“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Why do you hate them?”
“How should I know why I hate them? I just do. You hate telephone covers, and thermos bottles with flower decorations, and bell-bottom jeans with rivets, and me having my nails manicured. Not even you can say why. It’s just a matter of taste.”
In fact, I could have explained my reasons for all those things, but of course I did not. “All right,” I said. “It’s just a matter of taste. But can you tell me that in the six years we’ve been married you never once bought blue tissues or flower-pattern toilet paper?”
“Never. Not once.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. The tissues I buy are either white or yellow or pink. And I absolutely never buy toilet paper with patterns on it. I’m just shocked that you could live with me all this time and not be aware of that.”
It was shocking to me, too, to realize that in six long years I had never once used blue tissues or patterned toilet paper.
“And while I’m at it, let me say this,” she continued. “I absolutely detest beef stir fried with green peppers. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, it’s true. And don’t ask me why. I just can’t stand the smell of the two of them cooking in the same pan.”
“You mean to say that in six years you have never once cooked beef and green peppers together?”
She shook her head. “I’ll eat green peppers in a salad. I’ll fry beef with onions. But I have never once cooked beef and green peppers together.”
I heaved a sigh.
“Haven’t you ever thought it strange?” she asked.
“Thought it strange? I never even noticed,” I said, taking a moment to consider whether, since marrying, I had in fact ever eaten anything stir fried containing beef and green peppers. Of course, it was impossible for me to recall.
“You’ve been living with me all this time,” she said, “but you’ve hardly paid any attention to me. The only one you ever think about is yourself.”
“Now wait just a minute,” I said, turning off the gas and setting the wok down on the range. “Let’s not get carried away here. You may be right. Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention to things like tissues and toilet paper and beef and green peppers. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t paid any attention to you. I don’t give a damn what color my tissues are. OK, black I’d have a little trouble with, but white, blue—it just doesn’t matter. It’s the same with beef and green peppers. Together, apart—who cares? The act of stir frying beef and green peppers could disappear from the face of the earth and it wouldn’t matter to me. It has nothing to do with you, your essence, what makes Kumiko Kumiko. Am I wrong?”
Instead of answering me, she polished off her beer in two big gulps and stared at the empty bottle.
I dumped the contents of the wok into the garbage. So much for the beef and green peppers and onions and bean sprouts. Weird. Food one minute, garbage the next. I opened a beer and drank from the bottle.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked.
“You hate it so much.”
“So you could have eaten it.”
“I suddenly didn’t want beef and green peppers anymore.”
She shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy.”
She put her arms on the table and rested her face on them. For a while, she stayed like that. I could see she wasn’t crying or sleeping. I looked at the empty wok on the range, looked at Kumiko, and drank my beer down. Crazy. Who gives a damn about toilet paper and green peppers?
But I walked over and put my hand on her shoulder. “OK,” I said. “I understand now. I’ll never buy blue tissues or flowered toilet paper again. I promise. I’ll take the stuff back to the supermarket tomorrow and exchange it. If they won’t give me an exchange, I’ll burn it in the yard. I’ll throw the ashes in the sea. And no more beef and green peppers. Never again. Pretty soon the smell will be gone, and we’ll never have to think about it anymore. OK?”
But still she said nothing. I wanted to go out for an hour’s walk and find her cheery when I got back, but I knew there was no chance of that happening. I’d have to solve this one myself.
“Look, you’re tired,” I said. “So take a little rest and we’ll go out for a pizza. When’s the last time we had a pizza? Anchovies and onions. We’ll split one. It wouldn’t kill us to eat out once in a while.”
This didn’t do it, either. She kept her face pressed against her arms.
I didn’t know what else to say. I sat down and stared at her across the table. One ear showed through her short black hair. It had an earring that I had never seen before, a little gold one in the shape of a fish. Where could she have bought such a thing? I wanted a smoke. I imagined myself taking my cigarettes and lighter from my pocket, putting a filter cigarette between my lips, and lighting up. I inhaled a lungful of air. The heavy smell of stir-fried beef and vegetables struck me hard. I was starved.
My eye caught the calendar on the wall. This calendar showed the phases of the moon. The full moon was approaching. Of course: it was about time for Kumiko’s period.
Only after I became a married man had it truly dawned on me that I was an inhabitant of earth, the third planet of the solar system. I lived on the earth, the earth revolved around the sun, and around the earth revolved the moon. Like it or not, this would continue for eternity (or what could be called eternity in comparison with my lifetime). What induced me to see things this way was the absolute precision of my wife’s twenty-nine-day menstrual cycle. It corresponded perfectly with the waxing and waning of the moon. And her periods were always difficult. She would become unstable—even depressed—for some days before they began. So her cycle became my cycle. I had to be careful not to cause any unnecessary trouble at the wrong time of the month. Before we were married, I hardly noticed the phases of the moon. I might happen to catch sight of the moon in the sky, but its shape at any given time was of no concern to me. Now the shape of the moon was something I always carried around in my head.
I had been with a number of women before Kumiko, and of course each had had her own period. Some were difficult, some were easy, some were finished in three days, others took over a week, some were regular, others could be ten days late and scare the hell out of me; some women had bad moods, others were hardly affected. Until I married Kumiko, though, I had never lived with a woman. Until then, the cycles of nature meant the changing of the seasons. In winter I’d get my coat out, in summer it was time for sandals. With marriage I took on not only a cohabitant but a new concept of cyclicity: the phases of the moon. Only once had she missed her cycle for some months, during which time she had been pregnant.
“I’m sorry,” she said, raising her face. “I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I’m tired, and I’m in a bad mood.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “Don’t let it bother you. You should take it out on somebody when you’re tired. It makes you feel better.”
Kumiko took a long, slow breath, held it in awhile, and let it out.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“You don’t take it out on anybody when you’re tired. I do. Why is that?”
I shook my head. “I never noticed,” I said. “Funny.”
“Maybe you’ve got this deep well inside, and you shout into it, ‘The king’s got donkey’s ears!’ and then everything’s OK.”
I thought about that for a while. “Maybe so,” I said.
Kumiko looked at the empty beer bottle again. She stared at the label, and then at the mouth, and then she turned the neck in her fingers.
“My period’s coming,” she said. “I think that’s why I’m in such a bad mood.”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t let it bother you. You’re not the only one. Tons of horses die when the moon’s full.”
She took her hand from the bottle, opened her mouth, and looked at me.
“Now, where did that come from all of
a sudden?”
“I read it in the paper the other day. I meant to tell you about it, but I forgot. It was an interview with some veterinarian. Apparently, horses are tremendously influenced by the phases of the moon—both physically and emotionally. Their brain waves go wild as the full moon approaches, and they start having all kinds of physical problems. Then, on the night itself, a lot of them get sick, and a huge number of those die. Nobody really knows why this happens, but the statistics prove that it does. Horse vets never have time to sleep on full-moon nights, they’re so busy.”
“Interesting,” said Kumiko.
“An eclipse of the sun is even worse, though. Nothing short of a tragedy for the horses. You couldn’t begin to imagine how many horses die on the day of a total eclipse. Anyhow, all I want to say is that right this second, horses are dying all over the world. Compared with that, it’s no big deal if you take out your frustrations on somebody. So don’t let it bother you. Think about the horses dying. Think about them lying on the straw in some barn under the full moon, foaming at the mouth, gasping in agony.”
She seemed to take a moment to think about horses dying in barns.
“Well, I have to admit,” she said with a note of resignation, “you could probably sell anybody anything.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Change your clothes and let’s go out for a pizza.”
•
That night, in our darkened bedroom, I lay beside Kumiko, staring at the ceiling and asking myself just how much I really knew about this woman. The clock said 2:00 a.m. She was sound asleep. In the dark, I thought about blue tissues and patterned toilet paper and beef and green peppers. I had lived with her all this time, unaware how much she hated these things. In themselves they were trivial. Stupid. Something to laugh off, not make a big issue out of. We’d had a little tiff and would have forgotten about it in a couple of days.
But this was different. It was bothering me in a strange new way, digging at me like a little fish bone caught in the throat. Maybe—just maybe—it was more crucial than it had seemed. Maybe this was it: the fatal blow. Or maybe it was just the beginning of what would be the fatal blow. I might be standing in the entrance of something big, and inside lay a world that belonged to Kumiko alone, a vast world that I had never known. I saw it as a big, dark room. I was standing there holding a cigarette lighter, its tiny flame showing me only the smallest part of the room.
Would I ever see the rest? Or would I grow old and die without ever really knowing her? If that was all that lay in store for me, then what was the point of this married life I was leading? What was the point of my life at all if I was spending it in bed with an unknown companion?
•
This was what I thought about that night and what I went on thinking about long afterward from time to time. Only much later did it occur to me that I had found my way into the core of the problem.
Malta Kano’s Hat
•
Sherbet Tone and Allen Ginsberg
and the Crusaders
I was in the middle of preparing lunch when the phone rang again. I had cut two slices of bread, spread them with butter and mustard, filled them with tomato slices and cheese, set the whole on the cutting board, and I was just about to cut it in half when the bell started ringing.
I let the phone ring three times and cut the sandwich in half. Then I transferred it to a plate, wiped the knife, and put that in the cutlery drawer, before pouring myself a cup of the coffee I had warmed up.
Still the phone went on ringing. Maybe fifteen times. I gave up and took it. I would have preferred not to answer, but it might have been Kumiko.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, one I had never heard before. It belonged neither to Kumiko nor to the strange woman who had called me the other day when I was cooking spaghetti. “I wonder if I might possibly be speaking with Mr. Toru Okada?” said the voice, as if its owner were reading a text.
“You are,” I said.
“The husband of Kumiko Okada?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Kumiko Okada is my wife.”
“And Mrs. Okada’s elder brother is Noboru Wataya?”
“Right again,” I said, with admirable self-control. “Noboru Wataya is my wife’s elder brother.”
“Sir, my name is Kano.”
I waited for her to go on. The sudden mention of Kumiko’s elder brother had put me on guard. With the blunt end of the pencil that lay by the phone, I scratched the back of my neck. Five seconds or more went by, in which the woman said nothing. No sound of any kind came from the receiver, as if the woman had covered the mouthpiece with her hand and was talking with someone nearby.
“Hello,” I said, concerned now.
“Please forgive me, sir,” blurted the woman’s voice. “In that case, I must ask your permission to call you at a later time.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “This is—”
At that point, the connection was cut. I stared at the receiver, then put it to my ear again. No doubt about it: the woman had hung up.
Vaguely dissatisfied, I turned to the kitchen table, drank my coffee, and ate my sandwich. Until the moment the telephone rang, I had been thinking of something, but now I couldn’t remember what it was. Knife in my right hand poised to cut the sandwich in half, I had definitely been thinking of something. Something important. Something I had been trying unsuccessfully to recall for the longest time. It had come to me at the very moment when I was about to cut the sandwich in two, but now it was gone. Chewing on my sandwich, I tried hard to bring it back. But it wouldn’t come. It had returned to that dark region of my mind where it had been living until that moment.
•
I finished eating and was clearing the dishes when the phone rang again. This time I took it right away.
Again I heard a woman saying “Hello,” but this time it was Kumiko.
“How are you?” she asked. “Finished lunch?”
“Yup. What’d you have?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Too busy. I’ll probably buy myself a sandwich later. What’d you have?”
I described my sandwich.
“I see,” she said, without a hint of envy. “Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you this morning. You’re going to get a call from a Miss Kano.”
“She already called,” I said. “A few minutes ago. All she did was mention our names—mine and yours and your brother’s—and hang up. Never said what she wanted. What was that all about?”
“She hung up?”
“Said she’d call again.”
“Well, when she does, I want you to do whatever she asks. This is really important. I think you’ll have to go see her.”
“When? Today?”
“What’s wrong? Do you have something planned? Are you supposed to see someone?”
“Nope. No plans.” Not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow: no plans at all. “But who is this Kano woman? And what does she want with me? I’d like to have some idea before she calls again. If it’s about a job for me connected with your brother, forget it. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. You know that.”
“No, it has nothing to do with a job,” she said, with a hint of annoyance. “It’s about the cat.”
“The cat?”
“Oh, sorry, I’ve got to run. Somebody’s waiting for me. I really shouldn’t have taken the time to make this call. Like I said, I haven’t even had lunch. Mind if I hang up? I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m free.”
“Look, I know how busy you are, but give me a break. I want to know what’s going on. What’s with the cat? Is this Kano woman—”
“Just do what she tells you, will you, please? Understand? This is serious business. I want you to stay home and wait for her call. Gotta go.”
And she went.
•
When the phone rang at two-thirty, I was napping on the couch. At first I thought I was hearing the alarm clock. I reached out to push the button, but the clock was not ther
e. I wasn’t in bed but was on the couch, and it wasn’t morning but afternoon. I got up and went to the phone.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice. It was the woman who had called in the morning. “Mr. Toru Okada?”
“That’s me. Toru Okada.”
“Sir, my name is Kano,” she said.
“The lady who called before.”
“That is correct. I am afraid I was terribly rude. But tell me, Mr. Okada, would you by any chance be free this afternoon?”
“You might say that.”
“Well, in that case, I know this is terribly sudden, but do you think it might be possible for us to meet?”
“When? Today? Now?”
“Yes.”
I looked at my watch. Not that I really had to—I had looked at it thirty seconds earlier—but just to make sure. And it was still two-thirty.
“Will it take long?” I asked.
“Not so very long, I think. I could be wrong, though. At this moment in time, it is difficult for me to say with complete accuracy. I am sorry.”
No matter how long it might take, I had no choice. Kumiko had told me to do as the woman said: that it was serious business. If she said it was serious business, then it was serious business, and I had better do as I was told.
“I see,” I said. “Where should we meet?”
“Would you by any chance be acquainted with the Pacific Hotel, across from Shinagawa Station?”
“I would.”
“There is a tearoom on the first floor. I shall be waiting there for you at four o’clock if that would be all right with you, sir.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I am thirty-one years old, and I shall be wearing a red vinyl hat.”
Terrific. There was something weird about the way this woman talked, something that confused me momentarily. But I could not have said exactly what made it so weird. Nor was there any law against a thirty-one-year-old woman’s wearing a red vinyl hat.
“I see,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll find you.”
“I wonder, Mr. Okada, if you would be so kind as to tell me of any external distinguishing characteristics in your own case.”