337
with an incurable disease or her face horribly disfigured by violence. She was
confined to a wheelchair or had lost a limb or was wrapped
head to toe in bandages,
unable to move. Or then again she was being held in an underground room, fastened
like a dog on a thick chain. All of these possibilities, however, seemed far-fetched.
Kyoko Yasuda (as Tengo was now calling her in his mind) had hardly ever spoken
of her husband. Tengo had learned nothing about him from her—his profession, his
age, his looks, his personality,
where they had met, when they had married, whether
he was skinny or fat, tall or short, or whether or not they got along well. All Tengo
knew was that she was not particularly hard-pressed economically (she appeared to be
quite comfortable, in fact), and that she seemed dissatisfied with either
the frequency
or the quality of the sex she had with her husband, though even these were entirely
matters of conjecture on his part. She and Tengo spent their afternoons in bed talking
of many things, but never once had the subject of her husband come up, nor had
Tengo wanted to know about him. He preferred to remain ignorant of the man whose
wife he was stealing. It seemed only proper. Now that this new situation had
developed, however, he was sorry that he had never asked her about her husband (she
would almost certainly have responded frankly if he had asked). Was her husband
jealous? Possessive? Did he have violent tendencies?
He tried to put himself in the man’s place. How would he feel
if the situation were
reversed? Say, he has a wife, two small children, and a tranquil home life, but he
discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man once a week—a man ten years
her junior, and the affair has been going on for over a year. What would he think if he
found himself in such a situation? What emotions would rule his heart? Violent
anger? Deep disappointment? Vague sadness? Scornful indifference? A sense of
having lost touch with reality? Or an indistinguishable blend of several emotions?
No amount of thinking enabled Tengo to hit upon exactly how he would feel. What
came to mind through all his hypothesizing was the image
of his mother in a white
slip giving her breasts to a young man he did not know.
Destiny seems to have come
full circle
, Tengo thought. The enigmatic young man was perhaps Tengo himself, the
woman in his arms Kyoko Yasuda. The composition was exactly the same; only the
individuals had changed.
Does this mean
that my life has been nothing but a process
through which I am giving concrete form to the dormant image inside me? And how
much responsibility do I bear for her having become irretrievably lost?
Tengo could not get back to sleep again. He kept hearing the
voice of the man who
called himself Yasuda. The hints that he had left behind weighed heavily on Tengo,
and the words he had spoken bore a strange reality. Tengo thought about Kyoko
Yasuda. He pictured her face and body in minute detail. He had last seen her on
Friday, two weeks prior. As always, they had spent a lot of time having sex. After the
phone call from her husband, though, it seemed like something that had happened in
the distant past, like an episode out of history.
On his shelf remained several LP records that she had brought from home to listen
to in bed with him, all jazz
records from long, long ago—Louis Armstrong, Billie
Holliday (this one, too, had Barney Bigard as a sideman), some 1940s Duke
Ellington. She had listened to them—and handled them—with great care. The jackets
338
had faded somewhat with the years, but the records themselves looked brand-new.
Tengo picked up one jacket after another. Gazing at them, he felt with growing
certainty that he might never see her again.
Tengo was not, strictly speaking, in love with Kyoko Yasuda.
He had never felt
that he wanted to spend his life with her or that saying good-bye to her could be
painful. She had never made him feel that deep trembling of the heart. But he had
grown accustomed to having this older girlfriend as part of his life, and naturally, he
had grown fond of her. He looked forward to welcoming her to his apartment once a
week and joining his naked flesh with hers. Their relationship was an unusual one for
Tengo. He had never been able to feel very close to many women. In fact, most
women—whether he was in a sexual relationship with them or not—made Tengo feel
uncomfortable. And in order to curb that discomfort, Tengo had to fence off a certain
territory inside himself.
In other words, he had to keep certain rooms in his heart
locked tight. With Kyoko Yasuda, however, such complex operations were
unnecessary. First of all, she seemed to grasp exactly what Tengo wanted and what he
did not want. And so Tengo counted himself lucky that they had happened to find
each other.
Now, however, something had happened, and she was irretrievably lost. For some
unknowable reason, she could never visit here
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
