“It continued for about six months, give or take. We’d get together at a bar every two weeks or so and drink together,” Kafuku said. “Then it ended. I ignored his phone calls. Made no attempt to contact him. After a while he stopped calling.”
“I bet he found that strange.”
“Probably.”
“You may have hurt his feelings.”
“I guess so.”
“Why did you break it off so suddenly?”
“Because there was no need to keep acting.”
“You mean there was no need to stay friends once you didn’t have to act?”
“Yes, there was that,” Kafuku said. “But there was another reason too.”
“What was it?”
Kafuku fell silent. Misaki glanced at him occasionally, the unlit cigarette clamped between her lips.
“Go ahead and smoke if you want,” Kafuku said.
“Huh?”
“You can light that thing.”
“But the top is closed.”
“I don’t care.”
Misaki lowered her window, lit the Marlboro with the car lighter, and took a deep drag. Her eyes narrowed in pleasure. She exhaled slowly, directing the smoke out the window.
“Tobacco’s a killer,” Kafuku said.
“Being alive is a killer, if you think about it,” Misaki said.
Kafuku laughed. “That’s one way to see it.”
“That’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh,” Misaki said.
She had a point, Kafuku thought. It had been a long time indeed since he had laughed, not as an act, but for real.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while,” he said. “But there’s something very attractive about you. You’re not homely at all, you know.”
“Thank you very much. My features are plain, that’s all. Like Sonya’s.”
Kafuku looked at Misaki in surprise. “I see you’ve read Uncle Vanya.”
“I hear little bits of it every day, so I wanted to know what it was about. I get curious too, you know,” Misaki said. “ ‘Oh, how miserable I am! I can’t stand it. Why was I born so poorly favored? The agony!’ A sad play, isn’t it.”
“A sad play indeed,” Kafuku said. “ ‘Oh, how unbearable! Is there no help for me? I am forty-seven now. If I live till sixty I have thirteen more years to endure. Too long. How shall I pass those thirteen years? What will help me get through the days?’ People only lived to about sixty back then. Uncle Vanya was fortunate he wasn’t born into today’s world.”
“You were born the same year as my father. I checked.”
Kafuku didn’t respond. He took a handful of cassettes and scanned the songs on the labels. But he didn’t play one. Misaki was holding the lit cigarette in her left hand with her arm out the window. Only when the line of cars crept forward and she had to use both hands to steer and shift gears did she place it between her lips for a moment.
“To be honest, I wanted to punish that guy,” Kafuku said, as if confessing to something. “The guy who slept with my wife.” He put the cassettes back in their containers.
“Punish him?”
“Make him pay for what he did. My plan was to put him off his guard by pretending to be his friend, find his fatal flaw, and use it to torture him.”
“What kind of fatal flaw?” Misaki asked, knitting her brow in thought.
“I didn’t think that far ahead. He was a guy who let his defenses down when he drank, so I was sure something would turn up sooner or later. I could use whatever it was to cause a scandal—create a situation that would destroy his reputation. I figured it would be a piece of cake. Then when he went through his divorce arbitration, he’d probably lose the right to see his son, which would have been a terrible blow. I doubted he could recover from that.”
“That’s pretty dark.”
“Yeah, it’s dark for sure.”
“And it was all to take revenge on him for sleeping with your wife?”
“It was slightly different from revenge,” Kafuku said. “I wasn’t able to forget what had taken place between them. I tried really hard. But I failed. The image of her in another man’s arms was stuck in my mind, as real as life. As if there was a demon with nowhere else to go clinging to a corner of the ceiling, eyes fastened on me. After my wife’s death, I expected the demon would disappear if I just waited long enough. But it didn’t. Instead its presence grew even stronger. I had to get rid of it. To do that I had to let go of my rage.”
Kafuku wondered why he was telling all this to a young woman from Junitakicho in Hokkaido, a girl young enough to be his daughter. Yet once he started, he found he couldn’t stop.
“So you thought you’d try to punish him,” the girl said.
“Yes, that’s true.”
“But you didn’t, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” Kafuku said.
Misaki looked relieved to hear that. She gave a small sigh and flicked her lit cigarette onto the road. He guessed that was what people did in Junitakicho.
“I can’t explain it very well, but at a certain point a lot of things didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Like the demon had left me all of a sudden,” Kafuku said. “The rage vanished. Or maybe it was never rage in the first place.”
“Whatever it was, I’m glad for your sake that it left. That you never seriously hurt anyone.”
“I think so too.”
“But you never did figure out why your wife slept with that guy, why it had to be him, did you?”
“No, I never grasped that. It’s still a big question mark for me. He was a nice, uncomplicated guy. And I think he truly loved my wife. It wasn’t just a romp in the hay for him. Her death hit him hard. So did being turned away from her sickbed at the end. But I couldn’t help liking the guy, even thought we could become friends.”
Kafuku broke off. He was trying to trace the evolution of his feelings to find the words that best matched.
“In fact, though, he was a man of little consequence. He had a good personality. He was handsome, with a winning smile. He got along with everybody. But he wasn’t someone who commanded much respect. He was a weak man, and a second-rate actor. My wife, though, had a strong will and great depth of character. She was the type of person who could think things through on her own. So how could she fall for a nonentity like that and go to bed with him? It’s still a thorn in my heart.”
“It sounds like you feel insulted. Do you?”
Kafuku thought for a moment. She had a point. “You may be right,” he said.
“Isn’t it possible that your wife didn’t fall for him at all?” Misaki said simply. “And that’s why she slept with him?”
Kafuku looked at Misaki’s profile as if gazing at a distant landscape. She worked the wipers a few times to remove the drops from the windshield. The newly installed blades squeaked like a pair of squabbling twins.
“Women can be like that,” Misaki added.
Kafuku couldn’t think of what to say. So he kept silent.
“To me, it’s a kind of sickness. Thinking about it doesn’t do much good. The way my father walked out on my mother and me, my mother’s constant abuse—I blame the sickness for those things. There’s no logic involved. All I can do is accept what they did and try to get on with my life.”
“So then we’re all actors,” Kafuku said.
“Yes, I think that’s true. To a point, anyway.”
Kafuku settled back in the leather seat, closed his eyes, and tried to focus his mind on the sound of the engine when Misaki shifted gears. But he couldn’t catch the precise moment. It was all too smooth, too mysterious. He could only make out a slight gradation in the engine’s hum. It was like the wings of a flying insect, now drawing closer, now fading away.
Time to take a nap, Kafuku thought. Sleep deeply and wake up. Ten or fifteen minutes would be enough. Then back to the stage, and the acting. The bright lights, the rehearsed lines. The applause, the falling curtain. Leaving who one was for
a brief time, then returning. But the self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.
“I’m going to sleep a little,” Kafuku said.
Misaki didn’t answer. She quietly studied the road. Kafuku was grateful for her silence.
Translated by Ted Goossen
YESTERDAY
AS FAR AS I KNOW, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday” (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath.
Yesterday
Is two days before tomorrow,
The day after two days ago.
This is how it began, as I recall, but I haven’t heard it for a long time and I’m not positive that’s how it went. From start to finish, though, Kitaru’s lyrics were almost meaningless nonsense that had nothing to do with the original words. That familiar lovely, melancholy melody paired with the breezy Kansai dialect—which you might call the opposite of pathos—made for a strange combination, a bold denial of anything constructive. At least, that’s how it sounded to me. At the time, I just listened and shook my head. I was able to laugh it off, but I also read a kind of hidden import in it.
—
To my ear, Kitaru had an almost pitch-perfect Kansai accent, even though he was born and raised in Denenchofu, in Ota-ku, in Tokyo. As for me, although I was born and raised in Kansai, I spoke almost perfect standard (that is, Tokyo-style) Japanese. The two of us definitely made an odd pair.
I first met Kitaru at a coffee shop near the main gate of Waseda University, where we worked part time, I in the kitchen and Kitaru as a waiter. We used to talk a lot during downtime at the shop. We were both twenty, our birthdays only a week apart.
“Kitaru is an unusual last name,” I said one day.
“Yeah, for sure,” Kitaru replied in his heavy Kansai accent.
“The Lotte baseball team had a pitcher with the same name.”
“The two of us aren’t related. Not so common a name, though, so who knows? Maybe there’s a connection somewhere.”
I was a sophomore at Waseda then, in the literature department. Kitaru had failed the entrance exam and was attending a prep course to cram for the retake. He’d failed the exam twice, actually, but you wouldn’t have guessed it by the way he acted. He didn’t seem to put much effort into studying. When he was free, he read a lot, but nothing related to the exam—a biography of Jimi Hendrix, books of shogi problems, Where Did the Universe Come From? and the like. He told me that he commuted to the cram school from his parents’ place in Ota Ward, in Tokyo.
“Ota Ward?” I asked, astonished. “But I was sure you were from Kansai.”
“No way. Denenchofu, born and bred.”
This really threw me.
“Then how come you speak Kansai dialect?” I asked.
“I acquired it. Just made up my mind to learn it.”
“Acquired it?”
“Yeah, I studied hard, Verbs, nouns, accent—the whole nine yards. Same as studying English or French. Went to Kansai for training, even.”
I was impressed. So there were people who studied the Kansai dialect as if it were a foreign language? That was news to me. It made me realize all over again how huge Tokyo was, and how many things there were that I didn’t know. It reminded me of the novel Sanshiro, a typical country-boy-bumbles-his-way-around-the-big-city story.
“As a kid, I was a huge Hanshin Tigers fan,” Kitaru explained. “Went to their games whenever they played in Tokyo. But if I sat in the Hanshin bleachers wearing their jerseys and spoke with a Tokyo dialect, nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. Couldn’t be part of the community, y’know? So I figured, I gotta learn the Kansai dialect, and I worked like a dog to do just that.”
“That was your motivation?” I could hardly believe it.
“Right. That’s how much the Tigers mean to me,” Kitaru said. “Now the Kansai dialect’s all I speak—at school, at home, even when I talk in my sleep. My dialect’s near perfect, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely. I was positive you were from Kansai,” I said. “But your version isn’t the dialect from Hanshinkan—the Kobe area. It sounds more like it comes from hard-core, downtown Osaka.”
“You picked up on that, huh? During summer break in high school, I did a homestay in Tenojiku in Osaka. Great place. Can walk to the zoo and everything.”
“Homestay?” Now that was impressive.
“If I’d put as much effort into studying for the entrance exams as I did into studying the Kansai dialect, I wouldn’t be a two-time loser like I am now.”
He had a point. Even his self-directed put-down was kind of Kansai-like.
“So where’re you from?” he asked.
“Kansai. Near Kobe,” I said.
“Near Kobe? Where?”
“Ashiya,” I replied.
“Wow, nice place. Why didn’t you say so from the start?”
I explained. When people asked me where I was from and I said Ashiya, they always assumed that my family was wealthy. But there were all types in Ashiya. My family, for one, wasn’t particularly well off. My dad worked for a pharmaceutical company and my mom was a librarian. Our house was small and our car a cream-colored Corolla. So when people asked me where I was from I always said “near Kobe,” so they didn’t get any preconceived ideas about me.
“Man, sounds like you and me are the same,” Kitaru said. “My address is Denenchofu—a pretty high-class place—but my house is in the shabbiest part of town. Shabby house as well. You should come over sometime. You’ll be, like, ‘Wha’? This is Denenchofu? No way!’ But worrying about something like that makes no sense, yeah? It’s just an address. I do the opposite—hit ’em right up front with the fact that I’m from Den-en-cho-fu. Like, how d’you like that, huh?”
I was impressed. And after this we became friends.
—
There were a couple of reasons why, when I came to Tokyo, I totally gave up speaking the Kansai dialect. Until I graduated from high school, I spoke nothing but—in fact, I’d never spoken standard Tokyo even once. But all it took was a month in Tokyo for me to become completely fluent in this new version of Japanese. I was kind of surprised that I could adapt so quickly. Maybe I’m a chameleon and I didn’t even realize it. Or maybe my sense of language is more advanced than most people’s. Either way, no one believed now that I was actually from Kansai.
Another reason I stopped using the Kansai dialect was that I wanted to become a totally different person.
When I moved from Kansai to Tokyo to start college, I spent the whole bullet-train ride mentally reviewing my eighteen years and realized that almost everything that had happened to me was pretty embarrassing. I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it—it was so pathetic. The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories—I did. A handful of happy experiences. But if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea). Anyway, I wanted to get rid of it all and start a new life in Tokyo with a clean slate as a brand-new person. Try out the new possibilities of a new me. Jettisoning the Kansai dialect was a practical (as well as symbolic) method of accomplishing this. Because, in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people. At least that’s the way it seemed to me at eighteen.
“Embarrassing? What was so embarrassing?” Kitaru asked me.
“You name it.”
“Didn’t get along with your folks?”
“We get along okay,” I said. “But it was still embarrassing. Just being with them made me feel embarra
ssed.”
“You’re weird, y’know that?” Kitaru said. “What’s so embarrassing about being with your folks? I have a good time with mine.”
I couldn’t really explain it. What’s so bad about having a cream-colored Corolla? I couldn’t say. The road in front of our place was kind of narrow, and my parents just weren’t interested in spending money for the sake of appearances, that’s all.
“My parents are on my case all the time ’cause I don’t study enough. I hate it, but whaddaya gonna do? That’s their job. You gotta look past that, y’know?”
“You’re pretty easygoing, aren’t you?” I said.
“You got a girl?” Kitaru asked.
“Not right now.”
“But you had one before?”
“Until a little while ago.”
“You guys broke up?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Why’d you break up?”
“It’s a long story. I don’t want to get into it.”
“A girl from Ashiya?” Kitaru asked.
“No, not from Ashiya. She lived in Shukugawa. It’s nearby.”
“She let you go all the way?”
I shook my head. “No, not all the way.”
“That’s why you broke up?”
I thought about it. “That’s part of it.”
“But she let you get to third base?”
“Rounding third base.”
“How far’d you go, exactly?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“Is that one of those ‘embarrassing things’ you mentioned?”
“Yeah,” I said. That was another thing I didn’t want to remember.
“Man, complicated life you got there,” Kitaru said.
—
The first time I heard Kitaru sing “Yesterday” with those crazy lyrics he was in the bath at his house in Denenchofu (which, despite his description, was not a shabby house in a shabby neighborhood but an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood, an older house, but bigger than my house in Ashiya, not a standout in any way—and, incidentally, the car in the driveway was a navy-blue Golf, a recent model). Whenever Kitaru came home, he immediately dropped everything and jumped in the bath. And, once he was in the tub, he stayed there forever. So I would often lug a little round stool to the adjacent changing room and sit there, talking to him through the sliding door that was open an inch or so. That was the only way to avoid listening to his mother drone on and on—mostly complaints about her weird son and how he needed to study more. That’s where he sang the song with those absurd lyrics for me (though whether it was for my sake or not, I’m not sure).