by Sara Dillon
Ano ko, suki da kara ne, he would say. Because I like that girl.
Yes, he liked me. He liked to talk to me about strange and funny things in the reading of Japanese characters, and long French novels, and wood block prints.
And amazingly enough, a mere three weeks into my marriage, I completely lost my marbles. I fell apart as if from one moment to the next; the earth opened up as if in an earthquake and I fell down through, unable to see myself as myself. I lost everything at once.
I was no longer moving forward. I would not have everything. I was terrified; I was obsessive; I was dying.
I had been next to Yukito, walking along the aisles in the grocery store. The Midwestern summer was hot; I was lost. There was no Catherine, no past, no promises. The jig was up, and I was dying.
Yukito went on a trip, to a conference, to some vague place in the South. I walked around the house in the early evening heat, wearing a bathrobe. I spoke with him on the phone, and then it was like falling off a cliff or being dropped through a trap door. I couldn’t think of any rescuers.
I went on living, but it didn’t quite feel like that. Our plan to move to Germany for a year went forward; Yukito would be a visiting professor. I packed, I spoke.
In Germany, we rented a funny little apartment on the side of a hill. The landlord and his wife were very nervous and clearly were not sure about their decision to let us have the place. The landlord liked to come into the flat and open all the windows, pointing at the corners of the room, fretting about the possibility of mold, I think. The trees on the hilly street were bright and wild and frothy. We took the bus back and forth to the forbidding town, all built after the war, as the old town center had been bombed into nothing.
The aesthetic of that hill was soothing, luminous. I began to write in Japanese, a method I called shiteki chokuyaku, or direct poetic translation. From my mind to a certain set of sad poems.
Poor Yukito; he helped set me up with Japanese classes at the university in Bochum, another sterile set of buildings in a nondescript town. But how pleased I was to take off by myself in the early morning dark, in my loden green coat, carrying books and papers. I hadn’t recovered, not yet; I was suffering in a silent, secretive way. Since my German was skimpy at best, I could only take a course offered completely in Japanese, and this brings us, well, to Herr Murata, patches on his sleeves, thick glasses, at ease in German and Russian. Yukito called him a “typical teacher type”, which sounded quite insulting in Japanese, tenkeiteki na kyōshi; one got the sense of a pipe and slippers, a genial bicycle ride each morning to the local station.
Yet, how happy I was to go through the Bochum library’s maze, asking where I might find Herr Murata, ready for class, all prepared.
Whenever I am asked how long I was married for, I invariably say, A couple of weeks. For so it felt. Poor Yukito, how embarrassing it all must have been for him.
My little affair with Murata, walking through the snow, meeting in cafes, was like drinking a lovely draught of medicine. I began to feel that I would live after all; I was less frightened. I even felt less wacky. It had taken weeks and months, but I was decidedly less mad.
Murata showed me photos of his family, his heavy set Austrian wife left behind in Vienna, his two children with their regulation straw hats on in summer. And I didn’t even care; that is, it didn’t bother me. As Murata helped me on with my coat, I stood, eyes closed, ready to be kissed, and so he obliged.
Yukito, I said a week or so later. He sat with his face turned towards the ceiling, thinking through a math problem. Herr Murata and I have become close friends. I want to move out on my own for a while.
It was utter folly; the idea of being Murata’s friend, the idea of leaving one German apartment for another. But leave I did, and rented a three room flat in a working class neighborhood. I remember washing the floor and listening to the BBC World Service, the reassuring voices that said all was right with the world.
Nonsensical though it was, the entire concoction did go down like a big bottle of tonic marked Murata, three times a week for a month or two. In that way, I knew I would ultimately recover.
Murata was my wooden footbridge over a distant and dreaded river rushing below; a gravel path into the trees.
I broke it off with Murata in some way or another. Then, inevitably, Murata was gone, back for his Austrian summer. Yukito moved in turn over to my flat in the working class part of town, and then together we, naturally enough, went back home to the Midwest.
In the meantime, Daddy and Gramma had retired to a little shingled house on Cape Cod, so we stopped there to visit. Yukito and I bobbed in the warm waves, while my parents sat in beach chairs right at the water’s edge.
Suddenly and somehow, I could speak Japanese, really speak. Perhaps thanks to Murata.
In our beige house in the Midwest that year, both Yukito and I were making plans, thought quietly separate ones.
I began to phone Calvin Pini; sometimes he would take the call and sometimes not. When he did come on, he was mocking, cryptic. So, how’s your marriage working out? he would say.
Calvin, do you really remember me? Can you rescue me this time?
You got yourself into it.
We did, though, talk about John Merrill and Roger and Louis (Louis had died since, Calvin told me); and the drives in Vermont in spring, when Louis would put his head out the window and leaves would brush his muzzle.
It all runs together: the odd loyalties, the residues of that particular madness, the dissimulation and the planning. I studied demurely, diligently, Heian, Tokugawa, Edo, Meiji. Blossoms scattered, not really my thing, the fragile flowers, office workers and hanami, but Prince Genji pursued his adventures, hardly more complicated than my own, if rather more linked to his volition.
I applied to PhD programs, and told Yukito I would be moving to northern California. Just for a while, I said, to see how it goes, using the merciful Japanese tendency to fog and vagueness. I didn’t mention divorce, or even separation. The move was merely a fact, a regrettable necessity.
In Japanese, you are supposed to guess why the other person is doing what they are doing; an approach to things that was sometimes kind and sometimes cruel.
For his part, Yukito accepted an academic post at his old university in Tokyo. His parents kept asking him if things were over between us, but Yukito, of course, did not provide an answer, one assumes on the same theory of vagueness and guessing.
Ano ko, suki datta kedo ne, said Papa. Meaning something like, darn it, I really liked that girl.
Shibuya; 1980s
On the first day of my California program, once I’d settled into the bare, stone-walled dorm room, I ran across the campus, past the flowers still such a deep red, and always, as it turned out, in bloom, past the fountains with their perpetual rushing and rustling, into the courtyard, up the stairs and into the offices of the Japanese professors, bowing and shouting out, I am Catherine! I am starting my PhD in Japanese! I will be looking forward to your help and guidance!
They looked embarrassed, as well they might—it was not such a glorious prospect for them—but pleased, for exactly the same reason. This one would be a live wire; nice Japanese she spoke, too.
I bought a secondhand bicycle and rode everywhere. The weather was hypnotically bright, cool and deeply warm at once, with that constant rustling of the water in the fountains and the slow motion of a too-dazzling sun across the sky.
There were wine and cheese parties with both the Japanese and Chinese sides of the department, boisterous arguments over the status of Taiwan, and where Japan would have been had it not borrowed writing from China. Evening stole down over the idyllic campus; lights went on in offices around the courtyard. Fall moved forward with no discernible changes in temperature or light.
Yukito and I kept in touch by letters. He was happy to be back in a place where he was not only real, but a familiar figure, flesh and blood. Yukito was as Tokyo as Tokyo could be, as his mother had been. Fo
r him, all of Japan was in fact Tokyo, or more accurately, Tokyo was all of Japan. He said that he remembered the Midwest with a shudder, and that he would never go back.
Then there was my first trip to Japan. The evening sun, the chock-a-block beauty of the city, the lack of a horizon, the motion and noise of each and every street corner. I was right at home, too; it was precisely and exactly as I knew it would be.
Thus began a summer of sleeping on Yukito’s sofa, teaching private students English and having Yukito take photos of me, hundreds of them: climbing Mount Fuji, visiting the Izu Peninsula, wandering in a temple yard in a crowded neighborhood. This is the photo I still display on my own desk, the one in the urban temple grounds, turning to look at the camera, swinging around to see who is there.
We went out together and explored. We were peaceful, friendly, warm towards one another. I was not forgiven; nor unforgiven. We never mentioned it.
I began to run, all over Tokyo, as much as ten miles a day. I ran mainly in the early morning before people were up, before the intense heat. I ran along the small rivers, I watched the old folks open their doors and look at the sky. I ran and ran in my white shorts and top. I developed a way of running that Yukito called the flying fish, close to the ground and remarkably fast.
And in July I wrote a letter to Kido, the genius singer, the greatest romantic of all time, the poet. If I meet you once, I know that we will stay together. I know that we will love each other. I sent the letter to his record company; I heard nothing, and the summer drew, slowly and beautifully, towards an end.
In early August, Yukito and I went to his family’s summer place at Karuizawa. It’s awful to recount, but over that year, one by one, all of Yukito’s family had died: Papa, then Mama, followed quickly by Miyako. In an oddly Irish way, Yukito believed that Mama had come to snatch Miyako and take her along soon after Mama herself had died. In any case, they all went, so quickly and inexplicably, of mysterious cancers of the blood and stomach. Yukito kept remarking that he was the last, the only one left.
We went to Karuizawa and ran together around the artificial lake. The heat was intense; the sound of the cicadas amazing. Everything was completely Japanese style, with no exceptions: the fragrant tatami, the view up the grassy hill, the tall weeds bending, whispering, as in an Ozu film. Papa’s paintbrushes were there in a basket in the corner. His expensive book collection; Mama’s special kitchen utensils. We sat on the mats and ate edamame beans. Yukito never drank beer or wine; he seemed to have an allergy. I had sometimes asked him to drink just a small glass to see what would happen, and in minutes his face would flush a brilliant red and he would lie down, defeated.
Una hated my Japan motif, as I have said; within my Japan motif, she especially hated the Kido motif, if motif it was. I have my doubts.
Kido. Kido, Kido. Despite what I might have anticipated, it has remained a great silence, a blank I have been left to fill in myself. Years later, at different times of the year and depending on the time of day, I might present it to myself in very different ways.
In Greensboro, that was one more task I felt myself finished with.
Yukito and I were back in Tokyo; there was a mere two weeks left, and I would be returning to California. We walked around the city, stopped at restaurants, went shopping together, since, for the first time in my life, everything I tried on fit me. We did not talk about marriage or divorce; we were like two close pals, loyal to one another, but without saying a word about it.
How handy it could be to be Japanese, in that sense.
But one night in August, the phone rang. Yukito was in the other room of his flat, getting ready, as we had plans to go out. I picked up the phone, though this was unusual. I rarely picked up his phone; it was just that he was busy and had looked out and made a sort of gesture, as if to say, Would you get that? And so I did.
Catherine, is this? asked in Japanese.
Yes.
I knew it was Kido; I knew his voice from interviews, I knew that voice well.
What a letter that was, he said, or something to that effect. I really wanted to phone, once I saw it.
Yukito was looking at me. It’s Kido Ansé, I mouthed to him. He looked at me, aghast, no doubt, at my duplicity.
I’m going out, Yukito muttered, stomping past, slamming the door.
I arranged to meet Kido in Shibuya that evening. I put on my favorite black dress with the small white dots, and high-heeled brown shoes. I remember walking up the long slope, away from Shibuya station. I had never been prettier, lovelier, never felt more comfortable with the warm air, my hair riding the waves of a summer wind, my brown shoes taking step after happy step.
Kido Ansé was waiting for me, sitting simply and quietly on a railing near the street. I didn’t care for the way he looked or sounded; he’d grown heavier since the early photos, he was used to being spoiled, but not by happiness, and that made for something unpleasant, almost corrupt, in his manner of speaking.
Kido took me to a modest little apartment and we, well, we talked. He sang songs for me. He asked me why I wrote, where I got this idea of my love for him. Most wonderful of all, Kido certainly believed me, as clearly I was speaking his language in the letter. There was the absolute, the ultimate, the unchanging that both Kido and I had given so much thought to, and for so long. Either one did or didn’t, when it came to such things, and Kido and I both did, however much we might try to hide it from others.
I am certain he didn’t doubt me, after meeting me and spending that evening.
Indeed, Kido called the next two weeks Catherine’s time to destroy Kido. He was afraid of being tricked, of having the Japanese paparazzi hop out of the bushes, of being lied to. But not I; if nothing else I was pure and honest. This was Kido’s flaw: having been spoiled, though constrained, by the absurd and thuggish world of Japanese pop music, he worried most about the risk to himself, and did not consider the risk to me. As everyone had always thought, he also assumed me to be fine, just fine, needing nothing.
We spent afternoons and evenings together, in hotel bars and walking in summer-dark parks. It was sad, that early time. It’s a hard word to use properly; it was truly sad. We rather, well, loved each other, I do think so. But Kido liked being loved more than he intended to love; this was a problem, as it made me important to him, but not important in the right way.
How disgusted Yukito was with me; he barely spoke. He wasn’t one to anger, but he threatened to send on all the things I might leave behind to Kido’s; my red shoes, my books. Of course he was appalled; how terrible for him.
I knew that Kido was married, but it didn’t register with me. He had been married once when he was young to a home-town girl, but then divorced when he got in some obscure trouble with the law. The entertainment world rehabilitated him when he might have lost everything, and he remarried, someone not right for him at all. I knew that and so it did not register. It did not matter.
I suppose it did matter, but it didn’t matter to me.
I assumed he would leave her, and come to me. I believed that because of the language we spoke and the way we thought. I knew he had children, little children, though I didn’t know that it was three, and that they were very, very young. Even so, he would leave them and we would be together; it was so inevitable, it was so clear. Kido needed to be purified and restored; I did not want to escape from Kido.
I wanted the whole thing; marriage with its messes and unhappiness. I wanted the complexity of being with him and being annoyed and dissatisfied. I wanted to marry Kido. It is the only time I have ever wanted to marry.
Kido wore his sunglasses all the time; so when he wanted to go incognito, he simply took them off, and no one noticed him. We wandered the warm evenings, sat side by side in small restaurants, me holding my chopsticks in the air, hardly able to eat. We made love on the floor of his apartment, though what I remember best is stroking the back of his head, the familiar, wiry hair. I didn’t know what name to use, so decided on whispering
Kido-san.
And so those two weeks passed, and I was about to go back to California.
On the last night we wandered all around Tokyo in the warm darkness, ending up on a high hill overlooking the city lights. When we said goodbye, I watched Kido run away up a sloping street, under trees that bent over as if to touch his hair. Goodbye, no resolution, no plan, nothing, just the darkness holding Kido’s shadow where he had been, and a sad, tired return to Yukito’s to face the next day.
I returned to my program, of course. This short phase had outlived its usefulness, and something else had to happen.
It was then that Kido changed, made a comeback as the magazines might say. He began to write wonderful love songs; the words seemed to be taken from everything we had talked about.
Could that be explained to anyone? Well, imagine it. How did it sound, saying that this singer’s words came from our conversations; that I believed he loved me, but had no real proof, and that I was waiting for him.
Una was appalled; I was cut off from mentioning this at all. Should I happen to raise the topic, she would wave her hand in the air and say, You’ve got to get off this. Okay, he has a nice voice. Then one day she told me her therapist said I was a psychopath, believing that a rock star was singing to me, delusional, mad as a March hare.
Well, I was many things, but not delusional.
It was bizarre, though, to be living in this parallel universe; I didn’t like the implication of star gazing, which I’d never done. I had no interest in Kido for his fame; if anything, that was the silly part.
And while I say that this was the one time I did not want to escape, there was no way of testing this. Perhaps I would have, eventually.
Secrets; 1980s
I soon made plans to spend a whole year in Japan; Una opposed it, as did Gramma, but I relentlessly put this in motion. Yukito helped me rent a small apartment near an exhausted looking river in a near suburb of Tokyo. I had classes to go to; even a seminar at Tokyo University on the subject of the house in Japanese literature, of all things.
