Hardboiled & Hard Luck

by Banana Yoshimoto

Things that don’t matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.

What could have led us Japanese to misinterpret these things—potage and artificial flowers—as the standard accoutrements of elegance?

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go very easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness.

“You always think your own life is the hardest, and as long as you get along OK, as long as life is nice and easy and you’re having all the fun you can, everything’s just fine.”

But she was so absorbed in her own affairs that her gaze didn’t register anything.

The rituals of our daily lives permeate our very bodies. After all we had been through, the one tie that still bound my mother and me was the way time moved in our lives, because it had seeped down so deep inside us.

The town was subject to the same flow of time—the same cycle that had left its mark on my body over the years,

In order to sleep peacefully without seeing ghosts, Chizuru always went to bed wearing an array of objects that glowed or lit up. Rings, earrings, bracelets. She said these things kept the ghosts away. As a result, when we had sex—for some reason, she always played a masculine role—I always ended up getting poked in all kinds of places by various accessories, and it invariably hurt.

People tend to think they break up because they get tired of the person they’ve been with—that it’s someone’s decision, either yours or theirs. But this isn’t really true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it. Human willpower can’t change that—which means, if you look at it another way, that we might as well enjoy ourselves until that day arrives.

“I wonder why we feel so lonely? It’s odd, isn’t it?” We kept repeating such phrases, as if it were someone else’s problem.

As fond as I was of her, I wasn’t confident that I could love her enough to stay with her, to go on filling the dark, lonely space she carried within her. I knew that someday I would fall in love with a man, and what I would do to her then would be even worse. So I didn’t call her.

“I think you’re a really lucky person. I can tell you’re going to have a very unusual life. I bet all kind of things will happen. But you mustn’t blame yourself. You have to live a hard-boiled life, OK? No matter what happens, keep going around with your nose in the air.”

Suddenly I realized that she had taken most of the pills on purpose. She hadn’t let him take as many as she did. That’s why she seemed so fragile.

They’re all nice warm sounds—the sounds of two parents who went in to take a bath together one night and got to talking about this and that as they washed each other’s bodies, and sort of got in the mood.”

We swore in the most adorable way that when we grew up, one of us would have to install a skylight in her house so that we could gaze up at the stars while we talked.

When you’re in love, she once said, it really hurts, it aches, and you can’t suppress it, you want to see it through to the end even if it means that someone has to die, and so you end up causing a whole lot of trouble for everyone.

I felt as if we had been walking around together like this for years. But it was really the first time we had ever been alone together.

Every minute had been fun, I realized, so much fun it made my heart ache.

There are plenty of stories like this in the hospital. I’ve talked with people about all sorts of problems. They’ve told me about all kinds of hard choices they’ve had to make. But until recently, I never even suspected that this world existed.”

The instant the unbearable pain and the tears faded away, and I saw with my own eyes how vast the workings of the universe were, I would feel my sister’s soul.

no one tells you to go home and take it easy, because if you don’t you might have a cerebral hemorrhage.

That’s how I saw it then. In the world we now lived in, the good times were a hundred times better. If we couldn’t catch that sparkle, only the agony would remain. Each new day was a struggle, in both the positive and the negative senses. I didn’t want my mind to be muddled when the time came to say goodbye to my sister.

Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.

And I would throw myself wholeheartedly into whatever I did, so that I could get a good job. It would take a tremendous amount of energy to get my interrupted life back on track, whether it ended up being a twisted version of my old life or a life in which I gained something despite the loss of my sister. I also would never forget that now I was the only child my parents had. *

His spiritual guide tells him this is a sign that destiny has put before him, a sign that shows death is present in every aspect of people’s lives. And the spiritual guide says that when the man leaves the world, he’ll hear the incomparably beautiful tone of that trumpet once more.”

And as the music reverberated in our ears, the road zoomed closer and the sky seemed to widen. I felt as if the world had grown a little more beautiful than it was before; all of a sudden the cold and the darkness of the night were transformed into a lovely splash of light.

“We’ll go out every afternoon for pasta, and the sky will be clear, and we’ll go see all kinds of scenery. We’ll walk until our feet hurt, and drink wine, and we’ll sleep in the same room. We’ll look out new windows, and feel different from the way we do now with all that summer light pouring down around us, when it’s so hot we can’t stand it. I’ll wait until then—I won’t forget you. I don’t want things to end like this, only having known you during this strange time. But right now, I just can’t think about the future.”

Adam and hannah girls final scene