Goodbye Tsugumi

by Banana Yoshimoto

  She was panting. Clear drops of water kept dripping down from the hood of her raincoat onto the tatami. Her eyes were wide open.

  “Maria,” she said, her voice feeble.

  “Huh?” Still halfway caught in my dreams, I turned to look up at Tsugumi. She had an expression on her face like she was feeling uneasy, as if something had frightened her. When she spoke, however, her voice was bossy and urgent.

  “Hey, would you wake up?! This is serious, kid! Look at this!”

  Handling it extremely gently, as if it were something precious, she slipped a single sheet of paper from the pocket of her raincoat and held it straight out. I reached out vaguely with one hand, wondering why on earth she was acting in such an exaggerated way, and took the paper from her. The moment I saw what it was, I felt as if I’d suddenly been shoved under a spotlight, right in the dead center of the beam.

  There was no doubt about it: The vigorous, semicursive characters written there were in my grandfather’s hand. Handwriting that called up a soft ache of memories. The letter began as all his letters to me did:

  Maria, my treasure,

  Goodbye.

  Take care of your grandmother, your father, and your mother. I hope you’ll grow up to be a fine woman, worthy of the Virgin’s name.

  Ryūzō

  I was shocked. For a moment an image of my grandfather floated through my mind—I saw his straight back as he sat facing his desk—and my chest felt as if it would burst. When I spoke, it was with incredible force.

  “What is this? Where did you find it!”

  Tsugumi looked straight into my eyes, her brilliant red lips trembling, and answered me in a touchingly earnest tone, as if she were saying a prayer.

  “Can you believe it? In the haunted mailbox!”

  “What? Are you serious!”

  I had completely forgotten that old weather box, but now in a flash all the vanished memories returned. Tsugumi lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “Listen, kid, I’m a hell of a lot closer to death than the rest of you assholes, so I can feel these things. I was in bed earlier, right, and the old guy showed up in my dream. Even after I woke up things felt kind of weird, you know? Sort of like there was something he had wanted to say. When I was a kid he used to buy all sorts of stuff for me too, so you might say I’m kind of indebted to him. The thing is, kiddo, that you were there in the dream too, and the old guy kind of seemed like he wanted to talk with you—after all he loved you most of all, right? So then it hit me. I went and took a peek in the mailbox, right, and damned if . . . Hey kid, did you ever tell him about the haunted mailbox while he was alive?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh my God! Then this really is scary!” shouted Tsugumi, and then, her tone solemn, “Well, Maria, that damn box really was haunted, after all.”

  Now, pressing the palms of her hands together tightly and holding them before her chest, she closed her eyes. She seemed to be remembering herself running through the rain to the mailbox, just a short while ago. Even now the quiet sigh of the rainfall was echoing through the dark. I sensed reality slipping away from me as I was sucked deep into Tsugumi’s night. Everything that had happened up to then, death and life, it all seemed to be sliding down into a whirlpool of mystery, a place where a different kind of truth held sway—that was the feeling, the softly uneasy stillness in the room.

  “Maria, what on earth should we do?” Tsugumi said, her voice very quiet, and it sounded as if it had been a struggle for her to say even this much. Her face was terribly pale. She looked at me imploringly.

  “Well, to begin with—” I said firmly. Just then Tsugumi had this peculiar air of delicacy about her, as if the immensity of what had happened was simply too much for her. “Don’t say a word about this to anyone. But the most important thing of all is for you to go home right away, get yourself warmed up, and go to bed. It may be spring, but it’s still raining outside—I’m sure you’ll have a fever tomorrow. Hurry and change into some dry clothes. We can talk all this over in a day or two.”

  “Okay, I’ll go then.” Tsugumi wafted to her feet. “Later, babe.”

  Just before she left my room I said, “Tsugumi, thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it, kid,” Tsugumi replied.

  And without a glance back, leaving the door open, she was gone.

  For some time I sat there on the floor, rereading the letter again and again. Tears dripped down onto the carpet. A sweet, sacred warmth filled my chest. I felt the way I used to feel on Christmas morning when I woke to the sound of my grandfather’s voice—Well look here, there seems to be a present from Santa Claus!— and turned to see the wrapped gift lying by my pillow. The longer I kept reading, the less likely it seemed that my tears would ever stop. I slumped down over the letter and cried and cried and cried.

  Okay, so maybe I was a little gullible.

  I had my doubts, though! We’re talking about Tsugumi, after all.

  But those beautiful characters. The handwriting. The greeting that only my grandfather and I knew: “my treasure.” Tsugumi soaked by the rain, and the power in her gaze, the way it had spiraled into me, and her tone of voice. And what’s more, she had said with a totally serious face things she usually only said as a joke. Listen, kid, I’m a hell of a lot closer to death than the rest of you assholes . . . Oh yes, I had been magnificently deceived.

  The punch line came the next day.

  I went over to her house at noon, eager to have her tell me in more detail about the letter, but she wasn’t home. I’d gone up to her room and was there waiting when Tsugumi’s older sister, Yōko, came up to give me a cup of tea.

  “I’m afraid Tsugumi’s at the hospital,” she said, somewhat sadly.

  Yōko is short and round. She always speaks very mildly, almost as if she’s singing. No matter what Tsugumi does to her, she remains soft and calm—the only thing that changes is that she gets this sad look on her face. It takes something almost unheard of to get her angry. She’s the kind of person who really makes me feel small, you know, just being around her. Tsugumi went around jeering at Yōko, saying that she’d never met such a blockhead in her life and that the world would be a better place if she went and jumped in a lake, but I liked her a lot, and even looked up to her. There’s no way anyone could live with Tsugumi and not find her trying, and yet whenever you saw Yōko she was smiling brightly. To me she really seemed like an angel.

  “Is she feeling worse today?” I asked, worried.

  I figured that going out in the rain had made her sick after all.

  “Oh, not really . . . Lately she’s been working herself much too hard, and so now she’s started running a fever. I don’t know exactly what she’s doing, she seems to be writing some sort of letter or somethi—”

  “She’s what!” I shouted.

  And then, as Yōko looked on in amazement, I turned around and ran my eyes over the shelves above her desk. Sure enough, there it was: A Semicursive Calligraphy Workbook.

  She also had plenty of paper and ink, an inkstone, a very fine brush, and to top the whole thing off, a letter of my grandfather’s that she had evidently stolen from my room.

  Angry as I was, I was even more astounded.

  What was it that made her carry these things so far? For someone like her who had never even held a brush properly, to produce calligraphy as skillfully executed as that in the letter would take an incredible amount of tenacity—I really couldn’t imagine where it came from, or what purpose it served. The room was awash in spring sunlight. Dazed, I turned toward the window and looked out over the faintly glimmering ocean, allowing my thoughts to drift. Yōko was just opening her mouth to ask what had happened when Tsugumi returned.

  Her face was flushed with fever, and she was leaning against Aunt Masako, taking small, listless steps, but the second she entered the room and saw my expression she gave a smug little grin. “Cat out of the bag?” she asked.

  I felt so outr
aged and humiliated that in a flash my face turned bright red. Springing to my feet, I shoved her with all the strength I had.

  “Ma-Maria!” cried Yōko, surprised.

  Tsugumi crashed into the paper-paneled door, causing it to collapse, then flipped over and collided brutally with the wall. My aunt started to speak.

  “Maria darling, please, Tsugumi isn’t—”

  I shook my head, tears streaming from my eyes.

  “Please, just don’t talk to me right now!” I cried, glaring ferociously at Tsugumi. I was so furious that even Tsugumi couldn’t find anything to say. No one had ever pushed her or been at all violent with her before.

  “If you’ve got so much time on your hands that crappy stuff like this is all you can find to do,” I said, slamming A Semicursive Calligraphy Workbook down on the tatami floor, “then just drop dead! I don’t care if you die!”

  Perhaps at that moment, Tsugumi realized that unless she did something right away I would never have anything to do with her again for all of eternity—and that’s precisely what I was planning to do—because, as she lay there, still in the position she’d landed in, she looked straight into my eyes, her gaze very clear, and mumbled the words she had refused to say all her life, no matter what happened, however awful things got, even if you tortured her.

  “Sorry, Maria.”

  Aunt Masako and Yōko were both stunned, and I was more shocked than either of them. All three of us held our breath, unable to speak. The idea that Tsugumi would actually apologize to someone . . . no, it was completely unthinkable! And so we simply froze there, bathed in a brilliant flood of sunlight. The only sound we could hear was the far-off noise of wind blowing through the town, which had by now firmly settled into afternoon.

  “Pnph-pnph. Pnha-ha-haw!” Suddenly Tsugumi erupted into laughter, shattering the stillness. “But seriously, Maria! You’re so freaking gullible!” she said, writhing with new bursts of laughter. “I mean, what in the world were you thinking? Try using a little common sense, for God’s sake! How the hell is a dead guy gonna write you a letter? Talk about dumb with a capital D! Aha-ha-ha!”

  For some time, Tsugumi just kept rolling around the floor, whooping and holding her stomach as if she’d been suppressing the laughter the whole time and just couldn’t manage to keep it inside anymore.

  Seeing her like that, I burst out laughing myself. “Well, I guess there’s no point in being angry now,” I said, my face reddening, and then smiled again. The two of us reproduced the conversation we’d had during the rainfall the previous night for Yōko and my aunt, and the two of them stared in disbelief as we were swept up in round after round of riotous guffaws.

  For better or worse, that’s how Tsugumi and I ended up becoming such close friends.

  Spring and the Yamamoto Sisters

  Early this spring my father and his first wife were officially divorced, and my father telephoned to tell my mother and me that we could come to Tokyo. I’d already taken the entrance exam for a university in Tokyo, so my mother and I had been waiting for two calls at once: my father’s, and the one that would tell me whether or not I had passed the test. This meant that for a while we both became extraordinarily sensitive to the ringing of our phone. And of course it was precisely at times like this that Tsugumi would abandon her usual policy and ring me up several times every day “just to say hello” or to ask if I’d “had bad news re the exam”—calls she knew would only grate on my nerves. For once, though, my mother and I were feeling so delighted with how things were going that we were able to respond perfectly cheerfully every time. “Oh, is that you, Tsugumi?” one or the other of us would say mildly, and as soon as we had said goodbye we’d forget that she had even called.

  These were thrilling days. The joy of knowing that we were finally headed for Tokyo filled us with a bubbly, brilliant sense of anticipation. This was the period in our lives, in other words, when the winter snows began to melt.

  My mother enjoyed working at the inn, but after all she had been there for ages and ages, and even when she was having a good time she was still waiting. Looking at her, you wouldn’t have thought she was suffering much, but that was only because by acting as though she were having fun she managed to keep her suffering down to a minimum. I suspect this blithe surface of good humor is also what gave my father the heart he needed to go on commuting back and forth so diligently, instead of just giving my mother up. Not that she’s such a strong person—she really isn’t—but you got the feeling that part of her was struggling to become strong, even if she herself didn’t know it. Every so often I’d overhear her complaining to Aunt Masako, but she always spoke so cheerfully that the complaints didn’t sound as grave as the problems would lead you to expect, and I had the sense that even as Aunt Masako kept laughing and nodding, she was having trouble deciding how she ought to respond. And of course when you get down to brass tacks—well, no matter how kindly people treated my mother, she was still leeching off her sister’s family, still living as my father’s mistress, and there was no sign that things would ever improve. Even if she kept all this locked up inside, I’m sure there were plenty of times when the uncertainty of it all left her feeling so worn out that she just wanted to break down and cry. And since I thought I could understand some of what she was going through, I ended up becoming an adult without ever having passed through a rebellious stage, the way most adolescents do.

  Come to think of it, that seaside town where my mother and I lived for so many years, waiting for my father—it’s shown me all kinds of things.

  Now that spring was drawing near, and each day was warmer than the last, and now that we were finally going to leave, all the everyday, nothing-special scenes I was so used to seeing, like the aging corridors of the inn, and all those swarms of bugs that gathered in the light of the sign out front, and the poles where we hung laundry, where spiders liked to spin their webs and beyond which the mountains jutted up . . . suddenly all of these hit me harder, with greater clarity. The inn seemed bathed in a haze of light.

  Toward the end, I started going for walks along the beach every morning, taking along an Akita dog with the rather uninspired name of Pooch. Pooch belonged to the Tanakas, who lived in the house just behind the inn.

  Early mornings when the sky was clear the ocean always seemed to shine with a special brilliance. Something about the way the hundreds of millions of shimmering waves kept blinking into disarray and then rising up to start rolling forward again, with that chilly look to them—something in it seemed sacred, made you feel as if you had to keep your distance. Pooch would dash out and frisk around on the beach, running wherever he wanted to, stopping here and there to enjoy the affections of people out fishing, while I sat at the edge of the concrete embankment, looking out over the water.

  I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way Tsugumi started joining us on our walks. This made me really happy.

  Once, back when Pooch was still just a puppy, Tsugumi had bullied him so long and so relentlessly that he’d finally gotten desperate and given her hand the nastiest bite he could manage. Yōko and Aunt Masako and my mother and I were just sitting down to lunch when it happened. I can still picture the scene: Aunt Masako said, “I wonder where Tsugumi is?” and the very next moment Tsugumi stepped into the room with her hand streaming blood and her face just as pale as it could be. “Tsugumi, what happened!” shouted my aunt, leaping up from where she sat on the floor. And Tsugumi replied coolly, “The worm has turned.”The tone in which she said this was so hilarious that Yōko and my mother and I all exploded into laughter. But ever since that day, Pooch and Tsugumi had hated each other’s guts, and whenever Tsugumi went out the back door Pooch always started barking so wildly that we all got really worried, thinking that it might annoy the guests. Since I got along with both of them, their mutual animosity had always troubled me in a vague sort of way, and now that I was going to be moving away it was especially nice to see that they had patched up the
ir differences.

  Tsugumi came out with us as long as it wasn’t raining. I would slide my window open in the morning, and as soon as Pooch’s ears caught that sound he would come flying out of his doghouse, practically jiggling with excitement. I would hurry and wash my face and change into my clothes, then go outside and quietly push open the gate that separated the rear of the Yamamoto Inn from the Tanakas’ back garden. Pooch would be frolicking around, jangling his heavy chain, I’d catch hold of him and buckle on his leather leash, and then we’d walk back out through the gate. It was never really clear to me exactly when Tsugumi came out, but she was always there, waiting for us. At first, having her around put Pooch in kind of a grumpy mood, and even though Tsugumi tried not to let it show, you could tell that she was feeling a bit antsy herself, and wasn’t at all sure how to behave. So in the beginning our walks together tended to have sort of a gloomy atmosphere to them. Then Pooch warmed up to Tsugumi, and finally even started letting her hold his leash. I’d watch her being jerked along in the morning sunlight, shouting, “Slow down, you dumb mutt!” but obviously having a terrific time, and I’d realize just how adorable she could be. Deep down Tsugumi really wanted to be friends with Pooch, after all! I thought, feeling a quiet surge of tenderness. Of course if Pooch started running on ahead too quickly or anything like that Tsugumi would give his leash such a brutal jerk that he’d end up standing on his hind legs, so I couldn’t take my eyes off her for a second. It definitely would not have been good to have her vaporize the neighbor’s dog.