Asleep

  Even then my brother must have had that certain something that makes a man popular with women. He didn't even blush when our lovely older cousin teased him like this. He wasn't the slightest bit uncomfortable.

  “It's true, isn't it. No hassle involved—nice and easy,” he said.

  “And I bet our parents would be thrilled, too.”

  “It'd be fun if we could live in the same house as you,” I said.

  Mari nodded, smiling slightly.

  “But a lot of things are going to happen from now on,” my brother said.

  He sounded almost like he was talking to himself. I still find it strange. Why was it that even then, when he was still just a boy, my brother had such a profound if sketchy understanding of so much of life? Why did you get the impression that he already knew all about that mode of living where you're always making plans, always moving ahead, moving ahead, never settling down for good in any one place?

  The three of us walked on and on along the bank of the river. The roar of the water crashed through the air with such thunderous force that it somehow ended up seeming very quiet. Even so we were speaking quite loudly, and every little nothing we said seemed strangely pregnant with meaning.

  I often remember that evening, the river flowing on into the distance.

  And now a year had passed since my brother died.

  It really did snow a lot that winter. Maybe that explains why I hardly ever went out at night, but just stayed holed up inside my room. I was in college, but it had been decided that I'd study abroad the next semester, and that meant I didn't have to take any makeup exams. Which is to say that my situation ought to have been very pleasant and carefree, but for no particular reason I'd gone and turned down every invitation I'd received to go skiing or to travel around spa-hopping. I guess maybe I'd gotten to like the feeling of being snowed in—maybe that explains it. All the plain old houses lining the plain old streets were dusted with white, so that it seemed like something out of science fiction. It was great. You felt like everything had come to a halt, like you were stuck in some sort of snowdrift where what had piled up wasn't snow but time.

  It was snowing again that night. The snow kept streaming down outside, fast and thick, deepening. My parents had already gone to bed, and our cat was asleep—you couldn't hear a single living sound anywhere in the house. It was so quiet that I could even distinguish the low moan of the refrigerator out in the kitchen, and the rumble of cars driving along the main street.

  I was reading a book, concentrating intently, so I didn't notice what was happening for quite some time. Then suddenly I glanced up, startled by the rapping I heard, and saw a white hand at the window, beating very precisely on the glass. The sight was so chilling it made the air in the room start to quake and quiver the way it does when you're listening to a ghost story. I was so shocked that I just sat there, not saying a word, staring at the window.

  “Shibami! Hey!”

  Mari's familiar voice and a string of giggles sounded faintly outside the window, muffled by the glass. I went over to the window and slid it open. Looking out, I saw a thoroughly snow-plastered Mari gazing up at me with a big smile on her face.

  “God, you startled me,” I said.

  But even as I spoke I was having trouble accepting that Mari was there, suddenly there in front of me—I felt like I was dreaming. She'd been living with us until about three months earlier.

  “Well then, I'll startle you even more.”

  She pointed to her feet. I focused my eyes on the dim rectangle of light that the window cast into the darkness, and realized that Mari wasn't wearing any shoes. I shrieked. All the time I was standing there gusts of snowy wind had been whirling around me into the room.

  “Hurry inside. Go around to the front door,” I said.

  Mari nodded and walked off toward the front garden.

  “What on earth have you been doing?” I asked her as soon as I'd given her a towel, and was setting the heater in the room on high. She'd been drenched when she stepped through the door, and her hands were so cold they seemed like they might be turning into ice.

  Mari didn't say a word about how cold it was outside or about how warm it was inside or anything like that. She just grinned with her brilliant red cheeks and said, “Oh, nothing much.”

  She peeled off her wet socks and then sat down and put her bare feet up against the heater. Our cat slipped in through the crack between the door and the doorframe and came over and rubbed up against her. He'd always liked Mari. She started petting him, and I watched her, and gradually I began to understand. Mari was more or less a caged bird: she couldn't step out the front door of her house without first reporting to her parents. No doubt she'd been sitting by the window, gazing out at the snow, and suddenly she'd felt this urge to go outside, and since she didn't want to have to ask her parents for permission, she had just slipped out through the window. Luckily her room was on the first floor. . . .

  Mari stood up. “You want some coffee?” she asked.

  When I nodded she opened the door and strode off into the kitchen. The cat rolled himself up into a ball in the place Mari had been sitting, making it seem less and less obvious that she'd actually been there. As a matter of fact it had always been like that with Mari, even when she was living with us. She'd march through the house almost exactly the way a cat does, with that same air of belonging, and if you left her alone she'd just sit there staring off into space, not saying a word, or else go to sleep. You hardly even realized she was there. She seemed to be in the process of fading away.

  That's not the way it used to be.

  Mondays are English conversation, Tuesdays are swimming, Wednesdays she studies the tea ceremony, Thursdays she studies ikebana . . . that's the sort of feeling she had about her. She was the sort of person who was always doing something, and who did it all beautifully. In those days her very presence suffused a room with brightness and vigor. She wasn't an extraordinary beauty, but she had a really nice body, and her legs were long. Her features were all very compact and her face was tidily arranged, so the impression you got, looking at her, was one of cleanliness and purity. Whereas now she just seemed subdued. And I didn't think this was because she'd stopped using mascara and rouge, or because she was now twenty-five years old.

  Mari had stopped responding to the outside world, she'd pulled the plug on the whole system, she was taking a break—I felt convinced of this. Because, as she saw things right now, life was nothing but pain.

  “Here you go. One coffee with milk.” Smiling, Mari held out a cup, rousing me from my thoughts.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She held a cup of strong black coffee in her hand, just like old times.

  She kept grinning.

  “Are you planning to stay over tonight?” I asked.

  We'd left Mari's room in pretty much the same condition it had been in when she was living with us, and used it as a guest room. Though she hadn't read very many books during that period, and she hardly ever went out, and she hadn't listened to much music—basically all she did was go to sleep and then get up again, like a guest at some hotel who wasn't even having meals.

  Mari shook her head. “No, I'll go back home. It'd only cause a big stir if my parents found out, so I'll go back before they do. I just had this urge to talk to someone, you know, and I figured you'd probably still be awake.”

  “Then I'll lend you some shoes before you head back,” I said. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “Nothing, really. Actually I feel better already,” Mari said.

  Since it was late we both kept our voices down. As a result you almost had the feeling you could hear the snow whirling down outside. Snowflakes skittered whitely through the darkness on the far side of the fogged-up window. Everything seemed to gleam with a pale light.

  “This sure is some snow,” I said.

  “Yeah, I bet it'll pile up tonight.”

  Mari's tone of voice made it sound like none of it re
ally mattered much to her. For someone who'd just come walking barefoot over asphalt through the pitch black, she seemed pretty indifferent to the cold. I looked at her profile, her long hair, her small round lips. She was flipping disinterestedly through some new magazine.

  I walked her as far as the front gate when she left.

  The snow really was incredible—it hopped around chaotically right in front of your eyes, like it was dancing. The street just in front of our house was lost in the darkness and the snow. You could hardly even make it out.

  “Hey,” Mari said, laughing. “Wouldn't it be chilling if you got a notice tomorrow morning saying that I'd died sometime late tonight? Don't you think maybe I'm really a ghost?”

  “Don't even say stuff like that! I'll be up all night, you know, all alone!”

  I'd practically shouted this. But it was true, I'd been thinking all along that this was an awfully spooky situation—almost like a haunting.

  A barefoot cousin who bangs on the window late one snowy night.

  “Which reminds me, I had a dream about Yoshihiro yesterday afternoon,” Mari said. “It was the first time I'd dreamt about him in ages.”

  She'd taken a pair of bright red gloves out of her pocket, and as she spoke she slipped her hands into them, clomping her feet around in the much-too-big shoes I'd lent her. Her clear voice glittered in the night; the air was so cold it felt like pinpricks.

  “It's been months since I dreamt of him, seriously. In the dream I only saw his back, and he was wearing that jacket—the black one. I was walking down some street when I noticed that there was a back I sort of recognized, up ahead of me, in the middle of a crowd of people. So I'm thinking, Who can that be? Who on earth can that be? And then I decide to go find out, right, so I chase after him. And as I get closer and closer I start feeling so confused and so nervous that my chest starts to ache. I'm really upset. That back seems to be so precious to me. I don't exactly understand why, somehow it just seems precious to me. So precious that I want to hurl myself onto it and hold it tight and squeeze it to a pulp. And then all of a sudden, just as I'm about to lay my hand on his shoulder, I remember his name. ‘Yoshihiro!’ I actually called his name. And that woke me up. I was sleeping on the sofa in the living room, you know, and I shouted so loudly that my mother came in from one of the rooms in the back of the house and asked if I'd called. I told her I'd had a really scary dream. And it's true, isn't it? It really is scary.”

  Having said this, she waved and called good-bye, smiling.

  And then she vanished into the snow.

  Something about my brother's tone of voice when he called us up long-distance to tell us that he'd be returning immediately to Japan told me that things were over between him and Sarah. I didn't know what had happened. I just had a feeling that things were over.

  “There's nothing keeping me anymore. I'm coming home,” he said.

  “You want me to come meet you at the airport?” I asked.

  I had the idea it might be very relaxing to cut school and go to Narita.

  “Sure, if you've got nothing else to do. I'll treat you to lunch.”

  “You don't have to do that. My schedule's open. Is there anyone you want me to ask along? How about those girls who came to see you off?”

  My brother's voice reached me through static.

  “Actually . . . could you ask Mari?”

  Mari.

  For a moment I wasn't able to connect the name my brother had said with the person—our cousin, Mari. I struggled to think who he could mean.

  “Mari? Why her?”

  “She's sent me some letters, you know, and then six months ago she came to Boston. She and Sarah and I had dinner together. Just give her a call, okay?”

  I realized then that my brother was starting to fall for Mari. He wasn't even trying to hide it. He'd just come right out and given me her name.

  In fact there had been something between them ever since they were small, something that pulled them together even when they were paying no attention to each other at all. Something that would probably make them fall in love sooner or later. As they got older, each time they fell in love with someone else, that something became increasingly concentrated.

  I called Mari and asked if she wanted to go to Narita. She said she'd go. She explained that she'd stopped by Boston on her way back to Japan when she made a trip to New York.

  “We had dinner one night. The three of us, him and Sarah and me. Sarah had really changed. She was terribly thin, and very adult, and she didn't say very much. She didn't smile at all. Yoshihiro was just like he always is, just as cheery as always, and you had the feeling that he just went on being the same Yoshihiro no matter whether he was in Japan or Boston. You felt that in the way he acted toward Sarah, too. But Sarah looked completely worn out. Just Sarah. I'm not sure why. I just know that I had the feeling that things were over between them. . . . It bothered me, so I wrote Yoshihiro a letter when I got back to Japan. But the letter I got in reply was just a regular letter. Sarah's doing very well, and she's a really nice girl, and I sure do miss Japan, and I'm dying for a taste of cod roe, that kind of thing. I remember thinking, God, Yoshihiro's a really great guy. And that's really how I felt. He'd never say anything bad about Sarah to me, the girl who'd sat there surrounded by Boston's clear night air, staring right at him, the girl who'd started liking him. I'd gotten sort of drunk on all that traveling, but when I got that letter I thought about things again, and I felt like some of the dirt I'd had inside me had been washed away, just a little, and so I sent him a postcard apologizing. He really is a good guy.”

  When the time came I got my boyfriend to take us in his car.

  We picked up Mari and headed for the airport.

  It was a beautiful, slightly chilly autumn day. The kind of afternoon when invisible rays of sun stream down through the glass into the airport lobby. The plane arrived a little late, and there was an announcement saying that it had landed, and then finally, little by little, the passengers began to emerge.

  Mari's long hair was tugged back into a ponytail, and she had the band wound extremely tightly. She acted so jittery you got the feeling she must be just as taut inside. She looked like her heart must be close to bursting.

  “Mari . . . what's wrong?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew,” she said.

  A blue sweater and a tight beige skirt. The white of the lobby's floor set the colors off marvelously. She stood by herself, like the star of some movie, her pretty, tidily arranged face turned so that I saw it in profile, and she was staring so fixedly at the monitor that she almost seemed to be ripping into it with her eyes. Looking at her, you had the feeling that she existed in some way more real than any of the other people in the crowds waiting for the plane—that she more thoroughly filled the space she occupied. My brother didn't come out. Little scenes began playing themselves out all around us. People coming back together. And then the line of emerging passengers dribbled away into nothing. I took my boyfriend's hand in mine. “He sure is taking his time,” I said. But to tell the truth I wasn't looking at the monitor or even at the line—I was watching Mari. I was staring at her, at that figure standing there, so lovely it seemed she might shatter everything. Then my brother finally emerged, pushing a big trunk, looking like he'd matured a whole lot, and Mari started moving toward him through the crowds, walking fast, strangely fast, as if she were walking through a dream. Yoshihiro's face looked a little more tired than it had the day we'd come to see him off. Little by little she drew closer to him.

  “Hey!” Yoshihiro spotted us all and waved.

  Then he looked straight at Mari. “Mari. It's been a while.”

  She smiled faintly. “Welcome back, Yoshihiro,” she said.

  Her voice merged with the hustle and bustle of the lobby. It sounded very low when it reached my ears, and more adult than I'd ever known it.

  “Are they going out or something?” asked my boyfriend.

  He didn't know anything
about the two of them, and I figured that since things seemed to be heading in that direction anyway, I might as well just say they were. So I nodded. Mari was telling my brother that there were all kinds of things she'd been wanting to talk over with him. I went on watching her as she spoke. My brother nodded. Then he put his hand around her shoulder.

  “Did Mari come by last night, fairly late?”

  We were sitting at the breakfast table when my mother said this.

  “Yes. How'd you know?” I replied, surprised.

  “I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and she was in the kitchen making coffee, doing it in the pitch dark. I was still half asleep, you know, feeling a little vague, and it totally slipped my mind that she isn't living with us anymore. So I just said, ‘My goodness, are you still up?’ And then she said that she was and grinned at me, so I didn't think anything of it, and I just went back to our room and fell asleep again. So it wasn't a dream, then?”

  “Nope,” I said. “She was here. She just showed up all of a sudden.”

  Sunlight poured down out of the cloudless sky and smacked onto the thick accumulation of snow, making the space beyond the window so dazzling that it looked utterly new and clean. A peculiar feeling came over me as I gazed into that light, a feeling like I wanted to get some more sleep, like I was irritated about something. The television was bawling out the morning news, flooding the room with energy. My mother had sent my father off to work ages ago, and we were having a late breakfast together.

  “Maybe things aren't going too well in her other house?” my mother said.

  “Her other house? Mom, that ‘other house’ is her real house. She actually has a mother and father of her own, you know, real parents.”

  I laughed. I knew what my mother meant.

  “I really got to like her while she was living with us,” she said.

  My mother never even mentioned my brother anymore. Instead she'd spent the last year taking special care of Mari, trying to distract herself that way. Sometimes I'd find myself wondering what all this must seem like to her, what sort of terrible fantasy it must feel like. Giving birth to a son like him, bringing him up, then losing him. I just couldn't imagine it at all. “Mmhm,” I said, nodding, and went on nibbling at my bread. Mari had spent her whole time in our house with my mother, helping out with the housework and carrying around shopping bags and doing all sorts of stuff like that. There wasn't much else for her to do, and it was probably pretty effective in helping her to keep her spirits up. Yet as much as she pitched in like one of the family, she still always gave a little smile at dinner and said how delicious everything was, and whenever she and one of us happened to want a bath at the same time, she'd always say very politely that she'd wait until later, and gesture for you to go first, displaying the palm of her hand. She'd been very carefully brought up, and her manners impressed me very much. But she wasn't really living in our house, she wasn't really alive. She just stayed there in the same space with us, a pleasant presence, like a resident ghost. She existed like a mirage.