Near dusk, my uncle suddenly started to get agitated. “Where’s Roy?” he shouted, his ridiculously loud voice reverberating in our tiny shop. “I haven’t been able to find him since I got back from my delivery!”
My quiet moment reading a book while I worked at the register was now ruined. “How should I know where he is?” I said sullenly.
As far as my uncle was concerned, it didn’t matter if someone was trying to read, he had no problem striking up a conversation with them. The idea of leaving them alone never even entered into consideration.
It was always fun spending time at the bookshop, only it was a shame that my uncle had to ruin it by being noisy like this. Back when I lived here, my uncle would go to the hospital to undergo treatment for his lower back, so we didn’t actually overlap much at the shop. But now we were almost always here together. Which meant that I had to interact with him constantly. It might seem harsh to think of my uncle as being in the way in his own shop, but he’s the kind of person who gets riled up by the tiniest things, so these annoying outbursts happened at least once a day.
“Roy was here the whole day until I went out!” My uncle was walking around the shop making a commotion, then he chased me away from the chair behind the counter where I’d been sitting and started desperately looking around.
“I told you I didn’t know. You must’ve left him somewhere.”
“Roy is as precious to me as my own life right now. I would never do such a thing.” My uncle was still rattling on, when he suddenly shouted and bolted up to the second floor.
“That Momoko!”
After a moment, my uncle came stamping down the stairs, clutching a brown-colored cushion to his chest. I can’t think of any other adult I know who would make such a fuss over a single cushion like that.
Recently my uncle hadn’t just been suffering from back pain, he’d also developed a case of hemorrhoids, which, according to him, made the long hours sitting in a chair “absolute torture.”
Still, running a used bookshop means you spend the better part of the day sitting in a chair waiting for customers. It was going to be impossible for him to do his job in this condition. What saved him from his predicament was this: a cushion with a hole in the center, otherwise known as a donut pillow. The cushion was so good at easing the pain that my uncle had absolute faith in it. He said he couldn’t just call it a cushion. That would be heartless. And because it was for his hemorrhoids, he started calling it Roy. He wasn’t doing it to be funny. No, he was totally, absolutely, 100 percent serious.
“Ooh boy.” My uncle placed Roy on his chair and then lowered himself onto it with the care you’d expect from a bomb squad in an action movie. Which didn’t stop him from grumbling and cursing Momoko’s name. Apparently, while my uncle was out making deliveries, Momoko had left Roy drying on the veranda just before she went to the little restaurant to help out. Which was why my uncle was now furious with her.
“Well, it’s good you found it, isn’t it?” I felt obliged to ask. My uncle was catching his breath after his brush with danger.
“It’s tough getting older. All these little ailments pop up.”
“Stop talking like an old man.”
“I am an old man,” my uncle said with a hangdog look on his face.
“Uncle, you’re still in your forties,” I said, exasperated. I wanted him to stay healthy forever and not let the whole hemorrhoids thing drag him down. “You’re still young. You’ve got time. Old people are older than you.”
“These hemorrhoids are hopeless.” The only people who can understand the pain of hemorrhoids are the people who have them. My uncle spoke these words like he was reciting a maxim. I’m sure it must’ve been terrible. Any type of hemorrhoids come with a considerable amount of pain. But it was impossible to take what my uncle was saying as anything other than a joke. “That reminds me. Should I get one ready for you?”
“I’m fine, thanks. I don’t have hemorrhoids at the moment,” I replied brusquely. I was getting a little tired of him, and I decided not to pay him any more attention. Why would he be getting one ready for me? I had absolutely no idea what he was thinking. Did he plan on naming it Roy Jr.? This wasn’t my uncle’s only weird fixation or obsession. He had many, many others too. Every single one of them was annoying. For example, after his midforties, he started insisting that whenever they ate curry at home, it could only be the Vermont Curry brand, and only the “mild” flavor. When Momoko inadvertently bought the “medium hot” version, he spent the whole day pouting sullenly. According to Momoko, he became so irritating she wanted to give him a giant kick in the butt. I knew exactly how she felt.
Anyway, we’d found Roy, so I assumed my uncle would quiet down a little. I let out a sigh and tried to go back to the world of my book.
However, just as the thought crossed my mind, I saw an innocent smile appear on my uncle’s face, and he sidled right up next to me with his chair. As incorrigible as ever, he couldn’t resist poking his nose in again to interrupt me.
“So, Takako.”
I said nothing.
“Whatcha reading?”
“What? Come on. Does it matter?” But whether I tried to ignore him or get angry, it had absolutely no effect on him.
“Hey, is that Sakunosuke Oda?”
He’d snuck a look at the copy of Sweet Beans for Two! in my hand, nodded, and gave me a knowing look.
“You like the book?”
“I do. It’s actually my second time reading it. There. Are you satisfied now? I’m reading, please don’t interrupt.”
But naturally, my uncle made no attempt to listen.
“Now there’s another writer with a tragic fate.”
My uncle’s eyes narrowed like he was staring off into the distance as he went on in this earnest tone. “Ah, Takako, you like Sakunosuke Oda too . . . But I’m sure you don’t know anything about his life yet. That’s such a shame.”
At this point, it was already too late. I could tell how eager he was to tell me. I knew there was no way he’d let me go until I’d listened to the whole story. My uncle knew an extraordinary amount about Sakunosuke Oda—his whole life, not just his books. When he liked a writer, he loved nothing more than to read their autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, collected letters, etc. It had nothing to do with the business of running a used bookshop. He did it purely to satisfy his own interest. One thing he loved about books was that they could tell him what kind of lives the writers led, how they lived, how they loved, and how they left this world.
To me, there was something wonderful about that. However, my uncle really loved to make people listen to him recount all this as if it were something he’d witnessed firsthand. That’s how I ended up hearing about the lives of a lot of writers, people like Osamu Dazai, Takehiko Fukunaga, Haruo Satō. Of course, the lives of writers whose names now belong to history can be fascinating. But the time has to be right. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to listen to all that. But my uncle doesn’t care whether or not the time is right; once the switch has been flipped, he gets a glimmer in his eyes back behind his glasses, and he talks and talks until he’s had enough.
I gave up and closed the book with a dramatic sigh (which had no impact on him at all). I’d lost my time to read. What can you do? In this case, I could only listen to what he wanted to tell me.
“Sakunosuke had a tragic fate?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“You get a sense of that somehow from his style.”
“A lot of his work is based on his experiences.” He nodded deeply, perfectly satisfied now that I was showing interest in what he was saying. Then my uncle began to recount the events of Sakunosuke Oda’s life with great enthusiasm.
According to my uncle, Sakunosuke’s life had been a series of hardships. He suffered from tuberculosis when he was a student, and his misfortunes piled up until he had to leave college. He fell passionately in love with a woman named Kazue, who worked at a café, and he set his sights on becoming a novelist, but his work failed to find recognition, and for a long time they lived a life of poverty, with all its daily hardships. But their suffering was not in vain; his books Vulgarity and Sweet Beans for Two! finally won him the recognition he’d long sought. His writing career was on a roll, but a few years later, his beloved wife, Kazue, fell ill and passed away.
He had enough turmoil in his life to be the main character in a TV show.
Having lost Kazue, Sakunosuke would often collapse in tears, regardless of what others might think. Kazue was the first person Sakunosuke had loved deeply, and the one who had loved him in return. Without her love to support him, Sakunosuke’s life fell apart. His tuberculosis grew more and more serious. He must have sensed that death was near. Because when Kazue was on her deathbed, he’d cried as he told her he would follow in a few years. In the time he had left, he searched for solace in alcohol and coffee, as well as in the arms of other women. He coughed up blood as he wrote his novels.
My uncle told the story without a pause, as if he’d actually memorized the whole speech.
You could say he had a talent for it. As I listened, I was now completely entranced by the story, hanging on my uncle’s every word.
“In his later years, Sakunosuke was so exhausted both physically and spiritually that he started taking methamphetamines to help him go on writing novels. His illness was so advanced that without them, he couldn’t even hold a pen. His body had given out.”
“And methamphetamines are a kind of stimulant, right?”
“It’s hard to imagine now, but at the time it was easy to buy them at the drugstore. He’d inject them and work on his novel for days without sleeping.”
“Yikes.” That truly is hard to imagine now. Such a heartbreaking story, I thought, no matter how much times have changed.
“And he’s not the only one. There were a lot of writers who regularly used methamphetamines. It was fairly well known, for example, that Ango Sakaguchi was a meth head.”
“A meth head?” The words somehow sounded kind of cute, but it actually meant—
“Someone addicted to methamphetamines.”
I heard myself say “Yikes” again.
“It’s a terrible story,” he said, shaking his head woefully. “But Kazue always remained in his heart. One of his masterpieces is the story of a man, driven to despair by the death of his wife, who ends up taking money from his company and betting like a madman on whatever horse is in the number one gate at the racetrack. The sole reason he’s doing this is because his dead wife’s name, Kazue, is written with the character for ‘one.’ We can’t know for certain what Sakunosuke was thinking when he wrote the story, but there’s no doubt it’s connected to his intense feelings for Kazue, whose name, after all, begins with the same character.”
“Yeah . . . it seems undeniable.”
I have a weakness for stories like this. Just imagining what happened left me feeling somber.
“Even when he was dependent on drugs, even when he was coughing up blood, he went on writing novels. And when he had a massive lung hemorrhage and was taken to the hospital, he went on a rampage, demanding to be released because he needed to write. But later on, he ended up collapsing at the inn where he was living, and this time he didn’t recover. He died in 1947 at the young age of thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three? If he’d been healthy, he could’ve written so many more books,” I said, overcome by a sense of loss. “I wonder what he would have written if he’d lived longer.”
“But you could also say that he was able to write the novels he did precisely because he lived such a short time, and because death was always on his mind, as he burned through what remained of his life. He had that monstrous tenacity. When you think about it, there are lots of writers who had short lives. I suspect that they were able to write such amazing books because their lives were so short. Sakunosuke Oda didn’t write many books, but he left behind some wonderful short stories. Whether that was for better or worse, we can’t say. The only way to find out is to ask Sakunosuke in heaven.” My uncle looked deeply moved as he spoke these words, with his butt resting on the donut-shaped cushion.
“Is that right?” I mumbled. I glanced at the spines of the books lined up on the shelf. “If you think about it, most of the authors of the books here are no longer alive. It’s a little bit strange, don’t you think? Their books are still with us, and we read them to this day, and feel moved by them.” It was true. So many of the people whose names lined the shelves here had long ago left our world behind. When I thought about it, I started to feel close to tears again.
“You’re right. The way they shaped their feelings made them last. It’s amazing, isn’t it? And it’s not just writers. All artists are incredible. We can learn so much from the work passed down to us from our ancestors.”
I nodded enthusiastically in agreement. “It really is true.”
At some point, I realized the sun had set. Outside the windows, the world was shrouded in blue shadows. It was nearly time to close the shop. Somehow or other, my uncle had won me over, and I was drawn into his story.
But it wasn’t so bad after all, I said to myself, as I thought about the life of Sakunosuke Oda.
I think that my uncle tried to study these authors’ lives in such depth because he was trying to learn something from them, and lurking behind that desire was the hope that he might find a clue to help him understand his own life.
From what I’ve heard, when my uncle was young, he went through a profound existential crisis. He agonized over it.
So, in his twenties, he worked in Japan to save up money to travel, then put on his backpack and went wandering all over the world for months at a time, solo. When the money ran out, he came back to Japan and started over again. I guess you could say he was one of those guys who are searching for themselves. It might sound embarrassing to put it that way, but for someone like me, who can’t be bothered to do anything, the way my uncle was able to follow through on this plan without getting intimidated seems pretty cool.
When I visited his house in Kunitachi, he showed me a picture of himself from those days. It looks like it was taken when he had just started traveling. In the photo, he’s still a young man in his twenties. Since that was right after I was born, I’d never seen what he looked like at that age.
In the picture, he’s standing in a crowd in Nepal or India (my uncle couldn’t remember), his face is stubbly, his cheeks are sunken in, and his skin tanned by the sun to a dark brown. He stares into the camera, the pupils of his eyes glinting darkly in the light.
When I saw the picture, I ended up shouting, “Wow. You look like a totally different person.” I really wasn’t exaggerating. He had such a different air about him, compared to the way my uncle is now.
“I was young then. That’s almost thirty years ago.”
“It’s not just that. I don’t know, there’s something kind of amazing about you in that picture,” I said, still staring intently at the photograph. That young version of my uncle seemed to be staring back at me. To think that that young man today made such a huge fuss because he couldn’t find his cushion. Life is strange.
“Well, at the time, I was really troubled. When I wasn’t traveling, I spent all my time reading.” My uncle scratched the back of his head through his scruffy hair, chuckling to himself, like he was ready to laugh off the concerns of his former self.
“Every time I look at that picture, it makes me laugh,” Momoko said with a little cackle when she rejoined us.
Somehow that was the only picture he took during the many years he spent traveling.
“I only took it because it was my first trip, and I got caught up in the moment. From then on, I didn’t bring a camera when I was traveling,” my uncle said dryly.
“Really? What a shame.”
“Nah, what’s the use of leaving a bunch of pictures behind?”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Is this around when you met Momoko in Paris?”
“I met your uncle later on, I think,” Momoko said. “At that point, he didn’t look so terrible. There was more gentleness in his eyes. If he’d looked like this, I wouldn’t have let him near me.”
“I know it’s me, but I look terrible.”
“This guy looks like he’s going to kill someone.” After they said this to each other, they both doubled over laughing. Momoko pinched his cheek, and my uncle let her, as they roared with laughter. (Momoko has a baffling tendency to pinch the cheeks of people she’s close to.) They’re such a weird couple.
“But back in those days, my father and I didn’t see eye to eye. We were constantly arguing. I have to admit though, that I gave him nothing but trouble in those days. It’s true.”
“You and your father have totally different personalities.”
“Definitely. Totally different.”
My grandfather was a stern man. He hardly said a word and never uttered a joke; his brow was always deeply furrowed. To him, being stern was a virtue. He even thought of it as a point of principle. According to what my mother told me, his wife died soon after his first marriage. He was already nearly fifty when he married my grandmother. Normally, you might think that since he was older, he would spoil his children, but my grandfather was not that kind of man. My mother and my uncle had quite a strict upbringing. My grandfather stuck to his principles when it came to running the bookshop too. He was absolutely uncompromising in his approach to the business. They said he even used to chase away customers who had only come to browse. It was the complete opposite of my uncle’s approach.
“But you ended up being the one who took over from Grandpa.”
“Strange, isn’t it? I hope he’s not rolling over in his grave,” my uncle joked.
“I’m sure he’s out of his mind with rage. He’s thinking, that kid doesn’t know the first thing about running a used bookshop. He’s making so much noise he’s driving everyone around him crazy,” Momoko said, and the two of them laughed their heads off.
There was no need to worry though. My uncle’s personality might be the exact opposite of my grandfather’s, but when it came to the important stuff, they were the same. That was for certain.
I gazed again at the photograph of my uncle on the desk. The person in that photo was a complete stranger to me. That glint in his eyes could’ve been anger, or doubt, or some vague sadness.
I gave a silent message to the younger version of my uncle in the picture:
It’s okay. You’re going to meet nice people. You won’t have to be so sad anymore. Even if you suffer from back pain and hemorrhoids, you’ll be beloved as the owner of a bookshop. So you don’t have to worry anymore.