South of the Border, West of the Sun

12

From then until the spring, Shimamoto and I saw each other almost every week. She would stop by one of the bars, more often than not the Robin’s Nest, always past nine. She’d sit at the bar, have a couple of cocktails, and leave around eleven. I’d sit beside her, and we’d talk. I don’t know what my employees thought of this, but I didn’t care. It was like when we were in grade school and I didn’t let what my classmates thought about the two of us concern me.

Occasionally she’d call and invite me to have lunch. Most often we’d arrange to meet at a coffee shop on Omote Sando. We’d have a light meal and take a walk. We’d be together two, at most three, hours. When it was time for her to leave, she’d glance at her watch and then smile at me. “Guess I’d better be going,” she’d say. Her usual wonderful smile. I couldn’t read any of her emotions behind that smile. Whether she felt sad at leaving, or not so sad, or maybe relieved to be rid of me, I had no idea. I couldn’t even tell if she really did have to get home.

Anyhow, during the couple of hours we were together, we hardly stopped talking. Not once, though, did our bodies come in contact. Not once did I put my arm around her shoulder or even so much as hold her hand.

Back on the streets of Tokyo, Shimamoto had her usual cool, attractive smile. No more the rush of violent emotions she displayed on that cold February day in Ishikawa. The warm closeness born on that day was gone. As if by unspoken agreement, we never once mentioned our strange little trip.

As we walked side by side, I wondered what feelings she held in her heart. And where those feelings would lead her. Sometimes I looked deep into her eyes, but all I could detect was a gentle silence. As before, the line of her eyelids brought to mind the horizon, far off in the distance. At long last I could understand Izumi’s loneliness when we were going out Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter. Once, the door to that world had begun to open a crack. But now it was closed.

I felt again like a helpless, confused twelve-year-old. I had no idea what I should do, what I should say. I tried my best to stay calm and use my head. But it was hopeless. Everything I said and did was wrong. Every emotion was swallowed up in that radiant smile. Don’t worry, her smile told me. It’s all right.

I was completely in the dark regarding Shimamoto’s life. I didn’t even know where she lived. Or who she lived with. Whether she was married, or had been. The only thing I knew was that last February she had had a baby, which died the next day. And that she’d never worked. Still, she always wore the most expensive-looking clothes and accessories, which meant that she had a fair amount of money. That’s all I knew about her. She was probably married when she had the baby, but I couldn’t be sure. Thousands of babies are born out of wedlock every day, right?

As time passed, Shimamoto began to talk bit by bit about her junior high school and high school days. There being no direct connection between those days and her present life, she didn’t mind talking about them. I discovered how terribly lonely she had been. As she grew up, she tried her very best to be fair to everyone around her, never to make excuses. “Start making excuses, and there’s no end to it,” she told me. “I can’t live that kind of life.” But things didn’t work out well. Her attitude only gave rise to stupid misunderstandings, which hurt her deeply. Steadily, she shut herself away. Waking up in the morning, she’d vomit and refuse to go to school.

She showed me a photograph taken when she entered high school. She was sitting on a chair in a garden, with sunflowers in bloom around her. It was summer, and she had on denim shorts and a white T-shirt She was gorgeous. Facing the camera, she was smiling broadly. Compared to her smile now, she looked a bit self-conscious. Even so, it was a wonderful smile. The kind of smile that, through its very precariousness, affected people all the more. Certainly not the smile of a lonely girl spending each day in misery.

“Judging by this picture,” I told her, “I’d say you were the happiest girl in the world.”

She shook her head slowly. Charming lines appeared at the corners of her eyes; she looked as if she were recalling some far-off scene from the past “Hajime, you can’t tell anything from photographs. They’re just a shadow. The real me is far away. That won’t show up in a picture.”

The photograph brought a pain to my chest. It made me realize what an awful amount of time I had lost. Precious years that could never be recovered, no matter how much I struggled to bring them back. Time that existed only then, only in that place. I gazed at the photo for the longest time.

“What’s so interesting about the picture?” she asked.

“I’m trying to fill in time,” I replied. “It’s been twenty-five years since I saw you last. I want to fill in that gap, even a little.”

She smiled and looked at me quizzically, as if there was something weird about my face. “It’s strange,” she said. “You want to fill in that blank space of time, but I want to keep it all blank.”

From junior high through high school, she never had a real boyfriend. She was a beautiful girl, so boys paid attention to her, but she barely noticed them. She went out with a few, but never for very long.

“Boys that age are hard to like. You understand. Teenage boys are uncouth and selfish. And all they can think about is getting their hand up a girl’s skirt. I was so disappointed. I wanted what the two of us used to have.”

“Yeah, but when I was sixteen I wasn’t any different—uncouth, selfish, and trying to get my hand up a girl’s skirt. That was me in a nutshell.”

“I guess it was better I didn’t meet you then,” she said, and smiled. “Saying goodbye at twelve, meeting again at thirty-seven … maybe this is the best way for us, after all.”

“I wonder.”

“Now you’re able to think of a few things other than what’s under a girl’s skirt, right?”

“A few,” I said. “But if that’s got you worried, maybe next time you’d better wear pants!”

Shimamoto gazed at her hands, resting on the table-top, and laughed. She didn’t wear a ring. A bracelet, and a new watch every time we met. And earrings. But never a ring.

“I didn’t want to be a burden to any boy,” she continued. “You know what I mean. There were so many things I couldn’t do. Going on picnics, swimming, skiing, skating, dancing at a disco. It was hard enough just to walk. All I could do was sit with someone, talk, and listen to music, which boys that age couldn’t stand for very long. And I hated that.”

She drank Perrier with a twist of lemon. It was a warm afternoon in the middle of March. Some of the young people passing by on the street outside were decked out in short-sleeved shirts.

“If I had gone out with you then, I know I would have ended up being a burden to you. You would soon have been fed up with me. You would have wanted to be more active, to take a running leap into the wide world outside. And I wouldn’t have been able to endure it.”

“Shimamoto-san,” I said, “that’s impossible. I never would have been impatient with you. We had something very special. I can’t explain it in words, but it’s true. A special, precious something.”

She looked at me closely, her expression unchanged.

“I’m not some great person,” I continued. “I’m not much to brag about. I used to be pretty crude, insensitive, and arrogant. So maybe I wouldn’t have been the right person for you. But there is one thing I am certain about: I never, ever would have been fed up with you. That, at least, makes me different from other people you knew. In that sense I am indeed a special person for you.”

Shimamoto’s gaze again shifted to her hands on the table. She lightly spread her fingers, as if checking all ten of them.

“Hajime,” she began, “the sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay forever.”

Once, she called to invite me to a concert of Liszt piano concertos. The soloist was a famous South American pianist. I cleared my schedule and went with her to the conceit hall at Ueno Park. The performance was brilliant The soloist’s technique was outstanding, the music both delicate and deep, and the pianist’s heated emotions were there for all to feel. Still, even with my eyes closed, the music didn’t sweep me away. A thin curtain stood between myself and the pianist and no matter how much I might try, I couldn’t get to the other side. When I told Shimamoto this after the concert, she agreed.

“But what was wrong with the performance?” she asked. “I thought it was wonderful.”

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I can’t get into the music!”

Shimamoto laughed. “I wouldn’t exactly call that art appreciation.”

“This has nothing to do with art. Let a bald vulture eat that up, for all I care. I don’t care what anybody says; I like that scratch!”

“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. “But what’s this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about—they eat corpses. But bald vultures?”

In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail. The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. “The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. They’re completely different”

“You’re a strange one!” She laughed. And there in the train seat ever so slightly, she moved her shoulder to touch mine. The one and only time in the past two months our bodies touched.

March passed, and so did April. My younger daughter started going to nursery school. With the kids away from home, Yukiko began doing volunteer work in the community, helping out at a home for handicapped children. Most of the time it was my job to take the kids to school and pick them up again. Whenever I was busy, my wife took over. Watching the children grow, day by day, I could feel myself aging. All by themselves, regardless of any plans I might have for them, my children were getting bigger. I loved my daughters, of course. Watching them grow up made me happier than anything. Sometimes, though, seeing them grow bigger by the month made me feel oppressed. It was as if a tree were growing inside my body, laying down roots, spreading its branches, pushing down on my organs, my muscles, bones, and skin, forcing its way outward. It was so stifling at times that I couldn’t sleep.

Once a week I met Shimamoto. And daily I shuttled my daughters back and forth to school. And a couple of times a week I made love to my wife. Since starting to see Shimamoto again, I made love to Yukiko more often. Not out of guilt, though. Loving her, and being loved, was the only way I could hold myself together.

“You’ve changed. What’s going on?” Yukiko asked me one afternoon after sex. “Nobody told me that when men reach thirty-seven their sex drive goes into high gear.”

“Nothing’s going on. Same old same old,” I replied.

She looked at me for a while. And shook her head slightly. “My oh my, I wonder what’s going on inside that head of yours,” she said.

In my free time I listened to classical music and gazed out at Aoyama Cemetery. I didn’t read as much as I used to. My concentration was shot to hell.

Several times I saw the young woman in the Mercedes 260E. Waiting for our daughters to come out the school gate, we stood there, making small talk, the kind of gossip only someone living in Aoyama would comprehend. Advice about which supermarket lot you could find parking space in, and when; the latest on a certain Italian restaurant, which had changed chefs and now couldn’t serve decent food; news that the Meiji-ya import store was having a sale on imported wine next month, etc. Damn, I thought I’ve become a regular gossipy hausfrau! But these things were all we had in common.

In the middle of April, Shimamoto disappeared again. The last time I saw her, we were sitting in the Robin’s Nest. Just before ten, a phone call came from my other bar, something I had to take care of right away. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes or so,” I told her.

“All right,” she said, smiling. “I’ll read a book while you’re gone.”

I rushed to take care of the chore, then hurried back to the bar, but she was no longer there. It was a little past eleven. On the counter, on the back of a match book, she’d left a message: “Probably I won’t be able to come here for a while,” the note said. “I have to go home now. Goodbye. Take care.”

I was at loose ends for days. I paced around my house, wandered the streets aimlessly, and went to pick up my daughters early. And I talked with the Mercedes 260E lady. We went to a nearby coffee shop to have a cup of coffee, gossiping as usual about the state of the vegetables at the Kinokuniya Market, the fertilized eggs at the Natural House food store, the bargain sales at Miki House. The woman was a fan of Inaba Yoshie’s designer wear, and before the season arrived she ordered all the clothes she wanted from the catalog. We talked, too, about the wonderful eel restaurant near the police box on Omote Sando, which was no longer in business. We enjoyed talking. The woman was more friendly and open than she had first appeared to be. Not that I was sexually attracted to her. I just needed someone—anyone—to talk to. What I wanted was harmless, meaningless talk, talk that would lead anywhere but back to Shimamoto.

When I ran out of things to do, I’d go shopping. Once, on a whim, I bought six shirts. I bought toys and dolls for my daughters, accessories for Yukiko. I stopped by the BMW showroom a couple of times to check out the M5; I didn’t really plan to buy one but let the salesman give me his pitch.

A few unsettled weeks like this, and I found myself again able to concentrate. I’m going nowhere fast here, I decided. So I called a designer and an interior decorator to discuss remodeling the bars. They were overdue for a little remodeling anyway, and it was high time I did some serious thinking about how I ran my business. Just like with people, with bars there’s a time to leave them alone and a time for change. Being stuck in the same environment, you grow dull and lethargic. Your energy level takes a nosedive. Even castles in the air can do with a fresh coat of paint. I started with the other bar, saving the Robin’s Nest for later. I began by removing all the hyper-chic aspects of the bar, which, when you came right down to it, were a pain in the butt, the whole point being to come up with an efficient functional workplace. The audio system and air conditioning were about due for an overhaul too, as was the menu, which I drastically revamped. I interviewed my employees and came up with a hefty list of suggested improvements. In great detail I laid out to the designer my vision of what the bar should be, had him draw up a plan, then sent him back to the drawing board to incorporate features that had popped into my head in the meantime. We repeated this process a number of times. I selected all the materials, had the contractors draw up estimates, readjusted my budget. I spent three weeks scouring shops throughout Tokyo in search of the world’s greatest soap dispenser. All of this kept me extremely busy. But that, after all, was precisely what I was after.

May came and went, then it was June. Still no Shimamoto. I was sure she was gone forever. Probably I won’t be able to come here for a while, she’d written. It was this probably and for a while and the ambiguity inherent in them that made me suffer. Someday she might show up again. But I couldn’t just sit around, resting my hopes and dreams on vague promises. Keep on like this, I thought, and I’ll end up a blithering idiot so I concentrated on keeping myself busy. I started going to the pool every morning, and I’d swim two thousand meters without stopping, then go upstairs to the gym for weight lifting. A week of that, and my muscles started to rebel. Waiting at a stoplight one day, I felt my left foot go numb, and I couldn’t step on the clutch. Finally, though, my muscles got used to the workout. Hard physical effort left no room to think, and keeping my body always in motion helped me concentrate on the trivia of daily life. Daydreaming was forbidden. I tried my best to concentrate on whatever I was doing. Washing my face, I focused on that; listening to music, I was all music. It was the only way I could survive.

In the summer, Yukiko and I often took the kids to our cottage in Hakone. Away from Tokyo, in the great outdoors, Yukiko and the children were relaxed and happy. They picked flowers, watched birds with binoculars, played tag, splashed about in the river. Or else they just lay around in the yard. But they didn’t know the truth. That on a certain snowy winter day, if my plane had been grounded, I would have thrown them all away to be with Shimamoto. My job, my family, my money—everything, without flinching. And here I was, my head still full of Shimamoto. The sensation of holding her, of kissing her cheek, wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t drive the image of Shimamoto from my mind and replace it with my wife. Just as I could never tell what Shimamoto was thinking, no one had a clue to what was in my mind.

I decided to spend the rest of our summer vacation finishing up the remodeling. While Yukiko and the children were in Hakone, I stayed in Tokyo alone to supervise the work and give last-minute instructions. I’d swim in the pool, work out at the gym. On weekends I’d go to Hakone, swim in the Fujiya Hotel pool with my kids, and we’d all have dinner together. And at night I’d make love to my wife.

I was fast approaching middle age, yet had no extra fat to speak of, no thinning hair. Not a single white hair, either. Exercise helped keep the inevitable physical decline at bay. Lead a well-regulated life, never overdo anything, and watch your diet: that was my motto. I never got sick, and most people would have guessed I was barely thirty.

My wife loved to touch my body. She’d touch the muscles on my chest and stomach, and fondle my penis and balls. Yukiko, too, was going to the gym to work out regularly. But it didn’t seem to slim her down.

“Must be getting old,” she sighed. “My weight goes down, but this roll of pudge is still here.”

“I like your body just the way it is,” I told her. “You’re fine the way you are—no need to work out or go on diets. It’s not like you’re fat or anything.” Which wasn’t a lie. I really did like the softness of her body with its bit of extra flesh. I loved to rub her naked back.

“You just don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “You say it’s okay for me to look the way I am now, but it takes every ounce of energy I have just to stay in the same place.”

An outsider would probably have said we had an ideal life. Certainly I was convinced of it at times. I was fired up about my work and was taking in a good deal of money. I owned a four-bedroom condo in Aoyama, a small cottage in the mountains of Hakone, a BMW, a Jeep Cherokee. And I had a happy family. I loved my wife and my two daughters. What more could anyone ask for? If, say, Yukiko and the kids had begged me to tell them what they should do to be even better to me, to be loved even more, there was nothing I could have said. I could not imagine a happier life.

But since Shimamoto had stopped coming to see me, I was stuck on the airless surface of the moon. If she was gone forever, no one remained to whom I could reveal my true feelings. On sleepless nights I’d lie in bed and replay over and over in my mind that scene at the snowy Komatsu Airport. Recall it enough times, and the memories would start to fade. Or so I thought. The more I remembered, the stronger the memories became. The word “Delayed” flashing on the flight information board; outside the window, the snow coming down hard. You couldn’t see more than fifty yards. On the bench, Shimamoto sat still, hugging herself tight. Her navy pea coat and muffler. Her body with its mixed scent of tears and sadness. I could smell that scent. Beside me, in bed, my wife breathed quietly, asleep. She knows nothing. I closed my eyes and shook my head. She knows nothing.

The abandoned bowling alley parking lot, my melting snow in my mouth and feeding it to her. Shimamoto in the airplane, in my arms. Her closed eyes, the sigh from her slightly parted lips. Her body, soft and limp. She wanted me then. Her heart was open to me. Yet I held myself back, back on the surface of the moon, stuck in this lifeless world. And in the end she left me, and my life was lost all over again.

Sometimes I’d wake up at two or three in the morning and not be able to fall asleep again. I’d get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and pour myself a whiskey. Glass in hand, I’d look down at the darkened cemetery across the way and the headlights of the cars on the road. The moments of time linking night and dawn were long and dark. If I could cry, it might make things easier. But what would I cry over? Who would I cry for? I was too self-centered to cry for other people, too old to cry for myself.

Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn’t keep on living like this.