As Tetsuyuki went out from the employee exit behind the building and headed for the coffee shop where Yōko was waiting, Shimazaki caught up with him and tapped him on the shoulder.
“About permanent employment . . . I’d like to have your answer soon.”
“I’ve decided to take you up on your kind offer.”
“So, you’ve decided, have you? Good. Now, just leave everything up to me.” Shimazaki beamed and bustled back to his office. But, ten years . . . Tetsuyuki thought to himself. He would work hard for ten years, save money, and then start some business of his own, just as his father had said. He had no idea what kind of business he was suited for, or how much capital it would require, but Yōko’s mysterious caresses a mere two hours ago had emboldened him.
At a telephone in the coffee shop, Yōko informed Sawamura Chiyono of the arrangements made at the hotel. She returned to the table with a dejected look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“They decided a letter would take too long, so they made an international call to Munich.”
“Will their son come to pick them up?”
Yōko shook her head. “The son said to let them do as they pleased, and then curtly hung up.”
“So then, he’s telling them just to go ahead and die?”
“Mrs. Sawamura seemed a bit surprised by that too. What should I do? After all, I’m the one who took the Langs to her house to begin with.”
There is really such a thing as a son who could be indifferent to his aged parents after they had gone to a foreign country, attempted to poison themselves, and lacked the money for a return trip? Tetsuyuki conjectured that Mr. Lang must be concealing the real reason for the discord between himself and his son.
“She said they called at two thirty. Since the difference between Japan and West Germany is about eight hours, it would have been about six thirty in the morning there. Even so, from his manner of speaking the son seemed to be quite drunk. Mrs. Sawamura said that they’d try calling again after a while.”
“No matter how drunk he might be, a call like that from Japan should sober him up.”
Making no reply, Yōko fingered her curlless hair and said in a barely audible voice, “I’m tired.”
“Go home and have a good rest. I’ll see you to the station.”
“Then you’ll go home too, won’t you?”
“I’ll try going to my mom’s place. We’ve only talked on the phone, and I haven’t seen her in a long time. Today’s Sunday, her day off.”
Once she had gone through the ticket gate and climbed the stairs to the platform, Yōko came rushing back, insisting stubbornly on going with him. It had, in fact, been a long time since his mother and Yōko had seen each other.
The Yūki restaurant was a considerable distance, on the western end of the main road in Kita Shinchi, far from the Midōsuji Avenue area. Most of the clubs and eateries clustered in Kita Shinchi were closed on Sundays, and were it not for the rancid odor of offal crammed into plastic buckets, the place could seem like a ghost town. Occasionally one might find a young man properly dressed in a jacket and expensive tie standing idly in front of some shop. Without exception, they all possessed comely features, but slight mannerisms betrayed decadence and self-indulgence. A light was on in the second floor of Yūki. Staring at that light, Tetsuyuki thought how he would like to live together with his mother as soon as tomorrow. As long as one or the other of them exercises intelligence, a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law ought to be able to live together amicably. He expressed this thought to Yōko.
“I’m very fond of your mother.”
Of course, at the beginning no mother-in-law and no daughter-in-law intend not to get along, so why do so few of them live harmoniously under the same roof? Tetsuyuki mused that it was all due to the elemental core of that creature called woman.
Tetsuyuki knocked on the door of Yūki. A second-story window opened, and his mother poked her head out.
“Good evening!” Yōko smiled and waved unreservedly as if greeting a close female friend.
“Oh, Yōko, it’s been a long time since I saw you!” Smiling exuberantly, his mother closed the window and soon they heard her unlocking the front door. Tetsuyuki could tell, by her movements through the frosted glass, just how pleased she was by their visit. As soon as she saw Yōko, a questioning look appeared on her face.
“What happened to you? Your hair . . .” Then she led them to her second-story room.
“Excuse me for a moment. I’ll bring some tea.” With that, his mother went downstairs.
“See, I told you! All because of you, I have this hair that makes me look like a ghost.” Yōko pouted and glared reproachfully at Tetsuyuki.
“I never told you to get your hair wet in the shower. That’s something you chose to do.”
“Yeah, but at the time, I just felt like throwing all caution to the wind.”
“It’s all Mata Kitarō’s fault. He put you in the mood.” After that slipped out, it occurred to Tetsuyuki that it might actually be true. The wretchedness of the love hotel in that section of downtown Kyoto, the momentary sadness when they entered its front door, the good-natured drollery of its manager, and the frightening speed with which the human heart can change as a result of trivial matters—what an absurd thing it is to go through life dominated by such an uncertain heart. In Tetsuyuki’s mind this thought was accompanied by the image of Kin with his tail writhing back and forth.
“Don’t sit over there. Come and get warm under the kotatsu.” Entering the room with a tray bearing a teapot and cups, Tetsuyuki’s mother urged Yōko to make herself comfortable. Yōko asked where the bathroom was, and after making sure that she had gone down the stairs, his mother poked him on the head.
“Men are always in a hurry, aren’t they?”
“What are you talking about?”
“About how perfectly set hair should end up so straight. Yōko isn’t the kind of girl who would ever go out without setting her hair nicely.”
“It rained.” Led on by his mother’s gentle tone of voice, Tetsuyuki answered with a smile.
“A sudden rainstorm?”
“Yeah.”
Yōko returned and began sipping her tea. Tetsuyuki told them that his employment had been decided.
“When?” Yōko asked, surprised.
“A little while ago. They’d offered it to me some time ago, but I wasn’t able to make up my mind. Anyway, I’ve got to set sail, so it doesn’t matter which port I leave from. So when the section chief pressed my for an answer today, I made up my mind.”
“‘I’ve got to set sail, so it doesn’t matter which port I leave from’ . . . now, there’s a showy expression.” Chided by Yōko, he laughed with embarrassment. With a serious look on her face, his mother congratulated him. Since he had last seen her, his mother was thinner and she seemed pale. After much hesitation, Tetsuyuki brought up the matter of having her live with them. Yōko again mentioned the tidy apartment she had talked about before with Tetsuyuki.
“It’s actually more of a two-story town house than an apartment. Downstairs there is a six-mat room and an eat-in kitchen. Upstairs there are three-mat and six-mat rooms. It has a bathroom, and it’s about a five-minute walk from my house.”
Smiling slightly, Tetsuyuki’s mother asked, “Yōko, are you really going to marry Tetsuyuki?” Yōko nodded, but his mother shook her head.
“If I were your mother, I’d be dead set against it. For the next two or three years, we’ll be paying off the debts his father left behind, and until we do that, marriage is out of the question. Our family consists of one mother and one child, we have no home, just a lot of debts. I would never let my daughter marry into a situation like that, and I’m sure your parents wouldn’t either.”
Yōko was about to say something when Tetsuyuki’s mother cut her off. “Even if you make the decision now, in two or three years’ time you might find someone else you like.” Tetsuyuki and Yōko glanced at each other
in silence. “And you can’t imagine how thrilled I’d be to have a daughter-in-law like you, but such feelings are not the only basis for a marriage—we can only really be linked by karmic fate.” At that point she paused and, tilting her prim face—the face that still suggested what Tetsuyuki’s father often said without exaggeration when he was drunk, “When your mother was young, she was a real beauty”—mumbled to no one in particular: “Everyone uses the word ‘fate’ without much thought, but it’s a mysterious thing.”
Yōko’s nose was beginning to redden. Tetsuyuki, who knew that was a herald of her tears, felt eager to say something, but no words came out of his mouth. Yōko drooped her head and cried, barely audibly. Tetsuyuki thought that his mother’s words had doused the flame of courage Yōko had mustered, but such was not the case.
“Without telling anyone, I went ahead and rented that place. I’ve paid both the deposit and rent. After graduation, Tetsuyuki and I will both work, and the three of us will live there.”
This time, Tetsuyuki and his mother looked at each other with open mouths. “Where did you get the money for the deposit?” she asked.
“I added my money from part-time work to what I’ve saved since junior high school, and borrowed the rest from a cousin in Yokohama.” Yōko’s answer was delivered in a quivering voice, ending in muffled sobs and difficult to understand. Tetsuyuki’s mother bent forward and wiped Yōko’s tears with her handkerchief. Yōko raised her face and, with eyes closed like a child, allowed her face to be wiped.
“I’m glad I didn’t have a daughter. You never know what they’ll go and do when they grow up.” With that, Tetsuyuki’s mother stood up and, taking a savings passbook out of a dresser drawer, showed it to them. She had nearly 700,000 yen in her account.
“How did you save so much?”
“My net monthly pay is 110,000 yen, you see? But I don’t have to pay for rent or food, so I’ve been able to save 100,000 yen each month.”
“So then, you live on 10,000 a month?”
“Sometimes customers tip me. Some of them slip as much as 10,000 or 20,000 yen into the sleeve of my kimono.” She shrugged. “I’ve always been good at squirreling money away . . . Such a quantity of tears!” Speaking as if in praise, she again leaned forward to wipe Yōko’s face. Yōko giggled, but still kept pouring out tears endlessly.
Tetsuyuki’s mother went along to see Yōko to the station. After parting at the ticket gate of the Hankyū Line, as he was walking alongside his mother Tetsuyuki recalled the blue eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Lang. These several months—or rather these several years—he had never run that desperately. Even during a tennis match he had never chased the ball with such heroic resolve. He was glad that he had made it in time to stop them. He did not want them to die. On no account should he have allowed them to die. His mother suddenly stopped walking, and Tetsuyuki stopped and looked at her.
“She’s had a privileged upbringing, but I think that even tomorrow she’d be able to put off a bill collector.” At his mother’s words, Tetsuyuki’s face brightened and he turned to her. “Any bill collector who encountered tears like that would hightail it.”
9
By the time November came around, Kin would no longer eat anything. Tetsuyuki took Reptiles of Japan out of his bookcase and read the section “Keeping Lizards.” A point of caution on raising them indoors stated that in place of sunlight an infrared lamp should be used; otherwise, they would lose appetite. He thought he had committed all of that to memory, but it had slipped his mind. It also stated that during the winter one feeding per week is sufficient.
Two weeks had passed since Kin stopped eating. Tetsuyuki thought perhaps he was just tired of chestnut weevil larvae and tried giving him ants or spiders he found in the weeds growing thick behind the building, but Kin would just blink and not open his mouth.
Having purchased an infrared lamp at a department store, as soon as he finished his shift Tetsuyuki hurried back along the cold path in the deep of night and immediately trained the light on Kin. Then an idea came to him and he took out a ruler to measure Kin’s length: he was about one centimeter longer than the day he first appeared before Tetsuyuki.
“Kin-chan, you were still just a kid when I drove that nail through you.” For nearly half an hour he continued to talk to the lizard in a soft voice. Like keeping a diary, it had become a daily routine for him to relate to Kin the events of each day and to talk about his own state of mind. The shabby attire of the laborer accompanying his child in the train and the awkward manner in which he had shown affection . . . The wealthy-looking woman in Osaka Station whose profile somehow suggested a lack of vitality . . . The spitefulness of the front-desk manager . . . The overbearing guests whose manner of tipping made him want to throw it back at them . . . The look that woman who worked at the grill would give him from a distance, and how it did not just seem to be his vain imagination . . .
And just as in a diary, fictionalizing was mixed in with his words. When he became aware of these embellishments, it seemed as if he were improvising a novel, assaulted at times by feelings of sorrow, elation, or anger.
“If I didn’t have Yōko, maybe I’d have fallen for that woman at the grill. She moved to Osaka from Shimane Prefecture right after graduating from high school just to work at that hotel. Today, on the sly she brought me a steak fillet in piecrust that the cook had mistakenly made too many of, wrapped hidden in a napkin. I completely understood her motive, but still asked, ‘Why are you bringing me this?’ ‘The cook gave it to me.’ But that doesn’t amount to an answer. Even so, I know exactly why the cook gave it to her. She’s too pretty to be working as a waitress at a grill. With a little polishing, she’d be a real knockout.”
Tetsuyuki shut off the infrared lamp, thinking that sudden long exposure might not be good for Kin. “Before I go to bed, I’ll turn it on for another ten minutes.”
He spread out his futon and stared at the research materials for his graduation thesis piled on the desk. The day at the end of summer when he walked down Midōsuji Avenue through a violent downpour, getting soaking wet, suddenly came to mind, as did the evening scene where he heard from Yōko’s own mouth of the existence of another man in her life. Yōko, who had been meeting with that architectural designer Ishihama, mumbled words that Tetsuyuki had not forgotten: “If I can’t marry you, then I’d want to marry him.” And there was another suspicion that stubbornly smoldered in his mind: Yōko denied it, but did she really not have a physical relationship with that Ishihama?
Even though they had met many times since then, and even as their love had increased and they had made seemingly unbreakable promises to each other, that suspicion would suddenly well up. Though that incident was supposed to be behind them, it could still generate incurable jealousy. On those occasions, he would think of Mr. and Mrs. Lang. It had no relationship to them, but every time jealousy and suspicion darkened his mind there would arise in his thoughts the countenances of that elderly German couple—expressing at the same time resolution and helplessness—who had chosen a tea hut in the quiet and elegant garden of a foreign land as their place to die.
“I wonder how those two are doing. Their son ended up coming to Japan to pick them up, but I can’t imagine that he’s now living together with his parents in harmony in Munich. Human beings are all petty when it comes to feelings, and they won’t let bygones be bygones, no matter how small the matter. But you’re the same, too, aren’t you, Kin? You haven’t forgiven me, have you?”
Though he had just uttered the words “petty when it comes to feelings,” when he thought of Yōko’s having even briefly shifted her affections to another man, Tetsuyuki lost all sense of reason and, manipulated by that emotional scar, would imagine her naked in Ishihama’s embrace.
“I’m a man, so I understand how other men’s minds work, especially toward women. He put on the airs of a gentleman, but am I supposed to believe that he never laid a finger on Yōko when her feelings were inclined toward him? She’d rathe
r die than admit it, though.”
He again switched on the infrared lamp, and while Kin basked in it, he thought of the words he would like to hear from Yōko’s mouth that would clear her of the suspicions he harbored. But he instantly realized that any words would be powerless: if you doubt, then any words are unbelievable, and even in the unlikely event that she were to confess to having been in Ishihama’s embrace, he still would not be able to leave her.
Kin drank some water, but would not eat anything that night either. Tetsuyuki changed into his pajamas, turned off the light, and got under the quilts. As he looked at the faint glow from the curtains of the back window, a certain strategy occurred to him: he would get revenge on her. He would make her experience the same grief he had been feeling. He would torment her by creating a drama of his own affections shifting to another woman. An image flashed before him of a country girl, aware of her own beauty, whose ample, captivating breasts could seriously draw him away if he were not careful.
The next day, Tetsuyuki went earlier than usual to the employee cafeteria, because he knew that the grill cook, Nakae Yuriko, ate her dinner there an hour earlier than the other employees. Along with the other grill employees, Yuriko had finished eating and was washing the dishes. Having heaped rice into a plastic bowl, Tetsuyuki took one of the plates of side dishes set out near the sinks and whispered so that only Yuriko could hear, “Thanks for yesterday.”
Inhabitation Page 17