Junpei said he had been feeling sick.
“Yeah,” she said, “you’ve lost 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 contained only two cans of beer, a deceased cucumber, and some deodorizer. Sayoko sat down next to him. “I don’t know how to put 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. He himself 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. Then 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 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 you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, though, living would be a lot simpler.”
Junpei stared at her in profile. He had no idea what she was trying to say. Why does my brain always have to work so slowly? he wondered. He looked up, and for a long time his half-focused eyes traced the shape of a stain on the ceiling. What would have happened if he had confessed his love to Sayoko before Takatsuki? To this Junpei could find no answer. All he knew for sure was that such a thing could never have happened. Ever.
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 come open. Junpei caught the scent of tears, and drew breath from her mouth. He felt the softness of her breasts against him. Inside his head, he felt some kind of huge switching of places. He even heard the sound it made, like the creaking of every joint in the world. 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, riding on a breeze. It was a popular song. Junpei felt sure he would remember it till the day he died. In fact, though, try as he might after that, he was never able to bring back the title or the melody.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Sayoko said. “It’s not your fault.”
“I think I’m confused,” he said honestly.
She reached out and laid her hand on his. “Come back to school, OK? 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 with a resigned lowering of her head. “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 with almost magical ease. When he held her in his arms that day in his apartment and pressed his lips to hers, something inside him settled down where it belonged. At least he no longer felt confused. The decision had been made, even if he had not been the one to make it.
Sayoko would sometimes introduce Junpei to old high-school classmates 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 really passionate or devoted. The only times Junpei became passionate and devoted were when he was alone, writing stories. His girlfriend eventually went elsewhere in search of true warmth. This pattern repeated itself any number of times.
When he graduated, Junpei’s parents discovered he had been majoring in literature, not business, and things turned ugly. His father wanted him to come back to Kansai and take over the family firm, 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. So, he thought with a bitter smile, he had finally been disowned: the upright Confucian parents renounce the decadent scribbler—it was like something out of the Twenties.
Junpei never applied for regular employment, but took a series of part-time jobs that helped him to scrape by as he continued to write. Whenever he finished a story, he showed it to Sayoko to get her honest opinion, then revised it according to her suggestions. Until she pronounced a piece good, he would rewrite again and again, carefully and patiently. He had no other mentor, and he belonged to no writers’ group. The one faint lamp he had to guide him was Sayoko’s advice.
When he was twenty-four, a story of his won the new writer’s prize from a literary magazine, and it was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, the coveted gateway to a successful career in fiction. Over the next five years, he was nominated four times for the Akutagawa Prize, but he never 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 the creation of scene 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 things. “These guys are off their rockers. 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 a new writer’s short story collections, according to his editor. The reviews were generally favorable, but none gave his work passionate support.
Most of Junpei’s stories depicted the course of unrequited young love. Their conclusions were always dark, and somewhat sentimental. Everyone agreed they were well written, but they stood unmistakably apart from the more fashionable literature of the day. Junpei’s style was lyrical, the plots rather old-fashioned. Readers of his generation were looking for a more inventive style and grittier storylines. 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, and his fictional world would waste away. Writing a novel could open up whole new worlds for a writer. As a practical matter, too, novels attracted far more attention than stories. If he intended to have a long career, he should recognize that writing only short stories would be a hard way to make a living.
But Junpei was a born short story writer. He would shut himself in his r
oom, 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, then do more polishing in response to their remarks. 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; total concentration of imagery and language. Junpei felt only exhaustion when he thought about writing a novel. How could he possibly maintain and control that mental concentration for months at a time? That kind of pacing eluded him.
He tried, though. He tried over and over again, ending always in defeat. And so he gave up. Like it or not, he was going to have to make his living as a short story writer. That was his style. No amount of effort was going to change his personality. You couldn’t turn a great second baseman into a home-run hitter.
Junpei did not need much money to support his austere bachelor’s lifestyle. Once he had made what he needed for a given period, he would stop accepting work. He had only one silent cat to feed. The girlfriends he found were always the undemanding type, but even so, they would eventually get on his nerves, and he would come up with some excuse for ending the relationship. Sometimes, maybe once a month, he would wake at an odd time in the night with a feeling close to panic. I’m never going anywhere, he would tell himself. I can struggle all I want, but I’m never going anywhere. Then, he would either force himself to go to his desk and write, or drink until he could no longer stay awake. Except for these times, he lived a quiet, untroubled life.
Takatsuki had landed the job he had always wanted—reporting for a top newspaper. Since he never studied, his grades at university were nothing to brag about, but the impression he made at interviews was overwhelmingly positive, and he had pretty much been hired on the spot. Sayoko had entered graduate school, as planned. Life was all smooth sailing for them. 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 Tokyo. 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.
Takatsuki enjoyed his work at the newspaper. They assigned him first to the city desk and kept him running around from one scene of tragedy to the next, in the course of which he saw many dead bodies. “I can see a corpse now and not feel a thing,” he said. Bodies severed by trains, charred in fires, discolored with age, the bloated cadavers of the drowned, shotgun victims with brains splattered, dismembered corpses with heads and arms sawed off. “Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we’re alive, we’re all the same once we’re dead,” he said. “Just used-up shells.”
Takatsuki was sometimes too busy to make it home until morning. Then Sayoko would call Junpei. She knew he was often up all night.
“Are you working? Can you talk?”
“Sure,” he would say. “I’m not doing anything special.”
They would discuss the books they had read, or things that had come up in their daily lives. Then they would talk about the old days, when they were all still free and wild and spontaneous. Conversations like that would inevitably bring back memories of the time when Junpei had held Sayoko in his arms: the smooth touch of her lips, the smell of her tears, 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 have a baby. The three of them came up with names, but they settled in the end on Junpei’s suggestion—“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 said 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 Sayoko, and the next thing I know I’m a father. It’s weird, like I’m watching a movie in fast-forward. But you wouldn’t understand, Junpei. You’re still living the same 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. It 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 he was not yet sure of was how he ought to feel about it.
“I couldn’t tell you this before,”Takatsuki said, “but I’m sure Sayoko was more attracted to you than she was to me.” He was pretty drunk, but there was a far 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 pretty 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, but I figured, what the hell, I was in love with her, and I couldn’t find anybody better, so I had to have her. I still think she’s the greatest woman in the world. And 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. ’Cause you’re so damned stupid. That’s OK, though. I don’t care if you’re stupid. You’re not such a bad guy. I mean, look, you’re the guy that gave my daughter her name.”
“Yeah, OK, OK,” Junpei said, “but I still don’t get it when it comes to anything important.”
“Exactly. When it comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.”
“Anyhow, now there’s four of us,” Takatsuki said with a kind of sigh. “I wonder, though. Four of us. Four. Can that number be right?”
2
Junpei learned just before Sala’s second birthday that Takatsuki and Sayoko were on the verge of breaking up. Sayoko seemed somewhat apologetic when she divulged the news to him. Takatsuki had had a lover since the time of Sayoko’s pregnancy, she said, and he hardly ever came home anymore. It was someone he knew from work.
Junpei could not grasp what he was hearing, no matter how many details Sayoko was able to give him. Why did Takatsuki have to find himself another woman? He had declared Sayoko to be the greatest woman in the world the night Sala was born, and those words had come from deep in his gut. Besides, he was crazy about Sala. Why, in spite of that, did he have to abandon his family?
“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 with a gentle smile. “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.”
“In a lot of different ways,” she had said. The world is full of incomprehensible words, thought Junpei.
Sayoko and Takatsuki were divorced some months later. They concluded agreements on several specific issues without the slightest hang-up: 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. Easier? Junpe
i felt as if he had grown much older all of a sudden, though he had just turned thirty-three.
Sala called Takatsuki “Papa” and Junpei “Jun.” The four of them were an odd pseudo-family. Whenever they got together, Takatsuki would be 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 her parents were divorced. Junpei played his assigned role perfectly without the slightest objection. The three joked around as always and talked about the old days. The only thing that Junpei understood about all this was that it was something the three of them needed.
“Hey, Junpei, tell me,” Takatsuki said one January night when the two of them were walking home, breath white in the chill air. “Do you have somebody you’re planning to marry?”
“Not at the moment,” Junpei said.
“No girlfriend?”
“Nope, guess not.”
“Why don’t you and Sayoko get together?”
Junpei squinted at Takatsuki as if at some too-bright object. “Why?” he asked.
“ ‘Why’?! Whaddya 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 ought to 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’s not the problem. I just wonder if you can make, 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, right? That’s the most important thing. I know you’ve got your own special hang-ups. Fine. I grant you that. But to me, it looks like you’re trying to pull off your shorts without taking off your pants.”