It’s nice to sit here and eat in peace, isn’t it?
You ask me what is satisfaction? When my staff are also my family and friends, when my work is a finished autobiography to which I keep adding chapters and footnotes, that is satisfaction. Satisfaction is the tattoo on my back. It’s not having to explain. It’s Ran-chan putting her head against my chest and listening to my heart, before we watch a film together on television in the afternoon with the curtains drawn. It’s being addressed as a professional, here, in my casual clothes, with my sleeves rolled up. It’s you asking me these questions. Men like me aren’t usually asked for interviews, you know.
Anyway, the other day you asked me about my earliest memories, and I really couldn’t answer you at the time, but something about your question must have worked on the old grey parts of me that have been coming out like lizards in the sun. My retirement has given me a lot of time alone with my thoughts. So, I wanted to tell you about them.
It’s not that simple, actually, but I’ll start small. I’ve worked out that I must have met her twice. That is, she arrived twice, and left twice, but the actual memories contained between each arrival and each departure keep getting mixed up and then turning up in completely different parts of my life altogether, some of which I didn’t even know I had. Please bear with me.
The first time I met her was my first memory. It was in the early 00’s—some fifty years ago now. I’m sure there were memories before that, but not distinct enough for me to recall as individual events. Not now. I can’t work out why it’s taken this long to realise that the famous Koda Kumi of my childhood, and the famous Koda Kumi whose music I enjoyed in a mild and yet deep way as an adult were one and the same. I think it’s because after she went away the second time, no one ever talked about her again. I vaguely remember that she was going to arrive, that the whole family was talking about her coming over from Kyoto. I didn’t know who she was to be excited about, and yet I was excited, with the coolness of an empty room in summer, before it’s filled with sudden voices. I was excited with a retrospective excitement, that does not realise it is retrospective. I had some vague idea she was an aunt—perhaps it was because Uncle Toru was staying with us at that time and I thought if she was coming to see him, she must be an aunt, although she may just have been a friend of the family. Apparently—I think I filled in the details later—she’d just made her ill-fated appearance on ‘All Night Nippon,’ where she’d caused an uproar by telling her manager to have children before she turned thirty-five and her “amniotic fluid soured.” That was it; that was the scandal. The marketing campaign for her newest album was cancelled, and a lot of her sponsors dropped her.
People say that Kuu made a mistake for saying what she did. But she was right. A woman should have children before she’s thirty-five—it’s only natural. The trouble is, people don’t like to hear the truth.
That’s all the hubbub of background, but the actual memory itself is this. We were in a toy shop by a café right near Enoshima beach. The sun was that stark, bleachy kind outside, so that there seems almost to be no shade, only sunlight and precise shadows. Even the cool inside the shop seemed to tingle with the shock of the white light reflected off the dusty ground outside. The mix of the cool inside and dazzling sunshine from outside had given me a kind of pins-and-needles. She had on a beautiful summer yukata—the kind you don’t see these days—floral, classic and elegant, and she was wearing lipstick and sunglasses. She also wore gold earrings and rings on her fingers. I know that I had never seen anything like her. She was leading me between the shelves of toys. I had been given some spending money, and she asked me to choose. I’m afraid that I am at a loss as to how to convey the stunned disbelief I felt as a small child, gently led around and spoken to by this being. Eventually I managed to select a toy, which was a kind of inverted plastic cone for shooting ping pong balls in the air and catching them again. I remember that Kuu was standing at the counter of the shop with the toy, still in cellophane, in her hand, asking me if I was going to pay the nice lady with the money I had been given. Kuu’s voice, and her perfume, and simply the way she was, soft, fragrant, precise and towering, perfect as a matinee there beneath her hat in the heat of summer, made her utterly different to every single other thing in the world, almost as if she were superimposed upon this world, and you could still see the line around her. You find this hard to believe? You think that Kuu hasn’t lasted, that she was short, fat, a poor singer? These things might be true, from one perspective. She was no Matsuda Seiko. But that didn’t matter. Standing before me, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“How much?” I remember being terrified and embarrassed as I asked this, even at that age.
“That’s three hundred yen,” Kuu said, and I noticed the faint trace of her Kyoto accent. It was like the smell of lipstick.
I felt light-headed.
“Oh. Then, I’ve got too much. I’ve got four hundred yen. I can’t get it.”
Both of them laughed at me.
“That’s okay. You can buy it with that,” Kuu said. “Look, the lady will show you.”
And, indeed, the shopkeeper counted out my money in her palm and gave me a hundred yen back. I was overjoyed to have my toy and one hundred yen, and Koda Kumi had been present at that formative moment in my life.
You do not remember what love is for a child, do you? I remember.
I remember how, over the next few days, Kuu’s sunglasses, the bag in which she sometimes kept them, and all the other things she took from her bag, came to me to mean Kuu, so that they were in fact pieces of her, as if she might take off a hand and leave it upon her beach towel. I did not dare touch her glasses, or her watch, or her bottle of suntan lotion, when she did this, but sometimes I would simply look at one of these items, the way one might look into the flames of a fire, or at a sleeping animal. And if I ever saw one of them suddenly, in an unexpected place, when Kuu was not there, my heart would leap as at the smell of her perfume.
I don’t know what I meant to Kuu, or if she remembered me in later life. I believe she only stayed with us for a matter of days that first time. She was very busy, of course, and could not spare much time from her schedule. She had to be back in Tokyo soon. However, while she was with us, it was as if she gave us everything, with no thought of her other duties. She was perfectly able to relax and be one with the pacific mood of the sunlight. I have a sense that each day was a lazy struggle with getting the family ready to go to the beach together, a struggle of preparation, involving towels, cameras, parasols and so on, that seemed to me at that age interminable. It was also a struggle that seemed to centre around Kuu’s bag. I would watch its open mouth to see what went in and what came out as an indication of our stage of readiness for the expedition, until that blessed moment when finally the mouth of the bag was snipped shut and sailed through the air in Kuu’s hand, and, in excitement, I would run beside her and put my tiny hand in hers. In the evening we would come home again, the air cooling on sunburnt skin, and there would follow a terrible ebb tide of lethargy when no one would play with me, and I would often sulk or cry.
The thing is, I’m not sure how much of this I’m getting from the second visit now, which must have been pretty similar to the first in a lot of ways. I do remember, though, there was one occasion when we’d gone right round to a secluded area by the shore, because the tide was out, and all the others, including Uncle Toru, were playing in the rock pools. Kuu was lying face down on a beach towel in her bathing suit by one of those wide, rippling, sparkling, aquamarine pools that seems almost prehistoric. Her brownish-blonde hair sparkled in the sun. I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. I was just playing with pebbles and seashells and so on. I really wanted to play with Kuu, but didn’t dare to disturb her. Instead I sat quietly next to her and watched the shadow cast on the skin of her back and shoulder by my hand as I moved it about in the air. She did not seem to notice. Then a strange idea occurred to me. I saw the paler marks
on her skin where the straps of her bathing suit had been. I decided that I would hold my hand in exactly the same place until the shadow it cast made a mark on her upper shoulder. The shadow of my hand looked to me like a dragonfly, forever about to land, but never quite settling. If only it could land, I thought, if only it could stay there. I do not believe I had ever been so determined in my short life. Soon my arm ached and I had to keep it up by holding it grimly in place with my other hand. I began to huff and puff with effort.
After some time Uncle Toru came rattling back over the pebbles.
“What on Earth are you doing?” he said.
I felt a sick kind of cold in my belly.
“Don’t know,” I said, and started moving my hand about, as if it were simply some kind of childish hand dance, and nothing to do with casting a shadow on Kuu’s shoulder.
That is the first time that I remember the experience of hate.
And then, of course—I mean after the allotted days had passed, which must have seemed many summers to me, but still too brief—Kuu left again, as crisply and glamorously and professionally as she had arrived, and a great shadow fell on the rest of the holiday, as if she had walked into the sun itself and cast her shadow behind her. The sunglasses were no longer on the kitchen table. This was worse than all those ebb tide evenings of tiredness and sunburn put together. It was from this sickness and this burning that my excitement before her arrival had come, that too thrown like a shadow.
I learned to climb the rocks on the beach alone. I found nothing but pebbles and shells.
No one knew what was wrong, and probably neither did I. No one, that is, except my sister, who teased me for loving Kuu until I started crying and screaming and told her to stop.
How much later was the second visit? Well, that’s difficult to say. As I told you, no one mentioned her again after she left that second time. I wonder now if there had been some kind of falling out or something that was never explained to me. To hell with that, if there was. My guess now is that the first visit was before I started school and the second after, though I’m not even really sure about this.
Anyway, the second visit seemed to come so long after the first, it was as if the first had become a buried geological stratum of history. That’s how it seemed to me at that age. Kuu belonged to the distant past, and it was impossible that she could ever return, almost as if she no longer existed in the age of the living. In the “real world,” of course, she was making her comeback, but I don’t remember noticing it.
There’s an image that comes to me now. It’s of a little alley or path at the end of a row of buildings in Fujisawa. The path ran close to the Katase river and then turned left behind the buildings and led to a patch of waste ground behind an amusement arcade, which used to be the old gas station before I was born. I somehow discovered this whole area between the two visits, and something about it marked the division between eras in my life. I remember I used to stand with my elbows on the rusty railings, looking out at the river, and at the sand, and thinking about how I had grown older, and about how epically sad and great and like a song it was, and how I was a hero, and so forth. But I would never get those days back.
So, in a way you can say I’d almost forgotten Kuu by the time of her second visit, but when I heard she was going to come again, I remembered. This time she was actually going to come down with Uncle Toru, and she was going to stay longer, too—a whole two weeks. How can I describe the effect that this news had on me? It was as if an orchestra of violins that had receded into silence had slowly returned to engulf everything. There is love in this world. I remembered. Kuu was in the age of the living with the rest of us, after all. She wasn’t just sad and beautiful history.
Forgive me. I cannot tell this part clearly or calmly. She did come. She came back. I had wondered what on Earth I could ever say to her now, and how to show her I had grown whilst still being the same person, and that my chest had lengthened and hardened with the intervening eras of the epic sadness, and I had evolved a consciousness capable of reflecting on its own history. What could I say to her to make us see all this, and would she remember me, and recognise me now that we could talk beyond the talk of me holding her hand? How wonderful that suitcase seemed, and the white lady’s coat hung over it.
Then Kuu was there, alive in the living room, with Uncle Toru, saying hello to the family, while I watched from the door, where I had rushed to see her, wondering if she would even notice me. And I was afraid that when the greetings had finished it would be time for her to go again. And then she saw me.
“Kuu,” I said, as if we were meeting for the first time and it was the first time I said her name, “don’t leave. Never leave again.”
She made a kind of sympathetic ‘ah’ noise, and I’m afraid, child that I was, I cried my heart out right there.
I was embarrassed, but I was happy, because it seemed we were the best of friends after all, and soon I was upon her knee in an armchair and she was wiping away my tears with a scrunched up tissue and saying, “There, there!”
“I won’t be going now. Not for a long time,” she said.
“Don’t ever go,” I said, and buried my face in her collar. “I never want you to go.”
There, on that armchair, with the family standing and talking and walking about, and the kotatsu in the sitting room next to the kitchen reminding us, perhaps, of some ancestral Japan behind this family summer, and my face actually in Kuu’s perfumed collar—I do not believe that life has ever come closer to assuming the very shape of my heart and allowing me to be who I am.
And, as I’ve intimated before, this second visit was in many ways a repeat of the first, to the extent they have become entangled in my mind. We went to Enoshima in the sunny afternoons, and came home in the evenings. I do remember some differences, however, such as picnics on the beach, late evening games of cards and so on. I believe, even at the time, I was comparing the two visits continuously, which might have been where the entanglement started. It was as if I were trying to determine which was the true Age of Kuu’s Visit. Was it the time when I couldn’t talk so well, and Kuu was a looming perfumed statue? Or were these times now the essential, the classic Kuu? Which memories and times were most precious—those lost old times, or these recent living ones? But no answer was necessary. The questions were merely asked in the spirit of a child treasuring, one by one, his precious things, with joy.
There was one thing that troubled me though, this time more than the previous occasion. That was the amount of time it took to get ready to go to the beach. Preparation time was a kind of dead time, since I could not properly talk and play with Kuu. And it seemed, each day, to drag on and gruellingly on, and, worst of all, in doing so, to eat into our beach time, so that, in a way, it was really only a few hours each day that was pure Kuu, and even that, for one reason or another, wasn’t really pure or Kuu. Other people would claim her attention, or I’d be sent to buy some ice creams or some such thing. The overall pattern, however, was of a kind of darkness before and after the sunny gay brightness of the afternoon and the beach. The first darkness was in many ways worse, like that of black clouds refusing to break into storm, because at least during the second darkness I was tired, and there was a soothing melancholy within this enervation. I think I know what that first darkness was made of, though. It was made of the memory of the first time that Kuu left. It was made of the shadow she had cast when she went. I knew now, as I had not then, how time passes.
Someday I suppose I’ll write down some specific memories from that time in detail, like the occasion that Kuu and Uncle Toru took me to a bright white café, where I ate my first ever giant parfait. I suppose I’ll find some way to describe the chill whiteness of it all, the glass frontage and the steel stool legs, and the sunlight in which the edges of the table seemed to disappear as if in an overexposed photograph, and Uncle Toru’s high-collared white shirts, and Kuu’s bag, and the grown-up talk I didn’t understand about Kuu’s songs and vide
os, and the family business, and the dispute with the Yoshifuji family. That giant parfait, its many layers like the layers of all I loved then failed to take in, but somehow took in anyway, but still cannot express, was too big and too rich for me to finish. I was used to my grandmother making me finish everything.
“I don’t think I can eat anymore,” I said to Kuu, when there was still perhaps a third of it left in the tall glass, which was curved like a woman’s figure.
I said it to Kuu almost as if Uncle Toru was not there, because I was a little afraid of him, and because Kuu had become family to me.
“That’s okay, sweetie. You don’t have to finish it.”
“But it’ll melt.”
She laughed.
“Well, never mind. It was awfully big, wasn’t it?”
It did, indeed, melt, before our eyes. We watched it do so, as if the melting were particularly meant for spectators. I think even Uncle Toru laughed. And then it was time to pay, and I was a little afraid again, and guilty, when both Kuu and Uncle Toru reached for purse or wallet at the same time, and each insisted on paying. Somehow Kuu managed to prevail upon Uncle Toru to let her pay. I don’t know why it should have made a difference, but the parfait became more wonderful to me than ever because Kuu was paying for it. After putting down the money she turned, and nodded to Uncle Toru, and he picked up his newspaper and said to me, “Come on then, you. And say thank you.”
I was only too glad to do so.
But, as I say, there are many things I’d like to talk about, and that I wish I could explain, and I suppose they’d bore you if I tried to tell you all of them now. I should cut to the thing I really want to tell you about. It was another of those occasions on the beach. We were at Enoshima again, at the same place we had been when I tried to imprint my shadow on Kuu’s skin. The whole family was there, but everyone else was lost in the distance now, their voices thin on the salt air, peaceful somehow, and soothing, even as they laughed and shouted to each other. Kuu was sunbathing again, and I was playing nearby, looking under rocks and so forth, until my patience gave way and I went back down to sit by her in the hope that she would turn over and start to talk to me. I remembered the time with the hand, but I suppose, although I had failed to leave the intended pale mark on Kuu’s skin, a mark, a shadow, had been left on me that day, and this time I did not even dare to try such a thing. Instead I just stared at the rocks, and the water; and the sun was so inescapable and intense in its reflections off everything that it was as if I was looking very directly at the sun, or as if we were at the very heart of the sun, ourselves. And when I looked at Kuu’s shoulder, the very intensity of the sunlight made it appear blue. By chance, or because she had noticed me, Kuu propped herself up on her elbows, and then smiled at me and began to talk. I suppose I wondered if I was bothering her, but she talked anyway, and as long as she talked, I wasn’t going to go anywhere.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 36
