AND SHE WAS RIGHT. We went to a disco, and her energy started coming back little by little as we danced. She drank two whiskey and cokes, stayed on the dance floor until her forehead was drenched in sweat.
“This is so much fun!” she exclaimed when we took a break at a table. “I haven’t danced like this in ages. I don’t know, when you move your body, it’s kind of like your spirit gets liberated.”
“Your spirit is always liberated, I’d say.”
“No way,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “Anyhow, now that I’m feeling better, I’m starved! Let’s go for pizza.”
I took her to a pizza house I knew and ordered draught beer and an anchovy pizza. I wasn’t very hungry and ate only four of the twelve slices. Midori finished the rest.
“You sure made a fast recovery,” I said. “Not too long ago you were pale and wobbly.”
“It’s ’cause my selfish demands got through to somebody,” she answered. “It unclogged me. Wow, this pizza is great!”
“Tell me, though. Is there really nobody at home?”
“It’s true. My sister’s staying at her friend’s place. Now, that girl’s got a real case of the creeps. She can’t sleep alone in the house if I’m not there.”
“Let’s forget this love-hotel crap, then. Going to a place like that just makes you feel cheap. Let’s go to your house. You must have enough bedding for me?”
Midori thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “O.K., we’ll spend the night at my place.”
We took the Yamanote Line to Otsuka, and soon we were raising the metal shutter that sealed off the front of the Kobayashi Bookstore. A paper sign on the shutter read “Temporarily Closed.” The smell of old paper filled the dark shop, as if the shutter had not been opened for a long time. Half the shelves were empty, and most of the magazines had been tied in bundles for returns. That hollow, chilly feeling I had experienced on my first visit had only deepened. The place looked like a hulk abandoned on the shore.
“You’re not planning to open the shop again?” I asked.
“Nah, we’re gonna sell it,” Midori said. “We’ll divide the money and live on our own for a while without anybody’s ‘protection.’ My sister’s getting married next year, and I’ve got three more years of school. We ought to make enough to see us through that much at least. I’ll keep my parttime job, too. Once the place is sold, I’ll live with my sister in an apartment for a while.”
“You think somebody’ll want to buy it?”
“Probably. I know somebody who wants to open a yarn shop. She’s been asking me recently if I want to sell. Poor Papa, though. He worked so hard to get this place, and he was paying off the loan he took out little by little, and in the end he hardly had anything left. It all melted away, like foam on a river.”
“He had you, though,” I said.
“Me?!” Midori said with a laugh. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s cold down here.”
Upstairs, she sat me at the kitchen table and went to warm the bathwater. While she busied herself with that, I put a kettle on to boil and made tea. Waiting for the bath to heat up, we sat across from each other at the kitchen table and drank the tea. Chin in hand, she took a long, hard look at me. There were no sounds other than the ticking of the clock and the hum of the refrigerator motor, turning on and off as the thermostat kicked in and out. The clock showed that midnight was fast approaching.
“Y’know, Watanabe, study it hard enough, and you’ve got a pretty interesting face.”
“Think so?” I asked, somewhat hurt.
“A nice face goes a long way with me,” she said. “And yours … well, the more I look at it, the more I get to thinking, ‘He’ll do.’”
“Me, too,” I said. “Every once in a while, I think about myself, ‘What the hell, I’ll do.’”
“Hey, I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m not very good at putting my feelings into words. That’s why people misunderstand me. All I’m trying to say is I like you. Have I told you that before?”
“You have,” I said.
“I mean, I’m not the only one who has trouble figuring out what men are all about. But I’m working at it, a little at a time.”
Midori brought over a box of Marlboros and lit one up. “When you start at zero, you’ve got a lot to learn.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Oh, I almost forgot! You want to burn a stick of incense for my father?”
I followed Midori to the room with the Buddhist altar, lit a stick of incense in front of her father’s photo, and brought my hands together.
“Know what I did the other day?” Midori asked. “I got all naked in front of my father’s picture. Took off every stitch of clothing and let him have a good, long look. Kind of in a yoga position. Like, ‘Here, Daddy, these are my tits, and this is my cunt.’”
“Why in the hell would you do something like that?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I just wanted to show him. I mean, half of me comes from his sperm, right? Why shouldn’t I show him? ‘Here’s the daughter you made.’ I was a little drunk at the time. I suppose that had something to do with it.”
“I suppose.”
“My sister walked in and fell over. There I was in front of my father’s memorial portrait all naked with my legs spread. I guess anybody’d be kinda surprised.”
“I guess so.”
“I explained why I was doing it and said, ‘So take off your clothes and sit down next to me and show him, too, Momo’ (her name’s Momo), but she wouldn’t do it. She went away shocked. She’s got this really conservative streak.”
“In other words, she’s relatively normal, you mean,” I said.
“Tell me, Watanabe, what did you think of my father?”
“I’m not good with people I’ve just met, but it didn’t bother me being alone with him. I felt pretty comfortable with him. We talked about all kinds of stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Euripides,” I said.
Midori laughed out loud. “You’re so weird! Nobody talks about Euripides with a dying person they’ve just met!”
“Well, nobody sits in front of her father’s memorial portrait with her legs spread, either!”
Midori chuckled and gave the altar bell a ring. “G’night, Daddy. We’re going to have some fun now, so don’t worry and get some sleep. You’re not suffering anymore, right? You’re dead, right? I’m sure you’re not suffering. If you are, you’d better complain to the gods. Tell ’em it’s just too cruel. I hope you meet Mommy and the two of you really do it. I saw your wee-wee when I helped you pee. It was pretty impressive! So give it everything you’ve got. G’night.”
WE TOOK TURNS in the bathtub and changed into pajamas. I borrowed a nearly new pair of her father’s. They were a little small but better than nothing. Midori spread out a mattress for me on the floor of the altar room.
“You’re not scared sleeping in front of the altar?” she asked.
“Not at all. I haven’t done anything bad,” I said with a smile.
“But you’re gonna stay with me and hold me until I fall asleep, right?”
“Right,” I said.
Practically falling over the edge of Midori’s little bed, I held her in my arms. Nose against my chest, Midori set her hands on my hips. My right arm curled around her back while I tried to keep from falling off by hanging on to the bed frame with my left hand. This was not exactly a situation conducive to sexual excitement. My nose was resting on her head and the short-cut hairs there would give it a tickle every now and then.
“C’mon, say something to me,” Midori said with her face buried in my chest.
“Whaddya want me to say?”
“Anything. Something to make me feel good.”
“You’re really cute,” I said.
“Midori,” she said. “Say my name.”
“You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself.
“Whaddya mean really cute?”
“So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.”
Midori lifted her face and looked at me. “You have this special way with words.”
“I can feel my heart softening when you say that,” I said, smiling.
“Say something even nicer.”
“I really like you, Midori. A lot.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Like a spring bear,” I said.
“A spring bear?” Midori looked up again. “What’s that all about? A spring bear.”
“You’re walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring, and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, ‘Hi, there, little lady. Want to tumble with me?’ So you and the bear cub spend the whole day in each other’s arms, tumbling down this clover-covered hill. Nice, huh?”
“Yeah. Really nice.”
“That’s how much I like you.”
“That is the best thing I’ve ever heard,” said Midori, cuddling up against my chest. “If you like me that much, you’ll do anything I tell you to do, right? You won’t get mad, right?”
“No, of course I won’t get mad.”
“And you’ll take care of me always and always.”
“Of course I will,” I said, stroking her short, soft, boyish hair. “Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.”
“But I’m scared,” she said.
I held her softly, and soon her shoulders were rising and falling, and I could hear the regular breathing of sleep. I slipped out of her bed and went to the kitchen, where I drank a beer. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy, so I thought about reading a book, but I couldn’t find anything worth reading nearby. I considered returning to Midori’s room to look for one there, but I didn’t want to wake her up by rummaging around where she was sleeping.
I sat there staring into space for a while, sipping my beer, when it occurred to me that I was in a bookstore. I went downstairs, switched on the light, and started looking through the paperback shelves. There wasn’t much that appealed to me, and most of what did I had read already, but I had to have something to read no matter what. I picked a discolored copy of Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel that must have been hanging around the shop unsold for a long time, and left the money for it by the cash register. This was my small contribution to reducing the inventory of the Kobayashi Bookstore.
I sat at the kitchen table, drinking my beer and reading Beneath the Wheel. I had first read the novel the year I entered middle school. And now, eight years later, here I was, reading the same book in a girl’s kitchen, wearing the undersized pajamas of her dead father. Funny. If it hadn’t been for these strange circumstances, I would probably never have reread Beneath the Wheel.
The book did have its dated moments, but as a novel it wasn’t bad. I moved through it slowly, enjoying it line by line, in the hushed bookstore in the middle of the night. A dusty bottle of brandy stood on a shelf in the kitchen. I poured a little into a coffee cup and sipped it. The brandy warmed me but it did nothing to help me feel sleepy.
I went to check on Midori a little before three, but she was sound asleep. She must have been exhausted. The lights from the block of shops beyond the window cast a soft white glow, like moonlight, over the room. Midori slept with her back to the light. She lay so perfectly still, she might have been frozen stiff. Bending over, I caught the sound of her breathing. She slept just like her father.
The suitcase from her recent travels stood by the bed. Her white coat hung on the back of a chair. Her desktop was neatly arranged, and on the wall over the desk hung a Snoopy calendar. I nudged the curtain aside and looked down at the deserted shops. Every store was closed, their metal shutters down, the vending machines hunched in front of the liquor store the only sign of something waiting for the dawn. The moan of long-distance truck tires sent a deep shudder through the air every now and then. I went back to the kitchen, poured myself another shot of brandy, and went on reading Beneath the Wheel.
By the time I finished the book, the sky was growing light. I made myself some instant coffee and used some notepaper and a ballpoint pen I found on the table to write a message to Midori: “I drank some of your brandy. I bought a copy of Beneath the Wheel. It got light out, so I’m going home. Good-bye.” Then, after some hesitation, I wrote, “You look really cute when you’re sleeping.” I washed my coffee cup, switched off the kitchen light, went downstairs, quietly lifted the shutter, and went outside. I worried that a neighbor might find me suspicious, but there was no one on the street at five-fifty-something in the morning. Only the crows were on their usual rooftop perch, glaring down at the street. I glanced up at the pale pink curtains in Midori’s window, walked to the streetcar stop, rode to the end of the line, and walked to my dorm. On the way I found an open eatery and had myself a breakfast of rice, miso soup, pickled vegetables, and fried eggs. Circling around to the back of the dorm, I gave a little knock on Nagasawa’s first-floor window. He let me in right away.
用户评论