I sensed a presence before the desk, and when I looked up I saw Eriko standing there, picking up one of the books, holding it with both hands, and looking at it. It was a hardcover copy of Mishima’s Runaway Horses, a first edition released more than thirty years ago, which I’d found in a secondhand bookstore in Hongo.
When Eriko became aware that my eyes were trained on her, she looked my way to say, Mishima, right? I put my pen down, leaned back in my chair, and after briefly explaining what I was doing, I asked whether she liked Mishima. Eriko just smiled without answering. So I asked her whether she knew what Mishima had said to his mother the night before he died. As expected, Eriko didn’t say anything; she just faintly shook her head.
"You know, he’d said, ‘So far, I haven’t been able achieve a single thing I’ve set out to do.’ Funny, isn’t it? In the summer when he died he’d written in an essay, ‘When I think about the twenty-five years inside me, I’m surprised by how empty they are, so much so that I can hardly say that I’ve lived. I just passed through those years, pinching my nose.’ He adds, ‘I’m fully vulgar, and even endowed with the gambling spirit to an excessive degree, yet I can’t put myself into a state of mind that would help me engage in what is commonly known as play. I wonder why? It puzzles me so much I’ve come to doubt myself, my heart. For the most part I don’t love life.’
Among Mishima’s writings, I like this one best of all. What about you?
Eriko finally opened her mouth to say she was interested in knowing what the French scholar’s interpretation of Mishima’s death was.
Out of all the dull things he said in the interview, only two things stood out for me.
I slowly leafed through the thick stack of shorthand notes to the beginning and started to explain. One was the fact that, although Mishima appeared to take no notice back then of the intellectuals who used to mock him as a right-wing buffoon, in reality he was stewing inside, finding them intolerable. And that by actually dying, he’d compellingly asked, With my corpse before you, do you still intend to say that I’m just acting in a play?
The other thing was a typically French observation, suggesting that since Mishima was homosexual, his suicide by disembowelment—his seppuku—was in the end an act meant to establish his own sexual identity. As evidence of this, the scholar highlights the fact that when Mishima made his speech from the balcony of the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Force in Ichigaya, he made frequent use of the line, Can you still call yourself a man?!, arguing that we should consider this line as a question being posed to himself, rather than to the soldiers. For this reason, he asserts that Mishima was, in effect, asking himself, Am I man? Am I man?
As I babbled on leisurely, it struck me as terribly funny that a gorgeous woman was quietly devouring me with her eyes, with a copy of Mishima’s Runaway Horses in hand, eagerly listening to what was essentially tripe.
I asked her once again if she liked Runaway Horses. Eriko tilted her head slightly and began to leaf through the book. Her eyes seemed to be meaningfully scanning the text, but at the same time, she also seemed to be feigning interest, so I was getting pretty irritated. I suddenly stood up then, taking the book away from her and telling her I only liked one part of it, before turning to the page where that part appeared and handing it back to her.
It was the part where Shigekuni Honda encounters Isao Iinuma, and comes to believe that Isao is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae.
I often remember even to this day the episode written in there about the four successive existences. One of them is the existence between death and the next birth, when the spirit, assuming the form of a child, has a glimpse of a man and woman copulating. Fascinated by the body of the shameless woman who would become his mother, while harboring resentment toward the man who would become his father, as soon as the father ejaculates his impurity into the mother’s womb, the child sees his opportunity to get reincarnated. This story strikes something of a chord in me. It’s probably the only part of the book that smacks of realism.
When Eriko heard me say this she laughed, so I added that I didn’t believe there was another writer who was as dedicated as Mishima was to the quest for the truth about this world, even though it was in vain.
In a slightly discontented tone, Eriko said she wanted to know why I thought so.
Noticing how confident she looked, as if to test me, I got suddenly annoyed, thinking to myself—she’s been standing there, not saying much herself, yet she’s got this suggestive manner about her. What the hell’s going on?
So I told her that there was no particular reason; I’d said so because I simply thought so, but it came out, even to myself, sounding terribly blunt and cold. I looked away from Eriko and returned my gaze to the manuscript paper. I then sensed her quietly placing the book on the desk before leaving for her assigned place.
Thereafter, our eyes would meet now and then. That is, Eriko would be constantly looking in my direction, and, sensing her eyes were on me, I’d look up sometimes. Whenever our eyes met like that, Eriko would give a small smile; her timing was off, though. After a few more such awkward moments I began to slightly wave my hand in return, but such gestures never got us talking to each other again.
9
IT HAPPENED TWO YEARS ago, on an October day, as I was walking around the city of Tokyo on business, utterly exhausted. I hadn’t slept a wink the previous night, troubled by the symptoms of gastrospasm, a chronic, neurological disease involving stomach cramps. In the morning I was in the National Diet Library looking for source materials on the Russian government’s economic policy for a paper a certain university professor was attempting to write. In the afternoon, I paid a visit to the Textbook Administration Division of the Ministry of Education to report on some issues for a paper being prepared by a different professor, concerning high-school textbooks on Japanese history. After that, I met up with a farmer from Akita, with whom I had a passing acquaintance, at a hotel in Yaesu where we exchanged opinions on the post-liberalization challenges faced by rice farmers before I left to visit a newspaper firm in Otemachi, where I interviewed, for approximately an hour, a certain figure who was said at the time to be the prime minister’s brain.
Although I’d left this newspaper about five in the evening, I was so tired my gait was unsteady. Still, I had to go to the office of a design firm to receive a photogravure whose layout I’d asked them to handle, so I hastily made a connection to a subway line from Otemachi and went to the station near the design office.
And then, by pure chance, I ran into Eriko.
The station was a hub for many metro lines, and since the line I’d used was a new one, the platform was located at the station’s deepest underground level. Access to the ground was possible only via one of four adjacent escalators, alternately moving up or down.
I stepped onto the ascending escalator with downcast eyes, my head drooping, the tie I loosened feeling too heavy around my neck. When I casually looked up the well-lit stairs above my head, after surrendering myself to the sedate motion of the escalator, I noticed just then a couple stepping onto the descending escalator to my right. One of them was Eriko, dressed in bright red clothes, and standing next to her was a fortyish mustachioed man, wearing a gray suit that clearly advertised, at a glance, his involvement in the fashion business. There was a distance of around thirty meters between us, but nobody stood in between to obscure the view, so Eriko also noticed me instantly as she gradually approached, her eyes motionless and fixed on me in the usual way. It was the first time that I’d seen Eriko’s figure from such an angle, but the view of her, her jawline, was like beholding before your very eyes the perfect curve found in a Lautrec painting in all its exquisite beauty—a detail that had been lost on me whenever she came to my office, wearing incredibly thick layers of makeup that made her look artificial.
I was shaken up a little, running into her so unexpectedly; it also didn’t help that I was dead tired. So the moment I thought I saw my reflection in Eri
ko’s eyes—the reflection of a young office worker in a tired-looking suit with a sweaty face turned up vacantly, burdened with a big bag hanging down from his shoulder, which clumsily bulged with the things he’d shoved inside—thick wads of photocopying paper, a tape recorder, an automatic camera, and several notebooks of varying kinds—I averted my eyes and looked down. But at the same time I began to feel something like a resentment brewing inside me toward Eriko’s beauty—a beauty that made someone like me—someone who had nothing to do with her—feel small. It was audacious of her, after all, to remain nonchalant while casting a piercing glance on another person’s face. I lifted my eyes.
Something white jumped into view.
It was Eriko’s right palm, resting on the black rubber of the escalator’s handrail, the nails of her shapely, slender fingers manicured with a thin enamel, shining. I consciously and slowly traced my eyes from her hand to her shoulder, to her throat, and then to her face before finally looking into her eyes, deadpan, fully returning her stare. The ten or so seconds that followed, while we were approaching each other, seemed to last an eternity. The moment we were in alignment, when my hand was thirty centimeters apart from hers, I reached out toward her palm resting on the handrail sliding in the opposite direction. Eriko attempted to swing it away at once, but I seized it before she could; her palm was surprisingly soft.
After I let go and the two of them had passed me by, I heard the man next to Eriko say in a wildly impulsive, high-pitched voice, What the hell just happened?
I met Eriko at the office after that, but we didn’t talk.
It was only a month and a half after the chance encounter that we had an opportunity for the first time to have a lengthy, prolonged exchange.
A year-end party was held annually in honor of a certain female author, and it was held that year, as usual, in
Tokyo on an evening in the beginning of December. The writer had specially traveled from the countryside to attend the event. The draw was a restaurant in the outskirts of Roppongi, which had been entirely reserved to make it a closed-door affair.
Praised to high heaven by industry insiders about her serial novel in progress or her other works adapted for film, the kimono-clad author, on cloud nine by then, would get drunk, watching the party guests belt out a tune, one after another. That’s what the usual proceedings were like.
For the occasion, every publisher, scrambling for the rights to her manuscript, attempted to send in as many of its own people as possible. Naturally, since the target of their attention—the author—was a single, middle-aged woman, they’d bring out the youngest male employees they could. Consequently, I was nominated to attend last year.
I was near the entrance, seated at a corner table, on a round red chair that resembled a stool for a dressing table, taking sips from a glass of whiskey and water, when Eriko entered the restaurant, accompanied by a young man who seemed my age.
No sooner had the singing begun than every VIP of every company had finished taking turns grabbing the microphone to offer their greetings. There were perhaps fifty people gathered there. A band had been specially arranged, providing accompaniment upon request.
When Eriko and her date arrived, the publishing director of Kobunsha was just in the middle of singing a Frank Nagai tune. Urged by her companion, Eriko sat by the writer, exchanging some pleasantries with her for a while, as if the two were old acquaintances.
Even in the dimly lit restaurant, Eriko’s beauty stood out and, as usual, I could see many eyes drifting in her direction.
After gazing at her for about five minutes, I gave myself up to alcohol. At times like this I made it a point to get drunk early and keep my eyes and ears closed.
Around an hour later the party had reached the stage where all the veteran editors were done singing, and the young ones began to be called out to appear on stage, against their will. They called out my name once too, but I was seated far away and declined with a shake of my head. Fortunately, that was the end of that, since a guy from some other company cut in and started to sing of his own accord.
That’s when Eriko, having apparently noticed for the first time that I was there—when my name had come up—approached me. But I’d completely forgotten about her, having had plenty to drink by then.
Standing before an empty seat, she asked if she could sit next to me. I ignored her for a while, after lying that the seat was taken by a girl who had gone to the restroom. But she didn’t look like she was going to leave me alone, so I reluctantly raised my head and suggested moving over together to a vacant counter nearby if she liked. In one long pull I drained the rest of my glass of double whisky and water, which the bartender had made for me just a moment earlier, and stood up, feeling somewhat unusually wobbly.
We sat down on the stools at the counter, side by side, our backs turned to the stage, and began to talk.
The first thing Eriko said was a question: she wanted to know why I hadn’t sung a while ago when I’d been named. Even I rolled my eyes at this question, and even though I was feeling unwell, partly thanks to my plastered state of mind, I nonetheless said, I don’t think it’s any of your business, but if you must know, it’s because I’m exceptionally tone-deaf.
By then I was getting so liquored up that my entire life was starting to drag me down, so I just began to speak about how music had never been one of my fortes, raising a few examples in the process. In grade school, the teachers used to always make us take these song tests at the end of the term, so I had to sing in front of everyone. For each such test, I’d practice desperately the night before, but just when I’d reach about the fifth measure, the teacher would invariably stop me to remark, Rearranging the song without permission, are we, Matsubara? Laughed at by the entire class, I’d feel ashamed and want to cry.
"And it wasn’t just the singing! I also sucked at playing the harmonica, the flute, the organ; everything was way out of tune. At the school arts festival when I was in the fifth grade, my entire class performed Friedrich Silcher’s Die Lorelei together, purely by whistling, but I sucked at that as well, incapable of whistling satisfactorily. Here, look at my front teeth; there’s a huge gap between them even when my jaws are closed, right? The sound just escapes, turning my whistling into a travesty. Come practice time I’d always fake-whistle and fool everybody. I thought I’d get found out one day, though, feeling uneasy for nearly a month. In fact, I got so paranoid I thought I
was going to die. Really. And because I got so worried, in the end, my stomach started aching in the morning, and I was unable to go to school for some time. But on the day of the arts festival, my teacher took the trouble to come pick me up, insisting that all the effort I’d put in would be wasted if I didn’t show up—so I ended up delivering a performance after all, whistling—no, actually hissing—through my breezy dental arrangement. Totally pathetic, right?"
Incidentally, I also informed her that I’ve always been timid since I was a child, and that my friends used to tease me and make me cry all the time. To illustrate, I made up a few examples again. Eriko laughed at each one of them before remarking, Where does a spineless person like you get the nerve to touch me the other day at the subway station?
She was being so predictable I found it funny. I told her that her palm was very soft and pleasant to the touch, as if the bones were as pliable as a straw. Eriko then told me that after the incident she was badly razzed by the designer acquaintance standing next to her. I nodded, sure that that must have been the case, before going on to explain that there was no particular motive behind my gesture so she shouldn’t be concerned, and begged her pardon if it had upset her.
You’re different, Eriko suddenly said, adding that the moment she saw me for the first time at my company she felt there was something slightly off about me, that I was the only odd man out in there. I responded by telling her that it was just her imagination, that it only seemed that way because she found it monotonous and boring to be in that office every day, so even a subt
le change in mood would prompt her to see me in such a light, and that was all. I then told her, based on my observations of her, that her present job didn’t seem to suit her at all, that I had been of this opinion for a long time.
Puzzled, Eriko wanted to know why, saying that it was the first time anyone had said such a thing. I said I just thought so, and added that only she knew best what the reason was. Then I asked her to refrain from using the word why in front of me because I found that word to be rather lacking in decorum.
Regardless of who you’re talking to, I explained, if someone doubts you, you should first of all carefully contemplate the reason for that doubt inside your own head, and only when you can’t come up with a decent answer yourself should you approach your doubter to ask ‘why.’ But, honestly, before you do, you should first take a day to come up with an explanation of your own to throw at the guy, to see how he’ll react. But you know something? If you really take the trouble to work out the reason yourself you’ll find that, in most cases, it’ll be unnecessary and meaningless to ask. Listen, you’re a grown woman, and you can’t expect this world to go on being a school forever—and no one’s obligated to be your teacher or anything like that either, you know.
Eriko was listening silently, but after I finished she asked if I wanted to drink some more, so I answered that I did. She left the counter and returned with a glass of whiskey for me and one for herself.
At that moment a certain editor in chief at my company’s magazine bellowed out my name from the stage. This man was sort of emceeing the occasion and he was the kind of character you often spotted in my line of work: an asinine fan of Ango Sakaguchi—the kind of manic and strung-out individual who was convinced that showing off one’s flaw, say an uptight, nervous disposition, was a defense mechanism. Apparently this editor was practicing the principles set out in Ango’s book, Playing Hysterically, but he simply struck me as an idiot and a royal pain in the ass.
The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside Page 10
