seven when we finished. I was headed for the platform of the Chu¯o¯ line when, unbidden, my feet turned and led me instead to the To¯kaido¯ line, a train came, I got on. I’ll go as far as Atami and then turn back, the Chu¯o¯ Line runs pretty late, it’ll be fine, I told myself, and all of a sudden I felt so alone, I endured the loneliness as best I could, and then, unable to bear it, I got off the train. Manazuru was where I disembarked.
I descended from the platform, walked along a narrow corridor, and exited the gate. The station faced a plaza. The information kiosk had been closed for hours. I asked the taxi driver to take me to a guest house. It’s small, he told me, but it’s a decent place. He let me out in front of the house with the nameplate: “suna.”
I called Mother from the train. What should I put in Momo’s lunch tomorrow? she asked. You can use anything but the chicken in the refrigerator, I started to say, then changed my mind. Use anything, anything at all. I’m sorry, going off all of a sudden, I said. Mother replied, That’s all right. Her voice sounded very distant. I had the sense something was following me then, too, and turned to look, but I was alone, standing in the space between two cars, where I had gone to use my cell phone. No sign of anyone, not even a shadow.
I thought I glimpsed the ocean from the train window. In the darkness, I couldn’t be sure it was the water, or sure it wasn’t. Every so often my work takes me away from home, I leave Mother and Momo alone, together, but I never simply go, without warning, the way I did this time. I don’t stay out with Seiji. He has kids of his own. Three kids, and a wife. His middle child is Momo’s age. Ninth grade.
I rode the bus back to the station, then started out again, on foot, toward the cape.
Surprising, I thought, that they let me stay, without even asking what I was doing there: I had only one small bag with me, and by the time I arrived it was no longer even early evening. I pondered the name on the nameplate, as well. Suna. Odd that it didn’t strike me last night. It wasn’t the sound of the name. It was that I couldn’t think of a given name that went well with it.
The road was straight with a gentle incline. Near the port, it began to trace the line of the shore. Each passing car swerved away, giving me a wide berth. Closer to the station there had been people heading in the other direction, but here the street was empty. I approached a cluster of inns and restaurants serving fresh seafood; beyond them there was only the steadily ascending road. In the inns and restaurants, no sign of life.
I did know who the son’s voice reminded me of. My missing husband, who disappeared without warning twelve years ago—my husband, as he went to sleep. When drowsiness eddied around him like a haze, straddling that threshold, his voice like a child’s. Kei. When he said my name, there was sweetness deep in his voice, a hint of moisture, so that for some reason I heard him, beneath the familiar adult male skin, as someone on the cusp of manhood, a boy, or perhaps a young man, it was hard to say which.
My husband vanished, leaving nothing behind. To this day, I have had no news.
I thought it might be some spirit of the sea that was following me. My husband loved the sea.
I ignored it, forged on toward the tip of the cape. My breathing deepened. Because I am walking fast, I supposed. The small cloth bag, all I was carrying, swung at my side. I bought a bottle of green tea at a vending machine. I had deliberated briefly whether I wanted it hot or cold, and chose hot. I carried it for a time. Then, just like that, the thing that had been following was gone.
The sky is narrow here, I thought. Perhaps it was the sheerness of the mountain jutting up at my right. A bird was flying, a kite. Flying low. A squat finger of rocks thrust out into the ocean; only there did the kite soar up.
I’m settled now, I think. I don’t recall how I lived the first two years after he disappeared. I asked Mother to let us stay with her, accepted any work that came, and gradually I had a life to live. That was when I met Seiji. We became involved almost immediately. What does that mean, anyway? We became involved.
When Momo was born, as she fed at my breast, I thought: She is so close. How close this child and I are. She is closer now, I thought, than when she was inside me. She was not adorable or loveable, that wasn’t it. She was close.
To become involved is not to be close. It isn’t exactly to be distant, either. When two people become involved, and also when they do not, there is, always, a little separation.
A bus passed by. I was getting tired. The bus stop was only a hundred meters ahead, but I didn’t run. The bus drove by without stopping. Another line of seafood restaurants appeared. Seagulls perched on the roofs. Only one restaurant had an open sign hung out, its lights on. Artificial light looks so helpless in the daytime. I went in.
I ordered a set lunch. Horse mackerel sashimi.
The fish wasn’t minced, as it generally is, but sliced into pieces as large as the ball of my thumb and served with finely chopped ginger and perilla leaves. The mixture was sensuously moist and slightly chewy—the cook must have let the fish marinate in soy sauce for a time. I finished everything: the soup, a fish-bone stock flavored with miso, and a heaping bowl of rice.
I was the only customer. The cook came out and gruffly took my order, then went behind the counter and dished out the soup and the rice. He brought the food to me himself. When he leaned over to set the tray down, I noticed a tear in the sleeve of his white uniform that had been carefully mended.
A wide window looked out on the sea. The kite kept flying in the same pattern as before. Seagulls flew by, too. Earlier I had heard the shrill whistle of their cries and the flapping of their wings; inside, the motion was not accompanied by sound, and the absence unsettled me. It was like watching a silent film.
We went to two silent films at the National Film Center, my husband and I. There was a narrator who read the intertitles that flashed on the screen between each bit of action in a dramatic, sing-song tone. He only did the first movie; there was no narrator for the second.
“I prefer it this way,” I said. My husband nodded. Yeah, me too.
Sometimes, of late, I forget him. It’s strange, when his presence used to be so thick. When his sudden departure only made his presence thicker.
I thought it was rain, but it was spray.
I was on the shore, and the sea was a good ten meters away. A strong wind blew. A chill came over me. When we eat, the heat is drawn away from our hands and feet.
“The blood collects in your stomach,” Mother likes to say. Momo’s school must be letting out about now. She has only an hour of class on Fridays. She looks just like my husband. Every few years the pendulum swings: first she resembles me, then him. Since she started junior high, she has looked like my husband. The line of her jaw is sharp, her eyes are large. Her complexion is dark.
The tip of the cape wasn’t far. Suddenly the incline grew steeper. The cliff was gone, and in its place a wood had appeared. A footpath led deep into it.
Again something was following.
This one is a woman. I’ve never told anyone about these things that come and follow me. This includes my husband, of course. Today my memory of him is thick. It hasn’t been this way for a while. An image of his hometown comes to me. The town was near the Inland Sea. On a mountainside. Each road comes to a dead end near the top, leaving the wind nowhere to go, and in those places, especially, the scent of the tide hangs and eddies.
My husband’s mother passed away two years before he disappeared, when Momo was one. His father still lives there, in the same town. We do not see each other.
Did my husband want to die?
Or did he disappear because he wanted to live?
Living, dying. Perhaps he had no such thoughts, either way. The trees grew sparse and the pavement widened. The road ended in a roundabout. That must be the bus that passed earlier, waiting at the final stop. The driver was gone. The door was open.
Suddenly the sky opened up. The waves pounded far below. I saw whitecaps shattering. I saw people, one here, there two,