“And then there’s the dental situation. As you know, more than half of Akari’s teeth are already bad. I know the doctor talked to you about the results of the most recent set of blood tests, and while I only skimmed the written report, there seemed to be very few items on the list that weren’t marked ‘Requires Medical Care.’ His sleep apnea hasn’t improved, either, even though we’ve done our best to get his weight down. The reason he takes so many catnaps during the day is to compensate for all the sleep he loses at night.
“Back in the days when Akari was still going to work at the support center for disabled people, the head of the institute showed me a disheartening statistical chart of average life expectancy based on all the people who had ever been enrolled there. You were with me that day, remember? Anyway, he explained that after a certain point children with disabilities begin to age more rapidly than their parents, and when I tried to talk to you about it later, your only reply was silence. Now, though, I realize that what the doctor said is absolutely true, and the problem is we’re aging at a worrisomely rapid rate as well.
“On another topic, I don’t think I fully understood how heartsick you were about having to abandon work on the drowning novel. On reflection, I think this is the first time you not only didn’t finish a book you’d started, but simply stopped writing altogether. (You did take a short break once, early on, but it actually involved this very same book in its earliest incarnation.) Little by little, though, I’m starting to grasp the impact this disappointment has had on you, just from seeing how low your spirits have been since you returned from your fruitless trip to Shikoku. I don’t know when I’ve seen you as miserable as you are now, and it’s also obvious that Akari has been in seriously low spirits. You know how sometimes you’ll be sitting in the living room reading a book while he’s in the dining room studying a musical score? (That is, when you aren’t both holed up in your rooms.) Well, the scenario appears outwardly unchanged, apart from the fact that you aren’t speaking to each other. But for quite a while I’ve felt as if there were two giant mounds of depression permanently camped out in the house, and I couldn’t help worrying about what might happen if those two volatile lumps of unhappiness were to collide. And now what I think has happened is that they finally did crash into each other.
“Since Akari was born, you have never once said anything even remotely like ‘You’re an idiot’ to him. Akari clearly understands the meaning of the heartless phrase you blurted out, and when I think about it I can understand why, as Maki mentioned, you’re unable to summon the courage to patch things up with your son. I know you’re sincerely sorry about hurting Akari, but some combination of the stubbornness of age and a deep-seated personality trait is keeping you from saying the simple words that might restore harmony to our little family.
“This morning I was wide-awake from a very early hour, and I couldn’t stop turning this horrible situation over and over in my mind. Apparently Akari, too, had awakened while it was still dark outside; I had a feeling something wasn’t right, and when I went into his room, thinking he might be having a seizure, I found him crying his eyes out. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but he hasn’t made any attempt to listen to music on his own since the episode at the hospital, even when he’s alone in his room. That hasn’t happened since he was a baby.”
I was truly cornered. And I know this is unspeakably childish, but at that moment I was actively hoping to be ambushed by another attack of vertigo, just to free me from Chikashi’s relentless and entirely justified criticism. But alas, no dizzy spell rode to the rescue and I didn’t have the acting chops to fake one, so I had no choice but to sit quietly while my wife’s quiet censure rained down on me.
Very late that evening, as I was lying on the bed in my study still feeling as though my heart had been put through a meat grinder, I heard the strains of the second of the three sonatas Beethoven wrote and dedicated to Haydn (Op. 2 no. 2 in A Major, to be precise) wafting up through my pillow. Someone was playing the CD downstairs in the living room, with the volume unusually loud. I didn’t move, but when I heard the next piece — Mozart’s Symphony K. 550—being played full blast, I couldn’t control myself any longer, and I went charging down the stairs. Akari was crouched on the floor in front of the stereo.
“It’s after midnight, so why don’t you do this tomorrow instead?” I said mildly. Akari didn’t even glance in my direction, and I was suddenly galvanized by anger. When I went over and squatted beside him in an attempt to get his attention, he responded by boldly turning the volume up even louder. He continued to stare straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge my presence, and I could see the back of his neck flushing a deep crimson. Chikashi emerged from her bedroom and stood in the doorway, shooting me an inquiring look, but after she saw the expression on my face she retreated without speaking.
When the piece had ended, Akari carefully put the compact disc away and stood up. When he met my eyes at last I said flatly, “You know what? You really are an idiot.”
I went upstairs, and after spending a long time staring into the depths of a darkness that wasn’t nearly as black as my mood, I switched on the bedside lamp. For the first time since returning to Tokyo, I groped around on the nearby bookshelf and grabbed the first paperback that came to hand. As I began to read a random page, the rectangle of tiny, tightly packed Japanese characters and the border of white space surrounding the dense block of type suddenly began to blur and whirl before my eyes.
(Incidentally, that reminds me of a gathering I once attended where I got into an animated discussion with an anthropologist, an architect, and several other friends about the fact that in English those borders are called margins, while scribbled comments and annotations in the blank spaces are known as marginalia — although our discussion was primarily focused on the more abstract idea of the intrinsically marginal nature of culture. Another dear friend, the composer Takamura, seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. I assumed he was only half listening to our conversation, so I was surprised when not long afterward he published an exquisite composition titled Marginalia. Now that I think about it, those days when all my brilliant friends were still alive were probably the most creative and stimulating time of my entire life.)
Anyway, as I was saying, my hands and wrists, which were holding the book out in front of me, suddenly collapsed and crashed into the bookshelf while the visible world began to spin so violently that my normally straight line of vision seemed to be tilted at a wildly exaggerated angle, as if I were on some out-of-control carnival ride.
That was the beginning of the second coming of the bouts of extreme dizziness that would become a chronic condition throughout my later years: an alarming series of breakdowns everyone in my family (except Akari) ended up calling “the Big Vertigo.”
PART TWO. Women Ascendant
Chapter 6. Tossing the Dead Dogs
1
After the Big Vertigo struck again, I developed some singular new habits. Once a dizzy spell had abated, I would tumble precipitously into a sleep of total, unrelenting darkness. If what followed the initial episode had been the sleep of death, I mused, then I must now be existing in a state beyond life. And yet my consciousness was still functioning, so according to the principle of Cogito, ergo sum, I was still present and alive in reality.