A Guide to Berlin (5 page)

They were quiet now. There was a gleam, a polish, that surrounded them all, Cass thought. Light from the crossed lamps collected them in a primitive and artful arrangement. The storyteller against death. The retrieval of a few lucky images from the semi-darkness of the past. There was no irony here, no superior
whatever
to the presence of others. She thought at this unlikely moment of Karl's massive hands gently but firmly on Marco's shoulders, the blue veins prominent and bulging, the sausage fingers pressing down,
the fan of each hand seeming to command the jerking body beneath it to halt and recover.

Mitsuko looked pleased with herself. She was absentmindedly fiddling with the imitation pansies in her pink hair, relaxed and newly social now that her telling was done. She plucked one, reshaped the petals in finicky pulling actions, then placed it back in its jumble. They were all watching as she performed what might have been, in its elegant simplicity, a Zen ceremony dedicated to the worship of cherry blossoms. The hovering silence that followed was like that of a sleeping household, all at rest, all self-enclosed, all comfortably dreaming their own dreams.

After Mitsuko's speech, they decided they were irrevocably committed, and that each remaining story should swiftly follow. It was Marco who suggested it, speaking as if a social experiment was taking place. Each would consent, following Victor and Mitsuko's example, to revelation. Earlier, rather than later, so that none would suffer a relative advantage or disadvantage of knowing. It was an acceleration, he said, of the usual processes of friendship; it was a narrative artifice to which they might all pledge their mysteries.

Gino snorted. ‘Pledge our mysteries? Jesus, this sounds like the church.'

Marco was unperturbed. ‘Why does “mysteries” make you anxious? Why not pretend for the duration that we are all mysterious to each other?'

‘I like scepticism,' he responded, ‘though I am flagrantly superstitious.'

They were staring at each other in a fraternal challenge. Victor was delighting in their argument and hoping for more; Mitsuko and Yukio were both uncomfortably silent.

‘Fine. Let us hear of your scepticism and superstition.'

‘No mysteries.'

‘No mysteries. Not a single one. We shall abolish all mysteries.'

Now they were smiling at each other. Something in their shared past had resurfaced to trouble and interrupt the present. Marco was calm and obstinate; Gino was worried, perhaps, about what he might be called upon to reveal.

‘Say no more than you wish.'

‘
Certo, Marco; certo, professore!
'

Gino shrank back into himself, implicitly conceding. The idea of their contest was intriguing to the others. Cass thought of Mitsuko's tale – she had never heard of Hagi, or Lolita girls, or
hikikomori
– there was so much to discover behind each face in the room. But already she too was apprehensive, worried in advance at what she might be able to say, or not say. This was a pact of strangers and carried the danger of capricious misunderstanding. Perhaps, being the newest recruit and a kind of visitor, they might not expect her to offer up a story.

‘
Alles gut
,' said Victor. ‘Save me from being the only two-bit putz who spilt his guts at chez Oblomov …' This was for Gino's benefit.

So it was resolved to continue in the spirit of sympathetic listening, and to enjoy the drinking, and the conversation, and the temporary community. Cass expected Marco to renew his dinner invitation, but after Mitsuko's talk they all dispersed into the dark, and she watched as he turned and walked away in the opposite direction, just as he had done after they left the Pergamon Museum. It occurred to her that having witnessed his shame, further intimacy might no longer be possible. This evening Marco had been distant
and formal, not unfriendly, but simply removed. There was a moment in which they had accidentally touched, each studiously winding their scarves in the vestibule, and she saw a brief flush overtake him, and the shade of an idea, perhaps an invitation, begin to form, before he turned away and shrugged silently into his overcoat.

 

Yukio's speak-memory, entwined with Mitsuko's, took place the next night. It was perhaps inevitable that they should wish to be paired. Yukio frowned in concentration. They saw a seriousness in him now, less visible in the couple, as though Mitsuko absorbed an aspect of his character he might only express when he spoke as one.

‘My English is not so good as Mitsuko. But I will try.

‘When I think about this story, my story, and Mitsuko's Hagi story, I think we are made for each other and we needed to meet. But now, my story.'

Yukio sat on the floor, cross-legged. He closed his eyes for a second, and then he began.

‘In 1995 there was a gas attack in the Tokyo subway, somewhere near Kasumigaseki station. Sarin gas is very deadly – one tiny drop can kill a man. Psychos left sarin in plastic bags in the subway, and broke the bags open using the ends of umbrellas.'

Yukio glanced at Victor. ‘Ferrule,' he said carefully, making sure to pronounce the ‘l' as best he could.

‘Ferrule of the umbrella. It sounds a crazy idea, but that's how they did it. With umbrellas to break open the plastic bags. Many people died, I don't know how many. And very many were sick, and are still sick today. Some are blind,
forever. Some cannot move. I watched Kasumigaseki station on Japan TV. The same pictures on TV, again and again. There was Takaheshi, the stationmaster, lying on the ground dead, with a spoon in his mouth. This is a horrible image. Dead with a spoon in his mouth. They said his name, Takaheshi, Takaheshi, and I had never seen a real dead man, with a real name, on television before. A Japanese man.

‘And many others coughing and crying, and one man …' – here he consulted Mitsuko for vocabulary – ‘…
foaming
in the mouth. Lying on the ground. No breathing at all. I was very, very scared. I was ten years old then and everyone at school talked all day about the sarin gas attack. There were many very bad stories. We lived in Waseda, a long way from the station. But it was my city, it was my subway.

‘I had very bad dreams. I was afraid of the subway. I was afraid of men with umbrellas. In Japan we have typhoons and earthquakes and nuclear and tsunami, but then, just a boy, I was afraid of the city. Sometimes in my dream I was a long way in the north, Sapporo, in the snow, in the mountains of Hokkaido, and there was a typhoon in my dream, spinning and spinning, like cartoon or like manga. But this was not as scary as the sarin attack in the subway.

‘I have an older brother, Ichiro, five years older than me. He was excited by the attack. He teased me because he knew that I was afraid. I hated my brother. He is now a salaryman for a big company – Nikon, you have heard of it – and we don't talk to each other. My father is also a salaryman for Nikon, and early I knew that I was not like them. My father is a hard man and very strict. He was hard on Ichiro too, but Ichiro had girlfriends – very handsome, my brother Ichiro – and magazines about women. He was
popular, he was confident, he was very good at IT. I was just the kid brother who was afraid of Tokyo.

‘My mother was loving and very worried. She cared for me. But she could see I was going a little crazy. She cooked my favourite pork gyoza, she bought me computer games and manga, but it didn't help.

‘I think now it was maybe my mother's idea: I was sent to live with her parents in Nagoya, in Aichi Prefecture. My grandparents cared for me too. I liked Nagoya. I wanted to stay there forever, with my Oba and Oji. One day my grandfather taught me to play chess. We sat by the window of his apartment, where the sunlight fell on the chessboard, for many hours. Many times my grandfather let me win. But later I was winning all by myself. I liked the small pieces and thinking about the chess moves. I liked the shape of the board and how it started in full rows and slowly became scattered and then at last became empty. I liked how the small pieces made shadows across the squares of the board, it was a beautiful thing. A simple thing. Most of all I liked the puzzles inside my head, those squares of black and white, and the pieces moving this way, that way, and other pieces disappearing. The pawns, the queen, the knight, the bishop. All the little shadows and small disappearances.

‘Mitsuko says this feeling is
mono no aware
.'

‘Sensitivity to things,' said Mitsuko, ‘the pathos of things. Melancholy, shadows, tiny objects vanishing …'

‘When I was fifteen I was sent back to Tokyo. My grandfather became ill and it was too hard for them to keep me. Back in Waseda, I went to school for one more year, then I refused to return. It was easier to stay in my room. I had a fixed world there. I had my own world there. My
double-click world. There was a lot to see inside my laptop. I studied and I taught myself. I studied very hard. Everyone thinks
otaku
…'

‘Obsessives,' Mitsuko chipped in.

‘Everyone thinks we just play video games and read manga and waste our life, but double-click was my real education. I was disciplined and serious.

‘First I changed my time. I woke up at night-time and went to sleep in daytime. This way I knew there would be hours when everyone was sleeping, and I could make my own room-world in silence. My mother left food outside my door, and I would collect it when I knew everyone was asleep. Sometimes I even went outside, to 7-Eleven, in the middle of the night. I took my father's money from his wallet and bought snack foods, batteries, sweets, magazines. I didn't stay out long. The darkness was scary. On the internet I read that Yakuza were hunting young
otaku
men to kill them for their body organs. Maybe true, maybe not. There are many scary stories on the internet. There had been murders of young men like me in
kapsaru hoterus
…'

‘Capsule hotels,' Mitsuko said, ‘where you sleep in a stacked room, the size of a coffin.'

‘They died, or woke up with a hole and no kidney. So it was better, much safer, in my room at home.

‘At first my father would bang on the door and shout. He said there were hospitals for people like me. He said he would not have a
hikikomori
for a son. He cursed and he threatened. Ichiro, who no longer lived at home, would sometimes visit to bang on my door for maybe hours. Then he would tire and leave. I had fixed good locks. I knew my father was ashamed and would not tell others what had
happened to his second son. I knew he would rather have me hide away than shame him in public. Sometimes my mother passed letters under the door saying she still loved me and begging me to come out. Once, when I went to the bathroom, my father seized me and I hit him. I was ashamed I hit my father, but I still stayed in my room.

‘In my room with my double-click, I had my own education. I watched one English film a day, so I learnt English language. Not so good as Mitsuko, of course. I bought
Star Wars
and watched those movies many times, copying the speech. My favourite film is
Blade Runner
.'

Here Yukio closed his eyes and recited with dramatic gravity, as if offering a sonnet: ‘“I've … seen things you people wouldn't believe … Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments … will be lost in time, like tears … in … the rain. Time … to die …”

‘There is a whole world of
otaku
still talking about
Blade Runner
, forever, like outer space. I studied other things, too: medicine – you will be surprised how much medicine was on the internet, even then – I studied chess moves, geology. I learnt about constellations of the stars. I kept little notebooks of symbols and ideas. I wrote stories about life on other planets.

‘After four years in my room things became sad. I was skinny and sick. For some reason my parents started again to try to get me back into the world. They battled with me, I stayed still, protecting myself. But in my double-click world I had begun to feel lonely. I think I knew I could not live in my bedroom forever.

‘When Mitsuko arrived, I was angry my parents had told my life to a girl, and I was sure I would not open my door to her. She came almost every night for weeks. I could hear her behind the door, reading aloud to herself in English, sometimes talking to me in Japanese. I learnt she was practising her language, but she was also waiting for me to come out. After the first week she pushed a photograph of herself under the door and I was very surprised. Her voice was sweet and low, but her photograph looked nothing like the girls I had known. She was in her goth Lolita costume and dressed in black. She had black make-up and red lipstick and long wild hair. She was the same age as me and I was impressed that she was already so confident as herself. She was out in the world, and dressed like that.

‘I began to wait for Mitsuko's visits at night. My parents gave her keys and she let herself into our apartment about two am. Sometimes she stayed for just an hour, sometimes two, even three. Once I think she fell asleep behind the door, because I did not hear her say goodbye, and in the morning I was woken by my mother's voice, exclaiming.

‘After a few weeks I began to talk a little to Mitsuko. I was curious about her. I think I was already in love, but I didn't know it yet. I began to wait for her voice and long for her visits. And I began to ask her questions about herself – this was the first time for many years I was curious about another person. She told me all about Hagi and her parents, she described her room in Aoyama and her strict Aunt Keiko. She told me her strange ideas about time: we all live in different times, and only sometimes these match. This is called friendship, or love, this matching time. We talked about forever, what that might be.

‘
Infinity
– that was one English word Mitsuko taught me.

‘When I asked Mitsuko about her English language, she said she was translating a difficult story, she had discovered a Russian writer who knew special things about the world and memory and how words fit in. I had never heard of Nabokov. One night Mitsuko put under the door three pages of her translation of the story “First Love”. In this story – you know it – a boy is in a train, travelling to the seaside where he meets a little girl called Colette. They are on holiday. She is English, he is Russian. She has a dog called Floss. When they are looking at a starfish together, she kisses him on the cheek. Only this. It sounds like nothing, but it is a whole world. I didn't know anyone had written a story in this way, noticing everything, taking a child's mind seriously.

‘When I read the first pages of the story, I remembered my train trip to Nagoya. I was on the
shinkansen
, the fast train, not like the train in the story, but I understood how the boy watched the world rush away, how he saw the telegraph wires go up and down, how the white daytime moon follows the train, how he hears new sounds and notices a voice, or a cough, or words from other passengers, floating to him in the new world of the train.