The amount of exercise we got on our walks seemed to be just right for Tsugumi. Since she’d started coming with us, I’d cut the length of the walk in half. I’d been worried that it still might be too far, but her complexion improved and she didn’t run a fever, so I decided it was probably okay.
I remember the walk we took one morning.
It was a gorgeous day, without a single cloud in the sky, and the color of the ocean and the sky struck you as being vaguely sweet—they were that shade of blue. Everything glinted with gold in the morning sun, so bright you could hardly stand to keep your eyes open, and the outlines of things were pale and fuzzy the way they are sometimes in movies. About halfway down the beach there was a tall wooden platform shaped like a castle turret. During the summer months lifeguards stood up there and kept an eye on the swimmers. Tsugumi and I climbed the ladder to the platform. Pooch kept circling around the base for a while, looking up enviously at us, but when he realized there was no way he could climb up after us he gave up and trotted off down the beach, pretty far away. Tsugumi shouted, “Serves you right, jerk!” in an unbelievably spiteful tone, and Pooch answered with a woof.
“What makes you say things like that?” I asked, astonished.
“Hell, that damn dog even understands Japanese!” Tsugumi said, grinning. She had her face turned to the ocean, and her thin bangs kept swishing across her forehead, all the tiny hairs lightly jostling together. She had run a really incredible distance, and now her cheeks were bright red and you could see the veins under her skin. Her glittering eyes reflected the water.
I looked at the ocean, too.
It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes or by the commotion of the surface—it never seems too loud, or too wild.
I simply couldn’t believe that I was about to move to a place where there was no ocean. Somehow it didn’t register; it was so strange that just thinking about it made me uneasy. Because the ocean had always been there, in the good times as well as the bad times of my life, when it was sweltering out and the beach was filled with people, and in the dead of winter when the sky was heavy with stars, and when we were heading to the local shrine on New Year’s Day . . . all I had to do was turn my head and it would be there, the same as always. It didn’t matter if I was a kid or a grown-up. The old woman next door might have just died, the local doctor might have just had a baby, or I might be on my first date or have fallen out of love—none of this made any difference at all to the ocean; it remained just as it was, fanning out around the edge of our town and zooming quietly off into the distance, the tide rising and falling just as it always did, no matter what. On days when the visibility was particularly good you could easily make out the shore on the far side of the bay. And it seemed to me that even if you weren’t actively letting your emotions ride its surface, the ocean still went on giving you something, teaching you some sort of lesson. Perhaps that was why I had never actually considered its existence before—never really thought about the thundering of the waves as they sweep in endlessly toward the shore. But since I was thinking about it, what on earth did people in the city turn to when they felt the need to reckon with “balance"? Maybe the moon? That seemed like the obvious choice. But then the moon was so small and far away, and something about it felt sort of lonely, and it didn’t seem like it would really help . . .
“Tsugumi, I don’t think I can live without the ocean nearby,” I blurted out suddenly, without thinking. “I’m too used to having it here.”
Now that I had actually put the feeling into words, I began to realize with increasing clarity how nervous I really was. With every moment that passed, the early sun grew whiter and stronger. Off in the distance we could hear the innumerable sounds that spread through the town as it woke.
“God, you’re a moron!” Tsugumi snapped. She sounded furious, and she kept her face turned toward the water. “Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too—that’s just the way things work. The three of you are finally going to be living together, right? Mom, Dad, and baby Maria, one happy little family! You’ve succeeded in chasing off the old wife, haven’t you? What more could you want? What’s an ocean compared to all that, Maria? You’re such a freaking child, you know that?”
“Yeah . . . I guess you’re right,” I said, struggling to hide my confusion.
Tsugumi’s response had been so honest and to the point that it left me shaken. So much so that for a moment the unease I’d felt was completely blown away. Could I understand this to mean that somewhere deep down inside Tsugumi was also “getting” and “losing” things, and just kept those feelings to herself? She’d always seemed so comfortable with herself, so independent and strong that you could never have imagined her getting and losing things that way . . . All of a sudden I felt as if she had come into focus for me, and for the first time I could see her clearly—a strange, overwhelming sadness.
Has she just kept all this hidden from us?
Is that really how she feels?
Time passed as I continued doing the things that needed to be done before I could leave the town of my childhood. One by one, I tried to come to terms with all the things I would miss. I got together briefly with some friends from junior high whom I hadn’t seen in ages and saw the guy I’d gone out with in high school, and told them that I would be moving away. I had the feeling that this need to do everything so properly was something I’d inherited from my mother, and somehow this touched me deeply. Maybe it had something to do with the position she had been in as my father’s mistress, I don’t know, but she had always taken great care when she interacted with people to treat them very politely, very properly. To tell the truth, I’d actually intended to make a more stylish exit when the time came, sashaying away without saying a word to anyone. But my mother made such a display of going around to all the neighbors to say her goodbyes, and she acted so genuinely sorry to be leaving that I could see everyone in our small town would end up hearing the news before very long. Of course this meant I would have to switch my own tack. In the end I made up my mind just to go ahead and get together with anyone I felt like seeing.
Also, little by little, I started to pack up the things in my room.
Packing was a task that put me in a luminously beautiful, heartrending frame of mind. A mood that recalled the waves. It didn’t matter where I was in the job, suddenly I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and stay perfectly still, and once again the knowledge that this work was leading me to an inescapable, but certainly not unhappy, parting—a natural separation—would gush into me. And every time this happened I would realize that this feeling wasn’t quite suffering, no, but a kind of distress that was at the same time wonderfully exciting. Even as I rested there this sea of emotions continued to ebb and flow through my chest.
Tsugumi’s sister Yōko and I had part-time jobs working at the same shop, a bakery on the main street in town, well known in the area for being the only place around that dealt exclusively in Western desserts. (I’m not sure that really gives them the right to brag, but hey . . .)
That night, I was supposed to pick up my last paycheck. I waited until just before the store closed, since that was the shift Yōko was working, and just as I’d hoped, we each ended up going home with a box of leftover cakes.
Yōko had stacked the boxes very gently in the basket of her bike, which she was now pushing alongside her. I walked next to her, keeping my pace nice and slow. The gravel path that led to the Yamamoto Inn followed the bank of a river and eventually ran into this big bridge. The sea opened into view on the other side of the bridge, and the river flowed quietly into it. The light of the moon and the streetlamps shone brightly on the water and the railings of the bridge.
We had almost reached the bridge when Yōk
o cried out, “Wow, look at all the flowers!” Her gaze was directed down under the bridge. The bank around its base had been hardened with cement, but in the little patch of dirt that still remained, a clump of white flowers was in full bloom, swaying lightly back and forth in the night wind.
“God, there are so many!” I said.
The whiteness of the flowers seemed to levitate in the dark. Every time the crowd of petals bobbed under a puff of wind you were left with an afterimage of white that had the texture of a dream. And just beside that dream the river continued to flow, and off in the distance the dark nighttime ocean stretched the glow of the moon into a single gleaming road. The black waters before us swelled up and fell back again, glimmering with tiny flecks of light, the dark motion extending all the way to infinity.
I won’t have the luxury of seeing scenes like this much longer, I thought, letting the sadness bloom gently in my mind. I didn’t say anything to Yōko. She had been crying a lot lately, and I didn’t want to make her lonely.
We stopped and stood still for a moment.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I said.
“Very.” Yōko gave me a little smile.
Her long hair rippled lightly down her shoulders. Compared to Tsugumi, she wasn’t the sort of person who really stood out for her great looks, but her face was elegantly proportioned. For some reason both she and Tsugumi had very fair skin, even though they had grown up so close to the ocean. Under the light of this moon, Yōko looked even paler than usual.
Soon we started walking on toward the house. In another ten minutes we would be eating the cakes that were now bumping around in the basket of the bicycle. The scene seemed to rise up before my eyes: the clamor of the television, the fragrance of the tatami; four women enjoying each other’s company. Yōko and I would saunter into the brightly lit living room, where my mother and Aunt Masako would be sitting, and announce that we were back. Tsugumi would grumble that she was “sick to hell of eating all these freebie cakes you morons are always bringing home,” but even so she would pick out three or four that she liked and retreat with them to her room. Because that’s what she always did. As she put it, “I hate this home-is-where-the-heart-is garbage. It makes me want to puke.”
We continued walking. Even when we had stepped into some scrunched-up side street where you couldn’t see the ocean, the roar of the waves would follow us. Just as the moon followed us. There beyond and beyond the rows of old roofs, always—the moon.
As cheery and bright as we knew things would be when we arrived home, Yōko and I both felt vaguely dispirited as we ambled on. Maybe it was because, starting today, I no longer worked at the bakery. A loneliness heavy enough to balance out all the years the two of us had spent together as cousins and good friends echoed between us like the faint strains of a melody. Maybe I’d started thinking again about Yōko and what she was like, the translucent silhouette of a petal fluttering down to the ground against the glare of the sun—a petal from a flower named gentleness. No, no—in fact it wasn’t like that at all. We were just walking along talking about silly things, giggling—that was it. And yet no matter how much fun I seemed to be having at the time, sometimes when I think back over my memories all that comes to mind is the blackness of the night and the shadows of telephone poles and garbage cans, things like that, very dark, and the images make me heartsick. When I remember that night now, it seems that’s how it really was.
“You said you were going to come just before the store closed,” said Yōko, “so I was betting that the manager would let us have the leftover cakes. I was looking forward to it the whole time. I’m so happy he did!”
“It’s true. He doesn’t always let us have them, and sometimes there aren’t any left over anyway. We lucked out tonight,” I replied.
Yōko smiled. “When we get home we can have a little party!”
Even in profile her face looked gentle. She had on her round glasses.
“Hey Yōko . . . I really, really want to have one of those apple pies before Tsugumi takes them all. You know how much she likes apple pie.”
It’s kind of pathetic, but I think my tone was pretty desperate at the time.
“Well there aren’t any apple pies in this box, so we just have to make sure only to show her this one. How does that sound?” She smiled again.
Yōko is smart enough to accept all the little selfish demands that people make, no matter what it is they’re asking. It was sort of like sand soaking up water. The environment she’d grown up in seemed to have given her a kind of cheerfully levelheaded way of looking at things.
Setting Tsugumi aside for the moment, since her personality is somewhat unique, I had a number of friends at school who were like Yōko, the daughters of families that ran inns. And no matter how different they all were as types, there was something they all shared. I’m only talking here about the general sort of aura they had—I want to stress that—but you really did get the sense that they had all mastered the art of keeping interpersonal relations nice and dry. I guess it’s because, from the time they were children, people had always been coming to live in their houses for a while and then going off again, and they had all grown up seeing this, having it there all the time in the background. Perhaps you could say that they’d just been totally goodbyed out, and that they were great at masking the various emotions that get called up when the time comes to part with someone you know. I’m not actually the child of one of these families, but I’m pretty close to being one, and I have a feeling that I tend to deal with things in the same way. I think I’m good at running away from the pain that comes with these ordinary emotions.
But when it came to goodbyes, Yōko was different from the rest of us.
When we were kids we used to run around while the maids were cleaning the rooms and doing that sort of stuff, and every once in a while guests who were staying for long periods of time would come over and say hello and ask if we were the owners’ children, and we’d get friendly with them. Even if we just knew them enough to recognize them, it was still fun to say hello when we met. And for every truly unpleasant guest there would be one who was really wonderful, who made everyone feel good just by being around. They were the kind of people whose presence seems to light up a gathering, who become popular with the cooks and the part-time staff and end up as one of the main topics of their conversation. And when the time came for these men and women to leave and they packed up their belongings and climbed into their cars and waved and then drove off, the afternoon light that spilled down into the hollow emptiness of their rooms always seemed so bright you could hardly stand to look. You knew they would probably come again next year, but next year seemed so distant and abstract. Then another guest would come and stay in the same room. It was a cycle we had all been through again and again and again. An inescapable part of our lives.
Toward the beginning of autumn, when the tourist season drew to a close and the number of guests rapidly declined, I’d always manage to muddle my way through the loneliness by forcing myself to be very boisterous and cheery. But Yōko wandered around looking as if she felt all alone in the world, and if she came across something that had been forgotten by one of the kids she’d been friendly with she would even start to cry. The part of people that feels this kind of loneliness is actually very small, and I think anyone who really tries can get by without suffering from it at all. All you have to do is keep the spotlight turned in some other direction. It’s perfectly obvious that letting yourself focus on that area is what makes you get all sentimental and lonely, so the more opportunities you have to experience these goodbyes the more skilled you should become at distracting yourself, and thus at coping with these little lonelinesses. And yet Yōko had done precisely the opposite. Something in her had continued protecting that feeling, had nurtured that loneliness, taking special care to keep it safe. I suppose she didn’t want to lose it.
As soon as you turned the corner you would see the sign of the Yamamoto Inn glowing out from
among the bushes. Every time I saw that sign, and saw the long line of guest room windows, I would relax a little, feel a kind of relief. It didn’t matter whether there were lots of guests and lights shining in most of the rooms, or whether the whole place was empty and the windows were dark; either way it felt like I was being welcomed back by something big, something much larger than me. We would go around to the kitchen side of the inn and slide open the door to the main house, and Yōko would call in, “We’re back!” At that hour my mother was either still over in the inn or else sitting having a cup of green tea in the living room of the main house. Once we’d finished our cakes and pies and whatever else, my mother and I would head back over to the guest house. That was the routine. It had been like that for ages.
“You know what?” I said, as we were taking off our shoes, remembering something I’d been planning to do. “I’ve been thinking I’ll just give you that album you asked me to tape for you. Why don’t I go get it now?”
“Huh? Oh, but I couldn’t take it from you! It’s a two-record set, isn’t it? Just a tape would be fine,” Yōko said, looking stunned.
“No, really, I don’t mind. I was planning to leave it behind anyway; you’ll be doing me a favor if you take it.” I realized as I was speaking that this wasn’t a topic I should have brought up now, but my mouth simply wouldn’t stop. “Think of it as my going-away present. Hold on, is that right? Can I call it a going-away present when I’m giving it to you?”
I glanced over at Yōko. She was in the shadowy part of the entryway, near the door, putting the cover over her bike. She had her face turned down and her cheeks and forehead were red. There were tears in her eyes.