Kitchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

My family had steadily decreased one by one as the years went by, but when it suddenly dawned on me that I was all alone, everything before my eyes seemed false. The fact that time continued to pass in the usual way in this apartment where I grew up, even though now I was here all alone, amazed me. It was total science fiction. The blackness of the cosmos.

No matter how dreamlike a love I have found myself in, no matter how delightfully drunk I have been, in my heart I was always aware that my family consisted of only one other person.

When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.

When my grandmother died, time died, too, in this apartment. The reality of that fact was immediate. There was nothing I could do to change it.

When I got together with Sotaro, it was always like that. Just being myself made me terribly sad.

When I’ve fallen in love before, I’ve always tried to run it down and tackle it, but with him it would be different. The conversation we just had was like a glimpse of stars through a chink in a cloudy sky—perhaps, over time, talks like this would lead to love.

An irresistible shift had put the past behind me. I had recoiled in a daze; all I could do was react weakly. But it was not I who was doing the shifting—on the contrary. For me everything had been agony.

When I thought, now at last I won’t be torn between two places, I began to feel strangely shaky, close to tears.

I was surprised. Am I losing my mind? I wondered. It was like being falling-down drunk: my body was independent of me. Before I knew it, tears were flooding out. I felt myself turning bright red with embarrassment and got off the bus.

I had a feeling that I wasn’t crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many.

I implored the gods: Please, let me live.

if a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I’m grateful for it.”

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.

As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a gloomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.

When I finished reading I carefully refolded the letter. The smell of Eriko’s favorite perfume tugged at my heart. This, too, will disappear after the letter is opened a few more times, I thought. That was hardest of all.

I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop. Houses always feel like that after someone has died.

To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn’t like it, but it made it easier to go on.

Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy.

What I mean by “their happiness” is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone.

Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life—my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing.

No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible.

And yet there was—how should I put this?—a huge, terrifying premonition that those unpaid bills would inexorably come due. The enormity of it only heightened our feeling of being orphans alone in the dark.

But I was afraid—terribly afraid—to even hope for such happiness. If I did let myself hope for that, and you became angry with me, I’d be pushed even further toward the depth of despair. I didn’t have the confidence, the courage, to explain all this to you so you could understand what was going on with me.”

I try to think about it, but with the kind of worthless thoughts I’m having in the state I’m in, I can’t decide anything. I’ve got to pull myself out of it soon. Now I’ve got you tangled up in it. The two of us may be in the epicenter of death, but I was hoping to spare you this misery. It could be like this for as long as we stay together.”

Yuichi

Even though we’re standing side by side, even though we’re closer to each other than to anyone else in the world, even though we’re friends forever, we don’t join hands. No matter how forlorn we are, we each insist on standing on our own two feet.

All for a depressing mission that could offer her no solace. When I imagined the workings of her mind, the senseless anger that spurred her to come here, I pitied her from the bottom of my heart.

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses. And things of no particular importance, or irreplaceable things, can suddenly resurface in a café one winter night.

Now that Eriko was dead, the two of us, alone, were flowing down that river of light, suspended in the cosmic darkness, and were approaching a critical juncture. I understood. I understood it from the color of the sky, the shape of the moon, the blackness of the night sky under which we passed. The building lights, the streetlights, were unforgiving.

I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn’t up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am.”

Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated—defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.

The times of great happiness and great sorrow were too intense; it was impossible to reconcile them with the routine of daily life.

At that moment I had a thrillingly sharp intuition. I knew it as if I held it in my hands: In the gloom of death that surrounded the two of us, we were just at the point of approaching and negotiating a gentle curve. If we bypassed it, we would split off into different directions. In that case we would forever remain just friends.

Day had turned to night, and night was passing in the same way all over the world. Now I felt really alone, at the bottom of a deep loneliness that no one could touch.

The driver

We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously.

I knew it: the glittering crystal of all the good times we’d had, which had been sleeping in the depths of memory, was awakening and would keep us going. Like a blast of fresh wind, the richly perfumed breath of those days returned to my soul.

although it wasn’t the most creative gift—took it from my palm and wrapped it carefully in his handkerchief as if it were something precious. He surprised me: it was not typical behavior for a boy that age. As it turns out, it was love. Whether he did it because the gift was from me or because that was how he was raised, not to treat a gift carelessly, it amazed me and made me warm to him.

There was electric charge between our hearts, and its conduit was the sound of the bell. The whole time we spent apart on that class trip, we each had the bell on our minds. Whenever he heard it ring, he would remember me and the time we had spent together; I passed the trip imagining I could hear the bell across the vast sky, imagining the person who had it in his possession. After we got back, we fell deeply in love.

Sleeping at night was what I feared most. No—worse than that was the shock of awakening. I dreaded the deep gloom that would fall when I remembered he was gone.

Neither recourse was anything more than a way of trying to lend some life to a shriveled spirit. It was a way to divert our minds, to kill time.

A kindness spoken out of reflex, at once impersonal and generous, but by no means bridging the distance established between two people—it always produces in me that sense of transparency, that deeply moving emotion I was being reminded of right then. An unbearable sense of loss.

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt?

In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.

The pretty scene was brimming with life, but my soul was pining for the desolate streets of winter and for that river at dawn. I wished my heart would break and get it over with.

Still, it was a good four years, and that day was an unusually perfect one for us, so much so as to make us fearful it would end. Of that day in which everything was just too beautiful in the transparent winter air, what I remember most is the sight, when I turned back to look, of Hitoshi’s black jacket melting into the darkness.

She had shown my heart a rainbow. The thing was . . . she had reminded me that I could get excited over something unknown, and a tiny window opened in my heart. Even if nothing happened—even if it turned out to be just the two of us watching the sparkling glint, off the cold, flowing river—it would feel good. It would be enough for me.

“Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can’t believe you’ll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman’s energies.”

Like Hitoshi when we parted, no matter how much I could lay bare my heart, no matter how much I strained my eyes, that “something” would remain transitory. That was certain. That “something” shone in the gloom with the strength of the sun itself; at a great speed, I was coming through.