The soil in the garden where Momo buried the tadpoles was moist and dark, mossy green. Each time she thrust the shovel in, the earth crumbled.
IT WAS A dark green blazer.
The last summer blazer Rei bought. We’re not supposed to wear ties on Fridays anymore. What a hassle, he said, as we headed to the department store. Rei didn’t like shopping for clothes. After we married, he made me shop for him. Don’t you have a preference in ties, at least? I asked, but he shook his head. I don’t care, as long as there are no panthers, or dragons.
And yet, this time, he suggested a white jacket. I think a darker color might be better, considering the slacks you have, I told him, and he nodded.
There was, however, a brief moment of vacillation. So it seemed to me later. At the time, I didn’t notice any wavering of his.
At home, I clipped off the price tag, paired the jacket with the slacks hanging in the wardrobe, and said, Yes, this was definitely the better color. Rei said nothing. I thought he hadn’t heard. He wore the jacket to work a few times. Then he went back to neck-ties. They say we’re not supposed to wear them, but about half the people still do. I’m a formal type, anyway, he grumbled.
Summer had just passed when Rei disappeared. Not long before, checking the blazer’s pockets before taking it to the cleaners, I found a slip of paper. In the breast pocket. With a number, an hour, it seemed, written on it.
21:00
The slip of paper was the size of a business card, and the tiny numerals were written in one corner. I crumpled it and threw it away.
For a month after it became clear that Rei had disappeared, I didn’t pick up the blazer at the cleaners. When I found the receipt in my wallet, I forced myself to go get it. On the way, I recalled the 21:00. My heart pounded.
It was still pounding as I opened the door of the cleaners. The woman behind the counter was sweating profusely. I don’t do well with air conditioning, she said. Shortly before summer, she would begin repeating this, justifying herself, as her customers complained. Long after summer ended, the woman continued to sweat. She smelled, faintly.
I left the plastic bag on the blazer and pushed it deep into the closet. Until the day I packed our things to move in with Mother, I never touched it.
I WONDER WHAT Rei was thinking when he wrote that number. 21:00.
Wondering leads nowhere. Little by little, as time passes, the hurt Rei left fades. I threw the blazer out a few years ago. Even so, there is no shortage of proof that he existed.
“Seiji.” I spoke his name into the phone. Saying it over the phone brings him closer. More so than when he is here, with me. Because the ear concentrates the sound, perhaps.
“Yes?”
“Will we break up, eventually, you and me?”
“That’s an unexpected question,” Seiji said. “Do you want to break up?”
“No, I was just remembering.”
Seiji knows that when I tell him I remember, I am not speaking about him, but about Rei. It’s a terrible way to be. I think so myself. Of myself.
Seiji is so good. He never says anything that isn’t good. So he scares me. Frightens me in a different way, not like Rei.
“If you were meeting someone at nine at night, where would you meet?” I asked.
“That’s a hard one. By then most cafes are closed. A hotel lobby. Or a lounge. Maybe a bar would be best.” He answers me seriously, carefully.
I can’t even be certain that the number 21:00 marked the time of a meeting. I am simply playing, clinging to my dead-end wondering.
“I’m meeting someone at nine tonight myself,” Seiji said on the other end.
Oh.
“An old classmate, younger than me, in a hotel bar.”
“Well, take care,” I said, and Seiji smiled. He didn’t laugh aloud, he never does, but I could sense the outward movement of the air around his mouth.
Could Rei’s disappearance have been avoided if I had told him to take care? Wondering, again, leads nowhere. I straighten my back, quiet my need to be comforted. I ask Seiji brusquely when we will see each other. I’m busy this month, I may not have time, I’m sorry, Seiji says.
That’s okay, I understand. I don’t protest. Seiji smiles again. You’re quiet today.
When he said he couldn’t see me, my chest ached. I didn’t miss him, I ached.
THERE WAS MORE than the slip of paper.
I have Rei’s diary, too. It sits next to the dictionaries, on the bookshelf. Once a month or so, I flip through its pages.
It is a diary of notes. “1 pack razor blades.” “Torigen tonight.” “Takamatsu.” “Kawahara.” “Section chief paid for dinner.” “Momo’s horse figurine.” Such things, written, utterly flat. None of the words have any life, yet every time I read them I am wounded. The mere sight of the words, lined up on the pages, cuts into me.
I hadn’t known Rei kept a diary. At first, when I found it, I pored carefully over it hoping it might contain a clue to his disappearance. Some murkiness—a woman, money. I searched for anything unclear.
I didn’t find anything. I sat dazed for a time. Not because I had failed, but because I had been afforded a glimpse of Rei’s life. The words, the cost of a bowl of chicken-and-egg-over-rice he’d had for lunch, a list of the back issues of a magazine, a note from work: “delivery five days early, negotiations tomorrow,” refused absolutely to connect to the person who had been here with me until recently, to Rei.
I moved the diary behind other books for a time. So I wouldn’t have to see it. Rei had never looked like a stranger to me, not for an instant, and yet suddenly, reading his diary, he was someone I didn’t know. I couldn’t recall his face. His smell. The feel of his skin. His voice.
It wasn’t because he was gone. It was because, reading his diary, I was seeing the things around me, not with my own eyes, but with his. It was sickening to view things through another’s eyes. Since then, to read his diary hurts. I ache. No. I refuse. Him, Rei. He is separate from me. A barrier stands between him and me.
Yet I always knew the barrier was there. I knew it, but it comes as a shock, having to confront it. I am emotionally seared, as when a flame licks forward, and you leap back.
After a time, I brought the diary back out to the front. To the shelf reserved for the books I use. Stupid Rei. Sometimes I say this. In a faint way, I say it, to see how it feels.
Once, as I said the words, Momo was gazing at me, fixedly, unseen. From behind.
She left right away as I remained motionless, the open diary in my hand. Antipathy. That’s not the word, precisely, but I sensed a thick anger radiating. From behind.
I envied her anger. Try as I might to get angry, it slips away. There is nothing for me to seize onto, and so I reach out, and my hand passes right through all that I have.
THE TREES BLOSSOM, and the air is scented.
I can’t see Seiji, and now that Momo has started high school, she is busy. I walked alone to the university. It feels good when the sky is so clear. I went to the pond by the tennis courts and sat on the grass. The last three of Momo’s tadpoles grew into frogs. Not long ago, Momo and I came to this pond and released them. The small green frogs sat motionless for some time on the grass, then leaped, vanishing into the underbrush, hopping in low, minute arcs.
On days when the sky is clear, the things that come and follow me shine. The pond water buzzes. I open a can of tea that I bought on the way and drink. I’m thirsty. I realize as I drink that I have been thirsty. It is a man who comes. I may have known him once. The thought crosses my mind as I gulp my tea.
I take Rei’s diary from my bag. Open it, tear out a random page. Once a year, or so, I do this. Eventually, I hope, I will tear all the pages out. I start making an airplane. I will send it flying onto the surface of the pond, let it sink.
My fingers, folding the sheet of paper, brush over Rei’s handwriting. A bit below the thick black words—TWENTY ¥62 STAMPS. SAITŌ CO. DONE—written with a fountain pen, is the word MAN
AZURU. It jolts me. I undo the folds and look closer. On a date one month before his disappearance, in a ballpoint pen’s thin strokes, he had written Manazuru.
I fold the sheet of paper into a square and stick it back between the diary’s pages. Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. I whisper the syllables. I hadn’t noticed. Or had I forgotten? Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. Once again, I say the word. The surface of the pond sparkles. The thing following me, too, is sparkling. The wind rises. The space around me is filled by the rustling of leaves. I can’t see for all the light.
three
I SAW A CAMELLIA blossom fall.
I had seen crimson petals scattered on the ground, like water drops, and I had seen those bulky blossoms capsized whole in dirt, but I had never actually seen one fall.
“Look,” I said, and Rei, walking beside me, quickly glanced over.
“It dropped, huh?” Rei said, then bent and scooped the blossom up.
It was no different from when it had still been on the tree.
Without a word, Rei clenched it in his fist. Large petals fluttered down. Slipping through his bent fingers, a few petals at a time. Finally only the yellow core remained. Rei crushed it, too.
“There’s pollen in my hand,” he said, opening his fist. The undone weave of stamens, pistil, calyx, and the fine petals at the center, fell more slowly than the larger petals.
“Poor thing,” I said.
Rei turned to look at me. Why?
To destroy it like that.
It would have rotted anyway, eventually.
We had been a couple for some time by then. I thought him heartless. Rei. I spoke his name, to see how it would feel. Usually it didn’t come easily; this time it came right out.
Kei, he replied. One of the fingers that had toyed with the camellia entered my mouth. For a moment the strong sweet scent of the flower’s core wafted up, and then, without realizing what had happened, I was sucking. Sucking on his finger.
Occasionally, when I started nursing Momo, I recalled that sensation. Sucking Rei’s finger. I sucked like a baby. At the time I didn’t notice, I only realized it when I started nursing Momo. Utterly, sweetly, painfully engrossed, sucking, heedless, the finger he held out.
REI WAS LIKE the retreating tide.
Try to stand your ground, still it draws your body in.
Rei drew me in. He was a master of the surprise attack. You think he is flat, uninteresting, you cease to pay attention, and he sweeps you off your feet. Less than two months after we started dating, I couldn’t get him out of my mind.
Our first night together, we stayed in Hakone. We met at dusk, in Shinjuku. We didn’t know where we would go, but we had decided that we would spend the night.
“Let’s take the Romance Train,” Rei announced, and purchased our tickets. I still remember the sound of my ticket being punched when I presented it at the gate.
We switched at Yumoto to the Tozan Line and got off at one of the stations along the way. The road shot straight up the mountain; walking, we came to an inn.
“We’ll stay here, then?” Rei said.
As he slid open the frosted-glass door, an old pendulum clock, hanging to one side, came into view. A woman sat behind the counter. She walked out, a pair of slippers in each hand, and aligned the slippers on the floor.
“How much a night?” Rei asked.
Seven thousand yen each, dinner and breakfast included, she replied. All right, we’ll stay, Rei told her without missing a beat, and the woman promptly led us to our room.
Rei tore the paper wrapper from a sweet on the table and popped it whole into his mouth. Shall I make some tea? I asked. It’s okay, I can do it, he answered.
I went to soak in the bath. When I returned, Rei was stretched out on the floor. The top of his light cotton kimono hung open; he had propped himself up, a tea cup at his elbow.
Want some? he asked, and when I asked, Tea? he said, No, whiskey, it was in the fridge.
Gotta have booze, right? It would have been awkward without it, just the two of us at an inn like that, Rei explained later. We finished dinner and set out on a walk in the kimonos the inn provided. The mountain road was dark. The clatter of our wooden clogs on the asphalt reverberated stiffly through the air. I could smell the alcohol on Rei’s breath.
I had gotten rooms with men before, but they always wore themselves out trying to make our time together festive, from start to finish. With Rei, the air was clear. Every unnecessary sound, the heat of our bodies, siphoned away, vanished. We did not exhilarate, we were not warmed.
And so, all the more, he drew me in.
IT WAS EARLY summer when we were in Hakone.
As dawn broke on the mountain, before it was fully light, we briefly loved. It was deeper than when we had embraced in the evening. As we were paying at the desk, I suddenly pictured the daybreak tangle of our bodies, and became wet. The rainy season was unusually long that year. We sauntered through a light rain, sharing an umbrella. Nesting dolls were arrayed on a glass shelf in a souvenir shop. They looked just like Russian matryoshka dolls, seven sizes, big to small, each one progressively smaller, lined up in a row.
How adorable, I said, and Rei asked, You want them? When I hesitated, offering no reply, he picked them up and took them wordlessly to the salesperson. He paid, then stuffed the purchase into my bag. I never bought a woman anything, he told me on the Romance Train on the way back. It was a surprise. Your first present, and you get these? Smiling broadly, I popped the dolls open at the torso, unnesting them, and lined them up on the windowsill. The smallest, cradled at the center, was about as big around as a one-yen coin.
One after the other, Rei tapped each empty, hollow doll with his fingernail. They didn’t make much of a sound. A half-hearted thwack.
I never went anywhere with a woman without wanting to skip out on her, either, Rei said when we got off the train, merging with the Shinjuku crowds.
Skip out? Laughing, I lifted my face and peered at him. There was almost a smile on his face, but it wasn’t a smile, his expression was sour.
Reluctant to part, we found a backstreet bar, a yakitori place, and went in, even though it was early, even though the sun had yet to set. We ordered two large mugs of draft beer, and as the sun finally began to sink, we relaxed. I didn’t go home that night, I stayed for the first time at Rei’s apartment. Before the night descended, early in the evening, already we were deep within it. By then, our bodies knew each other. Still embracing, we fell, almost fainting, asleep.
“MY, DOES THE gutter smell,” Mother says.
“I don’t think there are any gutters left around here,” I tell her. When I played ball as a child, the ball was always rolling into the gutters that ran along both sides of the street. I would dry the surface, which glistened from the trickle of drainage, by wiping it on the street. Then, years later, the gutters were filled in, and the smell dispersed.
“It smells like stagnant water, though.”
Maybe when the wind is just right it blows here all the way from the river, I say. Mother closes her eyes. She breathes deeply. But the river is in the next district. Kind of far, isn’t it?
Come to think of it, Mother goes on, these past few years, it has hardly rained at all during the rainy season. “An empty rainy season.” We get a good deal more precipitation earlier on, in the “rapeseed rainy spell,” as it’s called, spring showers, than during the true rainy season.
I, too, inhale. From time to time the scent of water drifts over, strong. It smells this way when a hot, clear day follows upon a period of rain. Empty rainy season, rapeseed rainy spell. I think the words. When I was young, in early summer, my body seemed to be bleeding outward, past its edges; now, year by year, that feeling fades. I sensed myself blurring when I started to stay over at Rei’s apartment, too. Not only at the end of the rainy season, at other times as well. Hard as I struggled to contain it, something leaked. After I was married, after I gave birth to Momo, even then my body blurred. It was more than the fluids secreted by
the dark, soft place; I seemed to feel something bleeding out from behind my eyes. The scent of early summer made me giddy, for just a moment. It still does.
I am rereading the diary, carefully. I have slipped the folded page that says Manazuru back into the diary, after the final page. There is nothing new in this diary. Everything written here remains the same as the last time I checked. I can only read from it what I have already read.
I THINK I’M pregnant, I told Rei. I couldn’t remember when.
But it was there, recorded in his diary.
“A baby. Due next April. Kei looked like a fish when she told me.” One of the rare entries with a personal touch. What’s that supposed to mean, I looked like a fish? I was too distraught when I first read the diary, in the aftermath of Rei’s disappearance, to respond to much of anything, and yet I laughed at that.
The morning sickness was awful. Less than two weeks after the fertilized egg attached itself to the wall of my uterus, I felt gray, excruciatingly. It would take more time to determine whether or not I was actually pregnant. I could tell, though, that a foreign body was in me. “A foreign body” sounds too charged, it was less than that, just a little thing that came in.
It astonished me that something smaller than the tip of my pinky could induce such nausea. It was this sickness that made me look like a fish.
There was only one other personal entry.
“A place I should never have come to.”
The date is about a year before his disappearance. A place I should never have come to. Where was my husband when he felt this way? Then, under the same date:
Manazuru Page 5
