Moshi Moshi

by Banana Yoshimoto

  But I felt so much tenderness for every movement he made that it made me shiver. I understood clearly, though not in words, that he was in the process of starting to really care for me. I felt certain he was seeing me as I really was.

  Shintani-kun and Yamazaki-san had both given me things I’d wanted—the experience and physical compatibility, and the pure sexual pleasure of being with an older man; and the romance and considerate, awkward sex of a younger man—even though in my immaturity I’d been taken in by their appearances and confused one for the other. I felt like reality had somehow stepped in to sort out these elements that had long been muddled up inside me.

  After a long while, when Yamazaki-san finally entered me, I had the sense that something conclusive had happened. There was no going back, and nor did I want to. I didn’t have to worry about anything anymore—that was how it felt.

  Whether he felt it, too, I didn’t know.

  This was something just for me, which I intended to keep safe for a very long time.

  WE MUST HAVE BEEN tired from our trip, because both of us fell into a deep sleep for an hour or so.

  When I opened my eyes again, the world looked different. I felt like everything had returned to its true form. The spell of love still held, and everything looked bright and hopeful.

  The cat was asleep in a soft mass by my side, and beyond it was Yamazaki-san, who had been watching me sleep.

  It was one thirty in the morning. It was time for me to go.

  I sat up slowly and started to get dressed. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t have much choice. It was time for the spell to be broken.

  “I was counting on feeling more self-loathing than this,” Yamazaki-san said, frowning.

  “I’m a grown woman now, I can take care of myself,” I said.

  “Don’t speak, Yocchan,” he said. “I’m trying to forget that you’re Imo’s daughter, Yocchan. I want to pretend you’re just some young and attractive girl I picked up because I fancied her.”

  I thought about how I loved his knobbly knees, and even the hairs on his fingers.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said. “The fact you need to try gives it away.” I stroked the cat, and smiled.

  Yamazaki-san gave me a big hug outside his door, and we held hands and walked back to the main road together.

  “We won’t see each other for a while,” he said. “Shit, I won’t see you.”

  “When spring comes,” I said. “I’ll get in touch when I’m back from France. I’d like it if you felt able go to the aquarium with me, depending on how you feel then.”

  “Okay. Let’s do that,” he said.

  “I have something to ask you,” I said. Some tears fell from my eyes. How much more did I have to cry before my tears would run dry? I was tired of crying, tired from crying. And yet. “Please don’t find someone else before spring. I don’t mind if you sleep with people, but don’t live with anyone,” I said.

  “I won’t,” he said, and stroked my head.

  Like a father, and like a lover. Like both those things I was missing.

  In the city, the midnight air was clear and cold. I breathed it in until it filled my lungs. I felt a longing for the heat that lingered in my body as the cold quickly stole it away.

  I got into the taxi, and, as though it was a spell to make everything okay, said: “To Shimokitazawa, please.”

  It was my hometown for now; the place where I had something to protect; the place I was going home to.

  The door swung closed and Yamazaki-san waved at me in the darkness. Then he turned around and went home, back into the room where we’d made love—definitely, certainly.

  MY HEART FELT SO full I couldn’t think properly, so I got out of the taxi by the station entrance on Chazawa-Dori.

  Despite the late hour, the street was still busy, and I was overcome by memories of being with Shintani-kun. I don’t think trying to drown my sorrows in pleasures of the flesh is working for me right now, I thought. I guess I’ll feel more curious about seeing pleasure through to its end once I’m Dad’s age.

  There was so much I still didn’t understand, I reflected. Dad and that woman—their relationship, what she’d been like, what they’d seen, anything: I hated to admit it, but all of it was theirs alone. I wanted to think they alone had staked their lives to see it. Then there was what had been Dad’s alone, just as Mom and I had been precious to him.

  No one could hold anything with you, but we could touch, and overlap, in ways that made us feel like we did.

  Good-bye, Shintani-kun. And thanks.

  That made me feel a little upset, but inside, I was still full of the warmth of Yamazaki-san’s body. I cradled it gently, like a treasure, and walked through Azuma-Dori toward Osho.

  The restaurant was lit up brightly, and full of noise and bustle, and people filling their bellies with pot stickers. It made me happy to see them through the glass.

  I turned left and came back out onto Chazawa-Dori, and walked to where the bistro had been. The building was completely dark, but still standing.

  Soon the lot would be empty again, and the cherry tree would be cut down. The life that had adorned the street at night with so much color and beauty would be gone. There was nothing I could do. I could thank the tree, but I wouldn’t get a response. I touched its bark as I’d always done, but it only made me sadder to know we’d be parting soon. I could hardly believe it wasn’t going to be here to bloom come spring.

  The heavy wooden door that I’d pulled open every day would soon be no more. It seemed incredible. Yet the sight of it, and the weight of it, still remained inside me, surprisingly solid to the touch. This too was all mine, but also had been touched and shared by every person who walked through this town. It would never disappear, even if we all did.

  They were a part of me just as much as the times that I’d spent with Dad, or his DNA.

  Nothing could take away the sights that my eyes had seen, that my mind remembered, or that I lived in the very cells that made up my body. Take that, time, I thought, and squeezed my hand into a fist.

  Under the freezing starry sky, I felt an understanding make its way deeper into me: the preciousness of me, as an individual, with my own experience which no one else in the world could know the whole of, but which I shared parts of with so many people everywhere whose experiences touched and overlapped with mine, even if I was young and miserable and looked like I had nothing at all.

  I closed my eyes and saw the cherry tree in my mind’s eye in full bloom, its branches laden with pale pink flowers swaying on the wind.

  Beneath it, the Les Liens in my heart was open for business as usual, quietly, forever.

  It was never going to disappear. It was safe.

  I thought again, and resolved to see new sights and make new memories when spring came. Paris, the countryside in France, so many beautiful landscapes, good food, Michiyo-san’s determined expression—all these things. And, just maybe, the way Yamazaki-san looked at different times, too—we might sometimes hate each other, or fight, or treat each other coldly, but I wasn’t afraid, for now. Or we might not see each other again. That was for future me to think about once I was back from France. No one could tell how things might be by then, and the only way I could know who I would be at that point was by growing into that person, day by day, until we got there.

  It wasn’t just that I’d bedded someone I liked, someone I’d chosen. And it wasn’t simply that I was in high spirits from having done what I needed to for Dad.

  If someone had asked me how I’d spent this period in my life, I’d have said I’d done nothing in particular. It had all felt like a dream. But I drew confidence and satisfaction from the fact that I had in fact achieved things, that there had been a through line. Even when I’d felt suffocated and short of breath with nowhere to go, I’d done what I could, and it had all linked up and moved forward, and before I knew it I was coming up for breath somewhere where I was no longer weighed down. That place
just happened to be here, tonight.

  Right now, I seemed to be standing on my own in the middle of the night on a cold and lonely street, but when I thought of the wider town, I wasn’t alone at all.

  Just down the street, Chizuru-san would be at her bar, probably frying up a delicious snack. A little while ago, Eri-chan would have tidied the tea house to its usual serene state and quietly walked home across the street of shops on the east side. Hacchan, always the ladies’ man, would have closed up at the used bookstore and gone out to see his date for the evening. The couple at the coffee roastery would have spent the day brewing and serving coffee, in their aprons and with their bandanas tied around their brows. Michiyo-san would probably be in touch tomorrow about arrangements for our trip. At this hour, Miyuki-san and Tecchan at the Thai restaurant might still be clearing up together after the evening’s service. Soon they’d be going home, companionably, through the residential streets of the neighborhood.

  My mind conjured up the faces and smiles and gestures of even more of the many people I’d met since coming to live and work in Shimokitazawa. No doubt the people Mom and I had come to know here had each spent another ordinary day of their lives in this town.

  That was what a town was made of.

  I could sense the daily movements and patterns of people I hadn’t even known about few years ago coming in and out of this town like breath. I wasn’t alone. There were other people, people I didn’t know, coming in and out of this town, too, the same way, and all of that was how a town was made.

  It was just as the pianist Fujiko Hemming had said. On first glance it looked chaotic, and muddy, and ugly, but when your eyes were open, you saw that all the movements and elements wove themselves into a wonderful pattern. What a joyful sight it was.

  It was like a twining plant, made of a mixture of desire and worry and misery and love and splendid smiles and abundance and everything else in our collective unconscious. Even if the vine was severed with a hatchet, or burned to the ground, nothing would take away the landscapes inside people’s hearts or the time that lived on inside them.

  Through me, Dad was also now firmly a part of this realm.

  That was what the town had shown me. Thank you, Shimokitazawa. You wrapped me gently and let me rest and showed me what was true. No matter how you change, may you remain here forever, tenaciously sending up new shoots . . .

  I layered my voice with the many that had no doubt already expressed this simple wish.

  Each day, I walked across this battlefield of remembrance—which was littered with the dead bodies of the hopes of those who had fallen victim to invisible powers, and those who had departed but left their hearts in this town—knowing that my footsteps left their mark on the ground like flowers offered in their memory.

  The town I grew up in worked the same way. But the reason I only understood all this when I moved here was because this was a town where the wind blew through, and people loved it and cherished it especially.

  I started walking again, and even though I was wearing grown-up shoes on a grown woman’s feet, the lightness of my step felt just the same as they had when I’d walked in my favorite childhood sneakers, which Dad had taken me to buy.

  Beyond these crossroads was my home, where my mother was waiting. I looked up at the light in the window of the room where she was. I saw the TV’s big screen flashing light into the room. My father was gone now, but my mother was here. I could be with her today, for certain, at least, and hopefully much longer than that.

  I’m coming home now, Mother—Mother, I’m glad you’re here—I’ll be coming through the door in a moment.

  As I called out to her silently, I found myself holding something within me that could only be described as an enormous happiness, as though a star had fallen, twinkling, straight into my chest.

  Nothing had changed. The clouds hadn’t disappeared. But my heart was replete with something like an answer.

  Afterword

  WHEN MY LATE FATHER read this book, he called me on the phone to give me his long and rambling opinion about its pacing, and also how I seemed to have written it about my own father. I didn’t know what to say. A newspaper serial always requires a certain amount of repetition and exposition, but more importantly, the dad in the story was a completely different type of dad than him.

  But when I was reading the proofs for the paperback, not long after losing him so suddenly, I found the characters in the novel expressing my feelings so perfectly that I felt supported and reassured by my own novel. I even wondered whether I’d somehow known what I’d need.

  I was going through a time where I couldn’t find the answers I needed, no matter how much I thought or wondered or tried to guess, because the person who could tell me was gone. I was mired in heavy shadow. I spent my days with endless questions from which there was no real relief.

  I even thought my father might have had a point.

  People often criticize my work for being unrealistic and full of ideas that sound good, but which they wouldn’t be able to keep believing in if they were faced with the death of a loved one. They also tell me that adults have various responsibilities and obligations that mean they can’t live by just following their feelings as I do. But it turned out that actually, when I found myself in that situation, what I’d written felt very natural and even healing, so I felt confident that I hadn’t been on the wrong track after all.

  I had a ways to go before I reached a level where I could heal people who were very different from me, but anyone of an even slightly similar type I thought I could confidently say I could console. I thought I had gotten this far, at least.

  It might sound all too optimistic, but that was what I thought.

  THIS NOVEL GAVE ME the opportunity to forge a strong and ongoing relationship with the people at Mainichi Newspapers; I was able to deepen and cement my friendship with its illustrator Mai Ohno; I strengthened my links with the Pure Road Flea Market through organizing the small, handmade event which was going to be my last public appearance; I met and made a friend in Mamiko Ueyama, who helped us with it; and I became indebted to Hideyuki Hasunuma of One Love Books, who contributed so much to the event out of the goodness of his heart. I celebrated with many editors who came by despite it being published by a different publishing house, spent quality time with Ishihara-san and Tsuboi-san at Gentosha making the paperback, went on a research trip to Ibaraki and had a great time with Akashi Oumi and his wife—this novel has truly given me so much.

  Although Les Liens, where the story is set, has closed, its chef Yoshizawa-san still serves up good food daily at Au Péché Gourmand, her new bistro in Hatagaya, which is always bustling. Her barley salad is still on the menu, and still tastes of life.

  I can’t list all your names here, since that would take an infinite amount of space, but I am so grateful to everyone who was involved in making this book, and every reader who read it, and every person who attended what was probably my last book signing ever. Thank you.

  SADLY, THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF Shimokitazawa continues to become a lonelier place. Its wonderful independent shops are disappearing one after the other, being replaced by chain stores and hostess clubs. “Dr. Akahige,” the street masseur, is nowhere to be seen. The mah-jong parlors that used to fill the streets with the sound of clicking tiles are no longer. Hamadako the takoyaki stall has closed, as has Cicouté Cafe.

  I’m not trying to bemoan the passage of time, or say that change is wrong. Some things are probably inevitable, and since I grew up in the heyday of independent businesses, my fondness for them might be simple nostalgia.

  But the way things are going, there will be less and less space for individuals to find their niche within a community, and less and less leeway for people to live at a pace that suits them. Customers will be forced to conform to the business’s timetable, and learn to consume what they are given within the time they are allotted, like livestock. In that kind of situation there can be no opportunity for personal relati
onships to take root.

  All I can do is to express my hope that the powers that resist this trend will somehow make it through, and that times will move again toward the better, so that businesses will once again be able to invest in things beyond money.

  I recently went to the new Dover Street Market in Ginza set up by Comme des Garçons. Fewer people are investing in fashion now, and with times being hard, no doubt there are some ways in which they’ve been forced to cut costs. But I was moved by the belief and intent behind a domestic fashion house deciding to invest in culture in such a way at this juncture.

  Some things are rewarding enough and meaningful enough that as humans, we choose to do them even if in purely financial terms it would be more profitable not to. My sense is that as long as we have bodies, our basic human desires will remain more or less the same. I only pray for the survival of all the many fine shops that still quietly continue to exist.

  —Banana Yoshimoto