‘Wow,’ Shinya said, a little envious. ‘That’s great, man – you’re going to be a college student in Tokyo.’ As his stop drew near he stood up and started towards the exit, but stopped, like he’d forgotten to say something. ‘Hey, keep it up,’ he said. ‘Let’s face it, I’m a screw-up and I’ll probably stay that way. So be a success for me in Tokyo, okay?’
For a month after I received Etsuko’s phone call about Shinya’s death, this picture of his accident raced through my head at night, when I was trying to fall asleep – even though I never witnessed it. In my mind, Shinya is speeding down a straight road on his motorcycle. Maybe there’s something in the road that he swerves to avoid and he loses his balance. But knowing him, I’m sure he would have been able to right himself. Even if he did wipe out, I just couldn’t imagine him dead. He was athletic, and handsome. He could beat the track team guys at sprints, and our music teacher, an old maid, used to say he looked like James Dean.
When we met on the bus Shinya had also told me about a prank he had played on my father.
‘You know that huge house across from ours? The Yanagawas’?’ he asked me. ‘When I was in grade school, me and some of my friends called your shop and said, “This is the Yanagawas on 3-chome. Please deliver four orders of your best sushi right away.” It was raining like crazy and your dad’s raincoat was soaked when he arrived on his motorcycle. The rain was coming down so hard that your dad was squinting and his face looked kind of scary. We were peeking through the curtains, giggling, never thinking we were doing anything bad, just that your dad’s face looked funny all wet like that. We were a bunch of brats. Your dad parked his motorcycle in front of the Yanagawas’ and he ducked inside through the side entrance. We waited to see what sort of expression he’d have on his face when he came out. After a while, I don’t remember how long, he came out again, bowing repeatedly and he stooped down through the low side entrance, just like when he came in. We’d thought he’d leave right away. I was sure he’d realise it was a prank call and he’d get pissed off and go home. But your dad, in the pouring rain, started walking around, checking the nameplates on all the houses. He trudged around, getting even more drenched, checking the houses one by one to see if there was another Yanagawa family in the neighbourhood. After a while he finished one circuit of the neighbourhood and came back to his motorcycle and then headed down another alley. I couldn’t watch any more and we drifted away from the window, sat back down under the kotatsu foot warmer, and forced ourselves to talk about something else, anything to keep us from thinking about what was going on outside. It was really cold that day, and I don’t know how long your dad continued to look for the house.’
My dad. The same dad who took me to the airport on the day when I set off for Tokyo to go to college, so anxious I could barely breathe. ‘I know this sounds old-fashioned,’ my dad said to me then, ‘but find a good older student you can be friends with at college. A mentor. Someone you can be friends with for life, someone you respect.’
‘No way do I want to be someone’s minion,’ I said, laughing.
‘You dummy,’ my dad said, lightly poking me in the head. ‘A person with a good older colleague to take care of him will have good younger colleagues who admire him.’
So I found Umezaki, who gave me the washing machine I was now using to do my laundry. When Umezaki was delivering the machine I said, kind of maliciously, ‘If you’re going to give me a washer, you should give me a better one.’
‘You got a lot of nerve, you know that?’ Umezaki replied. ‘I’m giving you this for free, plus I brought it over in a truck.’ As always, he smiled as he spoke.
The washer he gave me, the kind that has a separate spinner for drying, vibrates so much that it shimmies from one end of the balcony to the other end. The balcony is slightly tilted, too, so water will flow towards the drain. By the time the water’s all drained out the washer’s pulling at the cable like a dog straining to be free of its leash.
Recently I feel like I want to tell somebody about Shinya. What kind of person he was, what kind of possibilities he had hidden away . . . What kind of life he had, how he died . . . The things he told me on the bus . . . I want to tell all these things to somebody. But right now I have no one to tell. No matter how good a friend Sakuma is, it’s not something I can talk about with him. If I did, he’d just make fun of me and then suggest we go shoot some pool. If he did take me seriously I know it would only embarrass me and I’d shut up. Plus I don’t want my roommates – Koto, Mirai and Naoki – to see such a sentimental and serious side of me. Our living arrangement works precisely because we avoid those situations. Life goes smoothly with us because we limit ourselves to acceptable topics, skipping what we’d really like to talk about.
As I waited for the washing to finish, I looked down again at the street below. Maybe because I’d been absorbed in my own thoughts, I hadn’t noticed till now the expensive black Century parked in front of our building. The sun had set long before, and the street lights were reflecting in the shiny black body of the car, glistening like an insect. I turned around and saw that the rinse cycle was finished.
It was just then I heard the front door bang, and Koto, looking pale, barged into the guys’ room, a bento dangling from one hand.
‘What’s the matter?’ I was standing there, inexplicably holding out my newly washed underpants, fresh out of the wringer, as she, seemingly worked up about something, inexplicably took them from me without a word. ‘H-he’s here,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘He’s come to see the people next door.’
‘He? Who’re you talking about?’
‘You know – the guy who’s on TV all the time . . .’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know his name. The congressman from Shizuoka or somewhere, the one who’s on TV a lot. The guy who was a flunky of that former prime minister, the one I didn’t like. The one who’s always grinning – you know . . .’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about!’
‘I told you, I don’t know his name. The one whose face looks like the comedian Knock Yokoyama. You know who I mean . . .’
‘Yoshio Noguchi?’
‘Yes! That’s the guy! And he’s come to visit apartment 402.’
I tried to calm her down, and gently guided her into the living room, the damp underpants still clutched in her hands. I gave her a glass of water to drink and sat back to hear her story. She’d gone out to buy a bento at the station and when she got out of the lift and was walking down the hallway, suddenly the door to 402 opened and this guy who appeared to be Yoshio Noguchi emerged. I thought again of the shiny black car parked outside, but knowing Koto’s reaction to the sexual harassment scandal the bald-headed Knock Yokoyama, nicknamed ‘Octopus’, had been embroiled in, which was enough to put her off eating octopus for ever, instead I pretended to have my doubts.
‘Are you sure it was Yoshio Noguchi?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Koto said, shivering. ‘We’ve got to report it. We’ve got to! When I think of a pervert like that doing who knows what to girls on the other side of this wall, it makes me so sick I won’t be able to sleep!’ She was outraged.
‘Hold on. Weren’t you just telling me that they weren’t a brothel but some kind of religious group? Telling the police is fine by me, but then they’ll check us out too – and if the building’s management company find out, then what? They’ll kick us out. This building’s supposed to be for newly married couples.’
‘If it’s for newly married couples, then why is a pervert like that visiting?!’ Koto looked surprised by her own outburst. She clearly found the idea of prostitution going on next door less disgusting than the thought of a middle-aged pervert frequenting it.
‘I’ve lost my appetite,’ she said, and gave me the Karasu bento that she’d gone all the way to the station to buy. For the record, the Karasu (crow) bento is the most popular item at a bento shop in front of the station. Kara stands for kara-age, fried chicken nuggets;
su is a dialect pronunciation of the first part of shoga-yaki, ginger pork. Both of these are included in the bento at the bargain price of ¥580. The way they flavour the ginger pork is out of this world, and unless you get there before eight p.m., they’re usually sold out.
1.4
What’s the matter with me? Ever since I came back from Izu Kogen, I feel like I can’t breathe. I blame it all on Koto, for not coming with me. No – blaming her won’t get me anywhere. I knew from the start that she wouldn’t go, and I’m the one to blame for going on the trip that Umezaki had organised, a double-date trip, even though I didn’t have a date. Initially I’d turned him down. ‘I don’t have anyone to go with, so I’d better not,’ I told him. But Umezaki, kind as always, said, ‘Well, then you should come alone. It’s a four-person cottage, and I won’t be able to find somebody else at such short notice.’
Someone with more sense would have said, ‘No, I don’t want to be a bother,’ and turned him down. But not me. Instead, I said, ‘Really? Then I guess I’ll go. I’ve got nothing else going on.’
We drove to Izu in Umezaki’s car. Unlike Momoko, his Pajero’s engine doesn’t conk out every ten kilometres. It was too much trouble, he said, to come all the way to pick me up, so I drove Momoko to Nishi Kokubunji, parked in front of his building like usual, and blasted my horn a couple of times.
Umezaki’s girlfriend, Kiwako, who was going with us, had apparently spent the night at his place. Normally Umezaki would come out on the balcony, but this time Kiwako appeared. She held her hair as the wind blew it around and she gazed down at me like she was inspecting potatoes at the grocery store. I stuck my head out of the car window and bowed, and Kiwako seemed momentarily startled and then hurriedly bowed back. Anybody would be taken aback if potatoes started greeting you. It looked like she was talking to Umezaki back inside the apartment. I wasn’t sure if I should go upstairs or wait there in the car.
Kiwako came downstairs with Umezaki to the car park. When our eyes locked for the first time, I admit that I was immediately attracted to her. You could even call it love at first sight. Okay, well, it was my first time experiencing it, so honestly I don’t know if that’s really what people call love at first sight or not. If love at first sight means that when you’re with that person you get all restless, more than restless – you’re as jumpy as a video tape on fast forward – that you overanalyse each and every word that comes out that person’s mouth so when she just says something like You want to go for a walk? you suddenly jump to conclusions and are about to call your dad and tell him you’re getting married – if all that’s what the world means by love at first sight, then I think that yes, I had fallen in love at first sight with my loveable older friend’s girlfriend.
Unfortunately, when we arrived at Izu Kogen, it was raining. The tennis court we reserved was soaked, and with no hot springs at the cottage, there was nothing else to do. While we waited for the barbeque that was going to be held under the covered terrace, the three of us took walks around the cottage, invaded the soaked tennis court and, umbrellas in hand, batted a squishy wet tennis ball around with our hands. You’re probably imagining that Kiwako stood by watching, with a quiet smile on her face as these two mischievous guys dashed around in the rain, but it was actually Kiwako who ran around the most, getting all muddy. She even shouted at me to pick up the pace.
Covered in mud, we went back to the cottage, and, after the evening barbeque, we again found ourselves at a loose end. We took turns taking a bath in the tiny bathtub, and opened a bottle of Chablis we had chilled in the fridge. One beer was all it took for Umezaki to turn into Gushiken, the light flyweight champion. Beer and an oolong tea highball and he’d be Guts Ishimatsu. Add wine to that and he’d leap right over Carlos Rivera and wind up like goofy Tako Hachiro. He knew how he reacted to alcohol but still he drank, so he had only himself to blame. Not that I was entirely blameless myself – I knew what alcohol did to him yet I encouraged him. Predictably, by ten p.m., Umezaki had crashed and was snoring up a storm in the bedroom. Kiwako and I stayed in the living room, with the fireplace that we had been told was off limits. We sat at each end of a three-person sofa, laughing occasionally as Umezaki’s thunderous snores wafted out from the bedroom.
Kiwako always referred to Umezaki as that guy . . . I don’t know how many times that night she used that term. But every time she started out saying You know, that guy . . . I called him by his last name. It was a great chance for me, the two of us all alone at last, but all we talked about was Umezaki. It was like he was sitting there on the sofa in the space right between us.
It’s been a week since we came back from Izu Kogen. I tried to put that night in the cottage, the two of us alone, out of my mind, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I keep replaying the details, wondering why I said certain things, telling myself that next time I’d say something different. All the while knowing that there most likely won’t be a next time.
Talking to Kiwako that one night convinced me that the kind of man she’s really hoping for isn’t someone like Umezaki. Maybe the two of them might even split up. There’s a reason I say this: he has zero amount of interest in Kerouac and Boris Vian. Instead he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t mind telling you that he’s seen Rocky III five times.
I’m sure Kiwako’s aware of this. And I think Umezaki himself feels uncomfortable with who he is. It’s just that the two of them can’t bring themselves to talk about it. And I’m not just saying this because I secretly love her. I mean, take the other day, before our trip, when he brought the washing machine over to my place. I hadn’t met Kiwako yet. When I said, ‘How’s it going with your new girlfriend?’ he said, ‘Yeah, we’re getting along. I don’t know. It’s just that . . .’
‘Just what?’
‘It’s just that – she’s kind of aggressive. Kind of wild, I guess . . . She comes right out and tells me she wants to give me a blow job.’
I turn twenty-two on my next birthday, but I’ve never met a girl yet who’s said she wants to give me a blow job. Umezaki had filled me in on Kiwako: how they’re the same age (in other words, three years older than me); how she’s from Sapporo and works for a temp agency that also contracts with the big food manufacturer where Umezaki is employed; and how she lives in a condo in Daita, in Setagaya, with her younger brother, a college student. When I finally met Kiwako, though, she seemed like the exact opposite of a girl who went around offering blow jobs.
Since we came back from Izu Kogen I’ve called Umezaki’s place three times.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘You again?’
‘Yeah, I didn’t have anything else going on.’
‘Why are you calling?’
‘No particular reason. Do I have to wait until I have a reason to call?’
Umezaki gave an innocent ha-ha-ha laugh. I don’t think I’d ever called this much except when I wanted something. My motives were pretty obvious, but my naive older friend didn’t pick up on it at all. ‘How’s Kiwako?’ I asked. ‘She’s fine,’ he replied. ‘You’re all she talks about since we came back from the trip.’ His total lack of malice made me feel even worse.
Almost every day this week when I recalled our trip, I let out a huge sigh. That night on the sofa, I should have told Kiwako how I felt, and I regretted not doing so. To tell the truth, I felt confident. I’m sure she sensed how I felt about her, and I don’t think she would have turned me away if I’d admitted it, but, coward that I was, I avoided letting her know my feelings and talked instead about neutral topics like college memories I had about Umezaki. In return I listened quietly as she talked about her relationship with Umezaki. I wasn’t hesitating so much because of him. If I had, for instance, been lucky enough to kiss her on that sofa, I knew it would only make me feel awful. If I had casually let slip an I think I love you, it seemed like she would just as casually have slept with me. Even now, a week after we came back, fear of that keeps me plagued by these wimpy thoughts, and unable to take a
step forward.
What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want to be the one Kiwako cheats on her boyfriend with. Not that I can ask her to break up with him. So here I sit, unable to see her, and going nuts because of it. I don’t know what the hell to do.
Suddenly I noticed a knock at the door. I lifted my head from where I was slumped over the desk and there was Koto at the door to the guys’ room. Before my trip to Izu Kogen, we’d been all worked up over the goings-on in apartment 402, to the point of considering infiltrating the place, but after I came back from the trip I didn’t care any longer what went on next door. Koto, too, seemed able to leave it alone, as long as no bald pervert showed up again.
‘What’s up?’ I asked sullenly.
‘Nothing, really,’ Koto said. ‘You haven’t come out of your room in a while and I was wondering what you’re doing.’
‘Just thinking over some things.’
‘Thinking, huh?’
Koto came inside, came around behind me and started massaging my shoulders.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go to karaoke with me.’
‘I told you I’ve got things to think about!’
I brushed her away and when I looked up, Koto seemed worried.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘They asked me to. Naoki and Mirai.’
‘Asked you to do what?’
‘To take you out for karaoke, and make sure you sang to Shogo Hamada.’
‘Why? Why would they want you to do that?’
‘’Cause . . . you know, it’s true . . .’
‘What is?’
‘Well . . . that the person who’s having a breakdown is the last one to notice it . . .’
She must be talking about herself. Mirai and Naoki must have said something like Instead of holing up in the apartment waiting for the phone to ring, why don’t you go out and do karaoke? and she mistakenly thought they were talking about me.
Parade Page 3
