by Ryu Murakami
I thought I knew what she meant: that there aren’t that many things you can get totally wrapped up in. For me, when I thought about it, it came down to just three: Billie, Chet, and Javier.
It seemed like my turn to speak.
“Would you...”
“What?” she said, turning her melancholy face my way.
“Would you like to listen to Javier Olmo?”
I took a Walkman out of my knapsack and attached two sets of earphones. The song was “Historia de un Amor,” of course. I handed her one set of phones, adjusted the volume, and pressed play. First came that bass line played by a genius named Feliciano Arango. Arango picks and strums his six-string bass like a regular guitar and produces an incredibly rich and supple sound. I pantomimed “Can you hear okay?” by pointing at my own ear and raising my eyebrows, and she nodded rapidly a few times.
Then Javier began singing. It was like a thin cloud stretching out across the pink sky, an incomparably delicate, sorrowful, sensual vocal. I didn’t understand the Spanish lyrics, but according to the liner notes it was a sad love song, the story of a great romance gone bad. Akagawa Mieko knew a little Spanish, and I wondered what she was feeling as she listened. Every time I hear Javier sing this song, tears well up. (Call me sentimental if you like, but I never cry over enka or those sickening Japanese pop songs.) It’s as if his voice pierces the tenderest parts of me, the parts I’ve always tried to protect and hold on to. Memories of things I’ll never experience again, or things I treasured and lost—he pinpoints those places in my brain and heart. Javier’s voice alone is like that for me: a narrow but powerful beam of light that penetrates deep inside.
When the song ended, neither of us said anything for a while but just gazed out at the dying light.
P.S.
After we listened to “Historia de un Amor” in the Park Hyatt, things quickly progressed in an unexpected direction.
Akagawa Mieko and I went for drinks at a place she knew. We got so drunk on Cuban rum that my lips and fingertips went numb. Then she invited me to her condo “to listen to some more Cuban music.” I went, and we ended up in bed together, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The next morning, she asked me to go to Cuba with her.
We got together several more times before the departure date, and I stayed at her place each time. I was walking on air, though I see now that I probably didn’t have a good grasp of the situation.
We agreed to meet at Narita Airport, in front of the check-in counter for a JAL flight to Mexico City via Vancouver. This was during Golden Week, at the end of April, about a month after that first night together.
Narita was packed with people, but she wasn’t among them. She never showed up. I phoned her, of course, but all she said, over and over again, was, “I’m sorry.”
Everything went black before my eyes. I thought about canceling but finally mustered every speck of energy I had left and made it onto the plane.
The fact is, this was my first trip overseas, and I was a nervous wreck. But I managed somehow to muddle through, as I guess people generally do. I spent a night in a hotel next to the airport in Mexico City, making sure to eat some genuine tacos, and the next day I landed in Havana, all on my own.
The first thing I wanted to do after checking in at my hotel was just wander through the streets of the town, but the sunlight soon proved too hot for me. “Violent” was the only word that seemed to describe it.
From my room I had a breathtaking view of blue sea and blue, blue sky.
Once I’d got my bearings a bit, I asked the staff about Javier Olmo, and to my amazement none of them had ever heard of him. He wasn’t famous in Cuba. I was able to locate the recording studio EGREM, however, and the people there gave me Javier’s address. They even arranged a taxi for me, and I set out to find him.
The angel-voiced singer who’d captured my heart lived in a narrow but tidy room in an ancient tenement building on a dirt road outside the city.
I found Javier’s father there and presented him with the two bottles of rum I’d brought as a gift. It seems the father had been a singer in a famous band called Orquesta Aragón, but of course we didn’t share a language, and I understood very little of what he said. He was delighted, though, when I showed him my copy of Javier’s CD. He explained, mostly with gestures, that it wasn’t on sale in Cuba, and that, sadly, he didn’t own a CD player.
After some time Javier himself arrived, in the company of a young woman. His face was just like the photo on his CD, but he was dressed only in a T-shirt, shorts, and rubber sandals. The young woman, as it turned out, wasn’t his girlfriend but his father’s.
The rum was nearly gone (the father having put away about three-quarters of it) when Javier broke into an a cappella version of a traditional Cuban song. It was the same voice as on the CD, of course, but listening to him in real life I found myself remembering all kinds of things—Mieko among them—and actually leaking tears.
I stayed in Cuba nearly three weeks, and attended performances by different singers and bands almost every night.
I talked to Mieko just once on the phone. I had tried to call about a dozen times before finally getting through.
“I’m in Havana right now.”
“Oh.”
“I can see the sea from my room.”
“I bet it’s beautiful. I’ve seen pictures.”
Her voice sounded far away on the phone, and she too seemed distant.
“I love it here,” I said.
She didn’t respond to that, and I was out of things to talk about. I wanted to say, “Let’s come here together next time,” but Japan was so far away, and the sea and sky before me were so blue, that it would have sounded pointless. The Havana sky seemed to say, “Come if you want to. If you don’t really want to, don’t.”
“I’ll call you when I get back,” I told her.
“Okay,” she said, in a voice I could barely hear, and we hung up.
I stepped out on the veranda to soak up some of the violent sunlight. It was like being mugged. But I felt as if I had grasped a small part of the secret of Javier Olmo’s voice.
Cuba doesn’t tolerate any childish dependence on others.
Se Fué
I first met her at the highrise hotel in Akasaka where I keep a suite.
She was still in her mid-twenties then, an editor for a travel magazine. On the telephone she told me she was a fan of my films and requested an interview.
I’m Sakurai Yoichi. I got my start at an ad agency, directing TV commercials, then went independent. After directing more than a dozen PR films and documentaries, I shot my first full-length feature, in Paris, and it met with unexpected success. The story was simple enough: As the result of a travel agent’s silly mistake, a typically average Japanese woman becomes separated from her tour group on a trip to Paris and stumbles into the city’s dark side, where she gets embroiled in a series of dangerous situations but eventually escapes unharmed. A major airline sponsored the film, and thanks to all the young women with romantic dreams of the City of Lights flocking to see it, it became a sizable hit. The airline company and the distributor were eager to turn it into a series, changing the city and the lead actress with each installment, and I gladly complied. I filmed six installments in six years—Paris, New York, London, Berlin, Rome, Hong Kong—all with the same basic plotline. In the process I achieved some status as a director, and came to be labeled an “internationalist,” whatever that might mean. The video versions sold like rice cakes, and undreamed-of amounts of money began rolling in. My lifestyle changed accordingly, and shortly after the weekly magazines began having a field day reporting on my involvement with the lead actress of the London film, my wife, whom I’d met at the ad agency, left me. The actress was a tough, intense woman, and when she found out she wasn’t slated for the lead in the Berlin installme
nt, she too left, airily apologizing for having insisted I go through with my divorce.
From that point on I gradually turned into a fairly disreputable character, but I can’t blame it entirely on the divorce and the doomed affair. The main reason was that, from the London installment on, the making of these films about Japanese women having risky adventures overseas had become a routine. I had invested all my energy and focus in the first film, in Paris; and the second one, in New York, was equally stimulating for me. But by the third, in London, partly owing to my involvement with the actress, the camerawork and direction were already becoming a lot less innovative and interesting. From Berlin on, the newness was completely gone, and with Rome and Hong Kong the quality of the product fell off a cliff. I had abandoned my pride as an artist and was only in it for the money by this stage, just going through the motions, and yet strangely enough the films continued to do well. The series was novelized, and I was hired to direct a lot of major TV commercials, even appearing in some myself, and the resulting increase in income made the alimony payments seem like pigeon feed. Taking advantage of my name recognition and deep pockets, I proceeded to plunge into a series of meaningless affairs. I bought a spacious condominium in Minami-Aoyama to serve as both an office and living quarters, and used the hotel suite in Akasaka as a space for my writing and my aventures. I drove a Porsche Carrera, went through bottles of fine wine, champagne, and brandy on a nightly basis, and changed girlfriends every other month or so.
I lived like that for three or four years. At first the girlfriends were mostly actresses or aspiring ones, but after a number of disasters I switched categories. It just wasn’t worth the grief. Talented actresses tend to be starving for love, in an irrational and uncontrollable way, and to seek it from the whole world through the movie screen. They may try to achieve stability in their private lives, but their idea of stability is skewed. Which is not to say that they’re failures as human beings; it’s just that their priorities are different from most people’s. Untalented actresses, on the other hand, are possibly the loneliest and most pathetic of all pretty women. Unconsciously they’d like to find fulfillment in their daily lives, but their appetite for love or a stable relationship is half-hearted. Their priorities are confused, which results in them causing pointless suffering for their partners.
After I decided I’d had enough of actresses, I began dating women in other walks of life, from a top fashion model to a nurse who barely made enough to live on. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even see what a rotten sort of person I was becoming. Thanks to all the drinking and smoking, the irregular lifestyle, a complete lack of physical exercise, and an overindulgence in rich food, I was turning pale and flabby, and my stomach, liver, and heart were all paying a price. By the time I was forty I suppose I looked at least a decade older. Bedding one woman after another was the only thing that really stimulated me at that point, however, and I scarcely recognized the physical and psychological malaise that went with it.
She rescued me from all that. Her name was Akagawa Mieko. She was twenty-six when I met her.
“Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule. Shall we begin? I hope you won’t mind if our photographer takes a few pictures during the interview.”
Compared to aspiring models or actresses she was quite ordinary-looking, but I liked her from the start. It was springtime, and she was wearing a pale yellow dress just right for the season. She looked directly at me and spoke in an appealingly straightforward, businesslike way. And she had beautiful hands. The length and shape of her fingers and nails, and the delicate bone structure and silky skin, reminded me of my wife. Since the divorce, I’d thought about my wife’s hands thousands of times. They were a symbol of all I’d lost and could never recover.
“As I mentioned on the telephone, we’re hoping to use the interview in a special issue with the theme ‘Southward!’ As someone who has traveled widely, Sensei, what particular associations does the word ‘south’ call up for you, in terms of countries, cities, experiences?”
Before replying I told her rather curtly not to call me “Sensei.” It was fairly early in the morning, and after a night of the usual dissipation I wasn’t feeling very well. My stomach was heavy and my head hurt. And though I felt favorably disposed toward this woman, the fact that her hands made me recall my long-lost wife only increased my irritability.
She calmly started over.
“Sakurai-san, then, if I may. Could you tell us which countries or cities in the south you’re especially drawn to?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off those hands. I kept thinking how pretty they were. It was frustrating to think that I had no claim on them, and I found myself responding quite rudely. Combatively.
“‘South’ covers a lot of ground. There’s a fundamental difference, first of all, between resorts and public places.”
“That’s true, isn’t it. Let’s say, aside from resorts, then.”
“I still can’t answer the question if you aren’t a little more specific.”
“Of course. Well, then, which countries in the south appeal to you?”
“Still too vague. Look. There’s a lot of talk these days about the North–South divide, right? If you’re talking about that, about developed versus developing nations, then where do you put a place like Chile? Most people wouldn’t put it in the South category, would they? And what about a country like Portugal? Would you include Portugal, or Greece?”
“Any of those countries would do—whatever fits your own image of the south. But I do apologize for being so vague. Let me try again. Which do you prefer, hot climates or cold ones?”
“I prefer heat to cold.”
“And why is that?”
“I have coronary issues. A cold climate is hard on the heart. Shrinks the arteries. But who doesn’t prefer warm weather?”
“You’ve made films in a number of appealing locations abroad. Do you foresee the possibility of filming in a southern—that is to say, in a tropical city at any point?”
“Where, for example?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Which tropical city, for example?”
“Well, Singapore, perhaps. Kingston, Jamaica. Miami. Tunis. Or, say, a city in Morocco...”
“There was a novelist—was it Dan Kazuo?—who used to churn out sentimental stuff about Portugal. I suppose you want something like that from me, some easy-to-understand, cookie-cutter crap.”
“Not at all! I—”
“Sure you do. Look, my view of cities overseas is mainly influenced by my work. And from that standpoint a place like Singapore, which makes cleanliness and law and order its chief sales points, is just a boring, totalitarian wasteland. Kingston is synonymous with severe discrimination and bone-crushing poverty. Miami—people have this image of it as a playground for the wealthy, because people are idiots, but in fact it’s a hotbed of crime and corruption, and its beaches aren’t the least bit interesting. I don’t know about Tunis, but as for Morocco, whether it’s Fes or Casablanca or Marrakech, they’re all just sterile tourist traps.”
My voice, as much as my words, betrayed the irritation I was feeling. Akagawa Mieko had turned pale as I came out with this sour rant, and the sixtyish photographer had stopped snapping pictures and was looking on anxiously.
For some time she sat there in silence, head bowed and hands on knees, apparently searching for words. Inwardly I was disgusted with myself and thinking, What sort of man are you? But seeing those slightly trembling hands of hers only annoyed me all the more, and the next thing I knew I was saying something even ruder.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
She raised her head, a startled expression on her face, and opened her mouth to speak but was silenced by a gesture from the photographer. She stood up then, seemingly on the verge of tears, bowed deeply, and left.
A couple of hours later I got a frant
ic call from her boss at the magazine.
“It appears that one of our young editors has been exceedingly discourteous to you, Sensei. Please accept our sincere apologies. I assure you that the young lady in question has been severely reprimanded, and that if there’s anything at all we can do to make up for her disgraceful behavior...”
I’m thinking, What the hell? She did nothing wrong. I was the one who behaved disgracefully. But as a man whose nerves were on edge and whose self-esteem had been shaken, I was incapable of being honest with myself, and lacked the courage to speak plainly. I could envision this editor-in-chief yelling at Akagawa Mieko, with her beautiful hands, in front of all the other employees, and it enraged me. He’s sickeningly obsequious to me, but treats his own staff like dirt.
“I don’t want your fucking apology. Teach your people not to plan such shit-brained articles, asshole!”
I shouted the last part and slammed down the receiver. At the time I was in no state even to consider what consequences my outburst might have, but that night I was besieged with feelings of remorse. I swilled brandy and misdirected the self-hatred at my mild and modest new girlfriend.
About a week after the aborted interview, I received a short letter from Akagawa Mieko.
“... Please forgive me for the debacle the other day. I can’t apologize enough. I subsequently resigned my position at the magazine, but the fact is that I had already been planning to change jobs for some time. It may be presumptuous of me even to say this, but I do hope you won’t give the episode another thought...”
I managed to bully the travel magazine into giving me her home phone number, and dialed it.
“This is Sakurai Yoichi. Forgive me for calling you out of the blue like this.”
“Oh. Good evening.”
She sounded taken aback, and wary.
“I got your number from your ex-employer, but I promise to throw it away and never call you again if you’ll just hear me out. I have a rather selfish request.”
