After dark

16

The drab storage basement where the band is allowed to practice at night. No windows. High ceiling with exposed pipes. Smoking is prohibited here because of the poor ventilation. As the night draws to a close, the formal practice has ended and the musicians are jamming. There are ten of them altogether. Two are women: the pianist at the keyboard and the soprano-sax player, who is sitting this one out.

Backed up by electric piano, acoustic bass, and drums, Takahashi is playing a long trombone solo. Sonny Rollins’s “Sonnymoon for Two,” a midtempo blues. His performance is not bad, marked less by technique than by his almost conversational phrasing. Perhaps it is a reflection of his personality. Eyes closed, he immerses himself in the music. The tenor sax, alto sax, and trumpet throw in simple riffs every now and then. Those not playing are drinking coffee from a thermos jar, checking their sheet music, or working on their instruments as they listen. Some call out now and then to urge Takahashi on during the pauses in his solo.

Enclosed in bare walls, the music is loud; the drummer plays almost entirely with brushes. A long plank and tubular chairs comprise a makeshift table, on top of which are scattered takeout pizza boxes, the thermos jar of coffee, paper cups, sheet music, a small tape recorder, and saxophone reeds. The heating here is almost nonexistent. People play in coats and jackets. Some band members sitting out have donned scarves and gloves. It is a bizarre scene. Takahashi’s long solo ends, the bass takes a chorus, and the four horns join in for the final theme.

When the tune ends, they take a ten-minute break. Everyone seems tired after the long night of practice, and there is less chatting than usual. As they prepare for the next tune, one musician stretches, another takes a hot drink, another nibbles some kind of cookie, a couple go out for a smoke. Only the pianist, a girl with long hair, stays with her instrument during the break, trying out new chord progressions. Takahashi sits in a tubular chair, organizes his sheet music, dismantles his trombone, spills the accumulated saliva on the floor, gives the instrument a quick wipedown, and begins putting it into its case. He is obviously not planning to participate in the next jam.

The tall young bass player comes over and taps him on the shoulder. “That was a great solo, Takahashi. It had real feeling.”

“Thanks,” he says.

The long-haired young man who was playing the trumpet asks him, “Are you calling it a night, Takahashi?”

“Yeah, I’ve got something to do,” he says. “Sorry I can’t help with the clean-up.”

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The Shirakawa house kitchen. On the TV, a beep signals the hour and the NHK news begins. The announcer stares straight into the camera, dutifully reading the news. Shirakawa sits at the table in the dining area, watching the television at low volume. The sound is barely audible. Shirakawa has loosened his tie and is leaning back in his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. The yogurt container is empty. He has no special desire to see the news. Nothing is likely to arouse his interest. He knows that. He just can’t sleep.

On the table, he opens and closes his right hand slowly. This is no ordinary pain he is feeling: it is a pain with memories. He takes a green-labeled Perrier bottle from the refrigerator and uses it to cool the back of his hand. Then he twists off the cap, pours himself a glass of water, and drinks it. He takes off his glasses and massages himself intently around the eyes. Still he feels no sign of sleepiness. His body is clearly suffering from exhaustion, but something in his head is preventing him from sleeping. Something is bothering him, and he can’t seem to get rid of it. He gives up, puts his glasses back on, and turns to the TV screen. The steel export dumping problem. Government measures to rectify the drastic rise of the yen. A mother who killed herself and her two children. She doused her car with gasoline and lit it. A shot of the blackened hulk of the car, still smoking. Time for the Christmas retail wars to begin.

The night is nearly over, but for him the night will not end so easily. Soon his family will be getting up. He wants to be asleep by then for sure.

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A room in the Hotel Alphaville. Mari is sunk deep in a chair, napping. Her feet, in white socks, rest on a low glass table. In sleep, she wears a look of relief. Her thick book lies facedown on the table, spread open at the halfway point. The ceiling lights are on. The brightness of the room is apparently of no concern to Mari. The TV is switched off and silent. The bed is made. The only sound is the monotonous hum of the heater on the ceiling.

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Eri Asai’s room.

Eri Asai is back on this side now. She is sleeping in her own bed in her own room again. Face turned toward the ceiling, she lies utterly still. Even her breathing is inaudible. This is the same view we had the first time we entered this room. Heavy silence, sleep of frightening density. Waveless, mirrorlike surface of the waters of thought. She floats there face-up. We can find no hint of disorder in the room. The TV screen is cold and dead, like the far side of the moon again. Could she have succeeded in escaping from that enigmatic room? Could a door have opened for her somehow?

No one answers our questions. Our question marks are sucked, unresisting, into the final darkness and uncompromising silence of the night. All we know for sure is that Eri Asai has come back to her own bed in this room. As far as our eyes can tell, she has managed safely to return to this side, her outlines intact. She must have succeeded in escaping through a door at the last moment. Or perhaps she was able to discover a different exit.

In any case it appears that the strange sequence of events that occurred in this room during the night has ended once and for all. A cycle has been completed, all disturbances have been resolved, perplexities have been concealed, and things have returned to their original state. Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium. Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. None of our principles have any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.

Free of all confusion, Eri now sleeps decorously in her bed. Her black hair fans out on her pillow in elegant, wordless significance. We can sense the approach of dawn. The deepest darkness of the night has now passed.

But is this actually true?


Inside the 7-Eleven. Trombone case hanging from his shoulder, Takahashi is choosing food with a deadly serious look in his eye. He will be going back to his apartment to sleep but will need something to eat when he wakes up. He is the only customer in the store. Shikao Suga’s “Bomb Juice” is playing from the ceiling speakers. Takahashi picks up a tuna sandwich packed in plastic and a carton of milk. He compares the expiration date on this carton with those on other cartons. Milk is a food of great significance in his life. He cannot ignore the slightest detail where milk is concerned.

At this very instant, a cell phone on the cheese shelf begins to ring. This is the phone that Shirakawa left there shortly before. Takahashi scowls and stares at it suspiciously. Who could possibly have left a cell phone in a place like this? He glances toward the cash register, but there is no sign of the clerk. The phone keeps ringing. Takahashi finally takes the small silver phone in his hand and presses the talk button.

“Hello?”

“You’ll never get away,” a man’s voice says instantly. “You will never get away. No matter how far you run, we’re going to get you.”

The voice is flat, as though the man is reading a printed text. No emotion comes through. Takahashi, of course, has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Takahashi says, his voice louder than before. But his words seem not to reach the man at the other end, who goes on talking in those same unaccented tones as though leaving a message on voice mail.

“We’re going to tap you on the shoulder someday. We know what you look like.”

“What the hell…”

“If somebody taps you on the shoulder somewhere someday, it’s us,” the man says.

Takahashi has no idea what he should say in response to this. He keeps silent. Having been left in a refrigerator case for a while, the phone feels uncomfortably cold in his hand.

“You might forget what you did, but we will never forget.”

“Hey, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m telling you you’ve got the wrong guy,” Takahashi says.

“You’ll never get away.”

The connection is cut. The circuit goes dead. The final message lies abandoned on a deserted beach. Takahashi stares at the cell phone in his hand. He has no idea who the man’s “we” are or who was meant to receive the call, but the sound of the voice remains in his ear—the one with the deformed earlobe—like an absurd curse that leaves a bad aftertaste. He has a smooth, cold feeling in his hand, as if he has just grabbed a snake.

Somebody, for some reason, is being chased by a number of people, Takahashi imagines. Judging from the man’s declarative tone, that somebody will probably never get away. Sometime, somewhere, when he is least expecting it, someone is going to tap him on the shoulder. What will happen after that?

In any case, it has nothing to do with me, Takahashi tells himself. This is one of many violent, bloody acts being performed in secret on the hidden side of the city—things from another world that come in on another circuit. I’m just an innocent passerby. All I did was pick up a cell phone ringing on a convenience-store shelf out of kindness. I figured somebody called because he was trying to track down his lost cell phone.

He closes the phone and puts it back where he found it, next to a box of Camembert cheese wedges. Better not have anything to do with this cell phone anymore. Better get out of here as fast as I can. Better get as far away from that dangerous circuit as I can. He hurries over to the register, grabs a fistful of change from his pocket, and pays for his sandwich and milk.

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Takahashi alone on a park bench. The little park with the cats. No one else around. Two swings side by side, withered leaves covering the ground. Moon up in the sky. He takes his own cell phone from his coat pocket and punches in a number.

The Alphaville room where Mari is. The phone rings. She wakes at the fourth or fifth ring and looks at her watch with a frown. She stands up and takes the receiver.

“Hello,” Mari says, her voice uncertain.

“Hi, it’s me. Were you sleeping?”

“A little,” Mari says. She covers the mouthpiece and clears her throat. “It’s okay. I was just napping in a chair.”

“Wanna go for breakfast? At that restaurant I told you about with the great omelets? I’m pretty sure they have other good stuff, too.”

“Practice over?” Mari asks, but she hardly recognizes her own voice. I am me and not me.

“It sure is. And I’m starved. How about you?”

“Not really, tell you the truth. I feel more like going home.”

“That’s okay, too. I’ll walk you to the station. I think the trains have started running.”

“I’m sure I can walk from here to the station by myself,” Mari says.

“I’d like to talk to you some more if possible. Let’s talk on the way to the station. If you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Okay?”

“Okay,” Mari says.

Takahashi cuts the connection, folds his phone, and puts it in his pocket. He gets up from the park bench, takes one big stretch, and looks up at the sky. Still dark. The same crescent moon is floating there. Strange that, viewed from one spot in the predawn city, such a big solid object could be hanging there free of charge.

“You’ll never get away,” Takahashi says aloud while looking at the crescent moon.

The enigmatic ring of those words will remain inside Takahashi as a kind of metaphor. “You’ll never get away…. You might forget what you did, but we will never forget,” the man on the phone said. The more Takahashi thinks about their meaning, the more it seems to him that the words were intended not for someone else but for him—directly, personally. Maybe it was no accident. Maybe the cell phone was lurking on that convenience-store shelf, waiting specifically for him to pass by. “We,” Takahashi thinks. Who could this “we” possibly be? And what will “we” never forget?

Takahashi slings his instrument case and his tote bag over his shoulder and starts walking toward the Alphaville at a leisurely pace. As he walks, he rubs the whiskers that have begun to sprout on his cheeks. The final darkness of the night envelops the city like a thin skin. Garbage trucks begin to appear on the streets. As they collect their loads and move on, people who have spent the night in various parts of the city begin to take their place, walking toward subway stations, intent upon catching those first trains that will take them out to the suburbs, like schools of fish swimming upstream. People who have finally finished the work they must do all night, young people who are tired from playing all night: whatever the differences in their situations, both types are equally reticent. Even the young couple who stop at a drink vending machine, tightly pressed against each other, have no more words for each other. Instead, what they soundlessly share is the lingering warmth of their bodies.

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side—which world—contains his center of gravity.