Some nights, my mom wouldn’t return. She never brought a man into the apartment, though. My mom had a strict sense of duty, and the way she saw it, that space belonged to my dad. I was sort of surprised that my dutiful mom ran off with my inheritance, but there’s no point going on about that. I suppose she must have hated my father for not leaving her anything after she had worked so desperately hard to raise me.
By the time I’d been to the game center there in that unfamiliar town, and had numerous cups of coffee, and sat on an embankment to watch the sunset, and stood for a while in the bookstore, reading, I was completely and utterly confused.
I seemed to be in some generic town of the sort one encounters in dreams. My heart, bathed in light from the western sun, felt as if it were beginning to rot. My head was spinning; I thought that if I just turned the next corner, I’d be able to get back home. And when I arrived, I’d find those rooms where I had lived with my mom, and the scent of clean laundry would rise up around me, and I would hear the kitchen floorboards creaking—it was impossible not to believe it would all be there unchanged. The building we lived in was fairly nice, but it had been built a good twenty years ago, and in a lot of places it was starting to show signs of age. It was hot in summer, cold in winter. I thought I could go back to that apartment. My mom would be eating dinner as if nothing had happened, and I would burst through the door, and our old life would begin again... that’s how it felt. Isn’t it Monday today? I’ll have to fold laundry, I thought, then go do the shopping.
The truth was that my mother was living in an apartment I didn’t know, here in this unfamiliar town, with a man I didn’t know. When the time seemed more or less right, I made my way back to the building.
My mom always left the curtains open, and they were open now, too, in this new apartment. I had a clear view of her silhouette in the window: she was busy getting ready to go out. The windows were made of frosted glass, but the lights were on, and I could see every movement. After she was dressed, she came back into the room and changed her jacket, just as she used to when we were living together, then looked herself over from head to toe in the full-length mirror by the window—another habit of hers. I became more and more confused, until in the end I no longer had any idea when all this was taking place. If I just walked in there, everything that had happened would be erased—I really felt as if time could run backward. My mom switched off the lights and left the room. Which means, I figured, that the man isn’t there.
My mom hurried away, unaware that I was hiding in the shadows. She was a beautiful woman who loved dealing with customers, and she couldn’t get along without the pleasures of a job at a bar. She was doing the same work here in this town. Her small back hadn’t changed. She walked off at a fast pace.
I quickly checked her mailbox to make sure I had the right apartment number, then slipped my hand through the slot and felt around the top of the box. Just as I expected: the key was stuck there with packing tape, just like always. I took out the key and headed for my mother’s new apartment.
The building, which was built on the model of a housing complex, was very big. I was an intruder—my heart thumped each time I passed someone. All kinds of happy noises came through the different windows. The voices of children, of fathers already going in to take a bath, someone calling to someone else, the sounds of dinners being prepared, and the delicious smells... I started to feel as if I might cry, so I rushed down the hall very quickly.
My mother’s apartment was all the way at the end. I slid the key into the lock and opened the door. Male clothing I didn’t recognize hung on the wall. It was a suit. I gave a sigh of relief, because, judging from the style, he was clearly just a regular businessman. She hadn’t, it seemed, been sweet-talked by a yakuza. My mother was living a new life now. The kitchen looked very tidy; I could smell my mother’s scent. There were four rooms. I went into the one where I had seen her silhouette earlier, since it seemed like the best place to start, and opened the drawer where she had always kept her underwear. And just as I expected, my seal and passbook were both there, under the underwear. Looking through the passbook, I saw that my father had left me twenty million yen. She didn’t appear to have touched it yet. Taking the money was one thing, but I don’t know how she expected me to get along without my official seal. I really needed it. I left the apartment, taking the seal and passbook with me. I locked the door, thinking as I did that it was kind of unusual—a thief locking the door behind her. I had left a slip of paper in the bottom of the drawer on which I had written, in small characters, “Lupin the Third Strikes Again!” though I doubted my amusing manga allusion would make her smile. I finished things off by taping the key back where it had been, then caught a train and went home.
The next day I canceled my contract with the phone company and got a cell phone. Then I completed the paperwork necessary for me to move out of my apartment. It would have been a pain if my mother realized the things were gone and came to get the money. I must have used a whole life’s worth of energy going through it all. In one sleepless night, I disposed of everything. I packed all my dad’s clothes into a single cardboard box. I put his books, his letters, and all the other things he had left behind into storage. None of the things my mother had left mattered—that was why she had left them, after all—so I threw everything away. I also tossed as many of my own things as possible and put the rest into storage with my dad’s things. Ultimately, I was able to fit everything into just two suitcases. Two days later, I went to the bank and opened a new account for myself with ten million yen, then had them print up a check for the remaining ten million, which I mailed to my mother. When I got the receipt for sending it by registered mail, an image of the mailbox in that building drifted up before my mind’s eye. It occurred to me—and I felt how true it was—that the moment this check slipped into that mailbox, I would really be alone.
I stayed in a business hotel for a while, but then Chizuru suggested that I come stay in her place. She started out as the friend of a friend. I knew she liked me, and I liked her, and at that point in my life I was just looking for a way to buy time until the sense of rootlessness that pervaded my days abated. And so I decided to take advantage of her kind offer.
Living with Chizuru was great, right from the start.
Chizuru saw ghosts, or sometimes sensed their presence. She was the sort of person who would get teary-eyed when something sad happened to a friend, even though she didn’t particularly feel like crying. And when my shoulders were stiff or I had gastritis or something, she could make it better just by putting her hand where it hurt. Chizuru’s explained that when she was a child something terrible had happened to her—she had tumbled down a long flight of stairs—and she’d had these powers ever since then. Her eyes were very clear, and she was always staring someplace a little off to one side of whoever she was with, her gaze full of light. She was a strong person. Nothing scared her.
What’s more, her apartment was just the sort of place my troubled heart needed then. It was on the seventh floor of a building that was falling to pieces, right next to the highway, and when you looked down out of the window you saw a bunch of alleys squashed together and a row of slumlike buildings. It was always very loud, many of the tenants were behind on their rent, and the apartment one floor above—a two-room place just like hers—was inhabited by a family of eight that made a stunning amount of noise. Her building reminded me of the slums in Kulong, Hong Kong, which I had seen once on TV.
One day I asked her, So what made you decide to live in a place like this? To which she replied with a smile, Somehow I feel really relaxed here. Because when I see too many ordinary people, I start thinking that I’m strange, and that makes me uneasy.
Chizuru kept things abnormally clean—the floors and the kitchen were always polished until they shone. More than once I’d been awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of her scrubbing the floor, and it was so slick I used to slip and fal
l all the time.
She almost never slept. She said a few hours of sleep was enough. And that scrubbing the floor was just a way to kill time. She said she had been scrubbing the floors even before we started living together, even though there was no one to notice how clean they were, as she waited for daybreak.
She also insisted that she saw ghosts. She was constantly muttering to herself, saying the most frightening things. There’s an old woman coming, and look, she’s got a bunch of persimmons! That kid must have been run over by a car, huh? And so on. While I was with her, the world teemed with ghosts.
I had made up my mind that if I couldn’t see something, it didn’t exist, so I wasn’t too concerned about all that. And yet, from time to time, I did sense something. Out on the street, in the apartment. And every time that happened, without fail, she would say someone was there.
In order to sleep peacefully without seeing ghosts, Chizuru always went to bed wearing an array of objects that glowed or lit up. Rings, earrings, bracelets. She said these things kept the ghosts away. As a result, when we had sex—for some reason, she always played a masculine role—I always ended up getting poked in all kinds of places by various accessories, and it invariably hurt.
There really was a lot of fog that year.
When I awoke, near daybreak, Chizuru would often be sitting with a rag in one hand, partway through scrubbing the floor, gazing out the window.
The headlights of cars would reflect off the fog, filling the air with a mysterious glow. It was like a scene from another world. Or like something you might see at the edge of this world—and that included Chizuru, the spectator. I would open my eyes a crack and watch her, without letting her know I was awake. She would rest her elbow on the rusty window frame, which rattled in the wind, and gaze out like a child, cradling her chin in her hand. The fog out there was milky, so thick it seemed you could reach out and touch it. I felt as if morning might never come. Chizuru’s torso and her arms were so thin they seemed to have been rejected by the world. They were only allowed to exist in these peculiar landscapes.
People tend to think they break up because they get tired of the person they’ve been with—that it’s someone’s decision, either yours or theirs. But this isn’t really true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it. Human willpower can’t change that—which means, if you look at it another way, that we might as well enjoy ourselves until that day arrives.
Our life together was peaceful and fun, right to the very end.
Or was I the only one who felt this way? No, I doubt that.
Little by little, as we lived a life fueled by convenience store meals in that old apartment, I began to train my mental muscles, which was what I needed to do to become an adult. It occurred to me that maybe it was time to try living alone. I found a place that was cheap, just right for me, and not too far away; I decided to take it right away, and told Chizuru. She didn’t seem particularly disturbed at the time. She just smiled and said, We can still go back and forth, right? So I didn’t realize what a shock it gave her.
Our last Sunday together, we felt a little lonely. So Chizuru said she wanted to go for a drive. We headed for a nearby mountain, me behind the wheel of Chizuru’s car. We had a lunch of rice with mushrooms at a small Japanese-style teahouse at the top of the mountain, went out to the overlook and stared at the colorful mountains, then went and soaked in a hot spring.
Yes, it was autumn then.
From where we sat in the bath, we had a splendid view of the autumn leaves: foliage brilliant enough to drive you crazy—a kaleidoscope of different reds and yellows. Each time there was a breeze, the leaves danced as if a storm had blown up. We sat for ages in that open-air bath, but the loneliness never went away.
The loneliness of passing time. The loneliness of the fork in the road.
“I wonder why we feel so lonely? It’s odd, isn’t it?”
We kept repeating such phrases, as it it were someone else’s problem.
“Yeah, we’ll just be living in different places. What’s up with us?”
I felt so bad I envied everyone around us, because they all seemed to be having such fun. All the people who came to soak in the water: the old women, the small children, their mothers. People whose bodies had been molded by the things they did each day, in their ordinary lives. Even after they had all left and new people started coming in, one after another, we stayed there, soaking in the bath. The sky was very high.
“We were inside so much, you know,” said Chizuru, “and there was so much fog, and the weather wasn’t very nice—it’s like a dream, being in such a lovely place.”
“Your mind feels sharper, doesn’t it? When the sky is clear like this.”
Then, in the car on the way back, Chizuru said:
“I’ll get out here.”
I tried and tried to convince her not to leave, but she insisted. The atmosphere in the car grew heavier and heavier, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore, and I let her go. It was almost as if a spell had been cast over me.
When I got back to Chizuru’s apartment, alone this time, it hit me. How could you do something like that? But no matter how I looked at it, she had been serious. I decided the only thing I could do now was get out, not wait in the apartment for her to return, so that she wouldn’t have to be there when I left. So I packed and cleaned until no trace remained of my existence. I left all the things we had shared. I thought about my life—a life that necessitated two speedy moves in such a short period. And I thought about Chizuru. As fond as I was of her, I wasn’t confident that I could love her enough to stay with her, to go on filling the dark, lonely space she carried within her. I knew that someday I would fall in love with a man, and what I would do to her then would be even worse. So I didn’t call her.
Then, a month later, once life in the new apartment had finally begun running smoothly on its tracks, I realized that I really did need her as a friend. I made up my mind to go see her at last, and gave her a call.
“Hey, how are you doing?”
Chizuru sounded just the same as always when she answered the phone.
There, in that apartment.
“Sorry I’ve had the car all this time. Did you get home all right?”
“Yeah, I was fine—we hadn’t gone very far. I stayed two nights after you left, and I was able to hitchhike back right away.”
“That’s good.”
My eyes filled with tears.
“I mean, I’m the one who told you to leave me there, right?” said Chizuru, her voice very gentle. “I really did want to stay on, just a little longer—there in the middle of all that nature, that autumn scenery. I wanted to sort out my emotions. I’m the one who made you do it, so I’m not mad at you, not at all. I just couldn’t bear to be there when you left.”
“I understood how you felt,” I said, “but I should have taken you to the station, at least.”
“No, it’s OK. It’s awkward, isn’t it? Saying goodbye at a station.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You know, I had a lot of fun. Living with you, I mean. I never thought I’d be able to live with another person.”
“Same here.”
“I think you’re a really lucky person. I can tell you’re going to have a very unusual life. I bet all kind of things will happen. But you mustn’t blame yourself. You have to live a hard-boiled life, OK? No matter what happens, keep going around with your nose in the air.”
“What? Do I go around with my nose in the air?”
“Not really.” Chizuru chuckled.
Her voice rang out quietly, like a bell.
“Well, see you around.”
“Yeah, see you around.”
I felt a surge of relief as I put down the phone. There might not be any future for us as a couple, but I began to hope we might come together in some other way. And I was able to fall a
sleep—for the first time since we said goodbye on that mountain road, I fell into a deep, deep sleep.
I had a strange dream then, too.
I’m driving back up the mountain, no longer angry, but in a very gentle mood. In the twilight, the colors of the foliage fade into each other. I come to the place where Chizuru and I said goodbye. Chizuru is there, crouching like a kitten. As I drive toward her, she smiles happily. She opens the door and gets in, the expression on her face more vibrant than any I’ve ever seen. We hold hands. It’s hard driving in the mountains with only one hand, but I don’t want to let go. Chizuru’s cold palm. Her fingers are cold, too, as always. She looks smaller than usual. No matter how dirty her building is, even though the roof leaks when it rains and the walls are so thin you can hear everything, even though there is nothing in the landscape out the window that saves the place, I’m going to go back there with her, and we’ll stay together all our lives...
That’s when I woke up.
I couldn’t begin to describe how I felt.
All day, I kept thinking about that dream. Toward evening, it occurred to me that I hadn’t told anyone but Chizuru my new address, so I gave one of my friends a call. He was a mutual acquaintance of Chizuru and mine.
“You’re alive!” he shouted. “Talk about the devil’s luck!”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
His words resonated strangely with what Chizuru had said earlier.
“You mean you haven’t heard?... I’m so sorry. The day before yesterday, there was a fire in the building where Chizuru lived. Chizuru died.”
“What?” I said, stunned. “But I talked to her on the phone yesterday!”
“That’s... you know. You know Chizuru. It could happen.”
“But how...”
“Everyone thought you were still living with her, and we were so worried, we were searching for your body, trying to figure out where you might have gone,” said our friend. “We had no way of contacting you or anything—we didn’t know what to do. God, I’m so glad you’re all right. At least there’s something good in this tragedy. I’ll tell everyone you’re OK.”