Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 3

  I laughed.

  “Is that strange?” my cousin asked.

  “Yep,” I laughed. And he laughed. It’d been a long time since I’d seen him laugh.

  After a while my cousin said, like he was unburdening himself, “Would you look inside my ears for me?”

  “Look inside your ears?” I asked, a little surprised.

  “Just what you can see from the outside.”

  “Okay, but why do you want me to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” my cousin blushed. “I just want you to see what they look like.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

  My cousin sat facing away from me, tilting his right ear toward me. He had a really nicely shaped ear. It was on the small side, but the earlobe was all puffy, like a freshly baked madeleine. I’d never looked at anybody’s ear so intently before. Once you start observing it closely, the human ear—its structure—is a pretty mysterious thing. With all these absurd twists and turns to it, bumps and depressions. Maybe evolution determined this weird shape was the optimum way to collect sounds, or to protect what’s inside. Surrounded by this asymmetrical wall, the hole of the ear gapes open like the entrance to a dark, secret cave.

  I pictured my friend’s girlfriend, microscopic flies nesting in her ear. Sweet pollen stuck to their tiny legs, they burrow into the warm darkness inside her, sucking up all the juices, laying tiny eggs inside her brain. But you can’t see them, or even hear the sound of their wings.

  “That’s enough,” my cousin said.

  He spun around to sit facing forward, shifting around on the bench. “So, see anything unusual?”

  “Nothing different as far as I could see. From the outside at least.”

  “Anything’s okay—even a feeling you got or something.”

  “Your ear looks normal to me.”

  My cousin looked disappointed. Maybe I had said the wrong thing.

  “Did the treatment hurt?” I asked.

  “No, it didn’t. Same as always. They just rummaged around in the same old spot. Feels like they’re going to wear it out. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like my own ear anymore.”

  “There’s the number twenty-eight,” my cousin said after a while, turning to me. “That’s our bus, right?”

  I’d been lost in thought. I looked up when he said this and saw the bus slowing down as it went round the curve coming up the slope. This wasn’t the kind of brand-new bus we’d ridden over on but one of the older buses I remembered. A sign with the number 28 was hanging on the front. I tried to stand up from the bench, but I couldn’t. Like I was caught up in the middle of a powerful current, my limbs wouldn’t respond.

  I’d been thinking of the box of chocolates we’d taken when we went to that hospital on that long-ago summer afternoon. The girl had happily opened the lid to the box only to discover that the dozen little chocolates had completely melted, sticking to the paper between each piece and to the lid itself. On the way to the hospital my friend and I had parked the motorcycle by the seaside, and lay around on the beach just talking and hanging out. The whole while we’d let that box of chocolates lie out in the hot August sun. Our carelessness, our self-centeredness, had wrecked those chocolates, made one fine mess of them all. We should have sensed what was happening. One of us—it didn’t matter who—should have said something. But on that afternoon, we didn’t sense anything, just exchanged a couple of dumb jokes and said goodbye. And left that hill still overgrown with blind willows.

  My cousin grabbed my right arm in a tight grip.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  His words brought me back to reality, and I stood up from the bench. This time I had no trouble standing. Once more I could feel on my skin the sweet May breeze. For a few seconds I stood there in a strange, dim place. Where the things I could see didn’t exist. Where the invisible did. Finally, though, the real number 28 bus stopped in front of me, its entirely real door opening. I clambered aboard, heading off to some other place.

  I rested my hand on my cousin’s shoulder. “I’m all right,” I told him.

  —TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL

  BIRTHDAY GIRL

  She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked on Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. The other part-time girl had agreed to switch shifts with her as a matter of course: being screamed at by an angry chef while lugging pumpkin gnocchi and seafood fritto misto to customers’ tables was no way to spend one’s twentieth birthday. But the other girl had aggravated a cold and gone to bed with unstoppable diarrhea and a fever of 104, so she ended up working after all on short notice.

  She found herself trying to comfort the sick girl, who had called to apologize. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I wasn’t going to do anything special anyway, even if it is my twentieth birthday.”

  And in fact she was not all that disappointed. One reason was the terrible argument she had had a few days earlier with the boyfriend who was supposed to be with her that night. They had been going together since high school. The argument had started from nothing much but it had taken an unexpected turn for the worse until it became a long and bitter shouting match—one bad enough, she was pretty sure, to have snapped their long-standing ties once and for all. Something inside her had turned rock-hard and died. He had not called her since the blowup, and she was not about to call him.

  Her workplace was one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the tony Roppongi district of Tokyo. It had been in business since the late sixties, and while its cuisine was hardly cutting edge, its high reputation was fully justified. It had many repeat customers and they were never disappointed. The dining room had a calm, relaxed atmosphere without a hint of pushiness. Rather than a young crowd, the restaurant drew an older clientele that included some famous stage people and writers.

  The two full-time waiters worked six days a week. She and the other part-time waitress were students who took turns working three days each. In addition there was one floor manager and, at the register, a skinny middle-aged woman who supposedly had been there since the restaurant opened—literally sitting in the one place, it seemed, like some gloomy old character from Little Dorrit. She had exactly two functions: to accept payment from the customers and to answer the phone. She spoke only when necessary and always wore the same black dress. There was something cold and hard about her: if you set her afloat on the nighttime sea, she would probably sink any boat that happened to ram her.

  The floor manager was perhaps in his late forties. Tall and broad-shouldered, his build suggested that he had been a sportsman in his youth, but excess flesh was now beginning to accumulate on his belly and chin. His short, stiff hair was thinning at the crown, and a special aging bachelor smell clung to him—like newsprint that had been stored in a drawer with cough drops. She had a bachelor uncle who smelled like that.

  The manager always wore a black suit, white shirt, and bow tie—not a clip-on bow tie, but the real thing, tied by hand. It was a point of pride for him that he could tie it perfectly without looking in the mirror. He performed his duties adroitly day after day. They consisted of checking the arrival and departure of guests, keeping abreast of the reservation schedule, knowing the names of regular customers, greeting them with a smile, lending a respectful ear to any complaints that might arise, giving expert advice on wines, and overseeing the work of the waiters and waitresses. It was also his special task to deliver dinner to the room of the restaurant’s owner.

  “The owner had his own room on the sixth floor of the same building where the restaurant was,” she said. “An apartment, or office or something.”

  Somehow she and I had gotten on to the subject of our twentieth birthdays—what sort of day it had been for each of us. Most people remember the day they turned twenty. Hers had happened more than ten years earlier.

  “He never, ever showed his face in the restau
rant, though. The only one who saw him was the manager. It was strictly his job to deliver the owner’s dinner to him. None of the other employees knew what he looked like.”

  “So basically, the owner was getting home delivery from his own restaurant.”

  “Right,” she said. “Every night at eight, the manager had to bring dinner to the owner’s room. It was the restaurant’s busiest time, so having the manager disappear just then was always a problem for us, but there was no way around it because that was the way it had always been done. They’d load the dinner onto one of those carts that hotels use for room service, the manager would push it into the elevator wearing a respectful look on his face, and fifteen minutes later he’d come back empty-handed. Then, an hour later, he’d go up again and bring down the cart with empty plates and glasses. Every day, like clockwork. I thought it was really weird the first time I saw it happen. It was like some kind of religious ritual, you know? But after a while I got used to it, and never gave it a second thought.”

  The owner always had chicken. The recipe and the vegetable sides were a little different every day, but the main dish was always chicken. A young chef once told her that he had tried sending up the same exact roast chicken every day for a week just to see what would happen, but there was never any complaint. A chef wants to try different ways of preparing things, of course, and each new chef would challenge himself with every technique for chicken that he could think of. They’d make elegant sauces, they’d try chickens from different suppliers, but none of their efforts had any effect: they might just as well have been throwing pebbles into an empty cave. In the end, every one of them gave up and sent the owner some run-of-the-mill chicken dish every day. That’s all that was ever asked of them.

  Work started as usual on her twentieth birthday, November 17. It had been raining on and off since the afternoon, and pouring since early evening. At five o’clock the manager gathered the employees together to explain the day’s specials. Servers were required to memorize them word for word and not use crib sheets: veal Milanese, pasta topped with sardines and cabbage, chestnut mousse. Sometimes the manager would play the role of a customer and test them with questions. Then came the employees’ meal: waiters in this restaurant were not going to have growling stomachs as they took their customers’ orders!

  The restaurant opened its doors at six o’clock, but guests were slow to arrive because of the downpour, and several reservations were simply canceled. Women didn’t want their dresses ruined by the rain. The manager walked around tight-lipped, and the waiters killed time polishing the salt and pepper shakers or chatting with the chef about cooking. She surveyed the dining room with its single couple at table and listened to the harpsichord music flowing discreetly from ceiling speakers. A deep smell of late autumn rain worked its way into the restaurant.

  It was after seven thirty when the manager started feeling sick. He stumbled over to a chair and sat there for a while pressing his stomach, as if he had just been shot. A greasy sweat clung to his forehead. “I think I’d better go to the hospital,” he muttered. For him to be taken ill was a most unusual occurrence: he had never missed a day since he started working in the restaurant over ten years earlier. It was another point of pride for him that he had never been out with illness or injury, but his painful grimace made it clear that he was in very bad shape.

  She stepped outside with an umbrella and hailed a cab. One of the waiters held the manager steady and climbed into the car with him to take him to a nearby hospital. Before ducking into the cab, the manager said to her hoarsely, “I want you to take a dinner up to room 604 at eight o’clock. All you have to do is ring the bell, say ‘Your dinner is here,’ and leave it.”

  “That’s room 604, right?” she said.

  “At eight o’clock,” he repeated. “On the dot.” He grimaced again, climbed in, and the taxi took him away.

  The rain showed no signs of letting up after the manager had left, and customers arrived at long intervals. No more than one or two tables were occupied at a time, so if the manager and one waiter had to be absent, this was a good time for it to happen. Things could get so busy that it was not unusual even for the full staff to have trouble coping.

  When the owner’s meal was ready at eight o’clock, she pushed the room service cart into the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor. It was the standard meal for him: a half bottle of red wine with the cork loosened, a thermal pot of coffee, a chicken entree with steamed vegetables, rolls and butter. The heavy aroma of cooked chicken quickly filled the little elevator. It mingled with the smell of the rain. Water droplets dotted the elevator floor, suggesting that someone with a wet umbrella had recently been aboard.

  She pushed the cart down the corridor, bringing it to a stop in front of the door marked “604.” She double-checked her memory: 604. That was it. She cleared her throat and pressed the doorbell.

  There was no answer. She stood there for a good twenty seconds. Just as she was thinking of pressing the bell again, the door opened inward and a skinny old man appeared. He was shorter than she was, by some four or five inches. He had on a dark suit and a necktie. Against his white shirt, the tie stood out distinctly, its brownish yellow coloring like withered leaves. He made a very clean impression, his clothes perfectly pressed, his white hair smoothed down: he looked as though he were about to go out for the night to some sort of gathering. The deep wrinkles that creased his brow made her think of ravines in an aerial photograph.

  “Your dinner, sir,” she said in a husky voice, then quietly cleared her throat again. Her voice grew husky whenever she was tense.

  “Dinner?”

  “Yes, sir. The manager suddenly took sick. I had to take his place today. Your meal, sir.”

  “Oh, I see,” the old man said, almost as if talking to himself, his hand still perched on the doorknob. “Took sick, eh? You don’t say.”

  “His stomach started to hurt him all of a sudden. He went to the hospital. He thinks he might have appendicitis.”

  “Oh, that’s not good,” the old man said, running his fingers along the wrinkles of his forehead. “Not good at all.”

  She cleared her throat again. “Shall I bring your meal in, sir?” she asked.

  “Ah yes, of course,” the old man said. “Yes, of course, if you wish. That’s fine with me.”

  If I wish? she thought. What a strange way to put it. What am I supposed to wish?

  The old man opened the door the rest of the way, and she wheeled the cart inside. The floor had short gray carpeting with no area for removing shoes. The first room was a large study, as though the apartment was more a workplace than a residence. The window looked out on the nearby Tokyo Tower, its steel skeleton outlined in lights. A large desk stood by the window, and beside the desk was a compact sofa and love seat. The old man pointed to the plastic laminate coffee table in front of the sofa. She arranged his meal on the table: white napkin and silverware, coffeepot and cup, wine and wineglass, bread and butter, and the plate of chicken and vegetables.

  “If you would be kind enough to set the dishes in the hall as usual, sir, I’ll come to get them in an hour.”

  Her words seemed to snap him out of an appreciative contemplation of his dinner. “Oh yes, of course. I’ll put them in the hall. On the cart. In an hour. If you wish.”

  Yes, she replied inwardly, for the moment that is exactly what I wish. “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said after a moment’s consideration. He was wearing black shoes polished to a high sheen. They were small and chic. He’s a stylish dresser, she thought. And he stands very straight for his age.

  “Well, then, sir, I’ll be getting back to work.”

  “No, wait just a moment,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Do you think it might be possible for you to give me five minutes of your time, miss? I have something I’d like to say to you.”

  He was so polite in his request that
it made her blush. “I…think it should be all right,” she said. “I mean, if it really is just five minutes.” He was her employer, after all. He was paying her by the hour. It was not a question of her giving or his taking her time. And this old man did not look like a person who would do anything bad to her.

  “By the way, how old are you?” the old man asked, standing by the table with arms folded and looking directly into her eyes.

  “I’m twenty now,” she said.

  “Twenty now,” he repeated, narrowing his eyes as if peering through some kind of crack. “Twenty now. As of when?”

  “Well, I just turned twenty,” she said. After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “Today is my birthday, sir.”

  “I see,” he said, rubbing his chin as if this explained a great deal for him. “Today, is it? Today is your twentieth birthday?”

  She nodded.

  “Your life in this world began exactly twenty years ago today.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, “that is true.”

  “I see, I see,” he said. “That’s wonderful. Well, then, happy birthday.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said, and then it dawned on her that this was the very first time all day that anyone had wished her a happy birthday. Of course, if her parents had called from Oita, she might find a message from them on her answering machine when she got home from work.

  “Well, well, this is certainly a cause for celebration,” he said. “How about a little toast? We can drink this red wine.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I couldn’t, I’m working now.”

  “Oh, what’s the harm in a little sip? No one’s going to blame you if I say it’s all right. Just a token drink to celebrate.”

  The old man slid the cork from the bottle and dribbled a little wine into his glass for her. Then he took an ordinary drinking glass from a glass-doored cabinet and poured some wine for himself.