Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

“You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some of your eel.”

I’d brought her to the store, promising to buy her something new to wear, or anything else she wanted, but Hakone had headed straight for the escalator down to the basement food hall and asked for a bento. “I saw it on the local news the other day. They had a feature on department store deli eats, and the Spicy Fillet Steak Summer Set Bento just looked so delicious,” she said, flattening her plump eyelids in anticipation.

Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. Banners positioned around the floor advertised the Beat the Heat Bento Expo.

Hakone swiftly referred to the floor guide and said, “This way,” and took off without sparing a glance at the stalls she passed. I followed, but never having been very good at walking through crowds, I kept barging into people’s shoulders, and by the time I caught up, she had already joined the line for the steak bento. I’d planned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the Special Selection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into getting one. It featured eel sourced from the Shimanto River, Lake Hamana, the Mikawa region, and Miyazaki Prefecture, grilled both with sauce and without. I carefully took a piece of each and placed them on top of Hakone’s rice.

“Do you think he’s still getting them? The weird garbled messages?”

“Probably.”

“Has he said?”

“No, but you can just tell these things sometimes.”

“Huh. Aren’t you worried? Didn’t you say his ex-wife was really good-looking?”

“ Really good-looking. Like that actress from the movies.”

“And she’s got long legs?”

“Really long legs.”

“How did he split up with a person like that and end up marrying you?”

“I wonder.” What would you think if you saw his true form? I thought. I shivered, then looked up and saw there was an AC vent embedded in the ceiling right above my head. “Hakone, are you and Senta thinking about getting married yet?” I asked, getting a light blouse out of my bag.

Hakone hummed and said nothing. She looked like she was giving it some serious thought. Her eyes were focused on the booth’s cloud-glass partition, but her mouth was still chewing away steadily at the steak.

“Do you think he’s too immature? Is that the problem?” I asked.

“No, it’s not like that. I’m not sure why. Maybe I don’t really know, myself. But I’d like us to stay as separate people for a little longer.”

“Separate people?”

“I mean, getting married, that means swallowing everything about the other person, the good things and the bad. What if there ends up being more of the bad? You’d both be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?” Hakone said. “Do you know the story of the snake ball? I don’t remember where I read it. Maybe someone told it to me, a long time ago. There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other one’s tail. And they eat and they eat at exactly the same speed, until they’re just two heads making a ball, and then they both get eaten up and disappear. I think that’s the image I have of marriage—that both me and the other person, as we are now, will disappear before we can do anything about it. But I guess that can’t be right. I think?”

“Snake ball, huh?” I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales.

Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. “But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. Between me and Senta, I might end up swallowing him all in one big gulp.”

I took a mouthful of grilled eel seasoned with plenty of sansho pepper. The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region.

I was secretly impressed by Hakone’s story. Whenever I’d gotten close to someone in the past, I’d had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. The other person’s ideas, interests, and habits would gradually take the place of my own. Every time I noticed myself acting as though that was who I’d been all along, a chill went up my spine. The fact that I couldn’t stop, even if I tried, was proof that it wasn’t actually a matter of anything as benign as acting or pretending.

Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. As if to prove it, I could hardly recall the men I’d been with before. Strangely, too, the men I’d been with had all wanted me to grow in them. Eventually, I’d start to feel in danger of root rot, and would hurriedly break the pot and uproot myself.

Was that the fault of the soil, or did the problem lie in the roots?

I’d expected marriage to be an even more constricting flower pot than my previous relationships. But after four years, I hadn’t tried to escape from the soil that was my husband. Hearing Hakone’s snake-ball story, I finally felt that something that had been cloudy to me had become clear. All this time, I had been feeding myself to those men. By now, I was like the ghost of a snake that had already been eaten up by many other snakes, and I’d lost my own body long before getting swallowed up by my husband. Didn’t that explain why I didn’t much mind whether it was a husband I was living with or something only resembling a husband?

One night, after dinner, I was surprised to notice my husband engrossed in his iPad rather than the variety show playing on the TV.

“What are you doing on there?” I peered over his shoulder.

“Huh?”

“Is it a game?”

“It’s a game.”

“What kind of game?”

There was no response. I gave up and cleared the table and went for a bath, but when I came back, my husband hadn’t moved.

“Bath’s free.”

“Okay,” I heard a muffled voice say. I finished towel-drying my hair and stepped out onto the balcony to bring in the laundry I’d hung out that afternoon. The zelkovas planted in a clump just beyond the railing were overgrown with green leaves that looked like a neglected hairdo. I recalled seeing a circular in the mailroom about plans to prune the plantings.

“Uwano recommended this game,” my husband said at last.

I was folding laundry on the living room floor. “Uwano again? You’re talking about him a lot lately.”

“I think you should try it. It’s good.”

“No thanks. I don’t like games.”

“That’s exactly what I told Uwano. Here, take it.”

“I’m folding laundry.”

“Let the cat do it. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her.” He moved the cat off the space beside him where she’d been asleep, and beckoned to me. Normally he was never this insistent. I guessed he must be feeling needy.

My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. When he made me sit with him while he watched his variety shows, claiming it was more fun than watching alone, it had to be that he was trying to erase the chilly gaze that he felt I was directing at him. He probably thought that once he and I became one, he would never again have to worry about being judged by others.

I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. I was expecting some cutting-edge visual effects, but what I saw was an image representing what looked like oceans and continents, drawn in simple lines like in old Nintendo games. Small discs of different colors twinkled all across the map.

“What are these?” I asked.

“Oh, those,” my husband said, turning his shoulders toward me. “Coins.”

“And what do I do with these coins?”