The End of the Moment We Had
Page 8
The woman slips off her shoes, dangling her stockinged feet from the stool. A few times she reaches down with both hands to massage her calves, which are a little swollen. Her black pumps are on the floor, the left one tipped on its side. The right one is still standing.
After the text came in, she looked for a moment at the earbud nested in his ear. Then she found herself staring intently, considering the ear as a whole. There was a split second when she saw the music seeping out of the space between earbud and ear like a curl of steam or smoke. My husband’s hair is cut pretty short, so the ear looked exposed and helpless. All the more so because he doesn’t have sideburns, just bare skin.
She stared, but she didn’t let herself get lost in the shape of the ear, this fold and that curve, nothing physical like that, instead she focused on the overall impression of a complex object, zoomed out on it, trying to reach the point where the ear stops looking like an ear, even though she knew it was an ear, so as she little by little lost its ear-ness she got the feeling that something unbelievable was happening to her. She stared some more until she just about reached the point of flipping the values of light and shadow in the textures of his ear. She leant her elbow on the counter, then opened her hand like a flower, but almost immediately drew it back to her face, tracing the span between the ear and eye. She decided she would stay there a little longer. But that’s as far as she got.
I’m starting to think I should sit up. For a while now I’ve been feeling it might be more comfortable than lying here. I roll onto my back instead, raise my butt up into the air and bring my knees in towards my face. Then I prop my hips up on my hands and raise my legs straight up in a perfect vertical. I look at my legs, floating against the ceiling. But I can’t hold the position for long, no more than ten seconds, then I have to drop my legs back down so they’re stretched out flat again.
The earbud cord hanging from my husband’s right ear meets up with the cord hanging from his left ear, and the joined cords rest on the counter, brushing up against the sharp pointiness of his bare right elbow resting on the tray. His arm is set at a nearly perfect right angle. The tip of the elbow is covered in marks from old cuts and burns, dark red and purple, that look like stains. After bumping against his right elbow, the cord snakes along the counter to the right, where it reaches the edge of the counter and drops down into the pocket of his jeans. That was where her attention settled, her interest in my husband suddenly fixed on one question: What is he listening to? The music is pumped steadily up the cord into his ears.
The counter is at a window where she can see her reflection and also a view of the café behind her, though the image is not as clear as it would be at night. The tray-return station is reflected in the window too. A staff member comes by every now and again to tidy it up. One is there right now.
The clouds break and let the sun through. Light pours into the café, making anything white-coloured seem to shine and blur at the edges.
The young woman in the grey suit isn’t looking at the reflection in the glass now, instead she directs her focus towards what’s actually in front of her, beyond the window. That’s what she meant to do all along. But it isn’t going as she had hoped.
She raises her hips off the stool slightly and touches her face to the glass for a bit, gazing down at the people coming and going in and out of the station. Between the sidewalk and the avenue is a taxi stand with several cars lined up. Just about at the left edge of the window the avenue meets up with a few other roadways, more complicated than a standard four-way intersection. The waiting taxi drivers are leaning back in their seats, reading newspapers or magazines.
There’s a pedestrian bridge over the intersection, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway passes over that. From where she sits it looks like the bottom of the highway grazes the walkway below.
My husband’s slumped-over upper body expands and recedes with the rhythm of his breathing. The wall immediately to his left is also a window from waist-level up, showing the outside world. Over the ridges of his shoulders and spine she has a direct view of the stairs to the pedestrian bridge. She stares at the people going up and down, at their outfits, at the parasols some are carrying.
A Democratic Party of Japan campaign van is coming up the avenue, blaring its message.
I scrunch up my shoulders and slowly roll my head back, lifting my torso, supporting the weight of my body on the top of my skull. My mouth hangs open.
The guard rails on the pedestrian bridge have a white rust-resistant coating. A kid is pressing his face into the vertical space between two of the bars, peering down at the traffic. The DPJ van passes.
A couple other kids are chasing each other around, chanting I got you, I go-o-o-ot you to the tune of “Momotaro’s Song”, screeching every so often. They’re not on the pedestrian bridge, though, they’re inside the café. She’s looking at my husband again. He’s fidgeting a bit, more movement than he’s made up until now, which she guesses means he’s waking up.
I can see the refrigerator upside down. It seems to be on the verge of taking on human characteristics. It’s about to happen, I can see it. But it never quite does. In the end the refrigerator stays a plain old refrigerator.
For some reason I have a recollection of flipping the mattress to find the vinyl flooring wet and covered in mould like green fur.
The high-school boys who had been making noise in the café are now silent, leaning over their mobile phones. One has gone, leaving four.
My husband’s neck and shoulders suddenly go slack. It’s not clear how this action might be connected to his arm physiologically, but his elbow jerks up into the air and comes crashing back down on the counter. The sound of the impact reverberates through the café. When his elbow strikes the counter she doesn’t look towards it, she looks away, back to her own phone for a split second, before returning her gaze to my husband. This is when he wakes up.
My husband, like me, has never managed to make it down to the deepest levels of sleep. To us those levels don’t exist. Or they’re too far out of our league, something we’ll never be able to have, like a hotel suite or first-class seats on a plane. Coming up with the comparison makes me realize how true it is. In his shallow sleep my husband was dreaming that he boarded the train at one of those aerial tracks that a lot of the stations on the Odakyu Line have, but he noticed right away that he was headed in the wrong direction, so he got out at the next stop and went back the way he was supposed to be going, although he wasn’t actually sure it was the Odakyu Line he got on, trying to get to his job by 7:30, and although his phone told him it was already 7:23, he was pretty sure he would make it in time.
He reaches for his phone on the tray to find out what time it actually is. That’s when he sees the text I sent him: Morning! Long night, huh? You okay? Don’t push yourself too hard.
Tears start to flow down his cheeks, more reflex than emotion. There’s a warm feeling inside him, but it isn’t his own, it’s being forced into him from outside. His tears last only a few moments. His head is hazy, to the point that he’s mystified by the fact that he feels a connection between who he was when he fell asleep and who he is right now.
He rolls his head around to loosen his neck, which is stiff from sleeping in an awkward position.
I’m on my back again, pointing my chin at the ceiling.
The woman in the grey suit is looking at her phone again, no longer interested in my husband. Over the music in his earbuds he can just make out the receding noise of the speech on the loudspeaker of the DPJ van. It seems like the two sounds have always coexisted, superimposed on one another. Having music playing when he wakes up robs him of the chance to wonder what music he might want to hear, and actually he doesn’t even feel like listening to music at all right now, so the song in his ears makes waking up in this less-than-ideal spot for a nap even more of a drag.
When he listens to music with earbuds for a while, it gets to the point where no matter what he’s listening to it just
sounds like noise pressing on his ear, and he wants to turn it off but he also still wants to be listening to music, and he gets confused about what it is he wants to do. When he was in his early twenties he would put in earplugs instead, the colour of orange and yellow sink sponges. He never knew where he put his earplugs and was always buying new ones. Then he’d find the old ones in his bag or his pockets.
Now he’s thirty.
He was sleeping with his glasses on, so now the lenses are smudged with the body oil of his arm. He happens not to be wearing the jeans he always wears, so his lens cloth isn’t in his pocket. When he bought the ¥5,900 Zoff glasses, the clerk warned him only to use a lens cloth and not to use napkins like the kind on the tray because they would scratch the lenses, and normally he’s careful to do that but this time he has no other option so he takes a napkin and rubs the oiliness off. He puts his glasses back on, then notices the woman in the grey suit sitting at the counter to his right, tapping out a text, and looks at her.
Her body is solid and largish, her froggy eyes bulging, which I would say is his type. The reason I would say that is because she is me, hair shorter than it is now, when I was half a year into the job at a small advertising-design firm and I would go to Becker’s for breakfast. She turns her eyes back to her phone, where she’s been typing for some time. I can’t read the long passage she’s written out. But I know what it says, it’s a draft of the longer version of the bland little text I sent before, the real version, not just long but full of love and appreciation for him, with nothing about how tired my body feels, no complaints about whatever weird problems I’m having, just my honest feelings put into words in a long message.
But I can’t read the words that are written there.
She looks at him intermittently, which breaks the flow of her writing, and she loses the thread. She erases the whole thing. She gets down off the stool, rights the fallen shoe and wriggles her feet in. Then she steps away. My husband glances over at her large ass. She heads down the stairs. He starts to thumb his phone. Writing a message.
My phone vibrates. Of course it’s just a phantom buzz.
At that moment I register movement in the kitchen. Almost immediately I see it: an unusually large cockroach.
She leaves Becker’s, but instead of going to the office she goes back to the station. The Sobu Line headed for Shinjuku arrives almost immediately. Until a little past Ichigaya the track runs along the green water of the outer moat. The far bank is a grassy slope with trees planted at regular intervals, and partway up the slope it becomes a stone wall, the top of which runs beside the road above. Many of the buildings along the road have signs saying they’re print shops and tutoring centres.
I throw my phone at the cockroach, even though there’s no way I’ll ever hit it. The cover slides off and the battery pops out, still held by the battery ribbon.
The cockroach is unhurt, of course. It scuttles up the face of the fridge, past the lower compartment and almost to the middle of the upper compartment, when it stops. I bet it was the roach that knocked over the beer cans.
I get up from the futon, wanting to kill the cockroach. I grab the help-wanted weekly off the floor and roll it up tightly, back into the tube it once was. The roach darts from the fridge to the wall, scurrying along near the ceiling into the room where I was lying. The grey suit is in a cabinet in the room, the hardest one to reach by far which is fine because all we have in there are things we never take out, old letters, my husband’s old game consoles and cartridges, my work from art school, my grey suit which I didn’t bother to hang on a hanger but is at least in the plastic bag it came in, I think. I’m pretty sure the suit is stuffed in there. By now it’s probably covered in mould. The cockroach slips into the drawer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOSHIKI OKADA is a hugely admired playwright, director and novelist. Born in Yokohama in 1973, he formed the chelfitsch theatre company in 1997. Since then he has written and directed all of the company’s productions, and has come to be known for his hyper-colloquial dialogue and staccato choreography. His play Five Days in March, on which the first story in The End of the Moment We Had is based, won the prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award. His works have been translated into many languages around the world.
SAM MALISSA has translated Japanese fiction and non-fiction, including work by Hideo Furukawa, Masatsugu Ono and Shun Medoruma. He has a master’s degree in Japanese literature from Yale University.
JAPANESE FICTION
FROM PUSHKIN PRESS
RECORD OF A NIGHT TOO BRIEF
Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Lucy North
SPRING GARDEN
Tomoka Shibasaki
Translated by Polly Barton
SLOW BOAT
Hideo Furukawa
Translated by David Boyd
Ms ICE SANDWICH
Mieko Kawakami
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
THE BEAR AND THE PAVING STONE
Toshiyuki Horie
Translated by Geraint Howells
THE END OF THE MOMENT WE HAD
Toshiki Okada
Translated by Sam Malissa
COPYRIGHT
Series editors: David Karashima and Michael Emmerich
Translation editor: Elmer Luke
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street
London WC2H 9JQ
The End of the Moment We Had was first published as
Watashitachi ni yurusareta tokubetsu na jikan no owari in Japan, 2007
First published by Pushkin Press in 2018
English translation © Sam Malissa 2018
© Toshiki Okada 2007
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the
British Centre for Literary Translation and the Nippon Foundation
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ISBN 13: 978 1 78227 417 9
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