Goodbye Tsugumi

by Banana Yoshimoto

It’s true: Tsugumi really was an unpleasant young woman.

If I had to make a list of the Top Three Victims of Tsugumi’s Outrageously Nasty Disposition, the order would undoubtedly be: Aunt Masako, then Yōko, then me.

“Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too—that’s just the way things work.

The whiteness of the flowers seemed to levitate in the dark. Every time the crowd of petals bobbed under a puff of wind you were left with an afterimage of white that had the texture of a dream. And just beside that dream the river continued to flow, and off in the distance the dark nighttime ocean stretched the glow of the moon into a single gleaming road.

I won’t have the luxury of seeing scenes like this much longer, I thought, letting the sadness bloom gently in my mind.

Perhaps you could say that they’d just been totally goodbyed out, and that they were great at masking the various emotions that get called up when the time comes to part with someone you know.

Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

This dad of mine sometimes says some pretty good stuff! A

“If you spend your time talking like that, you’ll just end up complaining forever! You’ll be moaning that something’s missing even as they lay you out in your coffin.

“Moron! I said extraordinary, not extra ordinary!

I bet he ate nothing but sweets when he was a kid. He must have had the most cushy childhood imaginable!

It was so perfectly the same, so solidly there that I started to feel strange as soon as I saw it. Everything seemed slightly out of whack, as if I had stumbled across some house that I’d visited long ago in a dream.

“It’s no joke, kid. This is the pits. I feel like some sort of Don Juan who’s gotten himself all tangled up in the passions of one of his young virgins and accidentally ended up married.” “What are you talking about? That’s supposed to be a metaphor for your friendship with Pooch?”

“Okay, imagine that there’s a huge famine all across the globe.” “A famine? . . . Sorry, too far out. I can’t imagine it.” “Maria, you’re a pest. Just shut up and listen, okay?

Deep down inside, Tsugumi had this perfectly polished mirror, and she only believed in the things she saw reflected there. She never even considered anything else.

Tsugumi, who had been going through her rebellious teens ever since she was born, growled back, “Keep your mouth shut unless you’ve got something worth saying!”

I was only a child, but I knew the feeling that came when you parted with something, and I felt that pain. I lay gazing up at the ceiling, feeling the sleek stiffness of the well-starched sheets against my skin. My distress was a seed that would grow into an understanding of what it means to say goodbye.

before Tsugumi continued. “I may be the sort of chick who’d just get irritated looking at the last leaf on the plant in that O. Henry story, and rip it off, but I’m able to see the beauty in it. Is that what you mean?”

“You know, Tsugumi, I get the feeling that you’ve started speaking more like a human being lately,” I said. “Maybe my time is running out.” Tsugumi laughed.

Lovely nights like tonight. The wonderful scent of the wind—a fragrance reminiscent of the aura of the mountains and the sea, which weaves slowly, translucently through every little nook and cranny of our town. I knew this night would never be back, but that didn’t matter. Just having the possibility, just knowing that I might find myself again in a night like this, in some other summer, was enough to make it all perfect.

On rainy days like this both the past and the future dissolve quietly into the air and hover there, surrounding you. A single teardrop fell onto my open book. Before I even understood what was happening, tears were streaming from my eyes.

The only reason her existence here seemed so unshakably settled was that deep inside her she had a hidden store of energy that rebelled against the frailty of her flesh, struggled ferociously against it . . .

This seaside town where I’d grown up was no longer mine, but I had somewhere else to return to, an unshakably real home of my own.

Thinking back on that incident now, I kind of get the feeling that Tsugumi changed after that day—maybe this was when she started keeping her true self hidden at school.

“We may not be together, but don’t forget me,” Tsugumi muttered, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “Don’t ever forget me.”

you know how it is in the dark? How you can smell things so clearly?

That night remains in my heart as a truly wonderful scene.