The Lake (2 page)

When I came to Tokyo and became an ordinary art school student, just like everyone else, I felt so free and light I thought I’d float up into the air.

I remember how I felt when my father’s relatives came to see my mom laid out in her coffin, everyone overcome with curiosity, fascinated by her, jealous of her, putting on a show in their obligatory black mourning suits and dresses and kimono, all made up in their phony solemnity, their faces full of grief but their eyes shining, biting into her … I wanted to strip and dance naked in front of them, because maybe then I could have demolished the fake, slimy atmosphere they had created. As long as I live, I’ll never forget that feeling.

But the mourners’ dirty stares couldn’t touch my mom’s body: her corpse was eased into the flames and made pure. I hadn’t realized her cremation would bring me such relief. I could see that their curiosity was perfectly well satisfied by the clothes my mom was wearing, by her ordinary good looks, and by the intensity with which my dad had prepared a funeral that was, in the end, magnificent, and for which no expense had been spared.

It was my duty to lead the ceremony, so I made a speech, I smiled at people, and every so often I shed a tear and dabbed at it, just for show; but inside, I was raging, quivering with a sense of indignation that I couldn’t communicate to anyone.

My fury was lofty, pure, cool. It was an emotion that none of these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on a life when life has no shape, could begin to understand.

I was grateful, though, despite everything, when one middle-aged woman who lived nearby and my mom’s few friends reached out to me; I had some good moments with them, and we shared a few cups of steaming tea. Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more—it’s sad, but that’s the truth. The women didn’t have to say it, because their eyes did:
We know, darling, we know you’re hurting
.

And yet … when I saw my dad clinging to the coffin, sobbing and wailing, I knew that I had gotten the short end of the stick in all this. My dad wasn’t paying the slightest attention to anyone but her, and here I was getting miffed about things that were totally pointless.

Standing there, a witness to the end of the century’s greatest romance (even if my parents were the only ones who saw it that way), I was just a little girl, trembling at the death of a parent. Of course, maybe that’s only to be expected. A husband is different from a daughter.

At any rate … when my mom appeared in my dream that night, it was the flowerlike her, not the other one.

The mom I really wanted to see, who seemed to be peeking out bashfully from underneath an umbrella of thin, fluttering petals.

She spoke to me. We were in the hospital room where she had lived out her last days. She hadn’t sat up in the longest time, so when I saw her doing that in my dream, leaning against the headboard, I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic.

A breeze blew in through the open window, making the sunlight churn brilliantly in the air, and in her pink pajamas my mom looked just like a high school girl on an overnight class trip. She was enveloped in a sort of beautiful haze. The flowers her visitors had brought seemed like they were about to dissolve into her light.

She was too dazzling to look at straight on, so I fixed my gaze on the film of dust that had accumulated on the windowsill.

My mom spoke to me.

“You know, Chihiro, darling—all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life, like me. If you’re always angry, always yelling at people, ultimately that just means you depend on them.”

I know, I thought, I know. You weren’t really the sort to nag at people, to fawn over your regular customers to protect your business, or to snap at Dad over the phone when he was too busy to come see us; you weren’t the kind of person to grumble, at such times,
What right do I have to complain? I’m just your partner, after all, not a
real
wife
. Your outlook wasn’t so jaded … the truth is, Mom, you weren’t even a wildflower blooming in a field, as they say, you were such an extraordinarily delicate, transparent person that, if anything, you were like a blossom softly unfurling its petals on a cliff somewhere, so high that no one ever came your way, no one but birds and deer … I know, I thought, I know.

Dad knew, too. He understood, the best he could, and watched over you.

Because when you were relaxing with him, you always looked like a little girl. You were like children, both of you. Only society, the world at large, wouldn’t let you be.

I guess you just lacked the courage, the guts to strike out on your own. And so when it all came to an end, you were still living that way, a life you never meant to be anything more than a stopgap, filling in for the real thing.

These were all just thoughts running through my mind, but of course these things are easy in dreams. My mom nodded. And then she continued.

“I didn’t want things to be that way. I never really liked makeup, either. I hated the idea of having plastic surgery done so I’d look young again, I was terrified of the surgeon, and I was frightened of seeing people there, at the surgeon’s, who wanted to be beautiful. In one way or another, I was always in pain, always scared. But when people told me I should do something, I started to think that maybe I had to, and so I would—it was as simple as that. And once I’d done it, it was done, and I had to cover up how scared it made me, so I’d turn it all into a joke, even though deep down inside my heart was aching.

“Of course I didn’t want to be always griping at your dad. But I worried constantly that he might drift away from me, so I clung to him as hard as I could. I knew there were other ways, besides anger, to show what I was feeling, but the anger just came. Somehow I’d ended up on this path, instead of some other, and it turned out that on this path there was no turning back. Being anxious only made me more anxious, and play-acting got a better response, so that was how it had to be. I couldn’t stop myself. In the end, I died before anything could change.

“But you know, Chihiro, from where I am now I can look out over it all, and I understand much better, I understand a lot. I see so clearly now that a lot of what happened—it’s not that I’m regretting those things, it’s not that—but I didn’t really need to worry so much,” my mom said. “You see what I mean?”

From where I am now
 … Is it heaven? Is heaven real, then? I thought.

My mom smiled vaguely. And she went on.

“I was frightened of so many things, in my vanity, that ultimately I couldn’t protect myself any other way. Try not to be like that, okay? Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered. Live like a flower. You have that right. It’s something you can achieve, for sure, in your lifetime. And that’s enough.”

My mom smiled brightly, and all of a sudden I remembered how, when I was little, I used to push the blanket off my stomach when I slept, and when my mom came in to check on me she would tell me to keep my tummy warm. Even in my dream, tears came to my eyes.

All throughout my childhood, whenever my eyes fluttered open at night, my mom would be there, giving my bare stomach a gentle pat, rearranging my pajamas, spreading the blanket over me. How many times had I seen her do this?

This is what it means to be loved … when someone wants to touch you, to be tender
 … My body still remembers that feeling, even now. My body knows not to respond to fake love. I guess maybe that’s what it means to have been brought up well.

Mom, let me see you once more
, I prayed.
I want to touch you. To smell your smell
.

I miss even the club, in all its daylight dinginess, now that I know it’s gone.

Maybe it wasn’t the most gorgeous place, but that’s where I come from. That world had my mom’s smell. In the end, I know it was as comforting to me as it was oppressive. I’m still a child, I still need my parents, and yet, suddenly, I find that I am walking alone.

In my dream, I felt twice as sad and so weak it almost crushed me.

Tears were trickling down my cheeks when I woke.

Waking up with a start, I glanced over at Nakajima, who was lying beside me on a futon of his own, sound asleep. He had pushed his arm out from under the covers, and it looked cold, lying there on the tatami. I gave the comforter a tug, pulling it up over him.

Now that I was back in the real world, the dream didn’t seem so sad. The sense of my mom, of her presence, kept radiating warmly through my chest, though I still didn’t feel any affection for the town where I’d grown up.

Why, I wondered, had I suddenly gone back to being a child again? Probably somewhere deep down, a part of me was still holding on to the past, just a little …

I was
here
enough now, though, to analyze my emotions.

The one thing I kind of miss is the apartment, now that it’s not ours anymore. Sometimes I wish I could go back and live there again, and go back to being a child …

I cast my memory back.

The cheerful mood on Sunday mornings—the sounds of programs more fun and easygoing than anything on TV today streaming into the room as my dad sat taking it easy, waiting for what would be breakfast and lunch combined, while in the kitchen my mom experimented with a palette of imported ingredients, mixing up some sort of ethnic dish.… They were both slightly hungover from the night before, and looking back now I realize that something of the tender lethargy that follows sex hung in the air. Their languor made them seem so gentle, so sleepy. I used to lie in bed as a child, gazing out at that world, entranced.

I wouldn’t mind going back to my hometown as it was then
.

And then, once again, I noticed with a start that Nakajima was lying beside me. That’s odd. What’s he doing here? If this is a dream, don’t let me wake up.

Right, I remember. He decided to spend the night.

Slowly my memory began to kick in.

I found myself recalling, without exactly meaning to, the earnest sexual exchange we had bumbled through before we fell asleep, and I felt a bit embarrassed. Now we had our pajamas on, lying on our separate futons, as if nothing had happened. It was as though we had been living together for ages, and yet Nakajima’s presence still came as a shock. I felt somewhat bewildered, somewhat calm, somewhat giddy. Maybe that’s why I had dreamed of my mom.

I don’t often get to spend time with such an unusual guy.

For some reason I had made up my mind that Nakajima wouldn’t want to stay in the same room with anyone else for long. I had seen him in his apartment with a woman I assumed was his girlfriend, but I didn’t get the sense that they were always together.

The night before, Nakajima had told me tearfully that he was afraid if he let this chance go, he’d never be able to have sex with anyone for the rest of his life. Oh please, I had said, you’re exaggerating. At the same time, imagining what it took for him to confess something like that, I started to feel a bit sorry for him, and I got sad myself. My mood grew somber.

And then what happened? Did we go all the way? Or not?

We hadn’t been drinking, and yet I could remember only fragments of what had happened. Whatever, I thought, who cares. He’s still here.

Again the sense of my mom’s presence wafted through my mind.

That was a sad dream, I thought. But it was beautiful.

My mom was really there—the mom I wanted to see, who came so rarely.

She always spoke her mind, she could laugh anything off, she was proud, and she made you feel that you could lean on her as much as you liked, it didn’t bother her, so eventually even I began to forget her true nature, which that façade concealed.

But when I was little—on certain rare occasions when she smiled at me with a special, airy softness, or when we warmed our cold feet against each other in the futon we shared, or when we set out on an exhilarating walk the morning after a snowfall, leaving a line of footprints in the freshly fallen snow … at such times, her true self would surface, she was like a little girl, and it seemed as if she would stay that way forever.

I stared blankly at Nakajima’s chest as I relived these memories, watching it rise and fall, and little by little I began to feel calmer, as if I were succumbing to hypnosis.

Nakajima. Nakajima … funny-looking Nakajima
.

Those pinched nostrils, his stick-thin wrists and long fingers, the way his mouth gaped as he slept, the almost touching scrawniness of his neck, the childish fullness of his cheeks, and the way his smooth hair tumbled over his eyes, so that his narrow eyes themselves, with their long eyelashes, seemed to be hiding … I adored it all, everything about him. I found myself thinking that when, far in the future, Nakajima heaves his final breath and floats up into the sky to take his place among the stars (I know I’ve heard that metaphor before, but it seems to fit him so perfectly—in fact, the image of him becoming a star is almost
too
appropriate, considering how weak a hold life seems to have on him), my spirit will be with him. What I felt for him wasn’t exactly love, it was closer to a sense of surprise, even shock. And so I just kept watching him, unable to get completely involved.

He’s still here today
, I thought.
He hasn’t disappeared. And I still feel the same way!

Each day was so fresh, now that I had become hopelessly attracted to this puzzling young man, Nakajima. Ever since we started hanging out, I’d been out of sorts. For years now I had been thinking only of myself, struggling to get my own way, pressing relentlessly forward, my gaze trained on an ideal future—I’d been focused exclusively on putting as much distance as I could between me and my hometown, steadfastly refusing to put down roots. But Nakajima was so intense he had rolled right over me, and now he was dragging me along behind him.

Here, time didn’t exist. We were cut off from rest of the world. Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.