Maybe this was the kind of thing my husband was trying to avoid too, by playing his game all the time.
“I’m going for the grilled duck breast.” Senta stood up.
Hakone, busy coiling spaghetti carbonara and spaghetti pescatore alternately onto her fork, didn’t even glance his way.
“Is Senta always like that? Even at home?” I asked. I tried to recall what he’d been like growing up.
“Like that? Yeah, I guess he is,” Hakone said, head tilted, seeming not to understand the question.
Just as I thought—his face doesn’t degenerate like my husband’s. I said, “I guess he’s not a man with many worries.”
“No.” Hakone nodded thoughtfully. “But his screenplays always seem to be full of really conflicted characters. Which makes me laugh. Because when he’s at home he’s usually got a belly full of cabbage, you know? I mean, I pad his meals out with cabbage just to make the other dishes go further. So I always think, why doesn’t he make a film about cabbage? I think that’d be a lot more interesting. Don’t you?”
I looked toward Senta as he prowled back and forth in front of the silver trays of food. “Maybe you’re right. That could be interesting.”
Senta went back to the buffet for two more helpings after that. “The beef stroganoff and curry on rice combo works better than you’d think,” he said as he shoveled it into his mouth.
Hakone got a small mountain of cake from the dessert section, and expressed regret at having to leave more than half of it.
I paid and met the two of them at the hotel entrance where they’d been waiting. They bowed at me like flunkies, saying, “Thank you for the meal,” in unison.
As I was waving goodbye and walking away, Senta came running back toward me. “Sis! The mountains you were asking about earlier? How about Gunma Prefecture?”
“Gunma?”
“I just remembered that when I went out there to help a friend’s shoot, there were some mountains there that looked pretty untouched. There might be animals living there.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I’ll send you the address later.”
“Yes, please.”
Senta turned on his heel again and ran off into the station.
After taking a stroll around town and doing some shopping, I came home to find my husband’s work shoes in the entryway.
It was only 4:00 p.m. Wondering whether he was back from work already, I called out, “I’m home!” There was no answer.
I left my shopping in the hallway and went into the living room. On the table was an empty glass and an open container of the sweet-and-savory sautéed shishito peppers I’d made ahead and stashed in the refrigerator. I picked them both up and moved them to the sink in the kitchen along with a pair of abandoned chopsticks, and went back out into the hallway, saying, “Anybody home?” This time, I encountered a pair of suit trousers and a dress shirt on the floor, still retaining a somewhat human form.
I picked up the clothes and knocked on the door to my husband’s room. When I opened it, Zoromi, who had been curled up on top of my husband’s desk, looked at me, got up, and thrust his front legs forward in a stretch. He must have gotten trapped inside. He made an affectionate sound and brushed up against my shin.
I hung up the suit jacket on a clothes hanger and moved toward the bedroom with Zoromi.
My husband was sitting with his back against the headboard, dressed in T-shirt and sweatpants, playing on the iPad again. Even though it was daytime, he had the curtains shut tight.
“What happened to work?” I was secretly exasperated. If he was here, why hadn’t he answered me?
“I’ve been feeling kind of sluggish.” My husband didn’t look up from the game. His voice was so faint, it was nearly drowned out by the tinkling sound of the coins.
“You should see a doctor.” I picked up a pair of socks from the floor beside the bed. As soon as I said it, though, I found myself doubting whether it was really the kind of problem a doctor could help with.
“San, what would you do if I died?”
I’d moved toward the window to draw the curtains, but I stopped and turned around. “What are you talking about?”
“Uwano told me something his wife said recently, when it turned out her dog needed surgery. She said that if the dog died, she’d be more upset than if he died.”
I pictured Uwano’s rosy, macaque-like face. That must have been a blow.
“I feel like you’d be pretty indifferent too, considering,” my husband said.
Without replying, I flung the curtains open. Sunlight leapt into the room through the glass. My husband looked up at me for a moment, but the shafts of light and the dust rising from the bedclothes prevented me from seeing his face clearly.
“Could be a summer slump,” he said, eyes back on the screen.
“Could be a summer slump,” I said.
“Something good to eat might do the trick,” he said.
“Something good to eat might do the trick,” I repeated, and left the bedroom, which was suffused by my husband’s smell.
But his condition didn’t improve. His color looked worse and worse every day. He was managing to go to work but didn’t seem to be sleeping well. Even his once-formidable appetite dropped off, and he lost weight. He went to a doctor but was only told, noncommittally, that it could be a case of late-summer slump.
I tried to get my husband to quit playing the game. But he said that would only make him feel worse, and he continued to collect the tinkling coins as if he’d been possessed.
“It’s a mantra,” Kitae said, pulling the tab on a canned coffee.
“A mantra? The game?” I said, shuffling my butt around on the bench, which was damp from the previous day’s rain.
“Yes. I think your husband’s trying to shut all his troubles and worries and anxieties out of his mind. Which is why he needs to tap-tap-tap all the time.”
“You mean like in the story of Hoichi the Earless,” I said.
“I hadn’t even thought of that, but maybe. Of course, there’s also the possibility he’s desperately hiding from some kind of temptation.”
“Temptation?” I was surprised.
“Yes, temptation. You haven’t noticed anything?”
The only possibility that the word “temptation” brought to mind was the issue of his ex-wife. My husband hadn’t mentioned her since that one conversation, and I’d assumed the whole thing had blown over. But what had actually happened?
Kitae looked at the dogs playing and chasing each other around. “I’d be doing everything I could for you, if I weren’t so distracted myself,” she said, and sighed. “You’re going through such a difficult time too—I’m so sorry,” apologizing for the fourth time that day.
We were setting a date to abandon Sansho.
Kitae had been postponing it every Sunday, saying, “We’ll wait until it’s just a little cooler,” but the situation had finally come to a head. Their whole apartment smelled foul, and a neighbor had raised a complaint.
Kitae had grown haggard. “So, Gunma Prefecture,” she said, as though she were trying to work up some enthusiasm for the idea.
“Yes. I haven’t been there myself either, but as far as I can tell online, it looks like there are several species of animals living there too.”
“Do you suppose there are bears?”
“It is a mountain, after all.”
“Yes,” Kitae said, and sighed deeply again. “I’m so sorry. You must excuse me. When you’ve gone to so much trouble.”
Maybe because the evening was slightly cooler, there were more dogs in the dog run than usual. Kitae wasn’t saying anything more, so I watched the dogs and drank the coffee, which had gone warm.
I was listening to the voices of children laughing when Kitae said, “I’ve been thinking about how little it takes to bring happiness crumbling down. I couldn’t have imagined any of this would happen when I d
ecided to get Sansho. To have a husband and a cat to live with, that was everything I wanted. I thought I was all set. Who would have thought the cat pee—! It just makes you think,” she said. “Cat pee, of all things!”
A dog barked, and one of the dog owners who had been chatting nearby pointed to what the dog was looking at, and said, “Dragonfly! Dragonfly!”
“Maybe I ought to try to disappear into a game, myself,” Kitae said. The way she said it, I couldn’t quite take it as a joke.
I left the apartment complex to shop for dinner. Ever since Kitae’s recommendation, I’d switched over to shopping at the local shops on the main street. Prices were higher than at the supermarket, and it was more trouble paying separately at each shop, but even so, I felt like taking time and trouble over something added dimension to my bland life.
The way I was living now was like being exiled on an island. The isolated island was certainly a kind of paradise, with abundant fruit trees and animals I could frolic with to my heart’s content, but even so, I’d occasionally be overcome with longing for where I used to be. When I was newly married, I felt that the island would ruin me if I stayed on it, and I often seriously considered escape. But then I’d quickly remember about having to fight for fruit or endure the petty discomforts of living with others, and I remained a drifting resident of this utopia, cut off from everyone else.
When I turned the corner of the flower shop, a brightly colored rose moss caught my eye. Now that it was September, the plants and flowers on display were starting to have an autumnal feel. The word Kitae had used earlier—“temptation”—resurfaced in my mind. Picking out tomatoes at the grocery store, I tried to conjure up an image of my husband’s ex-wife, whom I’d only seen in photographs, to picture her propositioning him, but before it could happen, my husband’s face started to collapse. The whole scene seemed so completely unlikely.
The prospect of one day finding myself more upset by losing a pet than a husband—like Uwano’s wife—hit much closer to home than the worry that my husband would get back together with his ex.
As I hunted through a cardboard box for the shapeliest daikon, a boy of grade-school age slipped past me and said, “Here you are, mister,” and handed a scrap of paper and a one-thousand-yen note to the shopkeeper.
“That’s today’s, then. Well done, lad. See you again tomorrow.”
The boy took the bag of vegetables and the change, and left the shop with a sullen expression on his face.
Now that was a shopping technique I hadn’t considered, I thought admiringly, but then I accidentally made eye contact with the shopkeeper, and feeling awkward, I said, “I’d like some bran pickle, please. One eggplant.”
Maybe what was tempting my husband wasn’t the ex-wife, but a voice that said, There’s no need to live life just keeping up the appearance of being human. The thought came into my head as I looked down at the shopkeeper’s baseball cap as he crouched to get my pickles. “I’ll throw in the turnip tail for free,” the shopkeeper said, and stood up holding the bag of pickles, bringing the sharp, sour smell of fermented rice bran to my nostrils.
When I got home, my husband was in the kitchen deep-frying something.
The whole time we were dating, and since we’d been married, he’d never once cooked anything.
“What’s going on?” I asked, shocked.
“I saw it on TV and just felt like trying it out,” he said, without even looking up. He’d been in bed a lot recently—was he feeling better?
“I’m impressed you figured it out,” I said. When I looked around the stove where he was standing, I saw a jumble of brand-new cooking equipment, including a thermometer and some metal trays for laying out the hot food to soak up excess oil. “I didn’t know where to find everything, so I bought what I needed from the supermarket,” he said.
“What about work?”
“I left early.”
“Okay.” I started putting my groceries away into the refrigerator and the pantry. What had happened to the mantra, the temptation? The question was in my throat, but the sound of the oil popping and the whine of the extractor fan surrounded my husband like a wall, and there was no opening for me to speak to him.
“Sit down, San. I’m making us the deep-fried special tonight,” he said in a slightly injured tone. Apparently, I was getting in his way.
I took a seat on the couch, where my husband usually sat. Zoromi had followed me, so I stroked her fur for a while, but I still felt unsettled. “Do you need me to show you where the paper towels are? You can use the grill rack that came with the microwave to let the oil drip off.” As I commented on this and that, my husband brought me a highball and plonked it down on the table.
“You sit and drink this and watch some TV,” he said, and picked up the remote and pressed play on a variety show he’d recorded. Without another word, I did what he said, and sat and sipped at the highball, which was a drink I didn’t even like. I tried concentrating on the TV screen, but the show’s appeal was entirely beyond me.
After a half hour or so, I heard him say, “Here it comes,” and when I went to the table I saw a mound of fritters on a large serving platter, the bran pickles I’d bought earlier, inexpertly sliced, and two empty glasses laid out in a plausible way. There were even small dishes for condiments, with a choice of salt, sauce, or lemon juice.
“Quick, San,” my husband said, and I sat in my seat and picked up my chopsticks.
My husband sat down next to me, took the top off a bottle of beer, and started pouring it into my empty glass.
“What’s going on?” I said again. I couldn’t help feeling spooked.
“It makes a nice change, doesn’t it?” My husband poured himself a beer as well, held it up, and said, “Cheers.” His Adam’s apple moved happily up and down. He drank so fast it was as if the beer were soaking straight into his body.
I had a mouthful as well. The mild bitterness and alcohol content spread through my mouth and felt pleasant.
“They’re best eaten hot.”
I tentatively extended my chopsticks toward the fritters piled on the serving dish. They looked a little lumpy, but the batter was a tawny golden color. My appetite whetted by the smell and the sound that had pervaded the room, I dabbed salt on the batter and threw it in my mouth.
It was good. I’d feared that it might be undercooked, but the filling was the ideal texture, and the batter made a satisfying crispy sound between my teeth.
“Where did you learn to do this?” I said, huffing as I moved the hot fritter loosely around my mouth.
“It’s my first time,” he said, huffing like me.
“It looks like you got your appetite back.”
For the first time in a good while, he seemed to be enjoying his food. He reached for another fritter and said, “Yeah.” There was much more I wanted to ask, but he just kept saying, “Best hot, San,” so I dutifully shoveled down the fritters. Onion rings. Squid. Prawn. Sweet potato. Chicken. They were all tasty. I had them with sauce, and then with lemon juice, and the mountain on the serving dish, which I’d thought we could hardly finish between the two of us, began diminishing before our eyes. In silence we devoured the fritters and guzzled down more beer. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had this much to drink.
“So you’re feeling better,” I said, slightly drunkenly, once my belly was filled up. I could feel a rosy flush around my eyes.
My husband was still eating in silence, picking up the fritters with his fingers now rather than his chopsticks.
“What do you think it was, in the end? I know it wasn’t the summer slump,” I said. My husband cocked his head to one side as if to say, Yeah, I don’t know what it was, and I heard myself laugh. I felt relaxed for the first time in months. “By the way, I was telling Miss Kitae about the game today, and she asked whether you’re feeling tempted by something.”
“Something?”
“She didn’t say what. But I guess there
was no need to worry,” I said, and laughed again, louder.
Then I noticed there wasn’t even a smile on my husband’s face, and my expression sobered.
“You are feeling better, aren’t you?” I asked again.
My husband didn’t respond, and continued eating, keeping his reptilian eyes cast down at his plate.
I looked at his expressionless profile and remembered that I hadn’t seen his face from the front in a long time.
I took a long swig of my beer.
“Maybe I’ll go into business, open a fritter joint,” my husband said quietly, licking the oil off his fingers. His voice sounded both like my husband’s and like that of a complete stranger, and though the last mouthful of beer suddenly tasted of nothing, I gulped it down without meaning to.
I went to see Hasebo in her and her husband’s new place, and got home late afternoon to find my husband, who seemed to have left work early again, standing pensively in front of a pan of oil, holding a pair of cooking chopsticks.
“Should we open a window?”
The heat of the frying had steamed up the apartment. My husband, who’d been gazing into the pan as if he were searching for his long-lost mother, finally reacted to the beep emitted by the AC remote and said, “San, welcome home.” It sounded hollow, as if half of him was still wandering through some dream.
The tray on the countertop held a lavish pile of battered and breaded ingredients. Not again. Just the sight of it seemed to bring last night’s fritters back up to my throat. Truthfully, my stomach had begged for mercy long ago. But what was the right thing to do when a sick person told you the only thing that gave him relief was deep-frying fritters?
It turned out that the fritters were just a replacement for the coin-tinkling game, and my husband was still unwell.
He once again installed me on the couch and handed me a highball. Helpless to refuse this strangely solicitous husband, I brought the glass to my lips and stared dimly at the variety show. There was still nothing interesting to me about it. But soon enough, between the sounds of deep-frying coming from the kitchen and the cacophonous cries on the TV, I felt a mist descend over my head. Stirring from the couch seemed like a huge effort.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder Page 8
