I asked if this was a man Kawako had known before. Akiko said it wasn’t.
“As Kawako hung in the air, wondering who this young man might be, it suddenly occurred to her that she might be in the middle of his dream instead—that she might have intruded on this stranger’s mind somehow, or at the very least stolen that dream away from him.”
“That’s a peculiar thing to consider,” I said. Akiko agreed. Akiko said she had told Kawako just as much, and Kawako had replied saying she didn’t know how the thought had occurred in her brain. It just did. Nobuo then asked what had happened to the rest of her dream, and Kawako closed her eyes.
“She found that her dream had started to change,” Akiko said to me. “She realised that the young man’s body had overturned, and that she could no longer see his face. ‘He was floating on his front, with his face in the water,’ said Kawako. ‘The man was dead.’”
It was the following day, after the funeral procession and the cremation were over, when Kawako asked Akiko if she would move into her apartment. I have a free room now, Kawako had said, and am in need of a roommate. Akiko looked at her, seated in the middle of what used to be her father’s bedroom, sorting out the last of his things. She noticed that Kawako was leaving nothing behind: all of it was to go straight to recycling.
I’ll think about it, Akiko had said to Kawako. I’ll do it for you, at the very least.
Kawako stopped. Don’t think of me, she said; think of yourself.
After they were done with the last of her father’s things, Kawako went into the living room, where she had left her purse behind. She opened it up and took out a business card.
It’s Nobuo’s number and e-mail address, she’d explained, handing it to Akiko. She said he had passed it to her that morning, before the funeral procession began. He wanted Akiko to have it.
What for? Akiko had asked. We haven’t spoken in years.
Kawako set her purse aside. For old time’s sake, I suppose.
I drank the last of my tea, and poured myself a second cup. Akiko, now at a pause in her story, was busy looking out of the window, through the space above the lady’s shoulder. The lady was still seated outside, halfway through her iced Americano. The rain, though light, continued to fall.
“Were you close to Haruhito Daisuke?”
She turned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Were you close to Kawako’s father?” I repeated myself. Akiko shook her head.
“Kawako and I have been friends for nearly ten years now, and I’ve only met her father once,” Akiko said. “Is that hard to believe?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “What kind of a man was Haruhito Daisuke?”
Akiko thought about it for a while. “A perfectly normal man in a strange profession,” she said. “Nobody ever really knew what he did for a living. I think I remember Kawako saying once that he was a specialist.”
I blinked. “A specialist?”
“Yes,” said Akiko. “A specialist.”
They met at a birthday party Nobuo’s parents had thrown for Kawako. This was during the spring holiday, at the end of their first year at Waseda, when the three of them were still together as friends. Everybody had been gathered in the living room that evening when the power went out. The entire block had lost its electrical supply, and Nobuo’s father had gone out to investigate. The conversation soon resumed, however, with people amused and joking in the dark. Phones were taken out, casting blue light over sections of the room.
Akiko could barely see anything. But she did notice Mr Haruhito, standing beside her and doing nothing in particular. He was neither in the middle of a conversation, nor was he busy attending to the food on his plate. He was doing nothing at all. This was the first and only time Akiko had ever met the man in the flesh, and it struck her as a little odd how she had not noticed his presence in the room before, what with his imposing height and skinny frame. She asked if he was indeed Kawako’s father, and he said that he was. Akiko introduced herself.
I believe I’ve heard about you before, Ms Kurosawa, Mr Haruhito had said; my daughter talks about you all the time. I hear you live in Akishima city?
Akiko said that she did. Mr Haruhito remarked how long her journeys must have been, in order to commute to and from Waseda. Each ride on the train must have taken an hour at least. Akiko said that was true.
“Before I came to live here, I lived in an apartment a few streets north of Nakagami station,” Akiko explained to me. “I’ve lived there all my life, with my parents, my grandparents and my two older sisters.” Needless to say, there were times when Akiko felt an immense sense of claustrophobia: she felt it weigh like a bag of wet dirt in her chest. She constantly struggled for air.
Haruhito Daisuke had listened to Akiko with great attention. You must have often felt the need to break free, Ms Kurosawa, he’d said to her. Akiko said that she did, and going on long walks around the neighbourhood didn’t do much to comfort her either. Mr Haruhito asked her why. She’d said: Akishima city is a commuter town. It has nothing but residential blocks and health clinics and industrial complexes. Every summer, the residents either stay out of town or stay in their homes, to seek shelter from the heat. And then the entire neighbourhood would become too empty and quiet for me to bear.
Does it give you nightmares? he’d asked.
Yes, said Akiko. Every summer I dream of ghosts, of towns full of ghosts. And nothing the ghosts ever do in those towns would have any impact on reality. She then paused, before adding: I’m very glad I got to meet Kawako, Mr Haruhito. She’s the first real friend I ever made outside Akishima.
And Nobuo?
The second, came her reply; it was Kawako’s idea, actually, that the three of us form a group amongst ourselves. Kawako and Nobuo were close as cousins, and it was becoming evident that I was her best friend at university. It only seemed natural that I got to know Nobuo as well, she’d said.
That’s true, responded Mr Haruhito; that’s true. He then paused for a while. Can I ask you a personal question, Ms Kurosawa? he said. Akiko said she didn’t mind. He then asked Akiko what had drawn her to his daughter. Akiko responded by saying it was her generosity, and her gentleness. She’d always feel at ease whenever she was around her.
What about Nobuo? asked Mr Haruhito.
He’s honest, Akiko replied; he is always searching for the truth. And for that I know I can always speak my mind.
Mr Haruhito had chuckled. Thank you for thinking so highly of them, Ms Kurosawa, he said. He then paused again, before remarking: It’s a wonder why the lights have gone out.
Akiko hadn’t been sure either. Maybe someone stole the light, she said. She then sensed Mr Haruhito smiling in the dark. He said to her: You remind me of a certain woman, Ms Kurosawa, a woman whom I came to know a long time ago, back when I was still a young man. I’d spot her from across the river that runs along my neighbourhood, just down the foot of my block. It was hard not to see her—almost impossible, in fact, to avoid the sight of her.
Akiko had asked if she was a beautiful woman. Mr Haruhito chuckled once more.
She was, Ms Kurosawa, but it wasn’t that. It was her soul, he said; you can find it, if you know where to look—and hers was terribly, terribly bright. Too bright to have caught a direct glimpse of.
Akiko tried to imagine it: the soul of a human being, glowing like the end of a firefly, or a lone satellite in the night. She knew, in the back of her mind, that she would never have a way of catching one. She asked if he had ever dared to approach her, this woman across the river, and he paused again, for the third time, before he said that he hadn’t. She was on one side of the river, and there he was, alone on the other.
I wasn’t brave, then, he’d said to her. I wasn’t brave enough to change my life.
Akiko took hold of her pot, and poured herself a third cup of tea. I was on my third as well, and close to the end of my supply. I glanced quickly at the lady seated outside, and saw that she had finished her Americano. She
was now busy checking something on her phone, running her fingers through the end of her ponytail.
“I wonder how that encounter must have affected you,” I said to Akiko. Akiko pursed her lips.
“I thought about what he said, for the rest of the night. Even after the party was over,” she said. “I remember walking home from Nakagami station and feeling a wind pick up around me, pushing me from behind. Next thing I knew I found myself standing right at my doorstep, not knowing how I had gotten there. I wondered if this was what Kawako’s father had meant—to let life continue, to let it go on the way it always has. To just follow wherever it takes you without any complaint whatsoever, in whichever direction it chooses to pull you. I thought about the amount of courage it would require, just to affect any sort of change in one’s destiny. But don’t take my word for it, Ms Chiba. I might be wrong about what he meant.”
I nodded. I took a sip of tea. “I can’t help but also wonder how the three of you fell apart,” I said to her. “If the birthday party had happened during the spring holidays, and the three of you stopped being a trio before sophomore year began, something drastic must have happened in between. That interval couldn’t have been very long either.”
Akiko shook her head, and kept on drumming her fingers on the table. “I wouldn’t call it drastic,” she said to me. “But it did change everything.”
“What happened?” I asked. Akiko’s fingers stopped.
“Nobuo asked me out for lunch, two days after the party. Over lunch he said he was in love with me.”
“Oh,” I said. “A confession.”
“Yes.” She paused. “Nobuo asked if I could remember that time when we had gone drinking on Valentine’s Day—the three of us, at a karaoke joint in Shibuya, downing pints of Asahi as our other friends made fools of themselves. He asked if I remembered what I had said to him.”
“What did you say, exactly?”
Akiko tilted her head to the side. “On that night in Shibuya?”
“Yes.”
“I said that I had never willingly fallen in love before,” Akiko replied. “I said that the only way I could ever fall in love was if somebody fell in love with me first.” She looked out of the window again. “Instead I told Nobuo that I didn’t remember. I told him I’d been dead drunk. I said there was no way I could recall something like that.”
I kept my gaze focused on Akiko. “Why did you lie to him?”
She looked back towards me. “We lie to protect ourselves, Ms Chiba. And I was young, then, just nineteen. All I wanted was to keep our group together, and I didn’t want something like that tearing us apart. But it did, in the end. Kawako found out from Nobuo, and wanted to meet me that night.”
“That night?”
She nodded.
“Kawako called me and said that she needed to talk, and wondered if I was free. I told her I was. She then told me to meet at Kichijoji station, which was more or less a midpoint for us. She said she would meet me at the Chuo Line platform. I told her I could be there in forty-five minutes.”
Akiko remembered getting off the train and seeing Kawako that night, dressed in a floral green dress and a nice, white cardigan. She was seated on a bench on the platform, and had stood up when she saw Akiko. They sat together as Akiko’s train rolled away, and the commuting crowd gathered and moved towards the escalators. Kawako didn’t say anything for a long time; a while passed before the din had quietened down, and she told Akiko that she was in love with Nobuo.
I blinked. “Kawako was in love with her cousin?”
Akiko nodded again.
Kawako’s feelings for Nobuo, Akiko explained to me, began when Kawako was in elementary school. They were rather active as children, and would often play all kinds of make-believe games during family gatherings.
“Once, in a game of cops, Nobuo had pinned her down as the main suspect in a case, and screamed questions at her until she confessed to her crime. It was then she felt a strange stirring within her body, in both her chest and in her groin.” Akiko paused. “It felt like a part of her had locked together, to use her words; the world had suddenly made sense to her. She felt a tight knot of feeling in her chest that she was determined to hold on to.”
Was it infatuation? Was it love? Kawako didn’t know. As his cousin, it was easy for her to be close to him whenever she wanted, but the connection itself made it paramount that she should maintain a distance. As Kawako went through middle school and high school, she realised that it was becoming harder and harder to put his body out of her mind, the body that had pinned itself on top of hers. She saw Nobuo everywhere—running circles around the school field, sitting next to her in class, bumping into him in the corridors—even though they went to different schools. Whenever she saw Nobuo in the flesh at family gatherings, she’d find herself wet, so very wet—she craved for the press of his sex against hers.
“Kawako had a boyfriend once, but that relationship didn’t last very long,” Akiko said to me. “I’d seen a picture of him before. He was the vice-captain of the basketball team: tall, handsome, muscular. He was the kind of guy who looked even better in glasses, which is rare. When they broke up, he told her that she always seemed to be somewhere else, even when they were in the midst of sex. She didn’t deny any of his accusations. She let him go.”
When her first term at Waseda began, Kawako knew, of course, that Nobuo had chosen to enrol at the same university. Though glad he was studying for a different major, she realised that they both had many classes in the same faculty building; they would bump into one another, run into one another, just like how they would in her high school fantasies. Kawako found that she needed some way to be around Nobuo without being too close at the same time, and she figured that the best way to do this was to introduce a third party into their equation—a friend she could both trust and confide in, to serve as a link to the young man and a barrier against him.
That’s where you come in, Kawako had explained to Akiko, as a second train came and left. You were very kind, and very friendly towards me, she’d said. You made a friend out of Nobuo as well, just as I had predicted. For a long while you gave me a reason to be around him, Akiko, and I appreciate that. But now I have to step away.
Akiko didn’t know what Kawako had meant at first. Kawako remained as still as a statue, and stared at the tracks before her.
Who else knows? asked Akiko.
Only you.
Not even your father?
Kawako shook her head. This is my secret, she said; it is mine to keep. She shook her head again. I’m a monster, she’d added, softly under her breath.
It was then Akiko had noticed a train, coming in from the other side of the platform. The lights were small at first, like pinpoints in the distance, before growing larger and larger within seconds. Akiko felt a sudden kick in her chest—a sudden impulse, springing to life within her, as the wind picked up around the platform. She took hold of Kawako’s hands, and held them tight in her lap. She told Kawako that she was her best friend: she was the key to her new life. She wouldn’t know what to do without her in it.
But what about Nobuo? Kawako had asked. Akiko told her not to worry. Just forget about him, she’d said; we’ll forget about him.
Back in the café, Akiko rested her hand on her cheek, and looked out of the window: the lady outside, stranger as she was, was still seated with her back against the window, as though she too were a part of our conversation, of our special arrangement. The ice in her cup had now melted into a murky layer of liquid.
“Looking back, it is hard not to see how cruel we both were, in our own separate ways,” Akiko said to me. “I was as much a monster as she was.”
The lady with the ponytail finally made a move: she got up and left, and walked out of sight. It was still raining, gentle over the river, and there was a small ring of water left where the base of her cup had been.
“I moved into Kawako’s apartment on the eighth of June,” Akiko said to me. “It was the Fri
day following her father’s wake, and I had anticipated that I would need the whole weekend, just to move my belongings from my old place to the new. It wasn’t till Sunday, after I had brought back the last of my things, when I decided to give Nobuo a call.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t call him sooner,” I said.
“I was busy,” said Akiko. “I needed time.”
Kawako’s apartment, located in the 1-chome of the Aobadai district, was a cosy two-bedroom setting. “The kitchen bleeds into the living room, with the dining table caught in between. There’s a small balcony at the living room, big enough to fit two people. Surrounding the balcony is a simple metal grille that leads up to the waist.” She placed a finger on the glass of the window. “As you can see.”
I leant towards the glass.
“According to Kawako, her father had lived there his entire life,” said Akiko. “His sister, Nobuo’s mother, was the one who’d had to move out.” She removed her finger from the glass. “I remember walking over to the balcony and catching sight of this café, its name boldly printed across a deep blue awning, like foam on the sea. There was a pavement sign near the entrance, proudly displaying its name.”
I finished the last of my tea. “Do you think this is where Haruhito Daisuke might have seen this particular woman of his?”
Akiko didn’t respond immediately. “I thought of that,” she said. “But I wouldn’t know.”
Akiko had dialled Nobuo’s number in the end, that Sunday on the tenth of June. He picked up the call on the fifth ring and cut straight to the chase: he asked her if she would like to meet up for coffee sometime, and Akiko said yes. She added that she had a place in mind.
“What place was this?” I asked Akiko. Akiko kept her gaze directed out of the window.
“It was this same café, Ms Chiba. And we sat at this very same table as well.”
“Oh, is that so?” I said. I felt taken aback. “And what did you both talk about?”
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