Next I took a few scraps of lumber and made myself a mailbox. I painted it red, wrote my name on it, and set it out in front of my door. Up until April 3, the only piece of mail that found its way to my box was something that had been forwarded from the dorm: a notice from the reunion committee of my high school class. A class reunion was the last thing I wanted to have anything to do with. That was the class I had been in with Kizuki. I threw the thing into the trash.
I found a letter in the box on the afternoon of April 4. “Reiko Ishida,” it said on the back. I made a nice, clean cut across the seal with my scissors and went out to the porch to read it. I had a feeling this was not going to be good news, and I was right.
First Reiko apologized for making me wait so long for an answer. Naoko had been struggling to write me a letter, she said, but she could never seem to write one through to the end.
I offered to send you an answer in her place, but every time I pointed out how wrong it was of her to keep you waiting, she insisted that it was far too personal a matter, that she would write to you herself, which is why I haven’t written sooner. I’m sorry, really. I hope you can forgive me.
I know you must have had a difficult month waiting for an answer, but believe me, the month has been just as difficult for Naoko. Please try to understand what she’s been going through. Her condition is not good, I have to say in all honesty. She was trying her best to stand on her own two feet, but so far the results have not been good.
Looking back, I see now that the first symptom of her problem was her loss of the ability to write letters. That happened right around the end of November or beginning of December. Then she started hearing things. Whenever she would try to write a letter, she would hear people talking to her, which made it impossible for her to write. The voices would interfere with her attempts to choose her words. It wasn’t all that bad until about the time of your second visit, so I didn’t take it too seriously. For all of us here, these kinds of symptoms come in cycles, more or less. In her case, they got quite serious after you left. She is having trouble now just holding an ordinary conversation. She can’t find the right words to speak, and that puts her into a terribly confused state—confused and frightened. Meanwhile, the “things” she’s hearing are getting worse.
We have a session every day with one of the specialists. Naoko and the doctor and I sit around talking and trying to find the exact part of her that’s broken. I came up with the idea that it would be good to add you to one of our sessions if possible, and the doctor was in favor of it, but Naoko was against it. I can tell you exactly what her reason was: “I want my body to be clean of all this when I meet him.” That was not the problem, I said to her; the problem was to get her well as quickly as possible, and I pushed as hard as I could, but she wouldn’t change her mind.
I think I once explained to you that this is not a specialized hospital. We do have medical specialists here, of course, and they provide effective treatments, but concentrated therapy is another matter. The point of this facility is to create an effective environment in which the patient can treat herself or himself, and that does not, properly speaking, include medical treatment. Which means that if Naoko’s condition grows any worse, they will probably have to transfer her to some other hospital or medical facility or what have you. Personally, I would find this very painful, but we would have to do it. This is not to say that she could not come back here for treatment on a kind of temporary “furlough.” Or, better yet, she could even be cured and finish up with hospitals completely. In any case, we’re doing everything we can, and Naoko is doing everything she can. The best thing you can do meanwhile is hope for her recovery and keep sending those letters to her.
The letter was dated March 31. After I had finished reading it, I stayed on the porch and let my eyes wander out to the garden, full now with the freshness of spring. An old cherry tree stood there, its blossoms nearing the height of their glory. A soft breeze blew, and the light of day lent its strangely blurred, smoky colors to everything. Seagull wandered over from somewhere, and after scratching at the boards of the veranda for a while, she stretched out next to me and went to sleep.
I knew I should be doing some serious thinking, but I had no idea how to go about it. And, to tell the truth, thinking was the last thing I wanted to do. The time would come soon enough when I had no choice in the matter, and when that time came I would take a good long time to think things over. Not now, though. Not now.
I spent the day watching the garden, propped against a pillar and stroking Seagull. I felt completely drained. The afternoon deepened, twilight approached, and bluish shadows enveloped the garden. Seagull disappeared, but I went on staring at the cherry blossoms. In the spring gloom, they looked like flesh that had burst through the skin over festering wounds. The garden filled up with the sweet, heavy stench of rotting flesh. And that’s when I thought of Naoko’s flesh. Naoko’s beautiful flesh lay before me in the darkness, countless buds bursting through her skin, green and trembling in an almost imperceptible breeze. Why did such a beautiful body have to be so sick? I wondered. Why didn’t they just leave Naoko alone?
I went inside and closed my curtains, but even indoors there was no escape from the smell of spring. It filled everything from the ground up. But the only thing the smell brought to mind for me now was that putrefying stench. Shut in behind my curtains, I felt a violent loathing for spring. I hated what the spring had in store for me; I hated the dull, throbbing ache it aroused inside me. I had never hated anything in my life with such intensity.
I spent three straight days after that all but walking on the bottom of the sea. I could hardly hear what people said to me, and they had just as much trouble catching anything I had to say. My whole body felt enveloped in some kind of membrane, cutting off any direct contact between me and the outside world. I couldn’t touch “them,” and “they” couldn’t touch me. I was utterly helpless, and as long as I remained in that state, “they” were unable to reach out to me.
I sat leaning against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. When I felt hungry I would nibble anything within reach, take a drink of water, and when the sadness of it got to me, I’d knock myself out with whiskey. I didn’t bathe, I didn’t shave. This is how the three days went by.
A letter came from Midori on April 6. She invited me to meet her on campus and have lunch on the tenth when we had to register for classes. “I put off writing to you as long as I could, which makes us even, so let’s make up. I have to admit it, I miss you.” I read the letter again and again, four times altogether, and still I couldn’t tell what she was trying to say to me. What could it possibly mean? My brain was so fogged over, I couldn’t find the connection from one sentence to the next. How would meeting her on registration day make us “even”? Why did she want to have “lunch” with me? I was really losing it. My mind had gone slack, like the soggy roots of a subterranean plant. But somehow I knew I had to snap out of it. And then those words of Nagasawa’s came to mind: “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
“O.K., Nagasawa. Right, on,” I heard myself thinking. I let out a sigh and got to my feet.
I did my laundry for the first time in weeks, went to the public bath and shaved, cleaned my place up, shopped for food and cooked myself a decent meal for a change, fed the starving Seagull, drank only beer, and did thirty minutes of exercise. Shaving, I discovered in the mirror that I was becoming emaciated. My eyes were popping. I could hardly recognize myself.
I went out the next morning on a longish bike ride, and after finishing lunch at home, I read Reiko’s letter one more time. Then I did some serious thinking about what I ought to do next. The main reason I had taken Reiko’s letter so hard was that it had upset my optimistic belief that Naoko was getting better. Naoko herself had told me, “My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots.” And Reiko had warned me there was no telling what might happen. Still, I had seen Naoko twice, and had been given the impression that she was on the mend. I had assumed that the only problem was whether she could regain the courage to return to the real world, and that if she managed to, the two of us could join forces to make a go of it.
Reiko’s letter smashed the illusory castle that I had built on that fragile hypothesis, leaving only a flattened surface devoid of feeling. I would have to do something to regain my footing. It would probably take a long time for Naoko to recover. And even then, she would probably be more debilitated and would have lost even more of her self-confidence than ever. I would have to adapt myself to this new situation. As strong as I might become, though, it would not solve all the problems. I knew that much. But there was nothing else I could do: just keep my own spirits up and wait for her to recover.
Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult. Because that’s what I have to do. I always used to think I’d like to stay seventeen or eighteen if I could. But not anymore. I’m not a teenager anymore. I’ve got a sense of responsibility now. I’m not the same guy I was when we used to hang out together. I’m twenty now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.
“SHIT, WATANABE, what happened to you?” Midori asked. “You’re all skin and bones!”
“That bad, huh?”
“Too much you-know-what with that married girlfriend of yours, I bet.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I haven’t slept with a girl since the beginning of October.”
“Whew! That can’t be true. We’re talkin’ six months here!”
“You heard me.”
“So how’d you lose so much weight?”
“By growing up,” I said.
Midori put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye with a twisted scowl that soon turned into a sweet smile. “It’s true,” she said. “Something’s different, kinda. You’ve changed.”
“I told you, I grew up. I’m an adult now.”
“You’re fantastic, the way your brain works,” she said as if genuinely impressed. “Let’s go eat. I’m starved.”
We went to a little restaurant behind the literature department. I ordered the lunch special and she did the same.
“Hey, Watanabe, are you mad at me?”
“What for?”
“For not answering you, just to get even. Do you think I shouldn’t have done that? I mean, you apologized and all.”
“Yeah, but it was my fault to begin with. That’s just how it goes.”
“My sister says I shouldn’t have done it. That it was too unforgiving, too childish.”
“Yeah, but it made you feel better, didn’t it, getting even like that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“O.K., then, that’s that.”
“You are forgiving, aren’t you?” Midori said. “But tell me the truth, Watanabe, you haven’t had sex for six months?”
“Not once.”
“So, that time you put me to bed, you must have really wanted it bad.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
“But you didn’t do it, did you?”
“Look, you’re the best friend I’ve got now,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You know, if you had tried to force yourself on me that time, I wouldn’t have been able to resist, I was so exhausted.”
“But I was too big and hard,” I said.
Midori smiled and touched my wrist. “A little before that, I decided I was going to believe in you. A hundred percent. That’s how I managed to sleep like that with total peace of mind. I knew I’d be all right, I’d be safe with you there. And I did sleep like a log, didn’t I?”
“You sure did.”
“On the other hand, if you were to say to me, ‘Hey, Midori, let’s do it. Then everything’ll be great,’ I’d probably do it with you. Now, don’t think I’m trying to seduce you or tease you. I’m just telling you what’s on my mind, with total honesty.”
“I know, I know.”
While we ate lunch, we showed each other our registration cards and found that we had registered for two of the same courses. So I’d be seeing her twice a week at least. With that out of the way, Midori told me about her living arrangements. For a while, neither she nor her sister could get used to apartment life—because it was too easy, she said. They had always been used to running around like crazy every day, taking care of sick people, helping out at the bookstore, and one thing or another.
“We’re finally getting used to it, though,” she said. “This is the way we should have been living all along—not having to worry about anyone else’s needs, just stretching out any way we felt like it. It made us both nervous at first, like our bodies were floating a couple of inches off the floor. It didn’t seem real, like real life couldn’t really be like that. We were both tense, like everything was gonna get tipped upside down any minute.”
“A couple of worrywarts,” I said with a smile.
“Well, it’s just that life has been too cruel to us till now,” Midori said. “But that’s O.K. We’re gonna get back everything it owes us.”
“I’ll bet you are,” I said, “knowing you. But tell me, what’s your sister doing these days?”
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