Kitchen

  He looked me straight in the eye and he spoke for all the world with the sincerity of someone trying to persuade a murderer to turn himself in.

  I nodded.

  “Well! I’m going to finish mopping the floor,” he said.

  As I washed the tea things, I heard Yuichi singing to himself, his voice blending in with the sound of running water.

  To avoid disturbing the

  Moonlight shadows

  I brought my boat to rest

  At the tip of the cape

  “Oh!!” I said. “I know that song. What’s it called again? I love that song. Who was it that sang it?”

  “Umm . . . Momoko Sakuchi. It really sticks with you, doesn’t it?” Yuichi smiled.

  “Yes, yes!”

  While I scrubbed the sink and Yuichi mopped, we sang together. It was so much fun, hearing our voices in the silent kitchen in the middle of the night.

  “I especially love this part,” I said, singing the second stanza.

  A lighthouse in the distance

  To the two of us in the night

  The spinning light looks like

  Sunshine through the branches of trees

  In high spirits, we sang that part again, together, at the top of our lungs: “A LIGHTHOUSE IN THE DISTANCE—TO THE TWO OF US IN THE NIGHT THE SPINNING LIGHT LOOKS LIKE SUNSHINE THROUGH THE BRANCHES OF TREES.”

  All of a sudden I found myself blurting out: “Wait, stop. We’re going to wake my grandmother sleeping in the next room.” Now I’ve done it, I thought.

  Yuichi seemed to feel it, too. He abruptly stopped scrubbing and turned to face me, his eyes troubled. Embarrassed, I tried to smile.

  The son that Eriko had brought up so gently was suddenly revealed to be a prince. “After we finish cleaning up here, I really feel like stopping at the ramen noodle stand in the park,” he said.

  I awoke abruptly.

  It’s true that I wasn’t used to going to bed so early, but that wasn’t the reason. I went into the kitchen for a drink of water, thinking, strange dream. . . . My heart was chilled. Eriko wasn’t home yet. It was two A.M.

  The sensation of the dream was still very fresh. Listening to the sound of water splashing on the stainless steel, I wondered vacantly, should I scrub the sink? . . .

  The night was so deathly silent that I felt I could hear the sound of the stars moving across the heavens. The glass of water soaked into my withered heart. It was chilly. My bare feet trembled in my slippers.

  “Hi there.” Coming up behind me, Yuichi made me jump.

  “Wha-what?” I said, turning around.

  “I just woke up and I’m starving. I was thinking, hmm, maybe I’ll make some ramen noodles. . . .” In contrast to the way he had been in my dream, Yuichi was mumbling, his face puffy with sleep.

  I could feel my own face swollen from crying. “I’ll make it for you,” I said. “Have a seat on my sofa.”

  “Ah,” he said, “your sofa.” He stumbled over to it and sat down.

  In this little room suspended in the black of night, under the kitchen light, I opened the refrigerator. I chopped vegetables. Here in my favorite place, I suddenly thought: ramen! What a coincidence! Without turning around I said playfully, “In my dream you said you wanted ramen.”

  There was no response whatsoever. Wondering if he had fallen back asleep, I looked over, and there was Yuichi, gaping at me.

  “I. . . I don’t believe this,” I said.

  “The floor in your old kitchen, was it a kind of yellow-green color?” Yuichi asked. “This isn’t some kind of riddle.”

  That was strange. I nodded and said, “Thanks for mopping it for me.” Women are always quicker to pick up on these things.

  “Now I’m awake,” he said, but, half-apologetic for not getting it sooner, he smiled. “I really want you to make me some tea right now, and not in a teacup.”

  “You make it.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Okay, how about some juice—you want some?”

  “Sure.”

  Yuichi went to the refrigerator and got out a couple of grapefruits, then happily took the juicer from its box. Accompanied by the ungodly racket of the machine in the silent, middle-of-the-night kitchen, I slipped the noodles into boiling water.

  While what had happened was utterly amazing, it didn’t seem so out of the ordinary, really. It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.

  I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.

  “It’s not easy being a woman,” said Eriko one evening out of the blue.

  I lifted my nose from the magazine I was reading and said, “Huh?” The beautiful Eriko was watering the plants in front of the terrace before she left for work.

  “Because I have a lot of faith in you, I suddenly feel I ought to tell you something. I learned it raising Yuichi. There were many, many difficult times, god knows. If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something. It could be children, or it could be house plants, you know? By doing that you come to understand your own limitations. That’s where it starts.” As if chanting a liturgy, she related to me her philosophy of life.

  “Life can be so hard,” I said, moved.

  “Yes. But if a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I’m grateful for it.”

  Her hair rustled, brushing her shoulders. There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.

  “I think I understand.”

  “I love your honest heart, Mikage. The grandmother who raised you must have been a wonderful person.”

  I smiled. “She was.”

  “You’ve been lucky,” said Eriko. She laughed, her back to me.

  One day I’ll have to move out, I thought as I turned back to my magazine. The thought made me woozy. But I would have to do it.

  Someday, I wondered, will I be living somewhere else and look back nostalgically on my time here? Or will I return to this same kitchen someday?

  But right now I am here with this powerful mother, this boy with the gentle eyes. That was all that mattered.

  As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.

  * * *

  Dream kitchens.

  I will have countless ones, in my heart or in reality. Or in my travels. Alone, with a crowd of people, with one other person—in all the many places I will live. I know that there will be so many more.

  2 FULL MOON

  Eriko died late in the autumn.

  A crazy man became obsessed with her and killed her. He had spotted her on the street and liked what he saw; when he followed her he discovered that the place where she worked was a gay bar. Shocked to find out that this beautiful woman was a man, he began writing her long letters and hanging around the bar. The more persistent he was, the colder Eriko and the people at the club became. One night, screaming that he had been made a fool of, he lunged at her with a knife. Eriko, wounded, grabbed a barbell off the bar—it was part of the club’s decor—with both hands and beat him to death.

  “There!” she said. “Self-defense, that makes us even.” Those were her last words.

  I didn’t learn of this until winter. It was a while before Yuichi finally phoned to let me know.

  “She died fighting,” Yuichi said w
ithout preamble. It was one o’clock in the morning. I jumped out of bed in the dark at the ring of the telephone and grabbed the receiver. I had no idea what he was talking about. In my sleepy brain I pictured a scene from a war movie.

  “Yuichi? What? What are you talking about?”

  After a long silence he said, “My mother . . . or, uh, father, I should say, was killed.”

  I didn’t understand; nothing was getting through. I was too stunned to speak. As if reluctant to talk about it, he began to tell me about Eriko’s death, little by little.

  He spoke haltingly, but with each word the tale became more incredible. I stared into space. For a moment the receiver seemed miles away.

  “When . . . did it happen? Recently?” I asked, though I had no idea where my own voice was coming from or what I was saying.

  “No. It was a while back. Her friends at the club gave her a small funeral. I’m sorry. Somehow . . . somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to call you.”

  I felt like my insides had been gouged out. And now she is no longer here. She isn’t anywhere anymore.

  “Forgive me, please forgive me,” Yuichi kept repeating.

  The telephone wasn’t enough. I couldn’t see him. Did he want to cry, did he want to laugh hysterically, did he want to have a long talk, did he want to be left alone? I couldn’t tell.

  “Yuichi, I’m coming over right now. Is that okay? I want to talk to you and I want to see your face when I talk to you.”

  “Sure. I’ll drive you home so you won’t have to worry about getting back in the middle of the night.” Of course he had agreed without giving me a clue as to his emotional state.

  “See you soon,” I said, and hung up.

  When was it that Eriko and I last saw each other? Had we parted laughing? My head was spinning. It was early in the fall when I left the university once and for all and got a job as an assistant in a cooking school. Was that the last time I had seen her, the day I moved out? Eriko had cried a little: “You’re still going to be in the neighborhood—you’ll come back and see us on weekends, won’t you?” No, no, that wasn’t it. I saw her near the end of last month. Yes, at the all-night minimart.

  It was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t sleep. I had gone to the store to get a pudding cup, and there was Eriko, just off work, standing in the doorway with the “girls” from the club, drinking coffee out of paper cups and eating fish balls in broth. I called out, “Eriko-san!”

  She took my hand and said, “My goodness, Mikage, you’ve gotten so thin since you left our house!” She laughed. She was wearing a blue dress.

  On my way out with the pudding, I saw her, cup in hand, her eyes half-closed, watching the city glitter in the darkness. I said, teasing, “Eriko, you’re looking a little masculine tonight!” She flashed me a big smile and said, “Poor me! I have a smart-ass for a daughter. I wonder if she’s hitting puberty?” I answered that I was beyond that, thank you, and all the girls laughed. She asked me to come and visit soon, and I said I would. We parted smiling. That was the last time.

  How long did it take me to put together an overnight bag? I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Opening and closing drawers, checking in the bathroom, breaking a vase, mopping it up. I covered the entire apartment several times over in total confusion. I smiled a little at how typical it was that I should still be empty-handed after all that frenzied activity. You have to calm down, I thought, and closed my eyes.

  At last I stuffed a toothbrush and towel into the bag and, after double-checking that the gas was off and the answering machine on, I stumbled out of the apartment.

  When I regained enough composure to realize where I was, I found I was walking up the wintry street toward the Tanabes’ apartment building. As I walked along under the starry sky, my keys jingling, the tears began to flow one after the other. The street, my footsteps, the quiet buildings, everything seemed warped. My breath became painfully blocked; I felt like I was choking. My eyes were stung by the lashing wind, and I began to feel colder and colder.

  Things that my eyes normally take in—telephone poles, street lights, parked cars, the black sky—I could now barely make out. There was a strange beauty to their distortion. Everything came zooming in at me. I felt powerless to stop the energy from rushing out of my body; it seemed to dissipate with a hissing sound into the darkness.

  When my parents died I was still a child. When my grandfather died, I had a boyfriend. When my grandmother died I was left all alone. But never had I felt so alone as I did now.

  From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a gloomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.

  I wanted it to end, and quickly, but for now I would go see Yuichi. Hear everything he had to say, in detail. But what good would that do? What could come of it? It was not a question of hoping for anything. It would mean being flooded with an even more gigantic despair. Utterly devoid of hope, I rang the doorbell. In my confusion I had run up the stairs all the way to the tenth floor before I even realized it, and I was panting.

  I listened to the familiar rhythm of his footsteps approaching the door. When I was living there I had often gone out and forgotten my key—I don’t know how many times I had rung that doorbell in the middle of the night. Yuichi would get out of bed and come to the door, and the sound of the chain would echo in the silent hallway the way it did now.

  “Hi.” A somewhat thinner Yuichi greeted me.

  “It’s been a long time,” I said, unable to repress a big smile. In spite of myself I was glad. In the inner recesses of my heart I was unabashedly happy to see him.

  He just stood there, gaping. “May I come in?” I asked. He smiled weakly and said, as if recovering himself, “Sure, of course. I was . . . I um . . . I was expecting you to be incredibly mad at me. Sorry. Please come in.”

  “How could I be mad? You should know me better than that.”

  Yuichi said, “Right,” trying to show me his old grin. I smiled back at him and took off my shoes in the entryway.

  At first I was strangely ill at ease in this apartment where I had lived until just a little while ago, and I was seized with nostalgia. But I sank into the sofa and soon became reacclimated to its smells. Yuichi brought me coffee.

  “It feels like ages since I’ve been here.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? You must have been pretty busy. How’s your job? Is it fun?” asked Yuichi politely.

  “Yes, right now everything I do is fun, you know? Even peeling potatoes. I’m still in that phase,” I answered, smiling. Then, putting down his cup, Yuichi started to talk.

  “Tonight, for the first time, my brain started working again, and I realized that I had to tell you. So I called.”

  I leaned forward attentively, looking into his eyes.

  “Up to the funeral, I couldn’t take in what had happened. My mind was blank; in my eyes everything was dark. I’d never lived with anyone but Eriko. She was my mother, my father. Because she was always just Eriko, I never had to think about it; there were so many things to do every day that I just kept barrelling along without worrying about it. That’s how things were. And then, wow! At the funeral . . . It was so like her, not to die in some normal way. Even the murderer’s wife and kids showed up. The girls from the club went nuts, and had I not behaved in a way befitting an eldest son it would have been complete chaos. You’ve been on my mind the whole time. That’s the truth. All the time. But somehow I just couldn’t call you. I was afraid that telling you would make it all real. I mean, to have my mother, my father, die that way meant I was left all alone. I couldn’t tell you, even though I knew that you two were close. I was confused, out of my mind.” Yuichi was staring at the cup in his hand.
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  I looked intently at his face, so beaten down by it all, and this is what came out of my mouth: “For some reason there’s always death around us. My parents, my grandfather, my grandmother . . . your real mother, even Eriko. My god—in this gigantic universe there can’t be a pair like us. The fact that we’re friends is amazing. All this death . . . all this death.”

  “Really.” Yuichi smiled. “Maybe we should go into business. Our clients could pay us to move in with people they want dead. We’ll call ourselves destruction workers.”

  His sadly cheerful face radiated a dim glow. We moved deeper into the dead of night. I turned around to look out the window at the flickering lights below. The city was fringed with tiny points of brightness, and the lines of cars were like a phosphorescent river flowing through the darkness.

  “So I’ve become an orphan,” said Yuichi.

  “That goes double for me. Not that I’m bragging about it,” I said, laughing, and suddenly tears began to stream down Yuichi’s cheeks.

  “I really needed you to make me laugh,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his arm, “so much I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  I reached out and took his face in both hands. “Thank you for calling me,” I said softly.

  We decided that I should have Eriko’s favorite red sweater. I recalled the evening when I had tried it on, and she had said, “God, how it pains me! Expensive as it was, it looks much better on you.”

  Then Yuichi went to Eriko’s dresser drawer and pulled out her amazingly lengthy “will.” After handing it to me, he bid me goodnight and went to his room. I read:

  Yuichi,

  I feel very odd writing a letter to my own child. But because lately I’ve been feeling that somehow I might be in danger, I’m writing you this on the one chance in a million that something might happen to me. No, just kidding. One of these days we’ll read this together and laugh.