When the news and weather ended, I turned off the radio and cleaned up the breakfast dishes. Then I sat down again at the table, drank a second cup of coffee, and thought. Most people would have used that time to read the Sunday paper, but I didn’t subscribe. So I just sipped my coffee, looked at the magnificent willow tree outside the window, and thought.
First, I thought about my wife, who, I had been told, was about to give birth. Then it hit me—she wasn’t my wife any longer. No connection between us remained. Not contractual, not personal. From where she stood, I was now in all likelihood a virtual stranger, a person of no special consequence. It felt weird. Until a few months ago we had eaten breakfast together, shared the same soap and towel, walked around naked in front of each other, slept in the same bed. Now our lives bore no relationship to each other.
As I followed this train of thought, gradually I began to feel a stranger to myself as well. I placed my hands on the table and studied them for a while. These were my hands, no doubt. Right and left a symmetrical pair. I used these hands to paint, to cook, to eat, sometimes to caress a woman’s body. But this morning, for some reason, they didn’t look like my hands at all. They had become a stranger’s hands—the palms, the backs, the fingernails.
I quit studying my hands. And thinking about the woman who had formerly been my wife. I got up from the table and went to the bath, where I removed my pajamas and took a hot shower. I carefully washed my hair and shaved in the bathroom sink. When I finished, I thought about the baby Yuzu was about to have—the baby who was not my child—again. I didn’t want to, but there was nothing I could do about it.
She was about seven months pregnant. Seven months ago had been the second half of April. Where was I then, and what was I doing? I had left home and set out on a long, solitary trip in mid-March, driving my antique Peugeot 205 more or less at random all across Hokkaido and northeastern Japan. By the time my trip ended and I returned to Tokyo it was already early May. In late April I had crossed over from Hokkaido to Aomori in northern Honshu on the ferry that ran from Hakodate to Oma on the Shimokita Peninsula.
I pulled the simple diary I had kept out of a desk drawer and checked. At that time I had been traveling in the mountains of Aomori, far from the sea. Although it was well into the second half of April, it was still cold, and snow was everywhere. Why on earth had I chosen such a cold place? I couldn’t remember the precise location, but I did recall a small, almost deserted lakefront hotel where I had stayed for a few days. It was an unprepossessing old building made of concrete, where they offered simple (but not bad) meals and amazingly cheap rates. There was even a small outdoor hot springs bath in a corner of the garden that was available twenty-four hours a day. The hotel had just reopened for the spring season, and I was practically the only guest.
For some reason, my recollections of that trip were vague. All I recorded in the notebook I used as a diary were the names of the places I visited, where I stayed, what I ate, the distance I had driven, and how much I spent. It was a brief, very hit-and-miss record. I could find no mention of my thoughts and feelings, or anything else along those lines. I guess there was nothing to write about. One day just flowed into another, with no distinction between them. I had jotted down the names of the places, but couldn’t remember much about any of them. Many times, even their names had been left out. Looking back, I could only recall that feeling of repetition: the same scenery day after day, the same food, the same weather (“cold” and “not so cold” were my only categories).
The little sketchbook I had carried did a better job of bringing the trip back to life. (I carried no camera, so I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Instead, I had sketched.) Even so, there weren’t that many sketches to look at. When I had spare time, I had just whipped off simple drawings of what was before my eyes with an old pencil or ballpoint pen. Flowers and plants on the roadside, dogs and cats, mountain peaks, things like that. Now and then I would sketch someone I met along the way, but I almost always gave those pictures to whomever I had drawn.
Beneath the diary entry for April 19 I had written the words “Dream last night.” That was all. I had been staying at the small lakefront hotel on that date. The words were underlined with a thick pencil. It must have been a special kind of dream to warrant such emphasis. It took me a while to remember what the dream had been about. When the memory returned, though, it arrived all at once.
The dream had come to me shortly before dawn that day. It was vivid, and very erotic.
* * *
—
In the dream I was back in the apartment in Hiroo. The one Yuzu and I had shared for six years. There was a bed, and my wife was sleeping in it. I was looking down at her from the ceiling. In other words, I was hovering above her. I didn’t find that at all out of the ordinary. In fact, the me in the dream found floating in the air to be perfectly normal. Nothing unnatural about it. Of course, I had no idea I was dreaming. What was happening felt totally real.
Quietly, so as not to wake Yuzu, I descended from the ceiling to stand at the foot of the bed. I was sexually aroused, powerfully so. I hadn’t made love to her for ages. Bit by bit, I peeled back the quilt covering her. She was fast asleep (had she taken a sleeping pill before retiring?) and showed no signs of waking up, even when I removed the quilt. She never even twitched. This made me more daring. Taking my time, I slipped off her pajama bottoms, then her panties. Her pajamas were a pale blue, her tiny cotton panties pure white. Still she did not wake. There was no resistance, no sound.
I gently parted her legs and caressed her vagina with my finger. It was warm and wet, and opened to my touch. As if it had been waiting for me. I couldn’t stand it any longer—I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter. Yuzu did not open her eyes, but she sighed and let out a small moan. As if she had been impatient for this to happen. Her nipples were as hard as cherry pits when I touched them.
She might be deep in a dream, I thought. If she was dreaming of someone, though, it was surely not me. For a long while now she had resisted sex with me. Whatever dream she might be having, though, whoever she was mistaking me for, it was too late to turn back, for I was already inside her. It could be a terrible shock if she woke up in the midst of the act and saw who it was. She might well be furious. If that were to happen, I would deal with it then. Now all I could do was take it to the limit. My desire raged like a river through a broken dam, carrying me along.
At the beginning, I moved my penis slowly, trying not to arouse her so much as to wake her up, but, naturally, the pace quickened as I went on. I could tell from the way her body welcomed me that she wanted me to be more forceful. Soon, though, I reached the moment of climax. I wanted to remain inside her, but I couldn’t control myself any longer. It had been ages since we had last had sex, and, though asleep, she was responding to our lovemaking with more passion than ever before.
My ejaculation was violent, and repeated. Again and again, semen poured from me, overflowing her vagina, turning the sheets sticky. There was nothing I could do to make it stop. If it continued, I worried, I would be completely emptied out. Yuzu slept deeply through it all without making a sound, her breathing even. Her sex, though, had contracted around mine, and would not let go. As if it had an unshakable will of its own and was determined to wring every last drop from my body.
* * *
—
I woke up at this point. I had indeed ejaculated. My underwear was drenched in semen. I quickly slipped it off to avoid soiling the bed, carried it to the sink, and washed it. Then I went out through the hotel’s back door to bathe in the hot springs. As the bath was entirely exposed to the elements, with no ceiling or walls, I was freezing by the time I reached it. Once I got in, however, the water warmed me to the core.
I soaked there alone in the predawn hush, listening to the water d
rip as steam melted the ice, replaying the dream over and over in my head. The memory was so vivid and physical it didn’t feel like a dream at all. I had actually visited the Hiroo apartment and had actually made love to Yuzu—that was the only way I could think about it. My hands remembered the touch of her silky skin and my penis could still feel her vagina. It had clung to my penis, had embraced it with a violent passion (true, Yuzu may have mistaken me for someone else, but it was me nonetheless). She had wrung me out, taking every last drop of my semen for her own.
I could not help but feel a kind of shame for having such a dream (if dream indeed it was). After all, I had raped my own wife in my imagination. I had undressed and entered her while she was sleeping, without her consent. In the eyes of the law, a man who does that to a woman—even his wife—is guilty of sexual assault. In that sense, my conduct was far from praiseworthy. Still, objectively speaking, it was a dream. Something experienced in sleep. I had not created it on purpose. I had not written the script.
Yet in it I had played out my truest hopes and desires. There was no question on that score. Had I been placed in a similar situation in real life—not in a dream—I might well have acted the same. I might have stripped and forcibly entered her. I wanted Yuzu’s body, longed to penetrate it. I was possessed by that desire. I had been able to realize it in exaggerated form in my dream (conversely, only in a dream could it have been realized).
As I continued on my solitary journey, this “real” erotic dream provided me with a provisional kind of happiness. You might say it buoyed me up. By recalling it, I could feel that I was a living creature organically connected to the world. Linked to my surroundings not through logical or conceptual thought, but carnally, through my body.
At the same time, though, the thought that someone else—some other man—was actually enjoying Yuzu as I had in my dream was agony. That someone was caressing her stiffened nipples, removing her tiny white panties, and thrusting himself into her until he came, again and again. When I imagined that, it felt as though I were torn and bleeding inside. Nothing (as far as I could remember) had ever made me feel that way before.
That was the strange dream I had experienced shortly before dawn on April 19. Noted in my diary as “Dream last night” and thickly underlined in pencil.
* * *
—
It was right around that time that Yuzu had conceived. Of course, the precise date could not be known. But it would not be odd if it were that day.
The similarity between my situation and the story Menshiki had told me was striking. The difference was that he had made love to a flesh-and-blood woman on his office sofa in reality. That had not taken place in a dream. And it had been right around then that she had conceived. Immediately thereafter she had married a man of substantial means, and had subsequently given birth to Mariye. Menshiki’s belief that Mariye might be his child therefore had a basis in fact. It was a long shot, perhaps, but at least it was possible. My lovemaking with Yuzu, on the other hand, had taken place in a dream. I was in the mountains of Aomori, while Yuzu was (probably) in the heart of Tokyo. Thus her child could not possibly be mine. That was the only logical conclusion. The odds were not low, they were zero. If, that is, one was thinking logically.
But my dream was too vivid to be so easily dismissed on logical grounds. Moreover, the pleasure I had felt during our lovemaking was greater, and far more memorable, than at any time during our six years of marriage. When I came again and again inside her, the fuses in my brain seemed to have all blown at once, melting what had been distinct layers of reality into a single heavy, turbid mass. As in the primal chaos of the earth.
So graphic an occurrence must have consequences—it couldn’t end like any other dream. I felt that strongly. It had to be connected to something. To have some sort of impact on the present.
* * *
—
Masahiko woke up shortly before nine. He padded into the dining room in his pajamas and drank a cup of hot black coffee. No breakfast, thanks, he said—just coffee, if you don’t mind. There were bags under his eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, rubbing his eyelids. “I’ve had much worse hangovers. This is mild.”
“Why don’t you stick around for a while?” I said.
“Don’t you have a guest coming?”
“That’s at ten. There’s still time. And there’s no problem if you’re here when they arrive. I’ll introduce you. They’re both very attractive.”
“Both? I thought there was just one model.”
“Her aunt is her chaperone.”
“Her chaperone? So they still do things the old-fashioned way in this neck of the woods? Like in a Jane Austen novel. They don’t wear corsets and ride in a horse-drawn carriage, do they?”
“Not a horse-drawn carriage. A Toyota Prius. And no corsets. When I’m painting the girl, the aunt sits in the living room and reads for the whole two hours. ‘Aunt’ makes her sound old, though—she’s pretty young.”
“What sort of books is she into?”
“I don’t know. I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.”
“No kidding,” he said. “Oh yeah, speaking of books, remember the character in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, the guy who shoots himself with a pistol just to prove how free he is? What’s his name? I figured you might know.”
“Kirillov,” I said.
“That’s right, Kirillov. I’ve been trying to remember, but it keeps slipping my mind.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“No special reason,” Masahiko said, shaking his head. “He popped into my head, and when I tried to recall his name, I couldn’t. It’s been bugging me. Like a fish bone caught in my throat. But man, those Russians. They come up with the weirdest ideas, don’t they?”
“There are lots of characters in Dostoevsky who do crazy things just to prove that they are free people, unconstrained by God and society. Though looking at Russia back then, maybe they weren’t so crazy after all.”
“Then how about you?” Masahiko asked. “You and Yuzu are formally divorced, which means you’re now a lawfully unwedded man. So what comes next? Even if it wasn’t your choice, freedom is still freedom, right? Why not run out and do something crazy, now that you have the opportunity?”
I laughed. “I’m not planning anything at present. Sure, I may be free for the moment, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to go out and prove it to the world, does it?”
“So that’s how you look at it,” Masahiko said in a disappointed tone. “But hey, you’re a painter, right? An artist. Artists flaunt the rules left and right—they make a great show of it. But you’ve always walked the straight and narrow. The path of reason, I guess. So why not let loose now, throw off the restraints and do something wild?”
“Like murdering an old moneylender with an axe?”
“Yeah, that might work.”
“Or falling for a prostitute with a heart of gold?”
“Even better.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “But you know, it seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That’s why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.”
“Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” Masahiko said resignedly.
It’s more than just “one way of looking at it,” I wanted to tell him. Indeed, it felt like everything around me was becoming unscrewed—that reality was losing its grip. If I lost my grip too, then the craziness would get completely out of hand. But I couldn’t tell Masahiko the whole story at this stage of the game.
“At any rate, I’ve got to be going,” he said. “I’d love to meet the two women, but I’ve got work waiting for me back in Tokyo.”
Masahiko finished his coffee, got dressed, and drove off in his boxy jet-black Volvo. Baggy eyes and all. “Glad we f
inally had a chance to talk,” were his parting words.
One thing that morning completely stumped me. Masahiko’s knife, the one he’d brought to prepare the fish, had gone missing. It had been carefully washed, and neither of us remembered touching it afterward, but we searched the kitchen high and low and still couldn’t find it.
“Forget it,” he said. “It’s probably out for a walk. Grab it for me when it comes back. I’ll pick it up on my next visit—I don’t use it all that often.”
I’ll keep looking, I told him.
* * *
—
I checked my watch once the Volvo was out of sight. The Akikawas would be showing up before long. I removed the bedding from the living room sofa, and flung the windows wide open to let fresh air in. The sky was still faintly overcast and gray. There was no wind.
I took Killing Commendatore from my bedroom and hung it back where it had been on the studio wall. Then I sat down on the stool to examine the painting one more time. Red blood still gushed from the Commendatore’s chest, while Long Face’s sharp eyes still glittered in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas. Nothing had changed.
Even as I studied Killing Commendatore, though, I couldn’t erase Yuzu from my mind. It had been no dream, of that much I felt sure. I had truly visited our apartment that night. I was as sure of that as I was that Tomohiko Amada had visited the studio several days before. Like him, I had overcome the laws of physics by some means to make my way to our Hiroo apartment, penetrate her, and discharge my semen inside her body. People can accomplish anything, I thought, if they want it badly enough. There are channels through which reality can become unreal. Or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean that we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.
If I had the chance, I wanted to ask Yuzu if she had experienced a similar dream in late April of this year. If she had dreamed shortly before dawn that I had come to ravish her while she was fast asleep (or else somehow deprived her of her freedom). In other words, was my dream something I alone experienced, or was it a two-way street? That’s what I wanted to confirm. Yet if the dream was one we had shared, wouldn’t she view me as sinister, a villain? Could such a presence exist within me? I hated to think of myself in that way.
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