First Person Singular Read online

  I nodded silently. He might be right.

  “I pretty much stopped going to school because of all that,” my girlfriend’s brother went on. “The more I thought about it, the more frightened I got, and I couldn’t bring myself to go to school. My mom explained the situation to my teacher, and even though I had way too many absences, they made an exception for me and let me graduate. I imagine the school wanted to get rid of a problem student like me as soon as it could. But I didn’t go on to college. My grades weren’t so bad, and I could have gotten into some kind of college, but I didn’t have the confidence to go out. Ever since then, I’ve been loafing around at home. I take the dog for a walk, but otherwise I hardly ever leave the house. These days I don’t feel as panicky, or whatever. If things calm down a little more, I think maybe I’ll start going to college.”

  He was silent then, and so was I. I had no idea what to say. I understood now why my girlfriend never wanted to talk about her brother.

  “Thank you for reading that story to me,” he said. “ ‘Spinning Gears’ is pretty good. A dark story, for sure, but some of the writing really got to me. You sure you don’t want any coffee? It’ll just take a minute.”

  “No, I’m fine, really. I’d better be going soon.”

  He glanced again at the clock on the wall. “Why don’t you wait till twelve-thirty, and if nobody’s back by then you can leave. I’ll be in my room upstairs, so you can see yourself out. No need to worry about me.”

  I nodded.

  “Is it interesting, going out with Sayoko?” my girlfriend’s brother asked me one more time.

  I nodded. “It’s interesting.”

  “What part?”

  “How there’s so much about her I don’t know,” I replied. A very honest answer, I think.

  “Hmm,” he said, mulling it over. “Now that you mention it, I can see that. She’s my kid sister, blood related, the same genes and all, and we’ve been living together under the same roof since she was born, but there are still tons of things I don’t understand about her. I don’t get her—how should I put it? What makes her tick? So I’d like it if you could understand those things for me. Though there may be things it’s best not to try to figure out.”

  Coffee cup in hand, he rose from the armchair.

  “Anyway, give it your best shot,” my girlfriend’s brother said. He fluttered his free hand at me and left the room.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  At twelve-thirty, there was still no sign of anyone returning, so I went alone to the front door, slipped on my sneakers, and left. I walked past the pine forest to the station, jumped on the train, and went home. It was an oddly still and quiet Sunday autumn afternoon.

  I got a call from my girlfriend after two p.m. “You were supposed to come next Sunday,” she said. I wasn’t totally convinced, but she was so clear about it that she was probably right. I must have messed up the days. I meekly apologized for going to her place a whole week early.

  I didn’t mention that while I was waiting for her to come home her brother and I had a conversation—maybe conversation wasn’t the right word, since I basically just listened to him. I figured it was probably best not to say that I’d read Ryuˉnosuke Akutagawa’s “Spinning Gears” to him, and that he had revealed to me that he had an illness with memory lapses. I had a kind of hunch, too, that he hadn’t told my girlfriend anything about it. And if he hadn’t, there wasn’t any reason for me to.

  Eighteen years later, I met her brother again. It was the middle of October. I was thirty-five then, living in Tokyo with my wife. After I graduated from college in Tokyo, I settled there. My work kept me busy, and I hardly ever went back to Kobe.

  It was late afternoon, and I was walking up a hill in Shibuya to pick up a watch that was being repaired. I was heading along, lost in thought, when a man I’d passed turned and called out to me.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He had an unmistakable Kansai intonation. I stopped, turned around, and saw a man I didn’t recognize. He looked a little older than me, and a tad taller. He had on a thick gray tweed jacket, a crew-neck, cream-colored cashmere sweater, and brown chinos. His hair was short, and he had the taut build of an athlete and a deep tan (a golf tan, it looked like). His features were unrefined, yet still attractive. Handsome, I suppose. I got the sense that this was a man who was pleased with his life. A well-bred person, was my guess.

  “I don’t recall your name, but weren’t you my younger sister’s boyfriend for a while?” he said.

  I studied his face again. But I had no memory of it.

  “Your younger sister?”

  “Sayoko,” he said. “I think you guys were in the same class in high school.”

  My eyes came to rest on a small tomato-sauce stain on the front of his cream-colored sweater. He was neatly dressed, and that one tiny stain struck me as out of place. And then it hit me—the twenty-one-year old brother with sleepy eyes and a loose-necked navy-blue sweater sprinkled with bread crumbs. Old habits die hard. Those kinds of inclinations, or habits, don’t seem to ever change.

  “I remember now,” I said. “You’re Sayoko’s older brother. We met one time at your home, didn’t we?”

  “Right you are. You read Akutagawa’s ‘Spinning Gears’ to me.”

  I laughed. “But I’m surprised you could pick me out in this crowd. We only met once, and it was so long ago.”

  “I’m not sure why, but I never forget a face. Plus, you don’t seem to have changed at all.”

  “But you’ve changed quite a lot,” I said. “You look so different now.”

  “Well—a lot of water under the bridge,” he said, smiling. “As you know, things were pretty complicated for me for a while.”

  “How is Sayoko doing?” I asked.

  He cast a troubled look to one side, breathed in slowly, then exhaled. As if measuring the density of the air around him.

  “Instead of standing here in the street, why don’t we go somewhere where we can sit down and talk? If you’re not busy, that is,” he said.

  “I have nothing pressing,” I told him.

  * * *

  —

  “Sayoko passed away,” he said quietly. We were in a nearby coffee shop, seated across a plastic table from each other.

  “Passed away?”

  “She died. Three years ago.”

  I was speechless. I felt as if my tongue were swelling up inside my mouth. I tried to swallow the saliva that had built up, but couldn’t.

  The last time I’d seen Sayoko she was twenty and had just gotten her driver’s license, and she drove the two of us to the top of Mt. Rokko, in Kobe, in a white Toyota Crown hardtop that belonged to her father. Her driving was still a bit awkward, but she looked elated as she drove. Predictably, the radio was playing a Beatles song. I remember it well. “Hello, Goodbye.” You say goodbye, and I say hello. As I said before, their music was everywhere then, surrounding us like wallpaper.

  I couldn’t grasp the fact that she’d died and no longer existed in this world. I’m not sure how to put it—it seemed so surreal.

  “How did she…die?” I asked, my mouth dry.

  “She committed suicide,” he said, as if carefully picking his words. “When she was twenty-six she married a colleague at the insurance company she worked at, then had two children, then took her life. She was just thirty-two.”

  “She left behind children?”

  My former girlfriend’s brother nodded. “The older one is a boy, the younger a girl. Her husband’s taking care of them. I visit them every once in a while. Great kids.”

  I still had trouble following the reality of it all. My former girlfriend had killed herself, leaving behind two small children?

  “Why did she do it?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody knows why. She didn’t act like she was troub
led or depressed. Her health was good, things seemed good between her and her husband, and she loved her kids. And she didn’t leave behind a note or anything. Her doctor had prescribed sleeping pills, and she saved them up and took them all at once. So it does seem as though she was planning to kill herself. She wanted to die, and for six months she stashed away the medicine bit by bit. It wasn’t just a sudden impulse.”

  I was silent for quite a while. And so was he. Each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  On that day, in a café at the top of Mt. Rokko, my girlfriend and I broke up. I was going to a college in Tokyo and had fallen in love with a girl there. I came right out and confessed all this, and she, saying barely a word, grabbed her handbag, stood up, and hurried out of the café, without so much as a glance back.

  I had to take the cable car down the mountain alone. She must have driven that white Toyota Crown home. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and I remember I could see all of Kobe through the window of the gondola. It was an amazing view. But this was no longer the city I used to know so well.

  That was the last time I ever saw Sayoko. She went on to college, got a job at a major insurance company, married one of her colleagues, had two children, saved up sleeping pills, and took her own life.

  I would have broken up with her sooner or later. But, still, I have very fond memories of the years we spent together. She was my first girlfriend, and I liked her a lot. She was the person who taught me about the female body. We experienced all sorts of new things together, and shared some wonderful times, the kind that are possible only when you’re in your teens.

  It’s hard for me to say this now, but she never rang that special bell inside my ears. I listened as hard as I could, but never once did it ring. Sadly. The girl I knew in Tokyo was the one who did it for me. This isn’t something you can choose freely, according to logic or morality. Either it happens or it doesn’t. When it does, it happens of its own accord, in your consciousness or in a spot deep in your soul.

  “You know,” my former girlfriend’s brother said, “it never crossed my mind, not once, that Sayoko would commit suicide. Even if everybody in the whole world had killed themselves, I figured—wrongly, it turns out—she’d still be standing, alive and well. I couldn’t see her as the type to be disillusioned or have some darkness hidden away inside. Honestly, I thought she was a bit shallow. I never paid much attention to her, and the same was true for her when it came to me, I think. Maybe we just weren’t on the same wavelength…Actually, I got along better with my other sister. But now I feel as though I did something awful to Sayoko, and it pains me. Maybe I never really knew her. Never understood a thing about her. Maybe I was too preoccupied with my own life. Perhaps somebody like me didn’t have the strength to save her life, but I should have been able to understand something about her, even if it wasn’t much. Whatever it was that led her to die. It’s hard to bear now. I was so arrogant, so self-centered, and it hurts so much I can’t stand it.”

  There was nothing I could say. I probably hadn’t understood her at all, either. Like him, I’d been too preoccupied with my own life.

  My former girlfriend’s brother said, “In that story you read me back then, Akutagawa’s ‘Spinning Gears,’ there was a part about how a pilot breathes in the air way up in the sky and then can’t stand breathing the air back here on earth anymore…‘Airplane disease,’ they called it. I don’t know if that’s a real disease or not, but I still remember those lines.”

  “Did you get over that condition where your memory flies away sometimes?” I asked him. I think I wanted to change the subject away from Sayoko.

  “Oh, right. That,” he said, narrowing his eyes a bit. “It’s kind of weird, but that just spontaneously went away. It’s a genetic disorder and it should have gotten worse over time, the doctor said, but it just up and vanished, as if I’d never had it. As if an evil spirit had been expelled.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. And I really was.

  “It happened not long after that time I met you. After that, I never experienced that kind of memory loss, not even once. I felt calmer, I was able to enter a halfway-decent college, graduate, and then take over my dad’s business. Things took a detour for a few years there, but now I’m just living an ordinary life.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I repeated. “So you didn’t wind up bashing your father over the head with a hammer.”

  “You remember some dumb things, too, don’t you,” he said, and laughed out loud. “Still, you know, I don’t come to Tokyo on business very often, and it seems strange to bump into you like this in this huge city. I can’t help but feel that something brought us together.”

  “For sure,” I said.

  “So how about you? Have you been living in Tokyo all this time?”

  “I got married right after I graduated from college,” I told him, “and have been living here in Tokyo ever since. I’m making a living of sorts as a writer now.”

  “A writer?”

  “Yeah. After a fashion.”

  “Well, you were really great at reading aloud,” he said. “It might be a burden to you for me to tell you this, but I think Sayoko always liked you best of all.”

  I didn’t reply. And my ex-girlfriend’s brother didn’t say anything more.

  And so we said goodbye. I went to get my watch, which had been repaired, and my former girlfriend’s older brother slowly set off down the hill to Shibuya station. His tweed-jacketed figure was swallowed up in the afternoon crowd.

  I never saw him again. Chance had brought us together a second time. With nearly twenty years between encounters, in cities three hundred miles apart, we’d sat, a table between us, sipping coffee and talking over a few things. But these weren’t subjects you just chatted about over coffee. There was something more significant in our talk, something that seemed meaningful to us, in the act of living out our lives. Still, it was merely a hint, delivered by chance. There was nothing to link us together in a more essential or organic way. [Question: What elements in the lives of these two were symbolically suggested by their meeting again and their conversation?] I never saw that lovely young girl again, either, the one who was holding the LP With the Beatles. Sometimes I wonder—is she still hurrying down that dimly lit high school hallway in 1964, the hem of her skirt fluttering as she goes? Sixteen even now, holding that wonderful album cover with the half-lit photo of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, clutching it tightly as though her life depended on it.

  .  .  .

  CONFESSIONS OF A SHINAGAWA MONKEY

  I met the elderly monkey in a small Japanese-style inn in a hot springs in Gunma Prefecture, some five years ago. The inn was rustic, or, more precisely, decrepit. It was barely hanging on and I just happened to spend a night there.

  I was traveling around, wherever the spirit led me, and when I arrived at the hot springs town and got off the train, it was already past seven p.m. Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness specific to mountainous areas. A cold, biting wind blew down from the peaks, sending fist-sized leaves rustling down the street.

  I walked through the central part of the hot springs town searching for a place to stay, but none of the decent inns would take guests after the dinner hour had passed. I stopped by five or six places, but they all turned me down, and finally, in a deserted area outside town, I ran across an inn that would take me that didn’t include a dinner charge. It was a totally desolate-looking lodging, a ramshackle place that might best be called a flophouse. The inn had seen many years go by, but it lacked all the charm you might expect from a quaint lodging of its age. Mismatched fittings here and there were ever so slightly slanted, as if slapdash repairs had been made. I doubted that it would make it through the next earthquake, and I could only hope that no tremblor would hit that day, or the next.

  They
didn’t serve dinner, but breakfast was included, and the fee for one night was incredibly cheap. Inside the entrance was a simple reception desk, behind which sat a completely hairless old man—devoid even of eyebrows—who took my payment for one night in advance. The lack of eyebrows made the old man’s largish eyes seem to glisten bizarrely, glaringly. There was a large brown cat, equally ancient, sacked out on a floor cushion beside him. Something must have been wrong with its nose, for it snored louder than any cat I’d ever heard. Occasionally the rhythm of its snores fitfully missed a beat. Everything in this inn seemed to be old, ancient, and falling apart.

  The room I was shown to was small, like the little storage area where they keep futon bedding. The light on the ceiling was dim, and the flooring under the tatami creaked ominously with each step. But it was too late to be particular. I told myself I should be happy enough to have a roof over my head and a futon to sleep on.

  I put my large shoulder bag, my only luggage, down on the floor and set off for town (this wasn’t exactly the type of room I wanted to lounge around in). I went into a nearby soba noodle shop and had a simple dinner. There weren’t any other restaurants open, so it was that place or nothing. I had a beer, some bar snacks, and some hot soba. The soba was mediocre, the soup lukewarm, but again, I wasn’t about to complain. It certainly beat going to bed on an empty stomach. After I left the soba shop, I thought I’d buy some snacks and a small bottle of whiskey, but couldn’t find a convenience store. It was after eight, and the only places open were the little shooting-gallery stalls typically found in hot springs towns. So I hoofed it back to the inn, changed into a yukata, and went downstairs to take a bath.