Maki Kashimada: Touring the Land of the Dead: Two Novellas

Her heart was distressed one moment, calm the next, continuously being tossed around by the waves. The unrestful things that disturbed her and the things that brought her assurance could be found in equal measure in each and every picture. She witnessed them all, together with Taichi, flowing together as a single current. They didn’t move in front of the pictures—rather, the paintings seemed to float up in front of them. First one, then the next, one after the other, filling her heart with all kinds of impressions, before quickly sinking back into the stream. She no longer paid attention to the artists’ names, nor to the titles, nor to the years in which they had been produced. She simply watched as the paintings flowed by in turn. After a while, the vivid impressions reached out to her only for the briefest of moments—until at last no sooner might a picture awaken some deep-rooted feeling inside her than it would slip quietly into the past. She no longer felt afraid. There were paintings that were difficult to understand, that were creepy, or discomforting—but she was able to look at them, just look at them, directly, while at the same time still being oblivious to any deeper meaning that might lie within. And as she looked at these images that conveyed no meaning, she realized that she had broken out of that state of mind in which looking was unbearable. Now, she could face them all, even without understanding. She was simply looking at pictures.

She didn’t associate them with anything anymore. There wasn’t anything left to be afraid of. Not her mother, nor her younger brother. She felt nothing.

They came flowing back to her. Your grandfather, you know. The words with which her mother would always begin that heroic saga.

Your grandfather, you know, he took us to all these hotels in a hired car driven by a chauffeur.

On arriving at each hotel, Natsuko’s mother, her grandfather’s beloved daughter, would inspect the suite. If she didn’t like it, they would all get back into the hired car and go somewhere else. And the health retreat was the place that she liked the most. Wearing a dress, dancing in the salon with Natsuko’s grandfather and grandmother. French cuisine at an ocean-view restaurant. Chanson performances. Each of those things had made her young mother feel special.

It was strange, Natsuko thought. Now, she could picture her mother’s stories, those stories that she had so detested, with indifference, as though they belonged to someone else. Her mother’s agitated way of talking, where you could almost see her tongue darting around, was indeed unpleasant, but now it was just an image, one picture among many. She could look at her pitiable mother, she could see her as part of a portrait of a wealthy family. And she could look at that scene without calling to mind the regret that her mother, completely unawares, must have felt when she contemplated that special time now past. If she did that, Natsuko realized, she could look at them as no more than memories of a vacation taken by a rather ordinary, well-to-do family.

Eventually, her mother had been forced to give up her property, to part with her apartment in order to pay off her son’s debts, and to move with him to the suburbs. There, after catching wind of the rumors that she had fled to the countryside in shame, she ended up trying to kill herself. She spent a week in hospital. Then, no sooner had she been discharged than she started running to the local psychiatrist, clinging to her doctors, shedding fake tears, pretending to have aphasia, all in a bid for sympathy, all in an attempt to convince someone, anyone, that she should receive a disability pension. It should have been much easier for her just to find a job, but her mother didn’t see things that way. And so instead, she tried to get her hands on money the only way that she knew how. But of course, even if she had succeeded, it would only have ended up feeding her son’s alcoholism.

Her mother, however, had no such apprehensions, and kept on going as if nothing were amiss. She felt no sense of danger at the possibility of going broke, of finding herself completely penniless. She spent her days decorating her new suburban apartment with lace in all her favorite colors, pale pinks and whites. Her small, meagre castle. A castle in which even the darkness was bleached white. The room was fitted with a bed surrounded by a canopy of pure white lace. The pillows were like blue and pink heart-shaped marshmallows, as if even they were divided into male and female, like pairs of lovers. She passed the days sleeping in that huge bed, so soft that it was as if her body would sink into it and disappear. She resembled nothing so much as a pistil in the center of a rose.

Right, Natsuko remembered, her father too had been good at drawing.

When her mother finally had to let go of her apartment, she let Natsuko sort through her deceased father’s belongings. Her mother cherished that 8 mm film, but she was completely indifferent toward her late husband’s things, telling her daughter that if she wanted them, she could keep them, that if she didn’t, she could throw them out.

As she sifted through them all, Natsuko felt for the first time as if she truly understood her father.

Among those items, she came across an old diary. Her father, it seemed, had been a student at a vocational high school. She found herself filled with curiosity at what he had studied there. The only thing that her mother had ever told her about him, at least of the time before he came down with his disease, was that he had held an office job at a prestigious company. And that, as such, she had been incredibly happy when they got engaged. After he proposed, I quit my job as a stewardess, of course, so I’d go to see plays at the theater with your grandmother. I was so happy. I didn’t have to do anything anymore, I could just go and watch the plays, doing nothing. It was like soaking in a nice, warm bath, forever. It was so wonderful. I got married, bought an apartment to live in, and kept living like that for a while. I was so shocked at how much money I had, I was able to save so much. So I thought to myself, why don’t I buy another apartment with all these savings?

That was what her mother thought. That she could rent out another apartment, that she could earn money without working. But before she could buy that second apartment, her husband was felled by illness. And not long after, she had been forced to sell off her one and only apartment to pay for her son’s debts, left with no choice but to move to the suburbs. Her happiness, like a warm bath, didn’t last.

That was why, no doubt, her mother didn’t want her deceased husband’s belongings.

Natsuko found some pictures amid those items. He must have drawn them during his days at the vocational school. The first was a sketch of a Van Gogh painting, the second a landscape. They both had notes on the back, one giving a mark of eighty points, and the other ninety. Her father, it seemed, had been an outstanding student.

There was even a picture that had received a full hundred points. It was a delicate abstract sketch, almost mechanical, like the interlocked gears inside a clock. Black, grey, white. Each gear was drawn in monochrome gradations, but no matter which she looked at, not a single one of them was the same shade as any other. She didn’t know whether it was a beautiful picture. But she could tell that it was a very elaborate one, one that must have required a high level of skill to draw. So this was the kind of picture that scored a hundred points, she wondered in admiration.

It was a premonition, she thought, of the mysterious disease that would attack her father’s brain, the brain of a worker at a prestigious company, and leave him with dementia. And it was also, it seemed to Natsuko, a premonition of her mother’s life, a life that should have turned out so differently, and the final unexpected downfall of a family that stretched back to the time of her grandfather.