“I bet you’re probably lonelier than I am, though,” I said.
“You’re probably right. I knew that I couldn’t just go on making a pest of myself at the inn forever, and of course I’m glad that your father and I have finally been able to come together like this, but somehow I just can’t forget the feeling of living in a group with so many other people. It’s in me even now, an unending presence deep within me, like the crashing of the sea.”
Having said this, my mother pressed her hand to her mouth and slipped into a little fit of giggles. “My,” she said, “aren’t I the poet today!”
I was still terribly young at the time, so my memory of this is a little vague, but there was a routine we used to go through every so often that makes me smile when I think of it now. Often during the summer I would get so worn out from playing all day that after dinner I would just flop down next to the low table where we ate and lie there watching TV. Soon I would begin drifting off to sleep, and my mother and father would start talking about their problems, and then I would make the mistake of waking up. I’d end up lying there with my eyes half open, gazing at the tatami from about as close up as it’s possible to get, listening to them talk. As a matter of fact, this happened fairly often. My father would keep going on and on and on about how his wife in Tokyo just wouldn’t agree to the divorce, and about how he couldn’t bear to have the two of us spending all our time in a place like this, and about anything and everything else that came to mind. Back when he was younger he was always agonizing over things like that, always taking the gloomiest view. That’s the kind of person he was then. It was only after he met my mother that he began to correct that aspect of his personality. And I really think he’s changed a lot. After all, my mother is a very optimistic person.
I remember her response to my father during the particular conversation I’m thinking of. “A place like this?” she said. “That’s a rude thing to say!”
“Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean it, I just got carried away. Of course Masako is your sister; there’s no denying that. But still, you’re mooching off these folks and you spend all day every day doing backbreaking work—you call that being happy?” Once again my father launched into an interminable speech. Even lying there with my back to the two of them I could sense that my mother was starting to get annoyed. She hates having to listen to people complain.
“All right, enough!” she said finally, heaving a profound sigh. I can still remember these words perfectly. As a matter of fact, this sentence always used to drift up into my head whenever things got rough—that’s how strong an impression it made. “If you spend your time talking like that, you’ll just end up complaining forever! You’ll be moaning that something’s missing even as they lay you out in your coffin. I don’t want to hear it anymore, okay?”
And then there was that time with Tsugumi.
We were in her room one day, making a tape of some record. “Man, your dad sure takes the cake, doesn’t he? He’s extraordinary, he really is,” she murmured, a kind of meditative shadow in her voice. It was a cloudy afternoon. One of those days when the weather outside is heavy and gray, and the waves look sharp and dangerously steep. On days like this Tsugumi always acts just a tiny bit friendlier toward the people around her. Aunt Masako once said that she thought maybe this was because on a day like this, back when Tsugumi was still a baby, she had come extremely close to dying.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Ordinary in what way?”
“Moron! I said extraordinary, not extra ordinary! And I even meant the cake bit literally. I bet he ate nothing but sweets when he was a kid. He must have had the most cushy childhood imaginable! That’s what I mean when I say he’s extraordinary. The guy should have been born a prince. You see? Catch my drift, darling?” Tsugumi smirked up at me from her futon. She was running a slight fever then, and her cheeks were glowing. Her hair lay fanned out over the pristine white pillowcase.
“Yeah, he does seem that way. But what made you think that?”
“Come on, he’s always fussing about these things that are really no big deal, right? And even though he’s a major wimp, he’s always acting so high and mighty, you know—just like you, in fact, except that even you aren’t as much of a wuss as your dad. I don’t know, it seems to me like the man has some kind of problem dealing with reality.”
To a certain extent what Tsugumi said really was true, so I found it hard to get angry at her. “Whatever, my father’s just fine the way he is,” I said. “Besides, isn’t that why he and my mom get along so well?”
“Yeah, probably. Anyway, someone like your dad is a hell of a lot easier to warm up to than a futonridden martyr like me. A lot better than a girl who’s learned everything she knows lying on her back on a futon, huh? Sounds a bit dirty when you say it that way, I guess? Heh heh. But you know, sometimes I run into your old man in the hall, right, and he says, Hey Tsugumi, anything you want from Tokyo? Just let me know and I’ll bring it when I come! And I gotta tell you, babe, when he pulls that kind of trick even I start beaming.”
Tsugumi looked at me and laughed. Mixed in with the afternoon light that flooded the room, the glow of the reading lamp looked incredibly white. A string of melodies flowed quietly on and on in the background. We sat in silence until the record ended, listening to this music, reading our magazines. Then the room was enveloped in a blanket of stillness that was disturbed only at intervals by the quiet rustle of pages flipping, flipping, flipping.
Tsugumi.
I understand her now that I’m so far away.
She did everything in her power to maintain that nasty front for no other reason than to prevent people from understanding her—I can see that now. (Of course there’s no denying that she had good material to work with.) And it seems to me that even though I’m the one who is supposedly able to meet anyone and go anywhere I want in the world, and even though she remains stuck there in that little nothing of a town, I’m the one who’s being forgotten by her, not the other way around. Because Tsugumi never turns her gaze back to the past. Because for Tsugumi there is only today.
The telephone rang one night, and when I picked up the receiver and said hello, Tsugumi’s voice came over the line. “Hey, babe, it s me.
All of a sudden the light and the shadows of that old town seemed to rise up before me. The space before my eyes went totally white.
“Oh my God!” I cried. “How are you, Tsugumi! It’s so great to hear your voice again! Is everyone there doing okay?”
“Evidently you’re still a total ditz, huh? Tell me, Maria, are you keeping up with your studies all right?” Tsugumi chuckled. When we got to talking like this, it felt as if the distance between us had shrunk in a blink to almost nothing. Once again we were as close as your average cousins are.
“Yeah, I’m studying all right.”
“Your old man isn’t having a fling with some girlie, is he? They say that when stuff like that happens twice it’ll happen a third time, you know.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but he’s not.”
“No? Well anyway, I think the old hag on this end is gonna give your ma some kind of formal notification later on, but the word is that we’re closing down the inn next spring.”
“What! You mean it’ll be gone?” I cried, startled.
“You got it, kid. I don’t know what the hell he’s thinking, but my pop says he wants to start one of those fancy European-style pensions. Manage it with some friend of theirs who’s got the land. Says it’s always been his dream. A dream like that just makes you want to laugh, doesn’t it? Sheesh. Straight out of fairyland. Eventually they’re gonna hand the pension over to Yōko. So that’s it, that’s the plan.”
“Are you going with them?”
“Maria babe, I can die in the mountains just as well as I can die by the sea,” said Tsugumi. Her tone made it sound as if she really didn’t care.
“Wow, it makes me feel lonely just thinking about it. The end of the Yamamoto Inn,” I murmu
red. The strength had drained from my body. Somehow I’d always assumed that they would live in that town forever.
“Anyway, the point is that you’ll just be bumming around this summer anyway, right? So why not come on down? The old hag says she’ll put you in one of the guest rooms and stuff you with the best sashimi there is.”
“I’ll come. Of course I’ll come!”
Like a series of projections from an old roll of 8 mm film, its colors faded, images of the town and the inside of the inn flashed through my mind. I saw Tsugumi lying there in that small room I knew so well, her skinny arm holding up the telephone receiver.
“Right, that’s that then. We’ll be waiting. Ah . . . hold on, the old hag is hollering at me that she’ll beat me up if I don’t let her talk to your mom. She’s just come up the stairs. Well, talk to you later,” Tsugumi said, speaking very rapidly. I said that I would get my mother, and called her to the phone.
And so it was decided. I’d spend one last summer at the inn.
Outsiders
Why was it? I wonder.
As the ferry approached the harbor I would always start to feel a little bit like an outsider, even when I was small.
Back when I was still living in the town, and I’d just taken the ferry out on some little trip and was riding it back—even then I used to have this feeling. For some reason I always felt as if I had actually come from somewhere else, and that one day I was bound to leave this harbor behind.
I guess when you’re out on the ocean and you see the piers way off in the distance, shrouded in mist, you understand this very clearly: No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider.
It was already late in the afternoon.
The waves sparkled so brightly in the glow of the setting sun that the glare was almost blinding, and across that water and beyond the orange sky it was just possible to make out the wharf, tiny and uncertain as a mirage. Now the music that played whenever the boat arrived at a stop started blaring out over the ancient speakers, and the captain called out the name of my old town—the town where I had grown up. Outside it was probably still hot, but here in the cabin the air-conditioning was on way too high, and it felt cold.
Earlier I had been so hyper I could hardly sit still, but once I changed from the bullet train to the high-speed ferry the see-sawing of the waves had lulled me into an unintended nap, and when I woke up the excitement had faded. Still dull with sleep, I sat up a little and gazed out through the saltwater spray that covered the windows at the distant line of the shore. The familiar, well-loved beach zoomed closer and closer, like a movie sped up.
The whistle blew and then the boat swung into a wide curve and cut around the tip of the concrete wharf. As the harbor neared I caught sight of Tsugumi leaning up against the billboard there, just under the word WELCOME, her arms crossed. She was wearing a white dress.
The boat kept gliding slowly forward, then bumped to a halt. Members of the crew tossed out the ropes and set out the gang-way. Passenger after passenger stepped down out of the cabin into the pale twilight outside. I stood up and gathered my luggage, then went to join the line of people waiting to disembark.
One step out of the cabin and the heat was stifling. Tsugumi marched straight over to where I was standing, and without so much as a “Long time no see!” or a “How’ve you been?”—and still scowling—she growled, “You’re late.”
“You haven’t changed at all, I see,” I said.
“Man, I was about to shrivel up,” she replied, still without a hint of a smile on her face. She spun around and started striding away. I didn’t say anything, but it was such a characteristically Tsugumi-esque welcome that a glad sort of hilarity too strong to contain surged up within me, and I grinned.
The Yamamoto Inn stood where it always had. It was so perfectly the same, so solidly there that I started to feel strange as soon as I saw it. Everything seemed slightly out of whack, as if I had stumbled across some house that I’d visited long ago in a dream.
But the moment Tsugumi yelled into the wide-open front door of the inn that “The ugly freeloader has arrived!” things felt real again.
Pooch started barking around back, and Aunt Masako walked out grinning from the back of the building, saying, “Tsugumi, that’s not a very nice thing to say!” Yōko came out as well, her face beaming, and greeted me with a bright “Hi, Maria, long time no see!” All at once everything came rushing back to me, and I started to feel a kind of bubbly sense of anticipation.
The numerous pairs of beach sandals lined up in the entry way showed how busy this final summer was going to be. The first whiff I got of the familiar scent of the house brought back my sense of the rhythm of life at the inn.
“Aunt Masako, is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
“No, no, don’t be silly. Why don’t you just go inside and have a cup of tea with Yōko or something.” She smiled at me, then hurried off in the direction of the kitchen, into the ruckus of busy noises emerging from it.
Come to think of it, we were just moving into that period of time in the Yamamoto Inn schedule when Yōko always sat down to eat before she left for work. It was the busiest hour of the whole day, the time when my aunt and uncle hurled themselves into the labor of getting dinner to the guests. In the world of the inn, each day passed in the same flow of time.
Going inside, I found Yōko just starting to eat a few onigiri—balls of rice in seaweed. She took out the cup I’d always used and set it down on the low table, then poured some tea into it, “Here you go,” she said, pushing the cup toward me. Her eyes were bright, and her face wore a wide, delighted smile. “Do you want one of these onigiri?”
“Hey, asshole! The girl’s about to sit down to a feast. You really want her to spoil her dinner with that crap?” Tsugumi was slumped back against the wall over in a corner of the room, her legs sticking straight out. She was leafing through a magazine, and she hadn’t even looked up when she spoke.
“That’s true, isn’t it? Well, I’ll bring home some cakes tonight, then, okay? That’s something to look forward to, right?” said Yōko.
“I take it you’ve been working at that place all along?”
“Yup. Oh, but we’re selling some new kinds of cake now! I’ll bring home some of the new ones tonight so you can try them.”
“Sounds great!” I said.
The windows were open, and guests returning to the inn after a swim in the ocean sauntered by just outside the screens, their laughter echoing cheerfully back and forth. By now the dinner hour had begun at all the inns, and the whole town was alive. The sky was still light, and the sound of the evening news was streaming from the TV. The fragrance of the sea breeze swished across the tatami and whirled through the room. Out in the hall, hurried footsteps skittered up and down, and groups of guests heading back to their rooms after a soak in the inn’s spas ambled by, filling the air around them with clouds of noise. Way off in the distance you could just make out the cries of seagulls over the water, and when you tilted your head up to look out the window, a sky so wildly crimson it was almost frightening glowed between the power lines. It was an evening exactly like all the others.
Even so, I was aware that nothing lasts forever.
We heard a man’s voice asking if Maria had arrived yet and then footsteps coming down the hall toward the room, and suddenly my uncle stuck his head in under the curtain that hung in the doorway. “Hey Maria, good to see you! Make yourself at home!” He gave me a smile and went out again.
Tsugumi stood up, padded over to the refrigerator, poured some wheat tea into the Mickey Mouse glass she’d gotten way back when as a giveaway at the liquor store, and gulped the liquid down. Then she plunked the empty glass down in the well-polished sink.
“A face like that, and the guy wants to start a pension. He sure knows how to make a nuisance of himself, let me tell you,” she said.
“He’s always dreamed of it,” said Yōko casually, lowering her ey
es a tad.
All this had such a solid existence now, but next summer there would be no trace of any of it. I knew this, but there was no way I could make myself feel the truth of it. No way to make it seem real. And I bet it didn’t seem real to them either.
Everyday life had never really made much of an impression on me before. I used to live here in this little fishing village. I would sleep and wake up, have meals. Sometimes I felt really great; other times I felt a little out of it. I watched TV, fell in love, went to classes at school, and at the end of every day I always came back here, to this same house. But when I let my thoughts wander back through the ordinariness of those cycles now, I find that somewhere along the way it has all acquired a touch of warmth—that I’ve been left with something silky and dry and warm, like clean sand.
Soaking up that gentle heat, a little tired from all the hustle and bustle of travel, I let myself savor an enticingly familiar sense of happiness.
Summer was coming. Yes, summer was about to begin.
A season that would come and go only once, and never return again. All of us understood that very well, and yet we would probably just pass our days the way we always had. And this made the ticking of time feel slightly more tense than in the old days, infused it with a hint of distress. We could all feel this as we sat there that evening, together. We could feel it so clearly that it made us sad, and yet at the same time we were extremely happy.
I was pulling things out of my bags after dinner when I heard Pooch start yipping excitedly. You could see the back garden if you leaned out the small window in my room. Peering down into the twilight, I saw Tsugumi untying Pooch and hooking his leash to his collar. She noticed me and looked up.