You know, if that’s the case, you really should’ve called the office. You’d have been able to at least just talk then, I think.
What? And have an involved conversation like this one? Over your office phone? Impossible.
But the details don’t matter, right? At least we’d be able to make small talk.
Jumping to sarcasm again, are we? It just goes to show that you lack conscience. For some reason Eriko said this in an awfully steely tone.
I decided to change the subject. Are you on a break today?
I’ve got a photo shoot now, and I won’t be done until evening. What about you?
I’m on holiday.
Shall we meet somewhere?
Not tonight. I’d like to take it easy, you know, because of the tooth.
I’m on leave tomorrow—want to catch a movie?
Sorry, I’ve got something planned for tomorrow.
Work?
No, not work.
Going somewhere?
Uh huh. Where?
Don’t know yet.
Traveling alone?
Yeah.
Is that fun?
Not in the least.
So why go?
Hell, I don’t know! No reason, really. Travel doesn’t have to be about having fun all the time, does it? What about you? What’s your plan?
Hmm, let’s see. I suppose I’ll go see a movie after all.
Now that’s what I call not having fun, seeing a movie alone.
Not necessarily. In fact, you can enjoy movies and plays more freely when you’re alone—you don’t have to have any scruples or anything.
If that were the case, I wondered why she’d wanted me to accompany her a while back.
Why don’t you ask someone else to come with?
You want me to?
Not really, but I thought it’d be nice if you went out with a friend or two, you know.
Well, why don’t you go out with your friends too then?
I don’t have any.
You know that’s not true.
It’s true. I’ve never had a single friend. You, on the other hand, probably have plenty.
Why do you say that?
Say what?
Why does it seem to you like I have a lot of friends?
Well, don’t you?
That’s not the point. I just want to know the reason why you think that.
No particular reason. It just seems that way.
You’re lying!
About what?
About the fact that you don’t have any reason. I bet you don’t actually believe in friends, do you? I bet you think anyone convinced that he or she has a lot of friends is just a mindless fool.
That’s not true. You know there’s a saying that goes ‘The bells that bless romantic love are the death knell of friendship.’ I just thought it’d be better if you went out with your friends sometimes because you start losing them by getting too absorbed in romance.
Here we go again with the mumbo jumbo.
It’s not mumbo jumbo! Even Francis Bacon said, ‘It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends (that is, to lack true friends); without which the world is but a wilderness.’ There’s also a quote that says something along the lines that love and friendship repel each other.
Francis Bacon, my ass, Eriko said, finally laughing.
I laughed as well and added, But most importantly Aristotle put it like this: ‘A friend to all is a friend to none.’
You see what I mean? You’re making fun of me after all.
All right, I’ll take back the word ‘plenty.’
So what does that make someone like you, someone without a single friend?
That makes me, as Confucius said, ‘A clear stream that’s avoided by fish.’
Huh?
It means common people avoid clearheaded, wise men like yours truly, which is why I’m friendless.
You’re such a twit.
I suppose so.
At this point I suddenly felt something like a fragment of a genuine feeling welling up inside me. It was a conviction that this presence called Eriko, who didn’t mind all the random back-and-forths we were having then, was a very important friend. But I held back from saying so, since it felt as though she’d, on the contrary, take offense if I did.
Well, talk to you again next week. This time I’ll call you for sure. Let’s meet somewhere.
Eriko muttered in a tiresome manner, I don’t know, maybe I’ll take the day off today. I don’t feel like going to work right now.
I’m sure, I chimed in.
Why? Eriko said suddenly in a brittle voice again.
Why what?
How could you say ‘I’m sure’ so offhandedly?
Because work isn’t fun. I for one think about ditching the office every day, and I mean every day!
That’s not what I’m talking about.
Guess you’re upset again.
Thanks to you.
If so, I apologize. I meant no offense. It’s just a matter of semantics, really—just a misunderstanding. Please don’t get so excited. Here’s another saying: ‘Without any intention to forgive each other’s faults, friendship can never be realized.’
I was fed up with the conversation by then and was half-laughing, hoping to calm her down. But this breezy manner of mine only backfired and she ended up getting even more excited.
What are you saying? I’m not your friend? Her voice kept getting sharper and sharper.
But Chekhov says, ‘A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages—first an acquaintance, next a mistress, and only then a friend.’
"Oh my God! What’s wrong with you? Do you really think I want to listen to all that laughable smart talk of yours, so full of jumbled up knowledge? Why can’t you give me straight answers—you know, the serious kind, in a sincere way?"
At this juncture I just wanted to hang up the phone. Partly for this reason, I decided to mount a somewhat decisive counterattack. I was also sure the reason why Eriko had suddenly flown into such a rage was because her sixth sense had detected—like sonar picking up a faint vibration—the genuine feeling of friendship I’d experienced only a few minutes ago.
Eriko, I’ve been giving you serious answers. But remember what you said about talking? That what’s important isn’t the content of a conversation? In the end all language ever really amounts to is a medley of jumbled up knowledge and information. And it’s not just me. That’s the way it is for absolutely everybody. You yourself said that what counts is the act of talking—the fact that we engage in the act, that we experience it, right? So why get upset? By your own account, there’s no need at all to get mad over anything I say, and basically, there’s no way you and I can ever, as you put it, understand each other through the medium of language alone, right? But all you keep doing is asking, why, why, why, and, frankly, it’s starting to get on my nerves a bit. In the first place, you never even tried to understand why I stopped contacting you for a while. All you did was treat me with contempt. If as you say the actual experience of talking is important while what’s actually being talked about is immaterial, why’d you phone me to talk like this in the first place? You know, if you really want to talk you should just come see me in person. Getting together anytime this week wouldn’t have been a problem. All you had to do was come visit me in my office. It’s not as if I’m trying to run away or hide from you after all. You know why we end up having this kind of idiotic quarrel? It’s because when you want to talk to me, you simply place a thoughtless phone call. Let me ask you this. When you talk about the importance of the act of talking to each other, you mean the importance of the act of talking itself, right? So if that’s so important, we should be talking to each other face-to-face, right? As long as we’re talking over the phone like this, we can’t check each other out, monitor changes in our facial expressions and body language, the look in each other’s eyes even, nor can we detect each other’s breathing or the way we s
mell—over the phone, it’s mostly just meaningless words going back and forth; words for mindlessly swapping pieces of random information and half-baked feelings from the gut. But while you say the content of what you talk about isn’t important on the one hand, on the other hand, you find fault in a single phrase and begin to criticize me and talk to me as if I hated you. So what the hell do you mean when you say, ‘give me straight answers?’ I mean, what’s up with that? You’re the one who’s being insincere, who’s not playing it straight. Besides, I’ve apologized properly and if you still need to lash out so much, you should’ve never called me like this to begin with. And what’s up with the ‘I’m not your friend’ line? Just what is it that you’re saying I am to you then? If what you want to say is that I’m your lover, why don’t you first of all clearly define in your head what the difference between a friend and a lover is before you say such such a thing? For your information, I consider you a true friend of mine, and to put it simply, in true Chekhovian fashion, you’re my best friend, and, right now, I even think of you as my lover. Of course, that’s not all there is to what I think about you.
Eriko was silent at the other end of the line. But it didn’t feel as though she sympathized with my views. She was most likely confused, terribly weary of being argued down by my rather unusual logic.
My tooth’s starting to ache, I said, so I’m hanging up. Hey, look, I was wrong. I’ll make amends. I’ll be sure to call you next week.
I pushed the End Call button and turned the cell phone off, just in case.
Moments later I poured myself more coffee, which had completely cooled down, and had a few sips while gazing at the view outside for a while.
By the way, regarding the proverb I quoted by the German Nobel Prize-wining author Paul Heyse? The one that went ‘The bells that bless romantic love are the death knell of friendship’? Well, I have to confess that it wasn’t altogether accurate. The correct quote is ‘The bells that bless marriage are the death knell of friendship,’ but for the life of me, I couldn’t utter the word marriage to Eriko, so I just replaced that bit with the phrase romantic love before delivering it.
But in the end I realized, looking out at the view beyond the veranda, that such a concern was unnecessary and not worth giving a damn about.
4
THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY I was in my office until late, reading a manuscript before setting out for home on the last train. As I walked down Kiyosumi Street from Morishita Station toward my apartment, I was thinking about this manuscript. The author was a female nonfiction writer who, when she was thirty-nine years old, saw her mother suffer a cerebral hemorrhage that robbed her of the ability to move and speak. The manuscript painstakingly relates the author’s thirteen-year battle to look after her mother, waged together with her aged father, before her mother passed away half a year ago—the work was, in part, as powerful and moving as a fictional first-person narrative—an I novel.
The final chapter vividly describes the author’s experience of attending to her mother until her final moments.
Late at night, in a dim-lit room, I was alone with my mother, seated by her bedside, rubbing her hands. Her chest was making a heavy sound like the one a pair of bellows makes. She seemed to be in constant pain. Although nobody said so, I was aware that Mother was approaching death. She no longer responded to anything I said, and her facial expression didn’t change anymore. Her bulging eyes were staring vacantly into thin air. Mother seemed like she wanted to take a rest now. I imagined she wanted to fall into a peaceful sleep. But it was as though her body didn’t allow her, as though it was forcibly detaining her, saying not yet, not yet.
But Mother seemed to be suffering now. She even seemed to be saying, ‘Enough already.’ I breathed in sync with Mother’s heavy breathing but couldn’t share the pain with her. Mother was fighting all by herself. From start to finish, it was a lonely battle.
I could no longer tell her to hold on. If it were up to me, I’d have removed the breathing tube reaching into her windpipe, cut off her oxygen supply, and ended it all for her right there and then. Mother was just running alone toward a goal she could never turn back from. As I continued to watch her suffer in such a hopeless state, the concept of time collapsed in my mind and I lost all track of it.
It was around half past seven in the morning when the doctor called. After I reported that there was no change in her condition, that she constantly seemed to be having difficulty breathing, he told me he’d dispatch a nurse first thing in the morning.
It happened soon after that. Mother’s breathing became heavier, more intense. She was gasping for breath, sounding like a locomotive train desperately climbing a steep slope, sputtering, her entire body rising as her chest heaved. I was overwhelmed by the intensity and before I knew it I threw myself at my recumbent mother and embraced her, desperately calling out to her. In my arms Mother breathed deeply, her chest creaking. And then, suddenly—like a locomotive suddenly coming to a halt—she ceased to breathe. For an instant, the room became enveloped in silence, and then the tube slipped from her lips.
Papa, Mother’s stopped breathing.
Father was standing there, stunned.
Is that so? he finally said.
How hard it is to grow old, to die—how heavily it weighs on us. Whether your family is by your side, or for that matter whether anyone is by your side, in the end it’s a lonely battle, one that each and every one of us must ride out on our own.
And that’s why, on that day, Mother had taught me, and only me, what dying is all about, telling me, in her own way, This is what it is to die, my dear.
Don’t worry, mom. I can, surely. Just like you, I can too, in the same way, I can.
I read this prose again and again in the office, breathlessly. The author says that death in the end is a solitary battle that everyone must ride out on their own, adding her declaration that she too could brave her own death. But then it occurred to me: if death were a battle, then exactly what purpose did it serve and for whom? Furthermore, what did it really mean to ride out death on your own?
I wondered whether Momma would be able to ride out on her own—like this author’s mother, or even the author herself—this very difficult thing called death.
Pondering this as I walked along, I felt my chest tighten. Death must actually be a phenomenon of no great significance in the scheme of things—nothing really worth bothering about; the suffering expressed during death is stage-managed so that what’s essentially just a turning point ends up becoming a heroic tale of a bitter and hard struggle, and all those accumulated memories of the past end up luring the dying into a deep swamp of regret and
lingering affection, dragging along those standing near them.
But that’s just a peripheral effect, as it were, of the phenomenon called death; it’s not the thing itself at all.
Death’s true substance is found in its inevitability: the fact that it happens, without fail, to everyone. In other words, it’s something tantamount to birth: an absolutely singular phenomenon. Beyond that, nobody really knows anything. If I were asked to give an accurate description of death, I’d have to say that it’s nothing more than an insignificant, common, and ordinary event after all.
But I could never leave it just at that. I believe that we all must make strenuous efforts to consider what lies beyond, even if it’s impossible to do so. If death were something to ride out or survive—as this author suggests—we must grasp by any means possible the identity or true nature of the thing to be found at the end of the ride.
I became lost in thought, just thinking how absolutely impossible such a thing is for Momma to achieve, that she isn’t capable of riding out death safely.
When I arrived in front of my apartment building, there was light spilling out from the window of my room on the third floor. I assumed Raita or Honoka had dropped in for the first time in ages.
But when I pulled the doorknob, I found that the door was locked.
I ne
ver locked my room. I didn’t even lock it from the inside when I was alone in there. I never felt the need to; I’d never lived in a residence where I was likely to be inconvenienced by a break-in. When I was a child though, when I lived together with my mother and younger sister in an apartment in Kita Kyushu, I admit I used to be in the habit of locking up on account of the fact that the apartment was a predominantly female-run household. But ever since I graduated high school and came to Tokyo I’ve never used this thing called a key. Back in my college days when I went about my days frantically trying to scrape together money to cover my school fees and living expenses, I’d never keep any valuables in my room—those personal effects that’d get me into trouble if they ever got stolen. And even after I found a job and began to lead the workaday life of a wage earner, the key still proved unnecessary because I’d stash valuables like my bankbook and signature seal inside my locker at the office.
However, in the case of Honoka, I’d strictly told her to keep the door locked and the chain set in place whenever she was alone in my apartment. It was only natural that I should.
After sounding the chime, the door opened a few moments later.
Welcome home, sensei. It was Honoka, whom I hadn’t seen in about two weeks.
Yeah, thanks, I said as she released the door chain. It’s been a while! Have you been well?
Honoka mustered a vague smile, her long hair wet, suggesting she’d just had a shower. I entered the apartment and went straight into the eight-mat Western-style room instead of following her into the kitchen.
I got out of my suit and headed for the bathroom to take a shower. After washing my hair and body I changed into my loungewear and then opened the door to the kitchen.
Honoka was writing something at the table, several books spread out before her. When I tried to take some beer from the refrigerator she spoke from behind me.
There’s some salad and stew in there. You can have them, if you like.
Yeah, I answered, grabbing a can of beer and two small plastic-wrapped bowls before putting them on the table and sitting down on a chair opposite her. Honoka didn’t even lift her face, her pen racing across the writing pad.
The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside Page 4
