Hardboiled & Hard Luck (2 page)

I’ll be down right away, I said, and went up to my room.

I put down my bag, peeled off my smelly socks, then rushed back downstairs.

Naturally, I was the only customer in the dimly lit restaurant. A fake orchid stood in an odd vase on my table. The thick corn soup that came first, ladled into a floral-patterned bowl, tasted—surprise, surprise—like it had come from a can. What could have led us Japanese to misinterpret these things—potage and artificial flowers—as the standard accoutrements of elegance? Still, the soup, the crusty bread, and the small bottle of beer did finally warm me up.

Through the window, I could see dark mountains and a dark town. The streetlights stretched off into the distance, pinpoints of illumination. I felt as if this place I had come to was nowhere. As if I no longer had a home to return to. That road I had been on didn’t lead anywhere, this trip would never end—it seemed to me as if next morning would never arrive. It occurred to me that his must be how it feels to be a ghost. Perhaps ghosts are trapped forever in a time like this, I mused. Why am I thinking about how ghosts feel, anyway? I couldn’t say. No doubt I was just tired.

Glancing back out the window, I noticed a faint glow in the sky. Just at that moment, a fire engine and an ambulance zoomed by outside the hotel window. An uncanny sensation came over me, and I stood up and went to pay the bill.

I returned to my room for the thin cotton kimono the hotel provided and then headed for the spring-fed baths. When I passed the front desk, the woman I had spoken with earlier had just come in from outside, looking cold.

“Has something happened?” I asked.

“Apparently there’s been a fire at the
udon
shop,” said the woman.

Uh-oh, I thought.

“Did anyone die?”

The woman looked at me long and hard, not saying a word.

“You see, I had
udon
earlier,” I went on. “I mean, I left without being able to finish it. I was just wondering if it was the same place.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t... oh, I see. The food there is terrible, isn’t it?” said the woman. “I don’t suppose anyone from the city would like it, seeing as even the locals don’t eat there. I understand.”

Good job, I thought. The woman had saved me from having to say something I’d rather not. After all, having a fire was bad enough.

“Don’t worry, nobody died. There’s just the one man who works there, and they said he managed to get out OK. Apparently he forgot to turn off the stove. It doesn’t seem to have been much of a fire.” The woman smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s not your fault, right? Go take your bath.”

Who knows, maybe it
was
my fault, I thought. It’s just a feeling, but...

I headed for the baths. To tell the truth, I was ready to get away from all this. To go to another town, to slip ahead into some time other than today. But it was too late for that now, I was already up to my neck in this night, submerged in this strange and lonely atmosphere. Already, I had the feeling that I was seeing everything through some sort of filter, and so I couldn’t think seriously about anything. This night had me in its power.

The old tiles in the small spring-fed bath were decorated with a lovely design. Gazing at the pattern as it shimmered under the water, I began to feel more relaxed.

The bath was hot. I felt its heat seeping into the exhaustion of my body, the pain in my feet. I took my time washing myself in the light of the fluorescent lamp overhead.

I wished the morning would come quickly. I yearned to bask in the bright rays of the morning sun, which would wash everything away—to be enveloped in light as I now was in this water. Because I knew that for the time being I had no choice—I had to live in this night—I was like someone so sick with fever that she can’t remember what it feels like to be healthy.

My face felt flushed, so I opened the window. Outside, it was dark and utterly still; the stars glittered coldly in the sky. The trees held their branches out without moving them, as if they were tangled in a darkness so thick it was palpable. Time had come to a standstill.

This is how it used to feel when I was with Chizuru.

Why am I thinking about her so much today? I wondered.

I looked down at my naked body. White legs and a white stomach, just the same as always, and the curves of my nails. Then, all of a sudden, it hit me. Today was the anniversary of her death.

I wished upon a small star that her soul was at peace.

May the gods accept her as she is—her good points, her rare and special nature, the sense of frailty that hung about her. Let her have an especially soft bed with a canopy overhead. Give her the sweetest heavenly sake to drink. And let her be reborn into an especially easy life. You can even take a year off my life if you have to, since it looks like I’ll be around for a while anyway. Please, I’m begging you.

Somehow this made me feel better. And so, thoroughly warmed by my bath, I returned to my room.

3

A Dream

The fatigue I had felt earlier was much worse after my bath, and I made matters worse by drinking a small bottle of sake from the hotel fridge. I tumbled into bed almost immediately. Without unpacking my bag, still wearing the hotel kimono, even forgetting to switch off the bedside lamp, I entered the world of sleep. There was nothing in the room but a bed, and nothing visible from the window but the mountains behind the hotel. When I open my eyes, I thought as I sank into sleep, the morning sun will be glowing through the sun-bleached curtains, streaming into the room. And by then, the rather eerie experience I had today will be a thing of the past... This thought, which flitted through my mind immediately before I fell asleep, made me breathe a sigh of relief.

But the world wasn’t that friendly.

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go very easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness.

In my dream, I was in a sort of maze.

I crept forward on my hands and knees through a darkness crisscrossed with narrow passageways. Tunnels kept splitting off in different directions. I tried to keep calm as I considered the options, tried to focus on finding my way back out. Every so often I would come to a place tall enough that I could stand up, but from there the path would just divide again and keep going.

Finally I saw light ahead. I pressed on.

Moving into the brightness, I discovered a small cave hung with many different colored strips of cloth and filled with burning candles. Peering through the fabric, I saw a shrine. Hold on, I thought, I know this shrine. In my dream, I realized that I had seen it before.

Just then, someone whispered in my ear, “Don’t you remember the date? It’s the —th of the —th month.” I could barely make out the words, but the sound of them still gave me an unpleasant feeling. It was a day I wanted to forget. Yes... I think this was that sort of day.

A scene came to mind. I saw a room, one I remembered very well. The highway that ran past the building was visible through the window, and it was always very noisy, and you could smell the exhaust from the cars. The floor of the room was dirty and the walls were thin. I was living there, living with someone...

At this point, I noticed a shadow flickering in the candlelight.

“You have to make an offering,” said Chizuru.

That’s right, I thought in my dream, it was her.

She must have been following me for some time and entered the cave behind me. She looked just as she always had: the same fair skin, the shortly cropped hair, the same lonely look on her face.

Without so much as a glance in my direction, she began making a line of black stones on a platform that seemed to serve as an altar.

“I collected these stones from the riverbed,” said Chizuru.

I felt that I needed to reply.

“I guess you mean
that
river, right?” I said. “The one that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead? No living person can go there, huh?”

This was all I could manage, even at a time like this? I couldn’t believe myself.

“That’s right,” replied Chizuru, without looking at me. “I thought I’d make an offering. After all, today
is
the anniversary of my death.”

“Shouldn’t I be doing that?” I said.

“Yeah, right—except you forgot.” Chizuru laughed. “You were strolling along there in the mountains, totally oblivious, humming as you went.”

I didn’t know what to say to this.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” she continued. “You always think your own life is the hardest, and as long as you get along OK, as long as life is nice and easy and you’re having all the fun you can, everything’s just fine.”

Chizuru’s eyes smoldered with a rage darker than any I had ever seen. I felt a deep hurt and anger at the unfairness of what she was saying. I had always loved Chizuru, in my own way.

“Yeah, if only my problems were more serious, right? Because compared to yours, the misfortunes I’ve borne are nothing at all, are they? Compared to all the big problems you had, my life is just as easy as can be, isn’t it! I couldn’t even win the consolation prize in a singing contest, because I couldn’t inspire enough pity!”

My voice trembled with an anger I couldn’t restrain. But even as I spoke, I was thunderstruck to notice that I really did tend to think my life was extremely hard, much more than I had previously realized. 

It was hot in the cave, and the air was thin. I really wish there were a window, I thought. How long will I be here? The candles cast a dim glow on the dirt walls. The scent of dust and mold hung in the air.

It was so hot that I woke up. Light streamed across the ceiling. I was bathed in sweat, and my head was throbbing from the pressure of the dream. My kimono was twisted uncomfortably around my body, and the sheets were tangled. God, I thought, what an awful dream.

I glanced at the clock: it was two in the morning. I was wide awake now, and I didn’t think I’d be able to go back to sleep. I got out of bed, took a bottle of water from the fridge, and drank. Gulped the water down. It was only at that moment that I began, finally, to feel alive. No wonder I’m hot, I thought, noticing that the heat was on—the thermostat was set too high. I rotated the dial on the ancient machine and adjusted the temperature.

It was late. The room was deathly still; nothing moved.

I got up and looked out the window. It was pitch-black, and there was no sign of movement out there either. My own face was reflected in the glass.

It’s no good, I thought. Something just doesn’t feel right tonight.

I guess I did pick up something on the road, after all. The mood.

The Chizuru I had encountered in my dream didn’t convey the same feeling of depth as the real Chizuru. She had seemed thin, insubstantial. It was a dream, I told myself, just a dream.

Chizuru wasn’t the sort of person who said things like that. She was stronger, more forbidding, and more bitterly sarcastic; she was also much cleverer, and nicer. Clearly the Chizuru I dreamed was a product of my own feelings of guilt.

After I lay down for a while, I began to get sleepy again.

The next thing I knew, I was back in the cave. Here we go again, I thought.

Chizuru was kneeling with her eyes closed, praying with all her heart. She was beautiful. The walls of the cave were gray in the candlelight. Chizuru looked so dignified, she made the cave seem as if it had been created just for prayer.

In the wavering light, her eyelashes took on an air of fragility. Her eyes—those beautiful cold brown eyes of hers—quivered beneath closed eyelids. What was she praying for? What had caused her such suffering?

Now that I was thinking seriously, I suddenly realized that I didn’t know the first thing about Chizuru. Back in those days, I didn’t have a solid grasp of things, even in my own mind. I was tired, I was hurt, I was still just a kid. Looking back, it seemed as if the sky outside my window was always full of clouds. And not just clouds, either—there was a lot of fog that year, too. Night after night, the landscape outside my window was a dirty, ashy gray.

This region calls out to something in my mind, and my mind answers back—that’s why I keep finding myself in this sad dream. So I might as well just enjoy seeing Chizuru again.

Because as long as she didn’t speak, the Chizuru before me looked like the one I had known, and it was good to see her. That white cardigan with the frayed cuffs; the jeans whose cost we had split and then fought over until finally we agreed that whoever got up first each morning could wear them; her light brown hair with its dried-out ends—these were things I would never have a chance to see anymore, no matter how much I wanted to. I gazed at her, long and hard.

In all probability, I thought, my thoughts had never gotten through to her, not even once. This is how she always was, sunk in the depths of her own inner life. She didn’t even try to make others understand.

And I had just looked on. In fact, that was why I liked watching her. Her life was like a pale shadow of life, given form by innumerable layers of anguish.

When Chizuru turned to look at me, the candles went out, and everything was plunged in darkness.

Ah, I must have slept again...

I thought.

I fell asleep and entered that dream again.

It was three o’clock. My mouth was dry, my head ached dully.

I looked around the unfamiliar room. Nothing seemed real. I pressed my face to the sheets, but they didn’t feel real either. Should I have a drink? Deciding that I should, I got a bottle of whiskey from the fridge and poured myself a glass. Who cares how many times I have this dream? It doesn’t matter if it’s just an evil effect brought about by the place I’m in, I should be happy that I got to see Chizuru on the anniversary of her death, even if she wasn’t real... I wonder where the cave is, though. Then something occurred to me: the evil person or thing or whatever it is that’s responsible must have been buried alive in a cave near that shrine I saw earlier! I can’t say how I knew this, but I did. Things were falling into place.