A Small, Round Something
So the Shizuoka Translation Contest Deadline has passed. I sent my entry in about a week ago. No idea how I''ll do. I quite liked the short story I translated though so I thought I would share it with you. It's got a lot of really nice (well not nice so much as well rendered) imagery in it, and hopefully I did that justice in translating it.
A Small Round Something
The first thing to pop into his no doubt horribly cold stricken, feverish, vaguely fogged up head is a small round something. It is a small white button, sewed with black cotton thread onto the thin cloth belt that winds around his folded and wrapped umbrella to fasten it in place. Since the original metal button had been torn off, his mother had probably replaced it with one from a dress shirt. He had to push the button through the loop on the end of the belt to fasten the umbrella, but since the dress shirt button was slightly bigger than the original it was always a little hard to do. The circumference was bigger certainly, but also the original button was a flat metal disk whereas the dress shirt button had a thickness to it, so when trying to fit it into the loop his finger tips never quite adjusted. But more than that, the white button against the black cloth and handle of the umbrella was so unpleasing to the eye, and the amateurish makeshift repair so obvious that when he took it to school he was a little embarrassed to place it in the stand next to the others and would put it aside in a corner where it would not be seen. He was in elementary school then, but does not remember what year.
Even though he had been shivering since yesterday morning he had gone to Shinjuku to meet his Aunt, and when he returned home he collapsed into bed and fell asleep in his clothes. He got up to urinate once, but even just going to the bathroom and back his legs became unsteady, and after barely managing to change into pajamas he curled up under the covers and immediately fell asleep. After some hours passed, he woke from a nightmarish, painful sleep, as if desperately forcing through heavy water to just barely push his face through the surface, but his body burning and his consciousness unaroused he now lays wandering drowsily in slumber. His joints hurt. Various fragments of unconnected memory rise up and disappear as quickly as they come, but for some reason they are all of his childhood. Probably because, after seeing his Aunt for the first time in years, he came home thinking of many things he had not thought of for a long time. That small white button. His old umbrella had been cotton, and waterproofing technology probably wasn’t very advanced then besides, so when he walked in the rain it quickly soaked up water and became quite heavy. When he got to school, he would close the umbrella, wrap the cloth around the shaft and wring the water out with a splash. When had he first touched an umbrella made from synthetic fiber? Was it while he was in elementary school, or after entering junior high? He hardly thinks of such things when he opens umbrellas now, but he still clearly remembers that elated feeling when he first held that light umbrella, how the raindrops would bead on the smooth fabric and roll off the edge, and even though the sky above was grim his heart would be refreshed. But now, lying in bed with his eyes closed, what vividly comes back into his feverish head is that small white button sewed onto his old heavy cotton umbrella, and, like a double exposure, the image of fatsia leaves knocked loose by the rain, covering the street.
Once he noticed a button was missing while putting on his clothes and when he told his mother, she had crouched down and replaced the button for him right there. How happy I had been, he thinks, missing his now dead mother. “Get undressed, I’ll sew one on for you.” “No way, it’s cold. I’m fine like this. It’s only missing one.” “All right then, leave them on. Just hold still for a little bit, I’ll fix one on quick.” His mother’s fingers moved deftly, manipulating needle and thread, and the button was sewn on as he stood there. When he tried to fit the just attached new button through its hole the feel was a little stiff.
In this way, things that no longer are, or things that probably still exist but now have no connection to his life, that he no longer sees or touches, unexpectedly come back to him in vivid outline. He remembers the soft feeling of the sweet bean candy, whose plastic wrapper would burst and curl up if pierced by the end of a toothpick, revealing the bean jam. Resounding right next to his burning ears are the dull, cool sounds made when he filled a pretty colored glass plate with water and lay marbles on the bottom, then taking care not to spill, gently lifted the the plate and swayed, tilting it left and right. He suddenly recalls the feel of placing his middle and index fingers onto a softball’s stitches to throw a curve, and grasps for an imaginary ball, his fingers cutting through air.
What is a memory? A “fossil of time” perhaps, but at the same time it is something more than a frozen and fossilized relic. Memories may even be living things. A living thing that abruptly stirs and moves, that falls asleep and awakens from long slumbers. That grows tired and bored, and bounds about with endless energy. That is slowly developing and growing, and conversely gradually wasting away and dying. A precious living thing, with all the tenacity particular to things possessing life, and all the transience. People make pets of them, carry too many of them around, and while thanks to them they are able to survive, at times they inflict horrible wounds. When he casts his eyes to the window the thick grey cloth curtains are pulled closed and he is unable to see outside. His bedroom is shrouded in dimness and it is unclear whether it is day or night. Lying on his side he looks in the direction of his feet to the round wall clock showing 9:30, and while it must be the next day by now he does not know if it is morning or evening
As his eyes are fixed upon the clock face the feeling comes over him that there is something weird and detestable about the way the second hand silently and smoothly circles around, a feeling he has been having recently but had not put into words. The clock that had hung in his old house, on the pillar in the hallway between the kitchen and living room, had kept time with a clear tick-tock as it shook the papier-mâché figurines. When it stopped he wouldn’t wait for his parents’ order, but instead all by himself bring a chair to just below the clock, stand on it, open the glass lid, stick a key into the screw, and wind it with a chk-chk-chk. Then the tick-tock-tick that marked the time would start again. Both within and without himself he feels like in those days time flowed with a clearer rhythm. What in the world happened to that clock? Tears suddenly well up and bead in the corners of both eyes, and before long they stream down the sides of his face. He has never particularly missed his now demolished childhood home, but that the clock that kept time, that had continued to keep time, at the very center of that house has been lost from his life feels like a kind of unrecoverable ruin, and a feeling like his chest will burst wells up. All the while his bedroom clock’s second hand, without sound and with a strange smoothness, continues to revolve, never resting for a moment.
Just what does it mean to remember something, to recall something that is not here now? It’s not as if it can be seen. If you close your eyes your field of vision goes dark, but it’s not as if images rise to the surface like transparencies amid that darkness, and what spreads out on the back of your closed eyelids is not the same as the true meaning of darkness to begin with, he thinks. You feel like you can see something but it’s not a picture, you feel like you can hear something but it’s not a real sound. If he had to say, rather it is probably something like a scent that drifts in faintly from who knows where and tickles the nostrils.
He thinks he probably only ever saw his mother cry twice. The first time, his teacher had ended school early and when he came home much earlier than normal his mother had her elbows on the dining room table, her face buried in her hands and was sobbing. He hadn’t exactly snuck home, so she must just not have heard the sound of the front door opening. When she noticed him standing there petrified, she panicked, went into the bathroom and stayed shut in there for a while. When she came out her eyes were red and her face was flushed, but her voice was as calm as always, and murmuring oh, the shopping, the shopping, she hurriedly left without giving him a chance to ask her anything. Perhaps she had often cried like that in places where he couldn’t see her. Certainly in those days my father wasn’t around the house, he thinks. His father went on a lot of business trips and hardly ever came home, however when the three of them were able to join together around the dinner table for a few nights in a row it made him feel hopelessly uneasy, so for him it was always better when it was just him and his mother in the house.
The second time she hadn’t tried to hide her tears. The two of them were sitting side by side on the small back porch, one of her arms around him the other rubbing here eyes as she sobbed and sobbed. He feels like they were like that for quite a while, but just how long had it continued? Then, after blowing her nose and taking a deep breath, she silently stood up and walked away, but he did not turn his head to follow her and stayed sitting as he was. He quieted his breathing to listen to the footsteps of his mother going up the stairs. A few moments later an intense argument began, and this was the first time that his parents had ever fought within his earshot. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, or rather, even if the fragments of their words entered his ears he purposely tried not to comprehend them, and to chase them out of his mind, but soon their exchanges escalated to a furious shouting match, and then broke off immediately after. A little while later his father came pounding down the stairs with furious momentum and left, slamming the front door behind him.
He had been sitting on the porch that faced the maybe 3.5 square meter plot around the back of the house, that couldn’t really be called a garden , but about when his parents argument became more violent he stepped barefoot down onto the ground, crouched in front of the fatsia bush and stared at the black and yellow striped spider busily building a web between the stalks and leaves. But were those leaves and that spider, and the scene that enclosed them, really visible to him, or not? Distracted by the short snatches of screaming voices that leaked out, was his mind not a complete blank? But, the image of many small drops of water crowded together in the mesh of that barely visible web, that would perpetually shake as the spider hurried about, seem visible to him even now. It was a cold and cloudy day, but soon the sun came suddenly through a crack in the clouds and the many drops of water sparkled in all the colors of the rainbow, enchanting him. ....Afterwards, maybe he climbed the stairs to the second floor to check on his mother. Or perhaps she came down to him, and feigned a smile. Just after that, or maybe a little later, he and his mother had probably talked about what had happened. He has absolutely no memory of that. Instead, only the cluster of countless tiny water droplets, that glittered all at once as they shimmered back and forth, and the feeling of the damp soil in the shade that seemed to stick to the bottom of his feet as he crouched down watching them come back to him vividly.
And then the shape and feeling of something else, small and round, yes, but this time something red, comes back to him. It’s an azuki bean, the stitching on a bean bag has frayed and four or five of the beans that were packed into it have come pattering out. He can hear the crackling sound of them hitting the floor, and he remembers, that’s right, I used to sit in a circle with my friends and play bean bags while waiting at after-school abacus class. Waiting for the advanced class to end, they had flopped down in the wooden floored room just inside from the entrance and killed time playing bean bags and the like. He remembers now the feel of the black floorboards, nothing like the “flooring” of today, the surface worn down and slick and the wood grain clearly standing out, and the way the azuki beans would split when they fell and bounced off the floor. He had been something of an effeminate boy who often played games with girls, but for some reason lots of boys his age, including sporty honor students and misbehaving ne’erdowells, attended that school, and those types too enthusiastically joined the circle to play bean bags, so it was probably something of a fad in his neighborhood. “On the hand, on the hand...grab them, grab them...slap the floor, slap the floor...scoop them up...” That accompanying song with its strange rising and falling tune even now instinctively climbs to his lips, but while that song suited the high clear voices of children, heard on the hoarse voice of a man in his fifties stifling the pain of a soar throat it is merely awkward, even if he just hums it to himself.
His mother was the one who had sewn those beanbags together, from set aside scraps of clothing. Azuki beans definitely made the best filling. Once he played with one that was filled with rice, but there was nothing enjoyable about the dull squashed feeling when it bounced on the back of your hand after you threw it up in the air. They really had to bounce with a nice shaker like sound to be any fun.
Come to think of it, the abacus too was a type of play, or maybe it should be called an art, where you flick round things about. He hasn’t touched that strange device, with the beads lined up in groups of five, one on the top and four on the bottom, in decades, but his fingers still remember the pleasant, lightly dried feel when he would grab the edge around the center of the beads with the tips of his thumb and forefinger to flick them up and down. “ Starting with ##Yen, ##Yen” What level had he reached at that school? His fingers were clumsy and slow so there was no way he could advance past a certain point, but he did not dislike the pleasurable feeling, like being duped all too easily by a clever trick, in the way the right answer would automatically be produced each time he touched that tool and mechanically moved the beads as he was told to. Sometimes, as he was absorbed in flicking the brown beads up and down, the sweat from the palms of his hands would run onto the abacus, stopping the beads from sliding properly, and when he told the teacher they would dust it with a fine talcum-like powder, and the beads would recover their elastic movement. That was a lot of fun, the time I spent at that abacus class I attended for two years is definitely one of my best memories of elementary school, he thinks, and though his head is hazy from the fever, he randomly flicks the beads of the abacus inside his head as he tosses and turns ....eight yen, thirty yen, six hundred and fifty seven yen. And then he notices that the sheets his right hand is weakly scraping while flicking the imaginary beads, are sticky and wet with sweat.
That happened in the a corner of the dimly lit wooden room as well, he thinks. His best friend the optician’s son Taichi, who went by just Ta, said hey, see, with a half proud half embarrassed expression, I got some hair! What, no way! Yes I did, take a look. Ta pulled his shorts and underpants down to about the middle of his thighs, and rubbing a spot above his penis, looked at him as if to say what do you think? When he came in for a closer look there certainly was something like a fuzzy down there, but it was a far cry from the shaggy crotch of his dad or the neighborhood men he had seen at the baths. What, this? This isn’t hair! Ta’s face went red. They’re pubes, stupid! They’re gonna grow more and more, and it’s gonna get thicker and thicker! He reached out to feel the fuzzy down on Ta’s lower stomach and gently pet it. Maybe it was just his imagination, but Ta’s penis seemed much bigger than his own, and the skin on the end was peeled back and something smooth and pink was peeking out. Wow, so these are pubes, huh. That’s right, I bet you don’t have any yet, Ta said self-importantly. Irritated, he lied, I’ve got just as much as you! You don’t, you liar. It’s not a lie! Well then let me see. No way, that’s gross. I showed you! You did that by yourself, it’s not like I asked you or anything, so there! Ta reached out to his pants, and in trying to shake him off it became a half-joking, half-serious struggle, and to strike back at poor Ta, whose shorts and underpants had slid down, he thinks he may have scraped with both hands at the “pubes” that were Ta’s pride and joy, but he is no longer certain about that. Then maybe Ta panicked and while pulling up his underpants tried to get away, keeping him at bay with his feet and rolling around on the floorboards trying to escape, but he doesn’t clearly remember anymore. All he remembers is the soft feel of Ta’s just sprouted thin fine pubic hair. It must have had a strong impact on him. But just how had he and Ta come to be left alone in that room that was always teeming with kids? Judging from the dim light, it feels like it must have been around dusk, but is it all just a trick of memory?
After they had grown a little older they had countless chances to see each other’s naked bodies - and the “pubes” that had long since stopped being anything interesting. But Ta went off to medical college in Hokkaido, and his family moved out into the Tokyo suburbs, so contact became more and more infrequent, and they had not met for many years when he unexpectedly got a message that Ta, who he had heard would soon be becoming an intern or something, had met with an accident on a winter mountain and died. Come to think of it, once when Ta had come to his house for the first time in a while, he had spoken about joining the mountaineering club and happily showed him his ice axe. That was the last time he ever saw Ta. He had cried plenty sitting in his chair at the wake, but that has already blurred in the far reaches of his memory, and a sentiment of earnest longing for that manly neat boy, or young man, no longer wells up. Even his face has grown blurry, and in the end he cannot recall it. What kind of strange mechanism of memory is it, that the feel of that clump of thin fuzzy down growing around the penis of the ten or so years old Ta comes back to his fingers as if it were just yesterday?
It was also when he was in college that his mother got remarried, but was that before or after Ta’s death? As a woman his mother was happy to be starting a new life, and for him, since his dad had left and the two of them had been spending night and day together, having his not exactly nagging but somewhat irritating mother watching every little thing he did had just started to feel a bit suffocating, and so while living alone in the small house his mother had left was a little lonely, the sense of liberation was greatly welcome. However, after only living four years in the new house she had married into, his mother had died suddenly of a heart attack. Her second husband was a kind elderly man who managed a lathe shop in the old part of Tokyo. At the funeral he had cried openly, paying no mind to the people looking on. It was a pity that his mother had died before even reaching her mid-forties, but he was glad that she had been able to spend the last four years of her life in happiness.
But this also feels distant. Now what feels the closest are things like the lukewarmness of the water that gradually enveloped his hand when he gently dipped it into the tropical fish aquarium that sat in the living room of his childhood home. A standard variety of tropical fish, like angel fish or guppies, were probably swimming inside that tank, he thinks, but in reality he hardly has any memory of the fish. What is fresh in his memory now is the feel of the bubbles spit out from the pump all throughout that lukewarm water and the soft algae that would wind around his finger as they swayed back and forth touching his hand, and the sickening peculiar fishy smell that, at times like now when he was sick and his body was weak, would shoot up his nostrils when he brought his face to the front of the tank. And also, the strange sludge that would stay on his fingertips when he gently rubbed the slimy surface of the inside glass with his hand. Amid the chaos of the divorce had they given that aquarium to someone, or thrown it away? All of a sudden it had disappeared from the house, but just where in the world had it gone? Keeping tropical fish was definitely my father’s hobby, he thinks. That aquarium, illuminated by an otherworldly pale blue fluorescent light, with the pump making that incessant bubbling sound night and day, was just this strange object to him. But that strangeness had some kind of irresistible lure, and in the idle boredom of long afternoons he would without meaning draw near to that aquarium and churn up the water warmed by the heater. He didn’t feel any hatred towards the fish themselves, or something like a hard to resist charm on the flip side of hatred either, he thinks. The fact that that fishy-smelling-water filled aquarium, that left his hands covered in sludge, was sitting in a corner of his living room was itself somehow detestable, but perhaps that detestability itself had a kind of unique attractive power, that bewitchingly stirred something laying stagnant deep within his child self. Maybe some kind of nameless warped emotion towards his father, or his father and mother’s relationship, was projected there.
His throat is horribly dry but he is reluctant to go to the kitchen and just can’t muster the energy to get himself up. Lying still with his eyes shut he dozes off into a shallow sleep, and in his dream a white small round button, his umbrella’s fastener or from his shirt or from his trousers’ fly he doesn’t know, pops off and lands on the ground in front of him and oh no, this is bad, he shrieks in a small voice and quickly looks down but the button has already sunk into the muddy road and no matter where he looks he cannot find it. He is standing dead still with his school sneakers snugly stuck in the muddy road, and the deafening sound of large raindrops pounding down on the mud reverberates. He bends down to the muddy ground to look for the fallen button, and all of a sudden he is crouched in a scandalous position with his trousers and underwear down, and he desperately wants to urinate but if he lets it out here like this then the rain water that falls from the sky and his urine will clearly mix, and he thinks that would somehow be very bad and unclean, and he freezes. If you pee like this with your bottom next to the ground, it’ll splash on your calves and your thighs and your bottom, and more than that it’ll be this weird water that isn’t quite pee or rain, this strange fishy-smelling water, you can’t do it, you musn’t, if you do you’ll get in trouble, he thinks. ...Unable to endure the need to urinate he wakes up, and having no choice gets out from under the covers, enduring the pain in his joints, and heads to the toilet. After finishing his business in the cold toilet, in the washroom he drains a cup of water in one gulp, pours another half cup and gulps it down, and then peers into his own eyes in the mirror. The whites of his eyes are a little bloodshot, but, contrary to the prediction that his face would be drawn and haggard, his complexion is unexpectedly healthy, which feels like some kind of betrayal, by what he doesn’t know, but at the same time he is a little relieved as he returns to bed.
Just going to the bathroom felt like a chore, and feeling as though his vigor and stamina have been completely used up he lies on his side bringing his knees to his stomach, curling his body. The damp feeling of that wet muddy road comes back to him, and though his body is burning hot, the cold dark sky of a rainy night is what spreads out inside his head, and for some reason he repeatedly thinks, it’s winter, it’s so cold, yeah it’s finally going to start getting colder now. That button, that one and only button has gone and bounced off somewhere, and now no trace of my mother is left in my life, he thinks.
Come to think of it, just where did that round stone that he and his mother brought back from Amami Island go? On that remarkable beach covered with big pebbles that had been shaved and smoothed by the rough seas of the pacific into pretty egg shapes, maybe it had been called Honohoshi beach, he and his mother had crouched down and searched for hours, determined to find the most shapely stone and bring it back with them. They found a smooth round stone about the same size as a chicken or quail egg, and brought it home. At that time things were supposed to have been fairly amicable between his parents, but it had been just him and his mother on that vacation to Amami. That small round stone had sat in the pencil tray on top of his desk and been used as a small paperweight for a long time, but after moving multiple times he had lost track of it. The smooth feel of that round stone, that when lightly grasped would settle snugly into the palm of your hand, suddenly comes back to him now. Call it strange if you wish, but he often felt afraid, since it was such a perfect egg shape and had such a smooth texture, that if he put it in his mouth and wetted it with his saliva, while moving it back and forth inside his mouth it might slip down the back of his throat into his esophagus. He had never actually put it in his mouth of course, but sometimes when looking at it and touching it a feeling like “this is pretty heavy for something so small, seems like it could slip down your throat and just keep going, sliding all the way to the stomach, how scary,” would hang over him, and a chill would run up his spine. Once in a childish conversation with some other elementary school students someone had said, the thing about watermelons is, you have to take out the seeds before you eat them, if you eat too many of those seeds your gut will clog up, and you won’t be able to poop and you’ll die! Which had probably influenced him without him knowing.
As he thinks that, the fleeting feel of thin tracing paper, that would make a faint rustling sound when touched, also comes back to him. As a child he had often bought that semitransparent tracing paper from the stationary store, cut it to a suitable size and made book covers. After making those homemade covers with scissors and glue, and wrapping them over the covers of his books, he had felt very pleased with himself lining up those “bound” paperbacks and comics in a row on his book shelf. I must have really liked it to spend so much energy cutting and folding that thin rustly paper with my clumsy fingers, he thinks wistfully, and more than that he thinks anew, I had a lot of free time back then, I had a lot of extra time on my hands. In the case of comics like Osamu Tezuka’s “Zero Man” and “The Ribbon Knight” that he had read countless times and memorized every panel and line, the tracing paper covers that he had gone to such trouble to construct would little by little become stained with sweat and grow saggy as he handled them over and over again, and once they got that way even if they dried the ripples in the cover would not mend. When that happened he would tear up the paper and once again cut, fold, and glue a new cover, but it was never any bother to him. He recalls the feel of that tracing paper that soaked with sweat had become bumpy, and moaning from the pain in his joints he rolls over and tentatively makes fists, but both his palms are feverish and moist with sweat, and now neither that paper that protected his precious books nor that beautiful pebble with it’s smooth, as though polished, surface is there.
Rather than just a common cold he’s probably caught a dire form of influenza. The hateful feeling that it is his aunt’s fault, that that old woman is to blame, wells up inside of him. I’ve got a picture I want to give to you, she had said on the phone, and trying to get out of it he had said, well just send it in the mail, but she insisted, oh but it’s been so long, I’m just dying to see you, and wouldn’t listen. Once she went so far as to say, you know I don’t know how much longer I am for this world, he pretty much had no choice, and after pushing his way through the throng of transferring passengers he made his way to the restaurant in “My City” at the Shinjuku station, and ultimately ended up having to foot the bill for their french cuisine lunch, but he had no idea what the picture in question was going to be. Even after being shown the yellowed picture of his yukata clad aunt holding him when he was just an infant, at a hot spring on some vacation, he couldn’t recall anything, and in the end his aunt too just tilted her neck and said, hmm, where was it, I wonder, and that was that. He had known from the start of course, but his aunt’s true objective was to try and convert him to a certain new age religion as she had many times before, and yesterday in Shinjuku as well he had to put up with her nonsense like “you see, these are the principles that lie at the root of the world” all the while fighting the urge to scream enough already, just shut up! Many times up to this point, on the phone, or when called out to meet her, he had had to listen to those gracious teachings at length, and, at times gently and others directly, he had always deflected her, but his efforts to not hurt his aunt who had been so kind to him when he was a child simply did not get through to this obtuse old woman.
He probably shouldn’t have, but yesterday he was tired and the symptoms of his cold had probably already started to develop, so he lost the energy to continue being patient, and hissed “could you just cut it out already?” with a drawn up face. Auntie, I don’t know if it’s offerings or charges for purification or what, but how much money have you put into this thing, aren’t you all wasting the savings you kept for your old age, he had said in a sharp tone to his aunt, who had been proudly talking about being made a regional officer or secretary of the group, and while those words were, in his way, out of concern for his elderly, single aunt, she likely took them simply as an insult. The reason she had begun talking about his mother over their after meal coffee was, whether consciously or unconsciously, almost certainly because she had been irritated by his sermon like tone. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” she had begun, and immediately his feelings sank, and as they did he braced himself as though shrouding his heart in armor. She was the type of poor spirited person who would start “I probably shouldn’t say” or “I shouldn’t interfere” or “it’s none of my business” and then without concern bluntly say the “thing she shouldn’t” that was guaranteed to hurt the other person. However yesterday what she went on to say about his mother was something he had never heard before, and even he, who up until now had let all kinds of things just go in one ear and out the other while smiling along, couldn’t help but be a little shocked.
“****,” meaning his mother, in other words her own younger brother’s former wife, “**** just did whatever she wanted, anyway,” she said hatefully, twisting up her face, “I know she’s your mother, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead besides, but fooling around like that. I really felt bad for my brother.” When he said, my father was the one who cheated on her, she continued “Oh come, my brother probably did a little, but **** was far worse! What, didn’t you know? That old guy she got remarried to, they’d been seeing each other for a long time. My brother was a kind person, so he pretended he didn’t know and put up with it, but eventually he just couldn’t and it became that big mess. And a lot happened before that old man too apparently. **** was just, what do you call it, lecherous?...” Then his aunt seemed to notice his pale complexion and the look in his eyes for the first time, and mumbling tried to discretely change the subject, but he no longer had any wish to continue talking. He paid the bill and exchanged curt farewells with his aunt in front of the restaurant and, unsure of what to do with his unsettled emotions, instead of riding the elevator he took the stairs from the ninth floor down to the subway. He threw away the photo he had been given in the platform garbage can along with its envelope.
Lying in bed he stretches out his hands, but unable to reach he sits up and leans out from the bed to grab the edge of the curtains and open them just a little. A weak, thinly dim light is shining through the patch of bamboo trees in the space between the house next door. How many hours, how many tens of hours has he slept by now? His watch shows just a little before five o’clock, but this is definitely not the light of dawn but rather the faint light of dusk. His fever hasn’t gone down, but even so he is hungry and has an appetite, which must be a good thing at any rate, he thinks.
Silver BB pistol, there was something called a silver BB pistol, he recalls now for no apparent reason. Ta and his other friends had often played with those cheap plastic toys, running around the side streets as the sun was beginning to set, shooting at each other with those BBs, that didn’t really even hurt if you got hit by them. The pistol was a simple device, where you put some silver BBs into the body of the gun and they would be shot out one at a time by a spring when you pulled the trigger, but those small round silver bullets were likely just hardened plaster with the color painted on the outside. They were strangely light, and when you crushed one on the sidewalk the fact that even though the outside was silver the inside was white felt kind of fake, and anyway once broken they just became a clump of oddly shaped white granules and crumbled away all too quickly. He thinks that fleeting impression somehow resembles the feeling of fragility and fleetingness that remained on his fingertips when he would ball up bits of used pencil eraser, and though after shaping them with his thumb and forefinger it would appear perfectly round and solid, after just a little bounce it would slowly and surely disintegrate back into the little scraps of rubber, scattering about. It was what his infant self, his child self had already clearly perceived, but just not had the words to express, the fragility and fleetingness, and preciousness of life itself.
A Small Round Something
The first thing to pop into his no doubt horribly cold stricken, feverish, vaguely fogged up head is a small round something. It is a small white button, sewed with black cotton thread onto the thin cloth belt that winds around his folded and wrapped umbrella to fasten it in place. Since the original metal button had been torn off, his mother had probably replaced it with one from a dress shirt. He had to push the button through the loop on the end of the belt to fasten the umbrella, but since the dress shirt button was slightly bigger than the original it was always a little hard to do. The circumference was bigger certainly, but also the original button was a flat metal disk whereas the dress shirt button had a thickness to it, so when trying to fit it into the loop his finger tips never quite adjusted. But more than that, the white button against the black cloth and handle of the umbrella was so unpleasing to the eye, and the amateurish makeshift repair so obvious that when he took it to school he was a little embarrassed to place it in the stand next to the others and would put it aside in a corner where it would not be seen. He was in elementary school then, but does not remember what year.
Even though he had been shivering since yesterday morning he had gone to Shinjuku to meet his Aunt, and when he returned home he collapsed into bed and fell asleep in his clothes. He got up to urinate once, but even just going to the bathroom and back his legs became unsteady, and after barely managing to change into pajamas he curled up under the covers and immediately fell asleep. After some hours passed, he woke from a nightmarish, painful sleep, as if desperately forcing through heavy water to just barely push his face through the surface, but his body burning and his consciousness unaroused he now lays wandering drowsily in slumber. His joints hurt. Various fragments of unconnected memory rise up and disappear as quickly as they come, but for some reason they are all of his childhood. Probably because, after seeing his Aunt for the first time in years, he came home thinking of many things he had not thought of for a long time. That small white button. His old umbrella had been cotton, and waterproofing technology probably wasn’t very advanced then besides, so when he walked in the rain it quickly soaked up water and became quite heavy. When he got to school, he would close the umbrella, wrap the cloth around the shaft and wring the water out with a splash. When had he first touched an umbrella made from synthetic fiber? Was it while he was in elementary school, or after entering junior high? He hardly thinks of such things when he opens umbrellas now, but he still clearly remembers that elated feeling when he first held that light umbrella, how the raindrops would bead on the smooth fabric and roll off the edge, and even though the sky above was grim his heart would be refreshed. But now, lying in bed with his eyes closed, what vividly comes back into his feverish head is that small white button sewed onto his old heavy cotton umbrella, and, like a double exposure, the image of fatsia leaves knocked loose by the rain, covering the street.
Once he noticed a button was missing while putting on his clothes and when he told his mother, she had crouched down and replaced the button for him right there. How happy I had been, he thinks, missing his now dead mother. “Get undressed, I’ll sew one on for you.” “No way, it’s cold. I’m fine like this. It’s only missing one.” “All right then, leave them on. Just hold still for a little bit, I’ll fix one on quick.” His mother’s fingers moved deftly, manipulating needle and thread, and the button was sewn on as he stood there. When he tried to fit the just attached new button through its hole the feel was a little stiff.
In this way, things that no longer are, or things that probably still exist but now have no connection to his life, that he no longer sees or touches, unexpectedly come back to him in vivid outline. He remembers the soft feeling of the sweet bean candy, whose plastic wrapper would burst and curl up if pierced by the end of a toothpick, revealing the bean jam. Resounding right next to his burning ears are the dull, cool sounds made when he filled a pretty colored glass plate with water and lay marbles on the bottom, then taking care not to spill, gently lifted the the plate and swayed, tilting it left and right. He suddenly recalls the feel of placing his middle and index fingers onto a softball’s stitches to throw a curve, and grasps for an imaginary ball, his fingers cutting through air.
What is a memory? A “fossil of time” perhaps, but at the same time it is something more than a frozen and fossilized relic. Memories may even be living things. A living thing that abruptly stirs and moves, that falls asleep and awakens from long slumbers. That grows tired and bored, and bounds about with endless energy. That is slowly developing and growing, and conversely gradually wasting away and dying. A precious living thing, with all the tenacity particular to things possessing life, and all the transience. People make pets of them, carry too many of them around, and while thanks to them they are able to survive, at times they inflict horrible wounds. When he casts his eyes to the window the thick grey cloth curtains are pulled closed and he is unable to see outside. His bedroom is shrouded in dimness and it is unclear whether it is day or night. Lying on his side he looks in the direction of his feet to the round wall clock showing 9:30, and while it must be the next day by now he does not know if it is morning or evening
As his eyes are fixed upon the clock face the feeling comes over him that there is something weird and detestable about the way the second hand silently and smoothly circles around, a feeling he has been having recently but had not put into words. The clock that had hung in his old house, on the pillar in the hallway between the kitchen and living room, had kept time with a clear tick-tock as it shook the papier-mâché figurines. When it stopped he wouldn’t wait for his parents’ order, but instead all by himself bring a chair to just below the clock, stand on it, open the glass lid, stick a key into the screw, and wind it with a chk-chk-chk. Then the tick-tock-tick that marked the time would start again. Both within and without himself he feels like in those days time flowed with a clearer rhythm. What in the world happened to that clock? Tears suddenly well up and bead in the corners of both eyes, and before long they stream down the sides of his face. He has never particularly missed his now demolished childhood home, but that the clock that kept time, that had continued to keep time, at the very center of that house has been lost from his life feels like a kind of unrecoverable ruin, and a feeling like his chest will burst wells up. All the while his bedroom clock’s second hand, without sound and with a strange smoothness, continues to revolve, never resting for a moment.
Just what does it mean to remember something, to recall something that is not here now? It’s not as if it can be seen. If you close your eyes your field of vision goes dark, but it’s not as if images rise to the surface like transparencies amid that darkness, and what spreads out on the back of your closed eyelids is not the same as the true meaning of darkness to begin with, he thinks. You feel like you can see something but it’s not a picture, you feel like you can hear something but it’s not a real sound. If he had to say, rather it is probably something like a scent that drifts in faintly from who knows where and tickles the nostrils.
He thinks he probably only ever saw his mother cry twice. The first time, his teacher had ended school early and when he came home much earlier than normal his mother had her elbows on the dining room table, her face buried in her hands and was sobbing. He hadn’t exactly snuck home, so she must just not have heard the sound of the front door opening. When she noticed him standing there petrified, she panicked, went into the bathroom and stayed shut in there for a while. When she came out her eyes were red and her face was flushed, but her voice was as calm as always, and murmuring oh, the shopping, the shopping, she hurriedly left without giving him a chance to ask her anything. Perhaps she had often cried like that in places where he couldn’t see her. Certainly in those days my father wasn’t around the house, he thinks. His father went on a lot of business trips and hardly ever came home, however when the three of them were able to join together around the dinner table for a few nights in a row it made him feel hopelessly uneasy, so for him it was always better when it was just him and his mother in the house.
The second time she hadn’t tried to hide her tears. The two of them were sitting side by side on the small back porch, one of her arms around him the other rubbing here eyes as she sobbed and sobbed. He feels like they were like that for quite a while, but just how long had it continued? Then, after blowing her nose and taking a deep breath, she silently stood up and walked away, but he did not turn his head to follow her and stayed sitting as he was. He quieted his breathing to listen to the footsteps of his mother going up the stairs. A few moments later an intense argument began, and this was the first time that his parents had ever fought within his earshot. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, or rather, even if the fragments of their words entered his ears he purposely tried not to comprehend them, and to chase them out of his mind, but soon their exchanges escalated to a furious shouting match, and then broke off immediately after. A little while later his father came pounding down the stairs with furious momentum and left, slamming the front door behind him.
He had been sitting on the porch that faced the maybe 3.5 square meter plot around the back of the house, that couldn’t really be called a garden , but about when his parents argument became more violent he stepped barefoot down onto the ground, crouched in front of the fatsia bush and stared at the black and yellow striped spider busily building a web between the stalks and leaves. But were those leaves and that spider, and the scene that enclosed them, really visible to him, or not? Distracted by the short snatches of screaming voices that leaked out, was his mind not a complete blank? But, the image of many small drops of water crowded together in the mesh of that barely visible web, that would perpetually shake as the spider hurried about, seem visible to him even now. It was a cold and cloudy day, but soon the sun came suddenly through a crack in the clouds and the many drops of water sparkled in all the colors of the rainbow, enchanting him. ....Afterwards, maybe he climbed the stairs to the second floor to check on his mother. Or perhaps she came down to him, and feigned a smile. Just after that, or maybe a little later, he and his mother had probably talked about what had happened. He has absolutely no memory of that. Instead, only the cluster of countless tiny water droplets, that glittered all at once as they shimmered back and forth, and the feeling of the damp soil in the shade that seemed to stick to the bottom of his feet as he crouched down watching them come back to him vividly.
And then the shape and feeling of something else, small and round, yes, but this time something red, comes back to him. It’s an azuki bean, the stitching on a bean bag has frayed and four or five of the beans that were packed into it have come pattering out. He can hear the crackling sound of them hitting the floor, and he remembers, that’s right, I used to sit in a circle with my friends and play bean bags while waiting at after-school abacus class. Waiting for the advanced class to end, they had flopped down in the wooden floored room just inside from the entrance and killed time playing bean bags and the like. He remembers now the feel of the black floorboards, nothing like the “flooring” of today, the surface worn down and slick and the wood grain clearly standing out, and the way the azuki beans would split when they fell and bounced off the floor. He had been something of an effeminate boy who often played games with girls, but for some reason lots of boys his age, including sporty honor students and misbehaving ne’erdowells, attended that school, and those types too enthusiastically joined the circle to play bean bags, so it was probably something of a fad in his neighborhood. “On the hand, on the hand...grab them, grab them...slap the floor, slap the floor...scoop them up...” That accompanying song with its strange rising and falling tune even now instinctively climbs to his lips, but while that song suited the high clear voices of children, heard on the hoarse voice of a man in his fifties stifling the pain of a soar throat it is merely awkward, even if he just hums it to himself.
His mother was the one who had sewn those beanbags together, from set aside scraps of clothing. Azuki beans definitely made the best filling. Once he played with one that was filled with rice, but there was nothing enjoyable about the dull squashed feeling when it bounced on the back of your hand after you threw it up in the air. They really had to bounce with a nice shaker like sound to be any fun.
Come to think of it, the abacus too was a type of play, or maybe it should be called an art, where you flick round things about. He hasn’t touched that strange device, with the beads lined up in groups of five, one on the top and four on the bottom, in decades, but his fingers still remember the pleasant, lightly dried feel when he would grab the edge around the center of the beads with the tips of his thumb and forefinger to flick them up and down. “ Starting with ##Yen, ##Yen” What level had he reached at that school? His fingers were clumsy and slow so there was no way he could advance past a certain point, but he did not dislike the pleasurable feeling, like being duped all too easily by a clever trick, in the way the right answer would automatically be produced each time he touched that tool and mechanically moved the beads as he was told to. Sometimes, as he was absorbed in flicking the brown beads up and down, the sweat from the palms of his hands would run onto the abacus, stopping the beads from sliding properly, and when he told the teacher they would dust it with a fine talcum-like powder, and the beads would recover their elastic movement. That was a lot of fun, the time I spent at that abacus class I attended for two years is definitely one of my best memories of elementary school, he thinks, and though his head is hazy from the fever, he randomly flicks the beads of the abacus inside his head as he tosses and turns ....eight yen, thirty yen, six hundred and fifty seven yen. And then he notices that the sheets his right hand is weakly scraping while flicking the imaginary beads, are sticky and wet with sweat.
That happened in the a corner of the dimly lit wooden room as well, he thinks. His best friend the optician’s son Taichi, who went by just Ta, said hey, see, with a half proud half embarrassed expression, I got some hair! What, no way! Yes I did, take a look. Ta pulled his shorts and underpants down to about the middle of his thighs, and rubbing a spot above his penis, looked at him as if to say what do you think? When he came in for a closer look there certainly was something like a fuzzy down there, but it was a far cry from the shaggy crotch of his dad or the neighborhood men he had seen at the baths. What, this? This isn’t hair! Ta’s face went red. They’re pubes, stupid! They’re gonna grow more and more, and it’s gonna get thicker and thicker! He reached out to feel the fuzzy down on Ta’s lower stomach and gently pet it. Maybe it was just his imagination, but Ta’s penis seemed much bigger than his own, and the skin on the end was peeled back and something smooth and pink was peeking out. Wow, so these are pubes, huh. That’s right, I bet you don’t have any yet, Ta said self-importantly. Irritated, he lied, I’ve got just as much as you! You don’t, you liar. It’s not a lie! Well then let me see. No way, that’s gross. I showed you! You did that by yourself, it’s not like I asked you or anything, so there! Ta reached out to his pants, and in trying to shake him off it became a half-joking, half-serious struggle, and to strike back at poor Ta, whose shorts and underpants had slid down, he thinks he may have scraped with both hands at the “pubes” that were Ta’s pride and joy, but he is no longer certain about that. Then maybe Ta panicked and while pulling up his underpants tried to get away, keeping him at bay with his feet and rolling around on the floorboards trying to escape, but he doesn’t clearly remember anymore. All he remembers is the soft feel of Ta’s just sprouted thin fine pubic hair. It must have had a strong impact on him. But just how had he and Ta come to be left alone in that room that was always teeming with kids? Judging from the dim light, it feels like it must have been around dusk, but is it all just a trick of memory?
After they had grown a little older they had countless chances to see each other’s naked bodies - and the “pubes” that had long since stopped being anything interesting. But Ta went off to medical college in Hokkaido, and his family moved out into the Tokyo suburbs, so contact became more and more infrequent, and they had not met for many years when he unexpectedly got a message that Ta, who he had heard would soon be becoming an intern or something, had met with an accident on a winter mountain and died. Come to think of it, once when Ta had come to his house for the first time in a while, he had spoken about joining the mountaineering club and happily showed him his ice axe. That was the last time he ever saw Ta. He had cried plenty sitting in his chair at the wake, but that has already blurred in the far reaches of his memory, and a sentiment of earnest longing for that manly neat boy, or young man, no longer wells up. Even his face has grown blurry, and in the end he cannot recall it. What kind of strange mechanism of memory is it, that the feel of that clump of thin fuzzy down growing around the penis of the ten or so years old Ta comes back to his fingers as if it were just yesterday?
It was also when he was in college that his mother got remarried, but was that before or after Ta’s death? As a woman his mother was happy to be starting a new life, and for him, since his dad had left and the two of them had been spending night and day together, having his not exactly nagging but somewhat irritating mother watching every little thing he did had just started to feel a bit suffocating, and so while living alone in the small house his mother had left was a little lonely, the sense of liberation was greatly welcome. However, after only living four years in the new house she had married into, his mother had died suddenly of a heart attack. Her second husband was a kind elderly man who managed a lathe shop in the old part of Tokyo. At the funeral he had cried openly, paying no mind to the people looking on. It was a pity that his mother had died before even reaching her mid-forties, but he was glad that she had been able to spend the last four years of her life in happiness.
But this also feels distant. Now what feels the closest are things like the lukewarmness of the water that gradually enveloped his hand when he gently dipped it into the tropical fish aquarium that sat in the living room of his childhood home. A standard variety of tropical fish, like angel fish or guppies, were probably swimming inside that tank, he thinks, but in reality he hardly has any memory of the fish. What is fresh in his memory now is the feel of the bubbles spit out from the pump all throughout that lukewarm water and the soft algae that would wind around his finger as they swayed back and forth touching his hand, and the sickening peculiar fishy smell that, at times like now when he was sick and his body was weak, would shoot up his nostrils when he brought his face to the front of the tank. And also, the strange sludge that would stay on his fingertips when he gently rubbed the slimy surface of the inside glass with his hand. Amid the chaos of the divorce had they given that aquarium to someone, or thrown it away? All of a sudden it had disappeared from the house, but just where in the world had it gone? Keeping tropical fish was definitely my father’s hobby, he thinks. That aquarium, illuminated by an otherworldly pale blue fluorescent light, with the pump making that incessant bubbling sound night and day, was just this strange object to him. But that strangeness had some kind of irresistible lure, and in the idle boredom of long afternoons he would without meaning draw near to that aquarium and churn up the water warmed by the heater. He didn’t feel any hatred towards the fish themselves, or something like a hard to resist charm on the flip side of hatred either, he thinks. The fact that that fishy-smelling-water filled aquarium, that left his hands covered in sludge, was sitting in a corner of his living room was itself somehow detestable, but perhaps that detestability itself had a kind of unique attractive power, that bewitchingly stirred something laying stagnant deep within his child self. Maybe some kind of nameless warped emotion towards his father, or his father and mother’s relationship, was projected there.
His throat is horribly dry but he is reluctant to go to the kitchen and just can’t muster the energy to get himself up. Lying still with his eyes shut he dozes off into a shallow sleep, and in his dream a white small round button, his umbrella’s fastener or from his shirt or from his trousers’ fly he doesn’t know, pops off and lands on the ground in front of him and oh no, this is bad, he shrieks in a small voice and quickly looks down but the button has already sunk into the muddy road and no matter where he looks he cannot find it. He is standing dead still with his school sneakers snugly stuck in the muddy road, and the deafening sound of large raindrops pounding down on the mud reverberates. He bends down to the muddy ground to look for the fallen button, and all of a sudden he is crouched in a scandalous position with his trousers and underwear down, and he desperately wants to urinate but if he lets it out here like this then the rain water that falls from the sky and his urine will clearly mix, and he thinks that would somehow be very bad and unclean, and he freezes. If you pee like this with your bottom next to the ground, it’ll splash on your calves and your thighs and your bottom, and more than that it’ll be this weird water that isn’t quite pee or rain, this strange fishy-smelling water, you can’t do it, you musn’t, if you do you’ll get in trouble, he thinks. ...Unable to endure the need to urinate he wakes up, and having no choice gets out from under the covers, enduring the pain in his joints, and heads to the toilet. After finishing his business in the cold toilet, in the washroom he drains a cup of water in one gulp, pours another half cup and gulps it down, and then peers into his own eyes in the mirror. The whites of his eyes are a little bloodshot, but, contrary to the prediction that his face would be drawn and haggard, his complexion is unexpectedly healthy, which feels like some kind of betrayal, by what he doesn’t know, but at the same time he is a little relieved as he returns to bed.
Just going to the bathroom felt like a chore, and feeling as though his vigor and stamina have been completely used up he lies on his side bringing his knees to his stomach, curling his body. The damp feeling of that wet muddy road comes back to him, and though his body is burning hot, the cold dark sky of a rainy night is what spreads out inside his head, and for some reason he repeatedly thinks, it’s winter, it’s so cold, yeah it’s finally going to start getting colder now. That button, that one and only button has gone and bounced off somewhere, and now no trace of my mother is left in my life, he thinks.
Come to think of it, just where did that round stone that he and his mother brought back from Amami Island go? On that remarkable beach covered with big pebbles that had been shaved and smoothed by the rough seas of the pacific into pretty egg shapes, maybe it had been called Honohoshi beach, he and his mother had crouched down and searched for hours, determined to find the most shapely stone and bring it back with them. They found a smooth round stone about the same size as a chicken or quail egg, and brought it home. At that time things were supposed to have been fairly amicable between his parents, but it had been just him and his mother on that vacation to Amami. That small round stone had sat in the pencil tray on top of his desk and been used as a small paperweight for a long time, but after moving multiple times he had lost track of it. The smooth feel of that round stone, that when lightly grasped would settle snugly into the palm of your hand, suddenly comes back to him now. Call it strange if you wish, but he often felt afraid, since it was such a perfect egg shape and had such a smooth texture, that if he put it in his mouth and wetted it with his saliva, while moving it back and forth inside his mouth it might slip down the back of his throat into his esophagus. He had never actually put it in his mouth of course, but sometimes when looking at it and touching it a feeling like “this is pretty heavy for something so small, seems like it could slip down your throat and just keep going, sliding all the way to the stomach, how scary,” would hang over him, and a chill would run up his spine. Once in a childish conversation with some other elementary school students someone had said, the thing about watermelons is, you have to take out the seeds before you eat them, if you eat too many of those seeds your gut will clog up, and you won’t be able to poop and you’ll die! Which had probably influenced him without him knowing.
As he thinks that, the fleeting feel of thin tracing paper, that would make a faint rustling sound when touched, also comes back to him. As a child he had often bought that semitransparent tracing paper from the stationary store, cut it to a suitable size and made book covers. After making those homemade covers with scissors and glue, and wrapping them over the covers of his books, he had felt very pleased with himself lining up those “bound” paperbacks and comics in a row on his book shelf. I must have really liked it to spend so much energy cutting and folding that thin rustly paper with my clumsy fingers, he thinks wistfully, and more than that he thinks anew, I had a lot of free time back then, I had a lot of extra time on my hands. In the case of comics like Osamu Tezuka’s “Zero Man” and “The Ribbon Knight” that he had read countless times and memorized every panel and line, the tracing paper covers that he had gone to such trouble to construct would little by little become stained with sweat and grow saggy as he handled them over and over again, and once they got that way even if they dried the ripples in the cover would not mend. When that happened he would tear up the paper and once again cut, fold, and glue a new cover, but it was never any bother to him. He recalls the feel of that tracing paper that soaked with sweat had become bumpy, and moaning from the pain in his joints he rolls over and tentatively makes fists, but both his palms are feverish and moist with sweat, and now neither that paper that protected his precious books nor that beautiful pebble with it’s smooth, as though polished, surface is there.
Rather than just a common cold he’s probably caught a dire form of influenza. The hateful feeling that it is his aunt’s fault, that that old woman is to blame, wells up inside of him. I’ve got a picture I want to give to you, she had said on the phone, and trying to get out of it he had said, well just send it in the mail, but she insisted, oh but it’s been so long, I’m just dying to see you, and wouldn’t listen. Once she went so far as to say, you know I don’t know how much longer I am for this world, he pretty much had no choice, and after pushing his way through the throng of transferring passengers he made his way to the restaurant in “My City” at the Shinjuku station, and ultimately ended up having to foot the bill for their french cuisine lunch, but he had no idea what the picture in question was going to be. Even after being shown the yellowed picture of his yukata clad aunt holding him when he was just an infant, at a hot spring on some vacation, he couldn’t recall anything, and in the end his aunt too just tilted her neck and said, hmm, where was it, I wonder, and that was that. He had known from the start of course, but his aunt’s true objective was to try and convert him to a certain new age religion as she had many times before, and yesterday in Shinjuku as well he had to put up with her nonsense like “you see, these are the principles that lie at the root of the world” all the while fighting the urge to scream enough already, just shut up! Many times up to this point, on the phone, or when called out to meet her, he had had to listen to those gracious teachings at length, and, at times gently and others directly, he had always deflected her, but his efforts to not hurt his aunt who had been so kind to him when he was a child simply did not get through to this obtuse old woman.
He probably shouldn’t have, but yesterday he was tired and the symptoms of his cold had probably already started to develop, so he lost the energy to continue being patient, and hissed “could you just cut it out already?” with a drawn up face. Auntie, I don’t know if it’s offerings or charges for purification or what, but how much money have you put into this thing, aren’t you all wasting the savings you kept for your old age, he had said in a sharp tone to his aunt, who had been proudly talking about being made a regional officer or secretary of the group, and while those words were, in his way, out of concern for his elderly, single aunt, she likely took them simply as an insult. The reason she had begun talking about his mother over their after meal coffee was, whether consciously or unconsciously, almost certainly because she had been irritated by his sermon like tone. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” she had begun, and immediately his feelings sank, and as they did he braced himself as though shrouding his heart in armor. She was the type of poor spirited person who would start “I probably shouldn’t say” or “I shouldn’t interfere” or “it’s none of my business” and then without concern bluntly say the “thing she shouldn’t” that was guaranteed to hurt the other person. However yesterday what she went on to say about his mother was something he had never heard before, and even he, who up until now had let all kinds of things just go in one ear and out the other while smiling along, couldn’t help but be a little shocked.
“****,” meaning his mother, in other words her own younger brother’s former wife, “**** just did whatever she wanted, anyway,” she said hatefully, twisting up her face, “I know she’s your mother, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead besides, but fooling around like that. I really felt bad for my brother.” When he said, my father was the one who cheated on her, she continued “Oh come, my brother probably did a little, but **** was far worse! What, didn’t you know? That old guy she got remarried to, they’d been seeing each other for a long time. My brother was a kind person, so he pretended he didn’t know and put up with it, but eventually he just couldn’t and it became that big mess. And a lot happened before that old man too apparently. **** was just, what do you call it, lecherous?...” Then his aunt seemed to notice his pale complexion and the look in his eyes for the first time, and mumbling tried to discretely change the subject, but he no longer had any wish to continue talking. He paid the bill and exchanged curt farewells with his aunt in front of the restaurant and, unsure of what to do with his unsettled emotions, instead of riding the elevator he took the stairs from the ninth floor down to the subway. He threw away the photo he had been given in the platform garbage can along with its envelope.
Lying in bed he stretches out his hands, but unable to reach he sits up and leans out from the bed to grab the edge of the curtains and open them just a little. A weak, thinly dim light is shining through the patch of bamboo trees in the space between the house next door. How many hours, how many tens of hours has he slept by now? His watch shows just a little before five o’clock, but this is definitely not the light of dawn but rather the faint light of dusk. His fever hasn’t gone down, but even so he is hungry and has an appetite, which must be a good thing at any rate, he thinks.
Silver BB pistol, there was something called a silver BB pistol, he recalls now for no apparent reason. Ta and his other friends had often played with those cheap plastic toys, running around the side streets as the sun was beginning to set, shooting at each other with those BBs, that didn’t really even hurt if you got hit by them. The pistol was a simple device, where you put some silver BBs into the body of the gun and they would be shot out one at a time by a spring when you pulled the trigger, but those small round silver bullets were likely just hardened plaster with the color painted on the outside. They were strangely light, and when you crushed one on the sidewalk the fact that even though the outside was silver the inside was white felt kind of fake, and anyway once broken they just became a clump of oddly shaped white granules and crumbled away all too quickly. He thinks that fleeting impression somehow resembles the feeling of fragility and fleetingness that remained on his fingertips when he would ball up bits of used pencil eraser, and though after shaping them with his thumb and forefinger it would appear perfectly round and solid, after just a little bounce it would slowly and surely disintegrate back into the little scraps of rubber, scattering about. It was what his infant self, his child self had already clearly perceived, but just not had the words to express, the fragility and fleetingness, and preciousness of life itself.