Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Page 36

  “That was a wonderful idea to put your name on a bracelet,” she commented after Mizuki had finished. “I like the way you dealt with it. The first thing is to come up with a practical solution, to minimize any inconvenience. Much better to deal with the issue in a realistic way than be tormented by a sense of guilt, brood over it, or get all flustered. I can see you’re quite clever. And it’s a gorgeous bracelet. It looks wonderful on you.”

  “Do you think forgetting one’s name might be connected with a more serious disease? Are there cases of this?” Mizuki asked.

  “I don’t believe there are any diseases that have that sort of defined early symptom,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “I am a little concerned, though, that the symptoms have gotten worse over the past year. I suppose it’s possible this might lead to other symptoms, or that your memory loss could spread to other areas. So let’s take it one step at a time and determine where this all started. I would imagine that since you work outside the home, forgetting your name must lead to all sorts of problems.”

  Mrs. Sakaki began by asking several basic questions about Mizuki’s present life. How long have you been married? What kind of work do you do? How is your health? She went on to question her about her childhood, about her family, her schooling. Things she enjoyed, things she didn’t. Things she was good at, things she wasn’t. Mizuki tried to answer each and every question as honestly, as quickly, and as accurately as she could.

  Mizuki was raised in a quite ordinary family, with her parents and older sister. Her father worked for a large insurance company, and though they weren’t affluent by any means, she never remembered them hurting for money. Her father was a serious person, while her mother was on the delicate side and a bit of a nag. Her sister was always at the top of her class, though according to Mizuki she was a little shallow and sneaky. Still, Mizuki had no special problems with her family and got along with them all right. They’d never had any major fights. Mizuki herself had been the sort of child who didn’t stand out. She was always healthy, never got sick, which doesn’t mean that she was particularly athletic—she wasn’t. She didn’t have any hang-ups about her looks, though nobody ever told her she was pretty, either. Mizuki saw herself as fairly intelligent, but didn’t excel in any one area. Her grades were all right—if you were looking for her name on the grade roster, it was faster to count from the top of the ranked list than from the bottom. She’d had some good friends in school, but they’d all moved to other places after getting married and now they seldom kept in touch.

  She didn’t have any particular complaints about married life. In the beginning she and her husband made the usual, predictable mistakes young marrieds make, but over time they’d cobbled together a decent enough life. Her husband wasn’t perfect by any means (besides his argumentative nature, his sense of fashion was nonexistent), but he had a lot of good points—he was kind, responsible, clean, would eat anything, and never complained. He seemed to get along fine with everyone at work, both his colleagues and his bosses. Of course there were times when unpleasant things did arise at work, an unavoidable consequence of working closely with the same people day after day, but still he didn’t seem to get too stressed out by it.

  As she responded to all these questions, Mizuki was struck by what an uninspired life she’d led. Nothing approaching the dramatic had ever touched her. If her life were a movie, it would be one of those low-budget environmental documentaries guaranteed to put you to sleep. Washed-out scenery stretching out endlessly to the horizon. No changes of scene, no close-ups, nothing exciting, just a flatline experience with nothing whatsoever to draw you in. Nothing ominous, nothing suggestive. Occasionally the camera angle would shift ever so slightly as if nudged out of its complacency. Mizuki knew it was a counselor’s job to listen to her clients, but she started to feel sorry for the woman who was having to listen so intently to such a tedious life story. Surely she couldn’t suppress a yawn forever. If it were me and I had to listen to endless tales of stale lives like mine, Mizuki thought, at some point I’d keel over from sheer boredom.

  Tetsuko Sakaki, though, listened intently to Mizuki, taking down a few concise notes. Occasionally she’d ask a quick question, but for the most part she was silent, as if focusing entirely on the process of listening to Mizuki’s story. The few times when she did speak, her voice revealed no hint of boredom, rather a warmth that showed her genuine concern. Listening to Tetsuko’s distinctive drawl, Mizuki found herself strangely calmed. No one’s ever listened so patiently to me before, she realized. When their meeting, just over an hour, wound up, Mizuki felt a burden lifted from her.

  “Mrs. Ando, can you come at the same time next Wednesday?” Mrs. Sakaki asked, smiling broadly.

  “Yes, I can,” Mizuki replied. “You don’t mind if I do?”

  “Of course not. As long as you’re all right with it. Counseling takes many sessions before you see any progress. This isn’t like one of those radio call-in shows where you can easily wrap up things and just advise the caller to ‘Hang in there!’ It might take time, but we’re like neighbors, both from Shinagawa, so let’s take our time and do a good job.”

  “I wonder if there’s any event you can recall that had to do with names?” Mrs. Sakaki asked during their second session. “Your name, somebody else’s name, the name of a pet, name of a place you’ve visited, a nickname, perhaps? Anything having to do with a name. If you have any memory at all concerning a name, I’d like you to tell me about it.”

  “Something to do with names?”

  “Names, naming, signatures, roll calls…It can be something trivial, as long as it has to do with a name. Try to remember.”

  Mizuki thought about it for a long while.

  “I don’t think I have any particular memory about a name,” she finally said. “At least nothing’s coming to me right now. Oh…I do have a memory about a name tag.”

  “A name tag. Very good.”

  “But it wasn’t my name tag,” Mizuki said. “It was somebody else’s.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Tell me about it,” Mrs. Sakaki said.

  “As I mentioned last week, I went to a private girls’ school for both junior and senior high,” Mizuki began. “I was from Nagoya and the school was in Yokohama so I lived in a dorm at school and went home on the weekends. I’d take the Shinkansen train home every Friday night and be back on Sunday night. It was only two hours to Nagoya, so I didn’t feel particularly lonely.”

  Mrs. Sakaki nodded. “But weren’t there a lot of good private girls’ schools in Nagoya? Why did you have to leave your home and go all the way to Yokohama?”

  “My mother graduated from there and wanted one of her daughters to go. And I thought it might be nice to live apart from my parents. The school was a missionary school but was fairly liberal. I made some good friends there. All of them were like me, from other places, with mothers who’d graduated from the school. I was there for six years and generally enjoyed it. The food was pretty bad, however.”

  Mrs. Sakaki smiled. “You said you have an older sister?”

  “That’s right. She’s two years older than me.”

  “Why didn’t she go to that school?”

  “She’s more of a homebody. She’s been sort of sickly, too, since she was little. So she went to a local school, and lived at home. That’s why my mother wanted me to attend that school. I’ve always been healthy and a lot more independent than my sister. When I graduated from elementary school and they asked me if I’d go to the school in Yokohama, I said OK. The idea of riding the Shinkansen every weekend to come home was kind of exciting, too.”

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” Mrs. Sakaki said, smiling. “Please go on.”

  “Most people had a roommate in the dorm, but when you got to be a senior you were given your own room. I was living in one of those single rooms when this all happened. Since I was a senior they made me student representative for the dorm. There was a board at the entrance of the dorm with name tags hanging there fo
r each of the students in the dorm. The front of the name tag had your name in black, the back in red. Whenever you went out you had to turn the name tag over, and turn it back when you returned. So when the person’s name was in black they were in the dorm; if it was red it meant they’d gone out. If you were staying overnight somewhere or were going to be on leave for a while, your name tag was taken off the board. Students took turns manning the front desk and when you got a phone call for one of the students it was easy to tell their status just by glancing at the board. It was a very convenient system.”

  Mrs. Sakaki gave a word of encouragement for her to go on.

  “Anyway, this happened in October. It was before dinnertime and I was in my room, doing homework, when a junior named Yuko Matsunaka came to see me. She was by far the prettiest girl in the whole dorm—fair skin, long hair, beautiful, doll-like features. Her parents ran a well-known Japanese inn in Kanazawa and were pretty well-off. She wasn’t in my class so I’m not sure, but I heard her grades were very good. In other words, she stood out in a lot of ways. There were lots of younger students who practically worshipped her. But Yuko was friendly and wasn’t stuck up at all. She was a quiet girl who didn’t show her feelings much. A nice girl, but I sometimes couldn’t figure out what she was thinking. The younger girls might have looked up to her but I doubt she had any close friends.”

  Mizuki was at her desk, listening to the radio in her room when she heard a faint knock at her door. She opened it to find Yuko Matsunaka standing there, dressed in a tight turtleneck sweater and jeans. I’d like to talk with you, Yuko said, if you have time. “Fine,” Mizuki said, frankly taken aback. “I’m not doing anything special right now.” Mizuki had never once had a private conversation with Yuko, just the two of them, and she’d never imagined Yuko would come to her room to ask her advice about anything personal. Mizuki motioned for her to sit down, and made some tea with the hot water in her thermos.

  “Mizuki, have you ever felt jealous?” Yuko said all of a sudden.

  Mizuki was surprised by this sudden question, but gave it serious thought.

  “No, I guess I never have,” she replied.

  “Not even once?”

  Mizuki shook her head. “At least, when you ask me out of the blue like that I can’t remember any times. Jealousy…What kind do you mean?”

  “Like you love somebody but he loves somebody else. Like there’s something you want very badly but somebody else just grabs it. Or there’s something you want to be able to do, and somebody else is able to do it with no effort…Those sorts of things.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way,” Mizuki said. “Have you?”

  “A lot.”

  Mizuki didn’t know what to say. How could a girl like this want anything more in life? She was gorgeous, rich, did well in school, and was popular. Her parents doted on her. Mizuki had heard rumors that on weekends she went on dates with a handsome college student. So how on earth could she want anything more?

  “Like what, for instance?” Mizuki asked.

  “I’d rather not say,” Yuko said, choosing her words carefully. “Besides, listing all the details here is pointless. I’ve wanted to ask you that for a while—whether you’ve ever felt jealous.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Mizuki had no idea what this was all about, but made up her mind to answer as honestly as she could. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that sort of experience,” she began. “I don’t know why, and maybe it’s a little strange if you think about it. I mean, it’s not like I have tons of confidence, or get everything I want. Actually there’re lots of things I should feel frustrated about, but for whatever reason, that hasn’t made me feel jealous of other people. I wonder why.”

  Yuko Matsunaka smiled faintly. “I don’t think jealousy has much of a connection with real, objective conditions. Like if you’re fortunate you’re not jealous, but if life hasn’t blessed you, you are jealous. Jealousy doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a tumor secretly growing inside us that gets bigger and bigger, beyond all reason. Even if you find out it’s there, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s like saying people who are fortunate don’t get tumors, while people who’re unhappy get them more easily—that isn’t true, right? It’s the same thing.”

  Mizuki listened without saying anything. Yuko hardly ever had so much to say at one time.

  “It’s hard to explain what jealousy is to someone who’s never felt it. One thing I do know is it’s not easy living with it. It’s like carrying around your own small version of hell, day after day. You should be thankful you’ve never felt that way.”

  Yuko stopped speaking and looked straight at Mizuki with what might pass for a smile on her face. She really is lovely, Mizuki thought again. Nice clothes, a wonderful bust. What would it feel like to be like her—such a beauty you stop traffic wherever you go? Is it something you can simply be proud of? Or is it more of a burden?

  Despite these thoughts, Mizuki never once felt envious of Yuko.

  “I’m going back home now,” Yuko said, staring at her hands in her lap. “One of my relatives died and I have to go to the funeral. I already got permission from our dorm master. I should be back by Monday morning, but while I’m gone I was wondering if you would take care of my name tag.”

  She extracted her name tag from her pocket and handed it to Mizuki. Mizuki didn’t understand what was going on.

  “I don’t mind keeping it for you,” Mizuki said. “But why go to the bother of asking me? Couldn’t you just stick it in a desk drawer?”

  Yuko looked even deeper into Mizuki’s eyes, which made her uncomfortable.

  “I just want you to hold on to it for me this time,” Yuko said, point-blank. “There’s something that’s bothering me, and I don’t want to keep it in my room.”

  “I don’t mind,” Mizuki said.

  “I don’t want a monkey running off with it while I’m away,” Yuko said.

  “I doubt there’re any monkeys here,” Mizuki said brightly. It wasn’t like Yuko to make jokes. And then Yuko left the room, leaving behind the name tag, the untouched cup of tea, and a strange blank space where she had been.

  “On Monday Yuko still hadn’t returned to the dorm,” Mizuki told her counselor, Mrs. Sakaki. “The teacher in charge of her class was worried, so he phoned her parents. She’d never gone home. No one in her family had passed away, and there had never been any funeral for her to attend. She’d lied about the whole thing and then vanished. They found her body the following week, on the weekend. I heard about it after I came back from spending the weekend at home in Nagoya. She’d killed herself in a woods somewhere, slitting her wrists. When they found her she was dead, covered with blood. Nobody knew why she did it. She didn’t leave behind a note, and there wasn’t any clear motive. Her roommate said she’d seemed the same as always. She hadn’t seemed troubled by anything. Yuko had killed herself without saying a word to anybody.”

  “But wasn’t this Miss Matsunaka trying to tell you something?” Mrs. Sakaki asked. “That’s why she came to your room, left her name tag with you. And talked about her jealousy.”

  “It’s true she talked about jealousy with me. I didn’t make much of it at the time, though later I realized she must have wanted to tell someone about it before she died.”

  “Did you tell anybody that she’d come to your room just before she died?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Why not?”

  Mizuki inclined her head and gave it some thought. “If I told people about it, it would only cause more confusion. No one would understand, and it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “You mean that jealousy might have been the reason for her suicide?”

  “Right. If I told people that, they might start thinking something’s wrong with me. Who in the world would a girl like Yuko be envious of? Everybody was pretty confused then, and worked up, so I decided the best thing was just to keep quiet. You can imag
ine the atmosphere in a girls’ school dorm—if I’d said anything it would have been like lighting a match in a gas-filled room.”

  “What happened to the name tag?”

  “I still have it. It’s in a box in the back of my closet. Along with my own name tag.”

  “Why do you still keep it with you?”

  “Things were in such an uproar at school then and I lost my chance to return it. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to just casually return it. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, either. Besides, I started to think that maybe Yuko wanted me to keep that name tag. That’s why she came to my room just before she died and left it with me. Why she picked me, I have no idea.”

  “It is sort of strange. You and Yuko weren’t very close, were you.”

  “Living in a small dorm, naturally we ran across each other,” Mizuki said. “We exchanged a few words every once in a while. But we were in different grades, and we’d never once talked about anything personal. Maybe she came to see me because I was the student representative in the dorm. I can’t think of any other reason.”

  “Perhaps Yuko was interested in you for some reason. Maybe she was attracted to you. Maybe she saw something in you she was drawn toward.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Mizuki said.

  Mrs. Sakaki was silent, gazing for a time at Mizuki as if trying to make sure of something.

  “All that aside, you honestly have never felt jealous? Not even once in your life?”

  Mizuki didn’t reply right away. “I don’t think so. Not even once.”

  “Which means that you can’t comprehend what jealousy is?”

  “In general I think I can—at least what might cause it. But I don’t know what it actually feels like. How overpowering it is, how long it lasts, how much you suffer because of it.”

  “You’re right,” Mrs. Sakaki said. “Jealousy goes through many stages. All human emotions are like that. When it’s not so serious, people call it fretting or envy. There are differences in intensity, but most people experience those less intense emotions as a matter of course. Like say one of your co-workers is promoted ahead of you, or a student in your class becomes the teacher’s pet. Or a neighbor wins the lottery. That’s just envy. It seems unfair, and you get a little mad. An entirely natural reaction. Are you sure you’ve never felt that? You’ve never even envied someone else?”