There were several things I needed to ask Mr. Koyasu, and several things I needed to tell him. What I, as a living person, should know, and things I wanted him, as a dead person, to know. But before that, there was a lot I had to sort out in my mind.
The window of time when Mr. Koyasu could take on human form and materialize in front of me was—according to his explanation—not so long. And he couldn’t appear that way whenever he wanted to. We needed to discuss all kinds of things within the confines of that limited amount of time. Lots of topics that defied logic, things that belonged to the conceptual realm. So it was necessary, to some extent, to gather my thoughts and plan out how to approach our talks. Otherwise, there was a strong possibility that I would wander forever, aimlessly, in a dark, enigmatic world, casting around for clues.
The next day, after one p.m., I asked Mrs. Soeda to come to the head librarian’s office on the second floor. There’s something we need to talk about, I told her.
Mrs. Soeda and I spoke nearly every day at the first-floor counter about matters related to the library’s operations, but I realized that we’d had almost no opportunities to speak alone. It wasn’t like Mrs. Soeda was intentionally avoiding those opportunities, but she was clearly also not seeking them out. Perhaps (now that I think about it, I mean) that might have been because she wanted to avoid the topic of Mr. Koyasu when we talked.
Mrs. Soeda had on a thin, light green cardigan, a simple white blouse, and a bluish-gray skirt. She wore low heels made from dark brown buckskin. Her outfit was neither expensive nor cheap, neither old nor well worn. All were clean and neatly taken care of, her blouse carefully ironed, crisp, and wrinkle free. She usually wore light makeup that didn’t stand out, yet today her eyebrows were drawn on thick and sharp, as if to emphasize a strong will. Everything about her suggested an experienced, capable librarian.
I sat behind my desk, and she sat across from me. I caught a trace of tension in her expression. Her thin lips, shaded with a refined pink lipstick, were set in a taut line, as if she’d decided ahead of time not to say more than was necessary.
Outside the window a fine, soundless rain fell, and the room was chilly and dampish. There was only a small gas stove, so the room never warmed up much. The rain had been falling like this, unchanged, since morning, and from the chill in the air it looked like it could snow at any time. The room was dim, the ceiling light only emphasizing the gloom. It was only one p.m. yet seemed like evening.
“I’d like to talk with you regarding Mr. Koyasu,” I said, launching right into it. I felt it best with Mrs. Soeda just to get straight to the point. Her expression was unchanged as she gave a slight nod, her lips remaining tight.
“Mr. Koyasu has already passed away, hasn’t he,” I said, coming right out with it.
Mrs. Soeda maintained her silence for a time and finally exhaled slightly, as if giving in, and reluctantly spoke.
“Yes. You are correct. Mr. Koyasu did pass away some time ago.”
“But though he’s dead he still sometimes appears in the library, looking like he did while alive. I’m correct, yes?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Mrs. Soeda said. She lifted her hands from her lap and adjusted her glasses. “But not everybody can see him.”
“You can see him,” I said, “and I can too.”
“Yes, that’s right. As far as I know, up to this point the only ones who’ve been able to see Mr. Koyasu, and speak with him, are you and me. The rest of the staff can’t see anything and can’t hear his voice.”
Mrs. Soeda seemed relieved to finally be able to unburden herself of this secret she’d held on to for so long. She must have had doubts, too, about her own sanity at times.
“Actually, until last night,” I said, “I didn’t know he was already dead. Ever since I took up this post in the library, I’ve been sure he was alive. No one told me otherwise. Last night he revealed the truth to me himself, and as you can imagine, I was shocked.”
“Of course you were,” Mrs. Soeda said. “I’m very sorry, but I couldn’t tell you myself that he is no longer of this world.”
I ran through an abbreviated version of the previous night’s events for her. How around ten p.m. Mr. Koyasu had called me, summoning me to the library. And how we’d sat in front of the warm stove in the subterranean room in the rear of the library, and as we sipped hot, fragrant tea (which Mr. Koyasu had boiled and made himself ) he disclosed to me that he was, in his words, already a dead person.
Mrs. Soeda remained silent. Behind the lenses of her glasses, her eyes remained steady on my face, as if trying to read something behind my words—if indeed there was anything to read.
“I believe Mr. Koyasu is personally fond of you,” she said quietly when my story was done. “I think there’s something about you, or about something you’re carrying around in your heart, that he’s concerned about.”
Something I’m carrying around in my heart, I repeated to myself.
“As far as you know,” I said, “until I started work here you were the only one who could see Mr. Koyasu after he died. That’s what you mean?”
“Yes, I am probably the only one here who could see him. When Mr. Koyasu appeared in the library, I was the only one he talked to. Just like when he was alive. It wouldn’t do for the other staff members to see me talking with an invisible person, so we only spoke when the two of us could be alone. Though what we mostly talked about was office-related matters about library operations.”
She pursed her lips, gathering her feelings, mulling over something. And then said, “I think Mr. Koyasu was still concerned over the operation of the library. The library is still officially a town-managed library, but actually it is his personal property. And almost everything to do with the library was managed by him alone. After he died suddenly last autumn I stood in as a temporary substitute until a new head librarian was decided. Needless to say, this was too much for me to handle alone. I’m just a librarian, and there is much about the overall operations of the library, let alone its daily operations, that I don’t know about, and cannot make suitable decisions regarding. I think Mr. Koyasu was unable to bear seeing that, so he started to return here after he passed away, in order to lend me a hand.”
“So after he died, you ran the library while receiving advice from Mr. Koyasu’s—ghost?”
Mrs. Soeda nodded.
“And after a period without a head librarian, I was hired. Correct?”
Mrs. Soeda nodded once. “Correct. In the summer when Mr. Koyasu interviewed you himself in this room, I was, quite honestly, surprised. No—less surprised than taken aback, a bit bewildered. Since he appeared so clearly to you, and on your very first meeting. Mr. Koyasu had been very careful, not appearing to anyone other than myself. I was puzzled and didn’t know what was going on. But when I saw that—though I didn’t really understand the reason for it—I guessed that there was something in you that Mr. Koyasu felt he could trust…something that made him think it was alright to appear to you.”
I said nothing and just listened. Mrs. Soeda continued.
“And you and Mr. Koyasu had a long, friendly talk here, which resulted in your appointment as the new head librarian, and the library continued to operate as smoothly as before. I felt a great burden lifted from me, which was a huge relief. It seemed like you and Mr. Koyasu built a good relationship, away from anyone else’s eyes, and nothing could have made me happier.
“Yet I couldn’t tell you myself that Mr. Koyasu had already died. It seemed a little—impertinent of me. I felt if he wanted to tell you that—that he was not a living person—he would do it himself. Not telling you meant it wasn’t yet time. So I stayed silent, watching developments, and have kept this critical fact to myself over these past several months. Should I have told you? The fact that Mr. Koyasu isn’t an actual living person, that he is a—what should you say—a soul, an apparition?”
“No,” I said, “I think it’s like you said, that Mr. Koyasu wanted to reveal that to me himself. He was waiting for the right time. So it wasn’t wrong for you to keep it to yourself.”
We stayed silent for a time. I looked out the window and checked that it was still raining. It hadn’t yet changed to snow. Soundless rain, soaking the ground, the garden stones, the trunks of the trees, and adding to the flow of the river.
“What sort of person was Mr. Koyasu?” I asked Mrs. Soeda. “I heard he was born in this town, but what was his background, what kind of life did he have when he was young, and what led him to create this privately owned library? I know next to nothing about him as a person. I have tried asking him many times, but he always sidesteps the questions, like he doesn’t want to talk about himself. After a while I gave up on asking personal questions.”
Mrs. Soeda kept her legs neatly together, her hands folded on her lap. Her ten slim fingers were delicately intertwined like a ball of yarn.
“Truthfully, I don’t know all that much personal information about Mr. Koyasu either. I’ve worked in this library nearly ten years or so yet have almost never spoken with him about anything personal. Strangely enough, I’ve grown more familiar with him after he passed away. When he was alive there was a certain, I don’t know—aloofness about him, a sense that his feelings were elsewhere. Not cold or arrogant or anything—I’m not saying that. He was always kind and nice to us, but it seemed like he was not quite interested enough in the reality around him, and kept a certain distance between himself and others.
“But after he passed away, after he became a soul, in other words, he’d look me straight in the eye and talk with me quite sincerely. His personality became livelier, with a kindness he hadn’t had up until then. It’s a strange—he became livelier in a human sense after he died, but it was like something important he’d kept hidden inside finally appeared once he was dead.”
“Like a hard shell that covered his heart when he was alive had been taken away.”
“Yes. Indeed it felt that way,” Mrs. Soeda said. “Like when the snow melts in spring and things underneath it are gradually revealed. Until I got married, I lived in Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, and knew nothing at all about this area. My husband is from this prefecture, Fukushima, but he grew up in Koriyama City and has no connections with this area. He just happened to get a job here as a teacher, so we moved here. So most of what I know about Mr. Koyasu is secondhand knowledge. People around me have told me things, bit by bit. Some of it is just rumors, and with some of it it’s hard to decide what really happened. But if you’re okay with that, I can tell you what I do know about Mr. Koyasu.”
According to Mrs. Soeda, Mr. Koyasu was the oldest son of one of the wealthier families in the area. He had a sister who was much younger, and for generations their family ran a thriving sake brewery. He graduated from a local high school and went to a private college in Tokyo. He majored in economics but wasn’t enthusiastic about his studies and had to repeat a few years. He really wanted to major in literature, but his father, grooming him to take over the family business, was dead set against it, which is why, reluctantly, he studied management. At college he ignored his studies and instead, with friends, started a little magazine that completely absorbed him, and wrote some short stories, one of which ended up published in a major literary magazine. Yet he never was able to find success as a full-time novelist, and for several years he gadded about Tokyo posing as one of the literati, and his father, who’d run out of patience with him, gave him an ultimatum—meaning he cut off his monthly allowance—and all he could do was return to this little country town.
He worked under his father as the heir apparent to the family brewery, training as the future owner, but they didn’t get along. His father was totally devoted to work, and naturally Mr. Koyasu was less than enthusiastic about the sake business operations. Life in this town was, for him, far from fulfilling. His few pleasures were reading and writing in his free time.
Since he was the only son of a well-to-do family, he had many marriage prospects, but he didn’t want to settle down, and instead he remained a bachelor for a long time. In his hometown, he was reserved and polite—there was public opinion to consider, and his father’s watchful eyes—but rumor had it that he made the occasional trip to Tokyo to cut loose and relax.
When he was thirty-two, his father, who loved to drink, suffered a stroke and was left bedridden, and Mr. Koyasu effectively took over management of the company. In actuality, the devoted longtime head clerk and other employees took over day-to-day operations, and he could get by sitting in a back room, giving instructions as needed, quickly scanning the business’s account books, and as long as he kept up social relationships by showing up at business meetings and dining together with influential people in town, that was sufficient. His days were boring and unstimulating, but his nitpicking father could barely speak anymore, and the business continued to do well—even though he didn’t devote himself to it. So life was comfortable.
As always, when he had free time he read books, and wrote fiction, yet after he turned thirty, his desire to create, which had once burned like a red-hot flame within him, gradually diminished. Like a traveler who discovers, without realizing it, that he’s crossed a great, meaningful divide. There were fewer and fewer days when he sat at his desk, his pen filling in manuscript pages.
A novel…what should I write about? He no longer had confidence. In the past he’d had no time to worry over those kinds of questions, as sentences welled up inside him like water gushing out of a crevice between rocks. While he stagnated here in this country town, critical events were happening in Tokyo, leaving him far behind. Over time his exchanges with his former literary friends in Tokyo faded and he became estranged from them.
Out of duty he listlessly plowed through these anxious, frustrating days—he’d turned thirty-five by then—when, by chance, he happened to meet a beautiful woman ten years younger than himself, and immediately he fell in love with her. His heart was full in a way he’d never experienced before. And that sudden rush of emotions was almost immeasurably deep and powerful, confounding him, shaking him to the core. It felt as if all the values he’d had up until then were nothing but an empty box. What have I been living for until now? he asked himself. He was so anxious he wondered if Earth had begun rotating in the opposite direction.
The woman came from Tokyo—she was the niece of a local acquaintance. She was born within the Yamanote Line, the circular rail line around central Tokyo, and grew up there. She graduated from a mission college, where she studied French literature and became fluent in French, then worked as a secretary in either the Tunisian or Algerian embassy. Intelligent and quick-witted, she was knowledgeable about literature and art. She could talk forever about those subjects, never losing interest. Whenever he talked with her, he felt his long-dormant intellectual curiosity revive. He regained a passion for life and couldn’t have been more overjoyed.
He was introduced to her when she visited the town during her summer vacation. They saw each other several times that summer and grew close. Later, he found opportunities to travel to Tokyo to go on dates with her. (By the way, at the time he didn’t wear skirts and was dressed neatly in normal clothes.)
After they had been going out for a few months, he mustered the courage to propose, but she didn’t accept right away. “I’m sorry, I’d like a little time to think about it,” she told him. And for several weeks, she was hesitant.
She loved him very much and considered him a trustworthy person. She enjoyed being with him and had no objection to the idea of marrying him (fortunately for Mr. Koyasu, a short time before this she’d broken up with another man). But she was clearly reluctant to give up a career that made use of her language skills, as well as the easy lifestyle of a single woman in the city, so that she could become the wife of a sake manufacturer and settle down in a small town in the mountains of Fukushima as the daughter-in-law in an old, established family.
Finally, after much discussion, they came to a mutual agreement that after they married, she would continue in her present job and come to the town on weekends and holidays, or Mr. Koyasu would visit her in Tokyo when he could find the time. This wasn’t a satisfactory setup as far as Mr. Koyasu was concerned, and he tried his best to persuade her otherwise, but her resolve was firm and the last thing he wanted was to give her up, so in the end he had to accept these conditions. They held a simple, token wedding ceremony in his family home. Only a few close relatives and friends were invited, there was no reception, and most people in town were not even aware that he had gotten married.
Mr. Koyasu wanted to give up managing the brewery, cut his ties with this small old-fashioned town, and live a carefree married life with her in Tokyo (how happy he would have been if he could have), but he couldn’t just selfishly leave and abandon his longtime employees, his bedridden father, and the family that depended on him. Whether he liked it or not, he had responsibilities to fulfill. Circumstances had forced these on him, but since he had taken them on, he couldn’t very well abdicate them.
Also, as a practical matter, if he waltzed off to Tokyo at his age, with no job, no career, and not enough talent to make a living as a writer (he no longer was confident he had such talent), what was he going to do there?
Which is why Mr. Koyasu had to accept her proposal of a commuter marriage. Can’t be helped, he thought. Most of life is made up of compromises, anyway, isn’t it? After this, they continued this inconvenient, hectic married life for nearly five years.
On Friday nights, or Saturday mornings, she’d take a series of trains to the town and return to Tokyo on Sunday evening. Or he would go to Tokyo for the weekend. During summer and winter vacation, the two of them could spend more days in a row together. If his thoroughly conservative father had been well, he no doubt would have had a litany of complaints about their style of married life, but (thankfully, one might say) he could hardly talk at all. Mr. Koyasu’s mother had always been a docile, quiet person whose operating principle was to never make a scene, and his younger sister, about the same age as his wife, found they got along well and had much to talk about, and they formed a close bond. So no one around him criticized his lifestyle, and their atypical, hurried married life proceeded, steady and smooth, for nearly five years.
And actually Mr. Koyasu enjoyed, in his own way, this married lifestyle that the world saw as quite unusual. Even if they could only see each other one or two days a week, being with her was by far the happiest part of his life, so that the time they could spend together was filled with a joy nothing else could equal. Perhaps given that the time he could spend with her was so limited, he experienced with her a joy that was something deeper, more all-embracing. On the days he couldn’t see her, his time was filled with a rich, colorful sense of anticipation as he dreamed about the coming weekend.
When he went to Tokyo, sometimes he took the train and other times he drove. He wasn’t much of a driver, but when he thought of seeing his wife, soon he didn’t find driving all that bothersome or traveling all that way by himself tiring. His heart pounded as he thought, mile by mile, that he was drawing closer to the city where she lived. As if he were young again. Though he’d never experienced, even in his youth, such deep, unconditional love.
Those atypical yet fulfilling days came to an end soon after he had turned forty. His wife found out she was pregnant. Neither of them had planned on having a child, and had used contraceptives, but one day, out of the blue, it was clear she was pregnant. They met to discuss how to deal with this unexpected situation, and had long, sober phone conversations. An abortion was the one thing she said she’d like to avoid, and they decided to respect this wish. Neither of them had much interest in having a child ( just being together, the two of them, was more than fulfilling), but since a tiny new life would be born, they wanted to treasure this development. She ended up quitting her job at the North African embassy and moved to the small town in Fukushima Prefecture where he lived. And awaited the birth of their child.
She was comfortable quitting her job at the embassy since the ambassador, who’d been very kind to her, had been replaced when a new administration had come to power, and she didn’t get along that well with the newly appointed ambassador. Her passion for her work had faded considerably since then. Another factor was that the weekly trips back and forth between Tokyo and Fukushima were starting to wear on her. And being pregnant would make traveling back and forth take even more of a toll.
She also felt she wanted to live as a married couple under the same roof. Her relationship with his relatives was friendly, and although it was a small, conservative town, she felt she’d be able to live a peaceful life there. If, by chance, any troubles arose, she was confident that her husband would protect her. She had come to trust Mr. Koyasu that much. Her feelings toward him were less a passionate love than a kind of overall respect for him as a person. What she sought from a life partner was not a burning passion but a stable, calm relationship.
Mr. Koyasu’s family and relatives welcomed her move to the town with open arms. He prepared a newly built, cozy house not far from his parents’ home, and they began living there. At long last he felt they were a normal married couple, which made him relieved. Their commuter marriage had been exciting, for sure, yet he’d been constantly plagued with the fear that eventually she would leave him. He’d never felt confident in his appeal as a man.
As he watched his wife’s belly grow, as he gently stroked it, he imagined the child that they were going to have. What kind of child, he wondered, would be born into this world? And what sort of person would that child grow into? What sort of ego would the child have, and what kind of dreams?
Mr. Koyasu couldn’t grasp what his own existence meant, but he no longer cared.
He’d inherited a set of information from his parents, which he’d modified slightly, and then would pass it on to his own child—he was, in effect, nothing more than a checkpoint along the way. Just a single ring in an endless chain. But what was wrong with that? Even if he ended up doing nothing meaningful in his life, nothing worth mentioning, so what? He would be able to hand over to his child a kind of possibility, even if it was nothing more than a possibility. Wouldn’t that alone make his life until now feel meaningful?
This was an entirely new viewpoint for him, something he’d never considered before. But thinking that way brought him a great sense of relief. Any confusion and melancholy vanished, and for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt at peace. He shelved all of his ambitions, his hopes and dreams, and replaced them with his settled days as the fourth-generation owner of a sake brewery in a rural town. There was hardly anything stimulating, any new changes, around him, yet none of that left him particularly dissatisfied. And with it, the random, frustrated sense he’d had that he was gradually being left behind by all the developments in the wider world disappeared. His life now had a reliable foundation, a little home where his beloved wife and the little baby growing stronger within her were waiting for him.
If he were to put it in a few words, it was as if he had stepped into the midportion of his life and found it to be a flat plateau where the view was magnificent.
Coming up with a name for their child became an obsession. The passion he’d once had to write a novel had now faded. Coming up with his child’s name was now the most important, meaningful creative activity. His wife was happy to leave this up to him. Our division of labor, she said, is me having a healthy baby and you giving the baby a wonderful name. Thinking up a good name for a baby was not in her skill set.
Mr. Koyasu pored through all kinds of materials, racking his brain, and after going back and forth he came to a firm conclusion.
If the baby was a boy, he’d name him Shin, the character for “forest.” If the baby was a girl, then the name would be Rin, meaning “woods.” Perfect names, he felt, for a child born in a small mountain town full of nature.
子易森 Shin Koyasu
子易林 Rin Koyasu
With brush and ink he wrote, in large characters on white paper, the two names, and taped them to his wall. And day and night, as he saw these names, he imagined what the baby to come would look like.
What wonderful names, his wife said, giving her consent. I like the characters visually, too. Wouldn’t it be great to have twins, a boy and a girl? But from the size of my belly I don’t think that’s about to happen. So which do you want? A boy, or a girl?
Either one is fine by me, Mr. Koyasu said. Either a boy or a girl is fine, as long as they’re healthy and their name suits them like a well-fitting garment.
This was Mr. Koyasu’s honest answer. Either one is fine—a boy or a girl. As long as that child carried on the possibilities he’d passed along, as possibilities.