years, he was nominated four times for the Akutagawa Prize, but he never won it. He remained the eternally promising candidate. A typical opinion from a judge on the prize committee would say: “For such a young author, this is writing of very high quality, with remarkable examples of both the creation of scene and psychological analysis. But the author has a tendency to let sentiment take over from time to time, and the work lacks both freshness and novelistic sweep.”
Takatsuki would laugh when he read such things. “These guys are off their rockers. What the hell is ‘novelistic sweep’? Real people don’t use words like that. ‘Today’s sukiyaki was lacking in beefistic sweep.’ Ever hear anybody say anything like that?”
Junpei published two volumes of short stories before he turned thirty:
Most of Junpei’s stories depicted the course of unrequited young love. Their conclusions were always dark, and somewhat sentimental. Everyone agreed they were well written, but they stood unmistakably apart from the more fashionable literature of the day. Junpei’s style was lyrical, the plots rather old-fashioned. Readers of his generation were looking for a more inventive style and grittier storylines. This was the age of video games and rap music, after all. Junpei’s editor urged him to try a novel. If he never wrote anything but short stories, he would just keep dealing with the same material over and over again, and his fictional world would waste away. Writing a novel could open up whole new worlds for a writer. As a practical matter, too, novels attracted far more attention than stories. If he intended to have a long career, he should recognize that writing only short stories would be a hard way to make a living.
But Junpei was a born short story writer. He would shut himself in his room, let everything else go to hell, and turn out a first draft in three days of concentrated effort. After four more days of polishing, he would give the manuscript to Sayoko and his editor to read, then do more polishing in response to their remarks. Basically, though, the battle was won or lost in that first week. That was when everything that mattered in the story came together. His personality was suited to this way of working: total concentration of effort over a few short days; total concentration of imagery and language. Junpei felt only exhaustion when he thought about writing a novel. How could he possibly maintain and control that mental concentration for months at a time? That kind of pacing eluded him.
He tried, though. He tried over and over again, ending always in defeat. And so he gave up. Like it or not, he was going to have to make his living as a short story writer. That was his style. No amount of effort was going to change his personality. You couldn’t turn a great second baseman into a home-run hitter.
Junpei did not need much money to support his austere bachelor’s lifestyle. Once he had made what he needed for a given period, he would stop accepting work. He had only one silent cat to feed. The girlfriends he found were always the undemanding type, but even so, they would eventually get on his nerves, and he would come up with some excuse for ending the relationship. Sometimes, maybe once a month, he would wake at an odd time in the night with a feeling close to panic. I’m never going anywhere, he would tell himself. I can struggle all I want, but I’m never going anywhere. Then, he would either force himself to go to his desk and write, or drink until he could no longer stay awake. Except for these times, he lived a quiet, untroubled life.
Takatsuki had landed the job he had always wanted—reporting for a top newspaper. Since he never studied, his grades at university were nothing to brag about, but the impression he made at interviews was overwhelmingly positive, and he had pretty much been hired on the spot. Sayoko had entered graduate school, as planned. Life was all smooth sailing for them. They married six months after graduation, the ceremony as cheerful and busy as Takatsuki himself. They honeymooned in France, and bought a two-room condo a short commute from downtown Tokyo. Junpei would come over for dinner a couple of times a week, and the newlyweds always welcomed him warmly. It was almost as if they were more comfortable with Junpei around than when they were alone.
Takatsuki enjoyed his work at the newspaper. They assigned him first to the city desk and kept him running around from one scene of tragedy to the next, in the course of which he saw many dead bodies. “I can see a corpse now and not feel a thing,” he said. Bodies severed by trains, charred in fires, discolored with age, the bloated cadavers of the drowned, shotgun victims with brains splattered, dismembered corpses with heads and arms sawed off. “Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we’re alive, we’re all the same once we’re dead,” he said. “Just used-up shells.”
Takatsuki was sometimes too busy to make it home until morning. Then Sayoko would call Junpei. She knew he was often up all night.
“Are you working? Can you talk?”
“Sure,” he would say. “I’m not doing anything special.”
They would discuss the books they had read, or things that had come up in their daily lives. Then they would talk about the old days, when they were all still free and wild and spontaneous. Conversations like that would inevitably bring back memories of the time when Junpei had held Sayoko in his arms: the smooth touch of her lips, the smell of her tears, the softness of her breasts against him, the transparent early autumn sunlight streaming onto the tatami floor of his apartment—these were never far from his thoughts.
Just after she turned thirty, Sayoko became pregnant. She was a graduate assistant at the time, but she took a break from her job to have a baby. The three of them came up with names, but they settled in the end on Junpei’s suggestion—“Sala.” “I love the sound of it,” Sayoko told him. There were no complications with the birth, and that night Junpei and Takatsuki found themselves together without Sayoko for the first time in a long while. Junpei had brought over a bottle of single malt to celebrate, and they emptied it together at the kitchen table.
“Why does time shoot by like this?” Takatsuki said with a depth of feeling that was rare for him. “It seems like only yesterday I was a freshman, and then I met you, and then Sayoko, and the next thing I know I’m a father. It’s weird, like I’m watching a movie in fast-forward. But you wouldn’t understand, Junpei. You’re still living the same way you did in college. It’s like you never stopped being a student, you lucky bastard.”
“Not so lucky,” Junpei said, but he knew how Takatsuki felt. Sayoko was a mother now. It was as big a shock for Junpei as it was for Takatsuki. The gears of life had moved ahead a notch with a loud
“I couldn’t tell you this before,”Takatsuki said, “but I’m sure Sayoko was more attracted to you than she was to me.” He was pretty drunk, but there was a far more serious gleam in his eye than usual.
“That’s crazy,” Junpei said with a smile.
“Like hell it is. I know what I’m talking about. You know how to put pretty words on a page, but you don’t know shit about a woman’s feelings. A drowned corpse does better than you. You had no idea how she felt about you, but I figured, what the hell, I was in love with her, and I couldn’t find anybody better, so I had to have her. I still think she’s the greatest woman in the world. And I still think it was my right to have her.”
“Nobody’s saying it wasn’t,” Junpei said.
Takatsuki nodded. “But you
“Yeah, OK, OK,” Junpei said, “but I still don’t
“Exactly. When it comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t
“Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.”
“Anyhow, now there’s four of us,” Takatsuki said with a kind of sigh. “I wonder, though. Four of us. Four. Can that number be right?”
2
