by Ryu Murakami
“Well, never mind all that. All I really wanted to do tonight is treat you to a nice dinner, to celebrate your success. Let’s put the serious talk aside and just enjoy a good meal, shall we?”
That’s what he proposes after finally breaking the woman down. Customers at the nearby tables sat there looking shell-shocked as the senior staff member, guzzling our cheapest Sicilian white and chain-smoking Seven Stars, started trying to make small talk. The woman didn’t contribute much, apart from “Oh” and “Ah” and so on.
It happened when I brought their main dish, grilled lamb.
“So,” he asked her, “where are you planning to go on your paid vacation? Marui was talking about Amsterdam, and Kuroki said something about Sweden.”
The woman’s reply hit me like an electric shock.
“I’m going to Cuba,” she said.
My heart started flopping around like a landed salmon.
“What?” The man gave her a bewildered look. “Cuba? Why would you go there? Aren’t places like that pretty dangerous nowadays? I don’t get it.”
The woman didn’t respond but looked at him in a way that said a bore like him wouldn’t “get it” if you shoved it up his ass, and silently went to work on her lamb. It was difficult for me to continue pretending to be uninterested. When I cleared away their other plates, my hands were shaking and the forks rattled on the tray. Cuba was the country I was saving up to visit.
“Excuse me for just a minute, I’ll be right back,” I said to the manager, bowing my head in a preemptive apology, and followed the pair outside. Spring was on its way, but it was cold enough to see my breath when I stepped out on the street. The two of them were standing there continuing their one-sided conversation.
“Look, I’m not trying to pressure you. It’s just that I’ve got a bottle of single malt with my name on it at a pub nearby, and I thought it’d be nice to top the night off with a little drink. Half an hour or so.”
“I really couldn’t manage any more.”
“Thirty minutes. You don’t think I’m going to try something stupid, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“So what’s the problem? The cocktails are terrific at this place, it’s very popular. I already made a reservation.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not much of a drinker.”
“Just half an hour, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t embarrass me. I’ve got a reservation!”
The woman noticed me before he did. I was standing behind them with my hands clasped together. I wasn’t wearing a jacket, just my white shirt and bow tie, so it was hard to miss me. When our eyes met I bowed to her and said, “Thank you for joining us tonight.”
The man glowered at me. His eyes were cloudy from all that wine, and I could smell the alcohol vapors from where I stood. He was wearing a gray coat that looked like it had seen about twenty winters.
“What do you want?”
I thought about explaining that I just wanted to have a word with the lady, but it was cold out there, and I knew I’d catch hell if I abandoned my post for too long, and I was pretty sure this guy wouldn’t be coming back to our restaurant anytime soon, so I ignored him. He was the sort of person it felt natural to ignore.
“My name’s Kodama Toru,” I told her. “I’m working in the restaurant here and saving up to travel to Cuba, and I hope I’m not out of line, but I was wondering if you could find the time to give me some advice. Any time that’s convenient for you would be fine, of course.”
I said all this in a couple of breaths and reckoned that I came across as a tactful but forthright young man. She was caught off guard, however, and hesitated. Get her business card, I told myself. Her business card.
“What the hell is this?” the man said, and tried to step between us. “Who are you to come barging in?”
I ignored him again and flagged down a passing taxi.
“Your ride, miss,” I said, gesturing toward the taxi door as the driver opened it. She looked at me as if I’d thrown her a lifeline and gave a little bow to her colleague, who was standing there dumbfounded.
“May I ask for your card?” I said, as she settled into the seat.
“What is it about Cuba that interests you?” she asked.
I mentioned Javier Olmo. “I have a CD of his,” I told her, “and I love his music.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” she said.
“I can make a cassette for you. He’s better even than Chet Baker. The great jazz balladeer?”
She took out a business card and handed it to me. The driver closed the door, and I directed a deep bow at the taxi as it pulled away. I wasn’t just looking for travel advice. What I wanted—and my brain, heart, and gut all agreed—was to accompany this woman to Cuba.
The senior staff member clamped a hand on my shoulder as I turned to go back into the restaurant.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said.
I spun around and spoke right in his ear:
“The whole world says to go fuck yourself.”
Then I knocked his hand away and half skipped back inside.
Akagawa Mieko was her name. Late that night, back at my apartment, I gazed at her card as I listened to the Javier Olmo CD. My apartment is in Honancho, but my family home is way out on the northern edge of Chiba Prefecture. My father runs a medium-size pharmaceutical company; my mother’s your average housewife; my older brother’s a doctor; and my sister, who’s a year younger than me, is studying nuclear physics at a national university that’s about twenty times harder to get into than my shit college. I don’t consider myself stupid, but at my age—I just turned twenty-one—I can’t offer much proof in my favor. Not many of my friends believe me when I tell them that throughout elementary and middle school I showed symptoms of autism. It was difficult for me to communicate with people—almost impossible, really. But when I entered high school, and without any major life-changing event to account for it, those tendencies disappeared. Throughout middle school I’d got into all kinds of trouble, in what I now think was probably just an attempt to find my own boundaries. Fistfights, truancy, inappropriate behavior with the opposite sex, dressing in studded leather jackets and motorcycle boots, sniffing paint thinner—that sort of thing. But I read a lot too. They say that kids with emotional problems are starving for words, but the main reason I got into books was that in my first year of middle school I was in love with a beauty named Makiko-chan, who suggested I do so. “Why don’t you try reading a book or two?” were her exact words, but I ended up devouring everything I could get my hands on, from juvenile mysteries to tomes full of unreadable kanji and foreign names and English words. I never found any answers in them, though.
I can’t say I found any answers in high school either, but I did make a friend there who had a big influence on me. Jun’ichi was a cheerful character but suffered from a lot of the same sort of problems I had, and talking with him made me realize I wasn’t the only one. “I mean, it’s like everybody’s acting out a part,” he’d tell me. “They say stuff they don’t really think, or do stuff they don’t really feel like doing, and after a while you find yourself acting the same way.” And I’d be like, “Wow. That’s so true.” Our conversations made me feel as though a barrier inside me was dissolving, like morning mist in the sunlight. Jun’ichi’s the person who introduced me to old-school jazz. His father was an architect and a devotee of Western culture with a huge collection of vinyl records, and Jun’ichi knew more about jazz than you’d expect any sixteen-year-old to know. I couldn’t relate to instrumental jazz much, and nothing really grabbed me till I heard Billie Holiday, a black lady who had a voice like a cat. And then, just when I was thinking I’d never find a vocalist to match her, I stumbled upon Chet Baker. I could listen to Chet Baker and Billie Holiday until my ears bled, but nobody else in our high school even knew who they were.
This society is steeped in the notion that we have everything we need. I know, because I was steeped in it too until I met Jun’ichi. The sad part is that people don’t like it when you begin to realize that something important is missing. You can end up being ostracized, or even persecuted, like witches in the Middle Ages. Mind you, I can’t say exactly what it is that’s missing. Smug-faced old farts will tell you that people nowadays lack “openheartedness” or “kindness” or “a sense of purpose” or “fulfillment” or “gratitude,” but that kind of talk just muddies the water. It’s clear that something’s wrong, but old people don’t have a clue what it really is. They talk as if it’s something that happened only recently, as if the problem didn’t exist in the old days but just sprouted up at some point, like the skyscrapers in West Shinjuku. That belief—that what’s missing now used to be available to us—is just an illusion, if you ask me. But the social pressure of “You’ve got everything you need, what’s your problem?” is more powerful than you might think, and it’s hard to defend yourself against it. In this country it’s taboo even to think about looking for something more in life. Jun’ichi is the one who turned me on to Billie Holiday, but if I had heard some expert or social commentator on the radio saying, “Young people need to listen to Lady Day,” I would’ve hanged myself before I ever considered buying one of her records. You can’t trust older people. You can’t trust anyone who doesn’t realize that something significant is missing, and that it’s something Japan never had.
I discovered Javier Olmo about six months ago. There was one CD of his left at HMV in Shibuya, just sitting there waiting for me to take it home. The photo on the cover made him look incredibly gentle and sensitive, maybe even a little autistic. I thought his name was really exotic too. I’d never listened to Cuban music before, but Javier’s voice seemed to penetrate my entire being. Believe it or not, when I heard the first song on the CD, “Historia de un Amor,” tears rolled down my cheeks. I had to wonder what sort of place Cuba was, to produce someone with such a beautiful, heartrending voice, and before long I decided to save up enough money to go there and see for myself.
On Saturday of that same week, Akagawa Mieko came to meet me in the lounge on the top floor of the Park Hyatt. I had suggested this place when I phoned her. She wore her hair tied back, very little makeup, a black leather jacket, straight jeans, and round-toed half-boots with laces. Oh, and a Hermes scarf. Hermes scarves suggest the vague loneliness of the unmarried career woman, and the moment I saw her I felt a twinge in my nether regions.
“Do you always meet with people in places like this?”
That’s the first thing she asked me after ordering a Vienna coffee. Outside the wall-to-wall windows was a panorama of western Tokyo. A cup of Vienna was twelve hundred yen, regular blend a thousand.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never been here before.”
Over the previous four days I had prepared my answers to all the questions I thought she might ask. Such is the wisdom—or the sad compulsion—of someone who was semi-autistic as a child.
“I thought it was the sort of place a person like you might be accustomed to,” I said.
“A person like me? Meaning?”
I had foreseen this question too.
“A businessperson who’s got it all together and works in a world I know nothing about, and who travels to foreign countries a lot. That’s the image I have.”
“I thought maybe you meant a person who cries in restaurants.”
I was ready for this as well.
“Ah. That was quite a disaster, wasn’t it, that night?”
“I bet you’ve never seen a customer blubbering like that before.”
“It happens now and then.”
“It does?”
“Maybe not to that extent, but...”
She chuckled, then sighed and grew serious again.
“You really helped me out, though,” she said. She shook her head and turned her gaze to the windows. Outside, the cityscape stretched to the horizon. The senior staff member had probably continued his snide offensive at the office. I needed to change the subject.
“So, anyway, I hope this isn’t a nuisance, but I really would like to ask you about Cuba.”
I wasn’t expecting her face to cloud over. I had thought that as soon as I brought up the subject, the mood would brighten. But her expression was a long way from cheerful. If I had to describe it in a word, I’d probably go with “melancholy.”
“Cuba...”
She turned her melancholy face to the view of Tokyo again as she murmured the name. Instinct, or intuition, told me to hold my peace: Don’t say anything right now, don’t ask any questions. Wait for her to speak. I took a sip of my thousand-yen blend. Outrageously expensive, but I had to admit it was the most delicious coffee I’d ever tasted.
“It’s been about three years now,” she said, and told me her story. It was a fairly simple, straightforward one.
“A dance troupe from Cuba was touring Japan, giving performances around the country. The way they danced was so powerful, so... breathtaking. Watching them do the genuine, original rumba, I realized that even ballet and Broadway don’t have anything on this. I was so stunned by what I saw that I ended up following the troupe around to different cities, and I fell in love with one of the dancers. After they’d returned to Cuba, I invited him to come back to Japan. I paid for his trip and expenses, and I bought him a lot of clothes and things too. I was hoping to marry him. But a mutual friend told me he had nothing like that in mind.”
I see, said my brain and heart and gut, but my gut in particular wanted to know if that dancer was a black guy. I remembered the size of the black actor’s thing in an uncensored American porno I’d watched with Jun’ichi. What chance would I have with a woman who was used to equipment like that? I wasn’t a complete flop with the ladies, and had slept with four up to that point, but none of them ever told me I was amazing.
“I kept thinking I should go to Cuba, but I was afraid to. You can understand that, can’t you? I think I got a little carried away. I told myself I was helping out a talented artist from a poor country, that I was the only one who could do that, and the only one who really understood how wonderful Cuban dance was. It was a kind of arrogance on my part, I guess. But I did some reading and came to realize how tough and resilient the people of Cuba are. They have to be, just to survive. And they’re always ready to jump on board with anything that can help them out. But... I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but they have a passion for life that’s hard for us Japanese to imagine. We can’t even imagine it. Standing up to big bad America, suffering through the economic blockade but refusing to bow down or apologize... And I’m afraid to go there. Does that make any sense?”
This was going in a direction I hadn’t foreseen, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. As I sat there in that lounge in the sky, with the sun sinking in the west, I was thinking that both Akagawa Mieko and I had been blindsided by something very much out of the ordinary. This luxurious lounge was a place you wouldn’t be ashamed to show anybody, from any country. The vast, open space; the high ceiling; the cutting-edge design; the waitresses’ spiffy uniforms; the excellent service; the expensive and delicious coffee; the tasteful clothing and bags and shoes of the customers... I myself was dressed sharply enough to keep from looking out of place, and before leaving the apartment I had showered and shaved and applied some lightly scented mousse to my hair. But although both I and the career woman across from me blended right into the scene, neither of us was what you could call a picture of happiness. There I was, sipping coffee with a mature, refined woman in a place that had “everything you need,” and inwardly trembling with the sense that something important was missing. And I knew it was missing for her too. I just couldn’t have said what it was.
“I’m a coward,” she went on. “That’s what my problem is.”
She w
as forgetting to drink her coffee, looking out the window again as she spoke. The spring twilight probably intensified her sentimental mood. The horizon was bright orange, and higher up the sky was pink. It was pretty, if a little vacant somehow.
“If I just went to Cuba and saw things for myself, it would make it all a lot clearer. Apparently he’s got a number of women, this dancer. His troupe performs all over the world, and I imagine he has girlfriends at every stop. I heard that he’s now living with a Swiss woman who followed him back to Havana. If I went there to see him I’d probably only end up feeling miserable, but at least I’d know where I stand. That’s the problem. I’m afraid of finding out where I stand.”
I was glad I’d chosen this time of day to meet. Broad daylight doesn’t lend itself to intimate personal confessions. I kept thinking I should speak but couldn’t think of anything to say. She was opening up to me, revealing her secrets, and I had no words to offer in return.
“Cuban dance was something so new and fresh for me. I used to go to New York every year and see all the latest shows on Broadway, so I thought of myself as a bit of an expert. But when I encountered this other, completely different style of dance, I realized I didn’t know anything. It wasn’t a bad feeling, though. One thing I’ve learned is that it isn’t often in life you can find something new and beautiful and exciting, something that makes you really happy. After I discovered Cuban dance, other things I had always been crazy about, like those Broadway musicals, suddenly began to lose their luster. Broadway is amazing, don’t get me wrong, but on TV and in magazines or whatever it’s like that’s the only thing going. The same is true of ballet. The importance of ballet is undeniable, but no matter how great it is, all you can do is watch it and try to appreciate it, so... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. The point is that I’m scared. I finally found something fresh and special, and I’m afraid of losing it. Losing him and losing Cuban dance are two separate things, I know, but for me, in my head, somehow they’re one and the same.”