The Forest Brims Over, page 10
After a short pause, his sense of reason dismissed the idea of a restaurant that his tongue remembered with a certain relish. It was a small izakaya bar run by a middle-aged couple, with a pair of tables set up on the terrace by the railroad tracks. The food was good—baked potatoes with butter and salted fish, fried chicken flavored with chili pepper, and a variety of other rough but tasteful dishes.
Nonetheless, it would be difficult for him now to return to that restaurant.
None of the establishments appealed to him. Before he knew it, he had gone as far as the end of the main street. Left with no other choice, he made his way to a familiar Chinese restaurant and filled his stomach with dumplings and green onion ramen noodles.
A sigh escaped his lips as he stared at the old tables and their peeling paint.
He knew that he had to get serious about starting on a new work. He was managing to keep relatively busy thanks to all the promotional activities for Garden, his column, miscellaneous book reviews, and requests to write commentaries for other works, but his sense of discomfort was beginning to come to a head.
With Rui gone, his life had become much simpler. His food and living expenses didn’t add up to much, and with no plans to have children or build a separate workspace, he could afford to put the majority of his continued income from Garden into his savings. He would still have to pay off the mortgage, but so long as he was by himself, he wouldn’t need to put much effort into maintaining the house, and he could always sell it if worse came to worst.
In Rui’s absence, a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. His spirit rejuvenated, new ideas flowed through him without limit, and he began to drift freely from one to the next. After all, women were dead weight. Whenever they opened their mouths, they would always insist that they were in the right, and they would impose their own heavy concepts of life, livelihood, love, duty, and whatnot on everyone around them. They practically beat a man to death with it all. They didn’t provide a space where you could easily belong, somewhere like a Sunday park where you could transform into a superhero by the mere act of jumping down from some high place.
But that was probably fine. It was precisely because of the self-righteous oppressive weight that he could measure whether he was good or bad, floating or sinking. It might have been fun to keep playing in the park forever, but it was scary when the sun went down. No one would notice he had become as ephemeral as a ghost.
Now that he had lost the weight of a woman, if he didn’t at least write a manuscript, he felt like the man whom he had worked so hard to create, Nowatari Tetsuya, would simply fade away. He wanted to write. He wanted to start writing something again so he could feel at ease.
But he couldn’t find a way into a story. Even when he was walking down the street, training in the gym, or slurping a bowl of ramen noodles, his next novel was always in the back of his mind. But no matter how he struggled to start jotting down the opening to a grand epic, it would collapse into banal sterility after just the first few lines.
Instead, whenever he closed his eyes, what he saw was Rui, no longer human, rambling incoherently that she loved him—and that was precisely why she couldn’t forgive him.
It was an intriguing sight. Unforgettable. He even felt his own chest tightening in affection.
Romance novels, in his mind, were the domain of women writers. It was one thing for a man to write one or two to showcase his ability, but it was essential for him to have a more concrete sensibility, a greater technical mastery or social outlook. Whenever he received praise for Tears or Garden, his chest choked simultaneously on both joy and bitterness. No, he wanted to respond to such comments. Those works had simply been opportunities for him to catch his breath. His quintessential writing style was completely different.
But try as he might to resist, it seemed that he still couldn’t escape from Rui’s shadow. If she was preparing something deep in that forest, he had no other choice. For him to embark on another work, he would have to go in and retrieve her.
He washed the greasiness out of his mouth with a glass of lemon-infused ice water, and with a strained grimace, stood up from his table.
WHEN HE OPENED the door to the second-floor bedroom, the first sensation to wash over him was one of tedium.
Why did he have to go through all this trouble? Everything about it—from the dense trees blocking his view to the weeds tangling around his legs—reminded him of the night of his living room quarrel with Rui.
Why? Why do you need to do that? She had hurled those unanswerable questions his way like a hail of bullets, leaving him silently stricken with discomfiture and guilt. Forgetting the trivial promises of everyday life, going out for drinks with an acquaintance when she was ill, adapting the things that she did and said as material for his novels, letting himself get carried away every now and then and having a little extramarital affair—he certainly wasn’t proud of those things, but when asked why they had happened, he could only respond that they simply had. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
There were times when all those whys that the woman hurled at him carried an almost barbaric ring about them. She was practically ordering him to dissect himself and remove those unsightly parts from his own flesh. They implied an unconscious arrogance, as though she believed that a human being could be composed of righteousness alone. In the end, dealing with her became so exhausting that he would shut himself away in his study and bury himself in work. The sound of her cries echoing down the corridor from the other room truly grated on his nerves.
The forest in front of him was filled with that same late-night gloom. It was a place that he didn’t want to remember, a place that permitted neither sleep nor escape.
It was all too much.
He crouched down by the doorway leading into the bedroom and stared into the quiet forest. The scene in front of him might have been indoors, but it was strangely bright, enough for him to see several meters ahead, with a slight breeze wafting through.
The window at the back must have been open. Right, he remembered seeing it from the outside what felt like so long ago, but the lush vines and leaves had soon spilled out from the frame, obscuring the window itself.
There were no insects in the forest, no animals—no signs of any life at all. And yet it was unmistakably breathing, trembling, expanding. What on earth was living in here?
The answer was obvious—Rui.
Walking into the forest meant entering her very interiority.
He didn’t want to go. She would just hurl more well-deserved criticisms at him that he wouldn’t be able to answer.
Ah, but he had to. Without her, he couldn’t write his manuscript.
With his hands in his denim pockets, Nowatari arched his back and headed into the forest.
He regretted it almost immediately. How could a ten-mat room feel so ridiculously large?
Though it should have been no more than a few simple steps from the entrance, no matter how far he walked, straddling over bushes and ducking under branches, he couldn’t reach the bed. All that he could hear was the sound of his own breathing and the rustling of leaves as he moved from place to place. It was enough to slowly paralyze his sense of the passage of time.
There soon came a break in the monotony of the forest. In the midst of that swarm of organic matter composed of soft and at times aggressive curves, a mass of straight lines cut into his vision with a clear sense of will as an easily recognizable man-made object appeared. It was a staircase, around two meters wide, built from old stones. And it went down.
There was a staircase in the forest?
No, the bedroom was on the second floor of the building, so it wasn’t surprising that it would lead down, but it was hard to imagine where exactly it might go. Certainly not to the kitchen or living room.
Most of all, it was terribly confusing to suddenly find a stone staircase inside what he had recognized visually as no more than a mere forest. It suggested something underneath where he was standing, some form of structure.
He couldn’t make out what lay at the end of the dark stairwell. But given what his editor had said, this staircase must have been what Rui was building. Frowning, he placed his hand against the wall and began to trudge downward. The pale light of the forest faded away as he sank into a darkness so deep that he couldn’t even make out his own fingertips. He could discern a sound—the steady rhythm of a piece of heavy machinery moving into the distance.
He would normally be able to recognize such sounds immediately, but for some reason, his mind was unusually sluggish. After taking a few more steps, he suddenly realized what it was—a train.
Yes, he remembered coming home by train one day after one of his meetings. Exhausted, he had debated with himself whether to stop somewhere for a drink.
He continued down the steps, one, two, three at a time, until he found himself in the stairwell leading to the ticket gates at the nearest subway station.
Under the magenta sunset, busy figures shrouded in faint shadow were coming and going in front of the station. Pulled along by an invisible thread, he made his way to a local izakaya bar by the railway tracks.
He slipped past the makeshift tables and the upside-down beer cases used for outside seating and entered the building. It might still have been early in the evening, but the establishment was crowded with customers. There was just enough space at the corner of the counter.
When he pulled out the stool and sat down, a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a black apron brought him a hand towel. Unable to make out her voice as she told him the names of today’s recommended dishes, he waved the woman away, muttering that anything would be fine. On the other side of the counter, the reticent master of the house was deep-frying some food.
A young woman carrying a tray stacked with glasses of beer and sours appeared behind the older woman. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans along with the same style of black apron as the middle-aged woman. She had a slim build, but her toned body caught his attention, prompting him to imagine a pleasant sense of elasticity. She could have been a sportswoman, except he already knew that she wasn’t. The kitchen in this cramped establishment was so small that she was forced to peel vegetables crouching down with a bowl on her lap. He remembered her laughing as she explained that working down on her knees and lifting and lowering all those ingredients made for a rigorous workout.
The woman was Rui—twenty years old, still with traces of a girlish innocence about her. He used to come to this izakaya bar every night to flirt with her. The middle-aged couple who ran the establishment couldn’t resist the distinction of an intellectual cultural figure. He might have been considerably older than Rui, the daughter of a relative who had died of illness, but they were happy to approve of his relationship with her.
He couldn’t recall what they had had to eat or drink. He had said that anything would be fine, so it must have been something appropriate. All that his body could remember was a vague sense of fatigue, a feeling of being fully satiated by the food and drink.
The customers in the bar gradually disappeared, until he realized that the owner and his wife were standing beside him with Rui, each of them watching him with equally inscrutable expressions.
It was the woman in the black apron who, with a shrug of her shoulders, spoke up first: “I don’t know how to say this, Mr. Nowatari, but we’re in a bit of a pickle here . . . We’ve had a lot of, well, I suppose you would call them stalkers, hanging around lately. Of course, everyone is always welcome here as a customer, you know? But we’ve had a lot of photographers come to take pictures in secret, asking all our female customers if they’re Rui . . . Just today, one of our customers was in tears, saying she wouldn’t be able to come here anymore. Besides . . .”
She was saying that she didn’t want Rui to work there anymore. The older woman was dissembling, but he knew what she meant. She had already suggested as much several times before.
Hold on, he thought, stopping himself there. This exchange had taken place sometime after they had gotten married, after Tears had been released in paperback. Everything was connected, but it was all out of order.
When they started their new life together, Rui had moved into his small one-bedroom apartment. Their life was a portrait of poverty. To put it simply, their home was too small. He couldn’t write at all while Rui was around, so he appreciated having her out of the house between noon and midnight. In that sense, it was extremely convenient to him for her to keep working at the family-owned bar.
“With all due respect, and as I’ve already explained, this is a matter of basic literacy. Even if my work isn’t prefaced with a message pointing out that it’s all fiction, it’s obvious to the average reader. Otherwise, we would have mystery authors committing murder nonstop and romance novelists having affairs left, right, and center. But that doesn’t happen. Still, the second you describe a town or a character’s workplace, people start jumping up and down thinking that it’s all based on your real life, and they even start poking their noses into your wife’s business. It’s crazy. Why should Rui or I have to change how we live just because of people like that? You should report them to the police. Besides, no book sells forever. It will all die down soon, and idiots like that will stop coming.”
“B-but aren’t they turning it into a TV miniseries? If we end up getting any more curious visitors . . .” The middle-aged woman turned to her husband, beseeching him for help.
Her behavior struck Nowatari as both borderline ridiculous and vaguely nostalgic. She was acting like a frightened raccoon dog.
When it came to couples of the older generation, Nowatari was of a mind that most wives were merely ventriloquist dolls of their husbands. The only things that came out of their mouths were diluted versions of their husband’s opinions and views with an added dose of public opinion—they didn’t have any perspectives of their own. When an outsider brought those views into question and reality came crashing down on them, they reacted like helpless circus animals that had failed to perform. There were various kinds of reactions, ranging from anxious fumbling to a stubborn refusal to accept the blindingly obvious, but what they all had in common was that they were always looking out for the well-being of the hand that pulled the strings.
Unlike the middle-aged woman, who was visibly upset, Rui glanced from her foster parents to Nowatari as though she hadn’t yet realized that they were talking about her. Nowatari appreciated her innocent nature. She was free-spirited and unbound by the trivial promises of the prior generation. She had a freshness that reminded him of a newly hatched cicada or butterfly.
Women were easy to deal with. They might complain every now and then, but they never thought to attack him head-on. Nonetheless, there was another troublesome existence before him.
“You’re spouting some confusing malarkey there, but do you really need such a highfalutin excuse to take care of your wife? You’ve got money, don’t you? Don’t make her slave away in this cheap old dive. Take her home, put a baby in her, and let her raise it in peace, you hear me?”
If you don’t do that, you’re a coward, the man’s rough, crushing tone of voice all but declared.
If Rui was going to stay at home, they would have to move, and if they were going to consider a place where they could raise a child, it would be better to buy instead of rent, but that would take a sizable bite out of his savings. He had been trapped in a long slump after his literary debut, and now that he had finally been blessed with a success, he had hoped that he might be able to have a little fun.
You’ve been using her as free labor all this time, but now that a few idiots are causing a nuisance of themselves, you’re going to throw her out onto the street? Or so he wanted to say, but instead he fought to hold his tongue. These kinds of idealistic arguments mixed with a generous serving of contempt were difficult to rebuff through mere words. If he tried to use logic, he risked being laughed off. As he swallowed his voice, the middle-aged woman nodded in satisfaction, turning with a look of gratitude to her trusted companion. It made his stomach seethe with exasperation.
And so he had no choice but to ask how Rui might draw her time working for them to a close.
As they walked side by side on their way home from the establishment, Nowatari caught a peek of Rui’s youthful profile. She had a refreshing, pale countenance, the kind that wouldn’t let him read her emotions.
The fact that she was showing him this scene from the past must have meant that she hadn’t wanted to quit her job. But if that was the case, why hadn’t she said as much at the time? Nothing was going to come from her dredging it all back up at this late hour.
“Are you happy now?” His voice was tinged with weariness, all but chastising her for having forced him to relive these unpleasant memories.
Rui’s eyes opened wide, and she took off at a run. She darted away without even the slightest hesitation, like a startled rabbit.
“Hey!”
The back of her white T-shirt disappeared down the stairs to the basement of the building that housed the restaurant. Biting back on his irritation, he chased after her.
The hard, dense concrete stairs beneath him faded into something else as he made his way down into the hollow cavern, the soles of his feet registering the feeling of soft wood.
The soles of his feet? He glanced down at his legs in consternation only to find that his shoes had disappeared, leaving just his white cotton socks. The narrow wooden staircase stretched into the distance, with only a faint light up ahead.
Nowatari continued downward.
HE FOUND HIMSELF on the first floor of his family’s kimono store, Matoiya.
A schoolgirl in a sailor uniform and with a sharp but beautiful face stood at the entrance, shrugging her shoulders uncomfortably.
Ah, he couldn’t even remember her name anymore.
Nowatari reflexively contorted his lips into a smile and pointed to the second floor.
