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

And yet, even now, her mother would still try to associate her daughter, a part-time working housewife, with her idea of an airline stewardess. That old woman next door told me she saw a real beauty passing by down the street. Excited by this trivial incident, her mother had rushed to call her. It must have been you, don’t you think? Because you’re my daughter.

Her mother’s endless stupidity never failed to exhaust her. Her neighbor had simply happened to see a beautiful passerby. But armed with no more information than that, Natsuko’s mother believed that it must have been her own daughter. She believed that a beautiful passerby ought to have been her own daughter. What she really wanted was to be told was that she, a former stewardess, was beautiful. But unable to understand even that much for herself, she had called to say that it was Natsuko who was being praised. She didn’t even understand what she herself was thinking.

Just before they had left, while Natsuko was doing her makeup, Taichi had been absorbed in a gravure magazine. He had bought an unfathomable number of adult DVDs and gravure magazines at a bargain price, and left them all strewn about the room. Like a collection of chocolates, or stamps, or stickers. Natsuko couldn’t help but feel somewhat amused by her husband. He had the body of a man, and was interested in those of women—and that alone allowed him to hold onto his sense of masculinity. When she looked at it that way, she felt a smile forming on her lips. It would be a lie to say that she didn’t harbor some degree of contempt toward him, but there was no denying that there was nonetheless something charming about it all.

Beyond the tunnel, the blue ocean burst out before them.

When they arrived at the station, Taichi proceeded headlong step by step with the help of his cane. Natsuko gripped his hand, wide and thick and covered with sweat. Whenever she held onto it, she felt as if he was the only person who truly cared whether she lived or died. So if she were to live, she decided, she would live for him. It wasn’t as if she felt that there was anything particularly special about living for someone else’s sake, but if it were for anyone else’s sake but his, there would be no need for her to exist.

They passed through the ticket gate and reached the bus terminal. The stop for the shuttle bus had to be around here somewhere. When Natsuko spread open the map that she had picked up at the ward office, Taichi poked his nose over her shoulder to take a look, like an animal sniffing for food. But he couldn’t have understood anything. The stop for the shuttle bus seemed to be the one furthest from the station. She brought her husband through the plaza, when she saw a foot bath. He would no doubt like to try it, she thought, but they didn’t have enough time.

At that moment, he gave her hand a sudden tug.

“What is it?” she asked.

He pointed to a child at a pedestrian crossing. “You can’t ignore the signal, not when there are kids around. They might copy you.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Natsuko sighed, relaxing. Taichi could be persuasive, every now and then.

“Ah, what I wouldn’t do for a kaisendon ,” he said, pointing, as innocently as ever, to a banner outside a nearby eatery.

Without uttering so much as a word, Natsuko led him into the restaurant. She had resigned herself to doing as he said. His stubbornness could be its own form of persuasion.

It was a set-meal restaurant, serving all kinds of local fish. Even though it was a weekday, the place was crowded with tourists.

Taichi’s eyes shone as he read the menu. It was a bit expensive, Natsuko thought, but her husband didn’t seem to have realized just how much she was stretching their finances. Natsuko ordered a kaisendon , and Taichi a tekkadon .

Their orders didn’t come for the longest time. Silence fell over the two of them, but there was nothing unusual about that. They had never been a particularly talkative couple. But Natsuko, as a wife, had never felt dissatisfied by her husband’s quiet disposition. She understood, at some vague level, that his life was fulfilled. And if he himself felt that it was fulfilled, there was no reason to deny him that. Even if his body continued to decline, and their finances too. And in order to complete that sense of fulfilment, it seemed necessary that she not say anything. Watching him sit there in silence, his eyes closed, she couldn’t help but think of a wild animal soaking in a medicinal bath to cure its wounds. For her part, she didn’t have anything in particular that she wanted to bring up either. If she were to start talking, she would no doubt end up telling him everything there was to hear about that life . But fortunately, her constant fatigue always invited her into a calm silence. She was simply too tired to tell him anything. Before she knew it, she wasn’t even able to bring herself to cry. Not talking, not crying, but at least it wasn’t boring. What kind of life was this, this state of nothing but denial?—but she put a stop to such thoughts, for they would surely just make her even more tired.

At long last, the two rice bowls arrived. Natsuko watched as her husband, his eyes closed, slowly lifted the slices of tuna into his mouth. He chewed slowly, no doubt due to his neurological disorder, and so looked as if he were truly relishing them. Natsuko remembered when she had gone once to a luxury Italian restaurant with her mother and brother. Back then, she hadn’t yet married Taichi, her mother was living off a widow’s pension, and her brother, though he had just graduated from university and found a job, hadn’t stuck to it, and spent his days wallowing in idleness. All three of them had no sense of thrift, no sense at all of the value of money. Red sea bream carpaccio paid for by credit card at a luxury Italian restaurant. It wasn’t real, she thought. That cold carpaccio, studded with green dill and caviar like miniature diamonds, didn’t look like a fish that had been alive. She couldn’t pin down its taste.

“This is hardly a high-class restaurant. That carpaccio was awful,” her brother began to complain in his usual high-minded way. “And this is hardly a real chef’s work. Looks more like some housewife put it all together.”

“Oh, you say such clever things!” their mother laughed ecstatically, no doubt seeing in her son the figure of a connoisseur.

The restaurant should have been sufficiently high-class for the both of them, and the food wasn’t at all bad. They certainly couldn’t have known any more highly ranked or expensive places than that one. But by insulting that high-class restaurant, they wanted to make out that they were regular patrons of even higher-class ones. Who were they trying to fool? Themselves, of course. They would tell themselves that they were high-class people who frequented high-class restaurants. They were no more than con artists conning themselves. The two of them continued to talk, about restaurants run by famous chefs, about members-only bars. Her brother had an endless list of phone numbers belonging to such places on his mobile. He showed one of them to their mother. And after looking at the number, the two of them smiled in satisfaction, leaning back in their chairs with full stomachs. If they were to behave in such a way in front of anyone else, anyone outside of their family, they would surely be met with contempt—but of course, they had no experience of that. It had been a long time since they belonged to society. Now, they went through their lives without friends, or even acquaintances. And so, in their own world, according to their own values, they had concluded that they were special.

Natsuko couldn’t eat any more and so gave her sashimi to Taichi. He, as ever, took it as a matter of course. He could eat anything, seemingly without end. Her mother and brother called him vulgar for that. They were always disparaging him.