FIREFLY
Once upon a time—more like fifteen years ago, actually—I lived in a privately run dorm for college students in Tokyo. I was eighteen then, a brand-new college freshman, and didn’t know the first thing about the city. I’d never lived on my own, either, and my parents were naturally worried; putting me in a dorm seemed the best solution. Money was a factor, too, and the dorm seemed the cheapest way to go. I’d been dreaming of living in my own apartment, having a great old time, but what can you do? My folks were footing the bill for college—tuition and fees, a monthly allowance—so that was that.
The dorm was situated on a generous piece of land on a rise in Bunkyo Ward, and had a fantastic view. The whole place was surrounded by a tall concrete wall, and right inside the main gate stood a huge zelkova tree. Some 150 years old, maybe more. When you stood at its base and looked up, its huge, leafy branches blotted out the sky. The concrete sidewalk detoured around the tree, then ran straight across the courtyard. On either side of the courtyard there were two concrete dorm buildings three stories tall, lined up side by side. Huge buildings. From the open windows somebody’s transistor radio was always blasting out some DJ’s voice. The curtains in the room were all the same color, cream being the color that fades least in the sunlight.
The two-story main building fronted the sidewalk. A dining hall and communal bath were on the first floor, an auditorium, guest rooms, and meeting rooms on the second. Next to the main building was a third dorm building, also three stories. The courtyard was spacious, and sprinklers spun around on the lawn, glinting in the sunlight. Rounding it all out was a playing field for soccer and rugby behind the main building, as well as six tennis courts. Who could ask for more?
The only problem with the dorm (not that everybody was convinced it was a problem, though) was who ran it—some mysterious foundation headed up by a right-wing fanatic. One look at the pamphlet the dorm put out made this clear. The dorm was founded on a spirit of “achieving the basic goals of education and cultivating promising talent to serve the country.” And a lot of well-heeled businessmen who agreed with that philosophy apparently helped underwrite the dorm. At least that was the official story. What lay beneath the surface was, like many things there, anybody’s guess. Rumor had it the whole place was a tax dodge, or some sort of land fraud scheme. Not that this made a bit of difference to the day-to-day life at the dorm. On a practical level, I guess, it didn’t matter who ran it—right-wingers, left-wingers, hypocrites, scoundrels. What have you. Whatever the real story was, from the spring of 1967 to the fall of ’68, I called this dorm home.
Each day at the dorm began with a solemn flag-raising ceremony. The platform for the flag raising was in the middle of the courtyard, so you could see it all from the dorm windows. Of course they played the national anthem. Just like sports news and marches go together, can’t have one without the other.
The role of flag-raiser was played by the head of the east dorm, the one I was in. He was fiftyish, an altogether tough-looking customer. He had bristly hair with a sprinkling of gray, and a long scar on his sunburned neck. It was rumored he was a graduate of the Nakano Military Academy. Next to him was a student who acted as his assistant. The guy was basically an enigma. He had close-cropped hair and always wore a school uniform. Nobody had any idea what his name was or which room he lived in. I’d never run across him in the dining hall or the communal bath. I wasn’t even sure he was a student. But since he wore the uniform, what else could he have been? Unlike Academy Man, he was short, chubby, and pasty-looking. Every morning at six the two of them would hoist the rising sun flag up the flagpole.
I don’t know how many times I watched this little scene play out. The six a.m. chime would ring and there they were in the courtyard, Uniform Boy carrying a light wooden box, Academy Man a portable Sony tape recorder. Academy Man placed the tape recorder at the base of the platform and Uniform Boy opened the box. Inside was a neatly folded Japanese flag. Uniform Boy handed it to the boss, who then attached it to the rope. Uniform Boy switched on the tape recorder.
“May thy peaceful reign last long…” And the flag glided up the flagpole.
When they got to the part that goes “Until these tiny stones…” the flag was halfway up the pole, and it reached the top when they got to the end of the anthem. The two of them snapped to attention and gazed up at the flag. On sunny days when there was a breeze, it was quite a sight.
The evening ceremony was about the same as in the morning, just done in reverse. The flag glided down the pole and was put away in the wooden box. The flag doesn’t wave at night.
Why the flag’s got to be put away at night I have no idea. The country still exists at night, right? And plenty of people are hard at work. Doesn’t seem fair those people can’t have the same flag flying over them. Maybe it’s a silly thing to worry about—just the kind of thought a person like me is likely to fret over.
In the dorm freshmen and sophomores lived two to a room, while juniors and seniors lived alone. The kind of two-man room I inhabited was cramped and narrow. On the wall furthest from the door was a window with an aluminum frame. The furniture was spartan, but solidly built—two desks and chairs, a bunk bed, two lockers, and built-in shelves. In most of the rooms the shelves were crammed full of the usual stuff: transistor radios, blow-dryers, electric coffeepots, instant-coffee jars, sugar, pots for cooking instant noodles, cups and plates. Playboy pinups were taped to the plaster walls, and lined up on the desks were school textbooks, plus the odd popular novel.
With just men living there the rooms were filthy. The bottoms of the trash baskets were lined with moldy orange skins, and the empty tin cans that served as ashtrays contained four-inch-high layers of cigarette butts. Coffee grounds were stuck to the cups, cellophane wrappers from instant-noodle packages and empty beer cans were scattered all over the floor. Whenever the wind blew in, a cloud of dust swirled up from the floor. The rooms stank to high heaven, too, since everyone just stuffed their dirty laundry under their beds. And forget about anyone airing out their bedding, so it all reeked of sweat and BO.
My room, though, was spotless. Not a speck of dirt on the floor, gleaming ashtrays as far as the eye could see. The bedding was aired out once a week, the pencils were lined up neatly in the pencil holders. Instead of a pinup, our room was decked out with a photo of canals in Amsterdam. Why? Simple enough—my roommate was a nut about cleaning. I didn’t lift a finger since he did it all—the laundry, too; even my laundry, if you can imagine. Say I’d just finished a beer; the instant I set the empty down on the table he’d whisk it away to the trash can.
My roommate was a geography major.
“I’m studying about m-m-maps,” he told me.
“So you’re into maps, huh?” I asked.
“That’s right. I want to get hired by the National Geography Institute and make m-maps.”
To each his own, I figured. Up till then I’d never given a thought to what kind of people want to make maps—and why in the world they would. You have to admit, though, that it’s a little weird for someone who wanted to work in the Geography Institute to stutter every time he said the word “map.” He stuttered only part of the time, sometimes not at all. But when the word “map” came up, so did the stutters.
“What’s your major?” he asked me.
“Drama,” I replied.
“Drama? You mean you put on plays?”
“No, I don’t act in plays. I study the scripts. Racine, Ionesco, Shakespeare, guys like that.”
I’ve heard of Shakespeare but not those others, he said. Actually, I didn’t know much about them myself. I was just parroting the course description.
“Anyhow, you like that kind of thing, right?” he asked.
“Not particularly.”
That threw him for a loop. When he got flustered he stuttered worse than usual. I felt like I’d done something awful.
“Any subject’s fine with me,” I hurriedly explained, trying to calm him down. “Indian philosophy, Oriental history, whatever. I just ended up choosing drama. That’s all.”
“I don’t get it,” he insisted, still upset. “In m-m-my case I like m-m-maps, so I’m learning how to make them. That’s why I came all the way to T-T-Tokyo to go to college and had m-m-my parents foot the bill. But you…I don’t g-get it…”
His explanation made more sense than mine. Not worth the effort, I figured, and gave up trying to explain my side of the story. We drew straws to see who’d get the top and bottom bunks. I got the top.
He was tall, with close-cropped hair and prominent cheekbones. He always wore a white shirt and black trousers. When he went to school he invariably wore the school uniform with black shoes, toting a black briefcase. A perfect right-wing student, by the look of it, and certainly the other guys in the dorm tagged him as such. In reality, the guy had zero interest in politics. He just thought it was too much trouble to pick out clothes to wear. The only things that could pique his interest were changes in the shoreline, newly completed tunnels, things like that. Once he got started on those topics he’d go on, stuttering all the while, for a good hour, even two, until you screamed for mercy or fell asleep.
Every morning he was up at six on the dot, the national anthem his alarm clock. So I guess the flag-raising wasn’t a complete waste. He dressed and went to wash up, taking an incredibly long time to finish. Made me wonder sometimes if he wasn’t taking each tooth out and brushing them individually. Back in the room he smoothed out his towel, hung it on a hanger, and put his toothbrush and soap back on the shelf. Then he’d switch on the radio and start exercising to the morning exercise program.
I was pretty much a night owl, and a heavy sleeper, so when he started up I was usually dead to the world. When he got to the part where he began to leap up and down, I’d bolt out of bed. Every time he jumped up—and believe me he jumped really high—my head would bounce three inches off the pillow. Try sleeping through that.
“I’m really sorry,” I said on the fourth day of this, “but I wonder if you could do your exercises on the roof or something. It wakes me up.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “If I do it there, the people on the third floor will complain. This is the first floor, so there isn’t anyone below us.”
“Well, how about doing it in the courtyard?”
“No way. I don’t have a transistor radio so I wouldn’t be able to hear the music. You can’t expect me to do my exercises without music.”
His radio was the kind you had to plug in. I could have lent him my transistor, but it only picked up FM stations.
“Well, at least could you turn the music down and stop jumping? The whole room shakes. I don’t want to complain or anything, but…”
“Jumping?” He seemed surprised. “What do you mean, j-jumping?”
“You know, that part where you bounce up and down.”
“What are you talking about?”
I could feel a headache coming on. Go ahead, suit yourself, I thought. But once I’d brought it up I couldn’t very well back down. So I started to sing the melody of the NHK radio exercise program, jumping up and down in time to the music.
“See? This part. Isn’t that part of your routine?”
“Uh—yeah. Guess so. I hadn’t noticed.”
“So—,” I said, “any chance you could skip that part? The rest I can put up with.”
“Sorry,” he said, brushing the suggestion aside. “I can’t leave out one part. I’ve been doing this for ten years. Once I start I do it w-without th-thinking. If I leave out one part I wouldn’t b-be able to d-do any of it.”
“Then how about stopping the whole thing?”
“Who do you think you are, bossing me around like that?”
“Come on! I’m not bossing you around. I just want to sleep till eight. If eight’s out of the question I still would like to wake up like normal people. You make me feel like I’m waking up in the middle of a pie-eating contest or something. You follow me here?”
“Yeah, I follow,” he said.
“So what do you think we should do about it?”
“Hey, I got it! Why don’t we get up and exercise together?”
I gave up and went back to sleep. After that he continued his morning routine, never skipping a single day.
She laughed when I told her about my roommate’s morning exercises. I hadn’t intended it to be funny, but I ended up laughing myself. Her laughter lasted just an instant, and made me realize it’d been a long time since I’d seen her smile.
It was a Sunday afternoon in May. We’d gotten off the train at Yotsuya Station and were walking along the bank beside the railroad tracks in the direction of Ichigaya. The rain had ended around noon, and a southerly breeze had blown away the low-hanging clouds. The leaves on the cherry trees were sharply etched against the sky, and glinted as they shook in the breeze. The sunlight had an early-summer kind of scent. Most of the people we passed had taken off their coats and sweaters and draped them over their shoulders. A young man on a tennis court, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was swinging his racket back and forth. The metal frame sparkled in the afternoon sun. Only two nuns on a bench were still bundled up in winter clothes. Looking at them made me feel maybe summer wasn’t just around the corner after all.
Fifteen minutes of walking was all it took for the sweat to start rolling down my back. I yanked off my thick cotton shirt and stripped down to my T-shirt. She rolled the sleeves of her light gray sweatshirt up above her elbows. The sweatshirt was an old one, faded with countless washings. It looked familiar, like I’d seen it sometime, a long time ago.
“Is it fun living with someone?” she asked.
“Hard to say. I haven’t been there that long yet.”
She stopped in front of the water fountain, sipped a mouthful of water, and wiped her mouth with a handkerchief she took out of her pants pocket. She retied the laces of her tennis shoes.
“I wonder if it’d suit me,” she mused.
“You mean living in a dorm?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t know. It’s more trouble than you’d imagine. Lots of rules. Not to mention radio exercises.”
“I guess so,” she said and was lost in thought for a time. Then looked me straight in the eyes. Her eyes were unnaturally limpid. I’d never noticed. They gave me a kind of strange, transparent feeling, like gazing at the sky.
“But sometimes I feel like I should. I mean…,” she said, gazing into my eyes. She bit her lip and looked down. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
End of conversation. She started walking again.
I hadn’t seen her for half a year. She’d gotten so thin I almost didn’t recognize her. Her plump cheeks had thinned out, as had her neck. Not that she struck me as bony or anything. She looked prettier than ever. I wanted to tell her that, but couldn’t figure out how to go about it. So I gave up.
We hadn’t come to Yotsuya for any particular reason. We just happened to run across each other in a train on the Chuo Line. Neither of us had any plans. Let’s get off, she said, and so we did. Left alone, we didn’t have much to talk about. I don’t know why she suggested getting off the train. From the beginning we weren’t exactly brimming with topics to talk about.
After we got off at the station she headed off without a word. I walked after her, trying my best to keep up. There was always a yard or so between us, and I just kept on walking, staring at her back. Occasionally she’d turn around to say something, and I’d come up with a reply of sorts, though most of the time I couldn’t figure out how to respond. I couldn’t catch everything she said, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She just had her say, then turned around again and walked on in silence.
We turned right at Iidabashi, came out next to the Palace moat, then crossed the intersection at Jimbocho, went up the Ochanomizu slope, and cut across Hongo. Then we followed the railroad tracks to Komagome. Quite a walk. By the time we arrived at Komagome it was already getting dark.
“Where are we?” she suddenly asked.
“Komagome,” I said. “We made a big circle.”
“How did we end up here?”
“You brought us. I just played Follow the Leader.”
We dropped in a soba noodle shop close to the station and had a bite to eat. Neither of us said a word from the beginning to the end of the meal. I was exhausted from the hike and felt like I was about to collapse. She just sat there, lost in thought.
Noodles finished, I turned to her. “You’re really in good shape.”
“Surprised? I did cross-country in junior high. And my dad liked to hike in the mountains so ever since I was little I went hiking on Sundays. Even now my legs are pretty buff.”
“I never would have guessed.”
She laughed.
“I’ll take you home,” I said.
“It’s OK. I can get back by myself. Don’t bother.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I said.
“It’s OK. Really. I’m used to going home alone.”
To tell the truth, I was a little relieved she said that. It took more than an hour by train to her apartment, and it’d be a long ride, the two of us sitting there side by side all that time, barely speaking a word to each other. So she ended up going back alone. I felt bad about it, so I paid for our meal.
Just as we were saying goodbye she turned to me and said, “Uh—I wonder, if it isn’t too much to ask—if I could see you again? I know there’s no real reason for me to ask…”
“No need for any special reason,” I said, a little taken aback.
She blushed a little. She could probably feel how surprised I was.
“I can’t really explain it well,” she said. She rolled the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows, then rolled them down again. The electric lights bathed the fine down on her arms in a beautiful gold. “Reason’s the wrong word. I should have used another word.”
She rested both elbows on the table and closed her eyes, as if searching for the right words. But the words didn’t come.
“It’s all right with me,” I said.
“I don’t know…These days I just can’t seem to say what I mean,” she said. “I just can’t. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can’t even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It’s like my body’s split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We’re running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.”
She put her hands on the table and stared into my eyes.
“Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
“Everybody has that kind of feeling sometimes,” I said. “You can’t express yourself the way you want to, and it annoys you.”
Obviously this wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“No, that isn’t what I mean,” she said, but stopped there.
“I don’t mind seeing you again,” I said. “I have a lot of free time, and it’d sure be a lot healthier to go on walks than lie around all day.”
We left each other at the station. I said goodbye, she said goodbye.
The first time I met her was in the spring of my sophomore year in high school. We were the same age, and she was attending a well-known Christian school. One of my best friends, who happened to be her boyfriend, introduced us. They’d known each other since grade school and lived just down the road from each other.
Like many couples who have known each other since they were young, they didn’t have any particular desire to be alone. They were always visiting each other’s homes and having dinner together with one of their families. We went on a lot of double dates together, but I never seemed to get anywhere with girls so we usually ended up a trio. Which was fine by me. We each had our parts to play. I played the guest, he the able host, she his pleasant assistant and leading lady.
My friend made a great host. He might have seemed a bit standoffish at times, but basically he was a kind person who treated everyone fairly. He used to kid the two of us—her and me—with the same old jokes over and over. If one of us fell silent, he’d restart the conversation, trying to draw us out. His antenna instantly picked up the mood we were in, and the right words just flowed out. And add to that another talent: he could make the world’s most boring person sound fascinating. Whenever I talked with him I felt that way—like my ho-hum life was one big adventure.
The minute he stepped out of the room, though, she and I clammed right up. We had zero in common, and no idea what to talk about. We just sat there, toying with the ashtray, sipping water, waiting impatiently for him to return. Soon as he was back the conversation picked up where it left off.
I saw her again just once, three months after his funeral. There was something we had to discuss, so we met in a coffee shop. But as soon as that was finished we had nothing to say. I started to say something a couple of times, but the conversation just petered out. She sounded upset, like she was angry with me, but I couldn’t figure out why. We said goodbye.
Maybe she was angry because the last person to see him alive was me, not her. I shouldn’t say this, I know, but I can’t help it. I wish I could have traded places with her, but it can’t be helped. Once something happens, that’s all she wrote—you can never change things back to the way they were.
On that afternoon in May, after school—school wasn’t out yet but we’d skipped out—he and I stopped inside a pool hall and played four games. I won the first one, he took the last three. As we’d agreed, the loser paid for the games.
That night he died in his garage. He stuck a rubber hose in the exhaust pipe of his N360, got inside, sealed up the windows with tape, and started the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. When his parents got back from visiting a sick friend he was already dead. The car radio was still on, a receipt from a gas station still stuck under the wiper.
He didn’t leave any note or clue to his motives. I was the last person to see him alive, so the police called me in for questioning. He didn’t act any different from usual, I told them. Seemed the same as always. People who are going to kill themselves don’t usually win three games of pool in a row, do they? The police thought both of us were a little suspect. The kind of student who skips out of high school classes to hang out in a pool hall might very well be the kind to commit suicide, they seemed to imply. There was a short article on his death in the paper and that was that. His parents got rid of the car, and for a few days there were white flowers on his desk at school.
When I graduated from high school and went to Tokyo, there was only one thing I felt I had to do: try not to think too much. I willed myself to forget all of it—the green-felt-covered pool tables, his red car, the white flowers on the desk, the smoke rising from the tall chimney of the crematorium, the chunky paperweight in the police interrogation room. Everything. At first it seemed like I could forget, but something remained inside me. Like the air, and I couldn’t grasp it. As time passed, though, the air formed itself into a simple, clear shape. Into words. And the words were these:
Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
Say it aloud and it sounds trivial. Just plain common sense. But at the time it didn’t hit me as words; it was more like air filling my body. Death was in everything around me—inside the paperweight, inside the four balls on the pool table. As we live, we breathe death into our lungs, like fine particles of dust.
Up till then I’d always thought death existed apart, in a separate realm. Sure, I knew death is inevitable. But you can just as easily turn that around and say that until the day it comes, death has nothing to do with us. Here’s life, on this side—and over there is death. What could be more logical?
After my friend died, though, I couldn’t think of death in such a na?ve way. Death is not the opposite of life. Death is already inside me. I couldn’t shake that thought. The death that took my seventeen-year-old friend on that May evening grabbed me, too, in its clutches.
That much I understood, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. Which was not an easy task. I was still just eighteen, too young to find some safe, neutral ground to stand on.
After that I dated her once, maybe twice a month. I guess you could call it dating. Can’t think of any better word for it.
She was going to a women’s college just outside Tokyo, a small school but with a pretty good reputation. Her apartment was just a ten-minute walk from the college. Along the road to the school was a beautiful reservoir that we sometimes took walks around. She didn’t seem to have any friends. Same as before, she was pretty quiet. There wasn’t much to talk about, so I didn’t say much either. We just looked at each other and kept on walking and walking.
Not that we weren’t getting anywhere. Around the end of summer vacation, in a very natural way, she started walking next to me, not in front. On and on we walked, side by side—up and down slopes, over bridges, across streets. We weren’t headed anywhere in particular, no particular plans. We’d walk for a while, drop by a coffee shop for a cup, and off we’d go again. Like slides being changed in a projector, only the seasons changed. Fall came, and the courtyard of my dorm was covered with fallen zelkova leaves. Pulling on a sweater I could catch the scent of the new season. I went out and bought myself a new pair of suede shoes.
At the end of autumn when the wind turned icy, she began to walk closer to me, rubbing up against my arm. Through my thick duffel coat I could feel her breath. But that was all. Hands stuck deep in the pockets of my coat, I continued to walk on and on. Our shoes both had rubber soles, our footsteps were silent. Only when we crunched over the trampled-down sycamore leaves did we make a sound. It wasn’t my arm she wanted, but someone else’s. Not my warmth, but the warmth of another. At least that’s how it felt at the time.
The guys at the dorm always kidded me whenever she called, or when I went out to see her on Sunday mornings. They thought I’d made a girlfriend. I couldn’t explain the situation to them, and there wasn’t any reason to, so I just let things stand as they were. Whenever I came back from a date, invariably someone would ask me whether I’d scored. “Can’t complain” was my standard reply.
So passed my eighteenth year. The sun rose and set, the flag went up and down. And on Sundays I went on a date with my dead friend’s girlfriend. What the hell do you think you’re doing? I asked myself. And what comes next? I hadn’t the slightest idea. At school I read Claudel’s plays, and Racine’s, and Eisenstein. I liked their style, but that was it. I made hardly any friends at school, or at the dorm. I was always reading, so people thought I wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to be anything.
I tried to tell her, many times, about these feelings. She of all people should understand. But I could never explain how I felt. It was just like she said—every time I struggled to find the right words, they slipped from my grasp and sank into the murky depths.
On Saturday evenings I sat in the lobby of the dorm where the phones were, waiting for her to call. Sometimes she wouldn’t call for three weeks at a stretch, other times two weeks in a row. So I sat on a chair in the lobby, waiting. On Saturday evenings most of the other students went out, and silence descended on the dorm. Gazing at the particles of light in the still space, I struggled to grasp my own feelings. Everyone is looking for something from someone. That much I was sure of. But what comes next, I had no idea. A hazy wall of air rose up before me, just out of reach.
During the winter I had a part-time job at a small record store in Shinjuku. For Christmas I gave her a Henry Mancini record that had one of her favorites on it, the tune “Dear Heart.” I wrapped it in paper with a Christmas tree design, and added a pink ribbon. She gave me a pair of woolen mittens she’d knitted. The part for the thumb was a little too short, but they were warm all the same.
She didn’t go home for New Year’s, and the two of us had dinner over New Year’s at her apartment.
A lot of things happened that winter.
At the end of January my roommate was in bed for two days with a temperature of nearly 104. Thanks to which I had to call off a date with her. I couldn’t just go out and leave him; he sounded like he was going to die at any minute. And who else would look after him? I bought some ice, wrapped it in a plastic bag to make an ice pack, wiped his sweat away with a cool wet towel, took his temperature every hour. His fever didn’t break for a whole day. The second day, though, he leapt out of bed as though nothing had happened. His temperature was back to normal.
“It’s weird,” he said. “I’ve never had a fever before in my life.”
“Well, you sure had one this time,” I told him. I showed him the two free concert tickets that had gone to waste.
“At least they were free,” he said.
It snowed a lot in February.
At the end of February I got into a fight with an older guy at the dorm over something stupid, and punched him. He fell over and hit his head on a concrete wall. Fortunately he was OK, but I was called before the dorm head and given a warning. After that, dorm life was never the same.
I turned nineteen and finally became a sophomore. I failed a couple of courses, though. I managed a couple of Bs, the rest Cs and Ds. She was promoted to sophomore, too, but with a much better record—she passed all her classes. The four seasons came and went.
In June she turned twenty. I had trouble picturing her twenty. We always figured the best thing for us was to shuttle back and forth somewhere between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen comes nineteen, after nineteen comes eighteen—that we could understand. But now here she was twenty. And the next winter I’d be twenty, too. Only our dead friend would stay forever as he was—an eternal seventeen.
It rained on her birthday. I bought a cake in Shinjuku and took the train to her place. The train was crowded and bounced around something awful; by the time I reached her apartment the cake was a decaying Roman ruin. But we went ahead and put twenty candles on it and lit them. We closed the curtains and turned off the lights, and suddenly we had a real birthday party on our hands. She opened a bottle of wine and we drank it with the crumbled cake, and had a little something to eat.
“I don’t know, but it seems kind of idiotic to be twenty,” she said. After dinner we cleared away the dishes and sat on the floor drinking the rest of the wine. While I finished one glass, she helped herself to two.
She’d never talked like she did that night. She told me these long stories about her childhood, her school, her family. Terribly involved stories which started with A, then B would enter the picture, leading on to something about C, going on and on and on. There was no end to it. At first I made all the proper noises to show her I was following along, but soon gave up. I put on a record and when it was over, I lifted up the needle and put on another. After I finished all the records, I put the first one back on. Outside it was still pouring. Time passed slowly as her monologue went on without end.
I didn’t worry about it, though, until a while later. Suddenly I realized it was eleven p.m. and she’d been talking nonstop for four hours. If I didn’t get a move on, I’d miss the last train home. I didn’t know what to do. Should I just let her talk till she dropped? Should I break in and put an end to it? After much hesitation, I decided to interrupt. Four hours should be enough, you’d think.
“Well, I’d better get going,” I finally said. “Sorry I stayed so late. I’ll see you again real soon, OK?”
I wasn’t sure whether my words had gotten through. For a short while she was quiet but soon it was back to the monologue. I gave up and lit a cigarette. At this rate, it looked like I’d better go with Plan B. Let the rest take its course.
Before too long, though, she stopped. With a jolt I realized she was finished. It wasn’t that she’d finished wanting to talk: her well of words had just dried up. Scraps of words hung there, suspended in midair. She tried to continue, but nothing came out. Something had been lost. Her lips slightly parted, she looked into my eyes with a vague expression. As if she was trying to make out something through an opaque membrane. I couldn’t help feeling guilty.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” I said slowly, weighing each word. “But it’s getting late so I thought I’d better be going…”
It took less than a second for the teardrops to run down her cheeks and splash onto one of the record jackets. After the first drops fell, the floodgates burst. Putting her hands on the floor she leaned forward, weeping so much it seemed like she was retching. I gently put my hand out and touched her shoulder; it shook ever so slightly. Almost without thinking, I drew her near me. Head buried in my chest, she sobbed silently, dampening my shirt with her hot breath and tears. Her ten fingers, in search of something, roamed over my back. Cradling her in my left arm, I stroked the fine strands of her hair with my right. For a long while I waited in this pose for her to stop crying. But she didn’t stop.
That night we slept together. That may have been the best response to the situation, maybe not. I don’t know what else I should have done.
I hadn’t slept with a girl for ages. It was her first time with a man. Stupid me, I asked her why she hadn’t slept with him. Instead of answering, she pulled away from me, turned to face the opposite direction, and gazed at the rain outside. I stared at the ceiling and smoked a cigarette.
In the morning the rain had stopped. She was still facing away from me, asleep. Or maybe she was awake all the time, I couldn’t tell. Once again she was enveloped by the same silence of a year before. I looked at her pale back for a while, then gave up and climbed out of bed.
Record jackets lay scattered over the floor; half a dilapidated cake graced the table. It felt like time had skidded to a stop. On her desktop there was a dictionary and a chart of French verb conjugations. A calendar was taped to the wall in front of the desk, a pure white calendar without a mark or writing of any kind.
I gathered up the clothes that had fallen on the floor beside the bed. The front of my shirt was still cold and damp from her tears. I put my face to it and breathed in the fragrance of her hair.
I tore off a sheet from the memo pad on her desk and left a note. Call me soon, I wrote. I left the room, closing the door.
A week passed without a call. She didn’t answer her phone, so I wrote her a long letter. I tried to tell her my feelings as honestly as I knew how. There’s a lot going on I don’t have a clue about, I wrote; I’ll try my damnedest to figure it all out, but you’ve got to understand these things take time. I have no idea where I’m headed—all I know for sure is I don’t want to get hung up thinking too deeply about things. The world’s too precarious a place for that. Start me mulling over ideas and I’ll end up forcing people to do things they hate. I couldn’t stand that. I want to see you again very much, but I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do…
That’s the kind of letter I wrote.
I got a reply in the beginning of July. A short letter.
For the time being I’ve decided to take a year off from college. I say for the time being, but I doubt I’ll go back. Taking a leave of absence is just a formality. Tomorrow I’ll be moving out of my apartment. I know this will seem pretty abrupt to you, but I’ve been thinking it over for a long time. I wanted to ask your advice, many times I almost did, but for some reason I couldn’t. I guess I was afraid to talk about it.
Please don’t worry about everything that’s happened. No matter what happened, or didn’t happen, this is where we end up. I know this might hurt you, and I’m sorry if it does. What I want to say is I don’t want you to blame yourself, or anyone else, over me. This is really something I have to handle on my own. This past year I’ve been putting it off, and I know you’ve suffered because of me. Perhaps that’s all behind us now.
There’s a nice sanatorium in the mountains near Kyoto, and I’ve decided to stay there for a while. It’s less a hospital than a place where you’re free to do what you want. I’ll write you again someday and tell you more about it. Right now I just can’t seem to get the words down. This is the tenth time I’ve rewritten this letter. I can’t find the words to tell you how thankful I am to you for being with me this past year. Please believe me when I say this. I can’t say anything more than that. I’ll always treasure the record you gave me.
Someday, somewhere in this precarious world, if we meet again I hope I’ll be able to tell you much more than I can right now.
Goodbye.
I must have read her letter over a couple of hundred times at least, and every time I was gripped by a terrible sadness. The same kind of disconcerting sadness I felt when she gazed deep into my eyes. I couldn’t shake the feeling. It was like the wind, formless and weightless, and I couldn’t wrap it around me. Scenery passed slowly before me. People spoke, but their words didn’t reach my ears.
On Saturday nights I still sat in the same chair in the dorm lobby. I knew a phone call wouldn’t come, but I had no idea what else to do. I turned on the TV set and pretended to watch baseball. And gazed at the indeterminate space between me and the set. I divided that space into two, and again into two. I did this over and over, until I’d made a space so small it could fit in the palm of my hand.
At ten I turned off the TV, went back to my room, and went to sleep.
At the end of that month my roommate gave me a firefly in an instant-coffee jar. Inside were blades of grass, and a bit of water. He’d punched a few tiny air holes in the lid. It was still light out so the firefly looked more like some black bug you’d find at the beach. I peered in the jar and sure enough, a firefly it was. The firefly tried to climb up the slippery side of the glass jar, only to slip back down each time. It’d been a long time since I’d seen one so close up.
“I found it in the courtyard,” my roommate told me. “A hotel down the street let a bunch of fireflies out as a publicity stunt, and it must have made its way over here.” As he talked, he stuffed clothes and notebooks inside a small suitcase. We were already several weeks into summer vacation. I didn’t want to go back home, and he’d had to go out on some fieldwork, so we were just about the only ones left in the dorm. Fieldwork done, though, he was ready to go home.
“Why don’t you give it to a girl?” he added. “Girls like those things.”
“Thanks, good idea,” I said.
After sundown the dorm was silent. The flag was gone, and lights came on in the windows of the cafeteria. There were just a few students left, so only half the lights were lit. The lights on the right were off, the ones on the left were on. You could catch a faint whiff of dinner. Cream stew.
I took the instant-coffee jar with the firefly and went up to the roof. The place was deserted. A white shirt someone had forgotten to take in was pinned to the clothesline, swaying in the evening breeze like a cast-off skin. I climbed the rusty metal ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of the water tower. The cylindrical water tank was still warm from the heat it had absorbed during the day. I sat down in the cramped space, leaned against the railing, and looked down at the moon before me, just a day or two short of full. On the right, I could see the streets of Shinjuku, on the left, Ikebukuro. The headlights of the cars were a brilliant stream of light flowing from one part of the city to another. Like a cloud hanging over the streets, the city was a mix of sounds, a soft, low hum.
The firefly glowed faintly in the bottom of the jar. But its light was too weak, the color too faint. The way I remembered it, fireflies were supposed to give off a crisp, bright light that cuts through the summer darkness. This firefly might be growing weak, might be dying, I figured. Holding the jar by its mouth, I shook it a couple of times to see. The firefly flew for a second and bumped against the glass. But its light was still dim.
Maybe the problem wasn’t with the light, but with my memory. Maybe fireflies’ light wasn’t that bright after all. Was I just imagining it was? Or maybe, when I was a child, the darkness that surrounded me was deeper. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even recall when I had last seen a firefly.
What I could remember was the sound of water running in the night. An old brick sluice gate, with a handle you could turn around to open or close it. A narrow stream, with plants covering the surface. All around was pitch black, and hundreds of fireflies flew above the still water. A powdery clump of yellow light blazed above the stream, and shone in the water.
When was that, anyway? And where was it?
I had no idea.
Everything was mixed up, and confused.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm myself. If I kept my eyes shut tight, at any moment my body would be sucked into the summer darkness. It was the first time I’d climbed the water tower after dark. The sound of the wind was clearer than it had ever been. The wind wasn’t blowing hard, yet strangely left a clear-cut trace as it rushed by me. Taking its time, night slowly enveloped the earth. The city lights might shine their brightest, but slowly, ever so slowly, night was winning out.
I opened the lid of the jar, took out the firefly, and put it on the edge of the water tower that stuck out an inch or two. It seemed like the firefly couldn’t grasp where it was. After making one bumbling circuit of a bolt, it stretched out one leg on top of a scab of loose paint. It tried to go to the right but, finding a dead end, went back to the left. It slowly clambered on top of the bolt and crouched there for a time, motionless, more dead than alive.
Leaning against the railing, I gazed at the firefly. For a long time the two of us sat there without moving. Only the wind, like a stream, brushed past us. In the dark the countless leaves of the zelkova rustled, rubbing against each other.
I waited forever.
A long time later, the firefly took off. As if remembering something, it suddenly spread its wings and in the next instant floated up over the railing and into the gathering dark. Trying to win back lost time, perhaps, it quickly traced an arc beside the water tower. It stopped for a moment, just long enough for its trail of light to blur, then flew off toward the east.
Long after the firefly disappeared, the traces of its light remained within me. In the thick dark behind my closed eyes that faint light, like some lost wandering spirit, continued to roam.
Again and again I stretched my hand out toward that darkness. But my fingers felt nothing. That tiny glow was always just out of reach.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL