The Human Element
from The Coat that Covers
"How did someone like you," said the new editor, on the job less than a month, "ever become a reporter?" In her exasperation she forgot to lower her voice, and at the titters in the background I felt my face go flaming red. She smiled. She's not a bad woman, and doesn't despise me half as much as she pretends to. In fact, I think deep down she has a soft spot in her heart for me - maternal rather than romantic, no doubt, under the impression as she is - wrongly - that she is a good deal older than I am. Truth to tell, I look absurdly young for my age. Once, a man I fell into talk with in a bar happened to ask, the subject of age having come up, how old I was. "Guess," I said. "Twenty-three?" I was thirty-six. I'm thirty-nine now, and if Catherine, the editor, is a day over thirty-five... well, of course, a woman determined not to look her age can preserve a youthful appearance into middle age and beyond, but Catherine doesn't seem that sort; her beauty is precisely the beauty of a woman indifferent to her appearance. If it weren't for my crippling shyness I might ask her out for a drink, I really might - but it is precisely my shyness that is at issue here.
"Your writing," she resumed, like a teacher addressing a promising but flawed pupil, "is good, but - well, look here." She beckoned me to join her on her side of the computer. There was my story about the fire that had left three families homeless. "You've got all the facts in - what time the fire started, how many fire trucks answered the call, how long the fire burned, x million yen worth of damage... That's good. You've got a quote from the fire department spokesperson. Fine. All that is important and necessary. But what about the people who were burned out? Why nothing from them?"
As she looked up from the screen into my face I seemed to hear a sound like the clinking of jewelry, though if she was wearing any it was not immediately visible.
"The human element," she said. "That's what your stories consistently lack." She shook her head and compressed her lips. "Consistently. Don't you know - I mean, don't they teach it in journalism school these days? - that a fire story without quotes from the victims is dead, meaningless? It's so obvious I feel like an idiot sitting here spelling it out for you. You need to - oh shit, excuse me." Her phone was ringing, and as she reached for it I slunk away.
***
How did someone like me become a reporter? Journalism school! That shows how little she knows me. She's right, though - there can be few men less temperamentally suited to the role of reporter than I - and yet, I thought as I put the finishing touches on my evening meal, about what profession could the same not be said? I am not without brains, not without abilities - on the contrary, I can claim the right to introduce myself as a rather brilliant fellow, and if I blush to do so, it's only because I blush all too damn easily. I was born in Tokyo of a Japanese mother and an Irish father. My father, dying when I was five, left me almost no visual memory of him, just a voice, a beautiful lilting voice (though my mother laughingly assures me he was tone-deaf and couldn't sing a note), sending me off to sleep with a lullaby of which all I retain is "tura-lura-lura..." - but my mother, who speaks very little English, nonetheless, in honor of the English name I bear, sent me to the international school in Setagaya, which I attended from kindergarten to grade twelve, so that I speak English as readily as I do Japanese. I speak Hebrew too, and Sumerian and Aramaic and various other dead Semitic languages - at least I read them. That's what I studied at Princeton - ancient civilization, the more ancient the better. To anyone who asks about my natural element, I reply that it is the long-vanished past, the past so remote its relevance to the present is scarcely discernible, scarcely imaginable. If you want to see me at ease in the world - my unblushing self, so to speak - you must visualize me poring over ancient clay tablets crammed with mysterious symbols, perfectly meaningless to all but a handful of specialists. Or pecking away at a computer, composing monographs on obscure passages of the Epic of Gilgamesh. "Your writing is good," Catherine said to me. How I would love to show her some of my real writing!
So why, you will naturally wonder, am I not poring over my beloved clay tablets, researching my beloved dead civilizations, losing myself in my precious old myths? Why, instead, am I slogging away as a city reporter at the Japan Times, a job to which, as I have said, few people could be less suited?
It's rather a long story, as these things generally are, but the essentials can be told in a few words. The world being what it is, a scholar cannot earn a living merely by studying; he is expected to teach, and that I could not do. I simply could not. I could not get up in front of a class of two hundred students and make my subject, so vibrant to me, come alive for them. The room swam before my eyes. I mumbled, digressed, lost the thread. Asked a perfectly simple question, my mind would suddenly go blank. It was hopeless. Students stopped showing up for class; word got around that I was a teacher to avoid. The head of my department, a fine scholar and a sympathetic man who valued my abilities, did his best to encourage me, for which I am grateful to this day - we still correspond from time to time. But it was making me ill; I had, I think, a kind of nervous breakdown. Nothing dramatic; I didn't run amok or have to be institutionalized - but it was serious enough that I feared it could end up that way if I persisted, and rather than lose my mind altogether I quit and fled back to Japan, telling myself and anyone who asked that my mother, aging and in poor health, couldn't be left alone.
That's how I came to be in Tokyo; as to the Japan Times - well, that's another long story I can abbreviate without loss to the reader. A girl my mother was hoping to marry me off to, the daughter of a lifelong friend, worked for an NGO and, just back from Afghanistan, had been interviewed by a senior Japan Times reporter. One evening the three of us - the girl, the reporter and I - got together for drinks and grew very convivial. He told me about his reporting, I told him about my clay tablets. "Hey!" he said, "maybe I'll do a story on you!" "Maybe I'll do one on you," was my meaningless rejoinder. We all laughed. He began to speak of how short-staffed they were at the paper, how hard it was to find English-speaking journalists who could conduct interviews in Japanese. "Maybe you can get a job there," said the girl to me. I had been working since my return at one of the English conversation schools that had sprung up during the boom years of the 1980s. Most of the lessons were private, and even group lessons involved no more than four students at a time, so there was no question of stage fright. There was another problem instead: paralyzing, glassy-eyed boredom. I was on no account, said the head teacher, to let students know I was a Japanese speaker. It was school policy that lessons were conducted exclusively in English, and if it was known I spoke Japanese the students would have less incentive to struggle to make such English as they knew work for them. The only bit of amusement the job provided - challenge, of course, there was none - was the opportunity to overhear the students talking unself-consciously among themselves, not suspecting that I understood every word they said. Only once did I come close to blowing my cover. As I walked into the coffee room one student was saying to another: "The teacher's a total moron." There was no reason to suppose it was me they were talking about; no reason to suppose it was not me either. In any case, I wheeled around as though I'd been stung and stared hard at the speaker, who reddened and lowered his eyes.
Anyway, the short answer to my supposed fiancee-to-be's question was that I was not a journalist, had never thought of being one, could not imagine myself as one. But before I could get the words out, if I even thought of replying, the reporter, all enthusiasm, burst out, "Hey, yeah, why not? Drop by the office, I'll introduce you to the powers that be."
It turned out that, though I had taken it as a joke, the reporter had not meant it as one when he spoke of doing a story on me. He called me at the school the following Monday to inform me he had sold the idea to the editor and looked forward to proceeding at my convenience. "We can do it here," he said, "if you like. Kill two birds with one stone. I'll interview you, and when we're done I'll show you around."
I went the next evening, after work. The interview process fascinated me. The reporter's skill was evident. Knowing nothing about the subject, he used his ignorance as a device for drawing me out. Before I knew it I had been coaxed out of my inhibitions and was talking as I had always wished I could in the lecture hall, one thought flowing naturally into another, ancient dusty cities with their merchants, scribes, soldiers, priests, coming alive before my eyes - before his too, I thought, my confidence growing.
"Wonderful," he said when at last he switched off the tape recorder. "Beautiful. You'll see, we'll make something of this. It'll fly, believe me. Ron!" An enormously tall, paunchy middle-aged man with thick gray hair and an equally thick, though less gray, beard, stopped in mid stride and turned to face us. "Ron, this is Steve McRae, the ancient civ scholar I was telling you about."
"Oh!" He advanced towards me, his face wreathed in smiles, his hand extended. "A pleasure!" His grip was tight enough to make me gasp.
The next thing I knew there were six of us at a table in a neighborhood pub, and before the party broke up I had been hired - Ron, Catherine's predecessor, having assured me that journalism was the best cure in the world for shyness. "Look what it's done for me!" he bellowed, roaring with laughter as all heads in the place turned in his direction.
***
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," said Catherine. "I have an idea. The perfect assignment for you." She paused. My heart sank. Something in her expression inspired dread. Catherine's face, though lovely, is generally expressionless. When it is not, the expression that appears on it is of the sort generally characterized as "hard to read." "This is Tokyo," she said, "the biggest city in the world, right? - a world in itself - my God, just think of all the unwritten stories that go on here! Not just every day but every minute! Go, hit the streets, find those stories, write them. Anything. Anything at all. Eight hundred words twice a week, on anything under the sun, how's that? - anything under Tokyo's smoggy skies, anyway. It's a dream assignment, I used to dream of it myself when I was reporting - if only I'd had an editor imaginative enough to assign it! Ah, but no, it was left to - What!" she suddenly rapped out impatiently to someone at the other end of the office. I didn't catch what her interlocutor said, or even know who he or she was, but whatever it was caused her to glance at her watch, at which she frowned and muttered "All right, I'm coming." She shut down her computer. "Editorial meeting. What I wouldn't give to change places with you." She rose to her feet, mechanically smoothing her cream-colored skirt and snatching her shapeless black handbag. "Good luck, and remember: the human element." With that she was gone.
***
Did that exchange, I wondered, clutching my coffee cup at the little train station coffee shop, really occur? "Exchange" - what exchange? I hadn't said a word. Had she? Hadn't I dreamed the entire scene? The funny thing was, I actually had had dreams like that - nightmares - off and on ever since I became a reporter. Me on the street, an atom in an overwhelming throng, charged with writing a story - what story? About what? Featuring whom? Which busy, self-absorbed, hurrying person should I impose myself upon, to ask what question?
A tiny television on a shelf above the cash register was showing some kind of game show - people whose faces I could barely make out, celebrities presumably, squealing with a delight that seemed perpetually self-renewing. My fellow customers numbered four - three men and one woman, all solitary, all ignoring the tv except for the youngest of the men - a boy I should call him, for he looked young enough to be in high school, his expression as he watched oddly grave, totally out of keeping with the ceaseless hilarity onscreen. The woman was also young, though unmistakably an adult; her hair was dyed reddish-brown, and there was a curious air of total detachment about her as she idly turned the pages of a magazine. She might have been at home in her own living room instead of in a public place. At one point, a propos of nothing obvious, she abstractedly drew a compact from her purse and began attending to her make-up. The other two men were middle-aged and wearing business suits, but the blankness of their expressions and their leisurely unconcern with the passing time suggested they had no very pressing business to go about.
Should I interview them? Catherine was right, there were stories everywhere. Even in a hole-in-corner coffee shop in which not a word was being spoken sat four people, four fates... four stories. What had brought them here in the middle of the day? What kind of lives did they lead? What kind of buffeting had they undergone? Supposing an archaeologist were to unearth clay tablets recording not commercial transactions or prayers or myths but the day-to-day lives of people such as these - ordinary, undistinguished people, living ordinary, undistinguished lives, in ancient Mari or Ur or Haran - what a find it would be! With what eagerness would people like me pounce on those texts, devour them, probe every bend and curve of the cuneiform characters for unexpected revelations and hidden layers of meaning! Well? Is not every man or woman a clay tablet in embryo? Does not every life have something to teach us, something worthy of being recorded, not only for readers of tomorrow's newspaper but for our descendants two, three, four, even ten thousand years from now?
Yes, but what was I to do? Sidle up to one of the middle-aged men, for example, and say, "Hello, I'm Steve McRae of the Japan Times, I wonder if I could ask you a few questions?" Ridiculous. No, the thing to do was engage them in general conversation, and see what it lead to. "Nice day"; "good coffee"; "weird tv show"... Ron, for instance, or Neil, Neil Harris, the reporter who had interviewed me - that sort of thing came so naturally to them - so naturally! They would have had their interview underway long ago, their cassette players filling up with colorful stories, anecdotes - commonplace, of course, but each in its own way unique, funny, tragic. No doubt these four people, sitting here so quietly, seemingly so self-absorbed, their faces as though hidden behind do-not-disturb signs, were really eager to talk, given the smallest encouragement. Why couldn't I, who was so eager to listen, encourage them?
Suddenly, I'm not quite sure how, my eyes met those of the woman with the dyed brown hair. How long had she been staring at me? What was the trouble? Something in her look said, "I know what you're up to!" In my confusion I snatched my knapsack and got to my feet, striking the tiny table painfully with my knee. "Three hundred yen," said the man at the cash. I had not even noticed him before, but there he was, silently presiding over the silence, an inscrutable little man, ageless rather than old, merging into the surroundings until his intervention was required. For how many years, day piled upon day, would he have been sitting there like that? How many people would he have seen come and go?
***
The train took me to Shinjuku. Neil had once said to me, laughing, that the first time he found himself in Shinjuku Station he was reminded of an anthill he had seen in tropical Africa. Two million people a day pass through that station. They fill every stairway, every escalator, ever bit of floor space, every minute of every hour of every day, neither pausing nor hurrying, a never-ending swarm, each individual going somewhere no doubt, but the swarm as a whole coming from nowhere and going nowhere, and I, Tokyo-born though I was, didn't have to think of ants to feel nauseated; the plain sight was enough. Why had I come here? Because the train I'd boarded at Tamachi Station stopped here and went no farther, it was as simple as that.
If there were four stories at the coffee-shop, there were two million stories here, but just then I was not thinking of stories, I was thinking of - "thinking" is hardly the word; I was frantically casting about for - escape. My mind reeled. At all costs, at all costs, I must steer clear of the swarm; once part of it, I would never emerge; I would crawl through Shinjuku Station for years, decades, millennia; the station would rot, crumble; all trace of it would vanish and still I would be crawling, crawling...
"Do you need help?"
I swallowed hard. Japanese voice, speaking accented English. Of course, he would take me for a foreigner. Most people did. I look more foreign than Japanese. The face was kindly, concerned, wrinkled, elderly. "Are you lost?" English did not come easily to him. I shook my head.
"I am a reporter on assignment," I said in Japanese. "If you don't mind, I would like to interview you."
"Ah, you speak Japanese," he said in English. "Where are you going?"
"The nearest exit."
"Just there." He pointed. "East exit. Kabukicho."
"Thank you." I sliced my way through the crowd towards the escalator he had indicated. Was he following me? No - I had shaken him off. I knew his type. Given half an opening, he would attach himself to me as my guide, my interpreter, my long-lost father, and there would be no getting rid of him. In the city of my birth, in the country of my mother tongue, I was a foreigner and that was that, there was nothing I could do about it.
Outside, I headed north, towards Kabukicho. If nothing else, the man had given me a destination, not that I had any business there. Kabukicho is the red-light district, one of the most remarkable in the world, they say. I don't pretend to be up on such matters. What would I do, write about sex? As if reading my thoughts, at my approach a man with greasy slicked-back hair disengaged himself from a doorway and said softly, in English, "You want a woman?" "No, I don't want a woman!" I barked, and continued furiously on my way - my way where? Maybe I could have interviewed him. He must have some interesting stories to tell. I tried to picture Catherine's face bent over my article about a Kabukicho tout. Not that anything I could unearth on the subject would shock a sophisticated woman like her, but still, it would be the last thing she'd expect from me. Her whole image of me would crumble, she'd have to build it up again from scratch, admit she'd never really known me, had only thought she had. I stopped abruptly; a man stumbled against me and muttered something; the crowd behind me parted and flowed around me like water flowing around a rock. What were all these people doing here? Had they come here for sex? Impossible! They were indistinguishable from the crowd at Shinjuku Station, ordinary people going about their business, most of them in business suits. A convenience store clock I happened to catch a glimpse of suggested an explanation: it was ten minutes past twelve, the height of lunch hour.
***
Hot, tired and hungry, I sat on a bench in a nondescript little park, eyes open, staring at nothing. If accomplishment were measured in distance walked, I could claim a successful afternoon; otherwise, not. Pigeons and sparrows pecked in the dust. Something was strange, something was out of place - what was it? Of course: there were no children. The swings, slide and sandbox were deserted, silent. Where was I? On an alien planet, whose surface familiarity concealed realities utterly different from anything we know or can imagine on Earth. The sun shone through the smog with an almost malevolent intensity. On the bench next to mine lay a homeless man, bearded and filthy, sound asleep. Had he been there when I came? If so I hadn't noticed him; but I hadn't noticed his arrival either. Was anyone else here? Did I have anyone else for company? I looked around. What a gray, lifeless place! There was nobody at all, nobody - except, in the farthest corner of the park, a small knot of people, gathered around what looked like a booth. Some fortune-teller, no doubt. I got to my feet. My head ached. I closed my eyes. Where was the station? What time was it? What should I do? Go back to the office and admit defeat? If the editor had been Ron, or Neil, or anyone but Catherine, I could have done that - but admit defeat to Catherine? No. Why? Did I love her? Is that what it meant to love someone?
"Maybe I'll go have my fortune read," I said aloud to the homeless man. "What do you say? Wanna come?"
Receiving no answer, I began walking in the direction of the booth. I closed my eyes and saw red. Every step seemed an effort. I was in a desert, a vast, trackless desert; soon night would close in, and where would I sleep? How would I restore my waning strength?
"What's this, one of those weird new religions or something?"
I opened my eyes. Actually, there was no booth, just two canvas folding chairs, on which sat a man and a woman, facing one another, each leaning slightly forward. The woman was middle-aged and foreign. The man, in a gray suit, perhaps in his mid fifties, was talking intently but quietly, too quietly for his words to be made out, and the woman was listening, nodding her head from time to time as if to say, "I understand, I understand." I found myself at the back of a small lineup of ten or fifteen people, evidently waiting their turn.
"No, not religion," a tall young man in a lawn-green T-shirt and cutoff jeans was saying to an older man in a blue suit whose face was beaded with perspiration. "She just listens."
"Listens? Listens to what?"
"To anything you feel like saying, whatever's on your mind. Like the sign says." He pointed to a handwritten cardboard sign taped to a tree trunk: "Will listen. No charge." "I've been here before. It's amazing. You talk to her for a while and somehow you feel better, though she hardly says a word."
"She understands Japanese?"
"Oh - perfectly. Been here twenty years. Married to a Japanese. Name's Joyce Nakanishi."
"Just listens, you say."
"Right."
"Does she give advice or anything?"
"She didn't give me any."
The man in the suit laughed. "Well - good luck." With the disappointed air of someone who had expected something more interesting, he turned and walked away.
***
"Well," said Joyce Nakanishi.
The sun was setting and the air had cooled considerably by the time my turn came. How many hours had I waited? I wasn't sure, having no watch with me, but it was a good long time. She imposed no time limits. She listened patiently as long as you had something to say, until you were ready to cede your place to the next person in line. She herself said very little - an occasional word, no more.
"I don't believe I've seen you before," she said.
I placed her accent immediately. "New Jersey?"
She smiled. "Even after all these years, I haven't lost it. You too?"
"Me? No. I grew up here. But I studied at Princeton."
"Ah. Studied what?"
"Ancient civilization."
She waited for me to continue. I didn't know what to say. If the silence weighed on me, she showed no sign of similar discomfort. A slight shiver came over me. "Aren't you cold?"
"No."
"I... My name is Steve McRae, I'm with the Japan Times..."
"You're a reporter?"
"Yes, a reporter." I laughed. "A sort of reporter."
"What sort?"
"What sort? I'll tell you what sort. This morning my editor said to me, 'Go out and find a story. On anything.' I've been wandering around all day, looking for a story."
"That's one thing no one need go begging for in Tokyo."
"That's what my editor said, but you see... I have a problem. I am pathologically, morbidly, idiotically shy. I can't approach people. It's a terrible disability."
"You approached me."
"Yes, but... well, that's different. You're here to be approached. You have a sign taped to a tree saying, 'Approach me!' Most people don't."
Behind her thick glasses her gray eyes twinkled with a sort of kindly amusement. Her laughter was friendly, not sarcastic. "I suppose not," she said.
"Do you think I could... interview you?"
"Interview me!"
"It's fascinating, this... what you do."
"I listen. Nothing more."
"Well? How many people do that nowadays? Listen, I mean. Really listen?"
"Very few."
"You're here every day?"
"Weather permitting."
"Let me buy you a cup of coffee."
"There are two people waiting."
"When you're done."
"All right. That is, all right you can buy me a coffee. I don't know about the interview. I'll have to think about that."
"Where should I wait for you?"
She named a coffee shop in the neighborhood and told me how to get there.
***
It was a long time before she joined me. "I was wondering if you'd still be here," she said, smiling. Her chair scraping against the floor as she pulled it back from the table made an unexpectedly loud noise, causing me to start, which in turn caused her to look at me with a faint expression of surprise. She was a rather pleasant-looking woman, a young-grandmother type, someone you could easily imagine pushing a shopping cart at a suburban New Jersey supermarket, judiciously comparing the various heads of lettuce on display and choosing the best one available.
In fact, I had been waiting without the slightest impatience. The coffee shop was an oasis - dim, quiet, with soft jazz flowing in the background, the two or three other customers shadowy, solitary presences whose occasional rustling of a book page or abstracted drumming of a fingernail on the table were not distractions but reassuring reminders that I was among my own kind. I closed my eyes, sipped my coffee, and relished my escape from the desert. "When she arrives" - so my idle thoughts ran - "she may refuse to be interviewed, in which case I'll have to consider what to do, how to face Catherine, but just now I don't have to consider anything, I can just sit here..."
The waiter came and she ordered an espresso. Then, to me, she said, "On three occasions I have refused to speak to reporters - one from the Asahi Shimbun, one from NHK, and one from, believe it or not, Weekly Playboy. The reason is obvious. The people who talk to me do so anonymously and confidentially. Publicity is the last thing they want, and if they see me as a publicity-seeker, they will lose confidence in me. However..." The waiter appeared with her espresso, which he set in front of her with the utmost delicacy before noiselessly withdrawing. Mrs. Nakanishi turned her attention to the coffee. She lifted the tiny cup and, clutching it in both hands, she closed her eyes. As she savored the aroma, I savored her last word: "However." That boded well. The silence was quite prolonged, but again, I felt no impatience.
"However," she resumed, "maybe just this once I will submit to an interview." She smiled. "'Submit to an interview' - that sounds rather grim, doesn't it? I didn't mean it that way. I'm used to listening, you see - not talking."
"Are you a psychologist," I asked, "or a therapist, or something like that?"
"No. I am nothing like that. I am an ear. That's all."
"Wait, let me..." Somewhat frantically, I reached down to the floor and fumbled in my knapsack for my tape recorder. "May I?" She nodded. I switched the machine on.
"An ear."
"An ear. Well, two ears, if you like. That's my whole secret."
"You were about to tell me why you agreed to 'submit' to this interview."
"It so happens that no more than three days ago a man who had been talking to me for a half hour or more and was just about to leave suddenly turned back and said, 'What if a journalist came to interview you. Would you tell him my story?' 'Certainly not,' I said. 'I don't talk to journalists.' 'Oh,' he said, 'but I want you to.' 'You want me to?' 'Yes - don't use my name, but tell my story.' 'Ok,' I said, 'I'm sure you have your reasons, and if a journalist comes along I will tell your story - but,' I added, 'I'm not exactly besieged by journalists, so don't expect anything.' That, as I said, was three days ago, and suddenly - here you are!"
"A remarkable coincidence."
"Or maybe something more. Maybe it's fate."
"Do you believe in fate?"
"If I can say yes without declaring myself a fatalist, yes."
I laughed. "I'm not sure you can do that."
"Fatalists see fate as a kind of irresistible force, like gravity. I see it as that which lends significance to chance encounters or chance happenings. If you ask what significance, I wouldn't even attempt an answer. Significance, whose opposite is meaninglessness. That's as far as I go, and, given my personal limitations, as far as I need go."
"So then, this meeting of ours is not meaningless."
"Right."
"But as to what its meaning might be - "
"You will hear a story you would not otherwise have heard, I will tell a story I would not have told, and a certain man I'll call Mr. Sato - I don't know his real name - will perhaps recognize himself in the story you write and be affected in who knows what way. He seems to have foreseen that the effect will be salutary. Maybe he thinks the publicity will cure him."
"Is he sick?"
"I don't know if sick is quite the word. Certainly he's not well."
"Hm. Does he read English newspapers? Because if he doesn't..."
"I really don't know if he does or not."
"I wonder, though, if before we talk about Mr. Sato I might ask you a question or two about Ms. Nakanishi."
"Ask away."
"Well... who is she? Tell me a little about yourself. How do you come to be here, and to be doing what you're doing? And... maybe this should come first - I'm still not quite clear really on what it is you do. You listen, you say. To total strangers. Who line up in that... that nothing little park... to be listened to. How long have you been doing it?"
"Two years. It'll be two years next month."
"How did it start?"
"How far back should I go, I wonder? Maybe it started in another life. My husband, good Buddhist that he is, is forever tracing events back to causes in previous lives. He's convinced he knew me in another life."
"Really. What does your husband do?"
"He's a doctor, at the forefront of cancer research, a very learned man. Fortunately for me, he wears his learning lightly. We met, believe it or not, in Egypt - two scruffy, travel-weary kids from opposite ends of the planet meeting in the middle. It was love at first sight, the most extraordinary thing... well, it seems extraordinary when it happens to you, though it probably happens to everybody..."
"It's never happened to me."
"You're still young."
"No, I'm not."
She paused, and though our acquaintance had been very brief, I realized immediately she had slipped into her listening mode. It was the mode that came most naturally to her. I smiled. "Never mind," I said. "For now I'm the listener and you're the talker."
"As you wish, sir. I don't suppose this is relevant to your story, but - hm - we were talking about other lives. What was extraordinary was not so much that we met, liked each other and fell in love, which happens... well, if not to everybody at least to a lot of people - but that we actually seemed to recognize each other. We were never strangers. I felt it too, so when he started in about how we must have known each other in other lives, I understood him, though I was about as far from being a Buddhist as a civilized person can get - a Jewish girl from Trenton, New Jersey. Anyway, we hitch-hiked together all over Africa, and then, when it was time for him to go home, I went with him."
"Just like that? You gave up your life in America - "
"Well, no, it wasn't 'just like that', and as for 'giving up my life' - wherever you are you're giving up a life somewhere else, aren't you?"
"I suppose that's true."
"Besides, I go back quite often, once every two years at least, so I'm not exactly out of touch.... but at this rate we'll be here all week without getting to poor Mr. Sato. To make a long story short, I settled in Tokyo, set about learning the language, which I now speak with a fair degree of proficiency, though I shudder to think how my New Jersey-accented Japanese sounds to Japanese ears. As to how I started my... my... what should I call it? - my practice? - in what you call the 'nothing little park', it came about quite spontaneously. I live nearby, and I was just sitting there quietly one afternoon two years ago when an elderly gentleman sat down beside me and started to talk. He talked and talked - "
"Maybe he knew you in another life."
"Maybe he did."
"What did he talk about?"
"Oh, about this and that. All kinds of things. About his wife who left him, his daughter who he hasn't seen in so long he doesn't know if he'd even recognize her, the money he'd won the night before at the race track. And all the time he was talking, I didn't say a word, not a word. I couldn't've got a word in edgewise, even if I'd had something to say. At last he stood up, bowed slightly, and said, 'Thank you so much, you have no idea how much better I feel.' And he left. It occurred to me that, for all he knew, I didn't speak a word of Japanese. Needless to say it made a deep impression on me. It started me thinking. Well... my sign taped to the tree saying 'Approach me' is the result."
"You're there every day, you say, weather permitting?"
"I'm there when I'm there. I don't keep office hours."
"No appointments or anything?"
"No appointments. Although some people do come to see me more or less regularly."
"People from the neighborhood?"
"Mostly. People who live here, or people who work here. The fact that I'm foreign helps. One man said to me, 'I can speak freely to you, because you won't judge me. We Japanese are always passing judgment on each other.' And there's also this: not being a native speaker, I have to listen very carefully to understand what people say. So they can see that I am really listening, not just sitting there with a bored expression on my face. That helps too."
"Have you ever... well, for example, saved anyone from committing suicide?"
"One young woman told me I did. And there was a man, a man of about fifty... He sat down and said, no preliminary, 'Tonight I am going to die. I am not unhappy. On the contrary, I have had more happiness in life than I deserve. The only shadow on my happiness is the fear that it can't continue. And I want to die at the peak of my happiness - because, you see, having been so happy for so long, I don't think I could handle suffering. I wanted to say goodbye to you - to a stranger, a foreigner. In saying goodbye to you, I am saying goodbye to the world. Goodbye, and thank you.' With that, he stood up and walked away."
"And?"
"And nothing. That's all I know."
"You don't know if he..."
"I have no idea. No idea at all. However." She glanced at her watch. "It's getting late. If I am to tell you Mr. Sato's story, I had better start now, don't you think?"
"I am all attention."
***
"Mr. Sato is forty-seven years old. He has a good job with a good company, a fine wife, two very bright children, a nice home in a nice suburb - and, like so many men in that seemingly enviable situation, he is not happy. Just think of all the billions of people on the planet who, if they could see how Mr. Sato was circumstanced, would cheerfully cut off their right arms to change places with him! Mr. Sato, being no fool, knows that very well. 'Not only have I no reason to be unhappy,' he said to me, 'I have no right to be unhappy!' But there it is, we can't command our feelings. The best we can do is repress them, when they seem unworthy of us. And repress them he does - to such good effect, he believes, that if his family or friends had even the slightest inkling of the sort of thing he was telling me, they would be utterly... they simply wouldn't know what to think.
"And yet it seems to be no uncommon thing among people who actually possess what everyone else desires - what they themselves desired until they came to possess it - a sense of letdown, of 'Well, this is nice, but... you know... is this it? There's nothing more to it than this? What happens now? What do I do for the rest of my life?' And it may be that, for some people, that feeling is more painful, more difficult to live with, than deprivation. That seems to be the case with Mr. Sato.
"He is not a sociable man by nature, he told me, and though his business requires him to show a convivial and extroverted face, and though he plays his man-of-the-world part to perfection, which partly accounts for his rapid rise in the company, his neighbors are more likely to regard him as arrogant and aloof. If so, he admits, they have reason. He shrinks from contact with them. If he is walking the family dog in the neighborhood and he spots someone he knows, he will instinctively bolt like a fugitive into another street to avoid an exchange of greetings. To have to stand on a street corner making small talk with someone just because they happen to know each other's faces is torture to him. It may seem strange that he would make so much of so little - "
"No," I interjected. "I understand how he feels."
"Do you? I'm not sure I do. There was one man in particular he couldn't seem to avoid - a retired elderly gentleman named Hasegawa who had no dog but spent his days strolling around the neighborhood. When Mr. Sato left the house in the morning - there he was. 'Beautiful day, Sato-san, not a cloud in the sky!' When he came home in the evening - ditto. 'How's life out there in the great world, Sato-san, eh?' When it was his turn to walk the dog after supper - the family takes turns - he would wait until after dark so he could come and go unseen. He found himself conceiving a hatred for this harmless senior citizen that was beyond all bounds. He felt he could have killed him cheerfully.
"And then one evening he came home and his wife gave him the news: Mr. Hasegawa was dead. He had been the healthiest old man in the world, had never been sick a day in his life - as everyone in the neighborhood knew because he took such immense pride in his health; it was his greatest achievement, his claim to fame, and he played it up for all it was worth - but that afternoon he had just sat down to lunch when he suffered a massive coronary, and that was the end of him. The rush of joy Sato felt on hearing the news was so powerful it was all he could do to keep it to himself - his wife knew nothing of Sato's strange, almost insane hatred for this kindly, unoffending man. He managed a conventional response - 'Oh, how sad' - which is what you do when your true feelings are incommunicable, but what he really felt was what a man suddenly released from prison would feel: 'Freedom!' What a load off his back, what a weight off his mind!
"But this happiness was not lasting. Before long he was feeling guilty. Freed of the man's physical presence, he began to see the matter in a truer light. Hasegawa was a warm-hearted old fellow with a pleasant word for everyone, with malice towards nobody, who would have jumped at the chance to render a service to anyone in need of help... What had he done to deserve the hatred Sato had borne him? Nothing. 'And yet,' he said to himself, 'I killed him!' It really began to seem to him that he had, that his malevolence had been the main cause of death, and the heart attack only a secondary cause. Why should a man like Hasegawa, who neither smoked nor drank, who ate a carefully balanced diet and who took plenty of exercise, have a heart attack of all things? And such a massive one at that?
"Two months went by, and then something extraordinary happened. It was another sudden death, a colleague this time, a man of his own age, his chief rival for a coveted promotion. Their relationship had been friendly over the years, but had lately suffered under the strain of the competition. Certainly Sato had not consciously wished the man dead, but the relief and elation that swept over him when he heard the news made the subconscious wish perfectly clear. 'Have I killed him too?' The circumstances of the death were almost freakish. He had gone into the hospital for a minor operation. A nurse preparing the post-op intravenous solution mistakenly gave him disinfectant instead of the prescribed mixture of antibiotics and anticoagulants. The patient was dead within two hours. How could such a thing have happened? The investigation proceeded, criminal charges were filed against the hospital. Meanwhile, Mr. Sato got his promotion, and grew more successful and more prosperous than ever.
"By the time he came to see me, three more people connected with him in one way or another had died untimely deaths - one a neighbor like Hasegawa who, for no good reason, he had taken a dislike to; one a woman he'd had a brief affair with who was making a nuisance of herself; the third a junior high school classmate who decades ago had beaten him up in some schoolyard squabble - Mr. Sato had not so much as thought of him in thirty years, but when he chanced to see the funeral notice in the paper you can imagine the effect it had on him, coming so soon after all the others. The neighbor had had cancer for years, though Mr. Sato had not been aware of that. The woman was murdered by a stalker. The classmate, an avid mountain-climber, was killed in a fall on Mount McKinley."
She paused. A bell tinkled. I started. I have a habit of starting at unexpected sounds, as though in instinctive belief that they must portend something awful. In this case it portended nothing more serious than a young woman entering the shop. It struck me that she rather resembled the young woman who had glared at me in the coffee shop at Tamachi Station - but no, it wasn't her, for our eyes met briefly, and in hers there was not a flicker of recognition.
"Pity coffee has to get cold," mused Joyce Nakanishi, clutching her cup in both hands.
"Shall I order you another?"
"No, thank you. My story is done, and" - she glanced at her watch - "it's time for me to get home and see about dinner."
"Your story's done?"
"More or less."
"But..."
"Obviously, Mr. Sato had no hand in any of those deaths. He is a well-educated, rational man. And yet - well, imagine yourself in his situation. People you dislike are dying one after another. Is it not natural - even rational, in a sense - to suspect that you may in some way be responsible?"
"I don't know. My imagination fails me."
"So does his. He is in anguish. He doesn't know what to do. Who will be next? How can he get this perverse power of his - if that's what it is - under some semblance of control? Should he go to the police and have them lock him up? Should he have himself committed to a mental institution? Is his wife, whose fading charms have begun to disgust him, in danger? What about his children, who he feels he never loved as a father ought to? What if his true feelings come to life and murder them?"
"My God!"
"Yes indeed."
"What advice did you give him?"
"I do not give advice. I listen."
"I see."
She stood up. "I look forward to reading your story."
I stood up too. "I... thank you, thank you for taking the time..."
"It was my pleasure."
"Shall I see you again?"
She smiled. "You know where to find me."