Nighttime turns people into friends in next to no time. Kyōichi gave the two of us a completely relaxed, openhearted smile.
“Do you go for walks every night?” I asked.
“Nah. I don’t know what it was, but somehow I just couldn’t get to sleep. Gongorō was out like a log, but I got him up and made him come out with me. Poor little guy.” Kyōichi grinned.
The sense that the three of us were becoming friends seemed to saturate the air between us like a kind of instinct, a pleasurable premonition. People who are going to get along really well know it almost as soon as they meet. You spend a little while talking and everyone starts to feel this conviction, you’re all equally sure that you’re at the beginning of something good. That’s how it is when you meet people you’re going to be with for a long time.
“Hey Kyōichi,” said Tsugumi, her eyes bulging so much that it looked like they were going to jump out of their sockets. “I’ve been wanting to see you ever since that time in the park. We gonna get together again? Huh?”
I was pretty shocked by her words myself, but Kyōichi seemed totally floored. He stood there silently for a few moments before replying.
“. . . Well, yeah. I mean, I’ll be here all summer. I’m always wandering around town, taking Gongorō out on walks. I’m staying in Nakahama Inn. You know where that is?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“You’re welcome to come visit anytime. My last name’s Takeuchi.”
“Gotcha.” Tsugumi nodded.
“Well, catch you later.”
“Good night.”
Tsugumi’s ardor had set the darkness on edge, but the moment Kyōichi had vanished down the dark road, the tension dispersed. It was a strange meeting. He showed up suddenly, then just as suddenly disappeared.
The night that enveloped us kept growing deeper and thicker.
“Wow, Tsugumi, you sure seem to have fallen for him!” I grinned.
“For the time being, yeah,” Tsugumi replied with a sigh.
“I mean, that was so weird. Didn’t you notice?”
“What do you mean? What was so weird?”
“You were talking just like you always do.”
I’d been aware of it all along, but I hadn’t said anything. Tsugumi always switches back into her Normal Young Woman mode in front of guys, but in talking to Kyōichi she had used the same vulgar tone she always uses. It was so intriguingly odd that I had gotten kind of jittery myself.
“Oh man!” cried Tsugumi.
“What’s the problem?”
“I didn’t even notice! Damn, it’s true, isn’t it?” she groaned. “I wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing. Man, of all the crappy mistakes! I must have sounded like some kind of nasty, foul-mouthed broad. Damn!”
“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, it was . . . interesting,” I said.
Tsugumi was staring straight ahead, her eyebrows tightly pinched together. The night wind puffed across her face. “Whatever, it’s too late to worry now. It’s all because of this night, that’s what it is,” she replied.
Confession
It had been raining since morning. A salt-scented summer rain.
And I was bored. I’d been holed up in my room for hours, reading.
Tsugumi had been laid up in her futon for a few days now with a fever and a terrible headache, probably as a result of our wild night out on the veranda. A little earlier, when I’d taken her lunch in to her, she’d been scrunched up in her futon, moaning. I was so used to seeing her that way that I even started to feel a bit nostalgic.
“Hey, I’ll leave your lunch here for you, okay?” I shouted, setting the tray down next to her pillow. Then suddenly, as I started out the door, I came out with this: “Hey Tsugumi, do you think maybe you’re just lovesick?”
Without saying a word Tsugumi whipped out her arm and hurled a nearby plastic pitcher at me.
Whatever else was wrong, that part of her was doing fine.
The pitcher slammed into the wooden post that served as a stopper for the sliding door, then tumbled across the tatami. Thanks to this, my hair was still glistening with moisture even now. I had returned to my own room, and I was lying down with my hair fanned out peacefully across the floor.
Outside the window, way off in the distance, I could see the ocean. It was a deep gray, and the tossing waves were so wild and jagged that it was actually sort of scary to look at. The whole vast expanse of sky and ocean stood on the other side of a monotone filter of mist. On a day like today, even Pooch was probably just sitting forlornly in his doghouse, closed in by the scent of damp earth, gazing out into the rain. The guests at the inn couldn’t go out to swim, and so for some time now I’d been hearing the sounds of voices downstairs, and people clumping from room to room. It was always like this when it rained. In the big house that this inn was, you ended up having too much free time on your hands. No doubt crowds of people had collected in front of the big TV in the lobby and around the ancient video game machines.
I managed to read quite a lot in the intervals when I stopped letting my lazy thoughts take control. Time and time again, images of the raindrops that kept streaming like shooting stars across the windowpane glimmered across the movie screen inside my head.
And then suddenly I had a thought.
What if Tsugumi gets worse and dies?
This fear had lived inside me ever since I was a little kid, when Tsugumi was even weaker than she was now. The possibility had always been terribly real to me. And it was something that was always jumping into my head just when I least expected it. On rainy days like this both the past and the future dissolve quietly into the air and hover there, surrounding you.
A single teardrop fell onto my open book. Before I even understood what was happening, tears were streaming from my eyes.
In the midst of my surprise, I heard the pattering of the rain as it soaked the eaves. Maria, what’s gotten into you? I thought, wiping away my tears. And soon I’d forgotten that this had ever happened. I was just reading my book.
Around three in the afternoon I finally ran out of things to read. Tsugumi was tucked up in her futon for reasons already stated, and Yōko had gone out, and there was nothing good on TV, so I decided to fight the excess of boredom by making a trip to the bookstore. Tsugumi must have heard me sliding the door open on my way out, because she yelled at me through her closed door.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To the bookstore. Do you want anything?” I replied.
“Get me some apple juice, will you? That 100% All Natural stuff.”
Her voice was hoarse. Her fever was probably pretty high.
“Okay, I’ll get some.”
“And get one of those expensive melons, and some sushi, and . . .”
She kept talking, but I ignored her and went downstairs.
I get the feeling that in towns near the sea the rain falls in a more hushed, lonely way than in other places. Perhaps the ocean absorbs the sound? When I moved to Tokyo, the exaggerated roar of the rain there was one of the things that surprised me most.
I took a road parallel to the shore on my way to the bookstore. The beach had been dyed completely black by the rain, and it was as still and peaceful as a graveyard—it felt weird to see it like that. The rain falling on the water broke into the roaring waves, sending out thousands upon thousands of ripples.
The biggest bookstore in town was unbelievably crowded. Not that I was surprised or anything—on days like this all the tourists in town make a beeline for the place. A quick glance around the premises confirmed what I had suspected: All the magazines I wanted were sold out.
I had no choice but to go look through the shelves of aging paperbacks, and that’s just what I was doing when I noticed—Hey, that’s Kyōichi back there! He was standing in front of a bookshelf all the way in the back, apparently very engrossed in the book he was reading. Surprise surprise! I thought, and began wandering over to where he was.
“Loo
ks like you left your dog behind today,” I said.
“Yeah,” he smiled. “It’s this rain. I left him back at the inn.”
“How is it that you’ve got a dog when you don’t even have a house?”
“I talked to the people at the inn and they agreed to let me keep him chained up in the back garden. I mean, I’ve been staying there for a while now and I’ve gotten to be pretty good friends with them, you know? Sometimes when I have nothing else to do I help them lay out the futons in the bedrooms and stuff. The only problem is that I can’t tell them why I’m here. It’s kind of a bizarre feeling, almost like I’m a spy or something.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I nodded. After all, Kyōichi’s parents owned that huge hotel that was going up at the base of the mountain, and to a greater or lesser degree all the innkeepers in town had the hotel on their minds. Come to think of it, this summer was probably pretty hard on him, too.
“Where’s Tsugumi today?” asked Kyōichi. “She’s not with you?”
Maybe it’s just hindsight, but I seem to recall that as I heard him say Tsugumi’s name, noticing the special clarity and deliberateness with which he pronounced it, my chest flooded for just a moment with an intuition that Tsugumi’s love might be headed into a bright future. Focusing my gaze on the transparent beads of rain that kept dripping from the plastic awning at the front of the store, I replied, “Tsugumi’s at home, lying in her futon. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but actually she’s incredibly frail. Hey listen, Kyōichi . . . if you don’t have any plans or anything, you know, why don’t you come pay her a visit? I bet she’d like that a lot.”
“Yeah, sure, if you think that won’t make her feel even worse,” he replied. “You know, I guess now that you mention it she is unusually thin and pale, isn’t she? She’s a pretty interesting girl, isn’t she?”
I’m afraid I can’t explain this very well. But just then, as the lucid rush of the rain went on closing over the town, little by little, I felt utterly convinced that something about the two of them was right.
I’d been living in Tokyo and going to school there since spring, and I’d had the chance to see an awful lot of couples. (That’s kind of a weird way to put it, I guess—makes me sound like I’d never been out of the boonies.) And I have to admit that I could sense what it was that had drawn all those people together. When you spend a lot of time with a couple, even two people who seem totally mismatched at first glance, you usually end up discovering some aspect of their relationship that makes their being together seem perfectly logical. It could be that they resemble one other, or that their lifestyles or their tastes in clothing are similar—there’s always something like that. But what I felt in Tsugumi and Kyōichi that day, in that sudden instant of understanding, was something much stronger, something incredibly powerful. Yes . . . earlier, when Kyōichi said her name, my images of the two of them fused, slipped together for just a moment, and the double image glittered . . . I saw that the concentration of interest each felt in the other had managed to slice through the dull, rainy afternoon—that the two of them had made a connection. I had confidence in this intuition of mine. And I had the impression that this force I had sensed in them was what people refer to as fate, the beginning of a fabulous love.
I remained lost in these thoughts as we walked, gazing down at the rainbow of colors sparkling on the wet steaming asphalt of the dark gray road.
“Hold on, aren’t you supposed to take some sort of gift when you go to see someone who’s sick? What sort of things does Tsugumi like?”
Kyōichi’s question made me burst out laughing.
“I’m sure anything’s fine. Earlier she told me that she wanted apple juice, one of those pricey gourmet melons, and some sushi.”
“Hmm . . .” Kyōichi cocked his head, looking puzzled. “It doesn’t really sound like a very good combination, does it?”
It occurred to me that this must be what people mean when they say that what goes around comes around, and I kept chuckling for ages.
My heart thumping with the excitement of imagining how Tsugumi would react—the startled look that would flicker into her eyes and all the little tricks she would use to try and keep us from noticing it—I quietly slid open the door to her room and yelled in, “Look, Tsugumi, you’ve got company!”
But Tsugumi wasn’t there.
The lights were still on, but the only trace of her left in the bright room was the heavy cover on her futon, which remained slightly raised, just as she must have left it when she slid out. I was dumbfounded. True enough, she was constantly doing incomprehensible things like this, but the girl had a fever of about a hundred and two degrees.
“I don’t get it . . . she’s not here,” I muttered.
“Didn’t you say she was super-sick?” Kyōichi replied, drawing his eyebrows tightly together in a frown. It was kind of an odd way to put it.
“Yeah, that’s true, but—” I found myself at a loss as to how to continue. Then, “Could you wait here a second? I want to take a look downstairs.”
I dashed down to the entryway, crouched in front of the shelf where people left their shoes when they came inside, and began hunting around for Tsugumi’s sandals—the beach sandals with the white flowers on top that she always wore. I was just relishing the feeling of relief that came the moment I found them lined up neatly among the crowd of sandals belonging to the guests at the inn, when Aunt Masako came walking down the hall.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked.
“Tsugumi isn’t in her room.”
“What?” she said, her eyes bulging. “But she’s running such a terrible fever today! We just had the doctor come a little while ago—it’s only been a few minutes since he gave her the shot! Maybe the medicine cured the fever, and so she started feeling like she was better . . .?”
“I bet that’s it.”
“But I’ve been at the front desk this whole time, and no one has gone past except for you. She must be inside somewhere . . . At any rate, we’d better see if we can find her,” said my aunt, looking uneasy.
“What is that girl thinking!” I sighed.
We decided to have Kyōichi go and take a look around the neighborhood, and Aunt Masako and I walked around the inn, searching for Tsugumi. We tried the guest house, the little alcove where the vending machines were, and everywhere else. We opened the door to Yōko’s room. But she wasn’t anywhere. No Tsugumi. Time after time we strode up and down the same dim halls of the small building, past doors that were all shaped the same, the sighing of the rain numbingly ever present, and gradually I began to slip into a peculiar mood, a feeling like I had stumbled into some sort of lonely labyrinth. Marching along, retracing our footsteps again and again under the light of the fluorescent bulbs, Aunt Masako and I were suddenly overcome by a quiet sense of helplessness. But come to think of it, it was always this way—the feeling that seized us at times like this wasn’t so much anxiety or anger as it was helplessness. These occasions always forced us to remember that no matter how clearly we saw the brilliantly burning flame of life that this sassy young woman harbored, her life was really playing itself out in a place that was fairly sad, and she could never shake off that sadness.
Just spending too much time on the swings . . .
Just half a day swimming at the beach . . .
Just being tired from having gotten caught up in a late-night movie . . .
Just going out without a jacket when there was a slight chill in the air . . .
would make Tsugumi collapse. She would lose strength. The only reason her existence here seemed so unshakably settled was that deep inside her she had a hidden store of energy that rebelled against the frailty of her flesh, struggled ferociously against it . . .
Yes, yes—on rainy days like this my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, and memories of days long gone come drifting up through my body, marvelously real. I seem to see the color that tinted the air in those days reflected in the dark wi
ndowpanes, and it’s a tint like the rush of sentiment. The weight of the closed doors in my childish eyes. My mother’s voice—“You’ve got to be quiet, Maria. Tsugumi’s condition is very precarious right now.” Yōko’s eyes filling with tears, her long braids. It happened all the time when I was a child, all the time.
“She just isn’t anywhere, is she?”
Arriving at the door to Tsugumi’s bedroom, we sighed once more.
Kyōichi called up to us as he climbed the stairs, “She isn’t anywhere in this neighborhood.” Apparently he hadn’t taken an umbrella when he went out, because his hair was drenched.
“Oh dear, look how wet you are! I’m so sorry to have put you to so much trouble,” murmured Aunt Masako, sounding very abashed, even though she still had no idea who he was. The order of things was all messed up.
“Do you think that means she’s gone somewhere far away?” I asked. And then for some reason or other I headed over toward the veranda, thinking that I might as well take a look outside. I peered out the big window with the wooden frame that opened out over the platform.
And I had found her.
“Here she is . . .” I said weakly, addressing Aunt Masako, and pushed the wobbly window open. It’s hard to believe, but Tsugumi had actually crawled down into the opening between the floor of the veranda and the roof that lay below it—the roof of the second story. She peeked up at me through the gap between two boards and, still squatting there, yelled up to me.
“So you figured it out!”
“Figured what out? What on earth are you doing there, Tsugumi?” I said, feeling stunned to the very core of my being. I just didn’t get it at all.
“Oh my God, Tsugumi! You went out there barefoot! It must be so cold out there, and you’ve got nothing on . . . ! Hurry up and get in here! You’ll end up with a fever again!” cried my aunt, an expression on her face that made it perfectly clear how relieved she was. She reached out and tugged a very wet Tsugumi out from under the veranda, inching her out a bit at a time. “I’m going to run and get a towel now, so I want you to climb right into your futon and stay there, you hear me?” Aunt Masako bustled off downstairs.
Goodbye Tsugumi Page 8
