Outside, the nighttime theater district lay virtually deserted. The man stood waiting for me to emerge from the building.
“I can’t stand this guy,” he said, poking at the playbill on a board propped up next to the entrance. Just then, the voice of that raconteur started crackling from the speaker.
“I don’t like him much, either,” I said.
“Course not.” The man started walking. “He ain’t cut out to be a closer, that’s for sure.”
We were headed in the direction of International Boulevard.
“Wanna stop by?”
“Excuse me?”
“You wanna come by the ol’ place?”
The man shifted his hips as he hiked up his pants.
“Are you sure it’s all right?”
“Of course it’s all right. What’re you talking about?”
I gauged him to be at least ten years my junior, but he was dispensing with all formalities as if he were talking to a much younger man.
“The trouble with Asakusa nowadays is how the whole place closes down so early. Can’t find anythin’ going on anymore after ten.”
We came out onto International Boulevard and stood waiting for the light to change. The street was still a major thoroughfare, but it did not seem as wide as I remembered it. Traffic was light.
“D’ya come often?”
“Excuse me?”
“To Asakusa, I mean.”
“Now and then.”
“Yeah?”
He marched briskly across the pedestrian stripes. I followed. People like this usually rubbed me the wrong way, but I couldn’t bring myself to part company with him. He fumbled for something in his pocket as he crossed the street.
“I’m gonna fetch me a pack o’ smokes,” he turned to say. “We’ll be going that-a-way. Just wait here, all right?”
Instructing me to hang tight by the crosswalk, he jogged somewhat bowleggedly up the sidewalk in the direction of the International Theater—where it had once been. A cigarette vending machine stood facing the sidewalk, and I watched as he started inserting coins. The man wore a white Henley-necked shirt hanging loose at the waist over a pair of white cotton pants. His short-cropped hair gave him a sharp, clean-cut image. I had been feeling a measure of relief over this fact—I suppose because I didn’t want a man who so resembled my father to look seedy.
He started back toward me.
“So whadda ya think?”
“Excuse me?”
“The hotel. It’s huge, don’t you think?”
“Ahh, yes,” I agreed, though from where we stood, the row of nearby buildings blocked my view, and I could not actually see the hotel that I knew had replaced the International Theater.
Apparently unconcerned with such minor details, the man set off again in the opposite direction. I fell in a half-step behind.
I found myself walking easily through a section of town I had not set foot in since the age of twelve. Now that I was here, it seemed like any other time-worn neighborhood in what had once been Tokyo’s bustling merchant quarters.
By all indications, we were on our way to this man’s home, and it seemed odd even to me that I was following along without the slightest hesitation. It would have been understandable if I had been in an advanced state of inebriation, of course, but I was not. What could have possessed me, I wondered, to let this stranger I had scarcely met take me to his home?
The answer was simple, of course: he bore an astonishing likeness to my dead father. This likeness had undone my usual sense of caution and rendered me helpless to resist.
Then again, why had this man gotten the notion to take me to his home in the first place? I was obviously much older than he was, so I couldn’t very well remind him of his dead son.
“Beer okay?”
“Pardon me?”
He seemed so like my father that I instinctively answered politely—even though I was actually the elder.
“It’s hot, so I thought maybe a nice cold beer would hit the spot,” he said, stopping to count the change in his hand. We were standing at another vending machine—this one offering canned beer.
“I only get to keep one bottle in the fridge. ’Cause if I have it, I drink it, you know.”
“Let me buy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Chunk-a-lunk-lunk. A 500 milliliter can dropped inside the vending machine and appeared below.
“It’s icy cold. Hold it with a handkerchief or something,” he said, handing the can to me.
“All right.”
I saw that he intended to buy another.
“Do you think we’ll want that much?”
“What’re you talking about? It’s a coupla measly cans.”
Chunk-a-lunk-lunk. Another 500 milliliter can appeared.
“You got it with a handkerchief?”
“Yes.”
He took the second can and started off walking again.
“You don’t need a handkerchief?” I asked.
“Nah, doesn’t bother me.”
He seemed quite pleased with himself.
Well, sheesh! It wouldn’t bother me, either, I felt like retorting, but an inexplicable feeling of glee welled up in me and stayed my tongue.
I wasn’t entirely sure what brought me such glee. But I realized I was relishing every moment I spent with this man, who carried himself with an air of complete authority. I was reveling in the illusion of tagging along after my father. I was basking in a warm sense of security I had not known for a very long while.
It doesn’t bother me, but I suggest you use a handkerchief, he says. What a card!
I restrained an impulse to slap him heartily on the back and let out a great big whoop.
“Here’s the place,” he said. “Upstairs.”
He turned into an alley and immediately started up a metal staircase ascending the side of a small, two-story apartment building. He stepped quickly but softly, taking care not to make noise. I instinctively followed suit.
An open walkway ran the length of the second floor and there were three doors. The man proceeded to the one farthest back.
“It’s me,” he said, tapping the door with his foot.
I hung back, chills once again racing through my body.
He was married! But of course he was. A while ago he’d said, “I only get to keep one bottle in the fridge”—which meant that was all that someone else, presumably his wife, would let him have. Somewhere in the back of my mind that statement had lingered.
I suddenly had this feeling that I did not want to meet the man’s wife. To meet her would be to instantly obliterate the glorious time I was having because of the man’s uncanny likeness to my father; I would have to come crashing back to reality. No, wait. That wasn’t it. Or at least that wasn’t all. A part of me was actually entertaining a secret hope, experiencing a secret terror. It couldn’t be, could it? Surely it couldn’t be.
“What’re ya standin’ way back there for. Come on in,” the man said, and disappeared into the apartment.
I remained frozen to the spot.
A woman poked her head out the door. “Do come in,” she said, flashing a cheerful smile before disappearing back inside.
I nearly went into a swoon. This couldn’t really be happening. There had to be something wrong with me. I knew I couldn’t be sleeping, for no dream could be so vividly real and true to life as this.
“Hey! What’s the big hold-up?” the man called.
“Please come in,” the woman repeated. It was my mother’s voice. The woman I’d glimpsed in the doorway was my mother.
My whole body shook. My feet would not move. Choking back tears, I managed to squeeze out only a weak “Uh.”
The man stuck his head out the door. “What’re ya waitin’ for? I told you to come on in.”
“Yup …”
“Stop being such a mouse.”
“Yup …”
I struggled to compose myself. I knew I couldn’t just turn around and leave. I wasn’t ready to break everything off here and never see the two again. Yet it took every last reserve of strength I had to quiet my agitation. Thank goodness being alone in the world for so long had given me plenty of practice at containing my emotions.
I stepped to the doorway and said, “Thank you. I’m sorry to impose at such a late hour.”
“Oh, never mind that,” my mother said. My mother had died at thirty-five. But I was gazing at the spitting image of my mother at thirty-five.
“The night is young,” my father said. “Here, sit down.”
It was a worn-out old apartment with only a small kitchenette and a single eight-tatami room, but it was clean and tidy. They keep a nice house, I noted to myself, deliberately trying to occupy my mind with concrete observations.
The refrigerator didn’t look particularly old. Their thermos jar was the modern push-top kind. And, whadda ya know, they had a calendar from “Rox,” that new building with all the specialty shops. No way these people were my mother and father.
“Hey, get a load o’ this,” the man said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a controller,” he said. “This silly woman is crazy about radio-controlled cars.”
Three pretty good-sized model racing cars sat side by side on a sheet of newspaper in the corner of the room.
“She is?” I could not actually look at the woman.
“Can you believe it? At her age? Give her a free moment and she’s playing with her model cars. She’s already gone through four or five others besides the ones you see there now.”
The woman laughed. I forced myself to look at her and saw my diminutive, fair-skinned, slightly thick-lipped mother laughing exactly the way I remembered her laughing.
But the woman played with radio-controlled cars. She couldn’t possibly be my mother.