The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside Read online

  So it comes to you naturally, doesn’t it, this ability to commit to memory? To most people, that’s incredible, and enviable.

  No, it doesn’t really come to me all that naturally. It’s more like an obsession I’ve had since I was a child; a compulsion, if you will, to memorize anything, and I haven’t been able shake it off to this day. What I think is happening is that whenever I memorize, just like any other person, my brain cells are working extra hard, and end up even getting fried. But in my case, I’ve probably become desensitized.

  Obsession? Eriko said dubiously.

  It’s not as serious as it sounds.

  Noticing Eriko’s searching eyes, I immediately regretted the trifling remark I’d just blurted out. Until then, I hadn’t breathed a word about that to a soul, and it was the first time I’d ever even hinted at it so plainly.

  When I stayed silent and averted my gaze to the view outside the window, Eriko suspended her line of questioning and turned her eyes, too, toward the view of the sprawling, lush green rice fields outside.

  While staring at her graceful profile, I felt, for some reason, strange and wonderful, as if my heart, deep down inside, was bubbling with joy. I was reminded once again of the gap I’d felt between her and me when the two of us were returning from President Nakagaki’s wake. It then occurred to me that I had to get closer to her—and no one else—in my own fashion, at my own pace, however insufficient or flawed the attempt may turn out to be in the end.

  The look of happiness, of blissed-out fulfillment clearly shining out of her face at that moment was further amplifying those thoughts reeling in my mind. I felt a certain kind of responsibility, a kind that was unprecedented in my life. It wasn’t unlike the feeling that made me want to burst into tears when I was playing with Takuya by the

  river—the feeling of being wanted.

  When I was little, there was one time when Momma had left me behind, I caught myself saying, unawares. For the first time in my life I was attempting to confide to a soul a part of my past that I hadn’t even disclosed to my sister, or even to Machiko-san.

  Eriko slowly turned her face toward me, and watched me in silence.

  My mother abandoned me once.

  Now that I was recounting, I decided my words should have a more precise impact, so I repeated the same thing. Nevertheless, I wasn’t satisfied; I felt I hadn’t said enough, so I fine-tuned further.

  That woman dumped me.

  I was then inwardly surprised that these words—the very same words that used to freeze my heart and turn my world into a bleak, black-and-white nightmare the moment I uttered them to myself—failed to have much of an impact when I said them in front of another person for the first time.

  I realized, unexpectedly, that I was calm. Perhaps it was Momma’s death that was bringing about such composure in me.

  "I was still two. Momma had just been abandoned by my father, and probably had no idea what to do; she was just a little over twenty then, and was very child-like herself, after all. I think it was just around this time of the year. Momma and I boarded the train together and headed for the town of Hakata, where we were going to have fun at the zoo there; that huge one called Minami Doubutsuen. In those days I used to like animals, and when Momma told me that she’d take me along to a place where I could find plenty of real-life elephants, zebras, giraffes, tigers, and lions, I got so excited the night before that I couldn’t sleep. Once there, I was ecstatic, watching all those real animals at the zoo; so much so that at first I didn’t even realize that I’d actually been left behind. I remember it well. There was this monkey pavilion, and I was tirelessly watching the monkeys, leaning against a low fence. Momma then said, ‘Nao-chan, Mommy’s going to buy some ice cream, so you stay put here, all right?’ I hardly gave her an answer, I think, since I was mesmerized by the sight of the monkeys.

  "After I realized Momma wasn’t returning, for six whole days after that realization, I can’t tell you how much I regretted not having said, ‘I’ll go with you too.’ I kept telling myself that Momma had gotten separated from me because I was an idiot, because I was careless, and because I was a bad boy. To a child, it’s inconceivable that a parent would abandon him, you know. An employee of the zoo came, took me to his office, asked my name, and kindly made an announcement over the PA system, over and over again. You know, the kind that goes, ‘We have a lost boy who is looking for his mom. He’s two years old and he’s wearing a blue shirt. You can find him at our office. Thank you.’ Listening to this announcement, I frantically asked the employee to also mention my name over the PA system, telling him that my name was Naoto. You know why, right? Momma might not realize it’s me, I thought at the time, if the only description she hears is a boy of around two wearing a blue shirt. And if she ended up taking home by mistake a different boy of around two years old wearing a blue shirt, why, I’d never be able to get back home, right?

  "Evening came, the police arrived, and the atmosphere grew stranger and stranger when I was escorted into a police car and driven out of the zoo. Watching from the rear, I saw the front gates of the zoo receding into the distance. I sobbed and began to whine. Because, once I was away from the zoo, Momma would never be able to find me ever again. Still, the police car continued to travel down a pitch-black road unknown to me, and nothing was making any sense to me anymore. Mother used to scold me, after all, that if I left her side without permission, I’d get kidnapped. So I thought that I had, at last, been kidnapped, that because I’d been a bad boy, that day of reckoning had finally come. In retrospect, though, I believe I was taken to the lodging facilities of a children’s welfare center. A kind-looking, middle-aged woman was waiting for me there, where I was served a meal; she even let me have some juice and cake. I was then taken into a tatami room, where I was persistently asked about my name and where I lived. But I was just two, so I couldn’t remember my surname. The lady nevertheless kept asking me eagerly, ‘Naoto-kun, what is your last name?’ I’m sure she was thinking that, once she knew my full name, she could look me up in the public records of residential addresses or the family register. But I didn’t have any idea what a surname was. In the end, for six whole days, I couldn’t recall my last name, Matsubara.

  "How did you get here? Did you take the train? Ride the bus? From which station? How long did it take? What kind of house do you live in? Who’d you come with? What’s your mother’s name? Your father’s? I couldn’t answer a single question the first day. On the second day, though, I began to calm down a little. As the lady drove me to

  various stations, I was able to tell her the color of the train I’d taken, and even that the name of the station I’d gotten off at was Hakata Station. But even in my child’s mind, I understood that such recollections were worthless as clues. The next day, in addition to the lady, a young man came, and he drove us around Hakata’s downtown area. When I burst into tears, the two would say things like, ‘Naoto-kun, you don’t have to worry. Your mother’s going to come get you for sure. There are other kids like you who get lost sometimes, you know. But all their mothers come pick them up in a day or two.’ But on the fourth day, both of them stopped saying things like that, and even I understood that my mother wasn’t going to come pick me up, that this wasn’t my mother’s problem, but my own. By that time, even the lady and the young man seemed to have mostly given up. All they wanted me to do now was to tell them whatever I could remember about my home, my parents, my neighborhood, my friends. When night came, I went into the same room of the same building and slept with the lady, but she went to sleep before I did. So, paying close attention to her breathing, I quietly slipped out of the futon to search my memory, in the pitch-black room, for any flimsy threads of recollections. I was so desperate to remember that I thought my head might catch fire. I tried to remember the name that came after my first name; the name of the town I lived in; the name of the station where I got on the train; the name of the bus stop where I got on the bus to go to this station. By the morni
ng of the fifth day, I’d remembered some of these things. While my surname remained a blank, I remembered that the station was Tabata, that the train was Kumamoto-bound, that the bus was a Nishitetsu bus, and that the bus stop was Asao or Asau, or some such thing. But it still wasn’t enough, I thought; I had to remember the name of some key place, I thought.

  "Around noon on the fifth day, I borrowed paper and pencil from the lady because I wanted to remember the name of the small park Momma used to take me to every day—of course, I didn’t remember the name, but I had a faint recollection of the nameplate at the entrance to the park, and, more importantly, of the kanji characters inscribed in this nameplate. The one place I used to visit every single day was this park, after all, where I’d catch sight of the nameplate throughout the year.

  "Although I made mistakes over and over again, I wrote the character I saw in my mind’s eye. Imagine that! A kid who’s just two, writing a kanji character! It was the first character I ever wrote in my life. Incredible, don’t you think? Bottom line, I learned that a human being could always do something for himself to get out of a scrape, no matter what kind of a situation he found himself in. The character was hikari, the kanji character for light. When I finished writing it I was sure I was right. The place where I always used to play was a park named Hikari Park. Of course, I had no idea at the time about how to read the character of Hikari at all."

  When I finished talking, I was unconsciously looking down. For a while I relished the time that gently flowed by, as if time was something chewable. I’d just spoken something I swore I’d never whisper to a soul as long as I lived. I wasn’t sure anymore, though, about how accurate it was. Up to what point was the memory fact? From which point in the story did my reconstruction of the events—pieced together after growing up—possibly begin? Nonetheless, I was confident that my memory was probably intact, that it was probably, in fact, all factually correct. This was because, after the incident, I’d accumulated memories of everything that followed it, without losing much detail. That one night in July, when I’d concentrated so intensely that I thought my head would catch fire, something had definitely transformed inside me, and evolved. Since then, unless sleep deprivation or heavy drinking inhibited me, I became incapable of forgetting moments and events, no matter how negligible they were. I came to believe that I must never, ever forget about anything; it wasn’t a matter of honing my intellectual capabilities or becoming more perceptive to enhance the quality of my life or some such thing. My survival depended on it. To me, the act of forgetting was potentially critical and life-threatening, and it was out of the question for me to remain passive and entrust my life to the whims and caprices of surrounding circumstances. After all, if there was anything I learned from that little episode of abandonment, it was that if I did forget, I’d immediately suffer a merciless betrayal and lose everything.

  I lifted my face and looked at Eriko. Her face appeared hardened, as if she’d lost all emotion.

  "And so that’s why The Lost World is etched in my mind in its entirety. Come to think of it, the book’s title, and even the name of the park, Hikari Park, is quite ironic, isn’t it? Speaking of Hikari Park, as expected, there was only one to be found in Tobata. So on the sixth day, early in the morning, I was taken to this Hikari Park, where my temporary guardians questioned the mothers who were there with their children and found out where I lived.

  "When Momma opened the door to the filthy, one-room apartment, she saw me standing there, accompanied by the staff members of the welfare center, and glared, her sleepiness blown away. As for what happened next, I

  really don’t care to talk about it."

  Like most decent people listening to such a story, Eriko had her eyes fixed on me, the teller, but she didn’t seem uncomfortable, trying to find the right words to say. Instead, she was reacting to my words calmly, in silence.

  After this incident, I went on, "I became firmly convinced at first that there was nobody who could ever protect me but myself, that to survive in such a terrible world as this, self-protection was essential, not just for me, but for everybody, just like Honoka’s mother used to say to Honoka. But eventually, I came to believe that such a thing was a downright lie. Because I never again could consider myself so important as to merit any protection in particular. Don’t you agree? I’m a human being who was readily abandoned by his own mother, the very person who gave birth to him, you know. How can there be any significant value attached to such a human being? And when I was finally old enough to understand things, I began to wonder why it is that I was unable to forget about that incident. If I could completely forget about it, I could become much happier, I thought. But then again, I thought, there must be something wrong with my personality, something so rotten to the core about it that it made me doggedly hold on to that memory and suffer such an intense grudge that I could never open up my heart to Momma. But a little while later, I realized that even such a notion was wrong. A human being can never look away, no matter what, from anything that’s essential to his life. For example, it’s absolutely impossible to forget, no matter how much you keep deluding yourself, an incident like being abandoned by a parent, or the fact that you’re going to die someday. In the end, once a person with my kind of roots gets wrapped up in himself, he begins to get baffled about why he’s alive. If I try to attach great importance to myself, the moment I begin to try, I get terrified. And that’s why when my younger sister was born, after I entered grade school, I had the idea of taking her away from Momma, and for the next ten years or so, until my sister grew up, I resolved to dedicate my life to her well-being. That way, I’d be able to go on living without being reminded of how worthless I was, right? I told you once, didn’t I? That I didn’t believe in families? You see, that’s because, in my eyes, the so-called ordinary family you see every day isn’t a family at all. For a mother to truly be a mother, for a father to truly be a father, for an older brother to truly be an older brother, and for a younger sister to truly be a younger sister, each of them has to make drastic sacrifices for the other. That, I believe, is key. That, I believe, is what makes a family a family.

  Just as Kohei died for Raita, and just as Raita had become convinced that a part of him too, after experiencing Kohei’s death, had died, a person should be connected to another in just such a profound way; two people should be swept away into the depths of each other’s lives. But in the bonds that form between humans, things like equality, respect, or sacrifice simply can’t exist. The same can be said of romantic relationships, right? What’s important isn’t loving or cherishing someone. Such acts aren’t enough for a human being to resolve the heart of the matter of life. While love is about totally ruining yourself so that you could just live for your lover—so that you could just live inside her—nobody’s really capable of doing such a thing. Regardless of how passionately two lovers love each other, regardless of how much a husband and wife adore each other, there will inevitably come a time when lovers will lose each other. Now, when that happens, that is, when one lover dies, do you think his sweetheart will be so bereft she’ll also die to follow him into the hereafter? Have you ever heard of any such thing actually happening? I, for one, haven’t, not even once. But that’s how it is for all of us; it’s only natural. This is because no person ever has any right to really do something about his life, which is something that’s been bestowed on him, you see. If you start thinking that you could really do something about your life by dint of your own will and effort, this fragile and fleeting flower called love, far from blooming into full glory, will immediately wither away and die. In a world where each and every human being believes that his life is his own, there can only prevail violence, discrimination, domination, and subjugation, I believe. Just as you see in this world right now.

  We arrived in Suwa sometime past noon and boarded—as per Eriko’s plan—the pleasure boat that cruised around Lake Suwa. Standing on the deck and resting against the rails on the side of the ship, we were gaz
ing at the surprisingly rough, white slipstream trailing in the ship’s wake, when Eriko suddenly spoke under her breath. I’ve finally done it, haven’t I? I’ve dragged you all the way down to the place I was born.

  Although what she said had nothing to do with the story I’d recounted in the train, her words evoked a considerateness that was very characteristic of her. I gazed at Eriko’s profile, as she took in the dazzling view of the lakeside.

  But, she went on, it’s been pretty much a one-way street, hasn’t it? It’s always just been me chasing you. Strange, isn’t it? I mean, for all I know you might be really annoyed with me, after all.

  Out of habit I felt like telling her, If you feel like that, even just one tiny bit, why do you continue to chase me? but I quickly reconsidered, thinking that the unease Eriko was trying to convey wasn’t anything so ordinary as that. No, what was making her anxious was probably, in reality, the fact that I was detached; if I was hardly troubled by whatever she did, by the same token, I wasn’t happy either.

  Without answering her I shifted my gaze toward the faintly misty Yatsugatake Mountains, lying beyond the lake.

  Let’s go, Eriko said. The wind’s chilly.

  Upon Eriko’s further urgings we returned to the spacious cabin with a large panoramic window. Thereafter, my mood sank. It was in such a despondent state that in the evening I was shown to her huge two-story home with a large garden and presented to her parents, who were awaiting my arrival.

  21

  ERIKO’S FATHER WAS THE proprietor of a company that subcontracted the production of meters for a precision-machine maker based in Suwa. In effect, he was a second-generation president of a subcontracting firm employing around three hundred people, and as such, his company was considered to be a major one in Suwa. The moment I saw him, I thought his face was the kind that anyone would find amiable. At the dinner table, where I sat across from him, the first thing he said was that he’d graduated from the same university as I had, and therefore was my college senior. For a while, he wistfully talked about his memories of the Hongo area in the late 1950s, mentioning the names of several diners, shoe shops, tailors, and bars before asking if I knew any of them.