He rolls his head around to loosen his neck, which is stiff from sleeping in an awkward position.
I’m on my back again, pointing my chin at the ceiling.
The woman in the grey suit is looking at her phone again, no longer interested in my husband. Over the music in his earbuds he can just make out the receding noise of the speech on the loudspeaker of the DPJ van. It seems like the two sounds have always coexisted, superimposed on one another. Having music playing when he wakes up robs him of the chance to wonder what music he might want to hear, and actually he doesn’t even feel like listening to music at all right now, so the song in his ears makes waking up in this less-than-ideal spot for a nap even more of a drag.
When he listens to music with earbuds for a while, it gets to the point where no matter what he’s listening to it just sounds like noise pressing on his ear, and he wants to turn it off but he also still wants to be listening to music, and he gets confused about what it is he wants to do. When he was in his early twenties he would put in earplugs instead, the colour of orange and yellow sink sponges. He never knew where he put his earplugs and was always buying new ones. Then he’d find the old ones in his bag or his pockets.
Now he’s thirty.
He was sleeping with his glasses on, so now the lenses are smudged with the body oil of his arm. He happens not to be wearing the jeans he always wears, so his lens cloth isn’t in his pocket. When he bought the ¥5,900 Zoff glasses, the clerk warned him only to use a lens cloth and not to use napkins like the kind on the tray because they would scratch the lenses, and normally he’s careful to do that but this time he has no other option so he takes a napkin and rubs the oiliness off. He puts his glasses back on, then notices the woman in the grey suit sitting at the counter to his right, tapping out a text, and looks at her.
Her body is solid and largish, her froggy eyes bulging, which I would say is his type. The reason I would say that is because she is me, hair shorter than it is now, when I was half a year into the job at a small advertising-design firm and I would go to Becker’s for breakfast. She turns her eyes back to her phone, where she’s been typing for some time. I can’t read the long passage she’s written out. But I know what it says, it’s a draft of the longer version of the bland little text I sent before, the real version, not just long but full of love and appreciation for him, with nothing about how tired my body feels, no complaints about whatever weird problems I’m having, just my honest feelings put into words in a long message.
But I can’t read the words that are written there.
She looks at him intermittently, which breaks the flow of her writing, and she loses the thread. She erases the whole thing. She gets down off the stool, rights the fallen shoe and wriggles her feet in. Then she steps away. My husband glances over at her large ass. She heads down the stairs. He starts to thumb his phone. Writing a message.
My phone vibrates. Of course it’s just a phantom buzz.
At that moment I register movement in the kitchen. Almost immediately I see it: an unusually large cockroach.
She leaves Becker’s, but instead of going to the office she goes back to the station. The Sobu Line headed for Shinjuku arrives almost immediately. Until a little past Ichigaya the track runs along the green water of the outer moat. The far bank is a grassy slope with trees planted at regular intervals, and partway up the slope it becomes a stone wall, the top of which runs beside the road above. Many of the buildings along the road have signs saying they’re print shops and tutoring centres.
I throw my phone at the cockroach, even though there’s no way I’ll ever hit it. The cover slides off and the battery pops out, still held by the battery ribbon.
The cockroach is unhurt, of course. It scuttles up the face of the fridge, past the lower compartment and almost to the middle of the upper compartment, when it stops. I bet it was the roach that knocked over the beer cans.
I get up from the futon, wanting to kill the cockroach. I grab the help-wanted weekly off the floor and roll it up tightly, back into the tube it once was. The roach darts from the fridge to the wall, scurrying along near the ceiling into the room where I was lying. The grey suit is in a cabinet in the room, the hardest one to reach by far which is fine because all we have in there are things we never take out, old letters, my husband’s old game consoles and cartridges, my work from art school, my grey suit which I didn’t bother to hang on a hanger but is at least in the plastic bag it came in, I think. I’m pretty sure the suit is stuffed in there. By now it’s probably covered in mould. The cockroach slips into the drawer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOSHIKI OKADA is a hugely admired playwright, director and novelist. Born in Yokohama in 1973, he formed the chelfitsch theatre company in 1997. Since then he has written and directed all of the company’s productions, and has come to be known for his hyper-colloquial dialogue and staccato choreography. His play Five Days in March, on which the first story in The End of the
