But I can’t read the words that are written there.
She looks at him intermittently, which breaks the flow of her writing, and she loses the thread. She erases the whole thing. She gets down off the stool, rights the fallen shoe and wriggles her feet in. Then she steps away. My husband glances over at her large ass. She heads down the stairs. He starts to thumb his phone. Writing a message.
My phone vibrates. Of course it’s just a phantom buzz.
At that moment I register movement in the kitchen. Almost immediately I see it: an unusually large cockroach.
She leaves Becker’s, but instead of going to the office she goes back to the station. The Sobu Line headed for Shinjuku arrives almost immediately. Until a little past Ichigaya the track runs along the green water of the outer moat. The far bank is a grassy slope with trees planted at regular intervals, and partway up the slope it becomes a stone wall, the top of which runs beside the road above. Many of the buildings along the road have signs saying they’re print shops and tutoring centres.
I throw my phone at the cockroach, even though there’s no way I’ll ever hit it. The cover slides off and the battery pops out, still held by the battery ribbon.
The cockroach is unhurt, of course. It scuttles up the face of the fridge, past the lower compartment and almost to the middle of the upper compartment, when it stops. I bet it was the roach that knocked over the beer cans.
I get up from the futon, wanting to kill the cockroach. I grab the help-wanted weekly off the floor and roll it up tightly, back into the tube it once was. The roach darts from the fridge to the wall, scurrying along near the ceiling into the room where I was lying. The grey suit is in a cabinet in the room, the hardest one to reach by far which is fine because all we have in there are things we never take out, old letters, my husband’s old game consoles and cartridges, my work from art school, my grey suit which I didn’t bother to hang on a hanger but is at least in the plastic bag it came in, I think. I’m pretty sure the suit is stuffed in there. By now it’s probably covered in mould. The cockroach slips into the drawer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOSHIKI OKADA is a hugely admired playwright, director and novelist. Born in Yokohama in 1973, he formed the chelfitsch theatre company in 1997. Since then he has written and directed all of the company’s productions, and has come to be known for his hyper-colloquial dialogue and staccato choreography. His play Five Days in March, on which the first story in The End of the Moment We Had is based, won the prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award. His works have been translated into many languages around the world.
SAM MALISSA has translated Japanese fiction and non-fiction, including work by Hideo Furukawa, Masatsugu Ono and Shun Medoruma. He has a master’s degree in Japanese literature from Yale University.
JAPANESE FICTION
FROM PUSHKIN PRESS
RECORD OF A NIGHT TOO BRIEF
Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Lucy North
SPRING GARDEN
Tomoka Shibasaki
Translated by Polly Barton
SLOW BOAT
Hideo Furukawa
Translated by David Boyd
Ms ICE SANDWICH
Mieko Kawakami
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
THE BEAR AND THE PAVING STONE
Toshiyuki Horie
Translated by Geraint Howells
THE END OF THE MOMENT WE HAD
Toshiki Okada
Translated by Sam Malissa
COPYRIGHT
Series editors: David Karashima and Michael Emmerich
Translation editor: Elmer Luke
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street
London WC2H 9JQ
The End of the Moment We Had was first published as Watashitachi ni yurusareta tokubetsu na jikan no owari in Japan, 2007
First published by Pushkin Press in 2018
English translation © Sam Malissa 2018
© Toshiki Okada 2007
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Nippon Foundation
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ISBN 13: 978 1 78227 417 9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press