I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While

by Taichi Yamada

  ‘That morning…’ the woman started. ‘That morning at the hospital.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must have been disgusted.’

  ‘…No.’

  ‘Pretending to be young, thinking that we would never see each other.’

  ‘You are young in reality.’

  ‘But you didn’t think so when you saw me that morning, did you?’

  ‘No. There were some grey streaks in your hair.’

  ‘Not some. My whole head was grey.’

  ‘I have heard that these things can happen.’

  ‘These things?’

  ‘That people can turn grey overnight due to an illness or stress — even though they are still young.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Side effects from medication, maybe?

  ‘No.’

  Then what was it? I almost asked, but I didn’t, thinking that she might not want to talk about it. She changed the subject.

  ‘After leaving the hospital, I separated from my husband.’

  She said these words without any sadness, as if she were just stating facts.

  ‘That’s why you are at your family home in Yokohama…’

  ‘You remember that it’s in Yokohama…’

  ‘You did mention it.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would remember such a minor detail.’

  ‘Well, it’s very rare to have a night like that.’

  ‘But I’m not at my family home. My brother died last year, so the only people living there are his wife, the eldest son, the son’s wife and their children.’

  ‘So you live alone…’

  ‘Yes.’

  The coffee came.

  ‘I…’

  She waited for the waiter to leave and looked up.

  ‘Yes.’

  She dropped her gaze abruptly and let out a small sigh as if she was hesitating to voice her thoughts.

  ‘Is there something?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, and said, ‘I’ve become young again.’

  I could see that, obviously.

  ‘My hair isn’t dyed,’ she said, touching her head.

  ‘Well, I think should keep this information classified,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Classified?’

  ‘Yes, a secret.’

  ‘Keep what a secret?’

  ‘Well if middle-aged women found out that they could all become much younger by leaving their husbands, they’d do it without a second thought.’

  She laughed and said, ‘You know how I don’t have anybody—’

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘Like friends…’

  ‘Even in Yokohama?’

  ‘I have friends I haven’t seen for a long time, but things aren’t so simple. I can’t just go and see them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’ve become younger.’

  ‘But that’s a good thing.’

  ‘Even so, I would imagine they’d find it creepy.’

  ‘Of course they wouldn’t. You should show off your youth.’

  ‘I suddenly realised that there was only you…’

  ‘But it was just one night…’

  ‘It was a first for me, and I had a good time.’

  ‘I had a good time as well.’

  ‘But because I pretended to be young…’

  ‘You can’t say it was pretending.’

  ‘You must have felt like you had been taken in, and I was feeling very sorry about that. I also thought that it was very kind of you to act like you had forgotten about it afterwards.’

  ‘To be honest with you, the whole experience was beginning to feel like a dream to me. It’s not a bad memory. A kind of sweet—’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘When you called, I was afraid that memory would be ruined. I wanted to keep that experience as it was.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, bowing her head.

  ‘No. Now that we’ve met, I’m glad we did.’

  ‘I’m selfish.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know how you saw me as a grey-haired old woman. Once I became younger, I wanted you to see me like this.’

  ‘I’m not very smooth with words, but you are beautiful.’

  ‘But I hesitated. I thought that it would be an inconvenience to you. Going to your home.’

  ‘That a woman would get nervous over seeing me at this age?’ I said. ‘I can’t help but let it go to my head.’

  ‘What time are you free until?’ she asked, glancing at the clock.

  ‘Any time. l don’t work overtime these days. It’s a good thing to stay out late once in a while.’

  The fact that l didn’t work overtime meant I didn’t get any overtime pay and that I couldn’t afford to go out, so I almost always ate at home. My wife and son were often out, but there would be something waiting for me that l could just heat up on the stove or in the microwave. l would turn on the TV and eat dinner with the 7:30 shows like Word Association Game and Quiz Derby as my companions.

  ‘Let’s celebrate our recoveries!’ I said, my voice becoming a little louder.

  I was worried about my budget, but I had a good idea of what things would cost in this area, so I felt I’d be able to manage.

  After that, things gradually started to become clear. The Japanese restaurant in the basement of the same building had no free tables and the zashiki-style rooms were all reserved. We were told that there were seats at the counter, but there was a group of men in their thirties and forties who were already slightly drunk.

  ‘I think it’ll be fine,’ she said.

  ‘No, let’s go up to another floor.’

  On the forty-fourth floor we switched lifts to the one that went all the way up to the fifty-fifth. I didn’t want to make her walk so much if possible, but if we had sat at the counter, those men would have no doubt started ogling her. And ever since moving back from the Northern Japan branch office, I’d had an aversion towards energetic-looking office workers.

  ‘If you could just wait for a short while,’ said the greeter at the restaurant on the fifty-fourth floor.

  Then we were taken to the bar where we sat with the night view to our backs. I ordered a Martini and she opted for a Campari soda. I caught the middle-aged Caucasian couple sitting next to us whispering to each other.

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Really is.’

  Wondering what they were praising, I glanced at them as I put my hand towel down. The grey-haired husband smiled at me as if to say, ‘Maybe you overheard us?’ Then he looked me sincerely in the eyes, as if he were about to confess something. ‘Excuse me, but since coming to Tokyo, we’ve rarely seen anyone in a kimono. I think this is the first time I have come to really understand the beauty of a kimono.’

  The wife, who was sitting on the other side of the husband, nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘I’m one of those people who normally think kimono designs are lacking in taste, but I’d love one with a refined fabric like that.’

  I said ‘thank you’ to them and turned back to the woman. Her eyes were asking, What did they say? And when I told her what they had said, she looked at the couple, smiled and said, ‘Thank you very much,’ in a small voice. The couple nodded, then left us alone.

  Our drinks were placed in front of us.

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Their remarks.’

  ‘Well, I have to say, that I’m quite fond of this myself.’

  ‘It’s not the kimono.’

  ‘No. It’s the kimono,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  I was about to seriously tell her how beautiful she was, but the bartender came close by.

  ‘Bon appétit.’ She picked up her glass a little quickly as if to escape my compliments.

  ‘Yes—’

  That’s when I finally realised and turned pale.

  How had I understood the couple?

  They’d spoken to me in French. But
I’d been able to understand them quite easily and had interpreted for her, too. This couldn’t be possible. Even though I’d chosen French as my second foreign language at university, I’d only ever studied very basic textbooks and had forgotten most of it anyway. Even if I had been able to understand the conversation I’d just had, surely I would have had to ask them to repeat what they’d said several times, perhaps even with some English, and it would have still taken me some time to digest. There was no way I would have been able to understand what they had said so easily.

  ‘Are you talking to yourself?’ asked the woman.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said, “Ah.”‘

  ‘Just now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, it’s—’

  I didn’t think I had voiced my thoughts.

  ‘We drank our drinks without making a toast,’ I said, moving the conversation forward.

  ‘I still have some left.’

  ‘I guess I’ll have another then.’

  I asked the bartender for another of the same. Then I was suddenly overcome with an unsuppressible need to talk to the Caucasian man again.

  ‘When did you arrive in Japan?’

  I could speak French.

  ‘Three, no, four days now.’

  ‘I see.’

  I must have learned that level of French in class. But…

  ‘Your French is very good,’ whispered the woman by my ear.

  ‘It shouldn’t be.’

  ‘No, it’s excellent.’

  ‘I’ve been in Tokyo the entire time,’ said the white man. My wife’s been to Kamakura and Hakone on a bus tour, but I had business to attend to.’

  ‘Are you finished with that now?’

  ‘Almost. When I’m done, I plan to go and see Kyoto and Himeji Castle.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Although my friends who know a lot about Japan tell me those aren’t the best sites to see.’ I couldn’t catch what he said next. I guess there were words I didn’t understand, too. It was not surprising, given that I really shouldn’t have been able to understand hardly a word, but there was a part of me that was puzzled by the fact that this miracle had its limits.

  I gave him a vague smile. ‘You should go to Kyoto,’ I said.

  ‘We plan to,’ said the husband with a smile. The wife also smiled and nodded.

  ‘Mr Taura,’ the waiter said in a small voice behind my back, ‘your table is ready.’

  It was the first time I’d been to this restaurant, and the first time I’d seen the night view of skyscrapers from a window in the sky with a woman, but for some reason I felt like I was reliving the experience.

  When I was thirty-seven, I began a three-year relationship with a twenty-six-year-old woman at an architectural office in Yotsuya. It was the only affair I ever had. Now, as we began eating, I could feel the same sexual desire, the same guilt, the same sense of accomplishment, and the same burden I felt back then gradually coming back to me. It wasn’t a vivid, graphic memory, but one wrapped in nostalgia that nudged forward my feelings that were already leaning towards the woman.

  The woman looking through the menu under the dim lights wasn’t as young as the woman in my past, but she was so beautiful that I would have felt daunted by her had it not been for the unusual circumstances under which we’d met. I found the quality of her skin to be just right for someone her age, com forting even. If on top of being so beautiful, she had also been young, I would probably have felt lonely sitting there with her.

  Looking back, the woman I had an affair with was a reflection of my low self-worth. But even when I was at the peak of my career, I probably wouldn’t have even dared to think of having an affair with the woman in front of me now. Even more so today.

  I gave our orders and our wine was brought to us. I watched her profile as she looked down at the night view of the forest of high-rises, remarking that ‘the tiny lights are so beautiful’, and my timid wonderings about an ulterior motive for her meeting me began flutter around my chest.

  ‘That night,’ she said. ‘We only talked for a few hours, so when I think of something to talk about with you, I can only think of things about the hospital or our individual lives.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I want to forget those things.’

  ‘I’m all for that. I’m sure you might have guessed, but the life I lead isn’t all that exciting.’

  She looked me in the eyes in silence. As if she were attempting to read something in mine. I smiled without looking away.

  ‘Then what should we talk about?’ I asked.

  ‘Anything,’ she said, appearing relieved.

  Perhaps it was just me, but I got the feeling that she was looking for self-pity in my eyes. But even I have some pride and I was pretty certain I wasn’t revealing anything like that.

  ‘You can’t see it from here…’ I said, turning to the night view.

  ‘Yes.’ The woman turned her gaze to the direction I was looking in.

  ‘There’s the KDD building.’

  ‘The international phone carrier?’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose you could call it something like a telephone station.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think it’s nine o’clock, that’s when the international phone rates become cheap. You can see foreigners who don’t have a phone at home flocking there every night to call people overseas.’

  ‘Always the same people?’

  ‘All kinds of people. Given that they don’t have a phone at home, I suspect most of them go once a week at most, or once a month perhaps.’

  ‘I see…’

  ‘The waiting room and phone booths are filled with all kinds of foreigners.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘So you can hear many different languages from different faraway places. Some people are so happy to be talking to their families that they start speaking loudly without realising it. Some people start crying just saying the word ‘mom’. Others receive news of someone’s death. And others of birth. And there are people listening to these various voices as they sit waiting with their heads down. It seems there are always more Asians than Caucasians.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There must be men and women that meet in the waiting room.’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  I looked down at the night view.

  ‘Their Tokyo is probably very different from our Tokyo.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She too was gazing at the glimmering windows across the city.

  ‘That’s all…’

  ‘That’s all it takes,’ she said, ‘to make the night view look completely different.’

  I looked down at the stream of headlights, the river of red tail-lights going in the other direction and the people walking along the pavement here and there.

  ‘I don’t have any wonderful observations like that to share, but…’

  She told me about an old woman in Gloucester, England, who had lost her husband. She’d read it in the paper a few years ago. The husband was eighty-one years old and weighed 120 kilograms. The wife, who was seventy-seven years old and weighed only 44 kilograms, was pinned underneath her husband. She tried to push him off, but his body wouldn’t budge. She screamed, but nobody heard. It was three whole days before she was found. She spent three days under her husband’s dead body. In the end, her nephew visited her house, became suspicious on seeing the uncollected milk bottles by the front door and called the police. The old woman was rescued and she recovered in hospital.

  I laughed. She grinned too and said, ‘That’s all there is to the story.’

  ‘That’s all,’ I said, ‘it takes to know.’

  ‘Takes to know what?’

  I hesitated a little at her question but decided to go ahead and tell her. After all, the two of us had exchanged more private moments across a partition.

  ‘Basically,’ I said lowering my voice. ‘That they were having sex.’

  ‘
No!’

  ‘Isn’t that what the episode is about?’

  ‘He was eighty-one years old.’

  ‘Why else would she be pinned underneath him?’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, impressed. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me. I just thought it was a funny story about a woman who was rescued from under her heavy husband after three days.’

  ‘Our antennas are probably pointing in different directions. I was comparing the old man’s sexual drive with mine, and you were thinking about the poor woman who was rescued. But I’m surprised you remember an article from a few years ago so—’

  She dropped her gaze and I immediately apologised.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that. We should keep reality as far away as possible.’

  After that, we talked about why wild animals on land such as giraffes and zebras weren’t used for food as much as sea creatures like fish. We shared our thoughts about flowers that would soon be blossoming like cherry blossoms, aronias, wisterias and peonies. And I gave her my analysis as a construction professional of the rising Tokyo land prices.

  As she was drinking her demitasse coffee, she said, ‘I’ve reserved a hotel room.’

  I thought I must have misheard her.

  ‘Pardon, … I—’ I looked at her.

  ‘A hotel room.’

  She dropped her gaze. But I needed a little more to be sure of what she was thinking.

  ‘Where do you live now?’

  ‘In Tokyo.’

  Those were the words I needed. But I didn’t know how to react. I’d also wondered at the same time that it might be just my wishful thinking, so I simply put down my napkin and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘I was thinking…’ she began saying in a small voice without moving from her seat.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘…that I haven’t been with anyone other than my husband.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied.

  ‘But that’s not exactly the case, is it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been with you.’

  ‘But that was just words.’

  ‘You weren’t just words.’

  ‘That’s true, but—’

  I was about to smile, but the woman continued to speak with a straight face, her gaze on the table, slowly pushing out the words.