Asleep

by Banana Yoshimoto

  “Good night,” I whispered, and lay down.

  Love Songs

  * * *

  Late at night the trees in my garden seemed to shine.

  Awash in light from the street, the quiet glittering green of the leaves and the deep brown of the trunk seemed startlingly vivid.

  I'd noticed this for the first time just recently, after I'd started drinking more heavily. Each time I looked out on that scenery with drunken eyes I'd be overwhelmed by the unbelievable purity of those colors, and I'd start feeling as if nothing really mattered, like I wouldn't really care at all even if I were to lose everything I had.

  This wasn't resignation, or desperation. It was a much more natural form of acceptance, a feeling that arose from a sweep of emotion that was quiet and cool and crystal-clear.

  Every night I fell asleep thinking about these things.

  Of course I realized that I was drinking too much and that it would be a good idea for me to start drinking less, and during the daytime I always swore that I'd drink only the tiniest amount that night. But then night would come and the first glass of beer would lead to the next and soon I'd be flying along. I'd start thinking about how well I'd sleep if I just drank a little bit more, and I'd find myself fixing yet another gin and tonic. As the night deepened I'd start increasing the amount of gin, and the drinks would get stronger. And as I munched my way through a bag of the greatest snack this century has produced—Butter Soy Sauce Popcorn—I'd think, Damn, I've done it again. . . . Here I am drinking. I never drank enough to make me feel that I'd done something wrong, but I sometimes got a bit of a shock when I discovered that there was an empty bottle standing on the table in front of me.

  It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing.

  At first I thought it was my pillow. Because it seemed to me that the pillow that always cradled my cheek so gently—no matter what was happening, however bad things were—would have a voice just like the one I was hearing, just that clear. I only heard the voice when my eyes were closed, so I figured it was a comfy sort of dream. At times like these I was never lucid enough to think very deeply about anything.

  The reverberations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in the scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace . . . the voice was like a combination of all this.

  That night I heard it again.

  A faint song that felt more sensual than an angel's, and also more real. I tried to catch the melody, fixed the little that remained of my consciousness on it, listened desperately. Sleep trickled down around me, and the happy tune dissolved away into my dreams.

  Long ago I'd fallen in love with a strange man and ended up acting out one of the parts in a bizarre triangular relationship. He'd been a friend of the guy I was going out with now, and he'd had the aura of a man whom women love fleetingly but with explosive force. Actually, he was a slightly peculiar and rather boisterous sort of guy, something of a thug, I could see that now, but I'd been young at the time and of course I'd fallen for him. I didn't remember much about him anymore. We'd slept together any number of times, done it again and again, but we'd never gone out on the sort of dates where you get to spend time looking at each other, so I could hardly even remember his face.

  For some reason I remembered only the nasty woman, Haru.

  Apparently Haru and I had both fallen for the man at the same time. As time passed and the two of us kept running into each other at his house, we began little by little to get acquainted, and then toward the end things got so bad that it was almost as if the three of us were living together. Haru was three years older than me, and she worked part-time. I was in college.

  Naturally we despised each other, cursed each other, and sometimes we'd even whip out our fists and get tangled up in all-out fights. Never in my life had I come so vividly close to another person, and never in my life had I resented anyone so much. Haru was all that stood in my way. I must have wished for her death a hundred times, and wished in earnest. Of course Haru probably wished for my death too.

  Our two loves finally came to an abrupt end one day when the man, exhausted by the life we'd been living, ran off to some faraway place and didn't come back. My relationship with Haru ended then too. I went on living in the same town, but from what I'd heard through the grapevine, Haru had run off to Paris or someplace like that.

  That was the last I'd heard of her.

  I had no idea why all of a sudden I'd started remembering her, thinking of her almost fondly. I didn't particularly want to see her again, and I wasn't interested in knowing what she was doing. That period in my life had been so filled with passionate emotion that it had ended up spinning around and becoming nothing but a string of blank memories. Ultimately it hadn't made any profound impression on me at all.

  Knowing her, it seemed likely that she'd have ended up as some kind of two-bit hustler, sponging off some artist in Paris, or maybe if she was lucky she'd have found some elderly patron and she'd be living off of him, very elegantly. That's the sort of woman she was. She was skinny as a bone, and her manner of talking was irritatingly frigid; her voice was deep, and she always wore black. She had thin lips, and there were always wrinkles carved into the space between her eyebrows, and she complained constantly. Yet when she smiled, she looked sort of like a child.

  It kind of hurt to remember her smile.

  Of course when you go to sleep having drunk as much as I had, waking up is total hell. It felt like the alcohol had pounded me flat, like my entire body—both inside and out—had been soaking in a bath of hot sake. My mouth was like a desert, and it was a while before I could even roll over.

  I couldn't even begin to consider getting up and brushing my teeth, or taking a shower. I found it impossible to believe that in the past I'd done those things quite casually, as if they were nothing at all.

  Arrowlike rays of sun bit into my head.

  I couldn't even stand to tally up all my symptoms, there were so many, and it was all so terrible that I just wanted to burst into tears. I didn't see how I could ever be saved.

  Lately every morning was like this.

  Finally I gave up and dragged myself limply out of bed. If I just left my aching head on its own it would start swaying from side to side, so I held it in my hands. Still holding it, I fixed myself a cup of tea and drank it.

  For some reason my nights tended to stretch out to surprising lengths, like rubber, and they were endlessly sweet. And my mornings were unforgivingly sharp. The light seemed to stab at me with some sort of pointy object. It was hard and translucent and stubborn. It was wretched.

  Every thought I had just made me unhappy. And then, like an army in pursuit of an already thoroughly pummeled foe, the phone started to shriek. It was an awful sound. The insistent clangor got on my nerves so much that I answered with intentionally exaggerated vitality.

  “Hello!”

  “Wow, you sure sound lively,” said Mizuo cheerfully.

  Mizuo was my boyfriend. He'd known both Haru and the man. When the two of them made their exits, he and I were left alone.

  “I'm not. I've got a hangover and my head's throbbing.”

  “Not again?”

  “You're off today, right? Are you coming over?”

  “Yeah, I'll be over soon,” Mizuo said.

  He hung up.

  He owned a store that sold various little household goods, so weekdays were his days off. I'd be
en working in the same kind of store until recently, but the place had gone out of business. It had been decided that I'd go to work at a new branch Mizuo was about to open in the next town, and I was waiting for it to open, which would be in about six months.

  Every once in a while Mizuo looked at me with the same eyes he used to look at objects. Like he was thinking, It'd really be better without this floral pattern here . . . it might get a good price if it didn't have this chip . . . this stripe here might look tacky but it captures people's hearts.

  At times like these the look in his eyes was so coldly penetrating it was shocking, and when I noticed it I'd give a little gasp. But it seemed he was also inspecting the changes that took place within my heart, regarding even those as just another pattern.

  He brought flowers that afternoon.

  We ate sandwiches and a salad, feeling peaceful. I was still stretched out in bed, and every time we kissed he'd chuckle and say things like, “You stink so terribly of alcohol it's amazing. I wouldn't be surprised if your hangover made its way through your mucus membranes into me!” It seemed as if his smile ought to give off a perfume like a flower—maybe something along the lines of a white lily.

  Winter was almost over. Though inside the room everything felt incredibly happy, I had the feeling that outside the window things were frighteningly dry. It seemed like the wind blowing past was hitting up against the sky, scraping noisily across its surface.

  I figured it was just too sweet inside, too warm.

  “I just remembered something,” I said. The sweetness and the warmth had reminded me. “I've been having something like a dream every night as I'm about to fall asleep, you know, it's always the same, and so I'm kind of worried that I might be starting to have hallucinations. Except hallucinations aren't supposed to feel very good, are they? Do you think with the amount I'm drinking I could be an alcoholic? Could I be that far gone?”

  “Don't be ridiculous,” Mizuo said. “Even if you do have something of a tendency toward dependence, the real problem is just that you have time on your hands, so you end up drinking too much—that's all. Things will go back to normal as soon as you start working again, and of course it's totally fine for you to be living the sort of slowed-down life you're living now. But the dream you mentioned . . . what sort of dream is it?”

  “I'm not sure I'd actually call it a dream.” The pain and the nausea I'd felt were finally starting to soften. In this new mood I tried desperately to trace my way back to that happiness. “It's like . . . I get drunk and tumble into bed, right? And then I start to feel like I'm being sucked up into something, you know, it's like I'm walking in this place that used to be really important to me, a place that's precious to me, but with my eyes closed—that's the sort of feeling I have. There's this nice smell, and I feel so safe and relaxed, and then I start to hear this song, always the same song, ever so faintly. The voice singing it is so sweet I almost start to cry . . . maybe it's not even a song. But it's something like a melody, and it's ever so faint, and it's far away, and it's singing of absolutely perfect joy. Yeah, and it's always the same melody.”

  “Sounds bad. You must be an alcoholic.”

  “Huh?” I squinted at him, startled.

  Mizuo burst out laughing. “Just kidding. Actually I've heard a story like that before. In fact it was just like yours. They say it means someone wants to speak to you.”

  “What do you mean someone? Who?”

  “Someone who's died. Has anyone you know died?”

  I puzzled for a bit, but no one came to mind. I shook my head.

  “They say that when a dead person wants to say something to someone it was close to in life, that's how it gets the message across. And when you get drunk or when you're just about to fall asleep, at times like that it's easier to get synchronized, you know, so that's when it happens. Anyway that's what I heard somewhere.”

  Suddenly I felt icy cold. I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders.

  “Is it always someone you know?” I asked.

  No matter how happy the song made me feel, the idea of having some dead stranger singing into my ear was not something I liked.

  “So they say. Maybe . . . could it be Haru?” he said.

  Mizuo is very quick to sense these things. And it's true—I gave a little start and felt almost immediately that he was probably right. In fact what I felt was almost a certainty. I hadn't heard a word from her, and then lately all these memories of her drifting through my mind. . . .

  “You should see what you can find out.”

  “Yeah, I'll ask some friends,” I said.

  Mizuo nodded.

  No matter what people said to him, Mizuo never butted in with stories of his own or ignored what they were saying. His parents must have raised him well. And yet you can't deny that his name—Mizuo, written with characters meaning “water” and “man”—is fairly weird, and it's certainly not easy to try and figure out how his parents came up with it. The extraordinary truth is that when his mother was young, conditions made it necessary for her to have an abortion, even though she didn't want one. When she had Mizuo she named him “waterman,” hoping that he'd be happy enough for two—the fetus that had been lost, the “waterbaby” as they're called in Japanese, and himself.

  Is that the sort of name you give a child?

  The whole interior of the room was flooded with the sweet scent of the white roses he'd brought. It occurred to me that if the scent lasted until night, I might be able to fall asleep without drinking so much. We kissed once again and embraced.

  * * *

  “Yeah, Haru died.”

  This half-expected answer came so smoothly it was shocking.

  Mizuo had told me that a guy whom Haru and the man and I had all known was working at a certain all-night coffee shop now, and so I'd jumped in a taxi and rushed straight there, hoping he might be able to tell me something—I'd made a special trip, in fact—and this was the answer I got. If that was all he was going to say, I might as well just have called. I spent a few moments peering at his eyes and understood that he wasn't joking. He was standing behind the crowded shop's counter, dressed in his waiter's uniform, drying dishes. His eyes were grim.

  “You mean overseas? How? Did she have AIDS?” I asked.

  “It was drinking. She died from drinking,” he said quietly.

  Icy chills, like a double shock, jittered down my spine. For an instant I felt sure I must be cursed, just as she'd been.

  “She got to where she was drunk all the time, and then one day in the apartment her patron kept for her she just . . . she'd been in and out of some specialist rehab center for alcoholics, and from what I hear it sounds like she just totally collapsed toward the end. This friend of mine who just got back from Paris told me about it—said he'd heard it all from some guy who was close to her.”

  “Oh.”

  I took a gulp of coffee and nodded slightly, as if appreciating the flavor.

  “I thought you two hated each other's guts. What's up?”

  “‘Even travelers who brush sleeves on the road are bound by ties from a former life’ . . . isn't exactly what I mean, but I hadn't heard a word from her since she left, you know, so I started wondering what she was doing. After all, I'm with Mizuo now, and I'm happy—you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, stuff like that happens sometimes, doesn't it?”

  Back during the days when Haru and the man and I were pretty much living together, this guy was working as a bartender, and I was always going to the bar where he worked, to get drunk and blow off steam. He'd always been completely indifferent to things that were happening in other people's lives, so it was easy to talk to him, and you could talk to him about anything. I sat looking at him now, his form hovering in the dun light of the shop, feeling paralyzed, and found myself remembering the feeling that had hung in the air in those days—felt it all coming back. Weary, tomorrowless, smoldering. I certainly had no desire to put myself back there, to feel the sensations
whose memory I was now reliving, and yet they called up an odd sentimentality.

  “Well, so Haru's no longer in this world,” I said.

  Across the counter my old friend nodded.

  I went back to my apartment and drank all alone in memory of Haru. For some reason I felt that it was okay for me to drink a lot that night, so I was able to pour in as much as I wanted and still feel good. In the past, whenever my mind had begun to circle vaguely around thoughts of Haru, an image of the Eiffel Tower had drifted up before me, like a shot of it on television, but tonight the image didn't appear. Instead I saw the world that had opened up inside Haru after she lost the only outlet she'd had for her overabundance of energy, and quickly lost herself in drink. I completely understood what Haru had gone through when the man left, and why she hadn't been able to pull herself together and move on again. Because that's how totally involved our love for him was—both of us had given it everything we could. The man was extremely attractive to begin with, of course, but to tell the truth, Haru and I couldn't have put so much effort into that love if we hadn't been competing. I don't know if he found all this amusing or if it made him feel like he needed some space to breathe or what, but for some reason the man always used to do stuff like invite one of us over to his house and then go out on a date with the other. Toward the end he frequently left Haru and me at his house together and didn't come back all night.

  I'm naturally clumsy, and it takes everything I have just to cook a meal or mend some little tear in a piece of clothing, to tie the strings on little packages or put together a cardboard box. Haru was particularly good at that kind of thing, so whenever she found me struggling over something she'd shout out, “God, are you clumsy!” and “I sure would love to see what kind of parents you've got!” and all sorts of stuff, jeering at me without mercy. In return I'd coolly point out that she had no breasts, and that her taste in clothes was absolutely atrocious. The man was the sort of person who praised what was good and told you honestly that what was bad was bad, and that just spurred the two of us on, making us even more paranoid.