The only time I really felt vividly aware that Mari was a living creature during the time she stayed in our house was when she was crying. Even that didn't happen too often during the second half of her stay, but in the beginning, during the weeks after she first came to live with us, she'd always be sobbing to herself in the guest room when I went into the kitchen to make coffee at night. Her sobs slipped softly through the darkness and sank down into me, into my very being, the way the endless rains do in the monsoon season.
I often got pretty depressed myself back then. It felt like I was standing at the very edge of this world, that's the kind of mood I was in, the kind of emptiness I felt. And in those days, whenever Mari was all alone in the house, when everyone else had gone out, she'd slip into my brother's bedroom—his room, which we'd left just as it was when he died. I'd notice that she was gone when I came home, and I'd get a little worried and would go upstairs and catch sight of her through the half-open door, curled up in the middle of my brother's color-filled room, crying. She even cried in the bath. I'd head for the bathroom as soon as she'd finished, planning to take a bath myself, and when we passed in the hall, steam would still be rising from her skin; her face would be a brilliant red, you could tell she'd just climbed up out of the hot water . . . and yet her eyes would be red and puffy, and she'd be sniffling as she walked by. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that she left the water salty, I'd think as I lowered myself into the bathtub, and then I'd sit with the hot steam drifting up all around me, feeling so terrible that I could hardly stand it.
Could it actually be true that tears help people to heal?
Because Mari did eventually stop crying, and went back home.
“Ask her when we can talk next time, okay? I mean, if you should happen to run into her someplace,” my mother said.
“Okay, I'll tell her if I see her,” I replied, standing up.
I went to campus and handed in a few essays, then decided that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to clean out my locker every once in a while, and went over to the locker room. When I got there I found a note taped to the door. I took it down and read it. It was from a friend, a guy named Ken'ichi.
I can return the money.
Call me around lunchtime tomorrow.
Ken'ichi
Ken'ichi had borrowed money from practically every bozo in the world and then run off without returning a yen to anyone. He had stopped coming to campus a while ago. I'd lent him fifty thousand yen all together, but I hadn't actually expected to get any of it back. My brother was the same way, so I could sort of understand. Judging from the things I heard, it sounded like you'd come up with a pretty incredible sum if you added up all the money he'd managed to scrape together, and so everyone was raging, people were going crazy with anger. But even though there were occasions when I'd find myself staring at some piece of clothing I'd wanted, thinking, If only I had that fifty thousand yen right now, I just figured that was the way things went. He was a good guy, but that didn't mean anything when it came to money. And anyway, who could stand to be around someone who wasn't just a good guy, but even returned your money on time? I thought, shaking my head, wondering how he could possibly manage to pay me back. I folded up the note and put it in my pocket, then headed out into the still-snowy courtyard.
“Hey Shibami!” someone called.
I turned toward the voice, and saw that Tanaka was standing nearby.
“Hey, has Ken'ichi said anything about paying you back?” I asked.
I'd heard that Tanaka had lent money to Ken'ichi too.
“No, he hasn't! And it's no joke, either—I lent the jerk thirty thousand yen! I can't believe he'd use my money to run off to Hawaii with some girl!”
He sounded pretty seriously enraged.
“Hawaii?”
“Yeah. He's dating some high school kid.”
“Really? And has he come back?”
“You think I'd know?”
“Oh.”
How like him. I bet he's only planning to pay back the people he likes.
I nodded in agreement with myself as I thought this.
“Why? Have you heard from him?” asked Tanaka.
“Nope, not a word!” I said, shaking my head. I certainly didn't want to make things difficult for Ken'ichi now that he'd said he was going to pay me back.
“By the way, I've been seeing your cousin around a lot lately.”
“What do you mean? Around where?” I asked.
Mari and Tanaka were acquaintances.
“What do you mean, where? That bar by the intersection, the one that's open all night, and over at the side of the road, and at Denny's, you know, in this area basically, usually at night.”
“I see—at night.” I nodded. So the previous night's excursion hadn't just been a onetime affair. Yes . . . come to think of it, she'd lacked the vigor of someone out enjoying the night. She'd been wandering around in a trance, like a sleepwalker.
What did she see on that snow-blanketed night, as she stood gazing up at the light streaming from my window? Perhaps since it was so dark outdoors the interior of my room looked extremely bright, very white. Perhaps it looked like it would be really warm and cozy inside?
These thoughts made me feel a little sad.
I said good-bye to Tanaka, and we walked off in opposite directions.
On my way home from work I stopped by the place Tanaka had mentioned, that dark and rather somber bar, hoping to meet up with Mari. It was pretty dimly lit inside, too, but what got to you most was the gloominess of the neighborhood. The place is directly across from a cemetery.
Mari was there. She had her elbows propped up on her table.
I walked over, calling her name.
“Hey, what luck!” she said.
She pointed at a bag lying on the chair next to her.
I sat down across from her. “What do you mean? What's so lucky?”
“Your shoes are in there.”
“Are they?” I smiled.
“Yup.” Mari smiled back.
Then she held out the bag, a gorgeous one from the expensive department store Isetan. No doubt my scuffed-up shoes were sitting in a beautiful box inside that bag, carefully dried and rubbed until they were clean. It occurred to me that the elegant way Mari had of going about things like this was the lingering effect of certain habits she'd developed in a past that was now lost to her—that those habits were controlling her actions even now. I felt a kind of tenderness as I sat staring at her, the sort of feeling you might have looking at a ghost.
“So you'd been planning to stop by our house?” I asked.
“Yeah. But since the windows were dark, I decided to just go home.”
I ordered a gin and tonic, and told her what my mother had said.
“My mother says to come visit during the day. She says it's like she's dreaming you when you come at night, so it isn't any fun.”
Mari burst out laughing. “I knew it! She was still half asleep then, right? The stuff she was saying was kind of crazy, you know, so I just played along with her.”
“That's what she said,” I said.
For some time we sat and drank in silence. Mari was gazing out at the river of cars flowing past outside the window, her eyes open incredibly wide. Her expression didn't seem especially unhappy, and yet I recalled that when she was a girl she'd had a real aversion to the nighttime, and that she couldn't stand to stay up late: even when we stayed over at one or the other of our houses she'd always go to sleep once it passed ten o'clock. And as soon as I started thinking about these things—even though she was my cousin, a cousin I'd known for ages—she started to seem like someone new, like someone who'd changed in ways I knew absolutely nothing about.
“Did you know that Sarah was pregnant?” Mari said suddenly.
“Huh?” For a moment this was the only reply I could make. I was trying to pluck the words “Sarah” and “pregnant” out from among all the other words in my head, trying to put them together.
Finally I understood.
“No, I had no idea!” I said.
“Yeah, I guess I just remembered it myself, you know, all of a sudden. You know how in places like this where it's dark and there's music playing real loud, suddenly you find yourself sort of vaguely remembering all kinds of things that you'd forgotten? You know what I mean? And then there's that blue-eyed girl at the table over there, right? She's been there for quite a while. So I started wondering what Sarah's doing these days. . . .”
“Was it my brother's?”
“As a matter of fact, she said she didn't know.” Mari burst out laughing. “You see, Sarah had been having her cake and eating it, too, for quite some time. She was dating an old childhood pal from Boston at the same time she was dating Yoshihiro. It's like these stories you hear about guys who live out in the country having one girlfriend at college and one back at home, you know? Sarah was doing the same thing, except that hers was the international version. Apparently Yoshihiro only found out about all that after he'd arrived in Boston. And of course he was Japanese, right? So he knew that he'd eventually go back to Japan, and from what I can tell it seems like he drew back from her on his own. But Sarah kept him from going. So for the last six months the three of them were totally tangled up, evidently it was all a huge mess. And Yoshihiro really didn't like that kind of mess, right, and so he was probably running away the whole time, that's probably how he made it through, except that when you're overseas—I mean, there probably wasn't anywhere for him to run, was there? He didn't have anyone he could turn to, after all. But then you think about Sarah—how she got to know Yoshihiro just after she'd arrived in Japan, and how she grew to like him a whole lot . . . I'm sure that must have been terribly hard for her, too. Back then, back before there was anything between Yoshihiro and me, she used to talk to me about all that fairly often. About how she already had a steady boyfriend in Boston, and about how she did like Yo-shi-hi-ro a whole lot, except that the two of them were from different countries, and though for the time being she was here studying in Japan she'd eventually be going back, and about how hard that would be. That kind of thing. Yoshihiro said he didn't know whether Sarah's pregnancy was real or whether it was just a big put-on, but that even if it was true, which seemed kind of unlikely, it was almost definitely the other guy's child. That's what he said.”
“I had no idea about any of this,” I said.
But even as I said this I was putting certain things together.
Of course the pregnancy wasn't the only thing I hadn't known about. I'd never even been told that Sarah had a boyfriend in Boston. That day Sarah and I had talked—had that dream she'd told me about been something she only wished for when she was in Japan, something she only told me about because I happened to be her boyfriend's kid sister? Maybe she wanted to act out the role of the older brother's perfect girlfriend for me, just for me, the innocent sibling? I remembered the way her translucent golden bangs had looked as she did my homework for me. Her unclouded eyes. No, that hadn't been it. She'd really meant what she was saying. The sparkle in her eyes told me that she really wanted to believe everything would work out all right. . . . Or maybe her boyfriend in Boston was the sort of businessman type that she had described to me. Could it be that all my brother did was put a little twist in Sarah's life, and then vanish?
Thinking about it wouldn't help me understand. The only thing I understood about Sarah was that she had been an adult then. She'd been more of an adult than me, more of an adult than my brother, more of an adult than Mari. She'd been so grown up I felt sorry for her.
I was drunk now. The darkness of the bar seemed so incredibly still and settled that it startled me. And yet Mari seemed more sharply visible than anyone else, the outline of her form even clearer than that of the dismal-looking young waitress chatting with a customer at the bar on the other side of the room, clearer than that of the stunningly gorgeous woman with the long hair who was sitting with her boyfriend, holding her head close to his, and clearer than that of the woman with the childlike features sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette and looking at a magazine. Why was it that Mari appeared this way? I considered the matter vaguely.
“So . . . is Sarah back in Japan now?” Mari asked.
“What do you mean?” I said, startled. “She only came to Japan to study, right? And that was years ago. She didn't even come back when Yoshihiro died!”
Mari's expression softened. No doubt my reaction had made it perfectly clear to her that I wasn't hiding Sarah's return to Japan from her, trying to make things easy.
“You see, I got this mysterious phone call yesterday,” she said.
“Mysterious in what way?”
“Well, when I picked up the phone and said hello there was no response—-just silence. So I kept listening for a while, right, and then I heard this guy's voice in the background, speaking in English. Of course it might just have been a prank call—maybe the person had the public-radio English Conversation Seminar going in the background or something—but I don't know . . . the density of that silence . . . it was like whoever it was was about to start speaking, but couldn't make up her mind to do it, you know, that sort of silence. So I kind of got the idea that it might be Sarah. That's all.”
“I see,” I said.
To tell the truth, right then I wasn't the slightest bit concerned about Sarah and whether it had been her calling. More than anything, it frightened me that Mari was talking about these things—things related to my brother, who'd been dead for so long—as if it were all perfectly ordinary, part of everyday life.
“I'll let you know if I hear anything.”
“Good, I hope you do,” Mari said, and smiled.
When we parted, Mari called out her good-bye in a voice so incredibly loud you'd have thought it was the middle of the day, and then walked briskly off. I listened for a moment to the sound of her shoes scraping across the asphalt, and then started walking down the night-dark road myself.
* * *
When I was in junior high school my mother found out that my father was having an affair. There was a huge commotion at home, and in the end both my parents left the house. It was the middle of winter.
The affair was probably just a tiny little fling, the sort of thing people have all the time, but my mother went into hysterics and ran off to her parents’ house, leaving me and my brother behind. My father went to bring her back. Evidently their talks didn't go very well, things got complicated . . . but it would be totally wrong to suppose that my brother and I were even the slightest bit confounded at being left on our own. The first thing we did was get Mari to come stay with us. Next we took advantage of all the confusion to withdraw huge loads of cash with our parents’ ATM card and buy anything and everything that we'd been wanting. We stayed up until very late every night drinking booze. Mari was just eighteen, but in my eyes she was already a beautiful adult woman.
Come to think of it, the three of us slept side by side then.
It was snowing that evening too, and it was terribly cold—the sort of night where you couldn't even make yourself get up to go to the bathroom. Outside the window, the air was so bitterly cold you almost expected it to snap suddenly into a single frozen block. That frigid air, pushing up against the window. . . .
But inside the room it was warm, and we were all drunk and completely stuffed. That night we slept in our clothes, lying under the kotatsu. My brother was the first to drift off, his breathing becoming slow and steady and deep. Then Mari, already half dozing, settled down. I was so incredibly sleepy myself that I could hardly stand it anymore, and so without saying a word I lay down beside her. Our eyes met. “Why don't we just sleep here tonight,” Mari said. And then she lifted the upper half of her body and bent down over Yoshihiro's cheek and gave him a kiss good night. I goggled at her, startled. She grinned and gave me a kiss too, one that lasted just as long as my brother's.
“Thank you,” I said. Mari answered with a little smile, then flopped artlessly d
own and shut her eyes. Snow hurtled without a sound into the depths of the night, streaming down all around, closing us in. I went to sleep staring at the shadows that Mari's long eyelashes cast on her white skin.
Our parents finally returned after four days to find the entire house turned upside down, and the three of us all dressed up in fancy clothes that they'd never seen before, suffering from the lingering effects of the previous night's drinking. They were pretty shocked, and they gave my brother an earful: he was older than me, and had been more or less responsible for everything.
But Yoshihiro didn't give in. “The idea that the two of you might split up scared me so much that I didn't know what else to do!” he said, making our parents cry. It was unbelievably fun.
The night glittered brilliantly then. The night seemed to be infinitely long. And I could see something stretching way off into the distance behind Yoshihiro, whose eyes sparkled with the same mischievous light as always. I caught sight of a vast landscape.