The Earthquake Bird (10 page)

A couple of months after Mrs. Yamamoto’s death, I joined a tea ceremony class. Of course, I was hoping to find again the simple
pleasure of the teacup, the sweet cake, the tatami, and the beautiful quiet touched only by the click of the teapot. But the
other women in the group were not so serious. They gossiped and chattered throughout the proceedings. They couldn’t remember
one part of the ceremony correctly from week to week because they were never listening properly the first time. I found no
depth of concentration. Nor was the gossip particularly interesting, and so I gave up.

There was just one thing from the string quartet that I kept and followed through. It was Sado Island. Mrs. Katoh had told
me many times of this beautiful, remote place and I thought about it often. I planned to visit one day but in all my plans
I was there alone. In fact, when I finally went, it was with Lily and Teiji as my traveling companions. It is sad but I cannot
thank Mrs. Katoh for Sado Island—look where it has got me.

But there was much time between to be filled in and after Mrs. Yamamoto’s death, I took to wandering around Tokyo alone. I
had friends at work—Japanese and non-Japanese—but I avoided going out with them more than once or twice a month. I couldn’t
bear to spend my life talking to people. It seemed wasteful.

* * *

I used to take the Yamanote line to any station, then follow the tracks to the next one, or farther. That was how I came to
be in Shinjuku the night I met Teiji. I would not have said that I was lonely in those days—I never felt lonely—and yet when
I saw Teiji there, silent and studious, I could not bear to walk away from him and be alone again.

We had silent conversations with invisible gestures. We walked around the streets together. We hung out in his uncle’s noodle
shop. While Teiji was serving customers or taking out the rubbish, I read the novels of Mishima and Soseki Natsume,
The Tale of Genji
. Where the Japanese was too difficult, I used a translated text to help me. I wrote new kanji in a notebook, practiced the
form until I knew the stroke order as well as I knew how to write Lucy Fly.

We spent whole weekends in bed. But our favorite thing was to go out in the rain on a warm night. And here are conversations
I know we had. Teiji taught me the Japanese adverbs to describe different types of rainfall, the kinds of words that don’t
always show up in a Japanese-English dictionary. Potsu potsu is fine, spitting rain. Zaa zaa is a downpour. In my memories
of the time I spent with Teiji, it always seems to be the rainy season.

The nights have become jumbled in my mind and maybe I am confusing them, but what I remember is this.

I am lying on the floor looking up at Teiji’s ceiling. Teiji slips into the room and grabs my hand.

“It’s raining. We can’t stay indoors. Come on.”

He pulls me out into the street. I am laughing (I
am
). He is wearing cut-off jeans and flip-flops. I can’t picture my own clothes but I know my feet are bare. We splash through
puddles and follow the shiny pavements from one road to the next. On the main highway car tires screech, crowds push forward
with umbrellas. On a smaller street we can hear each raindrop land in its destination, a leaf, a windowsill, a flower petal,
potsu potsu.

We race each other, kicking up dirty water, to the railway bridge. In the shelter of the Yamanote and Chuo lines, we lean
against the concrete wall and wait for a train to pass over our heads. Since the Yamanote trains go at intervals of three
minutes or so, we don’t need to be patient. I kiss Teiji, holding him so tightly that drops of water squeeze from our T-shirts.
He touches his nose softly against mine and smiles. I let my tongue touch his teeth, crooked pearls which I love. When the
Shibuya-bound train rattles over our heads a thrill runs from the tip of my nose down to the backs of my knees. It is quiet
again. Teiji unhooks my bra and slips it out through the sleeve of my T-shirt with a flickering smile.
Abracadabra
. His forehead pushes my T-shirt higher so his hair is brushing my skin. He kisses my nipples with rainy lips and when the
next trainful of commuters runs over our heads, we are fucking. The rough concrete wall makes pink and white lines on my back
and tugs hard at the ends of my hair.

Recently, I have tortured myself by standing under railway bridges, making myself shiver when a train passes. Then I weep
because Teiji’s smile and Teiji’s body are not there and because I’m so stupid. Then I cry more because my sobs are echoing
and returning to me, showing me how foolish I am. And I cry for Lily too.

“No hobbies at all?” Oguchi gives me a look that is almost a cry.

“None. I don’t need hobbies. That doesn’t make me a murderer, though.”

He is flustered, clears his throat, says nothing.

They stand up together and leave the room. I am promised that they will be back later, with reinforcements, to get some sense
out of me. When the door is safely locked behind them, I sink from my chair to the floor, crawl to the corner of the room,
and crouch against the wall. Then I cry for Lily.

S
achi was in the middle of the photograph box and Lucy was at the top. I knew my place and it was a better one than hers. It
was the best position of all. I didn’t consider myself jealous, not in the sense that I thought Teiji still loved Sachi. But
I couldn’t get rid of her. I was terrified of the day that my photographs would be replaced by a layer of new ones, of the
next person or object. I imagined myself spinning off into darkness, nothingness, like Sachi. I wondered what had become of
her, what was the point of those bleak parties where she came to look unhappier, sicker. I wrote many stories in my head and
soon began to think of her as someone I had always known, a sister even.

The story told by Teiji’s photographs was this. There was a young man who sometimes came into the noodle shop for a cheap
meal before going to some small theater. He loved plays and dance so much that he couldn’t bear to spend his evenings anywhere
else. He went as often as he could afford tickets and to all kinds of shows. The theater made him weep. At the sight of the
actors or dancers entering the lights as the play started, his tear ducts moistened and his nose stung. Best of all were the
white-faced dancers of butoh. Their gestures, aggressive and erotic, touched him deep inside, set his legs quivering. He liked
musicals too—whether danced, roller-skated, or performed on ice—and the happier the songs, the harder he cried. He could soak
three or four handkerchiefs in an evening watching the spectacular song and dance numbers of the all-female Takarazuka.

When Teiji saw him in the restaurant, the crying man was always nervous, a little tense, like someone killing time before
an interview or exam. He would tell Teiji of the play he was to see and sometimes, choked with sobs, talked of the previous
night’s theatrical adventure.

Teiji took a few photographs of this man, but couldn’t be satisfied. The crying man looked rigid and ordinary, even when red-eyed.
He allowed Teiji to take the pictures but said, “You don’t want to take photographs of me. You should go to the theater. There’s
nothing interesting about my life. I’m the audience. Nothing’s ever happened to me, or ever will. That’s why I go to watch.
It’s not that I dream of being an actor, you see. That’s a mistake a lot of people make. My role is to be in the audience
and my duty is to do it well. I want to be watching the performers. There
is
nothing for you to photograph.”

Teiji became curious about the theater, this part of the city he had never met. He went to a little-known venue one night
to see a play. He thought there would be new images to photograph and so there were. The play was a one-woman show starring
a student actress. When she stepped out onto the lonely stage in her brown military uniform that he didn’t recognize from
any army, Teiji knew that he needed to catch her in his camera. Her face was young and a little soft but she shouted with
the aggression and ugliness of a middle-aged man. From the back of the audience Teiji took her picture, just one. When the
play was almost over he slipped out to wait for her beside the stage door. She was alone. He looked at her through the lens
and when she saw him she smiled. To be photographed by every newspaper and magazine in Japan was her aim. This was a start.
They went to a bar near the theater and stayed all night.

Off the stage she was sullen and unhappy but glad, at least, to be with Teiji. He didn’t require her to perform, even to speak.
He was fascinated by what she was, the image she left in his eyes. Sachi trusted him. Then, as she grew weaker, she came to
need him.

He went to the theater between shifts at work. When he couldn’t go to performances he settled for rehearsals. In different
theaters and different plays he saw her as a princess, a secretary, a concubine. She strutted in a costume made of peacock
feathers, danced on her toes in a black leotard. He didn’t much care to follow the plots of the dramas and rarely remembered
the story. Often he didn’t notice that there was a story. He was excited only by the sight of Sachi, her costume, voice, and
face, the gestures she used. After performances and rehearsals Teiji met her outside the stage door, or in some coffee shop
or bar near the theater. Sachi chain-smoked and they would sit together behind a gauze of cigarette smoke. She laughed and
cried alternately, sometimes with a hacking cough. She didn’t care for the world of theater but didn’t belong in any other.
They went to parties where she drank too much and cried in the bathroom. She didn’t like the people and was bad at party small
talk, but couldn’t stop herself going. She had to be where the actors and actresses were. Sometimes Teiji learned that after
getting her home she’d called a taxi and returned to the party she’d hated so much. He thought she wanted to destroy herself.
She stopped going to rehearsals, stopped getting up during the day and soon no director wanted to cast her. She was addicted
to the parties she couldn’t bear and even Teiji couldn’t save her from them.

And there the story was interrupted because Teiji had found me flicking through his pictures. But the final image continued
to haunt me. Sachi lying on the pavement. It could have been an overdose, drunkenness, sleep, or death. I didn’t ask Teiji
about Sachi again. And of course, I know nothing of the crying man. I made it up. Perhaps he never went to the theater in
his life. It could have been that his noodles were too hot, and so his eyes were red and moist in the photograph I saw.

I thought of going to the theater to find Sachi, but how would I know which one? I could scour an entertainment magazine to
find out what was on and where, but it was risky. A theater is a dangerous place for Lucy. I can’t watch a play without believing
I am in it, or even that I am it. As a child I went on occasional school trips to see Shakespeare, or a pantomime, never anything
between. I dreaded the plays in the same way that I sometimes feared sleep. I would be sucked into a nightmare and might never
wake up. And yet, once I was there, waiting on my velvet folding seat for the lights to go down, I became involved in the
drama with the embracing passion of a schoolgirl. I scarcely breathed until the lights came up, such was my concentration.
The concept of invited audience participation has always struck Lucy as bizarre. I
was
participating. I was every character, and the place and plot too. Whether I was Falstaff or a babe in the wood, whether I
was a murder or a mystery, I lived it to the full. I was both Titania and Oberon, Demetrius and Lysander, Puck and Flute the
bellows mender. I was Wall and Moonlight. I was also Snow White and all the Seven Dwarves. I was the skull of Yorick and I
was a very sharp rapier. When the curtain came down, I couldn’t bear to leave and yet I wanted to. A teacher would drag me
along the aisle and toward the minibus. I kicked and screamed, lost fingernails and hair to the theater. It was a kind of
madness because it made no difference whether I stayed in the theater or whether I returned home to my bedroom. I would be
stuck inside the play for weeks and months, living it again and again, changing and developing it each day obsessively and
against my will. People around me were barely visible, hardly audible. Then, as I emerged from the frenzy, I would enjoy the
calm and await the next trip with terror.

I’m not forced to visit theaters anymore, so I don’t. Such a loss of self-control would be intolerable; I would never be able
to concentrate on my translations. No, I couldn’t look for Sachi in a theater. Besides, according to the photographs, she
was no longer there. She wasn’t anywhere.

I went, after Lily’s death, to a pond near my apartment. I looked for Teiji’s reflection in the water. I wanted him to teach
me words of comfort but I found only turtles and carp. I was drunk. I was off food at the time and so I’d had gin for breakfast.
It’s a pleasant way to begin the day. Before the glass was empty I felt as if the day had been dealt with, was out of my hands,
and I was free to do whatever I liked. I wandered past the reeds and waterlilies, unable to focus my eyes. A profusion of
color—corn-blue sky, green-headed ducks, a scarlet wooden bridge—throbbed hazily. A shrine stood beside the pond and I wondered
whether or not it would be all right to clap my hands before it and say a prayer for Lily and Teiji. I decided it was probably
best not to pray when drunk, and went to watch the carp swimming.

On a bench in front of me a young man stretched out in the sun. He might have been a runner, for he wore baggy shorts and
his top was bare. He had brown skin and long black hair that fell over the end of the bench in a single ponytail. His chest
glistened in the light, rising and falling gently as he breathed. The reeds behind him swayed slightly and flies buzzed around.
The whole place seemed to breathe with him, as if each breath he took filled the earth’s lungs. I stared beyond him, at the
water and the wooden shrine, but all I saw was that thick black hair, curved eyelids, glinting brown skin.