When Izumi and I sat at our outdoor café, drinking coffee or beer, aimlessly gazing at the boats in the harbor, the seagulls, and the far-off Turkish hills, we were sitting at the edge of Europe. The wind was the wind at the edge of the world. An inescapable retro color filled the place. It made me feel as if I were being quietly swallowed up by an alien reality, something foreign and just out of reach, vague yet strangely gentle. And the shadow of that substance colored the faces, the eyes, the skin of the people gathered in the harbor.
At times I couldn’t grasp the fact that I was part of this scene. No matter how much I took in the scenery around me, no matter how much I breathed in the air, there was no organic connection between me and all of this.
Two months before, I had been living with my wife and our four-year-old son in a three-bedroom apartment in Unoki, in Tokyo. Not a spacious place, just your basic, functional apartment. My wife and I had our own bedroom, so did our son, and the remaining room served as my study. The apartment was quiet, with a nice view. On weekends, the three of us would take walks along the banks of the Tama River. In spring, the cherry trees along the banks would blossom, and I’d put my son on the back of my bike and we’d go off to watch the Giants’ Triple A team in spring training.
I worked at a medium-size design company that specialized in book and magazine layouts. Calling me a designer makes it sound more interesting than it was, since the work was fairly cut-and-dried. Nothing flamboyant or imaginative. Most of the time, our schedule was a bit too hectic, and several times a month I had to pull an all-nighter at the office. Some of the work bored me to tears. Still, I didn’t mind the job, and the company was a relaxed place. Because I had seniority, I was able to pick and choose my assignments, and say pretty much whatever I wanted to. My boss was OK, and I got along with my coworkers. And the salary wasn’t half bad. So if nothing had happened, I probably would have stayed with the company for the foreseeable future. And my life, like the Moldau River—more precisely the nameless water that makes up the Moldau River—would have continued to flow, ever so swiftly, into the sea.
But along the way I met Izumi.
Izumi was ten years younger than I was. We met at a business meeting. Something clicked between us the first time we laid eyes on each other. Not the kind of thing that happens all that often. We met a couple of times after that, to go over the details of our joint project. I’d go to her office, or she’d drop by mine. Our meetings were always short, other people were involved, and it was basically all business. When our project was finished, though, a terrible loneliness swept over me, as if something absolutely vital had been forcibly snatched from my grasp. I hadn’t felt that in years. And I think she felt the same way.
A week later she phoned my office about some minor matter and we chatted for a bit. I told a joke, and she laughed. “Want to go out for a drink?” I asked. We went to a small bar and had a few drinks. I can’t recall exactly what we talked about, but we found a million topics and could have talked forever. With a laserlike clarity I could grasp everything she wanted to say. And things I couldn’t explain well to anyone else came across to her with an exactness that took me by surprise. We were both married, with no major complaints about our married lives. We loved our spouses and respected them. Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle—running across someone you express your feelings to so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been a mistake to label this “love.” It was more like total empathy.
We started going out regularly for drinks. Her husband’s job kept him out late, so she was free to come and go as she pleased. When we got together, though, the time just flew by. We’d look at our watches and discover that we could barely make the last train. It was always hard for me to say goodbye. There was so much more we wanted to tell each other.
Neither of us lured the other to bed, but we did start sleeping together. We’d both been faithful to our spouses up to that point, but somehow we didn’t feel guilty, for the simple reason that we had to do it. Undressing her, caressing her skin, holding her close, slipping inside her, coming—it was all just a natural extension of our conversations. So natural that our lovemaking was not a source of heartrending physical pleasure; it was just a calm, pleasant act, stripped of all pretense. Best of all were our quiet talks in bed after sex. I held her naked body close, and she’d curl up in my arms and we’d whisper secrets in our own private language.
We met whenever we could. Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, we were absolutely convinced that our relationship could go on forever, our married lives on one side of the equation, our own relationship on the other, with no problems arising. We were convinced that our affair would never come to light. Sure we had sex, but how was that hurting anyone? On nights when I slept with Izumi, I’d get home late and have to make up some lie to tell my wife, and I did feel a pang of conscience, but it never seemed to be an actual betrayal. Izumi and I had a strictly compartmentalized yet totally intimate relationship.
And, if nothing had happened, maybe we would have continued like that forever, sipping our vodka and tonics, slipping between the sheets whenever we could. Or maybe we would have got tired of lying to our spouses and decided to let the affair die a natural death so that we could return to our comfortable little lifestyles. Either way, I don’t think things would have turned out badly. I can’t prove it; I just have that feeling. But a twist of fate—inevitable, in retrospect—intervened, and Izumi’s husband got wind of our affair. After grilling her, he barged into my home, totally out of control. As luck would have it, my wife was alone at the time, and the whole thing turned ugly. When I got home, she demanded that I explain what was going on. Izumi had already admitted everything, so I couldn’t very well make up some story. I told my wife exactly what had happened. “It’s not like I’m in love,” I explained. “It’s a special relationship, but completely different from what I have with you. Like night and day. You haven’t detected anything going on, right? That proves it’s not the kind of affair you’re imagining.”
But my wife refused to listen. It was a shock, and she froze, and literally wouldn’t speak another word to me. The next day, she packed all her things in the car and drove to her parents’ place, in Chigasaki, taking our son with her. I called a couple of times, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. Her father came on instead. “I don’t want to hear any of your lame excuses,” he warned, “and there’s no way I’m going to let my daughter go back to a bastard like you.” He’d been dead set against our marriage from the start, and his tone of voice said he’d finally been proved right.
At a complete loss, I took a few days off and just lay alone forlornly in bed. Izumi phoned me. She was alone, too. Her husband had left her, as well, but not before smacking her around a bit. He had taken a pair of scissors to every stitch of clothing she owned. From her overcoat to her underwear, it all lay in tatters. She had no idea where he had gone. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. Everything is ruined, and it’ll never be the same again. He’s never coming back.” She sobbed over the phone. She and her husband had been high school sweethearts. I wanted to comfort her, but what could I possibly say?
“Let’s go somewhere and have a drink,” she finally suggested. We went to Shibuya and drank till dawn at an all-night bar. Vodka gimlets for me, daiquiris for her. I lost track of how much we drank. For the first time since we’d met we didn’t have much to say. At dawn we worked off the liquor walking over to Harajuku, where we had coffee and breakfast at a Denny’s. That’s when she brought up the notion of going to Greece.
“Greece?” I asked.
“We can’t very well stay in Japan,” she said, looking deep into my eyes.
I turned the idea around in my mind. Greece? My alcohol-soaked brain couldn’t follow the logic.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Greece,” she said. “It’s been my dream. I wanted to go on my honeymoon, but we
didn’t have enough money. So, let’s go—the two of us. And just live there, you know, with no worries about anything. Staying in Japan’s just going to depress us, and nothing good will come of it.”
I didn’t have any particular interest in Greece, but I had to agree with her. We calculated how much money we had between us. She had two and a half million yen in savings, while I could come up with one and a half million. Four million yen altogether—about forty thousand dollars.
“Forty thousand dollars should last a few years in the Greek countryside,” Izumi said. “Discount plane tickets would set us back around four thousand. That leaves thirty-six. Figure a thousand a month, and that’s enough for three years. Two and a half, to be on the safe side. What do you say? Let’s go. We’ll let things sort themselves out later on.”
I looked around me. The early morning Denny’s was crowded with young couples. We were the only couple over thirty. And surely the only couple discussing taking all our money and fleeing to Greece after a disastrous affair. What a mess, I thought. I gazed at the palm of my hand for the longest time. Was this really what my life had come to?
“All right,” I said finally. “Let’s do it.”
At work the next day I handed in my letter of resignation. My boss had heard rumors and decided that it would be best to put me on extended leave for the time being. My colleagues were startled to hear that I wanted to quit, but no one tried very hard to talk me out of it. Quitting a job is not so difficult after all, I discovered. Once you make up your mind to get rid of something, there’s very little you can’t discard. No—not very little. Once you put your mind to it, there’s nothing you can’t get rid of. And once you start tossing things out, you find yourself wanting to get rid of everything. It’s as if you’d gambled away almost all your money and decided, What the hell, I’ll bet what’s left. Too much trouble to cling to the rest.
I packed everything I thought I’d need into one medium-size blue Samsonite suitcase. Izumi took about the same amount of baggage.
As we were flying over Egypt, I was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear that someone else had taken my bag by mistake. There had to be tens of thousands of identical blue Samsonite bags in the world. Maybe I’d get to Greece, open up the suitcase, and find it stuffed with someone else’s possessions. A severe anxiety attack swept over me. If the suitcase got lost, there would be nothing left to link me to my own life—just Izumi. I suddenly felt as if I had vanished. It was the weirdest sensation. The person sitting on that plane was no longer me. My brain had mistakenly attached itself to some convenient packaging that looked like me. My mind was in utter chaos. I had to go back to Japan and get back inside my real body. But here I was in a jet, flying over Egypt, and there was no turning back. This flesh I was temporarily occupying felt as if it were made out of plaster. If I scratched myself, pieces would flake off. I began to shiver uncontrollably. I knew that if these shakes continued much longer the body I was in would crack apart and turn to dust. Despite the air-conditioning in the plane, I broke out in a sweat. My shirt stuck to my skin. An awful smell arose from me. All the while, Izumi held my hand tightly and gave me the occasional hug. She didn’t say a word, but she knew how I was feeling. These shakes went on for a good half hour. I wanted to die—to stick the barrel of a revolver in my ear and pull the trigger, so that both my mind and my flesh would be blown to dust.
After the shakes subsided, though, I suddenly felt lighter. I relaxed my tense shoulders and gave myself up to the flow of time. I fell into a deep sleep, and, when I opened my eyes, there below me lay the azure waters of the Aegean.
The biggest problem facing us on the island was an almost total lack of things to do. We didn’t work, we had no friends. The island had no movie theaters or tennis courts or books to read. We’d left Japan so abruptly that I had completely forgotten to bring any books. I read two novels I’d picked up at the airport, and a copy of Aeschylus’ tragedies Izumi had brought along. I read them all twice. To cater to tourists, the kiosk at the harbor stocked a few English paperbacks, but nothing caught my eye. Reading was my passion, and I’d always imagined that if I had free time I’d wallow in books, but, ironically, here I was—with all the time in the world and nothing to read.
Izumi started studying Greek. She’d brought along a Greek-language textbook, and made a chart of verb conjugations that she carried around, reciting the verbs aloud like a spell. She got to the point where she was able to talk to the shopkeepers in her broken Greek, and to waiters when we stopped by the café, so we managed to make a few acquaintances. Not to be outdone, I dusted off my French. I figured it would come in handy someday, but on this seedy little island I never ran across a soul who spoke French. In town, we were able to get by with English. Some of the old people knew Italian or German. French, though, was useless.
With nothing much to do, we walked everywhere. We tried fishing in the harbor but didn’t catch a thing. Lack of fish wasn’t the problem; it was that the water was too clear. Fish could see all the way from the hook up to the face of the person trying to catch them. You’d have to be a pretty dumb fish to get caught that way. I bought a sketchbook and a set of watercolors at a local shop and tramped around the island sketching the scenery and the people. Izumi would sit beside me, looking at my paintings, memorizing her Greek conjugations. Local people often came to watch me sketch. To kill time, I’d draw their portraits, which seemed to be a big hit. If I gave them the picture, they’d often treat us to a beer. Once, a fisherman gave us a whole octopus.
“You could make a living doing portraits,” Izumi said. “You’re good, and you could make a nice little business out of it. Play up the fact that you’re a Japanese artist. Can’t be many of them around here.”
I laughed, but her expression was serious. I pictured myself trekking around the Greek isles, picking up spare change drawing portraits, enjoying the occasional free beer. Not such a bad idea, I concluded.
“And I’ll be a tour coordinator for Japanese tourists,” Izumi continued. “There should be more of them as time goes by, and that will help make ends meet. Of course that means I’ll have to get serious about learning Greek.”
“Do you really think we can spend two and a half years doing nothing?” I asked.
“As long as we don’t get robbed or sick or something. Barring the unforeseen, we should be able to get by. Still, it’s always good to prepare for the unexpected.”
Until then I’d almost never been to a doctor, I told her.
Izumi stared straight at me, pursed her lips, and moved them to one side.
“Say I got pregnant,” she began. “What would you do? You protect yourself the best you can, but people make mistakes. If that happened, our money would run out pretty quick.”
“If it comes to that, we should probably go back to Japan,” I said.
“You don’t get it, do you?” she said quietly. “We can never go back to Japan.”
Izumi continued her study of Greek, I my sketching. This was the most peaceful time in my whole life. We ate simply and carefully sipped the cheapest of wines. Every day, we’d climb a nearby hill. There was a small village on top, and from there we could see other islands far away. With all the fresh air and exercise, I was soon in good shape. After the sun set on the island, you couldn’t hear a sound. And in that silence Izumi and I would quietly make love and talk about all kinds of things. No more worrying about making the last train, or coming up with lies to tell our spouses. It was wonderful beyond belief. Autumn deepened bit by bit, and early winter came on. The wind picked up, and there were whitecaps in the sea.
It was around this time that we read the story in the paper about the man-eating cats. In the same paper, there was a report about the Japanese emperor’s condition worsening, but we’d bought it only to check on exchange rates. The yen was continuing to gain against the drachma. This was vital for us; the stronger the yen, the more money we had.
“Speaking of cats,” I said a few days after we’d re
ad the article, “when I was a child I had a cat who disappeared in the strangest way.”
Izumi seemed to want to hear more. She lifted her face from her conjugation chart and looked at me. “How so?”
“I was in second, maybe third grade. We lived in a company house that had a big garden. There was this ancient pine tree in the garden, so tall you could barely see the top of it. One day, I was sitting on the back porch reading a book, while our tortoiseshell cat was playing in the garden. The cat was leaping about by itself, the way cats do sometimes. It was all worked up about something, completely oblivious to the fact that I was watching it. The longer I watched, the more frightened I became. The cat seemed possessed, jumping around, its fur standing on end. It was as if it saw something that I couldn’t. Finally, it started racing around and around the pine tree, just like the tiger in ‘Little Black Sambo.’ Then it screeched to an abrupt halt and scrambled up the tree to the highest branches. I could just make out its little face way up in the topmost branches. The cat was still excited and tense. It was hiding in the branches, staring out at something. I called its name, but it acted like it didn’t hear me.”