The Briefcase

by Hiromi Kawakami

  “I’m sorry for making such a strange joke before,” I apologized.

  Kojima just shook his head and laughed again.

  “Omachi, you were always like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “The type who would say something outlandish with a totally straight face.”

  Was that right? I never would have thought of myself as the type who made jokes or witty remarks. I was more likely the type who spent recess in a quiet corner of the schoolyard, sometimes tossing back an errant ball.

  “Kojima, what do you do now?”

  “I work in an office. And you?”

  “Me too.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  There was a slight breeze. Even though the cherry blossoms were not yet in full bloom, every now and then the wind would catch one or two petals and send them scattering.

  “So, you know, I was married to Ayuko,”Takashi Kojima muttered after a brief silence.

  “You were?”

  Ayuko was the girl who had said she wanted to grow up to be like Ms. Ishino, the same classmate who had brought me to the art room after school. Now that I thought about it, Ayuko was sort of like Ms. Ishino. She was petite and full of energy, but she could also appear quite timid. She must have been aware of it too. It was this quality that attracted lots of boys. Ayuko was always getting “love letters” or “pickups.” But she never responded to any of them. At least not openly. There were rumors that she was dating a college boy or a businessman, but whenever she and I would walk home together from school, getting soft-serve ice cream or just chatting, I never had the slightest impression any of that was true.

  “I had no idea,” I said to Kojima now.

  “Hardly anyone did.”

  Kojima said that they had gotten married while they were still students at university, but that they had split up after three years.

  “That’s a pretty short marriage.”

  “Ayuko insisted on getting married, she didn’t want us just to live together.”

  Kojima had failed his entrance exams and started university a year later, so Ayuko had entered the workforce a year before him. She fell in love with her boss and, after much ado, they finally got divorced. Kojima relayed the story dispassionately.

  Now that I thought about it, Kojima and I had gone on a date once. It was during the last term of our junior year in high school, I remembered. We went to a movie. We met up at a bookstore, walked to the cinema, and used tickets that Kojima had bought in advance. “I can pay you,” I had said, but Kojima had replied, “It’s okay, I got the tickets from my brother.”

  I don’t think I realized that Kojima probably didn’t have a brother until the next day.

  After we saw the movie, we walked through a park, talking about our reaction to the film. Kojima had been rather impressed by a trick that was employed in the film. I, on the other hand, had been rather impressed by the various hats worn by the lead actress. We came upon a kiosk selling crepes, and Kojima asked if I wanted one. When I answered no, he had grinned and said, “Good, I’m not one for sweets anyway.” Instead, we got hot dogs and yakisoba that we washed down with colas.

  And now I find out after graduation that, in fact, Kojima is quite fond of sweets.

  “How is Ayuko?” I asked.

  “She’s fine,” he nodded. “She married her boss, and they live in a three-story prefab home, it seems.”

  “Prefab, huh?” I murmured, and Kojima repeated, “Yup, prefab.” A strong breeze blew up, and the petals swirled around the two of us.

  “So, you never married?” he asked me.

  No—I mean, I don’t know anything about prefab housing, I replied. Kojima laughed. We drained our cups of saké, petals and all.

  “TSUKIKO, COME HERE,” Sensei called. Ms. Ishino was beckoning me as well. There was a hint of excitement in Sensei’s voice. I pretended not to hear him, to be engrossed in conversation with Kojima.

  Even when Kojima said, “Someone’s calling you,” I only made a vague reply. Kojima’s cheeks were flushed red. I never really liked Mr. Matsumoto, he said quietly. What about you?

  I don’t really remember him, I said, and Kojima nodded. That’s right, you were always a million miles away. Here in body, not in spirit, or so they say.

  Sensei and Ms. Ishino beckoned me for the umpteenth time. Right at that moment I happened to be facing in their direction as I tried to fix my windblown hair. I couldn’t help but catch Sensei’s gaze.

  “Tsukiko, come over here with us,” Sensei said loudly. It was the same tone of voice that I recognized from the classroom in my high school days. His tone was different when we sat next to each other, drinking together. I turned my back to him, sulkily.

  “You know, I had a bit of a crush on Ms. Ishino,” Kojima said blithely. His cheeks were now an even deeper shade of crimson.

  “Yeah, Ms. Ishino sure was popular,” I said, trying not to sound emotional.

  “Ayuko was really crazy about her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess that’s why I fell for her too.”

  That was just like Kojima, to fall in line. I poured some saké into his cup. Kojima gave a little sigh and took a tiny sip.

  “She’s as pretty as ever.”

  “She is.” No emotion. Or so I tried to tell myself.

  “It’s hard to believe she must be in her fifties.”

  “You’re right.” Must not get emotional.

  Sensei was engaged in a lively conversation with Ms. Ishino (of that I was sure, despite the fact that my back was turned to them). I no longer heard him calling my name. The sun was starting to set. There were numerous lanterns lit. The cherry blossom party grew merrier and merrier as here and there people were breaking into song.

  “Do you want to go somewhere else for a drink?” Kojima asked.

  Right next to us, a group of students who had graduated a few years before us started singing, “I used to run after rabbits on that mountain.”

  Hmm, what do you think? I murmured. But the same moment one of the women’s voices rang out in a fine vibrato, and Kojima leaned forward, saying, What? I missed that.

  What do you think? I repeated, loudly this time. He then pulled his face back and smiled.

  “Now I remember, you always used to say things like that—‘What do you think?’ Or ‘I’m not sure . . . ’ Was that right?”

  “And then you say that with such conviction.”

  You are convinced of your uncertainty! Kojima said amiably.

  “Shall we go?” I said, drawing out the words.

  “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get a drink somewhere else.”

  It was completely dark, and the group beside us had finished singing the third verse of “My Hometown.” Every now and then, amid the cacophony, snippets of Sensei and Ms. Ishino’s conversation reached my ears. Sensei’s voice sounded somewhat more strident than when he spoke to me, while Ms. Ishino’s still had that familiar huskiness, although I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, only the interrogatives and inflections at the end of their sentences.

  “Let’s go,” I said, standing up. I brushed the sand off the plastic sheet and carelessly crumpled it up while Kojima stared at me.

  “Omachi, you’re a bit of a brute, huh?” he asked.

  Yes, I am, I replied, and Kojima laughed again. He had a warmhearted laugh. I peered through the darkness in Sensei’s direction but I couldn’t see very well.

  Let me have a go, Kojima said as he took the sheet from my hands and neatly folded it back up for me.

  Where to? I asked as Kojima and I turned away from our places at the cherry blossom party and started down the stairs that led from the embankment to the street.

  The Cherry Blossom Party, Part 2

  TAKASHI KOJIMA TOOK me to a cozy little bar that was located on the underground level of a building.

  “I didn’t know there was a bar like this so close to school,” I said, and Kojima nod
ded.

  “Of course, I never came here when we were high school students,” he said earnestly. The bartender laughed at his comment. The bartender was a woman. Her hair, faintly flecked with gray, was smoothed back perfectly, and she wore a crisply ironed white shirt with a garçon-style black apron.

  Kojima introduced her as Maeda, the owner of the bar, and as she set out a plate of edamame, she asked in a soft, low voice, “How many years has it been since you started coming here, Kojima?”

  “Hmm, I came here a lot with Ayuko.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  That meant that he must have been a longtime regular. Because if he came here with Ayuko, then they must have been here before they had broken up, which meant that Kojima had been frequenting this bar for more than twenty years.

  Kojima turned to me and asked, “Omachi, are you hungry?”

  “I’m a little hungry,” I replied.

  “Me too,” Kojima said.

  “The food’s tasty here,” he added, taking a menu from Maeda.

  I’ll let you decide, I said, and he turned his gaze to the menu.

  Cheese omelet. Green salad. Smoked oysters. Kojima pointed at each of the items on the menu as he ordered them. Then Maeda carefully poured us each a glass of red wine from a bottle she had just meticulously uncorked.

  Cheers, Kojima said, and in return I said, Cheers to you. Sensei flashed through my mind for an instant but I immediately chased his image away. Our glasses clinked. The wine had just the right heft and a subtle dusky aroma.

  “That’s a nice wine,” I said.

  Kojima turned to Maeda and said, “So she says.”

  Maeda gave a slight bow of her head. “I’m just pleased you like it.”

  Flustered, I bowed my head as well, and Kojima and Maeda both laughed.

  “Really, Omachi, you haven’t changed a bit,” Kojima said, swirling the wine around in his glass and then tasting it. Maeda opened a silver refrigerator that had been built in under the counter and began to prepare the items that Kojima had ordered. I thought about asking about Ayuko—what she was doing these days, what kind of work she did—but since I didn’t really care to know, I decided against it. Kojima was still swirling his wine around.

  “You know, lots of people do this—swirl their wine around—but I always feel kind of embarrassed when I see them do it.” I had been staring fixedly at his fingers as they swirled, and Kojima had followed my gaze from his hands to my face.

  “Uh, no, that’s not what I was thinking,” I stammered, but in fact, I sort of was.

  “Just humor me and try it yourself,” Kojima urged, looking me deep in the eyes.

  “Really?” I said, swirling around the wine in my own glass. The aroma rose to my nostrils. I took a sip, and the wine tasted just the slightest bit different from before. As if there were no resistance. The flavor nestled right up, was perhaps a better way of putting it.

  “What a difference,” I said, my eyes widening.

  Kojima nodded vigorously. “See what I mean?”

  “It’s amazing.”

  I felt like I had entered into a strange time, sitting there next to Kojima, in a bar I’d never been to before, swirling wine around in my glass and savoring smoked oysters. Every so often, the thought of Sensei would flit across my mind, but each time, just as suddenly, it would then disappear. It wasn’t as though I had returned to my high school days, but neither did it feel like I was actually in the present—all I could say was that I had caught a fleeting moment at the counter of Bar Maeda. It seemed like we had ended up within a time that didn’t exist anywhere. The cheese omelet was warm and fluffy. The green salad was peppery. After we worked our way through the bottle of wine, Kojima ordered a vodka cocktail while I ordered a gin cocktail, and we were then surprised by how late it had become. I would have thought it had only just gotten dark out, but it was already past ten o’clock.

  “Shall we go?” Kojima, who had grown somewhat taciturn, asked.

  “Yes, let’s,” I answered without thinking. Kojima had only barely mentioned the details of his breakup with Ayuko, and I couldn’t really remember what he had said. The ambience in the bar was no longer the crackling mood when they’ve just opened—by now the air was charged with a dense festivity. At some point, another bartender—a young man—had also appeared behind the counter, and the bar was humming with just the right level of activity. Kojima had apparently taken care of our bill without my noticing. I’ll pay my half, I said softly, but Kojima just shook his head gently, replying affably, “Don’t worry about it.”

  I slipped my arm lightly through Kojima’s as we slowly climbed the stairs from the underground to the street level.

  THE MOON WAS suspended in the sky.

  Looking up, Kojima said, “That’s your moon,” referring to the first character in my name, tsuki, the Japanese word for moon. Sensei would never have said such a thing. Abruptly remembering Sensei, I was startled. While we had been inside the bar, I had felt distant and detached from Sensei. Suddenly, I became aware of the weight of Kojima’s arm, lightly resting on the small of my back.

  “The moon is so round,” I said, casually moving my body away from Kojima.

  “Yes, it is,” he replied, without trying to bridge the distance between us that I had just created. He just stood there, staring up abstractedly at the moon. He looked older than he had when we were in the bar.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Kojima looked over at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “Are you a little tired?”

  “Just getting old,” Kojima said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Are not!” I was being unusually obstinate.

  Kojima chuckled and bowed his head toward me. “That was rude of me, seeing as how we’re the same age.”

  “Not at all.”

  I was thinking about Sensei. He had never once referred to himself as “old.” Aside from the fact that he was old enough not to make light of his age, it just wasn’t in his nature to talk about it. Standing there on the street right then, I felt very far away from Sensei. I was keenly aware of the distance between us. Not only the difference between our age in years, nor even the expanse between where each of us stood at that moment, but rather the sheer distance that existed between us.

  Kojima put his arm around my waist once again. To be sure, he didn’t exactly encircle my waist so much as hold his arm against the air around my waist. The gesture was quite subtly adept. Since he wasn’t actually touching me, there was nothing for me to shake off. I wondered when he had acquired such a skill.

  Held this way, I felt as though Kojima were manipulating me like a doll. Kojima hurried across the street and walked into the darkness, taking me along with him. I could see the school ahead of us. The doors of the gate were shut tightly. The school looked huge at night, lit up by the streetlights. Kojima headed up the path to the embankment anyway, and I went along with him.

  The cherry blossom party was over. There was not a soul to be found. Not even a stray cat. When the two of us had slipped away, there had been yakitori skewers and empty saké bottles and packets of smoked squid strewn about, and the partygoers had been serried together as they sat on their mats, but now there was no sign of anything on the embankment. All the trash and empty cans had been completely cleared away, and the ground looked as though it had been swept clean with a bamboo broom. Even the garbage cans on the embankment had been emptied of the refuse from the cherry blossom party. It was as if the party had been nothing more than an illusion or a mirage.

  “Everything’s . . . gone,” I said.

  “Not surprisingly,” Kojima replied.

  “Why not?”

  “People who are teachers are much more dutiful about upholding public morality.”

  A few years ago, Kojima said, he had attended one of these annual cherry blossom parties the teachers held right before the start of the school year. He had stayed until the en
d that time, and as the party drew to a close, he had witnessed the teachers’ full-scale cleanup firsthand. There were those who picked up the paper trash and placed it in plastic bags that they had brought for this purpose. There were those who bundled the empty bottles together and piled them on the back of a truck from a liquor store that pulled up to the school entrance just as the party was ending (which, no doubt, Kojima added, had been previously requested to arrive at the given hour). There was the one who distributed any leftover liquor equitably among the teachers who liked to drink. There were those who used brooms from the schoolyard to level out the ground. And there were those who went around picking up whatever had been left behind and collected it all in a box. The teachers worked briskly and efficiently, like a well-trained company of soldiers. Every last vestige of the cherry blossom party—in boisterous celebration until the very last moment—was completely eliminated in less than fifteen minutes.

  “I was so astonished, all I could do was just stand there watching,” Kojima finished saying.

  And so this year as well, that must be how the teachers cleaned up every last trace of the party.

  Kojima and I walked around a bit along the area where, not an hour ago, the party’s attendees had swarmed. The moon shone brightly. The flowers bloomed pale white, lit up by the moonlight. Kojima led me over to a bench in a corner. He still had his arm circled around my waist, with the same delicate touch.

  “I guess I’m a little drunk,” Kojima said. His cheeks were flushed, about the same shade of red they had been during the cherry blossom party. Aside from the color in his cheeks, though, his demeanor did not in any way suggest that he was drunk.

  “It’s still cold out,” I said for whatever reason, trying to make conversation. How on earth did I find myself in this situation? Where could Sensei have gone off to? After briskly cleaning up the smoked squid wrappers and yakitori skewers and smoothing out the ground, he and Ms. Ishino were probably out together somewhere.