Moshi Moshi

by Banana Yoshimoto

“You and your mother are in fundamentally different positions right now. It’s no wonder there are things you’re not on the same page about. But I imagine that must feel especially lonely,” Yamazaki-san said. We didn’t call him Columbo for nothing, I thought. “I heard through the grapevine that your mother had left home and was staying with you. I think it’s kindest for you now to just let her stay, without saying too much.”

  “I think so, too. But I have this funny feeling there’s still more I could be doing,” I said adamantly.

  Yamazaki-san thought for a while in silence. “I know where you’re coming from, actually. If I were in your shoes, at your age, I think I’d say the same. There’d be something wrong with you if you were able to keep going like nothing had happened. So if I were you, I’d feel the same—I’d be desperate to do something, to make it better. But nothing’s going to bring him back. I think what you have to do is hold on tight and live with that feeling, even if it’s wild and rough, and you feel like you’re on the verge of giving up. I sometimes wake up thinking, Wait, aren’t we supposed to be rehearsing for our gig this month? Better call Imo and find out, and then lie there in bed crying,” he said, looking at me steadily with his bright, round eyes. Imo was what Yamazaki-san always called Dad. Each time he said the name, I felt like Dad was somewhere close by, and my chest tightened.

  “I think I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “Maybe I’m just tired from trying to do it.”

  Yamazaki-san nodded, and said, “The story was that she was your dad’s, ah, younger sister’s husband’s child, from when he was young?”

  “No, I heard she was my uncle’s niece,” I said.

  “Anyway, neither of those is true. She was actually your dad’s sister’s daughter, whom she gave birth to when she was very young and had to give up. But your grandma didn’t tell your aunt that the baby had been adopted. I don’t know how she did it—maybe she told her it had died, or just that she was going to take care of it. Either way, your aunt doesn’t know about her. Or maybe she knows, but has decided to forget, or pretend she doesn’t.”

  “What?!” I was taken aback. This meant that woman was a much closer relative than I’d been led to believe.

  “From what I understand, she was placed with a family, but it was a difficult environment, and she ran away from home quite young. It seems she led a hard life after that, too,” he said.

  “I wonder if Dad felt sorry for her,” I said. “But wait, wouldn’t that have made them too closely related? She was his niece, right?”

  “I’m sure that was an issue, too. But my suspicion is that they got involved before they realized. They probably only found out after they’d gone too far,” he said. “Frankly, she was a disturbing woman. Shintani-kun might have told you, but I saw her, just once. She had this air about her that gave me the shivers, and she was on my mind the whole night, even while I was on stage. Only Shintani-kun and I seemed to feel it, but we wondered whether she wasn’t an actual ghost.

  “She disappeared after the gig without staying for the party, so I didn’t put it together that the woman was her. I had no idea until Shintani-kun told me.

  “Aside from that, I vaguely knew your dad was in some kind of trouble, and he did talk to me about it, just a little. He said there was someone he was seeing. He couldn’t break it off, he’d lent her money, and there were some complications. But he thought it would turn out all right, and he had absolutely no intention of leaving his family. He was pretty clear on that. And that’s the truth.”

  When I heard that, relief and regret rushed over me, making my head spin. I felt even more helpless, like I’d been sent a confession of love from someone who was already dead.

  “I think your dad got sucked in,” Yamazaki-san said, “without meaning to. I think there was a part of him that was drawn to things like that. Something that held him back, no matter how warm and loving you and your mom were. But what an idiot he was—He started a family to get away from that kind of thing, only to throw it away again. Never having had kids, of course I can’t say for certain, but if I had a daughter like you I’m sure I would have wanted to stay alive to be with you,” Yamazaki-san said looking down at his big hands, with their neatly clipped fingernails.

  “I’d like to believe he felt that way,” I said.

  “I think you can be sure of that,” he said immediately. “I remember how fondly he always talked about you. He said you were too good for him. In that sense, your dad was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill father. Not one who’d think it was okay to turn to drink and women, and kill himself. I know guys who are like that, and the difference is obvious. But for some reason, those guys survive, and the good ones like Imo end up dead.”

  It meant a lot to me to hear that from Dad’s closest friend.

  “But he probably got closer and closer to the danger, felt drawn in. Bit by bit. Convinced himself that nothing bad could happen. Granted, I only saw her once, but she was the kind of woman who could mess with your thinking so badly that you couldn’t see her clearly, no matter how hard you looked. I know she was never brought to justice, since she died, too, but I’m sure she would have been given a sentence if she had been. And I would have gladly testified. But even that wouldn’t bring him back. What a mess he’s left us in.

  “The thing is—and I don’t mean to be crude—being in a band and playing music together is exactly like having sex with someone, repeatedly.

  “You share an invisible, wordless language of the body. For hours. That’s why I’ve been feeling jealous, like someone’s stolen my lover. This whole time, wondering why he didn’t open up to me more—I can’t tell you how much I’ve reproached myself for assuming he’d come to me if he got in real trouble. For believing he was all right because he didn’t,” Yamazaki-san said. I saw tears glinting at the corners of his eyes.

  Sex with Dad? That’s going a little far, I thought, but surprisingly it didn’t make me uncomfortable.

  Perhaps it was because I’d experienced something slightly similar. The physical experience of living as the three of us, our bodies in the same space: the way we breathed when we passed by each other in the hallway, the touch of our hands when we handed over a glass, the smell of clothes hanging in our closets, the feeling of his leather shoes when I accidentally stepped on them as I left the house, the awareness of someone’s presence in a space—that was what family meant. Why—when we’d shared all those things, and happily enough—had Dad felt the need to tear himself away?

  Whenever I talked about Dad to people, I made sure to do it lightly, no matter who I was talking to—friends, people who had heard on the news, or neighbors.

  I did the same with Yamazaki-san. I was trying to speak in a measured way, and not be overly positive, or too down. Otherwise, I’d start feeling so depressed I’d want to die, too. Sometimes the molten cauldron deep inside me boiled over like lava, and I felt hot and full in my belly, and something would rise through my chest and stop me from breathing. When that happened, I couldn’t think about anything pleasant, anything new. But there was no point hitting other people with it (unlike with Mom, with whom I vented often), so I always talked about it with a detached attitude, staying on the surface, not looking straight at it.

  But Yamazaki-san’s presence, and how easy he was to talk to, and the closeness I felt toward him as someone who’d also shared Dad, and his absence, made all the things I’d been hiding and ignoring in my new life come flooding out.

  I slammed my palms down on the table and started wailing. I wrung more tears out of that bottomless well, which never seemed to dry up no matter how much I cried.

  Yamazaki-san didn’t put his arm around my shoulders, or stroke my head. But he stayed there with me. I felt him being there.

  This is ridiculous, I thought. Crying at men who remind you of Dad. It’s like whoring yourself—no different from sleeping with lots of men because you miss him. But my tears overrode any logic. When I raised my swollen eyes and my snot-stained face
, there was Yamazaki-san, with his kind face and tears in the corners of his eyes, waiting.

  He patted the back of my hand with an elegant hand, and said, “He was a really good man, and we both miss him now he’s gone.”

  I could only nod.

  Pathetic, I thought. I wasn’t recovering, just dragging this around. Dawn wasn’t coming, regrets couldn’t be redeemed, words left unsaid stayed unsaid. It had been nearly two years, and I was still stuck in the same place—and might be forever.

  Even so, come tomorrow morning, I’d be kneading bread dough, boiling water, shredding salad vegetables, mopping the floor. My body would know what to do, and I’d smile and greet customers when they came in. That was all I could do.

  In the same way that Mom was actively doing nothing, I had to keep doing the only thing I could.

  We each had to live our own battles. We could hardly give up and die; and if we had to live, we’d have to rely on what we were made of. When I went in to the bistro tomorrow, the space would give me a little consolation. I’d been there long enough to get sick of the place, and when I was tired it did feel claustrophobic; but its small but perfect kitchen, the crisp figure of Michiyo-san as she stood in it, witnessing the food her hands turned out as though by magic, and bringing them to people and seeing them smile—it all added up inside me, drop by drop, into some kind of strength. People could kill each other, but people could save each other, too.

  “I heard she’d attempted suicide with someone else, previously. I really don’t know why Imo got involved with someone like that. It must have been bad luck, and bad timing,” Yamazaki-san said.

  “Dad wasn’t the only one, then?” I said. It was just like I’d thought in my dream.

  “That’s what Imo said. That she’d tried to die with a man before, and failed, and had been in and out of hospital since, something like that. I told him that didn’t sound too good, that he should stay away . . . But your dad said, I’ll be fine, I’m not going to kill myself. I guess he couldn’t leave her be,” Yamazaki-san said.

  “I didn’t think Dad was so dumb and foolish,” I said, feeling fastidious.

  “What happens between a man and a woman has nothing to do with the mind,” Yamazaki-san said, seeing right through me. Sometimes he really was just like Columbo.

  I stopped in my tracks, and looked at him with eyes still full of tears. “I’m sure that’s true. I guess I don’t understand it yet,” I said.

  “I don’t understand it all, either, I don’t think. But that’s how it is. It’s not about reason or sense,” he said. “You dad had probably given her a substantial amount of money, too. Didn’t she have a lot of debt? And you know he’d rather have died than get into debt himself.”

  That made a lot of sense to me, and I felt wretched, thinking such a small thing had pushed him to it.

  When he died, Dad’s bank account was nearly empty, and the savings account he’d been building up to start his own studio had also been cleared out.

  Dad, you idiot. What about us? I thought—words I’d repeated many times since he’d died. Wasn’t light enough? The warmth of daily life didn’t sustain you? Was the allure of what was dark, dirty, cloudy, and shadowed really so strong, once you’d had a taste—once your heart was stained with it, that it was worth your life?

  As we were leaving, Yamazaki-san said, “Imo really loved you, Yocchan. Remember that—even though I’m hardly the one you ought to be hearing it from. Life isn’t always a barrel of laughs, but it’s not all terrible, either.”

  When he said that, I felt like Dad was there, and near enough that I expected him to respond. It was like Dad was speaking through Yamazaki-san.

  “You’re right. I know I’m trying to make sense of things logically, when I can’t,” I said. “And I know he loved me.”

  “That’s right . . . My old mother’s nearly ninety, but each year in spring she still puts up vegetable preserves—cooks them down into tsukudani with soy sauce, sweet rice wine, and sugar. And each year, when I taste that familiar flavor, we both know it could be the last time she makes the spring tsukudani. But that’s just thoughts. When my mother gets a bumper crop of butterbur or prickly ash, she just gets to it, starts cooking, even if it’s hard work. She’s not thinking about what might happen next year. The great thing about the everyday is that we don’t care about next year, as long as the tsukudani turns out good this spring. So I let go, too, and instead of getting maudlin over every mouthful, I just say, Mom, your tsukudani’s so good, it’s the best, I’m so glad I get to eat it again this year, it makes rice taste so good. And I think there’s a case to be made for you finding your appetite for enjoying that kind of happiness. Of course, what happened to Imo was terrible, and it’s healthy to grieve. But aren’t you letting fear trick you into thinking too rigidly about the time you have now with your mom?” he said.

  Something in me lifted, and I felt myself almost dissolving into the joy in what he said. They were the words I’d been waiting for, and they soaked into me, easing both my body and my soul.

  I COULDN’T TELL MOM I’d seen Yamazaki-san, let alone what we’d talked about.

  I actually considered coming clean, but that night, at the sight of her lolling around on the floor among cushions, humming a tune and reading a manga she’d bought that day from The Village Vanguard—it was a volume of Marginal, by Moto Hagio, whom she’d always been a fan of—I faltered and missed my chance.

  When I saw her reading manga with her belly out, shedding tears while murmuring, “I understand, of course you want to go back and live in the cave,” I was filled up with the thought that this woman hadn’t done anything wrong, and didn’t deserve any of this.

  Yes, Shimokitazawa was a little like a mountain cave in the outlands, where people who found it difficult to keep up with the vagaries of the world could live quietly, as they wanted. Even people who’d been left behind, like me and Mom.

  Even though we were confident enough not to pay much attention to what people thought or said, there had been a time when we’d be walking around Jiyugaoka and feel like people were pointing at us and whispering behind our backs—that we were the family of that man who’d abandoned them in a love-suicide.

  That was why I didn’t tell Mom about what I’d discovered.

  But her mother’s intuition must have done it for me, because she asked, “Yocchan, has something happened? You seem down. You weren’t working today, so what did you get up to? Hey, your next day off, do you want to go to Isetan together, do some shopping, and have lunch? I’ll buy you some winter clothes,” she said.

  “Okay, let’s. But we can’t live like this forever, right?” I said.

  “Why?” she said, blankly.

  “I don’t know, it seems kind of temporary,” I said.

  “Well, it is,” she said. “But are you my mom? Why are you so responsible?” She smiled. “I mean, if you decide to go and apprentice at another restaurant somewhere, or overseas even, then things would have to change. But we can cross that bridge when we get to it. It’s not happening today, or tomorrow; we’re talking about the future. Or if you find a husband. But that would be okay, too. You’re the only one I have left, so I’ll come and live nearby, and help look after the grandchildren. It could be fun,” she said.

  “Who said I’d be okay with you coming to live nearby?” I said.

  “You’ll want some help. It’s hard for a woman to keep working. Everyone I knew who did that had a breakdown at some point. You’ll need a support system, since—knowing you—you’re not going to give up work even if you get married or have children,” she said.

  “Could be,” I said. “I’d like to work for Michiyo-san forever, and maybe even take over when she retires; that’s how much I look up to her. Well, she’s not that much older than me, so I guess I won’t need to take over, but whatever happens, I’d like to keep helping her at the bistro. I love her, and her food.”

  “It’s not often that you find someone like that to
work for. You should stick with her, whatever it takes,” Mom said.

  “If that means I need to go and train somewhere else for a few years, I think I will. I don’t care what I end up doing at the bistro, whether it’s just front of house, or cleaning, or admin—whatever way I can be involved. It’s more important to me than wanting to serve my own food,” I said.

  “You must be pretty serious about this—it wouldn’t be like you to share a half-baked idea,” Mom said. “Fair enough, because that barley salad was literally life-giving. I was so miserable I wanted to die, and full of cloudy feelings that rolled around inside me like sludge, and totally stuck, and that salad accepted me as I was. I rediscovered my little, precious spark of life inside that salad.”

  “Thanks, Mom. That’s the best possible compliment,” I said.

  “The way you say that goes to show how much you’re a part of the restaurant now,” Mom said. “I think it’s about time I started something, too. I’m getting bored of strolling around, and I spent way too long as a housewife.”

  What on earth was she going to do? Work on the checkout at Ozeki, the supermarket? Waitress in a café, or, god forbid, at a late-night bar? Sell vintage clothes?

  I wanted to ask, but restrained myself.

  Whatever she said she wanted to do, I thought, I had to be supportive. In the early days, when Mom’s spirit seemed to have left her body, I couldn’t have imagined her expressing a desire to do anything at all.

  “Anyway, Yocchan, have you got a boyfriend yet?” she said.

  “No, why do you ask?” I said.

  “Women’s intuition,” Mom said. I was impressed.

  “There’s someone I might be getting closer to, that’s all. But it’s not quite coming together yet. I think I’m not ready, either,” I said.

  “Have you got ED?” she said.

  “Um, no, for a number of different reasons,” I said, “but it might be something similar.

  “Whenever I get excited, or have any fun, or start looking forward to something, I can sense another me observing myself from between cold, harsh waves, like the Japan Sea in winter. Right now, exploring things with a man my own age—talking and getting to know each other and feeling like something could happen—feels like a silly and pointless game.”