Realizing that he could not go on, he stopped still. He had not reached the bus route and there was no sign of people on the narrow street. He could take no more and squatted down. His left hand grasped the Otani stone that served as a foundation for the wall around some home. His right hand contacted the base of a thin utility pole. His nerves were frayed and he felt prickly, but he no longer had the energy to be concerned about it. There was a darkness before his eyes, and he collapsed.
Suddenly he felt a violent tugging of his arm. The pulled skin hurt as though it were being pulled off. He wanted to say to stop, but he could not express the idea clearly. Osamu's mouth was unable to produce a clear voice.
"Say, it's Taniguchi-sensei.1) Sensei, what happened?"
Osamu's consciousness cleared somewhat when he heard his own name called. Because he was an instructor at P University, when he heard "sensei" a nerve connected somewhere in his fogged awareness and he tried to straighten his back.
"You're weak. It's all right, sensei, we'll go to my apartment. It's quite close."
Osamu was vaguely aware of walking, being half-dragged, and climbing the stairs to a dimly lit apartment. Or rather, this was a memory that was supplemented afterwards; what he actually remembered was a plank fence coated with tar, a cypress-leaf hedge, a mortar wall, and a dark corridor that smelled of ammonia.
When the doctor came, Osamu's consciousness had cleared to a large extent. He was lying in a six-mat 2) room. His pillow and sheet were certainly not soiled, but they were permeated with the smell of a youthful body odor and cosmetics. A window could be seen if he twisted his head a little; the view was blocked by the yellow vinyl siding of the neighboring houses that reflected the heat of the sun into the room. A young woman's dress was hanging on a hanger on the opposite wall.
A chubby, middle-aged man who appeared to be a doctor finally came. He may have been about the same age as Osamu.
"What happened?"
A youth of about 20 was with the doctor, holding his bag. He was probably the P University student who had helped Osamu. However, Osamu did not recognize the youth's face at all. The doctor looked searchingly at Osamu's face, pulled back his eyelids, had him stick out his tongue, examined his chest, and finally muttered his diagnosis, "Looks like cerebral anemia. Sunstroke would have the same symptoms. Your body has low blood pressure, you know."
When Osamu nodded, the doctor said, "It may be overwork, too. When you get to be 40, you can't pull all-nighters or work late into the night any more. Well, we're both dead weight." He sat cross-legged and took out a hypodermic syringe. "Shall we use vitamins, glucose, and a heart stimulant? Stay quiet for another three or four hours and then go home when it's cooled off."
The doctor left and only the youth remained. His head was clear but, perhaps for that reason, Osamu was unsettled. Although the youth seemed to know all about Osamu, Osamu knew nothing about the youth and so he couldn't offer more than perfunctory thanks. In the case of the doctor, Osamu had a doctor-patient relationship and could maintain a prescribed relationship that included a stethoscope on his chest and a hypodermic injection, but he didn't know what he ought to say to the youth who had helped him.
If the youth had encountered him in the halls of the university and asked "Are there any books in Japanese that introduce the theories of W.G. Sumner?" or "Does the exam overlap the employment exam?", Osamu would be able to respond without the slightest perplexity. In other words, he could handle it within the framework of the teacher-student relationship, which is impersonal like the doctor-patient relationship.
The present Osamu, however, had been thrust into the personal life of the youth. He was hazy about the middle part of the process by which this had come about, but even if there had been no state of unconsciousness, he had never gone to the apartment of a student whose face and name were previously unknown to him, and a student should not face a teacher in a room in which a young woman's dress was hanging. Osamu gazed again at the pink one-piece hanging on the wall. He could not help being interested, not so much in the dress as in the owner of the dress. It was just hanging limply like curtains now, but when he pictured it being worn by a female with a thick bust and solid-looking hips, he ended up wondering about the relationship between her and the youth.
"Where are we?"
The youth muttered a placename that Osamu did not know. Osamu wanted to ask the youth's name as well, but held back from that. He thought it inexcusable not to know the name of one who had helped him so much.
"When I caught a bus from Ikebukuro I got on the wrong one. Apparently I got lost while walking along after getting off along the bus route going to Totsuka."
"The streets around here are really confusing."
With that, they ran out of topics. Osamu was bored and closed his eyes. When he opened them he was still face to face with the youth, unfortunately, and felt that he would have to say something.
"Aren't you feeling well, sensei?"
"No, I'm fine. Thank you."
Osamu answered with his eyes closed. He wished the youth would read a book or study something and stop looking at his face.
"Well then, I'll go down and do the laundry, so yell if anything happens."
There were sounds of moving around the apartment for a little while, but finally it was quiet. Osamu opened his eyes. Right above his head was an electric light, beneath which a fly circled like a merry-go-round. Beside the window there was a desk that a dozen or so notebooks and text books shared with a mirror stand and a line of cosmetic bottles. Osamu stood up. He was still a little light-headed. There was a thin leather wallet on the desk. It would certainly hold a rail pass and an ID card. He hesitated a moment, then made up his mind and picked up the wallet. As expected, it held an ID card: Yoshii Eishun, third year economics student at P University. So, his name was Yoshii.3) After returning the wallet to its original position, Osamu lay down on the bed again. He was greatly relaxed by just knowing the youth's name and station. Now he wouldn't mind being a nuisance in the room for two or three more hours.
He realized that it was the smell of hair oil and cosmetics permeating the pillowcase that interested him in the pink dress. The pillowcase was not soiled. It seemed to have just come from the laundry; it was starched and had the sharp smell of bleach. But the perfume that permeated the pillow itself was joined with a body odor that was not a relationship of yesterday and today; it linked the activity of a man and a woman.
"Even I could keep a woman in a place like this," he muttered, and then he thought of his wife Toshiko. About now she would be having the children do their homework, or taking a nap. She would never dream that her husband was stretched out in this sort of an apartment, directly below a young woman's dress.
For him to have a woman live in a room like this, however, he would need money his wife didn't know about--40 or 50 thousand yen. 4) There was no way he could take that out of his pocket money without part-time work as well. Osamu thought of college classmates, one who was editor of an exam-prep magazine and one who was a television producer.
There was a sound in the corridor and the youth who had put the laundry in the washing machine--Yoshii, that is--entered the room.
"How are you doing?"
"Um, fine, thanks. It's about time I took my leave..."
"But since the doctor said that, it would be better for you to rest a little longer. It's really no bother for me."
Osamu drew a breath and fell silent; he decided to accept what Yoshii had said. The reason he drew a breath was that all the laundry Yoshii was arranging in the window facing the afternoon sun was women's underwear--slips, brassieres, panties. Yoshii, humming, had begun hanging these slowly dripping things of various colors on a cord strung between poles.
Osamu's wife didn't use such attractive underwear. In their dozen or so years of married life she seemed to have become bland right down to her underwear. And so Osamu found this laundry as stimulating as a high school student would.
Osamu had said, "umm," but that didn't mean he agreed. But at that time he thought, in a way that resembled yearning, that there are probably some women to whom that tacky feel is well suited.
As he watched Yoshii drying the laundry he remembered that day over ten years ago now. Even so, he wondered if Yoshii's spreading such things out before him was a matter of a lack of sensitivity. No, it was more that a link that went beyond the framework of the instructor-student relationship had been formed between the two of them and he no longer needed to defer to treatment of Osamu as his sensei.
The fact was that from the time that he collapsed by the side of the road and was helped up, Osamu had lost, with respect to Yoshii, his dignity as an instructor. He became a middle-aged male of known name and occupation who weighed 68 kilos.5) And Osamu had exposed his upper body, pale as an aged squid, to the eyes of Yoshii. When the doctor came, in particular, Osamu's body was handled just like an animal to be dissected, in order to check his knee reflexes and the state of his stomach.
Just as Yoshii had seen Osamu's naked body, Osamu had suddenly come into contact with Yoshii's naked lifestyle. And so now there was no longer any need for him to conceal the laundry. Osamu felt a familiarity such that he could turn to Yoshii and ask any question at all and expect an answer.
"Whose underwear is that?"
"The woman I live with," Yoshii replied, looking back with a slight smile. "She works in a company, and I do the laundry and such on days when I get home first."
"How long have you been living like this?"
"Since last fall. During the summer break I had temporary employment doing odd jobs at her company's beach dormitory, and I met her there. And so I do the odd jobs in her life even now. Cleaning, washing, and shopping are my responsibility, for the most part. And for cooking I do what is called 'preparatory work,' washing the ingredients and everything until they go on the stove."
"And financially ...?"
"I get 170,000 yen from home. Her salary is 190,000 yen and I make 5,000 or 6,000 working part time."
"What sort of work?"
"Heaters with thermostats. For tropical fish. A lot of those things get exported. It's a small, neighborhood factory, but they get piles of letters from other countries. The man that runs it can't read English, so I read them. And I answer the letters and so on. Two thousand yen a month for that. Besides that, I get three or four thousand yen for assembling heaters. Most of it is piecework done by housewives; there are about ten of them. But if I go there is work to do. I'm good with my hands, and if I work all afternoon I make four or five hundred yen. ... But it's crazy. Humans huddle together and shiver to stay warm in the cold of winter but fish live in tanks fully equipped with heaters. No matter how great I become in the future, I will never raise tropical fish. When I'm making fish heaters with my fingers numbed by the winter cold, I get to feeling really revolutionary."
"So do you demonstrate against the Japan-South Korea talks?"6)
"No such thing. Both look about the same, but they're not related. I put everything into my work, fiddling with cold glass. My fingers get numb, and my nose runs. At such times I'd think, 'damn--let's turn the world around,' just like I'd like to stop and stretch, but that's not related to the Japan-South Korea talks, is it? Theoretically my feelings about making heaters were just like the Japan-South Korea talks, but my feelings changed in mid-stream. At first I felt envy at being treated as less than a goldfish, but after a while I came to take the menacing stance of one who indicts the malefactors. And so I don't go to the demonstrations. If I have that sort of time, I go make heaters."
"I liked demonstrations. Friendships in college were rarely friendly. I'd know a name and a face and a major subject, but I wouldn't know what kind of a guy he was. But when we were demonstrating we would link arms and I had the feeling of sharing something with the man next to me..."
"That happens, certainly. I'm in my third year but there are only ten or twenty people whose names and faces I really know. Even though there are 600 students in my class, when I go to the university there are days that I go all day without seeing anyone I recognize or speaking a word to anyone."
Yoshii muttered this as he stretched out on the tatami. The heat was unbearable; had Osamu's body finally returned to normal? When he wrung out a towel in the wash basin where Yoshii had run some water and wiped his chest and face, it felt really good.
"You should try this too. It's cool."
"You think so?"
Yoshii stripped and stuck a towel in the same basin.
"Oh, this is just lukewarm. I'll run more water. Or it would be nice to get some ice somewhere."
Yoshii stood up holding the basin. The soaked towel covered from his face to his chest and felt cool when there was a faint breeze from the window. Osamu closed his eyes. He was surprised himself that he and a student unknown to him were talking just like school friends from long ago. Probably Yoshii was lonely. There were things one couldn't do even with a woman . . ."
At that time it had looked like fireworks in the night air. Osamu had watched them from the pitch-black deck at the end of the steam train. The fireworks were incendiary bombs, and Kobe must have been in the darkness below them. The train was stopped in the fields with its lights extinguished. Although it was March, the wind-swept rear deck was cold and Osamu's body was shivering.
Osamu was not dreaming, but was trying to remember such a scene 20 years earlier. But the memory was so real that Osamu thought he was falling asleep again. In a moment the remembered scene disappeared in the noise of vehicles hurrying along the street in front of the apartment. Yoshii spoke of getting ice, and perhaps he had gone to the ice house to buy some. Osamu started to open his eyes, but they seemed to snap back and he really did go to sleep.
The deck of the train was cold and was crammed with a variety of baggage as though it were a baggage car. People were sandwiched between the pieces of baggage, sleeping. Osamu was by the far door and could not avoid the cold; all the baggage made it impossible to close the door. Osamu was very conscious that there was a young girl beside him. Further inside there were those, apparently parents and children, closely embracing each other and certainly sleeping warmly. Because of his awareness of the presence of the girl, however, Osamu had actually edged his body away from her. Osamu shifted his position. His shoulder contacted the girl's body. She was, unexpectedly, closer to him. Osamu kept his shoulder in contact with her. Slight as it was, there was warmth coming from that point. The girl made no effort to move away from his shoulder. Osamu endeavored to increase the area of contact, little by little. In any case, the portion in contact with the girl was perceptibly warmer. Once or twice the girl started to pull away, but before long she would nestle up against him again. Soon the two were back to back and closely joined. It's not that Osamu felt no erotic excitement, but what he enjoyed was the flow of warmth in the physical sense coming from her. He eventually fell asleep, framed by the baggage and the girl.
When he had opened his eyes, the morning was ash-colored and before Osamu's eyes was the braided hair and sooty face of the girl. At some point the two had come to be sleeping with their arms around one another. Her face was one with gently curved eyebrows and a well-ordered mouth. Osamu, then 19, hurriedly looked around. He wondered if anyone else had seen them in such a position. But everyone was sleeping in the dim light of the dawn. Their soot-stained faces looked like corpses or mannequins scattered here and there.
When he quietly attempted to extract his left arm, which was pinned between the girl's body and the baggage, her eyes opened. Startled, she turned her face away and got up. Then he could move his left arm, but it remained numb and his hand hurt as though poked by thousands of needles.
He woke up. Osamu's eyes, however, were still closed. His body had completely recovered now. And because of that he was embarrassed to face Yoshii. His left arm was numb in reality, not just in the dream. He cracked an eye open for a look, and saw a block of ice the size of a large dictionary in the wash basin next to him, with a towel draped over it. It was probably because Yoshii had changed cold towels that Osamu had the cold dream.
The reason that he had remembered, in the dream, the girl who had slept with her cheek against his was something in common with the relationship between Yoshii and Osamu. Both cases began with highly psychological and physical encounters, and so there was a sense of embarrassment afterward.
He sensed that the nature of the relationship between Yoshii and the woman who lived with him might also be a factor. Osamu still remembered the name of that girl on the train. After it got light the two, rucksacks on their backs, walked together around a district of Kobe that had been burned down in a night. When they separated the two exchanged addresses, but no reply came to the letter he sent from Tokyo. Actually, after Osamu returned to his house in Tokyo that house was burned down and there was a dizzying series of address changes in the next three or four years, so it was possible that she had sent a letter that never reached his hands. And there was also a good chance that her house in Osaka suffered the same fate as Osamu's.
"Kou, ko, ko, ko." Yoshii's voice could be heard. Osamu opened his eyes and looked toward the window. Yoshii was sitting in the window frame extending his hand behind the glass pane. Was a bird or something coming?
"Kou, ko, ko, ko." Yoshii made the sounds in the back of his throat. When he glanced into the room and saw Osamu's face he smiled and again directed his gaze to his own fingers behind the glass pane. Then, shifting his hips little-by-little, he brought his body back into the room. Even so, there was almost no change in the position of his arm. Next he gradually pulled his arm toward him. Then all movement stopped and he said, "Kou, ko, ko, ko."
Apparently he was using some kind of bait to attract a bird somehow. Eventually a wristwatch appeared from behind the pane, and then a wrist, and then a thin, transparent plastic container like fruit sellers use for strawberries came into view. Milk was puddled in the bottom of it.
What appeared next was not a bird but a kitten. When the cat's yellow eyes glanced into the room and saw Osamu was there, it quickly pulled back. Yoshii said,"Kou, ko, ko" in a low voice. The cat showed it's face again. When it saw that Osamu had not moved from his position of a moment earlier, it was reassured; this time it showed its entire body. It was a black and white tiger-striped cat. Its ears stood straight up and it had big, sweet eyes.
Now Yoshii was squatting inside the room, holding the milk out toward the cat in the window but increasing the distance between them little by little. The cat moved a front paw two or three times as though trying to catch the plastic container, but when it realized it could not reach it, it looked around peevishly. Then, seeming to forget about Yoshii and Osamu, it licked its own shoulder and bit its flank two or three times, perhaps at a flea. But as evidence that it had not forgotten the presence of the two, when Osamu moved slightly the cat's attitude changed instantly and it ran to the glass pane. Even so, when it saw the two were not following, it stopped and looked back and forth between the milk and the two men.
"Kou, ko, ko," Yoshii said without an interval. Again the cat looked briefly as though it was ignoring the two men, but suddenly it dropped down onto the tatami and glared up at their faces.
"Please look away," Yoshii asked, and Osamu slowly turned his back. After a moment Yoshii said, "There, I've got it," so he sat up; the cat had been caught by the neck. Unexpectedly, it dit not struggle but became calm.
"You seem to have tamed it."
"Not at all. Try petting it."
When he touched his hand to its back, the cat's entire body was shaking like a vibrator. It may have been severely frightened, but where Yoshii held it, it remained held. This seemed to resemble the attitude of a man skilled in judo who is matched with a strong man, who remains flexible while awaiting an opening.
Yoshii used both hands to grasp the front legs near the chest and he moved the cat's head close to the plastic container. For a while the cat glared as though in a bad temper, but eventually it resignedly stretched out its neck and began to drink the milk. The stretch of its neck was surprising; it resembled an otter or weasel, or rather, aside from the ears, the head of a snake.
"This is the child of thieving cats of the neighborhood. Its mother was poisoned about ten days ago by the old man who manages the building. All its brothers and sisters died; just this one is left."
Are you trying to tame it?"
"Yeah. It's very suspicious, though. It's taken more than two weeks just to get this far. When I remove my hands, it's gone in a flash."
The kitten began squirming when it finished the milk. When Yoshii placed it on the tatami, it slowly stepped forward with its front feet. Then taking a low stance as though it was about to creep under a low hedge, it quickly put its feet in action and leapt up to the window frame.
"Look!" When Yoshii pulled a dried fish for stock 7) from his pocket and tossed it, the cat gave a startled jump, then ran to the fish and pinned it down with a front paw before taking it in its mouth. In that instant there was a glimpse of the yellow claws protruding from the fur-covered paw.
"In Africa there are scholars who try to tame gorillas by feeding them. If it goes well, they get their doctorates, or maybe receive prizes," Yoshii muttered with his eyes on the kitten that watched the two men as it ate the dried fish.
"In any case, it's tough training a stray cat like this. You can do it if you have enough spare time. It's a war of wits. Or maybe it's more like fishing. You draw it toward you and then bam, you grab it. The cat is startled. It keeps shivering. While it's drinking the milk it keeps wondering when I'm going to strangle it. And because I want to tame it somehow or other, I unconsciously put more strength into my fingers, and it, being descended from generations of stray cats and not wanting to be tamed, thinks I want to strangle it."
Osamu took the towel that was on the block ice and wiped his face and chest with it. His body had recovered, but mentally he was unwilling, because of the cerebral anemia, to leave this hot apartment with the sun in the west shining on it.
"You had a good sleep, sensei. I thought you might get up if I put a cold towel on your chest, but you didn't seem to mind at all."
"Thanks to you, I had a dream that I was standing on the cold deck of a train, exposed to the cold wind."
Yoshii laughed without saying anything. The way he opened his mouth resembled the face of a cat when yowling. He couldn't see where the cat had gone. Following Osamu's line of sight to the window, Yoshii said, "Holding a cat that isn't at all used to it is a real thrill."
"It wouldn't work with a woman, I suppose."
"Well, that is, to start with there is a proper route between me and the women of the world."
"'Love' or some such word?"
"There's that too, but women, unlike cats, don't think of me as an enemy. Under certain circumstances I'd be a fearsome enemy, but if they're careful it would be okay. There are lots of ways to look down on it. There's marriage and laws and so on. If I strangle a cat, that's the end of it, and so . . . in reality, people do get killed by parents and brothers, though."
"Isn't taming a cat just like what makes life worthwhile?"
"I've never talked to anyone about this, but that's really how it is. When you call a cat to you, you actually have to forget everything else. It feels like a 50-50 face-off with a separate life. Because if I go to college I don't have any friends, and if there were more of them they'd just be harder to find, and the sensei's lectures are bad but they put me to sleep."
"But you do have a wife."
"Yes, we've lived together since I was 19. For a little while after we first became acquainted it was a little like taming a cat, but like you said, sensei, just the words are the same. I watch her for an opening and before I pin her down and do violence I can say, "I want you." And then instead of trembling while drinking the milk, she says to write out a vow never to abandon her."
"Did you do it?"
"Yes. Because I'm a minor I need parental approval to officially marry. They would just oppose it if I talked to them, so we exchanged pledges to register when we reached the age where we could marry freely; at her urging we took them to a notary public--they wouldn't have much effect legally, of course, but we do have dated documents . . ."
"And her parents?"
"They live in the countryside. She didn't like rural life and went to a company from her uncle's place in Tokyo, but she said she was going to room with a friend and started living with me. We affected to look like we'd been married a long time and rented this apartment. Unlike a cat, in other words, she doesn't fear me in the least--it's just that two people can live as well for 40,000 yen as one person can for 30,000 yen."
It occurred to Osamu to take 5,000 yen out of the rounded wallet in the pocket of the trousers beside him and hand it to Yoshii. He mumbled his thanks and quickly stuffed the money into his pocket.
"Sensei, let's go out to eat tonight. I'll buy. Today my woman has been invited out to dinner by her supervisor."
Yoshii happily explained that when she was treated by a male co-worker it freed up her dinner money, and so he could use the money for two to dine out or fix a really good meal himself. It didn't appear to bother him at all that she would be chatted up and invited out by a middle-aged supervisor who thought she was single.
For whatever reason, Yoshii never said the name of the woman living with him. He would say "her" or use a term like "my woman." Then when the cat got away, Yoshii began to talk of her in a rambling way. Just as perspiration beaded up and rolled down from their foreheads and chests while they were packed in this hot room, the talk kept coming back to her even though his thoughts seemed to hesitate.
For example, when he opened the kitchen window on the south, the back end of the air conditioner of the house on that side poked out and emitted a stream of heated air like the exhaust of a jet engine that blew into the room; thinking that air conditioners could be called anti-social egotism that cooled one's own room at the sacrifice of others, he told how her company was air-conditioned and how annoyed he was when she came home and said it was so hot.
Osamu's mental state was also very loosely organized. He nodded agreement to Yoshii's chatter, and asked questions, and talked of his own experience. He was completely unlike his usual self. When Yoshii brought in the washing, Osamu casually stroked a brassiere and said, "This part of the elastic is still damp." As he did so, he sensed the strangeness of his starting to check the laundry in a student's apartment when he would never do such a thing in his own home.
Osamu's home, to start with, was not this hot. When he came back from outside he would wipe himself off, change into dry clothes, turn on a fan, and somehow get by. At least there were never occasions at home for leisurely exchanges on topics likely to raise a sweat. Life in his home was more hurried and more orderly.
The Osamu of recent days, especially, had been swamped for about a week with jobs that he had been putting off until the beginning of the summer holiday. That is why his lack of sleep and his overwork had continued, as the doctor who had just come had said. His children had their term-end tests, and Toshiko was certainly not unenthusiastic about education. Osamu, his wife Toshiko, and the children all pursued the things they had to do, and in fact none of them had the time to think about not being able to stand the heat or about what they wanted to do now.
That being the case, while he was sleeping in Yoshii's apartment Osamu came to think that it was his own daily life that was abnormal. Yoshii called air conditioners anti-social equipment that sacrificed others to cool oneself, but Osamu thought his own home was like that.
The two children were excellent students and Toshiko was a healthy, clever housewife who loved cleanliness. And Osamu himself was an amiable educator who would not disrupt society or his family. While his salary could not be called high, if one included his occasional side jobs, he did not think it inferior when compared with acquaintances from his college days who now headed sections in first-rate corporations.
In other words, Osamu's home was a standard, middle-class home. The hot, dirty air of the world was completely shut out of it, and parents and children dressed in laundered and starched clothing sat quietly in rooms where the faint growl of air conditioning could be heard. But while this lifestyle was cool, it might be somewhat artificial and cheerless. Osamu saw that sort of empty lifestyle being lived by mannequins in the showroom of a department store. The one playing Osamu's part was tanned and seated on the sofa reading an English-language newspaper. Some golf clubs were spread out beside him. The one taking Toshiko's part was a B.B. look-alike.8) She was cooking in front of a gas range and a stew pot. Aside from the issue of beauty, the decided difference from Toshiko was that the clothes were brand new and the apron was spotless. The mannequin corresponding to his daughter Itoko had an ear inclined toward a stereo, and that for Youichi was running toward the father, holding up a toy sailboat.
They were motionless, as though the course of time had been stopped in mid-gesture or mid-step. And there were manufacturer's labels attached to all the products that surrounded them.
Yoshii's woman worked in an air-conditioned company; that is, she had a practical company life style and may have brought an air of the department store showroom, like that of Osamu's home, to this apartment. She had, according to Yoshii, established a precise life plan. This percentage of income would be put into savings, Yoshii would finish college and become employed after this many years, and she would concentrate on homemaking. Children would be born at these times.
"In any case, at first I just wanted to sleep with her. Then there were the pledges all of a sudden. Then the budget and the life plan, in that order. Following those steps, if that does come about, well, it's like setting off a firecracker in a safe, so to speak. Is your house like that, sensei?"
"Umm, in any case, mine is the daughter of an Imperial Army major general, you know."
There was, however, that atmosphere about Toshiko and her home, but when Osamu had met her in 1947 or 1948, it was a time when the safe was a rusted wreck like ruined grave markers, its door gaping open. Toshiko's father, the Imperial Army officer, felt unsure of Osamu's way of life even now and had lost confidence in the face of the physical precariousness of life.
Toshiko had been engaged to marry one of her father's former subordinates, a man she had never met. That captain had died, however, in the jungles of Burma. Then when Osamu said that he loved her, she felt guilty about the idea of being happy with Osamu just because of the death of a man she didn't necessarily love but ought to have loved.
Or rather, because everything in Toshiko's home at that time--war and fatherland, comradery and livelihood, everything--had been destroyed and betrayed, Toshiko could not believe that ordinary happiness in the form of romance or marriage to Osamu could come to her.
One day Osamu had been wandering through the burned out ruins, searching. He had been searching for a location in which to violate Toshiko. He had found a bricker boiler at the base of a tall chimney, a cave well-suited for a wild beast to drag his prey into. But there was the musty smell of life there, and a clay charcoal grill and straw matting. He had found an air raid shelter in which water stained red with rust had puddled. He had walked through hills and hollows with no houses. Because there were no houses, there were no roads. Climbing a hill, he had seen distant train tracks and a cluster of burned out roofs, as well as the remaining cedars of a shrine, scorched brown by fire.
Osamu felt spiteful. Even though he was going to meet a young woman, he could not feel any happiness to urge him on. When he thought of Toshiko he grimaced in spite of himself and muttered, "Now we'll see, damn it."
His lunch that day had been corn bread and margarine; he found it tasteless but gobbled it down. Eating it didn't fill his empty stomach, and he felt further irritation at his coarseness in hungering for more of even such poor food. His lunch-time irritation continued on as Osamu walked through the ruins.
In the evening Osamu led Toshiko to the place he had selected. It was a mansion on a knoll; the house was completely burned down, of course, but there was a high concrete wall separating it from the adjoining houses and the road, and so it was hidden, not that anyone would be walking along a road through the ruins at night.
Toshiko had brought some home-made, wheat-flour bread that she fed to Osamu. It included an artificial sweetener, but more than that it was the sharp taste of baking soda used as a leaven that his tongue sensed. He gazed fixedly at Toshiko as he ate the bread. She seemed unusually giddy, as though she sensed something in the atmosphere.
"My, what a lovely moon. You could read a book by it."
"This used to be the living room, probably. And that was the reception hall. That area would have been the garden, all in lawn." Toshiko walked around as though dancing, moving further away from Osamu, who was seated on the concrete foundation with his mouth at work.
On the spot that Toshiko said used to be lawn, he grabbed her arm. When she tried to pull loose, he slapped her cheek with some force and said, "If you want to bring charges, then do it. Even prison is better than the military." And he pushed her down on the grass.
His words were not meant as a lie in terms of his feelings at that time. He felt then that the burned out ruins were a completely extra-governmental place where there was no law and no human life. But the ruins grew smaller each year, and could no longer be seen within Tokyo. And Toshiko and Osamu grew more practical each year. Osamu could not understand how, at that time, he had been willing to spend years in prison in exchange for enjoying Toshiko for two or three minutes. For her part, she thought of it as a blot on her life and a deviation resulting from post-war disruption. When Osamu raised the issue, she dodged it by saying, "No, no. That was a long, long time ago." Then Osamu would no longer feel that he dared pursue the matter a step further. It made him feel negligent and unhealthy, like he did when, for example, lying naked in Yoshii's apartment with sweat running down.
"There were these burned out ruins a long time ago. People like me were living there like that cat earlier. This area was burned out too, probably," Osamu said after a long silence.
Yoshii turned his head a little. "But I don't think that cat will ever be tamed."
"Yoshii-san! Telephone!" When a man's voice was heard in the corridor, Yoshii jumped down from his seat in the window. It had turned to evening outside the window. The sun's rays striking the corrugated vinyl siding had weakened and the clouds dimly visible between one roof and the next were beginning to turn yellow. Osamu was getting homesick, and at the same time the talking and thinking in this apartment all felt like when he was intoxicated.
Osamu stood up and got ready to put on his clothes and go home. Eventually Yoshii came back and said, "Are you going home?"
"Yeah. Thank you for everything."
"No, I'm the one that came out ahead. My woman's coming back now. Her supervisor did something rude in the taxi, and she's coming home without eating anything."
As he left the room, Osamu looked back once more at the pink dress hanging on the wall. It was somewhat a matter of regret that he was going back without meeting her. She undoubtedly had a lively, graceful glamor. And she would certainly take, before Osamu, a deeply suspicious attitude like that cat had.
Yoshii guided him as far as the bus route. They walked a ways along a narrow, twisting street. The space enclosed by the concrete walls and the asphalt street was as hot as a bread oven.
They finally came out to a broad road and he caught a taxi. As the car started off, he tried to remember a landmark of the lane he had just come out of, but it was too ordinary; he would not be able to come back again. He felt that even if he found the entrance, it would be absolutely impossible to follow the twisting path and go to Yoshii's apartment. But when he thought about it, there was no need to go there again. And so Osamu sighed deeply as he sat in the taxi seat wondering how best to explain these three or four hours to Toshiko, who was sure to realize the sense of guilt of her straying husband.
3. His name was Yoshii: His surname, of course. Osamu thinks of himself in terms of his given name.
4. Yen: At this time the yen was pegged at 360 to the dollar, so Osamu is thinking of about $125. He may be over-estimating, but it becomes clear that housing was expensive and wages were low by American standards.
6. Demonstrations: This sets the time of the story in 1964 or 1965 when, at the instigation of the U.S., Japan and South Korea negotiated the normalization of relations after Japanese colonization ended with WWII, 20 years earlier.
7. Fish for stock: Much Japanese cooking uses a stock flavored with fish rather than meat or vegetables. One tradition uses bonito that is dried to the appearance and consistency of a block of wood; this is shaved with a plane to provide bonito flakes that are added to hot water. Yoshii's household used dried minnows of no particular species (anchovies are popular). Many prefer the convenience of "Dashinomoto," dried granules which store well and provide adequate flavor.
8. B.B. look-alike: French actress Brigitte Bardot, of course, another reference placing this story in the mid-1960s.