That night remains in my heart as a truly wonderful scene.
For a long time after that, so long that our hair ended up drenched, the two of us stood there together without exchanging a word. We gazed out vaguely toward the farthest reaches of the ocean, in perfect understanding.
I went to visit Tsugumi the day before my return to Tokyo.
In order to avoid being embarrassed by Tsugumi’s foul behavior, my aunt had arranged for her to be given a room of her own. There was no response when I knocked, so I opened the door without saying anything.
Tsugumi was asleep.
Her white skin still had the same smooth sheen as always, but she looked terribly emaciated. The long eyelashes on her closed lids and the hair that fanned across her pillow and everything else about her looked so pristine and lovely that you could almost believe she was a real-life Sleeping Beauty, and it scared me to look at her. I felt as if the Tsugumi I knew had vanished.
“Hey, wake up!” I said, patting Tsugumi’s cheek.
She moaned and opened her eyes. Her jewellike pupils stared back at me, very large in her small face. “Ah-h-h-h-h, why’d you have to wake me?” she whimpered in a very nasal voice, and then rubbed her eyes.
I smiled at her, relieved. “I came to say goodbye. I’m heading home, you know,” I said. “But I want you to hurry up and get better, okay?”
“You’re what! I can’t believe you’re so cruel!” Tsugumi said. Her voice sounded dreadful, as if it had taken all she had just to pronounce those words. Evidently she didn’t have the energy to sit up, because she just kept glaring at me from where she was, flat on her back.
“It’s your own fault. You get what you deserve.” I grinned.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true.” Tsugumi smiled faintly. And then she said it: “Listen to me, kid. I’m not going to tell anyone else about this, but I’ve got a feeling this is the end. I’m dying.”
My body stiffened. I sat down hurriedly in the chair by her bed, right beside her. “What on earth are you talking about?” I said. I felt somewhat bewildered, somewhat disbelieving. “I mean, they say you’re getting better every day, right? Everything’s progressing just as it should, isn’t it? Are you trying to say there’s something else wrong this time? You know, a big part of the reason your parents are keeping you in the hospital like this is to keep you from doing anything too wild while you’re getting better. They’re using this like a mental hospital or something. This isn’t a matter of life or death at all. Seriously, get a grip on yourself.”
“No, this time it’s different,” Tsugumi said, her expression deadly serious. The shadow I saw in her eyes now was more dark and earnest than anything I had ever seen in her before. “You get what I’m saying, right? Whether you live or die, you know—it has nothing to do with the kind of crap you’re talking about. Maria, I don’t feel like going on anymore. I really don’t.”
“Tsugumi?” I said.
“Trust me, nothing like this has ever happened before,” Tsugumi went on, her voice faltering. “It didn’t matter how bad things got, it didn’t matter what was happening, until now I’ve never felt such a total lack of interest in things. Right now I don’t care about anything. I’m serious, it really feels like some part of me is gone. In the past I didn’t give a damn about death, you know, but now it terrifies me. Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can’t make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don’t get back on track somehow, I’m dead, that’s the sense I get. There isn’t a single strong emotion inside me. That’s a first for me, Maria. I mean, I don’t even hate anything. It’s like I’ve turned into a boring twit of a cliché, just another damn wispy bedridden girl. I can understand how that babe in the O. Henry story felt as she watched the leaves fall off that vine one by one, how honestly frightened it must have made her. I think about how the people around me will start treating me like some kind of incompetent ass as I get ever weaker and weaker, even compared to the way I was before, how they’ll be making fun of me, and about how I’ll slowly start to fade away, and it just makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“But . . .”I fell silent. It stunned me to realize that she really seemed to mean what she was saying. But what was most surprising was that she seemed never to have felt these things before—the arrogance of it was astonishing. Had she been scared to think that things might not work out with Kyōichi after her family moved? Or had the things Yōko said hit her too hard? Because it was true—just as Tsugumi had said, the energy her entire body had always radiated, no matter how sick and weak she got, was starting to vanish. I could sense that. “Listen,” I said. “If you can make a speech like that, you’re fine.”
Tsugumi was staring out uneasily at the sky.
“It’d be nice if that were true.”
She turned to look at me. I had peered into these eyes thousands, tens of thousands of times since the two of us were small, eyes as clear as glass beads—there was no trace of a lie in them now. A profound sparkle that never changes, a sparkle that seems to sing of the glory of eternity.
“Of course it’s true,” I replied.
But to tell the truth, the idea that, for the first time in her life, Tsugumi was suffering the same torments as the rest of the world really did scare me. If she loses her spunkiness, maybe she really will die, I thought. But I couldn’t let her know . . .
“Well, I’m going.” I stood up.
“WHAT!” she cried. “I can’t believe you!”
This time her voice was pretty loud.
I wanted to keep our goodbyes nice and dry, make them as quick and casual as a little boy’s when he saunters out of the room. I jerked open the door, glancing back only as I walked out.
“See you later.”
And then I turned my back on her. You asshole! You’re such a jerk! Is this actually happening? We might never see each other again, and you’re telling me school is more important! Oh my GOD! What a monster! You realize that’s why you’re so unpopular, yeah? Man, you . . . The background music of Tsugumi’s furious cursing kept flowing on behind me as I sauntered down the hall of the hospital.
It was night when I stepped outside.
I sensed a faint breath of salt in the cool breeze—it was as if the ocean that surrounded the peninsula had enveloped every nook and cranny of the town. Walking along the darkened street, I felt a little bit of an urge to cry.
* * *
The next day the sky was as clear as it could be, and a hot sun burned down with such blinding strength it was like the middle of summer. Even so, the incredible clarity of the rays made you feel the autumn.
I felt a tug of pain during breakfast. It was almost as if the whole table and all the fresh seafood that Aunt Masako always went to buy at the market every morning and the general atmosphere created by the meals she prepared and all the rest was being slowly burned into my heart. I ate cheerily, boisterously.
“Tsugumi really is hopeless, isn’t she? Now she won’t even be able to see you off.” Aunt Masako laughed. She’d spoken in exactly the same buoyant tone she used to ask Yōko if she wanted any more to eat. And so as I sat there flooded in morning sunlight, I found myself believing once again what I had already confirmed for myself any number of times—that Tsugumi really was going to be all right. Aunt Masako was packing some pickled vegetables and a mixture of boiled foods into two plastic containers. She wrapped the boxes in a white cloth and started tying a tight knot at the top. “Give these to your mom as a present from me, okay?” she said. Watching her fingers flit deftly about as she did all this, I could already feel myself starting to miss her.
When the time came for me to go, my aunt and uncle came and saw me off at the front door, standing on the stoop. Yōko said she would go with me to the bus stop and went off to get her bicycle. I said goodbye to Pooch.
Then I turned to my aunt and uncle. “Thanks for everything.”
“Come and se
e us at the pension,” replied my uncle, smiling.
“It was a nice summer, wasn’t it?” said my aunt.
Leaving the Yamamoto Inn behind me for good, walking away through the burning rays of the sun, really wasn’t hard at all. I just stepped out the door the way I did every time I went to buy a soda, and by the time I turned to look back I was already far away. I got a glimpse of my aunt’s and uncle’s backs as the two of them went into the inn.
Yōko and I started walking again, side by side.
She kept squinting into the bright sunlight, the rays hitting us straight on, and as she strode on next to me the fact of her shortness and the way her hair swished across her shoulders with every step she took sank deep into my heart, as if it had all been specially pieced together for a scene in some movie. The row of old inns that lined the narrow street leading to the bus stop. The withered shades of the bindweed flowers that had been planted everywhere, all along the street. My memories will remain here, closed within this dry noon. Encased within the unique feeling of noon in a town by the ocean.
We sat down on the concrete steps of the ticket office at the bus stop, and each of us ate a Popsicle.
I doubt it would even be possible to count up the number of Popsicles Yōko and I have eaten together over the summers. As far back as it was possible for either of us to remember, we had been going out together to buy Popsicles with our allowance money. Tsugumi would steal Yōko’s and cram them into her mouth, a whole Popsicle in one bite, showing no mercy, making Yōko cry.
A surge of emotion cuts into my chest, overwhelmingly fierce. As if these people I love and this town are going to vanish from the very face of the earth, a feeling so overwhelmingly bright I can’t stand to look at it straight on.
Shielding her eyes with her hand, Yōko looked up at the sky. “I wonder if these will be our last Popsicles of the year,” she said.
“Nah,” I grinned. “We’ll find an excuse to eat more.”
“For some reason I just feel so bummed out, you know?” murmured Yōko. “Just think, next month we’ll be moving . . . I don’t know, somehow it just doesn’t feel true to me, I don’t quite get it. I don’t think any of this will really hit me until the time comes when we actually have to leave.”
Yōko looked at me and smiled. She seemed very calm. You got the sense that she’d made up her mind not to let herself cry today.
“Cousins are cousins as long as they live,” I said. “It doesn’t matter where in the world they are.”
“Yup. And sisters are sisters as long as they live.” Yōko giggled.
“Tsugumi’s been kind of weird lately, hasn’t she?” I said. “Do you think maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to move? Or did she put so much energy into digging that hole and all that she just burned herself out? I’m not sure what to make of her now.” Half of me wondered whether Yōko was feeling the same unease.
“Hmmm . . . I’m not . . . I don’t think that’s it. You’re right that she’s different from usual, I know what you mean. It’s like her thoughts have gotten stuck somewhere, you know, something like that. She acts the same as always with Kyōichi, but then . . . well, I go to see her, right? But she doesn’t even answer when I knock on the door. So I just open the door and walk in, not calling in or anything because I don’t want to wake her up if she’s sleeping, and she looks really surprised and hides something in her bed—it looks like it must be some sort of paper. I ask her what she thinks she’s doing, tell her she has to get some rest instead of fooling around, and then when I leave the room to get some hot water for tea or something—you know how you keep stepping out for a moment to do stuff like that—well, I go off and get whatever it is and then come back, right, and she’s working at it again, writing something.”
“Writing?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah, she seems to be writing something. And you know, if she’s going to throw herself that deeply into whatever it is she’s doing, she’s simply never going to get well. Even if her chances of recovering are good, it’s too much . . . I really wonder what that girl is thinking.”
“She still has a fever, right?”
“Yes. It zooms way up at night and then goes down again every morning, just the same thing over and over.”
“What do you think she’s writing? A poem or a story or something?” I cocked my head, puzzled. Tsugumi and the act of “writing” struck me as such an unlikely pair that I hardly knew what to think.
Yōko grinned at me. “I never understand what’s going on in Tsugumi’s mind.”
I don’t think I’ll ever forget her elegant manner, the soft feeling of dignity that tinted all the kind, helpful things she did. Just like Tsugumi, she would continue to live and grow as a pale shadow in the recesses of my heart. From now on, no matter where I was, whatever sort of person I grew up to be.
“It sure is hot today, isn’t it? It feels like the middle of summer.” Yōko looked up at the sky again as she spoke, and I gazed at the round silhouette of her chin. Yes, it was strange. I was seeing everything so clearly. Almost as if I were viewing it all through a special wide-angle lens, taking in a full 180 degrees. I sat there, sunk in a very quiet mood, breathing in all that there was in this town, the town where I had grown up.
The bus pulled slowly in.
I couldn’t shake off the vague feeling of sadness that clung to me as I stood in the brightness of noon, not even when it was time to board the bus.
—If only Tsugumi had been here, if only she’d been able to come and make all this vanish with that powerful light of hers. If only she had come to sneer at us, make fun of the lonely expressions on our faces.
Looking out at Yōko through the window of the bus as she kept waving her hand, hardly moving it, still waving as she fell away into the distance, I knew that all I’d really wanted was Tsugumi’s presence there with us.
It was raining in Tokyo.
I don’t know if it was because the weather was different, or because of the chill in the air, or because it was so crowded, but when I stepped out onto the platform of the train station near our apartment, everything had an oddly unanchored look to it, as if it were all hovering in the air.
I suppose it was just my state of mind.
I’d come back, this was my homecoming, and yet everything seemed so far away it was like a scene I’d encountered once in a dream. My body brimmed with energy from the month I’d spent sucking in lungfuls of sea breeze, going around the town, simply moving around.
Walking through the gate, staring out into the gray of the rain-misty city, my thoughts turned for no real reason in an unexpected direction.
My real life is just beginning.
I wobbled down the crowded stairs, struggling with my giant bag, and found my mother standing at the bottom. Surprised, I hurried over.
“Mom! What are you doing here?”
She was holding the basket she used when she went shopping.
She smiled. “I was out shopping anyway, so I thought I’d come meet you. You don’t have an umbrella, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Well, we can go home together.”
My mother and I started walking side by side. I could feel my mother’s presence pushing me back toward reality, one step at a time.
“Did you have a nice time?”
“You bet.”
“That sure is some tan, Maria.”
“Yeah, it was sunny out every day.”
“And I hear Tsugumi has a boyfriend! Your father was surprised.”
“Yeah. They spent all summer together and got really close.”
“And Tsugumi is back in the hospital? She’d been doing so well.”
“I have a feeling this summer was too much for her.”
We walked on through the rain, sharing a single umbrella. My mother’s voice was very quiet. We were heading down a street lined on both sides with stores, toward our apartment, and deep inside I was beginning to realize with even greater clarity just how hot th
e summer had been. And at the same time I was thinking more tenderly of Tsugumi than ever before.
Tsugumi in love. That brilliant face.
“Your father has been waiting. He was so eager to get you back it wouldn’t surprise me if he came home early today. To tell the truth, it was a bit boring for me too while you were away. I’m planning to make all your favorite foods tonight, you know. How does that sound?”
My mother smiled.
“Boy, it’ll really be nice to eat at home. It’s been so long since I last tasted your cooking. And we have so much to talk about,” I said.
But even as I said this, I was thinking that I probably wouldn’t tell them about the hole. Or about how deep Kyōichi’s love for Tsugumi was when he stood near the dark ocean, or about the awful weight of Yōko’s tears. Because these things could never be communicated, these treasures of my heart.
And so my summer came to an end.
A Letter from Tsugumi
I felt kind of lost for a while after I went back to Tokyo.
Of course school was packed with people like that, still muddle-headed from the effects of summer vacation. In the beginning my classmates and I all kept making the same observation, saying that it felt as if we were actually just little kids playing school, pretending. And yet each time I had a conversation with someone about what we’d done during the break, I couldn’t help feeling that the summer I’d passed had been a little different from everyone else’s.
Yes, I really had been in a different world.
The ferocious energy Tsugumi gave off, the strong sunlight on the summer beach, the new friend I’d made . . . it had all blended together to create a space unlike any I’d ever been in. A world sturdier and more powerful than reality, as vivid as the dreams soldiers have just before they die, when they see the towns they were born in. And yet here in this weak September light I found myself empty-handed, without even a trace of the summer left in me, not an inkling of its past presence. All I could say when people asked me what I had done was that I’d spent the whole time back in the town where I’d grown up, staying for free at an inn run by some relatives. For me the summer had been the concentrated essence of everything in the past that I loved and missed.