Moshi Moshi

by Banana Yoshimoto

  “Sure. I was planning on staying with my friend in Paris for the first while, and then traveling around the north or the south of France for the rest. I need to go to Brittany, and I’d like to see Provence as well. Or wherever I can. We can travel around together. We can meet up in Paris, so give me a budget, and I’ll find you a hotel. My friend’s apartment is too bijou for us to both stay.” She smiled. “Let’s eat some good cheap food, and work on the menu for our next place.”

  “Thank you. I’d love that,” I said. I wanted to think of this as something positive, not a forced retreat. Otherwise, I’d feel too bereft.

  “I like this building a lot, and I was feeling depressed about having to leave,” Michiyo-san said. “I thought you’d want to quit, too, but now I have something to look forward to. I’m glad to have you with me, Yocchan. Thanks.

  “I loved this bar, and the little window. And the old toilet. We’ve only got a little longer, but let’s take care of this old building, so it can leave this world happy. I’m sad we have to leave this place, but I feel privileged to have spent time in it. Almost like after all these years, the building chose me to spend its last moments with.”

  Michiyo-san was only saying commonplace things in an ordinary way, but her words felt to me like a breath of fresh air. It had been a while since I’d heard anyone talk about this kind of thing—the everyday love of someone truly committed to a specific place. That attitude seemed to be so on the decline everywhere that the occasional touch of it felt especially reassuring.

  “I’d like to do that too,” I said.

  I was certain I wouldn’t regret following her lead.

  How lucky I was, I thought. If I’d found dishes hard work, or getting up early a chore, or being on my feet all day exhausting, or prep boring, I wouldn’t have felt this way, and would have rushed to set up on my own, and made a bad shop. I felt like it had taken some emotional fortitude, almost like a kind of muscle I’d developed, to be able appreciate the gift that was Michiyo-san.

  Since arriving in this town, I was becoming more and more honest, open, and grounded. At first, I’d come through like a tourist, but now, I could feel every one of my footsteps leaving a mark on the ground here, and sense how they added up over time.

  Each day I walked this town, every step my feet inscribed, I was also building my inner landscape. They’d keep growing, in tandem, and a hint of my presence would linger even after I was gone . . . I was experiencing that form of love for the first time.

  It was something I could never have learned in the town I’d grown up in. Back in Meguro, I hadn’t ever had to stand on my own two feet. If I went back now, I would of course feel nostalgia, longing. But that would come with a burden of heaviness, and darkness, too.

  When all this business with Dad was settled, I would probably be able to call that place my hometown. The day would come eventually.

  But here, in Shimokitazawa, Mom and I were living our truth. Breathing like ourselves.

  Couldn’t we start over here, with Dad, all three of us? I thought.

  It was too late for that.

  I felt tears rising, and looked out the window. People were walking peacefully down Chazawa-Dori.

  If the two of us as we were now—me, having taken it day by day, struggling through sweat and back pain and hangnails, earned someone’s trust, and found myself a plan for the next little while; and Mom, having let go of the need to live up to the Madame lifestyle, and gone back to being her candid, jolly self—if only we could have lived with Dad in this town, we might have succeeded in building something lighter, and different.

  Why did being alive have to mean that the body recovered, even when the soul couldn’t?

  No—that was the wonderful thing, of course. The body helped.

  Right around now, Mom would be inside the soothing traditional-style space of the tea house, at work, moving her body in ways she hadn’t known before, getting hungry, getting tired. As her body lived and metabolized, as its cells renewed themselves, she moved forward, step-by-step, leaving Dad behind.

  Dad’s absence in our lives now was so complete it almost felt cruel. In six months’ time, I would be in a place I’d never been before, being stimulated by lots of new experiences, continuing my journey toward the flavors of the next phase of my life.

  Of course, there were some things that didn’t change—the familiar and nostalgic colors and smells, tastes, and places in our memories.

  But we could no longer relive them as things that were real to our own bodies. I’d never smell Dad’s back again—I could only recall how I once had.

  How brutal life was! How fleshly, and mundane.

  I was reeling, from having understood it for the first time.

  What was lost would never return.

  In its place, I now knew the smell of Chazawa-Dori in the rain.

  I knew the energy and the particular thrill of walking though the buzz of young people on the main shopping street on the east side on a sunny day toward the station.

  Six months ago, I hadn’t even met Shintani-kun. He might have known of me, but I’d known nothing of him.

  I’d been struggling so hard trying to forget Dad, trying to move forward; but my body, regardless of my effort, had already sneakily insinuated itself into the present. I could hardly fault Dad for having been carelessly drawn over to the other side. Our bodies forgot, left things behind, without our hearts meaning to. Then the things that were left behind curled up somewhere deep inside us, and hunkered down. Time didn’t move at the same speed for them, so they always left a lump, something unresolved.

  How do I let this go? I wondered.

  I didn’t feel enthused about seeking out the woman from Ibaraki again, and giving us more to share. A formal ceremony might have been the correct thing to do, but I just couldn’t picture me and Mom kneeling there in that forsaken forest and praying. It seemed more realistic, and relevant, to think about us visiting Oarai aquarium. If Dad’s spirit needed pacifying, well, this life would have to be enough. It was the truest prayer I had to offer.

  Since what happened with Dad, we’d stopped wasting our lives, wasting time. We’d given up thinking about things as though we understood them, or even as though we could, and committed to living our days like a continuous length of thread we were each spinning.

  ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN I was having thoughts like these, I met up with Shintani-kun in Shinjuku.

  I was accompanying him to the Conran Shop, where he wanted to do some shopping—a fairly normal setup for a date. It felt strange, enough to make me realize I hadn’t been on a real date in a long time. Standing there in my dress, I felt like I was a character in a play standing against the wrong backdrop.

  I was on the first floor, watching Shintani-kun approach. As he walked across the shiny floor through the throng of people, the hem of his light coat flapping, I drifted into thought.

  I was getting to love his face. There was absolutely nothing about him I didn’t like. I admired the way his boldness and calmness showed themselves in his eyes, his mouth. The part of me who wanted to act my age gravitated toward him. If only we’d met at a better time, I thought, how captivated I might have been, and how much I might have suffered!

  The way I saw him was strangely painful, like the way a married man might look at a girlfriend he loved to see—looking at someone who wasn’t right for you, although they might have been, in a different time and place. You could call it the gift of perspective, and it was probably what had enabled things to be so easy between us, but I felt a little resentful, too. I tried to imagine if this was how someone might feel if they reconnected with their first love, once they were both middle-aged. They were still the same people, but to tell the truth, they would have preferred to meet each other in younger bodies, with fewer responsibilities and nothing to worry about.

  Shintani-kun, unaware of my complicated feelings, spotted me through the crowd, smiled, and walked faster.

  “I’ve been excited
about replacing my sofa with a better one since I tripped and spilled coffee on it the other day, when the power went out,” he said. “It was an old imitation leather one I brought from my folks’ house.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard you mention your parents’ place. Where was it? Near Shinjuku?”

  “Um, a place called Nippori. My mom and dad got divorced when I was in college, and now my mom lives in Kobe, where her parents are. My dad stayed in the house, and he remarried, so they live there now.”

  “I see. My parents lived in Yanaka when I was young. That’s close to Nippori, right?”

  “What a coincidence! Do you remember it?” Shintani-kun’s eyes shone.

  “No, I was just a baby,” I said, feeling bad for not remembering.

  “Too bad. I love that area, it’s so peaceful. There are so many temples, and everything’s up a hill. Let’s take a walk around there sometime,” he said, with the air of someone telling you about his beloved hometown.

  “I wonder if the apartment block we lived in is still standing. I’ll ask Mom,” I said.

  I felt subdued. I’d assumed that Shintani-kun hadn’t had any troubles in life, having simply taken over the family business, but of course, very few people got through life with no hardships at all. My family was in tatters, but in one sense, we hadn’t divorced, or given up on being a family, which might mean we’d been happier than his.

  We picked out a pretty sofa with thick blue fabric for Shintani-kun’s apartment. Darker colors would be better for hiding stains, we’d agreed, seriously, like an old married couple.

  “That ended up costing much less than I expected, so let me treat you to dinner,” he said.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t even do anything, just tagged along,” I said.

  “Well, you always feed me well,” he said.

  “That’s all Michiyo-san.” I laughed.

  “There’s an excellent Korean restaurant near my place. Do you want to try it?” he said smiling, ever the food lover.

  “Okay, since Mom’s working all day today,” I said.

  “Your mom has a job? Where?” he said, surprised.

  “The Japanese tea house opposite the flower shop. She serves tea, and takes care of the pet turtles,” I said.

  Shintani-kun laughed. “I’m going to go in there sometime, pretending I don’t know a thing,” he said. “Wow, so if I want to see the Imoto women, all I have to do is head to that street.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said. “We might be too fast for you. We don’t have a lot of stuff, so we could make a pretty quick escape.

  “But it still feels strange to me. I need something and pop out to 7-Eleven, with my purse. And when I walk down Chazawa-Dori, I get a weird feeling. A kind of loneliness, but also freedom, like I’m on vacation somewhere.

  “A long time ago, when I was young, but after we’d moved to Meguro, Dad took me to the main street on the east side of Shimokitazawa Station. Just the two of us, by bus. It was so crowded, I asked him whether it was a festival, and he said, No, it’s always like this here on a Sunday, and we held hands and walked down the street. The decorations were waving in the wind, and the way people’s voices overlapped each other sounded just like music to my ears, and when we sat down for a cup of tea, I still felt like I was looking at a festival in a foreign country. Dad bought some vinyl, and got me a little purse.

  “It’s only a small thing, from an ordinary day, but with the weather and the festival atmosphere, and Dad being in a good mood, and how I used that purse for a long time, it’s turned into a really important memory to me.

  “Sometimes now, I look up at the sky, and feel exactly the same as I did that day—as though I was out on a journey. I think it’s because there are different people there all the time. But since I actually live there now, even if I’m walking around with my head in the clouds like that, I end up running into someone I know. We only say hello, or catch up for a minute, but it grounds me.

  “The most important thing is, I have this sense that the feeling of holding Dad’s hand that day is etched into the time within my body, but also into the town itself. That the memory will last forever, because the town was a witness.”

  “Wow,” Shintani-kun said. “So even if you leave and come back again, they’re still there. The marks you made will stay.”

  “Yes, I think they won’t disappear, even if I lose my memory. Even if Dad’s dead. I think places have that kind of power, as long as we love them. Even after someone dies, their feelings are marked there, like the lines on a CD.”

  Our home in Meguro had also been the place where I’d spent my adolescence, which had come with its own struggles.

  The place was dense with memories: A phase when I hated Mom and her complete assumption that we were on good terms, so much that I could barely stand her touch, but never let on; the times I was sick with envy, in a grass-is-greener kind of way, of families whose dads came home at the same time every evening. The fact that I’d spent a lot of my time there feeling unequipped to deal with what I was going through and trying to tune it out probably contributed to me not being able to claim Meguro as my hometown, yet.

  Of course, if Shintani-kun and I were to split up acrimoniously enough to no longer be on speaking terms, Shimokitazawa would look dull and gray, too. If Michiyo-san decided to open her new shop in Aoyama, I’d move over there. Everything flowed, everything changed.

  One of the things you lost sight of when you lived in the city was the sense of how much power an individual had.

  For example, even a major bookstore inside a large building would have its star staff members, who’d be missed if they moved to a different branch. But as Mom was saying, they’d immediately be replaced by someone new, and the shop would keep on running. People who lived in cities actually felt safer that way, I thought. That the world went on without them, that businesses wouldn’t fold, that the town would keep functioning.

  But it was human nature to be dissatisfied by that, too.

  Recently—probably especially since losing Dad, and seeing his old band break up—I’d been thinking a lot about the power that one person could have. What it meant for someone to be irreplaceable, that things had to end if they left. For something to have to end that way, even if it had had a good run. And how that made you realize that you had to be a little greedy about making the most of what was now.

  Being told, logically, that there was no time like the present didn’t mean much, but when someone disappeared from a community, you suddenly cherished the days you’d had with them. People were only really capable of grasping things on that kind of scale, I thought. When I considered the destruction of the earth, I felt like I’d deal with it when I saw it happening, but when I thought of losing Shimokitazawa, I felt real fear. I guess that was just the way things worked.

  If Miyuki-san left that small, bustling Thai restaurant, if her slender arms stopped shaking those sauté pans by the window, the taste of her cooking would be lost forever. If Tecchan, her husband, were to die suddenly in an accident, that would change the flavor, too, into something sad and dejected. When I passed by the colorful restaurant on a summer evening and smelled the spices, and heard the sounds of the kitchen, I got nostalgic for Thailand, even though I’d barely spent any time there. When the restaurant’s yellow lights shone brighter as the darkness fell, they made me long for somewhere to go home to. Once I was inside, the smiles of the two of them as they greeted me transformed the melancholy of sundown into an equal amount of joy, as though through some kind of alchemy. And all it took for that magic to happen was for just two people to exist in this world and to find each other.

  If Hacchan disappeared from the secondhand bookstore, we’d stop stopping by to see how he was doing when we passed the shop. The stacks of books and things that lay on the wooden floor, waiting to find their place, and the gallery area with its strange pictures made it feel like the place was his home, and drew lonely people inside to spend time with him.


  If Eri-chan didn’t put her heart into caring for them every day, the turtles in the tea house would probably die before long, just as the teapots and teacups would lose their shine, and look lifeless.

  The same went for Les Liens. If Michiyo-san got discouraged, and started slacking off on her cooking, her famous barley salad would lose the lightness that came from her deft touch and start weeping moisture onto the plate, and the whole shop would grow stale and dingy and old.

  If Chizuru-san, who ran Mom’s favorite bar, were to leave, the town would become clouded by the unhappy sighs of her middle-aged clientele who were left with nowhere to go.

  It seemed incredible that everything relied on just a handful of individuals in that way. Frankly, I would have preferred never to discover such an alarming thing.

  This discovery also confronted me with my own responsibility. If I worked at the bistro for long enough, customers would start coming to the restaurant to see my smile. They’d start counting on me, almost like family, even though we weren’t. They’d come looking, not just for Michiyo-san’s food, but our work as a team in bringing it to them.

  I felt dizzy at the enormity of it. I marveled at how people could pretend to be unaware of such an amazing fact.

  Before going to the Korean restaurant, we decided to stop by Shintani-kun’s apartment so he could lend me some CDs.

  Which was to say, I’d signaled that I was prepared to take our relationship deeper.

  We’d been seeing each other for a while now, and had become used to linking arms when we walked, or holding hands. I was almost surprised by how unremarkable it felt to be standing outside his door.

  I wondered whether Shintani-kun would be nervous, too, but he unlocked and opened the front door without hesitation, since it was his place, after all.

  The first thing I saw was a small, wood-cased Tivoli radio speaker.

  “I imagined you’d have a big hi-fi system,” I said.

  He laughed. “I don’t really have the space,” he said.

  For a one-bed apartment, it was fairly spacious, but he lived more simply than I’d imagined. The laminate floor was clean and polished, and there was no hint of dust or mildew. The kitchen was obviously well used, and the pots and pans weren’t brand-new, either, so I guessed he cooked for himself. The space felt comfortable and lived-in. A bottle palm with willowy leaves cast a strange silhouette against the light from the window.