South of the Border, West of the Sun

9

I didn’t see Shimamoto for a long time after that. Every evening, I sat at the counter of the Robin’s Nest, passing the time. I read books, glancing every once in a while at the front door. But she didn’t show up. I was afraid I’d said something wrong, something I shouldn’t have, that upset her. One by one, I reviewed every word we’d spoken that night. But I couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe Shimamoto was disappointed. A distinct possibility. She was so beautiful, and her leg was all fixed. What in the world would a woman like that find in me?

The year drew to a close, Christmas came and went as did New Year’s. My thirty-seventh birthday rolled around. And January was suddenly over. I gave up waiting for her and only rarely made an appearance at the Robin’s Nest. Being there reminded me of her, causing me to search the faces of the customers in vain. I sat at the bar of my other place, flipping through the pages of books, lost in aimless musings. For the life of me, I couldn’t concentrate.

She’d told me I was the only friend she’d ever had. That made me happy and gave birth to the hope that we might be friends again. I wanted to talk with her about so many things, hear her opinion. If she didn’t want to say a thing about herself, fine by me. Just to be able to see her, to talk with her, that was enough.

But she didn’t come. Maybe she was too busy to find time to see me, I mused. But three months was way too long a gap. Even supposing she couldn’t come to see me, at least she could pick up the phone and call. She’d forgotten all about me, I decided. I wasn’t so important to her, after all. That hurt, as if a small hole had opened up in my heart. She never should have said that she might come again. Promises—even vague ones like that—linger in your mind.

But in early February, again on a rainy night she appeared. It was a quiet, freezing rain. Something had come up, and I was at the Robin’s Nest earlier than usual. The customers’ umbrellas carried with them the scent of the chilly rain. A tenor saxophonist had joined the usual piano trio to play a few numbers. He was pretty well known, and a stir ran through the crowd. As always, I sat on my corner stool at the bar, reading. Shimamoto sat down quietly beside me.

“Good evening,” she said.

I put down my book and looked at her. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes.

“I was sure you weren’t ever coming here again.”

“Forgive me,” she said. “Are you angry?”

“I’m not angry. I don’t get angry at things like that. This is a bar, after all. People come when they want to, leave when they feel like it. My job’s just to wait for them.”

“Well, anyway, I’m sorry. I can’t explain it, but I just couldn’t come.”

“Busy?”

“No, not busy,” she replied quietly. “I just couldn’t come here.”

Her hair was wet from the rain. A couple of strands were pasted to her forehead. I had the waiter bring a towel.

“Thanks,” she said, and dried her hair. She took out a cigarette and lit it with her lighter. Her fingers, wet and chilled from the rain, trembled slightly.

“It was only sprinkling, and I thought I’d catch a cab, so I just wore a raincoat. But I started walking, and ended up walking a long way.”

“How about something hot to drink?” I asked.

She looked deep into my eyes and smiled. “Thanks. I’m okay.”

In an instant that smile made me forget the three months.

“What are you reading?” She pointed to my book.

I showed it to her. A history of the Sino-Vietnam border conflict after the Vietnam War. She flipped through it and handed it back.

“You don’t read novels anymore?”

“I do. But not as many as I used to. I don’t know anything about new novels. I only like old ones, mostly from the nineteenth century. Ones I’ve read before.”

“What’s wrong with new novels?”

“I guess I’m afraid of being disappointed. Reading trashy novels makes me feel I’m wasting time. It wasn’t always that way. I used to have lots of time, so even though I knew they were junk, I still felt something good would come from reading them. Now it’s different. Must be getting old.”

“Yes, well, it is true you’re getting older,” she said, and gave an impish smile.

“What about you? Do you still read a lot?” I asked.

“Yes, all the time. New books, old books. Novels and everything else. Trashy books, good books. I’m probably the opposite of you—I don’t mind reading to kill time.”

She asked the bartender to make her a Robin’s Nest. I ordered the same. She took a sip of her drink, nodded slightly, and returned the glass to the countertop.

“Hajime, why are the cocktails here always so much better than at any other bar?”

“’Cause we do our best to make them that way,” I replied. “No effort, no result.”

“What kind of effort do you mean?”

“Take him, for instance,” I said, indicating the handsome young bartender, who, all serious concentration, was busy breaking up a chunk of ice with an ice pick. “I pay him a lot of money. Which is a secret as far as the other employees are concerned. The reason for the high salary is his talent at mixing great drinks. Most people don’t realize it, but good cocktails demand talent. Anyone can make passable drinks with a little effort. Spend a few months training, and anyone can make your standard-issue mixed drink—the kind most bars serve. But if you want to take it to the next level, you’ve got to have a special flair. Same with playing the piano, painting, running the hundred-meter dash. Now take me: I think I can mix up a pretty mean cocktail. I’ve studied and practiced. But there’s no way I can compete with him. I put in exactly the same liquor, shake the shaker for exactly the same amount of time, and guess what—it doesn’t taste as good. I have no idea why. All I can call it is talent. It’s like art. There’s a line only certain people can cross. So once you find someone with talent, you’d best take good care of them and never let them go. Not to mention pay them well.” The bartender was gay, so sometimes other gays gathered at the counter. They were a quiet bunch, and it didn’t bother me. I really liked the young bartender, and he trusted me and worked hard.

“Maybe you have more talent at running a business than would appear,” Shimamoto said.

“’Fraid I don’t,” I said. “I don’t really consider myself a businessman. I just happen to own two small bars. And I don’t plan to open any more, or to earn much more than I do right now. Can’t call what I do talent. But you know, sometimes I imagine things, pretending I’m a customer. If I were a customer, what kind of bar I’d go to, what kind of things I’d like to eat and drink. If I were a bachelor in my twenties, what kind of place would I take a girl to? How much could I spend? Where would I live and how late could I stay out? All sorts of scenarios. The more scenarios I come up with, the more focused my image of the bar becomes.”

Shimamoto had on a light-blue turtleneck sweater and a navy-blue skirt. Small earrings glittered at her ears. Her tight-fitting sweater revealed the shape of her breasts. I suddenly found it hard to breathe.

“Go on,” she said. Once again that happy smile came to her lips.

“About what?”

“Your business philosophy,” she said. “I love to hear you talk that way.”

I blushed a little, something I hadn’t done in a long while. “I wouldn’t call it a business philosophy. You know, this whole process is one I’ve been doing since I was little: Thinking about all kinds of things, letting my imagination take over. Constructing an imaginary place in my head and little by little adding details to it. Changing this and that to suit me. Like I told you, after college I worked for a long time in a textbook company. The work was a complete bore. Absolutely no room for using your imagination. I was sick of it. I couldn’t stand to go to work anymore. I felt like I was choking, like every day I was shrinking and someday I would disappear completely.”

I took a sip of my drink and glanced around the bar. A nice crowd, considering the rain. The tenor sax player was putting his instrument away in a case. I called the waiter over and had him take a bottle of whiskey to the saxophonist ask him if he’d like something to eat.

“But here it’s different,” I continued. “You have to use your imagination to survive. And you can put your ideas into practice immediately. No meetings, no executives here. No precedents to worry about or Ministry of Education position papers to contend with. Believe me, it’s great. Have you ever worked in a company?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Me and companies just don’t get along. I don’t think you’d find it any different. Eight years working there convinced me. Eight years down the tubes. My twenties—the best years of all. Sometimes I wonder how I put it up with it for so long. I guess that’s what I had to go through, though, to wind up where I am today. Now I love my job. You know, sometimes my bars feel like imaginary places I created in my mind. Castles in the air. I plant some flowers here, construct a fountain there, crafting everything with great care. People stop by, have drinks, listen to music, talk, and go home. People are willing to spend a lot of money to come all this way to have some drinks—and do you know why? Because everyone’s seeking the same thing: an imaginary place, their own castle in the air, and their very own special corner of it.”

Shimamoto extracted a Salem from her small purse. Before she could take out her lighter, I struck a match and lit her cigarette. I liked to light her cigarettes and watch her eyes narrow as she stared at the flickering flame.

“I haven’t worked a single day in my life,” she said.

“Not even once?”

“Not even once. Not even a part-time job. Labor is totally alien to me. That’s why I envy you. I’m always alone, reading books. And any thoughts that happen to occur to me have to do with spending money, not making it.” She stretched both arms out in front of me. On her right arm she wore two thin gold bracelets, on her left arm an expensive-looking gold watch. She kept her arms in front of me for a long while, as if they were displaying goods for sale. I took her right hand in mine and gazed for a time at the gold bracelets. I recalled her holding my hand when I was twelve. I could remember exactly how it felt And how it had thrilled me.

“I don’t know … maybe thinking about ways to spend money is best, after all,” I said. I let go of her hand and felt that I was about to drift away somewhere. “When you’re always scheming about ways to make money, it’s like a part of you is lost.”

“But you don’t know how empty it feels not to be able to create anything.”

“I’m sure you’ve created more things than you realize.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things you can’t see,” I replied. I examined my hands, resting on my knees.

She held her glass and looked at me for a long while. “You mean like feelings?”

“Right,” I said. “Everything disappears someday. Like this bar–it won’t go on forever. People’s tastes change, and a minor fluctuation in the economy is all it’d take for it to go under. I’ve seen it happen; it doesn’t take much. Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”

“But you know, Hajime, some feelings cause us pain because they remain. Don’t you think so?”

The tenor saxophonist came over to thank me for the whiskey. I complimented him on his performance.

“Jazz musicians these days are so polite,” I explained to Shimamoto. “When I was in college, that wasn’t the case. They all took drugs, and at least half of them were deadbeats. But sometimes you could hear these performances that would blow you away. I was always listening to jazz at the jazz clubs in Shinjuku. Always looking to be blown away.”

“You like those kinds of people, don’t you.”

“Must be,” I said. “People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That’s what can move the world. That’s art.”

I looked again at my hands, resting on my knees. Then I looked up at her. She was waiting for me to continue.

“Anyway, things are different now. I’m the manager of a bar, and my job’s to invest capital and show a profit. I’m not an artist or someone about to create anything. I’m not a patron of the arts. Like it or not, this isn’t the place to look for art. And for the manager, it’s a lot easier to have a neatly turned out, polite group than a herd of Charlie Parkers!”

She ordered another cocktail. And lit another cigarette. We were silent for a long while. She seemed lost in thought. I listened to the bassist play a long solo in “Embraceable You.” The pianist added the occasional accompanying chord, while the drummer wiped away his sweat and had a drink. A regular at the bar came up to me, and we chatted for a while.

“Hajime,” Shimamoto said a long time later. “Do you know any good rivers? A pretty river in a valley, not too big, one that flows fairly swiftly right into the sea?”

Taken by surprise, I looked at her. “A river?” What was she talking about? Her face was utterly expressionless. She was quiet, as if gazing at some faraway landscape. Maybe it was me who was far away—far from her world, at least with an unimaginable distance separating us. The thought made me sad. There was something in her eyes that called up sadness.

“What’s with this river all of a sudden?” I asked.

“It just suddenly occurred to me,” she answered. “Do you know any river like that?”

When I was a student, I traveled around the country quite a bit lugging a sleeping bag. So I’d seen quite a few Japanese rivers. But I couldn’t come up with the kind of river she described.

“I think there might be a river like that on the Japan Sea coast,” I said after a great deal of thought. “I don’t remember what it’s called. But I’m sure it’s in Ishikawa Prefecture. It wouldn’t be hard to find. It’s probably the closest to what you’re after.”

I recalled that river clearly. I went there on fall break when I was a sophomore or a junior in college. The fall foliage was beautiful, the surrounding mountains looking as though they were dyed in blood. The mountains ran down to the sea, the rush of the water was gorgeous, and sometimes you could hear the cry of deer in the forest. The fish I ate were out of this world.

“Do you think you could take me there?” Shimamoto asked.

“It’s all the way over in Ishikawa,” I said in a dry voice. “Enoshima I could see, but we’d have to fly, then drive for at least an hour. And stay overnight. I’m sure you understand that’s something I can’t do at the moment.”

Shimamoto shifted slowly on her stool and turned to face me. “Hajime, I know I shouldn’t be asking this favor of you. I know that. Believe me, I realize it’s a burden to you. But there’s no one else I can ask. I have to go there, and I don’t want to go alone.”

I looked into her eyes. Her eyes were like a deep spring in the shade of cliffs, which no breeze could ever reach. Nothing moved there, everything was still. Look closely, and you could just begin to make out the scene reflected in the water’s surface.

“Forgive me.” She smiled, as if all the strength had left her. “Please don’t think I came here just to ask you that I wanted only to see you and talk. I didn’t plan to bring this up.”

I made a quick mental calculation of the time. “If we left really early in the morning and did a round trip by plane, we should be able to make it back by not too late at night. Of course, it depends on how much time we spend there.”

“I don’t think it’ll take too long,” she said. “Can you really spare the time? The time to fly over there and back with me?”

I thought a bit. “I think so. I can’t say anything definitely yet But I can probably make the time. Call me here tomorrow night, all right? I’ll be here at this time. I’ll figure out our plan by then. What’s your schedule?”

“I don’t have any schedule. Any time that’s fine with you is fine with me.”

I nodded.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have met you again, after all. I know I’ll only end up ruining everything.”

She left just a little before eleven. I held an umbrella over her and flagged down a cab. The rain was still falling.

“Goodbye. And thank you,” she said.

“Goodbye,” I said.

I went back into the bar and returned to the same seat at the counter. Her cocktail glass was still there. As was the ashtray, with several crushed-out Salems. I didn’t have the waiter take them away. For the longest time, I gazed at the faint color of lipstick on the glass and on the cigarettes.

Yukiko was waiting up for me when I got home. She’d thrown a cardigan over her pajamas and was watching a video of Lawrence of Arabia. The scene where Lawrence, after all sorts of trials and tribulations, has finally made it across the desert and reached the Suez Canal. She’d already seen the film three times. It’s a great film, she told me. I can watch it over and over. I sat down next to her, and had some wine as we watched the rest of the movie.

Next Sunday there’s a get-together at the swimming club, I told her. One of the members owned a large yacht, which we’d been on several times offshore, fishing and drinking. It was a little too cold to go out in a yacht in February, but my wife knew nothing about boats, so she didn’t have any objections. I hardly ever went out on Sundays, and she seemed to think it was good for me to meet people in other fields and be outdoors.

“I’ll be leaving really early in the morning. And I’ll be back by eight, I think. I’ll have dinner at home,” I said.

“All right. My sister’s coming over that Sunday anyway,” she said. “If it isn’t too cold, maybe we could take a picnic to Shinjuku Gyoen. Just us four girls.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

The next afternoon I went to a travel agency and made plane and rental car reservations. There was a flight arriving back in Tokyo at six-thirty in the evening. Looked like I would be back in time for a late dinner. Then I went to the bar and waited for Shimamoto’s call. She phoned at ten. “I’m a little busy, but I think I can make the time,” I told her. “Is next Sunday okay?”

That’s fine with me, she replied.

I told her the flight time and where to meet me at Haneda Airport.

“Thank you so much,” she said.

After hanging up, I sat at the counter for a while, with a book. The bustle of the bar bothered me, though, and I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the rest room and washed my face and hands with cold water, stared at my reflection in the mirror. I’ve lied to Yukiko, I told myself. Sure, I’d lied to her before, when I slept with other women. But I never felt I was deceiving her. Those were just harmless flings. But this time was wrong. Not that I was planning to sleep with Shimamoto. But even so, it was wrong. For the first time in a long while, I looked deep within my own eyes in the mirror. Those eyes told me nothing of who I was. I laid both hands on the sink and sighed deeply.