The Lake Read online

  I was comfortable with him, and to a certain degree I was in love, so it hadn’t bothered me, but I couldn’t help noticing that there was something in him that scared me every so often.

  Or maybe that’s necessary when two people are serious about each other?

  We try our hardest not to feel that, to sweep it under the carpet, but I bet it’s there.

  A particular variety of loneliness, like peering deep into the darkness.

  It’s only natural, when two separate universes touch.

  For instance, when I was a child I saw a lot of vomit, middle-aged women totally drunk with their bras cutting into the flesh of their backs, and even middle-aged men running their eyes lasciviously over my young body—I was used to it. And that was only the beginning.… It wasn’t hard for me to imagine a world out there in which murder was an everyday occurrence. That wasn’t my world, and it wasn’t the world my parents had lived in, but somewhere, anywhere, all you had to do was peel away the skin, and you’d discover a path leading down into it.

  Everyone knows that hidden pull is there, but we go on living our lives, pretending we don’t. We keep our gazes fixed, day after day, on the things we want to see.

  But sometimes we encounter people like Nakajima who compel us to remember it all. He doesn’t have to say or do anything in particular; just looking at him, you find yourself face-to-face with the enormousness of the world as a whole. Because he doesn’t try to live in just a part of it. Because he doesn’t avert his gaze.

  He makes me feel like I’ve suddenly awakened, and I want to go on watching him forever. That, I think, is what it is. I’m awed by his terrible depths.

  A few days later, in the morning, I set out for that town.

  Stepping down from the train alone this time, the station seemed even more forlorn than it had the first time. The only sign of life in the dead of the afternoon was the supermarket, whose huge electric sign glowed. It seemed to suck people in: elderly men and women, prematurely aged housewives.

  I kept walking on and on along the single street that extended from the station and found the road that led to the lake. The breeze carried the scent of water. Passing a small boathouse, a run-down shop that sold fishing tackle, and a closed restaurant, I emerged from the woods onto the shore of the lake.

  I cared for Nakajima so deeply that I was shaking. I felt it even more in his absence.

  Last time, when we had walked here together, the lake had been more beautiful than it was now, and shone more brilliantly. I guess I must have been in love already.

  The lake, utterly still now, seemed to have been abandoned by the world and its goings-on. There was no mist yet; the sunlight beat down almost painfully on the bare tree branches.

  I kept walking, heading for the red torii. My footsteps were uncertain, as if I were walking in a dream. What if it’s just a ruin when I get there, empty for the past hundred years? I thought. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were.

  So I was relieved when the small house came into view. Relieved, and stunned.

  Because Mino was standing in the doorway, waving.

  I ran over. “How on earth …” I said.

  “Chii said you’d be coming, alone this time,” Mino said. “I was out here waiting.”

  “It’s amazing she knows these things,” I said. “And that you would have such faith in her that you’d come out and wait for me, like a little dog or something.”

  Without thinking, I patted Mino on the head. He had the most adorably dog-like round eyes to begin with, and for him to be perched on the stoop like this … it was so cute I could hardly stand it.

  “I’m not a dog.” Mino smiled. “Come on inside. I’ll make us some tea.”

  I smiled back and followed him through the door.

  Relief washed over me. They exist. It wasn’t a dream.

  If anything, it was Nakajima’s bizarre mood that had made them seem unreal.

  The house was just as tidy as before, and yet it felt homey. Somehow you always get that sense when you visit someplace for the second time, and that’s how it was here, too. This was a place I could relax in. And now I knew my way around.

  I sat back and watched Mino as he boiled water and made tea. There wasn’t anything unusual about the way he did these things, but his movements were very precise. He took his time, but he wasn’t dawdling. It was like watching a master at the tea ceremony.

  “It’s no use trying to steal my technique. It’s all in the spring water.”

  Mino smiled.

  “Maybe I’ll take some when I go.”

  “I’ll show you where later,” Mino said.

  The tea, made from leaves with a subtly smoky aroma, was so good I could feel my senses sharpening. It had a sweetness to it, and at the end of each sip I’d catch a whiff of fruit.

  “It’s delicious.…” I murmured.

  “Life sure is funny,” Mino said. “Ordinarily I don’t go out much—I order most of what we need, books and tea leaves and so on, online. The supermarket in front of the station is really the only place I go. The weird thing is, while I never feel any desire to see other people, I get all happy when someone tells me they like the tea I make.”

  “Maybe you just know I recognize good tea when I drink it?” I said.

  “That could be,” Mino said.

  I sort of knew what he meant.

  I’m sure that if I hadn’t been a friend of Nakajima’s, if I were a traveler who just happened to run into Mino on the road, or a tourist in the area who randomly dropped by this shack, he wouldn’t have opened his heart to me the way he did. We wouldn’t have been able to talk this intimately.

  Mino and Nakajima were a lot alike in that way.

  They weren’t casual about things the way normal people are. They didn’t see any reason to try and be amiable with people just because they happened to be there.

  Maybe in a sense their way of doing things was kind of sad, but it put me at ease. Because it’s normal.

  In most cases, relationships fall into place the second you figure out who someone is and once you have a grasp of the context that led to your meeting them. For Mino and Nakajima, though, that process was all messed up.

  Think of those kids at the center. They’re honest but cautious; they would never come plop themselves down beside me and start asking questions right from the first day. It always takes at least a week before kids start pestering me and getting excited.

  I’ve got more experience with life than they do, it’s true, and sometimes as I paint I start thinking, Look, ultimately we’re going to get friendly anyway, and once I finish painting I’ll be gone. So why don’t you hurry up and come over? What’s the point in waiting?

  But just because you’re working within a fixed time frame like that doesn’t mean you can just leap over the distance that separates you. The kids, in this case, are right.

  I could relax with Mino because he didn’t seem to have any extra baggage, and I sensed that over time, little by little, we would become friendly. It was the same as with the kids.

  It’s more than just a matter of words—there’s always a physical distance to overcome. We look each other in the eye, smell the air, drink our tea together, gathering up tiny sparks of reassurance. And then there’s the matter of affinity. If Nakajima had attempted to decrease the distance between us two weeks earlier than he had, I bet I would have been turned off. I probably never would have cried as I had, touched at the sight of his wire rack.

  “I feel like this could become a habit—taking the train here, making my way around the lake, coming here for a delicious cup of tea,” I said. “Would it be all right if I visited occasionally, Mino, with Nakajima? Not to have my fortune told, just to come.”

  “Yes,” Mino said quietly. “Maybe then our stopped time would move again.”

  The stopped time, I realized, was Nakajima’s, too.

  “Quite a hero, aren’t you?” Mino said in Chii’s voice. Mino’s eyes were closed.r />
  Chii’s eyes, too, were closed. She was asleep, breathing lightly, her chest rising and falling slightly under the fluffy comforter that covered her.

  “Wouldn’t I be a heroine?”

  This time, no longer unnerved by her sarcasm, I could be myself.

  I could totally see why Nakajima had wanted to see them so badly. Basically, they were really nice, interesting people. They had managed to build something like a solid, healthy household on a foundation that was seriously skewed. Here, keeping to themselves, they treasured certain elements of life, like restraint and dignity, that people in the city had long since abandoned.

  “No, Nobu’s the heroine of the story,” Chii said. “The damsel in distress. You saved him from the prison he’d shut himself up inside, you woke him up and brought him out.”

  I sort of knew what she meant.

  “Go to Paris with him. You two may well end up living there for quite some time, but do it anyway,” Chii said. “You seem to be hesitating, but isn’t it too late for that? He’s grabbed you. And you’ve grabbed him, too—he can’t live by himself anymore. I think I can show you an image that will make you understand. Here, give me your hand.”

  Looking at Chii, I saw that she had opened her eyes. The color of her eyes was so deep I shuddered. I didn’t want to touch her, but I figured that was just my instincts telling me to steer clear of anything too powerful. And since I had come this far, why not? Screwing up my courage, I took her hand in mine. It was smooth, and very thin. The hand of a sleeping beauty who had nothing to do with ordinary life.

  “Close your eyes,” Chii said. “Match your breathing with mine. It seems like hypnotism, I know, and in a way it’s sort of similar, but it’s not hypnotism. We’re simply going to share an image. Don’t be afraid.”

  I did just as she told me. The dark screen in front of my eyes was blank. But after a while, as I waited, absolutely still, an image rose up in my mind. All at once, just like that.

  It was snowing.… In a dark sky, like motes of dust, like bird feathers pirouetting in the air, ever so lightly, snow was drifting this way and that.

  I was looking down on the snow from above. I could tell because the flakes kept tumbling away from me. Then, all of a sudden, I was up in a tree somewhere, watching the street below. Gradually, I realized that the tree was just one in a row that lined the street. It was an ordinary paved street; no sooner had the snowflakes landed on it than they melted. The only place they were starting to pile up, in a thin layer, was on the roofs of the cars parked along the street.

  I saw Nakajima in the distance, walking toward me, a heavy-looking backpack full of books on his shoulder. I could tell it had books in it because of the neat, square way it bulged.

  Hey, it’s Nakajima! Just look at him, he’s so cool! I thought automatically. The way he stoops over like that, the long toes in those shoes of his—I love it all. It’s not logical.

  Looking more closely as he approached, I noticed that he seemed to have lost weight and he looked pale and unsteady on his feet. He must have been studying nonstop again, without taking a break to eat. As if he were trying, by studying, to free himself from something. Then, without any warning, he stopped and looked up.

  I doubt our eyes could have met then, since I was transparent.

  He slumped down on the ground and leaned against the tree. There was no one else around, just the snow dancing lightly in the air. Nakajima was watching the snow. His eyes were lovely. His face wore the expression of someone confronted by something wonderful.

  Then Nakajima opened his backpack and slipped an object awkwardly out from between the books that did, indeed, fill the backpack almost to the bursting point. It was that old wire rack. He put it under his arm like a thermometer and closed his eyes.

  “No! Don’t go to sleep there! You’ll freeze!” I screamed.

  The sound of my own screaming jolted me into consciousness.

  Chii was still holding my hand, her eyes open. She was watching me.

  Once again Mino spoke in Chii’s voice. “That was a symbolic representation of Nobu’s past, and of his future. Of what happened to him, and what could happen again.”

  “I can’t allow that,” I said, tears welling unexpectedly in my eyes.

  My heart was thumping, just like when I’d dreamed of my mom.

  “It’s important to remember that it’s not something that actually happened, it’s an allegory. Though of course it could happen,” Mino said without emotion, just interpreting.

  But I caught it. The shade of sadness hidden in the glint of Mino’s eye.

  “All right. You’ve made your point.”

  Chii, who had lifted herself up, collapsed heavily back into bed as if she no longer had the energy to sit up. She shut her eyes.

  “I bet Paris will be wonderful for you,” Mino said, himself again. “Maybe living there will be even nicer than it is here.”

  His return indicated that this session was over.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Ten thousand yen,” Mino said.

  “That doesn’t seem like much,” I said, somewhat taken aback.

  Judging from the atmosphere, I was sure it would be much more.

  “We never accept more than that,” Mino said.

  I glanced over at Chii, planning to thank her, but her eyes were closed. Then, looking more closely, I noticed a photograph of their mother hanging on the wall behind her. I hadn’t even seen it last time.

  I could tell she was their mother by the shape of her body: she was kind of small and oddly proportioned, just like them. She stared straight out of the picture in its plain white frame.

  It hit me that I recognized her. I had seen her on TV.

  And suddenly I understood everything.

  “Oh, my god, Mino! I didn’t realize!”

  He seemed to understand everything I wanted to say.

  He nodded once.

  I decided not to say anything more.

  “I think I should go,” I said, standing up.

  As I left the room, a feeble, high-pitched voice called, “Good luck.”

  When I looked back, Chii was still asleep.

  “I haven’t heard her voice in a long time,” Mino said. “I don’t see why she has to use me if she can talk on her own.”

  “I bet she thinks you need a job, too,” I said. “Besides, talking takes energy.”

  “I guess there’s a reason for me to exist, after all,” Mino said, smiling.

  “What do mean, a reason! You matter very much to everyone!” I said earnestly.

  Mino didn’t reply.

  His silence was exactly like Nakajima’s, and it hurt to see him like that. He was quiet in the way people are when they believe the world would get along just fine without them.

  I had one more cup of tea and then stepped outside. Mino brought out an empty plastic bottle and told me to take some spring water back for Nakajima.

  Today, small waves rode the surface of the lake. There was a light breeze. The boats looked kind of lonely moored with no one sitting in them, rocking in time to the waves.

  My mind felt numb, as if I were in an unreal world.

  The tree branches were swaying slightly, too, hanging out over the lake. I noticed that they were cherry trees—lots and lots of them. I pictured the lake when they bloomed, framed by a ring of hazy, whitish pink.

  “It must be lovely when the cherries are in bloom,” I said.

  “That’s the most amazing event of the year here,” Mino said.

  He wasn’t comfortable enough with me to come right out and invite me to visit then, but his manner made me feel as if he had.

  Then we climbed the old stairway to the shrine, where the spring was.

  Turning to look back when we reached the top, we were so high that the lake looked like an adorable miniature of itself, ensconced in a ring of greenery. The boats, lined up in a neat row, were like toy boats.

  The spring water was cold and tasted s
lightly salty and hard when I scooped some up and drank it.

  There was no one in the shrine; the only sound to be heard in the pure, cleanly swept space was the calling of birds.

  It occurred to me that Nakajima and his mother had probably come here for water every day, too. I pictured the two of them then, living their lives, clinging to each other.

  They were so hurt and they had lost so much that they no longer knew what was what, but the need they felt for each other was still love. No one could deny that.

  Mino spoke. “Perhaps to your eyes, Chihiro, this lake looks like the kind of scenery you’d encounter in a dream—beautiful, ineffable.

  “But that’s because you saw it for the first time through Nobu’s eyes.

  “We have all kinds of days here, just like anywhere. The lake has all sorts of different faces. And so it’s always fresh. Some days the sky is clear and the water shines so brightly you can’t even look at it, and it lifts your spirit; some days it’s plastered with boats. Sometimes I’ll just sit staring at the snow melting away into nothing on the surface of the lake, and some days when it’s overcast, even the trees in our garden look dingy. It’ll be so hazy that our bicycles look like junk.

  “The truth is, time hasn’t really stopped for us. Things are constantly changing, even if the change happens so slowly you don’t notice. I go to that big supermarket in front of the station and wander around looking like a kid, buying packages of curry rice mix with anime characters on them, collecting coupons. I buy things like buckets. Or a toilet brush. Ordinary stuff. And I cart it all home on my bike. You see that …” Mino pointed to a little general store that was visible a short distance from the lake. “That store over there. The man who runs it is part of our neighborhood association, so if we run into each other at the supermarket he gives me a lift in his car. His relatives are in Shizuoka, and in the winter they send him boxes of mikan. He brings us a lot, every year.