"So Masakichi got his paws full of honey—way more honey than he could eat by himself—and he put it in a pail, and do-o-own the mountain he went, all the way to the town, to sell his honey. Masakichi was the all-time No. 1 honey bear."
"Do bears have pails?" Sala asked.
"Masakichi just happened to have one," Junpei explained. "He found it lying by the road, and he figured it would come in handy sometime."
"And it did."
"It really did. So Masakichi went to the town and found a spot for himself in the square. He put up a sign: 'Deeelicious Honey. All Natural. One Cup ¥200.' "
"Can bears count money?"
"Absolutely. Masakichi lived with people when he was just a cub, and they taught him how to talk and how to count money. Masakichi was a very special bear. And so the other bears, who weren't so special, tended to shun him."
"Shun him?"
"Yeah, they'd go, like, 'Hey, what's with this guy, acting so special?' and keep away from him. Especially Tonkichi, the tough guy. He really hated Masakichi."
"Poor Masakichi!"
"Yeah, really. Meanwhile, the people would say, 'O.K., he knows how to count, and he can talk and all, but when you get right down to it he's just a bear.' So Masakichi didn't really belong to either world—the bear world or the people world."
"Didn't he have any friends?"
"Not a single friend. Bears don't go to school, you know, so there's no place for them to make friends."
"Do you have friends, Jun?" "Uncle Junpei" was too long for her, so Sala just called him Jun.
"Your daddy is my absolute bestest friend from a long, long time ago. And so's your mommy."
"That's good, to have friends."
"It is good," Junpei said. "You're right about that."
Junpei often made up stories for Sala before she went to bed. And whenever she didn't understand something she would ask him to explain. Junpei gave a lot of thought to his answers. Sala's questions were often sharp and interesting, and while he was thinking about them he could also come up with new twists to the story he was telling.
Sayoko brought a glass of warm milk.
"Junpei is telling me the story of Masakichi the bear," Sala said. "He's the all-time No. 1 honey bear, but he doesn't have any friends."
"Oh, really? Is he a big bear?" Sayoko asked.
Sala turned to Junpei with an uneasy stare. "Is Masakichi big?"
"Not so big," Junpei said. "In fact, he's kind of on the small side. For a bear. He's just about your size, Sala. And he's a very sweet-tempered little guy. When he listens to music, he doesn't listen to rock or punk or that kind of stuff. He likes to listen to Schubert, all by himself."
"He listens to music?" Sala asked. "Does he have a CD player or something?"
"He found a boom box lying on the ground one day. He picked it up and brought it home."
"How come all this stuff just happens to be lying around in the mountains?" Sala asked with a note of suspicion.
"Well, it's a very, very steep mountain, and the hikers get all faint and dizzy, and they throw away tons of stuff they don't need. Right there by the road, like, 'Oh, man, this pack is so heavy, I feel like I'm gonna die! I don't need this pail anymore. I don't need this boom box anymore.' "
"I know just how they feel," Sayoko said. "Sometimes you want to throw everything away."
"Not me," Sala said.
"That's because you're young and full of energy, Sala," Junpei said. "Hurry and drink your milk so I can tell you the rest of the story."
"O.K.," she said, wrapping her hands around the glass and drinking the warm milk with great care. Then she asked, "How come Masakichi doesn't make honey pies and sell them? I think the people in the town would like that better than just plain honey."
"An excellent point," Sayoko said with a smile. "His profits would be much greater that way."
"Plowing up new markets through value added," Junpei said. "This girl will be a real entrepreneur someday."
It was almost 2 A.M. by the time Sala went back to bed. Junpei and Sayoko waited for her to fall asleep, then went to split a can of beer at the kitchen table. Sayoko wasn't much of a drinker, and Junpei had to drive home.
"Sorry for dragging you out in the middle of the night," Sayoko said, "but I didn't know what else to do. I'm totally exhausted, and you're the only one who can calm her down. There was no way I was going to call Takatsuki."
Junpei nodded and took a swig of beer. "Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm awake till the sun comes up, and the roads are empty at 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 its way out. Like the slide rule. 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. 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—too little for anyone to fit into. She tells him she doesn't want to get inside, and he starts pushing her—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 looking for him: in the closets, in the shoe cupboard 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 an hour, 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. "The earthquake's all they're showing these days."
"I almost never watch TV anymore. But it's too late now. The Earthquake Man keeps coming."
Junpei thought for a while.
"What do you say we go to the zoo on Sunday? Sala says she wants to see a real bear."
Sayoko narrowed her eyes and looked at him. "Not bad. It just might change her mood. Let's do it—the four of us. It's been ages. You call Takatsuki, O.K.?"
Junpei was thirty-six, born and bred in the city of Kobe, where his father owned a pair of jewelry stores. He had a sister six years his junior. After a year at a private cram school, he had enrolled at 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 writer.
At the university, Junpei 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 used the same approach with Sayoko. Junpei was with Takatsuki when he tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Hey, what do you say the three of us go 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, took parttime jobs at the same place, went to latenight movies and rock concerts, walked all over Tokyo, and drank so much beer that 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 go 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 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 expressed herself quietly and with simple honesty, but deep down she had great strength. 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 incredible. He had never fallen in love until he met Sayoko. He had attended a boys' high school and had had almost no opportunities to meet girls.
But Junpei couldn't bring himself to express his feelings to Sayoko. He knew that there would be no going back once the words were spoken, and that Sayoko might take herself off somewhere far beyond his reach. At the very least, the perfectly balanced, comfortable relationship between Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko would undergo a shift. So Junpei 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 out of the blue, but I'm in love with Sayoko," he told Junpei. "I hope you don't mind." This was midway through September of their second year. Takatsuki explained that he and Sayoko had become involved, almost by accident, while Junpei was at home 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 smile. "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. 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. O.K.?"
Junpei spent the next several days in a fog. He skipped classes and work. He lay on the floor of his one-room apartment, eating nothing but the scraps in the refrigerator and slugging down whiskey whenever the impulse struck him. He thought about quitting university 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 life style for him, he decided.
On the fifth day of this, 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."
Junpei said he had been feeling sick.
"Yeah," she said, "you've lost some 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 held only two cans of beer, an old cucumber, and some baking soda. Sayoko sat down next to Junpei. "I don't know how to ask 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. Junpei 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. 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 whole 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 that you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, living would be a lot simpler."
Junpei looked at Sayoko in profile. He had no idea what she was trying to say. Why does my brain always work so slowly? he wondered. He looked up, and for a long time his half-focussed eyes traced the shape of a stain on the ceiling. How would the situation have developed if he had confessed his love to Sayoko before Takatsuki had confessed his? To this Junpei could find no answer. All he knew for sure was that such a thing would never have happened.
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 part. Junpei caught the scent of tears and drew breath from her mouth. He felt the softness of her breasts against him. Inside, he felt some kind of switching of places. He even heard the sound it made—like joints creaking. 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. It was a popular song. Junpei was sure that he would remember it till the day he died. But, in fact, try as he might after that, he was never able to recall the title or the melody.
"You don't have to apologize," Sayoko said. "It's not your fault."
"I think I'm confused," Junpei said honestly.
Sayoko reached out and laid her hand on Junpei's. "Come back to school, O.K.? 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. "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. By holding her in his arms that day in his apartment and pressing his lips to hers, Junpei had calmed something inside himself. At least he no longer felt confused. The decision had been made, even if he had not been the one to make it.
Sayoko sometimes introduced Junpei to a classmate 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 passionate or devoted. She eventually went elsewhere in search of true warmth. The same pattern repeated itself any number of times.
When he graduated, Junpei's parents discovered that he had been majoring in literature, not economics, and things turned ugly. His father wanted him to take over the family business, 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.
Junpei took a series of part-time jobs that helped him to scrape by as he continued to write fiction. Whenever he finished a story, he showed it to Sayoko and got her honest opinion, then revised it according to her suggestions. Until she pronounced a piece good, he would rewrite it again and again, carefully and patiently. He had no other mentor, and he belonged to no writers' group.
When he was twenty-four, a story of his won an award from a literary magazine, and over the next five years Junpei was nominated for the coveted Akutagawa Prize four times, but he never actually 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 plot 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 opinions. "These guys are out of their minds. 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 short-story collections, according to his editor. The reviews were generally favorable, but none gave his work passionate support. Most of Junpei's stories were about young people in situations of unrequited love. His style was lyrical, the plots rather old-fashioned. Readers of his generation were looking for a more inventive style and grittier plots. 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. Writing a novel could open up whole new worlds for a writer. As a practical matter, too, novels attracted far more attention than stories. Writing only short stories was 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. 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. Junpei felt only exhaustion when he thought about writing a novel. How could he possibly maintain his concentration for months at a time? That kind of pacing eluded him.
Given his austere bachelor's life style, Junpei did not need much money. Once he had made what he needed for a given period, he would stop accepting work. He had only one silent cat to feed. His girlfriends were always the undemanding type, and when he grew bored with them he would come up with some pretext for ending the relationship. Sometimes, maybe once a month, he would wake at an odd time in the night with a feeling that was close to panic. I'm not going anywhere, he would tell himself. I can struggle all I want, but I'm never going to go anywhere. Then he would either force himself to go to his desk and write, or drink until he could no longer stay awake.
Takatsuki had landed the job he'd always wanted—reporting for a top newspaper. Since he never studied, his grades at the university were nothing to brag about, but the impression he made at interviews was overwhelmingly positive, and he had basically been hired on the spot. Sayoko had entered graduate school, as planned. They married six months after graduation, the ceremony as cheerful and busy as Takatsuki himself. They honeymooned in France, and bought a two-room condo a short commute from downtown. Junpei would come over for dinner a couple of times a week, and the newlyweds always welcomed him warmly. It was almost as if they were more comfortable with Junpei around than when they were alone together.
Takatsuki enjoyed his work at the newspaper. He was assigned first to the city desk, which kept him running from one scene of tragedy to the next. "I can see a corpse now and not feel a thing," he said. Bodies dismembered by trains, charred in fires, discolored with age, the bloated cadavers of drowning victims, gunshot victims with their brains splattered. "Whatever distinguished one lump of flesh from another when they were alive, it's all the same once they're dead," he said. "Just used-up shells."
Takatsuki was sometimes too busy to make it home before morning. Then Sayoko would call Junpei. She knew that he was often up all night.
"Are you working? Can you talk?"
"Sure," he would say. "I'm not doing anything special."
They'd discuss the books they had read, or things that had come up in their daily lives. Then they'd talk about the old days, when they were still free and spontaneous. Conversations like that would inevitably bring back memories of the time that Junpei had held Sayoko in his arms: the smooth touch of her lips, the softness of her breasts against him, the transparent early-autumn sunlight streaming onto the tatami floor of his apartment—these were never far from his thoughts.
Just after she turned thirty, Sayoko became pregnant. She was a graduate assistant at the time, but she took a break from her job to give birth to a baby girl. The three of them came up with all kinds of names for the baby, but decided in the end on one of Junpei's suggestions—Sala. "I love the sound of it," Sayoko told him. There were no complications with the birth, and that night Junpei and Takatsuki found themselves together without Sayoko for the first time in a long while. Junpei had brought over a bottle of single malt to celebrate, and they emptied it together at the kitchen table.
"Why does time shoot by like this?" Takatsuki asked with a depth of feeling that was rare for him. "It seems like only yesterday I was a freshman, and then I met you, and then I met Sayoko, and the next thing I know I'm a father. It's weird, like I'm watching a movie in fast-forward. You probably wouldn't understand, Junpei. You're still living the way you did in college. It's like you never stopped being a student, you lucky bastard."
"Not so lucky," Junpei said, but he knew how Takatsuki felt. Sayoko was a mother now. This was as big a shock for Junpei as it was for Takatsuki. The gears of life had moved ahead a notch with a loud ker-chunk, and Junpei knew that they would never turn back again. The one thing that he was not yet sure of was how he was supposed to feel about it.
"I couldn't tell you this before," Takatsuki said, "but I'm pretty sure Sayoko was more attracted to you than she was to me." He was drunk, but there was a more serious gleam in his eye than usual.
"That's crazy," Junpei said with a smile.
"Like hell it is. I know what I'm talking about. You know how to put words on a page, but you don't know shit about a woman's feelings. A drowned corpse does better than you. You had no idea how she felt about you, and I figured, what the hell, I was in love with her, and I had to have her. I still think she's the greatest woman in the world. I still think it was my right to have her."
"Nobody's saying it wasn't," Junpei said.
Takatsuki nodded. "But you still don't get it. Not really. When it comes to anything halfway important, you're so damn stupid. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together."
"Yeah, well, that's a different thing."
"Anyhow, now there are four of us," Takatsuki said with a sigh. "Four of us. Four. Is that O.K.?"
Junpei learned just before Sala's second birthday that Takatsuki and Sayoko were on the verge of breaking up. Sayoko seemed apologetic when she broke the news to him. Takatsuki had had a lover since the time of Sayoko's pregnancy, and he hardly ever came home anymore, she explained.
Junpei couldn't seem to grasp what he was hearing, no matter how many details Sayoko was able to give him. Why would Takatsuki have wanted another woman? He had declared Sayoko to be the greatest woman in the world the night that Sala was born, and he had meant it. Besides, he was crazy about Sala. "I mean, I'm over at your house all the time, eating dinner with you guys, right? But I never sensed a thing. You were happiness itself—the perfect family."
"It's true," Sayoko said. "We weren't lying to you or putting on an act. But quite separately from that he got himself a girlfriend, and we can never go back to what we had. So we decided to split up. Don't let it bother you too much. I'm sure things will work out better now, in a lot of different ways."
Sayoko and Takatsuki were divorced some months later. They reached an agreement without the slightest problem: no recriminations, no disputed claims. Takatsuki went to live with his girlfriend; he came to visit Sala once a week, and they all agreed that Junpei would try to be present at those times. "It would make things easier for both of us," Sayoko told Junpei. He felt as if he had suddenly grown much older, though he had only just turned thirty-three.
Whenever they got together, Takatsuki was his usual talkative self, and Sayoko's behavior was perfectly natural, as though nothing had happened. If anything, she seemed even more natural than before, in Junpei's eyes. Sala had no idea that her parents were divorced. And Junpei played his assigned role perfectly. The three joked around as always and talked about the old days.
"Hey, Junpei, tell me," Takatsuki said, one January night when the two of them were walking home, their breath white in the chill air. "Do you have somebody you're planning to marry?"
"Not at the moment," Junpei said.
"No girlfriend?"
"Nope."
"What do you say you and Sayoko get together?"
Junpei squinted at Takatsuki as if at some too bright object. "Why?" he asked.
"What do you mean, 'why'? It's so obvious! If nothing else, you're the only man I'd want to be a father to Sala."
"Is that the only reason you think I should marry Sayoko?"
Takatsuki sighed and draped his thick arm around Junpei's shoulders.
"What's the matter? Don't you like the idea of marrying Sayoko? Or is it the thought of stepping in after me?"
"That doesn't bother me. I just wonder if you can make this like some kind of deal. It's a question of decency."
"This is no deal," Takatsuki said. "And it's got nothing to do with decency. You love Sayoko, right? You love Sala, too, don't you? That's the most important thing. I know you've got your own hangups. Fine. I grant you that. But to me it looks like you're trying to pull off your shorts without taking off your pants."
Junpei said nothing, and Takatsuki went into an unusually long silence. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked down the road to the station, heaving white breath into the night.
"In any case," Junpei said, "you're an absolute idiot."
"I have to give you credit," Takatsuki said. "You're right on the mark. I don't deny it. I'm ruining my own life. But I'm telling you, Junpei, I couldn't help it. There was no way I could put a stop to it. I don't know any better than you do why it had to happen. It just happened. And, if not here and now, something like it would have happened sooner or later."
Junpei felt as if he had heard the same speech before. "Do you remember what you said to me the night that Sala was born? That Sayoko was the greatest woman in the world, that you could never find anyone to take her place."
"And it's still true. Nothing has changed where that's concerned. But that very fact can sometimes make things go bad."
"I don't know what you mean by that," Junpei said.
"And you never will," Takatsuki said with a shake of the head. He always had the last word.
Two years went by. Sayoko never went back to teaching. Junpei got an editor friend of his to send her a story to translate, and she carried the job off with a certain flair. The editor was impressed enough to give her a substantial new piece the following month. The pay was not very good, but it added to what Takatsuki was sending and helped Sayoko and Sala to live comfortably.
They all went on meeting at least once a week, as they always had. Whenever urgent business kept Takatsuki away, Sayoko, Junpei, and Sala would eat together. The table was quiet without Takatsuki, and the conversation turned to oddly mundane matters. A stranger would have assumed that the three of them were just a typical family.
Junpei went on writing a steady stream of stories, bringing out his fourth collection, "Silent Moon," when he was thirty-five. It received one of the prizes reserved for established writers, and the title story was made into a movie. Junpei also produced a volume of music criticism, wrote a book on ornamental gardening, and translated a collection of John Updike's short stories. All were well received. Securing his position as a writer little by little, he had developed a steady readership and a stable income.
He continued to think seriously about asking Sayoko to marry him. On more than one occasion, he kept himself awake all night thinking about it, and for a time he was unable to work. But still he could not make up his mind. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that his relationship with Sayoko had been consistently choreographed by others. His position was always passive. Takatsuki was the one who had picked the two of them out of his class and created the threesome. Then he had taken Sayoko, married her, made a child with her, and divorced her. And now Takatsuki was the one who was urging Junpei to marry her. Junpei loved Sayoko, of course. About that there was no question. And now was the perfect time for him to be united with her. She probably wouldn't turn him down. But Junpei couldn't help thinking that things were just a bit too easy. What was there left for him to decide? And so he went on wondering. And not deciding. And then the earthquake came.
Junpei was in Barcelona at the time, doing a story for an airline magazine. He returned to his hotel in the evening to find the TV news filled with images of collapsed buildings and black clouds of smoke. It looked like the aftermath of an air raid. Because the announcer was speaking in Spanish, it took Junpei a while to realize what city he was looking at. "You're from Kobe, aren't you?" his photographer asked.
But Junpei did not try to call his parents. The rift was too deep, and had gone on too long for there to be any hope of reconciliation. Junpei flew back to Tokyo and resumed his normal life there. He never turned on the television, and hardly looked at a newspaper. Whenever the subject of the earthquake came up, he would clamp his mouth shut. It was an echo from a past that he had buried long ago. He hadn't set foot on those streets since his graduation, but still the catastrophe laid bare wounds that were hidden somewhere deep inside him. It seemed to change certain aspects of his life—quietly, but completely. Junpei felt an entirely new sense of isolation. I have no roots, he thought. I'm not connected to anything.
Early on the Sunday morning that they had all planned to take Sala to the zoo to see the bears, Takatsuki called to say that he had to fly to Okinawa. He had managed at last to pry the promise of a one-on-one interview out of the governor. "Sorry, but you'll have to go to the zoo without me. I don't suppose Mr. Bear will be too upset if I don't make it."
So Junpei and Sayoko took Sala to the Ueno Zoo. Junpei held Sala in his arms and showed her the bears. She pointed to the biggest, blackest bear and asked, "Is that one Masakichi?"
"No, no, that's not Masakichi," Junpei said. "Masakichi is smaller than that, and he's smarter-looking, too. That's the tough guy, Tonkichi."
"Tonkichi!" Sala yelled again and again, but the bear paid no attention. Then she looked at Junpei and said, "Tell me a story about Tonkichi."
"That's a hard one," Junpei said. "There aren't that many interesting stories about Tonkichi. He's just an ordinary bear. He can't talk or count money like Masakichi."
"But I bet you can tell me something good about him. One thing."
"You're absolutely right," Junpei said. "There's at least one good thing to tell about even the most ordinary bear. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Well, Tonchiki—"
"Tonkichi!" Sala corrected him with a touch of impatience.
"Ah, yes, sorry. Well, Tonkichi had one thing he could do really well, and that was catching salmon. He'd go to the river and crouch down behind a boulder and snap!—he would grab himself a salmon. You have to be really fast to do something like that. Tonkichi was not the brightest bear on the mountain, but he sure could catch more salmon than any of the other bears. More than he could ever hope to eat. But he couldn't go to town to sell his extra salmon, because he didn't know how to talk."
"That's easy," Sala said. "All he had to do was trade his extra salmon for Masakichi's extra honey."
"You're right," Junpei said. "And that's what Tonkichi decided to do. So Tonkichi and Masakichi started trading salmon for honey, and before long they got to know each other really well. Tonkichi realized that Masakichi was not such a stuck-up bear after all, and Masakichi realized that Tonkichi was not just a tough guy. Before they knew it, they were best friends. Tonkichi worked hard at catching salmon, and Masakichi worked hard at collecting honey. But then one day, like a bolt from the blue, the salmon disappeared from the river."
"A bolt from the blue?"
"Like a flash of lightning from a clear blue sky," Sayoko explained. "All of a sudden, without warning."
"All of a sudden the salmon disappeared?" Sala asked, with a sombre expression. "But why?"
"Well, all the salmon in the world got together and decided they weren't going to swim up that river anymore, because a bear named Tonkichi was there, and he was so good at catching salmon. Tonkichi never caught another decent salmon after that. The best he could do was catch an occasional skinny salmon and eat it, but the worst-tasting thing you could ever want to eat is a skinny salmon."
"Poor Tonkichi!" Sala said.
"And that's how Tonkichi ended up being sent to the zoo?" Sayoko asked.
"Well, that's a long, long story," Junpei said, clearing his throat. "But, basically, yes, that's what happened."
"Didn't Masakichi help Tonkichi?" Sala asked.
"He tried. They were best friends, after all. That's what friends are for. Masakichi shared his honey with Tonkichi—for free! But Tonkichi said, 'I can't let you do that. It'd be like taking advantage of you.' Masakichi said, 'You don't have to be such a stranger with me, Tonkichi. If I were in your position, you'd do the same thing for me, I'm sure. You would, wouldn't you?' "
"Sure he would," Sala said.
"But things didn't stay that way between them for long," Sayoko interjected.
"Things didn't stay that way between them for long," Junpei said. "Tonkichi told Masakichi, 'We're supposed to be friends. It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not real friendship. I'm leaving this mountain now, Masakichi, and I'll try my luck somewhere else. And if you and I meet up again somewhere, we will still be best friends.' So they shook hands and parted. But after Tonkichi came down from the mountain, he didn't know enough to be careful in the outside world, so a hunter caught him in a trap. That was the end of Tonkichi's freedom. They sent him to the zoo."
"Couldn't you have come up with a better ending? Like, everybody lives happily ever after?" Sayoko asked Junpei later.
"I haven't thought of one yet."
The three of them had dinner together, as usual, in Sayoko's apartment. Sayoko boiled a pot of spaghetti and defrosted some tomato sauce while Junpei made a salad of green beans and onions. They opened a bottle of red wine and poured Sala a glass of orange juice. When they had finished eating, and cleaning the kitchen, Junpei read to Sala from a picture book, but when bedtime came she resisted.
"Please, Mama, do the bra trick," she begged.
Sayoko blushed. "Not now," she said. "We have a guest."
"No, we don't," Sala said. "Junpei's not a guest."
"What's this all about?" Junpei asked.
"It's just a silly game," Sayoko said.
"Mama takes her bra off under her clothes, puts it on the table, and puts it back on again. She has to keep one hand on the table. And we time her. She's great!"
"Sala!" Sayoko growled, shaking her head. "It's just a little game we play at home. It's not meant for anybody else."
"Sounds like fun to me," Junpei said.
"Please, Mama, show Junpei! Just once. If you do it, I'll go to bed right away."
"Oh, what's the use," Sayoko muttered. She took off her digital watch and handed it to Sala. "Now, you're not going to give me any more trouble about going to bed, right? O.K., get ready to time me when I count to three."
Sayoko was wearing a baggy black crewneck sweater. She put both hands on the table and counted, "One . . . two . . . three!" Like a turtle's head retracting into its shell, her right hand disappeared up her sleeve, and then there was a light back-scratching kind of movement. Out came the right hand again, and the left hand went up its sleeve. Sayoko turned her head just a bit, and the left hand came out holding a white bra—a small one, with no wires. Without the slightest wasted motion, the hand and bra went back up the sleeve, and the hand came out again. Then the right hand pulled in, poked around at the back, and came out again. The end. Sayoko rested her right hand on her left on the table.
"Twenty-five seconds," Sala said. "That's great, Mama, a new record! Your best time so far was thirty-six seconds."
Junpei applauded. "Wonderful! Like magic."
Sala clapped her hands, too. Sayoko stood up and announced, "All right, show time is over. To bed, young lady. You promised."
Sala kissed Junpei on the cheek and went to bed.
Sayoko stayed with her until her breathing was deep and steady, then joined Junpei on the sofa. "I have a confession to make," she said. "I cheated."
"Cheated?"
"I didn't put the bra back on. I just pretended. I slipped it out from under my sweater and dropped it on the floor."
Junpei laughed. "What a terrible mother!"
"I wanted to make a new record," she said, narrowing her eyes with a smile. He hadn't seen her smile in that simple, mischievous way for a long time. Time wobbled on its axis inside Junpei, like curtains stirring in a breeze. He reached for Sayoko's shoulder, and her hand took his. They came together on the sofa in a strong embrace. With complete naturalness, they wrapped their arms around each other and kissed. It was as if nothing had changed since the time they were nineteen.
"We should have been like this to begin with," Sayoko whispered after they had moved from the sofa to her bed. "But you didn't get it. You just didn't get it. Not till the salmon disappeared from the river."
They took their clothes off and held each other gently. Their hands groped clumsily, as if they were both having sex for the first time. They took their time, until they knew they were ready, and then at last Junpei entered Sayoko and she drew him in.
None of this seemed real to Junpei. In the half-light, he felt as if he were crossing a deserted bridge that went on and on forever. He moved, and she moved with him. Again and again, he wanted to come, but he held himself back, fearing that, once it happened, the dream would end and everything would vanish.
Then, behind him, he heard a slight creaking sound. The bedroom door was easing open. The light from the hallway took the shape of the door and fell on the rumpled bedclothes. Junpei raised himself and turned to see Sala standing against the light. Sayoko held her breath and moved her hips away, pulling Junpei out. Gathering the sheet to her breasts, she used one hand to straighten the hair on her forehead.
Sala was not crying or screaming. Her right hand gripping the doorknob, she just stood there, looking at the two of them but seeing nothing. Her eyes were focussed on emptiness.
Sayoko called her name.
"The man said to come here," Sala said in a flat voice, like someone who has just been ripped out of a dream.
"The man?" Sayoko asked.
"The Earthquake Man. He came and woke me up. He told me to tell you. He said he has the box ready for everybody. He said he's waiting with the lid open. He said I should tell you that, and you would understand."
Sala slept in Sayoko's bed that night. Junpei stretched out on the living-room sofa with a blanket, but he could not sleep. The TV faced the sofa, and for a very long time he stared at the dead screen. Junpei knew that they were inside there. They were waiting with the box open. Junpei felt a chill run up his spine, and, no matter how long he waited, it did not go away.
He gave up trying to sleep and went to the kitchen. He made himself some coffee and sat at the kitchen table to drink it, but he felt something bunched up under one foot. It was Sayoko's bra, still lying there. He picked it up and hung it on the back of a chair. It was a simple, white piece of underwear, devoid of decoration. It hung on the kitchen chair in the predawn darkness like some anonymous witness who had wandered in from a time long past.
Junpei thought about his early days in college. He could still hear Takatsuki the first time they met, saying, "Hey, let's get something to eat," in that warm way of his, and he could see Takatsuki's friendly smile that seemed to say, "Relax. The world is just going to keep getting better and better." Where did we eat that time, Junpei wondered, and what did we have? He couldn't remember, though he was sure it was nothing special.
"Why did you choose me to go to lunch with?" Junpei had asked him that day. Takatsuki tapped his own temple with complete confidence. "I have a talent for picking the right friends at the right times in the right places."
And Takatsuki had not been wrong, Junpei thought, setting his coffee mug on the kitchen table. He did have an intuitive knack for picking the right friends. But that was not enough. Finding one person to love over the long haul of life was quite a different matter from finding friends. Junpei closed his eyes and thought about the stretch of time he had passed through. He did not want to think of it as something he had merely used up without any purpose.
As soon as Sayoko woke in the morning, he would ask her to marry him, Junpei decided. He was sure now. He couldn't waste another minute. Taking care not to make a sound, he opened the bedroom door and looked at Sayoko and Sala sleeping bundled in a comforter. Sala lay with her back to Sayoko, whose arm was draped on Sala's shoulder. Junpei touched Sayoko's hair where it fell across the pillow, and caressed Sala's small, pink cheek with the tip of his finger. Neither of them stirred. He eased himself down to the carpeted floor by the bed, his back against the wall, to watch over them in their sleep.
Eyes fixed on the hands of the clock, Junpei thought about the rest of the story for Sala. He had to find a way to end the tale of Masakichi and Tonkichi. There had to be a way to save Tonkichi from the zoo. Junpei retraced the story from the beginning. Before long, an idea began to sprout in his head, and, little by little, it took shape.
Tonkichi had the same thought as Sala: he would use the honey that Masakichi had collected to bake honey pies. It didn't take him long to realize that he had a real talent for making crisp, delicious honey pies. Masakichi took the honey pies to town and sold them to the people there. The people loved Tonkichi's honey pies and bought them by the dozen. So Tonkichi and Masakichi never had to separate again: they lived happily ever after in the mountains.
Sala would be sure to love the new ending. And so would Sayoko. I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far, Junpei thought. I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so that they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone—not anyone—try to put them into that crazy box, not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar.
Translated by Jay Rubin
Showing posts with label haruki murakami. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haruki murakami. Show all posts
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Lexington Ghosts by Haruki Murakami
This is something that actually happened several years ago. I have altered the names on account of certain circumstances, but other than that it's entirely true.
I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for about 2 years. At that time, I got to know this architect--a handsome guy, just past fifty, about half of his hair was white. He wasn't very tall. He enjoyed swimming a lot, swam everyday, and consequently was in very good shape. He played tennis once in a while as well. As for his name--let's call him Casey. He was single, and lived in this old mansion in Lexington, a suburb of Boston, together with an extremely reticent, sallow-faced piano tuner. His name was Jeremy: probably mid-thirties, tall, slender as a willow, hair thinning a little. In addition to being a piano tuner he also played tolerably.
A few of my stories had been translated into English, and then had appeared in a magazine. Casey had read these and sent me a letter through my publisher.
"I'm very interested in your work, and curious what kind of person you are," he wrote. I don't usually meet people who send me fan mail (in my experience, these kinds of meetings are never very fun or interesting), but I thought that meeting this guy Casey would probably be OK. His letter was really interesting, and imbued with a his rich sense of humor. I also had the optimism that comes with living overseas. We lived quite close to each other. Still, all of these circumstances didn't match up to one other, peripheral reason. The single biggest reason I wanted to meet this guy Casey was that he was the owner of a magnificent collection of old jazz records.
"If you searched the whole country over, you probably wouldn't find a single private collection that is so complete. I understand that you like jazz a lot, or are at least interested in it," he wrote. Just so. I am certainly interested in it. After reading his letter, I wanted to see this record collection so badly I couldn't stand it. When I get ensnared by a collection of old jazz records, all my psychological powers of resistance disappear, like a horse bewitched by the scent of some special tree.
Casey's house was in Lexington. That's about 30 minutes by car from where I lived. When I called him, he faxed me a detailed map with directions. One afternoon in April, I got in my green Volkswagen and drove to his house alone. I quickly picked it out. It's was a huge, old three-story house. It had probably been standing there for at least 100 years. Even in Boston's swank residential neighborhoods, where stately mansions stand side-by-side and all have long histories, this splendid house particularly stuck out. It was good enough for a postcard.
The garden was like a vast forest, and blue jays jumped from branch to branch, raising their sharp, merry voices all the while. There was a new BMW parked in the driveway. When I parked the car behind the BMW, a large mastiff who had been sleeping on the welcome mat on the front porch slowly got to his feet and barked dutifully two or three times. His bark seemed to suggest "It's not that I really want to bark, so I'll do it sort of halfway."
Casey came out and shook my hand. He had a firm handshake that seemed to confirm something. While he was shaking my hand, he patted my shoulder gently with his other hand. This was a frequent mannerism of his. "Hi. I'm glad you came. It's really nice to meet you," he said. He was wearing a fashionable white Italian shirt buttoned all the way to the top, a light brown cashmere cardigan, and soft cotton pants. He also had on a pair of small Georgio Armani-style glasses. All very smart.
Casey took me inside, sat me down on a sofa in the living room, and brought out a freshly-made pot of excellent coffee.
Casey wasn't overly forward; he'd had a good upbringing and was well-educated. Having traveled all over the world when he was young, he was a great conversationalist. We got to be good friends, and I went over to his house to hang out about once a month. And he shared the blessing of that splendid record collection with me. When I was there, I was able to listen to incredibly rare and valuable music as much as I liked, which I otherwise never would have heard. Compared to that record collection, the stereo system wasn't so great, but the old vacuum-tube amp produced a warm, nostalgic sound.
Casey used the house's study as his office, and drew up building plans on a big computer there. But he didn't tell me very much about his work. "It's not particularly important," he said with a laugh, as if making an excuse. I have no idea what kind of buildings he designed. He never appeared to be particularly busy. The Casey I knew was always sitting on the sofa in the living room, his wine glass tilted elegantly, reading a book or straining to hear Jeremy's piano. Or perhaps sitting in his garden chair playing with the dog. It's just a feeling I have, but I think that he didn't work that hard.
His deceased father had been a nationally famous psychologist, and had written five or six books, all of which were well on their way to becoming classics. Also a devoted jazz fan, he was a close friend of Prestige Records founder and producer Bob Weinstock, and on account of that his collection of jazz vinyl from the 1940's to the 1960's was, as Casey 's letter had said, astonishingly complete. While it's sheer volume was particularly impressive, one couldn't complain about the outstanding quality of the records either. Almost all the records were first editions and in perfect condition. Neither the jackets nor the disks themselves had the slightest blemish. It was very close to miraculous. Casey took great care with their preservation, and he handled each one as if he were bathing an infant.
Casey had no siblings, and his mother died when he was young. His father had never remarried. Hence, when his father had succumbed to pancreatic cancer 15 years before, he alone had inherited the house and all it's various heirlooms, including the complete record collection. Because Casey respected his father more than anyone, and loved him too, he didn't get rid of a single record, and preserved the whole collection with great care, just as it was. Casey liked to listen to jazz, but he wasn't as ardent a fan as his father. He really preferred classical music, and whenever Seiji Ozawa was conducting the Boston Symphony, he and Jeremy never failed to attend.
After I had known him for about a year, Casey asked me to take care of his house while we was away. Although it happened very rarely, he had to go to London for about a week on business. When Casey went away on trips, Jeremy usually looked after the house, but this time he couldn't. Jeremy's mother, who lived in West Virginia, was in declining health, and a short time before he had gone back home. So Casey called me.
"Sorry to do this to you, but I couldn't think of anyone else," he said. "And while I say ‘house-sitter,' aside from giving Miles (that was the dog's name) his food twice a day, there's not really anything else to do. You can listen to whatever records you like. And there's plenty of food and drink, so help yourself."
It didn't sound like a bad proposition. I was living alone at that time on account of certain circumstances, and the house next to my apartment in Cambridge was under construction, so there was an unbearable racket everyday. I got some extra clothes, my MacIntosh Powerbook, and a couple of books and went to Casey's house early in the afternoon one Friday. Casey had just finished packing and was about to call a taxi.
Have a good time in London, I said
"Yeah, of course," Casey said smiling. "Enjoy the house and the records. It's not a bad place."
After Casey had gone, I went to the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee. Then I set up my computer on a table in the music room, which adjoined the living room and, listening to some of the records Casey's father had left behind, I worked for about an hour. It seemed like I should be able to get a lot of work done during the coming week.
The desk, a huge mahogany affair, had drawers on either side. It was from quite an ancient time. It was by far the oldest thing in the room, and beside anything from a different era, like the MacIntosh I had brought with me, it seemed as if it had remained there unmoved for an unimaginably long period of time. After his father had died, Casey hadn't added so much as a postage stamp to the music room--it was as if he regarded it as some holy shrine or reliquary. While the whole house was prone to dust on account of it's age, in the music room it was as if the flow of time had stopped until moments before. It was in perfect order. There wasn't a speck of dust on the shelves, and the desk was polished to sparkling.
Miles came in and lay down at my feet. I patted his head a few times. He was a terribly lonely dog, and couldn't stand to be alone for very long. He'd been trained to sleep on his own bed in the kitchen, but the rest of the time he was always at someone's side, unaffectedly attaching himself to some part of his companion's body.
The living room and the music room were separated by a high door-less doorway. In the living room there was a large brick fireplace, and a very comfortable three-person leather sofa. There were four mismatched arm-chairs, and three coffee tables, also all distinct. A fancy, but now somewhat faded, Persian carpet had been laid on the floor, and from the high ceiling dangled a chandelier of ancient origin. I went in and sat down on the sofa, taking in my surroundings. The clock above the fireplace chopped up the minutes with a tick-tock that sounded like someone smashing a window on tip-toes.
The tall wooden bookshelves against the wall were lined art books and volumes on all sorts of specialties. A couple of oil paintings of some unknown coastline hung on three walls, kind of haphazardly. The general impression created by this scenery was somehow fitting. No human form could be seen in any of these pictures, just lonely sea-scapes. They looked as though, if you brought your ear up close enough, you'd be able to hear the sound of the chill wind and the rough seas. Splendid pieces, all, but not a one that particularly stood out. There wafted from each one the smell of moderate, New England-style, but still quite detached, Old Money.
The record shelf was against one broad wall of the music room, and all of those old records were lined up neatly, in alphabetical order according to the performers' names. Even Casey didn't know exactly how many there were. It's probably around six or seven thousand, he had said. But there are the same number again, packed in cardboard boxes and stored in the attic. "I wouldn't be surprised if the whole place sank into the ground someday on account of the weight of all those old records, like the House of Usher."
I set an old Lee Connitz 10" on the turntable, and as I sat at the desk writing, time passed comfortably and tranquilly. I had a very pleasant sensation, like I had buried myself in a perfectly-fitting mould. As time passed, I felt like I developed a special, carefully-constructed intimacy with this room. The reverberation of the music permeated everything: every nook of the room, every tiny cavity in the walls, right down to the creases in the curtains.
That evening I opened a bottle of Montepulciano that Casey had left specially for me, poured it into a crystal wine glass, and drank several glasses, sitting on the sofa reading a new-release novel I had just bought. Even disregarding Casey's recommendation, the wine was great. I got a wedge of Brie out of the refrigerator and ate about a quarter of it with crackers. All the while, it was quiet as a mouse. Apart from the tick-tock of the aforementioned clock, the only sound that could be heard was the occasional car passing on the street out front. The street closest to the house was just a cul-de-sac, though, so traffic was limited just to people in the neighborhood. When evening came, it dropped off to almost nothing. Coming from Cambridge, with it's noisy student crowds, it felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean. As per my usual, when the clock struck 11 I began to feel a little tired. Putting the book aside, I set my wine glass in the kitchen sink and said goodnight to Miles. The dog curled up on top of his bed with resignation and, after a slight groan, shut his eyes. I turned out the lights and went up to the guest bedroom on the second floor. I changed into my pajamas and was soon fast asleep.
When I woke up, I was in a formless void. I didn't know where I was. For a little while I was senseless, like a wilted vegetable. Like a vegetable that's forgotten and left forgotten in a dark cupboard for a long time. At length I finally remembered that I was house-sitting for Casey. Oh, yeah. I'm in Lexington. I fumbled around for the wristwatch I had left on the pillow. When I pushed the button, the time appeared with a blue glow. It was 1:15.
I quietly raised myself from the bed and turned on a small reading lamp. It took me a minute to find the switch. The lamp was made of polished glass in the shape of a lily, and produced a yellow light. I rubbed my temples strongly with the palms of both hands, heaved a big sigh, and looked around the inside of the brightened room. I inspected the walls, gazed across the carpet, and looked up at the ceiling. Then, like collecting beans that had spilled out on the floor, I gathered up the fragments of my consciousness one-by-one, and got reacquainted with the reality of my body. Gradually, I became aware of something: there was a sound. A low rumble, like waves crashing against the shore--that sound is what had roused me from my deep sleep.
Someone is downstairs.
I tip-toed to the door and held my breath. Soon, I could hear the sound of my own heartbeat. There was no mistaking that there was someone in the house besides me. And it wasn't just one or two people. A sound like music could also be faintly heard. I had no idea why. A cold sweat began to trickle from my armpits. What in the world had gone on while I was asleep?
The first thing that popped into my head was that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke. Casey had only pretended to go to London, but in reality had stayed behind, and had organized a party in the middle of the night just to scare me. No matter how I thought it about it though, I couldn't convince myself that Casey was the type to play such a childish prank. His sense of humor was more refined, more elegant.
Or perhaps--I thought, as I stood there still leaning on the door--the people down there were acquaintances of Casey's whom I didn't know. They knew that Casey was going out of town (but not that I was house-sitting for him), and had decided to stop by his house in his absence. At any rate, I was pretty sure that they weren't burglars. When burglars break into someone's house, they usually don't play their music so loud.
I took off my pajamas and picked up my pants. I put on my sneakers and pulled a sweater over my T-shirt. But I was only one person. I wanted something in my hands. Glancing around the room, nothing suitable presented itself. There wasn't a baseball bat or a set of fire tongs. The only things I could see were the bed, the dresser, a small book shelf, and a framed picture.
When I went out into the hall, I could hear the noise more clearly. The sound of cheerful old-time music floated up like steam into the hallway from the bottom of the stairs. The melody was quite familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the tune.
I could hear voices, too. Since there were a lot of people's voices mixed up together, I couldn't make out what they were talking about. Occasionally there was a laugh. It was a pleasant, airy laugh. It seemed like there was a party going on downstairs, and by the sound of it, it was just getting good. As if coloring the whole scene, the clinking of champagne glasses and wine glasses resounded merrily. There were probably people dancing, too; I could hear what sounded like the rhythmical creaking of leather on the wood floor.
I crept down the hallway to the landing of the staircase. Leaning forward over the banister, I looked down. Light spilled out from the high vertical window in the foyer, filling it with a queer, ghastly light. There were no shadows. The doors that separated the living room from the hall were shut tight. I know that I had left them open when I went to bed. I am absolutely certain of that. There was no alternative but that someone had shut them after I had gone upstairs to bed.
I was completely at a loss about what to do. One possibility was to return to my second-floor bedroom and hide. Lock the door from the inside, crawl into bed and... When I considered the matter calmly, this seemed like the most prudent course of action. And yet, standing at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of that cheery music and laughter, it was something of a shock to realize that it seemed to be growing quieter, like ripples on the surface of a pond subsiding. Judging by that atmosphere, I surmised that perhaps these were not an ordinary kind of people.
I took one long, deep breath and descended the stairs to the entrance hall. The rubber soles of my sneakers silently passed from one of those old wooden steps to the next. When I came to the foyer, I immediately turned left and went into the kitchen. Turning on the lights, I opened a drawer and retrieved a heavy meat cleaver. Casey was a cooking enthusiast and had a set of expensive German-made kitchen knives. The finely-polished stainless steel blade gleamed voluptuous and true in my hand.
But when I tried to imagine myself walking into that rollicking party gripping an enormous meat cleaver, I quickly realized that it was a bad idea. I poured myself a glass of water from the tap and returned the meat cleaver to the drawer.
Wait:
What happened to the dog?
I realized for the first time that Miles was nowhere to be found. He wasn't on his usual pillow on the floor. Where in the world could he have gone? Wasn't it his job to bark or something if someone broke into the house in the middle of the night? Bending over, I felt the depression in the fur-covered pillow where he usually lay. No warmth remained. It seemed he'd gotten out of his bed long before and gone off somewhere.
I left the kitchen, went out into the foyer, and sat down on a small bench there. The music continued without a break and the conversation continued as well. Like waves, they swelled up from time to time, and then quieted down again, but they never stopped altogether. How many people were in there? It seemed like there had to be at least 15. Or maybe it was more like 20. At any rate, it seemed like that big living room was pretty nearly filled.
I thought for a second about whether I should throw open the doors and go in. That was a strange and difficult decision. I was the caretaker of the house after all, and as such it's management was my responsibility. On the other hand, I hadn't been invited .
I strained my ears to catch fragments of the conversation that crept through the cracks in the door, but it was impossible. The conversation blended into one monotonous whole, and I couldn't distinguish any individual words. While I knew that there was a conversation, it was like there was a thick plaster wall in front of me. There was no room for me to enter there. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out a quarter. I twiddled it around in my fingers absently. That silver coin's solidity and reality restored me to my senses. Then something hit me, like a blow on the head from a fluffy mallet:
They were ghosts.
The folks assembled in the living room, listening to music and amiably chatting away weren't real people. The air pressure changed like a phase shift had taken place, and my ears were buzzing. I tried to swallow, but my throat had gone dry and I couldn't. I put the coin back in my pocket and looked around me. My heart began to thump heavily in my chest.
It seemed very odd that I hadn't realized this until now. How totally ridiculous to think that someone would break into the house and have a party. The sound of so many cars parking near the house, and the tramp of so many feet from the front gate to the house would certainly have woken me up. The dog probably would have barked. In short, there was no way that they could have entered the house.
I wanted Miles by my side. I wanted to put my hands around his big neck, smell that smell, feel the warmth of his skin. But the dog wasn't anywhere to be seen. I went and sat back down on the bench in the foyer by myself, as if I were under a spell. Naturally, I was terrified. But it surpassed the fear of any one particular thing. The fear was deep and mysterious like some vast desert.
Taking in a couple of deep breaths, I quietly replenished the air in my lungs. Little by little, my normal senses returned. It was a feeling like many cards were being turned over deep inside my consciousness.
Then I stood up, and muffling the sound of my footsteps exactly like before, I crept up the stairs. I returned to the bedroom and, without changing my clothes, got into bed.
The music and conversation meandered on. I couldn't sleep well, so I had no choice but to lie there, until almost day-break. Leaving the light on, I leaned against the headboard and stared at the ceiling, trying to hear the sounds of the never-ending party below. Eventually, I managed to fall asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, it was raining. It was a quiet drizzle, whose sole purpose was to soak the earth. The blue jays sang from under the eaves. The clock's hour hand showed a little before nine. The doors between the foyer and the living room were again standing open, as I had left them when I went to bed. The living room was not disordered. The book that I had been reading lay open on the couch. Fine cracker crumbs were still scattered across the top of the coffee table. Just as I had anticipated, there were no traces of the party.
Miles was curled up on the kitchen floor, sound asleep. He got up and I gave him his dog food. Shaking his ears, he ate greedily and with relish, as if nothing had happened.
The bizarre party in the middle of the night took place the first night I stayed at Casey's house. After that, nothing unusual transpired. Lexington's quiet, secretive nights returned without incident. But for some reason, almost every night I was there I'd wake up in the middle of the night. It was always between 1:00 and 2:00. I guess I was just high-strung, staying in someone else's house. Or perhaps I was anxious about a recurrence of that strange party.
When I woke up like this, I'd hold my breath, and strain to hear anything in the darkness. But there was never a sound. Occasionally, I'd hear the sound of leaves rustling in the garden. At those times I'd go downstairs and get a drink of water in the kitchen. Miles was always curled up asleep on the floor, and when he saw me he'd get up happily, wag his tail, and lay his head on my feet.
I'd take the dog with me into the living room, turn on the lights, and carefully look around. I never felt anything there, though. The sofa and the coffee table were always lined up silently in their places. Those cold oil paintings of the New England coast hung on the walls as always. I'd sit down on the couch for 10 or 15 minutes and just kill time. And when I wasn't able to discover any clue as to what had happened, I'd close my eyes and focus on my consciousness. But I couldn't feel anything. I was simply in the suburbs on a quiet and peaceful night. I'd open the window that looked out on the garden and breathe in the flower-laden spring air. The curtains would flap slightly in the night breeze, and in the woods, owls would hoot.
When Casey returned after a week in London, I decided not to say anything about what had happened that night, for the time being. I can't really explain why. I just had a feeling that it was better that way. Anyway.
"So, how was it? Anything happen while I was gone?" Casey asked me as we stood in the foyer.
"No, nothing special. It was really quiet and I got a lot of work done." That was totally the truth.
"That's great," Casey said with a happy look on his face. Then he pulled a bottle of expensive scotch out of his bag that he'd gotten for me as a souvenir. We shook hands and parted, and I drove the Volkswagen back to my apartment in Cambridge.
After that, I didn't see Casey for about six months. We talked on the phone a few times. Jeremy's mother had died, so that reticent piano tuner had returned to West Virginia permanently. At that time, I was in the final stages of a long novel, so except for matters of utter necessity, I didn't have room to meet anyone or go anywhere. I was spending more than twelve hours a day at my desk working, and I don't think I was ever more that a kilometer away from my house.
The last time I met Casey was at a cafe near the Charles River boathouse. I walked there to meet him and we had a cup of coffee together. I don't know why, but Casey had aged considerably since our last meeting. He was almost unrecognizable. He looked like he had gained ten years. The white in his hair had increased, and he had dark bags under his eyes. The backs of his hands had also become more wrinkled. I couldn't reconcile him with the Casey I had known before, who had always taken such care about his appearance. Perhaps he had some kind of disease. But Casey didn't say anything about it, so I didn't ask.
Jeremy probably won't come back to Lexington, Casey said to me with a sinking voice, gently shaking his head from left to right. I call West Virginia once in a while and talk to him on the phone. The shock of his mother's death changed him somehow, he said. He's different from the Jeremy of the old days. He only talks about the constellations now. From beginning to end, this unfortunate astrology talk. How the constellations are positioned today, and so what it's OK to do today, what should be avoided, that kind of thing. When he was here, he never mentioned the stars even once.
"I'm really sorry," I said. But I didn't really know who in the world he was talking about.
"When my mother died, I was only ten years old," Casey began, his eyes fixed on his coffee cup. "Since I didn't have any brothers of sisters, it was just the two of, my father and I, left behind. She died in a yachting accident in the early fall one year. We were totally unprepared psychologically for the shock of my mother's death. She was young and vivacious; more than ten years younger than my father. It had never occurred to either my father or myself that one day my mother would die. But then one day she was suddenly gone from this world. Poof. Like she'd vanished into thin air. She was clever and gorgeous and everybody liked her. She like to go out walking, and had a great stride, with her back stretched, her chin thrust forward slightly, and both hands clasped behind her. She walked with such an air of pleasure. She usually sang songs while she walked. I loved to go walking with her, the two of us together. Whenever I think of my mother, I see her walking along the boardwalk by the sea in Newport, bathed in the vivid light of a summer morning. The hem of her long summer dress fluttered coolly in the breeze. It was a cotton flower-print dress. That scene is burned into my mind like a photograph.
"She was very dear to my father, and he valued her tremendously. I think he probably loved her even more deeply than he loved me. He was that kind of person. He loved things that he had gained by his own hand. To him, I was something obtained by a natural string of events. This is not to say that he didn't love me: I was his one and only son. But he never loved me as much as he loved my mother. This is something I understood well. There was no one that my father loved like my mother. After my mother died, he never remarried.
"For three weeks after my mother's funeral, my father slept continuously. That's not an exaggeration. Literally, for three weeks straight.
"Occasionally, he would stagger out of bed and, without saying anything, drink a glass of water and eat a little food. He looked like a sleepwalker or a ghost. It was always only for the shortest possible time, and then he'd get back into bed. With the shutters shut tight, and the air stagnant in that dark room, he slept like an enchanted princess. He hardly moved at all. He didn't roll over and his expression remained the same. Being very uneasy about him, I went back to his side time after time to check up on him. I was afraid he would suddenly die in his sleep. When I came in to fluff his pillow and bring him food, I looked closely at his face.
"But he didn't die. He just slept deeply, like a stone buried in the ground. I think he probably didn't dream. In that dark, quiet room, only the sound of his regular breathing could be heard. That sleep, so long and deep, was unlike anything I had ever seen. He looked like a person departed for another world. I remember being very afraid. Completely alone in that huge mansion, I felt like I had been abandoned by the whole world.
"15 years ago, when my father passed away, I was obviously very sad, but frankly I wasn't that surprised. My father looked just the same dead as he had during that deep sleep. He's just like he was then, I thought to myself. It was deja vu. This overwhelming deja vu, like something deep inside of me had shifted. From a distance of 30 years, I retraced the past just as it had been. Only this time, I couldn't hear the sound of his breathing.
"I loved my father. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. I respected him, too. But even more than that, I was strongly bound to him, both emotionally and spiritually. I know this may sound strange, but when my father died I, too, got in bed and slept for many days, exactly like my father had when my mother died. It was like I had succeeded to some special ritual of my bloodline.
"It probably lasted for about two weeks. During that time I slept and slept and slept... I slept until time decayed and melted away into nothing. No matter how much I slept, it was never enough. At that time, the world of sleep was the real world, and the everyday world became nothing more than a vain and temporary place. It was a superficial world devoid of the color of life. I thought that I didn't want to live anymore in such a world. Gradually, I came to understand what I imagine my father must have felt like when my mother died. Do you get what I'm saying? Things take on a different shape all together. Without these new shapes, they can't exist."
Casey was then silent for a moment as if he was thinking about something. It was late fall, and the sound of acorns falling and hitting the ground with a thud occasionally reached my ears.
"There's only one thing I can say," Casey said raising his head, his familiar stylish smile returning to his lips. "When I die, there is not one person in the world who will have to sleep that deep sleep."
Sometimes I think about the Lexington ghosts: about their unknown character and number, and about that lively party they had in the living room of Casey's old mansion in the middle of the night. And I think about Casey and his long, solitary deep sleep, as if in preparation for death, in the second floor bedroom, with the shutters shut tight. And I think about his father. I think about Miles, the lonely dog, and that breathtaking record collection. Jeremy playing Shubert. The blue BMW wagon parked in front of the front door. But they all have the feeling of things that happened a terribly long time ago in a place terribly far away. Even though they just happened recently.
I've never told these things to anyone until now. Whenever I try to think about it, although it seems like a very strange tale indeed, perhaps on account of the distance, it doesn't seem very strange to me at all.
Translated by Christopher Allison
I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for about 2 years. At that time, I got to know this architect--a handsome guy, just past fifty, about half of his hair was white. He wasn't very tall. He enjoyed swimming a lot, swam everyday, and consequently was in very good shape. He played tennis once in a while as well. As for his name--let's call him Casey. He was single, and lived in this old mansion in Lexington, a suburb of Boston, together with an extremely reticent, sallow-faced piano tuner. His name was Jeremy: probably mid-thirties, tall, slender as a willow, hair thinning a little. In addition to being a piano tuner he also played tolerably.
A few of my stories had been translated into English, and then had appeared in a magazine. Casey had read these and sent me a letter through my publisher.
"I'm very interested in your work, and curious what kind of person you are," he wrote. I don't usually meet people who send me fan mail (in my experience, these kinds of meetings are never very fun or interesting), but I thought that meeting this guy Casey would probably be OK. His letter was really interesting, and imbued with a his rich sense of humor. I also had the optimism that comes with living overseas. We lived quite close to each other. Still, all of these circumstances didn't match up to one other, peripheral reason. The single biggest reason I wanted to meet this guy Casey was that he was the owner of a magnificent collection of old jazz records.
"If you searched the whole country over, you probably wouldn't find a single private collection that is so complete. I understand that you like jazz a lot, or are at least interested in it," he wrote. Just so. I am certainly interested in it. After reading his letter, I wanted to see this record collection so badly I couldn't stand it. When I get ensnared by a collection of old jazz records, all my psychological powers of resistance disappear, like a horse bewitched by the scent of some special tree.
Casey's house was in Lexington. That's about 30 minutes by car from where I lived. When I called him, he faxed me a detailed map with directions. One afternoon in April, I got in my green Volkswagen and drove to his house alone. I quickly picked it out. It's was a huge, old three-story house. It had probably been standing there for at least 100 years. Even in Boston's swank residential neighborhoods, where stately mansions stand side-by-side and all have long histories, this splendid house particularly stuck out. It was good enough for a postcard.
The garden was like a vast forest, and blue jays jumped from branch to branch, raising their sharp, merry voices all the while. There was a new BMW parked in the driveway. When I parked the car behind the BMW, a large mastiff who had been sleeping on the welcome mat on the front porch slowly got to his feet and barked dutifully two or three times. His bark seemed to suggest "It's not that I really want to bark, so I'll do it sort of halfway."
Casey came out and shook my hand. He had a firm handshake that seemed to confirm something. While he was shaking my hand, he patted my shoulder gently with his other hand. This was a frequent mannerism of his. "Hi. I'm glad you came. It's really nice to meet you," he said. He was wearing a fashionable white Italian shirt buttoned all the way to the top, a light brown cashmere cardigan, and soft cotton pants. He also had on a pair of small Georgio Armani-style glasses. All very smart.
Casey took me inside, sat me down on a sofa in the living room, and brought out a freshly-made pot of excellent coffee.
Casey wasn't overly forward; he'd had a good upbringing and was well-educated. Having traveled all over the world when he was young, he was a great conversationalist. We got to be good friends, and I went over to his house to hang out about once a month. And he shared the blessing of that splendid record collection with me. When I was there, I was able to listen to incredibly rare and valuable music as much as I liked, which I otherwise never would have heard. Compared to that record collection, the stereo system wasn't so great, but the old vacuum-tube amp produced a warm, nostalgic sound.
Casey used the house's study as his office, and drew up building plans on a big computer there. But he didn't tell me very much about his work. "It's not particularly important," he said with a laugh, as if making an excuse. I have no idea what kind of buildings he designed. He never appeared to be particularly busy. The Casey I knew was always sitting on the sofa in the living room, his wine glass tilted elegantly, reading a book or straining to hear Jeremy's piano. Or perhaps sitting in his garden chair playing with the dog. It's just a feeling I have, but I think that he didn't work that hard.
His deceased father had been a nationally famous psychologist, and had written five or six books, all of which were well on their way to becoming classics. Also a devoted jazz fan, he was a close friend of Prestige Records founder and producer Bob Weinstock, and on account of that his collection of jazz vinyl from the 1940's to the 1960's was, as Casey 's letter had said, astonishingly complete. While it's sheer volume was particularly impressive, one couldn't complain about the outstanding quality of the records either. Almost all the records were first editions and in perfect condition. Neither the jackets nor the disks themselves had the slightest blemish. It was very close to miraculous. Casey took great care with their preservation, and he handled each one as if he were bathing an infant.
Casey had no siblings, and his mother died when he was young. His father had never remarried. Hence, when his father had succumbed to pancreatic cancer 15 years before, he alone had inherited the house and all it's various heirlooms, including the complete record collection. Because Casey respected his father more than anyone, and loved him too, he didn't get rid of a single record, and preserved the whole collection with great care, just as it was. Casey liked to listen to jazz, but he wasn't as ardent a fan as his father. He really preferred classical music, and whenever Seiji Ozawa was conducting the Boston Symphony, he and Jeremy never failed to attend.
After I had known him for about a year, Casey asked me to take care of his house while we was away. Although it happened very rarely, he had to go to London for about a week on business. When Casey went away on trips, Jeremy usually looked after the house, but this time he couldn't. Jeremy's mother, who lived in West Virginia, was in declining health, and a short time before he had gone back home. So Casey called me.
"Sorry to do this to you, but I couldn't think of anyone else," he said. "And while I say ‘house-sitter,' aside from giving Miles (that was the dog's name) his food twice a day, there's not really anything else to do. You can listen to whatever records you like. And there's plenty of food and drink, so help yourself."
It didn't sound like a bad proposition. I was living alone at that time on account of certain circumstances, and the house next to my apartment in Cambridge was under construction, so there was an unbearable racket everyday. I got some extra clothes, my MacIntosh Powerbook, and a couple of books and went to Casey's house early in the afternoon one Friday. Casey had just finished packing and was about to call a taxi.
Have a good time in London, I said
"Yeah, of course," Casey said smiling. "Enjoy the house and the records. It's not a bad place."
After Casey had gone, I went to the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee. Then I set up my computer on a table in the music room, which adjoined the living room and, listening to some of the records Casey's father had left behind, I worked for about an hour. It seemed like I should be able to get a lot of work done during the coming week.
The desk, a huge mahogany affair, had drawers on either side. It was from quite an ancient time. It was by far the oldest thing in the room, and beside anything from a different era, like the MacIntosh I had brought with me, it seemed as if it had remained there unmoved for an unimaginably long period of time. After his father had died, Casey hadn't added so much as a postage stamp to the music room--it was as if he regarded it as some holy shrine or reliquary. While the whole house was prone to dust on account of it's age, in the music room it was as if the flow of time had stopped until moments before. It was in perfect order. There wasn't a speck of dust on the shelves, and the desk was polished to sparkling.
Miles came in and lay down at my feet. I patted his head a few times. He was a terribly lonely dog, and couldn't stand to be alone for very long. He'd been trained to sleep on his own bed in the kitchen, but the rest of the time he was always at someone's side, unaffectedly attaching himself to some part of his companion's body.
The living room and the music room were separated by a high door-less doorway. In the living room there was a large brick fireplace, and a very comfortable three-person leather sofa. There were four mismatched arm-chairs, and three coffee tables, also all distinct. A fancy, but now somewhat faded, Persian carpet had been laid on the floor, and from the high ceiling dangled a chandelier of ancient origin. I went in and sat down on the sofa, taking in my surroundings. The clock above the fireplace chopped up the minutes with a tick-tock that sounded like someone smashing a window on tip-toes.
The tall wooden bookshelves against the wall were lined art books and volumes on all sorts of specialties. A couple of oil paintings of some unknown coastline hung on three walls, kind of haphazardly. The general impression created by this scenery was somehow fitting. No human form could be seen in any of these pictures, just lonely sea-scapes. They looked as though, if you brought your ear up close enough, you'd be able to hear the sound of the chill wind and the rough seas. Splendid pieces, all, but not a one that particularly stood out. There wafted from each one the smell of moderate, New England-style, but still quite detached, Old Money.
The record shelf was against one broad wall of the music room, and all of those old records were lined up neatly, in alphabetical order according to the performers' names. Even Casey didn't know exactly how many there were. It's probably around six or seven thousand, he had said. But there are the same number again, packed in cardboard boxes and stored in the attic. "I wouldn't be surprised if the whole place sank into the ground someday on account of the weight of all those old records, like the House of Usher."
I set an old Lee Connitz 10" on the turntable, and as I sat at the desk writing, time passed comfortably and tranquilly. I had a very pleasant sensation, like I had buried myself in a perfectly-fitting mould. As time passed, I felt like I developed a special, carefully-constructed intimacy with this room. The reverberation of the music permeated everything: every nook of the room, every tiny cavity in the walls, right down to the creases in the curtains.
That evening I opened a bottle of Montepulciano that Casey had left specially for me, poured it into a crystal wine glass, and drank several glasses, sitting on the sofa reading a new-release novel I had just bought. Even disregarding Casey's recommendation, the wine was great. I got a wedge of Brie out of the refrigerator and ate about a quarter of it with crackers. All the while, it was quiet as a mouse. Apart from the tick-tock of the aforementioned clock, the only sound that could be heard was the occasional car passing on the street out front. The street closest to the house was just a cul-de-sac, though, so traffic was limited just to people in the neighborhood. When evening came, it dropped off to almost nothing. Coming from Cambridge, with it's noisy student crowds, it felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean. As per my usual, when the clock struck 11 I began to feel a little tired. Putting the book aside, I set my wine glass in the kitchen sink and said goodnight to Miles. The dog curled up on top of his bed with resignation and, after a slight groan, shut his eyes. I turned out the lights and went up to the guest bedroom on the second floor. I changed into my pajamas and was soon fast asleep.
When I woke up, I was in a formless void. I didn't know where I was. For a little while I was senseless, like a wilted vegetable. Like a vegetable that's forgotten and left forgotten in a dark cupboard for a long time. At length I finally remembered that I was house-sitting for Casey. Oh, yeah. I'm in Lexington. I fumbled around for the wristwatch I had left on the pillow. When I pushed the button, the time appeared with a blue glow. It was 1:15.
I quietly raised myself from the bed and turned on a small reading lamp. It took me a minute to find the switch. The lamp was made of polished glass in the shape of a lily, and produced a yellow light. I rubbed my temples strongly with the palms of both hands, heaved a big sigh, and looked around the inside of the brightened room. I inspected the walls, gazed across the carpet, and looked up at the ceiling. Then, like collecting beans that had spilled out on the floor, I gathered up the fragments of my consciousness one-by-one, and got reacquainted with the reality of my body. Gradually, I became aware of something: there was a sound. A low rumble, like waves crashing against the shore--that sound is what had roused me from my deep sleep.
Someone is downstairs.
I tip-toed to the door and held my breath. Soon, I could hear the sound of my own heartbeat. There was no mistaking that there was someone in the house besides me. And it wasn't just one or two people. A sound like music could also be faintly heard. I had no idea why. A cold sweat began to trickle from my armpits. What in the world had gone on while I was asleep?
The first thing that popped into my head was that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke. Casey had only pretended to go to London, but in reality had stayed behind, and had organized a party in the middle of the night just to scare me. No matter how I thought it about it though, I couldn't convince myself that Casey was the type to play such a childish prank. His sense of humor was more refined, more elegant.
Or perhaps--I thought, as I stood there still leaning on the door--the people down there were acquaintances of Casey's whom I didn't know. They knew that Casey was going out of town (but not that I was house-sitting for him), and had decided to stop by his house in his absence. At any rate, I was pretty sure that they weren't burglars. When burglars break into someone's house, they usually don't play their music so loud.
I took off my pajamas and picked up my pants. I put on my sneakers and pulled a sweater over my T-shirt. But I was only one person. I wanted something in my hands. Glancing around the room, nothing suitable presented itself. There wasn't a baseball bat or a set of fire tongs. The only things I could see were the bed, the dresser, a small book shelf, and a framed picture.
When I went out into the hall, I could hear the noise more clearly. The sound of cheerful old-time music floated up like steam into the hallway from the bottom of the stairs. The melody was quite familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the tune.
I could hear voices, too. Since there were a lot of people's voices mixed up together, I couldn't make out what they were talking about. Occasionally there was a laugh. It was a pleasant, airy laugh. It seemed like there was a party going on downstairs, and by the sound of it, it was just getting good. As if coloring the whole scene, the clinking of champagne glasses and wine glasses resounded merrily. There were probably people dancing, too; I could hear what sounded like the rhythmical creaking of leather on the wood floor.
I crept down the hallway to the landing of the staircase. Leaning forward over the banister, I looked down. Light spilled out from the high vertical window in the foyer, filling it with a queer, ghastly light. There were no shadows. The doors that separated the living room from the hall were shut tight. I know that I had left them open when I went to bed. I am absolutely certain of that. There was no alternative but that someone had shut them after I had gone upstairs to bed.
I was completely at a loss about what to do. One possibility was to return to my second-floor bedroom and hide. Lock the door from the inside, crawl into bed and... When I considered the matter calmly, this seemed like the most prudent course of action. And yet, standing at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of that cheery music and laughter, it was something of a shock to realize that it seemed to be growing quieter, like ripples on the surface of a pond subsiding. Judging by that atmosphere, I surmised that perhaps these were not an ordinary kind of people.
I took one long, deep breath and descended the stairs to the entrance hall. The rubber soles of my sneakers silently passed from one of those old wooden steps to the next. When I came to the foyer, I immediately turned left and went into the kitchen. Turning on the lights, I opened a drawer and retrieved a heavy meat cleaver. Casey was a cooking enthusiast and had a set of expensive German-made kitchen knives. The finely-polished stainless steel blade gleamed voluptuous and true in my hand.
But when I tried to imagine myself walking into that rollicking party gripping an enormous meat cleaver, I quickly realized that it was a bad idea. I poured myself a glass of water from the tap and returned the meat cleaver to the drawer.
Wait:
What happened to the dog?
I realized for the first time that Miles was nowhere to be found. He wasn't on his usual pillow on the floor. Where in the world could he have gone? Wasn't it his job to bark or something if someone broke into the house in the middle of the night? Bending over, I felt the depression in the fur-covered pillow where he usually lay. No warmth remained. It seemed he'd gotten out of his bed long before and gone off somewhere.
I left the kitchen, went out into the foyer, and sat down on a small bench there. The music continued without a break and the conversation continued as well. Like waves, they swelled up from time to time, and then quieted down again, but they never stopped altogether. How many people were in there? It seemed like there had to be at least 15. Or maybe it was more like 20. At any rate, it seemed like that big living room was pretty nearly filled.
I thought for a second about whether I should throw open the doors and go in. That was a strange and difficult decision. I was the caretaker of the house after all, and as such it's management was my responsibility. On the other hand, I hadn't been invited .
I strained my ears to catch fragments of the conversation that crept through the cracks in the door, but it was impossible. The conversation blended into one monotonous whole, and I couldn't distinguish any individual words. While I knew that there was a conversation, it was like there was a thick plaster wall in front of me. There was no room for me to enter there. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out a quarter. I twiddled it around in my fingers absently. That silver coin's solidity and reality restored me to my senses. Then something hit me, like a blow on the head from a fluffy mallet:
They were ghosts.
The folks assembled in the living room, listening to music and amiably chatting away weren't real people. The air pressure changed like a phase shift had taken place, and my ears were buzzing. I tried to swallow, but my throat had gone dry and I couldn't. I put the coin back in my pocket and looked around me. My heart began to thump heavily in my chest.
It seemed very odd that I hadn't realized this until now. How totally ridiculous to think that someone would break into the house and have a party. The sound of so many cars parking near the house, and the tramp of so many feet from the front gate to the house would certainly have woken me up. The dog probably would have barked. In short, there was no way that they could have entered the house.
I wanted Miles by my side. I wanted to put my hands around his big neck, smell that smell, feel the warmth of his skin. But the dog wasn't anywhere to be seen. I went and sat back down on the bench in the foyer by myself, as if I were under a spell. Naturally, I was terrified. But it surpassed the fear of any one particular thing. The fear was deep and mysterious like some vast desert.
Taking in a couple of deep breaths, I quietly replenished the air in my lungs. Little by little, my normal senses returned. It was a feeling like many cards were being turned over deep inside my consciousness.
Then I stood up, and muffling the sound of my footsteps exactly like before, I crept up the stairs. I returned to the bedroom and, without changing my clothes, got into bed.
The music and conversation meandered on. I couldn't sleep well, so I had no choice but to lie there, until almost day-break. Leaving the light on, I leaned against the headboard and stared at the ceiling, trying to hear the sounds of the never-ending party below. Eventually, I managed to fall asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, it was raining. It was a quiet drizzle, whose sole purpose was to soak the earth. The blue jays sang from under the eaves. The clock's hour hand showed a little before nine. The doors between the foyer and the living room were again standing open, as I had left them when I went to bed. The living room was not disordered. The book that I had been reading lay open on the couch. Fine cracker crumbs were still scattered across the top of the coffee table. Just as I had anticipated, there were no traces of the party.
Miles was curled up on the kitchen floor, sound asleep. He got up and I gave him his dog food. Shaking his ears, he ate greedily and with relish, as if nothing had happened.
The bizarre party in the middle of the night took place the first night I stayed at Casey's house. After that, nothing unusual transpired. Lexington's quiet, secretive nights returned without incident. But for some reason, almost every night I was there I'd wake up in the middle of the night. It was always between 1:00 and 2:00. I guess I was just high-strung, staying in someone else's house. Or perhaps I was anxious about a recurrence of that strange party.
When I woke up like this, I'd hold my breath, and strain to hear anything in the darkness. But there was never a sound. Occasionally, I'd hear the sound of leaves rustling in the garden. At those times I'd go downstairs and get a drink of water in the kitchen. Miles was always curled up asleep on the floor, and when he saw me he'd get up happily, wag his tail, and lay his head on my feet.
I'd take the dog with me into the living room, turn on the lights, and carefully look around. I never felt anything there, though. The sofa and the coffee table were always lined up silently in their places. Those cold oil paintings of the New England coast hung on the walls as always. I'd sit down on the couch for 10 or 15 minutes and just kill time. And when I wasn't able to discover any clue as to what had happened, I'd close my eyes and focus on my consciousness. But I couldn't feel anything. I was simply in the suburbs on a quiet and peaceful night. I'd open the window that looked out on the garden and breathe in the flower-laden spring air. The curtains would flap slightly in the night breeze, and in the woods, owls would hoot.
When Casey returned after a week in London, I decided not to say anything about what had happened that night, for the time being. I can't really explain why. I just had a feeling that it was better that way. Anyway.
"So, how was it? Anything happen while I was gone?" Casey asked me as we stood in the foyer.
"No, nothing special. It was really quiet and I got a lot of work done." That was totally the truth.
"That's great," Casey said with a happy look on his face. Then he pulled a bottle of expensive scotch out of his bag that he'd gotten for me as a souvenir. We shook hands and parted, and I drove the Volkswagen back to my apartment in Cambridge.
After that, I didn't see Casey for about six months. We talked on the phone a few times. Jeremy's mother had died, so that reticent piano tuner had returned to West Virginia permanently. At that time, I was in the final stages of a long novel, so except for matters of utter necessity, I didn't have room to meet anyone or go anywhere. I was spending more than twelve hours a day at my desk working, and I don't think I was ever more that a kilometer away from my house.
The last time I met Casey was at a cafe near the Charles River boathouse. I walked there to meet him and we had a cup of coffee together. I don't know why, but Casey had aged considerably since our last meeting. He was almost unrecognizable. He looked like he had gained ten years. The white in his hair had increased, and he had dark bags under his eyes. The backs of his hands had also become more wrinkled. I couldn't reconcile him with the Casey I had known before, who had always taken such care about his appearance. Perhaps he had some kind of disease. But Casey didn't say anything about it, so I didn't ask.
Jeremy probably won't come back to Lexington, Casey said to me with a sinking voice, gently shaking his head from left to right. I call West Virginia once in a while and talk to him on the phone. The shock of his mother's death changed him somehow, he said. He's different from the Jeremy of the old days. He only talks about the constellations now. From beginning to end, this unfortunate astrology talk. How the constellations are positioned today, and so what it's OK to do today, what should be avoided, that kind of thing. When he was here, he never mentioned the stars even once.
"I'm really sorry," I said. But I didn't really know who in the world he was talking about.
"When my mother died, I was only ten years old," Casey began, his eyes fixed on his coffee cup. "Since I didn't have any brothers of sisters, it was just the two of, my father and I, left behind. She died in a yachting accident in the early fall one year. We were totally unprepared psychologically for the shock of my mother's death. She was young and vivacious; more than ten years younger than my father. It had never occurred to either my father or myself that one day my mother would die. But then one day she was suddenly gone from this world. Poof. Like she'd vanished into thin air. She was clever and gorgeous and everybody liked her. She like to go out walking, and had a great stride, with her back stretched, her chin thrust forward slightly, and both hands clasped behind her. She walked with such an air of pleasure. She usually sang songs while she walked. I loved to go walking with her, the two of us together. Whenever I think of my mother, I see her walking along the boardwalk by the sea in Newport, bathed in the vivid light of a summer morning. The hem of her long summer dress fluttered coolly in the breeze. It was a cotton flower-print dress. That scene is burned into my mind like a photograph.
"She was very dear to my father, and he valued her tremendously. I think he probably loved her even more deeply than he loved me. He was that kind of person. He loved things that he had gained by his own hand. To him, I was something obtained by a natural string of events. This is not to say that he didn't love me: I was his one and only son. But he never loved me as much as he loved my mother. This is something I understood well. There was no one that my father loved like my mother. After my mother died, he never remarried.
"For three weeks after my mother's funeral, my father slept continuously. That's not an exaggeration. Literally, for three weeks straight.
"Occasionally, he would stagger out of bed and, without saying anything, drink a glass of water and eat a little food. He looked like a sleepwalker or a ghost. It was always only for the shortest possible time, and then he'd get back into bed. With the shutters shut tight, and the air stagnant in that dark room, he slept like an enchanted princess. He hardly moved at all. He didn't roll over and his expression remained the same. Being very uneasy about him, I went back to his side time after time to check up on him. I was afraid he would suddenly die in his sleep. When I came in to fluff his pillow and bring him food, I looked closely at his face.
"But he didn't die. He just slept deeply, like a stone buried in the ground. I think he probably didn't dream. In that dark, quiet room, only the sound of his regular breathing could be heard. That sleep, so long and deep, was unlike anything I had ever seen. He looked like a person departed for another world. I remember being very afraid. Completely alone in that huge mansion, I felt like I had been abandoned by the whole world.
"15 years ago, when my father passed away, I was obviously very sad, but frankly I wasn't that surprised. My father looked just the same dead as he had during that deep sleep. He's just like he was then, I thought to myself. It was deja vu. This overwhelming deja vu, like something deep inside of me had shifted. From a distance of 30 years, I retraced the past just as it had been. Only this time, I couldn't hear the sound of his breathing.
"I loved my father. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. I respected him, too. But even more than that, I was strongly bound to him, both emotionally and spiritually. I know this may sound strange, but when my father died I, too, got in bed and slept for many days, exactly like my father had when my mother died. It was like I had succeeded to some special ritual of my bloodline.
"It probably lasted for about two weeks. During that time I slept and slept and slept... I slept until time decayed and melted away into nothing. No matter how much I slept, it was never enough. At that time, the world of sleep was the real world, and the everyday world became nothing more than a vain and temporary place. It was a superficial world devoid of the color of life. I thought that I didn't want to live anymore in such a world. Gradually, I came to understand what I imagine my father must have felt like when my mother died. Do you get what I'm saying? Things take on a different shape all together. Without these new shapes, they can't exist."
Casey was then silent for a moment as if he was thinking about something. It was late fall, and the sound of acorns falling and hitting the ground with a thud occasionally reached my ears.
"There's only one thing I can say," Casey said raising his head, his familiar stylish smile returning to his lips. "When I die, there is not one person in the world who will have to sleep that deep sleep."
Sometimes I think about the Lexington ghosts: about their unknown character and number, and about that lively party they had in the living room of Casey's old mansion in the middle of the night. And I think about Casey and his long, solitary deep sleep, as if in preparation for death, in the second floor bedroom, with the shutters shut tight. And I think about his father. I think about Miles, the lonely dog, and that breathtaking record collection. Jeremy playing Shubert. The blue BMW wagon parked in front of the front door. But they all have the feeling of things that happened a terribly long time ago in a place terribly far away. Even though they just happened recently.
I've never told these things to anyone until now. Whenever I try to think about it, although it seems like a very strange tale indeed, perhaps on account of the distance, it doesn't seem very strange to me at all.
Translated by Christopher Allison
Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami
TONY TAKITANI by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Tony Takitani's real name was really that: Tony Takitani.
Because of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I. But Tony Takitani's mother and father were both one-hundred-per-cent genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those days, Shanghai was just a day's boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo, or anywhere else in Japan, that he would hate to lose. He left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai's elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was twenty-one years old.
And so he took it easy through the upheaval of the war from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs. He played his trombone in Shanghai night clubs as the struggles took place somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest inclination to influence, or even to reflect upon, history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with kindness and good feeling, which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and a talented musician, he stood out wherever he went like a crow on a snowy day. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis had made him a Shanghai sensation.
Shozaburo was also blessed (though he did not realize it) with a talent for making "useful" friends. He was on good terms with high-ranking Army officers, millionaires, and various influential types who were reaping gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never exited a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani and they just "clicked." And they took special care of him whenever problems came up.
But talent can sometimes work against you. When the war ended, Shozaburo's connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, others who had been imprisoned for similar reasons were taken out of their cells and executed without a trial. Guards would just appear, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. Shozaburo assumed that he would die in prison. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They would put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I've lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought. I've slept with tons of women. I've eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There isn't so much in life that I'm sorry I missed. Besides, I'm not in any position to complain about being killed. It's just the way it goes. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese have died in this war, and many of them in far more terrible ways.
As he waited, Shozaburo watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on his cell's filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the women he had slept with. In the end, though, he turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time, the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo stood on the deck of the boat, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance he thought, Life: I'll never understand it.
Emaciated, with no possessions to speak of, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war had ended. He discovered that his parents' house had burned down in the great Tokyo air raid of March, 1945, and they were dead. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo was now alone in the world. This was not a great shock to him, however; nor did it make him feel particularly sad. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he was convinced that everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was in his thirties, and beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had suddenly aged several years at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.
One way or another, Shozaburo had managed to survive, and he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.
Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American Army major, an Italian-American from New Jersey who played a mean clarinet himself. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the records he wanted, straight from the United States, and Shozaburo would go to the major's quarters and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were difficult to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, Shozaburo thought, not a bad time to be alive.
In 1947, he married a distant cousin on his mother's side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. Before long they ended up living together, probably because she had become pregnant. At least, that was the way that Tony Takitani heard it from his father. His mother was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not very healthy. She gave birth to Tony the year after she was married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, quickly and quietly. She had experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.
Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what death was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole, as a fait accompli. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disklike thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn't say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more about what had happened. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby that he had left in the hospital.
The major took Shozaburo under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together at the base nearly every day. "You've got to get ahold of yourself," the major would tell Shozaburo. "The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right." The words meant nothing to Shozaburo, who merely nodded in silence. "Hey, I know," the major added suddenly one day. "Why don't you let me be the boy's godfather? I'll give him a name." Oh, Shozaburo thought, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.
The major suggested his own first name - Tony. Tony was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major's mind. When Shozaburo got home, he wrote the name Tony Takitani on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall. He stared at it for the next several days. Tony Takitani. Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last awhile, he thought, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.
For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was not much fun. The other kids at school called him a "half-breed," and whenever he told people his name they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming face to face with a child called Tony Takitani was all it took to reopen old wounds.
Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any close friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. His father was always traveling with the band, and when Tony was little a housekeeper had come to take care of him during the day. But by the time he was in his last years at elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. This seemed preferable to having someone fussing over him all the time.
Shozaburo Takitani never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he didn't bring any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as different from each other as one might imagine. But, being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.
Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours every day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate, and highly detailed drawings of bicycles, radios, engines, and the like. If he drew a plant, he would capture every vein in every leaf. It was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually won first prize in school art contests.
So it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to art school to a career as an illustrator. There was never any need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were agonizing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And, because it was a time when most young people were acting out against the establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art-school professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony himself could not see what was so great about their work, with its ideological content. To him it looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.
Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. "They look realer than the real thing," everyone said. His sketches were more detailed than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator everybody had to have. And he took on everything - from the covers of automobile magazines to advertising illustrations. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He bought a big house in Setagaya, an affluent Tokyo suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.
By this point in his life, Tony had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them, for a short time. But he had never considered marriage, had never seen a need for it. Cooking, cleaning, and laundry he could manage for himself, and when his work interfered with those things he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He lacked his father's special charm, and he had no real friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. But he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others, and just about everybody who knew him liked him. He saw his father no more than once every two or three years, on some matter of business. When the business was over, neither man had much to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani's life went by, quietly and calmly.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. She worked part time for a publishing company, and she came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a demure girl with a gentle smile. Her features were pleasant enough but, objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani's heart a violent punch. The moment he first saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could say what it was about her that had struck him with such force.
The next thing that caught his attention was her clothes. He generally took no particular interest in what people wore, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed that it made a deep impression on him; indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed elegantly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Utterly different. She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy.
After she left, he sat at his desk, dazed, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.
The next day, he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though they were fifteen years apart in age, they found they had much in common, almost strangely so. They agreed on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. She was a little nervous at first, but she gradually relaxed, until she was laughing and talking freely.
"You really know how to dress," Tony said when they parted.
"I like clothes," she answered, with a bashful smile. "Most of my money goes on clothing."
They went on a few dates after that. They didn't go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours - about their pasts, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking. It was as if they were filling up each other's emptiness.
The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been seeing since high school. The relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, she admitted, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things whenever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere near as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but, still, that didn't mean that she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And, besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that age gap might mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.
Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn't work. He drank, alone. Suddenly, his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thick, cold walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn't want to marry me, I might just kill myself.
He went to see her and told her exactly how he felt. How lonely his life had been until then. How much he had lost over the years. How she had made him realize all that.
She was an intelligent young woman. She had come to like this Tony Takitani. She had thought well of him from the start, and each meeting had only made her like him more. Whether she could call this "love" she didn't know. But she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married.
By marrying her, Tony Takitani brought the lonely period of his life to an end. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was look for her. When he found her sleeping next to him, he felt relief. When she wasn't there, he felt anxious and searched the house for her. There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. The question haunted him: What would he do? Sometimes this fear would make him break out in a cold sweat. As he became used to his new life, though, and the possibility of his wife's suddenly disappearing seemed to lessen, the anxiety gradually eased. In the end, he settled down and wrapped himself in his new and peaceful happiness.
One day, she said that she wanted to hear what kind of music her father-in-law was making. "Do you think he would mind if we went to hear him?" she asked.
"Probably not," Tony said.
They went to a Ginza night club where Shozaburo Takitani was performing. This was the first time that Tony Takitani had gone to hear his father play since childhood. Shozaburo was playing exactly the same music he had played in the old days, the same songs that Tony had heard so often on records when he was a boy. Shozaburo's style was smooth, elegant, sweet. It was not art, but it was music made by the skillful hand of a professional, and it could put a crowd in a good mood.
Soon, however, something began to constrict Tony Takitani's breathing, as though he were a narrow pipe that was filling quietly, but inexorably, with sludge, and he found it difficult to remain seated. He couldn't help feeling that the music he was hearing now was just slightly different from the music he remembered his father playing. He had heard it years ago, of course, and he had been listening with a child's ears, after all, but the difference, it seemed to him, was terribly important. It was infinitesimal but crucial. He wanted to go up onto the stage, take his father by the arm, and ask, "What is it, Father? What has changed?" But he did nothing of the sort. He would never have been able to explain what was in his mind. Instead, he stayed at his table until the end of his father's set, drinking much more than he usually did. When it was over, he and his wife applauded and went home.
The couple's married life was free of shadows. They never fought, and they spent many happy hours together, taking walks, going to movies, traveling. Tony Takitani's work continued as successfully as ever, and, for someone so young, his wife was remarkably capable at running their home. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. A strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought that she had suddenly taken ill. He had noticed it before their marriage, but it wasn't until their honeymoon that it began to seem serious. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels around Europe. In Milan and Paris, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Ferr¨¦. Mesmerized, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.
Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house, and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvelous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody's perfect, he told himself.
When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.
He took the plunge one night after dinner. "I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes," he said. "It's not a question of money. I'm not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?"
His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, "You're right, of course. I don't need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can't help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can't stop myself." She promised to try to hold back. "If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long."
And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn't stand it.
She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favorite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. "Certainly, Madam," she was told. She was one of the store's best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colors, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail. She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.
A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.
Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife's clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.
Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favorable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size. From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife's, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.
Tony Takitani told the woman, "The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies - that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I've recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It's just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I'm pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that she is dead."
Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request - so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife's having died. And she understood the part about the wife's having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife's clothes. Normally, she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye. But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn't look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.
"I think I understand," she said. "And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size."
"Of course," Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.
Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.
"Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I've never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I'm sorry." She dried her tears with a handkerchief.
"If it's all right with you, I'd like to have you start at the office tomorrow," Tony said in a businesslike manner. "Pick out a week's worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you."
The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days' worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.
"Take a coat, too," Tony Takitani said. "You don't want to be cold."
She chose a warm-looking gray cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.
When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife's closet, shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.
These dresses had once clung to his wife's body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room's air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again, like a lukewarm broth. It's all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it's over.
He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologizing.
"But how can that be?" the woman asked, stunned.
"I'm sorry, but the situation has changed," he said. "You can have the clothes and shoes you took home, and the suitcase, too. I just want you to forget that this ever happened, and please don't tell anyone about it."
The woman could make nothing of this, and the more she pressed for answers the more pointless it seemed.
"I see," she said finally, and hung up.
For a few minutes, she felt angry at Tony Takitani. But soon she came to feel that things had probably worked out for the best. The whole business had been peculiar from the beginning. She was sorry to have lost the job but she figured she would manage somehow or other.
She unpacked the dresses she had brought home from Tony Takitani's house, smoothed them out, and hung them in her wardrobe. The shoes she put into the shoe cabinet by her front door. Compared with these new arrivals, her own clothes and shoes looked horrendously shabby. She felt as if they were a completely different type of matter, fashioned of materials from another dimension. She took off the blouse and skirt she had worn to the interview, hung them up, and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the floor, drinking a cold beer. Recalling the room full of clothes she had seen at Tony Takitani's house, she heaved a sigh. So many beautiful dresses, she thought. And that "closet": it was bigger than my whole apartment. Imagine the time and money that must have gone into buying all those clothes! And now the woman who did it is dead. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many beautiful dresses behind.
The woman's friends were well aware that she was poor, so they were amazed to see her wearing a new dress every time they got together - each one a sophisticated, expensive brand.
"Where did you ever get a dress like that?" they would ask her.
"I promised not to tell," she would say, shaking her head. "Besides, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."
In the end, Tony Takitani had another used-clothing dealer take away everything that his wife had left behind. The dealer gave Tony less than a twentieth of what he had paid for the clothes, but that didn't matter to him. He would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where he would never see them again.
Once in a while, Tony would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mind go blank. He would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife's shadows. But, as the months went by, he lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it was gone. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished fell back, as if retreating from the province of his mind. Like a mist in the breeze, his memories changed shape, and with each change they grew fainter. Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.
Sometimes he could barely recall his wife's face. What he did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that his wife had left behind. He recalled her unremarkable face and her worn-out patent-leather shoes. Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman's name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.
Two years after Tony Takitani's wife died, his father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo Takitani suffered little, and his time in the hospital was short. He died almost as if falling asleep. In that sense, he lived a charmed life to the end. Aside from a little cash and some stock certificates, Shozaburo left nothing that could be called property. There was only his instrument, and a gigantic collection of old jazz records. Tony Takitani left the records in the boxes supplied by the moving company and stacked them up on the floor of the empty room. Because they smelled of mold, he had to open the windows in the room at regular intervals to air it out. Otherwise, he never set foot in the place.
A year went by this way, but having the boxes of records in the house began to bother him more and more. Often, the mere thought of them sitting in there made him feel that he was suffocating. Sometimes, too, he would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep. His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.
Tony Takitani called a record dealer and had him make an offer for the collection. Because it contained many valuable disks that were long out of print, he received a remarkably high payment, enough to buy a small car. To him, however, the money meant nothing.
Once the records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.
Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.
Copyright © 2004 by Ò»¸¯Èå
Tony Takitani's real name was really that: Tony Takitani.
Because of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I. But Tony Takitani's mother and father were both one-hundred-per-cent genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those days, Shanghai was just a day's boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo, or anywhere else in Japan, that he would hate to lose. He left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai's elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was twenty-one years old.
And so he took it easy through the upheaval of the war from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs. He played his trombone in Shanghai night clubs as the struggles took place somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest inclination to influence, or even to reflect upon, history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with kindness and good feeling, which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and a talented musician, he stood out wherever he went like a crow on a snowy day. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis had made him a Shanghai sensation.
Shozaburo was also blessed (though he did not realize it) with a talent for making "useful" friends. He was on good terms with high-ranking Army officers, millionaires, and various influential types who were reaping gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never exited a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani and they just "clicked." And they took special care of him whenever problems came up.
But talent can sometimes work against you. When the war ended, Shozaburo's connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, others who had been imprisoned for similar reasons were taken out of their cells and executed without a trial. Guards would just appear, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. Shozaburo assumed that he would die in prison. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They would put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I've lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought. I've slept with tons of women. I've eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There isn't so much in life that I'm sorry I missed. Besides, I'm not in any position to complain about being killed. It's just the way it goes. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese have died in this war, and many of them in far more terrible ways.
As he waited, Shozaburo watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on his cell's filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the women he had slept with. In the end, though, he turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time, the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo stood on the deck of the boat, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance he thought, Life: I'll never understand it.
Emaciated, with no possessions to speak of, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war had ended. He discovered that his parents' house had burned down in the great Tokyo air raid of March, 1945, and they were dead. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo was now alone in the world. This was not a great shock to him, however; nor did it make him feel particularly sad. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he was convinced that everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was in his thirties, and beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had suddenly aged several years at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.
One way or another, Shozaburo had managed to survive, and he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.
Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American Army major, an Italian-American from New Jersey who played a mean clarinet himself. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the records he wanted, straight from the United States, and Shozaburo would go to the major's quarters and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were difficult to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, Shozaburo thought, not a bad time to be alive.
In 1947, he married a distant cousin on his mother's side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. Before long they ended up living together, probably because she had become pregnant. At least, that was the way that Tony Takitani heard it from his father. His mother was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not very healthy. She gave birth to Tony the year after she was married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, quickly and quietly. She had experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.
Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what death was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole, as a fait accompli. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disklike thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn't say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more about what had happened. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby that he had left in the hospital.
The major took Shozaburo under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together at the base nearly every day. "You've got to get ahold of yourself," the major would tell Shozaburo. "The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right." The words meant nothing to Shozaburo, who merely nodded in silence. "Hey, I know," the major added suddenly one day. "Why don't you let me be the boy's godfather? I'll give him a name." Oh, Shozaburo thought, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.
The major suggested his own first name - Tony. Tony was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major's mind. When Shozaburo got home, he wrote the name Tony Takitani on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall. He stared at it for the next several days. Tony Takitani. Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last awhile, he thought, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.
For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was not much fun. The other kids at school called him a "half-breed," and whenever he told people his name they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming face to face with a child called Tony Takitani was all it took to reopen old wounds.
Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any close friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. His father was always traveling with the band, and when Tony was little a housekeeper had come to take care of him during the day. But by the time he was in his last years at elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. This seemed preferable to having someone fussing over him all the time.
Shozaburo Takitani never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he didn't bring any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as different from each other as one might imagine. But, being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.
Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours every day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate, and highly detailed drawings of bicycles, radios, engines, and the like. If he drew a plant, he would capture every vein in every leaf. It was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually won first prize in school art contests.
So it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to art school to a career as an illustrator. There was never any need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were agonizing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And, because it was a time when most young people were acting out against the establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art-school professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony himself could not see what was so great about their work, with its ideological content. To him it looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.
Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. "They look realer than the real thing," everyone said. His sketches were more detailed than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator everybody had to have. And he took on everything - from the covers of automobile magazines to advertising illustrations. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He bought a big house in Setagaya, an affluent Tokyo suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.
By this point in his life, Tony had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them, for a short time. But he had never considered marriage, had never seen a need for it. Cooking, cleaning, and laundry he could manage for himself, and when his work interfered with those things he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He lacked his father's special charm, and he had no real friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. But he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others, and just about everybody who knew him liked him. He saw his father no more than once every two or three years, on some matter of business. When the business was over, neither man had much to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani's life went by, quietly and calmly.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. She worked part time for a publishing company, and she came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a demure girl with a gentle smile. Her features were pleasant enough but, objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani's heart a violent punch. The moment he first saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could say what it was about her that had struck him with such force.
The next thing that caught his attention was her clothes. He generally took no particular interest in what people wore, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed that it made a deep impression on him; indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed elegantly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Utterly different. She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy.
After she left, he sat at his desk, dazed, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.
The next day, he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though they were fifteen years apart in age, they found they had much in common, almost strangely so. They agreed on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. She was a little nervous at first, but she gradually relaxed, until she was laughing and talking freely.
"You really know how to dress," Tony said when they parted.
"I like clothes," she answered, with a bashful smile. "Most of my money goes on clothing."
They went on a few dates after that. They didn't go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours - about their pasts, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking. It was as if they were filling up each other's emptiness.
The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been seeing since high school. The relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, she admitted, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things whenever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere near as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but, still, that didn't mean that she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And, besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that age gap might mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.
Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn't work. He drank, alone. Suddenly, his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thick, cold walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn't want to marry me, I might just kill myself.
He went to see her and told her exactly how he felt. How lonely his life had been until then. How much he had lost over the years. How she had made him realize all that.
She was an intelligent young woman. She had come to like this Tony Takitani. She had thought well of him from the start, and each meeting had only made her like him more. Whether she could call this "love" she didn't know. But she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married.
By marrying her, Tony Takitani brought the lonely period of his life to an end. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was look for her. When he found her sleeping next to him, he felt relief. When she wasn't there, he felt anxious and searched the house for her. There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. The question haunted him: What would he do? Sometimes this fear would make him break out in a cold sweat. As he became used to his new life, though, and the possibility of his wife's suddenly disappearing seemed to lessen, the anxiety gradually eased. In the end, he settled down and wrapped himself in his new and peaceful happiness.
One day, she said that she wanted to hear what kind of music her father-in-law was making. "Do you think he would mind if we went to hear him?" she asked.
"Probably not," Tony said.
They went to a Ginza night club where Shozaburo Takitani was performing. This was the first time that Tony Takitani had gone to hear his father play since childhood. Shozaburo was playing exactly the same music he had played in the old days, the same songs that Tony had heard so often on records when he was a boy. Shozaburo's style was smooth, elegant, sweet. It was not art, but it was music made by the skillful hand of a professional, and it could put a crowd in a good mood.
Soon, however, something began to constrict Tony Takitani's breathing, as though he were a narrow pipe that was filling quietly, but inexorably, with sludge, and he found it difficult to remain seated. He couldn't help feeling that the music he was hearing now was just slightly different from the music he remembered his father playing. He had heard it years ago, of course, and he had been listening with a child's ears, after all, but the difference, it seemed to him, was terribly important. It was infinitesimal but crucial. He wanted to go up onto the stage, take his father by the arm, and ask, "What is it, Father? What has changed?" But he did nothing of the sort. He would never have been able to explain what was in his mind. Instead, he stayed at his table until the end of his father's set, drinking much more than he usually did. When it was over, he and his wife applauded and went home.
The couple's married life was free of shadows. They never fought, and they spent many happy hours together, taking walks, going to movies, traveling. Tony Takitani's work continued as successfully as ever, and, for someone so young, his wife was remarkably capable at running their home. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. A strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought that she had suddenly taken ill. He had noticed it before their marriage, but it wasn't until their honeymoon that it began to seem serious. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels around Europe. In Milan and Paris, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Ferr¨¦. Mesmerized, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.
Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house, and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvelous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody's perfect, he told himself.
When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.
He took the plunge one night after dinner. "I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes," he said. "It's not a question of money. I'm not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?"
His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, "You're right, of course. I don't need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can't help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can't stop myself." She promised to try to hold back. "If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long."
And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn't stand it.
She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favorite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. "Certainly, Madam," she was told. She was one of the store's best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colors, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail. She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.
A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.
Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife's clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.
Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favorable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size. From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife's, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.
Tony Takitani told the woman, "The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies - that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I've recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It's just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I'm pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that she is dead."
Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request - so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife's having died. And she understood the part about the wife's having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife's clothes. Normally, she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye. But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn't look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.
"I think I understand," she said. "And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size."
"Of course," Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.
Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.
"Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I've never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I'm sorry." She dried her tears with a handkerchief.
"If it's all right with you, I'd like to have you start at the office tomorrow," Tony said in a businesslike manner. "Pick out a week's worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you."
The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days' worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.
"Take a coat, too," Tony Takitani said. "You don't want to be cold."
She chose a warm-looking gray cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.
When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife's closet, shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.
These dresses had once clung to his wife's body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room's air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again, like a lukewarm broth. It's all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it's over.
He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologizing.
"But how can that be?" the woman asked, stunned.
"I'm sorry, but the situation has changed," he said. "You can have the clothes and shoes you took home, and the suitcase, too. I just want you to forget that this ever happened, and please don't tell anyone about it."
The woman could make nothing of this, and the more she pressed for answers the more pointless it seemed.
"I see," she said finally, and hung up.
For a few minutes, she felt angry at Tony Takitani. But soon she came to feel that things had probably worked out for the best. The whole business had been peculiar from the beginning. She was sorry to have lost the job but she figured she would manage somehow or other.
She unpacked the dresses she had brought home from Tony Takitani's house, smoothed them out, and hung them in her wardrobe. The shoes she put into the shoe cabinet by her front door. Compared with these new arrivals, her own clothes and shoes looked horrendously shabby. She felt as if they were a completely different type of matter, fashioned of materials from another dimension. She took off the blouse and skirt she had worn to the interview, hung them up, and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the floor, drinking a cold beer. Recalling the room full of clothes she had seen at Tony Takitani's house, she heaved a sigh. So many beautiful dresses, she thought. And that "closet": it was bigger than my whole apartment. Imagine the time and money that must have gone into buying all those clothes! And now the woman who did it is dead. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many beautiful dresses behind.
The woman's friends were well aware that she was poor, so they were amazed to see her wearing a new dress every time they got together - each one a sophisticated, expensive brand.
"Where did you ever get a dress like that?" they would ask her.
"I promised not to tell," she would say, shaking her head. "Besides, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."
In the end, Tony Takitani had another used-clothing dealer take away everything that his wife had left behind. The dealer gave Tony less than a twentieth of what he had paid for the clothes, but that didn't matter to him. He would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where he would never see them again.
Once in a while, Tony would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting his mind go blank. He would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife's shadows. But, as the months went by, he lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it was gone. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished fell back, as if retreating from the province of his mind. Like a mist in the breeze, his memories changed shape, and with each change they grew fainter. Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.
Sometimes he could barely recall his wife's face. What he did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that his wife had left behind. He recalled her unremarkable face and her worn-out patent-leather shoes. Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman's name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.
Two years after Tony Takitani's wife died, his father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo Takitani suffered little, and his time in the hospital was short. He died almost as if falling asleep. In that sense, he lived a charmed life to the end. Aside from a little cash and some stock certificates, Shozaburo left nothing that could be called property. There was only his instrument, and a gigantic collection of old jazz records. Tony Takitani left the records in the boxes supplied by the moving company and stacked them up on the floor of the empty room. Because they smelled of mold, he had to open the windows in the room at regular intervals to air it out. Otherwise, he never set foot in the place.
A year went by this way, but having the boxes of records in the house began to bother him more and more. Often, the mere thought of them sitting in there made him feel that he was suffocating. Sometimes, too, he would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep. His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.
Tony Takitani called a record dealer and had him make an offer for the collection. Because it contained many valuable disks that were long out of print, he received a remarkably high payment, enough to buy a small car. To him, however, the money meant nothing.
Once the records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.
Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.
Copyright © 2004 by Ò»¸¯Èå
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