It translates to ‘don’t know what to do.’
Right, okay.
"But that completely fails to capture the finer nuance of robai, don’t you think?"
The finer nuance?
"Well, the kanji characters for robai contain the radical for ‘beast’ and the characters for ‘ryo’ and ‘kai,’ right? So both characters in robai, that is both ro and bai, are a reference to wolf: ro is a wolf with long front legs and short hind legs, while bai refers to a wolf with short front legs and long hind legs. These two usually move around in pairs, but once they get separated, they both falter and start panicking. And that’s why robai means confusion. Didn’t you know?"
Nope.
Really? It’s common knowledge.
Sorry about that.
There’s no need to apologize. I mean it’s not as if I’m blaming you or anything.
When I saw her earlier at the door she looked her usual sullen self, but apparently she was in a good mood tonight. She was even enjoying her hot tea with great relish, blowing on it to cool it down. She picked up the tea bag and examined it again.
"I’ll buy you a chakoro next time. I know it’s belated, but it’ll be my gift to you, okay? If I remember correctly, sensei, your birthday is on the tenth?"
"What’s a chakoro?"
My dear teacher, perhaps you’re under the impression that tea is just for drinking?
When I refrained from answering, the look on her face turned all the more amused.
"The chakoro is a tea incense burner; you place some tea leaves on a plate inside it and warm the leaves from underneath with a candle. She pointed to the tea we were drinking. These tea leaves should give off a pleasant aroma. It’ll be so soothing for the soul."
Soothing for the soul, eh? Hmmm.
Oh stop with that condescending look of yours. You’re always quick to give me that look.
She appeared genuinely amused.
I’m not making fun of you, but all that talk doesn’t really interest me—that talk about what’s soothing for the soul. It’s all just wispy mumbo jumbo to my ears, and hearing it from your mouth makes it sound all the more incredible.
Why, how rude of you, sir! I hope you can see that I’m not always depressed, you know, and that’s because I have latitude in my life, you see, and latitude is the most important thing you can have from day to day. Tea can give you that latitude, so can a fragrance, so can kanji.
I then remembered. Eriko had similar things to say when she’d given me the tea.
This tea’s really tasty. You can prepare it just by putting it in a cup and adding hot water, so why don’t you try some when, for instance, you’ve had too much to drink. It’ll be a great way to take a break. I’ve always felt you lacked a certain peace of mind that would allow you just to relax and genuinely take pleasure in what’s pleasurable.
Latitude, huh?
Yes, latitude.
Honoka’s smile—as I always felt—was somehow tinged with mystery.
5
THE NEW YEAR BEGAN all too soon, while I was swamped with work.
Publishing gets busiest during the year-end. In the case of a magazine’s editorial department, we have to finish the New Year’s special issue and the Early Spring issue (the February issue) in less than a month, from the end of November through the middle of December, and on top of that, it’s also necessary to prepare half of the table of contents for the March issue (released in February). Even books, pressured by the situation at the printing press, the deadlines for finishing the proofs of titles, planned for publication in January and February, follow a tight schedule. Furthermore, with the year-end settlement of accounts approaching in March, the top brass mandate company-wide increases in sales, so the number of releases we’re expected to make at the very beginning of the new year is usually considerable, and what’s more, in a major publishing house like the one I work for, we have to come up with at least several eye-catching products worthy of the honor of being the first releases for the year, and therefore worthy of gracing the newspaper ads running on New Year’s Day. The year-end season is a showdown, so to speak—the moment of truth when each and every editor finally sends out into the world the fruits of their year-long labor, including full-length novels by bestselling authors, over-sized books, and the first releases in a series of collected works or of theme-based compilations.
Even in my case, I had to compile more than thirty studies done on educational issues by experts of various fields—studies I’d invested about half a year in collecting—and I also had to finish at a stretch the memoirs of the former Prime Minister whom I used to be on familiar terms with during my days working at the monthly magazine. For this reason, I ended up staying overnight through two-thirds of December, in the basement of the office, which was, for all intents and purposes, the napping room.
On Christmas Eve I enjoyed French cuisine with Eriko at a hotel in Toranomon. We’d dined there the previous year as well and Eriko was feeling slightly sentimental about the fact that she was spending Christmas Eve with the same person for the second year in a row.
It’s been a year already since that rainy day, hasn’t it? she said wistfully. When I pointed out that it was only a year, she appeared happy nonetheless. The food wasn’t good at all; it was merely expensive, just as it was last year.
On Christmas Day we held a party at New Seoul in the evening. When I arrived around seven with some cake, champagne, and gifts for the mother and child, Tomomi was in the middle of roasting a chicken in a microwave oven placed on the counter—she’d taken it down from the top of the shop’s refrigerator, where it was usually kept.
After draping a white tablecloth over the table, the three of us sat down on a U-shaped sofa, popped open a champagne bottle, and set off crackers. While tearing out a piece of chicken, Tomomi remarked that it was the third time she’d eaten chicken like this with me. Since it was the most fragrant chicken I’d ever tasted, its skin roasted to a crisp, I praised her a number of times.
She told me that Ilgon Park had brought presents on Christmas Eve. Takuya began to spin the many Beyblade tops he’d gotten from his father on the small floor of the shop, and I joined him, getting absorbed in the game too.
On December 29th, Eriko returned to her childhood home in the town of Suwa. I saw her off at Shinjuku Station.
Tomomi also left with Takuya for her parental home in Sendai on the thirtieth. I saw them off at Tokyo Station in the daytime.
Raita was to visit on New Year’s Eve in the evening. I awoke around noon and drove to the liquor store in Monzennakacho to purchase some alcohol. Although I consider myself a heavy drinker, Raita gets quite hilarious and thrilling when he drinks; I doubt I’ll ever meet a heavier drinker than him. After purchasing a large quantity of all sorts of liquor and grabbing a bite to eat at a revolving sushi bar, I returned to the apartment and spent my entire afternoon reading a book. It had been a while since I read for pleasure, but when it occurred to me that neither Eriko nor Tomomi was in Tokyo, my mind quieted down and I was able to lose myself in the book.
Raita arrived a little past nine. He’d brought a large platter heaped with food, and after he placed it in the center of the dining table, we began drinking at once. He told me how he’d spent the entire day preparing the food from leftover ingredients he’d gotten from the restaurant where he worked, which had closed for the year the previous night. Raita had prepared food for last New Year’s Eve as well—his cooking tasted great, being quite the chef
himself. This year he’d prepared so much more than last year that we couldn’t finish eating everything in a single night.
When I remarked how gorgeous the food looked, he appeared bitter and said, The customer traffic’s been bad; the amount of meat and vegetables left over was double last year’s.
He then went on to say, I’m fed up with all those structural reforms that bully the people—I say protect employment, protect the small and medium-sized companies from the politic
s that prioritize large corporations over the weak.
He pauses to laugh. Seriously though, your proletarians about town are in deep trouble, you know. Even my boss is getting really worried, with the traffic of regular customers steadily fading and all.
Raita dropped out of high school after his sophomore year and became a live-in attendant at a yakitori shop in Nakano called Torimasa. He just turned twenty this year. His father had been a long-time board member of the Communist Party of the Tama area and was now serving as a city council member of Inagi City. Raita and his father apparently got along well and on his days off Raita would help out the political party with their activities.
I’d become acquainted with Raita after a TV producer called Terauchi, an acquaintance of mine, tried and failed to recruit Raita while he was handing out flyers for the Japanese Communist Party in the streets of Shinjuku two years ago, in the spring.
Terauchi was plainly turned down, but he didn’t give up and managed to get Raita to disclose where he worked. Since then, Terauchi kept visiting Raita at Torimasa every single day to persuade him, but in the end it was to no avail. It was on such an occasion when I was invited by Terauchi to visit the yakitori shop with him. I’d accompanied him just for fun when I met Raita there for the first time. It happened two years ago in the month of June.
Raita claimed, with a swagger in his voice, that his hobby was class warfare and that his favorite book was The Communist Manifesto. Terauchi was mystified, but of course, Raita was no Marxist at all. Even though his father had apparently urged him to join his political party, I’m certain the chances of Raita complying were zero.
Apart from Raita’s questionable nature, though, there was nothing unreasonable about why Terauchi was so driven to offer Raita a role in a drama he was producing; Raita was a beautiful young man; so much so that the word breathtaking applied literally in his case. Even I was captivated when I beheld him for the first time, despite being told what to expect from Terauchi.
When I went to the shop alone the next time, I was able to have a decent conversation with him and I found out that apparently proposals from talent scouts like Terauchi had been incessant since the time he was in high school.
With those looks of yours, life’s probably not that easy, huh? I said, and Raita nodded and laughed, saying, Yeah, I guess … Well, once I get old and get used to living a life of poverty, this face of mine, the looks I have now in my youth, is just going to tumble downhill, right? It’s just going to look drab and lackluster, you know. Until then, I just have to be patient I suppose.
Yeah, I guess so, I chimed in. I think there’s something slightly wrong with people who become singers or actors on account of their good looks—they get carried away. But then again, those guys who go to The University of Tokyo and become bureaucrats or scholars just because they’ve got good heads are even worse; they really have a problem.
Yeah, sure seems that way … Raita appeared to agree with my words, slightly raising the flesh of his cheeks while carefully grilling skewers of meat over the charcoal fire. It was a fearless expression bordering on a sneer, marked with an unquestionable trace of violence, inspiring dread and trepidation in anyone who beheld it.
Later on, after the shop closed and the two of us went barhopping, Raita spoke his mind, asserting, Naoto-san, you said something’s wrong with scholars and government officials, but I think it’s the entertainers and politicians who’re the real scumbags, the lowest of the low. No one knows scholars and bureaucrats—they’re lost in obscurity. But entertainers and politicians? Now these guys are engaged in the petty business of selling their faces for a price, right? That’s like such an uncool thing to do, yet they think of themselves as being cool or great, and that upsets me sometimes—I mean I get this feeling that they’re unforgivable, see. I’m like, what the hell do they think they’re doing, you know, like how can they get it all so wrong? There’s nobody more unruly, I believe, than someone who’s convinced he can see everything about himself all by himself. Don’t you agree, Naoto-san?
What do you mean by ‘see everything about himself all by himself?’ I asked in return, my interest slightly sparked by that line.
Well, he said, the thing about the business of selling your face is that the initial sales strategy concerns whether the person selling himself can successfully control the person he’s actually selling, right? It’s all about how much you can sell this product called yourself for. So you can say it’s a business transaction, an act that allows you to profit, right? But if you ask me, what it all boils down to is the fact that anyone who commercializes the self just ends up with this make-believe self who’s supposed to manage the commercial product—the commercial self—and in so doing, such a person ends up completely removing all the imperfections, vagueness, and all the fuzzy relativity inside him and gives himself permission to subject his entire existence to the dogged pursuit and acquisition of wealth and power. But you’ve got to be out of your mind to do something like that, right? After all, no matter how hard you try, there’s no way you could ever truly know yourself, right? But these people carry on wheeling and dealing anyway, peeling off the surface appearances of the selves they’re completely clueless about—at the end of the day they’re nothing more than shameless strippers of the human psyche. That’s all you can say about those bozos, really.
While mulling over Raita’s half-baked words for a while, I remembered the following passage in a book by Erich Fromm that I’d read.
How are we to come to terms with the fact that subjectively speaking our actions are motivated by self-interest while, objectively speaking, we serve purposes other than those for ourselves? How are we to reconcile the spirit of Protestantism with the spirit of modern individualism?
It seems to me that Fromm has concluded that individualism isn’t self-love, but simply another form of greed.
So I said to Raita, I don’t think it’s really necessary to argue in your roundabout way to point out that entertainers and politicians are uncool. At the end of the day we’re all just sellers, all of us human beings. Just as you’re doing business by selling yakitori, the grocery store sells vegetables; the fishmonger sells fish; the butcher shop sells meat; those guys at the GS gas station sell gasoline; the car dealer sells cars; the electronics store sells electrical appliances; the bank sells money; scholars, artists, and various other artisans sell whatever know-how they’ve mastered; entertainers sell acts; politicians sell policies, and that’s all there is to it. Everyone’s just the same in that respect. To eat, everyone’s just stripping off various resources from this planet. Sure, when you talk about someone selling his face, you could certainly call it the commercialization of the self, but simply put, what you really mean to say is that—as a seller—an entertainer or politician lies more than a grocer or fishmonger, right? When the product you’re selling is fish and vegetables there’s not much scope for lying, and you don’t see that much deception either in the skills and techniques of artisans. However, with entertainers and politicians it’s a different story: the products they sell are often vague and don’t assume any kind of shape that easily, so these guys attempt to boost their commercial value through ostentatious displays, see. Now what you’re saying is that this obvious avarice and deception, to us buyers, look awfully shameful, right? After all, there’s a saying that goes ‘Show me a liar, and I’ll show you a thief.’ So in brief, those people who upset you are simply good-for-nothing liars—that’s what you basically want to say, right?
Well, yeah, I suppose so. But hey, doesn’t it really piss you off hearing those phonies call each other ‘artist’ or ‘sensei’? It’s a sign this world’s going to the dogs, that it just keeps getting more and more rotten to the core.
But it’s not just the world today that’s rotten to the core, is it now? I mean the world’s been rotten throughout the ages—through all time—so saying that it’s getting rotten is a bit naive in my opinion, pal.
A month after we met, Raita
began staying at my apartment occasionally, and we’ve continued our friendship for more than two years.
We watched the Kohaku Uta Gassen, the Red and White Song Battle, on TV and had loads to eat and drink. When it was past twelve Raita tidied up the glasses and tableware and went home after saying, Well then, Naoto-san, I think it’s time for me to call it a day.
For the next three days after New Year’s Day, in order to prepare an annual New Year’s guest list of the politically powerful, the cameraman from my company’s photography department and I were in a rental car, circling around the homes of politicians—the Premier’s official residence, Ozawa’s house in Fukazawa, and Hatoyama’s original house in Gokokuji—to monitor the traffic of luxury automobiles with black-tinted windows entering and exiting through grand, imposing gates. For several years getting this job done was apparently a major struggle for the company, since nobody readily volunteered to take it on. But this problem was solved once I joined the
company.
During those three days I used the car phone four times, placing three calls to my younger sister in Kitakyushu, and one call—my first one—to Mrs. Onishi. When I called her at six in the morning on New Year’s Day, the missus said in a still half-asleep, groggy voice, Happy New Year!
I promised to meet her on the evening of the fourth at the usual hotel and hung up.
Every afternoon, inside the car, when the traffic of political guests would come to an end and the cameraman would begin to put away his film, I’d open the book I’d started reading on New Year’s Eve and lose myself in its world. The book was a collection of essays written by a certain wealthy female Buddhist scholar in her later years, recounting the teachings of Buddha in such a lucid and eloquent fashion that it was worthy of multiple readings. Her prose was that marvelous. For example, in the passage titled What It is To Live, after introducing the famous Buddhist story titled Sights From the Four Gates During A Stroll—the Shimon Yukan—she writes as follows.
The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside Page 6