your Kansai accent.”

“No? I can’t tell, myself”

“I do declare, you must be joking,” said Keisuke in exaggerated Kansai tones.

“Cut the shit, Keisuke. The last thing I want to hear is some Ibaragi asshole trying to talk to me in a phony Kansai accent. You eastern farm boys would be better off tearing around on your motorcycles during the slack season.”

“Whoa, I sure rubbed you the wrong way! You look like a nice quiet guy, but you’ve got one hell of a mouth. And this place is Ibaraki, not ‘Ibaragi.’ All you Kansai types are ready to put us eastern lam boys’ down at the drop of a hat. I give up,” Keisuke said. “But seriously, though, did anybody get hurt? You must have had somebody you know in Kobe. Have you seen the news on TV?”

“Let’s change the subject,” Miyake said. “Whiskey?”

“You bet.”

“Jun?”

“Just a little,” Junko said.

Miyake pulled a thin metal flask from the pocket of his leather jacket and handed it to Keisuke, who twisted off the cap and poured some whiskey into his mouth without touching his lips to the rim. He glugged it down and sucked in a sharp breath.

“That is great!” he said. “This has got to be a twenty-one-year-old single malt! Super stuff! Aged in oak. You can hear the roar of the sea and the breath of Scottish angels.”

“Give me a break, Keisuke. It’s the cheapest Suntory you can buy.”

Next it was Junko’s turn. She took the flask from Keisuke, poured a little into the cap, and tried a few tiny sips. She grimaced, but chased after that special warm feeling as the liquid moved down from her throat to her stomach. The core of her body grew a touch warmer. Next, Miyake took one quiet swallow, and Keisuke followed him with another gulp. As the flask moved from hand to hand, the bonfire grew in size and strength—not all at once, but in slow, gradual stages. That was the great thing about Miyake’s bonfires. The spread of the flames was soft and gentle, like an expert caress, with nothing rough or hurried about it—their only purpose was to warm people’s hearts.

Junko never said much in the presence of the fire. She hardly moved. The flames accepted all things in silence, drank them in, understood, and forgave. A family, a real family, was probably like this, she thought.

Junko came to this town in May of her third year in high school. With her father’s seal and passbook, she had taken three hundred thousand yen from the bank, stuffed all the clothes she could into a Boston bag, and run away from home. She transferred from one train to the next at random until she had come all the way from Tokorozawa to this little seaside spot in Ibaraki Prefecture, a town she had never even heard of. At the realtor’s across from the station she found a one-room apartment, and the following week took a job at a convenience store on the coast highway. To her mother she wrote: Don’t worry about me, and please don’t look for me, I’m doing fine.

She was sick to death of school and couldn’t stand the sight of her father. She had gotten on well with him when she was little. On weekends and holidays the two of them had gone everywhere together. She felt proud and strong to walk down the street holding his hand. But when her periods started near the end of elementary school, and her pubic hair began to grow, and her chest began to swell, he started to look at her in a strange new way. After she passed five-foot-six in the third year of junior high, he hardly spoke to her at all.

Plus, her grades were nothing to boast about. Near the top of her class when she entered middle school, by graduation time it would have been easier to count her place from the bottom, and she barely made it into high school. Which is not to say that she was stupid: she just couldn’t concentrate. She could never fmish anything she started. Whenever she tried to concentrate, her head would ache deep inside. It hurt her to breathe, and the rhythm of her heart became irregular. Attending school was absolute torture.

Not long after she settled in this new town, she met Keisuke. He was two years older, and a great surfer. He was tall, dyed his hair brown, and had beautiful straight teeth. He had settled

in Ibaraki for its good surf, and formed a rock band with some friends. He was registered at a second-rate private college, but hardly ever went to campus and had zero prospects of graduating. His parents ran an old respected sweetshop in the city of Mito, and he could have carried on the family business as a last resort, but he had no intention of settling down as a sweetshop owner. All he wanted was to ride around with his friends in his Datsun truck, surf, and play the guitar in their amateur band—an easygoing lifestyle that anyone could see was not going to last forever.

Junko got friendly with Miyake after she moved in with Keisuke. Miyake seemed to be in his mid-forties—a small, slim guy with glasses, a long, narrow face, and short hair. He was clean-shaven, but he had such a heavy beard that by sundown each day his face was covered in shadows. He liked to wear a faded dungaree shirt or aloha shirt, which he never tucked into his baggy old chinos, and on his feet he wore white, worn-out sneakers. In winter, he would put on a creased leather jacket and sometimes a baseball cap. Junko had never seen him in any other kind of outfit. Everything he wore, though, was spotlessly clean.

Speakers of the Kansai dialect were all but nonexistent in this place, so people noticed Miyake. “He lives alone in a rented house near here,” one of the girls at work told Junko. “He paints pictures. I don’t think he’s famous or anything, and I’ve never seen his stuff. But he lives okay. He seems to manage. He goes to Tokyo sometimes and comes back late in the day with painting supplies or something. Gee, I don’t know, he’s maybe been here five years or so. You see him on the beach all the time making bonfires. I guess he likes them. I mean, he always has this intense look in his eyes when he’s making one. He doesn’t talk much, and he’s kind of weird, but he’s not a bad guy.”

Miyake would come to the convenience store at least three times a day. In the morning he’d buy milk, bread, and a newspaper. At noon, he’d buy a box lunch, and in the evening he’d buy a cold can of beer and a snack—the same thing, day after day. He and Junko never exchanged more than the barest civilities, but she found herself drawn to him after a while.

When they were alone in the store one morning, she took a chance and asked him about himself. Why did he come in so often, even if he did live close-by? Why didn’t he just buy lots of milk and beer and keep it in the refrigerator? Wouldn’t that be more convenient? Of course, it was all the same to the store people, but still ...

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said. “It’d make more sense to stock up, but I can’t.”

“Why not?” Junko asked.

“Well, it’s just, like—I can’t, that’s all.”

“I didn’t mean to pry or anything,” Junko said. “Please don’t let it bother you. It’s just the way I am. I can’t help asking questions when I don’t know something. I don’t mean any harm

by it.”

Miyake hesitated a moment, scratching his head. Then, with some difficulty, he said, “Tell you the truth, I don’t have a refrigerator. I don’t like refrigerators.”

Junko smiled. “I don’t like refrigerators myself, but I do have one. Isn’t it kind of inconvenient not having one?”

“Sure it’s inconvenient, but I hate the things, so what can I do? I can’t sleep at night when there’s a refrigerator around.”

What a weird guy, thought Junko. But now she was more interested in him than ever.

Walking on the beach one evening a few days later, Junko saw Miyake tending a bonfire, alone. It was a small fire made of driftwood he had collected. Junko spoke to Miyake, then joined him at the fire. Standing beside him, she was a good couple of inches taller. The two of them traded simple greetings, then said nothing at all as they stared at the fire.

It was the first time that Junko felt a certain “something” as she watched the flames of a bonfire: “something” deep down, a “wad” of feeling, she might have called it, because it was too raw, too heavy, too real to be called an idea. It coursed through her body and vanished, leaving behind a sweet-sad, chest-gripping, strange sort of feeling. For a time after it had gone, she had goose flesh on her arms.

“Tell me, Mr. Miyake, when you see the shapes that a bonfire makes, do you ever feel kind of strange?”

“How so?”

“I don’t know, it’s like all of a sudden you get very clear about something people don’t usually notice in everyday life. I don’t know how to put it, I’m not smart enough, but watching the fire now, I get this deep, quiet kind of feeling.”

Miyake thought about it awhile. “You know, Jun,” he said, “a fire can be any shape it wants to be. It’s free. So it can look like anything at all depending on what’s inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that’s because it’s showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself. You know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But it doesn’t happen with just any fire. For something like this to happen, the fire itself has to be free. It won’t happen with a gas stove or a cigarette lighter. It won’t even happen with an ordinary bonfire. For the fire to be free, you’ve got to make it in the right kind of place. Which isn’t easy. Not just anybody can do it.”

“But you can do it, Mr. Miyake?”

“Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. Most of the time, I can. If I really put my mind to it, I pretty much can.”

“You like bonfires, don’t you?”

Miyake nodded. “It’s almost a sickness with me. Why do you think I came to live in this navel-lint nothing of a town? It’s because this place gets more driftwood than any other beach I know. That’s the only reason. I came all the way out here to make bonfires. Kind of pointless, huh?”

Whenever she had the chance after that, Junko would join Miyake for his bonfires. He made them all year long except for midsummer, when the beach was full of people far into the night. Sometimes he would make two a week, and sometimes he would go a month without one. His pace was determined by the amount of driftwood that washed ashore. And when the time came for a fire, he would be sure to call Junko. Keisuke had an ugly jealous streak, but Miyake was the one exception. He would rib Junko about her “bonfire buddy.”

The flames finally found their way to the biggest log, and now at last the bonfire was settling in for a long burn. Junko lowered herself to the sandy beach and stared at the flames with her mouth shut tight. Miyake adjusted the progress of the fire with great care, using a long branch to keep the flames from either spreading too quickly or losing strength. From his small pile of spare fuel, he would occasionally pick a length of driftwood and toss it in where it was needed.

Keisuke announced that he had a stomachache: “Must’ve caught a chill. Think I just need a crap.”

“Why don’t you go home and rest?” Junko said.

“Yeah, I really should,” Keisuke said, looking sorry for himself. “How about you?”

“Don’t worry about Jun,” Miyake said. “I’ll see her home. She’ll be fine.”

“Okay, then. Thanks.” Keisuke left the beach.

“He’s such an idiot,” Junko said, shaking her head. “He gets carried away and drinks too much.”

“I know what you mean, Jun, but it’s no good being too sensible when you’re young. It just spoils the fun. Keisuke’s got his good points, too.”

“Maybe so, but he doesn’t use his brain for anything.”

“Some things your brain can’t help you with. It’s not easy being young.”

The two fell silent for a while in the presence of the fire, each lost in private thoughts and letting time flow along separate paths.

Then Junko said, “You know, Mr. Miyake, something’s been kind of bothering me. Do you mind if I ask you about it?”

“What kind of something?”

“Something personal.”

Miyake scratched his stubbly cheeks with the flat of his hand. “Well, I don’t know. I guess it’d be okay.”

“I was just wondering if, maybe, you had a wife somewhere.”

Miyake pulled the flask from the pocket of his leather jacket, opened it, and took a long, slow drink. Then he put on the cap, slipped the flask into his pocket, and looked at Junko.

“Where did that come from all of a sudden?”

“It’s not all of a sudden. I kind of got the feeling before, when Keisuke started talking about the earthquake. I saw the look on your face. And you know what you once told me, about how people’s eyes have something honest about them when they’re watching a fire.”

“I did?”

“And do you have kids, too?”

“Yup. Two of ’em.”

“In Kobe, right?”

“That’s where the house is. I suppose they’re still living there.”

“Where in Kobe?”

“The Higashi-Nada section. Up in the hills. Not much damage there.”

Miyake narrowed his eyes, raised his face, and looked out at the dark sea. Then he turned his eyes back to the fire.

“That’s why I can’t blame Keisuke,” he said. “I can’t call him an idiot. I don’t have the right. I’m not using my brain any more than he is. I’m the idiot king. I think you know what I mean.”

“Do you want to tell me more?”

“No,” Miyake said. “I really don’t.”

“Okay, I’ll stop, then. But I will say this. I think you’re a good person.”

“That’s not the problem,” Miyake said, shaking his head again. He drew a kind of design in the sand with the tip of a branch. “Tell me, Jun, have you ever thought about how you’re going to die?”

Junko pondered this for a while, then shook her head.

“Well, I think about it all the time,” Miyake said.

“How are you going to die?”

“Locked inside a refrigerator,” he said. “You know. It happens all the time. Some kid is playing around inside a refrigerator that somebody’s thrown away, and the door closes, and the kid suffocates. Like that.”

The big log dipped to the side, scattering sparks. Miyake watched it happen but did nothing. The glow of the flames spread strangely unreal shadows across his face.

“I’m in this tight space, in total darkness, and I die little by little. It might not be so bad if I could just plain suffocate. But it doesn’t work that way. A tiny bit of air manages to get in through some crack, so it takes a really long time. I scream, but nobody can hear me. And nobody notices I’m missing. It’s so cramped in there, I can’t move. I squirm and squirm, but the door won’t open.”

Junko said nothing.

“I have the same dream over and over. I wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. I’ve been dreaming about dying slowly in pitch-blackness, but even after I wake up, the dream doesn’t end. This is the scariest part of the dream. I open my eyes, and my throat is absolutely dry. I go to the kitchen and open the refrigerator. Of course, I don’t have a refrigerator, so I

ought to realize it’s a dream, but I still don’t notice. I’m thinking there’s something strange going on, but I open the door. Inside, the refrigerator is pitch-dark. The light’s out. I wonder if there’s been a power failure and stick my head inside. Hands shoot out from the darkness and grab me by the neck. Cold hands. Dead people’s hands. They’re incredibly strong, and they start dragging me inside. I let out a huge scream, and this time I wake up for real. That’s my dream. It’s always the same. Always. Every little detail. And every time I have it, it’s just as scary as the last.”

Miyake poked the big log with the tip of a branch and pushed it back in place.

“It’s so real, I feel as if I’ve already died hundreds of times.”

“When did you start having the dream?”

“Way, way back there. So long ago I can’t remember when,” Miyake said. “I have had periods when it’s left me alone. A year ... no, two years when I didn’t have it at all. I had the feeling things were going to be okay for me. But no. The dream came back. Just as I was beginning to think, I’m okay now, I’m saved, it started up again. And once it gets going, there’s nothing I can do.”

Miyake shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Jun, I really shouldn’t be telling you these dark stories.”

“Yes you should,” Junko said. She put a cigarette between her lips and struck a match, inhaling a deep lungful of smoke. “Go on.”

The bonfire was nearing its end. The big pile of extra driftwood was gone now. Miyake had thrown it all into the fire. Maybe she was imagining things, but Junko thought the ocean sounded louder.

“There’s this American writer called Jack London,” Miyake began.

“Sure, the guy who wrote about the fire.”

“That’s him. For a long time, he thought he was going to die by drowning in the sea. He was absolutely sure of it. He’d slip and fall into the ocean at night, and nobody would notice, and he’d drown.”

“Did he really drown?”

Miyake shook his head. “Nope. Killed himself with morphine.”

“So his premonition didn’t come true. Or maybe he did something to make sure it wouldn’t come true.”

“On the surface, at least, it looks like that,” Miyake said, pausing for a moment. “But in a sense, he was right. He did drown alone in a dark sea. He became an alcoholic. He soaked his body in his own despair—right to the core—and he died in agony. Premonitions can stand for something else sometimes. And the thing they stand for can be a lot more intense than reality. That’s the scariest thing about having a premonition. Do you see what I mean?”

Junko thought about it for a while. She did not see what he meant.

“I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.”

Miyake gave a nod. “I know what you mean,” he said. “But there’s such a thing as a way of living that’s guided by the way a person’s going to die.”

“Is that how you’re living?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. It seems that way sometimes.”

Miyake sat down next to Junko. He looked a little more wasted and older than usual. The hair over his ears was uncut and sticking out.

“What kind of pictures have you been painting?” she asked.

“That would be tough to explain.”

“Okay, then, what’s the newest thing you’ve painted?”

“I call it Landscape with Flatiron. I finished it three days ago. It’s just a picture of an iron in a room.”

“Why’s that so tough to explain?”

“Because it’s not really an iron.”

She looked up at him. “The iron is not an iron?”

“That’s right.”

“Meaning it stands for something else?”

“Probably.”

“Meaning you can only paint it if you use something else to stand for it?” Miyake nodded in silence.

Junko looked up to see that there were many more stars in the sky than before. The moon had covered a long distance. Miyake threw the last piece, the long branch he was holding, into the fire. Junko leaned toward him so that their shoulders were just touching. The smoky smell of a hundred fires clung to his jacket. She took in a long, deep breath of it.

“You know something?” she said.

“What?”

“I’m completely empty.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She closed her eyes, and before she knew it, tears were flowing down her cheeks. With her right hand, she gripped Miyake’s knee as hard as she could through his chinos. Small chills ran through her body. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close, but still her tears would not stop.

“There’s really nothing at all in here,” she said much later, her voice hoarse. “I’m cleaned out. Empty.”

“I know what you mean,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m an expert.”

“What can I do?”

“Get a good night’s sleep. That usually fixes it.”

“What I’ve got is not so easy to fix.”

“You may be right, Jun. It may not be that easy.”

Just then a long, steamy hiss announced the evaporation of water trapped in a log. Miyake raised his eyes and, narrowing them, peered at the bonfire for a time.

“So, what should I do?” Junko asked.

“I don’t know. We could die together. What do you say?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

His arm still around her shoulders, Miyake kept silent for a while. Junko buried her face in the soft worn-out leather of his jacket.

“Anyhow, let’s wait till the fire burns out,” Miyake said. “We built it, so we ought to keep it company to the end. Once it goes out, and it turns pitch-dark, then we can die.”

“Good,” Junko said. “But how?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“Okay.”

Wrapped in the smell of the fire, Junko closed her eyes. Miyake’s arm across her shoulders was rather small for that of a grown man, and strangely bony. I could never live with this man, she thought. I could never get inside his heart. But I might be able to die with him.

She felt herself growing sleepy. It must be the whiskey, she thought. Most of the burning driftwood had turned to ash and crumbled, but the biggest piece still glowed orange, and she could feel its gentle warmth against her skin. It would be a while before it burnt itself out.

“Mind if I take a little nap?” she asked. “Sure, go ahead.”

“Will you wake me when the fire’s out?”

“Don’t worry. When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not.”

She repeated the words in her mind: When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not. Then she curled herself against him and dropped into a fleeting, but deep, sleep.

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo

translated by Jay Rubin

Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five foot three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog’s imposing bulk.

“Call me ‘Frog,”‘ said the frog in a clear, strong voice.

Katagiri stood rooted in the doorway, unable to speak.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you. Just come and close the door. Please.”

Briefcase in his right hand, grocery bag with fresh vegetables and canned salmon cradled in his left arm, Katagiri didn’t dare move.

“Please, Mr. Katagiri, hurry and close the door, and take off your shoes.”

The sound of his own name helped Katagiri to snap out of it. He closed the door as ordered, set the grocery bag on the raised wooden floor, pinned the briefcase under one arm and untied his shoes. Frog gestured for him to take a seat at the kitchen table, which he did.

“I must apologize, Mr. Katagiri, for having barged in while you were out,” Frog said. “I knew it would be a shock for you to find me here. I but had no choice. How about a cup of tea? I thought you would be coming home soon, so I boiled some water.”

Katagiri still had his briefcase jammed under his arm. Somebody’s playing a joke on me, he thought. Somebody’s rigged himself up in this huge frog costume just to have fun with me. But he knew, as he watched Frog pour boiling water into the teapot, humming all the while, that these had to be the limbs and movements of a real frog. Frog set a cup of green tea in front of Katagiri and poured another one for himself.

Sipping his tea, Frog asked, “Calming down?”

But still Katagiri could not speak.

“I know I should have made an appointment to visit you, Mr .. Katagiri. I am fully aware of the proprieties. Anyone would be shocked to find a big frog waiting for him at home. But an urgent matter brings me here. Please forgive me.”

“Urgent matter?” Katagiri managed to produce words at last.

“Yes, indeed,” Frog said. “Why else would I take the liberty of barging into a person’s home? Such discourtesy is not my customary style.”

“Does this ‘matter’ have something to do with me?”

“Yes and no.” Frog said with a tilt of the head. “ No and yes.”

I’ve got to get a grip on myself thought Katagiri. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all, not at all,” Frog said with a smile. “It’s your home. You don’t have to ask my permission. Smoke and drink as much as you like. I myself am not a smoker, but I can hardly impose my distaste for tobacco on others in their own homes.”

Katagiri pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket and struck a march. He saw his hand trembling as he lit up. Seated opposite him, Frog seemed to he studying his every movement.

“You don’t happen to be connected with some kind of gang by any chance?” Katagiri found the courage to ask.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha! What a wonderful sense of humor you have, Mr. Katagiri!” Frog said, slapping his webbed hand against his thigh. “There may be a shortage of skilled labor, but what gang is going to hire a frog to do their dirty work? They’d be made a laughingstock.”

“Well, if you’re here to negotiate a repayment, you’re wasting your time. I have no authority to make such decisions. Only my superiors can do that, I just follow orders. I can’t do a thing for you.”

“Please, Mr. Katagiri,” Frog said, raising one webbed finger. “I have not come here on such petty business. I am fully aware that you are Assistant Chief of the lending division of the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank. But my visit has nothing to do with the repayment of loans. I have come here to save Tokyo from destruction.”

Katagiri scanned the room for a hidden TV camera in case he was being made the burr of some huge, terrible joke. But there was no camera. It was a small apartment. There was no place for anyone to hide.

“No,” Frog said. “We are the only ones here. I know you are thinking that I must be mad or that you are having some kind of dream, but I am not crazy and you are not dreaming. This is absolutely, positively serious.”

“To tell you the truth, Mr .. Frog—.”

“Please,” Frog said, raising one finger again. “Call me ‘Frog’.”

“To tell you the truth, Frog,” Katagiri said, “I can’t quite understand what is going on here It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t seem to be able to grasp the situation exactly. Do you mind if I ask you a question or two?”

“Not at all, not at all,” Frog said. “Mutual understanding is of critical importance. There are those who say that ‘understanding’ is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings, and while I do find this view interesting in its own way, I am afraid we have no time to spare on pleasant digressions. The best thing would be for us to achieve mutual understanding via the shortest possible route. Therefore, by all means, ask as many questions as you wish.”

“Now; you are a real frog, am I right?”

“Yes, of course, as you can see. A real frog is exactly what I am. A product neither of metaphor nor allusion nor deconstruction nor sampling nor any other such complex process, I am a

genuine frog. Shall I croak for you?”

Frog tilted back his head and flexed the muscles of his huge throat Ribit, Ri-i-i-bit, Ribit ribit ribit Ribit Ribit Ri-i-i bit. His gigantic croaks rattled the pictures hanging on the walls.

“Fine, I see, I see!” Katagiri said, worried about the thin walls of the cheap apartment house in which he lived. “That’s great. You are, without question a real frog.”

“One might also say that I am the sum total of all frogs. Nonetheless, this does nothing to change the fact that I am a frog. Anyone claiming that I am not a frog would be a dirty liar. I would smash such a person to bits!”

Katagiri nodded. Hoping to calm himself, he picked up his cup and swallowed a mouthful of tea. “You said before that you have come here to save Tokyo from destruction?”

“That is what I said.”

“What kind of destruction?”

“Earthquake,” Frog said with the utmost gravity.

Mouth dropping open, Katagiri looked at Frog. And Frog, saying nothing, looked at Katagiri. They went on staring at each other like this for some time. Next it was Frog’s turn to open his mouth.

“A very, very big earthquake. It is set to strike Tokyo at 8:30 A.M. on February 18. Three days from now. A much bigger earthquake than the one that struck Kobe last month. The number of dead from such a quake would probably exceed 150,000—mostly from accidents involving the commuter system: derailments, falling vehicles, crashes, the collapse of elevated expressways and rail lines, the crushing of subways, the explosion of tanker trucks. Buildings will be transformed into piles of rubble, their inhabitants crushed to death. Fires everywhere, the road system in a stare of collapse, ambulances and fire trucks useless, people just lying there, dying. One hundred and fifty thousand of them! Pure hell. People will be made to realize what a fragile condition the intensive collectivity known as ‘city’ really is.” Frog said this with a gentle shake of the bead. “The epicenter will be close to the Shinjuku ward office.”

“Close to the Shinjuku ward office?”

“To be precise, it will hit directly beneath the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank.”

A heavy silence followed.

“And you,” Katagiri said, “are planning to stop this earthquake?”

“Exactly” Frog said, nodding. “That is exactly what I propose to do. You and I will go underground beneath the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank to do mortal combat with Worm.”

As a member of the Trust Bank lending division, Katagiri had fought his way through many a

battle. He had weathered sixteen years of daily combat since the day he graduated from the university and joined the bank’s staff. He was, in a word, a collection officer—a post that won him little popularity. Everyone in his division preferred to make loans, especially at the time of the bubble. They had so much money in those days that almost any likely piece of collateral—be it land or stock—was enough to convince loan officers to give away whatever they were asked for, the bigger the loan the better their reputations in the company. Some loans, though, never made it back to the bank: They got “stuck to the bottom of the pan.” It was Katagiri’s job to take care of those. And when the bubble burst, the work piled on. First stock prices fell, and then land values, and collateral lost all significance. “Get out there,” his boss commanded him, “and squeeze whatever you can out of them.”

The Kabukicho neighborhood of Shinjuku was a labyrinth of violence: old-time gangsters, Korean mobsters, Chinese Mafia, guns and drugs, money flowing beneath the surface from one murky den to another, people vanishing every now and then like puffs of smoke. Plunging into Kabukicho to collect a bad debt, Katagiri had been surrounded more than once by mobsters threatening to kill him, but he had never been frightened. What good would it have done them to kill one man running around for the bank? They could stab him if they wanted to. They could beat him up. He was perfect for the job: no wife, no kids, both parents dead, a brother and sister he had put through college married off. So what if they killed him? It wouldn’t change anything for anybody—least of all for Katagiri himself.

It was not Katagiri but the thugs surrounding him who got nervous when they saw him so calm and cool. He soon earned a kind of reputation in their world as a tough guy. Now, though, the tough Katagiri was at a total loss. What the hell was this frog talking about?

“Worm? Who is Worm?” he asked with some hesitation.

“Worm lives underground. He is a gigantic worm. When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes,” Frog said. “And right now he is very, very angry.”

“What is he angry about?” Katagiri asked.

“I have no idea,” Frog said. “Nobody knows what Worm is thinking inside that murky head of his. Few have ever seen him. He is usually asleep. That’s what he really likes to do: take long, long naps. He goes on sleeping for years—decades—in the warmth and darkness underground. His eyes, as you might imagine, have atrophied, his brain has turned to jelly as he sleeps. If you ask me, I’d guess he probably isn’t thinking anything at all, just lying there and feeling every little rumble and reverberation that comes his way, absorbing them into his body and storing them up. And then, through some kind of chemical process, he replaces most of them with rage. Why this happens I have no idea. I could never explain it.”

Frog fell silent watching Katagiri and waiting until his words had sunk in. Then he went on: “Please don’t misunderstand me, though. I feel no personal animosity toward Worm. I don’t see him as the embodiment of evil. Not that I would want to be his friend, either: I just think that as far as the world is concerned, it is, in a sense, all right for a being like him to exist. The world is like a great big

overcoat, and it needs pockets of various shapes and sizes. But right at the moment, Worm has reached the point where he is too dangerous to ignore. With all the different kinds of hatred he has absorbed and stored inside himself over the years, his heart and body have swollen to gargantuan proportions—bigger than ever before. And to make matters worse, last month’s Kobe earthquake shook him out of the deep sleep he was enjoying. He experienced a revelation inspired by his profound rage: It was time now for him, too, to cause a massive earthquake, and he’d do it here, in Tokyo. I know what I’m talking about, Mr. Katagiri: I have received reliable information on the timing and scale of the earthquake from some of my best bug friends.”

Frog snapped his mouth shut and closed his round eyes in apparent fatigue.

“So what you’re saying is,” Katagiri said, “that you and I have to go underground together and fight Worm to stop the earthquake.”

“Exactly.”

Katagiri reached for his cup of tea, picked it up and put it back. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “Why did you choose me to go with you?”

Frog looked straight into Katagiri’s eyes and said “I have always had the profoundest respect for you, Mr. Katagiri. For sixteen long years, you have silently accepted the most dangerous, least glamorous assignments—the jobs that others have avoided—and you have carried them off beautifully. I know full well how difficult this has been for you, and I do not believe that either your superiors or your colleagues properly appreciate your accomplishments. They are blind, the whole lot of them. But you, unappreciated and unpromoted, have never once complained.

“Nor is it simply a matter of your work. After your parents died you raised your teenage brother and sister single-handedly, put them through college and even arranged for them to marry, all at great sacrifice of your time and income, and at the expense of your own marriage prospects. In spite of this, your brother and sister have never once expressed gratitude for your efforts on their behalf. Far from it. They have shown you no respect and acted with the most callous disregard for your loving kindness. In my opinion, their behavior is unconscionable. I almost wish I could beat them to a pulp on your behalf. But you, meanwhile, show no trace of anger.

“To be quite honest, Mr. Katagiri, you are nothing much to look at, and you are far from eloquent, so you tend to be looked down upon by those around you. I, however, can see what a sensible and courageous man you are. In all of Tokyo, with its teeming millions, there is no one else I could trust as much as you to fight by my side.”

“Tell me, Mr. Frog,” Katagiri said.

“Please,” Frog said, raising one finger again. “Call me ‘Frog’.”

“Tell me, Frog,” Katagiri said, “how do you know so much about me?”

‘Well, Mr. Katagiri, I have not been frogging all these years for nothing. I keep my eye on the important things in life.”

“But still, Frog,” Katagiri said. “I’m not particularly strong, and I don’t know anything about what’s happening underground. I don’t have the kind of muscle it will take to fight Worm in the darkness. I’m sure you can find somebody a lot stronger than me—a man who does karate, say, or a Self-Defense Forces commando.

Frog rolled his large eyes. “Tell you the truth, Mr. Katagiri,” he said, “I’m the one who will do all the fighting. But I can’t do it alone. This is the key thing: I need your courage and your passion for justice. I need you to stand behind me and say, ‘Way to go, Frog! You’re doing great! I know you can win! You’re fighting the good fight!’”

Frog opened his arms wide, then slapped his webbed hands down on his knees again.

“In all honesty, Mr. Katagiri, the thought of fighting Worm in the dark frightens me, too. For many years I lived as a pacifist, loving art, living with nature. Fighting is not something I like to do. I do it because I have to. And this particular fight will be a fierce one; that is certain. I may not return from it alive. I may lose a limb or two in the process. But I cannot—I will not-run away. As Nietzsche said, the highest wisdom is to have no fear. What I want from you, Mr. Katagiri, is for you to share your simple courage with me, to support me with your whole heart as a true friend. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

None of this made any sense to Katagiri, but still he felt that—unreal as it sounded—he could believe whatever Frog said to him. Something about Frog—the look on his face, the way he spoke—had a simple honesty that appealed directly to the heart. After years of work in the toughest division of the Security Trust Bank, Katagiri possessed the ability to sense such things. It was all but second nature to him.

“I know this must be difficult for you, Mr. Katagiri. A huge frog comes barging into your place and asks you to believe all these outlandish things. Your reaction is perfectly natural. And so I intend to provide you with proof that I exist. Tell me, Mr. Katagiri: you have been having a great deal of trouble recovering a loan the bank made to Big Bear Trading, have you not?”

“That’s true,” Katagiri said.

“Well, they have a number of extortionist working behind the scenes, and those individuals are mixed up with the mobsters. They’re scheming to make the company go bankrupt and get out of its debts. Your bank’s loan officer shoved a pile of cash at them without a decent background check, and, as usual, the one who’s left to clean up after him is you, Mr. Katagiri. But you’re having a hard time sinking your teeth into these fellows: They’re no pushovers. And there may be a powerful politician backing them up. They’re into you for 700 million. That is the situation you are dealing with, am I right?”

“You certainly are.”

Frog stretched his arms out wide, his big green webs opening like pale wings. “Don’t worry, Mr. Katagiri. Leave everything to me. By tomorrow morning, old Frog will have your problems

solved. Relax and have a good night’s sleep.”

With a big smile on his face, Frog stood up. Then, flattening himself like a dried squid, he slipped out through the gap at the side of the closed door, leaving Katagiri all alone. The two teacups on the kitchen table were the only indication that Frog had ever been in Katagiri’s apartment.

The moment Katagiri arrived at work the next morning at nine, the phone on his desk rang.

“Mr. Katagiri,” said a man’s voice. It was cold and businesslike. “My name is Shiraoka. I’m an attorney with the Big Bear case. I received a call from my client this morning with regard to the pending loan matter. He wants you to know that he will take full responsibility for returning the entire amount requested, by the due date. He will also give you a signed memorandum to that effect. His only request is that you do not send Frog to his home again. I repeat: He wants you to ask Frog never to visit his home again. I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean, but I believe it should be clear to you, Mr. Katagiri. Am I correct?”

“You are indeed.” Katagiri said.

“You will be kind enough to convey my message to Frog, I trust.”

“That I will do. Your client will never see Frog again.”

“Thank you very much. I will prepare the memorandum for you by tomorrow.”

“I appreciate it,” Katagiri said.

The connection was cut.

Frog visited Katagiri in his Trust Bank office at lunchtime. “I assume that Big Bear case is working out well for you?”

Katagiri glanced around uneasily.

“Don’t worry,” Frog said. “You are the only one who can see me. But now I am sure you realize I actually exist. I am not a product of your imagination. I can take action and produce results. I am a living being.”

“Tell me, Mr. Frog,” Katagiri said.

“Please,” Frog said, raising one finger, “call me ‘Frog.’”

“Tell me, Frog,” Katagiri said. “What did you do to them?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Frog said. “Nothing much more complicated than boiling Brussels sprouts. I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination. But never mind that, Mr ... Katagiri. Tell me about the Big Bear case. It is working out well, I assume?”

Katagiri nodded and lit a cigarette. “Seems to be.”

“So, then, have I succeeded in gaining your trust with regard to the matter I broached to you last night? Will you join me to fight against Worm?”

Sighing, Katagiri removed his glasses and wiped them. “To tell you the truth, I am not too crazy about the idea, but I don’t suppose that’s enough to get me out of it.”

“No,” Frog said. “It is a matter of responsibility and honor. You may not be ‘too crazy’ about the idea, but we have no choice: You and I must go underground and face Worm. If we should happen to lose our lives in the process, we will gain no one’s sympathy. And even if we manage to defeat Worm, no one will praise us. No one will ever know that such a battle even raged far beneath their feet. Only you and I will know, Mr. Katagiri. However it turns out, ours will be a lonely battle.”

Katagiri looked at his own hand for a while, then watched the smoke rising from his cigarette. Finally, he spoke. “You know Mr. Frog, I’m just an ordinary person.”

“Make that ‘Frog,’ please,” Frog said, but Katagiri let it go.

“I’m an absolutely ordinary guy. Less than ordinary. I’m going bald, I’m getting a potbelly, I turned 40 last month. My feet are flat. The doctor told me recently that I have diabetic tendencies. It’s been three months or more since I last slept with a woman—and I had to pay for it. I do get some recognition within the division for my ability to collect on loans, but no real respect. I don’t have a single person who likes me, either at work or in my private life. I don’t know how to talk to people, and I’m bad with strangers, so I never make friends. I have no athletic ability, I’m tone-deaf, short, phimotic, nearsighted—and astigmatic. I live a horrible life. All I do is eat, sleep and shit. I don’t know why I’m even living. Why should a person like me have to be the one to save Tokyo?”

“Because, Mr .. Katagiri, Tokyo can only be saved by a person like you. And it’s for people like you that I am tying to save Tokyo.”

Katagiri sighed again, more deeply this time. “All right, then, what do you want me to do?”

Frog told Katagiri his plan. They would go underground on the night of February 17 (one day before the earthquake was scheduled to happen). Their way in would be through the basement boiler room of the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank. They would meet there late at night (Katagiri would stay in the building on the pretext of working overtime). Behind a section of wall was a vertical shaft, and they would find Worm at the bottom by climbing down a 150-foot rope ladder.

“Do you have a battle plan in mind?” Katagiri asked.

“Of course I do. We would have no hope of defeating an enemy like Worm without a battle plan. He is a slimy creature: You can’t tell his mouth from his anus. And he is as big as a commuter train.”

“What is your battle plan?”

After a thoughtful pause Frog answered, “Hmm, what is it they say—’ Silence is golden?”

“You mean I shouldn’t ask?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“What if I get scared at the last minute and run away? Whet would you do then, Mr. Frog?”

“‘Frog’.”

“Frog. What would you do then?”

Frog thought about this awhile and answered, “I would fight on alone. My chances of beating him by myself are perhaps just slightly better than Anna Karenina’s chances of beating that speeding locomotive. Have you read Anna Karenina, Mr .. Katagiri?”

When he heard that Katagiri had not read the novel, Frog gave him a look as if to say “What a shame.” Apparently, Frog was very fond of Anna Karenina.

“Still, Mr. Katagiri, I do not believe that you will leave me to fight alone. I can tell. It’s a question of balls—which, unfortunately, I do not happen to possess. Ha ha ha ha.” Frog laughed with his mouth wide open. Balls were not all that Frog lacked. He had no teeth either.

Unexpected things do happen, however.

Katagiri was shot on the evening of February 17. He had finished his rounds for the day and was walking down the street in Shinjuku on his way back to the Trust Bank when a young man in a leather jacket leaped in front of him. The man’s face was a blank, and be gripped a small black gun in one hand. The gun was so small and so black that it hardly looked real. Katagiri stared at the object in the man’s hand, not registering the fact that it was aimed at him and that the man was pulling the trigger. It all happened too quickly: It didn’t make sense to him. But the gun, in fact, went off.

Katagiri saw the barrel jerk in the air and, at the same moment, felt an impact as though someone had struck his right shoulder with a sledgehammer. He felt no pain, but the blow sent him sprawling on the sidewalk. The leather briefcase in his right hand went flying in the other direction. The man aimed the gun at him again. A second shot rang out. A small eatery’s sidewalk signboard exploded before his eyes. He heard people screaming. His glasses had flown off, and everything was a blur. He was vaguely aware that the man was approaching with the pistol pointed at him. I’m going to die, he thought. Frog had said that true terror is the kind men feel toward their imagination.

Katagiri cut the switch of his imagination and sank into a weightless silence.

When he woke up, he was in bed. He opened one eye, took a moment to survey his surroundings and then opened the other eye. The first thing that entered his field of vision was a metal stand by the head of the bed and an intravenous feeding tube that stretched from the stand to where he lay. Next he saw a nurse dressed in white. He realized he was lying on his back on a hard bed and wearing some strange piece of clothing under which he seemed to be naked.

Oh yeah, he thought, I was walking along the sidewalk when some guy shot me. Probably in

the shoulder. The right one. He relived the scene in his mind. When he remembered the small black gun in the young man’s hand, his heart made a disturbing thump. The sons of bitches were trying to kill me! he thought. But it looks as if I made it through OK. My memory is fine. I don’t have any pain. And not just pain: I don’t have any feeling at all. I can’t lift my arm .....

The hospital room had no windows. He could not tell whether it was day or night. He had been shot just before five in the evening. How much time had passed since then? Had the hour of his nighttime rendezvous with Frog gone by? Katagiri searched the room for a clock, but without his glasses he could see nothing at a distance.

“Excuse me,” he called to the nurse.

“Oh, good. You’re finally awake,” the nurse said.

“What time is it?”

She glanced at her watch.

“Nine-fifteen.”

“P.M.?^„

“Don’t be silly; it’s morning!”

“Nine-fifteen A.M.?” Katagiri groaned, barely managing to lift his head from the pillow. The ragged noise that emerged from his throat sounded like someone else’s voice. “Nine-fifteen A.M. on February 18?”

“Right,” the nurse said, lifting her arm once more to check the date on her digital watch. “Today is February 18, 1995.”

“Wasn’t there a big earthquake in Tokyo this morning?”

“In Tokyo?”

“In Tokyo.”

The nurse shook her head. “Not as far as I know.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever had happened, the earthquake at least had been averted. “How’s my wound doing?”

“Your wound?” she asked. “What wound?”

“Where I was shot.”

“Shot?”

“Yeah, near the entrance to the Trust Bank. Some young guy shot me. In the right shoulder, I

think.”

The nurse flashed a nervous smile in his direction. “I’m sorry, Mr. Katagiri, but you haven’t been shot.”

“I haven’t? Are you sure?”

“As sure as I am that there was no earthquake this morning.”

Katagiri was stunned. “Then what the hell am I doing in a hospital?”

“Somebody found you lying in the street, unconscious. In the Kabukicho neighborhood of Shinjuku. You didn’t have any external wounds. You were just out cold. And we still haven’t figured out why. The doctor’s going to be here soon. You’d better talk to him.”

Lying in the street unconscious? Katagiri was sure he had seen the pistol go off, aimed at him. He took a deep breath and tried to get his head straight. He would start by putting all the facts in order.

“What you’re telling me is, I’ve been lying in this hospital bed, unconscious, since early evening yesterday, is that right?”

“Right,” the nurse said. “And you had a really bad night, Mr. Katagiri. You must have had some awful nightmares. I heard you yelling, ‘Frog! Hey, Frog!’ You did it a lot. You have a friend nicknamed Frog?”

Katagiri closed his eyes and listened to the slow, rhythmic beating of his heart as it ticked off the minutes of his life. How much of what he remembered had actually happened and how much was hallucination? Did Frog really exist, and had Frog fought with Worm to put a stop to the earthquake? Or had that just been part of a long dream? Katagiri had no idea what was true anymore.

Frog came to his hospital room that night. Katagiri awoke to find him in the dim light, sitting on a steel folding chair, his back against the wall. Frog’s big, bulging eyelids were closed in straight slits. “Frog,” Katagiri called out to him.

Frog slowly opened his eyes. His big white stomach swelled and shrank with his breathing. “I meant to meet you in the boiler room at night the way I promised,” Katagiri said, “but I had an accident in the evening—something totally unexpected—and they brought me here.”

Frog gave his head a slight shake. “I know. It’s OK. Don’t worry. You were a great help to me in my fight, Mr. Katagiri.”

“I was?”

“Yes, you were. You did a great job in your dreams. That’s what made it possible for me to fight Worm to the finish. I have you to thank for my victory.”

“I don’t get it,” Katagiri said. “I was unconscious the whole time. They were feeding me intravenously. I don’t remember doing anything in my dream.”

“That’s fine, Mr. Katagiri. It’s better that you don’t remember. The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats. Each and every on of us is a being of limited duration: All of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose. You and I together, Mr. Katagiri, were able to prevent the annihilation of Tokyo. We saved 150,000 people from the jaws of death. No one realizes it, but that is what we accomplished.”

“How did we manage to defeat Worm? And what did I do?”

“We gave everything we had in a fight to the bitter end. We—” Frog snapped his mouth shut and took one great breath. “We used every weapon we could get our hands on, Mr. Katagiri. We used all the courage we could muster. Darkness was our enemy’s ally. You brought in a foot-powered generator and used every ounce of your strength to fill the place with light. Worm tried to frighten you away with phantoms of the darkness, but you stood your ground. Darkness vied with light in a horrific battle, and in the light I grappled with the monstrous Worm. He coiled himself around me and bathed me in his horrid slime. I tore him to shreds, but still he refused to die. All he did was divide into smaller pieces. And then ...”

Frog fell silent, but soon, as if dredging up his last ounce of strength, he began to speak again. “Fyodor Dostoevsky, with unparalleled tenderness, depicted those who have been forsaken by God. He discovered the precious quality of human existence in the ghastly paradox whereby men who have invented God were forsaken by that very God. Fighting with Worm in the darkness, I found myself thinking of Dotoevsky’s ‘White Knights.’ I ...” Frog’s words seemed to founder. “Mr. Katagiri, do you mind if I take a brief nap? I am utterly exhausted.”

“Please,” Katagiri said. “Take a good, deep sleep.”

“I was finally unable to defeat Worm,” Frog said, closing his eyes. “I did manage to stop the earthquake, but I was only able to carry our battle to a draw. I inflicted injury on him, and he on me. But to tell you the truth, Mr. Katagiri ...”

“What is it, Frog?”

“I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog.”

“Hmm, I don’t get that at all.”

“Neither do I,” Frog said, his eyes still closed. “It’s just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me. Inside me is the un-me. My brain is growing murky. The locomotive is coming. But I really want you to understand what I am saying, Mr. Katagiri.”

“You’re tired, Frog. Go to sleep. You’ll get better.”

“I am slowly returning to the murk, Mr. Katagiri. And yet ... I ...”

Frog lost his grasp on words and slipped into a coma. His arms hung down almost to the floor, and his big, wide mouth drooped open. Straining to focus his eyes, Katagiri was able to make out deep cuts covering Frog’s entire body. Discolored streaks ran through his skin, and there was a sunken spot on his head where the flesh had been torn away.

Katagiri stared long and hard at Frog, who sat there now wrapped in the thick cloak of sleep. As soon as I get out of this hospital, he thought, I’ll buy Anna Karenina and “White Nights” and read them both. Then I’ll have a nice, long literary discussion about them with Frog.

Before long, Frog began to twitch all over. Katagiri assumed at first that these were just normal involuntary movements in sleep, but he soon realized his mistake. There was something unnatural about the way Frog’s body went on jerking, like a big doll being shaken by someone from behind. Katagiri

held his breath and watched. He wanted to run over to Frog, but his own body remained paralyzed.

After a while, a big lump formed over Frog’s right eye. The same kind of huge, ugly boil broke out on Frog’s shoulder and side and then over his whole body. Katagiri could not imagine what was happening to Frog. He stared at the spectacle, barely breathing.

Then, all of a sudden, one of the boils burst with a loud pop. The skin flew off, and a sticky liquid oozed out, sending a horrible smell across the room. The rest of the boils started popping, one after another, twenty or thirty in all, flinging skin and fluid onto the walls. The sickening, unbearable smell filled the hospital room. Big black holes were left on Frog’s body where the boils had burst, and wriggling, maggot-like worms of all shapes and sizes came crawling out. Puffy white maggots. After them emerged some kind of small, centipede-like creatures, whose hundreds of legs made a creepy rustling sound. An endless stream of these things came crawling out of the holes. Frog’s body—or the thing that had once been Frog’s body—was totally covered by these creatures of the night. His two big eyeballs fell from their sockets onto the floor, where they were devoured by black bugs with strong jaws. Crowds of slimy worms raced each other up the walls to the ceiling, where they covered the fluorescent lights and burrowed into the smoke alarm.

The floor, too, was covered with worms and bugs. They climbed up the lamp and blocked the light, and, of course, they crept onto Katagiri’s bed. Hundreds of them came burrowing under the covers. They crawled up his legs, under his bed gown, between his thighs. The smallest worms and maggots crawled inside his anus and ears and nostrils. Centipedes pried open his mouth and crawled inside, one after another. Filled with an intense despair, Katagiri screamed.

Someone snapped a switch and light filled the room.

“Mr. Katagiri!” called the nurse. Katagiri opened his eyes to the light. His body was soaked in sweat. The bugs were gone. All they had left behind in him was a horrible, slimy sensation.

“Another bad dream, eh? Poor dear.” With quick, efficient movements, the nurse readied an injection and stabbed the needle into his arm.

He took a long, deep breath and let it out. His heart was expanding and contracting violently. “What were you dreaming about?”

Katagiri was having trouble differentiating dream from reality. “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real,” he told himself aloud.

“That’s so true,” the nurse said with a smile. “Especially where those dreams are concerned.”

“Frog,” he murmured.

“Did something happen to Frog?” she asked.

“He saved Tokyo from being destroyed by an earthquake. All by himself”

“That’s nice,” the nurse said, replacing his near-empty intravenous-feeding bottle with a new one. “We don’t need any more awful things happening in Tokyo. We have plenty already.”

“But it cost him his life. He’s gone. I think he went back to the murk. He’ll never come here

again.”

Smiling, the nurse toweled the sweat from his forehead. “You were very fond of Frog, weren’t you, Katagiri?”

“Locomotive,” Katagiri mumbled. “More than anybody.” Then he closed his eyes and sank into a restful, dreamless sleep.

Ufo In Kushiro

Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways. She never said a word. Sunk deep in the cushions of the sofa, her mouth clamped shut, she wouldn’t answer when Komura spoke to her. She wouldn’t shake her head or nod. Komura could not be sure the sound of his voice was even getting through to her.

Komura’s wife came from way up north in Yamagata and, as far as he knew, she had no friends or relatives who could have been hurt in Kobe. Yet she stayed rooted in front of the television from morning to night. In his presence, at least, she ate nothing and drank nothing and never went to the toilet. Aside from an occasional flick of the remote control to change the channel, she hardly moved a muscle.

Komura would make his own toast and coffee, and head off to work. When he came home in the evening, he’d fix himself a snack with whatever he found in the refrigerator and eat alone. She’d still be glaring at the late news when he dropped off to sleep. A stone wall of silence surrounded her. Komura gave up trying to break through.

When he came home from work that Sunday, the sixth day, his wife had disappeared.

Komura was a salesman at one of the oldest hi-fi-equipment specialty stores in Tokyo’s Akihabara “Electronics Town.” He handled top-of-the-line stuff and earned a sizeable commission whenever he made a sale. Most of his clients were doctors, wealthy independent businessmen, and rich provincials. He had been doing this for eight years and had a decent income right from the start. The economy was healthy, real-estate prices were rising, and Japan was overflowing with money. People’s wallets were bursting with ten thousand-yen bills, and everyone was dying to spend them. The most expensive items were the first to sell out.

Komura was tall and slim and a stylish dresser. He was good with people. In his bachelor days he had dated a lot of women. But after getting married, at twenty-six, he found that his desire for sexual adventures simply—and mysteriously—vanished. He hadn’t slept with any woman but his wife during the five years of their marriage. Not that the opportunity had never presented itself—but he had lost all interest in fleeting affairs and one-night stands. He much preferred to come home early, have a relaxed meal with his wife, talk with her for a while on the sofa, then go to bed and make love. This was everything he wanted.

Komura’s friends and colleagues were puzzled by his marriage. Alongside him with his clean, classic good looks, his wife could not have seemed more ordinary. She was short with thick arms, and she had a dull, even stolid appearance. And it wasn’t just physical: there was nothing attractive about her personality either. She rarely spoke and always wore a sullen expression.

Still, though he did not quite understand why, Komura always felt his tension dissipate when he and his wife were together under one roof; it was the only time he could truly relax. He slept well with her, undisturbed by the strange dreams that had troubled him in the past. His erections were hard; his sex life was warm. He no longer had to worry about death or venereal disease or the vastness of the universe.

His wife, on the other hand, disliked Tokyo’s crowds and longed for Yamagata. She missed her parents and her two elder sisters, and she would go home to see them whenever she felt the need. Her parents operated a successful inn, which kept them financially comfortable. Her father was crazy about his youngest daughter and happily paid her round-trip fares. Several times, Komura had come home from work to find his wife gone and a note on the kitchen table telling him that she was visiting her parents for a while. He never objected. He just waited for her to come back, and she always did, after a week or ten days, in a good mood.

But the letter his wife left for him when she vanished five days after the earthquake was different: I am never coming back, she had written, then went on to explain, simply but clearly, why she no longer wanted to live with him.

The problem is that you never give me anything, she wrote. Or, to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me. You are good and kind and handsome, but living with you is like living with a chunk of air. It’s not entirely your fault, though. There are lots of women who will fall in love with you. But please don’t call me. Just get rid of all the stuff I’m leaving behind.

In fact, she hadn’t left much of anything behind. Her clothes, her shoes, her umbrella, her coffee mug, her hair dryer: all were gone. She must have packed them in boxes and shipped them out after he left for work that morning. The only things still in the house that could be called “her stuff” were the bike she used for shopping and a few books. The Beatles and Bill Evans CDs that Komura had been collecting since his bachelor days had also vanished.

The next day, he tried calling his wife’s parents in Yamagata. His mother-in-law answered the phone and told him that his wife didn’t want to talk to him. She sounded somewhat apologetic. She also told him that they would be sending him the necessary forms soon and that he should put his seal on them and send them back right away.

Komura answered that he might not be able to send them “right away.” This was an important matter, and he wanted time to think it over.

“You can think it over all you want, but I know it won’t change anything,” his mother-in-law said.

She was probably right, Komura told himself. No matter how much he thought or waited, things would never be the same. He was sure of that.

Shortly after he had sent the papers back with his seal stamped on them, Komura asked for a week’s paid leave. His boss had a general idea of what had been happening, and February was a slow time of the year, so he let Komura go without a fuss. He seemed on the verge of saying something to Komura, but finally said nothing.

Sasaki, a colleague of Komura’s, came over to him at lunch and said, “I hear you’re taking time off. Are you planning to do something?”

“I don’t know,” Komura said. “What should I do?”

Sasaki was a bachelor, three years younger than Komura. He had a delicate build and short hair, and he wore round, gold-rimmed glasses. A lot of people thought he talked too much and had a rather arrogant air, but he got along well enough with the easygoing Komura.

“What the hell—as long as you’re taking the time off, why not make a nice trip out of it?”

“Not a bad idea,” Komura said.

Wiping his glasses with his handkerchief, Sasaki peered at Komura as if looking for some kind of clue.

“Have you ever been to Hokkaido?” he asked.

“Never.”

“Would you like to go?”

“Why do you ask?”

Sasaki narrowed his eyes and cleared his throat. “To tell you the truth, I’ve got a small package I’d like to send to Kushiro, and I’m hoping you’ll take it there for me. You’d be doing me a big favor, and I’d be glad to pay for a round-trip ticket. I could cover your hotel in Kushiro, too.”

“A small package?”

“Like this,” Sasaki said, shaping a four-inch cube with his hands. “Nothing heavy.”

“Something to do with work?”

Sasaki shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “Strictly personal. I just don’t want it to get knocked around, which is why I can’t mail it. I’d like you to deliver it by hand, if possible. I really ought to do it myself, but I haven’t got time to fly all the way to Hokkaido.”

“Is it something important?”

His closed lips curling slightly, Sasaki nodded. “It’s nothing fragile, and there are no ‘hazardous materials.’ There’s no need to worry about it. They’re not going to stop you when they X-ray it at the airport. I promise I’m not going to get you in trouble. And it weighs practically nothing. All I’m asking is that you take it along the way you’d take anything else. The only reason I’m not mailing it is I just don’t feel like mailing it.”

Hokkaido in February would be freezing cold, Komura knew, but cold or hot it was all the same to him.

“So who do I give the package to?”

“My sister. My younger sister. She lives up there.”

Komura decided to accept Sasaki’s offer. He hadn’t thought about how to spend his week off, and making plans now would have been too much trouble. Besides, he had no reason for not wanting to go to Hokkaido. Sasaki called the airline then and there, reserving a ticket to Kushiro. The flight would leave two days later, in the afternoon.

At work the next day, Sasaki handed Komura a box like the ones used for human ashes, only smaller, wrapped in manila paper. Judging from the feel, it was made of wood. As Sasaki had said, it weighed practically nothing. Broad strips of transparent tape went all around the package over the paper. Komura held it in his hands and studied it a few seconds. He gave it a little shake but he couldn’t feel or hear anything moving inside.

“My sister will pick you up at the airport. And she’ll be arranging a room for you,” Sasaki said. “All you have to do is stand outside the gate with the package in your hands where she can see it. Don’t worry, the airport’s not very big.”

Komura left home with the box in his suitcase, wrapped in a thick undershirt. The plane was far more crowded than he had expected. Why were all these people going from Tokyo to Kushiro in the middle of winter? he wondered.

The morning paper was full of earthquake reports. He read it from beginning to end on the plane. The number of dead was rising. Many areas were still without water or electricity, and countless people had lost their homes. Each article reported some new tragedy, but to Komura the details seemed oddly lacking in depth. All sounds reached him as far-off, monotonous echos. The only thing he could give any serious thought to was his wife as she retreated ever farther into the distance.

Mechanically he ran his eyes over the earthquake reports, stopped now and then to think about his wife, then went back to the paper. When he grew tired of this, he closed his eyes and napped. And when he woke, he thought about his wife again. Why had she followed the TV earthquake reports with such intensity, from morning to night, without eating or sleeping? What could she have seen in them?

Two young women wearing overcoats of similar design and color approached Komura at the airport. One was fair-skinned and maybe five feet six, with short hair. The area from her nose to her full upper lip was oddly extended in a way that made Komura think of shorthaired ungulates. Her companion was more like five feet one and would have been quite pretty if her nose hadn’t been so small. Her long hair fell straight to her shoulders. Her ears were exposed, and there were two moles on her right earlobe which were emphasized by the earrings she wore. Both women looked to be in their mid-twenties. They took Komura to a café in the airport.

“I’m Keiko Sasaki,” the taller woman said. “My brother told me how helpful you’ve been to him. This is my friend Shimao.”

“Nice to meet you,” Komura said.

“Hi,” Shimao said.

“My brother tells me your wife recently passed away,” Keiko Sasaki said with a respectful expression.

Komura waited a moment before answering, “No, she didn’t die.”

“I just talked to my brother the day before yesterday. I’m sure he said quite clearly that you’d lost your wife.”

“I did. She divorced me. But as far as I know she’s alive and well.”

“That’s odd. I couldn’t possibly have misheard something so important.” She gave him an injured look. Komura put a small amount of sugar in his coffee and gave it a gentle stir before taking a sip. The liquid was thin, with no taste to speak of, more sign than substance. What the hell am I doing here? he wondered.

“Well, I guess I did mishear it. I can’t imagine how else to explain the mistake,” Keiko Sasaki said, apparently satisfied now. She drew in a deep breath and chewed her lower lip. “Please forgive me. I was very rude.”

“Don’t worry about it. Either way, she’s gone.”

Shimao said nothing while Komura and Keiko spoke, but she smiled and kept her eyes on Komura. She seemed to like him. He could tell from her expression and her subtle body language. A brief silence fell over the three of them.

“Anyway, let me give you the important package I brought,” Komura said. He unzipped his suitcase and pulled the box out of the folds of the thick ski undershirt he had wrapped it in. The thought struck him then: I was supposed to be holding this when I got off the plane. That’s how they were going to recognize me. How did they know who I was?

Keiko Sasaki stretched her hands across the table, her expressionless eyes fixed on the package. After testing its weight, she did as Komura had done and gave it a few shakes by her ear. She flashed him a smile as if to signal that everything was fine, and slipped the box into her oversize shoulder bag.

“I have to make a call,” she said. “Do you mind if I excuse myself for a moment?”

“Not at all,” Komura said. “Feel free.”

Keiko slung the bag over her shoulder and walked off toward a distant phone booth. Komura studied the way she walked. The upper half of her body was still, while everything from the hips down made large, smooth, mechanical movements. He had the strange impression that he was witnessing some moment from the past, shoved with random suddenness into the present.

“Have you been to Hokkaido before?” Shimao asked.

Komura shook his head.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a long way to come.”

Komura nodded, then turned to survey his surroundings. “Funny,” he said, “sitting here like this, it doesn’t feel as if I’ve come all that far.”

“Because you flew. Those planes are too damn fast. Your mind can’t keep up with your body.”