“Sensei,” I called out, and from within I heard the reply, “It’s open.” I carefully turned the doorknob.
Sensei was resting his elbows on the low table. He was drinking a beer, his back to the bedding that had been moved off to the side.
“Is there no saké?” I asked.
“No, there’s some in the refrigerator, but I’ve had enough already,” he said as he tilted a five-hundred-milliliter bottle of beer. The foam rose cleanly in his glass. I took a glass that was upside down on a tray on top of the refrigerator.
Please, I said, holding it out in front of Sensei. He smiled and poured the same clean head of beer for me.
There were a few triangular pieces of cheese wrapped in silver foil on the table.
“Did you bring those with you, Sensei?” I asked, and he nodded.
“You came prepared.”
“I thought of it just as I was leaving and threw them in my briefcase.”
The night was tranquil. The sound of the waves could be heard through the window. Sensei opened a second bottle of beer. The popping sound of the bottle opener echoed throughout the room.
By the time we finished the second bottle, both of us had fallen silent. Every so often the sound of the waves grew louder.
“It’s so quiet,” I said, and Sensei nodded.
A little while later, Sensei said, “It’s very quiet,” and this time I nodded.
The silver foil wrappers from the cheese had been peeled off and lay curled up on the table. I gathered the foil into a ball. I suddenly remembered how, when I was little, I had collected the silver foil from chocolate fingers and had fashioned a rather large ball out of them. I would carefully unfold each piece, flattening them out as best I could. Occasionally, I came across a gold wrapper, and I would set these aside. I had a vague memory of saving these in the bottom drawer of my desk, with the idea to use them as a Christmas tree topper. But then, when Christmas came round, I seem to recall that the gold paper had gotten buried under my notebooks and my modeling clay set, and had been crushed and wrinkled.
“It’s so quiet.” Who knows how many times we’d said it, but this time Sensei and I had both said it at the same time. Sensei adjusted his seat on the cushion. I did the same. I sat across from Sensei, playing with the silver foil ball in my hands.
Sensei opened his mouth as if to say, “Oh,” but no sound came out. His open mouth showed signs of his age. Much more so than earlier, when he had been chewing the abalone. Softly, I averted my gaze. Sensei did the same.
The sound of the waves was constant.
“Perhaps it’s time to go to sleep,” Sensei said quietly.
“Yes,” I replied. What else was there to say? I stood up and closed the door behind me, and I walked back to my room. There were now even more moths clustered around the light in the hallway.
I AWOKE WITH a start in the middle of the night.
My head hurt a little. There was no sign of anyone else in my room. I tried to revive that indefinite sense of Sensei without much success.
Once I wake up I never get back to sleep. The ticking of my watch by the pillow rang in my ears. Just when I thought it was so close, it would recede. But the watch was always in the same place. How strange.
For a while I just lay still. Then I began to stroke my own breast under my yukata. It was neither soft nor hard. I let my hand slip down to caress my belly. My belly felt very smooth. And further on down. My palm brushed against something warm. Despite my idle touch, though, it wasn’t the least bit pleasurable. Then I thought about whether I had any hope or expectation about being touched by Sensei, and whether that would be pleasurable, but that seemed futile as well.
I must have lain there for about thirty minutes. I thought I might fall back asleep, just listening to the sound of the waves, but instead I was wide-awake. I wondered what the chances were that Sensei too was lying there, awake in the dark.
Once the thought occurred to me, the idea steadily expanded in my mind. Soon enough, I became convinced that Sensei was calling me from the other room. If not kept in check, nighttime thoughts are prone to amplification. I couldn’t lie still any longer. Without turning on the light, I opened the door to my room very quietly. I went to the bathroom at the end of the corridor and used the toilet. I thought that if my bladder could relax, perhaps my exaggerated mood might deflate as well. But my mind still wasn’t the least bit eased.
I returned to my room and applied a bit of lipstick, then I tiptoed over to Sensei’s room. I put my ear to the door, trying to listen inside. Just like a thief. Rather than the sound of him breathing, I could hear some other kind of sound. I stood there for a moment, listening carefully, and now and then the sound grew louder. Sensei, I whispered. Sensei, what’s the matter? Are you all right? Is there something wrong? Should I come in?
SUDDENLY THE DOOR opened. I shut my eyes against the flood of light from within the room.
“Tsukiko, don’t just stand there, come inside!” Sensei beckoned to me. Once I had opened my eyes, they adjusted to the light immediately. It appeared that Sensei had been doing some kind of writing. Papers were strewn about the table.
What are you writing? I asked, and Sensei picked up a sheet of paper from the table to show me.
OCTOPUS FLESH, FAINTLY RED was written on the page. I gazed at it for a good long while, and then Sensei said, “I can’t seem to come up with the final syllables.”
He mused, “What might come after ‘faintly red’?”
I flopped down to sit on a cushion. While I had been agonizing over my feelings for Sensei, he had been agonizing over the puzzle of the octopus.
“Sensei,” I said in a low voice. Sensei raised his head absently. On one of the sheets strewn on top of the table, there was a lame attempt at a drawing of an octopus. The octopus had a dotted hachimaki tied around its head.
“What is it, Tsukiko?”
“Sensei, that…”
“Yes?”
“Sensei, this…”
“Yes?”
“Sensei.”
“Whatever’s the matter, Tsukiko?”
“How about ‘the roaring sea’?”
I could not seem to bring myself to the heart of the matter. I wasn’t even sure if there was such a thing as “the heart of the matter” between Sensei and me.
“Oh, you mean, ‘Octopus flesh, faintly red, the roaring sea’?”
Sensei paid no attention to my desperate state at all, or else he pretended not to notice, as he wrote the verse on the page. Octopus flesh, faintly red, the roaring sea, he recited as he wrote.
“That’s quite good. Tsukiko, you have a fine aesthetic.”
I murmured a vague reply. Furtively, so that Sensei wouldn’t see, I brought a piece of scrap paper to my lips and wiped away the lipstick. Sensei muttered to himself as he fine-tuned the haiku.
“Tsukiko, what do you think of ‘The roaring sea, octopus flesh, faintly red’?”
There was nothing to think about it. I parted my now colorless lips to murmur another vague response. Having transferred the poem to the page with obvious delight, Sensei now shook his head, somewhat skeptically.
“It’s Basho,” Sensei said. I didn’t have it in me to reply, all I could do was simply nod my head. Basho’s poem is “The darkening sea, a wild duck calls, faintly white.” As he continued writing, Sensei began to lecture. Here, now, in the middle of the night.
You could say that the haiku we have written together is based on Basho’s haiku. It has an interesting broken meter. “The darkening sea, faintly white, a wild duck calls” doesn’t work, because this way “faintly white” carries over to both the sea and the duck’s call. When it comes at the end, it brings the whole haiku to life. Do you understand? See? Tsukiko, go ahead, write another poem.