6

As soon as I woke at seven o'clock on Monday morning, I washed my
face, shaved, and went straight to the dorm Head's room without
eating breakfast to say that I was going to be gone for two days hiking
in the hills. He was used to my taking short trips when I had free time,
and reacted without surprise. I took a crowded commuter train to
Tokyo Station and bought a bullet-train ticket to Kyoto, literally
jumping onto the first Hikari express to pull out. I made do with
coffee and a sandwich for breakfast and dozed for an hour.
I arrived in Kyoto a few minutes before eleven. Following Naoko's
instructions, I took a city bus to a small terminal serving the northern
suburbs. The next bus to my destination would not be leaving until
11.35, I was told, and the trip would take a little over an hour. I
bought a ticket and went to a bookshop across the street for a map.
Back in the waiting room, I studied the map to see if I could find
exactly where the Ami Hostel was located. It turned out to be much
farther into the mountains than I had imagined. The bus would have to
cross several hills in its trek north, then turn around where the canyon
road dead-ended and return to the city. My stop would be just before
the end of the line. There was a footpath near the bus stop, according
to Naoko, and if I followed it for 20 minutes I would reach Ami
Hostel. No
wonder it was such a quiet place, if it was that deep in the mountains!
The bus pulled out with about 20 passengers aboard, following the
Kamo River through the north end of Kyoto. The tightly packed city
streets gave way to more sparse housing, then fields and vacant land.
Black tile roofs and vinyl-sided greenhouses caught the early autumn
sun and sent it back with a glare. When the bus entered the canyon,
the driver began hauling the steering wheel this way and that to follow
the twists and curves of the road, and I began to feel queasy. I could
still taste my morning coffee. By the time the number of curves began
to decrease to the point where I felt some relief, the bus plunged into a
chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way
they towered over the road, blocking out the sun and covering
everything in gloomy shadows. The breeze flowing into the bus's open
windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin.
The valley road hugged the river bank, continuing so long through the
trees it began to seem as if the whole world had been buried for ever
in cedar forest - at which point the forest ended, and we came to an
open basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Broad, green farmland
spread out in all directions, and the river by the road looked bright and
clear. A single thread of white smoke rose in the distance. Some
houses had laundry drying in the sun, and dogs were howling. Each
farmhouse had firewood out front piled up to the eaves, usually with a
cat resting somewhere on the pile. The road was lined with such
houses for a time, but I saw not a single person.
The scenery repeated this pattern any number of times. The bus would
enter cedar forest, come out to a village, then go back into forest. It
would stop at a village to let people off, but no one ever got on. Forty
minutes after leaving the city, the bus reached a mountain pass with a
wide-open view. The driver stopped the bus and announced that we
would be waiting there for five or six minutes: people could step down
from the bus if they wished. There were only four passengers left now,
including me. We all got out and stretched or smoked and looked
down at the panorama of Kyoto far below. The driver went off to one
side for a pee. A suntanned man in his early fifties who had boarded
the bus with a big, rope-tied cardboard carton asked me if I was going
out to hike in the mountains. I said yes to keep things simple.
Eventually another bus came climbing up from the other side of the
pass and stopped next to ours. The driver got out, had a short talk with
our driver, and the two men climbed back into their buses. The four of
us returned to our seats, and the buses pul led out in opposite
directions. It was not immediately clear to me why our bus had had to
wait for the other one, but a short way down the other side of the
mountain the road narrowed suddenly. Two big buses could never
have passed each other on the road, and in fact passing ordinary cars
coming in the other direction required a good deal of manoeuvring,
with one or the other vehicle having to back up and squeeze into the
overhang of a curve.
The villages along the road were far smaller now, and the level areas
under cultivation even narrower. The mountain was steeper, its walls
pressed closer to the bus windows. They seemed to have just as many
dogs as the other places, though, and the arrival of the bus would set
off a howling competition.
At the stop where I got off, there was nothing - no houses, no fields,
just the bus stop sign, a little stream, and the trail opening. I slung my
rucksack over my shoulder and started up the track. The stream ran
along the left side of the trail, and a forest of deciduous trees lined the
right. I had been climbing
the gentle slope for some 15 minutes when I came to a road leading
into the woods on the right, the opening barely wide enough to
accommodate a car. AMI HOSTEL PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING
read the sign by the road.
Sharply etched tyre tracks ran up the road through the trees. The
occasional flapping of wings echoed in the woods. The sound came
through with strange clarity, as if amplified above the other voices of
the forest. Once, from far away, I heard what might have been a rifle
shot, but it was a small and muffled sound, as though it had passed
through several filters.
Beyond the woods I came to a white stone wall. It was no higher than
my own height and, lacking additional barriers on top, would have
been easy for me to scale. The black iron gate looked sturdy enough,
but it was wide open, and there was no one manning the guardhouse.
Another sign like the last one stood by the gate: AMI HOSTEL
PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING. A few clues suggested the guard had
been there until some moments before: the ashtray held three butt-
ends, a tea cup stood there half empty, a transistor radio sat on a shelf,
and the clock on the wall ticked off the time with a dry sound. I waited
a while for the person to come back, but when that showed no sign of
happening, I gave a few pushes to something that looked as if it might
be a bell. The area just inside the gate was a car park. In it stood a
mini-bus, a four-wheel drive Land Cruiser, and a dark blue Volvo.
The car park could have held 30 cars, but only those three were parked
there now.
Two or three minutes went by, and then a gatekeeper in a navy-blue
uniform came down the forest road on a yellow bicycle. He was a tall
man in his early sixties with receding hair. He leaned the yellow bike
against the guardhouse and said, "I'm very sorry to have kept you
waiting," though he didn't sound sorry at all. The number 32 was
painted in white on the bike's mudguard. When I gave him my name,
he picked up the phone and repeated it twice to someone on the other
end, replied "Yes, uh-huh, I see" to the other person, then hung up.
"Go to the main building, please, and ask for Doctor Ishida," he said
to me. "You take this road through the trees to a roundabout. Then
take your second left - got that? You r second left - from the
roundabout. You'll see an old house. Turn right and go through
another bunch of trees to a concrete building. That's the main building.
It's easy, just watch for the signs."
I took the second left from the roundabout as instructed, and where
that path ended I came to an interesting old building that obviously
had been someone's country house once. It had a manicured garden
with well-shaped rocks and a stone lantern. It must have been a
country estate. Turning right through the trees, I saw a three-storey
concrete building. It stood in a hollowed-out area, and so there was
nothing overwhelming about its three storeys. It was simple in design
and gave a strong impression of cleanliness.
The entrance was on the second floor. I climbed the stairs and went in
through a big glass door to find a young woman in a red dress at the
reception desk. I gave her my name and said I had been instructed to
ask for Doctor Ishida. She smiled and gestured towards a brown sofa,
suggesting in low tones that I wait there for the doctor to come. Then
she dialled a number. I lowered my rucksack from my back, sank
down into the deep cushions of the sofa, and surveyed the place. It
was a clean, pleasant lobby, with ornamental potted plants, tasteful
abstract paintings, and a polished floor. As I waited, I kept my eyes on
the floor's reflection of my shoes.
At one point the receptionist assured me, "The doctor will behere
soon." I nodded. What an incredibly quiet place! There were no
sounds of any kind. It was as though everyone were taking a siesta.
People, animals, insects, plants must all be sound asleep, I thought, it
was such a quiet afternoon.
Before long, though, I heard the soft padding of rubber soles, and a
mature, bristly-haired woman appeared. She swept across the lobby,
sat down next to me, crossed her legs and took my hand. Instead of
just shaking it, she turned my hand over, examining it front and back.
"You haven't played a musical instrument, at least not for some years
now, have you?" were the first words out of her mouth.
"No," I said, taken aback. "You're right."
"I can tell from your hands," she said with a smile.
There was something almost mysterious about this woman. Her face
had lots of wrinkles. These were the first thing to catch your eye, but
they didn't make her look old. Instead, they emphasized a certain
youthfulness in her that transcended age. The wrinkles belonged
where they were, as if they had been part of her face since birth. When
she smiled, the wrinkles smiled with her; when she frowned, the
wrinkles frowned, too. And when she was neither smiling nor frown-
ing, the wrinkles lay scattered over her face in a strangely warm,
ironic way. Here was a woman in her late thirties who seemed not
merely a nice person but whose niceness drew you to her. I liked her
from the moment I saw her.
Wildly chopped, her hair stuck out in patches and the fringe lay
crooked against her forehead, but the style suited her perfectly. She
wore a blue work shirt over a white T-shirt, baggy, cream-coloured
cotton trousers, and tennis shoes. Long and slim, she had almost no
breasts. Her lips moved constantly to one side in a kind of ironic curl,
and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes moved in tiny twitches. She
looked like a kindly, skilled, but somewhat world-weary female
carpenter.
Chin drawn in and lips curled, she took some time to look me over
from head to toe. I imagined that any minute now she was going to
whip out her tape measure and start measuring me everywhere.
"Can you play an instrument?" she asked. "Sorry, no," I said.
"Too bad," she said. "It would have been fun."
"I suppose so," I said. Why all this talk about musical instruments?
She took a pack of Seven Stars from her breast pocket, put one
between her lips, lit it with a lighter and began puffing away with
obvious pleasure.
"It crossed my mind that I should tell you about this place, Mr. -
Watanabe, wasn't it? - before you see Naoko. So I arranged for the
two of us to have this little talk. Ami Hostel is kind of unusual - you
might find it a little confusing without any background knowledge.
I'm right, aren't I, in supposing that you don't know anything about
this place?"
"Almost nothing."
"Well, then, first of all - " she began, then snapped her fingers. "Come
to think of it, have you had lunch? I'll bet you're hungry."
"You're right, I am."
"Come with me, then. We can talk over food in the dining hall.
Lunchtime is over, but if we go now they can still make us
something."
She took the lead, hurrying down a corridor and a flight of stairs to the
first-floor dining hall. It was a large room, with enough space for
perhaps 200 people, but only half was in use, the other half partitioned
off, like a resort hotel out of season. The day's menu listed a potato
stew with noodles, salad, orange juice and bread. The vegetables
turned out to be as delicious as Naoko had said in her letter, and I
finished everything on my plate.
"You obviously enjoy your food!" said my female companion.
"It's wonderful," I said. "Plus, I've hardly eaten anything all day."
"You're welcome to mine if you like. I'm full. Here, go ahead."
"I will, if you really don't want it."
"I've got a small stomach. It doesn't hold much. I make up for what
I'm missing with cigarettes." She lit another Seven Star. "Oh, by the
way, you can call me Reiko. Everybody does."
Reiko seemed to derive great pleasure from watching me while I ate
the potato stew she had hardly touched and munched on her bread.
"Are you Naoko's doctor?" I asked.
"Me?! Naoko's doctor?!" She screwed up her face. "What makes you
think I'm a doctor?"
"They told me to ask for Doctor Ishida."
"Oh, I get it. No no no, I teach music here. It's a kind of therapy for
some patients, so for fun they call me "The Music Doctor' and
sometimes "Doctor Ishida'. But I'm just another patient. I've been here
seven years. I work as a music teacher and help out in the office, so
it's hard to tell any more whether I'm a patient or staff. Didn't Naoko
tell you about me?"
I shook my head.
"That's strange," said Reiko. "I'm Naoko's room-mate. I like living
with her. We talk about all kinds of things. Including you."
"What about me?"

"Well, first I have to tell you about this place," said Reiko, ignoring
my question. "The first thing you ought to know is that this is no
ordinary "hospital'. It's not so much for treatment as for
convalescence. We do have a few doctors, of course, and they give
hourly sessions, but they're just checking people's conditions, taking
their temperature and things like that, not administering "treatments'
as in an ordinary hospital. There are no bars on the windows here, and
the gate is always wide open. People enter and leave voluntarily. You
have to be suited to that kind of convalescence to be admitted here in
the first place. In some cases, people who need specialized therapy
end up going to a specialized hospital. OK so far?"
"I think so," I said. "But what does this "convalescence' consist of?
Can you give me a concrete example?"
Reiko exhaled a cloud of smoke and drank what was left of her orange
juice. "Just living here is the convalescence," she said. A regular
routine, exercise, isolation from the outside world, clean air, quiet.
Our farmland makes us practically self-sufficient; there's no TV or
radio. We're like one of those commune places you hear so much
about. Of course, one thing different from a commune is that it costs a
bundle to get in here."
A bundle?"
"Well, it's not ridiculously expensive, but it's not cheap. Just look at
these facilities. We've got a lot of land here, a few patients, a big staff,
and in my case I've been here a long time. True, I'm almost staff
myself so I get concessions, but still ... Now, how about a cup of
coffee?"
I said I'd like some. She stubbed out her cigarette and went over to the
counter, where she poured two cups of coffee from a warm pot and
brought them back to where we were sitting. She put sugar in hers,
stirred it, frowned, and took
a sip.
-You know," she said, "this sanatorium is not a profit making
enterprise, so it can keep going without charging as much as it might
have to otherwise. The land was a donation. They created a
corporation for the purpose. The whole place used to be the donor's
summer home about 20 years ago. You saw the old house, I'm sure?"
I said I had.
"That used to be the only building on the property. It's where they did
group therapy. That's how it all got started. The donor's son had a
tendency towards mental illness and a specialist recommended group
therapy for him. The doctor's theory was that if you could have a
group of patients living out in the country, helping each other with
physical labour and have a doctor for advice and check-ups, you could
cure certain kinds of sickness. They tried it, and the operation grew
and was incorporated, and they put more land under cultivation, and
put up the main building five years ago."
"Meaning, the therapy worked."
"Well, not for everything. Lots of people don't get better. But also a
lot of people who couldn't be helped anywhere else managed a
complete recovery here. The best thing about this place is he wayt
everybody helps everybody else. Everybody knows they're flawed in
some way, and so they try to help each other. Other places don't work
that way, unfortunately. Doctors are doctors and patients are patients:
the patient looks for help to the doctor and the doctor gives his help to
the patient. Here, though, we all help each other. We're all each other's
mirrors, and the doctors are part of us. They watch us from the
sidelines and they slip in to help us if they see we need something, but
it sometimes happens that we help them. Sometimes we're better at
something than they are. For example, I'm teaching one doctor to play
the piano and another patient is teaching a nurse French. That kind of
thing. Patients with problems like ours are often blessed with special
abilities. So everyone here is equal - patients, staff - and you. You're
one of us while you're in here, so I help you and you help me." Reiko
smiled, gently flexing every wrinkle on her face. "You help Naoko
and Naoko helps you."
"What should I do, then? Give me an example."
"First you decide that you want to help and that you need to be helped
by the other person. Then you are totally honest. You will not lie, you
will not gloss over anything, you will not cover up anything that might
prove embarrassing to you. That's all there is to it."
"I'll try," I said. "But tell me, Reiko, why have you been in here for
seven years? Talking with you like this, I can't believe there's anything
wrong with you."
"Not while the sun's up," she said with a sombre look. "But when
night comes, I start drooling and rolling on the floor." "Really?"
"Don't be ridiculous, I'm kidding," she said, shaking her head with a
look of disgust. "I'm completely well - for now, at least. I stay here
because I enjoy helping other people get well, teaching music,
growing vegetables. I like it here. We're all more or less friends.
Compared to that, what have I got in the outside world? I'm 38, going
on 40. I'm not like Naoko. There's nobody waiting for me to get out,
no family to take me back. I don't have any work to speak of, and
almost no friends. And after seven years, I don't know what's going on
out there. Oh, I'll read a paper in the library every once in a while, but
I haven't set foot outside this property all that time. I wouldn't know
what to do if I left."
"But maybe a new world would open up for you," I said. "It's worth a
try, don't you think?"
"Hmm, you may be right," she said, turning her cigarette lighter over
and over in her hand. "But I've got my own set of problems. I can tell
you all about them sometime if you like."
I nodded in response. "And Naoko," I said, "is she any better?"
"Hmm, we think so. She was pretty confused at first and we had our
doubts for a while, but she's calmed down now and improved to the
point where she's able to express herself verbally. She's definitely
heading in the right direction. But she should have received treatment
a lot earlier. Her symptoms were already apparent from the time that
boyfriend of hers, Kizuki, killed himself. Her family should have seen
it, and she herself should have realized that something was wrong. Of
course, things weren't right at home, either ..."
"They weren't?" I shot back.
"You didn't know?" Reiko seemed more surprised than I was.
I shook my head.
"I'd better let Naoko tell you about that herself. She's ready for some
honest talk with you." Reiko gave her coffee another stir and took a
sip. "There's one more thing you need to know," she said. "According
to the rules here, you and Naoko will not be allowed to be alone
together. Visitors can't be alone with patients. An observer always has
to be present - which in this case means me. I'm sorry, but you'll just
have to put up with me. OK?"
"OK," I said with a smile.
"But still," she said, "the two of you can talk about anything you'd
like. Forget I'm there. I know pretty much everything there is to know
about you and Naoko."
"Everything?"
"Pretty much. We have these group sessions, you know. So we learn a
lot about each other. Plus Naoko and I talk about everything. We don't
have many secrets here."
I looked at Reiko as I drank my coffee. "To tell you the truth," I said,
"I'm confused. I still don't know whether what I did to Naoko in
Tokyo was the right thing to do or not. I've been thinking about it this
whole time, but I still don't know."
"And neither do I," said Reiko. "And neither does Naoko. That's
something the two of you will have to decide for yourselves. See what
I mean? Whatever happened, the two of you can turn it in the right
direction - if you can reach some kind of mutual understanding.
Maybe, once you've got that taken care of, you can go back and think
about whether what happened was the right thing or not. What do you
say?"
I nodded.
"I think the three of us can help each other - you and Naoko and I - if
we really want to, and if we're really honest. It can be incredibly
effective when three people work at it like that. How long can you
stay?"
"Well, I'd like to get back to Tokyo by early evening the day after
tomorrow. I have to work, and I've got a German exam on Thursday."
"Good," she said. "So you can stay with us. That way it won't cost you
anything and you can talk without having to worry about the time."
"With "us'?" I asked.
"Naoko and me, of course," said Reiko. "We have a separate bedroom,
and there's a sofa bed in the living room, so you'll be able to sleep
fine. Don't worry."
,,Do they allow that?" I asked. "Can a male visitor stay in a Woman's
room?"
"I don't suppose you're going to come in and rape us in the middle of
the night?"
"Don't be silly."
"So there's no problem, then. Stay in our place and we can have some
nice, long talks. That would be the best thing. Then we can really
understand each other. And I can play my guitar for you. I'm pretty
good, you know."
"Are you sure I'm not going to be in the way?"
Reiko put her third Seven Star between her lips and lit it after
screwing up the corner of her mouth.
"Naoko and I have already discussed this. The two of us together are
giving you a personal invitation to stay with us. Don't you think you
should just politely accept?"
"Of course, I'll be glad to."
Reiko deepened the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and looked at
me for a time. "You've got this funny way of talking," she said. "Don't
tell me you're trying to imitate that boy in Catcher in the Rye?"
"No way!" I said with a smile.
Reiko smiled too, cigarette in mouth. "You are a good person, though.
I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after
seven years of watching people come and go here: there are people
who can open their hearts and people who can't. You're one of the
ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to."
"What happens when people open their hearts?"
Reiko clasped her hands together on the table, cigarette dangling from
her lips. She was enjoying this. "They get better," she said. Ash
dropped onto the table, but she seemed not to notice.
Reiko and I left the main building, crossed a hill, and passed by a
pool, some tennis courts, and a basketball court. Two men - one thin
and middle-aged, the other young and fat were on a tennis court. Both
used their racquets well, but to me the game they were playing could
not have been tennis. It seemed as if the two of them had a special
interest in the bounce of tennis balls and were doing research in that
area. They slammed the ball back and forth with a kind of strange
concentration. Both were drenched in sweat. The young man, in the
end of the court closer to us, noticed Reiko and carne over. They
exchanged a few words, smiling. Near the court, a man with no
expression on his face was using a large mower to cut the grass.
Moving on, we came to a patch of woods where some 15 or 20 neat
little cottages stood at some distance from each other. The same kind
of yellow bike the gatekeeper had been riding was parked at the
entrance to almost every house. "Staff members and their families live
here," said Reiko.
"We have just about everything we need without going to the city,"
she said as we walked along. "Where food is concerned, as I said
before, we're practically self-sufficient. We get eggs from our own
chicken coop. We have books and records and exercise facilities, our
own convenience store, and every week barbers and beauticians come
to visit. We even have films at weekends. Anything special we need
we can ask a staff member to buy for us in town. Clothing we order
from catalogues. Living here is no problem."
"But you can't go into town?"
"No, that we can't do. Of course if there's something special, like we
have to go to the dentist or something, that's another matter, but as a
rule we can't go into town. Each person is completely free to leave this
place, but once you've left you can't come back. You burn your
bridges. You can't go off for a couple of days in town and expect to
come back. It only stands to reason, though. Everybody would be
coming and going."
Beyond the trees we came to a gentle slope along which, at irregular
intervals, was a row of two-storey wooden houses that had something
odd about them. What made them look strange it's hard to say, but that
was the first thing I felt when I saw them. My reaction was a lot like
what we feel when we see unreality painted in a pleasant way. It
occurred to me that this was what you might get if Walt Disney did an
animated version of a Munch painting. All the houses were exactly the
same shape and colour, nearly cubical, in perfect left -to-right
symmetry, with big front doors and lots of windows. The road twisted
its way among them like the artificial practice course of a driving
school. There was a well-manicured flowering shrubbery in front of
every house. The place was deserted, and curtains covered all the
windows.
"This is called Area C. The women live here. Us! There are ten
houses, each containing four units, two people per unit. That's 80
people all together, but at the moment there are only 32 of us."
"Quiet, isn't it?"
"Well, there's nobody here now," Reiko said. "I've been given special
permission to move around freely like this, but everyone else is off
pursuing their individual schedules. Some are exercising, some are
gardening, some are in group therapy, some are out gathering wild
plants. Each person makes up his or her own schedule. Let's see,
what's Naoko doing now? I think she was supposed to be working on
new paint and wallpaper. I forget. There are a few jobs like that that
don't finish till five."
Reiko walked into the building marked "C-7", climbed the stairs at the
far end of the hallway, and opened the door on the right, which was
unlocked. She showed me around the flat, a pleasant, if plain, four-
room unit: living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. It had no extra
furniture or unnecessary decoration, but neither was the place severe.
There was nothing special about it, but being there was kind of like
being with Reiko: you could relax and let the tension leave your body.
The living room had a sofa, a table, and a rocking chair. Another table
stood in the kitchen. Both tables had large ashtrays on them. The
bedroom had two beds, two desks and a closet. A small night table
stood between the beds with a reading lamp on top and a paperback
turned face down. The kitchen had a small electric cooker that
matched the fridge and was equipped for simple cooking.
"No bath, just a shower, but it's pretty impressive, wouldn't you say?
Bath and laundry facilities are communal."
"It's almost too impressive. My dorm room has a ceiling and a
window."
"Ah, but you haven't seen the winters here," said Reiko, touching my
back to guide me to the sofa and sitting down next to me. "They're
long and harsh. Nothing but snow and snow and more snow
everywhere you look. It gets damp and chills you to the bone. We
spend the winter shovelling snow. Mostly you stay inside where it's
warm and listen to music or talk or knit. If you didn't have this much
space, you'd suffocate. You'll see if you come here in the winter."
Reiko gave a deep sigh as if picturing wintertime, then folded her
hands on her knees.
"This will be your bed," she said, patting the sofa. "We'll
sleep in the bedroom, and you'll sleep here. You should be all right,
don't you think?"
"I'm sure I'll be fine."
"So, that settles it," said Reiko. "We'll be back around five. Naoko and
I both have things to do until then. Do you mind staying here alone?"
"Not at all. I'll study my German."
When Reiko left, I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. I lay
there steeping myself in the silence when, out of nowhere, I thought of
the time Kizuki and I went on a motorbike ride. That had been
autumn, too, I realized. Autumn how many years ago? Yes, four. I
recalled the smell of Kizuki's leather jacket and the racket made by
that red Yamaha 125cc bike. We went to a spot far down the coast,
and came back the same evening, exhausted. Nothing special
happened on the way, but I remembered it well. The sharp autumn
wind moaned in my ears, and looking up at the sky, my hands
clutching Kizuki's jacket, I felt as if I might be swept into outer space.
I lay there for a long time, letting my mind wander from one memory
to another. For some strange reason, lying in this room seemed to
bring back old memories that I had rarely if ever recalled before.
Some of them were pleasant, but others carried a trace of sadness.
How long did this go on? I was so immersed in that torrent of memory
(and it was a torrent, like a spring gushing out of the rocks) that I
failed to notice Naoko quietly open the door and come in. I opened my
eyes, and there she was. I raised my head and looked into her eyes for
a time. She was sitting on the arm of the sofa, looking at me. At first I
thought she might be an image spun into existence by my own
memories. But it was the real Naoko.
"Sleeping?" she whispered.
"No," I said, "just thinking." I sat up and asked, "How are you?"
"I'm good," she said with a little smile like a pale, distant scene. "I
don't have much time, though. I'm not supposed to be here now. I just
got away for a minute, and I have to go back right away. Don't you
hate my hair?"
"Not at all," I said. "It's cute." Her hair was in a simple schoolgirl
style, with one side held in place with a hairslide the way she used to
have it in the old days. It suited her very well, as if she had always
worn it that way. She looked like one of the beautiful little girls you
see in woodblock prints from the Middle Ages.
"It's such a pain, I have Reiko cut it for me. Do you really think it's
cute?"
"Really."
"My mother hates it." She opened the hairslide, let the hair hang
down, smoothed it with her fingers, and closed the hairslide again. It
was shaped like a butterfly.
"I wanted to see you alone before the three of us get together. Not that
I had anything special to say. I just wanted to see your face and get
used to having you here. Otherwise, I'd have trouble getting to know
you again. I'm so bad with people."
"Well?" I asked. "Is it working?"
"A little," she said, touching her hairslide again. "But time's up. I've
got to go."
I nodded.
"Toru," she began, "I really want to thank you for coming to see me. It
makes me very happy. But if being here is any kind of burden to you,
you shouldn't hesitate to tell me so. This is a special place, and it has a
special system, and some people can't get into it. So if you feel like
that, please be honest and let me know. I won't be crushed. We're
honest with each other here. We tell each other all kinds of things with
complete honesty."
"I'll tell you," I said. "I'll be honest."
Naoko sat down and leaned against me on the sofa. When I put my
arm around her, she rested her head on my shoulder and pressed her
face to my neck. She stayed like that for a time, almost as if she were
taking my temperature. Holding her, I felt warm in the chest. After a
short while, she stood up without saying a word and went out through
the door as quietly as she had come in.
With Naoko gone, I went to sleep on the sofa. I hadn't intended to do
so, but I fell into the kind of deep sleep I had not had for a long time,
filled with a sense of Naoko's presence. In the kitchen were the dishes
Naoko used, in the bathroom was the toothbrush Naoko used, and in
the bedroom was the bed in which Naoko slept. Sleeping soundly in
this flat of hers, I wrung the fatigue from every cell of my body, drop
by drop. I dreamed of a butterfly dancing in the half-light.
When I awoke again, the hands of my watch were pointing to 4.35.
The light had changed, the wind haddied, the shapes of the clouds
were different. I had sweated in my sleep, so I dried my face with a
small towel from my rucksack and put on a fresh vest. Going to the
kitchen, I drank some water and stood there looking through the
window over the sink. I was facing a window in the building opposite,
on the inside of which hung several paper cut-outs - a bird, a cloud, a
cow, a cat, all in skilful silhouette and joined together. As before,
there was no sign of anyone about, and there were no sounds of any
kind. I felt as if I were living alone in an extremely well-cared-for
ruin.
People started coming back to Area C a little after five Looking out of
the kitchen window, I saw three women passing below. All wore hats
that prevented me from telling their ages, but judging from their
voices, they were not very young. Shortly after they had disappeared
around a corner, four more women appeared from the same direction
and, like the first group, disappeared around the same corner. An
evening mood hung over everything. From the living room window I
could see trees and a line of hills. Above the ridge floated a border of
pale sunlight.
Naoko and Reiko came back together at 5.30. Naoko and I exchanged
proper greetings as if meeting for the first time. She seemed truly
embarrassed. Reiko noticed the book I had been reading and asked
what it was. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I told her.
"How could you bring a book like that to a place like this?" she
demanded. She was right, of course.
Reiko then made coffee for the three of us. I told Naoko about Storm
Trooper's sudden disappearance and about the last day I saw him,
when he gave me the firefly.
"I'm so sorry he's gone," she said. "I wanted to hear more stories about
him." Reiko asked who Storm Trooper was, so I told her about his
antics and got a big laugh from her. The world was at peace and filled
with laughter as long as Storm Trooper stories were being told.
At six we went to the dining hall in the main building for supper.
Naoko and I had fried fish with green salad, boiled vegetables, rice
and miso soup. Reiko limited herself to pasta salad and coffee,
followed by another cigarette.
"You don't need to eat so much as you get older," she said by way of
explanation.
Some 20 other people were there in the dining hall. A few newcomers
arrived as we ate, meanwhile some others left. Aside from the variety
in people's ages, the scene looked pretty much like that of the dining
hall in my dormitory. Where it differed was the uniform volume at
which people conversed. There were no loud voices and no whispers,
no one laughing out loud or crying out in shock, no one yelling with
exaggerated gestures, nothing but quiet conversations, all carrying on
at the same level. People were eating in groups of three to five, each
with a single speaker, to whom the others would listen with nods and
grunts of interest, and when that person had finished speaking, the
next would take up the conversation. I could not tell what they were
saying, but the way they said it reminded me of the strange tennis
game I had seen at noon. I wondered if Naoko spoke like this when
she was with them and, strangely enough, I felt a twinge of loneliness
mixed with jealousy.
At the table behind me, a balding man in white with the authentic air
of a doctor was holding forth to a nervouslooking young man in
glasses and a squirrel-faced woman of middle age on the effects of
weightlessness on the secretion of gastric juices. The two listened with
an occasional "My goodness" or "Really?" but the longer I listened to
the balding man's style of speaking, the less certain I became that,
even in his white coat, he was really a doctor.
No one in the dining hall paid me any special attention. No one stared
or even seemed to notice I was there. My presence must have been an
entirely natural event.
Just once, though, the man in white spun around and asked me, "How
long will you be staying?"
"Two nights," I said. "I'll be leaving on Wednesday."
"It's nice here this time of year, isn't it? But come again in winter. It's
really nice when everything's white."
"Naoko may be out of here by the time it snows," said Reiko to the
man.
"True, but still, the winter's really nice," he repeated with a sombre
expression. I felt increasingly unsure as to whether or not he was a
doctor.
"What do you people talk about?" I asked Reiko, who seemed to not
quite follow me.
"What do we talk about? Just ordinary things. What happened that
day, or books we've read, or tomorrow's weather, you know. Don't tell
me you're wondering if people jump to their feet and shout stuff like:
"It'll rain tomorrow if a polar bear eats the stars tonight!"'
"No, no, of course not," I said. "I was just wondering what all these
quiet conversations were about."
"It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly," said Naoko. She made a
neat pile of fish bones at the edge of her plate and dabbed at her
mouth with a handkerchief. "There's no need to raise your voice here.
You don't have to convince anybody of anything, and you don't have
to attract anyone's attention."
"I guess not," I said, but as I ate my meal in those quiet surroundings,
I was surprised to find myself missing the hum of people. I wanted to
hear laughter and people shouting for no reason and saying overblown
things. That was just the kind of noise I had become weary of in
recent months, but sitting here eating fish in this unnaturally quiet
room, I couldn't relax. The dining hall had all the atmosphere of a
specialized -machine-tool trade fair. People with a strong interest in a
specialist field came together in a speci fic place and exchanged
information understood only by themselves.
Back in the room after supper, Naoko and Reiko announced that they
would be going to the Area C communal bath and that if I didn't mind
having just a shower, I could use the one in their bathroom. I would do
that, I said, and after they were gone I undressed, showered, and
washed my hair. I found a Bill Evans album in the bookcase and was
listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the
record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the
night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had beenonly six
months ago, but it felt like something from a much remoter past.
Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often - too
often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.
The moon was so bright, I turned the lights off and stretched out on
the sofa to listen to Bill Evans' piano. Streaming in through the
window, the moonlight cast long shadows and splashed the walls with
a touch of diluted Indian ink. I took a thin metal flask from my
rucksack, let my mouth fill with the brandy it contained, allowed the
warmth to move slowly down my throat to my stomach, and from
there felt it spreading to every extremity. After a final sip, I closed the
flask and returned it to my rucksack. Now the moonlight seemed to be
swaying with the music.
Twenty minutes later, Naoko and Reiko came back from the bath.
"Oh! It was so dark here, we thought you had packed your bags and
gone back to Tokyo!" exclaimed Reiko.
"No way," I said. "I hadn't seen such a bright moon for years. I wanted
to look at it with the lights off."
"It's lovely, though," said Naoko. "Reiko, do we still have those
candles from the last power cut?"
"Probably, in a kitchen drawer."


Naoko brought a large, white candle from the kitchen. I lit it, dripped
a little wax into a plate, and stood it up. Reiko used the flame to light a
cigarette. As the three of us sat facing the candle amid these hushed
surroundings, it began to seem as if we were the only ones left on
some far edge of the world. The still shadows of the moonlight and the
swaying shadows of the candlelight met and melded on the white
walls of the flat. Naoko and I sat next to each other on the sofa, and
Reiko settled into the rocking chair facing us.
"How about some wine?" Reiko asked me.
"You're allowed to drink?" I asked with some surprise.
"Well, not really," said Reiko, scratching an earlobe with a hint of
embarrassment. "But they pretty much let it go. If it's just wine or beer
and you don't drink too much. I've got a friend on the staff who buys
me a little now and then."
"We have our drinking parties," said Naoko with a mischievous air.
"Just the two of us."
"That's nice," I said.
Reiko took a bottle of white wine from the fridge, opened it with a
corkscrew and brought three glasses. The wine had a clear, delicious
flavour that seemed almost homemade. When the record ended, Reiko
brought out a guitar from under her bed, and after tuning it with a look
of fondness for the instrument, she began to play a slow Bach fugue.
She missed her fingering every now and then, but it was real Bach,
with real feeling - warm, intimate, and filled with the joy of
performance.
"I started playing the guitar here," said Reiko. "There are no pianos in
the rooms, of course. I'm self-taught, and I don't have guitar hands, so
I'll never get very good, but I really love the instrument. It's small and
simple and easy, kind of like a warm, little room."
She played one more short Bach piece, something from a suite. Eyes
on the candle flame, sipping wine, listening to Reiko's Bach, I felt the
tension inside me slipping away. When Reiko ended the Bach, Naoko
asked her to play a Beatles song.
"Request time," said Reiko, winking at me. "She makes me play
Beatles every day, like I'm her music slave."
Despite her protest, Reiko played a fine "Michelle".
"That's a good one," she said. "I really like that song." She took a sip
of wine and puffed her cigarette. "It makes me feel like I'm in a big
meadow in a soft rain."
Then she played "Nowhere Man" and "Julia". Now and then as she
played, she would close her eyes and shake her head. Afterwards she
would return to the wine and the cigarette.
"Play "Norwegian Wood'," said Naoko.
Reiko brought a porcelain beckoning cat from the kitchen. It was a
coin bank, and Naoko dropped a ?100 piece from her purse into its
slot.
"What's this all about?" I asked.
"It's a rule," said Naoko. "When I request "Norwegian Wood,' I have
to put ?100 into the bank. It's my favourite, so I make a point of
paying for it. I make a request when I really want to hear it."
"And that way I get my cigarette money!" said Reiko.
Reiko gave her fingers a good flexing and then played "Norwegian
Wood". Again she played with real feeling, but never allowed t to i
become sentimental. I took ?100 coin from my pocket and dropped it
into the bank.
"Thank you," said Reiko with a sweet smile.
"That song can make me feel so sad," said Naoko. "I don't know, I
guess I imagine myself wandering in a deep wood. I'm all alone and
it's cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me. That's why Reiko
never plays it unless I request it."
Sounds like Casablanca!" Reiko said with a laugh.
She followed "Norwegian Wood" with a few bossa novas while I kept
my eyes on Naoko. As she had said in her letter, she looked healthier
than before, suntanned, her body firm from exercise and outdoor
work. Her eyes were the same deep clear pools they had always been,
and her small lips still trembled shyly, but overall her beauty had
begun to change to that of a mature woman. Almost gone now was the
sharp edge - the chilling sharpness of a thin blade - that could be
glimpsed in the shadows of her beauty, in place of which there now
hovered a uniquely soothing, quiet calm. I felt moved by this new,
gentle beauty of hers, and amazed to think that a woman could change
so much in the course of half a year. I felt as drawn to her as ever,
perhaps more than before, but the thought of what she had lost in the
meantime also gave me cause for regret. Never again would she have
that self-centred beauty that seems to take its own, independent course
in adolescent girls and no one else.
Naoko said she wanted to hear about how I was spending my days. I
talked about the student strike and Nagasawa. This was the first time I
had ever said anything about him to her. I found it challenging to give
her an accurate account of his odd humanity, his unique philosophy,
and his uncentred morality, but Naoko seemed finally to grasp what I
was trying to tell her. I hid the fact that I went out hunting girls with
him, revealing only that the one person in the dorm I spent any real
time with was this unusual guy. All the while, Reiko went through
another practice of the Bach fugue she had played before, taking
occasional breaks for wine and cigarettes.
"He sounds like a strange person," said Naoko. "He is strange," I
said. "But you like him?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "I guess I can't say I like him. Nagasawa is
beyond liking or not liking. He doesn't try to be liked. In that sense,
he's a very honest guy, stoic even. He doesn't try to fool anybody."
""Stoic' sleeping with all those girls? Now that is weird," said Naoko,
laughing. "How many girls has he slept with?"
"It's probably up to 80 now," I said. "But in his case, the higher the
numbers go, the less each individual act seems to mean. Which is
what I think he's trying to accomplish."
"And you call that "stoic'?"
"For him it is."
Naoko thought about my words for a minute. "I think he's a lot sicker
in the head than I am," she said.
"So do I," I said. "But he can put all of his warped qualities into a
logical system. He's brilliant. If you brought him here, he'd be out in
two days. "Oh, sure, I know all that,' he'd say. "I understand
everything you're doing here.' He's that kind of guy. The kind people
respect."
"I guess I'm the opposite of brilliant," said Naoko. "I don't understand
anything they're doing here - any better than I understand myself."
"It's not because you're not smart," I said. "You're normal. I've got
tons of things I don't understand about myself. We're both normal:
ordinary."
Naoko raised her feet to the edge of the sofa and rested her chin on
her knees. "I want to know more about you," she said.
"I'm just an ordinary guy - ordinary family, ordinary education,
ordinary face, ordinary exam results, ordinary thoughts in my head."
"You're such a big Scott Fitzgerald fan ... wasn't he the one who said
you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinary man? You
lent me the book!" said Naoko with a mischievous smile.
"True," I said. "But this is no affectation. I really, truly believe deep
down that I'm an ordinary person. Can you find something in me that's
not ordinary?"
"Of course I can!" said Naoko with a hint of impatience. "Don't you
get it? Why do you think I slept with you? Because I was so drunk I
would have slept with anyone?"
"No, of course I don't think that," I said.
Naoko remained silent for a long time, staring at her toes. At a loss for
words, I took another sip of wine.
"How many girls have you slept with, Toru?" Naoko asked in a tiny
voice as if the thought had just crossed her mind.
"Eight or nine," I answered truthfully.
Reiko plopped the guitar into her lap. "You're not even 20 years old!"
she said. "What kind of life are you leading?"
Naoko kept silent and watched me with those clear eyes of hers. I told
Reiko about the first girl I'd slept with and how we had broken up. I
had found it impossible to love her, I explained. I went on to tell her
about my sleeping with one girl after another under Nagasawa's
tutelage.
"I'm not trying to make excuses, but I was in pain," I said to Naoko.
"Here I was, seeing you almost every week, and talking with you, and
knowing that the only one in your heart was Kizuki. It hurt. It really
hurt. And I think that's why I slept with girls I didn't know."
Naoko shook her head for a few moments, and then she raised her face
to look at me. "You asked me that time why I had never slept with
Kizuki, didn't you? Do you still want to know?"
"I suppose it's something I really ought to know," I said.
"I think so, too," said Naoko. "The dead will always be dead, but we
have to go on living."
I nodded. Reiko played the same difficult passage over and over,
trying to get it right.
"I was ready to sleep with him," said Naoko, unclasping her hairslide
and letting her hair down. She toyed with the butterfly shape in her
hands. "And of course he wanted to sleep with me. So we tried. We
tried a lot. But it never worked. We couldn't do it. I didn't know why
then, and I still don't know why. I loved him, and I wasn't worried
about losing my virginity. I would have been glad to do anything he
wanted. But it never worked."
Naoko lifted the hair she had let down and fastened it with the slide.
"I couldn't get wet," she said in a tiny voice. "I never opened to him.
So it always hurt. I was just too dry, it hurt too much. We tried
everything we could think of - creams and things - but still it hurt me.
So I used my fingers, or my lips. I would always do it for him that
way. You know what I mean."
I nodded in silence.
Naoko cast her gaze through the window at the moon, which looked
bigger and brighter now than it had before. "I never wanted to talk
about any of this," she said. "I wanted to shut it up in my heart. I wish
I still could. But I have to talk about it. I don't know the answer. I
mean, I was plenty wet the time I slept with you, wasn't I?"
"Uh-huh," I said.
"I was wet from the minute you walked into my flat the night of my
twentieth birthday. I wanted you to hold me. I wanted you to take off
my clothes, to touch me all over and enter me. I had never felt like
that before. Why is that? Why do things happen like that? I mean, I
really loved him."
"And not me," I said. "You want to know why you felt that way about
me, even though you didn't love me?"
"I'm sorry," said Naoko. "I don't mean to hurt you, but this much you
have to understand: Kizuki and I had a truly special relationship. We
had been together from the time we were three. It's how we grew up:
always together, always talking, understanding each other perfectly.
The first time we kissed it was in the first year of junior school - was
just wonderful. The first time I had my period, I ran to him and cried
like a baby. We were that close. So after he died, I didn't know how to
relate to other people. I didn't know what it meant to love another
person."
She reached for her wineglass on the table but only managed to knock
it over, spilling wine on the carpet. I crouched down and retrieved the
glass, setting it on the table. Did she want to drink some more? I
asked. Naoko remained silent for a while, then suddenly burst into
tears, trembling all over. Slumping forward, she buried her face in her
hands and sobbed with the same suffocating violence as she had that
night with me. Reiko laid down her guitar and sat by Naoko, caressing
her back. When she put an arm across Naoko's shoulders, she pressed
her face against Reiko's chest like a baby.
"You know," Reiko said to me, "it might be a good idea for you to go
out for a little walk. Maybe 20 minutes. Sorry, but I think that would
help."
I nodded and stood, pulling a jumper on over my shirt. "Thanks for
stepping in," I said to Reiko.
"Don't mention it," she said with a wink. "This is not your fault. Don't
worry, by the time you come back she'll be OK."
My feet carried me down the road, which was illuminated by the
oddly unreal light of the moon, and into the woods.
Beneath that moonlight, all sounds bore a strange reverberation. The
hollow sound of my own footsteps seemed to come from another
direction as though I were hearing someone walking on the bottom of
the sea. Behind me, every now and then, I would hear a crack or a
rustle. A heavy pall hung over the forest, as if the animals of the night
were holding their breath, waiting for me to pass.
Where the road sloped upwards beyond the trees, I sat and looked
towards the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell her room.
All I had to do was find the one window towards the back where a
faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long
time. It made me think of something like the final pulse of a soul's
dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep
it alive. I went on watching it the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny
light on the opposite shore night after night.

When I walked back to the front entrance of the building half an hour
later, I could hear Reiko practising the guitar. I padded up the stairs
and tapped on the door to the flat. Inside there was no sign of Naoko.
Reiko sat alone on the carpet, playing her guitar. She pointed towards
the bedroom door to let me know Naoko was in there. Then she set
down the guitar on the floor and took a seat on the sofa, inviting me to
sit next to her and dividing what wine was left between our two
glasses.
"Naoko is fine," she said, touching my knee. "Don't worry, all she has
to do is rest for a while. She'll calm down. She was just a little worked
up. How about taking a walk with me in the meantime?"
"Good," I said.
Reiko and I ambled down a road illuminated by street lamps. When
we reached the area by the tennis and basketball courts, we sat on a
bench. She picked up a basketball from under the bench and turned it
in her hands. Then she asked me if I played tennis. I knew how to
play, I said, but I was bad at it.
"How about basketball?"
"Not my strongest sport," I said.
"What is your strongest sport?" Reiko asked, wrinkling the corners of
her eyes with a smile. "Aside from sleeping with girls."
"I'm not so good at that, either," I said, stung by her words. "Just
kidding," she said. "Don't get angry. But really, though, what are you
good at?"
"Nothing special. I have things I like to do." "For instance?"
"Hiking. Swimming. Reading."
"You like to do things alone, then?"
"I guess so. I could never get excited about games you play with other
people. I can't get into them. I lose interest."
"Then you have to come here in the winter. We do crosscountry
skiing. I'm sure you'd like that, tramping around in the snow all day,
working up a good sweat." Under the street lamp, Reiko stared at her
right hand as though she were inspecting an antique musical
instrument.
"Does Naoko often get like that?" I asked.
"Every now and then," said Reiko, now looking at her left hand.
"Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But
that's OK. She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being
able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die
inside, then you're in big trouble."
"Did I say something I shouldn't have?"
"Not a thing. Don't worry. Just speak your mind honestly That's the
best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and someone may get upset
the way Naoko did, but in the long run it's for the best. That's what
you should do if you're serious about making Naoko well again. Like I
told you in the beginning, you should think not so much about
wanting to help her as wanting to recover yourself by helping her to
recover. That's the way it's done here. So you have to be honest and
say everything that comes to mind, while you're here at least. Nobody
does that in the outside world, right?"
"I guess not," I said.
"I've seen all kinds of people come and go in my time here," she said,
"maybe too many people. So I can usually tell by looking at a person
whether they're going to get better or not, almost by instinct. But in
Naoko's case, I'm not sure. I have absolutely no idea what's going to
happen to her. For all I know, she could be 100 per cent recovered
next month, or she could go on like this for years. So I really can't tell
you what to do aside from the most generalized kind of advice: to be
honest and help each other."
"What makes Naoko such a hard case for you?"
"Probably because I like her so much. I think my emotions get in the
way and I can't see her clearly. I mean, I really like her. But aside
from that, she has a bundle of different problems that are all tangled
up with each other so that it's hard to unravel a single one. It may take
a very long time to undo them all, or something could trigger them to
come unravelled all at once. It's kind of like that. Which is why I can't
be sure about her."
She picked up the basketball again, twirled it in her hands and
bounced it on the ground.
"The most important thing is not to let yourself get impatient," Reiko
said. "This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get
impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't
get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread
before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a
long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time. Do
you think you can do that?"
"I can try," I said.
"It may take a very long time, you know, and even then she may not
recover completely. Have you thought about that?" I nodded.
"Waiting is hard," she said, bouncing the ball. " Especially for
someone your age. You just sit and wait for her to get better. Without
deadlines or guarantees. Do you think you can do that? Do you love
Naoko that much?"
"I'm not sure," I said honestly. "Like Naoko, I'm not really sure what it
means to love another person. Though she meant it a little differently.
I do want to try my best, though. I have to, or else I won't know where
to go. Like you said before, Naoko and I have to save each other. It's
the only way for either of us to be saved."
"And are you going to go on sleeping with girls you pick up?"
"I don't know what to do about that either," I said. "What do you
think? Should I just keep waiting and masturbating? I'm not in
complete control there, either."
Reiko set the ball on the ground and patted my knee. "Look," she said,
"I'm not telling you to stop sleeping with girls. If you're OK with that,
then it's OK. It's your life after all, it's something you have to decide.
All I'm saying is you shouldn't use yourself up in some unnatural
form. Do you see what I'm getting at? It would be such a waste. The
years 19 and 20 are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and
if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that
age, it will cause you pain when you're older. It's true. So think about
it carefully. If you want to take care of Naoko, take care of yourself,
too."
I said I would think about it.
"I was 20 myself. Once upon a time. Would you believe it?"
"I believe it. Of course."
"Deep down?"
"Deep down," I said with a smile.
"And I was cute, too. Not as cute as Naoko, but pretty damn cute. I
didn't have all these wrinkles."
I said I liked her wrinkles a lot. She thanked me.
"But don't ever tell another woman that you find her wrinkles
attractive," she added. "I like to hear it, but I'm the exception."
"I'll be careful," I said.
She slipped a wallet from her trouser pocket and handed me a photo
from the card-holder. It was a colour snapshot of a cute girl around ten
years old wearing skis and a brightly coloured ski-suit, standing on the
snow smiling sweetly for the camera.
"Isn't she pretty? My daughter," said Reiko. "She sent me this in
January. She's - what? - nine years old now."
"She has your smile," I said, returning the photo. Reiko pocketed the
wallet and, with a sniff, put a cigarette between her lips and lit up.
"I was going to be a concert pianist," she said. "I had talent, and
people recognized it and made a fuss over me while I was growing up.
I won competitions and had top marks in the conservatoire, and I was
all set to study in Germany after graduation. Not a cloud on the
horizon. Everything worked out perfectly, and when it didn't there was
always somebody to fix it. But then one day something happened, and
it all blew apart. I was in my final year at the conservatoire and there
was a fairly important competition coming up. I practised for it
constantly, but all of a sudden the little finger of my left hand stopped
moving. I don't know why, but it just did. I tried massaging it, soaking
it in hot water, taking a few days off from practice: nothing worked.
So then I got scared and went to the doctor's. They tried all kinds of
tests but they couldn't come up with anything. There was nothing
wrong with the finger itself, and the nerves were OK, they said: there
was no reason it s hould stop moving. The problem must be
psychological. So I went to a psychiatrist, but he didn't really know
what was going on, either. Probably pre-competition stress, he said,
and advised me to get away from the piano for a while."
Reiko inhaled deeply and let the smoke out. Then she bent her neck to
the side a few times.
"So I went to recuperate at my grandmother's place on the coast in Izu.
I thought I'd forget about that particular competition and really relax,
spend a couple of weeks away from the piano doing anything I
wanted. But it was hopeless. Piano was all I could think about. Maybe
my finger would never move again. How would I live if that
happened? The same thoughts kept going round and round in my
brain. And no wonder: piano had been my whole life up to that point. I
had started playing when I was four and grew up thinking about the
piano and nothing else. I never did housework so as not to injure my
fingers. People paid attention to me for that one thing: my talent at the
piano. Take the piano away from a girl who's grown up like that, and
what's left? So then, snap! MY mind became a complete jumble. Total
darkness."
She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stamped it out, then bent
her neck a few times again.
"That was the end of my dream of becoming a concert pianist. I spent
two months in the hospital. My finger started to move shortly after I
arrived, so I was able to return to the conservatoire and graduate, but
something inside me had vanished. Some jewel of energy or
something had disappeared - evaporated - from inside my body. The
doctor said I lacked the mental strength to become a professional
pianist and advised me to abandon the idea. So after graduating I took
pupils and taught them at home. But the pain I felt was excruciating. It
was as if my life had ended. Here I was in my early twenties and the
best part of my life was over. Do you see how terrible that would be? I
had such potential, then woke up one day and it had gone. No more
applause, no one would make a big fuss over me, no one would tell
me how wonderful I was. I spent day after day in the house teaching
neighbourhood children Beyer exercises and sonatinas. I felt so
miserable, I cried all the time. To think what I had missed! I would
hear about people who were far less talented than me winning second
place in a competition or holding a recital in such-and-such a hall, and
the tears would pour out of me.
"My parents walked around on tiptoe, afraid of hurting me. But I
knew how disappointed they were. All of a sudden the daughter they
had been so proud of was an ex-mental-patient. They couldn't even
marry me off. When you're living with people, you sense what they're
feeling, and I hated it. I was afraid to go out, afraid the neighbours
were talking about me. So then, snap! It happened again - the jumble,
the darkness. It happened when I was 24, and this time I spent seven
months in a sanatorium. Not this place: a regular insane asylum with
high walls and locked gates. A filthy place without pianos. I didn't
know what to do with myself. All I knew was I wanted to get out of
there as soon as I could, so I struggled desperately to get better. Seven
months: a long seven months. That's when my wrinkles started."
Reiko smiled, her lips stretching from side to side.
"I hadn't been out of the hospital for long when I met a man and got
married. He was a year younger than me, an engineer who worked in
an aeroplane manufacturing company, and one of my pupils. A nice
man. He didn't say a lot, but he was warm and sincere. He had been
taking lessons from me for six months when all of a sudden he asked
me to marry him. Just like that - one day when we were having tea
after his lesson. Can you believe it? We had never dated or held
hands. He took me totally off guard. I told him I couldn't get married.
I said I liked him and thought he was a nice person but that, for certain
reasons, I couldn't marry him. He wanted to know what those reasons
were, so I explained everything to him with complete honesty - that I
had been hospitalized twice for mental breakdowns. I told him
everything - what the cause had been, my condition, and the
possibility that it could happen again. He said he needed time to think,
and I encouraged him to take all the time he needed. But when he
came for his lesson a week later, he said he still wanted to marry me. I
asked him to wait three months. We would see each other for three
months, I said, and if he still wanted to marry me at that point, we
would talk about it again.
"We dated once a week for three months. We went everywhere, and
talked about everything, and I got to like him a lot. When I was with
him, I felt as if my life had finally come back to me. It gave me a
wonderful sense of relief to be alone with him: I could forget all those
terrible things that had happened. So what if I hadn't been able to
become a concert pianist? So what if I had spent time in mental
hospitals? My life hadn't ended. Life was still full of wonderful things
I hadn't experienced. If only for having made me feel that way, I felt
tremendously grateful to him. After three months went by, he asked
me again to marry him. And this is what I said to him: "If you want to
sleep with me, I don't mind. I've never slept with anybody, and I'm
very fond of you, so if you want to make love to me, I don't mind at
all. But marrying me is a whole different matter. If you marry me, you
take on all my troubles, and they're a lot worse than you can imagine.
"He said he didn't care, that he didn't just want to sleep with me, he
wanted to marry me, to share everything I had inside me. And he
meant it. He was the kind of person who would only say what he
really meant, and do anything he said. So I agreed to marry him. It
was all I could do. We got married, let's see, four months later I think
it was. He fought with his parents over me, and they disowned him.
He was from an old family that lived in a rural part of Shikoku. They
had my background investigated and found out that I had been
hospitalized twice. No wonder they opposed the marriage. So,
anyway, we didn't have a wedding ceremony. We just went to the
registry office and registered our marriage and took a trip to Hakone
for two nights. That was plenty for us: we were happy. And finally, I
remained a virgin until the day I married. I was 25 years old! Can you
believe it?"
Reiko sighed and picked up the basketball again.
"I thought that as long as I was with him, I would be all right," she
went on. "As long as I was with him, my troubles would stay away.
That's the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of
trust. If I put myself in this person's hands, I'll be OK. If my condition
starts to worsen even the slightest bit - if a screw comes loose - he'll
notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience he'll fix
it, he'll tighten the screw again, put all the jumbled threads back in
place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away. No more
snap! I was so happy! Life was great! I felt as if someone had pulled
me out of a cold, raging sea and wrapped me in a blanket and laid me
in a warm bed. I had a baby two years after we were married, and then
my hands were really full! I practically forgot about my sickness. I'd
get up in the morning and do the housework and take care of the baby
and feed my husband when he came home from work. It was the same
thing day after day, but I was happy. It was probably the happiest time
of my life. How many years did it last, I wonder? At least until I was
31. And then, all of a sudden, snap! It happened again. I fell apart."
Reiko lit a cigarette. The wind had died down. The smoke rose
straight up and disappeared into the darkness of night. Just then I
realized that the sky was filled with stars.
"Something happened?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "something very strange, as if a trap had been laid for
me. Even now, it gives me a chill just to think about it." Reiko rubbed
a temple with her free hand. "I'm sorry, though, making you listen to
all this talk about me. You came here to see Naoko, not listen to my
story."
"I'd really like to hear it, though," I said. "If you don't mind, I'd like to
hear the rest."
"Well," Reiko began, "when our daughter entered kindergarten, I
started playing again, little by little. Not for anyone else, but for
myself. I started with short pieces by Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti. After
such a long blank period, of course, my feel for the music didn't come
back straight away. And my fingers wouldn't move the way they used
to. But I was thrilled to be playing the piano again. With my hands on
the keys, I realized how much I had loved music - and how much I
hungered for it. To be able to perform music for yourself is a
wonderful thing.
"As I said before, I had been playing from the time I was four years
old, but it occurred to me that I had never once played for myself. I
had always been trying to pass a test or practise an assignment or
impress somebody. Those are all important things, of course, if you
are going to master an instrument. But after a certain age you have to
start performing for yourself. That's what music is. I had to drop out of
the elite course and pass my thirty-first birthday before I was finally
able to see that. I would send my child off to kindergarten and hurry
through the housework, then spend an hour or two playing music I
liked. So far so good, right?"
I nodded.
"Then one day I had a visit from one of the ladies of the
neighbourhood, someone I at least knew well enough to say hello to
on the street, asking me to give her daughter piano lessons. I didn't
know the daughter - although we lived in the same gen eral
neighbourhood our houses were still pretty far apart - but according to
the woman, her daughter used to pass my house and loved to hear me
play. She had seen me at some point, too, and now she was pestering
her mother to let me teach her. She was in her fourth year of school

and had taken lessons from a number of people but things had not
gone well for one reason or another and now she had no teacher.
"I turned her down. I had had that blank of several years, and while it
might have made sense for me to take on an absolute beginner, it
would have been impossible for me to pick up with someone who had
had lessons for a number of years. Besides, I was too busy taking care
of my own child and, though I didn't say this to the woman, nobody
can deal with the kind of child who changes teachers constantly. So
then the woman asked me to at least do her daughter the favour of
meeting her once. She was a fairly pushy lady and I could see she was
not going to let me off the hook that easily, so I agreed to meet the girl
- but just meet her. Three days later the girl came to the house by
herself. She was an absolute angel, with a kind of pure, sweet,
transparent beauty. I had never - and have never - seen such a
beautiful little girl. She had long, shiny hair as black as freshly ground
Indian ink, slim, graceful arms and legs, bright eyes, and a soft little
mouth that looked as if someone had just made it. I couldn't speak
when I first saw her, she was so beautiful. Sitting on my sofa, she
turned my living room into a gorgeous parlour. It hurt to look directly
at her: I had to squint. So, anyway, that's what she was like. I can still
picture her clearly."
Reiko narrowed her eyes as if she were actually picturing the girl.
"Over coffee we talked for a whole hour - talked about all kinds of
things: music, her school, just everything. I could see straight away
she was a smart one. She knew how to hold a conversation: she had
clear, shrewd opinions and a natural gift for drawing out the other
person. It was almost frightening. Exactly what it was that made her
frightening, I couldn't tell at the time. It just struck me how
frighteningly intelligent she was. But in her presence I lost any normal
powers of judgement I might have had. She was so young and
beautiful, I felt overwhelmed to the point where I saw myself as an
inferior specimen, a clumsy excuse for a human being who could only
have negative thoughts about her because of my own warped and
filthy mind."
Reiko shook her head several times.
"If I were as pretty and smart as she was, I'd have been
a normal human being. What more could you want if you were that
smart and that beautiful? Why would you have to torment and walk all
over your weaker inferiors if everybody loved you so much? What
reason could there possibly be for acting that way?"
"Did she do something terrible to you?"
"Well, let me just say the girl was a pathological liar. She was sick,
pure and simple. She made up everything. And while she was making
up her stories, she would come to believe them. And then she would
change things around her to fit her story. She had such a quick mind,
she could always keep a step ahead of you and take care of things that
would ordinarily strike you as odd, so it would never cross your mind
she was lying. First of all, no one would ever suspect that such a pretty
little girl would lie about the most ordinary things. I certainly didn't.
She told me tons of lies for six months before I had the slightest
inkling anything was wrong. She lied abouteverything, and I never
suspected. I know it sounds crazy."
"What did she lie about?"
"When I say everything, I meaneverything." Reiko gave a sarcastic
laugh. "When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up
a bunch of lies to go with the first one. 'Mythomania' is the word for it.
When the usual mythomaniac tells lies, they're usually the innocent
kind, and most people notice. But not with that girl. To protect herself,
she'd tell hurtful lies without batting an eyelid. She'd use everything
she could get her hands on. And she would lie either more or less
depending on who she was talking to. To her mother or close friends
who would know straight away, she hardly ever lied, or if she had to
tell one, she'd be really, really careful to tell lies that wouldn't come
out. Or if they did come out, she'd find an excuse or apologize in that
clingy voice of hers with tears pouring out of her beautiful eyes. No
one could stay mad at her then.
"I still don't know why she chose me. Was I another victim to her, or a
source of salvation? I just don't know. Of course, it hardly matters
now. Now that everything is over. Now that I'm like this."
A short silence followed.
"She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved
when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me
on the street a few times, too, and had begun to worship me. She
actually used that word: "worship'. It made me turn bright red. I mean,
to be "worshipped' by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don't think
it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course,
and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no
special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me,
something that was missing in her, I suppose. That must have been
what got her interested in me to begin with. I believe that now,
looking back. And I'm not boasting."
"No, I think I know what you mean."
"She had brought some music with her and asked if she could play for
me. So I let her. It was a Bach invention. Her performance was ...
interesting. Or should I say strange? It just wasn't ordinary. Of course
it wasn't polished. She hadn't been going to a professional school, and
what lessons she had taken had been an on-and-off kind of thing; she
was very much self-taught. Her sound was untrained. She'd have been
rejected immediately at a music-school audition. But she made it
work. Although 90 per cent was just terrible, the other 10 per cent was
there: she made it sing: it was music. And this was a Bach invention!
So I got interested in her. I wanted to know what she was all about.
"Needless to say, the world is full of kids who can play Bach far better
than she could. Twenty times better. But most of their performances
would have nothing to them. They'd be hollow, empty. This girl's
technique was bad, but she had that little bit of something that could
draw people - or draw me, at least - into her performance. So I decided
it might be worthwhile to teach her. Of course, retraining her at that
point to where she could become a pro was out of the question. But I
felt it might be possible to make her into the kind of happy pianist I
was then - and still am - someone who could enjoy making music for
herself. This turned out to be an empty hope, though. She was not the
kind of person who quietly goes about doing things for herself. This
was a child who would make detailed calculations to use every means
at her disposal to impress other people. She knew exactly what she
had to do to make people admire and praise her. And she knew exactly
what kind of performance it would take to draw me in. She had
calculated everything, I'm sure, and put everything she had into
practising the most important passages over and over again for my
benefit. I can see her doing it.
"Still, even now, after all of this came clear to me, I believe it was a
wonderful performance and I would feel the same chills down my
spine if I could hear it again. Knowing all I know about her flaws, her
cunning and lies, I would still feel it. I'm telling you, there are such
things in this world."
Reiko cleared her throat with a dry rasp and broke off.
"So, did you take her as a pupil?" I asked.
"Yeah. One lesson a week. Saturday mornings. Saturday was a day off
at her school. She never missed a lesson, she was never late, she was
an ideal pupil. She always practised for her lessons. After every
lesson, we'd have some cake and chat."
At that point, Reiko looked at her watch as if suddenly remembering
something.
"Don't you think we should be getting back to the room? I'm a little
worried about Naoko. I'm sure you haven't forgotten about her now,
have you?"
"Of course not," I laughed. "It's just that I was drawn into your story."
"If you'd like to hear the rest, I'll tell it to you tomorrow. It's a long
story - too long for one sitting." "You're a regular Scheherazade."
"I know," she said, joining her laughter with mine. "You'll never get
back to Tokyo."
We retraced our steps through the path in the woods and returned to
the flat. The candles had been extinguished and the living room lights
were out. The bedroom door was open and the lamp on the night table
was on, its pale light spilling into the living room. Naoko sat alone on
the sofa in the gloom. She had changed into a loose-fitting blue gown,
its collar pulled tight about her neck, her legs folded under her on the
sofa. Reiko approached her and rested a hand on her crown.
"Are you all right now?"
"I'm fine. Sorry," answered Naoko in a tiny voice. Then she turned
towards me and repeated her apology. "I must have scared you."
"A little," I said with a smile.
"Come here," she said. When I sat down next to her, Naoko, her legs
still folded, leaned towards me until her face was nearly touching my
ear, as though she were about to share a secret with me. Then she
planted a soft kiss by my ear.
"Sorry," she said once more, this time directly into my ear, her voice
subdued. Then she moved away from me.
"Sometimes," she said, "I get so confused, I don't know what's
happening."
"That happens to me all the time," I said.
Naoko smiled and looked at me.
"If you don't mind," I said, "I'd like to hear more about you. About
your life here. What you do every day. The people you meet."
Naoko talked about her daily routine in this place, speaking in short
but crystal clear phrases. Wake up at six in the morning. Breakfast in
the flat. Clean out the aviary. Then usually farm work. She took care
of the vegetables. Before or after lunch, she would have either an
hour-long session with her doctor or a group discussion. In the
afternoon she could choose from among courses that might interest
her, outside work, or sports. She had taken several courses: French,
knitting, piano, ancient history.
"Reiko is teaching me piano," she said. "She also teaches guitar. We
all take turns as pupils or teachers. Somebody with fluent French
teaches French, one person who used to be in social studies teaches
history, another good at knitting teaches knitting: that's a pretty
impressive school right there. Unfortunately, I don't have anything I
can teach anyone."
"Neither do I," I said.
"I put a lot more energy into my studies here than I ever did in
university. I work hard and enjoy it - a lot."
"What do you do after supper?"
"Talk with Reiko, read, listen to records, go to other people's flats and
play games, stuff like that."
"I do guitar practice and write my autobiography," said Reiko.
"Autobiography?"
"Just kidding," Reiko laughed. "We go to bed around ten. Pretty
healthy lifestyle, wouldn't you say? We sleep like babies."
I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before nine. "I guess you'll
be getting sleepy soon."
"That's OK. We can stay up late today," said Naoko. "I haven't seen
you in such a long time, I want to talk more. So talk."
"When I was alone before, all of a sudden I started thinking about the
old days," I said. "Do you remember when Kizuki and I came to visit
you at the hospital? The one on the seashore. I think it was the first
year of the sixth-form."
"When I had the chest operation," Naoko said with a smile. "Sure, I
remember. You and Kizuki came on a motorbike. You brought me a
box of chocolates and they were all melted together. They were so
hard to eat! I don't know, it seems like such a long time ago."
"Yeah, really. I think you were writing a poem then, a long one."
"All girls write poems at that age," Naoko tittered. "What reminded
you of that all of a sudden?"
"I wonder. The smell of the sea wind, the oleanders: before I knew it,
they just popped into my head. Did Kizuki come to see you at the
hospital a lot?"
"No way! We had a big fight about that afterwards. He came once,
and then he came with you, and that was it for him. He was terrible.
And that first time he couldn't sit still and he only stayed about ten
minutes. He brought me some oranges and mumbled all this stuff I
couldn't understand, and he peeled an orange for me and mumbled
more stuff and he was out of there. He said he had a thing about
hospitals."
Naoko laughed. "He was always a kid about that kind of stuff. I mean,
nobody likes hospitals, right? That's why people visit people in
hospitals to make them feel better, and perk up their spirits and stuff.
But Kizuki just didn't get it."
"He wasn't so bad when the two of us came to see you, though. He
was just his usual self."
"Because you were there," said Naoko. "He was always like that
around you. He struggled to keep his weaknesses hidden. I'm sure he
was very fond of you. He made a point of letting you see only his best
side. He wasn't like that with me. He'd let his guard down. He could
be really moody. One minute he'd be chattering away, and he next t
he'd be depressed. It happened all the time. He was like that from the
time he was little. He did keep trying to change himself, to improve
himself, though."
Naoko re-crossed her legs on the sofa.
"He tried hard, but it didn't do any good, and that would make him
really angry and sad. There was so much about him that was fine and
beautiful, but he could never find the confidence he needed. "I've got
to do that, I've got to change this,' he was always thinking, right up to
the end. Poor Kizuki!"
"Still," I said, "if it's true that he was always struggling to show me his best side, I'd say he succeeded. His best side was all that I could see."
Naoko smiled. "He'd be thrilled if he could hear you say that. You
were his only friend."
"And Kizuki was my only friend," I said. "There was never anybody I
could really call a friend, before him or after him."
"That's why I loved being with the two of you. His best side was all
that I could see then, too. I could relax and stop worrying when the
three of us were together. Those were my favourite times. I don't
know how you felt about it."

"I used to worry about what you were thinking," I said, giving my
head a shake.
"The problem was that that kind of thing couldn't go on for ever," said
Naoko. "Such perfect little circles are impossible to maintain. Kizuki
knew it, and I knew it, and so did you. Am I right?"
I nodded.
"To tell you the truth, though," Naoko went on, "I loved his weak side,
too. I loved it as much as I loved his good side. There was absolutely
nothing mean or underhand about him. He was weak: that's all. I tried
to tell him that, but he wouldn't believe me. He'd always tell me it was
because we had been together since we were three. I knew him too
well, he'd say: I couldn't tell the difference between his strong points
and his flaws, they were all the same to me. He couldn't change my
mind about him, though. I went on loving him just the same, and I
could never be interested in anyone else."
Naoko looked at me with a sad smile.
"Our boy-girl relationship was really unusual, too. It was as if we
were physically joined somewhere. If we happened to be apart, some
special gravitational force would pull us back together again. It was
the most natural thing in the world when we became boyfriend and
girlfriend. It was nothing we had to think about or make any choices
about. We started kissing at 12 and petting at 13. I'd go to his room or
he'd come to my room and I'd finish him off with my hands. It never
occurred to me that we were being precocious. It just happened as a
matter of course. If he wanted to play with my breasts or pussy, I
didn't mind at all, or if he had cum he wanted to get rid of, I didn't
mind helping him with that, either. I'm sure it would have shocked us
both if someone had accused us of doing anything wrong. Because we
weren't.
We were just doing what we were supposed to do. We had always
shown each other every part of our bodies. It was almost as if we
owned each other's bodies jointly. For a while, at least, we made sure
we didn't go any further than that, though. We were afraid of my
getting pregnant, and had almost no idea at that point of how to go
about preventing it ... Anyway, that's how Kizuki and I grew up
together, hand in hand, an inseparable pair. We had almost no sense of
the oppressiveness of sex or the anguish that comes with the sudden
swelling of the ego that ordinary kids experience when they reach
puberty. We were totally open about sex, and where our egos were
concerned, the way we absorbed and shared each other's, we had no
strong awareness of them. Do you see what I mean?"
"I think so," I said.
"We couldn't bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I'm sure we
would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing
unhappy."
"Unhappy? Why's that?"
With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair back several times. She had
taken her hairslide off, which made the hair fall over her face when
she dropped her head forward.
"Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it,"
she said, raising her eyes to mine. "The pain of growing up. We didn't
pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why
Kizuki did what he did, and why I'm here. We were like kids who
grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we'd just pick a
banana; if we got lonely, we'd go to sleep in each other's arms. But
that kind of thing doesn't last for ever. We grew up fast and had to
enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were
the link connecting us with the outside. We were struggling through
you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it
didn't work, of course."
I nodded.
"I wouldn't want you to think that we were using you, though. Kizuki
really loved you. It just so happened that our connection with you was
our first connection with anyone else. And it still is. Kizuki may be
dead, but you are still My only link with the outside world. And just as
Kizuki loved you, I love you. We never meant to hurt you, but we
probably did; we probably ended up making a deep wound in your
heart. It never occurred to us that anything like that might happen."
Naoko lowered her head again and fell silent.
"Hey, how about a cup of cocoa?" suggested Reiko.
"Good. I'd really like some," said Naoko.
"I'd like to have some of that brandy I brought, if you don't mind," I
said.
"Oh, absolutely," said Reiko. "Could I have a sip?" "Sure," I said,
laughing.
Reiko brought out two glasses and we toasted each other. Then she
went into the kitchen to make cocoa.
"Can we talk about something a little more cheerful?" asked Naoko.
I didn't have anything cheerful to talk about. I thought, If only Storm
Trooper were still around! That guy could inspire a string of stories. A
few of those would have made everybody feel good. The best I could
do was talk at length about the filthy habits of the guys in the
dormitory. I felt sick just talking about something so gross, but Naoko
and Reiko practically fell over laughing, it was all so new to them.
Next Reiko did imitations of mental patients. This was a lot of fun,
too. Naoko started looking sleepy after eleven o'clock, so Reiko let
down the sofa back and handed me a pillow, sheets and blankets.
"If you feel like raping anybody in the middle of the night, don't get
the wrong one," she said. "The unwrinkled body in theleft bed is
Naoko's."
"Liar! Mine's the right bed," said Naoko.
Reiko added, "By the way, I arranged for us to skip some of our
afternoon schedule. Why don't the three of us have a little picnic? I
know a really nice place close by."
"Good idea," I said.
The women took turns brushing their teeth and withdrew to the
bedroom. I poured myself some brandy and stretched out on the sofa
bed, going over the day's events from morning to night. It felt like an
awfully long day. The room continued to glow white in the moonlight.
Aside from the occasional slight creak of a bed, hardly a sound came
from the bedroom where Naoko and Reiko lay sleeping. Tiny
diagrammatic shapes seemed to float in the darkness when I closed
my eyes, and my ears sensed the lingering reverberation of Reiko's
guitar, but neither of these lasted for long. Sleep came and carried me
into a mass of warm mud. I dreamed of willows. Both sides of a
mountain road were lined with willows. An incredible number of
willows. A fairly stiff breeze was blowing, but the branches of the
willow trees never swayed. Why should that be? I wondered, and then
I saw that every branch of every tree had tiny birds clinging to it.
Their weight kept the branches from stirring. I grabbed a stick and hit
a nearby branch with it, hoping to chase away the birds and allow the
branch to sway. But they would not leave. Instead of flying away, they
turned into bird-shaped metal chunks that crashed to the ground.
When I opened my eyes, I felt as if I were seeing the continuation of
my dream. The moonlight filled the room with the same soft white
glow. As if by reflex, I sat up in bed and started searching for the
metal birds, which of course were not there. What I saw instead was
Naoko at the foot of the bed, sitting still and alone, staring out through
the window. She had drawn her knees up and was resting her chin on
them, looking like a hungry orphan. I searched for the watch I had left
by my pillow, but it was not in the place where I knew it should be. I
guessed from the angle of the moonlight that the time must be two or
three o'clock in the morning. I felt a violent thirst but I decided to keep
still and continue watching Naoko. She was wearing the same blue
nightdress I had seen her in earlier, and on one side her hair was held
in place by the butterfly hairslide, revealing the beauty of her face in
the moonlight. Strange, I thought, she had taken the slide off before
going to bed.
Naoko stayed frozen in place, like a small nocturnal animal that has
been lured out by the moonlig ht. The direction of the glow
exaggerated the silhouette of her lips. Seeming utterly fragile and
vulnerable, the silhouette pulsed almost imperceptibly with the
beating of her heart or the motions of her inner heart, as if she were
whispering soundless words to the darkness.
I swallowed in hopes of easing my thirst, but in the stillness of the
night the sound I made was huge. As if this were a signal to her,
Naoko stood and glided towards the head of the bed, gown rustling
faintly. She knelt on the floor by my pillow, eyes fixed on mine. I
stared back at her, but her eyes told me nothing. Strangely transparent,
they seemed like windows to a world beyond, but however long I
peered into their depths, there was nothing I could see. Our faces were
no more than ten inches apart, but she was light years away from me.
I reached out and tried to touch her, but Naoko drew back, lips
trembling faintly. A moment later, she brought her hands
up and began slowly to undo the buttons of her gown. There were
seven in all. I felt as if it were the continuation of my dream as I
watched her slim, lovely fingers opening the buttons one by one from
top to bottom. Seven small, white buttons: when she had unfastened
them all, Naoko slipped the gown from her shoulders and threw it off
completely like an insect shedding its skin. She had been wearing
nothing under the gown. All she had on was the butterfly hairslide.
Naked now, and still kneeling by the bed, she looked at me. Bathed in
the soft light of the moon, Naoko's body had the heartbreaking lustre
of newborn flesh. When she moved - and she did so almost
imperceptibly - the play of light and shadow on her body shifted
subtly. The swelling roundness of her breasts, her tiny nipples, the
indentation of her navel, her hipbones and pubic hair, all cast grainy
shadows, the shapes of which kept changing like ripples spreading
over the calm surface of a lake.
What perfect flesh! I thought. When had Naoko come to possess such
a perfect body? What had happened to the body I held in my arms that
night last spring?
A sense of imperfection had been what Naoko's body had given me
that night as I tenderly undressed her while she cried. Her breasts had
seemed hard, the nipples oddly jutting, the hips strangely rigid. She
was a beautiful girl, of course, her body marvellous and alluring. It
aroused me that night and swept me along with a gigantic force. But
still, as I held her and caressed her and kissed her naked flesh, I felt a
strange and powerful awareness of the imbalance and awkwardness of
the human body. Holding Naoko in my arms, I wanted to explain to
her, "I am having sex with you now. I am inside you. But really this is
nothing. It doesn't matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies.
All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by
the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh. By doing this,
we are sharing our imperfection." But of course I could never have
said such a thing with any hope of being understood. I just went on
holding her tightly. And as I did so, I was able to feel inside her body
some kind of stony foreign matter, something extra that I could never
draw close to. And that sensation both filled my heart for Naoko and
gave my erection a terrifying intensity.
The body that Naoko revealed before me now, though, was nothing
like the one I had held that night. This flesh had been through many
changes to be reborn in utter perfection beneath the light of the moon.
All signs of girlish plumpness had been stripped away since Kizuki's
death to be replaced by the flesh of a mature woman. So perfect was
Naoko's physical beauty now that it aroused nothing sexual in me. I
could only stare, astounded, at the lovely curve from waist to hips, the
rounded richness of the breasts, the gentle movement with each breath
of the slim belly and the soft, black pubic shadow beneath.
She exposed her nakedness to me this way for perhaps five minutes
until, at last, she wrapped herself in her gown once more and buttoned
it from top to bottom. As soon as the final button was in place, she
rose and glided towards the bedroom, silently opened the door, and
disappeared.
I stayed rooted to the spot for a very long time until it occurred to me
to leave the bed. I retrieved my watch from where it had fallen on the
floor and turned it towards the light of the moon. It was 3.40. I went to
the kitchen and drank a few glasses of water before stretching out in
bed again, but sleep never came until the morning sunlight crept into
every corner of the room, dissolving all traces of the moon's pale
glow.
I was somewhere on the edge of sleep when Reiko came and slapped
me on the cheek, shouting, "Morning! Morning!"
While Reiko straightened out my sofa bed, Naoko went to the kitchen
and started making breakfast. She smiled at me and said "Good
morning".
"Good morning," I replied. I stood by and watched her as she put on
water to boil and sliced some bread, humming all the while, but I
could sense nothing in her manner to suggest that she had revealed her
naked body to me the night before.
"Your eyes are red," she said to me as she poured the coffee. "Are you
OK?"
"I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep."
"I bet we were snoring," said Reiko.
"Not at all," I said.
"That's good," said Naoko.
"He's just being polite," said Reiko, yawning.
At first I thought that Naoko was embarrassed or acting innocent for
Reiko, but her behaviour remained unchanged when Reiko
momentarily left the room, and her eyes had their usual transparent
look.
"How'd you sleep?" I asked Naoko.
"Like a log," she answered with ease. She wore a simple hairpin
without any kind of decoration.
I didn't know what to make of this, and I continued to feel that way all
through breakfast. Buttering my bread or peeling my egg, I kept
glancing across the table at Naoko, in search of a sign.
"Why do you keep looking at me like that?" she asked with a smile.
"I think he's in love with somebody," said Reiko.
"Are you in love with somebody?" Naoko asked me.
"Could be," I said, returning her smile. When the two women started
joking around at my expense, I gave up trying to think about what had
happened in the night and concentrated on my bread and coffee.
After breakfast, Reiko and Naoko said they would be going to feed the
birds in the aviary. I volunteered to go along. They changed into jeans
and work shirts and white rubber boots. Set in a little park behind the
tennis courts, the aviary had everything in it from chickens and
pigeons to peacocks and parrots and was surrounded by flowerbeds,
shrubberies and benches. Two men in their forties, also apparently
sanatorium patients, were raking up leaves that had fallen in the
pathways. The women walked over to say good morning to the pair,
and Reiko made them laugh with another of her jokes. Cosmos were
blooming in the flowerbeds, and the shrubberies were extremely well
manicured. Spotting Reiko, the birds started chattering and flying
about inside the cage.
The women entered the shed by the cage and came out with a bag of
feed and a garden hose. Naoko screwed the hose to a tap and turned
on the water. Taking care to prevent any birds from flying out, the two
of them slipped into the cage, Naoko hosing down the dirt and Reiko
scrubbing the floor of the cage with a deck brush. The spray sparkled
in the glare of the morning sun. The peacocks flapped around the cage
to avoid getting splashed. A turkey raised its head and glowered at me
like a crotchety old man, while a parrot on the perch above screeched
its displeasure and beat its wings. Reiko meowed at the parrot, which
slunk over to the far corner but soon was calling: "Thank you!"
"Crazy!" "Shithead!"
"I wonder who taught him that kind of language?" said Naoko with a
sigh.
"Not me," said Reiko. "I would never do such a thing." She started
meowing again, and the parrot shut up.
Laughing, Reiko explained, "This guy once had a run-in with a cat.
Now he's scared to death of them."
When they had finished cleaning, the two set down their tools and
went around filling each of the feeders. Splashing its way through
puddles on the floor, the turkey darted to its feed box and plunged its
head in, too obsessed with eating to be bothered by Naoko's smacks
on its tail.
"Do you do this every morning?" I asked Naoko.
"Every morning!" she said. "They usually give this job to new women.
It's so easy. Like to see the rabbits?"
"Sure," I said. The rabbit hutch was behind the aviary. Some ten
rabbits lay inside, asleep in the straw. Naoko swept up their droppings,
put feed in their box, and picked up one of the babies, rubbing it
against her cheek.
"Isn't it precious?" she gushed. She let me hold it. The warm, little ball
of fur cringed in my arms, twitching its nose.
"Don't worry, he won't hurt you," she said to the rabbit, stroking its
head with her finger and smiling at me. It was such a radiant smile,
without a trace of shadow, that I couldn't help smiling myself. And
what about Naoko last night? I wondered. I knew for certain that it
had been the real Naoko and not a dream: she had definitely taken her
clothes off and shown her naked body to me.
Reiko whistled a lovely rendition of "Proud Mary" as she stuffed a
plastic bag with the debris they had gathered and tied the opening. I
helped them carry the tools and feed bag to the shed.
"Morning is my favourite time of day," said Naoko. "It's l ike
everything's starting out fresh and new. I begin to get sad around noon
time, and I hate it when the sun goes down. I live with those same
feelings clay aster day.
"And while you're living with those feelings, you youngsters get old
just like me," said Reiko with a smile. "You're thinking about how it's
morning now or night and the next thing you know, you're old."
"But you like getting old," said Naoko.
"Not really," said Reiko. "But I sure don't wish I was young again."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because it's such a pain in the neck!" she said. Then she tossed her
broom in and closed the door of the shed, whistling "Proud Mary" all
the while.

Back at the flat, the women changed their boots for tennis shoes and
said they were going to the farm. Reiko suggested I stayed behind
with a book or something because the work would be no fun to watch
and they would be doing it as part of a group. "And while you're
waiting you can wash the pile of dirty underwear we left by the sink,"
she added.
"You're kidding," I said, taken aback.
"Of course I am," she laughed. "You're so sweet. Isn't he, Naoko?"
"He really is," said Naoko, laughing with her.
"I'll work on my German," I said with a sigh.
"Yeah, do your homework like a good boy," said Reiko.
"We'll be back before lunch."
The two of them went out tittering. I heard the footsteps and voices of
a number of people walking by downstairs.
I went into the bathroom and washed my face again, then borrowed a
nail clipper and trimmed my nails. For a bathroom that was being
shared by two women, its contents were incredibly simple. Aside from
some neatly arranged bottles
of cleansing cream and lip moisturizer and sun block, there was
almost nothing that could be called cosmetics. When I finished
trimming my nails, I made myself some coffee and drank it at the
kitchen table, German book open. Stripping down to a T-shirt in the
sun-filled kitchen, I had set about memorizing all the forms in a
grammar chart when I was struck by an odd feeling. It seemed to me
that the longest imaginable distance separated irregular German verb
forms from this kitchen table.
The two women came back from the farm at 11.30, took turns in the
shower, and changed into fresh clothes. The three of us went to the
dining hall for lunch, then walked to the front gate. This time the
guardhouse had a man on duty. He was sitting at his desk, enjoying a
lunch that must have been brought to him from the dining hall. The
transistor radio on the shelf was playing a sentimental old pop tune.
He waved to us with a friendl y "Hi" as we approached, and we
hello'ed him back.
Reiko explained to him that we were going to walk outside the
grounds and return in three hours.
"Great," he said. "You're lucky with the weather. Just stay away from
the valley road, though. It got washed out in that big rain. No problem
anywhere else."
Reiko wrote her name and Naoko's in a register along with the date
and time.
"Enjoy yourselves," said the guard. "And take care."
"Nice guy," I said.
"He's a little strange up here," said Reiko, touching her head.
He had been right about the weather, though. The sky was a fresh-
swept blue, with only a trace of white cloud clinging to the dome of
heaven like a thin streak of test paint. We walked beside the low stone
wall of Ami Hostel for a time, then moved away to climb a steep,
narrow trail in single file. Reiko led the way, with Naoko in the
middle and me bringing up the rear. Reiko climbed with the confident
stride of one who knew every stretch of every mountain in the area.
We concentrated on walking, with hardly a word among us. Naoko
wore blue jeans and a white blouse and carried her jacket in one hand.
I watched her long, straight hair swaying right and left where it met
her shoulders. She would glance back at me now and then, smiling
when our eyes met. The trail continued upwards so far that it was
almost dizzying, but Reiko's pace never slackened. Naoko hurried to
keep up with her, wiping the sweat from her face. Not having indulged
in such outdoor activities for some time, I found myself running short
of breath.
"Do you do this a lot?" I asked Naoko.
"Maybe once a week," she answered. "Having a tough time?"
"Kind of," I said.
"We're almost there," said Reiko. "This is about two-thirds of the way.
Come on, you're a boy, aren't you?" "Yeah, but I'm out of shape."
"Playing with girls all the time," muttered Naoko, as if to herself.
I wanted to answer her, but I was too winded to speak. Every now and
then, red birds with tufts on their heads would flit across our path,
brilliant against the blue sky. The ields around us were filled with f
white and blue and yellow flowers, and bees buzzed everywhere.
Moving ahead one step at a time, I thought of nothing but the scene
passing before my eyes.
The slope gave out after another ten minutes, and we gained a level
plateau. We rested there, wiping the sweat off, catching
our breath and drinking from our water bottles. Reiko found a leaf and
used it to make a whistle.
The trail entered a gentle downward slope amid tall, waving thickets
of plume grass. We walked on for some 15 minutes before passing
through a village. There were no signs of humanity here, and the
dozen or so houses were all in varying states of decay. Waist-high
grass grew among the houses, and dry, white gobs of pigeon
droppings clung to holes in the walls. Only the pillars survived in the
case of one collapsed building, while others looked ready to be lived
in as soon as you opened the storm shutters. These dead, silent houses
pressed against either side of the road as we slipped through.
"People lived in this village until seven or eight years ago," Reiko
informed me. "This was farmland around here. But they all cleared
out. Life was just too hard. They'd be trapped when the snow piled up
in the winter. And the soil isn't particularly fertile. They could make a
better living in the city."
"What a waste," I said. "Some of the houses look perfectly usable."
"Some hippies tried living here at one point, but they gave up.
Couldn't take the winters."
A little beyond the village we came to a big fenced area that seemed to
be a pasture. Far away on the other side, I caught sight of a few horses
grazing. We followed the fence line, and a big dog came running over
to us, tail wagging. It stood up leaning on Reiko, sniffing her face,
then jumped playfully on Naoko. I whistled and it came over to me,
licking my hand with its long tongue.
Naoko patted the dog's head and explained that the animal belonged to
the pasture. "I'll bet he's close to 20," she said. "His teeth are so bad,
he can't eat anything hard. He sleeps in front of the shop all day, and
he comes running when he hears footsteps."
Reiko took a scrap of cheese from her rucksack. Catching its scent, the
dog bounded over to her and chomped down on it.
"We won't be able to see this fellow much longer," said Reiko, patting
the dog's head. "In the middle of October they put the horses and cows
in trucks and take 'em down to the barn. The only time they let 'em
graze is the summer, when they open a little café kind of thing for the
tourists. The "tourists'! Maybe 20 hikers in a day. Hey, how about
something to drink?"
"Good idea," I said.
The dog led the way to the café, a small, white house with a front
porch and a faded sign in the shape of a coffee cup hanging from the
eaves. He led us up the steps and stretc hed out on the porch,
narrowing his eyes. When we took our places around a table on the
porch, a girl with a ponytail and wearing a sweatshirt and white jeans
came out and greeted Reiko and Naoko like old friends.
"This is a friend of Naoko's," said Reiko, introducing me. "Hi," she
said.
"Hi," I answered.
While the three women traded small talk, I stroked the neck of the dog
under the table. It had the hard, stringy neck of an old dog. When I
scratched the lumpy spots, the dog closed his eyes and sighed with
pleasure.
"What's his name?" I asked the girl.
"Pepé," she said.
"Hey, Pepé," I said to the dog, but he didn't budge.
"He's hard of hearing," said the girl. "You have to speak up or he can't
hear."
"Pepé!" I shouted. The dog opened his eyes and snapped to attention
with a bark.
"Never mind, Pepé," said the girl. "Sleep more and live longer." Pepé
flopped down again at my feet.
Naoko and Reiko ordered cold glasses of milk and I asked for a beer.
"Let's hear the radio," said Reiko. The girl switched on an amplifier
and tuned into an FM station. Blood, Sweat and Tears came on with
"Spinning Wheel".
Reiko looked pleased. "Now this is what we're here for! We don't have
radios in our rooms, so if I don't come here once in a while, I don't
have any idea what's playing out there."
"Do you sleep in this place?" I asked the girl.
"No way!" she laughed. "I'd die of loneliness if I spent the night here.
The pasture guy drives me into town and I come out again in the
morning." She pointed at a four-wheel drive truck parked in front of
the nearby pasture office.
"You've got a holiday coming up soon, too, right?" asked Reiko.
"Yeah, we'll be shutting up this place soon," said the girl. Reiko
offered her a cigarette, and they smoked.
"I'll miss you," said Reiko.
"I'll be back in May, though," said the girl with a laugh.
Cream came on the radio with "White Room". After a commercial, it
was Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair".
"I like that," said Reiko when it was over.
"I saw the film," I said.
"Who's in it?"
"Dustin Hoffman."
"I don't know him," she said with a sad little shake of the head. "The
world changes like mad, and I don't know what's happening." She
asked the girl for a guitar. "Sure," said the girl, switching off the radio
and bringing out an old guitar. The dog raised its head and sniffed the
instrument.
"You can't eat this," Reiko said with mock sternness. A grass-scented
breeze swept over the porch. The mountains lay spread out before us,
the ridge line sharp against the sky.
"It's like a scene from The Sound of Music," I said to Reiko as she
tuned up.
"What's that?" she asked.
She strummed the guitar in search of the opening chord of
"Scarborough Fair". This was apparently her first attempt at the song,
but after a few false starts she could play it through without hesitating.
She had it down pat the third time and even started adding a few
flourishes. "Good ear," she said to me with a wink. "I can usually play
just about anything if I hear it three times."
Softly humming the melody, she did a full rendition of "Scarborough
Fair". The three of us applauded, and Reiko responded with a
decorous bow of the head.
"I used to get more applause for a Mozart concerto," she said.
Her milk was on the house if she would play the Beatles' "Here Comes
the Sun", said the girl. Reiko gave her a thumbs up and launched into
the song. Hers was not a full voice, and too much smoking had given
it a husky edge, but it was lovely, with real presence. I almost felt as if
the sun really was coming up again as I sat there listening an d
drinking beer and looking at the mountains. It was a soft, warm
feeling.
Reiko gave back the guitar and asked to hear the radio again. Then she
suggested to Naoko and me that we take an hour and walk around the
area.
"I want to listen to the radio some more and hang out
with her. If you come back by three, that should be OK."
"Is it all right for us to be alone together so long?"
"Well, actually, it's against the rules, but what the hell. I'm not a
chaperone, after all. I could use a break. And you came all the way
from Tokyo, I'm sure there's tons of stuff you want to talk about."
Reiko lit another cigarette as she spoke.
"Let's go," said Naoko, standing up.
I started after her. The dog woke up and followed us for a while, but it
soon lost interest and went back to its place on the porch. We strolled
down a level road that followed the pasture fence. Naoko would take
my hand every now and then or slip her arm under mine.
"This is kind of like the old days, isn't it?" she said.
"That wasn't 'the old days'," I laughed. "It was spring of this year! If
that was 'the old days', ten years ago was ancient history."
"It feels like ancient history," said Naoko. "But anyway, sorry about
last night. I don't know, I was a bundle of nerves. I really shouldn't
have done that after you came here all the way from Tokyo."
"Never mind," I said. "Both of us have a lot of feelings we need to get
out in the open. So if you want to take those feelings and smash
somebody with them, smash me. Then we can understand each other
better."
"So if you understand me better, what then?"
"You don't get it, do you?" I said. "It's not a question of what then'.
Some people get a kick out of reading railway timetables and that's all
they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of
matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the
world who enjoys trying to understand you?"
"Kind of like a hobby?" she said, amused.
"Yeah, I guess you could call it a hobby. Most normal people would
call it friendship or love or something, but if you want to call it a
hobby, that's OK, too."
"Tell me," said Naoko, "you liked Kizuki, too, didn't you?" "Of
course," I said.
"How about Reiko?"
"I like her a lot," I said. "She's really nice."
"How come you always like people like that - people like us, I mean?
We're all kind of weird and twisted and drowning - me and Kizuki and
Reiko. Why can't you like more normal people?"
"Because I don't see you like that," I said after giving it some thought.
"I don't see you or Kizuki or Reiko as "twisted' in any way. The guys I
think of as twisted are out there running around."
"But we are twisted," said Naoko. "I can see that."
We walked on in silence. The road left the fence and came out to a
circular grassy field ringed with trees like a pond.
"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night so scared," said
Naoko, pressing up against my arm. "I'm scared I'll never get better
again. I'll always stay twisted like this and grow old and waste away
here. I get so chilled it's like I'm all frozen inside. It's horrible ... so
cold. .. "
I put my arm around her and drew her close.
"I feel like Kizuki is reaching out for me from the darkness,
calling to me, "Hey, Naoko, we can't stay apart.' When I hear him
saying that, I don't know what to do." "What do you do?"
"Well ... don't take this the wrong way, now." "OK, I won't."
"I ask Reiko to hold me. I wake her up and crawl into her bed and let
her hold me tight. And I cry. And she strokes me until the ice melts
and I'm warm again. Do you think it's sick?"
"No. I wish I could be the one to hold you, though," I said.
"So hold me. Now. Right here."
We sat down on the dry grass of the meadow and put our arms around
each other. The tall grass surrounded us, and we could see nothing but
the sky and clouds above. I gently lay Naoko down and took her in my
arms. She was soft and warm and her hands reached out for me. We
kissed with real feeling.
"Tell me something, Toru," Naoko whispered in my ear.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Do you want to sleep with me?"
"Of course I do," I said. "Can you wait?" "Of course I can."
"Before we do it again, I want to get myself a little better. I want to
make myself into a person more worthy of that hobby of yours. Will
you wait for me to do that?"
"Of course I'll wait." "Are you hard now?"
"You mean the soles of my feet?" "Silly," Naoko tittered.
"If you're asking whether I have an erection, of course I do." "Will
you do me a favour and stop saying "Of course'?" "OK, I'll stop."
"Is it difficult?" "What?"
"To be all hard like that." "Difficult?"
"I mean, are you suffering?"
"Well, it depends how you look at it."
"Want me to help you get rid of it?"
"With your hand?"
"Uh-huh. To tell you the truth," said Naoko, "it's been sticking into me
ever since we lay down. It hurts." I pulled my hips away. "Better?"
"Thanks."
"You know?" I said.
"What?"
"I wish you would do it."
"OK," she said with a kind smile. Then she unzipped my trousers and
took my stiff penis in her hand. "It's warm," she said.
She started to move her hand, but I stopped her and unbuttoned her
blouse, reaching around to undo her bra strap. I kissed her soft, pink
nipples. She closed her eyes and slowly started moving her fingers.
"Hey, you're pretty good at that," I said. "Be a good boy and shut up,"
said Naoko.

After I came, I held her in my arms and kissed her again. Naoko did
up her bra and blouse, and I zipped up my flies.
"Will that make it easier for you to walk?" she asked.
"I owe it all to you."
"Well, then, Sir, if it suits you, shall we walk a little farther?"
"By all means."
We cut across the meadow, through a stand of trees, and across
another meadow. Naoko talked about her dead sister, explaining that
although she had hardly said anything about this to anyone, she felt
she ought to tell me.
"She was six years older than me, and our personalities were totally
different, but still we were very close. We never fought, not once. It's
true. Of course, with such a big difference in our ages, there was
nothing much for us to fight about."
Her sister was one of those girls who are successful at every
thing - a super-student, a super-athlete, popular, a leader, kind,
straightforward, the boys liked her, her teachers loved her, her walls
were covered with certificates of merit. There's always one girl like
that in any school. "I'm not saying this because she's my sister, but she
never let any of this spoil her or make her the least bit stuck-up or a
show-off. It's just that, no matter what you gave her to do, she would
naturally do it better than anyone else.
"So when I was little, I decided that I was going to be the sweet little
girl." Naoko twirled a frond of plume grass as she spoke. "I mean, you
know, I grew up hearing everybody talking about how smart she was
and how good she was at games and how popular she was. Of course
I'm going to assume there's no way I could ever compete with her. My
face, at least, was a little prettier than hers, so I guess my parents
decided they'd bring me up cute. Right from the start they put me in
that kind of school. They dressed me in velvet dresses and frilly
blouses and patent leather shoes and gave me piano lessons and ballet
lessons. This just made my sister even crazier about me - you know: I
was her cute little sister. She'd give me these cute little presents and
take me everywhere with her and help me with my homework. She
even took me along on dates. She was the best big sister anyone could
ask for.
"Nobody knew why she killed herself. The same as Kizuki. Exactly
the same. She was 17, too, and she never gave the slightest hint she
was going to commit suicide. She didn't leave a note, either. Really, it
was exactly the same, don't you think?"
"Sounds like it."
"Everybody said she was too smart or she read too many books. And
she did read a lot. She had tons of books. I read a bunch of them after
she died, and it was so sad. They had her comments in the margins
and flowers pressed between the pages and letters from boyfriends,
and every time I came across something like that I'd cry. I cried a lot."
Naoko fell silent for a few seconds, twirling the plume grass again.
"She was the kind of person who took care of things by herself. She'd
never ask anybody for advice or help. It wasn't a matter of pride, I
think. She just did what seemed natural to her. My parents were used
to this and thought she'd be OK if they left her alone. I would go to
my sister for advice and she was always ready to give it, but she never
went to anyone else. She did what needed to be done, on her own. She
never got angry or moody. This is all true, I mean it, I'm not
exaggerating. Most girls, when they have their period or something,
will get grumpy and take it out on others, but she never even did that.
Instead of getting into a bad mood, she would become very subdued.
Maybe once in two or three months this would happen to her: she'd
shut herself up in her room and stay in bed, avoid school, hardly eat a
thing, turn the lights off, and space out. She wouldn't be in a bad
mood, though. When I came home from school, she'd call me into her
room and sit me down next to her and ask me about my day. I'd tell
her all the little things - like what kinds of games I played with my
friends or what the teacher said or my exam results, stuff like that.
She'd take in every detail and make comments and suggestions, but as
soon as I left - to play with a friend, say, or go to a ballet lesson - she'd
space out again. After two days, she'd snap out of it just like that and
go to
school. This kind of thing went on for, I don't know, maybe
four years. My parents were worried at first and I think they went to a
doctor for advice, but, I mean, she'd be perfectly fine after two days,
so they thought it would work itself out if they left her alone, she was
such a bright, steady girl.
"After she died, though, I heard my parents talking about a younger
brother of my father's who had died long before. He had also been
very bright, but he had stayed shut up in the house for four years -
from the time he was 17 until he was 21. And then suddenly one day
he left the house and jumped in front of a train. My father said,
"Maybe it's in the blood - from my side'."
While Naoko was speaking, her fingers unconsciously teased the
tassel of the plume grass, scattering its fibres to the wind. When the
shaft was bare, she wound it around her fingers.
"I was the one who found my sister dead," she went on. "In autumn
when I was in the first year. November. On a dark, rainy day. My
sister was in the sixth-form at the time. I came home from my piano
lesson at 6.30 and my mother was making dinner. She told me to tell
my sister it was ready. I went upstairs and knocked on her door and
yelled "Dinner's ready', but there was no answer. Her room was
completely silent. I thought this was strange, so I knocked again,
opened the door and peeped inside. I thought she was probably
sleeping. She wasn't in bed, though. She was standing by the window,
staring outside, with her neck bent at a kind of angle like this, like she
was thinking. The room was dark, the lights were out, and it was hard
to see anything. "What are you doing?' I said to her. "Dinner is ready.'
That's when I noticed that she looked taller than usual. What was
going on? I wondered: it was so strange! Did she have high heels on?
Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to
speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It
came straight down from a beam in the ceiling - I mean it was
amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a
ruler. My sister had a white blouse on - yeah, a simple white blouse
like this one - and a grey skirt, and her toes were pointing down like a
ballerina's, except there was a space between the tip of her toes and
the floor of maybe seven or eight inches. I took in every detail. Her
face, too. I looked at her face. I couldn't help it. I thought: I've got to
go right downstairs and tell my mother. I've got to scream. But my
body ignored me. It moved on its own, separately from my conscious
mind. It was trying to lower her from the rope while my mind was
telling me to hurry downstairs. Of course, there was no way a little
girl could have the strength to do such a thing, and so I just stood
there, spacing out, for maybe five or six minutes, a total blank, like
something inside me had died. I just stayed that way, with my sister,
in that cold, dark place until my mother came up to see what was
going on."
Naoko shook her head.
"For three days after that I couldn't talk. I just lay in bed like a dead
person, eyes wide open and staring into space. I didn't know what was
happening." Naoko pressed against my arm. "I told you in my letter,
didn't I? I'm a far more flawed human being than you realize. My
sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots. And
that's why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don't wait for
me. Sleep with other girls if you want to. Don't let thoughts of me hold
you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up
taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don't want to do. I don't
want to interfere with your life. I don't want to interfere with
anybody's life. Like I said before, I want you to come to see me every
once in a while, and always remember me. That's all I want."
"It's not all I want, though," I said.
"You're wasting your life being involved with me." "I'm not wasting
anything."
"But I might never recover. Will you wait for me forever?
Can you wait 10 years, 20 years?"
"You're letting yourself be scared by too many things," I said. "The
dark, bad dreams, the power of the dead. You have to forget them. I'm
sure you'll get well if you do."
"If I can," said Naoko, shaking her head.
"If you can get out of this place, will you live with me?" I asked.
"Then I can protect you from the dark and from bad dreams. Then
you'd have me instead of Reiko to hold you when things got difficult."
Naoko pressed still more firmly against me. "That would be
wonderful," she said.

We got back to the cafe a little before three. Reiko was reading a book
and listening to Brahms' Second Piano Concerto on the radio. There
was something wonderful about Brahms playing at the edge of a
grassy meadow without a sign of anyone as far as the eye could see.
Reiko was whistling along with the cello passage that begins the third
movement.
"Backhaus and Bohm," she said. "I wore this record out once, a long
time ago. Literally. I wore the grooves out listening to every note. I
sucked the music right out of it."
Naoko and I ordered coffee.
"Do a lot of talking?" asked Reiko.
"Tons," said Naoko.
"Tell me all about his, uh, you know, later."
"We didn't do any of that," said Naoko, reddening. "Really?" Reiko
asked me. "Nothing?" "Nothing," I said.
"Bo-o-o-ring!" she said with a bored look on her face. "True," I said,
sipping my coffee.

The scene in the dining hall was the same as the day before - the
mood, the voices, the faces. Only the menu had changed. The balding
man in white, who yesterday had been talking about the secretion of
gastric juices under weightless conditions, joined the three of us at our
table and talked for a long time about the correlation of brain size to
intelligence. As we ate our soybean burgers, we heard all about the
volume of Bismarck's brain and Napoleon's. He pushed his plate aside
and used a ballpoint pen and notepaper to draw sketches of brains. He
would start to draw, declare "No, that's not quite it", and begin a new
one. This happened several times. When he had finished, he carefully
put the remaining notepaper away in a pocket of his white jacket and
slipped the pen into his breast pocket, in which he kept a total of three
pens, along with pencils and a ruler. Having finished his meal, he
repeated what he had told me the day before, "The winters here are
really nice. Make sure you come back when it's winter," and left the
dining hall.
"Is he a doctor or a patient?" I asked Reiko. "Which do you think?"
"I really can't tell. In either case, he doesn't seem all that normal."
"He's a doctor," said Naoko. "Doctor Miyata."
"Yeah," said Reiko, "but I bet he's the craziest one here." "Mr Omura,
the gatekeeper, is pretty crazy, too," answered
Naoko.
"True," said Reiko, nodding as she stabbed her broccoli. "He does
these wild callisthenics every morning, screaming nonsense at the top
of his lungs. And before you came, Naoko, there was a girl in the
business office, Miss Kinoshita, who tried to kill herself. And last year
they sacked a male nurse, Tokushima, who had a terrible drinking
problem."
"Sounds like patients and staff should swap places," I said.
"Right on," said Reiko, waving her fork in the air. "You're finally
starting to see how things work here."
"I suppose so."
"What makes us most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not
normal."

Back in the room, Naoko and I played cards while Reiko practised
Bach on her guitar.
"What time are you leaving tomorrow?" Reiko asked me, taking a
break and lighting a cigarette.
"Straight after breakfast," I said. "The bus comes at nine. That way I
can get back in time for tomorrow night's work."
"Too bad. It'd be nice if you could stay longer."
"If I stayed around too long, I might end up living here," I said,
laughing.
"Maybe so," Reiko said. Then, to Naoko, she said, "Oh, yeah, I've got
to go get some grapes at Oka's. I totally forgot."
"Want me to go with you?" asked Naoko.
"How about letting me borrow your young Mr Watanabe here?"
"Fine," said Naoko.
"Good. Let's just the two of us go for another nighttime stroll," said
Reiko, taking my hand. "We Yesterday. Let's go all the way tonight."
"Fine," said Naoko, tittering. "Do what you like."
were almost there.
The night air was cool. Reiko wore a pale blue cardigan over her shirt
and walked with her hands shoved in her jeans pockets. Looking up at
the sky, she sniffed the breeze like a dog. "Smells like rain," she said.
I tried sniffing too, but couldn't smell anything. True, there were lots
of clouds in the sky obscuring the moon.
"If you stay here long enough, you can pretty much tell the weather by
the smell of the air," said Reiko.
We entered the wooded area where the staff houses stood. Reiko told
me to wait a minute, walked over to the front door of one house and
rang the bell. A woman came to the door - no doubt the lady of the
house - and stood there chatting and chuckling with Reiko. Then she
ducked inside and came back with a large plastic bag. Reiko thanked
her and said goodnight before returning to the spot where I was
waiting.
"Look," she said, opening the bag.
It held a huge cluster of grapes.
"Do you like grapes?"
"Love them."
She handed me the top bunch. "It's OK to eat them. They're washed."
We walked along eating grapes and spitting the skins and seeds on the
ground. They were fresh and delicious.
"I give their son piano lessons once in a while, and they offer me
different stuff. The wine we had was from them. I sometimes ask them
to do a little shopping for me in town."
"I'd like to hear the rest of the story you were telling me yesterday," I
said.
"Fine," said Reiko. "But if we keep coming home late, Naoko might
start getting suspicious."
"I'm willing to risk it."
"OK, then. I want a roof, though. It's a little chilly tonight."

She turned left as we approached the tennis courts. We went down a
narrow stairway and came out at a spot where several storehouses
stood like a block of houses. Reiko opened the door of the nearest one,
stepped in and turned on the lights. "Come in," she said. "There's not
much to see, though."
The storehouse contained neat rows of cross-country skis, boots and
poles, and on the floor were piled snow removal equipment and bags
of rock salt.
"I used to come here all the time for guitar practice - when I wanted to
be alone. Nice and cosy, isn't it?"
Reiko sat on the bags of rock salt and invited me to sit next to her. I
did as I was told.
"Not much ventilation here, but mind if I smoke?"
"Go ahead," I said.
"This is one habit I can't seem to break," she said with a frown, but
she lit up with obvious enjoyment. Not many people enjoy tobacco as
much as Reiko did. I ate my grapes, carefully peeling them one at a
time and tossing the skins and seeds into a tin that served as a rubbish
bin.
"Now, let's see, how far did we get last night?" Reiko asked.
"It was a dark and stormy night, and you were climbing the steep cliff
to grab the bird's nest."
"You're amazing, the way you can joke around with such a straight
face," said Reiko. "Let's see, I think I had got to the point where I was
giving piano lessons to the girl every Saturday morning."
"That's it."
"Assuming you can divide everybody in the world into two groups -
those who are good at teaching things to people, and those who are not
- I pretty much belong to the first group," said Reiko. "I never thought
so when I was young, and I suppose I didn't want to think of myself
that way, but once

I reached a certain age and had attained a degree of selfknowledge I
realized it was true after all: I'm good at teaching people things. Really
good."
"I bet you are."
"I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I'm
much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's
just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the
matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a
first-class matchbox than a second-class match. I got this clear in my
own mind, I'd say, after I started teaching this girl. I had taught a few
others when I was younger, strictly as a sideline, without realizing this
about myself. It was only after I started teaching her that I began to
think of myself that way. Hey - I'm good at teaching people. That's
how well the lessons went.
As I said yesterday, the girl was nothing special when it came to
technique, and there was no question of her becoming a professional
musician, so I could take it easy. Plus she was going to the kind of
girls' school where anybody with halfdecent marks automatically got
into university, which meant she didn't have to kill herself studying,
and her mother was all for going easy with the lessons, too. So I didn't
push her to do anything. I knew the first time I met her that she was
the kind of girl you couldn't push to do anything, that she was the kind
of child who would be all sweetness and say "Yes, yes,' and absolutely
refuse to do anything she didn't want to do. So the first thing I did was
let her play a piece the way she wanted to - 100 per cent her own way.
Then I would play the same piece several different ways for her, and
the two of us would discuss which was best or which way she liked
most. Then I'd have her play the piece again, and her performance
would be ten times better than the first. She would see for
herself what worked best and bring those features into her own
playing."
Reiko paused for a moment, observing the glowing end of her
cigarette. I went on eating my grapes without a word.
"I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than
me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought,
,if only she had started out with a good teacher and received the
proper training, she'd be so much farther along!' But I was wrong. She
wasn't the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just
happen to be people like that. They're blessed with thismarvellous
talent, but they can't make the effort to systematize it. They end up
squandering it in little bits and pieces. I've seen my share of people
like that. At first you think they're amazing. They can sight-read some
terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the
way through. You see them do it, and you're overwhelmed. You think,
"I could never do that in a million years.' But that's as far as it goes.
They can't take it any further. And why not? Because they won't put in
the effort. They haven't had the discipline pounded into them. They've
been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they've been able to
play things well without any effort and they've had people telling them
how great they are from an early age, so hard work looks stupid to
them. They'll take some piece another kid has to work on for three
weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher assumes they've
put enough into it and lets them go on to the next thing. And they do
that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out
what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a
crucial element required for character building. It's a tragedy. I myself
had tendencies like that, but fortunately I had a very tough teacher, so
I kept them in check.
"Anyway, it was a joy to teach her. Like driving down the highway in
a high-powered sports car that responds to the slightest touch -
responds too quickly, sometimes. The trick to teaching children like
that is not to praise them too much. They're so used to praise it doesn't
mean anything to them. You've got to dole it out wisely. And you can't
force anything on them. You have to let them choose for themselves.
And you don't let them rush ahead from one thing to the next: you
make them stop and think. But that's about it. If you do those things,
you'll get good results."
Reiko dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and stamped it out. Then
she took a deep breath as if to calm herself.
"When her lessons ended, we'd have tea and chat. Sometimes I'd show
her certain jazz piano styles - like, this is Bud Powell, or this is
Thelonious Monk. But mostly she talked. And what a talker she was!
She could draw you right in. As I told you yesterday, I think most of
what she said was made up, but it was interesting. She was a keen
observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She
could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at -
stirring people's emotions,moving you. And she knew she had this
power. She tried to use it as skilfully and effectively as possible. She
could make you feel whatever she wanted - angry or sad or
sympathetic or disappointed or happy. She would manipulate people's
emotions for no other reason than to test her own powers. Of course, I
only realized this later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing
to me."
Reiko shook her head and ate a few grapes.
"It was a sickness," she said. "The girl was sick. She was like the
rotten apple that ruins all the other apples. And no one could cure her.
She'll have that sickness until the day she dies. In that sense, she was a
sad little creature. I would have
pitied her, too, if I hadn't been one of her victims. I would have seen
her as a victim."
Reiko ate a few more grapes. She seemed to be thinking of how best
to go on with her story.
"Well, anyway, I enjoyed teaching her for a good six months.
Sometimes I'd find something she said a little surprising or odd. Or
she'd be talking and I'd have this rush of horror when I realised the
intensity of her hatred for some person was completely irrational, or it
would occur to me that she was just far too clever, and I'd wonder
what she was really thinking. But, after all, everyone has their flaws,
right? And finally, what business was it of mine to question her
personality or character? I was just her piano teacher. All I had to care
about was whether she practised or not. And besides, the truth of the
matter is that I liked her. I liked her a lot.
"Still, I was careful not to tell her anything too personal about myself.
I just had this sixth sense that I'd better not talk about such things. She
asked me hundreds of questions - she was dying to know more about
me - but I only told her the most harmless stuff, like things about my
childhood or where I'd gone o school, stuff like that. She said she t
wanted to know more about me, but I told her there was nothing to
tell: I'd had a boring life, I had an ordinary husband, an ordinary child,
and a ton of housework. "But I like you so much,' she'd say and look
me right in the eye in this clingy sort of way. It sent a thrill through
me when she did that - a nice thrill. But even so, I never told her more
than I had to.
"And then one day - a day in May, I think it was - in the middle of her
lesson, she said she felt sick. I saw she was pale and sweating and
asked if she wanted to go home, but she said she thought she'd feel
better if she could just lie down for a while. So I took her - almost
carried her - to the bedroom.
We had such a small sofa, the bed was the only place she could lie
down. She apologized for being a nuisance, but I assured her it was no
bother and asked if she wanted anything to drink. She said no, she just
wanted me to stay near her, which I said I'd be glad to do.
"A few minutes later she asked me to rub her back. She sounded as
though she was really suffering, and she was sweating like mad, so I
started to give her a good massage. Then she apologized and asked me
if I'd mind taking off her bra, as it was hurting her. So, I don't know, I
did it. She was wearing a skin-tight blouse, and I had to unbutton that
and reach behind and undo the bra hooks. She had big breasts for a
13-year-old. Twice as big as mine. And she wasn't wearing any starter
bra but a real adult model, an expensive one. Of course I'm not paying
all that much attention at the time, and like an idiot I just carry on
rubbing her back. She keeps apologizing in this pitiful voice as if she's
really sorry, and I keep telling her it's OK it's OK."
Reiko tapped the ash from her cigarette to he floor. By then I had t
stopped eating grapes and was giving all my attention to her story.
"After a while she starts sobbing. "What's wrong?' I ask her.
"Nothing,' she says. "It's obviously not nothing,' I say. "Tell me the
truth. What's bothering you?' S o she says, "I just get like this
sometimes. I don't know what to do. I'm so lonely and sad, and I can't
talk to anybody, and nobody cares about me. And it hurts so much, I
just get like this. I can't sleep at night, and I don't feel like eating, and
coming here for my lesson is the only thing I have to look forward to.'
So I say, "You can talk to me. Tell me why this happens to you.'
Things are not going well at home, she says. She can't love her
parents, and they don't love her. Her father is seeing another woman
and is hardly ever around, and that makes her mother half crazy and
she takes it out on the girl; she beats her almost every day and she
hates to go home. So now the girl is really wailing, and her eyes are
full of tears, those beautiful eyes of hers. The sight is enough to make
a god weep. So I tell her, if it's so terrible to go home, she can come to
my place any time she likes. When she hears that, the girl throws her
arms around me and says, "Oh, I'm so sorry, but if I didn't have you I
wouldn't know what to do. Please don't turn your back on me. If you
did that, I'd have nowhere to go.'
"So, I don't know, I hold her head against me and I'm caressing her
and saying "There there,' and she's got her arms around me and she's
stroking my back, and soon I'm starting to feel very strange, my whole
body is kind of hot. I mean, here's this picture-perfect beautiful girl
and I'm on the bed with her, and we're hugging, and her hands are
caressing my back in this incredibly sensual way that my own
husband couldn't even begin to match, and I feel all the screws coming
loose in my body every time she touches me, and before I know it she
has my blouse and bra off and she's stroking my breasts. So that's
when it finally hits me that she's an absolute dyed-in-the-wool lesbian.
This had happened to me once before, at school, one of the sixth-form
girls. So then I tell her to stop.
""Oh, please,' she says, "just a little more. I'm so lonely, I'm so lonely,
please believe me, you're the only one I have, oh please, don't turn
your back on me,' and she takes my hand and puts it on her breast -
her very nicely shaped breast, and, sure, I'm a woman, but this electric
something goes through me when my hand makes contact. I have no
idea what to do. I just keep repeating no no no no no, like an idiot. It's
as if I'm Paralyzed, I can't move. I had managed to push the girl
away at school, but now I can't do a thing. My body won't take orders.
She's holding my right hand against her with her left hand, and she's
kissing and licking my nipples, and her right hand is caressing my
back, my side, my bottom. So here I am in the bedroom with the
curtains closed and a 13-year-old girl has me practically naked - she's
been taking my clothes off somehow all along - and touching me all
over and I'm writhing with the pleasure of it. Looking back on it now,
it seems incredible. I mean, it's insane, don't you think? But at the time
it was as if she had cast a spell on me."
Reiko paused to puff at her cigarette.
"You know, this is the first time I've ever told a man about it," she
said, looking at me. "I'm telling it to you because I think I ought to,
but I'm finding it really embarrassing."
"I'm sorry," I said, because I didn't know what else to say.
"This went on for a while, and then her right hand started to move
down, and she touched me through my panties. By then, I was
absolutely soaking wet. I'm ashamed to say it, but I've never been so
wet before or since. I had always thought of myself as sort of
indifferent to sex, so I was astounded to be getting so worked up. So
then she puts these slim, soft fingers of hers inside my panties, and ...
well, you know, I can't bring myself to put it into words. I mean, it
was totally different from when a man puts his clumsy hands on you
there. It was amazing. Really. Like feathers or down. I thought all the
fuses in my head were going to pop. Still, somewhere in my fogged-
over brain, the thought occurred to me that I had to put a stop to this.
If I let it happen once, I'd never stop, and if I had to carry around a
secret like that inside me, my head was going to get completely
messed up again. I thought about my daughter, too. What if she saw
me like this? She was supposed to be at my parents' house until three
on
Saturdays, but what if something happened and she came home
unexpectedly? This helped me to gather my strength and raise myself
on the bed. "Stop it now, please stop!' I shouted.
"But she wouldn't stop. Instead, she yanked my panties down and
started using her tongue. I had rarely let even my husband do that, I
found it so embarrassing, but now I had a 13-year-old girl licking me
all over down there. I just gave up. All I could do was cry. And it was
absolute paradise.
""Stop it!' I yelled one more time and slapped her on the side of the
face as hard as I could. She finally stopped, raised herself up and
looked into my eyes. The two of us were stark naked, on our knees, in
bed, staring at each other. She was 13, I was 31, but, I don't know,
looking at that body of hers, I felt totally overwhelmed. The image is
still so vivid in my mind. I could hardly believe I was looking at the
body of a 13-year-old girl, and I still can't believe it. By comparison,
what I had for a body was enough to make you cry. Believe me."
There was nothing I could say, and so I said nothing.
""What's wrong?' she says to me. "You like it this way, don't you? I
knew you would the first time I met you. I know you like it. It's much
better than doing it with a man - isn't it? Look how wet you are. I can
make you feel even better if you'll let me. It's true. I can make you feel
like your body's melting away. You want me to, don't you?' And she
was right. She was much better than my husband. And I did want her
to do it even more! But I couldn't let it happen. "Let's do this once a
week,' she said. "Just once a week. Nobody will find out. It'll be our
little secret'."
"But I got out of bed and put on my dressing-gown and told her to
leave and never come back. She just looked at me. Her eyes were
absolutely flat. I had never seen them like that
before. It was as if they were painted on cardboard. They had no
depth. After she stared at me for a while, she gathered up her clothes
without a word and, as slowly as she could, as though she were
making a show of it, she put on each item, one at a time. Then she
went back into the piano room and took a brush from her bag. She
brushed her hair and wiped the blood from her lips with a
handkerchief, put on her shoes, and left. As she went out, she said,
"You're a lesbian, you know. It's true. You may try to hide it, but
you'll be a lesbian until the day you die'."
"Is it true?" I asked.
Reiko curved her lips and thought for a while. "Well, it is and it isn't. I
definitely felt better with her than with my husband. That's a fact. I
had a time there when I really agonized over the question. Maybe I
really was a lesbian and just hadn't noticed until then. But I don't think
so any more. Which is not to say I don't have the tendencies. I
probably do have them. But I'm not a lesbian in the proper sense of the
term. I never feel desire when I look at a woman. Know what I
mean?"
I nodded.
"Certain kinds of girls, though, do respond to me, and I can feel it
when that happens. Those are the only times it comes out in me. I can
hold Naoko in my arms, though, and feel nothing special. We go
around in the flat practically naked when the weather's hot, and we
take baths together, sometimes even sleep in the same bed, but
nothing happens. I don't feel a thing. I can see that she has a beautiful
body, but that's all. Actually, Naoko and I played a game once. We
made believe we were lesbians. Want to hear about it?"
"Sure. Tell me."
"When I told her the story I just told you - we tell each
other everything, you know - Naoko tried an experiment. The two of
us got undressed and she tried caressing me, but it didn't work at all. It
just tickled. I thought I was going to die laughing. Just thinking about
it makes me itchy. She was so clumsy! I'll bet you're glad to hear
that."
"Yes I am, to tell the truth."
"Well, anyway, that's about it," said Reiko, scratching near an
eyebrow with the tip of her little finger. "After the girl left my house, I
found a chair and sat there spacing out for a while, wondering what to
do. I could hear the dull beating of my heart from deep inside my
body. My arms and legs seemed to weigh a ton, and my mouth felt as
though I'd eaten a moth or something, it was so dry. But I dragged
myself to the bathroom, knowing my daughter would be back soon. I
wanted to clean those places where the girl had ouched and licked t
me. I scrubbed myself with soap, over and over, but I couldn't seem to
get rid of the slimy feeling she had left behind. I knew I was probably
imagining it, but that didn't help. That night, I asked my husband to
make love to me, almost as a way to get rid of the defilement. Of
course, I didn't tell him anything - I couldn't. All I said to him was that
I wanted him to take it slow, to give it more time than usual. And he
did. He concentrated on every little detail, he really took a long, long
time, and the way I came that night, oh yes, it was like nothing I had
ever experienced before, never once in all our married life. And why
do you think that was? Because the touch of that girl's fingers was still
there in my body. That's all it was.
"Oh, man, is this embarrassing! Look, I'm sweating! I can't believe I'm
saying these things - he "made love' to me, I "came'!" Reiko smiled,
her lips curved again. "But even this didn't help. Two days went by,
three, and her touch was still there. And her last words were echoing
and echoing in my head.
"She didn't come to my house the following Saturday. My heart was
pounding all day long while I waited, wondering what I would do if
she showed up. I couldn't concentrate on anything. She never did
come, though. Of course. She was a proud little thing, and she had
failed with me in the end. She didn't come the next week, either, nor
the week after that, and soon a month went by. I decided that I would
be able to forget about what had happened when enough time had
passed, but I couldn't forget. When I was alone in the house, I would
feel her presence and my nerves would be on edge. I couldn't play the
piano, I couldn't think, I couldn't do anything during that first month.
And then one day I realized that something was wrong whenever I left
the house. The neighbours were looking at me in a strange way. There
was a new distance in their eyes. They were as polite as ever with
their greetings, but there was something different in their tone of voice
and in their behaviour towards me. The woman next door, who used to
pay me an occasional visit, seemed to be avoiding me. I tried not to let
these things bother me, though. Start noticing things like that, and
you've got the first signs of illness.
"Then one day I had a visit from another housewife I was on friendly
terms with. We were the same age, and she was the daughter of a
friend of my mother's, and her child went to the same kindergarten as
mine, so we were fairly close. She just showed up one day and asked
me if I knew about a terrible rumour that was going around about me.
"What kind of rumour?' I asked. "I almost can't say it, it's so awful,'
she said. "Well, you've got this far, you have to tell me the rest.'
"Still she resisted telling me, but I finally got it all out of her. I mean,
her whole purpose in coming to see me was to tell me what she had
heard, so of course she was going to spit it out eventually. According
to her, people were saying that I was a card-carrying lesbian and had
been in and out of mental hospitals for it. They said that I had stripped
the clothes off my piano pupil and tried to do things to her and when
she had resisted I had slapped her so hard her face swelled up. They
had turned the story on its head, of course, which was bad enough, but
what really shocked me was that people knew I had been hospitalized.
"My friend said she was telling everyone that she had known me for
ever and that I was not like that, but the girl's parents believed her
version and were spreading it around the neighbourhood. In addition,
they had investigated my background and found that I had a history of
mental problems.
"The way my friend heard it, the girl had come home from her lesson
one day - that day, of course - with her face all bloated, her lip split
and bloody, buttons missing from her blouse, and even her underwear
torn. Can you believe it? She had done all this to back up her story, of
course, which her mother had to drag out of her. I can just see her
doing it - putting blood on her blouse, tearing buttons off, ripping the
lace on her bra, making herself cry until her eyes were red, messing up
her hair, telling her mother a pack of lies.
"Not that I'm blaming people for believing her. I would have believed
her, too, this beautiful doll with a devil's tongue. She comes home
crying, she refuses to talk because it's too embarrassing, but then she
spills it out. Of course people are going to believe her. And to make
matters worse, it's true, I do have a history of hospitalization for
mental problems, I did hit her in the face as hard as I could. Who's
going to believe me? Probably just my husband.
A few more days went by while I wrestled with the
question of whether to tell him or not, but when I did, he believed me.
Of course. I told him everything that had happened that day - the kind
of lesbian things she did to me, the way I slapped her in the face. Of
course, I didn't tell him what I had felt. I couldn't have told him that.
So anyway, he was furious and insisted that he was going to go
straight to the girl's family. He said, "You're a married woman, after
all. You're married to me. And you're a mother. There's no way you're
a lesbian. What a joke!'
"But I wouldn't let him go. All he could do was make things worse. I
knew. I knew she was sick. I had seen hundreds of sick people, so I
knew. The girl was rotten inside. Peel off a layer of that beautiful skin,
and you'd find nothing but rotten flesh. I know it's a terrible thing to
say, but it's true. And I knew that ordinary people could never know
the truth about her, that there was no way we could win. She was an
expert at manipulating the emotions of the adults around her, and we
had nothing to prove our case. First of all, who's going to believe that
a 13-year-old girl set a homosexual trap for a woman in her thirties?
No matter what we said, people would believe what they wanted to
believe. The more we struggled, the more vulnerable we'd be.
"There was only one thing for us to do, I said: we had to move. If I
stayed in that neighbourhood any longer, the stress would get to me;
my mind would snap again. It was happening already. We had to get
out of there, go somewhere far away where nobody knew me. My
husband wasn't ready to go, though. It hadn't dawned on him yet how
critical I was. And the timing was terrible: he loved his work, and he
had finally succeeded in getting us settled in our own house (we lived
in a little prefab), and our daughter was comfortable in her
kindergarten. "Wait a minute,' he said, "we can't just up sticks and go.
I can't find a job just like that. We'd have to sell the house, and we'd
have to find another kindergarten. It'll take two months at least."
"I can't wait two months,?I told him. "This is going to finish me off
once and for all. I'm not kidding. Believe me, I know what I'm talking
about.' The symptoms were starting already: my ears were ringing,
and I was hearing things, and I couldn't sleep. So he suggested that I
leave first, go somewhere by myself, and he would follow after he had
taken care of what had to be done.
""No,' I said, "I don't want to go alone. I'll fall apart if I don't have
you. I need you. Please, don't leave me alone.' He held me and pleaded
with me to hang on a little longer. Just a month, he said. He would
take care of everything - leave his job, sell the h ouse, make
arrangements for kindergarten, find a new job. There might be a
position he could take in Australia, he said. He just wanted me to wait
one month, and everything would be OK. What could I say to that? If
I tried to object, it would only isolate me even more."
Reiko sighed and looked at the ceiling light.
"I couldn't hold on for a month, though. One day, it happened again:
snap! And this time it was really bad. I took sleeping pills and turned
on the gas. I woke up in a hospital bed, and it was all over. It took a
few months before I had calmed down enough to think, and then I
asked my husband for a divorce. I told him it would be the best thing
for him and for our daughter. He said he had no intention of divorcing
me. "We can make a new start,' he said. "We can go somewhere new,
just the three of us, and begin all over again.' "It's too late,' I told him.
"Everything ended when you asked me to wait a month. If you really
wanted to start again, you shouldn't have said that to me. Now, no
matter where we go, no matter how far away we move, the same thing
will happen all over again. And I'll ask you for the same thing, and
make you suffer. I don't want to do that any more.'
"And so we divorced. Or I should say I divorced him. He married
again two years ago, though. I'm still glad I made him leave me.
Really. I knew I'd be like this for the rest of my life, and I didn't want
to drag anyone down with me. I didn't want to force anyone to live in
constant fear that I might lose my mind at any moment.
"He had been wonderful to me: an ideal husband, faithful, strong and
patient, someone I could put my complete trust in. He had done
everything he could to heal me, and I had done everything I could to
be healed, both for his sake and for our daughter's. And I had believed
in my recovery. I was happy for six years from the time we were
married. He got me 99 per cent of the way there, but the other one per
cent went crazy. Snap! Everything we had built up came crashing
down. In one split second, everything turned nto nothing. And that i
girl was the one who did it."
Reiko collected the cigarette butts she had crushed underfoot and
tossed them into the tin can.
"It's a terrible story. We worked so hard, so hard, building our world
one brick at a time. And when it fell apart, it happened just like that.
Everything was gone before you knew it."
She stood up and thrust her hands in her pockets. "Let's go back. It's
late."
The sky was darker, the cloud cover thicker than before, the moon
invisible. Now, I realized, like Reiko I could smell the rain. And with
it mixed the fresh smell of the grapes in the bag I was holding.
"That's why I can't leave this place," she said. "I'm afraid to get
involved with the outside world. I'm afraid to meet new people and
feel new feelings."
"I understand," I said. "But I think you can do it. I think you can go
outside and make it."
Reiko smiled, but said nothing.
Naoko was on the sofa with a book. She had her legs crossed and
pressed her hand against her temple as she read. Her fingers almost
seemed to be touching and testing each word that entered her head.
Scattered drops of rain were beginning to tap on the roof. The
lamplight enveloped her, hovering around her like fine dust. After my
long talk with Reiko, Naoko's youthfulness struck me in a new way.
"Sorry we're so late," said Reiko, patting Naoko's head.
"Enjoy yourselves?" asked Naoko, looking up.
"Of course," said Reiko.
"Doing what?" Naoko asked me, - just the two of you."
"Not at liberty to say, Miss," I answered.
Naoko chuckled and set down her book. Then the three of us ate
grapes to the sound of the rain.
"When it's raining like this," said Naoko, "it feels as if we're the only
ones in the world. I wish it would just keep raining so the three of us
could stay together."
"Oh, sure," said Reiko, "and while the two of you are going at it, I'm
supposed to be fanning you or playing background music on my guitar
like some dumb geisha? No, thanks!"
"Oh, I'd let you have him once in a while," said Naoko, laughing.
"OK, then, count me in," said Reiko. "Come on, rain, pour down!"
The rain did pour down, and kept pouring. Thunder shook the place
from time to time. When we had finished the grapes, Reiko went back
to her cigarettes and pulled out the guitar from under her bed and
started to play - first, "Desafinado" and "The Girl from Ipanema", then
some Bacharach and a few Lennon and McCartney songs. Reiko and I
sipped wine again, and when that was gone we shared the brandy that
was left in my flask. A warm, intimate mood took hold as the three of
us talked into the night, and I began to wish, with Naoko, that the rain
would keep on falling.
"Will you come to see me again?" she asked, looking at me.
"Of course I will," I said.
"And will you write?"
"Every week."
"And will you add a few lines for me?" asked Reiko. "That I will," I
said. "I'd be glad to."
At eleven o'clock, Reiko unfolded the sofa and made a bed for me as
she had the night before. We said goodnight and turned out the lights.
Unable to sleep, I took The Magic Mountain and a torch from my
rucksack and read for a while. Just before midnight, the bedroom door
edged open and Naoko came and crawled in next to me. Unlike the
night before, Naoko was the usual Naoko. Her eyes were in focus, her
movements brisk. Bringing her mouth to my ear, she whispered, "I
don't know, I can't sleep."
"I can't either," I said. Setting my book down and turning out the
torch, I took her in my arms and kissed her. The darkness and the
sound of the rain enfolded us.
"How about Reiko?"
"Don't worry, she's sound asleep. And when she sleeps, she sleeps."
Then Naoko asked, "Will you really come to see me again?"
"Of course I will."
"Even if I can't do anything for you?"
I nodded in the darkness. I could feel the full shape of her breasts
against me. I traced the outline of her body through her gown with the
flat of my hand. From shoulder to back to hips, I ran my hand over her
again and again, driving the line and the softness of her body into my
brain. After we had been in this gentle embrace for a while, Naoko
touched her lips to my forehead and slipped out of bed. I could see her
pale blue gown flash in the darkness like a fish.
"Goodbye," she called in a tiny voice.
Listening to the rain, I dropped into a gentle sleep.

It was still raining the following morning - a fine, almost invisible
autumn rain unlike the previous night's downpour. You knew it was
raining only because of the ripples on puddles and the sound of
dripping from the eaves. I woke to see a milky white mist enclosing
the window, but as the sun rose a breeze carried the mist away, and
the surrounding woods and hills began to emerge.
As we had done the day before, the three of us ate breakfast then went
out to attend to the aviary. Naoko and Reiko wore yellow plastic
raincapes with hoods. I put on a jumper and a waterproof windcheater.
Outside the air was damp and chilly. The birds, too, were avoiding the
rain, huddled together at the back of the cage.
"Gets cold here when it rains, doesn't it?" I said to Reiko.
"Every time it rains it'll be a little colder now, until it turns to snow,"
she said. "The clouds from the Sea of Japan dump tons of snow when
they pass through here."
"What do you do with the birds in the winter?"
"Bring them inside, of course. What are we supposed to do - dig them
out of the snow in spring all frozen? We defrost 'em and bring 'em
back to life and yell, OK, everybody, come and get it!"
I poked the wire mesh and the parrot flapped its wings and squawked
"Shithead!" "Thank you!" "Crazy!"
"Now, that one I'd like to freeze," Naoko said with a melancholy look.
"I really think I will go crazy if I have to hear that every morning."
After cleaning the aviary, we went back to the flat. While I packed my
things, the women put on their farm clothes. We left the building
together and parted just beyond the tennis court. They turned right and
I continued straight ahead. We called goodbye to each other, and I
promised I would come again. Naoko gave a little smile and
disappeared around a corner.
On my way to the gate I passed several people, all wearing the same
yellow raincapes that Naoko and Reiko wore, all with their hoods up.
Colours shone with an exceptional clarity in the rain: the ground was a
deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, and the people
wrapped in yellow looking like otherworldly spirits that were only
allowed to wander the earth on rainy mornings. They floated over the
ground in silence, carrying farm tools, baskets and sacks.
The gatekeeper remembered my name and marked it on the list of
visitors as I left. "I see you're here from Tokyo," the old fellow said. "I
went there once. Just once. They serve great pork."
"They do?" I asked, uncertain how to answer him.
"I didn't like much of what I ate in Tokyo, but the pork was delicious.
I expect they have some special way of rearing 'em, eh?"
I said I didn't know, it was the first I'd heard of it. "When was that, by
the way, when you went to Tokyo?"
"Hmm, let's see," he said, cocking his head, "was it the time His
Majesty the Crown prince got married? My son was in Tokyo and said
I ought to see the place at least once. That must have been 1959."
"Oh, well then, sure, pork must have been good in Tokyo back then," I
said.
"How about these days?" he asked.
I wasn't sure, I said, but I hadn't heard anything special about it. This
seemed to disappoint him. He gave every sign of wanting to continue
our conversation, but I told him I had to catch a bus and started
walking in the direction of the road. Patches of fog remained floating
on the path where it skirted the stream, but the breeze carried them
over to the steep flanks of a nearby mountain. Every now and then as I
walked along I would stop, turn, and heave a deep sigh for no
particular reason. I felt as though I had arrived on a planet where the
gravity was a little different. Yes, of course, I told myself, feeling sad:
I was in the outside world now.
Back at the dorm by 4.30, I changed straight away and left for the
record shop in Shinjuku to put in my hours. I looked after the shop
from six o'clock to 10.30 and sold a few records, but mainly I sat there
in a daze, watching an incredible variety of people streaming by
outside. There were families and couples and drunks and gangsters
and lively-looking girls in short skirts and bearded hippies and bar
hostesses and some indefinable types. Whenever I put on hard rock,
hippies and runaway kids would gather outside to dance and sniff
paint thinner or just sit on the ground doing nothing in particular, and
when I put on Tony Bennett, they would disappear.
Next door was a shop where a middle-aged, sleepy-eyed man sold
"adult toys". I couldn't imagine why anyone would want the kind of
sex paraphernalia he had there, but he seemed to do a roaring trade. In
the alley diagonally across from the record shop I saw a drunken
student vomiting. In the game arcade across from us at another angle,
the cook from a local restaurant was killing time on his break with a
game of bingo that took cash bets. Beneath the eaves of a shop that
had closed for the night, a swarthy homeless guy was crouching,
motionless. A girl with pale pink lipstick who couldn't have been more
than 12 or 13 came in and asked me to play the Rolling Stones'
"Jumpin' Jack Flash". When I found the record and put it on for her,
she started snapping her fingers to the rhythm and shaking her hips as
she danced around the shop. Then she asked me for a cigarette. I gave
her one of the manager's, which she smoked gratefully, and when the
record ended she left the shop without so much as a "thank you".
Every 15 minutes or so I would hear the siren of an ambulance or
police car. Three drunk company executives in suits and ties came by,
laughing at the top of their voices every time they yelled "Nice arse!"
at a pretty, long-haired girl in a phone box.
The more I watched, the more confused I became. What the hell was
this all about? I wondered. What could it possibly mean?
The manager came back from dinner and said to me, "Hey, know
what, Watanabe? Night before last I made it with the boutique chick."
For some time now he had had his eye on the girl who worked at a
boutique nearby, and every once in a while he would take a record
from the shop as a gift for her.
"Good for you," I said to him, whereupon he told me every last detail
of his conquest.
"If you really wanna make a chick, here's what ya gotta do,"
he began, very pleased with himself. "First, ya gotta give 'er presents.
Then ya gotta get 'er drunk. I mean really drunk. Then ya just gotta do
it. It's easy. See what I mean?"
Head mixed up as ever, I boarded the commuter train and went back
to my dorm. Closing the curtains, I turned off the lights, stretched out
in bed, and felt as if Naoko might come crawling in beside me at any
moment. With my eyes closed, I could feel the soft swell of her
breasts on my chest, hear her whispering to me, and feel the outline of
her body in my hands. In the darkness, I returned to that small world
of hers. I smelled the meadow grass, heard the rain at night. I thought
of her naked, as I had seen her in the moonlight, and pictured her
cleaning the aviary and tending to the vegetables with that soft,
beautiful body of hers wrapped in the yellow raincape. Clutching my
erection, I thought of Naoko until I came. This seemed to clear my
brain a little, but it didn't help me sleep. I felt exhausted, desperate for
sleep, but it simply refused to cooperate.
I got out of bed and stood at the window, my unfocused eyes
wandering out towards the flagpole. Without the national flag attached
to it, the pole looked like a gigantic white bone thrusting up into the
darkness of night. What was Naoko doing now? I wondered. Of
course, she must be sleeping, sleeping deeply, shrouded in the
darkness of that curious little world of hers. Let her be spared from
anguished dreams, I found myself hoping.