after the quake

Junpei learned just before Sala’s second birthday that Takatsuki and Sayoko were on the verge of breaking up. Sayoko seemed somewhat apologetic when she divulged the news to him. Takatsuki had had a lover since the time of Sayoko’s pregnancy, she said, and he hardly ever came home anymore. It was someone he knew from work.

Junpei could not grasp what he was hearing, no matter how many details Sayoko was able to give him. Why did Takatsuki have to find himself another woman? He had declared Sayoko to be the greatest woman in the world the night Sala was born, and those words had come from deep in his gut. Besides, he was crazy about Sala. Why, in spite of that, did he have to abandon his family?

“I mean, I’m over at your house all the time, eating dinner with you guys, right? But I never sensed a thing. You were happiness itself—the perfect family.”

“It’s true,” Sayoko said with a gentle smile. “We weren’t lying to you or putting on an act. But quite separately from that, he got himself a girlfriend, and we can never go back to what we had. So we decided to split up. Don’t let it bother you too much. I’m sure things will work out better now, in a lot of different ways.”

“In a lot of different ways,” she had said. The world is full of incomprehensible words, thought Junpei.

Sayoko and Takatsuki were divorced some months later. They concluded agreements on several specific issues without the slightest hang-up: no recriminations, no disputed claims. Takatsuki went to live with his girlfriend; he came to visit Sala once a week, and they all agreed that Junpei would try to be present at those times. “It would make things easier for both of us,” Sayoko told Junpei. Easier? Junpei felt as if he had grown much older all of a sudden, though he had just turned thirty-three.

Sala called Takatsuki “Papa” and Junpei “Jun.” The four of them were an odd pseudo-family. Whenever they got together, Takatsuki would be his usual talkative self, and Sayoko’s behavior was perfectly natural, as though nothing had happened. If anything, she seemed even more natural than before in Junpei’s eyes. Sala had no idea her parents were divorced. Junpei played his assigned role perfectly without the slightest objection. The three joked around as always and talked about the old days. The only thing that Junpei understood about all this was that it was something the three of them needed.

“Hey, Junpei, tell me,” Takatsuki said one January night when the two of them were walking home, breath white in the chill air. “Do you have somebody you’re planning to marry?”

“Not at the moment,” Junpei said.

“No girlfriend?”

“Nope, guess not.”

“Why don’t you and Sayoko get together?”

Junpei squinted at Takatsuki as if at some too-bright object. “Why?” he asked.

“ ‘Why’?! Whaddya mean ‘why’? It’s so obvious! If nothing else, you’re the only man I’d want to be a father to Sala.”

“Is that the only reason you think I ought to marry Sayoko?”

Takatsuki sighed and draped his thick arm around Junpei’s shoulders.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like the idea of marrying Sayoko? Or is it the thought of stepping in after me?”

“That’s not the problem. I just wonder if you can make, like, some kind of deal. It’s a question of decency.”

“This is no deal,” Takatsuki said. “And it’s got nothing to do with decency. You love Sayoko, right? You love Sala, too, right? That’s the most important thing. I know you’ve got your own special hang-ups. Fine. I grant you that. But to me, it looks like you’re trying to pull off your shorts without taking off your pants.”

Junpei said nothing, and Takatsuki fell into an unusually long silence. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked down the road to the station, heaving white breath into the night.

“In any case,” Junpei said, “you’re an absolute idiot.”

“I have to give you credit,” Takatsuki said. “You’re right on the mark. I don’t deny it. I’m ruining my own life. But I’m telling you, Junpei, I couldn’t help it. There was no way I could put a stop to it. I don’t know any better than you do why it had to happen. There’s no way to justify it, either. It just happened. And if not here and now, something like it would have happened sooner or later.”

Junpei felt he had heard this speech before. “Do you remember what you said to me the night Sala was born? That Sayoko was the greatest woman in the world, that you could never find anyone to take her place.”

“And it’s still true. Nothing has changed where that’s concerned. But that very fact can sometimes make things go bad.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Junpei said.

“And you never will,” Takatsuki said with a shake of the head. He always had the last word.

Two years went by. Sayoko never went back to teaching. Junpei got an editor friend of his to send her a piece to translate, and she carried the job off with a certain flair. She had a gift for languages, and she knew how to write. Her work was fast, careful, and efficient, and the editor was impressed enough to bring her a new piece the following month that involved substantial literary translation. The pay was not very good, but it added to what Takatsuki was sending and helped Sayoko and Sala to live comfortably.

They all went on meeting at least once a week, as they always had. Whenever urgent business kept Takatsuki away, Sayoko, Junpei, and Sala would eat together. The table was quiet without Takatsuki, and the conversation turned to oddly mundane matters. A stranger would have assumed that the three of them were just a typical family.

Junpei went on writing a steady stream of stories, bringing out his fourth collection, Silent Moon, when he turned thirty-five. It received one of the prizes reserved for established writers, and the title story was made into a movie. Junpei also produced a few volumes of music criticism, wrote a book on ornamental gardening, and translated a collection of John Updike’s short stories. All were well received. He had developed his own personal style which enabled him to transform the most deeply reverberating sounds and the subtle gradations of light and color into concise, convincing prose. Securing his position as a writer little by little, he had developed a steady readership, and a fairly stable income.

He continued to think seriously about asking Sayoko to marry him. On more than one occasion, he kept himself awake all night thinking about it, and for a time he was unable to work. But still, he could not make up his mind. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that his relationship with Sayoko had been consistently directed by others. His position was always passive. Takatsuki was the one who had picked the two of them out of his class and created the threesome. Then he had taken Sayoko, married her, fathered a child with her, and divorced her. And now Takatsuki was the one who was urging Junpei to marry her. Junpei loved Sayoko, of course. About that there was no question. And now was the perfect time for him to be united with her. She probably wouldn’t turn him down. But Junpei couldn’t help thinking that things were just a bit too perfect. What was there left for him to decide? And so he went on wondering. And not deciding. And then the earthquake struck.

Junpei was in Barcelona at the time, writing a story for an airline magazine. He returned to his hotel in the evening to find the TV news filled with images of whole city blocks of collapsed buildings and black clouds of smoke. It looked like the aftermath of an air raid. Because the announcer was speaking in Spanish, it took Junpei a while to realize what city he was looking at, but it had to be Kobe. Several familiar-looking sights caught his eye. The expressway through Ashiya had collapsed. “You’re from Kobe, aren’t you?” his photographer asked.

“You’re damn right I am,” Junpei said.

But Junpei did not try to call his parents. The rift was too deep, and had gone on too long for there to be any hope of reconciliation. He flew back to Tokyo and resumed his normal life. He never turned on the television, and hardly looked at a newspaper. Whenever anyone mentioned the earthquake, he would clam up. It was an echo from a past that he had buried long ago. He hadn’t set foot on those streets since his graduation, but still, the sight of the destruction laid bare raw wounds hidden somewhere deep inside him. The lethal, gigantic catastrophe seemed to change certain aspects of his life—quietly, but from the ground up. Junpei felt an entirely new sense of isolation. I have no roots, he thought. I’m not connected to anything.

Early on the Sunday morning that they had all planned to take Sala to the zoo to see the bears, Takatsuki called to say that he had to fly to Okinawa. He had managed at last to pry the promise of an hour-long one-on-one interview out of the governor. “Sorry, but you’ll have to go to the zoo without me. I don’t suppose Mr. Bear will be too upset if I don’t make it.”