IT PROBABLY HAPPENS all the time, but I disliked my kid sister’s fiancé right from the start. And the less I liked him, the more doubts I had about her. I was disappointed in her for the choice she had made.
Maybe I’m just narrow-minded.
My sister certainly seemed to think so. We didn’t talk about my feelings, but she knew I didn’t like her fiancé, and she let her annoyance show.
“You’ve got such a narrow view of things,” she said.
At the time, we were talking about spaghetti. She was telling me that I had a narrow view of spaghetti.
This was not all she had in mind, of course. Her fiancé was lurking somewhere just beyond the spaghetti, and she was really talking about him. We were fighting over him by proxy.
It all started one Sunday afternoon when she suggested we go out for Italian food. “Fine,” I said, since I just happened to be in the mood for that. We went to a cute little spaghetti house that had recently opened up across from the station. I ordered spaghetti with eggplant and garlic, and she asked for pesto sauce. While we waited, I had a beer. So far, so good. It was May, a Sunday, and the weather was beautiful.
The problem started with the spaghetti itself, which was a disaster. The surface of the pasta had an unpleasant, floury texture. The center was still hard and uncooked. Even a dog would have turned its nose up at the butter they had used. I couldn’t eat more than half of what was on my plate, and I asked the waitress to take the rest away.
My sister glanced at me once or twice but didn’t say anything at first. Instead, she took her time, eating everything they had served her, down to the last thread. I sat there, looking out the window and drinking another beer.
“You didn’t have to make such a show of leaving your food,” she said when the waitress had taken her plate.
“Yuck.”
“It wasn’t that bad. You could have forced yourself.”
“Why should I? It’s my stomach, not yours.”
“It’s a brand-new restaurant. The cook’s probably not used to the kitchen. It wouldn’t have killed you to give him the benefit of the doubt,” she said, and took a sip of the thin, tasteless-looking coffee they had brought her.
“You may be right,” I said, “but it only makes sense for a discriminating individual to leave food he doesn’t like.”
“Well, excuse me, Mr. Know-it-all.”
“What’s your problem? That time of the month again?”
“Oh, shut up. I deserve better than that from you.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “You’re talking to a guy who knows exactly when your periods started. You were so late, Mom took you to see a doctor.”
“You’re going to get my pocketbook right between the eyes …”
She was turning serious, so I shut up.
“The trouble with you is, you’re so narrow-minded about everything,” she said as she added cream to her coffee (meaning it was tasteless, after all). “You only see the negative things. You don’t even try to look at the good points. If something doesn’t measure up to your standards, you won’t touch it. It’s so annoying.”
“Maybe so. But it’s my life, not yours.”
“And you don’t care how much you hurt people. You just let them clean up your mess. Even when you masturbate.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I remember when you were in high school you used to do it in your sheets. The women of the family had to clean up after you. The least you could do is masturbate without getting it all over your sheets.”
“I’ll be more careful from now on,” I said. “Now, forgive me for repeating myself, but it just so happens that I have my own life. I know what I like and I know what I don’t like. It’s as simple as that.”
“Okay, but you don’t have to hurt people. Why don’t you try a little harder? Why don’t you look at the good side? Why don’t you at least show some restraint? Why don’t you grow up?”
Now she had touched a sore spot. “I am grown up. I can show restraint. And I can look at the good side, too. I’m just not looking at the same things you are.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re so arrogant. That’s why you haven’t got a steady girlfriend. I mean, you’re twenty-seven years old.”
“Of course I have a girlfriend.”
“You mean a body to sleep with. You know I’m right. Do you enjoy changing partners every year? How about love and understanding and compassion? Without those, what’s the point? You might as well be masturbating.”
“I don’t change partners every year, do I?”
“Pretty much. You ought to think about your life more seriously, act more like a grownup.”
That marked the end of our conversation. She just tuned out.
Why had her attitude toward me changed so much over the past year? Until then, she had seemed to enjoy being partners with me in my resolutely aimless life-style, and—if I’m not mistaken—she even looked up to me to some extent. She had become gradually more critical of me in the months since she had begun seeing her fiancé.
This, to me, seemed tremendously unfair. She had been seeing him for a few months, but she and I had been “seeing” each other for twenty-three years. We had always gotten along well, practically never had a fight. I didn’t know a brother and sister who could talk so honestly and openly with each other, and not only about masturbation and periods: She knew when I first bought condoms (I was seventeen), and I knew when she first bought lace underwear (she was nineteen).
I had dated her friends (but not slept with them, of course), and she had dated mine (but not slept with them, of course—I think). That’s just how we were brought up. This excellent relationship of ours turned sour in less than a year. The more I thought about it, the angrier it made me.
She had to buy a pair of shoes at the department store near the station, she said. I left her outside the restaurant and went back to our apartment alone. I gave my girlfriend a call, but she wasn’t in. Which wasn’t surprising. Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon was not the best time to ask a girl for a date. I flipped the pages of my address book and tried another girl—a student I had met at some disco. She answered the phone.
“Like to go out for a drink?”
“You’re kidding. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“So what? We’ll drink till the sun goes down. I know the perfect bar for watching the sunset. You can’t get good seats if you’re not there by three.”
“Are you some kind of connoisseur of sunsets?”
But still she accepted, probably out of kindness. I picked her up, and we drove out along the shore just beyond Yokohama to a bar with a view of the ocean. I drank four glasses of I.W. Harper on the rocks, and she had two banana daiquiris (can you believe it?). And we watched the sun go down.
“Are you going to be okay driving with that much to drink?” she asked.
“No problem. Where alcohol is concerned, I’m under par.”
“‘Under par’?”
“Four drinks are just enough to bring me up to normal. You haven’t got a thing to worry about. Not a thing.”
“If you say so …”
We drove back to Yokohama, ate, and enjoyed a few kisses in the car. I suggested we go to a hotel, but she didn’t want to.
“I’m wearing a tampon.”
“So take it out.”
“Yeah, right. It’s my second day.”
And what a day it was. At this rate, I should have just had a date with my girlfriend. But no, this was going to be the day I spent a nice, leisurely Sunday with my sister, something we hadn’t done for a long time. So much for that plan.
“Sorry,” said the girl. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“Never mind. It’s not your fault. I’m to blame.”
“You’re to blame for my period?” she asked with an odd look.
“No, it’s just the way things worked out.” What a stupid question.
I drove her to her house in Setagaya. On the way, the clutch started making funny rattling noises. I’d probably have to bring it into the garage soon, I thought with a sigh. It was one of those classic days, when one thing goes wrong and then everything goes with it.
“Can I invite you out again soon?” I asked.
“On a date? Or to a hotel?”
“Both,” I said with a smile. “The two go together. You know. Like a toothbrush and toothpaste.”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
“You do that. Thinking is good for you. It keeps you from getting senile.”
“Where do you live? Can I come and visit?”
“Sorry. I live with my sister. We’ve got rules. I don’t bring women home, and she doesn’t bring men.”
“Yeah, like she’s really your sister.”
“It’s true. Next time I’ll bring a copy of our lease. Sunday okay?”
She laughed. “Okay.”
I watched her go in through her gate. Then I started my engine and drove home, listening for those clutch noises.
The apartment was pitch-black. I turned on the light and called my sister’s name, but she wasn’t there. What the hell was she doing out at ten o’clock at night? I looked for the evening paper but couldn’t find it. Of course. It was Sunday.
I got a beer from the refrigerator and carried it and a glass into the living room. I switched on the stereo and dropped a new Herbie Hancock record on the turntable. Waiting for the music to start, I took a long swallow of beer. But nothing came from the speakers. Then I remembered. The stereo had gone on the blink three days earlier. The amp had power, but there was no sound.
This also made it impossible to watch TV. I have one of those monitors without any sound circuitry of its own. You have to use it with the stereo.
I stared at my silent TV screen and drank my beer. They were showing an old war movie. Rommel’s Afrika Korps tanks were fighting in the desert. Their cannons shot silent shells, their machine guns shot silent bullets, and people died silently, one after another.
I sighed for what must have been the sixteenth time that day.
I HAD STARTED living with my sister five years earlier, in the spring, when I was twenty-two and she was eighteen. I had just graduated from college and taken my first job, and she had just graduated from high school and entered college. Our parents had allowed her to go to school in Tokyo on the condition that she live with me, a condition we were both glad to accept. They found us a nice, big two-bedroom apartment, and I paid half the rent.
The thought of living with my sister was an almost painless proposition. Not only did we get along well, as I mentioned earlier, but our schedules matched well, too. Working for the PR section of an appliance manufacturer, I would leave the house fairly late in the morning and come back late at night. She used to go out early and come home as the sun was going down. In other words, she was usually gone when I woke up and asleep by the time I came back. And since my weekends were mostly taken up with dates, I didn’t really talk to my sister more than once or twice a week. We wouldn’t have had time to fight even if we had wanted to, and we didn’t invade each other’s privacy.
I assumed she had her own things going, but I felt it was not my place to say anything. She was eighteen, after all. What business was it of mine who she slept with?
One time, though, I held her hand for a couple of hours—from one to three in the morning, to be exact. I found her at the kitchen table, crying, when I got home from work. Narrow-minded and selfish as I am, I was smart enough to realize that if she was crying at the kitchen table and not in her room she wanted some comforting from me.
So I sat next to her and held her hand—probably for the first time since elementary school, when we went out hunting dragonflies. Her hand was much bigger and stronger than I remembered. Obviously.
She cried for two hours straight, never moving. I could hardly believe the body was capable of producing such quantities of tears. Two minutes of crying was all it took to dry me out.
By the time 3:00 a.m. rolled around, though, I had had it. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Now it was my turn, as the elder brother, to say something, though giving advice was definitely not my line.
“I don’t want to interfere with the way you live your life,” I began. “It’s your life, and you should live it as you please.”
She nodded.
“But I do want to give you one word of advice. Don’t carry condoms in your purse. They’ll think you’re a whore.”
When she heard that, she grabbed the telephone book that was sitting on the table and heaved it at me with all her might.
“What are you doing snooping in my bag!”
She always threw things when she got mad. Which is why I didn’t go on to tell her that I had never looked in her bag.
In any case, it worked. She stopped crying, and I was able to get some sleep.
Our life-style stayed exactly the same, even after she graduated from college and took a job with a travel agency. She worked a standard nine-to-five day, while my schedule became, if anything, looser. I’d show up at the office some time before noon, read the newspaper at my desk, eat lunch, and finally get serious about doing a little something around two in the afternoon. Later, I’d make arrangements with the guys from the ad agency, and we’d go out drinking till after midnight.
For her first summer vacation, my sister went to California with a couple of friends on a package tour put together by her agency. One of the members of the tour group was a computer engineer a year her senior, and she started dating him when they came back to Japan. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it’s not for me. First of all, I hate package tours, and the thought of getting serious about somebody you meet in a group like that makes me sick.
After she started seeing this computer engineer, though, my sister began to glow. She paid a lot more attention to appearances, both the apartment’s and her own. Until then, she had gone just about everywhere in a work shirt and faded jeans and sneakers. Thanks to her new interest in clothing, the front closet filled up with her shoes, and all the other closets were overflowing with wire hangers from the cleaner’s. She was constantly doing laundry and ironing clothes (instead of leaving them to pile up in the bathroom like an Amazonian ants’ nest), always cooking and cleaning. These were dangerous symptoms, I seemed to recall from my own experience. When a woman starts acting like this, a man has only one choice: to clear out fast or marry her.
Then she showed me his picture. She had never done anything like that before. Another dangerous symptom.
Actually, she showed me two pictures. One had been taken on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. It showed my sister and the computer engineer standing in front of a swordfish and wearing big smiles on their faces.
“Nice swordfish,” I said.
“Stop joking. I’m serious.”
“So what should I say?”
“Don’t say anything. This is him.”
I took the photo again and studied his face. If there was one single type of face in the world designed to arouse instant dislike in me, this was it. Worse, something about him reminded me of a particular upperclassman in a high-school club of mine, a guy I hated—not a bad-looking type, but absolutely empty-headed and a real whiner. He had a memory like an elephant; once he had some picky thing on you, he’d never let go. He made up for lack of brains with this phenomenal memory.
“How many times have you done it with him?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, blushing. “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”
The second photo had been taken after the trip. It showed the computer engineer by himself. He wore a leather jacket and was leaning against a big motorcycle, his helmet perched on the saddle. His face had exactly the same expression as in San Francisco. Maybe he didn’t have any other expressions.
“He likes motorcycles,” she said.
“No kidding. I didn’t think he put on the leather jacket just to have his picture taken.”
Maybe it was another example of my narrow-minded personality, but I could never like motorcycle freaks—the way they swagger around, so pleased with themselves. I kept my mouth shut and handed the picture back.
“Well, then,” I said.
“Well, then, what?”
“Well, then, what comes next?”
“I don’t know. We might get married.”
“Has he proposed?”
“Sort of. But I haven’t given him my answer.”
“I see.”
“Actually, I’m not sure I want to get married. I’ve just started working, and I think I’d like to take it easy, play around a little more. Not go crazy like you, of course …”
“That’s probably a healthy attitude,” I offered.
“But I don’t know, he’s really nice. Sometimes I think I’d like to marry him. It’s hard.”
I picked up the photos again and looked at them. I kept my sigh to myself.
This conversation happened before Christmas. One morning after New Year’s, my mother called me at nine o’clock. I was brushing my teeth to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”
She asked if I knew the man my sister was seeing.
I said I didn’t.
She said she had gotten a letter from my sister asking if she could bring him home two weeks from Saturday.
“I suppose she wants to marry him,” I said.
“That’s why I’m trying to find out from you what kind of man he is. I’d like to learn something about him before I actually meet him.”
“Well, I’ve never met the guy. He’s a year older than she is and he’s a computer engineer. Works at one of those three-letter places—IBM or NEC or TNT, I don’t know. I’ve seen his picture. A nothing kind of face. Not my taste, but then I don’t have to marry him.”
“Where did he graduate from? Does he have a house?”
“How should I know?”
“Well, would you please meet him and find out about these things?”
“No way. I’m busy. Ask him yourself when you meet him in two weeks.”
Finally, though, I had no choice but to meet my sister’s computer engineer. She was going to pay a formal visit to his family’s home the following Sunday, and she wanted me to come with her. I put on a white shirt and a tie and my most conservative suit. They lived in an imposing house in the middle of a nice residential neighborhood in Meguro. The 500CC Honda I had seen in the photo was parked in front of the garage.
“Nice swordfish.”
“Please,” she said, “none of your stupid jokes. All I’m asking is that you restrain yourself for one day.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
His parents were fine people, very proper—maybe a little too proper. The father was an oil-company executive. Since my father owned a chain of gas stations in Shizuoka, this was by no means an unthinkable match. The mother served us tea on an elegant tray.
I offered the father my calling card, and he gave me his. Then I managed to dredge up all the proper phrases to explain that I was here to represent my parents, who were unfortunately unable to attend, owing to a previous engagement; we hoped that on some future date acceptable to both parties they might be allowed to pay their formal respects.
He replied that his son had told him much about my sister and that, meeting her now, he saw that she was far lovelier than his son deserved. He knew we came from an upstanding family, and as far as he and his wife were concerned they had no objection to the “present discussions.” I imagined he must have had our family background thoroughly investigated, but he couldn’t possibly have found out that my sister had not had her first period until she was sixteen and that she was chronically constipated.
Once the formalities ended without mishap, the father poured me a brandy—pretty decent stuff. As we drank, we talked about jobs of various kinds. My sister poked me now and then with the toe of her slipper, warning me not to drink too much.
The computer engineer, meanwhile, said nothing, but sat next to his father all the while with a tense expression on his face. You could see right away that he was under his father’s thumb, at least while he remained in this house. It figured. The sweater he was wearing had a strange pattern of a kind I had never seen before, and its color clashed with his shirt. Why couldn’t she have found somebody a little sharper?
The conversation reached a lull around four o’clock, and we stood up to leave. The computer engineer saw us as far as the station. “How about a cup of tea?” he urged. I didn’t want tea and I certainly didn’t want to sit at the same table with a guy wearing such a weird sweater, but it would have been awkward for me to refuse, so the three of us went into a nearby coffeehouse.
They ordered coffee and I ordered beer, but the place didn’t serve beer so I ordered coffee, too.
“Thanks so much for coming today,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”
“Just doing what’s expected of me,” I said simply. “No thanks necessary.” I had lost the energy to make wisecracks.
“She’s told me so much about you—Brother.”
Brother!?
I scratched an earlobe with the handle of my coffee spoon and returned it to the saucer. My sister gave me another healthy kick, but its meaning seemed lost on the computer engineer. Maybe he only got jokes in binary notation.
“I envy the two of you being so close,” he said.
“We kick each other in the leg when we’re happy,” I said.
He took this with a puzzled expression.
“It’s supposed to be a joke,” grumbled my sister. “He likes to say things like that.”
“Just a joke,” I concurred. “We share the housework. She does the laundry and I do the jokes.”
The computer engineer—his name was Noboru Watanabe—gave a little laugh, as though this had solved a problem for him.
“You two are so bright and cheery,” he said. “That’s the kind of household I want to have. Bright and cheery is best.”
“See?” I said to my sister. “Bright and cheery is best. You’re too uptight.”
“Not if the jokes are funny,” she said.
“If possible, we’d like to marry in the autumn,” said Noboru Watanabe.
“Autumn is the best time for a wedding,” I said. “You can still invite the squirrels and bears.”
He laughed. She didn’t. She was starting to look seriously angry. I excused myself and left.
Back at the apartment, I phoned my mother and summed up the afternoon for her.
“He’s not such a bad guy,” I said, scratching my ear.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“He’s a serious individual. At least, more serious than I am.”
“But you’re not serious at all.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Thanks,” I said, looking at the ceiling.
“So, where did he graduate from?”
“Graduate?”
“Where did he go to college?”
“Ask him yourself,” I said, and hung up. I was sick of all this. I took a beer from the refrigerator and drank it alone.
THE DAY AFTER the spaghetti argument with my sister, I woke up at eight-thirty. It was another beautiful, cloudless day, just like yesterday. In fact, it was like a continuation of yesterday, and my life seemed to be starting up again, too, after a halftime break.
I threw my sweat-dampened pajamas into the hamper, took a shower, and shaved. While shaving, I thought about the girl I hadn’t quite been able to get last night. Ah, well, it just wasn’t in the cards. I did my best. I’ll have plenty more opportunities. Like next Sunday.
I toasted two slices of bread and warmed up some coffee. I wanted to listen to an FM station but remembered the stereo was broken. Instead, I read book reviews in the paper and ate my toast. Not one of the books reviewed was something I thought I’d want to read: a novel on “the sex life of an old Jewish man, mingling fantasy and reality,” a historical study of treatments for schizophrenia, a complete exposé of the 1907 Ashio Copper Mine pollution incident. It’d be a lot more fun to sleep with the captain of a girls’ softball team. The newspaper probably chose books like this just to annoy us.
Munching on my toast, I laid the paper on the table; then I noticed a memo under the jam jar. In my sister’s tiny handwriting, it said that she had invited Noboru Watanabe for dinner this Sunday and she expected me to be there.
I finished eating, brushed the crumbs off my shirt, and put the dishes in the sink. Then I called the travel agency. My sister took the phone and said, “I can’t talk right now. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”
The call came twenty minutes later. In the meantime, I had done forty-three push-ups, trimmed all twenty finger-and toenails, picked out my shirt, necktie, jacket, and pants for the day, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and yawned twice.
“Did you see my note?” she asked.
“Yup. Sorry, but I’ve got a date this Sunday. Made it a long time ago. If I had known, I would have left the day open. Too bad.”
“You expect me to believe that? I know what you’re going to do: go somewhere and do something with some girl whose name you hardly know. Well, you can do that on Saturday.”
“Saturday I have to be in the studio all day with an electric-blanket commercial. We’re busy these days.”
“So cancel your date.”
“I can’t. She’ll charge me a cancellation fee. And things are at a pretty delicate stage with her.”
“Meaning things are not so delicate in my case?”
“No, I don’t mean that at all,” I said, holding the necktie I had chosen next to the shirt hanging on a chairback. “But don’t forget: We’ve got this rule not to trespass on each other’s lives. You eat dinner with your fiancé and I’ll have a date with my girlfriend. What’s wrong with that?”
“You know what’s wrong with that. Look how long it’s been since you’ve seen him. You met him once, and that was four months ago. It’s just not right. Every time I arrange something, you run away. Don’t you see how rude you’re being? He’s your sister’s fiancé. It wouldn’t kill you to have dinner with him once.”
She had a point there, so I kept quiet. In fact, I had been trying to avoid crossing paths with him, but to me it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. We had nothing in common to talk about, and it was exhausting to tell jokes using my sister as a simultaneous interpreter.
“Will you please just join us this once? If you’ll do that much for me, I promise I won’t interfere with your sex life till the end of the summer.”
“My sex life is pretty feeble at the moment. It might not make it through the summer.”
“You will be home for dinner this Sunday, though, won’t you?”
“How can I say no?”
“He’ll probably fix the stereo for us. He’s good at that.”
“Good with his hands, huh?”
“You and your dirty mind,” she said, and hung up.
I put on my necktie and went to work.
The weather was clear all that week. Each day was like a continuation of the previous one. Wednesday night, I called my girlfriend to say we couldn’t get together on the weekend. She was understandably annoyed: We hadn’t seen each other for three weeks. Receiver still in hand, I dialed the college girl I had made a date with for Sunday, but she was out. She was out again on Thursday and on Friday.
My sister woke me up at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. “Get out of bed, will you? I have to wash the sheets.”
She stripped the sheets and pillowcase and ordered me out of my pajamas. My only refuge was the bathroom, where I showered and shaved. She was getting to be more and more like our mother. Women are like salmon: In the end, they all swim back to the same place.
After the shower, I put on a pair of shorts and a faded T-shirt, and with long, long yawns I drank a glass of orange juice. My veins still carried some of last night’s alcohol; opening the Sunday paper would have been too much for me. I nibbled a few soda crackers from the box on the kitchen table and decided that that was all the breakfast I needed.
My sister threw the sheets into the washing machine and cleaned our two rooms. Next, she put some soap and water in a bucket and washed down the walls and floors of the living room and kitchen. I sprawled on the sofa all this time, looking at the nude photos in a copy of Hustler that a friend of mine in the States had gotten past the postal censors. Amazing, the variety in shape and size of the female sex organ. They can be as different as people’s heights or IQs.
“Stop hanging around and do some shopping for me, will you?” She handed me a list crammed full of things to buy. “And please hide that magazine. He’s very proper.”
I laid the magazine down and studied the list. Lettuce, tomatoes, celery, French dressing, smoked salmon, mustard, onions, soup stock, potatoes, parsley, three steaks …
“Steaks? I just had steak last night. Why don’t you make croquettes?”
“Maybe you had steak last night, but we didn’t. Don’t be so selfish. You can’t serve croquettes when you have a guest for dinner.”
“If some girl invited me to her house and fed me fresh-fried croquettes, I’d be deeply moved. With a nice pile of julienned white cabbage, a bowl of miso clam soup … that’s real life.”
“Maybe so, but I have decided on steak. Next time I’ll feed you croquettes till you drop, but today you’ll have to make do with steak. Please.”
“That’ll be fine,” I told her reassuringly. I can be a pain in the neck, but finally I’m a kind, understanding human being.
I went to the neighborhood supermarket and bought everything on the list. On the way home, I stopped off at a liquor store and bought a 4,500-yen bottle of Chablis—my gift to the young couple. Only a kind, understanding human being would think of something like that.
At home, I found a blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a spotless pair of cotton pants neatly folded on the bed.
“Change into those,” she said.
With another silent sigh, I did as I was told. I couldn’t have said anything to her that would have brought me back my pleasantly messy, peaceful Sunday.
NOBORU WATANABE came riding up at three. Astride his trusty cycle, he arrived with the gentle zephyrs of springtime. I caught the ominous put-put of his 500CC Honda from a quarter mile away. I stuck my head out over the edge of the balcony to see him parking next to the entrance of our apartment house and taking off his helmet. Fortunately, once he removed that white dome with its STP sticker, his outfit today approached that of a normal human being: overstarched button-down check shirt, baggy white pants, and brown loafers with tassels—though the color of the shoes and belt didn’t match.
“I think your friend from Fisherman’s Wharf is here,” I said to my sister, who was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink.
“Keep him company for a while, will you? I’ll finish up here.”
“Bad idea. I don’t know what to talk to him about. You talk to him—I’ll do this.”
“Don’t be silly. It wouldn’t look right for me to leave you in the kitchen. You talk to him.”
The bell rang, and I opened the door to find Noboru Watanabe standing there. I showed him into the living room and settled him onto the couch. His gift for the evening was a selection of Baskin-Robbins’s thirty-one flavors, but cramming it into our tiny, already-stuffed freezer took a major effort on my part. What a pain. Of all the things he could have brought, why did he have to pick ice cream?
“How about a beer?”
“No thanks. I think I’m allergic to alcohol. One glass is enough to make me sick.”
“I once drank a whole washbasinful of beer on a bet with some college friends.”
“What did it do to you?”
“My pee stank beer for two whole days. And I kept burping up this—”
“Why don’t you have Noboru look at the stereo set?” interjected my sister, who had come along in the nick of time, as if she had smelled smoke, with two glasses of orange juice.
“Good idea,” said Noboru.
“I hear you’re good with your hands,” I said.
“It’s true,” he confessed unabashedly. “I always used to enjoy making plastic models and radio kits. Anytime something broke in the house, I’d fix it. What’s wrong with the stereo?”
“No sound,” I said. I turned on the amp and put on a record to show him.
He crouched down in front of the stereo like a mongoose ready to spring. After fiddling with all the switches, he announced, “It’s definitely in the amplifier system, but it’s not internal.”
“How can you tell?”
“By the inductive method.”
Oh, sure, the inductive method.
He pulled out the mini-preamp and the power amplifier, removed all the cords connecting them, and began to examine each one. While he was busy with this, I took a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator and drank it alone.
“It must be fun to be able to drink alcohol,” he said as he poked at a plug with a mechanical pencil.
“I wonder,” I said. “I’ve been doing it so long I wouldn’t have anything to compare it with.”
“I’ve been practicing a little.”
“Practicing drinking?”
“Yes. Is there something odd about that?”
“No, not at all. You should start with white wine. Put some in a big glass with ice, cut it with Perrier and a squeeze of lemon juice. That’s what I drink instead of fruit juice.”
“I’ll give it a try,” he said. “Aha! I thought so!”
“What’s that?”
“The connecting cords between the preamp and the power amp. The connection’s been broken at the plugs on both channels. This kind of pin plug can’t take much movement. In addition to which, they’re cheaply made. I’ll bet somebody moved the amplifier recently.”
“I did the other day, when I was cleaning,” said my sister.
“That’s it.”
She looked at me. “We got this thing from your company. It’s their fault for using such weak parts.”
“Well, I didn’t make it,” I muttered. “I just do the commercials.”
“Don’t worry,” said Noboru Watanabe. “I can fix it right away if you’ve got a soldering iron.”
“A soldering iron? Not in this house.”
“Never mind. I’ll zip out and buy one. You really ought to have a soldering iron in the house. They come in handy.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. But I don’t know where there’s a hardware store.”
“I do. I passed one on the way.”
I stuck my head out over the balcony again and watched Noboru Watanabe strap on his helmet, mount his bike, and disappear around a corner.
“He’s so nice,” sighed my sister.
“Yeah, a real honey.”
NOBORU WATANABE finished repairing the pin plugs before five o’clock. He asked to hear some easy-listening vocals, so my sister put on a Julio Iglesias record. Since when did we have crap like that in the house?
Noboru asked me, “What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh, I just love stuff like this,” I blurted out. “You know: Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Beck, the Doors.”
“Funny, I’ve never heard of any of those. Are they like Julio?”
“Yeah, a lot like Julio.”
He talked about the new computer system that his project team was currently developing. It was designed to generate an instantaneous diagram showing the most effective method for returning trains to the depot after an accident. In fact, it sounded like a great idea, but the principle made about as much sense to me as Finnish verb conjugations. While he raved on and on, I nodded at appropriate times and thought about women—like who I should take where to drink what on my next day off, including where we would eat and the hotel we’d use. I must have an inborn liking for such things. Just as there are those who like to make plastic models and draw train diagrams, I like to get drunk with women and sleep with them. It was a matter of Destiny, something that surpassed all human understanding.
Around the time I was finishing my fourth beer, dinner was ready: smoked salmon, vichyssoise, steak, salad, and fried potatoes. As always, my sister’s cooking was pretty good. I opened the Chablis and drank it alone.
As he sliced his tenderloin, Noboru Watanabe asked me, “Why did you take a job with an appliance manufacturer? I gather you’re not particularly interested in electrical devices.”
My sister answered for me. “He’s not particularly interested in anything that’s of benefit to society. He would have taken a job anywhere. It just so happened he had an in with that particular company.”
“I couldn’t have said it any better myself,” I chimed in.
“All he thinks about is having fun. It never occurs to him to concentrate on anything seriously, to make himself a better person.”
“Yours truly, the summer grasshopper.”
“He gets a kick out of smirking at those who do choose to live seriously.”
“Now, there you’re wrong,” I interjected. “What I do has nothing to do with what anybody else does. I just go along burning my own calories in accordance with my own ideas about things. What other people do doesn’t concern me. I don’t smirk at them; I don’t even look at them. I may be a good-for-nothing, but at least I don’t get in the way of other people.”
“That’s not true!” cried Noboru Watanabe in something like a reflex action. “You’re not a good-for-nothing!” He must have been brought up well.
“Thank you,” I said, raising my wineglass to him. “And by the way, congratulations on your engagement. Sorry to be the only one drinking.”
“We’re planning to have the ceremony in October,” he said. “Probably too late to invite the squirrels and bears.”
“Not to worry,” I said. Incredible, he was making jokes!
“So, where will you go on your honeymoon? I suppose you can get discount fares?”
“Hawaii,” my sister answered curtly.
We talked for a while about airplanes. Having just read several books on the crash in the Andes, I brought up that topic.
“When they ate human flesh, they would roast it in the sun on pieces of aluminum from the airplane.”
My sister stopped eating and glared at me. “Why do you have to talk about such awful things at the dinner table? Do you say things like that when you’re eating with girls you’re trying to seduce?”
Like a guest invited to dinner by a feuding married couple, Noboru Watanabe tried to come between us by asking me, “Have you ever thought of marrying?”
“Never had the chance,” I said as I was about to put a chunk of fried potato in my mouth. “I had to raise my little sister without any help, and then came the long years of war …”
“War? What war?”
“It’s just another one of his stupid jokes,” said my sister, shaking the bottle of salad dressing.
“Just another one of my stupid jokes,” I added. “But the part about not having had the chance is true. I’ve always been a narrow-minded guy, and I never used to wash my socks, so I was never able to find a nice girl who wanted to spend her life with me. Unlike you.”
“Was there something wrong with your socks?” asked Noboru Watanabe.
“That’s a joke, too,” my sister explained wearily. “I wash his socks, at least, every day.”
Noboru Watanabe nodded and laughed for one and a half seconds. I was determined to make him laugh for three seconds next time.
“But she’s been spending her life with you, hasn’t she?” he said, gesturing toward my sister.
“Well, after all, she’s my sister.”
“And we’ve stayed together because you do anything you please and I don’t say a thing. But that’s not a real life. In a real, grown-up, adult life, people confront each other honestly. I’m not saying the past five years with you haven’t been fun. It’s been a free and easy time for me. But lately, I’ve come to see that it’s not a real life. It hasn’t got—oh, I don’t know—the feel of what real life is all about. All you think about is yourself, and if somebody tries to have a serious conversation with you, you make fun of them.”
“Deep down, I’m really a shy person.”
“No, you’re just plain arrogant.”
“I’m shy and arrogant,” I explained to Noboru Watanabe as I poured myself more wine. “I have this shy, arrogant way of returning trains to the depot after an accident.”
“I think I see what you mean,” he said, nodding. “But do you know what I think? I think that after you’re alone—I mean, after she and I get married—that you are going to start wanting to get married, too.”
“You may be right,” I said.
“Really?” my sister piped up. “If you’re really thinking about getting married, I’ve got a good friend, a nice girl, I’d be glad to introduce you.”
“Sure. When the time comes,” I said. “Too dangerous now.”
WHEN DINNER WAS OVER, we moved to the living room for coffee. This time my sister put on a Willie Nelson record—maybe one small step up from Julio Iglesias.
My sister was in the kitchen, cleaning up, when Noboru Watanabe said to me with an air of confidentiality, “To tell you the truth, I wanted to stay single until I was closer to thirty, like you. But when I met her, all I could think of was getting married.”
“She’s a good kid,” I said. “She can be stubborn and a little constipated, but I really think you’ve made the right choice.”
“Still, the idea of getting married is kind of frightening, don’t you think?”
“Well, if you make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things, there’s nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you can think again at that point.”
“You may be right.”
“I’m good at giving advice to others.”
I went to the kitchen and told my sister I would be going out for a walk. “I won’t come back before ten o’clock, so the two of you can relax and enjoy yourselves. The sheets are fresh.”
“Is that all you think about?” she said with an air of disgust, but she didn’t try to stop me from going out.
I went back to the living room and told Noboru Watanabe that I had an errand to run and might be late getting back.
“I’m glad we had a chance to talk,” he said. “Please be sure to visit us often after we’re married.”
“Thanks,” I said, momentarily shutting down my imagination.
“Don’t you dare drive,” my sister called out to me as I was leaving. “You’ve had too much to drink.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll walk.”
It was a little before eight when I entered a neighborhood bar. I sat at the counter, drinking an I.W. Harper on the rocks. The TV behind the bar was tuned to a Giants-Swallows game. The sound was off, and instead they had a Cyndi Lauper record going. The pitchers were Nishimoto and Obana, and the Swallows were ahead, 3-2. There was something to be said for watching TV with the sound off.
I had three whiskeys while I watched the ball game. It was the bottom of the seventh, score tied 3-3, when the broadcast ended at nine o’clock and the set was switched off. Two seats away from me was a girl around twenty I had seen there a few times. She had been watching the game, too, so I started talking to her about baseball.
“I’m a Giants fan,” she said. “Which team do you like?”
“They’re all the same to me. I just like to watch them play.”
“What’s the fun of that? How can you get excited about the game?”
“I don’t have to get excited. I’m not playing. They are.”
I had two more whiskeys on the rocks and treated her to two daiquiris. She was a major in commercial design at Tokyo University of the Arts, so we talked about art in advertising. At ten, we moved on to a bar with more comfortable seats, where I had a whiskey and she had a grasshopper. She was pretty drunk by this time, and so was I. At eleven, I accompanied her to her apartment, where we had sex as a matter of course, the way they give you a cushion and a cup of tea at an inn.
“Put the light out,” she said, so I did. From her window you could see a big Nikon ad tower. A TV next door was blasting the day’s pro-baseball results. What with the darkness and my drunkenness, I hardly knew what I was doing. You couldn’t call it sex. I just moved my penis and discharged some semen.
As soon as the moderately abbreviated act was finished, she went to sleep as if she couldn’t wait any longer to be unconscious. Without even bothering to wipe up properly, I got dressed and left. The hardest thing was picking out my polo shirt and underpants from among her stuff in the dark.
Outside, my alcoholic high tore through me like a midnight freight. I felt like shit. My joints creaked like the Tin Woodman’s in The Wizard of Oz. I bought a can of juice from a vending machine to sober me up, but the second I drank it down I vomited the entire contents of my stomach onto the road—the corpses of my steak and smoked salmon and lettuce and tomatoes.
How many years had it been since I last vomited from drinking? What the hell was I doing these days? The same thing over and over. But each repetition was worse than the one before.
Then, with no connection at all, I thought about Noboru Watanabe and the soldering iron he had bought me. “You really ought to have a soldering iron in the house. They come in handy,” he had said.
What a wholesome idea, I said to him mentally as I wiped my lips with a handkerchief. Now, thanks to you, my house is equipped with a soldering iron. But because of that damned soldering iron, my house doesn’t feel like my house any longer.
That’s probably because I have such a narrow personality.
IT WAS AFTER midnight by the time I got home. The motorcycle was, of course, no longer parked by the front entrance. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, unlocked the apartment door, and went in. Everything was pitch-black except for a small fluorescent light above the sink. My sister had probably gotten fed up and gone to bed. I couldn’t blame her.
I poured myself a glass of orange juice and emptied it in one gulp. I used lots of soap in the shower to wash the foul-smelling sweat from my body, and then I did a thorough job of brushing my teeth. My face in the bathroom mirror was enough to give me chills. I looked like one of those middle-aged men you see on the last trains from downtown, sprawling drunk on the seats and fouling themselves with their own vomit. My skin was rough, my eyes looked sunken, and my hair had lost its sheen.
I shook my head and turned out the bathroom light. With nothing on but a towel wrapped around my waist, I went to the kitchen and drank some tap water. Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I’ll do some thinking. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.
“You were so late tonight,” came my sister’s voice out of the gloom. She was sitting on the living-room couch, drinking a beer alone.
“I was drinking,” I said.
“You drink too much.”
“I know.”
I got a beer from the refrigerator and sat down across from her.
For a while, neither of us said anything. We sat there, occasionally tipping back our beer cans. The leaves of the potted plants on the balcony fluttered in the breeze, and beyond them floated the misty semicircle of the moon.
“Just to let you know, we didn’t do it,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Do anything. Something got on my nerves. I just couldn’t do it.”
“Oh.” I seem to lose the power of speech on half-moon nights.
“Aren’t you going to ask what got on my nerves?”
“What got on your nerves?”
“This room! This place! I just couldn’t do it here.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, is something wrong with you? Are you feeling sick?”
“I’m tired. Even I get tired sometimes.”
She looked at me without a word. I drained the last sip of my beer and rested my head on the seat back, eyes closed.
“Was it our fault? Did we make you tired?”
“No way,” I said with my eyes still closed.
“Are you too tired to talk?” she asked in a tiny voice.
I straightened up and looked at her. Then I shook my head.
“I’m worried. Did I say something terrible to you today? Something about you yourself, or about the way you live?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Really?”
“Everything you’ve said lately has been right on the mark. So don’t worry. But what’s bothering you now, all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know, it just sort of popped into my mind after he left, while I was waiting for you. I wondered if I hadn’t gone too far.”
I got two cans of beer from the refrigerator, switched on the stereo, and put on the Richie Beirach Trio at very low volume. It was the record I listened to whenever I came home drunk in the middle of the night.
“I’m sure you’re a little confused,” I said. “These changes in life are like changes in the barometric pressure. I’m kind of confused, too, in my own way.”
She nodded.
“Am I being hard on you?” she asked.
“Everybody’s hard on somebody,” I said. “But if I’m the one you chose to be hard on, you made the right choice. So don’t let it worry you.”
“Sometimes, I don’t know, it scares me. The future.”
“You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.” I gave her the same speech I had given Noboru Watanabe.
“But what if things don’t work out the way you want them to?”
“If they don’t work out, that’s when you think again.”
She gave a little laugh. “You’re as strange as ever.”
“Say, can I ask you one question?” I yanked open another can of beer.
“Sure.”
“How many men did you sleep with before him?”
She hesitated a moment before holding up two fingers. “Two.”
“And one was your age, and the other was an older man?”
“How did you know?”
“It’s a pattern.” I took another swig of beer. “I haven’t been fooling around for nothing all these years. I’ve learned that much.”
“So, I’m typical.”
“Let’s just say ‘healthy.’ “
“How many girls have you slept with?”
“Twenty-six. I counted them up the other day. There were twenty-six I could remember. There might be another ten or so I can’t remember. I’m not keeping a diary or anything.”
“Why do you sleep with so many girls?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I guess I’ll have to stop at some point, but I can’t seem to figure out how.”
We remained silent for a while, alone with our own thoughts. From the distance came the sound of a motorcycle’s exhaust, but it couldn’t have been Noboru Watanabe’s. Not at one o’clock in the morning.
“Tell me,” she said, “what do you really think of him?”
“Noboru Watanabe?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s not a bad guy, I guess. Just not my type. Funny taste in clothes, for one thing.” I thought about it some more and said, “There’s nothing wrong in having one guy like him in every family.”
“That’s what I think. And then there’s you: this person I call my brother. I’m very fond of you, but if everybody were like you the world would probably be a terrible place!”
“You may be right.”
We drank what was left of the beer and withdrew to our separate rooms. My sheets were new and clean and tight. I stretched out on top of them and looked through the curtain at the moon. Where were we headed? I wondered. But I was far too tired to think very deeply about such things. When I closed my eyes, sleep floated down on me like a dark, silent net.
—translated by Jay Rubin