"But what did we do? Did we take into consideration the welfare of such children? Not at all! Instead, we went full steam ahead with a budget allocation that just prioritized the parents’ convenience. In effect, without ever
listening to the voice of our true clients—the children—we ended up providing a service that was utterly useless for them. If you stop to think about it, there’s no way we could ever help society as a whole benefit by building a system that makes it possible for parents to part with a forty-three-day-old newborn baby and leave him or her with a stranger. In the event you actually build such a system for society, you shouldn’t complain if your kids turn out strange; it’s not surprising to see that there’d be something wacky and helter-skelter about them. Still, we failed to realize this essentially simple truth, so I can’t help thinking how truly screwed up we were back then, that there was something terribly wrong with us, you know."
I related Mr. Minegishi’s story to Honoka after she talked to me about her mother.
Honoka then told me with an ironic smile, I guess when something goes irreversibly wrong, it’s not just partially wrong, it’s totally wrong.
Every time Eriko visited she brought along small things: a folding table; tableware; a mirror; a pillbox; an electric pot; her clothes; and clothes hangers. At first, various objects innocuously occupied a corner of my room, but before long they ended up laying down the law.
Finally, on the morning of the first Sunday in April, a massive three-door refrigerator arrived. I was fast asleep when the doorbell rang an umpteen number of times, rousing me from bed. When I opened the door, I saw before me a brand-new refrigerator wrapped in white vinyl, its receipt stuck onto the door of the vegetable compartment with adhesive tape. In no time at all, two delivery guys conveyed it into the kitchen by hand and left with the small refrigerator that I’d been using until then. Momentarily, the interior of the new refrigerator filled up with a plethora of things: cans of beer, bottles of white wine, yogurt and cheeses, tomatoes and apples, eggs and balls of udon noodles. Eriko, Honoka, and Raita—they’d all gotten busy filling up the fridge.
On the Saturday of the week the refrigerator arrived, we had Raita and Honoka over so that the four of us could make some sukiyaki and enjoy it together—Eriko had taken the trouble to return to her apartment to bring back, for cooking sukiyaki, an iron pan I’d bought for her as a souvenir from Morioka, where I’d gone on a business trip.
At the table, Eriko enjoyed very pleasant exchanges with Raita and Honoka, but what I found surprising was that Honoka, the vegetarian, had joined the rest of us around the sukiyaki frying pan without any trepidation. When Eriko told me, rather belatedly on the day of the occasion, I’ve invited those two as well, I said, Honoka won’t eat sukiyaki dishes.
So what? she responded quite apathetically. We shouldn’t be indulging her, right? If she won’t eat meat, she can just have vegetables.
Honoka didn’t show any signs of being dismayed. Instead, she earnestly began to serve into her small bowl and eat with great relish all the vegetables Eriko had tactfully set aside for her: dried bean curds, shredded kuzu cakes, tofu, mushrooms, and plenty of garden greens.
I went on meeting Mrs. Onishi once a month at the usual hotel. And every time I did, I had to ask her for some money. My mother’s condition had worsened and my younger sister, in her desperation, was trying out various folk remedies, leaving me with more medical bills than I could handle.
In the beginning of April, when Tokyo’s cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and when prime-time news programs began reporting on their sites in various areas up north, I made an appearance at New Seoul for the first time in two weeks. When Tomomi saw me she said, laughing, I had a feeling you’d show up sometime today. She then remarked that I’d gained some weight, that my face had become rounder.
After telling her that I’d slim down and restore my former physique soon enough, I asked, changing the subject, How about Shinjuku Gyoen this year?
Last year we took a trip all the way down to the large botanical garden in Musashino, but the park was right in the middle of carrying out maintenance work, so cherry-blossom viewing was out of the question.
Prohibited from even approaching the trees lined up right before us, where the petals were falling wonderfully, both Tomomi and I were very disappointed. The grounds were being irrigated with massive supplies of water and a power shovel was digging up the soil with a deafening roar, so the entire park felt damp and miserable, prompting the three of us to retreat immediately after opening the lunch boxes, which Tomomi had woken up early to prepare.
My, my, my! she said. "Year after year! You never get tired of cherry viewing, do you? Isn’t there anyone else
you could invite?"
Tomomi had said some such thing last year as well. I answered that I didn’t get tired of it necessarily, that I didn’t want to go cherry-blossom viewing with anybody else.
When I visited her bar for the first time around four years ago, it was just around this time of the year. I was still working as a reporter for a weekly magazine back then and was brought to the place by a freelance writer who was working with me in the same editorial division.
In those days, I used to live in an apartment in Higashiojima, and New Seoul, which is in Morishita, was on my way home. At any rate, ever since that first visit, I began frequenting the bar almost every night, emptying the most expensive bottles available there at a rate of one every couple days. In the first two months I’d racked up a bar tab of around five hundred thousand yen, but, as I recall, I settled the bill in full with the bonus I got in June.
What got me interested in Tomomi at first was her awfully high-pitched laugh, which she’d put to good use in the company of her customers. The laughter had a hollow ring to it, as if small pebbles were rolling inside a flimsy and transparent barrel. I thought I’d heard such a sound a long time ago, and when I pondered over it, I vaguely recalled that my mother used to laugh in such a way when she was still young.
The second reason behind my interest in her was the fact that I was terribly surprised to hear from the freelance writer that she was actually a mother. Severely inebriated, the writer pointed up at the ceiling of the watering hole in an exaggerated gesture and said in a somewhat angry-sounding tone, At this very moment, right above our wasted brains, sweet little Tomomi’s baby lies fast asleep, breathing peacefully. You can hear him if you listen carefully. At that time Tomomi looked very young—she was far from looking like someone who was shouldering the burdens of motherhood. In my eyes her face looked so dignified, and I couldn’t possibly imagine that a baby’s large head, along with its body, had been wrenched out from between her legs. That night I just couldn’t keep my eyes off her belly.
On the fifth day after first visiting the bar, I’d bought my first present for Takuya before dropping in. Since I knew neither the name nor the gender of the child, I had the attendant at the department store choose some bright yellow children’s attire for me.
Suddenly presented with such a thing by a customer who had been gulping down whiskey night after night without saying a word, Tomomi seemed a little bewildered. I’d finally found an opportunity to start a genuine conversation, but it occurred to me that I didn’t particularly want to know anything about Tomomi, so I couldn’t find anything concrete to talk about in the end.
But apparently I’d gotten drunk soon enough and had posed as a palm reader, inspecting her lines and telling her, Mama-san, you should devote as much of yourself as possible to someone born in the Year of the Monkey, and have someone born in the Year of the Rat reward you for that devotion. I had no recollection of this whatsoever, but the next day when I visited again, Tomomi began to tell me that I’d said so. The year of the Monkey, which I’d blurted out at random, in fact turned out to be the year Ilgon Park was born, and of course, the Year of the Rat was the year I was born.
She then went on to talk about her relationship with Park in some detail, but I wasn�
��t that concerned, so I was hardly listening, and I’ve never since then asked about the man.
I think it was probably ten days after I started visiting her bar, since it was around the end of the cherry-blossom season, just prior to the garden party that year, on a Sunday, when I invited Tomomi to a cherry-blossom viewing.
Together with Takuya, the three of us went to the Shinjuku Imperial Garden. With Takuya strapped to her chest in a baby sling, her long hair gathered into a knot at the back, a large bag slung from her shoulder, Tomomi came to Shinjuku-Sanchome Station, our rendezvous spot. When we arrived at the Imperial Garden in the early afternoon, I draped Takuya in the jacket I was wearing and seated him by my side before lying down next to Tomomi on the lawn of the Imperial Garden, gazing up for a long time at the clouds drifting to the north across a beautifully clear, springtime sky.
At the Imperial Garden’s restaurant I ate curry and rice and Tomomi had a thin, hardened offal steak, but it didn’t seem tasty. I’d borrowed from a colleague of mine a single-lens reflex camera, so I used up three rolls of thirty-six-exposure film to take continuous mother-and-child snapshots—at the train station platform, inside the train, amid the crush in Shinjuku, by the park’s pond, atop a big sky-blue bench blanketed with cherry blossom petals, and at the base of a cherry blossom tree. Whenever I pointed the lens at her, Tomomi would smile, and
with Takuya in her embrace, she’d change the boy’s position every which way before striking a pose with him. Takuya slept comfortably, his hair teased by the spring breeze.
We ate Chinese food in Shinjuku and on the train ride home I carried Takuya, strapping the baby sling to my chest. Tomomi laughed dramatically, amused by this sight.
It was five days later that I had one of the many finished photographs enlarged and made into a canvas print before taking it to Tomomi’s bar, along with the nearly one hundred remaining standard-size photos.
Tomomi was behind the counter, tirelessly looking over the photographs in which she appeared with Takuya. She’d repeatedly put them away in a drawer only to goggle at them again whenever business slowed down, her back turned to the few remaining customers.
Since that day, I’ve brought in various other things as well, and after a while, after she closed shop, we began to drink beer together, just the two of us, helping ourselves to sushi that I’d buy.
It was in the autumn of that year when my relationship with Tomomi turned sexual. One night I was talking a lot about silent films, which I’d acquired a passion for in those days: Mary Pickford, Janet Gaynor, and Lilian Gish in A Romance of Happy Valley, a story about John and Jenny, two people leading quiet lives in a peaceful valley in Kentucky until John foolishly sets out for New York, swept away by the tides of ambition.
At first, Tomomi was silently listening to my commentary, but before long, she began to comment on the actresses in detail herself.
"Although Gish was famous for her role in Griffith’s masterpiece, she was really more impressive on stage in her later years. Gaynor in A Star is Born is surely peerless; no one can act better than that. I like Pola Negri more than Pickford—the Pola Negri, who became involved with Rudolf Valentino!"
I was astounded by how well informed she was. And then I remembered her telling me around the time we first met that she’d been an actress in a small theatrical company once, performing in plays. Anyway, even after closing shop, we kept guzzling down gin and sounding off until dawn about silent-film actresses.
Eventually both of us became completely drunk, and before I knew it, we had climbed up to the second floor. At that time, in Tomomi’s room, there used to be an old sofa for two, and when I laid back on this sofa and relaxed with my suit still on, Tomomi, who was laying out a futon with shaky, staggering steps, suddenly said loudly, I’m going to take a bath! and became stark naked in front of me. Then, when she crouched down at my feet, as if sapped of all her strength, she began to take my clothes off, muttering Hey, let’s take a bath without looking at my face. Gazing down into the deep gulf between her largish breasts, and taking in the sight of her kneeling down like a slave girl, I became very aroused.
After we finished, Tomomi murmured out of the blue in a sober voice, lying face down, taking sips from a cold can of Coke, Yup! Still a woman, just like any other.
As for me, I was finding it a major hassle to get up and get dressed again to return to my apartment, so I pretended to be asleep. But Tomomi didn’t ask me to leave. We just fell asleep together, embracing in the nude.
8
AFTER I MADE TOMOMI promise to go out cherry-blossom viewing next Sunday, I brought up the topic of the television drama in which Ilgon Park was appearing.
NHK’s Hisashi Nozawa had written the show for the Saturday evening serial-drama time slot, and nearly ten episodes of it had already been aired to high acclaim.
Park in particular had attracted a great deal of attention for playing one of the three protagonists in the drama, in what was his first television appearance. Having been a stage actor specializing in art-house theater until then, he was apparently regarded highly in the world of stage dramas, but otherwise, as far as the general public was concerned, he was practically a nobody. But after being cast for the television role suddenly, at a time in his life when he was past thirty, he began to try to sell himself as a major character actor. Of course, he was known under a Japanese pseudonym, and the fact that he’d had a wife once, and that he was a father to a boy who was about to turn five, all remained under wraps. Whenever I mentioned Park’s current circumstances, which I’d gleaned from magazine articles, Tomomi simply responded with a nonchalant, Oh well.
It was past twelve when I left New Seoul, but on the way back to my apartment I was overcome by fatigue. It was so sudden and intense I couldn’t walk any further; I had to crouch down by the side of the road and throw up twice, after which I felt considerably better, but then my foot went numb. I somehow managed to crawl into a small alley, where a row of tenements stood, and sat down on the ground, hugging my knees.
I felt myself plunged into a quiet world just then, a world without wind, heat, or light.
While rubbing my sleeping foot, I muttered how tired I was, reflecting on how weary I felt about the manic life I’d come to lead these past several years: about all the different things I did with Eriko; about seeing Mrs. Onishi regularly; about bringing gifts to Takuya; about going somewhere with Tomomi and the boy, acting like they were my real family.
In the end I wasn’t really accomplishing anything, I thought.
I kept still for probably ten minutes. I tried to stand up but still couldn’t get my foot to move, so I dropped to the ground again and wondered how to go about killing some time until my foot recovered. To fend off boredom, I tried to contemplate my future with Eriko, but that train of thought failed to advance even an inch, barricaded at the entrance gate, as it were.
So I said to myself aloud, Sure wish something nice would happen to me. But my voice sounded like someone else’s. I thought about what I was supposed to do tomorrow, but there wasn’t anything in particular. I’d just handle all the small tasks written into the column for tomorrow’s date in my day planner, and at night, end up drinking in Shinjuku or Morishita. That was all.
Without anything else to do, I decided to remember the time when Eriko and I had first met. I was feeling guilty for not being able to think about my future with her, so I wanted to at least prevent my mind drifting away from the thought of her. That’s what I did whenever I felt down—ruminated over somebody I’d come across in my life. To me, it was one way of finding solace. Perhaps this was the only reason I’d kept company with Eriko, Mrs. Onishi, Tomomi, and various other individuals in my past. If you sometimes wallow in your misery—your rock-bottom feelings of despair—and endure them, then everyone in your past becomes illuminated in the buoyant radiance of nostalgia.
Eriko used to turn up in my office sometimes because of her work, mainly associating with the people in the women’s m
agazine section. But she was nonetheless popular and much discussed in the office.
She was an exceptionally beautiful woman, after all.
She used to frequently drop by the women’s magazine editorial desk, which was partitioned off from my editorial division by a single glass screen. She needed to carry out photo shoots for photogravures in the basement studio, so she’d bring along dozens of fashion models, one after another, but not one of them, except perhaps in terms of height, could hold a candle to Eriko. She was that beautiful.
The moment she stepped into the editorial office, all eyes, with the rhythmic regularity of waves, would fall upon her. Meanwhile, it seemed business as usual for Eriko as she went about her affairs in her inimitably practiced, artless way.
Although her voice sounded slightly childish, I was occasionally impressed by how terse and pithy she was, listening to her nearby. She clearly had a certain steadiness about her, the kind of presence of mind possessed by
only those seasoned in the art of attracting attention.
Eriko began paying frequent visits to my office at a time when it was decided that the editorial desk of the women’s magazine would put out a special edition. It was she who made the first move then, the one to break the ice. I was compiling for an essay some shorthand notes from a certain interview, using the wide writing desk usually reserved for senior staff writers. The substance of the interview was about a well-known French scholar of comparative literature analyzing Yukio Mishima’s philosophy of self-determination from the perspective of the classical Japanese view on life and death derived from a Buddhist text, Ojoyoshu, or The Essentials of Rebirth in the Pure Land. To turn this university professor’s boring talk into prose, I’d loaded onto the desk several books by Mishima and a copy of his father’s memoirs, riffling through relevant parts while putting pen to paper. It was quite late at night by then.
The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside Page 9