Nagasawa helped me with the move. He managed to borrow a light truck to transfer my stuff, and, as promised, he gave me his refrigerator, TV, and oversize Thermos bottle. He might not need them anymore, but for me they were perfect. He himself was scheduled to move out in two days, to an apartment in the Mita neighborhood.
“I guess we won’t be seeing each other for a long time,” he said as he left me, “so be well. I’m still sure we’ll run across each other in some strange place years from now.”
“I’m already looking forward to it,” I said.
“And that time we switched girls, the funny-looking one was way better.”
“Right on,” I said with a laugh. “But anyway, Nagasawa, take care of Hatsumi. Good ones like her are hard to find. And she’s a lot more fragile than she looks.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, nodding. “That’s why I was hoping you would take her when I was through. The two of you would make a great couple.”
“Get serious!” I said.
“Just kidding,” said Nagasawa. “Anyhow, be happy. I get the feeling a lot of shit is going to come your way, but you’re a stubborn son of a bitch, I’m sure you’ll handle it. Mind if I give you one piece of advice?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only assholes do that.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. We shook hands and went our separate ways, he to his new world, and I back to my swamp.
THREE DAYS AFTER my move, I wrote to Naoko. I described my new house and said how relieved I was to be away from the idiots in the dorm and all their idiotic brainstorms. Now I could start my new life with a new frame of mind.
My window looks out on a big yard, which is used as a meeting place by all the neighborhood cats. I like to stretch out on the veranda and watch them. I’m not sure how many of them get together, but this is one big gang of cats. They take group sun baths. I don’t think they’re too pleased to see me living here, but when I put out an old chunk of cheese a few of them crept over and took a chance on nibbling it. They’ll probably be friends of mine before too long. There’s one striped tomcat in the bunch with half-eaten ears. It’s amazing how much he looks like my old dorm head. I expect him to start raising the flag any day now.
I’m kind of far from school here, but once I start my major I won’t have too many morning classes, so it shouldn’t be too bad. It may even be better with the time to read on the train. Now all I have to do is find some easy work out here that I can do three or four days a week. Then I can get back to my spring-winding life.
I don’t mean to be rushing you, but April is a good time of year to start new things, and I can’t help feeling that the best thing for us would be to begin living together then. You could go back to school, too, if it worked out well. If there’s a problem with us actually living together, I could find an apartment for you in the neighborhood. The most important thing is for us to be always near each other. It doesn’t have to be spring, of course. If you think summer is better, that’s fine with me, too. Just let me know what you’re thinking, O.K.?”
I’m planning to put some extra time in at work for a while. To cover my moving expenses. I’m going to need a fair amount of money for one thing or another once I start living alone: pots and pans, dishes, stuff like that. I’ll be free in March, though, and I definitely want to come to see you. What dates work best for you? I’ll plan a trip to Kyoto then. I look forward to seeing you and to receiving your answer.
I spent the next few days buying the things I needed in the nearby Kichijoji shopping district and started cooking simple meals for myself at home. I bought some planks at a local lumberyard and had them cut to size so I could make a desk for myself. I figured I could study on it and, for the time being, eat my meals there, too. I made some shelves and laid in a good selection of spices. A white cat maybe six months old decided she liked me and started eating at my place. I called her Seagull.
Once I had my place fixed up to some extent, I went into town and found a temporary job as a painter’s assistant. I filled two solid weeks that way. The pay was good, but the work was murder, and the fumes made my head spin. Every day after work I’d have supper at a cheap eatery, wash it down with beer, go home and play with the cat, and sleep like a dead man. No answer came from Naoko during that time.
I was in the thick of painting when Midori popped into my mind. I hadn’t been in touch with her for nearly three weeks, I realized, and hadn’t even told her I had moved. I had mentioned to her that I was thinking of moving, and she had said, “Oh, really?” and that was the last time we had talked.
I went to a phone booth and dialed Midori’s apartment. The woman who answered was probably her sister. When I gave her my name, she said, “Just a minute,” but Midori never came to the phone.
Then the sister, or whoever she was, got back on the line. “Midori says she’s too mad to talk to you. You just up and moved and never said a thing to her, right? Just disappeared and never told her where you were going, right? Well, now you’ve got her boiling mad. And once she gets mad, she stays that way. Like an animal.”
“Look, could you just put her on the phone? I can explain.”
“She says she doesn’t want to hear any explanations.”
“Can I explain to you, then? I hate to do this to you, but could you listen and tell her what I said?”
“Not me, fella! Do it yourself. What kind of man are you? It’s your responsibility, so you do it, and do it right.”
It was hopeless. I thanked her and hung up. I really couldn’t blame Midori for being mad. What with all the moving and fixing up and working for extra cash, I had never given her a second thought. Not even Naoko had crossed my mind the whole time. This was nothing new for me. Whenever I got involved in something, I shut out everything else.
But then I started thinking how I would have felt if the tables had been turned and Midori had moved somewhere without telling me where or getting in touch with me for three weeks. I would have been hurt—hurt badly, no doubt. No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for—and to do it so unconsciously.
As soon as I got home from work, I sat at my new desk and wrote to Midori. I told her how I felt as honestly as I could. I apologized, without explanations or excuses, for having been so careless and insensitive. “I miss you,” I wrote. “I want to see you as soon as possible. I want you to see my new house. Please write to me,” I said, and sent the letter special delivery.
The answer never came.
This was the beginning of one weird spring. I spent my whole break waiting for letters. I couldn’t take a trip, I couldn’t go home to see my parents, I couldn’t even take a part-time job because there was no telling when a letter might arrive from Naoko saying she wanted me to come see her on such-and-such a date. Afternoons I would spend in the nearby shopping district in Kichijoji, watching double features or reading in a jazz coffeehouse. I saw no one and talked to almost no one. And once a week I would write to Naoko. I never suggested to her that I was hoping for an answer. I didn’t want to pressure her in any way. I would tell her about my painting work, about Seagull, about the peach blossoms in the garden, about the nice old lady who sold tofu, about the nasty old lady in the local eatery, about the meals I was making for myself. But still, she never wrote.
Whenever I got sick of reading or listening to records, I would do a little work in the garden. From my landlord I borrowed a rake and broom and pruning shears and spent time pulling weeds and trimming bushes. It didn’t take much to make the yard look good. Once the owner invited me to join him for a cup of tea, so we sat on the veranda of the main house drinking green tea and munching on rice crackers and sharing small talk. After retirement, he had taken a job with an insurance company, he said, but he had left that, too, after a couple of ye
ars, and now he was taking it easy. The house and land had been in the family for a long time, his children were grown and independent, and he could manage a comfortable old age without working. Which is why he and his wife were always traveling together.
“That’s nice,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Traveling is no fun. I’d much rather be working.”
He let the yard grow wild, he said, because there were no decent gardeners in the area and because he had developed allergies that made it impossible for him to do the work himself. Cutting grass made him sneeze.
When we had finished our tea, he showed me a storage shed and told me I could use anything I found inside, more or less by way of thanks for my gardening. “We don’t have any use for any of this stuff,” he said, “so feel free.”
And in fact the place was crammed with all kinds of stuff—an old wooden bathtub, a kid’s swimming pool, baseball bats. I found an old bike, a handy-size dining table with two chairs, a mirror, and a guitar. “I’d like to borrow these if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Feel free,” he said again.
I spent a day working on the bike: cleaning the rust off, oiling the bearings, pumping up the tires, adjusting the gears, and taking it to a bike repair shop to have a new gear cable installed. It looked like a different bike by the time I was finished. I cleaned a thick layer of dust off the table and gave the piece a new coat of varnish. I replaced the strings of the guitar and glued a section of the body that was coming apart. I took a wire brush to the rust on the tuning pegs and adjusted those. It wasn’t much of a guitar, but at least I got it to stay in tune. I hadn’t had a guitar in my hands since high school, I realized. I sat on the porch and picked my way through The Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” as well as I could. I was amazed to find I still remembered most of the chords.
Next I took a few scraps of lumber and made myself a mailbox. I painted it red, wrote my name on it, and set it out in front of my door. Up until April 3, the only piece of mail that found its way to my box was something that had been forwarded from the dorm: a notice from the reunion committee of my high school class. A class reunion was the last thing I wanted to have anything to do with. That was the class I had been in with Kizuki. I threw the thing into the trash.
I found a letter in the box on the afternoon of April 4. “Reiko Ishida,” it said on the back. I made a nice, clean cut across the seal with my scissors and went out to the porch to read it. I had a feeling this was not going to be good news, and I was right.
First Reiko apologized for making me wait so long for an answer. Naoko had been struggling to write me a letter, she said, but she could never seem to write one through to the end.
I offered to send you an answer in her place, but every time I pointed out how wrong it was of her to keep you waiting, she insisted that it was far too personal a matter, that she would write to you herself, which is why I haven’t written sooner. I’m sorry, really. I hope you can forgive me.
I know you must have had a difficult month waiting for an answer, but believe me, the month has been just as difficult for Naoko. Please try to understand what she’s been going through. Her condition is not good, I have to say in all honesty. She was trying her best to stand on her own two feet, but so far the results have not been good.
Looking back, I see now that the first symptom of her problem was her loss of the ability to write letters. That happened right around the end of November or beginning of December. Then she started hearing things. Whenever she would try to write a letter, she would hear people talking to her, which made it impossible for her to write. The voices would interfere with her attempts to choose her words. It wasn’t all that bad until about the time of your second visit, so I didn’t take it too seriously. For all of us here, these kinds of symptoms come in cycles, more or less. In her case, they got quite serious after you left. She is having trouble now just holding an ordinary conversation. She can’t find the right words to speak, and that puts her into a terribly confused state—confused and frightened. Meanwhile, the “things” she’s hearing are getting wore.
We have a session every day with one of the specialists. Naoko and the doctor and I sit around talking and trying to find the exact part of her that’s broken. I came up with the idea that it would be good to add you to one of our sessions if possible, and the doctor was in favor of it, but Naoko was against it. I can tell you exactly what her reason was: “I want my body to be clean of all this when I meet him.” That was not the problem, I said to her; the problem was to get her well as quickly as possible, and I pushed as hard as I could, but she wouldn’t change her mind.
I think I once explained to you that this is not a specialized hospital. We do have medical specialists here, of course, and they provide effective treatments, but concentrated therapy is another matter. The point of this facility is to create an effective environment in which the patient can treat herself or himself, and that does not, properly speaking, include medical treatment. Which means that if Naoko’s condition grows any worse, they will probably have to transfer her to some other hospital or medical facility or what have you. Personally, I would find this very painful, but we would have to do it. This is not to say that she could not come back here for treatment on a kind of temporary “furlough.” Or, better yet, she could even be cured and finish up with hospitals completely. In any case, we’re doing everything we can, and Naoko is doing everything she can. The best thing you can do meanwhile is hope for her recovery and keep sending those letters to her.
The letter was dated March 31. After I had finished reading it, I stayed on the porch and let my eyes wander out to the garden, full now with the freshness of spring. An old cherry tree stood there, its blossoms nearing the height of their glory. A soft breeze blew, and the light of day lent its strangely blurred, smoky colors to everything. Seagull wandered over from somewhere, and after scratching at the boards of the veranda for a while, she stretched out next to me and went to sleep.
I knew I should be doing some serious thinking, but I had no idea how to go about it. And, to tell the truth, thinking was the last thing I wanted to do. The time would come soon enough when I had no choice in the matter, and when that time came I would take a good long time to think things over. Not now, though. Not now.
I spent the day watching the garden, propped against a pillar and stroking Seagull. I felt completely drained. The afternoon deepened, twilight approached, and bluish shadows enveloped the garden. Seagull disappeared, but I went on staring at the cherry blossoms. In the spring gloom, they looked like flesh that had burst through the skin over festering wounds. The garden filled up with the sweet, heavy stench of rotting flesh. And that’s when I thought of Naoko’s flesh. Naoko’s beautiful flesh lay before me in the darkness, countless buds bursting through her skin, green and trembling in an almost imperceptible breeze. Why did such a beautiful body have to be so sick? I wondered. Why didn’t they just leave Naoko alone?
I went inside and closed my curtains, but even indoors there was no escape from the smell of spring. It filled everything from the ground up. But the only thing the smell brought to mind for me now was that putrefying stench. Shut in behind my curtains, I felt a violent loathing for spring. I hated what the spring had in store for me; I hated the dull, throbbing ache it aroused inside me. I had never hated anything in my life with such intensity.
I spent three straight days after that all but walking on the bottom of the sea. I could hardly hear what people said to me, and they had just as much trouble catching anything I had to say. My whole body felt enveloped in some kind of membrane, cutting off any direct contact between me and the outside world. I couldn’t touch “them,” and “they” couldn’t touch me. I was utterly helpless, and as long as I remained in that state, “they” were unable to reach out to me.
I sat leaning against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. When I felt hungry I would nibble anything within reach, take a drink of water, and when the sadness of
it got to me, I’d knock myself out with whiskey. I didn’t bathe, I didn’t shave. This is how the three days went by.
A letter came from Midori on April 6. She invited me to meet her on campus and have lunch on the tenth when we had to register for classes. “I put off writing to you as long as I could, which makes us even, so let’s make up. I have to admit it, I miss you.” I read the letter again and again, four times altogether, and still I couldn’t tell what she was trying to say to me. What could it possibly mean? My brain was so fogged over, I couldn’t find the connection from one sentence to the next. How would meeting her on registration day make us “even”? Why did she want to have “lunch” with me? I was really losing it. My mind had gone slack, like the soggy roots of a subterranean plant. But somehow I knew I had to snap out of it. And then those words of Nagasawa’s came to mind: “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
“O.K., Nagasawa. Right, on,” I heard myself thinking. I let out a sigh and got to my feet.
I did my laundry for the first time in weeks, went to the public bath and shaved, cleaned my place up, shopped for food and cooked myself a decent meal for a change, fed the starving Seagull, drank only beer, and did thirty minutes of exercise. Shaving, I discovered in the mirror that I was becoming emaciated. My eyes were popping. I could hardly recognize myself.
I went out the next morning on a longish bike ride, and after finishing lunch at home, I read Reiko’s letter one more time. Then I did some serious thinking about what I ought to do next. The main reason I had taken Reiko’s letter so hard was that it had upset my optimistic belief that Naoko was getting better. Naoko herself had told me, “My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots.” And Reiko had warned me there was no telling what might happen. Still, I had seen Naoko twice, and had been given the impression that she was on the mend. I had assumed that the only problem was whether she could regain the courage to return to the real world, and that if she managed to, the two of us could join forces to make a go of it.