Sputnik Sweetheart

5

It’s time to say a few words about myself.

Of course this story is about Sumire, not me. Still, I’m the one whose eyes the story is told through—the tale of who Sumire is and what she did—and I should explain a little about the narrator. Me, in other words.

I find it hard to talk about myself. I’m always tripped up by the eternal who am I? paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as me. But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors—values, standards, my own limitations as an observer—make me, the narrator, select and eliminate things about me, the narratee. I’ve always been disturbed by the thought that I’m not painting a very objective picture of myself. This kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother most people. Given the chance, they’re surprisingly frank when they talk about themselves. “I’m honest and open to a ridiculous degree,”

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they’ll say, or “I’m thin-skinned and not the type who gets along easily in the world,” or “I’m very good at sensing others’

true feelings.” But any number of times I’ve seen people who say they’re easily hurt or hurt other people for no apparent reason. Self-styled honest and open people, without realizing what they’re doing, blithely use some self-serving excuse to get what they want. And those who are “good at sensing others’

true feelings” are taken in by the most transparent flattery. It’s enough to make me ask the question: how well do we really know ourselves?

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to take a rain check on the topic of me. What I’d like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That’s how I’d grasp a dearer sense of who I am.

These are the kinds of ideas I had running through my head when I was a teenager. Like a master builder stretches taut his string and lays one brick after another, I constructed this viewpoint—or philosophy of life, to put a bigger spin on it. Logic and speculation played a part in formulating this viewpoint, but for the most part it was based on my own experiences. And speaking of experience, a number of painful episodes taught me that getting this viewpoint of mine across to other people wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. The upshot of all this is that when I was young I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life.

My family isn’t anything special. So blandly normal, in fact, I don’t know where to begin. My father graduated from a local university with a degree in science and worked in the research lab of a large food manufacturer. He loved golf, and every Sunday he was out on the course. My mother was crazy about tanka poetry and often attended poetry recitals. Whenever her name was in the poetry section of the newspaper, she’d be happy as a lark for days. She liked cleaning, but hated cooking. My sister, five years older than me, detested both cleaning and cooking. Those are things other people did, she decided, not her. Which meant that ever since I was old enough to be in the kitchen, I made all my own meals. I bought some cookbooks and learned how to make almost everything. I was the only child I knew who lived like that.

I was born in Suginami, but we moved to Tsudanuma in Chiba Prefecture when I was small, and I grew up there. The neighbourhood was full of white-collar families just like ours. My sister was always top of her class; she couldn’t stand not being the best and didn’t step one inch outside her sphere of interest. She never—not even once—took our dog for a walk. She graduated from Tokyo University law school and passed the bar exam the following year, no mean feat. Her husband is a go-getter management consultant. They live in a four-room condo they purchased in an elegant building near Yoyogi Park. Inside, though, the place is a pigsty.

I was the opposite of my sister, not caring much about studying or my grades. I didn’t want any grief from my parents, so I went through the motions of going to school, doing the minimum amount of study and homework to get by.

The rest of the time I played football and sprawled on my bed when I got home, reading one novel after another. None of your typical after-hours cram school, no tutor. Even so, my grades weren’t half bad. At this rate, I reckoned I could get into a decent college without killing myself studying for the entrance exams. And that’s exactly what happened.

I started college and lived by myself in a small apartment. Even when I was living at home in Tsudanuma I hardly ever had a heart-to-heart conversation with my family. We lived together under one roof, but my parents and sister were like strangers to me, and I had no idea what they wanted from life. And the same held true for them—they didn’t have any idea what kind of person I was or what I aspired to. Not that I knew what I wanted in life—I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature, but history. I didn’t have any special interest in history, but once I began studying it I found it an engrossing subject. I didn’t plan to go to grad school and devote my life to history or anything, though my adviser did suggest that. I enjoyed reading and thinking, but I was hardly the academic type. As Pushkin put it:

All of which didn’t mean I was about to find a job in a normal company, claw my way through the cut-throat competition, and advance step by step up the slippery slopes of the capitalist pyramid.

So, by a process of elimination, I ended up a teacher. The school is only a few stations away by train. My uncle happened to be on the board of education in that town and asked me whether I might want to be a teacher. I hadn’t taken all the required teacher-training classes, so I was hired as an assistant teacher, but after a short period of screening I qualified as a proper teacher. I hadn’t planned on being a teacher, but after I actually became one I discovered a deeper respect and affection for the profession than I ever imagined I’d have. More accurately, really, I should say that I happened to discover myself.

I’d stand at the front of the classroom, teaching my primaryschool charges basic facts about language, life, the world, and I’d find that at the same time I was teaching myself these basic facts all over again—filtered through the eyes and minds of these children. Done the right way, this was a refreshing experience. Profound, even. I got along well with my pupils, their mothers, and my fellow teachers.

Still the basic questions tugged at me: Who am I? What am I searching for? Where am I going?

The closest I came to answering these questions was when I talked to Sumire. More than talking about myself, though, I listened attentively to her, to what she said. She threw all sorts of questions my way, and if I couldn’t come up with an answer, or if my response didn’t make sense, you’d better believe she let me know. Unlike other people she honestly, sincerely wanted to hear what I had to say. I did my best to answer her, and our conversations helped me open up more about myself to her—and, at the same time, to myself.

We used to spend hours talking. We never got tired of talking, never ran out of topics—novels, the world, scenery, language. Our conversations were more open and intimate than any lovers’.

I imagined how wonderful it would be if indeed we could be lovers. I longed for the warmth of her skin on mine. I pictured us married, living together. But I had to face the fact that Sumire had no such romantic feelings for me, let alone sexual interest. Occasionally she’d stay over at my apartment after we’d talked into the small hours, but there was never even the slightest hint of romance. Come 2 or 3 a.m. and she’d yawn, crawl into bed, sink her face into my pillow, and fall fast asleep. I’d spread out some bedding on the floor and lie down, but I couldn’t sleep, my mind full of fantasies, confused thoughts, self-loathing. Sometimes the inevitable physical reactions would cause me grief, and I’d lie awake in misery until dawn. It was hard to accept that she had almost no feelings, maybe none at all, for me as a man. This hurt so bad at times it felt like someone was gouging out my guts with a knife. Still, the time I spent with her was more precious than anything. She helped me forget the undertone of loneliness in my life. She expanded the outer edges of my world, helped me draw a deep, soothing breath. Only Sumire could do that for me.

In order to ease the pain and, I hoped, eliminate any sexual tension between me and Sumire, I started sleeping with other women. I’m not saying I was a big hit with women; I wasn’t. I wasn’t what you’d call a ladies’ man, and laid no claim to any special charms. For whatever reason, though, some women were attracted to me, and I discovered that if I let things take their course it wasn’t so hard to get them to sleep with me.

These little flings never aroused much passion in me; they were, at most a kind of comfort.

I didn’t hide my affairs from Sumire. She didn’t know every little detail, just the basic outlines. It didn’t seem to bother her. If there was anything in my affairs that was troubling, it was the fact that the women were all older and either were married or had fiancés or steady boyfriends. My most recent partner was the mother of one of my pupils. We slept together about twice a month.

“That may be the death of you,” Sumire warned me once. And I agreed. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

One Saturday at the beginning of July my class had an outing. I took all 35 of my pupils mountain climbing in Okutama. The day began with an air of happy excitement, only to descend into total chaos. When we reached the summit, two children discovered they’d forgotten to pack their lunches in their backpacks. There weren’t any shops around, so I had to split my own nori-maki lunch the school had provided. Which left me with nothing to eat. Someone gave me some chocolate, but that was all I had the whole day. On top of which one girl said she couldn’t walk any more, and I had to carry her piggyback all the way down the mountain. Two boys started to scuffle, half in fun, and one of them fell and banged his head on a rock. He got a slight concussion and a heavy nosebleed. Nothing critical, but his shirt was covered in blood as if he’d been in a massacre. Like I said, total chaos.

When I got home I was as exhausted as an old railway sleeper. I took a bath, downed a cold drink, snuggled into bed too tired to think, turned off the light, and settled into a peaceful sleep. And then the phone rang: a call from Sumire. I looked at my bedside clock. I’d only slept for about an hour. But I didn’t grumble. I was too tired to complain. Some days are like that.

“Can I see you tomorrow afternoon?” she asked.

My woman friend was coming to my place at 6 p.m. She was supposed to park her red Toyota Celica a little way down the road. “I’m free till four,” I said.

Sumire had on a sleeveless white blouse, a navy-blue mini skirt, and a tiny pair of sunglasses. Her only accessory was a small plastic hairclip. An altogether simple outfit. She wore almost no make-up, exposed to the world in her natural state. Somehow, though, I didn’t recognize her at first. It had only been three weeks since we last met, but the girl sitting across from me at the table looked like someone who belonged to an entirely different world from the Sumire I knew. To put it mildly, she was thoroughly beautiful. Something inside her was blossoming.

I ordered a small glass of draught beer, and she asked for grape juice.

“I hardly recognize you these days,” I said.

“It’s that season,” she said disinterestedly, sipping at her drink through a straw.

“What season?” I asked.

“A delayed adolescence, I guess. When I get up in the morning and see my face in the mirror, it looks like someone else’s. If I’m not careful, I might end up left behind.”

“So wouldn’t it be better to just let it go, then?” I said.

“But if I lost myself, where could I go?”

“If it’s for a couple of days, you can stay at my place. You’d always be welcome—the you who lost you.”

Sumire laughed.

“All joking aside,” she said, “where in the world could I be heading?”

“I don’t know. Look on the bright side—you’ve stopped smoking, you’re wearing nice clean clothes—even your socks match now—and you can speak Italian. You’ve learned how to judge wines, use a computer, and at least for now go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. You must be heading somewhere.”

“But I still can’t write a line.”

“Everything has its ups and downs.”

Sumire screwed up her lips. “Would you call what I’m going through a defection?”

“Defection?” For a moment I couldn’t see what she meant.

“Defection. Betraying your beliefs and convictions.”

“You mean getting a job, dressing nicely, and giving up writing novels?”

“Right.”

I shook my head. “You’ve always written because you wanted to. If you don’t want to any more, why should you? Do you think your not writing is going to cause a village to burn to the ground? A ship to sink? The tides to get messed up? Or set the revolution back five years? Hardly. I don’t think anybody’s going to label that defection.”

“So what should I call it?”

I shook my head again. “The word defection’s too oldfashioned. Nobody uses it any more. Go to some leftover commune, maybe, and people might still use the word. I don’t know the details, but if you don’t want to write any longer, that’s up to you.”

“Commune? Do you mean the places Lenin made?”

“Those are called kolkhoz. There aren’t any left, though.”

“It’s not like I want to give up writing,” Sumire said. She thought for a moment. “It’s just that when I try to write, I can’t. I sit down at my desk and nothing comes—no ideas, no words, no scenes. Zero. Not too long ago I had a million things to write about. What in the world’s happening to me?”

“You’re asking me?”

Sumire nodded.

I took a sip of my cold beer and gathered my thoughts. “I think right now it’s like you’re positioning yourself in a new fictional framework. You’re preoccupied with that, so there’s no need to put your feelings into writing. Besides, you’re too busy.”

“Do you do that? Put yourself inside a fictional framework?”

“I think most people live in a fiction. I’m no exception. Think of it in terms of a car’s transmission. It’s like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything’s all nicely in sync. That’s how you keep your fragile body intact. Does this make any sense?”

Sumire gave a small nod. “And I’m still not completely adjusted to that new framework. That’s what you’re saying?”

“The biggest problem right now is that you don’t know what sort of fiction you’re dealing with. You don’t know the plot; the style’s still not set. The only thing you do know is the main character’s name. Nevertheless, this new fiction is reinventing who you are. Give it time, it’ll take you under its wing, and you may very well catch a glimpse of a new world. But you’re not there yet, which leaves you in a precarious position.”

“You mean I’ve taken out the old transmission, but haven’t quite finished bolting down the new one? And the engine still’s running. Right?”

“You could put it that way.”

Sumire made her usual sullen face and tapped her straw on the hapless ice in her drink. Finally she looked up.

“I understand what you mean by precarious. Sometimes I feel so—I don’t know—lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.”

“Like a little lost Sputnik?”

“I guess so.”

“But you do have Miu,” I said.

“At least for now.”

For a while silence reigned.

“Do you think Miu is seeking that, too?” I asked.

Sumire nodded. “I believe she is. Probably as much as I am.”

“Physical aspects included?”

“It’s hard to say. I can’t get a handle on it yet. What her feelings are, I mean. Which makes me feel lost and confused.”

“A classical conundrum,” I said.

In place of an answer, Sumire screwed up her lips again.

“But as far as you’re concerned,” I said, “you’re ready to go.”

Sumire nodded once, unequivocally. She couldn’t have been more serious. I sank back deep into my chair and clasped my hands behind my head.

“After all this, don’t start to hate me, okay?” Sumire said. Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

“After all this, I won’t start to hate you.”

The next time I saw Sumire was two weeks later, on a Sunday, when I helped her move. She’d decided to move all of a sudden, and I was the only one who came to help. Other than books, she owned very little, and the whole procedure was over before we knew it. One good thing about being poor, at least.

I borrowed a friend’s Toyota minivan and transported her things over to her new place in Yoyogi-Uehara. The apartment wasn’t so new or much to look at, but compared to her old wooden building in Kichijoji—a place that should be on a list of designated historical sites—it was definitely a step up. An estate agent friend of Miu’s had located the place for her; despite its convenient location, the rent was reasonable and it boasted a nice view. It was also twice as big as the old place. Definitely worth the move. Yoyogi Park was nearby, and she could walk to work if the mood took her.

“Starting next month I’ll be working five days a week,” she said. “Three days a week seems neither here nor there, and it’s easier to stand commuting if you do it every day. I have to pay more rent now, and Miu told me it’d be better all around if I became a full-time employee. I mean, if I stay at home, I still won’t be able to write.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I commented.

“My life will get more organized if I work every day, and I probably won’t be calling you up at 3.30 in the morning. One good point about it.”

“One very good point,” I said. “But it’s sad to think you’ll be living so far away from me.”

“You really feel that way?”

“Of course. Want me to rip out my heart and show you?”

I was sitting on the bare floor of the new apartment, leaning against the wall. Sumire was so bereft of household goods the new place looked deserted. There weren’t any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn’t fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a gang of intellectual refugees. The fulllength mirror on the wall, a moving present from Miu, was the only thing that stood out. The caws of crows filtered in from the park on the twilight breeze. Sumire sat down next to me.

“You know what?” she said.

“What?”

“If I were some good-for-nothing lesbian, would you still be my friend?”

“Whether you’re a good-for-nothing lesbian or not doesn’t matter. Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus ‘Mack the Knife’. That’s what my life would be like without you.”

Sumire narrowed her eyes and looked at me. “I’m not sure I follow your metaphor, but what you mean is you’d feel really lonely?”

“That’s about the size of it,” I said.

Sumire rested her head on my shoulder. Her hair was held back by a small hairclip, and I could see her small, nicely formed ears. Ears so pretty you’d think they had just been created. Soft, easily injured ears. I could feel her breath on my skin. She wore a pair of pink shorts and a faded, plain navyblue T-shirt. The outline of her small nipples showed through the shirt. There was a faint odour of sweat. Her sweat and mine, the two odours subtly combined.

I wanted to hold her so badly. I was seized by a violent desire to push her down on the floor right then and there. But I knew it would be wasted effort. Suddenly I found it hard to breathe, and my field of vision narrowed. Time had lost an exit and spun its wheels. Desire swelled up in my trousers, hard as a rock. I was confused, bewildered. I tried to get a grip. I breathed in a lungful of fresh air, closed my eyes, and in that incomprehensible darkness I slowly began counting. My urges were so overpowering that tears came to my eyes.

“I like you, too,” Sumire said. “In this whole big world, more than anyone else.”

“After Miu, you mean,” I said.

“Miu’s a little different.”

“How so?”

“The feelings I have for her are different from how I feel about you. What I mean is… hmm. How should I put it?”

“We good-for-nothing heterosexuals have a term for it,” I said. “We say you get a hard-on.”

Sumire laughed. “Other than wanting to be a novelist, I’ve never wanted anything so much. I’ve always been satisfied with exactly what I have. But now, right at this moment, I want Miu. Very, very much. I want to have her. Make her mine. I just have to. There are no other choices. Not one. I have no idea why things worked out like this. Does that… make sense?”

I nodded. My penis still maintained its overpowering rigidity, and I prayed that Sumire wouldn’t notice.

“There’s a great line by Groucho Marx,” I said. “‘She’s so in love with me she doesn’t know anything. That’s why she’s in love with me.’”

Sumire laughed.

“I hope things work out,” I said. “But try your best to stay alert. You’re still vulnerable. Remember that.”

Without a word, Sumire took my hand and gently squeezed it. Her small, soft hand had a faint sheen of sweat. I imagined her hand stroking my rock-hard penis. I tried not to think that, but couldn’t help it. As Sumire had said, there were no other choices. I imagined taking off her T-shirt, her shorts, her panties. Feeling her tight, taut nipples under my tongue. Spreading her legs wide, entering that wetness. Slowly, into the deep darkness within. It enticed me inside, enfolded me, then pushed me out… The illusion grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I closed my eyes tight again and let a concentrated clump of time wash over me. My face turned down, I waited patiently for the overheated air to blow above me and away.

“Why don’t we have dinner together?” she asked. But I had to take the minivan I borrowed back to Hino by the end of the day. More than anything else, though, I had to be alone with my violent urges. I didn’t want Sumire to get involved any more than she already was. I didn’t know how far I could control myself if she was beside me. Past the point of no return, and I might completely lose it.

“Well, let me treat you to a nice dinner sometime soon, then. Tablecloths, wine. The works. Maybe next week,” Sumire promised as we said goodbye. “Keep your diary free for me next week.”

“Okay,” I said.

I glanced at the full-length mirror as I passed by and saw my face. It had a strange expression. It was my face, all right, but where did that look come from? I didn’t feel like retracing my steps and investigating further.

Sumire stood at the entrance to her new place to see me off. She waved goodbye, something she rarely did.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be. At the beginning of August I received a long letter from her.