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  INHABITATION

  Copyright © 1984 by Teru Miyamoto

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Roger K. Thomas

  First published in Japan in 1984 by Bungei Shunjū

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miyamoto, Teru, author. | Thomas, Roger K., translator.

  Title: Inhabitation : a novel / Teru Miyamoto ; translated from the Japanese by Roger K. Thomas.

  Other titles: Haru no yume. English

  Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2019] | “First published in Japan in 1984 by Bungei Shunju”— Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018050853 | ISBN 9781640092174

  Subjects: LCSH: Osaka (Japan)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PL856.I8735 H3713 2019 | DDC 895.63/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050853

  Cover design by Sarah Brody

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Calligraphy by Shih-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  13579108642

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  1

  Cherry blossom petals were falling on the twilit path. It was at the end of a shopping arcade with no cherry trees in sight. Feeling as if someone were scattering bits of garbage toward him as some kind of joke, Iryō Tetsuyuki cast his eyes about with vague misgivings.

  The single road from the shopping arcade led to a railroad crossing, beyond which it began to twist and turn until it was soon following a small stream. A little farther, the stream turned to the right and the road extended straight ahead toward Mount Ikoma. There was a liquor store and a vacant lot thick with weeds. The signboard of a coffee shop that appeared to have closed several months before was shaking noisily in the unseasonably cold wind. After turning right by a general store and a barbershop, he took another twenty minutes before arriving at the apartment he was renting in a crowded, cheaply built residential area. He had only a short while ago moved from Fukushima Ward in Osaka to this apartment on the outskirts of Daitō, his belongings loaded in a friend’s small truck. In exchange for the deposit and advance payment of rent, his landlady had handed him the key. Aside from minimal necessary eating utensils and kitchenware, his meager belongings consisted of a decrepit low desk, a small television set, a refrigerator, a chest of drawers that had been part of his mother’s trousseau, and a futon. Within fifteen minutes, he and his friend had finished unloading and carrying everything to his new room on the second floor. His friend left immediately to return to work, and only when Tetsuyuki set about putting things away by himself did he realize that there was not a single light bulb in the apartment. He went to the landlady’s house to inquire.

  “Sorry, I guess the former tenant took them when he moved out.”

  The landlady, a fortyish woman who ran a tiny beauty salon in this squalid residential area, continued to brush a customer’s hair and paid no more attention to Tetsuyuki, as if to say “Go buy light bulbs yourself.” Light bulbs should be her responsibility, he thought, but the expression on her face conveyed what a tightwad she was and he reluctantly walked to the station, where he bought two 60-watt bulbs and a fluorescent light for the small apartment.

  The sun had almost disappeared and a faintly bluish tint of dusk was spreading in the room. From a cardboard box he pulled out the tennis cap Yōko had given him for his birthday, wanting before anything else to find a place to hang it. He screwed in a light bulb and flipped the switch, but it did not turn on. He inserted a new fluorescent light and turned the switch, but it did not come on either. Checking the meter located just outside the door, he found that a tag had been attached to it by the power company. He again went to the landlady’s beauty parlor.

  “The lights won’t come on.”

  The landlady glanced at Tetsuyuki. “Oh no! I forgot to contact the power company. It must be turned off at the meter.”

  “Does that mean I’ll have to spend the night in the dark?” Tetsuyuki suppressed his anger with a calm voice.

  “I’ll bring some candles by later. I’ll just have to ask you to put up with it for one night.”

  Tetsuyuki returned to his dark room and sat down on the tatami. Oh well, what can I expect for 7,500 yen in rent? The landlady hadn’t been going to budge from her demand for 10,000, but when he pleaded that he was a student after all and couldn’t she knock it down a bit, she reluctantly reduced it to 7,500. The musty-smelling six-mat room looked as though it hadn’t been renovated in more than ten years.

  He cast his eyes about the darkening apartment. Well, at least it has its own toilet, not a communal one. He placed the low writing table in a corner and set the chest of drawers next to it. He put the futon away in the cramped closet, set the box of eating utensils in the kitchen, and then took out his toolbox with its cutting pliers, nails, and hammer. He looked for a short nail, but in the now pitch darkness of the room was not able to find one shorter than two inches. He moved the chest of drawers slightly, creating a space between it and the low table, and groping about, drove the nail into a four-inch pillar where the two walls intersected. Roughly estimating the location, he pounded the nail with all his might. The room shook at the reverberation of the pounding. Tetsuyuki hung his tennis cap on the nail, and then smoked a cigarette in the darkness. Then the landlady stopped by.

  “Please don’t go pounding nails in the walls.” She handed him five slender candles. “I turned the gas on, but it’s propane here, so don’t use a stove that requires anything else.” Then she left without further ado.

  The stove Tetsuyuki had brought with him was not made for propane. Would he have to buy that new as well? Having lit a candle, he emptied the money out of his pockets and counted it. Since he had purchased light bulbs and eaten dinner at a Chinese restaurant in front of the station, the money his mother had given him was down to 47,000 yen. He snuffed out the candle and left the apartment to look for a public telephone, but with no success. He expected to find one at the entrance to the general store, but it was already closed even though it was not yet seven o’clock. Following instructions given by a woman he asked, it took him more than fifteen minutes at a quick pace before he finally saw the phone booth, and during that time he did not encounter a single other person, nor was a single streetlight on. His hands in his pockets and hunched over, he muttered to himself, “Is this really part of Osaka?”

  When Yōko answered the phone, he said, “This place is a ghost town!”

  “Are you coming to school tomorrow?” she asked in a worried tone.

  “No, I’m going to crash here tomorrow, ’cause I’ll have to start work the day after.” Then he told her how to get to his apartment. After a pause she said in a barely audib
le voice, “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is there anything you’d like me to pick up and bring with me?”

  “I need a gas stove that uses propane. A small, cheap one will do.”

  After hanging up, he next dialed the number of the café in Kita Shinchi where his mother worked. It was the busiest time, and he worried that they might not call her to the phone, but the young waitress who answered affably summoned his mother from the kitchen. She seemed to have been expecting Tetsuyuki’s call, asking whether he had eaten dinner, whether there was anything he needed, and telling him to be sure to make every effort to go to every class. Then she added, “Be sure to call every day. I’ll be waiting in front of the phone at twelve noon.”

  “There’ll be times when I won’t be able to call right at twelve.”

  “It doesn’t have to be exactly at twelve. But make sure to call me around noon. All right?”

  “Yeah.”

  As he returned along the cold, unlit path, Tetsuyuki thought about his need to graduate from college soon. This year he had failed in four classes and was not able to graduate. Any more extension of his time in school would not be permitted. He needed to secure employment that summer, and then graduate next year. And after being employed, he would need to fulfill his promise to pay 15,000 yen monthly for a period of three years to the Naniwa Commerce Bank. There were five promissory notes his father had drawn shortly before his death, and three of the five had been canceled by the other party out of pity for the impoverished circumstances of the bereaved. Some recalled how they had been obliged to his father when he was alive, and others finally gave up after showering Tetsuyuki and his mother mercilessly with cutting remarks and seeing them hang their heads. But the collectors for the remaining two were tenacious. One had found its way to the Naniwa Commerce Bank, and another had ended up with a broker of promissory notes. The person in charge who came from the Naniwa Commerce Bank, a mild-mannered man well past sixty, asked, “Since it’s not a very large sum, why don’t you pay it off in monthly installments?”

  This “not very large sum” was 540,000 yen, a huge amount for Tetsuyuki and his mother in their present straits. Without consulting his mother, Tetsuyuki went to the Naniwa Commerce Bank and petitioned the elderly man, saying that he was currently a college student who planned to find a permanent job the following year, and asking if he might not be allowed to begin paying it off over several years following that. An agreement was reached: no interest would be assessed in the intervening period. Tetsuyuki affixed his seal to the memorandum.

  The remaining six-month promissory note for 323,000 yen that had gone to a broker was a problem. Its holders had no interest in negotiation or anyone’s circumstances. Over a period of three months someone would come to the house where Tetsuyuki and his mother were living, sometimes showing up in the middle of the night and making threatening statements until nearly daybreak, other times pleading gently. Eventually his mother became neurotic and would start trembling all over when night came, hiding in the closet and not coming out until morning. Tetsuyuki would hide elsewhere, spending nights at his friends’ places. Then one night a week ago, the man who had always come by himself showed up with three gangsters. They kicked down the front door and rushed into the house, dragged his trembling mother out of the closet and threatened her, saying that if she did not come up with the money, they would take one of her son’s arms as payment. The next morning, Tetsuyuki and his mother assembled all of their household belongings, explained the situation to their landlord, and for the time being sequestered themselves at an aunt’s place in Amagasaki. The widowed aunt made ends meet with the pittance she received from a pension and from part-time work with a nearby auto-parts maker. She lived alone in a small rented home, and was worried that the loan shark would track down their location and come barging into her place. After discussing the matter, Tetsuyuki and his mother decided to live separately in an attempt to evade the gangsters. Through the introduction of an acquaintance, his mother decided to work as a live-in employee at the Yūki restaurant in Kita Shinchi, while Tetsuyuki rented a single-room apartment he had found with the help of a college friend living in Daitō. Tetsuyuki thought that it would be just like gangsters to spend entire days lying in wait by the school gates, and so he had not attended a single lecture of the new semester that had begun five days ago. Did they think they’d get any money if they came to this place? No, he resolved that he would just keep dodging them.

  When he got back to his apartment, he struck a match, lit a candle, and fixed his gaze on the tennis cap hanging on the nail he had driven into the pillar. He had been active in the tennis club, but realizing he would no longer have time for such things, he had quit the sport shortly before his father died. When he announced his decision to the other club members, they said they would retain his membership, and that anytime he wanted to play he need only come to the courts. Under the flickering light of the candle, Tetsuyuki lay down in the narrow room and stared intently at the French-made tennis cap, a gift from Yōko. With no heat in the room, he soon spread out his futon and dived under the covers. He heard coughing in the room next door, and then later a telephone rang. “Ah, so my neighbor has a phone.” He thought about taking some cake or saké next door the following day to say hello, ask for the phone number, and see if his neighbor would be willing to take calls for him. The only calls would be from his mother or Yōko, at most only one or two a week, so his neighbor might be accommodating. He blew out the candle and turned his thoughts to Yōko’s visit tomorrow. For the first time in a long time, they would be alone.

  Tetsuyuki recalled the first time he saw her on campus three years ago. She was a new freshman, he a sophomore. On that warm day she was wearing a white blouse and a light blue crepe georgette skirt. She was not an outstanding beauty, but her facial expression had a soft roundness about it that he had never seen in other girls. An overflowing feeling of purity and a reserved lightheartedness about her drew his unending attention.

  “That girl’s cute,” Tetsuyuki remarked to the tennis club member next to him.

  “Then you’d better act fast. Yamashita in the rugby club has his eyes on her, and about three others in the karate club are taken with her.”

  “I think I’m in love with her.”

  “Make your move now. Show me what you’re made of.”

  Tetsuyuki set aside his unfinished ramen noodles, went up to Yōko, who had just entered the student cafeteria, and tapped on her shoulder. She turned around and gave him a suspicious look.

  “Would you like to join the tennis club?”

  Yōko blushed and said apologetically that she had no interest.

  “That was just a pretext. Actually, I wonder if you’d lend me your notes for French. I’m a sophomore, but I flunked French last year and have to take it over again. But I haven’t gone to class even once. Is it okay if I copy your French notes from now on?”

  Even as he was talking, Tetsuyuki felt disgusted with himself: What a clumsy approach! And yet, Yōko cheerfully lent him the notes. Two weeks later they met at a coffee shop in Umeda and then went to see a movie. Some days after that, he visited Yōko at her house, where he was treated to dinner. That evening as she saw him off to the station, he kissed her and could feel her breasts under her thin blouse.

  Tetsuyuki had a feeling that tomorrow they would surely spend the night together under his quilt. He had never been with a woman before, and Yōko had not let him do more than touch her breasts. He imagined her carrying the groceries, the cake, and the gas stove on the long path through the unfamiliar town, and determined that he must never do anything to hurt her. There was not a shred of mean-spiritedness about her, and she was totally without worldly guile. He desired to see her unclothed body, and the way she had said “I’ll be there tomorrow” seemed to hint at something. In his mind he embraced the naked Yōko, and fell asleep.

  After waking up the next morning, Tetsuyuki unlocked the do
or and then went back to bed. When he awoke again, Yōko was sitting next to his futon looking down into his face. He had been aching to see her, and there she was. She didn’t wake me up, but just watched me sleep. The thought was accompanied by an incomparable euphoria as the two looked at each other. He raised his hand from under the quilt and caressed her cheek, eliciting a smile from her.

  “Here I am,” she whispered, as if humoring a child.

  “When did you get here?”

  “About twenty minutes ago.”

  “You should’ve woken me.”

  “Why? I was just thinking how much I like you, even though you’re not all that handsome, you wear dirty shoes, and you never give me any presents.”

  “But I am handsome!”

  “Well, depending on how one looks at you. Your face looks strange.” Yōko had a light complexion, with just a few freckles under her eyes.

  “How is it strange?”

  “It’s so strange I couldn’t begin to say how.”

  “I guess it must be a disgusting face.”

  Yōko giggled and squeezed Tetsuyuki’s hand on her cheek. “I like your face.” She embraced him. Her cheek was cold.

  “I left home at eight o’clock, and it took me two hours to get here,” Yōko whispered as she lightly bit Tetsuyuki’s lip. Then she added reproachfully, “It’s cold. You don’t even have a heater.”

  Tetsuyuki pulled her into the futon and for a long time briskly rubbed her cheeks, back, and shoulders. He slipped out from under the bedding to wash his face and brush his teeth. Having finished, he turned around and was stunned to see Yōko clad only in scant underwear, sitting on top of the futon with her back turned to him. Hiding her breasts with her hands, she turned her head and looked at him. With a slight smile on her face, she was brimming with shyness. Of all her facial expressions, this was his favorite: that faint smile projecting both innocence and reserved allure. As he sat down, she lay back, whispering that she was cold and asking him to put the quilt over her. Tetsuyuki sat staring silently into her face; although she had already willingly taken off her clothing, she was overcome with shame. Coming to his senses, he took off his pajamas and underwear and stood there naked. Bright morning sunlight was streaming through the still-curtainless window. She asked him to darken the room. In place of a curtain, he took off the quilt cover, securing it over the window with thumbtacks. Then, in the darkened shabby old room he glanced at Yōko, who was waiting for him under the musky-smelling quilt with an expression that combined fear and a broader than usual smile.