The Elephant Vanishes (23 page)

“You may be right.”

We drank what was left of the beer and withdrew to our separate rooms. My sheets were new and clean and tight. I stretched out on top of them and looked through the curtain at the moon. Where were we headed? I wondered. But I was far too tired to think very deeply about such things. When I closed my eyes, sleep floated down on me like a dark, silent net.

—translated by Jay Rubin

G
REETINGS
,

The winter cold diminishes with each passing day, and now the sunlight hints at the subtle scent of springtime. I trust that you are well.

Your recent letter was a pleasure to read. The passage on the relationship between hamburger steak and nutmeg was especially well written, I felt: so rich with the genuine sense of daily living. How vividly it conveyed the warm aromas of the kitchen, the lively tapping of the knife against the cutting board as it sliced through the onion!

In the course of my reading, your letter filled me with such an irrepressible desire for hamburger steak that I had to go to a nearby restaurant and have one that very night. In fact, the particular neighborhood establishment in question offers eight different varieties of hamburger steak; Texas-style, Hawaiian-style, Japanese-style, and the like. Texas-style is big. Period. It would no doubt come as a shock to any Texans who might find
their way to this part of Tokyo. Hawaiian-style is garnished with a slice of pineapple. California-style … I don’t remember. Japanese-style is smothered with grated daikon. The place is smartly decorated, and the waitresses are all pretty, with extremely short skirts.

Not that I had made my way there for the express purpose of studying the restaurant’s interior décor or the waitresses’ legs. I was there for one reason only, and that was to eat hamburger steak—not Texas-style or California-style or any other style, but plain, simple hamburger steak.

Which is what I told the waitress. “I’m sorry,” she replied, “but such-and-such-style hamburger steak is the only kind we have here.”

I couldn’t blame the waitress, of course.
She
hadn’t set the menu.
She
hadn’t chosen to wear this uniform that revealed so much thigh each time she cleared a dish from a table. I smiled at her and ordered a Hawaiian-style hamburger steak. As she pointed out, I merely had to set the pineapple aside when I ate the steak.

What a strange world we live in! All I want is a perfectly ordinary hamburger steak, and the only way I can have it at this particular point in time is Hawaiian-style without pineapple.

Your own hamburger steak, I gather, is the normal kind. Thanks to your letter, what I wanted most of all was an utterly normal hamburger steak made by you.

By contrast, the passage on the National Railways’ automatic ticket machines struck me as a bit superficial. Your angle on the problem is a good one, to be sure, but the reader can’t vividly grasp the scene. Don’t try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.

Your overall score on this newest letter is 70. Your style is improving slowly but surely. Don’t be impatient. Just keep working as hard as you have been all along. I look forward to your next letter. Won’t it be nice when spring really comes?

P.S. Thank you for the box of assorted cookies. They are delicious. The Society’s rules, however, strictly forbid personal
contact beyond the exchange of letters. I must ask you to restrain your kindness in the future.

Nevertheless, thank you once again.

I
KEPT THIS
part-time job going for a year. I was twenty-two at the time.

I ground out thirty or more letters like this every month at two thousand yen per letter for a strange little company in the Iidabashi district that called itself “The Pen Society.”

“You, too, can learn to write captivating letters,” boasted the company’s advertisements. New “members” paid an initiation fee and monthly dues, in return for which they could write four letters a month to The Pen Society. We “Pen Masters” would answer their letters with letters of our own, such as the one quoted above, containing corrections, comments, and guidance for future improvement. I had gone for a job interview after seeing an ad posted in the student office of the literature department. At the time, certain events had led me to delay my graduation for a year, and my parents had informed me that they would consequently be decreasing my monthly support. For the first time in my life, I was faced with having to make a living. In addition to the interview, I was asked to write several compositions, and a week later I was hired. Then came a week of training in how to make corrections, offer guidance, and other tricks of the trade, none of which was very difficult.

All Society members are assigned to Pen Masters of the opposite sex. I had a total of twenty-four members, ranging in age from fourteen to fifty-three, the majority in the twenty-five-to-thirty-five range. Which is to say, most of them were older than I was. The first month, I panicked: The women were far better writers than I was, and they had a lot more experience as correspondents. I had hardly written a serious letter in my life, after all. I’m not quite sure how I made it through that first month. I was in a constant cold sweat, convinced that most of the members in my charge would demand a new Pen Master—a privilege touted in the Society’s rules.

The month went by, and not one member raised a complaint about my writing. Far from it. The owner said I was very popular. Two more months went by, and it even began to seem that my charges were improving thanks to my “guidance.” It was weird. These women looked up to me as their teacher with complete trust. When I realized this, it enabled me to dash off my critiques to them with far less effort and anxiety.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but these women were lonely (as were the male members of the Society). They wanted to write but they had no one to write to. They weren’t the type to send fan letters to a deejay. They wanted something more personal—even if it had to come in the form of corrections and critiques.

And so it happened that I spent a part of my early twenties like a crippled walrus in a warmish harem of letters.

And what amazingly varied letters they were! Boring letters, funny letters, sad letters. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep any of them (the rules required us to return all letters to the company), and this happened so long ago that I can’t recall them in detail, but I do remember them as filled to overflowing with life in all its aspects, from the largest of questions to the tiniest of trivia. And the messages they were sending seemed to me—to me, a twenty-two-year-old college student—strangely divorced from reality, seemed at times to be utterly meaningless. Nor was this due solely to my own lack of life experience. I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning. I didn’t know it then, of course, and neither did the women. This was surely one of the reasons that everything in their letters struck me as oddly two-dimensional.

When it came time for me to leave the job, all the members in my care expressed their regret. And though, quite frankly, I was beginning to feel that I had had enough of this endless job of letter writing, I felt sorry, too, in a way. I knew that I would never again have so many people opening themselves to me with such simple honesty.

•   •   •

H
AMBURGER STEAK
. I did actually have the opportunity to eat a hamburger steak made by the woman to whom the earlier-quoted letter was addressed.

She was thirty-two, no children, husband worked for a company that was generally considered the fifth-best-known in the country. When I informed her in my last letter that I would have to be leaving the job at the end of the month, she invited me to lunch. “I’ll fix you a perfectly normal hamburger steak,” she wrote. In spite of the Society’s rules, I decided to take her up on it. The curiosity of a young man of twenty-two was not to be denied.

Her apartment faced the tracks of the Odakyu Line. The rooms had an orderliness befitting a childless couple. Neither the furniture nor the lighting fixtures nor the woman’s sweater was of an especially costly sort, but they were nice enough. We began with mutual surprise—mine at her youthful appearance, hers at my actual age. She had imagined me as older than herself. The Society did not reveal the ages of its Pen Masters.

Once we had finished surprising each other, the usual tension of a first meeting was gone. We ate our hamburger steak and drank coffee, feeling much like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train. And speaking of trains, from the window of her third-floor apartment one could see the electric train line below. The weather was lovely that day, and over the railings of the building’s verandas hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance.

The hamburger steak was perfect—the flavor exactly right, the outer surface grilled to a crisp dark brown, the inside full of juice, the sauce ideal. Although I could not honestly claim that I had never eaten such a delicious hamburger in my life, it was certainly the best I had had in a very long time. I told her so, and she was pleased.

After the coffee, we told each other our life stories while a
Burt Bacharach record played. Since I didn’t really have a life story as yet, she did most of the talking. In college she had wanted to be a writer, she said. She talked about Françoise Sagan, one of her favorites. She especially liked
Aimez-vous Brahms?
I myself did not dislike Sagan. At least, I didn’t find her as cheap as everyone said. There’s no law requiring everybody to write novels like Henry Miller or Jean Genet.

“I can’t write, though,” she said.

“It’s never too late to start,” I said.

“No, I know I can’t write. You were the one who informed me of that.” She smiled. “Writing letters to you, I finally realized it. I just don’t have the talent.”

I turned bright red. It’s something I almost never do now, but when I was twenty-two I blushed all the time. “Really, though, your writing had something honest about it.”

Instead of answering, she smiled—a tiny smile.

“At least one letter made me go out for a hamburger steak.”

“You must have been hungry at the time.”

And indeed, maybe I had been.

A train passed below the window with a dry clatter.

W
HEN THE CLOCK
struck five, I said I would be leaving. “I’m sure you have to make dinner for your husband.”

“He comes home very late,” she said, her cheek against her hand. “He won’t be back before midnight.”

“He must be a very busy man.”

“I suppose so,” she said, pausing momentarily. “I think I once wrote to you about my problem. There are certain things I can’t really talk with him about. My feelings don’t get through to him. A lot of the time, I feel we’re speaking two different languages.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t understand how one could go on living with someone to whom it was impossible to convey one’s feelings.

“But it’s all right,” she said softly, and she made it sound as if it really were all right. “Thanks for writing letters to me all
these months. I enjoyed them. Truly. And writing back to you was my salvation.”

“I enjoyed your letters, too,” I said, though in fact I could hardly remember anything she had written.

For a while, without speaking, she looked at the clock on the wall. She seemed almost to be examining the flow of time.

“What are you going to do after graduation?” she asked.

I hadn’t decided, I told her. I had no idea what to do. When I said this, she smiled again. “Maybe you ought to do some kind of work that involves writing,” she said. “Your critiques were beautifully written. I used to look forward to them. I really did. No flattery intended. For all I know, you were just writing them to fulfill a quota, but they had real feeling. I’ve kept them all. I take them out every once in a while and reread them.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And thanks for the hamburger.”

T
EN YEARS
have gone by, but whenever I pass her neighborhood on the Odakyu Line I think of her and of her crisply grilled hamburger steak. I look out at the buildings ranged along the tracks and ask myself which window could be hers. I think about the view from that window and try to figure out where it could have been. But I can never remember.

Perhaps she doesn’t live there anymore. But if she does, she is probably still listening to that same Burt Bacharach record on the other side of her window.

Should I have slept with her?

That’s the central question of this piece.

The answer is beyond me. Even now, I have no idea. There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate. All I can do is look up from the train at the windows in the buildings that might be hers. Every one of them could be her window, it sometimes seems to me, and at other times I think that none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.