I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While

by Taichi Yamada

  First published in the UK in 2008

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU

  Originally published in Japan as Tohii Yume Wo Shibaraku Minai

  by Shinchosha Co. Ltd, Tokyo, in 1989

  British edition rights arranged by Taichi Yamada

  through The Marsh Agency Ltd/Japan Foreign Rights Centre

  All rights reserved

  © Taichi Yamada, 1989, 2008

  English translation © David James Karashima, 2008

  The right of Taichi Yamada to be identified as author, and of David James Karashima as translator, of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-571-23497-4

  I talked about how I hadn’t dreamed of flying for a while,

  And that very night, for the first time in a while,

  I dreamt I was flying.

  From ‘Dream’ by Sachiko Yoshihara

  Prologue

  It started in winter, just two and a half months before my forty-eighth birthday. There I was, confined to my hospital bed with a fractured thigh, when suddenly I realised I was becoming detached from this world.

  Please forgive my rather pretentious beginning. It’s just that the story I’m about to tell is of a unique experience. It’s also one that I still can’t make up my mind about — not even now it’s a thing of the past.

  On any day I can come up with several different explanations for what happened, only to shoot them all down immediately. On some days, I cling desperately to one particular answer; then on others, I give up trying to make sense of it altogether. Let me start by telling you some of the things I consider to be part of this world.

  There are the many elements of my life as deputy sales director of the Northern Japan branch of a prefab construction company. These include living away from my family, management responsibility, sales performance, the booming trades man’s voice of our branch president, my department director’s shameless instinct for self-preservation, the interest rate of the Government Housing Loan Corporation, the feigned enthusiasm of my junior staff, a wife in Tokyo, a daughter who married and left home, a son in his second year of university (and the unfortunate way things are between us), nervous insomnia, gastrointestinal neurosis, an over-frequent need to urinate and many other aspects too numerous to mention.

  I never would have thought I could become detached from all these things after just ten or so bedridden days. But when you spend most of your time staring up at a white ceiling, you can soon start to feel like you’re floating further and further away. Or perhaps I’d just given up.

  Despite my reluctance to admit it, the feeling that my career had come to a dead end had soaked through me like water into a cotton rag, right from the very moment I got injured. And though this sense seemed to press down on me with a great weight, it was probably the great mass of the sensation that actually helped me unload it, allowing a new me to surface; one that until now had been pushed deep down inside.

  Okay, it might seem a little over the top for me to put it that way. But one morning I just suddenly felt as free as an adolescent. I was overwhelmed at my newfound freedom, by how long it had been since I’d felt that way and by how much I’d been repressing. And then there was the premonition. At least, that’s what I think it was. After all, I’d never experienced one before and the whole thing was completely alien to me. I’d certainly never predicted the future before.

  I had been working in a company that relied entirely on official data and left no room whatsoever for personal instinct. It was an environment that suited me well as someone who’d never relied on intuition, not even in my personal life. So when the premonition came to me, I didn’t even recognise it.

  It arrived out of the blue early one afternoon.

  I was nodding off when it hit me like the crack of a whip. First, I felt it in my stomach. Then a surge of suffocating anxiety welled up around my chest, forcing me to open my eyes. Before I knew it, a sense of urgency had overwhelmed my entire body, impelling me to open my mouth. My immediate impulse was to try not to let out a cry. So instead, I concentrated on taking deep breaths to repress the mounting sense of restlessness.

  It had to be a dream. I had to have been dreaming. But it certainly hadn’t felt like a dream. My entire body was seething with an unfathomable sense of immediacy and my heart was pounding. The term ‘cardioneurosis’ crossed my mind and I tried with all my willpower to suppress this sudden attack.

  I noticed the soft light shining onto the white ceiling and the wilting red carnation standing still in its vase. Everything else around me was motionless too — but then, I hadn’t felt myself moving either. The leg that was fixed in place hadn’t budged and I thought maybe there was something wrong with me — to make me lose my breath, break out into a sweat and be clutching my blanket over nothing.

  ‘Calm down, I told myself, ‘It’s nothing.’

  Then I heard the voices of children outside. And the laughter of the young nurse, Ms Nakanobu. The sound of a car boot being shut — probably somebody being discharged from the hospital — reminding me that I should check with someone on the appropriate amount to leave the nurses to show my gratitude. There must be a standard amount for patients in private rooms, I thought, but there were no other hospitals in this area. And for all I knew, that sort of thing might not even be expected at this one. On the other hand, it might be an even bigger deal out here in the countryside.

  Then, as I was immersed in these thoughts, I was struck by another wave of urgency and I held my breath to try to keep it at bay.

  That’s when I heard a train far away in the distance. A withering sensation rushed through me. A strong shiver spreading from the pit of my stomach to my chest. Then it all became clear. I could see it vividly. The train derailing and rolling over. But why was I thinking that? Feeling that? Was I losing my mind?

  All those feelings of urgency and restlessness had nowhere to go until that point. But now they focused themselves on the sound of the train speeding along the tracks. But there was nothing out of the ordinary about that sound. The only thing out of the ordinary was me. I listened to the sound, searching for even a hint that something was wrong. But there was nothing like that at all. Just the sound of the train coming closer and closer, like every other train I’ve heard on the Hokuriku Line since I’d been in here.

  But my heart continued to beat faster. The train continued to come closer. And I covered my mouth with the back of my hand — afraid of letting out a cry. What was happening to me? Why were my nerves torturing me? Fear overwhelmed me.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted, ‘Stop!’

  Then I shoved my fist in my mouth to stifle myself, while the engine maintained its speed, its velocity and its pounding, timely rhythm.

  There was nothing I could do.

  Nothing.

  I covered my face.

  The roar boomed on.

  Moving forward.

  Getting louder.

  Building power.

  And then… a split-second of silence.

  The ground began to rumble.

  Metal thrashed and tumbled.

  And my story. It began.

  1

  The noise of the helicopter above drowned out the sound of the TV as it flew over the hospital, then across the fuzzy TV screen, before providing a bird’s-eye view of the devastation below. Two train carriages lay overturned and a third was derailed but upright. The remaining seven carriages were still on the tracks. Fourteen people were dead and more than six
ty were injured and the Hokuriku Line express train Snow Grouse accident went on being reported throughout the day.

  Although the accident had happened so close by, I couldn’t even look out of the window to see what was going on. Although the television was my only source of information, it at least gave me the opportunity to see the outside of the building into which I’d been carried ten days earlier — even from the sky. It was built along a national highway that ran parallel to the railway tracks, and all that surrounded the hospital, other than a few houses here and there, were snow covered fields.

  According to the news, thirty-one of the injured had been brought to this hospital from the crash site and tents had been set up by the main entrance as a makeshift emergency centre. I saw a reporter reading out the names of the dead on TV And behind the reporter, I could see the window of what was probably my room.

  After the NHK broadcast ended, I flipped through the other TV channels, turning down the volume whenever commercials came on. Then I heard the sound of someone running down the hall in slippers followed by a flurry of excited voices that filled the fifth floor.

  ‘Don’t use the lift!’ ‘It’s terrible.’ ‘Get to the second-floor hallway.’

  The noise of ambulances and human cries continued almost ceaselessly throughout the first several hours of the afternoon. And mixed in among them was the leisurely voice of someone guiding a driver in the parking lot.

  ‘Okay, okay, a little to the right. All right, all right. So calm, so ordinary, it was a voice that made me feel that what was going on outside was not the same as this tragedy unfolding on my screen.

  Lunch was served at three.

  ‘Sorry it’s late,’ said the lady in her fifties who brought it. She was uncharacteristically quiet and didn’t smile as much as usual either.

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Is it really bad down there?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  I’d touched a nerve. She crouched down without answering and turned the bed handle. As the back of my bed rose, I observed her expression. She looked annoyed, which surprised me a little since she was usually so playful. It was possible that she was just in a foul mood and that it had nothing to do with the accident. But for the first time I actually felt I’d experienced the accident at first hand — a shocking event that had occurred so close by, yet which I could witness only by television. I imagined the horror of the lower levels of the hospital and the scenes that had silenced this usually chatty woman.

  ‘Enjoy,’ she said, and the door shut abruptly. I felt her annoyance at me, even though I’d done nothing wrong.

  Since the accident, I’d thought about the premonition many times and I eventually decided it was probably a kind of illusion. Like the way people who fall out of bed (although you don’t hear of that happening so much these days) can have a long dream with a plot leading up to the fall, I’d probably been asleep until the accident had happened. Then I’d dreamed about a premonition in the split-second between hearing the accident and waking up. Although that split-second had felt like five minutes or more in my dream. It was an implausible explanation, but it seemed no more improbable than the chances of someone like me, who had nothing to do with the accident, having a premonition about it. In this way, I convinced myself it was nothing more than a dream by the end of the afternoon.

  A little later, just before six o’clock, the head nurse came into my room with a young nurse named Ms Ozaki.

  ‘What should we do?’ she said with the professionalism of someone immersed in their duties.

  ‘What on earth should we do about it?’ she said again, look ing at me as if I were a piece of furniture.

  ‘About what?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh.’ She laughed, as if she’d only just noticed me. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Then she quickly straightened out the duvet around my shoulder, turned to the young nurse and asked her, ‘Do you think it would upset him?’

  She turned and looked down at me again.

  `What should I do?’ she said.

  ‘About what?’ I asked again.

  ‘If you’re really against it, we can put another bed in the six person room. But as you can guess, we’re having difficulty with room arrangements.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if we weren’t already fully occupied. But even in normal circumstances, twenty is the maxi mum number of emergency patients we’re equipped to handle. Right now, we have thirty, some of whom are on mattresses on the floor.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Well, the director is saying he will do something about it by tomorrow morning. But would you mind moving to the single room on the other end of this floor for now?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Good, but the thing is, though I say it’s a single room, it’s actually already occupied. So there’ll be two of you in one small room. The other person has already said it would be okay. And we would also put a partition up. So what do you think?’

  ‘The other person doesn’t have anything contagious, right?’

  ‘No. Similar to you. Bruising and fractures. Can’t move either, but nothing serious.’

  ‘Then there isn’t even a need for a partition. I’ll move.’

  ‘Actually the partition was requested by the other patient. It’s a woman, you see.’

  ‘…Ah.’

  ‘But, as I say, neither of you is able to move and it is just for the one night.’

  ‘Well, I guess there’s nothing more for me to say. It’s up to the other patient, then,’ I said with a blank expression and in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Neither the head nurse nor Ms Ozaki showed any sign of understanding how it would make a middle-aged man feel to be asked to share a room with a woman. The head nurse simply said, ‘That’s a relief,’ and the next thing I knew I was placed on a rolling bed and pushed out into the hallway.

  Throughout this time, I noticed the head nurse hadn’t said anything that might hint at the age of the woman, and I got the feeling that she was doing so deliberately. Could the fact that she’d asked for a partition mean that it was a young woman? No, surely they wouldn’t put a young woman in the same room with a man, even if the man weren’t able to move. She’d be the same age as myself at the youngest. Or much older. That was more likely. The nurses were probably pretending to act indifferent and getting a kick out of thinking of all the things I was imagining. But then again, surely the nurses wouldn’t have the time for such things, given the current situation. Had they simply said nothing because it wasn’t even worth mentioning? Or did the fact that I was thinking about it so much simply mean I had a dirty mind? Either way, I was starting to feel irritated that all of these thoughts were occupying my mind.

  As I was transferred from the eastern end of the floor to the corner room on the western end I worried a little about what the other patients, in their boredom, would make of my move. But it turned out that there wasn’t anyone in the hallway to see. Then I realised that the other patients were probably anything but bored on this particular day, before turning my thoughts to the evening news, which would have already started.

  ‘Sorry to bother you again,’ said the head nurse as she opened the door of room 513.

  ‘It’s okay,’ came a quiet response.

  It sounded like a woman in her forties. Or perhaps in her thirties? I replayed the voice in my head as I was carted into the room, but I came to no clear decision. The first thing that came into sight was the partition. A steel pipe frame holding up a light blue cloth. It wasn’t very tall, but it was wide enough so that I could only see the very end of the other bed.

  ‘This is Mr Taura. The man I mentioned,’ said the head nurse to the woman.

  ‘This is Ms Miyabayashi,’ said the nurse, looking at me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to the blue piece of cloth.

  ‘Hello. Nice to meet you.’

  Her voice was frail. I got the impre
ssion that it had taken a great deal of effort to squeeze out those words.

  ‘Since neither of you can move from your beds, we’ve asked you a favour we wouldn’t normally ask. But this is an emergency arrangement, and as soon as we’re able to move even some of the people from today, we will have everything back to normal. So please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.’ After that, the two of us were left alone.

  The woman was breathlessly silent. Not fifteen minutes had passed since the head nurse had walked into my original room and I was already wondering if I’d agreed to all this a bit hastily. The two beds were closer than I had expected and although the partition just about separated our two sides, it suddenly struck me just how odd an arrangement this was. I also noticed that the partition was blocking my view of the window. As tor the television, it was on the shelf above and to the left of the door, where it was most likely out of the woman’s sight. I could watch it, but I had to turn my neck and look up to manage it. The woman’s bed that had been facing the window had been moved to the side and the room was barely large enough to fit in the partition and my additional makeshift bed. Had there really been no other option?

  Even taking the emergency into account, I found it hard to believe that they had to resort to such an arrangement. I briefly wondered if they were playing some kind of joke on us, but surely they wouldn’t do that on a day like this. Then there was the issue of the woman’s age. She may not have been really young, but I was still surprised the nurses didn’t worry about a middle-aged man turning lustful. I regretted having agreed to put myself in such a situation, but I couldn’t tell them to take me back now.

  The woman let out a sigh, which gave me quite a start. It felt close and it sounded as if she’d been holding her breath as I’d suspected. But it sounded soft. I turned my face away, not wanting to react. I wanted to be left alone. Though of course the woman was leaving me alone. All she’d done was let out a breath and I felt bad for reacting with such hostility, though I think it was more a case of me trying to put a lid on my feelings. I knew the reason, too. It was because of my wife.