“Think how the family would laugh at me if they heard I let my nephew pay for the food!” Reiko said. “Besides, I’m carrying a fair amount of cash. So don’t worry. I wasn’t about to leave the sanatorium broke.”
Reiko washed the rice and put it on to boil while I set up for cooking on the veranda. When everything was ready to go, Reiko took out her guitar and seemed to be testing it with a slow Bach fugue. On the hard parts she would purposely slow down or speed up or make it detached or sentimental, listening with obvious pleasure to the variety of sounds she could draw from the instrument. When she played the guitar, Reiko looked like a seventeen-year-old girl enjoying the sight of a new dress. Her eyes sparkled, and she pursed her lips with the hint of a smile. When she had finished the piece, she leaned back against a pillar and looked up at the sky as if deep in thought.
“Do you mind if I talk to you?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she said. “I was just thinking about how hungry I am.”
“Aren’t you planning to see your husband or your daughter while you’re here? They must be in Tokyo somewhere.”
“Close enough. Yokohama. But no, I don’t plan to see them. I’m sure I told you before: it’s better for them if they don’t have anything to do with me. They’ve started a new life of their own. And I’d just feel terrible if I did see them. No, the best thing is to keep away.”
She crumpled up her empty box of Seven Stars and got a new box of cigarettes from her suitcase. She cut the seal and put one in her mouth, but she didn’t light up.
“I’m all through as a human being,” she said. “All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by rote memory.”
“But I like you now, Reiko, the way you are, lingering memory or whatever. And what I have to say about it may not make any difference, but I’m really glad that you’re wearing Naoko’s clothes.”
Reiko smiled and lit her cigarette with a lighter. “For such a young guy, you really know how to make a woman happy.”
I felt myself reddening. “I’m just saying what I really think.”
“Sure, I know,” said Reiko, smiling.
When the rice was done soon after that, I greased the pan and arranged the ingredients for sukiyaki.
“Tell me this isn’t a dream,” said Reiko, sniffing the air.
“No, this is one-hundred-percent realistic sukiyaki,” I said. “Empirically speaking, of course.”
Instead of talking, we attacked the sukiyaki with our chopsticks, downed lots of beer, and finished up with rice. Seagull came around, attracted by the smell, so we shared our meat with her. When we had eaten our fill, we sat leaning against the porch pillars and looking at the moon.
“Satisfied?” I asked.
“Totally,” she groaned. “I’ve never eaten so much in my life.”
“What do you want to do now?”
“Have a smoke and go to a public bath. My hair’s a mess. I need to wash it.”
“No problem. There’s one down the street.”
“Tell me, Watanabe, if you don’t mind. Have you slept with that girl Midori?”
“You mean have we had sex? Not yet. We decided not to until things get straightened out.”
“Well, now they’re straightened out, wouldn’t you say?”
I shook my head. “Now that Naoko’s dead, you mean?”
“No, not that. You made your decision long before Naoko died—that you could never leave Midori. Whether Naoko is alive or dead, it has nothing to do with your decision. You chose Midori. Naoko chose to die. You’re all grown up now, so you have to take responsibility for your choices. Otherwise, you ruin everything.”
“But I can’t forget her,” I said. “I told Naoko I would go on waiting for her, but I couldn’t do it. I turned my back on her in the end. I’m not saying anyone’s to blame: it’s a problem for me myself. I do think that things would have worked out the same way even if I hadn’t turned my back on her. Naoko was choosing death all along. But that’s beside the point. I can’t forgive myself. You tell me there’s nothing I can do about a natural change in feelings, but my relationship with Naoko was not that simple. If you stop and think about it, she and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start.”
“If you feel some kind of pain with regard to Naoko’s death, I would advise you to keep on feeling that pain for the rest of your life. And if there’s something you can learn from it, you should do that, too. But quite aside from that, you should be happy with Midori. Your pain has nothing to do with your relationship with her. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix. So, hard as it may be, you have to be strong. You have to grow up more, be more of an adult. I left the sanatorium and came all the way up here to Tokyo to tell you that—all the way on that coffin of a train.”
“I understand what you’re telling me,” I said to Reiko, “but I’m still not prepared to follow through on it. I mean, that was such a sad little funeral! No one should have to die like that.”
Reiko stretched her hand out and stroked my head. “We all have to die like that sometime. I will, and so will you.”
WE TOOK THE five-minute walk along the riverbank to the local public bath and came home feeling somewhat refreshed. I opened the bottle of wine and we sat on the veranda drinking it.
“Say, Watanabe, could you bring out another glass?”
“Sure,” I said. “But what for?”
“We’re going to have our own funeral for Naoko, just the two of us. One that’s not so sad.”
When I handed her the glass, Reiko filled it to the brim and set it on the stone lantern in the garden. Then she sat on the veranda, leaning against a pillar, guitar in her arms, and smoked a cigarette.
“And now could you bring out a box of matches? Make it the biggest one you can find.”
I brought out an economy-size box of kitchen matches and sat down next to her.
“Now what I want you to do is lay down a match every time I play a song, just set them in a row. I’m going to play every song I can think of.”
First she played a soft, lovely rendition of Henry Mancini’s “Dear Heart.”
“You gave a recording of this to Naoko, didn’t you?” Reiko asked.
“I did. For Christmas the year before last. She really liked that song.”
“I like it too,” said Reiko. “So soft and beautiful …” She ran through a few bars of the melody one more time before taking another sip of wine. “I wonder how many songs I can play before I get completely drunk. This’ll be a nice funeral, don’t you think—not so sad?”
Reiko moved on to the Beatles, playing “Norwegian Wood,” “Yesterday,” “Michelle,” and “Something.” She sang and played “Here Comes the Sun,” then played “The Fool on the Hill.” I laid seven matches in a row.
“Seven songs,” said Reiko, sipping more wine and smoking another cigarette. “Those guys sure knew something about the sadness of life, and gentleness.”
By “those guys,” Reiko of course meant John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison.
After a short breather, Reiko crushed her cigarette out and picked her guitar up again. She played “Penny Lane,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “When I’m 64,” “Nowhere Man,” “And I Love Her,” and “Hey Jude.”
“How many songs is that?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
She sighed and asked me, “How about you? Can you play something—maybe one song?”
“No way. I’m terrible.”
“So play it terribly.”
I brought out my guitar and stumbled my way through “Up on the Roof.” Reiko took a rest, smoking and drinking. When I was through, she applauded.
Next she played a guitar transcription of Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dying Queen” and a beautifully clean rendition of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune.”
“I mastered both of these after Naoko died,” said Reiko. “To the end, her taste in music never rose above the horizon of sentimentalism.”
She performed a few Bacharach songs next: “Close to You,” “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” “Walk On By,” plus Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues.”
“Twenty,” I said.
“I’m like a human jukebox,” Reiko exclaimed. “My professors would faint if they could see me now.”
She went on sipping and puffing and playing: several bossa novas, Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Carole King, The Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki Song,” “Blue Velvet,” “Green Fields.” Sometimes she would close her eyes and nod or hum to the melody.
When the wine was gone, we turned to whiskey. The wine in the glass in the garden I poured over the stone lantern and replaced it with whiskey.
“How’s our count going?” Reiko asked.
“Forty-eight,” I said.
For our forty-ninth song, Reiko played “Eleanor Rigby,” and the fiftieth was another performance of “Norwegian Wood.” After that she rested her hands and drank some whiskey. “Maybe that’s enough,” she said.
“It is,” I answered. “Amazing.”
Reiko looked me in the eye and said, “Now listen to me, Watanabe. I want you to forget all about that sad little funeral you saw. Just remember this marvelous one of ours.”
I nodded.
“Here’s one more for good measure,” she said, and for her fifty-first piece she played her favorite Bach fugue. When she was through, she said in a voice just above a whisper, “How about doing it with me, Watanabe?”
“Strange,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
WE WENT INSIDE and closed the curtains. Then, in the darkened room, Reiko and I sought out each other’s bodies as if it were the most natural thing in the world for us to do. I removed her blouse and slacks, and then her underwear.
“I’ve lived a strange life,” said Reiko, “but I never thought I’d have my panties removed for me by a man nineteen years my junior.”
“Would you rather take them off yourself?”
“No, go ahead. But don’t be too shocked at all my wrinkles.”
“I like your wrinkles.”
“You’re gonna make me cry,” she whispered.
I kissed her all over, taking special care to follow the wrinkled places with my tongue. She had the breasts of a little girl. I caressed them and took her nipples in my teeth, then slid a finger inside her warm, moist vagina and began to move it.
“Wrong spot, Watanabe,” Reiko whispered in my ear. “That’s just a wrinkle.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling jokes at a time like this!”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m scared. I haven’t done this for years. I feel like a seventeen-year-old girl: I just went to visit a guy in his room, and all of a sudden I’m naked.”
“To tell you the truth, I feel as if I’m violating a seventeen-year-old girl.”
With my finger in her “wrinkle,” I moved my lips up her neck to her ear and took a nipple with the fingers of my other hand. As her breathing intensified and her throat began to tremble, I parted her long, slim legs and eased myself inside her.
“You’re not going to get me pregnant now, are you? You’re taking care of that, right?” Reiko murmured in my ear. “I’d be so embarrassed if I got pregnant at this age.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Just relax.”
When I was all the way in, she trembled and released a sigh. Caressing her back, I moved inside her and then, without warning, I came. It was an intense, unstoppable ejaculation. I clutched at her as my semen pulsed into her warmth again and again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Don’t be silly,” Reiko said, giving me a little slap on the rump. “You don’t have to worry about that. Do you always have that on your mind when you’re doing it with girls?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Well, you don’t have to think about it with me. Forget it. Just let yourself go as much as you like. Did it feel good?”
“Just great. That’s why I couldn’t control myself.”
“This is no time for controlling yourself. This is fine. It was great for me, too.”
“You know, Reiko,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“You ought to take a lover again. You’re terrific. It’s such a waste.”
“Well, I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I wonder if people take lovers and things in Asahikawa.”
Growing hard a few minutes later, I went inside her again. Reiko held her breath and twisted beneath me. I moved slowly and quietly with my arms around her, and we talked. It felt wonderful to talk that way. If I said something funny and made her laugh, the tremors came into me through my penis. We held each other like that for a very long time.
“Oh, this feels marvelous!” Reiko said.
“Moving’s not bad either,” I said.
“Go ahead. Give it a try.”
I lifted her hips and went in as far as I could go, then savored the sensation of moving in a circular pattern until, having enjoyed it to the full, I let myself come.
ALTOGETHER, WE JOINED our bodies four times that night. At the end each time, Reiko would lie in my arms trembling slightly, eyes closed, and release a long sigh.
“I never have to do this again,” said Reiko, “for the rest of my life. Oh, please, Watanabe, tell me it’s true. Tell me I can relax now because I’ve done enough to last a lifetime.”
“Nobody can tell you that,” I said. “There’s no way to know.”
I TRIED TO convince Reiko that taking a plane would be faster and easier, but she insisted on going to Asahikawa by train.
“I like the ferry to Hokkaido. And I have no desire to fly through the air,” she said. I accompanied her to Ueno Station. She carried her guitar and I carried her suitcase. We sat on a platform bench waiting for the train to pull in. Reiko wore the same tweed jacket and white pants she’d had on when she arrived in Tokyo.
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