But as he walked along, he began to feel shame and asked himself: What’s this “powers of discerning people’s characters”? He’s “weak against adversity,” or his “range of feelings is narrow”? I had my nerve speaking of someone that way. “Weak against adversity” or “range of feelings is narrow” describes me better than anyone. And what will happen to Yōko now that she’s been left alone? If we part like this, nothing will be recoverable.
Tetsuyuki wheeled around and ran back to the hotel. His mind full of a premonition that Yōko had just disappeared forever from his life, he looked into the tea lounge with apprehension. Yōko was sitting there. She looked at Tetsuyuki and her face flushed a bright red, a reaction he was unable to understand.
“If you had kept me waiting another ten minutes for you to come back, I think I’d really have begun to hate you. I thought for sure you’d come back, but my heart was pounding and I wondered what I’d do if you didn’t show up.”
“Why did you think for sure that I’d come back?”
“Because you love me.”
“It’s already over between you and Ishihama, isn’t it?”
“Who was it that pulled a dirty trick to end it?”
“That was the only ‘trick’ I had left to pull.”
“There was no need to do that.” Waiting until Tetsuyuki took a seat, she continued. “Didn’t you understand that I’d made up my mind while you were in the bathtub?”
“How should I have understood that? The night you first told me that you liked another guy, you went with me to a hotel, didn’t you?” Yōko’s face again flushed a bright red. Bracing himself, Tetsuyuki said: “Tell me that you want me to marry you!”
“No! I’d die before I’d say that. Instead, I’ll have you bow your head before me and ask me to marry you.” Yōko snickered. Putting his forehead down on the table, Tetsuyuki said in a small voice, “Please marry me.” He could feel that he was bleeding from a small but deep wound in the depths of his joy. “I’ve been writhing in agony these twenty days.”
He raised his head and noticed that Yōko’s smile was somehow melancholy, and he worried that even after his exchange with Ishihama, perhaps she really had come to love the guy even more.
“I’m sure you won’t be able to forget this, Tetsuyuki. And I have a feeling that after we’re married, you’ll be the one who’ll keep dredging up the past. That’s because you’re never willing to take a back seat to anyone, you have a strong sense of self-esteem, you’re given over to jealousy, you’re obsessive, and you’re intelligent . . .”
“When it comes to intelligence, you have me beat. I’m an idiot. But you’re right about everything else. The most that can become of a guy like me is to be a thief or a swindler, the typical sort who make their wives suffer.”
The smile disappeared from Yōko’s face and was replaced by an expression of obvious sorrow.
“I never imagined that you’d fall in love with another guy. So, to your analysis of my character you’d have to add: narcissist.”
“I’m only twenty-one. And I like it when a man makes a fuss over me. Is there anything wrong with that?”
Tetsuyuki realized that this was turning into a serious argument between them, and clammed up. Whenever it seemed that he was about to lose an argument with her, he had until now always kicked her in the shins. Though he thought he was taking care not to go too far, there were two or three times when he raised a blue welt on her, making her refuse to talk to him for an entire day. By trying to kick her lightly in the shins under the table, he was attempting to show his affection for her, but before he could do so, tears welled up in her eyes.
“I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid, but I’ll say how I feel anyway.”
He expected to hear from her a renewed confession of love for Ishihama, or words to that effect. But that is not what she said.
“You’re special to me. I really did develop a fondness for Ishihama, but compared to what I felt for you, I knew from the start that it was of a completely different nature. And I calculated: who will be of greater benefit to me . . . And that calculation gradually caused me to be in love with Ishihama. I’m a woman who can fall in love with a man that way. I’m not the pure and innocent woman you think I am. Now you’ll get angry and kick me in the shins, won’t you? Well, go ahead and kick. I don’t care.”
Tetsuyuki could not bear to look at Yōko’s weeping face, and dropped his gaze to the table. He felt both chill and exhaustion. The face of the collector, Kobori, flickered before his eyes, as did the double chin of the portly former geisha who was his mother’s employer. The debt his father had left behind formed a pitch-black wall in his path. Yōko asked what time it was.
“Ten after nine.” Tetsuyuki rose from his seat, and Yōko grabbed her purse and stood up, walking wordlessly across the lobby and exiting the hotel. Thinking that she would probably never return to him, he watched the form of that lovely, graceful creature as she stood at the Hankyū ticket gate and then ascended the stairs to the platform.
As he sat in the dirty train car on the Katamachi Line he bowed his head and with folded arms and tightly shut eyes mustered strength in an attempt to suppress the chills that continuously assaulted him. He wanted money. As he walked shivering along the long dark path from the station to his apartment, the thought never left his mind: I want money. I want money.
Climbing the stairs to his apartment, he realized that he did not have the box containing the larvae; he could not recall whether he had left it on the table in the tea lounge or on the rack in the train car. He went up to Kin. “Sorry, but you’ll have to go without dinner today. Try to make do with just water.” As was his custom, he talked to Kin as the lizard lapped water from the spoon with its long tongue. Like recording the day’s events in a diary, Tetsuyuki had kept up this nightly practice for several months. And, much the same as in a diary, untruths were mixed in among the words.
“Kin-chan, I don’t care about myself anymore. I’m so exhausted that I’m just hanging on to life by a thread. I don’t have the energy to work, and I don’t have the courage to be a thief. And just so that I could claim some kind of victory over that Ishihama guy, I ended up ruining Yōko’s entire life. When he walked out of the hotel, I felt as if I knew how to defeat an enemy; it was as if my body were on fire. ‘This is how you beat them, one by one.’ And courage welled up in me. But you know, Kin-chan, a solitary victory is no victory at all. What’ll become of Yōko? It stands to reason that she wanted to marry him more than me. But I interfered, and if my interference results in her unhappiness, then it was no victory for me. It was defeat. I talked big when it came to putting down Lamenting the Deviations, but I feel a fascination for that book of cheerless grieving.”
The moment he said that, he realized that a thoroughgoing nihilism was linked to a certain kind of courage, but that it was not the sort of courage that could elevate a human being. What exactly was this courage that offered no uplift? Tetsuyuki fell into a dull pensiveness as he looked at Kin’s motionless body and taut limbs.
He dived into the quilts, which had been left out. Intense chills left his teeth chattering. He fell asleep, listening closely to his own rough breathing. At about three a.m. he awoke in great discomfort. The shivering had stopped, but his head ached and he could tell that he had a high fever. With the light left on, Kin was writhing. Thinking that Kin could not sleep with the light on, he tried to get up but was unable to move. The slightest movement set off intense shivering. His vision was too clouded for him to focus on the nail piercing Kin, and he succumbed momentarily to the illusion that the lizard had regained its freedom and was crawling down the wall, escaping from this cramped apartment to the spacious world beyond. Something irreplaceable was leaving. Goaded by his own sadness, he finally roused himself to get up and turn off the fluorescent light. His entire body again shivered.
Hearing footsteps and feeling a pleasant coolness on his forehead, Tetsuyuki awoke and glanced around. The fluorescent
light was on, and the only thing he understood was that it was nighttime. But he had no idea how many hours he had slept. Kin was still nailed to the pillar. A washbowl filled with ice water had been placed next to his pillow. He reached his hand to his forehead to find a chilled towel placed on it, then twisted around to look into the kitchen. Yōko, her back toward him, was peering into a pot. He gazed at her intently. She turned around, shut off the gas, and sat down at his bedside.
“Is it night now?”
Yōko nodded in reply, and said as she turned the towel over, “You still have a high fever.”
“Was it yesterday, or the day before, that we met?”
“Yesterday. What time did you go to bed?”
“Before eleven, I think. I woke up once in the middle of the night, but I’ve been asleep ever since.”
Counting on her fingers, Yōko said with a smile, “Then you’ve slept twenty hours.”
“Why did you come to my apartment?”
“You left something in the hotel yesterday, didn’t you? A little box in department store wrapping. When we parted I forgot to hand it to you and ended up taking it home with me. I wondered what was in it, and can you imagine how I screamed when I opened it?” Tetsuyuki laughed. “So, this evening I went to the hotel where you work in order to hand this disgusting package to you. When they told me you were still off and hadn’t contacted them I got a bit worried. You said, didn’t you, that you were going to return to work today?” Tetsuyuki extended his hand and stroked Yōko’s hair. “I borrowed a key from your landlady and . . . didn’t you hear my scream when I came in?”
Together they looked at Kin. Yōko explained that when she saw the lizard nailed to the pillar her feet began to shake and did not stop for a long time, and that since Tetsuyuki’s breathing was so rough it seemed he might die any moment, she lay down beside him and felt with her hand that he had a high fever. When Tetsuyuki complained of thirst, she brought him some water.
“Can you get up?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“There’s a clinic just a seven- or eight-minute walk from here.” At Yōko’s adamant insistence, Tetsuyuki let himself be taken to the small clinic with only one elderly doctor, who told him that it was a case of influenza and gave him an injection and medicine to take, adding that he would need complete rest for two or three days. When they returned to his apartment, Yōko told him to change into his pajamas, and it was only then that he realized he had been sleeping all that time in his street clothes.
As he was undressing, Yōko sighed. “It’s because you got so drenched in the rain.”
“But I soaked for a long time in the tub at the hotel . . .”
He had no appetite at all but, sitting upright on the futon, sipped the rice porridge and nibbled at the fried egg she had prepared for him. As he ate, it occurred to him that, while he hadn’t swallowed any food for an entire day, Kin had gone even longer without anything. In fits and starts, he described how the lizard came to be nailed to a pillar in his room. After hearing everything, Yōko was lost in thought for a while.
“Tetsuyuki, why don’t you get out of this place and move somewhere else?” She mentioned that there was a vacancy in a tidy apartment complex near her home.
“The deposit and rent for a place in your neighborhood would be three or four times what it is here. I don’t yet have that kind of money.”
“You and your mother could live there together, couldn’t you?”
Tetsuyuki shook his head. He was haunted by the thought of not knowing when an accomplice of that collector might show up. He never wanted his mother to go through that kind of bitter experience again. If she were to be threatened by collectors daily the way she was, then she would surely lose her mind. He was about to explain all of that to Yōko, but when he opened his mouth, words unrelated to his thoughts came out instead.
“Just forget about me. Let’s agree never to meet again.” He was surprised at his own words. His hand, as if of its own accord, took the Rolex off his wrist and placed it in Yōko’s lap.
“Why?”
“I’ve gotten so that I don’t care about anything. Not about you, not about this lizard, not about school or graduating . . . I don’t care about anything.” As he spoke, he gradually came to feel that way. Even if only for a moment, he felt hatred toward Yōko for having shifted her affections to another man. And he harbored anger toward Kin for stubbornly clinging to life as if in some sort of vengeance against him. He wanted money and hated his poverty. Inside of himself, Tetsuyuki shouted all of these things.
“Those are all lies. When your fever goes down, you’ll be sure to apologize to me. After all, you love me . . .”
Tetsuyuki looked her in the eyes. No words could have calmed his agitated mind more than those, and the fact that Yōko could deliver them without the slightest pretentiousness or perturbation filled him with immeasurable joy. She had him take his medicine and lie down, then covered him with the quilt.
“It isn’t safe around here at night. And a lot of country thugs and small-time gangsters hang out in the shopping arcade near the station. You ought to borrow the landlady’s phone and call a cab to take you back.”
Yōko carried the pot and dishes to the kitchen and ran some water.
“I’ll stay here tonight. Before you woke up, I called home from the pay phone over there at the general store.”
“You told your mom that you’d be staying in my room?”
Yōko nodded as she wiped her hands. “My mom was furious, and screamed, ‘You get back here!’ But when I told her that a guy with that high a fever wasn’t going to turn into a ravenous wolf, she reluctantly gave in. When I asked her to tell Dad some suitable lie, she said, ‘You’re a fool. An intelligent woman thinks of love and marriage separately.’ That was her sermon, but she seems to know everything that’s going on.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.” Yōko’s eyes sparkled as she sat down beside him. Tetsuyuki reached his hand from under the quilt, groping his way to the innermost recess under her skirt. Pinching his arm, she said with a look of exasperation as she fell against him, “You won’t turn into a wolf, but you will turn into a snake, huh?”
But the raging fever prevented Tetsuyuki from turning into either a wolf or a snake. The weight of her body made it difficult for him to breathe.
“I won’t touch you anymore, so please, get back a bit. I can’t breathe.”
Giggling, Yōko leaned on top of him all the more.
“Give that lizard some larvae and water.”
Flustered at Tetsuyuki’s request, Yōko pulled away. Straightening her disheveled hair, she cast a look at Kin. “I couldn’t . . . do something like that.”
“But Kin hasn’t eaten for two days.”
“No, I couldn’t bring myself to touch those things.”
“Just grab them with tweezers and hold them up to his nose. He’ll eat them by himself. And you can give him water with a spoon.”
“You should be able to do that much yourself.”
“With a fever like this I don’t have the energy to get up.”
“And yet you were able to walk to the clinic.”
At Tetsuyuki’s repeated urging and with an expression as if she had just been sobbing, Yōko put some water in a spoon and, standing as far away as possible, held it out to Kin. The lizard appeared to be very thirsty and lapped it up greedily. During all of this, a thin sound like a scream leaked out of her mouth. Tetsuyuki closed his eyes, and in his ears that voice took on a sort of sensual beauty. And as he listened, Kin seemed like some kind of extraordinary being. At the same time, he realized that Yōko was also an extraordinary creature.
8
Tetsuyuki placed the two bags of an elderly German couple in the entrance to their guest room. The luggage was so heavy that he wondered what could possibly be in it. He bowed and was about to leave when the wife grabbed his elbow with her soft hand.
Neither of them could speak Englis
h, but with exaggerated gestures asked him to wait a moment. He had never received a tip from a foreign guest. Foreigners who visit Japan have all been thoroughly instructed by the guidebooks that tipping is not necessary and never offer so much as a 100-yen coin.
The white-haired husband and wife were small of stature and gentle of countenance. Discussing something in German, the two of them fumbled about in their pockets, opened their wallets, and shrugged their shoulders with embarrassed looks. She took a 10,000-yen bill out of her wallet and said something in an apologetic tone. Judging from their exchanges with each other and from the expressions on their faces, Tetsuyuki realized that they wished to give him a tip but unfortunately aside from this bill did not have suitable small change between them and were at a loss what to do. Waving his hand, he smiled and used the only German he knew.
“Danke schön!”
Then he bowed again and left the room. The husband followed after him, mimicking walking unsteadily carrying two bags. He brought Tetsuyuki to a halt with a hand on his shoulder, then hurried by himself toward the elevator. It seemed he intended to break the 10,000-yen bill at the front desk. Tetsuyuki declined to accept the money, explaining in his imprecise English that the kind thought was sufficient reward, that carrying bags was his job, and that no tip was necessary. Taking the bill from the old man’s hand, Tetsuyuki folded it in two and returned it to the man’s coat pocket.
But the old man was obstinate and waited for the elevator to arrive, indicating to Tetsuyuki to remain there. His wife then came out of the room and said something to him, to which he grunted a reply and put an arm around Tetsuyuki’s shoulders, speaking to him in German. The wife smiled at Tetsuyuki. He recalled that one of the cooks down in the kitchen had spent three years working in Munich and, motioning for the elderly couple to wait in their room, got on the elevator. He opened the door to the basement kitchen and looked about for Nabeshima. Their busiest hours had ended, and the cooks were leaning against wooden crates and walls, smoking. He found Nabeshima sitting by an enormous refrigerator, leafing through a weekly magazine.
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