The Tatami Galaxy: a Novel, page 20
“It hurts, it hurts, it really hurts. Do something!” he moaned. “Nnngh!”
“Quit your whining. It’s your fault for climbing up on the railing,” I said. “The ambulance will be here soon, so just deal till then.”
I could see that Jogasaki, kneeling next to whining Ozu, was struggling with what to do with his anger. And even I didn’t have the heart to take Ozu and his broken leg back to Shimogamo Yusuiso to put him through the coffee grinder.
Eventually Ozu’s master alighted on the riverbed. He must have walked at a leisurely pace from Shimogamo Yusuiso.
“Sheesh. I was wondering where you were,” he said.
“Ozu’s hurt, Higuchi. His leg is broken,” said Jogasaki.
“Pathetic wretch.”
“But Master, this was all for your sake.”
“You’re quite a promising disciple, Ozu,” said Ozu’s master.
“Thank you, Master.”
“But you’re supposed to work to the bone for your master, not break it. You’re an incorrigible idiot.”
Ozu cried softly.
It took about five minutes for the ambulance to arrive at the end of Kamo Ohashi.
Jogasaki ran up the bank and came down with the medical techs. The techs wrapped Ozu in a blanket and loaded him onto a stretcher with skills pros could be proud of. It would have been hilarious if they had just thrown him into the river like that, but emergency workers are admirable individuals who sympathize with all injured people equally. Ozu was packed onto the ambulance with a gravity disproportionate to his nasty ways.
“I’ll go with Ozu,” said his master, and he leisurely boarded the ambulance.
A moment later, it had driven away. Jogasaki seemed to have already forgotten about Ozu and left the riverbed saying he was going to go procure a car to use to pick up Kaori.
The only ones left were Akashi on the bench, holding her pale face, and me, sopping wet.
“Are you okay?” I asked Akashi.
“I really can’t handle moths,” she groaned, still seated on the bench.
“Why don’t we get some tea or something to calm down?” I suggested.
It’s not as if I was thinking anything so rude as stooping to using her weakness against moths to my advantage. Seeing her so pale, I was offering out of concern.
I walked to the nearest vending machine and bought two hot coffees, which we drank together. She gradually relaxed. I told her about my fatal bond with Ozu. And I told her about his evil doings I’d discovered in the past few days. I mentioned the name of the fictional maiden, Keiko Higuchi, and said that Ozu deserved to die for the crime of toying with my heart, but then Akashi suddenly apologized.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry—but I think I’m partly to blame. I’ve been writing the letters because Ozu asked me to.”
“What!”
“I read the book you recommended, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” A pleasant smile appeared on her face. “Your letters were good. It seemed like you told a lot of lies. But they were well written.”
“You could tell?”
“Of course, I was lying, too, so we’re even,” she said.
Then with a smile on her still pale cheeks, she said something I never imagined I would hear. “We met at the Shimogamo Shrine used book fair. Do you remember?”
* * *
It happened the previous summer at the Shimogamo Shrine used book fair. The riding grounds stretching north to south alongside the approach to the shrine were crammed full of sellers’ tents, and tons of people were strolling around on the hunt for books. It was only a short walk from Shimogami Yusuiso, so I attended practically every day.
After basking in the charms of summer to my heart’s content, drinking a ramune in the sunlight filtered through the treetops, I strolled among the bookseller stalls on either side, browsing as I went. No matter where I looked, I saw wooden shelves packed with books; it made me a little dizzy. On the cloth-covered benches set up in rows, people who must have gotten book fair sick like me hung their heads. I had sat down, too, dazed. It was August, which meant it was muggy and hot, so I wiped the sweat off my forehead with a handkerchief.
Straight ahead was the used bookshop Gabi Shobo’s stall. Sitting in the folding chair at the entrance was a woman with her intellectual brow furrowed. I rose from the bench, and when I made eye contact with her while looking through Gabi Shobo’s stacks, she bowed her head slightly. I bought Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. I was walking away afterward when she got up and came after me.
“Here, you can use this,” she said, handing me a paper fan with the words “Summer Book Fair” printed on it.
That was Akashi.
I remembered fanning my sweaty face as I left Tadasu no Mori carrying Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
* * *
Jogasaki came over that night to pick up Kaori and resume his tranquil love life.
From what Ozu told me, Jogasaki was also very popular with human women and had racked up experience as the interest took him while in the club. Given his looks, it’s no surprise. What I don’t understand is why someone who has no lack of relationships with real women would be so attached to Kaori. He had been living with her for two years; he’s hardcore.
“There’s meaning in living alongside a doll you care for. Owning a love doll is entirely different from dating a woman. A barbarian like you who only sees them as tools for sexual gratification probably can’t understand, but what we’re dealing with is a highly evolved form of love.” That was Ozu’s take.
From my four days living with her, I have the feeling I understand, but I realize it’s not a realm a clumsy guy like me should go stepping into. Yes, I’ll choose a human black-haired maiden. Like Akashi, for example.
Ozu’s master continues to live on the second floor of Shimogamo Yusuiso, so I run into him sometimes. He wears that navy yukata and lives a quiet, leisurely life. Akashi continues to visit him. “He is somewhat admirable—key word ‘somewhat’—but still” was her appraisal.
He said to me, “Why don’t you become a disciple, too?” so I’m considering it. My first reservation is that I have no idea what I’d be a disciple of. My second reservation is that I’d be Ozu’s junior.
The other day I had hot pot at Higuchi’s and saw Hanuki.
“Small world,” she said.
I don’t know the details of the fight between Higuchi and Jogasaki that led to the plot to abduct Kaori. But stealing Kaori was deemed a rule violation. While Ozu was in the hospital, Akashi took over Ozu’s role with aplomb and rebuilt Jogasaki’s bicycle into a quincycle in a single night.
* * *
Following those events, Akashi and I grew closer.
So, considering the outcome, Ozu’s evil deeds had a silver lining—not that that means I’m interested in forgiving him. All I got out of it was something else to talk about at English school, so it’s totally not worth it. But I’m sure my classmates will give me a round of applause for delivering this most recent development.
How my relationship with Akashi developed after that is a deviation from the point of this manuscript. Therefore, I shall refrain from writing the charming, bashfully giddy details. You probably don’t want to pour your time down the drain reading such detestable drivel, anyhow.
There’s nothing so worthless to speak of as a love mature.
* * *
It’s not fair for you to assume that I’d naively approve of my past just because there have been some new developments in my student life lately. I’m not the kind of man who would so readily affirm his past mistakes. Certainly I considered giving myself a big, loving embrace, but regardless of how it would go with a black-haired maiden of a tender age, who would have any interest in hugging a mess of a twenty-something guy? Driven by that inescapable anger, I firmly refused to give my past self salvation.
I can’t shake the feeling that I never should have signed up for the Mellow softball club at the foot of that fateful clock tower. I think about what could have happened if I had chosen something else. If I had chosen the film club, Ablutions, or answered that bizarre ad for a disciple, or if I had joined that underground organization Lucky Cat Chinese Food, I would have had a very different couple of years. At least, it’s clear that I wouldn’t be as warped as I am now. I might have attained that elusive treasure, a rose-colored campus life. No matter how I try to avert my eyes, I can’t deny the fact that the past two years have been utterly wasted on a pile of mistakes.
More than anything, the stain of having met Ozu is sure to linger for the rest of my days.
* * *
Ozu stayed in the hospital next to the school for a little while.
I have to say, it felt pretty great to see him strapped into a crisp white bed. He always had such a horrible complexion that he looked like a patient with an untreatable illness, but it was just a broken bone. I suppose it’s lucky that he got away with just a broken bone. He grumbled that he wasn’t able to perpetrate any of the misdeeds he preferred over three square meals a day, but I just thought, That’s what you get. When his grumbles got to be too much, I crammed the castella I brought him into his mouth to shut him up.
“So now you’ve learned your lesson and can quit meddling in other people’s business, right?” I said with my mouth full of castella, but Ozu shook his head.
“No thank you. I mean, what else do I have to do?”
This guy is rotten straight to the core.
“What was so fun about toying with me in my innocence?” I grilled him.
* * *
Ozu put on his usual yokai grin and laughed his head off.
“It’s my love language.”
“Gross—you can spare me,” I replied.
Four
Around the Tatami Galaxy in Eighty Days
Let’s just say I accomplished absolutely nothing during the two years leading up to the spring of my junior year in college. Every move I made in my quest to become an able participant in society (to associate wholesomely with members of the opposite sex, to devote myself to my studies, to temper my flesh) somehow missed its mark, and I ended up making all sorts of moves, as if on purpose, that need not have been made at all (to isolate myself from the opposite sex, to abandon my studies, to allow my flesh to deteriorate). How did that happen?
We must ask the person responsible. And who is responsible?
It’s not as if I was born this way.
Fresh from the womb I was innocence incarnate, every bit as precious as the Shining Prince Genji must have been in his infancy. My smile, without a hint of malice, is said to have filled the mountains and valleys of my birthplace with the radiance of love. And now what has become of me? Whenever I look in the mirror I am swept up in a storm of anger. How the hell did you end up like this? You’ve come so far, and this is all you amount to?
“You’re still young,” some would say. “It’s never too late to change.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
They say that the soul of a child at three remains the same even when the man reaches a hundred. So what good can it do for a splendid young man of twenty-one, nearly a quarter century old, to put a lot of sloppy effort into transforming his character? The most he can do in attempting to force the stiffened tower of his personality to bend is to snap it right in half.
I must shoulder the burden of my current self for the rest of my life. I mustn’t avert my eyes from that reality.
I can’t look away, but it’s just so hard to watch.
* * *
The spring I became a junior, I was living holed up in my four-and-a-half-mat tatami room.
It wasn’t as if I felt out of steam after the rush of the new semester starting, and it wasn’t as if I was frightened of society. I was shut up in my room, cut off from the outside world, in order to retemper myself in a tranquil environment. Having wasted two years smearing my future with mud, I didn’t have enough credits. Heading ambiguously into my third year, the university had nothing for me. I believed that all my rigorous austerities had to be performed on these four and a half tatami mats.
Shūji Terayama once famously said, “Throw away your books, rally in the streets!”
But what I thought at that time was Rally in the streets for what, exactly?
* * *
I’m writing this record to ponder the existence of four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms—something most people have zero need to think about. My reason is that recently, by bizarre chance, I got stuck traversing an endless series of four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms and was forced to think about them so much I wanted to jump from the Kegon Waterfall.
I’m terribly fond of four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms and have been known in some circles as a four-and-a-half-mat tatami-ist. Everywhere I went, no one failed to pay their respects; everyone cast admiring gazes my way. “There’s the four-and-a-half-mat tatami-ist everyone’s talking about,” black-haired maidens would whisper to each other. “Oh, my, now that you mention it, he does have a noble air about him . . .”
But there comes a time when even a four-and-a-half-mat tatami-ist like me has to step outside.
What would drive a man who has such an enthusiasm for four-and-a-half-mat tatami rooms to such a measure?
I’m about to tell you.
* * *
Pretty much the only character in this record is me.
Though it’s terribly depressing, I really am basically the only one.
* * *
It was the end of May in my junior year.
My base of operations was a room at Shimogamo Yusuiso in Shimogamo Izumikawacho. From what I had heard, it had been standing there since being rebuilt after burning down in the disorder accompanying the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate. If there hadn’t been light seeping through the windows, the building would have been taken for abandoned. No wonder I thought I must have wandered into the walled city of Kowloon when I first visited the place on the university co-op’s introduction. The three-story wooden structure caused all those who saw it anxiety; it seemed ready to collapse at any moment. Its dilapidation was practically Important Cultural Property level. Certainly no one would miss it if it burned down. In fact, there was no doubt in my mind that this would be a load off for its landlady, who lived just to the east.
I’ll never forget—it was the night before I left on that “journey.” I was sulking alone in my room, Shimogamo Yusuiso number 110, when Ozu came to visit.
I’d had a fatal bond with Ozu ever since we met as freshmen. After washing my hands of the secret organization Lucky Cat Chinese Food, I was maintaining my solitary status, and the only person I had kept in touch with for any length of time was this rotten hack yokai of a man. Though I loathed how he polluted my soul, I couldn’t cut him off.
Ozu frequented the lodgings of one Seitaro Higuchi, who lived above me, and called him “Master,” and every time he stopped by there, he poked his head into my room.
“Gloomy as usual,” he said. “You don’t have a girlfriend, you don’t go to school, you don’t have friends. What the hell are you trying to accomplish?”
“You better watch your mouth, or I’m going to smack you dead.”
“Smack me, sure, but dead? Why would you do such a horrible thing?” Ozu grinned. “Actually, you were out two nights ago, right? I came all the way here for nothing.”
“Yeah, I did go out the other night. I was applying myself to my studies at a manga café.”
“I wanted to introduce you to this girl, Kaori. I brought her over, but you weren’t here, so I took her elsewhere. Sucks for you.”
“On your introduction? I’ll pass.”
“There, there. Don’t get too down on yourself. Here, I’ll give you this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Castella. I got a bunch from Master Higuchi, so I’m sharing.”
“Huh, it’s not every day I get a gift from you.”
“Well, it’s because cutting up a huge castella and eating it alone is the far reaches of solitude. I want you to get a good taste of loneliness,” Ozu said.
“Oh, that’s what you’re up to? Sure, I’ll taste it. I’ll keep tasting it till I’m damned well sick of it.”
“By the way, I heard from Hanuki that you went to the dentist?”
“Yeah, I had a thing.”
“So you did have a cavity?”
“No, a more profound infection,” I said.
“Liar. Hanuki was like, ‘Only an idiot leaves a toothache for that long.’ Half of your wisdom tooth was gone, right?”
Ozu still belonged to Lucky Cat Chinese Food, the secret organization I had fled, and now he was ruling from on high. On top of that, he hinted that he was involved in all sorts of other things. Most would hope that he would make his energy useful “for society and the world at large,” but he said that the moment he considered the world or society, his joints quit working.
“How were you raised that you ended up like this?” I asked him.
“It’s another pearl of wisdom from my master.”
“What does he teach you?”
“I can’t explain it in just a word or two. It’s too profound,” Ozu said with a yawn. “Oh, so, back when my master wanted a seahorse, I found an aquarium at a garbage dump and took it to him. When I tried filling it up, it sprang a furious leak, and the water came rushing out, causing a whole scene. The master’s whole room was soaked.”
“Wait, what number is your master’s room?”
“It’s the one directly above this.”
I flew into a rage.
Previously, while I was away, there had been a flood on the second floor. When I got home, the water had dripped down to make all of my precious documents—both obscene and not—soggy. But that wasn’t the only damage I suffered. All my precious data—both obscene and not—was lost from my waterlogged computer, vanished into the electron sea. It goes without saying that this incident hastened the decay of my academic life. I thought I would complain, but getting involved with this unknown upstairs resident seemed like a pain, so I had left the matter unresolved.
