“This is great,” I said with my mouth full.
“O.K., tell me the truth now,” Midori said. “You weren’t expecting my cooking to be very good, were you—judging from my looks.”
“I guess not,” I said honestly.
“You’re from the Kansai region, so you like this kind of delicate flavoring, right?”
“Don’t tell me you changed style especially for me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I wouldn’t go to that much trouble. No, we always eat like this.”
“So your mother—or your father—is from the Kansai?”
“Nope, my father was born in Tokyo and my mother’s from Fukushima. There’s not a single Kansai person among my relatives. We’re all from Tokyo or the northern Kanto.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How come you can make this hundred-percent-authentic Kansai-style food? Did somebody teach you?”
“Well, it’s kind of a long story,” she said, eating a slice of fried egg. “My mother hated housework of any kind, and she almost never cooked anything. And we had the business to think about, so it was always like ‘Today we’re so busy, let’s order out’ or ‘Let’s just buy some croquettes at the butcher shop’ and stuff. I hated that even when I was a little kid, I mean like cooking a big pot of curry and eating the same thing three days in a row. So then one day—I was in the third year of middle school—I decided I was going to cook for the family and do it right. I went to the big Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and bought the biggest, handsomest cookbook I could find, and I mastered it from cover to cover: how to choose a cutting board, how to sharpen knives, how to bone a fish, how to shave fresh bonito flakes, everything. It turned out the author of the book was from the Kansai, so all my cooking is Kansai style.”
“You mean you learned how to make all this stuff from a book?!”
“I saved my money and went to eat the real thing. That’s how I learned flavorings. I’ve got pretty good intuition. I’m hopeless as a logical thinker, though.”
“It’s amazing you could teach yourself to cook so well without having anyone show you.”
“It wasn’t easy,” said Midori with a sigh, “growing up in a house where nobody gave a damn about food. I’d tell them I wanted to buy decent knives and pots and they wouldn’t give me the money. ‘What we have now is good enough,’ they’d say, but I’d tell them that was crazy, you couldn’t bone a fish with the kind of flimsy knives we had at home, so they’d say, ‘What the hell do you have to bone a fish for?’ It was hopeless trying to communicate with them. I saved up my allowance and bought real professional knives and pots and strainers and stuff. Can you believe it? Here’s a fifteen-year-old girl pinching pennies to buy strainers and whetstones and tempura pots when all the other girls at school are getting huge allowances and buying beautiful dresses and shoes. Don’t you feel sorry for me?”
I nodded, swallowing a mouthful of clear soup with fresh junsai greens.
“When I was in my first year of high school, I had to have an egg fryer—a long, narrow pan for making this dashimaki style of fried egg we’re eating. I bought it with money I was supposed to use for a new bra. For three months I had to live with one bra. Can you believe it? I’d wash my bra at night, go crazy trying to dry it, and wear it the next day. And if it didn’t dry right, I had a tragedy to deal with. The saddest thing in the world is wearing a damp bra. I’d walk around with tears pouring from my eyes. To think I was suffering this for an egg fryer!”
“I see what you mean,” I said with a laugh.
“I know I shouldn’t say this, but actually it was kind of a relief to me when my mother died. I could run the family budget my way. I could buy what I liked. So now I’ve got a relatively complete set of cooking utensils. My father doesn’t know a thing about the budget.”
“When did your mother die?”
“Two years ago. Cancer. Brain tumor. She was in the hospital a year and a half. It was terrible. She suffered from beginning to end. Finally lost her mind, had to be doped up all the time, and still she couldn’t die, though when she did it was practically a mercy killing. It’s the worst kind of death—the person’s in agony, the family goes through hell. It took every cent we had. I mean, they’d give her these shots—bang, bang, twenty thousand yen a pop, and she had to have round-the-clock care. I was so busy with her, I couldn’t study, had to delay college for a year. And as if that weren’t bad enough—” she stopped herself in midsentence, put her chopsticks down, and sighed. “How did this conversation turn so dark all of a sudden?”
“It started with the business about the bras,” I said.
“So anyway, eat your eggs and think about what I just told you,” Midori said with a solemn expression.
Eating my portion filled me up, but Midori ate far less. “Cooking ruins my appetite,” she said. She cleared the table, wiped up the crumbs, brought out a box of Marlboros, put one in her mouth, and lit up with a match. Taking hold of the glass with the daffodils, she studied the blooms for a while.
“I guess I won’t switch them to a vase,” she said. “If I leave them like this, it’s like I just happened to pick them by a pond somewhere and threw them into the first thing I got my hands on.”
“I did pick them by the pond at Otsuka Station,” I said.
She chuckled. “You are a weird one. Making jokes with a perfectly straight face.”
Chin in hand, she smoked half her cigarette, then crushed it out in an ashtray. She rubbed her eyes as if smoke had gotten into them.
“Girls are supposed to be a little more elegant when they put their cigarettes out. You did that like a lumberjack. You shouldn’t just cram it down in the ashtray but press it lightly around the edges of the ash. Then it doesn’t get all bent up. And girls are never supposed to blow smoke through their noses. And most girls wouldn’t talk about how they wore the same bra for three months when they’re eating alone with a man.”
“I am a lumberjack,” Midori said, scratching next to her nose. “I can never manage to be chic. I try it as a joke sometimes, but it never sticks. Any more critiques for me?”
“Girls don’t smoke Marlboros,” I said.
“What’s the difference? One tastes as bad as another.” She turned the red Marlboro package over and over in her hand. “I just started smoking last month. It’s not like I was dying for tobacco or anything. I just sort of felt like it.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
She pressed her hands together atop the table and thought about it a while. “What’s the difference? You don’t smoke?”
“Quit in June,” I said.
“How come?”
“It was a pain. I hated running out of smokes in the middle of the night. I don’t like having something control me that way.”
“You’re very clear about what you like and what you don’t like,” she said.
“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe that’s why people don’t like me. Never have.”
“It’s ’cause you show it,” she said. “You make it obvious you don’t care whether people like you or not. That makes some people mad.” She spoke in a near mumble, chin in hand. “But I like talking to you. The way you talk is so unusual. ‘I don’t like having something control me that way.’”
I HELPED HER WASH the dishes. Standing next to her, I wiped as she washed, and I piled the things on the counter.
“So,” I said, “your family’s out today?”
“My mother’s in her grave. She died two years ago.”
“Yeah, I heard that part.”
“My sister’s on a date with her fiancé. Probably on a drive. Her boyfriend works for some car company. He loves cars. I don’t love cars.”
Midori stopped talking and washed. I stopped talking and wiped.
“And then there’s my father,” she said after some time had gone by.
“Right,” I said.
“He went off to Uruguay in June of last year and he’s been there ever since.”
“Uru
guay?! Why Uruguay?”
“He was thinking of settling there, believe it or not. An old army buddy of his has a farm there. All of a sudden, my father announces he’s going to go too, that there’s no limit to what he can do in Uruguay, and he gets on a plane and that’s that. We tried hard to stop him, like, ‘Why do you want to go to a place like that? You can’t speak the language, you’ve hardly ever left Tokyo.’ But he wouldn’t listen. Losing my mother was a real shock to him. I mean, it made him a little cuckoo. That’s how much he loved her. Really.”
There was not much I could say in reply. I stared at Midori with my mouth open.
“What do you think he said to my sister and me when our mother died? ‘I would much rather have lost the two of you than her.’ It knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t say a word. You know what I mean? You just can’t say something like that. O.K., he lost the woman he loved, his partner for life. I understand the pain, the sadness, the heartbreak. I pity him. But you don’t tell the daughters you fathered ‘You should have died in her place.’ I mean, that’s just too terrible. Don’t you agree?”
“Yeah, I see your point.”
“That’s one wound that will never go away,” she said, shaking her head. “But anyhow, everybody in my family’s a little different. We’ve all got something just a little bit strange.”
“So it seems,” I said.
“Still, it is wonderful for two people to love each other, don’t you think? I mean, for a man to love his wife so much he can tell his daughters they should have died in her place …!”
“Maybe so, now that you put it that way.”
“And then he dumps the two of us and runs off to Uruguay.”
I wiped another dish without replying. After the last one, Midori put everything back in the cabinets.
“So, have you heard from your father?” I asked.
“One postcard. In March. But what does he write? ‘It’s hot here,’ or ‘The fruit’s not as good as I expected.’ Stuff like that. I mean, give me a break! One stupid picture of a donkey! He’s lost his marbles! He didn’t even say whether he’d met that guy—that friend of his or whatever. He did add near the end that once he’s settled he’ll send for me and my sister, but not a word since then. And he never answers our letters.”
“What would you do if your father said, ‘Come to Uruguay’?”
“I’d go and have a look around at least. It might be fun. My sister says she’d absolutely refuse. She can’t stand dirty things and dirty places.”
“Is Uruguay dirty?”
“Who knows? She thinks it is. Like the roads are full of donkey shit and it’s swarming with flies, and the toilets don’t work, and lizards and scorpions crawl all over the place. She maybe saw a movie like that. She can’t stand bugs, either. All she wants to do is drive through pretty scenery in fancy cars.”
“No kidding.”
“I mean, what’s wrong with Uruguay? I’d go.”
“So who’s running the store?”
“My sister, but she hates it. We’ve got an uncle in the neighborhood who helps out and makes deliveries. And I help out when I have time. A bookstore’s not exactly hard labor, so we can manage. If it gets to be too much, we’ll sell the place.”
“Do you like your father?”
Midori shook her head. “Not especially.”
“So how can you follow him to Uruguay?”
“I believe in him.”
“Believe in him?”
“Yeah, I’m not that fond of him, but I believe in my father. How can I not believe in a man who gives up his house, his kids, his work, and runs off to Uruguay from the shock of losing his wife? Do you see what I mean?”
I sighed. “Sort of, but not really.”
Midori laughed and patted me on the back. “Never mind,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter.”
ONE STRANGE THING after another came up that Sunday afternoon. A fire broke out near Midori’s house and when we went up to the third-floor laundry deck to watch, we sort of kissed. It sounds stupid when I put it that way, but that was how things worked out.
We were drinking coffee after the meal and talking about the university when we heard the sound of sirens. They got louder and louder and seemed to be increasing in number. Lots of people ran by the store, some of them shouting. Midori went to a room that faced the street, opened the window, and looked down. “Wait here a minute,” she said, and disappeared, after which I heard feet pounding up stairs.
I sat there drinking coffee alone and trying to remember where Uruguay was. Let’s see, Brazil was over here, and Venezuela there, and Colombia somewhere over here, but the location of Uruguay I couldn’t manage to recall. Midori came down a few minutes later and urged me to hurry somewhere with her. I followed her to the end of the hall and climbed a steep, narrow stairway to a wooden deck with bamboo laundry poles. The deck was higher than most of the surrounding rooftops and gave a good view of the neighborhood. Huge clouds of black smoke shot up from a place three or four houses away and flowed with the breeze out toward the main street. A burning smell filled the air.
“It’s Sakamoto’s place,” said Midori, leaning over the railing. “They used to make traditional door fittings and stuff. They went out of business, though.”
I leaned over the railing with her and strained to see what was going on. A three-story building blocked our view of the exact fire scene, but there seemed to be three or four fire engines over there working on the blaze. No more than two of them could squeeze into the narrow lane where the house was burning, the rest standing by on the main street. The usual crowd of gawkers filled the area.
“Hey, maybe you should gather your valuables together and get ready to evacuate this place,” I said to Midori. “The wind’s blowing the other way now, but it could change any time, and you’ve got a gas station right there. I’ll help you pack.”
“What valuables?” said Midori.
“Well, you must have something you’d want to save—passbooks, seals, legal papers, stuff like that. Emergency cash.”
“Forget it. I’m not running away.”
“Even if this place burns?”
“You heard me. I don’t mind dying.”
I looked her in the eye, and she looked straight at me. I couldn’t tell if she was serious or joking. We stayed like that for a while, and soon I stopped worrying.
“O.K.,” I said. “I get it. I’ll stay with you.”
“You’ll die with me?” Midori asked with shining eyes.
“Hell, no,” I said. “I’ll run if it gets dangerous. If you want to die, you can do it alone.”
“Cold-hearted bastard!”
“I’m not going to die with you just because you made lunch for me. Of course, if it had been dinner …”
“Oh, well … Anyhow, let’s stay here and watch for a while. We can sing songs. And if something bad happens, we can think about it then.”
“Sing songs?”
Midori brought two floor pillows, four cans of beer, and a guitar from downstairs. We drank and watched the black smoke rising. Midori strummed and sang. I asked her if she didn’t think this might anger the neighbors. Drinking beer and singing while you watched a local fire from the laundry deck didn’t seem like the most admirable behavior I could think of.
“Forget it,” she said. “We never worry about what the neighbors might think.”
She sang some of the folk songs she had played with her group. I would have been hard-pressed to say she was good, but she did seem to enjoy her own music. She went through all the old standards—“Lemon Tree,” “Puff (the Magic Dragon),” “Five Hundred Miles,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” At first she tried to get me to sing bass harmony, but I was so bad she gave up and sang alone to her heart’s content. I worked on my beer and listened to her sing and kept an eye on the fire. It flared up and died down several times. People were yelling and giving orders. A newspaper helicopter clattered ove
rhead, took pictures, and flew away. I worried that we might be in the picture. A policeman screamed through a loudspeaker for gawkers to pull back. A little kid was crying for his mother. Glass shattered somewhere. Before long the wind started shifting unpredictably, and white ash flakes would fall out of the air around us, but Midori went on sipping and singing. After she had gone through most of the songs she knew, she sang an old one that she said she had written herself.
I’d love to cook a stew for you
But I have no pot.
I’d love to knit a scarf for you
But I have no wool.
I’d love to write a poem for you
But I have no pen.
“It’s called ‘I Have Nothing,’” Midori announced. It was a truly terrible song, both words and music.
I listened to this musical mess with thoughts of how the house would blow apart in the explosion if the gas station caught fire. Tired of singing, Midori put her guitar down and slumped against my shoulder like a cat in the sun.
“How did you like my song?” she asked.
I answered cautiously, “It was unique and original and very expressive of your personality.”
“Thanks,” she said. “The theme is that I have nothing.”
“Yeah, I kinda thought so.”
“You know,” she said, “when my mother died …”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t feel the least bit sad.”
“Oh.”
“And I didn’t feel sad when my father left, either.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s true. Don’t you think I’m terrible? Cold-hearted?”
“I’m sure you’ve got your reasons.”
“My reasons. Hmm. Things were pretty complicated in this house. But I always thought, I mean, they’re my mother and father, of course I’d be sad if they died or I never saw them again. But it didn’t happen that way. I didn’t feel anything. Not sad, not lonely. I hardly even think of them. Sometimes I’ll have dreams, though. Sometimes my mother will be glaring at me out of the darkness and she’ll accuse me of being happy she died. But I’m not happy she died. I’m just not very sad. And to tell the truth, I never shed a single tear. I cried all night when my cat died, though, when I was little.”