by Неизвестный
My roommate was a geography major.
“I’m studying about m-m-maps,” he told me.
“Oh, you’re into maps, then?” I asked.
“That’s right. I want to get a position in the National Geography Institute and make m-maps.”
To each his own, I figured. Up until then, I’d never given a thought to what kind of people wanted to make maps and for what reasons. You have to admit, though, that it’s a little weird for someone who wanted to work in the National Geography Institute to stutter every time he said the word “map.” He stuttered only part of the time, sometimes not at all. But when the word “map” came up, so did the stutters.
“What are you majoring in?” he asked me.
“Drama,” I replied.
“Drama? Oh, you mean you put on plays?”
“No, I don’t act in plays. I study the scripts. Racine, Ionesco, Shakespeare, guys like that.”
“I’ve heard of Shakespeare but not those others,” he said. Actually I didn’t know much about them myself. I was just parroting the course description.
“Anyhow, you like that kind of thing, right?” he asked.
“Not particularly,” I replied.
He was flustered. When he got flustered, he stuttered more than usual. I felt like I’d done something terrible.
“Any subject’s fine with me,” I hurriedly explained, attempting to calm him down. “Indian philosophy, Oriental history, whatever. It just ended up being drama. That’s all.”
“I don’t get it,” he insisted, still upset. “In m-m-my case I like m-m-maps, so I’m learning how to make them. That’s why I came all the way to Tokyo to go to college and had my parents pay for it. But you . . .”
His explanation made more sense than mine. Not worth the effort, I figured and gave up trying to explain my side of the story. We drew straws to see who’d get the top and bottom bunks. I got the top.
He was tall, with close-cropped hair and prominent cheekbones. He always wore a white shirt and black trousers. When he went to school, he always wore the school uniform with black shoes, toting a black briefcase. He really did look like a right-wing student, and most of the others in the dorm tagged him as such. In reality, the guy had zero amount of interest in politics. He just thought it was too much trouble to pick out other clothes to wear. The only things that could pique his interest were changes in the shoreline, newly completed tunnels, those sorts of things. Once he got started on those topics, he’d go on, stuttering all the while, for an hour, even two, until you screamed for mercy or fell asleep.
Every morning, he got up at six on the dot. The national anthem was his alarm clock. Guess the flag raising wasn’t a complete waste. He dressed and went to wash up, taking an incredibly long time to do so. Made me wonder whether he wasn’t taking out each tooth and brushing them one by one. Back in the room, he smoothed out his towel, hung it on a hanger, and put his toothbrush and soap back on the shelf. Then he’d switch on the radio and start exercising to the morning exercise program.
I was pretty much of a night owl and a heavy sleeper, too, so when he started up I was usually still fast asleep. But when he got to the part where he began to leap up and down, I’d bolt out of bed. Every time he jumped up—and, believe me, he jumped really high—my head would bounce three inches off the pillow. Try sleeping through that.
“I’m really sorry,” I said on the fourth day, “but I wonder if you could do your exercises on the roof or something. It wakes me up.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “If I do it there, the people on the third floor will complain. This is the first floor, so there isn’t anyone below us.”
“Well, why don’t you do it in the courtyard?”
“No way. I don’t have a transistor radio, so I wouldn’t be able to hear the music. You can’t expect me to do my exercises without music.”
His radio was the kind you had to plug in. I could have lent him my transistor, but it could pick up only FM stations.
“Well, then could you turn the music down and stop jumping? The whole place shakes. I don’t want to complain, or anything, but—”
“Jumping?” he seemed surprised. “What do you mean, j-jumping?”
“You know, that part where you bounce up and down.”
“What are you talking about?”
I was starting to get a headache. Go ahead, suit yourself, I thought. But once I’d brought it up, I couldn’t very well back down. So I started to sing the melody of the NHK radio exercise program, jumping up and down in time to the music.
“See? This part. That’s part of your routine, right?”
“Ah—yeah. Guess it is. I hadn’t noticed.”
“So—,” I said, “could you skip that part? I’ll put up with the rest.”
“Sorry,” he said, lightly dismissing the idea. “I can’t leave out one part. I’ve been doing this for ten years. Once I start, I do it w-without th-thinking. If I leave out one part I wouldn’t b-be able to d-do any of it.”
“Then could you stop the whole thing?”
“Don’t be so bossy—ordering people around.”
“Come on! I’m not ordering anyone around. I just want to sleep till eight. Even if I can’t sleep till then, I’d still like to wake up the way people usually do. You make me feel like I’m waking up in the middle of a pie-eating contest. Can you follow me here?”
“Yeah, I get it. . . .” he said.
“So what do you think we should do about it?”
“I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we get up and exercise together?”
I gave up and went back to sleep. After that, he continued his morning exercises, never skipping a single day.
She laughed when I told her about my roommate’s morning radio exercises. I hadn’t intended it to be funny, but I ended up laughing too. Her laughter lasted just an instant, and I realized it’d been a long time since I’d seen her smile.
We’d gotten off the train at Yotsuya Station and were walking along the bank beside the railroad tracks in the direction of Ichigaya. A Sunday afternoon in May. The rain had ended around noon, and a southerly breeze had blown away the low-hanging gray clouds. The leaves on the cherry trees were sharply outlined and glinted as they shook in the breeze. In the sunlight was a clear scent of early summer. Most of the people we passed had taken off their coats and sweaters and draped them over their shoulders. A young man on a tennis court, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was swinging his racket back and forth. The metal frame of the racket sparkled in the afternoon sun. Only two nuns sitting together on a bench were still bundled up in winter clothes. Maybe summer isn’t just around the corner after all, I mused, watching them absorbed in a lively conversation.
After walking for fifteen minutes, sweat started to roll down my back. I pulled off my thick cotton shirt and stripped down to my T-shirt. She rolled up the sleeves of her light gray sweatshirt up above her elbows. The sweatshirt was an old one, faded with countless washings. It looked familiar, as if maybe I’d seen it sometime—a long time ago. Maybe my imagination was playing tricks on me. Even at eighteen, my memory wasn’t what it had once been. Sometimes everything felt like it had taken place a long long time ago.
“Is it fun living with someone else?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been there that long yet.”
She stopped in front of the water fountain, sipped a single mouthful of water, and wiped her mouth with a handkerchief she took out of her pants pocket. She retied the laces of her tennis shoes.
“I wonder if it would suit me,” she mused.
“You mean living in a dorm?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t know. It’s more trouble than you’d imagine. Lots of rules. Not to mention radio exercises.”
“That’s right,” she said and was lost in thought for a time. Then looked me straight in the eyes. Her eyes were unnaturally limpid. I’d never noticed till then how limpid. It gave me a kind of a strange, transparent
feeling. Like gazing at the sky.
“But sometimes I feel like I should. I mean . . .” she said, looking into my eyes. She bit her lip and looked down. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
End of conversation. She started walking again.
I hadn’t seen her for half a year. She’d gotten so thin I almost didn’t recognize her. Her plump cheeks had thinned out, as had her neck. Not that she struck me as bony or anything. She looked prettier than ever. I wanted to tell her that but couldn’t figure out how to go about it. So I gave up.
We hadn’t come to Yotsuya for any particular reason. We just happened to run across each other in a train on the Chūō Line. Neither of us had any plans. Let’s get off, she said, and we did. Left alone, we didn’t have too much to talk about. I don’t know why she suggested getting off the train. From the very beginning, we didn’t have anything to talk about.
After we got off at the station, she headed off without a word. I walked after her, trying my best to keep up. There was always about a yard between us, and I just kept on walking, staring at her back. Occasionally she’d turn around to say something. Sometimes I could come up with a reply of sorts, but sometimes I couldn’t figure out at all what to say. And sometimes I couldn’t catch what she said. Didn’t seem to make any difference to her. She just said what she wanted to say, turned around again, and walked on in silence.
We turned right at Iidabashi, came out next to the palace moat, then crossed the intersection at Jinbōchō, went up the Ochanomizu Slope, and cut across Hongo. Then we followed the railroad tracks to Komagome. Quite a walk. By the time we arrived at Komagome, it was already getting dark.
“Where are we?” she suddenly asked me.
“Komagome,” I said. “We’ve made a big circle.”
“How did we end up here?”
“You brought us here. I just played Follow the Leader.”
We dropped in a soba noodle shop close to the station and had a bite to eat. Neither of us said a single word from the beginning to the end of the meal. I was exhausted from the walk and felt like I was going to collapse. She sat there lost in thought.
“You’re really in good shape,” I said, the noodles finished.
“Surprised?”
“Um.”
“I was a cross-country runner in junior high. And my dad liked to hike in the mountains, so ever since I was little I went hiking on Sundays. Even now my legs are pretty strong.”
“I never would have guessed it.”
She laughed.
“I’ll take you home,” I said.
“It’s OK,” she said. “I can get back by myself. Don’t bother.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“It’s OK, really. I’m used to going home alone.”
To tell the truth, I was a little relieved she said that. It took more than an hour by train to her apartment, and I didn’t like the idea of the two of us sitting there side by side on the train all that time, silent as before. So she ended up going back by herself. To make up for it, I paid for the meal.
Just as we were saying good-bye, she turned to me and said, “Uh—I wonder, if it’s isn’t too much to ask, if I might see you again? I know there’s no real reason for me to ask you . . .”
“You don’t need any special reason,” I said, a little taken aback.
She blushed slightly. She probably could feel how surprised I was.
“I can’t really explain it well,” she said. She rolled the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows and then rolled them down again. The electric lights bathed the down on her arms in a beautiful gold. “I didn’t mean to say reason. I probably should have used another word.”
She rested both elbows on the table and closed her eyes, as if searching for the right words. But the words didn’t come.
“It’s all right with me,” I told her.
“I don’t know . . . these days I just can’t seem to say what I mean,” she said. “I just can’t. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I say the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right, the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can’t even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It’s like my body’s split in two, and one of me is chasing the other. There’s a big pillar in the middle, and we’re running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.”
She put her hands on the table and stared into my eyes.
“Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
“Everybody has that kind of feeling sometimes,” I said. “You can’t express yourself the way you want to, and you get irritated.”
These weren’t the words she wanted to hear, apparently.
“No, that isn’t what I mean,” she said but stopped there.
“I don’t mind at all seeing you again,” I said. “I have a lot of free time, and it’d sure be a lot healthier for me to go on walks with you than lie around all day.”
We left each other at the station. I said good-bye; she said good-bye.
The first time I met her was in the spring of my sophomore year in high school. She was the same age and was attending a well-known private Christian school. One of my best friends, who happened to be her boyfriend, introduced us. The two of them had known each other since grade school and lived only a couple of hundred yards down the road from each other.
Like many couples who had known each other since they were young, they didn’t have any particular desire to be alone. They were always visiting each other’s homes and having dinner together with the one of their families. We went on a lot of double dates together, but I never seemed to get anywhere with girls, so we usually ended up a trio. Which was fine by me. We each had our parts to play: I played the guest, he the able host, and she was his pleasant assistant and leading lady.
My friend made a great host. He might have seemed a bit standoffish at times, but basically he was a kind person, and fair. He used to kid the two of us—her and me—with the same jokes. If one of us fell silent, he’d start talking to us right away, trying to draw us out. His antennae could instantly pick up the mood we were in, and the right words just flowed out. And add to that another talent: he could make the world’s most boring person sound fascinating. When I was talking with him, I felt that way—like my life was one big adventure.
But if he stepped out of the room, she and I clammed up. We had zero in common and no idea what to talk about. We just sat there, toying with the ashtray on the table, perhaps, or drinking water, waiting for him to return. When he got back, the conversation picked up where it had left off.
I saw her again just once, three months after his funeral. There was something we had to discuss, so we met in a coffee shop. But as soon as that was finished, we had nothing to say. I started to talk about something a couple of times, but the conversation just petered out. She sounded upset, like she was angry with me, but I couldn’t figure out why. We said good-bye.
Maybe she was angry with me because the last person to see him alive was me, not her. I shouldn’t say this, I know, but I can’t help it. I wish I could change places with her, but it can’t be helped. Once something happens, that’s all she wrote; there’s no way to change things to the way they were.
On that afternoon in May, after school (actually school wasn’t over yet, and we’d skipped out), he and I stopped inside a pool hall and played four games. I won the first one; he took the next three. As we’d agreed, the loser paid for the games.
That night he died in his garage. He stuck a rubber hose in the exhaust pipe of his N360, got inside, sealed up the windows with tape, and started the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. When his parents got back from visiting a sick friend, he already was dead. The car radio was still on, a receipt from a gas station still stuck under the wiper.
He didn’t leave any note or clue to his motives. I was the last person to see him alive, so the police called me in for questioning. He didn’t act any different f
rom usual, I told them. Seemed the same as always. People who are going to kill themselves don’t usually win three games of pool in a row, do they? The police thought both of us were a little suspect. The kind of student who skips out of high-school classes to play pool might very well be the kind to commit suicide, they seemed to imply. There was a short article about his death in the paper, and that was that. His parents got rid of the car, and for a few days there were white flowers on his desk at school.
When I graduated from high school and went to Tokyo, there was only one thing I felt I had to do: try not to think too deeply. I willed myself to forget all of it—the pool tables covered with green felt, his red car, the white flowers on the desk, the smoke rising from the tall chimney of the crematorium, the chunky paperweight in the police interrogation room. Everything. At first it seemed like I could forget, but something remained inside me. It was like air, and I couldn’t grasp it. As time passed, though, that air formed itself into a simple, clear shape. Into words. And the words were these:
Death is not the opposite of life but a part of it.
Say it aloud and it sounds trivial. Just common sense. But at the time I didn’t think of it as words; it was more like air filling my body. Death was in everything around me—inside the paperweight, inside the four balls on the pool table. And as we live, we breathe death into our lungs, like fine particles of dust.
Up till then I’d always thought death existed separately, apart from everything else. Sure, I knew death was inevitable. But you could just as easily turn that around and say that until that day comes, death has nothing to do with us. Life is over here; death is over there. What could be more logical?
