Kitchen

  Yuichi, think about what I’m about to say. If I should die, you will be left all alone. But you have Mikage, don’t you? I’m not joking about that girl. We have no relatives. When I married your mother, her parents cut off relations entirely. And then, when I became a woman, they cursed me. So I’m asking you, DON’T, whatever you do, DO NOT contact them, ever. Do you understand me?

  Yes, Yuichi, in this world there are all kinds of people. There are people who choose to live their lives in filth; this is hard for me to understand. People who purposely do abhorrent things, just for the attention it draws to them, until they themselves are trapped. I cannot understand it, and no matter how much they suffer I cannot feel pity for them. But I have cheerfully chosen to make my body my fortune. I am beautiful! I am dazzling! If people I don’t care for are attracted to me, I accept it as the wages of beauty. So, if I should be killed, it will be an accident. Don’t get any strange ideas. Believe in the me that you knew.

  Just this once I wanted to write using men’s language, and I’ve really tried. But it’s funny—I get embarrassed and the pen won’t go. I guess I thought that even though I’ve lived all these years as a woman, somewhere inside me was my male self, that I’ve been playing a role all these years. But I find that I’m body and soul a woman. A mother in name and in fact. I have to laugh.

  I have loved my life. My years as a man, my years married to your mother, and after she died, becoming and living as a woman, watching you grow up, living together so happily, and—oh! taking Mikage in!! That was the most fun of all, wasn’t it? I yearn to see her again. She, too, is a very precious child of mine.

  Sentimental of me, isn’t it?

  Please tell her I said hi. And tell her to stop bleaching the hair on her legs in front of boys. It’s indecent. Don’t you think so?

  You’ll find enclosed the papers detailing all my assets. I know you can’t make heads or tails of all that legalese. Call the lawyer, okay? In any case, I’ve left everything to you except the club. Isn’t it great being an only child?

  XXX

  Eriko

  When I finished reading I carefully refolded the letter. The smell of Eriko’s favorite perfume tugged at my heart. This, too, will disappear after the letter is opened a few more times, I thought. That was hardest of all.

  I stretched out on the sofa that had been my bed when I lived here, feeling a nostalgia so sharp it was painful. Night was just as it had been—here I was in the same room, the silhouettes of the plants in front of the terrace window looking down over the city.

  Still, no matter how late I waited up, she would not come back.

  Just before dawn: the sound of humming and high-heeled shoes drawing nearer, the key in the door. After the club closed she would come home a little tipsy, and because she made a lot of noise, I would wake up, sleepy-eyed. When I heard the sound of the shower, the sound of her slippers, the sound of water boiling, I would go back to sleep, feeling at peace. It was always like that. How I missed her! So much I thought I’d go mad.

  I wondered if I’d woken Yuichi with my crying—or was he in the throes of a heavy, painful dream?

  A door opened before us that night—the door to the grave.

  The next day both of us slept into the afternoon. I had the day off and was nibbling bread and lazily looking through the newspaper when Yuichi came out of his room. After washing his face, he sat down beside me and poured himself a glass of milk. “I guess I’ll go to class now. . . .”

  “My, you students have a cushy life, don’t you?” I broke my bread in half for him. “Thanks,” he said, taking it and eating it noisily. I had the strange sensation, while we were sitting in front of the TV, that we really were orphans.

  “Mikage,” he said, getting up, “are you going back to your house tonight?”

  “Hmm . . .” I thought about it. “I wonder if I should go home after dinner. . . .”

  “Ah!” said Yuichi, “make me a professional dinner!” That gave me a terrific idea, and I got serious.

  “All right, then, let’s get to work. We’ll make a dinner to end all dinners.”

  I enthusiastically planned a magnificent feast, wrote down everything we needed, and thrust the paper at him.

  “Take the car. Buy everything on this list and bring it back. I’m going to make all your favorite foods, so I hope you’ll be quick about it, since the sooner you get back, the sooner you’ll be digging in.”

  “Ordering me around like a new bride,” he grumbled on his way out.

  I heard the door close, and when I was alone I realized I was dead tired. The room was so unearthly quiet, I lost all sense of time being divided into seconds. I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop.

  Houses always feel like that after someone has died.

  I sank into the sofa and stared blankly at the melancholy early-winter gray outside the large window. The heavy, cold air of winter permeated every part of this little neighborhood—the park, the walkways—like a fog. I couldn’t bear it. It oppressed me, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko’s was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.

  I flopped down on my back and looked up at the dear, familiar ceiling. Right after my grandmother died, I had stared at this same ceiling many an afternoon while Yuichi and Eriko were out. I remember thinking to myself, my grandmother is dead, I’ve lost my last blood relation, and things can’t get any worse. But now they had. Eriko had been enormously important to me. In the six months we spent together she had always been there for me; she spoiled me.

  To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn’t like it, but it made it easier to go on.

  My heart was so heavy now because of just that. I watched the gloomy clouds and the orange of the sunset spreading across them in the western sky. Soon the cold night would descend and fill the hollow in my heart. I felt sleepy but said to myself, if you sleep now, you’ll have bad dreams. So I got up.

  After a long absence I was once again in the Tanabe kitchen. For an instant I had a vision of Eriko’s smiling face, and my heart turned over. I felt an urge to get moving. It looked to me like the kitchen had not been used in quite a while. It was somewhat dirty and dark. I began to clean. I scrubbed the sink with scouring powder, wiped off the burners, washed the dishes, sharpened the knives. I washed and bleached all the dish towels, and while watching them go round and round in the dryer I realized that I had become calmer. Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much? It’s strange. Perhaps because to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul. As I stood there, I seemed to be making a new start; something was coming back.

  * * *

  That summer I had taught myself to cook.

  The sensation that my brain cells were multiplying was exhilarating. I bought three books on cooking—fundamentals, theory, and practice—and went through them one by one. On the bus, in bed, on the sofa, I read the one on theory, memorizing caloric content, temperatures, and raw ingredients. Every spare minute I cooked. Those three books grew tattered with use, and even now I always have them near at hand. Like the picture books I loved when I was little, I know the illustrations on each page by heart.

  Yuichi and Eriko took to saying to each other, “Mikage has gone completely nuts, hasn’t she?” And it’s true that for the whole summer I went about it with a crazed enthusiasm: cooking, cooking, cooking. I poured all my earnings from my part-time job into it, and if something came out wrong I’d do it over till I got it right. Angry, fretful, or cheery, I cooked through it all.

  When I think about it now, it was because of my cooking that the t
hree of us ate together as often as we did; it was a good summer.

  Looking out the window as the evening wind came through the screen door, a remnant of pale blue stretching over the hot sky, we ate boiled pork, cold Chinese noodles, cucumber salad. I cooked for them: she who made a fuss over everything I did; he who ate vast quantities in silence.

  Complicated omelets, beautifully shaped vegetables cooked in broth, tempura—it took a fair amount of work to be able to make those things. Because my biggest flaw is lack of precision, it didn’t occur to me that dishes turn out badly or well in proportion to one’s attention to detail. For example, if I put something in the oven before it had come to temperature, or if I got the steam going before I had everything chopped, that sort of triviality (or so I thought) was precisely reflected in the color and shape of the final product. Which surprised me. Although that kind of cooking made my dinners no worse than those of the average housewife, they by no means resembled the illustrations in the books.

  There was only one way to learn: I tried making anything and everything, and I tried to do it right. I would carefully wipe out the bowls, replace the caps on the spices every time, calmly chart out the steps in advance, and when I began to make myself crazy with irritation I would stop what I was doing and take a few deep breaths. At first my impatience would lead me to the brink of despair, but when I finally learned to correct my mistakes coolly, it was truly as if I had somehow reformed my own slapdash character. Or so I felt (of course, it wasn’t true).

  Getting the job I have now, as an assistant to a cooking teacher, was incredible. She not only teaches cooking classes, but also gets a lot of important television and magazine work, and she is actually rather famous. An amazing number of candidates apparently tested for the job. Why was it that I—a novice with only one summer of study under my belt—got hired? When I saw the women who attend the classes, it made sense. Their attitude was completely different from mine.

  Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by “their happiness” is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that’s great. I wouldn’t mind that kind of life. Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life—my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing.

  But—that one summer of bliss. In that kitchen.

  I was not afraid of burns or scars; I didn’t suffer from sleepless nights. Every day I thrilled with pleasure at the challenges tomorrow would bring. Memorizing the recipe, I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I would stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. Having known such joy, there was no going back.

  No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible.

  Inching one’s way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can’t take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself, into the heart: I know about that.

  It was evening by the time I’d finished cleaning up and preparing for dinner.

  Yuichi rang the doorbell and, carrying a large plastic bag in his arms, pushed the door open with a great show of difficulty and stuck his head inside. I walked toward him.

  “Unbelievable,” he said, putting down his burden with a thud.

  “What is?”

  “I bought everything you said to, but I can’t carry it all in one trip. There’s too much.”

  “Oh,” I said, pretending not to catch on, but Yuichi’s snort of irritation let me know there was no getting out of it. I went down with him to the garage.

  In the car were two more gigantic bags. Even carrying them from the car to the garage entrance was back-breaking.

  “I bought a few things for myself, too,” said Yuichi, carrying the heavier of the two.

  “A few things?” I peered into my bag. Besides shampoo and notebooks, there were lots of “instant” dinners: a clear indication of his recent eating habits.

  “You could have made a couple of trips.”

  “Yes, but—with you we can do it in one. Hey, look! Isn’t that a pretty moon?” Yuichi pointed to the winter moon with his chin.

  “Oh, isn’t it,” I said sarcastically (his diversionary tactics were so obvious), but as I stepped into the building I turned to glance at it. It was almost full and shed an incredible brightness.

  In the elevator on the way up, Yuichi said, “Of course there’s a relationship.”

  “Between what?”

  “Don’t you think that seeing such a beautiful moon influences what one cooks? But not in the sense of ‘moon-viewing udon,’ for instance.”

  The elevator stopped with a little jerk. When he said that, my heart faltered for an instant. He spoke as if he knew my very soul. As we walked to the door, I asked, “In what sense then? In a more profound way?”

  “Yes, yes. In a more human sense, you know?”

  “I agree. That’s absolutely true,” I said without hesitation. If they asked a hundred people on a quiz show, a hundred voices would reverberate as one: “Yes! Yes! It’s true!”

  “You know that I think of you as an artist. For you cooking is an art. You really do love to work in the kitchen. Of course you do. Good thing, too.”

  Yuichi agreed with himself again and again, carrying on a one-man conversation. I said, smiling, “You’re just like a child.”

  A moment before, my heart had seemed to stop. Now that feeling voiced itself in my mind: If Yuichi is with me, I need nothing else. It flashed for only an instant, but it left me extremely confused, dazzled as I was by the light given off by his eyes.

  It took me two hours to make dinner.

  Yuichi peeled potatoes and watched TV while I cooked. He had very nimble fingers.

  For me, Eriko’s death was still a distant event. I couldn’t deal with it head-on. Faced with a tempest of shock, I could only approach the dark fact of her death little by little. And Yuichi—Yuichi was like a willow beaten down by the driving rain.

  So even though it was now just the two of us, we avoided talking about Eriko’s death, and that omission loomed larger and larger in time and space. But for the time being, “just the two of us” was a warm, safe place where the future was on hold. And yet there was—how should I put this?—a huge, terrifying premonition that those unpaid bills would inexorably come due. The enormity of it only heightened our feeling of being orphans alone in the dark.

  The limpid night descended, and we began to eat the extravagant dinner I had prepared. Salad, pie, stew, croquettes. Deep-fried tofu, steamed greens, bean thread with chicken (each with their various sauces), Chicken Kiev, sweet-and-sour pork, steamed Chinese dumplings . . . It was an international hodge-podge, but we ate it all (it took hours), with wine, until we couldn’t face another bite.

  Yuichi, uncharacteristically, was very drunk. Just as I was thinking that it was odd—I didn’t see him have that much at dinner—I noticed, with a start, an empty bottle on the floor. Apparently he had been at it while I was cooking; no wonder he was three sheets to the wind. I asked him, amazed, “Yuichi, did you drink this whole bottle before dinner?”

  Yuichi, face up on the sofa, munching celery, muttered, “Yup.”

  “You hid it well,” I said, and Yuichi’s face suddenly looked terribly sad. It’s tough dealing with things when you’re drunk. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

>   Yuichi said, his face serious, “That’s all everyone has been saying for the last month, and it really hurts.”

  “Everyone? You mean at school?”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  “Have you been drinking like this for a month?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No wonder you didn’t feel like calling me,” I said, laughing.

  “The telephone was glowing.” He laughed, too. “I’d be walking home at night, drunk, and I’d see a phone booth, all lit up. Even on a dark street I could always see a telephone booth in the distance. I would sort of tortuously make my way over to it, thinking, I have to call Mikage, and I’d repeat your number in my head, get out my telephone card, step into the booth, and everything. But then, just on the verge of dialing, when I’d think about the state I was in, and what I would say, I’d stop. Then I’d go home and collapse into bed and have these horrible dreams where I’d call you and you’d be crying and angry with me.”

  “It was all your imagination. And imagination is sometimes worse than reality.”

  “You’re right. Suddenly I feel happy.” In a sleepy voice, he continued, pausing frequently. He probably had no idea what he was saying. “You came to this apartment even though my mother is dead. I thought you’d be angry with me and never want to see me again. It was something I was prepared for, if that was how it had to be. I was afraid that the memory of the three of us living here might just be too painful. I had a feeling I would never see you again.” Yuichi breathed a sigh of relief and continued, as though he were talking to himself. “I always liked it when people stayed here on the sofa. The crisp white sheets and all . . . Even though we were at home, it was like being on a trip. . . . Since I’ve been alone in this place, I haven’t been eating very well. I’d often say to myself, hmm, should I cook something? But food, too, was giving off light, like the telephone. So I wondered if eating would put out the light, but it seemed like too much trouble, so I just drank. I thought maybe if I explain everything to Mikage, she’ll come over, maybe not move back in, but just come over. At least maybe she’ll listen to what I have to say. But I was afraid—terribly afraid—to even hope for such happiness. If I did let myself hope for that, and you became angry with me, I’d be pushed even further toward the depth of despair. I didn’t have the confidence, the courage, to explain all this to you so you could understand what was going on with me.”