by Ryu Murakami
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, it’s not like you were his girlfriend.”
“I couldn’t call him, but we met every couple of weeks.”
“He was just using you.”
“I’m thinking about going to see him.”
“All right, now you’re pissing me off. You really are an idiot, aren’t you.”
Yoshiko lifts her chopsticks from her plate of pan-fried noodles and points them at me as she says this last bit, and then somebody calls and Mother gives me the assignment, so I have to leave. Mother isn’t really our mother, of course, that’s just what we call her, but she’s been right there the whole time, reading Lady’s Seven, and though she must have heard everything I said she didn’t react at all. She never says anything one way or the other about the private lives of us girls.
The first time I met the musician was on a night just like this. I was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette, and Mother was reading a magazine—not Lady’s Seven but Woman’s Self—and a phone call came in, and when she told the guy the name of the usual love hotel, he asked her to have me come to the New Otani Tower Suites. When I got to the room, there were a lot of musical instruments in there, and the man was naked and said, “I just got out of the shower, and I’m hungry. Let’s go down to the bar.” I told him I only had two hours, but he said if it was a question of money he’d pay for the extra time, so we went to the bar and had champagne and raw oysters, both of which were firsts for me. Sitting next to me at the bar, he explained that he didn’t like to eat or drink alone, and he reached over and touched my hair and smiled. It was a beautiful smile. He talked about a lot of things. And even later, when we were naked and touching each other, he kept on talking. Mostly it was about foreign countries. I think it was in Indonesia, some little island near there, where he said there was this native who could cure any illness by chanting and going into a trance—like, he could remove a patient’s heart with his bare hands and replace it with the healthy heart of somebody who’d just died. He also told me about some primitive tribe that, if a member of the tribe went crazy, they’d take a red-hot iron spike and drive it into his head and stir it around, and it would cure him. Stories like that. Then he asked me if I was a student. I’d been working in a beauty salon till about six months before, but I lied and said yes. “Which college?” he asked. “You don’t have to tell me the name, just which part of town it’s in.” My lie wasn’t going to hold up, and I was so embarrassed I started crying, but he just smiled and stroked my hair. I felt like some poor little puppy that nobody had ever treated gently before...
This time, of course, it isn’t the New Otani but the same old love hotel. The customer is a drunken salaryman. He’s sitting on the edge of the round bed, dangling a plastic take-out sushi bag from one finger and reeling back and forth. “Kinda old, aren’t ya?” he says when I come in. Then he opens his zipper, pulls out his limp little thing, and points at it and says, “Start sucking.” I want to ask him if we could shower first, but I’m afraid he’ll call the office and ask for a different woman, so I go ahead and get down on my knees. And later, when I’m standing there bent over with my skirt hiked up and my ass sticking out, taking it from behind, I start thinking that at this rate my life is only going to get more and more pathetic, and I just want to die, and by the time my crotch is all slimy and sticky, I’ve made up my mind to go visit the musician at his house. As soon as I decide that, a big weight lifts off me, and I no longer even feel the pain in my cheekbone from Toru’s punch.
The musician’s address is out in the suburbs, far enough for me to pack a lunch, so I fix a little box of weiner sausages, scrambled egg, and some pickles, but after changing trains at Meguro Station it’s only eighteen minutes before I arrive. It isn’t like where Toru and I live, with buildings all on top of each other, but has this big wide street in front of the station that runs straight off into the distance, like something you’d see in some American town in the movies. There’s no police box where I can ask for directions, so I just climb on a No. 1 bus.
I get off at a stop with the name of the section of town he lives in, right in front of a liquor store. Hundreds of bottles of wine are in the front window, along with a lot of stuffed animals. There’s a gorilla, a rabbit, a frog. I go in and show the shopkeeper the musician’s address and ask how to get there, and he takes the trouble to point out the way on a map, so I buy a bottle of red wine for forty-eight hundred yen, thinking it’ll be the perfect gift to bring. The streets are wide here too, and hardly anybody is out walking around. Now and then a big foreign car with shiny bumpers blows by at high speed, and each time I wonder if he’s driving it and try to look inside but can’t see anything.
All the houses are big, with big yards, and some have rose gardens and pools and terraces. I’m getting hungry, so after I pass a house where a dog is barking I sit down on some stone steps and take out my lunch. The sausage grease and the sauce on the egg have soaked into the rice and give it a really nostalgic taste, and I’m thinking how glad I am I packed a lunch, when I hear a husky voice behind me say, “What do you think you’re doing?” I turn around, and an older woman in a kimono is standing there. “Sorry,” I say, “I was hungry, and...” The woman points up the street and tells me, “There’s a little park a bit farther on, you can have your lunch there.”
The park is full of trees, with a big kiddy slide built with rocks and cement, and a few sculptures dotted around. And just as I’m thinking how nice it would be to have some music, somebody starts singing in an opera-style voice, and my chopsticks freeze in mid-air. The song gets louder, and then an old lady with wild hair steps out from behind a big cherry tree, holding her arms out and slowly waving her hands in a sort of dance. When she pauses for breath she smiles at me.
I clap when she’s finished singing, and she comes right up to me and says, “Kashiwabara-san?” I shake my head. “Oh come now, I know it’s you,” she says, and sits down beside me on the bench. “Why did you come to see me? It’s all water under the bridge now.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. She’s old and thin but still pretty and wearing a dress like you’d see on a concert stage and so much perfume it makes me gag, so I can’t explain that she’s got the wrong person.
“I decided long ago to forget all the bad things. You should forget them too. Ah, but do you remember Zurich? I had that Scotch terrier named Grant. Grant died of filaria, but I always wondered if in fact my husband hadn’t killed him. He hated dogs, as I’m sure you know, and it was just before he went off to Singapore to do some work for the army. But I was wrong, Grant really did die of filaria, as I came to understand just recently. And as for what happened with you and my husband, it’s all in the past, I never even think about it. After all, we’re both old ladies now!”
She takes my hand and holds it to her breast, smiling all the while, and I’m getting a little scared and just keep nodding yes, yes.
“I don’t know why, but I had a feeling you’d be here. That’s why I was singing that song. I know you love Schumann. You once said I sang the lieder even more beautifully than Schwarzkopf, didn’t you? Now that my heart has been washed clean, I try to remember only the good things.”
“I see,” I say, and she tells me she’d like to sing one more piece. This time she stands up on the bench and joins her hands together at her breast. Just as she starts to sing the wind gusts, and all the leaves on the cherry trees begin to flutter, and a small gray bird I don’t know the name of flies up into the clear sky, and as I’m listening to the lady’s shimmering voice I feel like all the jagged edges in my heart are being smoothed out. I’m remembering the time, on a snowy night not long before Christmas, when the musician took me to dinner and played for me on the restaurant’s piano.
“Do you still resent me, Kashiwabara-san?” The lady is perched on the bench like a little bird, pushing her lips out in a pout.
Her feet are bare, and each toenail is painted a different color. Starting with the big toe, the nails on her left foot are red, yellow, purple, orange, and black, and on her right foot white, pink, green, and blue, with no color at all on the little toe.
“Was there something you wanted from me?” she says.
“I came to hear you sing.”
“Did you really?” She points at my food. “And what’s that?”
“My lunch.”
“What’s that thing that looks like a wiener sausage?”
“A wiener sausage.”
“Fried?”
“Yes.”
“And what about the part that looks like scrambled egg?”
“It’s scrambled egg.”
“Oh. I thought it was something that looked like egg but wasn’t. Soufflé aux marrons, maybe, or shrimp coquille, or ingen mame, or venison paté.”
“Sorry. Just scrambled egg.”
Suddenly she lifts her muddy left foot in front of my face and says, “Lick it.” I flinch and lean away, and she shouts, “YOU WHORE!” and kicks my shoulder, knocking my lunch to the ground.
Just then I see this young woman step out of the trees and run toward us. She looks angry. The lady starts singing again, but the woman grabs her by the arm, bowing her head to me to apologize, and drags her away.
When I take my spoiled lunch to the trash can, I notice a man wearing glasses looking out at me from the window of a house right next to the park. He points at the side of his head and twirls his finger around. I ask him where the musician’s house is.
It turns out it isn’t far from the park, on a corner where one wide street crosses another. It looks like a country inn, the sort of place they have in ski resorts.
I can’t decide if I should ring the bell or not, but finally I just push on the gate, and it opens, so I go into the yard. A small dog with long hair comes charging out of a cream-colored kennel, yanking its chain tight just short of me and barking and baring its teeth. Once when I was little and we were playing hide-and-seek I got bitten by the same kind of dog, a little one with long hair, but I’m not about to let this animal stop me after I’ve come this far. I take a deep breath and just flip the thing off and walk up to the front door.
It’s locked, and nobody answers when I knock, so I go around back, following a sign that says Service Entrance→, but that’s locked too. The dog is still barking when I come back, but when I look up above it I notice an open window on the second-floor balcony and realize I can use the kennel to climb up there. When I step toward it, the dog tucks its tail between its legs and slinks inside, then pokes its face out and bares its teeth, but I’m not afraid any more and just growl at it: “I’ll bake you in an oven and eat you whole, if you don’t shut up!” I get one foot on top of the kennel, but when I put my weight on it the plywood roof splits open with a crunching sound, and my leg goes down inside, and the dog bites me. It really hurts, and I try to pull free, but I’m straddling the wall with my other leg off the ground and can’t get any leverage, and all the fear I’ve been holding down comes rushing up, and I start bawling and calling out the musician’s name.
It’s not his face I see in my mind as I’m crying out but his penis. He used to shove it into my mouth so hard that sometimes it split my lip and made me bleed. I’m sure my leg is bleeding now, and I’m sobbing so hard I can hardly breathe, when I see the man from the liquor store walking this way and pointing at me. Right behind him are a pair of policemen, who come over and lift me up to free my leg. They both smell of sweat. “That’s her,” says the liquor store man. “She’s the one who asked me for directions.” One of the policemen grabs me by the collar, and I’m dragged, limping, out to the patrol car. When I struggle they give me a little rap on the head. They also grope my breasts.
“Stop!” says a voice. “She’s a friend of mine!”
It’s the lady who was singing in the park, still wearing the same dress. She pulls me away, and the policemen look at each other. “What the hell?” one says, and the other goes, “Just another crazy from the hospital, I guess.” So they let me go with the lady, and she and I walk back to the park and sit down.
When I was little, my grandmother used to rub a certain type of weed on our cuts and scratches, and the same kind of weed is growing next to the bench, so I pluck a few leaves and rub them on my ankle where the dog bit me. The lady stands up on the bench and joins her hands together and starts singing a lullaby I know. I’m trying to remember if it’s Brahms or Schubert, when the musician’s penis pops into my mind again. The lullaby is really beautiful, and I can’t stop the tears.
Penlight
I just got back from New York, the man says.
“White broads have horrible skin, dry as hell. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a Japanese woman again, but, shit, don’t they have anything better than you?”
Then he calls my office.
“Yeah, she looks young enough, but, I mean, come on. I’ll pay for her taxi back—just send over another woman, will ya?”
Kiyomi, I say to the other person inside me. It happened again. He says I’m a pig.
What do you expect? You are a pig. What a view from up here, though! It’s like the hotel I stayed at in Hong Kong.
You’ve been to Hong Kong?
I’ve been everywhere. In Hong Kong, a man from Sumitomo Bank named Kawamura took me to a private club. It was in an old building with no sign outside, and you go up a metal staircase to I think the third floor, and there’s a thick wooden door with a little window about as big as the palm of your hand, and when it opens you say the password, which is in a Slavic language, because Hong Kong has a lot of tourists from Eastern Europe, and then a man about two meters tall with a squashed nose who used to be a pro wrestler opens up, and you go down the hall till you come to a pink curtain, beyond which there’s music playing and girls from all over the world laughing, or dancing naked, or doing nastier things.
What did you do there, at that club?
Well, I just watched. I thought, you know, it never hurts to learn something about the world.
Where did you meet this man Kawamura?
At the hotel, the Mandarin Palace in Kowloon, in the tea lounge. He came up and introduced himself. A real gentleman. Tall too, and single.
“What are you mumbling about?” the man says and holds out the telephone receiver. “The broad from your office wants to talk to you.”
I gaze out the hotel window at all the lights that Kiyomi said look like Hong Kong at night while Auntie from the office starts yelling at me.
“What are you wearing? I told you not to dress like a slob, didn’t I? You have makeup on? Don’t tell me you went there with dirty fingernails again.”
I look at my fingernails, and they are kind of grubby, and it freaks me out because I wonder how she knew that. I’m wearing the blouse I bought for nineteen hundred and eighty yen at the supermarket next to my apartment and some jeans I bought four years ago, and I don’t have any makeup on since all I did today was sit at the little table with the electric heater underneath that I never put away this spring, dozing and eating instant ramen and reading Lady’s Seven magazine and watching TV, but how could she know that?
The man gives me ten thousand yen, saying it’s for the taxi, so then I don’t mind leaving. The taxi to the hotel cost less than two thousand, and the trains are still running, so I end up making eight thousand without even taking my clothes off.
I decide to just go home and have something good to eat and chat with Kiyomi. Kiyomi knows everything, she really does.
But then I remember there isn’t any food in my place, so I stop at a pub down the street from the station. It’s Friday night and really crowded, and the only seats free are at the counter.
The man sitting next to me starts chatting me up.
/> “Won’t you join me in a beer?” he says. “Spaghetti and beer go well together.”
I do feel like a beer, and besides I’m a Pisces and have type O blood and was the youngest child and Grandma’s pet, and I’m ugly and fat, so I don’t usually turn down any kind of invitation from a man.
“Pasta’s good for you,” he says. “Lots of complex carbohydrates.”
I don’t know what “pasta” is, so I ask Kiyomi.
Kiyomi, what’s “pasta”?
Noodles, basically. Like the spaghetti you’re eating.
The man says he’s a sports nutrition consultant. Most people are surprised when they see me talking to Kiyomi, but he just smiles and tells me I’m an interesting girl.
“How long have you known Kiyomi-san? Have you always been close?”
Kiyomi’s too important for me to want to talk about her to just anybody, so I clam up.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking. As I said, I’m in nutrition now, but I didn’t get involved in that till I was twenty-eight and had a serious illness. That’s when I realized that the only way to really conquer illness is through proper eating habits, so I went back to university to study nutrition. But originally my field was psychology. I’m not trying to make fun of you or anything—I’m genuinely interested.”
Kiyomi says it’s all right, so I decide to go ahead and tell him.
“We became friends slowly. I mean, isn’t everybody like that? Nobody remembers exactly when they got close to somebody, right?”
“But when did you first meet? Approximately is fine. Kindergarten, elementary school, more recently?”
“In high school.”
“Did she just suddenly appear?”
The pub’s getting noisy, so I invite the man to my apartment to talk.
The minute he steps into my room he makes a face. He kind of tiptoes across the floor, trying to keep from getting stuff on his socks, and goes to sit down on the sofa bed but has to clear a space first because it’s covered with underwear and old newspapers and magazines and cosmetics and leftover pieces of McDonald’s hamburgers and napkins and a tube of ketchup and torn stuffed animals and overflowing ashtrays and magic markers and ten-yen coins and cookie crumbs and matches and dead moths and things.