Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

“I felt almost cheated,” Kitae said, munching a piece of cookie in which Sansho had shown no interest. “Because a part of me had been hoping they’d have become even more alike.”

The three of them finished their meal and headed toward the main street to find a taxi. Kitae looked at the husband’s back as he walked ahead and, suddenly feeling laughter bubbling up, turned to the wife and confessed what had been on her mind for the last ten years. “I don’t know what got into me. I guess I imagined it.”

The couple invited Kitae back to their place and drank wine until the husband passed out. After Kitae and the wife had emptied their third bottle, the wife said, “Kitae, darling, why don’t we step out and have a look in the garden?”

Kitae had been gazing at the rocks that were placed around the house, thinking the display was in peculiar taste. She got up and followed the wife outside unsteadily. In the moonlight the wife made her way through the English-style garden and crossed a small bridge over the pond. Eventually, she stopped in front of a flower bed blooming with salvia.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret, about how I got back to the way I was,” the wife said. It must have been the wine that made her sound like she was trying not to giggle.

“What are you talking about?” Kitae asked.

“I mean how I got back to myself. You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? That’s the secret,” the wife said, and pointed to the side of the flower bed.

“A rock?” The moonlit flower bed was strewn with fist-size stones similar to the ones inside the house.

“Exactly. My stand-ins.” The wife told Kitae to pick one up.

Doubtfully, Kitae crouched and chose one. Like the ones inside the house, it was a lumpy, thoroughly ordinary rock. “What about it?” Kitae asked, impatient.

“Look closer,” the wife said. “You’ll see that it’s nearly a perfect likeness.”

“Likeness? To what?”

“You’ll see it. Just look.”

Kitae stood up and looked at the rock in the moonlight. She half thought she was being played for some kind of joke, but when she changed the angle of the rock slightly, she felt her tipsiness evaporate.

“Incredible,” she said softly. There was the nose, the eyes—the resemblance to the husband was remarkable.

“Isn’t it?”

The wife explained that it had all started with the stones in the flower dish she’d put by their bedside. “They’d get to look so much like him, and I had to keep swapping them out. They just kind of piled up.” Only then did Kitae notice that there were countless rocks of a similar size by the side of the salvia bed.

I let out a breath. “It reminds me of the story of the three talismans.”

“How does that one go?” Kitae tilted her head to one side.

“Wasn’t it about a monk who was nearly devoured by a mountain hag, and stuck a talisman on a pillar in the lavatory to take his place?”

Kitae said, “Right,” though I couldn’t tell whether she was interested or not. She got up, saying, “She asked me whether I wanted to take one as a souvenir, but I couldn’t. It would have been just a little too peculiar, don’t you think?”

We were the only ones left in the dog run. “Thank you for the coffee,” I said, and rushed to open the fire door for Kitae, who had started pushing her cart toward it. I watched for a while as she made her way across the suspended walkway toward the east wing, and then made my way back to the west wing.

Back in the apartment, I picked up around the living room and switched on the Roomba.

What with the built-in dishwasher doing the dishes after breakfast, and the washing machine drying the laundry too, I sometimes got confused about who did the housework around here. Before I was married, I’d had an office job at a water cooler company. The company was small and understaffed, and when I met my future husband the workload was taking a toll on my health. I only found out his earnings were more than average after we started dating, but when he told me I shouldn’t keep working if I didn’t want to, I leapt at the opportunity. Since then, though I called myself a homemaker, I felt a lingering guilt about just how easy I had it. Owning a home at this age, I felt as if I’d somehow managed to cheat at life. I almost wished for a child so I could have a good reason to stay at home, but—perhaps because my motives were impure—there was no sign of us conceiving anytime soon.

It was past one o’clock. I remembered that it was the use-by date for the ground meat in the fridge, so I decided to fry it up with sweet chili miso and eggplant. My mind kept going back to the couple Kitae had talked about earlier. Was it all true? What happened to them after that? I couldn’t get them out of my head. I tried to tell my husband the story when he came back from work, but somehow it didn’t seem as mysterious or resonant as when Kitae told it.

“What is that, some kind of horror story?” My husband was picking pieces out of his miso soup, like a bird pecking at birdseed. I’d repeatedly asked him not to, but he claimed a doctor had told him to watch his salt intake, and since then he’d made a point of leaving the broth almost untouched every night.

I reached for the dish of green onions and cuttlefish tentacles in vinegar and miso dressing, and took the opportunity to look at my husband’s profile as he sat at the table. Because he preferred to watch TV during dinner, my customary seat was on his right, side-on rather than across from him.

My husband was engrossed in some variety show, highball tumbler happily in hand. It was a habit he’d kept completely secret while we were dating. Soon after our wedding, he’d sat me down and said, “San, you should know that I’m a man who likes to watch at least three hours of TV a day.”

I’d never been married before, but my husband had previously had a failed marriage. He said he’d hidden his bad habits from his first wife, trying to keep up appearances, and that had become too much of a burden. “That’s why I want to show you the real me,” he said. He’d sounded so sincere that I unthinkingly welcomed it as a good thing.

I discovered that night that “TV” meant variety shows. Nor was “three hours” an exaggeration—each night, for at least the time it took to have a drink and eat dinner, his attention was glued to the screen as though he were suckling it with his eyes. Having successfully exposed me to the “real” him, my husband eventually worked up to making it clear, every chance he got, that he was a man who liked to not think about anything when he got home.

I examined his features more closely. My husband’s eyes were piercing, to put it nicely. To put it another way, they constantly looked suspicious, even reptilian. Because of his bad posture, he always looked as though he were peering up at the world, and eight or nine times out of ten, he gave people an unpleasant first impression. His nose was long, as though it had been pushed down from above, and his lips were thin.

My face, on the other hand, was pretty average. I had a round, low nose that took after my grandfather’s. My lips, which were like my grandmother’s, were plump, but thanks in part to the paleness of my skin, the overall impression was bland, so that sometimes even I looked in the mirror and was reminded of a blank postcard. What was more, my face lacked cohesion, because the right eyelid had one fold and the left had two. I’d had a boyfriend or two who’d told me they liked the way I looked, so I wasn’t unhappy with my face, but now that I was married and had fewer reasons to put on makeup, my likeness to a blank postcard was perhaps more noticeable.

I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking we resembled each other. So why had I felt that we did?