That was the end of the conversation. She continued walking east, and I followed just behind.
Almost a year had gone by since I had last seen Naoko, and in that time she had lost so much weight as to look like a different person. The plump cheeks that had been a special feature of hers were all but gone, and her neck had become delicate and slender. Not that she was bony now or unhealthy looking: there was something natural and serene about the way she had slimmed down, as if she had been hiding in some long, narrow space until she herself had become long and narrow. And a lot prettier than I remembered. I wanted to tell her that, but couldn’t find a good way to put it.
We had not planned to meet but had run into each other on the Chuo commuter line. She had decided to see a movie by herself, and I was headed for the bookstores in Kanda—nothing urgent in either case. She had suggested that we leave the train, which we happened to do in Yotsuya, where the green embankment makes for a nice place to walk by the old castle moat. Alone together, we had nothing in particular to talk about, and I wasn’t quite sure why Naoko had suggested we get off the train. We had never really had much to say to each other.
Naoko started walking the minute we hit the street, and I hurried after her, keeping a yard behind. I could have closed the distance between us, but something held me back. I walked with my eyes on her shoulders and her straight black hair. She wore a big, brown barrette, and when she turned her head I caught a glimpse of a small, white ear. Now and then she would look back and say something. Sometimes it would be a remark I might have responded to, and sometimes it would be something to which I had no way to reply. Other times, I simply couldn’t hear what she was saying. She didn’t seem to care one way or another. Once she had finished saying whatever she wanted to say, she’d face front again and keep on walking. Oh, well, I told myself, it was a nice day for a stroll.
This was no mere stroll for Naoko, though, judging from that walk. She turned right at Iidabashi, came out at the moat, crossed the intersection at Jinbocho, climbed the hill at Ochanomizu, and came out at Hongo. From there she followed the trolley tracks to Komagome. It was a challenging route. By the time we reached Komagome, the sun was sinking and the day had become a soft spring evening.
“Where are we?” asked Naoko as if noticing our surroundings for the first time.
“Komagome,” I said. “Didn’t you know? We made this big arc.”
“Why did we come here?”
“You brought us here. I was just following you.”
We went to a shop by the station for a bowl of noodles. Thirsty, I had a whole beer to myself. From the time we gave our order until the time we finished eating, neither of us said a word. I was exhausted from all that walking, and she just sat there with her hands on the table, mulling something over again. All the leisure spots were crowded on this warm Sunday, they were saying on the TV news. And we just walked from Yotsuya to Komagome, I said to myself.
“Well, you’re in good shape,” I said when I had finished my noodles.
“Surprised?”
“You bet.”
“I was a long-distance runner in junior high, I’ll have you know. I used to do ten or fifteen kilometers. And my father took me mountain climbing on Sundays ever since I can remember. You know our house—right there, next to the mountain. I’ve always had strong legs.”
“It doesn’t show,” I said.
“I know,” she answered. “Everybody thinks I’m this delicate little girl. But you can’t tell a book by its cover.” To which she added a momentary smile.
“And that goes for me, too,” I said. “I’m worn out.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve been dragging you around all day.”
“Still, I’m glad we had a chance to talk. We’ve never done that before, just the two of us,” I said, trying without success to recall what we had talked about.
She was playing with the ashtray on the table.
“I wonder …” she began, “if you wouldn’t mind … I mean, if it really wouldn’t be any bother to you … Do you think we could see each other again? I know I don’t have any right to be asking you this.”
“Any right?” What do you mean by that?”
She blushed. My reaction to her request might have been a little too strong.
“I don’t know … I can’t really explain it,” she said, tugging the sleeves of her sweatshirt up over the elbows and down again. Her arms shone a lovely golden down color in the lights of the shop. “I didn’t mean to say right exactly. I was looking for another way to put it.”
Elbows on the table, she stared at the calendar on the wall, almost as if she were hoping to find the proper expression there. Failing, she sighed and closed her eyes and played with her barrette.
“Never mind,” I said. “I think I know what you’re getting at. I’m not sure how to put it, either.”
“I can never say what I want to say,” continued Naoko. “It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words—the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.”
Naoko raised her face and looked into my eyes. “Does this make any sense to you?”
“Everybody feels like that to some extent,” I said. “They’re trying to express themselves and it bothers them when they can’t get it right.”
Naoko looked disappointed with my answer. “No, that’s not it either,” she said without further explanation.
“Anyhow, I’d be glad to see you again,” I said. “I’m always free on Sundays, and walking would be good for me.”
We boarded the Yamanote Line, and Naoko transferred to the Chuo Line at Shinjuku. She was living in a tiny apartment way out in the western suburb of Kokubunji.
“Tell me,” she said as we parted. “Has anything changed about the way I talk?”
“I think so,” I said, “but I’m not sure what. Tell you the truth, I know I saw you a lot back then, but I don’t remember talking to you much.”
“I guess that’s true,” she said. “Anyhow, can I call you on Saturday?”
“Sure. I’ll be expecting to hear from you.”
I FIRST MET NAOKO in the spring of my second year of high school. She was also in her second year and attending a refined girls’ high school run by one of the Christian missions. The school was so refined you were considered unrefined if you studied too much. Naoko was the girlfriend of my best (and only) friend, Kizuki. The two of them had been close almost from birth, their houses not two hundred yards apart.
As with most couples who have been together since childhood, there was a casual openness about the relationship of Kizuki and Naoko and little sense that they wanted to be alone together. They were always visiting each other’s homes and eating or playing mah-jongg with each other’s families. I double-dated with them any number of times. Naoko would bring a classmate for me and the four of us would go to the zoo or the pool or a movie. The girls she brought were always pretty, but a little too refined for my taste. I got along better with the somewhat cruder girls from my own public high school who were easier to talk to. I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn’t understand me, either.
After a while, Kizuki gave up trying to arrange dates for me, and instead the three of us would do things together. Kizuki and Naoko and I: odd, but that was the most comfortable combination. Introducing a fourth person into the mix would always make things a little awkward. We were like a TV talk show, with me the guest, Kizuki the talented host, and Naoko his assistant. He was good at occupying that central position. True, he had a sarcastic side that often impressed people as arrogant, but in fact he was a considerate and fair-minded pers
on. He would distribute his remarks and jokes fairly to Naoko and to me, taking care to see that neither of us felt left out. If one or the other stayed quiet too long, he would steer his conversation in that direction and get the person to talk. It probably looked harder than it was: he knew how to monitor and adjust the air around him on a second-by-second basis. In addition, he had a rare talent for finding the interesting parts of someone’s generally uninteresting comments so that, when speaking to him, you felt that you were an exceptionally interesting person with an exceptionally interesting life.
And yet he was not the least bit sociable. I was his only real friend at school. I could never understand why such a smart and capable talker did not turn his talents to the broader world around him but remained satisfied to concentrate on our little trio. Nor could I understand why he picked me to be his friend. I was just an ordinary kid who liked to read books and listen to music and didn’t stand out in any way that would prompt someone like Kizuki to pay attention to me. We hit it off right away, though. His father was a dentist, known for his professional skill and his high fees.
“Wanna double-date Sunday?” he asked me just after we met. “My girlfriend goes to a girls’ school, and she’ll bring along a cute one for you.”
“Sure,” I said, and that was how I met Naoko.
The three of us spent a lot of time together, but whenever Kizuki left the room, Naoko and I had trouble talking to each other. We never knew what to talk about. And in fact there was no topic of conversation that we held in common. Instead of talking, we’d drink water or toy with something on the table and wait for Kizuki to come back and start the conversation up again. Naoko was not particularly talkative, and I was more of a listener than a talker, so I felt uncomfortable when I was left alone with her. Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
Naoko and I saw each other exactly once after Kizuki’s funeral. Two weeks after the event, we met at a coffee house to take care of some minor matter, and when that was finished we had nothing more to say. I tried raising several different topics, but none of them led anywhere. And when Naoko did talk, there was a certain edge to her voice. She seemed angry with me, but I had no idea why. We never saw each other again until that day we happened to meet on the Chuo Line in Tokyo a year later.
NAOKO MIGHT HAVE BEEN ANGRY with me because I, and not she, had been the last one to see Kizuki alive. That may not be the best way to put it, but I more or less understood how she felt. I would have traded places with her if I could have, but finally what had happened had happened, and there was nothing I could do about it.
It had been a nice afternoon in May. After lunch, Kizuki suggested we cut classes and go play pool or something. I had no special interest in my afternoon classes, so together we left school, ambled down the hill to a billiards parlor on the harbor, and shot four games. When I won the first, easygoing game, he got serious and won the other three. This meant that I paid, according to our custom. Kizuki made not a single wisecrack as we played, which was most unusual. We had a smoke afterward.
“Why so serious?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to lose today,” said Kizuki with a satisfied smile.
He died that night in his garage. He led a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe of his N-360 to a window, taped over the gap in the window, and revved the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. His parents had been out visiting a sick relative, and when they opened the garage to put their car away, he was already dead. His radio was going, and a gas station receipt was tucked under the windshield wiper.
Kizuki had left no suicide note, and had no motive that anyone could think of. Because I had been the last one to see him, I was called in for questioning by the police. I told the investigating officer that Kizuki had given no indication of what he was about to do, that he had been exactly the same as always. The policeman had obviously formed a poor impression of both Kizuki and of me, as if it was perfectly natural for the kind of person who would skip classes and shoot pool to commit suicide. A small article in the paper brought the affair to a close. Kizuki’s parents got rid of his red N-360. For a time, a white flower marked his homeroom desk.
In the ten months between Kizuki’s death and graduation, I was unable to find a place for myself in the world around me. I started sleeping with one of the girls at school, but that didn’t last six months. Nothing about her really got to me. I applied to a private university in Tokyo, the kind of school with an entrance exam for which I wouldn’t have to study much, and I passed without exhilaration. The girl asked me not to go to Tokyo—“It’s five hundred miles from here!” she pleaded—but I had to get away from Kobe at any cost. I wanted to begin a new life where I didn’t know a soul.
“You don’t give a damn about me anymore, now that you’ve slept with me,” she said, crying.
“That’s not true,” I insisted. “I just need to get away from this town.” But she was not prepared to understand me. And so we parted. Thinking about all the things that made her so much nicer than the other girls at home, I sat on the bullet train to Tokyo feeling terrible about what I’d done, but there was no way to undo it. I would try to forget her.
There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:
Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.
Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.
I lived through the following spring, at eighteen, with that knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
NAOKO CALLED ME THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, AND THAT SUNDAY we had a date. I suppose I can call it a date. I can’t think of a better word for it.
As before, we walked the streets. We stopped someplace for coffee, walked some more, had supper in the evening, and said good-bye. Again, she talked only in snatches, but this didn’t seem to bother her, and I made no special effort to keep the conversation going. We talked about whatever came to mind—our daily routines, our colleges; each a little fragment that led nowhere. We said nothing at all about the past. And mainly, we walked—and walked, and walked. Fortunately, Tokyo is such a big city, we could never have covered it all.
We kept on walking like this almost every weekend. She would lead, and I would follow close behind. Naoko had a variety of barrettes and always wore them with her right ear exposed. I remember her most clearly this
way, from the back. She would toy with her barrette whenever she felt embarrassed by something. And she was always dabbing at her mouth with a handkerchief. She did this whenever she had something to say. The more I observed these habits of hers, the more I came to like her.
Naoko went to a girls’ college on the rural western edge of Tokyo, a nice little school famous for its teaching of English. Nearby was a narrow irrigation canal with clean, clear water, and Naoko and I would often walk along its banks. Sometimes she would invite me up to her apartment and cook for me. It never seemed to concern her that the two of us were in such close quarters together. The room was small and neat and so lacking in frills that only the stockings drying in the corner by the window gave any hint that a girl lived there. She led a spare, simple life with hardly any friends. No one who had known her in high school could have imagined her like this. Back then, she had dressed with real flair and surrounded herself with a million friends. When I saw her room, I realized that, like me, she had wanted to go away to college and begin a new life far from anyone she knew.
“Know why I chose this school?” she said with a smile. “Because nobody from home was coming here. We were all supposed to go someplace more chic. You know what I mean.”
My relationship with Naoko was not without its progress, though. Little by little, she grew more accustomed to me, and I to her. When summer vacation ended and the new term started, Naoko began walking next to me as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. She saw me as a friend now, I concluded, and walking side by side with such a beautiful girl was by no means painful for me. We kept walking all over Tokyo in the same undirected way, climbing hills, crossing rivers and rail lines, just walking and walking with no destination in mind. We forged straight ahead, as if our walking were a religious ritual meant to heal our wounded spirits. If it rained, we used umbrellas, but in any case we walked.