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.

Ultimately, though, it’s living people that frighten me the most. It’s always seemed to me that nothing could be scarier than a person, because as dreadful as places can be, they’re still just places; and no matter how awful ghosts might seem, they’re just dead people. I always thought that the most terrifying things anyone could ever think up were the things living people came up with.

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.

This is how she always was, sunk in the depths of her own inner life. She didn’t even try to make others understand.

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 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.”

“People are always going on about how scared they are of ghosts, but the way I see it, people are much more frightening,”

I said this earlier, but it’s true—you have strange nights no matter where you are. And they always pass. You just have to force yourself to act like nothing is wrong, and when morning comes everything is back to normal.

And it’s true, I thought, interesting things do happen, even in the midst of the blackest nights. And when you take a spill, you can always rise up from it with something good in your hand.

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.

“Everyone comes to terms with things in his own way, right?”

Death isn’t sad. What hurts is being drowned by these emotions.

But I know that sometime in the future, a day will come when my family will start to feel differently. That world out there, this landscape we’re looking at now, through this window, will start to seem good to us, and different from the way it is now—so different that we aren’t even allowed to imagine it yet. It’s just that I’m tired of waiting. Because in the early days, I was always waiting for a miracle.”

And it struck me that if anything was a miracle, it was this: the lovely moments we experienced during the small, almost imperceptible periods of relief. 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.