South of the Border, West of the Sun
“When will you know?”
I shook my head.
“Well, then, take your time and think about it.” She sighed. “I don’t mind waiting. Take as long as you like.”
Starting that night, I slept on the sofa in the living room. Sometimes the kids would get up in the middle of the night and ask me why I was sleeping there. I explained that my snoring was so loud these days that their mother and I decided to sleep in separate rooms. Otherwise Mom wouldn’t get any sleep. One of the kids would snuggle up next to me on the sofa. And I would hug her tight. Sometimes I could hear Yukiko in the bedroom, crying.
For the next two weeks I spent every day endlessly reliving memories. I’d recall ever single detail of the night I spent with Shimamoto, trying to tease out some meaning. Trying to find a message. I remembered the warmth of her in my arms. Her arms sticking out of the sleeves of her white dress. The Nat King Cole songs. The fire in the stove. I called up each and every word we spoke that night.
From out of those words, these of hers: There is no middle ground with me. No middle-ground objects exist and where there are no such objects, there is no middle ground.
And these words of mine: I’ve already decided, Shimamoto-san. I thought about it when you were gone, and I made my decision.
I remembered her eyes, looking over at me in the car. That intense gaze burned into my cheeks. It was more than a mere glance. The smell of death hovered over her. She really was planning to die. That’s why she came to Hakone–to die, together with me.
“And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?”
When she said that, Shimamoto wanted my life. Only now did I understand.
I had come to a final conclusion, and so had she. Why was I so blind? After a night of making love, she planned to grab the steering wheel of the BMW as we drove back to Tokyo and kill us both. No other options remained for her. But something stopped her. And holding everything inside, she disappeared.
What desperate dead end had she reached? Why? And more important, who had driven her to such desperation? Why, finally, was death the only possible escape? I was grasping for clues, playing the detective, but I came up empty-handed. She just vanished, along with her secrets. No probablys or in a whiles this time-she just silently slipped away. Our bodies had become one, yet in the end she refused to open up her heart to me.
Some kinds of things, once they go forward, can never go back to where they began, Hajime, she would no doubt tell me. In the middle of the night, lying on my sofa, I could hear her voice spinning out these words. Like you said, how wonderful it would be if the two of us could go off somewhere and begin life again. Unfortunately, I can’t get out of where I am. It’s a physical impossibility.
And then Shimamoto was a sixteen-year-old girl again, standing in front of sunflowers in a garden, smiling shyly. I really shouldn’t have gone to see you. I knew that from the beginning. I could predict that it would turn out like this. But I couldn’t stand not to. I just had to see you, and when I did, I had to speak with you. Hajime–that’s me. I don’t plan to, but everything I touch gets ruined in the end.
I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
Every day, I scanned the papers from top to bottom for articles about women suicides. Lots of people kill themselves, I discovered, but it was always someone else. As far as I knew, this beautiful thirty-seven-year-old woman with the loveliest of smiles was still alive. Though she was gone from me forever.
On the surface, my days were the same as ever. I’d drive the kids back and forth to the nursery school, the three of us singing songs as we went. Sometimes in the line of cars in front of the nursery school I’d see the young woman in the 260E, and we’d talk. Talking with her made me able to forget at least for a while. Our subjects were limited, as always. We’d exchange the latest news about the Aoyama neighborhood, natural foods, clothes. The usual.
At work, too, I made my usual rounds. I’d put on my suit and go to the bars every night make small talk with the regulars, listen to the opinions and complaints of the staff, remember little things like giving a birthday present to an employee. Treat musicians who happened to drop by to dinner, check the cocktails to make sure they were up to par, make sure the piano was in tune, keep an eye out for rowdy drunks–I did it all. Any problems, I straightened out in a flash. Everything ran like clockwork, but the thrill was gone. No one suspected, though. On the surface I was the same as always. Actually, I was friendlier, kinder, more talkative than ever. But as I sat on a barstool, looking around my establishment everything looked monotonous, lusterless. No longer a carefully crafted, colorful castle in the air, what lay before me was a typical noisy bar-artificial, superficial, and shabby. A stage setting, props built for the sole purpose of getting drunks to part with their cash. Any illusions to the contrary had disappeared in a puff of smoke. All because Shimamoto would never grace these places again. Never again would she sit at the bar; never again would I see her smile as she ordered a drink.
My routine at home was unchanged too. I ate dinner with the family and on Sundays took the kids for a walk or to the zoo. Yukiko, at least on the surface, treated me as she always had. We talked about all kinds of things. We were like childhood friends who happened to be living under the same roof. There were certain words we couldn’t speak, certain facts we didn’t acknowledge. But there was no unconcealed hostility in the air. We just didn’t touch each other. At night we slept separately–I on the sofa, Yukiko in the bedroom. Outwardly, that was the only change in our lives.
Sometimes I couldn’t stand how we were just going through the motions, acting out our assigned roles. Something crucial to us was lost, yet still we could carry on as before. I felt awful. This kind of empty, meaningless life was hurting Yukiko deeply. I wanted to give her an answer to her question, but I couldn’t. Of course I didn’t want to leave her, but who was I to say that? Me–the guy who was going to throw his whole family away. Just because Shimamoto was gone, never to return, didn’t mean I could blithely bounce back to the life I’d had and pretend nothing had happened. Life isn’t that easy, and I don’t think it should be. Besides, lingering images of Shimamoto were still too clear, too real. Every time I closed my eyes, every detail of her body floated before me. My palms remembered the feel of her skin, and her voice whispering in my ear wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t make love to Yukiko with those images still implanted so firmly in my brain.
I wanted to be alone, so knowing nothing else, I went swimming every morning at the pool. Then I’d go to my office, stare at the ceiling, and lose myself in daydreams of Shimamoto. With Yukiko’s question hanging before me unanswered, I was living in a void. I couldn’t go on forever like that. It just wasn’t right. As a human being, as a husband, as a father, I had to live up to my responsibilities. Yet as long as these illusions surrounded me, I was paralyzed. It was even worse whenever it rained, for then I was struck by the delusion that Shimamoto would show up: quietly opening the door, bringing with her the scent of rain. I could picture the smile on her face. When I said something wrong, she would silently shake her head, smiling all the while. All my words lost their strength and, like raindrops glued to the window, slowly parted company with reality. On rainy nights I could barely breathe. The rain twisted time and reality.
When I grew exhausted with these visions, I stared at the scenery outside. I was abandoned in a lifeless, dried-out land. Visions had drained color from the world. Everything, every scene before me, lay flat, mere makeshift. Every object was gritty, the color of sand. The parting words of my old high school classmate haunted me. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end … all that remains is a desert.
The following week, as if lying in wait, strange events ambushed me one after another. On Monday morning, for no speci
al reason I recalled the envelope with one hundred thousand yen and decided to look for it Many years before, I’d put it in a drawer in the desk in my office, a locked drawer, second from the top. When I moved into the office, I put some other valuables together with the envelope in that drawer; other than occasionally checking to see that it was there, I never touched it. But now the envelope was gone. This was strange, uncanny even, for I had absolutely no memory of moving it I was absolutely certain of that Just to make sure, I pulled open the other drawers and checked them from top to bottom. No envelope.
I tried to remember when I’d last seen it I couldn’t pin down an exact date. It wasn’t all that long ago, but not so recently, either. A month ago, maybe two. Three at the most.
Bewildered, I sat down on my chair and stared at the drawer. Maybe someone had broken into the room, unlocked the drawer, and removed the envelope. That wasn’t likely, though–the drawer contained more cash and valuables, which were untouched. Yet it was within the realm of possibility. Or maybe unconsciously I’d disposed of the envelope and for whatever reason erased the memory from my mind. Okay, I told myself, what does it matter? I was going to get rid of it someday. I just saved myself the trouble, right?
But once I acknowledged that the envelope had disappeared, its existence and nonexistence traded places in my consciousness. A strange feeling, like vertigo, took hold of me. A conviction that the envelope had never actually existed swelled up inside me, violently chipping away at my mind, crushing and greedily devouring the certainty I’d had that the envelope was real.
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an alternate reality—to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist But something can happen to sever that chain, and we are at a loss. What is real? Is reality on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side?
What I felt at that point, then, was this kind of cut-off sensation. I closed the drawer, deciding to forget all about it I should have thrown that money away when I first got it Keeping it was a mistake.
On Wednesday afternoon of the same week, I was driving down Gaien Higashidori, when I spied a woman who resembled Shimamoto. She had on blue cotton pants, a beige raincoat, and white deck shoes. And she dragged one leg as she walked. As soon as I saw her, everything around me froze. A lump of air forced its way up from my chest to my throat Shimamoto, I thought I drove past her to check her out in the rearview mirror, but her face was hidden in the crowd. I slammed on my brakes, getting an earful of horn from the car behind me. The way the woman held herself, and the length of her hair—it was Shimamoto exactly. I wanted to stop the car right then and there, but all the parking spots along the road were full. Two hundred meters or so ahead, I finally found a place and managed to squeeze my car in, then I ran back to find her. But she was nowhere to be seen. I ran around like a lunatic She had a bad leg, so she couldn’t have gone too far, I told myself. Shoving people aside, jaywalking across streets, I ran up the pedestrian overpass and looked down on all the passersby below. My shirt was soaked with sweat Soon, though, a revelation dawned on me. She had been dragging the opposite leg. And Shimamoto’s leg was no longer bad.
I shook my head and sighed deeply. Something must be wrong with me. I felt dizzy, all my strength drained away. Leaning against the crosswalk signal, I stared at my feet for a while. The signal turned from green to red, from red to green again. People crossed the street, waited, crossed, with me immobile, collapsed against the post, gasping for breath.
Suddenly I looked up and saw Izumi’s face. Izumi was in a taxi stopped right in front of me. From the rear-seat window, she was staring right at me. The taxi had halted at the red light, and at most, three feet separated her face and mine. She was no longer the seventeen-year-old girl I used to know, but I recognized her at once. The girl I’d held in my arms twenty years before, the first girl I kissed. The girl who, on that fall afternoon so long ago, took off her clothes and lost the clasp to her gaiter belt People might change in twenty years’ time, but I knew this was her. Children are afraid of her, my old classmate said. When I’d heard that, I didn’t understand what he meant I couldn’t grasp what those words were attempting to convey. But now, with Izumi right before my eyes, I understood. Her face had nothing you could call an expression. No, that’s not an entirely accurate way of putting it I should put it this way: Like a room from which every last stick of furniture had been taken, anything you could possibly call an expression had been removed, leaving nothing behind. Not a trace of feeling grazed her face; it was like the bottom of a deep ocean, silent and dead. And with that utterly expressionless face, she was staring at me. At least I think she was looking at me. Her eyes were gazing straight ahead in my direction, yet her face showed me nothing. Or rather, what it showed was this: an infinite blank.
I stood there dumbfounded, speechless. Barely able to support my body, I breathed slowly. For a moment or two, my sense of self really did break down, its very outlines melting away into a thick, syrupy goo. Unconsciously I reached out my hand and touched the window of the cab, stroked the surface of the glass with my fingertips. I had no idea why. A couple of passersby, startled, stopped and stared. But I couldn’t help myself. Through the glass, I slowly stroked that faceless face. Izumi didn’t move a muscle or so much as blink. Was she dead? No, not dead. She was still alive, in an unblinking world. In a deep, silent world behind that pane of glass, she lived. And her lips, motionless, spoke of an infinite nothingness.
The light finally changed to green, and the taxi took off. Izumi’s face was unchanged to the end. I stood rooted to the spot, watching until the taxi was swallowed up in the surge of cars.
I walked back to my car and slumped into the seat I had to get out of there. As I was about to turn on the engine I was hit by a sudden wave of nausea. Like I was going to spew my guts out But I didn’t vomit Resting both hands on the steering wheel, I sat there for a good fifteen minutes. My underarms were drenched in sweat, and an awful smell rose from my body. This wasn’t the body that Shimamoto had so gently loved. It was the body of a middle-aged man, giving off an awful acrid stink.
A few minutes later, a patrolman came up to my car and knocked on the window. I rolled it down. “You can’t park here, pal,” he said, looking around inside. “Get your car out of here.” I nodded and started the motor.
“You look terrible. Do you feel sick?” the policeman asked me.
Wordlessly, I shook my head. And started driving.
It took me several hours to recover. I was drained, completely, leaving an empty shell behind. A hollow sound reverberated through my body. I parked my car inside Aoyama Cemetery and stared listlessly through the windshield at the sky beyond. Izumi was waiting for me there. She was always somewhere, waiting for me. On some street corner, beyond some pane of glass, waiting for me to appear. Watching me. I just hadn’t noticed.
For several days afterward, I couldn’t speak. I’d open my mouth to talk, but the words would disappear, as if the utter nothingness that was Izumi had taken over.
After that strange encounter, though, the afterimages of Shimamoto began, gradually, to fade. Color returned to the world, and I no longer had the helpless feeling that I was walking on the surface of the moon. Vaguely, as if looking through a glass window at changes happening to someone else, I could detect a minute shift in gravity and a gradual sloughing off of something that had clung to me.
Something inside me was severed, and disappeared. Silently. Forever.
r /> While the trio was on break, I went up to the pianist and told him he no longer needed to play “Star-Crossed Lovers.” I mustered up the friendliest smile I could. “You’ve played it for me enough. It’s about time to stop.”
He looked at me as if weighing something in his mind. The two of us were friends, had shared a few drinks and gone beyond your usual polite conversation.
“I don’t quite understand,” he said. “You don’t want me to go out of my way to play that song? Or you don’t want me to ever play that song again? There’s a big difference, and I’d like to be clear about this.”
“I don’t want you to play it,” I said.
“You don’t like the way I play it?”
“I have no problems with your playing. It’s great. There aren’t many people who can handle that tune the way you do.”
“So it’s the tune itself you don’t want to hear anymore?”
“You could say that,” I replied.
“Sounds a little like Casablanca to me!” he said.
“Guess so,” I said.
After that, sometimes when he catches sight of me, the pianist breaks into a few bars of “As Time Goes By.”
The reason I didn’t want to hear that tune again had nothing to do with memories of Shimamoto. The song just didn’t do to me what it used to. Why, I can’t say. The special something I’d found ages ago in that melody was no longer there. It was still a beautiful tune, but nothing more. And I had no intention of lingering over the corpse of a beautiful song.
“What are you thinking about?” Yukiko asked me as she came into the room.
It was two-thirty in the morning. I was lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.
“I was thinking about a desert,” I said.
“A desert?” she asked. She’d sat down next to my feet and was looking at me. “What kind of desert?”
“Just a regular desert. With sand dunes and a few cactuses. Lots of things are there, living there.”