‘What are you doing? Let’s go,’ Ryosuke shouted from the front door.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t think of any,’ and I guided Koto out the door and went into the living room.
After they’d left for the video store, I switched off the TV they’d left on and sat down on the sofa. Under my bum I found Ryosuke’s keyring, and I picked it up. It was a black leather holder with five keys. One key was for the apartment, another was most likely for Momoko, but I wasn’t sure about the remaining three. One was maybe for Kiwako’s apartment, and another for his parents’ home. But what the fifth key was for I had no clue. I tossed the keyring onto the table and the five keys made a pleasant clatter.
Since I’d turned off the TV it was so quiet I could hear the second hand on the wall clock. I shifted my weight and the fake leather of the sofa creaked. The living room was almost always occupied, and I hadn’t been alone in it like this for quite some time. Restless, I stood up and turned on the TV. And I continued over to the girls’ room, which I hadn’t been in recently, and went in. Mirai had moved the bed to a slightly different spot from where Misaki used to have it. I turned on the light and made a half-circuit of the bed. A futon, the one Koto must sleep in, was neatly folded up on the floor, with a batik cover over it. Three cardboard boxes were lined up against the wall, with what appeared to be her clothes inside. This was all she had. I happened to nudge one of the boxes with my foot and saw invoices for a parcel delivery service stuck between them. I pulled the invoices out and saw they were already all filled in, in pen. The receiver’s address was Koto’s parents’ address. From: Kotomi Okochi, Tokyo. To: Kotomi Okochi, Hiroshima. Packages sent from her to herself. There were three invoices, one for each of the three boxes that contained Koto’s belongings.
Oddly, I felt nothing. Koto may be leaving here. She might not be here any more. These were my thoughts, but no emotion welled up as a result. Actually, I may have been thinking the same thing from the time she first moved in. It was like I was saying Let’s live together from today and Okay, see you. Bye! at one and the same instant . . . Like from the moment things began, we’d reached the end. Maybe from the day Koto first came here she had already left. Maybe these last few months I’d been enjoying living not with the Koto who would someday leave, but with the after-image of the Koto who had already left.
I wasn’t counting on Koto to be thoughtful enough to buy a new fluorescent light bulb, so I went out to buy one. The exact moment I opened the front door the fortune teller from 402 next door emerged from his place, a bin bag in each hand. I’d seen him several times but had never spoken to him. Since we were looking right at each other, I said good evening but the fortune teller bluntly turned away. I’m not sure why, but I apologised.
From behind his closed front door I could hear cats mewing. Not just one, but five or six cats irritably meowing and scratching at the door with their claws.
I didn’t feel like getting in the same lift as him, so I took the stairs down to the ground floor, but as luck would have it right when I arrived the lift door opened and again we came face to face. This time I looked away first. In the corner of my eye I sensed him giving a reluctant bow, but I had broken eye contact so openly I couldn’t very well face him again.
I left the building, wove my way through the cars as I crossed the street, and went into the convenience store across the way. I bought two energy-saving fluorescent bulbs and a bunch of slightly black bananas. I left the store and was about to cross the street again when I spotted a man in a suit coming down the emergency stairs next to the convenience store. The first and second floors of the convenience store building were offices of a life insurance company, the third floor was an acupuncture clinic, while the owner of the building occupied the fourth floor. Out of pure curiosity, I decided to go up the emergency stairs the man had come down.
When I got to the landing between the third and fourth floors, our own apartment building across the street was completely exposed to view. Our apartment was long and narrow, so the windows for all three rooms – the guys’ room, the living room, and the girls’ room – faced the street. The lights were on in all the rooms, with the florescent light in the guys’ room, as always, flickering. The TV in the living room was still on. The girls’ room was a bit dim, but with the curtains open I could clearly see Mirai’s illustrations hanging on the wall.
I put the plastic bag with the two fluorescent bulbs and bunch of bananas down at my feet, rested my chin on the metal railing, and gazed at our apartment. No one was in any of the rooms. It felt strange to be viewing the rooms from the outside like this. Not because no one was there, but it was strange to think that we actually lived inside there. I wanted to see somebody inside those three empty rooms. If I waited a while, Koto and Ryosuke should be coming back from the video store.
For some reason, I suddenly thought of Satoru. One time when we went to the ramen place in front of the station, Satoru was holding a plate of fried rice and as he shovelled it in he said, ‘I have a favour to ask.’ I was only sort of half listening.
‘I have this friend named Makoto, and I was wondering if it’d be okay if he comes to live with us.’
According to Satoru, he’d already talked this over with Koto, and had asked Ryosuke and Mirai, and all three of them were against it. And he wanted me to ask them again. I was eating the ramen as he spoke, and I sipped down the last bit of soup right as he finished. I put the bowl down and looked up and saw Satoru staring at me. Almost unconsciously I said, ‘Aren’t you kind of jumping to conclusions?’ For a second his face went pale. ‘Well – what I mean is,’ I hurriedly added, ‘you don’t have any place to stay, right?’
‘Yeah, that’s true,’ he replied, and fell silent.
I remembered all this as I stood there on the landing of the emergency stairs, vaguely watching our empty apartment across the street.
Ryosuke and Koto didn’t seem to be coming back, no matter how long I waited, and I was about to give up and go home when a navy blue BMW pulled up outside our building. It was Misaki who emerged from the passenger side and I leaned over the railing and was about to call out to her, but she went around to the driver’s side and was trying to pull this guy I’d never seen before out of the car against his will. The guy who got out was a drab, middle-aged man, who I figured must be Tanitsu, Misaki’s boyfriend. Dragging the reluctant man along, Misaki went inside the entrance. I thought of following them, but decided to stay out and watch.
Misaki soon appeared in the living room. Her mouth was moving a little, maybe calling out to the man, who was still at the front door. Misaki opened the door to the guys’ room. She disappeared from sight for a second, then reappeared under the flickering fluorescent light. The man still hadn’t made an appearance. Misaki switched off the flickering light. The three lit-up rooms became two, and she exited the guys’ room, cut through the living room and went into the girls’ room. I waved to her, but she wasn’t looking outside.
This was when the man came inside. He nervously looked around and motioned to Misaki to come, probably telling her they should leave. She came back into the living room and shrugged and held both hands out wide, the way foreigners do. It looked like a poorly performed pantomime. I could see the man’s face from the front. Nothing special. Misaki dragged him into the girls’ room and pointed to where her bed used to be, no doubt telling him This is where I used to live. And that’s when it happened. The man was scanning all of Mirai’s illustrations up on the wall, when his eyes pierced through the window and ran smack into mine. It felt like our eyes both wavered for an instant. I didn’t look away, and he moved his gaze away from me and back to the walls of the room, in an entirely natural way, as if he’d never seen me. He took Misaki’s hand and pulled her back to the living room.
After this they sat on the sofa for about ten minutes. I could see the guy get up a few times, tugging at Misaki’s arm. The rest of the time it was just their heads as they faced each other on the sofa.
As I watched their stationary heads, a strange doubt welled up in me. I was vaguely thinking how Misaki lives now in a high-rise condo in Kiyomi and the strange doubt that suddenly hit me was this: not just Misaki, but everyone else who lives in our apartment might actually be living somewhere else . . . Just like Misaki lives in the high-rise condo in Kiyomi, maybe all of them – Mirai, Koto, Ryosuke, and Satoru – all have their own places somewhere else? Which means that the only one who actually lives in this apartment I was looking at is me. The whole idea is impossible, but somehow this strange fantasy threw me.
I remember how, back when Misaki and I were living together, before Mirai moved in, and things weren’t going too well with us, Misaki said this:
‘It’s just the two of us living here, you and me. But sometimes it feels like there’s someone else here. I can’t explain it well, but it’s like there’s this monster that you and I have created.’
She didn’t go on to say, ‘And it’s because of that that we’ve grown hostile to each other.’ She was merely saying that, like it or not, when people come together they give birth to that sort of thing.
Misaki and her boyfriend left before Ryosuke and Koto came back. I went down the stairs when they came down, and from the landing between the first and second floor, watched them as they exited the building. Under the street light I could see Tanitsu’s face more clearly this time. Like I thought before, he was nothing special.
I waited until they’d driven away before crossing the street. I went into our apartment, opened the living-room window, and directly across was the landing where I’d been standing. Right below the railing was the plastic bag with the two fluorescent lights and the bunch of bananas. I clucked my tongue, and kicked the side of the sofa Misaki and her boyfriend had been sitting on. The plywood inside broke with a loud crack. I kicked it again and my toes sunk deep inside the hole I’d made.
The smell of rain came in from the window. I went out on the balcony and looked up at the sky, but there were no rain clouds, just the pale moon. I suddenly recalled how the fortune teller next door only read fortunes around the time of a new moon or a full moon. The moist night air stroked my cheeks, blowing in the sleeves of my T-shirt and tickling my underarms. When I turned around, the brand new fluorescent lights I’d put in were dazzlingly bright.
I went back inside, changed into my jogging gear and went back out to the living room. Ryosuke and Koto were still out, maybe stopping at a karaoke place after the video store. Mirai wasn’t back yet, probably out drinking somewhere. I glanced at the wall clock, and it was already eleven.
As I was tying my laces up tight at the front door, I thought about where I should run. Going east down Kyukoshu Kaido Boulevard, then over Kanpachi to Bashikoen would be good, and I felt I had more than enough energy to head north, go under the overpass for the Metro Expressway and make it all the way to Inokashira Park.
I was doing a few warm-up leaps in the entrance when I heard, outside the door, Ryosuke and Koto laughing. I opened the door and saw them walking down the hallway towards me. Their eyes both went to my feet and for some reason for a second they both looked annoyed.
‘You guys really took your time,’ I said.
‘You’re going jogging?’ Koto said. ‘We had a parfait on the way back,’ Ryosuke said, their voices overlapped. Ryosuke was holding a bag from the video store.
‘So what did you get?’ I asked.
‘It’s a secret,’ Ryosuke replied.
‘And we were hoping so much to watch it with you,’ Koto said slyly.
‘I can’t, I’m going running,’ I said.
‘I guess not, then.’
Koto and Ryosuke came in and I went out the door, almost shoved out the narrow entrance. ‘So what did you end up renting?’ I asked again.
As she removed her shoes Koto laughed. ‘Porn.’
‘Don’t look at me!’ Ryosuke protested. ‘She’s the one who wanted to rent it.’
I shut the door and proceeded down the corridor. I got in the lift and when I did some deep knee bends, the floor bowed downwards.
At the entrance to the building I did some more warm-up exercises. Through my headphones I could hear Maria Callas – the aria ‘La mamma morta’ from Andrea Chénier. I stretched out my Achilles tendons, pushed rewind on the tape, took a deep breath, and set off.
I left the entrance and came out on Kyukoshu Kaido Boulevard. I hadn’t decided which route to take, but my feet turned left. I ran down the white line on the pavement between the pedestrian path and the street. Whenever there was an electric pole in the way, the straight white line twisted out towards the road, and then the slightly bulging line went back to the way it had been. As I swerved around a couple standing there talking, and an illegally parked car, Maria Callas’s voice swelled up again. It felt good to be running down the streets like this at night, listening to this aria, to the plea for mercy. It was like I was escaping the world, and my legs felt stronger for it. I timed my breathing with my strides. My feet seemed to glide across the ground. Whenever I swerved out into the street a little, headlights would draw near from behind. The car would pass by with inches to spare. One car after another passed me. The world I should be escaping from was still pulling ahead of me. I turned left at Matsuba Boulevard. Cross this narrow street and you come out on Route 20.
As I ran, I noticed all kinds of unusual things. A crack in the pavement. A guard rail bent by an accident, a throwaway ad sign, folded over, a flickering street light, a brilliant hydrangea sticking out between a concrete block wall.
I came out on Route 20. At the intersection the green light for pedestrians was flashing. I decided to go for broke and raced across the broad road, which has three lanes on each side. The headlights of the stopped cars seemed to sear my cheeks. The sweat waiting just under my skin now gushed out my pores. Just when I got to the median, the light turned red. I sped up even more and raced across the rest of the brightly lit crossing. The instant my left foot reached the far side a car whizzed by, like the bridge I’d just crossed had collapsed behind me.
I passed the young couple who had been leisurely crossing ahead of me and headed north along Matsuba Boulevard. The sound from my Walkman cut out for a second and the music switched from ‘Habanera’ to ‘Je veux vivre dans ce reve’. Just for a moment, at the pause between songs I could hear the hard sound of my feet as they hit the pavement. When the music started up again, though, the asphalt felt soft, like I was running down a rotting, mushy old linoleum floor. Like it wasn’t the earth, but skin covering the earth.
A cavernous darkness spread out before me. At Takaido the Metro Expressway branches off from Route 20, and the elevated bridges on the motorway rise up in the night sky as if about to crush the streets below. As I ran underneath the elevated bridges, I turned left and ran alongside the concrete bridge. At the time of the 1995 Kobe earthquake on TV I saw the same sort of bridge toppled over. I suddenly looked up. Even now, hundreds of cars were silently gliding along that bridge.
No one else was on the deserted, dark street underneath the bridge, just the crossing light changing from green to red. There was a fence between the thick pillars, and the bare concrete walls shone palely in the street lights. Graffiti was sprayed on the wall in black paint. I couldn’t make out what was drawn there, but it was kind of amateurish. Once before when I was running here, there was a group of skateboarders yelling in sort of weird, angry voices. But tonight I didn’t see them.
I jogged on, not breaking stride. I suddenly smelled dirt, and just then raindrops plopped down on my cheeks. Before I even noticed it, rain clouds had covered the sky, the colour you’d get if you mixed every colour of paint together. The rain spattered down on my bare arms and ears. The street lights lit up the raindrops as if they were a cloud of beetles. I suddenly recalled that the car park where Ryosuke parked his car was just up the street. Satoru might be there, I thought.
Every time I ran under the street lights, my dark shadow fo
rmed at my feet. With each step the shadow stretched out ahead of me, and as the next street light approached it faded away. When I turned around and ran backwards, a different shadow formed at my feet and trailed away behind me.
For Setagaya, there were still a lot of farm fields around. The car park that Ryosuke rented a space from was in the middle of one of these fields. I could feel the gravel in the car park against my feet. My ears, though, were still full of the voice of Maria Callas.
Ryosuke’s car was all by itself in one corner of the spacious car park. As I entered the car park I gradually slowed down and, catching my breath, started walking. It was pitch dark. As I got near the car, I could see the raindrops flowing down the windscreen. I leaned up against the driver’s side window and peered inside. In the back seat there was a rumpled blanket and pillow and a few manga books. The window clouded up with my breath. The body of the car felt a bit warm to the touch. Raindrops slid down the back of my neck and slowly down my back and made me shiver.
I decided I should go back home before it started raining hard. I left the car and started slowly jogging back out of the car park. The smell of dirt got even stronger. The rain didn’t wait. Even over Callas’s powerful voice I could hear the sound of it as it struck the ground. My shoulders got wet and my T-shirt slowly grew heavy. The rain ran down my hair and forehead and got in my eyes, and the light of a far-off traffic signal looked blurry.
By the time I got back to the elevated bridge over the motorway, my T-shirt was plastered against my chest and stomach. Rain and sweat were slowly soaking into the elastic band of my shorts. I tried to wipe my wet face but my palm was soaked. I crossed under the elevated bridge and stopped at the median, thinking I’d look for somewhere to get out of the rain. I leaned my hand against the rusty fence and bent over to catch my breath. A mix of sweat and rain – it was hard to tell one from the other – dripped down to my feet, wetting a chunk of concrete that lay there. A rusty reinforcing bar stuck out of the concrete. From far away a car was getting nearer. Its headlights illuminated the graffiti on the pillars of the bridge, and it sent up a splash as it drove past me and away.
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