The Lake

The Lake
Originally published by Foil Co., Ltd., in Japanese, as
Mizuumi
© 2005 by Banana Yoshimoto
Translation © 2011 by Michael Emmerich
First Melville House printing: April 2011

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.mhpbooks.com

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Yoshimoto, Banana, 1964-
  [Mizuumi. English]
  The lake / by Banana Yoshimoto ; translated by Michael Emmerich.
       p. cm.
  eISBN: 978-1-935554-69-1
  I. Emmerich, Michael. II. Title.
  PL865.O7138M5913 2011
  895.6′35–dc22
                                                         2011006711

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

First Page

The first time Nakajima stayed over, I dreamed of my dead mom.

Maybe it was having him in the room that did it, after having been alone so long.

I hadn’t slept next to anyone since my dad and I stayed in my mom’s hospital room.

I kept waking up and then, relieved that she hadn’t stopped breathing, going back to sleep. The floor was dustier than you’d expect in a hospital, and I lay staring at a ball of lint that was always in exactly the same place. I didn’t sleep well, and whenever I drifted into wakefulness I would hear the footsteps of nurses moving down the hallway. And it occurred to me that I was surrounded by people who could die at any minute, and in some odd way their presence made me feel more at ease here, in the hospital, than I did outside.

When things get really bad, you take comfort in the
placeness
of a place.

I hadn’t dreamed of my mom since she died.

Or rather, sometimes she would appear in disconnected fragments of dream as I drifted off to sleep, but until that night she had never been there so clearly or for so long. Somehow I had the feeling, when I awoke, that I had been with her again, for real, after a very long separation.

That’s an odd thing to say about someone who’s dead, but that’s how it felt.

You could almost say my mom had two different faces. Two selves that came and went inside her, went and came, like distinct personalities.

One was sociable and upbeat, a woman of the world who lived in the moment and seemed like a really cool person to be around; the other was extremely delicate, like a big, soft flower nodding gently on its stem, looking as if the slightest breeze would scatter its petals.

The flowerlike side wasn’t easy to recognize, and my mom, always eager to please, tried hard to cultivate the feisty, easygoing side of her personality. Watering it, rather than the flower, with lots of love, fertilizing it with people’s approval.

My mom wasn’t married to my dad when she had me.

My dad was the president of a small import-export company in a large town on the outskirts of Tokyo, and my mom was the reasonably beautiful owner, the “Mama-san,” of a ritzy club in the entertainment district of that same town.

One night, a business associate invited my dad out drinking and took him to my mom’s club. My dad fell for my mom the moment he set eyes on her. She had a good feeling about him, too. When it came time to close up shop, they went to a Korean restaurant and ordered all sorts of dishes, laughing like crazy and having a ball, sharing their food like old friends. My dad went back to the club the next night, and the next, and so on, even when it had snowed—he went so often that in two months they were a couple. Considering how they met, two months seems like a pretty long time. That’s what makes it seem like the real thing.

They always gave the same answer when I asked what made them laugh so hard.

“Because it was a restaurant with no Japanese customers, just a place we’d stumbled across, wandering around in the middle of the night. And since we couldn’t read the menu, we ended up ordering a whole bunch of things at random, and the waiter kept carting out one dish after another, foods we didn’t recognize at all, some of them incredibly spicy, and the portions were much bigger than we had expected … it was hilarious.”

I don’t buy it, though.

I think they were just so happy to be sitting across the table from each other that night that the excitement made them giddy. I’m sure they had to endure all kinds of social pressure, but in front of me they were always very sweet to each other. They used to quarrel all the time, it’s true, but even that was kind of cute—like little kids having an argument.

My mom really wanted a baby, and she got pregnant with me immediately; but even then my parents never officially married. It wasn’t the usual story, though. My dad didn’t already have a wife and family, and he doesn’t have anyone else now.

His relatives were the problem. They were dead set against the union, and my dad didn’t want to drag my mom into a fight. So I grew up as an acknowledged but illegitimate child.

You hear a lot of talk about families like ours. In the end, though, my dad was home more than he was away, and I wasn’t miserable at all.

Except for being totally sick of that environment.

Sick of the town, sick of the situation, sick of everything. I was dying to get away from it all. I could almost convince myself it was a good thing my mom had died, because now I would never, ever have to go back there. Except for the fact that I no longer saw my dad as much as I used to, I didn’t regret anything. He had already sold the apartment where my mom and I used to live, to keep it from becoming the epicenter of an all-out dogfight among his relatives, and he’d put the money in my bank account. I felt like I was being awarded damages for her death or something, and I didn’t like that; but on the other hand, the cash was my inheritance from her. And that was all I needed to be free. There was nothing left in my old hometown now to show that I had ever been there. I couldn’t say that made me sad, though.

Take my mom’s club, for instance: When you went in during the daytime, the place looked dark and a little dingy, and it stank faintly of alcohol and cigarettes. I felt utterly, totally blank there. And when my mom’s flashy outfits came back from the cleaners and I saw them in the daylight, they seemed so cheap and flimsy it was pathetic.

All those emotions, balled up, were how I felt about the town.

It’s no different, even now that I’m going on thirty.

Last time I saw my dad, he stared at me with moist eyes.

I’ve come to resemble her.

“It’s such a waste—the best times of our life were still to come. We were looking forward to old age, relaxing, traveling together. We were planning to go on a round-the-world cruise. If I’d known things would end this way, we could have gone and done all that stuff instead of making excuses about my job, about how your mother couldn’t spare the time, couldn’t afford to leave the club.”

I’m sure my dad must have played around when he was younger, since he could hold his liquor and loved to socialize, but as far as I know he was never seriously involved with another woman after he and my mom got together.

My dad has this notion that he has to come across as a playboy, and even though he tries to act the role, it’s obvious that it’s just a pose. He’s the sort of guy who looks like a dweeb no matter what he does—and what’s more, he’s the perfect image of a balding, middle-aged hick. There’s nothing even remotely sexy about him. He’s totally uncool. So earnest that a real, bona-fide playboy would burst out laughing at the sight of him.

At heart my dad is an uncomplicated guy, but his position, the need to take over his father’s business, put a lot of strain on him, and he never seems to have felt any desire to break out of that. So he’s muddled through life, going through the motions, doing whatever it takes to fit into a recognizable mold. The son of a rich, land-owning family. The president of an import-export company in a provincial town. That, at any rate, is my take on him.

I guess my mom was all he had—the one flower that smelled like freedom.

He was careful never to let outside business intrude on the spaces he shared with my mom. He made it seem like the man he was at home was who he really wanted to be. Whenever he came to spend time with us, he threw himself into household tasks: fixing the roof, puttering in the garden, going out to eat with my mom, checking my homework, tuning up my bike.

My parents never even considered leaving town to try and find a lifestyle that was actually their own. Because being there together, hemmed in—that
was
their way of life.

I think now my dad is afraid, more than anything, that I’ll abandon him.

He’s not really afraid. He just thinks about it, with a shiver.

He wonders if one day I’ll tell him:
We never had the same family name anyway, so starting today, that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t want anything more to do with you
.

Sometimes, for no reason, he puts money in my bank account or mails me food. I call to say thank you. His nervousness is palpable, radiating from the receiver.

I know what he’s thinking:
We’re still father and daughter, right? Right?

I thank him, and I accept the money, but I’ve never told him in so many words that our relationship will go on like this, like a real family, because I don’t feel I need to. That’s not the kind of relationship we have: he’ll always be my dad, whatever anxieties the little prickings of his conscience may inspire in him, and even if I did try to abandon him.

Unlike my dad, I don’t have to worry about these things.

I wouldn’t be unwilling to lean on him for support if the need arose, but at the same time I know that if I let him give me anything too solid, too permanent, certain people out there who are driven by a jealousy and a desire I can’t fathom would come swooping in around me, eager to inspect it. It’s totally clear to me that all they’re after are the pleasures of voyeurism, but still it’d be a pain in the ass to have to deal with them.

Everything that tied me to my hometown was a pain. The less of it the better.

I know my parents had their own ideas, but from my perspective their feet were shackled and the chains bound them to my hometown.

All my life, I cherished the possibility of escape. I worried that if I started going out with a guy and somehow botched things up and fell seriously in love, if we ended up having a splendid wedding in some hotel in town—or even worse, if I happened to get pregnant!—well, that would be the end of everything. So while my classmates thrilled over their puppy loves and fantasized about getting married, I held myself back. Before I did anything, I considered the possible consequences. And as soon as I graduated from high school, on the pretext of attending an art school in Tokyo, I made my getaway. I left home.

My body knew. It sensed the discrimination, subtle but real, all around me.

Sure, she’s the daughter of a prominent local figure, but c’mon—he knocked up the Mama-san of a bar, right? That’s the kind of girl she is
. The feeling oppressed me, squeezing all the more tightly because I knew it was only in this city, nowhere else, that my dad mattered.