Actually I wasn’t remembering this conversation when I made the decision. Instead I put the vicious cat on one side of the scales, and mild-mannered, fashionable Naoki on the other, and turned to Misaki, not Mama, and said, in a coaxing tone, ‘I’ll take you up on your offer. Is it okay if I move in next month?’
I’d been expecting things not to work out so well, but the communal life the three of us had – Misaki, a secretary at a huge cosmetics company; Naoki, who works at an independent film distributor; and me, an illustrator who managed an import boutique – turned out to be much better than I ever imagined. It’s like a camera on a tripod – three legs and it stands up, two legs and it falls over.
In the beginning Misaki and Naoki used what is now the girls’ room and I had what is now the guys’ room to myself. Then Misaki complained that Naoki talked in his sleep and it bothered her, so she made him stay by himself in the guys’ room and I moved into the girls’ room with her. About half a year after the three of us had started living together, Naoki brought Ryosuke to live with us – he was a younger classmate of someone who was a younger classmate of Naoki’s at college. Misaki and I should have asked Naoki why he wanted Ryosuke to move in, but instead all we asked was, pointlessly, ‘What? A college student?’ We felt left out of the decision, but we told him it was okay. Now that I think about it, Misaki must have already been considering breaking up with Naoki at this point.
It wasn’t long after this that Misaki starting going out with a middle-aged bachelor from her company and spending most of her time at his place. By the time she was staying most of every week there, I asked Naoki about it.
‘Are you okay with this?’ I asked him.
And he said, ‘Sure. How about you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If Misaki leaves here then you’ll be one woman with two men.’
‘That’s why I want you to stop counting that way.’
‘How should I count?’
‘Three people is fine. Three people.’
And Misaki really did leave. Naoki borrowed a truck for her move and Ryosuke and I helped out. But Misaki still continues to drop by. And when she feels like it, she stays over a few days, sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Even Ryosuke wonders what’s going on. ‘What a second,’ he’ll say, ‘didn’t Misaki and Naoki break up?’ It’s hard to explain their relationship now. I guess a relationship that’s easy to explain isn’t much of one to begin with, but still I think it’s pretty odd how happy Naoki is when Misaki stops by. And Misaki’s pretty odd too. I mean, she’s living with another guy, yet she comes to her old boyfriend’s place, says, ‘This is where I can breathe easy,’ and seems totally relaxed.
3.7
I had a terrible hangover and, clutching a bottle of Volvic, I’d collapsed on the sofa. There was a memo on the table: Gone to the hair salon, Koto had written, and on the back I’ve got nothing else to do so I went with her. Satoru.
It was just a little after noon when the doorbell rang. I dragged myself to the entrance and when I opened the heavy front door, there stood two uniformed cops.
It was the middle of the day but my hair was all over the place, I was dressed in rumpled pyjamas, and my face was pale. The two cops took one look at me and must have thought I was ill. They quickly explained the reason for their visit, bowed, and left. ‘We hope you feel better,’ they told me.
It seems that recently in our neighbourhood two women on their way home had been attacked from behind by a man and bashed in the face. The attacks had taken place one after the other. Luckily the first woman wasn’t injured badly, but the woman who’d been assaulted the other day had a broken nose. Both attacks had taken place on the opposite side of the station, the police said, but still they cautioned me to be careful if I was walking alone at night, and to have a man go with me, if possible.
I went back to the sofa and told myself I’d have to tell Koto to be careful, too. Ah! That’s right! I told myself, this time out loud. When the policemen had asked if I lived alone I’d told them I lived with a friend. ‘So there’re two women living here?’ they asked, and I said, ‘No, two men and two women. Four people in all.’
I picked up the memo on the table again and reread the back, written in Satoru’s childish writing: I’ve got nothing else to do so I went with her.
3.8
I knew I wasn’t going to sell anything, but still I went to Inokashira Park, next to the pond, to try to sell some of my illustrations. I dragged Koto along with me. I laid out a black cloth on the ground and spread out my latest illustrations (ones with the theme of men’s navels) and was waiting for potential customers to stop by when an elderly man, a gentlemanly type with salt-and-pepper hair, came up and painstakingly examined each and every drawing. Whenever I have Koto sit next to me it’s amazing how many men stop by. They pretend to look at the drawings as they steal glances at her, but this man was different. He didn’t give her a single glance and concentrated instead on my illustrations.
‘Are there any in particular you like?’ I asked. Normally I just let people browse, but the man was so totally intent on my work that I couldn’t help but speak up. He didn’t even raise his head at this, and continued scanning the drawings.
In the end the man left without saying anything.
‘What was that all about?’ Koto asked.
‘Guess he didn’t like them,’ I said, grouchily.
It was then that I realised how much I was dying to be discovered. I’d been hoping, as I sat there on the cold stone pavement of the park, that the man might turn out to be an art dealer from Ginza or Aoyama, or a curator who lived in New York who was the first person to recognise my genius. It’s almost embarrassing how much I was hoping this was true.
I’ve never yet sold a drawing at a park or on the pavement. I’ve had drunk old guys about to buy one, but I always politely turn them down. In times like those I understand how I’ve still got a long way to go as an artist. Someday, though, I’d like to draw the kind of works that drunks would not only be unable to buy, but wouldn’t even be able to look at.
It was about an hour later when that elderly man reappeared. Again he came up and, without a word, carefully looked through each drawing. After a while he looked up and asked, ‘Are these navels?’
‘Y-yes, they are,’ I replied, flustered.
‘Ah – so they’re navels. I guess they are, now that you mention it.’
After he said this, the man went away again.
‘So they’re navels, he says,’ Koto laughed and I laughed with her.
Is there some other way – other than trying to laugh it off – to deal with frustration?
3.9
Last night Ryosuke called a group meeting and we all assembled in the living room. Naoki and I were of course a little buzzed, while Koto, who’s crazy about the video game Biohazard 2, was playing it with Satoru, before he went to work. All of us sat there listening to Ryosuke, who stood in front of us, legs set wide apart.
Ryosuke told us that this weekend he’d invited the girlfriend of his older college friend, Umezaki – the one who’d given him the washing machine – for dinner and he wanted us all to clear our schedules since he’d really like us to join them.
Sounds good, we agreed and were heading back to our own rooms when Ryosuke stopped us. ‘Actually I have another favour I need to ask you,’ he said.
‘What else?’ I asked, sort of irritated.
‘I hope you’re not going to ask us to help you steal Umezaki’s girlfriend from him,’ Naoki said.
‘Is there something you want us to say to her?’ Koto went on.
‘Like bring up a selling point, tell her how good you are at something?’ Satoru laughed.
Ryosuke visibly flinched, so we knew they’d hit the mark.
‘So what do you want us to say to her?’ I laughed, and Koto said, ‘He doesn’t look like much, but he’s actually very manly. Something like that?’
‘Any girl who’d fall for that isn’t wor
th much,’ Satoru said, and everyone nodded deeply in agreement. For eighteen, he was a surprisingly good judge of women.
‘If there’s something you want us to say, write it down,’ Naoki said and was heading to his room.
‘Actually, I do have something,’ Ryosuke said, and pulled out some sheets of paper with writing on it.
He’d already prepared copies of a script for us to use at dinner, five whole pages of paper. The script began with Ryosuke introducing his friend’s girlfriend, Kiwako, to all of us. The names of each speaker were indicated before the lines on the script.
‘The heck with this,’ Naoki and I said, and went back to our rooms, but it was almost scary how much Koto and Satoru, who had way too much time on their hands, were suddenly into it. They each played two different parts, and with Ryosuke instructing them in no uncertain terms – No, that’s too obvious! – Do that part again! – they practised until late into the night.
I tried to concentrate on drawing in my room, doing my best not to be bothered by the school play going on in the living room, but Koto’s voice as she repeated one line – ‘Ryosuke is a chameleon – when he likes someone, he loves whatever they like most’ – stuck with me for some reason and I couldn’t get any work done at all. Person he likes must mean his friend Umezaki. When I thought of Kiwako sitting there, forced to eat dinner while lines like that flew back and forth, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor girl.
I finally was focused on my drawing for a while when I heard Satoru dramatically call out a line, like he was on stage at the Takarazuka Review: ‘Sometimes this is what I think. I want to be the kind of person who lives life on his own terms!’ They must have woken up Naoki, who shouted out: ‘Shut up! You think that way, that’s why you’re so damned noisy!’ I remembered that Naoki had to get up the next morning to go to Narita Airport to meet a film director coming from France.
As I imagined Naoki tossing and turning, unable to sleep, I lined up on my desk the reference photos of Ryosuke and Satoru’s backs that I’d taken the other day.
3.10
Until last year this transvestite named Ken – a pretty heroic name, ken the character for sword – worked at Mariné Mama’s. He and I were great friends, so much so that when I was still living by myself in Yutenji, before I moved in here, and Ken had been dumped by his married boyfriend, I let him stay at my place for a while.
Last night was the third anniversary of Ken’s death.
Ken got drunk one day, ran out of the bar and was hit by a taxi and died. As often happened with him, he’d fallen for a married man, been cruelly dumped and was pretty upset. Mama and her customers heard a dull thud, raced outside and found, just beyond the taxi, Ken lying in the middle of the road, dressed, as usual, in women’s clothing. With stifled shrieks everyone rushed over, and Ken opened his eyes once, smiled, said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ and lost consciousness. ‘One of his red high heels was lying by an electric pole,’ Mama recalled.
Naturally I attended the funeral, which took place in his hometown of Sendai. Mama and his other friends from the bar came along, but they asked me to attend the funeral alone. ‘Ken told his family he was working in advertising,’ they said and, worried about what the other mourners might think, they just stood at a distance across the street from the funeral home and watched as his coffin was being carried out.
While I was waiting for Ken to be cremated, I went into the lobby of the building and was having a smoke when his older sister called out to me. I was the only woman who’d come all the way from Tokyo for the funeral and was wondering how I should introduce myself when she said, ‘I know all about him.
‘Father doesn’t know a thing,’ she continued, ‘but Mum and I figured out what kind of job he was doing . . . Those were all his friends outside the funeral parlour, weren’t they? I was thinking I should go over and say hello . . . A little while ago Mum said this: “Ken must have been a very happy person to have so many friends”.’
I didn’t say anything, and was thinking that Mariné Mama should be hearing this.
It was about six months after Ken’s funeral when I got a call from his sister, asking me to take her to the bar where he’d worked. It turned out she and her mother were already in Tokyo. I contacted Mama right away.
Ken’s sister and mother were pretty shocked when they saw the photo of him on the wall of the bar dressed up as a nurse, but both of them could drink a lot, and as we drained a whole bottle of Ken’s favourite whisky, Four Roses Black Label, the atmosphere started to mellow out.
‘That girl always fell for married men and then got dumped,’ Mama said, pulling no punches. ‘He never learned. I think his hippocampus must have been damaged.’
‘It must run in the family, then,’ his mother slurred. ‘I stole his father away from another woman when I married him.’
We reminisced about Ken until the wee hours of the morning, and by the time his mother and sister had to go back to Sendai they were big fans of Mama’s bar.
Last night, at the third anniversary memorial service at the bar, his mother and sister were there, of course. It was hard to believe how nervous they’d been the first time I’d taken them there, ’cause this time his mother was behind the bar, mixing drinks for the customers with Mama, while his sister ran through a whole rendition of the song Ken and I used to perform together – Wink’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ – complete with all the dance steps.
The night I came back from Ken’s funeral I was so overcome with grief I didn’t know what to do, so I asked Ryosuke, who’d just started living with us, to take me for a drive in Momoko.
I didn’t tell Ryosuke that a close friend had just died. I just asked him to drive me around all night – I didn’t care that we had to stop every nine kilometres. I sat there sobbing in the passenger seat but Ryosuke didn’t ask me anything, he silently kept on driving. At one point, though, when we stopped at a petrol station in Harumi to fill up, he said, jokingly, ‘Heavy drinkers do seem to cry differently.’ I’m grateful to Ryosuke for that night. I’m happy he could be by my side.
Come to think of it, two months ago Ryosuke surprised me by asking me to go with him on a drive, and we drove all around until the next morning. ‘Is anything the matter?’ I asked him several times, but he just said, ‘Not really,’ and kept his eyes on the road. Instead, he asked, ‘Hey, do you know when Disney Sea is going to open?’ ‘Are you going to go?’ I asked and he said, ‘No, a friend of mine from junior high said he’s coming.’ I wasn’t interested, and said I didn’t know. ‘Really?’ Ryosuke said, and said no more.
3.11
I bought a bento at Karasu Bento, came back home and found Koto and Satoru huddled in the living room, deep in the midst of a discussion about what they should submit for the contest to name the shopping area in front of the station. The first prize was ¥1,000,000.
‘Since the area’s called Chitose Karasuyama – with the word “crow” in there, karasu – how about “Caw Caw Road”?’
‘I bet a hundred other people have come up with that one.’
Koto and Satoru are always together during the day and have grown close.
I suddenly realised I hadn’t had a call from my mother the whole week. Nothing could be better, but still, not hearing from her always worries me. I think it was about ten days ago when she called last. I was just back from work and Koto had said, ‘You had a call from your mother.’
‘What’d she say?’ I asked.
‘Nothing really, but I think she was drunk. She was kind of laughing uproariously, sounded kind of happy,’ Koto replied, unfazed.
My mum calls me, drunk in the middle of the day, laughing uproariously, and Koto says she’s in a good mood.
Sometimes I wish it was all a joke – all the scenes I can’t help remembering, of Dad slamming the door and Mum crouching in fear, of Mum reeking of alcohol and Dad grabbing her by the arm, or me running upstairs, crying in my room. Sometimes I wish I could just add some silly background m
usic to it all, like the entrance music when the comedian Ken Shimura plays his moronic stock samurai character on TV.
I think it was back in high school. One day I was going to the kitchen to get some juice when I overheard my parents in the next room. Dad was apparently pinning Mum down against her will, and I heard him growl out in a low voice, ‘That’s what I married you for, right?’
3.12
I had the day off and when I woke up in the morning I was feeling – for the first time in I don’t know how long – so refreshed I decided to put all my winter clothes away. Koto usually does a great job of vacuuming and our room and the living room are so clean you could eat off the floor.
I opened the wardrobe and was stuffing a thick coat and jumper into a cardboard box when I ran across an old plastic bag from a Lawson’s convenience store. I knew without opening it what was inside – a 120-minute Sony video tape tossed in like so much rubbish.
The video tape had all the rape scenes from films that I knew recorded on it. Like the last scene in the film Cinema Paradiso, where the main character watched a film of all these movie kiss scenes spliced together, this tape contained a dozen or so rape scenes. Like the scene in The Accused, where Jodi Foster is raped on top of a pinball machine. The scene in A Clockwork Orange where a girl is raped with ‘Singing in the Rain’ playing in the background. Girls in Last Exit to Brooklyn, Blue Velvet, Thelma and Louise all crying for the men to stop it! In Straw Dogs and Class of 1984, the men rape women as the heroes in a revenge drama. Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon, Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. One woman after another getting raped, enough to make you want to puke. No other scenes at all. Just rape scenes going on and on. Based on these scenes you don’t get any idea of the women’s backgrounds, like where they live, what kind of work they do, what kind of flowers they like, what dreams they have, whether they’re married, or have kids. No info on that at all. All you see are women struggling to get away from men.
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