“No, I’m a born short story writer,” Junpei said dryly. “I’m not suited to writing novels.”
“Even so,” she said.
Junpei offered nothing more on the subject. He remained quiet and listened to the breeze from the air conditioner. In fact, he had tried several times to write novels, but always bogged down partway through. He simply could not maintain the concentration it took to write a story over a long period of time. He would start out convinced that he was going to write something wonderful. The style would be lively, and his future seemed assured. The story would flow out almost by itself. But the farther he went with it, the more its energy and brilliance would fade—gradually at first, but undeniably until, like an engine losing speed and coming to a halt, it would peter out entirely.
The two of them were in bed. It was autumn. They were naked after long, warm lovemaking. Kirie’s shoulder pressed against Junpei, whose arms were around her. Two glasses of white wine stood on the nightstand.
“Junpei?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re in love with another woman, aren’t you? Somebody you can’t forget?”
“It’s true,” Junpei admitted. “You can tell?”
“Of course,” she said. “Women are very sensitive about such things.”
“Not all women, I’m sure.”
“I don’t mean all women.”
“No, of course not,” Junpei said.
“But you can’t see her?”
“There are problems.”
“And no possibility those ‘problems’ could be solved?”
“None,” Junpei said with a quick shake of the head.
“They go pretty deep, huh?”
“I don’t know how deep they are, but they’re there.”
Kirie drank a little wine. “I don’t have anybody like that,” she said almost under her breath. “I like you a lot, Junpei. You really move me. When we’re together like this, I feel tremendously happy and calm. But that doesn’t mean I want to have a serious relationship with you. How does that make you feel? Relieved?”
Junpei ran his fingers through her hair. Instead of answering her question, he asked one of his own. “Why is that?”
“Why don’t I want to be with you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Does it bother you?”
“A little.”
“I can’t have a serious everyday relationship with anybody. Not just you: anybody,” she said. “I want to concentrate completely on what I’m doing now. If I were living with somebody—if I had a deep emotional involvement with somebody—I might not be able to do that. So I want to keep things the way they are.”
Junpei thought about that for a moment. “You mean you don’t want to be distracted?”
“That’s right.”
“If you were distracted, you could lose your balance, and that might prove to be an obstacle to your career.”
“Exactly.”
“And so to avoid any risk of that, you don’t want to live with anybody.”
She nodded. “Not as long as I’m involved in my current profession.”
“But you won’t tell me what that is.”
“Guess.”
“You’re a burglar.”
“No,” Kirie answered with a grave expression that quickly gave way to amusement. “What a sexy guess! But a burglar doesn’t go to work early in the morning.”
“You’re a hit man.”
“Hit person,” she corrected him. “But no. Why are you coming up with these awful ideas?”
“So, what you do is perfectly legal?”
“Perfectly.”
“Undercover agent?”
“No. OK, let’s stop for today. I’d rather talk about your work. Tell me about what you’re writing now. You are writing something now?”
“Yes, a short story.”
“What kind of story?”
“I haven’t finished it yet. I’m taking a break.”
“So tell me what happens up to the break.”
Junpei fell silent. He had a policy of not talking to anyone about works in progress. That could jinx the story. If he put it into words and those words left his mouth, some important something would evaporate like morning dew. Delicate shades of meaning would be flattened into a shallow backdrop. Secrets would no longer be secrets. But here in bed, running his fingers through Kirie’s short hair, Junpei felt that it might be all right to tell her. After all, he had been experiencing a block. He hadn’t been able to move forward with the story for some days now.
“It’s in the third person, and the protagonist is a woman,” he began. “She’s in her early thirties, a skilled internist who practices at a big hospital. She’s single, but she’s having an affair with a surgeon at the same hospital. He’s in his late forties and has a wife and kids.”
Kirie took a moment to imagine the heroine. “Is she attractive?”
“I think so. Quite attractive,” Junpei said. “But not as attractive as you.”
Kirie smiled and kissed Junpei on the neck. “That’s the right answer,” she said.
“I make it a point to give right answers when necessary.”
“Especially in bed, I suppose.”
“Especially in bed,” he replied. “So anyway, she has a vacation and goes off on a trip by herself. The season is autumn: the same as this. She’s staying at a little hot-spring resort in the mountains and she goes for a walk by a stream in the hills. She’s a bird-watcher, and she especially enjoys seeing kingfishers. She steps down into the dry streambed and notices an odd stone. It’s black with a tinge of red, it’s smooth, and it has a familiar shape. She realizes right away that it’s shaped like a kidney. I mean, she’s a doctor, after all. Everything about it is just like a real kidney—the size, the coloration, the thickness.”
“So she picks it up and takes it home.”
“Right,” Junpei said. “She brings it to her office at the hospital and uses it as a paperweight. It’s just the right size and weight.”
“And it’s the perfect shape for a hospital.”
“Exactly,” Junpei said. “But a few days later, she notices something strange.”
Kirie waited silently for him to continue with his story. Junpei paused as if deliberately teasing his listener, but in fact this was not deliberate at all. He had not yet written the rest of the story. This was the point at which it had come to a stop. Standing at this unmarked intersection, he surveyed his surroundings and worked his brain as hard as he could. Then he thought of how the story should go.
“Every morning, she finds the stone in a different place. She leaves it on her desk when she goes home at night. She’s a very methodical person, so she always leaves it in exactly the same spot, but in the morning she finds it on the seat of her swivel chair, or next to the vase, or on the floor. Her first thought is that she must be wrong about where she left it. Then she begins to wonder if her memory is playing tricks on her. The door is locked, and no one else should be able to get in. Of course the night watchman has a key, but he has been working at the hospital for years, and he would never take it upon himself to enter anyone’s office. Besides, what would be the point of his barging into her office every night just to change the position of a stone she’s using as a paperweight? Nothing else in her office has changed, nothing is missing, and nothing has been tampered with. The position of the rock is the only thing that changes. She’s totally stumped. What do you think is going on? Why do you think the stone moves during the night?”
“The kidney-shaped stone has its own reasons for doing what it does,” Kirie said with simple assurance.
“What kind of reasons can a kidney-shaped stone have?”
“It wants to shake her up. Little by little. Over a long period of time.”
“All right, then, why does it want to shake her up?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then with a giggle she added, “Maybe it just wants to rock her world.”
“That�
�s the worst pun I’ve ever heard,” Junpei groaned.
“Well you’re the writer. Aren’t you the one who decides? I’m just a listener.”
Junpei scowled. He felt a slight throbbing behind his temples from having concentrated so hard. Maybe he had drunk too much wine. “The ideas aren’t coming together,” he said. “My plots don’t move unless I’m actually sitting at my desk and moving my hands, making sentences. Do you mind waiting a bit? Talking about it like this, I’m beginning to feel as if the rest of the story is going to work itself out.”
“I don’t mind,” Kirie said. She reached over for her glass and took a sip of wine. “I can wait. But the story is really getting interesting. I want to know what happens with the kidney-shaped stone.”
She turned toward him and pressed her shapely breasts against his side. Then quietly, as if sharing a secret, she said, “You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does.” Junpei was falling asleep and could not answer. In the night air, her sentences lost their shape as grammatical constructions and blended with the faint aroma of the wine before reaching the hidden recesses of his consciousness. “For example, the wind has its reasons. We just don’t notice as we go about our lives. But then, at some point, we are made to notice. The wind envelops you with a certain purpose in mind, and it rocks you. The wind knows everything that’s inside you. And not just the wind. Everything, including a stone. They all know us very well. From top to bottom. It only occurs to us at certain times. And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.”
For the next five days, Junpei hardly left the house; he stayed at his desk, writing the rest of the story of the kidney-shaped stone. As Kirie predicted, the stone continues quietly to shake the lady doctor—little by little, over time, but decisively. She is engaged in hurried coupling with her lover one evening in an anonymous hotel room when she stealthily reaches around to his back and feels for the shape of a kidney. She knows that her kidney-shaped stone is lurking in there. The kidney is a secret informer that she herself has buried in her lover’s body. Beneath her fingers, it squirms like an insect, sending her kidney-type messages. She converses with the kidney, exchanging intelligence. She can feel its sliminess against the palm of her hand.
The lady doctor grows gradually more used to the existence of the heavy, kidney-shaped stone that shifts position every night. She comes to accept it as natural. She is no longer surprised when she finds that it has moved during the night. When she arrives at the hospital each morning, she finds the stone somewhere in her office, picks it up, and returns it to her desk. This has simply become part of her normal routine. As long as she remains in the room, the stone does not move. It stays quietly in one place, like a cat napping in the sun. It awakes and begins to move only after she has left and locked the door.
Whenever she has a spare moment, she reaches out and caresses the stone’s smooth, dark surface. After a while, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to take her eyes off the stone, as if she has been hypnotized. She gradually loses interest in anything else. She can no longer read books. She stops going to the gym. She maintains just enough of her powers of concentration to see patients, but she carries on all other thought through sheer force of habit and improvisation. She loses interest in talking to her colleagues. She becomes indifferent to her own grooming. She loses her appetite. Even the embrace of her lover becomes a source of annoyance. When there is no one else around, she speaks to the stone in a lowered voice, and she listens to the wordless words the stone speaks to her, the way lonely people converse with a dog or a cat. The dark, kidney-shaped stone now controls the greater part of her life.
Surely the stone is not an object that has come to her from without: Junpei becomes aware of this as his story progresses. The main point is something inside herself. That something inside herself is activating the dark, kidney-shaped stone and urging her to take some kind of concrete action. It keeps sending her signals for that purpose—signals in the form of the stone’s nightly moves.
While he writes, Junpei thinks about Kirie. He senses that she (or something inside her) is propelling the story; it was never his intention to write something so divorced from reality. What Junpei had imagined vaguely beforehand was a more tranquil, psychological story line. In that story line, rocks did not take it upon themselves to move around.
Junpei imagined that the lady doctor would cut her emotional ties to her married surgeon. She might even come to hate him. This was probably what she was seeking all along, unconsciously.
Once the rest of the story had become visible to him, writing it out was relatively easy. Listening repeatedly to songs of Mahler at low volume, Junpei sat at his computer and wrote the conclusion at what was, for him, top speed. The doctor makes her decision to part with her surgeon lover. “I can’t see you anymore,” she tells him. “Can’t we at least talk this over?” he asks. “No,” she tells him firmly, “that is impossible.” On her next free day she boards a Tokyo Harbor ferry, and from the deck she throws the kidney-shaped stone into the sea. The stone sinks down to the bottom of the deep, dark ocean toward the core of the earth. She resolves to start her life over. Having cast away the stone, she feels a new sense of lightness.
The next day, however, when she goes to the hospital, the stone is on her desk, waiting for her. It sits exactly where it is supposed to be, as dark and kidney-shaped as ever.
As soon as he finished writing the story, Junpei telephoned Kirie. She would probably want to read the finished work, which she, in a sense, had inspired him to write. His call, however, did not go through. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed,” said a recorded voice. “Please check the number and try again.” Junpei tried it again—and again. But the result was always the same. She was probably having some kind of technical problem with her phone, he thought.
Junpei stuck close to home, waiting for word from Kirie, but nothing ever came. A month went by. One month became two, and two became three. The season changed to winter, and a new year began. His story came out in the February issue of a literary magazine. A newspaper ad for the magazine listed Junpei’s name and the title, “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day.” Kirie might see the ad, buy the magazine, read the story, and call him to share her impressions—or so he hoped. But all that reached him were new layers of silence.
The pain Junpei felt when Kirie vanished from his life was far more intense than he had imagined. She left behind a void that truly shook him. In the course of a day he would think to himself any number of times, “If only she were here!” He missed her smile, he missed the words shaped by her lips, he missed the touch of her skin as they held each other close. He gained no comfort from his favorite music or from the arrival of new books by authors that he liked. Everything felt distant, divorced from him. Kirie may have been woman number two, Junpei thought.
Junpei’s next encounter with Kirie occurred after noon one day in early spring—though you couldn’t really call it an “encounter.” He heard her voice.
He was in a taxi stuck in traffic. The young driver was listening to an FM broadcast. Kirie’s voice emerged from the radio. Junpei was not sure at first that he was hearing Kirie. He simply thought the voice was similar to hers. The more he listened, though, the more it sounded like Kirie, her manner of speaking—the same smooth intonation, the same relaxed style, the special way she had of pausing now and then.
Junpei asked the driver to turn up the volume.
“Sure thing,” the driver said.
It was an interview being held at the broadcast studio. The female announcer was asking her a question: “—and so you liked high places from the time you were a little girl?”
“That is true,” answered Kirie—or a woman with exactly the same voice. “Ever since I can remember, I liked going up high. The higher I went, the more peaceful I felt. I was always nagging my parents to take me to tall buildings. I was a very strange little creature,” the
voice said with a laugh.
“Which is how you got started in your present line of work, I suppose.”
“First I worked as an analyst at a securities firm. But I knew right away it wasn’t right for me. I left the company after three years, and the first thing I did was get a job washing windows in tall buildings. What I really wanted to be was a steeplejack, but that’s such a macho world, they don’t let women in very easily. So for the time being, I took part-time work as a window washer.”
“From securities analyst to window washer—that’s quite a change!”
“To tell you the truth, washing windows was much less stressful for me: if anything falls, it’s just you, not stock prices.” Again the laugh.
“Now, by ‘window washer’ you mean one of those people who get lowered down the side of a building on a platform.”
“Right. Of course, they give you a lifeline, but some spots you can’t reach without taking the lifeline off. That didn’t bother me at all. No matter how high we went, I was never scared. Which made me a very valuable worker.”
“I suppose you like to go mountain climbing?”
“I have almost no interest in mountains. I’ve tried climbing a few times, but it does nothing for me. I can’t get excited climbing mountains, no matter how high I go. The only things that interest me are man-made multistory structures that rise straight up from the ground. Don’t ask me why.”
“So now you run a window-washing company that specializes in high-rise buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan area.”
“Correct,” she said. “I saved up and started my own little company about six years ago. Of course I go out with my crews, but basically I’m an owner now. I don’t have to take orders from anybody, and I can make up my own rules: it’s very handy.”
“Meaning, you can take the lifeline off whenever you like?”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 34
