Do you always address women that way, by their first names? I asked.
“About half the time, I guess,” Nishino replied. His words cut through me. Of course I hadn’t expected him to say, Only with you, Sayuri. But I had hoped the answer might be something more along the lines of, Almost never. I was surprised by the way this wounded me.
The afternoon was full of surprises. I was surprised that men like Nishino existed in this world, the type of man who could slip so smoothly into a woman’s sensibility. I was surprised by the way, before even being aware of it, I was trying to act out the role of the “alluring older woman.” I was surprised by how easily emotions such as jealousy or possessiveness could be aroused with regard to a person for whom I harbored not even the slightest feelings.
Not even the slightest feelings? Were my feelings for Nishino actually so slight, after all? Even now, I cannot say. And at the time, I was even less sure.
At some point, Nishino and I found ourselves talking on the phone.
Come to think of it, almost all of my interactions with him were over the telephone. In the morning, after I’d done all of the cleaning and laundry and the house felt as if it were bathed in white. When I was preparing dinner, and the haze inside my head would grow just a bit denser. When I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and couldn’t fall back asleep, so would sit on the sofa in the living room and just stare off into space. These were the times when Nishino would call me on the phone, as if he were peeking in at me through a hole that had opened up in the wall. This part was crucial. Ultimately, as far as I was concerned, the manner in which Nishino telephoned me was the thing that set him apart as unique.
Surely Nishino must have developed a sixth sense. Without exception, Nishino never called when my husband was by my side, or when one of my daughters had brought my grandchildren over to play. It must have been because I didn’t want it that way. On the other hand, had I preferred to sneak in a conversation with Nishino while I was next to my husband, then that would probably have been when Nishino called.
A man who could satisfy a woman’s desires that even she was unaware of, who could draw them out from deep within her heart—that was Nishino. None of which seemed very significant. Calling on the phone at the desired time. Calling at the desired frequency. Using the desired words of praise. Offering the desired kindness. Scolding in the desired way. Things so insignificant that no man could pull them off. But Nishino did all of these things with ease. He was detestable—both to men and women.
That’s right. People who are too good to be true arouse a certain hatred. Nishino often talked about “the girl he was seeing now.” Where they had gone on a date. What they had eaten. How they had hit on him (like moths to a flame, the girls always hit on Nishino—without him even realizing that he was being hit on). What kind of sex they had had. What they had accused him of. And finally, how the relationship had gone wrong.
In due course, the girls would accuse him of things, and start to make demands. “You’re too cold” or “Your head is always in the clouds” or “You don’t love me enough.” These were the kinds of things the girls always complained about. To my mind, in the hearts of these girls, some part of them hated Nishino’s perfection. His slippery, elusive perfection.
“You don’t cast off your coolness in order to love someone?” I once asked Nishino.
“Sayuri, have you ever loved someone that way?” Nishino tossed the question back at me. His voice was low. It made me shiver. This almost never happened when I was on the phone with Nishino, but I often felt a shiver go through me right before he called me. Could that have been Nishino’s intuition running high? During that time, my own intuition was unusually keen.
“I have,” I replied after giving it some thought. Who was I thinking of at the time? I tried vaguely to call up the face of someone. But a clear image hadn’t formed.
Who did I mean? I wondered, doubting myself. The memory must have been there. It remained unfocused, but I knew it was there. Could I say that it wasn’t Nishino? Perhaps it was. Perhaps it wasn’t. Of that, no one—not even myself—could be sure.
At some point, the telephone calls from Nishino stopped abruptly.
During the time I was talking to Nishino, I had not abandoned my mentality toward economizing, price-worthiness, and bargains. Humans in general—and homemakers in particular—are abundantly able to compartmentalize between this and that. I carried on in the performance of rituals with Mrs. Kobayashi, and I did not neglect the weeding of the garden. I even boasted perfect attendance at the energy-saving cooking club. I had been steadily making kinpira from daikon peelings and Chinese stir-fry from the outer leaves of cabbage, serving these at my table as well as faxing the recipes to both of my daughters. Though I didn’t know whether or not they had made any of the recipes themselves.
I realized there hadn’t been any calls from Nishino a week after he stopped phoning me. In truth, my body knew sooner than that, but my mind refused to admit it. Nishino was also absent from the cooking club (Nishino had perfect attendance, like me, a fact in which I took untold secret pleasure), and each of the club members were saddened by this.
It was at the next meeting that we all found out that Nishino had left the club. I too heard it for the first time then.
I tried to remember what Nishino had talked about the last time we spoke. Trifling things. The dog he had had a long time ago. The scent of the perfume that the girl he was seeing now used. What kind of sound did the ocean make at night? Those were the kinds of things that Nishino had mentioned. It was always like that. Not once did he ever bring up anything of consequence. Then again, there aren’t many things in this world that are really of any consequence. Perhaps there are none at all.
I suffered for three months, thinking about Nishino. Needless to say, during that time I maintained perfect attendance at the cooking club, and I carried on regularly with the weeding, and interacted with the neighbors. But as I went about my life, adhering to my mentality toward economizing, bargains, and price-worthiness, I thought constantly of Nishino’s sweet, low voice.
As those three painful months were drawing to a close, I found myself standing idly in front of a pet store in the middle of the shopping district. Not thinking about what kind of dog Nishino used to have. I was just vaguely watching the dogs. “Young” ladies like me, we tend to think of things in abstraction, much more than most people realize.
Inside the shop, there were tanks of tropical fish and goldfish lined up. My mind still a total blank, I ventured into the store. Then I remembered my older daughter had bought a red-eared slider turtle from this shop. The turtle, which she had named Dolly, had lived a long time. Next to the aquarium of guppies, there was a tank filled with the green moss balls called marimo. There were many of them, in all different sizes, sunk on the bottom of the tank. I reached out my hand and touched the surface of the water. The marimo—all of them, large and small—were utterly still. Marimo are found at the bottom of lakes, where they gradually grow bigger. My younger daughter had written a composition about them when she was in school. Mustn’t the marimo get lonely?—she had included that line in her essay.
Mustn’t the marimo get lonely? I repeated these words over and over in my head as I stared at the marimo. The marimo seemed very much like Nishino. This thought occurred to me, for some reason. For an instant, I considered buying one of the marimo, bringing it home and putting it in the sunny spot on top of the sideboard in the living room, as a memento of my feelings for him. But I gave up the idea. “Young” ladies like me, we have a tendency toward unsentimentality, much more so than most people realize.
As I stared at the marimo, I thought about the sound of Nishino’s voice. I thought about Nishino’s selfishness. I thought about Nishino’s tenderness. I thought about all the things I could remember about Nishino. And then, at last, I thought about that moment when I had forgiven
him for everything. I reminisced about it all, everything up until the end, to my heart’s content.
Once these thoughts stopped running through my head, I knew that my period of suffering was over. I had fond memories of Nishino. That was how I felt. And yet, I knew this was a lie.
I thought back over it. Why only remember the good parts?
Ten years from now, if I’m still alive, I’ll come back and buy a marimo. I’ll put it in a glass bowl and set it out in a sunlit spot.
The sun was setting, and the streetlights were starting to go on in the shopping district. Would I still be here in another ten years? Would I still be able to recall Nishino’s voice?
Goodbye, Nishino, I said softly, and I waved to the aquarium filled with marimo. When I left the store, all of the other shops were brightly lit up. I was lost among the bustle of the evening street.
GRAPES
Nishino quickly let out a sigh.
“Thirty million years from now, this place will merge with the Andromeda Galaxy,” he said.
“When you say ‘this place,’ just which place do you mean?” I asked, and Nishino let out an even deeper sigh.
“I mean the Earth and the Sun and Pluto and even the stars further away—all of it,” he replied.
“So, is there something wrong with this place being joined up with Andromeda?”
“It would be brighter. Meaning, it wouldn’t get dark at night.”
When I looked at Nishino’s face, his brow was furrowed and his expression was serious.
“I think it would be nice if it didn’t get dark at night,” I said softly.
Nishino shook his head. “A world without darkness is unthinkable.”
Nishino pulled on my hair as he said this. I think he thought of this as a demonstration of affection. I, however, did not appreciate having my hair pulled.
Andromeda contains so many stars, there’s no way it would ever be night, Nishino explained. It would always be daytime. Everything filled with light. There would be no shadows. Nishino gave another sigh.
“Does that mean that there wouldn’t be any more cloudy days either?” I asked.
“Well, there would probably still be clouds.”
“What about rainy days?”
“It would probably still rain.”
That would be okay, then, I said. I liked rainy days. And I liked cloudy days even more. The day when I had first met Nishino had been a blazing sunny day.
It was at the end of the summer, in Enoshima. My relatives ran a beachside refreshment shack, and I worked there part-time. Every weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, I worked two days straight. From the beginning of July, when the beach shack opened, to early September, when they closed it up, I commuted down to Enoshima, never missing a day. I may have been feeling a bit bored and adrift—since, although I had been accepted at my first-choice university, soon after classes had started the previous spring I began to find them dull and so rarely showed my face on campus—nevertheless I had always loved the beach shack. I had been working there every year since middle school.
Nishino had been accompanied by a woman. She looked to be just past thirty, with short hair and a very nice figure. Nishino was in his mid-fifties, which meant that she was quite a bit younger, but Nishino was youthful—in appearance as well as in substance—so the age difference between them didn’t seem so vast.
No matter how chic or urbane the men and women might have appeared when they arrived in Enoshima in their street clothes, once they had changed into bathing suits and were eating sea snails cooked in their own shells and buying nacre key chains in the souvenir shops, they were no different from other “native Japanese.” Enoshima was the kind of place that had an equalizing effect.
However, the woman who had accompanied Nishino was different. She wore a gold chain around her slender ankle. Her pedicure was the color of the deep ocean. She may have looked like a Japanese person but her mien called to mind a place far from Enoshima. Perhaps the deserted beach of an unknown southern island. Or the white sands of a dark and looming seaside forest.
“That girl—it was like she was always off in the clouds. She didn’t seem to belong anywhere.” This had been Nishino’s reply some time later, when I had remarked on my impression of the woman who had been with him.
“Why would you break up with such a charming lady?” I asked.
Nishino stifled a laugh. “Because, I fell in love with you, Ai!”
“So, Nishino, you mean to say that, when you fall for the next girl, you break up with the previous girl right away?” I asked, raising my voice. Nishino opened his eyes wide and peered closely at my face. His look seemed to say, You’re so young, yet you’re so quaintly old-fashioned.
“I do not break up with them right away,” Nishino replied, after a moment had passed.
“Which means you two-time?”
“I would if I could, but usually the girl doesn’t stand for it.”
“So then what happens?”
“I end up getting dumped. By both of them.”
Once it comes out—in some way or another—that he’s been two-timing, things are a mess for a couple of weeks. About a month later, the strong-willed ones (and occasionally a weak-willed one) will make up her mind to leave. As for the girl who’s left behind, the situation with her remains cheerful and pleasant for an average of three months. But once the thrill of victory is gone, the girl begins to reflect calmly upon Nishino’s past behavior and, by the fourth month, the accusations begin to fly that Nishino is two-timing again. And then it’s not just about two-timing—the fifth month brings full-scale complaints that Nishino is constitutionally commitment-phobic or that he has a deep-rooted tendency for cheating. I just can’t trust you anymore, and so on. I still love you, but it’s too painful. These were the kinds of things said by the girl who’s left behind when, ultimately, in the sixth month, she leaves.
It takes about half a year to reach this “final conclusion,” Nishino said with a laugh. It’s like the laws of physics. Why is it that, eventually, all girls end up adhering to the same formula in their response, no matter whether they are chubby or skinny, laid-back or uptight, conventionally beautiful or idiosyncratically striking, pescatarians or red-blooded meat-lovers? Nishino inclined his head in wonder.
I myself was just as baffled by Nishino, a man in his mid-fifties who resembled boys my own age, teenagers who thought of nothing but girls.
“Nishino, do you really believe that all girls are exactly the same?” I asked.
“I could be wrong,” Nishino said leisurely. “All the girls I’ve ever known, at least, they’ve all been the same, down to the last.”
Well, then, the girls you date must all be pretty boring, I thought fleetingly, but I immediately regretted feeling mean toward all the girls Nishino had dated whom I had never laid eyes on. I bet one would be hard-pressed to find a girl out there who qualified as “boring.” More likely, they were quite a bit scarcer than boys who were “boring.” I would have said as much to Nishino, but I figured he would make fun of me or call me a nit-picker, saying I must be in favor of female supremacy, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Are you angry?” Nishino asked. I had grown very quiet and still. “I don’t mean you, Ai. I’m sure you’re different,” Nishino went on.
Not you, you’re different—that was pretty cliché, wasn’t it? I thought to myself. This guy Nishino was like some kind of sweetheart swindler.
“I mean it, Ai. There’s something about you that’s different from all the other girls I’ve ever known.” Nishino grinned, and then he kissed me. I kept my eyes open and stayed still.
No doubt the thing about me that differed from all the other girls was that I didn’t harbor the smallest bit of yearning for Nishino. It wasn’t just Nishino for that matter—I had never harbored feelings for a boy at all, not once. Sure, I liked going out
drinking or seeing a movie or simply talking with them just fine, but I had never really fallen for one or found any of them particularly memorable. Not in all of my eighteen years.
So. I had met Nishino at the beach shack. He had been accompanied by the short-haired woman with the nice figure. The following week, Nishino came back again. This time, he was by himself.
“Are there any good bars around here?” Nishino had first said to me. This old guy seems out of place, I had thought.
“There are, if you don’t mind walking a bit, in the opposite direction from the station,” I said, giving him an earnest answer anyway.
“What time do you get off?” Nishino persisted.
I was silent. I had no obligation to tell a complete stranger information like that. I had just spun around and was about to retreat inside when, from behind me, I heard him apologize.
Sorry, that was a rude thing to ask. Nishino spoke in a soft voice.
Later, I told Nishino that his apology had seemed to reflect the wisdom of age, and he had nodded.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize—all too well—that things like manners and reason are not simply for appearance’s sake. What’s more, even when you’re as polite as can be, personal relationships can still fall to pieces. People are very complicated, you know. Nishino sighed as he said this.
I had plenty of doubts about just how polite (principally, to women) and reasonable (again, principally, to women) Nishino had actually been. He had yet to demonstrate either of these qualities to me, at least. Or so I thought.
“You’ve got a boyfriend, don’t you?” Kikumi said to me not long after I had met Nishino.
“Not really,” I replied. Kikumi was staring fixedly at the area around the nape of my neck.
“Then how come you’re hardly ever at your place lately? How come you get so many phone calls from some guy who just says, ‘It’s me” without giving his name? How come sometimes you smell like a certain unfamiliar cologne, Ai?” Kikumi asked in a single breath. I told Kikumi I thought she sounded like a girl chiding her boyfriend for having an affair, and she narrowed her eyes at me.
The Ten Loves of Nishino Page 12