by Ryu Murakami
“So you cycled together in lots of different places, then?”
“Yeah, but not really ‘vacation spots’ so much, now that I think about it. I guess the place that made the biggest impression on me was Canada.”
“You went to Canada? Lucky you! I’ve seen TV shows about Canada. It’s supposed to be really beautiful, right?”
“All I really saw was Vancouver. The man I almost got serious about had to go there on business, and we decided I’d visit him sort of secretly, but I could only stay three days. It was definitely a pretty place, the scenery and everything, but there wasn’t much to do. Seems like all we did was ride bikes.”
“Hemii, you never told us about this before! You were married then, weren’t you? You mean you were having an affair?”
“My husband and I were already separated by this time, and the bicycle-lover was in the same sort of situation. Anyway, there wasn’t that much you could do or see on a bicycle in Vancouver, but at the close of each day we’d end up at this little zoo. I mean, I guess you’d call it a zoo. It wasn’t on the scale of Ueno Zoo or Tama Zoo or anything, but the entrance or whatever, the gate where you bought tickets, was really magical, like something out of a fairy tale, and there was a big painting of one of the animals, but without anything tacky about it, if you know what I mean. I still remember that place. Or maybe I should say, that’s about all I do remember.”
“What kind of animal? A grizzly bear? Or a moose or something?”
“A white wolf. This wolf was the biggest attraction at the place, kind of like the panda at Ueno, and there were usually lots of people in front of its cage, but we always got there around sunset, when most of the people were leaving. I still remember buying the tickets and going in to see the wolf, and even though I was already in my thirties my heart was pounding like a little girl’s.”
“Because of the white wolf?”
“That was a big part of it, yeah, though of course there was the bicycle-lover too—but the funny thing is, I can hardly remember anything about him. Of course, we only dated for a short time but, I mean, why is it that I barely remember a man I almost got serious about but can still close my eyes and see that white wolf so clearly? He was all by himself, because the other wolves were in a separate cage—I mean, they weren’t cages so much as these fenced-in spaces that looked like mountain scenes, with big rocks and everything—and each of the three times we went there that white wolf was sitting in this very noble sort of pose on top of the highest rock, kind of looking off into the distance and not moving a muscle. I remember asking the man, ‘Is it alive?’ And to this day, every time I go cycling, which isn’t very often because, I mean, when do you get the chance? But each time I do, I remember that white wolf sitting there like a statue on those gray rocks, and I remember saying those words. Is it alive? Is it alive? Is it alive?”
The Italian restaurant was nestled in a wooded area dotted with small villas and summerhouses. The building itself was unusual, in that its exterior walls were made of concrete poured into molds to resemble square, round, and triangular logs, and the name of the place was almost too long to say without pausing for breath: Monte Varvarini di Noventa. When the Midoris arrived on their bicycles they were greeted at the entrance by a foreigner wearing a threadbare tuxedo and bleating, “Irasshaimase!”—not an Italian man, apparently, but one from the Middle East or South America or someplace. They ordered spaghetti and carpaccio and minestrone and linguine. The fact that there were no other customers in the restaurant made it seem a sort of showcase for the bursting of the economic bubble, and the spaghetti carbonara was, to everyone’s astonishment, garnished with crumbled scraps of hard-boiled eggs.
“In my office there’s this twenty-three-year-old who recently got married, and she invited me to her wedding because we used to have tea together sometimes, and she always just struck me as an average sort of girl, but then the other day she called me up and said, ‘Takeuchi-san, I’m having an affair!’”
“My! And she just got married, right?”
“Just a couple of months ago. But the guy she’s having an affair with, she was seeing him even before she got married, and she says he was actually more her type but he wouldn’t ask her to marry him, so she was like, All right, you’re not the only man in the world, and she married this other guy she was seeing at the same time. The one she married is some sort of civil servant and very serious and conservative and when they have sex it’s over before she knows it and the things he talks about bore her to death, and the other one works in a boutique in Aoyama and plays in a band and knows how to get any drug you might want, and he seems to have other girlfriends too, but she sees him two or three times a week, and then about a week ago the civil servant found out about it, and the way he found out was because she didn’t know the other guy’s condom had slipped off and was still inside her and her husband found it when they went to have sex, and she just thought, Oh, to hell with it, and told him everything, and would you believe it? He started bawling like a baby and pleading with her, going, ‘It’s okay if you want to keep seeing the guy, just please don’t leave me!’”
A man like that, the four Midoris all agreed, had no business being alive.
After lunch they headed for the tennis courts.
II
They rode the tandem bicycles down a dirt road to the courts and rented rackets and balls at the little log-cabin-style office from a young man with no shortage of pimples. He directed them to Court B, where they split into two teams for a doubles match. None of them had ever played before, so their serves were rarely within the lines and nothing resembling an extended rally ever occurred, but the four Midoris enjoyed themselves immensely, cheering and shrieking every bit as energetically as the younger groups on either side of them. They had reserved the court for two hours, but after an hour of playing their particular style of tennis, in which all four players jump up and down and squeal with delight whenever one of them manages to hit the ball, they’d had their fill and sat down on the benches, drinking sports drinks and chattering excitedly. None of them had produced so much as a drop of perspiration, but they had achieved one of their dreams—tennis by the lake—and spirits were high. Tomiyama Midori peered up at Mount Fuji, looming right in front of them, and said, Come to think of it…
“I used to come here when I was little, not the tennis courts but Lake Yamanaka. I wonder why I’ve forgotten about that for so long. My father worked in a bank that had a lodge where the employees could stay on their holidays. Judging from the position of Fuji, I’d say it was on the far end of the lake, like if you walked halfway around the lake from here, that’s about where the lodge was. It seems like we went there every summer when I was little, but of course my father was just an average clerk in the bank, so he could never get a vacation of any length, more like three days at a time, and I even seem to remember trips where we stayed at the lodge just one night, but anyway we went there many, many times. I wonder how old I was when this thing happened—I remember my father carrying me on his shoulders, so I must’ve been really small, first or second grade, maybe. It wasn’t much of a lodge or anything, nothing special about it, just a dining hall and three or four rooms upstairs lined with bunk beds, but it was on this gently sloping hill, and out in the garden was a barbecue, just a simple one made out of bricks with a heavy iron screen kind of thing sitting on top, and I remember the last dish we’d cook would always be yaki-soba noodles, but we grilled all sorts of things, steaks and potatoes and hamburgers and frozen prawns, and the adults drank beer and we kids drank orange pop, and then, before going to bed, we always had fireworks. My father usually took his vacation after the Obon holidays, so it was just about the time of year it is now, but it’s funny, isn’t it, that I’d suddenly remember this? I had this one big firework called a Rainbow Fountain, because it would shoot out this fountain of colorful sparks for like forever, but the fuse was damp and it wouldn’t light. We always started with the little ground spinners and spar
klers and things and gradually went bigger and bigger, and this one that wouldn’t light was the one I’d been saving for last, so it made me really sad and I started crying, and my father came up to me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I just pointed at the dud firework, and he squatted down and reached for it, and wouldn’t you know, just as he’s reaching for it the damn thing goes off. He managed to cover his face with his left hand, but his right hand got really badly burned. You know, fireworks are incredibly hot, hotter than fire even, and my father’s hand turned all white, but he didn’t want me to worry, so even though he was biting his lip to keep from screaming he tried to smile. He held his hand under the faucet and ran cold water over it, and then they put on some ointment, but after a while it swelled up to about twice the normal size. But he kept telling me it didn’t hurt, didn’t bother him at all. And then, years ago, the last time I remember thinking about all this, I was trying to make some porridge with this turtle soup stock that one of the girls at my office had given me, and as I was heating it up I accidentally touched the pot and burned my finger—just a little bit, but it really hurt—and that made me remember my father’s burn, which had covered the whole palm of his hand, and I couldn’t even imagine how painful that must have been, and yet he tried to act like it was nothing at all—just because he didn’t want me to worry, right? It made me feel like, you know, like he really cared about me. But it’s funny, isn’t it? I’d forgotten all about that this entire time. I wonder why I’d remember it right now.”
“It’s because your heart is open right now,” Suzuki Midori murmured, and Tomiyama Midori nodded. The other two Midoris understood as well. And why were their hearts open now? Because they were doing what they really wanted to do. Until now, they’d never known what that was. Until now, there hadn’t been anything they really wanted to do.
“Back when I was married, I was always somewhere else in my mind, thinking about all sort of things, and now I feel like I understand why.”
They were pedaling their swan boat over the surface of the lake, plowing slowly through the shimmering golden fan painted there by the sinking sun, their hair waving in the wind.
“Whenever I was with my husband, whether we were eating dinner or taking a walk, or even just talking about things, I was always thinking about something else. At the time, though, it never even occurred to me that there was anything abnormal about that.”
Suzuki Midori squinted into the setting sun as she spoke.
“When you’re married to someone, you talk about all sorts of things, right? Since we didn’t have any children to talk about, my husband would tell me about things at the office, that a colleague of his who’d once visited us at our home had cancer, or that a man who’d entered the company the same year as him got tricked by the mama-san of some bar into cosigning on a loan and now his life was a living hell, things like that. And we had a pet cat named Fu Ming, kind of a Chinese-sounding name, who was part Siamese, and I was still in my early twenties and didn’t want to be some boring housewife who can only talk about things she saw on TV that afternoon, so mostly I talked about Fu Ming, but even when we were talking and laughing about the cat I’d be thinking about something completely different. ‘Today Fu Ming was chasing a fly and jumped up on the coffee table but landed on a cassette tape and slipped and nearly fell off’—I’d be telling my husband some story like that, but all the time my brain would be somewhere else, some really stupid place. Like I might be thinking about that morning, when I walked with him to the station to see him off and a tall woman in a suit passed by and he stared at her for about three seconds. I’d be thinking, That’s probably the type of woman he really likes, and it would turn into a kind of obsession that kept ballooning, getting bigger and bigger, and I’d start to feel like I hated having a person like him for a husband. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could even talk to anyone about, though, so I’d just feel sorry for myself, and it would go on like that. I’d be rehashing these things in my mind, over and over, even while I was sitting there laughing with him, telling him funny stories about Fu Ming. It was like that the entire time we were together, and finally I started to wonder if there wasn’t something wrong with me, but I didn’t have anyone to discuss it with, and then, after about half a year or a year of that, Fu Ming got this sickness called hydro-peri-something, where her tummy filled up with water, and she died, and after she died I didn’t have much to say to my husband anymore. It wasn’t because I was thinking about Fu Ming or grieving or anything, it just felt like my head was completely empty. I mean, it wasn’t about the cat. It was about the fact that I’d never told my husband any of the things I was actually thinking. So, well, I’m the one who was messed up, I guess, but it was always that way for me. I’ve never known what it feels like to do something and have it be the only thing in my head. Even during, excuse me, sexual intercourse, I’d be thinking about something else completely. It’s terrible, I know, and I got to hate the whole situation so much that I ended up getting a divorce, but even getting divorced didn’t fix the problem. But now…the amazing thing is that now, everything’s changed.”
The western slope of Mount Fuji was turning pink and lavender in the setting sun.
“Everything’s changed….”
The wind had died, and the shadow cast by the swan boat stretched out across the glassy surface of the lake, heralding the rapid approach of night.
“There’s a place somewhere in this world,” Suzuki Midori said, remembering some tidbit she’d read in a book, “where they talk about the night as if it were a living creature. Not just that day loses its light, but that the creature called night comes and swallows everything up….”
The little bar they were looking for was down a narrow lane that separated the bike rental shed from a souvenir shop. The bar, sandwiched between a noodle kitchen and a coffeehouse, had an old-timey sign hanging over its windowless entrance.
The man was already there, drinking a glass of Suntory Old with water and ice. When the four Midoris opened the door and looked in, he waved and said, “Hi! Over here! Over here!” From the top of his haircut to the soles of his black patent-leather shoes he exuded, along with a faint odor of sweat, the air of a man who had never had any luck with the ladies, just never had any luck with them at all.
There were no other customers in the place, which was furnished with only a short counter and three small tables. A woman wearing no lipstick or any other makeup except for thickly painted layers of blue, green, and brown around her eyes—a dubious cosmetic strategy—and a chubby girl who looked to be about middle school age and well below average intelligence, chanted “Irasshaimase!” in unison as the Midoris stepped inside.
Suzuki Midori, intuiting that no one wanted to sit next to the man, made that sacrifice herself. The man, having presumably picked out the best articles of clothing he owned without giving any thought as to whether or not they went together, wore a yellow shirt, pink-and-gray-checkered trousers, purple nylon socks, a brown blazer with black stripes, and a red silk neckerchief.
“I’m Sakaguchi,” he said. He was a member of the Self-Defense Forces.
III
“You must be the four ladies who are all named Midori.”
Sakaguchi was gulping his whiskey and water even as he said this, so that it came out more like, You must be gulp, the four ladies who gulp, are all named gulp, Midori. His cheeks and the flesh around his eyes were flushed, but Suzuki Midori knew it wasn’t merely the result of alcohol. He was plainly nervous and self-conscious in their presence. They might be Oba-sans in their late thirties, but this man had probably never in his life been surrounded by four women before, and certainly not by four women who had any sort of interest in him. All of them could sense that much.
“Would you like something to drink?” He arranged his mouth in a smile as he said this. “When I say ‘something,’ I mean whiskey, is what I mean. That’s all there is in this joint.”
It was an appalling and alarming smile.
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br /> “This whiskey, in the old days they called it ‘Dharma.’ Isn’t that funny? Dharma. They used to sell it in a wooden case, six bottles to a case. From the time I was in high school I used to think that was something really special, and I decided that someday I’d become a man of such importance that people would bring me gifts like that, whole cases of Dharma. But then at some point—and just overnight, really—along come your Early Times and your Jim Beam and your I. W. Harper, and before you’re even used to the idea that there’s so many different types of liquor in the world, everybody stops drinking domestic whiskey. Okay if I mix it with water? This bar, the one thing about it, the water’s delicious. There’s a well out back, and I’m told that the mama-san and her daughter draw fresh water from it every day. Not with a motorized pump either, but with a pulley and a bucket on a rope, just like in the old days.”
A lot of effort was clearly going into maintaining the smile, and yet you sensed that if you were to praise it as lovely or charming, the owner would continue to bear it for an hour or two or, if necessary, all night long. “Whiskey and water would be wonderful,” said Suzuki Midori, and Tomiyama Midori smiled and nodded, saying, “We’re not so young that we don’t have fond memories of Suntory Old!” Reassured, perhaps, Sakaguchi finally let go of the smile. Even the mama-san and her hostess offspring breathed a sigh of relief from behind the counter as the smile was disassembled, and the Midoris were aware of tension going almost audibly out of the room, like air escaping a balloon. None of them had ever before met a man who could create a general atmosphere of panic simply by smiling.