The Elephant Vanishes: Stories Read online

  “Really?” my sister piped up. “If you’re really thinking about getting married, I’ve got a good friend, a nice girl, I’d be glad to introduce you.”

  “Sure. When the time comes,” I said. “Too dangerous now.”

  WHEN DINNER WAS OVER, we moved to the living room for coffee. This time my sister put on a Willie Nelson record—maybe one small step up from Julio Iglesias.

  My sister was in the kitchen, cleaning up, when Noboru Watanabe said to me with an air of confidentiality, “To tell you the truth, I wanted to stay single until I was closer to thirty, like you. But when I met her, all I could think of was getting married.”

  “She’s a good kid,” I said. “She can be stubborn and a little constipated, but I really think you’ve made the right choice.”

  “Still, the idea of getting married is kind of frightening, don’t you think?”

  “Well, if you make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things, there’s nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you can think again at that point.”

  “You may be right.”

  “I’m good at giving advice to others.”

  I went to the kitchen and told my sister I would be going out for a walk. “I won’t come back before ten o’clock, so the two of you can relax and enjoy yourselves. The sheets are fresh.”

  “Is that all you think about?” she said with an air of disgust, but she didn’t try to stop me from going out.

  I went back to the living room and told Noboru Watanabe that I had an errand to run and might be late getting back.

  “I’m glad we had a chance to talk,” he said. “Please be sure to visit us often after we’re married.”

  “Thanks,” I said, momentarily shutting down my imagination.

  “Don’t you dare drive,” my sister called out to me as I was leaving. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll walk.”

  It was a little before eight when I entered a neighborhood bar. I sat at the counter, drinking an I.W. Harper on the rocks. The TV behind the bar was tuned to a Giants-Swallows game. The sound was off, and instead they had a Cyndi Lauper record going. The pitchers were Nishimoto and Obana, and the Swallows were ahead, 3-2. There was something to be said for watching TV with the sound off.

  I had three whiskeys while I watched the ball game. It was the bottom of the seventh, score tied 3-3, when the broadcast ended at nine o’clock and the set was switched off. Two seats away from me was a girl around twenty I had seen there a few times. She had been watching the game, too, so I started talking to her about baseball.

  “I’m a Giants fan,” she said. “Which team do you like?”

  “They’re all the same to me. I just like to watch them play.”

  “What’s the fun of that? How can you get excited about the game?”

  “I don’t have to get excited. I’m not playing. They are.”

  I had two more whiskeys on the rocks and treated her to two daiquiris. She was a major in commercial design at Tokyo University of the Arts, so we talked about art in advertising. At ten, we moved on to a bar with more comfortable seats, where I had a whiskey and she had a grasshopper. She was pretty drunk by this time, and so was I. At eleven, I accompanied her to her apartment, where we had sex as a matter of course, the way they give you a cushion and a cup of tea at an inn.

  “Put the light out,” she said, so I did. From her window you could see a big Nikon ad tower. A TV next door was blasting the day’s pro-baseball results. What with the darkness and my drunkenness, I hardly knew what I was doing. You couldn’t call it sex. I just moved my penis and discharged some semen.

  As soon as the moderately abbreviated act was finished, she went to sleep as if she couldn’t wait any longer to be unconscious. Without even bothering to wipe up properly, I got dressed and left. The hardest thing was picking out my polo shirt and underpants from among her stuff in the dark.

  Outside, my alcoholic high tore through me like a midnight freight. I felt like shit. My joints creaked like the Tin Woodman’s in The Wizard of Oz. I bought a can of juice from a vending machine to sober me up, but the second I drank it down I vomited the entire contents of my stomach onto the road—the corpses of my steak and smoked salmon and lettuce and tomatoes.

  How many years had it been since I last vomited from drinking? What the hell was I doing these days? The same thing over and over. But each repetition was worse than the one before.

  Then, with no connection at all, I thought about Noboru Watanabe and the soldering iron he had bought me. “You really ought to have a soldering iron in the house. They come in handy,” he had said.

  What a wholesome idea, I said to him mentally as I wiped my lips with a handkerchief. Now, thanks to you, my house is equipped with a soldering iron. But because of that damned soldering iron, my house doesn’t feel like my house any longer.

  That’s probably because I have such a narrow personality.

  IT WAS AFTER midnight by the time I got home. The motorcycle was, of course, no longer parked by the front entrance. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, unlocked the apartment door, and went in. Everything was pitch-black except for a small fluorescent light above the sink. My sister had probably gotten fed up and gone to bed. I couldn’t blame her.

  I poured myself a glass of orange juice and emptied it in one gulp. I used lots of soap in the shower to wash the foul-smelling sweat from my body, and then I did a thorough job of brushing my teeth. My face in the bathroom mirror was enough to give me chills. I looked like one of those middle-aged men you see on the last trains from downtown, sprawling drunk on the seats and fouling themselves with their own vomit. My skin was rough, my eyes looked sunken, and my hair had lost its sheen.

  I shook my head and turned out the bathroom light. With nothing on but a towel wrapped around my waist, I went to the kitchen and drank some tap water. Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I’ll do some thinking. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.

  “You were so late tonight,” came my sister’s voice out of the gloom. She was sitting on the living-room couch, drinking a beer alone.

  “I was drinking,” I said.

  “You drink too much.”

  “I know.”

  I got a beer from the refrigerator and sat down across from her.

  For a while, neither of us said anything. We sat there, occasionally tipping back our beer cans. The leaves of the potted plants on the balcony fluttered in the breeze, and beyond them floated the misty semicircle of the moon.

  “Just to let you know, we didn’t do it,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Do anything. Something got on my nerves. I just couldn’t do it.”

  “Oh.” I seem to lose the power of speech on half-moon nights.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what got on my nerves?”

  “What got on your nerves?”

  “This room! This place! I just couldn’t do it here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey, is something wrong with you? Are you feeling sick?”

  “I’m tired. Even I get tired sometimes.”

  She looked at me without a word. I drained the last sip of my beer and rested my head on the seat back, eyes closed.

  “Was it our fault? Did we make you tired?”

  “No way,” I said with my eyes still closed.

  “Are you too tired to talk?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  I straightened up and looked at her. Then I shook my head.

  “I’m worried. Did I say something terrible to you today? Something about you yourself, or about the way you live?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Everything you’ve said lately has been right on the mark. So don’t worry. But what’s bothering you now, all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t know, it just sort of popped into my mind after he left, while I was waiting for you. I wondered
if I hadn’t gone too far.”

  I got two cans of beer from the refrigerator, switched on the stereo, and put on the Richie Beirach Trio at very low volume. It was the record I listened to whenever I came home drunk in the middle of the night.

  “I’m sure you’re a little confused,” I said. “These changes in life are like changes in the barometric pressure. I’m kind of confused, too, in my own way.”

  She nodded.

  “Am I being hard on you?” she asked.

  “Everybody’s hard on somebody,” I said. “But if I’m the one you chose to be hard on, you made the right choice. So don’t let it worry you.”

  “Sometimes, I don’t know, it scares me. The future.”

  “You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.” I gave her the same speech I had given Noboru Watanabe.

  “But what if things don’t work out the way you want them to?”

  “If they don’t work out, that’s when you think again.”

  She gave a little laugh. “You’re as strange as ever.”

  “Say, can I ask you one question?” I yanked open another can of beer.

  “Sure.”

  “How many men did you sleep with before him?”

  She hesitated a moment before holding up two fingers. “Two.”

  “And one was your age, and the other was an older man?”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s a pattern.” I took another swig of beer. “I haven’t been fooling around for nothing all these years. I’ve learned that much.”

  “So, I’m typical.”

  “Let’s just say ‘healthy.’ “

  “How many girls have you slept with?”

  “Twenty-six. I counted them up the other day. There were twenty-six I could remember. There might be another ten or so I can’t remember. I’m not keeping a diary or anything.”

  “Why do you sleep with so many girls?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I guess I’ll have to stop at some point, but I can’t seem to figure out how.”

  We remained silent for a while, alone with our own thoughts. From the distance came the sound of a motorcycle’s exhaust, but it couldn’t have been Noboru Watanabe’s. Not at one o’clock in the morning.

  “Tell me,” she said, “what do you really think of him?”

  “Noboru Watanabe?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He’s not a bad guy, I guess. Just not my type. Funny taste in clothes, for one thing.” I thought about it some more and said, “There’s nothing wrong in having one guy like him in every family.”

  “That’s what I think. And then there’s you: this person I call my brother. I’m very fond of you, but if everybody were like you the world would probably be a terrible place!”

  “You may be right.”

  We drank what was left of the beer and withdrew to our separate rooms. My sheets were new and clean and tight. I stretched out on top of them and looked through the curtain at the moon. Where were we headed? I wondered. But I was far too tired to think very deeply about such things. When I closed my eyes, sleep floated down on me like a dark, silent net.

  —translated by Jay Rubin

  GREETINGS,

  The winter cold diminishes with each passing day, and now the sunlight hints at the subtle scent of springtime. I trust that you are well.

  Your recent letter was a pleasure to read. The passage on the relationship between hamburger steak and nutmeg was especially well written, I felt: so rich with the genuine sense of daily living. How vividly it conveyed the warm aromas of the kitchen, the lively tapping of the knife against the cutting board as it sliced through the onion!

  In the course of my reading, your letter filled me with such an irrepressible desire for hamburger steak that I had to go to a nearby restaurant and have one that very night. In fact, the particular neighborhood establishment in question offers eight different varieties of hamburger steak; Texas-style, Hawaiian-style, Japanese-style, and the like. Texas-style is big. Period. It would no doubt come as a shock to any Texans who might find their way to this part of Tokyo. Hawaiian-style is garnished with a slice of pineapple. California-style … I don’t remember. Japanese-style is smothered with grated daikon. The place is smartly decorated, and the waitresses are all pretty, with extremely short skirts.

  Not that I had made my way there for the express purpose of studying the restaurant’s interior décor or the waitresses’ legs. I was there for one reason only, and that was to eat hamburger steak—not Texas-style or California-style or any other style, but plain, simple hamburger steak.

  Which is what I told the waitress. “I’m sorry,” she replied, “but such-and-such-style hamburger steak is the only kind we have here.”

  I couldn’t blame the waitress, of course. She hadn’t set the menu. She hadn’t chosen to wear this uniform that revealed so much thigh each time she cleared a dish from a table. I smiled at her and ordered a Hawaiian-style hamburger steak. As she pointed out, I merely had to set the pineapple aside when I ate the steak.

  What a strange world we live in! All I want is a perfectly ordinary hamburger steak, and the only way I can have it at this particular point in time is Hawaiian-style without pineapple.

  Your own hamburger steak, I gather, is the normal kind. Thanks to your letter, what I wanted most of all was an utterly normal hamburger steak made by you.

  By contrast, the passage on the National Railways’ automatic ticket machines struck me as a bit superficial. Your angle on the problem is a good one, to be sure, but the reader can’t vividly grasp the scene. Don’t try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.

  Your overall score on this newest letter is 70. Your style is improving slowly but surely. Don’t be impatient. Just keep working as hard as you have been all along. I look forward to your next letter. Won’t it be nice when spring really comes?

  P.S. Thank you for the box of assorted cookies. They are delicious. The Society’s rules, however, strictly forbid personal contact beyond the exchange of letters. I must ask you to restrain your kindness in the future.

  Nevertheless, thank you once again.

  I KEPT THIS part-time job going for a year. I was twenty-two at the time.

  I ground out thirty or more letters like this every month at two thousand yen per letter for a strange little company in the Iidabashi district that called itself “The Pen Society.”

  “You, too, can learn to write captivating letters,” boasted the company’s advertisements. New “members” paid an initiation fee and monthly dues, in return for which they could write four letters a month to The Pen Society. We “Pen Masters” would answer their letters with letters of our own, such as the one quoted above, containing corrections, comments, and guidance for future improvement. I had gone for a job interview after seeing an ad posted in the student office of the literature department. At the time, certain events had led me to delay my graduation for a year, and my parents had informed me that they would consequently be decreasing my monthly support. For the first time in my life, I was faced with having to make a living. In addition to the interview, I was asked to write several compositions, and a week later I was hired. Then came a week of training in how to make corrections, offer guidance, and other tricks of the trade, none of which was very difficult.

  All Society members are assigned to Pen Masters of the opposite sex. I had a total of twenty-four members, ranging in age from fourteen to fifty-three, the majority in the twenty-five-to-thirty-five range. Which is to say, most of them were older than I was. The first month, I panicked: The women were far better writers than I was, and they had a lot more experience as correspondents. I had hardly written a serious letter in my life, after all. I’m not quite sure how I made it through that first month. I was in a constant cold sweat, convinced
that most of the members in my charge would demand a new Pen Master—a privilege touted in the Society’s rules.

  The month went by, and not one member raised a complaint about my writing. Far from it. The owner said I was very popular. Two more months went by, and it even began to seem that my charges were improving thanks to my “guidance.” It was weird. These women looked up to me as their teacher with complete trust. When I realized this, it enabled me to dash off my critiques to them with far less effort and anxiety.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but these women were lonely (as were the male members of the Society). They wanted to write but they had no one to write to. They weren’t the type to send fan letters to a deejay. They wanted something more personal—even if it had to come in the form of corrections and critiques.

  And so it happened that I spent a part of my early twenties like a crippled walrus in a warmish harem of letters.

  And what amazingly varied letters they were! Boring letters, funny letters, sad letters. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep any of them (the rules required us to return all letters to the company), and this happened so long ago that I can’t recall them in detail, but I do remember them as filled to overflowing with life in all its aspects, from the largest of questions to the tiniest of trivia. And the messages they were sending seemed to me—to me, a twenty-two-year-old college student—strangely divorced from reality, seemed at times to be utterly meaningless. Nor was this due solely to my own lack of life experience. I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning. I didn’t know it then, of course, and neither did the women. This was surely one of the reasons that everything in their letters struck me as oddly two-dimensional.

  When it came time for me to leave the job, all the members in my care expressed their regret. And though, quite frankly, I was beginning to feel that I had had enough of this endless job of letter writing, I felt sorry, too, in a way. I knew that I would never again have so many people opening themselves to me with such simple honesty.

  • • •