26
As I walked home, I imagined how his story would unfold. Perhaps it was enough that he had confided in me, and he would go home and speak up. But perhaps not. Perhaps he would delay it until the last savings were exhausted. And perhaps that was what he was waiting for: That Kyōko would figure it out. That she would wake up one morning with an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right. She would start to investigate, find him out, put him on the spot. And perhaps we really were like each other in that way. We watched as everything slid away from us, and felt some relief at not being able to set things straight. Perhaps that was the reason we’d encountered each other. To simultaneously and irrevocably realize that it was impossible for us now to change what has happened to us. So perhaps his story was my story too. It concerned what he had neglected, what could not now be changed.
So many people going home. So many shoes in step, I was out of step. There ahead of me under the street lamp I saw Father coming from work, past a flowering bush, his gaze on the ground. He did not see me. I had quickly hidden behind a vending machine. I wanted to spare us, him and me, the pain of meeting outside on the street and not knowing what to say. Only when he had gone around the corner did I feel sorry that I had not wished him good evening, at the very least.
27
A lovely day, isn’t it? When the sky is so blue, one would love to drive out to the seaside. Too bad, really. He looked down at himself, shaking his head. I am free and yet I am not. But tomorrow is another day. He sat down. Sighed. So, Taguchi Hiro. I thought you were mute and somehow that would have been alright by me. Not really of course, if you see what I mean. He scratched his chin. In the green of the trees behind him, a runner flung her arms in the air. She trotted on, wearing a red headband. From the street came a gentle honking. The sound of cars rising and falling away in the surrounding bushes, staying outside the innermost circle that contained us.
He picked up where he had left off. Really it would be alright if Kyōko found out that I come here. It’s a comfort to me, the idea that she may know, instinctively, in her heart; it would make her, if she knew, my accomplice, did it for my sake. Sad, isn’t it. The idea that she would play along, willingly. Early this morning, when she tied my tie, she said, and she said it seriously: If only one were crazy enough to do everything differently. To break out for once, she said and drew a breath. That would have been the moment to admit to her that I’ve been outside for a long time. But then she finished tying the tie and what remained was only the shame. I’m ashamed of my shame. How much effort I use, to conceal it from myself and from Kyōko. It’s like this: it’s not just my job that I’ve lost. The biggest loss is self-respect. That’s where the descent begins. When you stand at the end of a crowded platform, see the lights of the approaching train and find yourself calculating the exact moment when a leap onto the rails would mean certain death. You take a step forward. You think Now! Now! Now! And then: Nothing! Such a dark Nothing! You’re not even up to that. The train rolls in. It’s full of people. You see your reflection in the windows as they glide by and you don’t recognize yourself anymore.
28
So! He drew himself up. That’s the end. I talk and talk. You must think I can’t stop. Enough about me. Now it’s your turn. Tell me something.
What?
Whatever. The first thing that comes to you. I’ll listen.
And then he leaned back and actually seemed to have nothing else in mind but to listen.
Where to start? I was looking for something that would be worthy of what he had said. It’s difficult, I said. The first thing that occurs to me is that it is difficult to tell something. Every person is an accumulation of stories. But I. I hesitated. I am frightened of accumulating stories. I’d like to be one in which nothing happens. Given that you throw yourself in front of the train in the early morning. What is the use of what I’m telling today? And does it have any validity? As I said. It’s difficult. The first thing that occurs to me is: We are skating on melting ice.
A fine sentence. He repeated it. We are skating on melting ice. Is it yours?
No, not mine. Kumamoto’s. I swallowed. Kumamoto Akira.
The words flooded out of me. I was a dry riverbed where hard rain falls after years of drought. The ground is quickly soaked through and then there is no stopping. The water rises and rises, way over the banks, pulls down trees and bushes, laps over the land. I felt a release with every word I spoke.
29
Kumamoto wrote poems. His school notebooks were full of them. Always on the quest for the perfect poem, his obsession, he sat with a pencil stuck behind his ear, completely withdrawn from the world, a poet through and through, a poem in himself.
We were both in our final year. Both under the same pressure to pass. He found it easier than I did. Or rather, he pretended to. What’s the point of learning, he joked, when my path is mapped out. Unmistakably. The footprints that have marked it before me. My great grandfather, my grandfather, my father. All lawyers who have paved the way for me. I don’t have to learn anything. They’ve already done it for me. I just have to regurgitate and spit it out afterwards. That’s what I owe them. Look! He showed me his notebooks. Torn up. Father thinks society doesn’t need misfits. Well, he’s right. I just can’t help it. I’ve spent hours taping it back together.
Under one strip of adhesive tape I read: Hell is cold.
The most perfect line, he said, that he had ever created.
Hellfire is not a warming fire.
I am freezing beside it.
No place is as cold as this burning desert.
Thick pencil lines. Scored in the thin paper. In some places a bit was missing. It doesn’t matter.
Kumamoto beat his chest three times. It’s all in there. My own requiem.
30
At first I did not understand him. I understood him just as little as the poems he wrote. I read them and understood the words that formed them. I understood hell and fire and ice. But the abyss they described, to understand that required a way of reading into the depths, which I shied away from because I realized I was already down there and didn’t want to admit it. Anyway. If I had understood him then, perhaps some things would have happened differently, but who knows? Who knows what good something is, and whether it counts that it’s good? As far as I remember no word that Kumamoto used was ever good.
Yet we became friends. Good friends. I admired his single-mindedness. A light emanated from him, showing someone who knew where he was going and that there, where he was going, it would be terribly lonely. He couldn’t have cared less about what other people thought. He laughed with those who laughed at him. So with his father he said: You’re quite right. Only I can’t do anything about it. He said it with a wink.
What he admired in me?
I don’t know. Perhaps that I believed in him absolutely. I trusted in him and his cheerfulness. I trusted that here was someone who would always stay young, and who, when I was dead, would still be there, with snow-white hair, dreaming of the perfect poem.
31
Usually we met in the evening. He liked the twilight. He said the light was sad and happy at the same time. It was mourning for the day that had passed and anticipating the night to come. We walked aimlessly in the streets. Kumamoto, trailing behind me, surrounded by the smell of an unfamiliar landscape. It smelled of soil frozen hard centimeters down, of unusual plants held hidden beneath. When they shot up, what would come to the surface?
The answer was an intersection.
Kumamoto stopped. Above him an advertisement for shampoo pulsed in neon letters. Men and women ran in wide arcs around us. We were an island in the middle of surging waves. An embrace, and suddenly Kumamoto held me tight. With both hands he gripped my arms. I’ve got it, he cried, there is no perfect poem! Its perfection arises precisely from its imperfection. Do you see? I did not want to see. He, into my ear: I have an image in my head. I see it clearly before me. Its colors are glaring and harsh in their brightness. But as soon as I rush to capture it, it explodes, and what I write down are separate bits that don’t form a whole. Do you see it now? It’s as if I tried to glue together a broken vase, piece by piece. But the shards are so fragmentary that I don’t know which goes with which or how I fit them together, there’s always one fragment left over. But this fragment! It makes the poem. It alone gives meaning. His voice was feverish: My requiem should be a vase with water shooting through the glue in its cracks.