—
Masahiko’s black Volvo station wagon came trundling up the slope shortly before four o’clock on Saturday afternoon. He loved the toughness and reliability of those old boxy cars. He’d driven this one seemingly forever, put a ton of miles on it, yet showed no inclination to trade it in for a new one. On this occasion, he brought along the special carving knife he used for fish. As always, it was razor sharp. In my kitchen, he used it to prepare the large, fresh sea bream he had just bought in Itoh. Masahiko had always been good with his hands, a man of many talents. Without a wasted motion, he filleted the fish, sliced the flesh into sashimi, and boiled the bones for broth. He lightly grilled the skin to nibble on with our drinks. I just stood there, enjoying the show. Who knows, he might have been a famous chef had he taken that route.
“Actually, it’s best to let sashimi sit a day until the flesh softens and the flavor comes out, but what the hell,” he said, deftly plying the knife. “You can handle it, right?”
“No problem—I’m not picky,” I said.
“You can eat any leftovers tomorrow.”
“Will do.”
“Hey, do you mind if I crash here tonight?” Masahiko asked. “I’d like to stay the evening so we can hang out and drink without feeling rushed. Drinking and driving is no good, right? I can sleep on the sofa in the living room.”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s your house, after all. Stay as long as you like.”
“Are you sure some woman won’t show up in the middle of the night?”
“No plans as of now,” I replied, shaking my head.
“Okay, then I’ll stay.”
“You don’t have to crash on the sofa—there’s a bed in the guest room.”
“No, I prefer the sofa. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks. Slept like a baby on it back in the old days.”
He pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal, cut the seal, and opened it. I brought ice from the refrigerator and two glasses. The gurgle of whiskey pouring into the glass was music to my ears. Like an old friend opening his heart to me. We sipped the whiskey as we finished preparing dinner.
“It’s been a hell of a long time since you and I drank like this,” Masahiko said.
“It sure feels that way. I remember us putting back a lot.”
“I put back a lot, you mean,” he said. “You never drank that much.”
I laughed. “Maybe not from your point of view, but it was a lot for me.”
I never got totally drunk. I always fell asleep first. But he was a different kind of drinker. Once he settled in for the long haul, he went all the way.
We sat across from each other at the table, sipping whiskey and eating the seafood. For starters, we shared the eight raw oysters he had bought with the sea bream. Then we dug into the sashimi. It was a bit too firm, as he had predicted, but it was delicious nonetheless, especially with the whiskey. By the end, we had polished it all off. We were already pretty full. The only other food was the crispy fish skin, small chunks of wasabi mixed with sake lees, and a dish of tofu. We topped off the meal with the soup he had prepared.
“I haven’t had a feast like this in ages,” I said.
“You can’t eat like this in Tokyo,” he said. “Living around here wouldn’t be half bad. Fresh fish anytime.”
“I bet you’d find life here boring eventually, though.”
“Are you bored?”
“Am I? I guess I’ve never found boredom that painful. And besides, there’s quite a lot going on here.”
That was for sure. I had met Menshiki soon after my arrival in early summer, we had dug up the pit behind the shrine, then the Commendatore had made his appearance, and finally Mariye Akikawa and her aunt Shoko had entered my life. I had a girlfriend, a housewife in her sexual prime, who came to comfort me. Tomohiko Amada’s living spirit had paid me a visit. There was hardly time to be bored.
“I might not be bored here either,” Masahiko said. “Did you know I used to be into surfing? I rode the waves all up and down this coast.”
That was news to me, I told him. He’d never mentioned it before.
“I’ve been thinking of leaving Tokyo, of going back to that kind of life. I’d check out the ocean when I woke up, then grab my board and head out if the surf was up.”
The idea of that kind of life left me cold.
“What about your job?” I asked.
“I only need to go to Tokyo twice a week to take care of business. Most of my work is done on computer anyway, so it wouldn’t be that hard to live outside the city. The world’s changing, right?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He looked at me in amazement. “This is the twenty-first century, man. Haven’t you heard?”
“I’ve heard talk.”
* * *
—
After dinner, we moved to the living room to continue drinking. Autumn was almost over, but it wasn’t so cold that we needed to light a fire.
“So then, how’s your father doing these days?” I asked.
Masahiko let out a small sigh. “Same as always. His mind is shot. Can’t tell the difference between his balls and a pair of eggs.”
“If it breaks when you drop it, it’s an egg,” I said.
He laughed. “People are strange creatures, aren’t they? I mean, my father was as solid as a rock until just a few years ago. Mind as clear as the night sky in winter. To an almost disgusting degree. And now his memory is like a black hole. This dark, unfathomable hole that popped up out of nowhere in the middle of the cosmos.”
Masahiko shook his head.
“Who was it that said, ‘The greatest surprise in life is old age’?” he asked.
I couldn’t help him with that one. I’d never heard the saying. But it was probably true. Old age must be an even bigger shock than death. Far beyond what we can imagine. The day someone tells you that you’re flat-out useless, that your existence is irrelevant—biologically (and socially)—in this world.
“So tell me about this dream you had of my father,” Masahiko asked me. “Was it really as lifelike as you said?”
“Yeah, so lifelike it hardly seemed a dream.”
“And he was in the studio?”
I took him to the studio.
“Your father was sitting there,” I said, pointing to the stool in the middle of the room.
Masahiko walked over to the stool. “Just sitting?” he asked, placing his palm on its seat.
“That’s right. He wasn’t doing anything.”
In fact, his father had been staring at Killing Commendatore on the wall, but I didn’t tell him that.
“My father loved this stool,” he said. “It was just a common old thing, but he never got rid of it. He sat on it to paint, and to think.”
“It’s relaxing to sit on,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”
Masahiko stood there with his hand on the stool, lost in thought. But he didn’t sit down. After a minute, he turned his attention to the two canvases facing it. A Portrait of Mariye Akikawa and The Pit in the Woods, my two works in progress. He examined them slowly and carefully, like a doctor looking for a trace of shadow on a patient’s X-ray.
“These are great,” he said. “Really interesting.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes, both. When you place them side by side like this, you feel a strange kind of movement between them. Their styles are totally different, but you get a sense they’re somehow linked.”
I nodded. I’d been thinking the same thing for a few days, in a vague sort of way.
“It seems to me that, little by little, you’re finding a new direction,” he went on. “Like you’ve finally emerged from a deep forest. You should take this really seriously, old friend.”
He raised his glass and took a swallow of whiskey. The ice cubes tinkled.
I felt an urge to show Masahiko his father’s Killing Commendatore. What would he have to say about it? His comments might provide a valuable clue. But I suppressed the impulse. Something was holding me back.
It’s still too early, it said. Still too early.