Hardboiled & Hard Luck

by Banana Yoshimoto

  I had a good view of the branches of the trees that lined the street. Young men and women were looking through the clothes at a used-clothing shop; they were having fun, making lots of noise. There was a greengrocer next door with a whole array of different colored vegetables set out under the lights, all of them looking really lovely. Orange persimmon. The brown of burdock root, the orange of carrots. Colors the gods made, so gorgeous one never tires of looking at them.

  A month earlier, I never would have believed that I would be feeling so calm again so soon, admiring vegetables while I sat drinking a cup of coffee. One never knows what the future may hold. In our hearts, we were all peacefully saying goodbye, to my sister’s life. Or rather, we were moving in that direction, because we had no choice. That was the unbending path down which we were headed, as quietly as the deepening of autumn and the onset of winter.

  2

  Stars

  Late one afternoon, I went to the office where Kuni used to work. Total strangers kept coming up to me with tears streaming from their eyes to say one thing or another. After a while it started getting on my nerves, though I felt their pain.

  The woman at the next desk began crying when I went through the things in Kuni’s desk; she said she couldn’t believe how much my hands looked like my sister’s. I told her we looked the same naked, too, but she was in no condition to laugh at my joke; she left the office early, still crying.

  Everyone wanted to touch me, the way people do at funerals, which made me feel very ill at ease. But I could sympathize with that, too. I learned that Kuni had been a cheerful and dedicated worker, and that she was great with computers. She had been so neat that there was hardly anything for me to get rid of.

  I found lots of things in her locker that seemed out of place at the office: a pair of outlandish ski boots, for instance, and all sorts of snowboarding equipment, which she had just gotten into recently.

  When the time came to save Kuni’s e-mail on a disk and erase all the personal information from her computer’s hard drive, even I started to cry. The man who was helping out, one of her coworkers, cried with me. This stranger and I sat in the secretary’s office where Kuni had worked, passing tissues back and forth. All these chores made me even sadder than the sight of Kuni hooked up to the respirator, eyes staring into space. I mentioned that to Kuni’s coworker, and he said through his tears that he understood. Being with you is agonizing, he said, because it feels like I’m with Kuni. The way you talk, your gestures—it forces me to admit that she’s gone, he said. You make me remember her.

  I didn’t really know much about Kuni’s day-to-day life. Just that she worked as a secretary for one of the company’s directors.

  But there at the office, I realized that the loss of one ordinary worker is enough to send emotions rippling through the entire staff of a company. And the traces of that emotion would never disappear. I understood then that I couldn’t just give up on the world. It would have been easier if I were the kind of person who could simply blame the company for Kuni’s death, but I knew that she and her own bad luck were the real culprits, so I couldn’t try to put the blame anywhere else. And so I was left with nothing but an inward glow, a trace of the tiny, respectful, adorable light she had given off. No doubt she had worked herself so hard, both mentally and physically, because she didn’t want to cause problems for the people she loved. No one was to blame. Life in a company is hard: when you’re working frantically to prepare things for your successor, no one tells you to go home and take it easy, because if you don’t you might have a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Kuni’s coworker and I both had red eyes by the time we finished what we’d been doing. Around then, my dad arrived. He went in to greet my sister’s boss and the company president.

  After my dad and I said goodbye to everyone, a big crowd of people helped us carry my sister’s things down to the underground garage. All these nice men and women in their suits, people I’d never meet again. Somehow we managed to pack everything into the car, and I waved goodbye. It was the first time I had met most of these people, and yet for some reason I had the illusion that I was the one who had been working there, and I was quitting my job to get married, and the things we were taking with us were my own.

  “Why did you come in the small car, Dad?” I said after the car started moving. “Didn’t I ask you to bring the station wagon?”

  “Your mother took the wagon to the hospital,” said my dad. “She’s so worn out that she can’t think straight anymore. I suppose it didn’t even occur to her that she didn’t need the big car; she just got in the wagon and drove off. So when I went out to the lot to get the car, this was the only one there. What was I supposed to do?”

  There were so many of my sister’s things in the car that I ended up sitting in a very peculiar position, scrunched up in the passenger seat.

  The streetlights seemed strangely close from this angle, and they were very pretty. And I could see lots of stars. I felt sick to my stomach, but I thought I could put up with the discomfort if it was just for a short time, because it made the world seem kind of new.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk to me from down there,” said my dad.

  “I can’t help it, can I? Can I lay my head on your lap?”

  “Sure.”

  “I feel like a kid again,” I said. My dad’s thighs felt just as hard as they had when I was little. “Yes, a young, beautiful woman is resting her head on your lap, it’s true, but I don’t want you getting excited and having an erection, OK?”

  “Why would you make such a vulgar joke about your own father?” asked my dad.

  The stars were beautiful. The streets kept whizzing by.

  “Apparently they’re going to take your sister off the respirator soon.”

  There was no difference between my dad’s tone when he said this and when he’d said “Pooch is dead” when the dog we had had for so long and who had liked my father best passed away. That’s how deep his sorrow was.

  “God, how this could have happened?” said my dad. “It’s like a bad dream.”

  Like a bad dream.

  “It really is a bad dream,” I said.

  We lapsed into silence. I inhaled the scent of my father’s pants.

  Unfortunately the car also smelled of my sister’s perfume, the scent of which hovered over all her possessions.

  Maybe I’ll switch to this perfume, I thought. Because it made me feel as if my sister were riding in the backseat, and I really did feel like a child again.

  Back in the days when our family went on drives.

  The Guerlain perfume my precocious sister had used even in her teens.

  “Are you going out with that guy?” my dad asked.

  The suddenness of it jolted me back into reality.

  “What guy? You mean that fat guy at the office, the one I was crying with?”

  “No, not him,” said my father. “The weird brother.”

  “Sakai? Our relationship isn’t at all like that,” I said. “And you shouldn’t say things like that. He’s a really nice person, you know.”

  “Maybe, but if you were to marry him or something, that spineless brother of his would be a relative, and then he’d come see us again, right? I can’t stand the thought of that. Just thinking about it makes me angry.”

  “I doubt he would come. Besides, Sakai and I really aren’t going out or anything. He’s a great guy, though. I think so, anyway. At any rate, I know it’s hard not to bad-mouth his brother, but Kuni did fall in love with him, after all. Let’s try not to say nasty things about him.”

  “I didn’t really mean it. But what’s he thinking, going off to his parents’ house like that? It’s not a joke, you know? He must have been crazy if he thought he could marry my daughter if that’s all the feeling he has for her.”

  Realizing that my father needed a bad guy right now,
I gave up defending him. I didn’t have much of a sense of what my sister’s former fiancé was like. All I knew was that she loved him, and she had gotten as swept up in her love as she always did.

  “We should be glad she didn’t marry someone so flaky,” I said.

  “What is there to be glad about now!” shouted my dad.

  “I didn’t mean it,” I said.

  “God, it hurts. It really hurts.”

  My father’s voice came from deep down in his belly, and I was feeling carsick; the combination of my queasiness and his pain made me start crying again. The tears I shed lately, particularly those linked to memories, were all but meaningless. They came out on their own, like bird shit. My dad knew this, and kept quiet.

  The town where I was born and raised kept whizzing by.

  “Mom isn’t doing too well, is she?” I said. “Maybe I’ll stay at home tonight. I want to go though Kuni’s things, anyway.”

  “Yes, you should stay,” said my father. “She’d like that.”

  “OK. I’ll make something for dinner, then.”

  “How about a hot pot or something? I’d like something hot.”

  “Sure, if you can stop by the store.”

  Just then, as we were talking in the warm car, it hit me: we were having a good time again.

  Kuni hadn’t only given us pain, she had also created moments for us that were so much more concentrated than usual. That’s how I saw it then. In the world we now lived in, the good times were a hundred times better. If we couldn’t catch that sparkle, only the agony would remain. Each new day was a struggle, in both the positive and the negative senses. I didn’t want my mind to be muddled when the time came to say goodbye to my sister.

  3

  Music

  A few days later, Kuni was taken off the respirator. We all confirmed together that she was dead.

  It said in a book that my sister’s brain had dissolved. But from the outside, her face looked exactly the same: Kuni’s face. After we did her makeup, she seemed even more alive. She looked as if she were about to leave for work. I brushed my finger across the foundation in her compact. Kuni always kept everything so clean—the mirror was spotless, and the sponge. I felt her life in everything. We dressed her in her favorite clothes and filled the coffin with her favorite flowers.

  My sister’s face was lovely when they carried her off to the crematory.

  I had wanted my mind to be clear when this time came, but of course I was in a daze the whole time. I felt as if my eyes weren’t focusing, because they didn’t want to see what was happening. And that really made me feel lost, as if I were swimming in a dream world. My head was reeling the whole time; I just had to get through each new thing that happened as quickly as possible. My mom only stayed in bed for one day.

  Sakai wasn’t there for my sister’s last moments, of course, but his brother was. Even with my dad punching him and my mom wailing at him, he stayed and saw my sister through the last hours of her life, and then helped out with the funeral. His tenacity then was splendid. If it were me, just getting looks like the ones my parents were giving him would have been enough to send me running back home. I had a chance to talk with him for a little while. He wasn’t a bad guy. If things had happened the way they were supposed to, I would have been seeing a lot of him from now on, and we could have taken our time getting to know each other over the years. Now, after a single conversation at this sad event, I was unlikely ever to see him again. It’s so strange—the ties that bind us to people. But I know Kuni was glad he came. After all, she was a woman who lived in love.

  I was lonely now that Kuni had officially died and I couldn’t go see her any more.

  Sometimes I would burst out sobbing. One evening when I was taking a bath, for instance, I noticed that the Bulgari animal soap she had brought back for me as a souvenir of a trip overseas had lost its animal shape, even though it had seemed like it would last forever, and was now just a round blob.

  Time passes.

  Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.

  I realized again how much I wanted to see my sister in the flesh, even the way she looked when she was dying. Because back when she was still in the hospital, I had been able to take that soap down and use it without giving it a second thought.

  I made a lot of progress in Italian, because I had nothing else to do.

  Later on, there would be my life in Italy. I would stay in touch with my mom and dad and be a support for them while I was gone. And I would throw myself wholeheartedly into whatever I did, so that I could get a good job. It would take a tremendous amount of energy to get my interrupted life back on track, whether it ended up being a twisted version of my old life or a life in which I gained something despite the loss of my sister. I also would never forget that now I was the only child my parents had.

  I saw Sakai two more times: once on the day of the funeral, then again on the evening of the following Sunday. Somehow evening seemed like the best time to get together with him.

  I had been dashing about in my mourning clothes, making arrangements to have boxed lunches distributed to the guests; when I saw Sakai, I heaved a sigh of relief. Just knowing that there was someone in the temple who could take care of himself, whose feelings didn’t need to concern me right then, just knowing that his vibrant light was shining there made me breathe a little easier. I hurried toward him, smiling.

  “Can we get together one day soon?” he asked.

  I smiled. “This is hardly the right occasion to ask me that.”

  “How about Sunday? Are you free Sunday?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  We agreed on a time and place. The temple was flooded with afternoon light, and the mood was peaceful. Sakai said he was going for a walk, and disappeared among the graves.

  The sky was that ambiguous color peculiar to Tokyo: very faint traces of white seemed to have been mixed into the blue. The trees among the gravestones looked cold and barren. The guests all had on black coats; they were like crows wheeling around the temple. I didn’t feel cold. I felt relaxed now because Sakai was there. I had never felt such a sense of complete reliance on someone—on the very fact of his existence, the knowledge that he was alive. I felt like a little bird gazing up at the sky from her nest. I knew he was weird, and kind of a fraud, and that he was cold and unreasonably cheerful, and that he had no sense of responsibility. But none of that mattered. I could rest my wings in that endless expanse. And that was enough. Maybe that’s all our relationship was. Right now and forever.

  After Kuni died, I ate nothing but curry—her favorite food.

  So naturally Sakai and I went for curry, too.

  The restaurant was kind of strange: you sat right on the floor, and the curry you got was Indian, not the Japanese-style curry most places serve. People stared as they walked past the window. We concentrated on our curry, sweating.

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Sakai?” I asked.

  “No, not really,” he said. “Just girls who are friends.”

  “I wonder if we’ll ever get together like this again,” I said.

  “I’m sure we will. And it won’t be too long, either.”

  “The timing is so bad... it’s hard to think right now.”

  “I’d be surprised if you suggested that we start dating right now.”

  “I talked to your brother at the funeral, you know. Quite a lot.”

  “I bet he was really weak.”

  “Yeah, he was crying the whole time.”

  “You know... I really hate it when people talk like experts about things they’ve never experienced, so I don’t want to say much about all this. I’m sorr
y. Actually, I once lost someone close to me. But it didn’t happen like it did with your sister, and I’ve never been a parent. So I have a hard time imagining what it’s like, even for my own brother. And for Kuni, of course. And for you. I don’t understand how it feels, but even so I think I kind of get what’s happening, just from what I’ve seen and heard, and what I’ve felt. There are so many things I want to say to you. But I can’t say them—they just won’t come out.”

  Sakai said all this in a very formal tone.

  “Not many people have experienced this sort of thing,” I said, smiling. “And I don’t particularly want people to understand, anyway. I realize how good you’ve been to me, though.”

  When we went outside, the winter sky was full of stars.

  “There was a passage in a book I read a long time ago,” Sakai said, “about how if you hear extraordinarily beautiful music on a street corner, it means that the same piece will be playing for you when you die. The main character is walking down the street one fine afternoon when this incredibly lovely melody starts coming from a record store across the street. So he sits down to listen. His spiritual guide tells him this is a sign that destiny has put before him, a sign that shows death is present in every aspect of people’s lives. And the spiritual guide says that when the man leaves the world, he’ll hear the incomparably beautiful tone of that trumpet once more.”

  “Hey, the same thing happened to me!” I said. “One winter afternoon I was in the place we’ve just come from, the curry restaurant. I was having a chai, all alone. They had the radio tuned to this station that only played reggae, so there were all these minor reggae songs playing, tunes I’d never even heard of, one after another. And one of them came into my head so clearly it felt like a bolt of lightning hit me. It was a duet with a man and a woman singing, and it was about summer vacation. It was a pretty dumb song, nothing special; the thing is, it came straight into my head. And even though it was winter, my mind became full of sunshine. And suddenly I knew: I’m going to die on a summer afternoon. I was so sure of it. Of course, I can’t be sure it will really turn out that way.”