I sat alone drinking my coffee, trying to picture just where Uruguay was. If Brazil was here and Venezuela over here and Columbia somewhere hereabouts, why couldn’t I place Uruguay? Soon Midori came running back down and told me to come with her quick. I followed her to the end of the hall and up a steep narrow staircase onto the platform. We were higher up than any of the surrounding roofs, so we had a clear view over the neighborhood. Black smoke was billowing up three or four houses away and wafted out to the main street on a slight breeze. The air smelled foul.
“That’s the Sakamotos’ place,” said Midori, leaning out over the handrail. “Mr. Sakamoto used to be in the building supply trade, but he went out of business.”
I leaned over the handrail to have a look. It was just out of sight behind a three-story building, but whatever was happening, three or four fire trucks had assembled to put out the fire. The streets were so narrow that only two trucks could get in, while the others waited out in the main thoroughfare. And of course, as expected, the streets were crawling with people come to see the show.
“Looks like we’d better gather up your valuables and make a break for it,” I told Midori. “Right now the wind’s in the other direction, so we’re all right, but you never know when it’ll change, and there’s a gas station right over there. I’ll help, so let’s get packing.”
“No valuables here,” said Midori.
“But there’s got to be something. Bank books or seals or documents, things like that. Whatever happens, you’ll be out of luck with no money.”
“No problem. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re going to stay here and burn?”
“Yes,” said Midori. “Dying is fine by me.”
I looked Midori in the eye. Midori looked me in the eye. I couldn’t even begin to tell whether she was serious or not. I kept staring at her, but finally figured what the hell.
“Okay, I get it. I’ll see you through,” I said.
“You’ll die with me?” said Midori, eyes sparkling.
“You kidding? If it gets dangerous, I’m getting out of here. If you want to die, you can die by yourself.”
“Bastard!”
“Listen, I’m not about to die for a lunch. Dinner notwithstanding.”
“Have it your way. But as long as we’re here, why don’t we sing some songs while we keep an eye on the situation. If it starts looking bad, we can take it from there.”
“Songs?”
Midori brought up two cushions, four cans of beer, and a guitar from down below. And so we sat there, drinking beer, taking in the roiling black smoke. Whereupon Midori picked up her guitar and sang. I asked her whether this kind of thing would go down well with the neighbors. Sitting around on a veranda, drinking beer, and singing songs as you watched the local tragedy was not exactly your most praiseworthy activity.
“It’s okay, believe me. We don’t care what the neighbors think,” she said.
Midori ran through some folk songs she used to sing. You couldn’t call either her singing or her guitar-playing good, not even as a compliment, but she herself seemed to enjoy it. “Lemon Tree’” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” “500 Miles” to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,” right on down the line. In the beginning I tried to sing along to the bass parts Midori taught me, but my singing was so horrible I gave up and let her sing alone to her heart’s content. I just took swigs of my beer and listened, all the while paying careful attention to the fire’s progress. One minute you’d think the smoke had suddenly picked up, only to see it come back under control the next, over and over again. People were shouting at the top of their lungs, barking orders back and forth. A newspaper helicopter swooped in overhead for photos, whipping up the air with its propeller, then headed off. I hoped we weren’t in the picture. Policemen came around with loud-speakers, yelling at the crowds to please stand back. Mothers called out to their crying children. There came the sound of breaking glass. The wind grew unstable and began to shift, sending white waves of heat shimmering all around us. But Midori just kept daintily sipping her beer and singing merrily through it all. Then, having done all the songs I knew, she sang a strange little composition of her own.
I wanted to cook you a stew
I have no pot
I wanted to knit you a muffler
I have no yarn
I wanted to write you a poem
I have no pen.
“The song’s called ‘I Have Nothing,’ ” said Midori. Horrible lyrics, horrible tune.
Listening to that pitiful excuse for a song, I thought, if the gas station catches, this house is going to go up in no time. Midori tired of singing and set down her guitar, curling up in the sun like a cat, her head resting on my shoulder.
“What did you think of my song?” Midori asked.
“Uniquely original, really expressive of your character,” I phrased a cautious answer.
“Thanks,” she said. “It was all about having nothing.”
“I could sort of tell,” I said.
“You know, when Mother died…” Midori dispensed the words in my general direction. “Umm?”
“I wasn’t even the least bit sad.”
“Umm.”
“Then Father went away and even that didn’t make me at all sad.”
“Oh?”
“No, really. Don’t you think that’s horrible? Doesn’t that seem too cruel?”
“But there were all sorts of circumstances, right? All leading up to it.”
“Well, yeah, maybe so. All sorts of reasons,” agreed Midori. “Things were pretty mixed up in this family. Still, I can’t help but think. Say what you will, but when your only Father and Mother die on you or go off somewhere, aren’t you supposed to feel something? With me, it’s no good. I don’t feel anything, not sad, not lonely, not bitter—such feelings hardly even cross my mind. Maybe they come out occasionally in dreams— Mother’ll be there, glaring at me out of the darkness, accusing me, ‘Glad I died, are you?’ I’m not glad that Mother died; I’m just not upset. To tell the truth, I didn’t shed one tear. And to think I cried one whole night when a cat I had as a child died.”
How can one building produce so much smoke, I was thinking. Can’t even see any flames, no sign of the fire spreading. Just endless columns of smoke. What could possibly keep burning this long, I wondered.
“But it’s not my fault. It’s just that I’m not the emotional type. Maybe if they—Mother and Father—had shown me a little more love, I might have been able to feel differently. Like lots sadder or something.”
“You feel you weren’t loved much?”
She turned her head to look me in the face, then gave one solid nod. “Somewhere between ‘not enough’ and ‘not at all.’ Always starved for love, I was. Just once I would have liked to have been smothered with affection, enough to say I’d experienced it. That’s all I asked. But they never gave me any, not even one lousy time. Cast aside if I sidled up to them, yelled at whenever I wanted anything that cost money, nothing but that straight through. All I could do was to say I’ll show them, I’ll go out and find myself someone who’ll love me one hundred percent, all year long. That was in my fifth or sixth year of school. I made up my mind.”
“Amazing,” I said, quite impressed. “And how did you make out?”
“Tough-going,” said Midori, then gave it some thought while watching the smoke. “Maybe it was because I’d waited so long, but I went to the other extreme, looking for something perfect. That’s why the going was so tough.”
“A perfect love?”
“No, no, no. Even me, I wouldn’t dream of looking for that much. What I was looking for was simply my own greedy little way. Perfect selfishness. Say I turned to you now and told you I wanted to eat strawberry shortcake, you’d have to drop everything and run out to buy me some. Then, when you’d come running back, all out of breath, saying, ‘Here you are, Midori, here’s your strawberry shortcake!’ I’d say, �
��Hmph, I don’t want to eat that any more!’ and chuck it out the window. That’s what I wanted.”
“Seems to me that has nothing to do with love,” I said, more than slightly fazed.
“No, it does. Only you just don’t know,” Midori said. “All that’s very important to girls.”
“Throwing strawberry shortcake out of windows?”
“Exactly. I’d have my guy tell me, ‘All right, Midori, I understand. I was supposed to discern that you no longer wanted strawberry shortcake. I’m stupid and insensitive as donkey shit. By way of apology, let me go out one more time and buy you something else. What will it be? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?’”
“And what would that prove?”
“It’d prove him worthy of my love.”
“Sounds pretty unreasonable if you ask me.” “But to me, that’s what love is. Nobody understands, though,” said Midori, with a shake of her head as it lay on my shoulder. “To some people, love must have really humble, or even trivial, beginnings. If not, it just doesn’t happen.”
“You’re the first girl I’ve ever met who thinks that way,” I said.
“That’s what everyone says,” she pouted, picking at her cuticles. “But me, I can only seriously think that way, frankly speaking. Not that I think my way of thinking’s any stranger than anybody else’s, nor would I have them change on my account. But the truth is everyone thinks it’s all either some kind of put-on or an act. And that sometimes gets to be a drag.”
“Which is why you thought you’d show them all by dying in a fire?”
“Now just a minute, you don’t get away with that! I was only…curious.”
“About dying in a fire?”
“No, not about that. I wanted to see how you’d react,” said Midori. “Even so, the idea of actually dying doesn’t frighten me at all. Honest. All it’d take would be to be overwhelmed by smoke, lose consciousness and die, and that’d be that. What’s there to be frightened of? Nothing compared to what I’ve seen of Mother’s death or those of other relatives. Did I tell you? All my relatives seem to die from excruciating illnesses. I guess it runs in the blood. It takes them forever to kick off, holding on until the last stretch when you can’t even tell if they’re alive or dead, pain and suffering the only consciousness left to speak of.”
Midori put another Marlboro to her lips and lit it.
“What I’m afraid of is dying like that. The shadow of death slowly, ever so slowly encroaching upon the living, everything fading to black, those around you treating you as more dead than alive. That’d be unbearable. I absolutely wouldn’t be able to stand it.”
As it turned out, they had the fire under control in another thirty minutes. It hadn’t really burned for so long. No injuries. One fire truck stayed behind and the others headed back, signaling the crowds to disperse. A patrol car, light revolving, was stationed on the street to regulate traffic. Two ravens flew in from somewhere to perch on telephone poles and survey the scene.
Midori seemed somehow exhausted by the time the fire ended. She listlessly gazed off at the sky and hardly said a word.
“Tired?” I asked.
“It’s not that,” Midori said. “It’s just the first time I’ve let myself go in a long time, been really relaxed.”
I looked Midori in the eye and she looked me in the eye. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and kissed her. Midori gave the slightest little twitch of her shoulders, then immediately relaxed again and closed her eyes. Five seconds, six seconds, our lips met softly. The early autumn sun cast shadows of her lashes across her cheeks, trembling slightly.
It was a tender, gentle, undirected sort of kiss. If we hadn’t made a time of drinking beer and watching the fire in the afternoon sun on the laundry platform like we did, I wouldn’t have kissed her, and I got the same feeling from her. Up there, looking out over the glinting roofs, the smoke, and dragonflies, we’d gotten all warm and intimate and unconsciously wanted to produce some sort of memento of it all. Our kiss had been that kind of kiss. Still, like all kisses, this one could not be said to be wholly free of an element of danger.
Midori was first to pull away. Taking my hand in hers, she told me with some difficulty that there was a guy she was seeing. I told her I kind of figured as much.
“Is there some girl you’re involved with?”
“There is.”
“But you’re always free on Sundays?”
“It’s pretty complicated,” I said.
Which told me in an instant that all the magic of that early autumn afternoon had vanished.
At five o’clock I told Midori I had to go to my job, and left. I asked her if maybe she’d like to step out and get a quick bite to eat with me, but she declined, saying that maybe the call might still come through.
“You have no idea how I hate being cooped up in the house all day, waiting for a stupid phone call. When I’m all by myself, I feel like my body’s rotting little by little.”
“Well, just let me know if you ever need company when you’re phone-sitting. I’d be glad to oblige, if lunch is provided,” I said.
“It’s a deal. And I’ll be sure to throw in an after-meal fire,” said Midori.
*
Midori didn’t show at the “History of Theater II” lecture the following day. After class I went to a student eatery, had one cold and awful lunch, then sat in the sun checking out the scene. Sitting right next to me were two coeds engaged in a long conversation. One cradled a tennis racket as carefully as a baby, while the other held a few books and a Leonard Bernstein LP. Both were pretty and they were thoroughly enjoying their talk. I could hear someone practicing bass riffs in the nearby clubhouse. Here and there sat other students in fours and fives, freely voicing their opinions about this and that, laughing and shouting. A professor cut across the parking lot, leather satchel in hand, avoiding marauding skateboarders. A helmeted coed crouched in the courtyard painting a placard denouncing the “American Imperialist Invasion of Asia.” Your typical university lunch hour, the first I’d really observed in a good long while. Then it struck me. Everyone looked so happy doing what they were doing. Were they indeed happy, or did they simply seem that way? Whatever, with everyone in such seemingly high spirits out in the pleasant late September sun, before I knew it I was feeling lonely. I didn’t belong in that picture.
So in what picture did I belong? Thinking back over the previous few years, the last scene I could really remember fitting in was that dockside pool hall shooting billiards with Kizuki. Then that very evening Kizuki was dead, and ever since some kind of jagged, icy gap had come between me and the world. What on earth had this guy Kizuki been to me? There was no answer. All I knew was that Kizuki’s death had put a permanent end to one aspect of my so-called adolescence. That much I could clearly feel and comprehend. But just what that meant, what that engendered as a result, was completely beyond my comprehension.
I sat there for ages, killing time looking at the campus sights, all the people coming and going. Just maybe Midori’ll turn up, I thought, but there was no sign of her. After lunch break I went to the library and studied up on my German.
*
Saturday afternoon that week, Nagasawa came to my room and asked if I’d like to go out on the town with him that night, saying he’d arrange the overnight passes. Fine, I told him. My head had been fogged all that past week and I felt like sleeping with somebody, anybody.
Toward evening I took a bath and shaved, put on a polo shirt and a cotton jacket over that. Then I ate supper in the dining hall with Nagasawa and the two of us took a bus into Shinjuku. We got off the bus amidst the bright lights, stretched our legs a bit, then ducked into a bar to wait for some likely looking girls. The bar had a largely female clientele, but for some reason no girl would come near us that night. We nursed whiskey-and-sodas for close to two hours, taking tiny sips so as not to get drunk. A promising pair of girls took seats at the counter and ordered a gimlet and a margarita. Nagasawa sprang into action an
d struck up a conversation, but they were waiting for men friends. Nothing to lose, we talked a while anyway, the four of us, until their dates showed up and the two went off with them.
Suggesting we blow that scene, Nagasawa led me to another bar. A small place, sort of out of the way, where the action was already in full swing. A girl threesome was at a table in the back and we made it a ready five. Not a bad little place. Everyone was getting jolly. But when we invited them to another round somewhere else, the girls said they had curfews and had to be heading back. All three, it seemed, dormed at some women’s university. It was just one of those “off” nights. We hit another place after that, but still no go. All signs read that tonight no girls were coming our way.
At half-eleven, Nagasawa decided to call it quits.
“Sorry about that, dragging you out like this,” he said.
“Not at all, I’m happy just to learn that even the great Nagasawa has nights like this,” I said.
“Once a year, maybe,” said Nagasawa.
To tell the truth, I found myself perfectly indifferent about getting laid or not. Wandering around the neon night of Shinjuku on a Saturday for some three and a half hours, soaking up all those loose electrons of libido and alcohol only made my own puny sex drive seem inadequate.
“What’re you going to do, Watanabe?” Nagasawa asked me.
“Think I’ll go to an all-night show. Been a while since I’ve seen any movies.”
“Well, guess I’ll go to Hatsumi’s. Okay?” “Nothing wrong with that,” I said with a laugh. “If you want, I can set you up with a girl who’ll put you up for the night. How about it?”
“Nah, I’ll go to the movies for tonight.”
“Sorry about things. I’ll make it up sometime,” he said, then disappeared into the crowd. I popped into a hamburger stand and had a cheeseburger, plus a hot coffee to counteract the drink in my system, then went and saw The Graduate at the nearby second-run movie house. Not the greatest movie in the world, I thought, but since I didn’t have anything else to do, I stayed for another showing. When I left the theater it was just shy of four in the morning. Whereupon I walked the chilled-out Shinjuku streets.
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 10
