‘Should we have another drink?’
‘I’ll take care of it. You’ve had a long day,’ said Sadako.
J nodded with a content expression, hung his suit jacket in the closet and sat in a chair, unbuttoning his collar and cuffs with a sigh.
‘Perhaps we should go to bed early,’ said J. ‘It really has been a long day.’
Sadako nodded and smiled. J looked over at her as she poured them each a glass of whisky from a small bottle he had in his room.
‘You look so nice there.’
Sadako smiled awkwardly.
‘I’m sure you want to have children one day,’ he said.
Sadako smiled. ‘Of course.’
She brought the drinks over to J and sat down.
He kissed her on the mouth and Sadako moved closer to him. He held her head with one hand while he kissed her and the gesture made Sadako feel particularly wanted.
‘My beautiful wife,’ he said. ‘Watching you there in the kitchen, I couldn’t stand it.’ He put his hands on her stomach. ‘I imagined you standing there with my child in your belly, your round stomach pressing through your dress.’ He put his hand into her underwear. Sadako felt herself become wet; she curled inwards and pressed her pelvis against his hand. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘you want that, don’t you? You want my child.’
‘Of course,’ said Sadako. ‘And you love me, don’t you?’
‘I do, I do.’ He kissed her chest.
Sadako felt a momentary wave of warmth, struck with a sense of happiness that had already left her, gone before it was ever hers. She sat up straighter. It was too much and too strange, too close to being real. She stood up. J looked at her and then at his hands. He had a slightly overweight stomach, thick arms and a heavy body. She caught sight of his face, half turned away, and saw an expression that was so desperate it struck her as deeply sad.
Sadako knew that she represented something this man wanted but didn’t have, that he had, hopelessly, tried to mould the woman he had married into being. Though in truth there was probably no woman who would be the one he wanted; he wanted what men for so long had cultivated without realising it wasn’t real. Sadako, in her fake role, was the most real version he would ever find. She thought of the thousands of people who now worked for companies that provided fake girlfriends, fathers, children, husbands and colleagues—an army of the fake to stave off the difficulty of the real, to avoid conflict; to avoid facing the truth: that nobody is as precise and sharp as our fantasies. Sadako felt pity for J’s wife, who would either be carried along by the life expected of her, or live swimming against its perpetual current. Unless she was able to find another alternative altogether, an other side of herself, another life.
The next day, Sadako woke to bright sunlight. She had fallen asleep without closing the blinds in her small room. Her phone rang. It was her mother, who rarely called.
‘It’s your father,’ she said. ‘You need to go to him.’
Sadako sat up. Her eyes hurt from the sudden light.
Her father had suffered a heart attack, her mother continued, but it was considered mild. He was home again now and Sadako should go to him. The hospital had called her mother, who was listed as his next of kin, but she refused to go all the way to Yugawara. They were divorced, after all.
‘I can go for the weekend,’ said Sadako, ‘but after that I have to return to work.’
‘He’s your father! It’s your responsibility. You’ll go there for as long as you’re needed.’ Her mother’s persistent, angry voice, which had rattled throughout her childhood, now reached her all the way in Tokyo.
‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I can leave today.’
‘Yes,’ said her mother. ‘Of course you will go.’
Yugawara was two hours from Tokyo by train, in Kanagawa Prefecture. Sadako had her father’s address saved in a text message sent a long time ago, but she had never been there. She packed a bag with a few changes of clothes, underwear, toothbrush and make-up bag. She took the subway to Tokyo Station, then a fast train to Yugawara.
On the local train, an elderly woman offered her a pear, greenish-white and as round as a moon, from a plastic bag. Sadako thought of her grandparents. A young girl hears things, although she may not understand them. The family sat on thin cushions, at her grandmother’s table. They had soup, fish, radish salad. Her grandmother said something about her grandfather—when he was supposed to fly that plane. Sadako knew he had been a pilot, knew he was in the war, but no more detail than that. She recalled the silence after her grandmother’s words, broken only by the tap of plastic chopsticks against rice bowls. On her way to see her father, Sadako thought of her dead grandfather. He hated Americans, he liked to drink; she didn’t remember much else about him.
Yugawara Station was small, a modern white building. Outside, in a sea of concrete, stood a large tree with broad, reaching branches. The air was humid. The main road was stacked with short, ugly buildings and powerlines in rows. A typical small town. A hairdresser, a women’s clothing shop, an American-style diner, a pizza and beer shop, several vending machines. A staircase took pedestrians from the street down a steep hill to a parallel street. Houses coated the steep green hills surrounding the town.
Sadako started walking. The air was thin and warm, as though it had less oxygen than the air she was used to. She stepped into the town’s supermarket, relieved at the air conditioning and the familiar noises, beeps and whirring fans, the fluorescent lights. Outside had been too hot, too bright and quiet. She wasn’t used to small towns. She bought a cold orange drink then went outside again, checked the map on her phone and kept walking through the hot, quiet air.
The house where her father lived was small, with cream walls, a brown-tiled roof and shuttered windows. She rang the doorbell.
‘Who is it?’ she heard her father’s voice.
‘It’s Sadako, Father.’
Her father had aged in the two years since she had seen him. He looked thinner, more bent and grey, his face sucked dry by cigarettes and sun, wrinkled at the mouth.
‘Come inside, then.’
Sadako made a small bow as she stepped up to the door and took off her shoes. Inside was dim and not as humid as the street.
They stood in the kitchen and her father made tea.
‘You came from Yokohama?’
‘No, from Tokyo. I moved. I’ve been working there.’
‘You look skinny.’
‘Work makes me tired.’
The kitchen was small and cramped, full of boxes and containers, herbs and leaves drying at the window, a large rice cooker, a sink with a hose, a small fridge. Sadako connected this kitchen with the one of her childhood, where her parents had fought, her father drank, her mother cooked. Her mother’s screeching, her father’s drunk silences, the repetitive meals made from cheap ingredients.
‘Are you better now? What did the doctors say?’
He waved away her question. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll drink less beer.’
‘So you live here now,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘It’s a resort town. Hot springs. It was popular in the sixties. Not so much now.’ He took a single cigarette out of his pocket. ‘You can put your bag there.’ He pointed with his unlit cigarette to the small living room. ‘I have to get some things at the shop. There is food in the fridge. Keiko, the woman I live with, will be home later. And her son, Toru. He’s your age.’
He paused at the door and kicked off his slippers, put the cigarette between his thin lips. ‘You really didn’t need to come.’
Sadako shrugged. Her father closed the door behind him.
She walked back to the kitchen, opened the fridge, saw lots of plates with leftover food, a shelf of fresh vegetables, and closed it again. She went to the bathroom. It was dark and cramped, with a small square trough, bucket and hose. Clean towels were folded on a plastic shelf. A tap dripped gently.
Sadako was washing a cup and teapot when the front door opened. Someone
kicked off their shoes and put on slippers. A man in his late twenties came in, average height, a short haircut, face shining in the humidity. He was tanned and his arms looked strong, as though he worked outside in the sun. He didn’t seem surprised to see her.
‘I’m Toru.’
‘Sadako.’
He went to the fridge. ‘Did you eat?’
Sadako shook her head. He took out a plate of leftover fish, some green vegetables, and put them in the microwave. He rinsed rice and put on the cooker. Then he boiled the kettle, took two packets of instant soup and poured the water and mixture into two small bowls. He handed one to Sadako.
‘I guess it’s too hot for soup,’ he said.
Sadako sipped from the bowl. She hadn’t realised she was hungry.
‘Your father said you live in Tokyo.’
Sadako nodded. ‘I just moved there. Well, a few months ago.’
When the rice was ready, they ate at the table. It had been so long since Sadako had eaten a home-cooked meal.
‘What do you do there?’
‘I work in a bar.’
Toru nodded, his face was shining with the humidity and the soup. He sniffed and brushed his nose with the back of his hand.
‘What do you do here?’ she asked.
‘Different things. Building sites. Maintenance for the hot springs—repairing the old spa systems, cleaning parts, that kind of thing.’ He scraped his bowl to get the last few pieces of rice.
‘And my father, he lives with your mother?’
Toru nodded. ‘My mother works at one of the hot spring resorts. She serves the dinners to the tourists.’
They finished the meal and Sadako washed the plates in the kitchen. Toru went to the door and kicked off his slippers. ‘I have to go back to work now. We’ll all be home later.’
Alone in the empty house again, Sadako lay down in the living room and felt her body unstiffen. She kept thinking of her parents. At the end, they didn’t resemble the serene figures in their wedding photograph, but those kind of photos were never real anyway. When Sadako was young, her father was a typical salaryman, dedicated and exhausted in his cheap suit, riding the subway to work every morning and home again late at night. When the company he worked for collapsed, he was home for many strange mornings when usually he wouldn’t have been, shuffling through the kitchen with messy hair. After the divorce he moved into a miserable room in a shared apartment with one bathroom for five tenants. He had taken all kinds of odd jobs that paid badly. Then, two years ago, he announced he was leaving Yokohama for Yugawara and a job in a shop owned by the relative of an acquaintance.
Sadako slept, and woke to the sound of voices. At first she might have been waking up in her childhood, to the sound of her parents arguing. But it was her father’s voice, smooth and even, talking to a woman who responded in a chatty, almost cheerful way. Sadako got up, smoothed her hair down and walked into the kitchen.
‘You slept, I’m glad,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Keiko.’
Sadako lowered her head. ‘I was so tired.’
‘Toru will be home soon and then we will eat.’
When Toru arrived, his face tired and red, he went to the fridge and took out two bottles of iced tea. ‘It’s hot,’ he said, and handed Sadako a bottle. She stood awkwardly; she didn’t know her place there. When it was dark, they walked out into the street. The air was clearer but still warm.
Keiko said that tomorrow Toru would show her the town. ‘He has the day off work.’
‘We’ll go to the waterfall,’ he said. ‘It will be cooler there.’
Fragmented clouds and stars sailed above them while down below they sweltered.
Keiko made up a bed for Sadako in one of the rooms. Toru would sleep in the living room.
When she closed her eyes the room was silent in a way that troubled her. The noise of Tokyo, of Yokohama, the cities of her life, was comforting. To hear dulled noise from the other side of the window told Sadako she was present, there, that she was somewhere. Without the noise she sensed a void, was aware of how alone she was, how alone everyone’s minds really are when we lie down to sleep in dark places.
‘It’s good you woke early,’ said Toru the next morning. ‘We can leave before it gets too hot. Don’t bring a bag, nothing that will weigh you down—there’s a bit of a climb.’
Toru filled two bottles with water, put them in a backpack with apples and rice cakes, and they went out into the warm morning. Low stone walls covered in small round leaves lined the street. They walked down the main road and then, rather than continue towards the station, where Sadako had arrived the day before, they turned right towards the hills. A bus and a few cars passed them.
They continued for half an hour. Sadako saw a few old wooden houses and blocks of ugly apartment buildings behind them. Trees were slowly taking over the sides of the road, and their path grew steeper. A tall stone wall rose up on one side, a bridge overlooked a sudden drop. The air was getting cooler as they slowly made their way up the hill. They reached a small parking area and then started up a flight of stone steps into a forest. Red lantern posts lined the path. A small hut had a gift shop, with an unsmiling man who stared at them as they passed. The stairway continued into the forest, then became a footpath, a bridge, more stairs. The waterfall was thin and steep, flowing down a wall of rock.
‘It’s good to walk here,’ said Toru. ‘I walked here every day when we first arrived. It cleans you somehow.’
‘When did you come here?’
‘Oh, ages ago. I was fifteen.’ Toru walked with long, deliberate strides. ‘We had to leave Saitama. My father got a new girlfriend.’
Sadako stared at the waterfall. She felt out of place, outside, in this forest.
‘Why did your mother choose Yugawara?’
Toru shrugged. ‘She had been here when she was young. We never took holidays when I was a kid, so I guess this was the only place she could think of.’
When Sunday evening came, Sadako couldn’t make up her mind to leave. She sent a message to her boss to say that she would miss work the next day. But then Monday arrived and she stayed another day, and then another. Somehow, a whole week passed and Sadako didn’t return to Tokyo. She told her boss she would need the next week off work, too. She stressed that it was a serious family matter, and he begrudgingly agreed. Her boss said that a regular customer had been in to see her, had been asking for her, and Sadako knew that it was the client, J. Sadako said she would return as soon as her father was better. But in reality her father seemed fine.
The heat persisted, close and windless. Sometimes it rained heavily and the sky was the colour of steel. The small town, its slow and sultry pace, was somehow reassuring in a way that Sadako had not known she needed. Her life in Tokyo, the encounter with J, being his fake wife, seemed to have been experienced by a part of her that was now very distant. She could not imagine returning to Tokyo right now. Yet staying here was too strange a possibility. At the end of her thoughts was an empty space, as if she had reached the limit of where her life could take her. Her life felt precarious; she had no idea what she would do when she was older and no longer attractive enough to be a hostess in Kabukicho.
One night at dinner, her father put a tall bottle of sake on the table. ‘It’s just for tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s the anniversary of your grandfather’s death.’
Sadako could only remember her grandfather as a quiet, gruff man who did not seem to care that she existed.
They ate the meal, drank the sake. When he had finished several cups of sake her father said something strange.
‘He was supposed to die a long time ago, your grandfather. He was a pilot and the date on which he was to die for Japan had been scheduled. Then the war ended, so he didn’t get to do it. An aborted suicide is what I call it.’
Sadako swallowed another mouthful of sake. She was starting to feel drunk too.
‘You never told me this,’ she said.
Her father only shrugged.
>
‘Well, it is good that he could live a longer life,’ said Keiko, glancing at Sadako’s father. ‘And for that reason we have you, we have Sadako.’
Toru nodded and looked closely at Sadako.
Sadako’s father had never mentioned this before. In fact, he had rarely spoken such a long sentence in her whole memory of him. But she couldn’t think of how to respond, so she kept quiet and finished her sake.
One morning, Keiko suggested that Sadako visit the hot spring resort where she worked serving the traditional multi-course dinners to tourists. ‘We have an excellent massage therapist,’ Keiko said. ‘She’s a real master.’
Sadako nodded. She felt shy around Keiko, suddenly a girl again, as though scared she would do something wrong, or that she didn’t know what to say. But Keiko chatted and smiled as they got in her car and drove to the guesthouse.
Inside the guesthouse, Sadako was led to a room by a quiet woman with a round, pleasant face. She went in and smelled the clean, woody scent of tatami on the floor. Sadako’s heart moved. A woman was lying on a low bed in the middle of the room, in dim orange light, stretched out with her arms straight at her sides, a white sheet over her face. Sadako thought there had been some horrible mistake, that she’d walked into someone else’s room or, worse, had been brought to some other place entirely and was interrupting the preparations for a funeral, disturbing the dead. But then the woman removed the white sheet from her face, sat up and gestured to Sadako to sit in one of the armchairs. The woman had thin shoulders, short grey hair, a wrinkly tanned face. She got up and changed the towels on the bed.
‘It relaxes me,’ said the woman. ‘It relaxes me to feel the warmth of my breath on my skin. It tells me where I am.’
She asked Sadako to undress and lie down. She said that Sadako’s muscles were cold, even though it was so hot outside. Sadako’s body felt as stiff as the wood of a tree; she couldn’t make it relax. Perhaps the woman knew this, for she started talking about how when she was young she could never have bared her body like this to a stranger. She was born in Nagasaki. After the bomb, people who had been there at the time, people like her, were seen as contaminated. A woman’s body became a place of war. Men didn’t want to sleep with her. She never had a husband, only boyfriends when she lived in Hakata and pretended she was from far away in the north.
The Shut Ins Page 8