Manazuru

by Hiromi Kawakami

  She leads me, and I walk.

  I hear nothing, I see nothing. My eyes are wide open, and yet there is no scenery. I might be wandering through a thick fog, or drifting woozily within myself, lost in a deep trance. Off in the distance, there is the surface of the ocean, the burning boat.

  “Dreadful, isn’t it.” The woman says this every so often, turning to look.

  “Did they all die—in the fire?” I ask.

  She does not answer. After all the—, she begins.

  After all the what?

  After all the trouble they went to, she says, finally, launching the boat.

  All at once, ahead of me in the fog, there is a party of men, marching forward. Something about their backs suggests that they are embarking on a journey. The men are wrapped snugly in their coats, they carry leather traveling bags. Their hair is neatly combed. In their breast pockets, no doubt, are crisp, new tickets.

  “Rei,” I call.

  One of the men turns.

  But it is not Rei. The next man looks back as well. He has handsome chiseled features, he reminds me of Rei, yet he has none of Rei’s energy. The next man in line turns around. Like grass stirring in the wind, one after another, the heads swivel: one male face after another reveals itself.

  Rei’s is not among them.

  The woman still leads me by the hand. Let go, I say, hoping it will work, but she does not let go. I want to dash over, cry out Rei’s name, find him, but I cannot.

  “Were they on the capsized boat?” I ask.

  I don’t know, the woman says, and pulls my hand, hard. I nearly fall. Without meaning to, I cry out. All at once, again, the men turn.

  That’s Rei, I think. All the way up front, among the undulating backs of the walking men, his face appears, is hidden, emerges again. His features are the same as when he disappeared, in his mid-thirties.

  Beside myself, I scream his name.

  But this time no one turns.

  The boat is burning. Pale white smoke climbs, breaking apart into innumerable lines, from the area around the port, far below.

  Rei, I think, strongly. No matter how strongly I think, he will never return. I know that. I know he will not be coming back. And yet I can’t help thinking, so strongly.

  ONCE AGAIN THERE is no one else, only the two of us, alone.

  How far have we walked, I wonder. We are standing on an unfrequented bit of shoreline. This is not the port near the market, where the men carried the shrine and the posts all decked out with paper flowers; there is no one, nothing in sight, but the quay, dark, partly submerged beneath the waves.

  “I’ve been here before, to this beach,” the woman says.

  Before, when? I ask offhandedly. The woman no longer pulls me by the hand. She stands, lost in thought, facing the sea.

  After I had the twins, she tells me.

  The woman appears now, cradling one twin in her arms, with the other on her back. It is more than her presence; I hear a baby crying, faintly, too.

  “You came to see the ocean?”

  “I saw the ocean every day.”

  “Did you come to feel the wind, then?”

  “The wind, too, I felt every day.”

  “So what did you come for?”

  Sometimes I got sick of living, the woman snapped. Harried with work all day long, morning to night, without even realizing how haggard I had become, no idea of the things that make me happy, having no contact with the depths of people’s hearts, never even realizing that my own heart had its depths, too, simply counting the minutes, oh, it all got so tiresome.

  The woman tossed the baby in her arms into the ocean. She untied the twisted cords that crossed her breast, binding the second baby to her back, clasped her once to her bosom, then tossed her away, too. The babies floated for a moment on the tide before the ocean swallowed them.

  The woman changes. Now she is wearing a white pants suit, and holds a black square bag. You’ve had wonton soup, I’m sure, looking like that. I think to myself. A few strands of hair have broken free from her bun, at the base of her neck, and turn lightly in the wind.

  “I was always like that, sick of it all,” the suited woman says.

  Perhaps, but Rei wasn’t sick of anything. I fire back, speaking the words only in my heart. Even these utterances of the heart communicate immediately to the woman. That Rei of yours, a useless man. The woman snickers. She said the same thing yesterday. A useless man. Without even knowing him.

  Useless or not, once he’s gone, you can’t help it, left behind.

  The wind whips around the woman. Wonton soup, jiajiang noodles, whatever you feel like, we can eat them together. Don’t talk anymore about being sick of it all, let’s just live our lives, effortlessly, without a thought. I call to the woman, once again, in my heart.

  She shakes her head in disbelief. Are you for real, or a flake? I don’t get you.

  For real, flaky—like they can be separated. We’re alive, you know! I shout at her.

  The woman falls silent; the wind keeps whipping around her.

  I WANT TO go home. I think.

  The smoke from the burning boat has drifted this far. It is a gray mist, filling the sky.

  Why do they all hurry so, to go? To sink down, into the ocean? I ask the woman, but she has not been present for some time. I am all alone here now.

  I have no choice, I start to walk. Walking on, alone, I think of Rei.

  We went to see a waterfall. It was before we were married. The waterfall was deep in the mountains, at the end of a road too narrow for the car. The spot where the cascade commenced its fall was so high we could not see it. The sunlight was strong. It cut into our eyes. There was no hope with that sunlight, even less, of discovering the point from which the water fell.

  “It’s kind of creepy, not knowing where the water comes from,” I remarked.

  And Rei agreed, Yeah.

  A moment passed in silence. Then:

  “Do you know where you come from?” he asked. “Kei?”

  Me? Where I come from? I repeated, unsure of his meaning.

  Rei nodded, slowly.

  Actually, he began, my first memory is very vivid. I was three.

  Oh, that’s what you meant, by where I come from, I said, cocking my head, and Rei put his arm around my shoulders, drew me closer. Chilly, isn’t it? he asked, simply.

  I was three years old, and I was trying to grab this bug from a tree in the garden. It was green, sort of a peculiar shape, long and thin. Only I couldn’t control my grasp, so I couldn’t really pick it off, I ended up grabbing it with my whole hand, and all of a sudden goo squirted out of the bug’s body. All over my palm, all sticky. I just squashed it.

  So I went in with it, like that, to where my mother was, in the kitchen, and showed her my hand. She drew back from me. I knew it wasn’t me, it was the bug she was avoiding, but still it hurt me. The bug wasn’t alive anymore. I hurled it down on the floor. The bright green of its body was very clear, I remember, against the floor’s deep wooden hues.

  That’s a walking stick, my mother told me. You don’t see them often.

  I’d never heard that name, walking stick, before. My mother didn’t back away again, she lifted the bug between her fingertips, her expression perfectly ordinary, and then she opened the kitchen door and tossed it out into one of the plants in the garden.

  I wanted to get the juice off my hand, so I went over and rubbed my palm back and forth on the earthen floor just inside the door, in the entryway before you step up into the kitchen. I could see my mom, a shadow, looming overhead. She stared at me, very still.

  “I’ve never seen a walking stick,” I said, and Rei smiled slightly.

  So that’s where I come from, that scene with the walking stick. That’s where I begin. Like the waterfall, coming from up there. I have no memory of anything before that. Even though it’s my life, he said, and pulled me closer, stronger, against him.

  “I don’t really know where I come from,” I
told him. Chilly, isn’t it, he repeated. It wasn’t winter. I can’t remember whether it was early spring or late autumn. I always forget these things. I’ve forgotten, even, where I come from.

  The waterfall kept cascading down, ever new, like something that had only just appeared, sending up clouds of spray. Even though it had been falling there for centuries.

  IT’S TRUE, IT is, I’m always forgetting. I’ve forgotten a good deal about Seiji, too. Since I came here. To Manazuru.

  Even as I walk on, alone, Seiji is not in my thoughts. Poor thing, I think. But what am I thinking? Is it Seiji I pity? Or do I pity myself, for not thinking of him?

  The boat is still burning. I have left the sad, unfrequented bit of shoreline, and once again I am approaching the port. There is a bitterness to the smell of fire. There is a touch of bitterness, too, in Seiji’s breath. Something acrid within the sweetness. When we embrace, saliva passes abundantly between us. There, too, there is a bitterness.

  At times, it is not Seiji who embraces me, but I who embraces him. It is not a question of how it happens, it is a feeling, how the air hangs in the room, the coolness of our skin.

  Sometimes, embracing Seiji, I recall Rei, telling me where he is from. I do not know where I come from, but there are moments when I begin to remember the odors of the place, faint sounds that reached me, the loneliness.

  Rei drew me in, but with Seiji I can remain just as I am, endlessly, drifting. I am not lonely. Whether it is he who embraces me, or I who embraces him. And so, all the more, I remember the old loneliness.

  “You look so forlorn,” Seiji tells me.

  So I look even more forlorn. I do not mean to, but I am pulled back, deeper and deeper, into the lighthearted loneliness of the time, long ago, before it all happened, before I met Rei, when I knew nothing of the world beyond the cradle of my parents’ hands.

  I come to the port. There is no one left from the festival now. Only the music boat, still burning. Reduced to a white skeleton, the hull still smolders, riddled with small flames.

  Overhead, I hear a helicopter. Sound has returned, I think, and suddenly the landscape regains its color.

  I don’t want to go back. Was it this that Rei felt? No desire, maybe, to go back. Still caught in my uncertainty, the agony of it, in a flash, I have returned.

  REACHING THE HOTEL, I pick up my key and go out to the pool. The pool is outside the lobby. Ripples drift across the water’s surface. I had thought the air was still, but there is a breeze.

  I sit down under a beach umbrella. The plastic table creaks when I lean my elbow on it. The woman’s presence is thick.

  We’ve become very close, haven’t we? I had said to her.

  The colonial-style ceiling fan in the lobby rotates in slow, broad circles. The surface of the pool gleams in the light from the lobby. Sometimes I see the figure of a dead man in the water. No, he isn’t dead, he’s been thrown into the ocean, that’s all. The men came up onto the beach right after that, dripping.

  The woman tells me, whispering in my ear.

  At 21:00, Rei was with a woman I had never seen. I had forgotten that, all along. But now I have remembered.

  So they didn’t die, those men. What about the boat, the one on fire? I ask the woman.

  It was never on fire, of course not, she replies. It just capsized, that’s all. It would never burn that close to the shore, people aren’t going to die. Don’t be ridiculous.

  But I saw it happen.

  Maybe you wanted it to happen.

  No, I didn’t. I deny it, and then, all at once, I am clutching my stomach. The pain is back. The woman Rei was with was lovely. She looked slightly younger than me. She wore her hair up, revealing a mole on her neck. A mole one wanted to reach out and touch.

  There was a splash from the pool, and for a moment light filled everything. I was dazzled, blinded. Rei squeezed the woman’s hand. The woman squeezed back, gently. They were talking. I couldn’t hear. They were too distant for me to hear. But I saw the intimacy of their words. But I had forgotten. All along, I had forgotten.

  Did you really? the woman asks. Her tone is ruthless.

  Had you really forgotten?

  The pain is fierce in the pit of my stomach. The light off the pool is almost too much to bear, it has become so strong.

  THE NIGHT DEEPENS.

  The hotel is full of sounds. The rushing of the waves. Trucks driving in both directions on the dark highway. The night receptionist settling wearily into his creaky seat. Countless winged insects buzzing by, just outside my window.

  I let my head sink into the pillow, try to remember. What I had forgotten. What I have been trying to forget.

  Rei’s voice, calling my name, Kei. Every time he said it, something in my body ached. Like a dull blade, his voice hurt. I loved him so intensely, helplessly. I was captivated by him. I had believed that if we married, if I bore his child, in our life together, whatever a life together was, I could dilute the fierceness of my fixation. But I was unable to.

  The woman’s profile was white. Perhaps they were meeting on business. An appointment at 21:00. The hour, scribbled on a scrap of paper. The evening Rei met the woman, he wore a dark green jacket. The woman wore soft clothing. Everything about her, her clothing, her hair, seemed to be pulled in Rei’s direction. Like seaweed on the river bottom.

  I had followed Rei. I left Momo with Mother, got a seat near dusk in a café near his office, and waited. It was after eight when Rei came out of the main entrance. He went straight down into the subway. I dashed out of the café, tumbled down the steps after him. Rei swept through the gate with his pass. I hurried after with the ticket I had bought in advance. I had prepared tickets for the subway, the JR train lines, and the private line a short walk from his office—every possibility. Kind of an odd occasion to be so thorough. I seem to hear the woman’s voice. But it was not the woman’s voice. It was my own.

  Rei stepped into the train. I got on the next car down. I felt the rocking of the train, to and fro, very strong. My body swung heavily in time. I watched Rei, clandestinely, where he stood, next to the doors connecting the cars. He stood with his back straight, swaying.

  I noticed my pale face reflected, thin, distorted, on the silver handrail.

  THAT TWISTED FACE was my own, without a doubt, and yet, suddenly, it was another.

  Ah, I gasped.

  It was then. The first time one came, clearly, and followed me.

  I couldn’t tell for sure whether the reflected face was a woman’s or a man’s, but the expression was utterly different from my own; it was nothing more than a reflection on the silver handrail, and yet the way it stared out at me, its frozen gaze, stopped me.

  “It’s two, overlapping,” I murmured.

  My own face and a stranger’s, doubling, more twisted than before.

  The train rocked violently.

  I looked at Rei. The back of his dark green jacket was slightly curved, and he was gazing out the window into the darkness. An air of fatigue tinged his profile. He was only a little distance away, and yet we were not together.

  Rei got off at the second stop. I followed, mingling with the crowd. The distance between us grew, then shrank, shrank and grew, and when the rush of people pressed me near enough that I could have reached out and touched him, I almost called out, Hey.

  He wouldn’t turn, even if you did.

  The thing that followed whispered into my ear. No, I know, I replied, silently.

  On and on, Rei kept going. To where the woman was. To meet the woman with the mole on her neck. I could have stretched out my hand, he would never have noticed, a cool, thin wall standing between us, that was how it was.

  The woman was waiting.

  The moment Rei and the woman were seated across from each other, the air around them filled with light. I couldn’t see, it was so bright.

  IT WAS A hotel lounge.

  A tall glass stood before the woman. Light green, a cocktail, she took only the smallest s
ip before setting it back down.

  When she let go of the glass, she looked hard at Rei.

  Rei did the talking. He didn’t take any papers from his briefcase, there were no explanatory gestures punctuating his conversation, it hardly looked like work, it was very intimate.

  Rei ordered a drink, as well. I stood motionless in the spacious lobby just off the lounge. The revolving door turned slowly, and everyone who entered or left passed by me.

  After a time, a dish and a glass were brought out. Rei pushed the dish, which had been set down before him, forward, to the center of the table, midway between him and the woman. The woman reached out a hand. She deftly fingered a small, thin thing and raised it to her lips. She wiped her fingers on her napkin. Next, Rei reached for the plate. He seized a larger clump of something, lifted his hand straight to his mouth. The woman was watching. How he touched his lips lightly to his fingers, how his lips moved as he chewed.

  The lobby offered a clear view of the lounge. Rei was in a flat, open place. The woman sat between us. Suddenly, hatred filled me.

  My body pulsed with it, until my legs shook. I walked over to a sofa in the lobby, and sank my body into it. Rei and the woman were now only half visible. But the sense of their presence reached me, thick. I thought I could hear their voices. Even though I knew I was too far away to hear anything.

  “Rei,” the woman is saying.

  Rei speaks the woman’s name. What is her name? His lips move, softly.

  “Rei,” the woman says again.

  Rei toys with her hand, without replying.

  I couldn’t hear them, yet I felt as if I could. I couldn’t see them, but I felt I could.

  Madam, I heard a voice. From a distance, on the other side. I kept looking down, and the voice came again. Madam.

  Glancing up through my disheveled hair, I saw a man in a hotel uniform. Are you feeling unwell? Would you like me to bring you a glass of water? he asked.

  I shook my head, briskly looked up. No, thank you. I’m fine, really. The uniformed man bowed slightly. I’m glad to hear that, excuse me for interrupting, he said, and turned away.