I took a sip of my drink and glanced around the bar. A nice crowd, considering the rain. The tenor sax player was putting his instrument away in a case. I called the waiter over and had him take a bottle of whiskey to the saxophonist ask him if he’d like something to eat.
“But here it’s different,” I continued. “You have to use your imagination to survive. And you can put your ideas into practice immediately. No meetings, no executives here. No precedents to worry about or Ministry of Education position papers to contend with. Believe me, it’s great. Have you ever worked in a company?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No.”
“Consider yourself lucky. Me and companies just don’t get along. I don’t think you’d find it any different. Eight years working there convinced me. Eight years down the tubes. My twenties—the best years of all. Sometimes I wonder how I put it up with it for so long. I guess that’s what I had to go through, though, to wind up where I am today. Now I love my job. You know, sometimes my bars feel like imaginary places I created in my mind. Castles in the air. I plant some flowers here, construct a fountain there, crafting everything with great care. People stop by, have drinks, listen to music, talk, and go home. People are willing to spend a lot of money to come all this way to have some drinks—and do you know why? Because everyone’s seeking the same thing: an imaginary place, their own castle in the air, and their very own special corner of it.”
Shimamoto extracted a Salem from her small purse. Before she could take out her lighter, I struck a match and lit her cigarette. I liked to light her cigarettes and watch her eyes narrow as she stared at the flickering flame.
“I haven’t worked a single day in my life,” she said.
“Not even once?”
“Not even once. Not even a part-time job. Labor is totally alien to me. That’s why I envy you. I’m always alone, reading books. And any thoughts that happen to occur to me have to do with spending money, not making it.” She stretched both arms out in front of me. On her right arm she wore two thin gold bracelets, on her left arm an expensive-looking gold watch. She kept her arms in front of me for a long while, as if they were displaying goods for sale. I took her right hand in mine and gazed for a time at the gold bracelets. I recalled her holding my hand when I was twelve. I could remember exactly how it felt And how it had thrilled me.
“I don’t know … maybe thinking about ways to spend money is best, after all,” I said. I let go of her hand and felt that I was about to drift away somewhere. “When you’re always scheming about ways to make money, it’s like a part of you is lost.”
“But you don’t know how empty it feels not to be able to create anything.”
“I’m sure you’ve created more things than you realize.”
“What sort of things?”
“Things you can’t see,” I replied. I examined my hands, resting on my knees.
She held her glass and looked at me for a long while. “You mean like feelings?”
“Right,” I said. “Everything disappears someday. Like this bar–it won’t go on forever. People’s tastes change, and a minor fluctuation in the economy is all it’d take for it to go under. I’ve seen it happen; it doesn’t take much. Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”
“But you know, Hajime, some feelings cause us pain because they remain. Don’t you think so?”
The tenor saxophonist came over to thank me for the whiskey. I complimented him on his performance.
“Jazz musicians these days are so polite,” I explained to Shimamoto. “When I was in college, that wasn’t the case. They all took drugs, and at least half of them were deadbeats. But sometimes you could hear these performances that would blow you away. I was always listening to jazz at the jazz clubs in Shinjuku. Always looking to be blown away.”
“You like those kinds of people, don’t you.”
“Must be,” I said. “People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That’s what can move the world. That’s art.”
I looked again at my hands, resting on my knees. Then I looked up at her. She was waiting for me to continue.
“Anyway, things are different now. I’m the manager of a bar, and my job’s to invest capital and show a profit. I’m not an artist or someone about to create anything. I’m not a patron of the arts. Like it or not, this isn’t the place to look for art. And for the manager, it’s a lot easier to have a neatly turned out, polite group than a herd of Charlie Parkers!”
She ordered another cocktail. And lit another cigarette. We were silent for a long while. She seemed lost in thought. I listened to the bassist play a long solo in “Embraceable You.” The pianist added the occasional accompanying chord, while the drummer wiped away his sweat and had a drink. A regular at the bar came up to me, and we chatted for a while.
“Hajime,” Shimamoto said a long time later. “Do you know any good rivers? A pretty river in a valley, not too big, one that flows fairly swiftly right into the sea?”
Taken by surprise, I looked at her. “A river?” What was she talking about? Her face was utterly expressionless. She was quiet, as if gazing at some faraway landscape. Maybe it was me who was far away—far from her world, at least with an unimaginable distance separating us. The thought made me sad. There was something in her eyes that called up sadness.
“What’s with this river all of a sudden?” I asked.
“It just suddenly occurred to me,” she answered. “Do you know any river like that?”
When I was a student, I traveled around the country quite a bit lugging a sleeping bag. So I’d seen quite a few Japanese rivers. But I couldn’t come up with the kind of river she described.
“I think there might be a river like that on the Japan Sea coast,” I said after a great deal of thought. “I don’t remember what it’s called. But I’m sure it’s in Ishikawa Prefecture. It wouldn’t be hard to find. It’s probably the closest to what you’re after.”
I recalled that river clearly. I went there on fall break when I was a sophomore or a junior in college. The fall foliage was beautiful, the surrounding mountains looking as though they were dyed in blood. The mountains ran down to the sea, the rush of the water was gorgeous, and sometimes you could hear the cry of deer in the forest. The fish I ate were out of this world.
“Do you think you could take me there?” Shimamoto asked.
“It’s all the way over in Ishikawa,” I said in a dry voice. “Enoshima I could see, but we’d have to fly, then drive for at least an hour. And stay overnight. I’m sure you understand that’s something I can’t do at the moment.”
Shimamoto shifted slowly on her stool and turned to face me. “Hajime, I know I shouldn’t be asking this favor of you. I know that. Believe me, I realize it’s a burden to you. But there’s no one else I can ask. I have to go there, and I don’t want to go alone.”
I looked into her eyes. Her eyes were like a deep spring in the shade of cliffs, which no breeze could ever reach. Nothing moved there, everything was still. Look closely, and you could just begin to make out the scene reflected in the water’s surface.
“Forgive me.” She smiled, as if all the strength had left her. “Please don’t think I came here just to ask you that I wanted only to see you and talk. I didn’t plan to bring this up.”
I made a quick mental calculation of the time. “If we left really early in the morning and did a round trip by plane, we should be able to make it back by not too late at night. Of course, it depends on how much time we spend there.”
“I don’t think it’ll take too long,” she said. “Can you really spare the time? The time to fly over there and back with me?”
I thought a bit. “I think so. I can’t say anything definitely yet But I can probably make the time. Call me here tomorrow night, all right? I’ll be here at this time. I’ll figure out our plan by then. What’s y
our schedule?”
“I don’t have any schedule. Any time that’s fine with you is fine with me.”
I nodded.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have met you again, after all. I know I’ll only end up ruining everything.”
She left just a little before eleven. I held an umbrella over her and flagged down a cab. The rain was still falling.
“Goodbye. And thank you,” she said.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I went back into the bar and returned to the same seat at the counter. Her cocktail glass was still there. As was the ashtray, with several crushed-out Salems. I didn’t have the waiter take them away. For the longest time, I gazed at the faint color of lipstick on the glass and on the cigarettes.
Yukiko was waiting up for me when I got home. She’d thrown a cardigan over her pajamas and was watching a video of Lawrence of Arabia. The scene where Lawrence, after all sorts of trials and tribulations, has finally made it across the desert and reached the Suez Canal. She’d already seen the film three times. It’s a great film, she told me. I can watch it over and over. I sat down next to her, and had some wine as we watched the rest of the movie.
Next Sunday there’s a get-together at the swimming club, I told her. One of the members owned a large yacht, which we’d been on several times offshore, fishing and drinking. It was a little too cold to go out in a yacht in February, but my wife knew nothing about boats, so she didn’t have any objections. I hardly ever went out on Sundays, and she seemed to think it was good for me to meet people in other fields and be outdoors.
“I’ll be leaving really early in the morning. And I’ll be back by eight, I think. I’ll have dinner at home,” I said.
“All right. My sister’s coming over that Sunday anyway,” she said. “If it isn’t too cold, maybe we could take a picnic to Shinjuku Gyoen. Just us four girls.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
The next afternoon I went to a travel agency and made plane and rental car reservations. There was a flight arriving back in Tokyo at six-thirty in the evening. Looked like I would be back in time for a late dinner. Then I went to the bar and waited for Shimamoto’s call. She phoned at ten. “I’m a little busy, but I think I can make the time,” I told her. “Is next Sunday okay?”
That’s fine with me, she replied.
I told her the flight time and where to meet me at Haneda Airport.
“Thank you so much,” she said.
After hanging up, I sat at the counter for a while, with a book. The bustle of the bar bothered me, though, and I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the rest room and washed my face and hands with cold water, stared at my reflection in the mirror. I’ve lied to Yukiko, I told myself. Sure, I’d lied to her before, when I slept with other women. But I never felt I was deceiving her. Those were just harmless flings. But this time was wrong. Not that I was planning to sleep with Shimamoto. But even so, it was wrong. For the first time in a long while, I looked deep within my own eyes in the mirror. Those eyes told me nothing of who I was. I laid both hands on the sink and sighed deeply.
10
The river flowed swiftly past cliffs, in places forming small waterfalls, in others coming to a halt in pools. The surface of these pools faintly reflected the weak sun. An old iron bridge downstream spanned the river. The bridge was so narrow one car could barely squeeze across it. Its darkened, impassive metal frame sank deep into the chilled February silence. The only people who passed over the bridge were the hotel’s guests and employees, and the people in charge of caring for the woods. When we walked over it we passed no one going the other way, and looking back, we saw no one. After arriving at the hotel, we had had a light lunch, then we crossed the bridge and walked along the river. Shimamoto had on a heavy pea coat, the collar turned up, and a muffler wrapped around her up to her nose. She had on casual clothes, good for walking in the mountains, much different from her usual attire. Her hair was tied in back, and she wore a pair of rugged-looking work boots. A green nylon shoulder bag was slung over one shoulder. Dressed like that, she looked just like a high school girl. On either side of the river, hard patches of snow remained. Two crows squatted on top of the bridge, gazing down at the river below, every once in a while releasing grating, scolding caws. Those shrill calls echoed in the leaf-blanketed woods, crossed the river, and rang unpleasantly in our ears.
A narrow, unpaved path continued along the river, a terribly silent, deserted path leading who knows where. No houses appeared beside the path, only the occasional bare field. Snow-covered furrows inscribed bright white lines across the barren land. Crows were everywhere. As if signaling their comrades down the line of our approach, the crows let out short, sharp caws as we passed. They stood their ground, not trying to fly away. From close proximity I could see their sharp, weapon-like beaks and the vivid coloring of their claws.
“Do we still have time?” Shimamoto asked. “Can we walk a little farther?”
I looked at my watch. “We’re okay. We should be able to stay here another hour.”
“It’s so quiet,” she said, looking around slowly. Every time she opened her mouth, her hard white breath drifted into the air.
“Is this river what you were looking for?”
She smiled at me. “It’s like you could read my mind,” she replied. And reached out with her gloved hand to grasp mine, also in a glove.
“I’m glad,” I said. “If we came all this way and you said this wasn’t the place, then what’d we do?”
“Hey, have more confidence in yourself. You’d never make that kind of mistake,” she said. “But you know, walking like this, just the two of us, I remember the old days. When we used to walk home together from school.”
“Your leg isn’t like it was, though.”
She grinned at me. “You seem almost disappointed.”
“Maybe so.” I laughed.
“Really?”
“I’m just kidding. I’m very happy your leg’s better. Just a bout of nostalgia, I guess.”
“Hajime,” she said, “I hope you understand how very grateful I am to you for doing this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s like going on a picnic. Except we took a plane.”
Shimamoto walked on for a while, looking ahead. “But you had to lie to your wife.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“And that couldn’t have been easy. I’m sure you didn’t want to lie to her.”
I didn’t know how to respond. From the woods nearby, a crow let out another sharp caw.
“I’ve messed up your life. I know I have,” Shimamoto said in a small voice.
“Hey, let’s stop talking about it,” I said. “We’ve come all the way here, so let’s talk about something more cheerful.”
“Like what?”
“Dressed like that, you look just like a high school girl.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I wish I were.”
We walked slowly upstream. For a while we proceeded in silence, concentrating on our walking. She couldn’t walk very fast but was able to handle a slow but steady pace. She held my hand tight. The path was frozen solid, and our rubber soles hardly made a sound.
Just as she had implied, if only we could have walked this way when we were teenagers, or even in our twenties, how wonderful that would have been! A Sunday afternoon, just the two of us strolling along a river like this … I would have been ecstatic. But we were no longer high school kids. I had a wife and children, and a job. And I’d had to lie to my wife in order to be here. I had to drive back to the airport, take the flight that arrived in Tokyo at six-thirty, then hurry back to my home, where my wife would be waiting for me.
Finally Shimamoto stopped, rubbed her gloved hands together, and gazed all around. She looked upstream, then downstream. On the opposite shore there was a range of mountains, on the left-hand side a line of bare trees. We were utterly alone. The hot-springs hotel, where we’d had lunch, and the iron bri
dge, lay hidden in the shadow of the mountains. Every once in a while, as if remembering its duty, the sun showed its face through a break in the clouds. All we could hear were the screeches of the crows and the rush of water. Someday, somewhere, I will see this scene, I felt. The opposite of déjà vu—not the feeling that I’d already seen what was around me, but the premonition that I would some-day. This premonition reached out its long hand and grabbed my mind tight. I could feel myself in its grip. There at its fingertips was me. Me in the future, grown old. Of course, I couldn’t see what I looked like.
“This spot will be all right,” she said.
“To do what?” I asked.
She smiled her usual faint smile. “To do what I’m about to do,” she replied.
We went down to the riverbank. There was a small pool of water, covered by a thin sheet of ice. On the bottom of the pool several fallen leaves lay still, like the bodies of flat dead fish. I picked up a round stone and rolled it in my hand. Shimamoto took off her gloves and put them in her coat pocket. She undid her shoulder bag, opened it, and removed a small bag made out of a pretty cloth. Inside the bag was an urn. She undid the fastening on the lid and carefully opened the urn. For a while she gazed at what was inside.
I stood beside her, watching, without a word.
Inside the urn were white ashes. Very carefully, so that none would spill out she poured the ashes onto her left palm. There was barely enough to cover her hand. Ash left after a cremation, I figured. It was a quiet windless afternoon, and the ash didn’t stir. Shimamoto returned the empty urn to her bag, stuck her index finger into the ash, put the finger to her mouth, and licked it. She looked at me and tried to smile. But she couldn’t. Her finger remained near her lips.