Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

  “Happy birthday,” he said. “May you live a rich and fruitful life, and may there be nothing to cast dark shadows on it.”

  They clinked glasses.

  May there be nothing to cast dark shadows on it: she silently repeated his remark to herself. Why had he chosen such unusual words for her birthday toast?

  “Your twentieth birthday comes only once in a lifetime, miss. It’s an irreplaceable day.”

  “Yes, sir, I know,” she said, taking one cautious sip of wine.

  “And here, on your special day, you have taken the trouble to deliver my dinner to me like a kindhearted fairy.”

  “Just doing my job, sir.”

  “But still,” the old man said with a few quick shakes of the head. “But still, lovely young miss.”

  The old man sat down in the leather chair by his desk and motioned her to the sofa. She lowered herself gingerly onto the edge of the seat, with the wineglass still in her hand. Knees aligned, she tugged at her skirt, clearing her throat again. She saw raindrops tracing lines down the windowpane. The room was strangely quiet.

  “Today just happens to be your twentieth birthday, and on top of that you have brought me this wonderful warm meal,” the old man said as if reconfirming the situation. Then he set his glass on the desktop with a little thump. “This has to be some kind of special convergence, don’t you think?”

  Not quite convinced, she managed a nod.

  “Which is why,” he said, touching the knot of his withered-leaf-colored necktie, “I feel it is important for me to give you a birthday present. A special birthday calls for a special commemorative gift.”

  Flustered, she shook her head and said, “No, please, sir, don’t give it a second thought. All I did was bring your meal the way they ordered me to.”

  The old man raised both hands, palms toward her. “No, miss, don’t you give it a second thought. The kind of ‘present’ I have in mind is not something tangible, not something with a price tag. To put it simply”—he placed his hands on the desk and took one long, slow breath—“what I would like to do for a lovely young fairy such as you is to grant a wish you might have, to make your wish come true. Anything. Anything at all that you wish for—assuming that you do have such a wish.”

  “A wish?” she asked, her throat dry.

  “Something you would like to have happen, miss. If you have a wish—one wish, I’ll make it come true. That is the kind of birthday present I can give you. But you had better think about it very carefully because I can grant you only one.” He raised a finger. “Just one. You can’t change your mind afterward and take it back.”

  She was at a loss for words. One wish? Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the windowpane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears.

  “I have to wish for something, and it will be granted?”

  Instead of answering her question, the old man—hands still side by side on the desk—just smiled. He did it in the most natural and amiable way.

  “Do you have a wish, miss—or not?” he asked gently.

  “This really did happen,” she said, looking straight at me. “I’m not making it up.”

  “Of course not,” I said. She was not the sort of person to invent some goofy story out of thin air. “So…did you make a wish?”

  She went on looking at me for a while, then released a tiny sigh. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I wasn’t taking him one hundred percent seriously myself. I mean, at twenty you’re not exactly living in a fairy-tale world anymore. If this was his idea of a joke, though, I had to hand it to him for coming up with it on the spot. He was a dapper old fellow with a twinkle in his eye, so I decided to play along with him. It was my twentieth birthday, after all: I figured I ought to have something not-so-ordinary happen to me that day. It wasn’t a question of believing or not believing.”

  I nodded without saying anything.

  “You can understand how I felt, I’m sure. My twentieth birthday was coming to an end without anything special happening, nobody wishing me a happy birthday, and all I’m doing is carrying tortellini with anchovy sauce to people’s tables.”

  I nodded again. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand.”

  “So I made a wish.”

  The old man kept his gaze fixed on her, saying nothing, hands still on the desk. Also on the desk were several thick folders that might have been account books, plus writing implements, a calendar, and a lamp with a green shade. Lying among them, his small hands looked like another set of desktop furnishings. The rain continued to beat against the window, the lights of Tokyo Tower filtering through the shattered drops.

  The wrinkles on the old man’s forehead deepened slightly. “That is your wish?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is my wish.”

  “A bit unusual for a girl your age,” he said. “I was expecting something different.”

  “If it’s no good, I’ll wish for something else,” she said, clearing her throat. “I don’t mind. I’ll think of something else.”

  “No, no,” the old man said, raising his hands and waving them like flags. “There’s nothing wrong with it, not at all. It’s just a little surprising, miss. Don’t you have something else? Like, say, you want to be prettier, or smarter, or rich: you’re OK with not wishing for something like that—something an ordinary girl would ask for?”

  She took some moments to search for the right words. The old man just waited, saying nothing, his hands at rest together on the desk again.

  “Of course I’d like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can’t imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don’t really know what life is all about. I don’t know how it works.”

  “I see,” the old man said, intertwining his fingers and separating them again. “I see.”

  “So, is my wish OK?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. It’s no trouble at all for me.”

  The old man suddenly fixed his eyes on a spot in the air. The wrinkles of his forehead deepened: they might have been the wrinkles of his brain itself as it concentrated on his thoughts. He seemed to be staring at something—perhaps all-but-invisible bits of down—floating in the air. He opened his arms wide, lifted himself slightly from his chair, and whipped his palms together with a dry smack. Settling in the chair again, he slowly ran his fingertips along the wrinkles of his brow as if to soften them, and then turned to her with a gentle smile.

  “That did it,” he said. “Your wish has been granted.”

  “Already?”

  “Yes, it was no trouble at all. Your wish has been granted, lovely miss. Happy birthday. You may go back to work now. Don’t worry, I’ll put the cart in the hall.”

  She took the elevator down to the restaurant. Empty-handed now, she felt almost disturbingly light, as though she were walking on some kind of mysterious fluff.

  “Are you OK? You look spaced out,” the younger waiter said to her.

  She gave him an ambiguous smile and shook her head. “Oh, really? No, I’m fine.”

  “Tell me about the owner. What’s he like?”

  “I dunno, I didn’t get a very good look at him,” she said, cutting the conversation short.

  An hour later she went to bring the cart down. It was out in the hall, utensils in place. She lifted the lid to find the chicken and vegetables gone. The wine bottle and coffeepot were empty. The door to room 604 stood there, closed and expressionless. She stared at it for a time, feeling it might open at any moment, but it did not open. She brought the cart down in the elevator and wheeled it in to the dishwasher. The chef looked blankly at the plate: empty as always.

  “I never saw the owner again,” she said. “Not once. The manager turned out to have just an ordinary stomachache and went back to delivering the owner’s meal again himself the next day. I quit the job after New Year’
s, and I’ve never been back to the place. I don’t know, I just felt it was better not to go near there, kind of like a premonition.”

  She toyed with a paper coaster, thinking her own thoughts. “Sometimes I get the feeling that everything that happened to me on my twentieth birthday was some kind of illusion. It’s as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened at all. But I know for sure that they did happen. I can still bring back vivid images of every piece of furniture and every knickknack in room 604. What happened to me in there really happened, and it had an important meaning for me, too.”

  The two of us kept silent, drinking our drinks and thinking our separate thoughts.

  “Do you mind if I ask you one thing?” I asked. “Or, more precisely, two things.”

  “Go right ahead,” she said. “I imagine you’re going to ask me what I wished for that time. That’s the first thing you want to know.”

  “But it looks as though you don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Does it?”

  I nodded.

  She put the coaster down and narrowed her eyes as if staring at something in the distance. “You’re not supposed to tell anybody what you wished for, you know.”

  “I won’t try to drag it out of you,” I said. “I would like to know whether or not it came true, though. And also—whatever the wish itself might have been—whether or not you later came to regret what it was you chose to wish for. Were you ever sorry you didn’t wish for something else?”

  “The answer to the first question is yes and also no. I still have a lot of living left to do, probably. I haven’t seen how things are going to work out to the end.”

  “So it was a wish that takes time to come true?”

  “You could say that. Time is going to play an important role.”

  “Like in cooking certain dishes?”

  She nodded.

  I thought about that for a moment, but the only thing that came to mind was the image of a gigantic pie cooking slowly in an oven at low heat.

  “And the answer to my second question?”

  “What was that again?”

  “Whether you ever regretted your choice of what to wish for.”

  A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desiccated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

  “I’m married now,” she said. “To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.

  “Even if the Audi’s bumper has two dents?”

  “Hey, bumpers are made for denting.”

  “That would make a great bumper sticker,” she said. “‘Bumpers are for denting.’”

  I looked at her mouth when she said that.

  “What I’m trying to tell you is this,” she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”

  “There’s another good bumper sticker,” I said. “‘No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.’”

  She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.

  She rested her elbow on the bar and looked at me. “Tell me,” she said. “What would you have wished for if you had been in my position?”

  “On the night of my twentieth birthday, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I took some time to think about that, but I couldn’t come up with a single wish.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I confessed. “I’m too far away now from my twentieth birthday.”

  “You really can’t think of anything?”

  I nodded.

  “Not one thing?”

  “Not one thing.”

  She looked into my eyes again—straight in—and said, “That’s because you’ve already made your wish.”

  “But you had better think about it very carefully, my lovely young fairy, because I can grant you only one.” In the darkness somewhere, an old man wearing a withered-leaf-colored tie raises a finger. “Just one. You can’t change your mind afterward and take it back.”

  —TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN

  NEW YORK MINING DISASTER

  A friend of mine has a habit of going to the zoo whenever there’s a typhoon. He’s been doing this for ten years. At a time when most people are closing their shutters, running out to stock up on mineral water, or checking to see if their radios and flashlights are working, my friend wraps himself in a Vietnam-era army surplus poncho, stuffs a couple of cans of beer into his pockets, and sets off. He lives about a fifteen-minute walk away.

  If he’s unlucky, the zoo is closed, “owing to inclement weather,” and its gates are locked. When this happens, my friend sits down on the stone statue of a squirrel next to the entrance, drinks his lukewarm beer, and then heads back home.

  But when he makes it there in time he pays the entrance fee, lights a soggy cigarette, and surveys the animals, one by one. Most of them have retreated to their shelters. Some stare blankly at the rain. Others are more animated, jumping around in the gale-force winds. Some are frightened by the sudden drop in barometric pressure; others turn vicious.

  My friend makes a point of drinking his first beer in front of the Bengal tiger cage. (Bengal tigers always react the most violently to storms.) He drinks his second one outside the gorilla cage. Most of the time the gorillas aren’t the least bit disturbed by the typhoon. They stare at him calmly as he sits like a mermaid on the concrete floor sipping his beer, and you’d swear they actually feel sorry for him.

  “It’s like being in an elevator when it breaks down and you’re trapped inside with strangers,” my friend tells me.

  Typhoons aside, my friend’s no different from anyone else. He works for an export company, managing foreign investments. It’s not one of your better firms, but it does well enough. He lives alone in a neat little apartment and gets a new girlfriend every six months. Why he insists on having a new one every six months (and it’s always exactly six months) I’ll never understand. The girls all look the same, like perfect clones of one another. I can’t tell them apart.

  My friend owns a nice used car, the collected works of Balzac, and a black suit, black tie, and black shoes that are perfect for attending funerals. Every time someone dies, I call him and ask if I can borrow them, even though the shoes are one size too big for me.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” I said the last time I called. “Another funeral’s come up.”

  “Help yourself. You must be in a hurry,” he answered. “Why don’t you come over right away?”

  When I arrived, the suit and tie were laid out on the table, neatly pressed, the shoes were polished, and the fridge was full of imported beer. That’s the kind of guy he is.

  “The other day I saw a cat at the zoo,” he said, popping open a beer.

  “A cat?”

  “Yeah, two weeks ago. I was in Hokkaido on business and dropped by a zoo near my hotel. There was a cat asleep in a cage with a sign that said ‘Cat.’”

  “What kind of cat?”

  “Just an ordinary one. Brown stripes, short tail. And unbelievably fat. It just plopped down on its side and lay there.”

  “Maybe cats aren’t so common in Hokkaido.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” he asked, astonished. “There must be cats in Hokkaido. They can’t be that unusual.”

  “Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?” I said. “They’re animals, too, right?”

  “Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody’s going to pay money to see them,” he said. “Just look around you—they’re everywhere. Same thing with people.”
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  When we’d finished off the six-pack, I put the suit and tie and shoe box into a large paper bag.

  “Sorry to keep doing this to you,” I said. “I know I should buy my own suit, but somehow I never get around to it. I feel like if I buy funeral clothes I’m saying that it’s OK if somebody dies.”

  “No problem,” he said. “I’m not using them anyway. Better to have someone use them than to have them hanging in the closet, right?”

  It was true that in the three years since he’d had the suit he’d hardly worn it.

  “It’s weird, but since I bought the suit not a single person I know has died,” he explained.

  “That’s the way it goes.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it goes,” he said.

  For me, on the other hand, it was the Year of Funerals. Friends and former friends died one after another, like ears of corn withering in a drought. I was twenty-eight. My friends were all about the same age—twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Not exactly the right age to die.

  A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty-four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. You’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six-lane highway—whether you want to be or not. You get your hair cut; every morning you shave. You aren’t a poet anymore, or a revolutionary or a rock star. You don’t pass out drunk in phone booths or blast out the Doors at four in the morning. Instead, you buy life insurance from your friend’s company, drink in hotel bars, and hold on to your dental bills for tax deductions. At twenty-eight, that’s normal.

  But that’s exactly when the unexpected massacre began. It was like a surprise attack on a lazy spring day—as if someone, on top of a metaphysical hill, holding a metaphysical machine gun, had sprayed us with bullets. One minute we were changing our clothes, and the next minute they didn’t fit anymore: the sleeves were inside out, and we had one leg in one pair of pants, the other in a different pair. A complete mess.