‘Ryosuke, are you tired?’
‘Huh? What did you say?’
‘Nothing. I was just wondering if you were sleepy.’
‘I could sleep. Once I close my eyes I’m out like a light in five seconds.’
I’m not sure how much I caught of what was going on, but if social hierarchy is fixed, I’m most definitely the lowest class of all, the one that’s exploited and not given an ounce of respect.
When I woke up the next morning Kiwako wasn’t there. I found my underpants, which had slipped into the crack between the bed and the wall, tugged them on and padded out to the living room, where I found a guy I’d never seen before buttering a slice of toast. As I stood there wondering whether I should go into the living room in my underwear or go back to the bedroom, the guy glared at me sullenly. Just then Kiwako emerged from the kitchen, a coffee cup in each hand.
‘Morning.’
She smiled a perfect morning smile and set one of the cups down in front of the guy. ‘This is my younger brother, back after a night out. Looks like he’s a bit pissed off about me bringing a man home with me.’ She smiled again.
Her brother was shoving a fried egg on toast into his mouth, and I nodded a greeting to him. Be friendly and the other person will do the same, sort of. At least he no longer looked like he wanted to kill me. I hesitated, then came out into the living room dressed only in my underwear. Kiwako and I had shared a bed last night so I was going to sit down beside her, but I felt her brother’s icy stare. Younger brothers apparently have special feelings when it comes to their older sisters. Feeling strangely apprehensive, I sat down next to her brother instead, which made the situation even stranger. As I sat down beside him, her brother glared at me even more coldly. Kiwako looked at her lover and kid brother, side by side.
It was after this, though, that I totally lost it. Seated beside her brother, I was eating the toast she’d made for me, slathered with butter and jam, washing it down my parched throat with some chilled orange juice. In front of me, Kiwako was sipping her hot coffee, beside me her brother silently chewing his toast. And that’s when it happened.
‘Ryosuke. Are you – crying?’
Until Kiwako asked this, I didn’t realise I’d been crying. Her brother looked dumbfounded.
‘What the heck is he crying for?’ he asked.
‘Wh-what’s the matter?’
It was definitely creeping them out. You’re enjoying a bright, sunny morning, eating buttery, slightly burnt toast and drinking hot coffee when, out of the blue, the young guy sitting there in his underwear starts blubbering.
‘Sorry – I’m sorry.’
I had no idea where these tears were coming from, but I tried my best to stop them. But still the salty tears kept rolling down, dripping down beside my nose to my mouth as I chewed on the slice of toast.
‘Man . . . this – is so weird,’ I stuttered.
The more I tried to casually explain it, the more my voice broke, until I was on the verge of sobbing. Kiwako hurriedly passed me a tissue. Her kid brother’s mouth was wide open. He looked at me like he was ready to make a run for it.
But for some reason, while I was sitting there eating the toast Kiwako had made for me, I had pictured my father’s face. He was getting things ready in the sushi shop, and the shop was full of the smell of vinegary rice. And then I saw Shinya. Shinya as he was getting off the bus, patting me on the shoulder and waving and saying, ‘Hey, do your best there in Tokyo . . . be a success for me, too, okay?’ As I drank down the orange juice I desperately tried to shake off this mental image. The next face I saw was Umezaki’s, as he brought over the washing machine to my place.
‘I’ll be on the sofa, watching TV,’ he’d told me, ‘and Kiwako will kneel down between my legs. And I’ll say I like this way the best, and she’ll say Me too.’
As he struggled with the heavy washer, Umezaki gave an embarrassed smile.
Then I remembered some words Kiwako and I had exchanged in bed the night before. Our bodies were flushed and I was holding her tight.
‘I like this way the best,’ I’d said.
Breathing against my chest, Kiwako said, ‘Me too.’
I went on crying. The tears wouldn’t stop. It was like there was another me, totally separate, ignoring the real me, and crying like crazy.
KOTOMI OKOCHI (23)
2.1
THE DAYTIME TV show It’s Okay to Laugh is amazing. I can watch it for a whole hour, but as soon as I turn off the TV, I can’t remember a single thing they said or did. It’s the definition of the word pointless.
I switched off the TV and was sitting there wondering what to have for lunch when Ryosuke emerged from the guys’ bedroom. His eyes were sleepy, his hand was inside his underwear, and his hair, as always, was a mess. Seems like he tosses and turns most nights. Naoki, who shares the room with him, said if the room didn’t have walls, Ryosuke would probably roll all the way to the station.
‘Ryosuke, what do you want for lunch?’
Ryosuke took a carton of milk out of the fridge. He sniffed at it, then started drinking. He motioned for me to wait and, with his neck stretched out, drained the carton.
‘How about you, Koto?’ he asked with a burp, and I stared for a moment at his white milk moustache.
‘How about KFC?’ I asked back.
‘KFC? What about that new soba noodle place that opened in front of the salon you go to? Why don’t we eat there?’
He stuck his right hand down his boxers again and scratched, then drifted off to the bathroom. He’s in the middle of an unrequited love for the girlfriend of his older friend Umezaki, but these past few days he hasn’t mentioned it at all. The other day, uncharacteristically, he stayed out overnight. I asked him where he was, and he did say At her place – but for a first-night stay with a girl he didn’t seem all too thrilled by it. Maybe he’d already had his heart broken. Anyway, I don’t care about the casual affairs of a guy like him. He might be torn between the demands of love and friendship, but clearly he’s not losing any sleep if he can sleep enough to have cowlicks like that, so I’m not too worried about him.
Five months ago, when I moved into this apartment and first met him, the thought struck me that the hiragana symbol fu described Ryosuke perfectly. It wasn’t like he was slumped over, the way the symbol looks, it’s just that when I looked at him, the negative prefix pronounced fu always came to mind. Fuantei? (Unstable?) Fukigen? (Unhappy?) Or is it fushigi? (Unusual?) No, that’s not quite it. Fu, fu, fu . . . Funuke? (Unassertive.) That might be closer to it.
When Ryosuke came out of the bathroom I asked, ‘Which character is used to write the fu in funuke?’
Without washing his hands, he grabbed a cookie off the table. ‘The fu in funuke? It’s something to do with internal organs, or guts or something, isn’t it?’ he said, chomping on the cookie. ‘Like you have no guts.’ I pictured Ryosuke’s body, all hollowed out, and the cookie he was chewing swirling down inside this body, like falling snow.
Ryosuke apparently had nothing going on until the evening, when he went out to his part-time job. It had broken my heart to do so, but I’d finally switched off the TV (I’d started out watching the morning talk shows and somehow had kept on watching all the way through It’s Okay to Laugh), but as he contentedly chewed on his cookie, he turned it on again. A talk show had started and the expressionless face of the host, Baku Owada, appeared. Whenever Ryosuke turns on the TV these days it always starts zapping. ‘Not again,’ he muttered and he started to hit the left side of the set. ‘Not there,’ I quickly cautioned. ‘Hit the right side, three times,’ and he did as instructed. But the static remained.
‘It doesn’t work.’
‘You’re hitting it too softly. You’ve got to hit it hard, hard, then soft. You have to get angry with it.’
‘I can’t be angry with a TV. Koto, you try it.’
‘No way. I just turned it off.’
As we bickered, the clear picture returned,
all by itself. Ryosuke changed the channel with the remote and said, ‘Who’s the guest on At Home with Testuko today?’
‘What do you have planned for the afternoon?’ I asked Ryosuke, who ignored the TV now and headed back to the guys’ bedroom. ‘I going to wash Momoko,’ he said happily. ‘I envy guys who get all excited about washing their car. They probably don’t have a care in the world. They’re probably so carefree they go looking for problems.’ On the TV Emiko Kaminuma’s cooking show was on and she was preparing a spring chicken with aromatic spices. It looked delicious.
I’m keeping it a secret from my parents that they (Ryosuke and Naoki) live in this apartment. It’s not like I’m ashamed of it or anything, it’s just that they don’t need to know how their supposedly level-headed daughter is living. Far from being ashamed of living with Ryosuke and Naoki, I’m more ashamed at how little there is going on between us. Of course, when I first started living here, the way Ryosuke would casually check out my breasts felt like a hot arrow. I learned from watching the women who run those shooting galleries at hot springs resorts that when the arrow misses the target, the best thing to do is to pull it out right away and hand it back to the customer. The customer isn’t stupid, and if you pull the arrow out right away he understands that he missed. Still, there are plenty of women in the world who go around with arrows still stuck in them. So the customer’s left waiting for his prize, which causes all sorts of problems. There are too many women running shooting galleries who are unmotivated – women who, with countless arrows sticking out of their chest, complain about not being able to make any men friends as they grab away the money from the half-drunk guests.
I think the reason I’m okay with living here is that my roommate, Mirai, isn’t one of those women. Of course another reason is that Ryosuke and Naoki aren’t like the policemen and civil servants who go to hot springs resorts and go totally nuts.
Coming to live here happened all of sudden. Like a bolt of lightning. Or more like a bite on the backside by a dog. No, not really . . . Anyway, one night five months ago I was dancing at this club I liked to go to when the music stops and the lights go on. The guy dancing in front of me is all sweaty, and I’m all sweaty, and the DJ hurriedly announces, ‘Sorry, guys, we’re having problems with the speakers, so please be patient,’ and the people around me laugh or complain, and everyone staggers off to the bar. The guy in front of me asks if I’d like a drink, and that’s the instant it hit me, like a revelation: I have no interest in anything.
I don’t mean no interest in immediate things, like that sweaty guy or that there was nothing I particularly wanted to drink. I noticed I didn’t have any interest even in the kinds of things that my family liked – my father and his job, teaching maths in a local girls’ high school, Mum and her housework, my sister and her volleyball team, my other sister and her infatuation with Shingo Katori, one of the singers in the group SMAP. As I found myself alone there on the dance floor, the revelation startled me. I hadn’t asked for it, but at that instant the knowledge that I was leading an empty life really hit me hard.
Right after I graduated from junior college, I went to work at the branch office of a pharmaceutical company and got paid at the end of every month by direct debit. I think even then I must have noticed an emptiness, a sadness, deep down inside. Every time I got paid I’d go out to eat at a fancy French restaurant with my friends, or buy a ring at Tiffany’s, but these things never really satisfied me. Then I’d go to a bookshop and see a pile of books with the title It’s Okay: Enjoy the Present, and I’d figure the life I was leading must be fine after all.
It was tough coming to the realisation that I wasn’t interested in anything, though realising it didn’t mean I could then immediately find something to engage my interest. I tried to think of something. Maybe I could study a foreign language, or study abroad in Rome or somewhere? Or, more realistically, grab some guy I knew and have a destination wedding abroad? But everything I could think of was based on how envious it would make people, not on any genuine interest I might have. Still, in high school, when the boys held a contest to select the prettiest girl, I always came out on top. Which doesn’t mean that the other girls hated me or anything – they didn’t. I even had girlfriends who, as they started to get a little drunk, would say embarrassing things like, I envy you, Koto – you’re beautiful and such a sweet girl, to which I’d reply I don’t know what to say! I was pretty satisfied with being that sort of girl.
And then suddenly, because of the speakers breaking down at a club, I found myself on a brightly lit dance floor, hearing a voice – whether that of an angel or the devil, I don’t know – saying You haven’t suffered. So you haven’t experienced true happiness.
‘What’s wrong?’ the sweaty guy in front of me asked and without thinking I yelled out, ‘No way!’ I wasn’t answering him, of course, but this voice in my head that was lecturing me about suffering and happiness.
The guy looked at me with this did-I-say-something-wrong? sort of expression. Ah! That’s right! I thought. ‘Didn’t you say your brother was driving a truck to Tokyo tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Yeah – yeah, I guess I did.’
‘Do you think he can give me a ride?’
‘To Tokyo?’
‘Right. To Tokyo.’
‘What are you going to do there?’
‘Suffer.’
‘Huh? Suffer?’
‘That’s right. Suffer.’
The guy looked puzzled, but went ahead and called his brother. After that, though, he avoided me for the rest of the night.
I’d decided I’d go to Tokyo. Tokyo wasn’t the main attraction, though. I wanted to be near Tomohiko Maruyama. Loving him was the only thing I’d ever suffered over in my life.
I met Tomohiko at a party soon after I started junior college. We had such a typical first meeting it’s almost too embarrassing to talk about. Naturally all five girls who were in the room had their eyes on him. It’s kind of slutty for me to say this (but if I think it and don’t say it, it’s even more slutty) but some of the guys there – okay, I’ll go ahead and say it: every single one of them – were interested in me. But I couldn’t act all innocent, couldn’t pretend to be prim or pretend to be surprised at coming out on top in the end as the most popular girl naturally would. So instead I went after Tomohiko openly, right from the start – so much so that the other guys backed off. As the most popular girl I felt I had the right to sell myself openly.
I got a call from Tomohiko the day after the party. The group of people I was with had gone on to a second bar to continue the party, and after that broke up, we girls went by ourselves to a third place, then wound up at a wild karaoke party. Completely wasted, with my throat aching from belting out Chisato Morisato tunes and my stomach aching from too much Bombay Sapphire gin, I stumbled home around five a.m. Tomohiko called me four hours later, just before nine.
On the way to the second bar everyone had stopped by a convenience store to buy gum and disposable cameras, but Tomohiko and I waited outside.
‘So, have you always been interested in people’s teeth?’ I asked casually. Even if the other girls had no shot at Tomohiko, they were staying out past curfew because all the guys in the group were promising catches – they were in dental school. Dentists-to-be.
Tomohiko paused. ‘I’m really sorry, but I’m not like the rest of them. I work in a DIY store.’
At that moment I was grateful I’d watched soap operas since junior high, since it helped me come up with a line like something out of one of those shows: ‘No need to apologise. I’m just a junior college student myself,’ I said, very calmly. A full moon was in the sky, he and I were lingering along the dark road at night. Any second now I expected to hear cheesy dramatic music.
‘But all of the others are for real,’ he hastily added. ‘They’re real dental students. I didn’t want to come, but Kengo – you know, the one with glasses? – we’ve been friends since we were kids – he dragged me along.
’
‘But wasn’t it Kengo who introduced all of you? He said you’re all in college together.’
‘He did, didn’t he? It would be embarrassing for me if the truth came out. I’m sorry about that.’
Guys might project this ‘we’re just innocent boys for ever’ look, but deep down, they are totally insecure.
When he called the next morning, I was so hungover I couldn’t remember what we talked about. But I was lucid enough to make a date with him, because after I hung up, I found myself clutching a memo that said 7 p.m., Saturday, in front of the Civic Centre.
One thing I noticed when I was walking down the street with Tomohiko was that girls check out guys pretty openly. They’d look at him first, then check out the girl on his arm – me – then look back at him once more. Thanks to Tomohiko, I saw things I’d never seen before. Once I even saw a McDonald’s employee so overcome by Tomohiko’s good looks that her hands started shaking. I’d like a takeaway, he’d told her, but from the way she reacted, it was as though he’d ordered her, not a vanilla shake.
‘So you’re pretty popular, aren’t you?’ I couldn’t help but say as soon as we exited the store.
‘You must be, too, Koto,’ he replied, which was nice to hear. Yeah, we were being snide, but whatever. The vanilla shake we took turns slurping tasted delicious.
Around noon, Ryosuke and I went for lunch at the new soba place in front of the station. Ryosuke’s hair was still a mess of cowlicks. They were giving a twenty per cent discount on all orders to celebrate the opening, so the place was packed. We were about to give up and leave when a four-person table opened up. The waitress looked a little put out that we were going to take up so much space, but we sat down anyway. When she brought us water she said, ‘You might have to share the table with someone else later.’ I’d been sitting across from Ryosuke but went around and sat down next to him.
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