by Ryu Murakami
“That’s my son,” she told anyone who would listen. Hashi sat a few seats away, slightly embarrassed.
Kiku began by checking the clearance to aim for, holding his pole straight up in the box below the bar. Next he measured the distance of the approach, adding a bit extra for a height he had never attempted; pivoting on the take-off point, he paced off the distance to the starting line, beginning with the other foot—not the one he would end on—and counting an even number of steps. His approach would start on the take-off foot.
So now he was staring straight ahead, imagining himself soaring, then falling, then gazing up at the stationary bar from the landing pit. He started his run and almost immediately his muscles relaxed into the sprint. Don’t be nervous, he reminded himself, just make sure you reach top speed as you hit the mark. His spikes dug up the track as he leaned into his run; the stadium grew quiet. The pole planted smoothly in the box, bent almost double, and suddenly he was snapped aloft, legs perpendicular to the ground. A shudder went through the pole, Kiku’s arms strained, and he was sailing through the air. This is it, he thought, as he rode the recoil through the soft, whirling sky spread out before him. Applause… and he was lying still in the pit looking up at the motionless bar. A perfect jump.
The other boys seemed a little rattled—all, that is, except the one in glasses. The other two tried to pump themselves up by saying they couldn’t let a freshman beat them. The sprinter paced off his approach again and again, while the other kid did endless stretching exercises; but both failed to clear the height. After a miss apiece, they began to feel the pressure, and their form only got worse. Kiku, meanwhile, watched them coolly, muttering “Plants too early, no rhythm in the approach, upper arm bent, twists his hips too late…” Just then the boy in glasses came up.
“You a freshman?” Kiku looked him in the eye and nodded. “You’re not bad. Who’s your coach?” This time Kiku shook his head. He hated small talk. “No coach, huh? I thought you were pretty much winging it. You’ve got the timing down OK, but I’d like to see how you’d do with a headwind.”
Now it was just Kiku and the guy in glasses. At 4.75 meters, glasses chose to pass, but Kiku, who never let his opponents bother him, decided to have a go at it. After two misses, he reached down and pulled up a few blades of grass, then tossed them in the air. A breeze had come up as the sun began to set, a light headwind. As he glanced up at the stands, an uneasy feeling came over him: Hashi was nowhere to be seen. Why do I feel so funny, he wondered. Can’t be the stupid wind; must be because of Hashi. But what does Hashi have to do with it? Then it occurred to him for the first time: could I be jumping just so Hashi’ll watch me? Sounds too stupid. He tried to concentrate on the bar, to see himself lofted over it, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t so much that the image was out of focus; it felt as if the plug had been pulled on the projector. Haven’t I done all this practicing by myself? Why should I lose my concentration just because Hashi isn’t here to watch?
He measured the approach and the position of the bar, but his body still felt heavy. Hashi must have gone to get some ice cream, he thought, annoyed that his head should be full of such crap right before a jump. Putting his pole down, he walked toward the main track, empty now that all the other events had finished, and slipping past the officials cleaning up after the meet, he took off on a fast lap. The people left in the stands looked on admiringly as he found his rhythm and allowed himself to be carried along on the wind, forcing himself to stop thinking about Hashi. If he could only drain the blood from his head into his muscles… As he broke into a sweat, the image of himself clearing the bar revived and came into focus. The lap finished, Kiku didn’t so much as glance at the stands. He doesn’t mean a thing to me, he told himself. I’m alone like I’ve always been. It’s just me and the bar, nobody else… and it’s time. Raising his hand to signal the judge that he was ready, he started his run-up. The shock from the cleats flashed up through his veins straight to his head, as the image began to crystallize in a haze of speed and churned earth. Once again he could see himself up there over the bar. The pole plant, the mark, his body dipping slightly, and then the explosive snap. But at the very instant of the spring-back, the image ruptured, bursting from Kiku’s pores and dissolving in the air. His knee caught the bar, and he crashed into the pit. Sighs could be heard from here and there in the crowd as Kiku lay motionless on his back, a puzzled look on his face.
As he lay there, however, he wasn’t wondering why he had missed; a new image, something he had never seen before, had appeared to him at the instant he was catapulted skyward, and he could still see it from the pit. He had seen himself vaulting a different hurdle, much higher than the bar, something soft, red, and quivering that he was clearing with ease. What was it, this damp red thing? He pondered the mystery for a while, but then it slipped his mind as another image came into focus, this one of Hashi, smiling and applauding, and licking an ice cream cone.
Kazuyo came running onto the field waving a piece of paper which she handed to Kiku with trembling hands.
Kiku,
Take care of Milk for me. Make sure not to give him anything salty. I’m going to Tokyo. I know you can win at the national meet. You’ll show them. I’ll see you again soon.
Hashi
“What does it mean? What’s happened?” Kazuyo was frantic. “Kiku, do you know anything about this?” She was on the verge of tears. Though he didn’t say so, Kiku, in fact, had a good idea why Hashi had run away: he had gone to look for his mother.
Three days earlier they had been watching an interview program on TV. The guest was a seventy-two-year-old woman, a novelist, who had been a kleptomaniac since childhood and had served four separate sentences for larceny. A book of hers called Apples and Hot Water, based on her own experiences, had apparently become a bestseller and won some sort of prize. The interviewer’s first question was why she had written the novel.
“No reason in particular,” she’d answered. “When I was a young girl, I enjoyed writing little compositions, but somewhere along the line I got interested in stealing, and one thing led to another until now I’m old and don’t go in for theft much any more. I suppose I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to do, so I took up writing again after all these years. The main thing is, you see, I realized that I knew hundreds of unhappy women, women with no other way to express themselves than through crime, and I wanted to tell their stories in my book. One of these women—if we have time?—one of them stabbed her husband to death, but was so scared by what she’d done she threw up all over the carpet. She then wasted every last bit of her best perfume trying to get rid of the smell. I think the perfume was called Vol de Nuit. Is there one called that? Yes, that was it.
“Another woman embezzled a hundred million yen from the bank she worked in for her boyfriend. She only used ¥350 for herself, and that only because she suddenly got her period and didn’t have the money for the necessaries. And another poor soul told me that she’d abandoned her own baby somewhere with only some bougainvilleas for comfort—bougainvilleas because they were the most expensive thing in the shop… With stories like these, I wanted to show the daily trials and triumphs that are all part of the life of the female criminal…”
“Kiku, did you hear that?!” Hashi had said, white in the face, and spitting out bits of some fried egg he was eating. Bougainvilleas were what he’d been keeping as pressed flowers for years. He fished them out of a desk drawer, then checked in a dictionary to make sure he had got the color and shape of the petals right. “What should I do?” he said, beginning to tremble. “Kiku, that old lady knows the woman who put me in the locker. What do I do?”
The next day he went out and bought Apples and Hot Water, but there was nothing about the bougainvillea lady in the book. Kuwayama and Kazuyo hadn’t been watching the program and knew nothing about his pressed flowers, so he had only Kiku to give him advice. But Kiku wasn’t much use; the whole episode had made him oddly angry. Why, Kiku wonde
red to himself, did this dumb story have to come and upset Hashi now like this?
Hashi borrowed some money from him and began to make plans.
“And what are you going to do if you find your mother?” Kiku wanted to know.
“I’m not sure,” he said, shaking his head. “I just want to see her, that’s all. I don’t even have to meet her necessarily. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I suppose actually meeting her would be pretty scary; so I think I’d just watch her from a distance, see how she talks, how she walks. That kind of stuff.”
Since then, only one postcard had come, telling them he was alive and well. The postmark was Tokyo but there was no return address. Kazuyo turned the card over and over in her hand, held it up to the light, and even sniffed it, looking for anything that might lead them in his direction. She had already filed a missing persons report and placed several items in the “Personal Inquiries” columns of Tokyo newspapers, but they had heard nothing. When Kiku picked up Hashi’s postcard, however, his reaction was a little different from Kazuyo’s; the card made him feel that he too would like to go somewhere far away and send someone a card just like this.
Kiku did his best not to think too much about Hashi, though somehow he had lost interest in almost everything, including pole-vaulting practice. But it had nothing to do with Hashi, he told himself; it was just that everything suddenly seemed a bit stupid—the island, the way the sea sparkled, the smell of fish drying, the canna lilies down by the hill, Milk’s barking… everything. I’m bored, he thought, standing on the practice field. The warm, soft breeze blowing from the sea was particularly unbearable.
7
Kiku was reading a novel on the Bullet Train. The summer of the year after Hashi had left home, Kazuyo had announced that she was going to Tokyo to look for him, so Kiku agreed to go along. As he read, she picked over a box lunch they’d bought at the station, looking as though she were about to burst into tears, but Kiku was secretly in a good mood. Looking up from his book, he gazed at the fresh green fields as the train hurtled along. Hashi will probably be waiting on the platform for us, all smiles, he thought, but the feeling might also have had something to do with the fact that he’d almost finished Apples and Hot Water. It was nice to reach the end of a book; liberating somehow.
“Next stop, New Yokohama Station,” the public address system on the train repeated and repeated until it seemed to Kiku that it was urging him personally to dredge up memories of Yokohama. But the only memory he had was shut inside a coin locker, and he wasn’t anxious to take it out and dust it off.
At Tokyo Station they were met on the platform by a staff member from the National High School Track Association. A coach at Kiku’s school, realizing they knew no one in Tokyo, had made a phone call that had apparently resulted in this small man in a green suit standing by the stairs calling Kiku’s name in exactly the same tone as the recorded announcements on the train. His jaw pumped so regularly and his tone was so flat that Kiku thought of a robot. Machinelike, arms folded, the green suit repeated its taped message: “Kikuyuki Kuwayama! Kikuyuki Kuwayama!”
All the same, Kazuyo seemed pleased to be met. When she caught sight of the little robot, she paused for a moment, pulling a mirror from her purse to check her makeup, and then rushed up to the man bowing at full speed. She said her hellos, then went on bowing to what Kiku thought was a ridiculous degree.
“He liked music,” she was saying to the man as Kiku approached. The green suit told them that runaways tended to congregate in Shinjuku.
Their hotel had been picked by Kazuyo from a picture in a travel magazine. It turned out to be behind a pinball parlor in east Nakano: “Hotel Springtime,” in large neon letters with the “t” in “Hotel” burned out. In real life, the outside didn’t look much like the magazine picture. In the photograph there had been a little pond stocked with goldfish and, flowing into the pond, a waterfall flecked with maple leaves. Parked in front were big foreign cars, and a foreign couple was walking out of the door arm-in-arm under a colorful display of flags. Since the picture was taken, however, the waterfall had dried up and a movie poster had been pasted over the cracked cement. The pond, also dry, was stacked with boxes, and a cleaning woman with dyed hair was standing in for the couple in the entranceway. She puffed away at a cigarette as she slopped water around with a mop, keeping one eye on the television in the lobby blaring a program about an air show. The silver in the cleaning woman’s teeth glinted as she flicked her cigarette ash into the mop bucket.
At the front desk were two men in bow ties who interrupted their game of checkers to greet the new guests. Kazuyo took her time filling out the registration card, carefully writing “beautician” in large letters in the blank marked “occupation.” After giving them the key, one of the men carried their luggage to the elevator where two dark-skinned, strong-smelling women were just getting out. One of them turned to look at Kazuyo and Kiku and said something in a foreign language. As the doors were closing, Kiku could see them pointing at Kazuyo and laughing, and when he turned to look, she was checking her dress, makeup, and nylons, trying to decide what was wrong. The man with the bags was staring at Kiku, but looked away with a smirk when he glared back.
“Have a good stay,” muttered the bow tie before abruptly leaving them in a room overlooking some workmen’s sheds, a building in the process of being demolished, and a line of drying laundry.
“You used too much powder,” Kiku said as soon as he had gone, pointing at her chest. A white line of sweat and makeup ran from Kazuyo’s neck down between her breasts.
For quite a long time they sat on the edge of the bed without saying a word while the gasoline-scented breeze from the air conditioner dried Kazuyo’s breasts.
“What could Hashi want in a place like this?” she muttered at last. The crash of a wrecking ball striking concrete rattled the window.
Shinjuku. Gaudy movie palaces with fountains; drunks and drifters in equal numbers. Squatters camped out on newspaper and crushed cardboard boxes, guzzling sake and silently watching the road; a man in a plastic mask feeding dried fish to his dog; a violinist, pretending to be blind, holding the bow in his teeth. Kiku was particularly depressed by the sight of two beggars—a father, wearing a ragged wig and old kendo armor, accompanied by his child. For passersby who threw money, the two of them would switch on a portable phonograph and act out a story to a scratchy record. The father would always end by sinking to his knees, with the child yelling triumphantly, “My fallen mother is avenged. Prepare to die!” as a tube of red paint hidden in the man’s armor split and spewed everywhere.
Kiku and Kazuyo went from bar to bar, every place they could hear music playing. They were usually welcome enough at first, but each time they showed the picture of Hashi and explained that they were looking for a runaway, they were told to check with the police and asked to leave. The tiny bars were stacked vertically, with dozens in a single building, and it seemed to Kiku it would take a hundred years to check them all. His nerves were already shot from the harsh blur of neon, smoke, topless girls and drunks. On the staircase of a building without an elevator, Kazuyo slipped on some newspaper that had been laid out to cover a pool of puke, taking a hard fall that left her dress covered with yellow slime.
They went into a small bar to rest. The only other customers were three women, all with makeup heavier than Kazuyo’s. Kiku drank his Coke in one gulp, but Kazuyo didn’t touch her cacao fizz; she had given up smoking and drinking—even tea—until they found Hashi. She did, however, hold the glass and sniff at the drink.
“It can’t hurt to have one,” said Kiku. She shook her head but, reaching across the table, put the glass under Kiku’s nose.
“Smells good, doesn’t it?” The cloudy brown liquid gave off a sweet odor; sugared mud, thought Kiku.
As they were getting up to go, they could hear the women at the bar discussing their children, all apparently in kindergarten.
“His skin is so delicate, he breaks
out all over his body just from a mosquito bite…,” one of them was complaining as the door closed.
Back in the street, they were stopped by a young man who said he’d seen them come into the bar where he worked earlier that evening; the places were all running together in their heads, but they thought he meant a bar with especially loud music and a woman dancing topless in a huge lighted ball.
“You’re from Kyushu, aren’t you?” he asked after introducing himself. Kazuyo nodded, and the man explained that he came from there himself. “I was working when you came in, so I couldn’t talk, but I want to help if I can.” When Kiku showed him Hashi’s picture again, he said he thought he’d seen him somewhere. He took them to the staff room of the bar he worked in and brought Kazuyo a damp towel to wipe her dress with.
“Mind if I keep the picture a while?” he asked Kiku. “I’ve got a hunch I could find him for you. When I get off work tonight, I’ll do some asking around. I know this town; it’ll take me half an hour to find out what you’d need a year to dig up. There are only so many places where runaway kids hang out, and I can hit them all. Come back tomorrow and I’m sure I’ll have something for you.” Kazuyo took a ten thousand yen bill out of her wallet, but he refused to take it.
“If you want to know, about four years back I ran away from home myself. I guess somebody must have come looking for me pretty much the same way… but I heard my mom died last year… Anyway, I don’t need your money. And don’t worry, we’ll find your son.”
They went back to the hotel exhausted. In the elevator, the cleaning woman was wiping down the walls. Though quite elderly, her hair was dyed, and she wore dark eyeliner and bright red lipstick that filled the deep wrinkles around her mouth.