Hardboiled & Hard Luck (9 page)

The suddenness of it jolted me back into reality.

“What guy? You mean that fat guy at the office, the one I was crying with?”

“No, not him,” said my father. “The weird brother.”

“Sakai? Our relationship isn’t at all like that,” I said. “And you shouldn’t say things like that. He’s a really nice person, you know.”

“Maybe, but if you were to marry him or something, that spineless brother of his would be a relative, and then he’d come see us again, right? I can’t stand the thought of that. Just thinking about it makes me angry.”

“I doubt he would come. Besides, Sakai and I really aren’t going out or anything. He’s a great guy, though. I think so, anyway. At any rate, I know it’s hard not to bad-mouth his brother, but Kuni did fall in love with him, after all. Let’s try not to say nasty things about him.”

“I didn’t really mean it. But what’s he thinking, going off to his parents’ house like that? It’s not a joke, you know? He must have been crazy if he thought he could marry my daughter if that’s all the feeling he has for her.”

Realizing that my father needed a bad guy right now, I gave up defending him. I didn’t have much of a sense of what my sister’s former fiancé was like. All I knew was that she loved him, and she had gotten as swept up in her love as she always did.

“We should be glad she didn’t marry someone so flaky,” I said.

“What is there to be glad about now!” shouted my dad.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said.

“God, it hurts. It really hurts.”

My father’s voice came from deep down in his belly, and I was feeling carsick; the combination of my queasiness and his pain made me start crying again. The tears I shed lately, particularly those linked to memories, were all but meaningless. They came out on their own, like bird shit. My dad knew this, and kept quiet.

The town where I was born and raised kept whizzing by.

“Mom isn’t doing too well, is she?” I said. “Maybe I’ll stay at home tonight. I want to go though Kuni’s things, anyway.”

“Yes, you should stay,” said my father. “She’d like that.”

“OK. I’ll make something for dinner, then.”

“How about a hot pot or something? I’d like something hot.”

“Sure, if you can stop by the store.”

Just then, as we were talking in the warm car, it hit me: we were having a good time again.

Kuni hadn’t only given us pain, she had also created moments for us that were so much more concentrated than usual. That’s how I saw it then. In the world we now lived in, the good times were a hundred times better. If we couldn’t catch that sparkle, only the agony would remain. Each new day was a struggle, in both the positive and the negative senses. I didn’t want my mind to be muddled when the time came to say goodbye to my sister.

3

Music

A few days later, Kuni was taken off the respirator. We all confirmed together that she was dead.

It said in a book that my sister’s brain had dissolved. But from the outside, her face looked exactly the same: Kuni’s face. After we did her makeup, she seemed even more alive. She looked as if she were about to leave for work. I brushed my finger across the foundation in her compact. Kuni always kept everything so clean—the mirror was spotless, and the sponge. I felt her life in everything. We dressed her in her favorite clothes and filled the coffin with her favorite flowers.

My sister’s face was lovely when they carried her off to the crematory.

I had wanted my mind to be clear when this time came, but of course I was in a daze the whole time. I felt as if my eyes weren’t focusing, because they didn’t want to see what was happening. And that really made me feel lost, as if I were swimming in a dream world. My head was reeling the whole time; I just had to get through each new thing that happened as quickly as possible. My mom only stayed in bed for one day.

Sakai wasn’t there for my sister’s last moments, of course, but his brother was. Even with my dad punching him and my mom wailing at him, he stayed and saw my sister through the last hours of her life, and then helped out with the funeral. His tenacity then was splendid. If it were me, just getting looks like the ones my parents were giving him would have been enough to send me running back home. I had a chance to talk with him for a little while. He wasn’t a bad guy. If things had happened the way they were supposed to, I would have been seeing a lot of him from now on, and we could have taken our time getting to know each other over the years. Now, after a single conversation at this sad event, I was unlikely ever to see him again. It’s so strange—the ties that bind us to people. But I know Kuni was glad he came. After all, she was a woman who lived in love.

I was lonely now that Kuni had officially died and I couldn’t go see her any more.

Sometimes I would burst out sobbing. One evening when I was taking a bath, for instance, I noticed that the Bulgari animal soap she had brought back for me as a souvenir of a trip overseas had lost its animal shape, even though it had seemed like it would last forever, and was now just a round blob.

Time passes.

Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.

I realized again how much I wanted to see my sister in the flesh, even the way she looked when she was dying. Because back when she was still in the hospital, I had been able to take that soap down and use it without giving it a second thought.

I made a lot of progress in Italian, because I had nothing else to do.

Later on, there would be my life in Italy. I would stay in touch with my mom and dad and be a support for them while I was gone. And I would throw myself wholeheartedly into whatever I did, so that I could get a good job. It would take a tremendous amount of energy to get my interrupted life back on track, whether it ended up being a twisted version of my old life or a life in which I gained something despite the loss of my sister. I also would never forget that now I was the only child my parents had.

I saw Sakai two more times: once on the day of the funeral, then again on the evening of the following Sunday. Somehow evening seemed like the best time to get together with him.

I had been dashing about in my mourning clothes, making arrangements to have boxed lunches distributed to the guests; when I saw Sakai, I heaved a sigh of relief. Just knowing that there was someone in the temple who could take care of himself, whose feelings didn’t need to concern me right then, just knowing that his vibrant light was shining there made me breathe a little easier. I hurried toward him, smiling.

“Can we get together one day soon?” he asked.

I smiled. “This is hardly the right occasion to ask me that.”

“How about Sunday? Are you free Sunday?”

“Yes, I think so.”

We agreed on a time and place. The temple was flooded with afternoon light, and the mood was peaceful. Sakai said he was going for a walk, and disappeared among the graves.

The sky was that ambiguous color peculiar to Tokyo: very faint traces of white seemed to have been mixed into the blue. The trees among the gravestones looked cold and barren. The guests all had on black coats; they were like crows wheeling around the temple. I didn’t feel cold. I felt relaxed now because Sakai was there. I had never felt such a sense of complete reliance on someone—on the very fact of his existence, the knowledge that he was alive. I felt like a little bird gazing up at the sky from her nest. I knew he was weird, and kind of a fraud, and that he was cold and unreasonably cheerful, and that he had no sense of responsibility. But none of that mattered. I could rest my wings in that endless expanse. And that was enough. Maybe that’s all our relationship was. Right now and forever.

After Kuni died, I ate nothing but curry—her favorite food.

So naturally Sakai and I went for curry, too.

The restaurant was kind of strange: you sat right on the floor, and the curry you got was Indian, not the Japanese-style curry most places serve. People stared as they walked past the window. We concentrated on our curry, sweating. 

“Do you have a girlfriend, Sakai?” I asked.

“No, not really,” he said. “Just girls who are friends.”

“I wonder if we’ll ever get together like this again,” I said.

“I’m sure we will. And it won’t be too long, either.”

“The timing is so bad... it’s hard to think right now.”

“I’d be surprised if you suggested that we start dating right now.”

“I talked to your brother at the funeral, you know. Quite a lot.”

“I bet he was really weak.”

“Yeah, he was crying the whole time.”

“You know... I really hate it when people talk like experts about things they’ve never experienced, so I don’t want to say much about all this. I’m sorry. Actually, I once lost someone close to me. But it didn’t happen like it did with your sister, and I’ve never been a parent. So I have a hard time imagining what it’s like, even for my own brother. And for Kuni, of course. And for you. I don’t understand how it feels, but even so I think I kind of get what’s happening, just from what I’ve seen and heard, and what I’ve felt. There are so many things I want to say to you. But I can’t say them—they just won’t come out.”

Sakai said all this in a very formal tone.

“Not many people
have
experienced this sort of thing,” I said, smiling. “And I don’t particularly want people to understand, anyway. I realize how good you’ve been to me, though.”

When we went outside, the winter sky was full of stars.

“There was a passage in a book I read a long time ago,” Sakai said, “about how if you hear extraordinarily beautiful music on a street corner, it means that the same piece will be playing for you when you die. The main character is walking down the street one fine afternoon when this incredibly lovely melody starts coming from a record store across the street. So he sits down to listen. His spiritual guide tells him this is a sign that destiny has put before him, a sign that shows death is present in every aspect of people’s lives. And the spiritual guide says that when the man leaves the world, he’ll hear the incomparably beautiful tone of that trumpet once more.”

“Hey, the same thing happened to me!” I said. “One winter afternoon I was in the place we’ve just come from, the curry restaurant. I was having a
chai
, all alone. They had the radio tuned to this station that only played reggae, so there were all these minor reggae songs playing, tunes I’d never even heard of, one after another. And one of them came into my head so clearly it felt like a bolt of lightning hit me. It was a duet with a man and a woman singing, and it was about summer vacation. It was a pretty dumb song, nothing special; the thing is, it came straight into my head. And even though it was winter, my mind became full of sunshine. And suddenly I knew: I’m going to die on a summer afternoon. I was so sure of it. Of course, I can’t be sure it will really turn out that way.”

“You know, I bet that’s exactly what it’s like.”

“I wonder what Kuni’s last song was,” I said.

A chilly wind gusted down the street. We were walking through a residential area with very few people around; we were going to keep walking until we came to a place where we could get some tea. I wished the street would never end.

“I wouldn’t know what the song was either way, but doesn’t it depend on when she died? Was it when she lost consciousness? When her brain was damaged? Or did it happen when her brain died? Or when they took her off the respirator?” Sakai paused. “I guess we’ll find that out for ourselves sooner or later.”

These were hard words, but when he said them it didn’t anger me at all.

The trees on either side of the road stretched their bare branches over our heads, creating a tunnel of black silhouettes. I took out my MD player as we walked.

“There were only two tracks on the mix my sister was making before she died. I’ve been listening to them a lot. I mean, not that this is really related to what we were talking about before.”

“What songs are they?”

“'September' by Earth Wind & Fire and Yūmin’s 'Autumn Travels.'”

“What a pair! Was it an autumn theme or something?”

“I think that must have been it. I mean, I can see why the Yūmin song is there: Kuni was such a devoted fan of hers that she was actually hoping that her marriage to Matsutōya Masataka would fail.”

“Wow. You can tell her age from those songs, though.”

“Why don’t I put them on while we walk?” I said.

We listened to the songs, each of us using one earphone, the way Kuni and I did back in the old days. These songs had seen my sister through the last September of her life. They weren’t selected for that role, it just happened that way. If Kuni had lived, she would have kept editing the minidisc, adding songs, playing it in the car. She had spent her last September, her final days, gazing up into a distant sky that still bore traces of summer. By November, Kuni was gone.

“Come to think of it,” said Sakai, almost shouting, “my brother sings this song a lot when we go to do karaoke.”

“He sings ‘September’?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pretty weird. But that explains why it’s on the disc.”

“Right, that must be it.”

“Is he good?”

“My brother doing Earth Wind & Fire, all on his own? Yeah, he’s good, but it’s scary as hell.”

“Oh.”

We kept walking, singing along with the music. Do you remember, we crooned, our voices light, the twenty-first night of September? And as the music reverberated in our ears, the road zoomed closer and the sky seemed to widen. I felt as if the world had grown a little more beautiful than it was before; all of a sudden the cold and the darkness of the night  were transformed into a lovely splash of light. I realized that my feet were hitting the ground in time with the beating of my heart. And I felt as if the world where I had walked with my sister when we were kids was living again. I felt a rush of nostalgia. This feeling I have right now, I thought, this is what first pushed me into the world, what helped me grow up to be what I am.