Inhabitation Page 7

  “Have you had dinner?” His mother’s face darkened as she looked at him. Then she pulled him by the arm into the brightly lit kitchen. “What happened to you? Your face . . .” She stared at his swollen nose and lip.

  “I stumbled and fell down on the apartment stairs.” Tetsuyuki had never before deceived his mother. As soon as she tried to say something, he cut her off. “I haven’t eaten dinner. And I only had a slice of bread for lunch.”

  Apparently having overheard him, Chef Ishii chimed in. “We have a bit of sliced squid left, along with some stewed pork and red miso.” With that, he opened a pot, heaped the food on a plate, and set it on the counter. His mother thanked Mr. Ishii as she filled a bowl with rice.

  “This is really good, so thank Mr. Ishii and eat up.” Tetsuyuki thanked Mr. Ishii, as well as the young woman who had come into the kitchen, for all they had done for his mother. The latticed door opened and a heavily made-up woman in Japanese attire staggered in, reeking of perfume. “That’s the proprietress,” Tetsuyuki’s mother whispered to him.

  “This is my son. He stopped by to discuss something with me, and hadn’t had any dinner, so the chef picked out a few leftovers for him,” she explained in a flustered tone.

  “Well, well, you have such a grown-up son.” The proprietress cast a sidelong glance at Tetsuyuki, who said, “Thank you for treating me.” He began to add an expression of thanks for all she had done for his mother, but the proprietress paid no attention to him, and asked the young woman who was putting things away in the kitchen to call a cab for her. Tetsuyuki judged her age to be forty-two or -three.

  “Yokota’s gotten so that he drinks too much, and I can’t keep up with him. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re down and out.” As the proprietress talked, Ishii changed out of his apron and responded briefly. “Aside from what you drink with him here, it’s not necessary to accompany him to other clubs, is it?”

  “Yes, but he and I go way back together, and he’s trying to hide the fact that his business isn’t going well, and I can’t all of a sudden give him the cold treatment. I had to down three glasses of brandy, and now I’m drunk.”

  “That’s because before that you’d already had five rounds of saké.”

  Both her cosmetics and her kimono made her look youthful, and her profile still had traces that suggested remarkable beauty in her younger years, but from the front, under strong light, her heavy makeup made her look older. In the middle of her face, which expressed both craftiness and innocence, was a pair of inorganic eyes that seemed like those of an exquisitely crafted doll.

  “Eat it up quickly, or it’ll get cold.” Urged by the proprietress, Tetsuyuki slurped the miso and stuffed his mouth with rice. There was no warmth in her words, and it seemed to him that she did not want him eating her shop’s leftovers for free. “How much do I owe you?” His intention was to show consideration, but the proprietress threw him a sharp look and said, “What do you mean? You want to pay? I’m sure our chef didn’t serve it with the intention of being paid.” With that, she got into the cab parked in front of the shop. Ishii and the young woman also went home, leaving only Tetsuyuki and his mother.

  “The proprietress seems a bit touchy.”

  “Well, she used to be a geisha.” Wiping the countertop, his mother named a major railroad company. “The president of that company set her up in this shop.” She held a pinkie erect as she spoke. “She’s lived in the world of nightclubs and bars since she was a kid. And then she went from being a first-class geisha to being the mistress of a millionaire and got this shop here in Shinchi. She’s getting on in years, but is like a naïve little girl when it comes to how the world works. It was after her patron died that she really got serious about the business. Up till then, all of her customers came here because of connections with her patron.”

  “How old is she?”

  “The same age as I am.”

  “Huh?! Then she’s fifty?” Tetsuyuki found it amusing, thinking that in that case her heavy makeup really did a splendid job of exposing her age.

  “She has her endearing qualities, but she’s pretty capricious. But by now I’ve gotten used to dealing with her.”

  His mother appeared in better spirits than he had expected. “You’ve grown thin,” she said. “Has something happened?” After finishing her work, she sat down next to him and began questioning.

  “No. Just hanging around in my apartment, I suddenly wanted to see you, that’s all.”

  “Does Yōko sometimes come to your apartment?”

  “Yeah . . . Sometimes she brings groceries.” Under his mother’s gaze, he sensed in her words that she had caught on to everything about them.

  “I really like that girl. She’s cheerful and sweet, not a single blemish on her character. I wonder if she’d be willing to marry you.” From a teapot she filled to the brim large teacups, the kind used at sushi restaurants. Cradling her cup in both hands, she looked down, focused on the tea stem floating in the brew. “About two months before your father died, I told him about you and Yōko, and said it seemed as if you had decided to tie the knot.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  “He laughed, and said that people never get to marry their first love.”

  Tetsuyuki beamed at his mother. For the first time in a very long time he felt peace in his heart.

  “My first love was cruelly shattered when I was in middle school.” As a teenager, he had fallen for the girl who managed the equipment of the baseball club. He didn’t like baseball, but joined with her as his aim.

  “I was put out in right field and made to practice catching fly balls. I got so nervous with her watching me that I caught a ball with my forehead instead of my mitt, and that made her double over laughing. She had become the manager because she had a crush on the pitcher, a guy named Takakura. As soon as I realized that, I quit the club after just three days, and a senior teammate slapped me across the face three times. Whenever I think about it, it seems so idiotic that I end up laughing.”

  On the street outside there was the insistent honking of a horn and a sudden surge of people. The noise of the bustle broke the silence of the closed restaurant.

  “It’s time for the hostesses to head home.” With that lone comment, his mother fell back into pensive silence, not even sipping the tea she had poured. At length, she said, “What really happened? Tell me, and don’t hide anything.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. I really fell down on the apartment stairs and hit my face.”

  “You never heard again from that collector?”

  “Never. There’s no way he could trace me so far outside Osaka. By the time he finds either of us, I’ll have saved three or four hundred thousand yen.”

  “It’s not money that we particularly need to repay, but . . . there’s no doubt that it’s your father’s debt.” She told Tetsuyuki to stay the night in her room on the second floor. After making sure that the door was locked and the gas turned off, she extinguished the light. After climbing a steep staircase next to the enormous refrigerator in the kitchen, they came to a cramped room with a wooden floor, crowded with stacks of cardboard boxes, beside which was a sliding door. Opening the door, she turned on a fluorescent light. It was a six-mat room properly furnished with a tokonoma alcove and filled with her familiar scent.

  “It won’t matter if I stay without permission?” Tetsuyuki glanced around the room.

  “No, it won’t matter. The proprietress won’t come to the shop until after seven p.m. Mr. Ishii will stop by at about six a.m. with a load of goods from the market, and will leave right after that.”

  “Then you have to get up at six?”

  “He has a key, so I can stay in bed. If I’m awake, I get up and make him a cup of tea, but he returns home after that and goes to bed. He gets up at four a.m. and goes to the central market by himself to pick out produce for our pantry. Then he comes to work at four p.m., and the restaurant opens at six.” She opened the closet and pulled out futo
ns and quilts, arranging beds for two. Tetsuyuki sat down by a latticed window facing the street.

  “This is a nice room.”

  “Until two years ago it was used for guests. It even has an alcove for decorations.”

  “Why isn’t it used that way now?”

  “They said it’s because they were so understaffed that they decided to limit the business to downstairs, but it’s probably because their customer base has dwindled. It’s rare that customers here request a separate room, and so they decided not to use the second floor.”

  “Where do you bathe?”

  “I take the bus to Jōshō Bridge. There’s an old public bath there.” She sat in front of a small dressing mirror, applying lotion to her face.

  “You take the bus, to go to a public bath?”

  “It’s only five minutes to Jōshō Bridge.” She changed into a nightgown and got into bed, and so he also undressed, switched off the light, and got into bed in his underwear.

  “I hope we can all live together someday soon, you and Yōko, the three of us . . .” she muttered, and yawned. It was not long until her regular breathing evinced slumber. Noting how exhausted she must have been, Tetsuyuki, too, closed his eyes.

  There were signs of a steady stream of traffic on the main avenue through Shinchi, and he could hear laughter and voices calling for others among the human noises that had increased. He listened intently to the clamor, his eyes closed tight. He wondered about the meaning of the dream in which he had gone through centuries of cycles of birth and death as a lizard. In a mere forty minutes, he had gone through several hundred years. Though he dismissed it as only a dream, he felt that he had stood on the brink of a chasm opening onto a deep and distant world, and that he had peered down into something very strange. The self that was dreaming and the self of his waking consciousness—how were they different?

  He thought of Kin, nailed to a pillar in a small dark apartment way beyond that distant station. Sometime, he would have to pull the nail out and set him free. He wanted to do this in a careful manner that would not kill him or aggravate the wound. Imagining Kin in the back of his mind, Tetsuyuki wanted to repeat the dream of the night before.

  5

  It was summer break at the university, and among Tetsuyuki’s classmates, there were several whose employment following graduation had already been secured. If nothing else, he could always do as Section Chief Shimazaki recommended and take full-time employment at the hotel. This offer had dampened his ambition to take the examinations for more desirable jobs.

  When he arrived at the employees’ entrance to the hotel a little before five o’clock, as usual, he found Yōko standing on the adjoining sidewalk, trying to avoid the foul-smelling effusion of the exhaust. Bathed in the setting sun of summer, half of her body was tinted red, giving her features a melancholy cast. She trotted across the street, breaking into a smile only after reaching the other side. Tetsuyuki had also dashed out into the street, dodging traffic to meet her.

  “What’s wrong?” Yōko returned his gaze in silence. They turned down an alley and entered a coffee shop. During the month that had passed since they last met they had only talked on the telephone.

  Until summer break arrived, Yōko had been attending lectures every day, and after that various errands seemed to come up for her, leaving them no opportunity to get together. Ever since the incident with the collector, Kobori, Tetsuyuki had told Yōko not to come to the apartment. On his days off he had always tried to arrange for them to meet in Umeda, but each time she either had errands to run for her mother, or she had to go help clean and do laundry for a cousin who had just given birth, and they were not able to meet.

  Sitting at the very back of the coffee shop with bossa nova music in the background, Tetsuyuki studied the expression on Yōko’s face.

  “Did you cut your hair?”

  “Yeah, it was getting hot, so I ended up cutting it.”

  “This is the first time I’ve seen you with short hair.”

  “This is the shortest it’s been since I was in middle school. You don’t like it?”

  “It looks good on you.” Then he asked again, “What’s wrong?”

  “When you’ve had a day off, I’ve had errands, and when I have time, you always have to work . . .”

  It was his least favorite time of the day, and yet he felt happy. He glanced at his watch: the same 4:40 as when he arrived at Osaka Station. He took the watch off and held it to his ear, shook it and tapped it lightly, but it didn’t move.

  “Ah, it’s stopped. It was cheap, so it was just a matter of time till it broke.” He threw it down on the table. Yōko took a watch out of her purse, an old Rolex that had belonged to her father and that she had begged him for. She always kept it in her purse.

  “I’ll lend this to you.”

  “It would look odd for a hotel bellboy to wear an elegant timepiece like this.”

  “Yes, but you have to have a watch, don’t you?” Then, quickly pulling the watch back from his hand as he tried to take it, she added it a jesting tone, “Now, you mustn’t take it to a pawnshop.”

  Laughing, he put the Rolex on his wrist. “I’ve had my eye on this. I thought if I married you, it’d be mine.”

  “No matter how much I begged, ‘Dad, pretty please,’ he wouldn’t give in. He’d say, ‘What would a woman do with a man’s watch?’ or ‘It has too many fond memories for me,’ and wouldn’t part with it.”

  “I’m surprised he gave it to you, then.”

  “He got a new Rolex at discount, and finally let me have this one.”

  “Why were you so set on having a man’s watch like this?”

  “You can’t find vintage Rolexes like this anymore. And besides, I really liked it for some reason.”

  “These are the toughest ones in the world.”

  “Take good care of it, okay?”

  It was 5:30. Finishing her iced coffee, Yōko stood up. At the sight of her breasts through the thin material of her blouse, Tetsuyuki felt a sudden surge of desire, darkening his expression and rendering him mute. Her words as they left the coffee shop were answered only with silence. He just ran his eyes from her lips to her breasts to her crotch, and then back down to the sidewalk.

  “What’s wrong? Are you angry about something?” Yōko cocked her head slightly, but Tetsuyuki only stared silently at the sidewalk. “Again! It’s always like this . . . you suddenly fall into a foul mood . . .” She seemed now to be in a bad humor herself. They crossed the street and parted, and he watched her as she mixed into the crowd. Abruptly, she turned and made a derisive gesture toward him, pulling against one eye and sticking out her tongue. Several passersby looked at her in surprise.

  Tetsuyuki changed into his uniform and hurried to the office.

  “You’re forty minutes late.” Tsuruta, one of the bellboys, was sitting at the desk.

  “I’m sorry.” In spite of Tetsuyuki’s apology, Tsuruta punched the time card himself and then wrote in some numbers with a red pencil.

  “You’re paid by the hour, so I’m docking forty minutes from your pay.” Such determinations were supposed to be made by the bellboy captain, Isogai, but Tetsuyuki just meekly voiced his acknowledgment and headed toward the lobby. Tsuruta walked up behind him and whispered, “For the time being, I’m substituting as bellboy captain.”

  After escorting guests to their rooms, Tsuruta was in the habit of killing time by shooting the breeze with female employees in the bellboy stations on each floor. Scrutinizing his acne-studded face, Tetsuyuki asked, “Has something happened to Isogai?”

  “He collapsed again, before noon. He’s resting in the nap room now. The section chief asked me to fill in for him.”

  After escorting a foreign couple to a room on the fourteenth floor, Tetsuyuki headed for the nap room. Preparation was under way for what appeared to be a major event, with waiters and waitresses busily carrying plates and cups. One of them almost bumped into Tetsuyuki, nearly dropping his plates. Co
ming to a standstill, he said with a sigh, “Hey, if you’ve got that much time on your hands down in the lobby, help us out here. We have to prepare a buffet for eight hundred people by seven o’clock.”

  “What kind of event is it?”

  The waiter named a well-known politician from a conservative party. “It’s to celebrate his seventy-seventh birthday, but that’s only the outward reason. It’s really a membership event to raise campaign funds.”

  Promising that he would inquire at the front desk and come back to help out if permission were given, Tetsuyuki proceeded through the narrow passage to the nap room. Upon gently opening the door and looking inside, his eyes met those of Section Chief Shimazaki, who was sitting on the bed. Tetsuyuki tiptoed up beside him and sat down. Isogai appeared to be asleep.

  “It’s been rather hectic today.” Shimazaki spoke softly. “He collapsed in the lobby. I was about to call an ambulance, but it so happened that there was a cardiologist right there who attended to him. He was here for some university class reunion, and there were about twenty doctors altogether. One of them had some medicine with him that saved Isogai’s life.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “He said to make sure Isogai received a thorough examination at a specialized hospital. He mentioned, too, that operations for valve disorders now have a fairly high success rate compared with other kinds of heart surgeries.”

  The door opened and a clerk from the front desk called for Shimazaki, who came back to the bedside after exchanging words with her. “Something’s come up and I have to return to the office. Iryō, you stay with him for a while.” As he was about to leave, Tetsuyuki hurriedly interjected. “Please tell Nakaoka at the front desk and the bellboy Tsuruta that you have asked me to remain here, or I’ll be accused of goldbricking.”

  Shimazaki nodded and walked off with his usual brisk gait. When the metal door was closed, the bustle and noise of preparation in the banquet room ceased and the dimly lit nap room returned to silence.