A FOLKLORE FOR MY GENERATION: A PRE-HISTORY OF LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM
I was born in 1949, entered junior high in 1961, and college in 1967. And reached my long-awaited twentieth birthday—my intro into adulthood—during the height of the boisterous slapstick that was the student movement. Which I suppose qualifies me as a typical child of the sixties. So there I was, during the most vulnerable, most immature, and yet most precious period of life, breathing in everything about this live-for-the-moment decade, high on the wildness of it all. There were doors we had to kick in, right in front of us, and you better believe we kicked them in! With Jim Morrison, the Beatles, and Dylan blasting out the sound track to our lives.
There was something special about the sixties. That seems true now, in retrospect, but even when I was caught up in the whirlwind of it happening I was convinced of it. But if you asked me to be more specific, to pinpoint what it was about the sixties that was so special, I don’t think I could do more than stammer out some trite reply. We were merely observers, getting totally absorbed in some exciting movie, our palms all sweaty, only to find that, after the houselights came on and we exited the theater, the thrilling afterglow that coursed through us ultimately meant nothing whatsoever. Maybe something prevented us from learning a valuable lesson from all this? I don’t know. I’m way too close to the period to say.
I’m not bragging about the times I lived through. I’m simply trying to convey what it felt like to live through that age, and the fact that there really was something special about it. Yet if I were to try to unpack those times and point out something in particular that was extraordinary, I don’t know if I could. What I’d find if I did such a dissection would be these: the momentum and energy of the times, the tremendous spark of promise. More than anything else, the feeling of inevitable irritation like when you look through the wrong end of a telescope. Heroism and villainy, ecstasy and disillusionment, martyrdom and betrayal, outlines and specialized studies, silence and eloquence, people marking time in the most boring way—they were all there, for sure. Any age has all these. The present does, and so will the future. But in Our Age (to use an exaggerated term) these were more colorful, and you could actually grasp them. They were literally lined up on a shelf, right before our very eyes.
Nowadays, if you try to grasp the reality of anything, there’s always a whole slew of convoluted extras that come with it: hidden advertising, dubious discount coupons, point cards stores hand out that you know you should throw out but still hold on to, options that are forced on you before you know what’s happening. Back in Our Age, nobody plunked down indecipherable three-volume owner’s manuals in front of you. Whatever it was, we just clutched it in our hands and took it straight home—like taking a baby chick home from one of those little nighttime stands. Everything was simple, and direct. Cause and effect were good buddies back then; thesis and reality hugged each other like it was the most natural thing in the world. And my guess is that the sixties were the last time that’ll ever happen.
A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism—that’s my own personal name for that age.
Let me tell you a little bit about the young girls back then. And us guys with our nearly brand-new genitals and the wild, joyous, sad sex we had. That’s one of my themes here.
Take virginity, for instance—a word that, for some unfathomable reason, always reminds me of a field on a beautiful sunny spring afternoon. In the sixties, virginity was a much bigger deal than it is today. I’m generalizing, of course—I haven’t taken a survey or anything—but my sense of it is that about fifty percent of the girls in my generation had lost their virginity by the time they reached twenty. At least among the girls I knew, that seemed to be the case. Which means that about half of the girls, whether they’d made a conscious choice or not, were still virgins.
It strikes me now that most of the girls in my generation—the moderates, you might dub them—whether virgins or not, agonized over the whole issue of sex. They didn’t insist that virginity was such a precious thing, nor did they denounce it as some stupid relic of the past. So what actually happened—sorry, but I’m generalizing again—was that they went with the flow. It all depended on the circumstances and the partner. Makes sense to me.
So on either side of this silent majority, you had your liberals and your conservatives—the entire spectrum, from girls who practiced sex as a kind of indoor sport, to those who were firm believers in remaining pure till they got married. There were guys, too, who were adamant that whoever they married had to be a virgin.
Like every generation, there were all kinds of people, with all kinds of values. But the big difference between the sixties and the decades before and after was that we were convinced that someday all those differences could be overcome.
Peace!
What follows is the story of a guy I know, a high school classmate in Kobe. He was one of those guys who was an all-round star: good grades, good at sports, a natural leader. He was more clean-cut than handsome, I suppose. He had a nice clear voice, and was a good public speaker, even a decent singer. He was always elected as class representative, and when our class met as a group he was the one who did the final wrap-up. He wasn’t full of original opinions, but in class discussion who expects any originality? There’re tons of situations when originality is not what’s called for. Most situations, in fact. All we wanted was to get out of there as quick as we could, and we could count on him to wind up the discussion in the time allotted. In that sense, he was a handy sort of guy to have around.
With him, everything was by the book. If somebody was making a racket in study hall he’d quietly tell them to simmer down. The guy was basically perfect, but it bothered me that I couldn’t figure out what was going through his head. Sometimes I felt like yanking his head off his neck and giving it a good shake to see what was rattling around inside. He was very popular with the girls, too. Whenever he popped to his feet in class to say something every girl would gaze at him with a dreamy look of admiration. He was also your go-to guy if you were stuck with a math problem you couldn’t solve. We’re talking about a guy who was twenty-seven times more popular than me.
If you’ve ever gone to public high school, you know the type I mean. There’s somebody like him in every class, the kind that keeps things running smoothly. Years spent in school absorbing training manuals for life have taught me many things, and one of the lessons I came away with was this: like it or not, every group has somebody like him.
Personally, I’m not too fond of the type. For whatever reason, we just don’t click. I much prefer imperfect, more memorable types of people. So with this particular guy, even though we were in the same class for a year, we never hung out. The first time we ever had a semi-decent conversation was after we graduated, during summer vacation when we were freshmen in college. We happened to be taking driving lessons at the same driving school and talked a few times there. We’d have a cup of tea together while we were waiting. Driving school has got to be one of the most boring places on earth, and if you see a familiar face you jump at it. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I know I wasn’t left with much of an impression one way or the other.
One other thing I did remember about him is his girlfriend. She was in a different class and was one of a handful of girls who were drop-dead gorgeous. Besides her stunning looks, she got good grades, was good at sports, was kind and a natural leader, and was the one who always summed up class discussions. Every class has a girl like her.
To make a long story short, they were perfect for each other. Mister Clean and Miss Clean. Like right out of a toothpaste commercial.
They were inseparable. During lunch break they sat side by side in a corner of the school yard, talking. They went home together, too, riding the same train but getting off at different stops. He was on the soccer club, she was in the English conversation club, and whoever finished earlier than the other would study in the library, waiting so they could go home together. It seemed like they were together every free moment they had. And they were always talking. I don’t know how they could keep from running out of things to say, but somehow they managed it.
We—and by “we” I mean the guys I hung out with—didn’t dislike this couple. We never made fun of them or said bad things about them. In fact, we hardly thought about them at all. They were like the weather, something that was just out there, that barely registered on our attention meter. We were too much into our own pursuits, the vital thrilling things the times had to offer. For instance? For instance sex, rock and roll, Jean-Luc Godard films, political movements, Kenzabur? ??e’s novels.
But especially sex.
Of course we were ignorant, conceited kids. We had no idea what life was all about. In the real world there was no such thing as Mister Clean and Miss Clean. They only exist on TV. The kind of illusions we had, then, and the kind of illusions this guy and his girlfriend had, weren’t all that different.
This is their story. It’s not a very happy one, and looking back on it now it’s hard to locate any lesson in it. But anyway, this is their story, and at the same time our story. So it’s a kind of folklore that I’ve collected and now, as a sort of bumbling narrator, will pass on to you.
The story he told me came out after we had batted around other topics over some wine, so strictly speaking it might not be entirely true. There are parts I didn’t catch, and details I’ve kind of imagined woven in. And to protect the real people in it, I’ve changed some of the facts, though this doesn’t impact the overall story. Still, I think things took place pretty much as said. I say this because though I might have forgotten some of the details, I distinctly recall the overall tone. When you listen to somebody’s story and then try to reproduce it in writing, the tone’s the main thing. Get the tone right and you have a true story on your hands. Maybe some of the facts aren’t quite correct, but that doesn’t matter—it actually might elevate the truth factor of the story. Turn this around, and you could say there’re stories that are factually accurate yet aren’t true at all. Those are the kind of stories you can count on to be boring, and even, in some instances, dangerous. You can smell those a mile away.
One other thing I need to make clear here is that this former classmate was a lousy storyteller. God might have generously doled out other attributes to the guy, but the ability to relate a story wasn’t one of them. (Not that the storyteller’s romantic art serves any real purpose in life.) So as he related his story, I could barely stifle a yawn. He’d get off track, go around in circles, take forever to remember some of the facts. He’d take a fragment of his story in his hand, frown at it for a while, and once he was convinced he had it right he’d line his facts up one by one on the table. But often this order was wrong. So as a novelist—a story specialist, if you will—I’ve rearranged these fragments, carefully gluing them together to form what I hope is a coherent narrative.
We happened to run across each other in Lucca, a town in central Italy. I was renting an apartment in Rome at the time. My wife had to go back to Japan, so I was enjoying a leisurely, solitary train trip, first from Venice to Verona, then on to Mantua and Pisa, with a stopover in Lucca. It was my second time there. Lucca’s a quiet, pleasant town, and there’s a wonderful restaurant on the outskirts of town where they have superb mushroom dishes.
He’d come to Lucca on business, and we just happened to be staying in the same hotel. Small world.
We had dinner together at a restaurant that night. Both of us were traveling alone, and were bored. The older you get, the more boring traveling alone becomes. It’s different when you’re younger—whether you’re alone or not, traveling can be a blast. But as you age, the fun factor declines. Only the first couple of days are enjoyable. After that, the scenery becomes annoying, and people’s voices start to grate. There’s no escape, for if you close your eyes to block these out, all kinds of unpleasant memories pop up. It gets to be too much trouble to eat in a restaurant, and you find yourself checking your watch over and over as you wait for streetcars that never seem to arrive. Trying to make yourself understood in a foreign language becomes a total pain.
That’s why, when we spotted each other, we breathed a sigh of relief, just like that time we ran across each other at driving school. We sat down at a table near the fireplace, ordered a pricey bottle of red wine, had a full-course mushroom dinner: mushroom hors d’oeuvres, mushroom pasta, and arrosto con funghi.
It turned out he owned a furniture company that imported European furniture, and was in Europe on a buying trip. You could tell his business was doing well. He didn’t boast about it or put on any airs—when he handed me his business card he just said he was running a small company—yet he’d clearly done well for himself. His clothes, the way he spoke, his expression, manner, everything about him made this obvious. He was entirely at home with his worldly success, in a pleasant sort of way.
He told me he’d read all my novels. “Our way of thinking and goals are very different,” he said, “but I think it’s a wonderful thing to be able to tell stories to other people.”
That made sense. “If you can do a good job of telling the story,” I added.
At first we mainly talked about our impressions of Italy. How the trains never ran on time, how meals took forever. I don’t remember how it came about, exactly, but by the time we were into our second bottle of wine he’d already started telling his story. And I was listening, making the appropriate signs to show I was following along. I think he must have wanted to get this off his chest for a long time, but for some reason hadn’t. If we hadn’t been in a nice little restaurant in a pleasant little town in central Italy, sitting before a fireplace, sipping a mellow 1983 Coltibuono, I seriously doubt he would have told me the tale. But tell it he did.
“I’ve always thought I was a boring person,” he began. “I’ve never been the type who could just cut loose and have a good time. It was like I could always sense a boundary around me and I did my best not to step across the line. Like I was following a well-laid-out highway with signs telling me where to exit, warning me that a curve was coming up, not to pass. Follow the directions, I figured, and life would turn out okay. People praised me for toeing the line, and when I was little I was sure everybody else was doing the same thing as me. But I soon found out that wasn’t the case.”
He held his wineglass up to the fire and gazed at it for a time.
“In that sense, my life, at least the beginning stages, went smoothly. But I had no idea what my life meant, and that kind of vague thought only grew stronger the older I got. What did I want out of life? I had no idea! I was good at math, at English, sports, you name it. My parents always praised me, my teachers always said I was doing fine, and I knew I could get into a good college with no problem. But I had no idea at all what I was aiming at, what I wanted to do. As far as a major in college, I was clueless. Should I go for law, engineering, or medicine? I knew I could have done well in any one of them, but nothing excited me. So I went along with my parents’ and teachers’ recommendations and entered the law department at Tokyo University. There was no principle guiding me, really—it’s just that everybody said that was the best choice.”
He took another sip of wine. “Do you remember my girlfriend in high school?”
“Was her name Fujisawa?” I said, somehow able to call up the name. I wasn’t entirely sure that was right, but it turned out it was.
He nodded. “Right. Yoshiko Fujisawa. Things were good with her, too. I liked her a lot, liked being with her and talking about all kinds of things. I could tell her everything I felt, and she understood me. I could go on forever when I was with her. It was wonderful. I mean, before her, I never had a friend I could really talk to.”
He and Yoshiko were spiritual twins. It was almost uncanny how similar their backgrounds were. As I’ve said, they were both attractive, smart, natural-born leaders. Class superstars. Both of them were from affluent families, with parents who didn’t get along. Both had mothers who were older than their fathers, and fathers who kept a mistress and stayed away from home as much as they could. Fear of public opinion kept their parents from divorcing. At home, then, their mothers ruled the roost, and expected their children to be the tops in whatever they did. He and Yoshiko were both popular enough, but never had any real friends. They weren’t sure why. Maybe it was because ordinary, imperfect people always choose similarly imperfect people as friends. At any rate, the two of them were always lonely, always a bit on edge.
Somehow, though, they hooked up and started going out. They ate lunch together every day, walked home from school together. Spent every spare moment with each other, talking. There was always so much to talk about. On Sundays they studied together. When it was just the two of them they could relax the most. Each knew exactly how the other was feeling. They could talk forever about the loneliness they’d experienced, the sense of loss, their fears, their dreams.
They made out once a week, usually in one of the rooms of their respective houses. It wasn’t hard to be alone, what with their fathers always gone and their mothers running errands half the time, their homes were practically deserted. They followed two rules during their make-out sessions: their clothes had to stay on, and they’d only use their fingers. They’d passionately make out for ten or fifteen minutes, then sit down together at a desk and study together.
“That’s enough. Why don’t we study now?” she’d say, smoothing down the hem of her skirt. Both of them got almost identical grades, so they made a game out of studying, competing, for instance, to see who could solve math problems the quickest. Studying was never a burden; it was like second nature to them. It was a lot of fun, he told me. You might think this is stupid, but we really enjoyed studying. Maybe only people like the two of us could ever understand how much fun it was.
Not that he was totally happy with their relationship. Something was missing. Actual sex, in other words. “A sense of being one, physically,” is how he put it. I felt we had to take the next step, he said. I thought if we did, we’d be freer in our relationship, and understand each other better. For me that would have been a completely natural development.
But she saw things differently. Her mouth set, she shook her head slightly. “I love you so much,” she quietly explained, “but I want to stay a virgin until I get married.” No matter how much he tried to persuade her, she wouldn’t listen.
“I love you, I really do,” she said. “But those are two different things. I’m not going to change my mind. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to put up with it. You will, if you really love me.”
When she put it that way, he told me, I had to respect her wishes. It was a question of how she wanted to live her life and there wasn’t anything I could say about that. To me, whether a girl’s a virgin or not didn’t matter that much. If I got married and found out my bride wasn’t a virgin, I wouldn’t care. I’m not a very radical type of person, or a dreamy, romantic sort. But I’m not all that conservative, either. I’m more of a realist, I guess. A girl’s virginity just isn’t that big a deal. It’s much more important that a couple really know each other. But that’s just my opinion, and I’m not about to force others to agree. She had her own vision of how her life should be, so I just had to grin and bear it, and make do with touching her under her clothes. I’m sure you could imagine what this involved.
I can imagine, I said. I have similar memories.
His face reddened a bit and he smiled.
That wasn’t so bad, don’t get me wrong, but since we never went any further, I never felt relaxed. To me we were always stopping halfway. What I wanted was to be one with her, with nothing coming between us. To possess her, to be possessed. I needed a sign to prove that. Sexual desire figured into it, of course, but that wasn’t the main thing. I’m talking about a sense of being one, physically. I’d never once experienced that sense of oneness with a person. I’d always been alone, always feeling tense, stuck behind a wall. I was positive that once we were one, my wall would come crumbling down, and I’d discover who I was, the self I’d only had vague glimpses of.
“But it didn’t work out?” I asked him.
“No, it didn’t,” he said, and stared for a time at the blazing logs in the fireplace, his eyes strangely dull. “It never did work out,” he said.
He was seriously thinking of marrying her, and told her so. After we graduate from college we can get married right away, he told her. We could even get engaged earlier. His words made her very happy, and she beamed a charming smile at him. At the same time, her smile revealed a hint of weariness, of a wiser, more mature person listening to a young person’s immature ideas. I can’t marry you, she said. I’m going to marry someone a few years older than me, and you’re going to marry someone a few years younger. That’s the way things are done. Women mature faster than men, and age more quickly. You don’t know anything about the world yet. Even if we were to marry right out of college, it wouldn’t work out. We’d never stay as happy as we are now. Of course I love you—I’ve never loved anyone else. But those are two different things. (“Those are two different things” being her pet saying.) We’re still in high school, and we’ve lived sheltered lives. But the world outside isn’t like that. It’s a big world out there, and we have to get ready for it.
He understood what she was getting at. Compared to other boys his age, he had his feet firmly on the ground. If someone else had been arguing the same point he probably would have agreed. But this was no abstract generalization. This was his life they were talking about.
I just don’t get it, he told her. I love you so much. I want us to be one. This couldn’t be clearer to me, or more important. I don’t care if it’s unrealistic. That’s how much I love you.
She shook her head again, as if to tell him it was out of the question. She stroked his hair and said, “I wonder what either of us knows about love. Our love has never been tested. We’ve never had to take responsibility for anything. We’re still children.”
He couldn’t say a thing. It just made him sad he couldn’t smash down the wall around him now. Until then he’d always seen that wall as protecting him, but now it was a barrier, barring his way. A wave of impotence swept over him. I can’t do anything anymore, he thought. I’m going to be surrounded by this thick wall forever, never allowed to venture outside. The rest of my insipid, pointless life.
Their relationship remained the same until the two of them graduated from high school. They’d meet up at the library as always, study together, make out with their clothes on. She didn’t seem to mind that they never went all the way. She actually seemed to like things left that way, unconsummated. Everybody else imagined that Mister and Miss Clean were both enjoying an uncomplicated youth. But he continued to struggle with his unresolved feelings.
In the spring of 1967, he entered Tokyo University, while she went to a women’s college in Kobe. It was definitely a first-rate school, but with her grades she could have gotten into someplace much better, even Tokyo University if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t think it was necessary, and didn’t take the entrance exam. I don’t particularly want to study, or get into the Ministry of Finance, she explained. I’m a girl. I’m different from you. You’re going to go far. But I want to take a break, and spend the next four years enjoying myself. After I get married, I won’t be able to do that again.
He was frankly disappointed. He’d been hoping they’d both go to Tokyo and start their relationship afresh. He pleaded with her to join him, but again she merely shook her head.
He came back from Tokyo for summer vacation after his freshman year, and they went on dates almost every day. (That’s the summer he and I ran across each other at driving school.) She drove them all around and they continued the same make-out sessions as before. He started, though, to sense that something in their relationship was changing. Reality was silently starting to worm its way between them.
It wasn’t like there was some obvious change. Actually, the problem was more a lack of change. Nothing about her had changed—the way she spoke, her clothes, the topics she chose to talk about, her opinions—they were all the same as before. Their relationship was like a pendulum gradually grinding to a halt, and he felt out of synch.
Life in Tokyo was lonely. The city was filthy, the food awful, the people uncouth. He thought about her all the time. At night he’d hole up in his room and write letter after letter to her. She wrote back, though not as often. She wrote all the details about her life, and he devoured her letters. Her letters were what kept him sane. He started smoking and drinking, and cutting classes.
When summer vacation finally rolled around, though, and he rushed back to Kobe, a lot of things disappointed him. He’d only been away for three months, yet strangely enough his hometown now struck him as dusty and lifeless. Talking with his mother was a total bore. The scenery back home he’d waxed nostalgic over while he was in Tokyo now looked insipid. Kobe, he discovered, was just a self-satisfied backwater town. He didn’t want to talk to anybody, and even going to the barbershop he’d gone to since he was a child depressed him. When he took his dog for a walk, the seashore was empty and littered with trash.
You’d think going on dates with Yoshiko would have excited him, but it didn’t. Every time they said goodbye, he’d go home and brood. He was still in love with her—that was a given. But it wasn’t enough. I have to do something, he felt. Passion will get by on its own steam for a time, but it doesn’t last forever. If we don’t do something drastic our relationship will reach an impasse, and all the passion will be suffocated out of us.
One day, he decided to raise again the issue of sex that they’d frozen out of their conversations. This will be the last time I bring it up, he decided.
“These last three months in Tokyo I’ve been thinking about you all the time,” he told her. “I love you, and my feelings won’t change, even if we’re away from each other. But being apart so long, all kinds of dark thoughts start to take over. You probably don’t understand this, but people are weak when they’re alone. I’ve never been so alone like this in my life. It’s awful. So I want something that can bring us closer together. I want to know for sure that we’re bound together, even if we’re apart.”
But his girlfriend turned him down. She sighed and gently kissed him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t give you my virginity. These are two different things. I’ll do anything for you, except that. If you love me, please don’t bring that up again.”
He raised the idea of their getting married.
“There are girls in my class who are engaged already,” she said. “Just two of them, actually. But their fiancés have jobs. That’s what getting engaged involves. Marriage involves responsibility. You become independent and accept another person into your life. If you don’t take responsibility you can’t gain anything.”
“I can take responsibility,” he declared. “Listen—I’m going to a top university, and I’m getting good grades. I can get a job later in any company or government office I want. You name the company and I’ll get into it as the top candidate. I can do anything, if I put my mind to it. So what’s the problem?”
She closed her eyes, leaned back against the car seat, and didn’t say anything for a while. “I’m scared,” she said. She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. “I’m so very very scared. Life is frightening. In a few years, I’ll have to go out in the real world and it scares me. Why don’t you understand that? Why can’t you try to understand what I’m feeling? Why do you have to torment me like this?”
He held her close. “As long as I’m here you don’t need to be afraid,” he said. “I’m scared, too—as much as you are. But if I’m with you, I’m not afraid. As long as we pull together, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She shook her head again. “You don’t understand. I’m not like you. I’m a woman. You don’t get it at all.”
It was pointless for him to say anything more. She cried for a long time, and when she was finished she said the following, rather astonishing thing:
“If…we ever broke up, I want you to know I’ll always think about you. It’s true. I’ll never forget you, because I really love you. You’re the first person I’ve ever loved and just being with you makes me happy. You know that. But these are two different things. If you need me to promise you, I will. I will sleep with you someday. But not right now. After I marry somebody else, I’ll sleep with you. I promise.”
“At the time I had no idea what she was trying to tell me,” he said, staring at the burning logs in the fireplace. The waiter brought over our entrees and laid a few logs on the fire while he was at it. Sparks crackled up. The middle-aged couple at the table next to us was puzzling over which desserts to order. “What she said was like a riddle. After I got home I gave a lot of thought to what she’d said, but I just couldn’t grasp it at all. Do you understand what she meant?”
“Well, I guess she meant she wanted to stay a virgin until she got married, and since after she was married there was no reason to be a virgin anymore, she wouldn’t mind having an affair with you. She was just telling you to wait till then.”
“I suppose that’s it. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
“It’s a unique way of thinking,” I said. “Logical, though.”
A gentle smile played at his lips. “You’re right. It is logical.”
“She gets married a virgin. And once she’s somebody’s wife she has an affair. Sounds like some classic French novel. Minus any fancy-dress ball or maids running around.”
“But that’s the only practical solution she was able to come up with,” he said.
“A damn shame,” I said.
He looked at me for a while, and then slowly nodded. “You got that right. I’m glad you understand.” He nodded again. “Now I can see it that way—now that I’m older. Back then, though, I couldn’t. I was just a kid. I couldn’t grasp all the minute fluctuations of the human heart. So pure shock was my only reaction. Honestly, I was completely floored.”
“I could see that,” I said.
We didn’t say anything for a while as we ate.
“As I’m sure you can imagine,” he continued, “we broke up. Neither of us announced we were breaking up, it just ended naturally. A very quiet breakup. I think we were too worn out to continue the relationship. From my perspective, her approach to life was—how should I put it?—not very sincere. No, that’s not it…. What I wanted was for her to have a better life. It disappointed me a little. I didn’t want her to get so hung up on virginity or marriage or whatever, but live a more natural, full sort of life.”
“But I don’t think she could have acted otherwise,” I said.
He nodded. “You might be right,” he said, taking a bite of a thick piece of mushroom. “After a while, you become inflexible. You can’t bounce back anymore. It could have happened to me, too. Ever since we were little, people had been pushing us, expecting us to succeed. And we met their expectations, because we were bright enough to. But your maturity level can’t keep pace, and one day you find there’s no going back. At least as far as morals go.”
“That didn’t happen to you?” I asked.
“Somehow I was able to overcome it,” he said after giving it some thought. He put down his knife and fork and wiped his mouth with the napkin. “After we broke up, I started going out with another girl in Tokyo. We lived together for a while. Honestly, she didn’t move me as much as Yoshiko did, but I did love her. We really understood each other, and were always up-front with each other. She taught me about human beings—how beautiful they can be, the kind of faults they have. I finally made some friends, too, and got interested in politics. I’m not saying my personality completely changed or anything. I was a very practical person, and I still am. I don’t write novels, and you don’t import furniture. You know what I mean. In college I learned there were lots of realities in the world. It’s a huge world, there are lots of different values co-existing, and there’s no need to always be the top student. And then I went out into the world.”
“And you’ve done very well for yourself.”
“I suppose,” he said, and gave a sheepish sigh. He gazed at me like we were a pair of accomplices. “Compared to other people of my generation, I make a good living. So on a practical level, yes, I’ve been successful.”
He fell silent. Knowing he wanted to say more, I sat there, patiently waiting for him to go on.
“I didn’t see Yoshiko for a long time after that,” he continued. “For a long time. I’d graduated and started work at a trading company. I worked there for five years, part of which took me overseas. I was busy every day. Two years after I graduated, I heard that Yoshiko had gotten married. My mother gave me the news. I didn’t ask who she’d married. When I heard the news, the first thought that struck me was whether she’d been able to keep her virginity until marriage. After that I felt a little sad. The next day I felt even sadder. I felt like something important was finally over, like a door behind me had closed forever. That’s only to be expected, since I loved her. We’d gone out for four years, and I guess I was still clinging to the hope that we might get married someday. She’d been a huge part of my youth, so it was only natural that I felt sad. But I decided that as long as she was happy, I was OK with it. I honestly felt that way. I was a little—worried about her. There was a part of her that was very fragile.”
The waiter came, removed our plates, and brought over the dessert wagon. We both turned down dessert and ordered coffee.
“I got married late, when I was thirty-two. So when Yoshiko called me, I was still single. I was twenty-eight then, which makes it more than a decade ago. I’d just quit the company I’d been working for and had gone out on my own. I was convinced that the imported furniture market was about to take off, so I borrowed money from my father and started up my own little firm. Despite my confidence, though, things didn’t go so well at first. Orders were late, goods went unsold, warehouse fees piled up, there were loans to repay. I was frankly worn out, and starting to lose confidence. This was the hardest time I’ve ever gone through in my life. And it was exactly during that rough spell that Yoshiko phoned me one day. I don’t know how she got my number, but one evening around eight, she called. I knew it was her right away. How could I ever forget that voice? It brought back so many memories. I was feeling pretty down then, and it felt wonderful to hear my old girlfriend’s voice again.”
He stared at the blazing logs in the fireplace as if trying to summon up a memory. By this time the restaurant was completely full, loud with the sound of people’s voices, laughter, plates clinking. Almost all the guests were locals, it seemed, and they called out to the waiters by first name: Giuseppe! Paolo!
“I don’t know who she heard it from, but she knew everything about me. How I was still single and had worked abroad. How I’d quit my job a year before and started up my own company. She knew it all. Don’t worry, she told me, you’ll do fine. Just have confidence in yourself. I know you’ll be successful. How could you not be? It made me so happy to hear her say that. Her voice was so kind. I can do this, I thought, I can make a go of it. Hearing her voice made me regain the confidence I used to have. As long as things stay real, I thought, I know I’m going to make it. I felt like the world was out there just for me.” He smiled.
“It was my turn then to ask about her life. What kind of person she’d married, whether she had children, where she lived. She didn’t have any children. Her husband was four years older than her and worked at a TV station. He was a director, she said. He must be very busy, I commented. So busy he doesn’t have time to make any children, she replied, and laughed. She lived in Tokyo, in a condo in Shinagawa. I was living in Shiroganedai at the time, so we weren’t exactly neighbors but lived pretty close to each other. What a coincidence, I told her. Anyway, that’s what we talked about—all the typical things two people who used to go out in high school might talk about. Sometimes it felt a bit awkward, but I enjoyed talking with her again. We talked like two old friends who’d said goodbye long ago and who were now walking down two separate paths in life. It had been a long time since I’d spoken so openly, so honestly, to anybody, and we talked for a long, long time. Once we’d said everything there was to say, we were silent. It was a—how should I put it?—a very deep silence. The kind of silence where, if you close your eyes, all sorts of images start to well up in your mind.” He stared for a while at his hands on the table, then raised his head and looked at me. “I wanted to hang up then, if I could have. Thank her for calling, tell her how much I enjoyed talking with her. You know what I mean?”
“From a practical standpoint that would have been the most realistic thing to do,” I agreed.
“But she didn’t hang up. And she invited me to her place. Can you come over? she asked. My husband’s on a business trip and I’m by myself and bored. I didn’t know what to say, so I was silent. And so was she. There was just that silence for a while, and then she said this: I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you.”
“I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you,” she said. At first he didn’t know what she meant. And then it all came back—her promise to sleep with him after she got married. He’d never considered this a real promise, just a stray thought she’d let slip out in a moment of confusion.
But it hadn’t been the result of any confusion on her part. For her it was a binding promise, a firm agreement she’d entered into.
For a moment he didn’t know what to think, no idea what he should do. He glanced around him, completely at a loss, but discovered no signposts to show him the way. Of course he wanted to sleep with her—that goes without saying. After they broke up, he often imagined what it would be like making love to her. Even when he was with other girls, in the dark he pictured holding her. Not that he’d seen her naked—all he knew about her body was what he’d been able to feel with his hand up her clothes.
He knew full well how dangerous it would be for him to sleep with her at this juncture. How destructive it could wind up being. He also didn’t feel like reawakening what he’d already abandoned back there in the dark. This isn’t the right thing for me to do, he knew. There’s something unreal about it, something incompatible with who I am.
But of course he agreed to see her. This was, after all, a beautiful fairy tale he might experience only once in life. His gorgeous ex-girlfriend, the one he’d spent his precious youth with, was telling him she wanted to sleep with him, asking him to come over to her house right away—and she lived close by. Plus there was that secret, legendary promise exchanged a long, long time ago in a deep woods.
He sat there for a while, eyes closed, not speaking. He felt like he’d lost the power of speech.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“I’m here,” he said. “Okay. I’ll be over soon. I should be there in less than a half hour. Tell me your address.”
He wrote down the name of her condo and the apartment number, and her phone number. He quickly shaved, changed clothes, and went out to flag down a cab.
“If it’d been you, what would you have done?” he asked me.
I shook my head. I had no idea what to say.
He laughed and stared at his coffee cup. “I wish I could have gotten by without answering, too. But I couldn’t. I had to make a decision right then and there. To go or not to go, one or the other. There’s no in-between. I ended up going to her place. As I knocked on her door, I was thinking how nice it would be if she wasn’t at home. But she was there, as beautiful as she used to be. Smelling just as wonderful as I remembered. We had a few drinks and talked, listened to some old records. And then what do you think happened?”
I have no idea, I told him.
“A long time ago, when I was a child, there was a fairy tale I read,” he said, staring at the opposite wall the whole time. “I don’t remember how the story went, but the last line has stayed with me. Probably because this was the first time I’d ever read a fairy tale that had such a strange ending. This is how it ended: ‘And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.’ Don’t you think that’s sort of a strange ending?”
“I do,” I said.
“I wish I could remember the plot, but I can’t. All I can remember is that strange last line. ‘And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.’ What kind of story could it have been?”
We’d finished our coffee by this point.
“We held each other,” he went on, “but didn’t have sex. I didn’t take her clothes off. I just touched her with my fingers, just like the old days. I decided that was the best thing to do, and she’d apparently come to the same conclusion. For a long time we sat there, touching each other. That was the only way we could grasp what we were supposed to understand at that time. If this had been long ago, that wouldn’t have been the case—we would have had sex, and grown even closer. We might have ended up happy. But we’d already passed that point. That possibility was sealed up, frozen solid. And it would never open up again.”
He turned his empty coffee cup around and around. He did this so long the waiter came over to see if he wanted anything. Finally he let go of the cup, called the waiter back over, and ordered another espresso.
“I must have stayed at her apartment for about an hour. I don’t remember exactly. Any longer and I might have gone a little nuts,” he said and smiled. “I said goodbye to her and left. This was our final farewell. I knew it, and so did she. The last time I saw her, she was standing in the doorway, arms folded. She seemed about to say something, but didn’t. She didn’t have to say it out loud—I knew what she was going to say. I felt so empty. So hollow. Sounds struck me as weird, everything looked distorted. I wandered around in a daze, thinking how my life had been totally pointless. I wanted to turn around, go back to her place, and have her. But I couldn’t. There was no way I could do that.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. He drank his second espresso.
“It’s kind of embarrassing to say this, but that night I went out and slept with a prostitute. It was the first time in my life I’d paid for sex. And probably the last.”
I stared at my own coffee cup for a while. And thought of how full of myself I used to be. I wanted to try to explain this to him, but didn’t think I could.
“When I tell it like this, it sounds like something that happened to somebody else,” he laughed. He was silent for a time, lost in thought. I didn’t say anything, either.
“‘And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing,’” he finally said. “That line always comes to me whenever I remember what happened. It’s like a conditioned reflex. It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical.”
As I said at the beginning, there’s no real moral or lesson to be learned from all this. But this is something that actually happened to him. Something that happened to all of us. That’s why when he told me his story, I couldn’t laugh. And even now I can’t.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL