“I used an electric razor, shaved him, and wiped his face with a damp towel. He didn’t resist at all. He just let me do whatever I wanted. After this I phoned his personal physician. When I explained the situation, the doctor came right over. He examined him and conducted a few simple tests. Dr. Tokai never said a word. He just stared at our faces with those impassive, vacant eyes the whole time.
“This might not be the right way of putting it, but he no longer looked like a living person. It was like he’d been buried in the ground, and should have turned into a mummy because he had no food. But, of course, he was unable give up worldly attachments, and unable to become a mummy, so he’d crawled back out onto the surface. That’s what it was like. I know it’s an awful way to put it, but that’s exactly how I felt. He’d lost his soul, and it wasn’t coming back. But his bodily organs, unable to give up, continued to function independently. That’s what it felt like.”
The young man shook his head a few times.
“I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to tell you this. I’ll finish up. Dr. Tokai was basically suffering from something like anorexia. He’d hardly been eating a thing, and had remained alive only because he was drinking water. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t anorexia. As I’m sure you know, it’s almost always young women who get anorexia. They cut back on calories so they can look good and lose weight, and soon losing weight itself becomes its own goal and they end up starving themselves. In extreme cases these women hope to reduce their weight to nothing. So even though it’s unthinkable that a middle-aged man would become ill with anorexia, in Dr. Tokai’s case that’s exactly what had happened. Of course, this had nothing to do with wanting to appear more attractive. I think he literally could not manage to swallow any more food.”
“Because he was lovesick?” I asked.
“Something close to that,” Goto said. “Or else a similar desire to reduce himself to nothing. Maybe he wanted to erase himself. Otherwise a normal person couldn’t stand the pain of starvation like that. Perhaps the joy of the body shrinking to nothing won out over the pain. Just like what women with anorexia must feel as they watch their bodies shrink away.”
I tried picturing Dr. Tokai lying in bed, obsessed by love to the point where he became a shriveled mummy. But all I could imagine was the person I knew, a cheerful, healthy, well-dressed man who loved good food.
“The doctor gave him nutritional shots and brought in a nurse to monitor an IV. But nutritional injections can only do so much, and if the patient wants to remove the IV, he can. And I couldn’t stay by his bedside night and day. I could have forced him to eat something, but then he would have just vomited it up. If a person is opposed to being hospitalized, you can’t very well force it on them. At this point Dr. Tokai had given up the will to live and decided to reduce himself to nothing. No matter what anybody did, no matter how many nutritional injections we gave him, there was no stopping this downward progression. All we could do was stand by, arms folded, and watch as starvation devoured his body. These were painful, trying days. I knew I should do something, but there was nothing to be done. The sole saving grace was that he didn’t seem to be in any pain. At least I never saw him wince. I went to his apartment every day, checked his mail, cleaned, and sat next to his bed, talking to him about all kinds of things. News related to work, gossip. But he never said a word. Never showed anything close to a reaction. I’m not even sure he was conscious. He just silently stared at me with his big eyes, his face like a mask. Those eyes were oddly clear. As if they could see to the other side.”
“Did something happen between him and a woman?” I asked. “He told me how serious he was getting about a married woman who had a child.”
“That’s right. From some time before this, he had gotten deeply involved with her. It was no longer a casual affair. Something very serious had happened between the two of them, and whatever it was caused him to lose the will to live. I tried phoning that woman’s home. Her husband answered. I told him I needed to talk with her about an appointment she’d made at our clinic, but he said she no longer lived there. Where should I phone to get in touch with her? I asked, and he said, very coldly, that he had no idea. And he hung up.”
He was silent for a while, then went on.
“Long story short, I was able to track her down. She had left her husband and child, and was living with another man.”
I was speechless. At first I couldn’t grasp what he was getting at. “You’re saying she walked out on both her husband and Dr. Tokai?” I finally managed to ask.
“Yes,” Goto said. He frowned. “She had a third man. I don’t know all the particulars, but he seems to have been younger than her. This is just my own opinion, but I got the sense that he wasn’t exactly the kind of man you’d admire. She’d run away from home to elope with him. Dr. Tokai turned out to be just a convenient stepping stone and nothing more. She used him. There’s evidence he spent quite a lot of money on her. I got lawyers involved and they checked his bank balances and credit card accounts, and this became clear. He probably spent all that money buying expensive gifts for her. Or maybe he loaned her money. There’s no clear evidence that shows exactly how the funds were used, and the details remain unclear, but what we know is that he withdrew a significant amount of money over a short period of time.”
I sighed heavily. “That must have been hard on him.”
The young man nodded. “If that woman had told him ‘I decided I can’t leave my husband and child, so I have to break up with you,’ then I think he could have stood it. He loved her more than he had ever loved anybody before, so of course he would have been devastated, but I doubt it would have driven him to death. As long as it all makes sense, no matter how deep you fall, you should be able to pull yourself together again. But the appearance of a third man, and the realization that he’d been used, was a shock he couldn’t recover from.”
I listened silently.
“When he died, Dr. Tokai weighed less than eighty pounds,” the young man said. “Normally he weighed over one sixty, so he was under half his normal weight. His ribs stuck out like rocks when the tide goes out. You didn’t want to look at him, it was so awful. It made me think of the emaciated Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps that I saw in a documentary a long time ago.”
Concentration camps. In a sense he’d foreseen this. Who in the world am I? I’ve really been wondering about this.
Goto went on. “Medically speaking, the direct cause of death was heart failure. His heart lost the strength to pump blood. But I think his death was brought on because he was in love. To use the old term, he was indeed ‘lovesick.’ I phoned the woman many times, explaining what was going on and asking her to help. I literally went down on my knees, pleading with her to come see him, even for a little while. At this point, I told her, he’s going to die. But she never came. Of course, I didn’t think that just seeing her was going to keep him from dying. Dr. Tokai had already made up his mind to die. But maybe a miracle would have taken place. Or else he would have had different feelings as he died. Or maybe seeing her would have only confused him, and caused him more pain. I don’t really know. Truthfully, I didn’t understand any of it. There’s one thing I do know, however. Nobody’s ever stopped eating completely and actually died just from being lovesick. Don’t you think so?”
I agreed. I’d never heard of such a thing. In that sense, Dr. Tokai was a special person. When I said this, Goto covered his face with his hands and silently cried for a while. He truly loved Dr. Tokai. I wanted to console him, but there was nothing I could do. After a while he stopped crying, took out a clean white handkerchief from his pants pocket, and wiped away the tears.
“I’m sorry you had to see me like this.”
“Crying for someone else is nothing to apologize about,” I told him. “Especially someone you care for, someone who’s passed away.”
“Thank you,” Goto said. “It helps to hear that.”
He reached under the table for t
he squash racket case and passed it to me. Inside was a brand-new Black Knight racket. An expensive one.
“Dr. Tokai left this with me. He’d ordered it through the mail, but by the time it arrived he didn’t have the strength to play squash anymore. He asked me to give it to you, Mr. Tanimura. Just before he died he was fully conscious for a short time and he gave me some instructions, things he wanted me to take care of. This racket was one of them. Please use it if you’d like.”
I thanked him and took the racket. “What’s going to happen to the clinic?” I asked.
“We’ll stay closed for the time being,” he said. “We’ll either close the clinic, eventually, or put it up for sale. There’s still office work to do, so I’ll be helping out for a while, but I haven’t decided about after that. I need to have a sense of closure, but right now I’m just not thinking straight.”
I hoped very much that this young man would recover from the shock.
As we were saying goodbye he said, “Mr. Tanimura, I know this is an imposition, but I have a favor to ask. Please remember Dr. Tokai. He had such a pure heart. I think that what we can do for those who’ve passed on is keep them in our memories as long as we can. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I can’t ask just anyone to do that.”
You’re absolutely right, I told him. Remembering someone for a long time is not as easy as people think. I’ll try to remember him as long as I can, I promised. I had no way to decide how pure Dr. Tokai’s heart really was, but it was true that he was no ordinary person, and certainly someone worth remembering. We shook hands and said goodbye.
I suppose that’s why I’m writing this account—in order not to forget Dr. Tokai. For me, writing things down is an effective method of not forgetting. I’ve changed the names and places slightly so as not to cause any trouble, but all the events actually took place, pretty much as I’ve related them. It would be nice if young Goto happened across this account and read it.
—
There’s one other thing I remember very well about Dr. Tokai. I can’t recall how we got on to the topic, but he was chatting to me about women in general.
Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie. This was Dr. Tokai’s personal opinion. It depends on the person, he said, about the kind of lies they tell, what situation they tell them in, and how the lies are told. But at a certain point in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things. They lie about unimportant things, too, but they also don’t hesitate to lie about the most important things. And when they do, most women’s expressions and voices don’t change at all, since it’s not them lying, but this independent organ they’re equipped with that’s acting on its own. That’s why—except in a few special cases—they can still have a clear conscience and never lose sleep over anything they say.
He said all this very decisively, which is why I remember it so well. I basically have to agree with him, though the specific nuances in what he was saying may be a bit different. He and I may have arrived at the same not-so-pleasant summit, even though we’d climbed there on our own.
I’m sure that, as he faced death, he got no joy in the confirmation that this theory was correct. Needless to say, I feel very sorry for Dr. Tokai. I truly mourn his death. It took great fortitude to deliberately stop eating and starve himself to death. The physical and emotional pain he must have suffered is beyond comprehension. But I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little envious of the way he loved one woman—putting aside what sort of woman she was—so deeply that it made him want to reduce himself to nothing. If he’d wanted to, he could have continued and carried out his contrived life as before. Casually seeing several women at the same time, enjoying a glass of a mellow Pinot Noir, playing “My Way” on the grand piano in his living room, enjoying some happy little love affairs in a corner of the city. But he fell so desperately, hopelessly in love that he could no longer even eat, that he stepped into a completely new world, saw things he’d never before witnessed, and eventually drove himself to death. As Goto put it, he was erasing himself. I couldn’t say which of these two lives was truly happy and real for him. The fate that followed Dr. Tokai from September to November of that year was full of mysteries that I, just like Goto, simply could not fathom.
I still play squash, but after Dr. Tokai died I moved and, as a result, changed gyms. In the new gym I generally play with hired partners. It costs money, but it’s easier. I’ve hardly used the racket Dr. Tokai left me. It’s a bit too light. And when I feel how light it is, I can’t help but picture his emaciated figure.
It feels like somehow our hearts have become intertwined. Like when she feels something, my heart moves in tandem. Like we’re two boats tied together with rope. Even if you want to cut the rope, there’s no knife sharp enough to do it.
Later on, of course, we all thought he’d tied himself to the wrong boat. But who can really say? Just as that woman likely lied to him with her independent organ, Dr. Tokai—in a somewhat different sense—used this independent organ to fall in love. A function beyond his will. With hindsight it’s easy for someone else to sadly shake his head and smugly criticize another’s actions. But without the intervention of that kind of organ—the kind that elevates us to new heights, thrusts us down to the depths, throws our minds into chaos, reveals beautiful illusions, and sometimes even drives us to death—our lives would indeed be indifferent and brusque. Or simply end up as a series of contrivances.
I have no way of knowing, of course, what Dr. Tokai thought, what sort of notions went through his head, as he teetered on the edge of his chosen death. But within the depths of his pain and suffering, if only for a short time, his mind became clear enough to leave instructions to leave me his unused squash racket. Maybe he was trying to send me some sort of message. Perhaps as he hovered near death he’d finally found something close to an answer to the question Who am I? And he wanted to let me know. I have a feeling that’s the case.
Translated by Philip Gabriel
SCHEHERAZADE
EACH TIME THEY HAD SEX, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid, intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to spend every day cooped up indoors.
Because of this, Habara had dubbed the woman Scheherazade. He never used the name to her face, but it was how he referred to her in the small diary he kept. “Scheherazade came today,” he’d note in ballpoint pen. Then he’d record the gist of that day’s story in simple, cryptic terms that were sure to baffle anyone who might read the diary later.
Habara didn’t know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented. He had no way of telling. Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives. Habara therefore enjoyed them as a child might, without questioning too much. What possible difference could it make to him, after all, if they were lies or truth, or a complicated patchwork of the two?
Whatever the case, Scheherazade had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart. No matter what sort of story it was, she made it special. Her voice, her timing, her pacing were all flawless. She captured her listener’s attention, tantalized him, drove him to ponder and speculate, and then, in the end, gave him precisely what he’d been seeking. Enthralled, Habara was able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment. Like a blackboard wiped with a damp cloth, he was erased of worries, of unpleasant memories. Who could ask for more? At this point in his life, that kind of forgetting was what Habara desired more than anything else.
Scheherazade was thirty-five, four years older than Habara, and a full-time housewife with two children
in elementary school (though she was also a registered nurse and was apparently called in for the occasional job). Her husband was a typical company man. Their home was a twenty-minute drive away. This was all (or almost all) the personal information she had volunteered. Habara had no way of verifying any of it, but he could think of no particular reason to doubt her. She had never revealed her name. “There’s no need for you to know, is there?” Scheherazade had asked. She certainly had a point. As long as they continued like this, she could remain “Scheherazade” to him—no inconvenience there.
Nor had she ever called Habara by his name, though of course she knew what it was. She judiciously steered clear of the name, as if it would somehow be unlucky or inappropriate to have it pass her lips.
On the surface, at least, this Scheherazade had nothing in common with the beautiful queen of A Thousand and One Nights. She was a housewife from a provincial city well on the road to middle age and running to flab (in fact it looked as if every nook and cranny had been filled with putty), with jowls and lines webbing the corners of her eyes. Her hairstyle, her makeup, and her manner of dress weren’t exactly slapdash, but neither were they likely to receive any compliments. Her features were not unattractive, but her face lacked focus, so that the impression she left was somehow blurry. As a consequence, those who walked by her on the street, or shared the same elevator, probably took little notice of her. Ten years earlier, she might well have been a lively and attractive young woman, perhaps even turned a few heads. At some point, however, the curtain had fallen on that part of her life and it seemed unlikely to rise again.
Scheherazade came to see Habara twice a week. Her days were not fixed, but she never came on weekends. No doubt she spent that time with her family. She always phoned an hour before arriving. She bought groceries at the local supermarket and brought them to him in her car, a small blue Mazda hatchback. An older model, it had a dent in its rear bumper and its wheels were black with grime. Parking it in the reserved space assigned to the House, she would carry the bags to the front door and ring the bell. After checking the peephole, Habara would release the lock, unhook the chain, and let her in. In the kitchen, she’d sort the groceries and arrange them in the refrigerator. Then she’d make a list of things to buy for her next visit. She performed these tasks skillfully, with a minimum of wasted motion, like a competent housewife, saying little throughout.