Goodbye Tsugumi

by Banana Yoshimoto

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

Compared to the pain Tsugumi gives me, this is nothing at all. It seemed that during the years I’d spent with Tsugumi, my body had come to understand in a hazy sort of way that, in the end, getting worked up really doesn’t take you anywhere.

For some reason it had occurred to me that love doesn’t ever have to stop. It’s like the national water system, I thought. No matter how long you leave the faucets running, you can be sure the supply won’t give out.

Long black hair, translucent white skin, and large, very large eyes. Eyelids with thick lines of long eyelashes that cast pale shadows whenever she let her gaze fall. Her arms and legs were long and slim, her veins seemed to lie just beneath the surface of her skin, and her body was small and tight—her physical appearance was so trim and gorgeous you could almost believe she was a doll fashioned that way by some god.

Even for me, who ought to have known her true character well enough, those scenes on the beach had an aura of sadness about them that struck chords somewhere deep within me, filling my chest with pain.

As she imagined it, our little fishing town was a world without boundaries. Each grain of sand was a particle of mystery.

I sensed reality slipping away from me as I was sucked deep into Tsugumi’s night. Everything that had happened up to then, death and life, it all seemed to be sliding down into a whirlpool of mystery, a place where a different kind of truth held sway—that was the feeling, the softly uneasy stillness in the room.

Even if she kept all this locked up inside, I’m sure there were plenty of times when the uncertainty of it all left her feeling so worn out that she just wanted to break down and cry. And since I thought I could understand some of what she was going through, I ended up becoming an adult without ever having passed through a rebellious stage, the way most adolescents do.

It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes or by the commotion of the surface—it never seems too loud, or too wild.

And it seemed to me that even if you weren’t actively letting your emotions ride its surface, the ocean still went on giving you something, teaching you some sort of lesson. Perhaps that was why I had never actually considered its existence before—never really thought about the thundering of the waves as they sweep in endlessly toward the shore. But since I was thinking about it, what on earth did people in the city turn to when they felt the need to reckon with “balance"? Maybe the moon? That seemed like the obvious choice. But then the moon was so small and far away, and something about it felt sort of lonely, and it didn’t seem like it would really help . . .

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

But Yōko wandered around looking as if she felt all alone in the world, and if she came across something that had been forgotten by one of the kids she’d been friendly with she would even start to cry. The part of people that feels this kind of loneliness is actually very small, and I think anyone who really tries can get by without suffering from it at all. All you have to do is keep the spotlight turned in some other direction. It’s perfectly obvious that letting yourself focus on that area is what makes you get all sentimental and lonely, so the more opportunities you have to experience these goodbyes the more skilled you should become at distracting yourself, and thus at coping with these little lonelinesses. And yet Yōko had done precisely the opposite. Something in her had continued protecting that feeling, had nurtured that loneliness, taking special care to keep it safe. I suppose she didn’t want to lose it.

For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they’ve emerged. You don’t even notice that you’ve been inside until it’s too late for you ever to go back—that’s how perfect the temperature of that blanket is. For me it was the ocean, the whole town, the Yamamoto family, my mother, and a father who lived far away. All this embraced me back then, ever so softly.

At times like that the very first memories that are resurrected in my mind are these two scenes: Tsugumi playing with Pooch on the beach and Yōko smiling as she walks down the path that night, pushing her bicycle beside her.

He was The Dad Who Came Late. But it’s true that his eagerness succeeded in skimming away the fine particles of unease that had continued to circulate among us. All the little knots that the years had put in our lives came undone, and we began to function as a proper family.

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.

And it seems to me that even though I’m the one who is supposedly able to meet anyone and go anywhere I want in the world, and even though she remains stuck there in that little nothing of a town, I’m the one who’s being forgotten by her, not the other way around. Because Tsugumi never turns her gaze back to the past. Because for Tsugumi there is only today.

I guess when you’re out on the ocean and you see the piers way off in the distance, shrouded in mist, you understand this very clearly: No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider.

Everyday life had never really made much of an impression on me before. I used to live here in this little fishing village. I would sleep and wake up, have meals. Sometimes I felt really great; other times I felt a little out of it. I watched TV, fell in love, went to classes at school, and at the end of every day I always came back here, to this same house. But when I let my thoughts wander back through the ordinariness of those cycles now, I find that somewhere along the way it has all acquired a touch of warmth—that I’ve been left with something silky and dry and warm, like clean sand. Soaking up that gentle heat, a little tired from all the hustle and bustle of travel, I let myself savor an enticingly familiar sense of happiness.

It wasn’t narcissism. And it wasn’t exactly an aesthetic. 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.

His gaze was strangely deep, and there was a light in them that made it seem as if he knew something huge, something extremely important. Perhaps you could say that, unlike the rest of him, his eyes were old.

Every so often I’ll have one of these really bizarre nights. Nights when space itself seems to have shifted a little out of line, and I feel as if I’m on the verge of seeing everything all at once. I lie there in my futon, unable to fall asleep, listening to that clock up there on the wall, and the ticking of the second hand and the rays of moonlight that stream across the ceiling dominate the night, just like they did when I was a little girl. This night will go on forever.

That night, having wriggled down into my futon all alone, I found myself in the grips of a wrenching sadness. 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. In contrast to the heavy ache I would come to know later on in life, this was tiny and fresh—a green bud of pain with a bright halo of light rimming its edges.

The clunking of the vending machine in the night seemed to send a shiver of surprise across the entire pitch-black expanse of the beach. The dark ocean undulated before us, blank and vague. Way off in the distance, the lights of our town glittered faintly, like a mirage. “It’s like the afterlife or something, huh?” Tsugumi said.

For some reason I was thinking about all this again. Glancing over at the clock, I saw that it was nearly two. The thoughts people have when they can’t get to sleep are generally a little weird. Your mind rambles through the dark, tossing up one dreamy conclusion after another, each one as tender as a bubble. All of a sudden I realized that sometime after that night, at some unknowable point along the way, I had grown up. I wasn’t living here in this town now, not anymore, I was attending a university in Tokyo. It all seemed so bizarre. My hands lay stretched out in the darkness, and somehow they didn’t seem to belong to me.

The knowledge that as long as I went on living I would always have chances to feel these nights made it possible for me to have hope for the future.

The sense that the three of us were becoming friends seemed to saturate the air between us like a kind of instinct, a pleasurable premonition. People who are going to get along really well know it almost as soon as they meet. You spend a little while talking and everyone starts to feel this conviction, you’re all equally sure that you’re at the beginning of something good. That’s how it is when you meet people you’re going to be with for a long time.

On rainy days like this both the past and the future dissolve quietly into the air and hover there, surrounding you.

Yes, it was a work of nature, and there wasn’t anything that could be done about it, but still it hurt to think of Tsugumi’s heart beating away in that broken body. Her spirit had strength like the raging of a fire that could reach out into the depths of space, burning deeper than anyone’s, but her body kept it locked in extreme confinement. Maybe this pointless energy of hers had led her to sense, at a glance, what it was that shone in Kyōichi’s eyes?

When she was with Kyōichi, on the other hand, she shone with a look of such utter happiness that you got the feeling she must have sped up the pace of her life somehow, that she was fighting to cram more life into each passing moment. Looking at her you felt a touch of unease—a feeling that seemed to flicker painfully through the depths of your chest, the way light glimmers through a hole in a cloud.

I’m in love with the moment when the water switches from being so cold you want to leap up into the air to something that feels just right against your skin.

For a moment I wondered if Kyōichi would ever have managed to discover her if they had gone to the same school, but I decided very quickly that he would have. Kyōichi had the same sort of unbalanced view of the world as Tsugumi, where you focus your entire life on a single thing and just keep digging down deeper and deeper into it. People like the two of them would be able to find each other blindfolded.

“Love is the kind of thing that’s already happening by the time you notice it, that’s how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn’t change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types—love where there’s an end in sight and love where there isn’t. People in love understand that better than anyone.

But Kyōichi is different. No matter how many times we get together I never get sick of being with him, and every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I’ve got in my hand and rub it into his face. That’s how much I like him.”

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next—and I didn’t want to forget a single one.

Right around the time when the hustle and bustle of preparations for the festival take ahold of the town, all of a sudden you find yourself noticing that autumn has begun weaving itself into the rhythm of your days. The sun is still just as strong as before, but the breeze blowing in off the sea has turned just the tiniest bit softer, and the sand has cooled. Now the rain that quietly drenches the boats ranged along the beach carries the damp, misty smell of a cloudy sky. You realize that summer has turned its back on you.

Feverish eyes see a world in limbo, one that soars up aggressively. Your heart flaps around with a lightness that balances the heaviness of your body, and your thoughts keep getting tangled up again and again in unfamiliar ideas.

We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions. The singing of flutes, the waving fans, the passing breath of a salty breeze—all this projected itself slowly onto the night, flowing on and on like paper lanterns adrift on a river.

We see all kinds of different things as we grow up. And with each instant that passes we change into something new. We keep moving forward, and as we move we keep being confronted by this fact, over and over again, in many different ways. But if there were one thing that I wanted to hold on to even with this knowledge, to retain just as it was, it would be this evening. I didn’t need anything else, I didn’t need anything more—that’s how happy we were then, how full the air surrounding us was with a small and quiet joy.

And then I noticed how terrifying the look in her eyes was. The fear you felt looking into them wasn’t like the feeling that came over us when we saw the tough guys at school, it was like she was insane. Her eyes glittered quietly as if she were staring off into some space that had no limits, that went on forever.

Summer is almost over. This knowledge left us a little quieter than before. For a moment I found myself wishing, really wishing that Tsugumi’s clothes would never ever dry, that our fire would never die.

Seeing him on the beach now without Gongorō to complete the pair, you had the impression that his body was lopsided, off-balance, like a person missing a limb. And in a way it was true—here in this still-unfamiliar town, Kyōichi really had lost a part of himself.

Finally this thought—something that Yōko must have understood a good deal earlier—welled up inside me, accompanied by a burst of shock. Kyōichi and the future meant less to her than this—that’s how badly she’d wanted to carry this through. Tsugumi had tried to kill a person. At the end of all the work, after struggling through labor so intense it passed well beyond the limits of her body’s strength, she seriously believed that the high school kid’s death would be a less weighty matter than the death of a dog she had loved.

She hadn’t changed a bit ever since she was a child. All along she had been living in a universe of thought that was all her own, shared with no one else. Every time I thought about all this, an image of Tsugumi sitting with a wide smile on her face, holding the dog that looked just like Gongorō in her arms, flickered across the surface of my mind like a burst of warm sunlight. There wasn’t a trace of anything ugly in that scene, and it left me dazzled.

Kyōichi listened in silence. My voice mingling with the rush of the waves, I painted a perfect picture of Tsugumi. An overwhelmingly clear sense of her presence rose with the wind that streaked through the darkness, fell with the chilly drops of rain that splashed down onto our cheeks. I kept working to change the things she had done into words, and little by little the brilliant light of Tsugumi’s life began to sparkle through the story, flickering up first in one place and then in another, glowing with such ferocious strength that it felt as if she were actually here with us even now. Like the lanterns on the boats that dotted the ocean, revealing its contours, Tsugumi’s life shone.

She turned to look at me. I had peered into these eyes thousands, tens of thousands of times since the two of us were small, eyes as clear as glass beads—there was no trace of a lie in them now. A profound sparkle that never changes, a sparkle that seems to sing of the glory of eternity.

A surge of emotion cuts into my chest, overwhelmingly fierce. As if these people I love and this town are going to vanish from the very face of the earth, a feeling so overwhelmingly bright I can’t stand to look at it straight on.

A world sturdier and more powerful than reality, as vivid as the dreams soldiers have just before they die, when they see the towns they were born in. And yet here in this weak September light I found myself empty-handed, without even a trace of the summer left in me, not an inkling of its past presence.