Was I in love with him? There is no way I can answer that question. The question itself seems irrelevant. Was I in love with you? To that I can answer without hesitation: Yes. I was always extremely glad that I had married you. And I still feel that way. So why, you might ask, did I have to have an affair and, to top it off, run away from home? I asked myself the same question over and over again even while it was happening: Why do I have to be doing this?
There is no way I can explain it. I never had the slightest desire to take a lover or have an affair. Such thoughts were the farthest thing from my mind when I first started seeing him. We met a few times in connection with business, and though we did find it easy to talk to each other, the most that happened after that was an occasional remark on the phone that went beyond business. He was much older than I, had a wife and children, and was not particularly attractive to me as a man: it never occurred to me that I might become seriously involved with him.
This is not to say that I was entirely free of thoughts about getting even with you. It still rankled me that you had once spent the night with a certain woman. I believed you when you said that you hadn’t done anything with her, but the mere fact that you hadn’t done anything with her didn’t make it right. It was just how I felt. But still, I didn’t have an affair in order to get even with you. I remember I once said I would, but that was only a threat. I slept with him because I wanted to sleep with him. Because I couldn’t bear not to sleep with him. Because I couldn’t suppress my own sexual desire.
We had not seen each other for some time, when we met on a business matter. We followed this with dinner and then went somewhere for a quick drink. Since I can’t drink, of course, all I had, to be sociable, was a glass of orange juice without a drop of alcohol in it. So alcohol had nothing to do with what happened. We were just talking and eating in the most ordinary way. But then one moment, by accident, we touched, and all I could think of was that I wanted to be in his arms. The instant we touched, I knew that he wanted my body, and he seemed to sense that I wanted his. It was a totally irrational, overwhelming charge of electricity that passed between us. I felt as if the sky had fallen on me. My cheeks were burning, my heart was pounding, and I had a heavy, melting feeling below the waist. I could hardly sit straight on the bar stool, it was so intense. At first I didn’t realize what was happening inside me, but soon I realized it was lust. I had such a violent desire for him that I could hardly breathe. Without either of us being the first to suggest it, we walked to a nearby hotel and went wild with sex.
Writing it out as graphically as this is probably going to hurt you, but I believe that, in the long run, an honest, detailed account will be the best thing. It may be hard, but I want you to bear the pain and read on.
What I did with him had virtually nothing to do with “love.” All I wanted was to be held by him and have him inside me. Never in my life had I experienced such a suffocating need for a man’s body. I had read about “unbearable desire” in books, but until that day I could never really imagine what such a phrase meant.
Why this need arose in me so suddenly, why it happened not with you but with someone else, I have no idea. But the desire I felt then was impossible to suppress, nor did I even try. Please understand: not for a moment did it occur to me that I was betraying you in any way. The sex I had in that hotel bed with him was something close to madness. To be totally honest, I had never in my life felt anything so good. No, it wasn’t that simple: it didn’t just “feel good.” My flesh was rolling in hot mud. My mind sucked in the sheer pleasure to the point of bursting—and then it burst. It was absolutely miraculous. It was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me.
And then, as you know, I kept it hidden all that time. You never realized that I was having an affair: You never doubted me, even when I began coming home late. I’m sure you trusted me completely. You thought I could never betray you. And for betraying this trust of yours, I had no sense of guilt. I would call you from the hotel room and say that work was going to keep me out late. I piled one lie on top of another, but they caused me no pain. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. My heart needed my life with you. The home I shared with you was the place where I belonged. It was the world I belonged to. But my body had this violent need for sex with him. Half of me was here, and half there. I knew that sooner or later the break would have to come, but at the time, it felt as if this double life would go on forever. Over here I was living peacefully with you, and over there I was making violent love with him.
I want you to understand one thing, at least. This was never a matter of your being sexually inferior to him or lacking in sex appeal, or my being tired of sex with you. It was just that, at that time, my body experienced this violent, irrepressible hunger. I could do nothing to resist it. Why such things happen I have no idea. All I can say is that it did happen. A few times during the weeks that I was sleeping with him, I thought about having sex with you too. It seemed unfair to me, for your sake, that I would sleep with him but not with you. But in your arms, I had ceased to feel anything at all. You must have noticed. For close to two months, I made up all kinds of excuses to avoid having sexual relations with you.
But then one day, he asked me to leave you for him. We were so perfectly matched, he said, that there was no reason for us not to be together. He would leave his family, he said. I asked him to give me time to think about it. But on the train home after I left him that night, I realized that I no longer felt a thing for him. I don’t understand it myself, but the moment he asked me to join him, that special something inside me disappeared as if a strong wind had come up and blown it away. My desire for him was gone without a trace.
That was when I started to feel guilty toward you. As I wrote earlier, I had felt nothing of the sort the whole time I was feeling intense desire for him. All I had felt was how convenient it was that you had noticed nothing. I thought I could get away with anything, as long as you failed to notice. My connection with him belonged to a different world from my connection with you. After my desire for him evaporated, though, I no longer knew where I was.
I have always thought of myself as an honest person. True, I have my faults. But where important things were concerned, I had never lied to anyone or deceived myself. I had never hidden anything from you. That had been one small source of pride for me. But then, for months, I went on telling you those fatal lies without a twinge of regret.
That very fact is what started to torment me. It made me feel as if I were an empty, meaningless, worthless person. And in fact, that is probably what I am. But there is one other thing, in addition, that continues to bother me, and that is: how did I suddenly come to feel such intense, abnormal sexual desire for a man I didn’t even love? This is what I simply cannot grasp. If it hadn’t been for that desire, I would still be enjoying my happy life with you. And that man would still be a nice friend to chat with on occasion. But that feeling, that incredible, overwhelming lust, tore down everything we had built up over the years. It took away everything that was mine: it took away you, and the home that we had made together, and my work. Why did such a thing have to happen?
After I had my abortion three years ago, I told you that there was something I had to say to you. Do you remember? Perhaps I should have done it. Perhaps I should have told you everything that was in my heart before things came to this. This might never have happened if I had done so. But now that it has happened—even now—I don’t believe that I would be able to tell you what I was feeling then. And that is because it seems to me that once I put it into words, things would be even more decisively ruined than they are now. Which is why I came to feel that the best thing I could do was to swallow it all and disappear.
I am sorry to have to tell you this, but the fact is that I was never able to have true sexual pleasure with you, either before or after we were married. I loved it when you held me in your arms, but all I ever felt was a vague, far-off sense that almost seemed to b
elong to someone else. This is in no way your fault. My inability to feel was purely and simply my own responsibility. There was some kind of blockage inside me, which would always hold any sexual feeling I had in check. When, for reasons I cannot grasp, that blockage was swept away by sex with him, I no longer had any idea what I should do.
There was always something very close and delicate between us, you and me. It was there from the very beginning. But now it has been lost forever. That perfect meshing of the gears, that mythical something, has been destroyed. Because I destroyed it. Or more accurately, some kind of something made me destroy it. I am terribly sorry it ever happened. Not everyone is lucky enough to have such a chance as I had with you. I hate the thing that caused all this to happen. You have no idea how much I hate it. I want to know precisely what it is. I have to know precisely what it is. I have to search out its roots and judge and punish it. Whether I actually have the strength to do so, I cannot be sure. One thing is certain, however: this is my problem alone. It has nothing to do with you.
I have only one thing to ask of you, and that is this: please don’t concern yourself about me anymore. Please don’t try to find me. Just forget about me and think about beginning a new life. Where my family is concerned, I will do the proper thing: I will write to them and explain that this is all my fault, that you are in no way responsible. They will not cause you any trouble. Formal divorce proceedings will begin fairly soon, I think. That will be best for both of us. So please don’t protest. Just go along with them. As far as the clothing and other things I have left behind are concerned, I’m sorry, but please just dispose of them or donate them somewhere. Everything belongs to the past now. Anything I ever used in my life with you I have no right to use now.
Goodbye.
I read the letter one more time from beginning to end and returned it to its envelope. Then I took another can of beer from the refrigerator and drank it.
If Kumiko was planning to institute divorce proceedings, that meant she had no intention of killing herself right away. That gave me some relief. But then I ran up against the fact that I had not had sex with anyone for almost two months. As she had said in her letter, Kumiko had resisted sleeping with me all that time. She had symptoms of a mild bladder infection, she said, and the doctor had told her to refrain from sex for a while. And of course I had believed her. I had no reason not to.
During those two months, I had had relations with women in my dreams—or in some world that, within the limits of my vocabulary, I could only call a dream—with Creta Kano and with the telephone woman. But now that I thought about it, two months had gone by since the last time I had slept with a real woman in the real world. Lying on the sofa, staring at my own hands atop my chest, I thought about the last time I had seen Kumiko’s body. I thought about the soft curve of her back when I zipped her dress up, and the smell of cologne behind her ears. If what she said in the letter was the irrevocable truth, however, I would probably never sleep with Kumiko again. She had written it with such clarity and finality: what else could it be but the irrevocable truth?
The more I thought about the possibility that my relationship with Kumiko had become a thing of the past, the more I began to miss the gentle warmth of that body that had once belonged to me. I had enjoyed sleeping with her. Of course, I had enjoyed it before we were married, but even after some years had gone by and the initial thrill had faded somewhat, I enjoyed having sex with Kumiko. Her slender back, the nape of her neck, her legs, her breasts—I could recall the touch of every part of her with present vividness. I could recall all the things I had done for her and she had done for me in the course of our sexual union.
But now Kumiko had joined her body with that of someone I did not know—and with an intensity I could hardly imagine. She had discovered in that a pleasure she had been unable to obtain from sex with me. Probably, while she was doing it with him, she had squirmed and writhed enough to make the bed toss and had released groans loud enough to be audible in the next room. She had probably done things with him that she would never have done with me. I went and opened the refrigerator, took out a beer, and drank it. Then I ate some potato salad. Wanting to hear music, I turned on the FM radio, tuning in to a classical station at low volume. “I’m so tired today,” Kumiko would say. “I’m just not in the mood. I’m sorry. Really.” I’d answer, “That’s OK, no big deal.” When Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings ended, a little piano piece came on that sounded like something by Schumann. It was familiar, but I couldn’t recall the title. When it was over, the female announcer said it had been the seventh of Schumann’s Forest Scenes, titled “Bird as Prophet.” I imagined Kumiko twisting her hips beneath the other man, raising her legs, planting her fingernails in his back, drooling on the sheets. The announcer explained that Schumann had created a scene of fantasy in which a mysterious bird lived in the forest, foretelling the future.
What had I ever known about Kumiko? Soundlessly, I crushed the empty beer can in my hand and threw it into the trash. Could it be true that the Kumiko I had thought I understood, the Kumiko I had held close to me and joined my body with over the years as my wife—that Kumiko was nothing but the most superficial layer of the person Kumiko herself, just as the greater part of this world belongs in fact to the realm of the jellyfish? If so, what about those six years we had spent together? What had they been? What had they meant?
•
I was reading Kumiko’s letter yet again when the phone rang. The sound shot me out of the sofa. Who could possibly be calling at two in the morning? Kumiko? No, she would never call here. Probably May Kasahara. She had seen me leave the empty house and decided to give me a call. Or possibly Creta Kano. She wanted to explain why she had disappeared. It could be the telephone woman. She might be trying to convey some message to me. May Kasahara had been right: there were just a few too many women around me. I wiped the sweat from my face with a towel that lay nearby, and when I was ready I lifted the receiver. “Hello,” I said. “Hello,” came the voice from the other end. It did not belong to May Kasahara. Neither was it Creta Kano’s voice, or the voice of the enigmatic woman. It was Malta Kano.
“Hello,” she said, “is that Mr. Okada? My name is Malta Kano. I wonder if you remember me?”
“Of course. I remember you very well,” I said, trying to still the pounding of my heart. How could I not have remembered her?
“I must apologize for telephoning you so late at night. This is something of an emergency, however. I fully recognized what a rude intrusion this would be and how angry it would make you, but I felt compelled to place the call nevertheless. I am terribly sorry.”
She need not be concerned, I assured her: I was up, in any case, and not the least bit bothered.
Discovered When Shaving
•
Discovered When Waking
“The reason I am calling you so late at night, Mr. Okada, is that I felt I should reach you at the earliest possible opportunity,” said Malta Kano. Listening to her speak, I had the impression that she was choosing and arranging each word into well-ordered sentences according to strict principles of logic—which was what she always did. “If you have no objection, there are several questions that I wish to be permitted to ask you, Mr. Okada. May I proceed?”
Receiver in hand, I lowered myself onto the sofa. “Go right ahead, ask me anything you’d like,” I said.
“Have you by any chance been away these past two days, Mr. Okada? I tried telephoning you any number of times, but you seemed always to be out.”
“Well, yes, I was out. I wanted to get away from the house for a while. I needed to be alone to do some thinking. I’ve got lots of things I need to think about.”
“Yes, Mr. Okada, I am very much aware of that. I understand how you feel. A change of scene can be a very good thing when one wishes to think clearly and carefully about something. In this case, however, Mr. Okada—and I know this will sound as if I am prying—were you not somewhere very far away?”
“Well, not so very far away,” I said, with deliberate ambiguity. I switched the receiver from my left hand to my right. “How can I put this? I was in a somewhat cut-off place. I really can’t go into it, though, in great detail. I have my reasons. And I just got back a little while ago. I’m too tired for long explanations.”
“Of course, Mr. Okada. I understand. All people have their reasons. I will not press you to explain. You must be very tired indeed: I can tell from the sound of your voice. Please do not concern yourself about me. I should not be bothering you with a lot of questions at a time like this. I am terribly sorry. We can always discuss this matter at a more appropriate time. I know it was terribly rude of me to ask such a personal question, but I did so only because I was worried that something very bad had happened to you over the past several days.”
I tried to make an appropriate response, but the little noise that came out of my throat sounded less like a response than like the gasp of an aquatic animal that had breathed the wrong way. Something very bad, I thought. Of all the things that were happening to me, which were bad and which were not bad? Which were all right and which were not all right?
“Thank you for being so concerned about me,” I said, after getting my voice to work properly, “but I’m fine at the moment. I can’t say that something good happened to me, but there’s been nothing especially bad, either.”
“I am glad to hear that.”
“I’m just tired, that’s all,” I added.
Malta Kano made a dainty little sound of clearing her throat. “By the way, Mr. Okada, I wonder if you might have noticed some kind of major physical change during the past few days?”
“A physical change? In me?”
“Yes, Mr. Okada. Some kind of change in your body.”