Vintage Murakami, Page 6

  TAKATSUKI had landed the job he had always wanted— reporting for a top newspaper. Since he never studied, his grades at university were nothing to brag about, but the impression he made at interviews was overwhelmingly positive, and he had pretty much been hired on the spot. Sayoko had entered graduate school, as planned. Life was all smooth sailing for them. They married six months after graduation, the ceremony as cheerful and busy as Takatsuki himself. They honeymooned in France, and bought a two-room condo a short commute from downtown Tokyo. Junpei would come over for dinner a couple of times a week, and the newlyweds always welcomed him warmly. It was almost as if they were more comfortable with Junpei around than when they were alone.

  Takatsuki enjoyed his work at the newspaper. They assigned him first to the city desk and kept him running around from one scene of tragedy to the next, in the course of which he saw many dead bodies. “I can see a corpse now and not feel a thing,” he said. Bodies severed by trains, charred in fires, discolored with age, the bloated cadavers of the drowned, shotgun victims with brains splattered, dismembered corpses with heads and arms sawed off. “Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we’re alive, we’re all the same once we’re dead,” he said. “Just used-up shells.”

  Takatsuki was sometimes too busy to make it home until morning. Then Sayoko would call Junpei. She knew he was often up all night.

  “Are you working? Can you talk?”

  “Sure,” he would say. “I’m not doing anything special.”

  They would discuss the books they had read, or things that had come up in their daily lives. Then they would talk about the old days, when they were all still free and wild and spontaneous. Conversations like that would inevitably bring back memories of the time when Junpei had held Sayoko in his arms: the smooth touch of her lips, the smell of her tears, the softness of her breasts against him, the transparent early autumn sunlight streaming onto the tatami floor of his apartment—these were never far from his thoughts.

  Just after she turned thirty, Sayoko became pregnant. She was a graduate assistant at the time, but she took a break from her job to have a baby. The three of them came up with names, but they settled in the end on Junpei’s suggestion—“Sala.” “I love the sound of it,” Sayoko told him. There were no complications with the birth, and that night Junpei and Takatsuki found themselves together without Sayoko for the first time in a long while. Junpei had brought over a bottle of single malt to celebrate, and they emptied it together at the kitchen table.

  “Why does time shoot by like this?” Takatsuki said with a depth of feeling that was rare for him. “It seems like only yesterday I was a freshman, and then I met you, and then Sayoko, and the next thing I know I’m a father. It’s weird, like I’m watching a movie in fast-forward. But you wouldn’t understand, Junpei. You’re still living the same way you did in college. It’s like you never stopped being a student, you lucky bastard.”

  “Not so lucky,” Junpei said, but he knew how Takatsuki felt. Sayoko was a mother now. It was as big a shock for Junpei as it was for Takatsuki. The gears of life had moved ahead a notch with a loud ker-chunk, and Junpei knew that they would never turn back again. The one thing he was not yet sure of was how he ought to feel about it.

  “I couldn’t tell you this before,” Takatsuki said, “but I’m sure Sayoko was more attracted to you than she was to me.” He was pretty drunk, but there was a far more serious gleam in his eye than usual.

  “That’s crazy,” Junpei said with a smile.

  “Like hell it is. I know what I’m talking about. You know how to put pretty words on a page, but you don’t know shit about a woman’s feelings. A drowned corpse does better than you. You had no idea how she felt about you, but I figured, what the hell, I was in love with her, and I couldn’t find anybody better, so I had to have her. I still think she’s the greatest woman in the world. And I still think it was my right to have her.”

  “Nobody’s saying it wasn’t,” Junpei said.

  Takatsuki nodded. “But you still don’t get it. Not really. ’Cause you’re so damned stupid. That’s OK, though. I don’t care if you’re stupid. You’re not such a bad guy. I mean, look, you’re the guy that gave my daughter her name.”

  “Yeah, OK, OK,” Junpei said, “but I still don’t get it when it comes to anything important.”

  “Exactly. When it comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.”

  “Anyhow, now there’s four of us,” Takatsuki said with a kind of sigh. “I wonder, though. Four of us. Four. Can that number be right?”

  2

  JUNPEI learned just before Sala’s second birthday that Takatsuki and Sayoko were on the verge of breaking up. Sayoko seemed somewhat apologetic when she divulged the news to him. Takatsuki had had a lover since the time of Sayoko’s pregnancy, she said, and he hardly ever came home anymore. It was someone he knew from work.

  Junpei could not grasp what he was hearing, no matter how many details Sayoko was able to give him. Why did Takatsuki have to find himself another woman? He had declared Sayoko to be the greatest woman in the world the night Sala was born, and those words had come from deep in his gut. Besides, he was crazy about Sala. Why, in spite of that, did he have to abandon his family?

  “I mean, I’m over at your house all the time, eating dinner with you guys, right? But I never sensed a thing. You were happiness itself—the perfect family.”

  “It’s true,” Sayoko said with a gentle smile. “We weren’t lying to you or putting on an act. But quite separately from that, he got himself a girlfriend, and we can never go back to what we had. So we decided to split up. Don’t let it bother you too much. I’m sure things will work out better now, in a lot of different ways.”

  “In a lot of different ways,” she had said. The world is full of incomprehensible words, thought Junpei.

  Sayoko and Takatsuki were divorced some months later. They concluded agreements on several specific issues without the slightest hang-up: no recriminations, no disputed claims. Takatsuki went to live with his girlfriend; he came to visit Sala once a week, and they all agreed that Junpei would try to be present at those times. “It would make things easier for both of us,” Sayoko told Junpei. Easier? Junpei felt as if he had grown much older all of a sudden, though he had just turned thirty-three.

  Sala called Takatsuki “Papa” and Junpei “Jun.” The four of them were an odd pseudo-family. Whenever they got together, Takatsuki would be his usual talkative self, and Sayoko’s behavior was perfectly natural, as though nothing had happened. If anything, she seemed even more natural than before in Junpei’s eyes. Sala had no idea her parents were divorced. Junpei played his assigned role perfectly without the slightest objection. The three joked around as always and talked about the old days. The only thing that Junpei understood about all this was that it was something the three of them needed.

  “Hey, Junpei, tell me,” Takatsuki said one January night when the two of them were walking home, breath white in the chill air. “Do you have somebody you’re planning to marry?”

  “Not at the moment,” Junpei said.

  “No girlfriend?”

  “Nope, guess not.”

  “Why don’t you and Sayoko get together?”

  Junpei squinted at Takatsuki as if at some too-bright object. “Why?” he asked.

  “ ‘Why’?! Whaddya mean ‘why’? It’s so obvious! If nothing else, you’re the only man I’d want to be a father to Sala.”

  “Is that the only reason you think I ought to marry Sayoko?”

  Takatsuki sighed and draped his thick arm around Junpei’s shoulders.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you like the idea of marrying Sayoko? Or is it the thought of stepping in after me?”

  “That’s not the problem. I just wonder if you can make, like, some kind of deal. It’s a question of decenc
y.”

  “This is no deal,” Takatsuki said. “And it’s got nothing to do with decency. You love Sayoko, right? You love Sala, too, right? That’s the most important thing. I know you’ve got your own special hang-ups. Fine. I grant you that. But to me, it looks like you’re trying to pull off your shorts without taking off your pants.”

  Junpei said nothing, and Takatsuki fell into an unusually long silence. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked down the road to the station, heaving white breath into the night.

  “In any case,” Junpei said, “you’re an absolute idiot.”

  “I have to give you credit,” Takatsuki said. “You’re right on the mark. I don’t deny it. I’m ruining my own life. But I’m telling you, Junpei, I couldn’t help it. There was no way I could put a stop to it. I don’t know any better than you do why it had to happen. There’s no way to justify it, either. It just happened. And if not here and now, something like it would have happened sooner or later.”

  Junpei felt he had heard this speech before. “Do you remember what you said to me the night Sala was born? That Sayoko was the greatest woman in the world, that you could never find anyone to take her place.”

  “And it’s still true. Nothing has changed where that’s concerned. But that very fact can sometimes make things go bad.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” Junpei said.

  “And you never will,” Takatsuki said with a shake of the head. He always had the last word.

  TWO years went by. Sayoko never went back to teaching. Junpei got an editor friend of his to send her a piece to translate, and she carried the job off with a certain flair. She had a gift for languages, and she knew how to write. Her work was fast, careful, and efficient, and the editor was impressed enough to bring her a new piece the following month that involved substantial literary translation. The pay was not very good, but it added to what Takatsuki was sending and helped Sayoko and Sala to live comfortably.

  They all went on meeting at least once a week, as they always had. Whenever urgent business kept Takatsuki away, Sayoko, Junpei, and Sala would eat together. The table was quiet without Takatsuki, and the conversation turned to oddly mundane matters. A stranger would have assumed that the three of them were just a typical family.

  Junpei went on writing a steady stream of stories, bringing out his fourth collection, Silent Moon, when he turned thirty-five. It received one of the prizes reserved for established writers, and the title story was made into a movie. Junpei also produced a few volumes of music criticism, wrote a book on ornamental gardening, and translated a collection of John Updike’s short stories. All were well received. He had developed his own personal style which enabled him to transform the most deeply reverberating sounds and the subtle gradations of light and color into concise, convincing prose. Securing his position as a writer little by little, he had developed a steady readership, and a fairly stable income.

  He continued to think seriously about asking Sayoko to marry him. On more than one occasion, he kept himself awake all night thinking about it, and for a time he was unable to work. But still, he could not make up his mind. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that his relationship with Sayoko had been consistently directed by others. His position was always passive. Takatsuki was the one who had picked the two of them out of his class and created the threesome. Then he had taken Sayoko, married her, fathered a child with her, and divorced her. And now Takatsuki was the one who was urging Junpei to marry her. Junpei loved Sayoko, of course. About that there was no question. And now was the perfect time for him to be united with her. She probably wouldn’t turn him down. But Junpei couldn’t help thinking that things were just a bit too perfect. What was there left for him to decide? And so he went on wondering. And not deciding. And then the earthquake struck.

  JUNPEI was in Barcelona at the time, writing a story for an airline magazine. He returned to his hotel in the evening to find the TV news filled with images of whole city blocks of collapsed buildings and black clouds of smoke. It looked like the aftermath of an air raid. Because the announcer was speaking in Spanish, it took Junpei a while to realize what city he was looking at, but it had to be Kobe. Several familiar-looking sights caught his eye. The expressway through Ashiya had collapsed. “You’re from Kobe, aren’t you?” his photographer asked.

  “You’re damn right I am,” Junpei said.

  But Junpei did not try to call his parents. The rift was too deep, and had gone on too long for there to be any hope of reconciliation. He flew back to Tokyo and resumed his normal life. He never turned on the television, and hardly looked at a newspaper. Whenever anyone mentioned the earthquake, he would clam up. It was an echo from a past that he had buried long ago. He hadn’t set foot on those streets since his graduation, but still, the sight of the destruction laid bare raw wounds hidden somewhere deep inside him. The lethal, gigantic catastrophe seemed to change certain aspects of his life—quietly, but from the ground up. Junpei felt an entirely new sense of isolation. I have no roots, he thought. I’m not connected to anything.

  Early on the Sunday morning that they had all planned to take Sala to the zoo to see the bears, Takatsuki called to say that he had to fly to Okinawa. He had managed at last to pry the promise of an hour-long one-on-one interview out of the governor. “Sorry, but you’ll have to go to the zoo without me. I don’t suppose Mr. Bear will be too upset if I don’t make it.”

  So Junpei and Sayoko took Sala to the Ueno Zoo. Junpei held Sala in his arms and showed her the bears. She pointed to the biggest, blackest bear and asked, “Is that one Masakichi?”

  “No no, that’s not Masakichi,” Junpei said. “Masakichi is smaller than that, and he’s smarter-looking, too. That’s the tough guy, Tonkichi.”

  “Tonkichi!” Sala yelled again and again, but the bear paid no attention. Then she looked at Junpei and said, “Tell me a story about Tonkichi.”

  “That’s a hard one,” Junpei said. “There aren’t that many interesting stories about Tonkichi. He’s just an ordinary bear. He can’t talk or count money like Masakichi.”

  “But I bet you can tell me something good about him. One thing.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Junpei said. “There’s at least one good thing to tell about even the most ordinary bear. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Well, Tonchiki—”

  “Tonkichi!” Sala corrected him with a touch of impatience.

  “Ah yes, sorry. Well, Tonkichi had one thing he could do really well, and that was catching salmon. He’d go to the river and crouch down behind a boulder and—snap!— he would grab himself a salmon. You have to be really fast to do something like that. Tonkichi wasn’t the brightest bear on the mountain, but he could catch more salmon than any of the other bears. More than he could ever hope to eat. But he couldn’t go to town to sell his extra salmon, because he didn’t know how to talk.”

  “That’s easy,” Sala said. “All he had to do was trade his extra salmon for Masakichi’s extra honey.”

  “You’re right,” Junpei said. “And that’s what Tonkichi decided to do. You and he had exactly the same idea. So Tonkichi and Masakichi started trading salmon for honey, and before long they got to know each other really well. Tonkichi realized that Masakichi was not such a stuck-up bear after all, and Masakichi realized that Tonkichi was not just a tough guy. Before they knew it, they were best friends. They talked about everything. They traded know-how. They told each other jokes. Tonkichi worked hard at catching salmon, and Masakichi worked hard at collecting honey. But then one day, like a bolt from the blue, the salmon disappeared from the river.”

  “A bolt from the blue?”

  “Like a flash of lightning from a clear blue sky,” Sayoko explained. “All of a sudden, without warning.”

  “All of a sudden the salmon disappeared?” Sala asked with a somber expression. “But why?”

  “Well, all the salmon in the world got together and decided they weren’t going to swim up that river anymore, be
cause a bear named Tonkichi was there, and he was so good at catching salmon. Tonkichi never caught another salmon after that. The best he could do was catch an occasional skinny frog and eat it, but the worst-tasting thing you could ever want to eat is a skinny frog.”

  “Poor Tonkichi!” Sala said.

  “And that’s how Tonkichi ended up being sent to the zoo?” Sayoko asked.

  “Well, that’s a long, long story,” Junpei said, clearing his throat. “But basically, yes, that’s what happened.”

  “Didn’t Masakichi help Tonkichi?” Sala asked.

  “He tried, of course. They were best friends, after all. That’s what friends are for. Masakichi shared his honey with Tonkichi—for free! But Tonkichi said, ‘I can’t let you do that. It’d be like taking advantage of you.’ Masakichi said, ‘You don’t have to be such a stranger with me, Tonkichi. If I were in your position, you’d do the same thing for me, I’m sure. You would, wouldn’t you?’ ”

  “Sure he would,” Sala said.

  “But things didn’t stay that way between them for long,” Sayoko interjected.

  “Things didn’t stay that way between them for long,” Junpei said. “Tonkichi told Masakichi, ‘We’re supposed to be friends. It’s not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that’s not real friendship. I’m leaving this mountain now, Masakichi, and I’ll try my luck somewhere else. And if you and I meet up again somewhere, we can be best friends again.’ So they shook hands and parted. But after Tonkichi got down from the mountain, he didn’t know enough to be careful in the outside world, so a hunter caught him in a trap. That was the end of Tonkichi’s freedom. They sent him to the zoo.”

  “Poor Tonkichi,” Sala said.

  “Couldn’t you have come up with a better ending? Like, everybody lives happily ever after?” Sayoko asked Junpei later.