“Live together? You and Naoko?”
“That’s right,” said Reiko with a little shrug. “So I told her it sounded good to me, but what about Watanabe? And she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get everything straight with him.’ That’s all. Then she talked about where she and I would live and what we’d do, that kind of thing. After that we went to the birdhouse and played with the birds.”
I took a beer from the refrigerator and opened it. Reiko lit another cigarette. The cat was sound asleep in her lap.
“That girl had everything figured out for herself. I’m sure that’s why she was so full of energy and smiling and healthy-looking. It must have been such a load off her mind to feel she knew exactly what she was going to do. So then we finished going through her stuff and throwing what she didn’t need into the metal drum in the yard and burning it: the notebook she had been using to keep a diary, and all the letters she had been getting. Your letters, too. This seemed kind of strange to me, so I asked her why she was burning stuff like that. I mean, she had always been so careful about putting your letters away in a safe place and reading them over and over. She said, ‘I’m getting rid of everything from the past so I can be reborn in the future.’ I guess I pretty much took her at her word. It had its own kind of logic to it, sort of. I remember thinking how much I wanted for her to get healthy and happy. She was so sweet and lovely that day: I wish you could have seen her!
“When that was over, we went to the dining hall for supper the way we used to do. Then we bathed and I opened a bottle of good wine that I had been keeping for a special occasion like this and we drank and I played the guitar. The Beatles, as always: ‘Norwegian Wood,’ ‘Michelle,’ her favorites. Both of us were feeling pretty good. We turned out the lights, got undressed, and lay in our beds. It was one of those steaming hot nights. We had the windows wide open, but there was hardly a breath of wind. It was black as ink outside, the crickets were screaming, and the smell of the summer grass was so thick in the room it was hard to breathe. All of a sudden, Naoko started talking about you—about the night she had sex with you. In incredible detail. How you took her clothes off, how you touched her, how she found herself growing wet, how you went inside her, how wonderful it felt: she told me all of this in vivid detail. So I asked her, ‘Why are you telling me this now, all of a sudden?’ I mean, up to then, she had never spoken openly to me about sex. Of course, we had had some frank talk about sex as a kind of therapy, but she had been too embarrassed to get into anything specific. Now I couldn’t stop her. I was shocked.
“So she says, ‘I don’t know, I just feel like talking about it. I’ll stop if you’d rather not hear it.’
“I said, ‘No, that’s O.K. If you’ve got something you need to talk about, you’d better get it all out. I’ll listen to anything you have to say.’
“So she went on with her story. ‘When he went inside me, I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. It was my first time, after all. I was so wet, he slipped right in, but still, my brain fogged over—it hurt so much. He put it in as far as he could, I thought, but then he lifted my legs and went in even farther. That sent chills all through my body, like I was soaking in ice water. My arms and legs went numb, and a wave of cold went through me. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I might die right then and there, and I didn’t care one way or the other. But he realized I was in pain, so he stopped moving, and still deep inside me, he started kissing me all over—my hair, my neck, my breasts—for a long, long time. Little by little, the warmth returned to my body, and then, very slowly, he started to move. Oh, Reiko, it was so wonderful! Now it felt as if my brain was just going to melt away. I wanted to stay like that forever, to stay in his arms for the rest of my life. That’s how great it was.’
“So I said to her, ‘If it was so great, why didn’t you just stay with Watanabe and keep doing it every day?’”
“But she said, ‘No, Reiko, I knew it would never happen again. I knew this was something that would come to me once, and leave, and never come back. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I had never felt anything like it before, and I’ve never felt anything like it since. I’ve never felt that I wanted to do it again, and I’ve never grown wet like that again.’
“Of course, I explained to her that this was something that often happened to young women and that, in most cases, it cures itself with age. And, after all, it had worked that one time: there was no need to worry it wouldn’t happen again. I myself had had all kinds of trouble when I was first married.
“But she said, ‘No, that’s not it, Reiko. I’m not worried about that at all. I just don’t want anybody going inside me again. I just don’t want to be violated like that again—by anybody.’”
I drank down my beer, and Reiko finished her second cigarette. The cat stretched itself in Reiko’s lap, found a new position, and went back to sleep. Reiko seemed at a loss how to go on until she had lit her third cigarette.
“After that, Naoko began to sob. I sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘everything is going to be all right. A beautiful young girl like you has got to have a man to hold her and make her happy.’ Naoko was drenched in sweat and tears. I got a bath towel and dried her face and body. Even her panties were soaked, so I helped her out of them—now wait a minute, don’t get any strange ideas, there was nothing funny going on. We always used to bathe together. She was like my little sister.”
“I know, I know,” I said.
“Well, anyway, Naoko said that she wanted me to hold her. I said it was way too hot for holding, but she said it was the last time we’d be seeing each other, so I held her. Just for a while. With a bath towel between us so our sweaty bodies wouldn’t stick to each other. And when she calmed down, I dried her off again, got her nightgown on her, and put her to bed. She fell sound asleep right away. Or maybe she was just pretending to sleep. Whatever, she looked so sweet and lovely that night, she had the face of a girl of thirteen or fourteen who’s never had a bit of harm done to her since the day she was born. I saw that look on her face, and I knew I could let myself fall asleep with an easy heart.
“When I woke at six in the morning, she was gone. Her nightgown was there, where she had dropped it, but her clothes and sneakers and the flashlight I always kept by my pillow were missing. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I mean, the very fact that she had taken the flashlight meant she had left in the dark. I checked her desk just in case, and there was the note: ‘Please give all my clothes to Reiko.’ I woke everybody up right away, and we took different areas to look for her. We searched every inch of the place, from the insides of the dorms to the surrounding woods. It took us five hours to find her. She had even brought her own piece of rope.”
Reiko sighed and patted the cat.
“Want some tea?” I asked.
“Yes, thanks,” said Reiko.
I boiled water and brought a pot of tea back to the veranda. Sundown was approaching. The daylight had grown weak, and long shadows of trees stretched to our feet. I sipped my tea and looked at the strangely random garden with its funny mix of yellow globeflowers and pink azaleas and tall, green nandins.
“So then the ambulance came and took Naoko away and the police started questioning me. Not that there was much to question. There was a kind of suicide note, and it had obviously been a suicide, and they took it for granted that suicide was just one of those things that mental patients did. So it was pretty pro forma. As soon as they left, I telegraphed you.”
“What a sad little funeral it was,” I said. “Her family was obviously kind of bothered that I knew Naoko had died. I’m sure they didn’t want people to know it was suicide. I probably shouldn’t even have been there. Which made me feel even worse. As soon as I got back, I hit the road.”
“Hey, Watanabe, what do you say we take a walk? We can shop for something to make for dinner, maybe. I’m starved.”
“Sure. Is there something you want to eat?”
“Sukiyaki,” she said. “I haven’t had anything like that for years. I used to dream about sukiyaki—just stuffing myself with beef and green onions and noodles and roasted tofu and greens.”
“Sure, we can have that, but I don’t have a sukiyaki pan.”
“Just leave it to me. I’ll borrow one from your landlord.”
She ran off to the main house and came back with a good-size pan and gas cooker and rubber hose.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad!”
We bought all the ingredients at the little shops in the neighborhood—beef, eggs, vegetables, tofu. I picked out a fairly decent white wine. I tried to pay, but Reiko insisted on paying for everything.
“Think how the family would laugh at me if they heard I let my nephew pay for the food!” Reiko said. “Besides, I’m carrying a fair amount of cash. So don’t worry. I wasn’t about to leave the sanatorium broke.”
Reiko washed the rice and put it on to boil while I set up for cooking on the veranda. When everything was ready to go, Reiko took out her guitar and seemed to be testing it with a slow Bach fugue. On the hard parts she would purposely slow down or speed up or make it detached or sentimental, listening with obvious pleasure to the variety of sounds she could draw from the instrument. When she played the guitar, Reiko looked like a seventeen-year-old girl enjoying the sight of a new dress. Her eyes sparkled, and she pursed her lips with the hint of a smile. When she had finished the piece, she leaned back against a pillar and looked up at the sky as if deep in thought.
“Do you mind if I talk to you?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she said. “I was just thinking about how hungry I am.”
“Aren’t you planning to see your husband or your daughter while you’re here? They must be in Tokyo somewhere.”
“Close enough. Yokohama. But no, I don’t plan to see them. I’m sure I told you before: it’s better for them if they don’t have anything to do with me. They’ve started a new life of their own. And I’d just feel terrible if I did see them. No, the best thing is to keep away.”
She crumpled up her empty box of Seven Stars and got a new box of cigarettes from her suitcase. She cut the seal and put one in her mouth, but she didn’t light up.
“I’m all through as a human being,” she said. “All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by rote memory.”
“But I like you now, Reiko, the way you are, lingering memory or whatever. And what I have to say about it may not make any difference, but I’m really glad that you’re wearing Naoko’s clothes.”
Reiko smiled and lit her cigarette with a lighter. “For such a young guy, you really know how to make a woman happy.”
I felt myself reddening. “I’m just saying what I really think.”
“Sure, I know,” said Reiko, smiling.
When the rice was done soon after that, I greased the pan and arranged the ingredients for sukiyaki.
“Tell me this isn’t a dream,” said Reiko, sniffing the air.
“No, this is one-hundred-percent realistic sukiyaki,” I said. “Empirically speaking, of course.”
Instead of talking, we attacked the sukiyaki with our chopsticks, downed lots of beer, and finished up with rice. Seagull came around, attracted by the smell, so we shared our meat with her. When we had eaten our fill, we sat leaning against the porch pillars and looking at the moon.
“Satisfied?” I asked.
“Totally,” she groaned. “I’ve never eaten so much in my life.”
“What do you want to do now?”
“Have a smoke and go to a public bath. My hair’s a mess. I need to wash it.”
“No problem. There’s one down the street.”
“Tell me, Watanabe, if you don’t mind. Have you slept with that girl Midori?”
“You mean have we had sex? Not yet. We decided not to until things get straightened out.”
“Well, now they’re straightened out, wouldn’t you say?”
I shook my head. “Now that Naoko’s dead, you mean?”
“No, not that. You made your decision long before Naoko died—that you could never leave Midori. Whether Naoko is alive or dead, it has nothing to do with your decision. You chose Midori. Naoko chose to die. You’re all grown up now, so you have to take responsibility for your choices. Otherwise, you ruin everything.”
“But I can’t forget her,” I said. “I told Naoko I would go on waiting for her, but I couldn’t do it. I turned my back on her in the end. I’m not saying anyone’s to blame: it’s a problem for me myself. I do think that things would have worked out the same way even if I hadn’t turned my back on her. Naoko was choosing death all along. But that’s beside the point. I can’t forgive myself. You tell me there’s nothing I can do about a natural change in feelings, but my relationship with Naoko was not that simple. If you stop and think about it, she and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start.”
“If you feel some kind of pain with regard to Naoko’s death, I would advise you to keep on feeling that pain for the rest of your life. And if there’s something you can learn from it, you should do that, too. But quite aside from that, you should be happy with Midori. Your pain has nothing to do with your relationship with her. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix. So, hard as it may be, you have to be strong. You have to grow up more, be more of an adult. I left the sanatorium and came all the way up here to Tokyo to tell you that—all the way on that coffin of a train.”
“I understand what you’re telling me,” I said to Reiko, “but I’m still not prepared to follow through on it. I mean, that was such a sad little funeral! No one should have to die like that.”
Reiko stretched her hand out and stroked my head. “We all have to die like that sometime. I will, and so will you.”
WE TOOK THE five-minute walk along the riverbank to the local public bath and came home feeling somewhat refreshed. I opened the bottle of wine and we sat on the veranda drinking it.
“Say, Watanabe, could you bring out another glass?”
“Sure,” I said. “But what for?”
“We’re going to have our own funeral for Naoko, just the two of us. One that’s not so sad.”
When I handed her the glass, Reiko filled it to the brim and set it on the stone lantern in the garden. Then she sat on the veranda, leaning against a pillar, guitar in her arms, and smoked a cigarette.
“And now could you bring out a box of matches? Make it the biggest one you can find.”
I brought out an economy-size box of kitchen matches and sat down next to her.
“Now what I want you to do is lay down a match every time I play a song, just set them in a row. I’m going to play every song I can think of.”
First she played a soft, lovely rendition of Henry Mancini’s “Dear Heart.”
“You gave a recording of this to Naoko, didn’t you?” Reiko asked.
“I did. For Christmas the year before last. She really liked that song.”
“I like it too,” said Reiko. “So soft and beautiful …” She ran through a few bars of the melody one more time before taking another sip of wine. “I wonder how many songs I can play before I get completely drunk. This’ll be a nice funeral, don’t you think—not so sad?”
Reiko moved on to the Beatles, playing “Norwegian Wood,” “Yesterday,” “Michelle,” and “Something.” She sang and played “Here Comes the Sun,” then played “The Fool on the Hill.” I laid seven matches in a row.
“Seven songs,” said Reiko, sipping more wine and smoking another cigarette. “Those guys sure knew something about the sadness of life, and gentleness.”
By “those guys,” Reiko of course meant John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison.
After a short breather, Reiko crushed her cigarette out and picked
her guitar up again. She played “Penny Lane,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “When I’m 64,” “Nowhere Man,” “And I Love Her,” and “Hey Jude.”
“How many songs is that?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
She sighed and asked me, “How about you? Can you play something—maybe one song?”
“No way. I’m terrible.”
“So play it terribly.”
I brought out my guitar and stumbled my way through “Up on the Roof.” Reiko took a rest, smoking and drinking. When I was through, she applauded.
Next she played a guitar transcription of Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dying Queen” and a beautifully clean rendition of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune.”
“I mastered both of these after Naoko died,” said Reiko. “To the end, her taste in music never rose above the horizon of sentimentalism.”
She performed a few Bacharach songs next: “Close to You,” “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” “Walk On By,” plus Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues.”