Hardboiled & Hard Luck

by Banana Yoshimoto

  Somehow this made me feel better. And so, thoroughly warmed by my bath, I returned to my room.

  3

  A Dream

  The fatigue I had felt earlier was much worse after my bath, and I made matters worse by drinking a small bottle of sake from the hotel fridge. I tumbled into bed almost immediately. Without unpacking my bag, still wearing the hotel kimono, even forgetting to switch off the bedside lamp, I entered the world of sleep. There was nothing in the room but a bed, and nothing visible from the window but the mountains behind the hotel. When I open my eyes, I thought as I sank into sleep, the morning sun will be glowing through the sun-bleached curtains, streaming into the room. And by then, the rather eerie experience I had today will be a thing of the past... This thought, which flitted through my mind immediately before I fell asleep, made me breathe a sigh of relief.

  But the world wasn’t that friendly.

  Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go very easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness.

  In my dream, I was in a sort of maze.

  I crept forward on my hands and knees through a darkness crisscrossed with narrow passageways. Tunnels kept splitting off in different directions. I tried to keep calm as I considered the options, tried to focus on finding my way back out. Every so often I would come to a place tall enough that I could stand up, but from there the path would just divide again and keep going.

  Finally I saw light ahead. I pressed on.

  Moving into the brightness, I discovered a small cave hung with many different colored strips of cloth and filled with burning candles. Peering through the fabric, I saw a shrine. Hold on, I thought, I know this shrine. In my dream, I realized that I had seen it before.

  Just then, someone whispered in my ear, “Don’t you remember the date? It’s the —th of the —th month.” I could barely make out the words, but the sound of them still gave me an unpleasant feeling. It was a day I wanted to forget. Yes... I think this was that sort of day.

  A scene came to mind. I saw a room, one I remembered very well. The highway that ran past the building was visible through the window, and it was always very noisy, and you could smell the exhaust from the cars. The floor of the room was dirty and the walls were thin. I was living there, living with someone...

  At this point, I noticed a shadow flickering in the candlelight.

  “You have to make an offering,” said Chizuru.

  That’s right, I thought in my dream, it was her.

  She must have been following me for some time and entered the cave behind me. She looked just as she always had: the same fair skin, the shortly cropped hair, the same lonely look on her face.

  Without so much as a glance in my direction, she began making a line of black stones on a platform that seemed to serve as an altar.

  “I collected these stones from the riverbed,” said Chizuru.

  I felt that I needed to reply.

  “I guess you mean that river, right?” I said. “The one that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead? No living person can go there, huh?”

  This was all I could manage, even at a time like this? I couldn’t believe myself.

  “That’s right,” replied Chizuru, without looking at me. “I thought I’d make an offering. After all, today is the anniversary of my death.”

  “Shouldn’t I be doing that?” I said.

  “Yeah, right—except you forgot.” Chizuru laughed. “You were strolling along there in the mountains, totally oblivious, humming as you went.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” she continued. “You always think your own life is the hardest, and as long as you get along OK, as long as life is nice and easy and you’re having all the fun you can, everything’s just fine.”

  Chizuru’s eyes smoldered with a rage darker than any I had ever seen. I felt a deep hurt and anger at the unfairness of what she was saying. I had always loved Chizuru, in my own way.

  “Yeah, if only my problems were more serious, right? Because compared to yours, the misfortunes I’ve borne are nothing at all, are they? Compared to all the big problems you had, my life is just as easy as can be, isn’t it! I couldn’t even win the consolation prize in a singing contest, because I couldn’t inspire enough pity!”

  My voice trembled with an anger I couldn’t restrain. But even as I spoke, I was thunderstruck to notice that I really did tend to think my life was extremely hard, much more than I had previously realized.

  It was hot in the cave, and the air was thin. I really wish there were a window, I thought. How long will I be here? The candles cast a dim glow on the dirt walls. The scent of dust and mold hung in the air.

  It was so hot that I woke up. Light streamed across the ceiling. I was bathed in sweat, and my head was throbbing from the pressure of the dream. My kimono was twisted uncomfortably around my body, and the sheets were tangled. God, I thought, what an awful dream.

  I glanced at the clock: it was two in the morning. I was wide awake now, and I didn’t think I’d be able to go back to sleep. I got out of bed, took a bottle of water from the fridge, and drank. Gulped the water down. It was only at that moment that I began, finally, to feel alive. No wonder I’m hot, I thought, noticing that the heat was on—the thermostat was set too high. I rotated the dial on the ancient machine and adjusted the temperature.

  It was late. The room was deathly still; nothing moved.

  I got up and looked out the window. It was pitch-black, and there was no sign of movement out there either. My own face was reflected in the glass.

  It’s no good, I thought. Something just doesn’t feel right tonight.

  I guess I did pick up something on the road, after all. The mood.

  The Chizuru I had encountered in my dream didn’t convey the same feeling of depth as the real Chizuru. She had seemed thin, insubstantial. It was a dream, I told myself, just a dream.

  Chizuru wasn’t the sort of person who said things like that. She was stronger, more forbidding, and more bitterly sarcastic; she was also much cleverer, and nicer. Clearly the Chizuru I dreamed was a product of my own feelings of guilt.

  After I lay down for a while, I began to get sleepy again.

  The next thing I knew, I was back in the cave. Here we go again, I thought.

  Chizuru was kneeling with her eyes closed, praying with all her heart. She was beautiful. The walls of the cave were gray in the candlelight. Chizuru looked so dignified, she made the cave seem as if it had been created just for prayer.

  In the wavering light, her eyelashes took on an air of fragility. Her eyes—those beautiful cold brown eyes of hers—quivered beneath closed eyelids. What was she praying for? What had caused her such suffering?

  Now that I was thinking seriously, I suddenly realized that I didn’t know the first thing about Chizuru. Back in those days, I didn’t have a solid grasp of things, even in my own mind. I was tired, I was hurt, I was still just a kid. Looking back, it seemed as if the sky outside my window was always full of clouds. And not just clouds, either—there was a lot of fog that year, too. Night after night, the landscape outside my window was a dirty, ashy gray.

  This region calls out to something in my mind, and my mind answers back—that’s why I keep finding myself in this sad dream. So I might as well just enjoy seeing Chizuru again.

  Because as long as she didn’t speak, the Chizuru before me looked like the one I had known, and it was good to see her. That white cardigan with the frayed cuffs; the jeans whose cost we had split and then fought over until finally we agreed that whoever got up first each morning could wear them; her light brown hair with its dried-out end
s—these were things I would never have a chance to see anymore, no matter how much I wanted to. I gazed at her, long and hard.

  In all probability, I thought, my thoughts had never gotten through to her, not even once. This is how she always was, sunk in the depths of her own inner life. She didn’t even try to make others understand.

  And I had just looked on. In fact, that was why I liked watching her. Her life was like a pale shadow of life, given form by innumerable layers of anguish.

  When Chizuru turned to look at me, the candles went out, and everything was plunged in darkness.

  Ah, I must have slept again...

  I thought.

  I fell asleep and entered that dream again.

  It was three o’clock. My mouth was dry, my head ached dully.

  I looked around the unfamiliar room. Nothing seemed real. I pressed my face to the sheets, but they didn’t feel real either. Should I have a drink? Deciding that I should, I got a bottle of whiskey from the fridge and poured myself a glass. Who cares how many times I have this dream? It doesn’t matter if it’s just an evil effect brought about by the place I’m in, I should be happy that I got to see Chizuru on the anniversary of her death, even if she wasn’t real... I wonder where the cave is, though. Then something occurred to me: the evil person or thing or whatever it is that’s responsible must have been buried alive in a cave near that shrine I saw earlier! I can’t say how I knew this, but I did. Things were falling into place.

  Why did I feel so certain? I didn’t know, but I felt sure I was right.

  I never shed a tear over Chizuru’s death. Why not? And why was I so harsh with her earlier, in the dream? I should have been nicer, even if it meant lying to myself.

  4

  The Visitor

  Just then, there was a knock at the door.

  It gave me a start, but I fought down the slight fear I felt and peered out through the peephole. I thought it might be the woman from the front desk.

  But the person I saw standing in the eerily bright hallway was a woman I didn’t recognize, dressed in a bathrobe; she stood perfectly straight, her hands hanging at her sides, and she was all alone.

  I opened the door.

  “As you can see, I’m a woman,” I said. “I don’t hire prostitutes.”

  The woman replied, keeping her voice down, “Don’t worry, that’s not why I’m here. I’ve been shut out of my room.”

  “The person inside won’t let you back in?”

  “He seems to be asleep.”

  “You can call from my room, if you want.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman was slender and she had long hair. The lower half of her face was particularly gaunt; she had very thin lips, but they lent her a kind of graceful air. I was stunned to catch a glimpse of hair under her bathrobe as she cut across the room—apart from the robe, she was completely naked. My god, I wondered, how long has she been standing out in the hall like that?

  She was standing by the phone now, but she wasn’t calling.

  “You haven’t forgotten your room number, have you?” I asked.

  “Oh no, that’s not it at all!” The woman gave her head an exaggerated shake. “The truth is, we had a fight. Even if I called, I doubt he’d answer.”

  “He must be feeling bad right now, though, don’t you think?” I said. “I mean, after kicking you out dressed like that...”

  “OK, I’ll just wait ten minutes and then call,” she replied. “Would you mind letting me stay here, just a little while?”

  I poured another glass of whiskey and offered it to her.

  She held out her thin, bare arm to accept it, then took a sip.

  “Have you ever had something like this happen to you?” she asked. “I mean, someone doing something terrible to you, or you doing something terrible to someone else?”

  “Many times. When things head in that direction...” I replied. Like earlier, when I couldn’t be nice to Chizuru, even in a dream. “I don’t know, it’s like I’m in some other world or something, that’s how it is with me. I lose the ability to make ordinary decisions, and my body moves on its own.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s like being in a bad dream,” she said. “The man I’m here with has a wife, and he refuses to break up with her.”

  “So you quarreled, and he chased you out into the hall, naked?”

  “I think he gets more violent because he knows it’s his own fault. In a town as small as this, just raising your voice in public is enough to get everyone talking, so sometimes I try to pick a fight with him out on the street. He holds things in, never raises his voice or anything, but I just keep shouting. In shops, on the sidewalk, wherever. And the thing is, I can feel that I’m gradually falling into a very peculiar emotional state. It’s like I’m in a plastic bag, slowly running out of oxygen. Like no one cares what I do anymore, and now it’s too late, there’s no going back. And then, as soon as we get into our room at the hotel, he starts hitting me. We just keep going through the same cycle, and it’s really worn me down. Earlier, we were up on this road in the mountains. We started shouting at each other again, and as we walked along, I started to feel like I didn’t care anymore, nothing mattered. People were already beginning to talk, and my mother thinks I should be institutionalized... I don’t suppose I’ll be able to stay in this town much longer. However you look at it, it’s all over now.”

  She spoke very quietly, almost as if she were talking about someone else.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but just having you here in my room wears me out.” It was the truth. Somehow when I looked at her, when I listened to her talking, my mind seemed to go numb, and I felt as if something inside me were being sucked out. “Why don’t you give him a call.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said, “not yet. I’m afraid.”

  “All right, then, why don’t I go down, wake up the woman at the front desk, and get you another key? How would that be?”

  I figured I could do that much for her.

  “Yes, that seems best. Would you mind?”

  “No problem at all.”

  “Let’s talk a little more, though, OK? I need to calm down.”

  “Sure.”

  “What was it like when you were in this situation? Being with someone you constantly fought with, tooth and nail?” As she spoke, her eyes met mine. But she was so absorbed in her own affairs that her gaze didn’t register anything.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t really say anything about that. I’ve never had an experience like that,” I said. “In my case, things always had a touch of humor, and we had some good times, and beautiful moments—there was always something good.”

  That was an incredible year.

  My father, who had been having an affair and hadn’t been home in ages, died, secretly leaving everything to me. My mother wanted what little he’d had, so she cooked up all sorts of cunning plots, and finally made off with my personal seal and my bank passbook.

  I call her my mom because she brought me up, but she isn’t my biological mother. We were on pretty good terms, though, so I was really shocked by what she did. The rumor was that she had quit her job at the snack bar where she used to work and run off with some man. I was so incredibly hurt and angry that I did some investigating and managed to find her new address. Then, one day I got up my courage and went to reclaim my inheritance. I didn’t think it would be easy, but in fact everything went so smoothly that it was almost a letdown.

  By the time I arrived in the town where she was living, it was late afternoon, almost evening. I didn’t try to get into her apartment as soon as I found it because I was afraid she might be living with the sort of man I would rather steer clear of; instead, I decided to spend some time in town, waiting for nightfall.

  I’ll never forget how I felt then...

  The rituals of our daily lives permeate our very bodies. Aft
er all we had been through, the one tie that still bound my mother and me was the way time moved in our lives, because it had seeped down so deep inside us.

  I wasn’t taking the situation that seriously; I even thought the two of us would get together again some day. I knew my mom had let my father’s mother take over as my legal guardian, but even so, I still believed we would get back together. I haven’t seen her once since she left, though, even today. For all I know, we may never see each other again. Back then it would have hurt me too much to admit that possibility, so I closed my heart to keep from thinking about it.

  The town was subject to the same flow of time—the same cycle that had left its mark on my body over the years, ever since I was young. In the evening, around the time the news came on TV, as the birds soared through the western sky, and the huge evening sun hovered in the west, slowly sinking toward the horizon, I had always walked home alone. I might be returning from school or from a boyfriend’s house, I might be heading back after skipping school and hanging out all day or even making a special trip back if I was out with friends—as long as I lived with my mom, I always went back in the evening to change clothes.

  This was the only time that my mother and I shared. I didn’t go back because I wanted to see her—it was a sort of obligation, something I did for her because she had raised me, even though she wasn’t related to me by blood. I made a habit out of something that had begun as an instinctive strategy, my childish way of reminding her that I was alive, and that she was supposed to be taking care of me.

  My mom was always having dinner when I got home. Then she would leave for the bar. My dad hadn’t been home much for a long time; the second half of our life together, my mom and I lived alone. I sat with her for a few minutes while she ate, then saw her off. Bye! See you later! I’d wave goodbye, then go do the dishes and clean up, and then, most of the time, go to a friend’s house or to my boyfriend’s. I usually didn’t come home until very late.