Finally, by Sunday night, Ms Ice Sandwich’s picture feels done. I go over and stand by Grandma’s bed, holding the painting in front of my chest.
“Grandma, this is my portrait of Ms Ice Sandwich. This is the best picture I’ve ever drawn. Don’t you think? It looks just like Ms Ice Sandwich. The Ms Ice Sandwich I’m always talking to you about. See those cool eyes? I made them really beautiful, it looks just like her. And guess what? After tomorrow, Ms Ice Sandwich isn’t going to be there any more. It’s her last day. Tutti asked someone at the supermarket for me.”
As I ramble on like this to Grandma, I start to feel a pain in my chest and tears suddenly start to roll down my cheeks, and suddenly I’m crying my eyes out. I’m not sure what’s causing it, why I’m so unhappy, but I can’t stop the tears. The angel decorations in Mum’s salon, or the smell of the blue crayon, the pattern on the zabuton cover that I trace with the tip of my finger, Tutti’s backpack getting farther into the distance, maybe all of this—everything inside me feels scrambled. Every time I breathe, my body kind of shudders and I feel like I’m never going to stop crying. With one hand on the sheet of Grandma’s bed, I squat down with my knees pulled up to my chin, and my other hand covering my eyes, and I stay like that crying and crying. I cry so hard that my shoulders heave and my face is soaked in tears and snot. And then I feel something touch my head, which startles me. I stop and look up and see that it’s Grandma. Grandma who’s supposed to be asleep is awake and her little eyes are looking at me tenderly and she’s got a faint smile on her face and her hand is gently resting on my head. She looks kindly into my face and there’s a little trembling glow in the pupils of her eyes, then in a really, really tiny voice, she says, Don’t cry. Very quietly, I say, Grandma, and I reach up to touch her but I don’t stop crying. We stay that way for a while before I end up falling asleep on the zabuton.
After school the next day, I collect my painting of Ms Ice Sandwich from home, and go to the supermarket. There’s no sign of Ms Ice Sandwich at the sandwich counter. Tutti had said Monday evening. I don’t know what time in the evening exactly, but I guess that if I wait here, if she is coming, I’ll see her. The supermarket starts getting crowded, so I go outside and stand in a spot where I can watch the front entrance as well as the big doors on the side where the trolleys and the deliveries go in and out, and I wait, watching for Ms Ice Sandwich to appear.
After waiting I don’t know how long, the side doors open and it’s Ms Ice Sandwich! But for some reason my feet won’t move, and I stand there watching that face, that head of dark hair move steadily away from me. She stops to say something to some people carrying cardboard boxes, speaks to someone else walking by, then she waves and sets off down the street towards the station. My feet suddenly able to move, I take off after her. I catch up with her halfway between the supermarket and the station and walk up so I’m next to her and I say, Um, excuse me, Miss?
Surprised, Ms Ice Sandwich turns to look at me. Me? she asks. Yes, I answer. I bow a little. What is it? she asks, stepping to the very edge of the road so she isn’t in the way of all the people walking by. Her eyes are so big, and her eyelids are coloured her usual electric ice-blue. My own eyes are wide open as I stare at her face. I begin by saying, I used to come to your shop to buy sandwiches. Ms Ice Sandwich: Oh yes, I thought I’d seen you before. Me: I heard you’re leaving that shop. Ms Ice Sandwich: That’s right. Me: Really? Ms Ice Sandwich: Yes, I am. At that point I don’t know what to say, so I just hand her my picture, rolled up and fastened with a rubber band. This… this is a picture I drew, I say. Ms Ice Sandwich: Really? May I look at it?, and she removes the rubber band and unrolls the picture. Wow! Ms Ice Sandwich says, sounding genuinely surprised. Is this me? Me: Yes, it is. Ms Ice Sandwich: It’s really me? Me: Yes! Ms Ice Sandwich: You drew it for me? Me: Yes, I did! I’m trying frantically to respond properly, but I feel my face burning hotter and hotter, and I can’t even believe I’m standing here talking to Ms Ice Sandwich, yet here I am talking to her, and every time I think about it my face gets even hotter.
“Can I keep this?” asks Ms Ice Sandwich.
“Yes.”
“Thank you. You know,” she goes on, “I think you’re going to be an artist in the future.” She laughs happily. This is the first time I have ever seen Ms Ice Sandwich laugh like that.
“And I remember now, you always came to buy sandwiches from me, so thank you for that too.”
“It was nothing,” I say, shaking my head.
“This is a nice town. I worked here quite a long time. I really liked it.”
“Are y—are you really leaving?”
“Yes. I’m getting married and going to live somewhere else.”
“You’re getting married?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh,” I say, nodding my head like mad.
“Well, I’d better get going,” says Ms Ice Sandwich.
“Thank you for the picture. Take care of yourself!”
There’s a black part of the asphalt, and there’s a dark grey part, and they run into one another, and they feel hard under the soles of my shoes as ever.
The supermarket car park, jam-packed with cars. The rounded, coloured neon letters on the dry cleaner’s signboard. The face of a politician that completely fills a rectangular poster. The broken white line along the edge of the road, its paint worn off in places. The leaflets and advertisements overflowing the postbox of the old house where nobody lives any more. The weeds I don’t know the name of. The man who sells vegetables stuffed in cardboard boxes from his truck. The bench where me and Tutti saw the Yorkshire terrier. The big barrel in someone’s garden that’s full of water (I have no idea what it’s for). The notices pinned to the community bulletin board. The tip of the faded surfboard sticking out from the balcony of a second-floor apartment. A potted plant. A tricycle in front of a door. A nameplate. A manhole. Gates and rubbish bins. I notice all these different things on the route back.
When I get home, Mum is giving Grandma her dinner. Hi, let’s have dinner together, she says, and I say, Yes. Mum says, You look really tired, are you OK? I hope you haven’t caught a cold. You know, it’s fine to draw pictures and be in Grandma’s room, but you need to sleep properly on your own futon. I say yes again, and I sit at the table and eat my dinner, and I take a bath as Mum tells me, get into my pyjamas, and go into the bedroom.
You really don’t look well, says Mum as she does her stretches, and I answer something vague. Then I mumble, I’m going to sleep, and turn down the cover of my futon and climb in. That’s when Mum says, Before you go to sleep, here, I’ve got this for you, and she brings over a largish, square package and hands it to me.
“What is it?” I ask, sitting up.
“Open it and see.”
I tear off the thin brown-paper packaging. “It’s a book!”
“You know how you were asking me about it? The picture book about the dogs with the giant eyes? I couldn’t find a book with just that story, but this collection has the story in it. Look, isn’t it this one?”
Mum flips through the pages and shows me a picture of the dogs.
“Yes,” I say. “This is the one! Mum, this is it!”
That night, tucked in my futon, in the dim light of the bedroom, I read The Tinderbox over and over. Just as I remembered, in the pictures the dogs with enormous eyes run with a princess on their backs. As I look at the pictures, they’re very familiar, like a fond memory of my own. I’m not sure whether I really came across this story or these illustrations before, but I have to believe that back when I was a little boy, someone read this book to me. I mean, that must be how I already know the story, and how I know these dogs with big eyes. I’m still looking at the pictures when I fall asleep.
That night, I dream. A dream where the dogs with the giant eyes carry the princess on their back and they’re running around the town. I’m watching them from somewhere high up and far away. Under a spreading, starry sky, they take off from the
brick road and they fly, their eyes growing bigger and bigger. Their breathing is rough, they’re panting, and they come right up to me with those gleaming rows of fangs as big as gates. Next I’m running with the dogs, at the same speed, all over the town. And now I realize I’ve turned into one of the three dogs, and my huge paws covered in brown fur are growing by the second, and my paws make a loud kind of clack as they kick off from the bricks, and they send off sparks, and I’m using every ounce of strength in my body to run towards the castle. The skirt of the princess’s long dress brushes against my back. I turn around as I’m running to check that the princess is all right. Lying on my back, wearing a long white dress, it’s Ms Ice Sandwich. She has a spellbound expression on her face, her eyes with their electric ice-blue lids are shut tight, and she’s lying on my back. She strokes the fur on my neck with her long, fair right hand, with her left she has a firm grip on my shoulder blade. Ms Ice Sandwich is on my back and we sparkle as we dash through the town, heading towards the castle. I’m watching this whole scene, my eyes wide in wonder. Ms Ice Sandwich on my back, flying into the wind, striding through the night, past gawping crowds of people, shaking off expectations, with little bursts of laughter, heading towards the castle. A soft smile on her lips, Ms Ice Sandwich lies secure and safe on my back. My eyes grow even more gigantic, taking in everything around me as we run through the night. I exhale a white cloud of breath from between my fangs, and the clear liquid that drips from my nose makes Ms Ice Sandwich’s dress wet, creating a spot that then quickly vanishes. Baring my fangs, I kick off from the rooftops, breathing out into the night, faster than anybody, stronger than anybody, Ms Ice Sandwich on my back, I run through the night. My claws spray gazillions of sparks as I run towards the castle. Goodbye, Ms Ice Sandwich! Goodbye, Ms Ice Sandwich! The hem of her dress falls over my eyes, then blows away again, finally the town stops rushing by so quickly, and my body begins to slow down second by second. My legs become heavier and heavier, and with a great rumbling of the earth, my body is released into a big open space, and now I can’t move on the bricks any more, and I just stand there breathing in and out. And as I watch my belly heaving, my eyelids become weighted down, and before long my giant eyes have stopped watching everything. Goodbye. There’s the sound of someone breathing, that’s what I’m listening to. Goodbye. The stars are setting, and in their last breath somebody tells me goodbye. Someone is saying goodbye, and now I can’t move at all, and all I can do is hold my breath, and silently listen to the final sound, nothing to do but listen silently to the very last echo of that sound.
I TOLD EVERYONE in my class that they didn’t need to come to my grandma’s funeral, but Tutti shows up, along with her dad. It’s a beautiful, sunny day towards the end of December, and your breath comes out so white it looks like you can touch it. By the time I run into Tutti, I’ve already stopped crying, and I lift my hand a little, and at first she looks a bit uncomfortable but then she lifts her hand a bit too. Thanks for coming, I say to her, and she says, No problem, shaking her head. After the funeral service, everyone eats a bento together, then we have to do some greetings, and then some of the relatives and Mum and me get into the hearse and go to the crematorium. Grandma looks very small and white when she’s brought back out. She’s only bones and ash, which are gathered up and put into a pretty box. I hug her tightly to my chest.
In the new year, Tutti and I start going to the planetarium, or to have ice cream, or I go to her house to watch movies. My voice sometimes gets a bit scratchy, and Tutti starts growing very quickly, and soon she’s way taller than me. The gunfight that we perform in Tutti’s living room gets even more polished, and her dad is always there napping on the sofa. Doo-Wop is still crazy about the same old video game, and my mum seems to be crazy about the same old stuff too, sitting in her salon listening to all these different women talking, crying, and laughing.
Sometimes I go to the supermarket just to buy sandwiches from the sandwich shop. There’s always the same woman behind the glass case, and when I say, May I have one egg sandwich, please, she smiles at me, puts it into a plastic bag, and places it firmly in my hand. I say, Thank you, and then, I think I’ll have another one, please, and I give her some more money. We haven’t made any plans today, but I think I’ll go over to Tutti’s house. And if Tutti’s there, we can sit on the sofa together and eat egg sandwiches.
About the Authors
MIEKO KAWAKAMI was born in Osaka in 1976. Her second novella, Breasts and Eggs (2008), won the Akutagawa Prize and has been translated into Norwegian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean and more. She has published many books, including novels, short stories, essays, and prose poems. In 2016, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Japanese Novelists.
LOUISE HEAL KAWAI was born in Manchester, but has been a resident of Japan for about twenty-five years, and a translator of Japanese literature for the past ten. Her translations include the bestselling memoir Yakuza Moon by Shoko Tendo, the ground-breaking feminist novel by Taeko Tomioka, Building Waves, and A Quiet Place by the mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto. Ms Ice Sandwich is her second Mieko Kawakami translation.
JAPANESE FICTION FROM PUSHKIN PRESS
RECORD OF A NIGHT TOO BRIEF
Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Lucy North
SPRING GARDEN
Tomoka Shibasaki
Translated by Polly Barton
SLOW BOAT
Hideo Furukawa
Translated by David Boyd
Ms ICE SANDWICH
Mieko Kawakami
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
THE BEAR AND THE PAVING STONE
Toshiyuki Horie
Translated by Geraint Howells
THE END OF THE MOMENT WE HAD
Toshiki Okada
Translated by Samuel Malissa
Copyright
Series Editors: David Karashima and Michael Emmerich
Translation Editor: Elmer Luke
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street
London, WC2H 9JQ
Original title: “Misu Aisu Sandoicchi” by KAWAKAMI Mieko
© KAWAKAMI Mieko, 2013
This piece was published in the literary journal Shincho first in 2013, and in 2014 it was included in the novel Akogare, which is a combination of two stories: “Miss Ice Sandwich” and “Strawberry Jam Minus Strawberry”.
English translation © Louise Heal Kawai 2017
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Nippon Foundation
ISBN 13: 978 1 78227 331 8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
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