“Can’t imagine,” I said. How could I have imagined what the old guy was going through? Midori and I went on watching the smoke.
“I really didn’t want to go to this school,” Midori said. She gave her head a little shake. “I wanted to go to an absolutely ordinary public high school. An ordinary school with ordinary people where I could relax and have fun like an ordinary teenager. But my parents thought it would look good for me to go to this fancy place. They’re the ones who stuck me in here. You know: that’s what happens when your grades are good in elementary school. The teacher tells your parents, ‘With grades like hers, she ought to go there.’ So that’s where I ended up. Six years I went and I never liked it. All I could think of was getting out. And you know, I’ve got certificates of merit for never having been late or missed a day of school. That’s how much I hated the place. Get it?”
“No, I don’t get it.”
“It’s ’cause I hated the place so much. I wasn’t going to let it beat me. I figured, let it get me once and I’d be finished. I was scared I’d just keep slipping down and down. I’d crawl to school with a temperature of a hundred and three. The teacher would ask me if I was sick, but I’d say no. At graduation they gave me certificates for perfect attendance and perfect punctuality, plus a French dictionary. That’s why I’m taking German now. I didn’t want to owe this school anything. I’m not kidding.”
“Why did you hate it so much?”
“Did you like your school?”
“Well, no, but I didn’t especially hate it, either. I went to an ordinary public high school but I never thought about it one way or another.”
“Well, this school,” Midori said, scratching the corner of her eye with her little finger, “had nothing but upper-class girls—almost a thousand girls with good backgrounds and good grades. Rich girls. They had to be rich to survive. High tuition, endless contributions, expensive school trips. Like, if we went to Kyoto, they’d put us up in a first-class inn and serve us tea-ceremony food on lacquer tables, and they’d take us once a year to the most expensive hotel in Tokyo to study table manners. I mean, this was no ordinary school. Out of a hundred and sixty girls in my class, I was the only one from a middle-class neighborhood like Toshima. I looked at the school register once to see where the others lived, and every single one of them was from a rich area. Well, no, there was one girl from way out in Chiba with the farmers, so I got kinda friendly with her. And she was really nice. She invited me to her house, though she apologized for how far I’d have to travel to get there. I went and it was incredible, this giant piece of land you’d have to walk fifteen minutes to get around. It had this amazing garden and two dogs like compact cars they fed steaks to. But still, this girl felt embarrassed about living out in Chiba. This is a girl who would be driven to school in a Mercedes Benz if she was late! By a chauffeur! Like right out of the Green Hornet: the hat, the white gloves, the whole deal. And still she had this inferiority complex. Can you believe it?”
I shook my head.
“I was the only one in the whole school who lived in a place like Kita-Otsuka Toshima. And under ‘parent’s profession’ it said, ‘bookstore owner.’ Everybody in my class thought that was so neat: ‘Oh, you’re so lucky, you can read any book you like’ and stuff. Of course, they were thinking of some monster bookstore like Kinokuniya. They could never have imagined the poor little Kobayashi Bookstore. The door creaks open and you’ve got nothing but magazines. The steady sellers are the ladies’ magazines with illustrated pullout sections on the latest sexual techniques. The local housewives buy them and sit at the kitchen table reading them from cover to cover, and give ’em a try when their husbands get home. And they’ve got the most incredible positions! Is this what housewives have on their minds all day? The cartoons are the other big seller: Magazine, Sunday, Jump. And of course the weeklies. So this ‘bookstore’ is almost all magazines. Oh, there are a few books, paperbacks, like mysteries and swashbucklers and romances. That’s all that sell. And how-to books: how to win at go, how to raise bonsai, how to give wedding speeches, how to have sex, how to quit smoking, you name it. We even sell writing supplies—stacks of ballpoint pens and pencils and notebooks next to the cash register. But that’s it. No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe, no Catcher in the Rye. That’s the Kobayashi Bookstore. That’s how ‘lucky’ I am. Do you think I’m lucky?”
“I can just see the place.”
“You know what I mean. Everybody in the neighborhood comes there, some of them for years, and we deliver. It’s a good business, more than enough to support a family of four, no debts, two daughters in college, but that’s it. Nothing to spare for extras. They should never have sent me to a school like that. It was a recipe for heartache. I had to listen to them grumble to me every time the school asked for a contribution, and I was always scared to death I’d run out of money if I went out with my classmates and they wanted to eat someplace expensive. It’s a miserable way to live. Is your family rich?”
“My family? No, my parents are absolutely ordinary working people, not rich, not poor. I know it’s not easy for them to send me to a private college in Tokyo, but there’s just me, so it’s not that big a deal. They don’t give me much to live on, so I work part-time. We live in a typical house with a little garden and drive a Toyota Corolla.”
“What’s your job like?”
“I work in a Shinjuku record shop three nights a week. It’s easy. I just sit there and mind the store.”
“No kidding,” said Midori. “I don’t know, just looking at you, I kinda figured you had never been hard up for money.”
“It’s true. I never have been hard up for money. Not that we have tons of it, either. I’m like most people.”
“Well, ‘most people’ in my school were rich,” said Midori, palms up on her lap. “That was the problem.”
“So now you’ll have plenty of chances to see a world without that problem. More than you want to, maybe.”
“Hey, tell me, what d’you think the best thing is about being rich?”
“Beats me.”
“Being able to say you don’t have any money. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we do something, she could say, ‘Sorry, I don’t have any money.’ Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said ‘I don’t have any money,’ it would really mean ‘I don’t have any money.’ It’s sad. Like if a pretty girl says ‘I look terrible today, I don’t want to go out,’ that’s O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her. That’s what the world was like for me. For six years, until last year.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I hope so. College is such a relief! It’s full of ordinary people.”
She smiled with the slightest curl of her lip and smoothed her short hair with the palm of her hand.
“Do you have a job?” I asked.
“Yeah, I write map notes. You know those little pamphlets that come with maps? With descriptions of the different neighborhoods and population figures and points of interest. Here there’s so-and-so hiking trail or such-and-such a legend, or some special flower or bird. I write the texts for those things. It’s so easy! Takes no time at all. I can write a whole booklet with a day of looking things up in the library. All you have to do is master a couple of secrets and all kinds of work comes your way.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“Like you put in some little something that nobody else has written and the people at the map company think you’re a literary genius and send you more work. It doesn’t have to be anything at all, just some tiny thing. Like, say, when they made a dam in this particular valley, the water covered over a village, but still every spring the birds come up from the south and you can see them flying over the lake. Put in one little episode like that and people love it, it’s so graphic and sentimental. The usual part-timer doesn’t bother with stuff like that, but I can make myself decent money with what I write.”
“Yeah, but you h
ave to find those ‘episodes.’”
“True,” said Midori with a tilt of the head. “But if you’re looking for them, you usually find them. And if you don’t, you can always make up something harmless.”
“Oh-ho!”
“Peace,” said Midori.
She said she wanted to hear about my dormitory, so I told her the usual stories about the raising of the flag and Storm Trooper’s Radio Calisthenics. Storm Trooper gave Midori an especially big laugh, as he seemed to do with all the world’s people. Midori said she thought it would be fun to have a look at the dorm. There was nothing fun about the place, I told her: “Just a few hundred guys in grubby rooms, drinking and jerking off.”
“Does that include you?”
“It includes every man on the face of the earth,” I explained. “Girls have periods and boys jerk off. Everybody.”
“Even ones with girlfriends? I mean, sex partners.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that. The Keio student living next door to me jerks off before every date. He says it relaxes him.”
“I don’t know much about that stuff. I was in a girls’ school so long.”
“I guess the ladies’ magazine supplements don’t go into that.”
“Not at all!” she said, laughing. “Anyhow, Watanabe, would you have some time this Sunday? Are you free?”
“I’m free every Sunday. Until six, at least. That’s when I go to work.”
“Why don’t you come visit me? At the Kobayashi Bookstore. The store itself will be closed, but I have to hang around there alone all day. I might be getting an important phone call. How about lunch? I’ll cook for you.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Midori tore a page from a notebook and drew a detailed map of the way to her place. She used a red pen to make a large X where the house stood.
“You can’t miss it. There’s a big sign: ‘Kobayashi Bookstore.’ Come at noon. I’ll have lunch ready.”
I thanked her and put the map in my pocket. “I’d better get back to campus now,” I said. “My German class starts at two.” Midori said she had someplace to go and took the train from Yotsuya.
SUNDAY MORNING I GOT UP AT NINE, shaved, did my laundry, and hung the clothes on the roof. It was a beautiful day. The first smell of autumn was in the air. Red dragonflies were flitting around the quadrangle, chased by neighborhood kids swinging nets. With no wind, the Rising Sun hung limp on its pole. I put on a freshly ironed shirt and walked from the dorm to the streetcar stop. A student neighborhood on a Sunday morning: the streets were dead, virtually empty, most stores closed. What few sounds there were echoed with special clarity. A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at a line of empty cans. A flower store was open, so I went in and bought some daffodils. Daffodils in the autumn: that was strange. But I had always liked that particular flower.
Three old women were the only passengers on the Sunday morning streetcar. They all looked at me and my flowers. One of them gave me a smile. I smiled back. I sat in the last seat and watched the old houses passing close by the window. The streetcar almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the yard of another house, a little kid was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from someplace, and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The streetcar snaked its way through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on at stops along the way, but the three old women went on talking intently about something, huddled together face-to-face.
I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori’s map down a broad street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs. Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or repaired in spots, and it was those additions that tended to look far more shabby than the old buildings themselves.
The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the people who used to live here had become fed up with the cars and the filthy air and the noise and high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap apartments and company flats and hard-to-move shops and a few stubborn holdouts who clung to old family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as if wrapped in a haze of exhaust gas.
Ten minutes’ walk down this street brought me to a corner gas station, where I turned right into a short block of shops, in the middle of which hung the sign for Kobayashi Bookstore. True, it was not a big store, but neither was it as small as Midori’s description had led me to imagine. It was just a typical neighborhood bookstore, the same kind I used to run to on the very day the boys’ magazines came out. A nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place.
The whole front of the store was sealed off by a big, roll-down metal shutter inscribed with a magazine advertisement: “Weekly Bunshun Sold Here Thursdays.” I still had fifteen minutes to noon, but I didn’t want to kill time wandering through the block with a handful of daffodils, so I pressed the doorbell beside the shutter and stepped a few paces back to wait. Fifteen seconds went by without an answer, and I was debating with myself whether to ring again when I heard a window clatter open above me. I looked up to find Midori leaning out and waving.
“Come in,” she yelled. “Lift the shutter.”
“Is it O.K.? I’m kind of early,” I shouted back.
“No problem. Come upstairs. I’m busy in the kitchen.” She pulled the window closed.
The shutter made a terrific grinding noise as I raised it three feet from the ground, ducked under, and lowered it again. The shop was pitch black inside. I managed to feel my way to the back stairway, tripping over bound piles of magazines. There I untied my shoes and climbed up to the living area. The interior of the house was dark and gloomy. Where the stairs came up was a simple parlor with a sofa and easy chairs. It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish movies. There was a kind of storage area on the left and what looked like the door to a bathroom. I had to climb the steep stairway with care to reach the second floor, but once I got there, it was so much brighter than the first floor that I felt a good deal of relief.
“Over here,” called Midori’s voice. To the right at the top of the stairs was what looked to be a dining room, and beyond that a kitchen. The house itself was old, but the kitchen seemed to have been remodeled recently with new cabinets and a bright, shiny sink and faucet. There I found Midori preparing food. She had a pot bubbling, and the smell of broiled fish filled the air.
“There’s beer in the refrigerator,” said Midori with a glance in my direction. “Have a seat while I finish this.” I took a can and sat at the kitchen table. The beer was so cold it might have been in the refrigerator for the better part of a year. On the table lay a small, white ashtray, a newspaper, and a soy sauce dispenser. There was also a notepad and pen, with a phone number and some figures on the pad that seemed to be calculations connected with shopping.
“I should have this done in ten minutes,” she said. “Can you stand the wait?”
“Of course I can,” I said.
“Get good and hungry, then. I’m making a lot.”
I sipped my beer and focused on Midori as she went on cooking, her back to me. She worked with quick, nimble movements, handling no fewer than four cooking procedures at once. Over here she tested the taste of a boiled dish, and the next second she was at the cutting board, rat-tat-tatting, then she took something out of the refrigerator and piled it in a dish, and before I knew it she had washed a pot she was finished using. From the back, she looked like an Indian percussionist—ringing a bell, tapping a block, striking a water buffalo bone, each movem
ent precise and economical, with perfect balance. I watched in awe.
“Let me know if there’s something I can do,” I said just in case.
“That’s O.K.,” said Midori with a smile in my direction. “I’m used to doing everything alone.” She wore slim blue jeans and a navy T-shirt. An Apple Records logo nearly covered the back of the shirt. She had incredibly narrow hips, as if she had somehow skipped the growth stage in which the hips are solidified, and this gave her a far more neutral look than most girls have in slim jeans. The light pouring in from the kitchen window gave her shape a kind of vague outline.
“You really didn’t have to put together such a feast,” I said.
“It’s no feast,” answered Midori without turning my way. “I was too busy to do any real shopping yesterday. I’m just slapping together a few things I had in the fridge. Really, don’t worry. Besides, it’s Kobayashi family tradition to treat guests well. I don’t know what it is, but we like to entertain. It’s inborn, a kind of sickness. Not that we’re especially nice or people love us or anything, but if somebody shows up we have to treat them well no matter what. We’ve all got the same personality flaw, for better or worse. Take my father, for example. He himself hardly drinks, but the house is full of alcohol. What for? To serve guests! So don’t hold back: drink all the beer you want.”
“Thanks,” I said.
It suddenly dawned on me that I had left the flowers downstairs. I had set them aside when untying my shoes and forgotten to bring them up with me. I slipped back downstairs and found the ten bright blossoms lying in the gloom. Midori took a tall, slim glass from the cupboard and arranged the flowers in it.
“I love daffodils,” said Midori. “I once sang ‘Seven Daffodils’ in the high school talent show. Do you know the song?”
“Of course I do.
“We had a folk group. I played guitar.”
She sang “Seven Daffodils” as she arranged the food on plates.
MIDORI’S COOKING WAS FAR BETTER than I had imagined it would be, an amazing assortment of fried, pickled, boiled, and roasted dishes using eggs, mackerel, fresh greens, eggplant, mushrooms, radishes, and sesame seeds, all done in the delicate Kyoto style.