The Lake

by Banana Yoshimoto

  Nakajima’s arms remained tightly folded across his chest. I knew the street we were walking on very well, and yet it seemed somehow to be detached from the earth, subtly distorted.

  Plodding on with even steps, I listened.

  “The group hadn’t been living in that place all along—evidently they were moving around from place to place, all over Japan, looking for somewhere to settle. So all kinds of people were coming and going all the time. It wasn’t at all unusual to suddenly see some face you didn’t recognize, or for someone who had been there to disappear, so it wasn’t hard for me to escape.

  “The thought that scared me the most was that maybe I’d keep going and going, but maybe I’d never arrive anywhere, and if I finally came to a populated area I’d find that it really was a foreign country, and I wouldn’t be able to communicate, and it would turn out that all those memories I’d had really were just an illusion. I didn’t have a passport, so I would have no way of getting back to the ‘home’ I was thinking of anyway. So I’d just have to go back to the same place and live there again. Without any hope. What if that turned out to be the truth? These thoughts plagued me endlessly. That was the worst, it really was.

  “I started thinking that if that were the case, I’d rather just be dead.

  “If this little dream I’d cherished turned out not to be there for me to hold on to anymore, I mean. Because it wasn’t just my mother I was dreaming of. It was the background against which I came into this world, the scent of freedom that wafted through my life, supported by all the hopes and the love my parents had for me, because back then, when I was still a kid, things like that were everything to me.

  “My head was spinning, and the world before me looked so dark, I was ready to lie down right there on the spot and die.

  “But I had Mino. His words, etched deep in my mind, were my reality then.

  “I could count on Mino. I’m sure I would have despaired even more if he hadn’t told me we were in Japan, probably in a place called Shimoda, even though no one ever said so.

  “He had been growing suspicious for some time as a result of information he got from his mysterious sister. He was secretly afraid that the adults might learn about her strange powers, and then their mother would end up in an even stronger position in the group, and they would have to stay even longer than they might otherwise. He tried his best to hide the things she said from them, but it was really hard. So I had no choice but to save them. I don’t know if they would agree that what I did deserves to be called ‘saving,’ though. After all, both their parents were part of the group—at least I’m pretty sure their father was, too. I’m sure their wounds, the despair they felt, must have been a lot deeper than mine.

  “I think what Mino did for me, his noble sacrifice, destroyed any sense of stability he’d had. And Chii’s, too. And even if that stability was built on a lie, at the time it was still something they could rely on. After that, everything changed. And yet he wanted that change, although maybe he wanted it for us, in order to save me and Chii—and that act of love, more than anything, is the reason he can keep smiling the way he does, even now.

  “I trudged through the forest, thinking only of Mino’s words, and of my mother.

  “I get the sense that most people assume that when someone who’s been brainwashed comes out of it there’s a feeling of relief, that it’s like waking up, but it isn’t like that. You feel sort of dull, nothing is clear—it makes you miserable. That’s the truth. I felt like there was nothing good waiting for me. I would actually keep feeling that way for a long time. Right then, though, making my way along that dark mountain road, I wasn’t worried about that, I was just fighting for my life. Trying to keep from getting torn to pieces inside, trying to hold myself together.

  “Eventually I saw lights, and my heart started thumping, my head hurt so badly it felt like it was about to split, and all the scary stories I had ever heard weighed down on me until I could hardly bear it anymore. But I kept walking. I stepped, almost collapsed, into the light. I didn’t know what it was, but there was a fence around the space, and I had the sensation of something beautiful watching me, so I stumbled over in that direction, and there was a stable with five horses lined up in their stalls, looking out at me.

  “For some reason the horses didn’t get nervous or start acting up when they saw me; they simply stood there watching me, perfectly still. Their black eyes and their lustrous coats made me feel completely calm. I stretched out a hand and touched one of them. I wasn’t afraid he would bite me. I just wanted to touch him, because he was so lovely. His skin felt warm, and then I caught a whiff of animal smell, and I loved the hard feel of his coat, stiff like grass—my eyes filled with tears. The horse just kept looking at me, it didn’t seem to be thinking anything, his eyes were like two lakes, so gorgeous, drawing me in.

  “I’ll be grateful to that horse for the rest of my life.

  “That horse, with its wild, natural eyes, brought me back, made me all right.

  “I pulled myself together again, got a grip.… The place I was in, it was a small riding club. I went and knocked on the clubhouse door. People who had come in from riding and the couple who owned the club were inside chatting over coffee, and they were pretty taken aback when they saw me, but the wife seemed to deduce immediately from how I looked that something was very wrong. She told me to come inside and sat me down at the back of the room and made me some coffee. The coffee smelled good, but even better than that was her smell—she smelled like a mother. The kind of bodily, nice scent of a mother who never lets her children out of her sight, who always thinks first of her kids—I smelled it. And it brought back such memories, it was so warm and familiar, that I cried and cried and couldn’t stop.

  “ ‘You’re Japanese, right? So this is Japan, after all? Please, call the police. I don’t even know my own name right now, honest. I was kidnapped.’

  “I kept repeating those words, crying all the while.

  “And then one of the riders said he recognized me, he had seen my mother on TV, and so right away the woman’s husband called the police.

  “ ‘You can tell us the details later’, the woman said, and gave me more coffee and some curry rice. There was lots of meat in it, and I realized how much I had missed that, too. When I was with that group, we weren’t allowed to eat any meat at all.

  “And it came back to me that this is what a mother is, this is the kind of being she is—it doesn’t matter what the situation is, if someone’s cold she warms him, and if he’s hungry she wants to feed him. I remembered that with such intensity, so vividly. It was okay for me to remember now, I realized, and I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t cry anymore. It took time for my heart to unclench itself.”

  We arrived at the center. Nakajima stopped talking while I chatted with the guard.

  Then, as we walked through the small gate, I asked my first question.

  “And you and your mom went to live in that house by the lake after you got back?”

  Nakajima nodded. After that, he started speaking again, but less rapidly.

  “I was almost ten at the time, but after I returned my mother and I slept in the same futon every night, with her hugging me tight. And for about three months, every morning when we woke up she would look at my face and burst out sobbing. I remember the suffocating feeling I got, even when my eyes were closed—the sense that someone is staring at you, at your face. I knew if I opened my eyes I’d see her, her face swollen from crying, so I just lay there, pretending to be asleep. It felt so oppressive, I’m sure it was even worse than what you feel being with me now, dealing with the things you don’t know about me. It was so over the top that my father got fed up and left her. That’s how bad it was.” Nakajima smiled. “I worried that she might go crazy, and so I asked if she could join me for counseling, even though it was really only meant for me, and we did go together, for a long time. Even then, with her in that condition, she did whatever was necessary to protect me when
the media came to do a story on us, and she told me we were going to make up for the time I’d lost—sometimes we’d go places, amusement parks and so on, and my father would come along, too.

  “Apparently my face was expressionless in the beginning, no matter what we were doing, I was always stiff, but that was just because I couldn’t find a way to show what I was feeling. Inside, I was having all kinds of emotions, but it was impossible to let them out. But day by day, slowly, over time, something was warming up in me, thawing. I started to love my mother again, and gradually I went back to being myself. I remember it all very clearly, that whole process.

  “And then, after things had settled down somewhat, our doctor suggested that we should go take it easy somewhere, and we went and lived in that house, by the edge of the lake.”

  That explains why he’s like this, I thought. It’s because he experienced something so awful himself that he’s determined, more than most people, not to be a burden to anyone, to me, and to take care of himself.

  Nakajima continued.

  “It’s not like I was being abused the whole time or anything, I was simply being trained by people who wanted to create a race of superhumans, so in a sense they were all very nice, the meals were always good, with lots of seafood, and I had friends I could play with every day, so it was actually pretty fun. But as far as the adults there were concerned, my relationships with them were all the same, homogeneous, there was no emotional involvement like there had been in my relationship with my mother.

  “I realized then, in the most physical way, that being logical and clear-headed isn’t at all the same thing as having everything the same, unruffled. When you’re in a state of homogeneity, it means you’ve lost yourself. That’s how you’re able to get that way in the first place.

  “All that love my mother sort of forced on me right after I escaped, it was like a soup that was too strong, it penetrated too deep. Her emotions were so intense—they were like gaudy clothes or something, with too many frills. That’s how I saw it.

  “In the end, I think it was my fault my mother and father separated, and she died sooner than she should have. That seemed to me like the most natural thing in the world, and I’m not thinking in some weird unscientific way or anything. It happened because she used so much energy; she chose to do that, in return for getting me back. What she put into me was taken away from her. She knew it would be like that, and still she used that energy. I really believe that, even now.

  “Of course, I don’t necessarily feel like I have that long to live myself, and so back then it was natural for me to think, What are you doing, I don’t need this life, Mom, it’s yours! But I didn’t have the strength to pray for that to happen, really deep down, the way my mother did. I could never compete with her, I realized that. She gave it everything she had, squeezing every last drop of strength in her body into following the tiny thread that led her to me.

  “I’ve been broken in all kinds of ways, and so for a long time now I’ve had the sense that I won’t be able to make it through my life in a normal way. But thanks to my mother, somehow or other I’ve been able to balance the books, and things have turned out really well.

  “Except it still makes me feel a little sad to think that the whole time she was searching for me, wearing herself out, I was having sashimi and laughing with my friends, and getting my first taste of the joys of sex,” Nakajima said.

  “Sorry, I cry when I talk about all this,” he added. And then he really cried.

  Nakajima and his mother had spent every day together, like lovers, trying to reclaim their lost time, and that ended up being the best period of his life, and providing his most precious memories. I doubted anything better than that would ever happen to him. He lived knowing that he had already experienced perfection; that, no doubt, was what gave him a certain aura of sadness, and a sense of flexibility.

  “Emotions aren’t much, though. I understand that quite well. Just as my memories of living with my mother by the lake are the most precious I have now, in the days after I started living with her I was always thinking of the ocean, how much fun I’d always had there, playing with Mino and Chii.… The waves were always rough at Shimoda, and we would see each other one second, and then the next we’d lose sight of each other. We’d laugh our heads off for no reason, fall down, get sucked in by the waves, and play so hard that we got out of breath.

  “When I try to gather up all the good things, I get an infinite number of combinations of events that fall under that heading, and if I try to gather up the painful things, those memories start coming out, and either way they’ll just keep coming, called up out of my brain or my heart or whatever, and none of it really means very much.

  “Just because things turned out badly in the end doesn’t mean that anything has changed in my relationship with my mother. Everything is still there, the same as always: the fact that we walked slowly around that lake together, holding hands, and the way my friends and I laughed in the ocean, the fact that I was looking at a seagull then. None of it has changed. It’s neither good nor bad, as I see it, the scenes are just there inside me, forever, and their mass remains the same. Of course, it’s true that sometimes the pink at sunrise somehow seems brighter than the pink at sunset, and that when you’re feeling down the landscape seems darker, too—you see things through the filter of your own sensibility. But the things themselves, out there, they don’t change. They existed, and that’s all there is to it.

  “Maybe it’s not even accurate to say things turned out badly. Sure, an accumulation of little incidents ended up ripping my life to shreds, and my mother swept all those pieces up with her too-passionate hands and jammed them together again any which way. That turned me into a kind of patchy guy. But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there. And that something is always greater than these emotions of mine.”

  Nakajima sounded, the way he murmured these words, as if he had only grudgingly decided to speak them.

  It was easy for me to listen, since I’d never been broken like him. That’s how people are, pretty much, wherever in the world you might go. There’s no need to forgive every mistake, to learn to like the bad things, we tell ourselves, and so we forgive just enough, in an easy sort of way.

  Take my mom, for instance. She was clumsy and terrible at math, she was nothing but a Mama-san at a bar, she had tons of plastic surgery, she died young, she had a child out of wedlock. Or my totally uncool dad, acting like a dipstick in that cheesy Italian restaurant. You need to have all that stuff, because that’s where it all begins.

  I’m sure it’s even harder for Nakajima. Because the scale is so huge.

  But who knows, maybe if he can get used to the fact that each day is another dull repetition of the same old thing, being with the same people all the time, nothing but the little leaps of your heart to put a splash of color in the world … if he can get accustomed to that, maybe, little by little, something will start to change.

  Not only was the street light shining on the wall, but the nearly full moon was shining pretty brightly, too—we could see the mural fairly well even from a distance. Certainly the colors would have shown up better in the daytime, but there was a kind of mysterious air to it, the way the outermost edges faded off into the darkness.

  “See, I painted everyone in over here,” I said, with a certain amount of pride.

  “Wow, so this is what it’s like.” Nakajima gazed at the mural for a long time, which was nice. It made me happy to see the same expression on his face that he gets when he’s studying really hard.

  I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself.

  Clearly I was recovering, too, from all kinds of things.

  I wanted to get back on my own two feet first, and then lead him by the hand down the path we would take together. Like the first time we went to see
Mino and Chii, drawing instinctively closer to him, without any hidden motives.

  Gazing all the while at the picture, very slowly, I explained.

  My voice reverberated through the dark, empty yard.

  “This is you. You’re taking it easy in the shade of the tree, eating a banana. And this is your mother—she’s always hovering around you, smiling. And here’s the lake, and obviously this is the shrine. And then over here, this is Mino. He’s laughing, making tea. See how small he is? And Chii, sleeping in her canopied bed. A little monkey princess. No one else knows what it means, but that doesn’t matter—it’s a happy world. No one can destroy that happiness. People will see this wall without having any idea what it means, and then eventually it will be knocked down, and it won’t exist anymore. But deep down in people’s subconscious, this happy group of monkeys, all of you, will still be there, just a little. Isn’t that nice?”

  Nakajima nodded without speaking.

  “Lately I’m always crying,” he said then, snuffling a bit, so I didn’t look at him. What the hell? I was thinking, a bit ruefully. This isn’t love, it’s volunteer work. This should be the scene where the guy is moved and embraces the girl, right? C’mon!

  We stood there looking at the wall for ages, so long we started getting cold.

  Whenever I think of this mural in the future, I’ll remember this night.

  No matter where we may be, or what we’re doing.

  “I don’t really know how to ask this, Chihiro, but did they … did they look unhappy to you?”

  Nakajima had been walking in silence when he blurted this out, his voice hoarse.