Anatomy of a Novel, Part Two, Episode 15
Like cherry blossoms, like everything in this world, beauty is fleeting.
The stew I’d eaten had long since left me feeling hungry again, so after telling Emi I would meet her outside, I changed into my street clothes in a foul-smelling toilet, then wandered down a creaky wooden hallway toward the kitchen, where I hoped to find a bit of rice or a slice of bread, something I could wolf down without anyone noticing.
I passed a number of other rooms, some with doors open, some with doors closed, and soon ran into Kaori, about to go into one of them. She carried a wooden bucket and wore a cotton yukata, her hair tied up in a towel, much like Ichikawa Yuki in her dormitory.
“Good idea,” I said. “I wish I’d thought of it.”
I plucked at my clothes, though they were clean and I was comfortable in them.
“Its crowded in there anyway. I had to wait for a man to stop lurking,” she said. “Japan is full of perverts, you know, at least one per family. I think theirs is that van driving guy.”
“So that’s where he’s been all day,” I said. “Old Mr. Sugiyama was looking for him.”
“Tell him to look in the bath, when women are there,” said Kaori.
Again, I heard the gentleness that flooded into her when she spoke Japanese. It gave me the courage to ask what I’d failed to ask her on the train, which was why, after years of insisting on English, she made the decision to go back to her native tongue.
I could see that my question surprised her.
“In order to let you see me, of course,” she said. “Did I not make that clear? If there is ever going to be anything between us you have to know what you’re getting into. And the best place for anyone to hide is inside the foliage of a foreign language. It took me two boyfriends and some very long talks with Junichiro to learn that, yet I didn’t stop doing it until after my exhibition. That’s how prideful I was. Or how thick-headed.”
I had a tough time understanding what she said, not only because my Japanese wasn’t good enough, but because I got stuck on “if there is ever going to be anything between us,” and whether or not she had made it clear. No, she hadn’t made it clear, she hadn’t said a word about it! And some very long talks with Junichiro, who was going back to hide in the foliage of his American life?
Kaori seemed to grow taller in her doorway, a gentle smile lingering at the edges of her mouth. Perhaps she felt that now she was making things clear, and that I should make a similar declaration. She leaned up to brush her lips across my cheek, then turned and went back into her room and closed the door.
After standing there for a minute, I headed down the hallway to the kitchen. But there was nothing in it save a vat of cold green tea and some crumbs left scattered around the floor for the field mice. I sat in a rickety chair in front of a rickety table with a cup of the tea in my hands, and thought about what had happened since my nap: how my walk had brought me to Mr. Sugiyama and his primary questions, how my search for something to settle my stomach had led me to Kaori’s surprise at having not made things clear, and how, sandwiched between them, Etsuko had said that she wasn’t going to Germany with Fritz and didn’t know how to tell him. I thought of my moment in the forest when the forks in that path had seemed identical in width and depth, identical in the care taken to maintain them, even in the way the clouds had gathered to flatten their dapple, and I began to understand that choice was like that, that we go where we go, end up where we end up, not according to how a path might look when we embark upon it, but with a commitment to care for it after the fact, whether it leads us to the vipers in a stand of cedars or back toward the safety of a farmhouse.
Other than noticing that my teacup disappeared whenever I sat it down and reappeared when I picked it up, I hadn’t paid attention to how dark it was getting until I began to hear others coming from their rooms. As soon as I did, I hurried out of the kitchen in order to keep my promise to Emi. Once outside, however, even under a cleared-up sky and a gibbous moon, I couldn’t find her. So I stopped at the cauldron, hoping that she might find me. The elder Mr. Sugiyama, back from his stump nap, began speaking as soon as he thought we were all assembled.
“We’ll be walking two-by-two. Once we get to our stream bed we will stop and wait until everyone arrives, and please, let us be quiet, this is not a time for speaking, except right now, if anyone has a question?”
“May we not take pictures?” asked Mr. Nomura.
“Yes, you may not. Try seeing what you are seeing, like in those long-gone days before photography.”
I thought that was lovely. See by looking yourself, instead of through someone else’s lens.
“What if a firefly lands on me? Should I leave it or brush it off?” asked Miss Arai.
Since she stood near me, I was able to see her swipe a hand against her left breast, like that would surely be the firefly’s landing place.
“If a firefly lands on you, leave it,” said Mr. Sugiyama. “It may bring good luck, or at least give you a lantern by which you might notice something good when it comes your way.”
I thought that was lovely, too.
There were more questions that I couldn’t understand, and then, when people started pairing up, Ichikawa Yuki came toward me out of the darkness.
“Will you view the fireflies with me?” she asked. “I’m afraid that Mr. Nomura will ask me and I want him to ask Miss Arai.”
When she put a hand on my forearm, just as Etsuko had inside, I kept my arm at a firm right angle so her hand would not slip off. I told myself that if she understood what the hand meant she would take it away or not on her own, that this time I would not defeat myself.
She left her hand where it was.
—
At first there were only a dozen fireflies, bobbing here and there like scouts, but soon there were other dozens, coming like strings of miniature Christmas lights, tiny and delicate upon the night. After that the stream bed filled with a thousand of them, then ten thousand, making it seem as if the phosphorous from another planet’s ocean had come to make the stream bed wet again; had come to tell us that water would always remain where water once was, even if seeing it became an impossibility.
The fireflies seemed to move in one direction, toward the bamboo forest, though some of them also meandered, flitting around our heads and landing on our bodies, letting us know that their path, though set primordially, could be taken at a hurried or a leisurely pace, quite like the lives of the humans that they currently enthralled. A score of them settled into Ichikawa Yuki’s hair, another score down the arms of her kimono, as if recognizing that beauty had an obligation to accent other beauty, to make an outline of it against the darkness. Nearby, I saw the similar outline of a miniature samurai with her sword out, and yet another of the samurai’s mother, glowing and lonely and standing off to the side. No fireflies landed on me but I felt no disappointment, for to see what I was seeing was better than being a part of it. It was better to observe than be observed, better to be a lover than a loved one.
We stayed motionless until the fireflies rose out of the stream bed, settled into it again, rose back out and settled in twice more, as if some celestial housekeeper were flipping a living and glittering quilt. I saw Bill in the flipping, no fireflies on his body, either, but a phalanx of them attacking his nose and mouth, his teeth aglow and his breathing hampered. I also saw Mr. Nomura, who seemed to be trying to sit in the stream bed, trying to wash away his sins in a frothy firefly bath.
Ichikawa Yuki let go of my arm and stepped away from me, over near Emi, while Miss Arai passed through my line of vision, fireflies leaving her breasts alone but adorning her hands like henna. I hoped that she would join Mr. Nomura in his bath, but she passed him by, her hands aglow and raised, as she were about to conduct a firefly orchestra.
I looked for Kaori, somehow sure I wouldn’t find her, but I saw her, too, on the creek’s opposite bank, fireflies defining her as if she were a constellation, Andromeda perhaps, the Princess of Ethiopia, though all she seemed to want anymore was to remain at home. A firefly nimbus hid the lower part of her face like a dancer’s fan.
When the fireflies rose up a fourth time they no longer resembled a glittering quilt, but were like bubbles leaving a river of champagne. Up they went, this way and that, until it seemed that a switch had been thrown somewhere, turning off their lights. Poof, gone. Like life. A few did linger on the bodies of those they had come to bless, but they, too, soon left us standing in the dark.
It happened far too quickly. I wanted the power of it to stay with me longer, to stay another hour, to stay with me always.
But others started talking as soon as the fireflies departed.
“Whew! That was beautiful!” one man said, as if too much beauty were something he was glad to be rid of.
Just as Mr. Sugiyama said, “Okay, that’s it, let’s go eat,” my Mitsubishi curmudgeon, Mr. Sato, came over to me in the soberest of moods, to intone the words, “Like cherry blossoms, like everything in this world, beauty is fleeting.”
“A haiku worthy of Basho,” he let me know, then he tipped his bowler and he too was gone.
The after-viewing dinner was nearly as cold as the tea I’d had. The bark hadn’t done its job.
Ichikawa Yuki thanked me for agreeing to be her partner, but then sat with Miss Arai during her own cold meal, and returned with her to their room when it was done.
I didn’t see either of them again that night, nor Kaori, either.
The next morning I overslept and found myself among the firefly stragglers, on the last van back to the station, where I waited for the final train home.
Endnotes…
This idea of “hiding in the foliage” of another language has plagued several of my novels over the years. I think it comes from my own rather poor ability to learn Korean when I was in the Peace Corps there in the 1960s, combined with my slightly better ability to learn Japanese in the early 70s. I was adamant during some of those years, not wanting to form friendships with Japanese people, for example, if I had to form those friendships in English. It was pure ego on my part but, for a time, that’s the way I was, “hiding in the foliage,” of Japanese, even though my linguistic abilities were mediocre. I noticed that same insistence (this time on speaking English to me) in Japanese people sometimes, so I gave that… I shall call it a lack of generosity… to Kaori during the larger portion of this book. In this episode, however, she seems to have decided to forgo English, thus appearing to be more magnanimous to Cornelius. I didn’t know that was going to happen until it did, but it adds a level of sophistication to her inner workings don’t you think, making her more magnanimous to readers of the episode, too?
If I ever decide to publish these episodes in a single volume, I think the following from Cornelius’s moment alone in the kitchen: “…we go where we go, end up where we end up, not according to how a path might look when we embark upon it, but with a commitment to care for it after the fact,” could act as a liner note, telling would-be readers what the book is, nominally, about.
This marks the final episode of Part Two. My notes tell me that Part Three will be shorter, giving those of you who’ve stuck with me what I hope will be a satisfying departure from Cornelius’s early life in five or six more weeks.
I remember a field full of fireflies because I was swimming naked with a Greek girl in a cold stream that ran by the field. She called me "kuklimu."