WE HARDLY TALKED the rest of the way to Kichijoji Station or on the bus to my place. We traded a few random comments on the changes in Tokyo and Reiko’s time at the College of Music and my one trip to Asahikawa, but said nothing about Naoko. Ten months had gone by since I last saw Reiko, but walking by her side I felt strangely calmed and comforted. This was a familiar feeling, I thought, and then it occurred to me it was the way I used to feel when walking the streets of Tokyo with Naoko. And just as Naoko and I had shared the dead Kizuki, Reiko and I shared the dead Naoko. This thought made it impossible for me to go on talking. Reiko continued speaking for a while, but when she realized that I wasn’t saying anything, she also fell silent. Neither of us said a word on the bus.
It was one of those early autumn afternoons when the light is sharp and clear, exactly as it had been a year earlier when I visited Naoko in Kyoto. The clouds were white and narrow as bones, the sky wide open and high. The fragrance of the breeze, the tone of the light, the presence of tiny flowers in the grass, the subtle reverberations that accompanied sounds: all these told me that autumn had come again, increasing the distance between me and the dead with each cycle of the seasons. Kizuki was still seventeen, and Naoko twenty-one: forever.
“Oh, what a relief to come to a place like this!” Reiko said, looking all around as we stepped off the bus.
“’Cause there’s nothing here,” I said.
As I led her through the back gate and the garden to my cottage, Reiko was impressed by everything she saw.
“This is terrific!” she said. “You made these shelves and the desk?”
“Sure did!” I said, pouring tea.
“You’re obviously good with your hands. And you keep the place so clean!”
“Storm Trooper’s influence,” I said. “He made me clean-crazy. Not that my landlord’s complaining.”
“Oh, your landlord! I have to go introduce myself to him. That’s his place on the other side of the garden, I suppose.”
“Introduce yourself to him? What for?”
“What do you mean ‘what for?’ Some weird old lady shows up in your place and starts picking on the guitar, he’s going to wonder what’s going on. Better to start out on the right foot. I even brought a box of tea sweets for him.”
“Very clever,” I said.
“The wisdom that comes with age. I’m going to tell him I’m your aunt on your mother’s side, visiting from Kyoto, so don’t contradict me. The age difference comes in handy at times like this. Nobody’s going to get suspicious.”
Reiko took the box of sweets from her bag and went off to pay her respects. I sat on the veranda, drinking another cup of tea and playing with the cat. Twenty minutes went by, and when Reiko finally came back, she pulled a tin of rice crackers from her bag and said it was a present for me.
“What were you talking about so long over there?” I asked, munching on a cracker.
“You, of course,” said Reiko, cradling the cat and rubbing her cheek against it. “He says you’re a very proper young man, a serious student.”
“Are you sure he was talking about me?”
“There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that he was talking about you,” she said with a laugh. Then, noticing my guitar, she picked it up, adjusted the tuning, and played Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Desafinado.” It had been months since I had last heard Reiko’s guitar, and it gave me the old, warm feeling.
“You practicing the guitar?” she asked.
“It was kicking around the landlord’s storehouse, so I borrowed it and plunk on it once in a while. That’s all.”
“I’ll give you a lesson later. Absolutely free.” Reiko put the guitar down and took off her tweed jacket. Sitting against the veranda post, she smoked a cigarette. She was wearing a madras short-sleeve shirt.
“Nice shirt, don’t you think?” she asked.
“It is,” I said. In fact it was a good-looking shirt, with a handsome pattern.
“It’s Naoko’s,” said Reiko. “I bet you didn’t know we were the same size. Especially when she first came to the sanatorium. She put on a little weight after that, but still we were pretty much the same size: blouses, slacks, shoes, hats. Bras were about the only thing we couldn’t share. I’ve got practically nothing here. So we were always trading clothes. Actually, it was more like joint ownership.”
Now that she mentioned it, I saw that Reiko’s build was almost identical to Naoko’s. Because of the shape of her face and her thin arms and legs, she had always given me the impression of being smaller and slimmer than Naoko, but in fact she was surprisingly solid.
“The jacket and pants are hers, too,” said Reiko. “It’s all hers. Does it bother you to see me wearing her stuff?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m sure Naoko would be glad to have somebody wearing her clothing—especially you.”
“It’s strange,” Reiko said with a little snap of the fingers. “Naoko didn’t leave a will or anything—except where her clothes were concerned. She scribbled one line on a memo pad on her desk. ‘Please give all my clothes to Reiko.’ She was a funny one, don’t you think? Why would she be concerned about her clothes of all things when she’s getting ready to die? Who gives a damn about clothes? She must have had tons of other things she wanted to say.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
Puffing on her cigarette, Reiko seemed lost in thought. Then she said, “You want to hear the whole story, in order, I suppose.”
“I do,” I said. “Please tell me everything.”
“TESTS AT THE HOSPITAL in Osaka showed that Naoko’s condition was improving for the moment but that she should stay there on a somewhat longer-term basis so that they could continue the intensive therapy for its future benefits. I told you that much in my letter—the one I sent you somewhere around the tenth of August.”
“Right. I read that letter.”
“Well, on the twenty-fourth of August I got a call from Naoko’s mother asking if it was O.K. for Naoko to come visit me at the sanatorium. Naoko wanted to pack up the things she had left with me and, because she wouldn’t be able to see me for a while, she wanted to have a nice long talk with me, and maybe spend one night in our apartment. I said that would be fine. I wanted to see her something awful and to have a talk with her. So Naoko and her mother showed up the next day, the twenty-fifth, in a taxi. The three of us worked together, packing up Naoko’s things and chatting away. Late in the afternoon, Naoko said it would be O.K. for her mother to go home, that she’d be fine, so they called a cab and the mother left. We weren’t worried at all because Naoko seemed to be in such great spirits. In fact, until then I had been very worried. I had been expecting her to be depressed and worn out and emaciated. I mean, I knew how much the kind of testing and therapy and stuff they do at those hospitals can take out of you, so I had some real doubts about this visit. But one look at her was all it took to convince me she’d be O.K. She looked a lot healthier than I had imagined and she was smiling and joking around and talking in a much more normal way than when I had last seen her. She had been to the beauty parlor and was showing off her new hairdo. So I figured there would be nothing to worry about even if her mother left the two of us alone. Naoko told me that this time she was going to let those hospital doctors cure her once and for all, and I said that that would probably be the best thing to do. So then the two of us went out for a walk, still talking the whole time, mainly about the future. Naoko told me that what she’d really like was for the two of us to get out of the sanatorium and go live together somewhere.”
“Live together? You and Naoko?”
“That’s right,” said Reiko with a little shrug. “So I told her it sounded good to me, but what about Watanabe? And she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get everything straight with him.’ That’s all. Then she talked about where she and I would live and what we’d do, that kind of thing. After that we went to the birdhouse and played with the birds.”
I took a beer from the refrigerator and opened it. Reiko lit another cigarette. The cat was sound asleep in her lap.
“That girl had everything figured out for herself. I’m sure that’s why she was so full of energy and smiling and healthy-looking. It must have been such a load off her mind to feel she knew exactly what she was going to do. So then we finished going through her stuff and throwing what she didn’t need into the metal drum in the yard and burning it: the notebook she had been using to keep a diary, and all the letters she had been getting. Your letters, too. This seemed kind of strange to me, so I asked her why she was burning stuff like that. I mean, she had always been so careful about putting your letters away in a safe place and reading them over and over. She said, ‘I’m getting rid of everything from the past so I can be reborn in the future.’ I guess I pretty much took her at her word. It had its own kind of logic to it, sort of. I remember thinking how much I wanted for her to get healthy and happy. She was so sweet and lovely that day: I wish you could have seen her!
“When that was over, we went to the dining hall for supper the way we used to do. Then we bathed and I opened a bottle of good wine that I had been keeping for a special occasion like this and we drank and I played the guitar. The Beatles, as always: ‘Norwegian Wood,’ ‘Michelle,’ her favorites. Both of us were feeling pretty good. We turned out the lights, got undressed, and lay in our beds. It was one of those steaming hot nights. We had the windows wide open, but there was hardly a breath of wind. It was black as ink outside, the crickets were screaming, and the smell of the summer grass was so thick in the room it was hard to breathe. All of a sudden, Naoko started talking about you—about the night she had sex with you. In incredible detail. How you took her clothes off, how you touched her, how she found herself growing wet, how you went inside her, how wonderful it felt: she told me all of this in vivid detail. So I asked her, ‘Why are you telling me this now, all of a sudden?’ I mean, up to then, she had never spoken openly to me about sex. Of course, we had had some frank talk about sex as a kind of therapy, but she had been too embarrassed to get into anything specific. Now I couldn’t stop her. I was shocked.
“So she says, ‘I don’t know, I just feel like talking about it. I’ll stop if you’d rather not hear it.’
“I said, ‘No, that’s O.K. If you’ve got something you need to talk about, you’d better get it all out. I’ll listen to anything you have to say.’
“So she went on with her story. ‘When he went inside me, I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. It was my first time, after all. I was so wet, he slipped right in, but still, my brain fogged over—it hurt so much. He put it in as far as he could, I thought, but then he lifted my legs and went in even farther. That sent chills all through my body, like I was soaking in ice water. My arms and legs went numb, and a wave of cold went through me. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I might die right then and there, and I didn’t care one way or the other. But he realized I was in pain, so he stopped moving, and still deep inside me, he started kissing me all over—my hair, my neck, my breasts—for a long, long time. Little by little, the warmth returned to my body, and then, very slowly, he started to move. Oh, Reiko, it was so wonderful! Now it felt as if my brain was just going to melt away. I wanted to stay like that forever, to stay in his arms for the rest of my life. That’s how great it was.’
“So I said to her, ‘If it was so great, why didn’t you just stay with Watanabe and keep doing it every day?’”
“But she said, ‘No, Reiko, I knew it would never happen again. I knew this was something that would come to me once, and leave, and never come back. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I had never felt anything like it before, and I’ve never felt anything like it since. I’ve never felt that I wanted to do it again, and I’ve never grown wet like that again.’
“Of course, I explained to her that this was something that often happened to young women and that, in most cases, it cures itself with age. And, after all, it had worked that one time: there was no need to worry it wouldn’t happen again. I myself had had all kinds of trouble when I was first married.
“But she said, ‘No, that’s not it, Reiko. I’m not worried about that at all. I just don’t want anybody going inside me again. I just don’t want to be violated like that again—by anybody.’”
I drank down my beer, and Reiko finished her second cigarette. The cat stretched itself in Reiko’s lap, found a new position, and went back to sleep. Reiko seemed at a loss how to go on until she had lit her third cigarette.
“After that, Naoko began to sob. I sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘everything is going to be all right. A beautiful young girl like you has got to have a man to hold her and make her happy.’ Naoko was drenched in sweat and tears. I got a bath towel and dried her face and body. Even her panties were soaked, so I helped her out of them—now wait a minute, don’t get any strange ideas, there was nothing funny going on. We always used to bathe together. She was like my little sister.”
“I know, I know,” I said.
“Well, anyway, Naoko said that she wanted me to hold her. I said it was way too hot for holding, but she said it was the last time we’d be seeing each other, so I held her. Just for a while. With a bath towel between us so our sweaty bodies wouldn’t stick to each other. And when she calmed down, I dried her off again, got her nightgown on her, and put her to bed. She fell sound asleep right away. Or maybe she was just pretending to sleep. Whatever, she looked so sweet and lovely that night, she had the face of a girl of thirteen or fourteen who’s never had a bit of harm done to her since the day she was born. I saw that look on her face, and I knew I could let myself fall asleep with an easy heart.
“When I woke at six in the morning, she was gone. Her nightgown was there, where she had dropped it, but her clothes and sneakers and the flashlight I always kept by my pillow were missing. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I mean, the very fact that she had taken the flashlight meant she had left in the dark. I checked her desk just in case, and there was the note: ‘Please give all my clothes to Reiko.’ I woke everybody up right away, and we took different areas to look for her. We searched every inch of the place, from the insides of the dorms to the surrounding woods. It took us five hours to find her. She had even brought her own piece of rope.”
Reiko sighed and patted the cat.
“Want some tea?” I asked.
“Yes, thanks,” said Reiko.
I boiled water and brought a pot of tea back to the veranda. Sundown was approaching. The daylight had grown weak, and long shadows of trees stretched to our feet. I sipped my tea and looked at the strangely random garden with its funny mix of yellow globeflowers and pink azaleas and tall, green nandins.
“So then the ambulance came and took Naoko away and the police started questioning me. Not that there was much to question. There was a kind of suicide note, and it had obviously been a suicide, and they took it for granted that suicide was just one of those things that mental patients did. So it was pretty pro forma. As soon as they left, I telegraphed you.”
“What a sad little funeral it was,” I said. “Her family was obviously kind of bothered that I knew Naoko had died. I’m sure they didn’t want people to know it was suicide. I probably shouldn’t even have been there. Which made me feel even worse. As soon as I got back, I hit the road.”
“Hey, Watanabe, what do you say we take a walk? We can shop for something to make for dinner, maybe. I’m starved.”
“Sure. Is there something you want to eat?”
“Sukiyaki,” she said. “I haven’t had anything like that for years. I used to dream about sukiyaki—just stuffing myself with beef and green onions and noodles and roasted tofu and greens.”
“Sure, we can have that, but I don’t have a sukiyaki pan.”
“Just leave it to me. I’ll borrow one from your landlord.”
She ran off to the main house and came back with a good-size pan and gas cooker and rubber hose.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad!”
We bought all the ingredients at the little shops in the neighborhood—beef, eggs, vegetables, tofu. I picked out a fairly decent white wine. I tried to pay, but Reiko insisted on paying for everything.
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