The Ten Loves of Nishino

by Hiromi Kawakami

  But isn’t he crazy in a good way? Kikumi said on the other end of the phone. For better or worse, love is full of madness, she went on. Kikumi thought nothing more than that Nishino and I had practically shacked up together.

  Lucky you, Ai! I hope one day I’ll have someone to live with like you do, Kikumi murmured.

  Nishino was very kind. These days, we hardly ever had sex.

  Do you know the novel called The Collector? Are we like that? I had tried asking.

  No, Nishino replied briefly, I have no interest in collecting. Then he would undress me and slowly caress me, either my breasts or my back or my legs. I never wore underwear. Nishino’s home was air-conditioned, and always at the perfect temperature.

  It’s time for me to go home, you know.

  How many times did I come close to saying that? But I never did. I had the feeling I could leave him whenever I wanted.

  I love you, Nishino would say.

  It’s a simple enough thing, loving a girl, Nishino went on quietly. I wonder why it is that I’ve never been able to love any of them. And then he would embrace me in my stark nakedness.

  I didn’t love Nishino. I might not have even liked him. The thought of Nishino’s death brought on not a single tear. I merely thought of it as an inevitability. Nishino embraced me tightly. He was crying. Why was this guy in tears, I wondered vaguely.

  Tomorrow—tomorrow for sure—I’ll go home, I would say to myself for the umpteenth time. But I knew that tomorrow would come and I would still be here. Within Nishino’s home, I was like a small insect in hibernation, curled up and immobile.

  Still, everything always comes to an end.

  Grapes, Nishino had said. I had come down with a fever. It was a cold. A few days earlier Nishino had started coughing, and he must have been contagious. Although Nishino had no fever, and had been well enough to go off to work each day.

  I’ll squeeze some grapes for you, Nishino had said as he was going out the front door. Some people say the best thing for a cold is canned peaches, or sipping apple juice—but where I come from, it was always grapes, Nishino had said cheerfully.

  I had laughed. But laughing made me cough, which was painful.

  You take the skins off, take the seeds out too, and then squeeze all the juice out with a juicer. Back in the day, we didn’t have a juicer though, so we’d use gauze to wring out all the juice. Oh, but that might not be good for a cough. It works for a fever, though. I don’t know about a cough . . . Nishino had muttered as he bounded gaily out the door, locking it behind him.

  In my feverish, half-asleep state, I imagined the grapes. Large, deep purple orbs of fruit. In the garden of the house where I grew up, there was a grape arbor, and when summer arrived, so did the scarab beetles. Even though the grapes were still small and pale green, the scarab beetles would devour them messily. By the end of summer, there would only be a few clusters left uneaten by the insects. The grapes from the arbor bore sour fruit that had a tremendous number of seeds considering their small size.

  Maybe I really do love Nishino. The thought occurred to me suddenly. No, no, that must just be the fever making me weak. I was dozing in and out of consciousness when the phone rang.

  I had decided not to answer it, so I let it ring and heard the answering machine pick up. “No one is here to take your call,” the automated female voice said. I liked the voice on Nishino’s answering machine just fine. I lay there, still, allowing the woman’s voice to cover me like a blanket, when I heard Nishino on the machine.

  “Ai.” he repeated my name several times.

  I got up and staggered to the phone, unsteady on my feet.

  “Is that you, Ai?” Nishino said.

  “Um-hmm.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you when you have a fever.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve had an accident.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  Nishino’s voice carried the same upbeat tone that it had had earlier when he left the house. I thought he was joking.

  “Ai, you never loved me, did you,” Nishino said on the other end of the line, sounding happy as ever.

  “That’s not true,” I replied, without skipping a beat, before I even had a chance to think about it. As was my habit.

  “It’s all right. You and I are alike, Ai, so I understand.”

  I murmured a response in my throat.

  Anyway, I’m waiting for the grapes, I said, and went to hang up.

  “Wait,” Nishino said. “I wanted us to die together, but I guess there’s nothing to be done about it. What a dull life mine has been, really, in the end.”

  There was a click, and the line went dead. The sound of an ambulance’s siren was coming from somewhere nearby. I collapsed back onto the bed, everything still a blur.

  I could tell that my fever was raging. In my state between dreaming and waking, I became convinced that Nishino really was dead. I was utterly certain of it.

  I wanted to eat the grapes, I murmured, and then I was drawn into a shallow yet insistent slumber.

  It’s a good thing I’m not wearing the shackle today. That was the last thing I remember thinking.

  The funeral was absolutely magnificent. Many of his “clients” came to burn offerings of incense, so it took a long time for the line of mourners to have their turn. Interspersed among them were several conspicuously attractive women.

  The woman who had come to Enoshima with Nishino that time was there. And around her slim and lovely ankle, under her black stocking, she was still wearing the same gold chain.

  “You’re Ai, aren’t you?” The woman from Enoshima spoke to me, when I was behind the temple, catching my breath after the incense lighting. She had a few more wrinkles than when I had seen her previously, but she was still beautiful.

  “He’s dead now, isn’t he,” she kept speaking.

  “You know who I am?” I asked, and the woman from Enoshima nodded.

  “I saw him sometimes, and he told me about you.”

  “Did you see him often?”

  “Maybe once a month.”

  That’s just like Nishino, I laughed a little. He’d leave me in shackles, and then shrewdly go and meet up with his old girlfriend.

  “But just for a meal,” the woman from Enoshima said, smiling. “You never did love him, did you,” she peered into my eyes as she said this. I did not feel compelled to respond to such a question from someone I barely knew, and yet there was something about her I liked. For no good reason.

  “Probably not,” I replied slowly.

  “Serves him right,” the woman from Enoshima murmured. I remained silent.

  “But you missed your chance, didn’t you,” she went on.

  What? I replied. Just what do you mean by that?

  “There may not have been much advantage in loving Nishino, but there were good times to be had, weren’t there. It was hard work, worth doing,” the woman from Enoshima said, and then laughed out loud.

  Her laugh was clear and pure. I myself was not laughing. I thought about the grapes.

  I wondered what kind of grapes Nishino had planned to buy for me. Purple ones, or green ones? Would they have been the ones with small fruit? I wished he would have been able to spoon-feed me the cold, fresh-squeezed grape juice.

  Nishino, I called out to him in my heart.

  Nishino, I never was able to love you. I’m sorry, I said to him. I had the sense that I could hear Nishino sighing in my ear, but of course it was just my imagination.

  Thirty million years from now, they say there will be no more night.

  The woman from Enoshima looked shocked when these words came out of my mouth.

  Is that so? she said, and then she turned her back on me.

  That’s right
, I called out after the woman from Enoshima as she walked away.

  That’s right. Thirty million years from now, there will be no darkness in the world. Just what should I do, then? Tell me, what should I do?

  MERCURY THERMOMETER

  I’m going to try to talk about Nishino.

  He was an odd kind of guy. Unlike anyone you had met before, or were likely to ever meet again. At the time, I had thought there would be others like him, but that wasn’t the case. Nishino had said that I brought up a lot of memories for him, but now I am the one who remembers him wistfully. I wonder where he is and what he is doing. Is he still alive? No, he’s probably dead by now, but vestiges of him remain indelible in my heart. And because of that, it makes no difference to me whether he is alive or dead.

  Yukihiko Nishino. He was eighteen years old at the time. He had neither crimes nor accomplishments to his credit, nor any particular qualifications. Back then, his hobby was seeking out clay sewer pipes.

  “You’re Nozomi Misono, aren’t you?”

  This was the first thing Nishino ever said to me.

  The voice came from directly above, and I opened my eyes slightly. My third period had been cancelled, so I had been lying on the grass in the rear courtyard by myself. The courtyard was shaded by jasmine bushes. It was the season when the bushes were covered with tiny pale yellow flowers, and it seemed like you only had to sit beside them briefly for their intoxicating fragrance to cling to you.

  “I am—who are you?” I asked as I sat up.

  “Yukihiko Nishino. I’m a first-year student in the economics department.”

  I see, I said, staring at Nishino. He had neatly trimmed, brownish hair that didn’t have any wave. He had on jeans and a white T-shirt, over which he wore a long-sleeved blue denim shirt that was undone to the third button.

  I didn’t recognize him. I only knew two guys who were in the economics department, and both of them were third-year students like me.

  “I’m not a suspicious character,” Nishino said, seeming to widen his eyes.

  “But isn’t it suspicious to use the phrase ‘suspicious character’ in the first place?” I asked in reply, laughing. Nishino laughed too.

  “I was behind you in high school.”

  Ah, I nodded.

  Back in high school, I had been president of the student council. At the time it was unusual for a girl to be president, and though it had been three years since graduation, even now whenever I went back home, students I had gone to school with—familiar and unfamiliar faces, both—would still regularly come up and speak to me.

  “So . . . ?”

  I may have been a sort of local “celebrity” back home, but having come to Tokyo for university, I was just another student in the crowd. I had decided to run for president out of sheer curiosity—I thought I might want to know what it would be like to run the student council. But as it turned out, I received an unprecedented percentage of the votes. Mind you, this was a time and a place where being female still carried a certain significance. And so, ever since, I had become a “school superstar.”

  Entering university had finally freed me from that uncomfortable role. With this aim, I had paid careful and deliberate attention to choosing a “mid-size vanilla” university that most people in my town hadn’t heard of. And I had hit the mark—since enrolling at this school, I had yet to meet a single person from my high school.

  “I know this may seem like a rude question, but is it true that you’ll have sex with anyone, Misono?”

  Nishino’s eyes opened even wider as he asked me this. At this point in time, I did not yet know that Nishino had a habit of opening his eyes wide when he was being dead serious, that there was nothing frivolous about this exchange.

  “Your question may be rude, but it’s just as rude to eyeball someone like that—didn’t your mother teach you?” I said, and with the rigid spine of Exercises in Thermodynamics I that was in my hand, I gave Nishino’s shin a good hard knock.

  Yow! Nishino yelped and crouched down. The jasmine bushes swayed, and several of the flowers scattered. I stood up slowly, brushed the grass off me and, without another glance at Nishino, I walked away.

  The next time I saw Nishino was about a month later.

  He was walking beside a girl on the path toward the literature department building. She must not be a student at our school, I thought to myself.

  The reason is, the girl was pretty. Of course, there were plenty of pretty girls at our school. Just that, much the same as the mid-size ranking that our school occupied, the prettiness of its female students was also somehow “mid-size.”

  But the prettiness of the girl next to Nishino far surpassed “mid-size”—her looks were exceptional. She was clearly and undeniably pretty.

  I would have bet that this pretty girl was a long-term veteran of trading on her good looks. That is to say, with regard to her own prettiness, she had not the slightest doubt.

  “Hey.” Nishino waved at me.

  “Hey,” I said in return. I did not make it a practice to have anything to do with guys who ask rude questions—my interest was merely piqued by his obvious talent for getting a girl of such caliber to come all the way over to another university’s campus.

  Hello, the girl next to Nishino bowed her head. Nishino’s attitude was laid-back. Their demeanor was like that of a couple who had been married for years.

  “Your girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Nishino admitted freely. “This is Kanoko, dear,” Nishino went on.

  Don’t call me “dear,” she said to Nishino, her cheerful voice expressing regret as she cast a smile in my direction with just the right amount of courtesy.

  That was a mistake, I thought to myself. I should have immediately pretended I didn’t know him and run off.

  “Misono. Well, see you,” I spun on my heel and tried to walk away. Nishino was placid as ever.

  Oh, said “Kanoko, dear.”

  Doing my best not to turn around, I glanced over from just the corner of my eye.

  “Kanoko, dear” was mystified. Surprisingly, she had taken notice that I was annoyed by the prospect of having to spend any more time in their presence. And what was even more surprising was that “Kanoko, dear” seemed apologetic about it.

  Now, unable to coolly take my leave, I stood frozen in this in-between position.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” said “Kanoko, dear” after a brief hesitation.

  Yeah, I replied, with my back still half turned.

  “Kanoko, dear” seemed to soften a bit at the tone of my voice.

  I have at times wondered just what guys make of this sort of “psychological power struggle” between women, which can resemble foreign diplomacy in its subtleties. Most guys probably don’t even notice it. In fact, it’s unlikely they grasp the idea that such a thing even exists.

  Sure enough, Nishino simply stood there, with nothing more than a fresh-faced smile.

  This time I turned all the way around, so that they were now behind me.

  Should we go? I heard Nishino say. “Kanoko, dear” didn’t reply, but I heard the sound of both of their footsteps and I could tell that they were walking away in sync.

  I hurried toward the science department building on the edge of campus.

  For a long time after that, I didn’t happen to run into Nishino. If things had gone on that way, I might never have given him a second thought.

  But, there was the matter of the clay sewer pipes. The reason I encountered Nishino again was the clay sewer pipes.

  It had been a busy week. Monday, I had been with Minakawa. Tuesday, I spent the afternoon with Suzuki, the evening with Kaneko, and when I got back to my place after midnight, Munakata came over. Wednesday and Thursday, I was stuck in the lab until late so I was on my own, but Friday and Saturday, I stayed over at Nakajima�
��s place.

  Of course, I was having sex with each of these guys.

  I couldn’t say whether having sex with five different guys in one week was far outside of the ordinary or whether it was actually surprisingly common. Only that, the answer to the question Nishino had asked me, “Will you have sex with anyone?”, was no.

  I didn’t have sex with just anyone. I’ve never once had sex with a guy I didn’t find interesting. When I have sex with someone, it always comes down to pure curiosity. Exactly like when I was in high school and decided to run for president of the student council.

  So that was how, that week in particular, I came to share various intimate moments with five different guys. That’s what I like about having sex with a guy—being able to have these intimate moments. The guy gets used to me. He starts to express a certain affection. He forgets his manners somewhat. His character simplifies. And, if things go well, he falls in love with me.

  Sunday, I spent the day by myself. I considered Sunday my Sabbath day. I did laundry, I tidied up, I cooked, I watched television—either the broadcast of a baseball game or a marathon, or if it was the season for sumo, I would leave that on. I may have had an insatiable curiosity, but spending time with people around the clock was exhausting.

  When evening fell, I went to the park in my neighborhood. This park was vast. One section of it was reserved for children’s playground equipment, while another sizable part had been left as fields.

  I always walked over to the part that was fields. I would stand among the weeds that tickled my ankles and stare at the swings or the slide. At that time of day, there were never any people in the park. The swings swayed in the breeze. The chains made a creaking sound. The grasses at my feet rustled.