Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

  “Hey, I got it! Why don’t we get up and exercise together?”

  I gave up and went back to sleep. After that he continued his morning routine, never skipping a single day.

  She laughed when I told her about my roommate’s morning exercises. I hadn’t intended it to be funny, but I ended up laughing myself. Her laughter lasted just an instant, and made me realize it’d been a long time since I’d seen her smile.

  It was a Sunday afternoon in May. We’d gotten off the train at Yotsuya Station and were walking along the bank beside the railroad tracks in the direction of Ichigaya. The rain had ended around noon, and a southerly breeze had blown away the low-hanging clouds. The leaves on the cherry trees were sharply etched against the sky, and glinted as they shook in the breeze. The sunlight had an early-summer kind of scent. Most of the people we passed had taken off their coats and sweaters and draped them over their shoulders. A young man on a tennis court, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was swinging his racket back and forth. The metal frame sparkled in the afternoon sun. Only two nuns on a bench were still bundled up in winter clothes. Looking at them made me feel maybe summer wasn’t just around the corner after all.

  Fifteen minutes of walking was all it took for the sweat to start rolling down my back. I yanked off my thick cotton shirt and stripped down to my T-shirt. She rolled the sleeves of her light gray sweatshirt up above her elbows. The sweatshirt was an old one, faded with countless washings. It looked familiar, like I’d seen it sometime, a long time ago.

  “Is it fun living with someone?” she asked.

  “Hard to say. I haven’t been there that long yet.”

  She stopped in front of the water fountain, sipped a mouthful of water, and wiped her mouth with a handkerchief she took out of her pants pocket. She retied the laces of her tennis shoes.

  “I wonder if it’d suit me,” she mused.

  “You mean living in a dorm?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I don’t know. It’s more trouble than you’d imagine. Lots of rules. Not to mention radio exercises.”

  “I guess so,” she said and was lost in thought for a time. Then looked me straight in the eyes. Her eyes were unnaturally limpid. I’d never noticed. They gave me a kind of strange, transparent feeling, like gazing at the sky.

  “But sometimes I feel like I should. I mean…,” she said, gazing into my eyes. She bit her lip and looked down. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

  End of conversation. She started walking again.

  I hadn’t seen her for half a year. She’d gotten so thin I almost didn’t recognize her. Her plump cheeks had thinned out, as had her neck. Not that she struck me as bony or anything. She looked prettier than ever. I wanted to tell her that, but couldn’t figure out how to go about it. So I gave up.

  We hadn’t come to Yotsuya for any particular reason. We just happened to run across each other in a train on the Chuo Line. Neither of us had any plans. Let’s get off, she said, and so we did. Left alone, we didn’t have much to talk about. I don’t know why she suggested getting off the train. From the beginning we weren’t exactly brimming with topics to talk about.

  After we got off at the station she headed off without a word. I walked after her, trying my best to keep up. There was always a yard or so between us, and I just kept on walking, staring at her back. Occasionally she’d turn around to say something, and I’d come up with a reply of sorts, though most of the time I couldn’t figure out how to respond. I couldn’t catch everything she said, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She just had her say, then turned around again and walked on in silence.

  We turned right at Iidabashi, came out next to the Palace moat, then crossed the intersection at Jimbocho, went up the Ochanomizu slope, and cut across Hongo. Then we followed the railroad tracks to Komagome. Quite a walk. By the time we arrived at Komagome it was already getting dark.

  “Where are we?” she suddenly asked.

  “Komagome,” I said. “We made a big circle.”

  “How did we end up here?”

  “You brought us. I just played Follow the Leader.”

  We dropped in a soba noodle shop close to the station and had a bite to eat. Neither of us said a word from the beginning to the end of the meal. I was exhausted from the hike and felt like I was about to collapse. She just sat there, lost in thought.

  Noodles finished, I turned to her. “You’re really in good shape.”

  “Surprised? I did cross-country in junior high. And my dad liked to hike in the mountains so ever since I was little I went hiking on Sundays. Even now my legs are pretty buff.”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  She laughed.

  “I’ll take you home,” I said.

  “It’s OK. I can get back by myself. Don’t bother.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I said.

  “It’s OK. Really. I’m used to going home alone.”

  To tell the truth, I was a little relieved she said that. It took more than an hour by train to her apartment, and it’d be a long ride, the two of us sitting there side by side all that time, barely speaking a word to each other. So she ended up going back alone. I felt bad about it, so I paid for our meal.

  Just as we were saying goodbye she turned to me and said, “Uh—I wonder, if it isn’t too much to ask—if I could see you again? I know there’s no real reason for me to ask…”

  “No need for any special reason,” I said, a little taken aback.

  She blushed a little. She could probably feel how surprised I was.

  “I can’t really explain it well,” she said. She rolled the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows, then rolled them down again. The electric lights bathed the fine down on her arms in a beautiful gold. “Reason’s the wrong word. I should have used another word.”

  She rested both elbows on the table and closed her eyes, as if searching for the right words. But the words didn’t come.

  “It’s all right with me,” I said.

  “I don’t know…These days I just can’t seem to say what I mean,” she said. “I just can’t. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can’t even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It’s like my body’s split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We’re running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.”

  She put her hands on the table and stared into my eyes.

  “Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

  “Everybody has that kind of feeling sometimes,” I said. “You can’t express yourself the way you want to, and it annoys you.”

  Obviously this wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  “No, that isn’t what I mean,” she said, but stopped there.

  “I don’t mind seeing you again,” I said. “I have a lot of free time, and it’d sure be a lot healthier to go on walks than lie around all day.”

  We left each other at the station. I said goodbye, she said goodbye.

  The first time I met her was in the spring of my sophomore year in high school. We were the same age, and she was attending a well-known Christian school. One of my best friends, who happened to be her boyfriend, introduced us. They’d known each other since grade school and lived just down the road from each other.

  Like many couples who have known each other since they were young, they didn’t have any particular desire to be alone. They were always visiting each other’s homes and having dinner together with one of their families. We went on a lot of double dates together, but I never seemed to get anywhere with girls so we usually ended up a trio. Which was fine by me. We each had our parts to play. I played the guest, he the able host, she his pleasant assistant and leading lady.

  My friend made a great host. He might have seemed a bit standoffish at times, but basically he was a kind person who
treated everyone fairly. He used to kid the two of us—her and me—with the same old jokes over and over. If one of us fell silent, he’d restart the conversation, trying to draw us out. His antenna instantly picked up the mood we were in, and the right words just flowed out. And add to that another talent: he could make the world’s most boring person sound fascinating. Whenever I talked with him I felt that way—like my ho-hum life was one big adventure.

  The minute he stepped out of the room, though, she and I clammed right up. We had zero in common, and no idea what to talk about. We just sat there, toying with the ashtray, sipping water, waiting impatiently for him to return. Soon as he was back the conversation picked up where it left off.

  I saw her again just once, three months after his funeral. There was something we had to discuss, so we met in a coffee shop. But as soon as that was finished we had nothing to say. I started to say something a couple of times, but the conversation just petered out. She sounded upset, like she was angry with me, but I couldn’t figure out why. We said goodbye.

  Maybe she was angry because the last person to see him alive was me, not her. I shouldn’t say this, I know, but I can’t help it. I wish I could have traded places with her, but it can’t be helped. Once something happens, that’s all she wrote—you can never change things back to the way they were.

  On that afternoon in May, after school—school wasn’t out yet but we’d skipped out—he and I stopped inside a pool hall and played four games. I won the first one, he took the last three. As we’d agreed, the loser paid for the games.

  That night he died in his garage. He stuck a rubber hose in the exhaust pipe of his N360, got inside, sealed up the windows with tape, and started the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. When his parents got back from visiting a sick friend he was already dead. The car radio was still on, a receipt from a gas station still stuck under the wiper.

  He didn’t leave any note or clue to his motives. I was the last person to see him alive, so the police called me in for questioning. He didn’t act any different from usual, I told them. Seemed the same as always. People who are going to kill themselves don’t usually win three games of pool in a row, do they? The police thought both of us were a little suspect. The kind of student who skips out of high school classes to hang out in a pool hall might very well be the kind to commit suicide, they seemed to imply. There was a short article on his death in the paper and that was that. His parents got rid of the car, and for a few days there were white flowers on his desk at school.

  When I graduated from high school and went to Tokyo, there was only one thing I felt I had to do: try not to think too much. I willed myself to forget all of it—the green-felt-covered pool tables, his red car, the white flowers on the desk, the smoke rising from the tall chimney of the crematorium, the chunky paperweight in the police interrogation room. Everything. At first it seemed like I could forget, but something remained inside me. Like the air, and I couldn’t grasp it. As time passed, though, the air formed itself into a simple, clear shape. Into words. And the words were these:

  Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

  Say it aloud and it sounds trivial. Just plain common sense. But at the time it didn’t hit me as words; it was more like air filling my body. Death was in everything around me—inside the paperweight, inside the four balls on the pool table. As we live, we breathe death into our lungs, like fine particles of dust.

  Up till then I’d always thought death existed apart, in a separate realm. Sure, I knew death is inevitable. But you can just as easily turn that around and say that until the day it comes, death has nothing to do with us. Here’s life, on this side—and over there is death. What could be more logical?

  After my friend died, though, I couldn’t think of death in such a naïve way. Death is not the opposite of life. Death is already inside me. I couldn’t shake that thought. The death that took my seventeen-year-old friend on that May evening grabbed me, too, in its clutches.

  That much I understood, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. Which was not an easy task. I was still just eighteen, too young to find some safe, neutral ground to stand on.

  After that I dated her once, maybe twice a month. I guess you could call it dating. Can’t think of any better word for it.

  She was going to a women’s college just outside Tokyo, a small school but with a pretty good reputation. Her apartment was just a ten-minute walk from the college. Along the road to the school was a beautiful reservoir that we sometimes took walks around. She didn’t seem to have any friends. Same as before, she was pretty quiet. There wasn’t much to talk about, so I didn’t say much either. We just looked at each other and kept on walking and walking.

  Not that we weren’t getting anywhere. Around the end of summer vacation, in a very natural way, she started walking next to me, not in front. On and on we walked, side by side—up and down slopes, over bridges, across streets. We weren’t headed anywhere in particular, no particular plans. We’d walk for a while, drop by a coffee shop for a cup, and off we’d go again. Like slides being changed in a projector, only the seasons changed. Fall came, and the courtyard of my dorm was covered with fallen zelkova leaves. Pulling on a sweater I could catch the scent of the new season. I went out and bought myself a new pair of suede shoes.

  At the end of autumn when the wind turned icy, she began to walk closer to me, rubbing up against my arm. Through my thick duffel coat I could feel her breath. But that was all. Hands stuck deep in the pockets of my coat, I continued to walk on and on. Our shoes both had rubber soles, our footsteps were silent. Only when we crunched over the trampled-down sycamore leaves did we make a sound. It wasn’t my arm she wanted, but someone else’s. Not my warmth, but the warmth of another. At least that’s how it felt at the time.

  The guys at the dorm always kidded me whenever she called, or when I went out to see her on Sunday mornings. They thought I’d made a girlfriend. I couldn’t explain the situation to them, and there wasn’t any reason to, so I just let things stand as they were. Whenever I came back from a date, invariably someone would ask me whether I’d scored. “Can’t complain” was my standard reply.

  So passed my eighteenth year. The sun rose and set, the flag went up and down. And on Sundays I went on a date with my dead friend’s girlfriend. What the hell do you think you’re doing? I asked myself. And what comes next? I hadn’t the slightest idea. At school I read Claudel’s plays, and Racine’s, and Eisenstein. I liked their style, but that was it. I made hardly any friends at school, or at the dorm. I was always reading, so people thought I wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to be anything.

  I tried to tell her, many times, about these feelings. She of all people should understand. But I could never explain how I felt. It was just like she said—every time I struggled to find the right words, they slipped from my grasp and sank into the murky depths.

  On Saturday evenings I sat in the lobby of the dorm where the phones were, waiting for her to call. Sometimes she wouldn’t call for three weeks at a stretch, other times two weeks in a row. So I sat on a chair in the lobby, waiting. On Saturday evenings most of the other students went out, and silence descended on the dorm. Gazing at the particles of light in the still space, I struggled to grasp my own feelings. Everyone is looking for something from someone. That much I was sure of. But what comes next, I had no idea. A hazy wall of air rose up before me, just out of reach.

  During the winter I had a part-time job at a small record store in Shinjuku. For Christmas I gave her a Henry Mancini record that had one of her favorites on it, the tune “Dear Heart.” I wrapped it in paper with a Christmas tree design, and added a pink ribbon. She gave me a pair of woolen mittens she’d knitted. The part for the thumb was a little too short, but they were warm all the same.

  She didn’t go home for New Year’s, and the two of us had dinner over New Year’s at her apartment.

  A lot of things happened that winter.
>
  At the end of January my roommate was in bed for two days with a temperature of nearly 104. Thanks to which I had to call off a date with her. I couldn’t just go out and leave him; he sounded like he was going to die at any minute. And who else would look after him? I bought some ice, wrapped it in a plastic bag to make an ice pack, wiped his sweat away with a cool wet towel, took his temperature every hour. His fever didn’t break for a whole day. The second day, though, he leapt out of bed as though nothing had happened. His temperature was back to normal.

  “It’s weird,” he said. “I’ve never had a fever before in my life.”

  “Well, you sure had one this time,” I told him. I showed him the two free concert tickets that had gone to waste.

  “At least they were free,” he said.

  It snowed a lot in February.

  At the end of February I got into a fight with an older guy at the dorm over something stupid, and punched him. He fell over and hit his head on a concrete wall. Fortunately he was OK, but I was called before the dorm head and given a warning. After that, dorm life was never the same.

  I turned nineteen and finally became a sophomore. I failed a couple of courses, though. I managed a couple of Bs, the rest Cs and Ds. She was promoted to sophomore, too, but with a much better record—she passed all her classes. The four seasons came and went.

  In June she turned twenty. I had trouble picturing her twenty. We always figured the best thing for us was to shuttle back and forth somewhere between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen comes nineteen, after nineteen comes eighteen—that we could understand. But now here she was twenty. And the next winter I’d be twenty, too. Only our dead friend would stay forever as he was—an eternal seventeen.

  It rained on her birthday. I bought a cake in Shinjuku and took the train to her place. The train was crowded and bounced around something awful; by the time I reached her apartment the cake was a decaying Roman ruin. But we went ahead and put twenty candles on it and lit them. We closed the curtains and turned off the lights, and suddenly we had a real birthday party on our hands. She opened a bottle of wine and we drank it with the crumbled cake, and had a little something to eat.