by Ryu Murakami
First published in Great Britain 2009
This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2009 by Ryu Murakami
Translation copyright © 2009 by Ralph McCarthy
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1
‘Why don’t you find yourself a new wife, Pops?’
It was this question, posed by his son, Shige, that precipitated Aoyama’s decision to remarry.
Shige’s mother, Ryoko, had died of a viral cancer some seven years before, when he was eight and Aoyama thirty-five. Because of her relative youth, Ryoko’s cancer had spread rapidly. She was operated on once, but recurrence was almost immediate, and within a month it was all over.
‘She didn’t have time to suffer, or even to grieve,’ Aoyama had told a close friend at the time.
Ryoko’s father was the owner of a venerable little firm that had been manufacturing fine musical instruments for generations. He and his wife, devotees of jazz and classical music, had raised their only daughter in a strict but loving household. Ryoko was cultured, intelligent and strikingly attractive. She was also a woman of great inner strength, and as a wife she’d been quietly supportive of Aoyama in every aspect of his life and career. He would never forget that it was only because of her help and understanding that he’d succeeded in his Great Adventure: leaving the giant ad agency where he’d worked for more than a decade to start his own video production company.
Although this was during the bubble years, when it seemed to be raining money, the sheer number of fledgling production companies ensured fierce competition, and for many months Aoyama’s adventure had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Ryoko’s father was the one who’d saved him. His firm had designed and built pipe organs for Catholic churches throughout South-East Asia, where VCRs were just beginning to proliferate, and Aoyama hit upon the idea of producing a simple visual presentation of scenes from the New Testament. Dubbed into the various languages, these videos sold literally hundreds of thousands of copies – thanks almost entirely to the old man’s connections.
Many wives might have made a point of dangling something like that over their husbands’ heads, but not the ever-modest and self-effacing Ryoko. Naturally, Aoyama had nothing but love, respect and gratitude for this remarkable wife of his, and yet it is also true that ever since his days at the agency he’d been rather extravagantly unfaithful to her. The most critical instance had occurred just after the Jesus video took off, when he got entangled with a nightclub hostess to the tune of millions of yen. But even then Ryoko had maintained her cool and her quiet dignity, and no serious fights ever occurred in the home. Her main priorities – first, last and always – were Shige’s well-being and education.
What husband has never speculated how free he might feel if his wife were suddenly out of the picture? And how many count the days till she takes the kids off for a week with her folks? Let these men actually lose their wives, however, and few can even summon the will or energy to run wild; it’s only then that they recognise the support system they’ve been taking for granted. When Aoyama lost Ryoko he became mired in feelings of utter powerlessness. Eventually he’d consulted with a physician friend, who warned him he was just a step shy of clinical depression. ‘You really will get ill if you don’t set some positive goals for yourself,’ this friend had said, and Aoyama set himself two.
One was to spend as much time as possible with his son. Shige was in a similar state of shock, devastated by his mother’s death, and Aoyama conscientiously went about finding things the two of them could do together. He bought a baseball and gloves, honed his skill at video games and watched more movies than he had in years. But, because he’d always entrusted the business of raising the boy to Ryoko, it took weeks before he really felt they were getting to know each other. Swimming was one activity that provided them with a lot of quality time. Aoyama took out a membership at a local sports club and the two of them swam in the pool almost every evening. Shige had been intimidated by the water but his father patiently helped him overcome his fear, teaching him first breaststroke and then the crawl.
It was some six months after Ryoko’s death, when Shige had got to the point where he could swim a hundred metres’ crawl, that Aoyama realised they were both finally on the road to recovery. Ryoko had died in midwinter, and now it was the rainy season. Walking through the car park of the sports club, Shige pointed at a cluster of hydrangeas and said, ‘Pretty, aren’t they, Daddy?’ They really were pretty, Aoyama thought. The vivid purple of the blossoms was something he could almost feel in the pleasant, after-swim fatigue of his body. It had been a long time since he or Shige had been able to appreciate things like flowers.
His second goal was to bring a certain legendary pipe organist to Japan. This elderly musician, who’d lived all her life in eastern Germany, was known to enthusiasts worldwide without ever having given a commercial recital. Aoyama launched his quest by carefully composing a long letter to her, researching the history of Christianity, the life of Bach and the culture of medieval Europe as he went. He had the letter translated into German, began studying the language himself and even started investigating possible venues for her to perform in. Promoters tended to laugh him out of the room the moment he mentioned the elderly virtuoso’s name, but Aoyama was determined to succeed – and through his own efforts alone. He didn’t enlist the help of Ryoko’s father, or even let the old man know what he was up to. And when, after two years of sending letters without any indication that she was reading them, he finally received a reply – and although the reply was a simple, polite refusal to perform, Aoyama literally shed tears of joy. He continued writing to her, dozens of letters to the effect that it was our duty as Believers to record and commemorate, with state-of-the-art technology, her performance on an instrument of the finest quality. Aoyama didn’t actually believe in God, but his experience with the Jesus video had served him well, and five years after he’d sent the first letter he was able to bring the legendary artist to Japan. She performed a free, one-time-only concert at the auditorium of a music school in Mejiro, and Aoyama recorded the event on both video and film. No one was more delighted about this triumph than Ryoko’s father, who understood well what it symbolised to his son-in-law: a final requiem for Ryoko and the beginning of a new life.
At fifteen, Shige was already taller than Aoyama’s 174 centimetres and a much faster swimmer of both the crawl and breaststroke. They’d both begun playing tennis the year after Ryoko’s death, but of course Shige, who took after his mother in both looks and character, had made much quicker progress. The two of them stayed on in the house in Suginami-ku, a substantial home on an 800-square-metre lot that Aoyama rented from an acquain
tance of Ryoko’s father. The owner was an ancient gentleman who’d once composed popular songs and who now lived at the foot of Mount Fuji, in a retirement home with its own hot springs. The rent – roughly half a million yen a month – was easily affordable now that Aoyama’s firm was well established. At his office, in a building on Meiji Boulevard in Shibuya, he employed a staff of fourteen.
Shige had entered a private high school in western Tokyo. He excelled at English and biology in particular, and he had a lot of friends. It was on a Sunday afternoon in midsummer, as the two of them sat in the living-room watching a women’s marathon, that he posed the question that started it all.
The living-room took up most of the first floor. It contained a massive sectional sofa; a big, square coffee-table; a twenty-seven-inch TV; an audio rack; and a huge mahogany drinks cabinet. Aoyama was stretched out on the sofa, sipping at a can of beer. From where he lay he had a view of the garden beyond the sliding glass doors, framed by the lace curtains that Ryoko had hemmed and hung so long ago. The housekeeper, Rie-san, was out there with Gangsta the beagle, who was barking and scampering in circles around her. Rie-san was forty-nine, a large, good-natured woman who loved chansons and travel and Furuta, the catcher for the Swallows. Aoyama had first hired her through an agency some four years ago, but because she lived near by and got along famously with Shige they’d ended up signing a long-term contract.
About twenty minutes into the women’s marathon, Shige had come in, plopped down on the opposite sofa and said, ‘What’re you watching, Pops?’
Shige had begun calling him ‘Pops’ about six months ago. Aoyama sat up and reached for a cigarette.
‘You’re spending Sunday at home for once?’ he said.
‘I’m going out later on. Hot as hell out there right now. What’s up with this?’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t know you liked marathons.’
‘I don’t.’
‘So?’
‘It’s women.’
‘Not very pretty ones. They’re all skin and bone.’
‘I predict,’ said Aoyama, ‘that eventually women will outrun men in the marathon.’
‘Because?’
‘Physiology. Body-fat ratio, things like that. I’m hoping to witness the historic moment when a woman becomes the world’s fastest marathon runner. Guess it’s not going to happen today, but . . .’
Shige shook his head and said, ‘Somebody needs a life.’
‘I’ve got a life. But a man needs to take a day off every now and then and just veg out. Rest the brain.’
‘Any runners from Uzbekistan?’ Shige said.
‘Uzbekistan?’
‘There’s this girl I see on the train sometimes, about every other day? Really pretty. So I finally work up the nerve to talk to her, and it turns out she’s from Uzbekistan. Working at a cake shop in Tachikawa while she goes to nursing school. Really, really pretty, you know? The girls in my school, it’s not even funny how ugly they are. In middle school there were at least a few who were like, Whoa, but I don’t know what happened to ’em. Where do all the pretty girls go?’
The cameras were trained on two Japanese runners in the front group. They were both plain-looking at best. Some years back, there’d been a Japanese marathon runner Aoyama had found attractive. He’d seen her in the Olympics. Was it Barcelona or Seoul?
‘Beautiful women are like stag beetles,’ he said. ‘The all-but-extinct black panther, or that prehistoric fish they found off Madagascar, the coelacanth. It’s not like you can find a stag beetle marching down the street, right? You have to go deep into the woods, under some tree.’
‘Or to a pet shop.’
‘They cost a fortune.’
‘So where are all the beautiful women?’
‘Well, there are swarms of them in the waiting rooms at Fuji TV, or in dimly lit basement clubs in Roppongi, but . . .’ Aoyama stopped himself from adding, ‘they cost a fortune, too’. Shige had inherited from his mother a certain demure sense of propriety.
They watched the race in silence awhile. Aoyama found himself thinking how his perception of marathons had changed. As a kid watching Abebe Bikila at the Tokyo Olympics, he’d had a definite sense that the marathon was a symbol of something. It was easy to identify with the runners, with their dreams and aspirations. Back then, Japan as a nation aspired to something in which each individual seemed invested. And that ‘something’ wasn’t just about economic growth, or transforming the yen into an international currency. It had more to do with accessing information. Information was indispensable, and not only as a means of obtaining necessities like food and clothing and medicine. Within two or three years of World War II’s end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depended on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what the Japanese wanted wasn’t a better life, but more things. And things, of course, were a form of information. But as things became readily available and information began to flow smoothly, the original aspiration got lost in the shuffle. People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety people turn to extreme sex, violence and even murder. Watching marathon runners on TV back in the day, you got the sense that everyone shared certain fundamental aspirations, but things were different now: it went without saying that each person was running for his or her own private reasons. For Japanese of Aoyama’s generation, that might be a bitter pill to swallow, but . . .
Shige interrupted this train of thought.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘don’t you find yourself a new wife, Pops?’
Shige went to a friend’s house that night, and Aoyama had dinner alone. Rie-san had left a pot of steamed rice, and he walked to a delicatessen near by, a place specialising in imported foods, and bought roast duck from France along with some smoked salmon and mushrooms. He wasn’t particularly fond of cooking, but neither did he consider it a chore to prepare a meal for himself. He boiled the mushrooms and placed them on a Ginori plate, laid the salmon on top of them, sprinkled them with tinned capers, ground some fresh pepper on top, and added a squirt of lemon and a dash of soy sauce. There were more than a dozen different varieties of beer in the refrigerator – something that would have been unthinkable in the old days, Aoyama was thinking as he selected a Belgian brew and popped it open.
When he’d gone to meet the pipe organist, he’d spent three weeks in a little town called Wittenberg, in the former East Germany, about halfway between Leipzig and Berlin. Food and goods were scarce there, but it was on the River Elbe and the scenery was dumbfoundingly beautiful. Unlike bigger cities, the town had no food markets that catered to foreigners, and every morning he’d line up with the townsfolk to buy bread and to bargain with farmers for vegetables and meat and home-made beer. It was three weeks of an unwonted sort of monotony, devoid of any flash or dazzle whatsoever, and yet he’d never felt bored for a moment. Each afternoon at the same time he’d call on the elderly pipe organist, who lived in a simple stone house on top of a hill at the edge of town, and chat with her in his broken German about things that had nothing to do with the proposed concert. The rest of the time he’d walk stone-paved streets along the swollen, slow-moving Elbe or gather shell casings left behind by Russian soldiers in World War II, and every evening he made dinner for himself. The gas burner in the little house he rented was a relic, and just getting it lit was a major undertaking, but it produced a mysterious, pale-blue flame at which he never tired of gazing. Aoyama had experienced a real sense of fulfilment in those days. And that
sense of fulfilment had truly changed him. The satisfaction he’d got from planning and realising the concert became the standard, the measure, for whatever he did from that point onwards in his life. Not even when making TV commercials or PR videos would he ever again settle for mediocrity.
Partially because of this meticulousness his business flourished, but the wildish lifestyle he’d maintained when Ryoko was healthy had lost all appeal for him. Which is not to say that he went without sex. There were always bars and clubs where one could find female companionship, and he had plenty of opportunities to meet women through his work; but he hadn’t got involved in anything one could call an affair, or even a romance. At one point, friends and acquaintances had been all over him about remarrying. Even Ryoko’s father had come to him one day, bearing a photo of an elegant-looking lady in her early thirties and saying, ‘I know it’s highly irregular for me of all people to suggest this . . .’ But Aoyama declined all such offers, and eventually they tapered off. He came to be regarded as fiercely loyal to the memory of his wife, and though he didn’t protest this assessment the truth was that he simply couldn’t be bothered. He might have considered remarrying if he’d been too unattractive or too poor to get his sexual needs met, but that wasn’t the case. The two goals he’d set for himself after Ryoko’s death had taken more time and effort to accomplish than he’d ever imagined they might. He’d ultimately succeeded at both of them, solidifying his company’s reputation and status into the bargain, but he had no desire to expend that sort of time and energy on a woman.
At least not until Shige asked the famous question, and added, ‘You seem pretty down in the dumps lately. Seriously, Pops. What if you thought about getting married again?’
Yoshikawa, an old friend and colleague from the ad agency, had been doing TV work for something like twenty years but was now involved in film. Although their career paths had diverged, he and Aoyama still got together often. They had a certain deep-seated respect for each other, which precluded the semi-antagonistic back and forth that makes some friendships so tiresome.
