But, mother, I’m not so competitive as you expect me to be.
My school record and a handful of memories from the past are the only things I can handle. For example, I have no idea what my father is made of. I rarely see him. He is too busy to have dinner at home with us. He became a workaholic after we had lost Naomi. Lately he seems to have xenophobia about his wife and daughter, but it is fine with me. I have no mind to be an executive in a Japanese trading company, like my father, to begin with, if the company is second-rate or B-class as my mother always points out whenever she feels like humiliating her husband with her usual benevolent-looking smile.
I am finally on the hilltop now. There is a vending machine that is humming invitingly. It reminds me of the old refrigerator in our house. Inside there is always a box of margarine, soft and easily soluble, never a box of butter, and my father likes to spread it on bread evenly. He leaves no corner neglected, whereas my mother spread it thick. I dislike the way my father makes a repetitious scratchy sound with butter knife. I seldom made any scratchy sound, for I was a devotee of orange marmalade. I always wish myself to be the invisible when I have to sit down at the table with my family.
Once in a while I come to feel sorry for my father that I have been an accomplice with my mother in the crime of having kept him being isolated from his own family. But what else could I do, daddy? You’ve been absent in the first place. It wasn’t my fault. You could succeed in forming good connections with your superiors and colleagues by cutting your connections with your own family.
Taking a can of hot green tea out of the vending machine, I remember the green iguana. That cold night, the flabby chin of the lizard reminded me of the scrotum of my grandfather. I am afraid it might have been dead.
There are rows of tile-roofed Japanese houses to be seen from here. As I turn around, what comes into view is a ballet school. There is also a cosmetic surgery clinic diagonally across this street from the ballet school. I used to take Naomi to and from that ballet school every other Sunday.
Everything here reminds me of something. Which slope would be the one from where the ominous car ran out into this street? It abruptly emerged out of the slope without the warning sound of a horn. It looked as if a great white shark had risen to the surface to catch a baby seal.
*
I have handed a complimentary present to Yukio’s grandfather. It is a box of Japanese sweets in which there are six daifukus packed together. A daifuku is a soft round rice cake stuffed with sweet bean jam. It resembles a Chinese-style steamed bun with a filling.
“It’s very courteous of you. Daifuku is my favorite. Come in please,” says Yukio’s grandfather.
I am relieved to hear it since he has been known to be a difficult person. I make a casual bow at an angle of five degrees and take off my shoes and step onto the entrance hall. His eyes narrow in satisfaction as he glances back at my school uniform, that is, our all-purpose sailor middy top and short pleated skirt.
My mother is very stingy in respect of gift. She buys ordinary cakes from a neighborhood confectionery and puts them into an elegant box of famous cake brand and wraps the box up in a fancy Japanese paper of the same well-known brand and then asks me to visit my homeroom teacher’s apartment to give it to him as a traditional midyear gift. To my mother, appearance precedes existence, that is, package precedes its content. She seems unable to imagine how embarrassed I can be the moment I have to hand such a fake gift over to my homeroom teacher. It has been always so painful that, this time, I bought daifuku myself and kept it secret from her.
“My wife has been unwell since that incident. Please forgive her for not greeting you. This way please.”
There is a stinging silence that reigns in this house.
Following after him, I step into my favorite living room.
Yukio’s grandfather is now seventy-three, who used to be a professor at the department of agriculture in a private university. He has already retired as a professor emeritus and been pensioned off since then. According to my mother, one of his daughters, that is, Yukio’s aunt, is taking care of things including housework for the professor emeritus and his wife who has been ill in bed since Yukio’s funeral.
Although Yukio’s grandmother has been isolated in the bedroom at the far end of the corridor, there is a sign of her presence to be sensed in every corners of this house. Not only is her feeble coughing audible but I can even hear her bronchial tubes wheeze as well. I wonder if this house might have turned into a haunted house.
Adjacent to this living room, there is a tatami-floored room, which is divided from here by a shoji, a paper sliding door. Even if it were shut tight, you would be still able to hear, for instance, a faint sigh uttered by his aunt in the next room.
No chairs are allowed in the tatami-floored room. It is the place where the elderly inhabit. I can smell a heap of experience. It is very much like the smell of smoke when we make a bonfire of fallen leaves early in the autumn morning.
The smoke whispers to everyone that nothing is infinite.
It is telling us that there is always an end to one’s life and that it will eventually visit everyone without a single exception. I wish that the driver who killed my little sister will have to face an unspeakably horrible end by the same executioner.
*
Yukio’s grandfather, the professor emeritus, serves me a cup of Jasmine tea.
“Green tea disturbs a good night’s sleep but insomnia is still better than what has happened to my wife.”
He shakes his head weakly and then sips the tea very slowly as if in daydream.
“My wife was ravaged by the accident when she found out that the police considered it suicide. It’s a shame to treat the death of our grandson as suicide.”
I lower my eyes in silence.
“Well, what had happened has happened. There is nothing we can do. Let me see your hands please,” asks the professor with the eyes of a scientist.
I extend my hands toward him as if in a hypnotic trance.
“How fresh and youthful these hands look. You must remember that the young are not allowed to die without permission. It’s the highest treason against your parents.”
There is a worn-out upright piano in the corner of this living room. It reminds me of the back view of Yukio while he was playing his favorite tune from Children’s Corner by Claude Debussy. This time, however, he sits down at the piano and looks a head shorter than he used to be. All of a sudden I become aware that what I am seeing right now may be the ghost of Yukio, but, for some reason, it doesn’t feel paranormal.
Yukio slowly turns his face toward this way over his shoulder, smiling smugly.
His organs and intestines are dangling from the chair.
(Oh no please don’t do that to me, Yukio. We were supposed to stop believing the supernatural once we started watching news programs, were we not?)
Just then Yukio the revenant has faded away from my sight. It is fortunate that he no longer need a pair of glasses. It is fortunate to me as well because I am now able to read his facial expression quite easily.
“Excuse me, professor.”
“Yes?”
“Would you mind my taking a look at his room?”
“Make yourself at home and take a long look at things my grandson treasured.”
*
Having excused myself from the table with a polite bow at an angle of fifteen degrees, I stop at the second room from the end of corridor where Yukio’s cinerary urn is enshrined in a family Buddhist altar. There on the opposite wall is being hanged a Noh mask that is carved into the face of the so-called tenderhearted woman. But, to me, it appears as eerie as photography of the face of a drowned woman.
Facing the urn, I sit straight and burn incense and join my hands in prayer and then curse Yukio for his having become a naughty spirit.
DVD
It feels as if he were standing by and watching me trying to find his secret. In his room on the second floor you can see
an extensive collection of books which covers two walls and the only window. It covers from the carpet floor to the ceiling where picture clippings from art books are being pasted with like a huge collage.
Yukio told me that there were more than 1,800 books and 350 DVDs as of last November. He burned downloaded movies on all those DVDs. He also said that in his Notebook were stored more than 6,400 tunes or so as of this January. I doubt whether Yukio could actually listen to every tune from beginning to end. It reminds me of what I heard from a music teacher in our gakko. She said that all tunes Mozart composed would be impossible for anyone to finish listening during one’s lifetime, even for Mozart the composer himself.
Yukio might have preferred collecting things to things collected.
Where is that green iguana anyway?
There is neither a cage nor a glass tank in his room.
After having made sure if the professor keeps standing right outside this room in order to listen to what I am doing, I lock the door and lie on my stomach to grope about under Yukio’s single bed. Unfortunately, there is no single pill of wool to be found there and it is the same under his desk. I get up and smooth the wrinkles out of my sailor middy top and short pleated skirt.
No photos. No clippings. No memo pads.
His aunt must have swept this room as clean as a hospital room. It however doesn’t disappoint me. Looking under the bed must be like a routine inspection by parents. I have already anticipated that something significant wouldn’t possibly be detected within my sight.
I am dealing with Yukio.
He was not only sharp but tidy and cautious as well. It is unthinkable that he concealed anything confidential in a place that is so easily spotted.
On his desk are several piled textbooks, a folded silvery Notebook, a portable printer with a sheet of a printout on its tray.
No photos. No clippings. No memo pads. No Mobile.
I am well aware that there is no point in searching every likely folder and file stored in his Notebook.
I have no time for doing that.
Eight minutes have passed already.
Where is his Mobile anyway? It is supposed to be the one and only life-support system for mankind unless some severe space weather disrupts all electronic communication systems on the globe.
I pick up the printout from its tray.
‘You’re unable to see what you don’t want to see. You deliberately miss the thing you’re afraid to see. Your eyes are romantics who are susceptible to deception in such a way that you’re never able to see a truth. All is because you yourself become the accomplice of deception by the very truth.’
Thus wrote Yukio.
Is this his last writing? It does sound very much enigmatic as if he had foreseen what would happen to him.
But its style tells me a different story. There is no customary phrase ‘Say sayonara with a sneer’ at the end of it. This would be an unfinished writing, a kind of scribbled note.
I start looking in drawers, but the contents of three drawers all look like nothing else but a model student’s belongings.
No photos. No clippings. No memo pads. No Mobile.
Twelve minutes have passed.
All of a sudden I have this feeling that someone might be coming up with a heavy wheeze for a look at me. I quickly press my ear against the door. It feels as if the sick old lady were climbing up the narrow stairs and coming toward this room with unsteady steps, her grey hairs and bony fingers shaking like the last leaves in a cold wind. I hold my breath and close my eyes, trying to listen to any sound behind this door.
Then I look inside Yukio’s closet but again nothing interesting is to be found.
After all, what is left before me is this extensive collection of books covering two walls and the only window. Yes, there are more than 1,800 books and they are all asking me to body-search them. Perhaps they want to be touched rather than to be read, for they used to be concubines of Yukio the book fetishist.
I pull a single book out of a bookshelf. There are neatly underlined sentences in almost every other page. The same will be applied to any book I pick up at random.
Twenty-three minutes have passed.
Before long I spot a single book that doesn’t match Yukio’s taste.
The Principles of Accounting?
It is a hardcover book on the topmost shelf right in front of me. The book is heavy to grab and the front cover thick like a photo frame.
I found you, I mutter to myself, this is it.
As I have expected, underneath the cover is being hollowed out squarely, and inside the hollow are hidden a virgin-looking DVD in a transparent plastic case and two newspaper clippings.
Reiko
As I hurry down the stairs, I catch a voice of a young woman who seems to have a pleasant chat with Yukio’s grandfather. I step in the living room and see Reiko turning her head around with that popular smile on her lips.
Unlike other ninety-five percent of female students in our gakko, Reiko is slim and good-looking with long straight black hair. And she is secretive as if she had already experienced a lot of things other girls including me can never even think of. She has a knowing air about herself that makes her appear like a woman of twenty. It simply sets her apart from her peer group. Reiko is also very good at giving a sidelong suggestive glance to boys.
“We have a very charming visitor, as you can see,” says Yukio’s grandfather.
I nod with a nervous smile.
Reiko smooth down her long black hair with her fingers.
She wears no make-up. According to Maya: Reiko is neither cute nor pretty. She is just a beauty.
Reiko whispers in my ear, “How is your asthma?”
“So far so good.”
“What did you get in last midterm?”
“I was the sixth out of one hundred and seventy-five freshmen,” I say.
But it would be one hundred and seventy-four by the time of the final exam because Yukio is no longer with us.
“I was the third,” said Reiko, checking the end of her hair.
“That’s good.” I feel chagrined.
“Maya was the fifth. Probably because she had to work for the photo contest sponsored by a major woman’s magazine.”
“Wow.”
“If not, she could have done better.”
I shrug my shoulders.
“I was not expecting you to be here, by the way,” Reiko says.
“It’s exactly what I was about to say to you.”
“What a surprise,” whispers Reiko with a restrained smirk.
“Strange things happen. All the time.”
“Oh, really.”
Reiko wears a sleeveless turtleneck. The bare shoulders in the middle of winter look especially vulnerable to a touch.
Sitting next to her, I notice that the end of her long straight black hair is still a little moist and that the scent of shampoo is faintly hanging in the air. She is intelligent and attractive but so cautious even as to make us unaware of the first asset.
Reiko excuses herself from the table with a graceful bow at an angle of five degrees and leaves the living room to offer her prayers for the soul of Yukio.
“That young lady always carries with her a very elegant way of moving.”
I tell the professor that Reiko has been practicing both the tea ceremony and the Japanese art of flower arrangement from the age of five.
Shortly later, on parting at the front door, I am surprised to see Reiko throwing her arms around the professor emeritus, with her armpit exposed, like an American girl I saw in a Hollywood family movie. She might have been under the influence of her stepfather who is a forty-six-year-old American investment banker.
Reiko’s Caucasian stepfather drives a Bentley and her mother an Alfa Romeo. My father drives a Toyota and my mother his Toyota, by the way.
*
Going up the sloping lane, Reiko starts talking as if she were speaking to no one in particular.
“He’s
adorable.”
“You mean, the professor? I can't believe that you thought him kawaii.”
“Is he not? I find his boyish smile quite charming.”
“I think he’s a difficult person.”
“He calls me Young Lady. He is an endangered species, like a coelacanth. I could hear his heartbeat when we embraced each other.”
“Really?”
“Oh, Luna. I’m wondering if you believe everything other girls say.”
And Reiko stops to wave to Yukio’s grandfather in farewell. He also keeps waving as if it were the last teatime he shared with us. We lose sight of him as we turn to the left around a corner.
“Maya is an artist you know. Her photographs are cool,” says Reiko.
“No doubt about that.”
“I like the shape of her eyes. They are as cute as those of a chipmunk. Did you know Maya had a cosmetic surgery on her eyes the day she turned fifteen? My mother told me that it was a birthday present from her parents.”
“I heard of it before. What about yourself, Reiko?”
“Me? I don’t need it. I was born pretty.”
I remember that Maya used to be a slant-eyed girl but now she has symmetrical almond-shaped eyes.
Reiko combs up her long black hair to let it flow down her back and then whispers in my ear, “I have an e-mail that was sent to me from Yukio-san two days before that incident.”
A Japanese Schoolgirl Page 4