Hardboiled & Hard Luck (7 page)

With all that going on, I hardly ever went back to my parents’ house anymore, though I did keep going to the hospital. I talked to my mother on the phone every day, in addition to seeing her at the hospital. But even so, I couldn’t even imagine the depth of her pain. She looked as if she might have some kind of attack herself. Whenever I went to the hospital, she was always there in my sister’s room, reading a magazine, washing my sister’s thin body, moving her around to prevent bedsores, or talking earnestly with a nurse. Externally she seemed very calm, but you just had to be standing nearby to sense the storm that was raging inside her.

“She said she had a cold or something,” Sakai replied.

I found it easy to talk to Sakai, and I generally used informal speech with him, as if he were a close friend my own age, though in fact he was already past forty.

And he had an unusual job. He was a master in a particular school of tai chi with a center of his own where he taught its philosophy and practice. He was the only person I knew who had such a weird occupation. But he had written a book, and he did have students, and I had even heard of people coming from abroad to study with him. Until recently, I hadn’t even realized that people could make something like that into a successful business.

I liked Sakai. I had liked him ever since I first set eyes on him. His unusually long hair, the strange sparkle in his eyes, the difficulty of what he taught, and the unexpected ways he reacted to things—his whole air branded him as an eccentric.

I’ve always had a soft spot for wackos and oddballs—in fact, my very first love was Tōru, “the boy who swallowed a tadpole in front of everyone”—and Sakai was certainly peculiar enough to intrigue me. Maybe that was why my sister had tried so hard to keep us apart. She was a sharp woman who knew my character well, so she found a way to prevent anything from developing between us. She must have worried a lot, because it really was very hard to know what to make of him. We met for the first time only after my sister was hospitalized.

I was so thouroughly exhausted the first time he came to visit that I was feeling a bit high, and the moment I saw him I thought,
Wow, this guy is awesome!
But since I was so preoccupied with my sister’s sickness, I suppressed the feeling. I have always found it relatively easy to keep my emotions in check. I stop being able to savor, even in the secret recesses of my own mind, the ache I feel, and my heart stops dancing when we talk—I convince myself that I never felt anything at all. Kuni always used to say that if I was able to do that, I couldn’t really be very deeply in love.
When you’re in love
, she once said,
it really hurts, it aches, and you can’t suppress it, you want to see it through to the end even if it means that someone has to die, and so you end up causing a whole lot of trouble for everyone.
Judging from the tenor of her comments, I would guess that she was having an affair with someone, probably a married man, at the time.

I used to look at Kuni, envious of the fun she was having. Would she still urge me to fall in love, I thought, even if she was the one who was dying? I always told her that she didn’t know what she was talking about, she just fell in love too easily, that was all. Who knows, I said, maybe I’m actually more passionate than you!

But we always enjoyed these differences in our personalities.

I was so carried away by my pain and all the things I had been doing during the past weeks that I forgot how much I had liked Sakai in the beginning. 

Now, for the first time since all this had started, my heart had a little room in which to maneuver. Except that ultimately that space was where I would have to learn to leave my sister behind.

“In November the sky always looks so high up, somehow, and it has such a sad, lonely feel to it,” said Sakai. “Which month do you like best?”

“November.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because the sky is high and lonely, and it makes me feel very alone, and that makes my heart dance, and then I feel stronger. But at the same time, there’s this energy in the air; it’s a time of waiting, before winter really sets in.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Yeah... I don’t know, I just like it a lot.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s my favorite, too. Hey, you want a
mikan
?”

“Is it tangerine season already?”

“Come to think of it, it was something else—some other fruit with a ‘kan’ at the end. I forget what they’re called. Your mom said some relative had sent them.”

“I wonder who? My aunt in Kyushu, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll have one. Where are they?”

“Right here.”

Sakai spun around and took a single round fruit from a basket on top of the TV, a set that was only there for visitors. Kuni wouldn’t be watching TV anymore. She would never again get to see Nakai, her favorite member of Smap.

“My sister loves these things,” I sighed. Every year she would look forward to eating them—these fruits that looked kind of like
mikan
.

“Really? Well, then, let’s give her one to smell!”

Sakai grabbed another piece of fruit, split it in two, and held it under my sister’s nose. A sweet, tart aroma wafted through the room, and somehow I found myself watching as a certain scene unfolded before me.

I saw my sister sit up in bed, bathed in afternoon light, and say, with a big smile and in that bell-like voice of hers, “God, what a wonderful smell!”

Of course that didn’t really happen—I was daydreaming. My sister lay there with a grim look on her face, making all sorts of noises, fast asleep. But the scene the smell of the
mikan
called to mind seemed so vividly real that I started to cry. It was the first time in ages that I had seen my sister looking that way.

“Did you see it, too?” asked Sakai, ignoring my tears, his eyes widening.

“I think so,” I replied. “Do you think that means part of her is actually aware of what’s going on around her?”

“No way, not a chance,” Sakai said, his tone so definitive that I was taken aback. “That vision we had was brought on by the
mikan
. It brought something back for the two of us, because it remembers Kuni’s love.”

I started to wonder if Sakai might be crazy.

But he had such a great smile on his face as he went on to say, “The world is a wonderful place, isn’t it?!” that something else burst inside me, and I began to sob. I bent over the edge of the bed and wailed as my nose ran and shudders wracked my body. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t care what it took to make it happen, whether it was a
mikan
or a
ponkan
or something else. I just wanted to see Kuni.

Sakai waited in silence for me to calm down.

“I’m going,” I said. “I’m sorry I cried.”

“I’m going, too.” Sakai got to his feet.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Kuni might get lonely if you and I both leave at once, and then she’ll get jealous.”

“All right,” Sakai replied, “wait for me downstairs, at the kiosk.”

When our eyes met, I noticed something frightening.

He likes me. Oh, so that’s it, I thought.

To tell the truth, I was happy.

But we couldn’t do anything about it. This wasn’t the right time, and besides, I would be leaving for Italy pretty soon.

The sky was very blue when I went outside. All different kinds of patients and their visitors were gathered around the kiosk.

Somehow none of the patients seemed all that dispirited. Even the ones who were clearly in pretty bad shape were smiling brightly. It was nice and warm in the sun, there were lots of appealing beverages lined up on the counter, and for some reason everyone looked very happy. It struck me that hospitals can be very comforting environments for people who aren’t doing too well.

A little later, I saw Sakai heading in my direction.

What would I peg him as, I wondered, just going by how he looks? He doesn’t look like a gangster, but then he’s not an office worker type, either... some kind of entrepreneur, maybe, or—wait, I’ve got it! He looks like he writes
manga
! Either that or a chiropractor, I guess.

I was still thinking when he reached me.

“Why don’t we have a cup of tea before we go?” he asked.

“I’d like a nice strong coffee, actually,” I replied.

“There’s a good place not too far from here.”

“Why don’t we walk there, then?”

We began walking.

I felt as if we had been walking around together like this for years. But it was really the first time we had ever been alone together. It felt odd to be leaving the hospital with him, since I would never have gotten to know him if my sister hadn’t ended up there. You never know what life will bring. My eyes were so puffy that I couldn’t really make out my surroundings. I probably hadn’t cried that way, with that same degree of oblivious intensity, since I was a baby.

The sky was distant, perfectly unique, and translucent; the green leaves on the trees were beginning gradually to lose their color.

I thought I detected the sweet scent of dried leaves drifting in the wind.

“I suppose it’ll just keep getting colder from now on,” I said.

“I guess so. You know, I never tire of the beauty of this season,” Sakai said, “no matter how many times I see it.”

I wonder when the day will come when he does get tired of it, I thought.

“How do you feel about your brother’s behavior, Sakai?” I asked.

“I think he’s being just as cowardly as I’d expect—he changes so little that it’s actually kind of touching,” he replied. “The thing I’m worried about is whether or not he’ll actually be able to make it as a dentist and take over the family business. I guess he’ll be OK—he’s a nice person, after all, and he’s good with his hands, and he’s pretty sturdily built. I’d be against it if he were going into surgery or something, of course, knowing what a crybaby he is.”

A lovely swath of bare branches was visible behind him. It was only November, yet already the branches these trees stretched toward the sky were as bare as bones. I felt safe when I looked into Sakai’s eyes. I saw a light there so deep and forceful that I felt as if he would forgive anything.

“I always thought he seemed pretty weak myself.”

“He is. And since he’s so honest, he just ran away from it all. I’m sure he’s been crying constantly, without even stopping to eat. He’ll put his emotions back in order before long, though, and I’m positive he’ll be there when your sister dies.” Sakai paused. “I know he hasn’t come to the hospital, and he did agree to break off the engagement, but I can’t really blame him for doing either of those things.”

“Neither can I. I doubt Kuni does, either.”

“Everyone comes to terms with things in his own way, right?”

“It’s true. I mean, if you think about it, even I’m starting to make preparations for the future. The way the two of us are acting, your brother and I, isn’t all that different, really. I do hope he’ll come to the funeral and stuff, though.”

“I’m sure he will. He’s very reliable when it comes to things like that.”

“Do you think he might not have left Kuni if her injury had been minor enough that he still could have married her?”

“It’s impossible to say for sure, but I doubt he would have. There’s something fundamentally different between the hypothetical situation you’re describing and what actually happened. The truth is, I think, that Kuni is already saying goodbye to the world—she’s going steadily through that process—and in the meantime we’re all caught in this odd space, the oddly empty block of time that’s left before her death, going through the motions of making a decision. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

I knew what he meant. The moment I started doing the paperwork for my trip to Italy, the moment I opened my now dusty textbook of conversational Italian and threw myself back into my studies, time, which had ground to a halt, started moving, and I began to feel things again.

It wasn’t death that saddened me, it was this mood.

It was the shock of it all.

That stunned feeling remained in the core of my mind, as hard and tight as ever. No matter how hard I tried to make it go away, it never did. Even when I thought I had finally gotten a grip on myself, all I had to do was call up an image of Kuni and all that confidence would disappear.

One morning, Kuni walked into the kitchen clasping her head in her hands.

I just happened to be back visiting my family—I had arrived the night before. I was sitting in the living room, having a cup of coffee.

“Would you like some coffee?”I asked.

“No thanks,” she said, her tone strangely gentle. “My head is killing me.”

I thought about how Kuni would be getting married soon, and then eventually, when her fiancé was ready to go home and take over the family business, moving to a place much further away. I started feeling a little sentimental.

It occurred to me that we would never talk about the skylight we used to dream of having, and that our dream would never come true.

Memories of childhood rose up inside me, so vivid that I was dazzled. The air, the different smells, the magazines piled beside our pillows—it all came back to me. Every minute had been fun, I realized, so much fun it made my heart ache.

I went and poked through the cabinet until I found an herbal tea that I’d heard was good for headaches and made a pot for Kuni. She gave me a little smile and washed down two aspirin with a gulp of tea.

I didn’t have the slightest premonition of what was going to happen.

If I had, I would have prevented it.

She had on the same pajamas as always and had the same haircut.

I always focus on the present, so why does the passage of time make me so sad? My sister, hopelessly romantic dreamer that she was, used to make me go with her at night when she set out to gaze at the window of her first love. As we walked along the darkened streets, we would listen to some song we both liked, playing it again and again, each of us using one earphone from the same Walkman. I wasn’t interested in the boy my sister liked, but standing in front of the building where he lived, staring up at the light in his window, was something that made my heart thrill and ache. There were always stars overhead. The asphalt looked much closer when we listened to music while we walked. And the headlights of the cars were beautiful. Sometimes, even though we were still just kids, a guy would try to hit on us, or we would notice someone following us, and we found that electrifying. But as long as we stuck together, nothing could frighten us.