Hardboiled & Hard Luck (4 page)

I stayed in a business hotel for a while, but then Chizuru suggested that I come stay in her place. She started out as the friend of a friend. I knew she liked me, and I liked her, and at that point in my life I was just looking for a way to buy time until the sense of rootlessness that pervaded my days abated. And so I decided to take advantage of her kind offer.

Living with Chizuru was great, right from the start.

Chizuru saw ghosts, or sometimes sensed their presence. She was the sort of person who would get teary-eyed when something sad happened to a friend, even though she didn’t particularly feel like crying. And when my shoulders were stiff or I had gastritis or something, she could make it better just by putting her hand where it hurt. Chizuru’s explained that when she was a child something terrible had happened to her—she had tumbled down a long flight of stairs—and she’d had these powers ever since then. Her eyes were very clear, and she was always staring someplace a little off to one side of whoever she was with, her gaze full of light. She was a strong person. Nothing scared her.

What’s more, her apartment was just the sort of place my troubled heart needed then. It was on the seventh floor of a building that was falling to pieces, right next to the highway, and when you looked down out of the window you saw a bunch of alleys squashed together and a row of slumlike buildings. It was always very loud, many of the tenants were behind on their rent, and the apartment one floor above—a two-room place just like hers—was inhabited by a family of eight that made a stunning amount of noise. Her building reminded me of the slums in Kulong, Hong Kong, which I had seen once on TV.

One day I asked her, So what made you decide to live in a place like this? To which she replied with a smile, Somehow I feel really relaxed here. Because when I see too many ordinary people, I start thinking that I’m strange, and that makes me uneasy.

Chizuru kept things abnormally clean—the floors and the kitchen were always polished until they shone. More than once I’d been awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of her scrubbing the floor, and it was so slick I used to slip and fall all the time.

She almost never slept. She said a few hours of sleep was enough. And that scrubbing the floor was just a way to kill time. She said she had been scrubbing the floors even before we started living together, even though there was no one to notice how clean they were, as she waited for daybreak. 

She also insisted that she saw ghosts. She was constantly muttering to herself, saying the most frightening things. There’s an old woman coming, and look, she’s got a bunch of persimmons! That kid must have been run over by a car, huh? And so on. While I was with her, the world teemed with ghosts.

I had made up my mind that if I couldn’t see something, it didn’t exist, so I wasn’t too concerned about all that. And yet, from time to time, I did sense something. Out on the street, in the apartment. And every time that happened, without fail, she would say someone was there.

In order to sleep peacefully without seeing ghosts, Chizuru always went to bed wearing an array of objects that glowed or lit up. Rings, earrings, bracelets. She said these things kept the ghosts away. As a result, when we had sex—for some reason, she always played a masculine role—I always ended up getting poked in all kinds of places by various accessories, and it invariably hurt.

There really was a lot of fog that year.

When I awoke, near daybreak, Chizuru would often be sitting with a rag in one hand, partway through scrubbing the floor, gazing out the window.

The headlights of cars would reflect off the fog, filling the air with a mysterious glow. It was like a scene from another world. Or like something you might see at the edge of this world—and that included Chizuru, the spectator. I would open my eyes a crack and watch her, without letting her know I was awake. She would rest her elbow on the rusty window frame, which rattled in the wind, and gaze out like a child, cradling her chin in her hand. The fog out there was milky, so thick it seemed you could reach out and touch it. I felt as if morning might never come. Chizuru’s torso and her arms were so thin they seemed to have been rejected by the world. They were only allowed to exist in these peculiar landscapes.

People tend to think they break up because they get tired of the person they’ve been with—that it’s someone’s decision, either yours or theirs. But this isn’t really true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it. Human willpower can’t change that—which means, if you look at it another way, that we might as well enjoy ourselves until that day arrives.

Our life together was peaceful and fun, right to the very end.

Or was I the only one who felt this way? No, I doubt that.

Little by little, as we lived a life fueled by convenience store meals in that old apartment, I began to train my mental muscles, which was what I needed to do to become an adult. It occurred to me that maybe it was time to try living alone. I found a place that was cheap, just right for me, and not too far away; I decided to take it right away, and told Chizuru. She didn’t seem particularly disturbed at the time. She just smiled and said, We can still go back and forth, right? So I didn’t realize what a shock it gave her.

Our last Sunday together, we felt a little lonely. So Chizuru said she wanted to go for a drive. We headed for a nearby mountain, me behind the wheel of Chizuru’s car. We had a lunch of rice with mushrooms at a small Japanese-style teahouse at the top of the mountain, went out to the overlook and stared at the colorful mountains, then went and soaked in a hot spring.

Yes, it was autumn then.

From where we sat in the bath, we had a splendid view of the autumn leaves: foliage brilliant enough to drive you crazy—a kaleidoscope of different reds and yellows. Each time there was a breeze, the leaves danced as if a storm had blown up. We sat for ages in that open-air bath, but the loneliness never went away.

The loneliness of passing time. The loneliness of the fork in the road.

“I wonder why we feel so lonely? It’s odd, isn’t it?”

We kept repeating such phrases, as it it were someone else’s problem.

“Yeah, we’ll just be living in different places. What’s up with us?”

I felt so bad I envied everyone around us, because they all seemed to be having such fun. All the people who came to soak in the water: the old women, the small children, their mothers. People whose bodies had been molded by the things they did each day, in their ordinary lives. Even after they had all left and new people started coming in, one after another, we stayed there, soaking in the bath. The sky was very high.

“We were inside so much, you know,” said Chizuru, “and there was so much fog, and the weather wasn’t very nice—it’s like a dream, being in such a lovely place.”

“Your mind feels sharper, doesn’t it? When the sky is clear like this.”

Then, in the car on the way back, Chizuru said:

“I’ll get out here.”

I tried and tried to convince her not to leave, but she insisted. The atmosphere in the car grew heavier and heavier, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore, and I let her go. It was almost as if a spell had been cast over me.

When I got back to Chizuru’s apartment, alone this time, it hit me. How could you do something like that? But no matter how I looked at it, she had been serious. I decided the only thing I could do now was get out, not wait in the apartment for her to return, so that she wouldn’t have to be there when I left. So I packed and cleaned until no trace remained of my existence. I left all the things we had shared. I thought about my life—a life that necessitated two speedy moves in such a short period. And I thought about Chizuru. As fond as I was of her, I wasn’t confident that I could love her enough to stay with her, to go on filling the dark, lonely space she carried within her. I knew that someday I would fall in love with a man, and what I would do to her then would be even worse. So I didn’t call her.

Then, a month later, once life in the new apartment had finally begun running smoothly on its tracks, I realized that I really did need her as a friend. I made up my mind to go see her at last, and gave her a call.

“Hey, how are you doing?”

Chizuru sounded just the same as always when she answered the phone.

There, in that apartment.

“Sorry I’ve had the car all this time. Did you get home all right?”

“Yeah, I was fine—we hadn’t gone very far. I stayed two nights after you left, and I was able to hitchhike back right away.”

“That’s good.”

My eyes filled with tears.

“I mean, I’m the one who told you to leave me there, right?” said Chizuru, her voice very gentle. “I really did want to stay on, just a little longer—there in the middle of all that nature, that autumn scenery. I wanted to sort out my emotions. I’m the one who made you do it, so I’m not mad at you, not at all. I just couldn’t bear to be there when you left.”

“I understood how you felt,” I said, “but I should have taken you to the station, at least.”

“No, it’s OK. It’s awkward, isn’t it? Saying goodbye at a station.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You know, I had a lot of fun. Living with you, I mean. I never thought I’d be able to live with another person.”

“Same here.”

“I think you’re a really lucky person. I can tell you’re going to have a very unusual life. I bet all kind of things will happen. But you mustn’t blame yourself. You have to live a hard-boiled life, OK? No matter what happens, keep going around with your nose in the air.”

“What? Do I go around with my nose in the air?”

“Not really.” Chizuru chuckled.

Her voice rang out quietly, like a bell.

“Well, see you around.”

“Yeah, see you around.”

I felt a surge of relief as I put down the phone. There might not be any future for us as a couple, but I began to hope we might come together in some other way. And I was able to fall asleep—for the first time since we said goodbye on that mountain road, I fell into a deep, deep sleep.

I had a strange dream then, too.

I’m driving back up the mountain, no longer angry, but in a very gentle mood. In the twilight, the colors of the foliage fade into each other. I come to the place where Chizuru and I said goodbye. Chizuru is there, crouching like a kitten. As I drive toward her, she smiles happily. She opens the door and gets in, the expression on her face more vibrant than any I’ve ever seen. We hold hands. It’s hard driving in the mountains with only one hand, but I don’t want to let go. Chizuru’s cold palm. Her fingers are cold, too, as always. She looks smaller than usual. No matter how dirty her building is, even though the roof leaks when it rains and the walls are so thin you can hear everything, even though there is nothing in the landscape out the window that saves the place, I’m going to go back there with her, and we’ll stay together all our lives...

That’s when I woke up.

I couldn’t begin to describe how I felt.

All day, I kept thinking about that dream. Toward evening, it occurred to me that I hadn’t told anyone but Chizuru my new address, so I gave one of my friends a call. He was a mutual acquaintance of Chizuru and mine.

“You’re alive!” he shouted. “Talk about the devil’s luck!”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

His words resonated strangely with what Chizuru had said earlier.

“You mean you haven’t heard?... I’m so sorry. The day before yesterday, there was a fire in the building where Chizuru lived. Chizuru died.”

“What?” I said, stunned. “But I talked to her on the phone yesterday!”

“That’s... you know. You know Chizuru. It could happen.”

“But how...”

“Everyone thought you were still living with her, and we were so worried, we were searching for your body, trying to figure out where you might have gone,” said our friend. “We had no way of contacting you or anything—we didn’t know what to do. God, I’m so glad you’re all right. At least there’s something good in this tragedy. I’ll tell everyone you’re OK.”

He wasn’t being all that delicate, but I could sense his sadness. I gripped the phone tightly in my hand, overwhelmed.

“Thanks for telling me. Is there going to be a funeral?”

“Some relative came to the hospital—judging from what I saw, he must have been a pretty distant relative—and went off almost immediately with her body. He said he hadn’t seen her in a decade. I guess Chizuru was involved in all kinds of stuff way back when, so her family wouldn’t have anything to do with her. I asked the guy to let me know about the funeral and stuff, but he never got in touch.”

“Oh. Did you get his number or anything?”

“Yeah, I did. I’ll give it to you next time we talk. It would be nice to visit her grave, at least, huh? It’s so hard to believe... all of a sudden she’s just not there, vanished without a trace.”

“I know what you mean.”

There was one other thing I wanted to ask.

“Did the fire start in Chizuru’s apartment?”

“No, it didn’t,” my friend answered angrily. “It started in the apartment next door, the one where the alcoholic guy lived. Apparently he got completely trashed and left the kettle on the stove. The bastard got out unscathed.”

“Oh... I see.”

I couldn’t cry. Even now, I still haven’t had a good cry.

I’ve regretted what I did so many times. I still do. But I keep telling myself not to.
We couldn’t have gone on any longer anyway, I know that. And we had fun, right to the end.
Again and again, like an incantation, I repeat these words.

“Oh, that’s nice—I wish things were like that for me. What did I do wrong?” the woman said, looking rather put out. I hadn’t told her what I was remembering, but she seemed to have read my mind. She looked as if she were truly annoyed, from the very bottom of her heart.

“It’s not too late, is it?” I said. “Why don’t you go back to your room, maybe talk a bit more seriously about breaking up or carrying on or whatever seems best? And put on some clothes. Aren’t you cold?”

“It may be too late,” said the woman. Her hair was covering her face. “We’re thinking of committing suicide together...”