Hardboiled & Hard Luck (6 page)

I was there, in Chizuru’s apartment. In a room that no longer exists.

Everything was so clear; I could even see the stains on the high ceiling.

I saw light glinting off the beautifully polished, stainless steel kitchen counter.

It was foggy outside. So foggy I almost thought it would come inside.

The sky glowed dully and the noise of the traffic was muted.

I could hear the sounds of the couple overhead ardently creating another child in the bathroom, as if they didn’t have enough already.

“God, they’re so loud!” I moaned. “Don’t they know how late it is?”

I was flipping through a magazine; my mind was blank.

Recently, I had become something of an alcoholic; I was almost finished with a two-liter bottle of sake I had been drinking, little by little, and I was very drunk.

“I know, why don’t I put on some music?” said Chizuru.

Since she didn’t sleep at night, she loved it when I tried to stay up late.

She looked so happy. Just like a child.

Chizuru put on a random CD. It was rather loud, but it still sounded muffled, as if the sound were being absorbed by the fog.

The couple upstairs carried on undisturbed, having such a wild time that every so often we would hear great splashes of water or a big crash as they knocked over the washbasin, or sometimes, in the midst of it all, started discussing their children’s education. Everything was so clearly audible that I began to suspect they were doing it with the bathroom window wide open.

“It’s amazing. They sure have a lot of stamina...” I said.

To my drunken eyes, Chizuru looked kind of transparent. Maybe it was the color of her skin, or maybe it was the fog, or maybe it was just the sort of person she was. It occurred to me that we might not have much longer together.

For some reason, it seemed natural that a creature like her, who didn’t sleep at night and hardly ate a thing, wouldn’t live very long.

“Personally, I don’t really mind,” said Chizuru. She smiled as she listened, entranced, to the mixture of the music and the noises upstairs. “Hearing people makes me feel safe. I don’t know, for me, it’s kind of a mom-and-dad sound.”

“There’s a bit too much of the mom-and-dad aspect, don’t you think?” I said. “I wouldn’t mind if they chose a slightly milder way of expressing it.”

Chizuru laughed. “I don’t agree. They’re all nice warm sounds—the sounds of two parents who went in to take a bath together one night and got to talking about this and that as they washed each other’s bodies, and sort of got in the mood.”

I didn’t matter either way. I was much more interested in looking at Chizuru sitting there by the window, the fog and the glow from the headlights at her back. She looked as if she might vanish then and there. As I gazed at her, I began to feel uneasy, then afraid. Is this our world or the world beyond? I couldn’t tell. That must be why Chizuru felt safe when she heard those mom-and-dad sounds—they let her feel that there was something holding her here, on this side.

Everything up to this point was, I’m sure, a mixture of memory and dream.

But then Chizuru turned to face me from outside the window.

“By the way,” she said, “I wanted to tell you that the Chizuru you saw in that dream you had earlier—that wasn’t me. This me—the one you’re seeing now, in this dream, as you lie sleeping in the woman’s room—this is the real me. And you know that shrine you saw earlier? It’s nothing to worry about. Really. After today, it won’t bother you again. Since I saw that you were in trouble, I kept an eye on you, all along.”

Those eyes, the way they looked right through me. Chizuru’s eyes.

Tears welled up in my own eyes.

“Thank you,” I said, taking her cold hand in mine.

I awoke with a start to find myself in a dark, shabby-looking room that I didn’t remember having seen before.

A faint light glimmered through the curtains.

Where the hell am I? I sprang up and saw the woman lying in another part of the room, sound asleep and snoring.

Her hair, which was run through with strands of white, and her nostrils, and those horribly tacky striped pajamas... they touched a tender chord in me now. Her receptionist’s uniform hung neatly on the wall.

It’s people like her, I thought, who keep the world turning.

Feeling a sense of relief, I drifted off to sleep again.

At last this night will end.

7

Morning Light

So morning came. And I went back up to my room.

Bathed in the light of a cloudless morning, it was amazing how peaceful it was. I couldn’t imagine what had been so frightening the night before.

I took a shower and got dressed.

Only the two glasses called to mind the events of the previous night, and they didn’t seem particularly significant with all this brilliant sunlight streaming into the room.

I quickly packed up my bag and went down to the front desk.

“Thanks for everything,” I said.

The woman smiled in reply as she accepted full payment for the room. “Sure, no problem. Take care of yourself.”

She acted as if nothing had happened. I chuckled to myself, thinking that this was just about as close to a one-night stand as you could get.

Outside, it was a typical morning in a country town.

One after another the stores were opening for business: gas station attendants went about their work, and an old cleaning lady was sweeping the street. 

In the distance, mountains awash with the tints of autumn leaves stood in a line, the blue sky soaring up behind them.

What was all that about last night? I wondered.

Beautiful traces of the final dream still echoed in my heart.

I was glad I’d had a chance to see the real Chizuru in my dream. It could only have happened in that distorted temporality. And it’s true, I thought, interesting things do happen, even in the midst of the blackest nights. And when you take a spill, you can always rise up from it with something good in your hand.

I took out my map and began walking toward the station.

HARD LUCK

1

November

For the first time in ages, my mom wasn’t at the hospital when I arrived.

Sakai was there alone; he sat at my sister’s bedside, reading a book.

Kuni had all sorts of tubes hooked up to her body, just as she did every day. The awful sound of the respirator filled the quiet space.

I was used to this scene by now, though from time to time I would still see it in my dreams, and somehow the shock I felt on waking was much worse than what I experienced when she was actually lying there before me.

I always felt much deeper emotions when I visited her sickroom in my dreams. In real life, in the train on the way there, I could sense that I was readying myself, little by little. The emotions I would have when I saw her lying there, when I felt her skin, were slowly being pieced together. It was different in dreams. In my dreams, Kuni still talked and walked just like she used to. And yet even in those dreams, I knew it wasn’t true. The image of her room in the hospital was always there, somewhere, waiting for me. The scene was always in the back of my mind, always; and so over time the distinction between wakefulness and sleep had faded. No matter where I was, I always felt that something inside me was stretched to the limit, and there was no relief. From the outside, though, I must have seemed very calm. Because as autumn deepened, my face grew less and less expressive, and the tears I cried fell on their own, automatically.

Already a month had passed since my sister had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. It happened after she stayed up several nights in a row preparing a manual for the person who was going to take over her job when she quit to get married. One cerebral hemisphere was seriously damaged, and the resulting edema put pressure on her brain stem, so that it slowly ceased to function. In the beginning she could still breathe on her own, if only faintly, but eventually her respiratory functions gave out. For the first time, I realized that living on as a vegetable isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a comatose. Slowly but surely, my sister’s brain was dying.

Recently my whole family had started studying up on these things, and we had learned that my sister could no longer even be called a vegetable, not even that slim ray of hope was left. Just one week ago, we had been informed that her brain stem was functioning at such a low level that her body was only being kept alive by the respirator. My mother had been planning to keep her alive for years, if necessary, as long as she was a vegetable, but now that wouldn’t be possible. All we could do was wait for the doctors to declare her officially brain-dead and take her off the respirator.

Slowly everyone in my family came to understand that no miracle would occur, and after that life became somewhat easier. In the beginning, because we had no knowledge to fall back on, we were hounded, again and again, by all sorts of ideas. We lived for a time in a kind of concentrated hell from which there was hardly any escape, torn between everything from superstition and science to our own heartfelt prayers to the gods; we even tried to make out the things Kuni said in our dreams. Then, once we had emerged, sort of, from that agonizing period in which we were constantly assaulted on all sides by conflicting hopes, we calmed down a little and made up our minds to do everything we could to keep my sister comfortable, and not to think or do anything she wouldn’t like. By then, we knew that Kuni wouldn’t be coming back—and it wasn’t just a matter of logic anymore, we could see with our own eyes that it was true. Though when we felt the warmth of her hands or saw that her nails were still growing, or when we heard her forced breathing or the beating of her heart, we couldn’t help imagining that something wonderful might happen.

That strange period we all lived through before my sister finally departed from this world forced us all to do a lot of thinking.

That very morning, the day I went to the hospital and found my mother absent, I’d started filling out paperwork again to go and study in Italy—a trip I had been forced to postpone and had been thinking of abandoning all together, depending on how things went with Kuni. We were starting to go on with our lives. Even if every sight that met our eyes was still alive with secret shadows of my sister.

The only one who didn’t seem particularly troubled was Sakai, the older brother of Kuni’s fiancé. My sisters fiancé had been so traumatized by the terrible thing that had happened to her that he had gone to stay with his mother. As a student in dental school, he knew very well that there was no longer any hope of a recovery now that Kuni’s brain stem had stopped functioning. My parents had made a formal request that the engagement be broken off, and the day before he had agreed.

Sakai came to the hospital pretty often, even though none of this had much to do with him—he happened to live in Tokyo, so he said he would like to come if that was OK with us. My family was pretty harsh with him in the beginning because we assumed he was only coming because he was ashamed of the way his useless younger brother was acting. This didn’t seem to be the case, though: he came regularly and sometimes tried to hit on the nurses. It didn’t seem to have taken very long for him to get used to this devastating state of affairs. I couldn’t figure him out.

His life was shrouded in mystery, though my sister had told me at some point that he and his brother had had a hard life. Their father died of some terminal illness, leaving their mother to raise them by herself, working all the while as head nurse in a local hospital. That, as far as I can recall, was the story my sister told me.

Whenever I remembered the time when my sister  could still talk, I felt as if there were some sort of membrane around me. My sister had a thin, high-pitched voice, and she talked a lot. When we were kids, we were always dragging our futons into each other’s rooms, then talking together until dawn. We swore in the most adorable way that when we grew up, one of us would have to install a skylight in her house so that we could gaze up at the stars while we talked. In our minds, the glass skylight gleamed, shiny and black, and the stars glittered like diamonds, and the air was clear. In that future room, there would be no end to the topics we wanted to discuss, and morning would never come.

My sister was always so cute—there was something about her that reminded you of a fairy tale—but when love was involved she became one very fierce woman, just the opposite of me. When she was a teenager, she was so into her boyfriend that she kept saying she was going to have his initials tattooed on her arm.

“I think it’s a bad idea,” I told her. “It’ll narrow your range of options, right? You won’t be able to date anyone later on unless they have the same initial.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, say you get a tattoo of the letter
N
for Nakazawa. It won’t make any sense if you date someone with no
N
in his name. What happens then? Sure, it’ll be just fine if you
happen
to end up with another
N
, but what if you fall in love with someone without any
N
s? You won’t be able to explain it.”

“I don’t see why you’re thinking about these things. None of that is relevant! I’ll never go out with anyone else! I mean, isn’t it romantic to marry the first guy you ever date? I’m pretty sure it’s going to work out, you know.”

“It’s never going to happen. Forget the tattoo.”

We enjoyed these silly, late-night conversations, and we had them all the time. Back then our imaginations were so vibrant that, even in the absence of a skylight, we could sense how full of stars the sky was.

At first, the membrane I felt around me when I thought of Kuni would dissolve when I cried, washed away by the hot stream of my tears. But now I had stopped crying. That’s how hard I was struggling, body and soul, to accept the situation. I remained enclosed in that membrane—the sense of my sister’s absent presence—all the time.

“Where’s my mom?” I asked Sakai.

I had left home to live on my own, and now I was in graduate school studing Italian literature. During the past several weeks I had suddenly started doing a lot of part time work, because it had occured to me, after my sister was hospitalized and the possibility arose that she might end up as a vegetable, that I might not be able to rely on my parents for money anymore. I also needed a way to distract myself. My days passed in a cycle of trips to the hospital, time spent with my sister, all-night jobs at bars, going to school, taking naps... and I was hardly eating at all. As a result, I learned that all you have to do is change your daily routine, and you start to accumulate an amazing amount of money. It began to seem as if I might even save up enough to cover the cost of my studies in Italy.