South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 4

  Izumi could never understand my dream. She had her own dreams, a vision of a far different place, a world unlike my own.

  But even before my new life began, a crisis came to rip our relationship to shreds.

  4

  The first girl I ever slept with was an only child. Like Izumi, she wasn’t exactly the type to turn any heads; most people would hardly notice her. Still the first time I laid eyes on her, it was as if I were walking down the road one afternoon and a silent bolt of lightning struck me smack on the head. No ifs, ands, or buts—I was hooked.

  With a very few exceptions, your typical beautiful women don’t turn me on. Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street and a friend will nudge me and say, “Wow! Did you get a load of that girl?” But strangely enough, I can’t recall a thing about this supposed knockout. And gorgeous actresses or models don’t do a thing for me. I don’t know why, but there it is. For me the boundary dividing the real world and the world of dreams has always been vague, and whenever infatuation raised its almighty head, even during my early teens, a beautiful face wasn’t enough to get my engines started.

  I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.

  The closest comparison might be the power of perfume. Perhaps even the master blender himself can’t explain how a fragrance that has a special power is created. Science sure can’t explain it. Still, the fact remains that a certain combination of fragrances can captivate the opposite sex like the scent of an animal in heat. One kind of fragrance might attract fifty out of a hundred people. And another scent will attract the other fifty. But there also are scents that only one or two people will find wildly exciting. And I have the ability, from far away, to sniff out those special scents. When I do, I want to go up to the girl who radiates this aura and say, Hey, I picked it up, you know. No one else gets it, but I do.

  From the first time I saw that girl, I knew I wanted to sleep with her. More accurately, I knew I had to sleep with her. And instinctively I knew she felt the same way. When I was with her, my body, as the phrase goes, shook all over. And my penis got so hard I could barely walk. I’d probably felt the stirrings of this kind of magnetism—a prototype of it—with Shimamoto, but I was too young to recognize it as such or even to give it a label. When I met this other girl, I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and she was twenty, a sophomore in college. Of all things, she happened to be Izumi’s cousin. She already had a boyfriend, but for the two of us, that was beside the point. She could have been forty-two, with three kids, and with a pair of tails growing out of her butt, and I wouldn’t have cared. The magnetism was that strong. I couldn’t just let this girl walk on by. If I did, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

  Anyway, that’s how the person I lost my virginity with happened to be my girlfriend’s cousin. And not just any old cousin, but the one she was closest to. Since they were little, Izumi and she often visited each other. The cousin was attending college in Kyoto and lived in an apartment near the west gate of Gosho, the old Imperial Palace. Izumi and I went to Kyoto once, and we phoned her and had lunch together. That was two weeks after the little farce with my aunt.

  While Izumi was away for a few minutes, I asked her cousin for her telephone number, saying I’d like to ask her a few things about the college she was attending. Two days later, I called her and asked if I could see her the following Sunday. After a moment’s pause, she said okay. Something in her tone of voice made me confident that she was hoping to sleep with me too. The following Sunday I went alone to Kyoto and met her, and by the afternoon, sure enough, we were in bed.

  For the next two months we had such passionate sex I thought our brains were going to melt. No movies, no walks, no small talk about novels, music, life, war, revolution. All we did was bang away. We must have talked a little, but I can’t for the life of me recall what about. All I remember are detailed concrete images–the alarm clock near her pillow, the curtains on the windows, the black phone on the table, the photos on the calendar, and her clothes tossed aside on the floor. And the smell of her skin and her voice. I never asked any questions, and she reciprocated. Just once, though, as we lay in bed, I suddenly wondered aloud whether she was, perhaps, an only child.

  “That’s right,” she said, with a quizzical look. “But how did you know?”

  “No particular reason. I just sensed it.”

  She looked at me for a while. “Maybe you’re an only child too?”

  “You got it,” I said.

  That’s all I remember about our conversations.

  Only rarely did we take a break to eat or drink. As soon as we laid eyes on each other, without a word exchanged between us, we’d yank off our clothes, hop into bed, and go at it. We just leaped to the chase. I was greedy for what was right before my eyes, and so was she. Every time we met we had sex four or five times, literally till my juices dried up and the tip of my cock swelled and ached. Despite the passion, and the violent attraction we each felt, it never occurred to either of us that we might want to become long-term lovers. We were in the midst of a whirlwind that would, in time, pass. Knowing this, that each time we met might very well be the last, only fanned the flames of desire that much higher.

  I wasn’t in love with her. And she didn’t love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.

  I liked Izumi a lot, but not once did I experience that irrational power with her. I knew next to nothing about this other girl, yet her effect on me was profound. We never talked seriously about anything because we didn’t see the point. If we’d had enough energy to talk, we’d have used it for another round between the sheets.

  In the normal course of events we would have been wrapped up in our relationship, without pausing to come up for air, for a few months, and then one of us would have drifted away. The reason being that what we were doing was a necessary, natural act one allowing no room for doubt. From the first, there was no possibility that love, guilt, or thoughts of the future would enter in.

  So if the relationship hadn’t been discovered (not to have been found out seems pretty unrealistic, so totally wrapped up was I in having sex with her), Izumi and I might have continued for some time as we had, boyfriend and girlfriend. Whenever summer vacation rolled around, we’d have gone on dates. Who knows how long the friendship would have lasted. But after a few years, one of us would have shifted away from the other. We were too different, and time would only have magnified our differences. Looking back on it now, it all seems so obvious. Yet even if we had to go our separate ways, if I hadn’t slept with her cousin we might have said goodbye as friends and moved on to the next stage of life in one piece.

  As it turned out, we couldn’t do this.

  In truth, I damaged Izumi beyond repair. It didn’t take much to realize how hurt she was. With her grades, she should have breezed into a top university, but she failed the entrance exam and ended up attending a small, third-rate girls’ college. After my relationship with her cousin came to light, I saw Izumi only once. We talked for a long time in a coffee shop that had been one of our hangouts. I tried to explain things to her as honestly as I could, selecting my words carefully, straining to convey my feelings. This thing between me and your cousin wasn’t planned, I said; it was a physical force that swept us off our feet. It didn’t even leave me with the sense of guilt about betraying you that you’d expect me to have. It has nothing to do with us.

  Of course, Izumi couldn’t understand what I meant
. And she called me a dirty liar. She was right on target. Without a word, I’d slept with her cousin behind her back. Not just once or twice, but ten, twenty times. I betrayed her from the word go. If my actions had been proper, after all, why the need for deception? I wanted to tell Izumi this: I wanted to sleep with your cousin; I wanted to screw her till my brains fried—a thousand times, in every position imaginable. It has nothing to do with you, I should have insisted from the start. But in reality I couldn’t say these kinds of things. That’s why I lied—repeatedly. I’d make up some excuse to break a date with her, then zip on down to Kyoto to ball her cousin. There was no getting around it—I was the one to blame.

  Izumi found out about us near the end of January, not long after my eighteenth birthday. In February I sailed through all the college entrance exams and was slated to move to Tokyo at the end of March. Before I left town, I called her, over and over. But she wouldn’t come to the phone. I wrote her long letters, waiting in vain for a reply. I can’t just leave like this, I thought I can’t just leave her here. But there was nothing I could do. Izumi wanted nothing to do with me.

  On the bullet train to Tokyo, I gazed listlessly at the scenery outside and thought about myself—who I was. I looked down at my hands on my lap and at my face reflected in the window. Who the hell am I? I wondered. For the first time in my life, a fierce self-hatred welled up in me. How could I have done something like this? But I knew why. Put in the same position, I would do the same thing all over again. Even if I had to lie to Izumi, I would sleep with her cousin again. No matter how much it might hurt her. Recognizing this was painful. But it was the truth.

  Izumi wasn’t the only one who got hurt. I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

  College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.

  Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I’ve lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I’d committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I’d hit rock bottom, and I knew it.

  5

  My four years of college were pretty much a waste.

  The first year, I was in a few demonstrations, even battled the police. I was out there with the student strikers and showed up at political rallies. I met some wild characters that way, but my heart was never in politics. Linking arms with strangers at demonstrations made me uneasy, and when we had to hurl rocks at the cops, I asked myself if this was really me. Was this what I wanted? I wondered. I couldn’t feel the requisite solidarity with the people around me. The scent of violence that hung over the streets, the powerful slogans of the day, soon lost their point. And the time Izumi and I had spent together grew more precious in my mind. But there was no going back. I’d bidden that world farewell.

  Most of my classes were a complete bore. Nothing excited me. After a while, I was so busy with my part-time job that I hardly ever showed my face at school; luck alone allowed me to graduate in four years. When I was a junior, I had a girlfriend I lived with for half a year. But it didn’t work out. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I wanted out of life.

  The next thing I knew, the season of politics was over. Like a drooping flag on a windless day, the gigantic shock waves that had convulsed society for a time were swallowed up by a colorless, mundane workaday world.

  Once I was out of college, a friend helped me get a job on the editorial staff of a textbook company. I got a haircut, shined my shoes, and bought a suit. It wasn’t much of a company, but jobs for literature majors being few and far between that year, and considering my lousy grades and lack of connections, I had to settle for what I could get.

  The job was a total bore. The company itself wasn’t such a bad place to work, but editing school textbooks didn’t brighten my day one bit. At first I thought: Okay, I’ll do my best, try to find something worthwhile in it; and for half a year I worked my butt off. Give it your best shot, and something good’s bound to happen, right? But I gave up. No matter how you sliced it this wasn’t the job for me. I felt as if the end of my life was staring me in the face. The months and years would drop away one by one, with me bored out of my skull. I had thirty-three years till retirement, chained day after day to a desk, staring at galley proofs, counting lines, checking spelling. I’d get married to some nice girl, have some kids, the usual twice-a-year bonus the one bright spot in an otherwise tedious existence. I remembered what Izumi had once told me. “I know you’ll be a wonderful person when you grow up. There is something special about you.” It pained me every time I remembered. Something special about me, Izumi? Forget it. But I’m sure you know that now. Ah, what the hell, everyone makes mistakes.

  Mechanically, I did the work assigned me, and I spent my free time reading or listening to music. Work is just a boring obligation, I decided, and when I’m not working, I’m going to use my time the best way I can and enjoy myself. So I never went out drinking with the guys from work. Not that I was a loner who didn’t get along with people. I just didn’t make the effort to get to know my officemates on a personal level. I was determined that my free time was going to be mine.

  Four or five years passed in a flash. I had several girlfriends, but nothing lasted. I’d date one for a few months, and then start thinking: This isn’t what I want. I couldn’t find within these women something that was waiting just for me. I slept with a couple of them, but it was no big deal. I consider this the third stage of my life—the twelve years between my starting college and turning thirty. Years of disappointment and loneliness. And silence. Frozen years, when my feelings were shut up inside me.

  I withdrew into myself. I ate alone, took walks alone, went swimming alone, and went to concerts and movies alone. I didn’t feel hurt or sad. I often thought of Shimamoto and of Izumi, and wondered where they were now, what they were doing. For all I knew, they might be married, even have children. I would have given anything to see them, to talk with them, even for an hour. With Shimamoto and Izumi, I could be honest I racked my brains wondering how to get back together with Izumi, how to see Shimamoto again. How wonderful that would be, I imagined. Not that I actually took steps to see that it came true. The two of them were lost to me forever. The hands of a clock run in only one direction. I started talking to myself, drinking alone at night. I was sure I would never get married.

  Two years after I started work, I had a date with a girl who had a bad leg. One of the guys from work set me up on a double date.

  “Something’s wrong with one of her legs,” he told me reluctantly. “But she’s cute and has a great personality. I know you’ll like her. And you won’t really notice the leg. She drags it a bit is all.”

  “Hey, no problem,” I replied. Truth be told, if he hadn’t mentioned her bad leg, I would have turned him down. I was sick to death of double dates and blind dates. But when I heard about her leg, I somehow couldn’t refuse.

  You won’t really notice the leg. She drags it a bit is all.

  The girl was a friend of the guy’s girlfriend. They had been classmates in high school. She was on the small side, with decent looks. Hers was a subdued sort of beauty, reminding me of some small animal deep in the woods who seldom showed its face. The four of us went to a movie one Sunday morning and then had lunch together. She hardly said a word. I tried my best to draw he
r out, but it was no go. She just smiled. Afterward, we split from the other couple. She and I went to take a walk in Hibiya Park, where we had some coffee. She dragged her right leg, not the left like Shimamoto. The way she twisted it too, was different. Whereas Shimamoto rotated her leg slightly as she moved it forward, this girl pointed the tip sideways a bit and dragged it straight ahead. Still, their way of walking was remarkably similar.

  She had on a red turtleneck sweater and jeans, and a pair of desert boots. She wore hardly any makeup, and her hair was in a ponytail. Though she said she was a senior in college, she looked younger. I couldn’t decide if she was just a quiet person or was nervous meeting someone for the first time. Maybe she just didn’t have anything to talk about. Anyway, I wouldn’t exactly characterize our initial interaction as conversation. The only fact I was able to drag out of her was that she was at a private college, majoring in pharmacology.

  “Pharmacology, huh? Is it interesting?” I asked. We were in the coffee shop in the park, having a cup.

  She blushed.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “Making textbooks isn’t exactly the world’s most exciting activity. The world’s full of boring things. Don’t worry about it.”

  She thought for a while and at long last opened her mouth. “It’s not that interesting. But my parents own a drugstore.”

  “Could you teach me something about pharmacology? I don’t know the first thing about it For the past six years I don’t think I’ve swallowed a single pill.”

  “You’re pretty healthy, then.”

  “I don’t even get hangovers,” I said. “When I was a kid, though, I was pretty sickly. Took lots of medicine. I was an only child, so my parents were overprotective.”

  She nodded, and stared into her coffee cup for a while. It was a long time before she spoke again.