Two or three minutes went by, and then a gatekeeper in a navy blue uniform came down the forest road on a yellow bicycle. He was a tall man in his early sixties with a receding hairline. He leaned the yellow bike against the guardhouse and said, “I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting,” though he didn’t sound sorry at all. The number 32 was painted on the bike’s fender in white. When I gave him my name, he picked up the phone and repeated it twice to someone on the other end. Replying, “Yes, uh-huh, I see” to the other person, he hung up.
“Go to the main building, please, and ask for Doctor Ishida,” he said to me. “You take this road through the trees to a rotary. Then take your second left—got that? Your second left—from the rotary. You’ll see an old house. Turn right and go through another bunch of trees to a concrete building. That’s the main building. It’s easy, just watch for the signs.”
I took the second left from the rotary as instructed, and where that leg ended I came to an interesting old building that had obviously been someone’s country house once upon a time. It had a manicured garden with well-shaped rocks and a stone lantern. This property must once have been a country estate. Turning right through the trees, I saw a three-story concrete building. It stood in a hollowed-out area, and so there was nothing overpowering about its three stories. It was simple in design and gave a strong impression of cleanliness.
The entrance was on the second floor. I climbed the stairs and went in through a big glass door to find a young woman in a red dress at the reception desk. I gave her my name and said I had been instructed to ask for Doctor Ishida. She smiled and gestured toward a brown sofa, suggesting in low tones that I wait there for the doctor to come. Then she dialed the telephone. I lowered my knapsack from my back, sank down into the deep cushions of the sofa, and surveyed the place. It was a clean, pleasant lobby, with ornamental potted plants, tasteful abstract paintings, and a polished floor. As I waited, I kept my eyes on the floor’s reflection of my shoes.
At one point the receptionist assured me, “The doctor will be here soon.” I nodded. What an incredibly quiet place! There were no sounds of any kind. You would have thought everyone was taking a siesta. People, animals, bugs, plants must all be sound asleep, I thought, it was such a quiet afternoon.
Before long, though, I heard the soft padding of rubber soles, and a mature, bristly haired woman appeared. She swept across the lobby, sat down next to me, crossed her legs, and took my hand. Instead of just shaking it, she turned my hand over, examining it front and back.
“You haven’t played a musical instrument, at least not for some years now, have you?” were the first words out of her mouth.
“No,” I said, taken aback. “You’re right.”
“I can tell from your hands,” she said with a smile.
There was something almost mysterious about this woman. Her face had lots of wrinkles. These were the first thing to catch your eye, but they didn’t make her look old. Instead, they emphasized a certain youthfulness in her that transcended age. The wrinkles belonged where they were, as if they had been part of her face since birth. When she smiled, the wrinkles smiled with her; when she frowned, the wrinkles frowned, too. And when she was neither smiling nor frowning, the wrinkles lay scattered over her face in a strangely warm, ironic way. Here was a woman in her late thirties who seemed not merely a nice person but whose niceness drew you to her. I liked her from the moment I saw her.
Wildly chopped, her hair stuck out in patches and the bangs lay crooked against her forehead, but the style suited her perfectly. She wore a blue work shirt over a white T-shirt, baggy, cream-colored pants, and tennis shoes. Long and slim, she had almost nothing for breasts. Her lips moved constantly to one side in a kind of ironic curl, and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes moved in tiny twitches. She looked like a kindly, skilled, but somewhat world-weary woman carpenter.
Chin drawn in and lips curled, she took some time to look me over from head to toe. I imagined that any minute now she was going to whip out her tape measure and start measuring me everywhere.
“Can you play an instrument?” she asked.
“Sorry, no,” I said.
“Too bad,” she said. “It would have been fun.”
“I guess it would have been,” I said. Why all this talk about musical instruments?
She took a pack of Seven Stars from her breast pocket, put one between her lips, lit it with a cigarette lighter, and began puffing away with obvious pleasure.
“It crossed my mind that I should tell you about this place, Mr.— Watanabe, wasn’t it?—before you see Naoko. So I arranged for the two of us to have this little talk. Ami Hostel is kind of unusual—enough so that you might find it a little confusing without any background knowledge. I’m right, aren’t I, in supposing that you don’t know anything about this place?”
“Almost nothing.”
“Well, then, first of all—” she began, then snapped her fingers. “Come to think of it, have you had lunch? I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
“You’re right, I am.”
“Come with me, then. We can talk over food in the dining hall. Lunchtime is over, but if we go now they can still make us something.”
She took the lead, hurrying down a corridor and a flight of stairs to the first-floor dining hall. It was a large room, with enough space for perhaps two hundred people, but only half was in use, the other half closed off with partitions, like a resort hotel in the off-season. The day’s menu listed a potato stew with noodles, salad, orange juice, and bread. The vegetables turned out to be as startlingly delicious as Naoko had said in her letter, and I finished everything on my plate.
“You obviously enjoy your food!” said my female companion.
“It’s wonderful,” I said. “Plus, I’ve hardly eaten anything all day.”
“You’re welcome to mine if you like. I’m full. Here, go ahead.”
“I will, if you really don’t want it.”
“I’ve got a small stomach. It doesn’t hold much. I make up for what I’m missing with cigarettes.” She lit another Seven Stars. “Oh, by the way, you can call me Reiko. Everybody does.”
Reiko seemed to derive great pleasure from watching me while I ate the potato stew she had hardly touched and munched on her bread.
“Are you Naoko’s doctor?” I asked.
“Me? Naoko’s doctor?!” She squinched up her face. “What makes you think I’m a doctor?”
“They told me to ask for Doctor Ishida.”
“Oh, I get it. No no no, I teach music here. It’s a kind of therapy for some patients, so for fun they call me the ‘Music Doctor’ and sometimes ‘Doctor Ishida.’ But I’m just another patient. I’ve been here seven years. I work as a music teacher and help out in the office, so it’s hard to tell anymore whether I’m a patient or staff. Didn’t Naoko tell you about me?”
I shook my head.
“That’s strange,” said Reiko. “I’m Naoko’s roommate. I like living with her. We talk about all kinds of things. Including you.”
“What about me?”
“Well, first I have to tell you about this place,” said Reiko, ignoring my question. “The first thing you ought to know is that this is no ordinary ‘hospital.’ It’s not so much for treatment as for convalescence. We do have a few doctors, of course, and they give hourly sessions, but they’re just checking people’s conditions, taking their temperature and things like that, not administering ‘treatments’ like in a regular hospital. There are no bars on the windows here, and the gate is always wide open. People enter voluntarily and leave the same way. You have to be suited to that kind of convalescence to be admitted here in the first place. In some cases, people who need specialized therapy end up going to a specialized hospital. O.K. so far?”
“I think so,” I said. “But what does this ‘convalescence’ consist of? Can you give me a concrete example?”
Reiko exhaled a cloud of smoke and drank what was left of her orange juice. “Just living he
re is the convalescence,” she said. “A regular routine, exercise, isolation from the outside world, clean air, quiet. Our farmland makes us practically self-sufficient; there’s no TV or radio. We’re like one of those commune places you hear so much about. Of course, one thing different from a commune is that it costs a bundle to get in here.”
“A bundle?”
“Well, it’s not ridiculously expensive, but it’s not cheap. Just look at these facilities. We’ve got a lot of land here, a few patients, a big staff, and in my case I’ve been here a long time. True, I’m almost staff myself, so I get a substantial break, but still … Say, how about a cup of coffee?”
I’d like some, I said. She crushed out her cigarette and went over to the counter, where she poured two cups of coffee from a warm pot and brought them back to where we were sitting. She put sugar in hers, stirred it, frowned, and took a sip.
“You know,” she said, “this sanatorium is not a profit-making enterprise, so it can keep going without charging as much as it might have to otherwise. The land was a donation. They created a corporation for the purpose. The whole place used to be the donor’s summer home, until some twenty years ago. You saw the old house, I’m sure?”
I had, I said.
“That used to be the only building on the property. It’s where they did group therapy. That’s how it all got started. The donor’s son had a tendency toward mental illness and a specialist recommended group therapy for him. The doctor’s theory was that if you could have a group of patients living out in the country, helping each other with physical labor, and have a doctor for advice and checkups, you could cure certain kinds of sickness. They tried it, and the operation grew and was incorporated, and they put more land under cultivation, and put up the main building five years ago.”
“Meaning, the therapy worked.”
“Well, not for everything. Lots of people don’t get better. But also a lot of people who couldn’t be helped anywhere else managed a complete recovery here. The best thing about this place is the way everybody helps everybody else. Everybody knows they’re flawed in some way, and so they try to help each other. Other places don’t work that way, unfortunately. Doctors are doctors and patients are patients: the patient looks for help to the doctor and the doctor gives his help to the patient. Here, though, we all help each other. We’re all each others’ mirrors, and the doctors are part of us. They watch us from the sidelines and they slip in to help us if they see we need something, but it sometimes happens that we help them. Sometimes we’re better at something than they are. For example, I’m teaching one doctor to play the piano, and another patient is teaching a nurse French. That kind of thing. Patients with problems like ours are often blessed with special abilities. So everyone here is equal—patients, staff—and you. You’re one of us while you’re in here, so I help you and you help me.” Reiko smiled, gently flexing every wrinkle on her face. “You help Naoko and Naoko helps you.”
“What should I do, then? Give me a concrete example.”
“First you decide that you want to help and that you need to be helped by the other person. Then you decide to be totally honest. You will not lie, you will not gloss over anything, you will not cover up anything that might prove embarrassing for you. That’s all there is to it.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “But tell me, Reiko, why have you been in here for seven years? Talking with you like this, I can’t believe there’s anything wrong with you.”
“Not while the sun’s up,” she said with a somber look. “But when night comes, I start drooling and rolling on the floor.”
“Really?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m kidding,” she said, shaking her head with a look of disgust. “I’m completely well—for now, at least. I stay here because I enjoy helping other people get well, teaching music, raising vegetables. I like it here. We’re all more or less friends. Compared to that, what have I got in the outside world? I’m thirty-eight, going on forty. I’m not like Naoko. There’s nobody waiting for me to get out, no family to take me back. I don’t have any work to speak of, and almost no friends. And after seven years, I don’t know what’s going on out there. Oh, I’ll read a paper in the library every once in a while, but I haven’t set foot outside this property for seven years. I wouldn’t know what to do if I left.”
“But maybe a new world would open up for you,” I said. “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”
“Hmm, you may be right,” she said, turning her cigarette lighter over and over in her hand. “But I’ve got my own set of problems. I can tell you all about them sometime if you like.”
I nodded in response. “And Naoko,” I said, “has she gotten better?”
“Hmm, we think she has. She was pretty confused at first and we had our doubts for a while, but she’s calmed down now and she’s improved to where she’s able to express herself verbally. She’s definitely headed in the right direction. But she should have gotten treatment a lot earlier than she did. Her symptoms were already showing up from the time that boyfriend of hers, Kizuki, killed himself. Her family should have seen it, and she herself should have realized that something was wrong. Of course, things weren’t right at home, either …”
“They weren’t?” I shot back.
“You didn’t know?” Reiko seemed even more surprised than I was.
I shook my head.
“I’d better let Naoko tell you about that herself. She’s ready for some honest talk with you.” Reiko gave her coffee another stir and took a sip. “There’s one more thing you need to know,” she said. “According to the rules here, you and Naoko will not be allowed to be alone together. Visitors can’t be alone with patients. An observer always has to be present—which in this case means me. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to put up with me. O.K.?”
“O.K.,” I said with a smile.
“But still,” she said, “the two of you can talk about anything you’d like. Forget I’m there. I know pretty much everything there is to know about you and Naoko.”
“Everything?”
“Pretty much. We have these group sessions, you know. So we learn a lot about each other. Plus Naoko and I talk about everything. We don’t have many secrets here.”
I looked at Reiko as I drank my coffee. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m confused. I still don’t know whether what I did to Naoko in Tokyo was the right thing to do or not. I’ve been thinking about it this whole time, but I still don’t know.”
“And neither do I,” said Reiko. “And neither does Naoko. That’s something the two of you will have to decide for yourselves. See what I mean? Whatever happened, the two of you can turn it in the right direction—if you can reach some kind of mutual understanding. Maybe, once you’ve got that taken care of, you can go back and think about whether what happened was the right thing or not. What do you say?”
I nodded.
“I think the three of us can help each other—you and Naoko and I—if we really want to, and if we’re really honest. It can be incredibly effective when three people work at it like that. How long can you stay?”
“Well, I’d like to get back to Tokyo by early evening the day after tomorrow. I have to work, and I’ve got a German exam on Thursday.”
“Good,” she said. “So you can stay with us. That way it won’t cost you anything and you can talk without having to worry about the time.”
“With ‘us’?” I asked.
“Naoko and me, of course,” said Reiko. “We have a separate bedroom, and there’s a sofa bed in the living room, so you’ll be able to sleep fine. Don’t worry.”
“Do they allow that?” I asked. “Can a male visitor stay in a woman’s room?”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to come in and rape us in the middle of the night?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“So there’s no problem, then. Stay in our place and we can have some nice, long talks. That would be the best thing. Then we can really understand eac
h other. And I can play my guitar for you. I’m pretty good, you know.”
“Are you sure I’m not going to be in the way?”
Reiko put her third Seven Stars between her lips and lit it after screwing up the corner of her mouth. “Naoko and I have already discussed this.The two of us together are giving you a personal invitation to stay with us. Don’t you think you should just politely accept?”
“Of course, I’ll be glad to.”
Reiko deepened the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and looked at me for a time. “You’ve got this funny way of talking,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to imitate that boy in Catcher in the Rye?”
“No way!” I said with a smile.
Reiko smiled too, cigarette in mouth. “You are a good person, though. I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.”
“What happens when people open their hearts?”
Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this. “They get better,” she said. Her ashes dropped onto the table, but she paid them no mind.
REIKO AND I LEFT THE MAIN BUILDING, crossed a hill, and passed by a pool, some tennis courts, and a basketball court. Two men—one thin and middle-aged, the other young and fat—were on a tennis court. Both used their racquets well, but to me the game they were playing could not have been tennis. It seemed as if the two of them had a special interest in the bounce of tennis balls and were doing research in that area. They slammed the ball back and forth with a strange kind of concentration. Both were drenched in sweat. The young man, at the end of the court closer to us, noticed Reiko and came over. They exchanged a few words, smiling. Beside the court, a man with no expression on his face was using a large mower to cut the grass.