The Atlas

A LETTER FROM TOKYO

The first time he read the Japanese girl's letter his heart rushed because he was sure that she was saying she was his. He had written to her passionately. She'd replied: If you have a little enough time, please stop by Tokyo to visit me. You probably are not interested in Tokyo, but maybe in seeing me. To him this phrasing seemed so delicate and perfect a statement of acceptance that he kissed her letter for joy. Then at the end she said: Please come back alive from Burma. Because I love you, too.

Night after night he stayed up rereading this and imagining holding her in his arms. He felt that he was approaching her ever more closely. Soon he'd be kissing the moist lips of her desire. But he wasn't there yet; although he knew what she'd written by heart, he had not penetrated every veil of her meaning. Her penciled marks were as cold and smoky as the Japanese Sea; it was only latterly that his urgency had begun to sense the low brain-colored island of Japan coming closer, to see the khaki squares as of a woven mat, interspersed with the dull leaden glitter of cities: You probably are not interested in Tokyo, but maybe in seeing me. Now he was close enough to glimpse Japan's dragonclaws and rivers, and the water like silvery fog (but maybe in seeing me), those dark green curds called trees. In seeing me. Because I love you, too. But then one night the letter was used up. Instead of tacit it seemed lukewarm. He tumbled into despondent confusion.

A week went by in which he didn't read it, and then one hot afternoon he took it from the envelope and traveled down its lines. This time it was not lukewarm but sisterly, loving, enthusiastic, not at all erotic. There was some other matter in the letter — chatty, newsy stuff — which in previous nights had appeared to him only as the lingerie which translucened the more exciting words, but now he comprehended that it was in fact the real stuff, that love was no more than fondness and the invitation merely kind and polite. He'd only thought otherwise because the letter he'd sent her first had been so desperately tender. What if she'd never even received that letter? After all, there was no reference to it. Ah, the perils of context! So he flew away from Japan, leaving her lights and blackness for more blackness.

He said to himself: How can the meaning of these words squirm and wriggle so much on my mind's hook?

But then he thought: After all, I never knew what anything else meant, so why should I know what this means? It's written that there's no such thing as truth. .

He sent her a love-charged reply and waited. Six months later he heard from her in a Christmas card that she was about to marry someone else.