“I’ll have hot pot, if you’re offering. But eating alone’s no fun, so why don’t you join me?”
What I’d said was “Can I treat you to a meal as a thank-you for all those times you had my back at work?”
And that was what Iwakura said in response.
I wasn’t quite sure how to take an invitation like that from a boy who had his own apartment.
This is Iwakura we’re talking about, I thought. He probably doesn’t mean anything by it. He’d already mentioned his building was nearby.
And in any case he said it so casually, and with such an artless expression, that my heart didn’t give a single flutter.
Iwakura had an intriguing mixture of bright and dark about him, like a cloudy midwinter sky, which had somehow made me hold back from starting to like him. I couldn’t see him giving me that heady feeling, the rush that makes you want to burst into a run—the things I was looking for in young love.
“I’ll come over and cook,” I said, and we picked a date, matter-of-factly.
We were by the bench under the tall zelkova on our college campus.
I didn’t have a lot of friends, and the few that I did have were too busy with their part-time jobs to come to class much. It was the kind of thing that happened at low-tier private colleges like ours. So Iwakura and I had naturally become close simply from being two loners on campus.
We’d met when I was covering some shifts for a friend at a local place that served drinks and food where he worked behind the bar.
After that, we’d stop to chat or eat lunch together whenever we saw each other on campus.
His parents ran a famous bakery in our town that sold high-end cake rolls. He’d told me how, as the only child, he was doing everything in his power to save up enough money to avoid having to take over the family business after graduation. I believed him. There was a desperation about him that spoke of the lifetime of baking cake rolls that awaited him by default unless he forged his own path. He went about his part-time job like someone who had his work cut out for him.
“Cake rolls! What’s not to like? They’re great,” I said, having never turned down a cake roll in my life.
“I don’t mind the cake rolls, but my mom’s practically perfect. Friendly, thoughtful, hardworking . . .” Iwakura said.
It was true that his mom was well known in the community for being welcoming and attentive. People ended up buying cake rolls at their bakery just because of how she made them feel.
“I . . . I think I’m quite a nice person,” he said.
“I agree.”
His gentle spirit and his good upbringing were obvious to me even just from our walks together. If we were in the park and the trees swayed in the wind and made the light dance, he would half-close his eyes and look blissful. If a child tripped and fell, he’d frown, and when the parent picked the child up afterward he’d look sympathetic and relieved. There was a candor about him I noticed in people whose parents had given them something unconditional and absolute growing up.
“If I stay home, with my family, for the rest of my life, I’ll just get more and more nice.”
“And that would be a problem because . . .”
“It’s fine, except the way I see it, it’s not real. Anyone can be kind when they’ve got enough money and free time, and no problems, don’t you think? What I’m saying is, if I stay at home, that’s all my niceness will ever be. And either something dark and unpleasant starts building up inside me, or I’m stuck with that superficial niceness until I die. I’m lucky to be easygoing by nature, and I want to make sure that’s what I feed. Not the dark stuff.”
“That’s why you’re so desperate to save up and leave?”
“Maybe it’s something like that. I’m just trying to look one step ahead. Otherwise I’ll end up doing cake rolls without ever having known anything different. And then I’d really be stuck,” Iwakura said.
The college we went to was expensive.
In my case, I ended up there because my parents were both busy at the restaurant around the time I was born, and enrolled me in the kindergarten of the school attached to the college, where I’d come up through the system ever since.
My family ran a fairly well-known yoshoku restaurant in the next town over, which had been started by my grandparents. It was the kind of place listed in all the tourist guidebooks, where a family would stop by for a meal out, or a single office worker would go for a nice dinner after work when they didn’t want to stretch for a French restaurant.
I wanted to run the place someday, so in truth I was more interested in learning to do that than in getting my degree. The restaurant’s menu was unchanged from my grandparents’ time, and I’d been trained from a young age to make things like omurice, pilaf, and demi-glace. All I really needed to do before I could take on the restaurant was to get my chef’s license.
My elder brother had no interest in food, and had moved out on his own while he was still in high school. Now he had a busy and successful job at an advertising agency.
Iwakura’s determination to do something—anything—other than go into the family business reminded me of my brother. Perhaps that was another reason I felt so close to him.
Back when we both still lived at home, my brother would often stay up late to vent his frustrations to me.
My brother loved people, and had an enormous sense of curiosity. He was always looking for excitement and loved surprises above everything. He was totally unsuited to a life of routine in which you needed to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same way, week in, week out. Only doting parents could have imagined he’d be the right person to run a restaurant.
“Leave it to me,” I always told him. “It’ll never work out for you.”
On those nights, my brother would frown and try to talk himself into it, saying things like But I’m better than you at working with my hands, and I like the idea of not being stuck behind a desk, and You know how happy it would make Mom and Dad . . .
He was also the kind of person who liked to hold on to things he had, especially if other people wanted them.
After he moved out, all we’d see of him was when he’d drop by and stay for dinner before leaving again. He seemed to be enjoying his freedom and not planning on settling down anytime soon, and the chances of him coming back to run the restaurant when the time came seemed slim.
This evidently gave my parents something to chew on, and when I said I wanted to do it, they seemed to think I might be saying it out of a sense of obligation. To avoid making the same mistake they had made with my brother, they decided that I should be encouraged to spread my wings and see a little of the world first. It seemed to me they’d been seriously shaken by finding out that my brother, who they’d always assumed would succeed them, had disliked the idea quite so much all along.
So they sent me to college to give me time to think it over, and a chance to change my mind if I wanted to.
In any event, my feelings about it stayed exactly the same, so staying in school was turning out to be more of an opportunity to gain some life experience.
For me, being at the restaurant while my mom and dad grew older and eventually took on the roles of my old grandma, who had passed a while ago, and my grandpa, who still hung around like a mascot and visited with some of our oldest regulars when they came in, seemed like the surest and most important thing in my life. I didn’t understand why my brother had been so against the idea that he had to move away from home to escape it.
Ever since I was young, I’d always stuck with things—maybe even taken them a little too far. I’d kept up my abacus until recently, and could still beat anyone at mental arithmetic. I’d been going to calligraphy lessons since I was a kid, and doing pottery as a hobby for more than a decade. I was even about to take a trip with three childhood friends to the same hot spring in Iwate we’d been to every year for the last eight years.
This was why I didn’t know why Iwakura was so determined to turn his back on his family’s bakery, whose position seemed as advantageous as their cake rolls were delicious. If he had his heart set on a different path, then maybe—but he had no plan. I couldn’t understand what he was trying to do.
Because he wasn’t the type to be forthcoming with the details of a situation, or his thoughts and feelings, it just sounded to me like he was giving up a sure thing in favor of pie in the sky.
That said, being from families that had been serving customers for generations, we had a lot in common, and understood each other well.
Even if they didn’t weigh too heavily on us, we couldn’t help but be aware of the responsibilities we’d been born into.
On the day we’d chosen, I bought the ingredients for the hot pot and went to Iwakura’s apartment for the very first time.
He’d told me that the building, which was already slated for demolition, stood on land owned by his uncle, who had agreed to let him live there in the meantime for a rent of five thousand yen a month. But somehow this hadn’t prepared me for what I found.
The old wooden building was dilapidated, with broken windows, a crumbling outside staircase, and holes in the floors where the boards had rotted through.
I stopped in amazement. Take a look at this, I thought. He lives here all on his own? I could never.
Now that I’d seen the state the place was in, I understood why he was the only one living there.
I felt like I’d discovered the source of his peculiarly translucent darkness, the air of loneliness and heaviness that hung around him wherever he went.
I tightened my scarf, looked up at the clouded sky through the chilly winter air, and gulped. Something made me think I wouldn’t be coming out of there the same as I went in.
I went up to the corner apartment on the second floor, and Iwakura opened the old sliding door and told me to come in.
“This is some place!”
“Isn’t it? This room used to be the landlords’ apartment, so it’s bigger than the others.”
He smiled.
It was true. Belying the impression I’d gotten from the small sliding door, the apartment easily contained two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a respectable-sized tatami room in the back. The ceilings were high, and the rear windows looked out onto a park where the evening chimes were just that moment ringing out from loudspeakers.
If you forgot that the other units were pitch dark and abandoned, it was a surprisingly bright and pleasant home.
“So, do you have a pot for this hot pot?” I asked.
“I do. And a picnic stove.”
“It’s going to be a simple dish of chicken meatballs, Chinese cabbage, and glass noodles. Are you happy with udon to finish?”
“This is a treat.” Iwakura smiled.
“You know I’m much more used to cooking Western-style food. I can do that blindfolded.”
“Of course, I can imagine. That’s what I should have asked for, if I’d thought about it. I just really wanted hot pot.”
“This way it’ll be a good challenge for me, too.”
I started getting the hot pot ready in the kitchen while Iwakura put on some music and read a book. Outside, the sky grew dark. The room got steamy, and every time I opened the rickety window to let the steam out, cold air rushed in and blew around the apartment.
We watched TV and filled our bellies with hot pot.
Time passed normally, and our conversation didn’t turn romantic at all.
I may not have been a chef yet, but my kitchen training had taught me to clean up as I went, and Iwakura did most of the rest. After the hot pot, he made coffee and cut a cake roll that his mom had brought him. We were sitting at the kotatsu with our legs under the warm blanket. I had a thought.
“There’s something unusual about this room. It feels peaceful, but also like time stops when you come through the door. It’s so quiet compared to everywhere else, I feel like it calms me right down. I’m impressed you can live here and still find the energy to go to work. If it was me, I think I’d be tempted just to stay in.”
Iwakura nodded.
“That’s it. When I’m here my mind gets so quiet, it’s like time stops. On top of that, it seems like there are other people here.”
“Here in this building?” I asked, alarmed. I thought he might mean homeless people, or squatters.
“No, not like that. I mean . . . the landlords.”
“They’re still here?”
“What I mean is . . . it’s kind of awkward. They’re dead, but they don’t seem to have noticed.”
“What do you mean?”
“The two of them fell asleep with their brazier lit and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The landlord and landlady. I mean, they were elderly, but still.”
“In this room?”
“That’s what happened . . .”
“You aren’t telling me this hoping I’ll get scared and jump into your arms so you can make a move, are you?”
“If only. But it’s all true. Sometimes I see them here in the apartment.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Are you . . . sensitive to that kind of thing?” I asked.
“Nope, not one bit. I spent the night in a graveyard once, when I was traveling alone, and slept like a baby.”
“Then how come . . .”
“Maybe because when I’m at home, I’m relaxed and have my guard down. Or I’ve just been working too hard. Anyway, every once in a while, when I’m just waking up, or when I come home tired and sit down with a cup of tea, it’s like the two worlds intersect and I see them, still living here like they used to.”
“Shouldn’t you get the place cleansed, or something?”
“But the whole building’s going to be gone soon. I don’t think there’s any harm in it,” Iwakura said. “They look happy here.”
This was precisely what made him so nice. He was even considerate to ghosts.
“Hmm,” I said. I was skeptical. Between worrying about his future and working too much, maybe he’s starting to lose his grip. I should keep an eye on him, I thought.
But the more pressing concern, for me, was how we were sitting across from each other at a kotatsu, steadily putting away a cake roll, and talking like this as though it were the most normal thing in the world. We seemed like an old couple ourselves, which struck me as pretty funny.
Afterward, he walked me back to my apartment, pushing his moped along so he could stop by the store on his way home.
“Secchan, why did you move out, when your family’s only one train stop away?” he said.
It was a starry night, and the moon looked as sharp as ice. Its whiteness made it look like it had been cut out of the sky with scissors.
“My mom started hosting cooking lessons, for fun, and so many people started hanging around the house that I had to give up my room. But I treat this apartment like a bedroom. I still go home a lot, anyway. I’ll eat dinner there and then come back here to sleep. I still help out at the restaurant a lot, too.”
“That sounds nice. Like you’re still in touch with the flow of things. I feel stranded right now.”
“I have to make sure I keep some distance from them, though. Otherwise, everything becomes too close, and it takes away the time I need for myself. That’s why I make a point of living on my own, and traveling, and things.”
“That’s what I thought. Maybe I got tired of it, too. Driving my parents out on trips and to the store, helping relatives move . . . I could just see a future where that was all I did. It’s not that I mind, and it’s not that I don’t want to be a pastry chef, but still.”
“You’ve got loads of time. Why don’t you save up and get a job, or go study abroad for a while? You can’t just be the dutiful child all the time, especially as a son. It makes you stingy, I think.”
“That’s it! My parents still see me on the same trajectory they pictured for me when I was a baby, but I’ve got my own life to live.”
“Thanks for walking me home.”
“Thanks for dinner. And sorry not to pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it. The cake roll was delicious!”
Iwakura waved and rode off on his moped. It was old, but looked expensive, and had been lovingly maintained. You can tell when people have been cared for, I thought.
I could imagine how trying to save up money and leaving home would come with their own complications when you started with advantages like his. No wonder things seemed to be weighing on him.
In any case, the whole evening had been so remarkably ordinary, and my feelings so calm the entire time, that I decided then and there this would never develop into a romantic relationship—that we would just be friends.
“Mom, do you know an old apartment building near here where the landlords died of carbon monoxide poisoning?” I asked.
“I heard about it. It was on the news. I think they lit a brazier and fell asleep with the windows closed?”
“That’s the one. Do you know anything else about them?”
My mom had grown up here, so I thought she might know the story.
We had closed and cleared the tables, and Mom and I were sitting at the counter eating our staff meal of crab pilaf and miso soup. The soup was Grandma’s own recipe. If someone had told me that I’d been put on this earth solely to pass down the taste of this miso soup to future generations, I wouldn’t have minded one bit. There was something almost magically inviting about it. Of course, Grandma had always made her miso paste from scratch.
“They used to come in often. Not so much once the gentleman started to have trouble walking, but weekday evenings, before the rush, they’d come in holding hands. Table six: omurice and pork curry. With side plates so they could share.”
“Oh, I remember now. I can picture them.”
“And a small bottle of beer. They were a cute old couple. You could tell their life was modest, but it seemed to be made up of all these little traditions they’d built up over the years. They were never a barrel of laughs or anything, but I always felt reassured when they came in. Dad and I used to say we wanted to be like them when we grew old. When we heard about what happened I remember telling him how—them going together in their sleep like that—maybe it was for the best,” she said.
My parents were unbelievably devoted to each other.
Dad used to have a normal office job, but as a regular at the restaurant he fell in love with Mom and quit his job to learn to cook, and ended up running the place with her—a bold move for a respectable office worker. He always smiled and went along with whatever she wanted. I’d been against the cooking classes, but he’d said yes as soon as Mom had asked.
“For the love of God, please don’t go together like them,” I said.
“We’re lucky the restaurant will be in good hands if we do,” she said, and laughed.
This was a phrase she’d often directed at my brother when we were younger.
Mom always said it cheerfully and with the best of intentions, but each time she did, it landed somewhere inside my brother, and stuck. For him, it had become too much of a burden to bear.
I, on the other hand, had always envied him being the one she counted on.
Maybe on some level, my dream of taking on the restaurant came from a petty place—was just something I’d convinced myself of out of stubbornness. Perhaps I’d taken the feelings I had about my brother, not accepting what was being offered to him on a platter, perhaps I’d let them ferment into a kind of complex, and laid them on myself.
When my grandma died, though, it made me realize something.
At the funeral, middle-aged men whom Grandma had fed and counseled when they were young men turned up in black suits and told stories about times they brought their dates for meals at the restaurant, or how she comforted them with fried prawns when their girlfriends broke up with them.
For the first time, I saw the difference we made by being there for people over the years, in the background of their lives.
The utensils and fittings we handled every day took on deeper colors the more we used and polished them. In the same way, Grandma’s life—which until then I’d only pictured as day after day at the same restaurant, serving the same dishes—suddenly seemed to have more depth than I could fathom.
I couldn’t imagine anything in the world more meaningful than that.
For the next few weeks, Iwakura continued working long hours at the bar, and I kept busy with school, the restaurant, and my various hobbies.
At the restaurant we started serving the omurice on plates I’d made, so my pottery was becoming a useful and busy pursuit. I handwrote the menu board, so I had to keep up with calligraphy practice, too. My dedicated nature meant I was always looking for ways to make use of what I had. I couldn’t really help it—that was just who I was, or at least what I was used to. The fact that I already knew what I would do after I finished college also meant I could put my energy into a variety of interests. My studies, on the other hand, could never have a practical application, so they never interested me much.
When I saw Iwakura around campus, I thought he looked a little washed out.
It had to be hard living on his own away from his family. I knew he was spending all his time either studying or working at the bar. He might have acted grown-up, but he was still a college student.
That said, I also thought that sharing a room inside a condemned building with a pair of ghosts couldn’t help.
I felt uneasy. Ghosts probably lived in ghost time—time that flowed in its own strange way, somewhere completely removed from our own. Couldn’t mixing in it, even just a little, sap you of some of the vitality you needed to live in this world?
Maybe I already liked Iwakura more than I realized.
About six months earlier, I’d broken up with someone I’d met at my pottery studio. It had been quite a major love affair. He was older and single, and I’d gotten caught up in it to the point that I’d even thought about marrying him. In the end we’d gone our separate ways, but I was still hung up on him. I didn’t see him anymore because he’d gotten married to someone else and left the pottery class.
The woman my ex-boyfriend married was a coworker who had initially approached him for advice about her relationship with her abusive husband. My boyfriend had gotten drawn in and had come to feel he had to protect her.
With youth being my only asset, I’d been powerless to stop them being strongly drawn toward each other. I could only watch miserably from the sidelines.
Once, when things were slow at the bar, I’d mentioned the situation to Iwakura. I made light of it, like a joke. But he said, “A man who can get taken in by a move like that will never change. I’m glad you broke up.”
I was pretty impressed that a boy of his age could have such an appropriate and reasonable opinion.
In fact, what he said continued to be a source of encouragement for me while I recovered from that tumultuous relationship. I never brought it up with Iwakura again, of course, and after a while I was able to put it all behind me, since my ex-boyfriend was married and no longer in my life. But Iwakura’s calmness and his snub-nosed profile as he stood next to me polishing the glassware and told me what he thought stayed with me even after that.
That afternoon, I bumped into Iwakura at the station.
“How’ve you been?” I asked, smiling.
“I took your advice,” he said promptly. “Are you free now? I’ll tell you while we walk.”
“Sure. I’m just on my way home,” I said. “Are you working tonight?”
“Not tonight. But I’ve got to be up at six tomorrow,” he said. I might have imagined it, but he seemed less pale and more alive than he had been lately.
“Seen any ghosts lately?” I asked.
“Yeah, sometimes. The old lady makes tea and folds laundry. The old man does stretches along to the radio.”
“You moved out of your family’s home into someone else’s,” I said. “I’m not sure that counts as living on your own.”
“I’m used to it now. I hardly notice. Once in a while I’ll see them and say hello. Even though it’s not like they know I’m there.”
It was a winter afternoon, and we were walking through the sparsely peopled streets.
Cars came and went, gleaming at one another in the low light, and the rows of plane trees along the street extended into the distance in their dull winter colors.
“So? What was this excellent advice you decided to take?” I asked.
“Going abroad. Only I’ve decided to go to patisserie school in Paris.”
“But that’s a cake-roll-track move!” I said.
“I realized I didn’t want to end up as a cake baker who’d never been to France, you know?”
“I get it. I’d have done the same if we were an Italian restaurant. I’m lucky yoshoku is Japanese, so I don’t need to go as far as you.”
“I don’t want to change what my old man’s created in his cake roll, but I want a chance to figure out what it’s all about for me separate from that, I guess. I might finish my training and get a job out there. I don’t know yet. I’ll need to see what happens, but right now that’s what I’m leaning toward. It’s not the working with my hands that I want to get away from, or the baking. Dessert gives people a moment to dream. It makes people happy. To start with, I was looking at schools in Japan, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted to go over there.”
“Have you told your parents?”
“Yeah. They’re dead against it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have enough money to cover tuition, and to find a cheap apartment and support myself while I look for a job. I also have a savings account in my name. It’s money my parents put away for me, so I’d rather not touch it, but still.”
“Wow, Iwakura, that’s great. You actually reached your goal.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve really been cutting back,” he said.
So he’s leaving, I thought, and suddenly my chest gave a squeeze, and an unexpected loneliness settled over me. The sky above us looked sad and distant. Soon he’d go abroad and find his own world, and spend years over there, and maybe never come back.
I’d noticed already—though only vaguely, perhaps—that Iwakura wanted to sleep with me. There was something in his expression, his voice. A feeling of closeness lay silkily between us, like a sourdough starter quietly rising.
“I wish I could have tried your omurice, Secchan,” Iwakura said. “I still regret asking you for hot pot that day. Even though it was delicious.”
“Come to the restaurant and you can have it anytime,” I said. “I mean, it’ll be my mom or dad cooking, but it’ll taste pretty much the same. Mine’s just a little less consistent than theirs.”
“You’ve still got time to get it perfect,” Iwakura said, and laughed.
“I can come over right now and make it for you,” I said. “As long as you get the ingredients.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
In that moment of melancholy, I think we both knew we might as well have been talking about having sex.
The cloudy winter sky felt unspeakably erotic, with its silvery hues and thickness of cloud, and the wind blowing through beneath. You could only think it was a setup designed to make you want to lay your skin against another’s. It made me want to stay indoors under its grayness forever. With a stranger, in an apartment, luxuriating in unconstrained desire, the only place I felt like I could truly let go.
We stopped at the supermarket for ingredients, and then I was back in the run-down building’s most haunted apartment.
This time around, there was nothing sinister about it at all. The room looked even more faded and see-through than before. The air was forsaken and crisp, and through the window, I saw clouds in heavy layers of gray, extending into the distance.
We talked about different things, occasionally opening the window to let out the heat of the cooking stove, and I made omurice. I couldn’t have made a sauced dish away from home, but with omurice I could re-create more or less exactly how it would taste at the restaurant. For an extra treat I whipped up a miso soup with oysters to go with it.
It was a dish I could make with my eyes closed, one I’d long since had my fill of, but Iwakura seemed delighted. He even polished off my leftovers.
Each time he got up and went to the bathroom, I worried slightly that the ghosts would appear, but thankfully I remained the only one in the room, aside from the heating stove glowing yellow like an open fire.
Then it was eight o’clock and we were sitting at the kotatsu, talking about nothing in particular, digging into a fluffy cake roll with a slightly firm, caramelized surface and filled generously with whipped cream.
“How are you always in cake rolls here?”
“My mom brings them over, along with bags of rice.”
“They must have enough food to feed the neighborhood, just like we do,” I said. “I know the craze has passed, but you still can’t say no to a cake roll.”
“The fillings are seasonal. And they keep for a few days, so they’re good for gifting. I think Japanese people just love cake rolls.”
“What are the flavors just now?”
“Matcha, chestnut, and yuzu.”
“Yuzu? I’m not sure I’d like that one.”
How can I describe the unique relaxed feeling I had while Iwakura and I sat talking? He wasn’t family, and it couldn’t be described as fun. But something fell into place, and we could have talked forever, or been equally comfortable sitting in silence. Unlike when I was with other men, it never crossed my mind to worry about whether my makeup had rubbed off, or if my hair was sticking up.
“I think I’ll get going,” I said. “It’s too bad I missed the ghosts.”
“If you want to see them, you should spend the night,” Iwakura said.
I was a little surprised. Only a little, admittedly.
“I don’t want to see any ghosts, but what do you mean I should spend the night? Can you at least explain yourself?” I asked.
“Well,” Iwakura said, and thought for a moment. He looked serious. “I guess when you work as a bartender, this kind of thing starts to seem like no big deal.”
For obvious reasons, I was offended.
“Are you serious? You could at least pretend to be attracted to me, even though I now it’s not true. Tell me that—if you had to say—you’d say I was pretty, or . . . There are so many things you could have said.”
“If I had to, I’d say that out of all the girls I know, I like both the way you look and the way you are the best,” Iwakura said.
He wouldn’t have said it unless it was true. I felt a pang of pain in my chest.
“What I meant was that when you work at a bar and everyone our age goes out after finishing work, then you start asking people if they want to stay over without it meaning very much, and I’ve gotten so used to it that I don’t feel those things so clearly anymore.”
“That makes sense to me.”
“And if you’re a girl and you’re at some guy’s apartment, you’re testing the heat of the situation using your whole body. Or so I imagine.”
“I think that’s normal.”
“But us guys, we only see holes. No matter how pretty a girl’s makeup looks, or what she’s wearing, or what ordinary thing we’re talking about, all we can think of is how somewhere deep inside this person, there’s a hole—a wet hole, and that’s all we can see. Once the thought comes into your head, it’s all there is.”
“Okay?”
“So that’s what’s been on my mind. Every time you laugh or say anything, I’m still thinking about that hole.”
“How am I supposed to feel about that? Flattered, or depressed?”
“Now that the thought’s there, I can’t stop myself from thinking about how I really want to do it. But I’m leaving the country soon, and I don’t want any regrets.”
“I know what you mean. We’ll end up feeling sad no matter how we act on our desires right now. If we have sex, it’ll probably make me start liking you.”
“Same here. Even more than I like you already.”
“It’s bad timing.”
“That’s it.”
“Well, maybe we can draw a line, and just agree to enjoy ourselves,” I said. “There’s no point thinking about the future. But I’m unattached, and there’s a hole here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t say that. Don’t leave it up to me.”
This is the strangest proposition I’ve ever received, I thought. You’re a funny one, Iwakura.
I stayed the night at Iwakura’s place.
I’d expected his futon to be flat and hard, but he was from a well-off family after all, and inside his closet there was an old but respectable mattress, a nice thick comforter, and clean sheets.
Outside, the cold wind blew and rattled at the windows.
That night, in the light of a small lamp, we had sex just once. We had incredibly sensual sex without either of us saying a word.
I’d only slept with one other man, but Iwakura’s attention that night transformed my pleasure. He seemed to carefully inspect my body to find out where and how to touch me. He put aside his own arousal to do this, which made it even more exciting, and I orgasmed with another person for the first time ever. He saw it through, waited the proper length of time, and then entered me. It was a bizarre moment. We both felt as though we’d encountered sex for the first time, and it took our breath away. We could tell we were both wondering what it was we’d been thinking of as sex until then. Something just hard and slippery enough, somewhere just wet and tight enough—of course there could be nothing better. So this is what sex is for, I thought. To experience the uniqueness and perfection of the way two people fit together. No soreness or pain—only mutual enjoyment that stopped just when you wanted it to keep going forever, so you did it again. I understood this for the first time.
Afterward, we rolled ourselves up inside the comforter and lay together, close and warm.
Just before we fell asleep, Iwakura said, “This was what I really wanted. To sleep right next to someone like this, more than a hot pot.”
“Maybe that’s what it means to be young,” I said. “You have a family to go home to, and they love you, but you feel lonely anyway.” I was speaking from personal experience.
When I woke up, Iwakura had overslept and was trying to get dressed while brushing his teeth. He told me he had to go—could I lock the door and leave the key in the mailbox when I left?—and rushed off.
But before he did, he came and kissed me, still naked under the comforter, and said, “Let’s see each other again before I leave.”
Nestled under the covers, woozily giving myself over to the warmth of my own body, looking up at a gray sky that seemed to promise more snow, I fell back to sleep.
When I woke up again, I felt somber and alone, but also very satisfied. The time was 8 a.m.
Staying here and getting more comfortable in Iwakura’s space will only make it harder, I thought, and told myself to get up. I had my own world to get back to, and my own life to start on.
I lit the gas stove to take the chill out of the room. I was gazing into its flames when I thought I sensed something move in the kitchen.
“I forgot about the ghosts,” I said to myself.
I turned my head and saw the old woman at the sink with her back to me. Slowly, sedately, she was preparing water to make tea. It wasn’t that the kettle moved, or that any water actually boiled. The half-transparent old woman simply made intermittent wavelike gestures that suggested that was what she was doing. Slowly, step by step, the usual motions, in the usual order, with the usual care, no doubt following a warm and comforting method that had been passed down from her mother, and her mother’s mother before that.
I watched her for a while, remembering how my grandmother used to move like this in the kitchen, and feeling like a young child again. Whenever I was home sick with a fever, I used to watch her work. I felt like she’d bring me a bowl of rice porridge any moment now. It was a wistful, nostalgic, warm feeling.
In the next room, the old man was exercising along to the radio. He was dressed in a pair of light cotton trousers and completed each movement diligently, slowly unbending at the hips and knees. He must have thought this routine would keep his body fit for as long as he’d need it. He could hardly have known that the brazier would turn out to be their downfall.
The two of them would have lived modestly, always greeted their tenants by name, collected everyone’s rents regularly and noted them down in a ledger, and gone out once a month to the same restaurant to indulge modestly in the same meal.
Why, there’s no need to be afraid of them. They don’t mean to be dead. They’ll simply keep on living the way they always did, forever.
My thoughts turned to Iwakura, under the covers here in this apartment, being with them quietly, keeping an eye on them, giving them space. I thought about his kind, parched heart, and thought I might be starting to have real feelings for him. My body, of course, still felt him everywhere. As weak, nice, and immature as he was, he was a man, and made love to me like one.
The old woman was still making small movements in the kitchen, and the old man was still doing his exercises. They looked intimate and peaceful, just like I remembered them from the restaurant.
I got dressed slowly so as not to disturb them, and quietly left the apartment.
At the door, I turned and said, “Thanks for having me.”
But they took no notice, and carried on in their quiet existence.
Iwakura’s plan was to get cheap language lessons until he left, from a French person he knew, and then enroll at a patisserie school just outside Paris once he could speak enough. So he became incredibly busy again, and even on the days when we did see each other at school, we’d only wave from afar, and before I knew it the day of his departure was nearly here.
I was vaguely avoiding him, wanting to put some distance between us.
I hadn’t forgotten him saying, “Let’s see each other again”—although it was more of a “let’s do it again.” I wanted to, of course. I think he did, too.
But I didn’t call or message him.
I was trusting that the right opportunity would present itself.
And on the Friday morning exactly two weeks before his flight, a day of velvety gray clouds and a strong wind, we bumped into each other outside the train station.
We were in thick coats that seemed to draw attention to just how far we had come since summer, when we’d worked together at the bar.
“I’m going to skip my French lesson today. I should pack and get ready.”
Iwakura was looking at me like someone in love. His gaze was hot, and I thought he might latch on to me right then and there. It wasn’t a hungry look, but that of a man looking at something that was important to him.
“I’m going to skip work, too,” I said. “But I want to stop by the bookstore.”
We went to the bookstore, and then had lunch together.
“They’re demolishing the apartment building. Just after I leave.”
“What do you think will happen to them?”
“You saw them?”
“Yeah, they were just going about their day. It turns out they were regulars at the restaurant. I knew them. The man was stretching, and the woman was making tea.”
“They seem harmless, don’t they?”
“They actually made me feel pretty at home.”
“Maybe we should light some incense for them, or something.”
“I think so. I know we’re not professionals, but it seems like the right thing to do.”
We went and bought a single white chrysanthemum and some sticks of incense, as though we were the ones who were an old married couple. Then it came to me.
“What if we make them omurice and pork curry as an offering? I bet they must have missed having it.”
Iwakura said he couldn’t imagine anything more fitting, so we went to the supermarket for ingredients.
Walking shoulder to shoulder on a winter afternoon, dressed casually and holding bulky bags of groceries, anyone seeing us would have thought we were newlyweds, or a nice cohabiting couple. But we were only two people, a little regretful, and soon to part.
We were having so much fun that it made me sad.
Iwakura had already packed up most of his apartment. He told me he’d been offered a room with a family in return for babysitting their kids. His dad had gotten in touch with someone he knew over there.
“Does that mean he’s changed his mind about you going?”
“My old man has. But my mom’s still against it. I think she knows I might not come back. I don’t want to lie, so I haven’t promised them I will. I’ll probably get my own place over there once I can afford it.”
When he talked about the future, his face seemed to come alive. He looked like someone looking toward a world that was about to open up to him—almost like a different person from when he’d been working at the bar and trying to decide what to do after college. I could see in his eyes that training in France would serve him well. I felt happy for him, not jealous or regretful. I much preferred to see him like this, rather than the pale and tired version of Iwakura he’d been.
As soon as we were inside his apartment, Iwakura and I got under the comforter and had sex. Then, still naked, we talked for a while about different things—our hopes and worries, our families, our ideals, and our ambitions for the future.
The sadness hung around us the whole time. No matter what we were doing, the awareness that we’d soon be going our separate ways made me feel cold at the passing of time. Every laugh we shared was followed by a moment of sadness. But we were enjoying each other’s company, so I tried to focus on the present.
When evening came and we got hungry, we found a sauté pan, a saucepan, a knife, and a cutting board from inside the moving boxes that were already packed, and I made pork curry and omurice.
I made the familiar dishes with as much care and attention as I could. The old couple had given my family the privilege of cooking the food that was the modest pleasure that garnished their final days, and the idea that I could offer some comfort to their spirits made me pour my heart into it. Never again would the two of them be able to come to the restaurant or taste their favorite meal. I just wanted to make sure they’d understand what I was trying to say with these dishes: Thank you for coming to us all those years. It was an honor to do this for you.
Most of the food was for Iwakura and me, but we plated up small portions on a paper plate and put them on the windowsill. We placed the chrysanthemum in a paper cup next to it, lit some incense, then put our palms together and prayed for their spirits to move on when the building was torn down. We left them a small bottle of beer, too.
I felt then that I’d done everything I could. It was a light, spacious feeling.
Giving back to those who knew and loved my family’s food—this was another part of my calling.
Just like last time, Iwakura ate up what I had cooked and said it was delicious.
Then, a little more calmly this time, we had sex again.
“It seems like a shame to be apart, when this is getting even better,” Iwakura said. I felt the same.
The ghosts didn’t show. They must have been satisfied with their meal.
I decided to leave later that night, because I knew staying would make me too sad. Iwakura walked me home.
There was something lighter about the two of us as we made our way through the dark streets.
“I’ll write you emails.”
“Good. I had a great time. Thanks.”
We smiled, and embraced. The heat of our bodies inside our coats joined together, and we were very warm.
“It seems strange to be saying goodbye when we like each other so much,” I said, and when I looked up I saw there were tears in Iwakura’s eyes, too.
“We were both too nice to sleep together and keep things casual.”
“The whole point of you leaving the country is so you can stop being so nice, remember?”
“Yeah, but it’s too late with you. You’ve seen everything.”
“Well, if we ever get another chance, then.”
And that was how we left things.
Iwakura stood there in the street in the dark and watched me leave, waving, and waving.
I think it was out of care for one another’s futures that we both stopped contacting each other.
Iwakura emailed me exactly once. Along with a general update, he said:
“No one seems to find me attractive over here.”
The tone of it, the way it seemed to miss the point, brought him back to me so vividly it made me want to weep.
Iwakura standing and looking slightly lost like he always did; the colors of all the skies we looked up at together; the way his hands and fingers had felt on my skin—all of him came back to me in a rush.
There was only one thing stopping us from being really good together, I thought. But now we’ll never see each other again. And the tears were rolling down my cheeks.
Not long after that, I happened to walk past Iwakura’s old block. His building was completely gone, and there was a brand-new apartment building in its place. This, too, was part of my job—to bear witness to the changing of the neighborhood—but this time I felt the loss in my heart. Our hot feelings were now buried firmly in the past, just like the old couple.
May all that lingers find peace, I thought as I walked away.
And sure enough, with the passing of time, I forgot it all.
But then—somehow, eight years later, we’d be married.
Fate had to have something to do with it.
Before that, though, Iwakura spent eight years as a patissier at a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris. I assume, of course, that in that time there were many love affairs, and the joys and sorrows that come with them.
For my part, I fell in love and considered giving up the restaurant to be his wife, but in the end, we went our separate ways and I returned to my calling. It would be a while yet before I was truly in charge at the restaurant, but I could keep the place running for a week while my parents went off to relax at a hot spring.
Iwakura’s mother passed away from a heart attack last April.
I didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t want to impose on the family simply because I’d slept with their son a few times. So in my mind I sent my condolences, and briefly wondered whether Iwakura had come back, but over the years my memories of him had faded along with the rest of my carefree college days, so I didn’t particularly hope to see him.
Part of the reason was that several of our regulars had expressed their interest in me, and thanks to my parents giving me a role as the face of the restaurant, I had my pick from among them, and was just then on the verge of developing something good with one.
The person was training to be a chef, so our plans for the future were compatible. He was big and kind and reminded me of my grandpa, and at the time I was envisioning a future where the two of us would be married.
But that was just when Iwakura and I happened to meet again. Perhaps it wasn’t so unexpected, since we were in our hometown, but the two of us seemed fated to keep meeting at moments when we had unexpected pockets of freedom in our usually full lives.
I was in a café near home, having a cup of tea, when he came through the door.
I noticed the sophisticated colors of his clothing before I noticed it was him.
He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him, but I waved him over and he came and sat down across from me.
I noticed how living abroad for so long had changed the texture of his skin. His right arm had grown strong from making all that pastry, and his shoulders were much more solid than before, and his face narrower, like it had been pared down. His eyes, which had been so soft and kind before, were now the sharp eyes of a man who knew both loneliness and independence.
So this was who he wanted to be, I thought, the person he had to go abroad to become. Now that he was in front of me, it all made sense. I finally saw it. From what he had told me back then, I hadn’t understood what he was looking for.
His smile still lit up his face just like it had before.
“How long has it been? You look all older,” I said.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” he said, and smiled.
Our table was bathed in the light of early summer streaming through the window next to it, and outside, on the corner, people leaving the train station turned onto the side streets of the neighborhood with freshly uncovered arms almost too dazzling to look at. The branches of the trees along the street were reaching upward toward the sky.
“I’ve come back to run the bakery.”
“I thought you would,” I said.
I knew that with his mom gone, there was no way he’d have left his dad to manage the bakery alone.
“Your mom—did you get to see her?”
“Yeah. When she had her first attack, I was here for a month. I visited her every day in hospital, and we took her to a hot spring once she was discharged. She didn’t say a word to me about the bakery. She was just happy to spend some time together. So that gave me some things to think about. It wasn’t the easiest decision, but there isn’t as much keeping me in France now—the restaurant just expanded and took on new chefs, but I’ve more or less finished training them, so they’ll be all right. It seemed like the right time for a change.”
“How’s your dad doing?”
“He’s taken it really hard. It’s tough to see him like this.”
“What’s going to happen with the bakery? Your dad on cake rolls, you doing other cakes?”
“I thought about it, but our cake rolls are what we’re known for, so I’m going to keep my other pastries for Christmas or special orders. Now that I know better, I can see there’s something to the old man’s methods and techniques. I mean, all that training, and I still can’t bake a better cake roll.”
“Do you think you could?”
“I might, if I keep learning from him. He’s a real artist—he tells me the sponge is done when it’s moist, but not hot to the touch; or the batter’s different every day, but not because of the temperature or the weather, but because of something he can’t explain! And he always knows just when to add the oil to the mix, and how much. I used to think his opinions were just things he’d cobbled together to make up for not having had the proper training, but in Paris, I learned a lot more from the ways things were done at each place I worked than I ever did at school. So I started to think about what my old man says in the same way. Who knows? Maybe my work will be to carry on what he’s created with his cake rolls. I want to understand how he does it and make it mine. But I’ll bake other things, too. He seems to like it when I show him things I’ve picked up. Maybe we’ll come up with some new cakes together. He’d like that.”
“How will the store carry on without your mom?”
“It’s a concern. People loved buying cakes from her. Now that it’s just the two of us, we can change a few things, maybe go with a slightly more plainspoken tone. It might take some time, but—we couldn’t do it her way even if we stood on our heads. Hers was a real gift. But I learned a lot while I was over there about valuing your traditions and your elders and your relationships, and that opened my eyes a little. And now that I can see myself as an equal with the old man, that means I can pull my weight, too. I even learned to cook some French food.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to open a French restaurant and compete with us, Iwakura. Times are hard enough already.”
“I didn’t say I was good. Anyway, your place is doing okay, isn’t it?”
“The old regulars are so picky about the taste. When I’m the only one in the kitchen, some of them let me know just how much further I’ve got to go.”
“Well, I know you’ve got nothing to worry about there, Secchan.”
We were speaking familiarly now, and it felt bittersweet.
And then, suddenly, time was flowing differently than usual.
It didn’t turn back, or even pause.
Time simply floated open and started to expand. Time held the two of us in light, inside a space so vast it might have reached the heavens, and turned eternal.
I assumed this experience was something personal and internal to me, but when I asked Iwakura later, he’d had the exact same feeling.
Just then, of course, there wasn’t even a hint of sexual desire between us.
In the window where we drank tea, the light fell and covered us in a buoyant, warm yellow glow. It was a light we’d been waiting for—that told our parched hearts this was what had been missing.
The best words I can find to describe it is to say I felt we were being blessed.
It was the feeling of finally finding what we’d been looking for after so long.
Because we’d been so young before, I’d assumed it had been the sex that connected us, but I was wrong. Just talking casually together like this made an indescribable aliveness come bubbling up from deep inside me, and I recognized it, and knew it was right.
The feeling turned into certainty, and the two of us sat there smiling and satisfied. This time we were in now would never end, we thought. This was it. We’d known something was missing, felt that something had been lost. Deep in our hearts we knew what it was, but we never suspected it was this. My soul spoke, and what it said was: We’ve been lonely for so long, and this was why. We were so lonely we couldn’t even know it.
The lights inside us both, the clean and clear light outside, and the light that now glowed between us all joined together as one, and lit the way to the future.
We exchanged numbers, and a week later, Iwakura called and said, “If you’re single, let’s get married.”
I’d been thinking the same, so I immediately agreed. “I’m unattached just now, and there’s a hole here.”
At the other end of the line, Iwakura burst out laughing.
We made arrangements for the marriage quickly, on the understanding that each of us would continue running our respective family business. My parents were a little surprised, but they soon came around to the idea.
The only changes we would be making at the restaurant would be to hire a professional chef—not the one who was in love with me—to assist me so I could have more of a family life, and to add cake rolls to the menu.
I carefully wrote “Cake roll of the week ¥600” on the menu board, and we started serving them up on dessert plates I’d made, two thick slices to a serving.
Over the years, I’d often found myself frustrated by quite how long things always seemed to take me. But I kept at it, and tried to accept myself for who I was, and be happy with the life that came with it.
In the end, that turned out to be far less boring than I expected.
When Iwakura said, out of nowhere, “I almost wish we could invite them to the wedding,” I nodded immediately, because I knew exactly who he had in mind. The unfurnished apartment had reminded me of them, too.
We’d decided on Nice for our honeymoon. Since Iwakura spoke French, I couldn’t have been any more excited. He knew all the restaurants and hotels we’d visit. And just like that, my world, which had been so small, got a little bigger. Then we started looking for a place to live, and after a long search, we found the right apartment.
We’d popped in to take measurements for the curtains ahead of moving in.
Iwakura said, “I don’t think we’ll have any ghosts here.”
The last eight years had changed him completely, apart from the ways in which he hadn’t changed at all.
His jackets, which were of a cut that no one in Japan owned, the patisserie tools he’d brought back, hearing him speak French on international calls—all of these actually filled me with hope.
I welcomed these new things coming into my life.
I sometimes worried if he found it boring being with me. I’d always been right here, doing this. The only things I contributed to his life were the unenviable position of having a wife who had her own business, and my omurice. I was convinced he’d rather be with someone who was good with customers, like his mom, or someone with a more impressive or sophisticated career.
I asked him about it a few times, but he said he didn’t find me boring at all, that he liked how he felt at ease with me, and that both my face and my body were more attractive to him now than when we first met.
Admittedly, my body had changed from my unripe, sticklike, girlish figure into a womanly shape. Sometimes when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I noticed the curves of my own waist and thought it was sexy. My bottom was solid, my ankles narrow, and my breasts were round with soft pink nipples. I looked good. It was another benefit of having an active job.
“That old couple—do you think they were able to move on?”
“The omurice and the curry will have done the job, I’m sure of it. Didn’t you say they stopped being able to come to the restaurant toward the end, because of the old man’s leg?”
“That’s what my mom said. I guess they would have enjoyed it.” I smiled.
I might never get another chance to cook a meal as powerful as that one, but even now, when I got tired and my arms felt heavy, or I started to overseason my dishes, I could think back to the intention I’d poured into it—the old couple’s final supper on earth, and my last send-off for Iwakura—and remind myself what it was all for.
Being a cook meant any meal I made could end up being someone’s last.
“Once we settle in, I’m thinking of starting a delivery service for old folks living alone in the neighborhood. Put together a cheap omurice bento or something,” I said.
“I want to do something similar. In France, especially outside of Paris, all the shops, even the smallest boulangerie, are there primarily to serve the community. Customers who come from far away are important, too, but there’s real pride in maintaining the quality of local life,” Iwakura said. “Let’s find a way to combine the restaurant and the bakery someday.”
“I’d love to find a bigger lot, so we can live there, too.”
But until then, this apartment would be our home.
The room was sunny and airy, and it had a view of the trees in the park, and the happy voices of children drifted over from the nearby elementary school. It was very different from Iwakura’s old run-down apartment. We were older now, and there were probably no ghosts here.
We’d needed to be apart, and grow older and wiser, to arrve at that moment of realization when we understood that the simple time we shared—sitting in a warm kotatsu with someone close to you, talking, or being together in silence, maybe feeling impressed sometimes, or at other times a little bored, never getting irritated or pushy—was far more important than fighting and then making up again passionately, or sex.
To feel that the latter was important, in itself, now seemed like youth. That must have been why neither of us had seen the other’s value back then. At the same time, we must have known it somewhere to have been able to recognize it years later.
That said, I knew that for us, even as we’d go on to busy ourselves in our daily lives, the existence of a “hole” and a “pole” would remain—unbeknownst to others—at the core of our relationship. And we’d spend our nights holding forth on unimportant topics, or having sex, and grow old together. We’d nurture our connection, which was neither simply physical nor solely emotional, and that would expand the space that belonged to just the two of us until there was no escaping it.
We’d travel first to Nice and then to many other places, and find out just how sexually compatible we were.
But we’d never have better than that time, under the cloudy sky, wrapped in the comforter, in the warm room inhabited by ghosts.
The feeling we found then would always be the foundation of our relationship.
And someday we’d disappear like that old couple, leaving barely a trace.
This life seemed simple at first glace, when in fact it existed within a flow that was far bigger, as vast as the seven seas. My dead grandma was part of it now, and Iwakura’s mom. The old couple, too. All of them had lived within that flow, and though each of us might strive or struggle against the current, we were all, in the end, part of the same water.
My only question is: What if—just if—I hadn’t seen the old couple in Iwakura’s apartment that day? Would he and I be married now?
Somehow, I think the answer is no.
It’s only a hunch, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.