The Ten Loves of Nishino

by Hiromi Kawakami

  I will as soon as you let me be your lover.

  “There’s something wrong with you, Nishino,” I said.

  Nishino nodded, a grave look on his face. “I know better than anyone that there’s something wrong with me.”

  Although Nishino always had a certain derisiveness about him, when he said this, he seemed dead serious.

  “Okay, then, from now on, you ought to walk the straight and narrow path,” I said.

  Nishino looked up at me and sighed.

  “I’m scared to even take the first step.”

  ‘What are you scared of?”

  “You know, that I’ll end up with a straight and narrow life.”

  “And you would hate that?”

  “It’s not that I would hate it—it’s that I’m scared of it.”

  Nishino uttered these words quickly. Then he buried his face in my chest and was still for a few moments.

  I love women’s breasts, Nishino liked to say. His cell phone rang, but Nishino didn’t answer it.

  Shouldn’t you get that? I asked.

  No. I don’t want to, Nishino replied. I’m serious, you know.

  He went on, You’re being mean, Eriko. His head was still buried in my breasts. I was idly staring at Maow’s plate. I was on the verge of falling in love with Nishino but, I told myself, I couldn’t love him. I thought about how strange the word “love” was. It was just like the inside of the antique shop where I had bought Maow’s plate. Totally silent, and dusty. Mementos from long ago, piled up in a jumble. Sort of nostalgic, and sad.

  Still buried in my chest, Nishino was quiet, his eyes closed.

  Nishino left just before Maow left.

  “I’m being transferred,” Nishino said.

  “Oh?” I replied. My voice was calm.

  “Eriko, why don’t you marry me?” As Nishino said this, he shifted his body aslant, so as to avoid my gaze.

  I giggled. But other than that I didn’t reply.

  Nishino glanced at me but quickly averted his eyes. Maow had left bits of grilled sardine on her plate. Instead of looking at me, Nishino stared at the sardines.

  “Would you like some sardines?” I asked.

  “I would,” Nishino replied in a low voice. “I wish I were Maow. Then you would give me sardines or mackerel every day.”

  The tone of his voice was facetious, so I laughed. But in the next moment, my laughter stopped when I noticed that Nishino’s eyes weren’t beaming this time.

  “Are you actually being serious?” I asked.

  Nishino lowered his gaze. “I’m not sure myself,” he replied. “All this time, I’ve been careful not to end up that way.”

  I had to laugh at what he’d said about being “careful.” And now Nishino laughed with me. It would soon be time for me to extricate myself from Nishino. My instincts warned me not to get too close to him. Otherwise, I really would fall for him. And Nishino might even end up falling in love with me too.

  Quietly, I carried Maow’s plate to the sink. I scraped the sardine bits into the strainer and started washing the plate. I could feel Nishino’s eyes on me. Almost painfully, I felt his gaze settle on my shoulders as I stood before the sink.

  My only lover is Maow, only Maow. I recited this, like a mantra, as I ran the water.

  “Eriko,” Nishino said my name.

  “What?” I replied lightly, my back still facing Nishino.

  “Eriko,” Nishino repeated. I still didn’t turn around. Maow’s plate was so clean it glistened, but I kept on rinsing it.

  “I’ll call you,” Nishino said. “I’ll call every night.”

  Good, I replied, still with my back to him.

  Then Nishino was gone.

  Even after he had left my apartment, I kept washing Maow’s plate. The plate gleamed. Usually it looked old and kind of weathered, but under the water it had a pretty sparkle.

  I made it through, I thought to myself. I managed to get through this quite well. Without ever falling in love. And by not falling in love, I didn’t inflict any harm. I didn’t sustain any harm either.

  I took a leisurely bath, even put on a mask and gave myself a manicure. I kept checking in with myself, testing whether or not my heart was churning, but whatever waves I felt were only ripples.

  I got into bed, closed my eyes, and tried to fall asleep. But sleep proved rather elusive. I thought about Maow. Tomorrow I would treat Maow to some tuna sashimi.

  The moment I decided this, though, the waves rolled in. Big, roiling swells. I missed Nishino. I wasn’t in love with him, I tried to tell myself through clenched teeth. It wasn’t love. I just—I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get this close to him. I repeated this to myself.

  Sleep finally began to descend upon me. But then it occurred to me that Nishino’s cell phone hadn’t rung that night. There hadn’t been a single interruption from the girls who were always calling him.

  I realized, just before drifting off, that Nishino must have turned his phone off. And as soon as I realized this, I fell into a deep sleep. A part of me feared that Nishino may have actually meant what he said.

  I tried to recall when it was that Maow left.

  The last time I saw Maow was New Year’s Eve—I’m sure of that. She had polished off the salmon that was leftover from the kombu maki rolls I had made. When I called out to her, “Maow,” she had replied in turn, “Maow.” As usual.

  But from the next day on, Maow stopped showing up. I had a good laugh, thinking to myself that she must have taken a holiday because of the New Year, but a week went by, and then a month, and still no sign of Maow.

  It had been three months since Nishino left, and his calls were becoming less frequent.

  I’ve been abandoned, by my lover and by my good friend. I’d murmur these words to myself sometimes, as I stepped out onto the veranda in the winter sunshine. I missed Maow. I tried saying it out loud. “I miss you, Maow.” I didn’t say a word about missing Nishino. Naturally.

  I washed Maow’s plate well and put it away on a low shelf in the cupboard. Cats other than Maow sometimes appeared on my veranda, but I didn’t feed them. Every so often, I would vividly recall Nishino’s voice and expressions, the way he could be both aloof and sensitive at the same time.

  What was it that Nishino was afraid of? And what about me—why had I been afraid to love Nishino? At the time, it had all seemed perfectly clear to me, but now in hindsight, everything was vague. Maow’s lithe movements were no longer distinct in my memory either.

  I wondered if, even now, in whatever faraway place Nishino was, if he was being careful not to fall in love with someone. Was he chatting up all the girls—and seducing some of them—in that affable voice of his?

  I should have given out sardines and mackerel every day. To Nishino, I mean. Then we might have lived together happily ever after. There are moments when I feel that way. But those moments quickly pass. And then I simply miss Maow. I miss her keenly. Maow, I call out for her. And then, in a quiet voice, I call out his name too.

  Nishino.

  The winter sun continues to shine on the veranda.

  MARIMO

  It was at the Energy-Saving Cooking Club that I became acquainted with Nishino. The club met twice a month at the home of Mrs. Yamamoto, who lived in the neighborhood. As the name suggested, it was a cooking course for those looking to conserve energy.

  It was the slogan I saw on the advertisement in the residential newsletter that motivated me to attend the course. “The Energy-Saving Cooking Club—economize, reduce waste, and have fun cooking on ¥30,000 a month!”

  This looks promising, I murmured to myself, having spent the entire morning weeding the garden. I loved the word “economize”—though I doubted that I was alone in that regard, amongst other full-time homemakers.

  Economize. Worth the price. B
argain. I was enchanted by such words and phrases. During the so-called high-speed growth period, and what was referred to as the bubble years, and even throughout the recession that followed—I had come to love hearing these words, no matter what era we were in. That’s not to say that I don’t spend money. I have a thirty-year mortgage on a two-story, ready-built, thirteen-hundred-square-foot house with an attached garage and a nine-hundred-square-foot yard. I sent my two daughters to university. And I gave those girls a proper wedding reception, with a seating chart and everything. My family’s ancestral burial plot requires a plane trip to get to it, so I entombed some of the ashes in a new grave at a massive cemetery an hour’s drive away. This enables us to get to the grave easily (visiting graves being a hobby of my husband’s for the last few years although, until my daughters grew up, his hobbies had involved more active outdoor activities), and my husband traded in the white Nissan Sunny that we had had for twenty-three years for a red Nissan March. (I personally have no interest in riding around in a red car, but my husband simply insisted. After more than thirty years of living together, I never would have expected that my husband had been yearning for a red car. Life can be so unpredictable, at least when it comes to the color of car that my husband likes . . . to say nothing about what happened with Nishino.)

  After I had finished weeding and was leaning up against the gate, surveying the garden with a feeling of deep self-satisfaction, Mrs. Kobayashi, my neighbor from three houses over, called out to me. Whenever I’m doing yard work, without fail Mrs. Kobayashi will pass by and say, “Ah, Mrs. Sasaki, always working so hard!” She patrolled the neighborhood several times a day, always calling out to each person she came across. My garden must have been included on her “route,” as it were.

  “Ah, Mrs. Sasaki, always working so hard!”

  On that day, Mrs. Kobayashi made her stock comment. If I ran into her at the gate as I was on my way out, it would be “And where are you off to?” Or if I were coming home, it was “And where have you been?” The pattern was so regular, it was like tea ceremony.

  “It’s such a puny little garden, the least I can do is keep the weeds out.”

  I had my own pattern of responses. Mrs. Kobayashi had a set of topics—the young single people who didn’t follow the rules for putting out the garbage, the declining birth rate, global warming—and she would chatter away about these, without pause, for exactly seven minutes and thirty seconds. I had recently begun timing her, to see just how long she could go on chatting by herself. The longest was thirteen minutes and twenty-five seconds, while the shortest was forty seconds. The brevity of the latter was due to the fact that she was interrupted by a sudden evening rain shower. It seems all humans are fallible in the face of nature’s greatness.

  Mrs. Kobayashi’s latest concerns were men and women over the age of thirty who were not married, couples who were married but who weren’t having children, and then general ecological awareness, it seemed. Unmarried people and childless couples were the objects of her criticism. Ecology, on the other hand, was the target of her praise, while those who were not ecologically aware naturally became the object of her reproach. Mrs. Kobayashi was clearly a dualistic thinker. I would bet she had dabbled in Cartesian theory in her youth.

  “The garbage attracts the crows and we can’t have that, can we?” I was able to break in after a moment of silence just past the seven-and-a-half-minute mark. One thing I had learned over the course of living here for twenty-five years was that disregarding the etiquette of conversational interjections was a sure-fire way to arouse Mrs. Kobayashi’s ire. Such as not responding to queries. No matter how vastly imbalanced the exchanges may have been. Needless to say, interpersonal relationships are not mathematically divisible.

  However, on that day, Mrs. Kobayashi brought news about Mrs. Yamamoto’s energy-saving cooking club. Without expressing any of her opinions regarding one’s freedom not to marry or not to have children, fortunately. Mrs. Kobayashi informed me that there was still space available in the club. I decided on the spot to put in a request to join—Mrs. Kobayashi served as the membership coordinator.

  Nishino stood out among the “young” ladies who made up the majority of the club’s members. (This was how I referred to women of my own generation. The word I liked to use for “young” was myorei, in which the character for myo included the pictographs for both “little” and “woman,” which meant that it was usually used to describe girls as well as young women. However, this same myo has several connotations: highly skilled, or unusual, or esoteric. Following this logic—as it occurred to me one day—when myo refers to age, its various meanings are more applicable to women “of a certain age” rather than simply young women.)

  For one thing, Nishino was quite a handsome man. Secondly, he was clean-cut. Furthermore, Nishino was kind and courteous. And to top it all off, he had a steady job with a respectable company.

  All of this sent the “young” ladies into a tizzy. I of course was no exception. How can I put it—yes, that’s right—as far as we ladies were concerned, by embodying all these things, Nishino seemed to exemplify the idea of a “bargain” with his very existence.

  “And what is it you do—” Mrs. Kobayashi had asked straightaway, after Nishino’s background check had passed through the initial stage (during the first break in our cooking practice, the “young” ladies had casually, and then more openly, flung assorted questions at Nishino like arrows). “—that enables you to slip out of the office? In the middle of the day like this?”

  Even to such an obviously rude question, Nishino responded courteously. At the firm where he worked, his department was now involved in the distribution of pots and pans made in Europe. Nowadays, amid demands for ecological awareness, there was a need for cookware that avoided the waste and disposal of ingredients. To this end, he had been dispatched to cooking sites in the field for the purpose of conducting research.

  At first, Mrs. Kobayashi had listened skeptically to Nishino’s formal explanation (he later confided to me that he had assumed that very tone for her benefit—it was one of his sales techniques, he had laughed refreshingly), but her expression had instantly softened at the mention of “ecology” and “avoiding waste.” Mrs. Kobayashi had been a fan of Nishino’s ever since. But having her as a fan meant that, every time, Nishino now found himself subject to Mrs. Kobayashi’s ritual of perpetual chatter, to which he submitted without complaint. It has long been my opinion that the inattentive cannot keep company with homemakers, but even for a company man, he demonstrated considerable skill.

  Nishino was not inattentive. Far from it. By his third time attending the energy-saving cooking club, he had won over all of the “young” ladies. When Nishino entered the classroom, a number of them would rush over and crowd around him. Even the ones who didn’t run over would watch out of the corner of their eyes, and whenever Nishino broke into a smile, they would return his smile threefold (the ladies’ smiling faces being both literally and figuratively large).

  This could be dangerous, I thought to myself at first. The sight of a single male seal holding sway over so many female seals—it wasn’t pretty, was it? But little by little I too became convinced. The female seals throng around the male seal because they desire him. They aren’t submitting themselves to him—clearly they do it joyfully. Perhaps the male seal finds himself at a loss, there amongst the females. But a male seal couldn’t tear himself away from the females, not once they have gathered momentum. Not even our male seal.

  I was having more and more fun. Women are beautiful when they are dedicating themselves to something. Or so the magazines often tell us. The “young” ladies who were dedicated to Nishino were certainly beautiful. Even Mrs. Kobayashi ceased her criticism of young and unmarried men and women past the age of thirty. Because Nishino was thirty-seven years old. And a bachelor. Who lived alone in Tokyo. An alluring company man. Yukihiko Nishino.

  “Hey, Sayur
i Sasaki!” This was what Nishino said, the first time he spoke to me. I was at an art-house cinema, and after the showing had ended and the lights had come up, there—sitting in the seat beside me—was Nishino.

  Still suffused with euphoria from the film, I stared at Nishino vacantly. I was surprised that he knew my first name. But I concealed my pleasure, assuming the decorum of a worldly “young” lady.

  “Nishino, what are you doing in a place like this? What about work?” I quickly asked, despite the fact that I had criticized Mrs. Kobayashi for being similarly rude.

  Nishino hesitated for a moment, and then eventually blurted out, “I’m playing hooky.”

  Nishino did not speak to me in the explanatory tone he used with the women at the energy-saving cooking club. Afterward, while we drank coffee in a café, Nishino told me, “It’s because you seem different from the other ladies, Sayuri.”

  The phrase “You seem different from the others” is generally thought of as a clincher. It’s written in all the books. I had always assumed that I would never fall for such a line. But since no one had ever spoken such words to me, I had been unable to confirm whether I could actually remain unfazed when I heard them.

  All is lost, I thought to myself at the time. The moment he said those words to me, I forgave Nishino everything. Even though up until that point, there wasn’t a single thing that Nishino needed me to forgive him for.

  I forgave Nishino his past, I forgave Nishino his present, and I forgave Nishino his eternal future.

  While we drank coffee, Nishino and I discussed the film we had just seen. Then we talked about the cooking club, and finally, we touched upon some of our favorite authors. Among the authors Nishino liked, there was one whom I also liked and one whom I hated. By the time we finished drinking our coffee, I no longer disliked that author all that much. Nishino called me by my name several times. Sayuri.