Outsiders

Why was it? I wonder.

As the ferry approached the harbor I would always start to feel a little bit like an outsider, even when I was small.

Back when I was still living in the town, and I’d just taken the ferry out on some little trip and was riding it back—even then I used to have this feeling. For some reason I always felt as if I had actually come from somewhere else, and that one day I was bound to leave this harbor behind.

I guess when you’re out on the ocean and you see the piers way off in the distance, shrouded in mist, you understand this very clearly: No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider.

It was already late in the afternoon.

The waves sparkled so brightly in the glow of the setting sun that the glare was almost blinding, and across that water and beyond the orange sky it was just possible to make out the wharf, tiny and uncertain as a mirage. Now the music that played whenever the boat arrived at a stop started blaring out over the ancient speakers, and the captain called out the name of my old town—the town where I had grown up. Outside it was probably still hot, but here in the cabin the air-conditioning was on way too high, and it felt cold.

Earlier I had been so hyper I could hardly sit still, but once I changed from the bullet train to the high-speed ferry the see-sawing of the waves had lulled me into an unintended nap, and when I woke up the excitement had faded. Still dull with sleep, I sat up a little and gazed out through the saltwater spray that covered the windows at the distant line of the shore. The familiar, well-loved beach zoomed closer and closer, like a movie sped up.

The whistle blew and then the boat swung into a wide curve and cut around the tip of the concrete wharf. As the harbor neared I caught sight of Tsugumi leaning up against the billboard there, just under the word WELCOME, her arms crossed. She was wearing a white dress.

The boat kept gliding slowly forward, then bumped to a halt. Members of the crew tossed out the ropes and set out the gang-way. Passenger after passenger stepped down out of the cabin into the pale twilight outside. I stood up and gathered my luggage, then went to join the line of people waiting to disembark.

One step out of the cabin and the heat was stifling. Tsugumi marched straight over to where I was standing, and without so much as a “Long time no see!” or a “How’ve you been?”—and still scowling—she growled, “You’re late.”

“You haven’t changed at all, I see,” I said.

“Man, I was about to shrivel up,” she replied, still without a hint of a smile on her face. She spun around and started striding away. I didn’t say anything, but it was such a characteristically Tsugumi-esque welcome that a glad sort of hilarity too strong to contain surged up within me, and I grinned.

The Yamamoto Inn stood where it always had. It was so perfectly the same, so solidly there that I started to feel strange as soon as I saw it. Everything seemed slightly out of whack, as if I had stumbled across some house that I’d visited long ago in a dream.

But the moment Tsugumi yelled into the wide-open front door of the inn that “The ugly freeloader has arrived!” things felt real again.

Pooch started barking around back, and Aunt Masako walked out grinning from the back of the building, saying, “Tsugumi, that’s not a very nice thing to say!” Yōko came out as well, her face beaming, and greeted me with a bright “Hi, Maria, long time no see!” All at once everything came rushing back to me, and I started to feel a kind of bubbly sense of anticipation.

The numerous pairs of beach sandals lined up in the entry way showed how busy this final summer was going to be. The first whiff I got of the familiar scent of the house brought back my sense of the rhythm of life at the inn.

“Aunt Masako, is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“No, no, don’t be silly. Why don’t you just go inside and have a cup of tea with Yōko or something.” She smiled at me, then hurried off in the direction of the kitchen, into the ruckus of busy noises emerging from it.

Come to think of it, we were just moving into that period of time in the Yamamoto Inn schedule when Yōko always sat down to eat before she left for work. It was the busiest hour of the whole day, the time when my aunt and uncle hurled themselves into the labor of getting dinner to the guests. In the world of the inn, each day passed in the same flow of time.

Going inside, I found Yōko just starting to eat a few onigiri—balls of rice in seaweed. She took out the cup I’d always used and set it down on the low table, then poured some tea into it, “Here you go,” she said, pushing the cup toward me. Her eyes were bright, and her face wore a wide, delighted smile. “Do you want one of these onigiri?”

“Hey, asshole! The girl’s about to sit down to a feast. You really want her to spoil her dinner with that crap?” Tsugumi was slumped back against the wall over in a corner of the room, her legs sticking straight out. She was leafing through a magazine, and she hadn’t even looked up when she spoke.

“That’s true, isn’t it? Well, I’ll bring home some cakes tonight, then, okay? That’s something to look forward to, right?” said Yōko.

“I take it you’ve been working at that place all along?”

“Yup. Oh, but we’re selling some new kinds of cake now! I’ll bring home some of the new ones tonight so you can try them.”

“Sounds great!” I said.

The windows were open, and guests returning to the inn after a swim in the ocean sauntered by just outside the screens, their laughter echoing cheerfully back and forth. By now the dinner hour had begun at all the inns, and the whole town was alive. The sky was still light, and the sound of the evening news was streaming from the TV. The fragrance of the sea breeze swished across the tatami and whirled through the room. Out in the hall, hurried footsteps skittered up and down, and groups of guests heading back to their rooms after a soak in the inn’s spas ambled by, filling the air around them with clouds of noise. Way off in the distance you could just make out the cries of seagulls over the water, and when you tilted your head up to look out the window, a sky so wildly crimson it was almost frightening glowed between the power lines. It was an evening exactly like all the others.

Even so, I was aware that nothing lasts forever.

We heard a man’s voice asking if Maria had arrived yet and then footsteps coming down the hall toward the room, and suddenly my uncle stuck his head in under the curtain that hung in the doorway. “Hey Maria, good to see you! Make yourself at home!” He gave me a smile and went out again.

Tsugumi stood up, padded over to the refrigerator, poured some wheat tea into the Mickey Mouse glass she’d gotten way back when as a giveaway at the liquor store, and gulped the liquid down. Then she plunked the empty glass down in the well-polished sink.

“A face like that, and the guy wants to start a pension. He sure knows how to make a nuisance of himself, let me tell you,” she said.

“He’s always dreamed of it,” said Yōko casually, lowering her eyes a tad.

All this had such a solid existence now, but next summer there would be no trace of any of it. I knew this, but there was no way I could make myself feel the truth of it. No way to make it seem real. And I bet it didn’t seem real to them either.

Everyday life had never really made much of an impression on me before. I used to live here in this little fishing village. I would sleep and wake up, have meals. Sometimes I felt really great; other times I felt a little out of it. I watched TV, fell in love, went to classes at school, and at the end of every day I always came back here, to this same house. But when I let my thoughts wander back through the ordinariness of those cycles now, I find that somewhere along the way it has all acquired a touch of warmth—that I’ve been left with something silky and dry and warm, like clean sand.

Soaking up that gentle heat, a little tired from all the hustle and bustle of travel, I let myself savor an enticingly familiar sense of happiness.

Summer was coming. Yes, summer was about to begin.

A season that would come and go only once, and never return again. All of us understood that very well, and yet we would probably just pass our days the way we always had. And this made the ticking of time feel slightly more tense than in the old days, infused it with a hint of distress. We could all feel this as we sat there that evening, together. We could feel it so clearly that it made us sad, and yet at the same time we were extremely happy.

I was pulling things out of my bags after dinner when I heard Pooch start yipping excitedly. You could see the back garden if you leaned out the small window in my room. Peering down into the twilight, I saw Tsugumi untying Pooch and hooking his leash to his collar. She noticed me and looked up.

“Hey, you wanna walk with us?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, and went downstairs.

Outside, traces of light still lingered in the sky, and against that background the streetlamps seemed to shine more clearly than usual. Tsugumi kept being yanked along by Pooch, just the same as before.

“I’m tired today, so we’re only going as far as the beach,” she said.

“Do you walk like this every night?” I asked, surprised. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Tsugumi was really healthy enough to be doing.

“As if I have any choice! Hell, you’re the one who got the dumb mutt used to these walks. After you left he started making this unbelievable noise every morning, a whine like you can’t imagine, right at the time when you used to take him out. Little Tsugumi with her delicate health was constantly getting woken up by this, you realize. So what else were we supposed to do? Yōko and I pleaded with the brute until he was gracious enough to compromise and let us take him out in the evening instead of the morning. The two of us walk him together.”

“Wow, that’s wonderful!”

“It does seem that getting jerked around like this by Pooch has made me a little stronger than I used to be, so it has its good points.” Tsugumi’s small head was turned so that I saw it in profile. She was smiling.

All her life Tsugumi has had to live with problems in one part of her body or another, but she hardly ever tells you where the pain is, not even as part of a joke. She just keeps it to herself and then takes her anger out on the people around her, or says things she knows will make everyone mad and then goes off to lie alone in her bed. And the girl never gives up.

I found this attitude kind of gallant, but sometimes it got on my nerves.

Night had almost fallen, and the street was deep blue and heavy with heat, and all along the vague white blur of the beach children were out setting off fireworks. We walked to the end of the gravel path, passed by the bridge, and headed toward the shore. We walked up to the top of the embankment that stretches straight out into the sea, and set Pooch free. While he tore off in the direction of the beach, Tsugumi and I climbed up on one of the huge concrete blocks that lined the edge of the sand and sat down, leaning back into two of its corners. Then we opened the cans of cold juice we’d just bought.

The wind felt good. Here and there the final glow of twilight would shine through holes in the thin sheet of gray clouds that hovered up there, flowing off into the distance, and then the light would blink out of sight again. And all the while the darkness went on pushing its way down the sky.

Pooch kept running off until we couldn’t even see him anymore and then coming back with a worried expression on his face and barking up at Tsugumi where she sat on the breakwater, too high up for him to reach. Tsugumi would grin and stretch out her hand and pet him or else give him a whack.

“You’ve really gotten to be good pals with Pooch, haven’t you, Tsugumi?” I said. It moved me to see that their friendship had grown even warmer since the previous summer.

Tsugumi didn’t reply. As long as she kept quiet, she actually seemed like what she was—a younger cousin. But after a while she made a face like she had bitten down on a lemon, and muttered her reply.

“It’s no joke, kid. This is the pits. I feel like some sort of Don Juan who’s gotten himself all tangled up in the passions of one of his young virgins and accidentally ended up married.”

“What are you talking about? That’s supposed to be a metaphor for your friendship with Pooch?” I kind of felt like I knew what she meant, but I wanted to make her explain a little more. I figured I might as well try taking this line. And Tsugumi answered.

“You bet it is, babe! Makes me shudder to think that I’ve gotten this buddy-buddy with a dog. If you consider it objectively it’s pretty gross, you know.”

“Oh please. Is this your idea of being sheepish?” I laughed.

Tsugumi made an ironic face. “Give me a break, Maria! You really don’t understand me at all, do you? I mean, how many years have you and I been together? Try using your brain every once in a while.”

“No, no, I do understand. I was just teasing you,” I said. “But I also know that you don’t have as much of an aversion to Pooch as you pretend.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true. I do like him, I like Pooch,” said Tsugumi.

The dusk surrounding us was a mass of any number of colors piled one on top of the other, and everything around us seemed to hover in space, deeply blurred, as if we were in a dream. Every so often a wave would hit up against the awkward silhouette of one of the breakwater’s concrete blocks, and the water would dance. The first star glittered brightly in the sky, looking like a tiny white bulb.

“But you see, nasty people have a special kind of nasty-people philosophy. This business with the mutt goes against that,” Tsugumi continued. “A nasty person who gets along with dogs, for heaven’s sake! It’s too easy.”

“A nasty person?” I grinned.

Evidently in the time since we’d last been together, some things had piled up inside Tsugumi—things that, in her own way, she really wanted to get off her chest. She talked to me of her emotions. This was the kind ofthing she would only speak about with me. Ever since that incident with the haunted mailbox I’d been the only person who really understood her, and even when the things she wanted to say had no relation to the way I was living my life, I still got the message.

“Okay, imagine that there’s a huge famine all across the globe.”

“A famine? . . . Sorry, too far out. I can’t imagine it.”

“Maria, you’re a pest. Just shut up and listen, okay? The idea is that I want to be the kind of jerk who could kill Pooch and eat him if it got like that—to a point where there was really nothing left to eat anymore—and not feel anything. Of course I don’t mean one of these half-baked jerks who’d shed a little tear afterward and then go put up a tombstone and whisper to it, ‘I’m so sorry it had to be this way, Pooch, but thanks to you maybe the rest of us will survive.’ I’m not talking about the kind of person who’d take a little chip of bone and make it into a pendant and wear it wherever she went. I want to be able to just laugh and say, ‘Wow, that Pooch sure was delicious!’ and I want to be able to feel really calm as I say it, and if possible I don’t want to feel any regret or any twinges of conscience, you see? Of course that’s just an example.”

The huge gap between the way Tsugumi looked as she sat there with her head slightly cocked, entranced by her own words, her skinny arms wrapped around her knees, and these things she was saying—that gap really made me feel strange. It was like I was seeing something from another world.

“I’d call that a strange person, not a nasty person,” I said.

Tsugumi was staring straight out across the dark ocean. She continued to speak very calmly, in a pleasant tone. “Yeah. That’s the kind of gal you just can’t figure out. Something about her always seems to hold her a little apart from everyone around her, and even though she herself doesn’t understand this stuff that’s going on inside her she doesn’t ever try to stop it, even though she has no idea where it may lead her—and yet you get the feeling that in the end she’s probably right . . . That’s what makes her so cool.”

It wasn’t narcissism. And it wasn’t exactly an aesthetic. Deep down inside, Tsugumi had this perfectly polished mirror, and she only believed in the things she saw reflected there. She never even considered anything else.

That’s what it was.

And yet I liked her even so, and Pooch liked her, and probably everyone else around her liked her too. We all continued to be enchanted by her. It didn’t matter what she put us through, or what awful things she said to us just because she happened to be in a crummy mood. In Pooch’s case, it didn’t matter that he might eventually end up being killed and eaten. Beyond her words and beyond her heart, much deeper than all that, supporting the snarl of who she was, was a light so strong it made you sad. Like a machine that has achieved perpetual motion, in some place that even Tsugumi herself wasn’t aware of, that light continued to shine.

“It’s cold now that the sun has gone down. Wanna head back?” Tsugumi said, standing up.

“Gosh, that was unladylike! I could see your undies.”

“So you see my undies, big deal. I can bear that much exposure.

“Yeah, well that doesn’t mean you should bare it all, ha ha.”

“Very funny, kid,” said Tsugumi, laughing. Then she shouted for Pooch. The dog dashed back at full speed, running in a straight line down the long embankment, then started prancing around, barking vigorously, as if he were telling us about all the different things he had just done.

“Yeah, we hear you. Good boy,” Tsugumi said.

We started walking. Pooch kept chasing after us and then trotting on ahead and stopping to wait. And then all of a sudden he jerked up his head as if he had noticed something, and streaked off in the same direction we were headed. I was still wondering what it was that had caught his attention when we heard him start barking his head off down on the other side of the embankment, which was evidently where he had ended up.

“What’s gotten into him?” we exclaimed, and ran over to where we could see him. Pooch was bouncing about excitedly, leaping up and down around a Pomeranian that had been tied to the base of the white statue in the smallish park on the other side of the embankment. The statue is in the middle of a little stand of pines. At first Pooch had been wagging his tail, eager to play, but having a dog as enormous as Pooch come springing at him like that had totally terrified the Pomeranian, and he became desperate. Yipping furiously, he nipped at Pooch. The latter yelped and sprang away, then turned serious. A moment later he’d turned himself into a cold-blooded fighting dog.

In the same instant that I shouted out, “We’ve got to stop them!” Tsugumi growled, “Sic ‘im, Pooch!” It was one of those moments when the difference between our two personalities was made particularly apparent.

There was nothing else to do, so I ran down alone and wrapped my arms around Pooch, using all my strength to hold him back. And then the little runt of a Pomeranian bit my ankle.

“YOW, that hurt! What was that for, you little bastard!” I shouted.

“Yeah baby! Go to it, all three of you!” cried Tsugumi.

I turned around to look at her, and saw that she was laughing. She had an expression on her face like she couldn’t be more thrilled.

And then it happened.

“Hey, Gongorō! Stop it!” called a young man, striding over.

This was our first encounter with Kyōichi, the other person who would be sharing the good old days of this final summer with us. All around us was the shallow darkness of early night, and it was still early in the summer. A blue moon like a painting was just beginning to climb up over the shore.

Kyōichi certainly did make a strange impression on me. He appeared to be about the same age as us. He was tall and slender, but his shoulders and neck were thick and sturdy—a combination that made him look strong in a really cool sort of way. His hair was cut short, his eyebrows looked kind of harsh—if you just glanced at him he seemed like a pleasant, carefree young guy, just the sort of person who ought to be wearing the white polo shirt he had on. But his eyes were a little different. His gaze was strangely deep, and there was a light in them that made it seem as if he knew something huge, something extremely important. Perhaps you could say that, unlike the rest of him, his eyes were old.

He strode over to where I was still sitting, right in the middle of the storm of barking that had marked the renewal of hostilities between Pooch and Gongorō. The latter was jumping around like crazy, making an awful racket. Even so, Kyōichi scooped him up lightly and cradled him in his arms.

“Are you all right?” he said. He stood with his back perfectly straight.

Finally able to release Pooch from the powerful grasp in which I had been holding him, I stood up. “Yes, I’m fine,” I said, “I’m afraid our dog came over and started meddling with yours, so it was our fault. Sorry.”

“Nah, this little guy here is a fighter to start with, and what’s more he isn’t afraid of anything,” said Kyōichi, chuckling. He turned to look at Tsugumi. “How about you, are you okay?”

Tsugumi instantly flicked the channel on her personality.

“Oh yes, thank you.” She smiled shyly.

“Well then, see you around,” said Kyōichi, and walked off in the direction of the beach, still holding Gongorō in his arms.

By now the night had deepened. It seemed to have plunged quickly down upon us during these last few minutes. Pooch stared up at us, as if in reproach, panting slightly through his nose.

“Let’s go,” Tsugumi said, and we started strolling back.

Here and there along the road the shadows of summer lay hidden. There was something sweet about the night air and the energy that surrounded us, something that seemed to infuse the evening with an excited vigor. You felt as if it colored even the fragrance of the breeze. The people we passed were all full of spirit and very boisterous. Everyone seemed to be having a blast.

“We should get home just about the same time that Yōko comes with the cakes, don’t you think?” I said, having completely forgotten the business with the dogs.

“Yeah, and you guys can do what you like with them. You oughta know how I feel about the foul cakes they make at that place,” replied Tsugumi. Her tone was a little vacant, and I decided to take advantage of this to tease her.

“I bet you’ve got your eye oil that guy, right?” I said.

But Tsugumi wasn’t at all ruffled by my comment.

“He sure was something, wasn’t he?” she murmured.

Did she have some kind of premonition then?

“What do you mean? In what way?”

I hadn’t felt anything special when we were with him, so I repeated this question several times, trying to figure out what she meant. But Tsugumi didn’t answer. She just kept walking silently along the dark road with Pooch at her side.