“Oh, I’m sure we’ll meet again somewhere before long,” I said, and left. What the hell am I doing? I started wondering as soon as I was alone and feeling disgusted with myself. And yet it was all I could do. My body was hungering for women. All the time I was sleeping with those girls, I thought about Naoko, about the white shape of her naked body in the darkness, her sighs, the sound of the rain. The more I thought about these things, the hungrier my body grew. I went up to the roof with my whiskey and asked myself where I thought I was heading.
Finally, at the beginning of July, a letter came from Naoko. A short letter.
Please forgive me for not answering sooner. But try to understand. It took me a very long time before I was in any condition to write, and I have started this letter at least ten times. Writing is a painful process for me.
Let me begin with my conclusion. I have decided to take a year off from school. Officially, it’s a leave of absence, but I suspect that I will never be going back. This will no doubt come as a surprise to you, but in fact I had been thinking about doing this for a very long time. I tried a few times to mention it to you, but I was never able to make myself begin. I was afraid even to pronounce the words.
Try not to be so worked up about things. Whatever happened—or didn’t happen—the end result would have been the same. This may not be the best way to put it, and I’m sorry if it hurts you. What I am trying to tell you is, I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened with me. It is something I have to take on all by myself. I had been putting it off for more than a year, and so I ended up making things very difficult for you. There is probably no way to put it off any longer.
After I moved out of my apartment, I came back to my family’s house in Kobe and was seeing a doctor for a while. He tells me there is a place in the hills outside Kyoto that would be perfect for me, and I’m thinking of spending a little time there. It’s not exactly a hospital, more a sanatorium kind of thing with a far freer style of treatment. I’ll leave the details for another letter. What I need now is to rest my nerves in a quiet place cut off from the world.
I feel grateful in my own way for the year of companionship you gave me. Please believe that much even if you believe nothing else. You are not the one who hurt me. I myself am the one who did that. This is truly how I feel.
For now, however, I am not prepared to see you. It’s not that I don’t want to see you: I’m simply not prepared for it. The moment I feel ready, I will write to you. Perhaps then we can get to know each other better. As you say, this is probably what we should do: get to know each other better.
Good-bye
I read Naoko’s letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with that same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko herself stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it. Objects in the scene would drift past me, but the words they spoke never reached my ears.
I continued to spend my Saturday nights in the lobby. There was no hope of a phone call, but I didn’t know what else to do with the time. I would switch on the baseball game and pretend to watch it as I cut the empty space between me and the television set in two, then cut each half in two again, over and over, until I had fashioned a space small enough to hold in my hand.
I would switch the set off at ten, go back to my room, and go to sleep.
AT THE END OF THE MONTH, Storm Trooper gave me a firefly. It was in an instant coffee jar with air holes in the lid and containing some blades of grass and a little water. In the bright room the firefly looked like an ordinary black bug you’d find by a pond somewhere, but Storm Trooper insisted that it was the real thing. “I know a firefly when I see one,” he said, and I had no reason or basis to dispute him.
“Fine,” I said. “It’s a firefly.” It had a sleepy look on its face, but it kept trying to climb up the slippery glass walls of the jar and falling back.
“I found it in the quad,” he said.
“Here? By the dorm?”
“Sure. You know the hotel down the street? They release fireflies in their garden for summer guests. This one made it over here.”
Storm Trooper was busy stuffing clothes and notebooks into his black Boston bag as he spoke.
We were several weeks into summer vacation, and Storm Trooper and I were almost the only ones left in the dorm. I had continued my jobs rather than go back to Kobe, and he had stayed on for a practical training session. Now that the training had ended, he was going back to the mountains of Yamanashi.
“You could give this to your girlfriend,” he said. “I’m sure she’d love it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
After dark the dorm was hushed, like a ruin. The flag had been lowered and the lights glowed in the windows of the dining hall. With so few students left, they turned on only half the lights in the place, keeping the right half dark and the left half lighted. Still, the smell of dinner drifted up to us—some kind of cream stew.
I took my bottled firefly to the roof. No one else was up there. A white undershirt hung on a clothesline where someone had forgotten to take it in, waving in the evening breeze like the discarded shell of some huge insect. I climbed a steel ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of the dormitory’s water tank. The tank was still warm with the heat of the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. I sat in the narrow space atop the tank, leaning against the handrail and coming face-to-face with a white moon only slightly short of full. The lights of Shinjuku glowed to the right, and Ikebukuro to the left. Car headlights flowed in brilliant streams from one pool of light to the other. A dull roar of jumbled sounds hung over the city like a cloud.
The firefly made a faint glow in the bottom of the jar, its light too weak, its color too pale. I hadn’t seen a firefly in years, but the ones in my memory sent a far more intense light into the summer darkness, and that brilliant, burning image was the one that had stayed with me all that time.
Maybe this firefly was on the verge of death. I gave the jar a few shakes. The firefly bumped against the glass walls and tried to fly, but its light remained dim.
I tried to recall when I had last seen fireflies, and where it might have been. I could see the scene in my mind, but was unable to recall the time or place. I could hear the sound of water in the darkness and see an old-fashioned brick sluice. It had a handle you could turn to open and close the gate. The stream it controlled was small enough to be hidden by the grass on its banks. The night was dark, so dark I couldn’t see my feet when I turned out my flashlight. Hundreds of fireflies drifted over the pool of water held back by the sluice gate, their hot glow reflected in the water like a shower of sparks.
I closed my eyes and steeped myself in that long-ago darkness. I heard the wind with unusual clarity. Far from strong, the wind swept past me, leaving strangely brilliant trails in the darkness. I opened my eyes to find the darkness of the summer night a few degrees deeper than it had been.
I twisted open the lid of the jar and took the firefly out, setting it on the two-inch lip of the water tank. It seemed not to grasp its new surroundings. It hobbled around the head of a steel bolt, catching its legs on curling scabs of paint. It moved to the right until it found its way blocked, then circled back to the left. Finally, with some effort, it mounted the head of the bolt and crouched there for a while, unmoving, as if it had taken its last breath.
Still leaning against the handrail, I studied the firefly. Neither I nor it made a move for a very long time. The wind continued sweeping past the two of us while the numberless leaves of the zelkova tree rustled in the darkness.
I waited forever.
Only much later did the firefly take to the air. As if some thought had suddenly come to it, the firefly spread its wings, and in a moment it had flown past the handrail to float in the pale darkness. It traced a swift arc by the side of the water tank as if trying to bring b
ack a lost interval in time. And then, after hovering there for a few seconds as if to watch its curved line of light blend into the wind, it finally flew off to the east.
Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.
More than once I tried stretching my hand out in that darkness. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond their grasp.
DURING SUMMER BREAK THE UNIVERSITY CALLED IN THE RIOT police, who broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside. This was nothing special. It’s what all the schools were doing at the time. The universities were not so easily “dismantled.” Massive amounts of capital had been invested in them, and they were not about to dissolve just because a few students had gone wild. And in fact those students who had sealed the campus had not wanted to dismantle the university either. All they had really wanted was to shift the balance of power within the university structure, a matter about which I could not have cared less. And so, when the strike was crushed, I felt nothing.
I went to the campus in September expecting to find rubble. The place was untouched. The library’s books had not been carted off, the professors’ offices had not been destroyed, the student affairs office had not been burned to the ground. I was thunderstruck. What the hell had those guys been doing behind the barricades?
When the strike was defused and lectures started up again under police occupation, the first ones to take their seats in the classrooms were those assholes who had led the strike. As if nothing had ever happened, they sat there taking notes and answering “here” when roll was called. I found this incredible. After all, the strike resolution was still in effect. There had been no declaration bringing it to an end. All that had happened was that the university had called in the riot police and torn down the barricades, but the strike itself was supposed to be continuing. The assholes had screamed their heads off at the time of the strike resolution, denouncing students who opposed the strike (or even expressed their doubts about it), at times even trying them in their own kangaroo courts. I made a point of visiting those former leaders and asking why they were attending classes instead of continuing the strike, but they couldn’t give me a straight answer. What could they have said? That they were afraid of losing college credits through inadequate attendance? To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke. Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.
Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you’re not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The assholes are earning their college credits and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image.
For a while I attended classes but refused to answer when they called the roll. I knew it was a pointless gesture, but I felt so bad I had no choice. All I managed to do was to isolate myself more than ever from my classmates. By remaining silent when my name was called, I made everyone uncomfortable for a few seconds. None of the other students spoke to me, and I spoke to none of them.
By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a college education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to quit school right away, and so I went to my classes each day, took lecture notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.
AND THOUGH THAT SECOND WEEK in September had rolled around, there was no sign of Storm Trooper. More than unusual, this was an earth-shaking development. His university had started up again, and it was inconceivable that Storm Trooper would cut classes. A thin layer of dust clung to his desk and radio. His plastic cup and toothbrush, tea can, insecticide spray, and such stood in a neat row on his shelf.
I kept the room clean in his absence. I had picked up the habit of neatness over the past year and a half, and without him there to take care of the room, I had no choice but to do it. I swept the floor each day, wiped the window every third day, and aired my mattress once a week, waiting for him to come back and tell me what a great job I had done.
But he never came back. I returned from classes one day to find all his stuff gone and his name tag removed from the door. I went to the dorm head’s room and asked what had happened.
“He’s withdrawn from the dormitory,” he said. “You’ll be alone in the room for the time being.”
I couldn’t get him to tell me why Storm Trooper had disappeared. This was a man whose greatest joy in life was to control everything and keep others in the dark.
Storm Trooper’s iceberg poster stayed on the wall for a time, but I eventually took it down and replaced it with Jim Morrison and Miles Davis. This made the room seem a little more like my own. I used some of the money I had saved from work to buy a small stereo. At night I would drink alone and listen to music. I thought about Storm Trooper every now and then, but I enjoyed living alone.
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY one Monday, after a lecture on Euripides in History of Drama, I took a ten-minute walk to a little restaurant and had an omelette and salad for lunch. The place was on a quiet back street and it had somewhat higher prices than the student dining hall, but you could relax there, and they knew how to make a good omelette. “They” were a married couple who rarely spoke to each other, and they had one part-time waitress. As I sat there eating by the window, a group of four students came in, two men and two women, all rather neatly dressed. They took the table near the door, spent some time looking over the menu and discussing their options, until one of them reported their choices to the waitress.
Before long I noticed that one of the girls kept glancing in my direction. She had extremely short hair and wore dark sunglasses and a white cotton minidress. I had no idea who she was, so I went on with my lunch, but she soon slipped out of her seat and came over to where I was sitting. With one hand on the edge of my table, she said, “You’re Watanabe, aren’t you?”
I raised my head and looked at her more closely. Still I could not recall ever having seen her. She was the kind of girl you notice, so if I had met her before I should have been able to recognize her immediately, and there weren’t that many people in my university that knew me by name.
“Mind if I sit down?” she asked. “Or are you expecting somebody?”
Still uncertain, I shook my head. “No, nobody’s coming. Please.”
With a wooden clunk, she dragged a chair out and sat down across from me, staring straight at me through her sunglasses, then glancing down at my plate.
“Looks good,” she said.
“It is good. Mushroom omelette and green pea salad.”
“Damn,” she said. “Oh, well, I’ll get it next time. I already ordered something else.”
“What’d you order?”
“Macaroni and cheese.”
“Their macaroni and cheese is not bad, either,” I said. “By the way, do I know you? I can’t seem to remember.”
“Euripides,” she said “Electra. ‘No god hearkens to my helpless cry.’ You know—the class just ended.”
I stared at her hard. She took off her sunglasses. At last I remembered her—a freshman I had seen in History of Drama. A striking change in hairstyle had kept me from recognizing her.
“Oh,” I said, touching a spot a few inches below my shoulder, “your hair was down to here before summer break.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I had a perm this summer, and it was just awful. I was ready to kill myself. I looked like a corpse on the beach with seaweed stuck to my head. So I figured as long as I was ready to die, I might as well cut it all off. At least it’s cool in the summer.” She ran her hand through her pixie cut and gave me a smile.
“It looks good, though,” I said, still munching on my omelette. “Let me see your profile.”
She turned away and held the pose for a few seconds.
; “Yeah, I thought so. It really looks good on you. Nicely shaped head. Pretty ears, too, uncovered like that.”
“So I’m not crazy after all! I thought I looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first-grader or a concentration camp survivor. What’s this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.”
“I think you look better now than you did before,” I said. And I meant it. As far as I could recall, with long hair she had been just another cute coed. From the girl who sat before me now, though, surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn’t seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.
“Do you mean it?” she asked.
I nodded, still munching on my salad.
She put her dark sunglasses on and looked at me from behind them.
“You’re not lying, are you?”
“I like to think of myself as an honest man,” I said.
“Far out.”
“So tell me: why do you wear such dark glasses?”
“I felt defenseless when my hair got short all of a sudden. Like somebody threw me into a crowd all naked.”
“Makes sense,” I said, eating the last of my omelette. She watched me with intense interest.
“You don’t have to go back to them?” I asked, motioning toward her three companions.
“Nah. I’ll go back when they serve the food. Am I interrupting your meal?”
“There’s nothing left to interrupt,” I said, ordering coffee when she showed no sign of leaving. The wife took my dishes and brought cream and sugar.