The Graveyard Apartment (6 page)

Teppei had made his way to this club any number of times since he was first brought here by some coworkers, but when he stopped to ask himself what the appeal was, he was unable to come up with an answer. It was just an easy place to sit and have a drink or two, lost in reverie. If you felt like getting up and singing a song, you could do that, and then you could take your leave and make it an early night. Teppei had thought more than once that spending that kind of uneventful, laid-back evening was curiously well suited to his temperament.

“Won't you give us a song? How about it?” the hostess asked Teppei with a false air of urgency, as if the background music had already begun to play. “This may be your last chance, because the guest over there is probably going to get up and treat us to his famous medley any minute now.”

“What sort of medley?” Teppei asked warily.

“War ballads, most likely,” said the hostess, with a dismissive shrug.

“Why don't you sing something, Tats?” Teppei suggested. “I really don't want to be subjected to a medley of depressing war ballads.”

“I'm not really in the mood tonight,” Tatsuji said. “You should get up and sing, though, for sure.” Just then the kimono-clad hostess returned with a list of songs organized in the Japanese way, by vowels:
a, i, u, e, o
.

Okay
,
fine
, Teppei thought.
I'll sing one song, and then we'll go home
. From time to time when he was out drinking, he would suddenly find himself wondering what he was doing in that place. He would be overcome by a sensation of detachment, as though he were an untethered balloon floating through the air, and he would start to feel exceedingly restless and displaced. That's what was happening to him tonight.

Now, as always, it wasn't because he was tired or tipsy. He just felt a soul-deep craving to find a place where he was truly, entirely at home. It gave him a hollow, empty feeling to think that maybe there was no such place, and never would be—not even in the bosom of his family, whom he loved with all his heart. There were times when the almost cosmic feelings of emptiness and loneliness seemed to threaten to suck him into an existential whirlpool. At moments like that, he would usually crack a joke to hide his true emotions.

As Teppei leafed idly through the list of songs, his eye came to rest on one title: “The Foghorn Is Calling Me.” It was an old song, circa 1960, made famous by the late actor and singer Keiichiro Akagi. Teppei had learned the lyrics by osmosis when he was a boy, because a certain university student in the neighborhood used to go around incessantly crooning that song.

“I'll sing this one,” Teppei said, and when Tatsuji saw the selection he chuckled derisively. “You're really showing your age, old man,” he teased. “Is that blast from the past the kind of thing you like to sing these days?”

“This'll be the first time I've done it as karaoke,” Teppei said, ignoring the jibe. “Though I must admit that I've been known to sing it in my bathtub on occasion.”

“I doubt whether Misao…” Tatsuji began, then quickly stopped and bit his lip before correcting himself. “I mean, I doubt if Sis even knows that song.”

“You're right,” Teppei said. “She's from the generation that grew up with Western pop songs.”

Teppei was acutely aware that Tatsuji found it difficult, unnatural even, to call his current sister-in-law “Sis” in the customary way. The only person Tatsuji had ever been able to address easily as “Sis” was Reiko.

While Teppei didn't appreciate his brother's attitude, he understood it. He had been married to Reiko for only a fraction of the number of years he'd now spent with Misao, but everything he and Reiko did as a couple had been impeccably conventional and proper: the wedding, the reception, the honeymoon, the respectful visits to each other's parents. His early relationship with Misao, by contrast, had been characterized by furtiveness, secrecy, and lies.

Tatsuji had been very attached to Reiko. No, maybe “attached” wasn't the right word. It would be more accurate to say that he admired and looked up to her. Reiko was the old-fashioned type of woman who radiates an aura of quiet, deferential serenity, and Tatsuji had frequently remarked that she seemed to have stepped out of an early novel by Natsume Soseki. He seemed to see Reiko as the embodiment of the womanly ideal, so Teppei was mystified when his younger brother fell in love with Naomi, who didn't resemble the docile, sedate Reiko in any discernible way.

No one who knew Reiko was likely to perceive her as an independent modern woman with a firm grip on the pragmatic realities of life. She had a way of smiling vaguely when other people were talking, and the faraway look in her eyes gave the impression she was off in a private world of her own. She never seemed to react strongly to anything, either way, and her passive equanimity could make other people feel uncomfortable. In retrospect, Teppei thought his first wife might have been one of those women who somehow manages to live her life without ever learning how to communicate effectively. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, Reiko had failed to acquire the basic tools of self-expression, and perhaps that was why she had reacted to Teppei's betrayal with such an extreme gesture.

Just as Teppei had pushed Tatsuji around when they were children, and had spoken to his brother in a deliberately heartless, hurtful way, at some point in his first marriage he began to address the emotionally buttoned-up Reiko in a way that was unkind, if not downright sadistic. Then he fell in love with Misao, and the more deeply they became involved the more repelled he was by the way Reiko clung to her usual placidly graceful demeanor, with no visible changes in her behavior even after she realized what was going on.

Teppei's negative feelings toward Reiko continued up until (and through) the instant in the entryway when he realized that she had committed suicide. His first thought when he saw her hanging from the ceiling was,
Oh, great, now I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty about the way I treated this pathetic woman
. Of course, he was in shock, but at that moment he felt more resentment than sorrow, by far.

In the immediate aftermath of Reiko's death, everyone around Teppei was amazed by how cool and calm he was. Strangely, he was never suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of remorse, nor did he ever think,
I'm entirely to blame for everything
. He kept expecting that guilty-conscience revelation to strike at any moment, but meanwhile he and Misao continued to see each other. Time passed and now, seven years later, entire days went by when Reiko's tragic death didn't cross his mind at all.

Although Misao did have a demure side, she was far more modern than Reiko: perpetually cheerful and exceptionally adept at expressing her feelings, which tended to run very deep. But Teppei was aware that while he saw Misao as an unusually genuine and cosmopolitan woman, she probably appeared quite ordinary and unremarkable to Tatsuji. In addition, Tatsuji clearly still saw his brother's current wife as a woman who had, in effect, murdered Reiko, and no one knew better than Teppei that his brother had taken a deep dislike to Misao from the beginning. It was also obvious that all these years later, Tatsuji still hadn't begun to forgive Teppei.

“Earth to Tepp—you're up! Here's the mic,” the hostess said perkily, handing Teppei the portable microphone. The recorded instrumental introduction to the song began to play. Looking away in a blatant display of indifference, Tatsuji lit a cigarette.

Without leaving his seat, Teppei began to sing, keeping his eyes on the page of lyrics on the table in front of him. The balding man abruptly stopped his raucous repartee with the hostesses and fixed his eyes on Teppei. He had a fat, ruddy, oily-looking face—the face, Teppei thought, of someone who might drop dead any moment from a heart attack or a cerebral aneurysm. The man took a big gulp of cognac, then stuck a cigar in his mouth and lit it. He was the type of man who always gave an impression of crudeness and vulgarity, no matter what he was doing. Only the eyes seemed alive in that overstuffed face, glittering ferociously like those of some wild beast monitoring its prey.

Tatsuji, sitting next to Teppei in the padded booth, made an ostentatious show of glancing at his watch.
You little brat
, Teppei thought, but he went on singing without missing a beat.
You think I wouldn't rather be on the way home, too?
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that going out drinking with his resentful younger brother really wasn't enjoyable at all.

The balding man said something to the hostess, then went back to staring at Teppei. The man's fleshy lips wore a knowing smirk, but there was no laughter in his eyes. Teppei's already minimal desire to sing had now evaporated completely, and when he reached the end of the second verse he placed the microphone on the table.

“Wait, what about the third verse?” the hostess asked.

“That's okay, I'm done,” Teppei said with a doleful smile. “That song is just too old, and I got sick of singing it about halfway through. Hey, Tats, I don't know about you, but I'm going to hit the road.”

“Hang on, I'll just be a minute,” Tatsuji said as he stood up and headed toward the restroom. The abandoned karaoke track continued playing until it reached the end of the song. The bald man and the three hostesses applauded halfheartedly.

In the instant before the karaoke machine reverted to background-music mode, a rare silence enveloped the room. Then the shiny-pated man, without removing the cigar from between his teeth, said to no one in particular: “Oddly enough, everyone who sings that song seems to end up dead.”

“You shouldn't say such wicked things!” one of the hostesses admonished the man in a low voice—moved, perhaps, by consideration for Teppei's feelings. The stranger's gaze seemed to be fixed on something in the far distance, but after a long beat he turned to catch Teppei's eye and muttered, “Seriously, I've personally known three people who died not too long after singing that song.”

Teppei made no response. Every club or bar seemed to have one or two characters like this man, and the best tactic was to ignore them. Just then Tatsuji returned, and the two brothers left the bar together.

“Hey,” Teppei said with a laugh as they walked toward the station, “it looks like I'm doomed. That old geezer was saying that everyone who sings the foghorn song ends up dying soon after, as a direct result.”

“Really?” Tatsuji's eyes widened in surprise. “That's hard to believe. Maybe he was thinking about Keiichiro Akagi, who died young in an accident on a movie set?”

“I don't know, but when I get home I'm going to ask Misao to scatter some salt on the doorstep, just to be safe,” Teppei quipped.

“Huh,” Tatsuji snorted. “To me, you always seem like the type of man who wouldn't die even if someone killed you, as the saying goes. I'm sure you'd be immune to a silly curse like that, if such a thing existed.” On the surface Tatsuji's words sounded like a compliment, but Teppei thought he detected a needling subtext.

At the station, as they were about to head off to their respective train platforms, Tatsuji said, “One of these days Naomi and I need to stop by and bring you a housewarming gift. It's been too long since I've seen Tamao and, um, Sis.”

“It has been a while,” Teppei said. “Please feel free to drop by anytime.”

“Thanks. We'll do that soon, for sure. Evenings are probably out, though, since Naomi isn't big on graveyards after dark.”

Teppei felt like suggesting that spending a night locked inside a cemetery might improve Naomi's attitude, but he managed to suppress that impulse.

Instead, he bid his brother a hasty good-bye, and they went their separate ways.

 

4

March 21, 1987

When Misao got up that morning and gazed out from the balcony, she saw that the usually deserted graveyard was teeming with families. With all the people running around, it almost looked like one of those hedge mazes sometimes seen at botanical gardens or amusement parks. Children were playing among the rows of neatly laid-out gravestones, and seen from the eighth floor, the legions of long, narrow wooden grave markers simply looked like decorative posts.

It was the day of the vernal equinox, also known as the spring solstice—the official end of winter. The air was pleasantly warm; there was no wind to speak of, and not a cloud in sight. It was perfect weather for a picnic.

No doubt the weather reporter on the midday news would say something formulaic, along the lines of “Today is the first day of spring. The Tokyo area will be blessed with clear and cloudless skies, and city dwellers will no doubt be setting out in droves to pay their respects at memorial parks within the city limits and in the outlying countryside, as well.”

The verbiage never changes,
Misao thought. The terms that the newscasters used for describing fine weather on holidays seemed to be set in stone. Really, she couldn't remember a single time when she had heard one of them use any phrasing other than the predictable “blessed with clear and cloudless skies” or “city dwellers setting out in droves.” The TV announcers were inordinately fond of expressions like “frolic among the gravestones,” as well. In fairness, though, that was exactly what the people outside Misao's window appeared to be doing at that very moment.

Just as Misao finished hanging the week's accumulated laundry out on the sunny, south-facing balcony to dry, Tamao and Teppei returned from taking Cookie for a walk.

“I only ran a few laps, but look at me—I'm covered with sweat,” Teppei said, swiping at the perspiration that gleamed on his forehead. “It's really warm out there. Not just that, but you know the little road in front of the temple? There are so many people coming in from outside that it looks like rush hour on the train platform. We saw lots of folks laying out their lunches on the grass at the entrance to the graveyard, too.”