A Wild Sheep Chase

  I guess.

  I’ve never been good at writing letters. Everything comes out backwards. I use exactly the wrong words. If that isn’t bad enough, writing letters makes me more confused. And because I have no sense of humor, I get all discouraged with myself.

  Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They’ve got plenty of life to lead inside their own context. This, of course, is only my opinion. Maybe it’s impossible to live out a life in context.

  It’s terribly cold now and my hands are numb. It’s like they aren’t my own hands. My brains, they aren’t like my own brains either. Right now it’s snowing. Snow like flakes of someone else’s brains. And it’ll pile up deeper and deeper like someone else’s brains too. (What is this bullshit all about anyway?)

  Other than the cold, though, I’m doing fine. How about you? I won’t tell you my address, but don’t take it personally. It’s not like I’m trying to hide anything from you. I want you to know that. This is, you see, a delicate question for me. It’s just this feeling I’ve got that, if I told you my address, in that instant something inside me would change. I can’t put it very well.

  It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can’t say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well. It’s got to be an inborn fault.

  Naturally everyone’s got faults.

  My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It’s like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I’ve got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that’s not the question, is it?

  In any case, I’ve decided I’m not giving you my address. I’m sure things’ll be better that way. For me and for you.

  Probably we’d have been better off born in nineteenth-century Russia. I’d have been Prince So-and-so and you Count Such-and-such. We’d go hunting together, fight, be rivals in love, have our metaphysical complaints, drink beer watching the sunset from the shores of the Black Sea. In our later years, the two of us would be implicated in the Something-or-other Rebellion and exiled to Siberia, where we’d die. Brilliant, don’t you think? Me, if I’d been born in the nineteenth century, I’m sure I could have written better novels. Maybe not your Dostoyevsky, but a known second-rate novelist. And what would you have been doing? Maybe you’d only have been Count Such-and-such straight through. That wouldn’t be so bad, just being Count Such-and-such. That’d be nice and nineteenth century.

  But well, enough of this. To return to the twentieth century.

  Let me tell you about the towns I’ve seen.

  Not the town where I was born, but different other towns.

  There really are a lot of different other towns in the world. Each with its own specific features, incomprehensible things that attract me. Which is why I’ve passed through my share of towns these past few years.

  Wherever I end up, I just get off at, and there’s a small rotary where a map of the town is posted and a street of shops. That much is the same everywhere. Even the dogs look the same. First thing I do is a quick once-around the place before heading to a real estate agent to see about cheap room and board. Sure I’m an outsider and nobody in a small town will trust me right off, but as you know I can be decent enough if I put half a mind to it. Give me fifteen minutes, and I can generally get on good terms with most people. That much accomplished, I’ve found out where I can fit in and all sorts of information about the town.

  Next, I look for work. This also begins with getting on good terms with a lot of different people. I’m sure this’d be a comedown for someone like you (and believe me, I’ve seen enough comedowns to last me) because you know you’re only going to stick around for four months anyway. But there’s nothing hard about getting on good terms with people. You find the local watering hole where all the kids hang out (every town has one—it’s like the town navel), you become a regular customer, meet people, get an introduction for some work. Of course, you come up with some likely name and life story. So that by now I’ve got a string of names and identities like you wouldn’t believe. At times I forget what I was like originally.

  In the work department, I’ve done all kinds of jobs. Most have been boring, but still I enjoy the work. Most often it’s been at a gasoline station. Next is tending some rinky-dink bar. I’ve minded shop at bookstores, even worked at a radio station. I’ve hired out as a day laborer. Been a cosmetics salesman. I had quite a reputation as a salesman, let me tell you. And I’ve slept with my share of women. Sleeping with women each time with a different name and identity isn’t half bad.

  You get the picture, in all its variations.

  So now I’m twenty-nine, turning thirty in another nine months.

  I still don’t know whether I’m cut out for this kind of life or not. I don’t know if there’s something universal about wanting to be a drifter. But as somebody once wrote somewhere, you need one of three things for a long life of wandering—a religious temperament, or an artistic temperament, or a psychic temperament. If you have one but only on the short side, an extended drifter’s existence is out of the question. In my case, I can’t see myself with any of them. In a pinch, I might say … no, better not.

  Otherwise, I might end up opening the wrong door some day, only to find I can’t back out. Whatever, if the door’s been opened, I better make a go of it. I mean I can’t keep buying my kicks for the rest of my life, can I?

  That’s about the size of it.

  Like I said at the beginning (or did I?), when I think of you, I get a little uneasy. Because you remind me of when I was a comparatively regular guy.

  Your friend,

  The Rat

  P.S.: I enclose a novel I wrote. It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, so do whatever you want with it. I’m sending this special delivery to make sure it reaches you by December 24. Hope it gets there on time.

  Anyway, Happy Birthday.

  And by the way, Merry Christmas.

  The Rat’s package was shoved all crumpled up into my apartment mailbox on December 29. Attached was a forwarding slip. It had been sent to my previous address. There’d been no way to tell him I’d moved.

  Four pages of pale-green stationery packed solid with writing. I read the letter through three times before I brought out the envelope to check the blurred postmark. It was a place I’d never heard of. I got the atlas down from my bookshelf and looked the place up.

  The Rat’s words had reached me from a small town on the northern tip of Honshu, smack in the middle of Aomori Prefecture. According to my book of train schedules, about an hour from the city of Aomori. Five trains stopped every day, two in the morning, one at noon, two in the evening.

  I’d been to Aomori several times in December. Frigid. The traffic signals freeze.

  I showed the letter to my wife, wife at the time, that is. All she could say was “poor guy.” What she probably meant was you poor guys. Hell, it makes no difference now.

  I tossed the novel, around two hundred pages, into my desk drawer without bothering to read the title. I don’t know why, I just didn’t feel like reading it. The letter was enough.

  I pulled a chair up in front of the heater and smoked three cigarettes.

  The Rat’s next letter came in May the following year.

  The Rat’s Second Letter

  (Postmarked May, This Year)

  Last letter I think maybe I was a little too chatty. Even so, I’ve forgotten completely what I said.

  I changed addresses again. Some place totally different from any place I’ve been up to now. It’s really quiet here. Maybe a little too quiet.

  In a sense, I’ve reached what is for me a final destination. I feel like I’ve come to where I was meant to come. What’s more, I feel I’ve had to swim against the current to get here. But that’s nothing I can pass judgment on.

&nbs
p; What lousy writing! It’s so vague you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Or maybe you think I’m reading too much meaning into my fate. If that’s the case, then the blame is all mine.

  I want you to know that the more I try to explain to you what’s going on with me, the more I start to digress like this. Still, I’m in good shape. Maybe better shape than I’ve ever been.

  Let me put things more concretely.

  Hereabouts, as I said earlier, it’s incredibly quiet. There’s nothing to do around here, so I read books (I’ve got enough books here to last me a decade) or listen to FM music or to records (got a whole lot here too). It’s been ten years since I listened to so much music. To my surprise, the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys are still going strong. Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

  Here, there is nothing my size. There’s nobody around here to make himself the measure of everything, to praise or condemn others for their size.

  Time keeps on flowing unchanged like a clear river too. Sometimes just being here I feel my slate has been cleaned, and I’m all the way back to my primal state. For example, if I catch sight of a car, it takes me a few seconds before I realize it’s a car. Sure, I must have some kind of fundamental awareness that it’s a car, but it doesn’t quite get across to my immediate waking consciousness. These experiences have been happening to me more and more lately. Maybe it’s because for a long time now I’ve been living by myself.

  The nearest town is an hour and a half away by car. No, it’s not even a town. Imagine your smallest town, then reduce it to a skeleton. I doubt you can picture it. I guess you’d have to call it a town anyway. You can buy clothes and groceries and gasoline. And if you get an urge to see other human beings, they’re there to be seen.

  All winter long the roads are frozen and almost no cars come through. Off the roads, it’s damp, so the ground is frosted over like sherbet. When there’s snowfall, it’s impossible to tell what’s road and what’s not. It’s a landscape that might as well be the end of the world.

  I came here at the beginning of March. Driving through the thick of it, chains on the tires of the jeep. Just like being exiled to Siberia. But now it’s May and the snow has all melted. From April on, the mountains were rumbling with snowslides. Ever hear a snowslide? Right after a snowslide comes the most perfect silence. Complete, total silence. You lose almost all sense of where you are. It’s that quiet.

  Sealed off in the mountains all this time, I haven’t slept with a woman for the last three months. Which isn’t bad, as far as that goes. All the same, if I stayed up here like this much longer, I know I’d lose all interest in people, and that’s not something I want to do. So I’m thinking that when the weather gets a little warmer I’ll stretch my legs and find myself a woman. I don’t want to brag, but finding women has never been much of a problem for me. So long as I don’t care—and staying here is living proof that I don’t care—then sex appeal’s easy, not a problem. It’s not a big deal for me to put the moves on. The problem is, I myself am not at ease with this ability of mine. That is to say, when things get to a certain point, I lose track of where I myself stop and where my sex appeal begins. It’s like where does Olivier stop and Othello begin? So midway when I find I’m not getting a return on all I’m putting into the situation, I toss everything overboard. Which makes problems for everyone all the way around. My whole life up to now has been nothing but one big repetition of this after another.

  But this time I can be grateful (really, I am) that I don’t have anything to throw overboard. A great feeling. The only thing I could possibly throw overboard would be myself. Not such a bad idea, throwing myself overboard. No, this is getting to sound pathetic. The idea itself, though, isn’t pathetic in the least. I’m not feeling sorry for myself. It only sounds that way when I write it down.

  Moan and groan.

  What the hell was I talking about?

  Women, that’s right.

  Each woman has a drawer marked “beautiful,” stuffed full of all sorts of meaningless junk. That’s my specialty. I pull out those pieces of junk one by one, dust them off, and find some kind of meaning in them. That’s all that sex appeal really is, I think. But so what? What’s that good for? There’s nowhere to go from there short of stopping being myself.

  So now I’m thinking about sex pure and simple. If I focus purely on sex, there’s no need to get all bent out of shape whether I’m feeling sorry for myself or not.

  It’s like drinking beer on the shores of the Black Sea.

  I just went back over what I’ve written so far. A few inconsistencies here and there, but pretty honest writing by my standards. All the more so because it’s boring.

  I don’t even seem to be writing this letter to you. Probably the postbox is as far as my thinking goes. But don’t get on my case for that. It’s an hour and a half by jeep to the nearest postbox.

  From here on, this letter is addressed to you.

  I’ve got two favors to ask of you. Neither is in the particularly urgent category, so whenever you get around to taking care of them is fine. I’d really appreciate it. Three months ago I probably couldn’t have brought myself to ask anything of you. But now I can. That’s progress, I guess.

  The first is a sort of sentimental request. Meaning it has to do with “the past.” Five years ago when I skipped town, I was in such a confused hurry, I forgot to say goodbye to a number of people. Specifically, you and J and this woman you don’t know. I guess I could probably see you again to tell you goodbye face-to-face, but with the other two I know I’ll never have the chance. So if you’re ever back there, can you say goodbye to them for me.

  I know it’s a selfish request. I ought to write them myself. But honestly, I’d rather have you go back there and see them for me. I know my feelings will get across better that way. I’m including her address and phone number separately. If she’s moved or married by now, then it’s okay, you don’t have to see her. Leave things at that. But if she’s still at the same address, give her my best.

  And be sure to give J my best too. Have a beer for me.

  That’s one.

  The other favor is maybe a bit odd.

  I’m enclosing a photo. A picture of sheep. I’d like you to put it somewhere, I don’t care where, but someplace people can see it. I realize I’m making this request out of the blue, but I’ve got no one else I can ask. I’ll let you have every last ounce of my sex appeal if you do me this favor. I can’t tell you the reason why, though. This photo is important to me. Sometime, at some later date, I’ll explain everything to you.

  I’m enclosing a check. Use it for whatever expenses you have. There’s no need for you to have to worry about money. I’m hard put even to find a way to use money here, and anyway at the moment it’s about the extent of what I can do for you.

  Make sure you don’t forget to have a beer for me.

  Your friend,

  The Rat

  I found the letter in my mailbox as I was leaving my apartment and read it at my desk at the office.

  The postmark was obliterated beyond legibility. I tore open the flap. Inside the envelope was a check for one hundred thousand yen, a piece of paper with a woman’s name and address, and a black-and-white photograph of sheep. The letter was written on the same pale-green stationery as before and the check was drawn on a bank in Sapporo. Which would mean that the Rat had crossed further north to Hokkaido.

  The bit about snowslides didn’t register with me, but it did strike me, as the Rat himself had said, as an honest letter. Besides, nobody sends a check for one hundred thousand yen as a joke. I opened my desk drawer and tossed in the whole lot, envelope and all.

  Maybe it was because my marriage was falling apart at the time, but spring that year had no joy for me. My wife hadn’t come home in four days. Her toothbrush by the washbasin was caked and crack
ed like a fossil. The milk in the refrigerator smelled sour, and the cat was always hungry. A lazy spring sun poured in on this state of affairs. At least sunlight is always free.

  A long, drawn-out dead-end street—probably just what she meant.

  The Song Is Over

  It was June before I returned to the town.

  I cooked up some reason to take three days off and took the Bullet Train early one Tuesday. A white short-sleeved sports shirt, green cotton pants worn through at the knees, white tennis shoes, no luggage. I’d even forgotten to shave after getting up that morning. It was the first time I’d put on tennis shoes in ages and the heels were worn through crooked. I’d been walking off-center without knowing it.

  Boarding a long-distance train without any luggage gave me a feeling of exhilaration. It was as if while out taking a leisurely stroll, I was suddenly like a dive-bomber caught in a space-time warp. In which there is nothing: no dentist’s appointments, no pending issues in desk drawers, no inextricably complicated human involvements, no favors demanded. I’d left that behind, temporarily. All I had with me were my tennis shoes with their misshapen rubber soles. They held fast to my feet like vague memories of another space-time. But that hardly mattered. Nothing that some canned beer and dried-out ham sandwiches couldn’t put out of mind.

  It had been four years. Four years ago, the return home had been to take care of paperwork related to the family registry when I got married. When I thought back on it, what a pointless trip! I thought it was all paperwork. The problem was that nobody else thought it. It comes down to the different ways in which minds work. What’s over for one person isn’t over for another. But the path splits in two different directions, and so you end up apart.

  From that point on there was no hometown for me. Nowhere to return to. What a relief! No one to want me, no one to want anything from me.