Manazuru

by Hiromi Kawakami

  Rei? The woman asked.

  My husband.

  The woman had followed as I drew the bath, and as we watched television after our baths, and as we went out onto the terrace to breathe the still night air. She had something to say.

  I know him, I think, said the woman. She was there erratically, growing faint one second, then suddenly more intense. She possessed no clear form to begin with, of course. Only I was aware she was following. I was the one who felt her eating shrimp, grimacing at me, and if you were to tell me there was no woman there at all, that would be the end of it.

  Is Rei alive?

  I don’t know.

  Where did you meet him?

  I forget.

  The woman’s replies were unsatisfactory. Since we had come to Manazuru, she had grown more intense, it was true, but there was no sense in probing further. I tried to sleep, but the woman distracted me. I wanted her to leave.

  Go away already.

  Where to?

  Where you usually are.

  But I don’t know where that is.

  The woman was at a loss. Very well, but there was nothing I could do to help her. I kicked off the covers. The air conditioning was set low, I couldn’t be hot, and yet my body was burning. It was all so strange. I had never talked to one before.

  Everything is such a mess. I thought. Then, all of a sudden, she was gone.

  The things that come and follow me don’t interest me. I don’t care. Whether or not they are there makes no difference to me. I feel like a scale with no weights resting in its pan. The weights have been removed, the scale rocks. You can’t tell from the rocking which side was heavier. All you can say for sure is that gradually the rocking will subside. I feel lonely.

  “COME ON, MA, perk up,” Momo said.

  The morning light was strong. We were having a Japanese breakfast in the same restaurant where we had eaten the previous evening. The hotel had more guests than I had thought. Only two tables were occupied then; now there was someone in almost every seat.

  Dried mackerel, miso soup with daikon, and slices of deep-fried tofu. Boiled spinach drizzled with soy sauce, boiled tofu. I’m not not perky, I said, and Momo laughed. Then why are you eating so little?

  I hadn’t touched the mackerel or tofu. Momo seemed to want them, so I let her have both. Growing children, you know, we’ve got appetites, Momo said, refilling her rice bowl.

  The brightness of late afternoon is not the same as the brightness of morning. Start with a clean slate, I murmured. What? Momo asked.

  That’s how morning feels, don’t you think?

  I told you you weren’t very perky. Were you thinking about Dad and stuff?

  Momo strips the mackerel, leaving the spine and the head, picking out the eyeballs, and cleans her plate. Rei liked fish, too. I have no desire to remember Rei, not now, not in the morning. Think of Seiji instead. That’s hardly fair to Seiji. To think of him solely to avoid thinking of another.

  “How about you, Momo? Is there a boy you like?” I asked.

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Ordinary.”

  I had readied myself for sullenness, but she replied jubilantly. I felt slightly happy, too.

  “What do you like about him?”

  “He’s nice.”

  I laughed. Momo sulked. I had laughed too much. I was amused by the words he’s nice. Momo is so adorable, I stroked her cheek. All at once she paled. She shook her head violently, rejecting the hand I touched her with. She wanted to be distant. From me.

  These things are hard, I thought. I got to my feet. Walking back to the room, a long, long way behind me, Momo followed. And between her and me, the woman.

  “HOW WAS MANAZURU?” Mother asked.

  “We went to Atami, too,” Momo told her. After checking out of the hotel, we changed our minds about going home and took a trip to Atami. I thought that with Momo, the tumult of my heart would be soothed by that town’s crowded, commercialized, flat scenery.

  We stopped for cake. We roamed aimlessly, left behind the strip of souvenir shops that stretched from the station, traced the course of the river as it ran toward the sea, and stumbled across a small pastry shop. There was a shooting gallery on the other side of the river. The shooting gallery was closed up, silent—perhaps it had gone out of business. The pastry shop was newly built, though a sign said it had been around for decades.

  The chocolate cake was good, Momo said. We had milk, too. Warm milk. In the shop, I noticed that the back of Momo’s neck smelled. It smelled sweet. Her growing up repulses me. It is not her growing that disgusts me, but the growing itself. She casts off unneeded things. So many things. She can’t help herself. And so I pity her. Her youth, her ignorance.

  What is it that repulses me? The burgeoning? Of her body, her emotions. It occurs to me that I am repulsed, as well, by the sight of pregnant women. I myself, pregnant with Momo, was more than I could bear.

  We took many pictures in Atami. The woman didn’t come. She had disappeared, suddenly, as the train passed through Yugawara. The sense of Rei’s presence, too, had faded. When we had the photos developed, Momo was smiling in every one.

  “My smile looks kind of fake,” Momo said, pointing to her face.

  “It’s a nice smile, you look happy.”

  “You look exactly like your mother when you smile,” Mother said.

  On the train back, I had gazed out the window at the town of Manazuru. Clouds hung over it. In Atami, the sky was clear. Something unquiet shrouded Manazuru. The people who live there don’t know it. Only the passersby can tell.

  Next time, all three of us should go somewhere, I said, glancing at Mother. Her expression said: I pity you. In Mother’s eyes, I am young, and ignorant.

  I AM AFLUTTER when I go to meet Seiji. We have been together for ages now, yet every time I see him, my heart dances.

  “I went on a trip with my daughter,” I tell him.

  “Was the weather nice?”

  “Half and half.”

  I talk to him, excitedly, of many things that make no sense. I talk as we walk. I am unable to make necessary adjustments, to talk of one thing but not another. I am like a coarse sieve—no matter what you put in, it drops through.

  “I get sleepy when I’m with you,” Seiji once told me.

  “You mean I bore you?” I asked, nervous.

  “No, not that, it’s more a peaceful sleepiness,” he replied, smiling.

  Sometimes I feel my age. Ten years have gone by since I met Seiji. The same accumulation of time ages us differently. He grows older at his pace and I grow older at mine, and our times keep time separately. We do not flow in the same way.

  “But it holds together.”

  “What does?” Seiji asked.

  “The whole thing.”

  “You think?”

  Seiji didn’t press me. The whole thing. I wasn’t sure what I meant. But it was true.

  “I tried to call you,” Seiji said quietly.

  “When?”

  “While you were in Manazuru.”

  You did? I asked, startled. I hadn’t seen any call on my cell phone. I remembered how deep the night had been in the hotel in Manazuru. The ocean rushing in, but seeming also to open out. The ocean went on and on, distant. How would it have felt to hear Seiji’s voice in Manazuru?

  I want you, I said. All right, then, we’ll make love today, Seiji answered. Our bodies, as we stood there, side by side, radiated heat.

  I SHY AWAY, just a little, until we start. Emotionally, physically, both.

  I hesitate to begin. Ever so slightly, I demur.

  “Come here,” Seiji says, and I slide over. Once we touch, I am willing.

  Seiji’s palms are soft. The tips of my fingers are always stiff at first, so I feel his softness more. Soon my fingers limber. A smooth tide rocks the stagnant pool of blood deep in the core of my body, and the liquid flows to my extremities.

  That’s nice, I w
hisper. With Seiji, I use words. With Rei, I never could.

  When we embrace, I feel as though I am only the outline of my body. My body’s outline traces Seiji’s. Two outlines almost fusing, but without dissolving, only what is contained within is swept together, leveled, blown again into a heap.

  Afterward, even more than during our lovemaking, my body loosens, and for a time I am unable to move. For a time, in this case, meaning five minutes or so.

  As I lie there, I hear a sound like the hissing of the tide.

  “What’s that sound?” I ask Seiji, and he cocks his head.

  “You mean that car driving away?” he replied.

  “The sound of a car driving, not close, but away?”

  “If the car is approaching,” Seiji says, pressing his cheek to the sheet, “it sounds sharper.”

  It strikes me that Seiji says things that are almost broken. Whether a car is coming or going, its velocity increases as it passes, there’s no way to tell the difference. I am tempted to protest. I can’t help wanting to say the words, to take what is almost broken, and break it.

  “I’m hungry,” I said in an intentionally husky voice. Seiji laughed. The almost brokenness dispersed.

  “I feel like having something warm,” I said, sitting up. I was capable of movement. I drew my finger lightly down his back. He kept his back straight, but his shoulders trembled.

  Do you feel it? I asked, and he replied, It tickles.

  I stretched, then touched Seiji again. The place where I touched him shrank from me. The roaring of the tide grew louder.

  WE COUPLE, AND then we eat, we part, we go home.

  I am light on the way back. Light and cool, no matter the time. In the day, at night, in the winter, in the summer. Cool and light.

  While I was waiting in front of the station for the light to change, before the red had turned, a man wearing a hat stepped into the street without looking, and didn’t stop.

  “Watch out!” I cried. A white car was heading this way, speeding up. The man neither quickened nor slowed his pace, he went on walking, unperturbed.

  My heart was pounding. Normally I don’t think of my heart, but when I’m startled, it pounds. I understand that it is beating. The man ducked immediately into a side street. The light turned green, and the crowd welled into the crosswalk. A woman was walking next to me. She was my height, with short hair, stocky, she took her time crossing the street.

  The beating of my heart attuned me to my body. To the movement of my feet. The steps of the woman beside me were synchronized with mine. Everyone in the crosswalk was walking at the same pace. I felt sick to my stomach.

  I was feeling light, cool, but now I am being drawn into something odd.

  To staunch this feeling, I think of Seiji. You don’t have to feel when you are thinking. The callus, a small bulge on the middle finger of his right hand, above the joint, from his pencil. No one uses pencils anymore, I said to him once. Seiji shook his head. I do. Most of the time, I use a pencil, not a pen.

  Seiji and I both work with writing. I am a writer. Writers write for Seiji. In the beginning, he and I worked together on a few projects. Each week, I would write a short essay. Seiji gives praise in a way unique to him. He praises without seeming to. The essays were published as a book, and more work came. I could take care of Momo, now. And myself.

  I was still thinking when I reached our house. I stood still for a time in the glow of the streetlight. There had been such a crowd in front of the station, but somewhere along the way I had been left alone. Where does a crowd like that go off to?

  When we left the hotel, Seiji said he was going back to the office. He flagged down a cab. As he climbed in, his back belonged to no one I knew. Sometimes these moments come.

  And yet Rei never looked unfamiliar to me. Even now I can draw his face and body, everything, leaving nothing out. The street light shines so dimly. I stepped away from the light and quietly pushed open the gate to our house.

  STILL THE SAME number of pills.

  Mother takes medicine for her high blood pressure each morning and night. Her blood pressure tends to climb in the winter so she takes twice as many pills then; eventually, when spring arrives, she goes back to the usual dosage.

  This year, even this late, I still need the same number.

  She sounds disheartened. Maybe it’s the doctor, I have a new doctor, now, a younger one. He does everything by the numbers. Old doctors understand, make adjustments.

  She is stretching her arms as she speaks. Her tone is disheartened, but I can see her body is opening to the spring. When she stretches, strength flows into the tips of her fingers.

  You’ll go back to the usual number soon enough, I say, and Mother nods. Oh. I saw some tadpoles, she says, out of nowhere.

  Where? I ask. Hmm. She giggles. Momo and I walked to the pond over at the university. On Sunday. While you were off at the movies by yourself.

  That was work, you know, I muttered, as if making an excuse, and again Mother chuckled. Nothing wrong with a movie, you’re welcome to go to as many as you like.

  I always stiffened when I talked with Mother about Rei. She never tried to look at him, at Rei, the man I was married to, except through a sort of fish-eye lens. I don’t mean she saw him from a prejudiced perspective. She was unwilling to regard him as a man with a form. She preferred to peer through her lens at his distorted, bulging toes, or at his ballooning head. Nothing else. She didn’t dislike him enough to look away. She didn’t hate him enough to stare. She chose to keep him indistinct.

  Talking to Mother about my work is a little, a very little, like talking about Rei. But work is only work. It is like the salt and water you set out as an offering on the household shrine. The things are there, but since their meaning transcends you, you cease to notice them. Rei possessed a body. This, for Mother, was hard to bear.

  Tadpoles, already? It seems too cold, I said. Mother cocked her head. Oops, did I say tadpoles? I meant eggs. They were still eggs. Those lines, like gelatin, covered with black dots. Can you believe that Momo says she’s never seen them before?

  The university is a twenty-minute walk away. The pond abuts the tennis courts. Rei and I went there a few times, I remembered, before we were married, on walks. The pond was small. Enclosed in untended growth, so that from the water’s edge we couldn’t see the tennis courts. We could only hear the thwack of the balls, so close it was eerie. Rei used to kiss me there, under the cover of the growth. Whispering my name, Kei, he kissed me.

  No matter the season, the water always buzzed.

  WHEN THE DAYS grew warmer, Momo went and caught some tadpoles. She scooped ten into a wide-mouthed glass jar.

  “Water,” Momo sighed, holding the jar up to the sunlight. “All this stuff floating in water.”

  Aligning my face with Momo’s, I joined her, peering up into the jar. Miniscule bits of something like seaweed. Dashes of gray, like filaments of thread. Bits of soil. At first glance the water seemed transparent, but it was true, all manner of things hung suspended in it. Among them, the tadpoles, several of them, shuddered as they swam.

  “Is it pond water?” I asked. Momo nodded. Funny, it looked so clean when I put it in the jar.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, that’s what pond water looks like,” I said. Again Momo eyed the jar.

  The next morning one tadpole had died and was floating on the water’s surface, but the rest were swimming around energetically. See how thin their tails are. Momo smiles. I love how thin they are, it’s so cute.

  After Momo left for school, a hush fell over the house. Mother was still asleep. I washed the dishes, set them into the drying rack. Water dripped. Catching the morning light, the drops were small and strong and intense. Are there things, all manner of tiny things, floating in these droplets, too? I wondered. Invisible swarms.

  Sometimes, rarely, they come in swarms. Not, as a rule, when I am in a crowd, but in places devoid of people. Twenty, thirty at a time. It only lasts a moment, and th
en they are gone.

  I opened my laptop on the kitchen table. Until recently, Momo called this silver machine “little Ginzō.” Gin for silver. So it’s a boy? I asked. Because, she told me, there aren’t any boys in this house. She christened the computer soon after she started junior high. How sullen she has become in these three years.

  A tub of margarine, sitting diagonally across from my computer, had been left with the lid ajar, and I could see how the margarine had softened. Its whitish yellowness looks cool when it is hard; when it softens, I want to touch it. To put a finger there, depress its surface, then lick off what clings to my skin. But I don’t.

  I closed the lid and put the container in the refrigerator. The fridge began to hum.

  SOON AFTER THEY sprouted hind legs, as their front legs started to bud, six tadpoles died. Momo cried. She wrapped the nearly tailless six in gauze and buried them in the garden.

  You’ve never had a pet before, Momo, have you? Mother said, stroking her head. You had a dog once, Kei, remember? You even built a doghouse. You bought a kit, and painted the roof red, Mother said, and Momo looked up.

  What kind of dog was it? Momo asked.

  A mutt.

  What was its name?

  Jirō.

  When did he . . .

  Twenty years ago.

  Was he cute?

  Yes.

  Three of the tadpoles in the glass jar were still swimming. Their tails were longer than those of the six that died. Perhaps they too would die when their tails disappeared. I wonder if it’s what I’m feeding them, Momo said. I’ll go ask at the pet shop at the station. Maybe we need a proper aquarium.

  I have errands to run, I’ll come with you, Mother said, and began getting her things together. I wouldn’t want a dog, Momo was saying. They’re so adorable, I’d be frightened, she was saying.

  “Frightened?” Mother asked.

  Mmm. Frightened it would leave.

  Mother falls silent. I fall silent as well. Momo keeps her head down as she buttons her jacket. Lately, we don’t go out of our way to talk about Rei’s disappearance, but we no longer avoid the topic. Jirō was a very smart dog. He could tell when it was all right to bark and when it wasn’t. His fur tended to clump, and he always looked out of sorts. Whenever you petted him, his tail would stick up, and he would be so happy.