Touring the Land of the Dead (and Ninety-Nine Kisses)

by Maki Kashimada

  Right, Natsuko remembered, her father too had been good at drawing.

  When her mother finally had to let go of her apartment, she let Natsuko sort through her deceased father’s belongings. Her mother cherished that 8 mm film, but she was completely indifferent toward her late husband’s things, telling her daughter that if she wanted them, she could keep them, that if she didn’t, she could throw them out.

  As she sifted through them all, Natsuko felt for the first time as if she truly understood her father.

  Among those items, she came across an old diary. Her father, it seemed, had been a student at a vocational high school. She found herself filled with curiosity at what he had studied there. The only thing that her mother had ever told her about him, at least of the time before he came down with his disease, was that he had held an office job at a prestigious company. And that, as such, she had been incredibly happy when they got engaged. After he proposed, I quit my job as a stewardess, of course, so I’d go to see plays at the theater with your grandmother. I was so happy. I didn’t have to do anything anymore, I could just go and watch the plays, doing nothing. It was like soaking in a nice, warm bath, forever. It was so wonderful. I got married, bought an apartment to live in, and kept living like that for a while. I was so shocked at how much money I had, I was able to save so much. So I thought to myself, why don’t I buy another apartment with all these savings?

  That was what her mother thought. That she could rent out another apartment, that she could earn money without working. But before she could buy that second apartment, her husband was felled by illness. And not long after, she had been forced to sell off her one and only apartment to pay for her son’s debts, left with no choice but to move to the suburbs. Her happiness, like a warm bath, didn’t last.

  That was why, no doubt, her mother didn’t want her deceased husband’s belongings.

  Natsuko found some pictures amid those items. He must have drawn them during his days at the vocational school. The first was a sketch of a Van Gogh painting, the second a landscape. They both had notes on the back, one giving a mark of eighty points, and the other ninety. Her father, it seemed, had been an outstanding student.

  There was even a picture that had received a full hundred points. It was a delicate abstract sketch, almost mechanical, like the interlocked gears inside a clock. Black, grey, white. Each gear was drawn in monochrome gradations, but no matter which she looked at, not a single one of them was the same shade as any other. She didn’t know whether it was a beautiful picture. But she could tell that it was a very elaborate one, one that must have required a high level of skill to draw. So this was the kind of picture that scored a hundred points, she wondered in admiration.

  It was a premonition, she thought, of the mysterious disease that would attack her father’s brain, the brain of a worker at a prestigious company, and leave him with dementia. And it was also, it seemed to Natsuko, a premonition of her mother’s life, a life that should have turned out so differently, and the final unexpected downfall of a family that stretched back to the time of her grandfather.

  It wasn’t that the gears were broken and in total disarray—rather, they looked to be frozen at the point just before collapse, faded into monochrome, and fitted into a sheet of paper. At the moment when, if just one more second were to elapse, the teeth would fail to mesh together, and the whole mechanism would shatter before one’s eyes.

  She spent a long time looking at that sketch, staring at it as if it had nothing at all to do with her family.

  In the end, she looked at all the works. She experienced each of them in turn.

  They left the wheelchair in the place marked by the exit. Taichi seemed disappointed to part with it.

  This journey had only been for herself, Natsuko thought, feeling beholden to her husband.

  “Do you want to go anywhere else?” she asked.

  “How about the beach?” Taichi suggested.

  * * *

  They followed the footpath that ran along the shoreline, the wind blowing around them. Natsuko could smell the salty air wafting up from the sea.

  Taichi, out of nowhere, said: “I’m taking a test for an electric wheelchair tomorrow. So I wanted to get used to sitting in one.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Natsuko helped him down to the beach. He stabbed at the sand with his cane, confirming his footing as he ambled forward.

  Some children ran up from behind, overtaking them. Taichi came to a stop, and watched the children run past. “How cute,” he murmured to himself, before turning to Natsuko. “I’ll be able to get one with a nickel battery. It’s got awesome horsepower. That’s what they’re going to let me use. I can get it for a ten percent copayment with the welfare office. Pretty lucky, huh?”

  A stray dog approached them. Taichi crouched down, trying to pat it on the head, but he was unable to bend over properly, and so instead flashed it a broad smile. The dog turned around and ran ahead along the beach.

  “I can’t keep up with kids, or dogs, can I? It’ll be different when I get the wheelchair.”

  “What should I do? Do you want me to go with you?” Natsuko asked, feeling more devoted than ever.

  “You don’t have to do anything, Natchan. With the wheelchair, I’ll carry your stuff,” he said, leaning against her.

  The waves brushed at their feet. Thinking that Taichi would get wet, Natsuko pushed him lightly up the slope, but he fell down. She offered him her hand, but he couldn’t stand up.

  “With the wheelchair, we’ll be able to go overseas. Anywhere we want, right?” In his excitement, Taichi spread his hands wide as if to emphasize the word anywhere.

  The waves broke over him the moment he finished speaking. Natsuko sat beside him. She wasn’t worried about getting wet. She wanted to hear the sound of the waves a little longer.

  They watched the sea in silence. It was the usual silence that fell over them.

  The sea was constantly changing shape, like something whose true form could never be truly grasped.

  She began to think about the things that she had long considered incomprehensible. About why Taichi never asked her why her family treated him so poorly, about why his neurological disease had befallen him. What did he think about that long series of unreasonableness and contradiction? But now, at the end of their trip, she finally felt as if she understood. He didn’t think about them at all. Taking off one’s clothes on a warm day, putting up an umbrella on a rainy one—that was the extent of his thoughts. Like someone reflecting on the changing seasons, and saying: Ah, it’s warming up. Like someone who after being exposed to violence of every kind decided simply to take a brief rest. That was how he lived. Anyone else would no doubt have been fed up with it all, with the unfairness of everything. But Taichi wasn’t like that. Of course, unfairness still existed in his world—but he just swallowed it down whole. No matter how bad it was, no matter how poisonous.

  But what about herself? Natsuko wondered. How should she deal with her life, with that life? She wasn’t her husband. What could she do?

  The waves surged forward. A sense of dread came over her, that they would keep rushing toward her forever. Because she couldn’t make out their true form.

  The seascape began to blur. She felt tears welling in her eyes. “When I was little,” she began, “I always thought the sea was so scary. Why, I wonder . . . ?”

  Taichi said nothing.

  She turned around, only to see her husband spread out like a star, sound asleep with his stomach peeking out from the bottom of his shirt.

  His belly looking up at the sky, his thighs opened out to the sea, his breathing, like the waves, keeping to the same slow, gentle rhythm.

  She pulled his shirt down to cover his navel.

  As she stared at his sleeping face, Natsuko began to reflect on how she had used the words unreasonable and contradiction to describe that life. I don’t get it, that way of thinking, she thought she heard Taichi say.

  She rem
embered something that he had said to her once: I’ve known the sea since I was a kid. The tide is always rising and falling.

  No doubt he had never feared it. Natsuko was afraid of things changing. She was terrified of it, in the same way that she was terrified of violence. And the sea was no different. But Taichi seemed to have no such fear. He had always been like that. To him, no doubt, the whole world was made up of a constant tide of rising and falling.

  He was a special person, Natsuko thought as she watched him lying there on the sand. A special person—someone she had never seen before, someone she had just seen for the first time in her life. But it was a strange kind of specialness. Even sitting beside that special person, she felt no sense of envy. But then, on the other hand, she felt no sense of superiority at being the wife of such a special person either. She just knew that she had picked up something very important. It was something that she had been given to look after for a while, something that, when the time came, she would have to give back.

  To Natsuko, this man, fast asleep with his belly exposed to the water, seemed also to be asleep to the wide, open sea of unreasonableness that comprised the world.

  Without seizing on the identity of her feelings, her sense of not properly belonging in her family, Natsuko, in her constant state of anxiety, had made a truly spur-of-the-moment decision to bring this stranger into her life. Her family’s illness would infect him too, and consume him from within, she thought. He would be a hapless victim, but it was her fate to find a necessary sacrifice, so there was no way of helping it. He would ultimately end up being absorbed by her family, by that life. That was what she had believed.

  When she looked back on it all, it was a strange, miraculous turn of events. A thorny ivy of arrogance and waste, built up over three generations, had entwined itself around her, trying to rob her of her very soul. And it had been swept away in an instant thanks to one average man’s cerebral attack. She wondered whether he really was so pitiful. If not for those seizures, he would have been destined to have everything he ever had be torn away from him by her family. He had managed to avoid that fate in a way that no one could have foreseen. Indeed, the attacks had begun with exquisite timing, without even the slightest margin of error. Quite as if they had been lying dormant in wait from the very beginning. Natsuko had found no means of her own to escape from her family. And Taichi—he was a simple, good-natured person, the kind of person who, even feeling ill at ease around his wife’s family, even knowing that they were exploiting him, would give them every last ounce of what he had. This was the kind of couple that the cerebral attacks had fallen on. It was an attack on their very lives.

  The wind was growing colder.

  Natsuko woke her husband, and they went back the way they had come. She looked at the footprints that he left in the sand. He dragged his feet when he walked, so his tracks stretched longer than normal.

  They returned to the plaza in front of the station.

  Why don’t we try out the foot bath? It’s gotten cold, don’t you think? Natsuko said. What foot bath? Taichi tilted his head. Come on, she urged, nudging him along.

  Several people were sitting there with their legs submerged. Steam was rising from the water. What’s this? Taichi asked. You can put your feet in, Natsuko answered. Come on, it’ll feel good.

  Do you want to go in? a woman asked them. Does it cost anything? Taichi responded. No, it’s free, but the towels do. You can buy one if you want, but you don’t have to.

  Let’s buy one, Natsuko said. I took one from the hotel, so we’re okay, Taichi answered. It’ll make a good memento, she insisted.

  She wanted to buy something for her husband, no matter how trivial it was, no matter how unnecessary to their lives. But he hadn’t realized that. He would probably never realize it—or maybe, after several years, she would finally find herself able to tell him everything.

  She couldn’t enter the foot bath with him. If she didn’t hold onto him, he might lose his balance, and fall over backward. So she decided to support him. It was the sensible thing to do.

  Taichi took off his shoes and socks. Natsuko and the woman helped support him. He slowly dipped his legs into the water, one by one, and sat down.

  Wow, it’s so warm! Taichi shone her a fully satisfied smile. He didn’t question for a second whether she would soak her feet too. That was fine.

  Is something wrong, Mister? the woman asked. Taichi nodded. It was only Natsuko’s family who condemned him for the way his body was, and he made no effort to hide his disability. What’s wrong? she asked again. My brain, Taichi answered. Oh my, your brain, that’s awful, the woman said, feigning surprise. There’s an electrode in my brain. The battery’s attached to my chest, Taichi continued. Really? There’s a machine here? The woman touched his chest. Taichi nodded, letting the woman leave her hand there. Really, there’s a machine here . . . Oh my, yes, here it is. Taichi laughed, as if being tickled. He looked to be enjoying himself.

  He was always on the move, always pushing his body in spite of his disability. He wasn’t able to help himself, always going out to buy sweets, manga, adult DVDs, and the like. And now he had set himself on the idea—and not a bad one at that—of buying an electric wheelchair. It was no doubt that unwavering drive to action that had spread to Natsuko, that had prompted her to set out on this trip in pursuit of her family’s lingering regrets, chasing after things that couldn’t be looked on directly.

  “Where are we going now?” Taichi asked innocently.

  “We’ll take the bullet train home. We’re finished here.”

  “There isn’t anywhere else you want to go?”

  “No. There’s nowhere else to go. Nothing left to see. Nothing at all.”

  Taichi sat in silence for a while, staring off into the distance, likely still unable to comprehend the meaning that lay behind those words.

  Even if she explained to him that it was all over, all finished, he still wouldn’t understand. So Natsuko said nothing.

  The bullet train began to slide out under that sky, too ripe in color to properly call dusk, as the two of them left the sea.

  Taichi pulled out a handful of tissues. He used them to blow his nose with all his strength, before rolling them into a ball and stuffing them back into his pocket. To Natsuko, watching on beside him, he seemed to resemble nothing so much as a figure who had taken the various joys and sufferings of life, put them all into one picture after another, rolled them all up, and stuffed them deep into his pocket.

  She felt herself overcome by a sense of awe at her husband’s actions. And then she asked, as if the words had been bubbling up inside her all along: Was the foot bath good? He nodded. Was the trip fun? He nodded again. Do you want to go to somewhere else some time, together? Taichi paused for a while, seemingly deep in thought, before nodding once more.

  He didn’t say anything, merely watching the scenery flow by. But he had indeed nodded to each of her questions.

  The two of them sat in silence for a while. Eventually, the in-car sales trolley began to make its way down the aisle. But Natsuko wasn’t paying attention. If she had been her usual self, she might have been driven by a sense of self-sacrifice, a force that might be described as almost sensual, to buy her husband a snack of mixed nuts or something like that.

  The short journey was nearing its end. Hey, what exactly do you see in that man? came her mother’s voice. You don’t honestly think he’s handsome, do you? But Natsuko couldn’t really explain what she liked about him, not in words. Her mother, every now and then, would say, her voice dripping with sarcasm: What an unfortunate man. Such a shame. Coming down with that disease, but still clinging onto life. Unable to work, having to be taken care of by his wife all the time. The nerve. At such times, Natsuko would be secretly grateful that she had married him.

  The skyscrapers of Tokyo came into sight. She could even make out a luxury hotel where she had once stayed using her brother’s credit card. Her mother probably didn’t even remember t
hat card anymore. For her, only the happy memories remained. That son of mine is so terribly filial, he even invited me to go with him to a truly wonderful hotel, she had said once. She probably didn’t even remember that he had gotten involved in a huge fight at the bar that time either. Or the trouble that had ensued after her attempted suicide, when she had been forced to let go of her apartment. Natsuko couldn’t tell whether the sense of oblivion that visited her mother was a form of enlightenment, or whether she had merely turned her eyes away from reality. All she knew was that, as far she herself was concerned, a certain season had passed. All thanks to the attacks of the man beside her, this man sitting there rolling tissues into balls.

  “What’s for dinner?” Taichi asked.

  Natsuko pondered the question for a moment. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. She was tired, so whatever she was going to cook, she wanted to get it over and done with quickly. All they had left in the kitchen was a bunch of bean sprouts, a few eggs, and the butter that Taichi’s mother had sent them from Hokkaido. It was unmistakably butter, not margarine. That and a little bit of brown rice.

  “How about we buy some shimeji mushrooms from that hundred-yen store near the station and make a risotto?”

  “Oh? I love risotto.”

  The bullet train was approaching Tokyo Station. Her journey was nearing its end. She felt vaguely tired. When she leaned against Taichi’s body, he turned to glance at her face for a second, his eyes blinking in puzzlement.

  * * *

  Taichi’s electric wheelchair test took place the following day. A public health nurse from the welfare office, a young man called Nakayama, came to their apartment. He was a little tactless, his attitude that of someone fresh out of university. As he helped Taichi into a manual wheelchair, he kept telling him over and over how much he loved him, treating him like a younger brother despite his being the elder.