Hardboiled & Hard Luck (3 page)

Why did I feel so certain? I didn’t know, but I felt sure I was right.

I never shed a tear over Chizuru’s death. Why not? And why was I so harsh with her earlier, in the dream? I should have been nicer, even if it meant lying to myself.

4

The Visitor

Just then, there was a knock at the door.

It gave me a start, but I fought down the slight fear I felt and peered out through the peephole. I thought it might be the woman from the front desk.

But the person I saw standing in the eerily bright hallway was a woman I didn’t recognize, dressed in a bathrobe; she stood perfectly straight, her hands hanging at her sides, and she was all alone.

I opened the door.

“As you can see, I’m a woman,” I said. “I don’t hire prostitutes.”

The woman replied, keeping her voice down, “Don’t worry, that’s not why I’m here. I’ve been shut out of my room.”

“The person inside won’t let you back in?”

“He seems to be asleep.”

“You can call from my room, if you want.”

“Thank you.”

The woman was slender and she had long hair. The lower half of her face was particularly gaunt; she had very thin lips, but they lent her a kind of graceful air. I was stunned to catch a glimpse of hair under her bathrobe as she cut across the room—apart from the robe, she was completely naked. My god, I wondered, how long has she been standing out in the hall like that?

She was standing by the phone now, but she wasn’t calling.

“You haven’t forgotten your room number, have you?” I asked.

“Oh no, that’s not it at all!” The woman gave her head an exaggerated shake. “The truth is, we had a fight. Even if I called, I doubt he’d answer.”

“He must be feeling bad right now, though, don’t you think?” I said. “I mean, after kicking you out dressed like that...”

“OK, I’ll just wait ten minutes and then call,” she replied. “Would you mind letting me stay here, just a little while?”

I poured another glass of whiskey and offered it to her.

She held out her thin, bare arm to accept it, then took a sip.

“Have you ever had something like this happen to you?” she asked. “I mean, someone doing something terrible to you, or you doing something terrible to someone else?”

“Many times. When things head in that direction...” I replied. Like earlier, when I couldn’t be nice to Chizuru, even in a dream. “I don’t know, it’s like I’m in some other world or something, that’s how it is with me. I lose the ability to make ordinary decisions, and my body moves on its own.”

“I know what you mean. It’s like being in a bad dream,” she said. “The man I’m here with has a wife, and he refuses to break up with her.”

“So you quarreled, and he chased you out into the hall, naked?”

“I think he gets more violent because he knows it’s his own fault. In a town as small as this, just raising your voice in public is enough to get everyone talking, so sometimes I try to pick a fight with him out on the street. He holds things in, never raises his voice or anything, but I just keep shouting. In shops, on the sidewalk, wherever. And the thing is, I can feel that I’m gradually falling into a very peculiar emotional state. It’s like I’m in a plastic bag, slowly running out of oxygen. Like no one cares what I do anymore, and now it’s too late, there’s no going back. And then, as soon as we get into our room at the hotel, he starts hitting me. We just keep going through the same cycle, and it’s really worn me down. Earlier, we were up on this road in the mountains. We started shouting at each other again, and as we walked along, I started to feel like I didn’t care anymore, nothing mattered. People were already beginning to talk, and my mother thinks I should be institutionalized... I don’t suppose I’ll be able to stay in this town much longer. However you look at it, it’s all over now.”

She spoke very quietly, almost as if she were talking about someone else.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but just having you here in my room wears me out.” It was the truth. Somehow when I looked at her, when I listened to her talking, my mind seemed to go numb, and I felt as if something inside me were being sucked out. “Why don’t you give him a call.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, “not yet. I’m afraid.”

“All right, then, why don’t I go down, wake up the woman at the front desk, and get you another key? How would that be?”

I figured I could do that much for her.

“Yes, that seems best. Would you mind?”

“No problem at all.”

“Let’s talk a little more, though, OK? I need to calm down.”

“Sure.”

“What was it like when you were in this situation? Being with someone you constantly fought with, tooth and nail?” As she spoke, her eyes met mine. But she was so absorbed in her own affairs that her gaze didn’t register anything.

“I’m sorry, I can’t really say anything about that. I’ve never had an experience like that,” I said. “In my case, things always had a touch of humor, and we had some good times, and beautiful moments—there was always something good.”

That was an incredible year.

My father, who had been having an affair and hadn’t been home in ages, died, secretly leaving everything to me. My mother wanted what little he’d had, so she cooked up all sorts of cunning plots, and finally made off with my personal seal and my bank passbook.

I call her my mom because she brought me up, but she isn’t my biological mother. We were on pretty good terms, though, so I was really shocked by what she did. The rumor was that she had quit her job at the snack bar where she used to work and run off with some man. I was so incredibly hurt and angry that I did some investigating and managed to find her new address. Then, one day I got up my courage and went to reclaim my inheritance. I didn’t think it would be easy, but in fact everything went so smoothly that it was almost a letdown.

By the time I arrived in the town where she was living, it was late afternoon, almost evening. I didn’t try to get into her apartment as soon as I found it because I was afraid she might be living with the sort of man I would rather steer clear of; instead, I decided to spend some time in town, waiting for nightfall.

I’ll never forget how I felt then...

The rituals of our daily lives permeate our very bodies. After all we had been through, the one tie that still bound my mother and me was the way time moved in our lives, because it had seeped down so deep inside us.

I wasn’t taking the situation that seriously; I even thought the two of us would get together again some day. I knew my mom had let my father’s mother take over as my legal guardian, but even so, I still believed we would get back together. I haven’t seen her once since she left, though, even today. For all I know, we may never see each other again. Back then it would have hurt me too much to admit that possibility, so I closed my heart to keep from thinking about it.

The town was subject to the same flow of time—the same cycle that had left its mark on my body over the years, ever since I was young. In the evening, around the time the news came on TV, as the birds soared through the western sky, and the huge evening sun hovered in the west, slowly sinking toward the horizon, I had always walked home alone. I might be returning from school or from a boyfriend’s house, I might be heading back after skipping school and hanging out all day or even making a special trip back if I was out with friends—as long as I lived with my mom, I always went back in the evening to change clothes.

This was the only time that my mother and I shared. I didn’t go back because I wanted to see her—it was a sort of obligation, something I did for her because she had raised me, even though she wasn’t related to me by blood. I made a habit out of something that had begun as an instinctive strategy, my childish way of reminding her that I was alive, and that she was supposed to be taking care of me.

My mom was always having dinner when I got home. Then she would leave for the bar. My dad hadn’t been home much for a long time; the second half of our life together, my mom and I lived alone. I sat with her for a few minutes while she ate, then saw her off. Bye! See you later! I’d wave goodbye, then go do the dishes and clean up, and then, most of the time, go to a friend’s house or to my boyfriend’s. I usually didn’t come home until very late.

Some nights, my mom wouldn’t return. She never brought a man into the apartment, though. My mom had a strict sense of duty, and the way she saw it, that space belonged to my dad. I was sort of surprised that my dutiful mom ran off with my inheritance, but there’s no point going on about that. I suppose she must have hated my father for not leaving her anything after she had worked so desperately hard to raise me.

By the time I’d been to the game center there in that unfamiliar town, and had numerous cups of coffee, and sat on an embankment to watch the sunset, and stood for a while in the bookstore, reading, I was completely and utterly confused.

I seemed to be in some generic town of the sort one encounters in dreams. My heart, bathed in light from the western sun, felt as if it were beginning to rot. My head was spinning; I thought that if I just turned the next corner, I’d be able to get back home. And when I arrived, I’d find those rooms where I had lived with my mom, and the scent of clean laundry would rise up around me, and I would hear the kitchen floorboards creaking—it was impossible not to believe it would all be there unchanged. The building we lived in was fairly nice, but it had been built a good twenty years ago, and in a lot of places it was starting to show signs of age. It was hot in summer, cold in winter. I thought I could go back to that apartment. My mom would be eating dinner as if nothing had happened, and I would burst through the door, and our old life would begin again... that’s how it felt. Isn’t it Monday today? I’ll have to fold laundry, I thought, then go do the shopping.

The truth was that my mother was living in an apartment I didn’t know, here in this unfamiliar town, with a man I didn’t know. When the time seemed more or less right, I made my way back to the building.

My mom always left the curtains open, and they were open now, too, in this new apartment. I had a clear view of her silhouette in the window: she was busy getting ready to go out. The windows were made of frosted glass, but the lights were on, and I could see every movement. After she was dressed, she came back into the room and changed her jacket, just as she used to when we were living together, then looked herself over from head to toe in the full-length mirror by the window—another habit of hers. I became more and more confused, until in the end I no longer had any idea when all this was taking place. If I just walked in there, everything that had happened would be erased—I really felt as if time could run backward. My mom switched off the lights and left the room. Which means, I figured, that the man isn’t there.

My mom hurried away, unaware that I was hiding in the shadows. She was a beautiful woman who loved dealing with customers, and she couldn’t get along without the pleasures of a job at a bar. She was doing the same work here in this town. Her small back hadn’t changed. She walked off at a fast pace.

I quickly checked her mailbox to make sure I had the right apartment number, then slipped my hand through the slot and felt around the top of the box. Just as I expected: the key was stuck there with packing tape, just like always. I took out the key and headed for my mother’s new apartment.

The building, which was built on the model of a housing complex, was very big. I was an intruder—my heart thumped each time I passed someone. All kinds of happy noises came through the different windows. The voices of children, of fathers already going in to take a bath, someone calling to someone else, the sounds of dinners being prepared, and the delicious smells... I started to feel as if I might cry, so I rushed down the hall very quickly.

My mother’s apartment was all the way at the end. I slid the key into the lock and opened the door. Male clothing I didn’t recognize hung on the wall. It was a suit. I gave a sigh of relief, because, judging from the style, he was clearly just a regular businessman. She hadn’t, it seemed, been sweet-talked by a
yakuza
. My mother was living a new life now. The kitchen looked very tidy; I could smell my mother’s scent. There were four rooms. I went into the one where I had seen her silhouette earlier, since it seemed like the best place to start, and opened the drawer where she had always kept her underwear. And just as I expected, my seal and passbook were both there, under the underwear. Looking through the passbook, I saw that my father had left me twenty million yen. She didn’t appear to have touched it yet. Taking the money was one thing, but I don’t know how she expected me to get along without my official seal. I really needed it. I left the apartment, taking the seal and passbook with me. I locked the door, thinking as I did that it was kind of unusual—a thief locking the door behind her. I had left a slip of paper in the bottom of the drawer on which I had written, in small characters, “Lupin the Third Strikes Again!” though I doubted my amusing
manga
allusion would make her smile. I finished things off by taping the key back where it had been, then caught a train and went home.

The next day I canceled my contract with the phone company and got a cell phone. Then I completed the paperwork necessary for me to move out of my apartment. It would have been a pain if my mother realized the things were gone and came to get the money. I must have used a whole life’s worth of energy going through it all. In one sleepless night, I disposed of everything. I packed all my dad’s clothes into a single cardboard box. I put his books, his letters, and all the other things he had left behind into storage. None of the things my mother had left mattered—that was why she had left them, after all—so I threw everything away. I also tossed as many of my own things as possible and put the rest into storage with my dad’s things. Ultimately, I was able to fit everything into just two suitcases. Two days later, I went to the bank and opened a new account for myself with ten million yen, then had them print up a check for the remaining ten million, which I mailed to my mother. When I got the receipt for sending it by registered mail, an image of the mailbox in that building drifted up before my mind’s eye. It occurred to me—and I felt how true it was—that the moment this check slipped into that mailbox, I would really be alone.