by Mariko Koike
“I do believe you’ll find the extra storage space surprisingly useful,” Eiko said, impishly adopting the elevated manner of a real estate agent trying to convince a potential buyer. “As for the lockers themselves, I admit that they aren’t quite as stylish as one might wish, but they serve the purpose well enough. Hey, look at this!” Eiko exclaimed, abruptly reverting to her normal tone of voice. “You know I mentioned there’s a company that has its offices on the second floor? Well, they distribute health food, and they’ve apparently overflowed their storage unit and are storing their unsold inventory right out in the open here. Doesn’t that strike you as kind of shameless?”
Eiko gestured at the cardboard boxes lined up along one wall. Each bore a printed label that read “Health Japan, LLC.”
“What kind of health food is it?” Misao asked.
“Apparently they’re some kind of high-calorie protein bars that were originally developed for the space program,” Eiko explained. “A salesman for that company actually came to our door and tried to persuade me to buy some. I was like, Seriously? So I said to the guy, ‘You should know this is an exercise in futility, trying to peddle high-calorie bars to a woman who’s on a perpetual diet.’ Honestly, I don’t know a single person who would dream of even looking at a weight-gain bar. Do such people even exist nowadays?” Eiko burst into incredulous laughter.
Kaori was standing nearby, scratching idly at the rusty fender of a derelict bicycle that someone had propped against one of the unused lockers. Turning to glare at her daughter, Eiko snapped, “Kaori, stop it! You know better than that!” As her exasperated voice bounced off the walls, the amplified echo made it sound almost like a roar.
Eiko went over to the storage locker that bore the number of her apartment, 402, and stuck her key in the padlock. The sliding door opened easily. Inside, a bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and on the floor was a motley tangle of worn-out chairs, reusable plastic beer crates, and an old tricycle.
“I’ve heard that if you go to Europe you’ll find facilities like this in nearly every apartment building. I guess this basement is proof that they’re catching on here, as well,” Eiko said as she slid the door closed again.
Misao felt a sudden, frigid draft swirling around her ankles, and she shuddered involuntarily. How can it be windy? she thought, looking around. She had a sudden feeling that the concrete walls were closing in on her.
“Mama?” Tamao came up and stuck her hand into her mother’s. “Can we go home now?”
“Yes, let’s do that,” Misao said quickly. “Let’s go home.” Once again, she felt the icy breeze caressing her feet and legs. Misao called out to Eiko, and the four of them trooped off to the elevator.
The Inoues got off at the fourth floor in a flurry of farewells. Just as Misao and Tamao disembarked and were standing in front of the door of their eighth-floor apartment, the telephone inside began to ring. Hastily, Misao jammed the key into the door, dashed down the hallway, and flew over to pick up the phone in the living room. But when she lifted the receiver to her ear, the line went dead.
“Oh dear, they hung up,” Misao said. “It might have been a call about Mama’s work. I hope they’ll phone again.”
Tamao was busy playing with Cookie, and didn’t exhibit the slightest interest in her mother’s missed call.
As Misao was replacing the receiver in its cradle, her eyes were drawn to the pale pink memo pad next to the telephone. There was a small white bird feather resting lightly on top of it. Misao picked up the feather between two fingers and held it in the air, level with her eyes. On closer inspection, she noticed that the white shaded into gray at the very tip. She remembered that while Pyoko, the little Java finch, was still alive, she had come across feathers exactly like this one every time she tidied the birdcage. But how did it come to be here, after all this time?
Still holding the feather, Misao let her gaze wander out to the balcony. The birdcage was still there, right where she’d left it. Maybe there had been an overlooked feather on the bottom of the cage after she’d given it a final cleaning, and the wind had carried that single feather into the living room? No, the cage was tightly wrapped in a plastic trash bag, and secured with a twisty tie. Even if they had somehow neglected to close the sliding-glass doors all the way and an incredibly strong wind had been blowing during the night when everyone was asleep, it was still hard to imagine a scenario in which one stray feather could have been extracted from the bag-enclosed cage and carried into the apartment.
“Um, Tamao?” Misao called out.
Tamao stopped cavorting with Cookie and looked over at her mother. “What, Mama?” she asked, with an expression of perfect innocence on her face.
“Look what I found,” Misao said.
Tamao cocked her head and came running over, waving a plump arm in the air. “Oh!” she said happily, as she took the feather from her mother’s hand. “That’s Pyoko’s! So I guess Pyoko was flying around in this room, too, Mama!”
Misao didn’t reply. Scowling grimly, she snatched the feather from Tamao’s grasp and tossed it into the kitchen wastebasket.
3
March 19, 1987
“My old lady’s in a rotten mood,” said Teppei’s younger brother, Tatsuji. He had returned from the hostess bar’s pay phone looking like someone whose mind is miles away: present in body, but definitely not in spirit. “It’s because I went out drinking last night, too, and came home late again.”
Tatsuji had only been married for about a year. The woman he chose as a life partner had been the belle of the university tennis club they both belonged to. Maybe it was because he had pursued her with single-minded persistence until she finally agreed to marry him, but he seemed to be perpetually in the doghouse at home.
“In that case, maybe we should call it a night,” Teppei said, glancing at his wristwatch. Ten o’clock. It had been months since he and his younger brother had gotten together like this, and after they’d shared their respective bits of news there didn’t seem to be anything left to talk about. Tatsuji worked for a giant food conglomerate, while Teppei had been on the creative side of the advertising business for many years, so their jobs didn’t really provide much common ground. Beyond that, though, Teppei simply couldn’t enjoy hanging out with someone who was constantly fretting about staying on his wife’s good side, and he was also fed up with the inevitable repercussions. Every time he saw Tatsuji’s wife, she would say something snide like, “Oh, I hear you’ve been leading my poor husband astray again.”
Try as he might, Teppei found his sister-in-law almost impossible to like. He didn’t even like to say her name: Naomi. As the saying went, even a hungry mosquito wouldn’t want to get too close to her.
Naomi was the only daughter of a university professor, and while she was undeniably pretty, she clearly believed that the entire universe revolved around her. She had been a model daughter and an outstanding student, constantly striving to meet her parents’ rigorous expectations, and as a result there were no youthful follies, dark secrets, or flaws of any sort in her past. Perhaps, Teppei mused, that parentally enforced perfection might be the reason Naomi had turned out to be so insensitive, self-centered, superficial, and judgmental.
“Oh, no, you aren’t leaving us already?” wailed the hostess sitting next to Teppei, when she noticed him tucking his cigarettes into a pocket of his sports jacket. “Please, stay a little longer. The night’s still young!”
“I’d like to, but this guy’s wife keeps him on a very short leash,” Teppei said. “She likes to be treated like a fairy princess, or maybe a queen, and if I don’t make sure he gets home on time he might end up sleeping on the couch.”
Tatsuji shot his older brother a warning look. “Don’t say that kind of thing,” he snarled, curling his upper lip. His combative words hung awkwardly in the air.
Although Tatsuji was already past thirty, there were still times when his face looked exactly as it had when he was a child of four or five. One
day during their boyhood, when Teppei was about to head off with his elementary-school buddies to explore the gravel pit at a nearby excavation site, Tatsuji tried to tag along uninvited. Teppei sneered, “Go home, little baby,” and his followers broke into a cruel chant of “Little baby, little baby!” Teppei felt an overwhelming urge to ride the intoxicating wave of power born of being both an older brother and the leader of his class, and he crossed the line from mischief into maliciousness.
“Okay, little baby, if you don’t go home I’m going to tell everyone that our mother is still suckling you late at night,” he taunted. “What do you say to that?” This outrageous accusation got Teppei’s fellow rascals even more worked up, and they cheered him on, cackling like mean-spirited fiends.
Tatsuji had just stood there, biting his lip. His eyes were blurred with unshed tears, but he somehow managed to keep from crying. “You’re a stupid-head!” he yelled at Teppei. “I hate you!” He glared daggers at his brother, and his little face was so contorted with misery that he seemed to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Teppei had started to feel slightly sorry for Tatsuji, but he didn’t apologize or offer any comfort. Truth be told, he took a certain perverse pleasure in tormenting his baby brother. Even now, Teppei still remembered the complicated expression on Tatsuji’s face: wounded petulance mixed with outright hostility, along with an unyielding determination to go on an adventure with the bigger boys, despite their unkindness. It was the face of an innocent, trusting, foolishly hopeful kid, and even today Teppei occasionally caught a glimpse of that vulnerable, childlike face peeking out from behind Tatsuji’s sophisticated adult facade.
“Do you really have to rush off?” the hostess asked again. Teppei had noticed that her makeup had started to flake as the night wore on, gradually revealing the dark circles under her eyes. Maybe she had liver disease.
“Well, I guess we can hang out for another half hour or so,” Tatsuji said, in a grudging tone, as if he wasn’t eager to stay but didn’t want to be perceived as a wet blanket, or a henpecked husband.
Teppei laughed. “Don’t force it on my account,” he said. “I’m worried about what might happen when you get home.”
“Like I said, it isn’t a problem,” Tatsuji said impatiently. “It’s not as if I’m having an affair or something. She just needs to get used to the fact that I may have to stay out late from time to time.”
There was something almost comically defensive about the way Tatsuji delivered this speech, but Teppei just nodded and said, “That’s the spirit!” with a perfectly straight face.
The small club they’d gone to was in Yotsuya, not far from that district’s main shopping and amusement area. There were three hostesses, and when the place had ten customers, there was no room for anyone else to crowd in. On this night, though, it was barely a third full. Indeed, the only other customer apart from Teppei’s party of two was a boisterous, high-spirited man with a rapidly receding hairline who was flirting nonstop with two of the hostesses while he drank his way through a bottle of cognac with lip-smacking gusto.
The bar was set up for karaoke, but hardly anyone ever got up to sing. In Teppei’s past experience, most of the patrons looked perpetually baffled, as if they weren’t quite sure what had made them think that coming to this place might be enjoyable. After sitting around sipping watered-down whiskey and trading stale jokes with the hostesses, all of whom were attempting to pass for at least ten years younger than their actual ages, they would usually wander out and head for home, or for a more interesting bar.
Teppei had made his way to this club any number of times since he was first brought here by some coworkers, but when he stopped to ask himself what the appeal was, he was unable to come up with an answer. It was just an easy place to sit and have a drink or two, lost in reverie. If you felt like getting up and singing a song, you could do that, and then you could take your leave and make it an early night. Teppei had thought more than once that spending that kind of uneventful, laid-back evening was curiously well suited to his temperament.
“Won’t you give us a song? How about it?” the hostess asked Teppei with a false air of urgency, as if the background music had already begun to play. “This may be your last chance, because the guest over there is probably going to get up and treat us to his famous medley any minute now.”
“What sort of medley?” Teppei asked warily.
“War ballads, most likely,” said the hostess, with a dismissive shrug.
“Why don’t you sing something, Tats?” Teppei suggested. “I really don’t want to be subjected to a medley of depressing war ballads.”
“I’m not really in the mood tonight,” Tatsuji said. “You should get up and sing, though, for sure.” Just then the kimono-clad hostess returned with a list of songs organized in the Japanese way, by vowels: a, i, u, e, o.
Okay, fine, Teppei thought. I’ll sing one song, and then we’ll go home. From time to time when he was out drinking, he would suddenly find himself wondering what he was doing in that place. He would be overcome by a sensation of detachment, as though he were an untethered balloon floating through the air, and he would start to feel exceedingly restless and displaced. That’s what was happening to him tonight.
Now, as always, it wasn’t because he was tired or tipsy. He just felt a soul-deep craving to find a place where he was truly, entirely at home. It gave him a hollow, empty feeling to think that maybe there was no such place, and never would be—not even in the bosom of his family, whom he loved with all his heart. There were times when the almost cosmic feelings of emptiness and loneliness seemed to threaten to suck him into an existential whirlpool. At moments like that, he would usually crack a joke to hide his true emotions.
As Teppei leafed idly through the list of songs, his eye came to rest on one title: “The Foghorn Is Calling Me.” It was an old song, circa 1960, made famous by the late actor and singer Keiichiro Akagi. Teppei had learned the lyrics by osmosis when he was a boy, because a certain university student in the neighborhood used to go around incessantly crooning that song.
“I’ll sing this one,” Teppei said, and when Tatsuji saw the selection he chuckled derisively. “You’re really showing your age, old man,” he teased. “Is that blast from the past the kind of thing you like to sing these days?”
“This’ll be the first time I’ve done it as karaoke,” Teppei said, ignoring the jibe. “Though I must admit that I’ve been known to sing it in my bathtub on occasion.”
“I doubt whether Misao…” Tatsuji began, then quickly stopped and bit his lip before correcting himself. “I mean, I doubt if Sis even knows that song.”
“You’re right,” Teppei said. “She’s from the generation that grew up with Western pop songs.”
Teppei was acutely aware that Tatsuji found it difficult, unnatural even, to call his current sister-in-law “Sis” in the customary way. The only person Tatsuji had ever been able to address easily as “Sis” was Reiko.
While Teppei didn’t appreciate his brother’s attitude, he understood it. He had been married to Reiko for only a fraction of the number of years he’d now spent with Misao, but everything he and Reiko did as a couple had been impeccably conventional and proper: the wedding, the reception, the honeymoon, the respectful visits to each other’s parents. His early relationship with Misao, by contrast, had been characterized by furtiveness, secrecy, and lies.
Tatsuji had been very attached to Reiko. No, maybe “attached” wasn’t the right word. It would be more accurate to say that he admired and looked up to her. Reiko was the old-fashioned type of woman who radiates an aura of quiet, deferential serenity, and Tatsuji had frequently remarked that she seemed to have stepped out of an early novel by Natsume Soseki. He seemed to see Reiko as the embodiment of the womanly ideal, so Teppei was mystified when his younger brother fell in love with Naomi, who didn’t resemble the docile, sedate Reiko in any discernible way.
No one who knew Reiko was likely
to perceive her as an independent modern woman with a firm grip on the pragmatic realities of life. She had a way of smiling vaguely when other people were talking, and the faraway look in her eyes gave the impression she was off in a private world of her own. She never seemed to react strongly to anything, either way, and her passive equanimity could make other people feel uncomfortable. In retrospect, Teppei thought his first wife might have been one of those women who somehow manages to live her life without ever learning how to communicate effectively. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, Reiko had failed to acquire the basic tools of self-expression, and perhaps that was why she had reacted to Teppei’s betrayal with such an extreme gesture.
Just as Teppei had pushed Tatsuji around when they were children, and had spoken to his brother in a deliberately heartless, hurtful way, at some point in his first marriage he began to address the emotionally buttoned-up Reiko in a way that was unkind, if not downright sadistic. Then he fell in love with Misao, and the more deeply they became involved the more repelled he was by the way Reiko clung to her usual placidly graceful demeanor, with no visible changes in her behavior even after she realized what was going on.
Teppei’s negative feelings toward Reiko continued up until (and through) the instant in the entryway when he realized that she had committed suicide. His first thought when he saw her hanging from the ceiling was, Oh, great, now I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty about the way I treated this pathetic woman. Of course, he was in shock, but at that moment he felt more resentment than sorrow, by far.
