2

Once upon a time, many years ago - just 20 years ago, in fact - I was
living in a dormitory. I was 18 and a first-year student. I was new to
Tokyo and new to living alone, and so my anxious parents found a
private dorm for me to live in rather than the kind of single room that
most students took. The dormitory provided meals and other facilities
and would probably help their unworldly 18 -year-old survive.
Expenses were also a consideration. A dorm cost far less than a
private room. As long as I had bedding and a lamp, there was no need
to buy a lot of furnishings. For my part, I would have preferred to rent
a flat and live in comfortable solitude, but knowing what my parents
had to spend on enrolment fees and tuition at the private university I
was attending, I was in no position to insist. And besides, I really
didn't care where I lived.
Located on a hill in the middle of the city with open views, the
dormitory compound sat on a large quadrangle surrounded by a
concrete wall. A huge, towering zelkova tree stood just inside the
front gate. People said it was at least 150 years old. Standing at its
base, you could look up and see nothing of the sky through its dense
cover of green leaves.
The paved path leading from the gate circumvented the tree and
continued on long and straight across a broad quadrangle, two three-
story concrete dorm buildings facing each other on either side of the
path. They were large with lots of windows and gave the impression
of being either flats that had been converted into jails or jails that had
been converted into flats. However there was nothing dirty about
them, nor did they feel dark. You could hear radios playing through
open windows, all of which had the same cream-coloured curtains that
the sun could not fade.
Beyond the two dormitories, the path led up to the entrance
of a two-story common building, the first floor of which contained a
dining hall and bathrooms, the second consisting of an auditorium,
meeting rooms, and even guest rooms, whose use I could never
fathom. Next to the common building stood a third dormitory, also
three storeys high. Broad green lawns filled the quadrangle, and
circulating sprinklers caught the sunlight as they turned. Behind the
common building there was a field used for baseball and football, and
six tennis courts. The complex had everything you could want.
There was just one problem with the place: its political smell. It was
run by some kind of fishy foundation that centered on this extreme
right-wing guy, and there was something strangely twisted - as far as I
was concerned - about the way they ran the place. You could see it in
the pamphlet they gave to new students and in the dorm rules. The
proclaimed "founding spirit" of the dormitory was "to strive to nurture
human resources of service to the nation through the ultimate in
educational fundamentals", and many financial leaders who endorsed
this "spirit" had contributed their private funds to the construction of
the place. This was the public face of the project, though what lay
behind it was extremely vague. Some said it was a tax dodge, others
saw it as a publicity stunt for the contributors, and still others claimed
that the construction of the dormitory was a cover for swindling the
public out of a prime piece of real estate. One thing was certain,
though: in the dorm complex there existed a privileged club composed
of elite students from various universities. They formed "study
groups" that met several times a month and included some of the
founders. Any member of the club could be assured of a good job after
graduation. I had no idea which - if any - of these theories was correct,
but they all shared the assumption that there was "something fishy"
about the place.
In any case, I spent two years - from the spring of 1968 to the spring
of 1970 - living in this "fishy" dormitory. Why I put up with it so long,
I can't really say. In terms of everyday life, it made no practical
difference to me whether the place was right wing or left wing or
anything else.
Each day began with the solemn raising of the flag. They played the
national anthem, too, of course. You can't have one without the other.
The flagpole stood in the very center of the compound, where it was
visible from every window of all three dormitories.
The Head of the east dormitory (my building) was in charge of the
flag. He was a tall, eagle-eyed man in his late fifties or early sixties.
His bristly hair was flecked with grey, and his sunburned neck bore a
long scar. People whispered that he was a graduate of the wartime
Nakano spy school, but no one knew for sure. Next to him stood a
student who acted as his assistant. No one really knew this guy, either.
He had the world's shortest crewcut and always wore a navy-blue
student uniform. I didn't know his name or which room he lived in,
never saw him in the dining hall or the bath. I'm not even sure he was
a student, though you would think he must have been, given the
uniform - which quickly became his nickname. In contrast to Sir
Nakano, "Uniform" was short, pudgy and pasty-faced. This creepy
couple would raise the banner of the Rising Sun every morning at six.
When I first entered the dormitory, the sheer novelty of the event
would often prompt me to get up early to observe this patriotic ritual.
The two would appear in the quadrangle at almost the exact moment
the radio beeped the six o'clock signal. Uniform was wearing his
uniform, of course, with black leather shoes, and Nakano wore a short
jacket and white trainers. Uniform held a ceremonial box of untreated
paulownia wood, while Nakano carried a Sony tape recorder at his
side. He placed this at the base of the flagpole, while Uniform opened
the box to reveal a neatly folded banner. This he reverentially
proffered to Nakano, who would clip it to the rope on the flagpole,
revealing the bright red circle of the Rising Sun on a field of pure
white. Then Uniform pressed the switch for the playing of the anthem.
"May Our Lord's Reign..."
And up the flag would climb.
"Until pebbles turn to boulders ..." It would reach halfway up the pole.
"And be covered with moss."
Now it was at the top. The two stood to attention, rigid, looking up at
the flag, which was quite a sight on clear days when the wind was
blowing.
The lowering of the flag at dusk was carried out with the same
ceremonial reverence, but in reverse. Down the banner would come
and find its place in the box. The national flag did not fly at night.
I didn't know why the flag had to be taken down at night. The nation
continued to exist while it was dark, and plenty of people worked all
night - railway construction crews and taxi drivers and bar hostesses
and firemen and night watchmen: it seemed unfair to me that such
people were denied the protection of the flag. Or maybe it didn't
matter all that much and nobody really cared - aside from me. Not that
I really cared, either. It was just something that happened to cross my
mind.
The rules for room assignments put first- and second-year students in
doubles while third- and final-year students had single rooms. Double
rooms were a little longer and narrower than nine-by-twelve, with an
aluminium-framed window in the wall opposite the door and two
desks by the window arranged so the inhabitants of the room could
study back-to-back. To the left of the door stood a steel bunk bed. The
furniture supplied was sturdy and simple and included a pair of
lockers, a small coffee table, and some built-in shelves. Even the most
well-disposed observer would have had trouble calling this setting
poetic. The shelves of most rooms carried such items as transistor
radios, hairdryers, electric carafes and cookers, instant coffee, tea
bags, sugar cubes, and simple pots and bowls for preparing instant
ramen. The walls bore pin-ups from girlie magazines or stolen porno
movie posters. One guy had a photo of pigs mating, but this was a far-
out exception to the usual naked women, girl pop singers or actresses.
Bookshelves on the desks held textbooks, dictionaries and novels.
The filth of these all-male rooms was horrifying. Mouldy mandarin
skins clung to the bottoms of waste-paper baskets. Empty cans used
for ashtrays held mounds of cigarette butts, and when these started to
smoulder they'd be doused with coffee or beer and left to give off a
sour stink. Blackish
grime and bits of indefinable matter clung to all the bowls and dishes
on the shelves, and the fl oors were littered with instant ramen
wrappers and empty beer cans and discarded lids from one thing or
another. It never occurred to anyone to sweep up and throw these
things in the bin. Any wind that blew through would raise clouds of
dust. Each room had its own horrendous smell, but the components of
that smell were always the same: sweat, body odour and rubbish.
Dirty clothes would pile up under the beds, and without anyone
bothering to air the mattresses on a regular basis, these sweat -
impregnated pads would give off odours beyond redemption. In
retrospect, it seems amazing that these shitpiles gave rise to no killer
epidemics.
My room, on the other hand, was as sanitary as a morgue. The floor
and window were spotless, the mattresses were aired each week, all
pencils stood in the pencil holders, and even the curtains were washed
once a month. My room-mate was a cleanliness freak. None of the
others in the dorm believed me when I told them about the curtains.
They didn't know that curtains could be washed. They believed,
rather, that curtains were semi-permanent parts of the window.
"There's something wrong with that guy," they'd say, labelling him a
Nazi or a storm trooper.
We didn't even have pin-ups. No, we had a photo of a canal in
Amsterdam. I had put up a nude shot, but my room-mate had pulled it
down. "Hey, Watanabe," he said, "I-I'm not too crazy about this kind
of thing," and up went the canal photo instead. I wasn't especially
attached to the nude, so I didn't protest.
"What the hell's that?" was the universal reaction to the Amsterdam
photo whenever any of the other guys came to my room.
"Oh, Storm Trooper likes to wank looking at this," I said.
I meant it as a joke, but they all took me seriously - so seriously that I
began to believe it myself.
Everybody sympathized with me for having Storm Trooper as a room-
mate, but I really wasn't that upset about it. He left me alone as long as
I kept my area clean, and in fact having him as my room-mate made
things easier for me in many ways. He did all the cleaning, he took
care of sunning the mattresses, he threw out the rubbish. He'd give a
sniff and suggest a bath for me if I'd been too busy to wash for a few
days. He'd even point out when it was time for me to go to the barber's
or trim my nasal hair. The one thing that bothered me was the way he
would spray clouds of insecticide if he noticed a single fly in the
room, because then I had to take refuge in a neighbouring shitpile.
Storm Trooper was studying geography at a national university.
As he told me the first time we met, "I'm studying m-m-maps."
"You like maps?" I asked.
"Yup. When I graduate, I'm going to work for the Geo graphical
Survey Institute and make m-m-maps."
I was impressed by the variety of dreams and goals that life could
offer. This was one of the very first new impressions I received when I
came to Tokyo for the first time. The thought struck me that society
needed a few people - just a few - who were interested in and even
passionate about mapmaking. Odd, though, that someone who wanted
to work for the government's Geographical Survey Institute should
stutter every time he said the word "map". Storm Trooper often didn't
stutter at all, except when he pronounced the word "map", for which it
was a 100 per cent certainty.
"W what are you studying?" he asked me.
"Drama," I said.
"Gonna put on plays?"
"Nah, just read scripts and do research. Racine, lonesco, Shakespeare,
stuff like that."
He said he had heard of Shakespeare but not the others. I hardly knew
anything about the others myself, I'd just seen their names in lecture
handouts.
"You like plays?" he asked.
"Not especially."
This confused him, and when he was confused, his stuttering got
worse. I felt sorry I had done that to him.
"I could have picked anything," I said. "Ethnology, Asian history. I
just happened to pick drama, that's all," which was not the most
convincing explanation I could have come up with.
"I don't get it," he said, looking as if he really didn't get it. "I like m-
m-maps, so I decided to come to Tokyo and get my parents to s-send
me money so I could study m-m-maps. But not you, huh?"
His approach made more sense than mine. I gave up trying to explain
myself. Then we drew lots (matchsticks) to choose bunks. He got the
upper bunk.
Tall, with a crewcut and high cheekbones, he always wore the same
outfit: white shirt, black trousers, black shoes, navy-blue jumper. To
these he would add a uniform jacket and black briefcase when he went
to his university: a typical right -wing student. Which is why
everybody called him Storm Trooper. But in fact he was totally
indifferent to politics. He wore a uniform because he didn't want to be
bothered choosing clothes. What interested him were things like
changes in the coastline or the completion of a new railway tunnel.
Nothing else. He'd go on for hours once he got started on a subject
like that, until you either ran away or fell asleep.
He was up at six each morning with the strains of "May Our Lord's
Reign". Which is to say that that ostentatious flag-raising ritual was
not entirely useless. He'd get dressed, go to the bathroom and wash his
face - for ever. I sometimes got the feeling he must be taking out each
tooth and washing it, one at a time. Back in the room, he would snap
the wrinkles out of his towel and lay it on the radiator to dry, then
return his toothbrush and soap to the shelf. Finally he'd do radio
callisthenics with the rest of the nation.
I was used to reading late at night and sleeping until eight o'clock, so
even when he started shuffling around the room and exercising, I
remained unconscious - until the part where he started jumping. He
took his jumping seriously and made the bed bounce every time he hit
the floor. I stood it for three days because they had told us that
communal life called for a certain degree of resignation, but by the
morning of the fourth day, I couldn't take it any more.
"Hey, can you do that on the roof or somewhere?" I said. "I can't
sleep."
"But it's already 6.30!" he said, open-mouthed.
"Yeah, I know it's 6.30. I'm still supposed to be asleep. I don't know
how to explain it exactly, but that's how it works for me."
"Anyway, I can't do it on the roof. Somebody on the third floor would
complain. Here, we're over a storeroom."
"So go out on the quad. On the lawn."
"That's no good, either. I don't have a transistor radio. I need to plug it
in. And you can't do radio callisthenics without music."
True, his radio was an old piece of junk without batteries. Mine was a
transistor portable, but it was strictly FM, for music.
"OK, let's compromise," I said. "Do your exercises but cut out the
jumping part. It's so damned noisy. What do you say?"
"J-jumping? What's that?"
"Jumping is jumping. Bouncing up and down." "But there isn't any
jumping."
My head was starting to hurt. I was ready to give up, but I wanted to
make my point. I got out of bed and started bouncing up and down
and singing the opening melody of NHK's radio callisthenics. "I'm
talking about this," I said.
"Oh, that. I guess you're right. I never noticed."
"See what I mean?" I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Just cut out
that part. I can put up with the rest. Stop jumping and let me sleep."
"But that's impossible," he said matter -of-factly. "I can't leave
anything out. I've been doing the same thing every day for ten years,
and once I start I do the whole routine uncon sciously. If I left
something out, I wouldn't be able to do any of it."
There was nothing more for me to say. What could I have said? The
quickest way to put a stop to this was to wait for him to leave the
room and throw his goddamn radio out the goddamn window, but I
knew if I did that all hell would break loose. Storm Trooper treasured
everything he owned. He smiled when he saw me sitting on the bed at
a loss for words, and tried to comfort me.
"Hey, Watanabe, why don't you just get up and exercise with me?"
And he went off to breakfast.

Naoko chuckled when I told her the story of Storm Trooper and his
radio callisthenics. I hadn't been trying to amuse her, but I ended up
laughing myself. Though her smile vanished in an instant, I enjoyed
seeing it for the first time in a long while.
We had left the train at Yotsuya and were walking along the
embankment by the station. It was a Sunday afternoon in the middle
of May. The brief on-and-off showers of the morning had cleared up
before noon, and a south wind had swept away the low-hanging
clouds. The brilliant green leaves of the cherry trees stirred in the air,
splashing sunlight in all directions. This was an early summer day.
The people we passed carried their jumpers or jackets over their
shoulders or in their arms. Everyone looked happy in the warm
Sunday afternoon sun. The young men playing tennis in the courts
beyond the embankment had stripped down to their shorts. Only
where two nuns in winter habits sat talking on a bench did the summer
light seem not to reach, though both wore looks of satisfaction as they
enjoyed chatting in the sun.
Fifteen minutes of walking and I was sweaty enough to take off my
thick cotton shirt and go with a T-shirt. Naoko had rolled the sleeves
of her light grey sweatshirt up to her elbows. It was nicely faded,
obviously having been washed many times. I felt as if I had seen her
in that shirt long before. This was just a feeling I had, not a clear
memory. I didn't have that much to rememberabout Naoko at the
time.
"How do you like communal living?" she asked. "Is it fun to live with
a lot of other people?"
"I don't know, I've only been doing it a month or so. It's not that bad, I
can stand it."
She stopped at a fountain and took a sip, wiping her mouth with a
white handkerchief she took from her trouser pocket. Then she bent
over and carefully retied her laces.
"Do you think I could do it?"
"What? Living in a dorm?"
"Uh-huh."
"I suppose it's all a matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things
bother you if you wanted to - the rules, the idiots who think they're hot
shit, the room-mates doing radio callisthenics at 6.30 in the morning.
But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage."
"I guess so," she said with a nod. She seemed to be turning something
over in her mind. Then she looked straight into my eyes as if peering
at some unusual object. Now I saw that her eyes were so deep and
clear they made my heart thump. I realized that I had never had
occasion to look into her eyes like this. It was the first time the two of
us had ever gone walking together or talked at such length.
"Are you thinking about living in a dorm or something?" I asked.
"Uh-uh," she said. "I was just wondering what communal life would
be like. And. .." She seemed to be trying - and failing - to find exactly
the right word or expression. Then she sighed and looked down. "Oh,
I don't know. Never mind."
That was the end of the conversation. She continued walking east, and
I followed just behind.
Almost a year had gone by since I had last seen Naoko, and in that
time she had lost so much weight as to look like a different person.
The plump cheeks that had been a special feature of hers were all but
gone, and her neck had become delicate and slender. Not that she was
bony now or unhealthy looking: there was something natural and
serene about the way she had slimmed down, as if she had been hiding
in some long, narrow space until she herself had become long and
narrow. And a lot prettier than I remembered. I wanted to tell her that,
but couldn't find a good way to put it.
We had not planned to meet but had run into each other on the Chuo
commuter line. She had decided to see a film by herself, and I was
headed for the bookshops in Kanda- nothing urgent in either case.
She had suggested that we leave the train, which we happened to do in
Yotsuya, where the green embankment makes for a nice place to walk
by the old castle moat. Alone together, we had nothing in particular to
talk about, and I wasn't quite sure why Naoko had suggested we get
off the train. We had never really had much to say to each other.
Naoko started walking the minute we hit the street, and I hurried after
her, keeping a few paces behind. I could have closed the distance
between us, but something held me back. I walked with my eyes on
her shoulders and her straight black hair. She wore a big, brown
hairslide, and when she turned her head I caught a glimpse of a small,
white ear. Now and then she would look back and say something.
Sometimes it would be a remark I might have responded to, and some-
times it would be something to which I had no idea how to reply.
Other times, I simply couldn't hear what she was saying. She didn't
seem to care one way or another. Once she had finished saying
whatever she wanted to say, she'd face front again and keep on
walking. Oh, well, I told myself, it was a nice day for a stroll.
This was no mere stroll for Naoko, though, judging from that walk.
She turned right at Lidabashi, came out at the moat, crossed the
intersection at Jinbocho, climbed the hill at Ochanomizu and came out
at Hongo. From there she followed the tram tracks to Komagome. It
was a challenging route. By the time we reached Komagome, the sun
was sinking and the day had become a soft spring evening.
"Where are we?" asked Naoko, as if noticing our surroundings for the
first time.
"Komagome," I said. "Didn't you know? We made this big arc."
"Why did we come here?"
"You brought us here. I was just following you."
We went to a shop by the station for a bowl of noodles. Thirsty, I had
a whole beer to myself. Neither of us said a word from the time we
gave our order to the time we finished eating. I was exhausted from all
that walking, and she just sat there with her hands on the table,
mulling something over again. All the leisure spots were crowded on
this warm Sunday, they were saying on the TV news. And we just
walked from Yotsuya to Komagome, I said to myself.
"Well, you're in good shape," I said when I had finished my noodles.
"Surprised?"
"Yeah."
"I was a long distance runner at school, I'll have you know. I used to
do the 10,000 metres. And my father took me mountain climbing on
Sundays ever since I can remember. You know our house - right there,
next to the mountain. I've always had strong legs."
"It doesn't show," I said.
"I know," she answered. "Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl.
But you can't judge a book by its cover." To which she added a
momentary smile.
"And that goes for me, too," I said. "I'm worn out."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I've been dragging you around all day." "Still, I'm glad
we had a chance to talk. We've never done that before, just the two of
us," I said, trying without success to recall what we had talked about.
She was playing with the ashtray on the table.
"I wonder. .." she began, ". . . if you wouldn't mind ... I mean, if it
really wouldn't be any bother to you ... Do you think we could see
each other again? I know I don't have any right to be asking you this."
"Any right? What do you mean by that?"
She blushed. My reaction to her request might have been a little too
strong.
"I don't know ... I can't really explain it," she said, tugging the sleeves
of her sweatshirt up over the elbows and down again. The soft hair on
her arms shone a lovely golden colour in the lights of the shop. "I
didn't mean to say "right' exactly. I was looking for another way to put
it."
Elbows on the table, she stared at the calendar on the wall, almost as
though she were hoping to find the proper expression there. Failing,
she sighed and closed her eyes and played with her hairslide.
"Never mind," I said. "I think I know what you're getting at. I'm not
sure how to put it, either."
"I can never say what I want to say," continued Naoko. "It's been like
this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong
words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I
mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track
of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and
playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this
big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch
her." She raised her face and looked into my eyes. "Does this make
any sense to you?"
"Everybody feels like that to some extent," I said. "They're trying to
express themselves and it bothers t can't get it right."
Naoko looked disappointed with my answer. "No, that抯 not it either,"
she said without further explanation
"Anyway, I'd be glad to see you again," I said. "I'm always free on
Sundays, and walking would be good for me."
We boarded the Yamanote Line, and Naoko transferred to the Chuo
Line at Shinjuku. She was living in a tiny flat way out in the western
suburb of Kokubunji.
"Tell me," she said as we parted. "Has anything changed about the
way I talk?"
"I think so," I said, "but I'm not sure what. Tell you the truth, I know I
saw you a lot back then, but I don't remember talking to you much."
"That's true," she said. "Anyway, can I call you on Saturday?"
"Sure. I'll be expecting to hear from you."

I first met Naoko when I was in the sixth-form at school. She was also
in the sixth-form at a posh girls' school run by one of the Christian
missions. The school was so refined you were considered unrefined if
you studied too much. Naoko was the girlfriend of my best (and only)
friend, Kizuki. The two of them had been close almost from birth,
their houses not 200 yards apart.
As with most couples who have been together since childhood, there
was a casual openness about the relationship of Kizuki and Naoko and
little sense that they wanted to be alone together. They were always
visiting each other's homes and eating or playing mah-jong with each
other's families. I double-dated with them any number of times. Naoko
would bring a school friend for me and the four of us would go to the
zoo or the pool or the cinema. The girls she brought were always
pretty, but a little too refined for my taste. I got along better with the
somewhat cruder girls from my own State school who were easier to
talk to. I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of
the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn't
understand me, either.
After a while, Kizuki gave up trying to arrange dates for me, and
instead the three of us would do things together. Kizuki and Naoko
and I: odd, but that was the most comfort able combination.
Introducing a fourth person into the mix would always make things a
little awkward. We were like a TV talk show, with me the guest,
Kizuki the talented host, and Naoko his assistant. He was good at
occupying that central position. True, he had a sarcastic side that often
struck people as arrogant, but in fact he was a considerate and fair-
minded person. He would distribute his remarks and jokes fairly to
Naoko and to me, taking care to see that neither of us felt left out. If
one or the other stayed quiet too long, he would steer his conversation
in that direction and get the person to talk. It probably looked harder
than it was: he knew how to monitor and adjust the air around him on
a second-by-second basis. In addition, he had a rare talent for finding
the interesting parts of someone's generally uninteresting comments so
that, while speaking to him, you felt you were an exceptionally
interesting person with an exceptionally interesting life.
And yet he was not the least bit sociable. I was his only real friend at
school. I could never understand why such a smart and capable talker
did not turn his talents to the broader world around him but remained
satisfied to concentrate on our little trio. Nor could I understand why
he picked me to be his friend. I was just an ordinary kid who liked to
read books and listen to music and didn't stand out in any way that
would prompt someone like Kizuki to pay attention to me. We hit it
off straight away, though. His father was a dentist, known for his
professional skill and his high fees.
"Want to double-date Sunday?" he asked me just after we met. "My
girlfriend goes to a girls' school, and she'll bring along a cute one for
you."
"Sure," I said, and that was how I met Naoko.

The three of us spent a lot of time together, but whenever Kizuki left
the room, Naoko and I had trouble talking to each other. We never
knew what to talk about. And in fact there was no topic of
conversation that we had in common. Instead of talking, we'd drink
water or toy with something on the table and wait for Kizuki to come
back and start up the conversation again. Naoko was not particularly
talkative, and I was more of a listener than a talker, so I felt
uncomfortable when I was left alone with her. Not that we were
incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
Naoko and I saw each other only once after Kizuki's funeral. Two
weeks after the event, we met at a café to take care of some minor
matter, and when that was finished we had nothing more to say. I tried
raising several different topics, but none of them led anywhere. And
when Naoko did talk, there was an edge to her voice. She seemed
angry with me, but I had no idea why. We never saw each other again
until that day a year later we happened to meet on the Chuo Line in
Tokyo.

Naoko might have been angry with me because I, not she, had been
the last one to see Kizuki. That may not be the best way to put it, but I
more or less understood how she felt. I would have swapped places
with her if I could have, but finally, what had happened had happened,
and there was nothing I could do about it.
It had been a nice afternoon in May. After lunch, Kizuki suggested we
skip classes and go play pool or something. I had no special interest in
my afternoon classes, so together we left school, ambled down the hill
to a pool hall on the harbour, and played four games. When I won the
first, easy-going game, he became serious and won the next three.
This meant I paid, according to our custom. Kizuki didn't make a
single joke as we played, which was most unusual. We smoked
afterwards.
"Why so serious?" I asked.
"I didn't want to lose today," said Kizuki with a satisfied smile.
He died that night in his garage. He led a rubber hose from the exhaust
pipe of his N-360 to a window, taped over the gap in the window, and
revved the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. His
parents had been out visiting a sick relative, and when they opened the
garage to put their car away, he was already dead. His radio was
going, and a petrol station receipt was tucked under the windscreen
wiper.
Kizuki had left no suicide note, and had no motive that anyone could
think of. Because I had been the last one to see him, I was called in for
questioning by the police. I told the investigating officer that Kizuki
had given no indication of what he was about to do, that he had been
exactly the same as always. The policeman had obviously formed a
poor impression of both Kizuki and me, as if it was perfectly natural
for the kind of person who would skip classes and play pool to
commit suicide. A small article in the paper brought the affair to a
close. Kizuki's parents got rid of his red N-360. For a time, a white
flower marked his school desk.
In the ten months between Kizuki's death and my exams, I was unable
to find a place for myself in the world around me. I started sleeping
with one of the girls at school, but that didn't last six months. Nothing
about her really got to me. I applied to a private university in Tokyo,
the kind of place with an entrance exam for which I wouldn't have to
study much, and I passed without exhilaration. The girl asked me not
to go to Tokyo - "It's 500 miles from here!" she pleaded - but I had to
get away from Kobe at any cost. I wanted to begin a new life where I
didn't know a soul.
"You don't give a damn about me any more, now that you've slept
with me," she said, crying.
"That's not true," I insisted. "I just need to get away from this town."
But she was not prepared to understand me. And so we parted.
Thinking about all the things that made her so much nicer than the
other girls at home, I sat on the bullet train to Tokyo feeling terrible
about what I'd done, but there was no way to undo it. I would try to
forget her.
There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in
the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper
distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green baize
pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about
smoke rising from tall crematorium chimneys, and chunky
paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first.
I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air.
And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple
form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:
Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.
It's a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words
but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in
four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and
breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate
from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I
had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This
had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over
there. I am here, not over there.
The night Kizuki died, however, I ost the ability to see death (and l
life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was
already here, within my being, it had
always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.
When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me
as well.
I lived through the following spring, at 18, with that knot of air in my
chest, but I struggled all the while against becom ing serious.
Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching the truth, I
sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no
matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating
contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were
strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life,
everything revolved around death.