I found the letter in my mailbox as I was leaving my apartment and read it at my desk at the office.
The postmark was obliterated beyond legibility. I tore open the flap. Inside the envelope was a check for one hundred thousand yen, a piece of paper with a woman’s name and address, and a black-and-white photograph of sheep. The letter was written on the same pale-green stationery as before and the check was drawn on a bank in Sapporo. Which would mean that the Rat had crossed further north to Hokkaido.
The bit about snowslides didn’t register with me, but it did strike me, as the Rat himself had said, as an honest letter. Besides, nobody sends a check for one hundred thousand yen as a joke. I opened my desk drawer and tossed in the whole lot, envelope and all.
Maybe it was because my marriage was falling apart at the time, but spring that year had no joy for me. My wife hadn’t come home in four days. Her toothbrush by the washbasin was caked and cracked like a fossil. The milk in the refrigerator smelled sour, and the cat was always hungry. A lazy spring sun poured in on this state of affairs. At least sunlight is always free.
A long, drawn-out dead-end street—probably just what she meant.
The Song Is Over
It was June before I returned to the town.
I cooked up some reason to take three days off and took the Bullet Train early one Tuesday. A white short- sleeved sports shirt, green cotton pants worn through at the knees, white tennis shoes, no luggage. I’d even forgotten to shave after getting up that morning. It was the first time I’d put on tennis shoes in ages and the heels were worn through crooked. I’d been walking off-center without knowing it.
Boarding a long-distance train without any luggage gave me a feeling of exhilaration. It was as if while out taking a leisurely stroll, I was suddenly like a dive-bomber caught in a space-time warp. In which there is nothing: no dentist’s appointments, no pending issues in desk drawers, no inextricably complicated human involvements, no favors demanded. I’d left that behind, temporarily. All I had with me were my tennis shoes with their misshapen rubber soles. They held fast to my feet like vague memories of another space-time. But that hardly mattered. Nothing that some canned beer and dried-out ham sandwiches couldn’t put out of mind.
It had been four years. Four years ago, the return home had been to take care of paperwork related to the family registry when I got married. When I thought back on it, what a pointless trip! I thought it was all paperwork. The problem was that nobody else thought it. It comes down to the different ways in which minds work. What’s over for one person isn’t over for another. But the path splits in two different directions, and so you end up apart.
From that point on there was no hometown for me. Nowhere to return to. What a relief! No one to want me, no one to want anything from me.
I had a second can of beer and caught thirty minutes of shut-eye. When I woke up, that initial carefree sense of release was gone. The train moved on, and as it did, the sky turned a rain-gray. Beneath which stretched the same boring scenery. No matter how much speed we put on, there was no escaping boredom. On the contrary, the faster the speed, the more headway into boredom. Ah, the nature of boredom.
Next to me sat a business type in his mid-twenties, engrossed in a newspaper, hardly moving the whole time. Navy-blue summer suit, not a wrinkle. Starched white shirt, just back from the cleaners. Shiny black shoes.
I looked up at the ceiling of the car and puffed on a cigarette. I made mental lists of all the songs the Beatles ever recorded. Seventy-three titles before I ran out. I wonder how many numbers Paul McCartney himself would remember? I stared out the window awhile, then shifted my eyes back to the ceiling.
I was twenty-nine years old. In six months my twenties would be over. A whole decade since living here. One big blank. Not one thing of value had I gotten out of it, not one meaningful thing had I done. Boredom was all there was.
How were things before? Surely there had to have been something positive. Had there been anything that really moved me, anything that really moved anyone? Maybe, but it was all gone now. Lost, perhaps meant to be lost. Nothing I can do about it, got to let it go.
At least I was still around. If the only good Indian is a dead Indian, it was my fate to go on living.
What for?
To tell tales to a stone wall?
Really, now.
“Why stay in a hotel?” J asked when I wrote my hotel number on the back of a matchbook and handed it to him. “You’ve got a home, haven’t you? Why not stay there?”
“It’s not my home anymore,” I said.
J didn’t say anything to that.
With three plates of snacks lined up in front of me, I drank half my beer, then pulled out the Rat’s letters and handed them to J. He wiped his hands on a towel, read the two letters through quickly before going over them again carefully, word by word.
“Hmm, alive and kicking, is he?”
“He’s alive, all right,” I said, taking another sip of beer. “But you know, before I do anything else, I’ve got to shave. You have a razor and some shaving cream you could lend me?”
“I do,” said J, bringing out a travel kit from behind the counter. “You can use the washroom, but there’s no hot water.”
“Cold water’s fine,” I said. “As long as there’s no drunk woman sprawled out on the floor. Makes it hard to shave.”
J’s Bar had completely changed.
The old J’s Bar had been a dank place in the basement of an old building by the highway. On summer nights with the air conditioner going, a fine mist would form. After a long bout of drinking, even your shirt would be damp.
J’s real name was some unpronounceable Chinese polysyllable. The nickname J was given to him by some GIs on the base where he worked after the war. His real name was soon forgotten.
In 1954, J quit his job on the base and opened a small bar. The very first J’s Bar. The bar proved quite successful. A large part of the clientele was from the air force officer candidate school, and the atmosphere wasn’t bad. After the bar got its start, J got married, but five years later his wife died. J never talked about the cause of her death.
In 1963, as the Vietnam War was beginning to go great guns, J sold the bar and moved far away to my hometown. There he opened the second J’s Bar.
He had a cat, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, never touched a drop of alcohol. That’s the sum of
