Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

  “Well, I guess she meant she wanted to stay a virgin until she got married, and since after she was married there was no reason to be a virgin anymore, she wouldn’t mind having an affair with you. She was just telling you to wait till then.”

  “I suppose that’s it. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “It’s a unique way of thinking,” I said. “Logical, though.”

  A gentle smile played at his lips. “You’re right. It is logical.”

  “She gets married a virgin. And once she’s somebody’s wife she has an affair. Sounds like some classic French novel. Minus any fancy-dress ball or maids running around.”

  “But that’s the only practical solution she was able to come up with,” he said.

  “A damn shame,” I said.

  He looked at me for a while, and then slowly nodded. “You got that right. I’m glad you understand.” He nodded again. “Now I can see it that way—now that I’m older. Back then, though, I couldn’t. I was just a kid. I couldn’t grasp all the minute fluctuations of the human heart. So pure shock was my only reaction. Honestly, I was completely floored.”

  “I could see that,” I said.

  We didn’t say anything for a while as we ate.

  “As I’m sure you can imagine,” he continued, “we broke up. Neither of us announced we were breaking up, it just ended naturally. A very quiet breakup. I think we were too worn out to continue the relationship. From my perspective, her approach to life was—how should I put it?—not very sincere. No, that’s not it…. What I wanted was for her to have a better life. It disappointed me a little. I didn’t want her to get so hung up on virginity or marriage or whatever, but live a more natural, full sort of life.”

  “But I don’t think she could have acted otherwise,” I said.

  He nodded. “You might be right,” he said, taking a bite of a thick piece of mushroom. “After a while, you become inflexible. You can’t bounce back anymore. It could have happened to me, too. Ever since we were little, people had been pushing us, expecting us to succeed. And we met their expectations, because we were bright enough to. But your maturity level can’t keep pace, and one day you find there’s no going back. At least as far as morals go.”

  “That didn’t happen to you?” I asked.

  “Somehow I was able to overcome it,” he said after giving it some thought. He put down his knife and fork and wiped his mouth with the napkin. “After we broke up, I started going out with another girl in Tokyo. We lived together for a while. Honestly, she didn’t move me as much as Yoshiko did, but I did love her. We really understood each other, and were always up-front with each other. She taught me about human beings—how beautiful they can be, the kind of faults they have. I finally made some friends, too, and got interested in politics. I’m not saying my personality completely changed or anything. I was a very practical person, and I still am. I don’t write novels, and you don’t import furniture. You know what I mean. In college I learned there were lots of realities in the world. It’s a huge world, there are lots of different values co-existing, and there’s no need to always be the top student. And then I went out into the world.”

  “And you’ve done very well for yourself.”

  “I suppose,” he said, and gave a sheepish sigh. He gazed at me like we were a pair of accomplices. “Compared to other people of my generation, I make a good living. So on a practical level, yes, I’ve been successful.”

  He fell silent. Knowing he wanted to say more, I sat there, patiently waiting for him to go on.

  “I didn’t see Yoshiko for a long time after that,” he continued. “For a long time. I’d graduated and started work at a trading company. I worked there for five years, part of which took me overseas. I was busy every day. Two years after I graduated, I heard that Yoshiko had gotten married. My mother gave me the news. I didn’t ask who she’d married. When I heard the news, the first thought that struck me was whether she’d been able to keep her virginity until marriage. After that I felt a little sad. The next day I felt even sadder. I felt like something important was finally over, like a door behind me had closed forever. That’s only to be expected, since I loved her. We’d gone out for four years, and I guess I was still clinging to the hope that we might get married someday. She’d been a huge part of my youth, so it was only natural that I felt sad. But I decided that as long as she was happy, I was OK with it. I honestly felt that way. I was a little—worried about her. There was a part of her that was very fragile.”

  The waiter came, removed our plates, and brought over the dessert wagon. We both turned down dessert and ordered coffee.

  “I got married late, when I was thirty-two. So when Yoshiko called me, I was still single. I was twenty-eight then, which makes it more than a decade ago. I’d just quit the company I’d been working for and had gone out on my own. I was convinced that the imported furniture market was about to take off, so I borrowed money from my father and started up my own little firm. Despite my confidence, though, things didn’t go so well at first. Orders were late, goods went unsold, warehouse fees piled up, there were loans to repay. I was frankly worn out, and starting to lose confidence. This was the hardest time I’ve ever gone through in my life. And it was exactly during that rough spell that Yoshiko phoned me one day. I don’t know how she got my number, but one evening around eight, she called. I knew it was her right away. How could I ever forget that voice? It brought back so many memories. I was feeling pretty down then, and it felt wonderful to hear my old girlfriend’s voice again.”

  He stared at the blazing logs in the fireplace as if trying to summon up a memory. By this time the restaurant was completely full, loud with the sound of people’s voices, laughter, plates clinking. Almost all the guests were locals, it seemed, and they called out to the waiters by first name: Giuseppe! Paolo!

  “I don’t know who she heard it from, but she knew everything about me. How I was still single and had worked abroad. How I’d quit my job a year before and started up my own company. She knew it all. Don’t worry, she told me, you’ll do fine. Just have confidence in yourself. I know you’ll be successful. How could you not be? It made me so happy to hear her say that. Her voice was so kind. I can do this, I thought, I can make a go of it. Hearing her voice made me regain the confidence I used to have. As long as things stay real, I thought, I know I’m going to make it. I felt like the world was out there just for me.” He smiled.

  “It was my turn then to ask about her life. What kind of person she’d married, whether she had children, where she lived. She didn’t have any children. Her husband was four years older than her and worked at a TV station. He was a director, she said. He must be very busy, I commented. So busy he doesn’t have time to make any children, she replied, and laughed. She lived in Tokyo, in a condo in Shinagawa. I was living in Shiroganedai at the time, so we weren’t exactly neighbors but lived pretty close to each other. What a coincidence, I told her. Anyway, that’s what we talked about—all the typical things two people who used to go out in high school might talk about. Sometimes it felt a bit awkward, but I enjoyed talking with her again. We talked like two old friends who’d said goodbye long ago and who were now walking down two separate paths in life. It had been a long time since I’d spoken so openly, so honestly, to anybody, and we talked for a long, long time. Once we’d said everything there was to say, we were silent. It was a—how should I put it?—a very deep silence. The kind of silence where, if you close your eyes, all sorts of images start to well up in your mind.” He stared for a while at his hands on the table, then raised his head and looked at me. “I wanted to hang up then, if I could have. Thank her for calling, tell her how much I enjoyed talking with her. You know what I mean?”

  “From a practical standpoint that would have been the most realistic thing to do,” I agreed.

  “But she didn’t hang up. And she invited me to her place. Can you come over? she asked. My husband’s on a business trip and I’m by myself and bored.
I didn’t know what to say, so I was silent. And so was she. There was just that silence for a while, and then she said this: I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you,” she said. At first he didn’t know what she meant. And then it all came back—her promise to sleep with him after she got married. He’d never considered this a real promise, just a stray thought she’d let slip out in a moment of confusion.

  But it hadn’t been the result of any confusion on her part. For her it was a binding promise, a firm agreement she’d entered into.

  For a moment he didn’t know what to think, no idea what he should do. He glanced around him, completely at a loss, but discovered no signposts to show him the way. Of course he wanted to sleep with her—that goes without saying. After they broke up, he often imagined what it would be like making love to her. Even when he was with other girls, in the dark he pictured holding her. Not that he’d seen her naked—all he knew about her body was what he’d been able to feel with his hand up her clothes.

  He knew full well how dangerous it would be for him to sleep with her at this juncture. How destructive it could wind up being. He also didn’t feel like reawakening what he’d already abandoned back there in the dark. This isn’t the right thing for me to do, he knew. There’s something unreal about it, something incompatible with who I am.

  But of course he agreed to see her. This was, after all, a beautiful fairy tale he might experience only once in life. His gorgeous ex-girlfriend, the one he’d spent his precious youth with, was telling him she wanted to sleep with him, asking him to come over to her house right away—and she lived close by. Plus there was that secret, legendary promise exchanged a long, long time ago in a deep woods.

  He sat there for a while, eyes closed, not speaking. He felt like he’d lost the power of speech.

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Okay. I’ll be over soon. I should be there in less than a half hour. Tell me your address.”

  He wrote down the name of her condo and the apartment number, and her phone number. He quickly shaved, changed clothes, and went out to flag down a cab.

  “If it’d been you, what would you have done?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. I had no idea what to say.

  He laughed and stared at his coffee cup. “I wish I could have gotten by without answering, too. But I couldn’t. I had to make a decision right then and there. To go or not to go, one or the other. There’s no in-between. I ended up going to her place. As I knocked on her door, I was thinking how nice it would be if she wasn’t at home. But she was there, as beautiful as she used to be. Smelling just as wonderful as I remembered. We had a few drinks and talked, listened to some old records. And then what do you think happened?”

  I have no idea, I told him.

  “A long time ago, when I was a child, there was a fairy tale I read,” he said, staring at the opposite wall the whole time. “I don’t remember how the story went, but the last line has stayed with me. Probably because this was the first time I’d ever read a fairy tale that had such a strange ending. This is how it ended: ‘And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.’ Don’t you think that’s sort of a strange ending?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “I wish I could remember the plot, but I can’t. All I can remember is that strange last line. ‘And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.’ What kind of story could it have been?”

  We’d finished our coffee by this point.

  “We held each other,” he went on, “but didn’t have sex. I didn’t take her clothes off. I just touched her with my fingers, just like the old days. I decided that was the best thing to do, and she’d apparently come to the same conclusion. For a long time we sat there, touching each other. That was the only way we could grasp what we were supposed to understand at that time. If this had been long ago, that wouldn’t have been the case—we would have had sex, and grown even closer. We might have ended up happy. But we’d already passed that point. That possibility was sealed up, frozen solid. And it would never open up again.”

  He turned his empty coffee cup around and around. He did this so long the waiter came over to see if he wanted anything. Finally he let go of the cup, called the waiter back over, and ordered another espresso.

  “I must have stayed at her apartment for about an hour. I don’t remember exactly. Any longer and I might have gone a little nuts,” he said and smiled. “I said goodbye to her and left. This was our final farewell. I knew it, and so did she. The last time I saw her, she was standing in the doorway, arms folded. She seemed about to say something, but didn’t. She didn’t have to say it out loud—I knew what she was going to say. I felt so empty. So hollow. Sounds struck me as weird, everything looked distorted. I wandered around in a daze, thinking how my life had been totally pointless. I wanted to turn around, go back to her place, and have her. But I couldn’t. There was no way I could do that.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. He drank his second espresso.

  “It’s kind of embarrassing to say this, but that night I went out and slept with a prostitute. It was the first time in my life I’d paid for sex. And probably the last.”

  I stared at my own coffee cup for a while. And thought of how full of myself I used to be. I wanted to try to explain this to him, but didn’t think I could.

  “When I tell it like this, it sounds like something that happened to somebody else,” he laughed. He was silent for a time, lost in thought. I didn’t say anything, either.

  “‘And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing,’” he finally said. “That line always comes to me whenever I remember what happened. It’s like a conditioned reflex. It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical.”

  As I said at the beginning, there’s no real moral or lesson to be learned from all this. But this is something that actually happened to him. Something that happened to all of us. That’s why when he told me his story, I couldn’t laugh. And even now I can’t.

  —TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL

  HUNTING KNIFE

  Two rafts were anchored offshore like twin islands. They were the perfect distance to swim to from the beach—exactly fifty strokes out to one of them, then thirty strokes from one to the other. About fourteen feet square, each raft had a metal ladder, and a carpet of artificial grass covering its surface. The water, ten or twelve feet deep at this point, was so transparent you could follow the chains attached to the rafts all the way down to the concrete anchors at the bottom. The swimming area was enclosed by a coral reef, and there were hardly any waves, so the rafts barely bobbed in the water. They seemed resigned to being anchored to that spot with the intense sun beating down on them day after day.

  I liked to stand out there and look back at the shore, at the long white beach, the red lifeguard tower, the green row of palm trees—it was a gorgeous scene, maybe a little too picture-postcard perfect. Off to the right, the beach ended in a line of dark craggy rocks that led to the hotel cottages where my wife and I were staying. It was the end of June, still early in the tourist season, and there weren’t many people in the hotel or on the beach.

  There was an American military base nearby, and the rafts lay right in the flight path of the helicopters returning to it. The helicopters would appear offshore, bisect the space between the two rafts, then zoom over the palm trees and disappear. They flew so low you could almost make out the expressions on the faces of the pilots. Still, except for those helicopters swooping overhead, the beach was a sleepy, quiet place—the perfect spot to be left alone on vacation.

  Each cottage was a white two-story building divided into four units, two on the first floor, two on the second. Our room was on the first floor, with an ocean view. Right outside our window was a stand of white plumeria, and beyond that a garden with a neatly trimmed
lawn. Morning and night, the sprinklers made a drowsy clatter on the grass. Past the garden was a swimming pool and a row of tall palm trees, whose huge fronds waved gently in the trade winds.

  A mother and her son, Americans, were staying in the unit next door to my wife and me. They seemed to have settled in long before we arrived. The mother was around sixty, the son close to our age, twenty-eight or twenty-nine. They resembled each other more than any mother and son I’d ever seen—both with identical long, narrow faces, broad foreheads, tightly set lips. The mother was tall, her posture erect, her movements always alert and brisk. The son seemed tall, too, but you really couldn’t say for sure, as he was confined to a wheelchair. Invariably, his mother was behind him, pushing the chair.

  They were incredibly quiet, their room like a museum. They never had the TV on, though twice I did hear music from their place—Mozart’s clarinet quintet the first time, the second time some orchestral music I didn’t recognize. Richard Strauss was my guess. Other than that, no sound at all. They didn’t use the air conditioner—they left their front door open instead, so the cool sea breeze could blow in. But, even with the door open, I never heard them talking. Any conversation they had—I’m assuming they had to talk sometime—must have been more or less an exchange of whispers. This seemed to rub off on my wife and me, and whenever we were in our room we found ourselves speaking in low voices.

  We often came across the mother and son in the restaurant, or in the lobby, or on one of the walkways through the garden. The hotel was a small, cozy place, so I guess we were bound to cross paths, whether we wanted to or not. We’d nod to one another as we passed. The mother and son had different ways of nodding hello. The mother would give a strong, affirmative nod; the son barely tilted his head. The impression that these two variant nods gave off, though, was pretty much the same: both greetings began and ended there, and nothing lay beyond. We never tried to speak to them. My wife and I had more than enough to talk about between ourselves—whether we should move to a new apartment when we got home, what we should do about jobs, whether or not to have kids. This was the last summer of our twenties.