By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whiskey, bread, and water.
ONE WINDY EVENING, as I lay wrapped in my sleeping bag, weeping, by the side of an abandoned hulk, a young fisherman happened by and offered me a cigarette. I accepted it and had my first smoke in over a year. He asked why I was crying, and almost by reflex I told him that my mother had died. I couldn’t take the sadness, I said, and so I was on the road. He expressed his deep sympathy and brought a big bottle of sake and two glasses from his house.
The wind tore along the sandy beach as we sat there drinking. He told me that he had lost his mother when he was sixteen. Never healthy, she had worn herself out working from morning to night. I half-listened to him, sipping my sake and grunting in response every now and then. I felt as if I were hearing a story from some far-off world. What the hell was this guy talking about? I wondered, and all of a sudden an intense rage struck me; I wanted to wring his neck. Who gives a damn about your mother? I lost Naoko! Her beautiful flesh has vanished from this world! Why the hell are you telling me about your goddamn mother?!
But my rage disappeared as quickly as it had flared up. I closed my eyes and went on half-listening to the fisherman’s endless talk. Eventually he asked me if I had eaten. No, I said, but in my knapsack I had bread and cheese, a tomato, and a piece of chocolate. What had I eaten for lunch? he asked. Bread and cheese, tomato, and chocolate, I answered. “Wait here,” he said, and ran off. I tried to stop him, but he disappeared into the darkness without looking back.
All I could do was go on drinking my sake. The shore was littered with paper flecks from fireworks that had been exploded on the sand, and waves crashed against the beach with a mad roar. A scrawny dog came along wagging its tail and sniffing around my little campfire for something to eat but eventually gave up and wandered off.
The young fisherman came back a half hour later with two boxes of sushi and a new bottle of sake. I should eat the top box right away because that had fish in it, he said, but the bottom box had only nori rolls and deep-fried tofu skins so they would last through tomorrow. He filled both our glasses with sake from the new bottle. I thanked him and polished off the whole top box myself, though it had more than enough for two. After we had drunk as much sake as we could manage, he offered to put me up for the night, but when I said I would rather sleep alone on the beach, he left it at that. As he stood to go, he took a folded five-thousand-yen note from his pocket and shoved it into the pocket of my shirt. “Here,” he said, “get yourself some healthy food. You look awful.” I said he had done more than enough for me and that I couldn’t accept money on top of everything else, but he refused to take it back. “It’s not money,” he said, “it’s my feelings. Don’t think about it too much, just take it.” All I could do was thank him and accept the money.
When he had gone, I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?
A wave of nausea came over me, and I vomited by the old ship. My head hurt from too much sake, and I felt bad about having lied to the fisherman and taken his money. It was time for me to get back to Tokyo, I decided; I couldn’t keep this up forever. I stuffed my sleeping bag into my knapsack, slipped my arms through the straps, and walked to the local railway station. I told the man at the ticket window that I wanted to go to Tokyo as soon as possible. He checked his schedule and said I could make it as far as Osaka by morning if I transferred from one night train to another, then I could take the bullet train from there. I thanked him and used the five-thousand-yen bill I had gotten from the fisherman to buy a ticket to Tokyo. Waiting for the train, I bought a newspaper and checked the date: October 2, 1970. So I had been traveling for a full month. I knew I had to go back to the real world.
The month of traveling neither lifted my spirits nor softened the blow of Naoko’s death. I arrived back in Tokyo in pretty much the same state in which I had left. I couldn’t even bring myself to phone Midori. What could I say to her? How could I begin? “It’s all over now; you and I can be happy together”? No, that was out of the question. However I might phrase it, though, the facts were the same: Naoko was dead, and Midori was still here. Naoko was a pile of white ash, and Midori was a living, breathing human being.
I was overcome with a sense of my own defilement. Though I returned to Tokyo I did nothing for days but shut myself up in my room. My memory remained fixed on the dead rather than the living. The rooms I had set aside in there for Naoko were shuttered, the furniture draped in white, the windowsills dusty. I spent the better part of each day in those rooms. And I thought about Kizuki. “So you finally made Naoko yours,” I heard myself telling him. “Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now, maybe, she’s where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko. I tried to establish a new life for the two of us. But forget it, Kizuki. I’m giving her to you. You’re the one she chose, after all. In woods as dark as the depths of her own heart, she hanged herself. Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another part of me into that world. Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.
THE FOURTH DAY after my return to Tokyo, I got a letter from Reiko. Special delivery. It was a simple note: “I haven’t been able to get in touch with you for weeks, and I’m worried. Please give me a call. At nine A.M. and nine P.M. I will be waiting by the telephone.”
I called her at nine o’clock that night. Reiko picked up after one ring.
“Are you O.K.?” she asked.
“More or less,” I said.
“Do you mind if I come visit you the day after tomorrow?”
“Visit me? You mean here in Tokyo?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. I want to have a good long talk with you.”
“You’re leaving the sanatorium?”
“It’s the only way I can come see you, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s about time for me to get out of this place. I’ve been here eight years, after all. If they keep me any longer, I’ll start to rot.”
I found it difficult to speak. After a short silence, Reiko went on, “I’ll be on the three-twenty bullet train the day after tomorrow. Will you meet me at the station? Do you still remember what I look like? Or have you lost interest in me now that Naoko’s dead?”
“No way,” I said. “See you at Tokyo Station the day after tomorrow at three-twenty.”
“You won’t have any trouble recognizing me. I’m the old lady with the guitar case. There aren’t many of those.”
AND IN FACT, I had no trouble finding Reiko in the crowd. She wore a man’s tweed jacket, white slacks, and red sneakers. Her hair was as short as ever, with the usual clumps sticking up. In her right hand she held a brown leather suitcase, and in her left hand a black guitar case. She gave me a big, wrinkly smile the moment she spotted me, and I found myself smiling back. I took her suitcase and walked beside her to the train for the western suburbs.
“Hey, Watanabe, how long have you been wearing that awful face? Or
is that the ‘in’ look in Tokyo these days?”
“I was traveling for a while, ate junk the whole time,” I said. “How’d you like the bullet train?”
“Awful!” she said. “You can’t open the windows. I wanted to buy a boxed lunch from one of the platform vendors.”
“They sell them on board, you know.”
“Yeah, overpriced plastic sandwiches. A starving horse wouldn’t touch that stuff. I always used to enjoy the boxed lunches at Gotenba Station.”
“Once upon a time, before the bullet train.”
“Well, I’m from once upon a time before the bullet train!”
On the way out to Kichijoji, Reiko watched the Musashino landscape passing the train window with all the curiosity of a tourist.
“Has it changed much in eight years?” I asked.
“You don’t know what I’m feeling now, do you, Watanabe?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m scared,” she said. “So scared, I could go crazy just like that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, flung out here all by myself.” She paused. “But ‘Go crazy just like that.’ Kind of a cool expression, don’t you think?”
I smiled and took her hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re gonna be O.K. Your own strength got you this far.”
“It wasn’t my own strength that got me out of that place,” Reiko said. “It was Naoko and you. I couldn’t stand it there without Naoko, and I had to come to Tokyo to talk with you. That’s all. If nothing had happened I probably would’ve spent the rest of my life there.”
I nodded.
“What’re you planning to do from now on?” I asked Reiko.
“I’m going to Asahikawa,” she said. “Way up in the wilds of Hokkaido! An old college friend of mine runs a music school there, and she’s been asking me for two or three years now to help her out. I told her it was too cold for me. I mean, I finally get my freedom back and I’m supposed to go to Asahikawa? It’s kinda hard to get excited about a place like that—some hole in the ground.”
“It’s not so awful,” I said, laughing. “I’ve been there. It’s not a bad little town. Got its own special atmosphere.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. It’s way better than staying in Tokyo.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “I don’t have anyplace else to go, and I’ve already sent my stuff there. Hey, Watanabe, promise me you’ll come and visit me in Asahikawa.”
“Sure I will. But do you have to leave right away? Can’t you stay in Tokyo awhile?”
“I’d like to hang around here a few days if I can. Can you put me up? I won’t get in your way.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’ve got a big closet I can sleep in, in my sleeping bag.”
“I can’t do that to you.”
“No, really. It’s a huge closet.”
Reiko tapped out a rhythm on the guitar case between her legs. “I’m probably going to have to condition myself a little before I go to Asahikawa. I’m just not used to being in the outside world. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get, and I’m nervous. Think you can help me out a little? You’re the only one I can ask.”
“I’ll do anything I can to help you,” I said.
“I hope I’m not getting in your way,” she said.
“I don’t have any way for you to get in,” I said.
She looked at me and turned up the corners of her mouth in a smile, but said nothing.
———
WE HARDLY TALKED the rest of the way to Kichijoji Station or on the bus to my place. We traded a few random comments on the changes in Tokyo and Reiko’s time at the College of Music and my one trip to Asahikawa, but said nothing about Naoko. Ten months had gone by since I last saw Reiko, but walking by her side I felt strangely calmed and comforted. This was a familiar feeling, I thought, and then it occurred to me it was the way I used to feel when walking the streets of Tokyo with Naoko. And just as Naoko and I had shared the dead Kizuki, Reiko and I shared the dead Naoko. This thought made it impossible for me to go on talking. Reiko continued speaking for a while, but when she realized that I wasn’t saying anything, she also fell silent. Neither of us said a word on the bus.
It was one of those early autumn afternoons when the light is sharp and clear, exactly as it had been a year earlier when I visited Naoko in Kyoto. The clouds were white and narrow as bones, the sky wide open and high. The fragrance of the breeze, the tone of the light, the presence of tiny flowers in the grass, the subtle reverberations that accompanied sounds: all these told me that autumn had come again, increasing the distance between me and the dead with each cycle of the seasons. Kizuki was still seventeen, and Naoko twenty-one: forever.
“Oh, what a relief to come to a place like this!” Reiko said, looking all around as we stepped off the bus.
“’Cause there’s nothing here,” I said.
As I led her through the back gate and the garden to my cottage, Reiko was impressed by everything she saw.
“This is terrific!” she said. “You made these shelves and the desk?”
“Sure did!” I said, pouring tea.
“You’re obviously good with your hands. And you keep the place so clean!”
“Storm Trooper’s influence,” I said. “He made me clean-crazy. Not that my landlord’s complaining.”
“Oh, your landlord! I have to go introduce myself to him. That’s his place on the other side of the garden, I suppose.”
“Introduce yourself to him? What for?”
“What do you mean ‘what for?’ Some weird old lady shows up in your place and starts picking on the guitar, he’s going to wonder what’s going on. Better to start out on the right foot. I even brought a box of tea sweets for him.”
“Very clever,” I said.
“The wisdom that comes with age. I’m going to tell him I’m your aunt on your mother’s side, visiting from Kyoto, so don’t contradict me. The age difference comes in handy at times like this. Nobody’s going to get suspicious.”
Reiko took the box of sweets from her bag and went off to pay her respects. I sat on the veranda, drinking another cup of tea and playing with the cat. Twenty minutes went by, and when Reiko finally came back, she pulled a tin of rice crackers from her bag and said it was a present for me.
“What were you talking about so long over there?” I asked, munching on a cracker.
“You, of course,” said Reiko, cradling the cat and rubbing her cheek against it. “He says you’re a very proper young man, a serious student.”
“Are you sure he was talking about me?”
“There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that he was talking about you,” she said with a laugh. Then, noticing my guitar, she picked it up, adjusted the tuning, and played Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Desafinado.” It had been months since I had last heard Reiko’s guitar, and it gave me the old, warm feeling.
“You practicing the guitar?” she asked.
“It was kicking around the landlord’s storehouse, so I borrowed it and plunk on it once in a while. That’s all.”
“I’ll give you a lesson later. Absolutely free.” Reiko put the guitar down and took off her tweed jacket. Sitting against the veranda post, she smoked a cigarette. She was wearing a madras short-sleeve shirt.
“Nice shirt, don’t you think?” she asked.
“It is,” I said. In fact it was a good-looking shirt, with a handsome pattern.
“It’s Naoko’s,” said Reiko. “I bet you didn’t know we were the same size. Especially when she first came to the sanatorium. She put on a little weight after that, but still we were pretty much the same size: blouses, slacks, shoes, hats. Bras were about the only thing we couldn’t share. I’ve got practically nothing here. So we were always trading clothes. Actually, it was more like joint ownership.”
Now that she mentioned it, I saw that Reiko’s build was almost identical to Naoko’s. Because of the shape of her face and her thin arms and legs, she had always given me
the impression of being smaller and slimmer than Naoko, but in fact she was surprisingly solid.
“The jacket and pants are hers, too,” said Reiko. “It’s all hers. Does it bother you to see me wearing her stuff?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m sure Naoko would be glad to have somebody wearing her clothing—especially you.”
“It’s strange,” Reiko said with a little snap of the fingers. “Naoko didn’t leave a will or anything—except where her clothes were concerned. She scribbled one line on a memo pad on her desk. ‘Please give all my clothes to Reiko.’ She was a funny one, don’t you think? Why would she be concerned about her clothes of all things when she’s getting ready to die? Who gives a damn about clothes? She must have had tons of other things she wanted to say.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
Puffing on her cigarette, Reiko seemed lost in thought. Then she said, “You want to hear the whole story, in order, I suppose.”
“I do,” I said. “Please tell me everything.”
“TESTS AT THE HOSPITAL in Osaka showed that Naoko’s condition was improving for the moment but that she should stay there on a somewhat longer-term basis so that they could continue the intensive therapy for its future benefits. I told you that much in my letter—the one I sent you somewhere around the tenth of August.”
“Right. I read that letter.”
“Well, on the twenty-fourth of August I got a call from Naoko’s mother asking if it was O.K. for Naoko to come visit me at the sanatorium. Naoko wanted to pack up the things she had left with me and, because she wouldn’t be able to see me for a while, she wanted to have a nice long talk with me, and maybe spend one night in our apartment. I said that would be fine. I wanted to see her something awful and to have a talk with her. So Naoko and her mother showed up the next day, the twenty-fifth, in a taxi. The three of us worked together, packing up Naoko’s things and chatting away. Late in the afternoon, Naoko said it would be O.K. for her mother to go home, that she’d be fine, so they called a cab and the mother left. We weren’t worried at all because Naoko seemed to be in such great spirits. In fact, until then I had been very worried. I had been expecting her to be depressed and worn out and emaciated. I mean, I knew how much the kind of testing and therapy and stuff they do at those hospitals can take out of you, so I had some real doubts about this visit. But one look at her was all it took to convince me she’d be O.K. She looked a lot healthier than I had imagined and she was smiling and joking around and talking in a much more normal way than when I had last seen her. She had been to the beauty parlor and was showing off her new hairdo. So I figured there would be nothing to worry about even if her mother left the two of us alone. Naoko told me that this time she was going to let those hospital doctors cure her once and for all, and I said that that would probably be the best thing to do. So then the two of us went out for a walk, still talking the whole time, mainly about the future. Naoko told me that what she’d really like was for the two of us to get out of the sanatorium and go live together somewhere.”