Just because we were both taxi drivers, he thought that gave him the right to talk to me. I didn’t understand his taking such an interest in someone else’s business. When it came to dealing with other people, sustaining ongoing relationships just didn’t come easily for me. With Sayuko, even, it was more from inertia than anything else that our relationship had managed to go on this long.
I turned the steering wheel as I stepped on the gas and drove off without replying. I felt guilty, thinking about how surprised he looked. But then again, wasn’t I wrong to feel like it was my fault? If I was going to feel guilty, then I should have just answered him in the first place.
It may have been my lack of enthusiasm, but by nighttime, I still hadn’t picked up any fares. Just as I was about to turn the corner at the post office, I caught sight of a middle-aged man with his arm raised in my direction, in front of a convenience store on my left. Since I had taken a little time off, this was my first fare in a week. He was drunk. He had been muttering something to himself since before he got in the cab. I was bummed to realize that he was the type who would want to make conversation. I had been subjected to lengthy speeches by passengers like him before, about the economy or politics or whatever the hell they wanted to talk about. After he told me where he was going, he asked how my business was going. I had no excuses to offer. Even on this fare, the meter wouldn’t even get to fifteen hundred yen before I reached his destination.
“Oh, you’re young . . . I bet you’re about the same age as my son . . . ”
He began speaking in a friendly tone as he looked at the photo of me posted behind the driver’s seat. It had been taken when I first joined the company. He took another look at my taxi license, which had only been taken a short time ago, but my face looked even younger in that photo.
“But . . . isn’t that unusual? I think you must be the youngest taxi driver I’ve ever had. Hmm, I guess young people today don’t want to drive a taxi, do they?”
He seemed to expect a response so I grunted vaguely.
“I always assumed that guys who end up doing this have already tried doing various other jobs . . . isn’t that right? You’re still young, there must be something else you can do, isn’t there?”
How depressing that the light had turned red. He seemed like he would be offended if I gave another vague response. I had no choice but to engage with him.
“Yes, well, I’m looking, but there’s the recession.” These were the first words I had uttered today.
“Right. Of course. Well, you should be commended just for working at all.”
His spirits seemed to have been restored.
“My son, you see, he doesn’t work, he’s too busy with his music. For him it’s as if not to follow his passion would be to deny who he is—it’s pathetic, like he’s desperate or something. And all he does is waste money, buying all kinds of equipment and CDs.”
He lit a cigarette, still chattering away.
“When we were his age, we had other things on our mind . . . When I was at university, I ran wild with my friends. You all probably wouldn’t understand. Nowadays, there are always all kinds of things happening—one after another—for you to go wild about, isn’t that right? But you’re all too meek. You’re like sheep. And you all seem to be crazy about war, don’t you?”
The light turned green, but the car in front of me was remarkably slow to react. Its speed was erratic, and every so often the car seemed like it was being drawn over to the right. Thinking the driver might be drunk, I moved into the left lane.
“Ah, you’re all just a flock of sheep. Nothing more than a self-serving generation, aren’t you? Don’t you even care about what’s going to happen in the end?”
All the cars behind me were following my lead and trying to change lanes. I thought that other car was about to crash into something. I cracked my window; it reeked of alcohol inside the taxi.
“You’re all obsessed with your own problems. Well, I don’t know about you personally, but that’s how the one I’ve got is, at least. All he wants to do is mope about his own problems, all by himself. That’s why he’s going to fall flat on his face.”
He swayed contentedly to the pop song that was playing on the radio. His eyes were closed, so maybe he would just fall asleep. It would be a drag if he threw up while he was sleeping. As I was watching him in the rearview mirror, he suddenly opened his eyes.
“Hey, what’s the matter? What happened to your face? It’s all swollen, isn’t it?”
Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. “I fell down drinking,” I said, and he let out a big laugh. We had arrived at his destination, but he was reeling; I had to help him out of the car.
•
On my way back to the garage, I happened to pass that same park and got out of the car. It didn’t seem like the guys from the other night were around. I bought a can of coffee from the vending machine and sat on a bench to drink it. On the playground next to the slide, there were two cylindrical pieces of equipment shaped like tunnels. Their configuration wasn’t necessarily designed to envelop whoever was inside and block out their surroundings, but they seemed beautiful to me. Or maybe they were made for adults—this foolish idea occurred to me as I crawled inside, as if beckoned there, and lit a cigarette. My hips were in a weird position, but I kind of liked the feel of the cool concrete.
Ever since I had been contacted by the orphanage, I seemed to be going through a phase of progressively worse behavior. A week ago, I learned that my father was still alive at the same time that I found out my mother had died. It was always like this. Just when I thought I had gotten over something, whatever it was would stubbornly reappear in my life. What did it mean to me now to know that my father was alive? My parents—both of whom had vanished from my life—didn’t even exist in memory. I couldn’t understand his desire to see me. The mere fact of it, at this point in time, didn’t seem right to me.
After both my parents had left me, I had moved around from one home to another. I had only faint memories from that time, but eventually I was taken in by the family of a distant relative, which I remember clearly. I don’t know how many times I was kicked and smacked around while I was there. My only hope was to survive without being beaten, to live without the fear of death. It would have been childish to focus my attention on the existence of my real parents, and there was never a chance to anyway. It wasn’t until I was in the custody of the orphanage that I began to think about it.
For a while, I was swayed by the idea that if my parents hadn’t abandoned me, I wouldn’t have had to go through what I did. That kind of wishful thinking was probably just my own weakness, an abstract notion of parents I didn’t remember, now nothing more than the object of my resentment. But I was still puzzled by the fact that there were times when I tried to imagine them. Even though they ultimately abandoned me, I wondered whether—before that, back when I was born—they had any hopes for me. Like, that I would be a good person, or that I would be successful. If I could have known what they hoped for back then, perhaps I might actually be able to live my life with those aspirations. Thinking there must have been some kind of reason or circumstance, a part of me had probably been trying to hold out for a place where I could return home to, for the time when I ought to have been there. But then, as I grew up and the days and months passed without any contact from my parents, that hope faded away within me. And now it had been more than twenty years.
At this point in time, none of this mattered to me anymore. These days, as long as I am working, I can live my life. I am not unhappy, nor at a disadvantage. And when I do think about what happened in that home, the mere fact that I’d survived to the age of twenty-seven made me think that it wasn’t such a big deal. And now, my father’s recent appearance didn’t evoke the slightest feelings at all. I hadn’t bothered to ask the person who called from the orphanage for any further details about him.
The only problem was, I was gradually losing whatever motivation I had. Even just making it through the day was hard lately. It wasn’t that I thought about killing myself. But I did feel as if I were being drawn toward death. Obviously it seemed wrong to describe it as an aspiration, but there was a desire inside me I couldn’t identify. All I knew was that it was distorting my life.
I emerged from the tunnel, but the scenery was unchanged. The moon that Sayuko and I had tried not to see was still shining against the surrounding clouds, the same way it was last night. I went back to the car and started the engine. On the radio, a report about the war was being replayed on the air.
When I got back to my apartment, a woman was lying in front of my door. Her turned-up skirt was probably the work of one of my neighbors. As I got closer, I could tell it was Sayuko. Other than her, there was no one who had any reason to be at my apartment.
When I brushed her long hair up out of her face, I saw that she was quite drunk. Her face was flushed, and her expression was twisted from her ragged and intermittent breathing. By now I had seen Sayuko like this many times. I picked her up, brought her inside, and put her to bed. The smell of alcohol pervaded the air around her, so I opened the window and laid a wet washcloth on her forehead. She was huffing and puffing violently, like an enormous pump. If this kept up, I would probably need to take her to the hospital. Like me, she detested the hospital.
About two hours later she awoke, while I was watching television I had no interest in and listening to music I didn’t care for. In a hoarse voice, she apologized over and over, almost obstinately, for losing her key to the apartment. As I listened to her, I noticed that she was being extra solicitous of me.
“You’re not going to ask me why I’m so drunk?”
“Why would I?”
“Wow, that’s mean. Don’t you care about me at all?” She laughed bitterly as she said this.
“No, that’s not it. It’s just that I’m no good with snappy comebacks.”
“Believe me, I know. Why don’t you just kick me out?”
As she was watching me, I lit a cigarette and searched for the right words. The tobacco smoke formed a white stream that gradually lost shape before dissipating completely.
“Why are you staying here at all?”
“I . . . Uh . . . ” Whether she was thinking about what to say, or she was put out by my cowardly reply, she tilted her head back and began staring at the ceiling, the way she did when we had sex. “I’ve told you about my parents before, haven’t I?”
“Yes, a few times,” I said, but she kept on talking as if she hadn’t heard me.
“My mother . . . no matter what my father did to her, she never left him. He had other women, he was violent when he was drunk, he spent all our money—but she still clung to him until the end. I hated my mother. I promised myself I would never be like that. But we can’t necessarily keep up with the promises we make to ourselves, you know?”
I nodded with my cigarette in my mouth.
“Until now, there haven’t been any decent guys. Even guys with kids, they were just unimaginably worthless. So quick to tell me they love me, like fools, and then they just disappeared . . . Well, there’s nothing decent about me, either, so I guess they suit me. Judging by the types I go for, I’m just like the mother I was so disgusted with.”
She laughed as she said this, but she was still staring up at the ceiling.
“When I stopped feeling things, I was stupid enough to think I had learned my lesson—that maybe my body had gone numb so I would stay away from men. But here I am, dependent on you. Since my mother died, I feel useless. Really, even I’m surprised by how I just don’t want to do anything. I can’t even muster the courage to kill myself.”
“That’s inevitable. You worked night and day to earn the money to pay for your mother’s treatment. You’re exhausted. Even though you hated her, you still tried to save her in the end, didn’t you?”
“Is that what you think?” she said. She seemed to laugh at herself. Her drunken pallor now gave off a strange radiance. “Caring for her was just a way for me to get back at her. I was just showing my mother, Look, because of you, see how hard your daughter has to work, day and night? How awful, isn’t it? She looks exhausted, doesn’t she? I was pretty persistent in my revenge.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true, that’s the kind of person I am. My mother . . . she even laid out a futon for my father and whatever woman he brought home. Of course that would make anyone sick, right? I hated her. Not just my mother. That whole family, I really hated them. But the one I hate the most is myself—always a wreck, manipulated like a fool, and such a mess I let the guy who knocked me up get away and lost my baby.”
“Stop it,” I raised my voice a little. “You’re tired, and you’re drunk. Go to bed already.”
“In the end, when I die, my life will have been just like my parents’. Doesn’t that scare you to think about? I hate how much I’m like my mother. I do everything I can to try to change, but instead I end up even more like her.”
She looked at me as she fell silent, as if searching for the words and only now realizing she had stopped talking. I had to say something.
“Aw, it’s all right. And the ones who hit me weren’t my real parents. They were distant relatives, a married couple who took me in after my parents left.”
“. . . Right. But in that case, there’s still hope for your real parents.”
It was as if the black smudges on the wall were talking to me. The wall was damaged and uneven, and if I looked closely, it resembled a man’s crestfallen face.
“I’m past the age for thinking about that. But I used to wonder, once in a while. Like when I won an art prize in school, I wondered if my parents were good at drawing. And when my homeroom teacher told me I was introverted, I wondered whether my parents were too. I feel like, by analyzing myself, instead I start to see my parents.”
“Right—you need to find out more about your parents.”
“But what happens when I find out? Look, I’ve asked those questions myself. But nobody from the orphanage has told me anything anyway. And . . . well, that pretty much makes me think there’s nothing good about them. When I was in junior high, someone from the orphanage tried to tell me, but I didn’t want to hear about my parents back then. I was annoyed, but really, none of this crap matters at this point, does it? Parents are parents, and children are children. It makes no difference.”
Sayuko looked as though she might say something in response, but she was silent. The television was still on; there was a news report about a random murder. The killer was jaded about life and decided to kill someone. Next, there had been another murder for insurance money; then they showed a photograph of a child who had been run over by a truck driver who was driving drunk. A teacher had struck a student, and the student had hit the teacher back. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“You have your parents, and I have mine.” Before I knew it, I had started speaking again. “But it makes no difference. There must be a part of you that is passed down from them, but we think for ourselves and—it may sound obvious, but—our character depends on our environment, and we started out as different people. You’re too anxious about that kind of thing, whether it’s in your blood or your DNA. It does no good just to blame your parents.”
She seemed slightly bewildered by me talking this way. I felt sheepish.
“I’m sure you’re right, but it drives me crazy. Thinking about even a drop of my mother’s or that asshole’s blood in my veins. And I hate that there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. It’s like I’ve got a lump in the pit of my stomach. As if their genes are living inside of me. Like I’m marked by them and can’t help taking on their qualities. I know that’s just in my head, but their blood really is in my veins, isn’t it? Physiologically, I can’t stand it.”
I knew just what she meant. Yet still, I wondered why I had pushed the conversation to the point where it hurt her.
“It seems like I’m getting worse and worse—it’s scary. It’s hard to describe, but I feel like there’s someone behind me, pushing me along. I’m resisting but—how can I put it?—maybe my resistance only makes things worse? Oh, forget it . . . I’m sick of it.”
I lit another cigarette, and imagined there was a lump in the pit of my own stomach. It felt creepy to think about a complete stranger’s information being embedded within me. I wondered if there were minute twitches, like threads strung throughout my body, that exerted an imperceptible influence on me, on my decisions and my actions.
Suddenly, I felt depressed about the prospect of waking up the next day. The relentless progression of one day after another seemed to engulf me like heavy smoke. But since this happened all the time, I was familiar enough with ways to regulate my mood swings. I opened the pages of The Castle once more. I went around in circles, as if burying myself in the words of the unfathomable ending.
4
I threw the can of coffee I had been drinking out the window. This apartment was on the fourth floor, so it was a pretty good distance from the ground. Whenever I did this, I always felt a sense of tension. My fingers seemed to stiffen with numbness, and they were slippery with perspiration where they came in contact with the can. I would grow anxious. My heartbeat would gradually start to race, and it almost felt as though the effort to stop what I was doing took over in my fingers before the idea even reached my consciousness. Yet, as if in rebellion, my hand would let go. I couldn’t tell whether that had actually been my intention or if I were merely resisting an urge. I regretted it after I let go, and yet I was suffused with a distinct sense of liberation. My chest was thumping as I watched to make sure the can hit the ground. The sensation of going from tension to liberation, coupled with a renewed anxiety, had caused sweat to break out on the nape of my neck and my breath to quicken as if harried. The can was no longer in my power. Its trajectory may have been by my own action, but at this point it was outside of my control. Everything was moving so slowly. When would it hit the ground below? It should have crashed by now. What was taking so long? Suddenly a hard high-pitched sound echoed, and I felt a weight in my chest as if my heart had been struck. The can bounced high off the ground and, after flying through the air a second time, it rolled away, now just another piece of trash on the ground. That had taken even longer than I expected. Now I wanted to drop something heavier, something that would offer more resistance.