Casualties

ALEX KERR

In Sanda Yoshio’s neighborhood in Kobe, there is a large pub-restaurant that survived the earthquake. It stands alone in the middle of an empty block that used to be crowded with shops and houses, and since it is the only cheap drinking spot in the area, it is very popular with students and salarymen relaxing after work. Recently it is the setting for Yoshio’s stories.

Yoshio has been telling me stories since I first met him when he was eighteen. I have never seen him in Kobe or with his family, so I don’t know if any of what he tells me is true. It seems improbable that one youth should have so many adventures, when the chance of adventure in well-behaved modern Japan is relatively slight.

On the other hand, Yoshio is a complete outsider. His family owns large plots of choice Kobe real estate, making him extremely rich. So his life will not follow the typical career path of most of his fellow students—university, salaryman, retirement. In addition he has lived abroad, speaks English and French fluently, and likes foreigners—all of which sets him up to have adventures.

Yoshio looks ordinary enough. He’s short, round bodied, dark skinned, and wears his hair cut short to his round head. On his flat face, heavy lids swell over his eyes, reducing them to half moons from which the black irises look out, half-obscured. The eyes of a spy.

His most recent story concerns job interviews.

The other day Yoshio met his old friend Higashida in the corridor of their college library. Higashida, tall and lanky, was looking his usual slightly shabby self, dressed in T-shirt and jeans. The fourth class hour had just finished; it was the end of the day. “Let’s go out somewhere for dinner. Tell me all about your job interviews,” said Higashida. So they set out to find a place to eat. For no particular reason they walked toward Yoshio’s apartment, and there being no alternative, found themselves in the pub-restaurant in the empty block.

They took a table in the crowded smoky room, but the atmosphere between them was strained. Higashida seemed distracted. “Sure. Anything’s OK. Fine,” Higashida murmured, while Yoshio ordered. In the end, Yoshio chose the entire dinner; Higashida ordered nothing of his own. Yoshio could see Higashida had something on his mind. He waited.

“So how are your job interviews coming?” blurted out Higashida.

“Just fine at the moment,” Yoshio replied cheerfully. After putting in a few years at some company to gain experience, Yoshio is going to take over his father’s business, so he hardly cares about his interviews.

“I hear you make a better impression if you look the interviewers in the eye,” said Higashida. “But I just can’t do it.”

“It’s easy,” said Yoshio. “When I had my interview with Sanwa Bank, I looked at those tired old salarymen, and I thought, ‘Your bank would be declared bankrupt if the government allowed the truth to be known.’ These bankers have more to be afraid of than I have,” he laughed. But Higashida wasn’t laughing. It struck Yoshio that Higashida’s interviews must be going very badly.

“I’ve been rejected at several places,” began Higashida. “Come on, don’t cry,” thought Yoshio, looking at Higashida’s stricken eyes. Higashida turned his face down. He seemed to be staring between his legs. Then he coughed, and brought his hand up to wipe his mouth.

“Ah! . . .” Yoshio could say nothing more.

Around Higashida’s mouth was a ring of something red and squishy. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. . . .” burbled Higashida, as blood oozed out of his lips.

Yoshio shouted for a waiter, and they called an ambulance. Yoshio rode with Higashida to the hospital. As he lay on the cot in the ambulance, Higashida kept crying and repeating, “I’m a failure, I’m a failure.”

After about an hour in the hospital, an orderly dressed in white came up to Yoshio. “What’s your relationship with the patient?” he asked.

“Just an acquaintance,” answered Yoshio. Which was true. He hardly knew Higashida. He didn’t even know his first name. But even as he said it, he regretted it. “Is this all Higashida ever meant to me?” he thought with a pang.

“What is wrong with Higashida?” Yoshio asked. The orderly replied, “It seems to be an ulcer. He’ll have to stay in the hospital a few days until his condition stabilizes. Let me take you to his room.” Higashida was lying tranquilized on the bed. Even asleep, his features looked drawn and strained.

There were four beds, and only Higashida’s was occupied. “Why not spend the night here?” suggested a friendly nurse. So Yoshio spent the night at the hospital.

The next morning he had to get up early to go to class. Walking away from the hospital in the early morning, his feet dragged and his head ached. He had not slept well. Somehow he survived his classes, and then in the evening he had to go to the station to pick up two friends with whom he had promised to have dinner.

Toyama and Kimura were waiting at the exit. Toyama, the plump one with glasses, always takes the role of leader of their little group. Kimura is good looking, with an angular face, and he dresses well, in expensive blacks and whites, but otherwise he doesn’t have much personality, and tends to hang around Toyama. “Where shall we go?” someone said, and there was only one option: the same pub-restaurant Yoshio had been to the previous night. As they entered, the waiter gave Yoshio a curious look. As the other two sought out a table, the waiter asked, “What happened to your friend from last night?”

“They took him to the Municipal Hospital,” said Yoshio, but he didn’t want to go into the details. He noticed Toyama and Kimura already seated and made his escape to their table. He was exhausted from lack of sleep, and Higashida’s problem still preyed on his mind. “At last I can sit down and relax,” he thought. They began to order. Yoshio glanced at the handwritten menu and recognized two spots of blood from the night before. It was the same table. He tried to suggest changing tables, but his friends were already into their first two beers and were not listening.

Yoshio sat through the rest of the evening in a daze, hardly eating, while his friends drank beer after beer. The plan was for them all to talk about their job interviews, but conversation lagged. Prospects were not good. Large companies-are downsizing by cutting back on the number of new hirees.

“I talked with my older brother, and he says it was completely different when he had his job interviews five years ago,” complained Kimura.

“It’s just a bad period right now. It’ll get better in a few years. We were unlucky when we graduated, that’s all,” said Toyama.

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Kimura. “That’s what my father says.” Kimura’s father is a carpenter in downtown Osaka. “My father says the bureaucrats have ruined the country, and it’s never going to be the same again!” Yoshio thought, “Count on the one from Osaka to come directly to the point.”

Kimura had accepted a job at a local firm that builds high-rise parking garages. The pay was lower than he had hoped, and the job was anything but the elite track, but the job should be enough to afford black and white designer clothes for a few more years. Toyama set his sights higher, interviewing at several big trading companies and clothing manufacturers. But he had not been called back a second time by any of them. It was too depressing to talk about job interviews, so instead of talking, they drank. To Yoshio, the friends on the other side of the table, one wearing glasses, one without glasses, looked disembodied, like people in a movie.

Suddenly Yoshio broke into their conversation. “Have either of you heard anything of Higashida lately?” he asked. “No, why?” answered the one not wearing glasses. “We’re in different years, so we never see him. Anyway, Higashida has no friends.”

Yoshio thought back to the hospital. He had gone through Higashida’s wallet, searching for his mother’s number, so he could call her and inform her about his illness. He dimly remembered that Higashida came from a house with no father. A divorce maybe? As he was looking, a photo fell out of the wallet. It showed a little boy with his mother and father—but where the father’s face should be there was a black smear.

He called Higashida’s mother in Hiroshima, and luckily she was in. Yoshio had heard that she usually worked at nights. She seemed distracted and unable to focus on the situation. Should she come to Kobe? She would rather not, since it would be an expensive trip, and she had to work the next day. But she would come, if her son needed her. In the background could be heard the sound of a train going by. A cheap apartment by the train tracks. “He seems to be all right,” said Yoshio. “The doctor says it’s because he’s too anxious about his interviews. He’ll be out of the hospital in a week. I don’t think you need to come just now. Tomorrow you can talk with him on the telephone.”

Yoshio’s mind was jerked back to the present. Toyama was saying, “Sanda, what’s wrong with you?” “Oh, nothing. Just a lot on my mind. Job interviews. . . ,” Yoshio answered. “I’m bored. Let’s go to my apartment.” Although his friends wanted to stay and drink more, Yoshio dragged them out onto the street.

Back at the apartment, they turned on the TV. It was showing the Thai-Japan soccer match. Yoshio’s friends were soon fervently caught up in the game. “We should be able to walk all over a country like Thailand,” said Toyama derisively. Yoshio began to argue. “What do you mean, ‘a country like Thailand’? Don’t you see what is happening to Japan? While we’re going through a depression, this year China surpassed our GNP. Pretty soon people will be sneering at us and saying, ‘A country like Japan.’ Anyway, why get so involved in this game? Soccer is just soccer.”

That comment threw a wet blanket over the rest of the evening. His friends stayed to see the end of the match—score 1 to 0, which was uncomfortably close for “a country like Thailand.” Then it was time to go. “Please give me a ride on your motorbike as far as the station,” said Kimura to Toyama. “I don’t think either of you should be riding a motorbike,” said Yoshio. “You’ve been drinking. Stay here tonight.”

But everyone was in a fairly bad mood. There was unspoken resentment over the fact that Yoshio, heir to a real estate fortune, did not really care about his job interviews.

Yoshio had to admit that he felt somewhat superior to his friends in that their drab ambitions were not his. But, it also made him feel lonely, cut off from them. As he said to me on the telephone later, “For us Japanese, what else is there to life besides drab ambitions? If you don’t share them, you’re an alien.” Yoshio has his own hidden agenda, which is how to avoid taking over the family business and become a writer. He dreams of writing novels and short stories. But there is a cloud on the horizon: His father has been diagnosed with colon cancer. He never voiced any of these concerns to Toyama or Kimura. But they could sense his distance.

Toyama and Kimura left. Yoshio found himself alone in the apartment. It was his first moment with time to think since the meeting with Higashida the day before. He went into the bathroom and turned on the spigot to fill the bath, and then called me.

It was an inconvenient time. I had guests. I could hear agitation in Yoshio’s voice, but I was in no position to talk to him. I told him, “Eat something. Take your bath. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

Yoshio hung up the phone, and made himself something to eat. He had hardly taken a bite at the restaurant. The phone rang, and he picked it up, thinking it was me. But it was the police. “Hello. Is this Sanda Yoshio? Your friend Toyama has been in an accident. He mentioned your name before he passed out. Was he drinking at your place tonight?”

Instantly on guard against the police, Yoshio answered, “That’s a private matter between Toyama and me. Tell me where he is. I’ll come over right away.” “The Municipal Hospital,” said the policeman.

So Yoshio found himself back at the Municipal Hospital. Toyama was in emergency surgery. It seems that he had got as far as the station and let Kimura off safely, but only a few blocks later ran into a telephone pole. Again Yoshio had to go through his friend’s things in order to find his parents’ number. This time the phone call was to Okayama.

Yoshio had visited Toyama’s parents earlier in the summer when he and his friends had made an excursion to see the town of Kurashiki. The Toyamas live in a large house just outside of Okayama city in an area which was once rice paddies, but is now basically a suburb. The father works at a company that sells plastic packing nets to mandarin orange farmers. The mother stays home all day keeping the house spic-and-span, and the younger sister, also plump and wearing glasses, is finishing her last year in high school.

“Hello. Thank you for everything you did for me last summer,” began Yoshio innocuously. But a late night call in suburban Okayama is a momentous event. Toyama’s mother instantly sensed trouble. She asked, “Has something happened to my son?” All Yoshio could tell her was that Toyama was in surgery, and the doctor said he would be OK. “We’ll drive over immediately,” said Toyama’s mother in a fluster, but Yoshio warned her, “Don’t drive yourself! Then we’ll have another accident. Come by train or taxi. It’s already midnight, so why don’t you wait until the first train in the morning?”

She agreed. Standing in the pale greenish light of the hospital lobby, Yoshio thought about his two friends in the hospital. For poor Higashida, with his dreary family background, becoming an average salaryman was his one avenue of escape. In gray post-bubble Japan, that avenue was looking increasingly remote.

Unlike Higashida, plump, pimply Toyama seemed so normal. He had no obvious family problems. He was the sort of person who would slide through life without a hitch, practically born to be a happy beer-drinking salaryman. But Toyama was just as much a victim of his job interviews as Higashida. If he had been in a better mood, he would have agreed to spend the night at Yoshio’s apartment, and the accident wouldn’t have happened.

Yoshio thought of spending the night at the hospital again, but the same nurse he had seen the night before urged him not to. “Bringing friends here twice in two nights is already too much,” she said. “There is nothing you can do for Toyama before his parents arrive in the morning. Go home. And don’t let me see you here with somebody else tomorrow night!”

Yoshio had a little money left on his telephone card, so he called home to ask about his father’s recovery from an exploratory operation. “You’re father is doing very well,” his mother told him, “But they found malignancies. We’ll talk about it when you come home on the weekend.” Yoshio hung up the phone. The worst had happened. His father’s illness meant that he would have to take up his position at the family real estate company much earlier than anyone expected. The curtain had just fallen on his writing career.

Yoshio left the hospital, head reeling. This time he was too tired to walk. He took a taxi, and tried to avoid thinking of his father and himself. The taxi stopped at a light, and through the window, he could see the pub-restaurant standing in the empty block. Kobe real estate.

He saw his future: “Sanda Real Estate Co. may be worth billions of yen, but I will never see any of that money. My responsibility will be to preserve the business for the next generation. It will be much harder for me than it was for my father. Kobe is losing its importance as a commercial city, and what will happen to real estate in the process? On the surface I will be a shacho, ‘company president,’ but the reality of my life will be working long hours in a smoky office. Just like Toyama, Kimura, and Higashida.” Suddenly he felt not so much an alien.

Opening the door to his apartment, he heard the rush of water. He had left the bath water on, and it was running an inch deep on the carpet! He dashed in to turn off the faucet, and began mopping the floor. Then the phone rang. It was me. And Yoshio began telling me his story.

[1995]