Moshi Moshi Shimokitazawa by Banana Yoshimoto
Copyright © 2010 by Banana Yoshimoto
Japanese original edition published by The Mainichi Newspapers English Translation rights arranged with Banana Yoshimoto through ZIPANGO, S.L. and Michael Kevin Staley
Counterpoint Edition 2016
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Moshi Moshi
Afterword
THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF SHIMOKITAZAWA FEATURES IN A MOVIE called Zawa Zawa Shimokitazawa by one of my favorite directors, the late Jun Ichikawa.
When I still lived in my childhood home, I watched the movie over and over, late at night, alone, to try and give myself the courage to move there. I wanted to immerse myself in the area until I felt confident in my decision.
One scene shows the pianist Fujiko Hemming talking about the town. The image shows Fujiko walking and shopping in the covered market near the station, while her narration comes in as a voice-over.
“The clutter of streets and buildings, which seem to have been left to spread and grow without any thought—they sometimes appear very beautiful, like a bird eating a flower, or a cat jumping down gracefully from a height. I feel that what might seem at first sight to be carelessness and disorder in fact expresses the purest parts of our unconscious.
“When we start something new, at first it is very muddy, and clouded.
“But soon, it becomes a clear stream, whose flow conducts itself quietly, through spontaneous movements.”
The very first time I watched that scene, I marveled at the truth in what she was saying and found tears rolling down my cheeks. After that, I watched it over and over, committing it to memory and storing up my courage.
What a comfort it was, I thought, to hear someone put into words something that you were on the verge of grasping.
I knew her beautiful words had only gained the intense significance they had on film—their power to sway people’s hearts, lift their spirits, and ground their feet to the earth—as a result of the accumulation of the myriad things that had befallen Fujiko in her life up until that point.
I longed to have the same kind of effect, in my own way—to cast such a wonderful spell over people.
When I thought about this, late at night, alone, it used to give me a space in which I could breathe deeply, without which I doubt I could have survived.
My depression after losing Dad wasn’t acute—the suffering was more like a gradual accumulation of body blows. I would be deeply sunken into it by the time I noticed, and then barely manage to lift my face to break the surface and come up for air. It was a cycle that started over again before I knew it.
I grew pedantic and over-logical, and my body seemed to have hardened and shrunk. Out of self-protection, I took to wallowing in my own thoughts even more than before.
Flowers and light, hope and excitement all suddenly seemed like things that were very distant from me, and I was trapped inside a deep, putrid, and bloody darkness. In it, only the ferocious power that lay deep inside my gut had meaning, and what was beautiful or light had no value at all.
Inside that darkness, I tried my best just to keep moving, keep breathing, and keep sight of what I could see.
Then, gradually, I started to see some light.
It wasn’t the light.
The darkness was still there, still in service to that brutish, feral bloodiness.
I didn’t understand the deeper meaning of what Fujiko had said until I’d gained enough breathing space to appreciate the beauty of that contrast.
I MOVED TO SHIMOKITAZAWA ABOUT a year after Dad got mixed up in a love murder-suicide in a forest in Ibaraki with a woman who’d apparently been a distant relative, whom neither my mom nor I had known anything about.
The woman had approached Dad for advice, and eventually—after they’d become involved—she had lured Dad into meeting with her, drugged his drink, and driven him out into an isolated forest, where he’d died from carbon monoxide poisoning from the charcoal briquettes she’d brought with her. Of course, the woman had died, too. The car had been sealed so it was airtight, and there was no reason to suspect any other crime.
Although the incident gave the impression of a suicide pact, Dad—for all intents and purposes—had been murdered.
I don’t want to say a lot about the ins and outs of the sobering scenes that took place, or the practical decisions that had to be made, and all the things that Mom and I had to see and hear because of that.
There was so much that was too shocking and too difficult to take in, and I didn’t have the chance to make sense of it all.
My memory of that time is patchy. Maybe there never will be a time when I’m able to look back on the whole of it. If life is a process of accumulating more and more things you simply can’t bring yourself to make peace with, well, my feelings about this are vast and deep enough for an entire lifetime’s worth of hang-ups.
Mom and I had been oblivious. We said to each other: There’ve been a lot of overnight trips and coming home in the morning lately, do you think he’s found someone? I don’t think Dad’s got the guts to abandon his family, but what shall we do if it comes to that? I guess we just have to carry on as usual, there’s no use thinking too deeply about things. He’ll probably come back when he’s ready. When the police called, we were totally blindsided.
We cried, we wailed, we acted out—for a while, we tried everything. Anything at all. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, sometimes supporting each other.
We blamed ourselves, too, for having accepted Dad’s indiscretions as an inevitable part of the music business, and, out of a strange kind of considerateness and somewhat resignedly, having left him to his unfettered lifestyle in the belief that to look too deeply into it would be to risk breaking up the family.
Aside from when he was on tour, Dad made it a rule not to spend the night away from home, even if that meant getting back at dawn, and he kept every promise he made to Mom or me, no matter how small, writing them down in his diary or on the back of his hand. Even now, when I think of his hands, I see them in my mind’s eye covered in notes.
Dad, who essentially stuck to his promises on anything we asked of him, from Could you pick up some milk on your way home? to Let’s go out and get dumplings together next week, was a good father first and foremost, even before his professional identity as a musician. So Mom and I had become complacent.
And that was why, when he died like that—and even after the funeral—we were still so surprised that it took a long time to really feel that he was gone.
Since the woman had died, too, there was no justice to be brought, and it all blew over without any resolution, without our feelings having anywhere to go. There had been no point seeking out her family to sue them for damages, since they might even have been related to us in some way, and we hardly wanted to meet
them, either.
And anyway, it seemed that the woman had been put up for adoption soon after she was born, and when she died it had been a long time since she’d run away from the family that had adopted her, so she effectively had no family. Even this was information that had come to us unbidden, which truthfully neither of us even wanted to know. So Mom and I took no action about this.
I didn’t look closely at her body, but from what I saw in a photograph later, she was chillingly pale and beautiful, and put me in mind of a fox or a snake. That, too, came as a shock—that Dad had been taken in by that kind of trite seductiveness. I’m sure it must have been far harder for Mom to bear.
But life went on, even at times like this, and it was surprising how easy it was to keep going as though nothing had changed. I found it strange that I could walk down the street and appear normal, just like anyone else. That I could be in complete turmoil inside, and yet my reflection in a shop window could look the same as it ever had.
AROUND A YEAR AFTER Dad died, feeling like Mom had started to get back on her feet, I finally took steps toward starting my own life.
I’d gone to culinary school straight out of junior college. Since graduating, I’d been slowly looking for a job while helping out at friends’ restaurants, but all of that had been put on hold by what happened. I’d even been talking with some friends from culinary school about starting up somewhere on our own, but that was out of the question now, and I was starting over again from scratch.
I LEFT THE CONDO that had been the family home and rented the upstairs of a building owned by the mother of a friend, right on Chazawa-Dori, the main thoroughfare in Shimokitazawa. My friend had lived there until she got married and moved to England, and I took it over straight away. The room was seven minutes’ walk from Shimokitazawa Station.
Soon after that, I started my job at Les Liens, a bistro within eyeshot of my apartment, on the other side of Chazawa-Dori. It was a small restaurant and I pitched in everywhere I could help—in the kitchen, at the front of the house, behind the bar—and just like that, my days were busy and full.
Once the heavy, stifling air at home had finally started to lift, living on my own was exactly what I needed. I thought I’d finally be able to shake off what happened with Dad, and move on with my own life.
I was finally starting to be able to feel the joy in sitting down to a cup of tea, or just getting up in the morning. It was amazing what a difference a change in scenery made. I could wake up without my first thought being that Dad was gone. Back at the condo, it welled up every morning, all around the apartment like a hidden message, clouding my heart.
I had the entire second floor of the old house, which was enough space, but not huge. The layout was simple: two rooms that faced west, laid with tatami mats, and a narrow kitchen. In summer, the afternoon sun shone in so strongly that turning on the air conditioning hardly made a dent in the heat.
The bathroom was old, and the small tub was tiled, but the shower had been installed just before I moved in and was brand-new. The rooms always had the characteristic smell of old houses, and the straw mats were dry and faded. The cook stove was antique, and the circuit breakers would get tripped half the time I tried to use my toaster oven, let alone the hair dryer, which could only be switched on if all the lights were out. It was a period piece, which made all my friends marvel that this kind of place still existed.
Even so, since I was happy to save up as much money as I could, the size, the cheapness, and the proximity to work were nothing short of a godsend. My friend’s mother was a live-out landlady, and had leased the first floor to a small vintage clothes shop and a cozy coffee shop with just a bar and no tables. The coffee wasn’t good and the cookies were underbaked, so I never went in, but it was run by friendly young women who were always there during the day, and at night there was no one to complain if my footsteps were too loud, or my music, or if I ran the washing machine, which was a bonus.
BUT MY HAPPINESS WAS short-lived. One day, out of the blue, without much more than the clothes on her back, Mom moved in.
It was late one drizzly afternoon, at a point in the year when the sky felt much higher all of a sudden—as if summer, with its relentless sun, had suddenly loosened its grip. There was a chill in the wind, and I knew fall was about to set in.
I’d just worked the lunch service at Les Liens, and was relaxing back at my apartment during my break. I got a call from Mom, who said, “I’m actually in Shimokitazawa right now.”
She came over often enough, so I said, “I’m at home. Drop by for a cup of tea?”
But then she showed up with several big shopping bags and a Birkin bag stuffed to bursting, and, like it was nothing out of the ordinary, said, “Yocchan, I just can’t stand living at home all alone anymore. Do you mind if I stay with you? Just for a while?”
I definitely did mind, and it was all I could do not to look annoyed. I restrained myself because Mom had been going through a hard time, too. Both of us were still nursing a lot of clouded, murky feelings that we weren’t yet able to put into words.
But I could hardly believe what she was saying. I was working all the time and mainly just needed a place to sleep at night, so the apartment was in no way comparable to the modern and spacious three-bedroom condo in Meguro that had been the family home. But it didn’t seem to matter to Mom. I’d counted on making a fresh start here, and now that I’d settled in at the bistro, I was itching to finally start having the kind of fun you got to have when you lived alone. I was looking forward to falling in love, or just having friends over to chat with. No way, I thought.
“Why don’t we go back to Meguro together? Let me come stay with you for a bit,” I said.
But she said, “I know it’s not Jiyugaoka’s fault, but the apartment, the whole neighborhood, reminds me of Dad.
“I like Shimokitazawa; this is where I want to be. That apartment’s just stifling. There’s no life there. I finally realized just how much of a comfort it was for me, Yocchan, having you around.”
The condo in Meguro, not far from Jiyugaoka, had been gifted to Mom and Dad by my paternal grandmother, on the occasion of their having a child—me. So it wasn’t like there was rent to pay while there was no one living in it. There was just the service charge, plus the owners’ association meetings, which were only about once a month provided you weren’t in charge of something that year. There was no real reason it couldn’t be left empty for a little while.
“I’m going to give it six months, and if I don’t feel differently by then, I’ll sell it,” she said.
“In that case, why don’t we at least find a slightly bigger place than this? We could afford it, together,” I said.
“But that would make everything much too definite. It would be a major undertaking. It’s not the time for that yet. We’ve got to go slowly just now, slow enough not to disturb a single mote of dust. Slowly, quietly, holding our breath. Making a big move just now would be disastrous,” Mom said.
She had a habit of coming out with strangely convincing ideas at times like this.
“This is where I want to be. When I’m looking down at Chazawa-Dori from this window, I can sense things slowly fading back to normal. Yocchan, please, for real—can’t you make believe I’m a friend of yours? Just pretend one of your girlfriends has had her heart broken and needs a place to stay for a little while,” she said.
I was looking at the pattern on the indescribably garish T-shirt she was wearing. She’d probably bought it in the vintage clothing place downstairs, and worn it here straight out of the changing room. She’d really embraced the Shimokitazawa look; the way she was dressed, you’d never have guessed she was a woman of leisure, a Meguro Madame.
“I can’t just pretend, ‘for real’ or no! Anyway, the situation’s way more serious than a breakup. I need to think about it,” I said.
“I don’t care if I’m pathetic for needing your help; there’s no way I can stay in Meguro with Dad gone, and never see
ing your smile either, not right now. I just need a break so I can start to face things again,” she said.
My head was spinning. I was suddenly being forced to reconsider everything about the life I’d been picturing for myself. Why should the two of us have to live together in this run-down apartment, as if we were in some shabby hotel far from home, when there was the well-appointed condo in Meguro? I mean, I’d moved into my friend’s mom’s place, whose only advantage was its location literally across the street from the bistro where I worked, specifically so I could save on rent and put some money aside.
Mom was saying she’d chip in, meaning she’d cover most of the rent, and probably do all the cleaning and laundry, too. I might as well have not left home! Careful to put it gently, I told her as much.
But she kind of let it slide, not really seeming to take in what I’d said. “Every single thing you’re saying is so sensible! You have reasons, and it’s all so logical and thought through,” Mom said.
“Well, yes,” I said. “I mean, of course! Isn’t that how it works?”
She shook her head. “I just want to do something that makes no sense right now. I want to forget about having to be a responsible adult. Because marriage and life and so on are all just a series of sensible decisions and expectations, and don’t you think your father must just have wanted to do something illogical for once, and ended up in over his head, and that’s why he died how he did?
“I want to do illogical things, too. I know it can’t be exactly like when I was younger, but now that you’re grown and off my hands, I just want to pretend like I’m crashing with a friend for a little while, and forget about everything, and just start over.”
The funny thing was, once I was able to listen with an open mind to the things she was saying, they didn’t seem so misguided after all. Her words resonated with me in a way I didn’t quite understand.
Dad had been a fairly well-known musician. He played keyboards in a band, but guys he knew would also get him into the studio to play on sessions they were laying down, or ask him to join their bands when they went on tour. He was always in demand, and made good money from it, too.