The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside
Page 17
I wondered why I was talking about all these things. Perhaps because the sight of this cheap apartment awakened a nostalgia in me, or perhaps I was moved by the light and wind and all too crystal-clear sky of the day. But then I had a thought. It occurred to me that I was confiding all these stories to Eriko—stories I’d never confided to a soul since coming to Tokyo—because I was happy, probably, and that feeling of happiness I was experiencing was probably quite substantial. What exactly was I so happy about? I knew immediately. I was terribly glad to
see Honoka, whom I hadn’t seen in a long while, looking happy for the first time. And I was also feeling deeply grateful to Eriko for helping Honoka become that way.
Must have been tough, Eriko said in a particularly relaxed tone.
"Yeah, it sure was. Even though I was born to a parent like that, I was honest and serious. During junior high, there was a time I badly wanted to become a juvenile delinquent, but my younger sister was there, and I never had fun strolling about town with the gang. I also did well in my studies, so in the end, I was lectured by my buddies
not to follow in their footsteps because I was different from them. I felt very lonely."
What swell friends you had!
Not really, I said, taking a deep breath and stretching, my head still on her lap. They were friends just for that time; I don’t have anything in common with them anymore.
I then looked up at Eriko’s beautiful face, only to see another face superimposed. It was the face of a certain person, who was totally different from Eriko in every possible way, including looks, age, and demeanor. Yet, there she was, perfectly superimposed over Eriko.
But, Eriko murmured, wearing a thin veil of a smile, I’m kind of ashamed.
About what?
Well, while you were going through hard times, I was leading an ordinary life, day to day, unable to do anything for you.
How could you? It’s not as if we could’ve met way back then.
I was laughing, but on the other hand, I felt she was right. Eriko was three years younger than me, and she’ll be twenty-seven this year. Just when she was leading a happy and blessed girlhood, I was accumulating formative years that I don’t care to remember anymore.
Ordinary, huh? I said. Ordinary family, ordinary life, ordinary youth—I envy all those things about you. Still, it frightens me, such ordinary happiness.
Frightens you? she said, suspicion appearing in her eyes.
Closing my eyes again, I breathed in the air of the quiet room through my nose. It smelled like dry grass.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything more frightening than the ordinary, because the ordinary sticks to you and never leaves, and the more ordinary you are the more difficult it gets for you to abandon yourself.
I then spoke for quite some time, keeping my eyes closed.
A great unhappiness makes it easy for you to renounce your despairing self, and a large happiness is always accompanied by an impulse to reject the much-too-happy person you find yourself to be. Frankly, in my childhood, I badly wanted to be reborn into a different family. I wished so many times to start over again. I wanted to become another person, and I had no regrets about my present self vanishing. I think it’s the same for other people who are also truly unhappy in their heart of hearts. When humans become filled with happiness, for some reason they want to freely give it away to others. But an ordinary, mediocre happiness isn’t like that. An ordinary happiness clings to you forever. Eventually, it begins to rot and make you sick. As long as you continue to indulge in ordinary happiness, you’ll never be able to change this thing called the self until the day you die; nor will you be able to abandon yourself. And when you’re like that, despite being able to have sympathy for another person’s misfortune, you can never have empathy. That’s because empathizing requires you to abandon yourself. Understanding another person isn’t about loving one another, sympathizing one-sidedly, or even being happy together. It’s about leaving yourself behind to become another self. Mediocrity makes that impossible, surely. You keep telling me that you want for us to understand each other, and that a relationship is meant to draw people closer to each other. But I don’t think people could ever understand each other by just getting close. If you really want to understand someone, you must completely abandon yourself and become that person. You must take in everything with that person’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, breathing with that person’s lungs, thinking with that person’s head, and feeling with that person’s heart. Only then can you for the first time draw another person’s happiness toward you and make it your own. But no one’s really capable of such a thing, let alone someone so steeped in ordinary happiness.
Eriko was listening to my talk in silence.
After my junior high school days ended, perhaps because my mother had, as might have been expected, begun to feel a little guilty, we moved to a municipal house in Kokura. But neither my sister nor I could open up to our mother. It must have been the same for Honoka as well; the bottom line was that it was too late.
I stood up and glanced at my watch; nearly an hour had passed already.
We better get going soon or else Raita and Honoka are going to get tired of waiting.
Standing up at the same time as me, Eriko grasped the palm of my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, Let’s do the best we can, you and me together, yeah?
Yeah, let’s, I said nodding, grasping her soft palm in return.
The flames of the bonfire were beyond expectation, flaring up so wildly that all of us simultaneously edged back nearly a meter to escape the gusting hot winds.
Raita’s old wooden desk and chair, bookshelf, manga books and magazines were all burning away in a magnificent blaze.
The four of us just stood there in silence for a while around the open-air fire, breathlessly transfixed, in the light of the afternoon, by the raging, semitransparent flames—which contained luminous, bright red inner cones—and by the emanating shimmering heat haze.
Raita’s apartment was in the neighborhood of a large metropolitan housing complex, standing in a cluttered area where stores, residences and plots of tillable land coexisted with each other. When we arrived there, most of the luggage had already been carried inside, and the only task remaining was to clear up some oversized refuse. Raita said he was planning on rearranging the apartment later at a leisurely pace with Honoka, so we all got in the pickup together and drove over to the scrapyard. Apparently, Nakagaki Industries was renting the land lot here, and situated on a fringe of its considerably spacious premises was a solitary shack, and in an adjacent parking lot, which was the only place where the land was leveled, there were parked a medium-sized excavator, a bulldozer, and three dump trucks. The rest of the place was dotted with piles of household scraps, large bundles of copper wire, old tires and rusted household electrical appliances, among other junk.
Raita unloaded some luggage from the pickup, picked out some combustible materials, and busily carried them over to a slightly sunken area in the middle of the lot. He then proceeded to unlock the door to the shack and bring out a polyethylene tank from inside it. Stuffing those materials—manga books and magazines—into any gaps found around his desk and chair, he sprinkled the contents of the tank over them. And that’s when I finally realized that he was going to burn them. When he threw a lit match, a towering flame shot up in no time, prompting Eriko and Honoka, who were on the pickup’s rear deck talking, to cheer and rush close to the bonfire.
Hurry, Hono-chan! Raita, who was standing to my left, called out suddenly to Honoka, who was standing next to Eriko, diagonally opposite us. Honoka nodded and put her hand into a large paper bag placed by her feet and pulled out several notebooks. Raita went behind me and approached Honoka.
Together with her, he took out more of these notebooks from the bag.
What the hell are those? Eriko asked Honoka.
They’re diaries, Raita answered on Honoka’s behalf. They’re Hono-chan’s diaries.
That’s a whole lot of diaries.
I know, right? Raita spoke again. She’s been keeping them since she was in the fourth grade, and there are twenty-four of them in all.
So like, you’re going to burn them all?
You bet.
Why? Eriko said, surprised.
Because, she’s written nothing but crap. It’s just full of whiny complaints. When she made me read everything once, I got super nauseated.
Honoka, standing next to Raita, was staring in silence at the cover of one of her diaries.
I told Hono-chan that it’s no use cherishing something like that. Since this seemed like a good opportunity, we both decided to burn them today.
Are you sure you’re okay with that, Honoka-chan?
Honoka turned to Eriko and said, Yes, I’m okay. I was thinking about doing it anyway.
All right then, let’s get this show on the road. Raita removed the remaining notebooks from the bag and handed over a few to Eriko before returning next to me. I’d like you to help out too, Naoto-san, he said, holding out five or six notebooks. I accepted them and looked at the cover of the diary on top of the stack. It was neatly inscribed Honoka Suzuki in a handwritten script I suddenly thought I’d seen somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember.
Raita went ahead and casually tossed his share of the notebooks into the flames. The diaries began to blaze up at once, and their pages, licked open by the flames, blackened while curling up. Following his lead, I threw in my share. Then Honoka, and finally Eriko. No one turned to any page before throwing the diaries.
Sometimes, when I was little, Eriko said out of the blue, "I used to wonder how I’d feel if my house burned
down in a fire."
I’ve also wondered about that myself, Raita said. But I’ve always lived in an apartment, so I couldn’t picture it all that well.
But there really exist people whose homes have been reduced to ashes, right? I wonder how they feel.
They probably feel refreshed, you know, Raita said without averting his gaze from the heap of diaries being reduced to ashes.
Yeah, I suppose you’re right, Eriko said pensively. At first, they’re probably terribly shocked, though.
I think so too, Honoka spoke. You know what? I’m kind of feeling refreshed right now.
I know, right? Raita said, turning to Honoka.
When the desk and chair were carbonized, the fire subsided and its flames finally began to settle into an elegant dance. Raita returned from the shack, holding four cans of beer. We were all sipping our beverages while talking around the fire, when around thirty minutes later, a car entered the site. It was a cream-colored Toyota Estima and it approached slowly, coming to a stop right near us.
A door—its window smoked glass—opened, and a woman around thirty and a small girl stepped out. From the driver’s seat a stern-looking middle-aged man also emerged.
Raita placed his emptied can of beer by his feet and took a deep bow toward the man. The man flashed a smile on his suntanned, wrinkly face and raised his hand to say hi.
Looks like you’re nearly finished, he said in a gentle voice that didn’t match his face. Although he was dressed in a pair of khaki cargo pants and a loud orange trainer, his close-cropped hair at the back gave him a formidable, masculine aura. He seemed to be in his mid-forties.
Anything the matter, sir? Raita asked in a relaxed tone.
No, it’s nothing. You were talking about lighting a fire so I thought I’d just drop by to have a look.
The woman and the girl, who had gotten out first, were already by the bonfire and had begun talking with Eriko and Honoka.
Naoto-san, this is President Nakagaki. The two over there are his wife Yoriko-san and his daughter Moe-chan.
My attention was caught by the wife and child, so the president ended up bowing ahead of me. Embarrassed, I returned a bow in a hurry and offered my greetings.
I’m Naoto Matsubara. I hear that you’ve kindly taken Raita under your wing. For that, I’m truly grateful. That’s my friend over there, Eriko Fukasawa, and the other one is Honoka Suzuki.
The president nodded with appreciation and said, I’m the one who’s grateful. It’s sad to see Torimasa gone now, but with the present times being the way they are, there was nothing that could be done to save it. Raita was really doing a fantastic job there, though. I have no idea how much help I can be to him, but I’d like him to give it his best shot at my company. He was speaking in a truly polite manner.
With this dismal economic climate, I said, business must be rather challenging for you too, sir.
Yes indeed. We can’t survive on demolition alone. The business of reconstruction has gone down the drain, so right now we’re somehow eking by since expanding into repairs last year. But you can imagine how meager our margins are, since we’re basically sub-sub-contractors.
Eriko and the others approached us. All four of them had reddened cheeks from exposure to the bonfire.
The president’s wife, Yoriko-san, was beautiful. Moe-chan looked as though she might be around Takuya’s age. She was endowed with pretty features herself, taking after her mother. With Eriko up close, President Nakagaki became wide-eyed for a moment, but immediately returned his gaze toward his daughter and wife.
Moe-chan was clinging to Honoka and giggling.
That Kitty-chan hair clip is really cute! Who bought it for you? Honoka said to Moe-chan, touching her fancy hair clip.
Mommy bought it for me.
Honoka then said with an exaggerated gesture, That’s so nice, I want one too.
Moe-chan showed an elated smile before throwing her arms around Yoriko-san’s knees. While patting her daughter’s head, Yoriko-san said to President Nakagaki, who was in the middle of a conversation with me, What about those things, Daddy?
Oh, yes, yes. The president headed toward the car and came back with a large furoshiki-wrapped parcel.
I don’t know if you’ll enjoy them, but my wife prepared some bento lunches. You all must be exhausted from the move, so please feel free to dig in. She’ll be delighted.
Raita, Honoka, Eriko, and even I let out shouts of joy, all at once.
Sir, I’m grateful to you, as always, Raita said. With your permission, we shall indeed dig in.
As if embarrassed by Raita’s moving tone of voice, President Nakagaki turned to look at the bonfire, which had become small, and said, Well, it’s about time we take care of that and pull out of here, don’t you think?
16
AS SOON AS THE holidays ended, I got bogged down by trouble.
A brand new full-length novel by a certain mystery writer, which was to be published in September to commemorate the company’s seventieth anniversary, was suddenly snatched away by another company. My superior and I had secured the promise of this very writer two years ago, and had been steadily preparing for the novel’s publication since then, investing abundantly for its publicity. If published, this work of his was expected to sell 300,000 copies, at a minimum, so we found the suddenness of his broken promise all the more jarring.
Along with the director of the literary division, we visited the author’s office on a daily basis and urged him on many occasions to reconsider his decision, but he wouldn’t budge. What bothered us the most, though, was his refusal to clarify the reason for his change of heart. In the end I was on my knees, together with my boss, pleading for an answer, but he nonetheless kept his mouth shut. Judging from my personal association with the writer, I could tell that it wasn’t for any ordinary reason like dissatisfaction with the slated number of first-edition copies or the advertising plans to be executed after publication. While he was no different from other bestselling authors in being selfish or moody, I knew for a fact that he wasn’t the kind of person who’d break a promise that easily once he made it—he was a man of his word.
Of course, we sounded the new publisher out about the m
atter, but they appeared rather bewildered themselves, since the author had apparently approached them out of the blue.
We were at our wits’ end.
In the office, various rumors spread about me and my boss—One of them must have been careless in his dealings with the author and upset him, it was rumored, or The project was being steamrolled ahead when nothing had been decided in the first place. The project was supposed to be a flagship for the first half of the year, so the mystery of the defection bred ever more suspicion, driving us into an untenable situation.
When we came to know the truth, the month of May was already drawing to a close.
A call suddenly came in to my cell from the author, after which my boss and I went to his place that evening. For the previous two weeks, in order to make up for the loss of the full-length novel, we’d been scrambling about trying to engage other authors whose prospects for generating sales seemed favorable, so we weren’t all that thrilled to be summoned so late in the game, but the author—opening the door to his office—had apparently heard about our predicament at our company, and so after he led us into his room with an openly apologetic demeanor, he dropped his head in a deep bow.