Sachi was in the middle of the photograph box and Lucy was at the top. I knew my place and it was a better one than hers. It was the best position of all. I didn’t consider myself jealous, not in the sense that I thought Teiji still loved Sachi. But I couldn’t get rid of her. I was terrified of the day that my photographs would be replaced by a layer of new ones, of the next person or object. I imagined myself spinning off into darkness, nothingness, like Sachi. I wondered what had become of her, what was the point of those bleak parties where she came to look unhappier, sicker. I wrote many stories in my head and soon began to think of her as someone I had always known, a sister even.
The story told by Teiji’s photographs was this. There was a young man who sometimes came into the noodle shop for a cheap meal before going to some small theater. He loved plays and dance so much that he couldn’t bear to spend his evenings anywhere else. He went as often as he could afford tickets and to all kinds of shows. The theater made him weep. At the sight of the actors or dancers entering the lights as the play started, his tear ducts moistened and his nose stung. Best of all were the white-faced dancers of butoh. Their gestures, aggressive and erotic, touched him deep inside, set his legs quivering. He liked musicals too—whether danced, rollerskated, or performed on ice—and the happier the songs, the harder he cried. He could soak three or four handkerchiefs in an evening watching the spectacular song and dance numbers of the all-female Takarazuka.
When Teiji saw him in the restaurant, the crying man was always nervous, a little tense, like someone killing time before an interview or exam. He would tell Teiji of the play he was to see and sometimes, chocked with sobs, talked of the previous night’s theatrical adventure.
Teiji took a few photographs of this man, but couldn’t be satisfied. The crying man looked rigid and ordinary, even when red-eyed. He allowed Teiji to take the pictures but said, “You don’t want to take photographs of me. You should go to the theater. There’s nothing interesting about my life. I’m the audience. Nothing’s ever happened to me, or ever will. That’s why I go to watch. It’s not that I dream of being an actor, you see. That’s mistake a lot of people make. My role is to be in the audience and my duty is to do it well. I want to be watching the performers. There is nothing for you to photograph.”
Teiji became curious about the theater, this part of the city he had never met. He went to a little-known venue one night to see a play. He thought there would be new images to photograph and so there were. The play was a one-woman show starring a student actress. When she stepped out onto the lonely stage in her brown military uniform that he didn’t recognize from any army, Teiji knew that he needed to catch her in his camera. Her face was young and a little soft but she shouted with the aggression and ugliness of a middle-aged man. From the back of the audience Teiji took her picture, just one. When the play was almost over he slipped out to wait for her beside the stage door. She was alone. He looked at her through the lens and when she saw him she smiled. To be photographed by every newspaper and magazine in Japan was her aim. This was a start. They went to a bar near the theater and stayed all night.
Off the stage she was sullen and unhappy but glad, at least, to be with Teiji. He didn’t require her to perform, even to speak. He was fascinated by what she was, the image she left in his eyes. Sachi trusted him. Then, as she grew weaker, she came to need him.
He went to the theater between shifts at work. When he couldn’t go to performances he settled for rehearsals. In different theaters and different plays he saw her as a princess, a secretary, a concubine. She strutted in a costume made of peacock feathers, danced on her toes in a black leotard. He didn’t care much to follow the plots of the dramas and rarely remembered the story. Often he didn’t notice that there was a story. He was excited only by the sight of Sachi, her costume, voice and face, the gestures she used. After performances and rehearsals Teiji met her outside the stage door, or in some coffee shop or bar near the theater. Sachi chain-smoked and they would sit together behind a gauze of cigarette smoke. She laughed and cried alternately, sometimes with a hacking cough. She didn’t care for the world of theater but didn’t belong in any other. They went to parties where she drank too much and cried in the bathroom. She didn’t like the people and was bad at party small-talk, but couldn’t stop herself going. She had to be where the actors and actresses were. Sometimes Teiji learned that after getting her home she’d called a taxi and returned to the party she’d hated so much. He thought she wanted to destroy herself. She stopped going to rehearsals, stopped getting up during the day and soon no director wanted to cast her. She was addicted to the parties she couldn’t bear and even Teiji couldn’t save her from them.
And there the story was interrupted because Teiji had found me flicking through his pictures. But the final image continued to haunt me. Sachi lying on the pavement. It could have been an overdose, drunkenness, sleep or death. I didn’t ask Teiji about Sachi again. And of course, I know nothing of the crying man. I made it up. Perhaps he never went to the theater in his life. It could have been that his noodles were too hot, and so his eyes were red and moist in the photograph I saw.
I thought of going to the theater to find Sachi, but how would I know which one? I could scour an entertainment magazine to find out what was on and where, but it was risky. A theater is a dangerous place for Lucy. I can’t watch a play without believing I am in it, or even that I am it. As a child I went on occasional school trips to see Shakespeare, or a pantomime, never anything between. I dreaded the plays in the same way that I sometimes feared sleep. I would be sucked into a nightmare and might never wake up. And yet, once I was there, waiting on my velvet folding seat for the lights to go down, I became involved in the drama with the embracing passion of a schoolgirl. I scarcely breathed until the lights came up, such was my concentration. The concept of invited audience participation has always struck Lucy as bizarre. I was participating. I was every character, and the place and plot too. Whether I was Falstaff or a babe in the wood, whether I was a murder or a mystery, I lived it to the full. I was both Titania and Oberon, Demetrius and Lysander, Puck and Flute the bellows-mender. I was Wall and Moonlight. I was also Snow White and all the Seven Dwarves. I was the skull of Yorick and I was a very sharp rapier. When the curtain came down, I couldn’t bear to leave and yet I wanted to. A teacher would drag me along the aisle and toward the minibus. I kicked and screamed, lost fingernails and hair to the theater. It was a kind of madness because it made no difference whether I stayed in the theater or whether I returned home to my bedroom. I would be stuck inside the play for weeks and months, living it again and again, changing and developing it each day obsessively and against my will. People around me were barely visible, hardly audible. Then, as I emerged from the frenzy, I would enjoy the calm and await the next trip with terror.
I’m not forced to visit theaters anymore, so I don’t. Such a loss of self-control would be intolerable; I would never be able to concentrate on my translations. No, I couldn’t look for Sachi in a theater. Besides, according to the photographs, she was no longer there. She wasn’t anywhere.
I went, after Lily’s death, to a pond near my apartment. I looked for Teiji’s reflection in the water. I wanted him to teach me words of comfort but I found only turtles and carp. I was drunk. I was off food at the time and so I’d had gin for breakfast. It’s a pleasant way to begin the day. Before the glass was empty I felt as if the day had been dealt with, was out of my hands, and I was free to do whatever I liked. I wandered past the reeds and waterlilies, unable to focus my eyes. A profusion of color—corn-blue sky, green-headed ducks, a scarlet wooden bridge—throbbed hazily. A shrine stood beside the pond and I wondered whether or not it would be all right to clap my hands before it and say a prayer for Lily and Teiji. I decided it was probably best not to pray when drunk, and went to watch the carp swimming.
On a bench in front of me a young man stretched out in the sun. He might have been a runner, for he wore baggy shorts and his top was bare. He had brown skin and long black hair that fell over the end of the bench in a single ponytail. His chest glistened in the light, rising and falling gently as he breathed. The reeds behind him swayed slightly and flies buzzed around. The whole place seemed to breathe with him, as if each breath he took filled the earth’s lungs. I stared beyond him, at the water and the wooden shrine, but all I saw was that thick black hair, curved eyelids, glinting brown skin.
I sat on the ground, among swollen pink azaleas, and shut my eyes while the earth tilted and swayed like the deck of a ship. I wanted Teiji so badly, to touch his skin, but I would never, ever see him again. When I threw up, a couple of hours later, I blamed it not on alcohol but on seasickness.