Nagasawa did have a steady girlfriend, one he’d been going out with since his freshman year. Her name was Hatsumi, and she was the same age as Nagasawa. I had met her a few times and found her to be a very nice girl. She didn’t have the kind of looks that immediately attracted attention, and in fact she was so ordinary that when I first met her I had to wonder why Nagasawa couldn’t do better, but anyone who talked to her took an immediate liking to her. Quiet, intelligent, funny, caring, she always dressed with wonderful good taste. I liked her a lot and knew that if I could have a girlfriend like Hatsumi, I wouldn’t be sleeping around with a bunch of easy marks. She liked me, too, and tried hard to fix me up with a freshman in her club so we could go out on double dates, but I would make up excuses to keep from repeating my past mistakes. Hatsumi went to the absolute top girls’ college in the country, and there was no way I was going to be able to talk to one of those super-rich princesses.
Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands.
“I don’t deserve a girl like Hatsumi,” Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.
THAT WINTER I FOUND a part-time job in a little record store in Shinjuku. It didn’t pay much, but the work was easy—just watching the place three nights a week—and they let me buy records cheap. For Christmas I bought Naoko a Henry Mancini record with a track of her favorite, “Dear Heart.” I wrapped it myself and added a bright red ribbon. She gave me a pair of woolen gloves that she had knitted herself. The thumbs were a little short, but the gloves did keep my hands warm.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “What a bad job!”
“Don’t worry, they fit fine,” I said, holding my gloved hands out to her.
“Well, at least you won’t have to shove your hands in your pockets, I guess.”
Naoko didn’t go home to Kobe for break that winter. I sort of stuck around Tokyo, too, working in the record store right up to the end of the year. I didn’t have anything especially fun to do in Kobe or anyone I wanted to see. With the dorm’s dining hall closed for the holiday, I went to Naoko’s apartment for my meals. On New Year’s Eve we had rice cakes and soup like everybody else.
A lot happened in late January and February that year, 1969.
At the end of January, Storm Trooper went to bed with a raging fever, which meant I had to stand Naoko up that day. I had gone to a lot of trouble to get my hands on some free tickets for a concert. Naoko had been especially eager to go because the orchestra was performing one of her favorites, Brahms’s fourth symphony. But with Storm Trooper tossing around in bed on the verge of what looked like an agonizing death, I couldn’t just go off and leave him, and I couldn’t find anyone crazy enough to nurse him in my place. I bought some ice and used several layers of vinyl bags to hold it on his forehead, wiped his sweat with cold towels, took his temperature every hour, and even changed his undershirt for him. The fever stayed high for a full day, but on the morning of the second day he jumped out of bed and started exercising as if nothing had happened, and his temperature was absolutely normal. It was hard to believe he was a human being.
“Weird,” said Storm Trooper. “I’ve never run a fever in my life.” It was almost as if he were blaming me.
This made me mad. “But you did have a fever,” I insisted, showing him the two wasted tickets.
“Good thing they were free,” he said. I wanted to grab his radio and throw it out the window, but instead I went back to bed with a headache.
It snowed several times in February.
Near the end of the month I got into a stupid fight with one of the upperclassmen on my floor and took a punch at him. He hit his head against the concrete wall, but he wasn’t badly injured, and Nagasawa straightened things out for me. Still, I was called into the dorm head’s office and given a warning, after which I grew increasingly uncomfortable living in the dormitory.
The academic year ended in March, but I came up a few credits short. My grades were mediocre—mostly Cs and Ds with a few Bs. Naoko had all the credits she needed to begin the spring term as a full-fledged sophomore. We had completed one full cycle of the seasons.
HALFWAY THROUGH APRIL Naoko turned twenty. She was seven months older than I was, my own birthday being in November. There was something strange about Naoko’s becoming twenty. I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the dead stay seventeen forever.
It rained on her birthday. After classes I bought a cake nearby and took the streetcar to her apartment. We ought to have a celebration, I had said. I probably would have wanted the same thing if our positions had been reversed. It must be hard to pass your twentieth birthday alone. The streetcar had been packed, and it had pitched wildly, so that by the time I arrived at Naoko’s room the cake was looking more like the Roman Colosseum than anything. Still, once I had managed to stand up the twenty candles I had brought along, light them, close the curtains, and turn out the lights, we had the makings of a birthday party. Naoko opened a bottle of wine. We drank, had some cake, and enjoyed a simple dinner.
“I don’t know, it’s stupid being twenty,” she said. “I’m just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody’s pushing me from behind.”
“I’ve got seven months to get ready,” I said with a laugh.
“You’re so lucky! Still nineteen!” said Naoko with a hint of envy.
While we ate I told her about Storm Trooper’s new sweater. Until then he had had only one, a navy blue high school sweater, so two was a big move for him. The sweater itself was a nice one, red and black with a knitted deer motif, but on him it made everybody laugh. He couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“Wha-what’s so funny, Watanabe?” he asked, sitting next to me in the dining hall. “Is something stuck to my forehead?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “There’s nothing funny. Nice sweater.”
“Thanks,” he said, beaming.
Naoko loved the story. “I have to meet him,” she said. “Just once.”
“No way,” I said. “You’d laugh in his face.”
“You think so?”
“I’d bet on it. I see him every day, and still I can’t help laughing sometimes.”
We cleared the table and sat on the floor, listening to music and drinking the rest of the wine. She drank two glasses in the time it took me to finish one.
Naoko was unusually talkative that night. She told me about her childhood, her school, her family. Each episode was a long one, done with the painstaking detail of a miniature. I was amazed at the power of her memory, but as I sat listening it began to dawn on me that there was something wrong with the way she was telling these stories: something strange, even warped. Each tale had its own internal logic, but the link from one to the next was odd. Before you knew it, story A had turned into story B contained in A, and then came C from something in B, with no end in sight. I found things to say in response at first, but after a while I stopped trying. I put on a record, and when it ended I lifted the needle and put on another one. After the last record I went back to the first. She had only six all together. The cycle started with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and ended with Bill Evans’s Waltz for Debbie. Rain fell past the window. Time moved slowly. Naoko went on talking by herself.
It eventually dawned on me what was wrong: Naoko was taking great care as she spoke not to touch on certain things. One of those things was Kizuki, of course, but there was more than Kizuki. And though she had certain subjects she was determined to avoid, she went on endlessly and in incredible detail about the most trivial and inane things. I had never heard her speak with such intensity before, and so I did nothing to interrupt her.
Once the
clock hit eleven, though, I began to feel nervous. She had been talking nonstop for over four hours. I had to worry about the last train, and my midnight curfew. I saw my chance and cut in.
“Time for the troops to go home,” I said, looking at my watch. “Last train’s coming.”
My words did not seem to reach her, though. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning. She clamped her mouth shut for a split second, then went on with her story. I gave up and, shifting to a more comfortable position, drank what was left of the second bottle of wine. I figured I had better let her talk herself out. The curfew and the last train would have to take care of themselves.
She did not go on for long, though. Before I knew it, she had stopped talking. The ragged end of the last word she spoke seemed to float in the air, where it had been torn off. She had not actually finished what she was saying. Her words had simply evaporated. She had been trying to go on, but had come up against nothing. Something was gone now, and I was probably the one who had destroyed it. My words might have finally reached her, taken their time to be understood, and obliterated whatever energy it was that had kept her talking so long. Lips slightly parted, she turned her half-focused eyes on mine. She looked like some kind of machine that had been humming along until someone pulled the plug. Her eyes appeared clouded, as if covered by a thin, translucent membrane.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but it’s getting late, and …”
One big tear spilled from her eye, ran down her cheek, and splattered on a record jacket. Once that first tear broke free, the rest followed in an unbroken stream. Naoko bent forward where she sat on the floor and pressing her palms to the mat, she began to cry with the force of a person vomiting on all fours. Never in my life had I seen anyone cry with such intensity. I reached out and placed a hand on her trembling shoulder. Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound. My shirt became damp—and then soaked—with her tears and hot breath. Soon her fingers began to move across my back as if in search of something, some important something that had always been there. Supporting her weight with my left arm, I used my right hand to caress her soft straight hair. And I waited. In that position, I waited for Naoko to stop crying. And I went on waiting. But Naoko’s crying never stopped.
I SLEPT WITH NAOKO that night. Was it the right thing to do? That I cannot tell. Even now, almost twenty years later, I can’t be sure. I guess I’ll never know. But at the time, it was all I could do. She was in a heightened state of tension and confusion, and she made it clear that she wanted me to give her release. I turned the lights down and began, one piece at a time, and with the gentlest touch I could manage, to remove her clothes. Then I took off my own. It was warm enough, that rainy April night, for us to cling to each other’s nakedness without a sense of chill. We explored each other’s bodies in the darkness without words. I kissed her and enfolded her soft breasts in my hands. She clutched at my erection. Her opening was warm and wet and asking for me.
And yet, when I went inside her, Naoko tensed with pain. Was this her first time? I asked, and she nodded. Now it was my turn to be confused. I had assumed that Naoko had been sleeping with Kizuki all that time. I went in as far as I could and stayed that way for a long time, holding Naoko, without moving. And then, as she began to seem more calm, I allowed myself to move inside her, taking a long time to come to climax, with slow, gentle movements. Her arms tightened around me at the end, when at last she broke her silence. Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard.
When everything had ended, I asked Naoko why she had never slept with Kizuki. This was a mistake. No sooner had I asked the question than she took her arms from me and started crying soundlessly again. I pulled her bedding from the closet, spread it on the mat floor, and put her in beneath the covers. Smoking, I watched the endless April rain beyond the window.
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED when morning came. Naoko was sleeping with her back to me. Or maybe she hadn’t slept at all. Whether she was awake or asleep, all words had left her lips, and her body now seemed stiff, almost frozen. I tried several times to talk to her, but she would not answer or move. I stared for a long time at her naked shoulder, but in the end I lost all hope of eliciting a response and decided to get up.
The floor was still littered with record jackets and glasses and wine bottles and the ashtray I had been using. Half the caved-in birthday cake remained on the table. It was as if time had come to a sudden stop here. I picked up the things off the floor and drank two glasses of water at the sink. On Naoko’s desk lay a dictionary and a French verb chart. On the wall above the desk hung a calendar, one without an illustration or photo of any kind, just the numbers of the days of the month. Neither were there memos or marks written next to any of the figures.
I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them on. The front of my shirt was still damp and chilly. It had Naoko’s smell. On the notepad lying on the desk I wrote, “I’d like to have a good, long talk with you once you’ve calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.” I took one last look at Naoko’s shoulder, stepped outside, and quietly shut the door.
A WEEK WENT BY, but no call came. Naoko’s apartment house had no system for summoning people to the phone, and so on Sunday morning I took the train out to Kokubunji. She was not there, and the name had been removed from her door. The windows and storm shutters were closed up tight. The manager told me that Naoko had moved out three days earlier. Where she had moved to, he had no idea.
I went back to the dorm and wrote a long letter addressed to Naoko at her home in Kobe. Wherever she was, they would forward it to her at least.
I gave her an honest account of my feelings. There was a lot I still didn’t understand, I said, and though I was trying hard to understand, it would take time. Where I would be once that time had gone by, it was impossible for me to say now, which is why it was impossible for me to make promises or demands, or to set down pretty words. For one thing, we knew too little of each other. If, however, she would grant me the time, I would give it my best effort, and the two of us would come to know each other better. In any case, I wanted to see her once again and have a good, long talk. When I lost Kizuki, I lost the one person to whom I could speak honestly of my feelings, and I imagined it had been the same for Naoko. She and I had probably needed each other more than either of us knew, which was probably why our relationship had taken such a major detour and become, in a sense, warped. “I probably should not have done what I did, and yet I believe that it was all I could do. The warmth and closeness I felt for you at that moment was something I had never experienced before. I need you to answer this letter. Whatever that answer may be, I need to have it.”
The answer did not come.
Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern. There was an abnormal lightness to my body, and sounds had a hollow echo to them. I went to classes more faithfully than ever. The lectures were boring, and I never talked to my classmates, but I had nothing else to do. I would sit by myself in the very front row of the lecture hall, speak to no one, and eat alone. I quit smoking.
The student strike started at the end of May. “Dismantle the university,” they all screamed. Go ahead, do it, I thought. Dismantle it. Tear it apart. Crush it to bits. I don’t give a damn. A breath of fresh air for me. I’m ready for anything. I’ll help if you need it. Just go ahead and do it.
With the campus blockaded and lectures suspended, I started to work at a trucking company. Riding shotgun, loading and unloading trucks, that kind of stuff. It was tougher than I thought. At first I could hardly get out of bed in the morning with the pain. The money was good, though, and as long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside. I worked on the truck five days a week, and three nights a week I continued my job at the record store. Nights without work I spent with whiskey and books. Storm Trooper wouldn’t touch whiskey and couldn’t stan
d the smell, so when I was sprawled on my bed chugging it down straight, he would complain that the fumes made it impossible for him to study and ask me to take my bottle outside.
“You get the hell out,” I growled at him.
“But you know drinking in the dorm is a-a-against the rules.”
“I don’t give a shit. You get out.”
He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.
In June I wrote Naoko another long letter, addressing it again to her house in Kobe. It said pretty much the same thing as the first letter, but at the end I added this: “Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.” When I dropped it in the mail, I felt as if the cavern inside me had grown again.
Also during June I went out with Nagasawa twice again to sleep with girls. It was easy both times. The first girl put up a terrific struggle when I tried to get her undressed and into the hotel bed, but when I began reading alone in bed because it just wasn’t worth it, she came over and started nuzzling me. And after I had done it with the second one, she started asking me all kinds of personal questions—how many girls had I slept with? Where was I from? Which school did I go to? What kind of music did I like? Had I ever read any novels by Osamu Dazai? Where would I like to go if I could travel abroad? Did I think her nipples were too big? I made up some answers and went to sleep, but next morning she said she wanted to have breakfast with me, and she kept up the stream of questions over the tasteless eggs and toast and coffee. What kind of work did my father do? Did I have good grades in high school? What month was I born? Had I ever eaten frogs? She was giving me a headache, so as soon as we had finished eating I said I had to go to work.
“Will I ever see you again?” she asked with a sad look.