“Excuse me,” he said. He had an unmistakable Kansai intonation. I stopped, turned around, and saw a man I didn’t recognize. He looked a little older than me, and a tad taller. He had on a thick gray tweed jacket, a crew-neck, cream-colored cashmere sweater, and brown chinos. His hair was short, and he had the taut build of an athlete and a deep tan (a golf tan, it looked like). His features were unrefined, yet still attractive. Handsome, I suppose. I got the sense that this was a man who was pleased with his life. A well-bred person, was my guess.
“I don’t recall your name, but weren’t you my younger sister’s boyfriend for a while?” he said.
I studied his face again. But I had no memory of it.
“Your younger sister?”
“Sayoko,” he said. “I think you guys were in the same class in high school.”
My eyes came to rest on a small tomato-sauce stain on the front of his cream-colored sweater. He was neatly dressed, and that one tiny stain struck me as out of place. And then it hit me—the twenty-one-year old brother with sleepy eyes and a loose-necked navy-blue sweater sprinkled with bread crumbs. Old habits die hard. Those kinds of inclinations, or habits, don’t seem to ever change.
“I remember now,” I said. “You’re Sayoko’s older brother. We met one time at your home, didn’t we?”
“Right you are. You read Akutagawa’s ‘Spinning Gears’ to me.”
I laughed. “But I’m surprised you could pick me out in this crowd. We only met once, and it was so long ago.”
“I’m not sure why, but I never forget a face. Plus, you don’t seem to have changed at all.”
“But you’ve changed quite a lot,” I said. “You look so different now.”
“Well—a lot of water under the bridge,” he said, smiling. “As you know, things were pretty complicated for me for a while.”
“How is Sayoko doing?” I asked.
He cast a troubled look to one side, breathed in slowly, then exhaled. As if measuring the density of the air around him.
“Instead of standing here in the street, why don’t we go somewhere where we can sit down and talk? If you’re not busy, that is,” he said.
“I have nothing pressing,” I told him.
—
“Sayoko passed away,” he said quietly. We were in a nearby coffee shop, seated across a plastic table from each other.
“Passed away?”
“She died. Three years ago.”
I was speechless. I felt as if my tongue were swelling up inside my mouth. I tried to swallow the saliva that had built up, but couldn’t.
The last time I’d seen Sayoko she was twenty and had just gotten her driver’s license, and she drove the two of us to the top of Mt. Rokko, in Kobe, in a white Toyota Crown hardtop that belonged to her father. Her driving was still a bit awkward, but she looked elated as she drove. Predictably, the radio was playing a Beatles song. I remember it well. “Hello, Goodbye.” You say goodbye, and I say hello. As I said before, their music was everywhere then, surrounding us like wallpaper.
I couldn’t grasp the fact that she’d died and no longer existed in this world. I’m not sure how to put it—it seemed so surreal.
“How did she…die?” I asked, my mouth dry.
“She committed suicide,” he said, as if carefully picking his words. “When she was twenty-six she married a colleague at the insurance company she worked at, then had two children, then took her life. She was just thirty-two.”
“She left behind children?”
My former girlfriend’s brother nodded. “The older one is a boy, the younger a girl. Her husband’s taking care of them. I visit them every once in a while. Great kids.”
I still had trouble following the reality of it all. My former girlfriend had killed herself, leaving behind two small children?
“Why did she do it?”
He shook his head. “Nobody knows why. She didn’t act like she was troubled or depressed. Her health was good, things seemed good between her and her husband, and she loved her kids. And she didn’t leave behind a note or anything. Her doctor had prescribed sleeping pills, and she saved them up and took them all at once. So it does seem as though she was planning to kill herself. She wanted to die, and for six months she stashed away the medicine bit by bit. It wasn’t just a sudden impulse.”
I was silent for quite a while. And so was he. Each of us lost in our own thoughts.
On that day, in a café at the top of Mt. Rokko, my girlfriend and I broke up. I was going to a college in Tokyo and had fallen in love with a girl there. I came right out and confessed all this, and she, saying barely a word, grabbed her handbag, stood up, and hurried out of the café, without so much as a glance back.
I had to take the cable car down the mountain alone. She must have driven that white Toyota Crown home. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and I remember I could see all of Kobe through the window of the gondola. It was an amazing view. But this was no longer the city I used to know so well.
That was the last time I ever saw Sayoko. She went on to college, got a job at a major insurance company, married one of her colleagues, had two children, saved up sleeping pills, and took her own life.
I would have broken up with her sooner or later. But, still, I have very fond memories of the years we spent together. She was my first girlfriend, and I liked her a lot. She was the person who taught me about the female body. We experienced all sorts of new things together, and shared some wonderful times, the kind that are possible only when you’re in your teens.
It’s hard for me to say this now, but she never rang that special bell inside
