Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

He caught up with Mitsuyo and Zombie enjoying a game of mini golf in a garden overlooking the sea. When they noticed him, they both paraded their matching dresses for him to admire.

“What’s with the matching clothes?” he asked, and Mitsuyo replied, “We got them in the hotel boutique shop. On your bill.”

“Hot springs resort geishas numbers one and two!” Zombie proclaimed, striking a pose.

“It looks like I’m going to get to meet Shinobu Yoimachi, girls.”

“Congratulations, your wish has been granted,” said geisha number one. “You’re a big boob boy, aren’t you Kita,” added geisha number two.

“The boobs were too expensive for me, actually. But that’s OK. Hey, hot springs resort geisha number two, I’ve got another favour to ask you. I want news of the girl I split with six years ago. Her name’s Mizuho Nishi. Her married name’s Higashi. The husband works for the Ministry of Finance.”

“So we should check out the address of a Higashi in the Ministry of Finance, right? I know someone in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, so I’ll ask him on Monday.”

“Please.”

Geishas one and two looked at each other with cheerful, easygoing smiles. Those smiling faces were worth ten Mona Lisas.

“My you’re a romantic, aren’t you Kita? Wanting to meet up one more time with an old sweetheart who’s married someone else. She must have been a fine woman. But hey, good women get snapped up by money and status in no time, don’t they? You still love her? If you do, the only thing to do is snatch her back.”

He felt no hatred for her any more. He’d had no unrealistic thoughts of getting back together with her or being a candidate for adultery. He’d simply done his best to get used to the fact he’d been ditched. Still, there’d been dreams. In those dreams, he’d tried to reconstruct the honeymoon time with Mizuho that had lasted less than two months, or brought her up to his dream flat as she might have been when there was no rival in love and it was only him she cared for. He also used her in his masturbation fantasies. Just for those brief moments, she was his and his alone. So was that some kind of lingering attachment? After all, he’d gone right on secretly cultivating this fantasy relationship after she jilted him. Suddenly, Kita came to himself, and what he realized was that when it came down to it Mizuho Nishi and Shinobu Yoimachi were the same thing, just fantasy women.

They went back to the hotel lobby, and there Kita found the little boy he’d bought the toy for being scolded by his mother.

“Tell me the truth! Where did you get this money?” “A man gave it to me.” “What man? There’s no such man here. You’re lying to me.” “But a man gave it to me.” The little boy caught sight of Kita. Sure he’d be in for a tongue-lashing, Kita made a dash for the elevator.

The evening’s meal was Mediterranean style. Abalone salad, a fish terrine with caviar on the side, seafood paella with squid ink, grilled lobster etc., washed down with Dom Perignon and Chablis. Once they were full, there was a karaoke nightclub, followed by the hot spring bath. By the time Kita got back to his room, both the night-time Pacific Ocean outside the window and the chandelier were spinning.

At dawn, he was woken by the tiny squishing sound of mucous membranes rubbing together. The dead television screen opposite mirrored the room behind him, and looking closely he realized that the two naked hot springs resort geishas were locked in an embrace in there. He sat up, intending to go and get in on the action, but the moment he did so his gorge rose, and he turned and vomited into the drawer of his bedside table. His stomach heaved up its contents remorselessly, the bile burning in his throat.

“Hey Kita, you OK?” came Zombie’s voice from next door.

“Don’t come in here!” he said, and heaved again. When the last spasms were done, he turned on the light and checked the contents of the drawer. Good God, he’d gone and defiled the Bible and the Buddhist sutras with his undigested seafood and wine!

Holding the drawer in his arms, he made for the bathroom. He rescued the Bible and the Sutras from the sea of vomit, rinsed them off under the shower, and wrapped them in a towel. Meanwhile, Zombie had crept over for a peek. She rushed off as if horrified to have witnessed some forbidden sight, to report to Mitsuyo.

“Help! Kita’s washing the Bible!”

“Eh? I didn’t know that was something you could wash…”

Kita lay there with a hangover until close to midday. Meanwhile, the two hot springs geishas set off early for a game of tennis. When he finally surfaced, Kita took a bath, then grabbed a taxi with the idea of filling his empty stomach with noodles or something. The driver took him to a noodle restaurant in a made-over old farmhouse. As he sat there, blankly making his way through omelette and grated yam, an old couple arrived and sat down at the same table. They said hello with friendly smiles, which made Kita nervous that he was about to get himself mixed up again with more well-intentioned meddling.

The wife then pointed to the garden of the farmhouse beyond the little lane, and murmured to her husband in a languid undertone, “Look at that lovely house, buried in flowers. So many! Hydrangea, orange blossom, pinks, rose of Sharon, petunias…It reminds me of that poem:

“Ah yes, that’s in the Kokinshu , isn’t it. Not ‘endless summer flowers,’ ‘endless summer blooms,’ it is.”

“What about some sake, darling?”

“Well, why not. It’s splendid weather, after all. Let’s be daring and have a cup, eh?”

“Soon it will be time for the gardenias and cotton roses to bloom, won’t it?”

“Those summer scents are so enchanting.”

“I remember Kenji used to love cotton roses.”

“Ah yes, how many years is it now since he died? I still feel as if he’s alive and could pop in for a visit any time, you know.”

“He made enough noise while he was alive, didn’t he, but how quiet he is in death.”

“Yes, it’s a sad truth, that old saying ‘silent as the grave.’”

Could they always have such elegant conversations with each other, wondered Kita, casting a furtive glance at this couple who seemed to inhabit a different universe from himself. True, they were speaking Japanese, and sitting at the same table as him, but their words struck him as some imagined poetic ephemera.

They sat there sipping their sake and picking at the side dish of wild vegetables they’d ordered, gazing at the flower-filled garden across the way. Taking them in, Kita’s eyes caught the husband’s.

“Would you like a cup?” The old man delicately wiped a finger over the rim of his sake cup, and held it out for Kita.

“Thank you so much, but I have a hangover and all I can face is water,” Kita replied politely, whereupon the wife remarked in the kind of elegant tone with which she might recite some poem, “Kenji tried to cure both hangovers and cancer with sake, I recall.”

“Kenji was doing his best to disinfect his body with alcohol.”

The wife smiled soundlessly with her teeth.

“Are you on holiday?” asked Kita.

“Yes. Death’s messengers will be coming for us soon enough, so we’re spending our remaining time on earth in perpetual travel. We’re still in the middle of the journey.”

“Really? So you do the pilgrimage to Ise Shrine, and so on?”