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- Just like that, my archaeologist begins sifting through the tell of my own past. Labeling all the artifacts, categorizing, analyzing.
- The years '59 and '60 stand there like gawky twins in matching nerd suits. Even if I hopped a time machine back to the period, I doubt I could tell the two apart.
- In spite of which, I persist with my labors. Doggedly expanding the dig, filling out the picture with every least new find. Shards of memory.
- ...there's a tiny henhouse, in which five chickens are enjoying what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch. It's a bright, clear day, so before going inside I sit down on the pavement next to the chickens and light up a cigarette. I watch the chickens pecking at their feedbox busily. Frenetically, in fact, so that they look like one of those old newsreels with two few frames per second.
- If birds in flight go unburdened by names, let my memories be free of dates.
- I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else's. At which point, can you even call it memory anymore?
- When I came to, I was lying on a bench under an arbor, it was late in the day, and the first things I noticed were the wet-and-dry smell of water that had been sprinkled over the baked earth and the musk of my brand-new leather glove, which they'd put under my head for a pillow. Then there was this dull pain in my temple.
- The Chinese elementary school at the edge of the world.
- The blackboard was a pristine deep green; the teacher's place was set with a box of chalk and a vase bearing a single white chrysanthemum. Everything was spotless, a flawless picture of order. There were no drawings or compositions tacked up willy-nilly on the bulletin board.
- "...But isn't that the same with you and your friends? Even if they are your friends, some things they cannot understand. But if you make an effort, you can still become close. That is what I believe. But in order to do that, we must begin with respect for each other... That is the first step."
- Some 20 years on, I've completely forgotten the results of the test. All I remember is the school kids walking quietly up the hill and the Chinese teacher. That, and how to hold my head up with pride.
- ...from where I stood it seemed like a common enough mishap. A momentary lapse and -- glitch! Could have happened to anyone. But not to her. A tiny crack in her head widened into a fissure, eventually becoming a gaping chasm. She wouldn't, she couldn't, take another step. At a total loss for words, she froze in place. She was a sorry sight, a ship sinking slowly in the night sea.
- Those two weeks in March passed along with the sleet of the season.
- Then we went to the disco and danced for two whole hours. The place was nice and warm, swimming with mirror balls and incense. A Filipino band was pounding out Santana covers. (...) In the colored strobe lights, she looked like a different person from the shy warehouse stock girl I knew.
- When we'd finally danced ourselves out, we left the club. The March night was brisk, but there was a hint of spring in the air. We were overheated from all that exercise, so we just walked, aimlessly, hands in our pockets. We stopped into an arcade, got a cup of coffee, kept walking. We still had half the school break ahead of us. We were 19. If someone had told us to, we would have walked clear out to the Tama River.
- I put my cigarette out under my heel and lit another one. The sounds of the city blurred lazily into the dark. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Nothing was amiss, but I couldn't shake this nagging feeling. Something wasn't right. What was it? What had I done?
- She wasn't that type. No, she was the type to keep riding the train the wrong way around.
- It was a chilly December afternoon. There was no wind; the air was so cold that what little light filtered through the clouds did nothing to clear away the gray of the city.
- "I got a bad stomach. I really ought to quit smoking, too," he said, fiddling with his cigarettes. He had that look that people with stomach troubles get when they talk about their stomach.
- "Everything is vivid. The weather that day, the temperature, the smells. Just like now. It gets confusing, like where am I? Makes me wonder if things are only memories. Ever get that feeling?" - I shook my head absently.
- This occurs to me while I'm riding the Yamanote Line. I'm standing by the door, holding on to my ticket so I won't lose it, gazing out the window at the buildings we pass. Our city, these streets, I don't know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty facades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city. That's when I remember what the Chinese girl said. This was never any place I was meant to be.
- I've wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It's the China that sends messages just to me. It's not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it's another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it's a part of myself that's been cut off by the word China. I wander through China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My mind takes place here in the Tokyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi. My adventures take me to the waiting room of the nearby dentist, to the bank teller's window. I can go everywhere and I don't go anywhere. - Tokyo -- one day, as I ride the Yamanote Loop, all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. And I'll be holding my ticket, watching it all. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn't a place for me. That is how we will lose our speech, how our dreams will turn to mist. The way our adolescence, so tedious we worried it would last forever, evaporated._Misdiagnosis,_ as a psychiatrist might say, as it was with that Chinese girl. But what am I, what are you, if not a misdiagnosis? And if so, is there a way out?- Even so, I have packed into a trunk my faithful little outfielder's pride. I sit on the stone steps by the harbor, and I wait for that slow boat to China. It is due to appear on the blank horizon. I am thinking about China, the shining roofs, the verdant fields. - __Let loss and destruction come my way. They are nothing to me. I am not afraid. Any more than the committed revolutionary fears the garrote. If only, if only... - Oh, friends, my friends, China is so far away.
- A dwarf came into my dream and asked me to dance. - I knew this was a dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So, very politely, I declined. The dwarf was not offended but danced alone instead.
- His body whirred like a tornado, sucking up the wild flurry of notes that poured from Charlie Parker's saxophone.
- "You're a great dancer," I cried out to him. "You're music itself."
- The sun set, covering the earth in the shadows of the forest. A huge black butterfly the size of a bird cut across the clearing and vanished into the depths of the forest. I felt the chill of the evening air. It was time for my dream to melt away, I knew. ("The Dancing Dwarf," 244)
- He let out a great cackle, spraying spit from a wide-open mouth missing half its teeth.
- He continued to look hard at me until his eyes reverted to the special mushy look that drunks have.
- ...they were practically hypnotized watching him dance. And he danced like nobody else. He could draw feelings out of his audience, feelings they hardly ever used or didn't even know they had. He'd bare these feelings to the light of day the way you'd pull out a fish's guts.
- The old man let out one long hiss of a sigh, and then he drained his glass in a single gulp. The pink liquid oozed out at the corners of his mouth, dripping down into the sagging collar of his undershirt.
- Suspended from the ceiling were movable rails from which hung dozens of elephant legs. If you squinted up at them, it looked as if a huge herd of elephants was winging down from the sky.
- I started dancing, slowly at first, but gradually faster and faster until I was dancing like a whirlwind. My body no longer belonged to me. My arms, my legs, my head, all moved wildly over the dance floor unconnected to my thoughts. I gave myself over to the dance, and all the while I could hear distinctly the transit of the stars, the shifting of the tides, the racing of the wind. This was truly what it meant to dance. I stamped my feet, swung my arms, tossed my head, and whirled. A globe of white light burst open inside my head as I spun round and round. - Again she glanced at me, and then she was whirling and stamping with me. The light was exploding inside her, too. I knew. I was happy. I had never been so happy.
- The air became filled with the perfume of white night-blooming flowers. I turned to see the dark shapes of the factory spread out below. From the dance hall, a yellow light spilled out onto its immediate surroundings like so much pollen, and one of the orchestras was playing a jump tune. The wind was soft, and the moonlight seemed to drench her hair. - Neither of us spoke. After such dancing, there was no need to say anything. She clung to my arm like a blind person being led along the road.
- I hear the dogs howling now. They're almost here. * So as things went, looking at these junior-high-school kids every day, one day it struck me. They were all just 14 or 15 years old. It was a minor discovery for me, something of a shock. 14 or 15 years ago, they weren't even born; or if they were, they were little more than semiconscious blobs of pink flesh. And here they were now, already wearing brassieres, masturbating, sending stupid little postcards to disc jockeys, smoking out in back of the gym, writing FUCK on somebody's fence with red spray paint, reading -- maybe -- War and Peace. Phew, glad that's done with. * Memory is like fiction: or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable. And then to put these things out as saleable items, you call them finished products -- at times it's downright embarrassing just to think of it. Honestly, it can make me blush. And if my face turns that shade, you can be sure everyone's blushing. Still, you grasp human existence in terms of these rather absurd activities resting on relatively straightforward motives, and questions of right and wrong pretty much drop out of the picture. That's where memory takes over and fiction is born. From that point on, it's a perpetual-motion machine no one can stop.__
- Now, I didn't do such meticulous work especially to build a reputation. You probably won't believe me, but I simply enjoy mowing lawns. Every morning, I'd hone the grass clippers, head out to the customers in a minivan loaded with a lawn mower, and cut the grass. There's all kinds of grass, all kinds of turf, all kinds of housewives. Quiet, thoughtful housewives and ones who shoot of their mouths. ... - No matter, I kept on mowing the lawn. Generally, the grass in the yard would be pretty high. Overgrown like a thicket. The taller the grass, the more rewarding I'd find the job. When the job was finished, the yard would yield an entirely different impression. Gives you a really great feeling. It's as if a thick bank of clouds has suddenly lifted, letting in the sun all around.
- It was summer, though nothing special as summers go. Clouds drifted across the sky like distant memories. The sun broiled my skin. My back peeled three times, and by then I was tanned dark all over. Even behind my ears.
- I drove with all the windows open. The wind grew brisk as I headed out of the city, the surroundings greener. The simmering heat of the lawns and the smell of dry dirt came on stronger; the clouds were outlines sharp against the sky. Fantastic weather. Perfect for taking a little summer day trip with a girl somewhere. I thought about the cool sea and the hot sands. And then I thought of a cozy air-conditioned room with crisp blue sheets on the bed. That's all. Aside from that, I didn't think about a thing. My head was all beach and blue sheets.
- I stretched out on a nearby patch of grass and casually watched the attendant check the oil and wipe the windows. Putting my ear to the ground, I could hear all kinds of things. I could even hear what sounded like distant waves, though of course it wasn't. Only the rumble of all the different sounds of the earth sucked in. Right in front of my eyes, a bug was inching along a blade of grass. A tiny green bug with wings. The bug paused when it reached the end of the grass blade, thought things over awhile, then decided to go back the same way it came. Didn't look all that particularly upset. - Wonder if the heat gets to bugs, too? - Who knows?
- ...and rang the doorbell. No answer. Everything was dead quiet. Not a soul in sight, kind of like siesta time in a Latin country.
- ...though both were sun-bleached beyond belief. It was an old house, a house all the more becoming for its age. The sort of house you often find at summer resorts, occupied half the year and left empty the other half. You know the type. There was a lived-in air to the house that gave it its charm.
- Through sleep-dulled eyes she gave me the most bothered look. A slightly graying shock of stiff frizzy hair rippled across the crown of her head; her two thick arms drooped out of the shoulders of a frumpy brown cotton dress. Her limbs were utterly pale. "What is it?" she said.
- I stopped when I came to a station playing Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," lay down on my back, and just looked up through my shades at the sun filtering between the branches. - The woman came and planted herself by my head. Viewed from below, she resembled the camphor tree. Her right hand held a glass, and in it whiskey and ice were aswirl in the summer light. - "Hot, eh?" she said.
- And except for the humming of the refrigerator, all was quiet.
- I finished working by 2:20. I turned off the radio, took off my shoes, and walked all over the lawn in my bare feet: nothing left untrimmed, no uneven patches. Smooth as a carpet.
- "...19 is an awful age to be. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to explain things better, but after a few years it probably won't matter anymore, will it?"
- Her tall glass was the kind they give away at liquor stores. The cicadas were still chirping the whole while. The woman didn't look a bit drunk; only her breathing seemed a little unnatural, drawn slow between her teeth with a slight wheeze. ("The Last Lawn of the Afternoon," 281)
- I took out my cigarettes and offered her one. As we stood there smoking, I noticed how big her hands were compared to mine. Big enough to dwarf both the glass in her right hand and the Hope regular in her left. Her fingers were stubby -- no rings -- and several of the nails had strong vertical lines running through them.
- ...a camphor-tree husband and wife.
- The woman filled her cheeks with vodka tonic as if she were going to gargle, then gulped down her precious mouthwash half a swallow at a time. Her whole forehead beaded up with sweat, like it was crawling with tiny bugs.
- I felt kind of light-headed from the heat. (-) The interior of the house was just as deathly quiet as before. Ducking in from the flood of summer afternoon light so suddenly, I felt my eyes tingle from deep behind my pupils. Darkness -- in a dim, somehow dilute solution -- washed through the place, a darkness that seemed to have settled in decades ago. The air was chilly, but not with the chill of air-conditioning. It was the fluid chill of air in motion: Somewhere a breeze was getting in, somewhere it was leaking out.
- All sorts of smells drifted the length of the hallway, each recalling something different. Time-worn smells, built up over time, only to dissipate in time. The smell of old clothes and old furniture, old books, old lives.
- Stacked on the desk were notebooks and two dictionaries, French and English. Both looked well used. Literally so; not ill-treated but handled with some care.
- I nodded vaguely. My father was that way, too. Still, there hasn't been a human being yet won out in a match against alcohol. The only stories you hear are about people who never catch on to things until they've sunk past their noses. My father died when I was 16. A real fine-line case, his was. So fine I can hardly recall if he'd even been alive or not.
- The woman remained silent all this time. The only sound she made was the tinkling of ice in her glass each time she took a sip. Every so often a cool breeze would blow in through the open window from another hill across the way to the south. A tranquil summer afternoon that seemed destined to put me to sleep. Somewhere, far off, a phone was ringing.
- In the third drawer, underwear, socks, and stockings. Everything was clean and neat. Somehow, it made me just a little sad, as if something were weighing down on my chest. I shut the last drawer.
- Little by little, I was beginning to get a feel for the girl; her presence hovered over everything in the room like a hazy white shadow. No face, no hands, nothing. Just a barely perceptible disturbance in a sea of light.
- The woman seemed to have left something unsaid. As if she didn't quite know how to put it. She stared down at the glass in her right hand, kind of lost. The glass was empty. Then she looked back up at me. - "You decide to start mowing lawns again, be sure to give me a call. Anytime at all."
- Loads of miniscule aches came over my weary muscles all at once... Everything seemed far off, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. "I'm sure you must want many things from me," my girlfriend had written, "but I myself can't conceive that there's anything in me you'd want."
- ...Ozawa's interest in boxing surprised even himself. The biggest reason was that, fundamentally, boxing is a loner's sport, an extremely solitary pursuit. It was something of a discovery for him, a new world. And that world excited him. The sweat flying off the bodies of the older men, the hard, squeaky feel of the gloves, the intense concentration of men with their muscles tuned to lightning-fast efficiency -- little by little, it all took hold of his imagination. Spending Saturdays and Sundays at the gym became one of his few indulgences. - "One of the things I like about boxing is depth. That's what grabbed me. Compared to that, hitting and getting hit is no big deal. That's the only outcome. The same with winning or losing. If you could get to the bottom of the depth, losing doesn't matter -- nothing can hurt you. And anyway, nobody can win at everything; somebody's got to lose. The important thing is to get deep down into it. That -- at least to me -- is boxing. When I'm in a match, I feel like I'm at the bottom of a deep, deep hole. So far inside I can't see anyone else and no one can see me. Way down there in the darkness, doing battle. All alone. But not sad alone," said Ozawa. "There's all different kinds of loneliness. There's the tragic loneliness that tears at your nerves with pain. And then there's the loneliness that isn't like that at all -- though in order to reach that point, you've got to pare your body down. If you make the effort, you get back what you put in. That's what I learned from boxing."
- "Why is it that you can't forget what you really want to forget?" Ozawa broke into a smile.
- "...I was getting heavy into my training. For a junior-high student, I was beginning to show results. I could feel my body changing. Shoulders broadening, chest thickening. My arms got firm, my cheeks taut. I thought, This is what it's like to become an adult. I felt great. Every night, I stood naked in front of the big mirror in the bathroom, I was so fascinated with my body.
- Ozawa pursed his lips and stared down at his coffee cup. Then he glanced up at me with a slight smile. From outside the plate-glass windows came the roar of the jet engines. A 737 shot straight off like a wedge into the clouds and vanished from sight.
- Aoki hadn't changed a bit since the 8th grade. Some people don't grow, and they don't degenerate; they keep on exactly as they always were.
- But suddenly, at the same time, there in the train, I felt something like pity. I mean, was this really the best this joker could do? Was this all it took to give him such airs of superiority? Could he actually be so satisfied, so happy with himself, for this? It was pathetic. I was practically moved to grief. To think that this fool would be eternally incapable of knowing true human depth. Not that I'm such a deep guy, but at least I know a real human being when I see one. But his kind, no. His life was as flat as a piece of slat. It was all surface, no matter what he did. He was nothing.
- After that, I was home free. I slept soundly, ate square meals, went to the gym. I wasn't going to be defeated. It wasn't like I had triumphed over Aoki, either. It was a matter of my not losing out on life. It's too easy to let yourself get ground down by those who give you shit. So I held out...
- He broke off and looked out the window to the clouds. They'd barely moved. A heavy lid, bearing down from the heavens. Absorbing all color from the control tower and airplanes and ground-transport vehicles and tarmac and men in uniform.
- "No, what really scares me is how easily, how uncritically, people will believe the crap that slime like Aoki deal out. How these Aoki types produce nothing themselves, don't have an idea in the world, and talk so nice, how this slime can sway gullible types to any opinion and get them to perform on cue, as a group. And this group never entertains even a sliver of doubt that they could be wrong. They think nothing of hurting someone, senselessly, permanently. They don't take any responsibility for their actions. Them. They're the real monsters. They're the ones I have nightmares about. In those dreams, there's only the silence. And these faceless people. Their silence seeps into everything like ice water. And then it all goes murky. And I'm dissolving and I'm screaming, but no one hears."
- ...the empty elephant house. Without the elephant, something about the place seemed wrong. It looked bigger than it needed to be, blank and empty like some huge, dehydrated beast from which the innards had been plucked.
- ...but I liked the idea of my town's owning an elephant.
- The elephant endured these virtually meaningless (for the elephant, entirely meaningless) formalities with hardly a twitch, and it chomped on the bananas with a vacant stare. When it finished eating the bananas, everyone applauded.
- I couldn't tell if the elephant was bothered by its shackle. On the surface, at least, it seemed all but unconscious of the enormous chunk of metal wrapped around its leg. It kept its blank gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in space, its ears and a few white hairs on its body waving gently in the breeze.
- The elephant's keeper was a small, bony old man. It was hard to guess his age; he could have been in his early 60s or late 70s. He was one of those people whose appearance was no longer influenced by their age after they pass a certain point in life. His skin had the same dark ruddy, sunburned look both summer and winter, his hair was stiff and short, his eyes were small. His face had no distinguishing characteristics, but his almost perfectly circular ears stuck out on either side with disturbing prominence.
- The elephant had not escaped. It had vanished.
- What good would it do to talk to people like that, who would not even consider the possibility that the elephant had simply vanished?
- It seemed that people were beginning to shove the elephant case into the large category of "unsolvable mysteries." The disappearance of one old elephant and one old elephant keeper would have no impact on the course of society. The earth would continue its monotonous rotations, politicians would continue issuing unreliable proclamations, people would continue yawning on their way to the office, children would continue studying for their college-entrance exams. Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever. And so many unremarkable months went by, like a tired army marching past a window.
- No one took care of the grounds any longer, and thick green summer grass had sprung up there as if it had been waiting for this opportunity.
- I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night -- the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep dark, ocean.
- ...where we settled in to continue our conversation. A soundless rain went on falling outside the lounge's panoramic window, the lights of the city sending blurry messages through the mist. A damp hush held away over the nearly empty cocktail lounge.
- "So then it's you. The problem's with you." - I stuck my finger in my glass and stirred the ice. I like the sound of ice in a whiskey glass.
- "May 17th at 7 PM. The days were already very long by then, and the sky had a reddish glow, but the lights were on in the elephant house."
- I took a swallow of my now somewhat watery scotch. The rain outside the windows was still coming down, no stronger or weaker than before, a static element in a landscape that would never change.
sep 6 2020 ∞
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sep 6 2020 +