•
In the third year of our marriage, Kumiko became pregnant. This was a great shock to us—or to me, at least—because of the extreme care we had been taking with contraception. A moment of carelessness must have done it; not that we could determine which exact moment it had been, but there was no other explanation. In any case, we simply could not afford the expense of a child. Kumiko had just gotten into the swing of her publishing job and, if possible, wanted to keep it. A small company like hers made no provision for anything so grand as maternity leave. A woman working there who wanted to have a child had no choice but to quit. If Kumiko had done that, we would have had to survive on my pay alone, for a while, at least, but this would have been a virtual impossibility.
“I guess we’ll have to pass, this time,” Kumiko said to me in an expressionless voice the day the doctor gave her the news.
She was probably right. No matter how you looked at it, that was the most sensible conclusion. We were young and totally unprepared for parenthood. Both Kumiko and I needed time for ourselves. We had to establish our own life: that was the first priority. We’d have plenty of opportunities for making children in the future.
•
In fact, though, I did not want Kumiko to have an abortion. Once, in my second year of college, I had made a girl pregnant, someone I had met where I worked part time. She was a nice kid, a year younger than I, and we got along well. We liked each other, of course, but were by no means serious about each other, nor was there any possibility that we would ever become serious. We were just two lonely youngsters who needed someone to hold.
About the reason for her pregnancy there was never any doubt. I always used a condom, but that one day I forgot to have one ready. I had run out. When I told her so, she hesitated for a few seconds and then said, “Oh, well, I think I’m OK today anyway.” One time was all it took.
I couldn’t quite believe that I had “made a girl pregnant,” but I did know that an abortion was the only way. I scraped the money together and went with her to the clinic. We took a commuter train way out to a little town in Chiba, where a friend of hers had put her in touch with a doctor. We got off at a station I had never heard of and saw thousands of tiny houses, all stamped out of the same mold, crowded together and stretching over the rolling hills to the horizon. These were huge new developments that had gone up in recent years for the younger company employees who could not afford housing in Tokyo. The station itself was brand-new, and just across from it stretched huge, water-filled rice fields, bigger than any I had ever seen. The streets were lined with real estate signs.
The clinic waiting room overflowed with huge-bellied young women, most of whom must have been in their fourth or fifth year of marriage and finally settling down to make children in their newly mortgaged suburban homes. The only young male in the place was me. The pregnant ladies all looked my way with the most intense interest—and no hint of goodwill. Anyone could see at a glance that I was a college student who had accidentally gotten his girlfriend pregnant and had come with her for an abortion.
After the operation, the girl and I took the train back to Tokyo. Headed into the city in the late afternoon, the train was nearly empty. I apologized to her. My carelessness had gotten her into this mess, I said.
“Don’t take it so hard,” she said. “At least you came with me to the clinic, and you paid for the operation.”
She and I soon stopped seeing each other, so I never knew what became of her, but for a very long time after the abortion—and even after we drifted apart—my feelings refused to settle down. Every time I recalled that day, the image would flash into my mind of the pregnant young women who filled the clinic waiting room to overflowing, their eyes so full of certainty. And the thought would strike me that I should never have gotten her pregnant.
In the train on the way back, to comfort me—to comfort me—she told me all the details that had made the operation so easy. “It’s not as bad as you’re thinking,” she said. “It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t hurt. You just take your clothes off and lie there. Yeah, I suppose it’s kind of embarrassing, but the doctor was nice, and so were the nurses. Of course, they did lecture me a little, said to be more careful from now on. So don’t feel so bad. It’s partly my fault too. I was the one who said it’d be OK. Right? Cheer up.”
All during the long train ride to the little town in Chiba, and all the way back again, though, I felt I had become a different person. Even after I had seen her home and returned to my room, to lie in bed and look at the ceiling, I could sense the change. I was a new me, and I could never go back to where I had been before. What was getting to me was the awareness that I was no longer innocent. This was not a moralistic sense of wrongdoing, or the workings of a guilty conscience. I knew that I had made a terrible mistake, but I was not punishing myself for it. It was a physical fact that I would have to confront coolly and logically, beyond any question of punishment.
•
The first thing that came to mind when I heard that Kumiko was pregnant was the image of those pregnant young women who filled the clinic waiting room. Or rather, it was the special smell that seemed to hang in the air there. I had no idea what that smell had been—if it was the actual smell of something at all. Perhaps it had been something like a smell. When the nurse called her name, the girl slowly raised herself from the hard vinyl chair and walked straight for the door. Just before she stood up, she glanced at me with the hint of a smile on her lips—or what was left of a smile that she had changed her mind about.
I knew that it was unrealistic for us to have a child, but I didn’t want Kumiko to have an abortion, either. When I said this to her, she replied, “We’ve been through all this. If I have a baby now, that’s the end of working for me, and you’ll have to find a better-paying job to support me and the baby. We won’t have money for anything extra. We won’t be able to do anything we want to do. From now on, the realistic possibilities for us will be narrowed down to nothing. Is that OK with you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it is OK with me.”
“Really?”
“If I make up my mind to it, I can probably find work—with my uncle, say: he’s looking for help. He wants to open up a new place, but he can’t find anybody he can trust to run it. I’m sure I’d make a lot more with him than I’m making now. It’s not a law firm, but so what? I’m not crazy about the work I’m doing now.”
“So you’d run a restaurant?”
“I’m sure I could if I gave it a try. And in an emergency, I’ve got a little money my mother left me. We wouldn’t starve to death.”
Kumiko fell silent and stayed that way, thinking, for a long time, making tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She had these little expressions that I liked. “Does this mean you want to have a baby?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know you’re pregnant, but it hasn’t really hit me that I might become a father. And I don’t really know how our life would change if we had a baby. You like your job, and it seems like a mistake to take that away from you. On the one hand, I think the two of us need more time with each other, but I also think that making a baby would expand our world. I don’t know what’s right. I’ve just got this feeling that I don’t want you to have an abortion. So I can’t make any guarantees. I’m not one hundred percent sure about any of this, and I don’t have any amazing solutions. All I’ve got is this feeling.”
Kumiko thought about this for a while, rubbing her stomach every now and then. “Tell me,” she said. “Why do you think I got pregnant? Nothing comes to mind?”
I shook my head. “Not really. We’ve always been careful. This is just the kind of trouble I wanted to avoid. So I don’t have any idea how it happened.”
“You think I might have had an affair? Haven’t you thought about that possibility?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I can’t claim a sixth sense or anything, but
I’m sure of that much.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking wine. It was late at night and absolutely silent. Kumiko narrowed her eyes and stared at the last sip of wine in the bottom of her glass. She almost never drank, though she would have a glass of wine when she couldn’t get to sleep. It always worked for her. I was just drinking to keep her company. We didn’t have anything so sophisticated as real wineglasses. Instead, we were drinking from little beer glasses we got free at the neighborhood liquor store.
“Did you have an affair?” I asked, suddenly concerned.
Kumiko smiled and shook her head. “Don’t be silly. You know I wouldn’t do anything like that. I just brought it up as a theoretical possibility.” Then she turned serious and put her elbows on the table. “Sometimes, though, I can’t tell about things. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real … what things really happened and what things didn’t really happen.… Just sometimes, though.”
“Is this one of those sometimes?”
“Well, sort of. Doesn’t this kind of thing ever happen to you?”
I thought about it for a minute. “Not that I can recall as a concrete example, no,” I said.
“How can I put this? There’s a kind of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me … like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a closet … and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I’ve established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.”
“Some kind of little something-or-other? A burglar?” I said. “Wow, talk about vague!”
“It is vague. Really,” said Kumiko, then drank down the rest of her wine.
I looked at her for a time. “And you think there’s some kind of connection between that ‘some kind of little something-or-other’ and the fact that you’re pregnant?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not saying the two things are related or not related. It’s just that sometimes I’m not really sure about the order of things. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
There was a growing touch of impatience in her words. The moment had arrived to end this conversation. It was after one o’clock in the morning. I reached across the table and took her hand.
“You know,” said Kumiko, “I kind of wish you’d let me decide this for myself. I realize it’s a big problem for both of us. I really do. But this one I want you to let me decide. I feel bad that I can’t explain very well what I’m thinking and feeling.”
“Basically, I think the right to make the decision is yours,” I said, “and I respect that right.”
“I think there’s a month or so left to decide. We’ve been talking about this together all along now, and I think I have a pretty good idea how you feel about it. So now let me do the thinking. Let’s stop talking about it for a while.”
•
I was in Hokkaido when Kumiko had the abortion. The firm never sent its lackeys out of town on business, but on that particular occasion no one else could go, so I ended up being the one sent north. I was supposed to deliver a briefcase stuffed with papers, give the other party a simple explanation, take delivery of their papers, and come straight home. The papers were too important to mail or entrust to some courier. Because all return flights to Tokyo were full, I would have to spend a night in a Sapporo business hotel. Kumiko went for the abortion that day, alone. She phoned me after ten at the hotel and said, “I had the operation this afternoon. Sorry to be informing you after the fact like this, but they had an opening on short notice, and I thought it would be easier on both of us if I made the decision and took care of it by myself while you were away.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Whatever you think is best.”
“I want to tell you more, but I can’t do it yet. I think I’ll have to tell you sometime.”
“We can talk when I get back.”
After the call, I put on my coat and went out to wander through the streets of Sapporo. It was still early March, and both sides of the roadways were lined with high mounds of snow. The air was almost painfully cold, and your breath would come out in white clouds that vanished in an instant. People wore heavy coats and gloves and scarves wrapped up to their chins and made their way down the icy sidewalks with careful steps. Taxis ran back and forth, their studded tires scratching at the road. When I couldn’t stand the cold any longer, I stepped into a bar for a few quick straights and went out to walk some more.
I stayed on the move for a very long time. Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance. The second bar I visited was below street level. It turned out to be a much bigger place than the entrance suggested. There was a small stage next to the bar, and on it was a slim man with glasses, playing a guitar and singing. He sat on a metal chair with his legs crossed, guitar case at his feet.
I sat at the bar, drinking and half listening to the music. Between songs, the man explained that the music was all his own. In his late twenties, he had a face with no distinguishing characteristics, and he wore glasses with black plastic frames. His outfit consisted of jeans, high lace-up boots, and a checked flannel work shirt that hung loose around his waist. The type of music was hard to define—something that might have been called “folk” in the old days, though a Japanese version of folk. Simple chords, simple melodies, unremarkable words. Not the kind of stuff I’d go out of my way to listen to.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to music like that. I would have had my whiskey, paid my bill, and left the place. But that night I was chilled, right to the bone, and had no intention of going outside again under any circumstances until I had warmed up all the way through. I drank one straight and ordered another. I made no attempt to remove my coat or my scarf. When the bartender asked if I wanted a snack, I ordered some cheese and ate a single slice. I tried to think, but I couldn’t get my head to work right. I didn’t even know what it was I wanted to think about. I was a vacant room. Inside, the music produced only a dry, hollow echo.
When the man finished singing, there was scattered applause, neither overly enthusiastic nor entirely perfunctory. There were no more than ten or fifteen customers in the place. The fellow stood and bowed. He seemed to make some kind of funny remarks that caused a few of the customers to laugh. I called the bartender and ordered my third whiskey. Then, finally, I took off my coat and my scarf.
“That concludes my show for tonight,” announced the singer. He seemed to pause and survey the room. “But there must be some of you here tonight who didn’t like my songs. For you, I’ve got a little something extra. I don’t do this all the time, so you should consider yourselves very lucky.”
He set his guitar on the floor and, from the guitar case, took a single thick white candle. He lit it with a match, dripped some wax into a plate, and stood the candle up. Then, looking like the Greek philosopher, he held the plate aloft. “Can I have the lights down, please?” One of the employees dimmed the lights somewhat. “A little darker, if you don’t mind.” Now the place became much darker, and the candle flame stood out clearly. Palms wrapped around my whiskey glass to warm it, I kept my eyes on the man and his candle.
“As you are well aware,” the man continued, his voice soft but penetrating, “in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know I have experienced pain in many different forms in my life, and I’m sure you have too. In most cases, though, I’m sure you’ve found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is this true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering, we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?”
He broke off and looked around the room once again.
/> “The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as a kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy.”
Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on the stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his left hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or a moan. You could see the tip of the flame burning the man’s palm. You could almost hear the sizzle of the flesh. A woman released a hard little scream. Everyone else just watched in frozen horror. The man endured the pain, his face distorted in agony. What the hell was this? Why did he have to do such a stupid, senseless thing? I felt my mouth going dry. After five or six seconds of this, he slowly removed his hand from the flame and set the dish with the candle in it on the floor. Then he clasped his hands together, the right and left palms pressed against each other.
“As you have seen tonight, ladies and gentlemen, pain can actually burn a person’s flesh,” said the man. His voice sounded exactly as it had earlier: quiet, steady, cool. No trace of suffering remained on his face. Indeed, it had been replaced by a faint smile. “And the pain that must have been there, you have been able to feel as if it were your own. That is the power of empathy.”
The man slowly parted his clasped hands. From between them he produced a thin red scarf, which he opened for all to see. Then he stretched his palms out toward the audience. There were no burns at all. A moment of silence followed, and then people expressed their relief in wild applause. The lights came up, and the chatter of voices replaced the tension that had filled the room. As if the whole thing had never happened, the man put his guitar into the case, stepped down from the stage, and disappeared.