Milena Michiko Flašar

I Called Him Necktie

for Kris

… You are so far removed from this world,

which is beautiful and perhaps meaningful,

so far from any natural fulfillment,

so alone in your emptiness,

so alien and deaf in this great silence…

Max Frisch, An Answer from the Silence

… wie ausgeschieden du bist aus dieser Welt,

die schön ist und vielleicht einen Sinn hat

wie ausgestoßen aus aller natürlichen Vollendung,

wie einsam in deiner Leere,

wie fremd und taub in dieser großen Stille…

Antwort aus der Stille

I Called Him Necktie

1

I called him Necktie.

The name pleased him. It made him laugh.

Red gray stripes on his chest. That’s how I want to remember him.

2

Seven weeks have passed since I last saw him. In these seven weeks the grass has grown dry and yellow. Cicadas sit chirping in the trees. Gravel crunches under my feet. In the harsh light of the midday sun, the park looks strangely desolate. Blossoms burst open on branches, bending wearily towards the ground. A faded blue handkerchief lies in the undergrowth, without a breath of wind to stir it. The air is heavy and oppressive. I’m all scrunched up. I say goodbye to someone who will not come again. I’ve known that since yesterday. He is not coming again. Above me stretches the sky that has swallowed him up — forever?

I still cannot believe that our parting is final. In my mind he could return at any moment, perhaps as someone else, perhaps with a different face, could throw me a glance which says: I’m here. Head turned to the north, smiling at the passing clouds. He could. That’s why I am sitting here.

3

I’m sitting on our bench. Before it became ours, it had been mine. I came here to try to work out whether the crack in the wall, that hairline fissure crossing above the bookshelves, had any meaning internal or external. I spent two whole years staring at it. Two whole years in my room, in my parents’ house. Behind my closed eyes I traced its broken line. It had been in my head, had continued there, had penetrated my heart and my arteries. I myself was an anemic stripe. My skin pale as death, for the sun didn’t shine on it. Sometimes I yearned for its touch. I imagined what it would be like to go outside and finally understand: There are rooms one never leaves.

One cold February morning I gave into my yearning. Through the gap in the curtains I could make out a flight of cranes. They flew up and down, with the sun on their wings, and dazzled me. With a stabbing pain in my eyes, I felt my way along the walls of my room towards the door, pushed it open, pulled on a coat and shoes, one size too small, went out onto the street and beyond, past houses and squares. Despite the cold, sweat ran off my forehead and I experienced a strange sense of satisfaction: I can still do it. I can put one foot in front of the other. I have not forgotten how. All efforts to forget were in vain.

I didn’t try to delude myself. Now as before it was about me, it was about being by myself. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Meeting someone means getting involved. An invisible thread is tied. From person to person. Real threads. Back and forth. Meeting someone means becoming part of a web, and I wanted to avoid that.

4

Like on that first walk out. That’s how a prisoner must feel, looking through the bars of the cell he carries around with him, knowing full well he is not free. When I think back to that first walk out, I feel as if I was a figure in black and white walking through a color film. All around the brightness screamed. Yellow taxis, red mailboxes, blue billboards. Their loudness deafened me.

With my collar up I turned the corner and took care not to stumble over anyone’s feet. I feared the thought that my trouser leg could graze the hem of someone’s coat in passing. I clamped my arms to my sides and ran, ran, ran, without looking right or left. The most horrible thing imaginable was the double glances, catching one another at random. The ones that linger for seconds. That never leave you. Such nausea. I was full of them. Full to the brim. The further I ran the more aware I was of the weight of my body. Someone bumped into me. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. With one hand to my mouth I ran into the park and threw up.

5

I knew the park and I knew the bench by the cedar, too. Distant childhood. Mother would beckon me to her, pick me up onto her lap and explain the world to me with a pointed finger. Look, a sparrow! It said chirp, chirp. Her breath was on my cheek. A tickling on the back of my neck. Mother’s hair swayed gently to and fro. When you are small, so small that you believe things will stay the same forever, the world is a friendly place. That’s what I thought when I recognized my childhood bench. This bench, where I should learn that nothing stays as it is, and yet it is still worthwhile being in the world. I am still learning that.

He would say: It was a decision.

And I did really decide to walk over the lawn, towards the bench, and to stand in front of it. I was alone, surrounded by silence. Nobody was there to catch me as I walked once, then once more, around the bench, in ever tighter circles. The taste in my mouth as I eventually sat down. The wish to be a child again. To look with eyes full of amazement. I mean, it was my eyes that became ill at the very beginning. My heart simply followed them. And so I sat in clothing much too thin. I shivered under my skin, which was even thinner.

6

After that I was compelled to come here every morning. I watched the snow as it fell. I watched the snow as it melted again. A gurgling rivulet. With the spring came the people and their voices. I sat with clenched teeth. A retching in my throat. That was the crack in the wall. It separated me from those who were woven in. A couple in love strolled by me whispering. The secret words flowing by me sounded foreign, like the words of a language I had not mastered. I am happy, I heard, inexpressibly happy. A sticky surge on my tongue. I stifled the retching.

Whether anyone was aware of me, I doubt it, and if so, then only as you are aware of a ghost. You see it clearly and distinctly, may not believe that you have seen it, and it’s gone in a blink. I was such a ghost. Even my parents were barely aware of me. If I encountered them in the entrance or the hallway, they murmured incredulously, Oh, it’s you. They had long given up counting me as one of them. We have lost our son. He has died, well before his time. That’s how they must have experienced it. As a deep loss. But gradually they came to terms with it. The sorrow they may have felt to begin with gave way to the realization that it was not in their power to win me back, and however strange the situation may have been for them, even in the strangeness a certain order prevailed. You lived together under the same roof and so long as nothing about it got out, you regarded it as completely normal, to live like that under the same roof.

7

Nowadays I realize that it is impossible not to encounter anyone. In that you are there and breathe, you encounter the whole world. The invisible thread has bound you to the others from the moment of birth. To sever it requires more than a death, and there’s no use opposing it.

When he appeared I have no idea.

I say: He appeared. For that was how it was. One morning in May he suddenly appeared. I sat on my bench, my collar turned up. A pigeon took flight. I felt dizzy from the beating of its wings. When I closed my eyes and opened them again, he was there.

A salaryman. Mid fifties. He wore a gray suit, a white shirt, a red and gray striped tie. In his right hand swung a briefcase. Brown leather. He walked, swinging it to and fro, shoulders bent forward, face turned away. Somehow tired. Without looking at me he sat down on the opposite bench. Crossed one leg over the other. Stayed like that. Motionless. His face tense as he looked away. He was waiting for something. Something was going to happen. Soon, soon. Bit by bit his muscles relaxed and he leaned back with a sigh. Such a sigh, like there was something inside him waiting to occur.

A fleeting glance at his watch, then he lit a cigarette. The smoke rose in ringlets. That was the beginning of our acquaintance. A sharp odor in my nose. The wind blew the smoke in my direction. Before we had exchanged names, this wind introduced us to each other.

8

Was it his sigh? Or the way he flicked away the ash? Absentmindedly, absent from his own mind. I was not afraid to watch him, as he was, sitting opposite me.

I observed him like a familiar object, a toothbrush, a washcloth, a piece of soap, which all at once you see for the first time, quite separate from its purpose. It may be that this familiarity was what stimulated my particular interest. His well-pressed figure was like thousands of others who fill the streets day in and day out. They stream out of the belly of the city and disappear into tall buildings, whose windows break up the sky into separate pieces. They are average, typical in their inconspicuousness, with smooth-shaven suburban faces, all of them interchangeable. He for example could have been my father. Any father. And yet here he was. Like me.

Again he sighed. This time more quietly. Someone who sighs like that, I thought, is not just a bit tired. More than thinking it, I felt it. I felt this is someone who is tired of life. The tie constricted his throat. He loosened it, looked again at his watch. It was almost midday. He unpacked his bento box. Rice with salmon and pickled vegetables.

9

He ate slowly, chewed each bite ten times. He had time. He slurped the iced tea in little sips. I watched him doing that too. I was surprised at myself now, because at that time I could hardly bear to look at anyone eating or drinking. But he did it with such care that I forgot my nausea. Or how should I describe it: He did it with a full awareness of what he did, and this transformed an everyday act into something meaningful. He took in each individual grain of rice, presenting it to himself with a grateful smile.

With anyone else I would have gotten up and run away, I would have seen his grinding jaws as a threat, his chomping teeth as a danger. I found it horrific, how one mouthful after another slipped in and down into his digestive system. I was gulping, without thinking about it. The inner compulsion to protect myself above all was a mystery I avoided solving. Better not to think about it.

As soon as he had finished eating, he became a normal salaryman. He spread open the newspaper, read the sports section first. The Giants*, printed in bold, had pulled off a triumphant win. He nodded in agreement as his finger traveled along the lines. A ring. So he was married. A married Giants fan. Once again he lit a cigarette. Then another and another, as the smoke enveloped him.

10

The park had grown smaller due to his presence. It consisted of just two benches, his and mine, separated by a few paces. When would he get up and go? The sun had traveled towards the west. It was cooling down. He folded his arms. The newspaper lay open on his knees. A gaggle of schoolchildren came tripping noisily over the grass. Two old ladies were discussing their ailments. That’s life, said one, you are born to die. He had fallen asleep. Heavy-headed. The newspaper fluttered to the ground. It can end at any moment, I heard, sometimes I have no feeling at all inside.

In sleep his face relaxed. Silver strands hung on his forehead, beneath his eyelids one dream chased another. Twitching thigh muscle. I felt something, as thin as the thread of saliva which hung from his open mouth. But the word for it was missing. Only now does it come to me. Sympathy. Or the rash impulse to cover him up.

When he eventually awoke he looked more tired than before.

11

Six o’clock.

He pulled his tie tighter. The park filled with the sounds of the approaching evening. A mother called out: Come, we’re going home. The gentle sound as she summoned them home, as if tugging at their navels. He brushed the hair off his forehead, yawned, and stood up. The briefcase was in his right hand, and he waited for one undecided second. What for? He disappeared, a gray back, behind one of the trees. I watched him until he had completely disappeared, and it must have been in that moment, in the short moment when I lost sight of him, that I sighed like him.

And so what. I shook myself. I shook him off. What connection did I have with someone I’d never see again? I was overcome by the old nausea. Unbearable, how I had meddled in the fate of a stranger. As if it had anything to do with me. Full of the old disgust I shook him off my hands and feet. As I’ve said: I had no idea. That evening, as I went to bed, the covers rising in waves, that evening I hadn’t the slightest idea why, shortly before going under, I should see his face crumbling away on the wall. I waded in the waters of my ignorance. The moon shone through the gap in the curtains.

12

I had not forgotten him when I made my way to the park a few days later. In my dreams he had appeared to me by turns as a grain of rice, a cigarette, a baseball bat, a necktie. The last image was blurred: a man in a room with no walls. It grew fainter with each step, then I extinguished it.

Reaching my bench, I was relieved to find his empty. Where he had sat, there was no trace of him remaining. A sanitation crew was emptying the trash bins. The cigarette butts had already been swept up and dumped into a plastic bag. There were no flakes of ash left to remind me of him. The park was just as big as it had been before. A dewdrop sparkled on one of the blades of grass that grew out of the gravel here and there. I bent down and found it warm from the morning sun. When I got up again he had suddenly appeared, as on the previous day.

I recognized him by his walk. Tilting a little. As if he wanted to avoid someone. That’s how people walk who are accustomed to moving through teeming masses. He wore the same suit, the same shirt, the same tie. The briefcase, swinging. He sat down, crossed his legs, waited, leaned back. Sighed. The same sigh. Blew smoke rings from his nose and mouth. To try to put him out of my mind from now on was futile. He was there, had gotten inside of me, had become a person of whom I could say: I recognize you.

13

He had a piece of bread with him. He unwrapped it carefully, tore it into smaller and smaller pieces, shaped them into little balls and scattered them in front of the cooing pigeons. For you, I heard him murmur. And when he finished: Kish, kish. White feathers swirled all around him. One landed on his head. It was caught up in his slicked back hair and gave him a playful air. If he had sat there in a t-shirt and shorts, you could have taken him for a child. Even the boredom that soon overwhelmed him was that of a child. He rocked restlessly to and fro. Ground his heels into the earth. Puffed out his cheeks. Let the air slowly escape.

I was forced to think about the persistent eternity of a day that had just begun, stretching endlessly ahead. The certainty that it would pass was nothing compared to the pale melancholy of its passing, and melancholy, I considered, was the word written on both our foreheads. It connected us. We met inside it.

In the park he was the only salaryman. In the park I was the only hikikomori*. Something was not quite right with us. He should really be in his office, in one of the high-rises, I should stick to my room, within four walls. We should not be here, or at least not pretend we belong here. High above us was a vapor trail. We should not look up, in the blue, blue sky. I puffed out my cheeks. Let the air slowly escape.

14

At midday others like him arrived. They came in small groups, their ties thrown over their shoulders, to the benches further to the side, and sat, each with his bento box, chatting happily together. At last a break, one of them laughed, at last we can stretch our legs. Others joined in on his laughter.

Why was he not with them? I speculated about it. Perhaps he was just traveling through and he’d missed his connection. Had to wait until. Or was just simply. I could not find an explanation.

His bento, this time it had rice balls, tempura, a seaweed salad. He separated the chopsticks, paused, stroked his eyes with the back of his hand, a surreptitious movement. His clenched jaw, I saw it, it was trembling. I was embarrassed to see he was weeping. It was a suppressed weeping, and I alone was his witness. The embarrassment continued: Who weeps in broad daylight? Who reveals himself to that extent? And not only to himself, but to me, the observer! He shouldn’t weep, not in front of me. He should be behind closed doors. He should know that. That weeping is a private matter. I shuddered at the memory of a squashed body on the asphalt. Dreadful. To stand nearby, dumb with shock. The white hand, strangely bent, pointed at me. Of all the bystanders, at me. I wanted to be blind. The sirens of the rescue vehicle blared at me. Never again, I swore to myself, would I share the pain of others. He should know that. That weeping and dying are private matters.

15

The sound of him clearing his throat. He pulled himself together. At first his chin quivered, then it became still and he didn’t blink. With a cigarette between his lips, he went behind the bushes. A zipper whizzed open and closed again, twigs crackled. I had seen too much. Even before he got back, I was on my feet and had run away. Out of the park, beyond the intersection, past Fujimoto’s general store. Home. Into my room. The click of the lock. I was in a safe place. As dust whirled, I drew the curtains shut.

The next morning I slept longer than usual. I heard the alarm clock ringing next door, stayed in bed, went to sleep again. I dreamed of an invisible thread robbing me of air. I finally woke up gasping. Nothing had happened. Guided by this principle — nothing had happened — and its corollaries — nothing happens, nothing will ever happen — I went on my way.

As I entered the park he sat bent over his newspaper. Beside him his empty bento box. He was snoring. Spread on his knees, the Giants and the secret of their success, I read, creeping past him. He had undone his tie. It dangled loose round his neck. Hair crumpled at the back. I gave in. And that too was a decision. To give in, and give him, sleeping there, a name. It had gone that far, I gave him a name. Not Honda. Not Yamada. Not Kawaguchi. I simply called him Necktie. The name suited him. Redandgray.

16

So, Necktie.

It is the tie that wears you, not the other way around. Later that was a joke between us. The tie wears you. At which he smiled, then laughed, a great roar broke out. You are right. It’s a mistake to think that I’m the one who wears it. I don’t wear anything, nothing at all. At which point he broke off abruptly, then fell silent, stayed silent. If I could have foreseen this silence, I would have given him a different name. Yet it was worth it, for the sake of his laugh, the laughter that preceded the silence. He laughed much too seldom.

The name binds me to him. Like the vague sympathy beforehand, I began to feel a vague responsibility. To be with him, not to leave him alone. It’s grotesque to feel responsibility for a person about whom you could no longer just say: I would recognize him again. Rather: I know him. I know how he breathes, when he sleeps. The name entangled me. I no longer felt the freedom to simply get up and leave. That a name should possess such power.

17

Two weeks passed. He appeared every Monday, exactly at nine, every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. He only stayed away on weekends. I missed him then. I had gotten so used to his presence that in his absence my presence in the park seemed somehow pointless. Without him and the questions he posed, I was a question mark with no purpose. There it is on a sheet of white paper, questioning the void.

Once, on a cloudy Friday in June, he was just about to nod off when it began to drizzle. He sat up, startled, stuck his newspaper over his head, whereas I, fortunately prepared, opened my umbrella, drew in my legs, and huddled under the protective shelter. First it dripped, then the drops soon turned into ribbons. He extended his hands into the rain, let the paper fall, closed his eyes. I watched as the water collected in his hands. He had formed them into a bowl. Plip-plop, it sprinkled on him. I was surprised. No salaryman likes to sit out in the rain. The park all around was indistinct and blurry. People scurrying everywhere. Nobody who is healthy sits out in the rain. Completely absorbed, already soaked to the bone, he seemed to experience no greater joy than to get wet like that. I stared transfixed at his happy face. He opened his eyes. He looked at me unexpectedly through the rain. I jumped up. I hadn’t counted on that. Not with this unexpected, knowing look. I am not alone, it said, you are there. Then he closed his eyes again.

18

I had fallen out of my anonymity, out of my cocoon. But that’s not quite right. His glance and the recognition he shined on me had merely illuminated the space around me a little. In the mornings he nodded to me. I nodded back. In the evenings he raised his hand as he left. I raised mine. A silent understanding. You are here. I am here. We both have the right to simply be here.

What changed between us was just one thing. I guessed it. Since he had seen me, I had become an image within him. Now he had a conception of me, and his daily greeting related to the image he had of me. He regarded it. Quietly. His look was not invasive. It was stored in his memories. He remembered a day by the sea, with fine sand, rough dune grass; he remembered his father’s beard, hard stubble on his chin, a certain light, how it fell on his wife’s back one morning in late autumn, a smile in a shop window, by chance, the warm fur of a cat that snuggled up against him. He had thousands of memories, thousands of images, and now, since he had noticed me, I was one of them.

I let it happen. I offered him my profile, held still, so he could absorb it. Looked over at him as well. Absorbed him further within me. So out of our minimal acquaintance grew a minimal friendship.

19

To speak with one another would still at this point in time have been going too far. There was a frontier, the gravel path. Here my bench, there — his. Between them were blades of grass, a rolling ball, a child tumbling after it.

I had practiced forgetting how to speak for two years. Granted, I had not succeeded. The language I had learned permeated me, and even when I was silent, my silence was eloquent. I spoke inner monologues, spoke incessantly into the void. But the sound of my voice had become alien to me. At night I sometimes woke bathed in sweat from a nightmare, only to find it continuing in the hoarse Aah forced from my belly, my lungs, my throat. Who is that shouting there, I asked myself, and fell asleep again. Wandered through a landscape in which every sound echoed as it was uttered. The last sentence I had spoken had been: I can no longer. Period. A vibrating period. After that something snapped shut. The effort it would cost to go on talking from where I had stopped was outweighed by the futility of expressing the inexpressible in words.

My room was like a cave, as always. I had grown up here. I had essentially lost my innocence here. I mean, growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling wildly in my heart. At thirteen it was too late. At fourteen. At fifteen. Puberty a battle, I lost myself by the end. I hated my face in the mirror, the growing, the surging within. The scars on my hand all stem from the attempts to make it better. Countless mirrors smashed. I didn’t want to be a man who thinks he is winning. Didn’t want to fit into any suit. Not to be a father who tells his son: You must work. Father’s voice. Mechanical. He worked. When I looked at him I saw a future in which I would slowly, too slowly, lose my life. Nothing works, I replied. And then: I can no longer. This last sentence was my maxim. The motto that defined me.

20

Defined in that way I was sitting on my bench when he suddenly reappeared, exactly at nine. It was a Thursday, I remember: He arrived hunched over, as if under a heavy load. I thought he’d aged overnight, with wrinkles on his neck as he nodded to me. So there you are. I nodded back. And more than that: I nodded an invitation. To my own amazement I nodded to him, who had aged, and even nodded again when he came towards me, warily, across the frontier, and offered me a cigarette.

Ohara Tetsu. He bowed slightly. Hajimemashite.* You don’t smoke? That’s good. Better not to start at all. It’s an addiction. I need it, you see. He sat down beside me, his briefcase between us. The clicking of the lighter, he puffed away. One of those things I can’t stop. Again I nodded. I’ve tried everything. No use. Can’t get away from it. Don’t have the willpower. I’m sure you know about that. A husky voice, he coughed quietly. In the firm, he continued, everyone smokes. It’s the stress, it never stops. In the firm. He bent down, stubbed out the cigarette. We spent the rest of the morning in silence on our bench.

Now and then someone came by. A mother pushing a stroller. A man limping. A group of truants in crumpled uniforms. The earth was turning, birds were flying. A butterfly landed for a few seconds on the bench across from me. Sitting together we watched as it swooped away. A faint recognition that from now on there was no going back.

21

Kyōko made this, he said, as he unpacked his bento at midday. Karaage* with potato salad. My wife. She’s a wonderful cook. Want some? No? He smiled in embarrassment. You know, she gets up every morning at six o’clock to prepare my bento. For thirty-three years. Every morning at six. And the best thing about it: It tastes wonderful! He rubbed his belly. Almost too good, he hesitated, for someone like me. But I’m lucky, aren’t I? And with that he started eating.

In my inner eye I saw Kyōko, his wife, in her nightgown standing in the kitchen. Sizzling oil. A fleck of marinade on her sleeve. She chops and stirs. Peels. Cuts. Salts. The whole house is filled with the sound of chopping and stirring. Of peeling. Cutting. Salting. He wakes up. Still half asleep he thinks: I’m lucky. He thinks it with a sadness almost unbearable in its infinity: I have damned good luck. He gets up. Goes into the bathroom. Bends over the sink and turns on the cold, very cold, water. Puts his face in it, his hair, his neck. Turns the tap further. Comes up. Turns it off. Stays under. Hears the glugging in the drain. Turns it on. Off. On. Off. Watches how the water separates into drops, the drops into dribbles. A smear of toothpaste on the edge of the sink. White on white. He pushes his finger in and — Kyōko doesn’t know. A faint burp. He spoke as if to himself: Kyōko doesn’t know that I come here. I haven’t told her. Stretched syllables: I ha-ven’t to-ld her that I lo-st my jo-b.

22

The pause afterwards. I had become a confidant. As soon as it was uttered, his secret made us allies. It weighed on my feet, and it was impossible now to get up and go. He had confided in me, me alone. I regarded my shoes, which pinched. Shapeless and worn out. He stretched his heels out half a meter in front of him. Black leather, polished smooth. Father’s shoes, it went through my head. I wonder whether he too sometimes has a longing to confide in someone. With some bitterness I noticed: I knew less about him than about the person whose name I had only discovered barely three hours ago. One more reason to stay sitting beside him and to nod to him over his briefcase and beyond.

It was pretty strange. He continued speaking. It’s not that I didn’t want to tell Kyōko. No, I wanted to. But then I couldn’t bring myself to. Something held me back. Habit, maybe. Gray smoke escaped from his mouth. The habit of getting up early and washing my face. She puts on my tie. As I leave I call out: Have a good day. She calls out: You too. She waves goodbye. At the first bend in the path I turn back towards her. Her figure in front of the house. Like a fluttering flag. I could run back. But there’s the bus coming. I get in. It goes to the station. Onto the express train. To the A. Into the subway. To the O. In its way, it works. I don’t. He was still laughing. It works.

23

And you? What brings you here? I shrugged my shoulders. No idea? Hm, you’re still young. Eighteen? I froze. Nineteen? Twenty? Incredible, so young. You have everything before you. No past. He sighed. Incredible, to have been so young once myself. Although what does that mean? There is only one age for anyone. I was and am, will always be fifty-eight. But you. Be careful what age you end up. It sticks to you. It seals you shut. The age you choose is like glue, it sets around you. This wisdom is not mine, you know. I got it from a book. A movie. I’m not sure. You notice things. It’s incredible. Your whole life you notice things.

As he read the newspaper I considered what he had said. Yet the more I considered it, the What escaped me and instead, the How took hold of me. The weary note that gave the words a bitter taste. Whether young or incredible, both had, the way he said them, acquired a stringent, heavy tone, and both were, as I had heard them, one and the same word. That’s how you speak, I thought, when you have been silent for a long time. All words are the same to you then and you can hardly understand how one differs from another. Whether glue or life, it didn’t make all that much difference.

24

His sleep came suddenly. On page two of the sports section it caught him. Leaning back he’d dozed off, his head bowed. His palms open over a picture of the Giants baseball team. A network of lines. Crossing the heartline. Grimy black print on his right forefinger. Again he looked like a child. Harmless. Vulnerable in his innocence. And again I felt the need to cover him, a natural desire to protect him somehow from harm.

When he woke up it was already past five thirty. Yawning, he stretched and wiped the dust from his eyes. A few more minutes, he said, blinking, then the day will be done. No overtime today. He folded up the newspaper. The nicest thing about working is the coming home. My first words when I come through the door, standing inside the entrance. It smells of garlic and ginger. Freshly steamed vegetables. I stand in the entrance, savor this smell and say: The nicest thing about working is the coming home. Kyōko calls me an idiot. From her it sounds so gentle. No offense meant. Do you understand. She could call me a lot worse things. A liar, a deceiver. And yet it would be with the same tenderness, I really hope, as when she calls me an idiot. Although. I’d rather not know. So long as there is hope, I’d rather not know how it would be if I told her the truth. What’s the point after all? She deserves better than the truth, so much better.

25

Five to six. He straightened his tie. Not too fast. Rather as if he had to restrain himself. A horse in harness, pulling at the reins. Again and again he shook his hand above him, pushed back the shirtsleeve, looked at his watch. I’m going now. Three minutes to six. No, wait a bit. Two minutes to six. Now, really. One minute to six. So then? Till tomorrow? I nodded. He spoke quietly, almost too faint to hear: Thank you so much. A last glance at his wrist. Exactly six. He got up with a jerk. I imitated him. We stood eye to eye, the same height. Goodbye. My voice. After two years of silence it was as translucent as glass. Goodbye. That was it. A crisp conjunction of consonants and vowels. Once more I was mute. Then it shot out of me: My name is Taguchi Hiro. I am twenty years old. Twenty is the age I have chosen. I bowed, awkwardly, stayed in the bow till he had gone. A strange satisfaction: I can still do it. Introduce myself to someone. I have not forgotten. Even though my name might dissolve on my tongue.

26

As I walked home, I imagined how his story would unfold. Perhaps it was enough that he had confided in me, and he would go home and speak up. But perhaps not. Perhaps he would delay it until the last savings were exhausted. And perhaps that was what he was waiting for: That Kyōko would figure it out. That she would wake up one morning with an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right. She would start to investigate, find him out, put him on the spot. And perhaps we really were like each other in that way. We watched as everything slid away from us, and felt some relief at not being able to set things straight. Perhaps that was the reason we’d encountered each other. To simultaneously and irrevocably realize that it was impossible for us now to change what has happened to us. So perhaps his story was my story too. It concerned what he had neglected, what could not now be changed.

So many people going home. So many shoes in step, I was out of step. There ahead of me under the street lamp I saw Father coming from work, past a flowering bush, his gaze on the ground. He did not see me. I had quickly hidden behind a vending machine. I wanted to spare us, him and me, the pain of meeting outside on the street and not knowing what to say. Only when he had gone around the corner did I feel sorry that I had not wished him good evening, at the very least.

27

A lovely day, isn’t it? When the sky is so blue, one would love to drive out to the seaside. Too bad, really. He looked down at himself, shaking his head. I am free and yet I am not. But tomorrow is another day. He sat down. Sighed. So, Taguchi Hiro. I thought you were mute and somehow that would have been alright by me. Not really of course, if you see what I mean. He scratched his chin. In the green of the trees behind him, a runner flung her arms in the air. She trotted on, wearing a red headband. From the street came a gentle honking. The sound of cars rising and falling away in the surrounding bushes, staying outside the innermost circle that contained us.

He picked up where he had left off. Really it would be alright if Kyōko found out that I come here. It’s a comfort to me, the idea that she may know, instinctively, in her heart; it would make her, if she knew, my accomplice, did it for my sake. Sad, isn’t it. The idea that she would play along, willingly. Early this morning, when she tied my tie, she said, and she said it seriously: If only one were crazy enough to do everything differently. To break out for once, she said and drew a breath. That would have been the moment to admit to her that I’ve been outside for a long time. But then she finished tying the tie and what remained was only the shame. I’m ashamed of my shame. How much effort I use, to conceal it from myself and from Kyōko. It’s like this: it’s not just my job that I’ve lost. The biggest loss is self-respect. That’s where the descent begins. When you stand at the end of a crowded platform, see the lights of the approaching train and find yourself calculating the exact moment when a leap onto the rails would mean certain death. You take a step forward. You think Now! Now! Now! And then: Nothing! Such a dark Nothing! You’re not even up to that. The train rolls in. It’s full of people. You see your reflection in the windows as they glide by and you don’t recognize yourself anymore.

28

So! He drew himself up. That’s the end. I talk and talk. You must think I can’t stop. Enough about me. Now it’s your turn. Tell me something.

What?

Whatever. The first thing that comes to you. I’ll listen.

And then he leaned back and actually seemed to have nothing else in mind but to listen.

Where to start? I was looking for something that would be worthy of what he had said. It’s difficult, I said. The first thing that occurs to me is that it is difficult to tell something. Every person is an accumulation of stories. But I. I hesitated. I am frightened of accumulating stories. I’d like to be one in which nothing happens. Given that you throw yourself in front of the train in the early morning. What is the use of what I’m telling today? And does it have any validity? As I said. It’s difficult. The first thing that occurs to me is: We are skating on melting ice.

A fine sentence. He repeated it. We are skating on melting ice. Is it yours?

No, not mine. Kumamoto’s. I swallowed. Kumamoto Akira.

The words flooded out of me. I was a dry riverbed where hard rain falls after years of drought. The ground is quickly soaked through and then there is no stopping. The water rises and rises, way over the banks, pulls down trees and bushes, laps over the land. I felt a release with every word I spoke.

29

Kumamoto wrote poems. His school notebooks were full of them. Always on the quest for the perfect poem, his obsession, he sat with a pencil stuck behind his ear, completely withdrawn from the world, a poet through and through, a poem in himself.

We were both in our final year. Both under the same pressure to pass. He found it easier than I did. Or rather, he pretended to. What’s the point of learning, he joked, when my path is mapped out. Unmistakably. The footprints that have marked it before me. My great grandfather, my grandfather, my father. All lawyers who have paved the way for me. I don’t have to learn anything. They’ve already done it for me. I just have to regurgitate and spit it out afterwards. That’s what I owe them. Look! He showed me his notebooks. Torn up. Father thinks society doesn’t need misfits. Well, he’s right. I just can’t help it. I’ve spent hours taping it back together.

Under one strip of adhesive tape I read: Hell is cold.

The most perfect line, he said, that he had ever created.

Hellfire is not a warming fire.

I am freezing beside it.

No place is as cold as this burning desert.

Thick pencil lines. Scored in the thin paper. In some places a bit was missing. It doesn’t matter.

Kumamoto beat his chest three times. It’s all in there. My own requiem.

30

At first I did not understand him. I understood him just as little as the poems he wrote. I read them and understood the words that formed them. I understood hell and fire and ice. But the abyss they described, to understand that required a way of reading into the depths, which I shied away from because I realized I was already down there and didn’t want to admit it. Anyway. If I had understood him then, perhaps some things would have happened differently, but who knows? Who knows what good something is, and whether it counts that it’s good? As far as I remember no word that Kumamoto used was ever good.

Yet we became friends. Good friends. I admired his single-mindedness. A light emanated from him, showing someone who knew where he was going and that there, where he was going, it would be terribly lonely. He couldn’t have cared less about what other people thought. He laughed with those who laughed at him. So with his father he said: You’re quite right. Only I can’t do anything about it. He said it with a wink.

What he admired in me?

I don’t know. Perhaps that I believed in him absolutely. I trusted in him and his cheerfulness. I trusted that here was someone who would always stay young, and who, when I was dead, would still be there, with snow-white hair, dreaming of the perfect poem.

31

Usually we met in the evening. He liked the twilight. He said the light was sad and happy at the same time. It was mourning for the day that had passed and anticipating the night to come. We walked aimlessly in the streets. Kumamoto, trailing behind me, surrounded by the smell of an unfamiliar landscape. It smelled of soil frozen hard centimeters down, of unusual plants held hidden beneath. When they shot up, what would come to the surface?

The answer was an intersection.

Kumamoto stopped. Above him an advertisement for shampoo pulsed in neon letters. Men and women ran in wide arcs around us. We were an island in the middle of surging waves. An embrace, and suddenly Kumamoto held me tight. With both hands he gripped my arms. I’ve got it, he cried, there is no perfect poem! Its perfection arises precisely from its imperfection. Do you see? I did not want to see. He, into my ear: I have an image in my head. I see it clearly before me. Its colors are glaring and harsh in their brightness. But as soon as I rush to capture it, it explodes, and what I write down are separate bits that don’t form a whole. Do you see it now? It’s as if I tried to glue together a broken vase, piece by piece. But the shards are so fragmentary that I don’t know which goes with which or how I fit them together, there’s always one fragment left over. But this fragment! It makes the poem. It alone gives meaning. His voice was feverish: My requiem should be a vase with water shooting through the glue in its cracks.

He let go of me. I swayed. I felt the imprint of his fingers on my arms.

You’re sick, I whispered.

He replied: You are too.

It was a warning. I heard it and ignored it.

32

Days later, in physics class, Kumamoto passed me a note. It said: Tonight at eight. At the intersection. I want to put it right. I still have the note. I know exactly where in my room, which drawer it’s in. Under an ancient fossil with an insect trapped inside. Now and then I take it out and read, word for word, like a prayer: Tonight at eight. At the intersection. I want to put it right.

His illness.

I believe that was definitely his intention. He wanted and wanted and wanted. To put it right. He knew he could not honor what he owed his father, and he knew that his good spirits would not prevail forever. You can’t go on maintaining forever: I can’t do anything about it. At a certain age, which he didn’t want to reach, you must see that you can always do something about it. This was his illness: Too young he recognized that nothing is perfect, and he was too young to draw the right conclusions from it. Since this was my illness too, perhaps he wanted to warn me.

When I left the house that evening the air was damp and clammy. Like a wet cloth wrapped around your body. I was tense, ran, the asphalt soft under my feet. Already from a distance I spotted him. He had turned his face towards me. A searing look, at me. Raised his hand, called out. His mouth opened and closed again. I didn’t understand him. Eclipsed by the noise in the street, his call died away as he, without turning around, plunged like a swimmer into the traffic, headlong before my eyes. The outstretched hand. Squealing brakes. The hand still raised for seconds in the heavy air. Then it flopped down. Someone shouted: An accident! Panting, I reached the spot. Sharp elbows in my side. I burrowed through the rows of passersby. Kumamoto, covered in blood. His hand, white and thin. The howling of sirens. I stepped back. Blind. Blinded. Was pushed away, far away. Hey, you! You alright? I sank down onto the pavement. Beside me was a torn garbage bag. Rotting meat. I lost consciousness. When I came to again, they had already taken him away. Above me an advertisement for face masks. You alright? I stood up and walked.

33

I walked home, legs trembling. Each person I met had his eyes. Kumamoto everywhere. Thick bodies, bones inside, organs, nothing permanent. His death — Was he actually dead? — had given me x-ray vision. I remember the woman walking in front of me. She was beautiful. Delicately built. I looked at her back and watched, breathing in and out, her spine swinging to and fro as she walked. This spine, I understood all of a sudden, it is moving towards death. I remember the man who ran up to her, took her by the arm, kissed her hand. He too, ashes and dust. My parents. I remember. Mother, a skeleton, was sitting in front of the television. Father, a skeleton, was drinking frothy beer. Ah, there you are at last. Bare skulls eyed me from staring hollows. What’s to become of you, I heard. Running around late at night. Have you forgotten? Your future! Father bit into a piece of raw sausage. Tearing teeth. I rushed across the hall. My shadow after me, into my room. The door fell quietly shut.

34

Here, take a sip. You must drink something.

The tie, red and gray stripes, summoned me back to the park.

Take it slowly, he said, that’s better.

I was glad he didn’t say anything more than that.

What can you say, I continued. What can you say when you’ve run out of words? After the door shut behind me, I felt a speechless emptiness. I lay down, speechless, ran in my thoughts towards the intersection again. Kumamoto’s mouth. What had he shouted? Again and again I tried to read it from his lips, again and again I tried and failed. Was it a word? A word like freedom? Or life? Or happiness? Was it a no? Or a yes? A simple greeting? Perhaps: Farewell? Was it my name? Or: Father? Perhaps: Mother? Or something of no importance and it was pointless to want to know.

I spent the rest of the night in a trance. I didn’t sleep, yet I slept the sleep of a sleepwalker. As soon as I closed my eyes I saw the hand, in the dark chamber of my memory, Kumamoto’s hand, how it emerged, quite alone, rose from the black asphalt. It had pointed at me. At me of all the bystanders. And what upset me most about it was the sudden flush of shame, for this: I don’t know him. He doesn’t belong to me. I am happy to be pushed away. From him, who lies there, suffering. The shame had passed as quickly as it had come but it was no use pretending after the event that it was a natural reaction. It was there, I had felt it, it was always there, and with it the anger, so: Why had Kumamoto done something in public when it concerned only himself and himself alone? Why had he forced this cowardly shame on me? Never again, I swore, would I be dependent on someone else. Never again tangled in someone else’s fate. I wanted to enter a timeless room, where no one would ever startle me. Life would continue outside. I wanted to block it out, to hide away from it, not accept that it was happening to me. A fragment had penetrated my consciousness and made sense of Kumamoto’s requiem.

35

The next morning I stayed in bed. Nothing unusual. I’d often skipped school in the past. It had happened before that I’d stayed at home for three, four days, and because I made clever excuses, I’d been left in peace. The main thing was to bring home good grades. I made up for the lost hours thanks to my last reserves of zeal.

This time, however, it was different.

A week passed by. My parents were worried. A week later they were angry. A week later despairing. Despairing for a long time. Then angry again. Finally, worried. And so it went on, up and down, until I could no longer distinguish whether the weeks had turned into months, or the months into years. I had bolted the door to my room. Futile knocking, I did not answer. According to whether my parents were worried or angry or despairing, their knocking had a gray or white or black tone. It colored the silence, which absorbed me and resembled the silence of a dark forest. You walk along a winding path. Swaying treetops, the sun falling diagonally through the branches. In its beams shimmered spider webs, delicate designs of dreamy threads. You think: How quiet it is here. And recognize in the next moment that you are mistaken. The silence of the forest is an imbued silence. It is filled with the voices of the birds, the crackle of rotting wood. The beetles whirr. A tired leaf spins down. Like music the silence murmurs, like a song without beginning and end. This song is the origin of all other songs. In my room I realized: Silence has a body. It is alive. The dripping of the tap from the kitchen. Mother’s furry slippers. The ringing of the telephone. The fridge starts humming. Father’s slurping. Through the blocked-up keyhole I could hear what was outside breathing and was relieved not to have to mix my own breath with it. An itching on my scalp. I felt my hair growing.

36

Did he get in touch again?

Who?

Kumamoto.

No, I shook my head: I don’t know what happened to him, and to be honest I really don’t want to find out.

Why not?

He has written his poem. Do you see? Now I am writing mine.

And if he were still alive…

… yet I’ve spent two years in my room. The last two years of my youth — given away! Given to him, who must be, I can’t imagine it any other way, dead to the bottom of his soul.

May I read it? Your poem?

It’s not finished yet.

But there it is.

Where?

On the back of your hand.

So many scars. I hid them in a flash.

37

Root vegetables, soba noodles, two korokke croquettes.

The few crumbs that were left he scattered in front of the pigeons, which had gathered around us flapping their wings. He stamped his feet. They whirred away. Came back with ruffled neck feathers. Forgetting that he had just shooed them away. The poor things, he murmured. It must be awful. No memory. But perhaps not as awful as you imagine. I mean. If you were to forget everything. Wouldn’t you forgive everything as well? Forgive yourself and others? Would you not be free of regret and guilt? An electrical crackling, he flicked an invisible fleck from his trousers with his sleeve. No, not so, that would be too easy. To forgive, to be really free, you have to remember, day after day.

Do you want to tell me more?

Yes, I’d like to forgive. The sentence came out, just like that.

I am not a typical hikikomori, I continued. Not like one of those in the books and articles that are put by my door from time to time. I don’t read manga comics, I don’t spend the day in front of the television and the night in front of the computer. I don’t build model airplanes. Video games make me feel sick. Nothing can distract me from the attempt to protect me from myself. From my name, my inheritance. I am an only son. From my body, whose needs have not ceased — to maintain it. From my hunger, from my thirst. In the two years since I withdrew, I was overcome by my body three times a day. Then I crept to the door, opened it a crack, picked up the tray my mother had put there for me. If no one was at home I crept out to the bathroom. I washed myself. Strange, this need to wash myself. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. It had grown long. A glance in the mirror: It is still me. I suppressed the cry sitting in my throat. I wanted to protect myself from it too. From my voice, from my language. The language, in which I now maintain that I don’t know whether a typical hikikomori really exists. Just as there are all sorts of rooms, there are all sorts of hikikomoris, who, for all sorts of reasons, have retreated into themselves in all sorts of ways and means. While one, whom I’ve read about, spends his vanishing youth practicing the same tune over and over again on a three-string guitar, the next, I’ve read about him too, assembles his shell collection. At night, when it is dark, he runs down to the sea, his hood over his head, and returns home only as the light dawns.

38

I’m lucky to have been left in peace up till now. For there are some who have been enticed out. They’re promised reintegration. Recovery too. Work. Success. With this faint promise on their lips they are led back step by step into society, that great commonality. They are accustomed to pleasing it. They are harmonized. But I am lucky. They haven’t reckoned with me. They haven’t sent a social worker to sit by my door and go on at me for hours and hours. The books and newspaper articles, Father’s aftershave, Mother’s fingerprint on a little ball of rice, this slight life is just enough, just tolerable. It is granted to me. That is my good fortune. To be part of a family, that is granted to me, to enclose me. Out of shame, mind you. Nobody should find out that I am a hikikomori. The neighbors have been told I’m on an exchange program in America, and now that I am going out again, they’ve been told that I came back, need time to get used to home. It’s my luck to be part of a family that’s ashamed of me.

And perhaps it is this luck which characterizes a hikikomori most of all. The happiness of being freed for an indeterminate time from events and effects, from the interplay of causes and effects. Without an earthly aim before your eyes and without the need to reach one, to remain in a space where nothing happens. A ball lying still, off to the side and not colliding with any others. As you cut yourself off, you fall out of the dense web of contacts and relationships, and you are relieved at that, not to have to do that. This relief: You don’t have to make any further contribution. At last you admit you’re completely indifferent to the world.

39

It is not easy to have a hikikomori in the family. Especially not at the beginning. You know: There is the threshold, beyond it his room, where he is playing dead. He’s still living, you hear him sometimes, much too seldom, walking up and down. You put the food by the door and see how it disappears. You wait. Certainly he must go to the bathroom at some point, to the toilet. You wait in vain. The first time I only went out when I was sure that nobody would disturb my existence. My existence consisted of my absence. I was the floor cushion nobody sat on, the empty place at the table, the nibbled plum on the plate I put back out by the door. In that I was absent, I had violated the rule that says, you must be there, and if you are there, do something, achieve something.

Yet it is not particularly difficult to have a hikikomori in the family. The initial despair dissipates. You’re no longer in despair at his absence, rather you are desperately trying to conceal it. A shame, that. Our only son. People have begun to talk about us. Furtive glances at the Fujimotos. They whisper, I’m buying for three when I should really only buy for two. At least he has closed the curtains. Just imagine if anyone were to see him. You know what it was like with the Miyajimas. In the end nobody had a good word to say about them any more.

Father and Mother were in agreement: Name and reputation must be preserved at all costs. They argued a lot over who was to blame for my retreat and who was more guilty. They argued quietly, just quietly enough that the neighbors could not hear them. You spoiled him, was the implication. Or: You were never there for him. But regarding name and reputation, they were in agreement, and their agreement was to my advantage, for it allowed me to retreat further and further.

Only once did they try to get me out. At the highpoint of their despair they broke down the door with a crowbar. Father stormed in, he was beside himself. And if I have to beat you out! He raised his hand. Kumamoto’s. For seconds in the air. I recoiled. It whistled down. Struck the void. Sank ineffectually towards the floor. I said: I can no longer. Said it rather to myself. From then on I was left quite alone.

40

Were you listening?

Hmm.

Then he was silent. His silence did not validate what I said, or how. It was hmm, nothing more, and with the hmm the sun moved right across the sky. When we began to talk again, we spent time making small talk. The weekend. The weather. If it stays nice out we’ll drive to the sea tomorrow. Kyōko loves that. To drive somewhere.

Another hmm.

Then he fell asleep.

It occurred to me that I’d left out a lot. For example, I’d left out that Kumamoto sometimes called me his twin. More accurately: his soul mate. I’d left out that I missed him. I’d left out that Mother often cried about me. And that Father never forgot to push my pocket money under the door. I left out that it was really these omissions which lent my story its shape. Kumamoto had been right: You could write requiems, millions, about one and the same death, and yet each one said something different, according to what it omitted.

41

Saturday and Sunday slipped wearily by. Our parting was light-hearted. Well. Take care. See you. No embarrassment had arisen between us. And so I waited all the more impatiently for Monday morning. Would he come again? The question obsessed me. It rang like the clatter of the rails. Like a Now! Now! Now! And a bland announcement: traffic has been delayed. We thank you for your patience. Somebody whispers into his cell phone: Another one’s had it.

For the first time in ages I wanted some diversion. My parents had gone out, I saw the lights of their car as it pulled away from our home. As soon as they were gone I crept, even now still on tiptoe, out into the living room. I turned on the television. A cooking program. Again. A baseball game. I left it on while I went, now walking more firmly, from the living room to the bedroom, from bedroom to bathroom, from bathroom to guest room. A forlorn bed surrounded by boxes. Well-thumbed books. A teddy bear. Old toys. The familiar smell of things you once valued. The guest room had become a storage room. The last guest to sleep there was Mother’s friend, Aunt Sachiko. Visitors came less often and then only for a word at the door. The whole house seemed to be waiting for someone to arrive, to fill it with life. It was a sad house. To cheer it up I walked again from the guestroom to the bathroom, from bathroom to bedroom, from bedroom to living room and everywhere, wherever I wanted to, I left a mark, to tell it that there was a little bit of life in it yet. I shifted objects. By half a centimeter. Pressed an indentation into cushions and pillows. Exchanged one hand towel for another. And turned back the clocks by a minute. From the walls in the foyer photos from a distant past smiled down. I stopped by one of them. It showed the three of us in front of a fake backdrop. The Golden Gate Bridge. Above it a huge inflated moon. We had never been to San Francisco. I turned the photo around so it faced the wall.

42

And? Did you drive to the sea?

No. He tried to laugh, it failed. Kyōko thought I looked exhausted and should just sit and rest. She thought: Otherwise I would work myself to death. Typical of Kyōko, she knows me too well. She knows I am a man who finds it difficult to do nothing. Anyway I was like that once. But that was quite a while back.

Two months?

Yes. Approximately. Since I was let go, time is approximate. Yet I really don’t know how I spent it. It seems to me, I only worked, nothing but work, and in contrast to some others: gladly.

But then why are you here?

Towards the end, I couldn’t keep up. He spoke without looking at me, his face slightly turned to the side. In the firm I had begun to attract attention. Ten young heads. Among them mine, gray. Twenty hands. Among them mine, too slow. I was noticed as someone who was faltering. Even drinking after work, I’d slowed down. While the others drank until they fell over, I drank only half and still fell over. No pleasure when you’re lying there and don’t know how you’ll get up the following day. You begin to ask yourself all sorts of questions. You glance in the mirror and look away quickly. You avoid mentioning the word old. Yet it slips out, just when it doesn’t fit in. And you yourself are unfit, somehow you don’t fit in any more.

43

I stumbled, once. It was an accident. I was carrying a pile of papers into a colleague’s office. As if in slow motion. There was a cable. I saw it. Had one foot already safely over it. Caught the other one. The papers flew everywhere. I was surrounded by black numbers. One in red: Fifty-eight. They laughed at me. Ten neckties as my witnesses. Twenty eyes, one look. He’s a goner, whispered one, a goner.

My accident, the only big one that occurred in the thirty-five years I worked, set off a chain of mistakes and insecurity. I had stumbled in the truest sense of the word, and what slid away from me was far, far more than just a pile of papers. I watched myself. Something was wrong with me. I felt along my arms and legs. Ran tentatively up and down the corridors. Tried walking at one pace, then another. Bought shoes with non-slip soles. Only to discover: What I had lost was not the ability to walk in a straight line, but a kind of sprightly energy I used to take for granted. I couldn’t catch up with myself. I was limping along behind myself.

44

And this tiredness.

It came like the first snow in winter. Everything used to be yellow and red and blue, now it was white. And once everything had been a house, a tree or a dog, now it was a shapeless pile, and I didn’t know what lay underneath. The tiredness overwhelmed me. A lead weight. I would sit in the subway, on the way to work, and consider how I would manage to get up again. I stopped sitting down. One hand in the strap, I would stand upright, so that it wouldn’t defeat me. It was a battle against gravity. My eyelids would close. The darkness, after they closed, gained more and more power over me.

This treacherous tiredness.

Soon it invaded not only my limbs but also, could it really be, my brain. I understood what I had been assigned to do, and yet I did not. With a weight on my neck I balanced along a narrow line, and a typing error or a mark on my shirt was enough to tip me head over heels into the abyss. But I did not fall any more. I went to sleep. After thirty-five years, I must stress that, after thirty-five years, I fell asleep one Monday morning at my desk. It was not a brief sleep. No. No wading in gentle waters. More a dive into a fathomless sea. I was a shipwreck, eaten up by algae, and the fish swam in glittering shoals through my stomach.

45

When I was shaken awake, I knew: Now I am gone. In my mouth was the stale taste of a dream I couldn’t recall, and I almost wished I hadn’t been awakened from it.

Shortly afterwards I was let go.

Not efficient enough, they said.

I packed my things and threw them in the nearest garbage can. A weight was removed from me. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit that for a delicious moment I experienced nothing but relief. I wasn’t needed. I didn’t have to prove anything anymore. The feeling of having finally failed intoxicated me. It was the wild flare of a candle, its flame fed only by a vanishing remnant of wax. It knows it will soon fade away. And so it glows for one last time, brighter than ever before.

Where to go? Not home. I sat myself down in a bar not far from here, still feeling relieved, and staggered out five beers later. Mild spring air. Drifting clouds. At one of the corners I passed, a drunk was giving a speech on the state of the nation. A moist coughing and then he spat. As our eyes met he cried: My brother, where have you been? Revolted, I turned aside. He came after me. I was aware of his gaze on my back. He came closer to me. I sensed his hand. With all my strength I pushed him over, kicked at him as if I had lost my senses. He did not defend himself, and that infuriated me. He did not swear back at me. A baby, blabbering: Where have you been? I bent over him. He was blue in the face. My dear brother. His blabbering pursued me.

Only when I got home did the tiredness return. The knotty root in the driveway. Broken asphalt all around. I barely made it through the garden gate. Kyōko’s flower pots. A glove. Misshapen fingers. The key grated wearily in the lock. Tender echo: Where have you been? I stammered: The nicest part about working is the coming home.

You stupid fool, you.

It smelled of mushrooms and onions.

46

I have never betrayed Kyōko with another woman. I can state that honestly. No temptation was as strong as the promise I had given her.

Hashimoto, a friend from my student days, used to mock me, saying I was a coward. He himself, a married man, missed no opportunity, and there were plenty of opportunities, for he was good-looking and also well paid. I marveled at his ability to cruise from one body to the next. He said it like that: I’m cruising. How do you do that, not let it show? To which he said: It’s no big deal. It starts with the first lie. You plant it. Into the system. It puts down roots. In this first stage of its growth a tug would be enough to pull it up. There follows the second lie. The roots grip deeper. The third, the fourth, the fifth lie. Now it would need a shovel. The sixth. The seventh. It would take an excavator. The root system has branched widely. An underground web. You don’t see it. Only if you tried to lift it out, you would see it from the hole left behind. The eighth, the ninth, the tenth lie. At some point the system is completely undermined. If you attempted to dig the roots out of the ground, the whole surface would crack open.

Hashimoto is still cruising. Just recently I ran into him in a store. I asked: How are you? He said: No cracks! His laugh was unworried. He had preserved his youthful vigor. And your wife? There she is, over there. He pointed to a group of women rummaging through items on a table. The one with the scarf. I was shocked. A face destroyed. She was a hundred, no, several hundred years old. What happened? He laughed, showing his white teeth: Life! Man! Life! A fraction too loud. I watched them as they disappeared up the escalator, he upright, she bent, a mismatched pair. Their backs turned to each other, each in their own world.

47

What I’d like to say. The lie takes its toll. Once you’ve lied you find yourself in a different place. You live under one roof, stay in the same rooms, sleep in the same bed, turn over under one blanket. Yet the lie eats right through the middle. It’s a moat. Unbridgeable. It causes one home to break into two. And who knows whether it does the same to the truth?

I, who have never betrayed Kyōko, feel as though I have a lover. Her name is Pretense. She is not beautiful, but she’s pretty enough. Long legs. Red lips. Wavy hair. I’m crazy about her. Although I don’t want to start a new life with her, I am building castles in the air with her. I take her to the most expensive restaurants in town. I feed her. I rent an apartment. I support her. No matter the cost. She satisfies me and my masculinity. By her side I am young and strong again. She murmurs: The world is at your feet. She believes in me and my abilities, and I believe in her belief and allow myself to be surrounded by this flattery. I am a contented adventurer.

At home I float in a bubble. It is so thin that one touch would puncture it. So I take care not to be touched. I sit in front of the television and watch the news. If Kyōko asks me what it was like at work, or why I haven’t done any overtime recently, or whether I have spoken to the boss about this or that, I say: Shh. Not now. She repeats the question. Fainter now. I say: Later. Please. She shrugs her shoulders. I dare to breathe out. The bubble in which I float barely vibrates with the expulsion of breath.

It is a decision.

And with that he unpacks his bento box. Rice with salmon and pickled vegetables again. I had resolved to behave as if. For that was my promise: That everyday life, our everyday life, would become our refuge. It has to be preserved. To the end.

Finally he looked at me. Winked: Kyōko’s bento boxes simply taste too good for me to miss.

48

Do you have any children?

No. He slumped a little. No. Why?

I was just thinking, you would be a good father.

Me?

Yes, you.

What makes you think that?

Because you sometimes look like a child yourself. When you eat, for instance. You do it like a child who is not aware of anything but what he is doing at the time.

And that would make me a good father?

Well, let’s say: a real father.

He bit back a word.

That girl there, for instance. Do you see her? She’s moving her finger through the puddle all the time. She’s drawing something in it. Sees the picture, how it disappears. Starts again from the beginning. Paints nothing but pictures that disappear. An aimless game, yet a happy one. The girl is constantly laughing. I often ask myself why we can’t do that anymore, be aimlessly happy. Why, when you are big, you sit in narrow, low-ceilinged rooms, wherever you are, at most you go from one room to another, but as a child you were in a room without walls. For that’s how I remember it: When I was small, I took refuge in life in the moment. Neither the past nor the present could affect me in any way, and how lovely if that were so now. If you could work, not for the sake of the result, but work as an offering, without effort.

Again he bit his lips white.

I sighed, anticipating his sigh.

He agreed and said: That would be really lovely.

49

For me the train has left anyway, and I’m glad it has set off without me. As far back as I can think, I never had a desire to achieve any particular aim. Not for myself, I mean. The good grades were not for me but for my parents, who thought I would become something respectable one day. It was their ambition, not mine. It was their image of a life of advancement.

I’ve still got the school uniform. It’s hanging in the darkest corner of my room, a garment without content. It looks like one of those figures you encounter in a dream. You don’t know them but are aware of a strange relationship. On closer examination it emerges that it’s your shadow.

If I put on the uniform today I would hardly fill it. It would be an absurd sight, as absurd as I felt then, when I wore it. A person dressed as a schoolboy, who pretends to be learning something, but in reality is forgetting what’s important. That’s also a reason why I am a hikikomori. Because I want to learn how to look at things again. From my bed I look at the crack I punched into the wall out of rage at myself. I’ve looked at it so long I’ve almost disappeared into it. Time has wrinkles, this is one of them. I look into it, to remind myself of the many moments when I looked away.

50

I was fourteen. An average student. My grades were good, but not too good, and my survival depended on maintaining this averageness, this much I had already learned. The thing was to be normal. Under no circumstances anything other than normal. For whoever stands out attracts the ill will of those who, bored by their own normality, have nothing better to do than torment him, the one who is different. And who wants that? Who exposes himself willingly to torture? So you fit in and are grateful that you’re among the inconspicuous.

Takeshi, though. He stood out. Kobayashi Takeshi.

He had grown up in America, just come back. When he said New York or Chicago or San Francisco, he said it as if it were just over there, around the corner. His English flowed, I couldn’t hear enough of it. He said Hi. And Thank you. And Bye. The words came from his mouth in a whirlwind. Too fast thought some, and were ready to pounce on him. The next day he was missing a tooth. He lisped: I fell. The tooth was replaced, the lisp remained. And worse still. He began to make mistakes. When the teacher asked him to pronounce something, he mispronounced it. If he was asked to read out loud, he misread it. Bit by bit he lost the ability to get the words out of his mouth, the language he had grown up with, which had once been his home. He even went so far as to imitate our accent. He said San Furanshisuko and it was gone, far far away. It was ghastly to listen to it. How he forced himself to do it. Before each word he spoke, he paused and mourned to see it go.

The dreadful thing was: I could have been him. But I was spared. Nevertheless I was the observer, and it took someone like me, who looked and then looked away. I remained average simply by behaving as if I hadn’t seen anything. And the paradox was: I was a master at it. At fourteen I was already achieved mastery in studiously ignoring the pain of others. My sympathy was limited to being the silent witness.

Hm.

And Hm again.

He hummed a song. Took a puff of his cigarette. Hummed some more. A little pile of ash fell on his chest, a gentle breeze wafted it away. A bicycle bell rang. I would like to have cried. Pale yellow blossoms fell from the bushes.

Takeshi wasn’t the only one, was he.

No. There was Yukiko too.

Hm.

Miyajima Yukiko.

The lump in my throat thickened. That Monday I could say no more than her name.

51

It looks like rain. He yawned.

I followed his gesture towards the dreary pale sky.

Tomorrow. What is it tomorrow? Right. Tuesday. The week has only just begun. If it rains… he rummaged around in his pocket and pulled out a card. His tongue pushed forward, he scribbled in big letters: MILES TO GO. A Jazz café. When it rains, he said, that’s where I am.

But.

But what?

I felt dizzy. The idea of walking past tables and chairs, across a sweaty room, sitting down, meeting the gaze of a waiter, sipping from a glass that God knows who had sipped out of before. Still trying to get used to the park and our friendship, this idea was beyond the bounds of possibility and my self-confidence.

It’s just that. I stammered. Outside there’s more room between people.

I understand. He stood up. Then until next time the sun shines. It was six o’clock. On the other side of the card I read his name, Ohara Tetsu, and his address. A business card. I am a coward, I thought. And: Another object which, in my room, in the drawer, under the age-old fossil. I did not complete the thought.

52

Quick, quick. Through the foyer. Who was smiling there? The picture of the untaken trip to San Francisco hung on the wall, carefully straightened and dusted, as if I hadn’t turned it around. Father’s hand on my shoulder. Mother’s “cheese” cried out from the frame. Me, pimply, crooked cap, two fingers spread in a victory sign. A frozen moment. A grain of sand in the hourglass. Soon it would slip through the narrow waist. A few grains of sand later and I would shake off Father’s hand. Mother’s “cheese,” it would collapse. What’s the matter with him, the boy. Let him be. It’s a phase. The truth is: They would rather not know. The truth is: I would rather not let them know. We had struck a pact: Better not to know anything about each other. And this pact is what holds families together for generations. We wore masks. Our faces no longer recognizable underneath, for our masks had grown onto us. It hurt to pull them off. It hurt so much that the pain of never meeting face to face was bearable, compared to the pain of showing your true face. Already this me in the photo knew that. It knew there’s no better place to hide than in a family, the ideal hiding place. It is the empty yellow-edged square that remains when you take a picture off the wall. I shoved it silently in the trash by the door. Crept back across the foyer into my room. Only after the door closed behind me did I ask myself whether my hikikomori identity, my complete indifference to the world, was also a masquerade. My answer: I am tired.

53

Two days passed. Drumming raindrops. Through the gap in the curtains I saw that the sky was sewn up. No tear in the clouds to be seen. I ran to and fro. An animal in a cage dreaming of the wide open plain. Again and again I brushed against the cage bars, cold iron on the pelt of longing. On the third day I outwitted myself and broke out. The cage had just been in my head.

The water smacked down from the overhanging roofs. I ran, the umbrella slanted in front of me, in wet shoes. MILES TO GO. I intended to walk past it at the very least. Past the flickering illuminated letters and perhaps catch a fleeting glimpse. Perhaps. With this Perhaps in my head I ranged like an escaped animal, a lion maybe, or a panther, through the wind and rain lashed streets.

It must be up there. The Perhaps was in my chest and from there had penetrated to all parts of my body, pumped me on, up to the door, and past it, around the corner, around the block, and again: Past it, around the corner, around the block. I can’t say how many times. In my memory I walked for miles. When I finally touched the handle, cold iron on a longing hand, I was exhausted as if from a long journey.

A cloud of smoke in the cafe. Gentle clink of glasses. A subdued nothingness, nothing. Someone was on the phone. The melting of ice cubes. Crackling. The lighting was muted. Hiro! His voice was a thread. He reeled me in. Come and sit down. What will you have to drink? A cola! He snapped his fingers. Good to see you here. I sank into the soft padding of a leather armchair.

54

He looked different from in the park. Bigger in some way. Without the sky above him he was a bigger man. While I, growing small and smaller, didn’t know where I should look. With the chilled glass in front of me, I sensed I had walked into a trap. What did I really have to do with him? How had it come to the stage where I, with my neck in the noose, was listening to a trumpet alongside a stranger, surrounded by strangers?

Simply fabulous. He swayed to the rhythm of the music. You lose all sense of place and time. What’s the matter? Are you feeling sick? You look so pale! What can I do? What can I get for you?

I waved him away.

But of course! You’ve taken a leap into the unknown! Don’t worry, now you’ve done it. Set your mind at rest: Nothing will happen. You’ll see. This is not the sort of place where anything happens, and everyone who comes here, comes because it’s like that. You step into a capsule of music bound by neither space nor time. Why do you think I chose this café? Well, just because I was sure it would be like your room. That’s better. Now you’ve got a little bit of color in your cheeks again. With these words he grew smaller, I became bigger, until we assumed our original size again. What disturbed me now was simply understanding how much courage there was in me. It needed courage to come here, to trust him.

55

To want a love that can’t be true. A throaty woman’s voice.

Kyōko’s favorite number. He laughed. The song she puts on when she wants to cry. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes she likes to lie flat on the floor and soak it with her tears, over and over again. She describes it as a sort of cleansing. It cleanses her eyes, she says, afterwards she can see more clearly. She doesn’t cry out of sadness. She cries to reach a clearer insight into the substance of life. The eyes are the windows, when she says it, it sounds like a new or recently rediscovered proverb, from which the soul shines. I wonder whether I want to understand that? Whether I can stand it?

We were brought together by a matchmaker. I was shown a picture of her. Twenty-three years old, typist, likes reading and singing, draws. The father a bank official, mother a housewife, no siblings. That’s how she was described to me. Fine face in the photo, hands neatly folded in her lap. Only the hairdo! Not particularly flattering. I agreed to meet her, without having any particular image of her. She pleased me and she didn’t please me. Basically I gave in to pressure from the family. I was twenty-five and had a well-paid job. What was missing was a wife and child, a comfortable home. Judging by the example set by my parents, that was neither desirable, nor was it undesirable. It was simply what was expected of me and what I expected of myself, because you’re not complete as a man if you have no one beside you.

56

We met for dinner in a hotel. My parents, more nervous than me. Okada-san*, the matchmaker, with the corners of her mouth pulled up in a spasm. A wax doll, she could at times be very, very soft, then very, very hard. I found her simultaneously friendly and unfriendly. Some people are like that. They leave you unsure as to how to take them. Ah! There you are now! She waved with her waxen hand. Matsumoto-san! A stiff movement. I stood opposite a woman who bore not the slightest resemblance to the woman in the photo.

Not even close. He laughed out loud. She behaved like someone who has resolved not to be loved. Her lips pursed, she looked me up and down and said: There you see again, how you can be deceived. A photo is only a copy after all. The original is equally uninteresting. She said it with a smile. That hit home.

She likes reading and singing, this was intoned by Okada-san with particular emphasis. Most of all, interrupted Kyōko, I like books and songs which deal with marrying off a daughter who does not want that. Embarrassed silence. Okada-san dabbed her forehead and eyebrows with a handkerchief, the parents stabbed awkwardly at their plates. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Kyōko spoke with her mouth full: I’m wearing a wig in the photo. I choked. Coughed. She jumped up and dealt me a blow on the back. So now you know, I can hit hard. I can do more than read and sing. I can, if it’s needed, deal you a blow you won’t forget so quickly. Oh how nice, intervened Okada-san, she has presence of mind. A quality often missing in young ladies. I broke into uncontrollable laughter. Forgive me! Nothing to forgive. A man should not apologize for his laughter or a woman for the tears she weeps. Sometimes, Kyōko put down her knife and fork, I have the urge to lie down on the floor and soak it with my tears over and over again. Can you understand that? Can you bear it? She furrowed her brow fiercely. Her face, her very own, propped up, chin on hand, scrutinizing me directly. Yes I can, I replied. I want to try. Surprised, she said: You fool.

57

He blushed.

His blush was not that of a young man who speaks of his first love. It was the blush of a man grown old, who bows before the first and last love of his life. It was a serene blush. It shimmered through his slack skin and lit up the whole space around us for several seconds. I blushed with him. A crackling. A whirring. The record had ended. Someone shouted: Let’s have Billie Holiday again! Murmurs of agreement, toasts to that across the tables.

Isn’t it strange? I had fallen in love with Kyōko’s Fool more than anything else. With her direct, open gaze. It saw through me. I wanted her to see through me.

But it was hard. Whenever we met she went in a different direction. I believe she didn’t know where to go. She simply set off, not really in the hope of getting anywhere, but for the pure joy of going. I am a plant, she said, I need fire, earth, water. Otherwise I will be stunted. And: Is marriage not such a stunting? The fire goes out. The wind grows weak. The earth dries out. The water dwindles. I would die. You too. She tossed her hair over her shoulders. Purple lavender. And what if it wasn’t like that, I argued. What if the daily routine, our daily routine, is my promise to you? Your toothbrush next to mine. You get annoyed because I’ve forgotten to turn the light off in the bathroom. We choose wallpaper we think is horrible a year later. You tell me I’m getting a belly. Your forgetfulness. You’ve left your umbrella somewhere again. I snore, you can’t sleep. In my dream I whisper your name. Kyōko. You tie my tie. Wave goodbye to me as I go to work. I think: you are like a fluttering flag. I think it with a stabbing pain in my heart. For Heaven’s sake, is that not enough? Is that not enough to be happy? She turned away: Give me time. I’ll think about it.

58

I waited. A whole month. Then at last a letter came. Her handwriting. Round. She had put in pressed flowers. My answer is Yes, I read: Yes, I would like to lose a thousand umbrellas, so long as you do not get a belly. I wrote back. Awkwardly. Let’s go and choose wallpaper.

That’s her. My wife. He pulled a photo out of his wallet. My first thought was: Mother. My second: She wants to make up for it. She wants to cry.

Our wedding, he went on, took place in a Shinto shrine. Okada-san was there with a guilty smirk on her face. No more doubts: She was an unfriendly, an extremely unfriendly person. I’m sorry, she wanted to say. Instead she said, like hardening wax: May your happiness be everlasting! Kyōko thanked her with an innocent laugh: What is everlasting? We are fireworks. Glowing bright and fading, we scatter sparks that soon die out.

Black coffee. A jug of milk. Two cubes of sugar. Slow stirring. Draining the spoon. He put it down carefully. Our first morning. Like coffee with milk and sugar. I woke up, Kyōko wasn’t there. Her pillow was indented, a hair stuck on the fabric. The sheet was still warm, I pushed my hand under the cover. From the kitchen came the sound of brewing from our coffee machine, a wedding present. I padded barefoot through the hall. I stopped by the gap in the doorway, saw only as much as was to be seen through it. Her back, gently bent over the stove. Sizzling pan. Her finger in a bowl. Quickly tasting. A pinch of salt, some pepper. She sneezed. As she sneezed she turned around. Her voice a bright bell: Breakfast is ready. On the counter, wrapped in a blue cloth, the bento box. For you. She added an apple. A still life.

And that too was a decision.

I once heard it said that the first morning together is of lasting significance. It is a commitment. It establishes who gets up first, who makes coffee, who prepares breakfast. Kyōko could just as well have stayed in bed, turned away and muttered: Buy yourself something on the way. The decision was what took my breath away, there by the gap in the doorway: I would not have loved her any less if she had.

59

We postponed our honeymoon. At that time all hands were needed in the firm, and you know how it is, we never got around to rearranging it. The old travel guides, Paris, Rome, London, covered in dust. A little while ago I found them again at the bottom of the bookcase. Dog-eared, notes here and there. Kyōko had marked all the sights she wanted to see with a felt tip pen. The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, Tower Bridge. Nothing but hearts. On one page I came upon a drawing, a portrait of me: Tetsu smoking on Montmartre, written underneath. She’d captured me well. The top button of the shirt open. Wind in my hair. Gaze directed into the distance. My younger self. It spoke to me. It looked fine to me, and I shut the book with a bang.

Who could I have become.

Who had I become.

Who will I be when she finds out who I am.

She’s just waiting until I bow my head before her: You were right. There is no such thing as a happy working day. You must strive for it afresh every morning. He coughed a little. The ashtray stood full to the brim between us. We never even made it to Miyajima*.

60

Miyajima. A catchword. He repeated it: Miyajima. What was her name now? Was it Yuriko? Yukiho? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Yukiko? Yes? So, the snow child. Please tell me about her. It would be fine by me to shut my eyes and just listen. It’s easier to talk when you’re not being looked at. Easier to hear without seeing. He took a deep breath. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.

The Miyajimas were our neighbors, I began. Their house right next to ours. As a little boy, I was eight years old, I would often ring the doorbell and ask for Yukiko. She was the only child my age in the neighborhood, and although my parents did not like hers, they said you couldn’t tell where they were from, they accepted that we two, only children after all, played with each other now and then in front of the temple a few blocks away. Too many words in one sentence. I know. Too many words that can’t express how comfortable we were, she and I, in a world where differences matter. Where a single word can be enough to separate one from another.

I would ring the doorbell, I say. Yukiko’s mother would stick her head out and croak: She’ll be right there. The door would close and after a few minutes open again. A musty smell every time it opened and closed, a musty smell on Yukiko’s clothing. She wore a blouse, dirty frills, a skirt that was too big for her, tied around her hips with parcel string. On one of her shoes the lace was broken. Poor girl, I heard people say, as we zoomed past them, drowned out by Yukiko’s laughter: Today we’re going to fly! She spread her arms and flew ahead of me, up to the crooked pine tree where she folded her wings around its trunk. With one ear against the tree she chirped: It just grew a millimeter.

61

They were fantastic days. I mean, really, we were flying. The temple grounds were heaven, we raced over them. We picked flowers and laid them on unknown graves. Caught cicadas. Butterflies. Dragonflies. Let them go as soon as we had caught them. Freed ourselves. When it was hot we poured bowls of water over our arms and legs. Bitten by mosquitoes. Chased the temple cat. Listened in on the monk’s sleepy singing. He was a dark man with a hump back. Sometimes he turned around towards us. Then he called out: Buddha’s children. And threw a candy for each of us. That’s what enlightenment tastes like, so sweet.

At home I seldom spoke of Yukiko. If I was questioned about her, I felt it was not out of interest, but out of a certain anxiety. You need to know who you are mixing with. And: The company you keep affects you, whether it’s good or bad. With such maxims she let me go and as I ran off, it felt as if someone had grabbed me roughly. Whether it was mother’s tone of voice, the face she made when the talk was of the Miyajimas, something told me that it was dangerous to give too much away. And so I kept it to myself that there were two buttons missing on Yukiko’s jacket, and so I kept it to myself, that it did not matter at all to me.

The vague feeling of threat remained, however. A tiny thorn in my breast, it bored deeper, and even the smallest, tiniest thorn torments when it sits deep enough, a wound in the flesh. You’re aware of it as a foreign body that slowly forces you to your knees.

62

How come you’re so different, I asked once, as we sat in the shade of the pine tree. Yukiko’s answer, a sentence learned by heart: Because I fell from a star.

From a star? I held my breath.

She nodded. My parents found me. In a box by the river. There was a note hanging around my neck. It said I was the princess of the constellation Lyra, condemned to lead a life on earth far from home. But shh! It’s a secret. If anyone finds out, I swear, I’ll dissolve into stardust.

And your clothing? I grew curious.

She screwed up her eyes, meditated with closed eyes, flashed them open and cried: A disguise! It’s all a disguise! I wear beggar’s clothes so that I don’t dissolve. Winding the end of the string around her finger she added in a whisper: Sometimes I’m homesick.

I said: Me too.

Does that mean you believe me?

Yes. I believe you.

And you promise not to betray me?

I give you my word.

Her hand in mine.

Friends. Forever and ever.

With a pocket knife we carved our names in the bark. Our friendship tree, announced Yukiko. She pulled a red cord from her skirt pocket, tied it around one of the branches and pronounced further: The red cord will remind us that we are bound to one another. Since I confided in you, you are indebted to me. And since you promised not to betray me, I’m indebted to you. A solemn undertaking. The shadow moved on. High above us the sun, sharp needles trickled softly down on our heads.

63

We were nine. Th en ten. With every passing year my awareness heightened. Or rather it clouded over. As I questioned them, my belief in childhood fairytales began to waver and suddenly I saw with scrutinizing eyes, with eyes of doubt, with eyes that no longer see. Like the holes in Yukiko’s tights, my sight was frayed. In the end it was right, what my parents said. I had no idea who I was associating with, and even if it didn’t matter at all to me whether the company I kept was good or bad, I still felt a growing anger that Yukiko withheld the truth from me about herself and her origins.

Where are you from, I tried to coax it out of her. We were sitting back to back and pulling blades of grass out of the ground. The red cord above us had faded. Tell me, where? Where are you really from? Her shoulders leaned gently against mine. You know already. What do I know? I can’t tell you. But why not? Wriggling shoulder blades. Why not? Stony silence. I tore a whole tuft of grass out of the ground and threw it against the temple wall. Please forgive me. She shifted away from me. The wind blew through a cool gap between our backs. I’d have liked to say to her: It’s all right. I forgive you. But the anger prevented me, an angry pain.

64

The following day when I rang the bell at the Miyajimas’, her mother stuck her head out as usual and squawked: She’ll be right there. The door shut, it smelled of mold and mildew. From inside I heard loud shouting at first, then quiet hissing, growing ever quieter. What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t want to see him? What’s this nonsense all about, you’re ashamed? The hissing broke off. Now it was quiet in the house, only a single cry broke the silence: I can no longer. After that it was quiet again. The door opened, it smelled of decay. The mother stuck her head out: Come another time. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps the day after. My daughter, the princess, has her moods.

Countless, all the other times I stood in front of the door and rang the bell. Behind it Yukiko, a twinkling star. Its bright light deceives, for it was extinguished long ago. With the eyes of the neighbors on my back I reached out towards it, in vain. With their gossip in my ears I had to accept that it was lightyears away, wandering in the universe. At the Miyajimas they eat cats and dogs. At the Miyajimas they fry ants. At the Miyajimas they drink from the rain barrel. At the Miyajimas — people talked about them. In our housing development they were the catalyst for fear of the Other. The fear: You could turn out like them. My parents shared it as well. I noticed it in their obvious satisfaction when I sat at dinner with my head drooping. Friends come and go, they said. You’d better get used to it. One day you will look back and realize that everything has a meaning and a place. Empty words whose emptiness emptied me. I had nothing to counter them. With the last remnants of resistance I wrote a letter. Dear Yukiko, I wrote, let’s meet again by our pine tree. I want to see you and to understand. To say goodbye. To tell you that. I rubbed out that bit for so long that the paper became thin and creased.

65

To want a love that can’t be true. Severe twitching under his eyelids. I paused. The song played, clicking as it turned round and round. At the next table someone ordered a whisky soda in a monotone. Somebody lifted up the curtain. Rain splashing down. The curtain fell back heavily over the window. The café, freed from the spell of daylight, returned to the enchantment of darkness. Incredible, that I had believed there was no room between the people inside. Each one sat sunk in his armchair, lost in his thoughts.

Did she come, he asked, his eyes still closed. In the gloomy smoke that enveloped us his tie was no longer red and gray. It was gray, simply gray.

Did she come, he repeated. And since I did not reply: But she must have come. Didn’t she? She did come! He said it with such emphasis, as if not just I, but he as well, as if we both had been waiting for her to come. As if it mattered to us both that she should come.

Yes, I said at last. Yukiko did come.

So there you are! He sighed.

But…

… What?

She had become a stranger. After barely four months I hardly recognized her. She was wearing her school uniform, looked like any other girl, with a bobbing ponytail. She looked sideways as she came towards me, as if embarrassed. Came up to me, head down. Only then did I recognize her by her smell. So self-conscious. I felt like hurting her. Grabbed her by the shoulders with my eleven-year-old hands. Shook her. Hit her, she took it silently, in the face. Why won’t you look at me? I lifted up her chin. You should look at me. At least that. I hate you. Can you hear? I hate you for making me belong to the others. To those who talk. Finally she looked at me: What you say is true. Our eyes locked. Near. Nearer. I kissed her. Far. Further. Something had come to an end. I pushed her away, and she turned aside. Walked like a bird with no wings over the sandy courtyard. I’m done with you, I screamed. Done forever. But by then she had already disappeared, white socks, behind the bushes. From the temple came the drone of the Heart Sutra*.

66

How to describe the bitterness? I was a glass, broken, and the space I once enclosed was now the same as the space around. Deserted space, in which I was lost, sharp knives under my feet. With each step it became less likely that I would ever get anywhere.

For a while I avoided passing the Miyajimas’ house. Instead of right I went left, instead of straight I went a roundabout way, and if it could not be avoided, I crossed to the other side of the street. I shivered at the thought that Yukiko could be standing by the window, or she could come up the road, towards me. The thought made me narrow and small. She might point at me, she might remind me of my guilt. I almost wished for it. So narrow and small was I that I almost wished she were a worse friend than me.

But she wasn’t.

Soon enough I forgot that we’d ever been friends, and since I forgot, what happened lost its significance. My forgetting washed the taste of her lips from mine. I only faintly remembered the moment when they touched each other. Whether it had really been a kiss? It seemed to me that we’d only brushed lips. And I forgot even that.

67

And I must say: Avoidance was an easy exercise.

Although the Miyajimas were our immediate neighbors, years passed without my meeting one of them. The father, they whispered, was bedridden with an illness, and the mother went about her business at night. Whatever that meant, anyway she was very seldom seen, and then only hastily scurrying, disheveled hair over her forehead, laden with sacks and bags. It was rumored she was carrying contraband, then that she was mad, and that stuck: She was mad. Even when nobody could claim to have seen her, they claimed her madness was obvious in her face. You can see things like that, was the unanimous conclusion, you can see it without looking. Only the fact that Yukiko, the poor girl, as she was now labeled, was accorded some recognition when she won first place in a mathematics competition, but: Who knows whether that was right? Who knows whether that wasn’t a made-up story? One thing was certain: It was better not to have anything to do with the Miyajimas. And for me too that was the case, until fate, what I called a stupid accident at the time, led our paths to cross one last time.

I was sixteen. A new school year had begun. The names of the students were read out in class. I sat there in boredom, twirling a chewed pencil in my hand. Thirty others who were feeling just like me. The vacation, which had not been a vacation, had ended again, and we had the dark premonition that it would always be like that. That life, which was no life, was rushing inevitably to its end.

Fujiwara Rie!

Here!

Hayashi Daiichi!

Here!

Kugimoto Sakuya!

Here!

Miyajima Yukiko!

Here!

The pencil broke. I didn’t look up. She was here! Here! Here!

Oyama Haruki!

Here!

Taguchi Hiro!

Here!

Red thread, the thread of fate. Forever and ever.

Ueda Sakiko!

Here!

Yamamoto Aiko!

Here!

She’s just a back. A slim back. That’s all she is. Sometimes I’m homesick. Butterflies, yellow, blue, green. The dust on their wings. Black monk’s habit. The Heart Sutra. One note. I hate you. Do you hear? It’s all the same to me. Friends come and go. Can’t you go? Princess. I’m beholden to you. Pst, pst. Blank space. The sky is falling. I would like to tell you. I’m finished with you.

The tip of the pencil in the palm of my hand.

A fleeting pain.

68

Just as I had succeeded for years in avoiding the people who lived next door, so I would succeed in the classroom, I resolved to do it from day one, to make a wide berth around the desk three rows in front of me. After all there was plenty of room not to meet each other, and as I’ve already said: I had practice. Nothing was easier for me than to go past someone in the most inconsequential way. What I could not know was just one thing, that this determination would be tested on the very second day.

No idea who set things in motion. It began with a harmless aside: That one smells. I heard it. Clearly and distinctly: That one smells. Then silent finger-pointing, a wrinkling of noses. Yukiko’s voice, a whisper: Please don’t! More laughter: She smells like she’s got a fish under her skirt. Someone grabbed at her. I saw it. Clearly and distinctly: She shot back. What are you looking at, in my face. I looked away. I saw nothing. And so I saw nothing of anything on the third and the fourth, or the fifth and sixth, or any of the days that followed.

This smell, came the cry from gaping mouths, whoever smells must pay five thousand yen. What do you mean, you don’t have it? Tomorrow you’ll pay. Dammit, you smell like a pig. Oink-oink. A dead hamster smells better than you. Hey, math whiz! How do you divide an ox into a cow? What started as a harmless aside grew into a litany with gathering speed.

Yukiko could have used a friend.

Someone to speak up for her.

But I.

I had no voice. I didn’t join in the others’ talk, nor did I protest against it. The thing was to stay outside if inside the world was falling apart. On that morning, when Yukiko came in to the classroom, her desk had been switched, and turned around. There was a caricature of a grunting pig on the blackboard. It was lifting one leg. Her name was underneath. She wiped it off, stroke by stroke. Yukiko became Yuki. Yuki became nothing. With the damp sponge in her hand, she eventually turned around, with a searching look, settling on me. In it was a sweetness, the glow of long ago: I swear to you, I’ll dissolve into stardust. That’s how she looked at me. As if she wanted to tell me: I’ll dissolve.

69

If I had. If I were. There is nothing more depressing than the past conditional. The possibilities it indicates will never be fulfilled, and, despite that, or because of that, they determine the present reality. If I’d somehow intervened then, if I’d been in a position to do that then, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.

I left it to Yukiko to defend herself. Yet she did little more than simply stand still. A magic chalk circle, it got smaller and smaller. She resembled an animal playing dead. For a while it worked. But then the attackers gained the upper hand, and they wouldn’t stop until they had sniffed out her weakest points. A careless movement and they knew, that’s where they should keep advancing. The game was no longer a game, it was life and death. On the way home I did not see how she was pushed up against a wall, I did not see how they shook their fists at her in the dark passage, I did not see how her skirt slipped above her knee in the empty parking lot. I went on, a silent witness, as I had learned to be. If I intervened, at that time it was still a present conditional, a completely possible possibility, I would be the next in line, that was fairly certain. Better not to let anything come near me. Better to turn off here, before anyone sees me.

70

So now you know.

Yes.

And do you understand? That I…

…. you have said enough.

No, not enough. There’s more.

The tip of the cigarette glowed.

Today they’re doing overtime. He opened his eyes and seemed to be searching for a point on which to focus. Blinking, he looked first at me, then at the bar, at me again, then at the floor. The floorboards creaked, a drunk went astray on his way to the toilet. Aimlessly he stood between the tables, someone should have taken him by the arm. But he just stood there, a statue without sense or purpose. It’s such a shame, he babbled, a trumpet interrupted his words.

No, not enough, I said once more. But my voice sounded harsh. Perhaps, I thought, I should spare us both the end. Nearby someone was talking about fish and whether fish ever slept. Perhaps, I thought again, I should leave it at that. An old saying came to mind: It is hard to wake someone who is not asleep. The whole time the drunk stood in the middle of the room. The waiter ran around him, as though he were part of the furniture. He really was standing stock still now, you could believe he’d fallen asleep upright. Only when someone knocked into him did he sway gently, to and fro, then immediately stood motionless again. It was minutes before he finally began to move. Instead of going to the toilet he returned to his place and ordered another brandy.

I must finish it, I thought, that’s the least I can do.

There’s more, I heard myself say.

71

Someone found her, limbs twisted, on the playground. She had thrown herself from the fifth floor. Someone laid flowers there, where she had fallen. Wilting roses, carnations, chrysanthemums. On one of the accompanying notes it said: We mourn and are ashamed. Dear Yukiko. I put no words to paper. Any moment she would pop up behind the bushes and run back, her ponytail bobbing, backwards. Up to me. And further back. To walk between the graves. I ran off with a white sheet of paper in my hands. Perhaps, perhaps she would be waiting for me, there, by the temple. And we would sit in the shade of the bent pine and not let the wind pass between us.

Red threads.

Breathless, I stood still.

The tree was bedecked with red threads, all over. Our friendship tree, on each branch hung five threads, for each year gone by, a thread. I gasped. How had she climbed so high? How had she reached the bushy crown? Our names in the bark had grown up with it, towards the sun. How had she known I would come here? Finally I saw and understood her. And yet not quite. Someone who creates such a work of art wants to preserve a secret to the very end. The meow of the temple cat. Was it still the same one? I picked her up and let her stretch her claws. Warm blood. I am still here. Dear Yukiko. I wrote it in the bend of my arm. I would like to tell you: I love you.

72

What remained was a gap in our housing development.

Her parents’ house was cleared out shortly afterwards. From the windows of my room I could watch how the men, masks over mouths and noses, brought out all sorts of rubbish, junk and trash. Broken bicycles, in piles. Dented pans. A dumpster full of newspapers and magazines. Radios. Sofas. Mattresses. Nibbled by mice. Three boxes of lamp shades. And nails. And screws. It emerged that the Miyajimas had lived off their neighbors’ garbage for a long time. A scandal, said Mother. She was standing close behind me. What they collected! Look, our alarm clock. As if it still belonged to us. As if it were ours forever. A passing remark. In her thoughts she had already moved on. I realized there was no point in reminding her that she had thrown the clock away more than a year ago because its ring was too shrill for her. Let someone else be woken by it! With these words she’d thrown it in the trash.

A last truckload of plastic. I went out. Empty tin cans. A cracked mirror, in which my face was a grimace, an ugly contortion. I reached into one of the sacks that had been put outside the entrance and pulled out a fossil. An insect was frozen inside it. I stuck it in my pants pocket and felt its surface in there. It was cool and smooth, a pleasure to touch. From behind his mask one of the workers grumbled: That’s enough for today.

73

The house was torn down. The materials had no value, they said, and it wasn’t worth repairing. On the way to school I saw them blocking off the street and on the way home I saw an excavator knocking down the last wall. The ground shook beneath my feet. Days later there was a level surface where I had once stood and rung the bell, and a few days later a new building went up. A family moved in: Father, mother and child. Good people, they said, perhaps a bit too stylish. How does that look? Our old Nissan next to their new one. There was hardly another word about the Miyajimas. According to what was known, and not much was known, not much anyone wanted to know, they moved into the lower part of town, burdened with debt, and no one would have been surprised to catch sight of them under a blue tarpaulin in one of the parks in S. Yes, one would have liked to be able to say that someone had seen them there. It would have been a reassuring horror story. To be able to say: They have hit rock bottom. And since the horror should not be allowed to fade, people said, without really knowing: No doubt about it. Even if they are not quite there. Some day they will hit rock bottom. Only when the Fujitas one block further over turned out to have a gambling addiction and marriage problems did the talk about the Miyajimas stop.

And then?

Nothing. I mean that’s how it was, and I had to get used to it. I had my seventeenth birthday. Then my eighteenth. The pressure grew. I resisted it. Clenched my teeth and thought: This is being grownup. To get over it, whatever it was, and even when you have not recovered, to regard it as over and done with. To forget. That too. To forget over and over again. If it were not for Kumamoto I would have managed it. But he had Yukiko’s eyes. The same look: I am dissolving.

It is –

I completed the sentence for him.

— A decision.

No. He shook his head. At least it is not one you have chosen to take. I see that now. In this café. He pointed to the right and left. We are unfree, all of us. Only, that does not absolve us of responsibility. Despite our lack of freedom we constantly make decisions and we have to take responsibility for them and their consequences. And so, with every decision we take we become less free.

That thought, although it was hard, made it easy for us to move out of our chairs and on to the street. The rain had slackened and was more of a drizzle.

See you tomorrow? I asked.

Definitely.

74

You don’t see any stars in the city. Its aura is too bright, it lights up the heavens, not the other way around, and instead of Lyra, the most you see is an airplane, gliding dangerously low, away over the houses.

What had I sacrificed?

I was now no longer merely an image, I was an image hiding another within. The image of a girl. Part of the tribe. I had asked the monk not to remove the threads. He agreed without knowing my story. Quite strange. That was all he said. Now and then I came by and sat under the tree. In time the threads lost their color and fell off the branches, all but two. Quite strange, the monk said, in exactly the same tone, when the last two fell off: Life.

The bent pine is still there. I spent that night under its shelter, my collar turned up. I didn’t mind the pine needles trickling down on me. I found it comforting to be apart like that, my fingers numb, to sit outside those dark hours. My parents would be waiting for me, for the sound of my footsteps in the hall, perhaps worrying where I was, perhaps even lifting the receiver, dialing 110, suddenly feeling ashamed and replacing it. For how can you draw attention to a ghost? How can you explain that someone has disappeared, when that person is already gone? And yet that’s what I wanted, as soon as morning dawned, no more than just that: For them to search for me and find me. Grab me by the shoulders, slap me in the face and ask: How has it come to this, that we failed each other so? Take me in their arms and say: Let us begin again from the beginning.

75

From the location of the sun I could tell it was a little after eight. The clouds had dispersed overnight towards the west. Only now I realized that I had forgotten my umbrella in the café. It was proof that yesterday had happened. If I hadn’t left it there I would have wondered whether it had all been a dream. But then I knew: The dry feeling in my mouth came from talking so much, the stale smell in my hair from all the smoke. Both were connected. As I was to him. When I stood up and knocked the damp earth off my legs, I thought: And what if he were to jump in front of the train today? I was convinced he would drag me down with him, to death on the humming rails. The stripes of his tie before my eyes, I set off.

Good morning.

He overtook me.

Bad night?

I followed him. Fell into step. Every once in a while he stopped. Looked for something. Found it. Walked on, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, slower. Stopped again. Walked on. So slowly that at some point we were no longer walking, but we sauntered idly along like two people strolling through rushing crowds. I saw our shapes reflected in a shop window, beyond the rhythm of the world. After rain the light is always at its clearest. He spoke to me over his shoulder. There was the park. We reached our bench. Good to be here again. He stretched out his legs.

76

Do you believe in an afterlife?

The question came rushing out.

I mean: Yukiko. Last night when I was lying in bed, I wondered whether she would be reborn. Let’s say, in Mexico. She would be two, three years old by now. She’d be talking already. Spanish. She learns fast. As soon as you’ve told her a word she babbles it back. She has two brothers. Jorge and Fernando. You can see them playing. The two older ones make sure their sister doesn’t swallow any of her building blocks. The girl reincarnated. I mean, just imagine. Yukiko, with all the knowledge that’s already in her, could now be in a house in Puebla, in a room, in a body called Isabella, picture her, as she places one block on another, she could suddenly realize she has been here before. She knows the sun that falls through the blinds on her hands as they play. She knows her mother’s call. There’s a recognition. With this picture in my head I fell asleep. That we, reincarnated, are here to recognize something. A stunning idea. Don’t you think? You could meet her. One day. In Mexico. Or somewhere else. A chance moment in time, her sleeve touches yours and it would be a great pity to miss such a moment. An incomparable loss. And furthermore: With us it could be the same. I mean. Today on the platform, surrounded by so many people, I asked myself whether I would miss any one of them if they weren’t here, and then: Whether they would miss me if I weren’t here. Whether we are not all somehow here in order to touch one another. When the train finally came and I saw my reflection in its windows and in the sleeping faces rolling by behind them, there was no question, only an insight: We must all, every one of us, relate to one another.

77

If I could choose. He drew a circle in the gravel with the toe of his shoe. There are two people I would like to meet again. May I? A clearing of the throat, he scratched his head. Two people I’d like to encounter again in passing.

One is my teacher. Watanabe-Sensei*. I just called him teacher. When I was ten years old, my parents got it in their heads that I should take piano lessons. They hoped I had a hidden talent. Dressed in shirt and trousers and with a ridiculous tie round my neck, I wore things like that even then, they sent me up to the teacher, full of hope. I say up. Because the teacher’s house stood a bit to one side on the hill, you had to walk up an unpaved road, through a thick forest. The teacher lived there, above the town and its smoke, with his wife who had lung disease. The pure air should be good for her, they said down below. It was a big house. When you entered you had the impression it would breathe you in. The light fell first through this window, then through that one, depending on the time of day. At any hour the teacher’s house was flooded with light.

But there was something else. A slightly sour smell. Like in a hospital. I remember. The teacher laughed: That’s what it smells like when someone dies. He indicated a half-open door. My wife, a roaring laugh, lies dying. It struck me to the core. Time is precious, he laughed again. Now let’s see what you can do. I tinkled listlessly up and down the scales. The teacher, directing his gaze fiercely at my hands: What is this? You are playing as if you had no life in you! Even a dead man has more life in him than you! He laughed again. I thought: How heartless. This man is made of stone. How is it possible for him to laugh while there his wife. Speaks of feeling and has none himself. I thought it with a natural, yes, a matter-of-fact, unquestioning contempt.

78

One time the bell rang, the teacher ran to the door and I, sitting at the piano, squashed a fly. I was in the process of dissecting it, starting with the legs, when he returned and suddenly let out such a piercing cry right behind me that I thought he’d seriously injured himself. He pushed me off the stool. Slammed the piano lid shut. Screamed: What are you thinking, you little devil, to kill an innocent animal in my house. Stiff as a rod I stood before him. In shock, since his face was distorted. I felt anger bubbling up at him, as he ran back and forth still screaming, reproaching me for such a trifle. He struggled for breath, I took advantage of the lull. My lips trembling with rage I said: You’re the one who laughs when your wife coughs out there. Eerie silence. He was frozen in mid movement. Looked at me eventually, after what seemed like an eternity. Released me from what seemed like an unending stare. Took one step towards me. Halted. Said quietly, very quietly: That’s exactly why you won’t make it as a pianist. You hear nothing. You have no ear. You hear only what is on the surface, not what lies within. Pack up your stuff. The lesson is over. Tell your parents you are the least talented student I’ve ever had. It’s a complete waste trying to teach you what music is. Someone who only hears laughter in a laugh is deaf, I tell you, deafer than deaf. I laugh for her. Do you hear? He laughed. I laugh because I know she loves it when I laugh. I put sadness into it. Do you hear? He laughed. He laughed once more. She needs to know that I’m sad she is going. I put gratitude into it. Do you hear? He could not stop laughing. I put everything I feel for her into it. She knows that. She hears it. My laughter is supposed to keep her company. He sank, laughing, to the floor. I turned to him, no longer angry at all. And there I saw, he was crying. Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he laughed and cried at the same time.

79

The teacher was right in the end. I wouldn’t become a pianist. Yet I remained his student for a whole year. I spent most of the lessons listening to him. Mozart. Bach. Schumann. Chopin. In between I had to describe what I had heard, and how. I developed a sensitive ear, as he called it. His favorite word: Kanjou*. He used it in almost every sentence.

Shortly before the death of his wife, when you could hear she was doing badly, I asked him to play me a waltz, but just as he began a terrible wild coughing, hardly human in its wildness, came from the room, behind the half open door. The teacher, his shoulders slumped, laid his fingers on the keys and began to play, slowly, to the rhythm of the coughing. He did not mask it. He accompanied it. He played how his wife coughed. There is no recording of it, sadly. Although. I don’t know whether such playing could be recorded. After he finished he said: If there is anything for you to learn, it’s only that you should not be ashamed. Don’t be ashamed to be a person with feelings. No matter what it is, feel it tenderly and deeply. Feel it more tenderly, feel it more deeply. Feel it for yourself. Feel it for others. And then: Let it go.

I first saw his wife at the funeral. In a white kimono, her head pointing to the north, she lay in a coffin bedecked with sweet smelling lilies. He stood in front of it, neither laughing nor crying. In the back row someone whispered: How heartless. This man is made of stone. However, I knew better: In his restrained demeanor, with his breathing the only movement, I read how he listened to his inner silence and was united with his wife’s silence, for she was already there. It was as if he were listening for her, her footsteps slowly departing.

80

Did you see the teacher after that? I suppressed the trembling in my voice.

Yes, I visited him several more times. Obviously my parents were disappointed that the only thing he taught me was to listen. They thought he’d cheated them out of my hidden talent, and still regretted sending me to him years later. In their opinion the teacher had destroyed any musicality in me forever. And they remained convinced of that. They were almost relieved when he died, shortly after the death of his wife, and they could finally bury their hopes.

The house is still up on the hill in any case. I went there once with Kyōko. Through the boarded up windows we could make out the piano, with a sheet of music on it, covered in dust. The door to his wife’s room stood wide open, but through the cracks we could see little more than a narrow bed. We sat down on one of the steps that led into the garden and listened for a long time to the wind as it roared through the trees. I hear him playing, said Kyōko, and pointed to the waving branches. Her finger towards the skies: I hear them all, up there, playing.

Be that as it may.

I would like to see the teacher again, because I’d like to admit I was a poor student. I am sorry, I’d like to tell him. I am sorry you wasted your time on me.

He drew a circle in the gravel with his toe, put his feet inside it and took them out again. He loosened his tie: Otherwise I can’t get any air.

81

If I remember correctly. He hesitated. Actually I’d rather death were the end. A clean cut. With nothing after. You step into a vacuum. No body any more, no history. Completely dissolved. Or how is it? His voice like crumpled paper. You should know. I didn’t tell you the whole truth. His breath became shallow. When you asked me if I had children. Kyōko and I. We have. We had a son. His name was, is Tsuyoshi. He pulled the tie from around his neck and threw it quickly over the back of the bench, breathed more freely, continued. His voice like crumpled paper, carefully unfolded and smoothed out again as best as possible: Tsuyoshi. The strong one.

We don’t talk about him very often. And when we do, it is Kyōko who talks about him, not me. She curls up on the couch, like a cat, buries her head in a cushion and talks into it. Always the same: I called him the little glowworm. His smile, so bright. And: You know. The blue sweater I knitted for him. How I undid it, stitch by stitch. And: You know? The little stuffed rabbit at the head of his bed. His rosy cheeks as he slept. And: You know? The similarity. It’s always the same. She talks of things I can’t remember. Of soap bubbles and dandelion heads. The only thing I remember is the pain, a hot wave, the pain of indifference, when they told me: Your son is handicapped. He’ll never be like others. The feeling, no feeling: There’s been a mix-up. This child is not mine but someone else’s. It is a mistake, this child, I reject it.

82

Good News! Kyōko ran towards me.

The best thing about working…

… is coming home. She pulled me by the arm, through the hall and into the living room. Our house. She had furnished it, had gone through the rooms right after we bought it and took measurements. The couch would go here, the television over there. The snow globes and the musical clocks on the sideboard. The dancing ballerina on the side table. The naked lady with her feet in the sand would hang on this wall, on the other one the sailor with the droopy eyes. Our home. All the furniture and objects and photos. But most important of all were Kyōko’s books. Every year she would declare: We need a new bookcase.

You have to guess. She pulled me close to her on the couch. I pretended to be stupid. There must be cabbage and peppers for dinner. She laughed. My hand on her stomach. Aha, I know! Strawberries and peaches! Her stomach, shaking with laughter. I heard happiness in it. Expectation. A little fear. And happiness again. Sh, sh, she went at last, you’ll wake it up. She, almost whispering. Soon we’ll be a family. The word was soft and melted in my mouth. A family, I repeated and melted at the same time as the word: A f-a-m-i-l-y.

83

I had a vision of the child, as yet incomplete, as yet not there, as yet nameless, growing in our midst. I had a vision of a person, in this world, growing up in it, who would in some way make it a better place. It was a typical image. Typical in its particularities. My child, our child, would be capable of it, no question. It would live up to this, would surpass this where possible, beyond expectations, would surpass this vision. One way or another, it would be the continuation of what I and my father before me had begun. I bore this vision, as Kyōko bore the child, in my heart. And even little Kei could not damage my faith in it.

It was late at night, shortly before the birth, when I heard Kyōko padding through the house. I found her, round bellied, in front of the wardrobe in the baby’s room, surrounded by colorful little hats and jackets and bootees.

Can’t you sleep? I walked towards her.

No. She turned away. The moon behind her. I was dreaming. She spoke as if she were still dreaming. I dreamed of little Kei.

Who is little Kei?

The girl with the birthmark. They said her face was half covered with a red mark, red as fire, from forehead to neck. They said it under their breath. Her parents were well aware of the talk and kept her hidden during the day. They would only take her outside after dark. Her father would carry her on his shoulders and show her the streets we played in. Her mother would sing as she trotted along beside them. They talked of it in hushed voices. The three would walk through the night, avoiding the glare of the street lights. And if anyone came towards them, they would plunge into the bushes, stand still against a wall, or hurry away with their heads down. When I still lived in the neighborhood, I was seven, perhaps eight years old, I quite often went past their house. Blank windows. Sometimes the curtains moved. I imagined little Kei was waving to me. How lonely she must be. I wished I had the courage to wave back. Strange. To dream of her after all these years. I haven’t thought about her for a long time. In the dream she was the one who asked me: Are you lonely? I said: Very. Without you I am very lonely.

Only a dream. You were dreaming. I crouched beside Kyōko on the cold floor and folded one of the tiny jackets, no bigger than my hand.

Is that right? Kyōko was suddenly wide awake. We would love our child, even if –

— What nonsense! I didn’t let her finish.

And when we were lying in bed: It’s a boy. The doctor told me it’s a boy.

I was already half asleep: He will be called Tsuyoshi.

84

The birth was apparently easy. I wasn’t there. I bought flowers on the way to the hospital. Their gentle scent in my nostrils mingled with the slightly sour smell I recognized from the teacher’s house. I thought of him as I ran up the steps, a song on my lips, I pushed open the door. I thought of him as I walked along corridors, past rooms and beds and countless name plates, at last read Ohara Kyōko, entered and on entering felt again that my life had reached a definitive point. It was a feeling of triumph. With one blow it was a feeling of defeat. They won’t bring him in to me. Kyōko’s first sentence after I walked in. I don’t know why. But they won’t bring him to me. Something’s not right. I don’t know why. Her hand grasped mine. Tetsu, please. I want them to bring him to me. Even if he has no eyes and no mouth. It doesn’t matter. I must see him. The flowers seemed withered, seemed dead, something hardened within me. I freed myself from Kyōko’s grasp, her hand fell back on the bedcover. What are you talking about? Everything is alright. I have a plan. Do you hear? I have thousands of plans. I screamed: Thousands! Do you hear? Thousands! We’re playing baseball together, Tsuyoshi and I. He’s the batter, I’m the catcher. You’re sewing a uniform for him, black and yellow, like the Giants. He’s interested in history. No. In geography. I buy him a globe and with our fingers we travel around the world. We fight. For fun, of course. We fight like in the movies we watch together at night, when you’re already asleep. He’s stronger than me. He has a strong punch. He hits me in the belly and I think: He’ll be a strong man. He studies medicine. No. Technology. No. Business. He’s the best in his class, and I’m proud of him. I don’t say it but I am proud. I deny it. I am so proud that I deny it. My pride is such that I behave as if it were nothing: That he is the best not only in his class, the best son, altogether, the best man I have ever met in my life.

The doctor.

Smoothly shaven.

Small eyes behind thick glasses.

There is no doubt. We are sure. Your son is handicapped. A heart problem, as well. No, it can’t be corrected. It’s not something that can be corrected. You must understand. He will be like that. It can’t be operated on. Do you understand? Ohara-san? It is important that you understand. Your son will never be like the others.

I did not understand a word he was saying. When he asked me if I was ready to see him now, I shook my head and went out, without saying goodbye. I think I was afraid he might look like me.

85

A week later they came home. They, I mean Kyōko and Tsuyoshi. I didn’t count myself as one of them. The word family, which once had so mellowed me, now stuck in my craw in a hard lump. I chewed on it, it choked me. The taste of it made me sick. I stood in the hall with a hand in front of my mouth and couldn’t bring myself to go across to them in the baby’s room.

Tsuyoshi didn’t cry. In my heart I had the image of a crying baby. The image of a mother rocking it to and fro, laying it to rest. The image of myself looking down, gently smiling on them both. That’s good, I had wanted to say, that’s good, to pat him on the back, and her on the arm. But I held myself apart. The silence allowed me that. In those days our house was silent. All sounds seemed muffled, suffocated by the silence. Hardly bearable. I longed for an earsplitting bang. For a door to slam shut, a pane of glass to shatter, for any sound similar to the crying of a baby as I had imagined it. The longing drove me away. I got up earlier than I needed to, left the house earlier than I needed to, sat at my desk in the office earlier than I needed to. The desk chair squeaked, the typewriter clicked. I did enough overtime for two. Close to dropping dead from exhaustion. Went drinking afterwards in a karaoke bar, stammered songs of sadness and beauty, the microphone close to my mouth. Stumbled out. Past rowdy streets. Obsessed beyond help by a person who had never been born.

86

Kyōko on the other hand!

She got up out of bed. I watched her as she rose, growing more beautiful by the day. That special glow in a mother’s eyes as she bends over her child’s bed, entranced by his every movement, even when it’s so small as to be hardly noticeable. Just look, he can grasp hold of things already, she’d say. Just look, he’s smiling. Just look, he has your eyes. Don’t you think? Papa’s eyes, she said to him, since I didn’t answer. You have Papa’s eyes. From the hallway I felt envy. I envied her the ability, against all reason, so I thought, against all normal human comprehension, to regard it as ours, to accept it as it was, without mentioning its deficiency, this silent, silent child. Moreover: Not to be aware of any deficiency in him. But she must see that it’s a mistake. Surely, I thought, she’s just pretending. Yes, surely she’s putting on an act. I told my colleagues in the firm our son had arrived in the world hale and hearty. Ten fingers, ten toes. They congratulated me, applause broke out. I remember the sound of hands that didn’t want to stop clapping. And I remember that for thirty seconds time I experienced something like joy.

Our parents came to visit. Kyōko’s. Mine. A dutiful glance into the baby’s room, afterwards, over tea and cookies, we spoke of rising prices, the typhoon in the south and an actor’s affair with a singer. It was a strained conversation, kept faltering, maintained only to prevent it from turning to Tsuyoshi if at all possible. I went into the garden to smoke a cigarette. Oppressive humidity, a thunderstorm was coming. My mother followed me out. I heard her behind me sniffling into a handkerchief. Poor son, she said. She meant me. It’s impossible to know how such things happen. The Matsumotos. Perhaps. Okada-san kept something from us. We should have done more thorough research. It’s not from our side, she whispered. I let it go. Heard comfort in her whisper: It is Kyōko. Definitely. So ill-mannered, she was then, one should have seen it in her bad manners. Enough of that. Not loudly, I said it quietly: That’s enough.

87

Could you hold him? Kyōko pushed him into my arms. I have to check on the water. She was already in the kitchen. I was alone with Tsuyoshi for the first and last time. His weight surprised me. As did the warmth of his body. In my imagination he was light and cool, like something you cannot grasp: A gentle breeze. Hardly there, already gone. He stared at me, his fists stretching up. I held his head. Silky hair. Flat little nose. Open mouth. You. Just cry. A little. Can’t you cry for me? Babies do that. They cry all day. It’s enough to drive you mad, their crying. But you. Why don’t you cry? I pinched his cheeks. First hard, then harder, until my fingers hurt. His cry was a wheeze, shocked, I put him down. No babies cry like that, only old people. I need some air. When Kyōko came back I was already outside under the maple tree, lighting a cigarette. Today I think: If I had stayed, just a moment, waited for his smile. I would have discovered that his handicap was a minor one compared to mine. My hardness prevented me from feeling the softness of his cheeks deeply and sincerely. Of the two of us I had the serious heart defect.

Kyōko didn’t reproach me. She knew my unspoken feelings and feared I would express them. All the people who came to convey their best wishes. She called them jokingly, agonizingly, condolence visits. They came to express their regret. How sad that he is not healthy. And what a misfortune. Could it have been prevented? Kyōko was afraid of hearing the same helpless regret from me. As if he were dead. She snorted in disgust. She raged against the world instead of me.

88

Once, Kyōko’s idea, we were guests at the Sun House. It was a house where parents of children like Tsuyoshi met to share their experiences. To belong. Suddenly that was a suffocating thought. To be part of a group. I arranged a proper smile, put it on, and wore it, as a sign that said: Please don’t touch. I barricaded myself behind it. In the round of introductions I said with a smile: I’m pleased to be here. Five children, I counted. Nine fathers and mothers. One was missing. Me. Yet I was welcomed in: The pleasure is all ours.

Tsuyoshi was the youngest. Five months old. The other children were three, six, ten, one was sixteen. I was amazed. The sixteen-year-old, I think he was called Yōji, was busy painting a picture. He sat bobbing up and down with excitement, a red crayon in his hand, squinted covertly over at us, then bent over his sheet of paper again. Meanwhile the ten-year-old Miki eagerly declared that she wanted to build houses when she grew up. Her father caught her proudly by the shoulders: So, an architect. My daughter will be an architect. What a madman, I thought. My smile was still fixed. The three-year-old crawled between my legs. Tachan, come here! His mother enticed him with a plastic duck. They talked over each other and stumbled over scattered toys. A doll with twisted limbs lay on an eyeless teddy bear. The six-year-old struck at it wildly.

Uncle.

I jumped. A red hand, red as fire, nudged me.

It was Yōji. He had difficulty speaking. He forced out each word as if he’d just learned it: I have painted a picture. Here. Please. It’s you. He held the sheet of paper under my nose.

I saw a face. Angular. The mouth was a line, the ends turned down. The eyes two holes, with two bolts of lightning coming out of them. No ears, but horns. The face of a demon. Yōji’s father apologized: It’s not a very good likeness. And to him: You can do better than that. You see, Uncle is smiling. Yōji sighed and went back to his place.

89

He was sighing as well. To think that this boy had seen into my soul. And he was not the only one. He wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. This heat. The grass is drying out. Of all the seasons I like summer the least. A little silent cough. We were in the park. I noticed that he hadn’t put his briefcase down between us as usual. I noticed, it didn’t worry me. Our bench was a waiting bench. Together we were waiting for something that would not happen.

Tsuyoshi!

A cry.

It echoes between the walls of our silent house.

I rush into the baby’s room. Kyōko is there. Crying. Over his bed. Lifting him up. His head falls heavily to one side. He’s not breathing. He’s cold. Come quickly. Hurry up. To the hospital. A slightly sour smell. I think of the teacher. Start the engine. The car, a moving cry. In the mirror I see Kyōko’s face distorted by crying. Tsuyoshi is lower down on her lap. I can’t see him. Tetsu, please. Drive faster. For heaven’s sake. Drive as fast as you can. And that moment, abrupt, when she stopped crying. Instead she whispered: He’s not breathing. He’s dead. Blue traffic light on Kyōko’s face. Drive slowly. Slower. You should drive slowly. I want to keep him with me as long as possible. I take my foot off the pedal. Brake. I feel this awkwardness, I admit it, a hot wave. Who has died? I don’t know him. Behind us there is honking. Someone shouts an insult. A feeling, no feeling: He doesn’t. It’s not me they are talking about when they when they say: We are sorry, there’s nothing to be done.

90

It’s pointless, I know. But I wish, I really wish I could say that I recognized right away what a loss I’d suffered that day. I recognized the loss of my son. I recognized the loss that meant I had never called him by his name, the name I’d given him. Tsuyoshi. The strong one. That’s how I had imagined him. Strong as a fist punching me in the belly, like in the movies I never watched with him. Yet the recognition of who and what I lost only came later, years later, and when it came, it was a double loss. The forcing open of a scar. And you reach in and understand, it cannot be corrected. It’s not something that can be corrected.

We two returned home. A rattle lay in the hallway. Kyōko bent down, picked it up. I said, out loud: Perhaps it’s better like this. Kyōko turned around towards me, rattling. Her eyes widened: For whom was it better? For you? She left me standing there with that question, went into the baby’s room, locked the door behind her. I listened for a sign, heard nothing but the watch ticking on my wrist. After an hour I gave up, sat down in front of the television and turned up the volume.

91

Years later.

Kyōko, catlike, curled up on the couch and spoke into a cushion. Always the same: You know what? That night in August. When you said: Perhaps it’s better like this. I’ve never in my life experienced such enmity towards you as then, when you said that. In your suit. Your tie was crooked. Dark patches at your armpits. I sat on Tsuyoshi’s bed and felt bitter enmity towards you. For six long months I struggled not to feel it, not when you came home drunk, not when you, in your drunken state, complained that your life was a dead end. But then it consumed me. Finally. It was the mournful longing to join him, on the other side. Friendly Death. I wanted him. In the midst of the enmity he appeared to me as a friend who would welcome me fondly, enfold me in his heart. Blessed night. I wanted to count sheep until the last one jumped over the fence. But. What do you think? What stopped me? Listen carefully! The simple thought that I have to get up at six o’clock and prepare your bento. Absurd. Isn’t it? An unparalleled absurdity. The thought that you need me. Me, who one day, today, will say to you: I see through you and your inability. Behind all your inability I see a person who suffers. This was the thought that saved me. All at once I saw you, how you travel to work and back, work and back, and all at once I saw that you’re rolling a rock, I’ll roll it with you. On and on. We’re rolling together up a steep mountain path.

92

Three rice balls. Tempura. Seaweed salad.

If Tsuyoshi were alive he would be thirty-one years old. A good age. He separated the chopsticks. An age when you can look back, and forward too. Would you like some?

I nodded.

Here, take a rice ball. Is it good?

Yes. It’s the best rice ball I’ve ever tasted.

He laughed, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. Invisible tears. I wish I could sit with him like this and eat Kyōko’s bento together. I mean. Like with you. Don’t you think? He indicated with the chopsticks in one direction then another. In some way they are all here in the park. The man there with the young woman on his arm. That’s Hashimoto. The old woman with the walking stick who is limping behind them: His wife. The one with the book over there, pen in his mouth, is Kumamoto. In the shade of the tree, pulling her skirt over her knee: Yukiko. The man sitting by the fountain feeding the pigeons. He could be the teacher. All of them here. Under this sky. You only have to look.

If that’s so, I wanted to say, then I would like to be your son. But I didn’t say it. Instead I asked him a favor. There is something, I began.

What is it?

There is something you could do for me.

Well, tell me.

Please tell your wife the truth, this very evening, that you have lost your job. You owe her that. After all that has happened, all that has not happened.

I promise you, I will do it. And you, you promise me that you’ll cut your hair short, this very evening. I’ve waited long enough, not saying it, you look dreadful with that shaggy mane.

I laughed with him: Good, it’s agreed.

On Monday we won’t recognize each other.

Will you come?

Yes, of course.

And then?

A new beginning.

93

That afternoon I was the one who fell asleep. I fell asleep and dreamed: I was in my room. Cold sweat on my hands. I lay stretched out on my bed, a corpse. With all my strength I tried to move. Then I heard Father’s voice: Nothing to be done. The boy is dead. I wanted to call out: No, I’m alive! But I had no mouth. Above me was a mirror. I saw I had neither mouth nor eyes. With eyes I didn’t have, I saw that my face was a white wall. Mother’s voice: It’s too bad, about him. He never found his face. At this moment the curtains opened. A harsh light came through the window and fell on the white wall, which was me, and suddenly in the mirror I saw the wall crumble, and then the four walls of my room crumbled away too. Wide open space all around me. Someone touched me. I ran after him. As I ran I got back my mouth and eyes. A stinging on my cheeks. I noticed I was crying. My tears were red threads, flowing down me. I have not forgotten, I cried, how to weep for you, my dear child.

When I awoke he was no longer there. Beside me, over the bench arm, hung his tie. I put it in my pocket and felt the material, warm silk. A new beginning, he said. I dragged myself through the park, over the intersection, past Fujimoto’s, home. My parents were standing looking worried in the doorway. There you are. Thank God. We were going to. But I was too tired to respond with anything more than my weary, thoughtless: Tadaima. I am home. My parents, with one voice: Okaerinasai. Welcome back.

94

This very evening. We had an agreement. I kept to it. With the scissors in my right hand, I cut strand by strand, until my head felt light and cool. Once cut, the hair all over the floor was no longer mine, and I thought, it would be the same for him. Once spoken, the burden of the truth would fall away and afterwards he would not be able to explain why he had put it off for so long. Like me he would stand in front of the mirror and find himself strange and familiar at the same time. He would think of me and say to himself: To cut your hair is to admit the truth.

Yet the familiar prevailed. The question: How should it continue? Our friendship was the larger space into which I had stepped. I decorated its walls with pictures of the people we described to each other, and the thought that I might have to leave it, through a door leading I knew not where, to expose myself to the unknown, that thought hovered dangerously. I almost hoped he would postpone his confession again, turn up on Monday and imply silently that he had failed. It was a mean hope. I pushed it away. I spent the whole weekend pushing it into a corner. On Sunday evening there was only the feeble wish that I had taken the chance to tell him I wished I were his son.

95

Nine o’clock. That must be him. Short-sleeved shirt, Hawaiian pattern. He came towards me, his face strangely youthful. No, a mistake, it wasn’t him. That one there behind him though. Shoulders bent forward. Stealthy walk, as if he wanted to avoid someone. Yes, that was him. Then: No. And again: Yes. Then: No, it’s not. And: Wrong again. How could it be? Surely something must have detained him. A delay. Surely. He would be here any moment now. The figure by the bushes. Was that a man? Or a woman? Or a child? What if he? I waited. Eyes scanning. Surely it was a misunderstanding. So many people, they came and went. I hadn’t noticed them before. What if something happened to him? With every false sighting I discovered a reason for his absence. Once it was a headache, then it was the death of a distant relative, a summer flu, someone urgently needed his help. With the tie grasped between my two fingers I waited, it was no longer clear for whom.

Midday. In the park, bentos were being unpacked. Sitting scattered in little groups, eating, drinking, chatting. I thought of Kyōko and wondered whether, out of habit, she had really gotten up at six o’clock even today. Or whether she had stayed in bed, had asked him not to go. Whether she knew about me. And whether she would come here to tell me the news if something had happened to him. The woman up there, that could be her. I had the impression she was looking for someone. I am here, I almost called out, but then I saw, she was already happily arm in arm. All at once I was ashamed I had ascribed such importance to myself. I turned up my collar. Who was I, to think that Kyōko must be looking for me? Who was I to think she must feel some obligation towards me? I watched her as she disappeared behind one of the trees. As they walked the salaryman beside her very gently laid his hand on her neck.

96

And there it was again. The feeling of being a nobody, or less than nobody, a nothing. It was a subconscious feeling. It shackled me and said: Run! I tried, struggled to and fro, moved not a millimeter. I shook with the effort it had taken to get this far. After Yukiko’s death it was this shaking, a constant tremor just beneath my skin, which reminded me inwardly and outwardly that despite all the striving, despite all the battles I fought to be normal, I was somehow different — because of this.

I hid it as best I could. So that no one should notice I was hiding it. And if it couldn’t be hidden, then I was the one who laughed the loudest, pointed it out and said: How funny! Usually I kept my hands in my pockets. Whenever my name was called they began to shake. Had I been caught? Had they found out? I, who pretended to have seen nothing, was particularly anxious not to be seen. And who is more invisible than he who conforms? With my hands in my pockets I pretended to be someone, a person with a guileless expression. That was the pressure I was referring to. Not the tests, not the grades. The pressure consisted of having to act out my lack of expression. The struggle for credibility. The first space I retreated into was not my room in my parents’ house, but my smooth forehead. If the talk turned to Yukiko, the teachers mentioned her story, now and again, for the lesson it held, I buried my hands deeper still, walked, whistling casually, to the toilet, where I locked myself in and waited long minutes until the shaking had worn off. Taguchi, someone knocked on the door, what are you doing in there? I: You know what. Oh, ok, a snigger of recognition. Boy, you take a long time. I came out with a blank grin.

At home I avoided eating at the table with my parents, the trembling fork and trembling spoon beneath their gaze. So they probably didn’t notice, since I adopted certain strategies to force the shaking back down under my skin and to hold it hidden there until, alone once more, a relief, I let it reappear on the surface. I ate in my room more and more often. Neither Father nor Mother asked the reasons. You know how it is, they said, it’s a difficult age. Had they asked, I could have given them no better answer. Their understanding of my difficult age was the best excuse I could produce: Please excuse me, but I don’t feel like sitting with you. Please excuse me but I don’t care to explain why. Shaky stare. Of all people it was me whom I least wanted to observe.

97

But I saw myself.

I stood to the side and saw myself.

Wobbly camera.

I saw the impossible, the attempt to outwit myself. It was normal to have looked away, I told myself. The most normal thing in the world to have ignored Yukiko’s strangled Please help me! To have walked on at the moment when her gaze met mine, held it, and suddenly realized: He won’t help me. No help is to be expected from him. This disappointment, as I left her, for I had walked on, stopped two street corners further on with a cough, heard a gentle clap, as if something very delicate had been squashed, torn, crushed by something very coarse. And who wouldn’t have done the same? Then run away even faster? Who wouldn’t have done the same? That’s how I persuaded myself and realized how I believed myself, definitely wanted to believe myself, how the belief calmed me, the calm was a delusion. Forget Yukiko. You have already forgotten her once. I watched how I gave myself the appearance of having forgotten her. She was the black dot on a white surface. If you overlook it for long enough, it stops existing. Reality is variable, merely a marker for a changing quantity. You bend it to shape. Not a crime. It’s only a crime if you take the unbent reality as more real than reality, and defend it as such against your better judgment.

If only I had cried, just once. I watched myself not crying. Jaw firm. Swallow. Break something. Quick. The mirror there, broken. And again. Smash your fist into it. A reassuring pain, masking the real one. The one that is not there. Which you force yourself not to feel. Sweep up the fragments. And away with them. To know, to know better, that not crying is crying. And yet you do not cry. Firm up the jaw. Swallow.

There were others like me. Easy to recognize them. Difficult to recognize myself in them. I recognized them by their wayward gait. Red blotches on the neck when you spoke to them. Exaggerated cheerfulness. A tense representation of normality, by which they demonstrated their difference. I found them repulsive. All of them. I found they were dilettantes in their transparency, who threatened me and my struggle for credibility. One mistake on their part and it would require even greater effort to protect my false face. What connected us was also what divided us from one another. Each of us in our shell. At the slightest vibration we drew in our heads.

98

On my seventeenth birthday Father suggested driving together to the sea. Today we are driving to the sea, he said. Just you and me, father and son. That was his way of suggesting something. In the car we listened to old hits. Sake and women, went one, there is nothing more beautiful. Father sang along, while I stared silently out of the window. It felt to me as if we weren’t moving. It was the houses, the rice fields, the clouds that were moving, not us. The pale moon. A strip of blue beneath it. It came nearer. The sea.

Father took the lead, his shirt billowing like a sail. I trudged behind him along the beach. The roar of the waves. A seagull fought against the wind. Two rocks. Let’s rest here. It’s a long time since we sat together like this. The first time, I replied. Embarrassed throat clearing. As always happened. It feels good to be together like this. We should do it more often. Together like this. He took off his shoes, his socks, stuck his feet into the sand. We do it too rarely. He laughed. I recognized him by his thin voice. I would have liked to pull his sleeve. To say to him: You don’t have to do that. Hide from me. Your sadness. You don’t have to laugh it away. He cleared his throat again, buried his toes deeper. You know, being grown up is not so bad after all. I mean. You have a goal and you are doing your best to get there. Keep your eye on it and aim for it step by step. If you stumble, pick yourself up again. In the end you’ll have reached it. The goal. You’ll look back and see how far you’ve come. Footprints in the sand. And you will be happy. All your doubts about the path you’ve taken will melt away. Do you understand? Yes, I nodded. Did you ever have doubts then? My question slipped out. Who? Me? He paused, his feet buried up to the ankles. No, what makes you think that? I’m just saying in general. What I want to say is. You must not allow yourself to be distracted. A gentle tap on the shoulder. It’s good talking together like this. Father knocked the sand off his feet, pulled on his socks, his shoes. We walked on. Broken shells, clattering stones. A boat on the horizon. Turned around, came home.

99

Strange. But the realization that Father was hiding something too, this realization comforted me, that he too, overwhelmed with shaking, had forced it under his skin. At least for a while. It was simply like that, as he said: You must have a goal. You must do your best. You must achieve it. To be happy at some point. Only a little jump was needed. Over to the safe side, over to those who don’t think too much, about how much it hurts to have betrayed others as well as oneself. I wanted to get there, made a run for it, was still running. Would have jumped, had not Kumamoto, the relay runner, passed me the baton of sincerity at the last moment. Admit it. Was that what he shouted? Finally admit it, you suffer from the same illness. My Yes was the door closing behind me. Father’s despair. It came too late. When he stormed into the room bellowing and raised his hand against me, I had long been untouchable. He saw it, I am sure of it. In reality he was the one who shied away from me. He deliberately missed.

Pale evening sky.

The park began to empty. The lights went on. One more minute. Perhaps he would come now. Just then when I stood up. Happy! Stay here! A straining leash. Warm dog’s nose on my neck. Happy! Stop that! Happy! Come here! Happy! Be good! The Shiba did not obey. Again and again he jumped at me and licked my face. Rough tongue. He wagged his tail. I pushed him aside and stood up. Happy! Come! I heard him barking for a long time after I left our bench.

100

A week passed this way. Nine o’clock, I was there. I would see him appear and then have to accept: It wasn’t him. I mistook a high school student, a career woman who smoked, a dancing shadow, for him. I invented stomach pains, the unexpected visit of an old friend, a trip to the mountains, a sudden whim. When I ran out of reasons the rainy season began.

MILES TO GO.

The umbrella I’d left behind stood in the corner. It proved nothing. No voice called out to me. I actually began to doubt whether we had met. Whether I hadn’t, was it possible, invented him, like I’d invented the many reasons for his absence. The tie was the only reliable assurance. I touched it and knew, he exists. A tingling on my scalp. My hair was growing again. In the café, on the other hand, time stood still. The same music. To want a love that can’t be true. Sometimes I wished I could lie flat on the floor and soak it through and through with my tears. No, you don’t invent something like that, something like that is true. I sank down and ordered a cola. Coming right up. With eyes closed I tried to remember his face. But the contours had lost their definition. As with Yukiko and Kumamoto, it was a particular expression I retained. A sad charm. With him it was a sad weariness. When I opened my eyes I noticed that the people surrounding me were mired in this weariness, and we all appeared to be waiting for someone who would set us free. A cold hell we persevered in. Now and again a sentence recurred: You must do something.

It took six more weeks, countless utterances spoken to him, the one who never came, until I found an answer.

101

His business card. I had memorized it. With the address in my head I decided to seek him out at his home, and I didn’t think any further than that point, where I would press the bell, ding dong, and wait for some sound behind the door. The first real decision since I nodded to him. I made it early yesterday. I woke up. In front of me the crack in the wall. If only one were crazy enough to do everything differently. To break out just once. Kyōko. I felt she was connected to me as well. I quickly got dressed. With each movement my decision grew firmer. I would wait for a sound and then. Not contemplate how it would work out. It would work out. I slipped out. The tie in my jacket pocket. I touched it at each corner I passed. It propelled me onward. Into the crowds. Bought a ticket. I had not forgotten how. Crossed the turnstile. Into the subway. His world, day after day, his hand holding the strap. I stood a bit sideways, with bent shoulders, rowed against the current. While everyone went into the city, I went out. I saw the things he must have seen. The billboards. The posters. The garbage cans. Full to bursting. My gaze glanced around, not only mine now, as it observed and was observed. I got onto the train. Father’s shoes everywhere. I repeated the address to myself. Seven weeks have passed. A period of mourning*. Why does that occur to me now? And got out. There is the platform where he had stood, the platform on which he asked himself whether anyone would miss him if he were not there. Nobody there. I slowed my steps. What would I say if the door were to open? Was my hope of seeing him behind it any different from my parents’ hope, right at the beginning, when they thought I would come out and tell them: Everything’s all right? I got on the bus. It drove off. Beside me, on the seat, a book left behind. Proof. Of what? The driver called to me: You must get out here. Hot air engulfed me. I had arrived. A short walk. Then.

102

Tsik-tsik-tsik. The cry of the cicadas. I captured one and released it again. I was walking through a commuter town, a slumbering community. White shirts on the clothes lines, each house like the next. Parched gardens like handkerchiefs. Potted palms. Women and babies. The children were at school, the men at work. Over there! The gnarled root. Cracked asphalt everywhere. The garden gate. I looked up. A window was open. Fluttering curtain. I rang. Now the door would open. Kyōko’s flower pots. The glove. I rang again. From the house next door came gentle piano music, interrupted by the clatter of silverware. Soon it would be midday. I sat down on the curb. Felt: So this is what it’s like. When the door stays closed. So this is what it’s like. When you stand outside and wait in vain for a human sound. The sun burned down. I blinked.

Hello? A bright female voice. She was coming up the street.

Still blinking, I tried to make out her shape. She was coming towards me. I jumped up. Ohara-san?

Yes, that’s me. And you are? Taguchi Hiro? A friend of my husband’s? Please forgive me. He never.

I pulled out the tie.

Or perhaps he did? She pushed open the garden gate, invited me in. She took the tie with a greedy gesture. Two steps at a time. As I took off my shoes in the entrance, I saw his, painfully neat. The briefcase beside them. A sports jacket hung on the hook. It smelled of cigarettes, bittersweet.

103

I followed Kyōko through the hall and into the living room. No rattle on the floor. It was silent. While she put the water on in the kitchen for tea, I sat on the couch, a cushion at my back, and looked around. At home. In front of me was the television. To the left, the sideboard. The snow globes and musical clocks. The ballerina revolved around herself on the side table. The naked lady hung on the wall, her body a knot, and the sailor, a girl beneath his gaze, rising smoke. Pink artificial flowers. A swan with a curved neck. Crystal figurines. A full ashtray. I had a hole in my sock, I curled up my toes. Soft carpet. Books. Stacked in piles. The shelves were full. They could have used a new one.

Some yokan* with your tea? Kyōko poured us two tiny bowls. If I had known you were coming. But. She smiled. I didn’t know. Taguchi Hiro, you said. I don’t believe he told me about you. Or did he and I have forgotten? I often wonder, since he. Her smile collapsed. I often wonder whether I really knew him. Such a sudden death. Afterwards you wonder all sorts of things. And as I collapsed with her smile: Yes, he’s dead. A heart attack. On the way home. On the train. On a Friday. Seven weeks ago. Yesterday his ashes were buried. If I’d known. I would have told you. All the same. You must have. I mean. The tie. He was wearing it on the day he died. Can it be? You were the last to? She didn’t hide her face from me. Not when I began to tell her. Not after I’d told the whole story. I saw how she cried, then laughed, remembered, then returned, how she turned pale, then red, and finally was simply there. How she never let go of the tie the entire time, held it tight. How she caressed it. With her fingers. She made it part of herself. Wanted to melt into it. Melted.

104

Which is worse, asked Kyōko after a while. The fact that he concealed his situation from me or the fact that I helped him conceal it? You heard right. I did, knowing full well he had lost his job and couldn’t tell me because of the shame of it, I helped him stay with this shame. I wanted to give him time. To wait with him, until. He needed that: Someone to wait with him. Someone who was patient. Sometimes I took a long step towards him. I talked of breaking out. Of leaning back. Of doing nothing. Or sometimes. About his firm. About his managers. About his colleagues. All this to smooth the way, to illuminate it for him, to help him understand: You don’t have to. To slave away. But he distanced himself. A game, at first it was a game, then I lost control. Ghastly. When you lose control. One moment it’s within your power to initiate movement toward a turning point, and then nothing happens. You have become part of the audience. The other person is on stage, a solo performance, the spotlight on his face, all alone. While you, in the back row, in the dark, incapable of intervening, watch as the performance emerges. The curtain falls. I wasn’t allowed to join in, at any point. Even though I did it for his sake, I must have known that a game like that has no happy ending.

At the beginning of course I had no idea. He left the house punctually at half past seven, came home in the evening, tired, went to sleep in front of the television. Not unusual. I covered him up. And as I was covering him I heard him whispering my name in a dream. Kyōko. Suddenly he was awake. I say: Suddenly. Like a dead man on a bier rising up with a jolt, his arms full of life flung around me, holding me in his embrace, almost crushing me, his breath close to my ear: Forgive me. Please. Forgive me. I gasped for breath. Then he let me go. His arms limp again, he sank back, fell asleep once more, deeper than before, his mouth half open. What a fool I am, I thought, and called up the firm the following day. When I put down the receiver I became aware of the significance of our decisions: He wanted to stay with the promise of his daily routine, I wanted to stay with him for the sake of our daily routine. In this tiny moment, as I put the receiver back on the cradle, I became aware of the beauty of it, that harmonious beauty, in our attempt to remain true to the decisions we had taken.

105

In a way he worked hard right to the end. If you understand. He didn’t particularly like his work. What he liked about it was only the routine and the satisfaction he got from keeping it up. The seamlessness of it. Even when nothing else functioned. To maintain this seamlessness, despite the reality, was the hardest work he had ever done.

It’s only obvious to me now. Kyōko put the tie around her neck. But I’m doing the same thing as him. Do you see the ashtray there? All the butts? I can’t bring myself to throw them away. The newspaper spread out over there. He read it, in his bubble, turned the pages back and forth. I can’t manage to throw it away. The pack of senbei* on the side table. No longer crisp. The bottle of beer he drank with them. Flat. In the sink in the bathroom I found one of his gray hairs. I’ve kept it. His toothbrush. The bristles all bent. The hand towel. The razor. Everything in its place. They gave me what he had been wearing. The watch. The shoes. The briefcase. Inside was a note: You only live once, they say, so why do you die so often. Only the tie was missing. I looked for it. They call it mourning. And I think that was the reason he tried so hard to be someone who functioned. By holding on to how things had always been, he was mourning what was missing: Our son, his love for him. What you don’t do, what you omit, often has more painful consequences than what you do. If I had shaken him awake. If I had spoken to him right after the phone call to his firm: I am not staying with you because of our daily routine, but for your own sake. And also. If you hadn’t acted on your desire to come here, I would still be searching for his tie tomorrow and thinking: I did not know him. I want to thank you for that. Kyōko took my hand and squeezed it. Thank you for having met him.

106

Before you go. She pointed to the door opposite, on the other side of the hall. In there, in the baby’s room is the Butsudan*. It would be nice if you. Three breaths, a pause. Would sit with him one more time.

Stepping over the threshold.

I closed the door behind me. A small room, no bigger than mine, ten square meters at most. No furniture. Only the altar. A floor cushion in front of it. I sat down. Fresh flowers on either side. His bento box, wrapped in blue cloth. A photo. Tsuyoshi. A second one. Him. I put in the incense sticks, rang the bell, placed my hands together. As my palms touched, it was as if there were no walls around me. Something gave way inside me. I burst into tears. I hadn’t cried for so long that my tears were like those of a child or a very old person. I cried without restraint or discretion. Cried for him and all the others who were gone. For Kyōko. My parents. Myself. Cried most of all for those who remained.

Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling.

107

They say a teacher is immortal. Even if he leaves his body, what he has taught lives on in the hearts of his pupils. I was compelled to think of that as I traveled home, down the hill. With a detached stare I saw the people, heads on their chests, being shaken to and fro, and all at once my gaze penetrated to a deeper level, beyond the bones and organs, beyond even that, into the indefinable, which no longer terrified me, but filled me with amazement. It was as if the tears I cried had cleared a sad veil from my eyes, and my I can no longer! turned into a question: What can I do?

Taguchi!

Someone was calling my name.

Taguchi Hiro!

In the crush of the subway station someone grabbed me by the shoulder. I turned around.

Kumamoto!

How could it be? There he stood, alive before me. The white hand, there it was. He stretched it out towards me. I grasped it.

Long time no see. Come on, let’s go up there. He was limping. To the café over there? A free table. What luck, he laughed, dammit, what luck. An empty table at this time of day. Giggling girls sat at a nearby table, busy deciding whether the lip gloss they bought suited their skin color. A few salarymen too. They were talking on their phones. A student chewing gum, who pulled the gum out with his fingers and let it snap back, blew a bubble, it burst. What luck, repeated Kumamoto. I’ve often wondered what it would be like if I bumped into you. I had prepared entire sentences. Just in case. Stupid really. I can’t remember a single one of them. All gone. Up there. He tapped his forehead.

What happened, I asked. I thought you were…

… dead. Yes, well, I was. To the core. He didn’t put his hand in front of his mouth, didn’t lower his voice: Five weeks of artificially induced coma. After that I woke up. It was a slow awakening, blinking, a light lift of the covers, spreading the fingers. As the memory dripped back into my brain, I would rather have gone to sleep again. Motionless, without consciousness. To lie still there while outside there was life. From my window I saw the city lights. You were in my thoughts too. How you came towards me. Your trust in me and my cheerfulness. I did not want to be responsible for abusing your trust. I felt it like a sharp pain below the left hip.

108

Kumamoto had changed. There was no longer anything feverish in his movements. They were more sedate than anything else. His body appeared bloated, I thought of a corpse that had been under water and now slopped onto land on a strong current. That’s the medication, he said. He stretched out his lame leg.

It’s good, I said. Good to see you again.

He nodded: Really good.

Are you better now?

I don’t know. After each accident, they persisted in calling them accidents, another one happened, just after I was released. Gas. Our house almost blew up. I was admitted to a clinic. They gave me these tablets. I slept again, gently compelled to sleep. I only have fragments of memory. There was a light beam that tickled my nose. A water carafe. A sprig of cherry, the buds opened. A nurse. Her hair up in a knot. A picture. She would take out the clip, her hair would fall in soft waves down her back. A patient who constantly babbled. We called him the drunkard. Though he only drank water and tea like the rest of us. Once I spoke to him. He explained to me in a babble that he had such a longing to lie down in the street, in a corner, in a state of intoxication, without memory, without a past, to hear people’s footsteps passing by. It would comfort him, he said, this sound of passing shoes.

Or Hiroko, the fat one. She thought she would dissolve into nothing at any moment. Can you see me, she asked. Do you see how I am disappearing? Yet her body was so plump you couldn’t imagine how it would ever disappear. Where are my toes, she asked, my feet, my knees. Full of horror, she felt her legs and screamed: I feel a void. In the end she had to be fed through a tube, because she was convinced she no longer had a mouth.

109

Why am I telling you this? Illness, I think, is holding onto an illusion. The loneliness while you’re holding onto it. If I say I don’t know whether I’m better, it’s because I don’t know whether that’s even possible. To be completely free. But: Yes. For the last half year I have really been so well that I gradually began to find pleasure in imagining bumping in to you, and telling you that I am genuinely pleased to see you again. A curiosity within me: What’s coming next? Wonderful. Such curiosity: Where is it all going? In the morning I get up and experience, as I wash my face, a simple pleasure in being so curious. The water is alive. It rinses the sleep out of my eyes, wakes me up. It’s as if I first have to practice being as alive as the water.

Of course for my parents it’s difficult. I see that now. That it is difficult for them, this vision they had of seeing me smashed to pieces. Not being able to hold onto that. For my father especially it’s a severe loss. He’s reluctant to talk about what happened, and when he does, he says he would rather I had gone on writing poems instead of being ill. He just says that in passing. With eyes brimming. Looks away when he adds: Would much rather you had written a long, long poem. I hear the apology in it. I hear it because I want to hear it. An effort of will, I owe it to him. It makes things easier for him. He doesn’t lose face. It makes it easier for me, I can reinvent myself. In this way we’re each in our own space and some time, who knows when, we’ll meet and sit in one space big enough for both of us, and then we’ll understand: We were never anywhere else.

110

Am I still writing? Unthinkable not to. In the very darkest night the words were like shiny pebbles. They caught the light of the moon and stars and reflected it back. One word among them that shone especially brightly. Simplicity. I would approach it, stepping softly, regard it from all sides, finally pick it up, enchanted by it, recognize that its enchantment lay in its shine, its pure meaning. Simplicity. To simply be there. Simply keep going. The longer I kept going, the easier it was to see how beautiful, simply beautiful, it is to be here.

I would like to write about how this word shines. I’d like to write about the simplest things. About, for example, how we’re sitting at this table now, across from each other, after two and a half years, telling each other things we usually conceal. The green tea latte we’re drinking is lukewarm, it tastes sweet. It will be dusk soon. The day is slipping into night with the sun. We notice lots of time has passed. My leg, extended, reminds us of that. You’re not blaming me. We’re friends, more than that, you know: Twins who turn to each other over half-filled glasses. I missed you. You missed me. So simple. The air conditioner hums. People are talking, laughing. The waitress runs to and fro and when she does stop, she wipes her apron over her tired face.

111

And Kumamoto had not changed.

Despite his sedateness, despite his bloated body, he sat before me as a poet through and through, he had maintained his integrity. He radiated a fierce strength, a man who had descended into the abyss, totally alone, and had taken its measure. And once he was out again he was the same man, just happy to be out.

What do you think? I laid my hand flat on the table so that he could see the scars. Do you think we are needed? I mean people like us, who have strayed from the path, withdrawn? Who have no diploma, no education, no work, nothing to show, have learned nothing except this: That it is worth it to stay alive. It worries me, the thought that we may not be needed now, after we have learned that and are still learning. We are marked, after all. We have a flaw. What if it is not forgiven? What if society… won’t have us back?

I avoid thinking of the big picture. If I think: Society. Then my head spins. Too big. What is that? I can’t see it. What I see are details. That’s what I want to stay with. With small things. And there, everyone is marked, everyone has a flaw, everyone needs each other. Kumamoto laid his hand beside mine. When I found you again just now, fingertip to fingertip, it was a moment. At first I did not recognize you. You’ve grown thinner. It was only when you let go of the strap in the swaying train and were gently thrown to and fro that I recognized you by the way you pushed back with your feet on the floor, against the pressure. The doors sprang open. I got up immediately. Following you. I didn’t want to lose sight of you again. You were quick, by the escalator already. I could hardly keep up. Stumbling after you I realized how much I need you. I need you so I can tell you: I’m sorry. I need you, so I can hear from you: It’s alright. You stopped for a moment. I hesitated. Overwhelmed by the feeling that I had no right to need you so much. But you were standing there. I reached out my hand towards you, and, that’s the answer to your question, perhaps it really is this reaching out, this reaching towards someone else, that’s needed most of all.

Do you have any plans, I asked.

You?

To fully emerge.

Me too.

112

The other thing I wanted to ask you: What did you, just before you, what did you call out then? You do know. I was coming towards you. And you called out something. The whole time I’ve been convinced it was a message for me. Something I should hear. Something that was intended for me. What was it?

I was confused.

Have you forgotten?

I don’t think it was anything.

No?

What’s the point of repeating it?

Perhaps to…

I am telling you: It was nothing.

Actually, it no longer mattered to me. A cry from the past, it was fading away. Whether it was freedom, life or happiness, it was no longer important. We bade each other farewell with a simple goodbye. We’ll bump into each other again, said Kumamoto. We will, I said, and take care. You too. For my sake. And with that he disappeared behind somebody’s broad back. He would go home. Go home. Suddenly I was aware of a great hunger. A hole in my stomach, I rushed off. Hunger drove me on.

113

Father’s shoes in the entrance. Polished leather, you could almost see yourself in them. My parents were sitting down to dinner. The television was on. Baseball. The Giants were ahead by three runs. I saw in the hall, surprised that I wasn’t surprised, that the picture I shoved in the trash not long ago hung in its place again. Under it a notice fixed with thumbtacks: I have the negative. However often you may remove the picture, I can get another made. Mother. Smiley face. The family is multiplying. There I stood again, Father’s hand on my shoulder, crooked cap, in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, and waited for the grain of sand to run through the hourglass, to shake off the hand, and — waited a little longer, until my bitterness over it had faded. Or as Kumamoto would have said: Because I didn’t want to feel any bitterness, I didn’t. It was a conscious effort. I owed it to myself. It made things easier for me. Without bitterness I picked up the tray from beside the door, the bowl of rice was still steaming, took a carefully considered step, then a second one, opened the door with a hand that wasn’t trembling. Wide eyes regarded me. A mute nod. Father broke the silence first. Well, clear the chair, he said, turning to Mother. On my chair, the chair I had not sat on for two years, lay a pile of old magazines, the Crown Princess waving a hand, a ball of red wool, knitting. Mother hurried to clear it off. As she did, the ball of wool fell in front of her, on the floor, and rolled to my feet. I nudged it on towards Father. A home run. I sat down. Itadakimasu*.

More rice?

Mother filled up the bowl. Here is some more tofu. Otousan*, please pass him the leeks. Within seconds the table was reorganized. Side dishes and sauces rearranged so that they lay within my reach. I ate. The last piece of Gyoza*. Father’s chopsticks clashed with mine. You take it. No, you. He rubbed his belly: I’m full. We looked at each other. We held it. A beer, he said finally: Keiko, fetch us a beer. We clinked glasses. To what? you ask. Well, to the Giants of course. Excited cheering came from the television. The commentator’s voice went crazy. The game continued. Mother brought three glasses and dried squid. Kampai*. We toasted each other. Beer tastes best, laughed Mother, at the end of a long day.

114

How we sat together and with the help of irreality agreed about reality. I realized that Father and Mother had been hikikomoris as well. With me in the house they were captive too, for my life depended on them. Father’s meager holidays had been spent at home. No trips to the seaside. No weekends in O, Mother’s hometown. Now and then to the movie theater, yes. To sit in the dark. To a restaurant, from time to time. With friends they hadn’t seen for ages. A few hours in the car, from time to time. Simply driving off and imagining what it would be like to drive on. To the end of the world. Then stopping and saying to each other: There is someone who needs us. Turn around. And back. Every few days to Fujimoto’s and shopping. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mother never missed any mealtimes. Sometimes there was a t-shirt. A pair of socks. A sweater in winter. Lots of letters, which I didn’t read, left that way by the door. I asked myself what they might have contained. Perhaps how it made them happy to see a cola missing from the fridge, or wet tiles in the bathroom. Perhaps also how it made them very sad. Perhaps how they were ashamed of me. Perhaps also how it was difficult for them to understand what brought me to shut myself away from them. After all that, to sit together and with the help of irreality to agree about reality, it was like the first breath after all three of us had been underwater. Breaking the surface. We were still gasping.

And then. I stood up. Good Night.

Father: That was the best game I’ve seen for a long time. He spoke without looking up, his gaze towards the screen. In one hand he grasped his empty glass, with the other he held onto the edge of the table. His white knuckles betrayed him. Revealing immobility. One more word and the glass in his hand would have shattered.

BEGINNING

~ ~ ~

I am grateful to all the people who have supported me while writing. Their incalculable friendship has flowed into the story in a living contribution.

Special thanks to my husband Thomas (I thank you for your encouragement, your patience, your solicitude), Ojiichan and Obaachan (I thank you for many summers filled with happiness), Michio, Niken, Ayana and Ryuta (I thank you for the red thread that bound us to one another across the miles), Satoshi (I thank you for the beautiful memory of you), Tobias (I thank you for your support), Angela (I thank you for your Epile Spitmek), Barbara and Verena (I thank you for your loyalty and glasses of wine), Kathrin (I thank you for our singing and reading together), Lelo (I thank you for cupcakes and stardust).

The greatest thanks goes especially to those I have not mentioned.

Glossary

Butsudan Buddhist altar to honor ancestors and the recently dead.

— chan Diminutive suffix added to names, especially of children.

Giants A Tokyo baseball team.

Gyoza Meat filled pastry squares.

Hajimemashite I am happy to make your acquaintance.

Heart Sutra A popular Buddhist writing, whose central doctrine is “Form is a void, the void is form.”

Hikikomori This is the word used to describe Japanese youths who refuse to leave their parents’ house, shut themselves in their rooms and reduce their contact with the family to the minimum. The period of time varies. Some spend up to 15 years or even longer shut in. How many hikikomoris there are remains uncertain, as many are concealed for fear of the stigma involved. According to estimates, between 100,000 and 320,000 young people fall victim to it. The main cause is believed to be the huge demands to conform and achieve in school and society.

Itadakimasu Said before a meal: I accept it with humility.

Kampai A toast: Cheers!

Kanjou Feeling.

Karaage Fried chicken.

Miyajima An area of beautiful countryside in Nihon.

Otousan Father, often used to address the husband.

Period of mourning In Japan this traditionally lasts for 7 weeks, after which the urn containing the remains of the deceased is placed in the grave. Cremation takes place at the funeral soon after death.

— san Suffix attached to a family name to indicate respect.

Senbei Rice cakes.

Sensei Teacher.

Yokan Sweet dish of azuki beans.

Content

Milena Michiko Flašar
I Called Him Necktie

I Called Him Necktie

~ ~ ~

Glossary