Then I spoke up again. “Tsugumi, what were you doing out there? Isn’t that kind of a strange place for you to be spending your time?”
It’s true that in the days when we played hide-and-seek, the space under the veranda had been one of her best hiding places. But then it goes without saying that this was hardly the sort of time to be playing hide-and-seek.
“Gimme a break, kid!” said Tsugumi, shaking into a fit of feverishly giddy laughter. “I saw you out the window! You bring Kyōichi back thinking that you’re gonna startle me out of my wits, and you’re prancing along with this gleeful look on your face, totally full of yourself . . . figured I might as well give you a taste of your own medicine . . .”
“Your mother sure is nice, isn’t she?” said Kyoichi. At first he had been worrying that his presence might make things awkward, and he had said that it might be best for him to leave, but my aunt and Tsugumi and I all struggled mightily to convince him not to go, and eventually he’d agreed to remain and have a cup of tea. “I mean, she didn’t yell at you at all.”
“Her love for her daughter is deeper than the sea,” said Tsugumi.
Liar, I thought. The only reason Aunt Masako remained so unperturbed was that she’d grown accustomed to having Tsugumi put her through all sorts of misery like this. I figured Kyōichi was bound to reach this conclusion on his own sooner or later, though, so I just kept sipping my tea in silence. I had also noticed that every time Kyōichi turned to looked at Tsugumi, his gaze was overflowing with sympathy, as if he were eyeing a kitten headed for the grave, and I didn’t want to rain on his parade. And though in a certain sense I was feeling just as cool and collected as my tone here suggests, Tsugumi appeared to be in such pain that even I got a bit concerned about her condition. There were dark circles under her eyes, her breath came quickly, and her lips were as white as they could be. Thin strands of drenched hair clung to her forehead, and her eyes and cheeks were so shiny they seemed to gleam.
Kyōichi stood up. “Well, I think I’ll head back now. Catch you two later. Quit playing these infantile games and stay in bed like you ought to, Tsugumi. You gotta hurry up and get well, hear me?”
“Hold on a second!” Tsugumi cried. She grabbed my arm with a hand so hot it was frightening. “Maria, don’t just let the scoundrel leave! Stop him!” she shouted, her voice hoarse.
I looked up at Kyōichi. “Sounds like she wants you to stay,” I said. “Could you stick around a little longer?”
“What is it?” Kyōichi said, coming back over near her pillow.
“Won’t you tell me a story?” Tsugumi pleaded. “Ever since I was a little girl I’ve never been able to fall asleep unless someone tells me a new story.”
Liar, I thought once more. But at the same time I was really impressed by the words “a new story.” They sounded sweet, had a nice kind of tang.
“Let’s see . . . a story. All right then, if it will help you settle down and go to sleep, I’ll tell you ‘The Story of the Towel,’” said Kyōichi.
“The towel?” I said. Tsugumi looked as nonplussed as I was.
“When I was a kid,” Kyōichi continued, “I had this problem with my heart. So we were waiting until I got a little older, you know, until my body became strong enough that they could operate. Of course this is all old news, I’ve had the operation now and I’m as healthy as I can be, and I hardly ever think of those days. But when something really awful happens, when I run into some kind of trouble, when I’m really hurting bad, I always remember the towel . . . Back in those days I was completely bedridden; I was a kid who never got up. There was no guarantee that the operation would even help, but still I had to keep on waiting. Most of the time it was okay waiting for something like that, for something that couldn’t even be counted on to help, but whenever I had an attack . . . man, let me tell you, I got so depressed and worried that it couldn’t have been any worse. It was such torture I didn’t know what to do.”
The sighing of the rain seemed to fade. We both concentrated intently on the utterly unexpected story Kyōichi was telling. He was speaking casually but very clearly. His voice filled the quiet room.
“Every time I had an attack I would force myself to lie there and not think of anything. If I closed my eyes my mind would start going through all kinds of stuff that I really didn’t want to think about, and I hated being in the dark, so I’d keep my eyes open the whole time. I would just lie there waiting for the pain to pass. You know how people say that if you meet up with a bear you should lie there acting like you’re dead? Well I think I can understand how people in that situation feel, because it’s probably the same way I felt then. It was awful, really awful. So anyway, I had this one-of-a-kind pillowcase that was made out of this fancy towel that my grandmother gave my mother when she got married to my father. The towel had been made overseas somewhere. It was very important to my mother and she’d used it for ages, and then when the edges started coming unraveled she sewed it into a pillowcase for me. It had a really cool design—all these multicolored flags from foreign countries lined up against a deep blue background. The mix of colors was very sharp, lots of contrast, and I would just keep staring at it and staring at it as I lay there, from that lying-down angle. That’s how I would pass my time . . . At the time I didn’t really think much about it, but later on—right before I had the operation, for example, and after the operation, when things were really hard, and even now, every time I run into some kind of problem—at times like that the design of that towel always catapults into my mind. The thing has been gone for ages and ages, but I see it so clearly it actually seems to be there in front of me, right in front of my eyes. It’s as if I could just reach out and grab it. And it’s strange—as soon as I see that design I start feeling like I’m in control again. I’ve decided that I should think of it as a kind of faith. Pretty interesting story in its way, don’t you think? The end.”
“Wow . . .”I said.
His unruffled calm, the maturity you sensed in his behavior, the aura of properness about him that was like a neatly drawn line, and especially those eyes—no doubt living through such a childhood was what had made him turn out this way. And though the way in which Tsugumi reflected her experience was the exact opposite of this, she too had walked a similar, solitary path. Yes, it was a work of nature, and there wasn’t anything that could be done about it, but still it hurt to think of Tsugumi’s heart beating away in that broken body. Her spirit had strength like the raging of a fire that could reach out into the depths of space, burning deeper than anyone’s, but her body kept it locked in extreme confinement. Maybe this pointless energy of hers had led her to sense, at a glance, what it was that shone in Kyōichi’s eyes?
Tsugumi looked at Kyōichi. “You’d gaze at those flags and think about all those faraway countries? And about the place you would go after you died?” she asked. It was the kind of question that makes your heart leap.
“All the time,” said Kyōichi.
“And now you’ve managed to change yourself into the kind of person who can go anywhere. Man, I wish I were like that,” Tsugumi said.
“Yeah, you’ve gotta be like that, too . . . No, I take that back,” Kyōichi said quietly. “Being able to go anywhere isn’t the point. Hey, it’s nice here, too. You can wander around in your sandals, wander around in your bathing suit, and you’ve got the mountains and the ocean. You’ve got a sturdy spirit and you’ve got guts—even if you were to end up spending your entire life here you’d get to see more than all these bozos who make trips around the world. That’s the sort of feeling I get from you.”
“Be nice if that were true.” Tsugumi smiled. There was a sparkle in her eyes, and her cheeks were flushed. She parted her lips slightly in a quick grin, displaying her white teeth. It seemed her white comforter might catch the faintly glossy red of her cheeks, toss back the faintest of reflections. That day it didn’t take much to make me cry, and now I found myself looking down, blinking. Just then Tsugumi turned her gaz
e directly on Kyōichi.
“I’m in love with you, babe,” she said.
Swimming with My Father
The sight of Tsugumi wandering along the beach with Kyōichi—this new amour of hers—created something of a stir in town. They stood out so much it was weird, it really was. You wouldn’t think we’d see anything odd in this combination of “Tsugumi + Male,” since we had been accustomed to seeing it for a very long time already, but somehow Tsugumi and Kyōichi always had this aura about them as they walked around our small town—like sweethearts rambling aimlessly through some distant land, they seemed to give off a halo of delicate, uncertain light. They were always on the beach, and they always had the dogs with them. The faraway sparkle in their eyes seemed like it must make everyone who glimpsed it think back on something precious, call up the pleasant ache of a reviving memory, like a dream dreamt long ago.
Back at home she still tormented her family, kicked Pooch’s food around, refused to apologize, and turned up stretched out here or there or somewhere else with her stomach showing, snoring her nose off. When she was with Kyōichi, on the other hand, she shone with a look of such utter happiness that you got the feeling she must have sped up the pace of her life somehow, that she was fighting to cram more life into each passing moment. Looking at her you felt a touch of unease—a feeling that seemed to flicker painfully through the depths of your chest, the way light glimmers through a hole in a cloud.
Tsugumi’s style of living always called up this fear.
Her emotions seemed to yank her body this way and that; they appeared to be whittling away at her life so quickly it was dizzying; they were dazzling.
“Hey, Mar-i-a-a!” My father stuck his hand out the window of the bus and waved to me, hollering in a voice so loud that I could only sit there stunned, my mouth agape, blushing. I stood up and went over to the bus stop. My eyes were trained on the giant bus as it slowly turned in from the highway and headed toward me, groaning loudly and sending out ripples of heat. The summer light made the scene look very solemn. And then the door opened and my father emerged in a stream of colorful tourists.
My mother hadn’t come. She’d said on the phone that going to the shore and seeing the same summer ocean as always would make her feel so nostalgic and sad that she was bound to start crying, and that was something she’d rather not have to go through. I figured she was planning to slip down very quietly at the beginning of autumn and see the Yamamoto Inn through its final days, when the preparations for moving got under way. Anyway, my dad absolutely refused to give up, saying that he would go alone if he had to. His head filled with dreams of A Vacation with My Grown-up Daughter, he had come to spend the night. I found it kind of funny how everything had changed so much. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that he’d been coming on the weekends to visit my mother and me. Yes . . . every summer since I was a child I’d relished the pleasure of sitting on the thoroughly baked concrete steps in my hat and my sandals, feeling the hot sun beating down on my skin as I waited for my father’s bus to arrive. He always came on the bus because boats made him seasick. So I would sit there patiently, looking forward to the soft scene that would play itself out between us, the reunion of a daughter and a father who lived apart. Most of the time my mother couldn’t get away from the inn, so I’d make my way to the bus stop through the daytime sun all alone. I’d scan the windows of each giant bus as it arrived, searching for my father’s face.
I went through the same routine in autumn and winter and spring, but for some reason when I think back on those days now it seems as if it was always summer. When my father stepped down from the bus his face would shine with a powerful smile, as if he had been holding in something unbearable, and the sunlight was always so bright you could hardly stand to look.
My father had put on sunglasses in an attempt to make himself look young, and seeing him like that gave me a shock, sent me reeling from my childhood back into my nineteen-year-old self. I stood up. It was so sweltering out that we seemed to have landed in some sort of dream, a world where everything was dizzily whirling. I felt unable to speak.
“Ah, smell that sea breeze!” sighed my father, the hair on his forehead swishing around lightly in the wind.
“Welcome back!” I said.
“Turned into a local again, I see. Got a tan and everything!”
“How’s Mom?”
“She decided to stay away, just like she said, so she’s just relaxing at home. Said to give you her love.”
“Yeah, I figured she wouldn’t come. Aunt Masako said she didn’t expect her either. God, it’s been a while since I came to meet you here, hasn’t it?”
“It sure has,” said my father quietly, as if to himself.
“What do you want to do? Should we go drop off your luggage first? You can say hello to Aunt Masako and everyone, and then . . . what do you feel like doing? You want to take the car and drive somewhere?”
“Nope, I’m going swimming!” said my father. His voice sounded very sharp and excited, as if he had been waiting to say this for a long time. “More than anything else, I came here to swim.”
My father didn’t used to swim.
It was as if he refused to let The Ocean enter at all into the time he spent together with my mother and me, our time as a family. As if he were afraid that the small periods of relaxation we shared would get lost in the languid, light-filled bustle of the midsummer beach. My mother was my father’s lover, the mistress of a married man, but she wasn’t at all afraid of being in the public eye, and so in the evenings when her work in the kitchen came to a temporary halt she would fix up her hair and change her clothes and come get me, and then she and my father and I would set out on a cheerful walk. The time we spent walking together like this—two parents and their daughter strolling along a shore that seemed to rise to meet the twilight—those moments were the happiest we knew. Silhouettes of dragonflies would dance against a deep purple-blue sky while I licked away at the Popsicle they had bought me. Usually the wind had died down by then, and the hot air that lingered on the beach hung close around us, smelling of the tide. The Popsicle always tasted too weak to hold on to—as if the flavor was already spiraling away into the past. My mother’s face looked white and blurry, and in the light of the few trails of clouds that still glimmered way off in the west I found her extremely beautiful, found the line of her profile soft and gentle. When my father walked alongside my mother, the shoulders that moved in line with hers seemed so solidly real that I found it hard to believe he had only just arrived from Tokyo.
The sand settled into patterns like waves in the tracks of the wind, and the only sound that echoed across the empty beach was the almost too loud pounding of the waves.
You feel really lonely when someone keeps coming and going all the time. And I had a hunch that somehow the loneliness I suffered in my father’s absence contained a vague shadow of death.
My father was always there on the weekends, but when I awoke on Monday mornings he’d be gone, leaving no trace that he’d even been there at all. And as young as I was, the thought of leaving my futon then really frightened me. I’d do what I could to put off asking my mother if he’d gone, having my father’s absence become a positive fact. But just as I began slipping back into a terrible, halfhearted, lonely sleep, my mother would strip off my covers.
“Rise and shine! You’ll be late for your exercises!” she’d say, smiling.
The dazzling brilliance of that smile called up our ordinary lives, the days we passed without my father. A feeling of relief would surge over me.
“Is Dad gone?” I’d ask in a voice fuzzy with sleep, just to make sure.
My mother would smile a little sadly before she answered.
“He left for Tokyo on the first bus this morning.”
I’d lie there for a while gazing through the screen at the morning outside, my eyes still sleepy, thinking about my father. How I went to meet his bus . . . the artless smile on his face as he wrapped his
big hand around mine, making no move to let go even when I told him it was too hot to hold hands . . . the three of us walking together in the evening.
Yōko would always come to get me right around then, and we would stride out into the still-cool morning and head for the park, on our way to join the other kids in town in the daily exercise program run by the radio station.
As I watched my father gradually vanish into the distant waves, I found myself suddenly recalling the mood of those mornings. The feeling was so clear it was like experiencing it all over again.
As soon as we’d arrived at the beach and he’d changed into his swimsuit, my unable-to-wait-a-second-longer father yelled that he was going in ahead of me and dashed off toward the edge of the water. I noticed that starting from his elbows, his arms and hands were shaped just like mine—the resemblance was so striking that it gave me kind of a shock. No mistaking it, I thought, as I continued smearing myself with sunscreen, that man really is my father.
The sun was high and brilliant, beating down with such ferocity that it bleached everything on the shore, turning it all vividly white. The sea was so calm you would almost think it was a lake, hardly a wave out there. Raising his voice in childish shrieks, yelling, It’s so cold! Man, is it cold! my father slowly disappeared into the water. He was heading out beyond the breakers. You got the impression that he was being dragged out by the water, rather than moving of his own accord. The expanse of blue was so infinitely vast that the scenery had no problem at all absorbing a person or two. I got up and sprinted into the ocean, chasing my father. I’m in love with the moment when the water switches from being so cold you want to leap up into the air to something that feels just right against your skin. Looking up, I saw the mountains that encircle the sea flashing their shimmering green out over the water, soaring up against a blue background of sky. All this greenery so close to the shore looked unbelievably thick and clear.