“Who’s that?” he heard someone say. Everyone was looking past Shōji to the other side of the room. There was another entrance to the room and there stood Sawada, with sunglasses and a silver suit and no shirt, poised with a comb at his glistening gelled hair. A dark red rose was ostentatiously pinned at his breast. Once he had everyone’s attention he let out a “What’s a shakin’ baybee!?”
The room erupted in laughter. “Give me a break, you fool!”
“So out of date!”
“Get out of here! Go home. You’re ridiculous!”
This level of excitement did not compare with Shōji’s entrance into the room. As the congratulations and the good-natured ribbing continued, Sawada, looking pleased with himself, took off his sunglasses and entered the room. When he saw Shōji he said, “Hey, Shōji, so you’re back in town?!”
Shōji looked up at Sawada, blinking as though in a bright light, nodding. He began to say, “Hey, it’s great to see you. That was a great thing you did. Bravo!” but Sawada, being hailed by the women, quickly moved off to where they were sitting.
The group of about twenty alums made for a raucous party. Conversations never seemed to flag. No surprise that Sawada was at the center of it from start to finish.
On the day of the disasters, he had been driving home to Hamazawa from his office. The tsunami waves had reached the road but not yet receded; he realized there was a group of people stranded in the middle of the knee-deep water. They were trying to flee but were unable to move for the water around their feet. So Sawada got out of his vehicle and gave them a hand, putting them into his car and driving them to safety. Then he went back, numerous times. When it was all over, one of the people he had helped, now in the evacuation center, told the story to a reporter who had come to report on the disasters, and it ended up that Sawada was written up in the papers, along with a photo of his face.
“I was just caught up in what I had to do, ya know? I wasn’t scared at the time. When I think about it rationally, of course, the tsunami might have kept coming and I might be dead. The shaking came later, ya know …?”
Everyone was now listening to Sawada tell his story. Then others began relating the events and experiences of that day, the individual tales of what people experienced at the time of the disasters. Many had gone through similar things, and nods accompanied grunts of agreement across the room. But the more the stories grew, the more that Shōji felt left out. Sayoko was sitting on the other side of the room lost in excited conversation with the women gathered around Sawada. Shōji, like someone who had dropped in to eat and drink by himself, started shoveling in the fried food before him and downing glasses of sake.
“This fried chicken is pretty good, nice and juicy … yep, yep, not bad … these edamame perfectly plump … yep, yep … everything cooked to perfection …” He started commenting to himself on the food, same as he did back in his room in Tokyo. He continued, although fully aware that what had begun as a means to fight back boredom was now turning into a source of further boredom. “And nooooow, well look at this! The chawanmushi custard we have all been waiting for! And what have we got here? A perfect piece of shiitake mushroom that functions as a presentation strategy before leading one to a perfect demonstration of shrimp, almost dancing in a lovely broth …”
“So, when you head back to Tokyo?” Katō, sitting to his left, and with whom he’d never been very close, suddenly asked him. He had put together a heavy metal band to play at the end-of-year festival, and it seemed like half the girls were in love with him back in the day, but now, since he worked in construction he was dark from the sun. His hairline was receding as well.
“Ah, I haven’t actually decided yet for sure.… I’ll go back home tomorrow, maybe the day after, not sure yet.”
Katō laughed heartily at that and pounded him on the shoulder in rebuke: “You’re not ‘goin’ back home,’ you’re just ‘returning,’ doncha think?!”
“Ha, good point. I guess so …,” Shōji laughed to match the flow of conversation.
“So, if you’re in Tokyo, you ever meet Toki-Kan?”
“Toki-Kan? He’s in Tokyo?”
Shōji looked across the table to where the guy they called Toki-Kan was sitting. His name was Jinin Hiroshi, but a jokey schoolboy misreading of his name had turned him into “Toki-Kan.” There he was with his thin features and fair complexion, his longish bangs brushed back, looking picture-perfect sharp, laughing. He got good grades, made it on the sports teams, played a decent guitar, and always seemed pretty well put together. Plus, he easily made people laugh. Shōji had always thought that even if he could be reborn as a different person he would still be no match for Jinin Hiroshi. What really sealed that impression was back when Sayoko had herself told him that she was seeing Toki-Kan.
“Really? Seriously? You didn’t know? Yes, that guy, he started a company in Tokyo and now he’s a CEO.”
“He’s in charge?”
“I think he’s in video games or something like that. Makin’ piles a money, sounds like. I’m here shoveling dirt to take home some pennies. An entirely different world.”
Katō rattled his glass, took a slug of his shōchū, pulled his head into his shoulders. Shōji couldn’t help but laugh since he looked just like a turtle. He also thought how with the boom in reconstruction that was surely coming Katō was also likely to make out all right from the activity. He looked over at Toki-Kan again. While the combination of dark-blue jacket and white dress shirt was the same as his, it was clear even to someone like him, with no fashion sense, that these were of impeccable design and material. Confidence dripped from every corner of his features and mannerisms. It looked to Shōji that whatever obstructions might have previously blocked Toki-Kan’s path had been easily cleared away, just like the setting for some video game. Nonetheless, what led him to look at Toki-Kan from another perspective was the story that he had heard from someone about how, after he had dumped Sayoko, she had fallen into some sort of emotional crisis and had had to withdraw from high school without graduating. He found himself wondering about Sayoko, and if she were experiencing any difficulties coming face-to-face with Toki-Kan in a place like this.…
“Shōji, okay if I squeeze in here?” It was Sayoko, with her glass in hand, come over to his table. “Oh, sure!” he said, moving closer to Katō and making a place for her to sit. As Sayoko sat next to him a hint of her light classy perfume wafted his way. It took him back to middle school and the slightly sweet, slightly tangy fragrance he remembered from when she walked past his desk. Unlike the cloying perfumes of other girls, this had a natural freshness, and even then he had thought there was something special about this girl. She was equally kind in her dealings with everyone, she was smart, and while she was always smiling she could unexpectedly burst into tears as well.…
She seemed a little tipsy as she leaned too far into the table, grazing his arm with her elbow. “How ya doin’? You holdin’ up yer end here with the drinks?”
“I’m drinkin’ my share, no worries. Nothin’ but drinking.…” That didn’t seem quite appropriate; he was a bit flustered. The spot where she had touched his arm still glowed.
“Seems you’ve been awfully quiet over here. Must be boring out here in the boondocks.”
“That’s not it at all. I think Tokyo’s the more boring place.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I wonder … but anyway …,” she said, drawing closer and looking straight into his face. With her big pupils so close to his face, he found he had stopped breathing.
“I imagine that you Tokyo folks think of us up here as ‘excess baggage’ these days, huh?!”
“Wha—? What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, with all the postdisaster reconstruction, you’ve got to use lots of money on Tohoku, right? Electricity usage is cut back for you and all that. I imagine that’s how it feels. I feel bad about all that.”
“What is all that about? You needn’t
worry about such things. It’s not necessary. You start talking about ‘excess baggage’ when you should take advantage of the opportunity and start loading up as ‘excess baggage.’ …” Shōji had suddenly spoken sharply; Sayoko giggled slightly. He didn’t think he was saying anything all that funny, though.
“Ya know, Shōji, your glasses are all dirty.”
He started. He removed them and began cleaning them with his handkerchief. “God,” he thought, “please don’t start acting all innocent, like some chaste young girl.” There she was looking at him, still laughing. But she wasn’t making fun of him, it was a good-natured laugh.
Flustered and embarrassed, but happy. Just like the old days. He had never talked much with his classmates, but for some reason he had on many occasions talked with Sayoko. They talked about the manga they were both reading and liked, about the stuff each of their pet dogs had been doing the day before, about all kinds of stuff. She had sat at the desk in front of him and often turned to engage him in conversation. He easily began to open up to her. He thought he was talking to her as normally as to anyone else; she found humor in his words and actions and would giggle and laugh. He felt as though this girl was understanding him and it warmed his heart.
At the end of middle school they graduated to different high schools. He had written her a love letter at that time. Call it a love letter, but it was shy and silly paragraphs that tormented him later. Even so, she made a point to call him on the phone and explain that she was actually seeing someone else and therefore couldn’t return his feelings. That’s when she went on to reveal that “the classmate she was seeing” was Toki-Kan. For Shōji, her concern for him, for this person who had in the end been dumped but whom she hadn’t just ignored but considered his feelings and called him, this served only to reaffirm the kindness that he sensed in her.
“Good luck to both of us in high school,” they had said to each other in closing and hung up the phone. He now recalled as though it were yesterday the kindness and the thankfulness he had felt then. He had been so nervous that for some time after hanging up he couldn’t stop shaking.
As he was putting his glasses back on he was encouraging himself: “Okay, okay, you are not that clumsy kid from so many years ago.… So, anyway, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Right, right, about that …” Her eyes instantly lit up and she pulled her tote bag closer. She pulled out of it a slender bottle full of clear liquid and placed it on the table. Printed on the surface in red block letters were the words SACRED MILKY WAY WATER. “This, this is something I am really hoping you will give a try.”
“What is it? Face cleanser?”
“No, no, this right here is a very special water, delivered from outer space.”
“Delivered from outer space?”
“Right. You’ve heard about cosmic waves, right?”
“I guess, not like I know that much about them … you mean like atomic nuclei and elementary particles, and stuff like that?”
“Yep, exactly. The small, small particles of the atomic rays, soo small you can’t even see them with an electron microscope. Well, even right now as we sit here they come falling out of the sky and come shooting through our bodies, chu-un, chu-un. Now, in this water right here there are, among those nuclear particles, some other, even smaller particles, just a few, so rare that they haven’t even been discovered by the scientists yet, some particles that hold the very source of life in the universe, very securely sealed up in here. They did it by an ancient secret method.”
“Wow …”
“So, if you wash your face with it, and drink some of it, and get it inside your body it creates a special sacred barrier against external threats. That way it disperses the unpropitious winds that might come our way, and in fact they say that it wards off such vile winds from even blowing our way in the first place.”
He felt a frigid blast of air from somewhere. The passion of her explanation registered on her face; Shōji continued to look intently at her.
“So, Shōji, didn’t you tell me in your messages that things are not going so well for you these days? So, I thought, this time when you come back home, I want to be sure to pass this information on to you. Everyone at my house, we’ve been drinking this and so, even with the earthquake and everything, nothing bad has happened to us.”
“Now I see. So, this water, um, how much does it cost?”
“Two of these bottles are only ten thousand yen. But there is also a cheaper way to get it.”
“How’s that work?”
“Weell, if you think you want to start using it, you can also become one of the sales associates. Then you can buy it at a twenty percent discount, and then by recommending it to others and adding them, the associates increase in number, at which point the original associate, based on how much income is generated that way by the new associates, will get award bonuses and stuff from the leader, the man who formed and is CEO of the company. There are people who have bought houses with their bonus money!”
“Sayoko, are you one of those sales associates?”
“I am! My husband recommended it! I was pretty skeptical at first, but after trying it for a while, well, I realized the stuff was amazing, it really worked!”
“Umm, can I ask you a question?” Shōji was now looking for a way to end a conversation that looked like it might go on forever. “Sayoko, are you happy?”
Sayoko’s eyes grew wide and she blinked two or three times. Then a smile crossed her face. “I am happy,” she said. “I said a while ago that this stuff really worked, right? Well, I don’t know if I should go into this, as it’s kind of personal and all, but, well, once I started using this water, things started to go much better with my husband, for example. He started coming home at reasonable times at night, he never raised his hand against me anymore. And then, my son, who had been rebellious all the time, had a change of attitude.…”
Under the table Shōji was clenching and unclenching his fists. “Oh my God this is sad,” he thought. Pushing down an impulse to embrace her in a hug, he said, “That’s enough.”
He continued. “Look, back in Tokyo I was in the publishing business. But these were the ‘if you do this one thing you will get that thing’ sort of books: ‘how to be happy,’ ‘how to make your wishes come true,’ ‘how to get your youth back,’ books with nothing but those nauseating phrases. That’s what I produced. It’s a business preying on people’s wishes and desires. Precisely because there is no proof for any of it they sell well and we keep making them. We confuse the fact that they sell with the fact that they are actually useful. The sense of guilt soon fades. I mean, there’s good money in it.”
He could see Sayoko looking at him with a strange expression, but he continued. “So, I tell ya, I just got sick of it. A society that measures everything only by my happiness, and my family’s happiness, well, to the depth of my being, sick of it. So, seeing you relying on something like that makes me sick to see it too.”
“You mean, you think this too is just covering over and preying on people’s wishes?”
“Of course I do. Absolutely. You don’t have to look very hard to know it’s true, but where you are now, you don’t want to know. You’d do anything to win the affection of that useless husband of yours, for example.”
“You’re wrong.” Sayoko’s voice was shaking. “It is thanks to this that truly everything got better again.”
“I’m telling you, that’s not it. It’s just that you have been recommending this stuff to everyone, and the numbers of associates have increased, and your husband is temporarily in better spirits.”
Sayoko’s expression had completely changed. Without the laughter her face seemed thin and sharp. She suddenly looked very old to Shōji. “And I thought that you, of all people, would understand.…” She stood, putting the bottles back into her bag, and returned to her former seat. Before long she had pulled the bottles from her bag again and seemed to be discussing them with the people
seated around her. She brought to mind the little match girl.
Shōji let out a big sigh. He scratched his head and lit a cigarette. The cold breeze seemed to have grown stronger.
“Isao, despite appearances and all, was really a very shy person.” Harumi’s words came back to him. “He’d return from the fishing boat, get on a bus to return home. But he’d then get off the bus and start walking, but not on the roads straight through town. He would intentionally head for the roads by the shore where there were few people. He’d have all the gifts he was bringing back, a buncha stuff, wrapped up in a furoshiki cloth, and carry it with him. You hafta wonder why. Was he embarrassed at the thought of running into people? There was that sensitive part about him.”
He had imagined that Uncle Isa, walking at those times, was feeling kindly and generous. For whatever reason, Shōji was sensing the loneliness that seemed to envelop Isa, feeling it blowing on him in these blasts of cold air. Shōji could think of nothing to do but to stand stock-still before these gusts. He had left the kitchen while Harumi was cleaning up the dishes and returned to the room he used as a bedroom whenever he returned home. The force of the melancholy hit him all at once, and for the first time he cried tears for Isa.
The school reunion was as raucous as every other. Laughter would burst from every corner of the room. Chopsticks would go flying, beer mugs were toppled. But none of that commotion registered in Shōji. He felt himself being blasted by the gusts of air that continued to grow stronger. Hardly able to stand it any longer, he leaned harder against the table. When his own glass got empty he started in on draining the other glasses scattered across the table.
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