After dark

9

Skylark interior. Fewer customers than before. The noisy student group is gone. Mari is sitting by the window, reading again. Her glasses are off. Her hat is on the table. Her bag and varsity jacket are on the next seat. The table holds a plate of little square sandwiches and a cup of herbal tea. The sandwiches are half gone.

Takahashi comes in. He is not carrying anything. He looks around, sees Mari, and heads straight for her table.

“Hey, how’s it goin’?”

Mari looks up, registers that it is Takahashi, and gives him a little nod. She doesn’t say anything.

“Okay if I join you?” he asks.

“Fine,” she says, her voice neutral.

He sits down facing her. He takes off his coat and yanks up the sleeves of his sweater. The waitress comes and takes his order: coffee.

Takahashi looks at his watch. “Three a.m. This is the darkest part of the night—and the hardest part. You’re not sleepy?”

“Not especially.”

“I didn’t sleep much last night. Had a tough report to write.”

Mari doesn’t say anything.

“Kaoru told me you’d probably be here.”

Mari nods.

Takahashi says, “Sorry for putting you through that. The Chinese girl, I mean. I was practicing and Kaoru called me on my cell phone and asked me if I knew anybody who spoke Chinese. None of us could, of course, but then I thought of you. I told her she’d find this girl named Mari Asai in Denny’s, and what you look like and that you’re fluent in Chinese. I hope it wasn’t too big a pain for you.”

Mari rubs the marks her glasses left on her skin. “No, don’t worry.”

“Kaoru says you were a tremendous help. She was really grateful. I think she likes you.”

Mari changes the subject. “You finished practicing?”

“Taking a break,” Takahashi says. “I wanted to wake myself up with some hot coffee—and say thanks to you. I was worried about the interruption.”

“What interruption?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I figured it must have interrupted something you were doing.”

“Do you enjoy performing music?” Mari asks.

“Yeah. It’s the next-best thing to flying through the air.”

“Oh? Have you flown through the air?”

Takahashi smiles. He holds the smile while inserting a pause. “Not all by myself, no,” he says. “It’s just a figure of speech.”

“Are you planning to be a professional musician?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not that talented. I love to play, but I could never make a living at it. There’s a big difference between playing well and playing really creatively. I think I’m pretty good on my instrument. People say they like my playing, and I enjoy hearing that, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m gonna quit the band at the end of the month and basically cut my ties with music.”

“What do you mean, ‘playing really creatively’? Can you give me a concrete example?”

“Hmm, let’s see…You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It’s giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.”

“Sounds hard.”

“It is hard,” Takahashi says. “That’s why I’m getting off. I’m gonna change trains at the next station.”

“You won’t even touch your instrument anymore?”

He turns his hands palm-upward on the table. “Maybe not.”

“Gonna take a job?”

Takahashi shakes his head again. “No, that I’m not going to do.”

After a pause, Mari asks, “Then what are you going to do?”

“Study law seriously. Take the National Bar Exam.”

Mari keeps silent, but her curiosity seems to have been piqued.

“It’ll take a while, I suppose,” he says. “Officially, I’ve been in pre-law all along, but the band is all I’ve ever thought about. I’ve been studying law like it was just another subject. Even if I change my attitude and start studying hard now, it won’t be easy to catch up. Life’s not that simple.”

The waitress brings his coffee. Takahashi adds cream, clanks his spoon around in the cup, and drinks.

Then he says, “To tell you the truth, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever wanted to study something seriously. I’ve never had bad grades. They weren’t especially good, but they weren’t bad, either. I could always get the point of things where it really mattered, so I could always manage with the grades. I’m good at that. Which is why I got into a pretty good school, and if I keep up what I’m doing now, I can probably get a job at a pretty good company. So then I’ll probably make a pretty good marriage and have a pretty good home…you see? But now I’m sick of the whole thing. All of a sudden.”

“Why?”

“Why did I suddenly start thinking I wanted to study seriously?”

“Yeah.”

Holding his coffee cup between his hands, Takahashi narrows his eyes and looks at her as if peeking into a room through a crack in a window. “Are you asking because you really want an answer?”

“Of course. Don’t people usually ask questions because they want answers?”

“Logically, yes. But some people ask questions just to be polite.”

“I don’t know. Why would I have to ask you questions just to be polite?”

“Well, true.” Takahashi thought about this a moment and returned his cup to his saucer with a dry clink. “Okay. Do you want the long version or the short version?”

“Medium.”

“You got it. One medium-size answer coming up.”

Takahashi took a moment to get his thoughts in order.

“I attended a few trials this year between April and June. In the Tokyo District Court in Kasumigaseki. It was an assignment for a seminar: to sit in on a number of trials and write a report. Uh…have you ever been to a trial?”

Mari shakes her head.

Takahashi says, “The court is like a cinema complex. They’ve got this big board near the entrance where they list all the trials and their starting times like a program guide, and you pick one that looks like it might be interesting to you and you go and sit there as an observer. Anybody can get in. You just can’t bring in any cameras or tape recorders. Or food. And you’re not allowed to talk. Plus the seats are cramped, and if you doze off the bailiff gets after you. But you can’t complain: the admission is free.”

Takahashi pauses before continuing.

“I mostly attended criminal trials—assault and bodily injury, arson, robbery, and murder. Bad guys who did bad things and got caught and put on trial and punished. Those are the easy ones to understand, right? With economically or ideologically motivated crimes, you have to know the background, and things can get complicated. It’s hard to tell good from bad. All I wanted to do was write my paper, get a halfway decent grade, and that would be that. Like a grade-school kid’s summer home- work assignment: keep a morning-glory observation diary.”

Takahashi breaks off talking at that point. His hands are on the table. He looks at his own palms.

“After I’d been to the court a few times, though, and observed a few cases, I started to become strangely interested in viewing the events that were being judged and the people who were involved in the events. Maybe I should say I found myself less and less able to see these as other people’s problems. It was a very weird feeling. I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they’re a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there’s this thick, high wall. At least, that’s how I saw it at first. I mean, there’s no way I’m gonna commit those vicious crimes. I’m a pacifist, a good- natured guy, I’ve never laid a hand on anybody since I was a kid. Which is why I was able to view a trial from on high as a total spectator.”

Takahashi raises his face and looks at Mari. Then he chooses his words carefully.

“As I sat in court, though, and listened to the testimonies of the witnesses and the speeches of the prosecutors and the arguments of the defense attorneys and the statements of the defendants, I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-maché. The second I leaned on it, I’d probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe it’s that the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven’t noticed. That’s how I started to feel. It’s hard to put into words.”

Takahashi ran his finger around the perimeter of his coffee cup.

“So once I started having thoughts like this, everything began looking different to me. To my eyes, this system I was observing, this ‘trial’ thing itself, began to take on the appearance of some special, weird creature.”

“Weird creature?”

“Like, say, an octopus. A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean. I’m sitting there listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.”

Mari’s eyes are locked on his.

Takahashi takes a sip of his coffee. “Am I being a little too grim here?”

“Don’t worry, I’m listening,” Mari says.

Takahashi returns his cup to its saucer. “Two years ago, there was this case of arson and murder in Tachikawa. A guy killed an old couple with an axe, grabbed their bank- book, and set fire to their house to get rid of the evidence. It was a windy night, and four houses burned down. The guy was sentenced to death. In terms of current Japanese legal precedent, it was the obvious sentence for a case like that. Any time you murder two or more people, the death sentence is almost automatic. Hanging. And this guy was guilty of arson, too. Plus, he was a real bastard. He had been locked up any number of times, usually for something violent. His family had given up on him years ago. He was a drug addict, and every time they let him out of jail, he’d commit another crime. In this case, he didn’t show an ounce of remorse. An appeal would have been rejected for sure. His lawyer, a public defender, knew from the start he was going to lose. So no one could be surprised when they came back with a death sentence, and in fact nobody was surprised. I sat there listening to the judge read the verdict, taking notes, and thinking how obvious it was. After the trial, I took the subway home from Kasumigaseki, sat down at my desk, and started putting my notes in order when all of a sudden I got this absolutely hopeless feeling. I don’t know how to put it: it was like the whole world’s electricity supply suffered a voltage drop. Everything got one step darker, one step colder. Little tremors started going through my body, and I couldn’t stop shivering. Soon I even felt my eyes tearing up. Why should that be? I can’t explain it. Why did I have to lose it like that just because that guy got the death penalty? I mean, he was a total scumbag, beyond any hope of redemption. Between him and me, there shouldn’t have been anything in common, no link at all. And yet, I had this deep emotional upset. Why should that have been?”

His question remains just that—a question, hanging in the air between them for a good thirty seconds. Mari is waiting for him to go on with his story.

Takahashi continues: “What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.”

He stares at the space above the table and heaves a long sigh.

“Anyhow, that day was a turning point for me. After that I decided to study law seriously. I figured that’s where I might find whatever I was looking for. Studying the law is not as much fun as making music, but what the hell, that’s life. That’s what it means to grow up.”

Silence.

“And that’s your medium-size answer?”

Takahashi nods. “Maybe it was a little long. I’ve never told this to anybody before, so I had trouble gauging the size…Uh, those little sandwiches you’ve got sitting on your plate: if you’re not planning to eat them, mind if I have one?”

“All that’s left are tuna fish.”

“That’s okay. I love tuna fish. You don’t?”

“No, I do, but mercury builds up in your body if you eat tuna fish.”

“Yeah?”

“If you’ve got mercury in your body, you can start having heart attacks in your forties. And you can start losing your hair.”

Takahashi frowns. “So you can’t have chicken, and you can’t have tuna?”

Mari nods.

“And both just happen to be some of my favorite foods.”

“Sorry.”

“I like potato salad a lot, too. Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with potato salad…?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Mari says. “Except, if you eat too much it’ll make you fat.”

“That’s okay,” Takahashi says. “I’m too skinny as it is.”

Takahashi picks up a tuna sandwich and eats it with obvious pleasure.

“So anyhow, are you planning to stay a student until you pass the bar exam?” Mari asks.

“Yeah, I guess so. I’ll just be scraping by for a while, I suppose, doing odd jobs.”

Mari is thinking about something.

Takahashi asks her, “Have you ever seen Love Story? It’s an old movie.”

Mari shakes her head.

“They had it on TV the other day. It’s pretty good. Ryan O’Neal is the only son of an old-money family, but in college he marries a girl from a poor Italian family and gets disowned. They even stop paying his tuition. The two manage to scrape by and keep up their studies until he graduates from Harvard Law School with honors and joins a big law firm.”

Takahashi pauses to take a breath. Then he goes on:

“The way Ryan O’Neal does it, living in poverty can be kind of elegant—wearing a thick white sweater, throwing snowballs with Ali MacGraw, Francis Lai’s sentimental music playing in the background. But something tells me I wouldn’t fit the part. For me, poverty would be just plain poverty. I probably couldn’t even get the snow to pile up for me like that.”

Mari is still thinking about something.

Takahashi continues: “So after Ryan O’Neal has slaved away to become a lawyer, they never give the audience any idea what kind of work he does. All we know is he joins this top law firm and pulls in a salary that would make anybody envious. He lives in a fancy Manhattan high-rise with a doorman out front, joins a WASP sports club, and plays squash with his yuppie friends. That’s all we know.”

Takahashi drinks his water.

“So what happens after that?” Mari asks.

Takahashi looks upward, recalling the plot. “Happy ending. The two live happily ever after. Love conquers all. It’s like: we used to be miserable, but now everything’s great. They drive a shiny new Jaguar, he plays squash, and sometimes in winter they throw snowballs. Meanwhile, the father who disowned Ryan O’Neal comes down with diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and Ménière’s disease and dies a lonely, miserable death.”

“I don’t get it. What’s so good about a story like that?”

Takahashi cocks his head. “Hmm, what did I like about it? I can’t remember. I had stuff to do, so I didn’t watch the last part very closely…Hey, how about a walk? A little change of atmosphere? There’s a tiny park down the street where the cats like to gather. We can feed them your leftover tuna-mercury sandwiches. I’ve got a fish cake, too. You like cats?”

Mari nods, puts her book in her bag, and stands up.


Takahashi and Mari walk down the street. They are not talking now. Takahashi is whistling. A black Honda motorcycle passes close to them, dropping its speed. It is the bike driven by the Chinese man who picked up the woman at Alphaville—the man with the ponytail. His full- face helmet is off now, and he scans his surroundings with great care. Between him and them, there is no point of contact. The deep rumble of the engine draws close to them and passes by.

Mari asks Takahashi, “How did you and Kaoru get to know each other?”

“I’ve been doing odd jobs at that hotel for the past six months or so. Alphaville. Dirty work—washing floors and stuff. Some computer stuff, too—installing software, fixing glitches. I even put in their security camera. Only women work there, so they’re happy to get a man’s help once in a while.”

“How did you happen to start working there specifically?”

Takahashi has a moment of confusion. “Specifically?”

“I mean, something must have led you to start working there,” Mari says. “I think Kaoru was being purposely vague about it…”

“That’s kind of a tough one…”

Mari keeps silent.

“Oh, well,” Takahashi says, as if resigning himself to the inevitable. “The truth is, I once took a girl there. As a customer, I mean. Afterwards, when it was time to go, I realized I didn’t have enough money. The girl didn’t, either. We had been drinking and really hadn’t thought much about that part. All I could do was leave my student ID with them.”

Mari offers no comment.

“The whole thing’s kind of embarrassing,” Takahashi says. “So I went the next day to pay the rest. Kaoru invited me to stay for a cup of tea, and we talked about this and that, at the end of which she told me to start part-time work there the next day. She practically forced me into it. The pay’s not much good, but they feed me once in a while. And my band’s practice space was something Kaoru found for us. She looks like a tough guy, but she’s actually a very caring person. I still stop in for a visit now and then. And they still call me if a computer goes out of whack or something.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“The one who went to the hotel with me?”

Mari nods.

“That was it for us,” Takahashi says. “I haven’t seen her since then. I’m sure she was disgusted with me. I really blew it. But anyhow, it’s no big deal. I wasn’t that crazy about her. We would have broken up sooner or later.”

“Do you do that a lot—go to hotels with girls you’re not particularly crazy about?”

“Hell no. I couldn’t afford it, for one thing. That was the first time I ever went to a love hotel.”

The two continue walking.

As if offering an excuse, Takahashi says, “And besides, it wasn’t my idea. She was the one who suggested we go to a place like that. Really.”

Mari says nothing.

“Well, anyhow, that would be another long story if I got started,” says Takahashi. “All kinds of stuff led up to what happened…”

“You seem to have a lot of long stories…”

“Maybe I do,” he says. “I wonder why that is.”

Mari says, “Before, you told me you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“Right. I’m an only child.”

“If you went to the same high school as Eri, your family must be here in Tokyo. Why aren’t you living with them? It’d be a lot cheaper that way.”

“That would be another long story,” he says.

“You don’t have a short version?”

“I do. A really short version. Wanna hear it?”

“Uh-huh,” Mari says.

“My mother’s not my biological mother.”

“So you don’t get along with her?”

“No, it’s not that we don’t get along. I’m just not the kind of guy who likes to stand up and rock the boat. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend every day making chitchat and putting on a smiley face at the dinner table. Being alone has never been hard for me. Besides, I haven’t got such a great relationship with my father.”

“You don’t like each other?”

“Well, let’s just say our personalities are different. And our values.”

“What does he do?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” Takahashi says. “But I’m almost one hundred percent sure that it’s nothing to be proud of. And besides—this is not something I go around telling people—he spent a few years in prison when I was a kid. He was an antisocial type—a criminal. That’s another reason I don’t want to live with my family. I start having doubts about my genes.”

“And that’s your really short version?” Mari asks in mock horror, smiling.

Takahashi looks at her and says, “That’s the first time you’ve smiled all night.”