Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (12 page)

“Well, let me know what you find,” Emiko said as Aya went out. “And see if he has any single friends.”

SHE TOLD HISAO SHE WAS JOINING
a string quartet organized by an acquaintance of Emiko’s.

“Do you even remember how to play that thing?” he asked from behind his newspaper.

“Of course,” she replied, pairing a batch of socks she’d just brought in from the line. “It was practically attached to my hand in high school.”

“I see. Are you going to practice now?”

She couldn’t tell if he wanted to her to bring out the old viola, or if he was checking to see whether his newspaper reading would be disturbed. “Maybe,” she said.

He nodded, mumbling to himself as he read. Then he said, “But in Tokyo? Couldn’t you find a group closer to home?”

She continued matching and rolling the socks, never
losing the rhythm of the work. “I don’t think so.” Then she paused and asked, “Do you think I’m extraordinary?”

He didn’t glance up from his paper. “You’re lovely, dear.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE HER TRIP,
she went to her bookshelf. She never left the house without something to read, but her choice this time seemed of real importance. Finally her eyes fell on the dog-eared copy of
Anna Karenina
she had not read since Ryo was a baby. She slipped it from the shelf into her bag. The weight of the story on her shoulder felt significant; this was a long journey and required a long tale, but more than that, she felt the characters themselves would be good company for this other Aya Kawaguchi.

But if anyone’s hit by a train while I’m waiting, I’m turning around,
Aya thought.

It took her a long time to fall asleep that night, and she woke up twice, certain she had missed her train. At five o’clock she gave up and took a bath. At seven Hisao drove her to the local train station, where she caught a two-car train to Nishiyama, her connection for the Tokyo bullet.

Safely onboard the bullet train, she shifted in her carpeted seat and let
Anna Karenina
fall open to random pages. “There are no customs to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”

“He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.”

She read:

She looked out the window. She took off her wedding ring, put it back on. The scenery flew by. She found she could relax her eyes and let the images blur together, or she could focus and pick out the elements: futons lolling from windows like tongues, cascades of electrical wiring, a rooftop rice paddy, a Coca-Cola billboard. Each thing was gone, replaced by something new, before there was time to reflect.
No need to think on a train this fast,
she thought.
If I could stay on this train forever, I’d never have to think about anything again, and life would just be an exciting show of what’s passing by on the outside.
It was a comforting idea.

STEPPING OFF THE TRAIN
was like jumping into a river. She wandered through surging crowds in search of a place to store her viola, the case of which suddenly seemed unnecessarily bulky.
Couldn’t I have said I was coming for a book club
? she thought.

So many people. She was struck by the purpose with which all of them seemed to be moving. A ribbon of song caught her ear, and she turned toward a group of musicians performing next to a bank of ticket machines. They
were college students, most likely—two violinists and a cellist. She laughed aloud at the coincidence, she arriving with the missing piece to the quartet and no intention of playing it. The tiny girl on cello caught sight of the instrument and tilted her head in an invitation to join them. Aya blushed and hurried past.

With the help of a young man who looked like Hisao in his slimmer days, she located the day storage lockers and stowed the instrument. Then she headed for the escalators.

She wanted to arrive at the restaurant early. She’d read her book, drink some tea to calm her nerves. She looked at her watch: 10:03, one minute later than the last time she’d looked.

The escalator carried her out of the subway and into a multistory mall arranged in circles that reached all the way up to a huge skylight. The sky beyond the glass was gray yet still bright enough to be cheerful. On the seventh floor she spotted a cosmetics store and stepped off the escalator.

After consulting with the heavy-lashed girl behind the counter, who assured her the color was not too suggestive but rather “elegant and age-repelling,” she purchased a tube of red lipstick in a shade called “Shhh” that cost as much as a hardback book. The makeup glittered like a ball gown and felt like satin on her lips. This reminded her of bed sheets, and she pushed the thought away. Afterward, in the department store’s bathroom, she applied and removed the lipstick four times before reaching a compromise between herself and the other Aya Kawaguchi (who
no doubt would have worn “Shhh” without compunction) and blended the shade with her functional chapstick. As a concession for toning down the lipstick, she removed her wedding ring. Then she washed her hands.

At the restaurant, she took a seat along the wall of windows and ordered a pot of tea. A light rain fell over the city, and in response the buildings and roads took on a fresh sheen and the colors of signs and cars brightened.

A moth on the glass caught her eye. It was unlike any moth she’d ever seen, its wings rounded at the top and pointed at the bottom. An indigo spot decorated each orange-rimmed wing.

She shifted uneasily. The spots on its wings made her feel she was being watched. Her mother said that deceased ancestors came to visit disguised as moths, and she didn’t want anyone she knew, living or dead, to witness her activity today. She shooed at the insect with her napkin, but it did not move.

She tried to ignore it and focus on
Anna Karenina,
but it was no use. She watched the action in the restaurant instead. The place was beginning to fill up. At eleven-thirty, half an hour early, Shinji Oeda walked in—a dandelion springing from his lapel as promised. He was not as tall as she’d imagined, but his clothes were professionally pressed and fit him well. Emiko would have found him handsome.

But what do
you
think? Aya thought. Good-looking? Yes. His face was wide and mild, with gold-rimmed glasses riding atop a nose so flat it seemed a miracle the glasses stayed up at all. He sat across the restaurant, facing away
from her. She admired his observation of table manners despite his lack of company, the way he placed his napkin in his lap immediately and sat straight in his chair, the warm smile with which he greeted the waiter.

She looked back to the moth. Its black, crooked legs moved slightly. A wing angled itself toward her. Abruptly she stood, cupped her hands over the thing, and closed them. She would carry it out into the mall, let its eerie eye-wings rest elsewhere.

The waiter had brought Shinji Oeda a small drink, which he threw back in one gulp, handing the empty glass back to the waiter. Emboldened by his nervous act, Aya walked toward the entrance, and him, the moth cupped in her hands. Its papery wings beat furiously against her palms. She would pass near his table, but since he didn’t know what she looked like, she would not be discovered.

As she approached, Aya watched his back, certain he could feel her eyes. His hair was cut very short, in an almost military style, and shimmered silver under the restaurant’s low-hanging lamps. His hair was like the rain, she thought.

She passed him, careful to walk neither too fast nor too slow, and went out into the mall. She shook the moth free. It flew toward the skylight. When she returned to the restaurant, she glanced automatically at Shinji Oeda and found his eyes on her.

Aya blushed. There was nothing to do but approach him. As she drew near, he stood, a smile spreading across his face as he took her in. “Oeda-san?” she asked.

“Please, call me Shinji. And you—you are the legendary Aya Kawaguchi.” He bowed deeply.

She bowed as well, holding the position so that she might catch her breath. His cologne reminded her of the forest behind her house.

His mouth was large, his smile a deep cradle. Up close, his gentle eyes and flat nose gave him the appearance of a woodblock print. “I saw what you did with that moth,” he said, and clasped her hands in his. “This is a great honor.”

Embarrassment washed over her. “The honor is mine. And please forget about the moth; it was quite silly of me.”

“Forget? Never! I suspected your identity just from that gesture—such a compassionate act, freeing an insect others would ignore, or even worse, kill!”

Aya was unsure what to say to this; luckily the waiter returned and pulled a chair out for her. “A drink, miss?” he asked as they sat.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I’ll have—” She thought about Anna, and Russian aristocracy.

“Vodka,” she said.

The waiter’s eyebrows twitched. “Rocks?”

“A few,” she said, certain that her order had been inappropriate.

Shinji slapped the table. “Vodka. Who’d have thought?” He grinned. “Make it two.”

SHINJI LEANED BACK IN HIS SEAT,
his second vodka nearly finished. They had chatted about a number of meaningless topics—the weather, food, and train travel.

“I have to say, I never thought I’d be having a drink— a
vodka
—with Aya Kawaguchi. For so many years you
were just a set of data... my imagination was forced to extrapolate from there.”

Aya did her best to sound well educated. “Life takes all kinds of strange turns,” she said, finishing her vodka and enjoying the warmth it brought to her cheeks. “If you let it,” she added.

He leaned in and whispered. “Forgive me, but—how is it you never married?”

Aya had managed to sidestep this topic but knew it would come up, and had prepared her answer. “I just never found the right man.”

He nodded as if he’d expected as much. “Extraordinary people have extraordinarily hard times.”

He went on, “I’ve wondered for so long... I know now that my imagination is a feeble mechanism. You’re so different from what I imagined—” She glanced at him. “So much better,” he quickly added.

She began to relax. “You haven’t told me about your research. I have a right to a debriefing, I think.”

“Simply put, we found a way to quantify a person’s ability to love. Their potential. It turns out that not all people are capable of loving to the same capacity. The idea was revolutionary.” He leaned forward, touched her hand. “Imagine being married to a person whose ability to love—whose lovingcapacity—is far below your own.”

As he spoke the word
lovingcapacity
, he tapped out the syllables with two fingers on the place her wedding ring had recently been.

“From their perspective, a person may be loving to their fullest extent,” Shinji continued. “However, this
isn’t good enough for the partner with the higher LC. It will
never
be good enough. This causes the lower-capacity partner to feel inadequate, unappreciated, and their partner feels the same because, to their mind, everyone should love as they do.”

“Can’t people be made to understand, to accept their differences?”

“Perhaps. But it is very hard for people to truly understand. We have, it turns out, a tremendous blind spot when it comes to being loved.”

“And people can’t improve?”

“Our research generally showed lovingcapacity to be a fixed and immovable trait, much like eye color or IQ. Of course, when it comes to the mind, one can never be sure.”

“I can’t believe I did so well,” she said, and just then the waiter arrived, balancing two large lunch boxes and a platter of drinks. As he set Aya’s box in front her, a glass of cola slid from his tray and crashed onto the table, splashing Aya and dousing her pork cutlet.

The waiter fumbled, apologizing, and promised to bring a new lunch. Aya grimaced at the idea of wasting so much food.

“There’s no need,” she said, dabbing at her shirt with her napkin. “I’ll eat it as it is.”

“Please, ma’am—”

“Really. Maybe you could discount the bill a bit instead.”

The waiter bowed, his face as red as “Shhh,” and hurried away.

Aya took a bite of her cola-flavored cutlet; she was
starving and the vodka had unloosed her appetite. Not bad, she thought. When she looked up, Shinji was looking her, his face shining. His food was untouched.

“Amazing,” he said.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, secretly pleased. “So tell me, what became of your findings?”

“In the autumn of 1970, we lost our funding. The government classified our work as ‘unscientific and possibly dangerous.’ ”

“Dangerous!”

“Some people felt we were meddling in a place science ought not to meddle. A real shame, since long-term research is by far the most robust in fields like this.” He made a small motion with his hand, and a minute later two more drinks appeared.

“Well, I’ve prattled on long enough,” he said, raising his glass. “Let’s hear about you. From the beginning. What did you study at Keio?”

She clinked her glass to his and took a long sip of her vodka. Aya Kawaguchi was a woman who could hold her liquor. “Literature,” she said. “My first love was Soseki.”

“Kokoro,”
he replied, naming the author’s first novel. As he said it, he placed his hand over his heart. “Maybe that is why your
kokoro
is so big.”

“Or maybe my big heart is what drew me to Soseki.” She was feeling more and more comfortable, as if lying about her identity had rolled out the red carpet for other untruths to follow.

He sighed and sat back in his chair, smiling. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be around a Keio girl. Don’t you miss city life?”

He focused on her completely as she spoke, his eyes wide, like a child watching a fireworks display. She felt— interesting. Extraordinary. “Well, college was a wild time,” she said, as if admitting something. “I didn’t always make it to class, let’s just say that.”