As Koto left my room I heard her yell, ‘I have cash, so don’t worry. And one more thing: those clothes you’ve been wearing for a week stink, so why don’t you change? And while you’re at it, take a shower, okay? That would make me even happier.’
1.5
Last night Ryo Ekura finally broke up with Tomohiko Maruyama. In the TV drama, I mean. I knew from the beginning that she was going to get back together with the popular actor Toshiya Ozawa (who, like her, had started out in modelling), but when Maruyama was sitting there in a restaurant in the posh Daikanyama district as she dumped him, it upset me. Koto was sitting next to me as we watched the show and I said, ‘Ryo Ekura has lousy taste in men.’ She waited until there was a commercial and replied, ‘No, it’s the writer who has lousy taste.’
‘You got that right. The writer has no sense of reality.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t popular when he was young, so that’s why he always writes this kind of storyline?’
Koto and I had taken quick bathroom breaks during the ads and had settled down nicely once more on the sofa in time for the drama to begin again. Truth be told, TV dramas are pretty boring.
‘Sugimoto-kun! Su-gi-mo-to-kun!’
An angry voice from behind me snapped me out of my daze. Ayako, the waitress in charge, held a slip in her hand and was glaring at me.
‘Stop spacing out! Did you hear the order I told you?’
‘Oh – sorry. I was thinking about the TV show I saw last night . . .’
‘TV show? Are you kidding me? I need an enchilada, a taco with cheese and beans, and we’re out of limes for the Coronas.’
Just then a customer called out from behind her and Ayako, still glaring at me with a scary look, called back, ‘Coming! Just a second!’ She sounded like husky-voiced actress Reiko Ohara dubbing in The Exorcist.
I’ve been working part-time as a cook in this small Mexican restaurant in Shimokitazawa for the past eight months. Of course, when I went for an interview I wasn’t looking for a job as a cook. My father may own a sushi restaurant, but I don’t know the first thing about cooking. And the owner wasn’t about to give a job as cook to a guy who was surprised to find that peppers had seeds in them. I’d gone to that neighbourhood hoping to buy some second-hand clothes, but when I saw the ‘help wanted’ poster, I leapt at the chance. I started off as a dishwasher and waiter, but two weeks into it, the cook, a guy named Masaharu, quit. I knew he and the owner didn’t get along, but I didn’t expect him to quit so abruptly. And I was the one who got dragged into it. ‘You’ve watched him cook while you were washing dishes, right?’ asked the owner (who obviously didn’t set much store by the culinary arts). Suddenly, I was in charge in the kitchen. The following week they finally found another cook (who’d worked until the month before in a Chinese restaurant!), but he was into triathlons and demanded three days off per week, including Saturdays. Saturday is the busiest day in Shimokitazawa, so I wound up continuing on as cook. It amazed me that people came in waves to this little Mexican restaurant, with its Chinese-cuisine-trained triathlete cook, and a second cook who had to consult a cookbook and hadn’t yet graduated from college.
By the time I finish the last order and clean up the kitchen, it’s usually past eleven p.m. That night, I gathered all the rubbish, took it out to the wheelie bins, and had a cigarette, though I don’t normally smoke.
When I got back inside, Ayako had taken her hair down and was sipping a Tecate, and going through the receipts. I took off my cooks’ uniform and said, ‘We were really busy today. We must have made, what, ¥100,000?’ Ayako silently shook her head. Sometimes the owner shows up just as we’re closing up, but usually it’s Ayako who takes all the cash and deposits it in the bank’s night deposit box.
‘Can I give you a ride back to your apartment?’ I asked her. I sat down beside her. Ayako sings in a rock band, and works at this restaurant to make ends meet. She’s turning twenty-nine this year, and I don’t know if it’s supposed to be serious or a joke, but her band’s name is Limit.
‘Oh, Ayako, there’s something I wanted to ask you.’ I was helping her total up the profits for the day and she looked at me, irritated.
‘What?’
‘A hypothetical, okay? You have a boyfriend, right? If a younger friend of his told you he loved you, what would you do?’
‘What do you mean, what would I do?’
‘I mean, would you be upset, or happy about it?’
‘Does that younger friend have guts?’
‘Guts? Not so much, I’d say.’
‘Then I’d be upset.’
‘Really?’
‘I would be if he said I love you.’
‘Well, okay. But what if he had guts?’
‘Hmm . . . Does this guy listen to The Who or The Kinks?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then he’s more into the Sex Pistols or the Clash, that kind of music?’
The name of her band, Limit, probably wasn’t a joke after all.
We left the restaurant and I drove to her apartment over on the other side of the station and then drove back to Kannana. Normally taking the back streets through Sasazuka and coming out onto Kyukoshu Kaido Boulevard would be fastest, but these past few days I’ve been intentionally driving through Kannana, even though it’s so crowded. Go into a back alley a little way from Kannana and there’s the apartment where Kiwako lives with her younger brother. According to Umezaki it’s a one-bedroom, and Kiwako uses the bedroom while her brother sleeps on the living-room couch. Usually there’s no light on in their place. Or at least the light’s never been on since I started driving past here after work. Umezaki told me that the brother has a girlfriend in Kashiwa City in Chiba and he basically lives there. Tonight, I gazed up sorrowfully at their dark window, assuming that Kiwako was at Umezaki’s.
I parked Momoko behind the building, got out, and headed towards the entrance. The entrance has an auto lock with a video intercom. I waited across the street, smoking a cigarette in front of the vending machines, until a guy in a suit, and no doubt drunk by the way he staggered, went into the building. He punched in the door code and as the door clicked open I followed him in, trying to look like I belonged there and just happened to show up at the right moment. The man apparently lived on the ground floor, because he didn’t take the lift, instead heading down the hallway. I was watching him when he suddenly turned around. I nodded to him, and the man snorted a little laugh, and reeled down the hallway again.
I took the lift to the third floor. I’d come this far before. But each time I hadn’t made it to the apartment itself. The first time I came here, I just stood in front of the apartment building; the second time I touched the mailboxes outside the entrance; the third time, thanks to a woman who was going out, I made it inside; and the fourth time I actually took the lift before I turned around and left. Tonight was the fifth time and finally I was standing outside Kiwako’s door.
The nameplate read Hiroshi and Kiwako Matsuzono, as if they were a married couple. I pressed my ear to the door but couldn’t hear anybody inside. I thought about last night, when I went into the girls’ room at home. Koto was already lying on her futon. I sat down formally, with my legs tucked under me, and confessed. ‘Every night, after work,’ I said, ‘I wander in front of her apartment building.’
Koto looked really sleepy, but for once, she took me seriously. ‘That’s awful,’ she said. ‘You’re acting like a pervert.’
‘You think so?’
‘You need to realise it yourself.’
‘Realise what?’
‘That you’re acting like a pervert.’
Okay, so if I realise I’m acting like a pervert, then what? I decided to tell her more.
‘I really think I like her.’
‘You like her? Or you think you like her?’
Of course Koto was hung up on details.
‘I said I think I like her because I’m a bit shy about it.’
‘On the outside you
seem pretty naive, Ryosuke, but you’re more complex than I thought.’
‘I seem naive?’
‘Well, that’s what Mirai and Naoki say . . . Anyway, you should stop moping around outside and ring the bell and tell her how you feel.’
‘But what should I say?’
‘Tell her I think I like you. The think part is ’cause I’m shy.’
‘Confess how I feel? No, I can’t do it,’ I said, sighing. ‘I mean, she’s Umezaki’s girlfriend.’
‘Then there’s nothing you can do,’ Koto said, and rolled over to go to sleep.
She didn’t know the first thing about giving love advice. The one thing you should never advise the person is to tell the truth. Mirai, who was lying in the bed, grumbled, ‘Could you guys stop whispering in the dark like that? I’m trying to sleep here.’
I ignored Mirai’s complaints and went on. ‘I know she feels something for me. But maybe to her I’m just someone to have a fling with.’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Koto said sleepily.
‘What should I say?’
‘How about—’
That’s as far as I heard, because then I was smacked with a pillow.
‘Unlike you two, I have to get up for work in the morning!’ Mirai yelled, so, obediently, I left. Through the closed door I could hear Mirai saying wearily, ‘Christ. All you guys think about is love affairs.’
So, here I was, on my fifth try at seeing Kiwako. I was clinging to her door, my finger pressed against the peephole, when I heard the lift behind me slide open. I spun around and there she was. I could tell she was surprised. She stood there, unmoving, her eyes gliding from my face to my shoulders, to my finger plugging up the peephole.
‘Wh-what are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘What am I doing? Well, I, uh . . .’ I answered.
Kiwako slowly walked towards me. She looked different from when we were on the trip, probably because she was wearing a suit.
‘My brother isn’t back yet?’
‘Uh . . . no . . . not yet.’
‘You came to see us?’
‘Yeah, uh . . . that’s right.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I just happened to be in the neighbourhood . . .’
That was the exact line I had told myself not to say if we did run into each other. Smiling, Kiwako stepped in front of me and unlocked the door. Inside, a phone was ringing.
1.6
It’s been thirty minutes now. I’ve been sitting in classroom 534 in the main building at college, in the last row, gazing at the blank blackboard. I’m alone in the room. The rows of desks all slope towards the blackboard, so from the very back row, it looks like large waves of long, neatly lined-up desks are pushing towards the podium. And I’m riding the crest of this wood-grained monster wave.
I think it was really hard for my parents to send their son to a private university in Tokyo. When I was a kid my mum always used to say, ‘Running a sushi shop is a respectable profession. But your father hopes that you’ll become the kind of customer this kind of restaurant values, rather than running the restaurant yourself.’ Since coming to Tokyo, I haven’t once been to a sushi restaurant. Kaiten sushi places and the like, yes, but they don’t count.
Women always strike me as much more realistic than men. At first my mum was dead set against me attending a private university in Tokyo. Part of this was simply because she’s a mother – because she wanted to keep her only son nearby. But then she carefully read through the information pamphlets on colleges, as well as the book I bought on living in Tokyo, and began estimating what it would cost for her son to attend college there. Naturally, for the wife of a sushi restaurant owner, this was a fair amount of money.
When Mum told me how much it would cost, I kind of half gave up. Since I was taking the scattergun approach, applying to a lot of places and hoping I might just get accepted somewhere, the exam fees alone started to snowball, in inverse proportion to my indifferent academic record. The more exams, the more we’d have to shell out for hotels; and even if I were to pass, I’d have to immediately cough up entrance and tuition fees, plus all the other endless fees, as well as rent for an apartment. When my mum showed me how much it would all come to, an image sprung into my mind of my dad making mounds of chutoro sushi to pay for all this.
My mum’s apparently implacable opposition was undone by a single sentence from my dad. She didn’t tell me about it until later. He said, ‘If he wants to go to Tokyo then we should let him.’
Mum replied, ‘That’s sounds good, but . . .’ and showed him the estimate, enough to strike fear into anybody’s heart.
But Dad ignored it. Instead he said, ‘Let’s think about you, first of all. Your friends are all from this backwater town in Kyushu, right?’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘They’re people I went to school with in junior and senior high.’
‘Same with me. Ryosuke should go to Tokyo and meet all kinds of other people. Don’t you think so? Like, say, the son of a guy who fishes for bonito in Tosa, or the son of an old established restaurant in Kyoto, or the daughter of a dairy farmer from Hokkaido. He should make friends with all kinds of people like that.’
Mum didn’t say anything. She told me later that while she listened to him she was already making a preliminary mental list of what I should pack when I moved to Tokyo. Finally, according to her, Dad said the following:
‘Fathers are different from mothers. The only thing fathers can do for their sons is give them a kick up the bum to send them out into the world.’
As I stared vacantly at the blackboard, the door adjacent to it opened, and a young guy stuck his head in. When he spotted me in the last row he said, loudly, ‘Hey, isn’t this Marketing Theory?’
‘No,’ I yelled back. I’d seen this guy before. We sat next to each other in the cafeteria once, and he gave me a copy of Spirit magazine that he’d finished reading.
‘Damn. Got the wrong room.’
He was about to leave when I told him to wait.
‘Hm?’ he said, reluctantly turning around.
‘This is going to sound strange, but what does your father do for a living?’ My voice echoed around the empty classroom.
‘My father?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘No special reason.’
‘He’s a civil servant.’
‘Where?’
‘In Kanazawa, in Ishikawa Prefecture.’
The guy looked puzzled for a moment, and then left. But I thought to myself, Dad, I just met someone whose father is a civil servant in Kanazawa.
I checked my watch. I still had time before my part-time job started. I could take Momoko for a drive around the city, but these last few days, whenever I drove her, it made me increasingly depressed. It wasn’t especially complicated – it brought back memories of the other day, when I was stalking Kiwako on the way back from work and before I knew it was in her apartment.
It was Umezaki who was calling when she entered the apartment. She’d given me a little shove and I was already inside. As she talked to him she motioned with her finger for me to help myself to a drink from the fridge and to sit down. I sat there, waiting patiently for her phone call with Umezaki to end.
When she hung up, I suddenly realised something very important. I was sitting right in front of her on the sofa, looking like some hand-me-down cat – no, more like one that’s been handed down several times – yet Kiwako never told Umezaki that I was there. So there’s still some hope, I thought, convinced I was right.
‘You didn’t tell him I was here,’ I said, avoiding her eyes.
She took a carton of Sunkist grapefruit juice out of her shopping bag. ‘Did you want me to?’ she asked, shooting me a meaningful glance.
‘I don’t really care if you do. I mean, we both know him, and it’s not like we’re hiding anything . . .’
Kiwako totally ignored what I said. She was absorbed in stowing away t
he juice and some fruit in the fridge.
The living-room sofa had a pillow that smelled of some kind of hair gel, probably her brother’s, and a crumpled-up blanket. A white door stood ajar at the edge of the room, leading into what appeared to be Kiwako’s bedroom. I could see a shelf lined with cosmetics, and a framed poster for the French film Sam Suffit, a film I’d seen at Mirai’s recommendation, propped up against the wall.
‘Oh, that’s right. On the phone just now, Umezaki said Say hello to Ryosuke for me.’
‘Huh?’ Before I knew it, I’d leapt up from the sofa.
‘Just kidding,’ Kiwako said, and came out from the kitchen.
‘He wouldn’t know I’m here.’
‘I guess not.’
When I’m with Kiwako it’s like I have to play the part of the sweet younger guy, and afterwards it makes me want to throw up. I’m not the sweet type to begin with, and trying to pretend I am is asking too much. I’m aware of all this, but in moments like these, I still overdo the younger guy act.
To cut to the chase, that night I slept with her. We had some beers and chatted a bit about Umezaki, and afterwards it was like a totally natural thing for us to wind up in her bedroom. As natural as finding Koto in the living room trimming her split ends, or Momoko conking out after ten kilometres.
The girls I live with, Koto and Mirai, are kind of eccentric. But being with Kiwako, who is so different from them, made me feel peaceful. I decided, without much of a reason, that it’s because she’s from Hokkaido. But that can’t be right – not all people from Hokkaido are like that. Take the owner of the restaurant I work at – he’s as thick and oily as a bowl of butter-pork ramen.
At any rate, I love Kiwako’s voice. When we snuggled in bed I was suddenly aware of how tiny she was – so tiny that I could hold her tight in my arms. I told her to say something, anything, so she whispered something against my chest. She laughed – what she’d said was ‘On your mark, get set, go,’ but her breath was hot against my chest, gently filtering up to my neck. ‘Consider this for a second,’ Kiwako said. ‘A film – a love story – about a man who doesn’t mind sleeping with his older friend’s girlfriend, and the girlfriend who doesn’t mind sleeping with her boyfriend’s younger friend.’ I wished she hadn’t said that. I couldn’t think of a smart comeback.
Parade Page 4
