Swimming with My Father

The sight of Tsugumi wandering along the beach with Kyōichi—this new amour of hers—created something of a stir in town. They stood out so much it was weird, it really was. You wouldn’t think we’d see anything odd in this combination of “Tsugumi + Male,” since we had been accustomed to seeing it for a very long time already, but somehow Tsugumi and Kyōichi always had this aura about them as they walked around our small town—like sweethearts rambling aimlessly through some distant land, they seemed to give off a halo of delicate, uncertain light. They were always on the beach, and they always had the dogs with them. The faraway sparkle in their eyes seemed like it must make everyone who glimpsed it think back on something precious, call up the pleasant ache of a reviving memory, like a dream dreamt long ago.

Back at home she still tormented her family, kicked Pooch’s food around, refused to apologize, and turned up stretched out here or there or somewhere else with her stomach showing, snoring her nose off. When she was with Kyōichi, on the other hand, she shone with a look of such utter happiness that you got the feeling she must have sped up the pace of her life somehow, that she was fighting to cram more life into each passing moment. Looking at her you felt a touch of unease—a feeling that seemed to flicker painfully through the depths of your chest, the way light glimmers through a hole in a cloud.

Tsugumi’s style of living always called up this fear.

Her emotions seemed to yank her body this way and that; they appeared to be whittling away at her life so quickly it was dizzying; they were dazzling.

“Hey, Mar-i-a-a!” My father stuck his hand out the window of the bus and waved to me, hollering in a voice so loud that I could only sit there stunned, my mouth agape, blushing. I stood up and went over to the bus stop. My eyes were trained on the giant bus as it slowly turned in from the highway and headed toward me, groaning loudly and sending out ripples of heat. The summer light made the scene look very solemn. And then the door opened and my father emerged in a stream of colorful tourists.

My mother hadn’t come. She’d said on the phone that going to the shore and seeing the same summer ocean as always would make her feel so nostalgic and sad that she was bound to start crying, and that was something she’d rather not have to go through. I figured she was planning to slip down very quietly at the beginning of autumn and see the Yamamoto Inn through its final days, when the preparations for moving got under way. Anyway, my dad absolutely refused to give up, saying that he would go alone if he had to. His head filled with dreams of A Vacation with My Grown-up Daughter, he had come to spend the night. I found it kind of funny how everything had changed so much. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that he’d been coming on the weekends to visit my mother and me. Yes . . . every summer since I was a child I’d relished the pleasure of sitting on the thoroughly baked concrete steps in my hat and my sandals, feeling the hot sun beating down on my skin as I waited for my father’s bus to arrive. He always came on the bus because boats made him seasick. So I would sit there patiently, looking forward to the soft scene that would play itself out between us, the reunion of a daughter and a father who lived apart. Most of the time my mother couldn’t get away from the inn, so I’d make my way to the bus stop through the daytime sun all alone. I’d scan the windows of each giant bus as it arrived, searching for my father’s face.

I went through the same routine in autumn and winter and spring, but for some reason when I think back on those days now it seems as if it was always summer. When my father stepped down from the bus his face would shine with a powerful smile, as if he had been holding in something unbearable, and the sunlight was always so bright you could hardly stand to look.

My father had put on sunglasses in an attempt to make himself look young, and seeing him like that gave me a shock, sent me reeling from my childhood back into my nineteen-year-old self. I stood up. It was so sweltering out that we seemed to have landed in some sort of dream, a world where everything was dizzily whirling. I felt unable to speak.

“Ah, smell that sea breeze!” sighed my father, the hair on his forehead swishing around lightly in the wind.

“Welcome back!” I said.

“Turned into a local again, I see. Got a tan and everything!”

“How’s Mom?”

“She decided to stay away, just like she said, so she’s just relaxing at home. Said to give you her love.”

“Yeah, I figured she wouldn’t come. Aunt Masako said she didn’t expect her either. God, it’s been a while since I came to meet you here, hasn’t it?”

“It sure has,” said my father quietly, as if to himself.

“What do you want to do? Should we go drop off your luggage first? You can say hello to Aunt Masako and everyone, and then . . . what do you feel like doing? You want to take the car and drive somewhere?”

“Nope, I’m going swimming!” said my father. His voice sounded very sharp and excited, as if he had been waiting to say this for a long time. “More than anything else, I came here to swim.”

My father didn’t used to swim.

It was as if he refused to let The Ocean enter at all into the time he spent together with my mother and me, our time as a family. As if he were afraid that the small periods of relaxation we shared would get lost in the languid, light-filled bustle of the midsummer beach. My mother was my father’s lover, the mistress of a married man, but she wasn’t at all afraid of being in the public eye, and so in the evenings when her work in the kitchen came to a temporary halt she would fix up her hair and change her clothes and come get me, and then she and my father and I would set out on a cheerful walk. The time we spent walking together like this—two parents and their daughter strolling along a shore that seemed to rise to meet the twilight—those moments were the happiest we knew. Silhouettes of dragonflies would dance against a deep purple-blue sky while I licked away at the Popsicle they had bought me. Usually the wind had died down by then, and the hot air that lingered on the beach hung close around us, smelling of the tide. The Popsicle always tasted too weak to hold on to—as if the flavor was already spiraling away into the past. My mother’s face looked white and blurry, and in the light of the few trails of clouds that still glimmered way off in the west I found her extremely beautiful, found the line of her profile soft and gentle. When my father walked alongside my mother, the shoulders that moved in line with hers seemed so solidly real that I found it hard to believe he had only just arrived from Tokyo.

The sand settled into patterns like waves in the tracks of the wind, and the only sound that echoed across the empty beach was the almost too loud pounding of the waves.

You feel really lonely when someone keeps coming and going all the time. And I had a hunch that somehow the loneliness I suffered in my father’s absence contained a vague shadow of death.

My father was always there on the weekends, but when I awoke on Monday mornings he’d be gone, leaving no trace that he’d even been there at all. And as young as I was, the thought of leaving my futon then really frightened me. I’d do what I could to put off asking my mother if he’d gone, having my father’s absence become a positive fact. But just as I began slipping back into a terrible, halfhearted, lonely sleep, my mother would strip off my covers.

“Rise and shine! You’ll be late for your exercises!” she’d say, smiling.

The dazzling brilliance of that smile called up our ordinary lives, the days we passed without my father. A feeling of relief would surge over me.

“Is Dad gone?” I’d ask in a voice fuzzy with sleep, just to make sure.

My mother would smile a little sadly before she answered.

“He left for Tokyo on the first bus this morning.”

I’d lie there for a while gazing through the screen at the morning outside, my eyes still sleepy, thinking about my father. How I went to meet his bus . . . the artless smile on his face as he wrapped his big hand around mine, making no move to let go even when I told him it was too hot to hold hands . . . the three of us walking together in the evening.

Yōko would always come to get me right around then, and we would stride out into the still-cool morning and head for the park, on our way to join the other kids in town in the daily exercise program run by the radio station.

As I watched my father gradually vanish into the distant waves, I found myself suddenly recalling the mood of those mornings. The feeling was so clear it was like experiencing it all over again.

As soon as we’d arrived at the beach and he’d changed into his swimsuit, my unable-to-wait-a-second-longer father yelled that he was going in ahead of me and dashed off toward the edge of the water. I noticed that starting from his elbows, his arms and hands were shaped just like mine—the resemblance was so striking that it gave me kind of a shock. No mistaking it, I thought, as I continued smearing myself with sunscreen, that man really is my father.

The sun was high and brilliant, beating down with such ferocity that it bleached everything on the shore, turning it all vividly white. The sea was so calm you would almost think it was a lake, hardly a wave out there. Raising his voice in childish shrieks, yelling, It’s so cold! Man, is it cold! my father slowly disappeared into the water. He was heading out beyond the breakers. You got the impression that he was being dragged out by the water, rather than moving of his own accord. The expanse of blue was so infinitely vast that the scenery had no problem at all absorbing a person or two. I got up and sprinted into the ocean, chasing my father. I’m in love with the moment when the water switches from being so cold you want to leap up into the air to something that feels just right against your skin. Looking up, I saw the mountains that encircle the sea flashing their shimmering green out over the water, soaring up against a blue background of sky. All this greenery so close to the shore looked unbelievably thick and clear.

My father had already swum out pretty far. He still had a long way to go before you could call him elderly, but he was also more than old enough to be supporting a family for the first time in his life. He really wasn’t that far off, only a few yards ahead, and yet as he swam his head kept appearing framed in the dizzyingly bright valley of the long, shining ocean, only to disappear again into the tight blue commotion of the waves—his head seemed so terribly tiny, so close to vanishing . . . this was what had made me think about his age. As I swam on, a vague feeling of unease began to take hold of me. Maybe it was because the water was cold, or maybe it was because for a while now I had been swimming in water so deep that my feet couldn’t touch the bottom. Or perhaps it was the strength of the sun, or the way the clouds changed shape every time I blinked—perhaps that was what opened the way for these thoughts to sneak into me, I don’t know. I’m losing sight of my father . . . we’re going to end up lost on the far side of these waves . . . never to return, vanished . . . No, that isn’t it. It’s nothing as physical as that. It’s just that I don’t really have a good grasp on our life in Tokyo yet. Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream. I saw my father swimming in front of me, his hands cutting through the water, but that was simply part of another faraway dream. Maybe deep down I still hadn’t managed to work through it all—maybe in the end I was still exactly what I’d been back then, a little girl who waited all alone for her father to arrive, weekend after weekend . . .

Back then, when things at work got too busy and my father showed up with a totally worn-out expression on his face, there was something my mother would say to him. She wasn’t trying to be unpleasant, and it wasn’t like she was really worried, because she would always say it with a smile.

“You know, if something ever happened to you, Maria and I aren’t in the kind of position where we’d be able to rush up to Tokyo to see you, and we certainly wouldn’t be able to come to your funeral. I don’t want that to happen, so you’ve really got to take better care of your health. Understand?”

I was only a child, but even so I understood. Yes, in the uncertainty of our days my father always seemed like he was about to depart for someplace very far away, never to return. That’s the kind of man he was for me.

These memories were still crowding my mind when my father turned his head to look at me, squinting his eyes in the sunlight. He stopped swimming. Stroke by stroke I closed in on him, plowing across the valleys between waves. As the distance between us dwindled, my father smiled.

“I decided I’d better let you catch up,” he said.

Light exploded on the water into millions of individual flecks, an array so dazzling that it made me catch my breath. As my father and I swam together toward a nearby buoy, my thoughts continued to race.

When Dad catches the bullet train back to Tokyo tomorrow, I just know he’s going to have about a ton of packages of dried fish and conches and all kinds of other stuff, and he’ll hardly be able to carry it all. My mother will be standing in the kitchen, and she’ll turn around to look at him and ask how I’m doing and how everyone else is doing . . . The scene rose up before me, almost transparent, like a vision, making me so happy I started to feel a bit dizzy. I’m happy to be what I am, a single daughter in this family. Yes, it was true. This seaside town where I’d grown up was no longer mine, but I had somewhere else to return to, an unshakably real home of my own.

I had come out of the water and was lazing about on the beach when I felt the bottom of someone’s bare foot slam down onto the palm of my hand and start squashing it. When I opened my eyes Tsugumi was peering down at me. With all the light streaming around from behind, her white skin and her large, intensely glittering eyes were so bright it was hard to look.

“God, Tsugumi, was it really necessary for you to stomp on my hand like that?” I moaned. “I mean, no warning or anything!” Figuring I had no choice, I sat up.

“Listen, kid, just be glad I didn’t do it with my sandal on.”

Tsugumi finally removed her faintly warm foot from my palm and put her sandal back on. My father sat up next to me with a groan.

“Hey there, Tsugumi!” he said.

“Howdy, Uncle. Long time no see.”

Tsugumi had squatted down beside me. She looked over at my father and grinned. A long time had passed since we stopped attending the same school, and seeing her smile in this meant-for-the-public way made me feel strangely nostalgic, calling up memories of her as a school-uniformed child. Playing angel at school was one of her favorite pastimes. For a moment I wondered if Kyōichi would ever have managed to discover her if they had gone to the same school, but I decided very quickly that he would have. Kyōichi had the same sort of unbalanced view of the world as Tsugumi, where you focus your entire life on a single thing and just keep digging down deeper and deeper into it. People like the two of them would be able to find each other blindfolded.

“So what’s up, Tsugumi? Where are you headed?” I asked.

There was a strong wind blowing, and I could feel sand swishing about in tiny swirls around my feet, then whirling off.

“Got a date. Pretty swell, huh?” Tsugumi said, giving me such a dazzling smile you had the impression it might spill over the top of her face. “I’m not one of these losers you come across on the beach spending their time dozing with their daddies, if you catch my drift.”

I let this pass just as I always do, but since my father hadn’t been properly Tsugumi-ized like the rest of us, his face took on a sort of puzzled expression.

“Well you know, when you’ve spent as much time living apart as we have, a grown daughter does come to seem somewhat like a lover,” he said. “Listen, Tsugumi, if you have the time, why not sit down with us and enjoy the sea.”

“I see your old man is still cracking his vulgar jokes,” said Tsugumi. “But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to sit down for a while before I go. To tell the truth, in my eagerness to get the guy I left the house a little early.”

Tsugumi plopped down on our plastic spread. She gazed out at the ocean, squinting against the light. Just beyond her, the curve of our beach umbrella cut sharply into the blue sky, flapping crazily, noisily in the wind. It was such an amazingly bright, vivid scene that I lay there unable to tear my gaze away. My heart felt as if it might flutter off to some place far away.

“It sounds like you’re in love, Tsugumi,” said my father. He’s a nice guy, he really is. In the past his niceness had created all sorts of barriers, keeping life from progressing as he wished, but now that things had ended up peacefully he seemed calm and bright, like those lines of mountains shining in the sun. Now, watching his goodness work its magic in a world where everything had settled into place, the change seemed truly sacred and good.

“Boy oh boy, am I ever!” Tsugumi cried, then flopped down alongside me, plopping her head down on the bag I’d brought with me as if she had every right in the world to do so.

“You’ll run a fever if you get sunburned,” I said.

“Women in love are strong.” Tsugumi laughed.

Without a word I picked up my hat and lay it over her face.

“Yeah, you’re right—the only reason I’ve managed to live this long, and the reason my skin is so fair, and the reason I’m able to relish my food as much as I do is that Maria here fusses over me so!” she warbled, and put on the hat.

“You seem to have grown a lot stronger, Tsugumi,” said my father.

“How lovely of you to notice,” said Tsugumi.

All three of us were now lying in a line, gazing up at the sky, which seemed kind of strange for some reason. Every so often a cloud would float by slowly overhead, the sky beyond it shining faintly through.

“Are you really that deeply in love with him?”

“Not as much as you’re in love, I’ll grant you that. Hell, all the years you spent as a commuting husband! I was wondering how things would turn out, and damn it if you didn’t push that love right through to the end!”

Tsugumi and my father got along really well. Tsugumi’s own father was a very inflexible, almost overly masculine, type of person—lots of times he would get angry over one of Tsugumi’s cheeky remarks and suddenly leap up and stalk away from the dinner table without even saying a word. Of course Tsugumi has never been the slightest bit bothered by things like that; she just goes right on living her own life. But my father isn’t simply a wishy-washy fellow who finds it hard to take a stance; he also recognizes the difference between good and bad intentions. He sees that Tsugumi doesn’t have any real malice in her. Their conversation now was so adorable that I felt a kind of tenderness welling up inside me as I listened.

“I’m the sort of person who can never give up on anything until it’s really finished, I’ll admit that, but I get the feeling that in this case it may have had more to do with the qualities of the partner I’ve found,” my father said.

“Yeah, she seems pretty tenacious, doesn’t she? And of course there’s no denying that she’s one hell of a looker. I was betting that she’d end up staying here her whole life, and that you’d keep doing the commuting husband thing right up to the end. After all, that’s the true path of the righteous lover, huh?”

“That might have been possible, as long as an end was in sight,” replied my father earnestly. Looking at him you would have thought he was talking to the goddess of destiny, rather than to some young girl. “Love is the kind of thing that’s already happening by the time you notice it, that’s how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn’t change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types—love where there’s an end in sight and love where there isn’t. People in love understand that better than anyone. When there’s no end in sight, it means you’re headed for something huge. After I first got to know Maria’s mom, the future started to feel totally unlimited, all of a sudden. So yeah, I guess you could say that maybe we didn’t even need to get married.”

“Then what would have become of me?” I said, just as a joke.

“Yeah, we had you, and now we’re happy, right?” My father stretched his arms up like a boy, looking out over the ocean and the mountains and the sky. “I certainly don’t have any complaints. This is the greatest!”

“You know, the way you’re so simple that you just come out and say things like that—I kinda like it. You’re one of the few guys around who’s able to put me in such an obliging mood,” said Tsugumi, her face very serious.

My father chuckled, looking pleased. “Is that right? Seems like you must have been pretty popular with the guys all along. Do you like this guy more than you liked any of the others?” he asked.

Tsugumi cocked her head slightly and replied in a whisper, almost as if she were talking to herself. “Hard to say . . . It kinda seems like something I’ve been through before, but on the other hand I guess you could say that it was never really like this. I mean, until now, no matter what happened, even if the guy were to break down and start bawling right in front of me, no matter how much I liked him, he could start bugging me to let him hold my hand or touch me or whatever, but somehow . . . I don’t know . . . it just always seemed like I was stuck at the edge. I was on the shore of this river, in the dark, looking at this fire burning on the other side. I could see just how long it would take for the fire to burn down, you know, and it was so boring I thought I might fall asleep. Because all that stuff always ends right on time, you know? I really couldn’t see what those guys were looking for in love, at our age.”

“I agree with you there. Sooner or later people are definitely going to give up if you don’t give them back as much as they’re giving you,” my father said.

“But you know, this time I really feel like I’m participating. Perhaps it’s because of the dogs, or because I’ll be moving. But Kyōichi is different. No matter how many times we get together I never get sick of being with him, and every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I’ve got in my hand and rub it into his face. That’s how much I like him.”

“I don’t think Kyōichi would really go for that,” I said. But even as I spoke I felt her words sinking into me, sinking me deep in thought. Hot sand brushed against the soles of my feet, silky smooth. Somehow the sensation made me want to start praying. Please let Tsugumi be visited by nothing but good from now on—over and over, in time with the roaring of the waves.

“I see,” said my father. “Introduce me to this guy sometime.”

Tsugumi nodded and said she would.

The next day I went to see my father off. He was taking a bus headed directly for Tokyo, an express. He was heading home.

“Say hi to Mom for me,” I said.

My newly tanned father nodded. Just as I’d expected, he was taking back such a load of various seafoods that he couldn’t carry it all, even using both hands. He had so much stuff you wondered just who he expected to eat it all. I figured my mother would end up being put to lots of trouble, going around distributing stuff to the neighbors. It was a scene I knew, one that had sent its roots deep down into me by now, and I could see it clearly. Like the lines of buildings in Tokyo, and the strangely subdued dinners the three of us ate together. Like the sound of my returning father’s footsteps.

The bus stop was flooded with late afternoon light, and the reflected orange glow was bright enough to make me squint. The bus drew in just as slowly as the one my father had come on, and my father got on; then the bus pulled out into the street, still moving slowly. My father never stopped waving.

I felt a little lonely as I strolled back to the inn through the gathering dusk, alone this time. I wanted to hold on to the particular feeling of languor that I got as I walked the streets of this town, the town of my past, which I would lose when summer ended. This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next—and I didn’t want to forget a single one.