Junpei nodded, took a slug of beer, and ate one of the crackers on the plate between them.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m awake till the sun comes up, and the roads are empty this time of night. It’s no big deal.”
“You were working on a story?”
Junpei nodded.
“How’s it going?”
“Like always. I write ’em. They print ’em. Nobody reads ’em.”
“I read them. All of them.”
“Thanks. You’re a nice person,” Junpei said. “But the short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule. Anyhow, let’s talk about Sala. Has she done this before?”
Sayoko nodded.
“A lot?”
“Almost every night. Sometime after midnight she gets these hysterical fits and jumps out of bed. She can’t stop shaking. And I can’t get her to stop crying. I’ve tried everything.”
“Any idea what’s wrong?”
Sayoko drank what was left of her beer, and stared at the empty glass.
“I think she saw too many news reports on the earthquake. It was too much for a four-year-old. She wakes up at around the time of the quake. She says a man woke her up, somebody she doesn’t know. The Earthquake Man. He tries to put her in a little box—way too little for anyone to fit into. She tells him she doesn’t want to get inside, but he starts yanking on her arm—so hard her joints crack—and he tries to stuff her inside. That’s when she screams and wakes up.”
“The Earthquake Man?”
“He’s tall and skinny and old. After she’s had the dream, she goes around turning on every light in the house and looks for him: in the closets, in the shoe cabinet in the front hall, under the beds, in all the dresser drawers. I tell her it was just a dream, but she won’t listen to me. And she won’t go to bed until she’s looked everywhere he could possibly hide. That takes at least two hours, by which time I’m wide awake. I’m so sleep-deprived I can hardly stand up, let alone work.”
Sayoko almost never spilled out her feelings like this.
“Try not to watch the news,” Junpei said. “Don’t even turn on the TV. The earthquake’s all they’re showing these days.”
“I almost never watch TV anymore. But it’s too late now. The Earthquake Man just keeps coming. I went to the doctor, but all he did was give me some kind of sleeping pill to humor me.”
Junpei thought for a while.
“How about we go to the zoo on Sunday? Sala says she wants to see a real bear.”
Sayoko narrowed her eyes and looked at him. “Maybe. It just might change her mood. Let’s do it—the four of us. It’s been ages. You call Takatsuki, OK?”
JUNPEI was thirty-six, born and bred in the city of Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, a quiet residential area in the Shukugawa district. His father owned a pair of jewelry stores, one in Osaka, one in Kobe. He had a sister six years his junior. After a time at a private high school in Kobe, he entered Waseda University in Tokyo. He had passed the entrance exams in both the business and the literature departments. He chose the literature department without the slightest hesitation and told his parents that he had entered the business department. They would never have paid for him to study literature, and Junpei had no intention of wasting four precious years studying the workings of the economy. All he wanted was to study literature, and then to become a novelist.
At the university, he made two friends, Takatsuki and Sayoko. Takatsuki came from the mountains of Nagano. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had been the captain of his high-school soccer team. It had taken him two years of studying to pass the entrance exam, so he was a year older than Junpei. Practical and decisive, he had the kind of looks that made people take to him right away, and he naturally assumed a leadership role in any group. But he had trouble reading books; he had entered the literature department because its exam was the only one he could pass. “What the hell,” he said in his positive way. “I’m going to be a newspaper reporter, so I’ll let them teach me how to write.”
Junpei did not understand why Takatsuki had any interest in befriending him. Junpei was the kind of person who liked to sit alone in his room reading books or listening to music, and he was terrible at sports. Awkward with strangers, he rarely made friends. Still, for whatever reason, Takatsuki seemed to have decided the first time he saw Junpei in class that he was going to make him a friend. He tapped Junpei on the shoulder and said, “Hey, let’s get something to eat.” And by the end of the day they had opened their hearts to each other.
Takatsuki had Junpei with him when he adopted the same approach with Sayoko. He tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hey, how about the three of us get something to eat?” And so their tight little group was born. Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko did everything together. They shared lecture notes, ate lunch in the campus dining hall, talked about their future over coffee between classes, took part-time jobs at the same place, went to all-night movies and rock concerts and walked all over Tokyo, and drank so much beer they even got sick together. In other words, they behaved like first-year college students the world over.
Sayoko was a real Tokyo girl. She came from the old part of town where the merchant class had lived for centuries, and her father ran a shop selling the exquisite little accessories that went with traditional Japanese dress. The business had been in the family for several generations, and it attracted an exclusive clientele that included several famous Kabuki actors. Sayoko had two elder brothers. The first had been groomed to inherit the shop, and the second worked in architectural design. She had graduated from an exclusive girls’ prep school, entering the literature department of Waseda with plans to go on to graduate school in English Literature, and ultimately to an academic career. She read a lot, and she and Junpei were constantly exchanging novels and having intense conversations about them.
Sayoko had beautiful hair and intelligent eyes. She spoke quietly and with simple honesty, but deep down she had great strength. Her expressive mouth bore eloquent testimony to that. She was always casually dressed, without makeup, but she had a unique sense of humor, and her face would crinkle up mischievously whenever she made some funny remark. Junpei found that look of hers beautiful, and he knew that this was the girl he had been searching for. He had never fallen in love until he met Sayoko. He had attended a boys’ high school and had had almost no opportunity to meet girls.
But Junpei could never bring himself to express his feelings to Sayoko. He knew that there would be no going back once the words left his mouth, and that she might take herself off somewhere far beyond his reach. At the very least, the perfectly balanced, comfortable relationship of Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko would undergo a shift. So he told himself to leave things as they were for now and watch and wait.
In the end, Takatsuki was the first to make a move. “I hate to throw this at you all of a sudden,” he told Junpei, “but I’m in love with Sayoko. I hope you don’t mind.”
This was midway through September. Takatsuki explained that he and Sayoko had become involved, almost by accident, while Junpei was home in Kansai for the summer vacation.
Junpei fixed his gaze on Takatsuki. It took him a few moments to understand what had happened, but when he did, it sank into him like a lead weight. He no longer had any choice in the matter. “No,” he said, “I don’t mind.”
“I am so glad to hear that!” Takatsuki said with a huge grin. “You were the only one I was worried about. I mean, the three of us had such a great thing going, it was kind of like I beat you out. But anyway, Junpei, this had to happen sometime. You have to understand that. If not now, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The main thing is that I want the three of us to go on being friends. OK?”
For the next few days, Junpei felt as if he were trying to walk in deep sand. He skipped classes and work. He lay on the floor of his one-room apartment eating nothing but scraps from the refrigerator and slugging down whiskey whenever the impulse struck him. He thought seriously about quitting the univ
ersity and going to some distant town where he knew no one and could spend the rest of his years doing manual labor. That would be the best lifestyle for him, he decided.
THE fifth day after he stopped going to classes, Sayoko came to Junpei’s apartment. She was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and white cotton pants, and her hair was pinned back.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “Everybody’s worried that you’re dead in your room. Takatsuki asked me to check up on you. I guess he wasn’t too keen on seeing the corpse himself. He’s not as strong as he looks.”
Junpei said he had been feeling sick.
“Yeah,” she said, “you’ve lost weight, I think.” She stared at him. “Want me to make you something to eat?”
Junpei shook his head. He didn’t feel like eating, he said.
Sayoko opened the refrigerator and looked inside with a grimace. It contained only two cans of beer, a deceased cucumber, and some deodorizer. Sayoko sat down next to him. “I don’t know how to put this, Junpei, but are you feeling bad about Takatsuki and me?”
Junpei said that he was not. And it was no lie. He was not feeling bad or angry. If, in fact, he was angry, it was at himself. For Takatsuki and Sayoko to become lovers was the most natural thing in the world. Takatsuki had all the qualifications. He himself had none. It was that simple.
“Go halves on a beer?” Sayoko asked.
“Sure.”
She took a can of beer from the refrigerator and divided the contents between two glasses, handing one to Junpei. Then they drank in silence, separately.
“It’s kind of embarrassing to put this into words,” she said, “but I want to stay friends with you, Junpei. Not just for now, but even after we get older. A lot older. I love Takatsuki, but I need you, too, in a different way. Does that make me selfish?”
Junpei was not sure how to answer that, but he shook his head.
Sayoko said, “To understand something and to put that something into a form you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, though, living would be a lot simpler.”
Junpei stared at her in profile. He had no idea what she was trying to say. Why does my brain always have to work so slowly? he wondered. He looked up, and for a long time his half-focused eyes traced the shape of a stain on the ceiling. What would have happened if he had confessed his love to Sayoko before Takatsuki? To this Junpei could find no answer. All he knew for sure was that such a thing could never have happened. Ever.
He heard the sound of tears falling on the tatami, an oddly magnified sound. For a moment he wondered if he was crying without being aware of it. But then he realized that Sayoko was the one who was crying. She had hung her head between her knees, and now, though she made no sound, her shoulders were trembling.
Almost unconsciously, he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. Then he drew her gently toward him. She did not resist. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to hers. She closed her eyes and let her lips come open. Junpei caught the scent of tears, and drew breath from her mouth. He felt the softness of her breasts against him. Inside his head, he felt some kind of huge switching of places. He even heard the sound it made, like the creaking of every joint in the world. But that was all. As if regaining consciousness, Sayoko moved her face back and down, pushing Junpei away.
“No,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “We can’t do this. It’s wrong.”
Junpei apologized. Sayoko said nothing. They remained that way, in silence, for a long time. The sound of a radio came in through the open window, riding on a breeze. It was a popular song. Junpei felt sure he would remember it till the day he died. In fact, though, try as he might after that, he was never able to bring back the title or the melody.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Sayoko said. “It’s not your fault.”
“I think I’m confused,” he said honestly.
She reached out and laid her hand on his. “Come back to school, OK? Tomorrow? I’ve never had a friend like you before. You give me so much. I hope you realize that.”
“So much, but not enough,” he said.
“That’s not true,” she said with a resigned lowering of her head. “That is so not true.”
JUNPEI went to his classes the next day, and the tight-knit threesome of Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko continued through graduation. Junpei’s short-lived desire to disappear disappeared itself with almost magical ease. When he held her in his arms that day in his apartment and pressed his lips to hers, something inside him settled down where it belonged. At least he no longer felt confused. The decision had been made, even if he had not been the one to make it.
Sayoko would sometimes introduce Junpei to old high-school classmates of hers, and they would double-date. He saw a lot of one of the girls, and it was with her that he had sex for the first time, just before his twentieth birthday. But his heart was always somewhere else. He was respectful, kind, and tender to her, but never really passionate or devoted. The only times Junpei became passionate and devoted were when he was alone, writing stories. His girlfriend eventually went elsewhere in search of true warmth. This pattern repeated itself any number of times.
When he graduated, Junpei’s parents discovered he had been majoring in literature, not business, and things turned ugly. His father wanted him to come back to Kansai and take over the family firm, but Junpei had no intention of doing that. He wanted to stay in Tokyo and keep writing fiction. There was no room for compromise on either side, and a violent argument ensued. Words were spoken that should not have been. Junpei never saw his parents again, and he was convinced that it had to be that way. Unlike his sister, who always managed to compromise and get along with their parents, Junpei had done nothing but clash with them from the time he was a child. So, he thought with a bitter smile, he had finally been disowned: the upright Confucian parents renounce the decadent scribbler—it was like something out of the Twenties.
Junpei never applied for regular employment, but took a series of part-time jobs that helped him to scrape by as he continued to write. Whenever he finished a story, he showed it to Sayoko to get her honest opinion, then revised it according to her suggestions. Until she pronounced a piece good, he would rewrite again and again, carefully and patiently. He had no other mentor, and he belonged to no writers’ group. The one faint lamp he had to guide him was Sayoko’s advice.
When he was twenty-four, a story of his won the new writer’s prize from a literary magazine, and it was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, the coveted gateway to a successful career in fiction. Over the next five years, he was nominated four times for the Akutagawa Prize, but he never won it. He remained the eternally promising candidate. A typical opinion from a judge on the prize committee would say: “For such a young author, this is writing of very high quality, with remarkable examples of both the creation of scene and psychological analysis. But the author has a tendency to let sentiment take over from time to time, and the work lacks both freshness and novelistic sweep.”
Takatsuki would laugh when he read such things. “These guys are off their rockers. What the hell is ‘novelistic sweep’? Real people don’t use words like that. ‘Today’s sukiyaki was lacking in beefistic sweep.’ Ever hear anybody say anything like that?”
Junpei published two volumes of short stories before he turned thirty: Horse in the Rain and Grapes. Horse in the Rain sold ten thousand copies, Grapes twelve thousand. These were not bad figures for a new writer’s short story collections, according to his editor. The reviews were generally favorable, but none gave his work passionate support.
Most of Junpei’s stories depicted the course of unrequited young love. Their conclusions were always dark, and somewhat sentimental. Everyone agreed they were well written, but they stood unmistakably apart from the more fashionable literature of the day. Junpei’s style was lyrical, the plots rather old-fashioned. Readers of his generation were looking for a more inventive style and gri
t-tier storylines. This was the age of video games and rap music, after all. Junpei’s editor urged him to try a novel. If he never wrote anything but short stories, he would just keep dealing with the same material over and over again, and his fictional world would waste away. Writing a novel could open up whole new worlds for a writer. As a practical matter, too, novels attracted far more attention than stories. If he intended to have a long career, he should recognize that writing only short stories would be a hard way to make a living.
But Junpei was a born short story writer. He would shut himself in his room, let everything else go to hell, and turn out a first draft in three days of concentrated effort. After four more days of polishing, he would give the manuscript to Sayoko and his editor to read, then do more polishing in response to their remarks. Basically, though, the battle was won or lost in that first week. That was when everything that mattered in the story came together. His personality was suited to this way of working: total concentration of effort over a few short days; total concentration of imagery and language. Junpei felt only exhaustion when he thought about writing a novel. How could he possibly maintain and control that mental concentration for months at a time? That kind of pacing eluded him.
He tried, though. He tried over and over again, ending always in defeat. And so he gave up. Like it or not, he was going to have to make his living as a short story writer. That was his style. No amount of effort was going to change his personality. You couldn’t turn a great second baseman into a home-run hitter.
Junpei did not need much money to support his austere bachelor’s lifestyle. Once he had made what he needed for a given period, he would stop accepting work. He had only one silent cat to feed. The girlfriends he found were always the undemanding type, but even so, they would eventually get on his nerves, and he would come up with some excuse for ending the relationship. Sometimes, maybe once a month, he would wake at an odd time in the night with a feeling close to panic. I’m never going anywhere, he would tell himself. I can struggle all I want, but I’m never going anywhere. Then, he would either force himself to go to his desk and write, or drink until he could no longer stay awake. Except for these times, he lived a quiet, untroubled life.